What could be more normal than three people sitting at perfectly-spaced distances from each other right here?
I live in the Boston suburbs. On a foggy walk home one morning, I wandered past this bus stop, noticed this bench, and felt disappointed in everyone involved in creating it.
Benches like this are subtle forms of “hostile architecture“—versions of public infrastructure that are designed to ward off use by the least fortunate in society. Spikes where someone might lie down for shelter, oddly angled seats that discourage getting comfortable, etc. These sorts of decisions are sometimes justified, in places with lots of foot traffic, or to prevent damage from, say skateboards. But more often then not, they’re used to prevent penniless people from sleeping somewhere sheltered or dry. Special constructions designed to ward off use by its user. They’re a way of looking at people who have absolutely nothing, nowhere to go, who are seeking an ounce of comfort from their surroundings, and denying it to them.
Inanimate objects themselves, most would say, are not inherently good or evil. Rather it’s how they’re used, and the intentionality behind their construction and placement that matters. That’s why there would be nothing hostile about anti-sleeping bench in a high-traffic place where there were people lingering or taking up too much space at once, or there was lots of other seating around. But place it somewhere that a desperate person might try to sleep inconspicuously, as a last resort, and it becomes cruel.
The area where I encountered this one isn’t really either of those things. It’s just sitting out on a wide street with no cover nearby, and no houses on that side. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen anyone waiting for a bus here. People take public transportation and there are plenty of pedestrians, but nobody’s lingering. There’s not even visible homelessness around that would prompt a reaction to install a specific anti-homeless-person bench.
Which means that the city either chose this model on purpose, or the bench company makes this kind by default and it’s cheaper. Either someone in city government chose to be cruel without even the excuse of plausibly being afraid of the homeless, or our civic life is so degraded and distrustful that bench manufacturers find it profitable to sell mass-produced hostile benches as the discount option.
I could check I suppose, but why bother? Which option would even be worse? [Note: I just thought about it for 5 sec and realized that the latter case would, because it would represent a more widespread issue.] Fortunately, the main victims of this particular bus stop are mopey citizens like me who find hostile benches depressing, as opposed to any actual hard-up person who needs a bench to sleep on. It’s mostly cruel in a theoretical sense. But just as a prevalence of umbrellas in the hands of Seattleites is a marker of their familiarity with rain, the normality of rude architecture marks a society’s callousness towards the destitute. It would be nice if things like this felt a little bit less normal.
The logical eventuality of electing the world’s stupidest authoritarian
Usually when trying to understand politics, we all grasp for historical precedents or analogies to situations that the founders envisioned. Most political commentary consists of those kinds of warring analogies, like “during the pandemic of 1918 city governments in San Francisco did X, while St Louis did Y” or “the writers of the Constitution wrote the Second Amendment to reserve militia powers to the states, which they believed were…” And a lot of the disagreement between different camps comes from various ways of interpreting the will of the people from the revolutionary era who envisioned how the government ought to do things.
Probably the largest gap in our understanding of how the government ought to work is due to the fact that the Constitution makes no references at all to political parties. This seems to have been the most significant oversight of the founders, who imagined that the three branches of government would be competing with one another, rather than cooperating across them based on factional affiliation to parties. That tension has been increasingly obscured over time despite the founders’ interest in preventing “factionalism.”
That obscurity has caused some number of people to miss an important bit of context in interpretations of last Wednesday’s events: that this scenario was exactly kind of thing that the framers of the constitution spent a lot of time thinking about. In fact, it was pretty much the most obvious political crime.
The president incited a mob to attack the congress during a transition of power. Strip away the particularities of our current age, the party affiliations of the various actors, the more recent historical examples of right-wing authoritarianism which this act was an outgrowth of, and the specific vectors which carried the false narratives that precipitated it. (Violent authoritarianism is almost always based on fraudulent beliefs.)
“What if the president doesn’t like something that congress is doing, and he sends the military to arrest all of them? Or he ignores the laws they pass over his veto? Or he whips up a mob to invade the capitol?” These are the kinds of questions we all game out when learning about the U.S. Constitution in middle-school history. It’s something that lots of people have thought about! Including, importantly, the very people who came up with the idea that there should be such a thing as a president and a legislature, and who enumerated the powers they ought to be granted to deal with one another. Unlike most of the political questions people debate, we don’t need to imagine what the founders would have thought about this—they spent ample time explaining their thinking about lawless rulers and the ability of government to constrain in situations exactly like this!
This is going to be the thing that schoolchildren learn about Donald Trump in 2076. That he lost re-election and then attempted to remain in power using every possible bullshit recourse. Because it is such a clear object lesson on how the various parts of the federal government and political representation as delegated to the states are all designed to interact as to make a perfect writing prompt for kids writing papers in class. They will be given essay assignments on how these events were a violation of the separation of powers, and be able to easily cite the steadily escalating constitutional abuses in the years running up to Wednesday’s debacle. Depending on the way the next 11 or so days play out, the extremely straightforward way in which he tried and failed to do this ought to clarify and distill all of his other actions over the past five years. We’ve been the frog in the pot as it heats up, getting acclimated to each transgression as it passes without consequence, waiting for the bubbles to start frothing over. (Or at least those of us without the wherewithal to look over the edge of the pot at any point and notice the burner.)
The specific lies which have facilitated this attempted power grab are so comically bogus and premeditated as to be unworthy of taking seriously, and have been roundly discredited by anyone even remotely tethered to reality at this point. Some people, by wandering into that mire and looking around, have gotten a bit hung up on the specifics of that alternate reality universe, missing the important consideration that any fascist uprising would, of necessity, be marinated in a sauce of dishonesty. It is always thus with demagogues, and it is indeed important not to ignore the chain of custody tying it to traits of right-wing thinking that led inevitably to this. The right is always a force for authoritarianism and enemies of a free and just society.
Yet that should not completely overshadow the fact that Trump sicced his bloodthirsty deplorables on Republicans as well as Democrats. People in the crowd were most eager to hang the Vice-President (working in his capacity as president of the Senate) and the Republican legislators whom they saw as obstacles to the executive seizing power. They ran roughshod over the seat of government, roaming around the corridors with zip ties to kidnap lawmakers and vandalizing their chambers. It’s a textbook definition of the kind of mob chaos that Madison et al imagined a president would attempt if the other branches were not given the ability to retaliate. Any senator or representative who doesn’t currently understand that they were attacked in their capacity as a legislator rather than as a member of a party “faction” right now needs a wake up call stronger than their own attempted murder, apparently. (The Republicans who voted to sustain objections to the electoral college votes after the incident belong in this category).
Such congresspeople may also apparently need to be reminded that failing to punish not only the president, but also the members of their own ranks who abetted this attack on representative democracy, will invite future attempts, and weaken the United States as a concept.
While I was watching the crisis unfold on Wednesday and seeing the flood of images that emerged afterwards (many gleefully filmed by the perpetrators themselves, who chose this particular moment to not wear masks in a turn of self-incriminating thinking that would be hilarious if it weren’t packaged with an adjacent cruelty towards others that is a hallmark of the year of Covid), I found myself becoming genuinely angry in a way I didn’t expect. I’m usually pretty above it, when it comes to sanctimonious outrage at offensive acts towards patriotic symbols, but as an American, it was infuriating to watch it all come to this in a way that I had cynically believed myself unable to feel at this point. Of all the disgraceful behavior of the right in our recent time period: suppressing votes, stealing a Supreme Court seat, extorting our foreign allies for domestic political advantage, stalling assistance to the country as it suffers through a health crisis, corrupting the justice system, and cheering on basically every variety of brutality towards Black people or immigrants—this was so obviously seditious that anyone who wasn’t shocked by it can safely be written off as unshockable. Anyone with a modicum of affection for this country (or at least good neo-classical architecture) was revolted.
Though this travesty was in some ways the least consequential of the events of the past year for the actual lives of people living in the United States, it was the most forthrightly symbolic of the right’s utter disregard for our shared civic spirit. If this isn’t enough for the people who preen and pose as if they honor our national values to realize that the forces they’ve been stoking are vile and un-American, what else possibly could be? It isn’t like the founders didn’t try to warn them about this guy.
As the sand runs out of the quadrennial hourglass, and the administration of our nation’s foremost very stable genius prepares to drunkenly lie down in a snow bank and go to sleep forever, it seems a natural time to pause for reflection on the many lessons that he has taught us.
Donald Trump’s presidency has truly shown that more than anything, America is a nation of laws.
It must surprise you that I am suggesting this. That is because you sense about me that you be would annoyed about how much I disliked him if you didn’t dislike him also. People around my age who wear medium-fashionable eyeglasses have predictable political views, and those views are never that the 45th president is paragon of lawfulness and virtue.
You can relax and rest assured that, predictably, I am asserting no such thing. I am not proposing that Donald Trump himself has been respecting the law, but rather that the fact of his presidency demonstrates how much we respect it. This is because any country that would allow him to become and act as our president must be full of people who respect the law so deeply that they would all be forced to agree with one another that he had technically fulfilled the legal requirements to do so, and that we therefore had to let him. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to, and we have since produced hundreds of overlapping theories as to why he did; and yet it was impossible to show that he hadn’t. Only in a country that truly loved following the law could such a thing happen, despite it going so definitively against everyone’s better judgement.
Let’s cast our minds back to 2015 when this all started. And remember how preposterous the idea initially seemed that someone that narcissistic and oafish would ever be allowed to hold power. How completely obvious to everyone across the width and breadth of the political spectrum, and indeed all of American society, that he lacked the wherewithal and emotional maturity to manage an after-work softball team, much less the apparatus of the executive branch. To get to a place where he ended up actually ended up executing the office of president of the United States required a lot of people following a lot of laws.
As the whole dreadful process wound its way through our history, from the first clerk in a state election office building squinting at a submitted form that someone had really written “Donald J. Trump” on, to the person shrugging and turning on the machine that prints lawn signs, to the Secret Service lady driving one of those decoy SUVs in the motorcade on the way to the inauguration, some part of everyone involved was thinking– we all know that this is a joke person and we shouldn’t be allowing this but there are laws and we’ve all got to follow them no matter how weird the result of doing that is.
Even now, in the junky caboose of this Snowpiercer-esque presidency, people have had to dress up and go to work in courthouses to rifle through legal briefs full of misspellings and dream logic about voter fraud and pretend to take their arguments seriously. As we do these things, a part of us knows how ridiculous it all is, and yet we must, because the law compels us. We are Americans, and if there is one thing that we love more than anything, it is laws, and the following of those laws.
Back in those waning days of 2016, as we grappled with how following our laws about democracy had forced us to acknowledge that the person who had gotten fewer votes in the election had ‘won’ in a odd, technical, but extremely legal manner, many assumed that doing all this had probably gone against his own better judgement as well. That he’d just been doing it for attention but that the whole thing had gotten out of hand and he wasn’t really expecting to win, just shout a lot and rile people up and then get to have some TV show or something. As we prepared ourselves for what we accurately assumed would be a four-year psychological assault, somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, he was no doubt dimly aware that his irrepressible zest for scamming his way through life was about to collide with a governmental power to do so, inevitably leading towards some kind of downfall. He might have even imagined a future time when he was on the verge of becoming powerless, with about 51% of the country calling for him to be drawn and quartered, with dozens of crimes waiting to spring out and yell “surprise!” when Joe Biden walks through the door on January 20th and turns on the lights.
And the reason that he was dreading that day? Because he knew how much we love following the law.
Evidence of perhaps the least consequential Republican crime of the last 20 years.
When I was in college at Dartmouth, one of the worst people in my extended social group was a skinny super-buttoned up college Republican type. A friend of some friends. Most of us were not very interested in politics, but it was the post-9/11 early Bush years and a higher than normal amount of them were from conservative parts of the country or otherwise sympathetic to that kind of jingoistic nonsense. This kid, Michael Ellis, hung around at the Dartmouth Review, the vile right-wing campus rag obsessed with clinging to the racist Indian mascot that the college had jettisoned years ago. (When I was there, they also spread misinformation about students registering to vote in NH losing their financial aid somehow, so as to tamp down on us poors voting in a swing state.) He also took part of a year off to work for Karl Rove in Bush’s 2004 re-election. I remember having lunch with him once where people pelted him with “you know those guys are evil right?” sort of questions, and he kept smirkily giving them “I do, but we’re getting away with it” responses. Another time, he got extremely drunk on scotch and blathered at everyone about how much he loved Richard Nixon for some goddamn reason. He sucked. Supposedly, his parents were quite liberal so he had gone full-Goebbels to anger them.
Once, fatefully, I mentioned to him that there was an episode of Monty Python with his name, “Michael Ellis” in the last season of that show. It’s a bad episode from the end-run of Flying Circus after John Cleese left, but I had the whole series on DVD. It was the extravagant thing I bought myself after a summer working for minimum wage as a dishwasher in high school. It came in a beautiful multi-colored set of 14 DVDs and cost about $150, which was a fortune for me at the time. He asked to borrow the DVD of his episode, as he’d never seen it, and I lent it to him. After it took him a very long time to return the disk, I managed to run into him and ask for it back, or at least money to replace it, and he tried to blow me off. He claimed that I should have asked for it back sooner, as if it was my fault that he’d just kept it.
Since I hated him, I didn’t bother keeping in touch after college. But I was aware that he was in Washington being a lawyer or something, which sounded about right for the kind of dickhead who steals your Monty Python DVD and then tries to blame you for it. I doubt I’ve thought about him for years. He’s been off doing his stuff (law?) and I’ve been doing mine (astronomy, technology, not being an ethical monstrosity). Cut to this morning, where I read that he is one of the Trump administration flunkies that they are trying to “burrow” into government prior to their eviction. Quoth CNN: “Michael Ellis, an official on the National Security Council, shifted over to the National Security Agency as legal counsel, which takes him out of a political appointee role at the White House and into a civil servant position, two sources confirmed to CNN. This makes Ellis harder to fire once the Biden administration comes in.”
Not only that, but he was also “in the room when Alexander Vindman reported his concerns about Trump’s 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky” and was apparently one of the people, if not the person who decided to cover it up by moving it to a secure server—a key reason for Trump’s impeachment.
Hopefully, he’ll be ousted from whatever utility closet they try to hide him in when the Biden administration does a sweep of these kind of amoral stooges. People sometimes tell themselves that Republicans under Trump were something different and worse than in previous times, but it isn’t so. These kind of sneering, power-grabbing, un-American shitheads were like this as college freshmen. It is fundamentally who they are as people, and indeed it is why they are Republicans. The Bush administration was just as unethical at every layer of government, stacked with the same kind of well-dressed liars and thieves, using their gilded qualifications as a distraction from their utter moral depravity. The next (Republican) one will be too, unless they’re hounded out of public life, as they deserve to be. If we’re lucky, prosecutors will find the backbone to bring charges against the mid-level thugs known to have committed crimes over the past four years; and for people in the grey area, legally-speaking, efforts like The Trump Accountability Projectare a worthy start at alienating them from polite society.
We sometimes talk about the people at this level of government as if they’re automatons, or hear about how they have friends who like them outside of politics, or pretend that you can separate out the work part of their life from the social parts as if they aren’t connected. Well, I barely knew this guy, in college, when everyone is supposed to have been at their most fun and carefree, and he was brazenly shitty about petty stuff back then! You can draw a straight line from covering up stealing my Monty Python disk to covering up the Ukraine extortion, it’s really just a matter of scale. He probably recalled his college experiences to draw up legal memos that justify seizing blankets from caged refugee children if they didn’t ask for them back soon enough or something.
I couldn’t remember whether I’d replaced my DVD. As I said, it’s from late in the show and I doubt I’d watched it more than once. So I checked. It’s still missing. Because of course it is.
Our national nightmare continues: for the second time in three months a girl has become stuck in between two buildings. This time in Portland. The victim actually fell from 2-storeys above to the alley between the buildings instead of forcing herself into the narrow passageway, so maybe she wasn’t blasted out of her mind. Except that it happened at 3:45 am, and this was Portland so…
Last Friday, Courtney Malloy, a 22-year-old woman in a state of considerable refreshment, went out the back door of a restaurant and made the inexplicable decision to try forcing herself through a passage no more than 8 inches across, as an unnecessary shortcut to the street. And, with an indomitable will to prevail over the forces of physics and common sense, she managed to push herself into the narrow space so vigorously that she was totally unable to free herself.
So far, you’re thinking, well, that’s a little stupid and unlikely, but it’s not THAT strange. And you’re right, except that every further detail just raises more questions. How is it even possible for an adult to get herself stuck in something in such a way that she cannot become unstuck? Did she expand? How can someone become stuck in such a way that firefighters couldn’t simply pull her out? (They had to break through one of the walls from the inside-out to get to her). When the firefighters got there, she had no idea how she’d gotten stuck— whether she walked into the alley, or fell from the roof of one the 3-story buildings that form the alley (it was later revealed that she started on ground level). And then, most importantly, there’s the fact that they found her wedged in there horizontally and 24 inches off the ground. Let me repeat that: horizontally and two feet off the ground. Like an extremely low-flying, drunk and bewildered Superman.
Someone pushed themselves into a space far to narrow to accommodate them, thought “this isn’t working” and proceeded to keep trying. In this way, no other news story in the past year more richly deserves to be written about on Aitch-Bar, a blog that is to bullshit as narrow alleyways are to confused college students.
Indeed, no other story so adequately expresses the essence of the American dream, that looks at life and says “I bet I can jam more stuff into this.” It’s the spirit that built the iPhone, that invented the spork, that made that pizza with cheese inside the crust. Every time a middle-aged woman tries fitting herself into her old pair of leather pants, every time a child tries pushing together two non-interlocking lego pieces, every time a father looks at a thanksgiving turkey and asks himself “how many more birds can I shove in this thing?” this spirit is renewed. Even Rhode Island itself, wedged tightly as it is into the confined space between Massachusetts and Connecticut, is an embodiment of it. And as the personification of this spirit, Courtney Malloy deserves to be honored with a full sized statue, which will then be ceremonially wedged into that now famous alleyway, so that future generations can squint at it through a narrow tunnel and reflect on how THEY can make the world a better place…through shoving.
There is a large truck directly ahead. Whatever your cruise control is set at, the truck is slightly slower. Tap those brakes. Can you get around? Negative; the truck is two lanes wide. Blue-tinted smoke bellows from its twin exhaust pipes. The sky rains asphyxiated birds in its wake, and you switch to recirculated air when the world begins to smell like cheap vodka. Judging from the bumper, the driver is geared to go fully Republican when the 2004 election rolls around. The back window is adorned with crucifixes and Gothic lettering, and you assume that the letters actually spell something, but your brain will be goddamned if it’s going to devote the energy necessary to decoding that stupid fucking font1. Still, you think, perhaps the driver is a person who you could hypothetically hold a conversation with. Perhaps, if the two of you were trapped on a desert island, there would be some grace period before things turned Lord of the Flies. And then your eye drifts toward the pavement, and the ensuing aneurysm and subsequent hemorrhage almost make you lose your cool. Camouflage truck nuts. There is only one thought left to think: camouflage doesn’t really work in some situations. Indeed. Not nearly as well as you wish it did. Dare I say, it looks more like leprosy. Enjoy this stretch of one-lane highway while you stare at something that looks similar to, but in fairness slightly better than, a pug’s rear2.
I assume that the endowment of trucks with reproductive organs is the reason why there are so many trucks on the road in the first place, in the face of soaring gas prices and concerns over manmade carbon emissions. There are a lot of issues to discuss on that front. I’m available for debate. Until then I’ll be in the Cabela’s parking lot, neutering pickups and affixing giant collars around their front grilles so that they can’t chew on their stitches3.
Aside from the fact4 that they look stupid, and that testicles are useless without a corresponding man cannon (which no one has the initiative to put on their car for some odd reason), what amazes me is the number of women who attach these to their trucks. There are more than zero who do this. In fact I’m told that hot pink are the scrota of choice for ladies’ vehicles. This is to delineate that these male genitalia are a woman’s. At this point, whatever message one may have thought one was conveying is now pretzeled beyond recognition. We can distill only the basics: you have a Hemi and you want it to feel embarrassed when it goes out in public.
It’s worth noting that South Carolina has imposed a blatantly unconstitutional ban on bumper balls. Which is great news; I love it when two wrongs interfere with one another. And nothing better illustrates the point that South Carolina legislators are well-focused on critical issues. Last year the law was contested by a 65-year-old woman who refused to pay a $445 ticket for going anatomic with her truck, which I guess makes her the Rosa Parks of gluing balls to your car. Her jury trial does not yet have a date set. I await, rapt, her made-for-TV movie.
1. Fuck that font. Write in normal human letters.
2. Pugs look absurd.
3. I have a “Gone But Not Forgotten” tattoo with Bob Barker’s face. With Gothic lettering. … Oh. He’s not dead? Am I the only one who wasn’t aware of that?
4. Fact.
It’s since been surpassed in the news by some kind of medieval shaman revealing to women at long last that they possess hitherto unknown reproductive powers in the category of “ways to shut that whole thing down,” but last week something amusing happened to someone who shares Todd Akin’s pre-Enlightenment views on female autonomy: VP candidate and ex-professional hand model, Paul Ryan.
P-Ryddy got an unpleasant surprise last Thursday, when Tom Morello, guitarist of his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine, and aging Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino look-alike, penned a Rolling Stone editorial that called him “the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against.” He wonders which Rage song is Ryan’s favorite, “Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of ‘Fuck the Police’? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production?” Rage has got to be one of the most aggressively left-wing bands of the last 20 years, and not just primarily outside their music, like Bruce Springsteen or Avril Levigne—the songs themselves are about the evils of war profiteering and how cool Trotsky’s beard looked. (Fun Fact: “Political Views and Activism of Rage Against the Machine” has its own page on Wikipedia). So it’s kind of funny that a Mr. Burns-level arch-Randian conservative liked their music so much. My theory: he’s missing the irony. Like in ‘Bulls on Parade’ when they sing about “Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes…I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library” maybe he just thinks all that sounds like a good idea.
As the campaign puts more scrutiny on Mr. Ryan, we’re going to find out about more of the things he didn’t fully understand. Here are my predictions of the harsh revelations he’s about to receive in the near future:
Jefferson Starship was not a real starship.
Even though they were both played by the same actor, Han Solo and Indiana Jones are, in fact, different characters.
Maize is corn.
None of the people in The Crucible were actually witches.
‘Ferris Bueller’ is not Matthew Broderick’s name in real life.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is only a saying—you can’t just replace Medicare with apples.
‘Rosebud’ was Kane’s sled, a symbol of his lost youth and innocence, not the name of a snowglobe company he tried but failed to acquire during his rise to power.
Even though it has ‘America’ in the name, we don’t actually own South America
The Eric Clapton song “Cocaine” was about drug use.
Cats are not always girls and dogs are not always boys.
Nabokov’s Lolita was not primarily a tribute to the motor lodges of the early 1950’s.
Crocodiles and alligators are different species. The resulting mix-up during the summer he worked at that zoo was his fault.
The music of Public Enemy is not about the supremacy of supply-side economics.
Aitch-Bar 