We Need a Real Congress to Stop the Illegal War

 

Should Democrats win control of even one house of Congress (and both is increasingly likely), the most urgent issue will be to head off resumption of the illegal, reckless, and fruitless Iran war. Donald Trump has been itching to resume his unilateral war, insistent that with just one more round (just a short one!) of random destruction, he can “win.”

There is zero evidence that additional military action (let alone one advertised in advance as brief) will force Iran to release its grip on the Strait of Hormuz and/or topple the regime. It therefore remains a mystery what plan could produce a result that anyone other than a deluded, addled president would consider victory. (Besides, he keeps saying we already won, so why is further action required?!)

According to news reports, Trump, ominously, received an in-person briefing last week on the resumption of active military operations from Adm. Brad Cooper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine. Meanwhile, the potential that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who egged Trump on to fight a preposterous regime-change war and sees his own legacy as tied to the (impossible) attainment of that goal — will remain in power after the inconclusive Israeli elections increases the likelihood for another joint operation.

The prospect of further war — never authorized by Congress (and opposed in multiple War Powers Act votes), overwhelmingly unpopular with voters, and likely to deepen the energy crisis and inflationary spiral — should alarm all Americans. And how Trump intends to wage this fiasco should be even more alarming.

Speaking at the Middle East Institute last week, Sen. Murphy, fresh from a visit to the region, told the audience, “I think we are seeing the president ready another devastating military campaign after the election, just as illegal as the first iteration was at a time where Americans are fed up with this war.” Denied access to damaged bases, he reported on “a cover-up that is underway — a dizzying and coordinated attempt to try to hide from the American people and from Congress the costs and the consequences of this war.” 

Most frightfully, he warned: "In one of these briefings, we did get the chance to have a fairly detailed conversation about what the war plan would be if we restarted military operations. You’ve heard a preview that it would be a short-duration plan. I will just say this: their plan is insane. It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law. …

"There’s been open reporting as to what we may be planning and the civilian infrastructure that we may be targeting. They’ve been asked by the President to develop a plan. Whether they believe it will work or not, I do not know. But the plan that they have developed will lead, in my view, to a prolongation and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.

"We do not know if that is the plan about which Trump was briefed last week, but we do know that any military action absent congressional authorization would be unconstitutional, further deplete our munitions (already critically low), endanger our troops at bases we are apparently unable to defend, kill and injure more people (including civilians, about whom the Trump regime has shown shockingly little regard), cause further physical destruction in the region, imperil our regional allies (whose oil facilities we are also unable to protect), and ultimately reinforce the image of the United States as a hapless, weakened oaf toddling around the region, unable to defeat a second-tier power."

Should Trump order our military to engage in massive war crimes, he would imperil them personally and further erode the standing of the U.S. military (which has already alienated allies because of its extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean).

As Murphy made clear, “this is the textbook illegal war.” He explained, “They are fighting a war without congressional authorization. They haven’t sought congressional authorization. There hasn’t been a hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee.” He added that “it is also clearly in contravention of international law and commitments that we have made to the rule of law to deliberately target civilians and to use the harm or potential harm of civilians as leverage in war. And it is also violative of commitments we have made to target political leadership at scale.”

The first order of business for lawmakers after the election therefore should be a vote to bar further offensive action against Iran, deprive the Trump administration of any funding for this outrageous gambit, and make crystal clear that anyone engaged in this illegal escapade — up to and including the president — will be held fully accountable to the greatest extent of the law (be that impeachment, prosecution for war crimes, court martial for senior brass, etc.).

Will Congress act, either before or after the new Congress is sworn in? Well, we will find out. Even if Democrats are outvoted on a party-line vote before January, their unity on these items is essential to make clear what will transpire as soon as new legislators are sworn in on January 3. Going on record unanimously may slow down military action, encourage Gulf allies to push back against Trump, and give military leaders additional arguments to dissuade Trump from acting.

It would be unfathomable for Democrats not to try to mount a furious effort to stop the resumption of the war. “We become an illegitimate body, especially with respect to our foreign policy powers, if we do not use our spending power to end the war,” Murphy reminded us. “The president has ignored the Constitution and ignored us. He has gone to war repeatedly in the Middle East, illegally, without congressional authorization.” He added, “The natural consequence of that should be for the Congress to deny funding for the war if you are not prepared to come to us and get authorization.”

Murphy is right that it is Congress’s “sacred responsibility as a co-equal branch to use the spending power to end the war.” And it is the sacred obligation of democratic citizens, whose obligations do not end with casting of ballots, to hold elected leaders to the promises they made and to abide by the unequivocal mandate of the American people to end the war.

Mass, peaceful protest may be required to bolster Democratic opposition. No Democratic lawmaker, whether just elected or considering future runs, should expect to hold power if he or she cannot wield the most consequential powers in Article I: the powers to declare war and to make appropriations. No Democrat serious about running for president in 2028 can remain on the sidelines. The election is tomorrow, but the most fateful decisions for the country, for the Middle East, and for the international world order will come after the votes are counted.

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This week brought devastating attacks on civilians and Ukraine’s power grid, but also emotional reunions as residents of occupied Oleshky finally reached safety.

Dnipro mourns victims of a railway station attack. On October 29, a Russian drone struck a crowded railway platform where passenger trains were standing. The death toll rose to 15 after another wounded man died in hospital. Fourteen people were injured, with an 11-year-old boy among those seriously hurt. People making ordinary journeys never made it home.

A journey out of occupied Oleshky. A temporary local ceasefire allowed humanitarian aid to reach the devastated city and residents to evacuate. On October 31, evacuees reached Ukrainian-controlled territory after a long journey through occupied Crimea, Russia, and Belarus. Families reunited after years apart, while exhausted arrivals received hot meals and medical care. Some described severe hunger and months of struggling to survive.

Fresh strikes leave families without electricity. Russia continued attacking energy infrastructure, including power facilities in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and Shostka. On October 31, President Zelenskyy reported that around 200,000 households in Dnipro and the surrounding region, along with more than 80,000 in Kyiv Oblast, were without power. Repair crews worked to restore supplies as colder weather approached.

Ukraine strikes military production and supply hubs. On October 31, Ukraine’s General Staff reported striking the Kamensky rocket-fuel plant in Russia’s Rostov Oblast, causing a warehouse fire and damaging four production workshops. Earlier, on October 26, Ukraine reported hitting the Energia plant, which produces specialized batteries for Russian glide-bomb guidance systems. Ukrainian forces also reported strikes on four military supply depots in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. These operations aim to disrupt the production and supply of weapons used against Ukraine.

Fierce fighting and an unusual operation near Kupiansk. Heavy fighting continued, with the Pokrovsk and Huliaipole sectors among the most active. On October 27, President Zelenskyy highlighted Operation Veles, in which Ukrainian troops used underground infrastructure to reach Russian positions near Kupiansk. The operation had first been disclosed the previous week; the reported 15-kilometer distance referred to underground movement, not a 15-kilometer advance of the front line.

European funding remains essential—and tied to reforms. Following the €2.9 billion Ukraine Facility payment earlier in October, attention turned to securing further support. A separate €3.7 billion payment remained delayed amid outstanding reform requirements. This week, the EU also outlined plans to bring forward its planned 2027 support, helping Ukraine meet urgent military and budget needs.

A new step in Ukraine–NATO technology cooperation. On October 29, Ukraine and NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator, DIANA, signed an agreement to expand joint technology development and testing. The partnership gives Ukrainian innovators greater access to NATO expertise and testing infrastructure, while bringing Ukraine’s wartime experience into shared defense innovation.

Thank you for standing with Ukraine and for continuing to support our community. Every act of solidarity helps keep Ukraine's story visible and reminds Ukrainians that they are not alone.

-Ukrainian Apparel 

Roaming Charges: The Anal Stage of US Politic

 

Few men had been as cavalier and as debauched as the Président, but completely jaded, utterly torpid, all he was left with now was the depravity and turpitude of libertinage.

–Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom

Donald Trump seems to have reached that transcendent state of personal satori, where he is liberated from all inhibitions, political and psychological. His true persona has been unleashed out on the road, at one pit-stop rally after another.

Trump seems not to care–perhaps he doesn’t even notice–that the once-packed auditoriums have dwindled to the point where giant curtains don’t cover the sections of empty seats. 

The rousing receptions have been groans and baffled silences, as he rambles on and on about his own peculiar obsessions. He riffs on Nicki Minaj’s ass and Arnold Palmer’s penis. He brags over and over again about being the only president to have taken and passed (without missing a question) “a very difficult” cognitive test, three times! Even though his recent performances would suggest otherwise.

He drops strange hints about his declining health. He showed up to one rally with a bruise on his left eye, leaving some to wonder whether Meiania belted him or Natalie smacked him with her portable printer.

He indulges in his lusty fantasies on the musculature of the male anatomy, using a sitting US senator as a case study. He spins sadistic stories of violence, murder and torture. He enjoys the theater of cruelty, though not Artuad’s kind. He often sounds like he’s narrating a slasher film. Here is Trump entertaining his followers with a debased description of the murder of Iryna Zarutska for no discernible reason other than his own titillation:  He was a big, strong guy and he stood up and violently slashed her neck. Almost cut her head right off. Slashed it violently and viciously. For those people who are able to handle that kind of stuff, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Very rarely do you see it run beyond the actual, almost-hit. If you did, you wouldn’t see anything like it, probably. 

In many cases, you wouldn’t be the same. Her head was barely attached. And she looked up in that final second of her life, and she said, to herself, ‘Oh god. What happened to me, oh God.’ And she knew she was dead. She knew it. She literally probably lived seconds. Or just a second. She knew what happened. The slash was inches deep. She knew she was in trouble. She walked onto the train because she didn’t wanna…I don’t know what. You could see how scared she was.

Trump boasts endlessly about his own wealth and openly expresses his envy of those wealthier than he is and his disdain for the poor. 

He ridicules his own supporters and thinks he can get away with it. He tells them their own financial problems are delusions. At one stop, Trump invited his MAGA followers to Mar-a-Lago, with this stipulation: “You could even come to Mar-a-Lago. You’ll be my guest. The problem is that for $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I’m not even sure you could buy that! No, don’t go there. It’s not a good place if you’re price conscious.”

At another stop, he doubled down on his statement that he couldn’t care less about higher gas prices, saying: “I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ That’ll be the headline. I said I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna say it: We’re making a freaking fortune.’”

America’s truckers, who once convoyed for Trump, aren’t making a fortune. In fact, they’ve been smacked hard by his tariffs and the spike in diesel prices from his imbecilic decision to go to war with Iran. At least 221 trucking companies have filed for bankruptcy this year alone, the most in decades. Smaller companies are, of course, the most vulnerable to financial ruin and are being gobbled up by big conglomerates like JB Hunt.

Trump’s speeches–rants, really–have become more and more profane. 

It’s like listening to less f-word-fueled private recordings of LBJ or Nixon, except delivered in public before audiences of evangelicals and Christian Nationalists. This is Trump unbound, unconstrained by the grammatical demands of paragraphs or even sentences. Free association is now the name of his rhetorical game and the thoughts and anecdotes unroll in no particular order, skipping from one not necessarily parallel universe to another.

More and more of Trump’s speeches have devolved into mere glossolalia (aka, grunts, groans, belches, wheezes and episodes of gurgling aphasia), which will be interpreted by the most devoted members of his cult as him speaking in the Divine Tongue. But most, I suspect, will see it as evidence of a mind unraveling in real time.

Trump seems to have embraced his own weirdness, a weirdness that has gone pathological. He is the Buffoon-in-Chief, and his presidency is our national opéra bouffe with a soundtrack by Lee Greenwood and the Village People. What is the point of his ravings? Often there is none, except his own gratification. 

His jokes have no punchlines. His stories fade off without endings. His anecdotes have no discernible political messages. He seems bored. Bored by the road. Bored by his crowds. Bored by his job. Several times he’s told his sparser and sparser audiences he doesn’t want to be there talking to them. They’re not really his kind of people. The kind of people that like ballrooms and are members of golf clubs. He repeatedly interrupts his rants to complain, “Why am I here? I don’t need this.” But of course, he needs this. Blind adulation is what he drinks instead of blood.

After all, this losing campaign isn’t really about him, even though it really is all about him. Sure, he’ll seize credit for any unlikely victories. But he won’t take any blame for the losses that seem sure to come.

Everything has gone to hell, and he seems to know it, despite Natalie only feeding him (highly edited) good news. 

His tariffs have backfired economically. His war on Iran is a debacle. He can’t stop the Ukraine war despite his vow to end it on day one. He has been diplomatically outplayed by Xi, Putin, Zelensky and the Prime Minister of Canada. Netanyahu calls and Trump comes and sits. His military has taken it on the chin from Iran and, embarrassingly, the Houthis. Internationally, few fear him anymore, and none respect him. He has alienated his base. His flacks in the White House are scheming behind his back. Women reporters just shrug off his verbal assaults and attempt to humiliate them. Much of the American public now views him not just with disdain but with disgust.

In the end, Trump replaced neoliberalism with neo-narcissism. 

His economic strategy is unabashed self-enrichment for him and his cronies. Though look out if you were a crony who made out better than he did. Trump has no friends, only collaborators and co-conspirators. He’s never really trusted anyone, not even his sons and accountants. He trusts NDAs, not the people whom he forces to sign them.

So, he celebrates his own malfeasance. Trump wallows in the aroma of his own mess. In the Anal Stage of US politics, it’s a thin line between self-love and self-loathing. 

One oozes seamlessly into the other. Trump’s personal wealth has swelled by $3.3 billion since retaking office. He may be America’s first self-dealing president. He’s turned the White House into his own gift shop. Contra Obama, it looks less like a Cheesecake Factory than Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Interior design as an infantilism.

He’s suggested he will issue sweeping pardons (thank Biden for the precedent) for even the lowest-ranking members of his staff, effectively indemnifying them from prosecution for any crimes or trampling of the Constitution he tells them to commit. And then he will, of course, force them to sign NDAs to prevent them from ever disclosing what crimes and who ordered them.

Trump doesn’t think he’ll need to pardon himself, though he may do so anyway, just because no one else has had the nerve to, not even Nixon, who was trained by Roy Cohn. It would be another first. And Trump likes firsts, the more unscrupulous, the better.

Trump believes the Supreme Court has given him the green light to do whatever he wants without legal consequences. 

And he may be right. He can trade on inside information. He can manipulate the markets to his advantage. He can cheat on his taxes. He can shake down white-collar criminals for pardons.  He can accept jumbo jetliners from a foreign government with ties to terrorists. He can reward purchasers of his meme coins with private meetings, even foreign nationals with dealings before the federal government. He can build monuments to himself and deface those of his predecessors. He can target his enemies with revenge prosecutions. All without, he believes, legal consequences. The disruptor agenda of 2015 has shriveled away. All that’s left is the cashing in.

The last vestige of populism that Trump exudes–and he more than exudes it–is his free-wheeling bigotry and the license he gives his followers to hate the same people he does.  As Tolstoy said of Napoleon after his Russian debacle, “He lost the power to think a decent thought.” […].

-Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch

Happy Unhappy...

The Wall that Protects Europe

 

                              Lest we forget what happened on September 1, 1938.

Posted on Tuesday, March 15, 2022

War, International Law, and Russia's Inhumane Crimes against the People of Ukraine by Glen Brown

Though Russia began its war with Ukraine in 2014, it was on February 24, 2022 that we began to witness a widespread and unlimited brutality of artillery and aerial bombing of innocent non-combatants.

To try to comprehend this brutality and terror on a sovereign nation, according to Quincy Wright, an American political scientist: “It may be said that wars usually result (1) technologically, because of the need of political power confronted by rivals continually to increase itself in order to survive, (2) legally, because of the tendency of a system of law to assume that the state is completely sovereign, (3) sociologically, because of the utility of external war as a means of integrating societies in time of emergency, and (4) psychologically, because persons cannot satisfy the human disposition to dominate except through identification with a sovereign group.”1 William James, a nineteenth century American philosopher, historian and psychologist, believed war is a permanent obligation, “a biological and sociological necessity, uncontrolled by ordinary psychological checks and motives.”2

In examining the sociological and psychological aspects of war, it appears that aggressive behavior is both a personal and social phenomenon as well as a manifestation of the same drive system: the instinct to unify is as strong as the instinct to destroy. However, it is the organization of political parties and the ideologies of nation-states that give sanction to personal aggression, for war is often a product of in-group thinking, an identification of the self with a nation-state focused upon an out-group, and “once war begins, there are no moral limits, only practical ones, only the limitations of force itself.”3 

It has been stated that rights of non-combatants are protected by international law, “derived from positive compacts or treaties between governments, binding in justice, but ceasing to bind when the other party [or aggressor] has ceased to observe it.”4  Though “international law is a relatively precise body of rules, defined in general and particular treaties, judicial precedents, and centuries of juristic analyses, with established international institutions, capable of making clear its applications in particular cases, [it is] not always successful in preventing violation or in applying remedies.”5

The paradoxical problem with the concept of political and legal sovereignty in international law is that it implies a nation-state is free to resort to war, even though international law also promotes (and is supposed to protect) human rights. It is true that “international law is said to allow no distinction between the foreseen and the intended consequences of an action, and that neither the League of Nations nor the United Nations contemplated enforcement of all the rules of international law. Sanctions were provided only to prevent or to stop illegal hostilities and, in the United Nations, to enforce World Court judgments. These sanctions were intended to preserve peace rather than to maintain law… If international law is to be real law, sovereignty must be subordinate to it and sanctioned by the community of nations.”6 

This, of course, would be an impossible undertaking with today’s rise in authoritarianism. In order to succeed, a peaceful world-community would depend upon moral conformity by leaders of every nation composed of diverse cultural values, political ideologies, mixed economies and nationalistic tendencies. If the truth be told in Russia, for example, it would depend upon exposing and dismantling Vladimir Putin's malicious propaganda, conspiratorial gaslighting, kleptocratic capitalism, and corrupt patronage. Now that he has shut down independent radio and television news stations and the internet, the majority of Russian people will be deceived indefinitely. The war in Ukraine can only be referred to as “a special military operation” in the media. Anyone who dares call it a war is subject to 15 years in prison. 

Furthermore, it is indisputable that Putin’s systematic and vicious annihilation of the Ukrainian people and their cultural heritage and independence is none other than what it is: a crime against humanity. What is the ultimate good which is supposed to compensate for this evil? Putin had no justifiable emergency and reasons to attack Ukraine in order to secure Russia’s survival, no just or legal cause, no right or moral intention, and no promise of a successful victory.

All attempts by western media to understand and explain Putin’s resentment and xenophobia toward the West, his intentions and rationalizations for war, such as his all-consuming ambition to restore the Soviet Union, his claim that Ukraine is not a sovereign country and belongs to Russia, his desire to eradicate the Ukrainian language and culture, his desire to aid the Separatists in their autonomy in the Donbas region, and his belief that the minority-aligned fascist militias in southeastern Ukraine and NATO’s eastern expansion are serious threats to Russia’s sovereignty..., cannot justify Russia's indiscriminate raping, torturing, killing and imprisoning innocent Ukrainian people and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.  

Finally, let’s remember Putin’s threat to the world: “Today's Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences never seen in history.” Asked recently, if an open clash could erupt between Russia and NATO, Putin replied: "Everything is possible in today's world. It's clear to everyone that it will put us a step away from full-scale World War III." 

Those of us who lived through the Cold War remember the fear of megaton nuclear bombs.  Nuclear deterrence depends upon a leader's rational perceptions and decisions that the use of nuclear weapons would ensure mutual destruction of our planet, and that both America and Russia have not only first strike capabilities but also second-strike capabilities for massive nuclear retaliation posthumously.

What is more, the admonition that an invasion of “one inch of NATO territory” will ignite a world war is a disturbing declaration. President Biden “evokes a Gestalt [the whole is greater than its parts] in which an absolute boundary is emphasized, given its certain arbitrary delineation.”7 Though some world leaders might contend that warfare can be a necessary and noble endeavor, as in the case of World War II, perhaps the greatest menace to the world today is when leaders create a scenario where World War III can become inevitable.

-Glen Brown 

Notes:

1. Wright, Quincy. A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. p. 114.

2. James, William. “The Moral Equivalent of War.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 8.

3. Walzer, Michael. “Moral Judgment in Time of War.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 54.

4. Ford, John C. “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.” War and Morality. Ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom. California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1970. p. 17.

5. Wright, Quincy. A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. p. 190.

6. Wright, Quincy. op. cit. pp. 200, 203.

7. Erikson, Eric H. “Wholeness and Totality.” War: Studies from Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology. Eds. Leon Bramson and George W. Goethals. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968. p. 128.

 

Hate, fear and bigotry is all the GOP has to offer — but will it sell?

The Republican Party no longer has anything constructive to say about anything or anyone, so what is its closing argument in the 2026 midterm elections? Hate, fear, and bigotry. On Sunday, Trump claimed that if Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won, he’d “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores.”

We’ve become so numbed to Trump’s bigotry that it’s necessary to remind ourselves that the president of the United States is now accusing an American citizen who’s running for the Senate of posing a danger to America because he’s Muslim.

Trump’s rants against Representative Ilhan Omar draw on the same Islamophobia. He’s launched a criminal investigation against her based on an allegation that she came to the United States fraudulently. He charged recently that her real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi and “her last name is, incredibly, also the exact name of her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the person they said she married and had children with.”

He’s called her “garbage” and “a scammer” who comes from “a non-country, basically. Somalia has no government, has no nothing. … All they do is run around shooting each other.” Again, the president of the United States is investigating a member of Congress because she was born in Somalia and is Muslim. Of course, hateful bigotry is nothing new for Trump. But until recently the Republican Party as a whole had avoided Trump’s bottom-feeding shite.

A few weeks ago, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, claimed that Dr. El-Sayed slept in an Osama “bin Laden jersey.”

On Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while campaigning against Dr. El-Sayed, falsely accused him of being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and then baselessly claimed that the rise of the Brotherhood (an Islamist political movement founded in 1928) had created “stagnant societies” in which Arabs do not win major global awards such as Nobel Prizes and “don’t produce literature.”

I once worked for RFK Jr.’s father. Junior’s bigotry would appall Robert F. Kennedy, whose life was dedicated to fighting such crap. But when it comes to mimicking Trump’s hatefulness, no one comes as close as JD Vance.

At a recent rally in Michigan, Vance branded El-Sayed a “little weasel” who harbored hatred for the U.S. and said he should “shut his mouth and show a little gratitude” to America. Vance’s bigotry extends beyond Islamophobia. Vance has tried to suggest that Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico is gay. Campaigning in Texas on October 13 for Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Vance answered a man who shouted that he loved him by saying he felt the same but in a “platonic” way, adding: “I’m not James Talarico.”

Then, insinuating that a positive statement Talarico once made about transgender children harbored something sinister in Talarico’s past, Vance alluded to Talarico’s internet search history before admitting he was “just guessing.”

Yet Vance thinks it’s fine to weaponize childhood sexual assault. He vigorously defends Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring the estranged birth mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a “liar” and mocking her mental health — without mentioning that the mother had lost custody of Acton after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for raping Acton as a child. Vance even blasted fellow Republicans who spoke out against the ad, calling their criticism “disgusting” and telling them to “stop whining” because “politics is a tough business.”

The midterm elections are bringing out this filth because Republicans dare not talk about the economy, which they and Trump have wrecked for most people; or foreign policy, in which Canada has become an enemy and Putin a friend; or the violent dragnet of their domestic policy, in which American citizens have been shot and killed by masked ICE agents.

All they have left with which to appeal to Americans is fear of the “other,” hate of Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, and blatant bigotry toward anyone who’s different. If this is enough for a majority of voters to keep them in control of Congress and deliver them governorships, our nation is a lot worse off than I feared.

-Robert Reich, Truthdig

Reading Ulysses at the Martello Tower by Chris Hedges

 

Dublin: It is a blustery, overcast morning on the Irish coast. I am standing on the roof of the Martello Tower, looking down at bathers diving from a rock into the Forty Foot in Dublin Bay on the beach at Sandycove. I hold James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

With nothing but the wind to disturb me, I open the book. I read the first chapter, which Joyce — who lived briefly in this decommissioned coastal fortification — set in the tower”

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” I read. “A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.”

The Latin translation is “I will go in to the altar of God,” the opening of Mass in the Catholic Church for centuries.

There is the stench of corruption in the opening chapter, with Mulligan intoning a dark Mass to Stephen Dedalus, who has spurned his mother’s request to pray at her deathbed. Dedalus, cast out from his father’s house, is soon exiled from the tower to wander Dublin. His refusal to bow before authority, whether embodied in the Roman Catholic Church or the British colonizers, makes him an outcast, like the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

We too are being orphaned in our own land.

I cope with the savagery around me by reading. I retreat into past worlds and past lives. I revel in the lyricism and musicality of great writing. I heed the wisdom of our ancestors.

Joyce detests what we should all detest. War. Violence. Nationalism, including Irish nationalism. Grasping capitalists. Fatuous pundits and journalists. Pseudo-intellectuals. Utopian dreamers. Pompous politicians. Bullies and brutes. He distrusts causes and noble ideals. 

Joyce knows the more inflated the rhetoric — “the big words that make us so unhappy,” as Dedalus says in the novel — the more the demand for human sacrifice. He chronicles the foibles, idiosyncrasies and struggles that define our lives. Like V. S. Pritchett — another writer I love — he reminds us that no one is ordinary.

Joyce’s heroes do not adorn recruitment posters enticing young men to fight in the suicidal folly of World War I, underway when he wrote much of the novel. Bloom’s bodily functions, including defecation and masturbation, are described in detail, scenes that led to the book being banned for obscenity in the United States and Britain and in the Soviet Union for “not conforming to the policy of socialist realism.”

But the point was to bring Bloom down to earth. Bloom is unmistakably human, yet filled with pathos, empathy and a desperate yearning for love. Heroism, Joyce shows us, is defined by the ability to endure suffering, rather than inflict it.

There is much in this world, from the genocide in Gaza to the consolidation of fascism in the U.S., which warrants despair. But when it becomes overwhelming, there is the reassuring comfort of novels like “Ulysses,” which is set on one day, June 16, 1904. It improbably casts a Jewish advertising salesman as a hero, as a modern Odysseus, struggling to hold on to goodness and kindness in a world where the cruel and heartless triumph.

The vulgar, such as the cad and womanizer Blazes Boylan in the novel — like Donald Trump — lack Bloom’s capacity for introspection. Words, for them, conceal more than they reveal. Joyce’s characters are portrayed with all our human complexity, ambiguity and inconsistency. They struggle with the contradictory and warring fragments of human nature — our plurality of identities.

Joyce, who lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, did not socialize with the literary grandees and fashionable denizens who congregated in the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain salons. His intimate circle encompassed waiters, fruit vendors, bank clerks and hotel concierges. The salons entranced Marcel Proust until Proust confronted their cruelty and hypocrisy in the final volume of “In Search of Lost Time.”

Joyce had little time for the bookish, the pretentious and pedants. At a dinner in Paris, to the consternation of the hosts, he chatted with Proust not about modernism and literature, but their physical ailments and shared fondness for dark chocolate truffles.

Proust, Joyce recalled, “would only talk about duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.”

Marxist critics, like many of Joyce’s contemporaries, recoiled at his depiction of our irrevocably flawed human nature and his disdain for the myth of human progress. For Joyce, we are not headed toward a classless utopia, or any utopia.

“I don’t know why they attack me,” Joyce said to his friend Eugene Jolas. “Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds.”

He understood that national myths are used to obscure our looming mortality, to create meaning out of chaos and to fool us into thinking we are bigger than ourselves. Joyce revels in the messiness of life, puncturing our self-delusions and the ways we present ourselves to the world. He obliterates the fatuous binary narratives we spin out in the name of conventional morality.

“If we go to him thinking he may be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel,” Richard Ellmann writes in his biography of Joyce. “If we go to him to find a defender of the family, he presents his central hero — the cuckold. If we ask him to be the celebrant of the isolated individual, Joyce shows isolation making him morose and defenseless. If we look for the spokesman of life, he introduces us to the dead.”

Late in the afternoon, rain clouds lowering overhead, I go to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin to see the graves of famous revolutionaries, including Roger Casement. Casement, who exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, was a fierce opponent of the British Empire, which Dedalus sums up as composed of “beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.”

Casement was originally buried on the grounds of Pentonville Prison in London, where he was hanged for treason after attempting to smuggle 20,000 Mosin-Nagant 1891 rifles, along with machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition from Germany to arm Irish nationalists in the ill-fated 1916 uprising. His body was repatriated to Ireland in 1965, where he lay in state in Dublin for five days and received a full state funeral with military honors.

I stand before the graves of the Irish revolutionaries Michael Collins and Countess Constance Markievicz. I peer up at the 180-foot granite tower marking the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, the 19th-century nationalist leader. I stop at the grave of Maud Gonne, the actress and activist who the poet William Butler Yeats compared to Helen of Troy and who spurned his numerous marriage proposals.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet,” Yeats writes. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Joyce models the chapters in his book on the episodes in “The Odyssey,” but his intentions diverge radically from Homer. Homer celebrates the military prowess and martial feats Joyce despises. Critics have busied themselves, and wasted our time, scouring “Ulysses” and Homer for parallels, mistaking Joyce’s superstructure for Joyce’s vision.

Joyce sets chapter six in this 124-acre graveyard that now holds 1.5 million souls. Odysseus in “The Odyssey” descends to Hades to meet the prophet Tiresias to discover how he can return to Ithaca. In Joyce’s hands, Hades does not conjure up spirits or prophecies but the awful finality of death.

Bloom attends the funeral in the cemetery for the drunkard Paddy Dignam. Bloom mourns the loss of his son, Rudy, who died 11 days after his birth a decade earlier. He envisions him as a young boy in an Eton suit. He remembers his father, who killed himself by drinking poison and, in his suicide note, begged Bloom to take care of his dog Athos. He struggles with the knowledge that in the afternoon his wife, Molly, has a rendezvous with her lover, Blazes Boylan. He endures the antisemitic slights of his fellow mourners. He looks at the plot where Rudy and his mother are buried and imagines his own burial.

He surveys the acres of tombs around him with their “saddened angles, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes.” “How many!” he says. “All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.” He watches the cemetery caretaker in a “well cut frock coat” who he suspects is weighing up the mourners “to see which will go next.”

“Well it is a long rest,” he thinks of those buried around him. “Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened death chamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest?

“Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! Expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.”

He sees “an obese grey rat” along the side of a crypt and thinks, “one of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick his bones clean no matter who it was… Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn’t be surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he’s well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn’t care about the smell of it.”

There are sections of “Ulysses” that should be read out loud. Joyce wrote about Dublin’s red-light district, Night town, as if it were a play. 

The characters’ names are set off in capital letters and there are italicized stage directions. Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, which lacks punctuation, is also better heard, as I was able to do when Eunice Wong performed it on stage in New York. RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, produced an audiobook of “Ulysses” in 1982 with a different actor for each character. You can link to the recording here.

We are not headed for a good place. The walls are closing in. We too are becoming outcasts. Novels such as “Ulysses,” as Dedalus says, provide “the eternal affirmation” of the human spirit. They remind us why we were put on this earth. They make us feel less alone. They sustain our souls.

-Chris Hedges

A Poster in my Library