Look what Trump wrote in the guest book at the Holocaust Memorial

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 0 Comment

Photo by Raoul Wootliff via Twitter

Times of Israel Knesset correspondent Raoul Wootliff took this picture of Trump’s entry in the guest book at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust. The president visited that site today as part of his larger Middle East junket, a whirlwind tour that left little time to write in guest books and even less time to think about it. According to Wootliff’s Twitter, Trump wrote:

It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends—so amazing + will Never Forget!

I guess that didn’t need to be a block quote, but I wanted it to feel important. It’s the guest book at Yad Vashem, after all. Here’s a tip for writing in solemn guest books: Don’t use exclamation points. Refrain from all types of exclaiming at the Holocaust memorial, unless you are directly addressing the Hebrew God. Do be sure to include in your inscription the official motto of the State of Israel, Never Forget! Capitalize both words, as you learned at Wharton.

The Washington Post offers this comparison between Trump’s remembrance of his trip with his friends and Barack Obama’s genuinely moving entry from his own visit to Yad Vashem, in 2008. Click on the Post thing, read that, and take a deep breath. Then note that old Max Bearack has been a little unfair to the Trumpster in his lede, which describes his handwriting as “all-caps.” Those are drop caps, in which lower-case letters are clearly distinguishable from initial capitals by their half size. Drop caps are the choice of many of us whose cursive handwriting is straight fucking inscrutable to everyone but ourselves.

Now that I’ve lightened the mood and our minds have shifted from the millions who died in the Holocaust, can we talk about Melania’s signature? That’s a nice signature. Obviously it can’t be bigger than Trump’s. Nor can it be on the opposite page or in the corner or something. It has to relate to his signature. Perhaps it is only because we are thinking in this vein that it look like her signature is perched on his, right where the p’s intersect. Her cramped bubble letters sit perfectly on his giant swoop. It’s like she is the pleasant person who comes along with Trump the way certain birds will ride around on the back of a warthog, theoretically free but dependent on the dumb beast.

Friday links! It’s the economy, you stupid garbage-eating piece of shit

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

House Republicans celebrate passing the AHCA.

As you may have heard, Republicans in the House passed their bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act yesterday. No longer will kids with cancer, women who had C-sections, and other drains on the system force the cost of their care onto real Americans by buying health insurance. No longer will insurers labor under the burdensome system of regulations that has depressed their soaring profits since 2010. Now freedom rings. Before doing the deed, the GOP caucus pumped itself up with a basement rendition of “Taking Care of Business”—fortunately, no one present could perceive irony—and celebrated afterward with Bud Light and a bus trip to the White House. Never mind that the Senate plans to scrap their bill and start over. The important thing is that House Republicans sent a message. Today is Friday, and America’s only functioning political party is hell-bent on cashing in while it can. Won’t you try not to get sick with me?

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How fake is Alex Jones?

By Dan Brooks in Epistemology 2 Comments

Alex Jones and a cake shaped like a gun

The shocking fact you need to know about Alex Jones is that he’s 43 years old. What happened? Maybe yelling stretches your face out. Perhaps knowledge of vast conspiracies has overtaxed his system. Or maybe he looks like a 43 year-old who got mutated in a tanning booth explosion 53 years ago because only his character is forty-three. The guy who plays him is older. Did you not realize, as I had not, that Alex Jones of Infowars and The Alex Jones Show is a character played by the performance artist Alex Jones? That’s what custody claimant Alex Jones’s lawyer recently argued in Travis County District Court, in the matter of Jones v. Jones. I quote the Austin American-Statesman:

At a recent pretrial hearing, attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”

“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”

Hold the phone—is Alex Jones breaking kayfabe? Never break kayfabe. The only time it’s okay is when your kids are on the line, as in the 1980s WWF storyline where Macho Man Randy Savage pretended to break kayfabe by wearing a suit and appearing  in family court as Randall Saváge, but then his essentially macho nature broke through and he hit his kids with a chair. Anyway, if you ever wanted to pin down Alex Jones and ask him whether he believes all the conspiracies his show presents as news, now is the time in Travis County.

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Awful poem will not, in fact, be read at Trump’s inauguration

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

Lyric poet Joseph Charles McKenzie

When I first read “Pibroch of the Domhnall,” a lyric poem celebrating the presidency of Donald Trump, it was in the context of an Independent story that made it sound like the poem would be read at Trump’s inauguration. It won’t. Although “Pibroch of the Domhnall” is an occasional poem Joseph Charles McKenzie wrote for Trump’s inauguration, it is not his inaugural poem. Snopes makes that clear, and in so doing throws a little shade at the Independent for sharing the story on social media with the tagline “Donald Trump to pay tribute to British heritage at inauguration with poem about Scotland.”

That formulation crosses the line between misleading and untrue. Instead of calling “Pibroch of the Domhnall” a Trump inauguration poem and letting the reader conclude it’s the inauguration poem, this version explicitly says the poem will happen at the inauguration. But it’s not the headline; it’s a social media post. Should the Independent apply to its Facebook posts the same standards of fact it applies to news stories?

The knee-jerk answer is yes. The newspaper relies on its reputation for accuracy, and that reputation attaches to its name on Facebook as readily as it does in print. But do we therefore expect them to fact-check every tweet? Must they respond to every @ with the same ethics that guide the sports page? Or do we kind of expect from social media a modicum of just sayin’ stuff?

We probably agree the social-media portrayal of how this poem relates to Trump’s inauguration is dishonest and therefore bad. But I suspect we also agree that it’s not as bad as if they did it in the newspaper. If this is true, and we expect more scrupulous accuracy in the news, then it follows that we expect the amount of dishonesty on social media to be greater than zero.

Finally, society has developed a system of mass communication less trustworthy than the newspaper. That we would not only welcome this advancement but also hold it to a lower standard of truth than other media—even as we panic over “fake news”—suggests that truth is not our number-one priority when it comes to information.

We want to know the truth, of course. But we want to know the truth already; we want the truth to support our existing views. The “truth” that Trump’s inaugural poem is rhyming doggerel about how Barack Obama was a tyrant confirms our view of the new president as a classless boor. It matters that it’s not his official inauguration poem, but it doesn’t really matter. The theme of that untrue story is true.

My favorite stanza is the one that celebrates the defeat of academia:

Academe now lies dead, the old order rots,
No longer policing our words and our thoughts;
Its ignorant hirelings pretending to teach
Are backward in vision, sophomoric in speech.

I’m so sick of college policing my thoughts. This poem really captures something about the marriage between smug populism and conservative opportunism that gave us President Trump. They really ought to read it at his inauguration. But we ought not to spread that untrue story on social media, even though it’s what we want to do. Perhaps some of that old, thought-policing order is good for us.

United States reserves the right to launch nuclear first strike

By Dan Brooks in Ethical Dilemmas 0 Comment
The first and last person to use nuclear weapons in war, Harry S. Truman

The first and last person to use nuclear weapons in war, Harry S. Truman

One of the central propositions of the Obama presidency, along with closing Guantanamo Bay and shooting Osama Bin Laden in the face, was to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US foreign policy. In both Prague in 2009 and Hiroshima in May, the president called for “a world without nuclear weapons.” Until that world is ours, though, the United States reserves the right to nuke first and ask questions later, presumably while pouring water over a rag stuffed in your mouth. The Times reports today that national security advisors have convinced the president to abandon plans to foreswear first use of nuclear weapons in combat. As of today, but also as of 1945, you don’t have to nuke the US for the US to nuke you.

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