Things Sean Spicer is Sorry For Today

First, I’d like to apologize to Greta Van Susteren for dragging her into this. I know you already look like a waffler for jumping ship from Fox News to MSNBC, almost like you don't really stand for anything but the next paycheck. Same for your networks. So having my sad mansplaining ass on your show probably didn't help much. If it's any comfort, when they fire you and you have to move to Russia Today right behind Ed Schultz, I’ll probably be looking for work too. Hey, maybe we could set up shop together? I could be your Ed McMahon! Think about it: “HEEEEEEERE’S Greta!” No, really, think about it. Please. I’ll leave my card with your people.

To Adolph Hitler: I know we keep dragging you out of the metaphor closet like an old coat. All the crap you’ve been through, you deserve the same chance at being consigned to oblivion that we gave Genghis Khan and the guy who thought Blunt Talk would be a step forward for Patrick Stewart. If it's any comfort, we may soon have a new gold standard for awful people doing obnoxious things. Just sayin’, we may get to retire your name soon. Sleep well, Adolph.

Also, to the Jews offended I mentioned Adolph during Passover: Mazel tov. I guess I was meshuggeneh. What a schlemiel, eh? Is okay, I go through desert with you. We all one people now. Is good, right?

My sincerest apologies to the camera guy who had to watch me flail. I slipped a C-note, so now your whiplash treatment is covered by Trumpcare. But let's just let that stay between you and me. We don't want everyone thinking they can get that kind of treatment.

To the UPI pool reporter, who asked about the tax returns, and I replied “Are you high?”: I had no idea that Jeff Sessions would order a spot drug test. Also, I had no idea about your Medical Marijuana card, or your debilitating pancreatitis, or the meds you can’t swallow without your dope. I truly am sorry, and though your lifeless remains can’t appreciate my sincere contrition, I did send your wife and your boyfriend fruit baskets, so it's okay. Right?

Fort Sumter. Not really me but, y’know, I knew people. So just, I’m sorry in general for that one. While we're being honest.

My regular cabbie, Sadiq, has become the one guy I can trust. He listens to my frustrations, and his old family hummus recipe belongs in the National Archives. Seriously. So Sadiq, if you’re watching this, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve had to say about your country, your family, and your people. That Instagram you showed me of your mother is really, really… well… I shouldn’t have asked for her number, that was inappropriate. You know I don’t have the connections to get her a green card, sorry. Do they have fruit baskets in your country?

To my agent: I know I said this would be a good way to kick-start my stand-up career, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I hadn’t really figured out how to get free stage time yet. And in fairness, hey, free publicity, right? It’s the Madonna principle: if people are talking smack about you, at least they’re talking. Okay, I admit, Madonna never had to make excuses for a guy who tried to stage-manage World War III. But I never tried to dry-hump a nun in four-four time. Which is a pretty good trade-off. I hope.

My wife says I should probably apologize for rendering up our firstborn as a hostage to The Donald and his diabolical plans. Because I used to believe in him, I really did. But you and I both know he’s gone batshit crazy off the rails, and I really want to get out of this train wreck. But he has my son. So until I get my family out of this, I guess my only hope is to grip my chair arms, make peace with my Lord, and await the sweet release of death.

And finally, I apologize for always wearing the same grey suit whenever I leave the house. There’s no excuse for that shit. I had the guy at Men’s Wearhouse take my measurements this morning, and I have my eyes on a debonair pinstripe number on the closeout rack. I hope they take EBT, because once I bust my son out, you know they ain't gonna pay me the big bucks anymore.

The Rule of Law in a Monopoly Society

Cell phone image of a bleeding passenger, since
identified as Dr. David Dao, being dragged off
a United Airlines flight

The great British critic GK Chesterton wrote, between the World Wars, that for most people, most times, there is no difference between Communist and Capitalist regimes. In the aggregate, no matter the system, we work for someone else, under conditions we didn't choose. We don't own our own tools, and therefore lack leverage to negotiate for better work. And in both systems, bureaucrats control our lives. Whether corporate or state bureaucrats makes little practical difference.

On Monday, we witnessed two examples of American bureaucrats so high-handed, they unified Right and Left in outrage against the corporate state. You’ve already seen cell-phone footage of United Airlines “security officers” forcibly ejecting a medical doctor from a flight he’d already legally boarded. The crew arbitrarily selected him to relinquish his seat, but citing his waiting patients, he refused. So security slammed him bodily against the bulkhead and dragged him, bleeding, down the aisle.

Almost simultaneously, the Lake County, Florida, sheriff’s department released a PR video in which the sheriff threatens imminent crackdowns on heroin dealers. Surrounded by four armed and armored deputies with balaclavas over their faces, he cast an image many viewers found eerily similar to Daesh (ISIS) propaganda videos. Sheriff Grinnell’s aggressive rhetoric sounds exactly like Jihadi John threatening vengeance on journalists, Christians, apostates, and the kitchen sink. Turn the sound off, the illusion becomes complete.



Frustratingly, both actions are completely legal. Courts have ruled that any orders given by airline pilots, however capricious, however illegal on land, have force of law. United is facing PR blowback, but they’ve destroyed baggage and killed pets before. Their overwhelming market dominance exempts them from consequences. And legal precedent permits sheriffs to threaten, lie, coerce, and bully with relative impunity. Sheriff Grinnell's video looks terrible, but is nevertheless protected by existing Supreme Court precedent.

Smarter commentators than I struggle to create meaningful definitions of the word “bureaucracy.” I won’t attempt to settle all debates here. For our purposes, let’s define a bureaucracy as a hierarchical institution that deputizes some people to enforce rules, but doesn’t accord them discretion to interpret those rules. Law officers, like Sheriff Grinnell, or their civilian analogues, like the United security officers, have rules to enforce. Only their superiors (judges, bosses) can amend those rules.

Bureaucracies require a functional monopoly. Sheriff Grinnell has complete authority to enforce law in Lake County, Florida, endowed with this authority by the civil government, and elected by the county’s citizens. Despite the myths of unarmed civilian crimefighters like Batman or Phoenix Jones, real authority to combat lawlessness is vested in the government. Even private security officers, like United’s, or real-life civilian crimefighters, like the Guardian Angels, eventually turn their arrests over to the police.

Likewise, United basically has a similar monopoly in commercial flight. Thought other airlines exist, economists will mention something called the 3-30 Rule: when three suppliers control thirty percent of a market, that market is no longer free. United, American, and Southwest Airlines, though nominal competitors, functionally have monopoly authority. They can do anything, because we cannot go elsewhere. That’s why United successfully shrugs off bad publicity, like United Breaks Guitar, because we cannot stop them.

Sheriff Peyton Grinnell
(Orlando Sentinel photo)

As always, whenever people who posess power exercise it over the powerless, apologists have come out defending the actions others consider deplorable. Without authority over their county, or their plane, how can these authorities do their jobs? This claim isn’t without merit, from the powerful side of the spectrum. This centralization of authority—commercial authority, legal authority, or whatever—certainly benefits whoever controls that authority. Americans believe only time stands between us and becoming powerful.

Except that transit of power never quite happens. According to the National Sheriffs’ Association, there are 3,081 sheriff's’ offices in America. Even if each elected sheriff served one term and retired, there aren’t enough offices for every qualified law officer in America, much less every person living under the law. And even if even if every qualified pilot owned an airliner personally, who would do booking? Publicity? Serve drinks? Power is, by nature, distributed unequally.

Our answer to this abuse isn’t fighting power with power. As Chairman Mao demonstrated, when power models reverse, the names change, but structures remain steadfast. Our society’s opponent isn’t a militarized police force or a monopolistic airline. It’s the power they represent, the domination of citizens by massive bureaucratic organizations. Our solution isn’t installing new bureaucrats, it’s empowering ordinary citizens. I don’t know how to do that yet. But the time has come to try.

The Usual Australian Suspects

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 18
Craig Monahan (writer/director), The Interview

When a police raid busts down Eddie Rodney Fleming’s (Hugo Weaving) door and arrests him for a stolen car, Fleming’s first reaction is to piss himself. Hardly the reaction of a street-hardened car thief. Also hardly the reaction, as the story unfolds, of a serial killer stalking the Australian outback, a predator stalking young students for the thrill of sport. But he may not be that either, as an excessively aggressive interrogator starts pulling contradictory stories loose.

Despite a brief flirtation with international fame following 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Weaving had essentially returned to anonymity outside Australia by this movie’s release. His debut as a staple of high-dollar American science fiction wouldn’t come until the next year, with The Matrix. This relative obscurity limited Weaving to smaller paychecks, but it permitted him artistic liberty to pursue intellectually adventurous art-house fare like this.

Most of this movie takes place within the confines of one urban police station, mainly a single interview room. It has, somewhat, the conventions of a single-set play, with dialog-driven scenes, revelations driven primarily by claustrophobia, and no clear act divisions. The aptly named Detective Sergeant Steele (Tony Martin) grills Fleming for hours, demanding information on crimes so grisly, Fleming visibly shrinks when asked about them. Steele rains down like God’s own vengeance.

Most of the movie turns on two questions: did he or didn’t he? And, do the ends justify the means? Fleming engages in surprisingly strategic horse-trades around his confessions. In exchange for a hot meal and dry shorts, he begins spilling details about crimes so gruesome that the tables turn, and Steele flees the room to regain his composure. But when Steele’s superiors ask follow-ups, Fleming insists his confessions were lies, calculated to end the humiliating interview.

Tony Martin (top, armed) arrests Hugo
Weaving in The Interview

Behind Fleming’s ambiguity, lies Steele’s. Fairly early on, as Steele sounds out Fleming, we discover somebody else is observing this interview. Apparently, Steele has a history of ethics violations, which his direct supervisors have overlooked because he gets results. But we watch Steele feed Fleming information, ask questions off the record, and directly threaten his suspect, all of which directly contravene Australian justice procedures. Steele is as rotten as the criminals he busts.

Writer-director Craig Monahan unabashedly plays with audiences’ loyalties. Fleming comes across initially as a shapeless nebbish: unemployed, divorced, living in a mold-stained flat with stacks of magazines and a pathetic goldfish. We wonder why Steele persecutes this poor sap so mercilessly. But Fleming’s confessions are too specific and detailed to have been invented spontaneously. Or are they? Even Steele realizes they’re contradictory and coincidence-driven. Who’s fooling who?

(An unused alternate ending, available on the DVD, sadly resolves this ambiguity. Skip it if you can.)

This movie is, essentially, an ongoing power struggle. DS Steele has the power to threaten, cajole, and coerce Fleming, confident he has the entire Australian justice system behind him. Falsely confident, as it happens. Fleming has only his stories to assuage the hot-tempered detective, but his words giveth, and his words taketh away. As Steele’s administrative support dwindles, Fleming manages to save his hide by playing both sides against one another.

Tony Martin, as Steele, is almost completely unknown outside Australia. He’s mainly done television and theatre at home, and hasn’t cultivated Weaving’s international audience base. That actually helps him with global audiences here: we have no baggage in seeing his performance. At times, he resembles Tim Roth or Harvey Keitel, actors whose characters are known for disregarding ethical norms in pursuit of their goals. Martin, as Steele, proves you can be right and still be wrong.



Monahan’s movie asks its audiences difficult questions about moral authority. Are people in power ever justified in lying to citizens who can’t fight back? Is it right to hang a suspect with rope he spun himself? When we have only verbal testimony, how can we be sure objective reality even exists? More important, this movie avoids the temptation to offer elementary solutions to these puzzles. To watch this film is to buy into its invitation to doubt the nature of reality.

This isn’t a crime movie. There’s no physical violence, no gunplay, no hard-bitten detective antics. Half police procedural, half psychological thriller, this movie forces audiences to adjust their rhythms to the pace presented, almost like a religious experience. Watching the movie, we, like Fleming, find ourselves transported to a world where words like “truth” and “time” have little meaning. And we return to our world changed by the experience.

Freedom, Anarchy, and the Immortal Soul

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 80
Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom and Anarchy and Christianity

Jacques Ellul became a committed Marxist during his membership in the French Resistance during World War II. Sometime following the war, he underwent a mystical experience (he left no record of exactly what happened) and converted to Christianity. These two forces, often presented as antagonistic, steered his thinking thereafter. He became a noted scholar of society, technology, and law. His pointed criticisms shaped global policy during the Cold War. But throughout, he remained his generation’s most visible Christian Marxist.

Written at the beginning of his career, The Presence of the Kingdom addresses the unique problems Christians face in the modern world. Ours is a singularly hostile age, stripping the tools we need to communicate with people as humans. Why do we allow technology to write our daily agendas? Why does communication become so muddled as our ways of speaking become clearer? This harsh world doesn't just threaten people; it jeopardizes Christians' mission to spread healing to a darkened world.

This book is basically five linked essays, in which Ellul addresses some of the most important threats to community and Christian theology. Do social philosophies help humankind, or do they add to our suffering? What does it mean for Christians to join in politics? Written during Europe’s postwar reconstruction, some of Ellul's specific references are three generations out of date, but his points remain as harrowing and poignant as they were then. This book provides a thumbnail introduction to his later, vastly complicated work.

Ellul's stark Calvinism offers a needed jolt to many American Christians, who lapse into comfy non-confrontation. His prose is  massively complex. He asks hard questions and requires his readers to think, to challenge their own dogmas. Great minds could spend years unpacking Ellul’s implications; in fact, Ellul himself did just that, devoting his career to expanding, revising, and clarifying points he first addresses here. His Christianity may seem harsh. But his point of view forces us out of the complacency we have enjoyed for far too long.

Near the conclusion of his career, Ellul’s Anarchy and Christianity condenses his lifelong philosophic theses into a concise format that provides a good overview and primer for possible future thought. Little more than a pamphlet, this volume restates Ellul’s most timeless thoughts, providing a handy summary of the logic by which he believes the Christian Scripture reveals an anti-statist bent at odds with the tendency of formal Christianity to make common cause with the powers of the earth.

Jacques Ellul

Throughout this volume Ellul insists he is not trying to proselytize anyone for a point of view. Like Luther or Bonhoeffer, he mainly exhorts Christians back to their origins; he vocally insists he would make no converts. The repetition makes me suspect he protests too much, but this book is too short and introductory to change many minds. What it is likely to do is start lively, productive discussions that may allow two camps, often regarded as incompatible, to find commonalities and stop the feud that divides them both.

As a strict Calvinist in a nation losing its spiritual heritage, Ellul expresses disdain for anyone exercising dominion over others. He insists we must be cautious and selective in reading Calvin and Luther. There are some places, particularly in his exegesis of 1 Peter and of Paul, that he must perform interesting verbal gymnastics to reconcile his thesis with Scripture. He might have been better served here to take a bold approach and admit there are some things he just doesn't know.

These two volumes bracket a massively complex and inclusive career. Across nearly five decades, Ellul challenged social mores that devalued and abased human dignity. A survivor of Vichy, he wrote on the corrosive influence of propaganda; a legal historian, he expounded on the consequences of what he called The Technological Society and The Political Illusion. Throughout his career, though, Ellul remained grounded on the one moral foundation he believed Marx and Christ shared, that when one human exercises power over another, that person claims a role belonging exclusively to God.

Jacques Ellul didn't write for dabblers or dilettantes. His prose is ponderous and allusive, citing prior writings by himself and others. His prose aims to engage true believers, activists, and thinkers. Be willing to reserve a healthy measure of time before reading this book. But if you apportion that time wisely, Ellul opens up a new way of regarding our Christian mission on earth. Highly recommended for Christians, for conscientious resisters, and for intellectuals on both sides of the theological divide.

John Sibley Williams in the Wilderness of Home

John Sibley Williams, disinheritance: poems

Veteran Portland, Oregon, poet John Sibley Williams writes like somebody carrying the weight of his ancestry in a backpack. You know, the big frame backpacks that excessively manful men wear while spending a long weekend getting lost up Mount Hood. The sprawling metaphor makes sense when reading his poetry, because Williams mixes liberal doses of nature imagery with deep feelings to coax meanings across the breadth of his book.

And what meanings they are. Williams explores themes of bone, ash, ghost: whatever traces the dead leave among the living. This may involve dark autumns along “Bone River,” a single poem Williams disarticulates into four segments throughout his book. This may involve a Dead Boy, a mysterious figure Williams has perform various enigmatic tasks, like Martyr His Mother or Fashion the Grand Canyon From His Body.

Like the best poets, Williams doesn’t permit simplistic, literal-minded interpretations of his verse. Overworked English teachers cannot (or shouldn’t) simply ask, what is the poet trying to tell us here. But as his themes develop across the range of his book, we realize there is nevertheless a current running, riparian, through his verse. Consider this representative passage from “The Cultural Narrative of Clouds”:

The sky is a girl abandoned naked by the river,
clouds swollen and purple
by light’s unthinkable angle.
Too young to spell moon
or her mother’s name.
Born ghosted. An offered fig
at the foot of the temple.

In early poems, readers could be forgiven for thinking Williams places emphasis on river, clouds, light. His use of wilderness imagery looms so large, I initially believed Williams had written a love song for the Cascadian forests. But it doesn’t take long to realize a parallel river permeates Williams’ forest. The forlorn child, lost, abandoned, or dead, leads these verses from behind. Clearly something personal, something not obvious, dominates Williams’ thinking.

John Sibley Williams

One should resist the desire to impute too much signifigance to individual titles. Especially in today’s narrow poetry-reading world, the ironic contradiction between title and content is a beloved device. Yet besides Dead Boy and Bone River, which between them constitute nearly a quarter of Williams’ titles, we have exemplars like “Miscarriage,” “Mother’s Day,” “Teething,” and one particular favorite, “Postpartum”:

He doesn’t know the consonants of our waste.
He can’t yet speak the vowels of ruin.
Perhaps it would be better if he never broke
from the frail bars of the cradle
into this vaguer cage.

I fear his sudden humanity.

So he won’t dream too far from things
I tear north from every map,
then I tear off the center. I take
down the photographs, sew shut the curtains,
go about eyes closed so he cannot see himself
in my mirror.

According to Facebook, Williams has young ’uns at home. This morbid taste of ash is paradoxical, but not wholly contradictory. It is, of course, dangerous to apply strict, one-to-one interpretations to poetry, especially non-objective poetry like Williams’. Poetry isn’t about a thing so much as the language experience. But Williams’ leitmotifs of Dead Boy, Miscarriage, and Mother surely bear consideration.

As a technical poet, Williams uses many popular motifs that readers have grown to expect. His expressionistic metaphors (“the consonants of our waste”) seem obvious once somebody voices them, but nobody did until Williams. Like many recent poets, he considers the left margin optional, and salts his poems with lacunae, which become more prominent as the book progresses, suggesting a mind caught in the frenzy of creative grief.

By the end, Williams’ themes have altered completely. Rather than getting lost in nature, the natural world becomes something he visits, a tourist destination with family on vacation (Grand Canyon). Rather than getting lost in the forest, trees become resources he consumes to shelter and protect his family. But sometimes, the resources he consumes in turn consume him, as in this passage from “Fertility”:

Can I say that a child died inside us
when all we have conceived is a name
for what could be?

We’ve built a cradle of nails and wood
to house a body too busy dying
to rest, a trophy of grief
we polish in case of tomorrow.

Williams basically invites us on a rugged journey into the heart of his pervasive melancholy. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, only the completely personal is truly universal, so as we venture into Williams’ struggles, we recognize ourselves, even we without children. His grief is ours, his glimpses of optimism between thunderheads our own. It isn’t easy. But it’s profoundly worth it.