This blog is going on hiatus.
It has been a distraction for quite a while* and I must work, seriously, immersively, unrelentingly, on more important writing.
The trouble with being too casual about a manuscript is that you don't do it. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, "I'll do it if I feel like it." One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not. And I am a little afraid that they are not much good. However, down they go. . . . Sometimes they come out better than at other times and that is all one can say.John Steinbeck, July 29, 1940(personal journal kept while writing The Grapes of Wrath)
The first public hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is scheduled for Thursday evening. There will be eight public hearings between now and June 23.
To get you ready, the Brookings Institute has this 104-page guide: "Trump on Trial: The January 6 Committee Hearings and The Question of Criminality". And Just Security has posted an aptly-titled primer: "Primer on the Hearings of the January 6th Select Committee".
The most comprehensive, insightful, and dot-connecting reports on the hearings will be found at Seth Abramson's Proof. His guide to Congress's "most significant hearings in a half-century" is here. I'm confident that any interested people who subscribe for the month of June ($5) will agree it was the best $5 they ever spent. (Or follow him for free on Twitter.) Based on his past reporting, I have high hopes for Seth's work over the next three weeks; he will likely exceed them.
(*: I believe in this and it's been tested by research.)
7 comments:
. . . and as if by magic, on the eve of the first public hearing, Fox says the "largest-ever migrant caravan" of brown people is a-comin' to git ya!
No doubt they will have stockpiled some other distractions too !
I hope your hiatus is successful and brief!
I've always found Trollope's work habits inspirational, though not easily accessible to mere mortals:
"Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”"
The New Yorker, June 14, 2004
I am so happy to see this. Also good to know that my buddy John Steinbeck has helped out.
Brian Beutler, Big Tent:
The way this works, the way it’s always worked with Republicans and Donald Trump, is that he keeps confronting them with moral dilemmas that are also opportunities to banish him, and they keep deciding they like his moral degeneracy, or maybe (generously) that they prefer it to whatever the consequences of expelling him from the party would be. But the key in every case is that once they join Trump in his deviancy, they add that bad deed to their karmic debt and never re-contemplate it.
This happened during the 2016 campaign on an almost weekly basis . . . The insurrection presented Republicans a historic second opportunity to simply vote Trump off the island of federal politics, and they weren’t interested. They talked themselves out of the view that the failed coup was unacceptable and should be investigated, into the view that the destruction of American democracy is preferable to a divided Republican Party. They made their deal with the devil, and they won’t reopen it. Their views of January 6 will go the way of every other crime they’ve abetted: not great → unimportant → litigated by the election → forgotten.
I have a lot of unkind things to say about how Republicans conduct themselves, but this is what makes them unacceptably dangerous—there’s no principle limiting what they’ll accede to, and no form of democratic accountability they won’t seek to sidestep, and they will follow that set of incentives to the darkest places you can imagine. If next time, the Mike Pence stand-in actually gets hanged, Republicans will have another opportunity to press the reset button, but they probably won’t; if Donald Trump makes a secret deal with Russia that benefits him personally, but sells out Ukraine and ends the NATO alliance, they will have another opportunity to press the reset button, but they probably won’t. If dissidents start falling out of helicopters, or whole populations get rounded up, they’ll abide. They’ll drag the whole world down until it causes them to be dislodged from power for more than a couple elections.
The idea can’t be to make them behave better; it has to be to interrupt that cycle as early as possible.
***
House January 6 Committee Hearing #2: After Action Report (AAR)
Here are the most important takeaways from the second of six scheduled June 2022 televised hearings by the House January 6 Committee. If you missed the hearing, you will definitely want to read this.
Seth Abramson . . .
AAR2: The Three Most Important Takeaways From House January 6 Committee Hearing #2 (June 13) . . .
(1) The “Big Lie” was launched by a drunk man who had been paid by Donald Trump to advance his interests. The lie was opposed—and debunked—by every 2020 Trump campaign aide and adviser paid to tell him the truth and interpret election results, and by his Cabinet officials. No reasonable man would have adopted the “Big Lie.” . . .
(2) After the election, Trump raised hundreds of millions of dollars for an Election Defense Fund that did not exist. Instead, money raised off the back of the “Big Lie” Trump knew was false was redirected to all sorts of other purposes, even including paying Event Strategies, the Paul-Manafort-co-run entity that set up the January 6 event at the White House Ellipse (the one that helped incite the Capitol attack). . . .
(3) The House January 6 Committee today continued its very cautious approach to the question of criminality, leaving this assessment for the Department of Justice so as not to be seen as usurping DOJ’s authority or leaning on it unduly. Nevertheless, the shape of these hearings is in the form of an opening statement—and even, to an extent, case-in-chief—in a federal prosecution of Trump (i.e., United States v. Trump). . . .
Conclusion
One of the best things the Committee is doing—something that both defuses Trump and the Republicans’ false claims that the bipartisan House January 6 Committee is in fact “partisan”, and helps AG Garland see more clearly what his case against Trump would look like (and how likely it would be to result in a conviction)—is ensure that almost every witness it calls isn’t just a Republican but an ardent, longtime Republican. . . .
The upshot is this: at least some Fox News viewers learned today, if they were at all willing to learn, that Trump carefully and premeditatedly stole their money after the election—conning them post-election in the same way he had pre-election. Will this change enough minds for DOJ to accept that a prosecution of Trump is what’s called for by rule of law, isn’t a partisan exercise, and would be accepted by independents and even some right-of-center GOP voters if the evidence is properly marshaled by his prosecutors? We don’t know. Certainly, how strong the evidence is that we see in the next four Committee hearings will go a long way toward determining that. What we can say for now is that this was another tour de force performance by the Committee—clear, sober, concise, well-organized, judiciously chronological, beautifully edited (as to its multimedia components), and compelling at the level of a federal prosecution of Donald Trump that every American, whatever their political stripe is, richly deserves.
***
An amazing recap of Public Hearing #3 here. Some wild, jaw-dropping shit today.
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