Tell-Some.

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            Reports of a new book on the presidency of Joe Biden have begun to appear.  It focuses on the troubled man revealed for all the world to see in his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump.[1]  Biden had been 77 years old when he finally was inaugurated in January 2021.  He would have been 82 at his second inauguration.  The job of President of the United States would be daunting to almost anyone at any age.  To be president in old age would be a much greater challenge.  The authors have called upon a host of—mostly anonymous—sources to document the failing powers of an ambitious man of modest abilities.[2] 

            Even during the original 2020 campaign, Biden had begun to forget the names of people he had known for a long time.  His condition worsened as his term progressed.  He confused one person with another.  In one case with nasty implications, he confused Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security.[3]  Cabinet meetings had to work from a written script.  Concern went as far as speculation about the president’s possible need for a wheelchair during a second term. 

            Apparently, those around Biden recognized his advancing physical and mental fragility.  Still, no one took it up with the president himself or, in any forceful way, with those closest to him.  The silence was widespread.  “No Democrats in the White House or on Capitol Hill raised any doubts, either privately with the president or publicly, about Biden’s second run” say the authors of the book. 

            Washington is a gossipy town filled with predatory people.  If the President makes the usual appearances and meets with donors, Congress people, Senators, the people from the CIA doing the daily Presidential brief, then these people would spot his problems the way a leopard spots a limp.  If the President disappears from all the usual appearances and communicates only through his closest staff, then that would be noticed as well.  Questions would arise. 

            The heightened attention and more frequent appearances running with the re-election campaign brought Biden’s limitations to the attention of many more people.  Democratic congressmen and donors (like George Clooney) were alarmed by the wreck of a man they now encountered.  People from the Obama presidency (William Daley, David Plouffe) tried to line up alternatives to Biden, to no avail.  Were Washington insiders just fooled?  Did they hope for the best in the election with the expectation that Biden would die or be removed in a second term? 

Most likely, many people hope to not be held to account for their parts in foisting off a dotard on the American people.[4]  Instead, “Dr. Jill and the Inner Circle” are being made into the goats.  The book provides a good deal of material for people to use against Jill Biden.  She is described as a “fierce advocate for her husband.”    She “grew more involved in his decision-making as he grew older.”  OK, which decisions?  “Just” re-election?  Foreign policy? 

[1] The book is Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (due out on 20 May 2025).  The book is discussed in Reid J. Epstein, “Book Promises New Data on Biden’s Mental Decline,” NYT, 15 May 2025. 

[2] Unless you think that keeping Robert Bork off the Supreme Court and getting Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is a positive record. 

[3] On the upside, he didn’t confuse either one of them with Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury. 

[4] It’s impossible to know, at present, if this operation ran only once (before the 2024 election) or if it ran twice (before the 2020 election as well). 

Further Thoughts on the Alien Enemies Act.

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            The Alien Enemies Act is constitutional.  The Supreme Court found it so in a 1948 case when it endorsed the order of a lower court that a German-American Nazi had to leave the country.  Trump’s use of the law to justify deportations seems illegitimate.  Still, the commentary on it seems equally revealing. 

            “It’s an 18th century law…”[1]  “We cannot allow antiquated laws to continue enabling discriminatory practices.”[2]  Well, both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are creations of the 18th Century.  Marbury v. Madison and the Emancipation Proclamation are products of the 19th Century.  So, age is no issue if you like the results, but it is an issue if you don’t like them?    This argument is a flight from honest thought. 

            “No one has tried to argue that that invasion or predatory incursion language could be used in any context other than a conventional war.”[3]  Except that is just what Trump has argued, backed by his Department of Justice.  The Supreme Court has neither rejected nor affirmed Trump’s argument.[4]  Does the author mean to say that the argument is illegitimate because it is not hallowed by time?  This is the opposite of the previous argument.  Furthermore, Plessy v. Ferguson stood as “settled law” for almost a century.  So, hallowed by time. 

            “Historian Joseph Ellis called support for the Alien Enemies Act “unquestionably the biggest blunder” of Adams’ presidency.”[5]  So, an expert attacks the law as wrong right from the beginning.  We defer (or should defer) to expert opinion on the efficacy of vaccines.  Therefore, we should defer to expert opinion on the foolishness of a law passed in the many days ago?  JMO, but Adams’ “biggest blunder” was his support for the Sedition Act, which led to the prosecution of a number of Democratic-Republican journalists.  The Sedition Act was hard to pass because it raised so many doubts even among Federalists.  The application of the Act against political rivals aroused opposition to the Federalists.  John Adams became the first one-term president as a result.  It was repealed after the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800.  In contrast, Presidents running declared wars against foreign powers have found it a useful tool.  During the Biden administration, bills to repeal the act were introduced in Congress in 2021 and 2023.  Neither bill made it out of committee.[6]  In both cases, the Democrats held the majority in the relevant chamber.  Some Democrats saw utility in keeping the Act.  Is this a case of a respected expert bending his analysis to oppose Trump? 

            That leaves the question of whether Trump’s use of the law in these circumstances is constitutional.  Currently, “the Supreme Court has limited the deportations without ruling on whether Trump may invoke the act.”[7]  So Trump’s actions may yet turn out to be constitutional.    

In the 1948 case, four Justices dissented, arguing that “Due process does not perish when war comes.”[8]  This is a complicated issue, but the one to fight on.  The rest is anti-Trump fluff. 

[1] “The Alien Enemies Act,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[2] Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), quoted in “A push for repeal,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[3] Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, quoted in “The Alien Enemies Act,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[4] “Supreme Court allows deportations to El Salvador,” The Week, 18 April 2025, p. 5.

[5] Ellis quoted in “The Alien Enemies Act,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[6] “A push for repeal,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[7] “The Alien Enemies Act,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

[8] Quoted in “The Alien Enemies Act,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 11. 

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 19.

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            I think that Donald Trump is a bad man with some good ideas and some bad ideas.  He seems prone to stick with the bad ideas (and bad people, like Pete Hogwallop[1]) while rabbiting around on the good ideas.  He may well represent a threat to Democracy.  Or not.  His method, much more this term than in the first, is the bull-rush.  Doing “everything, everywhere, all at once.”  Testing, even blowing through, established limits of all sorts; moving very fast and keeping it up across time; forcing changes that may or may not endure.  He’s a wrecking ball and a disruptor, not a builder. 

            Trump also is not a “politician.”  In contemporary America, a “politician” is a career public employee who gets his/her/their contract renewed every 2, 4, or 6 years by playing it safe within the terms of their own constituency.  Most of them rise by following what the Romans used to call the “cursus honorum” (“course of honors/offices”).[2]  They’re committed to never doing anything “risky.”[3]  Trump thinks that these people are Nithings.[4]  He’s pretty much right about most of them.[5] 

            But what is the alternative to Trump?  Leave things the way they were?  Keep going along the same lines that produced gigantic deficits and a national debt that seems likely to end in default?  A creeping expansion of the Executive Branch and rule through regulation, executive orders, and executive agreements, rather than legislation?  A withering of the Legislative Branch through its own indifference to its responsibilities?  A well-advanced politicization of the Judicial Branch?  That’s going to end in the election of Supreme Court Justices.  An economy that prioritizes Finance over everything else, including Manufacturing?  A neglect of American military power in an era of rising danger?  A materialist, consumerist culture—against which Jimmy Carter warned long ago—that has reduced us to a “Country Made of Ice Cream”?  How is any of that going to be reformed in a timely fashion by continuing with “the way we do things around here”? 

[1] Start at 4:05.  Pa always said never trust a Hogwallop! 

[2] Cursus honorum – Wikipedia 

[3] The NYT is risk averse in its attitude toward change.  New York Times risky – Search

[4] Old English term.  See the first meaning given.  NITHING definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary 

[5] But not all of them.  Gina Raimondo for the Democrats and Mike Gallagher for the Republicans offer hope. 

The Alien Enemies Act. Or, the Aliens Are Enemies Act.

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            As the result of historical experience during the French and Indian Wars, Anglo-Americans regarded France as the enemy and Britain as their benevolent parent-country.  Then the British and their American colonists fell out.  War followed.  During the Revolutionary War, the self-proclaimed United States signed an alliance with the French monarchy.  France loaned money to the Americans and declared war on Britain.  France also sent military forces to America.  The Franco-American alliance remained in effect after the war.  Then the French Revolution broke out, France overthrew the monarchy and declared itself a Republic, and declared war (1792) on everyone except the Man in the Moon and the Americans. 

            Americans divided sharply on how to deal with France.  Many people (often Federalists) hated the French version of revolution.  Many other people (mostly Democratic-Republicans) sympathized, at the least, with the aims of the French revolutionaries.  The issue became a partisan matter.  Congress seized the opportunity to repudiate repayment of the French war loans because they were onerous (1793).  Congress then ratified the “Jay Treaty” which settled disputes between the United States and Britain (1794).  France responded by allowing French “privateers” to seize a lot of American merchant ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean.  Trying to fend off a war, the Americans sent a delegation to negotiate with France (1797-1798).  This ended badly and a “Quasi-War” at sea broke out (1798-1801).[1] 

            President John Adams and the Federalist majorities in Congress passed a package of four “Alien and Sedition Laws” (1798).  Formally, Adams feared that the French would try to spread their revolutionary ideology to the United States.  Informally, the Federalists had come to see the Democratic-Republicans as inclined toward the same policies as the French.  So, stomp on them. 

            The “Alien Friends Act” allowed the President to deport anyone considered to be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”  The law sun-setted after two years, and the government didn’t make much of an effort to enforce it anyway. 

            The “Naturalization Act” extended the residence requirement before obtaining citizenship from 5 years to 14 years.  Lots of/most immigrants voted Democratic-Republicans once they got the right to vote.  The law was repealed in 1802. 

            The “Sedition Act” criminalized saying mean things about Federalists in government.  A whole bunch of Democratic-Republican writers for the media of the day were prosecuted.  (My personal favorite is Jame Callender.)  The law expired in 1801. 

            The “Alien Enemies Act” granted the President the authority to arrest, imprison, or deport any non-citizen during a time when the United States was at war with, either formally or informally, a foreign country from which that non-citizen originated.[2]  The informal part gave the president the right to act in something like the undeclared “Quasi-War” or if an attack occurred when Congress could not be consulted immediately.  The Act has never been repealed.  The Act has been used in the War of 1812, the First World War, and the Second World War. 

            So, can an old law be re-interpreted for new purposes?  If so, who can re-interpret it? 

[1] XYZ Affair – Wikipedia (sort of a “Town Mouse and Country Mouse” affair) and Quasi-War – Wikipedia 

[2] OK, that’s a long and clotted sentence.  The point is, the United States is not now at war with or suffering a “predatory incursion” ordered by a foreign country.  People free-lancing a “predatory incursion” isn’t covered by the language of the law.  Ipso fatso, President Trump doesn’t have a leg to stand on. 

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 18.

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            Americans have come to depend on cheap Chinese products.  Conversely, China has come to depend on massive exports of its goods to the United States.  Hence, President Donald Trump’s imposition of a 145 percent tariff on imports from China will shock both the American and Chinese systems.[1] 

            What does the United States get from China?  At least 75 percent of electric fans, dolls, video game consoles, tricycles, food processors, and smart phones.[2]  Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard all source many of their products from Asia (China, Taiwan).  The tariffs could push the price of a basic iPhone 16 from $799 to $1,140.[3]  China also produces and exports renewable energy equipment, lithium batteries, and electric vehicles. 

            Much of the American reaction to the trade war with China has been “Eeeek!”  One newspaper warned  of “an economic crisis that could leave America poorer for generations.”  A West Coast port executive said that “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased.”  As a result, one business economist[4] warned of “empty shelves in U.S. stores in a few weeks,” and “Covid-like shortages for consumers.”  These stoppages will cascade into job losses for longshoremen, truckers and railroads, and retail sales.[5] There could be a grievous toy shortage at Christmas because 80 percent of America’s toys are made in China.[6] 

What does China get from the United States?  Soybeans.  Some kinds of computer chips.  And many jobs.  All the stuff no longer going to America either has to be sold somewhere else, or stock-piled in warehouses, or not made at all.  Neither of the last two is sustainable, politically or economically, for long.  So China has to find a new target for its exports. 

Which country will blink first?  Is there a reasonable compromise that can be negotiated? 

Trump has wobbled on China to a degree.  He exempted some consumer electronics (smart phones, laptops) from most of the China tariffs.  He also indicated that he was ready to negotiate with China and that Xi Jinping had called him.  At the same time, he seems determined to “decouple” the economies of the two countries.[7]  At the very least, he said, “China will probably eat those tariffs.  Everything is going to be fine.” 

For their part, the Chinese seem not to have anticipated the “speed and ferocity” of the American trade counter-attack on China’s economic strategy.[8]  China’s public response has been to dig in.  “Bowing to a bully is like drinking poison to quench thirst.”[9]  Threats of retaliation abound.  When Trump said that Xi Jinping had called about tariffs, the Chinese Foreign Ministry basically called Trump a liar.  Hard to know which of those two to believe. 

[1] “Decoupling: The U.S.-China trade divorce, The Week, 25 April 2025, p. 34.    

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Inflation: How tariffs could push up prices,” The Week, 18 April 2025, p. 17.    

[4] As in an economist employed by a business, in this case an asset management firm. 

[5] “Trump shrugs off warnings over trade war costs,” The Week, 9 May 2025, p. 4. 

[6] Feels heartless denying kids their hearts’ desire at Christmas.  Still, Boxing Day can be a time for repentance. 

[7] The historian Stephen Kotkin has observed that Trump often talks out of both sides of his mouth, but if you look at what he actually does, you can tell what he really means.  His remarks bore on Iran’s nuclear program.  He thinks Trump means to stop it, whatever that may require.  There’s no reason not to apply the same view to China trade. 

[8] “Decoupling: The U.S.-China trade divorce, The Week, 25 April 2025, p. 34. 

[9] Given China’s behavior toward its neighbors in Taiwan and the Philippines, this is comic. 

Battering elite universities.

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The Second Addams Administration is pounding on Science. On the one hand, there’s R.F.K., Jr. “Nuff said there. On the other hand, the handful of “elite” universities (the Ivy League, the “public Ivies,” and the other great private universities like Stanford and Chicago) are all being menaced with loss of government research dollars and with investigations.

I suggest, just for the sake of argument, that there is a difference between the two prongs of the offensive. Kennedy’s actions pose a serious threat to public health. We’re talking about the increased potential for dead children and other living things.

The attack on the universities is different from this. What Trump and Republicans really want is to put a stop to the left-wing tilt in liberal arts and humanities faculties and in law schools. The great problem here for the administration is that the government doesn’t have much purchase on these people. The amount of public money spent on support for the liberal arts and law schools is minute in comparison to the money spent on Science and Engineering. There are the miniscule (but very welcome) sums paid by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. There are the miserly sums dispensed to support National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The latter amount to welfare for the intellectual left middle class. These are the parts of the universities and public culture that produce and disseminate D.I.E. scholarship and teaching. Turn off the tap on these funds and universities won’t even blink. “Professor Smithers, you have to be willing to sacrifice for your lonely pursuit of Truth and Beauty.”

If the administration wants to force universities to snap a choke chain on D.I.E. stuff, then it has to act like Willy Sutton. Go “where the money is.” Which it is doing by withdrawing funds for scientific research. If the universities want to tap turned back on, then they need to correct course in the liberal arts and the law schools. Sure, it’s humiliating to bend the knee to someone like Donald Trump. What’s more important to the universities, scientific research on cancer or an inter-sectional reading of bell hooks?

War Movies: “Anthropoid” (2016).

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If you want a look at a true case of “state-sponsored terrorism” and at one approach to counter-terrorism, watch “Anthropoid” (dir. Sean Ellis, 2016).  It gives a compelling view of the May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (the head of the Reich Main Security Office and also “Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia”[1]) and of what followed. 

In the movie, the motive for the assassination is the desire on the part of the Czech government-in-exile to inspire more resistance in the Nazi-occupied country.  The team of killers (Josef Gabcik, Jan Kubis[2]) is air-dropped at night; overcome difficulties to reach Prague; find that the Germans have wrecked the resistance movement and they must rely upon a small group of locals; eventually, they are joined by some other parachutists who had been dropped later; and they improvise an attack on Heydrich.  The German is mortally wounded; a gigantic manhunt begins; the Germans track the parachutists to a Prague church; and one hell of a gunfight ensues.  The few surviving parachutists kill themselves rather than be taken alive. 

The movie strives for realism: it was filmed in Prague and mostly on the sites where events occurred; the pervasive fear of the Germans among the Czechs is brought out, not minimized; the semi-botched assassination is clearly portrayed; and the ferocious Nazi manhunt should leave anyone squirming. 

Still, the movie simplifies or omits some things.  First, it begins with Gabcik and Kubis on the ground in a Czech forest.  The movie elides the origins of “Operation Anthropoid.”  In fact, Eduard Benes, the leader of the Czech government-in-exile, feared that the West would sell out his country after the war if the Czechs didn’t show some fight.  The British and French had surrendered the Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich (September 1938) and had shrugged their shoulders when Germany occupied the rest of the country (March 1939).  Several thousand Czech soldiers had found their way to the West before the Second World War began (September 1939), but this wasn’t much of a contribution.  Internal resistance had mostly been the work of the Czech Communist Party after Germany attacked the Soviet Union (June 1941).  If the Germans lost the war, the Communists might claim a moral right to rule as the only true “resisters.”   A dramatic act might arouse non-Communist resistance, but it would surely make the government-in-exile appear to be doing something.  So, kill Heydrich now for a distant gain.    

Second, Heydrich had crushed the resistance by a combination of carrot and stick.  He had good material.  Few Czechs wanted to run risks for the sake of the Western powers that had betrayed them before.  Wages and working conditions in factories were improved at the same time that Gestapo penetration agents combatted the Communist underground. 

Third, the Germans unleashed a savage response to the attack on Heydrich.  Mass arrests; right to torture in the pursuit of some clue; massacres of villages on the mere rumor that someone had sheltered the killers.  In a society where few people actually backed resistance, this worked.  Finally, one of the parachutists betrayed someone else to save his own family; and the betrayed finally gave up the hiding place of the other parachutists. 

“The Battle of Algiers” openly confronts truths that “Anthropoid” skims over. 

[1] Also the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust.  On this, see: “Conspiracy” (dir. Frank Pierson, 2001), with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann. 

[2] Played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan respectively. 

China Tariff Shock.

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            Once upon a time, people harbored high hopes for post-Mao China.[1]  The country adopted “market socialism,” invited Western capital and experts to facilitate its transition to participant in the global economy, and sent many of its own best and brightest to study and work in Western countries.  Employing a very simplified understanding of the West’s own history, people conjectured that a market economy would grow, enrich, and make assertive a middle class that would insist upon a more responsive government.  China would “Westernize.” 

            To accelerate this process, in 2001, China won admission to the World Trade Organization (W.T.O, successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, G.A.T.T).  “It did not have the effect that Long Shanks planned.”[2]  Instead, for ten years, cheap Chinese goods deluged foreign markets.  In the United States, 2.4 million jobs were lost, a million of them factory jobs.  All this happened between 2001 and 2011, and it kept happening at a slower pace afterward.  In 2019, China earned a trade surplus with the rest of the world of more than $500 billion.  Nobody did anything about it.  Why not?  Well, the price of many consumer goods fell.  Consumption increased for many people.  The number of service jobs increased, so lots of people weren’t working in factories, “dark, satanic” or otherwise.  “We’re doing better, right?”[3] 

            Since 2020, China has pursued a major export offensive on top of this already large volume of exports.  It has done so by subsidizing manufacturers of its already low-cost products to the tune of $1.9 trillion over four years. 

In one sense, the offensive has succeeded: in 2024 it earned a surplus of almost $1 trillion.  Since 2013, China has deployed much of its new-found wealth to entangle other counties in a complicated relationship that makes tariff retaliation against China difficult.[4]

In another sense, the offensive has failed: it has aroused international alarm and resistance.  Beyond the United States, the affected industries range from Indonesian textile factories to the German auto industry.  The first phase of the counter-attack against China’s trade offensive appeared in President Donald Trump’s first term with tariffs on China.  These were retained by the Biden administration.  The Chinese responded by moving some of its production “off-shore’ to other countries like Vietnam and Thailand, Turkey and Hungary, and—of course—Mexico.[5]  Trump’s second term began with new and gigantic tariffs on China, but also on many other countries. 

The American tariffs close off an estimated $400 billion in sales to the American market.  If China can’t cut back production, those goods will have to go elsewhere.  Other countries have begun to follow Trump’s lead.  They are hampered by those previously-established economic relationships with China. 

            Trump’s tariff barrage is best understood not as the start of a “Trade War.”  It’s best understood as a counter-attack in a trade war that has already been going on.  It’s a trade war which the United States and many other countries have been losing.  Through not fighting back. 

[1] “China Shock 2.0” The Week, 25 April 2025, p. 11. 

[2] Reference to another Mel Gibson historical wish-it-had-been-this-way mess. 

[3] To belabor the obvious, both the job losses and the failure of solidarity eventually had large political effects. 

[4] See: Belt and Road Initiative – Wikipedia 

[5] See: How Chinese firms are using Mexico as a backdoor to the US 

Sites of Disorder.

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N.C. Wyeth, Gunfight in a Western Saloon, 1916. 

            My Old Man comes home from the war.  Gets a job working in the purchasing department of a Standard Oil office in Seattle.  That palls after a few years, so he quits, goes to Sun Valley, gets work in a resort restaurant, and spends the rest of the time skiing.  Lives cheap and saves money.  When the season ends, he takes the long route back to Seattle.[1]  Probably goes to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.  He liked to play poker and he was good at it, so places with gambling appealed to him. 

            One time, he’s in San Francisco.  Heard about a game upstairs above a restaurant in Chinatown.  Round-eyes are welcome.  So he goes.  Old building, with authentic versions of all the BS decorations you see in modern Chinatowns.  Wide double doors next to the entrance to the restaurant.  An equally wide wooden staircase leading up to a landing, then the staircase turned right to the “gambling den.”  Landing is decorated with this big ornamental Chinese grill on the wall facing down the first set of stairs to the front doors.  He’s hustling up the stairs, glances to his left at the grill.  There’s a little room behind the grill.  Sitting in a chair looking out is this big Chinese guy.  He’s got a sawed-off double barrel shotgun across his lap.  He’s a Loss Prevention Specialist. 

Kind of reassuring.  Private gambling establishments weren’t legal.  Cops were paid to look the other way, but you couldn’t call the cops if someone ripped you off.  (Same with prostitution and drugs.)  Lots of cash on hand, between the house and the gamblers.  So, if a bunch of guys in overcoats and fedoras came bursting through the front door and hurried up the steps with their hands in their coat pockets, they were liable to catch a double load of double-O.[2] 

Another time he’s in a bar in Seattle, having a drink.  Not a really elegant place, so to speak.[3]  One of the other patrons starts to get quarrelsome.  Bouncer appears, grabs up the guy, and shoves him out of the door.  Tranquility returns.  Later, there’s a knock at the door (that kind of place) and the bouncer goes to open the door.  The previously-discharged patron has returned.  Bouncer slams the door shut, but the guy already has one arm inside the door.  He’s holding a .45-cal. Colt semi-automatic pistol.[4]  He can’t get in—or out, come to that—because the bouncer is putting all his weight against the door.  So he fires off the entire magazine until the slide locks back.  I forget what my old man told me happened next.  Thing is, everybody inside the bar was on the floor from the first instant they saw the gun.  Trying to get behind something solid. 

In any case, “places of ill repute” got that way, in part, because they were attended by “disorder.”  Wyeth is giving us a close-up view of just how bad bad behavior could get. 

[1] Where he picks up work driving a cab and, later, teaching people to drive.

[2] Best I understand it, each 12-gauge shotgun shell loaded with buck shot contains twelve 30-cal. balls.  For a view of the effects, there’s a posthumous photograph of the outlaw Bill Doolin at Doolinbody – Bill Doolin – Wikipedia   

[3] I could have said “if you know what I mean.”  However, even I don’t know what I mean exactly because middle-class people these days don’t have any real idea of what a “dive bar” of the old kind was like.  Well, maybe you do, even if I don’t.  There’s a place down the street, a hole in the wall place.  Sells $3 pints of beer.  However, I heard one co-ed say “After classes this afternoon, I’m going to Milo’s.”  So, not the sort of place that would appear in a Raymond Chandler novel.  And Chandler had drunk in most kinds of places.  Like Joseph Roth. 

[4] Things were all over the place after the war.  Soldiers, especially officers, declared them “lost in battle.”  William Manchester, the writer, threw his into a river during the late Sixties when he grew horrified by senseless violence.  My father-in-law had his from the Navy.  One time his wife wakes him up at night, says “Alec, I think someone is looking in the window.”  He rolls over and reaches under the bed to where he kept the gun.  Fired a shot through the window, then went back to sleep.  Defense Department sold off tons of them as “War Surplus.”  Same for the M-1 carbine.  Gun dealers advertised it as a “light sporting rifle.”  Somebody, nobody knows for sure who, shot Ben Siegel in Hollywood.  Bunch of times.  With a guy like that, you’d want to be sure.  Then there were the Lugers. 

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 17.

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            Has the post-Second World War period of ever-increasing “globalization”[1] come to an end?  If it has, then what will replace it?  Will it be a return to widespread “protectionism”?[2]  Will it be a restricted and managed globalization within large economic blocs protected by a high common external tariff? 

            Some will attribute the troubled state of international affairs to President Donald Trump’s rash and unsteady imposition of tariffs on anyone who crosses his line of sight.  In this view, “more trade is better, especially for the United States.”[3]  Trump’s tariffs will push up prices for consumers while slowing down economic activity.  It will make it “more costly for U.S. manufacturers to source vital parts and machinery.”  The result may be “stagflation” (stagnation plus inflation), such as what beset America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[4]

One could also attribute the smoldering crisis to a long-running combination of Chinese aggression with American complacency. 

            Chinese aggression should and does strike fear in the hearts of men.  China has used hard work, the mobilization of national talents, the repression of consumption below what might have been, the conversion of a vast population of under-employed peasants turned into tireless industrial workers, borrowed Western expertise, intellectual property theft on a grand scale, manipulation of the international trade regime, the repression of individual liberty by an autocratic state, and appeals to national pride.  Economic power has been transformed into military and diplomatic power.  China has begun to throw its weight around in the Far East and beyond.  The goal seems to be to evict the United States from the Western Pacific.  That would be a first step to establishing Chinese hegemony over South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam.[5]  On the other hand, there’s a particularly American character to China’s policy.  As the political philosopher George Washington Plunkitt once said, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”[6]   

            The manifestations of American complacency appear in the triumphalism following victory in the Cold War;[7] the misinterpretation of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man Standing; the combination of a long decrease in defense spending to yield a “Peace Dividend”; and the cornucopia of material benefits unleashed by ever more free trade.  Toy shops and coffee shops and retirement savings will now suffer.  Nobody wants discomfort.    

[1] Defined as progressive rounds of reducing barriers to trade, finance, and migration. 

[2] Defined as individual nations or blocs of nations raising up tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade, combined with restrictions on the movement of capital and people. 

[3] Republican Yoda Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, quoted in “Global order: Goodbye to the age of free trade?”, The Week, 18 April 2025, p. 34. 

[4] Tom Orlik in Bloomberg, quoted in ibid. 

[5] Strategists refer to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines as the “First Island Chain.”  South Korea and Vietnam can be considered the mainland anchors of this chain.  Together, they provide the geographic positions from which to limit Chinese power projection.  The loss of that island chain to Chinese domination would cripple both American trade relations with those countries and power projection.  For some idea of how the United States reached this advantageous position, see Evan Mawdsley, Supremacy at Seas: Task Force 58 and the Central Pacific Victory (2025). 

[6] “I Seen My Opportunities and I Took ‘Em.”: An Old-Time Pol Preaches Honest Graft 

[7] Queen – We Are The Champions (Live Aid 1985)