Word, phrases, concepts, ideas, and observations that I find meaningful, lovely, or otherwise notable
PUNCHY PITHY IRONIC WITTY SHARP SUCCINCT INSIGHTFUL
SARCASTIC APHORISTIC STRONG COMPELLING WEIGHTY COGENT
from the July 2025 New York Review, 'A Show of Force' by Fintan O'Toole
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I fell in love with the NY Review more than 25 years ago in large part because of the essays by Tony Judt, who died in 2010. God rest his soul. A fine thinker and writer. Nowadays he has a very good successor in Fintan O'Toole, whose thinking is clear and wordcraft is impeccable. Mary, my wife, is currently uninterruptably reading O'Toole's personal history of Ireland, We Don't Know Ourselves. It will be my next big read, so that I can share the thrill with her. Three cheers for Fintan, and three more for each of this essay's first three paragraphs pasted below!
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Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.
In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”
Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.