Quote of the Day (Tom Robbins, on Being ‘Extremely Reverent’)

“I’m extremely reverent; it just depends what I’m looking at. From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.” —American novelist Tom Robbins (1932-2025), quoted by Rob Liguori, “ ‘I Don't Let It Snow on My Fiesta,’” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2014

This cropped image of Tom Robbins, in San Francisco at a reading sponsored by Booksmith, was taken on Sept. 24, 2005, by 48states (talk).

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on the Hour of ‘This Rough Beast’)

“The wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last." — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," based on the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” included on Mitchell’s CD Night Ride Home (1991)

This post is dedicated to the victims of the Uvalde shooting this week—and to all the casualties of mass shootings over the last several decades.

Some of those “thoughts and prayers” we keep hearing about after all these incidents should be reserved for us, the guilty bystanders who haven’t done a blessed thing to stem the plague of gun violence in this country.

We are already experiencing the bewilderment of the international community over this rank failure. Before long, I fear, we will suffer the rebuke of history.

I can only hope God has mercy on us, because we surely don’t deserve any.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on the Reign of Chaos and Division)

“Joy to great Chaos! Let Division reign:

Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,

Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:

One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

Wake the dull church, and lull the ranting stage;

To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,

And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.” —English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), The Dunciad (1728)

Pope wrote his mock epic (one of my favorite long poems) about the baleful consequences of incompetence in the arts. 

But today, “chaos” and “division” describe a wider landscape—beginning in the "ranting stage" of the electronic culture, a vast black hole of inventive, hatred, and untruths, with its now-dimmed light bouncing toward the world of politics, which in turn reflects it back toward that hole, with the light growing ever fainter as it ricochets. 

Pope’s apocalyptic finale is of Creation reversed, and so it feels at times today, as the wider understanding heralded by God-given reason is gradually obscured by opportunists through polarizing propaganda.

Quote of the Day (Zbigniew Brzezinski, on History, Chaos and Conspiracy)

“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.” —Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in Hedrick Smith, “Brzezinski Says Critics Are Irked by His Accuracy,” The New York Times, January 18, 1981

As winter turned into spring in 1976, various relatives and friends mentioned to me a parishioner at my local Roman Catholic church, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ. Nobody I knew had remarked on him during his 16 prior years as a professor at Columbia University. 

But proximity to potential power, as foreign policy adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, now made him an object of curiosity. “That’s Brzezinski,” they whispered, pointing at a figure near the back of the church while trying not to draw undue attention to themselves in the process.

That was my remote introduction to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died yesterday at age 89. I would learn shortly that he had raised his family (including daughter Minka, now a morning-show fixture on MSNBC) in a Victorian house only several blocks from my home. 

But the psychic distance from that white-collar area to my blue-collar neighborhood might as well have put him on the other side of the moon.

By the time I entered Columbia myself two years later as a freshman, my interest in him had strengthened. The campus—particularly the school newspaper that I wrote for, filled with political science majors and/or liberals—was now avidly following his adventures in Washington, where he had gone, on extended sabbatical from the university, to serve as National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. 

Soon, that service had taken on all the aspects of an intramural mudfight, as Brzezinski’s hawkish views clashed with the more dovish perspective of another university academic now in the State Department, the Sovietologist Marshal Shulman.

In Washington, Brzezinski became more familiar than he might have liked with the notions of “conspiracy” and “chaos” that he discussed in the above quote. 

Right-wingers (and a few left-wingers) charged in the late Seventies and Eighties that a group that he had helped establish, the Trilateral Commission (formed, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, of prominent academics and politicians from North America, the European Union and Japan with a strong orientation toward global economics), was a secretive cabal out to rule the world.

At the same time, Carter Administration foreign policy was increasingly regarded by large parts of the American public as being rocked by chaos. Brzezinski battled internally not just against Shulman but also against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. 

By the third year of Carter’s Presidency, that internal sense of coming apart was being mirrored almost nightly on the evening news, with OPEC generating a second American oil shortage in less than a decade and American hostages being seized in Iran.

When he spoke to the New York Times Hedrick Smith, then, Brzezinski was being as defensive as he was philosophical in leaving office. 

He said what had annoyed his critics was how often his vision of policy had been borne out. He derided “any grand schemes regarding a new international world order,” noting that policymakers were simply liable to be “overwhelmed by events and information.”

No policymaker, even the best, gets it right all of the time, and Brzezinski didn’t either. He correctly predicted that the strain of dealing with so many different nationalities would lead the U.S.S.R. to collapse. 

But in his eagerness to hasten that day, he backed the ill-fate attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages and supported financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there, unknowingly encouraging the forces of radical Islam that have bedeviled the U.S. in the Mideast these last two decades.

(It must also be said that, long before it became universally truth even in Democratic circles, this onetime "hardliner" warned that George W. Bush's Gulf War would turn out to be a "historic, strategic and moral calamity.")

Himself the annoyed target of political paranoids, Brzezinski in 1981 couldn’t imagine a President who promoted both chaos and conspiracy. But that is what life is like in the U.S. today. 

The thoughtless blusterer once derided memorably by Jeb Bush as the “chaos candidate” is now the Chaos Commander in Chief, an executive who sows doubt in the efficacy and value of the government he leads by screaming about nonexistent plots (e.g., about President Obama wiretapping him).

To his credit, unlike other Cold Warriors who sought to undermine Soviet Communism only to make their peace with Vladimir Putin, Brzezinski before his death criticized both the Russian dictator and the American President who has uttered nary a word of criticism of him. 

He castigated the Russian President's "thuggish tactics" and "thinly camouflaged invasion" of the Ukraine in 2014, while this year scathingly dismissed Trumplomacy: The president, he said, “has not given even one serious speech about the world and foreign affairs.”

Quote of the Day (Hermann Hesse, on History, Chaos and Faith)

“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.”— Swiss Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi): A Novel (1943)

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, Defining Art)

“Art is the triumph over chaos.” — American short-story writer and novelist John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Death of Justina,” in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)