Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on the Truth of Science and the Truth of Art)

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.” — American mystery novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888–1959), "Great Thought" (Feb. 19, 1938), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

The Liars’ Club and a Senator Who Enables It

In the 1993 thriller The Liars’ Club, a circle of teens is forced to maintain even greater loyalty than before because of one member’s involvement in a sexual assault. When the victim is murdered, the web of complicity tightens. An attempt to call an end to the deceit only results in worse transgressions.

The Republican Party under Donald Trump has transformed into own version of The Liars’ Club. Only this time, it encompasses not a small group of entitled jocks (though Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seems like an alum of such a group), but an organization of politically engaged adults.

Their silence in the face of assaults on the Constitution and democracy—from Cabinet members (like the ones in this picture, joined by Veep J.D. Vance) down to local officials asked to violate time-honored election laws and regulations—is being enforced by a President with a code of omerta worthy of a sullen crime boss.

This week’s primary losses by Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, after their undistinguished challengers were flooded with funds and endorsements by the President and his spineless surrogates, will only confirm the sense of helplessness felt by any Republicans hoping for even an inch of space from a leader bent on remolding the Grand Old Party in his own scowling image.

There is a double danger affecting the nation’s Democrats: desperation that they can no longer rely on a single member of the opposite party to rein in the President, and that a defection by one of their own might further embolden him.

Which brings us to the curious case of John Fetterman.

Lack of Prudential Judgment

A relative of mine recently noted that, though he abominated Fetterman during his successful 2022 campaign for the U.S. Senate, his views about the former Pennsylvania lieutenant governor have moderated since then. “He makes more sense than many Republicans or Democrats,” he said, observing that Fetterman had won praise for his efforts on behalf of Western Pennsylvania.

In fact, late last July, Fetterman commended the Trump administration for delivering over $1 billion in infrastructure funding to the state. Surely it didn’t escape his notice how the President interfered with funding projects to build new Hudson River rail tunnels and Army Corps of Engineers plans in cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore—areas controlled, not coincidentally, by Democrats.

That’s the most charitable case for why, as Jonathan Martin’s column earlier this month for Politico laid out, Fetterman has become a tempting target for Presidential courting:

“He largely ignores Trump’s transgressions, finds ways to support the White House in high-profile moments and is increasingly ubiquitous when criticizing his own party on right-coded media in ways that affirm conservative views about liberal excess.”

I am not one to disown a Democrat or progressive for wandering off the reservation when compelled by conscience. In an age of polarization, independent thinking in a public official is as important now as it was back in 1774, when father of conservatism Edmund Burke extolled the ideal of a representative who “owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

But the independence that Burke advocated depends on a sense of prudential judgment that Fetterman, in backing the Iranian War—and in even more ludicrously supporting President Trump’s plans for a White House ballroom on national security reasons—sorely lacks.

Fetterman disregarded the bona fides of Trump and his lackeys in evaluating these two propaganda offensives. That’s important, because, if administration figures are prone to congenital misleading, then an elected official must work harder to verify claims and supporting evidence.

That fails utterly with the Iranian War and the White House Ballroom, as they have been started and supported by a Liars’ Club at the highest level of the nation: Trump and his advisers.

Ballroom BS

The $200 million for the ballroom, its financing through private donors currying favor with the President, and the complete East Wing demolition required to make way for it should have concerned Fetterman. Instead, in an interview last August with Fox News Digital, he predicted that the plans would be “done in a tasteful and historical kind of way.”

“Tasteful” and “historical” in the same sentence as the President who destroyed the Rose Garden? That would be enough to make many people gag. But Fetterman compounded his error this April by spreading Trump’s claim, with no evidence, that the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner further justified the ballroom plans on security grounds.

Periodically, Trump officials should be subjected to The Pinocchio Test: i.e., the louder they scream that they are telling the truth, blameless, and innocent, the faster we should whip out rulers to measure their noses for unexplained elongations.

Administering the Pinocchio Test should be normal business on Capitol Hill in maintaining the government’s system of checks and balances. Predictably, Republicans have abdicated this role except in the cases of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, who so embarrassed or disappointed the President that Congressmen and Senators could safely attack them.

But it is shocking to find a Democrat like Fetterman who commits the same sin. His support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza might be excused as backing for a nation subjected to a horrendous attack.

The Iranian Insanity

But the campaign against Iran was a war of choice, the logical consequence of breaking the 2015 Iran-US nuclear treaty negotiated by the Obama administration that allowed unprecedented monitoring of uranium stockpiles.

Once Trump, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging, pulled out of the pact, assessing any potential nuclear buildup became a matter of guesswork—which, as seen after the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, can prove wildly mistaken.

In assessing Netanyahu’s arguments for a widened conflict that no President from either party in the prior three decades had accepted, Trump—and, consequently, Fetterman—might have thought of an exchange between Pat Riley—at that time, before becoming a Hall of Fame coach, a secondary offensive weapon for the Los Angeles Lakers—and Wilt Chamberlain.

The superstar center, according to a speech I heard Riley give at a nonprofit trade association when he was with the New York Knicks, was incredulous that his teammate had taken and missed a shot that would have won the game. What was he thinking?

“I was wide open,” Riley answered.

“Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for that?” Chamberlain shot back.

Indeed, in reviewing past reluctance to authorize American military operations against Iran, Trump should have thought “there might be a reason for that.” Instead, with the Israeli leader feeding his fantasy of one-upping prior Presidents, he decided to join Israel in the attack.

He did so even though, according to a New York Times account of a crucial planning meeting, CIA director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed Netanyahu’s expectation of a mass Iranian uprising as fantasy, and Trump’s military advisers warned that the Strait of Hormuz could be seized.

Following the invasion, Trump, Pete Hegseth, and other officials tried out a series of shifting rationales—defeating Iranian proxies in attacks on Israel, neutralizing ballistic missiles, and regime change—before settling on what seems to be the current motivation: annihilating Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

The nuclear question seems to be the best way for punching one’s ticket for admittance to the Liars’ Club. Following last June’s “Twelve-Day War,” a US-Israel joint air attack launched for this very purpose, Trump announced that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.”

If that was the case, why the need for another operation, particularly since no evidence has emerged of Iran restarting nuclear enrichment?

Fetterman would be far better consuming shredded lettuce than the shredded war justifications of Trump and Pete Hegseth. And someone should ask why he muted his rhetorical trumpet when Trump issued this genocidal ultimatum to Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" unless a deal was reached.

At this point, it’s worth asking: Is there any use of military force by the administration that Fetterman regards as unwise, let alone immoral?

It’s hard to tell what’s more infuriating: the Fetterman negative vote against invoking the 1973 War Powers Act that ensured its Senate defeat, or his justification for it: “I would never want to restrict any future president to do this kind of military exercise that was very successful.”

Come again? “Successful” how?

Leave aside that Fetterman doesn’t seem disturbed by an administration and its congressional lackeys who, as this “military exercise” has evolved, have claimed: a) that the war is over; b) acknowledged that the war could continue for quite some time; and c) that a deal was within reach (this, often after the Trump Organization bought stock in companies that benefited from the war).

But what can you say about an “excursion” in which the Islamic regime remains in place, having discovered an effective tool of retaliation in closing the Strait of Hormuz that it had never attempted before—and reduced the President of the United States to a tweeting, cursing madman on Easter?

Like many of his fellow Trump supporters, a longtime friend of mine has consistently derided “globalists.” But what is the President now if not a globalist, except that his inclination is based on self-aggrandizement rather than the rules-based international law that long sustained Pax Americana?

In dealing with Russia and China, Trump’s attitude has been, “We’ll grab what we can, and let you do the same.” While busy taking over Venezuela, enforcing an embargo that has reduced Cuba to a shambles, and even threatening the NATO alliance by screaming for the annexation of Greenland, the President has signaled to Vladimir Putin that he doesn’t mind if Russia takes over Ukraine.

Where has Fetterman been in all of this? On Fox News last year, he said that if the President secured a lasting peace in the Ukraine conflict, he’d gladly nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. This then begs the question: how would Putin accept any deal that did not provide him with a net territorial gain at the expense of Ukraine?

Trump Derangement Syndrome—or Fetterman Derangement Syndrome?

Like the President, Fetterman has unleashed a round of vitriol against anyone who holds good-faith reservations about initiating a war against a nation nearly four times the area and twice the population of Iraq—a land in which, it might be remembered, the US became involved in a quagmire.

This month, with rhetoric earlier retailed by the masterminds who brought us the Vietnam War, he accused the Democratic base of becoming “increasingly anti-American.”

It didn’t stop there. In a March interview, he saw this cohort as being “governed by the TDS”—Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It’s not enough that the senator is using a shopworn version of columnist Charles Krauthammer’s “Bush Derangement Syndrome” coinage from 2003.

But he might have more profitably reflected that “TDS” refers not to administration critics but to a President who stays up all night tweeting the most absurd, bigoted, obscene memes and rants—as well as one who has started his very own Mideast forever war to go along with his domestic endless retribution campaign.

“I’m going to disagree with [Trump], but I’m always going to disagree with respect,” Fetterman vowed. That disagreement has been decidedly low-key. 

Aside from that, though, why would the senator accord respect to a head of government who doesn’t respect the dignity of the Presidency, let alone his predecessors, popes, officeholders, journalists, entertainers, economists, business leaders, and ordinary citizen?

In the face of a daily cascade of personal insults and envelope-pushing violations of the law, outrage is the more appropriate response.

“I’m never going to call people Nazis or fascists or authoritarianism and all those extreme terms,” Fetterman said on Fox News in late April. But if Trump does not crave authoritarian rule, how else to describe someone who:

*puts his image on currency and photos;

*says that the only thing restricting his conduct in office would be his own “ethics”;

*gives a tech billionaire outside government to remove congressionally authorized agencies and their staffers at will;

*threatens businesses with tariffs or lawsuits, or demands a share of profits as leverage, to pressure companies into political alignment with the administration;

*pursues prosecutions against the likes of James Comey, Mark Kelly, Governor Tim Walz, Jerome Powell, Adam Schiff, John Brennan, and Letitia James on thin to non-existent evidence;

*authorizes government agencies to harass universities, law firms, even networks with late-night talk-show hosts who joke about them.

If the pattern of Fetterman’s statements sounds familiar, it should: Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard started out as progressive Democrats until their criticisms of others in their movements became louder and more frequent while their complaints about Trump turned mute before being totally abandoned.

Never mind saving his political career: If Fetterman wants to preserve his self-respect, he can look at what happened to Kennedy and Gabbard once they fell into Trump’s embraces, which ended up involving:

*shamelessly praising the President beyond what they would ever have for any Democratic leader;

*keeping silent about major policy differences with the President;

*for RFK Jr., saying nothing while one of the primary tributes to his clan, the Kennedy Center, faced physical dismantling and creative emasculation;

*for Gabbard (before her just-announced resignation), investigating preposterous 2020 electoral claims of Presidential election that were outside her authority as director of national intelligence.

As with RFK Jr., it has to be asked how much Fetterman’s move towards the right resulted from genuine policy disagreements as opposed to an erratic personality. His attempt to carry on his senatorial duties following his stroke and the depression that followed is commendable.

But the behavior catalogued in a New York Magazine article last year (e.g., driving at recklessly high speeds, as well as what a former chief of staff listed as “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania…high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious”) calls into question whether he should continue in office.

In his interview with Martin for Politico, Fetterman wondered how Trump and the GOP could tolerate a social liberal like himself when they had forced out Tom Tillis and Bill Cassidy for far less.

As a public official, if you accept and spread the arguments of The Liars’ Club, you’re only one small step from joining it. Unlike a private citizen, you have access to information that might make you change your mind. Only willful ignorance, not naivete, could cloud a failure to perceive that the paramount issue of our time is preventing the most powerful man on earth from doing whatever he likes.

That should be as good a reason for any as why Fetterman should not accommodate an ignorant, loutish billionaire with a thirst for political dominance and a gift for demagogy.

Well, maybe one more: Caligula, according to the ancient historian Suetonius, had thought so highly of his horse Incitatus that the Roman ruler thought of naming him a consul until his assassination. 

Take your pick for why: either as an example of the emperor’s madness or of his contempt for the Senate—two traits typical of America’s current aspiring authoritarian.

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on the Government and the Rich)

“The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American humorist, reporter, and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), So This Is Depravity and Other Observations (1980)

Baker wrote this in the Carter Administration. Imagine what he might have written after reading about the plan signed off by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in which the Internal Revenue Service would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from all audits of “any matters currently pending” relating to President Trump, his family and his businesses.

Quote of the Day (John Irving, on Free Time and Writing)

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” —American novelist and screenwriter John Irving quoted by R.Z. Sheppard, “Life into Art: Novelist John Irving,” Time Magazine, Aug. 31, 1981

The image accompanying this post, John Irving in the Netherlands, was taken on May 2, 1989, by Rob Bogaerts (ANEFO).

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on the Past)

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), My Antonia (1918)

This Day in Rock ‘n’ Roll History (NY-Inspired Billy Joel Scores With ‘Turnstiles’)

May 19, 1976—Though Billy Joel did not achieve the chart-topping LP that executives desired on his fourth studio album, he staked out the sound that paved the way for later success—and created what many feel was a high-water mark in his career as a singer-songwriter—with Turnstiles.

A week or so ago, The New York Times created a hornet’s nest with a list of the 30 greatest living songwriters that some (like critic Ted Gioia) derided as methodologically suspect. Predictably, even more readers complained that their choices didn’t make the roundup, with Joel among the most glaring omissions. 

(See this podcast with the Times critics debating this egregious exclusion and others, in a manner that YouTube respondents variously assailed as “smug,” “insufferable,” “oblivious,” and “unbelievable.”)

I know that the Piano Man’s output has, for some reason, not always won critical acclaim. You can count me among his longtime fans. It’s not just that his concerts have been electrifying, but his recordings display to the utmost his skills as a lyricist and musician. Turnstiles is a prime example.

This album also represented his attempt to wrest creative control of his material in the most decisive fashion. His label, Columbia Records, suggested that he work with James William Guercio. This producer, manager, and songwriter, through such acts as Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Buckinghams, was at the time an influential proponent of jazz rock—or, as I noted in this prior blog post, “brass rock,” characterized by a driving horn section.

At the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado, Guercio was exerting tighter control over his productions. In Joel’s case, the producer pushed for studio musicians, including from Elton John’s backup band.

After listening to these sessions, Joel decided that, though this studio hires might have benefited the English superstar, it wasn’t what he wanted. He called the sessions off, and pressed his case with Columbia for a backup group of his own to work on his next album.

To make doubly sure that he got what he wanted, Joel took over the producer’s chores as well. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. He may have come closer to the sound he wanted, but, as he recalled in a 2009 Billboard interview, “I’m not a producer. I’m a good partnering producer when I work with somebody like Phil Ramone or Mick Jones; I have a lot of ideas. But I don’t know technically always what I should be going for.”

The real benefit came from the comfort level he felt from working with what became the “Billy Joel Band”: bassist Doug Stegmeyer, drummer Liberty DeVitto, guitarists Russell Javors and Howie Emerson, and saxophonist Richie Cannata. It was like what another up-and-coming Columbia artist, Bruce Springsteen, had wanted and gotten, with the now-legendary E Street Band.

Because he permanently parted ways with those backup musicians a couple of decades later, Joel didn’t achieve the longevity and camaraderie that The Boss gained with his “Band of Brothers.” But for the time they played together, there was a drive and cohesion to his sound.

Equally important for Joel, after three years of feeling lost in Los Angeles, the longtime Long Island resident moved back east. The title of this new collection, Turnstiles, was a celebration of that decision.

(Incidentally, the cover of the album was shot in an actual abandoned subway station. The assorted non-Joel figures in the photograph were meant to suggest people associated with different songs, so the teenaged girl with the headphones, for instance, represents “All You Wanna Do Is Dance.”)

Joel’s move back home also was something of an act of defiance against anti-New York sentiment in the nation. The singer-songwriter decided it was time for a change when he saw the notorious 1975 New York Daily News headline at the height of the bankruptcy crisis: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.”

On vinyl, Joel reacted with a dystopian piece of science fiction, "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)." After 9/11, it became an unexpected anthem of resilience for the metropolis. Now, we are almost a decade after the future that he imagined.

If "Miami 2017” seemed tailor-made for arena rock, “New York State of Mind” felt more like its natural setting was a small jazz club. Indeed, it has become something of a pop standard, covered by the likes of Tony Bennett, Carmen McRae, Mel Torme, Barbara Streisand, Shirley Bassey, and Diane Schuur with Stan Getz.

I embraced two other songs because in some ways they reminded me of the work of two cultural figures I was just beginning to enjoy.

With backup singers, castanets, strings, and especially an opening drumbeat reminiscent of “Be My Baby,” “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” was Joel’s tribute to “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector and then-wife Ronnie. (In fact, the latter released her own estimable cover version a year later, noting in interviews that she identified with the song’s theme of a break from California following her divorce.)

The other cultural figure I thought of was F. Scott Fitzgerald, on “I’ve Loved These Days.” So many of the images and themes evoked here—spending beyond one’s means, pearls, caviar, foreign cars, champagne, and cocaine—could have been drawn from the pages and life of the author of “The Great Gatsby.”

One other tune deserves special attention, as Joel would return to its main concern later in his career: “Summer, Highland Falls.” Named for the upstate New York town where Joel stayed upon his return from the West Coast, the song functioned as an emotional taking stock and recalibration.

He has been frank in admitting that lines like “It’s either sadness or euphoria” recognized the manic depression with which he has battled through much of his life, even at the height of his success—a condition he explored later in “I Go to Extremes” and “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”.

Though the album only peaked at #122 on the U.S. Billboard chart on its release, songs from Turnstiles helped solidify his growing acclaim as a top-notch live performer, as exemplified from several from the LP being included on his first live collection, Songs in the Attic (1981). Eventually it reached platinum status.

Joel did not produce another LP until 1993 with River of Dreams. Like Turnstiles, that marked a watershed of sorts, as it turned out to be his last collection of original pop tunes. 

His concert partner Elton John admonished him to sit down and write some more, but if Joel felt his creative well had run dry, it’s hard to take issue with his decision to take this turn in his career. It would only have invited more critical derision than he’d experienced already.

Quote of the Day (William Butler Yeats, on ‘The Innocent and the Beautiful’)

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”—Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet-playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” originally published in 1927, reprinted in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard Finneran (1989)