• Following up on last week’s post on the best way to pose for your mugshot, I should note that my state, like Texas, also has an attorney general now facing felony criminal charges. Kathleen Kane, a Democrat, is accused of perjury and obstruction of justice as part of an alleged vindictive, Nixon-ish effort to leak confidential materials to discredit those she felt wronged her. Kane opted for the stoic, no-emotion look, but I don’t think she pulled off either the serene confidence of John Lewis or the “quickly, mortals, I have better things to do” calm of David Bowie.
Related (to the discussion of mugshots, not the charges against Kane): Craig Briscoe directs us to Modern Farmer’s lovely gallery of “11 Goats That Look Like Famous Mugshots.”
• The creepy, eyeless statue to the right was in the garden of the house we stayed at last week down the shore. She needed a story, so we gave her one and she became, of course, the little girl who died there many years ago when she fell from the dock and drowned in the bay.
Some people say you can hear her footsteps on the dock late at night, a shuffling of steps on the porch, sometimes a knock at the door. …
Whatever you do, don’t open the door.
• Here’s a measure of extremely modest progress: In 1992, when Bill Clinton was winning primaries even after the Jennifer Flowers news, respectable political pundits regularly used the phrase “bimbo eruption” to refer to Clinton’s potential incontinent liabilities. Now those same pundits are saying Donald Trump’s candidacy is doomed because he uses words like “bimbo eruption.”
I have no idea what Trump’s political future looks like. This is a guy who has enjoyed decades of celebrity due to his brash, boorish personality and his capacity for saying appalling things without caring what anybody else thinks. He has recently entered politics and surged in the polls due to his brash, boorish personality and his capacity for saying appalling things without caring what anybody else thinks. I’m not willing to predict what happens next just because he has, once again, demonstrated his brash, boorish personality and his capacity for saying appalling things without caring what anybody else thinks.
I’m not even sure this is about Donald Trump himself — he seems to have become a proxy for a war between right-wing factions: Fox News vs. Drudge Report, Red State vs. Breitbart, the would-be-kingmakers of the religious right vs. the army of white evangelical voters in whom they’ve nurtured a seething resentment for 30 years.
• I’d always thought of tides being about pulling, but apparently they’re more about pushing. (Sort of, I think. It’s complicated.)
• Libby Anne waxes philosophical about masturbation and its weird placement at the center of adolescent white evangelical piety. It sounds absurd, but the truth is that thousands of church youth groups are like an extended version of the “contest” episode of Seinfeld. “How is your walk with the Lord?” people ask, piously, meaning “Are you still master of your domain?” That becomes, for those poor kids, the essence and pinnacle of discipleship.
Libby Anne knows that world and she’s very good at dissecting the self-perpetuating dynamic of inflicted shame. This doesn’t just apply to this topic. Spend years indoctrinating people to think of something trivial as a really big deal and it will become, for them, a really big deal. Spend years indoctrinating people that “You shouldn’t do X because it will fill you with shame and guilt” and some of the people who do X will feel shame and guilt — because of that indoctrination, not because they did X.
• Reta Halteman Finger, Christian Feminism Today, and the book of Jonah — these are a few of my favorite things.
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