Marni Morse

Paul Mirengoff forwards poignant excerpts from a student letter to the Daily Princetonian.

. . .I crawled into bed and cried for reasons I still [can’t] quite put into words, falling asleep before the election was called.

In the morning, I woke up to a New York Times news alert and social media feeds filled with disappointment. The United States had democratically elected a man who, among so many other despicable qualities and policies, is accused of and boasts about committing sexual assault.

As a woman passionate about gender equality, women’s leadership, and ending sexual violence; as someone dedicated to the Clinton campaign and ready to make history; and, quite frankly, as a human being, I didn’t know how to process this.

I still don’t. I felt for my friends and anyone who feels that this result puts their safety and their loved ones’ safety at risk, acknowledging that I am not the person this outcome will affect the most.

I didn’t leave my room Wednesday morning. I sat and sobbed and I still have the tissues all over my floor to prove it. When I absolutely had to get up for class, I put on my “Dare to say the F-word: Feminism” t-shirt and my “A woman belongs in the House and the Senate” sweatshirt to make myself feel stronger. Still crying, I left my room.

Ironically, she titled her letter “Stronger Together.”

You knew that Lena Dunham was going to compete.

Actress and Hillary Clinton campaign surrogate Lena Dunham has broken her silence after the Democratic presidential candidate’s loss to Republican Donald Trump earlier this week, describing in a blog post the agony of being at Clinton’s election night party in New York City and insisting that she “never truly believed” that Trump could win.

The 30-year-old Girls actress, who had hit the campaign trail repeatedly for Clinton for months leading up to the election, described waking up on Election Day feeling “rosy” and “thrilled,” only to see the good feelings evaporate hours later at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, when the election returns came flooding in.

“At a certain point it became clear something had gone horribly wrong. Celebrants’ faces turned. The modeling had been incorrect,” Dunham wrote in an essay for her Lenny Letter blog. “Watching the numbers in Florida, I touched my face and realized I was crying. ‘Can we please go home?’ I said to my boyfriend. I could tell he was having trouble breathing, and I could feel my chin breaking into hives.”

Dunham said she left the party early and was informed of Clinton’s loss when a friend called and told her.

The actress wrote that as a result of her support for Clinton throughout her campaign, she received “threats and abuse” at a level she could never have imagined. However, she remained hopeful that her detractors represented “the dying moans of the dragon known as the patriarchy being stabbed again and again in the stomach.”

Dunham continued:

We believed that on November 9, they’d be licking their wounds while we celebrated. It is painful on a cellular level knowing those men got what they wanted, just as it’s painful to know you are hated for daring to ask for what is yours. It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him, too. My voice was literally lost when I woke up, squeaky and raw, and I ached in the places that make me a woman [Emphasis added], the places where I’ve been grabbed so carelessly, the places we are struggling to call our own.

Whole story.

Myron Ebell

Scientific American sounded bitter this morning.

Donald Trump has selected one of the best-known climate skeptics to lead his U.S. EPA transition team, according to two sources close to the campaign.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said. …

Ebell is a well-known and polarizing figure in the energy and environment realm. His participation in the EPA transition signals that the Trump team is looking to drastically reshape the climate policies the agency has pursued under the Obama administration. Ebell’s role is likely to infuriate environmentalists and Democrats but buoy critics of Obama’s climate rules.

Ebell, who was dubbed an “elegant nerd” and a “policy wonk” by Vanity Fair, is known for his prolific writings that question what he calls climate change “alarmism.” He appears frequently in the media and before Congress. He’s also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of nonprofits that “question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.”

Ebell appears to relish criticism from the left.

In a biography submitted when he testified before Congress, he listed among his recognitions that he had been featured in a Greenpeace “Field Guide to Climate Criminals,” dubbed a “misleader” on global warming by Rolling Stone and was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebell criticized the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser for his views on global warming.

More recently, Ebell has called the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan for greenhouse gases illegal and said that Obama joining the Paris climate treaty “is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority.”

He told Vanity Fair in 2007, “There has been a little bit of warming … but it’s been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it’s caused by human beings or not, it’s nothing to worry about.”

Ebell’s views appear to square with Trump’s when it comes to EPA’s agenda. Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and he has said he would “cancel” the Paris global warming accord and roll back President Obama’s executive actions on climate change (ClimateWire, May 27).

Read the whole thing.

Trump gets serious points with me for this one.

(Some .gif files just do not work properly when saved. This was one of them. Unfortunately, I do not currently know how to fix that problem.)

A very strong, tough-to-compete-with, entry comes from Charles Walz on Facebook, whose profile picture shows a dork sitting on the Iron Throne. Mr. Walz post-election comment was so admired that it was widely circulated on Facebook via #MakeHimFamous.

Havilah Babcock, 1898-1964

A classic from the old-time Field & Stream magazine by South Carolinian English professor Havilah Babcock put up on-line by Sporting Classics:

Does your health show a marked improvement during the hunting season, and do your honest ailments get scant sympathy from a suspicious household the rest of the year? If so, you are ripe for membership in the order of Misunderstood Husbands, Unincorporated, and entitled to all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining.

I know a man who feels like “The Wreck of the Hesperus” for nine months of the year. He chews expensive vitamins. He sits for hours in the doctor’s office reading magazines. His medicine cabinet is filled with strange nostrums in ill-assorted bottles. He is subject to neuritis and lumbago and is plagued by nondescript aches and pains.

His digestion is so bad that he pays dearly for the slightest dietary indiscretion. And night brings him little respite; for sleep, sweet sleep that so poetically “knits up the raveled sleeve of care,” leaves him fagged and haggard. Nightmares use him to practice up on. His family regards him, and perhaps not without provocation, as moody and irritable. This fellow is really in an unenviable fix, but somehow he manages to drag his creaking chassis along . . . until November comes.

He is not a malingerer. Nor a neurotic. Nor one of those who enjoy bad health and revel in imaginary symptoms. He is honestly ailing. Once he went to a famous diagnostician who examined him for three days, charged him $100, and said: “You will live forever and feel like hell.” The second part of the diagnosis he can verify; the first part he is not so keen about verifying. Forever is too definite.

But when the first frost comes there is a noticeable improvement in his health. And when quail season arrives he is a new man. Tonics and elixirs and tinctures of this and that are consigned to the attic. The medical profession has to eke out its existence without his munificent patronage.

He is no longer susceptible to colds, neuritis, and lumbago, although he tramps the countryside in the unfriendliest of weather and is often in wet clothing the livelong day. He sleeps the sleep of the innocent, unharried by nightmares. His outlook is buoyant, his disposition amiable, and the household hears nothing of his woes—not a solitary complaint—for the next three months. For the master of the household is paying ardent court to Bob White and his bashful bevy.

This man sounds suspicious, but let’s not convict him on circumstantial evidence. A moderately honest and hard-working man he is, and I have a deal of sympathy for him. I know him well. In fact, I might be pardoned for saying that I hold him in peculiar esteem, for with all my faults I love me still. He is the gent who has been living with my wife for 25 years.

The fact that the improvement in my health coincides with the advent of the quail season doesn’t mean that my ills during the rest of the year are imaginary. For outdoor pursuits have a recognized therapeutic value. Especially quail hunting.

Read the whole thing.

See? I even found a flattering photo (you can hardly even see the groundhog on top).

I thought Donald Trump was a disgraceful candidate for the presidency, unqualified with respect to experience, character, and intelligence. I obviously had no intention of ever supporting, or voting for, Hillary, but I was inclined to believe that both of these unfortunate candidates were destined to be failures in office and the winner, whichever won, would bring disrepute on his or her respective party, and deliver a “one free presidency” ticket to the opposition.

The sober and mature side of my brain concluded that we’d be better off taking our medicine now, losing to Hillary this time, and coming back with a qualified, legitimate candidate next go round. Obviously, things did not work out that way.

I will reluctantly admit that, election night, sitting there, watching Fox News, alcoholic beverage in hand, the irresponsible side of my brain began taking over, and I found myself turning into Mr. Hyde. The worse version of me was in my heart of hearts hankering for Trump to win. Schadenfreude is so much fun. And the prospect of a Trump presidency would simply be so much more fun and entertaining than looking forward to four years of Hillary, a female US president played by some unlucky children’s high school principal. The very thought of seeing Hillary on TV for four years is enough to make any right-thinking American start itching to jump on that raft and head down the Mississippi, hoping to escape to the territories.

I then sat around for roughly 24 hours feeling guilty and ashamed of myself. I kept seeing, in my mind’s eye, General Washington, in Valhalla, cursing Trump and Trump’s supporters (and me), as he did General Charles Lee at Monmouth, “until the leaves shook on the trees.”

But Trump has been behaving decently. He won fair and square, according to the system. And, though I have every confidence that he didn’t write his proposed agenda himself, a lot of the Trump’s proposed first steps are absolutely wonderful. If Trump repeals Obamacare, and wipes out Caliban’s legacy, I will be tickled pink. If Trump abolishes, or at least neuters, the EPA, I promise to drink his health. If he really reduces taxes and regulations in the way he’s talking about, hell, I might vote for him for a second term.

I’ll grant my Trumpkin opponents this one: in his capacity as disgrace, Donald Trump really and truly got himself elected as a revolutionary Agent of Change. A real legitimate conservative would very likely have felt himself inhibited by mere propriety from undertaking really extreme changes, like actually abolishing major federal agencies & departments. Trump has no obligation to be respectable, because he never was respectable. Trump can break all the crockery, throw all the bombs he feels like. The crazed insurrectionary Trumpkins will support him, the scheming Republican insiders will support him, and, yes, Virginia! #NeverTrump conservatives like me are going to give Trump the honeymoon he is entitled to. I’ll support him and defend him against the Left on every conservative thing he does, and I’ll even refrain from delivering more than mild dissents in the areas where I most disagree with the Trump platform, for a while, until at least, he does something really horrible. Fair is fair. He has got a mandate, at least up to a point.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

—this post is repeated annually—

WWI came to an end by an armistice arranged to occur at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The date and time, selected at a point in history when mens’ memories ran much longer, represented a compliment to St. Martin, patron saint of soldiers, and thus a tribute to the fighting men of both sides. The feast day of St. Martin, the Martinmas, had been for centuries a major landmark in the European calendar, a date on which leases expired, rents came due; and represented, in Northern Europe, a seasonal turning point after which cold weather and snow might be normally expected.

It fell about the Martinmas-time, when the snow lay on the borders…
—-Old Song.

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

St. Martin, the son of a Roman military tribune, was born at Sabaria, in Hungary, about 316. From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for mildness of disposition; yet he was obliged to become a soldier, a profession most uncongenial to his natural character. After several years’ service, he retired into solitude, from whence he was withdrawn, by being elected bishop of Tours, in the year 374.

The zeal and piety he displayed in this office were most exemplary. He converted the whole of his diocese to Christianity, overthrowing the ancient pagan temples, and erecting churches in their stead. From the great success of his pious endeavours, Martin has been styled the Apostle of the Gauls; and, being the first confessor to whom the Latin Church offered public prayers, he is distinguished as the father of that church. In remembrance of his original profession, he is also frequently denominated the Soldier Saint.

The principal legend, connected with St. Martin, forms the subject of our illustration, which represents the saint, when a soldier, dividing his cloak with a poor naked beggar, whom he found perishing with cold at the gate of Amiens. This cloak, being most miraculously preserved, long formed one of the holiest and most valued relics of France; when war was declared, it was carried before the French monarchs, as a sacred banner, and never failed to assure a certain victory. The oratory in which this cloak or cape—in French, chape—was preserved, acquired, in consequence, the name of chapelle, the person intrusted with its care being termed chapelain: and thus, according to Collin de Plancy, our English words chapel and chaplain are derived.

The canons of St. Martin of Tours and St. Gratian had a lawsuit, for sixty years, about a sleeve of this cloak, each claiming it as their property. The Count Larochefoucalt, at last, put an end to the proceedings, by sacrilegiously committing the contested relic to the flames. …

The festival of St. Martin, happening at that season when the new wines of the year are drawn from the lees and tasted, when cattle are killed for winter food, and fat geese are in their prime, is held as a feast-day over most parts of Christendom. On the ancient clog almanacs, the day is marked by the figure of a goose; our bird of Michaelmas being, on the continent, sacrificed at Martinmas. In Scotland and the north of England, a fat ox is called a mart, clearly from Martinmas, the usual time when beeves are killed for winter use. In ‘Tusser’s Husbandry, we read:

When Easter comes, who knows not then,
That veal and bacon is the man?
And Martilmass beef doth bear good tack,
When country folic do dainties lack.’

Barnaby Googe’s translation of Neogeorgus, shews us how Martinmas was kept in Germany, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century

‘To belly chear, yet once again,
Doth Martin more incline,
Whom all the people worshippeth With roasted geese and wine.
Both all the day long, and the night, Now each man open makes
His vessels all, and of the must, Oft times, the last he takes,
Which holy Martin afterwards Alloweth to be wine,
Therefore they him, unto the skies, Extol with praise divine.’

A genial saint, like Martin, might naturally be expected to become popular in England; and there are no less than seven churches in London and Westminster, alone, dedicated to him. There is certainly more than a resemblance between the Vinalia of the Romans, and the Martinalia of the medieval period.

Indeed, an old ecclesiastical calendar, quoted by Brand, expressly states under 11th November: ‘The Vinalia, a feast of the ancients, removed to this day. Bacchus in the figure of Martin.’ And thus, probably, it happened, that the beggars were taken from St. Martin, and placed under the protection of St. Giles; while the former became the patron saint of publicans, tavern-keepers, and other ‘dispensers of good eating and drinking. In the hall of the Vintners’ Company of London, paintings and statues of St. Martin and Bacchus reign amicably together side by side.

On the inauguration, as lord mayor, of Sir Samuel Dashwood, an honoured vintner, in 1702, the company had a grand processional pageant, the most conspicuous figure in which was their patron saint, Martin, arrayed, cap-à-pie, in a magnificent suit of polished armour; wearing a costly scarlet cloak, and mounted on a richly plumed and caparisoned white charger: two esquires, in rich liveries, walking at each side. Twenty satyrs danced before him, beating tambours, and preceded by ten halberdiers, with rural music. Ten Roman lictors, wearing silver helmets, and carrying axes and fasces, gave an air of classical dignity to the procession, and, with the satyrs, sustained the bacchanalian idea of the affair.

A multitude of beggars, ‘howling most lamentably,’ followed the warlike saint, till the procession stopped in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Then Martin, or his representative at least, drawing his sword, cut his rich scarlet cloak in many pieces, which he distributed among the beggars. This ceremony being duly and gravely performed, the lamentable howlings ceased, and the procession resumed its course to Guildhall, where Queen Anne graciously condescended to dine with the new lord mayor.

An annual post.