You think I still have feelings?

Hoookay—as Bette Davis would say, it’s been a bumpy ride, hasn’t it, here in Kleptolandia? And we’ve only just got into August. What will it be like when it really starts heating up?

In case you’re not a subscriber to the Washington Post, I’m linking to a story they ran on Tuesday about the events of last week, as seen through—and told by—various players and observers from all walks of life. (Well, no Benedictine monks or Roller Derby mamas, that I could see, but there is a generally representative sampling of Americana in the quotes they give.)

They describe it as “An oral history of the Era of the Mooch—condensed and edited for clarity—as told by senators, Boy Scouts, soldiers, journalists, parents, talking heads, Wall Street traders and the CEO of an arcade-game company in Florida.”

So, yeah—Americana.

And it’s exhausting to realize that all this mishegoss happened in the space of Monday through Friday (with a bit of an epilogue). The thing is—aside from the desire to guzzle popcorn and gin that going through the non-stop rollercoaster news cycles of last week inspired—collecting these snippets of immediate responses as each event occurred is a mother lode for future historians. The Post may or may not have skewed the narrative, depending on which snippets they chose to include, but this is pretty much how we in the historying trade go about trying to patch together a reasonable quilt design when we practice our craft.

There are some bodacious quotes here; you owe it to yourself to read the entire story. A couple of my favorites are from Jesse Ferguson, former press aide for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, on the first Senate vote on some unknown quantity of a healthcare repeal bill (“How did I feel about [John McCain’s] vote? You think I still have feelings? Those died a long time ago.”); and Melissa Hanham’s description of the Slack channel for North Korea. You should read that.

Then there’s… Naw, just read them all.

With or without gin.

Brain STEM

I’m feeling kinda geeky today, so here are a couple of STEM visual jokes.

You’re welcome.

Déjà vu

Y’all know George Santayana’s axiom about the past—those who don’t remember it are condemned to repeat it. That sucker pops up periodically, but it seems particularly appropriate in the regime of the Kleptocrat, who can’t remember what he said or did seven minutes ago.

I was reminded of this when a friend in the UK sent me a political cartoon from The Times of London, published at the time of the Kleptocrat’s meetings with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit:

This cartoon is a brilliant reference to one by political cartoonist David Low, published in the Evening Standard on 20 September 1939, depicting the cynical collusion between ideological opposites over the carving up of Poland:

I just wish to God we would learn these lessons.

Job posting

Fortune 100 companies really ought to be careful about using social media, and in particular about how they advertise on a platform that’s meant for engagement.

Only last week, someone stuck with the weekend Twitter shift at Verizon got the piss taken out of them. But sticking your promoted tweets in people’s timelines is just asking for it.

Viz. this from a while ago:

I could have predicted the first responses. In fact, I only paused to leave my own snark before I blocked their butt, for essentially the same reasons spelled out here:

Seriously—they never learn.

The Bloody Fields of Flanders

It is the last day in July here in the District They Call Columbia. We had a break in the heat and humidity hell; yesterday as I was running errands I actually had to remind myself, “Self—it’s only 70 degrees. Roll your windows down.” And I could leave my patio door open most of the day and actually listen to the birds chowing down at the feeders.

But as the heat index rises to its customary triple digits, I’m casting my thoughts back to fields in Flanders, where one hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres began. Perhaps to distinguish it from the others, this one is known as Passchendaele, and it lasted from 31 July to 10 November, 1917.

By summer of 1917, the fields around Ypres were already a grotesque, ghastly charnel house. That part of Belgium is basically a thin strip of soil spread over clay. Nearly three years of artillery bombardment combined with repeated rain storms had churned Passchendaele into a god-awful potage of mud, in which the bodies and bones of men and animals churned to the surface and then roiled back into the soup. Trenches flooded, foodstuffs rotted and men and rats went mad.

Imagine, if you will, being one of those soldiers, peering warily over the top of your trench and seeing a vast expanse of that grey-brown churning mass, and knowing you were being ordered to climb over the parapet, in your woolen uniform and carrying your rifle, pack and other combat essentials (60 pounds' worth), and wondering how many yards you’d make it before the mud grasped your legs and pulled you down, making you an easy target for German machine guns. It is a fact that both men and horses drowned in it, although not always immediately. For more than three months.

In the end, the British had gained roughly five miles of territory, and suffered around 275,000 casualties. The math works out to just over ten men per foot of ground.

A few years ago I walked those fields around Ypres, and visited the endless cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They are beautiful places now, but even so, I was grateful to know that I had a hotel room with a bath and clean sheets to return to at night. If you think too hard about what it looked like a hundred years ago, you won’t sleep at all.

I’ve written before about the confluence of art and history, using artistic media to shorten the distance to the past. We’ve seen several instances of it during the centenary of the First World War: the Lights Out commemoration on 4 August 2014 of the declarations of war; the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London—one ceramic poppy for each British and Commonwealth soldier killed in the four years of war; the haunting appearance last year of men dressed in World War I kit at train stations in cities around England—each representing a British soldier who died on that first day, 1 July 1916.

This time, a Dutch artist sculpted a British soldier out of Passchendaele mud, and installed it in Trafalgar Square last week. You can see in his drooping shoulders and the expression on his face how bone-weary he is.

But then, through artificial rain, the soldier has been slowly disintegrating; in a few days, he’ll be just a pool of mud. It seems the most fitting depiction of this particular battle we could see.

A second artistic commemoration of Passchendaele is this pipers lament, known as “The Bloody Fields of Flanders”. “Bloody”, in this case, can be taken to mean both covered in blood, and as an intensive modifier, along the lines of “fucking”. Either way it would be accurate.