SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2025
The paralysis afflicting the dead: In Thursday morning's report, we detailed the disappearance of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.
On Wednesday, they'd held a high-profile press event in front of the Capitol Building. On Thursday morning, they were disappeared by the apparently reinvented Washington Post.
It was as we told you! As we scrolled down the front page of the Post's website, we had to scroll through thirty-one (31) headlines before we were offered a link to the Post's news report about what these victims had said.
In that way, those survivors had been disappeared. Just to refresh your memory, a few of those 31 news reports and opinion columns had appeared beneath such headlines as these:
What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.
This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S.
NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved?
The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet
The Post had invited us to click on those links before the paper was willing to tell us what Epstein's victims had said.
Also on Wednesday, the sitting president had said the Epstein thing was a "hoax." The Washington Post seemed to take things from there—and yesterday, after we returned from participation in the "every third Friday" medical cycle, we saw that the Post had published this editorial, dual headline included:
In defense of the War Department
Euphemisms such as “defense” and “security” have a tendency for bureaucratic mission-creep.
Euphemisms distort thought, and no entities are more adept at producing euphemisms than governments. President Donald Trump’s rebranding on Friday of the Department of Defense as the Department of War is a worthy blow against government euphemism. Perhaps it can be followed by clearer thinking about the military’s role at home and abroad.
[...]
Trump’s opponents complain about the aggressive connotations of the new name. But the United States is protected by the most lethal and vigilant fighting force ever assembled, no matter what it’s called. The new name could prompt more focused debate about how to use it.
Etcetera, and so forth and so on. As workmen vandalized a Washington building, scraping the word "Defense" away, the Washington Post was reciting President Trump's talking points:
This latest name change by the president was part of the war on euphemism! It was designed to lessen the likelihood that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would send us off to war!
This morning, we saw the same lines being recited by all three friends in the first fifteen minutes of Fox & Friends Weekend. Meanwhile, why do we call it "vandalism" when workers peel that silly woke word off the side of that building?
Simple! It's because the president doesn't seem to have the legal authority to rename that department. By law, it apparently remains the "The United States Department of Defense," until such time as Congress decides to act.
To appearances, Jeff Bezos may not have enough money yet. To appearances, he's vandalized the Washington Post to keep his dream of additional wealth alive.
Meanwhile, who sits on the editorial board at this new Washington Post? Who wrote and published that editorial?
Perhaps that masthead information exists somewhere. Late yesterday, we searched and searched and googled hard and we couldn't find a list of such names.
To appearances, a second war is currently under way. It seems to us that the forces of Red America may already have won.
In part, it's been the paralysis. It's the paralysis and the walking death—the ongoing death-in-life. In all the squalor we saw last night after returning from our day in the medical realm, we were perhaps most struck by the new column from David Brooks, which ran beneath this headline:
Why I Am Not a Liberal
We've long admired Brooks' work over the past dozen years. Also, there's zero reason why David Brooks, or anyone else, has to be "a liberal."
That said, it seems to us that he keeps doing this at this point in time. Every time he offers a challenge to President Trump, he hurries back to his study carrel and presents something, perhaps a bit performatively, which points in a different direction.
A war is on, and we Blues have lost, or so it can seem over here. In many ways, we'd chalk it up to elite "paralysis" and to elite walking death.
Over the past few years, we've suggested that we can possibly see the outlines of this war more clearly through the auspices of literature:
We can see the "revolt from below" in every verse of the Iliad, with the furious Achaeans having spent ten years trying to get Helen back. That leads to Professor Knox's account of what occurred after the war poem ends—his memorable account of what happened when sacred Troy finally fell:
Professor Bernard Knox:
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war...
So wrote Professor Knox. That's part of his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad.
The Achaeans performed that night assault using the tools of war of the Late Bronze Age. The current night assault—the current furious revolt from below—is being enacted using the weapons of our own Information Age. It's happening as a paralysis is keeping Blue America's timorous elites off the playing field.
The Iliad helps us see the fury behind the angry revolt from below. Passages from The Plague help illustrate the way we Americans, of whatever political hue, have failed to see, failed to comprehend, what is occurring around us
Albert Camus, The Plague
The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that come crashing down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
[...]
Our townsfolk were like everybody else...they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions...
Camus continued from there. In his account, the fictional townsfolk of Oran weren't built to see the pestilence which was slithering in around them.
To the Iliad and The Plague, we would now add The Dead. It's the famous final story in Dubliners, the collection of fifteen stories which the young Joyce described in a pair of letters to his recalcitrant publisher.
The publisher was too paralyzed to publish. He wanted material removed:
JOYCE (May 5, 1906): My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis...I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written.
JOYCE (May 20, 1906): I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you wished...The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them, what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country.
Rightly or wrongly, the young Joyce—he was just 24!—said he saw his own Dublin as "the center of [an unexplained type of] paralysis." It was a "spiritual" paralysis to which he referred, though as we noted on Thursday, the very first story started with the literal paralysis which had led to the death of the late Father Flynn.
Joyce said he was trying to "write a chapter in the moral history of my country." He said he hoped that he had "taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country."
As we noted on Thursday, the word "paralysis" sits right there, in the very first paragraph of Dubliners' first story. The famous final story is the near novella called The Dead.
Recently, we were called away to The Dead because of a delusional comment by President Trump—the delusional comment he made to President Macron concerning his darling Vladimir:
PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me.
Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.
Incredibly, that's what the president said. It took us back to Gretta Conroy, describing poor Michael Furey in Joyce's famous text—poor Michael Furey, who had died for her, long before, when he was just 17.
He had courted her, at age 17, by singing "The Lass of Aughrim." Her husband, Gabriel Conroy, had never heard this story before—but he was suddenly hearing it now:
“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.
“I was great with him at that time,” she said.
Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:
“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”
“I think he died for me,” she answered.
With that, she told her husband the fuller story—a story he'd never heard.
Gabriel Conroy's paralysis lies at the heart of this final story. Joyce reveals it slowly but surely, starting when Lily, the caretaker's daughter, unsettles him with this sudden remark as he arrives at the annual Twelfth Night party thrown by the Misses Morkan:
“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”
Lily's aim was true. Later, Miss Ivors seems to accuse him of being "a West Briton"—a Dubliner who may perhaps fancy the Brits. In the course of the story, Gabriel Conroy thinks about the literal dead, but walking death may perhaps have its eye on this decent man too.
In these times, as Blue America falls, it's the silence of the Blue American lambs where the paralysis and the (metaphorical) death can perhaps be seen. The observers in question are going to go to their cultural deaths without ever daring to say the things they all know to be true.
They're hanging on to "good jobs at good pay," to recall one of the sensible goals of the sensible Candidate Bill Clinton. They won't say what they actually think and think they know about the delusional President Trump, or about the apparent madness surrounding "Bobby" (and others).
In truth, they wouldn't know how to discuss the apparent illnesses which seem to afflict these men in much the way the Achaean leaders were driven by madness and rage. To appearances, neither their IQ nor their EQ equips them for such a task.
Gabriel Conroy's paralysis is subtly sketched by Joyce. He isn't insulted for his paralysis, but all through Joyce's famous story, hints of something like a paralysis are possibly shown to be there.
In ways those letters don't explain, Joyce wanted to liberate his country from the paralysis he thought he saw among his fellow Dubliners. As his story approaches its end, Gabriel Conroy's wife is asleep on their bed, her weeping having ended:
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades [ghosts]. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live [without her].
Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead...
He'd never felt like that himself, but Michael Furey had. Gabriel Conroy was himself among the walking dead, like the silent tribunes of Blue America who refuse to report what's happening around them and who refuse to discuss what they know.
They won't discuss the Fox News Channel at all, even though that's where that the troops are now coming over the walls. They refuse to say what they must think that know about President Trump, but also about such figures as Hegseth and Kennedy.
(As always, we advise you to pity the child.)
They won't report or discuss that channel at all. They won't say what they think they know about President Trump, who had the misfortune to be born to "a high-functioning sociopath."
In the summer of 2020, the president's niece had written a challenging, best-selling book. Clinging to the rules of their guild, they continue to refuse to report what's in it.
"They were all becoming shades." So observed Gabriel Conroy, a perfectly good and decent person.
By way of contrast, poor Michael Furey had insisted on singing "The Lass of Aughrim" in a cold, driving rain. Word of his death had reached the young woman who "was great with him at that time" roughly one week later.
He had never heard this story before. He sensed that something was missing or wrong.
Last chance before freeway: Don't cheat yourself of the chance to see Anjelica Huston perform that famous scene.
"I think that he died for me," she says in the 1997 film. Unlike the confession to poor Macron, her assessment's aim was true.
"He was such a gentle boy," she says at one point. You won't see a lot of that as the Achaeans come over the walls, undiscussed, at the Fox News Channel.
The Iliad, The Plague and The Dead. Do they help us see the various players with this war perhaps already lost?
