THE DEAD: What might a modern "paralysis" look like?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

Plus, his strangest behavior yet: Way back in 1914, James Joyce's collection of fifteen stories began with thoughts of "paralysis."

The collection bears the sacred name, Dubliners. Boasting a youthful, first-person narrator, the first story started like this:

The Sisters

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

That's the first paragraph of the young Joyce's sacred first book. "Paralysis" is sitting right there, marked by its "deadly work.".

As it turned out, Father Flynn had died "a paralytic," felled by his third stroke. The paralysis introduced here had delivered him to the ranks of the (literally) dead.

Way back in 1906, the very young Joyce—he was just 24—had written to a timid, slightly paralyzed publisher, describing the intention behind his unusual book:

"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."

At any rate, the cycle of stories started right there, with the literal death of the literally paralyzed Father Flynn. It ended with the longest story in the collection, the near novella which bears this famous title:

The Dead

The young Joyce wasn't playing around, even at age 24!

As we present-day Americans seek to understand the death-in-life of our own failing nation, we might consider abandoning the 24-second news cycle which now defeats our understanding. We might consider replacing it with certain similarities which may be lurking inside Joyce's first published text.

Last night, the garbage was general over the Fox News Channel. There seems to be very little "paralysis" over there.

Within the elites of Blue America, the situation may seem to be different. Consider the headlines one can see, this very morning, on the web site of the venerable Washington Post.

A bit more than fifty years ago, the Washington Post exploded into major prominence with its investigation of the "Watergate" matter. 

It's a different paper today. This morning, at 7:45 a.m., these were the first ten (10) headlines seen on the front page of its web site. Each of these headlines offered readers a link:

The Washington Post 

Trump officials ask Supreme Court to quickly allow sweeping tariffs

Inside the Trump team’s conflicting efforts to mend ties with India

RFK Jr. drives a wedge between red and blue states on vaccines

The case of the stolen pigeons:
Chinese tycoons turned pigeon racing into one of the world’s most lucrative sports. Then the thefts began.

House GOP weighing bills to remove elected D.C. attorney general, overhaul justice policies

At D.C. Superior Court, a system up at all hours under Trump’s order

National Guard deployment in D.C. expected to be extended for months

Plastic exposure before birth can leave babies with lifelong fertility issues

What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.
The supermarket freezer aisle is awash in ready-to-bake pizzas. We found a clear favorite.

This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S. 
This year’s map forecasts an early arrival of colors in the Northeast, while the West Coast and Southeast may experience foliage delays.

In this age of the flooding of the zone, most of those headlines linked to serious news reports about actual news topics. The stolen pigeons and the best frozen pizza were possibly included just for fun. Plus the foliage map!

At any rate, there they sat—the newspapers top ten headlines! After that, as we continued to scroll, we encountered this array of eight (8) "stories" which offered us even more news:

More top stories

Texas moves to allow anyone to sue abortion pill prescribers, distributors

Death toll rises to 17 after Lisbon’s popular Glória funicular derails

Trump administration rescinds protected status for 250,000 Venezuelans

Trump ordered strike on suspected drug boat to send a message, Rubio says

D.C. can predict who will get into car crashes but can’t stop them

Heard on a hot mic: Xi and Putin discuss living to age 150

House Republicans form new subcommittee to reinvestigate Jan. 6 attack

Putin may live to 150? A Post subscriber may have to live that long to encounter reporting about the topic for which we were searching this day!

We'd now encountered links to eighteen (18) different news reports. At this point, as we scrolled on, we encountered a section bearing this name:

Latest from The Post

The section included eight (8) additional offerings. Two of the eight were these:

Analysis / Mark Maske 
NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved? Plus, the top games in Week 1.

Analysis / Neil Greenberg
Predicting win-loss records for all 32 NFL teams

The count was now 26. After that came the day's "Better Living" section. Links were offered to four (4) more reports, not excluding these

Column / Ellie Krieger
Pear overnight oats show why this breakfast has stood the test of time

The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet

By now, we subscribers had been directed (or misdirected) to thirty (30) offerings. Now we came to another section. Its featured report was this:

Politics & Government

Judge rules Trump administration cannot withhold funding from Harvard

That was a perfectly serious topic. By now, our roll stood at 31.

As we'd scrolled down the Post's front page, we'd been invited to click on 31 links. Finally, we reviewed a set of six additional reports in that same Politics & Government section

This subset was offered in smaller print. Finally, though, we saw the topic for which we'd been searching. The link to it read like this:

Epstein accusers join lawmakers to push for full release of documents

At long last, there it stood! 

Yesterday, this event had been widely featured on two of the three major "cable news" channels. Perhaps a bit paralytically, perhaps driven by deference to power and by a bit of fear, the Washington Post had managed to squeeze it in at number 32 on today's play list:

That placed it below the discussion of onside kicks, and below the news report about the danger of excessive toilet scrolling. We've reported, now you can decide!

As decent people, we whispered a silent prayer of thanksgiving. We thanked the God of all Irish Catholics for the fact that the ambitious young Joyce never had to see this version of what might be a form of a type of moral "paralysis."

As for our youthful analysts, their souls swooned slowly as they heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 

(We're borrowing from the closing paragraph of The Dead as we bring you that report.)

Yesterday, there they were, the survivors or victims—take your pick—of Jeffrey Epstein and Gislaine Maxell, a pair of convicted criminals. 

Yesterday, they told their stories in a press event outside the Capitol Building. On CNN and MSNBC, this was treated, throughout the day and on into the evening, as a major news event.

On the Fox News Channel—no paralysis there!—the various messenger pigeons found a different array of topics with which to fills their hours. Various targets were slimed again when Greg Gutfeld took to the air.

It was a major event on two news channels, almost wholly avoided on one. This morning, at the Washington Post, the event had barely occurred.

The New York Times did somewhat better. In this morning's print editions, the report appears inside the paper, on page A14. 

It didn't make the paper's front page. It's listed as the fifth of eighteen news reports in the online "National" section.

It appears right below the fourth report. As seen in print editions, here are the headlines in question:

Brewery Owner in Maine Joins Push to Unseat Collins

G.O.P. Leaders Thwart Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

Accusers had been pleading for files, the headline said. Here's the headline which appears online, along with the opening paragraphs:

G.O.P. Thwarts Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

With the Capitol towering behind them, several women who said they had been among Jeffrey Epstein’s victims shared harrowing stories of sexual abuse, pleading with members of Congress to demand that the Trump administration release all of its investigative files in the case.

Lawmakers in both parties stood behind them, vowing to keep the pressure on for the disclosures.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, said the files must come out.

None of it appeared to be enough to outweigh the pressure from Mr. Trump and Republican leaders, who have moved quickly to squelch legislation that would require the Justice Department to quickly and completely release what it uncovered about Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Momentum was flagging behind an effort by Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, to force the House to vote on the measure, after most Republicans who initially said they would back it fell in line with the president’s exhortations to let the issue die.

We aren't saying that report is wrong, though the BBC said that the "several" women were actually nine in number. We're saying that a bit of "paralysis" may have infested the treatment of this topic at the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, here's something you may not get to read about at the Post or at the Times. Under present arrangements, you have to go to Mediaite to learn about bizarre behavior like this:

Trump Goes on Bizarre, Digitally-Altered Posting Bender About His Political Enemies

President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of Truth Social posts featuring digitally altered videos of some of his political enemies on Wednesday night. The posts featured some of his favorite targets, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

After publishing boilerplate posts about the Social Security Administration and his meeting with the president of Poland earlier in the day, the president’s timeline got weird, even by his posting standards.

Intriguing! Just how "weird" were the president's posts? Was his bender really "bizarre?"

We're going to say that it very much was—that it was the most bizarre yet. Michael Luciano's report continues along as shown, but you'll have to click over to his report to actually see the apparent illness which might seem to be involved here:

The bizarre bender began with a post about Rosie O’Donnell, who moved to Ireland after Trump won last year’s election. (Screenshots of the president’s posts are posted below instead of embedded posts, as Truth Social’s embed feature seems to be non-functional with some content management systems):

“As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship,” Trump wrote. “She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!”

This would be the last post in the series that included text. The rest were AI videos or videos that had been otherwise altered in some way.

They included a video of Schiff with an elongated neck...

And so on from there. 

The president had started with a suggestion that Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship might now be revoked. That was high sanity compared to what came next. 

You'll have to click to Luciano's report to see those altered photos. Incredibly, this is what the president has apparently posted concerning Senator Schiff.

Is something wrong with President Trump? We've asked this fairly obvious question again and again, noting that any such situation would of course be tragic state of affairs.

We've asked and asked and asked. You'll have to turn to the extremely strange visuals at Mediaite to encounter what seems to be an answer to that question.

"Silence invaded the suburbs," the poet Auden said, in honor of the poet Yeats. 

("Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest...")

Has a type of paralysis, in the form of a silence, invaded the Washington Post? 

Regarding the victims of Epstein and Maxwell, yesterday's open air presser had seemed to be a fairly substantial event. It was virtually disappeared by the Post, given somewhat limited play at the Times. 

More broadly, these newspapers refuse to discuss the possible state of the president's mental health, with respect to which we would strongly suggest that you look at the visuals which appear at Mediaite via the Truth Social site.

Our question:

Might we see portraits of our current Blue American selves in the page of Dubliners? In its final story, The Dead? 

Are we Blues possibly trapped in a form of walking death, in a form of moral paralysis? If we want to see ourselves more clearly, should we perhaps step back from the current news cycle? Might we try to look inside such honored writing instead?

Tomorrow: Additional language from The Dead:

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. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.