The Books of My Life: John Ford (Eyman)

With the revival of auteurism, if in a more systematic form than that of earlier film critic generations, in the 1950s and 1960s in France, England, Scotland, and the United States, director John Ford became one of the stars of the auteurist firmament. Ironically, he became a pantheon or Olympic director at the same time as his star was dimming in mainstream gatekeeper film criticism of publications like the New York Times as film historian, film critic, and film biographer Scott Eyman notes. In an era impacted by the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, Ford's sentimental and nostalgic Americana "pictures", particularly his manifest destiny Westerns with their negative portrayals of America's First Peoples, seemed, at least to establishment film critics, long past their sell by date and seemed reactionary to boot.

Scott Eyman's John Ford: The Searcher 1894-1973, also known as John Ford: The Complete Films (Köln: Taschen, 2004), takes readers on a chronological tour through the fiction films, documentaries, and television episodes directed by John Ford from The Tornado of 1917 to Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend of 1976. In the text and in the captions to the real star of Eyman's book, hundreds of stills and on location photographs, Eyman explores Ford's thematic motifs, visual motifs, and collaborators, and argues, like Sarris and others before him, that Ford really only became an auteur in the late 1930s and early 1940s with Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941).

Eyman's encyclopedic odyssey through Ford's films is unlikely to please those looking for more sociological, modern cultural, or reader response analysis of the impressionistic or quantitative sort. It is unlikely to please academic critics of auteurism since it simply accepts auteurism as its starting point. It is unlikely to please those who argue that Ford's film are grounded in those old literary analysis standards of man against man, man against nature, man against society, and man against change and popular culture genres. If, however,  you are looking for a brief and workmanlike analysis of Ford's films with an excellent selection of stills and on location photographs, this is the book for you. There is, by the way, no doubt that the stills are an excellent if somewhat problematic visual aid to the study of the films and television work of John Ford.

The Books of My Life: A Reader's Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Since its publication in the Soviet journal Moskva in 1966 and 1967 Mikhail Bulgakov's book for the drawer, The Master and Margarita, has become a cause celebre. The book's fame soon led to graffiti appearing in the stairwell in the house on Sadovaya ulitsa leading up to the apartment where Bulgakov once lived on the fourth storey, songs loosely based off of it such as "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, albums named after characters within it such as Patti Smith's Banga, and the celebration of one of its catch phrases, "manuscripts don't burn" particularly by Soviet dissidents. Today, as recent polls have affirmed again and again, The Master and Margarita is one of the most popular books among Russians. Pretty good for a book that its author thought might never be published and which may never have seen the light of day if not for Bulgakov's relatives, particularly his widow, Yelena Sergeyvena Bulgakova.

Bulgakov was a late comer to literature. He was born in Kyiv to an intellectual family in 1891. His father Afanasy was a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy and he graduated from the Medical Faculty of Kyiv University and even practised, as did Anton Chekhov, for a little while in the Russian "sticks", an experience that resulted in a series of related stories being published under the title A Young Doctor's Country Notebook. Though Bulgakov published a book, White Guard (1925), a novella, Fatal Eggs (1925), and had a few of his plays put on, most famously his theatrical adaptation of White Guard, The Days of the Turbans, at the famous Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Dancehnko, where he worked for a time thanks to the intervention of Yosif Stalin, during his lifetime, many of Bulgakov's works, including The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov worked on between 1928 and 1940, and A Dog's Heart (1925), could not be published in the USSR until after the Thaw and the period of glasnost and perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Master and Margarita, with its magical, satirical, and comic tale of the devil's visit to Stalin's Moscow, its realist tale of the confrontation between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ga-Nostri in Yerushalaim, and its tale of the love between the Master and Margarita, which brings the other strands together, has not only been a cause celebre in bohemian, dissident, and popular culture. It has stimulated a wealth of literature on both the book and the author of the book in the halls of academe. Julie Curtis's A Reader's Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (Boston: Academic Studies Press, Companions to Russian Literature series, 2019) is one of the latest. Curtis, who has written extensively on Bulgakov and Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, explores the broader economic, political, and cultural contexts, literary contexts, influence history, textual history, genre history, narrative structure, characters, Soviet and Russian publication history, and English translation history, though Curtis misses Michael Karpelson's translation of Bulgakov's book, provides readers with an excellent introduction to both Mikhail Bulgakov and his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.

For those looking for a book on the state of The Master and Margarita art written for a broad intellectual audience, I highly recommend Curtis's monograph. For those who are reading or who have read The Master and Margarita and are looking for a guide that will help them better understand the cultural and literary background of The Master and Margarita, I highly recommend Curtis's book. For those interested in Russian and Soviet cultural and literary history in general, I highly recommend Curtis's monograph. For those of you who have not yet read The Master and Margarita, I recommend that you read it, particularly if Gogolesque satire, carnavelesque, and humour, Tolstoyan like realism, and a deep humanism, are your cup of tea.

The Car Insurance Kiada

At 10:38 pm on Sunday the Third of May 2020, in the midst of pandemic, three cars, mine included, were hit by the young woman driving the car seen turned upside down in the photo to the left.  It was apparent from what I heard in my apartment that night, that the driver was driving way too fast when she had the accident.

The police, who were apparently close by, responded very quickly, before I was even out the door, in fact, to the scene of the crime. Those of us whose cars were hit were asked by the police for our registrations and our insurance information. We waited for over an hour while they sorted out the details of the accident.

Though the person who had the accident told all of us who she hit that night that she had the maximum in accident coverage and that all, as a result, would turn out well for our damaged cars, it turned out that she did not have anywhere near maximum coverage as those of us whose cars were hit by the out of control vehicle soon learned from her car insurance carrier, Progressive. In fact, she only had $10,000 dollars worth of coverage, something I quickly surmised would be gone given that the first of the three cars she hit was totalled. This was confirmed when I contacted Progressive. Progressive informed me and I informed my neighbour, whose car was also hit, that we should go through our insurance companies—mine was Amica—to make a claim. I did though the bureaucratic process, problematised by the pandemic, is still playing itself out and probably will be for some time as I still need to take my Escape to have it looked at by claims adjustors and I am apprehensive about the damage the force of the accident may have done to the suspension and undercarriage of the car.

Then on the 20^th of May 2020 things changed. The neighbour whose car was also hit informed me that her insurance company, Geico, was able to get a promise from Progressive—her case was handled by a different representative than mine for some bizarre reason—that Progressive would cover up to $500 dollars of the damage on her car, the equivalent of the standard deductible. I asked for the same promise—that Progressive would cover damage up to $500 dollars on my six month old 2019 Ford Escape and if the damage was over $500 dollars they would pay my deductible to Amica and Amica would, in turn, cover the remaining cost of the damage. My request, however, was denied by Progressive while Amica proved of little help in the matter. Given this it looks like my next move will be to file a complaint with both the insurance commissioner of New York state and the Attorney General of New York state.

Postscript: It turned out that my neighbour was wrong about Progressive covering damage up to $500 dollars and Amica was very helpful in every way.   

Life in the Kingdom of Glupov: Libertarianism and Moronicity

You have to somewhat admire the magnificent idiocy of those "libertarians" who are attending anti-lock down protests in several US states and who carry signs with Orwellian doublespeak like slogans such as my freedom does not end where your illness begins or if you want to quarantine, quarantine and if you don't, don't. They don't seem to grasp the obvious, that pandemics that can be and, in the case of the coronavirus are, deadly, spread from person to person via contact. Nor do these morons grasp something else that is obvious, namely that nothing gives them the right to put my health and my life in danger. Human freedom and liberty, you see, are not abstract free floating slogans nor are they meaningful outside of real human communities with their extensive social interactions.

Compared to those who think that the pandemic is fake the abstract life in a vacuum libertarians are geniuses. We may not be able to see the coffins of those who have been killed by the coronavirus on television, for obvious reasons, specifically we are living in the time of a pandemic, but life and death go on even if they are not on TV and even if they are cleansed from the minds of moronic know nothings living a really stupid version of postmodernism. We may also not know the exact number of those who have died as a result of covid-19 because countries aren't consistent in their reporting, some who have died may have had their deaths wrongly categorised particularly early on during the spread of the pandemic, and we don't know precisely how many have died in nursing homes, assisted living, and senior homes, and states don't always count these in the pandemic death statistics. What we do know, however, thanks to Johns Hopkins University's online coronavirus site, is that some 300,000 people have died from the pandemic as I type. That is akin to the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suddenly disappearing. We know that lock down and social distancing have saved lives, though we don't, thankfully, know how many. And we know that no amount of empirical data will convince Sergeant Schultz like orange crush know nothings that their "reality" is a pathetic, hate filled, and inhumane hallucination and fabrication.

That such dingbat libertarianism and wingnut postmodernism continues to go on in the Kindgom of Glupov is, of course, yet another reason for New York state to consider secession and perhaps petitioning Canada, which has fewer Glupovians in both absolute and per capita terms, to become the eleventh province of that nation. I know that I certainly don't want to spend the rest of what remains of my life in the Kingdom of Glupov with its many idiocies, moroncities, hallucinations, delusions, scapegoating xenophobias, authoritarianisms, theocracies, fetishes, anti-intellectualisms, hypocrisies, and devolutions.

The Books of My Life: The John Ford Movie Mystery

One of the mysteries that Andrew Sarris hoped to solve in his monograph The John Ford Movie Mystery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) was the mystery of why movie director John Ford's critical reputation declined so much in the United States between the critically acclaimed The Informer (1935) and Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the critically panned or critically ignored Wagonmaster (1950), The Searchers (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962). For Sarris, though he implies this more than laying the argument out, the key to solving the mystery of the decline in Ford's reputation lay in the social and cultural changes wrought in post-World War II America by the civil rights movement and the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s and the changes and culture wars they brought to the country. In this changed and charged hothouse cultural atmosphere, Sarris suggests, Ford's nostalgia and his celebration of community, family, Catholicism, and American manifest destiny, seemed markers of cultural and ideological backwardness to a cosmopolitan film criticism colony in New York City that had become cognizant of the dangers inherent in American imperialism, American nationalism, and American nostalgia for a romanticised past.

Sarris's monograph, not surprisingly given the central role Sarris played in bringing French style auteurism to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, is auteurist in form. In addition to attempting to answer why Ford's reputation declined between New Deal and Nixonian post-New Deal America, Sarris explores other mysteries including the themes of Ford's films--nostalgia, family, community, benign American manifest destiny, and Catholicism--for Sarris Ford was more a conservative rather than a reactionary--and Ford's preference for character and image--the epic long shot that emphasised community and character-- over plot and talk.

Sarris's The John Ford Movie Mystery is not the straw man auterism of so many contemporary critics of film auteurism. Sarris's auteurism was grounded in history. Sarris noted, for instance, that, in 1975, it was impossible to see many of Ford's early films and that hence any analysis of Ford's work had to be somewhat tentative. Sarris's auteurism was grounded in a recognition that film was a collaborative medium and Sarris paid attention to Ford's collaboration with writers like Dudley Nichols and Frank Nugent, directors of photography like Greg Toland, and actors like Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Ward Bond, and Ben Johnson. Sarris found no contradiction between the recognition that film is a collaborative medium and the polemic that the director was ultimately the author of at least some of his or her films. Sarris's auteurism was an auteurism that recognised that not every film of one of those few film auteurs was a masterpiece or even good. Finally, Sarris's auteurism was an auteurism that recognised that films by auteurs may help us understand the film artist.

Though not many contemporary critics share or even praise Sarris's auteurist approach, they do still share a great deal with Sarris. Like Sarris's auteurusm, which mixes and matches descriptive analysis with normative aesthetic criticism, many contemporary film critics, including those in the academy, often come to films and the directors of films in order to either praise them and him or her or damn them and him or her. They often praise or damn individual films or the films of their own favoured or disfavoured auteurs for somewhat different reasons than Sarris, however. They often praise or damn films on the basis of their ideological correctness or ideological incorrectness. Given the importance of the normative level in film analysis in both film theory past and present, the mystery that appears in need of exploration and explanation is whether film criticism is inherently a form of reader response even when it comes from professional film critics or academic "experts" in the study of cinema.

How to Read History: Musings on the Tara Reade Controversy

So, we can look analytically at the controversies swirling around Tara Reade's accusations of sexual harassment by Democratic former senator and vice-president on several levels: the exegetical or textual level, the hermeneutic level, and the homiletic level.

The exegetical, textual, or evidentiary level. On the exegetical level Reade's claims of sexual harassment and of Biden as the sexual harasser, go back to 1993 according to reputable sources. If one wants to challenge this data trail one has to show, for instance, that the interviews, the testimony of others, and the Larry King phone call were all actually produced in 2019 and 2010. Good luck with that. By the way, eight women have now accused Biden of sexual misconduct with them.

The hermeneutic or interpretive level. Here we can look at several interpretive sub-levels or layers swirling around the Reade controversy.
Layer 1: Neoliberal Democrats, generally speaking, are circling the wagons around Biden and attacking Reade, sometimes in a classic demagogic ad hominem fashion.
Layer 2: Progressive Democrats tend to argue that Reade's claims need to be taken seriously and thus should be investigated seriously.
Layer 3: Trumpians assume Reade's claims are accurate and are using her claims as demagogic propagandistic talking points against Biden hoping to manipulate the listening masses and get the faithful to echo them in the process.
Layer 4: the legal level. Reade's claims have not yet resulted in a settlement or a court room trial so...
Obviously most of the discourse surrounding Reade's allegations are operating on this level and are avoiding and eliding the factual or exegetical level in part or entirely.
Layer 5: Academic discourse about the above discourses.

The homiletic level:
Here we can look at how some draw morals from the Reade tale. Some are using Reade's experience to preach about the dangers of Biden, Washington DC, or patriarchy in general. This level interacts with and interpenetrates with the other levels. It is quite clear, of course, that on the exegetical or factual level patriarchy and male political and economic power have led to large number of real sexual harassment cases. See Clinton; See Weinstein; See Epstein...There have also, factually speaking, been claims of sexual harassment that are more the product of revenge, anger, wanting celebrity, wanting money, etc. To adjudicate between real and falsified claims requires an attention to the evidence, the exegetical level. The exegetical level, however, is often overdetermined by and read through the hermeneutic level. Additionally we have to remember that it is sometimes the case that some of the wealthy and powerful have, historically speaking, bought off their victims. See Jackson.

Playing this typology out...
Exegesis: A 1993 newspaper report from San Luis Obispo notes Reade's claim of sexual harassment by Biden. Additionally, Reade's mother called into the Larry King show claiming her daughter had been sexually harassed while working for Biden. Finally, in the 1990s, two neighbours of Reade said she told them that she had been sexually harassed while working for Biden and her ex-husband stated that Reade said she had been harassed during her tenure with Biden in a court document. All of this is evidence. These are empirical facts.

Hermeneutics: When we move to the hermeneutic level or interpretive level, beliefs, beliefs impacted by culture and ideology, often, tragically for the facts, play an important and determining role in what we humans see and how we humans see it. In a perfect world beliefs would be grounded solely in the facts. We don't live in a perfect or rational world, however. Oftentimes, instead, ideologically driven beliefs rewrite the facts even, in many cases, eliding or eliminating them in the process. You see this happening a lot among the devotees of the Orange One. You also see it in the attempt by some demagogues in the Democratic Party to deny that Reade's claims go back to 1993, a clear (and pathetic) attempt by demagogic polemicists to diffuse an ideologically correct and fictional narrative on their true believers hoping they will repeat this fictitious narrative in the process and overlook the facts, in large part, because they imbibe this fictional narrative.

Conclusions: As I have said repeatedly, sometimes to no avail since the ideologically correct generally put their own words into other peoples mouths in a sometimes manichean fashion (you are either for Trump or agin him), none of this proves Biden's guilt. Biden denies Reade's claims just as Trump denies the claims of the legions of women who have accused him of sexual harassment. What the exegesis above does prove is that the Reade claims are not recent fabrications by Republican polemicists and apologists.

Moving beyond Reade's specific claims we do have to recognise several other facts that are relevant to Reade's sexual harassment claims and case. We must note, factually speaking, for instance, that more than eight women have accused Biden of sexual harassment. This alone should make those of us who are not apologists or polemicists, who are not demagogues, in other words, and who are simply trying to look at the facts first, wonder, first, about what all these accusations may tell us about Biden's behaviour. Second, we need to take note of the fact that the rich and powerful, who are often men, far too often engage in such behaviours because they are rich and powerful (Harvey Weinstein) and far too often are able to delay recognition of their predatory behaviour because they are rich and powerful. Finally, we need ask ourselves why demagogues and their fellow travellers in the press are focusing on Reade and not also on the eight other women who have accused Biden of too much touchy feely.

I had forgotten, by the way, that while in law school at Syracuse Biden had engaged in plagiarism  and gotten caught. He explained his infraction by claiming that he was unfamiliar with the rules of attribution, which is pretty impressive for a guy who took a bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware (or perhaps it isn't). I guess Biden was still blissfully ignorant of the rules of attribution in 1987 when he borrowed from the speeches of British politician Neil Kinnock. All of this, of course, goes directly to questions about Biden's honesty and honourableness.

The Books of My Life: Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917-1978

Oxford academic and noted translator Ronald Hingley's Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917-1978 (London: Methuen, 1979) is a companion piece and sequel to Hingley's earlier Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, second edition, 1977) and is as equally enjoyable and enlightening as that earlier volume. As in Russian Writers and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Hingley's Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917-1978 uses Soviet writers of literature, poetry, plays, memoirs, and literary criticism to explore the economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic aspects of Soviet society from 1917 to 1978, just thirteen years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the USSR itself.

There are a number things I found interesting in Hingley's short book. One of the things I found most interesting in Russian Writers and the Soviet Union was Hingley's typology of Soviet writers particularly in the era after Stalin. Hingley argues that post-Stalinist Soviet writers can be grouped into three categories: custodians, those who supported the Soviet powers that be and the Soviet status quo, liberals, those who favoured reform of the Soviet system, and dissidents, revolutionaries who wanted an end to the Soviet system itself.

What I found particuarly interesting about Hingley's typology is that, despite Hingley's contention that the USSR was totalitarian and his assertion of the utility of the totalitarian model as a way to understand Soviet society, Hingley's book falls outside the early Cold War hardshell totalitarian perspective, an approach that sees Soviet totalitarian elites as calling out the dance steps the rest of the population danced to particularly once dissidents disappeared from their midst. Hingley's softshell totalitarianism with its post-Stalinist dissidents and their samizdat and export only literature, stretches the totalitarian model so far that it raises questions about the validity and usefulness not only of the hardshell totalitarian model but of the totalitarian model itself particularly when applied to the post-Stalin era USSR. One invariably wonders, in fact, whether the phrase modern autocracy might not be a more useful and valid ideal type and concept to apply to the Soviet Union than totalitarian.

Hingley's utilisation of the totalitarian model, which, after it was applied to Mussolini and Hitler came to be applied to Stalin, also raises the question of the impact of the Cold War on Hingley's monograph. There are times, reading retrospectively back from the twenty-first century, that Hingley's book seems, given the manichean Cold War context and its rhetoric of good versus evil that impacted it, a bit over the top particularly as it toggles between descriptive analysis and normative praise and blame on occasion. Additionally, this normative manicheanism seems to be aligned with a rather romantic conception of authors and authorship, an approach not everyone will find compelling in the wake of the postmodernist and post this or that revolution.

This Cold War context of Hingley's book also raises questions about Hingley's typology of Soviet writers.  One invariably wonders, from the vantage point of the end of the Cold War and the the 21st century, whether this degree of distance from the Cold War allows for an even more complex, nuanced, fluid and more accurate typology of, particularly, post-Stalinist Soviet writers (and composers for that matter), one of insider-insiders, insider-outsiders, outsider-insiders, and outsider-outsiders.

Finally, the Cold War context of Hingley's book raises questions about any Cold War canon of "great" Soviet literature. As Hingley notes, Soviet bureaucrats canonised literature that was socialist realist though, as Hingley notes, the conception of socialist realism was not static in the USSR. Some in the West, particularly on the left, of course, likewise, at times, canonised texts associated with socialist realism and socialist realism itself. Some on the right, on the other hand, canonised dissident literature that criticised the evil godless totalitarian Soviet state such as that of Vladimir Andreyev and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the latter, at least, until ostracism from the USSR eventually showed him to be a Russian Christian nationalist, something that wasn't particularly palatable to some on the right. Beauty and value seem, in other words, to be in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder and very much impacted by culture and ideology.

Like so many books written about the USSR, Hingley's book seems, at least in part, to be highly time bound and heavily context bound. It seems, in other words, to be, a product of its time. When one instead looks at Hingley's book from the vantage point of Max Weber's writings on rational means-ends forms of modern bureaucracy, the USSR looks less like an entirely different beast from the modern and now postmodern West and more like an autocratic variant or ideal type of the modern and now postmodern bureaucratic and oligarchic states that dominate the core nations of the world.

I See Nothing: Right Wing Anti-Governmental Amnesia

There is so much to admire, in a world turned upside down sort of way, about the moronic Quack Attack of devotees of the Cult of the Orange One. Chief amongst them is one of many realities they can no longer see because their minds have been colonised by a moronic anti-historical and anti-empirical ideology thanks to the right wing demagogues who have logosed in their ears, and that is the historical and empirical reality of who controls governments. To wit: the president of the US is a narcissistic and delusional failed businessman who has declared bankruptcy at least five times, while Mnuchin, one of the few adults in the Trump romper room, is a former investment banker. Those who run the government, in other words, are capitalists of the neoliberal sort until, of course, a crisis hits and they become born again Keyensians like Bush and Trump whose goal, in particular, is to bail out the 1%. So, the very thing the ditto heads are dittoing on about, government, is controlled by the clique and cabal they claim to adore, capitalists. Talk about bizarre.

They're Killing Christian Babies: Living in a Mad Conspiracy Theory World

I have to admit, I am fascinated intellectually by the right wing demagogues and their quack, quack, quacking puppets who spin fantastical and fantasy laden conspiracy theories, amongst them some of an anti-Semitic variety, of hatred which negatively impact and demonise others. And, of course, when you return the favour, they whinge and whine and boo hoo hoo about the conspiracy theories spun against them in satirical and parodic form and how they are hurting someone they care about. There are several words that describe such people. Hypocrite certainly comes to mind. So does wink wink nudge nudge, pot, kettle, black, goose, gander, glass houses, and self proclaimed Christian.

Alice in Wonderland Goes to College...

So, New Zealand universities collectively are facing half a billion New Zealand dollars in losses thanks, in part, to a decline in its foreign student body due to the coronavirus. If NZ universities are anything like those in the US they are top heavy with administrators who practise the retail model of education, one in which colleges and universities are akin to Walmart's and McDonald's. One study of a college in the US found an over 20% increase in upper level bureaucrats and an over 100% increase in mid-level bureaucrats between 1975 and 2008. Unless the mission of colleges and universities is to hire bureaucrats, some of whom are doing what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" and many of whom are siphoning monies away from education, there is some pork that can and should be cut there.

In the upside down world of the upper level corporate educational bureaucrat whose ideology is that only we are essential and whose god is Mammon, just like that of other corporate elite, the decline in student enrollment, for instance, is not their fault or the fault of those corporate managers trained in mush like student personnel who man student recruitment and student retention offices in the corporation. It is instead, in their faultless illogical corporate logic, the fault of those who care for the grounds, who serve students meals, and who teach the classes that were once regarded as central and essential to the mission of colleges and universities. Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Voinovich are smiling somewhere.

He's King Midas in Reverse: Donald Trump as Caligula Caesar

Once upon a time FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, gave help to America's states even if that help was sometimes inadequate and incompetent as during Hurricane Katrina. And then along came Drumpf. Under the monarchy of the Orange One, according to several state governors, FEMA and the Feds are taking PPE and ventilators from the states in a kind of reverse of what FEMA normally does, in a revived version, it seems, of feudal privilege. Who needs the Midas touch when you have the man with the Caligula Touch, Donald Trump?