Tyler Austin Harper:

This is something Michael Lind has been on since the 1990s, that the American public, the median American voter is basically fiscally liberal and socially conservative or moderate. There’s no party that represents that voter.

I think what we are seeing right now is a very, very slow moving but noticeable trajectory, where people are starting to figure out that the public is somewhat left on the economy. They are attracted to [things like] Medicare for All … but also they are pretty moderate on a range of issues, including immigration. This includes also minority working class folks who are moderate on immigration, et cetera.

I think there is a very, very slow arms race for moving toward, gradually, one of the parties embracing some kind of, whatever you want to call it, left conservatism, working class socialism… That’s where the public seems to be, roughly speaking.

I’ll be honest, I don’t see or feel that. At all. But I certainly hope he’s right and lament the lack of representation. (Also, what on earth is a “slow arms race?” And [high, drawn out inflection] who is racing for moderates?)

I’ve had dozens and dozens and dozens of conversations where people have described themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” No one has ever said, as I often want to say and said just the other day, “I’m kinda fiscally liberal and socially conservative.” (Liberal with [non-essential] money, conservative in [essential] relations, charity in all things.)

I basically see two or three splits. There are those on the left who have, almost entirely, stopped referring to themselves as “liberal” and instead unabashedly use the term “progressive.” This is quite common.

The folks who don’t like the term or ideology “progressive” — of which I confess I am one — are either the all-American conservative type: fiscally and socially conservative, and usually quite serious, and conservative, about their Christianity; or they are basically the secular conservative type: self-described as “socially liberal, fiscally conservative,” (often, I note, said as though they just came up with that description on the spot) and usually not very serious about Christianity or faith of any kind — often more serious about libertarianism than about “organized religion.”

As a non-progressive, I don’t fit into either of these groups — closer in many ways to the first, but so utterly averse to the praxis when it comes to politics, science, history, market economy, and often technology as to make that closeness basically illegible if not unintelligible.

While I know lots of folks on the left, I really don’t know many religious Democrats, leftists, or progressives. I assume that it’s partly the circles I happen to walk in — I’m sure my continued discomfort with the Anglican church doesn’t exactly expand that friend group — and partly because I live in Maine, but I don’t know many of the folks who make up what David French has called the “God gap” in and around the Democratic Party. I thoroughly act with the assumption they are there in plenty, but I mostly only know of them.

I’m not officially OCIA, but I’m known to them, have met with them, and I’m on the list or whatever — I just can’t find time to attend the meetings or even to figure out how serious I am about Catholicism. My sense, though, is that this could put me around at least a few strongly religious lefties, but we’ll see.

In any case, I would love to believe the Lind thesis above, but I certainly don’t believe anyone got there by polling the demographic of Maine 🙂

WSJ:

WASHINGTON—President Trump called Elon Musk on Wednesday and asked him to lift restrictions on a military-grade version of Starlink in Ukraine that the SpaceX chief had throttled, U.S. officials said.

The system was working more normally Thursday, shortly after their conversation, U.S. and Ukrainian officials said. Some Ukrainian officials said the system wasn’t restored to full functionality but was working at higher speeds than under the cap. 

Trump told Musk he was frustrated the system’s speeds remained capped at around 100 miles an hour, officials said. The speed limit rendered some of Ukraine’s offensive drones and interceptors powerless against Russian attacks. Their conversation followed a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Musk ordered the slowdown, though SpaceX and the White House have differing accounts about whether the world’s richest man acted alone or at the administration’s behest.

Trump has told aides and allies this week that he wanted to reverse the slowdown of Starlink, which Ukraine’s forces use to defend themselves along the front line, the officials said.

“Removal of the throttle limit will do much to enable Ukraine’s strike capabilities at operational depths and its current effort to scale up deployment of jet-powered interceptors,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kofman added that he had heard from Ukrainian military units that early tests suggest the system is now working more regularly.

“I don’t comment one way or the other,” Trump said on Thursday when asked about the Journal’s reporting that he had called Musk. “The bottom line: He put it back.”

Jeffrey Foucault:

Maybe we’re all hostage to a corporate-government cabal of outright grifters and psychopathic nerds. Maybe our sclerotic empire is shuffling toward catastrophe, riding the AI hustle into Weimar-style inflation and debt oblivion, and listing toward fascism. Maybe our tax dollars seem only to sharpen the longest knives, to build the bombs our proxies drop on children and families in countries we couldn’t have located on a map before we read about them in the news, while our government threatens our neighbors, extorts our allies, and terrifies and incarcerates the most vulnerable among us, then turns around and pawns our wild lands and clean waters for short term gain with all the ethical concern of a cancer cell. 

Maybe the politicians on both sides are bought off, and the money intercedes like a clutch between the gears so that our votes are too often a ritual pantomime. Maybe we’re bought off ourselves, as we dither and temporize, perform for our tribes, playact identity politics and entertain ourselves to death, walking around on the stilts we simultaneously lengthen and saw through a little farther each day. 

Maybe we all wander the digital funhouse, never sure what’s real, walking headlong into mirrors, lost in certainty and righteous anger at our neighbors, some preferring Hollywood nostalgia, the easy lie, the tax break, the reflexive jingo patriotism that Johnson called the last refuge of a scoundrel, while others strive for the valor of a correct opinion, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our wealth or comfort, always willing to join the good fight on any issue that flatters our pieties, so long as it requires no discussion of class, and doesn’t jeopardize our place near the top, just below the billionaires and the multimillionaires, where we’ve pulled up the ladder behind us and barricaded ourselves into expensive neighborhoods with artisanal bread and expensive coffee, and people who speak and dress just like we do, while the rest scrape. 

Maybe we ignore the desperation and despair that drive the opinions of our neighbors, Americans like us, whom we’ve written off as beneath our contempt, the ones who fly the flag without irony, send their kids into the military and work two or three jobs, mortgaging their futures as their real wages decline year over year, sold out by both parties and ready to tear the whole thing down; or maybe the ones who hang “Fuck ICE” signs in their windows and quietly drive their undocumented neighbors to work and prenatal appointments. 

Maybe this is all true. It’s no stretch to say that this world we’ve made is a furnace and a charnel house, and modern history reads like a butcher’s bill. But we still have to locate our work — even, or especially, when that work is play — and go like hell, and use what we have to help, however we can. 

Much of the time it feels pointless, self-indulgent, and meaningless. But it’s everything. Every time you think of quitting, consider your life without the ones who lighted your way: the art they made, the stories they told, the songs they wrote, the love and work they put into the world. Then keep going. It makes no sense, and it’s the only thing that makes sense.

He includes this message as well, which I’ll pass along here:

TOUR  — We’re in Chicago (Berwyn) tonight (10/21), in Minneapolis on Thursday (10/22), and then out to Thompson and Fargo, ND. to finish up the tour (10/23,25). In November we’ll work our way up the coast of California to Oregon and Washington, and I’m breaking even, if I’m lucky. 

Numbers are down across the board for live music, attendance down twenty-five or thirty percent with the war and tariffs and inflation, and that percentage is where the whole of our margin resides. Flights, hotels, gasoline, rental vans, food: everything has gone up in price except us. 

I know it’s hard to justify a night on the town when you’re barely getting by. So I’m asking you to please share this with anyone you know in Chicago, Minneapolis, Fargo, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle, etc. — any town on our line — so that even a few more people will know we’re coming to town. The hardest part is ringing the bell these days.

Or just share it with someone who needs to hear it. I woke up early on the road and wrote it out in a notebook and haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it, so I thought I’d send it to you.

Get out there and do your work, and vote your conscience, early and in-person if you can, and then be ready for whatever comes next. Ready with fierce love, and courage.

https://jeffreyfoucault.com/tour

Wendell Berry (1989):

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Of course, my sometime impression that I live on the receiving end of this problem is false, for country people contribute their full share. The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators. We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us even are unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. In my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous “necessities” as possible—and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and “appliances” designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away.

I confess that I am angry at the manufacturers who make these things. There are days when I would be delighted if certain corporation executives could somehow be obliged to eat their products. I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured “waste”—solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever—should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it. […]

I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of “more jobs” as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it.

I’ve been off-and-on reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison for a long time now, usually at night. Sometimes I get a couple of letters in, sometimes a couple of paragraphs. But since night reading is nonexistent these days, progress is even slower. Last week I was looking for a particular letter and just poking around old highlights and notables, and this one in a letter from Bethge in May 1944 when he was stationed in Italy stood out:

Many thanks for your long letter. Where do you keep getting such excellent stationery? Renate and I often worry about the shortage, but somehow we always manage to find a bit more. Do you have to listen to these radio broadcasts that stay on all day? Quite often I hear three all at once, and if I’m already feeling rather tired or under emotional pressure they torment me, like dreadful bodily pain or real nausea. Together with the daily stories in the newspapers, which aren’t ashamed of any topic or picture, these broadcasts are all the nourishment that most people get. Everyone here has some nude pinups hanging above his bed, while I have pinned up, over my writing desk, a large picture of a little Italian donkey and next to it a calendar, where I often note quite interesting relationships between my subjective sense of time and objective time. It’s good having this desk job, since I don’t have every noncommissioned officer breathing down my neck, only the company sergeant major, who, since I stay on good terms with him, pays less and less attention as time goes on, and the major who behaves as though he is educated in these things.

On the one hand, this is just a hilarious image and I love the thought of Bonhoeffer getting a chuckle from it. But to me it could be a little more than that. Whether it’s “Wow, how cool is this?” AI use, “Wow, how cool is this?” excitement over the latest iPhone, lazy-and-often-easily-avoidable plastics abuse, lazy-and-often-easily-avoidable battery powered Toys and Things, television consumption, tropical “vacationing,” cosmopolitan snobbery, or profound insistence that only this way of voting will Save the World…

Well, a man conscripted into a world war, sitting with a donkey pinned above his desk, surrounded by What Everyone Is Doing — I feel this image in my bones.

Isaac Greene:

Part way through the first movement of Bach I played, it happened. It’s happened before, but it doesn’t happen every concert. I could feel the energy of everyone in the room listening to the same sound and entering the music with me. When that happens, it’s almost as if you become a spectator too, hearing the music through the ears of everyone else. A 300-year-old piece of music I’ve played for almost twenty years was brand new, as vivid and alive as the day Bach wrote it down. Like a Bob Dylan song says: “every one of them [notes] rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”

It is a sacred moment.

Bede Griffiths (quoted in Taylor’s A Secular Age, in the same opening discussion as that other quote):

One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.

Vaclav Havel, June 19, 1982*:

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in Heřmanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning—this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and which has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what. Once, in one of my letters, I reflected upon this experience; now I think—at least in the perspective of these essays—that I understand it better.

Evidently there exists an experience in which the longing of separated Being for remerging with the integrity of Being is satisfied, as it were, in the most mature and complete manner. That experience is typically and most profoundly human: it is the experience of meaning, and of meaningfulness. The need for meaning and the search for it—regardless of their form, their strength or their depth, or how definite or indefinite they may be, though they be nothing more than a vague sensation of the absence of “something” without which life is worthless—accompany the human “I” from its beginning right through to its end. They are inseparable and its most important dimension (because it embraces all the rest), its maturest and most complete expression, and the instrument of its self-constitution. Perhaps it could be said that the “I” is, in fact, this search for meaning—the meaning of things, events, its own life, itself. Certainly this dimension of its longing for “Being in Being,” or rather this aspect of its thrownness into its source in Being, is somehow the “last” to come to light: it is something more than just the spontaneous intention of the “pre-I,” in which there are still echoes of the “prenatal” state of nonseparation; it is even something more than the vigorous effort of the mind to grasp Being by perceiving and throwing light on it; these intentions are, of course, present in the “I,” but they do not explain it entirely: it transcends them—by virtue, for example, of how it contains them within itself, mutually increases their strength and consummates them: paradoxically, the “I” seeks fullness of participation, but an alert participation, one that already knows of itself; it seeks a totality of merging, but a totality—so to speak—that is fully aware of its own unrealizability.

The experience of meaning is thus, essentially, the maturest or “highest” form of the “I” ‘s quasi-identification with the integrity of Being. It is the experience of genuine “contact,” but contact as something both autonomous and integral—paradoxical as that may be. Perhaps it might be described as the experience of “counterpoint” between the “voice of Being” in the “I” (in its source) and the “voice of Being” in the “non-l” (in the world), wherein the meaning of this counterpoint does not just lie in a harmony that amplifies the original quality, but in the new quality it brings, a quality that knows neither of the two intersecting voices. It is in this counterpoint that it first seems possible (if only for a fleeting moment) to hear a suggestion or an echo of the as yet unfamiliar theme from the symphony of Being. The semipresence of Being in the “I” and its hidden presence in the “non-I” encounter each other here for an instant as “insight,” a joyous sensation of participation and the vertigo that comes with it. The reflection of Being in the “I” renders us open to the mystery of Being in the “non-l”; Being concealed in the world, or the Being of the world, opens itself up to us. It is a meeting of two opennesses—but opennesses that are directed exclusively toward each other: it is not just that we seem to be here because of Being, but that Being seems to be here because of us. The greatest attainable closeness, fullness and completeness of Being would therefore seem to call forth the greatest degree of fullness and completeness of the “I.”

Perhaps it will now be clear why I link the experience of meaning with what I called the third paradox of our thrownnesses: the nearest we can come to the fullness of Being also gives us the clearest indication of how unattainable it is; the most mature identification is most powerfully revealed as quasi-identification. Joy has an undertone of horror, tranquillity of anxiety, good fortune a touch of the fatally tragic. This experience reveals to us that in complete and unlimited identification, total insight, utter happiness, lies the end of the “I,” death. It is by no means accidental that at the very heights of meaningfulness, happiness, joy and love, the specter of death inevitably appears with particular clarity. The experience of meaning also differs from less mature expressions of our longing for Being in that it contains within it—while at the same time, oddly enough, losing nothing of that sense of supreme happiness—the most forceful awareness of futility. But is it not precisely this that brings it closest to the contradictory essence itself of human life and the human mission?

Being spellbound within me and Being spellbound within the world can join hands anytime, anywhere and in any way: when I look into the crown of a tree or into someone’s eyes, when I succeed in writing you a good letter, when I am moved by an opera on television, when a passage from Levinas sets my thoughts swirling, when our visits work out, when I understand the meaning of my compassion for the weather-woman, when I help someone or when someone helps me, when something important happens, or when nothing in particular happens at all. But whenever and however it happens, such moments tend to be rare and fleeting. Given the contradictory nature of separated Being, it can’t be any other way and it is right that it should be so: after all, the uniqueness and the unpredictability of such moments combine to create their meaning: it is the meaning of “islands of meaning” in the ocean of our struggling, the meaning of lanterns whose light is cast into the darkness of our life’s journey, illuminating all the many meanings of its direction.

* A portion of this is also quoted in Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, but I find the whole letter is worth quoting. For another sample, see this one from August 21, 1982 that I posted last year. I want to say a lot more about these letters, particularly the last 16 of them which Havel intended to be read together. In fact, after his release they were originally published together in samizdat form. Regardless of whether or not I get around to it, I think the one from August 21st, the third to last of the 16, is a good summary. And quite frankly, I think it summarizes, or gets at, very nearly everything — from the general malaise to the political unrest to the global birth rate crisis — pretty well.

Jack Goldsmith:

There is a large, difficult question about how the next Democratic administration should think about accountability for the endless executive branch abuses and rampant illegality that have permeated the Trump administration. The forms of abuse and illegality have been so broad-based that it is hard to know where to start or how to proceed. There is also a large and difficult question about how the next Democratic administration will use all of the many tools of the weaponizing unitary executive that it will inherit from Trump against its Trumpian enemies, and what new tools it might wield.

And then there is the fact that what looks like accountability in one bubble looks like weaponization in another.

[…]

There is a growing element in the Democratic Party that wants to go much harder next time. Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, for example, said in February that Democrats once in power would punish the companies and institutions that have collaborated with Trump. “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming,” she said. “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget. It’s not going to end well for them.” She added: “Democrats have had a belly full, and we’re not going to play by the old set of rules… but we’re not going to be suckers.” Rice and those who share her view surely would apply this logic to “collaborators” inside the administration. […]

I understand but do not share Rice’s view. I believe accountability for Trump 2.0 should focus first and primarily on transparency, i.e., figuring out what happened, not just in Trump’s abuses of government, but also in his and his family’s extraordinarily corrupt financial aggrandizement—and yes, that includes finding out who enabled, and benefited from, all of these things, and how.

[…]

Despite the obvious hypocrisy in the Republican remarks, many on the Trump side really believe that the Democrats are just as bad, if not much worse, because they sought to decapitate Trump in his first term and to keep him off the ballot or weaken him considerably through lawfare in 2024.

[…]

I don’t have prescriptions. There were very good reasons for the long-standing norm of not prosecuting high-level political rivals or using overt legal tools to damage and try to block a presidential candidate in an election year. Democrats broke that norm, which they believed was justified by Trump’s horrific actions. And they further believed that the norm brought its own costs in allowing a law-indifferent and abusive president to not be held to account. The Trump side saw this all as norm-busting and in bad faith.

Trump won the election and could have stopped the cycle. But that was contrary to his vengeful nature and, in any event, would have been seen by his side as unilateral disarmament. And so he engaged in astonishingly harsh and broad retaliation for what the Biden administration did, in order to deter rivals on many dimensions. The Democrats are now contemplating whether and how to respond when they gain power. The incentive for brutal retaliation will be overwhelming, especially since it will be argued, just as Vance argued, that the other side has already done it, will do it again if possible, and thus must be maximally deterred.

And so on.

It’s a bleak future.

Vaclav Havel, from Heřmanice prison, June 26, 1982:

Dear Olga,

You may remember how upset I was that earthlings left such a mess on the moon, like a bunch of city people on a Sunday evening littering the banks of a pond with refuse from their sausages and mustard. Everything that was too heavy and no longer necessary the astronauts simply left scattered around the landing module; and in addition there is all manner of scrap metal strewn about on the moon (the now inactive Lunachod, rockets that have made hard or soft landings, etc.). Millions of years after our civilization has ceased to exist and its last traces on earth have turned to dust, the junkyard we have left behind us will remain unchanged on the moon, a sad monument to our advanced civilization. This distresses me not just because I’m essentially a tidy person; the reasons go far deeper: there is in it a rather melancholy symbol. I mention this because my meditations are edging toward—among other things—an analysis of the situation that this symbol illustrates.

(Heřmanice was a labor prison in Ostrava, northern Moravia, where Havel served over 3 1/2 years welding and acetylene torch cutting before being shifted to laundry and scrap metal as his health deteriorated, which eventually led to his release after spiking a serious fever in January 1983.)

“The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine” — Ross Bullen in The Public Domain Review:

In addition to the gendered dimension of neurasthenia (the majority of those diagnosed were women), it was also seen as a particularly American disease, with some ever referring to the ailment as “Americanitis”. [George Miller] Beard was among those interested in the national character of neurasthenia, a concept he explored in his book American Nervousness (1881). “The greater prevalence of nervousness in America”, he writes, “is a complex resultant of a number of influences, the chief of which are the dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country under such climactic conditions.” Despite this capacious description of what it is that makes Americans nervous, Beard emphatically states that the Jumping Frenchmen do not qualify. While sufferers of neurasthenia appear tired and enervated, the lumberjacks of Moosehead Lake are “among the best examples of physical hardness and endurance”. Beard makes a distinction between “nervousness” and “unbalanced mental organization”, aligning the jumpers squarely with the latter category. The closest analogue Beard can find for the Jumping Frenchmen are “Middle Age epidemics”, like the so-called dancing plagues that periodically occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The victims of these epidemics had “but little intellectual strength and very much emotion”, a description that he implicitly associates with the Jumping Frenchmen as well. For Beard, the Jumping Frenchmen cannot suffer from modern American nervousness because — as Canadians, as francophones, and as rural laborers — they are not really modern Americans. Rather, they are “precious curiosities, relics or antiques that the fourteenth century has, as it were, dropped right into the middle of the nineteenth.” […]

… Beard finds an analogue for the jumpers in the hysterical epidemics of the Middle Ages, but also with the “Holy Rollers” of various religious revivals, who would roll on the ground in a state of uncontrollable religious ecstasy. While throwing a pipe or hitting your friend might seem very different from communing with the Holy Spirit, Beard sees them as deeply related, if distinct, forms of human behavior.

… While other forms of psychic or mass hysteria can last hours or days, the action of the jumpers is both immediate and short lived. “The explosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and instantaneous”, Beard writes. “If we look at a Jumper five seconds after he has been jumped, we see no indication of what he has just done.” The second key difference is “the persistence and permanence of the liability to be excited”. People tend to move on from other forms of psychic hysteria. Once the medieval peasants stop dancing, or the Holy Rollers stop rolling, they return to their regular lives. Not so the Jumping Frenchmen, for whom jumping is a lifelong condition. Beard considers that jumping may be hereditary — he notes that many of the jumpers he met belong to the same extended family. He also speculates that jumping may have been “an evolution of tickling”, noting that many jumpers are ticklish, and that jumpers deliberately prank one another “in lieu of most other sources of amusement”. But ultimately Beard concludes that “[e]verything about this subject is incredible.”

Also, an early line in the essay worth quoting:

After running through a list of symptoms typically associated with the Jumping Frenchmen — throwing, striking, jumping — Beard speculates that the jumpers may be “an extreme illustration of what we all are — that is, they possessed far less inhibitory power than we all possessed.