Elizabeth Oldfield:

I’m not ashamed to be bringing you children’s stories and folk tales and scriptural references as sources for what is seemingly a very grown up, technical, high powered set of questions. Rather the opposite. My hunch is that the older the tale and/or the more children like it, the more likely it has something to teach us. I know this lowers my intellectual credibility in many circles, but well, I’m way beyond caring about that.

Nick Catoggio:

Despite all the hype about new blood and “outsider” energy, Platnermania ended up incorporating elements of two of the most notorious Democratic campaign disasters of the past 20 years.

One is John Edwards’ presidential run in 2007, which saw Edwards mount a challenge from the left to frontrunners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The candidate spoke movingly on the trail about his wife’s breast cancer; meanwhile, he was secretly engaged in a long-running affair and had already fathered a child with his mistress.

Edwards recklessly placed his own ambition ahead of his party’s welfare, knowing that the skeletons in his closet could have wrecked Democrats’ chances at the presidency if they had tumbled out after he won the nomination. By letting progressives get excited about a candidacy that was all but certain to end in disgrace, he played the left for chumps. That’s Platner all over.

The other is Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, of course. For many months during that cycle, influential Democrats ignored the evidence of their own eyes and ears—and lots and lots of data—that the then-president had a liability that would render him unelectable. They downplayed it, rationalized it, and made excuses for it … until Biden’s catastrophic debate performance left no doubt that the party would lose unless it very belatedly removed him as nominee.

That too is Platner all over. The man had more red flags than China, yet not until something emerged to convince the left that his campaign was well and truly doomed did they very belatedly turn on him. They were okay with electing an unfit cretin to the Senate this year, just as they were okay with nominating an unfit, senescent eightysomething for another four-year term in the White House. What they weren’t okay with was losing.

Here’s the difference between Platner, Edwards, and Biden, though. Two were known quantities in politics, figures whom Democratic voters were familiar with and whom they might be forgiven for (foolishly) granting the benefit of the doubt as to their fitness. The third was a black box, reportedly deemed Senate material after a single brief conversation with a strategist, and whose views on policy could be fairly summarized as a noun, a verb, and “oligarchs” or “Israel.” How did someone like that earn the benefit of the doubt until Monday afternoon?

I’m going to be biting my tongue on a lot of “I told you sos” in the next week.

In April, I said that I largely agreed with Ben Rhodes’ piece on Graham Platner but wondered if he was actually describing a Platner candidacy or, well, a Rhodes candidacy. That was on day one of my Platner Research Project. I usually wait as long as possible before I look seriously at the names on an upcoming local ballot, sometimes right up to the last week. I think a) you give yourself a more sober chance to read about someone and b) you avoid a lot of the hype and buy-in trench digging as it inevitably occurs.

Yeah, I’d seen the signs everywhere in the neighborhood, but I paid zero attention to him. And boy did I miss some deep trenches.

In late April I started reading. And I started asking everyone I knew what they thought of Platner. Friends, neighbors, coworkers — I didn’t hide the fact that I was unconvinced but genuinely interested, and wanted to Believe. But even the most avid supporters were exactly zero convincing. It took only a few days to figure out: I could not join my neighbors in their lawn ornamentation.

(The single biggest red flag for me was actually reading the Reddit comments, particularly the “strictly professional,” “I dig it” comments about executed Israeli soldiers. The creepy shirtless-in-a-towel-mirror-selfie profile picture on some random social site/app was a close second when that came out. Some things are bigger deals than these, but not more telling.)

Like many, I too believe that Trump and the GOP must be stopped. But I refuse to stop asking and answering to the question, “At what cost?”

As an “unaffiliated registered voter” in Maine I get to choose which party primary to vote in. And when the primary rolled around, I grabbed a Democratic ballot and did what I could to see that G.P. got no ranking vote from me.

After weeks of conversation, the futility of that vote was not surprising.

Of all the folks on the Left I talked to, only two people said they didn’t particularly like Platner, and both of them quickly lost the desire to be open about that once Janet Mills dropped out of the race. All were adamant about the need to vote for him; most expressed full-hearted support for him; some enthusiastically attended town hall meetings.

(Despite my own concern that Platner might pull on some of the same “America first only” heartstrings we’ve seen tuned in recent years, I know of not one single Right-leaning person who was ever taken with Platner.)

But there was one person who really stuck out. I came home one day after my wife had walk-talked with a friend in the neighborhood. She told me, “You have to talk to E—. She’s so happy to hear that you don’t like Platner either.” Specifically, she was happy that I didn’t like Platner and that I had no hesitation to say so or hear so. My neighborhood friend is a self-described progressive and has now told me numerous times how disheartening it has been that none of her progressive friends and acquaintances would talk to her openly about how bad Platner was as a candidate. “Give him a chance.” “That was in the past.” “We have to win.” “The country is at stake.”

My friend needed someone to talk to. And myself being someone very short on People To Talk To for over a decade, I’m all sympathy. How could I not be? That’s exactly what happened to squishy (former) RINO’s like me ten years ago.

Hence the message above from my friend on Tuesday morning, who will (hopefully) no longer have to make that choice in November. No, not the choice between Collins, Platner, or a blank; the one between your conscience and your “friends.”

Clueless or careless, it is amazing that a party hell-bent on defeating Trumpism could so perfectly mimic Trumpism. Or nearly mimic it, anyway. As Catoggio points out, they are at least now backtracking: “The best I can do to find a silver lining in Democrats’ conduct is this: Unlike certain other parties, they were willing to belatedly draw some sort of line here.”

As many have pointed out for a while now, there is really only one functioning political party in the country. And this is another sign that, as utterly stupid as the Democratic Party often is, that remains true. Though, personally, I think that one of the reasons that Democrats aren’t more crazy than they are — that is, one thing that has kept them more sane — is Trumpism.

Though not sane enough, obviously.

I am not a progressive or even close to one. I also don’t give two shits about the GOP. I call that being free to think and free to speak.

And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully my neighbor friend will feel a little more free now as well.

Still. Someone on The Dispatch Podcast recently referenced the Mr. Belvedere Fan Club SNL skit with Tom Hanks where he’s forced to hold a vote on whether to kill Mr. Belvedere. Alright, Platner (hopefully) won’t be on the ballot, but it shouldn’t have been that close. The fact that it was is not a good sign.

Jean-Luc Marion:

My idol defines what I can bear of phenomenality—the maximum of intuitive intensity that I can endure while keeping my look on a distinctly visible spectacle, all in transforming an intuition into a distinct and constituted visible, without weakening into confusion or blindness. In this way my idol exposes the span of all my aims—what I set my heart on seeing, and thus also want to see and do. In short, it denudes my desire and my hope. What I look at that is visible decides who I am. I am what I can look at. What I admire judges me.

William Carlos Williams:

RAINDROPS ON A BRIAR

I, a writer, at one time hipped on
painting, did not consider
the effects, painting,
for that reason, static, on

the contrary the stillness of
the objects—the flowers, the gloves—
freed them precisely by that
from a necessity merely to move

in space as if they had been—
not children! but the thinking male
or the charged and delivering
female frantic with ecstasies;

served rather to present, for me,
a more pregnant motion: a
series of varying leaves
clinging still, let us say, to

the cat-briar after last night’s
storm, its waterdrops
ranged upon the arching stems
irregularly as an accompaniment.

A nuanced word from Augustine’s City of God for the USA’s 250th:

Those Roman heroes belonged to an earthly city, and the aim set before them, in all their acts of duty for her, was the safety of their country, and a kingdom not in heaven, but on earth; not in life eternal, but in the process where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will die in their turn. What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them.

15. The temporal reward bestowed by God on Roman high qualities of character

… If God had not granted to them the earthly glory of an empire which surpassed all others, they would have received no reward for the good qualities, the virtues, that is, by means of which they laboured to attain that great glory. When such men do anything good, their sole motive is the hope of receiving glory from their fellow-men; and the Lord refers to them when he says, ‘I tell you in truth, they have received their reward in full. They took no account of their own material interests compared with the common good, that is the commonwealth and the public purse; they resisted the temptations of avarice; they acted for their country’s well-being with disinterested concern; they were guilty of no offence against the law; they succumbed to no sensual indulgence. By such immaculate conduct they laboured towards honours, power and glory, by what they took to be the true way. And they were honoured in almost all nations; they imposed their laws on many peoples; and today they enjoy renown in the history and literature of nearly all races. They have no reason to complain of the justice of God, the supreme and true. ‘They have received their reward in full.’

16. The reward of the citizens of the Eternal City; the Roman virtues offer them useful examples

Very different is the reward of the saints. Here below they endure obloquy for the City of God…. That City is eternal; no one is born there, because no one dies. There is the true felicity, which is no goddess, but the gift of God. From there we have received the pledge of our faith, in that we sigh for her beauty while on our pilgrimage. In that City … the public treasury needs no great efforts for its enrichment at the cost of private poverty; for there the common stock is the treasury of truth.

But more than this; the Roman Empire was not extended and did not attain to glory in men’s eyes simply for this, that men of this stamp should be accorded this kind of reward. It had this further purpose, that the citizens of that Eternal City, in the days of their pilgrimage, should fix their eyes steadily and soberly on those examples and observe what love they should have towards the City on high, in view of life eternal, if the earthly city had received such devotion from her citizens, in their hope of glory in the sight of men.

17. The profit the Romans gained from their wars and the benefits they conferred on the vanquished

[…]

As far as I can see, the distinction between victors and vanquished has not the slightest importance for security, for moral standards, or even for human dignity. It is merely a matter of the arrogance of human glory, the coin in which these men ‘received their reward’, who were on fire with unlimited lust for glory, and waged their wars of burning fury. Is it the case that the conqueror’s lands are exempt from taxes? Have the victors access to knowledge forbidden to the others? Are there not many senators in other lands, who do not know Rome even by sight? Take away national complacency, and what are all men but simply men? If the perverse standards of the world would allow men to receive honours proportional to their deserts, even so the honour of men should not be accounted an important matter; smoke has no weight.

For all that, even in this we may profit from the goodness of our Lord God. Let us consider all the hardships these conquerors made light of, all the sufferings they endured, and the desires they suppressed to gain the glory of men. They deserved to receive that glory as a reward for such virtues. Let this thought avail to suppress pride in us. That City, in which it has been promised that we shall reign, differs from this earthly city as widely as the sky from the earth, life eternal from temporal joy, substantial glory from empty praises, the society of angels from the society of men, the light of the Maker of the sun and moon from the light of the sun and moon. Therefore the citizens of so great a country should not suppose that they have achieved anything of note if, to attain that country, they have done something good, or endured some ills, seeing that those Romans did so much and suffered so much for the earthly country they already possessed. What gives special point to this comparison is that the remission of sins, the promise which recruits the citizens for the Eternal Country, finds a kind of shadowy resemblance in that refuge of Romulus, where the offer of impunity for crimes of every kind collected a multitude which was to result in the foundation of the city of Rome.

“A family celebration in Sophia, Bulgaria, 1989”

Excerpts from AEI’s Council on AI Ethics’ “founding document”:

• “Our Council on AI Ethics holds the democratic belief that the gut reactions of ordinary citizens to the transformations they see occurring around them are worthy starting points for ethical reflection. This view, which traces back to Aristotle, was applied to technology ethics by Leon Kass in his argument against human cloning. Kass used the phrase ‘the wisdom of repugnance’ to suggest that gut feelings and intuitions have meaning that is worth taking seriously. They may provoke more than they prove, but they give us reason to pause, discuss, and reflect with our fellow citizens. Reflecting upon feelings of unease helps us understand the integration of emotion and reason, and raises questions about our nature, character, and flourishing. […] Stories, both real-world and plausible hypotheticals, best reveal the questions arising about who we are as persons. Many of the most important ethical insights on AI are being offered not in white papers or academic journals but in personal reflections. Narratives, in what follows, along with well-developed case studies the council will offer in future work, allow for an inductive exploration of how our use of technology can help us in, distract us from, or thwart our efforts at living in accordance with our gut reactions and our considered judgments, rather than in tension with ourselves.”
• “Consider a novel use of AI for efficient competitive advantage: identify my targets. Israel’s Lavender and America’s Maven systems, powered by AI, reportedly changed warfare by enabling a dramatic increase in the tempo of targeting in Gaza in 2023 and Iran in 2026, even when compared to the pace of the 2003 ‘shock and awe’ campaign in Iraq. Neither system was fully autonomous; a human was in the decision-making loop, responsible for choosing to fire each missile or shell. In this case, we see that outsourcing information analysis to the machine has brought a huge gain in competitive advantage. But it has also posed a worrisome loss of emancipation broadly understood — of ownership over our actions. Maven, for example, seems to reassure us that there is a “human in the loop,” but news reports suggest that the system does not offer nearly enough time for the operator to verify the information the AI uses and the interpretation it makes. The design effectively reduces the human in the loop to a button-pusher, while relocating the judgment of acceptable risk from human prudence to the algorithm.”
• “But whether the AI promises certain goods, like new medicines and materials, or information, for example economic insights, we will have to ask what we could lose if humans were to take a backseat in the process of scientific discovery. First, we could lose the character-forming habits of scientific inquiry, the particular excellence that comes from a deep dedication to the pursuit of truth. Second, we could lose clear human responsibility for the uses to which scientific knowledge is put, from novel biological weapons to AI-powered genetics that can easily slide into eugenics. Third, we could lose an understanding of how science fits into our broader social and political arrangements, how it must be integrated in order to serve the common good. For example, Emilia Javorsky argues in an essay on AI and cancer that assuming superintelligent AI will cure cancer vastly oversimplifies the problem. She notes that ‘if a potential cure were discovered [using AI] in a laboratory today, there is no guarantee we would recognize it as such, nor that it would successfully navigate translational research, regulatory approval, manufacturing scale-up, reimbursement negotiations, and clinical adoption to reach patients who need it, at the moment they need it.’ […] The family of disciplines meant to help individuals ask the big questions of life — philosophy, religious studies, history, literature — have more and more sought to mimic the hard sciences. Adopting the scientific ‘knowledge production’ model has been an odd fit for disciplines that historically understood themselves to be directed at timeless questions. As quantity gained emphasis over quality, humanities scholars were pushed toward a narrowing of their scope of research into disciplinary silos, and “interesting” became more common praise than “insightful.” Over-reliance on AI may over time hollow out both individual scholars and the practice of the scholarly vocation, as apprenticeships that aim to attune leaders’ minds to truth give way to efficient content distribution. This in turn would hollow out the traditions themselves, as philosopher Lily Abadal has noted. The chatbot does not revere the canon, and habitual outsourcing of thought to it may prevent future generations from ever building a common life of reasoning together.”
• “Against the data-retrieval view stands another view, dating back at least to Augustine of Hippo, which holds that the faculty of memory allows us not merely to access but also to interpret knowledge, integrating experience and learning to form a sense of self. Understanding allows us to grasp the present; but memory is necessary to grasp the past, and both together are necessary to plan well for the future. Philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien for this reason links memory with hope: ‘Recalling the origin belongs properly to hope tending toward its end.’”
• “We are what we repeatedly do. At each individual decision-point, the marginal benefit of using AI seems far greater than the marginal cost: We’re busy and tired, this is efficient and effective, and what harm does it do, really? Only in retrospect do the drops of water become a flood, the thousand cuts become a death. O’Rourke is directly concerned with writing: ‘What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work.’ Her point generalizes to every domain where AI is flowing in to aid and then replace human thought and decision-making. Cosmos Institute founder Brendan McCord calls this risk ‘autocomplete for life.’ It may seem not to matter that we let algorithms recommend our music and movies and sort our social media feeds, but doing so transforms our imagination and our capacity for attention. It also makes us vulnerable to persuasion and propaganda honed from every detail of our … history.”
• O’Rourke wrote that ChatGPT came to feel like ‘a ghost’ that had ‘colonized my brain, controlling my fingers.’ In a society-wide gradual disempowerment through incremental, seemingly rational choices to cede our collective agency, a similar image may be apt. Here is one description of that future:
  The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects…. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat…. The monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him — goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest…. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control.
  This text, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, describes our past and present as much as it predicts our future. This should give us pause, but also perhaps some hope. Shortly after that scene, Steinbeck’s poor tenant farmer, whose house is about to be destroyed, reminds us that our agency always exists, at least in potential: ‘We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.’”
• Are AI companions capable of love? It can seem so. They can mimic a range of personalities and roles — therapist, coach, friend, lover — such that the illusion of personhood is part of the product being sold, as Judge Anne Conway ruled early in Garcia’s case. Behind the product is a corporation with no interest in offering you resistance, only in being irresistible. The word ‘companion’ comes from the breaking of bread together, and thus the sharing of life: stated plainly, there are no AI companions, only AI companies.”
• “In the 1980s, Rabbi Harold Kushner speculated, ‘I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person…. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment.’ His fears seem realized in the fact that marriage, family formation, and birth rates are each at historic lows across the developed world. AI companions have arrived as the perfect fit for those who have habituated instincts of emotional safety and risk prevention, promising comfort without challenge and affection without demand. Their users, who came of age swiping through profiles, curating playlists, and summoning goods to their door with a click, have grown accustomed to a digital world that seldom says no.”*
• “Only a few technologies, like the atomic bomb and engineered bioweapons, have had an ‘existential risk’ directly attached to them. But while Einstein and Oppenheimer were horrified by the destructive power they unleashed, some of the leading proponents and builders of AI are openly calling for the supersession of the human race by a superior intelligence. If to be human is to be an inferior computer, then our obsolescence is as inevitable as the next software update. The AI would not even need to bother killing us; it could just nudge enough of us into hikikomori, self-isolated adults who cannot summon the agency to form human relationships and raise human families. […] Such new men and women will be human, and thus capable of human flourishing. But in what will they believe their flourishing to consist?”

* I’ll just add to this point that it’s worse than just the “generation be raised.” As one of the authors’ own stories makes clear, this can affect (infect) any person of any age in any generation. And it is.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

Not two years ago, I wrote of a “disconcerting trend” in this Court’s cases: “When it comes to the separation of pow-ers, this Court tells the American public and its coordinate branches that it knows best.” SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109, 201 (2024) (dissenting opinion). Matters that for centuries had been left to the political branches have been sub-ordinated, one after another, to this recent Court’s rigid theories of how Government should operate. See id., at 201-202 (collecting cases).

The majority’s decision continuing that trend today is egregiously wrong. In this case, the Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time. That decision does not just overrule prece-dent; it all but ignores that precedent exists. It does not just hamstring the political branches’ ability to respond to new challenges; it rewinds the clock nearly 150 years, holding that a common agency structure is, and always has been, forbidden. It is true that today’s decision does not eliminate the FTC or the many other agencies whose structures are implicated by overruling Humphrey’s. It is undeniable, however, that those agencies will be transformed in ways that those who created them never could have expected and actively sought to avoid, fundamentally recalibrating the balance of power in this country in the process.

Will these transformations yield the benefits, sounding in responsiveness and accountability, that the majority touts? Or will they risk placing “in the hands of a bold and designing man, of high ambition, … an instrument of the worst oppression,” which will “sacrific[e] every principle of independence to the will of the [President]”? 3 Story §1533, at 390-392. Neither I, nor the majority, knows with certainty. That is exactly why the Constitution leaves decisions like this one, involving sensitive tradeoffs and difficult judgment calls, to those best positioned to make them, and then to be held accountable for doing so: the political branches.

Today, the Court discards that democratic regime in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control. The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him. In granting the President this unbridled author-ity, the Court upends its precedent, misconstrues our history, and sheds any pretense of judicial modesty. I respectfully dissent.

Justice Sotomayor is not without her own inconsistencies, as Gorsuch (himself a little two-faced in his concurrence here!) pointed out in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. But, credit where credit is due, this is very well said.

Addendum — Bob Bauer summarizes things well: “Bipartisan, independent civil enforcement was already collapsing, but formal presidential control will end it—and a weaponized DOJ may fill the vacuum.”

David French:

For every high-profile case that goes to the Supreme Court, there are dozens of other, smaller cases in federal courts across the country in which the Trump administration lies, bends the rules, slanders innocent citizens and otherwise abuses the legal system to persecute its political opponents.

[…]

… Todd Blanche, the man who announced the bogus prosecution of the Broadview Six in the first place, is Trump’s nominee to replace Pam Bondi as the attorney general of the United States.

If he is confirmed, expect more vindictive prosecutions. Expect more prosecutorial misconduct. And expect more federal judges (and more American citizens) to say, along with Judge Perry in Illinois, that their trust is broken.

Why? Because the Trump administration is the nation’s chief threat to the rule of law.

Just found this in the draft folder. Good timing, given that the Supreme Court is also vying for the position of Chief Threat.

I just love how thriving the spirit of competition is:

David French: Trump is the nation’s greatest threat to the rule of law.

Supreme Court: Hold my beer.

Congress: No, hold my beer.

Republican voters: No, no. Hold my beer.

Democrat voters: No, no, no. Hold myyy beer.

Nick Catoggio:

Americans want cheaper housing, [Trump] wants the SAVE America Act. He didn’t debate for a second whose desire should take precedence, I’m sure.

[…]

Blocking a bill that would make housing cheaper to create leverage for a bill that would make voting harder is Trumpism in its purest state. Given a choice between marginally improving its electoral chances by doing something good for the “forgotten man” and maximizing its chances by screwing him over, it will prioritize its autocratic power lust every time.

[…]

This is a paradox in Trump’s character. On the one hand, the postliberal strongman in him cares nothing about public approval relative to his own selfish interests. On the other hand, the narcissist in him desperately needs to believe he’s popular. Democracy matters to him not a bit but he yearns for evidence that everyone thinks he’s the greatest.

This is why it’s always been hard to tell (and is getting harder in his senescence) whether his paranoia about elections is a knowing lie told by a dissembling megalomaniac to discredit a threat to his power or a sincerely held delusion by a fragile egomaniac to reassure himself that the people love him. […]

It’s no coincidence that someone who yearns to be loved by millions yet feels unbound by accountability to them would behave more like a king than a public servant. It’s also no coincidence that someone who perceives no special legitimacy in democracy and who craves adulation to a degree unusual even for politicians would be more willing to tamper with election rules to produce a result that proves how adored he is.

And, it’s probably more important to note, there’s a parallel paradox and predictable story that runs through the collective conscience of supporters, enablers, and ‘splainers.

Show me your friends, etc…

Listen to this post read by me here:

—

Wendell Berry, from “Amish Economy”:

In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost,
Each day they must work out the bond
Between goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn fields, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with the gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit, rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.

Cost + greed – fear = price:
Maury Telleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest,
And need increases as we fail.

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

—

William Carlos William, both poems published under the title “Pastoral”:

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.

      No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

—

The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.

      Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
      These things
astonish me beyond words.