Tag: Harlan Crow

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Hunting Wild Boar in La Pampa II

We all need to lighten up. Yesterday morning Maureen Dowd quoted Bill Maher who “had joked that Trump was the love child of a human woman and an orangutan — what else could explain the tangerine hair?” I wrote this one back in March.

There was nothing left for me to do in Oaxaca. Erstwhile friends had fled north—where they encountered really bad weather while the days here were scorching. Talks at the Library I found totally uninteresting. The news media (CNN and Fox) had become so fixed in their political opinions that their comments were predictable and repetitive.

Movies on Netflix were as dreadful as ever, and the audio was the usual sonic blur. I was out of Bonne Maman cookies. I had begun to read again the fantastical stories of Donald Barthelme, the only inspiration I could find to continue writing. A total break from all this, I thought, might improve my digestion and my spirits.

The service desk at LATAM put me on long holds, giving me time to think about why I’d want to book with them after a recent flight suddenly dropped 500 feet in a dive, throwing people to the roof of the cabin and injuring 50. Still, it was the best way to Argentina where I would join a posse of rich Americans on a wild boar hunt.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” a friend asked. “You can’t afford this and you hate the idea of hunting. Have you been talking with Al Z. Heimer again?”

“I have no bucket list, whatever that is, and boredom has taken over my life here since I gave over volunteering for badly managed organizations, taking falls on broken sidewalks, and eating tacos stuffed with grossly hot jalapeños. Nor can one subsist on old jazz and schmaltzy Sibelius symphonies alone, as some have advised. Even curmudgeonry gets tiresome after a while.”

I told him I’ve never wanted to kill wild animals, or any animal, before now. I don’t like guns. And yet the urge to murder shitheads like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan became such a preoccupation that it scared me. I decided to invoke what the psychologists call displacement—avoiding the unacceptable and dangerous delusions of seeking death to those lunatics by taking out my aggressions on other beasts.

Of course, the trip to La Pampa never came off. The hold times were too long, and while waiting I read enough blurbs from the hunting lodge that I could hear the bangs of the AR-15s and feel the soggy mattresses in our tents. Not to mention associating with the Harlan Crows, Clarence Thomases and their ilk who would make up the party. Travel is for those with no imagination.

Posted on

Hunting Wild Boar in La Pampa

There was nothing left for me to do in Oaxaca. Erstwhile friends had fled north—where they encountered really bad weather while the days here were scorching. Talks at the Library I found totally uninteresting. The news media (CNN and Fox) had become so fixed in their political opinions that their comments were predictable and repetitive.

Movies on Netflix were as dreadful as ever, and the audio was the usual sonic blur. I was out of Bonne Maman cookies. I had begun to read again the fantastical stories of Donald Barthelme, the only inspiration I could find to continue writing. A total break from all this, I thought, might improve my digestion and my spirits.

The service desk at LATAM put me on long holds, giving me time to think about why I’d want to book with them after a recent flight suddenly dropped 500 feet in a dive, throwing people to the roof of the cabin and injuring 50. Still, it was the best way to Argentina where I would join a posse of rich Americans on a wild boar hunt.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” a friend asked. “You can’t afford this and you hate the idea of hunting. Have you been talking with Al Z. Heimer again?”

“I have no bucket list, whatever that is, and boredom has taken over my life here since I gave over volunteering for badly managed organizations, taking falls on broken sidewalks, and eating tacos stuffed with grossly hot jalapeños. Nor can one subsist on old jazz and schmaltzy Sibelius symphonies alone, as some have advised. Even curmudgeonry gets tiresome after a while.”

I told him I’ve never wanted to kill wild animals, or any animal, before now. I don’t like guns. And yet the urge to murder shitheads like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan became such a preoccupation that it scared me. I decided to invoke what the psychologists call displacement—avoiding the unacceptable and dangerous delusions of seeking death to those lunatics by taking out my aggressions on other beasts.

Of course, the trip to La Pampa never came off. The hold times were too long, and while waiting I read enough blurbs from the hunting lodge that I could hear the bangs of the AR-15s and feel the soggy mattresses in our tents. Not to mention associating with the Harlan Crows, Clarence Thomases and their ilk who would make up the party. Travel is for those with no imagination.

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Laughing All the Way to the Bench

Kudos to ProPublica, which finally pursued and broke open the story about Harlan Crow’s longstanding gifts to Clarence the Logroller. I wonder, is this just another tale of MAGA mania to be ignored or suppressed by a burnt-out public? Since it’s so difficult to impose any kind of ethics test (even though there is one) on the Supremes, will anything come of this? Will the story have any legs?

It just might if John Roberts has balls—or if the Democrats can keep some pressure on. Impeaching Thomas is just not possible since the Dems don’t have the votes. The whole Dark Money thing, with billions in unacknowledged contributions, owes its life to Citizens United (“money is speech”), one of the worst-ever decisions by the Court.

There is a federal law against these sorts of contributions but does it, will it, have any teeth? Thomas and his wife have enjoyed Harlan’s “opulent getaways” for decades—from a guy who is in bed with Leonard Leo and the whole crew of Dark Money funders. Harlan Crow also seems to be an equal-opportunity giver: he has contributed lesser funds to Manchin and Sinema, Gottheimer and Cuellar, who have frustrated the Biden administration forever.

The case against Thomas was well put by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate:

For years we have been hearing from the justices that it’s not their fault so many parties with business before the court are also their best friends. We’ve heard that it’s not on them to stop generous pals from lavishing gifts upon them. We have been given to understand—as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in justifying his own travels with parties litigating before him—that justices need to hang out with fabulous and wealthy movers and shakers because who else is there to hang out with. Oh, and for years we have swallowed the pablum that these trips are so intrinsically fun and interesting that Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, Mark Paoletta, and a megadonor can sit around for hours chatting about sports, and not talking about any past, present, or future matter that may come before the court.

And, according to Michael Tomasky, whose reporting I respect, Ginny Thomas’s “hard-right activism” is every bit as worrisome as her husband’s. “She’s a hard-right zealot who is active on just about every hot-button cultural issue in American politics.” You can’t fail to have noticed this, including her husband’s default failure to recuse himself from cases in which she would have an interest.

One must ask again why gross derelictions like the Thomas’s are so continually ignored or swept under the rug. One reason, as I suggested earlier, is that the public is burnt out or simply turned off by constantly hearing about such stuff. Or maybe they realize that given our broken polity there’s no apparent way to bring justice to the justices.