Tim’s view
Tim Robinson, the great cartographer and writer, was an Englishman who came to Ireland, fell in love with its landscape and never left. He went to live on the Aran Islands off the Galway coast and wrote two wonderful books about them which the Cambridge academic and writer Robert Macfarlane described as “one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out”.
Later Tim moved to Roundstone, a village in Connemara where he founded a company, Paper Landscapes, which published the exquisite hand-drawn maps of Connemara that he made. While in Roundstone he wrote his Connemara Trilogy, a profoundly ambitious and intimate study of a region that is unlike anywhere else on earth. The three books were published over a five-year period from 2006.
Tim died of Covid in 2020, and in 2022, when we were finally able to visit Ireland again, we made a pilgrimage to Roundstone, and I took this picture — which shows the view from his quayside window — as a kind of tribute. It shows the celebrated ’Twelve Bens’ mountain range.
Quote of the Day
”The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
- Dorothy Parker
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Paul Simon | Graceland (from The Concert in Hyde Park)
Magical concert.
Long Read of the Day
After Trump was elected in 2016, my friend and former colleague David Runciman wrote a perceptive little book, How Democracy Ends, in which he argued that, when they fail, Western democracies will not fail backwards. So there was no point looking to what happened to Germany in the 1930s, for example, (or Argentina, Chile, and Greece in later times) for indicators of what will happen in our time. The danger, he wrote, was not a Mussolini-style overthrow but a gradual corrosion of norms and weakening of institutions. Liberal democracy depends on trust, participation, and belief in the system. When citizens disengage or treat politics as a game (or spectacle), the system keeps running formally but hollows out in substance. And so the risk is not death but decay into a shell of democratic forms without genuine democratic practice.
Well, here we — or rather the citizens of the United States —are. What’s astonishing (to me) is how passively they (and we) are watching the systematic dismantling of a major democracy by an authoritarian ruler for whom nearly half of the population voted. Every morning my laptop brings news of the latest ‘unthinkable’ things that the Trump regime has been doing, accompanied by mainstream media reports that purport to cover, in a measured, ‘balanced’ way, the madness that’s unfolding. And the oddest thing is that all of this is happening in broad daylight: the regime feels no need to do things undercover.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the transcriptof Ezra Klein’s podcast of August 27 is really worth reading.
Here’s how he sets the scene:
You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and depending on where and how you focus your eyes — maybe you’re looking at a vase or two faces — the image keeps flickering back and forth? Looking at the Trump administration is like that for me — though the flickering is between: This is democracy — the American people are getting what they voted for, good and hard. And: This is authoritarianism — or at least the road to authoritarianism.
I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He’s just doing what he promised. He’s tripling ICE’s budget. He’s funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In L.A., protesters tried to obstruct him, so Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington to do something about it, to show Americans that he’s doing something about it.
I don’t like any of this. I certainly didn’t vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans voted for, the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel. So I can see that picture.
And then it flickers. My eyes refocus. And I see the evisceration of due process. I see detention centers being built where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people inside. I see men in masks refusing to identify themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they’re an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital.
What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot?
In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?
Because that’s the other picture I see — the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control.
And I wonder: Are these pictures even different? Trump promised all of this. It is possible to destroy democracy somewhat democratically…
You get the picture. Now read the transcript.
My commonplace booklet
Ever since I first read Steven Johnson’s Hearst Lecture I’ve kept a handwritten notebook which functions really as a ‘commonplace book’. Jillian Hess is likewise a notebook fan, and runs a nice blog on that general subject. In the latest edition she celebrates the blog’s third anniversary and sets out three reasons why “now is the perfect time to start a handwritten commonplace book”. They are:
- Commonplace books have been the solution to information overload for centuries. Which is why thinkers as varied as Francis Bacon and Virginia Woolf kept them).
- Commonplace books and AI don’t mix well (because they are purely subjective and require personal judgement and taste — things that can’t be outsourced to a machine).
- They bring us back into the material world — paper, pen and ink, not screens.
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