The opening: “You Think You’ve Seen ‘Shock & Awe’”??
(Trump posted this AI fantasy on Truth Social early Saturday)
“The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” [AP]
Indiana National Guard troops will mobilize to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement with transportation and logistics across the state beginning mid-September, a spokesperson for Gov. Mike Braun confirmed.
Around 50 Hoosier guardsmen will help ICE officials with tasks such as answering phones, biometric collection, tracking expenses, entering data and maintaining vehicles. They will not engage in law enforcement functions or make arrests, the spokesperson said.
Meantime, outside:
Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker posted a defiant retort on X: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.
This is not a joke. This is not normal.
Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke at a news conference Monday afternoon, August 25, addressing reports President Trump is planning to send the military to Chicago.
Here are excerpts from his remarks, edited for length, followed by a link to the full text:
Milton Mayer was born on August 24, 1908. He was a journalist, scholar, moral philosopher, terrific writer — and a Quaker.
A Jewish Quaker.
A southerner Jewish Quaker.
He wrote some of the most potent, challenging, memorable Quaker essays and books of the past century. He was also funny.
He and his work deserve to be remembered and re-examined now, 39 years after his death in 1986. Not only because of the excellent writing, but because his over-arching subject, which was facing/surviving authoritarian/totalitarian government — is now our over-arching crisis.
He predicted this rise, warned of it, analyzed its coming and impact in his lifetime. And he tracked how ordinary people reacted, resisted, or reinforced tyranny.
Mayer’s story was told in a probing summary essay by a top Quaker historian, H. Larry Ingle, in the journal, Quaker Theology. Here is Ingle’s incisive sketch:
Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog
A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle
Reprinted from Quaker Theology #8, 2003
Oxford-educated political scientist Isaiah Berlin, in his minor classic “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953), divided people into two groups, those who understood one big thing like the hedgehog and those, like the fox, who knew many things.
Milton Mayer
The subject of this essay was a hedgehog who throughout his life concerned himself with one common theme, the threat of state authority over the individual; this threat emerged, he insisted, because individuals permitted it by not resisting the state’s encroachments.
During the current period, a time of mounting concern about civil liberties and individual rights, especially in the face of mounting governmental authority, it is wise to consider one of the best known Friends of the twentieth century. I write of Milton Mayer (1908-86), now mostly forgotten but well worth recalling because he illustrated a significant, continuing, and newly-timely strain in Quaker thinking.
A newspaperman and magazine columnist, Mayer wrote and edited numerous books and turned out reams of personal essays for the Progressive, a journal that carried his byline for nearly forty years. His best known and most important book was his study of ten average Germans from 1933 to 1945, They Thought They Were Free, a work he published a decade after the war when he lived in Germany and interviewed residents of that defeated nation.
No one has done a biographical study of Mayer, although he left numerous references to his personal experiences in his essays and books, so it is only a matter of digging out the factual details to put his life into context.
Born in Chicago of a German Jewish father and an English-born mother, Mayer was educated in the public schools of the city where he reminded readers constantly, he received a classical education with a heavy emphasis on Latin and languages; he graduated from Englewood High School. His Reform Jewish family was well enough off that young Milton visited Germany probably after World War I.
His self-composed entry in Who’s Who in America for 1984 refers only to his being a student at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928, without mentioning that he did not earn a degree. Mayer apparently left the University the year before the thirty-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins became president in 1929. He told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942 that he was “placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window, ‘failing, however, to hit the dean.’” (“Keeping Posted, March 28, 1942) Their lives would be intertwined until Hutchins’s death in 1977, and Mayer’s widow would oversee the publication of a biography her husband had penned of his friend. This unorthodox study, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir, published in 1993 by the University of California Press, offers insights into the genesis of Mayer’s development that are absent from his other writings.
After leaving the University, Mayer worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post for nine years and married his first wife Bertha Tepper; the couple had two daughters. They were divorced in 1945, and two years later he married Jane Scully, who would become well-known as “Baby” or, after protests from feminists, “Ms. Baby,” to readers of his magazine columns. These details come from the Who’s Who entry, but the Hutchins biography reveals that Mayer had gone to work for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American sometime during the early 1930s, covering the University of Chicago from which position he met Hutchins.
Preparing an article for that paper, he read Hutchins’s 1935 commencement address to the graduates at the University, and his life was changed. In words that Mayer would echo and re-echo, again and again, Hutchins told his auditors that they faced a life that would corrupt them, tempting them to become safe, sound, agreeable, and inoffensive, giving them habits of timidity. “Believe me,” Hutchins pointedly warned, “you are closer to the truth now than you will ever be again.” (Mayer: 1993, 3-5) . . . .
Ms. Hazel’s Last July 4th — 2023: Her Flags & The Prayer Line
Ms. Hazeltine Umstead, with hammer & flags, July 2023.
I lived next door to Ms. Hazeline Umstead for twelve years. She was remarkable in many ways: she had grown up in this neighborhood; had returned to it after several years in New York City.
She was meticulous about her lawn (and doggedly patient with the unruly wildlife habitat we were making next door), and her blonde wigs.
She was in church every Sunday, and started most mornings on a telephone prayer line with several other believers, calling for divine protection and help for a continuing roster of those in need (I was on the list more than once).
But I think the thing she loved most was giving parties, marking her birthdays and holidays: she also had oversized blow-up yard figures for Christmas and especially Valentine’s Day. Each year in late summer she ordered loads of delectable local soul food for a free banquet for a huge crowd of local police.
2020-Covid. When this sign disappeared from her yard, she hand-painted another one.
Among these celebrations, July 4th was special. I could tell that because she spent at least a full day on her hands and knees, using a hammer to pound close to fifty American flags in the grass, on both sides of her driveway to the curb, plus the sidewalk to her porch, and here and there among her menagerie of lawn animals, and under the big flag that hung from the corner of her roof year-round.
I often pondered what had shaped this annual devotion. When she was a schoolgirl, around the corner on Lakewood, the street was a dirt road, the city and its schools were rigidly segregated; her mother and other elders were unable to vote. Durham had a large Klan chapter.
But she lived to see the street paved, the schools opened up (somewhat at least), the Klan dwindle, relatives serve in the military. She not only cast ballots religiously, but was twice able to vote for Obama (his photo was enshrined on her wall) and we lamented together the rise of Obama’s successor.
When these photos were taken, in 2023, we were again lamenting the prospect of that successor’s return. And Ms. Hazel was daily waging (and slowly losing) the most intense struggle of the years I knew her: against aging and its burgeoning disabilities.
She disliked doctors, medicines, pain —and even more hated having to ask for help. I would gladly have put in a batch of the flags. But I also knew she would have been affronted by the offer, with its unmistakable implication of weakness and need: she had set up these flags for I don’t know how many years before I turned up. It was her ritual, and if it took all day and night, she would erect it just so, and the only help she needed or would accept was that of her beloved Jesus.
So I watched from my side, and recorded her labor. One reason was that I feared this could be the last time she would get to do it. With her game legs, it was slow going.
But as she finished the driveway rows and practically crawled up the sidewalk with its concrete steps, painstakingly planting more slender wood posts, a different thought came: in good health or in decline, for reasons I could mostly just guess at, Ms. Hazel was the most patriotic American in our neighborhood.
It wasn’t a contest. A glance up and down the otherwise flag-free block confirmed it. We took America for granted; but despite its failings, which she knew all too well and did not excuse, Ms. Hazel did not.
Finally she arrived at the finish, and sat, worn out, on the top step of her porch, surveying the array. I imagined she was also reflecting on the strains loose and rising in the country, beyond what she could see, or feel.
Maybe that’s just my projection, but we had spoken often of these things. There was plenty threatening her country then, and now.
I was right about one thing. This was her last time: in October, the strokes came. She was carried from the house to hospitals and a rehab center, unable to speak. Ms. Hazel died there in February 2024.
A relative lives there now. The large flag at the corner of the roof flies solo. Most of her lawn menagerie has scattered.
But I think of her often, especially today. I wonder: if it’s really heaven, it must have a large green yard just for her, where she can work daily in perfect weather, with no aches or pains. And does she still take time to join that prayer line there?
If so, Ms. Hazel, please add me back onto the list. Along with all the rest of what moved you to plant those flags.
From confidential Washington sources, the following excerpt is drawn from an account of the aftermath of the March 17 seizure and closing of the U. S. Institute of Peace, by armed agents of the DOGE administration. The account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Brief Encounter at 2301
Mid-March, 2025, on the edge of the National Mall, not far from the Vietnam War Memorials.
It was almost break time, the leftover dinner pizza was hours cold, and Hennigan thought he heard something.
Standing up from the desk chair, he closed the Security Inc. employee handbook, which was making him drowsy anyway, and peered across the open atrium: first left, then right, following the protocol.
Everything seemed in order: several tiers of closed offices rose or each side. Lights were dim. Nothing moving.
often pondered what had shaped this annual devotion. When she was a schoolgirl, around the corner on Lakewood, the street was a dirt road, the city and its schools were rigidly segregated; her mother and other elders were unable to vote. Durham had a large Klan chapter.
It wasn’t a contest. A glance up and down the otherwise flag-free block confirmed it. We took America for granted; but despite its failings, which she knew all too well and did not excuse, Ms. Hazel did not.
