Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023

choi

(1) Ben Zimmer, Listless" A Nautical Term Becomes Political Insult. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023, at page C3.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/ele ... cal-insult-e94547fd
("In May, DeSantis referred to President Biden as 'a listless vessel, not energetic' in a Fox News interview. * * * 'Listless' is rooted in a now-obsolete meaning of 'list' meaning 'desire' or 'inclination,' sharing a root with 'lust.' ")

Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest/
(b) 'Luxury' Originally Meant 'Lust.'  undated
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/origin-of-luxury
-----------------
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken some heat for comments he made in an interview last week comparing supporters of former President Donald Trump, his rival in the Republican presidential primary race, to “listless vessels.”

“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard, a conservative news outlet. “If all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

Trump’s camp was quick to pounce on the remark, likening it to Hillary Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” in the 2016 presidential race to describe some Trump supporters. Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for MAGA Inc., a Trump-aligned super PAC, called on DeSantis to “immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.” DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin defended the “listless vessels” comment, saying that it was aimed at members of Congress who have endorsed Trump, not at his supporters at large.

DeSantis has actually used the phrase before in different contexts. When speaking on education, he has warned that students who are not provided with a foundation in what he calls “the principles that have made this country unique” will graduate as “listless vessels.” In May, DeSantis referred to President Biden as “a listless vessel, not energetic” in a Fox News interview. Meanwhile, his wife Casey has decried politicians who go to Washington, D.C. and “become listless vessels, bending in the wind, beholden to polls and politics.”

The peculiar turn of phrase hinges on what exactly it means to be “listless.” In the sense of “languid” or “unresponsive,” “listless” dates back to the 15th century in English usage. An English-Latin dictionary from 1440 gives “lystles” as a translation of the Latin words “desidiosus” (“lazy”) and “segnis” (“sluggish”). It could apply to things as well as people seen as lacking energy, as in a 1652 sermon by the English clergyman Anthony Burgess, who spoke of how “the Church was listless, unprepared.”

“Listless” is rooted in a now-obsolete meaning of “list” meaning “desire” or “inclination,” sharing a root with “lust.” As a verb, “list” could also mean “to wish to do something,” as in the line from the King James Bible, “The winde bloweth where it listeth.” This old meaning of “list” is likely related to the nautical use of the word, as both a noun and a verb, for a ship tilting to one side, since a tilt can be thought of as a kind of inclination. The more common kind of “list,” a series of items written in an ordered sequence, has an entirely different etymology, going back to a Germanic word for a strip of paper.

When DeSantis talks about “listless vessels,” it evokes a ship that is upright in the water and remaining still, as opposed to one that leans to the side from wind driving it onward. “Listless” has been used in this fashion to modify “vessels” since at least the 19th century. In an account of pleasure-boats navigating choppy waters on Lake Michigan, an 1875 correspondent to the Chicago Tribune wrote, “the few listless vessels under sail immediately bent to the breeze and tumbled through the water like blundering porpoises.”

By combining “listless” with “vessels,” DeSantis may also be appealing to religious sentiments, since in biblical use “vessel” has been applied metaphorically to people as receptacles for divine grace. In that case, “listless” may suggest a lack of spiritual purpose. But the nautical type of “vessel” makes more sense given the context—and also fits DeSantis’s background, given that he served in the U.S. Navy as part of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. It remains to be seen if all this talk of “listless vessels” creates any political headwinds for the DeSantis campaign as it navigates treacherous electoral waters.

choi

(3) Paul Kix (WSJ's introduction: "The author, most recently, of 'You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live; Ten weeks in Birmingham that changed America' "), Five Best: Books on the Civil-Rights Movement. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023, at page C8.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... s-movement-4f61e214

Note"
(a) Please read summary of book 4.
(b) Golden Rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
-------------------
Parting the Waters
By Taylor Branch (1988)
1. It’s that rare work of exhaustive history that’s propulsive, the narrative forcing you to keep flipping pages even if it means flipping them well past midnight. “Parting the Waters” is the first volume of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on the civil-rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But to say this book is about King, or even the SCLC, is to miss the point. “I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch,” Mr. Branch writes. What he has produced is, in a sense, an examination of cross sections of the American experience across generations. It’s breathtaking.


My Song
By Harry Belafonte, with Michael Shnayerson (2011)
2. Harry Belafonte discusses his success as a musician and actor, sure, and this dual-career life was no small feat for a midcentury American black man in two terribly discriminatory industries. But “My Song” is really about Belafonte’s activism. “I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activist. I was an activist who’d become an artist,” writes Belafonte, who died in April. Belafonte was the one who warned Martin Luther King Jr. against endorsing John F. Kennedy in 1960 and becoming the administration’s “black mouthpiece.” (King listened and endorsed no one.) Belafonte was the one who staged a massive fundraiser at his New York apartment that allowed the Birmingham Campaign to begin in 1963. Belafonte was the one who, at the height of his fame, gave up his Hollywood career for the movement. He became the liaison when Bobby Kennedy called and needed to understand King and the SCLC. “Martin would say that one of his greatest strategic decisions was recruiting me to the movement,” Belafonte writes. This man helped shape the America we live in today. “My Song” shows how he did it.


Citizen
By Claudia Rankine (2014)
3. It’s unlike any book you’ll read. Claudia Rankine subtitles it “An American Lyric.” That’s as good a description as any: a song for and about America in a post-civil-rights era. Through its poetry, art and personal essays, “Citizen” helps readers see what Ms. Rankine sees as a black woman. Her point is to show that nothing ends—not the racism endemic to America and certainly not the drive for equality, either. “I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending,” Ms. Rankine writes at the conclusion of her book. Because there is no way to make her story of America conform to, say, the three-act structure of narrative, she shows readers what the nation feels like instead. What it feels like to have a white mother protect her white daughter from sitting next to Ms. Rankine on an airplane. What it feels like as a black woman to watch Serena Williams’s frustration grow against bigoted umpires and privileged press corps: “Neither . . . God nor Nike camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court.” This is literature and history as urgent, maddening plea.


The Kingdom of God Is Within You
By Leo Tolstoy (1894)
4. After “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace,” and toward the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy sat down to write his manifesto on Christianity. “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” argues, in part, what its title suggests. The divine lives inside us, and we must honor that divinity through our actions. If the greatest truth of life is to love one’s brother, as the Golden Rule implies, then the greatest action is, in some sense, inaction: to never strike that brother. “It is the duty of all,” Tolstoy writes, “not to resort to force against anyone in any circumstance.” The book lays out the theological principles that support its main theme—a theme as old as Christianity and yet somehow still revolutionary. Gandhi read the book and modeled his civil disobedience on it. Civil-rights leaders in the American South in the 1950s and ’60s read the book; it shaped the campaigns they waged and helped the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act win the day. The book is gripping, a distillation of a lifetime of ideas from one of history’s greatest minds.


Man’s Search for Meaning
By Viktor Frankl (1946)
5. Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz, but this is not a concentration-camp story. It is instead a guide for how to live. An esteemed psychologist both before and after the war, Frankl writes that in every encounter in life we have a choice of how to respond. Once we realize that, we find our freedom and salvation. Even in the camps, that choice existed. For Frankl this meant realizing the nobility in suffering. “Dostoevsky once said, ‘There is only one thing that I dread: Not to be worthy of my sufferings,’ ” Frankl writes. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails . . . gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.” This idea, that the righteous life is always possible, influenced civil-rights leaders in the U.S., especially as they suffered and fought for the dignity they deserved. To this day, “Man’s Search for Meaning” influences readers world-wide. Every time I read it I learn something new about myself. It’s my favorite book.

choi

(2) Ronald C Rosbottom, The Enemy Within. France prosecuted Marshal Pétain, who had led the country's Vichy government during World War II, and sentenced him to death. But Pétain was hardly the only collaborator. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ins-shadow-88838286
(book review on Julian Jackson, France on Trial. The Case of Marshal Pétain. Belknap Press (an imprint of Harvard University Press; in publishing world, an imprint is akin to a brand of a company which may have many brands of goods), 2023)

Note:
(a) Philippe Pétain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_P%C3%A9tain
(1856 – 1951; "He led the French Army to victory at the nine-month-long Battle of Verdun" in 2016)
(b) "Julian Jackson, an emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London"
(i) University of London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_London
(section 4 Member institutions)
(ii) Queen Mary was wife of George V (reign 1910-1936; grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, whose father was George VI).
(c) "État français (known as the Vichy regime)"
(i) French-English dictionary:
* état (noun masculine): "state"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/état
* français (adjective Masculine): "French"
               (noun masculine): "French" language
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/français
   ^ A French man, a French woman are homme français and femme français, respectively. (Two words, rather than one.)
   ^ This is same as in Spanish where national (such as chino Chinese) or adjective (café colombiano  Colombian coffee) haslower case for the first letter, although in both French and Spanish, the first letter of a nation is always capitalized.
(ii) The ch in Vichy is pronounced the same as sh in she.
------------------------------
In 1940, after an intense six-week battle, the most formidable army in Europe was defeated by a much more flexible and aggressive German military. For almost 80 years, France has lived with its memory of that shameful defeat, as well as its ensuing four years of collaboration with the Germans. What makes this period of occupation stand out is that the “armistice” signed in 1940 left half of France independently governed by a reactionary coterie of its own politicos and military leaders. Their headquarters, though, were not in Paris, where the German administration held sway, but in the spa town of Vichy, in the middle of the country. Their leader was Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Julian Jackson, an emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, recognizes that readers may need to acquire some familiarity with the German invasion and occupation. His “France on Trial” clarifies this complex history through a careful elucidation of the differences between formal and casual collaboration, of the armistice of June 1940 that established the État français (known as the Vichy regime), and of Pétain’s eventual surrender to the French authorities in 1945.

One of Mr. Jackson’s strengths, as an expert on 20th-century France, is the detail he offers on the politics of 1940-45. He reminds us that Pétain’s 1945 trial for treason was about more than the guilt or innocence of an elderly soldier. It gave birth to moral and political doubts: “Where did patriotic duty lie after the defeat? Does a legal government necessarily have legitimacy? Are there times when conscience overrides the duty to obey laws?” The author seeks to put the quietus on any positive evaluation of the marshal and to vitiate the influence Pétainism still has on France’s collective memory and politics.

To understand the charges against Pétain, Mr. Jackson divides his book into three sections. The first sets the historical stage with a clear description of the French army’s defeat in May 1940 and the subsequent German occupation of France. He then presents the details of Pétain’s trial, explaining French jurisprudence and the social and bureaucratic complexities of a liberated France. The final section of the book is dedicated to the legacy of the Vichy government and its collaborators. This is where Mr. Jackson puts France on trial.

By returning of his own volition to face his accusers, Pétain complicated a simpler resolution of the embarrassment of “collaboration.” He crossed the border from Switzerland and surrendered to French police in late April 1945. Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, was furious. He recognized that the marshal, known as the Lion of Verdun during the previous war, was still quite respected in France, and that his arrival, and inevitable trial, would not allow France to easily cast aside the checkered history of the war.

At his trial, Pétain wore the uniform of a marshal, not that of a citizen. He entered the austere courtroom, confidently and firmly, and politely put his kepi on the table. Surprisingly, most of those present stood. Reading at length from a typewritten text, he explained to the court, and by implication to the French people, his own sacrifices for the salvation of his nation:

        I have spent my life in the service of France. Today, at the age of almost 90, thrown into prison, I wish to continue to serve her. . . . Let France remember! I led her armies to victory in 1918. Then, having earned the right to rest, I have never ceased to devote myself to her.

Upon finishing, he refused to answer questions, from either the prosecution or his own lawyers, or to make further remarks, sitting silently during the remainder of the trial. He was found guilty of indignité nationale and sentenced to death. But De Gaulle, by then the interim chief of state, commuted the sentence to life in prison, and ordered that it be passed on the isolated island of Yeu, off the coast of Brittany. Pétain died there, at the age of 95, in 1951. His last days are memorialized on the island in a small museum, still visited by tourists and admirers.

Why has the ghost of Pétain continued to affect the political discourse of France? Is it that the guilt about the division of the country during the war remains embedded in France’s historical memory? Mr. Jackson’s previous books include a first-rate biography of De Gaulle and “The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940.” In “France on Trial,” he gives us an intimate account of the construction of the memory of Pétain through the lens of the trial. He relies on archives in Paris, London and Washington, as well as the official files of the Vichy years, which were opened to the public in 2015. Mr. Jackson commands them all.

In July 1995, on the anniversary of the infamous 1942 roundup of Jews at the Paris velodrome, France’s President Jacques Chirac gave one of the most significant speeches of the 20th century. He bluntly reminded the French that the État français, led by Pétain, was part and parcel of their history, and that many citizens had accepted its legality, though they may have rejected much of its ideology. Mr. Jackson believes that the Vichy regime “would never itself have initiated a policy to murder Jews. Vichy’s anti-semitism was exclusionary not exterminatory.” He even exculpates French participation in the rounding-up and exiling of French and foreign Jews. These views are a rare deviation from Mr. Jackson’s studied objectivity.

Mr. Jackson concludes his book by stating that “the Pétain case is closed.” But is it? Among those who continue to revive the conundrums that the Vichy regime caused for France is Éric Zemmour, a French journalist and television pundit. Mr. Zemmour, who himself is Jewish, holds that Pétain served as a shield against the persecution of French Jews. He argues that the majority of French Jews survived the war precisely because of the marshal’s moral strengths, and that most of those who were exterminated by the Germans were in fact foreign-born. Rather, Mr. Zemmour views Pierre Laval, the prime minister during much of Pétain’s government, as the major villain in the French government’s treatment of immigrant Jews. Laval was tried and executed in 1945. Arguments such as Mr. Zemmour’s continue to cast a cloud over the persistent debates about French collaboration and resistance. And so, too, over Mr. Jackson’s major theses.

Nevertheless, this is a finely tuned history. Mr. Jackson endeavors to remain objective and fair in his analysis by reminding his readers that France’s tangled memory of a complicated time remains pertinent to the polity. The description of the trial, now that all the transcripts have been released, is thorough. Those who enjoy tales of the sparring among excellent lawyers arguing an important case will find this book riveting. And for those who want to understand contemporary France and its intricate politics, “France on Trial” provides, especially in its epilogue, a vibrant analysis of a trial and verdict that remain contentious almost eight decades later.

Mr. Rosbottom is professor emeritus of French and European Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of “When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation.”