Doom Report (Week 27: The Fact that We Even Have to Care How to Pronounce It Is Disturbing)

Nearly 1200 years ago, there was a guy named Ghislain who got himself made a saint.  His Wikipedia page doesn’t really go into what he did that was so saintly—I’m neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, but I always thought you had to do some miracles or something like that to get canonized.  And, hey: maybe he did drop a miracle or two here and there, but there’s no mention of it on Wikipedia.  Actually, the article reads like someone lifted it straight out a medieval text, with sentences like “He soon entered into relations with Waltrude, who was induced by him to build a monastery at Castrilocus, his former place of refuge” and “The intercourse between Ghislain and Aldegonde brought about a perfect understanding between Maubeuge and the monastery founded at Ursidongus under Ghislain’s direction.”  Wacky stuff.

Anyway, he may have been Germanic, but he died in Belgium, very close to the border with France.  And apparently it became a not-awfully-common-but-not-unheard-of name among the French-speaking peoples in Europe.  And, if you wanted to name your kid after this saint, but your kid happened to be a girl, you would just tack an “e” on at the end and call it a day.  Now, in “most of France and in Belgium,” you would pronounce the first syllable of this name as “ghee,” like the clarified butter.  The second syllable is pronounced “lehn,” with a bit of a nasal vowel and not much of the actual “n” sound, which I happen to do a passable job at because I have a friend from France whose name is “Alain,” and that’s pronounced the same way (although mostly he just gives up and lets us dumb Americans call him “Alan”).  The dumb American way for the second syllable of this name, though, is usually just “lane.”  So, overall: “ghee-lenh” or “ghee-lane” if you don’t want to sound pretentious and French.  But note that the source I linked to also, however, mentions that “in the south of France and in Canada,” the name is more commonly pronounced with an initial syllable like “jeez” (second syllable unchanged).  But nowhere does anyone pronounce it like “jizz.”  Unless you’re a dumb American pundit talking about Ghislaine Maxwell.

Because this person really has dominated our new cycle this week.  She is, in many ways, a fascinating figure, if you look at the totality of her life beyond just the horrific things that she probably (almost certainly) did for Jeffrey Epstein, a man who she never married (or perhaps more fair to say he never married her: the farthest he would go, apparently, was to refer to her as his “main girlfriend”), but will forever be associated with.  Her Wikipedia page tells us that she was born to non-native Brits living in France (specifically, the north of France, so the “ghee” pronunciation is presumably the correct one).  Her mother was originally French; her father had been born in what was then Czechoslovakia.  (Her father, by the way, has a whole interesting background as well: a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, he built a media empire in Britain, served in Parliament, died at 68 while pissing, nude, off the side of his yacht—presumably he had a heart attack, fell in the ocean, and drowned—was buried in Jerusalem at a lavish funeral attended by heads of state and heads of intelligence, including the Prime Minister of Israel, and then was discovered to have been embezzling from his companies’ pension funds.)  Ghislaine was their ninth and youngest child; two days after her birth, one of her older brothers was in a car crash that left him in a coma for six years, after which he died.  So that was her life up until age six.  Prep school, university at Oxford, dabbled in women’s clubs and business, possibly caught up in some of her father’s shady schemes, citizen of the US and the UK and France, lived in New York City off a Liechtenstein trust fund of 80,000 pounds (which is close to $300,000 in today’s money) per year.  Somewhere in there she managed to learn to fly a helicopter, which came in handy for transporting Epstein to his private island.  And her father’s yacht—remember, the one he died pissing off of?—a 180-foot, nearly 3,000 horsepower behemoth “equipped with a jacuzzi, sauna, gym and disco,” was named the Lady Ghislaine.

But, as Dear Leader Trumpy has proclaimed, this is all very boring.  “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” he said, and then immediately started whining about how Obama rigged the election that he won.  C’mon, guy: it’s one thing to claim that the election that you lost was rigged, but the one you won?  Shit’s getting weird.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger delivers another good roundup of the week’s news.  I think Kinzinger started off slow, but he’s picking up steam, finding his footing.  Other than the unfortunate “jizz-lane” pronunciation, I’m quite enjoying his take.

• Two good videos from Adam Conover this week: one, an astute summary of the (coming) fallout from the Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery (that name is really starting to grow on me), and, as an added bonus, a really incisive video comparing the fight for trans rights to the gay rights movement.

• In another bangin’ “In My Opinon” segment from The Daily Show, Charlamagne tha God asks, “does Trump have dementia?”  I suppose we can’t conclude definitively one way or the other, but Charlamagne brings the receipts.

• This week’s Weekly Show was pretty decent, but I mainly want to draw your attention to the outro segment, where Jon breaks down the interview with his producers.  Researcher and associate producer Gillian Spear is, as she so often is, the star of this one, throwing out banger after banger.  On House Speaker Mike Johnson’s whiplash-inducing change from demanding transparency in the Epstein case to just going along with whatever Trump says: “I mean, for Mike Johnson, morality and transparency is telling your son what porn you’re watching. Starts there; ends there.”  On Trump’s reaction to realizing that he couldn’t actually follow through on his threats to cancel President Musk’s contracts, because DOGE had fired everyone who might step in to take over: “And who led that charge, in some respect? It’s almost like—the guy that we have to give all our money to ...”  Stewart is entertaining, but Spears is who keeps me coming back for more.

• I absolutely adore that, even in the midst of all of Trump’s (very successful) attempts to flood the zone with shit, More Perfect Union is still putting out videos exposing everyday, ordinary corporate greed.  This time on the chopping block: why Spotify sucks.  To hear the prick who runs Spotify say shit like “I did this, not because I thought we could make a ton of money.  I did this because I cared about the problem.  I cared about music, and I cared about compensating artists fairly” and then to hear that he is worth nearly $10 billion and that many artists get paid, not pennies, not tenths of pennies, not even hundredths of pennies, but thousandths of pennies per stream ... it’s infuriating.

Finally, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny, the ladies are making excellent use of their time during the Supreme Court’s summer break.  While talking about how the Supreme Court keeps validating Trump by telling him “hey, we won’t say that what you’re doing is legal ... but we absolutely affirm your right to keep doing those potentially illegal things while we think about it,” Kate told this story:

And on the “impossibility of unringing the bell” point, I thought Kim Lane Shepley had a really evocative metaphor in a piece she wrote for The Contrarian about this, and I want to quote it in its entirety.  So she says, quote, “Think of the executive branch before 2025 as an aquarium in which various agency fishes were swimming around, acting like a government.  Trump inserted a blender into the fish tank because he asserted that he has the Constitutional power to create “fish soup.”  ...  So it matters, says Kim, if the court allows the blender to be turned on while it decides the legal question of whether the constitution in fact permits the president to make bouillabaisse.  Though it’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, the reverse operation is impossible.  So allowing Trump to turn on the blender while waiting for an answer about the soup decides the case.  Literally, I think that is what the administration has been doing since January 20th, but in particular in this case, turning on the blender and the lower court saying, like, “No, no, no.  You can’t do that.  We have to decide if you can make the soup.”  And the Supreme Court saying, “Go ahead and make the soup.”

Which, you know, is probably the best summary of the situation I’ve heard thus far.

They also have a guest, Rachel Barkow, who wrote a book about mass incarceration.  What she focusses on are several court cases where the Supreme Court decided—possibly improperly—to enable mass incarceration by curtailing liberties that should be enshrined in our Constitution.  And, while she doesn’t state this explicitly, what this discussion made me ponder was this:  We’ve managed to make imprisoning people easy (and profitable), so sending people to prison is a default outcome of most of our court cases.  But if prisons were difficult and/or expensive, we’d probably find other options.  It really makes you believe that we could have been better if it weren’t for a few errant Supreme Court cases, and then perhaps you can make the jump to: we still can be better, if we work at it.

And that’s about all the hope I can muster for you this week.  Maybe next time there’ll be more.