John Rachal's Blog

His presidency began with Trump’s claims of “American carnage,” and it ends with Trump’s incitement of American carnage. His people—at least those who stormed the Capitol and their sympathizers—are cultists, idol worshippers, idolaters of their chosen Messiah, with Him as the closest thing they will have to a religion. They are slaves to their cult leader and slaves to an ideology, incapable of critical thought, dupes for fairy tales and fantasy. As cultists, they are only drawn to a man who is fundamentally aberrant. It is impossible to imagine their being drawn to a Bush or a Romney or a McCain; they may vote for such men if they vote at all, but only because of their hatred for the mainstream media, those they see as the undeserving elite, and the Other. Their interest in actual politics is negligible. Bush, Romney, and McCain are not aberrant; they fit within political norms and thus have none of the appeal necessary for a true worshipper. The stormers’ interest in politics is limited to their grievance, their fear of marginality, and their sense of loss, and thus they are easy targets for a demagogue who can stoke those grievances and fears with lies, norm-breaking, and self-proclaimed deification. Trumpism is, for them, long-awaited, and he their savior. They are called to a Great Awakening, making them hallowed participants in a quasi-religious movement, where violence, as with ISIS, is within the pale. They flatter themselves as 1776-style patriots, but they are its enemies, and their waving of American flags an abomination. There is no truth, however obvious, that they are capable of accepting if it conflicts with their ideology; and no fantasy, however absurd, that they are capable of rejecting if it fits that ideology. Trump’s appeal is to the long-languishing demons hidden in the dark recesses of the American soul. With him, they crawled and slithered to the surface, and January 6th was their greatest coming-out party to date. He called them forth, and they came.

It is worth noting that Roman Emperor Caligula, whom historian Mike Duncan called both psychotic and the worst of the Roman emperors, declared himself to be a god, not to mention committing many, many acts of murderous depravity. He also lasted only four years. Even if some might quibble about the worst Roman emperor, given the many candidates, it is difficult to imagine any present or future academic historians having any trouble at all coming to a quick consensus as to who the worst American president was—at least as of 2021. The Republican party has gone from the acknowledged best president—Lincoln—to the soon-to-be, indeed already, acknowledged worst president—Donald Trump.

One other historical parallel. Now, two days afterward, we are hearing preposterous claims by those on the neo-Nazi right that the rioters were really antifa dressed up as Trump supporters. How they say that with a straight face is almost amusing. In 1939, Germans dressed as Polish soldiers “attacked” border positions in Germany, and left numerous dead bodies of concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers, all to give a justification for the German invasion of Poland. So the world was supposed to believe that those actual Germans were “really” Polish invaders, just like those actual neo-Nazi Trumpers were “really” antifa.

Of the six senators voting even after the riot for the objections to the vote in Arizona, only one (Marshall of Kansas) was outside the South. Those infamous five include, unsurprisingly, Mississippi’s Cindi Hyde-Smith, an epic non-entity. So here are six senators, and a majority of House Republicans, quite content to publicly take a stand that opposes democracy. They want the will of the majority of voters in Arizona and five other states simply thrown out in favor of the guy they wish had won. Conservative George Will has it right: Senators Cruz and Hawley, both hoping to be Trump 2.0 in 2024, should be ostracized and ignored, permanently, and should have a scarlet S emblazoned on their coats: Seditionist. 

One-hundred-forty House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, one president, and roughly one-third of American voters have declared that their loyalty to Donald Trump and his assault on American democracy exceeds their loyalty to the country they claim to defend. There have been some sixty lawsuits challenging the election results, all of which have been frivolous, lacking a scintilla of evidence, and thus dismissed. What those court challenges have succeeded in, however, is ramping up the outrage and paranoia of the Gullibles and the radical far right. These lawmakers are set to challenge the electoral votes as they are counted on January 6, claiming that as many as six states that Trump lost have participated in or succumbed to electoral fraud by declaring, truthfully, that their voters elected Joe Biden. The objectors’ claims of voter fraud are evidence-free; they want Trump to have won, so therefore he did win. Never mind that some down-ballot Republicans did win in those states; were those wins also thus fraudulent? Never mind that not one single case of alleged fraud was brought before the judiciary in states Trump actually won. Fraud only could have occurred in states he lost.

If these 140 House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, and Trump himself were to have their way, we as a nation would be a banana republic where elections are a charade for totalitarian rulers, a proto-fascist country where democracy is the fig leaf we use to cover our despotism. Mimicking other countries pretending to democracy and submission to majority will, we could call ourselves The Democratic Republic of the United States of America or The People’s Republic of the USA. The mantra of the GOP would be—indeed, may already be—“Power is all that matters; if it can be achieved by honest democratic means, wonderful. If it must be achieved by corrupt and unscrupulous means, then corrupt and unscrupulous means will be used—but always under the cover of ‘democracy.’” 

But those 140, and those 13, the so-called “sedition caucus,” should consider the consequences of their sedition. Will they slink to their dens, or will they be honored among the Trump adorers? What they prove by their very existence is how fragile our democracy is at this moment (even aside from its structural flaws, like the Electoral College, for starters), and possibly for an indeterminate future. At the very best, what can be said of them is that they have a high degree of moral flexibility. At worst, they are fascistic conspiracy fantasy-mongers. Ted Cruz should win two Academy Awards, one for hypocrisy and one for sycophancy. What happened to the Cruz who called Trump a “pathological liar” then, but leads the charge for overturning an American democratic and fair election now? Could even one of these people (who all, no doubt, purport to be good Christians) put a hand on the Bible in the privacy of their own home and say, “I truly believe Trump won”? Is it just their cowardly fear of balking Trump and alienating the trumpaholics, or is it that they’re hoping to emerge as Trump 2.0 themselves? Which ones aspire in 2024 to a strongman grab for power built on national resentment and chaos that they themselves, along with Trump, have inflicted on us? Given these options, let’s hope for mere cowardice.

In the fevered minds of Trump and the forever-Trumpers, his instantly infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is conceived as an Alamo-like stand for electoral integrity and justice. Rational people, however, saw immediately that that way madness lies. The call was the perfect analogue and the domestic equivalent of the Ukraine call—a mobster intimidating someone he regards as an underling. My question, aside from the call’s legal implications, is whether Trump actually now believes his claims of fraud, and thus proves himself beyond any sliver of doubt to be a deluded psychopath who, if we were not days away from the end of his presidency, should be removed under the 25th amendment; or is he simply practicing his lifelong skills of lying and bullying, and thus, if time allowed, should be removed through an impeachment conviction? Or is it both? We know he’s always been a liar and a bully, but neither of those precludes the possibility that he is quite mad. I’ve listened to enough of the tape to conclude that he could actually believe his assertions of fraud. His grandiose claims that he couldn’t possibly have lost Georgia have a ring of delusional self-deception. His unquestionable hubris—or in today’s lingo, his psychopathology—and his possible madness are of such an enormous scale that maybe he believes his own fantasies, and is better suited to join the frantic screamers in yesteryear’s asylum at Bedlam than the convicted inmates of Attica.

The following was written before the election.

The fellow whom we hired to cut some trees for us  generously dropped by a second time since we changed our minds about what needed to come down. Mr. Michaels is probably my age, good ol’ boy, wearing bib overalls, had the gentlest voice, and for all the world could have been your decent country boy grandpa. Deep in the Mississippi Bible Belt, he is, no doubt, a good churchgoer, possibly a deacon, and a fine family man, beloved by his daughters. He’s also wearing the same Trump 2020 hat he was wearing a few weeks ago. I ignored it then and hoped to ignore it today. But somehow the driveway conversation drifted to Montana, and he mentioned going there earlier this year and he and his family walk right into a restaurant not wearing masks. Here we go. Implying that the restaurant staff realize the silliness of masks, he makes clear that nobody says a word. Masks don’t work at all, he informs my wife and me, stuff is just too small to be blocked by a mask, and people pushing masks are just trying to take down our president. My wife and I are both trying to just get him on his way, but like a moth to the flame, I say, “Well, we’re on the other side of that”; he shrugs. Then, apropos of the political divide, he says, “I just hate all the lies.” Val said my mouth opened, presumably aghast, but just in case I was about to rebut, she said, sotto voce, “let it go.” I said, trying to shuffle him off as quickly as possible, “OK, we’ll see you next week.”

He hates all the lies? It was a revelation, though not without its humor. Can there be any more titanic irony than those words spilling from a Trump man? Those like me who see Donald Trump as the most consummate liar—indeed, gifted liar, if judged by the number of his marks—ever to even run for the presidency are blown back on their heels to discover that those on the right wing consider them to be the ones spewing daily mendacities. Trump, Fox News, social media, anti-deep state warriors, and conspiracy fantasists nationwide have turned truth on its head, turned the world upside down. The true believers, rejecting reality as too mundane and simplistic, knowingly and unknowingly spin fantasies and magical thinking, speak of “alternate facts,” and assault truth as fake news. According to The Washington Post, Trump has made over 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office. His demagoguery as president is unparalleled, and even his demonstrable lies fall on the true believers like refreshing summer rain on the fertile soil of their grievance and discontent. I told Val that Mr. Michaels probably went home and said, “Martha, I had these two customers today that were damned Democrats, and they were white too! I betcha they thought our president was a liar!” And just today Trump was re-spewing the lie about the Democrats dropping “under God” from the pledge at their convention. At least until this president, you at least had to tell plausible lies. Now you can say that the Democrats have been negotiating with the Martians and the Venusians to take over the world so that they can fully establish their Satan-worshiping, pedophiliac, child-eating caliphate. Through the megaphone of Fox News, Facebook, and creepy social media sites and shares, the Mr. Michaels of the world lap it up and conclude, “Well damn! So they are doing it! I was wondering if they were doing that!” 

I know I’ve been polarized. I know the Mr. Michaels of the country believe their narratives as strongly as I do mine. So could we both be equally wrong, or worse, could they be right and I be wrong? I take some solace—in fact, a lot of solace—in the fact that I have a pretty good education; I read things other than Facebook memes and shares; intelligent people, including a few in the GOP or with conservative points of view, agree with me on Trump and his enablers; I have some capacity for critical thinking; indeed, I entertain the possibility that I could be wrong, or at least partly wrong. So, even recognizing this clash between the ideologies of Trump et al. and everyone else from Lincoln Project conservatives to Sanders left-enders, I wonder how far off base I am to see parallels between Germany of the 30s and Trump’s America, and specifically the mind of Trump himself and the despotism of Putin of Russia and Xi of China, obviously; but also Orban of Hungary, Bolsonaro of Brazil, Duterte of the Philippines, Lukasovic of Belarus, and a few dozen or more autocrats scattered over the planet.

You can tell most of what you need to know about a person by whom he admires. I don’t mean lip-service admiration like Trump pretends to have for Lincoln, or some Christians for Jesus, but who that person actually admires in wishing and trying to emulate. And if that little aphorism is right, then the gang of people Trump admires and truckles to bodes terribly for his continuing leadership of the country in a qualitatively different way from that of Romney, McCain, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Those Republicans’ differences from me and others like me were essentially policy differences, which can of course be profound and have moral implications. But their views were still within the elastic bounds of American political discourse. Trump’s vision of America is categorically different; he admires and wants to be like those other guys, the ones who have or want lifetime presidencies, earned through the charade of “democratic elections,” and whose hands rest on all the levers of their nations’ power. Trump neither respects democracy (it’s “rigged”–but only if he loses), nor separation of powers (like an independent judiciary), nor American institutions, from a free press (“enemy of the people”) to inspectors general. Those institutions are there to serve him, to be loyal to him. This is new in our country; there is no previous president who has so boldly taken steps toward totalitarianism and about whom such things are so widely said and thought. Yet almost half of America thinks he is not only within those elastic bounds, but if he exceeds them it is only because he indeed is the chosen one, he is the representative and implementer of American greatness. Simultaneously they think that the collective rest of the country is, at best, hopelessly naive and deluded; or, at worst, the dark knight of moral degeneracy, the perpetrator of squalid lies, the anti-Christ mocking American greatness. Whether Trump himself actually sees us in that way or not is almost beside the point. For him the critical point is simply that we are the hated enemy, standing in the way of his idealized self-image, self-aggrandizement, power, and Messiah-ship.

If it were just him it would be bad enough, but it is also all the GOP supporters who think this is just politics as usual, not a dangerously deviant breakaway from our traditional Democrat and Republican norms and values, both constitutional and moral. The Gullibles like Mr. Michaels and 60% of the voters of Mississippi have simply joined a cult, with outstretched raised arms in a sieg heil salute; the Accomplices like Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have simply collaborated and sacrificed their integrity and pretend he’s not really all that bad—either succumbing to an ends-justify-the-means rationalization like many evangelicals have or selling their souls for some kind of personal advantage like Vice-President Mike Pence or some of the ultra wealthy. Is it a bridge too far to say that this election is the greatest test of our democracy since the Civil War? No. Not at all.

The broadcast journalists are making an extra effort to show how objective they are by wishing the president a speedy recovery and using words like sad and concern. I certainly respect the impetus for them to do so, whether from a personal ethical stance or from a journalistic need to seem even-handed and to show that their professionalism is such that they can rise above their personal feelings of dislike for his policies, corruption, and temperament. And they certainly know that any snarky comment like what I am about to say would cast them in a bad light and lend credence to right-wing charges of bias. I just wish they could not say such things at all and just report the situation as developments occur. It’s hard to imagine Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity wishing Joe Biden a speedy recovery if the shoe were on the other foot. Nor do I remember a lot of conservative condolences and well wishes when Hillary had a week-long stretch of pneumonia in the 2016 race, despite the fact that to hear the right-wing journalists spin it, her survival was sufficiently in doubt that she needed to get out of the race. Where were Tucker’s and Sean’s sweet words of well-wishing then?

Here’s my take. Choices have consequences. If you choose to jump out of a plane without a parachute, Mother Nature will insure that certain consequences result. If you choose to jump out of a plane with a parachute, you are a lot more likely to avoid those consequences. Mr. President, you chose not to wear a mask and never practiced social distancing. You downplayed those behaviors and even mocked Biden for practicing them. By ignoring and even disparaging those practices, you politicized them and contributed—not solely caused but definitely contributed—to the deaths of thousands of others. These are Mother Nature’s consequences for that. As for yourself, you made your bed, now you must lie in it (the double entendre not exactly intended, but if the shoe fits…). You are trying to kill Obamacare, with not even a hint of a replacement plan. That will mean that millions of Americans will lose health insurance, and some will die unnecessarily because of that. So if I am to choose between your good health and the thousands who have already gotten sick or died partly because of your covid response, well I’ve got to go with the greatest good for the greatest number. And if I have to choose between your good health and the thousands who may unnecessarily die because you and your Supreme Court will kill The Affordable Care Act, same call. Maybe not all political choices have consequences. Maybe not all moral choices do either. You’ve certainly managed to get away with a lot. But when you make bad decisions about Mother Nature, there’s a high probability that those choices will have consequences.

The title quote is from Mike Duncan, historian of Rome, in a droll reference to Julius Caesar

Having railed against the electoral college for about twenty-five years—the rough equivalent of my screaming some private grievance across the solar system to the good citizens of Neptune—I spent an afternoon calculating what would be the theoretical lowest percentage of the popular vote necessary to win a presidential election. Armed with the eligible voter population of each state, the electoral votes of each state, the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win the election (270), and a calculator, I selected a collection of less populated states and the District of Columbia whose electoral votes would add up to 270, divided the eligible voter population of each of those states in half, and added one single vote for each state, which would tip all of that state’s electoral votes to a single candidate (Maine and Nebraska, which both divide their electoral votes, being exceptions—a solution to the electoral college problem that I proposed in an earlier blog, presuming all states did so). I then added those states’ eligible half populations plus those critical single extra votes, that is, 50% plus one vote for each state, to get the lowest eligible total population necessary to yield 270 electoral votes. Then I took that number and divided it by the total eligible voting population of the United States and thus arrived at the minimum number of voters necessary to elect a president. Never mind that a friend I consulted to confirm the legitimacy of my method looked it up on the internet and immediately found that some other fellow had done almost the same thing, using instead the number of actual voters from each state in the last election, and came up with about the same number as I did within a percent or so. So much for my afternoon of superfluous labor.

The percentage of the popular vote necessary to win an American presidential election was astonishingly and alarmingly low: 22%. It varied somewhat by which states you chose; at first, I used random states, and got 27%, but then I restricted the calculation to lower population states and got the 22%. I don’t pretend to explain that difference, but there you go. So even in a two-candidate race, a person could win the presidency with less than a quarter of the popular vote. An acquaintance dismissively told me that that would never happen, given the near impossibility of the 50% plus one vote requirement. My response to her was that of course that would never happen. But if the presidency could technically be won with 22% of the popular vote to an opponent’s 78%, just consider how much more likely it would be to win it with 49% to an opponent’s 51%. Indeed Trump won with 46.1% to Clinton’s 48.2%.

Five times in our history the presidency has gone to the person with fewer popular votes, defying the very definition of democracy. One out of nine presidents received less votes than his opponent. That certainly is the most egregious, indeed outrageous, reason to change the way the Electoral College works: majority rule is the sine qua non of democracy. But there are other reasons. The current Electoral College means that Democrats’ votes in solidly Republican states and Republicans’ votes in solidly Democratic states do not count for anything in the actual outcome, since that outcome is determined by the electoral votes rather than the popular vote. It means that people’s votes in “battleground” states, and even in individual precincts within those states, are dramatically more important than other people’s votes. Instead of looking at the totality of the popular vote, we must look at sometimes minuscule and potentially litigable margins in a few selected states. For example Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, but lost three battleground states—and thus the Electoral College and the presidency—by a collective 77,744 votes in those three states. Those folks’ near 78 thousand votes were worth more than those other folks’ 2.86 million votes. Put another way, each of those 78 thousand voters was worth thirty-seven of those 2.86 million voters; or yet another way, the former’s votes were thirty-seven times as important as the latter’s.

It also means that candidates largely ignore states they know they will win or lose in order to concentrate on the battleground states, where they know those 78 thousand votes could make all the difference. Vladimir Putin knows this also, so rather than waste his cyber resources on all fifty states to influence the election, he conveniently can sow his seed mostly in the fertile fields of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and eight or nine other purple states.

The organization Common Cause has entered the lists against the Electoral College. Their solution is to require that once the popular vote is known, all electors must cast their votes for the winner, effectively keeping the Electoral College and avoiding a constitutional amendment to eliminate it, and giving all electoral votes to the popular vote winner. Rather than being determinative, the Electoral College would merely rubber stamp the popular vote. This is more elegant than my original solution—splitting the electoral vote for each state—by essentially slicing the Gordian knot in half rather than trying and failing to untangle it. Republicans will oppose any change, since the status quo somehow leans Republican, and that for them is more important than majority rule. In fact, in view of voter suppression efforts, majority rule is the enemy to them, except when they are in the majority. But even with a Democratic Senate, House, and presidency, I wonder if there is the will to make “American democracy” a valid term.

The following post originally appeared on my Facebook page and is slightly amended here. The title quote is the question lawyer Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy during the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings in June of 1954.

I have tried over the last few years to keep my FB page a politics-free zone concerning my own political commentary, preferring to relegate it to an unvisited blog. However in the Oscar Wilde tradition of being able to resist anything except temptation, I confess to occasionally commenting on others’ political posts, but I well know that the earth will continue to turn without panting to hear my political bon mots. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s attack on military personnel as “losers” and “suckers” is so profoundly offensive and so self-evidently disqualifying for a pretender to commander-in-chief that my personal disgust at this despicable man is no longer containable, and so I will speak here for my father, a career U.S. Marine serving in the Pacific in World War II, dying at 36 of cancer when I was three.

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in TheAtlantic.com, he relies on six separate anonymous sources (presumably some sources for some statements and other sources for other statements) who confirmed that Trump used those words in describing military personnel, especially ones who were wounded, died, or were captured. Naturally Trump has denied it, mendacity being his first line of both offense and defense. If an article appeared saying that Ronald Reagan had said it, or that WW II veteran George H. W. Bush (whom Trump called a “loser” for allowing his plane to be shot down) had said it, or that his son George W. Bush had said it, we could all easily dismiss it as the ranting of a left-wing blogger, or maybe even a far right-wing blogger pining for a Trump. It would be better, of course, if Goldberg’s sources had spoken on the record. But for this president, it absolutely rings true. We know that he got a doctor to keep him from military service saying that he had bone spurs in his feet. We know from an interview with smut-meister Howard Stern in the late 1990s that he joked that vaginas were “potential landmines” and thus avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.” We know he had an Iago-like envy of John McCain and disparaged him publicly by saying “I like people who didn’t get captured.” Now, thanks to Goldberg’s article and his sources, we know that Trump was outraged that flags were being flown at half-mast for McCain’s funeral: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he complained to aides.

On Memorial Day in 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with Marine four star General John Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan at age 29 and is buried at Arlington. According to Goldberg’s sources knowledgeable about the visit, Trump and Kelly were standing beside the grave, and with astonishing lack of sensitivity or empathy, Trump said to Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” We also know that when Trump was in France in 2018, he cancelled a scheduled visit to the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at Belleau Wood—sacred ground to marines—and asked, according to Goldberg’s multiple sources with firsthand knowledge, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The private reasons not to go were the “losers” buried there and his unwillingness to get his hair wet. The publicly stated reason was that since it was raining the helicopter couldn’t fly and the Secret Service wouldn’t take him—two more lies. Also on the same trip, in a different conversation, he referred to the 1800 marines who died at Belleau Wood and are buried at the cemetery as “suckers” for getting killed. And finally, if one other Trumpian quote disdaining service to country and valorizing the unfettered pursuit of wealth is needed, there is this: After then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford gave a White House briefing, Trump told aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” The idea of service to country is alien to Trump. He seems to be constitutionally incapable of moral reflection, asking only what’s in it for him, meanwhile taking pride in being neither a sucker nor a loser by finding, all those years ago and with Daddy’s help, a way to evade the military service that would possibly have gotten him killed and would definitely have detoured him from his profits in commercial real estate.

My dad, another Arlington Cemetery resident, would quite possibly, perhaps probably, have been a good lifelong Republican, and we would likely have had a round or two of political arguments. But he was not a sucker, and he was not a loser, and the man who as Commander-in-Chief apparently thinks he was is not fit to spit-shine his boots or to clean a Nazi latrine.

The American idea, that individual freedom is the supreme virtue and the franchise is its mechanism, labors against our baser instincts. Our truth falls short of our aspirations, manifested in and hanging between our dueling polarities: Jefferson the Declaration author and Jefferson the slaveowner; religious freedom and hellfire fundamentalism; Harvard-Berkeley-Princeton brilliance and Americans incapable of finding the U.S. on a world map; American soldiers liberating Dachau and machine-gunning at My Lai; “Give me your tired” and razor wire border fences; the Trail of Tears and manifest destiny; Tuskegee airmen and Jim Crow; Trumpish wealth and Delta poverty; The Donna Reed Show and The Feminine Mystique; forty million without health insurance and elective cosmetic surgeries; capital punishment and “the better angels of our nature.” Sometimes the polarities are not Manichean goods and evils but merely profound tensions, like liberty vs. equality, pluribus vs. unum, Whitman bravado vs. Dickinson intimacy, Twainian Tom Sawyer innocence vs. Letters from the Earth embittered experience. Hegel-like, the theses and the antitheses clash—occasionally, as with Jefferson and Twain, in a single individual. Sometimes in those clashes a just synthesis is possible. But in others, helping those better angels to prevail is our enduring challenge.

I wrote the above in October of 2007 and entered it in a contest for the best essay on “the American Idea,” the winner to be published in The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic). The rules stipulated that the essay could not exceed 200 words, and I strained to meet that limit, and in fact mine was exactly 200 words. As it turned out, the winner was a person of some national recognition, and his essay tripled the limit, to my and I suspect other entrants’ considerable annoyance.