So many of America’s problems can be attributed to our twin obsessions with cars and guns, but nothing underscores it quite as thoroughly as recent news about John Kuczwanski, a former chief of staff for a GOP state senator and Florida government official. Five years after being arrested for brandishing a handgun during a road rage incident outside of a Tallahassee Circle K, he got into another fight at the same intersection. This time, after ramming his BMW into a Prius, he pulled his gun and fired. He missed. The other driver, also armed, did not.
Of course America, and in particular the Florida GOP, will not learn from this. We build our environment for cars, and cut funding for transit because it’s for people of color, so we get too many cars. We forgive drivers for outrageous behavior and so cultivate road rage. And of course, we let just about anyone have a handgun even when they’ve demonstrated clearly that they should not. If not for the pathological policies Kuczwanski and his employers advocated and enacted, he might be alive today.
Recommended Reading/Listening
In Wired: A Grand Theory of Buying Stuff
A telling anecdote about how we buy things, and buy things for our things, and suddenly we have too many things and we haven’t achieved what we originally set out to do. In the case of author’s anecdote, the extra things are a digital drum pad and all the accessories. “The upshot of all this is that I have absolutely no musical talent… I am not a musician. I am a systems administrator for my digital audio workstation. There will be no SoundCloud for me.” But dialing back the accessories, and listening more carefully, he begins to gain a greater appreciation for drummers and producers, and an understanding of how music is made and heard.
Song pairing: Tonight I’m Gonna Give the Drummer Some, by Amy Rigby. (“He’s cute, if a middle-aged man can be described as cute…”)
In TNR: The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right
The energy in young right-wingers is leaning into less voting, more whiteness, less corporate influence, more Latin Mass, a familiar set of herrenvolk-democracy policies. “The New Right wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps.”
Song pairing: VBS (Vacation Bible School), by Lucy Dacus. (“When I tell you you were born and you are here for a reason / You are not convinced the reason is a good one“)
On Substack: America’s Top Environmental Groups Have Lost the Plot on Climate Change
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith brings in a guest to cover the reasons groups like the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement are opposing things like efforts to bring green electricity to cities and efficient mass transit. “Conservation is a conservative impulse, but right now, the climate threat calls for sweeping changes to our physical environment. Our best shot at mitigating the impact of climate change is to electrify every process in our economy as quickly as possible.”
Song Pairing: A punk cover of Little Boxes, because the genre and the song were once critiques of conformity and are now wielded in opposition to everything new and different.
Joy
Bunny x Snowman.
Turn the sound on to hear this kitten learn about gravity (he’s fine).
This cat bopping to New Order.
Secretly Ironic 