Conservatives love to say that liberals try to make everything about race. But it seems to me that they have an entire vocabulary of racial codewords that they may not even realize they’re using. “Suburban” always means “white.” “Urban” always means black and poor. “Hardworking” always means white and rich. “Working class” always means white and middle-income. White people with jobs who live in the city? Elitists. Black people who live in the suburbs and work in kitchens or factories? Not really mentioned.
This is true of sports commentary, as well (For a look at how sports commentary and right-wing media are basically drawing from the same well, check out this article by the founder of Deadspin): Black athletes are praised for their instincts, their physicality, their natural talent. White athletes get praised for their smarts, their hard work, their approachable personality, their looks.
And speaking of national politics… it ain’t good. Notable scholars are calling Mitch McConnell “the gravedigger of American Democracy.” And as we all know, and should have known for some time, moderate Republicans cannot save us.
┳┻| ┻┳| psst! ┳┻| ┻┳| want some GOP ┳┻| moderates? ┻┳| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┳┻| _ ┻┳| •.•) There aren’t any. ┳┻|⊂ﾉ They just like ┻┳| attention. ┳┻| ┻┳|
— Ed Boo-mila (@gin_and_tacos) October 5, 2018
Our only hope is that they’re as incompetent as they are evil.
Rep. Jim Renacci, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, defended flying in a strip-club owner’s private plane to a meeting earlier this week with faith leaders. As one does. https://t.co/RWAEFp8Y2K
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) October 6, 2018
I’m taking Economics 101 here are my hot economics takes Despite it not being part of my homework, I’m slogging my way through the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s 2018 report titled “Power, Platforms, and the Free Trade Delusion.” It’s very dense. It may make more sense after the macroeconomics portion of the course. But the introduction is pretty sharp:
[In] the end, social and political actions – in the form of rules, norms and policies – will determine how the future unfolds. In this respect, the digital revolution has the misfortune of unfolding in a neo-liberal era. Over the last four decades, a mixture of financial chicanery, unrestrained corporate power and economic austerity has shredded the social contract that emerged after the Second World War and replaced it with a different set of rules, norms and policies, at the national, regional and international levels. This has enabled capital – whether tangible or intangible, long-term or short-term, industrial or financial – to escape from regulatory oversight, expand into new areas of profit-making and restrict the influence of policymakers over how business is done. This agenda has co-opted a vision of an interconnected digital world, free from artificial boundaries to the flow of information, lending a sense of technological euphoria to a belief in its own inevitability and immutability. Big business has responded by turning the mining and processing of data into a rent-seeking cornucopia
Art/Transit Criticism Twitter
All of the mid-century paintings in the Whitney that were supposed to convey the crushing alienation of modern life now look like utopias where there were jobs and functioning infrastructure.
Sure, they’re filled with unnameable dread, but at least they’re not stuck on the platform for the third time this week because a Doritos bag caught on fire on the tracks. @AdrianChen, Nov 22, 2017
If you thought Pizzagate was absurd, just wait til you hear about QAnon. It’s everywhere. It’s nonsense. The short summary is that people think that almost everyone except Trump is a pedophile. They seem to be divided on whether Mueller is in league with the pedos, or actually working with Trump to use the Russia investigation as a cover to prove that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually trafficking child sex slaves in collaboration with Chrissy Teigen. I’m not linking to any of it, but Roseanne Barr is a serious believer in the meshugas.
… The “campus free speech” crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech — all of the above speakers fit that bill — in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they’re trolling. When students react by protesting or disrupting the event, the conservatives use it as proof that there’s real intolerance for conservative ideas.
Much-delayed hatchet jobs
It’s been a while since I insulted David Brooks in this newsletter, so let’s reminisce about the time that America’s greatest diagnostician of moral decay left his wife for his much-younger assistant. And their wedding registry was public. And they asked for very, very, very expensive designer tableware.
I have spent the last eight months at a special sanitarium for people who read too many bad Op-Eds. There were mountains, a lake. It was peaceful there.
Cultivating joy
Roughly 100 goats escaped from a goat-rental service and went to frolic in suburban yards. (Also, you can rent goats. Mostly for weed control, but also because they’re hilarious.) These cats. This dad.
This weekend I mentioned in passing that “everyone knows the phrase States’ Rights is a dog whistle.” And one of my friends replied “I didn’t know that.”
I guess that’s the point of a dog whistle. Not everyone knows the whole story. It’s a sign only to the initiates. As an anonymous right-wing messageboard strategist explains: “Leftists will recognize dog whistles and know we’re crypto, but normies won’t listen to them.”
But I was still surprised to hear someone say they didn’t recognize that one. Look up Dog-Whistle Politics on Wikipedia: “States’ Rights” is the canonical example.
In 1980, Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, near Philadelphia Mississippi, a town famous as the site of several civil-rights-related murders in 1964. So, how did he open his campaign? Praise of states’ rights. This was as clear a signal as possible to anyone who knew anything. Newspapers condemned it. I mean, sure, liberal out of touch coastal elite newspapers, but the New York Times is still a national newspaper. This was a longstanding pro-segregation slogan, used in a major political speech, in a town known for bloody battles over segregation and civil rights.
The use of racist dog-whistles is a deliberate Republican strategy, famously described by Reagan adviser Lee Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968, you can’t say “n*****” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”
I thought people knew this. I thought it was obvious. But I think I have just been blind to how effective that dog-whistle really is. Because somehow, after all that, people think the Republican party doesn’t have anything to do with racism, even though Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump all swept to office on tides of racism. It was most explicit for Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, and somewhat less so for the Bush boys. But not that much less.
David Brooks has a pretty decent column, for once, in the Times today. He discusses Trump’s strange lack of “theory of mind” and notes that the world is over-analyzing his work.
But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.
…
We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.
On Twitter I talked about “theory of mind,” a basic capacity humans develop around the age of 2 or 3 to recognize that other people are independent agents, distinct minds, with their own beliefs, desires, fears, etc. We learn to “read” behaviors as evidence of those internal states.
…
Much of the dialogue around him, the journalism and analysis, even the statements of his own surrogates, amounts to a desperate attempt to construct a Theory of Trump, to explain what he does and says through some story about his long-term goals and beliefs.
…
But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?
It's hard to remember now, but in the 70s and 80s, whiskey was the outdated old man drink, the sort of thing squares and hillbillies drank. It started to come back a little in the 90s with the single-malt Scotch trend, but it wasn't really until the 2000s that American whiskeys became fashionable again. It's only in this decade that rye has come into its own; it hadn't really been a major factor in the industry since before Prohibition.
Which is something of a long-winded introduction to the fact that Southern Comfort is returning whiskey as an ingredient to its liqueur, instead of "grain neutral spirit." The New York Times covers this marketing update as though it's an interesting development in the product.
It's not.
First off, the definition of whiskey is flexible enough that there's precious little difference between the two. It's not "straight bourbon" they're adding to the mix – it's just unaged white dog whiskey, grain spirits that are only slightly less purified than what they'd been using before. The new SoCo will be essentially the same product, but with whiskey-soaked brand appeal.
Not only is this just a brand update, it's actually way behind the trend. Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey, following a 2007 rebranding that moved it out of the lineup of Dr. McGillicuddy's schnapps, has completely supplanted Southern Comfort as the leader in the "underage binge-drinking vomit instigator" product category. They're playing catch-up a decade late with this product.
The Times article is by Robert Simonson, filling in for Eric Asimov's usual wine column this week. That may explain why it's such a low-effort regurgitation of a press release. It's basically written by the only person quoted – Kevin Richards, Senior Marketing Director for Southern Comfort. Did Simonson talk to a bartender anywhere? Did he taste both versions of the liqueur? No. This is lazy, lazy writing.
That doesn't exactly matter for something as trivial as a beverage marketed primarily at undergraduates.
But if I can't trust the Times to do a decent job reporting on a trivial subject I happen to know about, how do I know they're doing a good job on important things?
They've certainly been dropping the ball in the opinion section. They published two op-eds by people from one of those bogus "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" without disclosing that they are, in fact, paid employees of an operation that tricks women into thinking they're getting healthcare when they're actually getting some prayers and condescension. I mean, the fact that Ross Douthat still has a job is appalling.
Back in college I took a course on poetry of the Spanish Civil War. To someone from outside academia, that probably sounds irrelevant. But there was some great writing during that time. We also read some pretty terrible poetry, especially the lyric mash notes to Franco.
You can pretty much guess how it’s going to go. It calls Obama an illegitimate tyrant, specifically calls out academic elitism and women being uppity, and describes a strong immigration policy as necessary:
Lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm,
Should threaten our lives and our nation deform.
Because everyone knows that racism goes better in rhyming couplets.
So, it’s not a surprise that it’s a pretty terrible poem. And it’s probably not a surprise that this is not the first poem the author has written for Trump. The one congratulating him on his election describes liberals as “men of blood with fists for necks” led by a “feral queen.”
The author is former seminarian Joseph Charles MacKenzie. He’s a traditional Catholic and traditional lyric poet. He makes sure you’re clear on the traditional part. Make poetry rhyme again, make students read the classics in the original Greek.
What may surprise you, however, is that at the bottom of the page, where he promotes his book of sonnets (of course, sonnets):
You have boycotted modernist so-called “poetry” for over half a century, but arrogant publishers have ignored your rejection of pseudo-intellectual nonsense in chopped-up prose.
Backward old elites have censored traditional lyric poetry because it clashes with their Marxist-totalitarian world view. The result has been complete censorship of traditional lyric verse and the loss of the ability to produce it.
The only solution to the crisis is the triumphant appearance of Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s Sonnets for Christ the King, the first significant body of traditional lyric verse produced since the poems of W.B. Yeats and Charles Péguy.
Let’s unpack this. He thinks that there’s a vast audience of people pining for old-fashioned poems, but because of a Marxist academic conspiracy, his rhyming couplets are being repressed. That’s certainly a more comforting thought than the fact that nobody wants to read his poetry because it’s terrible, and the whole “Marxist academics” thing is a standard trope on the right that hardly bears examination or thought.
What truly gets me is the last bit: Comparing his sonnets (of course, sonnets about Jesus, because traditional Catholic poet) to Yeats and Péguy.
Comparing yourself to Yeats is hubris, which makes sense because MacKenzie already thinks his poetry is suppressed, not ignored.
Comparing himself to the early-20th Century French poet Péguy is a little stranger. I wasn’t familiar with him, but I looked him up on Wikipedia and the guy is apparently pretty well-known in France and was a favorite of DeGaulle, and so forth. However, his best-known work is free verse, which doesn’t strike me as all that traditional.
Wait, there it is:
Benito Mussolini referred to Péguy as a “source” for Fascism… Robert Brasillach praised Péguy as a “French National Socialist”, and his sons Pierre and Marcel wrote that their father was an inspiration for Vichy’s National Revolution ideology and “above all, a racist.”
So, there you go. Lyric mash notes to fascism. Still a thing.
Rain-driven to the surface
Then caught out overnight
In the morning their frozen bodies shine
Rimed in platinum
Scattered along the path
Like discarded jewels
While I’m fussing over tile and cabinetry (did you know there’s such a thing as GOLD GROUT?)
… here’s something to actually think about, on memory and justice and society and all the big things:
In liberal democracies, and especially in this one, there are so many distractions and so many options and so much media that the corrosive effects of the loss of the power of memory can elude anyone’s notice until something important comes apart all at once….
We knew from our long involvement in the Middle East where the sources of the rage were. We forgot. We knew from Vietnam the perils of involving the country in a land war in Asia. We forgot. We knew from Nuremberg and from Tokyo what were war crimes and what were not. We forgot that we had virtually invented the concept of a war crime. We forgot. In all cases, we forgot because we chose to forget. We chose to believe that forgetting gave us real power and that memory made us weak. We even forgot how well we knew that was a lie.
Secretly Ironic 