Guilty

Okay, another workday ending at  2 pm. I got a ride to the bus station, caught the 2:30 up to FedEx, missed it on its way back, so waited a half hour by visiting Aldi. Dark chocolate seemed called for. There was another layover between the 3 pm bus downtown and my bus home. I got here at 4 pm. I have to admit I felt like doing nothing.

Have I ever mentioned how riding the bus is very helpful for teaching patience? Well, it is.

I ripped through my email. Then I started working on this post at 6:46 PM.

Tomorrow, I need to take my pay stubs to the food stamps office. I do not see doing much writing tomorrow.

One subscription, so far. Which lets me know the people who I keep sending posts to are not really that interested in what I am writing. They have this in common with magazine editors.

I talked to my niece today. She rather likes "Love Stinks." I await KH's final word after Saturday.

CC's rummage sale started and then stopped due to heat.

That is pretty much all my news. I will watch The Blacklist at 8, then trip down to McClure's. I want to do some editing of my newsletter.

If you want to subscribe to my blog, go to the menu on the right hand side of your screen and select the second icon.

Whatever else is going on, why nota bigger stink about Study shows sharp increases in maternal deaths over two decades. I seem to recall Republicans claiming Obamacare would bring us a culture. It seems they were talking about themselves.

If you worship David Foster Wallace then I suggest Where be your jibes now by Patricia Lockwood and published by The London Review of Books. I cannto make the stretch, maybe I am too old. Yes, to Cormac McCarthy or Colson Whitehead or Don DeLillo or Michael Chabon, but I cannot wrap my head around Wallace. Sorry. Although, I did prefer his essays to his Infinite Jest.

Jack Hanson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Call of the Tribe for The Nation under the headline The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa is another I can take over David Foster Wallace.

Liberalism’s key virtue, Vargas Llosa insists, is the primacy it grants to the individual over the collective. The title of the volume, The Call of the Tribe, comes from Popper, who is perhaps most famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies, his critical-historical account of the intellectual origins of authoritarianism. This study, which attacks Plato, Hegel, and Marx for their “historicism” (Popper’s curiously misapplied term for social theory aimed at the prediction of future events), is still taken seriously by many liberals, despite a broad consensus that Popper’s thesis is based on a profound misreading of both political and intellectual history. Vargas Llosa cites him, along with Hayek and Berlin, as having had the greatest influence on his own political development, particularly in coming to understand the role of liberal society as the protector of the individual against the ever-present dangers of primitivism and irrationality, the anti-civilizational “call of the tribe.”

For Vargas Llosa, as for all of the thinkers he explores, the history of the 20th century is the fight of the liberal West against various manifestations of that call, which, in modern societies, takes the form of the mass or crowd. Citing Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, in which the emergence of the crowd in modern times is analyzed and warned against, Vargas Llosa writes: “The ‘mass’…is a group of individuals who have become deindividualized, who have stopped being freethinking human entities and have dissolved into an amalgam that thinks and acts for them, more through conditioned reflexes—emotions, instincts, passions—than through reason.” Crucially here, the liberal ideal is not a goal to be achieved but a neutral state to be protected. It is, in this telling, the natural form of human life, as opposed to the imposed structures of any other kind of social organization. Such naturalism is not merely a tendency but a main tenet of Vargas Llosa’s liberalism, and it accounts not only for the vehemence with which he attacks the thought that he believes threatens it (above all, the leftist positions he claims once to have held), but also for the means by which he defends what is now the mainstream—not to say hegemonic—social order.

***

I have to admit that by the end of The Call of the Tribe, I felt a kind of malaise, having read the litany of liberal virtue in so many iterations. Why, the question nagged, in its fourth (or, arguably, eighth) decade of nearly unchallenged global hegemony, do the representatives of Western liberalism feel the need to defend it against threats that have been for so long neutralized? And then it occurred to me that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup d’état, the death of Salvador Allende, and the beginning of a decades-long tyranny supported and praised by, among others, Hayek, Friedman, and the US government. Allende, as it happens, is one democratically elected socialist for whom Vargas Llosa, if this book is any indication, retains some sympathy, if only in retrospect. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the transition to a more fully liberal economy could have been accomplished more smoothly, less forcefully. Still, the Chicago Boys took over, the left was destroyed, and it is in the nature of stories to be retold, of rituals to be performed, of victories to be commemorated.

Sad that free-market economists found so much to like about dictators. 

I think Liberal Patriot has a pint with its Class Is Back in Session!, let's drop racial affirmative action for class affirmative action; it should get us to the same point. Of course, we may need to recognize that everything in this country is run by a bunch of white Ivy Leaguers.

Grants for arts in Indiana here. See, culture is not really dead in Indiana.

Summer flopbusters: why were Indiana Jones and The Flash box office bombs?:

What could have gone so disastrously wrong for these apparently safe bets? In the case of Dial of Destiny, it is almost as if depending on the sustained affection of an older, nostalgic and largely male audience, rather than including anything that could entice a younger, diverse demographic, has proved a flawed strategy.

***

The reasons for the crash of The Flash are less mysterious. You might blame the curse of the multiverse, which makes the exploits of different versions of the film’s hero seem less compelling than they would have been before this scenario started dominating everything everywhere all at once. Perhaps there is a reality in which the allure of the multiverse is not waning – but this isn’t it.

Just holler hey, Bo Diddley:

 sch 7:33