A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
My youngest nephew when we last spoke of the Democrats as socialists, and he was having no part of them. He, like his mother, is a Trumper. And now Trump is calling Democrats Communists. I wonder if that old world still holds many in its superstitious awe. Then I consider my youngest nephew. I wonder if he considers Trump's own warming to socialism.
Starting with Trump’s
surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10
percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is
approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in
U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from
orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive
government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.
That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.
Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s
early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid
its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly
unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and
mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden
administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Decades ago, a friend of mine who was a Marine captain often talked about the Turks and the Israeli armies as being on parity. He wondered what would be the outcome if they met. Too bad he died eleven years ago.
That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict
has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but
the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a
pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop
swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is
setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two
actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be
filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle
East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one.
The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the
Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In
sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power
in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in
the region.
Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in
this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire
Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears
to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a
vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike
contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded
by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures,
and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago,
Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the
region.
***
A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging
Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s
nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American
strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining
support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and
Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The
Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region,
partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd
democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so.
A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand,
could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.
***
The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and
splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably,
American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt,
generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash
for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with
capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out
Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has
the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly
historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region
that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity
returning to form.
Detached
from their ethnic and regional origins and attached to class-based
cultures, the British-American traditions Fischer identifies may endure,
as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants assimilate to multiple
melting pots along educational and occupational lines. Already in the
US, college-educated Hispanics tend to share the liberalism of other
college-educated Americans, reflecting the New England roots of today’s
academic culture, while working-class Hispanics are more socially
conservative, and many convert to evangelical Protestantism, with its
Scots-Irish influences.
Meanwhile,
the nativism of today’s “Heritage Americans” on the right is much more
inclusive than that of the Anglo-Protestant nativists of a century ago,
with Irish Americans and German Americans now considered “Heritage
Americans.”
I wonder if there is not a bit of the regionalism mentioned above in the regionalism of Soft Secession? (Sheila Kennedy).
Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump
administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie
disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and
local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated
responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and
local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states
have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public
property and data.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis
launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a
project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and
operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate
contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on
previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and
stockpiled abortion medication.
The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response
to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New
York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington
than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s
net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22
was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West
Virginia are net recipients.
Midterms are but 9, 10 weeks away. Maybe we end this silly season of American politics, maybe we can restore American greatness, but I think rejoicing needs await January if the Democrats take enough seats they take over Congress.
A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential
employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce.
Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and
introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce
in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war
against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted
scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that
intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon
graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.
A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by
banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for
emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and women considering
employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies
that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit
workers–male or female–from families still in their childbearing years.
I have been spending too much time doing research, trying to catch up with 30 years in a couple of weeks, but going down rocking. Reading and writing until my eyeballs feel like pinpricks and my brain is swirling. I started doing this thing of sleeping for a few hours and then getting back up to work.
Starting the day with new stuff from Ray Wylie Hubbard:
There has not been much to report. I did the group thing last Friday. The notes are around here somewhere. I think I will add them separately.
CC was found and she is alive.
I made it to church Sunday. The standing wore me out and I did not accomplish much else on Sunday. About the only other places I have been have been Payless or Walmart or the convenience store. I just came back from the convenience store.
Oh, I did laundry one day. Thursday or Friday. I talked to the niece when I did. Yes, it was Friday.
Another thing from last Friday: the phrase "all this useless beauty" got stuck in my head. It came to me as part of a song; one I could not remember. Then I tracked it down a few days later.
I have been keeping to Coke Zero or to one 2-liter of RC Cola.
We had heavy rains last night, after I called it a day.
I have decided that the Georgia Supreme Court writes tiresome opinions. It must be an institutional thing, since the same style persisted over 30 years,
The law is not a profession; it is an obsession, more like a disease of the brain.
Rock on.
I started this post days ago, meaning to write around these things.
There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.
This sounds more like me up to 2010:
Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.
***
Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”
The odd thing since I got home is that with my body falling apart I have not succumbed to the weariness and then the depression as I used to . I have learned to work around the problems and the pain. More importantly, I have medical insurance and a willingness to use that I did not have once upon a time. It is also good that I have done much to eliminate the stress, have learned to pace myself, and do not have a life where I have to keep throwing myself against a wall just to survive. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that has undertaken supervising my life does not understand that I have time only for writing, that is my job before I kick the bucket, my poor PO seems to think I am an isolated misanthrope when I feel like nothing of the kind.
When I was young, I was quite the reader of Heavy Metal. It seems to me now that that stopped in my thirties. Perhaps because the magazine became harder to find; perhaps because it no longer amazed me; perhaps because I turned to things that would make me money. Will it survive? Will its survival matter? Have our times gotten too shriveled with conservatism.
Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery(JSTOR Daily) forgeries are so much fun, yet this one on this day when lethargy has begun to overtake me again, I am troubled with the thought of history being undermined.
Both of De Caro’s copies of the Sidereus had a title page blemish that turned out to match perfectly a legitimate 1964 facsimile copy of the book. In that facsimile edition, a photo retoucher had failed to correct a paper blemish that the camera read as an ink dot … and here it was again four decades later, pointing to one of the sources of the De Caro fakes.
Detailing a trail of shady library exchanges; forgeries used to replace stolen originals; originals with added forged details to increase their value; and multiple forged copies (De Caro claimed he made five copies of Sidereus Nuncius), Wilding argues that the SNML “is merely the most sophisticated example we have so far detected in a long run of forgeries, whose primary aim was to stand in as surrogates for stolen copies.” Eager to disabuse people of rooting for clever forgers and the schadenfreude of seeing experts conned, Wilding writes, “these books are the product of organized crime” undermining history and the institutions that make history possible.
But is not history always undermining itself?
We found out today that Donald J. Trump has not even made an agreement to end his “excursion” into Iran, but only an agreement to make an agreement. How many will tout him as a genius? That he is the greatest dealmaker in history? Plenty.
And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.
***
Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?
Why It Matters(Sheila Kennedy) should leave depressed about the people but I think there are more who want to be better human beings, who think Trump and his ilk are not better human beings. Meanwhile, we live with their stupidity.
Gerrymandering in Indiana is worse than 95% of the U.S., new report says (wthr.com). The Indiana Supreme Court wrote in its last abortion case that if the people of Indiana have control of the legislature and can amend the constitution. Quaint legal fiction or a delusion, I leave to you, dear reader. I think it is BS. Indiana is in the hands of one political party that will not let the people decide for themselves.
Over time, a dominant party tends to fill watchdog roles — attorneys
general, inspectors general, ethics boards, judicial appointments — with
loyalists. These watchdogs may not be corrupt themselves, but they tend
to become less aggressive when it comes to investigating the ruling
party.
Long tenure also gives a party time to build patronage. Government
jobs, contracts, licenses, and permits flow disproportionately to allies
and donors. What begins as political favoritism can gradually morph
into corruption (Illinois and New Jersey are classic examples of states
where decades of machine politics have created cultures where
“transactional behavior” is just “how things work”).
In competitive states, scandals can be exploited by the opposition
party, but in states where the opposition is permanently weak, the
dominant party doesn’t have much incentive to police itself. The
discipline imposed by an external threat is missing.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Indiana Democrats are
running candidates in most of the districts thought to be “safe” for
Republicans, and the new Lincoln Party is also attempting to upend the
GOP’s lock on Hoosier governance. Perhaps the state is on the cusp of a
revived competitiveness–and a more competent and less corrupt
governance.
Reading American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present (Literary Hub) is a good antidote to my thinking that Trump is a giant hairball in our national history, it is time for us to just shut up and get off stage. He is that hairball. Diving back into legal history keeps reinforcing the idea that if you think there has been no systemic racism in this country then you need to look up the word thinking in the dictionary. It has been here, it lingers behind the mean-spirited cowardly parasites who think birth gives them status. What is also to be seen is how we have tried to follow our better angels. I thought in the following to see a glimpse for a better future.
Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism—the belief that America was born to lead—it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.
America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.
***
My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.
There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”
“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.
LaCroix concluded with the observation that, at the time of that
speech, the young Lincoln “did not know what was coming.” He had no
inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, but
what he could do at that time of his life was offer his listeners a set
of ideas that would attach them to civic life rather than alienating
them from it.
There was much more. The full video of her address is available on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/1199018583#t=1h18m28s. It
starts at the 1 hour 18 minute mark, and I strongly encourage you to
click through and watch the entire speech, which was far more powerful
than my efforts to describe it.
I had not heard the phrase “the mobocratic spirit,” but it is a perfect description of MAGA.
What Lincoln understood and emphasized was the central element of
true Americanism, which is allegiance to a specific approach to human
governance. It is that allegiance that separates citizens of the United
States from the “blood and soil” beliefs that underlie fascist regimes
and motivate Trump’s MAGA base. In a recent speech, Georgia Senator John
Ossoff recently reaffirmed Lincoln’s understanding of what makes one an
American, insisting that “Our national greatness flows not through our
blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race.
We’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions.
And that is what makes us exceptional.”
I finished with "Stranger Things" and "The Sandman" on Netflix. Winona Ryder has now graduated to mother roles and seems so far from Heathers, but damn she has got a way with an axe. "The Sandman" left me as cold as the graphic novels did until Shakespeare showed up. There is a dreaming, indeed.
Over on YouTube the algorithm turned up a Cary Grant movie I had never heard of This Is the Night . That it had Thelma Todd was what attracted my attention. I knew about her death but could never recall her from any movie. Attractive, funny, and, yeah, I can see why her death was a shocker. But it was another actress who caught my attention -Lili Damita - the rather notorious first wife of Erroll Flynn. I had never heard anything of her acting, so her being a charming fireball was a surprise. However, the fascinating thing about the movie was the opening; never seen one like it, call it jazz on film.
I was less impressed by The Brasher Dubloon; the novel is not my favorite Raymond Chandler novel, I like even Playback better; the movie is uneven, reminding me of better actors in the role such as Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum, but it beats Altman's The Long Goodbye.
This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade - good enough and could be better.
The same with this one, that never seems to come to life, and I understand why I have not seen it in too many decades to admit.
Thank you for submitting your piece "Agnes" to Thin Air online.
Our editorial staff has given it careful consideration and
unfortunately must pass at this time. Although we are not accepting your
work, our team was excited to have the chance to read and consider it.
We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Kruger, Web Editor
And this was not much of a surprise:
Thank you
for submitting "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We
regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest
in The Paris Review.
I need to make some calls. I thought of calling KH last night when I got thinking of the distance between old songs and today. For some reason, I got to going through Hank Willaims Jr. songs just before bedtime last night. He's not a soul singer like Waylon, but I like what he's doing now with country blues. That got me thinking about late style. He got pressed into the service of a country music that had little to offer him, he moved over to a more rocking, outlaw style, then got popular and somewhat stupid about politics, and with the country blues he is putting out music that has feeling.
Speaking of Waylon, this just came across the speakers from an old live song, something I used to think was corny and now sounds like a better view of America than is coming to me today.
The sheriff called the other day, wanting to do an interview as the DOC has implemented some new rules. I have no idea what the rules are. So, tomorrow I go out there, taking a break from work to satisfy some bureaucratic fears about my existence. Your tax dollars at work.
The writer's group meets today, and I intend to be there. Also, I need to hit a grocery. And deposit my Indiana tax refund. I probably should take time for my mail rather than my email.
I am supposed to be working on "Agnes" - maybe I can get to it this afternoon. It will let me get a grip on this research project to not be working on it all day today.
And that is pretty much life as it is here in Muncie. The sun is up now, two hours after I came back from the convenience store and started cleaning up this post. I suspect a few more will come out that will be more political,
And it could be time for breakfast.
Maybe I did get to you, I do know I got where I am going.
In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any
literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in
Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers.
Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a
tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob
Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that
slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.
***
The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than
rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable
embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t
learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The
internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the
detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie
National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea
levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and
materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and
other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.
My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort
Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in
the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book
tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American
flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the
military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would
have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition
of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S.
Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear
that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor
alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National,
the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.
***
The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and
contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground
of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when
the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible
opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had
believed its own cheerful propaganda
How easily scared and manipulated are Americans! Has it always been this way? I never read Richard Hofstadter's book on American paranoia, so all I can see is from my own perspective. There was the Red Scare after WWI, and that continued through HUAC and then started rising under Nixon and Dies until the fever of McCarthyism broke out. Has the time come for America to go under? That Lincoln's last best hope was all just an illusion?
But this obscures the asymmetry doing the real work. To approve access to medication abortion the FDA required drug companies to meet normal evidentiary standards demonstrating that the potential harm to patients taking mifepristone is marginal. The court, however, intervened, stating that this normal process was insufficient. Why? Because there could be some uncertainty about the applicability of these findings, given there was no longer an in-person requirement.
Doubt, in other words, undermined the conclusions of the FDA’s own rulemaking processes. In contrast, doubt played no role in undercutting Louisiana’s unfounded claims of risk and potential for “sovereign injury” — that is, the potential the state itself would suffer a kind of harm to its power as a state.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nothing scares those unworthy of power like its loss.
People who blame others for their failings, the kind of men who suck their thumbs and whine until they get attention. The traditional family, what they call the nuclear family, is a fiction, These kinds of people needing to put down others only show off their inadequacies.
Douglas Wilson has
a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the
Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system,
“we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church
structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson
is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches,
based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small
empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the
United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and
a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170
affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member,
and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in
February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of
America, people listen.
***
The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black
president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial
appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority
men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is
furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds,
describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I
think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss
of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made
that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that
it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”
Maybe I have spent too much time reading from 1850 with no little disgust at the racism of our ancestors.
Readers, Agents, Editors and Publishers do not owe you anything. Your job is to give them a story they cannot put down.
Start
the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the
story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited
in…fast.
Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff.
Your
first manuscript may simply be your apprenticeship. Sometimes Book One
only exists to teach you how to write the book that finally changes
everything.
Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting.
Readers only see the page. They do not know your intentions or the version in your head. Clarity matters.
Stop
tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters
make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human.
Publishing
is subjective, but craft still matters. You cannot control timing or
trends, but you can keep becoming better on the page.
Protect
your joy. The writers who survive this business are usually the ones
who refuse to let publishing destroy their love of storytelling.
Do
not decide your story has failed before you even try. People finish
books every day. People get agents every day. People build writing
careers every day. There is no reason you cannot become one of them.
I had “Scenes From A Small Indiana Factory Town” when I read this; I did some work on it today. These are the ones that jumped out at me.
Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff.
Last night, I sent this to KH with the subject line “critiquing myself”.
Reading https://eastoverpress.com/book/we-couldve-been-happy-here-by-keith-pilapil-lesmeister/
made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in
my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was
not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the
economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is
not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we
have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no
longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We
have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I
could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I
want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the
emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The
Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had
to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but
there is little I see in some published stories that concern
political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some
of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think
I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After
all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a
world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury
of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but
there is the humanity, isn't it?
Yeah, I have been worrying over whether I have been investing enough emotion in the story. Some of the story (now a novella) involves business decisions that change the titular city. One family member decides to turn loose the family's control of the city because she has felt herself too long under the control of a husband and her brother. There is another involving an abortion driving a girl towards her girlfriend and the effect of pregnancy on a former lover. There is the girl who is likened to the princess of the prominent family who wants only to be free, to be herself, and is the catalyst for the deaths of two boys. There are the feelings of fathers for a son and sons for fathers. I know no other way but for the payoff to be low key, perhaps even elliptical. But is that enough? When the rejections come in, I will have to assume it was not enough.
Then there is:
Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting.
Anyone reading my posts under the topic of “On Writing” knows that I keep doing this. Listening today to an old interview of E.L. Doctorow, he mentions a story that Thomas Hardy made revisions even after they were published. I made revisions this afternoon.
This is a little trickier because so many of the stories in “Scenes” are about people screwing up, and even those where characters do not blatantly screw up, they are not saints.
Stop
tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters
make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human.
So, trying, trying, trying.
Also, working on this one:
Start
the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the
story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited
in…fast.
The odd thing with "Scenes" versus its earlier incarnations as a collection of short stories is that I added two sections starting long before the earlier incarnations. They also introduce two characters that will persist throughout the novella. I guess it really does kick in the story of the town's rise and the stakes posed to the people of the loss of its industrial base.
I like trying to write plays, even if it has not been something done lately. Bertolt Brecht has ideas about making an audience think that I have gotten attached to, but with a caveat. If there are no emotional stakes, there is no attachment to the characters, and no one will pay attention to the ideas.
Why then with my fiction do I get too caught up with the action rather than the characters?
There was a miss on the writer's group yesterday, but it still took two hours out of my life. Only one other showed up and we chatted for about an hour. Then I went to get some Coke Zero at the closest convenience store only to find out I had left my debit card at home. I gave up waiting for the bus because parts were aching. Instead, I walked home; more like limped. There I got the debit card, caught the number three up to The Dollar General and then back to Riverside Avenue. Thereafter, I stayed home.
I stayed home for the rest of the day. Sleeping took out a chunk of my afternoon. Then I was up till around 2 AM working on my research project. Thinking I could make it to Liturgy, I laid down for a while with the alarm set for 5 AM. I am pretty sure the alarm went off, but now I cannot find my phone.
When I woke again, it was off to the convenience store for tobacco and caffeine.
Then I started on this post and went through browser tabs and email. What follows is the crop for this morning.
LOA: Ironweed is many readers’ introduction to
Kennedy. What do you think explains this novel’s appeal? Why has it been
Kennedy’s breakout book?
PG: Bill will say (novelists always say) it’s like naming a favorite child, but he knows that Ironweed is the top of his game, the best he’s ever written. Along with Legs and Billy Phelan in this trilogy, these novels represent a pinnacle.
The term of the day was “bums.” You look past bums. But Bill didn’t look past them. He gives them prominence, and in Ironweed
they’re deeply human and interesting and layered and smart and funny.
But they’re also broken, and they kind of fix each other—or try to. And
the result is beautiful.
Not much happens in the novel; Kennedy is not a plot-driven writer.
The characters walk up and down a handful of blocks in Albany, but
they’re looking for home, much like salmon returning to their spawning
stream. These two destroyed people, on the edge of survival, they’re
never going to get their job or their life or their house back, but
maybe they’re going to get a cup of soup that day, and maybe they’ll get
a place to sleep, and maybe they’ll find friendship, or love. You’re
rooting for these people. And it really is Albany. But it’s also any city.
We all want the same simple things. I think empathetic is a good word
to describe Bill. These characters are not written with halos over
them. They have a lot of flaws and they’ve done a lot of damage. He’s
not canonizing them, but he’s giving them their due. They deserve the
love they can find. They deserve to live another day.
Kennedy is one of the writers I knew of in my twenties and did not get around to reading until my fifties and wish I had read when I was younger.
Listen in: Spinoza, Atheist is a podcast from Princeton University Press. Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have been aware of since I was a teenager and yet who I never got around to reading. He intimidates me and he feels important; unlike Hegel who I think of as overhyped and empty. I listened to the podcast was I working, it seems to cover only a part of Sinoza's career.
I have a wary, on-again-off-again relationship with Jack Kerouac. I never succumbed to On The Road as did many people. Once, I thought it showed the limits of my mind and taste. Only to have the same so-what reaction when I read him again in my fifties. I gave up my plan to read his later novels. What I read about his later works has me thinking I am not missing anything. Yet, I continue reading about him. Which led me to Jack Kerouac: The Pseudo-Saint of Mindfulness by Josh Milton-Bell (Liberties). Not that this changed my mind about reading him further, but it has me thinking, instead, there is something to be learned from him.
What is it about Kerouac that still
inspires such fervent devotion among impressionable 17-year-olds, nearly
seventy years after On the Road’s initial publication? Kerouac lived the
experiences that he wrote about, his novels weren’t sterile thought
experiments written from the bowels of ivy-thick scholastic towers but
muscular records of a life spent tussling on the forest floor. To his
disciples, his spontaneous prose radiates wild, kinetic energy, a
dizzying musical propulsion of words building on words building on
words, the capstone of generative writing, frantic, compulsive hot
wanderlust dripping from the walls as the sun rises up over the San
Francisco Bay and gleams madly, gladly, while the — and so forth.
***
Kerouac was pathologically incapable of
escaping his desires, of surrendering himself totally to faith. But
unlike our wellness industry salesmen, Kerouac actually took his
spiritual quest seriously enough to be disturbed by his own failure to
rise to it. To some degree he understood these inner contradictions, and
desperately wanted to go beyond, to grasp onto true faith and outrun
himself. In the second half of The Buddhist Years the reader watches as Kerouac becomes increasingly repulsed by his owninadequacy.
The essay notes that Kerouac was depressed; some quotes remind me of how I thought when despondent. Then it gave me a reason for my paying attention to Kerouac:
But Kerouac was nothing if not
authentic. And this authenticity is no less poignant for being the true
expression of a limited man. His continued relevance does not follow
from the depth of his spiritual ideals but the poignancy of his
sincerity, his evocation of that tormented — sometimes sublime — search
for meaning that can come in the absence of true belief. Reading these
ragged efforts to will himself into faith, rushing and writhing to
ascend beyond, it’s difficult to not feel a profound compassion for him.
He held nothing back from us. Kerouac
was unafraid to fail spectacularly, cosmically, infinitely. The
inadequacy of his faith may be his greatest legacy.
I worked yesterday on my research project. It came out of the Indiana Supreme Court upholding Indiana's abortion statute. This morning I read Sheila Kennedy's Culture War Consequences, and it puts my work and the work of Indiana's Republicans in perspective:
When it comes to culture-war issues, however, they are simply unable
to connect the dots, despite the fact that a number of Indiana
businesses predicted–and are now experiencing– problems recruiting
employees as a result of the ban.
That connection– between Indiana’s ban and the state’s ability to
attract a talented workforce–emerged during a recent, enlightening
conversation with some friends. A former colleague who recently became a
grandfather noted that his son and daughter-in-law intended to have
another child–but not while they still lived in Indiana. Both are
high-tech workers of the sort Indiana desperately needs, and both
currently have excellent positions. But they plan to relocate,
because–as my colleague’s daughter-in-law explained–she fears what might
happen if she has a troubled pregnancy.
Another friend concurred, noting that he had counseled his daughter–a
recent elite college graduate–not to return to Indiana. As he
explained, although his family would have the means to send her
out-of-state for necessary care in normal course, that wouldn’t protect
her in the case of an emergency situation.
Is this the plan - to have the educated, the talented remove themselves from Indiana? Think about it.
Okay, there is a West Newton, Indiana, but no East Newton, or a Newton. Such is Indiana geography.
Okay, I’m overstating it. But yesterday, a new report in the Daily Mail1—a
hotbed, recently, for scoops from leaky and disgruntled DHS
employees—featured anonymous Mullin underlings griping about some
remarkable parallels between life under the old boss and under the new
boss. For one thing, Mullin is reportedly trying to get his wife
Christie on the DHS payroll as a “Special Government Employee”—the same
arrangement Noem once used for her boy-toy adviser Corey Lewandowski.
For
another, Mullin appears still to be flying around in the same $70
million luxury jet that helped end Noem’s tenure—and using it to spend a
good chunk of his working time in his home state of Oklahoma. “He
leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back
until Monday afternoon,” one source complained to the Daily Mail. “He is barely in the building.”
“Mullin seems to think ICE requires less work than a senator, and it shows,” griped another. “Meanwhile, ICE has no direction.”
The Pope WARNS The World About War, AI & Unchecked Power:
I spent yesterday's morning in Indianapolis. First, still trying to find the computer K wanted. No such luck. What I did learn was not to trust Staples' inventorying software. Online, Plainfield was shown as having the computer. Plainfield said that their computer showed North Keystone had three. I went to North Keystone, they had none. When I called Plainfield, the fellow who went to see their actual stock could not find one. I gave up. K was going to work off money lent her by typing up the “Chasing Ashes” manuscript. Someone else will do it for me.
Then I spent hours at the McKinney Law School law library. Too fat, too hot, it was a struggle that it ought not have been. Memory kept losing instructions on how to use their scanner. It was also not helpful in finding the Indiana Reports. I did not finish the job, either. Which worked out to my benefit. There was a massive thunderstorm that hit as I was leaving and accompanied me all the way home. Indianapolis streets were flooding. When I got back here, I found out the biggest selection did not get sent from the scanner.
I thought I would go back today, but I was too tired at 5 AM. I stayed that way for most of the day. I did manage a quit trip to Anderson and having two Spanish dogs from Gene's Root Beer. They were delicious.
I got the car back to Enterprise on time - 1 PM. Then I made my way back here. A siesta seemed like a good idea. Not ready for the heat; I need to get my inhalers. Two more hard rains came in the afternoon.
I think I heard frogs croaking this morning after the rains, and then again a little while ago. It might be something else. Not any bird song I recognized, so frogs seem likely, if bizarre.
Thank you for sending us your work. This particular submission wasn't chosen for publication, but we are grateful for your interest in our journal. We wouldn't be able to continue without writers like you.
Great luck with your writing, among all other things.
New editions of Georges Simenon's non-Maigret novels are coming out: The Crimes Georges Simenon Declined to Investigate. I admire the Maigret stories but find his non-Maigret novels fascinating. I did not even know of them until I was in my fifties. Do not wait so long to read them.
At the center of the recognition is Muncie Community Schools’ dramatic improvement
in early grade reading. During the 2024-2025 school year, districtwide
reading proficiency climbed from 69.8 percent to 79.2 percent, a
9.4-percentage-point increase that outpaced statewide gains. Grissom
Elementary posted one of the most significant improvements in Indiana,
increasing its third-grade reading proficiency rate from 46.6 percent to
79 percent in a single year.
StriveTogether leaders described Muncie as an example of how
place-based partnerships can drive long-term systems change when
communities align around shared data, coordinated strategies and
collective accountability. The national organization’s annual report
noted that more than 70 organizations and 200 individuals participate in
Cradle to Career Muncie’s work through The Opportunity Blueprint: 2030, a strategic plan shaped by more than 150 local voices.
Local leaders say the progress reflects years of intentional collaboration.
Massie lost in Kentucky. Trump now owns the Republicans. Considering what happens when Trump[ owns anything, this should be the end of the Republican Party.
A little-known nonprofit created by
Indiana lawmakers more than four decades ago could become a major lender
for student loan borrowers.
The Indiana Secondary Market for
Education Loans — which operates under the name INvestEd — issues
private student loans at interest rates starting at 4.26% to 8.51% — far
below the maximum 17.99% interest rate charged by some of its
for-profit competitors.
The nonprofit’s motto is simple: The best student loan is no loan at all.
But leaders at INvestEd anticipate a
surge in demand for private loans once tighter federal student loan
restrictions and borrowing limits take effect July 1.
I never heard of this, but then after 1987 I had no interest in the subject.
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.
This
is a long, long piece written while I was in pretrial detention but is
not actually notes about pretrial detention. I quite preposterously
labeled it as autobiography. However, the first 36 pages are missing,
and so are the years 1978–May 1982. sch 5/4/2026]
By 1983, TJ and I had been dating for about four years. She had been with me at Grandma Downes' funeral and at Grandpa Hasler's funeral. We had gone to all of her friends' weddings but one. I had proposed to her three times. There came a day a few months afterward when we learned she was pregnant.
TJ told me her plan was for an abortion. Being brought up as I had been, I acquiesced and supported her decision. Then she told me that I was not to go along with her to the abortion clinic. She might as well have hit me with a sledgehammer.
The night of the day TJ went to the abortion clinic, and I went to a friend's house with a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. I also had a set of shot glasses inherited from my Grandfather Hasler. Someone had a bottle of Jagermeister liqueur. I started chasing bourbon with liqueur. Someone else showed up with beer. Wild Turkey chased by Jagermeister was chased with beer. One person suggested we go to a bar. When I expressed enthusiasm for this idea, everyone else decided it was not a good idea. They were afraid I would get into a fight. I was sure I was not in a fighting mood. My friend's wife said I broke her screen door, but I did not. I did break a glass by throwing it across the street just to hear it break.
I had the worst hangover of my life the next morning. I left my friend's house for the next morning looking for a hangover cure and to TJ. (My best hangover cure consisted of a rare steak and an ice cold Coca-Cola; they had the effect of pushing out the poison.) I found TJ very unhappy with me. She thought I had told everyone what was going on with us. I never mentioned anything about why I was drinking so seriously. I did not tell anyone about her pregnancy and going to the abortion clinic until many, many years.
Things became ticklish between TJ and me. That I had not bought her the ring she wanted for an engagement ring caused her great annoyance. That I was saving money for the ring was unknown to her. When I bought a very cheap guitar, she broke off the engagement. She did this two weeks before I would have had the engagement ring paid off.
We still dated. We still owrked together at the bar. I still loved her. What I did not know was that she remained pregnant.
I did not know she had not had the abortion until one afternoon in my apartment she began to miscarry. She fell to the floor, crying, and lay there in a fetal position. She was bleeding and bleeding. I made to take her to the hospital, but she yelled her insistence that her friend Kathy take her instead. So, Kathy came to take her to the hospital, leaving me to think how close I had come to killing her. She called me later to let me know that she was all right.
Sex with TJ became problematic for me. I looked upon sex with her as having injured her, of almost killing her. The idea of me posing a danger to those I loved became firmly established in my mind.
We stopped talking about this time. No, we talked, but we did not say anything about what was important to us. I regressed at this point. TJ had broken down most of the wall I had erected around me. Now, I put them up again. Let me say here that self-knowledge does not always provide a corrective. I repeated this same foolishness with T1, T2, CC, and my wife. Let me also say that my family law experience showed me that at the bottom of almost every case was a failure of communication. All that knowledge does nothing to salve the injury caused.
The Los Angeles Review of Books dropped several essays today that drew my attention. I thought to share them with you.
Red Specters and Right-Wing Fever Dreams by Alexander Billet reviews The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A. J. A. Woods. Verso, 2026.
So it is with “Cultural Marxism.” Over the past 15 years—in particular the last decade—the concept has become so overused by the American Right that we almost tune out when we hear it. The same can be said for so many Trumpian talking points—“DEI,” “radical Left,” “Trump derangement syndrome”—that we brush it aside. As with anything so overused, we forget what made the idea potent in the first place.
This, naturally, is the point, and it ultimately works in the Right’s favor. Of course they see Marxists around every corner, we tell ourselves. It’s ridiculous. And it is. But when the ridiculous idea is believed and promoted by the most powerful man in the world (he who is currently and enthusiastically bombing Iran on the flimsiest of pretenses), what does its “truthiness” matter? If, eventually, you are forced to publicly declare I am not a Marxist just to sidestep the furor, haven’t they already won?
Against all this, A. J. A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026) offers a welcome corrective. The short book—Woods’s first—traces the genealogy and evolution of this right-wing bugbear. Of course, Woods points out, Cultural Marxism isn’t real, at least in the way the Right thinks of it. The idea that Marxists have taken over the educational and cultural apparatus of the United States, of the entire world, is ludicrous on its face. The real question, as Woods frames it, is what kind of society, what course of history, makes it possible for such a flagrantly silly idea to take root and spread so thoroughly?
I never met a Marxist. I am certain that none of my professors at Ball State University were Marxists. The only book by Marx that I ever read was The Communist Manifesto; that took about thirty years. That history was a speeding train towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. It sounded too much of the Calvinism I had already come to distrust, if not despise. But my spotty education about Marxism left me knowing enough that the blather about cultural Marxism was bullshit.
This paragraph gives me even more reason for the hysterical yapping about cultural Marxism:
Before the war, the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research had
been dedicated to answering why the socialist revolution hadn’t
succeeded in Germany. Answers weren’t going to be found only in
political economy or revolutionary strategy but also in culture, in
psychoanalysis, in the shape of everyday life itself. After the
institute’s thinkers—all Marxists, almost all Jewish—had fled the Third
Reich, their original preoccupation began to move in tandem with an
attempt to understand the success of fascism, and how it might return.
Echoes of fascist domination were woven into the fabric of postwar
consumer capitalism, and the Frankfurt School sought to highlight these
in their research, their scholarship, their philosophical work, and
their cultural criticism. This purpose is plain to anyone who reads
Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967), or Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man:Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964).
Ooh, might not the Frankfurt School scare the fascists by exposing their machinations of acquiring power?
One could argue that this conspiracy theory has come a long way from its
LaRouchian origins, but as Woods writes, all iterations and uses of the
Cultural Marxism trope contain a core characteristic. For all their
anti-elitist rhetoric, for all their appeals to tradition and “human
nature,” their ultimate aim is to simply replace one elite with another:
a multiracial elite with a white one, sex-positive consumerism with the
patriarchal family, a “woke” capitalism with one that has entirely
given up any pretense of social equality.
***
Misbehaving students weren’t what really scared the establishment, though. It was the potential that their ideas might spread beyond their ranks. The 1960s are too commonly thought of as just a student thing, a wave of kids rebelling against their own privilege. But the “hippies” versus “hardhats” dichotomy was never as cut-and-dried as it’s been made out to be. The further you fell down the income ladder, the more likely you were to oppose the Vietnam War. And high rates of poverty and deprivation drove many people of color to support groups like the Black Panthers or the Brown Berets.
Nor was Marcuse—by then just about the only member of the Frankfurt School worth a damn to the New Left—quite as dismissive of the working class as caricatures of his work would lead us to believe. His Essay on Liberation (1969) explicitly states that the students couldn’t do it on their own, that the working class is essential to any meaningful revolution. If they, the people most able to materially shut down the flows of capital, could be won over, then what Marcuse called the “new sensibility”—the collective aspiration for utopia—might gain more widespread hold. And thus people might stop fighting for their own servitude as if it were their freedom.
The essay uses a term of which I have not heard:
The logic behind this impulse is, if anything, even more pressing in the current moment. It almost seems as if, before addressing anything like Cultural Marxism, we first need to reckon with cultural capitalism. Today, the ideologies that create consent and even enthusiasm for capitalist domination are kept alive by a cultural-technological infrastructure more complex, more diversely ramified, and more subtly influential than ever. At the same time, those who hold that infrastructure together are acutely proletarianized, subjected to a precarity that bears more resemblance to the conditions of itinerant industrial workers in the 1900s. We need only look to striking writers, casualized university professors, and traumatized content moderators to see as much. And this doesn’t even begin to address the devastations that AI is beginning to exact on these occupations, or the ecological impacts on many communities.
Do we really want to be serfs of the tech bros? Do we really want to build a caste system?
And a caste system can be read into Natural Election by Jonathan Basile. This essay reviews Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden. Random House, 2026.
Harden’s book has been published at a moment when eugenicist and hereditarian thinking inform the ascendant Far Right, particularly through its preoccupation with the “Great Replacement” theory. This conspiracy theory explains demographic decline among white populations by imagining a globalist Jewish elite manipulating everything from immigration to gender nonconformity in order to dilute and disempower “the white gene pool.” Indeed, every political project implicated in the rise of fascism in the United States today—including the “America First” economy, abortion bans, the dismantling of DEI initiatives, attacks on queer and trans people, ICE’s campaign of terror against immigrants and their communities, and the undermining of any international environmentalist response to climate change—can be understood as an emanation of, among other things, this ideological investment in eugenics.
Harden would consider herself opposed to all such political projects. Indeed, much of Original Sin consists of anecdotes and asides that check the right boxes to affirm her political leanings as a Good Liberal. Her project, in brief, is to argue that liberals, in order to accomplish progressive goals, must accept the existence of innate genetic predispositions toward scholastic achievement and criminality. This tactic mirrors a broadly adopted political strategy: appealing to liberals to argue that their political aims can only be realized by embracing the current obsessions of conservatives.
I have read a little on the history of eugenics - one of America's contributions to Nazi race law. It was a pseudo-sceince, and it remains one. The review does not really address what I think is its great error: a self-fulfilling justification for elite classes to retain power. It does say this:
In fact, the stratified society being prophesied already exists—the children of the wealthy already live in a world apart. Everything from their healthcare to their schooling and experiences with the criminal justice system are fundamentally different from the realities of those with fewer resources. At no point in the present or future will maintaining this stratification require the wealthy or their children to be inherently healthier, more intelligent, or more virtuous. Hierarchy is a function of power, amassed within social, historical, and political structures, and resistance requires challenging the belief that social elites are truly the Elect.
What applies to the wider world also needs to be applied in this country.
To name this asymmetry is not to abandon the possibility of universality; it is to refuse a counterfeit version of it. The real question is no longer whether the Global South can see the structure clearly—we have long lived inside its consequences. The question is whether those who claimed custodianship of that order can imagine a world where law is not another name for managed inequality, and where justice is not postponed the moment it approaches the imperial archive. We are not outside the old language yet, but we are listening as its authority falters, sentence by sentence.
Eugenics, with its fake scientific predestination propping up a hierarchy justifying its control of politics, needs to go the way of the dodo. The censorship of ideas under the banner of Cultural Marxism needs a stake driven through its heart; otherwise, the American creed as written by Jefferson faces a death threat.
CC has disappeared from my life, but her problems keep surfacing. We were talking about homelss meth-heads after church today. Seeing the link to Aaron Bornstein's interview/review, Beyond a Theory of Irresistible Desire of What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard, I thought, What the hell? Which always leads to me reading.
Of course, there are differences between drug use in addiction and ordinary, day-to-day drug use. In the book, I argue that the crucial difference rests on whether, on balance, drugs are, or are not, good for a person. In addiction, drug use can come to undermine a person’s well-being, which creates what I call the puzzle of addiction—the task of explaining why a person would nonetheless keep using drugs. But the crucial point is that, even when the costs ratchet up, the value of drugs is not eradicated, which is part of why people stay stuck. We therefore need to recognize that value in order to help them. Reckoning with the idea that drug use is not black-and-white but gray is part of the core project of the book.
And in these paragraphs, I see an explanation of much of what I saw running with Muncie crackheads:
So, by engaging in this imaginative feat, you generate in your own mind an alternative hypothesis to the brain disease model. It’s not the power of drugs that made the rats press the lever for cocaine to the point of death. It’s the fact that they were alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine. In other words, it’s the barrenness of their environment and its impact on their psychological state that explains their behavior.
***
I am simplifying, but the take-home message from decades of animal and human research is that if you give rats or people meaningful alternatives to drugs, they take them. Addiction is associated with backgrounds of severe adversity, limited socioeconomic opportunities, and additional mental health conditions. In other words, being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine is an apt metaphor for the life circumstances faced by many people with addiction.
And the interview gets at what is wrong with treatment: moral police or moralistic police.
Presumably,
it’s not offered for political reasons. A lot of people would love for
science to be “apolitical.” But in the case of addiction science, we
don’t have that option. It is hard not to see a connection among the
hijacked brain model, dehumanizing public discourses, and addiction
policies. The connection drives ideas around “superpredators” or “meth
zombies,” as well as, here in California, “CARE Court”—a dystopian name
for a process whereby people diagnosed with a substance use disorder can
be sentenced to mandated treatment (which rarely works) and, if they
don’t comply, imprisonment. These policies take the paradigm to its
logical conclusion. How might a shift to a humanistic and heterogeneous
paradigm change this dynamic?
I
wrote the book in part because I wanted to make a difference. Your
question challenges the scientific community to address these
dehumanizing forces instead of cleaving to a paradigm that is nothing
more than dogma—not a theoretically coherent model with a solid evidence
base. That science is apolitical is a pretense. We need better and more
honest science. I think the brain disease model of compulsion has
failed people with addiction and served only to entrench certain forms
of stigma and discrimination. It is bad science. This does not mean that
brain science can’t illuminate many aspects of addiction. Of course it
can. But we won’t properly understand addiction if we continue to focus
so narrowly on the brain. We need a paradigm that is interdisciplinary,
integrating the natural sciences with the social sciences, the
humanities, and, crucially, the voices of people who themselves live
with addiction.
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past
I did not notice anything that jarred me with his presentation of the history presented, In fact, the presentation is superb. Would that other teachers of history were this good.
