Beto & The Lotos-Eaters (a movement of mind prompted by the late Benjamin DeMott’s protest against the “let us alone” legacy of a “tonal” prophet)
Tim Miller joked that he wanted “therapy” so he brought Beto to The Bulwark podcast, but Miller reflexively resisted Beto’s relentless positivity. He was always cordial, but he seemed like a frenemy when he jabbed his guest by citing James Carville who ‘d once rubbed it in after Beto dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. (Carville wacked Beto as a guy who could hit the hell out of a double A fastball, but couldn’t handle a major league change-up.) Perhaps Carville’s right. It could be that Beto lacks talent. Or maybe his meld of Lincoln (“Public sentiment is everything.”) and punk (“Joe Strummer said, ‘without people you’re nothing.'”) could still change the game.
50501 Demos
Dennis Myers was First‘s eye on the street on April 5th. (More photos by him after the jump.)
This series of protest signs won Micah Sifry’s prize for best in show on April 19.
(Sifry regrets not getting a photo of “Have You No Beer?”/Brett Kavanaugh.)
Absolute power can be a terrible weakness (The respective vulnerabilities of tyrants and crowds)
Henry Farrell posted what’s below in mid-April at his substack, Programmable Mutter. He added on a comment later in the month, noting that the post has been “getting around a bit.” He welcomed republication…
In other words: this article is effectively open source, put out there for everyone of good faith to do with as they see fit; the good ideas in it aren’t really mine, anyway.
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time, for quite different reasons than the reasons I’m writing now. Why it is useful — perhaps — is that we need, right at the moment, to think very clearly about how power is won or lost. Below is one way of doing this (there are certainly other useful ways).
Constructive Criticism
Pope Francis on Good Friday. Almost his last words.
Francis: “Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell.”
I Am Not Afraid (of Hamas or Ben-Gvir’s Mobs)
Today is my birthday (April 24th, Taurus, I am 35 years old). Two of my best friends gave me a cake that best captured my ethos with creative and colorful language. One is a direct condemnation of Hamas; the other is my favorite reimagining of a divisive slogan, confirming that peace is indeed a courageous necessity and evolution that will set both Palestinians and Israelis free, from the river to the sea. This is not romanticism, or oversimplification, but rather, a desperate plea to move away from division and toward bridge building; to abandon hate, violence, and the armed “resistance” narrative that Hamas has used to decimate the Palestinian people; and to stand firmly for what you believe in, even if it is unpopular, goes against conventional wisdom, challenges what the herd and group believe, or contests dominant and entrenched narratives.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wore that T-shirt and walked among thousands at the student encampment on the UCLA campus, seeking to understand what was really happening and what motivated some of the students’ actions, which I felt were not particularly helpful to serving the just and urgent aspirations of the Palestinian people.
Between Two Smiles
Noelle Canin, who’s helping translate Erella Dunayevsky’s writings for First, had some late-night advice for your editor when I mentioned I’d had trouble sleeping after reading one of Erella’s recent stories…
Benj, never read testimonies before going to sleep. We need softness and love before going to bed. Our world is going to get a lot harder and we need sanctuary as part of and in order to cope. What is happening in Israel gets worse by the day and there are now demonstrations planned where we’re forbidden to hold up pictures of Palestinian children who’ve been killed. Those pictures will get held up.
Anora’s Golden Ticket
The condom in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024) haunts me. Early in the Oscar-minted film, the titular adult entertainer presents a golden packet to Vanya, her callow yet absurdly wealthy young client, in advance of sexual intercourse. “You want to put this on? Or do you want me to put it on for you?” she coos, cleverly offering an illusion of choice while communicating that one way or the other, the condom is going on.
Only it doesn’t go on – ever. Not only because a shot of Mark Eydelshteyn’s genitals would bust through the film’s R rating – the MPA’s sexed bias is well documented – the application of the condom is neither mimed nor further referenced. The scene cuts jarringly to the couple mid-coitus, with Vanya on the brink of orgasm and Ani, of course, doing all the work. Then it cuts again to Ani dressing herself, Vanya’s lap coyly hidden beneath the sheets and the condom presumably discarded. That fleeting glimpse of its shimmery wrapper suggests an omnipresence that the film ultimately has no interest in depicting.
The condom is not only Ani’s golden ticket into Vanya’s lavish world, ushering Anora into an ongoing media trend that lampoons the ultra-wealthy’s heartlessness but too often hangs its critique on titillating wealth-porn. It’s also the means by which she protects herself, even as the thin latex sheath cannot shield her fully from the torrent of exploitation and abandonment to come. It’s a very real boundary she enforces in service of her own health and sexual privacy, a momentary inconvenience rupturing Vanya’s – and let’s be honest, the viewer’s – fantasy of unbarred access to the sex worker’s limitlessly porous body.
For this reason, I do not think the condom could have ceased to be a point of contention between Ani and Vanya. The princeling is accustomed to owning, not renting. He has clearly never been denied his immediate wishes, never been asked to consider the feelings or material conditions of the workers his family employs. His artless fucking makes it clear that Ani is no exception. When he purchases her uninterrupted service for a full week, and especially when the unlikely couple weds in a slapdash Vegas ceremony, are we expected to believe the condom stays on? Why was it ever there in the first place, if the film cannot stand to unwrap it?
A Wadler Classic: “My Jud Fry Problem” (with an advertisment for herself)
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this for a few hours, but my comic novel, “The Satyr in Bungalow D”, comes out today.
My Jud Fry Problem
Laurey, in “Oklahoma!”, telling Jud Fry he’s got to be kidding as he explains sex.
I was watching Oklahoma! on TCM last night and naturally the old question popped up: How could anybody go for a simple-minded twit like Curly when Jud Fry, the alleged bad guy, is so much more attractive?
Yeah, there’s the porn addiction and he’s living in a smokehouse, but I figure he’s got interesting reading material in there: Henry Miller, Kerouac, Hubert Selby. Plus a pin-up of the stripper he messes around with when he’s in Kansas City tacked up on the wall.
Also, Jud, as played by Rod Steiger, is hot.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Snow White
1. For centuries, male poets have mourned the transience of female pulchritude.
2. Their own sags and jowls remain unlamented.
3. In the original, Snow White is seven years old when she surpasses her stepmother’s beauty.
Fore!
Golf had been his father’s game, so Goshkin never played it. Adolescent rebellion, he supposed. In 1950s Philadelphia, football, baseball, basketball were the only honorable sports.
In recent years, though – 70-some and 3000 miles later – he had come to enjoy golf on TV, while his interest had faded from football, baseball, everything athletic in fact, except the Warriors, who continued to drive his blood pressure up 20-points, and the exercise he deemed necessary to keep his own surgically-enhanced heart pumping.
“What do you think your dad would say,” asked Ruth, his wife, a former therapist, “about your seeing the light?”
Goshkin snorted. Not his story. Left behind with the Liberty Bell.
Poem for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia with Phrases from the News and “America the Beautiful,” Ending with a Line by Keith Douglas
O beautiful a land made safe
and, if not safe, then free
of one more man from somewhere else.
The problem was “an administrative error”.
The problem was Garcia’s Bulls sweatshirt and cap.
The problem was his family’s pupusa business.
The problem was a gang had targeted him for death.
The problem was the majority of Americans didn’t vote.
The problem was the price of eggs.
Bless SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers…
Here is the statement issued by the Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s union after the Supreme’s Court’s ruling on April 11th.
A Broadside To More Than Half My Country
Grey-filtered morning & no one on the street
looks happy, a few unpleasantly defiant,
the sweep of catastrophe apparent.
This man is in charge of the US military…
(H/t Matthew Cushman)
Last Word
“The Bulwark’s” JVL has been helping anti-Trumpers think through their options. He seems destined to become a stalwart in what’s been dubbed The Defiance.[1] ICYMI, here’s the conclusion of Last’s April 1rst post comparing Elon Musk’s “family values” to those of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a migrant from El Salvador who has been a loving father to an autistic child. Garcia was deported last month…
One last thing. The federal government now stipulates that it was wrong to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a foreign prison. It admits that it broke the law.
But instead of trying to remedy its error, our government is going to the mat in an attempt to prevent remedy. The government claims in a filing that the president of the United States has no power—none!—over the sovereign nation of El Salvador and could not possibly coerce the country into returning Abrego Garcia to America.
The Party that Calls Us “Groomers” Passes a Law Allowing Genital Inspection of Minors without Parental Consent
Horrors that morons chose begin now.
Flag-draped walls are closing in now.
Whales sleep vertically, holding their breath.
Stars blink on. Hungry birds cry Ruin. Now
Artemis is running out of arrows.
Progress cut off like a foreskin. Now
the virus-spreading chickens have flown home
to roost. We bury the beached dolphin now.
In Yiddish, “vance” is “bedbug.” Pols twist words
like dishtowels. Empathy is sin now.