Nation

Barry Lynn’s Anti-Monopoly Jeremiad

by

In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:

“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”

Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”

What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic.

Read more

Adams Chronicle

by

Every fall semester, as I did again last week, I have the privilege of showing my students episode 2 in HBO’s marvelous dramatization of the life of John Adams. Episode 2 covers the debate in the Continental Congress over declaring independence from Great Britain.

Read more

Emergent

by

Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)

Read more

The Wind from the Midwest

by

We made it home. I’m sitting on the deck in 90-degree heat worrying that the 103 degrees we drove through in Nebraska might be on its way here. Uh-oh.

At any rate, a few random thoughts while driving across the West.

Read more

The Uses of the Rothermans

by

Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.

I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved short­ly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.

Read more

The Morning Crowd

by

(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)

The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.

Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.

Read more

Ten Things to Expect If Trump Wins

by

1. JFK to be renamed Trump International. By the time this takes effect, other airports will have been similarly renamed, along with their associated IATA codes. As this may create an elevated risk of baggage transport errors, carry-ons are recommended.

Read more

An Encroaching Evil: Anne Applebaum Confronts Autocracy, Inc.

by

Franz Kafka, a spiritual guide in these trying times, thought that there might be “a certain truth in a chorus (or choir)” of voices. For this choir, I propose vox populi and will draw counsel from readers of Anne Applebaum and listeners to Anne Applebaum who have written their reactions into the Web. After Applebaum spoke in London on “‘Putinism’: The Ideology,” one listener commented, quite simply, “Brilliant mind! Very articulate!”  On another occasion, an admirer wrote, “Always, always great to hear Anne Applebaum speak. So deeply informed, humane and articulate.”  I cite these voices because they speak to my own. True, another listener to her London talk complained about her very articulateness, since “being articulate like Ribbentrop or Beria (sic) is not a highly prized point of honor” (this is also what vox populi gets you); but readers of her latest book, Autocracy, Inc. aren’t likely to mind the clarity and force of her every word.

Read more

The Dispossessed (An excerpt from “The Miracle of the Black Leg”)

by

Patricia Williams’ The Miracle of the Black Leg, ends aptly (and elegantly) with a survey of the familial photo archive she recently deposited in a Harvard university library. She muses about “archiving as a social process” in her book’s final paragraph:

I yearn to have future beings see me and my wonderful forefathers and -mothers. We were all here! I wish them to live in social imagination more fully than many of them were able to while on the planet. And so I need to explain, I am constantly explaining. I am always looking for the right words, the right accent, the perfect analogy, the smoothest homology, the felt connection, the link that sparks a mental orgasm of humanizing recognition.

Williams squeezes out sparks in her chapter on her family and throughout The Miracle of the Black Leg. Try this extended excerpt from a passage on NOLA in a chapter titled, “The Dispossessed.” I think you’ll experience a kind of drawn-out “mental orgasm.” You may also cheer for Ms. Williams as she bites a hand that’s fed her.

Read more

Kamala Harris and the testicle deficit

by

A slightly adapted/compacted version of this Brit’s Substack commentary.

July  24

In our heart of hearts we all know what will decide this election. It won’t be debates or speeches or experience or fitness to serve. Saving external catastrophe it’ll be whether a critical part of the US electorate can really imagine — even almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century — a woman being president. If they manage that hurdle, Harris ought to win. But if they can’t and find enough excuses for not liking her, then she may well lose.

Read more

Death of a Salesman

by

File under #Grabembythebigotry. [Copyright to John Haas.]

So, Donald “George Wallace” Trump enlightened us all on his racial views yesterday before a group of black journalists.

Read more

Murder Tucker!

by

Pierre—a rando from comedy show Kill Tony’s lot of amateur comedians—opens his set with “I’ve been working out lately, and I realized I could rape everybody here… if I wanted too.'” An outlier/success in ep. 669’s series of audience call ups, Pierre spins racial stereotypes/myths about black people, taking cues from the show’s host Tony Hinchcliffe—who’ll run with jokes about his homosexual life (clever ones, not hateful slurs). Before Pierre’s entrance, it’s hard to watch as Tony pressures one guest, after a lame set—enough humiliation already!—to detail his violent criminal conviction. Ali Siddiq‘s feature and follow-up in another episode—head in hands as Tony does in a newbie whose stand-up is impaired by a speech impediment—embodies every (sane) KT viewer’s dilemma: should I really be watching, participating in this? Comedian Bill Burr amps up such doubts by explicitly refusing the show’s premise in one ep., calling out Tony for abusing newer/younger comedians. Yet KT’s formula, the cringe (and/or occasional burst of talent), is almost addicting—the show gets millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners.

Read more

Turn, Turn, Turn

by

I listened to the Trump-Biden debate with some kind of horror on BART. I’m not a fan of Biden but still, the shock of hearing him stumble through the event overrode any political disagreements. I felt a deep concern and pity for Biden (and all of us). What was it that was happening here? I left when they started talking about golf. The friend who I was staying with that night got a text from another friend about the debate. It simply said “haha, we’re all going to die.”

Read more

Waiting (& Roosting)

by

Originally posted on Sunday July 14, 2024.

One of the primary lessons I have learned after many years on social media is that it never hurts to wait before commenting. Waiting is usually the right choice. The wise choice.

Example: Within minutes of yesterday’s shooting, one of my Facebook “friends,” deeply mired in the Trump cult, took to my page to rage about “the liberal wacko,” “the liberal moron,” who, provoked by the “violent” rhetoric from the left, tried to assassinate Trump.

Then we wait.

Then it turns out the young man is a Republican. Who gave $15 to a Democratic Get-Out-the-Vote group. With a Libertarian father. A Democratic mother. And an AR-15.

Read more

The Delaware River is not running backwards

by

The author posted this before the assassination attempt. It’s still on time…

Photo by Tracy Harris

I have been reporting on and writing about politics for 55 years, and I have never in all those years seen people so depressed about the state of our union, as they say.

Read more