Emory University’s nosite.org has reblogged “Origin of the Species”—first posted here in mid-August, 2016.[1] Author Mark Dudzic wrote a brief intro for nosite, which includes post-election reflections. You can read his update below (along with his original post and an appended editor’s note).
Nation
Let it Snow
“We’re treating these [protesting] adolescents and Millennials like precious snowflakes,” Conway told host Sean Hannity. (11/17/2016)
Censoriousness & Solidarity
Laurie Stone, author most recently of My Life as an Animal, Stories (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) thinks through her October encounter with a censorious host at Columbia University’s radio station.
Misdirected Fire
In the wake of the Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in the presidential election, two Democratic operatives, Stanley B. Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, turn their attention to President Obama and ask the question “Was Obama Bad for the Democrats” (NY Times, Op Ed, December 23). Their answer is a qualified yes. Before I bear down on the Greenbergs for their insinuation that the Democrats went down to defeat on the presidential and congressional levels because of Obama, let me lay out their argument with editorial interruption.
Survival Pending Revolution
In a rare moment of stranger-than-fiction levity during jury selection in the 1970 conspiracy trial of Black Panther Party leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, defense attorney Charles Garry asked a prospective juror, “Can you take the judge’s instruction that my defendants here, Ms. Huggins and Mr. Seale, are innocent until proven guilty?”
The prospective juror replied, “I can.”
“So you know they are members of the Black Panther Party?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So what do you think of that? Do you think you can be a fair and impartial juror?”
“Well, I guess they are no different from any other motorcycle gang.”
As the courtroom erupted in laughter, the frustrated judge shouted, “Just get him out of here!”
Tale of the Tapes
My father, Reginald W. Major, died just over three years ago. While his passing has left me, his baby girl, with a tremendous void, l recently discovered a collection of audio tapes that we recorded over a period of years. I have found myself able to listen to him once again, getting his wisdom on political struggle, his honesty about his own shortcomings, on how he grew character and understanding, on his long view of history from the 1930’s to 2011.
How Moral Monday’s “Fusion Politics” Trumped North Carolina’s Right-Wing Extremists and How They Will Continue to Do So
Draining the Swamp
Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution.
I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today. You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well. You’ve been hearing a lot about ethics lately.
I need to talk about ethics today because the plan the President-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met.
Strategy Memo
OK, Meryl Streep is a wonderful actress, a very smart and eloquent lady. But I think her Golden Globes statement, while striking and eloquent, was a strategic mistake. And here’s why – because it puts style over substance, and not everybody agrees with putting down Trump’s style.
Miserabalism (& Socialism)
Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty by Jennifer M. Silva, Oxford University Press.
Continental Drift 2.0
Russell Banks responds to questions about the election put to him by a regular interlocutor from Nouvel Observateur.
1. Did anger and hatred against Obama contribute to Trump’s success?
Until now, on the eve of the winter solstice, at the start of a new astronomical year, I’ve put off trying to answer questions about the election of Donald Trump. I went to Ecuador and climbed in the Andes, cut myself off from radio and TV, the Internet and newspapers. I remained mostly silent, except to utter quiet moans and groans of despair or the low worried whimpering that follows a sudden fall from a great height after you’ve checked for broken bones and found none, but haven’t yet determined the extent of internal injuries. Since returning to the US, I’ve read most of the explanations for Trump’s victory by the pundits and commentators of the left, right, and center, and listened mainly in silence to my friends and colleagues as they try to explain how and why this mentally deranged ignoramus became the most powerful human being in the known universe.
Tease
Molly Klein is working on a piece for First that links Trump’s spectacles to “a war on rationality that began in Baltimore in 1966 with the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism/post-structuralism, which introduced the mountebanks Lacan and Derrida to US academia.” In the meantime, here’s a taste from her recent demolition of Slavoj Žižek, “The Protocols of the Learned Lacanian of Slovitzie,” published this year in a Belgrade academic journal. Klein’s clarity about “ecstasy of the bullying” makes her a national resource for Americans in our time of the Don.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Friday, January 23rd, 2016
In the few days prior to Trump becoming the President of the United States, even through a flickering awakeness, we know that given the power of the United States however in decline, the whole world is right now being funneled together for the long march into dreamland.
Post-Election Reflections
The role of identity politics in Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat: Identity politics, the invention of the multicultural left, has been taken over by Trump and his hard right supporters.
Long Weekend
Excerpts from familial emails.
12/11
BEFORE THE ELECTION
Mid-September, “Obama dispatched [Lisa] Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election.” —WashPost, story then scrubbed for particularities and replaced with blander version (about voting machine worry, discounting intelligence agencies’ consensus about Russian subversion of the Clinton campaign).
The Manchurian Candidate
The final item in Greil Marcus’s last Real Life Rock column (originally posted at Pitchfork.com) has taken on a new urgency in the light of Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and the leaked CIA “assessment” confirming “Russia intervened in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.”
