Googling “Trump fascist” yields 25 pages of hits and the caveat that “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 237 already displayed”.
Nation
In Transit
I was on the train last night heading home. Two young brothers–early teens–were standing in front of me. Both were wearing worn but clean clothes, one had his hoodie up, the other didn’t. Both had light jackets—too flimsy for the weather and knockoff hightop sneakers. It was a look I knew all too well. It reminded me of an entire winter I spent with a blue double-knit jacket as my “winter coat.”
They were chatting usual urban teen talk. I paid little attention until I heard one of them mention what Trump had said earlier in the day about the Pope.
Primary Wisdom
The author recently answered queries about Trump and the Democrats.
The Witnesses
Whittaker Chambers is my idea of an exemplary conservative. He dug Beats and Sorrow Songs, did in Ayn Rand in a definitive National Review piece, distanced himself from William Buckley, hung tight with his old friend James Agee, and tried to convince other conservatives Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin.
Gypsy Joe (& Camden Town)
I used to drink at Dale’s Bar on Broadway in Camden.
Street Life…and Death
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, Spiegel & Grau, 2015
I was raised during the Seventies on a cramped block of rundown tenements in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. Each building on my block was a five-floor walk-up. Each apartment–two to a floor–was a railroad-style flat. And in those apartments lived poor families raising passels of kids. Not only was this pre-gentrification but by modern hipster standards, this was downright prehistoric.
Group Grope: The Theory of Microaggression
Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the protesters has pushed me to think through the theory of microaggression.
The Price of Victimhood
Instances of police brutality and killing of unarmed Blacks, first revealed by social media, have been a catalyst for widespread expression of grievances about racism in colleges and universities. According to 538, “the most frequently requested data by protestors was for a survey on the atmosphere in classrooms that would collect information as part of end terms evaluations of subtle forms of racism, often called microaggressions, that are committed by specific professors and lecturers.” Microaggression: “everyday verbal, non verbal and environmental slights, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”
Feeling the Bern
Bernard Avishai has been blogging more lately. Here are two recent sharp posts about the other Bernie and a brush with neo-Zionist extremists.
Morning in Iowa
A report from an Iowa Caucus-goer.
It looks to be a long winter; Ted Cruz woke up this morning, saw his shadow, but then absolutely refused to go back in his hole.
Roots Moves II
Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Roots Moves
“Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose… We owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.”—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Simone Weil once lived in a building around the corner from Tiemann Place in West Harlem where we held our 29th annual “Anti-Gentrification Street Fair” in October.
They’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun observed that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws”. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is now testing an expansion of this proposition: if you could make all the ballads, need you care what is taught in the schools?
Timothy Mayer’s “Adams Chronicles”
Fredric Smoler’s mockery (above) of wannabe worldly—truly deadly—approaches to the American Revolution has an extra kick for this editor. My son’s assigned reading in his 7th grade class this season is a Y.A. text, My Brother Sam Is Dead, that leeches glory—and all the juice—out of our country’s creation story. Higher learning’s disdain for “American exceptionalism” seems to have trickled down to progressive high schools and middle schools.
“Hamilton”
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy. And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony. One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children. One would be wrong.
Greider and Goodwyn
William Greider published a piece last week criticizing a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” take on Trump (and Bernie Sanders) that conflated their political theater with American populism. Greider emailed a link to his Nation piece, which he self-deprecatingly described as a “rant,” to me (and others). I responded as follows…
Is Dan Mad?
George Trow’s magnificent, prophetic piece on Dan Rather—first published in First of the Month in 1999—never grows old.
Ambassador Satch’s Talk-Back
Julian Bond dug the first issue of First of the Month and stayed in our corner. While his support for First was of vanishingly small import compared to his other services to our country, it was an honor to know he was paying attention. After Amiri Baraka died last year, Bond sent First a swatch of an interview he’d conducted with Baraka under the aegis of the University of Virginia’s “Explorations in Black Leadership” program. Once it was edited and published he wrote to say “it was great to read this again, especially the Louis Armstrong section.” What follows is the section he highlighted.
Giving Us Something We Can Feel
You couldn’t buy a copy of Between the World and Me on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a stretch last month since it was sold out of every book store. It was rousing to find out readers were hungry for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s polemic against structural racism.
Shelby Steele’s Historylessness
What follows is a compacted version of a critique of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character (1991) that originally appeared in The Trouble With Friendship (1995).