The Eternal Engine
The greatest virtue of Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian action film, may be its oddity.
Endangered Species
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside after butchering his doe. Yet the main thing about today, beyond the appalling weather, my rancid mutt, my worries for the environment, and the anniversary of the birth of the Infant Jesus is that I finished reading a great novel and I am surging with energy and feeling the aesthetic thrill of having experienced something original and important.
Obama’s Executive Action
David Brooks agrees with the substance of Obama’s executive action on immigration, but believes that he has transgressed the Constitution in the process. The president has usurped the role of the legislature. For Brooks, process transcends substance, so apart from expressing sympathy for the substance of Obama’s action he has little to say about what should be done in addressing the plight of millions of undocumented immigrants, given the gridlock that exists between the branches of government. When it is pointed out that Obama’s action has its precedents in the actions of his predecessors, Republicans as well as Democrats, Brooks responds by noting the scale of the action, 5 million rather than 1.5 million under George H.W. Bush. He does not explain how this makes Obama’s action, but not Bush’s, unconstitutional.
Strangers in the Land (and Humanism in the Arena)
I
“Scripture tells us we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too.”
That line from Barack Obama’s speech on his executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation took on a different resonance in the wake of Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island. Obama’s vision of a more empathetic America seemed beamish if you read Darren Wilson’s testimony about why he had to kill the “demon” Michael Brown or watched video of police taking down Eric Garner (then mulling around him afterwards like he was a beast of no nation). The retaliatory assassination of the two cops (and family men) last Saturday in Brooklyn wasn’t a blow to empire so much as a blow to empathy itself. Those head-shots went to the heart of the country.
Field Notes from a Lagging Indicator
Your editor struck up a correspondence with the author of this article after we both responded to a group email from William Greider linking us to one of Greider’s recent pieces. It led to an exchange about the Affordable Care Act and to this piece of “samizdat” detailing one desperate senior’s angle on ACA (and the state of his state’s healthcare system).
James Brown (Stay on the Scene)
Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, has moved your editor to re-up on First‘s 2007 tribute to JB, which includes contributions from Amiri Baraka, Chuck D., Anne Danielsen, John Leland, W.T. Lhamon Jr. Michael Lydon, Charles O’Brien, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Torres, Casey Wasserman, & Mel Watkins.
Buzzfeed
Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey is a Jeremiad about Global Warming that’s also a charm offensive. The author’s faith in the appeal of his teacherly Yankee persona seems almost as strong as his certitude rising levels of atmospheric carbon will have a devastating impact on the climate.
Uncool World
Questlove says it all well.
American hip-hop is usually based on imitation, and it is meant to produce artists who are users of the existing tradition, not creators. And because of that, black culture in general—which has defaulted into hip-hop—is no longer perceived as an interesting vanguard, as a source of potential disruption or a challenge to the dominant. Once you don’t have a cool factor any longer—when cool gets decoupled from African-American culture—what happens to the way that black people are seen?
IMMA LET YOU FINISH
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.”
A Green Army Takes on Big Oil
First is honored to reprint this small classic of reportage on the struggle against oil and gas companies who are trashing Louisiana’s wetlands and spawning toxic sinkholes in places like Bayou Corne.
Women and Children First
Coincident with the centennial celebration of the outbreak of World War I, I finished David Fromkin’s excellent A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Fromkin’s message, if I may paraphrase, is that since in took Western Europe 1500 years to get its shit together after the fall of the Roman Empire, we may have another 1400 of reports of madnesses and slaughters to look forward to ingesting each morning over coffee in The New York Times.
Tight Connection to My Heart
When I listen to critics of Hamas (and in the largest sense, Hamas needs not only to be criticized but defeated) (I’m not talking about Netanyahu but the so-called moderates who take time out of their presumably busy days to worry about Hamas’ strategy or its charter, which is to say its thoughts on the Zionist project), I wonder what these people were saying in the seventies and eighties…
Double-Truths
Eugene Goodheart offered two angles on the war in Gaza just before the cease-fire, speaking truth to powers that be on both sides of the conflict.
Q&A: Scialabba & Smoler in the Court of Public Opinion
What follows is an exchange between George Scialabba, essayist and editor of The Baffler, and longtime First of the Month contributor, Fredric Smoler. The subject of their debate (which was sparked by Smoler’s article “Democracy Now.”) is the controversy surrounding Michael Kinsley’s Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.
The Atrocity
If a gang of neo-Nazis had kidnapped a 16-year old boy in a London Jewish neighborhood in the dark of the night, driven him to Hyde Park, beaten him up, poured gasoline into his mouth, doused him all over and set him on fire—what would have happened?
Arab Soccer in the Disapora
1.
In a qualifying match against Brazil for the 1990 World Cup, Chile was on the verge of elimination when the goalkeeper Roberto Rojas cut himself with a razor and writhed on the ground next to a firework that had been thrown from the stands. What happened after that resembled a Zionist or neocon dreamscape: angry protestations, a bloodied body ceremoniously hauled away in a mock martyr’s cortege, and a subsequent humiliation of the supposed victim.