The Power and the Glory

This news item caught my eye recently, partly because the vandalism happened in a nearby city I have ties to.  Someone broke into a Catholic church, played with the fire extinguisher and trashed the place,  destroying numerous objects there.  As far as I can tell, no one has been arrested yet.

What interests me is this comment by the parish priest:

"If you think about a statue that's been in a church for well over 100 years, the amount of devotion, the affection, the prayers that have gone up to heaven through the intercession of St. Joseph, it really is a loss for the community," said Father David Kime.

I'm not in favor of iconoclasm, whether sectarian or freelance, but this seems strange to me.  Will the "devotion, the affection, the prayers" disappear, or be invalidated, because the images they used were destroyed?  That question should be directed to the vandal too, though I doubt they hoped to achieve that; I speculate that they were unleashing some of the "wild male energy" I used to hear so much about.  

Catholics have often been accused of idolatry for their use of images, though the difference between them and even the most iconoclastic Protestants is a matter of degree, not of kind.  It's proper to deplore the malicious destruction of property, whether it belongs to a church or not; but I don't understand tying the non-material devotion etc. to the material objects.  Can't St. Joseph intercede for Catholics if his physical image isn't present, or has been destroyed?  I've asked similar questions before, with regard to Native American religion.

This doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with lay believers who find it hard to distinguish spiritual practice from the material objects they associate with it.  But admitting its importance seems to me to confirm my atheistic insistence that religion is a human invention and construction.  Apologists will, I think, counter that because of human weakness, many or most people need to refer to embodied symbols and concrete images. If only Christians were as understanding of the principle as applied to the "pagan" use of images!  I understand both groups, but I think understanding and sympathy can co-exist with rejection.

A Zen story comes to mind: an outsider observes a Zen master bowing to an image of the Buddha.  "Why are you doing that?" the outsider protests.  "It's just an image, an illusion, not reality.  I can spit on these statues."  "Okay," replies the master: "You spit; I bow."  I do neither, but I think that spitting on a religious image, no less than smashing it, indicates how much power that it still has over the vandal.  Of course images have power, because human beings assign them power.  I doubt we can ever escape that, but we can be aware of what we're doing.

Paradise by the Firelight

Speaking of Korea (and if you haven't heard, the ruling party blocked Yoon's impeachment), this video turned up on YouTube this week.

 

I'm fond of Park Hyo-shin's music, and I'm happy to see that he's still active - it was his name on the video that drew my attention.  I should be ashamed that I didn't recognize Kim Tae-hyung's name.  He is, of course, a member of the internationally popular K-pop group BTS, but I've never found them or their music interesting, and his name rang no bells for me.  I'm gratified that Kim, also known as V, decided to record this duet with Park; it will boost Park's visibility both in Korea and around the world.  (Reminds me of Elton John recording "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" with John Lennon.)

But what is going on here?  Two music videos have been released to promote "Winter Ahead."  The other one shows him in a theater, then blowing out birthday candles, and then in a European mansion nuzzling a sculpture of a naked woman which later comes to life, carrying a teddy bear through a European street, and back at the birthday party, dancing chaotically in a crowd of Westerners.  It has little if anything to do with the sloppy English lyrics, whose refrain is "Lie with me" and "Paradise."  I'm not sure who wrote "Winter Ahead"; the videos credit just about everybody except the songwriter.  I'm going to suppose Kim wrote it.

But this video, the one I embedded here, shows Kim and Park sharing a Western style steak dinner by candlelight with plenty of wine, singing the song to each other.  That wasn't clear to me at first, but this making-of video shows them rehearsing the lyrics for the shoot, deciding how to play it.  I wondered as I watched it, more than once, if they understood what they were singing.  Sure sure, this is homosocial male bonding, and Korean men can be very affectionate with each other, but "Lie with me" takes it further than that: the song is about erotic desire.  There was a time when Koreans could pretend not to know that homosexuality exists in Korea, but the popularity of BL* graphic novels in Korea, as in the rest of Asia, should have changed that.  I think the generational change is apparent in the making-of video: Kim and Park hug each other in greeting early on, but Kim (28 years old) is visibly more relaxed about it than Park (43).  Koreans traditionally aren't big huggers, but evidently it's caught on among the young, like so many Western customs.

I'm not suggesting that Kim and Park are gay, or boyfriends. (Years ago I enraged some Park fans who thought I'd said he was gay.  Not this time either, kids.)  Yes, it's a video, but what is it meant to depict?  Just in Korea times have changed, and with BTS' international reach they aren't even trying to be "pure" Korean, whatever that would be.  No matter what Kim and Park and their collaborators on the video had in mind, people outside Korea (and probably inside too) are going to see two cute guys singing "Lie with me" to each other, with the indication that it will be Paradise, and they'll read it as a love song.  Surely someone on the creative team would have noticed it.   I wonder how many BTS fans also love BL media? I'll bet a good many of them. They won't consider it an accusation to see this video as a date between two male stars, they'll see it as a celebration.  That's part of the cultural world BTS operates in, and they must know it.

But then the other video, the Pygmalion one, depicts Kim as a heterosexual.  That's as much a performance as this video, but how many apologists are going to insist that Taehyung isn't really straight, he's just acting?**  Anyway, my main question here is what Park and Kim are performing in the intimate dinner video.  It seems obvious to me, but maybe I'm misreading it.

------------------------------------------------

*BL = Boy Love, but most of the manga and dramas I've seen involve sexual relationships between high school boys, college students or even older men, into their thirties.

** As I once wrote about Shakespeare's sonnets, some of which are addressed to a young man and some to a woman:

No one seems to suppose that in the "Dark Lady" sonnets, Shakespeare was merely indulging in conventional rhetoric about a heterosexual passion that he didn't really feel. No, those poems are assumed to be transparently autobiographical, referring to a genital relationship replete with exchanged bodily fluids. It is the "Fair Youth" sonnets that are assumed to be "innocent", obviously intended to express no erotic feeling whatever -- unless they are appropriated for heterosexual use, in which case they are obviously erotic. (No one seems to have got in a snit over the [hetero]sexualizing of the "Fair Youth" sonnets in the movie Shakespeare in Love.)

Has President Yoon Suk-yeol Learned His Lesson?

Most of the US coverage of Yoon Suk-yeol's attempt to impose martial law on South Korea still looks predictably bad, though "chaos" has largely given way to "What can we expect?" Will Yoon resign, will he be impeached, what does this mean for future US relations with South Korea, etc.  The Washington Post headline I've screencapped above takes the cake for tone-deafness, though. "Misstep"?  That fits, of course, with the Beltway media fondness for saying that the United States "stumbles" or "blunders" into our many wars.

There has been some speculation from Koreans about what Yoon thought he was doing, though speculation is all it is.

The left-ish South Korean newsmagazine Hankyoreh ran this cartoon:

Speculation is fun, but I doubt we'll ever know why Yoon made this power grab.  His own political party, which voted to reject the order for martial law, has announced that they will not vote to impeach him, and he has his supporters among the populace - as I've said, there's a sizable base for authoritarianism in South Korea.  The country's largest labor union has called a general strike in support of Yoon's removal, and the South Korean police are investigating whether he can be charged with insurrection.

The best thing I've seen has been this long article by Tim Shorrock, an American journalist who knows Korea and its history well.  This is why I've relied heavily on independent and usually left-wing sources for news since the late 1960s: they're much more accurate than the mainstream, let alone overtly right-wing media.  I remembered former ROK president Park Geun-hye's failed attempt to impose martial law to avoid impeachment in 2017, but now I learned that "Yoon's gambit began at 11:00 pm on Monday night, when Army Chief of Staff General Park An-su, a four-star general, issued a decree of martial law" - that was an hour before Yoon went before the cameras to justify his move.  

I also learned more about Yoon's collaboration with US President Biden in military alliance with a re-arming Japan.  (Of course Biden likes to have a toady like Yoon in an important client state.)  Far from the "stability" the US prattles about, these moves destabilize northeast Asia.  So it's not surprising that the US Embassy in Seoul did not condemn Yoon's attempted coup, posting that his "announcement to end martial law is a crucial step" - as though martial law just appeared of its own volition and Yoon boldly moved to end it.  (Was it a coup, given that it was bloodless and failed almost immediately?  Yes.  Arnaud Bertrand is wrong to call it a "self-coup," since most coups are internal.)  Shorrock's article is long, but it's packed with information you need.

We're living in interesting times, aren't we?

I Gotta Get Out of This Bad Neighborhood

Wow.  A lot has happened in South Korea in the past twelve hours.  I hesitate to post this, because I don't know what the next twelve hours might bring, but for the moment things are looking up.

First President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in South Korea, vaguely blaming supposed pro-North Korean elements active in the South.  He did this at midnight Korean time, perhaps hoping it was a good time to spring a fait accompli on the nation.  But thousands of protesters hit the streets, including hundreds of members of the National Assembly, who pushed their way past police and soldiers into the Assembly building.  They then voted overwhelmingly (CNN says unanimously) to overturn the decree; this included not only the opposition but Yoon's own party.  A few hours later, at about 5 a.m. Korean time, Yoon backed down, saying that he would retract the declaration as soon as his cabinet could meet to confirm it.  As I write this, it appears that the cabinet has met and martial law has been lifted.

US and other Western media have reacted predictably enough.  CNN titled this Youtube clip "Yoon backtracks after plunging South Korea into chaos with martial law order," and the word "chaos" appeared in the reports of some other networks.  But it doesn't look to me like there was chaos, not even in CNN's reporting.  The protests were orderly, the assembly members pushed past the cops in an organized manner, and voted Yoon's declaration down.  At about that point, the military trucks dispersed.  But you know, the corporate media hate it when the rabble talk back to their betters: they can't see it as anything but chaos.  (Or CHOAS, as this outlet spelled it. P.S.: they've corrected the spelling in the thumbnail, but the Internet is forever.) 

The reporter in Seoul knows some of the history at least, and I give him credit for acknowledging the ROK's history of dictatorship and resistance to it.  This was the first time martial law had been declared in South Korea since it was lifted in 1980, but there have been times when it seemed close, as in 2008, when then-President Lee Myong-bak cracked down on protesters and media who objected to his authoritarian ways. Lee also accused his critics of being in league with the North, but that was normal South Korean right-wing politics then.  (I was in Seoul at the time.)

CNN's analyst wasn't bad either, in an Old-Asia-Hand way.  The anchors, on the other hand, were dreadful, spouting every cliche they could think of.

CBS' coverage was about the same, a mixed bag leading off with the obligatory reference to "chaos."  Their reporter, a White House correspondent traveling with Joe Biden in Angola, reads a preliminary NSC statement announcing America's "serious concern" about Yoon's action.  Yoon hadn't notified either Biden or other elements of the US government of his intention, and caught them by surprise. Biden said he was still being briefed.  The reporter, Willie James Inman, evidently has some experience in South Korea, but is more concerned to boost Biden's diplomacy in northeast Asia.  He says that South Korea "isn't necessarily in the best neighborhood" and mentions the "storied history", with "tense moments" between Korea and Japan.  That's an interesting way to describe the thirty-five year occupation of Korea by Japan,  of notable harshness and cruelty, including a serious attempt to eliminate Korean language and culture, but hey - time constraints.

I have the impression that corporate-media coverage of Korea has improved in the past couple of decades, but it was so desultory and ignorant before that that's not saying much.  At the moment I'm just relieved that this crisis seems to have been resolved so quickly. Our reporters speculated about Yoon's political future: can he stay in office?  He was already very unpopular, even for a South Korean President; again, comparable to his right-wing predecessors like Lee Myoung-bak and Park Geun-hye.  (Despite South Koreans' determination to preserve their democracy, they still keep voting in dangerous right-wingers every other term.  Korean democracy is counterbalanced by Korean authoritarianism.) There have already been calls for Yoon's resignation, and since his own party stomped on his overreach this time, he may not be able to stay in office. Or maybe he will; I'm not going to predict or even speculate.  My main concern, again, is the people of Korea, which includes numerous friends of mine, people I've known for decades.  It looks like they've dodged a bullet, and I'm very relieved, though probably not as relieved as they are.

What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.

The Golden Meanie

This letter to the editor appeared in an area paper recently:

Soon, America will devolve into a mean and ugly nation.  I blame the stupidity of Republicans and the cowardice of Democrats for our present situation.  When asked what kind of government the United States had, Benjamin Franklin's response was, "A republic, if you can keep it."  Most great Western civilizations were not conquered from the outside, but rotted from the inside.  Welcome to America 2025.

At about the same time I saw a post/ad from The Atlantic on Facebook, featuring a 2023 essay by David Brooks asking how "we" got so mean, and calling for a return to the "moral education" that used to be the American norm.

I can't say I'm surprised or incredulous that educated American adults are so misinformed about our history.  The United States has always been mean and ugly, from the Pilgrim Fathers who wanted religious freedom for themselves but not for Papists or Anabaptists, to the Declaration of Independence, to squabbles among the Framers, to the divisions over slavery, to Secession and civil war, to rebellion in the southern states after that war was over, to Jim Crow, to anti-immigrant sentiments and violence by and against labor, to fascist rallies and claims that FDR was a Communist Jew, and so on and on.  The people involved in these conflicts were also products of the moral education Brooks wants to exhume and inflict on the young.

But I imagine that the same people who wring their hands over our lost civility know all that history perfectly well, and would remember it if they thought they could use it for their own polemics. Generally they're old enough to remember such prominent political meanies as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.  I have to conclude that they just don't care; honesty and accuracy are not in their job description.

Am I saying that it's okay to be mean and rude?  That's not the question.  Historically, most Americans think meanness and rudeness are just fine, as long as we're mean and rude to the right people.  Maybe we shouldn't, but we do.  My point is that this isn't some new development or devolution, it's an American tradition, and it's much older than America.  Think of Jesus attacking his religious / political opponents; think of the Buddha telling a soldier that if he were to "die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions."  Apologists try to explain away such meanness as righteous wrath.  I say it's just being mean and rude to the right people.  I don't think anyone really wants to get rid of meanness; they just want to be in charge of it.

Now You See It...

A few people may have noticed that this blog disappeared for a couple of days this week.  ("Few" because, due to my own laziness and scandalously infrequent posting, it gets so little traffic now.)  On Tuesday morning I got email from Blogger notifying me that someone had flagged the blog for review, so they removed it.  I was allowed to appeal, and I did. This morning I got another message, telling me that they'd re-evaluated and "upon review, the blog has been reinstated," so here we are.

Needless to say, I'm immensely relieved.  Seventeen years of writing had gone up in smoke, and like a fool I hadn't backed it up.  The first thing I did after the reinstatement was to do just that. Coming on top of the Republican victory on Tuesday, this episode left me stunned, and I walked around in a daze for a while.  Even if no one else had read it, this blog is my intellectual journal, allowing me to revisit my thoughts on a range of subjects over the past two decades - which highlights my carelessness in not having backed it up.  I hope I've learned my lesson.

So here we are.  Looking back at November 2016, I see that I had a similar reaction to Trump's victory then.  It's worse now, because he won the popular vote this time, and the GOP won back the Senate.  The outcome for the House of Representatives is still unsettled as I write.

I've mostly avoided the usual media, because I know pretty much what they're going to say.  My timeline on Facebook is also predictable.  I've seen it all before.  Eventually I'll have more to say, I suppose, though I also have a backlog of other topics I've put off addressing, and I intend to write about them for awhile.  For now, let me quote what an old Bloomington friend from the 1980s posted on Facebook.

I think the news media bares [sic] a lot of responsibility for Trump winning. News media is now primarily entertainment media. So they cover candidates who are entertaining. President Biden did not and will not offer a daily dose of entertaining "event"s because he is too busy doing his job as President and whose ego doesn't require constant validation. Whereas Trump is entertaining and will say anything to keep attention on himself. The current news media and Trump are made for each other. Sadly the entire world will now suffer the consequences.

I don't entirely disagree with this - I've criticized the corporate media harshly and often - but my friend overlooks a few things.  One is that despite the "current news media," Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020.  The Democrats also defied the odds and drubbed the GOP in the 2022 midterms, to the disappointment of most of the corporate media.  By my friend's logic, none of that should have happened.  So while the news media should be criticized, it seems to me that something else could have been involved; could it perhaps be issues?  Like many liberals, my friend assumes that the masses are just sheep who do what the Lying Media tell them to do.  (Not him, though - why not?)  But you don't have to remember very far back to know that they don't, not always.  And it wouldn't do to ask why.  Ironically, my friend is echoing Trump's demonization of the media here.

I strongly disagree with his evaluation of Joe Biden's ego, which led him to seek re-election and to hang on to his candidacy no matter how unpopular he became.  His dogged support for Israel's crimes also hurt him, as it did Harris.  In general US media support Israel too, no matter what, so they can't be blamed for the public's revulsion against the atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.  On the other side, Trump's notorious laziness didn't keep him from doing a lot of harm during his first term, and I expect his second term to be even worse.  I'd hoped that the Democrats would control Congress, which would have impeded Trump's agenda somewhat, but that didn't happen.

One correction I want to make to yesterday's post.  I thought that "the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling," and I was flat wrong about that.  From what I've read and heard, voter turnout this year was the highest it has been since 2008, and while some of that involved voters who opposed Trump and the GOP, it wasn't enough to counter Trump's highly motivated supporters.

P. S. A correction to the correction: a reader tells me that voter turnout wasn't as high as I thought.  He thinks 2020 was higher.  I'm not going to dig into it, because it's certain that Trump's base went to the polls in sufficient numbers that he won the popular vote this time.

Rejoice, For the 2028 Presidential Campaign Is About to Begin!

What more is there to say?  I don't think it's just my advancing age that has made this election cycle seem worse than its predecessors.  If so much weren't at stake, it could have been entertaining: the progressive deterioration of Biden and Trump on live television, the antics of party and personal loyalists as reality kept throwing banana peels in the path of their dreams, the incompetence of most of the Beltway news media, the fecklessness of administration spokespeople trying to defend the indefensible, and so on and on.  Watching State Department spokesperson Matt Miller smirk helplessly as he runs interference for Israeli atrocities, or White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre roll her eyes like a bored teenager at impertinent questions would strain credibility of satire, but it's all real, which makes it no fun at all.

Some Biden dead-enders are still fuming that "They stabbed that man in the forehead," though most quickly jumped on the Harris bandwagon.  I still see some complaining that Harris was 'forced' on the voters without a primary, though the immediate flood of support she received, both verbal and monetary, ought to be evidence enough that there was massive uneasiness about Biden at least among the Democratic rank and file before he was pried loose from his candidacy.  Some continued to lie for months that it was too late to replace Biden's name with Harris's on the ballots in various states, though this was propaganda from the Trump campaign.  Even funnier were MAGA complaints about all the campaign material with Biden's name on it that had become useless overnight - all that money wasted, so unfair!

Myself, I felt enormous relief when Biden finally abdicated.  I was not, and still am not, an enthusiast for Harris.  Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate was probably her best high-profile move.  I think it's fair to call her handling of opposition to US support of Israel a misstep, though it's impossible to say how it will affect the election, especially since Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine than she and Biden have been. Among her supporters there's a tendency to talk as though criticism and opposition come only from Arab-Americans and Muslims, though that is certainly not true.

I think the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling, though again it's impossible to say by how much.  One thing that sticks with me is that, in the small town where I live, whose government is dominated by Republicans, the local GOP office did not have a Trump sign in its window until he secured the nomination: instead there was a De Santis sign, which was removed when he ended his campaign.  For several weeks, the only signs in the window were downticket candidates.  I saw fewer Trump-Vance signs than Harris-Walz signs around town until the past week or so.  This bespeaks a lack of enthusiasm for Trump in an area where I expected him to be much more popular.

The abortion issue is going to be important, and may bode well for Democrats at all levels. That's been clear since the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are running scared.  Even Trump is trying to distance himself from it, which isn't going to win over many voters and has alienated some forced-birther Republicans.

I wanted to write this before Election Day, just out of guilt for not having weighed in before.  One thing that reinforced my sloth was that when I looked at my posts during previous election cycles, I saw that I'd said before everything I wanted to say this time.  But I feel bad because in the future I won't be able to look at what I've written this year as a kind of journal, which I can do for campaigns in 2008 and later.  I won't be following Election Night coverage this time, any more than I have in years past.  One previous post I do want to refer to concerns the likelihood that we won't know who's won for several days.  I remember that this maddened many mainstream journalists in 2020, and it's likely to be true this time around as well.  But we'll see, and one lesson we all should have learned this year is that events can surprise us.  However, I don't think most people have learned that lesson at all; many are determined to know what will happen, what we can expect, in advance anyway.

One prediction I will make with some confidence, though: as they wait impatiently for the results to come in, commentators will be asking: What does this mean for 2028?

One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our two-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

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* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships

I should know better than to write about reviews of books rather than the books themselves, but I've been lazy lately, and since this review irritated me enough to start me writing, I'll go with it.  Remember, though, that I haven't yet read the book in question, and that I'm writing about the review.

So I happened on this review at the Guardian's website, of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm, published in December by Oxford University Press.  My beef is primarily with the reviewer, Peter Conrad, who writes as if he's never read a book about gay history before.  While that's true of many people, including gay ones, I expect a little better from a reviewer in a prestigious newspaper.

Evidently the book focuses on the brutal persecution of "the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them," and Conrad says it's all the fault of Christianity as he grimly but pruriently insists on detailing the punishments that our fore-uncles suffered.  "As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was 'male-male sexual intercourse or desire."  Conrad here echoes gay Christian apologetics of the 1960s through the 1990s or so, which argued that the story of Sodom was not about male-to-male buttsex but about violations of hospitality.  This line reached its peak in John Boswell's influential Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), which strained mightily to prove that Christianity was not hostile to homosexuality at all.  Boswell was effectively rebutted by numerous gay scholars, but his work remains popular (if largely unread) by gay laymen.  I'll just note that Conrad overlooks the prohibitions of male-to-male sex in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), which commands the execution of both partners, and in Romans 1, without referring to Sodom.  He also overlooks the hostility to receptive partners in Greek and Roman antiquity, expressed in heated rhetoric that presaged the ranting of medieval theologians on the subject.  That hostility is often found among gay men today.  While male-to-male sex was clearly common and popular in Roman society, an equally popular way to discredit one's political or other enemies was to accuse them of enjoying sexual passivity.  This let the accuser wallow in elaborate exciting fantasies about other people's practices, as bigots have done ever since.

The persecutions of sodomites weren't as consistent as Conrad implies either.  That doesn't excuse them, but it does indicate that religion wasn't the only or determining factor.  In Florence, for example, moral panics came and went.  According to Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), authorities realized that draconic punishments made it harder to get convictions, so they changed the penalties to fines. "Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death," Conrad writes; well, sometimes, but not always or "automatically."  If the Florentine sex cops were driven by religious fervor, they should have maintained the beheadings and torture.  Conrad even acknowledges this: "The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse for confiscating their wealth."

Conrad may not be aware of it, but gay scholars have been investigating these matters since at least the 1970s.  In addition to Rocke, I think of a paper in The Gay Academic (ed. Louie Crew, Etc. Publications, 1978, pp. 73-78) on a sodomite hunt in the Netherlands that led to the execution of at least fifty-nine men, plus the harassment and expulsion of many more, in 1730.  Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History (Crowell, 1976) has a long documentary section on official violence against gay people. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (California, 1985) details the public torture and executions of English sodomites in the late 1700s. And so on: these are just off the top of my head.  I imagine Noel Malcolm is aware of his predecessors, even if Peter Conrad isn't.

I look forward to reading Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, possibly this year; the Kindle edition is reasonably priced, so I intend to buy it soon.  But I found this bit, the end of Conrad's review, off-putting: "Announcing that he has 'come to this subject with no personal investment in it', Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of historians who double as gay activists and back-project 'anachronistic sexual significances' on to blameless friendships between medieval men."  For a moment it was as if I were reading about a publication from the 1970s or earlier, with the author distancing himself from his subject (he's not that way, he's impartial and objective!), as if anyone cared anymore.  Even worse is that bit about "anachronistic sexual significances" and "blameless friendships."  I've written about that before.  Erotic love relations between men are also blameless, and there's nothing anachronistic about wondering if same-sex friends were also erotic partners. The ancient Greeks, for example, were sure that the Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were erastes and eromenos - though they couldn't agree on which was which.  If anything, gay scholars like Alan Bray and David M. Halperin have done the opposite of what Malcolm says, denying erotic elements in medieval friendships.  So I'll have to see Malcolm's remarks in their context.