All Your Genes Are Belong to Her

I found myself grumbling crankily over liberal reactions to American Eagle's ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, so here's a little more.

Another brand put out a commercial featuring a pretty actor saying “This tan? Genetics. I just got my color analysis back and guess what? Golden summer.” While susceptibility to tanning rather than burning may have a genetic component, a tan is no more genetic than a haircut, or the clothes the actor is wearing.  That's another reminder that most people don't know what "genetic" means, and shouldn't be taken seriously when they invoke it.

But that includes inclusivity-minded liberals who think that being gay or trans is in one's genes, or that one's cultural tradition is in one's DNA, or that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived. (That last one is particularly painful, since the claim comes from one of America's best liberal writers, who subscribes to a bonkers idea about what DNA does and clings to it, rather sadly, despite harsh pushback from his commenters.)

I think a similar confusion drives the liberal freakout over Sydney Sweeney.  Why not say: okay, she has good genes – so do any number of other people.  Sure, racists think that only whites and especially she has good genes. The problem is that liberals think so too: if she has good genes, no one else has them.  Remember Chris Hayes's claim, in his book on meritocracy, that once you've found the absolute best soprano in the world, there's no reason to listen to any other. Then remember A. E. Housman's comment on another classical scholar's work: "Three minutes' thought would suffice to find [that] this [is complete wackery]; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time."  But liberals are addicted to "Oh, how can you say such terrible things?" as the first move in public discourse; for thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

I've written before that people like Sweeney, far from being special, are the least common denominators of human attractiveness. They can therefore be marketed to the largest possible number of consumers.  Marketing and consumption is what they are used for - and never forget that without mass communications and the institutions of publicity and marketing, she wouldn't exist as a star.  So thousands, even millions of men, can fantasize that her smiles are for them alone, and if she was lucky enough to meet them, she'd immediately recognize their supreme value; likewise, thousands or millions of young women can fantasize about being that desirable.  On some level they all know it's just a fantasy, but it's still a rush.

If Sydney's genes are so great, though, she should be having babies - lots of babies - to perpetuate them.  She's only their temporary custodian; that's what eugenics is all about.  American Eagle's copywriters know it too: "In the ad, the blonde hair, blue-eyed actress says, 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.'" (You didn't think she wrote her own lines, did you?)  The same is true of her appearance.  Her genes may give her a head start, but without workouts, makeup artists, and hairstylists, she wouldn't glow as much, and time's winged chariot is already bearing down on her.  Not to pick on her alone, this is a well-known problem faced by all people whose appearance is their fortune; the examples of Cher, Michael Jackson, and Madonna - not to mention Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, and Lauren Sánchez - stand as a warning to us all.  

And while she's apparently a registered Republican, if she utters any heterodox opinions, her MAGA fan base will turn on her without mercy.  So far it doesn't seem that Sydney Sweeney is such a big star; no doubt she's hoping to parley her new notoriety into reaching a higher level.  That will have to be seen.

The Trouble with Sydney - Born That Way?

There was a kerfluffle recently over a new ad campaign for American Eagle Jeans that featured Sydney Sweeney, a young model and actress who for some reason has become MAGA's sweetheart.  Not long before, terminally online right-wing guys were drooling over pictures of her cleavage and crowing that the Woke Left doesn't like pretty white girls -- take that, libtards!  Or this.  Or something.  These were the same guys who threw tantrums because M&Ms were no longer sexy enough to please them, and complaining because liberal co-eds didn't want to date them.  (Why did they want liberal women to date them anyway?  Social media are full of "conservative" males denouncing liberal women as fat lesbians with tattoos and piercings and blue or pink hair who will never get a man; or as stuck-up hot bitches who think they're too good for a regular guy.  But this is all just the mirror image of doughy gay guys who complain that some hot guy wouldn't breed* them, and I digress.) 

The ads' slogan was "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," with Sweeney chiming in "My jeans are blue."  Cute, but dumb - but then this is the world of advertising.  I remember amusing myself with the genes / jeans homonym as in the 70s, when I was younger and dumber though not cuter.  American Eagle had every reason to expect that the youth market would giggle and embrace the slogan and shell out for AE's not-made-in-America products. It got off to a promising start, with Donald Trump endorsing it after he was told that Sweeney is a registered Republican, and American Eagle stocks taking off.

But then things changed.  There were many complaints that the ads promoted eugenics and white privilege (Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed), which you'd ordinarily expect would help sales.  But then sales fell off and foot traffic in American Eagle stores declined - not drastically, but noticeably.  The business press suggested that AE might want to dial it back.  Certain MAGA celebrities and media denounced the Woke Mob for discrimination against white people and the sacred Free Enterprise system, though they were happy enough when they could claim that America had rejected Gender Ideology and forced businesses to stop using trans celebrities in their marketing.  Boycotts for me but not for thee.  All very predictable.

What had surprised me, though, was the objection to "eugenics."  Everybody knows that eugenics is bad.  But liberals and progressives generally love biological determinism, invoking genes and chromosomes and DNA and evolution.  They love to claim that this or that cultural phenomenon is "in our DNA."  In its day, before the Nazis ruined it for everybody, eugenics was as popular on the left as on the right.  (See Andre Pichot's The Pure Society [Verso, 2000].)   Sydney Sweeney probably does have good genes, though that's not as much of an achievement as people think.  So do any number of non-white celebrities adored for their looks. Maybe the American Eagle ads were a handy opportunity to push back against resurgent racism in American Society, but I don't think the people who objected were thinking strategically.  

The idea that the masses should be swayed by "influencers" seems to span the political spectrum.  Toward the left end it has the form that we should be able to see images of People Who Look Like Us in the media.  They generally don't look like us, but we should be able to dream that plastic, focus-grouped celebrities are us, or at least are our friends and will inclusively accept us and give us a sense of belonging.  I agree that there should be variety in the types of people's bodies depicted in media, but it's not enough, and I don't think that mass media can be engineered to give everybody a sense of belonging.  Sometimes it's good not to belong.  Sometimes you have to stand alone against public condemnation and even feel like an outcast.  There are no easy solutions to really important problems; or sometimes a easy solution is painful in some way.  But American Eagle isn't standing on principle, it's just interested in making money, and will change its sales pitch as it finds necessary.

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* Don't get me started on the use of "breed" among gay men to refer to penetration.  At least not today.

Go Ask Joanne

Last month a San Francisco bookstore announced that it would no longer carry Joanne Rowling's books because of her anti-transgender campaigning.  This caused some concern, some of it disingenuous, as I argued at the time.  I didn't mention this bit, but it's an excellent example of the way people distort things, deliberately or not:

On Monday, Booksmith provided a list on its website of fantasy books similar to the “Harry Potter” series for readers who are interested in alternatives, sparking some backlash and a debate about whether bookstores should make decisions about which books their customers can access.

“So you’re going to curate your selections to only sell books by authors that you agree with politically,” one commenter wrote on social media. “Good to know. I’ll be shopping elsewhere.”

Recommending some books rather than others doesn't deny "access", nor does suggesting alternatives; bookstores and libraries do both, and uninterested customers can ignore them in favor of what they do like.  Ask a clerk or a librarian if you don't know where to look.

Which reminds me of a recent thread from Twitter/X, intended to explain why guys aren't reading books anymore. "Exhibit A", a display of current fantasy fiction:

You see, if there are any books in the store or library that don't interest them, men and boys just have to flee the place before they are swamped in girl cooties.  When called out, the poster replied "I think we need more diversity in traditional publishing today."

There has been a lot of fussing over the alleged shortage of "literary fiction" by straight white males nowadays, and I've been meaning to write something about that.  As numerous writers have pointed out, it's not even certain that there is such a shortage; the alarmists have not cited any actual data in support of their claim, and have been openly impressionistic about it, it's just how it seems / feels to them.  But I'll try to return to that issue some other time.

I'm not very interested in the kind of fantasy fiction on display in the photo above, and I've read a fair sample.  It's not because it's girly, but because I'm put off by the preachiness and New-Agey spirituality common to the subgenre, and the formulaic though professional storytelling.  I'll keep on sampling, though, because some of it made a powerful impression on me: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) for example, and Victoria A. Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor (2018).  Both authors have published more work set in their respective universes, which I've enjoyed, but The Goblin Emperor keeps drawing me back; I've already read it three or four times.  The trouble is that there is so much being published, and fantasy isn't the only area important to me.

I've given up any reservations I might have had about the ethics of boycotting Rowling's work, though, now that she has urged a boycott herself, of the British retailer Marks and Spencer for having a transgender employee in the lingerie department.  I'm not going to try to disentangle the facts from Rowling's agenda in the case.  The point is that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ... goose.

And when I began writing this post I remembered something else about Rowling: she adopted the initials J. K. instead of her actual name when the first Harry Potter book was published, at her publisher's urging.  The idea was that a girl's name as author might alienate potential boy readers. Not unreasonably for an unknown debut writer, she went along with the ploy.  (Playboy magazine pressured Ursula K. Le Guin into using her initials when they published a story by her in 1968, thirty years before Harry Potter.)  Her treacherous chromosomes were never really a secret, and the series became a worldwide phenomenon.  It's significant, though, that when it came time to publish her first non-Potter novel, she chose not only another pseudonym but an unambiguously masculine one.  The first Robert Galbraith book didn't sell well until she, uh, came out as its author. Not to make too big a thing of it, but Rowling seems to have a penchant for gender disguise to mislead potential readers. Shouldn't she stop pretending that she can be a man for paraliterary purposes?  One could probably make a case that Harry Potter was the wedge that led to the invasion of commercial fantasy by women, and terrifying, emasculating book displays that cause men to give up on reading altogether.

That's My Noem, Don't Wear It Out!

Snopes is a valuable resource overall, especially since its writers lay out the evidence for the claims it examines and why it is or isn't credible.

Like any resource, however, Snopes isn't perfect.  I've noticed before that the site seems to go easy on right-wingers in high places.  That's okay, it's a reminder that you should be ready to be skeptical and critical of all media.

Today, while looking up some other topics, I found a recent post addressing a claim by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.  After South Park's latest episode, which satirized Noem's history of cosmetic enhancement, Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck, "It's so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It's only the liberals and the extremists who do that. If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can't."

Snopes writer Joe Esposito declared the quotation a "Correct Attribution," which it evidently was -- she did utter those words -- and left it there.  It would have been entirely proper, and I'd have thought an irresistible followup, to examine her claim itself.  Is it only "the liberals and the extremists" who "constantly make fun of women for how they look"? (I think it's a safe bet that by "extremists" she meant only left-wing extremists, not right-wing extremists like her boss or herself.  And I should add that the word "extremist," used as an epithet as she did there, is also lazy.)  That claim is obviously false; the right has a long history of doing it.  Just below the Noem post, Snopes provided a link to an earlier post about right-wing fantasies that Michelle Obama is too butch-looking to be a woman and must therefore be a man.  Contrariwise, South Park's previous episode had mocked Donald Trump's appearance even more harshly.  Noem was lying, and it wouldn't have been unfair for Esposito to mention that she was stretching the truth, or something comparably mild.

Noem was right, it's lazy to make fun of women's appearance, but South Park doesn't pretend to be sober, responsible discourse.  It has always, for twenty-seven seasons, been juvenile satire.  For awhile, a sect of right-wingers, known as "South Park Conservatives," managed to persuade themselves that Parker and Stone were their BFFs.  Even then it took some disciplined memory management to ignore the show's mockery of the right, but of course they managed it.  (I see from that article that the label "South Park Conservatives" was coined by Andrew Sullivan; it figures.)  I have no such illusions myself.  I figured out early on that I only agreed intermittently with their opinions.  I still enjoyed a lot of their work, and tuned it out when I didn't.  I haven't seen the Noem episode yet -- neither, she says, has Noem -- but from the summaries I've seen, it also attacked her for her policies and her actions - her job.

Trump's MAGA base, for all their religious posturing, has taken advantage of the breaking of taboos South Park spearheaded by becoming grosser than their predecessors could have been - openly, anyway. Hence the "Fuck Your Feelings" t-shirts, balanced by their indignation when someone stamps on their own feelings.  Stone and Parker have had to become even more outrageous to keep ahead of them.

I don't judge Noem or the rest of the Trump gang by their appearance, I judge them by the content of their characters - just as I judged their predecessors of both parties. It's not out of line, I should think, to notice that Trump judges women by their appearance: his female appointees are nearly all from the same mold.  That wouldn't matter if they were competent or honest, but of course they aren't.  They're chosen for their looks and their loyalty, their willingness to do what he tells them to.

My Father's House Has Many Cafes, Crafts Vendors, Etc.

I thought I'd written an update on this before, but apparently I didn't.

In late 2021, a "non-LGBTQ+ affirming" church opened in a liberal, artsy neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina.  Predictably, it attracted a lot of negative attention, but there were some notably strange things about it, which I wrote about in the blog post I just linked.  First, it occupied a space that had been held vacant for some time by a landlord who supported the venture; second, it was planned to include a cafe and crafts vendors because, the founding owner and pastor declared, "I get really cringy about church spaces that are open for like an hour on Sunday for service and then take up massive real estate and sit empty."  As I observed in that earlier post, I don't have the impression that most churches sit empty except for "like an hour on Sunday for service."  They have services on other days - Wednesdays appear to be popular - plus Bible study, fellowship groups, charity work including food pantries, and so on.  The pastor didn't seem to have any interest in such activities, or to know about them.

Every so often I would do a search for Pioneers, and nothing turned up until early last year.  According to this article, the church closed down on February 25, 2024, with a clearance (labeled "Garage") sale to dispose of its stock. I had the impression that the founders hadn't done much to build a congregation, and showed little interest in doing so.  They thought that they could run a church like a business, but didn't even do that very well: a business let alone a church would have tried harder to get along in its neighborhood and community, but the pastor did her best to dodge engagement with those who objected to Pioneers' agenda.  According to the accounts I read of its beginnings, they thought they could simply "plant" a church without testing the soil. It's surprising they lasted two years; good riddance.

That Is What Fiction Means; or, We Are In the Hands of a Madman

Apropos of Hell, a writer I like on Twitter/X wrote on July 23:

As ever, the downside to being an atheist is that I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell. 

He was referring to the Gaza Humanitarian Organization, which certainly is a despicable organization, set up by the Trump administration to pretend to deliver aid to suffering people in Gaza - but really to draw them to delivery sites so that the IDF can massacre them.

I sympathize, I really do, and I realize that his post is an anguished cry of helplessness expressing what many people feel about the horrors in the world. That's nothing new.  It probably is why people invented the notion of post-mortem punishment, as Dan McClellan argued in the video I discussed last time: people suffer terribly, those who torment them not only get away with it but thrive, so why not threaten the bad guys with punishment after they die?  It seems to make those who invent the notion feel a little better.  But it does nothing to help the sufferers.  It doesn't stop their suffering now or undo their pain.  Promising that they will sit at Abraham's right hand and view the torment of the damned doesn't help them either.  There is no Hell, there is no Heaven, but even if there were, the threat doesn't slow the bad guys down.  Someone, it seems to me, has not escaped his religious upbringing.

It's also unwise to make assumptions about divine justice.  In the context of Christian tradition, it's just as likely (zero equals zero) that Hell will be full of Muslims who dared to resist or attack the Holy Land given by God to His Chosen People, while the Christian Zionists behind the GHO who blessed Israel will spend eternity in Heavenly bliss.  Anguished helplessness tends to make people overlook such things.

I see many posts on social media from people who react to the horrors in Gaza by saying that they're praying for peace, that God will end the suffering and give the children comfort, that Allah will destroy the evil state of so-called Israel, and so on.  These are as empty as the post I quoted above.  If a powerful deity cares about these things, it can do something about it.  In the Yahwist traditions, it has done so before.  The logical conclusion is that it is content with the way things are going and has no interest in stopping it.

The same applies, I think, to atheists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, 'You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?' ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing."  Those who lack the cosmic perspective include Tyson himself: "Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country."  Like other religious teachers, Tyson contains multitudes and can be quoted on any side of any issue.

I was also set off on this topic by a song I heard on my community radio station on Friday: "The Day the Politicians Died," by The Magnetic Fields.

 

I was infuriated by it.  Unfortunately I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person in this band will go to hell ... just kidding.  If every politician died tomorrow, nothing would change.  The world would face the same problems of organization and distribution that it faces now, without the limited expertise that our institutions do have.  But I don't know, maybe The Magnetic Fields are MAGA?  It doesn't matter, because I've heard numerous people from all over the political spectrum express fantasies along these lines, as if politicians were a distinct race that can be extirpated.  They consider other politicians not to be politicians, so they don't really want all politicians to die, just the bad ones.  Bernie Sanders, Obama, the Clintons, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar et al.; or Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron De Santis, Mike Lee, Lauren Boebert et al. -- they aren't really politicians, they're doing the Lord's work and will be spared.  It takes a lot of determined stupidity to think like this. 

I have no exact solutions, but as a general principle I believe the only way to stop suffering is to stop inflicting it; not in a wishful afterlife, but in this one.  You can't wipe out the bad guys, because your own side has an ample supply of bad guys.  Removing either Hamas or Israel from the face of the earth would not end the conflict.  (Which reminds me of another post I saw recently, that confused "war" with "conflict."  More on that soon, I hope.)  It can only end through negotiation, and then making change happen.  Killing and terror just create more angry, vengeful people, guaranteeing that the killing and terror will continue.  And hoping for eternal punishment won't end it either.

Aw, Hell No

I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily.  But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok.  I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact.  But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video. 

 

McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on.  As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell."  At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!"  He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his reconstruction of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity.  I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."

So that much is good.  I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna.  As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved.  If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring.  It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all.  Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek?  Maybe he won't, I don't know.  

I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood.  (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.)  God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15).  As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick.  But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ.  As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway.  It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.

Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus.  Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way.  The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety.  The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.

Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory.  When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers.  SCHOOLED them.  And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.  

As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way.  McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field.  I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it.  The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him.  Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have  been found in the past century.  Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented.  But we know surprisingly little about him, almost no new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.)  The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do no know'".  But scholarship abhors a vacuum.  So do believers and unbelievers.

I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking.  It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority.  Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah.  If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them.  As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have.  It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.

The Race Is Not To The Swift

A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds."  I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.

The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.  Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince.  Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself.  "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood."  That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.

This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care.  The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does.  (Are "Hispanics" a "race"?  Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?)  Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms. 

Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that.  I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black."  It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics.  Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).  "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."

Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023.  "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys.  It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.

I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it.  What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics."  I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance.  (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.)  What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.

* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article. 

Barack Is Back!

It appears that the only Barack we've got launched a tirade against a room of big Democratic donors the other day.

“I think it’s going to require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions. And it’s going to require Democrats to just toughen up,” Obama said at the fundraiser, according to excerpts of his remarks exclusively obtained by CNN.

“You know, don’t tell me you’re a Democrat, but you’re kind of disappointed right now, so you’re not doing anything. No, now is exactly the time that you get in there and do something,” he said. “Don’t say that you care deeply about free speech and then you’re quiet. No, you stand up for free speech when it’s hard. When somebody says something that you don’t like, but you still say, ‘You know what, that person has the right to speak.’ … What’s needed now is courage.”

And more.  In a way these remarks are unexceptionable, but that's just it: they're platitudes.  If you imagine them being delivered in Obama's grating scold's voice, they become more annoying, especially when you remember that the speaker collaborated with the most far-right elements of the GOP in the apparent hope that they would be nice and work with him.  He let Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy continue before the Republicans asked for them (he later admitted it was a mistake, but so what?).  He appointed a commission of deficit hawks in hopes they'd demand cuts in Social Security, and when they didn't he accepted the demand anyway (though again, he wasn't able to do it).  He fired at least two staffers when right-wing attack media lied about them.  Having kneecapped potential opposition in advance, he scolded activists who criticized his right-wing, anti-immigrant, antigay policies publicly.  

And speaking of whining:

WHAT SOME WOULD HAVE PREFERRED: “Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.” The assumption here is that he would have lost the fight. It’s pretty much always Obama’s working assumption that he will lose any fight. And then, funnily enough, he does. 

Read the whole post, which consists of quotations from one of Obama's press conferences.  His apologists like to claim that he was helpless because the Democrats didn't control Congress, but that's false. They did control Congress for the first two years of his term, but he was still appeasing the Republicans anyway.

Of course at other times he put up his dukes and announced his readiness to take on all comers (these are from the same press conference);

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “And I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I’m itching for a fight on a whole range of issues.”

WHAT HE SUSPECTS: “I suspect they will find I am.”

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY: “I’m happy to have that battle. I’m happy to have that conversation. I just want to make sure that the American people aren’t harmed while we’re having that broader argument.” 

He took a similar tack in a meeting with CEOs in 2009:

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word.

But then Obama's flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem," he said. "And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices."

According to one of the participants, he then said, "I'm not out there to go after you. I'm protecting you. But if I'm going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation."

No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn't seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none; neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit.

After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show.

I think his leaked remarks to his donors are the same: for show.  They bring to mind Kamala Harris giggling "I told you so!" to a room of her fans.

“Stop looking for the quick fix. Stop looking for the messiah. You have great candidates running races right now. Support those candidates,” Obama said, calling out the New Jersey and Virginia elections, according to the excerpts of his remarks.

“Make sure that the DNC has what it needs to compete in what will be a more data-driven, more social media-driven cycle, which will cost some money and expertise and time,” he continued. 

Again, not such bad advice, though I wouldn't trust the DNC with my money, and he apparently didn't mention Zohran Mamdani, whom various party leaders are doing their best to undermine - "Vote Blue No Matter Who" was never meant seriously.

Tuck Me into Your Procrustean Bed, Big Daddy

If you need more evidence that our discourse around "race" and "ethnicity" stinks to high heaven, look no further than the freakout over New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college applications.  Corey Robin had a good post about it on Facebook today.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a blip of a story that temporarily seized the media and folks on Facebook about Zohran Mamdani's college application, where he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American, while specifying very clearly that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. The media, Mamdani's opponents in the race, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American.

In fact, Mamdani is Asian American and African-American.  His parents are South Asian by ancestry, and his father was born in Uganda, as was Zohran.  Robin continued:

Long story short: the Mamdani family, especially on his father's side, firmly identified with being African. It was critical to their identity and family story, particularly when Idi Amin kicked out people of Indian descent, claiming that because they were not Black, they were not African. (If you've ever seen Mississippi Masala, which I saw when it came out and recently re-watched, it tells that story, and of course Mississippi Masala was made by Zohran's mother and Mahmood's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair.) Mahmood Mamdani has written at length on the importance of his, and his family, being African, creating a world for themselves in Uganda and Tanzania, not as part of an Asian diaspora, but as Africans, or as Asian-Africans, if you will.

The ethnicity boxes on college applications (and just about everywhere these days) are notoriously Procrustean, like the ethnicity boxes for the US census.  What box should young Zohran have marked, since there evidently wasn't a "South Asian" one, and as Robin says, "African" was also legitimate.  Africans aren't "racially" monolithic anyway; due to the slave trade, most black Africans in the US were from sub-Saharan western Africa.  White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't "white" as "black," and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds.  Racial categories on the US census have varied over the years.

Consider another complicated case: what "race" or "ethnicity" are Latin Americans?  Many have predominantly European ancestry, though Spaniards haven't always counted as whites in the US.  But Germans and Poles have also contributed to the mix.  So have Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians.  Many have predominantly "Indian" or "Native American" ancestry, and speak indigenous languages as well as or instead of Spanish, though Americans tend to limit both of those categories to North American Indians.

I've told before of the diversity training session twenty years back at the Big Ten University where I worked, whose instructors told us that "Sunni" and "Shi'a" are ethnicities.  They definitely are not, any more than "Catholic" and "Protestant" are ethnicities.  I protested, and the instructors insisted that they were so.  So I let it go.  As I've also indicated before, I don't object to university diversity programs and policies on general principles, only to the ignorance and incompetence of the people who manage them.

I've been collecting anecdotes on this topic for a long time around here, such as the white liberals who thought it hilarious that a white American woman could set herself up as a Zen master, or who mock the Bible as the work of old white guys.  (Wait, wasn't it written by illiterate Bronze Age shepherds?)  I wish I could track down the white liberals who declared that race is as real as nappy hair, but that claim seems to be lost.  If hair color or texture were "racial" markers, then my brothers and I (born to the same parents) would be of different races. 

Then there was the Congressperson who threw a tantrum when a Sikh was invited to deliver a prayer in the House of Representatives.  First she claimed he was Muslim, then when corrected she insisted that non-Christian prayers should not be allowed in Congress even though Muslims and other non-Christians have led prayer there before.  Do I really care that she doesn't have a fine-tuned knowledge of racial, ethnic, or religious difference?  No, not really.

The people who attacked Mamdani's choices on his college applications postured as good liberals concerned for the well-being of real blacks and Asians, though they showed that they didn't understand the issues involved, and didn't care.  They're just throwing any mud they can at him, in hopes that some of it will stick.  One would think that in a time of resurgent US racism, they'd be more circumspect, but of course not.

Those Were the Days...

One of my current projects is reading some of the bestsellers of the 1950s, especially those my parents owned and left around the house. When I was about 6 my father brought home a box of books a co-worker had given him, I think with my mother in mind -- she was more of a reader than he was, especially of fiction. (He was ambitious, though: among the books he got for himself were G. Polya's How to Solve It and John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I don't think he read them, though.) I remember poking through the box and being disappointed that it contained nothing for kids.  But over the years I read some of them.  Those copies are long gone, but I've tracked down those whose titles I remember.

Right now I'm going through The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, originally published in 1956.  It sold very well and was filmed twice, once with Spencer Tracy and again for television in 1977, starring Carroll O'Connor.  It's an interesting story of the last political campaign of Frank Skeffington, an Irish-American machine politician in an unnamed city that resembles Boston. There's general agreement that The Last Hurrah is an accurate depiction of big-city politics in the first half of the twentieth century; one famous Boston pol objected to it at first as a portrait of himself, but when it became popular he claimed he was the model after all.

What I find interesting so far is that although everyone, including Skeffington, stresses that his style of politics is on the way out, partly because of the advent of television, it doesn't seem to have vanished yet. Take these remarks by Skeffington to his nephew, about a prominent local political reporter:

Second, while he did cover politics around here for a number of years, there’s no guarantee that he really understood very much about what he was covering. The fact that he was a newspaperman would suggest that he didn’t. It’s a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don’t know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their ‘objective analyses.’ The finest example of an objective analyst we’ve ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn’t know where City Hall was. That was no handicap, however, as he wrote his column for ten years without ever leaving the house; they used to call him ‘Mattress’ Mulrooney because it was believed that he never left his bed, either. Towards the end of his career it was rumored that some informer had smuggled in some valuable information to him: facts about the size of the city, who the officials were, how many parties we had, and what year it was....

I must say the most of our journalists don’t seem to be too strong on facts; no doubt they have an occupational distrust of them. 

Anyone who's watched the antics of the political press corps today should find that this description still applies to many of them.  So far The Last Hurrah is entertaining; I look forward to the rest of it. 

Let Jesus Sort Them Out

 

I was horrified by this image, which a Christian friend shared on Facebook.  It came with a post declaring that it "touched me in a powerful way, as it shows the precious girls running through water, to get to JESUS."  Not to quibble, but it looks to me like the girls are running on water, and why not? They're dead, and no longer bound by the limitations of the flesh. The flash floods that killed them rose far above their heads.  I'm sure this person wouldn't want to deny the supernatural elements that the picture takes for granted.

"People around the world need to see the joy on the girls faces and the warm, excited embrace of Christ."  Eeeuuw.  Just eeeuuw.  Christians never stop to think what they're revealing about their psyches when they write stuff like this.

I clicked on the original poster's profile, and something symptomatic was going on.  He was distraught over the lost girls, praying in tears.  Didn't he have faith that an excited Jesus would take them to his, erm, bosom?  That they weren't dead, but sleeping?  Someone commented that seven girls had been rescued, praise God!  Doesn't that mean that those precious girls didn't get to go straight to the Pearly Gates and be with Jesus forever?  Do they want them to be separated from their Heavenly Father?  

C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that deep in our hearts, we all believe that we are immortal. But if that were so, why would we see death as a bad thing, instead of a portal to a higher existence?  By Lewis's reasoning, it would seem that deep in our hearts, we don't believe we're immortal.  In an excellent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), the philosopher Martin Hägglund showed that in traditional orthodox Christianity, mourning the beloved dead shows a dangerous, even sinful lack of faith.  He quoted St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis berating themselves for feeling sorrow when someone dear to them went to be with God.  In general Christians have a great deal of difficulty reconciling their lively faith with their humanity.  As Sappho wrote, we know that death is an evil, or the gods would be mortal. (Lest someone try to claim that the Christian God became mortal through the incarnation, let me point out that he was only mostly dead, and rose again. He knew that mortality was an evil - but then according to Christian mythology, death is a curse he laid on us.)  

In the case of the Kerr County flash floods, which killed far more people than just the children at Camp Mystic, we're looking at what used to be called an act of God.  I've noticed that many Christians are squeamish nowadays about that kind of language, but it belongs to them and they shouldn't be allowed to distance themselves from it.  Not all Christians feel that way, of course, but they're still inconsistent about it.  By the time they get around to praying for the victims of this or that disaster, the damage is already done; it wouldn't occur to them to ask God not to make the disaster happen in the first place.  But after all, Jesus needs more angels to help him make rainbows.  God made the floods, and the Lamb reaps the harvest.

Once again I'm struck by how exactly the 18th-century philosopher David Hume described the ordinary believer's conception of God and his providence:

He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it. 

The Facebook friend who shared the image is the same person who lost her car keys and didn't find them until she'd spent a couple hundred dollars replacing them.  Meanwhile her friends prayed that they would turn up.  They also exhibited the understanding of their god that Hume described.

The poster on Facebook identified the artist behind the image as Afton Burkard, which I mention because artists should get due credit for their work, no matter how creepy it is.  But on the original post someone added a community note that the image is AI-generated, which seems more likely. 

All I Really Want to Do...

There was a flurry of concern online last week about a San Francisco bookstore that declared it would no longer sell books by J. K. Rowling. The store made the decision after Rowling, a billionaire and anti-trans troll, announced that "she would use her personal wealth to fund the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which describes itself as a legal fund to support 'individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.'"

There are valid concerns about such a move, but most of the discussion I saw exhibited the usual confusion about freedom of expression, censorship, and gender. People seem to be overlooking the fact that booksellers are also book buyers, and they're no more obligated to buy a given book than their customers are. It would be worrisome if Amazon or Barnes & Noble were to decide not to carry books by a certain author, but that's not likely to happen, and I'm not sure I'd object if they did.  Every case has to be evaluated on its own merits.  In this case, Rowling has made her personal brand inseparable from her politics, rather as Elon Musk has done, or Orson Scott Card before them. Uncomfortable as they are, boycotts are a valid tactic, even when I oppose specific cases.

I wrote about this at length a decade ago, 

when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!...

[Comics artist and blogger Barry Deutsch] drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business. It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. [Barry] argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, [Barry] doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

It seemed to me that the people who called the bookstore's action a "ban" were the same kind of people who would deny that getting books removed from public libraries or public school libraries is a ban. After all, they say reasonably, if you want your kids to read filth you can always buy it for them on Amazon; it's not censorship to remove books from a library, since no library can stock all books.  They conveniently forget that the pressure groups want laws passed that will force librarians to remove books they dislike.  That's government action, and by their own definition it's censorship.

I've been wondering how younger kids feel about Rowling's stance and actions.  After all, the Harry Potter books getting long in the tooth now; the first was published in 1997, the last in the series in 2007.  Will a new generation of kids be swayed by the batty opinions of their parents' favorite author, or will they be turned off by them?  One independent bookstore's boycott won't affect Rowling's net worth, but a generation's antipathy might. 

In the Court of the Ochre King

Another month down, and I haven't been productive, at least not here.  I've been too active, if anything, in comments under some videos on YouTube and Facebook.  I hope to bring some of those thoughts here.

Meanwhile, I found Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary uplifting.  But I quickly began to worry.  As with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' upset against Joseph Crowley in 2018, I noticed that many celebrants forgot that Mamdani won a primary, not a general election. She did win and go to Washington, and has so far managed to defeat Democratic party-hacks and MAGA scumbags hired to try to dislodge her.  I hope Mamdani will do as well, but the struggle isn't over yet.  The frenzy of bigotry being hurled at Mamdani, not only by Republicans but by Democratic elites, outstrips what I remember seeing aimed at AOC.  On the other hand, Mamdani has a little more political experience than she had, and seems well-prepared to take on his bigoted haters.  But I'm taking nothing for granted.

For an old guy, I have to concede that Donald Trump has a remarkable level of energy.  He travels around the world, he posts a flood of deranged, subliterate junk online, he's face-to-face with the media constantly.  His speaking seems to be getting rapidly less energetic and coherent, but overall he's not slowing down. That doesn't make him good, it makes him even more dangerous.  What chills me is how little even people I know who dislike Trump know about what is going on.  This is boosted by a poll I saw reported today, which found that "Nearly half (48%) of Americans haven’t heard anything about the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’" and "Only 8% of all Americans name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill they have heard about."  While the corporate media should be criticized harshly, I think my fellow citizens need to be responsible for their inattention to matters that will affect them.  As I think Ta Nehisi-Coates said: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Speaking of corporate media, NPR continues to appall me.  In the wake of the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses by a MAGA assassin, Morning Edition's A Martinez baited one of their colleagues on June 17:

Martínez: If you have a gun, are you thinking about taking it with you when you go places? And if you don't, are you thinking about buying one?

Scholten: Personal protection is certainly top of mind for lawmakers today and especially after this incident. We are reviewing a lot of our own internal safety protocols to see what else we might be able to do to keep ourselves safe, even in our own home. Even with the best security, we see here that it wasn't enough to stop or wouldn't have necessarily been enough to to stop the shooter in this instance.

I encourage everyone to read the whole story, and even more, to listen to the audio so you can hear Martinez working himself up to a peak of excitement at the idea of gun battles at political events in Minnesota.  State Representative Hilary Scholten stayed calm throughout; Martinez, who often confuses news with sports and action movies, should be fired.

There's so much more, but this will do for now.

My Imaginary Friend Can Beat Up Your Imaginary Friend!

I've often seen variations on this theme.  This time I figured out what is wrong with it.

There may be people living on other worlds, but if there are we don't know anything about them.  Myself, I take for granted that they would have cultures and histories and fateful blind spots, just as we do. Of course, I could be wrong.  But any statements or representations of them are fictional, "fairy tales" as the village-atheist meme has it, where someone projects his or her opinions onto them and gets them back endowed with authority.  They can fairly be called "religious."  It's completely normal, but the people who invent or share such memes believe that they're enlightened, superior to the gullible masses.  On the contrary, they are part of the masses.

That's basically it.  I might explore its implications some other time, but this will do for now.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.

Wooing Him From the Dark Side to the Dark Side

NPR's Steve Inskeep struck again this morning.  I was dawdling in bed, but I bounced even before this seven-minute absurdity was over.

INSKEEP: So I want people to know we talk from time to time. I don't really ask about your personal life, and I don't want to go too far here, but have you ever had a breakup like this?

SWISHER: Not like this. Not publicly like this. It's really quite strange, actually, but it's sort of in keeping with their relationship over the last year or so as Musk became very close to Donald Trump.

That's how it began, and it didn't get any better.

SWISHER: Well, I think they've had - you know, he sort of fell in love quickly, didn't he? He sort of went crazy, jumping up and down, doing the chainsaw thing, dedicating his life, moving into Mar-a-Lago, all this stuff, and shifted rather dramatically. Because he sort of was somewhat neutral in politics, had voted for Obama, you know, had a relationship with Trump in the first term, but certainly wasn't, you know, as deeply in love with him as he - and I hate to use these terms, but it's really been quite intense, calling himself BFF or best buddy or first buddy or whatever the heck they used.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SWISHER: And Trump reciprocated, too.

If you have time and a strong stomach, click through and listen to the audio.  Later on, Swisher says of Trump and Musk that "they're not serious people"; neither are she and Inskeep.  Remember this the next time someone calls NPR a radical-left outlet.

Also, this is weird: NPR's Scott Horsley reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's tariffs "could cut the federal debt by $2.8 trillion" in the next decade, while the Associated Press reported that the CBO forecast that Trump's budget bill would "spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade."  Horsley didn't mention the latter forecast, which seems to me a bit one-sided.  Horsley mentioned the effect of tariffs on wine prices, which inspired Inskeep to say:

INSKEEP: Hope you're able to pour yourself a glass, Scott. Thanks so much.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

But back to the Musk-Trump clash.  Liberal and left commentators were very excited about it yesterday, and you'd have thought that the two titans were clashing in person, face-to-face, instead of remotely.  They were also excited by Musk's threat that Trump's relations with Jeffrey Epstein were going to be revealed, as if Musk weren't a recreational liar who's posted false predictions often before, and as if the Trump-Epstein connection weren't well-documented already. What happens when two habitual liars clash?  Do they cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter?  None of this is really news anyway.  Many people had predicted that Musk would terminally piss off Trump, and vice versa; the only question was how long it would take.

Rumors are swirling like the dust from the Canadian wildfires that are making my eyes burn even as I write this.  First I read that Trump and Musk were going to meet to iron out their differences, then that the White House had denied it.  But it does seem that some highly placed Democratic centrists believe they see an opening to woo Musk to their side. May their memory be a curse.

The Farewell Symphony

The writer Edmund White died yesterday at the age of 85.  I just stumbled on the news this morning online, but so far, as of tonight, I haven't seen any mention of it in my social media.  My connections there include numerous gay media, publishers, and citizens, so I'm surprised.  I had numerous disagreements with him, but he was a fine writer, courageously chose to be openly gay before many of his contemporaries, he helped open the way for two generations of queer writers, and was very productive.  His most recent book, a memoir, appeared earlier this year; he was productive to the end.  Despite longtime poor health, his death seems to have come suddenly.  I'll miss him, despite my disagreements with him.

In particular I want to highlight a point on which I strongly agree with him:

A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

According to the Guardian, White produced more than thirty books in numerous genres, contributing his share to "more and more books." I prefer his essays and biographies to most of his novels, but it's time to go through all of them again.  It happens that I recently reread the first two, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so I'll go on from there.

Your Call Is Very Important to Us

 This has been getting some attention:

Musk: My frank opinion of the government is that the government is just the DMV that got big, okay, so when you say, like, let's have the government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it?

My first impulse, like other people who commented on it, was to defend the DMV.  I think I remember some surly staff when I first got a learner's permit in 1967, but since then my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.  In the past few years I've been to the BMV (as it's known in the Hoosier State) numerous times, not just for my own business but accompanying immigrant friends who needed an interpreter, and the staff have been wonderful: knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly.  The same is true of other government offices: Social Security in two different cities, the office in Chicago where I got my senior discount transit pass, and so on.  Numerous commenters under that post agreed, talking about DMV experiences around the country.

My second impulse was that what this drug-addled liar describes sounds to me not like government offices but private corporations: the impossibility of reaching a human being, being put on hold for hours, being stonewalled, being denied reasonable remedies ...  Most of the complaints I see about stagnant, inefficient, and unfriendly bureaucracy refer to the private sector.  Just try to cancel a newspaper subscription, or your cable service, or any number of other business dealings. Try to get a refund on your ticket for a canceled flight.  Try to talk to a real person without navigating complex menu trees that eventually dump you into an hour-long hold. And then there is the garden of earthly delights that is private health insurance.  These time sinks are the result of companies trying to boost profits by cutting service, which is labor-intensive: hence the menu trees, hence the call centers outsourced to poorer countries.  Next, breathing down our necks, will be AI telephone customer-service robots.  We'll hear a lot about their labor-saving, money saving superiority, but not very much about the actual costs of running and maintaining those systems.

I don't blame the phone center people, who often struggle with English & are hamstrung by the scripts they're given, but they try.  I blame the people at the top, people like Musk. 

About 30 years ago David Gordon published Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing".  The notion of big corporations as "lean and mean" was a myth then, and I doubt things have changed.  When business-school manager-types take over non-profit institutions such as colleges, they cut professors and service staff while hiring more office drones.  I saw this happen at around the same time, the mid-90s, in the state university food service where I worked.  Kitchen workers were RIFed (for Reduction in Force, the kind of acronym these people adore) in time for the beginning of the school year, and the system was reorganized.  The result was that serving lines got longer, food quality declined, worker morale declined, but the people at the top boasted in bulletin-board memos that another manager had been hired for the central administrative office. This was supposed to make us feel good.  They also brought in counselors, to help us cope with the stress. The entire year was disastrous and the dining service didn't recover for years after that, but the guy who'd done it was kept on for another year at his six-figure salary. New hires were outsourced to a private temp company, resulting in layers of waste: time reports had to be done by in-house managers and again by the company.  Plus the company had to make a profit, so the university paid more for workers.  That debacle was abandoned after a couple of years.  I wonder how much money was wasted.

The government, especially under Biden, tried to fix some of those problems, such as unsubscribing to email lists and getting refunds from airlines, against intense panicky opposition by the big corporations.  I hold no brief for Biden overall, but as a non-rich retiree I benefited from some of his actions.  So did many others.

In a way Musk is only part of the problem, albeit an important part.  One commenter wrote that he sounds like a spoiled toddler.  I say he sounds like a spoiled toddler who was raised on "free-enterprise" propaganda by rich right-wing parents; and that's what he is. The defense of government service many commenters raised was valid, and I was pleased to see it. But I didn't note more than a couple who pointed out that Musk's line applied most accurately to private corporations.

The Best Catch There Is

 “There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”

“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”

“What right did they have?”

“Catch-22.”

“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”

“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.

I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because 2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics.  Much of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or might potentially happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven spectacularly wrong.  Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption bring about a recession?  Inflation?  Experts are happy to weigh in for the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them?  Even though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly.  After all, eventually they'll be right.

The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police.  It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book.  There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances.  I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"?  That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure.  But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since.  I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does.  It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.

What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all.  It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing.  By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy.  Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals.  (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)

While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals.  The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction.  I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished.  If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement.  As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it.  If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation?  It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy.  It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in.  And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.