The problem with going to sleep too early is getting up too early, especially when Zoey The Dog tells me, in her silent-film way, she is hungry. Zoey The Dog does not bark nor does she welp in most situations. Instead, she just stands by your bed and maybe pants a bit until you wake up, and there she is...almost smiling. In that moment, she appears to be saying, "Come on now. You know I'm hungry." Zoey remains, at age 15 1/2, an extraordinary dog.
Anyway, The Wife is away in Taos for an art teachers' convention of sorts. I had spent Friday and part of yesterday with her before comimg hone yesterday. This morning, as a loner, I find I am able to click on YouTube and listen to prog rock cranked up. First up this morning was Yes' "Revealing Science of God," from the Topographic Oceans album (1973). Then, Genesis' "Battle of Epping Forest," from the Selling England by the Pound album (no intent, but also 1973). If one wishes to hear an amazing rock backbeat, Phil Collins' work on the latter song is perhaps the pinnacle of such drumming. Until one isolates the drums, one barely notices how busy Collins actually is throughout the song.
I am writing here at the blog as I have begun to largely refrain from engaging anymore within Facebook (FB). In that spirit, I provide what I call the "drive bys" in this "electronic drawer" known as a blog (the phrase is a nod to Victor Serge, who said he wrote his last novels, notebooks, and memoirs for the dressing room "drawer," as nobody was reading him at that last, destitute point in his life). As I said in previous post, I have finally grown tired of people on FB who don't read the article or source posted, and would rather parrot corporate media arguments they have ingested--and when faced with factual analysis, retreat into cognitive dissonance. Stated another way, I find myself emotionally defeated by the uninformed and misinformed. I am now feeling as Bertrand Russell felt in 1935 when he penned his brilliant essay, "The Ancestry of Fascism."
If we were to ask me, what am I happy about, well, let me begin by saying I am very proud of The Daughter for all the essays she has had published since the start of this year in HerCampus-UCLA. She has wanted to break into more hefty subjects than romance and films, but that is the nature of her assignments. What I find extraordinary is she has come up with the subjects of her articles, having only been told to write about film or more often, romance issues. She has complied a trove of essays worth publishing in book form, in my Dad-humble view. Her style is unlike Dad's and is far more in the Nora Ephron tradition, which may mean she may have a positive future ahead of her. Also, The Son begins his Neo-prog radio show at North Carolina State next Saturday. This is on top of his scientific endeavors in pursuing a PhD in Biomathematics, which, per his discussions with us, are not going as well as he'd like. He is, however, his own worst critics and we have told we support hum even if he wanted to quit. Of course, we are only able to respond to his feelings and cannot in the least offer any substantive help. Meanwhile, The Wife is enjoying her first art teaching job, and her taking this job (one which represented her dream job) has given me space to be a substitute teacher on his way, hopefully, to pursuing the "Alternative Licensure" program for teachers here in the Land of Enchantment. Finally, The Folks are getting used to living here, and enjoy, as much as we do, and we do, living next door to each other.
And so, with those positive notes, here go the drive-bys:
*I found an entire webpage of many of the legendary Ron Cobb's political cartoons. They remain deeply compelling and powerful, with the drawings themselves worthy of hanging on your wall. That these cartoons are mostly from about 45-50 years ago are an achievement of perspective and insight. These are well worth the clicks, especially if you have not seen Cobb's work before.
*Here is another political comic, from Bob the Angry Flower, positing a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, and reminding us how the capitalist elite actually don't know how to do anything. Bob the Angry Flower has caught my recent sensibilities in this one as well. I mean, really. If I hear one more some corporate-media-misleadingly-defined "moderate" rhetorically ask, "How are we going to pay for Medicare for All?" when never telling us how much the public option will add in costs (subsidies, people still paying co-pays, deductible, and premiums), how doctors are not likely to take the public option patients, since they are likely to be those who can't get insurance elsewhere, and how the public option does nothing to cut the paperwork that is a major part of what makes the current system so ridiculously expensive, I may develop Tourett's Syndrome.
*Yes, this article about unrest in Chile is, unfortunately, tediously long, but well worth wading through, since corporate broadcast media is not talking about what is happening in Chile at all. The writer is writing for an audience that has no memory of the events which led to 9/11/1973 and the fascist military coup that defaced what had been Latin America's longest functioning open government. Also, the author, a Chilean by heritage, is usually not up to writing about a topic this profound, so there is lots of what I like to call "tee-up," a phrase my first post-bar passage boss in the law, Douglas Woods Richardson, meant when he said there was too much explanation going on as if the judge did not know the first thing about the law (which he admitted sometimes was true...). Anyway, one cannot read this article without beginning to realize why the whole right wing and corporate Democratic Party member arguments about the failures of "socialism" in Venezuela are at best misguided, and more directly a lie. It is not about "socialism" or "capitalism" or any "isms" per se. Well, actually, it is about the legacies of militarism, colonialism, and imperialism. And maybe the Center for Economic Policy and Research is on to something when saying US sanctions have played a role in the rapid decline of economic fortunes in Venezuela, not merely the decline of oil prices. Still, I think there was a sadly typical military mindset--Chavez was a military officer the US trained, it must be remembered--prevailing in Venezuela in the early part of this century, where there was no planning for a decline in oil prices, little diversification for Venezuela's economy, and no sense of fiscal prudence which Scandinavians understand, and even Eugene Debs would have understood. So, I am fine with laying failure blame onto "socialism," too, but not with the glee or overstatement so prevalent in most discussions regarding Venezuela. For me, I think we should see Venezuela has been an economic basket case for decades before Chavez began his tenure as leader, as this article eventually summarizes (there were periods of tremendous growth followed by ridiculous inflation and unemployment). Yet, to hear the right wing and corporate Democrats tell it, one would think Venezuela was doing just fine until Chavez started building schools, getting more doctors in rural areas, and, in effect, sharing some of the oil wealth to a level not seen in Venezuela's history. Oh well. I don't know anyone who claims to be liberal or left in American politics who wants to emulate Venezuela. It's always about Scandinavia, and Western Europe in general.
* Saletan is usually great for this type of parsing style argument, and here he shows us how callous and reckless Trump really is. The betrayal of the Kurds is unbelievable in the sense that it clearly shows how and why Trump is pro-Putin and pro-Fascist International. Peter Galbraith's article in the most recent NYRB provides a good geo-political summary and analysis as well.
* In the What-the-Heck!? department, what is up with Morrissey being a British version of a Trumpist? The Wife and I adore The Smiths and Morrissey's solo career, when we followed it up through the mid to late 1990s. We found his and The Smiths' song lyrics to be equivalent to postcards from creative, thoughtful, caring, and eccentric minds. It is frankly bizarre how a guy who found international fame, particularly among Hispanics up and down the Western Hemisphere, would have such a worldview. Oh well again. I guess Morrissey is going to be like Cat Stevens to me; someone who no longer exists but who wrote part of my life's soundtrack.
And now for some drive by comments regarding other NYRB articles:
* Linda Greenhouse, the NY Times Supreme Court beat reporter for the past 20 years, has a good, but not great review of a book about Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman Supreme Court Justice. What Greenhouse misses, perhaps owing to personal familiarity with Justice O'Connor, is how O'Connr joining in with the full on reactionaries in Bush v. Gore in 2000 helped seal the fate that led to her being replaced by Justice Alito. Had O'Connor not been intellectually corrupt and elitist, and let the process in Florida's post-election counting continue, and Gore ascended to the presidency, Gore would have picked someone far more akin to O'Connor's version of "judicial moderation" than what came from the Bush II administration. Alito was a bomb thrower, and O'Connor knew it at the time Alito was nominated in 2005. However, neither O'Connor nor apparently Linda Greenhouse recognize this development as O'Connor's own Twilight Zone episode, meaning this: O'Connor feared a Gore victory and thought her "moderation" would be nullified. So she got what she wanted, which was judicially created Bush victory, and, in the end, her "moderation" has been nullified. The few fans of MF Blog, the Sequel may recall my paean and analysis of The Twilight Zone, and note theme #1 from the Zone show.
* I enjoyed this article about O'Keefe and Stiglitz and the other couple whose lives intersected with them. This review is a paradigmatic NYRB essay-review, meaning it is a great example as to why the NYRB remains the premier political-literary journal in the US since its founding 56 years ago. It means to American culture what the North American Review meant in the early 19th Century. It is just too bad the percentage of people vis a vis the entire US population who read the NAR was so much higher than the percentage of Americans who read the NYRB.
* Here is another essay-review which illuminates, excites curiosity to deeper thinking and perspective; this time on the continuing controversy regarding Confederate leader statues and, most importantly, and how not subjecting the slaveowner traitors to a Nuremberg trial after the US Civil War, led to the Southern region of our nation never coming to grips with its own guilt for supporting and promoting racism and murder of African Americans.
* It is a tragedy this article about the current situation in Israel and how it got there is behind the subscription wall. This article would never have been written under the initial ownership of the NYRB, as the one blind spot from the late Barbara Epstein and now late Robert Silvers was their emotionally based attachment to the Zionist dream, even as Chomsky and I.F. Stone tried to warn them what was happening. Instead of heeding Chomsky and Stone, Silvers and Epstein banished these two intellectual titans. Now, after Silvers' death in 2017, the new ownership and editorship have been far more open to the type of criticism Americans need to hear regarding Israel.
Back to other drive bys....
*So what is it about people like Kamala Harris, who come from strong, progressive backgrounds, who decide to be players and throw out whatever was good from those backgrounds? Here, the LA Times prints a story about Harris' Indian side of her family that has no sense of irony about Harris' neo-liberalism, her fealty to the prosecutor's creed to lock up people of color under the guise of fighting against "drugs," cynical ambition, etc. It is amazing to me how Al Gore seemed to run away from his father, Al Gore, Sr., for most of Gore, Jr.'s political career, how Mitt Romney ran away from his father George's union-liberal Repubicanism, and how Pete Buttigieg, aka Mayor Pete, has largely been and now has fully morphed into a cynical neo-liberal of the worst sort, when Mayor Pete's Dad was a devotee and leading translator of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. The thing about Kamala Harris which is truly wild is we already knew her Dad is Donald Harris, a major economist from Stanford, who is known to be a post-Keynes guy, with a critique more left wing than anything else. Each of these children of great progressives appear to have decided their parents failed because they were left wing. They are correct, of course, but to see these players play at being "Les Grossman" is beyond frustrating. I know. I blog on a Sunday morning and have not accomplished much of anything. Easy for me to say. :)
* One has to read this article from Mike Hiltzik of the LA Times all the way through to realize the editors chose a headline that far overstated the effect of the new California law regarding the gig economy on freelance writers and photographers. It is classic to read of the one guy who managed to work out a living in the gig economy as a travel writer/photographer who hates the new law, and come to recognize what a whiner he is. The article shows the devastating effect from greedy billionaires and their executives who used the "newspapers are dying" argument to make sure they make their billions for themselves and left their reporters and photographers fighting over the scraps as "independent contractors." That some succeed as independent contractors is no surprise. What should be noted is how few actually succeed. CA State Assemblywoman Gonzalez comes off as thoughtful and fair as a political leader, and recognizes some "winners" in the gig economy will have louder megaphones and will never be satisfied until they are fine, while the great mass suffers. One may ask why the editors chose the headline--until one reads the article and realizes whose side the editors are on, meaning themselves and the publishers-owners.
* And the next time one of my few readers sees Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, maybe, after cursing out these jerks for their recent attacks on the superhero genre, which attacks constitute a crime against culture, they may ask them to at least read this article explaining how powerful the new Watchmen series on HBO promises to be. As I can't afford HBO, I will have to wait for a final verdict. From what I have read, the new Watchmen series is dealing with the real American history of race relations, particularly the Tulsa massacre and riot by white folks nearly 100 years ago, which destroyed a middle class African-American community.
* My mother--The Mom--has a take on animation that mirrors Scorsese and Coppola about the superhero genre: It's for kids. What The Mom has had to grapple with over the past three decades, and in which she shows textbook cognitive dissonance, is the brilliance and very adult-oriented "cartoons." The last season of Bojack Horseman is upon us. For those with Netflix, and this show is the number one reason to get Netflix, and with it a crescendo for the most emotionally intelligent situation comedy ever to appear on television. This article from Salon.com gives us a decent to good explanation as to what is going on.
* The Wife and I so want to see JoJo Rabbit, and this article gives me even more reason to do so. It may be the best film about Nazis and society since Life is Beautiful, which I continue to say is a brilliant film. The Mom has always said I would have behaved the same as the Dad did with the Son in Life is Beautiful, and I think she is correct about that. What I have always thought about the film is how callous and non-redeemable the writer-director made the Germans. They were entitled to no subtitles when they spoke, and, when one thinks one of the "nice" Germans would help the main character-Dad, he doesn't, and his non-doing is so perfectly callous and apathetic. Anyone who thinks the film "whitewashes" the Holocaust does not understand the differences between the Italian experience during the Holocaust on the one hand, and does not understand the attack on the entire mentality which produced the Holocaust on the other. Also, for those who think the idea of a Dad shielding his son from such a situation is daft and itself callous-fiction writing, here is an article from today's--yes, today's--Los Angeles Times, where the writer speaks about the anti-Semitic attack in Pittsburgh last fall, when he was in the immediate facility. He writes:
Hearing a wail of sirens, I looked out a window and saw an armored personnel carrier racing down my street. A shelter-in-place order was issued as rumors spread that the heavily armed gunman (or gunmen, they didn’t yet know) was on the loose. These rumors later proved untrue — but in the moment, they were terrifying. I locked the doors to the house and took my kids into the basement. While I anxiously cradled my 3-month-old, I tried to persuade my 3-year-old that we were playing a game by hiding.
As a Dad, that is a natural reaction to a terror filled moment. It is not the only reaction, but it is certainly what we lawyers call "reasonably foreseeable." As I like to say, Oh well....Just keep on saying Life is Beautiful is a travesty--though maybe let's see how JoJo Rabbit fares with audiences, if any.
* We continue as a species to value short-term economic profit over our own lives, our children's lives, and the planet. It happens across the planet. Here is an article about an Italian steel plant which produced cancer as well as steel, and how difficult it was to decide to finally do something about it, and maybe even close the planet. Ibsen's 19th Century play, Enemy of the People, dealt with this precise issue, and yet, we never seem to learn. How Green Was My Valley also dealt with this issue. As I say, we never learn. I see it here in NM, as people shut down talk of alternative fuels, saying it would kill the economy, and then cynically say, You're a hypocrite if you want to use the money to jump-start pre-K education for children or otherwise help anyone who is vulnerable. Must be nice to live in that heretically sealed world known as "moderation" or "conservatism." As Corey Robin's magisterial work on the reactionary (conservative) mind, the duty is to preserve privilege. One may be intellectual in orientation, i.e. Burke, Kirk, and Rand, or one may be vulgar, as in Joe McCarthy or Donald Trump, the goal remains the same: Protecting the privileged.
As a final note, to the inevitable question: What am I reading? Well, here goes...
I am half way through Van Wyck Brooks' Howells: His Life and World (1959), one of Brooks' last works. As usual, I am knocked over by Brooks' insight and analysis. I also found myself holding and then buying, for $3, a book by May Sarton, Kinds of Love. I realized yesterday I am finally ready for Sarton. She is a writer from the mid to late 20th Century, who dared to speak of lesbian relationships, and who came from intellectual pedigree: Dad was a famous chemist and progenitor of what has become known as the "history of science," and Mom was an artist, suffragette, and socialist. What I find interesting about Sarton is critics of her work noted her wider societal lens in her works about personal relationships. I think what has impelled me toward Sarton is reading Van Wyck Brooks about the history of American literature, and its ground-zero location in New England, where Sarton set many of her works. As I say, I find myself ready for her, and managed to read nearly 50 pages in one sitting last evening, even though tired. I would describe the book thus far as follows: Sarton's description of place is outstanding, in the sense one does not have to have experienced New England to understand it. Further, Sarton has already provided great insight into various characters she has been introducing, all through dialogue and minimal narration. In between, I found, at a used bookstore in Taos yesterday, a book of interviews with Edward Said from the 1980s up to the year before his death in 2003. I remain convinced Said is one of the most remarkable minds of the past 50 years. His mind was so wide ranging, and nobody could make the Western canon more exciting than he could--with Martha Nussbaum being his equal. And to read his interviews on the Arab-Israeli wars is to see, in retrospect, his hopes and dreams, and to realize they have, in the 16 years since his death, essentially defeated.
Not being on FB has given me more time to read NYRB at night or early in the morning, too. Tomorrow, though, I am back to sub teaching, this time at a pueblo school north of here, subbing for a science teacher in middle school. I am bringing the Stephen Jay Gould essay book which includes the essay on Mickey Mouse to show how evolution works (with Mickey, in reverse) in case there is time beyond the teacher's notes for the students. It is an extra copy I have of the book so a lucky student may find it to be a gift tomorrow.
