Shared with Close Friends
I really would like to live off the grid, but I like receiving packages in two days and I like buying without leaving the house. What to do?
Thursday, February 25, 2021
The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages
The GOP has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.
We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or socialism; Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Republicans, especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968—or perhaps, even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says, “We’re living through 1955.”)
Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.
I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
No one thinks much about the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and no one really should. This was a time referred to by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as the vremya zastoi—“the era of stagnation.” By that point, the Soviet Communist Party was a spent force, and ideological conviction was mostly for chumps and fanatics. A handful of party ideologues and the senior officers of the Soviet military might still have believed in “Marxism-Leninism”—the melding of aspirational communism to one-party dictatorship—but by and large, Soviet citizens knew that the party’s formulations about the rights of all people were just window dressing for rule by a small circle of old men in the Kremlin.
David Graham: Trump thinks he’s found a new defense
“The party” itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of “Marshal of the Soviet Union.” He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnev’s medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.
The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used rote phrases such as “real socialism” and “Western imperialism” so often that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).
Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executed—this was not Stalinism, after all—but some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten “Comrade Pensioner.” The deal was clear: Pump the party’s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.
This should all sound familiar.
The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.
Read: The hole where Donald Trump was
Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now.
A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their “leading cadres,” including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing “NATO” and “revanchism” with “antifa” and “radicalism.”
Falling in line, just as in the old Communist Party, is rewarded, and independence is punished. The anger directed at Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger makes the stilted ideological criticisms of last century’s Soviet propagandists seem almost genteel by comparison. (At least Soviet families under Brezhnev didn’t add three-page handwritten denouncements to official party reprimands.)
This comparison is more than a metaphor; it is a warning. A dying party can still be a dangerous party. The Communist leaders in those last years of political sclerosis arrayed a new generation of nuclear missiles against NATO, invaded Afghanistan, tightened the screws on Jews and other dissidents, lied about why they shot down a civilian 747 airliner, and, near the end, came close to starting World War III out of sheer paranoia.
Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism
The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.
Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”
TOM NICHOLS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy.
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
by Greg Sargent in the WaPost
More broadly, we’re also seeing a re-centering of Trump as the primary victim in U.S. public life in other areas. Republican officials have launched efforts to make voting harder across the country, which they are justifying in part by claiming they will restore confidence in our elections among people who believe the election was stolen from Trump.
In short, the falsehood that the election constituted a hideous injustice done to Trump, and the fact that a lot of Republican voters believe it to be true, is becoming the rationale for more voter suppression and redoubled counter-majoritarian tactics — even though Trump and Republicans themselves spent months feeding this lie to them.
On top of that, Republican lawmakers who held Trump accountable for inciting the violent insurrection are getting censured everywhere, mainly by other Republicans who are demanding absolute fealty to the mythology that Trump remains the victim of that monstrous injustice.
It’s true that Trump’s exit creates a dilemma for the media. But it’s not the one Cruz has identified. It’s whether the media should continue giving a platform to Republicans who continue to traffic in the constellation of fictions that are organized around this central myth of Trump victimization.
As Sean Illing reports, some theorists have shown that merely allowing rank disinformation to seep into the media discussion actually undermines the possibility of consensus, allowing its purveyors to exploit the good-faith instinct toward openness to a full range of ideas toward unprincipled ends.
Press critic Jay Rosen has suggested that the media must seek to “decenter” Trump. If so, it may require the marginalization of that broader victimization mythology as well.
Monday, February 22, 2021
Greg Sargent in the WaPost
In short, the big lie that the election was stolen from Trump — and the fact that a lot of Republican voters believe this — is becoming the fake justification for more voter suppression and a redoubled commitment to winning future elections with counter-majoritarian tactics.
All this underscores the stakes of the next two years. Republicans are openly boasting that they will use extreme gerrymanders to recapture the House in 2020, and some experts believe they can do this even if Democrats win the national popular vote.
Losing the House to an increasingly radicalized GOP would go a long way toward crippling the country’s ability to respond to large public problems.
The stakes are incredibly high
This intensifies pressure on Democrats to hold the House, of course, which in turn requires a reckoning with why Democrats lost a dozen House seats in 2020 even as they won the White House and Senate.
When I asked DCCC Chair Maloney how the party will learn from 2020, he promised a “deep” analysis into those losses, “to understand what lessons there are both in terms of where we can do better, but also what worked so well in places like Georgia.”
Maloney noted that this analysis will look at what went wrong with outreach in Latino communities — where Trump and Republicans gained ground — and how to improve communications on digital and social media.
But this state of affairs will also require communicating with the public about what today’s Trump-controlled GOP has become — with a particular emphasis on how its descent renders it incapable of handling big pressing problems facing the country.
“They are divided and under siege from their dangerous elements,” Maloney told me. “If that’s where they continue to take themselves, then I believe they will separate themselves from the voters they need to win.”
“Swing voters in swing districts,” Maloney said, will “not follow the Republican Party to crazytown.”
Friday, February 19, 2021
Shared with Close Friends
There are new conspiracy theories making the rounds. Humpty Dumpty didn't fall. He was PUSHED. Bill Gates is behind the whole thing. What is Bill up to now? Another theory is that it was a Jewish attack from outer space. (Humpty is Protestant) Rush Limbaugh's last comment on the matter blames ANTIFA. Scary, huh?
Thursday, February 18, 2021
Shared with Close Friends
Let us remember the late President Thomas Jefferson, the fellow who wrote that ditty that starts, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," who also said, "I cannot live without books." You can make up your own mind, but I say that the latter is more profound.
Consider a man named Logan Pearsall Smith who wrote, "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
We finish with Billy Faulkner who famously said, "The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies."
The reader must be ruthless in the same way to get his reading done. Being able to read "To Kill a Mockingbird" is worth any number of old men.
Now you know how I feel.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
Monday, February 15, 2021
Shared with Close Friends
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
-James Joyce from his story "The Dead"
Sunday, February 14, 2021
'A Land Where the Dead Past Walks'
Brenda Wineapple in The New York Review of Books on the Rollyson Faulkner biographies and the Gora book on Faulkner and the Civil War
Faulkner is a veritable cottage industry.
Scholars are forever trying to solve Faulkner as if he were a riddle. There are many conflicting Faulkners. There is the modernist/experimentalist Faulkner admired by critics and other writers who admire his lush, long, complicated sentences with the self-correcting syntax. There is the humanistic Faulkner exemplified by the Nobel acceptance speech as he said that we possess "a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance" and that the writer's duty is to write about these things. Edmund Wilson said that for Faulkner the big picture is everything. There is also the unreconstructed white Faulkner who never totally rose above his racial raising. "Go slow" he said never realizing it translated as "go never." He said he would fight for Mississippi against the United States and shoot Negroes if necessary.
The Faulkner critic and biographer has to somehow blend the good Faulkner and the suspect Faulkner.
You have to balance his repellant political positions with his meditations on race, racism, violence, and cruelty in America.
His infuriating gradualism vs. his condemnation of the South.
"Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."
Great writing is produced by the human heart in conflict with itself.
He made the books and then he died.
Faulkner makes great demands on his readers.
Rollyson adds nothing new of substance to Faulkner's story.
Rollyson says that Faulkner remained an unreconstructed southerner.
William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897.
He grew up in segregated Mississippi and lived to the beginnings of the civil rights struggle.
Great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, a slave owner and Confederate officer.
Was killed on the street by a former business partner.
The Old Colonel looms over Faulkner's life as he wrote several novels.
His legends were handed down by Faulkner's grandfather, J.W.T. Falkner who read Dumas every year.
His father, far less successful than his forebears, ran a livery stable and a hardware store before becoming business manager at the Univ. of Mississippi.
His mother Maud was an amateur painter. He visited her every day even after he married.
Never finished HS though he was briefly a student at Ole Miss.
In the British air force though never saw action and came back to Oxford walking with a limp.
Failed poet.
Called "Count No Count."
In New Orleans with Sherwood Anderson who encouraged to write about his small Mississippi world.
Carl Rollyson is professor of journalism emeritus at Baruch College.
The Gora book is complicated dealing with Faulkner and the Civil War. I am not familiar enough with Faulkner's work to absorb i all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)