spot-on remarks on david brooks

from a blog called Easily Distracted, by a guy named Timothy Burke:

I think the thing I hate most about most mainstream punditry, liberal and conservative, but especially David Brooks, is a brutal combination of two connected syndromes: complete lack of self-reflection and a relentless moving of goalposts to conform to the conventional wisdom of the week. It is what betrays most of them as being people without abiding values, and it is what underscores how little any of them talk with people outside their own protected worlds. When I say “hate”, in a few cases I really mean it. David Brooks most of all: I think he now belongs in a select rank of the most noxiously sanctimonious American essayists in the country’s history. Whom, I might add, are hard for anyone but historians and literary specialists to name, because they are so forgettable once their era passes.

The commentary is never about the “I” that is writing. So today Brooks is his usual self: the marches were very nice, you see, but they’re about the wrong thing. And also it’s the wrong time–it’s always the wrong time, strangely enough, for this kind of politics, according to Brooks, except at some point in the past that Brooks usually knows almost nothing about. (Protip hint, should he ever grow curious: there has never been a social movement in this country or any other which included everyone in all segments of society. Every “success,” like the civil rights movement, the favorite of sanctimonious pundits, had numerous enemies and was socially divisive.)

shame and guilt

Undigested, unassimilated tidbits . . . 

Shame and guilt are improperly used to define kinds of cultures; for what they define, rather, is a subject’s relation to her culture. I use culture here to refer to a form of life that we inherit at birth, to all those things - such as family, race, ethnicity, and national identity - we do not choose, but which choose us. Call them gifts of our ancestors. The manner in which we assume this inheritance, and the way we understand what it means to keep faith with it, are, I argue, what determine shame or guilt.

. . .

To experience shame is to experience oneself not as a despised or degraded object, but to experience oneself as a subject. I am not ashamed of myself, I am the shame I feel: shame is there in the place of an object. Giorgio Agamben puts this clearly when he designates shame as the “proper emotive tonality of subjectivity” (Remnants of Auschwitz 110), as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject” (107). The entire thrust of Sedgwick’s argument, in fact, goes in this direction; shame, she says, is the sentiment that “attaches to and sharpens the sense of who one is” (37). The searing pain associated with shame is not one of being turned by another into an object, of being degraded; it has to do with the fact that one is not “integrated” with oneself (44), one is fundamentally split from oneself. (But isn’t this the very definition of a subject?)

. . .

The unbearable question of who we are was no sooner raised by modernity than resolved by capitalism as a matter no longer of being, but of possessing an identity. Like all possessions, identity turned out to be susceptible to measurement. One could have more or less of it, better or worse forms of it, but one cannot fully acquire it. Around this insufficiency a traffic in identity grows up and the value of modesty recedes drastically.

-Joan Copjec, "The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema"

inauguration day

I did not listen to or watch any of the coverage -- then again, I've never been an inauguration watcher, even in much, much better times. I did appreciate this take on the speech via Digby:

There is a gap between those who think that Trump is fit for the presidency, in mind and character, and those who don't. That gap is damn near unbridgeable.  

To my ears, Trump's address was nasty and borderline un-American -- for all its talk of patriotism and "America First." 

My favorite part of the address was its brevity.

From a columnist for the National Review! Who said Trump couldn't unify America?

optimism or pessimism? neither applies

I don’t tend to look for reasons for optimism or pessimism. I think human societies tend to be problematic. And we are just conforming to the rule.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates

ACA rally

I'm glad I went. It was one way of celebrating MLKjr's birthday. The majority of the crowd was a lot like me: nice white people with graying hair. It feels best to rally around something concrete, and this particular something has helped a lot of lower-income people by redistributing a bit of income downward. I was impressed by Keith Ellison. As you can see, I didn't get any good photos.

My reward was the Civic Center farmer's market -- I had forgotten about it.

I am home now, sitting in my sunny living room. I made an egg tortilla for myself and nearly burned the pan by leaving it on the burner that I had forgotten to turn off. A hint of what is to come in my doddering old age, perhaps.

bike crash

I had a little accident on my bike ride home from work. I'm OK but my hip is bruised pretty badly. I was waiting at a T-intersection just south of the Third St. bridge (behind the ballpark), and when the walk sign started flashing I got on my bike and coasted into the crosswalk, intending to turn onto the bike lane once I got to the other side of the street. But a car turning left off of Third St didn't see me, I guess -- and I didn't see him until the front corner of his car was right in front of me. I reached out, as if to push the car away, and then I fell on my right hip. I landed hard, a little bit underneath the car -- but, fortunately, NOT under any of the wheels. I got up relatively quickly -- adrenaline! -- and was told that somebody had called 911. I guess this was a good idea -- you don't always know right away if you're hurt or how. This set the whole firetruck/paramedic/police process in motion. The driver stuck around, and I think I can get him to cover my ambulance and ER copays -- I ended up agreeing to go to a hospital, just to be on the safe side. It turned out that nothing is broken. When I got home several hours later (thanks to a wonderful neighbor who came and got me) I burst into tears (relief, probably) and then I went to bed. Now I'm mostly just sitting around, walking very slowly with a cane, popping ibuprofen, and waiting the the bruise to make my flank turn colors. 

couldn't have said it better

Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to stop Trump.

-Rebecca Solnit, LRB 

Except that maybe I would change "she had failed to make them vote for her" to "she had failed to earn their support" -- because, for the most part, Solnit is talking about politically liberal men, or at least men who are not rabid conservatives. And many of these men did vote for her, but then, after she lost, declared -- with gusto -- that she lost because she was a terrible candidate. As if they could have done better.

a story is different

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment… A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. 
-Walter Benjamin

hunkering

The wind retreated for an hour or two but now it's blowing hard again. It is scaring me more than I expected. I was waiting for it, pretty much all day yesterday. I'm also afraid to look inside the leaky garage.

This too, shall pass, I tell myself. Meantime I try to avoid reading or hearing any news because I don't want to get too far into this apocalyptic frame of mind.