An especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
“There may be some Democrats who think, ‘That’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage! You ram it down Trump’s throat and beat him in the general election.’ (laughing) Really? Having fun envisioning that.” —Say what you will, but vulgar Freudianism is oftentimes painfully correct. We’ll leave you with the time Letterman spat in Limbaugh’s coffee, for all the good that did the world.
You didn’t, Rusty.
“Chip-polt-lay? Say it with one voice. —It’s spelled c-h-i-p-o-t-l-e. Chip-polt-lay, that’s it? You’re telling me it’s Ship-pole-tay? Well, I’m gonna call it Chip-pote-il because I’ve never heard the word pronounced that way, and it doesn’t matter! —Chip-polt-ay? Okay, I’m gonna read the paragraph again ’cause you have distracted everybody now from the point. This is, aw, jeez! This is a piece written by an intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, attempting to explain why Obama was right when he said: ‘You didn’t build that’.” —a recent Medal of Freedom recipient
Aviso de inspección de equipaje.
US Customs and Border Protection destroyed Ballaké Sissoko’s irreplaceable kora on the way out of the country, just because they could, why not. —Somehow, when they told us all the world was getting smaller, I don’t think this was what anyone had in mind. CBP delenda est; TSA delenda est; ICE delenda est; DHS delenda est: delenda, delenda, delenda est, unto the seventh generation.
It’s funny,
but none of the folks who insist that affirmative action degrades both accomplishment and accomplisher seem to mind that Rush “who the hell cares” Limbaugh is only getting a Medal of Freedom to pwn the libs.
Fake news.
So I had this whole riff on how the controversy (?) over how it turns out James Corden’s Range Rover is being towed whenever they film those Carpool Karaokes (!), on how that’s what happens when the news is filled with Republicans pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining people telling violently bald-faced lies without even caring whether they’re believed, and it’s overwhelming everything that you and everyone you know and love knows to be true, and there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t call those people out, you can’t touch them, you can’t even spit in their coffee, and changing the channel does no good at all anymore, it’s in the air, it’s on your phone, it covers you now like some sort of film, in your hair, your face, like a glaze, a coating, a patina of shit, I mean, and voting doesn’t do any God damn good, and even if you are a Republican openly affect to agree with them this constant grinding degrading cognitive dissonance is going to take a toll, is going to build up pressure that has to be relieved somewhere, somehow (to get hydraulic for a moment), is going to squirt out at the oddest moment, lashing when it sees a chance to feel weirdly betrayed by a cheaply obvious bit of televisual trickery, I mean, who out there is really all that invested in the belief that actors must really be driving when they’re playing at driving a car? (James Garner as always excepted, of course.) —I had this whole riff, but it turns out it’s really just that James Corden’s actually kinda a dick, and people don’t like him. So.
Unfinished Business.
“Rather than rehearsing nineteenth-century reform as a history of bourgeois abolitionists having tea and organizing anti-slavery bazaars for their friends, Jackson offers electrifying accounts of Boston freedom fighters locking down courthouses and brawling with the police. We learn of preachers concealing guns in crates of Bibles and sending them off to abolitionists battling the expansion of slavery in the Midwest. We glimpse nominally free black communities forming secret mutual aid networks and arming themselves in preparation for a coming confrontation with the state. And we find that antebellum activists were also free lovers who experimented with unconventional and queer relationships while fighting against the institution of marriage and gendered subjugation. Traversing the nineteenth-century history of countless ‘strikes, raids, rallies, boycotts, secret councils, [and] hidden weapons,’ American Radicals is a study of highly organized attempts to bring down a racist, heteropatriarchal settler state—and of winning, for a time.” —Britt Rusert
Disposable.
Before (the picture upon being taken):
After (the picture upon being published):
There was no ill intent. AP routinely publishes photos as they come in and when we received additional images from the field, we updated the story. AP has published a number of images of Vanessa Nakate.
Subsequently (the picture anent the explanation):
We regret publishing a photo this morning that cropped out Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, the only person of color in the photo. As a news organization, we care deeply about accurately representing the world that we cover. We train our journalists to be sensitive to issues of inclusion and omission. We have spoken internally with our journalists and we will learn from this error in judgment.
The subsequent more-of-an apology:
Vanessa, on behalf of the AP, I want to say how sorry I am that we cropped that photo and removed you from it. It was a mistake that we realize silenced your voice, and we apologize. We will all work hard to learn from this. Sincerely, Sally Buzbee
— Sally Buzbee (@SallyBuzbee) January 26, 2020
David Ake, the AP’s director of photography, told Buzzfeed UK that, under tight deadline, the photographer “cropped it purely on composition grounds.”
“He thought the building in the background was distracting,” Ake said.
reformacons, blood-and-soilers, curious liberal nationalists, “Austrians,” repentant neocons, evangelical Christians, corporate raiders, cattle ranchers, Silicon Valley dissidents, Buckleyites, Straussians, Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Tories—
“It did all raise a question. What if Trump had dialed down the white nationalism after taking the White House and, instead of betraying nearly every word of his campaign rhetoric of economic populism, had ruthlessly enacted populist policies, passing gargantuan infrastructure bills, shredding NAFTA instead of remodeling it, giving a tax cut to the lower middle class instead of the rich, and conspiring to raise the wages of American workers? It doesn’t take much to imagine how that would play against a Democratic challenger with McKINSEY or HARVARD LAW SCHOOL imprinted on his or her forehead. There seemed to be two futures for Trumpism as a distinctive strain of populism: one in which the last reserves of white identity politics were mined until the cave collapsed and one in which the coalition was expanded to include working Americans, enlisting blacks and Hispanics and Asians in the cause of conquering the condescending citadels of Wokistan. Was it predestined that Trump would choose the former? Steve Bannon was already audience-testing Trumpism 2.0, wrong-footing the crowd at the Oxford Union with complaints about the lack of black technicians in Silicon Valley. Why couldn’t Trumpism go in this direction in reality? The shrewdest move for the NatCons would surely have been to attract as many non-whites as possible to the Ritz and strike fear into the hearts of the globalists with a multiracial populist carnival—a new post-Trump pan-ethnic coalition that would someday consider it quaint that it had once needed to begin conferences with the profession: We are not actually racist.” —Thomas Meaney
A better solution to the problem.
“Firefighters’ calendar featuring Portland homeless camps” is one hell of a 2020 mood.
Fire officials haven’t identified the firefighter who made the calendar. It surfaced at Portland Fire Station No. 7, one of the city’s busiest stations in the Mill Park neighborhood at 1500 SE 122nd Ave., and firefighters from other stations apparently expressed interest in having one of their own, according to Fire Bureau members. Twenty-four firefighters are assigned to Station 7.
It case it’s not clear from the jump, the calendar wasn’t laudatory.
Alan Ferschweiler, president of the Portland Fire Fighters Association, said the calendar, while insensitive, highlights greater problems that aren’t getting enough attention from city leaders: “the friction between firefighters and the houseless population” and an “overstressed work force.”
Firefighters, he said, usually are sent to deal with low-level medical calls at homeless camps or to put out fires at the camps. Because Portland police aren’t responding as often to these calls, firefighters often feel unsafe or face aggression from people who are abusing drugs or alcohol, Ferschweiler said.
“Those negative interactions have a resounding effect on our members,” he said. “Police have responded less and less and less to those calls with us. That’s part of the situation too. I feel there’s calls where I wish the cops were here.”
Of course, there are very good reasons to keep interactions between the Portland Police Bureau and the houseless population at a minimum.
And one might be thankful it’s paramedics showing up for medical emergencies, and firefighters for fires, and not armed police, and one may lament that our first responders must so often respond firstly to situations and circumstances for which there is no clear-cut training, with resolutions far beyond the immediate scope of their admirably focused powers, but one can also take note of the curious rhetorical figure in Ferschweiler’s statement, “the friction between firefighters and the houseless population,” which whisks us with breathtaking suddenness to some notional arena where two unitary sets of stakeholders, firefighters and the houseless population, might set their competing agendas to duking it out with, sadly, some little friction.
—It’s understandable, to be charitable, that one would be so despondent at the abjunct between what one is tasked with doing or even what one can do at all, and what must needs be done, that one turns one’s efforts to what one can reach, metonymically speaking; thus does fighting homelessness become fighting the houseless population, much as what happened with the war on drugs. —And one could be so horrified by the idea of one’s own precarity that one might choose to assert one’s security by insisting such horrors happen only to a certain certain sort, you know, the houseless population, those people, THEM—look, there they are now, over there, not me, nope, nossir! —But such seductive turns of thought however understandable turn in your hand, lead you astray, make you think you’ve grabbed hold of something that isn’t there at all:
“Let’s have some talk about the problem we’re having,” he said.
A stranger’s stabbing Saturday night of an off-duty fire lieutenant who was at a Portland bar celebrating his wedding anniversary further highlights the problem, the union president said.
And surely we all can agree no matter how figurative our rhetoric that to see this incident as a skirmish in the “friction” between firefighters and the houseless population (McClendon, the estranged “stranger” who stabbed above, has no fixed address)—that would be dizzyingly unhinged. Yet here we are, at the end of our discussion, wrapping it up with this, as if it says anything at all about a Fire & Rescue station, frustrated by friction, letting off steam through the “dark humor” of a calendar that mocks homeless camps.
“We want to have a better solution to the problem,” Ferschweiler said. “We want people like Paul to be able to come downtown, have a good time with his wife and be able to go home safely.”
The borders of US and THEM, downtown and safety, are easy enough to sketch with a map like that. —Myself, I want people like Debbie Ann Beaver to be able to take the medicine they need in peace. This friction kills.
Painstakingly æstheticized chisme.
“After a few days,” says Myriam Gurba, “an editor responded. She wrote that though my takedown of American Dirt was ‘spectacular,’ I lacked the fame to pen something so ‘negative’.” Let’s make sure she has fame enough to pen as negative as she wants in the future. —Some additional background on Oprah’s latest bookclub pick. Remember, kids: the fail condition of condemnation is reification!
Quinnipiac in retrograde.
“But received wisdom about electability is powerful precisely because it defies reason and is resistant to critical scrutiny. Like many of the other concepts that shape electoral punditry and political discourse—charisma, qualification, momentum, authenticity—electability is a shibboleth of a political mysticism that ‘tickles the brain’ only because it cannot fully engage it—a drab, gray astrology, maintained by over-caffeinated men.” —Osita Nwanevu
On the one hand; on the other.
From the opinion filed today in Juliana v. United States, 6:15-cv-01517-AA, reversing the certified orders of the district court and remanding the case with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing:
Contrary to the dissent, we do not “throw up [our] hands” by concluding that the plaintiffs’ claims are nonjusticiable. Diss. at 33. Rather, we recognize that “Article III protects liberty not only through its role in implementing the separation of powers, but also by specifying the defining characteristics of Article III judges.” Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S. 462, 483 (2011). Not every problem posing a threat—even a clear and present danger—to the American Experiment can be solved by federal judges. As Judge Cardozo once aptly warned, a judicial commission does not confer the power of “a knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness;” rather, we are bound “to exercise a discretion informed by tradition, methodized by analogy, disciplined by system.” Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process 141 (1921).
From the dissent:
Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.
Freeze, peach!
How poetically telling, that the concept of kettling disruptive elements away in a First Amendment zone has been extended from protestors to reporters.
Message: I care.
The peculiar fusion of public and private, market forces and administrative oversight, the world of hallmarks, benchmarks, and stakeholders that characterizes what I’ve been calling centrism is a direct expression of the sensibilities of the professional-managerial classes. To them alone, it makes a certain sort of sense. But they had become the base of the center-left, and centrism is endlessly presented in the media as the only viable political position.
For most care-givers, however, these people are the enemy. If you are a nurse, for example, you are keenly aware that it’s the administrators upstairs who are your real, immediate class antagonist. The professional-managerials are the ones who are not only soaking up all the money for their inflated salaries, but hire useless flunkies who then justify their existence by creating endless reams of administrative paperwork whose primary effect is to make it more difficult to actually provide care.
This central class divide now runs directly through the middle of most parties on the left. Like the Democrats in the US, Labour incorporates both the teachers and the school administrators, both the nurses and their managers. It makes becoming the spokespeople for the revolt of the caring classes extraordinarily difficult.
I liked this, from David Graeber, which is of course about much more than last year’s depressing election in the UK. —It provides a certain clarity lacking in recent heated disputations, and recalibrates what’s seemed to be ineluctable math: I mean, if we’ve got to have an US and a THEM (and when there’s a fight, we do, yes, we do), then give us an US that everyone wants and a THEM no one wants to be (not so much the people that comprise it as the systems and rules and expectations, the bullshit, that generates and enforces the roles they end up playing; one is attempting, as ever, not to become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal). Care-giver versus administrator! (And not Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right, or PMC against Chapo Dirtbag.) —This a battle we all can join with a sunny heart.
The answer, I think, lies in the emerging structure of class relations in societies like England, which seems to be reproduced, in one form or another, just about everywhere the radical right is on the rise. The decline of factory jobs, and of traditional working-class occupations like mining and shipbuilding, decimated the working class as a political force. What happened is usually framed as a shift from industrial, manufacturing, and farming to “service” work, but this formulation is actually rather deceptive, since service is typically defined so broadly as to obscure what’s really going on. In fact, the percentage of the population engaged in serving biscuits, driving cabs, or trimming hair has changed little since Victorian times.
The real story is the spectacular growth, on the one hand, of clerical, administrative, and supervisory work, and, on the other, of what might broadly be termed “care work”: medical, educational, maintenance, social care, and so forth. While productivity in the manufacturing sector has skyrocketed, productivity in this caring sector has actually decreased across the developed world (largely due to the weight of bureaucratization imposed by the burgeoning numbers of administrators). This decline has put the squeeze on wages: it’s hardly a coincidence that in developed economies across the world, the most dramatic strikes and labor struggles since the 2008 crash have involved teachers, nurses, junior doctors, university workers, nursing home workers, or cleaners.
And if this move seemed odd, a bit redundant, somewhat unnecessary—“service work” does a fine-enough job delineating that US as it is, and of the three classes he’d cleave away (clerical, administrative, supervisory), it’s only ever really the clerical that gets fitted with a pink collar—the need to refine gives us just enough room to make sure the “care” in care-giver’s expansively defined, increasing our US, decreasing THEIR thems.
Whereas the core value of the caring classes is, precisely, care, the core value of the professional-managerials might best be described as proceduralism. The rules and regulations, flow charts, quality reviews, audits and PowerPoints that form the main substance of their working life inevitably color their view of politics or even morality . These are people who tend to genuinely believe in the rules. They may well be the only significant stratum of the population who do so.
But of course I’m going to latch onto this: I’m a professional manager in a decidedly PMC workplace—but a workplace with a mission to give what care we can to folks cataclysmically enmeshed in those rules, those regulations, those procedures, our laws. —I know which side I’m on, y’all. I know where I need to stand.
