Ta-Nehisi Coates: A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_2441 Dec. 14 20.10In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.

More here.

The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics

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Jacob T. Levy over at the Niskanen Center's No Virtue:

Soave is a fixture on the “political correctness” beat and his post-election commentary openly acknowledged that its purpose was to tell us that he told us so.

Lilla’s book The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction had already approvingly cited the idea that “left-wing activists [in France] made a disastrous mistake in the 1970s by abandoning the traditional working class and turning toward identity politics. Deserted, the workers turned toward the National Front and adopted its xenophobia…”

Not everyone who has been sounding alarm bells about identity politics and political correctness has written a post-election commentary blaming them for Trump’s victory; longtime critic Jonathan Chait has been conspicuous by his refusal to indulge the genre. But those post-election blamings have all come from such pre-existing critics. This alone should tell us to be on the lookout for the so-called “pundit’s fallacy,” the idea that one’s own normative commitments just happen to also be the best political strategy. The pundit’s fallacy when applied to losses takes the form of a morality play: because you fools did the thing I don’t like, the voters punished you. Lilla solemnly noted that “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.” The headline on Soave’s article was less subtle still: “Donald Trump won because leftist political correctness inspired a terrifying backlash: What every liberal who didn’t see this coming needs to understand.”

The 2016 election is bringing forth especially strange versions of pundits’ fallacies and morality plays. Donald Trump received a smaller share of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but his Electoral College victory was so unexpected that it seems to call forth explanation after explanation. The result is almost certainly over-explanation: theories get offered that, if they were true, would seem to imply that Trump should have done much better than he did, and much better than Romneydid. But there is a powerful temptation to attribute the surprising and dramatic fact of Trump’s win to some issue about which one had some preexisting ax to grind.

The backlash hypothesis is of this sort. Trump got a lower share of the white vote than Romney did (58% vs 59%). There was some change in both directions within the white vote: college-educated whites shifted toward the Democratic column by a few points (though a plurality still voted for Trump), but non-college-educated whites moved in larger numbers toward Trump (he got 67% of their votes, versus 62% for Romney). White men shifted toward Trump by 1% relative to 2012, white women in the other direction by 3%. This back-and-forth of course meant that Trump eked out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and therefore the presidency, by a combined 80,000 or so votes across the three states. But fundamentally, voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.

An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations.

More here.

Purging My Scholarly Memorabilia

Emily Mace in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Full_Library-Interior“What do I do with my academic books, now that I’m no longer a regular academic?” I’ve seen that question posed online, time and again, by Ph.D.s leaving academia for a different career. But this past summer, I asked that question myself — as I regarded the academic books and papers that sat unused on my shelves or buried in basement boxes. In 2012, when I left my first postgraduate home in North Carolina, everything came with me to Chicago: boxes of academic books and papers, too many course readers, and a heavy file cabinet full of meticulously organized folders holding my dissertation research. I unpacked my books but rarely opened the file cabinet in the months that followed. Now, four years later, I am no longer a traditional academic — I work as a grant coordinator in the digital humanities. We moved again, just across town, but this time, I wasn’t willing to bring everything from my old academic life with me. When I first started packing, I simply wanted to toss all of it. I’m not teaching survey courses anymore or, heaven forbid, writing graduate exams on subjects far removed from the keenest areas of my interest.

Dozens of books that I once had cherished no longer felt relevant to my life or my work. Books and papers are heavy, as any academic who’s ever moved knows all-too-well. I looked at my shelves, and suddenly all I could see were volumes I no longer read or consulted, sitting there, taking up space, refusing to make room for new ideas or new possibilities. The books felt like dead weight, holding down my shoulders as much as they did my shelves. My initial impulse was to purge everything— give away all the books, throw the course readers in the recycling bin, erase the dissertation research by tossing it, too, into the bin outside my home. Instead I hesitated. Among those books and papers were some that still meant something to me, and that might someday be relevant again to my life or work. So I started sorting. First, I organized the academic books into piles: keep, take to work, give to my husband (who happens to be in the same field), or sell. The “take-to-work” books comprised approximately two shelves’ worth of materials on late-19th-century America, the period most closely related to the grant that I administer. The “spouse” books were ones he didn’t own that were relevant to his work; he took them to his campus office rather than to our new home.

More here.

Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene

Ellis et al in Nature:

GettyImages-590468153_CMThree dozen academics are planning to rewrite Earth's history. The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (of which one of us, E.E., is a member) announced in August that over the next three years it will divide Earth's story into two parts: one in which humans are a geological superpower — an epoch called the Anthropocene — and the other encompassing all that came before our species had a major influence on Earth's functioning1. Where to put the transition is being debated. Discussions have narrowed to defining one or more 'golden spikes': sharp global signatures in the rock record derived from the introduction of mid-twentieth century technologies, from radionuclides to plastics. Such markers will be put forward as the basis for ratifying the epoch by the International Geological Congress.

We agree that human influences on the planet should be recognized — but the formalization of the Anthropocene should not be rushed. And we question the privileging of 1950s-era markers. This ignores millennia of previous human influences, from our use of fire to the emergence of agriculture2–6. Moreover, these markers misrepresent the continuous nature of human changes to our planet. They instil a Eurocentric, elite and technocratic narrative of human engagement with our environment that is out of sync with contemporary thought in the social sciences and the humanities3, 7–9. Decades of rigorous scientific research into the history, causes and consequences of the long-term reshaping of Earth systems by humans is being ignored in the group's discussions. How can a human-centred geological period be defined without characterizing the development of societies, urbanization, colonization, trading networks, ecosystem engineering and energy transitions from biomass to fossil fuels?

We call for the Anthropocene formalization process to be rebuilt on a rigorous, transparent, open and sustainable foundation in which the human sciences have a major role.

More here.

Mexico: The Cauldron of Modernism

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J. Hoberman in the NYRB:

In 1929, the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard did away with the United States. In a map of the world attributed to him that year, the American republic (except for a giant Alaska) has been subsumed by Labrador in the north and a sprawling Mexico in the south.

The image of Mexico as the center of the new world—and as what André Breton called “the surrealist country par excellence”—is a take-away from the exhibition “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950,” now showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Just as Éluard’s map can be read as an early polemic against Eurocentrism, so “Paint the Revolution” presents a Mexican response to European art that, at least up until World War II, was equal to and in some regards stronger than that of North America.

To a degree, “Paint the Revolution” is the story of the three star muralists, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who along with the posthumously canonized Frida Kahlo, defined the new Mexican art. (The exhibition borrows from the title, punctuated by exclamation point, of John Dos Passos’s 1927 New Masses article on the same subject.) But their work is situated among scores of lesser-known artists who were also responding to the decade-long Mexican revolution that broke out in 1910. Synthesizing avant-garde with folk art while embodying the tension between new and traditional media, these men and women engaged the central issues of early-twentieth-century culture.

More here.

Can We Fix Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Brexit?

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Lynn Parramore interviews Mariana Mazzucato in Evonomics:

LP: So what’s the real story of what’s not working for so many?

MM: If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

Our current model of capitalism and the dominant ideas in policy making have led to a failure of investment by both the public and the private sector in the things that drive productivity, and which affect its distribution. Shareholder value theory — the destructive idea that companies should be run solely for the benefit of shareholders — has led to financialized businesses that do not invest in the areas that will lead to future growth or the invention of useful new products. Companies prefer to put money in the pockets of shareholders or to hoard cash rather than to raise wages or invest.

But it is not just how these ideas have affected the private sector. They have also had a detrimental impact on our understanding of the role government can play in raising both the rate of growth and shaping its direction. Mainstream economic theories popular in the last several decades have tended to downplay the government’s role in markets and to increase skepticism about even that more limited role. Austerity, particularly in Europe, has added to the problem. It has not worked, even on its own terms.

More here.

On Gabriel García Márquez’s tour as an accidental propagandist

Joel Whitney in The Baffler:

ScreenHunter_2440 Dec. 13 20.05The road from the capital to Acapulco was riddled with deadly switchbacks. Navigating the sharp turns left him just enough residual focus to daydream about his novel. Gabriel García Márquez was driving his family to its first vacation after long stretches of poverty. Ad work and then films had somewhat stabilized the thirty-seven-year-old Colombian writer’s finances, and some awards had come. But he’d been stalled on a novel, one he had dreamed of writing since his teens. His working title had been The House, conceived as a tribute to life in his family’s ancestral home in the little Caribbean outpost of Aracataca. Suddenly a string of words came: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” It was perfect: a first sentence which entailed the ending, a circular loop.

What happened next is shrouded in myth. The most common version has García Márquez turning around the family’s white 1962 Opel (he’d bought it with prize money from an earlier novel), returning to Mexico City, and canceling all of his hard-won work. He went into debt with his landlord and for a year he secluded himself in his “mafia cave,” as he called his smoke-filled writing studio. The book was highly anticipated; his move to Mexico City had exposed him to the city’s literati and he’d dramatized his writer’s block as the precipice above a great discovery.

The final chapters were still being written when requests came for advance excerpts. One such request came from a Uruguayan critic named Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who was editing a new literary magazine, Mundo Nuevo. But it wasn’t just any literary magazine. Gringo spy money buttressed it, went the rumors. Like much of the Latin American literary world, Rodríguez Monegal heard about the novel nearly a year before it appeared. Latin American intellectuals were still bitterly at odds over the Cuban Revolution, which Mundo Nuevo’s paymasters opposed. However willing García Márquez was to contribute to a magazine that openly sought to publish work from both sides, as this one claimed, he was not interested in doing covert cultural propaganda for the gringos.

And yet . . . as One Hundred Years of Solitude was being published to immediate and universal acclaim—the literary equivalent of Beatlemania, as one critic has written—and as the book’s author had a new empire to manage, between the foreign rights, translations, sales numbers, requests from fans, interviews, film options, and what he would write next, something like a barnacle clung to his newfound success. Newspapers were reporting that much of the cultural world had been ensnared in a CIA scheme to marshal culture for Cold War gain against the Soviets. It must have been an “oh shit” moment equal and opposite to his Acapulco epiphany: Mundo Nuevo was one of those magazines, and he had been stupid enough to say yes. He wrote his editor-friend to protest his evident ensnarement in the scheme. What did it feel like? In a quietly seething letter, he wrote that he felt like a cuckold.

More here.

Your Pun-Divided Attention: How the Brain Processes Wordplay

Roni Jacobson in Scientific American:

ScreenHunter_2439 Dec. 13 19.59Puns are divisive in comedy. Critics groan that they are the “lowest form of wit,” a quote attributed to various writers. Others—including Shakespeare—pun with abandon. The brain itself seems divided over puns, according to a recent study published in Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. The results suggest the left and right hemispheres play different roles in processing puns, ultimately requiring communication between them for the joke to land.

To observe how the brain handles this type of humor, researchers at the University of Windsor in Ontario presented study participants with a word relating to a pun in either the left or right visual field (which corresponds to the right or left brain hemisphere, respectively). They then analyzed a subject's reaction time in each situation to determine which hemisphere was dominant. “The left hemisphere is the linguistic hemisphere, so it's the one that processes most of the language aspects of the pun, with the right hemisphere kicking in a bit later” to reveal the word's dual meanings, explains Lori Buchanan, a psychology professor and co-author of the study.

This interaction enables us to “get” the joke because puns, as a form of word play, complete humor's basic formula: expectation plus incongruity equals laughter. In puns—where words have multiple, ambiguous meanings—the sentence context primes us to interpret a word in a specific way, an operation that occurs in the left hemisphere. Humor emerges when the right hemisphere subsequently clues us in to the word's other, unanticipated meaning, triggering what Buchanan calls a “surprise reinterpretation.”

More here.

Why does friendship so readily turn toxic?

Carlin Flora in Aeon:

ScreenHunter_2438 Dec. 13 19.53Think of a time when you sat across from a friend and felt truly understood. Deeply known. Maybe you sensed how she was bringing out your ‘best self’, your cleverest observations and wittiest jokes. She encouraged you. She listened, articulated one of your patterns, and then gently suggested how you might shift it for the better. The two of you gossiped about your mutual friends, skipped between shared memories, and delved into cherished subjects in a seamlessly scripted exchange full of shorthand and punctuated with knowing expressions. Perhaps you felt a warm swell of admiration for her, and a simultaneous sense of pride in your similarity to her. You felt deep satisfaction to be valued by someone you held in such high regard: happy, nourished and energised through it all.

These are the friendships that fill our souls, and bolster and shape our identities and life paths. They have also been squeezed into social science labs enough times for us to know that they keep us mentally and physically healthy: good friends improve immunity, spark creativity, drop our bloodpressure, ward off dementia among the elderly, and even decrease our chances of dying at any given time. If you feel you can’t live without your friends, you’re not being melodramatic.

But even our easiest and richest friendships can be laced with tensions and conflicts, as are most human relationships. They can lose a bit of their magic and fail to regain it, or even fade out altogether for tragic reasons, or no reason at all. Then there are the not-so-easy friendships; increasingly difficult friendships; and bad, gut-wrenching, toxic friendships. The pleasures and benefits of good friends are abundant, but they come with a price. Friendship, looked at through a clear and wide lens, is far messier and more lopsided than it is often portrayed.

More here.

Scents and sensuality

William Dalrymple in The Economist:

ChaliSurrounded by thick forest on a hilltop plateau lost in the jungles of central India, Mandu is reached by a narrow road that corkscrews steeply up a near-vertical ravine. At the top lies a landscape of fallen palaces, shattered domes and overgrown arcades – all that remains of one of the most singular experiments in pleasure that the world has ever seen. In 1469, Ghiyath Shahi succeeded to the throne of the Sultanate of Malwa, which then controlled much of the region. In his accession speech, the new sultan announced a major change of state policy. For 34 years, he said, he had supported his father in enlarging his dominions by the sword. Now, he declared, he would no longer seek to extend his territories. His son, Nasir Shah, would assume responsibility for the day-to-day running of the state. In the meantime Shahi proposed to give himself up to the pleasures of this world, in the hope that his subjects would also share in the delights of this life, as a foretaste of those in the next. Shahi set about his new policy with gusto. He filled Mandu with 16,000 beautiful female slaves and the good-looking daughters of his feudatory rajahs; to house them, he set about constructing lavish palaces with lotus- and star-shaped pleasure pools. According to their talents and proclivities, some were taught dancing and drama, others the art of music, singing or flute-playing. A few were trained as wrestlers. The brighter princesses were given a thorough education and invited to join the sultan at meals, or else trained to run the administration, keeping accounts or administering the state factories. The walled hilltop citadel was henceforth defended by an army of 500 armour-clad Abyssinian women.

Meanwhile the sultan set to work recording the things that gave him the most intense pleasure. His book, the “Ni’mat­nama” or “Book of Delights”, survives today in the British Library, having passed through the eager hands of the Mughals and Tipu Sultan before being packed off in 1799 to the greyer skies of London by the conquering East India Company. The book is one of the greatest records of the life and pleasures of the bon viveur ever written. It includes advice on all manner of matters, such as hunting expeditions (don’t leave home without a picture of your beloved, camphor to have rubbed into your feet, your best sparrow hawk, and a cheetah or two). There are pages of recipes, which range from ten different ways to concoct the perfect samosa (don’t forget to add saffron, fried aubergines and ginger) to instructions for making the medieval Indian equivalent of Viagra: Ghiyath swears by sparrow brains fried in milk and ghee – eat this, he writes, and smear a mixture of balsam oil, cardamom, Tibetan musk and honey on your penis, and the combination will produce “strong lust…desire returns, joy is bestowed on the heart, there are erections and semen flows.”

More here.

The Perfect Gift? It’s the One They Asked For

John Tierney in The New York Times:

GiftSocial scientists bear glad tidings for the holiday season. After extensively observing how people respond to gifts, they have advice for shoppers: You don’t have to try so hard. You’re not obliged to spend hours finding just the right gift for each person on your list. Most would be just as happy with something quick and easy. This may sound too good to be true, but rest assured this is not a ploy by some lazy Scrooges in academia. These researchers are meticulous analysts of gift-giving rituals. Whether they’re drawing lessons from Kwakwaka’wakw Indian potlatches or Amazon.com wish lists, I’ve always found them the wisest mentors for the holidays, and this year they have more data than ever to back up their advice:

Don’t aim for the “big reveal.” Many shoppers strive to find a sensational toy or extravagant piece of jewelry that will create drama when it’s opened. But drama is not what recipients want, according to a new study by Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University. He and his colleagues have found that gifts go wrong because the givers are focused on the moment of exchange, whereas the recipients are thinking long-term: Will I actually get any use out of this? Don’t “over-individuate” your gifts. People too often give bad presents because they insist on buying something different for everyone. In experiments using greeting cards and gifts, psychologists found that people typically feel obliged to choose unique items for each person on their list even when the recipients wouldn’t know if they got duplicates — and even when one particularly good gift would work better for everyone. The more gifts you select, the more likely you’ll pick some duds. If you can find one sure thing, don’t be afraid to give it more than once.

More here.

Trump’s Wall and Alexander’s Gates: Managing the “Barbarians”

by Stephen T. Asma

ScreenHunter_2436 Dec. 12 11.06According to U.S. border patrol, Donald Trump's wall scheme (and Hillary Clinton's amnesty proposal) have inspired a northward rush to our border in recent months. Trump's proposed wall is unrealistic and unlikely to happen. But his desire to build it, and the giddy excitement it has inspired in his supporters, reminds us that “a wall” is a longstanding cultural answer to fear and xenophobia. The West has a storied tradition of trying to contain the foreign hordes –people who we recreate as monsters and barbarians.

The xenophobic idea of dangerous barbarians culminated in a popular story about “Alexander's Gates.” The European version of the story, of a barrier erected against savage enemies, seems to have first appeared in sixth century accounts of the Alexander Romance, but the legend is probably much older. Alexander supposedly chased his foreign enemies through a mountain pass in the Caucasus region and then closed them all behind unbreachable iron gates. The details and the symbolic significance of the story changed slightly in every medieval retelling, but it was very often retold –especially in the age of exploration.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meaning of Alexander's Gates had long since been Christianized, and played an important role in both the geography of monsters and the ultimate end-time purpose of such fiends. The maps of the time, the mappaemundi, almost always include the gates, though their placement is not consistent. Most maps and narratives of the later medieval period agree that this prison territory, created directly by Alexander but indirectly by God, housed the savage tribes of Gog and Magog. Recall that Gog and Magog are referred to, with great ambiguity throughout the Bible –sometimes as individual monsters, sometimes as nations, sometimes as places. In the story of Alexander's Gates, a kind of synthesis occurs, in which “Gog and Magog” becomes a label for designating infidel nations and monstrous races –a monster zone, which different scribes can populate with all manner of projected fears.

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Current Genres of Fate: Just Deserts

by Paul North

373212-the-three-stoogesIn the tale about the princess and the pea, the pea is more than a tiny little irritant, it is more than an interrupter of a good night's sleep. The pea is the enemy of desert. The princess doesn't deserve such bedding. She is someone who's deservingness is so thorough and so refined that it is an insult to her very being, this one tiny pea. We accept some things without question as what we deserve—shelter, food, human relationships. Some things we struggle to claim that we deserve—a voice in politics, hope for the future, freedom for self-determination. All this is trivial to this girl. The princess deserves all that of course, but as a princess she deserves even more: she deserves every single thing to her liking, down to the smallest pea.

This is obviously a comic situation. So let's talk about comedy for a minute. At first look ‘deservingness' doesn't seem like a fateful word and comedy has little to do with huge, sinister forces. Tragedy is the place for those. The tragic hero stands up against the gods and gets crushed. This is how ancient audiences learned the workings of fate. No matter how good or how noble the hero, forces beyond her were stronger than her will. Antigone wanted to bury her brother. She was caught in a clash of principles much bigger than she was, bigger even than the cause of her unburied brother. Her death was inescapable, and in a sense trivial. Mortals were not supposed to cry for Antigone so much as learn that the gods' law was the highest and had to be respected.

By mortal standards, Antigone doesn't deserve her fate—from this springs its tragic character. Still, we don't usually talk about tragic fate as a matter of desert. Fate is neutral. It is the way it is, the way it must be, irrespective of the worth of the participants. Mortals have a kind of horrible freedom to stumble into fate regardless of what they personally deserve. Aristotle does say that a tragic hero should be noble. Even this is not a matter of ‘desert,' however. It is only so that the hero looks like they have something to lose.

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Monday Poem

Love Kitchen
—Mary Mraz Culleny, 12/8/17-3/2/03

The tsunami scent of yeast inundated our house
the mornings our mother baked bread
up through floorboards it came, up the stairwell
it spread stirring our dreamselves alive—
fresh loaves, bells for the nose
their toll sent sleep from somnolent heads

I’d written that thinking of her floured hands,
sifting, kneading, table strewn
with the tools of her art and the stuff she teased
and blended with such skill, without need to measure,
knowing by sight and weight —by feel, what it took
to fold matter and love into sustenance
in her confectionery mill, her love kitchen
.

Jim Culleny
5/8/16
.

Circles in Time

Arrival8-1-600x450by Leanne Ogasawara

Two months ago, I wrote a post in these pages called The Romance of the Red Dictionaries. It was about the possibility of romance without a shared language; that language can make things more complicated and, well, less, fun and romantic! In my case at least, things went downhill fast the more I learned my husband's language–and indeed, I always looked back on our early days of mutual incomprehension as a golden time.

While love may have declined, my experience of thinking and dreaming in Japanese allowed me to experience life through a different mindset. And that was an experience I would not trade for anything.

I was like a different person in Japanese. I certainly said thank you more often, and I believe I became more considerate and compassionate. Speaking in particular, allowed me to gain a certain kind of inner harmony, as I have always been much more agitated in English.

I also think in the spoken language, there was an element of fun to be had with verbs coming at the end of sentences. Endless jokes could be made as a person expected you to say one thing, only to be taken off guard to see the action verb was something quite different from where they thought you were going with the sentence. I felt more on my toes and tended to listen more carefully than I did in English till I found out the verbs of each sentence.

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The Counter Revolution

by Akim Reinhardt

FDRThe United States boasts a deeply conservative economic tradition. From its origins as a colonial, agricultural society, it quickly emerged as a slave holding republic built on the ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide of Indigenous peoples. After the Civil War (1861-65), it reshaped itself in the crucible of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism straight through to the Roaring ‘20s. A post-Depression Keynesian consensus led U.S. leaders to reign in the most conservative impulses during the mid-20th century, but the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s set the stage for the current neo-liberal moment.

Consequently, ever since the industrial revolution, the United States has typically trailed other developed nations in establishing a basic social welfare system. It has never fielded a competitive socialist or labor party. It was the last major nation to implement an old age pension. More recently, ObamaCare made it the last major nation to mandate that all of its citizens receive some sort of healthcare coverage, even if it's quite wanting in many cases.

Amid its overriding conservativism, the United States has had only three presidents with any real socialist tendencies: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45), Harry S. Truman (1945-53), and most recently Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose presidency (1963-69) ended before half of current Americans were born (median age 37.9).

The election of Donald Trump as president and, just as important, the impending Republican dominance of Congress, make certain that the United States will not correct its social welfare shortcomings anytime soon. Indeed, the nation may take significant steps backwards.

However, a quick review of America's stunted progressive history suggests that the opportunity for a progressive counter-revolution may be closer than it appears at this dark moment.

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Perceptions

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Lucinda Childs Dance Company. “Dance”, 1979.

“… A racist and homophobic Chicago riot, July 12, 1979, is known as the day disco died an ignominious death. Meanwhile, Minimalism, idealistic and unfiltered, reached perhaps its pinnacle at the decade’s end with Lucinda Childs’ “Dance,” her choreography to Philip Glass’ “Dance Nos. 1–5” with filmed projections by the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.”

“In a Washington Post review of Dance, Alan M. Kriegsman wrote, “a few times, at most, in the course of a decade a work of art comes along that makes a genuine breakthrough, defining for us new modes of perception and feeling and clearly belonging as much to the future as to the present. Such a work is Dance”.”

“More here and here.

Not necessarily the best ambient and space music of 2016

by Dave Maier

OfftheskyIt's that time of year again, when lists of all sorts start appearing everywhere you look. 2016 featured a *lot* of ambient, space, and other electronic releases, and only the hardiest of us got through more than a small fraction of it. I certainly didn't, anyway, so while our list (and accompanying podcast; see widget below) features excellent music released in 2016, it is in no way a best-of. Just so that's clear!

Now here's our list:

Steve Hauschildt – Same River Twice [Strands]

We’ve heard from Steve before on our journeys, when he was channeling Jean-Michel Jarre as I recall. His new record is not quite so retro, but on the other hand this particular sequencer workout is well within the boundaries of its genre, which is fine by me. Steve tells us that

Strands is a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths. The title Steve alludes to the structural constitution of ropes as I wanted to approach the compositions so that they consisted of strands and fibers which form a unified whole […] I was also inspired by the movement of rivers, particularly their transformative aspect and how they’re in a state of flux and change, in particular the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where I live, which notoriously caught on fire thirteen times because of industrial pollution in the 1960s and before. I was very interested in the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry. It’s a very personal record for me as it is a reflection of my hometown where I grew up and where it was mostly recorded.

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