reading: Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon 📚
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I don’t necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
They’re noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But that’s not to say they didn’t lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because they’re largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didn’t reflect those of the larger populace.
That’s a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I can’t continue to live in a world that’s so painfully incongruent with this one I’m currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
There’s a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
But there’s hope, too.
Currently reading: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚
The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late.
The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth-that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.
Oof.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New ‘Message’ on Israel and Palestine
He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
Currently reading: Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan 📚
You build yourself up. You think ‘look at how good I’ve been, so helpful and earnest.’ Then you wake up one morning and realize your head is a mess. This beautiful construction you’ve made isn’t as shiny as you thought, not nearly as stable. There are cracks in the walls. You have not been born anew, and you are not that good. You’re afraid, sad, dark. And the dark leaches into the ground, pulling you with it.
Currently reading: Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder 📚
If you hear “holism,” I hear “bullshit.”
Currently reading: Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder 📚
Free will or not, we are here, and therefore we matter. But whether ours will be a happy story or a sad story, whether our civilization will flourish or wither, whether we will be remembered or forgotten—we don’t yet know. Instead of thinking of ourselves as selecting possible futures, I suggest we remain curious about what’s to come and strive to learn more about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.
I have found that abandoning the idea of free will has changed the way I think about my own thinking. I have begun paying more attention to what we know about the shortcomings of human cognition, logical fallacies, and biases. Realizing that in the end I am just working away on the input I collect, I have become more selective and careful with what I read and listen to.
Currently reading: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges 📚
Sometimes I think my lifetime was front-loaded with goodness; that so much of life until now has been good, and at some point, this can’t possibly hold. The excess and craven want of my culture will finally crest and begin to devour itself. In doing so, we find a truth we’ve worked for so long to avoid.
We’re out of balance, and imbalance doesn’t last.
Honestly, what makes me more depressed: that a course correction sure feels as though it’s on the horizon? Or that it might not be?
Past reads: Toward the Queerest Insurrection by The Mary Nardini Gang 📚
What a bunch of gibberish nonsense.
I used to find this stuff appealing, but now I think it to be tantamount to nihilism.
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis 📚
This was the most influential book of my last year.
How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
As we said our goodbyes, it felt like we’d just emerged from one of Delany’s late novels. Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of “Huckleberry Finn,” had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.
Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
With an eye for the darker side of human nature, his novels remain some of my favorite.
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
Winifred Gallagher
She’s fast becoming my favorite writer.