Our Weekly Discontents, 10/19/20
The Failsons Have Entered the Chat
Hunter Biden pretty obviously has some issues he’s working through, drug and otherwise; how many of those issues are contained on a laptop that implausibly made its way into the withered, grasping claws of Rudy Giuliani is a different matter.
For all but the most dedicated denizens of the Fox News Cinematic Universe, none of that is particularly important. Nobody who’s not already convinced is going to be swayed against the former vice president by the knowledge that Joe Biden still loves his failson, and Trump’s attacks on him at the debate in this vein have pretty clearly backfired.
The broader issue (to the extent that any of this actually matters in the Year of Our Lord 2020) is that Hunter Biden was in fact involved with a large Ukrainian natural gas company and its deeply corrupt oligarch owner at the precise time his father was vice president. This is quite obviously corrupt, precisely the kind of low-rent influence-peddling that so bedeviled Hillary Clinton in 2016; the fact that it’s common and generally accepted by both American and global political elites doesn’t mean it’s not actually corrupt, just that it doesn’t reach their specific threshold for being unacceptable. To anybody who doesn’t spend their time among consulting and lobbying firms that operate in these spaces - where family ties, business relationships, and international politics all intersect in uncomfortable ways - it looks pretty bad!
Of course, the Trump family has spent the last four years (and much longer, to be honest) engaged in precisely this kind of activity and far worse. It’s 2020; charges of hypocrisy don’t matter when it comes to Donald Trump and his Failsons, because their whole shtick is that everything is bad and shitty and corrupt, so you can’t blame them for any of it. The Dems, on the other hand, are still laboring under the twin dilemmas of trying to appear to be better while still having a class of politicians and hangers-on who exploit their public positions and relationships for all sorts of private gain. It would be a lot easier for the Democratic Party and its national ambitions if they decided not to defend this kind of business-as-usual corruption, or nominate politicians connected to it, but that’s the world we live in.
Maybe, moving forward, they can choose a different path. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
Patrick Wyman
No new post last week - I’m desperately trying to finish Tides of History scripts so I can do my book edits before the end of the month - but if you’re interested in 6,000-year-old megalithic tombs, check out this piece I wrote on the Irish monument of Newgrange and its incestuous dynasty of priest-kings. Speaking of failsons, last month I wrote a long essay on America’s local elites - our gentry class - and how they wield economic, social, and political power throughout the country.
Air Gordon pt. 2
Jeremy Gordon
Taste may simply be a complex web of bourgeois value judgments but I cannot really summon the gumption to insist Third Eye Blind are or were “good” by any reasonable metric. Nonetheless there was something in my 21st or 22nd straight listen of “Semi-Charmed Life” during what felt like a particularly bleak week of American political life that, for reasons I tried to elucidate in this week’s newsletter, resonated freshly with me. It also came at the same time I was rewatching a lot of Richard Linklater, and connecting deeply to the vision of goodnatured, no-bullshit optimism that threads his movies. At the very least, everyone should watch Everybody Wants Some!!, the most purely entertaining film I’ve seen in quarantine.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
Connor Wroe Southard
Last week, I answered reader questions. It went well! Probably better than I deserved. My Beautiful Readers offered up some great questions, and it was a blast to answer them. I talked about writing while drinking (wouldn’t advise doing it while properly drunk, but tipsy is doable) and why I hate autofiction (Knausgaard owes me hours of my life back).
I want to keep searching for ways to turn the newsletter into more of a conversation. That could mean a number of things, such busking storytelling where readers get to direct me toward the next chapter. Maybe I’ll even let readers commission pieces. At the very least, I want to take questions again. Sign up to get in on the fun!
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
It took a while to show up, but my deep dive into loitering munitions is out! These planes-that-are-sometimes-missiles have a lot of future implications for combat. The actual impact in the ongoing war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is, primarily, as a tool of propaganda, since flying cameras are great at making nationalist videos.
If that isn’t enough war-like dystopia, I spent my past week virtually attending the Army’s big arms show. The gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon is less cultural than either would like you to believe. If anything, what is missing in coverage of both is the kind of skepticism that shouts “what the fuck” when someone describes a soldier’s tablet, night-vision goggles, and rifle sight as all part of the “defense internet of things.”
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
This week I was very pleased to publish Daniel Bessner’s second FX column, discussing realist theory and the effect it’s had in shaping US foreign policy:
In my last column, I discussed the mid-20th century period, which was formative in shaping how Americans understand foreign policy, international relations, and, ultimately, their role in the world. In this column, I’d like to address one crucial approach to viewing geopolitics that emerged from the experiences of that era: realism. Realism is, by far, the most influential theory of international relations in the American academy.
Because US academics are constantly forced to distinguish themselves from their predecessors in order to advance in the university (a form of branding, some might say), in 2020 there are many different types of realisms: classical realism, neorealism, neoclassical realism, offensive realism, defensive realism, etc. Though each of these realisms has different emphases, in my opinion they’re united by a set of assumptions about how international relations works.
Daniel and I also recorded a podcast following up on his two columns and talking about a couple of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of leftists looking to challenge the Washington foreign policy establishment.
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
Hey everyone, I’m very excited to join this project. Next week—or sometime in the next few weeks—I’ll give a more detailed introduction to The Flashpoint. For now you can read up from this week on the suffering of a suspected Covid long-hauler and the continuing Alex Morse story.
I also wrote about my skepticism that Trump will ever be held accountable for his crimes:
While Trump triggers the same rage and hate among liberals that Bush did in the 2000s, there’s not a similarly hopeful and beloved president coming in Biden to defuse the anger.
While President Barack Obama was able to use some of his political capital before inauguration day to quash any chance of Bush facing accountability—”We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”—it’s an open question whether Biden can do the same after the last four years.
More to come—thanks for reading.
Cruel and Usual
Shane Ferro
This week, I contributed to my Discontents comrade Luke O’Neil’s The Last Normal Day series, writing about working in the basement of the Queens Criminal Courthouse until 1am on the Last Normal Thursday in March. Things were serious enough at that point that I was (mask-less and) sanitizing my hands 50 times a day, and irate that the courts continued on as usual knowing that “usual” means warehousing human beings together for hours in concrete and steel cells until they are able to see a judge. It was not yet serious enough, though, that I realized it would be the last time I was in a courtroom, or the last time I would see the human beings I represent in person for months on end. It was serious enough that a cop in the back had a hacking cough and told someone it was Covid (later his supervisor made him say he was joking). It wasn’t serious enough that anything came of that “joke.” Just a few days later, things got serious enough that most of the court closed and judges and attorneys began doing these arraignment shifts by video calls. Even at the height of the pandemic, though—with the ever-present sirens and the the morgue trucks at ever hospital—it was never serious enough that the people behind the bars got any relief. I’ve been at home for seven months, but video calls take me straight into that back room full of steel bars, where arrestees continue to be warehoused and processed in person, as if nothing has changed at all.
Welcome to Hell World
Shane mentioned her entry for The Last Normal Day above, but writer Chris A. Smith also contributed this week with memories of his last day surfing in San Diego and moving his mother into an assisted living home.
It was the second week of March, and the news was uniformly ominous: China in lockdown, surges in Italy and Spain, a disturbing cluster in a suburban Seattle nursing home. As I looked at the surfers around me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were living out the first twenty minutes of a zombie movie, where everyone ignores the crisis until it’s too late and the undead are breaking down the doors. We were all whistling past the graveyard, and each day it got harder to do.
I was in San Diego. My mom had suffered a stroke, and I had been shuttling between there and my home in San Francisco, coordinating her rehabilitation and moving her into an assisted-living facility. Those days would have been tough under any circumstance, but the looming pandemic added a layer of ambient dread. It began to rain, a change in weather to match my mood, and I caught a final wave.
Earlier in the week I published my own piece about The Last Normal Day.
I said it feels like it felt when I thought we were going to go to war earlier in the year like a creeping and overwhelming sense of existential dread but it was tempered with a sense of something like stolen valor because while I didn't know who they were or how many people would be killed throughout all this I was fairly certain I was not going to number among them and so the despair felt unearned. Everyone knows they are going to die but it is also an impossibility to hold on to for more than a moment it’s like looking directly into the sun.
Death is a fact but it’s easy to forget and there are lots things like that right where you know them to be true but you don’t know them know them like someone could ask you what the capital of Uruguay is and you’d go shit shit hold on then they’d say Montevideo and you’d go I knew that. And you did know it too you just couldn’t access it. Death is the capital of Uruguay is the point.
Considering some of the discourse about what’s to be done with Trump and his stooges down the line I was reminded of this earlier Hell World in which I discussed ~~the history books~~
The other thing is the pervasive concern from many usually libs for how the present day will look in history books. It’s something you’ve likely seen said a thousand times in the Trump era about how this or that god awful thing he did or said will be written about years from now and it’s just such a strange way of thinking about the world to me.
This type of shit is even more perverse when it’s someone with actual power like Schiff saying it. It’s a form of punting responsibility for real problems happening right now to some later date at which point the future moon historians or whatever will arrive and right the wrongs of our present with their scathing appraisal of how terrible Trump was.
BORDER/LINES
Among immigration policy people, there’s the idiom that the border is moving south. This isn’t literally true, of course, but a metaphor for the ways in which a Homeland Security-led foreign policy has pushed governments around Latin America to adopt anti-migration policies and often use their own law enforcement agencies to prevent migrants from ever even making it to the United States at all. Under threat of heavy tariffs, for example, the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador last year created a new national guard, which immediately started blocking Central Americans trying to reach its northern neighbor.
This cooperation between U.S. immigration authorities and Latin American partners took on a very concrete and illegal form in January of this year, when Customs and Border Protection agents stationed in Guatemala in a supposedly advisory role used State Department funds to rent buses that were used in a joint operation with Guatemalan border agents to deport Honduran members of a migrant caravan. The CBP agents violated international law as well as their own agreements with the State Department, and subsequently lied to State personnel about their activities, causing State to in turn lie to Congress. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report put out last week detailed the events and set forth a series of recommendations, including, pathetically, that the State Department retake its lead in coordinating foreign policy.
For last week’s edition of BORDER/LINES, we explored this incident and the broader campaign to make anti-migration the preeminent U.S. policy consideration in the western hemisphere, by any means necessary. We also touched on the alleged torture and forced deportations of a group of Cameroonian asylum seekers, and the third federal ruling so far to suggest that ostensible Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is unlawfully in his role.
Discourse Blog
We have a new website! Discourse Blog has relocated from Substack to a brand new, completely independent website of our own. You can read more about it here, in a note from our publisher Aleks Chan and editor Jack Mirkinson.
In our first week, we did another Twitch livestream where we fought about oatmeal, published in depth features on Army propaganda and destroying the Supreme Court, and examined Amy Coney Barrett’s record on racial justice. We also discussed EMAILS, specifically Hunter Biden’s this time. It was a blast. You know where to find us: discourseblog.com.
The Insurgents
This week we talked to former Bernie & Keith Ellison staffer Karthik Ganapathy about how Democrats (and liberals in general) need to not give in to right wing fear mongering about climate legislation. This was after the Vice Presidential debate where Kamala Harris made sure to explicitly promise that famous science-listener Joe Biden would never, ever ban fracking because of jobs or whatever. Check out Karthik’s piece in the Nation about this here.
Then in our second premium episode, we talked about Rob getting exposed to Covid-19, pour over coffee, Disco Elysium, and how Dianne Feinstein is a badass girlboss who doesn’t owe you anything! Also a theory on what is currently happening on Earth-2.