Our Weekly Discontents, 9/21/20: They should make a phone I can’t look at
Just hear me out
With no shortage of bad luck I drew the task of writing this week’s newsletter 36 hours after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an event that within minutes of its announcement turned my Twitter timeline into a cascading waterfall of Bad Vibes, with all the gorgeous and intelligent people I follow racing to outdo each other. RBG’s death is the end of democracy (we’ll see), except also democracy shouldn’t rest on the health of an octogenarian with cancer (true), except also RBG wasn’t worthy of the girlboss beatification to begin with (who is?), except also we deserve the space to mourn our meaningful public figures (isn’t that’s what Twitter is for?), except also if you look up to a Supreme Court Justice you need to be more radicalized (probably), except also we all need to take a deep breath and keep faith in the fight and call and VOTE.
(photo via Flickr/passetti)
All or some of this was true, and I don’t want to undermine wherever you, lovely reader, may fall in this interpretive calculus. I lean toward pragmatism and resolve, for whatever good that is, and so my feeling is that the fight over RBG’s replacement is hardly settled and that if anything worthwhile is going to happen in this country (ha ha) it’s just so crucial to get Trump out of there. He clearly doesn’t want to do this shit anymore. Every day he tries to instigate a race war because he’s a racist, but also because it’s the best and only idea his cottage cheese brain can remember. There’s a joke going around about how Biden’s main argument is “can you believe this fuckin’ guy” and how that’s sad for many reasons, but at the same time “can you believe this fuckin’ guy” is not exactly wrong. Certainly, it strikes an emotional chord.
Not to out myself as a resistance normie, though on Saturday night I watched 85% of JFK and thought “Let’s go, deep state.” I’ve just got some angst to burn. Within minutes of RBG’s dying I logged out of Twitter on every platform and booted up one of those apps that stops you from looking at your phone and opened a beer and turned on the basketball game… not exclusively out of self-care, but an instant understanding that going down the Bad Vibes tunnel was not a good way to spend Friday night. Now Monday is here, and the cycle begins anew. Take care of yourself. — Jeremy Gordon
Air Gordon pt. 2
This week I wrote about hanging out in 13th century Japan and ’80s New York and trying to momentarily imagine what life felt like in these worlds, and elsewhere. It’s also about digital sunsets and punk rock. I briefly touched on Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, a really quite exceptional memoir of the AIDS crisis that I can’t recommend enough. Readers of this newsletter may particularly enjoy the chapter she spends breaking down exactly why Andrew Sullivan is a fraud, an argument she makes with barely any venom; the facts of his fraudulence are just so self-evident that she doesn’t need to exaggerate.
Cathartic, though kind of a bummer if you remember she and other people picked this out in the ’90s, and he just kept on making six figures in perpetuity because he fit a dumb guy’s version of a smart guy. That sounds like a nice gig, doesn’t it? We’d like to personally profit at the expense of any integrity or coherent ideology, wouldn’t we? Someone’s got to.
Welcome to Hell World
On the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam I took a look back at “the bloodiest single day in American history.”
On this day in 1862 Donald Trump’s favorite general Robert E. Lee a guy whose love of losing battles and sucking shit came second only to his love of enslaving Black people had assembled his troop of dickheads outside of Sharpsburg, Maryland hoping to push into the north and win over recruits to his traitorous cause… Read more here.
I also unlocked a previously pay-walled piece about lemonade stands.
It was an extraordinarily hot summer in New York City in 1880. The type of day “a salamander would find no fault with,” an extraordinarily purple but charming piece of prose in the New York Times on July 10th explained. “You might have boiled eggs in the fountains,” the journalist wrote. It was hotter than even way down in New Orleans “where heat is commonly believed to have its home.”
The point is it was pretty hot that day as the guy was saying. Walking among the tired horses and perspiring workers of the city, all in search of shade and hydration, the reporter found one type of recently ascendant entrepreneur plying a busy trade: the lemonade peddlers. That day “the vendors of cheap lemonade squeezed out enough lemon juice to float a ship.”
Wars of Future Past
Between the last publication of Wars of Future Past and this Discontents, roughly 3,000 to 4,000 people in the US died of COVID-19. (Estimates vary). While the pandemic is not my specific beat, it is yet another reminder that the entire Forever War was launched in the names of 3,000 deaths, a number now casually absorbed by the nation, weekly.
This distinction between the dead the US lets rest, and the dead the US wages crusades to avenge, was the centerpiece of “Wring Out Your Dead.” The US cannot, I argued, escape the Forever War until it is willing to let the dead of 9/11 rest, something that enduring twitter ghoul and Hague-evader Ari Fleischer refuses to do, in an annual and extremely theatrical display of Never Forgetting.
Cruel and Usual
I, like Jeremy, saw the news on Friday night and promptly turned my phone off for the weekend. I’m sure I can imagine the Takes but I don’t want to read them, nor do I want to know what Mitch McConnell’s weak chin has to say.
I stuck with the theme this week, though, and wrote about the vast disparity in SCOTUS justices (and American judges generally) who have prosecutorial or pro-government backgrounds (8) versus those who worked as defense attorneys or civil rights litigators before joining the bench (the only one in my lifetime died this week, and you have to go back to Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991 to find someone who did any significant criminal defense work). The Constitution envisions that the people of the United States have significant leeway to be free from the power of the state, but it is hard to keep that flavor in the law itself if there are no judges with any experience pushing back against state power. Put a defense attorney on the Supreme Court you cowards.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
As sometimes happens in my guise as your correspondent on movies that are readily available on major streaming platforms, I had an epiphany last week: I needed to watch Michael Clayton. It turned out to be even better than I expected, and I daresay the newsletter I wrote about it is one of my better ones. Something about men in suits calling themselves “Shiva the god of death” both remorsefully and without a shred of irony appeals to the mythic storyteller in me. I’m less interested in pinning down exactly what fictional characters are than in narrating what they want to be and believe themselves to be—and how that self-narration collides with reality. Michael Clayton takes that interest and turns it on corporate lawyers, to great effect. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out, and also sign up.
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we mean when we talk about “elites” in the United States, and how a more expansive sense of who that term includes can help us better understand political power and socioeconomic status in this country. To that end, I wrote an essay on our property-owning American gentry class, the local elites who sit at the top of the social hierarchy throughout the mid-major metros and exurban swathes of the country. Car dealerships, fast-food franchises, concrete construction companies, lumber yards: these kinds of things can generate serious wealth and influence on a local and regional scale. Gentry classes are common historically, and because of their much larger numbers - there are a lot more millionaires than billionaire oligarchs - they exercise their social and economic power in more diffuse but no less important ways that shape our world.
This coming week on Perspectives, I’ll be launching the first post in a series of discussions of books: what I’m reading, what everybody else is reading, and what we’re learning in the process.
Foreign Exchanges
We covered a lot this week at Foreign Exchanges, like the culmination of Donald Trump’s diplomatic dog-and-pony show on Tuesday, when the governments of Bahrain and the UAE signed agreements to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel at the White House. There was the accession of new Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide, who’s clearly in a honeymoon period with Japanese voters but will have to find some answers for Japan’s listless economy if he hopes to maintain his current popularity. And we learned that the petroleum industry has been lying to us about plastics recycling, and major financial institutions have been lying to us about, well, pretty much everything.
But I think the story that resonated with me the most was the opening of peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, which began with an opening ceremony in Qatar last weekend and then some preliminary technical talks throughout the week, all while fighting between the two parties continues to kill civilians back home in Afghanistan. It’s not because I think this is a great milestone for peace. On the contrary, my expectation is that these talks will not go well initially, as the two sides work out their fundamental disagreements over the possibility of a ceasefire and over the nature of a future Afghan government.
The opening of these talks resonated with me because they should stand as a marker of the utter pointlessness of the US response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. After almost 19 years, tens of thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, the Taliban is in a stronger position than it’s been at any time since the US invaded that October. It’s in a position not just to return to power in Afghanistan, but to dictate the terms of that return to the detriment of Afghan women and minority groups. The United States chose to fight this war, and it lost.
Discourse Blog
We wrote a lot of things this week, most of which were completely wiped out of the news after Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death on Friday. RBG had been on the way out for years, but I think most of us were assuming that she’d find some way to hang on until January of next year. The shock of her death, then, was not so much that it had happened but that we now had to face the reality of what her absence means: namely, the almost certainty of another Trump-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court. Jack Mirkinson pulled together a shockingly clearheaded essay the night of, which I think drew together both the feelings of impending doom, frustration at the decision Ginsberg made to not retire when Democrats had the Presidency and Senate, and righteous anger that we’ll need to push back against another institution that will be all too easily weaponized against us.
It’s hard to believe the week started off with the Delaware primaries. Paul Blest talked to long-shot progressive candidate Jess Scarane, who failed to beat incumbent Sen. Chris Coons in the Democratic primary, but successfully mobilized a large part of the electorate and secured major down ballot results for the progressive wing of the party.
On a national level, Sam Grasso’s subscribers-only essay about the history of forced sterilization and medical malpractice by government agencies put the recent shocking news of ICE detainees receiving hysterectomies in a sharp focus. Next up: a week of us pulling our hair out as vying forces again wage war over the Senate’s two or three token moderate Republicans, who will probably confirm Trump’s nominee anyway.
no love in fear
Naomi Osaka endured, and outlasted, far more than seven opponents en route to her second U.S. Open title. Throughout the tournament she wore black masks with white letters, with each spelling the name of a different Black person murdered by police or police-adjacent actors. Seven matches, seven names. Though tennis media had ample opportunity, they largely missed her message. In the end, she had the last word.
The Insurgents
This week, after encouraging everyone listening to take their righteous fury over the coming Supreme Court battle and channel it into a Molotov Cocktail of voting power, we bring on Peter a.k.a. The Law Boy to talk about RBG’s death and what it’s going to mean for the future of America, whether she should have retired in 2014, how many people seem to be coming to the realization that what passes for democracy in the US is actually profoundly undemocratic and much more.
We also read some reviews of the show and discuss our devious plan to pit the Monster and Reign Energy Drink companies against each other for our highly coveted endorsement.
BORDER/LINES
First thing’s first: it’s our birthday! Like, the newsletter’s birthday. Gaby’s birthday was last week and she didn’t shut up about it. I, Gaby, am actually typing this, but I thought it would be Professional of me to write the blurb in third person, which I am now undermining. Anyway, it’s the newsletter’s birthday! We technically launched on 9/11 (oops) but our first real edition was published on September 20, 2019. Our big boy is all grown up now. Please smash that subscribe button and tell all your friends.
Last week, we looked into the horrifying allegations that several women were coerced into receiving hysterectomies at an ICE detention center in rural Georgia. Those allegations were part of a broader whistleblower complaint drawing attention to medical neglect at the Irwin County Detention Center, but they were the only part of the complaint that garnered national attention, for pretty obvious reasons. We also looked at how the story quickly morphed into “mass hysterectomies in ICE detention,” which doesn’t appear to be happening.
It’s worth repeating that the complaint itself is shocking, and that people in ICE custody are rarely treated with dignity or given adequate medical treatment. What’s happening now, though, seems like Kids In Cages redux, with observers latching their own explanations on to it and hardly paying attention to those who are affected.