Ken White, Stop Demanding Dumb Answers To Hard Questions:

America faces many problems. The easy ones we solve or ignore. We struggle with the hard ones. Hard problems raise complex questions that lack glib, one-word answers. The stubborn thirst for simple answers to hard questions is bad for America. It’s anti-intellectual, pro-ignorance, pro-stupidity, pro-bigotry, pro-reactionary, pro-totalitarianism, pro-tyranny, pro-mob.

Take this week’s Congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses, titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” A generous interpretation — a credulous one — would be that the hearing was designed to inquire why colleges aren’t protecting Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial…

Chris Arnade, Why Sneer at Wetherspoons? Society needs sources of cheap comfort:

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

Teetering Between Joy and Terror: Extreme Sledding in the Swiss Alps

I tend to think suggestions of widespread trauma are overdone but maybe I’m too skeptical.  Ana Marie Cox makes sense in “We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized.“:

What if our entire national character is a trauma response?

Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response…

Collective trauma, [Kai Ericson] wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”

In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community.

Paul Schofield, Liberals shouldn’t scoff at people’s fears of homelessness and crime:

Many cities around the United States with significant homeless populations also have large numbers of low-income renters, people of color and immigrants. Because these groups are less likely to have resources to buy their way out of a troubled neighborhood, they end up being the people whose kids are harassed by people under the influence of drugs on the way to school, the ones whose doorsteps are defecated on and the ones whose sidewalks are made impassible by tents and trash. They are the ones whose stores close early to avoid being stolen from, and whose eateries move to the other side of town. To shrug this off, or to dismiss it as mere conservative propaganda, is profoundly unprogressive.

Continue reading →

Lee Vinsel’s Peoples and Things podcast, Episode 61, Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood:

“The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing technologies that would give rise to an extended period of abundance and prosperity that Clinton compared to the industrial revolution. But the phrase became unpopular after the dot com bust of 2000-2002, which also marked the end of the 1990s economic expansion. Henwood and Vinsel discuss Henwood’s long career as an economic journalist and how he came to write the book as well as how studying “the New Economy” makes the technology bubbles of the 2010s feel like deja vu.

[Ed.:  Henwood’s “overproduction of elites” comment ~2/3 of the way in made me wince.  Painful.  True.  I won’t try to provide context here.  Listen to their whole conversation.]

Justin E. H. Smith in conversation with Christopher Beha on the Harper’s Magazine podcast, Generation X:

Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious.

[Ed.:  Their discussion of intergenerational relations is what got my attention.  Also, Smith’s distinction between “uncontested evil” and “contested evil” sticks in my mind.]

Continue reading →