Weekly Digest – October 11, 2020

Worth Reading

Housing groups, tenant advocates and landlords are working to hash out a deal with the Baker administration to deploy more federal money for people struggling to pay rent amid the coronavirus recession.

At the same time, the state’s housing courts are planning furiously to add resources to handle an expected flood of eviction filings that could come soon after the commonwealth’s eviction moratorium ends on Oct. 17.

[Ed.:  Please contact your State Rep and ask them to support H.5018, An Act to guarantee housing stability during the COVID-19 emergency and recovery.]

Emerging from the American Revolution, the founders reasonably were wary of insurgencies that could threaten the stability of the new Union. Shays’ Rebellion and other early armed uprisings against the states only solidified those fears. Thus, the “well regulated militia” in the Constitution’s Second Amendment refers to the militia that were once called forth by the government, not by private vigilante organizations deciding when and under what circumstances to organize and self-deploy.

The federal and state government control of the militia has also been confirmed by the Supreme Court. In 1886, the court upheld the constitutionality of a state criminal law that made it unlawful for “any body of men” outside state or federal governmental authority to “associate themselves together as a military company or organization, or to drill or parade with arms in any city or town of the state.”

To allow the American people to govern themselves, to rein in the judiciary and break a would-be reactionary super-legislature — to show Republicans that they cannot keep the ill-gotten gains of the Trump years — Democrats will need to expand the courts.

[In his book “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos] Lozada finds subtleties in areas we’ve assumed clear-cut. Take the president’s mind-numbing spew of lies. Lozada praises the former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani for lambasting “lefty academics who … argued that truth is not universal but malleable, a reflection of economic, political and cultural forces.” Or, as the philosopher Lee McIntyre put it, postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth.”

And here Lozada comes close to the core of the matter: Messing around with the notion of truth is a luxury that comes with affluence. We have spent the past 50 years undermining the basic institutions of society — not just our sense of common purpose and identity, but also normative values like truth and duty and expertise. The politics of consumerism — and grievance — have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility.

On my reading list:

Ending on a positive note:

A few thoughts on Tannenbaum’s piece:

  1. I’m not familiar with VH’s music post-OU812.  (Hagar was a letdown.)
  2. If I was stuck on a desert island and could only have one of those twelve it’d be “Mean Street.”
  3. Tannenbaum links to a version of Little Guitars without the acoustic intro.   You really should listen to the full version.  Here it is: