What Stood Out, WK 21
I want to start this post with three experiences I have had in the past week and a half.
A conservative family member and I were talking about book banning and as we did it became clear that we both believed “my side doesn’t do that.” This was astonishing to me because there is so much about the book banning of the right in my news feeds and nothing about liberal book banning. This family member cited the example of Huckleberry Finn. “Why would anyone want to ban Huckleberry Finn?” I said. I don’t think liberals could possibly do that. Our convictions about our “teams” were a roadblock to having a conversation about book banning itself.
I went for a walk and a cup of coffee and while I was sipping my coffee I looked up liberal book banning and sure enough, some liberals want to ban books with messages or words they don’t like. Huckleberry Finn’s sin was the N word. We don’t do it as much as conservatives do in the present moment, but we do it.
When I returned I immediately told M that I had researched book banning and that, yes, liberals do it too. I didn’t say anything about who did more, I simply acknowledged that liberals are guilty of it too. At that point, we were able to turn to the issue of book banning and we both agreed there should be no book banning wherever it comes from.
This past Friday we entertained one of M’s friends for dinner. This friend was conservative as is M. We had a lovely evening with lively conversation and then it turned to the issue of abortion. This friend told us they were Catholic and that they did not believe that abortion should ever be the choice. But, they said, they also didn’t believe they had any right to dictate how others think about abortion and whether it should be available. M is not in favor of banning all abortions either. We had an intelligent conversation about it and learned that we had overlapping views on abortion which can be summed up by the Clinton formulation, “available, safe and rare.” We listened to each other, embraced our common ground and respected our differences.
Yesterday. I was out for my morning walk when I passed by a large group of Proud Boys protesting outside a local church. The church was hosting a youth pride event. They had signs reading “Jesus is the Only Savior,” or Stop Grooming our Children," or “There is a Hell and You Will Burn in it Forever.” As I passed by one of the protestors asked me if I knew what was going on inside (the church). I said “yes and I am not on your side on this one.” They verbally harassed me until I was well down the block. It alarmed me to see the overlap of evangelical Christianity and the Proud Boys. Nothing good can come of that. A militia backed by a fundamentalist god is more sinister than it would be on its own.
Which brings me to the first of the articles I will share on the “Great Replacement Theory.”
The ideology of the Great Replacement is a particular threat to democratic governance because it insists that entire categories of human beings can or should be excluded from democratic rights and protections. Any political cause can theoretically inspire terrorism, but this one is unlike others in that what it demands of its targets is their non-existence.
Both conceive of America as fundamentally white and Christian, and in so doing posit not only a racial conception of citizenship but a racial hierarchy, one that must be maintained if America’s true nature is to endure.
This conspiracy theory has grown so popular among key GOP figures that the conservative elite can no longer condemn it unreservedly. Instead, some prominent conservatives have chosen to defend it in sanitized form, arguing that the Democratic Party’s support for immigration reform is a plot to, as Representative Elise Stefanik of New York put it in an ad last year, “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Note the notion that an “electorate” can be “overthrown” by being outvoted, as though Republican electoral defeat is by definition illegitimate—especially if that victory is enabled by the wrong kind of voters.
If any Democrats or Republicans believe that demographic change inherently advantages one party over the other, they are tremendously foolish.
Liberals can do nothing to prevent conservatives from embracing this conspiracy theory, beyond forcing Republicans to pay a political price at the ballot box. It would be better, by far, if prominent conservatives persuaded their comrades to reject this perverse ideology, rather than attempt to sanitize it for mainstream consumption. If their recent reaction to the Buffalo shooter is any guide, though, they have chosen a different path.
With Roe V. Wade hanging by a slim thread of time, it was interesting to find this article about Sex and the Single Woman, a book written by Hellen Gurly Brown, who also started Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Brown’s blunt copy is false advertising. After a while, the carefree singlehood that she claims to be selling begins to look like drudgery. Spared of housework and care work, the women Brown imagines toil instead at the labor of sexual conquest.
Men as active, women as passive; men deciding, women accommodating: That was Brown’s cosmology. And soon, even more people will likely be forced into its physics. When men and women have sex that ends in a pregnancy, it will be the women who bear the burdens. When men rape women, it will be women who bear the consequences. Feminists fought for sex to be casual—not in the sense that it doesn’t mean anything, but in the sense that it should not mean everything. The world we are facing is one that is losing that fight. And it is the world that Helen Gurley Brown foresaw, precisely because of her limited vision: Men will do what they do. Everyone else will adjust accordingly.
And thoroughly depressing to read this article about Oklahoma’s new abortion ban law.
Oklahoma Just Took Abortion Bans to a New Extreme – Mother Jones
On Thursday, the Oklahoma House passed a bill banning nearly all abortions in the state. Like a recent ban passed in Texas, which barred abortion after six weeks, the law will be enforced through private civil action. And Oklahoma’s bill takes things even further by banning abortion beginning at fertilization. It will take effect immediately upon being signed by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt.
Here are some sage words from Rebecca Solnit about how we can fight back to protect abortion rights:
Here’s how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rights | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian
“Us” these days means pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian man with rightwing politics. They’re building a broad constituency of opposition, and it is up to us to make that their fatal mistake.
The right knows that it represents a minority and a shrinking minority as Americans as a whole become more progressive and as the country becomes increasingly non-white. They have made a desperate gamble – to rule via minority power, for the benefit of the few, which is why voter suppression is so crucial a part of their agenda. It cannot be a winning strategy in the long run. But in the short run it can perpetrate immense damage to too many lives and to the climate itself. The revelations should strengthen our resolve to resist by remembering our power and strengthening our alliances, winning elections, and keeping eyes on the prize.
This one may have been under the radar for a lot of people, but congresses authority to delegate to agencies to administrate its policies has been under attack for being un-constitutional. To say they don’t have this authority would effectively kill the administrative state which would have serious consequences. I’ve read different opinions on how serious this particular case is. Some say the issue is fixable, others say it is the end of the world as we know it.
Bad Day in Court for the Administrative State
A nondelegation ruling against the SEC is a big deal, but the actual argument is somewhat more modest. The claim is that Congress did not articulate an intelligible principle to guide the SEC on whether to bring enforcement actions in Article III courts or through administrative decision-making. Significant, but pretty fixable.
I could not issue this weeks What Stood Out without a nod to my Niece and this wonderful review of her new book in The New Yorker.
A Riveting Memoir of Life as a Chef with an Eating Disorder | The New Yorker
I first read Loew-Banayan’s book because I was a fan of their cooking. Last year, they opened Café Mutton, their first restaurant, in the upstate town where I live, and it quickly became my favorite local place to eat. They work there in an open kitchen, wearing a baseball hat and T-shirt, roasting pigeons, pickling mussels, making pigs’-head terrines.
A couple of artists came to my attention.
Walter Murch Sought to “Paint the Air” Between His Eye and His Subject
Murch’s particular genius lies in the ways in which he could paint something that appeared at once solid and dissolving. As he claimed, “I paint the air between my eye and the object.”
Memories Remade With Charcoal and Ash
“The landscape of the subject is only true if we acknowledge that there is no such thing as landscape” because “landscape acquires meaning through memory.”
Back to politics, this article in The Dispatch about 45 and the GOP resonated with me:
Trump Cares About Control, Not Winning Elections
The key to understanding the GOP primaries is to understand that neither traditional conservative ideology nor even competence are qualifications or differentiators anymore. If they were, Liz Cheney wouldn’t be a pariah, and the bomb-throwing Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert wouldn’t be Republican stars. Everyone has to be an angry populist revolutionary who wants to see the world burn.
As did this one in the Atlantic about the state of our political system:
The Rotten Core of Our Political System
You’re confronted with a world of almost unrelieved cowardice, cynicism, myopia, narcissism, and ineptitude, where the overriding motive is the pursuit of power for its own sake. It’s rare that a politician thinks about any cause higher than self-interest.
Delusional vanity plays a part in the follies of both Democratic factions. Centrists deceive themselves into believing they can forge a bipartisanship that doesn’t exist, while progressives can’t see what’s in front of their faces—that they have little public support.
The rotten core around which our democracy has begun to collapse is the Republican Party. It remains Trump’s party as long as he keeps his grip on its voters and can defy the medical odds against an old man who eats badly and never exercises.
Those picking up this book a few decades from now will have to confront the question of why a free people, in discarding their most promising leaders while elevating the likes of Kevin McCarthy, asked for their own destruction.