I kind of hate The West Wing

A podcast I was listening to this morning ended -- as so many conversations do these days -- with the millenial-ish presenters all talking about how much they miss The West Wing, and how much they love The West Wing, and how painful it is to watch The West Wing, because it is so beautiful and crystalline an image of what responsible, functional government might once have been, and maybe even what it was, when the Clintons were in power.

But let's not go nuts.

Errata and Marginalia 005: Dorfman and Mattelart

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: OR Books, 2018).

OR Books brought out a new edition last year of the Marxist pop culture criticism classic by famous playwright and author Ariel Dorfman (best known for Death and the Maiden) and Belgian Marxist critic Armand Mattelart, and I knew I had to get a copy (apparently the first to appear in English since the extremely limited print run of the English translation in the '70s that survived Disney's notorious copyright lawyers).

It is, perhaps, a book more delightful in premise than in execution. And perhaps Marxist cultural critics are not a group known for their felicitous literary style. And perhaps this book -- though written by a famous author when young -- does not entirely fulfill one's hopes that it will break the mold.

A Sonnet

May I, dear friend, express sincere despair
At reading Reihan’s well-intentioned words
They start off so compassionate and fair
Condemning cruelty that from Trump disturbs.
He says he gets the reasons for their flight;
Why some leave home – but more than that, he’s found
Circuitous, a way to put it right
We wait, breath held, for oracles profound.
It turns out that the path was plain to see:
In, half-baked, Paul Romer’s hell-fired brain
A neoliberal lawless sub-country
Where sweat-shops surely shall abolish pain!
  So doth all like unasked-for meddling end
  Quoth Claude McKay: ‘God save us from our friends!’

When they go low...

I was talking politics with my brother-in-law the other day, as we do, and he shared with me his strategic analysis of the 2020 election. "Donald Trump is not invincible," he said. "He's like one of those bosses in a video game where you have to shoot off the armor until the weak spot opens up, then you just hit that over and over again. Like in Star Fox." I giggled tremendously. I knew exactly the analogy he had in mind. The core has appeared, I said in a surfer drawl, stand by to attack!

He then proposed an example of what he has in mind. If Trump has a fundamental weakness, it is that he actually does have a dread of humiliation. Anger, fear, condemnation seem to feed his sense of power -- power as it is always understood by people who are essentially weak in character. But actually being slighted, snubbed, mocked... there's a reason Chaplin perceived that parody can be as effective a tool against dictators, if not more so, than vilification.

Personal Recollections of the War on Terror (by a member of the State Department)

As a career civil servant I always try to keep partisanship out of my analysis -- even in a private and anonymous memoir of this sort. However, I am sure it is safe to declare as a certain truth, across the three administrations in which I have served, that the events of 9/11 fundamentally reshaped the politics of our globe.

This is not to say that there had not been warning signs earlier. Small scale attempted bombings -- as well, of course, as the far more serious and costly attacks that our allies the United Kingdom had endured, long before the violence reached our shores.

At the time, though, none of us appreciated the magnitude of the new threat facing our shared civilization. The Cold War had been won. Our nation enjoyed unrivaled supremacy of military and economic power, and our values of democracy, prosperity, and industriousness -- the heritage of those immortal theses that had once been nailed to the door of a cathedral in Wittenberg -- appeared to be triumphant.

Akbar Ahmed's "The Thistle and the Drone" (2013): A Review

Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam is a potentially life-transforming book. It is a book so instantly persuasive and recognizably honest that its findings should be described as obvious -- yet its ideas have never been allowed a foot in the door of post-9/11 U.S. policymaking, and they took me and I expect many others wholly by surprise. It is a book whose insights are reached almost entirely by synthesizing information many of us already half-knew, or quarter-remembered; yet they are insights that -- taken together -- provide a comprehensive reinterpretation not only of the "War on Terror" -- but of modern global history as a whole.

And it is a book, finally, whose conclusions -- though published five years ago now -- have only been borne out since.

Novels of Renunciation

The Mill on the Floss may be the perfect novel. Not my favorite novel. Not the best novel. But the novel that does most classically and quintessentially that which novels -- of all forms of literature -- are best at doing. After all, other kinds of books - ones that aren't novels -- can tell you what to do. They can explain why and how. But novels are the most equipped to accompany you with sympathy when you discover how very little aid this purely preceptial morality is when faced with actual adult human life, with all its passions and incompatible values.