The Year of Stupid

By Kyle Smith

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

 

It turned out that the novel coronavirus was only the second-most-infectious disease to spread through the U.S. this year. Satan’s Cupcake has, after all, been diagnosed in less than 1 percent of Americans. The not-so-novel imbecility virus is, on the other hand, ravaging the minds of everyone from news reporters and politicians to brand managers, high-school kids, and utility-company executives. The fervor out there is often compared to the French Revolution, complete with the installation of a toy guillotine/vegetable chopper in front of Jeff Bezos’s house. But this revolution has a distinctly 21st-century American flavor: Let’s hear it for liberté, égalité, stupidité. Has any people’s uprising ever been this moronic? It’s like a sketch-comedy spoof of history, Bastille Day reenacted by the characters from Anchorman.

 

Item: In Minneapolis, the City Council votes unanimously to disband the police department and replace it with a “department of community safety and violence prevention” driven by “a holistic, public-health-oriented approach.” So, a Committee of Public Safety, then? Should Minneapolis ever follow through on this barmy scheme, which it won’t, I guess the Mini Apple can look forward to friendship bracelets instead of handcuffs, armed robbers getting suites at the nearest Hilton Garden Inn instead of jail cells, and lots of holistic counseling sessions for rapists. If there’s one thing we owe black folks, it’s to let criminals roam unchecked in their neighborhoods while rich, white, and well-connected people surround themselves with private security. People like, er, the members of the Minneapolis City Council.

 

Item: In Washington, D.C., working with the loud backing of leading public intellectuals who claim Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans did nothing to free the slaves, a mob of the historically challenged gather around a statue commemorating emancipation that was universally understood as a moving symbol of the liberation of black America until ten minutes ago, before the super-spreading of the stupidity virus. Protesters at the Emancipation Memorial have for days threatened to give Lincoln and a freed slave the Saddam Hussein treatment and drag them off the plinth they’ve shared for 144 years. Over the weekend, a young woman yelling at a pitch that would cause a dog’s eardrums to explode screeched, “Why are you protecting it?” The calm and historically literate older black gentleman at whom the question was directed patiently asked, “Who paid for it?” The answer to his question was, of course, “freed slaves.” But she didn’t know, so she hopped around as though suffering a full-body case of Jimmy legs and screamed, “Why are you fighting me?” A black woman with a keen interest in local history, Marcia Cole, pointed out on a local news program that the slave depicted in the statue “is not kneeling on two knees with his head bowed. He is in the act of getting up. And his head is up, not bowed, because he’s looking forward to a future of freedom.” Instead of looking up he’ll soon be looking at the bottom of a river bed or a ditch if the mob gets its wish, as today’s mobs usually do.

 

Item: Hulu removes an ancient episode of The Golden Girls from its streaming platform, presumably never to be seen by human eyes again. It seems two of the famed Filles d’Or were wearing mud treatments on their faces when they met the black family into which one of their sons was about to marry. Hilarity ensued. Betty White’s character Rose said, “This is mud on our faces, we’re not really black.” Scenes from, or entire episodes of, Community, 30 Rock, The Office, and Scrubs were similarly memory-holed. An exasperated Twitter user wrote that not a single black person in America was offended and called the removal “white guilt knee-jerking into reactionary performative allyship.”

 

Item: A Latino truck driver, Emmanuel Cafferty, is publicly humiliated and fired from his job at San Diego Gas & Electric Company because he allowed his left thumb to touch his left index finger while driving a truck. Since the OK sign is coded as a white-power gesture among batty people who spend way too much time freaking out online, Cafferty was canned by panicky superiors. “To lose your dream job for playing with your fingers,” he said, “that’s a hard pill to swallow.” The motorist who pulled the pin on this social hand grenade on Twitter later deleted the tweet, allowed he may have gotten “spun up” about the non-meaning of the non-incident, and said he hadn’t intended to cost the man his job. Oops.

 

Item: Woke flume riders demand that Disneyland and Disney World rethink their popular Splash Mountain attraction because of racism. What racism? Well, the rides themselves, which feature cartoon animals, are not racist in any way, but they’re linked to the 1946 Uncle Remus film Song of the South, which features heavy use of regional accents by black and white actors and which CNN tells us has a “romanticized view of the antebellum South.” The movie is set entirely during Reconstruction, as anyone who has ever seen it could tell you, but why see it when you can just denounce it? The ride, meanwhile, is being reimagined to depict characters from The Princess and the Frog, a movie built around black protagonists in New Orleans. Here’s hoping Disney has enough wit to acknowledge our age of absurdity by rechristening it “New Orleans Mountain.”

 

Item: One David Shor, a white data analyst for the firm Civitas, is ritually degraded for accurately tweeting the results of a paper by a black Princeton professor, Omar Wasow, which found that violent protests tended to decrease voter support for the Democratic Party while nonviolent protests tended to bolster it. Shor’s white colleagues were incensed that anyone might mention research showing that burning down neighborhoods tends not to endear the voters to your agenda, and their obloquy got him a pink slip.

 

Among the very dim and very woke, some seem to find the Robespierre model too dull and have installed Stalinism as their O.S. As Martin Amis explained in his Stalin book Koba the Dread, “You might denounce someone for fear of their denouncing you. You could be denounced for not doing enough denouncing; the only disincentive to denunciation was the possibility of being denounced for not denouncing sooner. . . . Children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song.” Recently, on TikTok, a girl racked up 277,000 likes for a video in which she reenacted how she had supposedly shouted at her “Republican father” over dinner that he was a “stupid f***ing dinosaur.” This never happened, as the girl admitted to HuffPost; her parents actually “support the movement and are horrified at what happened to George Floyd.”

 

Today’s youngest radicals are taking the family denouncing a step farther; children are anonymously using social-media platforms to denounce other children, with the stated goal of destroying their future career prospects or chances of being admitted to college. The denouncers get rewarded with today’s equivalent of verse and song: the fawning news-media profile. A 16-year-old student in Smithtown, N.Y. told the New York Times, “I’m not trying to target freshmen or middle schoolers, but people who are about to go to college need to be held accountable for what they say. . . . I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs.”

 

Terrified parents hoping to buy insurance against their pubescent children being socially murdered via Facebook post while they’re trying to get into Wesleyan are clamoring to fend off the race police by getting a copy of one of the signature texts of the Year of Stupid: the cartoonish board book, Antiracist Baby, which is ostensibly for two-year-olds but is plainly aimed at grownups, like a woke successor to Go the F*** to Sleep. Garbled lessons include, “Some people get more while others get less/Because policies don’t always grant equal access.” Never mind that there is no way “equal access” can possibly guarantee that no one gets “more while others get less.” That’s just normal, 2019-level stupid. What makes this book extra-strength, 2020-level stupid is its assumption that you should roll up the social-justice artillery to a tiny human in diapers who thinks Elmo is real. Have no fear, Sesame Street watchers: Even if you don’t get Antiracist Baby for your second birthday, you’ll get plenty of chances to learn socially approved, grownup kinds of stupidity soon enough.

Our Age of Superstition

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

 

We live in a society gripped by a quasi-religious fervor and obsessed with symbols and irrational fears.

 

Anything that is thought to have the slightest association with racism, no matter how attenuated the connection or how innocent the explanation, must be crushed and expunged. The mere presence of a possibly offending word is deemed a threat, whether it is truly offensive or any real people have actually taken offense. We are engaged in a war with shadowy forces that we can’t truly understand, but must exercise the utmost vigilance, lest they sneak up on us unawares.

 

Ours is an enchanted world, like that of the Old Norse who believed in land spirits who could bless or hinder travelers who didn’t pay them heed, or animists who consider everything alive and fraught with spiritual meaning, or the 16th-century English who hunted down witches based on hypersensitive suspicions and presumed signs.

 

Our society isn’t progressing but falling back into a superstition that everyone must believe or pretend to believe for the supposed welfare of the community.

 

A NASCAR garage pull is shaped like a noose, so everyone immediately assumes that a racist has snuck into Bubba Wallace’s garage to send a nefarious signal to him. All people of good will have to unite to fight against this unseen, mysterious, malign force. When the FBI reports that sometimes a garage pull is just a garage pull, and this one has been in the garage since October 2019, people still insist that it was a noose — because the will to believe is so strong and, hey, better safe than sorry.

 

The band The Dixie Chicks changes its name to The Chicks, even though there was nothing remotely wrong with the origin of its name. It referred, not to the folk song “Dixie” that was the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy (and has its own complicated history), but to an album from the band Little Feat called “Dixie Chicken.”

 

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The title song of that album isn’t about lynching, the KKK, or white supremacy, rather a guy meeting an enchanting girl who, after he spends a lot of money on her, leaves him — not an unusual theme in American popular song.

 

No rational person would ever hear the name “The Dixie Chicks” and feel excluded or threatened or automatically think of chattel slavery. But rationality has nothing to do with it.

 

The University of Florida dumps its so-called Gator Bait chant, a tradition dating back to a boast of star defensive back Lawrence Wright, an African American, after a big win in 1995: “If you ain’t a Gator, ya Gator bait, baby!”

 

Why must it be shelved? Because there is racist imagery of African-American children as alligator bait from more than a hundred years ago that no one performing the Gator Bait chant over the past quarter of a century was aware of or could possibly have intended to invoke with their high-spirited cheer.

 

And on it goes, from one absurdity to the next. As long as this moral fever lasts, there will be more targets. There is no slaking the hunt for words and practices to vilify and erase — no amount of purity will ever be enough to protect the community, and the hunt itself has its deep satisfactions.

 

None of this has to do with police reform, which involves specific and concrete proposals that can be debated using facts and reason and that might — if thoughtfully done — improve policing and the lives of our citizens. No, mere changes in police practices can’t compare to a deeper, quasi-religious project.

 

The woke shamans are defining and enforcing a new symbology. They insist that their spiritual sense is better attuned than anyone else’s and will try to excommunicate anyone who says otherwise. Their work may seem shockingly new, but it is really a throwback to ages past — ones that no advanced society should want to revisit.

Roberts Misrules

National Review Online

Monday, June 29, 2020

 

The Constitution does not prohibit Louisiana from requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges in hospitals near where they operate. We know this fact from reading it; from the debates over the ratification of its provisions, none of which suggest that anyone believed that it could be used in such a fashion; and from the fact that for many decades states prohibited abortion altogether without anyone’s even alleging that they were violating the Constitution. Now five justices of the Supreme Court have conceded this obvious point.

 

The Court will not allow Louisiana this regulation anyway. Chief Justice John Roberts is one of the five justices who do not believe the law conflicts with the Constitution, rightly interpreted. He voted in 2016 that an identical Texas law should be upheld, and his opinion in the Louisiana case says that he still agrees with his reasoning then. Nevertheless, he claims to believe that the Louisiana law is too similar to the law that his colleagues in 2016 struck down over his dissent. The force of precedent, he maintains, requires the law to be nullified. Otherwise, Americans would lack confidence in the rule of law. It is, on the other hand, wonderfully inspiring to that confidence for a justice to strike down a law that he concedes the state had the constitutional authority to enact.

 

It is impossible to credit Roberts’s claim that respect for precedent dictated his decision. He has been perfectly willing to overrule precedents in the past. Some of them were of much longer standing. Janus v. AFSCME (2018), on public-sector unions, overruled Abood v. Detroit (1977). Some of them involved cases that presented nearly identical fact patterns. Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion of a type that had been struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

 

The Court’s abortion precedents bear the marks of repeated torture. In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court purported to find a right to abortion in the Constitution. Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) put new limits on that right while saying it had to stay in the name of precedent: Abortion regulations would be upheld unless they placed an “undue burden” on the right. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the 2016 decision, purported to apply Casey while changing it: Now abortion regulations had to pass a cost-benefit test imposed by the justices. In the latest decision, Chief Justice Roberts pretends that Whole Woman’s Health had not changed Casey at all. Never mind that in 2016, he joined an opinion that explained how it had changed it. Behold the majesty of the law.

 

The pro-life movement has persisted all these decades, no matter how long the odds, no matter how beleaguered the cause, no matter how insistently it was told that the question of the human rights of unborn children had been settled. It is secure in the conviction that all human beings have a right not to be killed, whatever their age or size or location or condition of dependence. It knows that what the Supreme Court has kept saying about our nation’s fundamental law is a slander. This latest sad and unconvincing decision should not cause pro-lifers to slacken for a moment.

 

One can only speculate why Chief Justice Roberts has engaged in his contortions. Perhaps he believes that this decision will somehow strengthen the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an institution above political strife. Instead, he has reinforced the impression, on all sides of our national debates, that he is the most politically calculating of the justices. He has diminished the belief in the impartiality of judges among those Americans who have been most reluctant to give it up. What he has accomplished for his institution is further disgrace.

Deconstruction Goes Mainstream

By Elizabeth Powers

Monday, June 29, 2020

 

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial drew attention to the source of the moral denunciation that now dominates journalism: namely, “dogmas that began in the universities.” These dogmas go by various names (among others, “postmodernism,” “multiculturalism”), but I will gather them under the term “deconstruction,” as it best encapsulates what is at their core. It consists of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which means exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that is hidden below the overt text of a novel. This French cultural product, which began to occupy a prominent place in American university literature departments in the 1970s, has had the effect, over several student generations, of bringing literature departments, especially those of foreign languages, to extinction. Why? It is in the DNA of adolescents, even of those who have never heard of Jacques Derrida, to deconstruct, to tear apart the assumptions of their forebears. When professors stopped talking about Milton’s prose and began pointing out his treatment of his daughters, students got the point immediately. Why would 18-year-olds hang around to confirm what they knew only a year or two earlier, anyway: that anyone born before their own birth year doesn’t have a clue?

 

The academics who have brought about this state of affairs first went to school in the 1950s. I am among this generation, the early Boomers, and we have been the most privileged generation in the history of the world. The best and brightest of us who grew up in the bare and quiet 1950s –– those who had mastered the three R’s, learned to write in a comprehensible hand, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at our desk several hours a day –– would by 1963 continue to the next educational and social experiment. Unlike at the beginning of the 21st century, when 70 percent of high-school graduates go to college, many of them possessing weak reading, writing, and study skills, no one in 1963 thought that the boys sitting in the back row of public-school classrooms were college material, even if most of them probably knew how to read and write.

 

With college, a weeding-out process began. Moreover, unlike high-school grads who enter college today, my cohort found itself in an environment that continued to nourish and support the capacities that had been drilled into us from the first grade. Thus, the curriculum across the country, whether at Stanford and Harvard or at a Big Ten school like the one I attended, was likewise standard. “Requirements,” as they were called, which may or may not have anything to do with one’s major, counted for a large portion of the credits needed for graduation, which included at least two years of a foreign language. Back then, it was taken for granted that “Western civ” was to be part of our education. When we entered the professional world circa 1973, we were high achievers who comprehended the importance of efficiency, of deadlines, of getting to work on time, and all the other prerequisites of the modern economic order.

 

Many of us, myself included, had majored in foreign languages in college. Just a few years earlier, in 1958, within a year of the launch of the Soviets’ first satellite, Sputnik, the National Defense Education Act became law, providing financial assistance for “defense-oriented” studies at universities: engineering, math, and foreign languages. My high-school interest in German, a most accidental enthusiasm, had occurred at just the right moment, as the foreign-language departments of universities were a serious undertaking. This reassessment of foreign-language education, combined with study abroad, produced by the mid 1970s young scholars, men and women both, trained in various European languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. It is not overstating things that my generation went on to do real scholarship on foreign literatures and languages.

 

We published a lot, books, articles, reviews, as is reflected in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, or PMLA. This is the journal of the Modern Language Association, or MLA, the mandate of which is the promotion of the study of modern languages and literatures. Anyone who has done a historical search of the PMLA will discover, by the late 1970s, the increasingly deconstructionist bias of articles and reviews. Deconstruction of the literary canon in which it had been trained became the focus of the scholarship of a generation that had profited so immensely from educational opportunity.

 

The aim of theory, as it was called in the academy, was to “read forward.” It would no longer be a case, as in traditional scholarship, of reading backward, of studying sources or analyzing the traces of literary predecessors (one could also apply this to historical events), documenting the immediate conditions of the creation of a work or of its reception by contemporaries, but instead it would lay bare the biases of its creation — intolerance, racism, privilege, misogyny, you name it — that lived on and was passed down in literary works. Those of my cohort who majored in English literature, which for the most part also meant the study of a “foreign” literature, i.e., the British literary tradition, carried out a similar job of deconstruction of that field. Currently, one of the biggest areas of research among American scholars of 18th-century British literature is the Atlantic slave trade. As I said, students already knew that anyone born before them is an idiot. They walked out of the classes long ago, and the scholars talk only to themselves.

 

The damage that has been done to university curricula can be seen in a report in 2018 by the MLA. Take foreign languages: “The 2016 ratio [of enrollment in foreign-language instruction versus overall student registration] is less than half of what it was in 1960 and approaches the lowest ratio recorded, 7.3, in 1980. Taking a long view, modern-language enrollments have lagged far behind overall college and university enrollments since 1960.” Further: “The percentage of four-year colleges and universities requiring students to take courses in languages other than English dropped 17 percentage points between 1995 and 2010, to about half of all institutions.” In my own field of German, for instance, course enrollment went from 95,614 in 2009 to 80,594 in 2016. But compare 1968: 216, 263! And French in 1968: 388,096.

 

Also, according to the MLA, in the four years since 2012, B.A.s in English have likewise fallen, by almost 11,000, or 20.4 percent, from 53,840 in 2012 to 42,868 in 2016. As the MLA admits, this “downturn” is not confined to English, but to all the humanities, “especially history, where bachelor’s degree completions have fallen by over 9,500 (27 percent) between 2012 and 2016, from 35,190 to 25,686. Degrees in languages other than English and in philosophy and religious studies have also declined, by 15.3 percent and 18.7 percent, respectively, since 2012.”

 

As the Wall Street Journal piece pointed out, the deconstructionist temperament is widespread in America, precisely because the early Boomer generation has come to occupy culturally important positions. But let me remain with the current situation of “woke” culture, which is primarily a phenomenon of kids who have passed through elite universities. “Woke” is so apposite, such a culturally apt description of the thinking (!) of kids who have been raised deconstructively. In my own long-ago experience teaching undergraduates, they are not only highly susceptible to overestimating their own worth, but they are also very idealistic. One has only to teach the novels of Hermann Hesse to a class of undergraduates to know this. (Remember Demian? Or Siddhartha?)

 

We should be so lucky if any of them read Hermann Hesse these days. They are no longer introduced to works that once helped young people overcome their own vanities or that encourage them to measure up to the standards of literary heroes. You can’t pay them anymore to read them. Novels are the only place where you can get into the mind of another person, but the minds of the young protesters are virginal, without depth, without empathy for differences of point of view. They have become more cynical than even the most hardened criminal when it comes to the values of Western civ. Channeling their idealism into spouting shibboleths, they have become spooky commissars merrily carrying on the work of deconstruction. After all, they know what kids instinctively know: They are always right.

The Media Mirror Has Two Faces

By James McCarthy

Monday, June 29, 2020

 

Two recent pieces in Vox and the New York Times say outright what many of us have long understood is an implicit belief among our elite media: that the media are motivated — and should be motivated — by ideology, not objectivity.

 

Of course, the ethics guidelines and mission statements of leading outlets have yet to acknowledge this reality, and many still read like paeans to the old gods.

 

“Our fundamental purpose,” the New York Times cautions its reporters, “is to protect the impartiality and neutrality [of our] reporting.” The Washington Post insists on strict “fairness” and that it “shall not be the ally of any special interest.” We are “unbiased, impartial, and balanced,” declares the Associated Press. “Non-ideological objectivity” is what the Los Angeles Times assures readers it maintains. “Professional impartiality . . . without our opinions,” is the standard declared by National Public Radio.

 

But if you look at what journalists actually say about each other and their racket behind closed doors, at the champagne-soaked galas where they hand each other prizes, you’re hard-pressed to find an acknowledgment that impartiality or balance are even virtues at all.

 

The most insider-y of these onanistic lovefests is the annual Mirror Awards, hosted by the prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications and focused on reporters who cover the journalism industry itself.

 

One of this year’s nominees for “Best Story on the Future of Journalism,” the Pacific Standard’s Brent Cunningham, perhaps captures the new media zeitgeist most starkly in an article spotlighting reporters who hold the “belief that journalism’s highest calling [is] not some feckless notion of ‘objectivity,’ but rather to . . . expose the many ways the powerful exploit the powerless” and “f*** ’em . . . with the facts.” Indeed.

 

Reporter Jon Marcus was nominated for a piece in Harvard’s Nieman Reports about reporters who withhold certain facts — say, the name of a mass shooter — in a move that’s come to be called “strategic silence.” While Marcus says it’s a “fraught and complex debate” that “media organizations are struggling with,” he rehearses an Olympian leap of logic from a left-wing activist at Media Matters, who argues that reporters should apply this strategic silence to the leader of the free world, too: The idea is that they should refrain from reporting statements by President Trump that they determine are not “inherently newsworthy” or that they classify as “misinformation.” Say what you will about the man — he probably shouldn’t be covered like a gunman.

 

Forget about laying out the facts, or airing competing viewpoints, or writing “the first draft of history.” Americans are far too thickheaded for that. Marcus cites another sage who observes that “assuming media literacy . . . may be optimistic.” Yet another one of his sources bemoans journalists who assume that if you merely “throw facts at someone . . . that’s going to change their minds.”

 

The other nominees for the 2020 Mirrors (19 in all, across six categories) hardly need the encouragement to selectively slant their reportage. The list includes a host of liberal media darlings singing straight from the progressive hymnbook. In the eyes of the Newhouse School, apparently no conservative writers came up with any worthy media criticism in the last year.

 

Elsewhere The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, a writer whose leftism is more knee-jerk than a can-can dancer’s, was nominated for an essay called “Trump TV,” which explains that, gee whiz, Fox News tends to support the president. Move over, Bob Woodward.

 

The Mayer love gets meta, too. Nominated for “Best Profile” is a piece by Molly Langmuir that appeared in the glossy magazine Elle, titled “What’s Next for New Yorker Reporter Jane Mayer?” Here is what the awards committee regards as an exemplar of “hold[ing] a mirror to their own industry for the public’s benefit”: “In person, Mayer, who is petite with brown shoulder-length hair she usually wears down, the tips slightly flipped up, displays a confidence that has no visible fault lines. She also has a tendency toward self-deprecation. And while her mind often seems to whir with seamless elegance, this appears to fuel in her not impatience but curiosity.”

 

And here’s a detail that didn’t make it in alongside the flipped tips: Mayer was recently excoriated by critics across the ideological spectrum for a baseless and uncorroborated hit piece she co-wrote, the central claims of which were later disavowed by “several dozen” sources contacted by the New York Times.

 

In an Orwellian flourish, Langmuir explains that to Mayer, the “furor from both the left and right” over the piece was a consequence of her and co-author Ronan Farrow’s own “attempts at carefulness.” Mayer told Langmuir that she had focused on the “‘accountability portion, trying to be fair,’” you see. Plus, Mayer’s certainty on the unsubstantiated accusation she did get into print was “informed by [another] incident Mayer learned about, the one she didn’t get into print.” Got that? The reporting rejected by every other mainstream outlet except The New Yorker was backed up by reporting rejected by every mainstream outlet — including The New Yorker.

 

If Mayer was at all chastened by the denunciation of her work by her peers, it’s hard to tell. In her most recent piece, “Ivanka Trump and Charles Koch Fuel a Cancel-Culture Clash at Wichita State,” she returned to one of her pet obsessions. Riffing on original reporting in the Wichita Eagle, Mayer deceptively claimed that Koch Industries “threatened to withdraw its financial support for the university” after Ivanka Trump was disinvited from giving a commencement speech. But the source article makes clear that neither Koch Industries nor Charles Koch threatened any such thing. A company spokesperson said explicitly that the company was not pulling funding and in fact stressed its commitment to “academic freedom.”

 

Maybe Elle ought to hold off on the puff profiles, and Mirror on the awards, until Mayer can master faithfully representing all the facts she finds reported in regional newspapers?

 

And that isn’t even the biggest coffee-spitter Mirror Awards nominee. That honor would go to David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun, saluted for his opinion piece applauding MSNBC host and serial prevaricator Brian Williams. “At this moment when journalism and a free flow of reliable information are under continual attack from the Trump administration and its many media allies,” Zurawik proclaimed, “our democracy is made stronger by having Williams . . . at the end of each weeknight to offer perspective on the political and cultural warfare” in our “nation’s civic life.”

 

But that’s tame stuff compared to the outright agitprop of the nomination for a multipart series jointly published by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, “The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns,” which argued that the press doesn’t spend enough time talking about climate change. Right, and the New York Post ought to devote more ink to a plucky ballclub from the South Bronx called the Yankees. A recent report found that in 2019 the top five U.S. newspapers combined ran between 400 and 800 articles per month that mentioned climate issues. The top seven TV news outlets (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, PBS) combined covered climate issues between 200 and 400 times a month.

 

For the authors of that series, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope, the sheer volume of this reporting isn’t good enough if it doesn’t send readers to the ramparts. “Instead of sleepwalking us toward disaster,” they insist, “the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities — to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action.”

 

Let me suggest a different historical analog for Hertsgaard and Pope. It was a former newspaper editor, Vladimir Lenin, who once wrote, “A newspaper is what we most of all need . . . [in] the pressing task of the moment. . . . Never has the need been felt so acutely as today for reinforcing dispersed agitation . . . that can only be conducted with the aid of a periodical press. . . . A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer.” That’s why, to turn the sleepwalkers into the fully woke, Lenin created the infamous Department of Agitation and Propaganda, or “agitprop” for short.

 

For all that they say the quiet parts out loud, most journalists still want to have it both ways. They want the satisfaction of slanting coverage to suit their ideological commitments but without giving up the authoritative veneer of neutral objectivity. This duplicity helps explain why surveys from leading media groups like Pew Research show a fast-growing majority of Americans no longer trust the news.

 

The Mirror Awards, at least, seem to have sensed which way the winds are blowing and are sailing in that direction. They’ve moved away from their promise that the prizes should “recognize reliable reporters who criticize the media and put their own views aside [to] be transparent and objective” and toward the consensus that the problem is “the media’s reliance on objectivity and what some see as false equivalency,” as Newhouse professor Joel Kaplan puts it.

 

Objectivity is for suckers. A reporter’s own subjective assessment is what counts, and the public is depending on the media to tell them what to think and how to vote.

 

Fine. But treat readers like grownups. Polemic masquerading as unbiased reporting demeans everyone involved, making liars out of the press and treating the public like idiots. So why not end every article with a shirttail stating plainly the reporter’s point of view? The author of this piece is a committed progressive and would like [insert desired political result] to come from the issues raised here.

 

The Newhouse School could even give the first New York Times or Washington Post reporter to adopt the practice an award for bravery.

The Curse of Identity Politics

By Jay Nordlinger

Monday, June 29, 2020

 

Yesterday morning, President Trump circulated a video showing a pitched battle at The Villages: a verbal battle between pro-Trumpers and anti-Trumpers. The Villages is a retirement community in Florida, billed as the state’s “Friendliest Hometown.”

 

You would not want to cite that video in support of that contention.

 

“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” the president wrote. “The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!”

 

The video was approximately two minutes long, and approximately ten seconds in, a pro-Trumper yelled, “White power!” twice.

 

Three hours after he circulated the video, the president deleted his tweet, with a spokesman saying, “President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”

 

To read about this episode, consult Axios, here.

 

The “white power” guy got me to thinking about identity politics, as happens.

 

Obviously, not all expressions of identity politics are equal. When I was young, the slogan “black power” was in the air. Black Americans had been severely disadvantaged for a long time. They were sick of being powerless.

 

There was also the slogan “Black is beautiful.” You did not hear “White is beautiful.” There was no need for such a slogan. The denigration of black skin needed to be countered.

 

I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., a liberal citadel (and, to a degree, a left-wing one). For my twelfth-grade year, I went to a boarding school elsewhere in the state, and heard a kid from a Detroit suburb say something jarring. He was a white kid, I should say. And he said, “Black is beautiful, but white is right.”

 

What in the world? How could a skin color be right or wrong?

 

Like you, certainly, I knew good white people and lousy white people. Good black people and lousy black people. One knew people.

 

I belonged to a “colorblind” school of thought, or approach to life: a school that was soon to be attacked, mocked, and routed. It’s not that we were naïve. No, not at all. It’s that we held a view of man that did not allow race as defining.

 

Yes, I actually use the word “man.” See what a dinosaur I am?

 

The “colorblind” view was related to a political outlook: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And don’t forget the national motto: E pluribus unum.

 

But mainly, I think, our view was rooted in religion: a religious, or spiritual, estimate of man (rising way, way above the physical).

 

In 1998, Vice President Al Gore made a statement to the NAACP: “I’ve heard the critics of affirmative action. They talk about a colorblind society. Give me a break! Hel-lo? They use their ‘colorblind’ the way duck hunters use their duck blind: They hide behind it and hope the ducks won’t figure out what they’re up to.”

 

I burned at this statement, as I did at most things Gore. I thought it was grossly defamatory.

 

Is man a tribal animal? I find it increasingly hard to deny that this is so. “What took you so long!” I can almost hear my old anthro profs say. (Yes, I was an anthropology major. To see my 2015 piece “Majoring in Anthro,” go here.)

 

Those who escape a tribal mentality are mainly able to do so through a religious or spiritual outlook, I think. Although it could be that secular humanism is enough. Of course, there’s plenty of religious tribalism (or ecclesiastical tribalism, let’s say).

 

In any case, the “default” of man, I suspect, is tribal. It seems to be baked way in.

 

Some individuals and some groups have tribalism forced on them, at least to a degree, by the tribalism of others. That must be acknowledged. If Smiths are constantly running down Joneses, people named “Jones” are going to feel like Joneses — are going to “identify” that way.

 

So, tribalism is a flagrant reality. But I hope people will not stop striving for one America. For the goal, or ideal, of E pluribus unum.

 

America aside, there is also the old concept of a “family of man,” which makes many eyes roll. I’m talking about a condition “where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free . . .” (Told you about the eye rolling.)

 

I find the identity politics of the Left and the identity politics of the Right distasteful, when not repulsive, but I don’t get a vote. Or rather, I get only one vote. And we see identity politics of many stripes on the rise.

 

Furthermore, I think that identity politics begets identity politics. (“Well, they’re doin’ it!”) As Jimmy Durante said, “Everybody wants to get into the act.”

 

Yesterday morning, shortly after Trump tweeted about “the great people of The Villages,” I went for a walk in Riverside Park, New York City. There, I witnessed something extraordinary: a fierce racial battle (verbal). I had never seen anything like it, in 20-plus years of living in these parts.

 

On one side were two black women; on the other, one white woman. I’m not sure what started the argument. I came on the scene mid-fight. I lingered a bit — I am a journalist, and there was a story — but could not hear much.

 

One of the black women was saying to the white woman, “We have gifted you this moment to channel the energy inside you in a different direction.” I also heard a “been black all my life.” I can’t give you more detail. Wish I could. I can tell you that all three women were very, very unhappy — and heated.

 

This was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, mind you. Let me say once more how unusual the episode was.

 

Was it a good thing or a bad thing, this battle, this clash? Was it a “long-overdue conversation” or an ugly instance of racial antagonism? You know, not knowing more, I’m really not sure.

 

One thing I have learned in recent years is that leadership matters, more than I ever thought it did. America is supposed to be a bottom-up society, not a top-down one! We are not supposed to take our cues from leaders!

 

Ah, but people do, that is clear. And leaders can summon better angels or worse ones.

 

For years, conservatives like me have used the term “racial arsonists” to refer to activists who like to start racial fires. Can we deny that there is some of that on the right, in addition to the left?

 

I know conservatives who refer to “our people.” They mean what some would call “the white working class,” I think. In 2012, President Obama ran an ad against his Republican opponent: “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”

 

How much I hate that stuff, I could not begin to tell you.

 

I think the veneer of civilization is very thin. The Balkans were doing just fine, all things considered. There was a lot of intermarriage. But bad leaders awoke the old tribal resentments. They flicked scabs off wounds (a Nixon phrase). Then there was blood.

 

“Ancient hatreds!” some analysts said. Yes, but these hatreds need help: present, demagogic help.

 

In my observation, the liberal spirit — the pluralistic spirit, or the Jeffersonian spirit — is very rare. Almost eccentric. I think it should be encouraged, at every turn.

 

For decades, we conservatives despaired over Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and he despaired over us. But in the early 1990s, he performed an outstanding service: a little book called “The Disuniting of America.” Conservatives lavished praise on it. These were Reagan conservatives, mind you, a long time ago.

 

Honestly, I can’t remember whether I read the book or simply read about it (which would be my pattern). I believe I bought a copy, which probably lies a-moulderin’ in my mother’s basement. I think I will order another copy today . . .

Corporate Anti-racism Statements Aren’t Worth the Cyberspace They’re Tweeted Through

By Graham Hillard

Thursday, June 18, 2020

 

For those of us who find corporate prose to be a frequent inducer of misery, the last days of May were little short of a preview of hell. To an already bulging dossier of mission statements, press releases, shareholder reports, and committee charters, American corporations began to add a new genre: the “anti-racism” declaration. On an aesthetic level, these tweets, Instagram posts, and mass emails offended primarily because of their excruciating banality — a near-inevitability given the fact that their content hewed to rigid ideological guidelines. Yet, for many on the right, such statements rankled because they implied that important and ongoing arguments about race and society had been settled, and we had lost. If Taco Bell is willing to concede the premises of the Black Lives Matter movement, such thinking went, what hope do conservatives have of shaping the conversation in the future?

 

In fact, corporate race missives are no more harbingers of conservative defeat than corporate ethics codes are heralds of a forthcoming moral paradise. To read them is to observe not the fruit of leftist persuasion but the cold-eyed realism required of actors in a market economy. To the extent that such statements mean anything at all, they merely affirm a truth that conservatives needn’t fear and ought rightly to celebrate. In a free society — in a nation that is capitalist not only in its laws but down to its marrow — profit-seeking organizations will do whatever is necessary to maximize their profit.

 

For most of the firms attempting to weather recent storms, whatever is necessary has been modest indeed, a state of affairs that should surprise no one given how dependent the Left has become on support from the cultural heights. At corporations such as Salesforce and Twilio, for example, assuaging the revolution has thus far required nothing more than an anodyne tweet featuring the message “We stand with the Black community.” (Actual meaning: “Please leave us out of your news cycle.”) At YouTube and Disney, rhetorical support has been accompanied by social-justice donations, but the sums in question have amounted to less than an hour’s revenue. (The companies have pledged $1 million and $5 million, respectively.) While Netflix’s tweeted assertion that “to be silent is to be complicit” is close to the despicable rallying cry du jour, even the corporate home of the Obamas can’t bring itself to declare that “silence is violence.” And these are the signifiers that American businesses are securely in the pocket of the activist Left?

 

As is often the case when the conservative capacity for pessimism outpaces the facts on the ground, what is required in this moment of performative “allyship” is not despondency but the healing balm of laughing at idiots. Consider, for example, that the top reply to Nike’s much-shared “Don’t Do It” video was, for many days, a GIF of looters destroying a Nike store. Or marvel at the notion that SurveyMonkey believes itself capable of moving the nation toward racial harmony via its Twitter feed. That Advance Auto Parts is actually trolling everyone with its Maoist request that “our team members recommit to the Cultural Beliefs we share” is probably too much to hope, but that shouldn’t stop us from enjoying its impassioned capitalization. Neither, for that matter, should we hesitate to chuckle at SoundCloud’s weirdly ungrammatical claim “racism experienced every day in the u.s.” Needless to say, the old-man-shouting vibe was present in the original.

 

If it seems ungenerous to assume insincerity as well as incompetence in such cases, the reader should note that even some on the left have begun to complain that the partnership with Big Business is not what it appears to be. Hence the assertion, in outlets from the Guardian to PRWeek, that firms are engaging in “woke-washing,” the cynical appropriation of progressive ideology for commercial ends. Hence also Vox’s grumble that “corporate platitudes and vague statements of solidarity” are “meaningless if there is no commitment to change.” The thinking conservative may, at this point, protest that corporate rhetoric does matter if it leads eventually to “change” along progressive lines, but that is exactly the demand that will one day bring cooperation with the mob to a halt. Unless a business means to transform itself into a public utility eternally funded by Democrats, it must turn its attention, finally, to profit. The uncrossable line may be stock buybacks. It may be arbitration clauses. It may be yet-more-formalized regimens of antiwhite discrimination. But there is a line. Just as a wave cannot crest forever, so the demands of post-adolescent social-media anarchists cannot be met in saecula saeculorum. The real world — rightly invoked by conservatives as a corrective to progressive fancy — simply doesn’t work like that.

 

Indeed, one of the lessons of 2020 may turn out to be the relative impotence of the mob rather than its strength. As I write these words, conservatives are growing increasingly fearful that “cancel culture” is transmuting into an unstoppable force, crushing beneath its boots all vestiges of heterodox opinion. Yet closer examination of the facts reveals that here, too, the success of the activist Left has been overstated. Though the number of ideological firings and resignations has undoubtedly increased in recent days, nearly every victim has been a fellow progressive or has invited abuse by groveling. Tucker Carlson soldiers on. Though minor statues have been toppled, the story will be different when the Left comes for the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam Wall. Like American corporations, the great American middle will make the occasional concession to mollify those who have a grievance. But even so flexible a people as we can bend only so far. Yes, we will probably stop teaching Huckleberry Finn in our secondary schools. But does anyone believe that the current generation of American children will be forbidden Harry Potter?

 

The more likely scenario is that the Left’s relationship with the culture will proceed approximately as its relationship with corporations has done: in a series of outbursts in which progressives draw themselves into a fury and then settle for what they can get. The reality TV show Cops, beloved by few, was an easy target for elimination. Paw Patrol, a cartoon whose characters include a police dog, is proving more difficult. Law & Order reruns will be harder still. Not for no reason did the business-extorting hashtag “#OpenYourPurse” briefly trend on Twitter while the plea “#RenounceProfit” was nowhere to be seen. To extract a donation is simple. (Political contributions are, after all, merely a form of speech.) What is much more difficult is altering the fundamental reality that corporations will ultimately sell what the people want to buy.

 

Among the many ironies of the present negotiation between Big Business and those who would secure its largesse is that it is proving beyond any doubt the arguments that animated Citizens United v. FEC. Not only are corporations obviously people, they are people from whom political tribute can be exacted. For many on the right, the proper metaphor for such a transaction is the extortion racket: “Give us what we want,” the mob declares, “or there will be trouble.” To my own way of thinking, however, the better analogy by far is prostitution. In exchange for the right to go about its business, the American corporation will tell left-wing activists that it sympathizes with their concerns and shares their troubles. This is, of course, merely playacting. As any john can attest, it doesn’t matter what a hooker says to her customer in the heat of the moment. She doesn’t really like you.

Blowin’ in the Wind

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, June 28, 2020

 

 On Sundays, I get up early to hear the word. On Saturdays, I get up early to hear the leaf blower.

 

Traffic noise or that of a vacuum cleaner typically runs around 70 decibels. A loud alarm clock is about 80 decibels. A leaf blower, by way of comparison, punishes those nearby with about 115 decibels, midway between the noise of a car horn (110 decibels) and a jetliner taking off (120 decibels). I do not usually sleep very late, but I do not get up as early as Hortulanus americanus. The Leaf-Blower Man and his colleagues work from dawn to dusk, their almost unvaried white pickup trucks prowling and parking, sometimes four or five to a block on a busy day where I live, constricting the typically wide residential avenues of my town to practically European proportions — the nice people around here can hardly get their Audis past one another. If you do not think very hard about the legal situation (more than a fifth of the landscaping work force is composed of illegal immigrants, and there is some reason to believe that some of these outfits are less than scrupulous about payroll taxes and the like), there is much to admire about the entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic on display.

 

Love the hustle. Hate the noise.

 

An unexpected upside of the coronavirus quarantine: Many of our gardens have never looked so good. We had a fine spring that is turning into a hot summer, and with the golf courses barricaded and gyms shuttered, the bourgeoisie, who in the course of our workdays seldom lift anything heavier than money, had no place to get exercise. And so we turned to our yards and gardens. What to plant? There is a superstition that lavender repels mosquitos, so I planted two kinds. I dug up old grass and planted better grass. And, of course, there were tools to buy. I do not like noise and I do not like the smell of gasoline (my motorcycle is a relatively quiet and clean one), and if you want to avoid that unpleasantness and also want to get some exercise, then the thing is an old-fashioned reel mower, which is human-powered rather than powered by gasoline or electricity. And so I get to have some of the experience of being a kind of bipedal draft animal.

 

My neighbors look at me a little funny (possibly because I am the only man on the block who cuts his own grass) and in some ways the reel mower really does not work all that well, but I’d rather push that contraption over the same spot six times than get the job done with a single sweep of a gasoline lawnmower. I can let my mind wander, and then finish up with a perfectly good piece of medieval technology: a broom.

 

Leaf-Blower Man watches this, and smiles, and roars, and enchants into whirling motion a furious little cyclone of minced vegetation.

 

One of the blessings of my life is that I spend a lot of time with immigrants. Immigrants have converts’ zeal, and they are inclined to see all that’s best in America. I myself was born in these United States, and I see leaf blowers as loud, contemptuous, selfish. Immigrants see the best in America because they see their new lives through the lens of their old ones, and they left their homelands for a reason. My people are old natives, with ancestors who came here sometime after the Mayflower but before Ellis Island, the kind of people who must have been very happy to forget wherever it was they had come from and become Americans without qualification or memory. I do not know if they bothered to comply with all the terms of U.S. immigration law, but their souls were naturalized, entirely. We may make vague noises about our ancestors’ being “German” or “English” — I think those just mean white here in Texas — but in reality we do not have an old country through which to filter our impressions of America, and so we can see the thing itself, without comparison, without sentimentality, and, if we work at it a little, without the distortion of empathy or the crutch of pity.

 

Maybe you see the leaf blower as a nifty little invention that saves you time sweeping up grass clippings or raking leaves, just another labor-saving device — America is, if nothing else, an awfully convenient place to live. But there are some unlovely aspects of this my native land as well, and the leaf blower is a pretty good emblem for them in that it effectuates our inexplicable national contempt for public spaces.

 

Leaf-Blower Man is the king of his castle, and if he blows his yard waste into the street, that is somebody else’s problem. “Not My Problem” — translate that into Latin and inscribe it on the Capitol Rotunda. If Leaf-Blower Man blows his trash into the faces of passing pedestrians or bicyclists, well, walking is for poor people and bicycles are for hippies, anyway. Missing Persons had it right back in 1982’s “Walking in L.A.” — if you’re on foot, you’re nobody, “a shopping-cart pusher” or “maybe somebody who just ran out of gas.” You see him, sometimes, that guy who runs out of gas, trudging down I-20, buffeted by the backdraft of 18-wheelers, somewhere behind him (or in front of him, if he’s carrying a jerry can full of gasoline) a worn-out 1994 Ford Taurus. How did things go so wrong for him? Who is he? “Maybe someone groovy / One thing’s for sure, he isn’t starring in the movies.” Not that I stop to ask. Not in these days of violence and infection. I don’t even slow down.

 

Leaf-Blower Man never runs out of gas.

 

If our contempt for public spaces is not necessarily something that is learned, it surely is something that can be unlearned. There’s a scene in The Wire where a young woman on the edges of the Baltimore drug trade is walking across the street to her car while finishing a bag of chips, and she just tosses the empty bag onto the asphalt, right there on the streets of Baltimore. There’s a murder every six minutes in that show, but that scene stands out. If somebody walking down my block tossed an empty potato-chip bag onto the street — and, let’s be clear here, these would be quinoa chips or crispy baked kale chips or something — we’d be reading about it on Nextdoor for years. But that attitude is new. When I was growing up in the 1970s, throwing trash on the streets was what you did — you threw that Styrofoam McDonald’s container right out the window of your wood-paneled station-wagon, along with your cigarette butts and an empty can of Coors with the pop-top tab jingling around in it like a clapper in a bell. And that went on and on until that famous commercial with the fake Indian and the single tear, when we all stopped. Until then, we just whooshed on down the road, unless there was gasoline rationing because of the Arab oil embargo.

 

(Iron Eyes Cody was an Italian-American, born Espera Oscar de Corti, and no more an Indian than Elizabeth Warren.)

 

The smell of gasoline might be understood as the bouquet of our contempt for public places. Where do the homeless congregate? Under freeway overpasses, outside of gas stations, begging drivers waiting in line at drive-thru windows or jammed up at busy intersections, tattered infantry to our high-riding armored cavalry. Half of the commercial and hospitality spaces in our country, from 7-Eleven to Starbucks, serve as part-time homeless shelters and mental wards for people blown out into the street like . . . I won’t belabor the metaphor — I’ll let Dante do it for me. Standing outside the Gates of Hell, the great pilgrim sees the souls of the dead making their final procession:

 

As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call.

 

When life got back to normal for a little bit, I had some accumulated things to do, some errands to run, and I started going back to the gym. I was so busy that I neglected my back yard for a few weeks. I was shocked by how quickly the weeds take over once again, if you let them.