"He buckled his seatbelt and rested his left hand on his knee, exposing between his knuckles and wrist a tattoo of the words 'want nothing' over the outline of a desert island."

I quoted that because it's my favorite sentence in "Will Welch Leads GQ to ‘the New Masculinity’/When he got the job as top editor, a friend told him, 'Yikes.' Now, with an assist from Brad Pitt, he has remade the men’s magazine for the post-#MeToo age" (NYT). 

What more do you want? Well, he has to want you to want his magazine. And he seems to want you to buy into masculinity, but doubts you'll buy that (or doubts you need him to inform you on the subject), so he came up with "new masculinity," so he must want you to believe that GQ is in the know about what is new.

"Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping."

"They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.... He has remade the Republican Party in his image.... In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates. Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first... On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.... [I]n Georgia... the former football star Herschel Walker... Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, 'He keeps winning.'... Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy.... [T]o blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party... scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election...."

Writes Sarah Longwell, "the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project and the publisher of The Bulwark," in "J.D. Vance Is More Proof That Trump Is King of the Republican Party" (NYT).

I haven't been reading enough about Herschel Walker to have seen, until now, that he's talked about playing Russian roulette more than 6 times! Is that anything but crazy? 

The oldest use of the term "Russian roulette" — according to the OED — is a 1937 short story by George Surdez. Here's a passage from that story, quoted in the Wikipedia article "Russian roulette":

"Thomas read 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' in his first year at Holy Cross. He put up a poster of Malcolm in his dorm room..."

"... and he began collecting records of Malcolm’s speeches, which he could still recite from memory two decades later. 'I’ve been very partial to Malcolm X,' Thomas said, in 1987. 'There is a lot of good in what he says.' On the eve of his appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas was still summoning Malcolm as a witness for the prosecution against the liberal establishment. 'I don’t see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own,' he said. 'Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?'...  At Yale [Law School], Thomas developed an understanding of racism that he would never shake. Whites—Southern and Northern, liberal and conservative, rural and urban—are racists.... The most that can be hoped for is that whites be honest about it. Honesty is demonstrated through crude statements of personal animus or intellectual suggestions of racial inequality. Dishonesty is demonstrated through denial of one’s racism and sympathetic extensions of help. Dishonesty lulls black people into a false sense of security, assuring them that they are safe when they are not."

From "Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race/Thomas has moved from black nationalism to the right. But his beliefs about racism, and our ability to solve it, remain the same" by Corey Robin (in The New Yorker)(drawn from Robin's new book "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas").

The reason I only have 1 post up today (until this one) is that I stopped to watch Bill Maher's show (which I had recorded).

I'd seen that he was the latest target in the game of Destroy a Comedian, and I wasn't interested in playing the game. We need our comedians, and if they're any good, they're going to offend us now and then. Maher does his show live, and he's got to jump at jibes when he sees them, and often he's childish or edgy or low.

I needed to watch the whole thing, and that took a while, because I have a sort of real-live, in-the-room, blogger-and-commenter thing happening here, and it takes a long time to watch the whole show. There's pausing and conversation and rewinding and innumerable points to be made — and not just about Maher's "Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger" response to Ben Sasse's invitation to come out to Nebraska and "work in the fields with us."

Meade and I weren't just talking about that, but about the entire interview with Ben Sasse, who was there to talk about his book — "The Vanishing American Adult" (which I've blogged about before). Sasse was doing a great job holding his ground and seeming like a smart, attractive, independent politician, and it will be a shame if people only want to talk about Maher's zinger with the bad word, but that's what we do these days. Because Sasse is right, adulthood is eroding.

Ooh! Maher said a bad word, Mommy. Punish him! 

And then there was a panel discussion, a completely unbalanced panel with what seemed to be 3 hopped-up Trump haters: Eliot Spitzer — isn't he supposed to be in prison? — Rebecca Traister — author of that NY Magazine Hillary hype, "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried." — and Jim VandeHei — a co-founder of that new media effort Axios, which aspires to fix what's wrong with media, but might be bad. These 3 jiggled and fidgeted and spluttered. The best part was when Traister, effusing, made a reference to Hillary Clinton redirecting her fundraising "hose." Maher — with almost nothing but facial expression — called attention to the pun, and Traister tsked at him. Meanwhile, sitting between Traister and Maher was Spitzer — Client 9 — but Maher resisted the edgy joke there. He didn't say "Eliot, you know about hos" or anything like that. The panel stumbled on.

In the middle of the panel, there was the most substantive, intelligent part of the show, a little interview with a man named Tristan Harris, whose bottom-of-the-screen identification read: "Former design ethicist, Google." He had a lot to say about the great power of manipulation possessed by Google and Facebook and Apple and the ethical problems of the attention-manufacturing business. But that set up a question Maher threw to Traister and Traister seized the opportunity to chatter manically and we never got back to Harris.

The morning was getting late and the cool breeze in real-life world wasn't going to last. I got out for a long walk. But now I'm back and I see that Maher has apologized:

"Friday nights are always my worst night of sleep because I’m up reflecting on the things I should or shouldn’t have said on my live show. Last night was a particularly long night as I regret the word I used in the banter of a live moment. The word was offensive and I regret saying it and am very sorry."

If it were up to me, I'd say fine. The word wasn't directed at anybody (other than at Maher himself). It was mostly just laughing at the idea of Bill Maher working in a field. Worse that the "n-word" itself, in my view — if you want to take racial matters seriously — is that he used slavery in a lighthearted way.

For a different perspective, here's what Malcolm X said about the "field Negro" and the "house Negro" (via "Five (Other) Times Bill Maher Was Racist, Islamophobic, or Sexist"):

Michael Moore and Glenn Beck try, each in his way, to explain America's alienation from from the elite.

"Meet the Press" had a very interesting segment today with Chuck Todd talking to Michael Moore and then to Glenn Beck about the rebellion against the elite going on in America. The left-wing Moore and the right-wing Beck were saying very similar things about the way people are feeling now.

Moore said people are seeing Trump as "maybe their messenger": "Even though they don't necessarily like him or agree with him so much, I think that... they love the idea of blowing up the system.... [F]or some strange reason, see Donald Trump as their, as their means to get back at, at, at this system."

Beck — who said Moore had correctly "diagnosed the problem in the country" — drifted into a more spiritual realm:

Everybody feels like there's a play going on, and we're just watching it and looking at each other and shaking our heads in disbelief. And nobody's listening to the hardworking American who doesn't feel like they belong to anything anymore. In fact, it's almost as if we're being, we're standing outside and we're not being invited to this party at all....

I couldn't decide if Beck sounded more like a bland minister or a stoned college roommate. He turned to history, which, he said, he's been "looking through":

And the only thing I can come back to is Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What we're going through right now is more of a Malcolm X attitude, where we don't understand reconciliation, we just want to win. We have to stop winning.

We have to stop winning. Donald Trump, of course, is always saying "We don't win anymore." Beck, oddly, is saying it's wrong to want to win. We ought to stop winning! What this has to do with the American people turning against the elite, I don't really know.

And we have to start reconciling with each other. And, and realize, we're not going to lose our houses or our jobs or our country. We're losing something much more important. 

Now, I'm hearing echoes of the words of Jesus: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Beck continues up to and beyond the edge of coherence:

We're losing ourselves. We're losing our civility. We're losing our decency. We're, we're losing our neighbors and our family. How high of a price are we willing to pay before we say the idea that Martin-- that, that Malcolm X had, which was, "Get 'em" is not the path that we should go on? We have to start reconciling with each other. And unfortunately, right now, there's no leader to do that nationally. It's going to require each of us, in our own communities to stand and, and, and be shamed, and be, and be pilloried for it but actually stand and do it.

Be shamed? What is Beck asking people to do?

How the Supreme Court decided the draft evasion case against Muhammad Ali.

It's hard to remember the details, and today's obituary's don't linger on this topic. For example, the NYT obituary just says: "As Ali’s draft-evasion case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, he returned to the ring on Oct. 26, 1970, through the efforts of black politicians in Atlanta."

But Ali had been convicted in 1967 and sentenced to 5 years in prison. The Supreme Court case that ultimately kept him out of prison came in 1971. What did the Court decide? Here's the very unusual inside story, found in "The Brethren" by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong:

Apart from the complicated war and draft issues, there were racial overtones to the case.... Public sympathy was growing for Ali, but at the same time the Black Muslim faith had been portrayed as separatist, antiwhite and bizarre....

Dead comedians on tour: Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx, the holograms.

Alki David, the billionaire behind Hologram USA made the announcement and said his company is "working with other estates of famous funny guys and funny girls, these just happened to be amenable estates who see the vision."

Mr. David said that the hologram shows... say, Andy Kaufman lip-syncing the “Mighty Mouse” theme on... “Saturday Night Live”....

Noting that Malcolm X had known Foxx before his stand-up fame and described him as “the funniest dishwasher on this earth,” Mr. David said, “We’re going to have a scene with Malcolm X. We’re going to have various notable names featuring in his story.”...

The company is preparing holographic versions of Billie Holiday to perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and of Whitney Houston for a worldwide concert tour next year..... “There are an awful lot of dead celebrities,” [David] said. “There are an awful lot of dead people with a lot of followers. The fresher the memory, the bigger the star.”...

Bonus red meat for pedants: The director of the licensing agency said that the dead celebrities "literally come back from the dead."

I'm hesitating to publish this because it's pretty obvious that David wants to provoke those who find this kind of entertainment disgusting. It's a virality strategy, and it gets out the word for the kind of people who do think it's cool to have the illusion of somebody they love come back from the dead (and don't give a damn about the right and wrong uses of "literally").

So I'm going to distance myself. Oh, the absurdity of "amenable estates who see the vision" and the sad comic deafness of the phrase "famous funny guys and funny girls." They're dead. They're not funny at all. And Malcolm X isn't funny dead or alive.

50 years ago today: Malcolm X was shot dead.

As Time Magazine put it:

Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will."

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait — occupants of "a similar niche of thoughtful progressive journalism" — are having an intra-niche spat about race.

I've been avoiding getting up to speed on this, because Chait's article is really long, and it has to do with something Paul Ryan said a while back, which occupants of that "thoughtful progressive" niche purveyed as racist and which I did not blog. I noticed Joan Walsh at Salon opining on the Chait-Coates spat, but it was obvious that she was talking to readers who'd been hanging out in the niche, being thoughtfully progressive and progressively thoughtful together, and that made it short but inscrutable to a non-nicher.

But now here's Clare Sestanovicha, at The Atlantic, with "Black Culture and Progressivism/What started as a discussion of Paul Ryan's comments by has [sic] turned into a revealing debate on the nature of liberal politics in the United States." It might be readable, assuming you're looking for an entry point. Excerpt:

"You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. That's what. You look like you've been reading Chinese poetry."

Says a beautiful white female character to a black male character in "The Dutchman," a 1964 play by LeRoi Jones, who died yesterday at the age of 79.

[Critics said "The Dutchman"] expressed deep hostility towards women — a charge that followed the playwright for much of his life. After the murder of Malcolm X, he left his white wife and two daughters to live by radical black nationalist ideals.... "In the '60s, after Malcolm's death, black artists met and decided we were gonna move into Harlem and bring our art, the most advanced art by black artists, into the community."

The Black Arts movement was a basically a counterpart [sic] to Black Power, and Baraka wrote a number of books now seen as foundational for a certain kind of black aesthetic and cultural identity. He converted to Islam, changed his name [to Amiri Baraka] and in the 1970s, turned towards Marxism. His work would always emphasize social and political issues: "The people's struggle influences art, and the most sensitive artists pick that up and reflect that," he said.

He became the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, which is what he was at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and his poem on the subject, "Somebody Blew Up America," was not appreciated. I suspect that most younger people, if they remember him at all, remember him as a man who was disgraced by a single poem. But there's much more to the story of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, much more grace and disgrace.

ADDED: Here's the full text of "Somebody Blew Up America." Excerpt:

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere....

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

ALSO: State-level poets laureate might seem like it shouldn't be a thing, but it is. The states that have no such position are: Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and (post-Baraka) New Jersey. ("Because of Baraka's defiant refusals to apologize or resign as poet laureate and that there was no mechanism within the law to remove him, the position was abolished by the legislature and Governor James E. McGreevey in 2003.")

My state's poet laureate is Max Garland, who's an English professor at UW-Eau Claire. Here's his poem "Fedoras."

"Troubled Life in Malcolm X’s Shadow Comes to a Violent End."

Malcolm Shabazz was 28.

[H]e died early Thursday morning in a popular tourist area [in Mexico City] after being assaulted outside a bar, the authorities said. It was a violent end to a young and tumultuous life....

Mr. Shabazz... spent much of his life seeking to make peace with his past. After pleading guilty to the juvenile equivalent of manslaughter and arson in his grandmother’s death in 1997, he was sentenced to institutions for many of his teenage years, followed by later stints in prison for other crimes.

The grandmother was the widow of Malcolm X.

The man who published all those dirty books... and turned down "Lord of the Rings" because he "couldn’t understand a word."

Barney Rosset, of Grove Press and Evergreen Review, dead now at 89.

Besides publishing [Samuel] Beckett, he brought early exposure to European writers like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”...

He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer," ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature published in the United States. He did the same thing on movie screens by importing the sexually frank Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).”

Grove Press also published "Naked Lunch" and "The Story of O." And Evergreen Review published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

What a great free speech hero! Thanks, Barney! RIP.

"If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech," he said.

Is "The White House Butler" an outrageously racist headline?

There's been some discussion here in Madison, Wisconsin, where former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler is a visiting professor at the law school, about whether that headline, on a Wall Street Journal editorial, is racist. The editors begin:

As consolation prizes go, Louis Butler can't complain. After being twice rejected by Wisconsin voters for a place on the state Supreme Court, the former judge has instead been nominated by President Obama to a lifetime seat on the federal district court. If he is confirmed, Wisconsin voters will have years to contend with the decisions of a judge they made clear they would rather live without.

Judge Butler served on the state Supreme Court for four years, enough time to have his judicial temperament grow in infamy. Having first run unsuccessfully in 2000, he was appointed by Democratic Governor Jim Doyle to the seat vacated by Justice Diane Sykes in 2004. But after serving four years, voters had seen enough of his brand of judicial philosophy, making him the first sitting justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in four decades to lose a retention election last year.

The editorial proceeds with a few paragraphs about how liberal Butler supposedly is and concludes: "Mr. Butler's nomination shows the dominance of liberal ideology in Mr. Obama's judicial selections, and especially a contempt for Wisconsin voters."

Now, my position is that the President of the United States, under the U.S. Constitution, has the power to appoint federal judges, and therefore he can choose liberal or conservative judges as he sees fit. If they are well enough qualified — which includes the requirement that they have a judicial temperament and are committed to legitimate legal methodology — the Senate should confirm them. This is why I supported George Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito:

Those Democrats who are already insisting that Judge Alito's record on the bench makes him unacceptable should keep in mind that someday they, too, will have a president with a Supreme Court seat to fill, and it would serve the country well if that president wasn't forced to choose only among candidates with no paper trail. To oppose Judge Alito because his record is conservative is to condemn us to a succession of bland nominees and to deprive future presidents of the opportunity to choose from the men and women who have dedicated long years to judicial work.

So Louis Butler has a liberal record as a judge. Obama is the President. I don't see the problem with confirmation.

But are the Wall Street Journal editors to be condemned as racist? I guess I need to nail down the point that Butler is African American. That's never mentioned in the editorial. Some of the people I have heard from are absolutely committed to the conclusion that the headline "The White House Butler" is undeniably and outrageously racist.

Now, it occurs to me that the person who came up with that headline may not even have known that Butler is black. It's not in the editorial, and I think headline writers tend to work with what's in the article. Here, the headline writer might have simply tried to come up with some play on the last name and didn't have to go very far to come up with the idea of a butler serving in the White House to insinuate that the judge would be doing Obama's bidding — carrying political ideology into the court.

The conventional image of a butler is quite white:

Those who see racism in the headline — because of the juxtaposition of "Butler" and "House"? — may perhaps be thinking of the idea of the "house negro and the field negro," as famously explained here by Malcolm X:



(Written text here.)

But there is nothing about Louis Butler's position in relation to Barack Obama that is at all like the "house negro" that Malcolm X opposed. And you'd have to stretch to say that the editorial insinuates that he is. You'd have to portray Obama as "the master" and the people of Wisconsin as the "field negroes." It's just too much to read into the editorial. You sound silly even saying it.

But that's not to say that the Wall Street Journal didn't lay a trap for Madison liberals. Maybe they knew they were putting in just enough resonance with racism to bait university types into crying racism. And if they do, as noted, those professors will sound silly, because there is nothing racial in the entire text of the editorial. And what will the people of Wisconsin think — those voters who twice rejected Louis Butler as a state judge — if they learn that Madison professors find outrageous racism in that headline?

What will the Wisconsin voters think?
	Thank you for opening my eyes about racism.
	One more reason to see Madison as a lefty enclave.
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