"There is a quite narrow truth at the heart of the film: yes, many grifters have flourished under the guise of 'diversity work,' descending like vultures..."

"... upon guilty—or H.R.-constrained—white people hungry to be lashed for (and then duly absolved of) their supposed racial sins. To hear some of these so-called D.E.I. consultants speak is to want to rip your ears off. They speak a fuzzy, specialist language, meant to be minimally refutable and maximally emotionally manipulative. If this is anti-racism—in fact, it isn’t—you might find yourself quietly resolving to give racism another chance.... A gag that comes up a couple of times during 'Am I Racist?' is Walsh’s encounter with the 2002 book [with the N-word as its title] by the brilliant legal scholar Randall Kennedy. The joke is that it’s hard for a white person to buy the book because of how it’s hard to say the title. Get it? But Walsh never cracks the book. If he were to give Kennedy’s work a try, he might find a probing, refreshing antidote to the thinking set forward by DiAngelo’s simplistic, overly binary, and often quite patronizing work—and a total refutation of the blithe, resentful attitude of quick-twitch cultural reaction that produces a world view like his own."

Writes Vinson Cunningham, in "Is Matt Walsh Trying to Make “Am I Racist?” the “Borat” of the Right?/In his work with the Daily Wire and in a new movie, the conservative podcaster and activist tries to expose the hypocrisies of the left" (The New Yorker)

Cunningham writes out the name of Randall Kennedy's book, but I can't. Here's an Amazon Associates link to it.

"Jack and Ben both love to look at and talk about and think about—and, yes, gratuitously touch—what they refer to as their 'dicks.'"

"Here, American navel-gazing has slipped a few inches and landed at the crotch. Both men toss out humor and insight just before jumping gleefully off one or another high moral cliff. Other writer-actor types have played the upper-middle-class intellectual as a kind of sheepish hero, all the while hiding, or prettifying, or justifying the dark interiors that often accompany that seemingly benign performance. Shawn turns this kind of character inside out and shows the demon within, then offers a tour of the kind of hell he can create."

I'm reading The New Yorker: "The Class Distinctions of Wallace Shawn/In new podcast versions of his plays 'The Designated Mourner' and 'Grasses of a Thousand Colors,' Shawn turns the upper-middle-class intellectual hero inside out to show the demon within," by Vinson Cunningham. Cunningham is a young black man, by the way. He was a staff assistant in the Obama White House. He teaches in the MFA writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

I was interested in his prose, specifically, and I'm interested to see that he teaches essay writing. One course is titled, "Nonfiction Craft: Emersonians and Montaignians: Two Approaches to the Essay." I'd sign up for that, and, without reading more, I'm sure I'm a Montaignian!

"It’s true that much of Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal has to do with her frank and fluid way of expressing a politics whose particulars are increasingly popular across the country. But some of it feels substitutionary..."

"... having something to do with her status as an ambassador from everyday life—still so much like the rest of us who follow politics, caught between complicit spectatorship and horror at the seriousness at hand."

I'm consuming New Yorker prose...

"Substitutionary" is an odd word for me. But it is a word. The OED finds its earliest use in 1772, in "Clerical Subscription No Grievance": "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his Life,..a substitutionary Ransom for many."

My Google search suggests that the word comes up most in the phrase "Substitutionary Atonement," and there's an article for that in Wikipedia:

Substitutionary atonement is the name given to a number of Christian models of the atonement that regard Jesus as dying as a substitute for others, 'instead of' them.... There is also a less technical use of the term "substitution" in discussion about atonement when it is used in "the sense that [Jesus, through his death,] did for us that which we can never do for ourselves"....

Atonement is a theological term for the act of paying for and thereby redeeming sin... A distinction is often made between substitutionary atonement (Christ suffers for us), and penal substitution (Christ punished instead of us)....

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suffers for us?



As the tag says: too much drama.

AND: What is the "politics whose particulars are increasingly popular across the country"? Socialism? I think that's what the New Yorker writer is festooning his prose around. So let's quote Trump's speech, because he talked about socialism:

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence - not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. 

ALSO: After Trump says, "We are born free, and we will stay free," the camera closes in on Bernie Sanders, visibly suffering:



He can't speak, but I imagine he's thinking something like: My socialism brings more freedom.