... where you can talk about whatever you want.
February 26, 2022
"Under new chief Chris Licht, CNN will dial down the prime-time partisanship and double down on the network's news-gathering muscle..."
Ratings are secondary to credibility, in the view of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who's taking over CNN.... Zaslav, at the urging of mentor John Malone, is likely to push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining....
Licht was CBS' EVP of Special Programming, and, we're told he "succeeded with three very different programs" — "Late Night with Stephen Colbert," "CBS This Morning" and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe." None of that seems like hard news and the avoidance of red-hot liberal opining, but I hope they do manage to rebuild CNN as hard news.
"The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates. It will make you a slave."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, quoted in "A Kennedy’s Crusade Against Covid Vaccines Anguishes Family and Friends/Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has risen to become a major figure in the vaccine resistance movement. Those close to him say it’s 'heartbreaking'" (NYT).
Five of his eight surviving siblings — two of his brothers have died — have publicly rebuked him over the past two years for his campaign against vaccines....
100 years ago today, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the 19th Amendment.
The case was Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, with Justice Brandeis writing for the Court:
On October 12, 1920, Cecilia Street Waters and Mary D. Randolph, citizens of Maryland, applied for and were granted registration as qualified voters in Baltimore City. To have their names stricken from the list Oscar Leser and others brought this suit in the court of common pleas. The only ground of disqualification alleged was that the applicants for registration were women, whereas the Constitution of Maryland limits the suffrage to men.
"In the end, Biden went with the safe choice. That might sound like an odd thing to say, considering that [Ketanji Brown] Jackson is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court..."
"But she’s also an insider — a former clerk for Stephen Breyer, the justice she would replace, and a product of [Harvard Law School]. Jackson has already been confirmed by the Senate three times, including for her current seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That court is often a feeder institution for the Supreme Court, in part because it deals mainly with arcane matters of administrative law, rather than the political kindling that tends to dominate nomination fights — abortion, guns, gender, freedom of speech, religion. Senators and their aides have combed through reams of pages of Jackson’s judicial record — including the nearly 600 opinions that she wrote as a district court judge... [T]he coming battle over her nomination will resemble what fans of professional wrestling call 'kayfabe.' As the sociologist Nick Rogers said of the term in a guest opinion essay back in 2017, 'We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.'"
From "Biden Made a Historic Supreme Court Pick. What Now? Nominating the first Black woman is both bold and politically savvy, Democrats told us. Republicans are divided over how much of a fight to put up" by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam (NYT).
Here's the 2017 Nick Rogers essay, "How Wrestling Explains Alex Jones and Donald Trump." Rogers is a lawyer/sociologist. Excerpt:
"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."
"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada’s countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."
From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei.
As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.
ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me" and not "I didn’t own them and they didn’t own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.
"By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to 'denazify' Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians..."
"... and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putin’s propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.... The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, 'globalism' and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones."
From "The antisemitism animating Putin’s claim to ‘denazify’ Ukraine/The Russian leader’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust" by Jason Stanley (The Guardian). Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, is the author of "How Fascism Works."
ADDED: Also in The Guardian, there's "'It’s not rational': Putin’s bizarre speech wrecks his once pragmatic image/Analysis: President makes appeal to Ukraine’s military to abandon its ‘drug-addicted, neo-Nazi’ leaders," in which Andrew Roth describes the speech Putin gave on Friday:
"Ukrainian forces are holding on to their capital even after hours of overnight street fighting that included explosions and bursts of gunfire...."
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fate of the nation was 'being decided right now,' and at daybreak, he posted a video of himself, unshaven, on the capital’s streets — proof of his apparent commitment to remain in Kyiv, even as Western officials warn about the possibility of his being captured or killed.... While some Ukrainians have picked up arms and created improvised weaponry, more than 50,000 others have fled, and 100,000 have been internally displaced. Ukraine has accused Russia of targeting civilian infrastructure, which the Kremlin denies...."
"But nobody tops Joy Behar for... making the whole thing — the destruction of property, the loss of life and of hope — all about her."
"'The View' co-host said on her show Thursday that she was 'scared' about how the strife in Ukraine might affect Western Europe, specifically Italy, where she planned to take a vacation this summer, long-delayed by things including the COVID-19 pandemic. 'You know, you plan a trip. You want to go there. I want to go to Italy for four years and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic,' she said."
From "Clueless, narcissistic celebs need to shut up about Ukraine" by Andrea Peyser (NY Post), where I also found out about this monstrosity:
Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin… pic.twitter.com/LbDFBHVWJf
— AnnaLynne McCord (@IAMannalynnemcc) February 24, 2022
February 25, 2022
Late afternoon, the day after the snow.
Talk about anything you want.
And here's the picture Meade took of me:
"The same qualities that made her music radical in the fifties also make her work sound antiquated now: a Black woman animated the horror..."
"... and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.... Odetta was the secret-agent contralto, amplifying a history of pain others were using for sing-alongs.... If 'Blade Runner' and 'Seinfeld' were early manifestations of the twenty-first century, Odetta was the last glowing ember of the nineteenth century, a performer who made her name on the stage with a voice that could reach the cheap seats and the town square, too. Bob Dylan’s early records are omnipresent, whereas Odetta’s are not. Certainly a matrix of biases helped bring about this outcome, most of them unfair. But at least one deals with the character of her singing itself. Her 1957 album 'At the Gate of Horn' is recorded well, and Odetta’s vocal quality is as heavy and shiny as gold. She did not let go of her opera willingly. Until the seventies, when she began to loosen her vocals, Odetta rarely missed a chance to use her chest voice, extend a note, and twist it with vibrato."
From "How Odetta Revolutionized Folk Music/She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer" by Sasha Frere-Jones (The New Yorker).
"Breathe.... Get moving.... Nourish yourself.... Stay connected.... Or sign off...."
= "5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle" (NPR).
Does that help?!
It seems lame. Yes. But, really, do you think, when you are watching the news from Ukraine, you are somehow helping? Do you think have a duty to rubberneck, to pay attention, to cry tears from afar, to construct arguments blaming the other side [Biden/Trump] for doing/not doing things that wouldn't have made a difference? What are you doing?
"Biden Picks Ketanji Brown Jackson for Supreme Court."
The official announcement from the White House is out. “President Biden sought a candidate with exceptional credentials, unimpeachable character, and unwavering dedication to the rule of law. He also sought a nominee — much like Justice Breyer — who is wise, pragmatic, and has a deep understanding of the Constitution as an enduring charter of liberty,” the White House says in its statement.
ADDED: WaPo greets the announcement with this sad headline: "Democrats hope Sen. Luján makes a quick recovery from stroke with vote on Supreme Court nominee looming."
Do the Democrats need every single Democratic Senator? No confidence that surely at least one Republican will cross over?
Jackson received three Republican votes — Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) — when she was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year. But Graham, citing the reports on Jackson, tweeted Friday that her expected nomination shows that Biden has been won over by the “radical Left,” signaling he could reverse course on a Supreme Court nomination vote.
What is the evidence that Jackson is "won over by the 'radical Left'"? I'm sure my question will be answered ad nauseam.
"In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue 'Where Europe Begins'... a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another..."
"... but none of the passengers can agree. Gradually, she descends into a trance brought on by reading Tungus and Samoyed fairy tales, which cut across the journey like a polar wind. The woman learns from an atlas that Japan is, tectonically, a 'child of Siberia that had turned on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific . . . a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.' She begins to dread the finality of arrival."
From "The Novelist Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages/Writing in Japanese and German, Tawada explores borderlands in which people and words have lost their moorings" (The New Yorker).
"My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor."
"They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations."
Says Wendell Berry, quoted in "Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age/Sixty years after renouncing modernity, the writer is still contemplating a better way forward" by Dorothy Wickenden in The New Yorker.
Berry's wife Tanya said "It’s too late for it to ruin your whole life." (He's 87.)
He was talking about his forthcoming book, "The Need to Be Whole," which some of his friends "urged him to abandon." It it, "he argues that the problem of race is inextricable from the violent abuse of our natural resources, and that 'white people’s part in slavery and all the other outcomes of race prejudice, so damaging to its victims,' has also been 'gravely damaging to white people.'"
Words of the morning: "irredentism" and "revanchism."
At Meadhouse this morning, one of us was looking up "revanchism" just as the other was looking up "irredentism." Do you know the difference?
From the Wikipedia article "Irredentism":
Irredentism is a political and popular movement whose members claim (usually on behalf of their nation), and seek to occupy, territory which they consider "lost" (or "unredeemed"), based on history or legend.[1][2] The scope of this definition is occasionally subject to terminological disputes about underlying claims of expansionism, owing to lack of clarity on the historical bounds of putative nations or peoples.
This term also often refers to revanchism but the difference between these two terms is, according to Merriam-Webster, that the word "irredentism" means the reunion of politically or ethnically displaced territory, along with a population having the same national identity. On the other hand, "revanchism" evolved from the French word "revanche" which means revenge. In the political realm, "revanchism" refers to such a theory that intends to seek revenge for a lost territory.
There's this illustration, with the caption, "An 1887 painting depicting schoolchildren in France being taught about the province of Alsace-Lorraine, which was lost in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and which is depicted by black coloring on a map of France":
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