Critical Race Theory: Warriors Don't Cry, by Melba Pattillo Beals
"The crowd is closing in. They've broken the barricades. The kids are trapped in here.....You're right. We may have to let the mob have one of these kids, so we can distract them long enough to let the others out."
Hang one of us? They were talking about hanging one of my friends, or even me. My knees were shaking so badly I thought I would fall over. I held my breath, trying not to make any noise. The two men discussing our fate were just on the other side of the door. "
This is the autobiography of one of the Little Rock Nine, the kids who integrated the formerly all-white Central High School for one school year before disgraced governor Orval Faubus shut down the whole school rather than let it stay integrated. The ones whom local police closed ranks to prevent from entering the school, until Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to protect the children from being murdered by racists; who walked through gauntlets of screaming white adults threatening to kill them; who had soup poured over their heads in the cafeteria; were suspended from school for "disruption" when white kids beat them up; who sometimes ran for their lives to get home.
And Republicans want to ban this book from schools on the pretext that it implies that white people and black people are different from each other and experienced history differently. I found and read the book because it was on a banned list, with karens challenging it because it made their sensitive white daughters cry and feel ashamed.
In fact, all Americans of all races should read it, to learn modern history, to remember Jim Crow and to see the pain gleefully inflicted on their fellow citizens by Southerners, and to vow "Never Again."
In 1987, Little Rock erected statues in front of Central High, honoring these students. And today, Arkansas sends Tom Cotton and five other Republican white supremacists as their entire Congressional delegation to crack down on the right to vote and to try to ban accurate history from being taught.
DID YOU KNOW??--White people in Arkansas don't have to work for a living! I know this because mobs of them were free to surround Central High School all day, every school day, shouting racist slurs and disrupting the entire school.
I have a friend who challenges white people to answer the question: if sub-Saharan Africans had colonized North America with Caucasian slaves, how would the white race have held up? My answer is that we would have likely broken much worse. I was bullied in elementary and junior high school, beat up by groups of boys under the approving eye of Umbridge-esque teachers and punished for "fighting" while the bullies were not punished, and I'm still in therapy, coping with trauma from that. I gazed down the abysses of suicide and delinquency. And that was from mundane bullying. Melba Beals was physically harassed by the entire school, threatened with murder, needed a military escort to get in the building. And she held up. Because warriors don't cry.
Batting One For Two: She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
"Social attitudes were shifting, and there were dramatic accusatory headlines almost daily, but the fundamentals were still largely the same. Sexual harassment laws largely were outdated and spottily enforced, and aside from some revisions in a few states, they did not appear to change any time soon. Secret settlements were still being paid--in fact, some lawyers said the dollar amounts were higher than ever--allowing predators to remain hidden. Race and class often had an outsized influence on how cases were handled."
Cantor and Twohey are the Woodward and Bernstein of #MeToo, and She Said is their account about how their journalism brought down Harvey Weinstein but failed to prevent a rapist from getting a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Hollywood is liberal enough to care when forced to look at the problem. Republicans rejoice in opportunities to further abuse survivors for coming forward, and to pretend not to believe women while secretly admiring rapists because they are rapists.
The Weinstein part is the most fascinating; the transition from Weinstein appearing to be an untouchable, unreachable King, to becoming a contemptibly small worm of a man as his own enablers, confronted with the light of truth, decide they've had it with him and throw him under the bus. The sense that a simple, vague "apology" would have kept him out of jail while his continuing double-downs and threats pretty much destroyed himself.
Meanwhile, the take-away from Kavanaugh is that you don't even have to believe Christine Blasey Ford. I do believe her, but I don't have to. beer Bong Bret himself, through his own uncontrolled, shrill meltdown, demonstrated himself to be unfit to sit on the bench. He and his lickspittle Lindsey Graham were so bad that they raised questions about whether men in general are too emotional to be trusted with political power. but republicans--and America--do not care. Not only was Kavanaugh rewarded for his rape with a lifetime judicial appointment *because* he was a rapist, but republicans gained senate seats in a republican midterm because Americans backlashed against feminists for speaking out about rape. that is where our country is at this moment. maybe it will change some day.
Intervention: Ten arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier
1. You are losing your free will.
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the inanity of our times.
3. Social media is making you into an asshole.
4. Social media is undermining truth.
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7. Social media is making you unhappy.
8. Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible.
10. Social media hates your soul.
This book made me feel like an alcoholic confronted with the effects of heavy drinking on my friends, family, and capacity for living well. Lanier makes it all seem true, and yet I don't really care.
Really, the "ten arguments" boil down to two.
(1) social media is run by fascists like Zuckerberg, who use insidious propaganda techniques to make Republicans into dangerously unhinged terrorist fanatics and Democrats discouraged from voting out of sheer despair (and I know; I have felt the despair personally and had to force myself to cut off what few right-leaning people I had previously had as friends, due to their increasing militance and my need to protect my own sanity; and
(2) the "influencers"--not the kids on reddit with a million followers, but the REAL behind-the-scenes godzillionaires--pay billions to mine your data and fuck you over with targeted propaganda. This is why i now charge a $50 fee to divulge my phone number or to take a survey, and why I make shit up in the rare event that i take an Internet "quiz".
And yet---I have a friend network via social media. I have in fact PRACTICED, not lost, empathy by interacting with them. I get to have friends in Colorado and Ohio and Florida and England, who I would never interact with at all, but for social media. And I have my own small forum for maybe, just a little, having a bit of influence over others with my thoughts, my songs, my world view, which would never go out to anyone but for social media. And so in some ways, it seems to me that it's all worth it.
Or maybe I'm just in denial. Listen to me. Listen to Lanier. then make up your own mind.
Still the best: Persist, by Elizabeth Warren
I'm moderately content with joe biden, but I still wish Elizabeth warren had made it to the Presidency. #Persisterhood
her autobiography cleverly merges Warren's agenda with the various stages of her life. Warren self-identifies as "A mother, a teacher, a planner, a fighter, a learner and a woman" (the six chapters of the book), and each aspect highlights one or more issues central to her 2020 Presidential campaign. The chapter on being a "mother", for example, preaches America's failure to make childcare affordable , while "teacher" discusses the shameful way America's teachers are treated, as well as the shameful American policy of burdening the educated with student debt for life, to punish them for trying to better themselves.
Warren won't be President, but she is senator for life for Massachusetts, and i for one hope she sticks around long enough to chair commerce or appropriations or whatever powerful committee she chooses. We need more smart women with a plan.
Mystery game: The Floating Admiral, by "The Detection Club"
I read this one because it was listed in Dorothy Sayers' list of novels. In fact, only one chapter is by Sayers. the other chapters are by GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, and other mystery fiction writers from the "golden age". After determining the order, the author of the first chapter submitted it to the one who would read it and then write chapter 2 and submit both chapters to the third author, and so on. Anthony Berkley drew the short straw and had to come up with the official solution after reading contributions from eleven others---and it is every bit the mess you would expect. The proposed solutions of each writer are included in the back of the book, and between them they had five guilty parties, so if you're like me and play along with the challenge of "whodunnit", you're very likely to agree with at least somebody.
The Autobiography of a Nebbish: Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo
The given circumstances are that Zeno was persuaded to write his memoirs as therapy, and that his therapist subsequently had them published as revenge for not having been paid. Supposedly, we are reading the memoirs of a fool. I'm not so sure.
Zeno believes he is a fool. he is unhappy, believes himself to be deeply neurotic, and cannot quit smoking--a frequent motif is his claim to be having his "last cigarette", which is never, in fact, his last.
On the other hand, he's not really such a failure as all that. He is better at business than most or all of his friends and family, and ends up comfortably middle class. He marries a woman who is not the one he loves, and has an affair on the side, but eventually settles down to as comfortable a marriage as most people have, at least. And, he may be an unreliable narrator, but most of the rest of the characters, and most people you and I know, are at least as neurotic as he is. Zeno may be a fool, but he's no idiot.
Life, the universe, and everything: An Outline of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
Russell is still one of my favorite philosophers, and one of the easiest to read, but this book, which reads like an extended version of The Problems of Philosophy disappointed me. Especially the part where he dutifully devotes one small chapter to ethics after declaring that he doesn't really consider ethics to be part of true philosophy. Russell has written some wonderful books on ethics, but this is not one of them. It's mostly about epistemology, metaphysics, and the process of thought, and as interesting as Russell can make it, but dull.
Not So Innocent Abroad: The Plumed Serpent, by DH Lawrence
Set in Mexico, The Plumed Serpent is a book apart from the rest of Lawrence's work. He mostly wrote about romances threatened by class divisions in early 20th century Britain. Here, he writes a lot more character and atmosphere than plot, and the real protagonist is not the main character Kate so much as a European's concept of "the Spirit of Mexico".
Not long after the Mexican revolution, Kate, an Irish tourist, finds Mexico City to be too politically unstable, and takes up residence in a hacienda in a remote area where the traditional Quetzalcoatl-centered religion is resisting Christian missionaries and the shirtless, reckless, earthy peasants with their careless enjoyment of life make her heart go pit-a-pat. there are always cliched dark, primitive stirrings in the air, the natives are not to be trusted, and I was frequently aware that this was what I had always been taught Mexico was and also that my vision was anything but authentic, but utter bullshit filtered through the sensibilities of a long-dead white Englishman. I found it romantic, atmospheric, and probably of limited use in this day and age. there's a reason you have to be pretty steeped in English literature to come across a book like this these days.