Jamelle Bouie, Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas’s Benefactor, Is Not Just Another Billionaire:

When we want to memorialize an atrocity or a crime – when we want to remember the consequences and costs of evil – we focus on the victims… You won’t find a statue of Osama bin Laden at ground zero…

I don’t know what is in Crow’s heart. But he is a wealthy man. He is a powerful man. And power is attracted to power… Does Crow secretly admire these figures of his fascination? Probably not. But he doesn’t seem to understand them, either. He doesn’t respect the weight and meaning of the histories in question.  What Crow has done is trivialize them. He has made them objects of curiosity. He has stripped them of specificity; they are meant to represent evil at its most generic and abstract…

To gaze at your collection of tokenized evil is to separate yourself from the perpetrators and their victims. It is to tell yourself — consciously or, more likely, subconsciously — that there’s nothing you could do to ever be like them.

Or so you hope.

Susan Neiman, There Are No Nostalgic Nazi Memorials: Continue reading →

Matthew Walther, What the Owner of an AR-15 Sees in Every Single Place He Goes:

Understanding the cultural appeal of AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles like those used in Nashville may not be as urgent a matter as the policy question concerning their availability. Indeed, though I generally support gun rights, I favor imposing restrictions on the manufacture and ownership of AR-15-style weapons. But the problem is deeper than the guns themselves — not just the existence of the evil people who pull the triggers but also the specific place these weapons occupy in American life and the logic by which their ownership seems justifiable to enthusiasts.

The AR-15 is situated at the intersection of a relatively innocent hobbyism and the sinister mainstreaming of features of the militia culture of the 1990s, even among people who lead law-abiding lives.

Nadya Williams, Updating Homer for Sensitive Modern Readers: A Tongue-in-Cheek Proposal:

As noted in the title, this essay is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. As a historian of the ancient world, I assure you that there is absolutely no way to sanitize antiquity properly to respect anyone’s sensibilities. The pre-Christian Greco-Roman Mediterranean, in particular, was a world filled with horrific abuses that are almost unimaginable for us, except that they are well-documented in our sources. And that is the point. Both the literary and historical past exist not for the purpose of making anyone comfortable, but to challenge us, as people living in a particular time and culture, to continue to learn about and from the human experience.

David Ho, Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative: Continue reading →

Mac Bryan, Maryland Campaign Medal of Honor Series: James Allen, 16th New York Infantry:

Born in Ireland, Pvt. James Allen mustered into service with Company F of the 16^th New York Regiment on April 24, 1861 at Potsdam, in upstate New York at the tender age of 17. During Allen’s enlistment his regiment participated in all the battles of the Army of the Potomac from First Bull Run to Chancellorsville, until his term of service expired in 1863.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: ‘I Don’t Know How to Explain the War to Myself’.  “Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.”

Driftglass with the appropriate response to David Brooks, Nostradumbass Returns to Form: The Ongoing Adventures of David Brooks:

So since the Sulzberger family continues to pay Mr. David Brooks an obscene amount of money to extrude the same steaming logs of Beltway insider claptrap over and over again, decades after decade, I see no reason why we shouldn’t amuse ourselves by repurposing some of it to create an equally plausible and much more satisfying fairy tale about how the Republican primary Cocaine Bear Lane is wide open and how one of several, promising American Cocaine Bears could jump into that lane and perhaps ride it all the way to the Republican nomination!

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Paul Kingsnorth, Who Will Stand Against Progress?   [Ed.:  1.  A few years Kingsnorth’s writing turned in a direction that didn’t appeal to me and I stopped reading him.  I was tipped to this by another feed and decided to have a look.  Perhaps I’ll start reading him again.  2.  Lasch’s critique of Progress, which read nearly 30 years ago, remains relevant.]

The work of what we have come to call Progress is the work of homogenising the world. I capitalise the word because Progress is an ideology — even a metaphysics — and if we want to understand it we need to grasp its foundational assumptions. We are trained from birth to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale. Our bodies, our nations, our forests, our heritage: Progress will not stop until everything is measured, commercialised, commodified, altered at the genetic level, put up for sale, forced into “equitable” relationships with everything else, or otherwise flattened and sold.

The religion of Progress is leading us into the flames, as [Edward Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine] saw so many decades back. Those of us who feel this way need to have the confidence to say to: to denounce the religion of the age, to dissect it, to make claims against it. Those of us who seek to resist the emerging Total System, or simply to give it the slip, need an alternative worldview: something to stand for, and stand upon. Not an ideology, mind, and certainly not a blueprint for utopia. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. No, what we need is something more old-fashioned: a stance. Even a politics. But what should it look like?

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My favorite essay of the past few years – I share the author’s sentiment as well as his sense of humor – David Bentley Hart, Three Cheers for Socialism:

Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, but – measured by a purely Darwinian calculus – too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage.

Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far…

Two other good ones –

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