Weekly Digest – September 27, 2020

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First weekly digest in a long time.  We’ll see if it becomes a regular thing again.

Worth Reading

In the Rhine city where I lived, I played noontime chess in the park with a group of elderly men. They were all former Wehrmacht soldiers, and we had long conversations about World War II, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Also at the park was a group of Pennern—bums, drunks—who hung out around benches beneath a pergola near the chess area. They were a motley crew, tattooed, unhealthy, rowdy. One day, one of them was especially drunk and unruly, cursing at passersby. The Polizei arrived. The man was obstreperous. They cautioned him and he belligerently waved them away, screaming profanity. Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.

Yet the situation didn’t escalate….

The roots of German policing, as Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy wrote in the New York Times in June, trace to the reconstruction period after World War II, when Allied occupying forces and the new postwar German leadership sought to “demilitarize and civilize” the police as a way of remedying the Nazi-era corruption of policing. Seventy years later, Bennhold and Eddy observe, “that early ambition of demilitarization has morphed into a broad-based strategy of de-escalation that has become the bedrock of modern German policing.”

In American mythology, there exists a gauzy past when white citizens were left alone to do as they pleased with their land and their labor (even if it was land stolen and labor enslaved). In the legend, those days of freedom and equality were, and still are, perpetually under assault. Most often the entity threatening to steal or undermine freedom in the American melodrama is the federal government. In the federal government’s checkered—perhaps “occasional” might be the better term—history of protecting minority populations from white people’s dominion, it presents a constant threat to the liberty of white people. That is why, as southern historian J. Mills Thornton put it, southern history—I would say U.S. history—displays an obsessive “fear of an imminent loss of freedom.” Understanding the anxious and fearful grind produced by threats to the domination-as-freedom complex helps us understand what Richard Hofstadter called the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics. The government is not just coming for your guns, its coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.

Because Americanism doesn’t rely on ethnicity or even culture, and because it’s open to anyone (at least in theory), it makes the question of self-criticism more challenging and fraught. You don’t see quite the same thing with, say, being German, since Germanness is more a mere fact than an aspiration. If America is an idea, then, like all ideas, it will and must be contested. Ideas can also be hated, and there is a strain of the American left (although thankfully a small minority) that seems rather content in its self-disgust. How much self-disgust can a nation sustain? A nation must have a narrative that enough people buy into, even if they do so passively.

It is also possible to frame disgust patriotically as James Baldwin did… American exceptionalism depends on understanding America’s sins.

But how much is too much? When does hating who we were prevent us from loving who we might become?

For ecological and political reasons, British farming has reached a turning point. When the country became part of the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union, it joined the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy, one of the world’s largest farm-subsidy programs. The C.A.P. consumes sixty-five billion dollars a year, about forty per cent of the E.U.’s budget; for decades, it has been criticized for its perverse incentives and environmental impact. In 2016, the C.A.P. was among the bureaucratic monstrosities of the E.U. that helped drive the vote for Brexit. Leaving the bloc has led to the first reform of agricultural policy in almost fifty years. “It is a reset moment,” Minette Batters, the leader of the National Farmers Union, told me. Beginning next year, British farming will transition to a new system of support, which will be linked to “public goods,” such as water quality and biodiversity.

To consider the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, one must go to a dark place, which is to say, one must look in the mirror. I’ve made passing glances at that glass for the past thirty years. On hiking trips, I have often kept a copy of Jeffers’s slim Selected Poems in my back pocket. I’ve loved what he has to say about hawks and rivers and mountains. But in the end, Jeffers’s darkness, his contempt for his own century and his own kind, always scared me off, sent me back to that more sanguine American poet, Walt Whitman. Since the election of Donald Trump, however, I’ve turned away from Whitman and have begun to take Jeffers’s grave warnings more seriously.

Ending on a Positive Note

IDLES released an album this week, ULTRA MONO: