The Online Grievance Industry

 Today's Nation leads with 

Rebecca Solnit’s (Mis)Adventures in the Manosphere. 

Solnit provides an historian's perspective on how most of the internet today is dominated by what is usually described as a cultural shift in how young men often see life.   She asserts that it is really an expression of economic exploitation by the billionaire media moguls.

 At the end of the article there is a link to Solnit's website. 

 The guiding principle of the website is expressed succinctly on page one:

"Every emergency is in part a storytelling emergency."

"Hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. ...we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."   

I have enjoyed reading Solnit's columns, articles and books for a long time.  I'm pleased to have found this new-to-me trove of thoughts about the big issues of our time. 

Solnit often spends part of the summer in New Mexico.  In an August article she talks about the state's changing climate, including longer and hotter summers and air filled with smoke from wildfires. 

Catching Up

 I have finally gotten around to  reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  The book was published in 2010  I don't know what preoccupation preempted my attention back then to produce such an oversight.  What finally woke me up was stumbling on an interview of Wilkerson on the New Mexico PBS program,  Report from Santa Fe, first aired in 2013.

Lorene Mills interviews Isabel Wilkerson

 Wilkerson, before producing the book, had a long and much acclaimed. career in journalism which included a Pulitzer -- the first given to an African-American woman.  She conducted a thousand interviews in the fifteen years of researching and writing The Warmth of Other Sons.  In it she recounts the decades-long story of the migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow Southern states to the North and West of the U.S.

 I found Wilkerson's speaking ability in the PBS program to be totally captivating.  I don't recall listening to anyone before who was so articulate.  Her eloquence in speaking about her experience in producing the book made me immediately resolve to find a copy.  A quick search turned up a copy on AbeBooks for just $7.50, shipping included.

The story of the great migration, covering decades is a complicated one which the author makes into an enjoyable read partly by focusing on the lives of three individuals who found very different paths out of the South.  

For me, the book has got me to remembering my own developing awareness of Black History.  In fact, I recall when I was in school being skeptical about the idea that there was a need for such a categorization of History, even though I had seen a lot of evidence supporting such a need during the course of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s.

Travel and life experiences eventually showed me the way to a more critical view of how History is constructed and told (and often distorted), but even these many years later Wilkerson's book is filling in a lot of important facts and ideas for me about this country's record of dealing with civil rights and human rights.

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Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddam 

Tipping Points

 I have spent some time recently looking through the book-length catalog of the Deco Japan exhibit which came to Albuquerque in 2012.  When I wrote about it then it seemed the best Art exhibit I had ever encountered.  It still seems so in the thoroughness in which it captured and expressed a whole cultural era.

There was a great variety of art objects in the show, all of it characterized by extraordinary craftsmanship.  What stood out for me, though, was a message that was not explicitly stated.  In the midst of enormous artistic and cultural achievement there was an undercurrent of militaristic nationalism which would cause the country and the world to veer onto a catastrophic path.  Japan's cultural influence in the 1930s and '40s could have carried the nation forward with little added effort, but the country's leadership at that moment chose territorial expansion as its strategic course.

It seems to me that we are facing a dilemma similar to that of Deco Era Japan now, and not just in the U.S.  There are many differences in the details, of course, but the consequences of the wrong decisions have exponentially expanded *.

* At Searchlight New Mexico

The Real Joe

 I think a lot of people hold two rather incompatible views about Biden.  On the one hand he is seen is an old guy who isn't doing badly for his age.  On the other, he is stubbornly sticking to a course that will tank his legacy and doom the country.

Some insight into how the second assessment is the correct one are to be found in a Guardian Article, 

We Learned Everything We Needed to Know About Biden in 1988.

The concluding paragraph:

"... But Biden appears to have failed to heed a lesson his mother imparted to him, according to Cramer: “The most important was: tell the truth, and do what you promised.” Biden in 2020 promised to be a “bridge” or “transition” candidate, reportedly telling his advisers he wouldn’t seek a second term, and now is failing to face—and tell—the truth about his obvious cognitive decline, about his historically low approval rating, and the widespread view among voters that he should step aside. The world at 81 years old looks very different from when he was 44, and his deep-seated character traits now have hardened into something quite different. His gritty determination looks like blind obstinacy, his boundless belief in himself seems like arrogant self-regard, and his attempt to bend the world to his will appears like a delusion of grandeur."