I enjoy reading about the burned over period since in some ways it reminds me of our current frantic and polarized era. Writing about it too–see here.
I just finished this book, and can recommend it to anyone looking for more history.
It deals specifically, and in detail, with Rochester, with the clearest focus on the several years before and after the big year of 1830, when Charles Grandison Finney came to town and galvanized Rochester society essentially overnight.
Before Finney: a complete and total mess, with a fractured elite unable to get its act together and worried that the rabble–itself a new idea in America–was out of control, and that in this east coast version of the Wild West they would go under.
After Finney: a mess, but an entirely different one, and one heading in a new direction. Finney’s message connects the elites with one another, and with the rabble, in ways that begin to cause a coherence.
That’s the tale Johinson tells anyway. He acknowledges in a later introduction to his original 1978 work that his book had come under some deserved criticism, related to his ambitions to create a bottom up social history using quantitative methods.
And I myself wondered as a complete amateur if he’d captured the clash of settlement cultures sufficiently. The path breaking book Albion’s Seed, which describes the four different English cultural patterns that are with us to this day, came out after Johnson’s book. So you don’t hear much about what it must have been like for settlers from New England, bottled up with their Puritan culture for several hundred years, to have found themselves, with a jolt, not only in a raw wilderness but hanging out for the first time with emigrants from Scots-Irish and Quaker America as well as immigrants from overseas–yet another completely new thing.
Johsnson’s analysis focuses more on class than culture. And whether or not he could have cast a wider net in terms of method he does seem to nail a lot of what went on.
The Burned Over thing was not just Rochester but also most of Western New York. And some scholars think that what happened in Western New York was not that different in Great Awakening terms than what happened elsewhere in the country, mostly in the Puritan-inflected New England the settlers had left behind. But something, and something downright strange, happened in Rochester quite quickly, that’s fer sure.
Finishing the book I am still left with the question of how much change could have happened so quickly. In one chapter you are in 1829 and it is impossible to imagine how things could get messier. Then you are in 1830 and everything is up for grabs. I guess there was a lot of tinder ready to be burned. But it is still hard to grasp, at a remove of almost 200 years, how so many people and factions, dug in and entrenched, should see fit to toss everything in the air, and to do it in ways that kickstarted a process of knitting together, however imperfect.
If you believe Johnson’s class-based analysis you will come round to one of his main theses: that while the Awakening was experienced by its participants in deeply religious ways it was fundamentally about social control. The elites felt their control slipping away. This control was deeply ingrained after several hundred years of patriarchy, the primacy of family in community, and a world of farms and artisans. They found themselves in this new land of strangers with different cultural habits, a new and assertive working class that greatly outnumbered them, and emerging organizational forms like factories that they were inventing but did not know how to run.
While the enthusiasms permeated a good deal of the working classes in religious terms Johnson is pretty clear that the Awakening was largely an elite concoction. It may not have been understood by any given member of the elite this way. Each was under pressure to conform to the new mandates in simple behavioral ways, from the pulpit, from the press, and often from their wives: stop drinking at home, go to church, stop giving out liquor at work, hire only people who go to church and don’t drink. Most of the elites fell in line and many of the workers, too. The workers who went along got steady work. The holdouts did not do as well, living on the margins or moving on.
It makes perfect Darwinian sense. A new way of thinking and behaving worked better, even if the religious and social control aspects are hard to tease apart, and even if any given convert was brought to a new exalted, seemingly religious, place mostly under behavioral pressure from family and peers.
I think I had a more romanticized view of Awakenings generally, and of the Burned Over period specifically. Like it was all a kind of emergent, bottom up phenomenon. Johnson takes the grittier view that the closer you look the more you find evidence of familiar patterns of social change–more dramatic perhaps but nothing that violates the usual protocols of change. And what you also find quite clearly is the hand of elites, being the primary agents of change in the direction they desire.
Relevance to today?
Most people I know are scratching their heads over not only the crazy nature of change but the speed at which it is happening. Much of what is now considered mandatory was, just a few years back, deemed ridiculously out of line. So one lesson to learn is that these periods of swift change do happen. We know Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Now we experience it.
But the other lesson relates to the how. How in the world could that much change be ignited in such a short time? The answer, then as now, is that elites forced rapid change because they saw their hold on things slipping in a new world they were unfamiliar with.
How could change happen that fast? Just consider the changes essentially forced down our throats the past five years. The difference? Maybe that regional and national elites in the past throttled their worst instincts since the nearby commoners had ways of holding their feet to the fire. That seems not to be the case with our current Betters. You only have to read what they say in venues like the World Economic Forum, and to reflect on the incessant beatdown of the deplorable heartland, to recognize the rules of the game, and the stakes, have been altered.
That does not mean the Betters win and the commoners lose in our global era. But it does suggest that the commoners start from a position of less natural traction. The system has slid sideways, and with the rise of global elites with no national moorings there is much less by the way of required feedback to keep things under control.
Maybe the traction will increase if, moving up the class and privilege ladder, greater numbers of the middle class who now revel in deploring the lower sorts recognize that they may be next in line in the cattle chute. It will take a lot to flip a burgher wedded to the notion he is protected, and is habituated to kissing up and kicking down. But if they start flipping things may get seriously sketchy.
Other than Whisky Prajer, who was hiding out in the cellar of this cavernous abandoned bloghouse, it is still pretty quiet here at Uncouth Reflections. That gave me some time to reflect on my post yesterday on Barbie, and here I reconsider, and possibly reverse, some of what I wrote yesterday.
It may seem odd to write a reconsideration after just one day’s time. But we live for better and worse in a Twitterized universe where all life can pass by in an instant. And, as I say, other than Prajer in the basement I have this whole place to myself, and you can get a fair amount of reflection done in a day if you are intentional about it.
Yesterday, I opted to eschew much consideration of the film as film, and so avoided for the most part auterurish questions of intent and aesthetics. The film is deservedly a springboard for mulling over the effect it is having on the funhouse mirror land that is our “culture”. But it is worth considering what is going on inside the contraption, even if that risks indulging in tricky questions of intent.
If you read yesterday’s post (and who hasn’t, really?) you will recall the gist of it, something I could have put in the lede instead of following my usual practice of multiple digressions.
But there I go again.
I felt that the bulk of the movie mirrored our confused state at present as regards sex and gender. But that, having simulated our confused state, the mandatory feminist conclusion could not work. There were too many balls in the air, too many social things that just don’t add up, for the film to credibly end on a you-go-girl note.
I said that was a failure, and posited an ending that I thought would have been better, and that maybe even the filmmakers might have preferred were they able to duck the requirement for a feel-good ending. I thought the feel-good ending they came up with was anything but, and said I would have preferred an ending in which both men and women come to grips with the pickles they are in, both separately and together, and resolve to work together on a shared better way. In that ending maybe Ken would get over his first rush of exhilaration having discovered his own gender in the real world, dropping the Andrew Tate bullshit after a time, and, with the prodding and lures of Barbie, coming to a place where his masculine self can reasonably, though not always giddily, benefit from a real relationship with a real woman. And vice versa, of course.
You know–the kind of answer that is hardly new, and that has served civilization rather well for a long time. Men willingly drop their beastly qualities, at least where women are concerned, in exchange of the pleasures of their company and the status derived from snagging a good one and siring a bunch of childen who can grow up to honor dad.
The female trade-off is similar but not exactly the male script in reverse. This because males and females are not mirror image opposites of one another as much as kissing cousins, with all those complications. Females defer to male power on the surface in exchange for holding their own kind of unique feminine power, plus the status gained by snagging a good one and mothering a bunch of children just because.
So that’s my happy enough ending. Get the fuck over the overriding narcissism of our age and find a 21st century version of the way things have generally been.
This is a Burkean conservative view, of course. But that’s kind of what I am. Try new things as you will but always keep in mind that certain patterns are longstanding for reasons, and deserve our respect.
Of course if you are not so inclined, and if you feel that the summum bonum is for women to take pride in their vaginas when visiting the gynecologist, good luck to ya. I think that inadequate, and that over time the sisters may agree, as they did in the movie before Barbie pulled a fast one.
Which brings me, after another set of digressions, to the reconsideration of the movie.
Here, I make the argument that the movie’s conclusion failed as a happy ending because a happy ending was not the intention. Barbie, as it turns out (at least until I change my mind) is a tragedy. My preferred ending was a better happy ending. But the conclusion supplied works perfectly well in terms of tragedy.
Whose tragedy? Well, The Tragedy of Barbie, I suppose. But tragedies have a way of rippling out to consume everything in their paths, in the manner of the conflagration of the world by fire that Edward Teller worried about in Oppenheimer. Many are the Shakespearean tragedies that end up with dead bodies everywhere, mostly because the main character could not see his critical flaw, and took everyone down with him. So while the play may be called The Tragedy of Barbie it is also the Tragedy of Ken, The Tragedy of Barbies, The Tragedy of Kens and the Tragedy of You and Me. Alan does fine, the lucky chap.
So let’s just drop our posturing and predispositions and try to take a look at what actually happens in the movie, so as to evaluate this claim to tragedy.
Most of the film’s inconsistencies are resolved when looking through a tragic lens. Ruth Handler adapted a sexpot German doll for the American market, a simple act that spun off in a million directions when it confronted the contradictory demands of the American “market”. Women were gaining their “liberation” over this period but, as the film suggests, that came at a price to both sexes.
Yes, Barbieland is a human contrivance and not real. But in the awkward vocabulary of the film Barbieland exists in a dynamic relationship with the real world. So if in that world female judges lose the thread of justice by overfeminizing the abstract realm of law (which happens in the film), this means something as the filmmakers see it. It is not just the action of silly toys.
First wave feminism. best captured on film by Jill Clayburgh in movies like It’s My Turn, assumed the fundamental compatability of men and women. Men should just be a little fairer and things will work out. But the world portrayed in Barbie is far harsher.
“Listen sisters we have struggled to gain power over men. You know as well as I do what will happen if we listen to the soft-hearted among us. Men will regain power over us. and that will not be a good thing. For every Alan there are a hundred Kens. each ready to establish dominion over us when given a chance. We cannot let this happen!”
But in return for that safety Barbies must live in Barbieland, where they hold power over emasculated males, can’t run a damn thing, and have their own relationships with one another shrunken down to “hi, Barbie!”
So Barbie and Ken visit the real world. Remember Barbie had no yearning to do so. She was happy (enough) in Barbieland and only agreed to visit the real world to cure deficiencies that were an impediment to life in Barbieland. It is curious, though not that strange when you think about it, that Ken was more willing to travel to parts unknown. just as he wants a sleepover and maybe even a kiss without knowing exactly why. That pesky y chromosome–hard to keep down when paired with x.
It should also come as no big surprise that it is Ken, not Barbie, that immediately gets what real life means. He returns to Barbieland in a state of intoxication about life’s possibilities as a man, with male power, and a dick. Oddly–or perhaps not so oddly–the Barbies get intoxicated in their own way. The interactions are sexist, I suppose, if you insist. But they are not unlike a different kind of “liberation” that boys and girls have felt for millennia when they come to grips, so to speak, with their natural equipment, and what it may mean for their personal and social power when dealing with the other sex or their own.
Barbie returns to a land permeated by testosterone and estrogen. Danger! It is here that we see her true character, and the arc of the tragedy is revealed. Ken took a bite of the apple. The other Barbies shared in that experience. But not our Barbie. She opts, fatefully, to stage a reactionary coup. She succeeds. Our Ken, and the rest of the Kens, are routed.
So Barbie has won. But what did she win? She realizes there was truth to Ken’s message of openness to life’s possibilities. But she is not “man enough” to go through the crucible. No, her path as tragic villain is clear: she defeats and humiliates the men, ditches the sisters in Barbieland she cajoled into the coup, hitches a ride with her new BFFs from the real world, gets a vagina and then proudly puts it to use seeing a gynecologist.
This is liberation? Return to Barbieland petrified by male power. Get your sisters to kill off the male threat. Leave them in Barbieland with their newly re-emasculated Kens. Run off to the real world where you can cash in on Ken’s risk taking. And then find yourself. “victorious” and “liberated”, in a doctor’s office.
After the appointment–what then? You can see her going back to the car to be with her new Best Friends Forever.
“Hi Best Friends Forever!”
And so we return to the beginning of the film. Barbie as monolith, a tragic edifice, poisoner of life.
Gee, not much of a guy’s club anymore. No one is ever here.
I was kinda hoping at least Blowhard Esq. would be here. He is a big fan of the new Barbie movie and I thought we might talk it over. Maybe he’ll come by. I’ll just ramble and see who shows up.
Say what you will about the film as film (and, to be truthful there is not a whole lot to be said from the perspective of formal criticism): Barbie is, to quote Truffaut in Spielberg’s Close Encounters, an event sociologique. People are talking about it less in terms of aesthetics and more in terms of its cultural messaging and potential impact. That’s OK. People should talk about what interests them.
There’s a joke in the movie about how Barbie the doll set back feminism by fifty years. Blowhard Esq. seems to think the opposite of Barbie the movie–that it set men’s issues back by fifty years. I am not so sure. But then again I am not so sure about a lot of things in this odd cultural package.
There is an awful lot of confusion of all kinds in the movie. It is a mess, actually. But since our nation is currently in a highly agitated state as regards sex ‘n gender any movie that might aim at that target could only be a fragmented mess. So in that sense I think it might be OK that it is contradictory and confused. As the saying goes there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, which accurately predicted a crisis right around now, Neil Strauss and William Howe examined cycles of historical change taking account of a number of social factors. These factors vary in observable ways over the roughly 80-100 years it takes to complete a journey from a first turning, where rebuilding takes place, to the fourth, where crisis sets the stage for another cycle of rebuilding.
One factor the authors analyze is the relation between the sexes, or, if you prefer, genders. Gender differences tend to be more pronounced in the first two turnings and then flattened out, so to speak, in the latter two.
Consider the differences between a Gibson girl and the boyish 1920s ideal.
Gender differences in terms of appearance and demeanor are . . . wider . . . during the upwards arc and narrow considerably as the cycle gets further along. We have seen something similar during the current cycle now coming to a close. Indeed this time round we have taken things quite far, with male and female coming so perilously close to one another that in many cases the distinctions are non-existent, or even reversed.
Is this a sustainable trend? Maybe. Strauss and Howe would place a bet on some kind of rough reversion, with the term “rough” having both metaphoric and real aspects. Barring some tinkering with the genome that would alter the boundaries of human variability I place my bet with them. And so to some extent this likely cultural movement is the framing device with which I would like to consider Barbie.
Twain, or someone else, remarked that history does not repeat but that it rhymes. Cycles do not repeat like clockwork for the simple reason that human nature is variable, but within boundaries that force reversions, with these creating the appearance of repetition. Out of the crooked timber of mankind nothing straight was ever made.
If the male and female principles comprised a simple black/white or either/or distinction, then you might expect their interactions to follow narrow and predictable paths. But the war between the sexes is like any other war: the battle plan seldom survives the first punch. Things get confused but a semblance of organized conflict continues.
A true polarity, like yin and yang, is not comprised of exact opposites. The opposite number to the xx chromosome is not yy but xy. The interactions in a polar system will have many attributes of symmetry but will also be characterized by some randomness and chaos. Male heads toward female, and vice versa, but neither side quite gets there (though the sperm can of course make it as far as the egg, which is the whole point, really.)
Moreover it is not just a matter of fluid and contrasting principles. There is also the pesky matter of that speck of white in deepest black territory, and vice versa once again.
What’s that all about? (hint: in the film the black yin dot deep in white yangland is called “Alan.”)
What happens when we get to the close of a cycle? What kind of discourse are you likely to see?
As the world headed into the 1930s, a “low and dishonest decade” much like our own, the leftist Gramsci wrote that ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.
Barbie is such a morbid symptom. There is no rule that says morbid symptoms cannot be fun.
We are in a Fourth Turning. The relationship between the sexes is bound up with the crisis. There will be a reversion of some sort after the crisis but for now we have all manner of confusion and contradiction.
Where is the confusion and contradiction in Barbie? Everywhere.
We start with that very clever opening cribbing from the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001. In 2001 the “unevolved” apes were prompted to move to a higher state by the monolith. In Barbie little girls are prompted to ditch playing mother to doll babies after exposure to a giant Barbie. In 2001 the apes realized they could use tools to kill animals and gain ascendance. In Barbie they use their dolls to smash other dolls, symbolically killing infants (presumably their own) in favor of the ideal of the indepedent,
yet very sexy,
yet very sexless,
yet very professional,
yet very incapable, woman.
Got that?
Helen Mirren’s voice over tries vainly to femalesplain as the sequence ends. After making the case that Barbie promoted female self-actualization and empowerment she hints that maybe it hasn’t worked out that way in the real world.
There’s the set-up for the movie, as neat and clean as the transition from bone to spaceship in 2001, presaging what the movie will be all about.
We cut to Barbieland. Here the women rule. But they rule over a fake and sexless universe. Male advocates in our world have been known to argue that any advances civilizations ever made were the result of male energies. Barbieland seems a testament to that proposition. Nothing gets done. Politics is eviscerated of meaning and conflict. The women in charge have no skills and play act their roles. There is no real conversation, even between women, because there can be not conflict, only the thinnest veneer of interaction under a rule of mandatory consensus.
“Hi Barbie!”
Neither males nor females have genitals. Demonstrating the proposition that polarities are not mirror images this equal opportunity sexlessness does not have equal effects on Barbieland culture. Sealing off a vagina is not the same thing in reverse as cutting of a penis. xy – y = x, a lesser form of woman.
Indeed this is what happens in Barbieland. Men are treated, and see themselves, as an inferior form of the dominant females.
This is a feminist paradise? I think not.
The poor guys (and not the women) seem to know something is missing. A phantom . . . . limb? Ken may not know what to do with a sleepover possibility with Barbie but he gets as excited about the prospect as his anatomy allows, and has a rough idea what kissing might be about. Barbie–indeed all the Barbies in Barbieland–are just not interested, from the get go. Is there something about the frisson of xy that provokes a tension absent from a simple xx?
Here we come to one of many points in the movie where the filmmakers’ intentions are hard to grasp. Do they spot the dilemma concerning female incompetence and happy tyranny? Did they build that pink dystopia into the movie to make a point, and if so, what? Or did they get caught in the byzantine contradictions that a Barbie movie would by necessity generate, and wildly improvise to get past the senselessness of it all?
Perhaps you can argue that what happens in Barbieland should not be taken as a map of the real world since it is a human contrivance. In that case any blemishes in Barbieland should be laid at the feet of its creators. There is in fact a hint of anti-Barbieness in the film, with one character saying Barbie set back women’s issues by fifty years. That has been a common sentiment post-feminism, so it is not shocking to hear it voiced in the film. But it is at odds with Mirren’s set-up statement, which suggests there is nothing wrong with Barbie, and that any deficiencies are more likely to be found in the real world.
And what is this real world? Is it a patriarchy, as advertised? Barbie gets catcalls on Venice Beach like 1950’s Rome. Sorry, not gonna happen. So why use the trope? Then we see a guy tell Ken that sure sure sure men still rule– but they have to be discreet. But wait a minute. If men rule why do they have to make a secret of it? What about the catcallers? And look!–the guy is a Beta not an Alpha, suggesting his claims to male rule are a delusion forced on him by his lack of actual power.
And then the strange matter of Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler. If Barbie set women’s rights back 50 years surely its female creator had something to do with that, no?
As you might expect we don’t get that message in the film. We are introduced to Handler as Barbie stumbles into a room Mattel has set aside in its skyscraper for Handler’s ghost (Handler died in 2002). That seems a respectful thing for the all-male senior management of Mattel to do. Despite the general notion presented in the movie that when you give men an inch they put the whole thing in, and become oppressors right quick, Mattel management is weirdly incompetent, almost as if they have been Barbie-ized in some strange way.
Barbie wonders why Handler did not model her doll on herself. Handler could not be more forthcoming: why use a short, unattractive Jew with a double masectomy when you could make a doll that looks, well, like a sexy shiksa?
No, no, you will argue, Handler’s motivations were not so crass. Indeed, at the end of the movie we witness a conversation between Barbie and Handler in which Handler paints the gauziest of pictures about her intentions. We see images flash by of women, women, women, all meant to symbolize the warm and wonderful Barbie of Handler’s dreams.
Two things are noteworthy here. First there are no men in these dream images. Second, even though there are no men a number of the images deal with woman-as-mother in a positive way. That’s strange. After all it is still kind of difficult to have kids without the presence of fathers (though give them time they are working on it!)
Further–oopsie!–wasn’t motherhood the very thing the Barbie Monolith was working to eliminate from the minds of young girls?
Somehow I think the filmmakers are not being totally straight with us about this Ruth gal. And while a film like this has limited obligations to history the filmmakers opted to use the real Ruth, so it seems fair to take a closer look ourselves.
Handler and her husband Eliot were along with another guy, behind Mattel at the start (her husband is the “el” in Mattel. So, as was hinted in the movie, America in the 1950s was sufficiently nonpatricarchal as to have Ruth at the big table.
As to her idealized view of Barbie–Handler modeled her adult toy after a German doll called Bild Lilli. Bild Lilli was so named because she first appeared, as Lilli, in a comic strip that appeared in the newspaper Bild in the tough postwar era. The adult-figured doll was ‘exactly what Handler had in mind”.
Lilli was post-war, sassy, and ambitious, “a golddigger, exhibitionist, and floozy”.[2] The cartoon always consisted of a picture of Lilli talking, while dressed or undressed in a manner that showed her figure, usually to girlfriends, boyfriends, or her boss. To a policeman who told her that two-piece swimsuits are banned in the street: “Oh, and in your opinion, what part should I take off?
Plus, just to pile on for a second, Handler was not shown the door by the patriarchy after Mattel reaped millions from her (copied from a German) “invention.” No, she was forced out after the S.E.C. found she produced fraudulent financial reports. She later pleaded no contest.
Enough Ruth already. Now on to the main attraction: is the movie anti-male?
Yes but.
The first two thirds of the movie is, per the above, a total mess when it comes to clarity of message. There are ambiguous messages in there. Barbieland is horrible. Ken is a scene stealer of the first order, and mostly sympathetic. And while the bulk of the movie makes no sense it is highly entertaining, working as farce even it fails any coherence test. But you would not mistake it for Peckinpah.
The last third of the film gets didactic, big time, and to me in an unattractive way. But even here things are muddy. The first part of the film pitched way too many balls in the air. Having left them all suspended in mid-air in the home stretch the movie can’t pull off its grand feminist finale in a satisfying, or even coherent, fashion. Even when it opts to make its big point it remains a mess, with the conclusion not having the luxury of farce to fall back on.
The movie was charged with false advertising for having presented itself as–wink wink nod nod–something other than tendentious femininist propaganda. The attorney Robert Barnes has even been mulling over the idea of a class action lawsuit. But that misses the mark. I think the first part of the movie was hopelessly confused but that it had cause to be given the late stage, terminal zaniness of our culture. And in that messy first parts of the movie the messaging got interesting.
I have to believe the fimmakers knew they were introducing ideas that are suspect in our current Woke era during most of the film. But of course they also had to know that by the final reel all the Current Gods must be honored. And so the ending has the acceptable form of an approved feminist narrative–a humorous version of the Handmaid’s Tale, in which the audience is reminded that all kidding aside when men get a taste of male power it is curtains for the weaker sex. And so the only answer is to use feminine wiles to hold on to power. Do the fimmakers even buy this, or is it a subtle way of undermining the mandated feminist finale? Hmmmm. . . .
One way or another it is a depressing ending, and not just for me as a guy. I might like to think that a reversion to a more normal set of gender relations might allow for civilizational innovations like gentlemanly behavior and chivarly. But no. In the constricted terms set by the master narrative men can only be beasts when not forcibly constrained, and so it is the lot of women to reject any non-symmetrical partnership and to blow up any idea of accommodation.
And so at the end we have Barbie regaining a vagina while the Kens remain dickless in Barbieland. Gee what happened to the nice world Jill Clayburgh set out for us in It’s My Turn?
Barbie ends in rhapsodic self-infatuation, expressing no interest in a guy who would do anything for her, and with no mention made of why she would want a vagina other than as a statement of “empowerment”. I have lost track of what phase of feminism we are in but this feels to me like Z-Phase. Can’t go any further.
There is a better ending to this movie. In my ending both men and women recognize they are at the end of their respective ropes, and that they are in it together. They determine to work towards new cultural forms that accept that liberation without limits is unworkable, and that while biology is not destiny neither can it be waved away without a thought. I harbor the belief, too, that the filmmakers may share my thinking more than they might like to acknowledge. They’re pretty smart, and I find it hard to believe they could possibly take their atrocious conclusion seriously. Maybe a movie with a better ending will be possible in a few years and maybe not.
But who cares about intentionality? I said this would not be a piece of film criticism, and whether the creators might have done a braver ending is of no real import.
So we are left with Barbie as she is, and the weird sociology of her. A mostly entertaining film that played on the edge quite adroitly until the point at which the fun must end. Confucius, or someone else, said “man who has tongue too firmly in cheek may find head up ass.” Ditto for women.
You ask about Trump’s new NFP deal. It is ludicrous. Damaging? Dunno. The Dems and the anti-Trump Rs will do anything to keep him out and so we can expect all kinds of caterwauling, even from Rs, over how this or that thing goes too far and he is finally kaput. You and I even get caught up in it. Did he really step in it this time? Is he finally a goner?
Truth is I sure don’t know. The problem with our current state of affairs is that mere citizens are kept in a permanent state of not being able to know anything for sure. When the main sources of information you have relied on in a mass technological society to give you your bearings on most everything have been corrupted what do you do? You have to rely more on your own instincts, analysis and alternative sources but that is itself dicey. You end up having to piece things through by looking at this and that anomaly and considering what the disjointedness means.
Take the polling issue. It makes no sense that we would see two polls so very different relative to whether Rs favor T or D. What does that mean? Could be bad polling. More likely one is fake. Which one? Perhaps one should ask cui bono?
Consider these elements.
There is no question AT ALL that T has commanded the support of the base for a while now. And that his supporters have been notorious for sticking with him.
The poll saying D has a big lead seems to rely on the parts of the new R tent that are not in control— the wealthier and more educated Rs that have seen their party go working class and don’t like it. Why should this resentful anti-T minority suddenly emerge as the dominant group of voters?
By contrast the poll showing T in the lead seems more explicable— it is in keeping with past consistent support and it represents the views of a sample that probably was more balanced in terms of middle American, rather than country club, support.
Anti-Trump = Establishment = Deep State. These guys have shown they gave the superior means and will to do bad things like cook poll results. So, all else being equal, if one of the polls was cooked it was the one showing T support dropping and D surging.
Tentative conclusion : T still commands the base and the D poll is just the first of many 2024 psy-ops intended to break T.
No question D is getting his financial support from big money and T from small donors. That prompts T people to smell a rat — “D is just a Deep State shill”.
I think it is more complicated than that. As Robert Barnes says, D has the fingerprints of a candidate that was cultivated for years. That’s what they do, and it is how our political class may talk populism but always do as they are told. Look at D’s background and you can see suggestions of that.
But Barnes also says that that does not mean D is a patsy. If the only candidates we get are manufactured a great man will have to arise from those smelly roots. T was the exception of course , and the fact that he was not groomed and is unreliable is why they now hate him, after decades of safe and idiosyncratic celebrity.
But T is an outlier. Any senior politico who takes populism seriously will have had to opt to bite the hand that fed him. Barnes seems to think that is possible with D—that he is a smart and aggressive working class kid who rose in the conventional way but who may opt (like Putin) look to revive a weakened system of government to push back on oligarchic control.
That is a nice thought. I hope it is the case, since I would like both T and D to be my kind of candidate and let the best man win.
Besides, Barnes also thinks that the big money backing D doesn’t want him to win. They only want a war that damages both T and D, such that Pompeo or Haley or Pence can swoop in and save the day. I find that extremely credible. But if there is any truth to it for sure T and D both know the Regime wants both of them gone, especially if (as has been happening) D increasingly gets tough about his populist positions.
My guess is D is saying this:
“OK rich donors I will take your money even though I know what you are up to. You want me to kamikaze T. You don’t want me as president. But keep giving me money. That’s fine. I will use it to take positions at least as bold as Trump’s. I will do it with more force and clarity and drive than T himself (who, truth be told, is a flake and getting stale). So I will not flinch—I will run a race on Trumpian themes and think I can win that way. And if I win you will have to hope I will still be your boy. I may not. So you decide: keep backing me as a way to indirectly promote the anti-Trump crowd who at the moment have zero support. Or drop your support of me if you see me as a sincere populist, and try to find some other way to defang populism and install a Deep State shill in the presidency”.
If so, smart, and Putin-like, too. If that is what he is doing I could go for it.
I have hung with a highly flawed T as the devil I know. But he is honestly such a goofball. The Deep State doesn’t like him because he is erratic but he is erratic for me too.
He got suckered in on vaccines and made it all about China, not the corruption of public health on his own watch. And he still won’t acknowledge it. “We got these things to market in record time!” Meanwhile D is more and more taking on the public health demon within, and that is a good thing.
Let me step back and take the long view.
My earliest political inklings came during JFK, and his killing ushered in an entirely new era, from the Beatles, to America as world leader, to the Me Decade, to endless interventions. Interesting as the ride has been, I think my whole life has paralleled the slow destruction of self government in favor of good times under a managed state.
Those who insisted on the sovereignty of the people, or even that any kind of government should be supreme over private interests and the hidden levers of power that are beholden to them, were eliminated.
JFK was turning against an intelligence function just in its strapping adolescence when he was killed by it. RFK too. And King.
And even Nixon. Biggest landslide victory ever and out on his ass a couple of short years later. Watergate was essentially another establishment contrivance.
And Trump of course.
These guys are no longer strapping adolescents. They are mature adults now, and unscrupulous ones.
I think all of that is true, even if the media didn’t tell me so and I have had to piece it together. I just don’t want to have endless discussions anymore with my progressive friends who think we are still back in 1964 and it is all about fat Republican bankers who hate black people. This is the situation we live in now.
But if you get past all the bullshit and see the situation for what it is you are-alas-forced to confront new questions that your prior bickering kept from your view.
Are we at a point in history where self government cannot do what is expected of it? Is it inevitable that we would have seen the triumph of the professional and managerial classes and the institutions they control? Is it maybe even desirable? Are we becoming more like China for a reason — that all advanced technological societies will sooner rather than later resemble one another in terms of social control, lack of formal popular sovereignty, technological super-powers and transhuman tendencies?
Or are all the powerful forces at work unstable and brittle underneath? Will they fall despite their great powers, as the Martians were destroyed by viruses in the War of the Worlds? Our betters are no longer strapping adolescents but are they strong and powerful adults or are they rotting from within, already weakened codgers with big guns?
Or maybe it is not an either/or but a kind of both/and. Let’s say it is inevitable that the world has changed, that the republic envisioned by the Constitution is not feasible, that the professional and managerial classes have the upper hand for a reason, that they will if left unchecked stamp out any remaining self-government in an attempt to create a new authoritarian approach more akin to China, and that they will attempt to outrun any popular pushback by giving the people what they seem to want and urging them to let the good times roll on.
But alongside that it may also that they may end up failing to persuade people they are delivering good times. People may eventually . . . ummm . . . notice that their wealth has evaporated, their public works are in disarray, that government is by and for the oligarchs, that they do not like no border, no gender distinctions, no identity.
In this #3 alternative we will need to square the obvious inadequacy of our corrupted form of government and our dissatisfaction with what it produces with the clear strength and power of the new tools transforming the world. We cannot wish away the world transforming abilities of AI, robotics, genetic engineering, social credit scores, and the surveillance state. Madison’s three branches of government, pitted against one another, and his presumption of the cleansing powers of a free press, may not be a workable tool for future use.
We invented a Constitution from scratch to deal with new problems. We may have to do something like that again. A document aiming to cultivate habits of liberty and a modicum of legitimacy and sovereignty in an age where we unavoidably have to deal with entirely new problems. Unless “the people”—whatever that means—get serious about the new world they live in the tools used to fashion that world will be owned by an oligarchic class.
We need some kind of new Constitution or, barring that, at least new modes of thinking and discussion aimed at a reassertion of popular sovereignty and a takedown of those who feel entitled to rule over us in an unaccountable fashion.
Is that possible? Probably not in one step. History works like rock-paper-scissors. Experience suggests that democracies descend to oligarchies that descend to tyrants that ascend — if you are lucky—to self government. I think we may need a detour to a tyrant before we can come back to self government.
Fairhaven, a town just across the harbor from the old whaling port of New Bedford, is one of my favorite places in New England. Like the still relatively undiscovered Newburyport and Bristol RI it has been spared both the pessimist’s child urban renewal and the optimist’s darling gentrification.
It was the second largest port early on, only later eclipsed by New Bedford, at which time it became a center for seafaring support and a close in suburb for the wealthier class. Melville has the Pequot setting sail from Fairhaven in Moby Dick.
The “downtown” area is lovely but raises questions. The architecture is stunning — a gargantuan town hall
a public library
and various public buildings and churches, some more monumental
and some stripped down New England.
And a few blocks from town hall, a massive and ornate high school.
But there are disconnects. First, where is the village center? The significant public and religious buildings are clustered but that is that. Given the grand scale of these buildings and their appeal you might expect some commercial activity. There is very little to be found. The impression is that of an imposing grouping of buildings dropped into a 19th century neighborhood.
Fairhaven is and was a town —16,000 souls today and less than 3,000 in the time of whaling. Quite small for such architecture.
The town describes the town hall:
The interior features quartered oak paneling, solid brass fixtures and leaded, stained glass windows. The tower houses a four-faced clock. The magnificent auditorium on the second floor, restored in the 1990s, has been the site of many town meetings, dances, concerts, plays and theatrical performances. Humorist Mark Twain, a close friend of Rogers, appeared on stage here on February 22, 1894, as the keynote speaker at the building’s dedication ceremony.
But in discussing its current functions:
Among the services that visitors to Fairhaven might need from the Town Hall are: • Shellfishing Permits • Boat Stickers • Notary
Further, it is not the case that the buildings showcase the town at its whaling prime. Whaling started its decline in the 1860s while the grand architecture came later, around the turn of the century. So they cannot be evidence of the extreme wealth of New Bedford across the harbor, for a time the richest city in the world.
The answer is to be found in that curious class of elites, the WASP aristocracy. Turns out one of Rockefeller’s oil boys, Henry H. Rogers, was a local, and on his own dime built the grand structures and gave them to the town (along with a water system and other improvements).
So it seems that the sense of place is not really related to the industry we associate with the area. It is not an illusion exactly but it is not exactly organic either.
Used to be philanthropy had a good name and for the most part it earned it. Nowadays it is about 1) put my name on it for status or, far worse and far more common at extreme levels of “giving” 2) let us change the world in very specific ways to my liking. It is not so much about supporting a worthy endeavor than about me.
Too bad the prudence and restraint of our forbears was so easily hacked.
Following the tour of Fairhaven my wife and I made our way to our favorite Portuguese restaurant, Antonio’s, a neighborhood joint in New Bedford. The kind of place where in Portuguese style they figure glasses of liquids, including wine, are meant to be filled up.
And where $18.99 buys you enough pork, clams, shrimp and fried potatoes in a garlic paprika sauce to feed an army.
My concerns about philanthropy old and new vanished for a couple of hours.
Fenster has a good friend, a doppelganger, really, who is on the board of a non-profit farm in upstate New York. The farm is situated in the heart of what has come to be known as the burned-over district, that section of Western New York roughly in the Rochester area, that burned very hot with religious enthusiasms in the first half of the 19th century.
The burned-over district refers to the western and central regions of New York in the early 19th century, where religious revivals and the formation of new religious movements of the Second Great Awakening took place.
The term was coined by Charles Grandison Finney, who in his 1876 book Autobiography of Charles G. Finney, referred to a “burnt district” to denote an area in central and western New York State during the Second Great Awakening. He felt that the area had been so heavily evangelized as to have no “fuel” (unconverted population) left over to “burn” (convert).
In references where the religious revival is related to reform movements of the period, such as abolition, women’s rights, and utopian social experiments, the region is expanded to include those areas of central New York that were important to these movements.
The burned-over period, being part of the so-called Second Great Awakening, is often understood in religious terms. But it was not only religion itself that burned hot. The passions of the age, while connected deeply to religion given the central role of religion in American life in the early 1800s, were very much social in character as well. The fires that burned upstate were often explicitly about abolition, women’s rights and a host of other progressive social causes.
The farm Fenster’s pal is associated with was scorched not once but twice. It was for a time the setting for a Shaker Community. That group was highly successful business-wise given its natural industriousness. It eventually would have had the problems of all Shaker communities–lucky in work unlucky in love, as it were. The Shakers had a good business model that, while possibly scalable, was not really reproducible. The community, fearing the bad sorts that a proposed canal from Lake Ontario to the Erie Canal might bring to the area, moved further west, and faded there.
Within a few years the property was sold to yet another utopian enterprise–the Fourierists. In some ways the Fourierists were the opposite of the Shakers–lucky in love unlucky at work. While the formal tenets of Fourieriesm as developed in Europe called for order and hierarchy in a planned community the fires burning in America gave Fourierism a different edge, one that emphasized a radical individualism and a permissive attitude towards personal growth via freedom. Unlike the Shakers the Fourierists were open about marriage and sexuality, but they could not manage a farm, run a seed business, or make nice furniture. The community cratered soon after opening, somewhat in the manner of the unstable hippie communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Doesn’t it seem odd that as the prim Shakers were leaving by the back door the freewheeling Fourierists were coming in the front? Yes the Shakers were ending their run around this time, having spread from English religious enthusiasms of the late 1700s. But the two quite different groups nearly overlapped. Not to mention the patriarchal but somewhat irregular Mormons, sprung to life by Joseph Smith in the nearby town of Palymyra. And the very permissive Oneida Community some 50 miles away.
Several things stand out about this. First, a lot of people seem to have had it with traditional marriage. The answer might be a chaste polygamy, a super-chaste regime of no sex, or a permissive regime of a kind of open marriage. But the status quo won’t do.
Second, a lot of this ferment can be tracked back to those perennial troublmakers and archtypal virtue signalers–the universalist-oriented descendants of the New England Puritans. As Albion’s Seed makes clear when the morally zealous New Englanders headed west their first stop was in upstate New York. Indeed, as a result of various historical and political circumstances New Englanders in search of new horizons skipped over the Mohawk River valley and Syracuse ended up being the main settlers of the Rochester region west.
Third, it is interesting that when you peel back religion, or other high-minded matters, you come so quickly to the carnal, or at least that disputed area where the carnal and high-minded meet. Is that so odd? Consider Michael Tracey’s excellent dissection of the quasi-religious mania on current display. The response to George Floyd’s death went well past the demands of current day abolitionism and slipped quite quickly into a supercharged outburst over, of all things, trans rights. Black trans, to be sure, given the intersectional way of things, but trans nonetheless.
We appear to have another first class mania on our hands, once again fixated on sex. But who are the maniacs? As Tracey points out they appear to be white, educated and privileged. They may not be direct descendants of the Puritans heading west from New England. But I strongly suspect that Yankees comprise some of the holiest of the holy. And even if some of the current maniacs are from sections of the country that were not settled by the Puritans many are likely to have been educated in woke institutions that trace their values and ideas to Puritan origin. Damn Yankees.
My overall response was very much in tune with Razib Khan’s thoughts on religion. Do you know Razib? He is a whirling dervish in a way: a Pakistani immigrant atheist polymath autodidact, especially in the realm of genetics. All traits are heritable to greater or lesser degrees in his view, with spirituality no exception.
But if that is what science tells you how do you integrate that into your life? Does not a conumdrum result? In particular, despite the fact that ideas present themselves to us in our heads as “ours”, as taking place in our individual noggins, the confluence of biology and culture suggests that our ideas are to a large extent social ideas–formed by cultural evolution and with some kind of adaptive purpose historically.
Our “reason” tells us this is not the case. No, by Jove, my ideas are my ideas! I use my reason!
If that is so what does that mean for us, in our individual heads, as we reflect on our seemingly individual ideas? It’s all kind of “meta”–but to me boils down to accepting a modest view as regards my own heroic ability to reason things through. I think this conundrum is what Robert Frost was getting at in Mending Wall.
Religion is not the purview of technically oriented nerds, and technically oriented nerds just don’t “get” it intuitively. This is something that is relevant to me personally, because I am myself a technically oriented nerd, and I just don’t “get” religion.
A few years ago I was asking a co-worker whey he believed in ghosts, and he stated: “because I’m human.” This is actually a good response. . . .
My realization that I was an atheist occurred when I was eight, as I thought for a few moments about the idea that God might not exist. At that moment I realized I did not think God existed, and, I also realized I hadn’t really thought about it before because religion was simply something I never really gave much thought to. . . .
Between 1995 and 2005 I went through a “Richard Dawkins” phase. . . .
But (a) reading program convinced me ultimately that I had “got it all wrong.” I had recreated religion in my own image, rather than understanding what it was in its own terms. I had turned the beliefs of illiterate and unintellectual masses of people into contingency tables and model logic! Rather than understand religion, I ended up arguing with something I could comprehend on a deep level.
He asks “what is religion?” and answers that it is “many things.” Mystical experiences, revelation, dogma, creed, social control and on and on and on.
(M)ysticism, collective rituals, and the communal identity which emerges out of that, is the raison d’etre of religion, and why religions are universal and share broad family resemblances. What about theology? What about the details of scripture? These are things religious professionals care about, but religious professionals are a function of complex stratified societies that emerged over the last several thousand years. Martin Luther was historically important, but his theological obsessions were really not.
Religious professionals though are the individuals that technically oriented nerds often go to to “understand” religion. This gives us a skewed and misleading view, and it means we misunderstand large aspects of history.
Like Razib I don’t have much by way of the “God gene.” And while I never went through a Dawkins phase I admit to a sense of near certitude for a while in the godless view of things. But I am in my own way a nerd like Razib and over time I came to see that it was kind of silly, really, to take potshots at the view of religion that I had constructed in my own head.
While the essays in the book are hardly uniform the fact that they are assembled by a skeptic and come mainly from that angle they do seem to partake a bit too much of the problem Razib cites. The authors protest too much. Jeez if atheism is a sure thing why is it so dang important to prove religion “wrong”? It seems to reveal more about the character complaining than it does about the thing complained about.
I suppose you can argue that it is important to skewer religion since if you don’t the ignorant religious masses will burn you at the stake. Maybe that argument held a little water in the 90s, when the essays were published. But now? It no longer takes bravery to take on religion–it takes a brave man to defend its claims. Show me the last time religion–especially Christianity, especially Catholicism–was taken seriously in the mainstream culture. When it was not openly mocked? So the argument “I had to take it down since it was after me” does not hold up. In fact, beating up on religion risks bully-boy behavior more than the opposite.
Setting that justification aside what do you have in terms of actual argument? I am not impressed. The main problem is that the critics seem to luxuriate in taking pot shots at assertions about history that do not seem reasonable–the Virgin Birth and all that. OK, take your shot. But it just feels like a weak straw man argument–make fun of the silly historical claims. But what of the mystical revelation that powered it all up? What about the intense social bonds that were generated from the power of the idea as it spread from person to person? Taking issue with historical accuracy is thin gruel.
And beyond even that how do the critics deal with the biological and cultural arguments that are presented by actual . . . science?
Stipulate that most humans are endowed with a spiritual capacity, and that the predisposition is in some significant measure genetic in origin. Is the correct response on the part of those not so endowed to push a buzzer–WRONG!! Might that tendency also betray one’s own default make-up? You don’t have the God Gene but then presume that your Superior Reasoning is an attribute that it is without its own genetic support–that you are somehow mysteriously capable of “seeing through it all” and coming to a Rational Conclusion that the universe is godless? That by making an argument criticizing intelligent design that somehow you can see into the inner workings of the universe, and can vouch that there is nothing there but the void?
Who is the true believer here? Moreover, who is the one ignoring science?
Of course not that many in the book showed this kind of intellectual arrogance. But it was in there, especially from the editor, who on more than one occasion seems to delight in making fun of the lower orders who are mired in belief. To my mind you have only to read the body language embedded in his prose to see him as having a catechism of his own, and a chip on his shoulder to boot.
All humans seem to have a need to organize the chaos of existence into a kind of order, continually folding and dicing and slicing and re-arranging so that in the end it all rolls up into an intelligible system. Call it God or call it No God. We yearn for wholeness, even in the void.
Me too. I will always push that rock up the hill like Sisyphus. But I know the rock is going to come down too. If a kind of double consciousness results so be it. No one made me God. I may not believe in ghosts but I am also, like Razib’s friend, only human.
It is a good thing we have free speech embedded in the Constitution since it is damn near impossible to amend the thing. Further, hypocrisy being the tribute vice pays to virtue, there is as of yet no real support to get rid of the idea, as there is with the Second Amendment. Even those who oppose free speech . . . er . . . support it.
In some ways it is better to force fights to the surface. We all know what we are talking about when it is matter of eliminating the right to own a gun. The problem with fights imbued with excess hypocrisy is that evasion and subterfuge make it harder to allow for necessary conflict between the real issues at stake.
But for now we will have “free speech”. But will we have “free speech” without the scare quotes? Will we have, if you will, free speech? That is not so clear.
I have argued often here that since I don’t believe in absolutes I am not a free speech absolutist. No idea occupies Platonic space since the that space does not exist. But I am as close to absolutism on this issue as pragmatism allows. I recognize that speech cannot be, in the words of Frank Zappa, absolutely free.
Prevailing interpretation of the First Amendment allows for very robust speech. That’s a good thing. But of course there a limits and caveats. Mostly this means that the categories of speech that are in the domain of the Amendment do not enjoy protection in the utterance of “fighting words”, narrowly understood to mean just what those two words suggest.
Beyond interpretation of intent, I will also acknowledge that free speech under real not simulated conditions may not have its much vaunted cleansing efffect if it is allowed to roam too freely under conditions of chaos, or intense factional disagreement. Free speech is alleged to help work through disagreements. Most of the time yes. Sometimes no.
Factional disagreement may get so hot that it will be tough to manage even with a fighting words doctrine. But things get even more complicated when a great many of those subject to the Amendment’s reach simply do not agree with the current interpretation, or when cultural differences result in too little consensus on what is reasonable and what not.
If reasonable men cannot agree on what “reasonbleness” means, reasonably speaking, then the “reasonable man” function, central to the law’s operations, will short-circuit. Or worse, get hacked. All the more reason to support an order that encourages free speech to flourish, and to be mindful that culture matters.
There are of course no fixed boundaries where interpetation is concerned, and whether the Court will remain a firm supporter of the current view is uncertain.
For one, someone has to sue, the Court has to take the case and then resolve it in a way the makes things at least temporarily clearer going foward, until the next case bollixes everything up again.
In the meantime, meaning right now, there are a lot of things happening–actual actions by people and institutions– that appear at odds with the Constitution. They are free to continue unless the Court makes it clear they cannot. At present: come and get me copper!
When and if a nice, ripe case makes its way to the Court how will the Court handle it? The law is often rightly accused of relating itself too directly to public opinion — but what is public opinion on this issue at present? Where is the deep shift that might prompt a Justice to take account of it, and to treat it as a troublesome yet worthy consideration in a Constitutional review?
No, if rollbacks gain traction it won’t be on the basis of clearly evolving standards, as was the case with certain matters involving race and sex. The pressure will come from the assertion of one faction about the need for another faction to shape up. In this case that means that well before we get to a court of law the leading institutions will articulate new standards as a fact, well before any cultural consensus will have taken shape on its own. This is what we call leadership.
These new standards will suddenly show up everywhere. This will be described as evidence, of course–evidence of the deep cultural consensus the new standards reflect. Effect before cause, probably–but we will get there in due time.
So the next time “fighting words” comes up at the Supeme Court we will have legal briefs asserting words are a form of violence. Scholars like George Lakoff will present the science backing up the notion that actual harm can be caused by an offensive comment.
It will be argued that “fighting words” must be adapted for our new 21st century scientific understandings of vioence and harm, and that if, Your Honor, you do not find the science argument persuasive we have a whole stack of justifications in here in this briefcase.
And then we will have the commentariat, too, free of the need to cloak their views in legalese, and taking the issue into the political square. Ta-Nehisi Coates will assert that that only a white man could imagine words cannot do harm. He will be lionized for his bravery.
Those things will come in time. Now, the battlefield must be prepared.
A lot has changed since January 6. I’m not a conspiracy addict but I must say it is as though someone flipped a switch on that date.
On this issue, as on many others it seems, there is before January 6 and after January 6.
Take Inside Higher Education. It is the accessible, shorter-form and digital counterpart to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A brief journey through the archives since 2005 reveals pretty much what you’d expect. Free speech is generally the good guy, sometime sharing the stage with a worthy challenger but always with its eloquent defenders.
But now comes the post-January 6 world, where everything is fraught. It’s fraught I tell you! Fraught! The lead article in the current Inside Higher Ed even puts it just that way: handing free speech is A Fraught Balancing Act.
You remember balancing acts, right? They are often used in formal legal review, with the Justices balancing one set of arguments against another, often rendering their opinion on the basis of a balance test analysis.
Yet the Supreme Court’s current views on free speech already incorporate balance. The result is what is called the law, which is supposed to be obeyed, not made subject to another amateur hour balancing test at Bennington College.
But let us not question the folk process. All the right folk are in favor of change and we little folk will be expected to dance to the music by-and-by. Take that balancing act, prole!
Here is the opening to the article. Keep in mind this is not in the journal’s opinion section but appears to be news.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Trump, college leaders are being asked to confront dangerous and offensive speech by students and faculty and staff members that promote false claims about the 2020 election and support the violence that occurred last week as a result of the spread of such claims.
The calls for administrators to rid their colleges of those who hold such views, and to examine how their institutions combat misinformation, is often complicated by First Amendment protections. Colleges and universities, after all, are meant to be forums for students to voice, debate and defend arguments founded in truth, experts on political expression said.
I submit you would not have found the blithe but dangerous assumptions on display here in an article at ICE from ten years ago, and probably not even in an article a few months ago. The new baseline assumptions embedded in this article are breathtaking in scope and sudden in appearance.
I am not going to parse the assumptions in those short paragraphs. The paradigm shift ought to be blazingly apparent.
I think it all reprehensible. But there it is, in all the innocence of its infancy. The New Mandatory Consensus.
In the moment so pure and tender. The rhetoric so caring and deep. But the dang thing cries a lot, and I worry that as they gets older the crying will continue, in deeper registers.
Tucker Carlson: Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. The events that unfolded in dramatic fashion on January 6 were terrible. It is terrible that we saw violence take place in the one building that most symbolizes our frayed republic and the values that are necsessary to sustain it. It is terrible that some Trump supporters, a small number to be sure, engaged in acts that are reprehensible. They should be brought to justce. But make no mistake: that is not the end of the terribleness.
The rest of the monologue, along with the introduction of his first guest, here.
You write that perhaps Pence can simply not open some of the envelopes. I am not so sure about that one.
I have not heard the argument that Pence can decline to open an envelope. And I don’t see that idea lurking in the penumbra of the passage you cited.
The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.
The language, especiallly “shall”, appears to me to direct the VP to open the envelopes. And I think the Electoral Count Act, which may or may not be constitional, directs him to open “all”.
As I understand it the ambiguity turns on the discretion he has after the votes are on view, including the votes from states where there are two slates sent in.
Giuiliani says one argument for wide discretion comes from the election of 1800, where VP Jefferson, as President of the Senate, decided the dispute in his own favor and beat Burr. That was a total mess, and the constitutional framework at the time was quite different. So I am not sure you can easily draw from that the conclusion that Pence can open the envelopes and decide on his own to reject some, or choose one over the other.
I haven’t studied it because it seems to get murky pretty quickly in terms of history and precedent but I am still failing to grasp the source of the assertion, put bluntly by Trump yesterday, that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” Is the argument here that Pence can on his own determine electors were chosen in a fraudulent way?
There is massive evidence of fraud and I believe the election was stolen. But as with any legal process you need to put the facts into the meat grinder and see what comes out. The states have had ample opportunity to weigh the arguments for fraud and have gone ahead and certified. That is pathetic but if the Constitutional process has been followed who is Pence to make the call? You can also make the argument that the judicial branch should step in and override the state processes on other grounds found in the Constitution and related to the evidence that the election was fraudulent.
The Court appears to favor the view that the resolution ought to be in the sphere of messy politics and seems reluctant to jump in and short circuit the political working through by invoking due process or some other constitutional concept. That’s pretty pathetic too.
So the system seems to have embedded in it a moral hazard that invites stealing big. A huge and obvious theft creates the grounds for its own success: the more massive the corruption the more both legislatures and the courts are invited to blind themselves to the obvious. Theft on a massive scale is then a way to hack the system.
You might think the framers would have thought it all through with their rock-paper-scissors logic and said “gee, in that case we need to have the buck stop with the President of the Senate. She can stop an out of control hack that slid through our best laid plans for a legitimate election.” But did the framers do that? If not maybe we have to accept that that the system has been hacked.
There’s the overlay of the Electoral Count Act of 1877, which may or may not be constitutional. At that my eyes glaze over. But whether the processes in that Act are constitutional or not I am still not seeing the source of the VP’s discretion in the moment to not open envelopes or do deem the election fraudulent on the basis of the the “regularly given” language or anything else.
It may be that there are limits to using an ordered lens at this point. There may be just too much chaos in the system, and it will have to be worked through chaotically. That’s one meaning of the word “crisis”. The illusions we create for ourselves that all is not flux work most of the time but then sometimes fail, and we look into the abyss. State legislatures, governors, Congress and Supreme Court justices seem willing to fall in. What about the executive branch?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 