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Say It Loud – I’m Woke and I’m Proud

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/16/say-it-loud-im-woke-and-im-proud/
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 01:00
Black leaders clap back at DeSantis Go ahead, Gov. Ron DeSantis. Use the N-word. You know you want to. It’s what his obsession with “woke” is about. It’s barely a dog whistle. Right-wing extremists have adopted woke as a synonym for Black. DeSantis, GOP officials, and conservative pundits also have weaponized woke as a four-letter word (conveniently) for branding white allies of Black Americans as “N-lovers.” The right means to turn back the clock to the pre-Brown 1950s that Donald Trump promised and failed to deliver for Republicans’ shrinking white base. Turning opponents strengths into weaknesses is classic Karl Rove. The right turned “liberal” into a smear. DeSantis and the right are doing the same with woke, left activist shorthand for being tuned into issues of racial justice. DeSantis trying to ban the teaching of Black history courses in Florida as part of that effort has generated blowback. Black activists have had enough. “I heard you say that Florida is the state where ‘woke’ comes to die….

The Specter of “Woke Communism”

https://tomdispatch.com/the-specter-of-woke-communism/
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:56

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and perhaps the next president of the United States, is waging war against something he and many others on the right identify as “woke communism.” DeSantis even persuaded the Florida legislature to pass a Victims of Communism law, mandating that every November 7th (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia), all public schools in the state must devote 45 minutes of instruction to the evils of the red menace. You might reasonably ask: What menace? After all, the Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago and, long before that, communist parties around the world had dwindled in numbers and lost their revolutionary zeal. The American Communist Party was buried alive nearly three-quarters... Read more

An Open Letter to the Woman Who Won’t Let Me Join the Moms Group Because I Am a Stay-at-Home Dad

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-woman-who-wont-let-me…
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:01

Dear Administrator of the Moms Group in Our Upper-Middle-Class Town,

I know I don’t fit all of your qualifications. Namely, the mom part.

However, I implore you to overlook the minor issue of my gender and peer into my soul. My exhausted, unappreciated, and lonesome stay-at-home father soul starved for communication beyond the incessant singing of Cocomelon.

Thank you so much for inviting my wife to your weekday morning get-togethers, but again, she can’t make it—she has work. And again, I can make it, as I’ve abandoned my career (note: not in childcare) to fetch organic gummy bunnies and anticipate the needs of two toddlers every second of every day for—wait for it—no compensation.

I understand and acknowledge that women deserve a safe space far from the male gaze. A wonderful dreamland where moms feel secure to recognize each other’s dedication to their kids and make passive-aggressive comments about the childrearing tactics of whichever mom didn’t show up that day. Sheer bliss.


Clare Bucknell: Don’t wait to be asked

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/clare-bucknell/don-t-wait-to-be-asked
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits or portraits of other women artists, presenting, implicitly, an idea of the female painter as both a subject for portraiture and a professional in her own right.


Michael Wood: At the Movies

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/michael-wood/at-the-movies
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice (‘un arrêt, mais pas la justice’). She talks of mothers and children, born and unborn, exchanging cells that scientists call ‘chimerical’. ‘We women are all monsters, but terribly human monsters.’


Abigail Green: Belonging to No Nation

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/abigail-green/belonging-to-no-nation
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
As Jessica Marglin argues, the Shamama case offers an ‘insight into the way legal belonging was proved – not only in the Shamama lawsuit but in countless cases both before and since: as a narrative’. Scholars of European nationalism have long understood that citizenship and nationality cannot be readily equated, and that legal and ethnocultural belonging are not the same thing, but there is nonetheless a benefit in viewing these issues through the eyes of a Tunisian Jew.


Eric Foner: Double V

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/eric-foner/double-v
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
While Blacks were fighting for the Double V – victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home – the federal government’s recruitment posters promoted the idea that military success would restore the prewar world, grounded in traditions of work, family and, implicitly, segregation. (Senator James Eastland of Mississippi was quite candid about this: on the Senate floor he declared that white soldiers were ‘fighting to maintain white supremacy’.)


Oliver Cussen: Cities of Fire and Smoke

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/oliver-cussen/cities-of-fire-and-smoke
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
It might be easy to conclude that 17th-century​ Europeans dismissed any natural limits to progress, or were oblivious to its impact on the environment. But the modern project of autonomy and abundance if anything made it easier to attribute ecological change to human agency. Far from rendering the environment invisible, the Enlightenment turned it into a subject of political and economic debate.


William Davies: The Reaction Economy

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/william-davies/the-reaction-economy
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practised. Any culture that lavishes praise on ‘authenticity’ to the extent that ours does will be beset by worries regarding ‘fakery’.


Charles Glass: Diary

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/charles-glass/diary
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
When I returned last year, the garbage was piled so high on the pavements that pedestrians had to compete with lunatic drivers for right of way. The private electricity generators were mostly quiet – few can afford the fuel needed to run them. The Ponzi scheme that the Lebanese central bank had been running for years caused the private banks to collapse in 2019.


Raymond N. MacKenzie: Trop Dandy

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/raymond-n.-mackenzie/trop-dandy
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
George Sand found the tall, slim Musset, with his fashionably dishevelled blond hair, more agreeable than she had expected. He wrote poems for her and sent her sketches. There was no talk of love. On the contrary: when it comes to love, he wrote, there’s a whole Baltic Sea between us. This was written on 24 July. In one of the century’s finest volte-faces, the very next day he wrote: ‘My dear Georges, I have something stupid and ridiculous to tell you . . . I’m in love with you.’


James Butler: This Concerns Everyone

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/james-butler/this-concerns-everyone
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work.


Tareq Baconi: Short Cuts

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/tareq-baconi/short-cuts
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
Palestinians understand that Israel is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for non-Jews. But just like the Green Line, this is a false separation, since the Jewish democratic system itself is dependent on ethnic exclusion and demographic engineering. The liberals condemning the rise of fascism in Israeli politics are fighting for the rights of only part of the population.


Adam Shatz: On Ming Smith

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/adam-shatz/on-ming-smith
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
Ming Smith often compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look at my work.’ There’s sometimes a melancholy in her photographs of Black life, but it’s offset by the same ironical awareness that infuses the blues.


Matthew Bevis: Cool Vertigo

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/matthew-bevis/cool-vertigo
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
Many maps have been offered over the years to assist the reader-quester, but if somebody gets a map out in one of Auden’s poems it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In one lyric a lover is advised to ‘Stand up and fold/Your map of desolation’. Auden country still feels unchartable, a space into which you are dropped, given a few co-ordinates and left to fend for yourself.


Barclay Bram: Against America

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/barclay-bram/against-america
Created
Fri, 17/02/2023 - 00:00
When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang Huning wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.