October 07, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…

Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer

… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…

1. Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here

2. How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
3. How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
4. How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoe Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers

… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…

Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions

In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.

Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani

Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico

The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.

Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love

Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”

10-04-2022

… HCR this morning mostly about the mounting trouble for various actors on the far right and the challenge to democracy… the noose closing around 45’s neck and the violence he seeks to sponsor to distract and prevent… it is a race to see if he becomes president before he is jailed, in which case he would never be jailed… the Oath Keepers go on trial… Moore v Harper was heard by SCOTUS… the conservative judges are flirting with giving states absolute rights to determine elections… the so called “independent state legislature” doctrine is being determined… 45 has been definitively tied to withholding documents from the government by a witness… Herschel Walker continues to melt down…

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

… read with interest Zeba Blay’s review of Blonde… her main complaint is that it fetishize Monroe’s pain to no good purpose and that the movie was boring… H agreed with that assessment… i did not… i thought it effectively showed the appalling behavior of patriarchal males while not pandering to that behavior with highly erotic (to most people) scenes… to the extent that nudity and sex were in the film, and there was lots of both, it wasn’t very titillating, at least not to me… still, one needs to pay attention to women on the subject because they know things men will never know about being a woman in a patriarchal society…

… Sidelined No More: Reading List of Fiercely Political Women… so many books one could read… so little time… the article makes an extensive argument that women still are not taken seriously when they write about politics seriously and offers up a selection of books by women authors past and present…

Among the Washington Post’s columnists, who mostly cover politics, 57 are men and 26 are women. In the last two months, the New York Times’s opinion pages published 77 political analyses by men and only 29 by women. Half of those women-authored pieces had a male co-author.

Male domination of writing on politics in America is most extreme in the conservative press. In the National Review, 90% of the recent political analyses were by men, and the quarterly Claremont Review of Books—which prides itself on being the intellectual heart of the American right—has gone two and a half entire years without publishing a single feature essay written by a woman.

The problem isn’t, or isn’t only, a moral one. Readers are denied something by this exclusion. Sometimes women have an especially intimate way of writing about politics that’s both close-up—examining the psychology and the erotics of power—and carries an interesting objectivity and distance, thanks, perhaps, to their own history of being distanced from the political sphere.

… relative to HCR’s post above is J. Michael Luttig’s piece in The Atlantic arguing that the “Independent State Legislature” theory is bunk…

If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states. It would mean that the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures would not be reviewable by the state courts—including the states’ highest court—under their state constitutions.

That as many as six justices on the Supreme Court have flirted with the independent-state-legislature theory over the past 20 years is baffling. There is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.

The state supreme court’s decision under the North Carolina constitution is conclusive under that constitution, and it is only reviewable by the federal courts and the Supreme Court of the United States thereafter for a determination of whether that decision violates the federal Constitution.

All of which goes to confirm that the Constitution neither contemplates nor permits federal constitutional commandeering of the states’ constitutions and their judicial processes. Rather, it contemplates and provides only for federal judicial review of the state supreme courts’ state constitutional decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court for consistency with the United States Constitution.

… we will know next summer how bad the current iteration of SCOTUS is… there is, unfortunately, reason to be concerned…

In this post I share an article on why Socialism is a turnoff for most of the people it might help.

I keep thinking that capitalism needs significant revision if not to be replaced by something altogether focused in a different direction. To me, it is obvious that the market capitalist system, built as it is on exploitation of resources and people, destroys as much value as it creates. Some form of socialism might help mitigate the situation and yet, working class and lower middle class American citizens have been taught that socialism is to their economic health as sunlight is to a vampire. Add to that the perception, not entirely unwarranted, that Democrats are elitist and out of touch with their issues.

Former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has described the image of his party this way: “coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.”

In this post I share an article that explains the value proposition of capitalism, which is the pumping of wealth from “the periphery,”—cheap labor, undervalued resources—to the center where societies based on excessive appetite vacuum it up. The solution that is groped towards is to delink local economies by emphasizing the fulfillment of local needs with local and traditional production, while maintaining some international trade around things that might be unique to one place or another and of interest/value to a broader public because of its uniqueness, not a production cost difference.

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

And then there was an article about the crisis of masculinity. What astonished me the most were the statistics about where women and men are, relatively, in the work force. It bares quoting again here.

Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the labor force today than during the Great Depression.

That’s huge progress for women. It makes the blowback of the patriarchal structure even more comprehensible. Not only is the mostly white, male power structure under threat from minorities who collectively will be a majority in the country in the near future, but even more so by women in general who are overtaking men in every category. It is no surprise that there is a strong push by this patriarchal structure to overturn democracy, and to hammer women back to the dark ages where they had no control over their bodies. Thus, the increasingly draconian laws passed that criminalize abortion and the intention of the same conservatives in this crowd to outlaw birth control.

I posted one of my favorite Moby Dick quotes which I will re-quote here.

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

It seems to me that this sentiment, I would say truth, underlies an awful lot of significant film making and literature. Think, the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home), or, fresh in the theaters, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It also ties in with the delinking of local economies idea above. If the most important things are those that are close at hand, perhaps delinking is the way to go.

As I look back over the past week in posts, I feel grounded, even if worried about the future. Grounded because having a daily practice of reading, writing, posting, then reviewing at the end of the week, helps to keep my sense of being in the world intact. Worried because I didn’t really expect to be confronting the possible collapse of Democracy in the United States as one of my ‘golden years’ planning scenarios.

In some ways I am bewildered it has gotten to this place, but, I saw the struggle and eventual crescendo years ago. I remember being in a local cafe and talking to somebody about the challenge to white patriarchy unfolding in the country. I am pretty sure this was during the early years of the Obama administration. A young white dude sitting nearby said he was studying that very thing in college and that I was right. He seemed surprised that an older white dude could be aware of it and name it. To what degree either of us white dudes was as enlightened as we felt ourselves to be in that moment is another question.

I am on the most comfortable ground when I am taking in the 360 degree view. I am a generalist. I am good at seeing big pictures, less good at developing detailed plans and seeing them through. The big picture to me has been, for a long time, the challenge of the multicultural promise of our democracy to hegemonic white patriarchal order.

Large numbers of white people, and we should resist the temptation to label them ‘white supremacists,’ favor white patriarchal control, either consciously or subconsciously. It is better understood, I think, as the privileged wanting to retain their privileges. Why wouldn’t they? It has been the state of things since the founding of the country. It has conferred a significant advantage to conducting their affairs which would be hard for any group to give up. It has been the foundation of their identity for as long as they have been living. Nobody likes to loose ground or the foundations of their identity, which is exactly what must happen to white men and women if the multiarchy (as I like to call it) is to emerge.

The entitlement and anxieties of white men and women are not new. They have reached crescendos in the past (Civil War anyone?). However, the present shift in demographics has brought white anxiety and insecurity to the surface in a profound way.

Good leadership could steer us through the transitional rapids to the multiarchy without overturning the boat of our democracy. Unfortunately, that is not what seems to be prevailing right now (though there have lately been some hopeful signs). Instead there is the leadership of desperate, mostly white, men and women who no longer believe in democracy because it won’t maintain their privileges. They are exploiting racial animus and resorting to minority rule tactics to maintain their position at the top.

I believe in the multiarchy. I will do what I can to help birth it, or at least not stand in the way of it. I have no idea which way this struggle is going to go. Some days I am in despair, on others I am hopeful. It’s a continuous effort to take each day as it comes and be grateful for it. Reading, writing and blogging helps.

First notes…

227.8 lbs

… 24 hrs till departure… things are more or less on track… a few more dangling ends than i would like, but they should be tied up by end of day…

… we watched A Very Murray Christmas last night… it was generally good except for the patriarchal configuration which was generally pretty traditional and maybe more than a little outdated?… it contained the song Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which has come to be known in some quarters as the “date rape song”… as i was listening to it the only thing that stood out to me was the “what’s in this drink” line, which suggests to some in present day audiences that the woman is being drugged… i get that, but, as usual the situation seems more nuanced… it’s worth reading this wikipedia article which outlines the controversy over the song… it is interesting that as contexts change, meanings change too… i generally like the song and the most significant thing to me is that the woman, while resisting, essentially consents… at no time in any performance of the song does she seem out of control… the “what’s in this drink?” line did hang me up a bit… the wikipedia article explains that this line essentially quotes “a common idiom of the period used to sidestep social expectations by blaming one’s actions on the influence of alcohol.”…

… we also watched Chocolat, which was a great movie with a wonderful cast, Jonny Depp, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin… it was a Babbette’s Feast movie except it’s more direct target was the Catholic Church entrenched Patriarchy of a small town… i look up Babbette’s Feast and just reading the Wikipedia article explaining the plot i am in tears… what a beautiful film and story… i discover it is based on a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)… i find a pdf of the story and save it to Evernote… i want to read it…

… i’ve gone down a rabbit hole, one thing leading to the next… what bliss…

First Thoughts

231.2

…HCR meter, depressing… the white patriarchy is winning… what can we do about it?… voting rights legislation would help… abortion rights legislation would help… none of that seems set to happen…

… i keep thinking about M… i keep thinking that they generally only watch Fox news and that because of that they have a very narrow view of the situation… they are only being told bits and pieces of the story with an overall picture painted that just isn’t what anyone would call truth… to some degree all news outlets offer up partial truths… they may be very factual in the stories they write, but story selection is another matter… there is no way to have an intelligent conversation with anyone about social and political issues if both parties aren’t taking in multiple sources of information… and who has time?… i barely have time and i have no job in the traditional sense… i will, rather than having political conversations, challenge M to get their information more broadly… then maybe we can have a conversation…

… i resent all this crap going on at this time in my life… but who gets to choose the crap that may or may not be going on during their lifetimes… what i am tasked with coping with pales in comparison to what many around the globe cope with…

… oral arguments on a case that challenges Roe v. Wade were heard by the Supreme Court yesterday… it seems likely that the law in question will be allowed to stand and that the standard for when the right to an abortion kicks in will become “undue burden” as opposed to setting the age of viability as the current court decisions in place do… so, undue burden will become that point at which a majority of women will recognize they are pregnant and are able to abort should they choose… in the case before the court, this rolls fetal age back to fifteen weeks, a little over three months… this is the point by which most women in the state of (Mississippi?, Missouri?) obtain an abortion… honestly, if this is the compromise we reach and even this Supreme Court upholds the right to an abortion, then i think we are as well off on the issue as we will be under the current juridical situation…

… it is still possible that Roe v. Wade will be completely undone, but it doesn’t sound like it to me… and then a string of cases from states across the country will refine the new conditions and the law will be settled at this level…

… Buddy Willard proposes, Esther demurs… well, so far, the chapter jumps oddly to skiing and a broken leg, Buddy plays the part of fatherly ski instructor then doctor… does this mean she will un-demure?… i find the scene descriptions a little forced, overwrought… H said it is depressing, i am wondering when i will get to the depressing bits, unless you count hurtling towards a life of wifely banality depressing, which it could be… if that is what we are heading for, it is uncertain at present…

… again, following up on note 05 from today, i find my way to the digital exhibition On Protest and Mourning at the Caribbean Cultural Center & African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) website… i read curator Grace Aneiza Ali’s statement…

Protest is a form of mourning; and mourning is a form of protest. Throughout these images we see a consistent narrative, a shared language, a call to action: we must resist slipping into numbness, we must always cry out against a state’s militarized violence, against the emotional and mental brutalities it wields. And, as a matter of survival, we must always cry out for the Black lives loved and lost.¹

… Black Lives Matter…

… relative to the exhibit at The New Museum, i think, CCCADI is better positioned to curate a visual art representation of the oppression, grief and protest of black and brown people…

… i am ambivalent about doing this in the cultural institutions of white patriarchy… i think it is important to have a conversation, a conscience… to admit the wrong of systematic oppression… but i can’t let go of the idea that oppressive cultural and political structures have a huge capacity for self critique without changing… the object of the self critique being to say, we see, we understand… maybe some do, but overall, there is little change as a result…

… there are two exhibitions discussed in this article… the first is what gets my attention… i am interested in the critique of star power rather than the subject of the exhibition… is this my white male privilege rearing an ugly head?…

Lilliana Castro producing “Temaquixtilitzli” (2019) (photo by Jesica Vasquez)

…this lead in photograph does pull me in, and apart from the fact that she is a young attractive woman, it is, for once, not my male gaze that pulls me in, but her earnestness… she is concentrating and creating and i fall in love with just that, a young, earnest woman creating a graphic, sending a message to the world…

… as i read the article, i realize it is by a woman, about a woman, creating artwork that is about the condition of women…

… all of the women in the article are LGBTQI… i don’t know what the I stands for…

… i wonder, to what degree is woman choosing woman to love physically about their rejection of the patriarchy?…