STARTING TOMORROW: The greatest movie of all time!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2022

But also, West and Trump: Donald J. Trump has now declared that the United States Constitution should be "terminated."

Hold on though—it gets even dumber than that! Kanye West has now declared that Hitler wasn't so bad after all. Also, there's the way the Morning Joe crowd has reacted to these events.

Also, though, there's also last week's unveiling of new greatest film of all time.

How does this array of topics actually hang together? You're asking a very good question! Let's start with the new greatest film.

Attention, Storyline shoppers! The newly-anointed greatest film of all time is a movie you've never heard of!

The identity of this greatest movie has emerged from a new survey.  What's the title of the greatest film? Brace yourselves—here it comes:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

That's the somewhat unwieldy title of the greatest film of all time. Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman was directed by Chantal Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker you've also never heard of.

Briefly, let's be frank! The fact that you've never heard of this film doesn't mean that it isn't the greatest film of all time. 

Of course, everyone knows that there's no such thing as the greatest film of all time. But if there actually were some such film, Jeanne Dielman could of course be it, whether you've heard of the film or not.

Still, the fact that this has been voted the new greatest film strikes us as highly instructive. It helps us understand where our basic ideas come from, including our ideas about the best way to respond to the dangerous public behaviors of people like Trump and West.

On what basis are we reporting that Jeanne Dielman has emerged as history's greatest film? Simple! It was voted as such in the new Sight & Sound critics' poll of history's greatest films.

Sight & Sound conducts this survey every ten years. In 2002, Jeanne Dielman had been known to critics for 27 years—and critics selected it, at that time, as the 75th greatest film.

The film wasn't known to regular people at that time, but it was known to film critics. Back then, it was only the 75th greatest film—but today, it's number 1!

What explains the rise of this film in the Sight & Sound survey? Almost surely, there are at least several factors involved in the switch—but it's also worth noting a humorous aspect of this great film's great rise.

The humorous aspect is this:

Based on what we've been reading and seeing, this greatest film—Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—is almost impossibly boring. It runs for well over three hours, and it seems to be impossibly hard to sit through!

Quite a few people have noted this point in discussing the great film's ascension. Consider one example:

Over at Vox, Alyssa Wilkinson voted in the new "greatest films" survey. Her report about last week's unveiling appears beneath this pair of headlines:

It’s best you know nothing about the new greatest movie of all time
The movie “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” was recently declared No. 1 in the prestigious Sight and Sound poll. Go in as cold as possible.

If you plan to watch the film, why should you "go in as cold as possible?" As she starts her intriguing report, Wilkinson starts to explain:

WILKINSON (12/1/22): I’m forever playing catch-up, so years ago when I walked into my first viewing of the 1975 drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, all I knew was that I probably should see this movie I’d heard of. What I didn’t know was anything else. Its plot. Its significance aside from its brilliant Belgian director, Chantal Akerman. The fact that it’s 201 minutes long (yes, that’s almost three and a half hours).

I discovered the runtime a couple minutes before it started and flinched. But, having texted my husband that I’d be late for dinner, I settled in. And was instantly mesmerized.

I can’t tell you why. Not because I don’t know, but because the experience taught me that this is a movie it’s best to see knowing as little as possible. I can tell you that it’s long, and for much of its runtime, it’s extremely boring. That is, precisely, the point—and if you’re ready to lean into patience, you’ll be rewarded.

For much of the greatest film's great length, the film is extremely boring. That's "precisely the point," Wilkinson says—though she adds that you'll be rewarded in the end if you can stick it out.

Later, Wilkinson explains the way this unknown film managed to become the greatest film, greater even than previous winners in this survey like Citizen Kane and Vertigo:

WILKINSON: There are lots of factors that led to this point. The movie is astounding, to be sure. Akerman, its director, who is a pioneer of feminist filmmaking, died in 2015, three years after the last poll. The film also was restored and re-released in the Criterion Collection in 2017, which means people like me who hadn’t seen it previously (we didn’t all go to film school) got a chance to do so in theaters. And the pool of voters from which the final list was drawn has been diversified since 2012, so it’s possible that helped with a film that is, undoubtedly, an ur-text of feminist film.

But I don’t want to discount the fact that Jeanne Dielman offers something unique: it runs against the grain of the frenetic, effects-heavy, plot-driven cinema world we now inhabit. It treats its audience like adults, people who have developed the ability to pay attention to something without looking at a second screen every three minutes. It’s repetitive. It feels like watching time. It does not explain what it is about because it thinks you will watch long enough to learn. It barely has any dialogue. There are no jokes. It has no references to the outside world, no story that can be turned into a franchise. You don’t want to watch a sequel to Jeanne Dielman.

According to this critique, you wouldn't want to experience a second such film—but this one's the best of all time!

You wouldn't want to see a sequel! That said, Wilkinson's explanation continues:

WILKINSON (continuing directly): But it’s also the kind of movie that, while you can watch it at home, absolutely begs to be seen in a cinema next to a dozen other people. (Hard to imagine a bigger audience than that.) Not for big-screen eyepoppers or huge sound effects, but because there are a few moments you have to be watching intently to catch and, then, you’ll gasp.

If I sound like I’m being vague, it’s because I am. If you’re ready to watch Jeanne Dielman, then I want you to go in as unspoiled as possible. A movie like this one is a little like a training ground for experiencing art. It asks you to enter without expectations, to sit quietly and get yourself out of the way, to fidget and feel antsy and stay and see what the movie wants to give you. There are vanishingly few movies like this anymore—certainly next to none being produced in Hollywood.

According to Wilkinson, if you sit through the full three hours plus, there will be a few moments when you'll gasp. 

If you're in a movie theater, you'll be sitting with maybe a dozen other people. It's hard to imagine the greatest film attracting a bigger audience than that!

You're going to fidget, and you'll feel antsy, as the drudgery proceeds. Hollywood almost never produces films like this any more!

Perhaps a bit comically, Wilkinson finally notes the source of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles's unparalleled greatness. As it turns out—and also, perhaps a bit comically—this new greatest film of all time is "a little like a training ground for experiencing art."

Presumably, the world's film critics already know how to execute that task. For that reason, they understand that this is the world's greatest film, even though you've never heard of the film and it would bore you stiff.

In our view, there's a lot to learn from this turn of events in Sight & Sound's new survey. More precisely, there's a lot to learn about where our basic frameworks of understanding come from—including the frameworks we bring to bear upon public figures like Trump and West.

Is Kanye West best understood as a public enemy or as a (tragically) public idiot? Similarly, what would be the most sensible and constructive way to respond to the latest idiocies emerging from Donald J. Trump?

Is Donald J. Trump a dangerous villain, or is he best understood as a fundamentally disordered person who seems to be dealing with mental health and/or cognitive issues? And as always, more to the point:

Where do our basic ideas about such matters come from?

If there really was such a thing as the world's greatest film, it's always possible that the world's most boring film might also be the greatest. It could be that the critics in the new Sight & Sound survey got it exactly right this time, correcting their colleagues' past misjudgments.

That said, it's also possible that this new survey helps us see the way certain cosseted elites help drive the public's basic frameworks of understanding, even about such serious topics as the behavior of dangerous, disordered public figures like West and Trump.

There's no such thing as the world's greatest film! Also, it doesn't matter if a few thousand critics are possibly wrong in this, their guild's most recent judgment.

That said, it's possible that our culture's various elites can sometimes say the dumbest things and reach the dumbest judgments. That leads us to a question which actually is important:

Is it possible? Is it possible that our elites really been showing bad judgment in the way they keep urging us to respond to the gong-show public idiocy of people like West and Trump?

Tomorrow: Where to start?

Four minutes, three hours: To experience four minutes (and 29 seconds) of the new greatest film of all time, you can just click this.

Almost surely, you'll be bored to tears. On the brighter side, you'll be getting a three-minute primer in the way to experience art!

Readers, you can thank us later! For now, just click and writhe!

THE DEMOGRAPHIFICATION RULES: Without question, the history's brutal!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2022

But did the essay make sense? In a more perfect world, we Americans would know the full, or at least the fuller, history of the so-called Americas—of North America and South America, before Columbus and after.

For those in search of such wider knowledge we'll recommend the widely praised 2005 book by Charles Mann:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

For the record, Mann's book isn't limited to the world that existed before Columbus. Early on, he relates the history the English people who arrived on Cape Cod in 1620, and of the Native Americans with whom they interacted.

(First sentence, Chapter 2: "On March 22, 1621, an official Native American delegation walked through what is now southern New England to negotiate with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement.")

Regarding the history of that particular interaction, we'd also recommend the highly erudite 2019 book by Professor David Silverman: 

This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

Having said that, we'd also say this. It seems to us that Silverman's book carries a bit of a point of view—a point of view which may help explain why our floundering blue political tribe can't even manage to hold onto the House in this, the age of Donald J. Trump.

(According to the Cook Report: With 107.2 million votes counted, Republican candidates outpolled their Democratic opponents this year, by three percentage points.)

Given our acknowledged moral and intellectual brilliance, why can't we blues do better than that? It seems to us that a tiny hint emerges from Professor Silverman's highly erudite book—more generally, from the ways our tribe is inclined to present such basic parts of our own nation's human history.

As we've repeatedly noted, Silverman's book is full of erudition. It's also built around a slightly sour point of view, a point of view our tribe routinely adopts as we struggle to convince the Others of our moral greatness.

On Thanksgiving Day 2019, the New York Times published an essay by Silverman—an essay built out of his vastly informative book. Yesterday, we edited the start of that essay, revealing the well-known, upbeat story which lies at the heart of this tale. 

We didn't add a single world to what Silverman wrote in his essay. Below, you see the actual way the essay began, hard-copy headline included:

The Vicious Myth of Thanksgiving

Generations of Americans have told themselves a patriotic story of the supposed first Thanksgiving that misrepresents colonization as consensual and bloodless.

The story goes like this: English Pilgrims cram aboard the Mayflower and brave the stormy Atlantic to seek religious freedom in America. They disembark at Plymouth Rock and enter the howling wilderness equipped with their proto-Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and the confidence that they are God’s chosen people. Yet sickness and starvation halve their population during the first winter and challenges their faith.

Meanwhile, the neighboring Indians (rarely identified by tribe), with whom the English desperately wish to trade for food, keep a wary distance. Just when Plymouth seems destined to become another lost colony, miraculously, the Natives make contact through the interpreters Samoset and Squanto (the story sidesteps how these figures learned English, nor does it explain why the Indians suddenly became so friendly). The sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (whom the English know, from his title, as “Massasoit”), even agrees to a treaty of alliance with Plymouth.

Over the spring and summer, the Indians feed the Pilgrims and teach them how to plant corn; the colony begins to thrive. In the fall, the two parties seal their friendship with the first Thanksgiving. The subsequent 50-year peace allows colonial New England and, by extension, the United States to become a citadel of freedom, democracy, Christianity and plenty.

As for what happens to the Indians next, this story has nothing to say. The Indians’ legacy is to present America as a gift to white people—or in other words, to concede to colonialism...

Did Silverman compose that headline? We'll assume he didn't. 

Nor does he say, in the text of his essay, that this country's long-standing Thanksgiving myth is "vicious." Whoever composed that very blue headline was working from the following passage in Silverman's essay:

"The Wampanoags, who are the Indians in this tale, have long contended that the Thanksgiving myth sugarcoats the viciousness of colonial history for Native people. It does."

In his own words, Silverman doesn't say that the Thanksgiving myth itself is vicious. And of course, it plainly isn't, until it falls into the hands of an egghead journalist from our flailing blue tribe.

Silverman doesn't say that the Thanksgiving myth is vicious. Instead, he says that this nation's subsequent "colonial history" turned out to be "vicious for Native people."  

We'd prefer the word "brutal" ourselves. But it's hard to argue that Silverman's assessment isn't tragically accurate. 

(He also seems to say that those Thanksgiving pageants taught the kids that the Indians were "conceding to colonialism." That strikes us as a peculiar, perhaps ridiculous claim—a claim which comes from a highly pointed point of view.)

In the centuries after that famous feast, the history of Native America became unmistakably brutal. For those of us alive today, the question is what we should do about that. We'll make a few suggestions:

One thing we probably shouldn't do is compose exciting headlines which 1) misstate what an author has said, and 2) will surely tend to offend many readers on the morning of a national holiday which many people love. 

The inclination to adopt such thrilling behaviors lies deep in our soul at newspapers like the New York Times. That said, it's a good way to drive the kind of tribal division which leaves the GOP in control of the House in spite of our own tribe's manifest goodness and brilliance.

In fairness to the headline writer, a sardonic tone may perhaps be found in the opening paragraphs of Silverman's actual essay. 

He starts by possibly seeming to refer to "Americans" as "them." He continues along in sardonic fashion, complaining that the children at our grade school pageants haven't even been told the name of the tribe which helped the Pilgrims survive.

Indeed, in the "grade school pageants" to which Silverman later refers, children aren't even told how the interpreters Samoset and Squanto learned to speak English! Nor have second graders ever been told "why the Indians suddenly became so friendly."

Also, the second graders were never told "what happen[ed] to the Indians next." More specifically, they were never told about what happened after "the 50-year peace" which followed that famous 1621 feast.

Later in his essay, Silverman fills us in about that history, exactly as an historian should. Inevitably, though, he seems to complain about the myth as he does:

SILVERMAN: The Thanksgiving myth also sanitizes the power politics of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag alliance. For years afterward, Ousmequin threatened rivals in and outside the Wampanoag tribe with violence from his English allies. Such intimidation played a far more important role in the Wampanoags’ alliance with Plymouth than the first Thanksgiving.

And the myth distorts history by highlighting the alliance while ignoring its deterioration. After Ousamequin’s death in 1660, the English and the Wampanoags constantly teetered on the edge of war because of the colonists’ aggressive, underhanded expansion. These tensions culminated in King Philip’s War of 1675-76, in which the English killed thousands of Native people—including Ousamequin’s son, Pumetacom—and enslaved thousands more. Plymouth and Massachusetts celebrated their bloody victory with a day of thanksgiving.

Imagine! When Americans staged those public school pageants, they didn't include the history of King Philip's War, which started fifty years later. The killing of Pumetacom wasn't even part of the deal!

What are schoolkids taught today about the history of such wars, which extended across the continent as this nation expanded? What are kids taught about the brutal history which followed that "First Thanksgiving?" About the effects of that brutal history in the present day?

What are second graders taught about that? How about kids in high school? We don't know the answer to those questions, and there's no sign that Silverman has researched those questions either. 

What he almost seems to be doing is complaining that children attending public school pageants weren't exposed to a graduate-level history curriculum when they were in third grade. In all candor, this complaint doesn't make a whole lot of sense—except to the extent that the complaining party is approaching this matter from a certain point of view.

We'll compliment Silverman, as at least one commenter did, for something he chose to include in his short capsule history. We refer to the capsule history in which the Wampanoags of that era weren't exclusively "kinder and gentler," as they may have seemed to be in grade school pageants of yore.

In Silverman's essay, Ousamequin is said to have engaged in intimidations and threats of violence against all manner of rivals, Native as well as British, in the years which followed that first Thanksgiving. That said, are we supposed to think that second graders should have been told that too?

Our view? Silverman wrote an angry essay which didn't exactly make sense.

For the record, let's be fair! If you think that anger provides the best route to future progress, there's plenty to be angry about in the brutal American history which lies at the heart of his brief

That said, it doesn't exactly make sense to aim your anger about Native American history at a story that's been told at grade school pageants—a story in which the Native Americans tend to function as the heroes of the piece.

Nor does it necessarily make a lot of sense to drop your bomb on Thanksgiving morning, under a tough-talking headline which misrepresents what your essay actually said. (We'll assume that headline came from some incompetent editor at the Times, not from the essay's author.)

Silverman's essay generated twenty-four comments. It seems to us that they're often very instructive. The shape of his larger point of view is on fuller display in his highly erudite book, concerning which our own general view would be this:

Silverman seems to be a highly erudite historian. Also, we think he's inclined toward an uninsightful political point of view, one which tends to damage progressive (and American) interests.

Did he start by suggesting that "Americans" are secretly "them?" In the actual text of the essay, it's pretty much as you like it. In Silverman's book, he seems to put more flesh on the bones of that sadly familiar point of view. 

Our blue tribe often broadcasts this view—and despite our self-acknowledged brilliance, we rarely seem to notice the fact that we're doing some such thing, or that we may be harming our interests in the process.

In Silverman's book, he seems to give voice to this framework. For example, why should a kid named "Silverman" have had to listen to "My Country Tis of Thee" during those grade school pageants?

In his book, Silverman directly asks that question. He quickly shows that he knows the theoretical answer, but it's an answer he seems to reject.

Are we the people one big people, or are we instead a collection of different demographic groups? Our deeply self-impressed blue tribe has become increasingly committed to difference rather than sameness.

You might call it the demographication of everything. When we're gripped by this growing impulse, we tend to follow the demographication rules, and when we engage in this unhelpful conduct, we may help keep Others in office.

Silverman is highly learned. We aren't high on the basic framework he brings to his work, on his thoroughly well-intentioned but unhelpful point of view.

Possibly coming: A look at some of the comments to Silverman's sardonic piece

What does performative virtue look like?

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2022

It looks like the Washington Post: What does performative virtue look like? More specifically, performative anti-racism? The attempt to pretend, to others or perhaps to yourself, that you actually care about matters of race?

We'd say that one such performance is currently being performed by the Washington Post in its endless series of reports about the relative lack of black head coaches in the NFL. 

Why do we regard these reports as phony, faux—performative? We nay discuss your excellent question in the days or weeks ahead.

For today, we'll only say this—a photograph of Jerry Jones, age 14, has now touched off one of the dumbest sets of pseudo-discussions we think we've ever seen (though mainly on ESPN). 

Today, Jerry Jones, age 80, is owner of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys. We're embarrassed to think that David Maraniss is responsible for this performance by the Post, which fills us with fear and with dread.

The year was 1957; Jones was a ripe young 14. We're embarrassed by what the Post has done in its deathless report. We're worried for the future prospects of our soft-headed human race.

Hitting the links: For the original report by Maraniss and Jenkins, you can just click this. They start their report with the photograph of Jones at age 14.

For a truly bizarre "analysis" piece by Philip Bump, we'll suggest that you steel yourselves, then you can click here.

Is human judgment really this soft? We're beginning to think that it is!

THE DEMOGRAPHICATION RULES: Professor Silverman knows a great deal!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2022

Then too, there's his point of view: As we've noted in the past few days, David Silverman strikes us as a highly erudite scholar.

He also strikes us as someone with a bit of a point of view. 

Needless to say, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, until such time as there possibly is. In the case of Professor Silverman, it seems to us that his point of view may not be especially sharp, and may not be massively helpful.

Let's provide some quick review! As we noted on Monday, Silverman is a professor of Early America and Native America at George Washington University.

His official bio lists four areas of expertise: Native American [sic], Colonial and Revolutionary America, the Early Modern World, and Imperialism and Colonialism. 

The bio also says that he specializes in a fifth area—"American racial history." In 2019, he published a fascinating book, a book which carries this title:

This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

In November of that year, he published an essay in the New York Times addressing that "troubled history." According to the headline which appears on that piece, the history in question was more than troubled:

The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth

That headline suggests that the history in question was vicious. As we've noted in recent days, a great deal of human history is. 

Silverman's essay in the Times was full of information. As we've noted, he strikes us as a highly erudite scholar.

The essay also suggests the point of view to which we've referred—a point of view which is more apparent in his (highly informative) book. It seems to us that this point of view employs our blue tribe's "demographication rules," a set of precepts we'll only be able to hint at in the two days remaining this week.

In print editions, the headline on Silverman's essay was slightly different. "The Vicious Myth of Thanksgiving," that version of the headline said. 

In that headline, a certain "myth" was vicious, not the reality behind the myth. 

For the record, we don't know if Silverman played any role in composing the headlines which sat above his piece. We would suggest that the person who composed the headlines may have been playing by our blue tribe's routinely unhelpful rules. 

At any rate, the essay in the New York Times started as shown below. In print editions, the essay appeared on November 28, 2019—Thanksgiving morning itself:

The Vicious Myth of Thanksgiving

Generations of Americans have told themselves a patriotic story of the supposed first Thanksgiving that misrepresents colonization as consensual and bloodless.

The story goes like this:...

Already, we'd offer one bit of advice to our blue tribe's tribunes and spokespersons. When we refer to something "Americans" are currently doing or are said to have done, Americans should probably be referred to as us, not as them.

Setting that suggestive matter to the side, we already see several points suggesting the author's point of view. For example, in telling the tale of that supposed first Thanksgiving, have Americans really been "misrepresent[ing] colonization as consensual and bloodless?"

A bit later, Silverman specifically refers to "Americans’ grade school Thanksgiving pageants" as one of the places where this story has been told.  

We'll guess we attended a few of those pageants, growing up in Massachusetts as we did. That said, were those pageants really intended to "misrepresent colonization" in the way Silverman describes?

Indeed, were those pageants meant to convey any particular impression of "colonization" at all? Did they convey any such impressions? We're not all that sure that they did!

(Also, was the story told at those pageants really meant to be "patriotic?" We're not entirely sure that it was. It may depend on your current point of view.)

In our view, Silverman is highly erudite. But even as we read that opening paragraph, we wonder if we're being offered a description which derives, at least in part, from a certain point of view.

Tomorrow, we'll try to define the point of view which seems to prevail in Silverman's extremely erudite book. For today, we're going to engage in a bit of editing.

What traditional story has been told at those grade school pageants? Right at the start of his essay, Silverman offers an account of that story—but it seems to us that he lards his account with quite a few sardonic insertions, sardonic insertions which come to us straight outta point of view.

Below, we show you how his essay would have started absent those insertions. Had we offered an initial edit, his piece would have started like this:

The Traditional Thanksgiving Myth

Generations of Americans have told a story of the supposed first Thanksgiving.

The story goes like this: English Pilgrims cram aboard the Mayflower and brave the stormy Atlantic to seek religious freedom in America. They disembark at Plymouth Rock and enter the howling wilderness equipped with their proto-Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, and the confidence that they are God’s chosen people. Yet sickness and starvation halve their population during the first winter and challenges their faith.

Meanwhile, the neighboring Indians, with whom the English desperately wish to trade for food, keep a wary distance. Just when Plymouth seems destined to become another lost colony, the Natives make contact through the interpreters Samoset and Squanto. The sachem (or chief) even agrees to a treaty of alliance with Plymouth.

Over the spring and summer, the Indians feed the Pilgrims and teach them how to plant corn; the colony begins to thrive. In the fall, the two parties seal their friendship with the first Thanksgiving. 

As for what happens to the Indians next, this story has nothing to say. 

There you see the start of Silverman's essay as we might have edited it. For the record, we haven't added a single word to the copy which appeared in the Times. We've merely dropped the various elements which introduce a certain point of view.

Americans, can we talk? Absent insertions of point of view, Silverman's account of that traditional story strikes us as perfectly accurate. (We left in the part about "God's chosen people," though we don't know for sure that it's true.)

As far as we know, that is the story of the (supposed) first Thanksgiving which third graders have often been told. And might we add a further note?

The neighboring Indians, with whom the Pilgrims ally, come off extremely well in this traditional story!

In the traditional story as fashioned by Silverman, the Pilgrims have already suffered a staggering amount of death by starvation. (We're not sure that literal death by starvation was heavily stressed at those pageants.) But just when it seems that the colony is going to fail, these Natives comes forward to help and establish a friendship, letting the Pilgrims survive.

In this traditional story, the neighboring Indians are, in effect, the generous heroes of the piece. According to Silverman, "As for what happens to the Indians next, this story has nothing to say."

Without any question, that last observation is accurate. But every story has to end somewhere, and this traditional story—a story told to second and third graders—has always ended on a rather upbeat note.

Silverman wants to tell the rest of the story. We strongly agree that he should! But in his essay in the Times, was he telling the rest of the story in a helpful, or even a sensible, way?

We're not super-sure that he was.

Alas! As often happens when our floundering tribe begins applying our demographication rules, it seems to us that Silverman is inclined to approach this Thanksgiving story in a way which does no one much good.

Can it be that harm results from such inclinations? We think it quite possibly could!

Tomorrow: One commenter spoke about Silverman's essay and "a monster like Trump"

Your chance to see those Fuentes clips!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2022

A portrait of disorder: Yesterday, we mentioned the fact that Rachel Maddow played video clips of Nick Fuentes on her weekly show Monday night. Today, we can offer you this link to those video clips.

Watching him on videotape, Fuentes strikes us as transparently disordered. Reading about him in the New York Times last weekend, we wondered how a person can be this far gone by the age of 24:

HABERMAN AND FEUER (11/26/22): Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, at Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, advisers to Mr. Trump conceded on Friday.

In recent years, Mr. Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference.

A Holocaust denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country.

[...]

Mr. Fuentes, who attended the bloody far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, is best known for running a white nationalist youth organization known as America First, whose adherents call themselves groypers or the Groyper Army. In the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Mr. Fuentes and the groypers were involved in a series of public events supporting the former president.

At a so-called “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in November 2020, Mr. Fuentes urged his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” The following month, at a similar event, Mr. Fuentes led a crowd in chanting “Destroy the G.O.P.,” and urged people not to vote in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Fuentes led a large group of groypers to the Capitol where they rallied outside in support of Mr. Trump. The next day, Mr. Fuentes wrote on Twitter that the assault on the Capitol was “awesome and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”

According to the Times, Fuentes is king of the groypers! 

He's also "one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists." Personally, we'd search for language which sounds less laudatory if we were to offer a capsule account of such a clownish, inane lost soul.

On a journalistic basis, some of those descriptions and accounts of Fuentes' statements were less specific than we would like. For example, we're told that he's a "white supremacist," but we aren't given the actual statements which justify that account.

(He inanely called for the army to be sent into black neighborhoods in order to address street crime.)

Similarly, it seems to us that some of the video clips Maddow played have been over-edited. That said, Fuentes strikes us as plainly disordered as we watch those clips. And good God—he's only 24!

How should such a disordered person best be described? In our view, we tend to confer power on such people when we fail to say, in the simplest terms, how disordered—how inane—their statements and their personal demeanor make them seem.

How do people get this way when they're still in their teens? (Fuentes would have been 17 at the time of the Charlottesville lunacy.) We'd like to see (carefully selected) medical / psychiatric specialists asked to speak on such points. 

Meanwhile, it seems to us that we grant such people increased power when we say how "prominent" they are, while failing to say how idiotic and disordered their behaviors make them seem.

"I pity the poor immigrant," Bob Dylan wrote long ago. (He was speaking metaphorically.) As we've said before, it seems to us that Dylan's description of this pitiable soul is a perfect portrait of Donald J. Trump.

("Who eats but is not satisfied, who hears but does not see. Who falls in love with wealth itself and turns his back on me.")

We regard Fuentes as being clownishly disordered—as someone who needs tons of help, and is therefore to be pitied, even as we search for ways to keep him from influencing others and thereby causing harm.

Go ahead and view those clips. We think we see a disordered, objectively loony lost soul. What do you think you see? 

THE DEMOGRAPHICATION RULES: Something we all can be thankful for!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Enslavement around the world: According to experts with whom we've consulted, Thanksgiving occurred last week. (Except of course in Canada, where things always happen first.)

Despite our current difficulties, we Americans did have certain things we could be thankful for. For one thing, we could be thankful that we don't live under some of the moral standards which have widely prevailed in the past.

In yesterday's award-winning demographic report, we quoted Professor David Silverman describing the massive enslavement of Native Americans during this country's colonial period. 

Modern prevailing moral standards would balk at such behavior today. That said, over the course of the past many years, the moral standards of our human race have left a lot to be desired all around the world.  

How widely was the enslavement of humans accepted in the past? Like you, we aren't experts on that question, but here's part of what the leading authority on the topic currently says about the historical state of affairs around the world after our somewhat imperfect species first crawled forth on the land:

The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of enslaved people have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.

Slavery has been found in some hunter-gatherer populations, particularly as hereditary slavery, but the conditions of agriculture with increasing social and economic complexity offer greater opportunity for mass chattel slavery. Slavery operated in the first civilizations (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia, which dates back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery was widespread in the ancient world in Europe, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. It became less common throughout Europe during the Early Middle Ages, although it continued to be practiced in some areas.

Even the hunter-gatherers! Also, even in Sumer (no relation)!

We can all be thankful that we don't have to live with the moral standards which prevailed in those various places at those various times. Or, for that matter, with the moral standards which once prevailed even over here, in our own part of the world: 

In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the most common forms of slavery were those of prisoners of war and debtors...Warfare was important to Maya society, because raids on surrounding areas provided the victims required for human sacrifice, as well as slaves for the construction of temples. Most victims of human sacrifice were prisoners of war or slaves... 

Other slave-owning societies and tribes of the New World were, for example, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Comanche of Texas, the Caribs of Dominica, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the west coast of North America from what is now Alaska to California, the Pawnee and Klamath. Many of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary, the slaves being prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes about a quarter of the population was enslaved.

We recall the question our fifth graders asked us way back when, during the broadcast of the highly influential TV program, Roots. Here's what those excellent children asked:

How could people ever have been willing to treat other people that way? 

That's what these good, decent children, with their good, decent minds, asked us during a class discussion or three. They were asking a truly excellent question, one which came to us live and direct from their memorably good, decent hearts.

We believe we told them that moral standards were often very different at earlier times—that people had routinely accepted types of conduct we wouldn't accept today. Also, as we always did, we told them they should talk about such questions with their parents or their grandparents or their guardians, since they were the most important people in their good, decent young lives.

We were very impressed by Professor Silverman's erudition as he spoke with Martin DiCaro in a recent, hour-long interview session. (We were also impressed to see the Washington Times producing this frank discussion.) 

As you might recall, we saw Silverman say the following, midway through the hour. For the C-Span tape, click here:

DICARO (10/27/22): As far as I understand, one reason why the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Africans exploded was because it proved impossible to enslave Native Americans for various reasons. But I might be getting ahead of myself.

SILVERMAN: Well, you know, the last fifteen years of scholarship, or so, has exploded that idea—which, you know, which was standard fare in colonial American history courses for a long time.

What we've now discovered is that over the course of the big colonial era—you know, so 16th century all the way through the mid-19th century—Europeans, and then European colonists, enslaved upwards of five and a half million indigenous people—

DICARO: I did not know—

SILVERMAN: Hemispherically, not within the boundaries of the United States. That's about forty percent of the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In North America, in the North American context—so this would be in English, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies—during the 17th century, so during the 1600s, you would have been as likely in a colonial setting, to encounter Native American slaves as Africans. 

That will change dramatically in the 18th century...

That's what happened closer to home during that earlier period. For all our blue tribe's transparent moral posturing about our vast love for racial / demographic justice, we can all be thankful for one thing:

We can all be thankful that we arrived on the planet during an era, and in a place, where different moral standards prevail.

Those fifth grade Baltimore kids had asked an extremely good question. How could people ever have done such things? 

More specifically, what could explain the brutal behavior they'd seen enacted as they watched the eight nightly broadcasts of Roots? They were troubled by what they were seeing—but they were puzzled by it as well.

We were vastly impressed by Silverman's erudition during his hour with DiCaro. We were also impressed by DiCaro's interest in the questions under review—though in some instances, we would have posed different questions than the questions which came from DiCaro. 

For example, we would have asked Silverman about the way Native groups along the northeast coast of this country viewed the repeated acts of enslavement which occurred during the 16th century—for roughly a hundred years before the Mayflower, Silverman said.

Silverman described such repeated acts. What did the region's indigenous groups think about behavior like that? What were the moral frameworks which they brought to such matters in that particular place and at that point in time?

There's a great deal we all could learn about the history of human brutality. Then again, there's Silverman's approach to the history of the so-called "First Thanksgiving" in 1621.

It happened a very long time ago. Tomorrow, we'll turn to that!

Tomorrow: Demographically speaking, are "Americans" us or them?

A few of the things we saw last night!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2022

Right there on our TV machine: We lost a chunk of time today, then watched the soccer game. With apologies, we thought we'd offer a list of things we saw on TV last night.

First, we watched the opening segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight. We saw the program's disordered host engage in the last example of his strangely unhinged behavior.

Later, thanks to On Demand, we watched a good chunk of our own channel's Deadline: White House. Make Way for Ducklings popped into our heads as we watched the program's host, Nicolle Wallace, adumbrate a series of themes, knowing that her many guests would waddle directly along in her wake, repeating every word she had said.

Also, we saw Rachel Maddow play actual videotape of the suddenly famous, 24-year-old Nick Fuentes. The videotape had come from People for the American Way. 

For our money, some of the statements on the tape had been over-edited. But we'll have to say that Fuentes came across like a tragically genuine nut.

(Then too, there was the increasingly nutty online Washington Post, pursuing its new, post-newspaper ways in today's early hours.)

Our nation's political elites have long since divided into tribes. One tribe is crazier than the other, but that second tribe is larded with overpaid recitation experts who actually ought to know better.

These tribes are working to establish a world of Us and Them. We don't think a whole lot of good can come of these round-the-clock efforts. 

Fuentes seemed like a genuine nut. Our own stars made us think of the famous book about all those imprinted ducklings.

We wish we could offer you more detail. We've lost a bunch of time in the past few days.

Alos this: The U.S. won the soccer game in a blowout, 1-0.

THE DEMOGRAPHICATION RULES: Enslavement in the colonial era!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2022

A deeply brutal history: Especially as judged by contemporary standards, the history of the western hemisphere is a vicious and bloody affair. 

Consider the contents of an exchange we viewed over the Thanksgiving weekend.  The exchange was part of a broadcast of an hour-long interview which took place in late October. 

You can watch the entire session thanks to this this C-Span videotape.  C-Span describes the event as shown:

Lessons from the First Thanksgiving

Martin DiCaro, host of the Washington Times' “History As It Happens” podcast, talked to historian David Silverman about challenges educators face when teaching about colonialism and the first Thanksgiving. This program was part of the Washington Times taping of its history podcast.

As we noted yesterday, we learned a lot from watching Professor Silverman's hour-long interview session. That said, how brutal is the history in question? 

Roughly thirty minutes into the session, consider this exchange:

DICARO (10/27/22): I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself, because as far as I understand, one reason why the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Africans exploded was because it proved impossible to enslave Native Americans for various reasons. But I might be getting ahead of myself.

SILVERMAN: Well, you know, the last 15 years of scholarship, or so, has exploded that idea—

DICARO: O.K.

SILVERMAN: —which, you know, which was standard fare in colonial American history courses for a long time.

Like DiCaro, we were surprised to hear that. Silverman continued from there:

SILVERMAN (continuing directly): What we've now discovered is that over the course of the big colonial era—you know, so 16th century all the way through the mid-19th century—Europeans, and then European colonists, enslaved upwards of five and a half million indigenous people—

DICARO: I did not know—

SILVERMAN: Hemispherically, not within the boundaries of the United States. That's about forty percent of the volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Assuming Silverman's data are accurate, forty percent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (North and South America combined) involved the enslavement of Native Americans! 

As with DiCaro, so too here: We don't think we knew that.

Elsewhere, Silverman noted that the bulk of these enslaved indigenous people were actually taken to Europe, where they were made to work at various tasks. Even so, as he continued, he surprised us again:

SILVERMAN (continuing directly): In North America, in the North American context—so this would be in English, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies—during the 17th century, so during the 1600s, you would have been as likely in a colonial setting, to encounter Native American slaves as Africans. 

That will change dramatically in the 18th century, largely because if you're enslaving the people you live near, it's a recipe for chronic war.

"This is depressing. I don't think I want to celebrate Thanksgiving," DiCaro said at this point. 

DiCaro was fashioning a rueful joke, but the history is brutal. That's especially true when the history is judged by contemporary moral standards, which are far superior to the moral standards which widely prevailed at that time.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we watched several interviews with Professor Silverman. As we noted yesterday, we were highly impressed by his wide-ranging erudition—though it must be said that we aren't in a position to judge the accuracy of his various factual statements.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but world history tends to be brutal. That's certainly true of the history of the Americas in the age of European colonization—and it was during that age that our struggling nation's so-called "First Thanksgiving" occurred.

As you can see from what's posted above, Silverman's interview with DiCaro was built around a desire to assess the stories which have long been told about that "First Thanksgiving." Back in 2019, Silvermna became the go-to academic on the history of that event when he published a well-received book on the subject:

This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.

Over the weekend, we learned a lot from watching Silverman is several interview sessions. At the same time, we thought we detected the possible hint of a possibly unhelpful tone in some of his attendant writings about that "troubled history."

Back in November 2019, Silverman wrote an essay for the New York Times about that "First Thanksgiving." As we noted yesterday, the headline in the essay said this:

The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth

We stand in awe of the depth of historical knowledge Silverman seems to bring to his work. At the same time, we wonder if a certain slightly unhelpful conceptual framework may perhaps be lurking in that essay for the Times.

Our deeply self-impressed blue tribe has recently embarked on a new tribal culture—a culture we would describe as "the demographication of everything." In part, we call it that to avoid the need to describe it as the racialization of everything, though that would be a reasonably accurate name for this culture as well. 

It seems to us that Silverman's essay begins to offer a window onto that emergent cultural framework. Meanwhile, we deeply self-impressed Blues!  

It seems to us that we often flounder on the merits when we advance that (deeply heartfelt) new tribal culture. On the politics, it seems to us that we routinely insist on driving voters away when we express our newly heartfelt array of identity-centric dogmas, novelizations, assertions, claims, memorized statements and views.

As an historian, Silverman strikes us as amazingly erudite. When it comes to the politics of our floundering tribe's heartfelt new culture, it seems to us that his essay may possibly point the way to our demise, perhaps from its first sentence on.

Tomorrow: In just its first six words...

Please don't call family or friends on the phone!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2022

A Washington Post alert: We'll admit that we retain our fascination with the headlong devolution of the (online) Washington Post.

As our culture moves post-truth, are we also moving in the direction of post-newspaper? Consider what we found when we journeyed to the online Post at 9:45 this morning.

As always, the online paper's endless front page started with what seemed to be a set of major news headlines. 

Those headlines appeared at the top of the page. That's very much as it ought to be, but the first three headlines were these:

Nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older

Sea levels are rising dramatically off Virginia, threatening a community—and the entire East Coast

Calling out of the blue: Why would you do this to someone you love? 

The first two headlines seemed to relate to recognizable news topics. But what about the inscrutable headline on that third report? 

In the case of that third report, the full double headline said this:

Calling out of the blue: Why would you do this to someone you love? 
In the age of texting and DMs, a ringing phone can sound like nothing but bad news.

Believe it or not, this third report was a heartfelt, lengthy warning about the danger of calling family or friends on the phone. 

Why would you call someone you love on the phone? Your family or friends may think it's bad news, the Post's Ellen McCarthy was bizarrely warning Post readers. 

Yes, that's what it said! It was the third report at the very top of the online Washington Post's front page, and it started like this:

MCCARTHY (11/28/22): Adria Barich is a haunted woman. Her tormentor tracks her everywhere, threatening to ambush her in a dimly lit parking garage, as she drives down a desolate road or when she’s let her guard down to wash dishes or collapse on the couch.

“I’ve actually changed my ringtone a few times, because I start to associate it with terror,” says Barich, a 24-year-old California woman who works in marketing. “But every time that I do, after, like, a week or so, it just becomes terrifying again.”

There is nothing that makes Barich seize up with fear like an incoming call.

“I feel anxiety. I stiffen up. I also kind of make myself pretend that I didn’t see it,” she says. “And nine times out of 10, I’m not going to answer it. If someone really needs to reach me, they can text me, leave a voice mail or continue to call me again and again and again. I wait for their next move before I decide what I’m going to do.”

For the record, McCarthy isn't suggesting that Adria Barich is in the grip of some puzzling phobia. McCarthy's point of view is completely different. Soon, she's offering this:

MCCARTHY: If these levels of live-caller dread sound ludicrous to you, congratulations. Maybe your friends and family call just to chat, and you welcome these telephonic drop-bys even when they are not invited or forewarned. Maybe those conversations seldom veer into awkwardness or tedium.

For the rest of us, impromptu calls have become roughly equivalent to turning up unannounced at someone’s home and smushing your face up against their window. Our comfort and patience with person-to-person calls have eroded as text messaging became the preferred way of communicating all but the gravest of news. The ringtone grows ominous. For whom does it toll?

The lunacy proceeds from there in this latest offering from the increasingly bizarre (online) Washington Post. 

McCarthy's report goes on and on about the anguish people feel when they hear the ring of their phone. It's clear that McCarthy feels that this anguish is entirely sensible. Meanwhile, let us repeat our original point:

At 9:45 this morning, this was the third (3rd) news report at the very top of the online Washington Post's front page! To appearances, this was the third most important topic the online Post believed it was reporting at that point in time.

Please don't call your friends on the phone, this high-profile offering said. Below it, the next headline led to an absurdly frivolous, poorly reasoned report about the way politicians have gained or lost Twitter followers since Elon Musk took over the company. The headline there said this:

Shift in follower counts for Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz show how Twitter is beginning to change

From there, it was on to one last pair of reports. They completed the set of six which were given full banner treatment at the top of the Post's front page:

Pilot, passenger rescued after plane gets tangled in high-voltage lines in Maryland

I drove all 1,700 miles of Australia’s remote Outback Way. Here’s what it’s like. 

According to those last two reports, there had been an unusual local accident in which no one was hurt. Also, some guy had driven across Australia, and he wanted to say what it's like!

For the record, today's print edition of the Post featured five (5) front-page news reports. All five of those reports concerned traditional "hard news" topics.

Three of those reports appeared above the fold on the front page of today's print editions. At 9:45 this morning, none (none) of those three reports were visible in any way on the endless, aggressively tedious front page of the online Washington Post. 

Observers have noted that we seem to be living in a "post-truth" world. Are we moving toward a post-sanity realm at the online Post?

THE DEMOGRAPHICATION RULES: Thanksgiving is the cruelest month!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2022

A deeply painful framework: Thanksgiving is the cruelest month! In his famous poem, Eliot simply wasn't willing to acknowledge this painful fact!

We came to this painful realization over the recent holidays. In particular, we came to this realization as we read some columns by Professor David Silverman, and as we watched him on several (highly informative) C-Span interview programs.

Who is David Silverman? According to his official bio at George Washington University, he's a professor of Early America and Native America. 

Beyond that, the official bio lists four areas of expertise: Native American [sic], Colonial and Revolutionary America, the Early Modern World, and Imperialism and Colonialism.

That covers a lot of ground! His capsule bio says this:

David J. Silverman (Ph.D., Princeton, 2000) specializes in Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history. His most recent book is This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, published by Bloomsbury in 2019. 

He is also the author of Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA., 2016); Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, 2010), and Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York, 2005), and co-author of Ninigret, the Niantic and Narragansett Sachem: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, 2014). 

His essays have won major awards from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the New York Association of History.

In addition to the four areas of expertise we've mentioned, we're also told, in that passage, that Silverman specializes in a fifth area—"American racial history."

Those five areas of specialization cover a very large amount of deeply forested ground! Having said that, and for whatever it's worth, Silverman strikes us as being highly learned concerning various aspects of our nation's cruelest month.

With his 2019 book about "the troubled history of Thanksgiving"—see the capsule bio above— Silverman became the go-to guy for information about our so-called "First Thanksgiving." He also became a go-to guy concerning what happened next.  

We aren't specialists at this site, but it sems to us that Silverman is extremely learned about those topics. We learned a lot of as we watched him on those C-Span interview programs—but we also thought we might have seen a certain unhelpful blue tribe framework rearing its unhelpful head.

Each year now, during our cruelest month, we Americans are subjected to a certain narration concerning that First Thanksgiving. For an overview of Silverman's approach, we'll recommend the guest essay he wrote for the New York Times in November 2019.

The essay was published in conjunction with his 2019 book. The essay discusses what actually happened on that so-called First Thanksgiving—but it also discusses events which took place some 55 years later, events which may not be an obvious part of that so-called first feast.

The essay covered a lot of ground. It appeared beneath this unfriendly headline:

The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth

Just for the record, that's the headline which still appears online. In print editions, the headline on the essay said this:

 The Vicious Myth of Thanksgiving

We don't know if Silverman wrote those aggressive headlines. Whoever may have composed the headlines, we'd say they convey a certain attitude—an attitude which will strike many voters as perhaps and possibly being a tiny touch "anti-Amerikan," at least in spirit and tone.

Needless to say, most of those voters will turn out to be racists, bigots, misogynists, homophobes. Still and all, those monsters get to vote—and so, here we all are!

Long ago and far away, Kevin Drum presented a list of seven things centrist voters don't like about us blue tribe members. As you may recall, his last two points were these:

Drum: "Things centrist voters don't like about us" 

[...] 

Point 6: They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy. 

Point 7: They do not like being called racist.

We continued to think about those last two points as we struggled through our cruelest month last week.

We learned a lot from watching David Silverman on a pair of C-Span programs! We also thought we may have heard the slightest hint of a certain unhelpful blue tribe framework—a framework which may not always seem to make perfect sense on the merits, and which may be losing us votes.

That sprawling framework emerges from our nation's deeply painful, brutal racial history. What name would we place on that sprawling framework—a sprawling framework to which our blue tribe is now exclusively wed?

For starters, we'd be inclined to call it "The demographication of everything." It tends to be regulated by our floundering tribe's racialization rules.

Tomorrow: A look at Silverman's essay

Tony Fauci is lying again...

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2022

...according to Tucker Carlson: The front page of today's New York Times includes this instructive report:

An Ancient Language, Once on the Brink, Is a British Isle’s Talk of the Town 

At issue is the ancient language Manx, which is apparently making a comeback on the Isle of Man. 

Given the world's endless complexifications, the Isle of Man "is a self-governing British Crown Dependency that is not a part of the United Kingdom, but whose residents are British citizens." 

The Isle of Man's population is roughly 84,000. According to the front-page report, around 2,200 [of those] people are now able to speak, read or write in Manx."

According to the news report, people on the Isle of Man have decided they want to slow or stop the erosion of their island's traditional culture, including the impending loss of its traditional language. 

All other things being equal, there's obviously nothing "wrong" with any such impulse or preference. Again and again, then again and again, we see that this desire to keep such traditions (and identities) alive is a thoroughly human impulse.

There's nothing "wrong" with any such impulse, until such time as there is. In that respect, this report also points to the possible difficulties involved in running a "diverse democracy," especially in a giant nation like ours.

We may return to that topic tomorrow with respect to our own nation's Thanksgiving Day traditions. For today, consider this:

Diversity can be challenging! It can get even harder in a giant nation like ours, where people like The Abandoned Boy of Fox News can command very large platforms.

Why do we mention Tucker Carlson? Also on today's front page is this perhaps slightly puzzling report:

A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths
The Biden administration has pushed social media giants like Facebook to curb Covid misinformation. But it is thriving on fringe platforms like Gab, a hub for extremist content.

In that second front-page report, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports the way Covid myths are being spread on certain "fringe platforms." 

That said, is Fox News "fringe?" We ask because, three nights ago, we saw a certain disordered child start a report like this:

CARLSON (11/22/25): So when the Covid pandemic began in early 2020, everyone wanted to believe Tony Fauci. We did. We had him on the show, actually, and then he began lying in ways so obvious that you could not ignore it. You began asking, "What is this about?" 

The guy in charge of the Covid response is lying about Covid? Why? He lied about herd immunity, then he lied about masks, then he repeatedly lied about vaccines. You can’t lie if you’re a public health official, but he kept doing it. 

Today, Tony Fauci, who is now 81, held his last press conference and, appropriately enough, he decided to tell one final lie about masks. Watch.

That's the way Carlson began his presentation. Below, as Carlson's report continued, viewers were shown videotape of the Q-and-A in which Fauci was said to have told that "one final lie about masks:"

REPORTER (videotape): What do you say about the word "mask" now being a pejorative in some communities?

FAUCI (videotape): No, it shouldn't be. I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, I know sometimes when you walk in and you have a mask and nobody has a mask you kind of feel guilty. 

You shouldn't feel guilty. You look terrific.

That was the full exchange in which Fauci was said to have told his "one final lie about masks." We now offer a bit of context:

Carlson's mother abandoned him when he was 8 years old.

He never saw his mother again. Instead, he goes on the air and behaves in routinely peculiar ways for a very large salary—a salary which isn't disclosed.

At any rate, that was just the start of Carlson's presentation Tuesday night. As he continued, he said this:

CARLSON (continuing directly): That's a question from the press corps? "What do you say about the word 'mask' becoming a pejorative?" That's media coverage? 

That's embarrassing. It's weird, too. 

People who love masks? Really? They don't work very well. Everyone knows that. The science shows that. But for some reason, Tony Fauci is still pretending it makes sense to wear a mask.

That's the way Carlson explained the problem with Fauci's "final lie about masks." That said, Carlson noted another problem with something Fauci had said:

CARLSON (continuing directly): He also pretended, once again, that you'll die unless you get the corona vaccine. For real. Watch.

FAUCI (videotape): The real danger is in the people who don't get vaccinated. So that's where we expect, if we're going to see a problem this winter, it's going to be among those people. 

CARLSON: Oh, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated, is it? 

This is insane! This is not science. In fact, all of the science shows just the opposite. It’s more risky for most people to get the vaccine than to get Covid at this point. 

It’s not speculation. The data from a bunch of countries, U.K. and Israel included, prove that. But Fauci somehow doesn’t know that? 

Carlson continued from there. 

We don't know much about Covid science. We're going to leave it to Kevin Drum to bring you up to date on the actual state of the science.

We do know that Carlson behaves extremely strangely on a great many nights—and that his peculiar behavior rarely makes the front page.

Long ago, back in the age of Hannity / Limbaugh, we frequently said that major newspapers like the New York Times should treat such events as front-page news.

Gab is on today's front page. Carlson's behavior isn't.

In such ways, populations can lose their ability to function as nations. That can be especially true in very large nations like ours. 

Fox contributes to this erosion, but so does our own blue tribe. We often thought of sacred Nietzsche as we watched some elements of our tribe observing Thanksgiving this year!

Thanksgiving Day meant Hillsdale High!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2022

Vanquishing Dick Vermeil:  Earlier today, we got to thinking about Thanksgiving Day football. 

More precisely, we got to thinking about Thanksgiving Day high school football—and, inevitably, about defeating Coach Vermeil.

We'd been raised on a great Thanksgiving Day football tradition—the ancient Bay State rivalry between Winchester and Woburn High Schools. The annual game, which started at 11 A.M., dated back into the 1890s. 

We saw Joe Bellino play in that game. You can read about the rivalry here.

Our family decamped for California in the summer of 1960. The Golden State was a different place then.

Its population stood at a minuscule 15.7 million—but a new high school was opening in the state roughly every ten minutes. Soon, there stood "our dear Aragon, stately and serene"—and also, prepared to do battle with our instant arch-rival, Hillsdale High, which had been open at that time for something like six years.

(Cali's population today: 39.2 million!)

The rivalry was instant—and delightfully fierce. In this 2013 report from a publication called the Aragon Outlook, a whimsical Aragon kid named Sasha Menshikova reported that the origin of the rivalry had been lost in the mist:

MENSHIKOVA (12/12/13): Rivals: A tale of two schools

Approximately two miles away from Aragon lies the illustrious Hillsdale High School, where Aragon students’ old middle school acquaintances roam the halls. But they lead different lives now. They live by different rules and revere a metal clad figure. One might not find the person they knew several years ago under the red and blue face paint.

Hillsdale, Aragon’s longtime rival, is always shown as the villain in the Homecoming rally skit, even dating back to the ’70s.

English teacher Sandra Skale, an Aragon alumna and former cheerleader, says, “The schools here in San Mateo were built pretty close in time and so because of the close proximity there was a rivalry. They actually stole something from us or we stole something, but I’m not really 100 percent sure [of] the factual beginning of [the rivalry]. We wanted to beat them, and they wanted to beat us. Just like San Mateo and Burlingame.”

Tired old San Mateo and Burlingame High Schools had been playing each other forever. We Dons soon had a comparable rivalry, one which had emerged full-blown out of some junior boys' heads.

Hillsdale's red-and-blue garbed mascot is a knight—hence Menshikova's condescending reference to the reverence its students feel for that "metal clad figure." Reading her piece, we were glad to see that at least one thing remains unchanged—Aragon's traditionally dismissive attitude toward its more dutiful middle-class rival.

That dismissive attitude—a product of that culture clash—was present from the start! That said, we do remember how the instant rivalry started:

In the winter of 1962, during our brand-new school's first (though also last) "Spirit Week," some highly excitable junior boys ventured down the Alameda and painted our new rival school in Aragon hues—red and an unwanted black!

The rivalry was instant and heated. It took only the light from that match.

Aragon played Hillsdale on Turkey Day in our last three years of high school. (1962-63 was the first school year in which Aragon had seniors.) Thumbing back through our dusty yearbooks, we learned that the scores were these:

1962: Hillsdale 20, Aragon 18
1963: Aragon 7, Hillsdale 3
1964: Hillsdale 7, Aragon 0

Don't worry! Aragon's flawless basketball team defeated the Knights in six out of seven meetings during those three school years. That said, Hillsdale sent its center, Steve Kelly, off to Oregon State where he became a 7-foot high jumper, teaming with sacred Fosbury as part of the greatest high jump team in NCAA history.

(In all honesty, those Hillsdale teams were full of good guys. Bobby Marcucci, a prince!)

Back to Turkey Day! Hillsdale's coach in that first meeting was a handsome young guy named Dick Vermeil. After struggling to victory against Aragon's first-ever team, Coach apparently knew that he'd have to go elsewhere to really win the big one.

He finally did, as head coach of the St. Louis Rams in the 2000 Super Bowl! Aragon may have chased him away, but he managed to land on his feet!

Many years later, we like the cut of Menshikova's jib as she explored the cultural chasm which still seemed to exist between those aging Cali high schools. 

When we arrived in 1960, the Golden State was practically empty. Then, they built all those schools!

GLIMMERS AND INTIMATIONS: What are children being told today...

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2022

...as one tale replaces another? We'll bite! What are schoolkids told today—or perhaps, permitted to learn on their own—about the so-called First Thanksgiving?

Let's take it one step further! What do school kids know today about the state of "the Americas" in 1621? About the state of the Americas in 1491, one year before the event which has long been taken as the first contact between Europe and this "new world?"

What do kids know about the civilizations of the Americas as of 1491? About the state of play in what is now called New England at the time of that first Thanksgiving Day feast?

About the events which came after that? What are today's children told? What do they learn on their own?

You're asking interesting questions there; you can color us curious blue! We'd love to know what today's textbooks say, and what kids learn on their own, but we're unlikely see such reports.

Instead, we'll continue to see the swapping of standard stories.

"For centuries," a standard story was told to children and adults alike about that first Thanksgiving—a very limited story. Today, it's been replaced by what may perhaps be seen as a new and substantially different standard / limited tale:

CHERY (11/19/22): For centuries, Thanksgiving has been billed as an opportunity for friends and family to gather, with peace and gratitude in their hearts. But for Native Americans, celebrating the autumnal holiday isn’t as simple.

The short-and-sweet story told in schools depicting the first Thanksgiving as a harmonious harvest celebration between Native people and Pilgrims “was a very romanticized, Whitewashed education about Indigenous peoples,” said Jordan Daniel, who’s a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe.

In reality, 1621 was not the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the Wampanoag people, said David Silverman, a George Washington University professor who specializes in Native American history. The Wampanoags tried to ally with the English for trade and to maintain political independence from another Native group after an epidemic dwindled their numbers.

“Tensions built for years as the English population grew and began dispossessing, subjugating and evangelizing Native people,” Silverman said. Finally, war broke out around 1675, and after the English won, they enslaved about 2,000 American Indian prisoners of war, he added.

In 1970, the United American Indians of New England began commemorating Thanksgiving Day as a National Day of Mourning to honor their ancestors who experienced cultural genocide at the hands of European colonialists.

That newer version of the story is now published each year. Arguably, it might be perceived as a bit of a "bluewashed" story, especially when it continues in ways such as this:

CHERY (continuing directly): Native Americans as a whole say they’re still fighting for what’s rightfully theirs. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still doesn’t have control over its entire ancestral land. The Supreme Court has been weighing the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which Congress passed in 1978 to remedy the practice of removing Native children from their homes and sending them to non-Native boarding schools and families.

The people of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still don’t have control over the tribe's entire ancestral land?  In reality, the 2,800 people of that tribe aren't ever going to "have control" over some such undefined expanse of ancestral land. 

As everyone knows, that isn't going to happen! History has moved on in a brutal but definitive way, as history has frequently done. It's hard to know whose interests are served by seeming to pretend different.

What are children told today about that First Thanksgiving? What are children told today about what happened next?

We'd love to know such things! We'd also like to know what adults are told about the problems of needs of Native American peoples today. But that's a topic which is almost never discussed within our blue tribe press.

In fact, no one cares a whole lot about that—about the interests and the needs of the Native American kids who are being born today. Instead, we retell the story, once a year, about this "national day of mourning"—a day of mourning which has now been observed, at least by some people, for over fifty years.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder," Paul Simon once declared. These are also days of great suffering around the world—and of advice columns prominently placed in the Washington Post, such as these recent insulting groaners: 

Miss Manners: I can’t deal with my colleagues pooping next to me

Miss Manners: The proper etiquette for disposing bathroom trash

Miss Manners: Guest pointed out a burned-out bulb in the middle of dinner

Miss Manners: I used my friend’s baby changing station. Is that weird?

The Washington Post should be embarrassed to publish such manifest drivel. That said, this seems to be a major way to attract our blue tribe's inquiring eyeballs, with the focus on bodily waste seeming to be on the rise:

DEAR PRUDENCE
Help! My Dad’s Visiting Friend Used Our Bathtub as a Toilet.

Pathetically, "Slate Staff" recently republished that monumental, world-class groaner from January 2020. Adding intellectual insult to cultural injury, we take it as obvious that the problem posed in the original letter to Slate was a fairly obvious hoax.

For our money, Margaret Renkl has been a superb addition to the New York Times' roster of opinion columnists. Today, she writes a column which appears beneath this title:

How to Give Thanks in a Screwed-Up World

For the record, the world is substantially worse than than "screwed-up." In our view, Renkl offers superb advice as she remembers her father:

RENKL (11/23/22): I think about my father every day, but I’ve been thinking about him more than usual lately. Not only because Thanksgiving is coming on, that time when the ache of my missing elders is especially acute, but because I am trying to remind myself how to see the world as my father saw it.

“Brew positivity,” the tag on my tea bag tells me, but I am thinking of nothing as simplistic as that. My father was no Panglossian determined to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds. Dad grew up during the Great Depression in what was effectively an orphanage. He knew very well that this was not the best of all possible worlds. Nevertheless, he loved his life and was grateful for every minute of it. Somehow he was able to hold the love and the beauty and the joy alongside the grief and the fear and the pain. 

That was her father! For the record, we human beings can't survive if we see nothing but the pain. Rather plainly, our species is built with the ability to ignore, forget, disregard.

That said, what are we ignoring as one of our biggest newspapers gives prominent placement to those insulting advice columns? Later, Renkl thinks about an important topic—happiness—and the (many) things she'll never be able to change:

RENKL: What voters want is transparently irrelevant to many of the officials charged to represent us, as the attorney general of Kentucky made clear last week. Voters in that state defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to its Constitution, but the attorney general insists the vote “has no bearing” on its near-total abortion ban. Down here, Mr. Trump’s movement is Glenn Close in the bathtub with a knife.

But it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m determined not to think about that this week. I will think instead about my father and his insistence on happiness. I will let my whole heart fill up with gratitude for what is still breathtakingly beautiful about this weary, ragged world; for the many people who are fighting for our democracy; and for all the people I love.

I can’t force polluting nations to work together to hold climate change to planet-surviving levels. I can’t force Congress to work together for solutions to the economic inequities and information silos that separate us. But I can pull out my mother’s recipe box and make a Thanksgiving feast. I can remember the loved ones who once shared this table and fill their seats with people whose loved ones are distant or otherwise missing. And I can be grateful for every single fantastic moment we have together.

None of us will ever be able to change the "economic inequities" of this nation—and those which afflict the world. That said, we blue tribals could at least make an effort to stop creating the "information silos" we help construct on a daily basis, including the silos in which brutal conduct from centuries past is never put away in service to the possibilities of the future. 

The good, decent people of that (very small) Massachusetts tribe aren't ever going to get their entire ancestral land back! The Post's young writer framed the issue that way, and some editor let it go.

(Or who knows? Maybe some editor inserted that point into the young writer's report!)

That said, something else is true. Our own blue tribe is full of standard stories designed to tell ourselves that We Are The Very Good People and The Others Are Very Bad. As we tell ourselves these stories, we pretend to care about X, Y and Z, then let those matters go.

Variants of this tribal self-flattery can be seen on a daily basis. They offer glimmers and intimations of the way we manage to lose elections, even as 6-year-old children lose their mothers as they try to cross the Darien Gap on their way to this land.

We repeat the talk of cosseted professors. We're quick to call Others names, preferably by the tens of millions. 

On this Thanksgiving Eve, that doesn't make us bad people. It simply makes us people people, but it also lets us know why we keep running in place.

Around the world, we humans are strongly inclined to cling to the nightmares of the past. That isn't an evil thing to do, but at what point might it possibly leave us poorly served?

Friday: Who took part in that cultural genocide? Also, what are children being told about that slightly earlier year?

Also, what sacred Nietzsche said! So much to look forward to!

GLIMMERS AND INTIMATIONS: Paul Simon in 1986!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2022

Our blue tribe's scripts today: In recent weeks, we've often thought of the gloomy ending to Paul Simon's widely-acclaimed album, Graceland.

The album appeared in 1986. It interwove two storylines. 

The dominant story concerned the way the people of the world were coming to see their essential similarity through the spread of "world music." Simon's album was, of course, part of that phenomenon. 

The secondary story on the album seems to concern the failure of Simon's first two marriages. 

In Graceland, the album's second song, Simon sings thusly: "My traveling companion in 9 years old, he's the child of my first marriage." 

Simon and the child are trying to reach Elvis Presley's iconic home—and a metaphorical graceland as well. In the album's penultimate song, That Was Your Mother, the singer provides this child with a great gift—he describes the scene when the child's mother and father first set eyes on each other. 

In the song's fictionalized telling, the child's mother and father meet in New Orleans, one of the places where the world's music entered the North American land mass. As they meet, Simon is "standing in the shadow of Clifton Chenier, king of the bayou"—but also, king of one of the musical traditions which arose in that location.

The album presents an ironic interplay of the singer's reflections on these simultaneous, interwoven themes and events. In its final song, The Myth of Fingerprints, the album ends with a downbeat reflection on a particular type of counter-productive human impulse, our drive toward individuation.

The album's final lyric goes like this:

"That's way we must learn to live alone." 

At least on the individual level, we're strongly inclined to tear ourselves apart—or at least, so Simon said. Within the album's wider context, that remains true even as we come to see and appreciate our vast global similarities as one human species. 

(Joseph's life was lived "Under African Skies"—but, within that very song, it's mirrored by Linda Ronstadt's!)

We've often thought of that album's downbeat final lyric in recent weeks and months. That lyric tends to pop into our heads when we see our own blue tribe insist on finding ways to perform the prehistoric task of otherization. 

It's an ancient human impulse, one we humans can't seem to quit. Our blue tribe keeps performing this function as we recite our tribe's sacred scripts.

We thought of that line as we read the gloomy, newly mandated headline in the Washington Post this weekend:

These Native Americans focus on family amid Thanksgiving’s dark history

As a matter of tribal loyalty, we're now expected to focus on that (extremely old) "dark history." For background, see yesterday's report.

We also thought of that downbeat line when we read Professor Chute's new essay in The Atlantic:

WHY MAUS WAS BANNED
What makes the book controversial is exactly what makes it valuable.

Professor Chute is very high end, and she's an expert on comics. As such, she'd be easy to parody, whether her work would actually deserve such treatment or not. 

She herself may be inclined to parody / stereotype Others. Almost a whole year later, she's still insisting on this:

CHUTE (11/21/22): It’s true that Spiegelman “speaks”—and draws—the unspeakable in Maus. In black line art, it presents two narratives: the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in 1951 with his wife, Anja, also a survivor, and their toddler, Art—and the story of the cartoonist son, as an adult, soliciting his father’s testimony. It is taught routinely in high school, college, and graduate school. It is, in addition, taught to many middle-school students. This came to wide attention this past January, when Maus was banned from an eighth-grade English-language-arts curriculum by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board. The ban became a global news story; Maus sold out on Amazon.

But the ban didn’t surprise me. A new wave of politically driven censorship, particularly one motivated by a discomfort with discussions of America’s history of slavery, has grown in the Trump and post-Trump years. And Maus’s frank visual depiction of horrors, the way it acts as a form of witness to dehumanization and genocide, is controversial. Of course, that confrontation with horror is exactly what makes it valuable. 

[...]

When the book emerged as a fresh target in the culture wars this year, the school board’s official, and flimsy, reasons for removing it from the curriculum amplified the outrage. The board cited bad language (such as “bitch” and “goddamn”) and nudity (specifically, one small image of Spiegelman’s mother, drawn in human form, in the bathtub after taking her own life, a profoundly troubling visual on which to pin the charge of obscenity). These aspects, while perhaps not ideal for an eighth-grade audience, feel beside the point in a narrative that bears witness to genocide.

One school board in one location didn't agree with this exalted professor's assessment about the suitability of the unspeakable for their district's middle schoolers. In the face of an outrage like that, the professor is eager to keep telling us what that means about the ways of the other tribe. 

There's no room for disagreement! What "feels beside the point" to this very high-end professor must feel that same way to everyone else.

If even one school board disagrees, The Others must be otherized—and The Others are all alike. The professor will rant about "censorship" and "banned books" when one "controversial" book is replaced in one district's lengthy middle-school curriculum about the Holocaust.

Also yesterday, we thought of the Graceland album's closing line when we read an instant opinion column in the Washington Post. 

Why would someone enter a bar and kill five people? Scripted within an inch of his life, Brian Broome instantly knew:

The Colorado massacre cannot be blamed on mental illness. It’s rooted in hate.

So read the headline on the column. In the actual column, the columnist offered this:

BROOME (11/21/22): You know who will get the blame for Colorado Springs, right? Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame “mental illness.” That’s what some thought drove Robert Bowers to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to kill 11 human beings. That’s what others believed made Dylann Roof stroll into a Black church in Charleston, S.C., to murder nine human beings. And, sooner or later, conservatives will say it was “mental illness” that drove this newest killer of the marginalized to commit the latest atrocity.

But are we ever going to ask why so many supposedly mentally ill people seem to carry right-wing talking points along with their AR-15s?

The Others keep blaming mental illness at such moments. As a result, people within our own blue tribe must insist that mental illness can't be the cause of such events. 

The real cause has to be hate—but can hate be rooted in mental illness? Please don't ask us questions like that when we're shouting our sacred scripts! 

(Also, please don't publish medical specialists. Publish script-readers like Broome!)

The Post's report about Thanksgiving involves a new mandated script. There's more to discuss within that report, which was written by a good, decent person who's six months out of college.

Tomorrow, we may be able to return to that new mandated script. For today, we'll only say this—the report seemed to provide glimmers and intimations of "why we must live alone."

Along the way, these instant script-readings remind us of two of Kevin Drum's recent points. Why do centrist voters drift away from our tribe's wise advice? 

They don't like the way we ape those professors, and they don't like the way we call everyone else certain types of names!

Tomorrow: A holiday's "dark" script