RAPS ON RACE: Just a few of Joe Scarborough's claims!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2021

Raps, propaganda and war: We were first "taught" (exposed to) the poem as a mere high school student at America's Aragon High. 

The school sits on the Alameda de las Pulgas (the road of the fleas) in San Mateo, California. Our exposure occurred in the last few years before drugs fully hit. 

(Altamont finally happened in December 1969.)

At present, we think of the poem every morning as we scan the major newspapers. For the record, the once-famous poem's once-famous title is drawn from a line from Horace. 

The leading authority on Horace explains that line in the manner shown below. Headline included:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori 

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is a line from the Odes (III.2.13) by the Roman lyric poet Horace. The line translates: "It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland." The Latin word patria (homeland), literally meaning the country of one's fathers (in Latin, patres) or ancestors, is the source of the French word for a country, patrie, and of the English word "patriot" (one who loves his country).

Horace's line was quoted in the title of a poem by Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum est", published in 1921, describing soldiers' horrific experiences in World War I. Owen's poem, which calls Horace's line "the old Lie", essentially ended the line's straightforward uncritical use. Before 1920, the phrase had tended to appear in memorials and monuments to the fallen; after 1921, it tended to decry propaganda and war.

We were exposed to Owen's poem—to "Dulce et Decorum est"—when we were still in high school. It's with us every day at this point. 

According to the leading authority, the Owen poem changed the way the line from Horace was typically used. After the poem's publication, the famous line upon which the poem is based tended to be used "to decry propaganda and war." 

So says the leading authority. Sadly, we offer this:

If it's propaganda and war you enjoy today, you should turn on MSNBC (but also CNN). We especially refer to the horrific corporate channel's ongoing ugly, repulsive treatment of the Rittenhouse trial.

Full disclosure! A bit of irony appears when the leading authority on Owen's poem reports the poem's provenance, 

The poem was a bitter commentary on the price a nation or tribal group may pay when that nation or tribal group longs for the greatness of war. 

According to the leading authority, the poem was once influential, even "renowned." Its sentiments are almost wholly unknown today. 

At any rate, this is the way the leading authority describes the poem's creation:

"Dulce et Decorum est" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. The Latin title is taken from Ode 3.2 (Valor) of the Roman poet Horace and means "it is sweet and fitting". It is followed by pro patria mori, which means "to die for one's country". 

One of Owen's most renowned works, the poem is known for its horrific imagery and condemnation of war. It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough but possibly Ripon, between January and March 1918. The earliest surviving manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and addressed to his mother, Susan Owen, with the message: "Here is a gas poem done yesterday (which is not private, but not final)."

It was "one of Owen's most renowned works." Cue the sardonic laughter!

At any rate, the leading authority tells us that Owen's bitter anti-propaganda poem was "probably revised at Scarborough." To all intents and purposes, that's precisely our point!

Our badly failing liberal world is increasingly sunk in propaganda and tribal war. This is especially true when we conduct our increasingly disgraceful "raps on race."

As Mead and Baldwin may have shown, it's never been easy to discuss issues of race. By way of contrast, it's very easy—extremely easy—to memorize propaganda.

We've been appalled, in the past few weeks, by the propagandistic presentations our tribal tribunes have offered. On Wednesday, November 10, for example, Joe Scarborough offered this:

SCARBOROUGH (11/10/21): We have a 17-year-old kid, underage, said he bought an AR-15 because he thought it was cool. He drove across state—had his mother drive him across state lines. He appointed himself a militia member. He goes around and he ends up unloading, what, 60 rounds? 

We were watching Morning Joe when the cable star made that presentation. He made other gruesome misstatements during that propagandistic segment, but we're able to quote this part of his presentation because a different cable news host finally played the videotape on Monday of this week.

Inevitably, that other cable news host immediately launched one of his own trademark rants. Immediately after playing that tape, he ranted about it as shown:

UNNAMED CABLE NEWS HOST (11/15/21): Of all the people, you could find to comment on a killing, it's interesting who they chose. But just listen to the words—consider how totally dishonest the summary you just heard is. Virtually every word is a lie. 

The summary was "totally dishonest?" "Virtually every word [was] a lie?" 

That assessment may be accurate! It's also possible that Scarborough actually believed his howling misstatements—howling misstatements our own blue tribe's propaganda machine has churned again and again and again.

No, Kenosha! Kyle Rittenhouse's mother didn't drive him to Kenosha that day or that night. That has been clear for a very long time—unless you're watching Our Channel.

Rittenhouse did "cross state lines" when he came to Kenosha that day—but that's because he lives roughly one mile across the state line in Aurora, Illinois. The vaguely criminal-sounding claim is endlessly recited by our tribunes. Though it has a wonderfully criminal feel, it's also completely irrelevant.

Did Rittenhouse "appoint himself a militia member?" We have no idea what that claim is even supposed to mean, but it serves the tribal purpose. Meanwhile, Scarborough outdid the rest of the tribe with the ugly, vile and ridiculous claim that Rittenhouse "end[ed] up unloading, what, like 60 rounds" that night.

He'd pulled that number right out of his ascot. In this report, the New York Times seems to count eight shots fired.

In a perfect world, that would be eight rounds too many, of course. But we don't live in a perfect world, as the conduct of people like Scarborough makes increasingly clear.

Back in the day, propagandists of this stripe urged others to march off to war. As he relates in his once-famous poem, Owen trudged along behind the carts filled with the dying and the dead. 

(Also, see the famous scene in Gone With the Wind of Atlanta's dying and dead.)

Corporate multimillionaire stars like Scarborough engage in such conduct today. They recite their points to excite their tribe—and to send a teenager to jail.

(They may not know that their claims are misleading and false. It isn't part of their culture to check.)

We thought of Owen's bitter words when we watched Scarborough behave that way that morning. He made other statements which were even more ridiculous. 

(His performance of racial greatness left no script behind. Pathetically, he even went back to play the old "he was carrying Skittles" card!)

We thought of Owen's bitter words when we watched Scarborough propagandize. So too as we watched Claire McCaskill the very next day, or as we watched William Cornell Brooks, or as we read Robin Givhan's remarkable statements this week.

People have always behaved in such ways; some behave this way today. As for our own inexcusable tribe, we're currently Building Balkanization Better as our tribunes engages in this ugly misconduct and the silly children of our tribe reward them for their behavior.

By the way, who was the unnamed cable host who played the tape of Scarborough? That unnamed host was Tucker Carlson. This forces us to offer a simple truth:

Despite his trademark rants, Carlson's coverage of the Rittenhouse trial has been vastly more accurate and informative than the coverage being churned on our own cable channels. It's hard to have sufficient contempt for the behavior of our own corporate tools. 

They do this to send a teenager to jail—and to pleasure you and yours. To extend separation and war.

"Dulce et Decorum est" was a bitter complaint about propaganda and war. It's hard to have sufficient contempt for the behavior of the figureheads who mislead us night after night.

McCaskill? Brooks? Givhan? That stupid brainwashed kid at Slate? "Ardent for some desperate glory," there's nothing they won't memorize and say for love of propaganda.

Setting those trademark rants to the side, the basic coverage at Fox has been much more informative. We expect to explore this state of affairs next week.

Disconsolate experts keep telling us that this ugly, evil state of affairs simply isn't going to change. Nor will we stop cheering our Caesars as they parade about on TV, performing these new raps on race.

Next week: Information v. faux

What Owen saw: The wages of propaganda are death. This remains true today:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning...

You can read the full poem here. You can even apply for membership[ in the post-tribal human race.

We watched our old pal Maher last night!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2021

A word we never use: We go all the way back to November 1982 with his ironyship, Bill Maher.

After that, there was the week of New Year's Eve in Richmond, December 1983. Let's just say that Bill made a miscalculation when the big night finally arrived at the end of the week.

Bill has long been amazingly talented—and that's a word we never use.  It's very, very, very hard to talk about news events and news topics in a consistently humorous and intelligent way. Very few people have ever come close to being able to do what Bill has been doing for years.

Last night, Bill did the full hour with Chris Cuomo. It isn't a matter of agreeing with every position Bill may have taken—but that was easily the most intelligent hour we've seen on TV in a very long time.

You rarely see an intelligent segment on a "cable news" show! On cable, it simply isn't done—but last night's hour was solid all the way through.

We were disappointed in Bill in one respect—he doesn't seem to have accepted the fact that it's over. We refer to this presentation, offered fairly late in the show:

MAHER (11/17/21): I mean, when I mention Liz Cheney now, and the audience claps, I'm like, "Oh, we love her now? Isn't that interesting?" And I see why.

CUOMO: Depends. Let's see—let's see if she goes after Biden a couple more times. But then again, who knows how long she's around, in her own primary?

MAHER: But that's OK. That's her job, to go after Biden. That's what Republicans do. They go after the—

I mean, we did that forever. Republicans and Democrats were cats and dogs, and they fought. But also, Tip O'Neill and Reagan could have a drink after work. They could work together.

I don't know how we are ever going to work together. How do you—we have how many QAnon members of Congress now? QAnon! I mean, Marjorie Taylor?

CUOMO: You're right. You got them.

MAHER: How do you negotiate with people who think that Democrats eat babies?

Bill seems to think there's a possibility of coming back from the nation's current state of affairs. For years now, the disconsolate experts with whom we consult have said there's no chance of that.  

We've passed that information along, but Bill has a dream today!

As in The Sixth Sense, so too here. Bill simply hasn't accepted the fact that it's actually over. Aside from that, we'd rate last evening's hour superb. To review the transcript, click here.

Tonight at 9, by way of contrast, you can watch Our Own Rhodes Scholar. She'll be busy selling the car.  Almost surely, she'll mug and she'll clown.

She'll help you see that we're real smart—that they're the stupid ones. That is her product, her only product. As with every human tribe, our blue tribe eagerly laps it up and then we gulp it down.

RAPS ON RACE: "Everybody's talkin' at me..."

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2021

Can't hear a word they're saying: As we've noted previously, Richard Elman didn't seem to like the 1971 book, A Rap on Race.

Elman, a figure of the left, reviewed the book for the New York Times. He didn't just dislike the book—the book almost seemed to make him angry. As we've noted previously, he began his review as shown:

ELMAN (6/27/71): No fuss. No bother. Eliminate dirty smudges on the fingertips, broken nails, and messy erasure marks. You don't need to revise, rethink, or rewrite. You don't even need to write. Just think of it, folks: No more bloodshot eyes, or coffee bowels, or angry friends you've stood up to work just a little longer, harder, more. Sealed inside your own angry mortal human vacuum, to be just as fatuous as Margaret Mead and James Baldwin about the crisis of our time—particularly race—all you have to do is talk and not listen, always avoid expressing your feelings openly, refer constantly to other times and other cultures with historical and/or pseudo-historical truths, interrupt whenever possible, call yourself a prophet or a poet, insist that you are being emotionally sincere and/or objectively rational, and record it all on tape, to be transcribed later as a book. 

To be as fatuous as Mead and Baldwin, all you had to do was talk and not listen! That was part of what Elman said, right straight out of the box.

A Rap on Race was the transcript, or at least the partial transcript, of a lengthy discussion between Baldwin and Mead from August 1970 The claim that their discussion had been "fatuous" may have been a bit surprising because of the stature of Baldwin and Mead as major, highly-regarded public intellectuals, and because they'd been conducting their "rap" about a subject which Elman called "the crisis of our time."

Mead and Baldwin were (and are) regarded as giants, and they were discussing a very important topic. It's always possible, of course, that the sheer importance of the topic may have contributed to the discussion's failure.

According to  Elman, Mead and Baldwin had engaged in "bilge," in "blather," even in "blah blah blah." As he described the provenance of the rap, he offered a few examples:

ELMAN: With their tape recorder, Margaret Mead and James Baldwin got together one steamy night last August. They had a mutual friend. So first they ate dinner and then they went blah blah blah in front of the recorder late into that night and then again the next day—about New Guinea, South Africa, Women's Lib, the South, slavery, Christianity, their early childhood upbringings, Israel, the Arabs, the bomb, Paris, Istanbul, the English language, Huey Newton, John Wayne, the black bourgeoisie, Baldwin's 2-year-old grand nephew and Professor Mead's daughter.

"We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible," he said to her, poignantly enough, at one point, "because we are still each other's only hope." But, eventually, they got so angry and muddled that he was being accused of mouthing anti-Semitic nonsense and, as a final quid pro quo, he lumped her among his potential enemies and victimizers. Rather smugly, the anthropologist has said she could not possibly be a racist because of her impeccable upbringing and because she had once or twice coddled babies in Africa, Samoa, West Irian. Baldwin countered by asking how could he be an anti-Semite since one of his best friends was Jewish.

According to Elman, Mead had "rather smugly said she could not possibly be a racist because of her impeccable upbringing." Was that a reference to the exchange which is heard at the start of this YouTube tape, the exchange which starts like this?

MEAD: I learned about race when I was a child.

BALDWIN: How did you learn about that?

We admire Baldwin' courtesy at that point. To our ear, Mead proceeds to answer Baldwin's question with a strikingly self-satisfied, self-assured bit of autobiography—with a rap about her upbringing. 

Was Elman referring to that presentation? We have no idea, but we will carry this thought away from Mead's presentation:

For perfectly understandable reasons, people who were socially defined as "white" were sometimes eager, even back then, to say that they weren't racist. For perfectly understandable reasons, this tendency still obtains today.

Was this 1970 conversation "bilge," or was it defined by its brilliance? As we've noted, different people have stated different views. Having noted that, let us also note this:

A few months before this conversation occurred, Midnight Cowboy won the 1970 Oscar as the Best Picture of 1969. 

The film's theme song had been a big hit. Written and originally recorded by Fred Neil, it was performed in the movie by Harry Nilsson.

The song was called Everybody's Talkin'. Its lyrics started like this:

Everybody's talking at me
I don't hear a word they're saying
Only the echoes of my mind

People stopping, staring
I can't see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes.

In the immediate aftermath of Midnight Cowboy's Oscar, Elman said that Baldwin and Mead were talking but not listening. According to Elman, the result was a lot of "blah blah blah" about the important subject of "race."

Right at the start of the YouTube recording, Mead asserts that she learned about race during her admirable upbringing. Fifty years later, we live in a world where the good decent people of our own liberal world are sometimes said to be eager to perform their lack of racism, or even their anti-racism, as Mead quickly did.

We can't help thinking that our own blue tribe can sometimes, in such forums, do a n enormous amount of talking but maybe a lot less listening. Is it possible that we don't hear a word some Others are saying—that we're only equipped to hear "the echo of our minds?"

This age-old question came to mind as we perused today's New York Times. We refer in particular to this lengthy opinion column by Farhad Manjoo, in which—or so it seems to us—Manjoo is making an effort, along the way, to be inclusive and fair.

We've been stunned by many things we've seen and heard, from our own tribe, over the past few weeks. In our view, our tribe can be ugly, cold-hearted, dishonest, cruel—and how we do love our scripts!

To our ear, Manjoo is trying hard today to be inclusive and fair, even as he argues a favored point about the uselessness of guns. Within a single sentence in this passage, he includes a talking-point of Fox News and a talking-point of our own. Perhaps you can pick them out:

MANJOO (11/18/21): The scene on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, had the makings of a classic gun-rights fantasy. An unruly mob had descended on private businesses. One such business was Car Source, an auto dealership with three locations in Kenosha. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time and a resident of Illinois (his father lived in Kenosha), said he had come with a friend to protect Car Source on the invitation of the owner...

"His father lived in Kenosha" is a bow to The Others. At the same time, It's a statement of a basic fact our own corporate stars disappear.

At the same time, "Rittenhouse was a resident of Illinois" is a bow to our own Storyline—to the memorized, irrelevant claim, peddled about by by our ugly tribe, that the lad in question had "crossed state lines" that night.

It seems to us that Manjoo is trying to be fair and balanced in this morning's column. Still and all, he's arguing a particular preferred claim about guns—a claim he starts to articulate in this fuller passage:

MANJOO: The scene on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, had the makings of a classic gun-rights fantasy. An unruly mob had descended on private businesses. One such business was Car Source, an auto dealership with three locations in Kenosha. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time and a resident of Illinois (his father lived in Kenosha), said he had come with a friend to protect Car Source on the invitation of the owner...

By the time Rittenhouse arrived, more than a hundred vehicles on a sales lot owned by Car Source had been set on fire. There were burning trash cans on the streets. Gunfire rang out often. Officers in riot gear and armed with tear gas were in control of much of the city, but there were sections where the police pulled back. It was here that the people with rifles took a stand against what they saw as a mob.

But as many witnesses testified, the rifles weren’t very helpful at all.

Is it true that the rifles in question "weren't very helpful" that night? 

The word "very" is an obvious dodge. That said, credit where due:

To his vast credit, Manjoo notes that "more than a hundred vehicles on a sales lot owned by Car Source had been set on fire" by the time Rittenhouse (and his colleagues?) arrived. Within our vile and ugly tribe, we constantly disappear such facts, pretending that Rittenhouse and the others had arrived on the scene of a mere "protest" (full stop).

Unlike the bulk of our attack dogs, Manjoo is willing to say, without using the words, that arson and mayhem were underway in Kenosha. But here's what he doesn't say:

He doesn't say how many cars on the lot were set on fire after the men with the rifles arrived. Setting aside what happened elsewhere during the "protest" that night, is it possible that the rifles actually were helpful in halting the arson at that location that night?

We've been struck by the ugliness and cruelty of our own liberal tribe as our corporate tribunes pretend to discuss that evening's events. 

We've also been struck by our blinding stupidity—by our devotion to Storyline and script. By our devotion to "motivated reasoning" as we mount out platforms and perform the (extremely limited) antiracism of which we suddenly seem so proud.

There's no false claim our corporate stars won't recite as we pursue this performance. Occasionally, we may lapse into unintentional humor, as when Manjoo says that "the people with rifles took a stand against what they saw as a mob."

Too funny! Exactly one paragraph earlier, Manjoo has explicitly said, in his own voice, that the car lot had been attacked by "a mob." Now, that becomes a mere perception on the part of the people with the rifles, as if the cars on that lot may have set fire to themselves.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep—and, for perfectly obvious reasons, discussions of race tend to involve vast stores of emotion. (For reasons our tribunes can explain, discussion of Rittenhouse's conduct that night has been framed as a discussion of race.)

Our deeply flawed species is strongly inclined to "motivated reasoning." That's true right from the jump. 

In the past week, the tribunes on our TV shows have been deeply ugly, stupid and cruel—and they've been cosmically "motivated" as they pretend to discuss this most important general topic.

On YouTube, Mead quickly frames herself, and her upbringing, in something resembling the way Elman described.

It's natural that people will want to do that. But oh, what kind of performance is this, which goes from bad to much, much worse? In which we keep talkin' our own talking points, keep hearing the echoes of our own deeply flawed minds?

Tomorrow: Scarborough? Givhan / McCaskill? William Cornell Brooks?

Our chronology concerning Sinema's clothes!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021

Clarifying a technical bungle: We're still annoyed about the misfire regarding Monday's afternoon post—the post which didn't bark.

For the sake of future historians, let's clarify the chronology:

On Monday morning, the New York Times finally did it! They published the third installment in Associate Professor Cottom's endless series of endless essays about Kyrsten Sinema's endlessly meaningful wardrobe.

This time, though, the Times published Cottom's essay in their print editions—in the space where the paper's editorials used to appear, no less! 

We reacted as any sane person would. To read that report, click here.

On Tuesday morning, the Times published a letter in which Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen  complained about unnamed journalists who have allegedly been launching "sly biphobic attacks" against Sinema. 

Edmonds-Allen included a quotation from one such alleged attack; the author of offending statement went unnamed. Upon googling, the quotation tracked back to the second essay in the Cottom triptych. 

We swung into action again. To read that second report, click this.

Due to a technical bungle, our Monday report didn't get posted until Tuesday afternoon. Today, we clarify the chronology, and we offer this observation:

Certain journalists and certain news orgs seem to love discussing the endless deep meanings of disfavored politicians' clothes. Major orgs have been publishing such work for decades now. Cottom's essays about Sinema's wardrobe add a major dose of academic pomposity to this long-standing dumb idea.

Our news orgs seem to love presenting this dreck. Again and again and again and again, it's a dumb / very dumb idea.

RAPS ON RACE: How good looking are Polynesians?

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021

They're not all that hot, Mead said: Listening to James Baldwin and Margaret Mead conduct their once famous "Rap on Race," we quickly felt sorry for Baldwin.

We were (apparently) listening to the record album which emerged from their lengthy discussion in August 1970—a lengthy discussion in which they seem to have discussed every available topic.

On YouTube, the recording runs a full hour and 45 minutes. The full discussion was apparently much longer—but as presented on YouTube (and perhaps on the record album, A Rap on Race), the discussion starts like this:

MEAD: I learned about race when I was a child.

BALDWIN: How did you learn about that?

Over the next few minutes, Baldwin is unfailingly polite. He agrees with everything Mead says—and the conversation touches on a wide array of topics, not excluding Mead's idea of why everyone thinks Polynesians are good looking, even though they pretty much aren't:

MEAD: My first field trip was to Samoa. But of course, you know Polynesians are people everybody thinks is [sic] beautiful. And you should look at them very closely. They are not really the most beautiful people in the world, and yet everybody thinks they are beautiful. Chinese think so, black people think so. Everybody thinks so. 

I have now figured out why...

Margaret Mead apparently thought that she had figured out why. To our ear, the comments we've quoted, and those that followed, sound like pure bloviation, of a very familiar kind.

On the YouTube recording, that rumination by Mead occurs less than three minutes in. During these early exchanges, Baldwin seems to agree with everything Mead says, including her wide-ranging thoughts about the global effects of the invention of boats. 

Sometimes these instant agreements seem to make sense. Sometimes, they even seem to point in an important direction. 

Sometimes, though, they possibly don't—and in the sixth minute of the recording, Mead launches this:

MEAD: I think you've got to realize one other thing about white people, and that is that white skin is a terrible temptation.

BALDWIN: How do you mean that exactly? I think I know what you mean—

MEAD: Because we look like angels! Did you know that?

BALDWIN: Yeah, I was going to get to that. I was—go on.

Less than six minutes in, Mead launches that particular ship. She goes on to describe an alleged historical event in which an unnamed Pope allegedly said that some very white "Angles"—slaves captured from today's British isles—looked more like "angels" to him.

Searching on that peculiar claim, we find that Mead's comments refer to an apocryphal historical tale concerning Pope Gregory the Great, who died in the year 604. As best we can tell, no one actually knows if the historical tale is true—but as always, so what?

Less than six minutes in, Mead repeats the story as fact, then draws a sweeping conclusion from it. Baldwin, for whom we're feeling sorry now, lets this whole "rap" go.

When we listen to this first six minutes of the YouTube presentation, are we listening to brilliance? Or are we perhaps hearing bilge?

As we noted yesterday, different observers have stated different views: 

In a set of essays in 2015, Maria Popova came down very strongly on the side of brilliance. But in a 1971 review of the book, A Rap On Race, the New York Times' Richard Elman angrily described the long conversation as "bilge," but also as "blather" and as "blah blah blah."

For ourselves, we think we may be hearing a bit of bloviation in the excerpts under review, especially on the part of Mead. It seems to us that this might serve as a cautionary tale.

In 1970, Baldwin and Mead were two of the western world's most famous and highly-regarding public intellectuals. Acknowledging that obvious fact, we might also say this:

Intelligent people know that they mustn't blindly trust authority. That includes intellectual authority, and this note of caution carries special weight in the case of such highly fraught topics as the ones under review when we the humans attempt to conduct our present-day "raps on race."

Listening to those first few minutes on YouTube, we were struck by Mead's overpowering sense of certainty concerning all possible matters. Reading Popova's highly favorable review of A Rap on Race, we were struck by this particular statement by Mead, as we noted yesterday:

MEAD: I was walking across the Wellesley campus with my four-year-old, who was climbing pine trees instead of keeping up with me.

I said, “You come down out of that pine tree. You don’t have to eat pine needles like an Indian.” So she came down and she asked, “Why do the Indians have to eat pine needles?” I said, “To get their Vitamin C, because they don’t have any oranges.” She asked, “Why don’t they have any oranges?” Then I made a perfectly clear technical error; I said, “Because the white man took their land away from them.” She looked at me and she said, “Am I white?” I said, “Yes, you are white.” “But I didn’t took their land away from them, and I don’t like it to be tooken!” she shouted.

Now if I had said, “The early settlers took their land away,” she would have said, “Am I an early settler?” But I had made a blanket racial category: the white man. It was a noble sentiment, but it was still racial sentiment. 

As a reviewer might have said, Blah blah blah blah blah. 

Speaking with a bit more detachment, that rumination strikes us as strange in several ways. Most strikingly, though, we would have answered that 4-year-old's question in a different way: 

We wouldn't tell a 4-year-old child that she belonged to a "race." We're somewhat surprised that Mead did.

"Race" is a famously fuzzy concept. Thanks to the brutal history of our nation and the larger world, the general topic is invested with vast emotional content.

For those reasons, our modern attempts to conduct discussions about "racial" topics may tend to be even more deeply flawed than our other attempts at discussion. In recent weeks, we've been embarrassed and dismayed to see the way our own blue tribe attempts to conduct, or pretends to conduct, such highly-fraught discussions. 

To cite one example, Robin Givhan's essay in today's Washington Post would strike us as ugly and vile (and nearly insane) if we weren't committed to the idea that we humans are all pretty much doing the best we can. We may flesh out our assessment tomorrow.

At any rate, so it will tend to go when we try to rap about "race." Tomorrow, we'll start to bring our discussion of such failed discussions into the present day.

Tomorrow: What Joe Scarborough recently said (and where you can see it transcribed)

Associate Professor Cottom assailed!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Where this nonsense takes us: Yesterday afternoon, we posted an award-winning report on the so-called "Cottom Triptych"—on the trio of lengthy essays by Associate Professor Cottom about Senator Sinema's deeply informative wardrobe. 

(Or at least we thought we did. See explanatory note below.)

That trio of lengthy, brain-numbing essays has been published by—who else?—the New York Times. We're sorry to return to the topic today, but a letter in this morning's Times helps us contemplate the wages of journalistic sin of this type.

The letter appears beneath this heading in this morning's Times:

Attacks on Kyrsten Sinema Over Her Bisexuality

In full, the letter says this:

To the Editor:

Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are facing criticism from Democrats for not toeing the party line. As a bisexual Democrat, I find it horrifying to watch the criticism of Ms. Sinema devolve into sly biphobic attacks that are increasing in frequency and ferocity.

Recent articles about Senator Sinema, including in The New York Times, focus on her person, not her politics. Democrats are attacking her because she is not voting the way they want her to vote, and the attacks are using her bisexuality as a weapon against her.

One article, for example, refers to Ms. Sinema’s style choices viewed as “a type of pinkwashing: leveraging positive associations with gay culture and identity to distract from one’s negative actions.”

Meanwhile, without federal anti-discrimination legislation, bisexuals face discrimination across the United States. One of the places making strides to eliminate L.G.B.T. discrimination is Arizona, Ms. Sinema’s state.

Whether or not one agrees with all of Ms. Sinema’s policy positions, and I often don’t, as an American who cherishes democracy I believe that it is her right (and, as an elected official, her duty) to determine her own political positions, free from attacks on her identity.

(Rev.) Marian Edmonds-Allen / New York

The writer is the executive director of Parity, a nonprofit that works on faith and L.G.B.T. issues.

The letter writer says she frequently disagrees with Sinema's policy positions. We'd be strongly inclined to make the same statement, if we were ever able to figure out what Sinema's positions are.

In our view, Sinema's political behavior has been extremely strange, but that isn't the topic of this morning's letter. The writer complains that attacks on Sinema are now "using her bisexuality as a weapon against her." 

The writer even cites an unspecified article which refers to Sinema's "style choices" as “a type of pinkwashing: leveraging positive associations with gay culture and identity to distract from one’s negative actions.”

Oddly, the Times doesn't provide a specific link to the article which used that particular language. When we googled the offending phrase, you can probably guess what we found:

The letter writer is complaining about the second essay in the Cottom triptych—the essay which was published, by the Times, beneath this brain-numbing headline:

Kyrsten Sinema and the Politics of a Sleeveless Silhouette

And no, we aren't making that up. That's actually what the actual headline on that essay said!

Is Reverend Edmonds-Allen making a fair criticism of Cottom's essay? Can it fairly be said that Cottom's essay in the Times included a sly biphobic attack against Sinema? Can it fairly be said that her essay used Sinema's bisexuality "as a weapon against her?"

We can't and won't answer your questions. In our view, Cottom's essay is so depressingly pompous and dumb that we're unable to read all the way through to the end. 

The dumbness of the essay in question—mixed with the knowledge that it was part of a brain-numbing triptych published by our tribe's most brainiac newspaper—seems to force our brain cells to shut our systems down. It leaves us thinking, as we now do every day, of the destruction Wilfred Owen saw back in World War I.

Did Associate Professor Cottom really lodge a sly biphobic attack on Sinema through the auspices of the Times? We don't know, and we make no such charge. But we can tell you this:

The Times launched a sly attack on the life of the mind when it published that trio of essays. When our academic and journalistic elites think that's the way our world should work, our world is coming to an end, like the more peaceful European realm predating The Great War.

Can a continental nation expect to survive when its academic and journalistic elites believe that work of that type makes sense?

Experts say the answer is no. We think of Owen, and of the ways in which worlds reach their end, whenever we read such manifest dreck, which is pretty much every day now.

It came to us from UNC—but also from the New York Times. Sadly, this should come as no surprise:

At the Times, brain-jangling dumbness has been a prominent cultural value dating back these many long years. They want to write about people's clothes, and to make it sound like they're doing deeply thoughtful work.

Was a sly biphobic attack involved? We leave you to figure that out.

Discourse on method: Doggone it! Somehow, yesterday afternoon's essay about the Cottom triptych failed to get posted.

To read our original essay, click here. This new report is intended as an addition to that  post.

It's all about Kyrsten Sinema's clothes!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2021

It's the stupidity, Stupid: The saddest words in the English language may well be these:

"Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill."

Actually, those words would only be sad on their own. They become the saddest words when they appear in the identity line of the featured opinion essay in today's New York Times.

In print editions, the opinion essay to which we refer appears in the spot traditionally reserved for New York Times editorials. In the present day, this dumbest of all American journals rents that space to opinion essays with such headlines as this:

How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class

Stunningly, this is now the third major essay by the associate professor concerning the various signals allegedly sent by Senator Sinema's wardrobe. Actually, this fact only becomes stunning when we realize that the New York Times has published all three of these brain-numbing disquisitions, perhaps with more to come!

At some point, the die is cast. At some point, you have to be able to see it or not. We refer to the human mental trait most commonly known as The Stupid.

(In our view, Sinema's politics emerge from that trait. But so do these long, grinding essays.)

All across the mainstream press, journalists savaged the wardrobe of Candidate Gore during 1999 and 2000. People are dead all over Iraq because these manifest subhumans wouldn't or couldn't stop behaving that way.

Candidate Gore represented their last shot at the loathed President Clinton. From the fall of 1999 on, they incessantly frisked his suits, his boots and his polo shirts, among other marks of the beast.

The number of buttons on his suit jackets (three!). The "earth tone" hue of that one troubling suit. 

The height at which he hemmed his pants. The degree of shine observed on his boots. The way these grinding fashion choices were aimed at fooling female voters. With respect to that earth tone choice, the way he had allegedly "hired a woman to teach him how to be a man."

They kept this up for month after month, no one more than Brian Williams. Now they want to talk (and talk) about Sinema's clothes. Nothing will force them to stop.

At the Times, The Stupid has been a controlling cultural value for at least thirty years. The blinkered class which prevails at the Times decamps to the Hamptons whenever it can. When forced to assemble a modern "newspaper," it assails the subscriber class with manifest bullshit like this.

At some point, it becomes the reader's responsibility. In our view, it's plainly the stupidity, Stupid.

Are you able to see it or not?

Earlier flights of the grindingly pointless and the cosmically pompous: The Kyrsten Sinema clothing triptych got started with these earlier brain-numbing essays by the associate professor:

October 29: Why We Should Talk About What Kyrsten Sinema Is Wearing 

November 5: Kyrsten Sinema and the Politics of a Sleeveless Silhouette

As best we can tell, those essays only appeared online. By today, the brainiac Times had been convinced: 

This endless flight into sheer inanity had to go straight into print!

Almost surely, the associate professor will give the editors more such product. Our question:

Will these "meritocratic" flyweights continue to publish this dreck?

RAPS ON RACE: One heard bilge, the other heard brilliance!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2021

When Mead and Baldwin rapped: It's never been easy to conduct serious discussions of the construct we refer to as "race."

Centuries of brutal inhuman history underlie the concept.  For reasons which are obvious. deep feelings underlie, and may undermine, attempts at such discussion.

It's never been easy to discuss such deeply fraught topics. Consider what happened when James Baldwin and Margaret Mead conducted their once-famous 1970 colloquy—a two-day discussion which came to be known as "A Rap on Race."

In 1971, a transcript of the discussion was published and sold in book form under that catchy title. Chunks of the discussion were also issued as a record album.

The book appeared in August 1971; it has long been out of print. In the following passage, the leading authority on this topic describes the way the book has been viewed down through the many long years:

The book was dismissed as "the same old bilge you've heard from the fellow on the next stool to you in the saloon " by a reviewer at The New York Times when it was first published. More recently, writer Maria Popova called the book "a remarkable and prescient piece of the cultural record" and "a bittersweet testament to one of the recurring themes in their dialogue—our tendency to sideline the past as impertinent to the present, only to rediscover how central it is in understanding the driving forces of our world and harnessing them toward a better future."

Say what? The book was dismissed as "the same old bilge" in the New York Times?

As a matter of fact, it was! The review appeared in June 1971. It was written by Richard Elman, a novelist and reviewer who would almost surely have been described as a man of the left.

In his review of A Rap on Race, Elman was more complimentary to Baldwin than to Mead. But yes, he called their discussion "bilge." Here's how the review began:

ELMAN (6/27/71): No fuss. No bother. Eliminate dirty smudges on the fingertips, broken nails, and messy erasure marks. You don't need to revise, rethink, or rewrite. You don't even need to write. Just think of it, folks: No more bloodshot eyes, or coffee bowels, or angry friends you've stood up to work just a little longer, harder, more. Sealed inside your own angry mortal human vacuum, to be just as fatuous as Margaret Mead and James Baldwin about the crisis of our time—particularly race—all you have to do is talk and not listen, always avoid expressing your feelings openly, refer constantly to other times and other cultures with historical and/or pseudo-historical truths, interrupt whenever possible, call yourself a prophet or a poet, insist that you are being emotionally sincere and/or objectively rational, and record it all on tape, to be transcribed later as a book.

You may perorate endlessly: "Well, I wonder. Perhaps its a very bizarre wonder, but I can't get myself into the head of, let us say—we're speaking in such horrible generalities, speaking of white and black people." And the reader will be sure to note that your Tristram Shandyesque syntax denotes sincerity...

Announce that "love is the only wisdom." Assert such "in the name of your ancestors." Denounce any and all assertions of "racial guilt." Speak out fearlessly against the plight of Chicanos, Filipinos, Sephardic Jews of Israel. Presto! You're off the hook. You've got a book. You haven't had to say anything at all, and it will probably sell fairly well. This is called instantaneous wisdom, although some may call it "A Rap on Race."

Basically, it will be the same old bilge you've heard from the fellow on the next stool to you in the saloon...

Elman didn't like the book. As a matter of fact, he didn't seem to like the book at all. 

He seemed to find the long conversation some form of self-indulgent. Here's more of what he wrote:

ELMAN: Caution: You must either be a world-famous white liberal anthropologist, or a brilliant black writer, or else there isn't much of an audience for this sort of thing except among your friends, or in taverns and bars where people generally call it baloney. But wisdom and baloney are as blither is to blather; here and there ideas are speckled like pieces of fat in a slab of Hebrew National, though most of it is pretty bland, chewy stuff...

With their tape recorder, Margaret Mead and James Baldwin got together one steamy night last August. They had a mutual friend. So first they ate dinner and then they went blah blah blah in front of the recorder late into that night and then again the next day—about New Guinea, South Africa, Women's Lib, the South, slavery, Christianity, their early childhood upbringings, Israel, the Arabs, the bomb, Paris, Istanbul, the English language, Huey Newton, John Wayne, the black bourgeoisie, Baldwin's 2-year-old grand nephew and Professor Mead's daughter.

"We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible," he said to her, poignantly enough, at one point, "because we are still each other's only hope." But, eventually, they got so angry and muddled that he was being accused of mouthing anti-Semitic nonsense and, as a final quid pro quo, he lumped her among his potential enemies and victimizers. Rather smugly, the anthropologist has said she could not possibly be a racist because of her impeccable upbringing and because she had once or twice coddled babies in Africa, Samoa, West Irian. Baldwin countered by asking how could he be an anti-Semite since one of his best friends was Jewish.

Was any of that a fair account of what these famous people said? We can't answer your question, but Elman was a figure of the left. He closed his review as shown:

ELMAN: [T]his sort of thing, if obviously impassioned, well-intentioned, and not always wrong-headed, is still not much more than a cut above the sort of thing that most blacks and whites are saying to each other now that we're all supposedly getting together. It may be a little bit more uptight, as Baldwin had the humanity to admit at one point when he said: "Let me tell you something else. I think I do realize some things about other people. Maybe what I realize is more bitter than I would like it to be. I realize that. I was thinking about it all day long, and when this rather terrifying show is over, I'll come and have a drink with you without any microphones or anything, because I want us to be friends and you know I mean that."

Better luck next time, Professor Mead and Mr. Baldwin. For the rest of us, I think we better start talking to each other and stop listening to wise men and women among us except when they deign to write down what they have to say in novels and plays and poems and essays and yes, then revise, if necessary.

In modern parlance, Elman seemed to think that Baldwin and Mead had been "bloviating" in a self-indulgent way during their lengthy "rap on race." They hadn't taken the time or the trouble to restrict and refine their endless  array of thoughts about this most important general subject.

Elman seemed to be angry about this. How insightful was his critique? We have no idea.

Many years later, Maria Popova expressed a quite different view. At her web site, she offered four lengthy essays about what Baldwin and Mead had said.

Today, Popova's site is called The Marginalian. Her essays appeared in 2015. If you want to read the essays, you can start where Popova starts. Headline included, you can start right here:

POPOVA (3/19/15): A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

On the evening of August 25, 1970, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and James Baldwin (1924–1987) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation about such enduring concerns as identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. By that point, Baldwin, forty-six and living in Paris, was arguably the world’s most famous living poet, and an enormously influential voice in the civil rights dialogue; Mead, who was about to turn seventy, had become the world’s first celebrity academic—a visionary anthropologist with groundbreaking field experience under her belt, who lectured at some of the best cultural institutions and had a popular advice column in Redbook magazine.

They talked for seven and a half hours of brilliance and bravery over the course of the weekend, bringing to the dialogue the perfect balance of similarity and difference to make it immensely simulating and deeply respectful. On the one hand, as a white woman and black man in the first half of the twentieth century, they had come of age through experiences worlds apart. On the other, they had worlds in common as intellectual titans, avid antidotes to the era’s cultural stereotypes, queer people half a century before marriage equality, and unflinching celebrators of the human spirit.

Besides being a remarkable and prescient piece of the cultural record, their conversation, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race, is also a bittersweet testament to one of the recurring themes in their dialogue—our tendency to sideline the past as impertinent to the present, only to rediscover how central it is in understanding the driving forces of our world and harnessing them toward a better future. This forgotten treasure, which I dusted off shortly after Ferguson and the Eric Garner tragedy, instantly stopped my breath with its extraordinary timeliness—the ideas with which these two remarkable minds tussled in 1970 had emerged, unsolved and unresolved, to haunt and taunt us four decades later with urgency that can no longer be evaded or denied.

Where Elman heard bilge, Popova heard brilliance. As she correctly noted, the conversation had been conducted by two of the most highly regarded intellectuals in the western world.

Was it bilge or was it brilliance? It can hardly matter now. 

Reading through Popova's detailed essays about the conversation, we've been struck by how "airy-fairy"—by how unhelpfully high-minded and abstruse—the conversation seems to have been.

For better or worse, Popova never seems to record anyone making any concrete proposal or suggestion. The conversation occurs on an extremely high intellectual plane, with the occasional odd remark thrown in. 

(Note Mead's remembered admonition to her four-year-old daughter, an admonition she had offered back in the 1940s. Popova regards this as an example of Mead's wisdom. In recent years, such remarks have gotten at least one major (beloved) American author semi-removed from the canon: 

MEAD: I was walking across the Wellesley campus with my four-year-old, who was climbing pine trees instead of keeping up with me.

I said, “You come down out of that pine tree. You don’t have to eat pine needles like an Indian.” So she came down and she asked, “Why do the Indians have to eat pine needles?” I said, “To get their Vitamin C, because they don’t have any oranges.” She asked, “Why don’t they have any oranges?” Then I made a perfectly clear technical error; I said, “Because the white man took their land away from them.” She looked at me and she said, “Am I white?” I said, “Yes, you are white.” “But I didn’t took their land away from them, and I don’t like it to be tooken!” she shouted.

Now if I had said, “The early settlers took their land away,” she would have said, “Am I an early settler?” But I had made a blanket racial category: the white man. It was a noble sentiment, but it was still racial sentiment. 

Popova presents that anecdote in her first essay. It strikes us as a strange anecdote, in at least several ways.

By the way, was Mead's daughter actually "white," as she was told that day? It all depends on what the meaning of "being white" is! Or at least, so we'd still say today!)

Baldwin and Mead conducted a very long discussion; it was published as "a rap." Elman thought he was hearing bilge. Popova thought she heard brilliance.

Inevitably, various people will have various reactions and various feelings concerning such deeply fraught topics. And at that point, our profoundly flawed human impulses start to enter the chase.

This brings us up to the present day, to our own badly failed conversations on race. At this point, a bit of disclosure:

As the past few years have gone by, we've been more and more repelled by the moral and intellectual squalor our own extremely self-impressed blue tribe brings to these failed discussions. 

"I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfish and I'm sad," a brilliant song-writer once brilliantly wrote. She even called the album Blue!

We've long been impressed by the brilliance of her highly unusual candor. Human tribes are rarely inclined to behave in any such way.

Tomorrow: Ignorant armies, by night

STARTING TOMORROW: The glass, extremely darkly!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2021

Attempts at discussing race: Yesterday morning, it was our very first search.

The English actress Thandiwe Newton, a good decent person, had spoken to the New York Times about a once-famous discussion. More specifically, here's what the Times' Kathryn Shattuck says that Newton said:

James Baldwin is to be read by everyone, everything, all of it. Just the genius of him—his sexuality, how he thought about religion, race. My husband spent years trying to find, because it’s out of print, “A Rap on Race” by Margaret Mead and James Baldwin. I should put every page on Instagram, just to share with people.

Margaret Mead to me is like a rock star. Like super cool. I’m an anthropologist and an archaeologist by trade. And I do see the bigger picture, unfortunately and fortunately. I see what humanity is doing, and the fact that this is all in the last tiny blip of time, and we’re [expletive] it up so severely.

We conducted a search for A Rap on Race. Here's part of what we found:

The once-famous discussion between Baldwin and Mead seems to have taken place in August 1970. A transcript of the discussion was published in book form in 1971. 

The book has long been out of print. Copies can be purchased online, though only at a very high price.

It seems that the conversation, or parts of the conversation, were also released as a record album. When we conducted our search, we were whisked away to this YouTube posting. 

Apparently, the YouTube posting presents an hour and forty-five minutes of the conversation as it was excerpted and presented on that record album.

We haven't listened to the whole thing. Yesterday morning, we were struck by a reference made by Mead about six minutes into the conversation.

When we searched on what Mead had said, it turned out that the famous anthropologist had perhaps engaged, at least by our lights, in a poorly founded bit of historical twaddle. Baldwin was possibly being polite, or perhaps he assumed that Mead's remarks were historically sound.

Question:

Are we the humans capable of having a serious "rap on race?" Are we up to the challenge of conducting intelligent discourse on a topic involving so much emotion—a topic which, for obvious reasons, is so historically fraught?

We'll explore that question all week. As we do, we'll offer excerpts from that original "Rap on Race." We'll also feature current attempts to discuss such topics as the recent Virginia election and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

Are we the humans up to the challenge of conducting such discussions? We'd say the prospects aren't very good.  Consider a letter which appeared in yesterday's New York Times. 

The letter concerns an earlier report in the Times—a lengthy report about fatal shootings by police officers. The letter contained an obvious howler. But there the erroneous letter sat, in the Sunday Times:

To the Editor:

Your article refers to officer-created jeopardy, when the police unnecessarily take risks in dealing with a driver and then argue that the risk required use of force. Officer-created jeopardy does not occur only in traffic situations.

A well-known example: Tamir Rice was killed in 2014 after officers, who had been notified that he held a gun, drove up very near to him, exited their vehicle and then shot the 12-year-old boy at close range on the basis that he posed immediate danger to them. Officers in that situation should have parked and exited their vehicle at some distance and used the vehicle as cover while they told him to drop his gun.

Officers need not place themselves in such danger in these situations, even where the gun is real, which was not the case for Tamir Rice.

T— G— / Washington

The letter refers to "a well-known example" of a fatal shooting incident. It proceeds to make an inaccurate statement about the "well-known" incident, with the writer claiming that the officers "exited their vehicle" before the fatal shooting occurred.

This fatal incident is indeed "a well-known example" of a fatal police shooting. The incident has been widely discussed in the past seven years.

That said, no one has ever claimed that the officers "exited their vehicle" before [they] "then shot the 12-year-old boy at close range." Simply put, even in this "well-known" incident, that isn't what actually happened.

We agree with the letter writer's suggestion that this was an example of egregiously bad police procedure. But that just isn't what actually happened, as you'd think that almost everyone would know.

It's amazing to us, yet not amazing, that the New York Times would publish such a baldly erroneous letter. The absurdity becomes even more instructive when we consider the Times' identity line for the letter writer:

The writer teaches criminal law in the sociology department of George Washington University.

We feel sure that Professor G— is a thoroughly good, decent person. But, with amazing regularity, this is very much the way our modern-day "raps on race" have tended to go. 

In this instance, a professor at a major university made a baldly inaccurate statement about a widely-discussed incident. She sent her account to the New York Times, and the brainiac newspaper published it.

Nothing will turn on the obvious error the newspaper chose to publish. But this is the way our contemporary "raps on race" have tended to go, ever since our tribe began performing our deep concern in the aftermath of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. 

Listening to Baldwin and Mead, we thought we were possibly hearing a bit of historical bilge, roughly six minutes in. As it turned out, the famous anthropologist had perhaps been sketching a bit of a novel about a Roman emperor's reaction to some "angels." 

When we searched on Mead's remarks, it didn't turn out well. That said, our more recent discussions concerning race have tended to be built around the process we described, long ago, in a totally different context, as "the novelization of news."

The letter in yesterday's New York Time made police behavior in a "well-known" incident a bit more egregious. In all honesty, this is very much the way our tribe tends to play, especially on the highest academic and journalistic levels.

We've been playing the game this way ever since an egregious error in the Times triggered nationwide anger in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. (That egregious factual error has never been corrected.) 

In all honesty, there is absolutely no sign—none—that the wiring of our flawed human brain will permit our tribe to behave any differently as we pretend to move forward.

Are we able to conduct serious discussions concerning "race?" We'll examine the question all week. As we've long reported, major anthropologists other than Mead all tell us the answer is no.

Concerning such emotional topics, the wiring of our human brains tends to let us see "through a glass [extremely] darkly," these disconsolate experts all say. We'll offer examples all week, reminding you of what we've long said:

It's all anthropology now.

Yesterday's letter was factually wrong. The famously brilliant New York Times rushed the letter to print.

The letter came from a ranking professor. So it very much tends to go with our failing tribe's "raps on race."

Tomorrow:  In 1971, the New York Times reviewed the Baldwin/Mead book

Full disclosure: According to our own disconsolate scholarly sources, your lizard brain is telling you that mistakes of the type in yesterdays letter don't actually matter. 

You're being told, "It's the thought that counts." Or so our sources allege.

"Cable news" covers the Rittenhouse trial!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2021

The cherry-picking is general: As of Tuesday night, we hadn't been following the Rittenhouse trial.

That night, we were surprised to hear that the trial was going poorly for the prosecution. More specifically, we were surprised to hear that said on CNN, first by reporter Sara Sidner, then by guest analyst Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Speaking with CNN's Erin Burnett, Sidner said that the videotape from the night in question was turning out to be "the defense's best evidence." Most strikingly, Sidner also said this:

"At times, the prosecution witnesses did as much for the defense as they did for the prosecution."

Later, Burnett threw to Rawlings-Blake, a former defense attorney and the former mayor of Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake offered this:

RAWLINGS-BLAKE (11/9/21): I think going into this case, we were given the impression that the prosecution's case was a lot stronger than it is, as we've seen. You should never be in the position as a prosecutor that your best evidence, your best witness, that video, is offering to the jury reasonable doubt. 

Sidner and Rawlings-Blake agreed. The videotape was helping the defense—but so was the testimony by the prosecution's witnesses!

We were surprised to hear this on CNN, a "cable news" channel now strongly inclined to advance the Storylines which are preferred by our own blue tribe. 

We might have expected to hear this on Fox. But this was CNN!

What will the jury end up deciding? We have no idea. 

For ourselves, we'd be disinclined to convict, though we haven't seen all the testimony. Also this:

As a general matter, we're disinclined to hope and pray that people, even teen-aged people, will get frog-marched to jail.

How will the jury rule? We have no idea. We can offer this assessment of the cable news coverage in the past few days:

The cherry-picking has been general. Beyond that, so has the ugliness of many tribunes within our own liberal tribe.

We hadn't been following the trial until we heard those surprising assessments. We've seen a lot of the "coverage" since then. 

In our view, the ugliest, most repulsive conduct has come from people who play the game On Our Own Liberal Side. On balance, we'd have to say that the cherry-picking and the ugliness have been worse Over Here.

In our view, the behavior has been ugly and bad, especially on CNN and on Morning Joe. That said, we also watched Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. Below, you see a few examples of the bullshit we've seen: 

Later that same night: Tucker Carlson

How bad were things for the prosecution? That same Tuesday night, we watched a lengthy presentation by Tucker Carlson.

We hadn't watched his program in months. But it has become painful to watch the cable stars on MSNBC and CNN. 

For whatever reason, we flipped over—and we're glad we did. We were treated to extensive video footage from the trial—but also to absurd illogic from the cable star Carlson himself.

Let's start with the footage:

Is it possible that the jury will agree with Rittenhouse's plea of self-defense? We don't know what's going to happen, but below, you see part of the testimony by one of the prosecution witnesses.

The witness in question is Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, one of the three people Rittenhouse shot that night. He was one of the prosecution witnesses to whom Sidner and Rawlings-Blake had referred as they spoke with Burnett.

Grosskreutz was also armed, and was also out in the streets, late on the night in question. As we saw on Carlson's show, here's part of the way his testimony went that day under questioning by defense attorney Corey Chirafisi:

CHIRAFISI (11/9/21): That’s a photo of you, yes?

GROSSKREUTZ: Yes. 

CHIRAFISI: That is Mr. Rittenhouse? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct. 

CHIRAFISI: Now, you would agree your firearm is pointed at Mr. Rittenhouse, correct? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Yes. 

[...]

CHIRAFISI: Okay. So, when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct. 

CHIRAFISI: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun—now your hands down, pointed at him—that he fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct.

Oof. That was part of the testimony to which Sidner and Rawlings-Blake had referred. In that testimony, Grosskreutz said that Rittenhouse hadn't fired at him until he himself advanced on the lad and pointed his own gun at him.

It was easy to see why that testimony would be helpful for the defense. Carlson aired other footage from that day's testimony which cut in the defendant's favor.

That said, you'll rarely see a presentation on Carlson's program in which information or evidence isn't quickly subsumed by Carlson's overstatements and illogic. After playing the tape of what Grosskreutz said, Carlson excitedly offered this:

CHIRAFISI: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun—now your hands down, pointed at him—that he fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct.

[End of videotape]

CARLSON: So that's kind of it right there, that's pretty much the end of the trial. Because when someone runs up and points a loaded gun in your face, you are allowed to shoot that person. That is called self-defense. That's the rule. It has been the rule throughout human history, in every society on Earth since people lived in caves. 

"That's pretty much the end of the trial?" You can't get dumber than that.

In fact, Grosskreutz was the third person Rittenhouse shot that night. Even if jurors decide that Rittenhouse shot Grosskreutz in self-defense, that has nothing to do with charges stemming from the first two people Rittenhouse shot, each of whom was killed.

We saw a lot of instructive footage on Carlson's show that night. Along with that, the deluge—Carlson's inevitable gong-show, an analysis which would be quite misleading for viewers who trust the star.

Thursday evening: Anderson Cooper

In the next few days, we saw performances on CNN and Morning Joe which struck us as ugly, evil, massively cherry-picked, destructive, demeaning, disgraceful.

We thought the behavior by Joe Scarborough and Claire McCaskill was little short of a disgrace. In our view, Professor Brooks' musings about "the old-fashioned slave patrols" only gets more tragic, and less sane, the further along he goes.

In our view, the spinning and dissembling were general, as was the bloodlust put on display by the various millionaires. Their behavior in these past few days has been an anthropology lesson and an indictment of our tribe.

For today, we'll only note what happened on Anderson Cooper's show. "Coop" had scored an interview with Grosskreutz himself. What happened was remarkable.

All in all, Grosskreutz has established himself as the Aaron Rodgers of the Rittenhouse trial. After delivering the sworn testimony we've posted above, he went on Thursday's Good Morning America and basically took it all back:

STRAHAN (11/11/21): Here you're allowed to say whatever you feel like you need to say. So you're saying that you actually didn't—you weren't pointing your gun at him. Is that what you're saying?

GROSSKREUTZ: That's absolutely what I'm saying, yes.

Behaving like the apocryphal potted plant, Michael Strahan let that flip-flop go. Or was it simply edited that way? To watch the interview, click here.

That night, Anderson Cooper interviewed Grosskreutz and pretended to challenge him on this instant self-contradiction.

You can check the transcript here. We'd say it's fairly obvious that Aaron Rodgers is writing Grosskreutz's stuff—and that people like Cooper are inclined to let this sort of thing go.

(Question: Has anybody told the judge about what Grosskreutz has been saying?)

We humans never were "the rational animal," the way we've always said. That basic fact has been clearly established during this long, stupid week.

We think McCaskill and Scarborough have been indecent, deranged. We think the Harvard professor behaved much as you might expect. 

Do we hear fire bells in the night? Is that the source of our fears?

We're afraid that voters all over the country can See Us As We Are. We think Cuomo and Lemon should be off the air, but mainly we wonder if a large continental nation like ours can survive a plague of "journalistic" locusts producing an epistemic Babel of this ever-devolving type.

We can see The Others when they behave in these ways, as they constantly do. As has always been true with our species' tribes, it seems that we can't see ourselves!

Full disclosure: We watched Hannity discuss the trial last night. 

He was much less ridiculous than the always ridiculous Carlson was. In our view, he was much more informative than the gruesome dissemblers and cherry-pickers so widely observed Over Here.

Highfalutin pseudo-discussion!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2021

What did Gödel prove? This morning, we got to thinking about the types of highfalutin, upper-end discussions to which we're all expected to bow.

Over the summer, we vowed to restrict ourselves to the analysis of such fare. Eventually, though, the nonsense from the lower slopes caused us to abandon our pledge.

(Michael Corleone said it best: "Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.")

At some point, we hope to return to those higher-level discussions. That said, the one question we'd like to see answered concerns—who else?—Kurt Gödel.

Our question would be this:

What did Gödel actually show in his "incompleteness theorems?" What did he actually prove?

Also, is it possible that he didn't prove anything at all? Is it possible that his alleged finding was really an example of the type of "conceptual confusion" the later Wittgenstein discussed?

Our interest in this question stems from several sources:

On the one hand, we've seen no one who is able to explain what Gödel proved in a way which would be comprehensible for the general reader. Then too, there are the nuggets which appear in the "Gödel-made-easy" books.

We refer to these two books, each of which was allegedly aimed at general readers:

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Rebecca Goldstein, 2005.

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. Stephen Budiansky, 2021.

In our view, neither author was able to explain the incompleteness theorem(s) in a way which would be comprehensible to the general reader. At some point, inquiring minds want to know why that assignment seems to be so hard.

On the other hand, Goldstein included a remarkably puzzling paragraph about the so-called "liar's paradox" and the way "the mind crashes" in the face of its wicked complexity. Due to its sheer incoherence, it remains the most interesting paragraph we've read in the past twenty years.

Meanwhile, Budiansky offers a comical account of Bertrand Russell's tussles with the liar's paradox. Both writers draw a connection between the liar's paradox, Russell and Gödel. In the face of their material, we can't help flirting with the unthinkable:

Is it possible that this whole mishegoss is just a ball of confusion, as the later Wittgenstein seems to have semi-alleged?

Gödel is widely described as the greatest logician since Aristotle. That said, what the heck did he actually prove? And why can't anyone seem to describe his famous theorem(s) in a way which would be comprehensible to the general reader?

What, if anything, did Gödel prove? We're assigning Kevin Drum the task of handling the submissions!

Tomorrow: Kenosha, flat and round

IMITATIONS OF DISCOURSE: "On interpretation," she almost said!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2021

The past isn't even past: Way back in 1966, Susan Sontag literally almost wrote the book on the important subject. 

"On Interpretation." That's what the title of her famous book almost was.

The actual title of the book was perhaps somewhat different. According to all critical sources, the actual title was this:

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

As it turns out, Sontag's famous book was a collection of essays. The leading authority on this topic describes the book as shown: 

Against Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, including "On Style," and the eponymous essay "Against Interpretation." In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact and novelty of art, instead fitting works into predetermined intellectual interpretations and emphasis on the "content" or "meaning" of a work. 

Few will argue with the eponymous essay's central thesis, the one about the sensuous impact and novelty of art. So too with the Sontag's final statement concerning the question at hand.

Sontag's essay contains ten sections. The final section of her essay is exactly one sentence long:

10. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Everyone agrees with that assessment—and no one knows what it means!

Our society's highest-level discussions, or possibly our imitations of same, are often extremely highfalutin. These discussions, or imitations of same, are conducted by our greatest minds. 

No one in the wider society is likely to have the slightest idea what they're talking about. Nor is it clear that those highest minds know what they're talking about!

Having stated these basic points, we can offer a basic bit of information concerning the nature of interpretation:

In the end, there is no ultimate way to say that some act of interpretation is actually "wrong." 

Any interpretation of any event can be clung to, by its adherents, to the bitter end. A justification can always be offered for the interpretation. 

There's never a way to force adherents to agree that their viewpoint is wrong. In the end, for better or worse, there is never some ultimate way to say that some act of interpretation is either "right" or "wrong." 

We pondered this point during last evening's 9 o'clock hour, as we watched the appalling Chris Cuomo conducting his TV show.

Alas! Our judgments concerning Cuomo's performance won't be shared by others. Similarly, we thought Claire McCaskill's performance was appalling on today's Morning Joe.  Others will think she was grand.

Let's return to the basic nature of interpretation:

In the end, no interpretation can be "proven" to be wrong in a way which compels agreement. Last night, this thought came to mind when we watched the former head of the NAACP state his view, on Cuomo's program, concerning the Rittenhouse trial.

We're speaking of Professor Cornell William Brooks, whose status as a (Harvard) professor was cited several times. His interpretation strikes us as tragic and borderline sane. To others, it's right on target:

BROOKS (11/11/21): What I believe is yes, I believe that Kyle Rittenhouse, along with the murderers down in Brunswick, Georgia, literally represent, not merely vigilantism. They represent the old-fashioned slave patrol.

Forget the part about the three men on trial in Georgia. According to Professor Brooks, Rittenhouse doesn't just represent vigilantism. He also "represents the old-fashioned slave patrol."

Indeed, Rittenhouse doesn't just "represent" the slave patrol, whatever that claim might mean. He literally represents the slave patrol—or so says Professor Brooks.

No interpretation can be fairly assessed until it's fully stated. Below, you see the start of the fuller statement made by Professor Brooks:

BROOKS: What I believe is yes, I believe that Kyle Rittenhouse, along with the murderers down in Brunswick, Georgia, literally represent, not merely vigilantism. They represent the old-fashioned slave patrol.

That, is to say, white men who deputize themselves, or were deputized by government, to literally hunt down black people or white people who sympathize with black people and stood in the gap in terms of preserving and protecting black lives.

So the fact that there were three white people who were shot in Kenosha, two of whom died, and all of whom were white, does not suggest in any way that this is anything less than a racially-infused and inflected crime. In other words, white people are not safe from white supremacy.

That was the start of the professor's fuller interpretation of what happened in Kenosha that night. That's his account of the way Rittenhouse "represented" the old-fashioned slave patrol.

Brooks seemed to say that Rittenhouse had been deputized, perhaps by himself, to literally hunt down white people who sympathize with black people. He was deputized to hunt them down. That's how those shootings happened.

That was the professor's interpretation of what happened in Kenosha that night. Rittenhouse had been deputized to literally hunt people down.

In fairness to the professor, his fuller explication of his interpretation continued on from there. You can read it in the CNN transcript. We will only say this:

On the merits, the professor's interpretation of these events strikes us as deeply tragic but also as tragically strange. Beyond that, it almost strikes us as exhibiting a type of blood lust which has always been a part of the wiring of the human race. 

That said, many others will find his interpretation to be spot on. In the end, there is no ultimate way to show that his interpretation is actually "right" or "wrong."

To some, the professor will seem to be making good sense. To others, he will seem to be crazily wrong—and the problem doesn't end there.

In the past few days, we've seen behavior by cable news stars which we've found appalling. To cite one example, McCaskill is a former prosecutor. Watching her today on Morning Joe, we thought again of the reasons why our prisons and jails are full of innocent people.

(In saying that, we don't mean to state a view concerning the appropriate verdict in the ongoing Kenosha trial. We only mean to say that prosecutors who are willing to behave in the way McCaskill did this morning have sent many innocent people to prison.)

We've been appalled by the behavior of major "cable news" stars. It seems to us that Cuomo needs to be taken off the air. Last night, Don Lemon may have been even worse.

In the past two days, Joe Scarborough's interpretations of events in Kenosha have struck us as astonishing. Yesterday, Mika played her standard role, chiming in with three-word slogans designed to support Joe's frameworks. 

(On Morning Joe, you can't repeat the pointless words "crossing state lines" often enough. Rittenhouse lives in Aurora, Illinois. It's one mile from the state line. 

(Yesterday morning, Joe even played the old Skittles card again, in the most irrelevant way possible. According to experts, we humans are wired to say the things we want to say when we want to say them.)

The larger point which gripped us last night involves a possible "fire bell in the night." It involves the question of whether a sprawling continental nation can expect to function and survive when operating as a type of Babel.

Long ago and far away, William Faulkner composed an interpretation of "the past" which is frequently quoted. The lines appear in Requiem for a Nun. Spoken by one of the novel's characters, they go exactly like this:

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The interpretations being offered today involve this nation's brutal history. Those slave patrols are never dead. As in the Balkans, so too here:

Those slave patrols are never dead. In reality, or perhaps in some people's minds, they're not even past!

Tomorrow: Cable stars spin the Kenosha trial in competing ways

Next week: We hope to return to Rachel Maddow's work—to her well-disguised and highly popular "forever war," concerning which our failing tribe could possibly take some lessons. We definitely plan to move ahead to an important question, one which leads in many directions.

The past has never been less dead than it is at the present time. Our important question would be this:

Who died and made Jonathan Capehart, a good decent person, lord god of all he surveys?

Charles Blow, tangled up in "woke!"

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2021

What's in a word? It would be hard to make less sense than Charles Blow does in his latest column.

Blow is tangled up in a word. The cobweb in question is "woke."

Blow's column appears beneath this headline:

The War on ‘Wokeness’

That headline may be a bit overwrought, but so far, things seem to make sense. There is, in fact, an ongoing set of disputes about various behaviors, impulses and beliefs which get denigrated as "woke."

Different people think different things about those behaviors, impulses and beliefs. But it's those beliefs and behaviors which are being debated, not the word "woke" itself.

Puzzlingly, Blow seems to think that people are somehow arguing about the word. This peculiar conception first shows up in this somewhat peculiar passage:

BLOW (11/11/21): Perhaps no other word of the moment is so under attack as “woke,” a word born as a simple yet powerful way of saying, be aware of and alert to how racism is systemic and pervasive and suffuses American life. Wake up from the slumber of ignorance and passive acceptance.

But because of its petit power, this small word was a prime candidate for co-option, for being turned against the people who used it. The opponents of wokeness—whether they be conservatives who believe it injures the ideal of America as inherently good, or moderate Democrats worried that it handicaps their electoral prospects—want to kill it.

Republicans want to recast “wokeness” as progressive politics run amok, and many establishment Democrats shrink from the term because they either believe that Republicans have succeeded at the task, or, of even more concern, they agree with those Republicans.

As he continues, Blow gets tangled up in the idea that the word "woke"—the word in itself—is now "under attack." He especially heads down this road as he quotes a statement by James Carville about the (politically unhelpful) use of (certain types of) "woke" language, a comment Blow doesn't seem to understand.

(Rightly or wrongly, Carville has said that liberals and Democrats should stop using the unfamiliar, highfalutin language of the academy.  Rightly or wrongly, he has said that the use of this unfamiliar academic language may tend to alienate average voters. Blow doesn't seem to understand that this is what Carville has said.)

All in all, what Blow seems to be saying is this:

At one time, when people described themselves as "woke," they meant it as a compliment. But now, many people have started using "woke" as term of a denigration. For that reason, people who once would have called themselves "woke" have often stopped using the word.

Those observations may all be accurate. That said, no one is criticizing, attacking or waging war on the word itself. Rightly or wrongly, certain people—and not just Republicans—are criticizing certain impulses, beliefs and behaviors. They aren't attacking a word.

Blow seems confused by this simple distinction. So it goes at our tribe's smartest newspaper as our nation slides toward the sea.

The New York Times has long branded itself as a high end, brainiac-style publication. Blow's column makes almost no sense, even by current Times standards.

We close with a simple suggestion to Blow. You could call it a discourse on method:

Identify some attitude or belief which is being derided as "woke." Proceed to assess the merits of that attitude or that belief. 

Our here in what's left of the rational world, it's really as simple as that. No one is waging war on the word. Amazingly, it may help Blow's future work if he can somehow get clear on that fact.

IMITATIONS OF DISCOURSE: Rachel wants to lock them up!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2021

Her forever war against Them: It was Wednesday night, November 3. Over Here, within the tents of our own childish tribe, we were getting to have some fun.

Rachel Maddow had interviewed the man she twice described, on the evening in question, as "the great Steve Kornacki." (It's her persistent way of "selling the car," in this case the full corporate line.)

The great Kornacki explained to Rachel that NBC had just called the New Jersey gubernatorial race for our own tribe's candidate. At this point, we acolytes got to have some fun, even as we absorbed instruction in how to love Rachel more:

MADDOW (11/3/21): Steve, there's a bottle of hundred-proof rye in my office right now. If you're sitting in my desk chair, you go with your left elbow, there's a door that doesn't look like a door. If you open that up, you can have it.

KORNACKI: How about that? Now that you've told everybody where it is, I hope nobody beats me to it.

MADDOW: I was going to say, you should go now, because now everybody knows where it is. But you deserve it, my friend. Thank you for all of these hours. I appreciate it.

KORNACKI: Hey, thank you very much. Appreciate that.

MADDOW: All right. And I will just tell the control room, if my office door is locked, either get Steve a lock pick or let him in because, boy, yeah!

All right. Lots more to get to this evening. Stay with us.

At this point, Rachel adopted one of her practiced facial expressions. We were taken to a commercial break, during which we were sold products.

In that exchange with the great Kornacki, Rachel rewarded us acolytes with some fun. As of this morning, we're sorry to say, the network is running that perfect bullshit in an official MSNBC ad.

On our pitiful tribe's own cable channel, we're encouraged to believe that the multimillionaire cable stars are our buddies, our pals, our friends. They often let us share their fun, no one more often than Rachel. These are the tiny rewards we receive for being so loyal and helpless.

Indeed, at the end of Rachel's hour that evening, the fun about the bottle of whiskey started up all over again. At this point, Rachel was pretending to be friends with Lawrence. After a pointless discussion of the New Jersey polling, we pitiful rubes were rewarded again, this time during Lawrence's hour:

MADDOW: In New Jersey, you're totally right, it was like double digits in some cases, or high single digits. The polling was really wrong, and we don't know what the exact margin is going to be with Murphy and Ciattarelli, and Steve is hopefully going to drink liquor in my office and take a nap. But he doesn`t think there`s any chance it`s going to be a five, 6 percent margin. It's going to be tight when the final results come in, and that just means we were wrong, wrong, wrong.

O`DONNELL: I'm going to be going straight to your office at 11:00 to see if he's passed out with a jug that you told him about.

It made me wonder, what do I have in my office for Steve Kornacki?

MADDOW: The non-drinker [a reference to Lawrence].

O`DONNELL: There's an answer to it, and it's neckties, and he borrowed one a million years ago that he's worn a million times.

MADDOW: And this is why you need a diverse cadre of friends. From some you can get liquor, from some you can get clothing. He would never borrow clothing from me.

O`DONNELL: Exactly. There we are. Thank you, Rachel.

MADDOW: Thank you, Lawrence.

O`DONNELL: Thank you.

Well, as Rachel just reported, we do have a projected winner in the election for governor of New Jersey... 

He would never borrow clothing from Rachel! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! It was just so amazing and fun!

As we learned so long ago—first on Cheers, but then on Friends—it's great to have so many pals. real friends and imagined. It's great to see the way these friends let us look in on their lives!

Did we mention the fact that the corporate bosses have taken that bullshit and turned it into an ad for the channel itself? It's their way of letting us know how helpless they know we are, thanks to their marketing research.

Rachel "earns" her multimillions—you aren't allowed to know how many—by entertaining us in these endless ways. The entertainment features are seldom far away on the TV show. Neither are the selective presentations of tribally pleasing stories.

This Tuesday night, we got to enjoy "the night of the million dick jokes." The name is derived from the entertainment feature offered during Rachel's program that night. Perhapos for obvious reasons, it was a Maddow Show exclusive:

MADDOW (11/9/21): The dance card in Washington just broadly is quite—here is something I want to show you on a lighter note. Here is something I want to show you that we've got exclusively. This is going to start airing broadly tomorrow.

There`s pretty significant ad buy behind it, so you will likely be seeing it circulating tomorrow. I say that with a little bit of surprise because, to be honest, we had to double triple check with the lawyers to see if we were even allowed to play this ad on TV. It turns out, we are allowed to play it. And so I am going to show it to you.

Again, it is coming up tomorrow. We got it here exclusively tonight, this is the world premiere. It is not gory, or sweary, or upsetting or anything. But it is a little edgy. I think that's the right word. Let's see what you think. Watch.

Even though the ad wasn't sweary, our own tribal idiot double triple checked with the lawyers! So amazingly daring and cool!

In fact, you probably won't be seeing a whole lot of that ad. That's because, even now, most outlets have better judgment and better sense than Our Own Forever Child.

The forever child proceeded to play the whole ad. Hilariously, it was an endless series of plays on "erectile / elective dysfunction!" It was just so amazingly clever!

The ad's dick jokes ran on and on. When it mercifully came to an end, Our Forever Child offered this:

MADDOW: Admit it, that's very well done.

Represent Us is a good government group. They're an anti-corruption group. My favorite parts are the sad Twizzler. I will never eat a Twizzler again without laughing at it.

The ad's "sad Twizzler" couldn't stand up straight, just like a you-know-what. 

That said, it was her favorite part. It's so much fun to share so much with Our Own Corporate Harlequin.

It would be hard to record all the foolishness found on this "sad Twizzler" TV show. We refer to the silly entertainments, but also to all the selective "reporting" on tribally pleasing themes.

Then too, the career politics! Yesterday, Our Own Rhodes Scholar found time to offer this tweet in recognition of the fact that Brian Williams will be leaving NBC:

MADDOW (11/10/21): I wish everyone could have the blessing of working alongside a colleague who is as hilarious, as wickedly capable, as enormously generous as the great Brian Williams. It's one of the true honors of my working life to have shared a desk (and so many midnight hot dogs) with him.

Those midnight hot dogs, so cool!

 It may well be that "the great Brian Williams" is a generous, enjoyable colleague. We recall the astounding ways he misbehaved during Campaign 2000 as he ushed hi way towards the top. and the subsequent ways he dreamed shit up in the course of getting himself canned from NBC Nightly News.

We thought of the many people who died because of his astounding behavior in 1999 and 2000. Watching Maddow play the fool in tribute to a history like this, we thought of the people who died in that other Great War.

Wilfred Owen was there:

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

In our view, Rachel likes to tell her own ancient tales with extreme "high zeal."

"Dulce et decorum est?" Yes, but also "the great Brian Williams." In such ways, we the suckers have always ended up getting sold.

At any rate, Williams clowned, and millions drowned. Today, our harlequin cheers him on. Those hot dogs were just so cool!

We'll postpone, until tomorrow, the principle thought behind this report. It deals with Maddow's "forever war"—the forever war we get to enjoy, her forever war against Others.

As we've long noted, Maddow is a master of imitations. Imitations of journalism abound—imitations of human discourse, imitations of life. 

Tomorrow: The night of November 4