Götterdämmerung

"I know Trump voters told pollsters that it was all about the economy, and maybe it was. Eggs and milk are higher. I'm not disputing that, but people like me thought our fellow Americans recognized that the cause of that inflation, and which the Trump administration initiated and the Biden administration continued, kept the economy afloat, and that President Biden steered the nation towards the soft recovery every economist believed was impossible. People like me were wrong."

Michael Ian Black at The Daily Beast reacts to Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election.

As does David Frum at The Atlantic.

As do John F. Harris and other writers at Politico.

As does Mona Charen at The Bulwark.

As Robert Kuttner and David Dayen at The American Prospect.

As do Ed Kilgore and Jonathan Chait at New York.

"A Democratic Election Is the Antithesis of an Internet Transaction"

"The awkward truth for those of us who rally in defence of liberal democracy today is that it has undergone no obvious renewal since its peak at the end of the last century. We, no less than the nationalists, are imprisoned by nostalgia, wishing the future could be more like the past. And so we find ourselves constantly testing the limits of analogue protection against a virus that is digitally borne."

Rafael Behr at The Guardian argues that "a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy."

"Taking a Race That Democrats Were Going to Lose and Making It Winnable"

"If Harris loses, pundits will focus on a number of decisions: her choice of running mate, her reluctance to break with Biden, her muddled message to young and Arab American voters disgusted by her administration's support for Israel's destructive war in the Middle East, her overcautious approach to both messaging and policy. But the fact remains that Harris gave Democrats a chance they did not have before. That is an accomplishment in and of itself, no matter the outcome of the election."

Alex Shephard praises Kamala Harris at The New Republic.

"Trump's Economic Plans Would Be Disastrous on a Grand Scale"

"Obama came into office in January 2009, amid a global financial collapse and recession. He did notch seventy-five straight months of job growth. Trump did sign a tax law that mostly helped corporations and the rich get richer. (He even bragged about it in those terms at Mar-a-Lago, telling wealthy friends that 'You all just got a lot richer.') That law added $1.9 trillion to the federal debt. And if Trump wins, the cycle will repeat, this time with President Joe Biden overseeing the handoff."

Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark writes, "Trump Wants to 'Fix' Our Booming Economy. Don't Let Him Near It."

October 2024 Acquisitions

Books:

S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed, 2024.

Paul Dini et al, Harley Quinn and the Gotham City Sirens, 2024.

Frank Herbert et al, Dune: The Graphic Novel, Book 1, 2020.

John Lewis et al, March: Book Two, 2015.

Music:

Archies, Sugar, Sugar..., .

Leon Bridges, , 2024.

Dare, What's Wrong with New York?, 2024.

Decemberists, , 2024.

Neil Diamond, Classics, .

Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch, .

Heavy Heavy, , 2024.

Hermanos Guiterrez, , 2024.

Lemon Twigs, A Dream Is All We Have, 2024.

Wes Montogomery, , .

Offspring, , 2024.

Thee Sacred Souls, , 2024.

Velocity Girl, , .

Tom Waits, Used Songs, .

Who, Live at Shea Stadium 1982, 2024.

Who, Odds & Sods, .

Various, Atlantic R&B, .

Various, Bluesmasters Vol. 2, .

"But They Disliked Democracy and Taxes and Regulation Far More"

"The aura of evil around the Nazis can make everything associated with them seem exotic and remote. It may be hard for us to imagine how respectable business leaders could enthusiastically support Hitler's election campaign. But their motives were mundane and familiar: pragmatism with a dash of ideological conviction."

Benjamin Hett at The New Republic argues that "[n]early a century later, many of our business leaders are blithely repeating the experiences of their German predecessors."

"Homeowners, She Said, Are Concerned About Property Values and Are Resistant to Policies They Believe Might Adversely Affect Them"

"'There are a lot of homeowners in L.A. who lean left, are sympathetic to the problem of homelessness and are generally supportive of these solutions,' Thomas said. 'But on a neighborhood block, they're incentivized quite differently.'"

Liam Dillon in the Los Angeles Times reports on a survey of homeowners and renters about housing.

"The Gradual-And-Then-All-At-Once Slide Into Our Strange Digital Present"

"For those who expect American politics to conform at least somewhat to the past two and a half centuries of history, the 2024 campaign cycle seems unsettling, an even stranger and more radical break than we've seen before. But if you look at what's driving these changes—a transformed media landscape, the increasingly tenuous link between policy and public sentiment, a sea change in how pollsters track the American public—you can see that it's not quite a break, but the emergence of a future that some have been living in for years."

At Politico, Derek Robertson writes that "[y]es, this is the future of politics."

"Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker"

"Early Mods could 'pass' between work and play without changing their suits, which is perhaps one of the reasons they were never sent up in the culture at large. Think back to 1960s and 1970s low comedy: no TV sketch show or sitcom or kitschy horror film was complete without its parade of subcult Aunt Sallies–hippies, ton-up boys, skinheads, punks. Rockers had shivs, skinheads had bovver boots, hippies might dose you–what was a Mod going to do? Make you listen to Otis Redding? Force you to buy a decent pair of trousers?"

In a 2013 London Review of Books article, Ian Penman reviews Richard Weight's Mod: A Very British Style.

"So: Read, Agree, Disagree, Argue, and Pass Them Along to Uncle Stan in Aliquippa. Unless You Calculate That It'll Just Make Uncle Stan Like Trump More."

"Some were just embarrassing. Many were horrific. All of them should disqualify him from another four years in the White House."

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic presents "The 100 Worst Things Trump Has Done Since Descending That Escalator."

And at The Bulwark, Cathy Young adds "101 MORE Reasons Trump Is Unfit to Be President."

""What, Me Worry?' Was the Slogan of a Holy Fool, Wiser Than the Know-It-Alls, and Forever Young"

"By 1960 MAD had conquered the teenage market. According to some estimates, it was read by most American college students and almost half the country's high school students (at least the male ones). Believe it or not, MAD would become even more popular in the next dozen years."

Tablet runs an excerpt from David Mikics's The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America's Brain!

"Welcome to Autumn, Fuckheads!"

"I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, 'Aren't those gourds straining your neck?' And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, 'It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.'"

McSweeney's reposts Colin Nissan's "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers."

"Democrats Must Offer Material Improvements to the Lives of Working-Class Americans, not Just Ironic Camouflage Trucker Hats"

"But the subjects of Shenk's narrative aren't the not-so-great men at the end of history. Rather, they are the insiders, standing behind those men, out of the spotlight: strategists Stan Greenberg and Douglas Schoen, 'political Zeligs' who emerge, again and again, on the scene of left-liberal parties' fabulous failures across the globe, hopping from ship to sinking ship over the past 30 years. But Greenberg and Schoen were no chameleons. They brought with them dueling ideas on how to reverse the losses wrought by dealignment. And through their rivalry, Shenk contends, we can understand the real story of dealignment, and how we might reverse it."

Ben Metzner at The New Republic reviews Timothy Shenk's Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.

"Selective Stories, Which Are Neither Completely True nor Exactly False"

"Our addiction to national mythologies—and our inability to create a common meaning for them—has brought us to an unhappy stalemate. It's hard to bargain and compromise with an opposition that you believe has fundamentally misunderstood its own country––to the point that they cannot even be considered good citizens. And with their mythologies as war clubs, both sides want to run an Antonio Gramsci–style takeover of institutions, making their reality the only acceptable paradigm. Slotkin writes an elegant, if depressing, diagnosis of the current mythological crisis. 'The result is a deadly feedback loop: government failure to alleviate these problems leads to deep mistrust of democratic institutions, and the substitution of culture war for rational policy debate,' he argues. '[C]ulture-war hyperpartisanship then prevents government from acting effectively, which intensifies mistrust of institutions and ratchets up the intensity of culture war.'"

Tom Zoellner at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Richard Slotkin's A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.

September 2024 Acquisitions

Books:

Kevin Bludso, Bludso's BBQ, .

Ellsworth, , .

Hill, Postal: Deliverance, .

Hill, Postal: Deliverance, .

Lau, Chinatown Pretty, .

Wood, DMZ, .

Wood, DMZ, .

The Sociology Book, .

Movies:
Galaxy Quest, 1999.
La La Land, 2016.
A Star Is Born: 3-Film Collection, 2020.
They Live, 1988.

Music:

Beabadoobie, , 2024.

BellRays, Heavy Steady Go, 2024.

Bernard Butler, Good Grief, 2024.

Billie Eilish, , 2024.

Marcus King, Mood Swings, 2024.

Kendrick Lamar, , .

MJ Lenderman, , 2024.

Nada Surf, Moon Mirror, 2024.

Noonday Underground, , .

Redd Kross, , 2024.

Rockpile, Seconds of Pleasure, .

Erik Satie, , .

Waeve, City Lights, 2024.

Various, On the Charts, .

"Trump Is Not Just Toxic for America; He Has Proven Toxic for Conservatism"

"Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election. This is the meaning of America, and Trump despises it. I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it."

Andrew Sullivan at The Weekly Dish writes "[a]n anguished but emphatic endorsement" of Kamala Harris for President of the United States.

The Devil and Donald Trump

"Wallnau's ideas have taken off in particular among a group of Christians often referred to as neo-charismatics, evangelicals who speak in tongues and believe that the Holy Spirit has possessed them with supernatural gifts, including prophecy and healing; this religious cohort is also one of the fastest-growing segments of Christianity in the U.S. Now, four years after an election that many of these Christians continue to think was stolen, Wallnau and his faithful are on the campaign trail. 'People don't know. They're going to look back on it in the future,' Wallnau promised the crowd in Michigan, 'and they're going to say the populist civic awakening began when believers prayed in Trump to disrupt the status quo.'"

Molly Olmstead at Slate writes about those who believe that "under Trump's protection, American Christians will rise up, defeat their demonic enemies, and take their rightful place of power in the country."

And Matthew D. Taylor at The Bulwark describes these beliefs as "victorious eschatology."