March and April 2017 Acquisitions

DVDs:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 2016.

"If We Have Movements That Are Entirely Based Around English Majors and Web Designers, We're Not Reaching the Majority of the American Population No Matter What Their Skin Color Is"

"I've written a little about the history of the term. It comes out of some groups that split off from the Communist Party in the '50s, and really came to prominence in the '60s. Its primary architects were Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, and they called it 'white skin privilege.' The idea of white skin privilege was that white workers had been bribed. The American ruling class, especially the Southern planter class dating all the way back to the 17th century, had bribed white workers with greater social status and privileges so they would not unite with black workers—from enslaved workers in the 17th century to super-exploited black wage workers in the '50s, '60s, and '70s—and pose a challenge to the ruling class.
"The idea was that white skin privilege was actually harmful to white people, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages. As a result, they did not build a movement across racial boundaries to fight their common oppression. The fact that the idea of white privilege is used today to show why we can't possibly unify—that's a reversal of the core idea."

Kelton Sears in Seattle Weekly interviews Asad Haider.

"If People Don't Get Justice in the Courtroom, They'll Get Justice in the Streets"

Mara Shalhoup in the LA Weekly presents "25 Years After the L.A. Riots: An Oral History."

Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic explains the significance of videotape to the events.

"Once a Nice Place to Live and a Destination. Now It's Just a Destination"

"But the gentrifiers--colonizers, really--are spoiling our quality of life. New neighbors are often unfriendly. Sometimes they're not really neighbors at all but transient groups from Craigslist, AirBnB or other online services. From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., five or even six days a week, bulldozers rumble around serving the construction sites. Where I used to see blue sky and trees I now see walls hovering over my house and yard."

Jack Schwartz in the Los Angeles Times discusses life in Venice, California.

Jennifer Swann in the LA Weekly reports on the fall of the Venice Freak Show to gentrification.

"The Utterly Predictable Fruit of the Democratic Party's Neoliberal Turn"

"The way I see it, the critical test for our system will come late next year. The billionaire great-maker in the Oval Office has already turned out to be an incompetent buffoon, and his greatest failures are no doubt yet to come. By November 2018, the winds of change will be in full hurricane shriek, and unless the Democratic Party's incompetence is even more profound than it appears to be, the D's will sweep to some sort of mid-term triumph.
But when 'the resistance' comes into power in Washington, it will face this question: this time around, will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind? Will they stand up to the money power? Or will we be invited once again to feast on inspiring speeches while the tasteful gentlemen from JP Morgan foreclose on the world?"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that "Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November."

"The Bile Poured on Him from Every Quarter Makes Today's Internet Vitriol Seem Dainty"

"This process of distillation obscures how Lincoln was perceived in his own time, and, by comparison, it diminishes our own age. Where is the political giant of our era? Where is the timeless oratory? Where is the bold resolve, the moral courage, the vision?
"Imagine all those critical voices from the 19th century as talking heads on cable television. Imagine the snap judgments, the slurs and put-downs that beset Lincoln magnified a million times over on social media. How many of us, in that din, would hear him clearly? His story illustrates that even greatness—let alone humbler qualities like skill, decency, good judgment, and courage—rarely goes unpunished."

Mark Bowden in a 2013 Atlantic article explores Northern criticism of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

"It Requires Us to Supplement How We've Come to View the Origins"

"I see a lot of power and persuasive force in the traditional model that focuses first and foremost on how kind of race-baiting politicians used race to cynically win votes, and how our relative indifference to black suffering at the national level is part of what's blinded people to the pain and the misery that is mass incarceration. I lay what I’m doing alongside those. I think we have failed to focus on all of these little tiny decisions. When you stack them up and you add them up across time and across the country, and when you add them up throughout the criminal-justice system from police on the one end, through prosecutors and judges and legislatures and probation and parole officers at the other end of the process—when you look at all of these actors over time and over space and across the country, if everyone only becomes somewhat more punitive, but everyone does it together and everyone does it for decades, you get mass incarceration.
"I do think that’s a crucial part of the story, and I don't think it’s one that has gotten enough attention. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs are the kind of natural hinge points for the story, and they're important. But they’re not the only things that are important. It's harder to see some of these smaller decisions."

Matt Ford at The Atlantic interviews James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America .

"Delights in Skewering the Left and the Right Simultaneously"

"It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

"Dreher's answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term 'liquid modernity' to describe a way of life in which 'change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.' The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism."

 

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker profiles writer Rod Dreher.

"Shut It Down"?

"Nearly all American politicians in both major parties support some limits on legal immigration, and some measures to enforce those laws. Virtually all of them define 'some human beings as "unworthy of legal standing"'—a position Baer insists does not deserve to be defended in public at all. Perfectly cogent arguments can and have been made that, say, Hillary Clinton advocates systemically racist policies or that Bernie Sanders encourages sexism. The ability to associate disagreeable ideas with the oppressor, and to quash free speech or other political rights in the name of justice for the oppressed, is a power without any clear limiting principle. Historically, states that rule on that basis tend to push that power to its farthest possible limit."

Jonathan Chait at New York revisits the state of the "illiberal left."

"Professor of Mambo"

"Thompson wants his students to recognize how aspects of African cultures infuse not only the music, art, and dance of the Americas, but also philosophy, religious practice, textile design, everyday gestures, and even vocabulary as quotidian as Uh-huh (yes) and Unh-unh (no). According to David Doris '02PhD, a professor of African art history at the University of Michigan, 'He coined the term that became prevalent in academia: "Black Atlantic."' Says Thompson, 'We can't know how American we are unless we know how black we are.'"

In a 2010 Yale Alumni Magazine article, Cathy Shufro profiles art historian Robert Farris Thompson.

"Gave the Music Its Sound and Its Attitude"

"It could be said that Berry wore the mask, though he did it in trickier ways. When that mask really dropped, at the end of the 1950s, he lost just about everything. Yet such was Berry's importance that if not for him, the Beatles, Dylan, the Rolling Stones and countless others wouldn't have had a model or map. Rolling Stone wouldn't be here without him. If ever there was an American who deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature, it was Chuck Berry. If ever there was an American who did not, it was Chuck Berry. If ever there was an American, it was Chuck Berry."

Mikal Gilmore at Rolling Stone writes an appreciation of Chuck Berry, who died at age ninety in March.

"Why CDs May Actually Sound Better Than Vinyl"

"'Every way you can measure it, digital is going to be superior,' Metcalfe says. 'It really does come down to the preference of the end user.'
"Or, as Kees Immink says: 'Some people like marmalade and some people like mustard. If people like to listen to vinyl, do so, enjoy life. But don't say that the sound is better.'"

In a 2015 LA Weekly article, Chris Kornelis explains.

"Early Front-Runners in the Race to Make Sense of It All"

"There is no Big Reveal, no shocking secret answer. Instead we get a slow-building case against the concept and execution of the Clinton campaign, with plenty of fault falling squarely on the candidate herself.
"Far from a juggernaut, the campaign we see in these pages is plagued with division, unease and anxiety practically from the outset. When things go right, it only means they are soon to go terribly wrong. Win a primary, lose a caucus. Quash a rumor, see three more go viral. Close one wound and find another torn open again."

Ron Elving at NPR reviews Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes's Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign.

As does Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times.

"His Ascent Is a Death Knell for an Entire Era"

"However deranged Bannon's assumptions, this willingness to call the system into question goes a long way toward explaining Trump's political success.
"Liberals see no such system. Instead, they see more or less qualified individuals who either have the right ideas or not, in government or business: cultural diversity, a fervent belief in incremental rather than structural change, and a firm commitment to meritocratic success. Rather than thinking historically—and preferring to avoid the whole idea of neoliberalism—they profess an ethos. And since they cannot recognize neoliberalism as a system, they cannot acknowledge its political and economic dissolution, its steady descent into incoherence. They cannot acknowledge the loss of the historical soil of their selfhood."

J.M. Bernays at The Baffler considers liberals in the Trump era.

"An Inducement to Wonder"

"A true stimulant to the imagination, as the modernists saw it, color just might work social and spiritual transformations in a world cowering before the oppressive gray of industry, the foul brown of the trenches. It was 'a power which directly influences the soul,' in the words of Wassily Kandinsky, and at the Bauhaus, where he arrived in 1922 after leaving Communist Russia for Germany, he proposed the theory that primary colors are intrinsically linked with basic forms. In a kind of utopian holy trinity, triangles were yellow, squares red, and circles blue. These pairings became the foundation of a new design grammar to be applied not just to canvas and sculpture but to daily existence—refashioning everything from buildings and chairs to cradles and nursery toys. 'Fortunately,' Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, summing up the wishful credo of innocence reclaimed, 'human beings are really childlike in the best sense when directly appealed to by simple, strong forms and pure, bright color.'"

Sebastian Smee in a 2014 Atlantic article looks at books about color.

"I Kept Finding Parallels"

"The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of 'emptiness,' he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it's just a collection of perceptions and emotions.
"'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.'
"That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn't have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
"Or could he have?"

In a 2015 Atlantic article, Alison Gopnik describes her efforts in investigating a link between Buddhism and David Hume.

"That Humility Has Been Lost"

"It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed 'to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.' For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic looks at the American embrace of preventive war.

Preoccupied with 1995

"Most of the URLs the Times printed in 1995 are now dead, including those that led to a guide for backpackers and wilderness trekkers; a livestream of a coffee pot; a Grateful Dead fan page; a map of estuaries; a federal spending website; a hub for online gaming; a gardening site; a site devoted to legislation affecting Massachusetts; Wired's coverage of legal issues in cyberspace; Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology; a graphic novel about living with cancer; an illustrated explanation of an infamous flaw in Intel's Pentium chip; a cybermall; a site for making hotel reservations in San Francisco; a site dedicated to subway routes; a virtual frog dissection; a wine-tasting club; a digital map viewer that let you zoom in to any spot on Earth; Yahoo's internet directory from when it was still hosted by Stanford; and an informational site about zebrafish."

Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic revisits a list of websites from an article in The New York Times back in 1995.

"Cities vs. Trump"

"In the 2016 election, virtually every large urban center and many small ones—white Boise and majority-black Baltimore, wealthy San Francisco and beaten-down Detroit, sprawling sunwashed megalopoli and shrinking union strongholds—rejected the man who became president, often by yawning margins. The density that is one of the defining characteristics of cities forces encounters that, more and more, seem to strengthen Democratic principles—and separates urban dwellers from their rural cousins."

Justin Davidson in New York asserts that the "urban-rural divide is more significant" to contemporary politics.

"If You Thought George W. Bush Was Generally Swell, but too Racially Inclusive, You Are Going to Like Trump's Presidency"

"Donald Trump ran an ethnonationalist cult-of-personality presidential campaign, in which his status as a (real) nonpolitician and (imaginary) business genius would allow him to transcend and solve every policy problem. He has retained the ethnonationalist themes, while abandoning, one by one, almost every other populist element differentiating him from the generic Republican brand."

Jonathan Chait in New York argues that "Trump has become a conventional party man."

"The Truly Paranoid Style in American Politics"

"Conspiracists are by nature anti-heroic—they believe that faceless networks must be far more powerful than ordinary individuals. A marginal figure like Ross could never have built his cocaine empire alone; Oswald could not have killed a president; a few dozen men in Afghan caves could not have brought down the Twin Towers. The romance of the conspiracy hunt lies in the way it transfers vitality from the assassin to the buff, at home alone, searching for the plot’s true source. In this, it matches perfectly the romance of the Internet, which perhaps explains why conspiracy has found such a resolute home there. If Ross, Oswald, and Hani Hanjour are merely pawns, then the story needs a hero, and the ­puzzle-solver himself raises his hand."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells looks at "50 years of conspiracy theory."

"That Shadow Has Mostly Subsided"

"These days, the black-and-white artifices of midcentury studio films often seem overly mannered to viewer who didn't grow up watching them on TV as Harry and Sally did. And while young men will always struggle to define masculinity in a way that feels authentic, the world in which they're struggling has changed dramatically. The bitter stoicism that made Bogey cool in the eyes of Allen Felix might look like emotionally stunted self-pity to Felix's son."

Laura Miller at Slate explores if Casablanca is losing its reputation as a beloved movie.