November 2019 Acquisitions

Books:
Devin Grayson et al, Batman: War Crimes, 2006.
Michael Green et al, Blade Runner 2019, Vol. 1, 2019.
Bob Kane et al, Batman: Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler, 2004.
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 2019.
Alex Segura et al. Archie Crossover Collection, 2017.

Music:
Joan Armatrading, 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Joan Armatrading, 2000.
Baby Lemonade, Exploring Music, 1998.
Beta Band, The Best of the Beta Band, 2005.
Miles Davis, Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1957.
Dire Straits, Money for Nothing, 1988.
Electric Light Orchestra, Out of the Blue, 1977.
Marvin Gaye, You're the Man, 2019.
Michael Kiwatuna, Home Again, 2012.
Sinead O'Connor, The Lion and the Cobra, 1987.
Rolling Stones, Metamorphosis, 1975.
Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything?, 1972.
Sweetback, Stage [2], 2004.
Various, Now That's What I Call Music! 72, 2019.

"Believe They're Being Routed in the War That Matters Most"

"Whatever Trump's moral failings, he's a street fighter suited for an era of political combat. Christian conservatives believe—rightly or wrongly—that they've been held back by their sense of righteousness, grace, and gentility, with disastrous results. Trump operates without restraint. He is the enemy they believe the secular deserve, and perhaps unfortunately, the champion they need. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding the psychology that attracts establishment Republicans to Trump, and convinces them that his offense is their best defense."

Ezra Klein at Vox explains the concept of "post-Christian culture wars."

Human Values or Mercantile Values

"With the past two generations experiencing this reconfiguration of academic labor, the cultural memory of full employment and faculty control has faded, and the new normal will be unapologetically tiered. A classic definition held that the university was the corporate body of the faculty; they were the long-term core that sustained it and that those who passed through its doors encountered. Now we have a different sense of the corporate and the hierarchy of a large-scale company."

Jeffrey J. Williams at The Chronicle Review criticizes the rise of a"New Humanities."

"A Politically Motivated Falsification of History"

"There are many scholars, students and workers who know that the 1619 Project makes a travesty of history. It is their responsibility to take a stand and reject the coordinated attempt, spearheaded by the Times, to dredge up and rehabilitate a reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history.
"Above all the working class must reject any such effort to divide it, efforts which will become ever more ferocious and pernicious as the class struggle develops. The great issue of this epoch is the fight for the international unity of the working class against all forms of racism, nationalism and related forms of identity politics."

The World Socialist Web Site launches a multi-article attack on The New York Times 1619 Project.

Tom Mackaman includes an interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.

And Sean Wilentz at The New York Review of Books discusses the history of American anti-slavery, while John Clegg at Jacobin points to a different kind of slavery influence.

"Not Designed to Promote Federalism"

"In 'Federalist No. 68,' Alexander Hamilton contended that the Electoral College would frustrate 'the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.' It would also 'afford a moral certainty that the office of President [would] seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.' In addition, it would keep from the office candidates with 'talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.' In evaluating the Electoral College today, one must judge whether Hamilton's hopes have been vindicated."

G. Alan Tarr at The Atlantic takes on defenders of the Electoral College.

"A Perverse Phenomenon Occurring Around Fiscal Policy"

"It seems that only Democrats actually have to figure out how to pay for budget priorities. Money spent on warfare abroad and obscenely wealthy interests at home requires no sacrifice or justification, but every cent spent on the basic dignity and welfare of the majority of the citizenry must be balanced and accounted for. No political system can function fairly when only one side is forced to pay for its priorities. Yet the notion that Democrats alone must shoulder this burden is such a deeply ingrained conventional wisdom in America that when newer progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently began to challenge it, it came as a shock to the entire discourse."

David Atkins at the Washington Monthly discusses the absurdity of political "pay-for."

"What May Be Deplorable Must Not Become Incomprehensible"

"As the political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out, income and social background are having ever less bearing on voting behaviour: 'Small-c conservative working-class voters have migrated to the Conservative party because of immigration and Brexit. On the other side, successful educated cosmopolitans opt for Labour or the Lib Dems.' This is most vividly seen in the correlation between remain voting and higher education. This is not a matter of economics, he says, but 'a measure of psychological openness and a liberal worldview'. "

Simon Jenkins at The Guardian discusses white identity politics in Britain and the United States.

Against "Promethean Politics"

"For basically my entire adult life, the default mode of Republican speechifying has been a kind of reheated 'optimism' with lots of waxing poetic about the great reserves of American can-do waiting to be tapped. These attempts to recapture 'Morning in America' have been delivered through clenched, Prozac-like smiles by men who promptly enter black SUVs to be hurried off back to their gated communities. I've always accepted that this is the way of electoral politics, which doesn't have much to do with a conservative intellectual disposition that tends to be more dour, or at least skeptical.
"But Hawley's speech went from those baleful statistics to a prophetic critique of a cult of the individual and self that is 'so thoroughly ingrained in American culture.'"

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review praises a speech by Sen. Josh Hawley.

"The Making of a Writer and Self-Styled Political Prophet"

"While poverty is what inspired Beck and his common-law wife, Betty, to transmute his dark memories into a book, 'Pimp was also meant to be a contribution to the black revolution. Instead, it catapulted the pimp into American popular culture's pantheon of celluloid heroes and outlaws.'"

In a 2015 New Yorker article, Robin D.G. Kelley reviews Justin Gifford's Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim.

"Only Person Who Ever Truly Saw World For What It Is Starts Antidepressant Medication"

"At press time, accounts confirmed Pearson had already capitulated to the cosmic farce of humanity by enjoying a night out with friends instead of brooding over the cold and vast nothingness of the universe."

From The Onion.

Billionaire Tears

"'The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me,' Cooperman told CNBC. He called her policies 'idiocy' and said it was 'appealing to the lowest common denominator, and basically trying to turn people's heads around by promising a lot of free stuff'.
"Warren responded with a tweet, saying: 'One thing I know he cares about–his fortune. He's a shareholder in Navient, a student loan company that has cheated borrowers and used abusive, misleading tactics. He even went so far as to ask how I might impact his investment in the last earnings call with Navient.'"

Dominic Rushe at The Guardian discusses the "great plute freakout of 2019."

"Precocious 5-Year-Old Already Holding Long, Pointless Business Meeting With Stuffed Animals"

"Sources further confirmed that on multiple occasions, the boy modulated his voice to ask a question as one of the female elephant attending the meeting before cutting her off and repeating a less coherent version of the same idea as though he himself had just thought of it, showing off his preternatural gifts for micromanagement and wasting his subordinates' time as he distributed crayon-drawn pictures of his vague future expectations for playtime that he had already voiced numerous times before."

From The Onion.

"What Was True in Hofstadter's Time Is All the More Urgently True for Ours"

"Vigilante violence, unfortunately, is a movie we've seen before. In the introduction to American Violence: A Documentary History, Richard Hofstadter wrote, 'What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence, but their extraordinary ability, in the face of that record, to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and best-regulated of peoples.' This historic violence, Hofstadter noted, was not initiated with a desire to subvert the state, and therefore didn't usually result in the undermining of authority. It was violence by and for the establishment and its preservation, unleashed at different times 'against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.'"

Alexander Hurst at The New Republic warns against pro-Trump violence in 2020.

Holidays from History in the Sun

"We all love a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending—preferably a happy ending but, above all, some clearly demarcated final page with a lesson. The lesson of 1989 is that there is no grand march, no dialectic of thesis versus antithesis resolving in some synthesis, no moral arc bending toward justice—or toward any particular thing. History is an unending whirlwind, and we're caught in it."

Fred Kaplan at Slate reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And Larry Elliott at The Guardian describes what was lost with the end of the Cold War.

fIREHOSING

"It might be tempting to write off personalities like Maher as eccentric and out of touch, and to leave them alone for fear of feeding the fire. I get that. After all, some studies show that repeating a lie, even to refute it, can help ingrain a false claim rather than dispel it. However, we cannot afford to be in denial about the power of science denial. When anti-vaxxers are in the spotlight, we need to expose the strategies they use for their own selfish benefit."

Lucky Tran at The Guardian warns against those "pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible."

"The Days of That Kind of Singular, Culture-Uniting Hit Are Well and Truly Done"

"This story is not unique to streaming, or even entertainment. But the handiest analogy is the transformation of Hollywood filmmaking. Studios have wanted hits as long as movies have existed, but as the field has grown more crowded and their audiences more instantaneously global, the studios have put all their money on the same end of the betting table: more franchises, more reboots, more anything with even the vaguest connection to preexisting IP—a TV show, a board game, a piece of used bubble gum, it doesn't matter as long as the name rings some distant bell in a prospective viewer's cluttered mind. The strategy is epitomized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whose unprecedented dominance has transformed the nature of moviemaking in the past 11 years, but now even the MCU is just a piece of a much larger puzzle, sitting next to all the Star Wars movies and all the Pixar movies and all the Disney movies and all their infinite possible spinoffs. With their homogenous feel and post-credits teasers, the MCU movies provided an experience akin to watching a sporadic, incredibly expensive TV show. And now that they've turned movies into TV, they're going to help turn TV into the MCU."

Sam Adams at Slate says that "The Golden Age of TV Is Over."

"This Is the Heavy Undertow That Churns Beneath the Apparent Rising Tide of the American Left"

"This fundamental shift—from the party of Humphrey to the party of Schumer—remains the most important American political development that confronts the Left today. It is no accident that the decline of class voting has corresponded with fifty years of retreat for American workers: stagnant wages, accumulating debt, and increasing precarity, even as corporate profits have soared. Nor is it a coincidence that even popular two-term Democratic presidents in this era, elected by such dealigned class coalitions, have proven unable or unwilling to push for structural reforms on anything like the scale of the New Deal era, even after facing the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression."

Matt Karp at Jacobin contrasts Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

"Increasingly Also at Odds Over the Very Foundations of Our Constitutional Order"

"Regime cleavages, by contrast, focus the electorate’s attention on the political system as a whole. Instead of seeking office to change the laws to obtain preferred policies, politicians who oppose the democratic order ignore the laws when necessary to achieve their political goals, and their supporters stand by or even endorse those means to their desired ends. Today, when Trump refuses to comply with the House impeachment inquiry, he makes plain his indifference to the Constitution and to the separation of powers. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argues that impeachment overturns an election result, he is doing the same. In the minds of Trump, his allies and, increasingly, his supporters, it's not just Democrats but American democracy that is the obstacle."

Thomas Pepinsky at Politico explains "Why the Impeachment Fight Is Even Scarier Than You Think."