"Catharsis, whilst liberating, is also terribly humbling. I admit to being a stubborn, self-righteous person, traits that are generally laughed at by those close to me, tolerated by those nearby, and reviled by those at a distance. Changing my view of the world, therefore, is a humiliating agony. Publicly changing it on a political subject? Suicide seems easier."
However objectionable the current American administration is – and it is deeply objectionable on a very wide range of issues – the Left should be very careful about becoming, unwittingly, the stalking horse for a would-be rival hegemon. On the eve of World War I, the German General Staff thought it important for Germany that the war be fought against Russia as well as France and Great Britain. Because Russia was the most reactionary and autocratic European Power, the war could then be presented as a war for central European culture against the dark barbarism of Russia. This would guarantee Social Democratic support for the war. This political strategy succeeded – and resulted in a catastrophe. We are very far from a pre-war situation. Nevertheless, the Left should not make the same mistake of supporting a rising counter-hegemon in order to defend civilization against the threat posed by a reactionary power.
"Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?
"Among all segments of the audience major misconceptions persist about the 12-tone technique of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. Schoenberg’s use of systematized sets of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale — all the keys on the piano from, say, A to G sharp — was a radical departure from tonality, the familiar musical language of major and minor keys."
“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”
"The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?"
Short story about a man, Jack, who, prompted by the memory of a conversation with his girlfriend, Ceil, rents and watches the film, “Open Range.” The story begins with Jack recalling the conversation with Ceil. “What if I were to vanish?” “Vanish?” “Say I met someone else.” “Well, see, that’s…
