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Sunday, October 15, 2023

Speaking of Which

Note: I ran out of time Sunday evening, so I posted what I had, hoping to fill it out with my usual sources and clean it up and repost Monday. I've added a few things (none new articles -- the Kaplan and Silverstein sections are largest, and a couple links to MEE), but my eyes are glazing over, and I need to take a break and move on to other things. So I've done very little rewriting, and no reorganizing. Sorry about that. Consider this final for the week. I believe that there are enough ideas and words here for a coherent essay, but despair of getting them structured right.

I started writing an introduction on Friday night, and spent all of Saturday laboring over it, only to find it impossible to say everything I wanted to say in the limited time I had. What I wrote wasn't worthless, so when I hacked it out, I moved it to the end of this post. It is, however, incomplete, and not as convincingly fleshed out as I would like. I did manage to write up a fantasy sketch on how what they're calling the "Israel-Hamas War" might come to a soft landing, given a considerable (and unexpected) change of heart in Jerusalem and Washington (and probably Cairo).

That's followed by one paragraph on why that's unlikely, which I might have followed up with three or four more on the genocidal psychology Israelis have cultivated for over a century. (It predates the Holocaust, which itself was the ultimate example of nationalist, colonial, and imperialist plots against whole peoples. I could give you a long list, probably starting with the extermination of the Arawak in Hispaniola, but one vivid example from American memory if the Trail of Tears. By the way, the deeply cultivated memory of the Holocaust in Israel probably acts more to inhibit its repeat than to inspire it, which is one reason why it's so difficult to write up analogies between Nazis and Israelis -- not because they boggle the imagination but because they're often so easy: you won't find a closer historical antecedent to the eruption from Gaza that started this episode than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.)

My wife also recommended this piece, dated [2018-08-14], so old as news goes, but had the movement it covers been more successful, we might be having less news this week: Nathan Thrall: BDS: How a controversial non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate. I've said a lot of negative things lately about sanctions, especially as a much-overused tool of American foreign policy, but in all things you need to consider the circumstances and the alternatives. One key case where a BDS campaign was successful in affecting much-needed change was South Africa. As with Israel, the established Apartheid regime was so entrenched and so powerful it was hard to imagine them getting overthrown, and impossible to think that a foreign power might persuade them. Yet economic pressure, along with an appeal to conscience, finally did the trick.

Perhaps the single best book I've read on Israel is Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (2004). He starts with an old Jewish parable which I'd have to look up to get right, but it basically says never give in to pressure now when you can put it off until later. Israeli leaders (even Netanyahu) have always been smart and flexible. They've repeatedly conceded points, but almost never have they followed up on those concessions. They begged for the UN partition resolution in 1947, then ignored its borders. They agreed to cease fires, only to reload and resume the attack. They signed armistices in 1949-50, promising to turn them into peace treaties, but never did. When Eisenhower insisted they halt the 1956 war, they did, but dragged their feet for six months on the necessary withdrawal. They agreed to UN resolutions after the 1967 and 1973 wars, then made a mockery of them, annexing Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. They invaded Lebanon in 1978, and when Carter insisted that they withdraw, they did . . . until they invaded again in 1982, which Reagan let them get away with. The signed the Oslo Accords, then dragged their feet, taking advantage of a loophole allowing "natural growth" of settlements. Even Netanyahu signed the Wye River Accord, then did nothing to implement it. The list goes on and on and on, but they got away with it, because in the end no one (well, other than Eisenhower) held them to their word. Give them an inch, they'll take a couple feet, then pretend you didn't understand, and talk about what great allies we are. That all fits the parable in the book.

The other point of the book is that Jewish Israel is actually divided into several distinct camps that basically don't like each other. But the conflict, having a common enemy, holds them together, so much so that they fear dissolution and despair if they should ever lose that common bond. And that conflict, not just the local one with Palestinians but the global, existential one between Jew and Gentile, is baked into every nook and cranny of their culture, their very being, the space they inhabit. The Holocaust Museum has halls full of nightmares, but you exit onto a hilltop overlooking Jerusalem, and that's Israel's deliverance, or at least that's the lesson. Cramer's book is 20 years old now, so he's not totally up to date. He hadn't yet seen how tightly wound that psyche would become, how viciously it would explode. Max Blumenthal's 2013 book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, was one of the first to really expose that, though books on the settler movement offered glimpse of that earlier (e.g., Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar: Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, from 2007).

Back around 2005, someone wrote to me and asked whether I thought Israel would commit genocide. I don't have the letter any more, but my answer was basically no. While there were forces, from deep within the racist, colonialist soul of Zionism, that could drive them in that direction, there were also other forces that would inhibit them, and save them from going off the deep end. I'm still not sure they will go through with it, but they're talking the talk, and walking the walk. And the time has come to talk them off the ledge.

Top story threads:

Israel/Gaza: I just grabbed a lot of articles below. I'm less interested in detailing the atrocities than I am with the broader thinking about the war and its future consequences. There's way too much here to fully digest, but I think the outlines and imperatives are clear. The outline: that despite the initial shock, the only story now is Israel's (and the world's) response. The imperative: to talk Israel down from committing genocide. As usual, there is a lot of good reporting at Middle East Eye, MondoWeiss, +972 Magazine, Tikkun Olam.

[PS: As I was trying to wrap this up, there is this report: Egypt-Gaza crossing set to open for aid, says Blinken; 24 hours' more fuel at Gaza hospitals, says UN.}

  • Vox: [10-13] 7 big questions about the Israel-Hamas war, answered: I could quibble on various points, but this is a reasonable starting point, especially if you don't have a lot of specialist knowledge. The questions:

    1. Where does the conflict currently stand?
    2. What do I need to understand about Gaza and Israel's relationship to understand today?
    3. But why did Hamas launch such a huge attack now?
    4. How did this become an outright war, worse than we've seen in decades?
    5. What will declared war mean?
    6. How is the US responding?
    7. What does this mean for the region -- and the world?

  • Yuval Abraham: [10-13] Settlers take advantage of Gaza war to launch West Bank pogroms.

  • Jonathan Alter: [10-11] Will Netanyahu survive the fallout? He didn't deserve to survive the last twenty years, or for that matter his brief term as Prime Minister back in the 1990s, so clearly his brand of oily but intransigent malevolence appeals to many Israelis. Whether they can also stomach the incompetence is an open question. I'm not surprised that Scher has no real insight into this. His turf is as a centrist Democrat, which leads to one of the stupidest lines I've read this week: "The war gives [Biden] a chance to address the nation about the need to protect both Ukraine and Israel from aggression -- to lump Vladimir Putin in with Hamas by explaining that both of them hate freedom and kill children." The wars are similar only in the sense that the US is backing the side that wants the land but not the people, who don't want our side (dare I say it, that want to be free of our side?). But Ukraine, at least, is fighting a well-armed foreign adversary, and they genuinely need our help. Israel doesn't need our help, except to restrain them from doing unimaginably horrible things. Sending them more arms won't do that.

  • Bernard Avishai: [10-15] l Can White House diplomacy prevent escalation in Gaza and beyond? They're not off to a good start. It's hard to impart wisdom when you got your head stuck up Netanyahu's ass . . . especially if you didn't have any wisdom in the first place. But at some point, Israel is going to become an embarrassment, even for someone as shameless as Biden.

  • Ramzy Baroud:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [10-11] How to think morally about the Israel-Hamas war: I hate to say this, but this feels like a guide to becoming pompous and irrelevant. Sure, it's easy to sit far removed from the fracas and condemn this or that, and there may be some intellectual satisfaction in that exercise. But that's a luxury, not just because you're safe, but because you get to judge a hypothetical rendition of events, filtered through the language and cognitive constructs you are comfortable with. Consider this:

    We can and should extend sympathy to Israeli victims, but we should not let that shade into justification for retaliatory atrocities. We should condemn Hamas terrorism, but we should also condemn Israeli abuses against Gazans.

    Why the qualifier "Israeli victims" but no qualifier for "retaliatory atrocities"? It's unclear whether he means "victims who are Israeli" or "victims of Israelis." And why distinguish "retaliatory" from any other kind of atrocities? Then note the word choices in the last line: why is it "Hamas terrorism" but "Israeli abuses"? "Abuse" is far from the most precise description of dropping bombs from F-15s. But "terrorism" -- which Beauchamp uses repeatedly -- bothers me more, as it's been used for decades now as code for evil souls who can only be stopped with killing. The only thing Israelis (and Americans) hear after "Hamas terrorism" is "we support you in killing them." So if that's not our intent, we should find better ways of talking about this.

  • Peter Beinart: [10-14] There is a Jewish hope for Palestinian liberation. It must survive.

  • Marin Cogan: [10-13] There's no Jewish American consensus about the conflict in Israel and Gaza: "Attitudes toward Israel were already changing. The unfolding violence is making it even more complicated."

  • Roy Cohen: [10-15] Families of Israelis abducted to Gaza decry government's 'abandonment'.

  • Jonathan Cook: [10-08] The West's hypocrisy towards Gaza breakout is stomach-turning: Written early, but revised three days ago.

  • Ryan Costello: [10-12] 'Freezing' Iran's humanitarian fund is self defeating: Not sure whether Biden did this due to Israeli orders or simple panic over Republican talking points, but neither is a good look -- especially as all it proves is that America is an unreliable diplomatic negotiator, likely to double cross you at the first opportunity.

  • Jamil Dakwar: [10-13] Neither Palestinians nor Israelis will be safe unless all are safe.

  • Badia Dwaik: [10-15] Israel is besieging the West Bank as it decimates Gaza: "While the world's eyes are on Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, Israel has also put the entire West Bank on lockdown. We are living under siege."

  • Elizabeth Dwoskin: [10-14] A flood of misinformation shapes views of Israel-Gaza conflict: "The barrage of false images, memes, videos and posts -- mostly generated from within the region itself -- is making it difficult to assess what is real."

  • Stefanie Fox: [10-13] Jewish grief must not be used as a weapon of war: "we cannot sit back while Israel uses our trauma as a reason to destroy Gaza."

  • Masha Gessen: [10-13] The tangled grief of Israel's anti-occupation activists. As one put it: "We've warned for a long time. But, when it actually happens, it's the most devastating thing." In my experience, we actually pull our punches, out of an overabundance of caution, or simply the dread that if our worst imagined scenarios came true, our thinking of them may have contributed, or more likely simply be blamed. I'm reminded of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke: while the pacifists were brushed aside (or in many cases incarcerated) once the US entered WWII, during the 1930s they were often the only ones who anticipated the horrors to come, and who tried to raise the alert.

  • Omar Ghraieb: [10-12] As darkness descends on Gaza, I yearn for the world to see us, too.

  • Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt: [10-13] This is genocide: All out to end the war on Gaza.

  • Neve Gordon: [10-13] Can Netanyahu survive Hamas's attack on Israel? Unlike Jonathan Alter (above), someone who actually knows something about Israeli politics.

  • Nicholas Grossman: [10-11] Trump's overrated peace plan helped enable the horrors in Israel and Gaza: Well, it was Kushner's plan, and the real goal was to get billions of Arab dollars for his investment fund, among other grafts. But Trump's concessions to Israel certainly added to their hubris.

  • Jonathan Guyer: [10-14] How the Arab world sees the Israel-Palestine conflict: "Demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians have broken out across the Arab world this week." This will only increase as the extreme cruelty of Israel's siege continues, and the failure of America and Europe to restrain Israel becomes more obvious. Guyer refers back to his article: [02-06] The US's empty commitment to a two-state solution.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-15] This could be my last report from Gaza: "Keep my stories alive, so that you keep me alive."

  • Benjamin Hart: [10-13] What Israel didn't understand about Hamas: Interview with Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence officer, an associate of Benny Gantz. I don't have any real insight into Hamas, but I don't buy this take, let alone the blanket demonization that goes with the drive to exterminate everyone associated with them. Early on Hamas was basically a charitable community organization, and later they transformed into a political party to challenge Fatah. Like Fatah, they spun off an armed wing, a rival to Islamic Jihad, and possibly others, but they seemed to have always had a function in civil society. Israel has always done much to control the public perception of Palestinian groups. Early on Israel seemed to boost Hamas as a lever against the PLO. During the second intifada, there was a period when every time Hamas would attack, Israel retaliated by shelling Arafat's headquarters -- hard to paint that as deterrence against Hamas. While I don't doubt that Hamas-affiliated groups led this attack, the idea of calling this the Israel-Hamas War seems to involve some sleight of hand. Especially as Israel has no ability and probably no incentive to distinguish between Hamas and any other Palestinians. The real war here is between Israel and the people of Gaza, and by "war" I mean massacre. Hamas is mostly just a brand that Israel uses for people they want to kill.

  • Hanine Hassan: [10-12] Israel-Palestine war: Mass slaughter in Gaza lays bare the depth of western racism.

  • Maha Hilal: [10-15] Israel's war isn't against Hamas -- it's on the Palestinian people.

  • Ellen Ioanes:

      [10-15] Gaza's spiraling humanitarian crisis, explained: "Israel's evacuation order is creating chaos in Gaza. A ground invasion will be worse." Consider this: "Though Israeli military policy is to use disproportionate force in Gaza as a deterrent strategy, that has so far failed to enact durable security, limit Hamas's ability to strike Israel, or allow space in Israeli politics for any sort of political negotiation that could lead to a more peaceful future."

    • [10-14] How does Iran fit into the war between Israel and Hamas?

  • Donald Johnson: [10-15] How would the 'NY Times' know if Israel valued human life? They say it over and over again, "but a reexamination of Times coverage of Israel's 2018 massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza shows that the Times itself does not uphold such values."

  • Fred Kaplan:

    • [10-10] The U.S. and Israel are walking a tightrope, and the stakes are high.

    • [10-11] Netanyahu is sharing power with one of his most popular political opponents. It could keep a broader war at bay.

    • [10-16] What is Israel's strategy now? I can't really navigate my brain through these labrythine articles, but the way I read the situation is that in public Netanyahu wants to come off as maximally hard (which is to say genocidal) and Biden wants to come off as totally loyal (which is, well, stupid). On the other hand, they both have underlings (at least now that Benny Glantz is in Israel's coalition) who share their basic worldviews but understand that implementing them isn't so simple, and carries some serious risks. That opens up a lot of hypothetical angles that are really just speculation until they aren't. For instance, "If Qatar can get Hamas to release all the hostages today, it is possible that Israel would agree to call off the invasion." Really? That would be sensible, but would be a major shift in strategy, for all concerned. There are lots of details here if you're into that sort of thing. But no answers.

  • Rashid Khalidi: [10-15] The U.S. should think twice about Israel's plans for Gaza.

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [10-11] A left that refuses to condemn mass murder is doomed: This came early enough in the cycle that he's focusing on anyone on the left who failed to immediately join the pro-Israeli chorus in condemning the first (and really only) wave of Hamas attacks, lecturing us that "it is therefore imperative for progressives to disavow all apologia for Hamas's atrocities and for the broader public to understand that the left's analysis of the conflict's origins, and its prescriptions for its resolution, are wholly extricable from the blood lust of a loud minority of pseudo-radicals." This is one of several articles noted here (like Beauchamp above, and Wright below) to harp on proper etiquette in responding to outbreaks of violence. He offers several examples that fell short of his standards, then inflates them to "it is not hyperbole to say that many left-wing supporters of Palestine celebrated Hamas's atrocities." Many? How sure are you that "supporters of Palestine" are left-wingers? Personally, I'm enough of a pacifist that I don't have a problem with condemning all acts of violence, but most people have more complex feelings about violence. For instance, we routinely applaud when somebody smites down the bad guy in a movie. (As Todd Snider put it, "in America we like our bad guys dead!") And what difference does me or you condemning someone make anyway? Sure, when people like Netanyahu, Biden, or whoever runs whatever faction of Hamas can make their condemnations felt, as can the soldiers who follow them, but you and me? We're mostly just expressing our moral sense, a luxury we enjoy because we aren't connected to the people we presume to judge. And, let's face it, we're doing it hastily on the basis of very little, and probably very faulty, information. I mean, I get where Levitz is coming from, because as a leftist, my politics reflects, and is an expression of, my moral sense, and I want them to be consistent and universal. But I also find it hard to condemn someone for trying to break out of jail and stand up to a power that had for all his life punished him and everyone he grew up with, even if that person wound up harming someone else. Sure, that's not something I would do, but I'm not in Gaza, and I've never had to live that life. I truly don't know what I'd do in his shoes. But what I am certain of is that in standing up to Israel, he was bound to die, and that, regardless of whether he killed or not, his defiance would be taken by Israelis as justification to punish more people in Gaza, more severely than ever before. As a leftist, I could go on and condemn Israel for their retaliation, as I had condemned them for their past transgressions (not that it did or will do any good). However, I can see one argument for not condemning the Palestinian kid who breaks out of jail and goes on a rampage: I'm not adding my voice to the clamor urging Israel to multiply his violence many times over.

      I could have phrased this many different ways. I could have brought up examples, like a slave revolt, or a kidnapping, where one would have been less likely to instinctively blame a person for fighting back. I don't, for instance, blame Ukrainians for fighting back against Russian invasion. It's human nature to resist attack and oppression. (And if you think this case is one where Hamas is invading Israel, you need to reconsider your facts.) But sure, if you want reassurance that I'm not in favor of Hamas any or all Israelis, I will give you that, but I'll try to phrase it in a way that doesn't support Israel's many crimes.

      One last point here: this article basically does the leg work, complete with quotes usable out of context, for someone else's anti-left tirade. Levitz may not be wrong in what he says, but he's giving us a lecture most of us don't need, and he's giving ammunition to our enemies, in many cases the same people who are clamoring for genocide against Gaza.

    • [10-13] The US is giving Israel permission for war crimes.

    • [10-13] No, America's declining power didn't cause Hamas's attacks. Evidently, some pundits who think America should throw its weight around more (huh?) have come up with this line -- names dropped her include David Leonhardt, Noah Smith, and Ross Douthat.

  • Gideon Levy:

  • Nicole Narea: [10-13] How the US became Israel's closest ally: Whole books have been written on this, dating back to Kathleen Christison's Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on US Middle East Policy (1999), with John B Judis: Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (2014) focusing on Israel's creation. But while American sympathies with Israel grew mostly through Democratic presidents from Truman through Clinton, they shifted when GW Bush's neocons explicitly aligned with the Israeli right to destroy the Oslo framework and use Israel as a free agent in striking out at supposed enemies like Iran. Obama struggled to return to a Clinton-level of fawning embrace, but by then the "facts on the ground" and the hardening of Israel's right had made that impossible, so he ultimately gave up. (Josh Ruebner's Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace covers this, as does Trita Parsi's A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy With Iran.) Trump, on the other hand, sided whole hog with Israel, and Biden has made no effort to reverse Trump's surrender (unlike in Europe and the Far East, where his reassertion of American leadership has already produced one war and made another more likely). While the bond has been real and deep, this has never struck me as a true alliance. Israel does what they want, and America helps clean up the mess. As Moshe Dayan put it: "America gives us arms, money, and advice. We accept the arms. We accept the money. We ignore the advice."

  • John Nichols: [10-14] Israelis are rejecting Netanyahu. So why is Biden giving him a blank check?

  • AW Ohlheiser: [10-12] Don't believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine: "Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here's how to avoid spreading it." Fairly generic reminder about how social media is regularly used to spread propaganda and other mischief. The problem it doesn't go into is how readily mainstream media falls for carefully tailored propaganda lines.

  • Kenn Orphan: [10-13] Israel and the Gaza prison break.

  • Eve Ottenberg: [10-13] Euphemisms for war are deadly: "How we talk about war matters." Refers to David Vine's Words About War guide. Actually, I think these could use some more work. No doubt we should avoid "terrorists" -- it's not just a loaded word, by now it's become a conditioned reflex to kill -- but I'm not sure "militants" is a better alternative. That word is almost exclusively used these days as a synonym for "dead Palestinian male." I also want to note that while "ethnic cleansing" has come to the process of driving a group out of a land (as, for instance, is now happening in Nagorno-Karabakh, or happened in the 1830s with the Trail of Tears), the phrase was originally just a euphemism for mass killing (specifically, what the Serbs did at Srebrenica in 1995), a cutesy way of saying genocide.

  • George Packer: Israel must not react stupidly: I didn't read this, due to the paywall, but I did manage a laugh. I counsel people against saying "never forget," but I guess I haven't. I then took a look at some of Atlantic's other links, reminding myself why I don't pay them money (besides that I'm cheap, I mean), and found: Conor Friedersdorf: "Students for Pogroms in Israel"; Helen Lewis: "The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test"; and Bruce Hoffman: "Understanding Hamas's Genocidal ideology." They're all on board, though one article could go either way: Hussein Ibish: Israel is walking into a trap: "Storming into Gaza will fulfill Hamas's wish." The author is a resident scholar at an Arab think tank in Washington, and every reference to Hamas in what I can see links them to "their Iranian backers." The trap I see is that Israel will lose what little's left of their souls. He probably seems martyrdom of Hamas as feeding into Iran's bid for leadership of the Muslim world. I doubt that's even a fantasy in Tehran -- although the Saudis are still reeling from a nod in that direction back in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini was in the first throes of revolution, so it could well be on Ibish's agenda.

  • Trita Parsi: [10-15] Biden refuses to talk 'ceasefire' though it could prevent a regional war: "It's strategic malpractice for the White House to give Israel carte blanche when he knows it could drag the US into a wider conflict." This isn't my big worry right now. Although Israel has shelled Lebanon and bombed Syria in recent days, their demonization of Iran has always been more about manipulating Washington than confronting a serious enemy. The real risk, short-term, is genocide in Gaza, and as that is unveiled -- and there's little chance that this one won't be televised -- the bad feelings that will be generated could come back to attack Israel and its allies (and the US is much more exposed than Israel is) in all sorts of unpredictable ways. And as long as the US and Israel remain committed to policies of massive reprisals, the real damage kicked off by provocations will mostly be self-inflicted. Why haven't they learned this much by now?

  • Matthew Petti: [10-13] Why does Egypt fear evacuating Gaza?: As noted here, Azerbaijan recently solved its Armenian enclave problem by setting up a "humanitarian corridor," driving residents of Nagorno-Karabakh to escape to safety in Armenia. Israelis -- and it sounds like the US is going along with this -- have called for something like that to depopulate Gaza through Egypt, which doesn't like the idea, and has so far Moved to prevent exodus of Palestinians from besieged Gaza. An influx of two million Palestinians would cause significant stress to Egypt's fragile not-really-democracy, especially given that many would align with the banned Islamic Brotherhood, and many understand that Egypt's cozy collaboration with Israel and the US has kept Gaza isolated and precarious. As Israel's plan seems to be to kill everyone in Gaza who can't get out, exile doesn't sound like the worst possible outcome. On the other hand, if Israel gets away with the depopulation of Gaza, they're sure to try the same thing in the West Bank. One can even argue that with the government supporting settler pogroms, they've already started. The Nazis had a term for this: Judenrein. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an analogous Hebrew term, translating to "Arab-free."

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [10-08] Hamas offensive the result of Washington's hostility to Palestinian rights.

  • Vijay Prashad: [10-13] The savagery of the war against the Palestinian people.

  • Meron Rapoport: [10-11] The end of the Netanyahu doctrine: "Did his plan to preserve Hamas in Gaza as a tool for keeping the strip separate from the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority weak finally backfire?"

  • Nathan J Robinson: [10-14] You can't selectively pay attention to certain atrocities and ignore all others: "How is it possible to be outraged by Hamas killings of Israeli children, but ignore or rationalize the killing of Gazan children?"

  • Kenneth Roth: [10-11] The attack on Israel has been called a '9/11 moment'. Therein lies a cautionary tale.

  • David Rothkopf: [10-15] The war's just started, but Benjamin Netanyahu has already lost: "No matter what happens following Israel's siege of Gaza, the Israeli prime minister's political ambitions are likely damaged beyond repair."

  • Richard Silverstein:

  • David Sirota:

    • [10-12] The fog of war in Israel and Palestine: "As the long-running quagmire erupts into more bloodshed and destruction, we need to stop dehumanizing the conflict and acknowledge both sides' pain and suffering." Benny Morris captured this sentiment in his title, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999. However, beyond suffering, we also need to check who has the power and agency to actively reduce the pain and harm.

    • [10-14] The war on Gaza is the result of decades of extreme Israeli policy: Interview with Matt Duss and Daniel Bessner.

  • Norman Solomon: [10-11] 'Israel's 9/11' is a slogan to rationalize open-ended killing of Palestinian civilians. It's also a phrase meant to appeal to Americans, and solicit their support for indiscriminate slaughter.

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [10-13] Roaming Charges: Gaza without mercy: "You won't have to interrogate them afterward. They are explicit about the war crimes they're planning to commit." Sample quotes (read it all):

    When you declare total war against Gaza, which has been under perpetual siege since 1967 after being seized by Israel during the Six Day War, what is it you're going to war against? There are no airbases, no army bases, no tank battalions, no air defense systems, no naval ports, no oil refineries, no rail system, no troop barracks, no armored personnel carriers, no howitzers, no satellite systems, no attack helicopters, no fighter jets, no anti-tank batteries, no submarines, no command-and-control centers. Just people, most of them women and kids. It's why the entire population must be dehumanized, turned into "human animals" whose lives don't matter.

    The reaction in the US to Hamas's attacks was more hysterical, the calls for ultra-violence more grotesque, and the lack of dissent more uniform, than in Israel itself (which is saying something because Netanyahu blustered this week that "Every member of Hamas is a dead man").

    Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is considered one of the most reasonable of the current crop of Republicans. "Finish them." Genocide is now her campaign theme.

    Lindsey Graham has reverted back to John "Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Iran" mode: "We are in a religious war, and I am with Israel . . . Level the place."

    The obvious parallel to Gaza is the Tet Offensive, which was a defeat for the Vietnamese, but it was the defeat that won the war, exposing the vincibility of the US military machine. It also triggered something deep in the psyche of the American occupiers, who responded with attacks of pointless savagery. The massacres and gang rapes at My Lai were a direct response to Tet. Netanyahu has vowed that Israel's response will be equally sadistic, which is, of course, a sign of its own weakness -- moral and military -- and a harbinger of its ruin.

    The column eventually moves on to his usual wide range of issues, plus some books and music at the end.

  • Bret Stephens: [10-15] Hamas bears the blame for every death in this war: I've mostly picked sensible, judicious opinion pieces, because they're the ones that deserve reading and distribution. But this one, obviously, is included just to show you how horrifically wrong an American pundit can be. The clear implication is that Israel's political leaders have no free will, no brains, no morals, no capacity for managing their own behavior. Sure, to some extent, that does seem to be the case, but to what extent won't be determined until Israel stops running up Hamas's tab. And here I was, foolishly thinking that not just people but nations should be responsible for whatever they do. [PS: Well, I also gotta admit some of this is pretty funny. E.g., the paragraph that begins with "But Hamas spends fortunes building a war machine whose only purpose is to strike Israel." Or: "Hamas launched an attack with a wantonness like what the Nazis showed at Babyn Yar." Nazi Germany attacked Russia with 134 divisions, about three million men, but at least Hamas matched their "wantonness"?]

  • Matt Stieb: [10-13] The violence is spreading outside Gaza: The West Bank, obviously, where Ben-Gvir is distributing another 10,000 rifles to settlers, and the border with Lebanon, as Israeli rhetoric threatens to morph into open season on Palestinians, some of whom could be inspired to fight back. Not included here is another piece of spillover violence: Hannah Allam: [10-16] U.S.-born Palestinian boy stabbed to death in hate crime: six-year-old Wadea Alfayoumi, in Illinois.

  • Noga Tarnopolsky:

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [10-10] In blistering remarks, Biden commits aid, intel, and military assets to Israel.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos/Blaise Malley: [10-12] Presidential hopefuls outdo each other on Hamas, Israel war: "Candidates across the spectrum urge overwhelming force and blast Biden's weakness." Republican candidates, that is, although Biden's own statement came off as the strongest, because he didn't detract from his message by talking nonsense about anyone else, even Iran. The article credits Vivek Ramaswamy with "restraint," because he stopped short of committing the US to war against Iran. Marianne Williamson waffled a bit, while assuring us she hated Hamas. Cornel West had a more coherent critique of US/Israel, but he too took pains to condemn Hamas, giving you an idea of how deep the party line has sunk in. RFK Jr strayed from his fellow Republicans in applauding Biden's statement, but more verbosely. I don't mind if he describes the Hamas attack as "ignominious" and "barbaric," but "unprovoked"?

  • Gidi Weitz: Netanyahu bolstered Hamas in order to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state.

  • Robert Wright: [10-13] Israel, Hamas, and Biden's failed foreign policy: After linking to this piece, I started to write the original intro (now at the end of the post), so I lost the thread here. I will say that the idea that Hamas attacked to keep Saudi Arabia from joining the Abraham cartel is a lot like saying an estranged friend killed himself to spoil your birthday party. Sure, he spoiled your day, but how could you think that's really the point? The real reasons are probably as simple as: Hamas has been trying to figure how to make enough of an explosion to remind the world that Palestinians are suffering but can still hit back and make Israelis feel some of the pain they've long subjected to; and the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War attack would heighten the element of surprise. The 1973 war was rebuffed easily enough, but the shock caused Israelis to doubt their security forces, and ultimately to negotiate peace with Egypt. But I doubt Hamas was so optimistic: they know better than anyone how determined Israel is to grind Palestine into oblivion. Second point, I really object to Wright's "assume that Hamas isn't motivated by actual concern for the Palestinian people." People who deliberately start doomed revolts may be misguided or foolish, but the idea of laying down your life to free your people goes way back, including every revolutionary we still honor, even as martyrs. I don't doubt that many Palestinians don't appreciate Hamas's efforts -- indeed, that they actively curse them -- but you need to understand their sacrifice, else you understand nothing.

  • Here are a couple statements from concerned groups:

Trump, and other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War:

  • Blaise Malley: [10-13] Diplomacy Watch: Surprise, Putin and Zelensky don't agree on Gaza war. Zelensky is absolutely supporting Israel, but his analogies between Hamas and Russia are pretty tortuous, and before long he's going to fret about Israel jumping ahead of him in the arms pipeline. Putin, on the other hand, has resorted to saying things like: "I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East." Ok, nobody's going to agree with him, but the rest of the line is hard to argue against.

  • Connor Echols: [10-10] GOP hawks slam Biden, say he has 'no strategy' for Ukraine: In particular, they want to make sure that no one in the administration is talking to Russia.

Other stories:

Kyle Chayka: [10-09] Why the internet isn't fun anymore: "The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over." News to me, not that I'm unaware of the decline of fun.

Jim Geraghty: [10-12] Why RFK Jr.'s independent bid makes sense, even if he doesn't: Having gotten no traction running in the Democratic primary, with most of his support coming from Republicans just looking to muddy the waters, this move keeps him in the game, but it also changes the game. The real curse of the third-party candidate is that you have to spend so much time defending against charges of being some kind of spoiler you never get to talk about your platform, or why the two parties accorded a chance are wrong.

Oshan Jarow: [10-13] Basic income is less radical than you think.

Sara Morrison: [10-11] We're in a new Gilded Age. What did we learn from the last one? Interview with Tom Wheeler, whose forthcoming book is Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?

David Owen: [08-14] What happens to all the stuff we return?

Greg Sargent: [10-12] The GOP's 'southern strategy' mastermind just died. Here's his legacy. Kevin Phillips, dead at 82, wrote a book in 1969 called The Emerging Republican Majority, landing him a job in the Nixon White House. His painstaking research on voting trends not only validated the "southern strategy" -- Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond worked that hard in 1964 -- but showed Democrats losing their commanding position among Catholics and other ethnic groups (e.g., Spiro Agnew) in the north, especially as they moved to the suburbs or the "sun belt." In the late 1960s, I did roughly the same work, plotting election results from World Almanacs on county maps, so when I read Phillips book, I recognized many of the same patterns -- the main difference being that I had near-zero sense of ethnic identity, but also I was less pleased with his conclusions, and therefore more resistant. Sargent collected comments from several figures, none striking me as quite correct.

For example, Michael Barone points out that Eisenhower has already won 49-50 percent of the popular vote in the South, then claims that southern whites "turned away from national Democrats not so much because of civil rights but because of [McGovern's] dovishness." But Eisenhower's southern support was all in the peripheral states, where Republicans at least had a party structure. The deep south (South Carolina-to-Louisiana) flipped for Goldwater because the local Democrats did, as they did for Wallace in 1968). But by 1972, when Nixon swept the region, he was ducking his association with war, but dog-whistling race like crazy.

The Nixon strategy was more sophisticated than just playing up civil rights backlash. It was deeply rooted in his psyche as an all-American petit bourgeois everyman -- Gary Wills' Nixon Agonistes is probably still the most exacting psychological profile -- but he was smart, cunning, and ruthless. Phillips' job was to feed him data, but it's use was pure Nixon. (Pat Buchanan, who worked closely with Phillips, helped convert that data into the sort of bile Nixon could spew.) Nixon's use of Phillips is a big part of the reason Republicans are so artful at gerrymandering and other dark arts.

Not mentioned here are Phillips' other books. He started moving away from the Republican monster he had helped create, perhaps as early as 1982's Post-Conservative America, certainly by 1993's Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity. I didn't start paying much attention until his scathing 2004 book on the Bush family: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. He followed that up with American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, which argued that financialization begot disaster in three world-empires (Netherlands, Britain, and most assuredly America next). That was 2006, so he was well prepared for 2008's Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.

In a piece I cite below, Robert Wright starts by noting, in italics for emphasis:

This piece rests on my belief that the following two ideas are logically compatible: (1) Hamas is morally and legally responsible for the atrocities it committed against Israeli civilians; and (2) The US is responsible for policy mistakes that, over the years, have made violent attacks by Palestinian groups, including this attack, more likely. I've noticed, in the context of the Ukraine War, that some people find this approach to allocating responsibility not just wrong but outrageous and offensive. So I'm adding this preface as a kind of trigger warning.

The first point is the sort of boilerplate lawyers write, in this case to anticipate the moral judgments insisted on in Zack Beauchamp's essay (also cited below), so the author can move on to something more interesting than virtue signaling. I went ahead and quoted the rest of the note because he points out that critics of twenty-some years of American foreign policy toward Russia had to first condemn Putin's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine before we -- I did this, as did Wright, and even Noam Chomsky -- before we could get around to the background that one must understand in order to make any sense out of what Putin did (and again, we all had to reiterate that Putin was still in the wrong). Still, every time we did that, we helped validate the people who provoked as well as fought back against Russian aggression, freely ignoring any concerns or fears we had, or doubts about their motives.

I could go on about Ukraine -- I have in the past, and no doubt will again in the future -- but the point I want to make is: I'm not sure that we need to repeat this exercise here. Sure, if you could isolate select events in the initial Hamas attack, like the mass shooting at the concert, or the abduction of hostages, they were things we were shocked and appalled by. But the Hamas attack came up far short of a war. When Russia launched a war into Ukraine, they came with thousands of heavily armed troops, tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft, a navy, backed by massive industry safely beyond reach of retaliation, one that could sustain operations for years with little fear of crippling losses.

What Hamas did was more like a jail break followed by a brief crime spree. They shot their wad all at once: a few thousand of their primitive rockets; 2,500 or so fighters infiltrated a few miles of Israeli territory, killing over 1,000 Israelis and taking 200+ captive. But that's basically it, and all it could ever be. Israel regrouped, killed or drove back all the fighters, patched the breaches in its defense. Hamas appears to have had no external coordination or support, and has no capability to inflict further significant damage on Israel. The attack was very dramatic, but never had a chance of being anything but a suicide mission. The only thing the attack could accomplish was to embarrass Israeli politicians, who had assured Israelis that their "iron wall" defense and the threat of massive, indiscriminate retaliation would keep them safe and render the Palestinians powerless. Unless, of course, Israelis responded in a way that exposed themselves as cruel and murderous. Which it was almost certain to do.

Even now, it isn't hard to think of a plausible path forward. Israel reseals its border, but ceases fire, contingent on no further fire from Gaza. (Similar cease fires have been negotiated many times before.) Israel allows humanitarian relief supplies to enter Gaza, under its inspection, and eventually via Egypt, as well as neutral observers and facilitators. They negotiate the release of hostages, with both sides committed to no more hostilities. Some number of refugees will be allowed out, to countries that agree to take them, with assurance that they will be allowed back in when requested. A non-partisan civil administration is constituted, in liaison with the UN, with a world-funded reconstruction budget. An indemnity fund will be set up and at least partly funded by Israel. Reparations will be drawn from this fund for any later cross-border damage by any source. Gun control will be implemented, and the region effectively disarmed. Egypt, with UN supervision, will assume internal security responsibility. Israel will renounce its claims to Gaza, which may remain independent or join Egypt. Other issues may be negotiated (e.g., water, air control).

Of course, this won't happen. Israel will insist on taking its revenge, and will kill a truly scandalous number of Gazans, further turning the area into a wasteland. Israel will probably get the hostages killed, and insist on taking further revenge for that. In short order, more people will die of starvation and disease than they can kill directly. Basically, they will kill and destroy until they tire and/or think better of it, then look to stampede whoever's left out the gate to Egypt, or let the American Navy organize a flotilla elsewhere -- like the service the British provided in 1948 moving Jaffa to Beirut. People will think up new euphemisms for this, but the root term is genocide.

I also wrote this fragment, which got moved around and is now stranded:

Before we move on to Israel's response to the attack, we should ask ourselves why frequent critics of Israel, like Beauchamp and Wright, feel a need to condemn Hamas before they can point out that Israel has done some bad things too. For most on the left, that seems fair and consistent: we oppose inequity but also violence, and imagine a possible a path toward much greater equality that doesn't involve violence. That may make sense in a stable society with laws and a responsible system of justice, which is our default understanding of America (even though reality often disappoints).

But what if no paths are available? Does it even make sense to make moral judgments over people who have no viable options to achieve morally-justified ends? If you are at all familiar with the history and politics of Israel/Palestine, I shouldn't have to run through the many reasons why people in Gaza, especially Hamas, are denied such options. Nor why hopes for change have been utterly dashed by the trajectory of increasingly right-wing governments and international indifference, especially how the US has given up any pretense of being anything but an Israeli tool. Palestinians have tried nonviolence (appealing to international law) and have tried violence. Neither worked. As each fails, the other advances.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 9, 2023

Music Week

October archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 40983 [40961] rated (+22), 26 [31] unrated (-5).

I expected this week's report to be delayed, and even so short. My plan was to entertain company, and do some fairly serious cooking. My niece came for a visit, but I came down with something undiagnosed and was a terrible host (though I did finally manage to knock out a decent phat thai). But rather than wait another day or two, I found a few minutes to knock this out before bed Monday, and figured it would be best to put it behind me.

Speaking of Which posted Sunday afternoon. I haven't followed the news since then, but I do have one important thing to say:

Anyone who condemns Hamas for the violence without also condemning Israel for its violence, and indeed for the violence and injustice it has inflicted on Palestinians for many decades now, is not only an enemy of peace and social justice, but under the circumstances is promoting genocide.

Anyone who has been paying attention must recognize by now how the Israeli people have been primed to commit massive and indiscriminate slaughter. And they must also understand that Israel, unlike Hamas, has the military power to do so. When Americans swear they continue to stand wholeheartedly with Israel, and don't show any concern for the great likelihood that Israel will commit atrocities, they are assuring Israeli leaders that anything they do will be excused. By the way, the one thing sending American naval ships into the Eastern Mediterranean reminds me of is how they stood by idly while Sharon orchestrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut.

As someone who believes in peace, and who has always condemned violence and prejudice on all sides, I am bothered that Hamas has chosen to respond to this cruel occupation in such a manner. But I am also aware that nothing else any group of Palestinians have attempted to secure fundamental human rights that we take for granted in America has made any headway with Israel.

For now, I'll leave it at that, aside from reproducing a tweet I managed Sunday evening:

On 9/11 I remember Netanyahu & Peres on TV, all smiles, lecturing us on how now we know it feels like to be targets of terrorism, and offering us their sage advice on how to fight and control terrorists. Not so jovial today, as all they thought they knew has blown up.

Nothing much to add to the reviews below, except that the new ones that came closest (Armand Hammer, Sarah Mary Chadwick) got multiple plays without quite convincing me. And while I showed a slight preference for one of the Yazoo comps, I would have gone with the higher grade for a 2-CD package.

New records reviewed this week:

Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (2023, Fat Possum): Hip-hop duo of Billy Woods and Elucid (Chaz Hall), sixth album. Hard, and I'm not sure why. (Gave this some extra plays, and it doesn't wear thin. If anything, it gets harder.) B+(***) [sp]

Bowmanville: Bowmanville (2023, StonEagleMusic): Chicago group, cites their local blues legacy and Django Reinhardt's Hot Club de Paris as inspirations -- the latter with its guitar and violin swing (Mason Jilier and Ethan Adelsman), the former with a harmonica-playing blues shouter (Graham Nelson), plus two bassists and a drummer. Six originals (mostly Adelsman) and five covers: "Georgia," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Saint James Infirmary," "Caravan," and "La Vie En Rose." B+(**) [cd]

Geof Bradfield/Richard D Johnson/John Tate/Samuel Jewell: Our Heroes (2023, Afar Music): Saxophonist (tenor, soprano, bass clarinet), backed by piano, bass, drums. Mainstream, very nice. B+(***) [cd]

Sarah Mary Chadwick: Messages to God (2023, Kill Rock Stars): New Zealand born, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter, eighth album since 2012. Mostly declaiming sharp words over piano, although the music picks up a bit midway, probably attributable to producer Tony Espie. B+(***) [sp]

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ: Destiny (2023, Spells on the Telly): London-based electronica duo, anonymous but reportedly siblings, aliases DJ Sabrina (as in Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and Salem, in business since 2017. Ninth album (per Discogs, plus a bunch of compilations and mixtapes), this one a monster: 41 songs, 236:00. Way too much. B+(*) [bc]

Arina Fujiwara: Neon (2023, self-released): Pianist, graduated from Manhattan School of Music, first album (or EP, as it's billed: six tracks, 29:26). With string quartet, vibes, guitar, bass, and drums. B+(*) [cd]

Andrew Krasilnikov: Bloody Belly Comb Jelly (2023, Rainy Days): Saxophonist, plays soprano and C-melody here, probably Russian (studied at Berklee and lived in New York before a "return to his roots" moved him to Moscow. Possibly his first album, recorded in Moscow, on a label which recently moved from St. Petersburg to Israel. Quartet with piano-bass-drums, plus spots for extra horns (many on the title track) and marimba. B [cd]

Jeff Lederer With Mary LaRose: Schoenberg on the Beach (2023, Little (i) Music): Saxophonist, plays clarinet and flute here, composed this song cycle based on the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and Webern, with texts by Goethe, Rilke, and others, sung by La Rose. In other words, this is way too fancy for me to figure out, and just annoying enough to keep me from wanting to try, but yeah, there's something here if you're up to it. B+(*) [cd]

Jeff Lederer/Morningside Tone Collective: Balls of Simplicity: Jeff Lederer Notated Works 1979-2021 (2023, Little (i) Music): "Chamber works" composed over the saxophonist's career. The group is: Leo Sussman (flute), Emmaile Tello (clarinet), Francesca Abusamra (violin), Jordan Bartow (cello), and Weiwei Zhai (piano), conducted by Lederer (although one piece calls for two clarinets), with Jamie Saft as guest pianist. B+(**) [sp]

Ivan Lins: My Heart Speaks (2023, Resonance): Brazilian singer-songwriter, b. 1945, fifty or so albums since 1970, I can't find a recording date (a bit troubling from a label that specializes in archival finds, but they're calling it a "follow up to Eddie Daniels' 2020 acclaimed Resonance tribute to Ivan Lins, Night Kisses," itself a "follow-up to Grammy-nominated Egberti Gismonti tribute!"). Featured guest spots here for Dianne Reeves, Jane Monheit, Tawanda, and Randy Brecker. Songs are Lins classics, played for ultimate lushness by the 91-piece Tblisi Symphony Orchestra. B+(**) [cd]

Madre Vaca: Knights of the Round Table (2022 [2023], Madre Vaca): Jazz collective, from Jacksonville, several previous albums, eleven credits this time, for an eclectic mix. B+(*) [cd] [11-21]

Astghik Martirosyan: Distance (2021 [2023], Astghik Music): Armenian singer, plays piano (as does co-producer Vardan Ovsepian), first album, recorded in Los Angeles, refashions Armenian folk songs. B+(*) [cd] [10-06]

Colette Michaan: Earth Rebirth (2022 [2023], Creatrix Music): Flute player, from New York, four previous albums (back to 2004). Not an instrument I'm particularly fond of, but the bouncy Latin rhythms keep it in the air. B+(*) [cd] [10-15]

Michael Musillami/Rich Syracuse/Jeff Siegel: Flight of Evangeline (2021 [2022], Playscape): Guitarist, couple albums in the 1980s, picked up the pace after he founded Playscape in 2000. Trio with bass and drums. B+(**) [sp]

Elsa Nilsson's Band of Pulses: Pulses (2023, Ears & Eyes): Flute player, from Sweden, based on Brooklyn, classical background, member of Esthesis Quartet. This project, backed by piano, bass, and drums, sports spoken word by poet Maya Angelou. B+(***) [cd]

Oneohtrix Point Never: Again (2023, Warp): Daniel Lopatin, tenth studio album under this alias, other work under his own name (mostly for films) and other aliases. Synths, sometimes configured for strings, a peculiar mix of background dreck with moments that sound pretty interesting, but never really develop. B [sp]

Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Borrowed Flowers (2023, Top Stop Music): Cuban pianist, long based in Florida, thirty-some albums since 1987. Solo here, venerable standards (unless one wants to get snide about Lennon/McCartney and Sting), most done perhaps a bit too slow, but "Take Five" is irrepressible. B+(**) [cd]

Sara Serpa & André Matos: Night Birds (2022 [2023], Robalo Music): Jazz singer, from Portugal, or maybe I should say art singer, as she works in a slow idiom that's suggestive of but not quite as arch as classical. Many of her albums are duos with a solo instrument, like Ran Blake on piano, or Matos on guitar (her third duo with him). Certainly artful. B [cd]

Gianluigi Trovesi: Stravaganze Consonanti (2014 [2023], ECM): Italian saxophonist, debut 1978, plays alto and clarinet here, with a small orchestra (11 pieces: strings, two oboes, bassoon, archiute, harpsichord, percussion/electronics), on a mostly classical program (Purcell, Dufay, Desprez, three Italians I don't recall hearing of, Trovesi himself). B+(*) [sp]

Ben Winkelman: Heartbeat (2023, OA2): Pianist, originally from Oregon, sixth album since 2007, mostly trios, this one adding Gilad Hekselman on guitar (5 of 9 tracks), not much of a difference. B [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Holy Church of the Ecstatic Soul: A Higher Power: Gospel, Funk & Soul at the Crossroads 1971-83 (1971-83 [2023], Soul Jazz): The label has a track record of putting together expert compilations around surprising concepts, so something like this is usually worth a go. But my interest in gospel has long been limited, such that I've only rated records by one artist included here (Swan Silvertones, and nothing since 1965), and haven't even heard of (at least they're not in my "shopping" database) half of them. I do hear the funk here, but don't see why we need to bother God about it. B+(*) [sp]

Old music:

The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs, Vol. 1 (1920s-30s [1997], Yazoo): Typical of this label's fine compilations, twenty-three songs from collectors of 78s, nicely integrated because the races had more in common than the law wanted you to think. B+(***) [sp]

The Rose Grew Round the Briar: Early American Rural Love Songs, Vol. 2 (1920s-30s [1997], Yazoo): Twenty-three more love songs, every bit as notable, partly because more than half of the artists return. I give this volume a slight edge, although it could just be that it ends even stronger. A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Affinity Trio [Eric Jacobson/Pamela York/Clay Schaub]: Hindsight (Origin) [10-20]
  • Frank Kohl: Pacific (OA2) [10-20]
  • Russell Kranes: Anchor Points (OA2) [10-20]
  • Aruán Ortiz: Pastor's Paradox (Clean Feed) [10-20]
  • Andrea Veneziani: The Lighthouse (self-released) * [10-06]
  • Jennifer Wharton's Bonegasm: Grit & Grace (Sunnyside) [10-20]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Speaking of Which

I wrote the introduction below before Israel blew up. On Saturday, I moved my irregular section on Israel up to the top of the "top story threads" section, ahead of the breakout on the House Speaker -- lots of links there, but the story is pretty pat. The Israel introduction was written Saturday afternoon. I resolved to post this early Sunday, as I have other things I need to do in the evening, so my coverage of the rapidly unfolding Israel story is limited. Still, I think the lessons are obvious, even if no one is writing about them. When I see lines like "this is Israel's 9/11" I process that differently: for America, 9/11 was a sad, sobering day, one that should have led us to a profound reassessment of our national fetish of power; instead, America's leaders took it as an unpardonable insult, and plotted revenge in a foolish effort to make any further defiance unthinkably costly. It didn't work, and in short order America had done more damage to itself than Al Qaeda ever imagined.

The only nation in the world even more hung up on its ability to project power and impose terror is Israel -- so much so that America's neocons are frankly jealous that Israel feels so little inhibition about flaunting its power. Today's formal declaration of war was another kneejerk move. But until Israelis are willing to consider that they may be substantially at fault for their misfortunes, such kneejerk moves will continue, hurting Israel as much as its supposed enemies.

Good chance Music Week won't appear until Tuesday, if then.

I ran across this paragraph on conservatism in Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring (pp. 251-252), and thought that, despite its unfortunate source, it has something to say to us:

In a sympathetic reflection on Metternich's political thought, Henry Kissinger, an admirer, exposed what he called 'the conservative dilemma'. Conservatism is the fruit of instability, Kissinger observed, because in a society that was still cohesive 'it would occur to no one to be a conservative'. It thus falls to the conservative to defend, in times of change, what had once been taken for granted. And -- here is the rub -- 'the act of defense introduces rigidity'. The deeper the fissure becomes between the defenders of order and the partisans of change, the greater becomes the 'temptation to dogmatism' until, at some point, no further communication is possible between the contenders, because they no longer speak the same language. 'Stability and reform, liberty and authority, come to appear as antithetical, and political contests turn doctrinal instead of empirical.

I draw several conclusions from this:

  1. Reactionaries always emerge too late to halt, let alone reverse, the change they object to. Change is rarely the result of deliberate policy, which makes it hard to anticipate and understand. And change creates winners as well as losers, and those winners have stakes to defend against reactionary attack.

  2. What finally motivates reactionaries is rarely the change itself, but their delayed perception that the change poses a threat to their own power, and this concern dominates their focus to the exclusion of anything else. They become rigid, dogmatic, eventually turning their ire on the very idea of flexibility, of reform.

  3. Having started from a position of power, their instinct is to use force, especially to repress anyone who threatens to undermine their power, including those pleading for reasonable reforms. Reason itself becomes their enemy.

  4. While they may win political victories, their inability to understand the sources and benefits of change, their unwillingness to entertain reforms that benefit others, drives their agenda into the realm of fantasy. They fail, they throw tantrums, they fail even worse. Eventually, they're so discredited they disappear, at least until the next generation of endangered elites repeats the cycle.

Consider several major sources of change since 1750 or so:

  • Most profound has been the spread of ideas and reason, which has only accelerated and intensified over time. One was the discovery that we are all individuals, capable of reason and deliberate action, and deserving of respect. Another is that we belong to communities.

  • Most relentlessly powerful has been the pursuit of profit: the basic instinct that preceded but grew into capitalism.

  • The incremental development of science and technology, which has been accelerated (and sometimes perverted) by capitalism.

  • The growth of mass culture (through print, radio, television, internet), and its subsequent fragmentation.

  • The vast increase in human population, made possible by longer lives and by the near-total domination of land (and significant appropriation of water and air) on Earth, driven by the above.

Nobody anticipated these changes. Though reactionaries emerged at every stage, they failed, and were forgotten, as generations came to accept the changes behind them, often railing against changes to come. It tells you something that conservatives claim to revere history, but history just dismisses them as selfish, ignorant cranks.

Of course, there is no guarantee that today's reactionaries won't win their political struggles. There may be historical examples where conservatives won out, like the Dark Ages following the Roman Empire, or the closing of China in the 15th Century. But human existence is so precariously balanced on limits of available resources that the threat they pose is huge indeed. Maybe not existential, but not the past they imagine, nor the one they pray for.

Top story threads:

Israel: Last week I folded this section into "World." Friday night I thought about doing that again, which a single link reviewing the Nathan Thrall book wouldn't preclude. Then, as they say, "all hell broke loose." When I got up around Noon Saturday, the Washington Post headline was: Netanyahu: 'We are at war' after Hamas attack. What he probably meant is "thank God we can now kill them all with impunity, all the while blaming our acts on them." The memory of occupiers is much shorter and shallower than the memory of the occupied. The first tweet I saw after this news was from a derecka, who does remember:

Palestinians can't march, can't pray, can't call for boycotts, can't leave, can't stay, can't publish reports, what's should people do? land acknowledgments?

Here's another tweet, from Tony Karon:

Is Netanyahu threatening genocide? "We will turn Gaza into a deserted island. To the citizens of Gaza, I say. You must leave now." Everyone knows the 2m Gazans can't leave because Israel has locked them in for decades. So how will he make it a "deserted island"

Netanyahu is Prime Minister, comanding one of the world's largest and most sophisticated war machines, so I don't think you can dismiss such threats as idle huffing. Looking backward, Doug Henwood tweeted:

Some perspective -- since September 2000:

Palestinians killed by Israeli forces: 10,500
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians: 881

That's a 12/1 ratio.

I've written hundreds of thousands of words on Israel since 2001. (You can find most of them in my notebooks and also in the "Last Days" series of book drafts.) I've read a lot. I've tried to be reasonable. I've never described myself as "pro-Palestinian" (or pro- any nation or ethnic group, not even American). I suppose you could say I'm "anti-Israeli" in the sense that I object to many policies Israel practices, also "anti-Zionist" in the sense that I believe Zionism is a fundamentally flawed creed and ideology. Still, I always felt that Jews had a right to settle in what became Israel. I just objected to the terms they imposed on the people who lived there before them, and continue to live there.

One piece I can point to is one I wrote on November 17, 2012, which is as good a place as any to start. In 2000, Ariel Sharon took over as Prime Minister, demolished the Oslo Accords that promised some sort of "two-state" division of Israel and Palestine, and provoked the second Intifada (Palestinians called this the Al-Aqsa Intifada, although I've always thought of it as the Shaul Mofaz Intifada, for the Defense Minister whose heavy-handed repression of Palestinian demonstrations kicked the whole thing off). By 2005, the Intifada was defeated in what isn't but could be called the second Nakba (or third, if you want to count the end of the 1937-39 revolt). Sharon then pulled Israel's settlers from their hard-to-defend enclaves in Gaza, sealed the territory off, and terrorized the inhabitants with sonic boom overflights (which had to be stopped, as they also bothered Israelis living near Gaza).

Hamas shifted gears, and ran in elections for the Palestinian Authority. When they won, the old PA leadership, backed by Israel and the US, rejected the results, and tried to seize power -- successfully in the West Bank, but they lost local control of Gaza to Hamas. Ever since then, Israel has tried to managed Gaza as an open-air jail, walled in, blockaded, and periodically strafed and bombed. One such episode was the subject of my 2012 piece. There have been others, every year or two -- so routine, Israelis refer to them as "mowing the grass."

Once Sharon, Netanyahu, and the settlers made it impossible to partition the West Bank -- something, quite frankly, Israel's Labor leaders as far back as 1967 had never had any intention of allowing -- the most obvious solution in the world was for Israel to cut Gaza free, allow it to be a normal, self-governing state, its security guaranteed by Egypt and the West (not Israel), with its economy generously subsidized by Arab states and the West. This didn't happen because neither side wanted it: Palestinians still clung to the dream of living free in their homeland (perhaps in emulation of the Jews), so didn't want to admit defeat; and Israelis hated the idea of allowing any kind of Palestinian state, and thought they could continue to impose control indefinitely. Both sides were being short-sighted and stupid, but one should place most of the blame on Israel, as Israel had much more freedom to act sensibly. But by all means, save some blame for the US, which from 2000 on has increasingly surrendered its foreign policy to blindly support Israel, no matter how racist and belligerent its politicians became.

I'll add a few more links, but don't expect much. It looks like this will take weeks to play out, and while the lessons should be obvious to any thinking being, Israel and America have dark blinders to any suggestion that the world doesn't automatically bend to their will.

Updates, by Sunday afternoon: Israel formally declares war against Hamas as hundreds killed on both sides; U.S. to provide arms, shift naval group toward Mideast; death toll in Israel, Gaza passes 1,100.

The shutdown and the speaker: A week ago, after acting like a complete ass for months, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reversed course and offered a fairly clean continuing spending bill, which instantly passed, cleared the Senate, and was signed by Biden. A small number of Republicans (eight), led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL), felt so betrayed by not shutting down the government that they forced a vote to fire McCarthy, which succeeded.

Trump:

DeSantis, and other Republicans:

  • Perry Bacon Jr: [10-04] Republicans are in disarray. But they are still winning a lot on policy. Way, way too much, considering that their policy choices are almost all deadass wrong.

  • Paul Krugman: [10-05] Will voters send in the clowns? A lot of things that show up in polls make little sense, but few show this much cognitive dissonance: "Yet Americans, by a wide margin, tell pollsters that Republicans would be better than Democrats at running the economy." Krugman spends a lot of time arguing that the economy isn't so bad, but regardless of the current state, how can anyone see Republicans as better?

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Kate Aronoff: [10-05] Biden scraps environmental laws to build Trump's border wall. Also:

  • Nicole Narea: [10-02] Who is Laphonza Butler, California's new senator? I did a double take on this line about the Democrats already campaigning for the Feinstein seat: "All three have sizable war chests for the campaign, with Schiff, Porter, and Lee having $29.8 million, $10.3 million, and $1.4 million on hand." Sure, they're all "sizable," but sizes are vastly different. They are currently polling at 20% (0.71 points per million dollars), 17% (1.65 ppmd), and 7% (5.0 ppmd).

  • Stephen Prager: [10-03] Voters have the right to be dissatisfied with 'Bidenomics': "The president's defenders think voters are ungrateful for a good economy. But people's economics experiences vary widely, and much of the country has little to appreciate Biden for." Well, compared to what? Not if you're comparing to Republicans. I'll grant that it can be hard to gauge, including shifts from Obama that I believe are very significant. But blaming Biden for canceling the Child Tax Credit misses the key point that Democrats didn't have enough votes to extend it. Same for the rest of the cutbacks from the Build Back Better bill that Bernie Sanders presented -- some of which (the parts that Joe Manchin accepted) was eventually passed. This piece cites another by Stephen Semler: [08-15] Bidenomics isn't working for working people. One thing that jumps out here is the chart "The U.S. is Shrinking Its Social Safety Net," where everything listed (and since phased out) was part of the remarkable pandemic lockdown relief act, which Trump got panicked into signing, but which was almost all written and passed by Pelosi and Schumer. To get it passed and signed, they had to sunset the provisions. Democrats need to campaign on bringing them back, and building on them.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols: [10-06] Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine's arduous path to EU accession: "A hopeful summit obscured the difficulties facing Kyiv as it pushes to join the bloc."

  • George Beebe: [10-04] Will Ukraine's effort go bankrupt gradually . . . then suddenly?

  • Dave DeCamp: [10-08] Biden considering huge $100 billion Ukraine spending package: If at first you don't succeed, go crazy! Good chance he'll be adding military aid for Israel before this passes. After all, look how successful the last 50 years of aid was.

  • David Ignatius: [10-05] A hard choice lies ahead in Ukraine, but only Ukrainians can make it: First I've heard of a McCain Institute, but if someone wanted a pro-war counter to the Quincy Institute, that's a pretty obvious name. As for the opinion piece, it is half-obvious, and half-ridiculous. The obvious part is that Ukraine, as well as Russia, will have to freely agree to any armistice. The ridiculous part is the idea that the US shouldn't exert any effort to achieve peace. The "defer to Ukraine" mantra is a blank check policy, promoted by people who want to see the war go on indefinitely.

  • Jen Kirby: [10-03] The West's united pro-Ukraine front is showing cracks. The leading vote-getter in Slovakia has promised to end military aid to Ukraine. Still, he's a long ways from being able to form a government. Biden's latest request for Ukraine got dropped from the bill the House finally passed to avoid (or forestall) a government shutdown. On a straight vote, it would probably have passed, but straight votes are hard to come by.

  • Jim Lobe: [10-06] Iraq War boosters rally GOP hawks behind more Ukraine aid: "Elliott Abrams' 'Vandenberg Coalition' also assails the Biden administration for being soft on Russia." Wasn't Abrams the guy who back in 2005 was whispering in Sharon's ear about how a unilateral dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza with no PA handover could be spun as a peace move but would actually allow Israel to attack Gaza with impunity, any time they might choose to? (Like in the lead up to elections, or in the interim between Obama's election and when he took office, so he's have to pledge allegiance to Israel before he could do anything about it.)

  • Siobhán O'Grady/Anastacia Galouchka: [10-06] Russian missile attack at Ukraine funeral overwhelmingly killed civilians: Link caption was more to the point: "Overwhelming grief in Ukrainian village hit by strike: 'There is no point in living.'" But already you can see the effort to spin tragedy into a propaganda coup.

  • Robert Wright: [10-06] The real lesson of Ukraine for Taiwan: Attempting to control a conflict through increased deterrence can easily backfire, precipitating the event one supposedly meant to deter. When Russia started threatening to invade Ukraine, Biden didn't take a step back and say, whoa!, can't we talk about this? No, his administration cranked up their sanctions threats, and expedited their increasing armament of Ukraine. Putin looked at the lay of the land and the timelines, and convinced himself that his odds were better sooner than later. Nor is this the only case where sanctions have backfired: the context for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was America's embargo of steel and oil. World War I started largely because Germany decided that war with Russia was inevitable, and their chances of winning were better in 1914 than they would be later. All these examples are bonkers, but that's what happens when states put their faith in military power. China has long claimed Taiwan (going back to the day when Taiwan still claimed all of China), but Peking has been willing to play a long game, for 75 years now. But the more America wants to close the door on possible reunification, the more likely China is to panic and strike first.

Around the world:

Other stories:

Kate Cohen: [10-03] America doesn't need more God. It needs more atheists. Essay adapted from the author's book: We of LIttle Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too).

Kevin T Dugan: [10-03] The 3 most important things to know about Michael Lewis's SBF book: The book is Going Infinite, which started out as one of the writer's profiles of unorthodox finance guys, and has wound up as some kind of "letter to the jury" on the occasion of crypto conman Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud trial. Also on Lewis:

Karen J Greenberg: [10-05] The last prisoners? With its prisoner population reduced to 30, why can't America close Guantanamo?

Eric Levitz: [10-06] Don't celebrate when people you disagree with get murdered. "In view of many extremely online, spritually unswell conservatives, [Ryan] Carson's brutal death was a form of karmic justice. . . . Days earlier, the nihilist right greeted the murder of progressive Philadelphia journalist Josh Kruger with the same grotesque glee."

Blaise Malley: [10-05] The plan to avert a new Cold War: Review of Michael Doyle's book, Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War. "If all sides continue to perceive actions by the other as hostile, then they will constantly be at the precipice of a military confrontation."

Charles P Pierce: [10-05] Guns are now the leading cause of accidental death among American kids.

JJ Porter: [10-05] Conservative postliberalism is a complete dead end: A review of Patrick Deneen's Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, as if you needed (or wanted) one.

Emily Raboteau: [10-03] The good life: "What can we learn from the history of utopianism?" Review of Kristen R Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Also see the Current Affairs interview with Ghodsee: [10-04] Why we need utopias.

Corey Robin: [10-04] How do we survive the Constitution? Review of the new book, Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the comparative political scientists who previously wrote up many examples of How Democracies Die. The authors are critical of various quirks in the US Constitution that have skewed recent elections toward Republicans, thus thwarting popular will and endangering democracy in America. I haven't spent much time with these books, or similar ones where the authors (like Yascha Mounk) seem to cherish democracy more for aesthetic than practical reasons. My own view is that the Constitution, even with its imperfections, is flexible enough to work for most people, if we could just get them to vote for popular interests. The main enemy of democracy is money, abetted by the media that chases it. The solution is to make people conscious, much less of how the Founding Fathers sold us short than of the graft and confusion that sells us oligarchy.

By the way, Robin mentions a 2022 book: Joseph Fishkin/William E Forbath: The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy. I haven't read this particular book, but I have read several others along the same lines (focused more on the authors and/or the text, whereas Fishkin & Forbath follow how later progressives referred back to the Constitution): Ganesh Sitaraman: The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017); Erwin Chemerinsky: We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (2018); Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2015). I should also mention Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019).

Nathan J Robinson: [10-06] How to spot corporate bullshit: "A new book shows that the same talking points have been recycled for centuries, to oppose every form of progressive change." Review of Corporate Bullsh*t, by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen, with plenty of examples.

Missy Ryan: [10-04] Over 80 percent of four-star retirees are employed in defense industry: "Twenty-six of 32 four-star admirals and generals who retired from June 2018 to July 2023." Based on the following report:

Washington Post Staff: [10-03] The Post spent the past year examining US life expectancy. Here's what we found:

  1. Chronic diseases are killing us
  2. Gaps between poor and wealthy communities are growing
  3. US life expectancy is falling behind global peers
  4. The seeds of this crisis are planted in childhood
  5. American politics are proving toxic

    Related articles:

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Monday, October 2, 2023

    Music Week

    October archive (in progress).

    Music: Current count 40961 [40918] rated (+43), 31 [30] unrated (+1).

    Pretty major Speaking of Which last night (8867 words, 114 links). My wife was more critical than I was of Fredrik deBoer, and recommended the Becca Rothfeld review that I had linked to, only to note that deBoer didn't like it. It now seems to me like she does a pretty fair job of summarizing deBoer's points and their limits. Final paragraph, which doesn't sound like an elite trying to usurp a mass movement and turn it into a vanity project:

    It is hardly a shock that BLM and #MeToo attracted some unsavory allies. Mass movements are, by definition, massive, and every large group includes some lunatics on the margins. To point to the existence of a few fanatic hangers-on is hardly to indict a movement or its methods. Indeed, a motley coalition is -- for better or worse -- a necessary result of any truly democratic foray. Who, then, is DeBoer's intended audience? Movements are not agents amenable to persuasion. There is no secretary to whom DeBoer could hand a petition, demanding more stringent "message discipline." There is only the flash and the fury, the sudden surge of belief in a better life. If the wayward beast of a mass action cannot always be coaxed into behaving rationally, so much the better: That is the source of its chaos, but also the source of its force.

    I've been focusing a lot on books lately because that's the forum -- not blogs and podcasts, and certainly not X -- where serious thinkers have the time and space to try to put their thoughts into coherent form. My latest Book Roundup has many of these, and this post adds several more: ones I missed like DeBoer's How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein's A Fabulous Failure, Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's Tyranny of the Minority, and Kevin Slack's ridiculous War on the American Republic; one I knew was coming soon: Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening, so held off on; and a couple future books I only just heard about: Zack Beauchamp's The Reactionary Spirit, and Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen's The Truce. (There are also mentions of several other books I had previously written about.)

    One thing I've been thinking about a lot is how changes happen, and why they move in some directions and not others. This isn't the place to attempt a disquisition on what I think, but I will note that my recent reading in Hobsbawm and Clark on 1789-1848 is giving me a lot of case studies (oddly enough, even drawing on Turchin's "elite overproduction" thesis).

    One final note is that after I slogged through Hobsbawm's first volume over 5-6 weeks, my wife got an audible of his second volume, and finished it within 3-4 days. Makes me wonder what I could get done if I wasn't listening to music all the time.

    I lost less time thrashing this week, trying to find something to play next, mostly thanks to Phil Overeem's latest list. Two records I didn't get around to because they're just too damn long are DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's Destiny (six LPs) and the big box (4-CD) of the Replacements' Tim. Given that Tim has long been my favorite of their albums, and that everyone is raving about the new mix, the latter seems like a lock. I did manage to make it through two more sets that ran too long, but were remarkable before I lost track: Kashmere Stage Band and Les Rallizes Dénudés. Phil also initiated the Money for Guns dive. I love that he comes up with records like these.

    Still only had one A-list album when I cut off the week, but it took long enough to do the Streamnotes indexing today that I got to the Allison Russell album, and decided to move it up. I also knocked off three jazz CDs from the queue, but they can (and should) wait. Until lately, the queue was almost all scheduled well into the future, but release dates have started to come fast -- ten (of 31) albums are already out. I need to work on that.

    I'm starting to think about the Jazz Critics Poll this year. It would be nice to get a jump on it for the first time ever, rather than getting blindsided a few days before the ballots need to be sent out. If you have suggestions, drop me a line.

    New records reviewed this week:

    Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: Afro Futuristic Dreams (2023, Strut): Saxophonist, originally Bruce Baker from Chicago, studied at Antioch under Cecil Taylor, discovered Africa and the cosmos, formed his original Pyramids there, reviving them around 2016 for four albums so far. A mix of cosmic Sun Ra and down home social music, a bit long on strings and vocals. B+(***) [sp]

    Farida Amadou/Jonas Cambien/Dave Rempis: On the Blink (2022 [2023], Aerophonic): Chicago saxophonist Rempis recorded in the Netherlands, with the two Belgian musicians on bass and piano, both with electronics. (Cambien is currently based in Oslo.) The background is enticing, something Rempis shows great sensitivity to, not that he never breaks loose for a power solo. A- [cd] [10-10]

    Zoh Amba: O Life, O Light Vol. 2 (2021 [2023], 577): Tenor saxophonist from Tennessee, plays some flute, burst onto the scene in 2022 with a half dozen albums of explosive free jazz, as if Albert Ayler had descended from the heavens and taken up improbable earthly form. The one I missed was the first part of this set, with William Parker on bass (and gralla) and Francisco Mela on drums. Two tracks, 39:25. I was reminded of this when I read a review bemoaning the drop from Vol. 1. I can't imagine how the previous album could have caused that remark. B+(***) [bc]

    Emil Amos: Zone Black (2023, Drag City): Drummer, and then some, has produced 16 albums since 2000 as Holy Sons, plus two under his name, describes this as "mood music for drug trips spent dreaming up new soundtracks to take drugs to!" B+(*) [sp]

    Florian Arbenz: Conversation #10: Inland (2023, Hammer): Swiss drummer, albums back to 2001, most of his work in the group VEIN until 2020, when he started his Conversation series, collaborating via email, initially in duos and trios, but with one of his largest groups here: Martial In-Albon (trumpet), Nils Wogram (trombone), Christy Doran (guitar), and Rafael Jerjen (bass), with Matthias Würsch (glass harmonica) on one track. B+(**) [sp]

    Kyle Bruckmann/Tim Daisy/Phillip Greenlief/Lisa Mezzacappa: Semaphore (2022 [2023], Relay): Listing is alphabetical, but Bruckmann (oboe, english horn, electronics) composed three pieces to four by Daisy (drums), with the others -- members of San Francisco's Creative Music Continuum -- on tenor sax and bass. B+(**) [bc]

    Chai: Chai (2023, Sub Pop): Japanese pop/rock band, fourth album since 2017, all four-letter words. Could be fun. B+(**) [sp]

    Margo Cilker: Valley of Heart's Delight (2023, Fluff and Gravy): Country singer-songwriter from Oregon, second album after 2021's impressive debut, Pohorylle. B+(***) [sp]

    Brent Cobb: Southern Star (2023, Ol' Buddy/Thirty Tigers): Country singer-songwriter, sixth studio album since 2006. Easy-going songs, comfort food. B+(**) [sp]

    Jeff Coffin/Jordan Perlson/Viktor Krauss: Coffin/Perlson/Krauss (2023, Ear Up): Saxophonist (tenor, soprano, clarinet, bass flute), drums, and bass (brother of Alison Krauss), all three writing songs. Coffin, based in Nashville, has a dozen albums since 1997, and has had long-running gigs with Béla Fleck and Dave Matthews. I've been filing his records under pop jazz, but this one is solidly postbop, impressive even. B+(***) [cd]

    Hollie Cook: Happy Hour in Dub (2023, Merge): British reggae singer, daughter of Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, four studio albums, including Happy Hour in 2022, this her second dub remix. B+(*) [sp]

    Charles Wesley Godwin: Family Ties (2023, self-released): Country singer-songwriter from West Virginia, third album, a long one (19 songs). B+(*) [sp]

    Laurel Halo: Atlas (2023, Awe): Electronic musician, from Ann Arbor, moved to Los Angeles, more lately spending time in Berlin, London, and Paris -- where this fifth album was recorded, with guest sax, violin, cello, and vocals, but nothing to break with the ambiance. PopMatters called this "her most glacial music yet." B [sp]

    Heather Lynne Horton: Get Me to a Nunnery (2023, Pauper Sky): Singer-songwriter, third album, married to Michael McDermott (plays here, Americana singer-songwriter from Chicago, 23 albums since 1991 per Discogs, none that I've heard). Opens with a wall-of-sound piece I can't stand, before falling back into pained troubadour mode with weeping strings. B- [sp]

    Loraine James: Gentle Confrontation (2023, Hyperdub): British electronics producer and vocalist, fifth album. Goes downtempo for "vignettes of memory and emotion," trip hop without the trip, or the hop. B+(*) [sp]

    Jlin: Perspective (2023, Planet Mu, EP): Electronica producer Jerrilyn Patton. She's taught a course called "Rhythm, Variation, & Vulnerability." This doesn't feel like a text, but its six tracks (27:21) are exemplary. B+(***) [sp]

    Nils Kugelmann: Stormy Beauty (2022 [2023], ACT): German bassist, first album, with piano (Luca Zambito) and drums (Sebastian Wolfgruber). B+(**) [sp]

    Lewsberg: Out and About (2023, self-released): Dutch VU-influenced alt-rock group, from Rotterdam, fourth album since 2017, songs in English, bassist Shalita Dietrich the main (but not only) singer. B+(**) [sp]

    Fred Lonberg-Holm/Tim Daisy: Current 23 (2022 [2023], Relay): Duo, cello/electronics and drums/percussion, both from the final edition of Vandermark 5, which takes them back 20 years. B+(**) [bc]

    Lydia Loveless: Nothing's Gonna Stand in My Way Again (2023, Bloodshot): Singer-songwriter from Ohio, last name Ankrom, started in a family band called Carson Drew, her 2011 debut on alt-country label Bloodshot impressed me, nothing quite so much since then. B+(*) [sp]

    Francisco Mela and Zoh Amba: Causa Y Efecto Vol. 1 (2021 [2023], 577): Cuban drummer, moved to Boston in 2000 to study at Berklee, has a distinguished career in Afro-Cuban jazz, but lately has been appearing in small free jazz sets, like this one with the young tenor saxophonist (she also plays a bit of flute). B+(***) [dl]

    MIKE/Wiki/The Alchemist: Faith Is a Rock (2023, ALC): New York rappers Michael Bonema and Patrick Morales, backed by producer Alan Maman. B+(*) [sp]

    Billy Mohler: Ultraviolet (2023, Contagious Music): Bassist, known to play guitar elsewhere, has a fairly wide range of pop and rock side credits, but this is his third quartet album with Shane Endsley (trumpet), Chris Speed (tenor sax/clarinet), and Nate Wood (drums). Nine tracks, 32:24. B+(***) [cdr] [10-13]

    Money for Guns: All the Darkness That's in Your Head (2023, Money for Guns): Google search for group name yields one plausible link, and lots of: "cash for arms," "sell your guns," "how to sell a gun online," "guns into cash," "money quick guns." Drop the title in and you don't get much more, even from the band's own website. Didn't sound like much at first, then I detected a pub rock vibe, then jotted down a line ("all the Catholic girls love Paul Simon"), and it got more interesting from there out. [PS: While Discogs has nothing, Spotify has ten albums, going back to 2011, one credited to Frustrated Bachelors 2003-06. Discogs identifies them as a band from Columbia, MO, and names three members, two in Money for Guns -- Dave Birk, Will Saulsbery. I've since heard they are now based in St. Louis.] B+(**) [sp]

    Wolfgang Muthspiel: Dance of the Elders (2022 [2023], ECM): Austrian guitarist, younger brother of trombonist Christian Muthspiel, has a couple dozen albums since 1989, early records mapped out a fusion groove comparable to John Scofield (Black & Blue, from 1992, is a favorite), but has slowed down, especially since landing on ECM in 2014. This one is a nice trio with Scott Colley (bass) and Brian Blade (drums), playing five originals plus covers of Brecht/Weil and Joni Mitchell. B+(**) [sp]

    Jessica Pavone: Clamor (2023, Out of Your Head): Violinist, closely associated with Mary Halvorson and more broadly with the Braxton crowd, twenty-some albums since 2001, some I can't stand while others improbably impress. She plays viola here in a string sextet (two each violins and viola, Matana Roberts on cello, Shayna Dulberger on double bass, with Karen Young for bassoon solos on the middle two tracks. B+(***) [cd] [10-06]

    Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023, Amusement/Island): Pop singer, songwriter (I guess), Kayleigh Amstutz, from a suburb of Springfield, MO, via Los Angeles. First album after a 2017 EP, produced by Dan Nigro (cf. Olivia Rodrigo). B+(**) [sp]

    Bobby Rush: All My Love for You (2023, Deep Rush/Thirty Tigers): Blues singer-songwriter Emmett Ellis Jr., born in Louisiana, made his way to Chicago in the 1950s, recorded some singles, but only released his first album in 1978 -- a one-shot with Philadelphia International. Went back south to "put the funk into the blues," and has been grinding out records ever since, still sounding vital as 89. B+(***) [sp]

    Allison Russell: The Returner (2023, Fantasy): Singer-songwriter from Montreal, absent father from Grenada, had a harrowing childhood, ran away to Vancouver at 15, joined a Celtic folk band, navigated through several other groups, including roots supergroup Our Native Daughters. Second solo album, no reason to file this under folk -- well, bits of banjo and French, but the hooks are pop, and the barbs pointed. Hits its stride with "Eve Was Black." A- [sp]

    Slayyyter: Starfucker (2023, Fader): Electropop singer-songwriter Catherine Garner, from Kirkwood (MO), based in Los Angeles, her debut a 2019 "mixtape," second album since. Some songs remind me of Madonna. Some videos remind me of that Sex book. B+(***) [sp]

    Veronica Swift: Veronica Swift (2023, Mack Avenue): Jazz singer, parents were pianist Hod O'Brien and singer Stephanie Nakasian, which gave her a leg up in recording her debut album at age nine. Third album since turning 21, an elaborate showcase for her talents and technique, starting with dazzling scat, swinging with some kind of big band, touching base with Brazil, sopping up strings and exotic guitar, throwing in an aria for all I can tell -- the label isn't very forthcoming on details -- then some rocked-out show tunes. I should be awed, but I'm not even dumbfounded. Just dumb. B- [sp]

    That Mexican OT: Lonestar Luchador (2023, Manifest/Good Talk/Good Money Global): Texas rapper Virgil René Gazca, from Bay City (down the coast southwest of Houston), "OT" for "Outta Texas," first album after an EP and some singles. B+(**) [sp]

    Tinashe: BB/ANG3L (2023, Nice Life, EP): R&B singer from Kentucky, last name Kachingwe, 2014 debut on RCA was a minor hit, left the label after declining sales of two more albums, third independent album (but at 7 songs, 20:45, we're calling it an EP). [sp]

    Brad Turner Quintet: The Magnificent (2023, Cellar): Canadian pianist/trumpet player, at least one previous album plus several featured credits, with Cory Weeds (tenor sax), Peter Bernstein (guitar), bass, and drums, playing the leader's compositions. B+(*) [cd]

    Fay Victor: Blackcity Black Black Is Beautiful (2023, Northern Spy): Jazz singer-songwriter, from Brooklyn but she's been around, with childhood years in Zambia and Trinidad, started singing with a three-month gig in Japan with Bertha Hope, then several years in Amsterdam before returning to New York, earning a reputation as a successor to Betty Carter, both as a singer and as a bandleader. This one, however, is solo, an ambitious work built out of processed tracks with keyboards, and multi-layered voices. B+(**) [sp]

    Håvard Wiik/Tim Daisy: Slight Return (2023, Relay): Norwegian pianist, plays in Atomic, played in Ken Vandermark's Free Fall trio, their association bringing him into contact with the Chicago (ex-Vandermark 5) drummer. B+(***) [bc]

    Simón Willson: Good Company (2022 [2023], Fresh Sound New Talent): Bassist, from Chile, based in New York, first album, mostly quartet with piano (Isaac Wilson), drums (Jonas Esser), plus tenor sax (Jacob Schulman), adding a little extra oomph on 8 (of 10) tracks. B+(**) [cd] [10-13]

    John Wojciechowski: Swing of the Pendulum (2022 [2023], Afar Music): Tenor saxophonist, originally from Detroit but long based in Chicago, has several albums since 2015. Strong tone, solid quartet, with Clark Sommers (bass) contributing three songs, plus Xavier Davis (piano) and Dana Hall (drums). B+(**) [cd]

    Miguel Zenón & Luis Perdomo: El Arte Del Bolero, Vol. 2 (2023, Miel Music): Alto sax and piano duo, from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, have played in Zenón's Quartet since 2002, with a previous volume of bolero duets in 2021. This is very pretty, only picking up the pace toward the end. B+(***) [sp]

    Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

    The Frustrated Bachelors: In the End It Wasn't Enough: All the Good Ones 2003-2006 (2003-06 [2023], Money for Guns): Discogs identifies this as a Columbia, MO band that registered a song on an anthology somewhere. At least two of the members (Dave Birk and Will Saulsbery) went on to form the equally obscure group Money for Guns. Looking for product to dump on Spotify, they dug these fifteen songs out of their archives. "You'll Never Raise the Dead" sounds like a Nirvana outtake, which I don't mean as top tier praise, but is something. Not all like that, of course. B+(**) [sp]

    Les Rallizes Dénudés: Citta' '93 (1993 [2023], Temporal Drift): Japanese experimental rock group, formed in 1967 but didn't anything until 1991, when they dropped three albums, including early studio tapes and a '77 Live. Wikipedia suggests their early works were psychedelic rock. Here they hint at Velvet Underground, before eventually plunging into an all-out noise assault: the last two pieces run 24:12 and 39:13, bringing the eight track total to 118:29. It's pretty remarkable, but a lot to sit through. B+(***) [bc]

    Money for Guns: Dead Tracks (2007-20 [2022], Money for Guns): Vault dive, collected when they decided to put their works out on Spotify. Mostly acoustic, could have stayed there. B [sp]

    Old music:

    Farida Amadou/Pavel Tchikov: Mal De Terre (2020 [2021], Trouble in Mind): Bass and guitar duo, with electronics and effects, two improvised sessions. Leans toward a slightly unsettled ambiance. B+(*) [sp]

    Kashmere Stage Band: Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 (1968-74 [2011], Now-Again, 2CD): Big band, from Kashmere High School in Houston, directed by Conrad O. Johnson, inspired by bands like the Bar-Kays and the J.B.'s. Johnson released several albums by the bands. The band was featured in the documentary, Thunder Soul, in 2011, which occasioned this reissue. B+(***) [sp]

    Wolfgang Muthspiel/Scott Colley/Brian Blade: Angular Blues (2018 [2020], ECM): Guitar, bass, drums. The collaboration with drummer goes back at least to a very good 2006 duo album, while the bassist replaced Larry Grenadier from two previous ECM albums. B+(**) [sp]

    Ernst-Ludwig Luten Petrowsky/Uschi Brüning/Michael Griener: Ein Résumé (2013, Jazzwerkstatt): "Luten" is the alto saxophonist's nickname. It shows up in various titles, but rarely on the slug line. He's also credited with piano, clarinet, and voice here, but the real vocalist is Brüning. Their duet on "You Don't Know What Love Is" reminds me of Sheila Jordan. That's the high point, among various scattered treats, etc. Griener plays drums. B+(**)

    Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

    • Constantine Alexander: Firetet (self-released) [10-18]
    • Geof Bradfield/Richard D Johnson/John Tate/Samuel Jewell: Our Heroes (Afar Music) [09-08]
    • Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Borrowed Flowers (Top Stop Music) [09-15]
    • The Angelica Sanchez Nonet: Nighttime Creatures (Pyroclastic) [10-27]
    • Joe Wittman: Trio Works (self-released) [11-01]
    • John Wojciechowski: Swing of the Pendulum (Afar Music) [08-18]

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, October 1, 2023

    Speaking of Which

    Front page, top headline in Wichita Eagle on Saturday: McCarthy's last-ditch plan to keep government open collapses. The headline came from an AP article, dropping the final "making a shutdown almost certain" clause. This headline, says more about the media mindset in America than it does about the politics it does such a poor job of reporting on. McCarthy is not trying to avert a shutdown (at least with this bill). Even if he somehow managed to pass it, there was no chance of it passing the Senate without major revisions, which his caucus would then reject. His core problem is that he insists on passing an extreme partisan bill, but no bill is extreme enough for the faction of Republicans dead set on shutting down the government, and nothing he can do will appease them.

    If he was at all serious about avoiding shutdown, he'd offer a bill that would attract enough Democrat votes to make up for his inevitable losses on the extreme right. That's what McConnell did in the Senate, with a bill that passed 77-19. But House Republicans follow what they call the Hastert Rule, which states that leaders can only present bills approved by a majority of the caucus -- in effect, that means the right-wing can hold bills hostage, even mandatory spending bills, and looking for bipartisan support is pointless. McCarthy had to compromise even further to gain enough votes to be elected Speaker.

    If the mainstream media refuses to provide even the barest of meaningful context, this kabuki propaganda will just continue, to the detriment of all.

    [PS: On Saturday afternoon, after I wrote the above, McCarthy did just that, passing a bill 335-91, with 90 Republicans and 1 Democrat opposed. The bill continues spending for 45 days, adds disaster relief funds, extends federal flood insurance, and reauthorizes FAA, but does not include the new Ukraine aid Biden wanted.]

    Top story threads:

    The shutdown: [PS: Congress finally passed a continuing spending resolution on Saturday, after McCarthy's "last-ditch" bill failed to pass the House. The intro below -- original title was "Drowning government in the bathtub" -- was written before this bill passed, as were the articles dated earlier. On the other hand, we're only 45 days away from the next big shutdown scare, which the same bunch of clowns and creeps are almost certain again to push to the brink.]

    The Grover Nordquist quote (from 2001) is: "I just want to shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Later he managed to get every Republican in Congress to sign onto his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which would seem to commit them to the ultimate destruction of the federal government. None of this slowed, let alone reversed the growth of government -- it just ensured that the growth would be funded mostly by deficits, which conveniently give Republicans something else to whine about, even though they're mostly just tax giveaways to the very rich. So whenever an opportunity arises for Republicans to vent their hatred of the government and their disgust over the people that government serves, they rise up and break things. One of those opportunities is this week, when the previous year's spending bills expire, without the House having passed new ones for next year. Without new authorization, large parts of government are supposed to shut down, giving Republicans a brief opportunity to impress Grover Nordquist. Then, after a few days or a couple weeks, they'll quietly pass a resolution to allow their incompetence to escape notice for another year. You see, most of what government actually does supports the very same rich people who donate to Republican politicians. I could file all of these stories under Republicans, since they are solely responsible for this nonsense, but on this occasion, let's break them out.

    Post-deal:

    • Corbin Bolies: [10-01] Rep. Matt Gaetz: I will force vote to can McCarthy 'this week'.

    • Sam Brodey: [10-01] It's bad news that so many in the GOP are pissed about averting a shutdown: On the other hand, every tantrum here should be recorded and thrown back in their faces in 2024. It's bad news because these idiots still have considerable power to wreak havoc. Vote them down to a small minority and it will merely be sad and pathetic, which is what they deserve.

    • David Rothkopf: [09-30] All that drama and the House GOP's only win was for the Kremlin: I'm sorry to have to say this, but Russiagate -- not the "collusion" but the jingoistic Cold War revival -- isn't over yet. One thing that the Republican right understands is that Russia's "expansionism" is fundamentally limited by their sense of nationhood, and as such is no real threat to their own "America First" nationalism. Democrats don't understand this. They view Russia through two lenses: one is as a rival to the US in a zero-sum game for world domination -- which was a myth in the Cold War era, and pure projection now; the other is that Putin has embraced a social conservatism and anti-democratic repression to a degree that Republicans plainly aspire to, so they are strongly disposed to treat both threats as linked. (Which, by the way, is not total whimsy: Steve Bannon seems to have taken as his life's work the formation of an International Brotherhood of Fascists.) The problem with this is that it turns Democrats into supporters of empire and war abroad, and those things not only breed enemies, they undermine true democracy at home. Still, I'm not unamused by Rothkopf taking a cheap shot in this particular moment. I just worry about the mentality that makes one think that's a real point.

    • Michael Scherer: [09-30] Shutdown deal avoids political pain for Republican moderates: For starters, this helps with definition: A "moderate" is a Republican who worries more about losing to a Democrat than one who worries more about being challenged by an even crazier Republican. Shutting down the government is a play that appeals to the crazies, but has little enthusiasm for most people, even ones who generally vote Republican.

    The Republican also-rans second debate: Six of the first debate's eight made their way to the Reagan Library in California, again hosted by Fox. Bear in mind that any judgments about winners and losers are relative.

    • Intelligencer Staff: [09-27] Republican Debate: At least 33 things you missed. If you're up for the gory details, here are the live updates. Notable quotes: "It's kind of sexist, but mostly it's just gross, and it drives home one essential fact about the people on tonight's stage. They are unrelatable freaks. There is something deeply off-putting about each person on stage." Also: "Ramaswamy: Thank you for speaking while I'm interrupting."

    • Mariana Alfaro: [09-27] Republican presidential candidates blame UAW strike on Biden: What? For giving workers hope they might gain back some ground after forty years of Republican-backed union busting?

    • Zack Beauchamp: [09-27] The Republican debate is fake: "With Trump dominating the GOP primary, the debate is a cosplay of a competitive election -- and a distraction from an ugly truth."

    • Aaron Blake: [09-27] The winners and losers of the second Republican debate:

      • Winner: Nikki Haley: The press hope for a rational Republican is getting real desperate here. Aside from dunking on Ramaswamy, the other claims for her are really spurious. How can anyone argue that the UAW strike was the result of "the impact of inflation on the workers"?
      • Winner: Donald Trump: "Okay, maybe this one's unoriginal."
      • Winner: Obamacare: Because Pence repeatedly avoided the question?
      • Loser: GOP debates: QED, right?
      • Loser: Ron DeSantis: "there was nothing that seemed likely to arrest his backsliding."
      • Loser: GOP moderation on immigration.

    • Jim Geraghty/Megan McArdle/Ramesh Ponnuru: [09-28] 'It sucks:' Conservatives discuss the GOP primary after the latest debate. I didn't listen to the audio -- I'm listening to music almost all the time; I can read at the same time, but I don't have free time for podcasts -- so I'm not sure where Geraghty is going with this, but the gist is that Trump sucks all the oxygen out of the party, and nobody else has the guts to say that he's suffocating the party just to stroke his own ego, because even if he somehow manages to win, he doesn't know how to actually do anything, other than keep sucking. (Pun? Sure.)

    • Eric Levitz: [09-28] Who won (and lost) the second Republican debate:

      • Winner: Vivek Ramaswamy: "came across as a slicks sociopath."
      • Winner: Chris Christie: "we're gonna call you Donald DUCK."
      • Losers: All of them: "In seriousness, there were no winners in Simi Valley." He then runs the rest down one by one.

    • Harold Meyerson: [09-28] Debate number two: Phonies and cacophonies.

    • Alexandra Petri: [09-28] Here's what happened at the second Republican primary debate. Really. Really? My favorite line here is one attributed to DeSantis: "If you measure popularity in number of tears that a candidate has collected from crocodiles and others, I am by far the most popular candidate."

    • Andrew Prokop: [09-27] 1 winner and 3 losers from Fox's dud of a second GOP debate:

      • Loser: Vivek Ramaswamy: "At tonight's debate, Ramaswamy's schtick sounded stale."
      • Loser: The moderators: "Dana Perino, Stuart Varney, and Illa Calderón seemed puzzlingly reluctant to have the candidates actually, well, debate each other."
      • Loser: Fox News: "Fox had to reduce its ad time slot prices by hundreds of thousands of dollars for this debate, compared to the first one, because interest was expected to be low."
      • Winner: You know who: "Sorry, Chris Christie, calling him 'Donald Duck' is cheesy and ineffective."

    Let me conclude this section with a quote from Jeffrey St Clair (see his "Roaming Charges" below for link) summing up the debate:

    The Republican "debate" at the Reagan Library seemed like an exercise in collective madness. And 24 hours and half a bottle of Jameson's later, I still don't know what's crazier, Nikki Haley saying that she'd solve the health care crisis by letting patients negotiate the price of treatment with hospitals and doctors, Tim Scott's assertion that LBJ's Great Society program was harder for black people to survive than slavery or Ron DeSantis' pledge to use the Civil Rights Act to target "left-wing" prosecutors: "I will use the Justice Department to bring civil rights cases against all of those left-wing Soros-funded prosecutors. We're not going to let them get away with it anymore. We want to reverse this country's decline. We need to choose law and order over rioting and disorder."

    Trump: While it was unprecedented for a former president to be indicted (for even one felony, much less 91), I think we now have to admit that's merely a historical curiosity, like Dianne Feinstein having been the first woman elected mayor of San Francisco. What is truly unprecedented is that this guy, facing so many indictments under four separate judges (plus more judges in prominent civil cases), is still being allowed to campaign for president, to fly free around the country, to give speeches where he threatens the lives of people he thinks have crossed him, to appear on television shows where he can influence potential jurors, and do this with complete impunity. While everyone knows that defendants are to be considered innocent until a jury finds them guilty, has anyone else under indictment ever been given such lax treatment? Many of them spend long pre-trial periods stuck in jail. (According to this report, there are 427,000 people in local jails who haven't been convicted.) Those who, like Trump, could manage bail, are subject to other numerous other restrictions. Maybe one reason Trump seems to regard himself as above the law is that the courts have allowed him such privileges.

    DeSantis, and other Republicans:

    • Jonathan Chait: [09-27] DeSantis forced to say why he enjoys denying health insurance to poor Floridians: Chait paraphrases: "Those people should work harder. Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary motivation." Conservatives believe that getting rich is a reward for virtue, but they also seem to believe that if there are no consequences for not getting rich, no one would bother putting the work in. (Even though most of the people who actually are rich got that way not from having worked hard, but from enjoying privileged access to capital.)

    • Ed Kilgore: [09-29] Scott, Haley, and the Radicalization of the 'moderate' Republican: It's ridiculous to call these people "moderate": they are the residue left from the evolution of the South Carolina Republican Party from Strom Thurmond through Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint. Their only saving grace, which each of their predecessors had to some degree, is that they aren't shamelessly stupid panderers. They have some sense of how they look to others, and try to sound respectable. But politically, there as far right as their predecessors (and Haley is about as psychotically hawkish as Graham). Perhaps you could give them some credit for moving beyond Thurmond on race, but perhaps they were just cast to look like it?

    • Jasmine Liu: [09-26] Everything you need to know about the right-wing war on books: "Here's your guide to the heroes and villains -- plus a list of the 50 most banned books." Censorship chiefs: Ron DeSantis, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Greg Abbott, Moms for Liberty. Those have definitely gotten more press than the Reading Rebels: Suzette Baker, Debbie Chavez, Summer Boismier, and "Anonymous Utah parent." The books are mostly off my radar, aside from two titles each for Toni Morrison and Ibram X. Kendi.

    • Greg Sargent: [09-28] New data on ultra-rich tax cheats wrecks the 'working-class GOP' ruse.

    Biden and/or the Democrats:

    Legal and criminal matters:

    Climate and environment:

    Economic matters:

    Ukraine War:

    Around the world:

    Dianne Feinstein: The Senator (D-CA) died Thursday, at 90, after more than 30 years in the Senate. She had a mixed legacy, which had soured lately as her absences kept Democrats from confirming many Biden appointees.

    Robert Menendez: Senator (D-NJ), was prosecuted for corruption several years ago, beat the charges, managed to get himself reëlected, and caught again.

    • Aaron Blake: [09-26] The GOP's defenses of Bob Menendez, and what they ignore. They may not have gotten to where they automatically sympathize with all criminals, but corrupt politicians are definitely their soft spot. (Also tax cheats. Except for Hunter Biden, of course.)

    • Bob Hennelly: [09-28] Bob Menendez and the gold bars: A short history of New Jersey corruption.

    • Robert Kuttner: [09-27] How to oust Menendez: The Agnew precedent: Good idea, but I don't see this happening, mostly because nobody is that desperate to get rid of Menendez: Garland probably likes the idea of being as tough on a Democrat as on Trump, and Republicans would cry foul if Menendez got off on a "sweetheart deal" while Trump still has to face trial. (Cf. their reaction to the Hunter Biden plea deal, which was a much smaller case than the ones against Menendez and Trump.)

    • Branko Marcetic: [09-27] Bob Menendez isn't merely corrupt. He carried water for a brutal dictator. Shouldn't that be plural? Menendez got caught taking money from Egypt, but he's been a dependable supporter of other nominal allies with troubled connections (Israel and Saudi Arabia get mentions here, but not Latin America, where his antipathy to anything leftist knows no bounds).

    • Timothy Noah: [09-29] Why is the GOP suddenly defending Bob Menendez? "From Trump on down, they're speaking out on behalf of a Democratic senator buffeted by accusations of corruption --he's just one more Biden deep state victim."

    • Henry Olsen: [09-27] Bob Menendez is right not to step down: One of the conservative hack pundits to rally behind Menendez, pleading "let the justice system play out as it's supposed to," urging him to hang in there even past conviction until all his appeals are exhausted, and assuring him that "there's little proof that a senator's indictment affects voters' decisions in other races." He offers the example of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who resisted pressure to resign after embarrassing photos from a yearbook came to light, but Northam wasn't indicted, and was barely distracted from doing his job. The charges against Menendez are very serious, and derive directly from his abuse of the power given him by his job. While the indictments may cramp his ability to collect further bribes, his job is one where even the appearance of corruption diminishes the office. It is this very sense of taint that has led many Democrats to call for his resignation. To see Republicans rally behind Menendez testifies to how they've evolved to celebrate his kind of corruption.

    Other stories:

    David Atkins: [09-27] America needs a true liberal media: "Our crisis of democracy is exacerbated by conservative misinformation. Time for a balanced media diet." Of course, he has a lot to complain about, but couldn't he put it better? I shouldn't have to parse the difference between "liberal" as an adjective and "liberal" (or "liberalism") as a noun, and explain why a "liberal media" isn't just a propaganda outlet for liberalism (as conservative media is for conservatism). If we had an honest media dedicated to rooting out misinformation from any source, it would easily find ten times as much emanating from right-wing interest groups (which it would clearly label as such). Atkins cites several examples of polls where scary large numbers of Americans believe things that are plainly false. That such numbers persist goes a long way toward indicting the media for failing to keep us informed.

    On the other hand, another sense of "liberal" is that it provides equal credence to all views, regardless of truth, merit or ulterior motives. This was, for instance, the view Marcuse et al. put forth in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). In light of this, one can be as critical as Atkins is of the present facts and draw the opposite conclusion, that the problem we have today is that the media, with its relentless balancing and its credulous repetition of blatant falsehoods, is simply too liberal.

    Zack Beauchamp: [09-24] Is America uniquely vulnerable to tyranny? Review of a new book, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose previous book, the comparative study How Democracies Die, was taken as a landmark among liberals who worry more about the formal political institutions than about government reflecting the interests of most people.

    Nina Burleigh: [09-26] Are we in the last days of Fox News? "Michael Wolff's new book on the Murdochs is full of juicy details, but its predictions may be off." The book is called The Fall: The End of Fox News.

    Joshua Green: [08-27] How social justice activists lost the plot: A review of Fredrik DeBoer's new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, "an entreaty to white, college-educated progressives: Stop obsessing over identity and language and start fighting for working people." I took a brief look at this book when assembling my latest Book Roundup and couldn't decide what to make of it: he's reputed to be a leftist, but he spends most of his time attacking others on the left side of "social justice" issues, possibly for not being leftist enough (on economic issues? for leftists of some vintage what else is there?). I'm not engaged enough to recognize much less care about many of the complaints lodged against today's younger generation on the left, but back in my day (c. 1970) I ran into similar problems, where comfortably well-off young people got worked up over other people's problems without having the grounding of knowing their own problems. (I was a rare working class kid, and pathological introvert, in an elite university, so I never had that luxury.) I have no idea how well, or how badly, DeBoer navigates problems with his fellow leftists. Green, however, ends with one piece of reasonable advice: "If they'd focus on electing Democrats, they'd finally be in a position to deliver for those groups, rather than just bicker over whose turn it is to talk next." I would add that while I don't think leftists should adopt bad positions just to get around, the only policy improvements that are achievable are ones that pass through the Democratic Party, so that's where you need to do your practical work.

    • Anthony L Fisher: [09-30] Why the 2020 social justice revolutions failed: Interview with DeBoer on his book, steering the discussion toward the 2020 BLM protests and the coincident looting ("riots"). Maybe DeBoer has something specific to say about all that, but that wasn't obvious to me from what I previously read. I wouldn't say that the protests failed -- they moved several meters significantly, especially in that the cop who killed George Floyd and the cops who aided and abetted the murder have been convicted of serious crimes, which is never expected when police kill civilians -- and I also wouldn't say that where they failed, they did so due to the liberal elite syndrome I take DeBoer to be critical of. What was possible from those protests was limited by Trump, other right-wing political figures, including police and vigilantes, responded so negatively, often deliberately attempting to provoke riots (which, based on much experience, they assumed would be blamed on the protesters).

    • Becca Rothfeld: [09-01] Should progressives want the support of the ruling classes? A critical review of DeBoer's book, mentioned in the Fisher interview above, the author dismissed by DeBoer as "exactly the kind of person that is being indicted in the book." [PS: On closer examination, this strikes me as a pretty good review of the book.]

    • Freddie deBoer: [0-25] AOC is just a regular old Democrat now. I saw this at the time, and didn't think it was worth reporting on, but since we're talking about the author now, it shines as much light on him as on her. The theme is not something I'd lose any sleep over.

    Tyler Austin Harper: [09-28] Ibram X. Kendi's fall is a cautionary tale -- so was his rise: Flagged for possible future reference, as I'm not close enough to this story to have an opinion. I will say that I fifty-plus years ago I read two important historical works on racism in the early 1970s: Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), which if memory serves argued that racism wasn't Stamped From the Beginning (the title of Kendi's big book) but was developed over time, primarily to justify chattel slavery in the Americas, and the profits derived therefrom. I read quite a bit more back then, covering later history as well as contemporary books like Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

    But it had been quite a while when Kendi's book came out, so I thought it might be useful to get a more contemporary reading of Jordan's domain. But when I looked at the book, I decided I didn't need or particularly want it. I had, by then, read lots about Thomas Jefferson's racism (and for that matter, Lincoln's), but didn't see much point in dwelling on it. But the big turn off was the section on major aboltionist William Lloyd Garrison. Looking at the Amazon preview now, my reaction may have been hasty: surely the later chapters on W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Davis weren't meant to be simple exposés of racist ideas like chapters on Cotton Mather and Jefferson? But then, what were they? Kendi followed up with an explicitly political book, and evidently built a mini-empire on his reputation. That could have been good, bad, irrelevant, or some combination thereof.

    Sean Illing: [09-26] Naomi Klein on her doppelganger (and yours): Another interview, promoting her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.

    Sarah Jones: [09-24] The dark side of courtship: "Shannon Harris's relationship was held up as a model for millions of Evangelicals. Now she's reclaiming her story."

    David Masciotra: [09-26] What the Clinton haters on the left get wrong: "A new book epitomizes the risible belief that the 42nd president betrayed liberals and the 1990s were a right-wing hellscape." The book is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein. I note this in passing, and also that the first publication to take such offense against such a blight on Clinton's good name is the one where the term "neoliberalism" was first coined. Somehow I doubt a book where the authors juxtaposed "fabulous" and "failure" is simply "untruths they've written [to] bolster the cynicism that undermines the trust vital to the survival of the American experiment."

    The first point anyone needs to understand is that Clinton pioneered a new political path by trying not to fight Reagan but to outflank him: to show leaders that Democrats in power would be even better for business than Republicans. That Clinton won gave his argument an air of gospel after a brutal decade, which only deepened the more hysterically Republicans attacked him. However, his two presidential wins were largely wiped out by losing Congress, and with it the ability to legislate anything beyond his pro-business and anti-crime initiatives.

    On the other hand, his failures -- mistakes and, especially, missed opportunities -- only grew. Listing them would take a book (probably even longer than this one). Compounding Reagan's turn toward increasing inequality is probably the top of the list. Or failing to trim back America's imperial overreach to secure a truly international peace -- today's conflicts with Russia and China, as well as the long war against the Middle East, are easily traced back to his failures. Or maybe we should wonder why Al Gore wasn't allowed to work on climate change when it wasn't yet too late, but was tasked instead with "reinventing government," which mostly meant making it more profitable for lobbyists. Or maybe we should ask why he stripped the Democratic Party down to a personal cult-of-personality, allowing Republicans to repeatedly rebound from disaster every time they came close to the lever of power?

    Dylan Matthews: [09-26] 40 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war: A Russian, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who was monitoring Russia's ICBM detection system, which had determined "with high probability" that the US had launched five Minutemen missiles at the Soviet Union. It hadn't, but two years of constant saber-rattling under Reagan, on top of worsening US-Soviet relations under Jimmy Carter (or should I say Zbigniew Brzezinski?), along with internal turmoil that might suggest weakness, left top Soviet circles more in fear of an American attack than ever before. David Hoffman wrote a book about this: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race & Its Dangerous Legacy (2009).

    Sara Morrison:

    Jonah Raskin: [09-29] "I am not now, nor have I ever been": Musings on communism and anti-communism. I've known a few American communists, or at least a few of their "red diaper baby" children. All good people, as far as I can tell.

    Heather Cox Richardson: [09-26] The fight for our America: Excerpt, or maybe a précis, from her forthcoming book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The setup: "There have always been two Americas. One based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in the rule of the people and the pursuit of equality. This next election may determine which one prevails." My first cavil here was over the word "prevails": recent elections (at least since 2000, and arguably since 1968 -- the landslides of 1972 and 1984 now look like flukes, as does the lesser margin of 2008) have turned out to be pretty indecisive. There is little reason to think that 2024 will turn out differently: a Trump-Biden rematch is unlikely to turn out much differently than in 2020, but Republicans have structural advantages in the Senate, the House, and the Electoral College that could flip the popular vote -- further reinforcing the current partisan divide over democracy itself.

    Still, in searching for a better term than "prevails," I find myself considering the more extreme "survives." While electoral results have remained ambiguous, the stakes for (and fears of) losing have only grown more urgent. Republicans have already used their narrow margins to establish a Supreme Court supermajority, which has already resulted in the loss of fundamental rights and will continue to frustrate efforts of elected Democrats to address important policy issues. Give them more power, and they'll continue their efforts to fortify their power bases and impose their will on a disempowered people.

    Democrats are right to fear such authoritarianism, and are right that the antidote is a renewed faith in democracy, but their defense of democracy has been frustratingly difficult, because Democrats rarely think of power in the broad sense that Republicans understand: the power of business and money, of media, of social institutions like churches, of culture (one area they have been least effective at controlling, and therefore one they're most paranoid about, hence their recent, seemingly desperate, stress on the "war against woke"). More often than not, Democrats have appealed to moneyed interests, even to the point of sacrificing traditional allies like unions, and this has tattered their reputation as champions of the people.

    Richardson's "two Americas" may serve as generic shorthand for the two highly polarized parties, but while identities align with parties, the underlying philosophies are more or less present and at tension in most people. By far the most important is the split on equality: the right views the world as necessarily (or rightly) inequal and hierarchical, where each person has a station, and order is maintained by popular acceptance (and, often, by force); the left views all people as fundamentally equal, at least in rights, and ideally in opportunities. The left naturally leans toward democracy, where government is constituted to act in the popular interest. The right leans toward dictatorship (originally of monarchs, although any strongman able to impose order to save their hierarchy will do), and distrusts democracy, suspecting that if given the chance, the majority would end the privileges of those atop the hierarchy.

    By the way, liberals are focused on the rights and ambitions of individuals. Whether they lean right or left depends mostly on the conservative hierarchy is in admitting talented upstarts -- for many would like to live like princes, but if they are locked out, they're happy to tear the hierarchy down, and willing to appeal to the masses for help in doing so. Liberals are disrupters, which is why conservatives loathe them, but as long as they are sufficiently corruptible, they can be co-opted. But until they get bought off, they are likely to inspire more widespread ambitions -- which is why we still admire Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt (and wanted to admire Obama).

    It is important to remember that nearly everything we cherish about our past was the work of liberals aspiring to the greater (more universal) good. (Which is to say, of moves toward the left, though often of people not strongly committed to the left.) Also that every advance has been met with conservative reaction, which was generally flexible enough to admit a select few in order to cut short the hopes of the many. Richardson groups religious zeal and mythology with the side of inequality. They are actually tools of a hierarchy which, given America's founding as a liberal/mass revolt against aristocracy, cannot be defended on its own terms. Rather, the right, in order to maintain any plausibility at all, has to spin a mythic past rooted in old fashioned religion and pioneering entrepreneurial spirit -- the new hierarchy that rose to replace the aristocracy dispatched by the Revolution.

    Jeffrey St Clair: [09-29] Roaming Charges: Our man in Jersey: Starts with Robert Menendez as a Le Carré character, "New Jersey's own apex con man, whose personal embellishments and political fictions have become so labryinthine that now that he's been caught with gold bars in his closet, he can't even get his own life story straight."

    In other items, he notes that the US drug overdose rate, in the fifty years since the War on Drugs was launched in 1973, has ("what a smashing success it has been!") increased from 3.0 per 100,000 to 32.4.

    Marcela Valdes: [10-01] Why can't we stop unauthorized immigration? Because it works. "Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants -- and U.S. employers."

    Jason Wilson: [10-01] 'Red Caesarism' is rightwing code -- and some Republicans are listening: This piece introduced me to a recent book by Kevin Slack: War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, which argues that America has been destroyed by three waves of liberals: "Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt's and Lyndon Johnson's secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam," and who finally cemented their power with "the 'great awokening' that began under Barack Obama." The result: "an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire."

    I don't know how I missed this tome in my list of paranoid rants tacked onto the end of my Book Roundup entry on Christopher Rufo, as it's basically Rufo's thesis backed up with more historical special pleading. I do wonder, though, how you could get from Grover Cleveland's America to world-topping empire and wealth except through the progressive machinations of the Roosevelts and their followers.

    The Amazon page for Slack's book doesn't mention "Red Caesarism," which seems to be the idea that Trump should seize power next chance he gets, and dispense with all the other trappings of democracy. At this point, the article shifts to Michael Anton's The Stakes, about which I previously wrote:

    Michael Anton: The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (2020, Regnery): Publisher is all the signal you need, but here's some background: Anton wrote a famous essay calling 2016 "The Flight 93 Election," because he figured it was better to storm the cockpit and crash the plane than to let Hillary Clinton win. He explains "the stakes" here: "The Democratic Party has become the party of 'identity politics' -- and every one of those identities is defined against a unifying national heritage of patriotism, pride in America's past, and hope for a shared future. . . . Against them is a divided Republican Party. Gravely misunderstanding the opposition, old-style Republicans still seek bipartisanship and accommodation, wrongly assuming that Democrats care about playing by the tiresome old rules laid down in the Constitution and other fundamental charters of American liberty."

    While I'm skeptical both of Trump's chances of winning in 2024, and even more so of his ability to seize total personal control of the government (as, sorry but there is no clearer example, Hitler did upon being appointed chancellor in 1933). Still, it is pretty clear that he would like to, and that he will go out of his way to hire people who have ideas about how to go about it (some of whom he'll have to spring from jail), but these will largely be the same sorts that talked him into thinking Jan. 6 was a bully idea.

    Zack Beauchamp announced: "I'm really excited to announce that I have written my first book!" The title is: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. I'd be real tempted to order a copy, but right now I'm bummed that there sems to be another year until publication date (next year, maybe fall). I've always imagined that if I could get my book written in the next 3-4 months, say, it could still appear several months before the 2024 election.

    Beauchamp has been writing more/less philosophical pieces in Vox for several years now. I've followed these with interest, as they dovetail nicely with my own thinking. He described his book in multiple tweets, collected and numbered here:

    1. Democracy as a system is based the idea that all people are political equals. As such, it empowers people to challenge existing social hierarchies through the political system -- which we saw, to a globally unprecedented degree, in the second half of the 20th century.
    2. This forces defenders of existing hierarchy to make a choice: fight social change through the system, or turn against democracy itself. The impulse to make the latter choice is what I call "the reactionary spirit," and it is at the heart of today's global democratic crisis.
    3. The reactionary spirit has threatened democracy since its earliest modern stirrings. But today's reactionary politics is different in a crucial respect: it pretends to be democratic.
    4. In The Reactionary Spirit, I argue that this reflects democracy's ideological triumphs. While reactionaries in the past openly rallied for alternative systems, like monarchy or fascism, today's reactionaries understand that democracy remains ideologically dominant.
    5. This is a very longstanding pattern in one place -- the United States, a country whose home-grown authoritarian tradition has always claimed to be democratic. The 20th and 21st centuries, I argue, have seen an Americanization of global reactionary politics in this key respect.
    6. The Reactionary Spirit engages deeply with reactionary political movements and thinkers, like John C. Calhoun and Carl Schmitt. It focuses on four case studies to illustrate the nature of our global crisis: the US, Hungary, Israel, and India.
    7. There's much more in the book, of course. I'll keep talking about it till publication date -- looking to be late summer or early fall 2024. The Reactionary Spirit synthesizes a decade of thinking and reporting about democratic crisis. I am so excited to share it with you.

    I also see that a book is coming out in January, 2024, by Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen, titled The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party (from WW Norton). The key here isn't that the leftists became reasonable -- we've long been eager to work on real even if piecemeal solutions -- but that the centrists finally started to realize that their approaches, which most often tried to incorporate right-wing talking points while slightly toning them down, weren't working, either for winning elections or for making tangible improvements (which are always hard when you're not winning elections).

    As I was trying to wrap this up, I ran across this Nate Silver tweet:

    I am a statistician. I'm also a statistician with a good bullshit detector.

    There is little variation in age by state. And to the extent there is, it doesn't argue in your favor. The four oldest states are West Virginia (very red), Florida (pretty red), Maine (pretty blue) and Vermont (very blue).

    What are their COVID death rates (per 1M population) since Feb. 1, 2021 (i.e. post-vaccine?):

    • West Virginia: 3454
    • Florida: 2992
    • Maine: 1881
    • Vermont: 1210

    These states all have the ~same elderly population, and yet there are huge variations in COVID death rates that line up 1:1 with partisan differences in vaccine uptake.

    In another tweet, Silver noted:

    Republicans have the same death rates as Democrats until the introduction of vaccines, then they start dying at much higher rates. That's a very useful first approximation.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Monday, September 25, 2023

    Music Week

    September archive (final).

    Music: Current count 40918 [40883] rated (+35), 30 [28] unrated (-2).

    Seems like I had very little to show for the first half of the week. I finally resolved to deal with a couple major technical problems: why email from my server often fails to reach its intended destination, and why my printer/scanner rarely functions properly: jobs sent to print get held up in a blocked queue, which reblocks itself when you try to enable it; and Xsane shows you test scans, but craps out when you try to get the actual scan data (but for some reason Simplescan works -- you just lose all of the fancier Xsane controls).

    I blame the latter on Hewlett-Packard, which has now eclipsed Apple as my most hated company in greater Silicon Valley (i.e., I'm not excluding Microsoft, which thanks to many years of total avoidance is now no worse than 3rd). The former problem is harder to assign blame for, but most of the problems have come with Gmail accounts, and Google has made getting help virtually impossible, so 4th (with a star)?

    I can't report unequivocal success in either case, but I'm a bit more hopeful. Email delivery is tied up with the rather fluid notion of reputation. When the problem first appeared, I was forwarding a lot of server admin email to my Cox account, then throwing almost all of it away. Cox's email forwarders seem to have gotten tired of this, so they started blackballing me, and eventually I got nothing. That's when I noticed I was having trouble with Gmail, as well. I devised a workaround for the server admin email, so now I store it locally, and fetch it using POP (after which I filter the excess baggage out, as before). I set up a couple more email accounts like this for special purposes (such as the Q&A form).

    When I retested things last week, I found that server mail is being delivered on Cox. Some further tests showed that most of the mail going to Gmail is also being delivered, but that some of it is going to users' spam folders. Of course, hardly any of us have the presence of mind to check whether anything worthwhile turns up flagged as spam. I still get a few spam-related bounce messages on the server, and don't really know what to do about them, other than to alert the people who were supposed to receive the mail, and hope they can persuade Google to fuck up less, but that's tough.

    As for the printer, my next move is to crawl under the desk and hook up a USB cable, which HP doesn't like but seems to allow. I also spent most of a day working on a website I host. I converted the hand-coded version to WordPress a couple years ago, but never got the client's sign off, so both versions have been online but dormant. The intervening time left a bunch of digital cobwebs I needed to clean up, and I had to write up a guide to how it all works.

    Then, midweek, I decided I wanted to push to get a Book Report post out ahead of the usual Sunday Speaking of Which. I managed to pull both off, but it was a huge amount of work -- during which I finally managed to give a cursory listen to a few recent records. Note that there are a couple music-related links in Speaking of Which: one on Sam Rivers, one on Nick Shoulders, plus something on Jann Wenner. I've been doing that for a bit: it's easier than trying to add a links section to Music Weekl, and I'm not that big on compartmentalization.

    I do have a couple things to add on Wenner. Conservatives scream "cancel culture" any time anyone has the temerity to challenge them, but what really gets their goat is the exposure that they're not always the ones in charge -- you know, the ones doing the canceling. They have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone in a position of property and power could turn on them. After all, the whole point of conservatism is to protect the rich and powerful from the masses.

    Wenner, as far as I can tell, has never been one of them politically, but he is a very rich guy, who achieved a power base by being the owner of a prominent publication, and he has a lot of practice (practically a whole lifetime) acting on his privileges. During his entire tenure, he has made thousands of decisions, big and small, often arbitrary according to his whims and prejudices. My very distant impression is that the magazine's success is largely due to more talented people managing to work around his idiosyncrasies, but I've heard various stories of him stepping in, and invariably they're turns for the worse. Since he's retired, he no longer has an organization dedicated to keeping him from exposing his ignorance and incompetence, and that's what you're seeing in this "scandal": the real Jann Wenner, a rich, tone-deaf boob.

    As for his book, no one would care about him peddling a set of interviews with famous old (and in a couple cases now dead) white guys. He could even keep the title (The Masters). Even if you had a second thought on seeing the seven bold names on the cover, by the time you read "By Jann S. Wenner" you'd know: of course, those were just the kind of guys he'd love to hang with, and being the fount of free publicity, who would hang with him. His problem was in trying to pass this conceit off as some sort of meritocracy. And, needless to say, the really weak link was Wenner himself. His further dissembling about blacks and women -- things absolutely no reasonable person would think of much less utter -- just dug him deeper into the pit of his vanity project.

    This week closes out the September Streamnotes archive. I'm not going to hold this up to do the usual indexing. (Oops, I still haven't done August Streamnotes. That probably doesn't matter to you, but it's fairly important for me when I can't remember whether or when I reviewed something already.)

    Not much to say about this week's records. Three high HM pop records (Doja Cat, Underscores, Yeule) got at least two plays each. Doja Cat might benefit from more, but my irritation with glitch pop both means that I'm done with those and that some of you will probably love them much more than I can imagine. At some point I'll have to admit that I'm just too comfortable in my ears to keep up with all this cutting edge shit.

    The Fujiwara album has some upside, too, but I took its thinness as a limit, even though it's a big part of the concept. The match up with Brennan and Reid is inspired, perhaps even by our Jazz Poll, where both won Debut Album recently. Billy Bang fans should know about the Jazz Doctors reissue, especially the previously unreleased second half. (Frank Lowe fans can pass.)

    The Estes album was one of Clifford Ocheltree's daily picks. Nice to wake up to his posts, which very often make me want to search out something (or, if I'm lucky, pull it off my shelves). Brad Luen, by the way, has a good review of Olivia Rodrigo, and features three jazz albums after that.

    I only found out about Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky's July 10, 2023 death this week. Much of his work remains hard to find, but the Zentralquartett albums on Intakt are all superb, as is The Salmon, with Michael Griener (drums). I'm playing another I just found, for next week.

    The Zoh Amba record got me looking through my cache of download links from 577 Records. (I ignore most downloads links, but have been saving those, then forgetting them.) Two more records (so far) for next week. I've been meaning to trawl through this trove, so perhaps this will get me moving.

    I'm starting to think about the Francis Davis Jazz Poll this year -- that's one thing I need working email lists for -- so I'm starting to get serious about whittling down my queue. Still, got a lot of mail last week, so the net effect was negative.

    New records reviewed this week:

    Zoh Amba/Chris Corsano/Bill Orcutt: The Flower School (2023, Palilalia): Tenor sax/acoustic guitar, drums, electric guitar, coming in from different directions and smashing each other up. Five tracks, 30:49. B+(*) [bc]

    Be Your Own Pet: Mommy (2023, Third Man): Nashville punk band, formed in high school, recorded two albums and a couple EPs 2006-08, broke up, regrouped 15 years later to open for a Jack White tour. Maybe it's the new company they're keeping, but sounds like they're trying harder to pump their sound up to fill the larger auditoriums. B+(**) [sp]

    Johnathan Blake: Passage (2023, Blue Note): Drummer, from Philadelphia, fifth album as leader since 2012, second on Blue Note. Opens with a short drum solo, slips in a short Dezron Douglas bass solo later, otherwise Blake wrote five (of 8) songs, draws one each from Douglas and pianist David Virelles, and one from the late Ralph Peterson Jr. Also showcases label mates Immanuel Wilkins (alto sax on five cuts, most spectacularly the first) and Joel Ross (vibes). B+(**) [sp]

    Benjamin Boone: Caught in the Rhythm (2019-21 [2023], Origin): Saxophonist, did two excellent albums with poet Philip Levine (2018-19), continues in that vein here, rotating six less famous poets (Faylita Hicks gets four tracks, T.R. Hummer three), various musicians, including some high profile guests. Most words are sharp and angry, with intense music to match, especially the sax. A- [cd]

    Doja Cat: Scarlet (2023, Kemosabe/RCA): Rapper-singer Amala Dlamin, from Los Angeles, fourth album, claims the lyrics but very little of the music. The harder stuff is mixed up front, but the softer, less obvious back end is make-or-break. B+(***) [sp]

    Michael Echaniz: Seven Shades of Violet (Rebiralost) (2023, Ridgeway): Pianist, from "West Coast" (studied at Santa Clara, California Jazz Conservatory, and CalAfts), first album, wrote nine (of 11) pieces, plays some organ and other keyboards, produced by bassist Jeff Denson, vocals on several tracks, guests I rarely notice. B+(*) [cd]

    Tomas Fujiwara: Pith (2023, Out of Your Head): Drummer, from Boston, where he studied under Alan Dawson, moved to New York, has been in various ensembles with Anthony Braxton and/or his students. Trio here with Tomeka Reid (cello) and Patricia Brennan (vibes), for a dazzling exhibition of rhythm. B+(***) [cd]

    Vince Gill & Paul Franklin: Sweet Memories: The Music of Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys (2023, MCA Nashville): Country singer, vaulted to stardom in 1989, and close to 20 albums later still bankable, teams up with the steel guitarist for their second standards album, after Bakersfield in 2013. Only two songs (of 11) actually written by Price. Sounded pretty good most of the way through, but tails off, and "Danny Boy" doesn't seem like such a good idea. B+(*) [sp]

    Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (2023, self-released): Bassist, from the Bronx, plays in Jazz at Lincoln Center, fourth album. Some lyrics. Lots of rhythm. B+(**) [cd]

    Per Texas Johansson: Den Sämsta Lönningen Av Alla (2023, Moserobie): Tenor saxophonist, numerous side credits since 1993, leads a septet here, also playing clarinet, oboe, English horn, and bass clarinet here, with an odd mix of other instruments: pedal steel guitar, piano, violin, vibes/marimba, bass, drums -- mostly name I recognize (e.g., Matthias Ståhl, Petter Eldh, Konrad Agnas). B+(***) [cd]

    Per Texas Johansson: Orkester Omnitonal (2023, Moserobie): Big band, directed by Johan Siberg. Johansson leans more toward clarinet in this context, long pieces which swoop and sway, meander and sometimes surprise. B+(***) [cd]

    Low Cut Connie: Art Dealers (2023, Contender): Philadelphia band, principally Adam Weiner, surprise find with their 2011 debut, next two albums I liked almost as much, since then I lost the thread (not that I didn't enjoy lockdown covers, collected as Tough Cookies). Here, however, he starts off like he's trying to be a harder rocking Billy Joel, before he loses speed to density. B [sp]

    Buddy & Julie Miller: In the Throes (2023, New West): Husband and wife singer-songwriters, both have solo careers as well as six duo albums since 2001. They sound terrific together, but I'm unsure about the songs. B+(**) [sp]

    Kylie Minogue: Tension (2023, BMG): Australian dance-pop diva, first album 1988, this is number sixteen, after Disco in 2020. B+(**) [sp]

    Willie Nelson: Bluegrass (2023, Legacy): Twelve old songs (from Nelson's songbook) + bluegrass musicians (acoustic guitar, banjo, dobro, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, no drummer) = new album. Docked a notch for cover art that shows even less imagination than the concept. B+(*) [sp]

    Octo Octa: Dreams of a Dancefloor (2023, T4T LUV NRG, EP): Electronica producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, from New Hampshire, several albums, more singles/EPs since 2011. Three tracks, 24:59. B+(**) [sp]

    Joel Paterson: Wheelhouse Rag (2021 [2023], Jalopy): Roots guitarist, from Chicago, learned by ear from old blues and country records, taste in album cover art is also retro, this his ninth since 2001, 14 pieces, subtitle: "The original fingerstyle guitar instrumentals of Joel Paterson. B+(**) [sp]

    Ivo Perelman/Matt Moran: Tuning Forks (2023, Ibeji Music): Duo, tenor sax and vibraphone, the former's eighth album so far this year (four duos, three trios, one quartet). B+(***) [bc]

    Pink Monads: Multiple Visions of the Now (2022 [2023], 4DaRecord): Quartet, first album: Edith Steyer (clarinet), Céline Voccia (piano), Marialuisa Capurso (voice), Sofia Borges (drums), with a field recording from Morocco. The voice gives a focal point the others scatter around, but their action is much more interesting. B+(**) [cd]

    Brandon Sanders: Compton's Finest (2023, Savant): Drummer, born in Kansas City but grew up in Los Angeles, debut album at 52, with Chris Lewis (tenor sax), Warren Wolf (vibes), Keith Brown (piano), and Eric Wheeler (bass), with Jazzmeia Horn singing two songs: one of his two originals, and "In a Sentimental Mood." B+(**) [cd]

    Matthew Shipp: The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp (2023, Mahakala Music): Solo piano, one of the greats, but much more like this to choose from. B+(**) [sp]

    Nick Shoulders: All Bad (2023, Gar Hole): Country singer-songwriter, based in Fayetteville, fourth album, does his own cover art. The straightforward country songs don't do much for me, but he's more fun when he commandeers a standard and steers it hard left ("Arkansas Troubler," "Won't Fence Me In"). Notable lyric: "workers of the world, I appreciate'cha/ for your poorly compensated toil, I appreciate'cha." B+(**) [sp]

    Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet: Precipice (2022 [2023], ARC): Avant-pianist, from New York, based in Black Mountain, North Carolina; quite some number of records since 1991, but not so many with his name first (e.g., Fonda/Stevens Group has 13). Quartet with Christian Howes (violin) filling the role of a horn lead, backed by bass (Bryan McConnell) and drums (Rick Dilling). Even swings some. A- [cd]

    Underscores: Wallsocket (2023, Mom + Pop): Glitch pop artist April Harper Grey, lots of self-released singles and EPs since 2015, second album, first picked up by a known label, cites Skrillex for inspiration, opened for 100 gecs in 2021. I don't like either of those models, and this isn't something I can imagine ever really enjoying, but I'm seriously impressed by a couple songs -- "Old Money Bitch," of course, and the ballad "Good Luck Final Girl" -- and a bit more amused than annoyed by the rest. B+(***) [sp]

    Vin Venezia: The Venetian (2023, Innervision): Guitarist, plays electric, baritone, acoustic, nylon, and synth guitars; second album, ends with an original but mostly arranges jazz standards (Davis, Corea, Strayhorn, Jobim). Backed by bass (Harvie S), drums (Richie Morales), with tenor sax (Davie Walsh, one track of Bob Magnuson), and occasional piano (David Budway on 4 of 13 tracks). Runs the gamut, but always in good taste. B+(**) [cd] [10-20]

    Yeule: Softscars (2023, Ninja Tune): Glitch pop artist Natasha Yelin Chang, aka Nat Cmiel, from Singapore, studied in London, based in Los Angeles, third album (after several EPs). I don't quite know what to make of this. B+(***) [sp]

    Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

    François Carrier Ensemble: Openness (2006 [2023], Fundacja Sluchaj, 3CD): Montreal-based alto saxophonist, goes back to the 1990s, always with drummer Michel Lambert, here at the La Chapelle festival, hosting Tomasz Stanko (trumpet), Mat Maneri (viola), and Gary Peacock (bass), over two nights. All improv, not so far out you can't just relax to it, but never slouches off or misses a step. A- [dl]

    Alan Goldsher: The Complete Pocket Sessions (2019 [2023], Gold Note): Email billed this as "the original jazztronica" -- a phrase that had appeared at least 20 years before the two albums remastered here (The Pocket and The Other Pocket). Goldsher plays bass and keyboards, has a bunch of releases since these albums kicked him off, and has a longer career (since 2002) as a writer of fiction and non (including books on Modest Mouse, Dave Brubeck, and Art Blakey's sidemen). B- [sp]

    The Jazz Doctors: Intensive Care/Prescriptions Filled [The Billy Bang Quartet Sessions 1983/1984] (1983-84 [2023], Cadillac): Two sessions in London, the first -- a quartet with Billy Bang (violin), Frank Lowe (tenor sax), Rafael Garrett (bass), and Dennis Charles (drums) -- released as Intensive Care; the second -- Bang, Lowe, Wilber Morris (bass), and Thurman Barker (drums) -- previously unreleased, but titled Prescriptions Filled. B+(***) [sp]

    Roberto Magris & the JM Horns: High Quote (2012 [2023], JM): Italian pianist, from Trieste, has a label in Kansas City, and recorded this in Lenexa, KS a decade ago, with a substantial horn section, bass, drums, and congas, with vocals by Monique Danielle on two tracks. B+(*) [cd]

    Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky: Luten at Jazzwerkstatt Peitz (2011 [2023], Jazzwerkstatt): German alto saxophonist (1933-2023), also plays clarinet, nickname Luten, one of the first important free jazz musicians to emerge from the GDR, probably best known for Zentralquartett (with Conrad Bauer, 1974-2016). Live set here came out a couple months before his death. With Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano) and Christian Lillinger (drums), a long piece (32:21) and a "Freie Improvisation" (10:28). B+(***) [sp]

    Mark Reboul/Roberta Piket/Billy Mintz: Seven Pieces/About an Hour/Saxophone, Piano, Drums (2004 [2023], ESP-Disk): Saxophonist, Discogs only offers two side-credits, one from 1985, the other 2007, so this is his belated debut, backed by relatively well known (even then, but more so now) pianist and drummer. Rather understated, but draws you in. B+(***) [cd]

    Old music:

    Sleepy John Estes: The Legend of Sleepy John Estes (1962 [1963], Delmark): Memphis bluesman John Adam Estes (1899-1977), first recorded for Victor in 1929, his 1929-40 compilations -- I have one on Yazoo, another on Wolf -- are highly recommended (but mostly interchangeable). Recorded a couple tracks for Sun in 1952, but hadn't been heard from since, until Bob Koester tracked him down and cut him loose for his first proper LP. Half of these 12 songs repeat from the earlier comps, his quavery voice and spare guitar timeless. A- [sp]

    Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky: Ein Nachmittag in Peitz (1981 [2008], Jazzwerkstatt): Plays alto sax, baritone sax, and flute on three tracks, just talks on one more (beware: 9:39, in German, with laughter). The music begins and ends with duets with Harry Miller (bass, cello, 13:53 and 12:12), separated by the talk and a 41:01 piece called "Relaxing With Heinz, Klaus, Joe and Tony" -- that's Becker (trumpet), Koch (bass), Sachse (guitar), and Oxley (drums). B+(***) [sp]

    Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky/Conny Bauer: Wanderung Durch Den Thüringer Wald (2011 [2019], Jazzwerkstatt): Duo, alto sax and bass trombone, they've been playing together at least since 1973, most notably in Zentralquartett. B+(**) [sp]

    Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

    • Flying Pooka! [Dani Oore & Florian Hoefner]: The Ecstasy of Becoming (Alma) [09-01]
    • Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (self-released)
    • Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (Impulse!)
    • Per Texas Johansson: Orkester Omnitonal (Moserobie) [06-10]
    • Per Texas Johansson: Den Sämsta Lönningen Av Alla (Moserobie) [06-10]
    • Sunny Kim/Vardan Ovsepian/Ben Monder: Liminal Silence (Earshift Music) [11-10]
    • Andrew Krasilnikov: Bloody Belly Comb Jelly (Rainy Days) [09-29]
    • Jeff Lederer With Mary LaRose: Schoenberg on the Beach (Little (i) Music) [10-06]
    • Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet: Hear the Light Singing (RogueArt) [11-03]
    • Quinsin Nachoff: Stars and Constellations (Adyhâropa) [10-13]
    • Pink Monads: Multiple Visions of the Now (4DaRecord) [07-24]
    • Joe Santa Maria: Echo Deep (Orenda) [11-03]
    • Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet: Precipice (ARC) [05-05]
    • Yuhan Su: Liberated Gesture (Sunnyside) [11-10]
    • Ben Winkelman: Heartbeat (OA2) [09-15]

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, September 24, 2023

    Speaking of Which

    Got a late start, as I thought it was more important to get my oft-delayed Book Roundup post out first. Still, I didn't have much trouble finding pieces this week. Seems like there should be more here on the UAW strike, but I didn't land on much that I hadn't noted previously.

    Top story threads:

    Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Trump did very little of note last week, so it's time to merge him back into the field.

    Biden and/or the Democrats: I was expecting more interest in the Franklin Foer book, but the bottom two articles are about it here. Biden's foreign policy issues are treated elsewhere, as is the breaking Menendez scandal.

    • Kate Aronoff: [09-21] Biden takes a tiny step toward a Roosevelt-style climate revolution: He's creating a Civilian Climate Corps, almost a homage to Roosevelt's CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). While the new group may also plant some trees, I suspect it will wind up mostly on the back side of climate change: not prevention, but clean up.

    • Perry Bacon Jr: [09-19] There's a simple answer to questions about Biden's age. Why don't Democrats say it? "Yes, there's a chance Vice President Harris becomes president -- and that would be fine."

    • Marin Cogan: [09-22] Why Biden's latest gun violence initiative has activists optimistic: By executive order, Biden is creating a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which won't do much, but will surely talk about it more.

    • Oshan Jarow: [09-21] We cut child poverty to historic lows, then let it rebound faster than ever before: "The expanded child tax credit was a well-tested solution to child poverty." Since it has expired, the case is clearer than ever.

    • Robert Kuttner: [09-20] Winning the ideas, losing the politics: "Progressives have won the battle of ideas. And reality has been a useful ally. No serious person any longer thinks that deregulation, privatization, globalization, and tax-cutting serve economic growth or a defensible distribution of income and wealth." Biden has "surprisingly and mercifully" broke with the "self-annihilating consensus" of neoliberalism that gripped and hobbled the Democratic Party from Carter through Obama. Meanwhile, "Republicans have become the party of nihilism." So why do Republicans still win elections? Whatever it is -- some mix of ignorance and spite -- is what Democrats have to figure out a way to campaign against, before the desruction gets even worse.

      Kuttner recommends a piece by Caroline Fredrickson: [09-18] What I most regret about my decades of legal activism: "By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got defeated on both." She recalls the opposition to Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Liberals objected to Bork's views on race and abortion, but completely ignored his influential reframing of antitrust law. (For my part, I always understood that Sherman was written to protect businesses from monopolies. The idea that its intent existed for consumer protection was as far from "originalism" as possible.) She also points to Ted Kennedy's pivotal role providing liberal blessing for right-wing business initiatives, and Democratic Supreme Court appointments being "far more business-friendly than Democratic appointees of any other Court era." It should give us pause that ever since 1980, income and wealth inequality has grown even more when Democrats were in the White House. Republicans sat the table with tax cuts and deregulation, but also depressed wages and the economy. Democrats grew the economy, giving that much more to the rich. Biden shows signs of breaking with some, but not all, of this.

    • Nathaniel Rakich: [09-20] Democrats have been winning big in special elections: "That could bode well for them in the 2024 elections."

    • Amy Davidson Sorkin: [09-10] The challenges facing Joe Biden: "A new book praises the President's handling of the midterms, but the midterms are beginning to feel like a long time ago." The book, of course, is Franklin Foer's The Last Politician.

    • David Weigel: [09-12] In books, Biden is an energetic leader. Too bad nobody reads them. This was occasioned by Franklin Foer's book because, what else is available? (Actually, he mentions two more books -- the same two in my latest Book Roundup.)

    Legal matters and other crimes: The Supreme Court isn't back in session yet, but cases are piling up.

    Climate and environment:

    Economic matters, including labor: The UAW strike is escalating. It looks like the Writers Guild has a tentative deal, after a lengthy strike, while the actors strike continues. Republicans blame all strikes on Biden, probably for raising the hopes of workers that they might get a fairer split of the record profits they never credit Biden for.

    • Dean Baker:

      • [09-22] Do people really expect prices to fall back to pre-pandemic levels? No, unless you're a Republican, then you'll run by promising miracles after you win, then forget about them the next day.

      • [09-18] Quick thoughts on the UAW strike: "Low pay of autoworkers; Higher productivity can mean less work, not fewer workers; CEO pay is a rip-off; Auto industry profits provide some room for higher pay; Inflated stock prices for Tesla and other Wall Street favorites have a cost; It is not an issue of electric vs. gas-powered cars; The UAW and Big Three are still a really big deal."

    • David Dayen: [09-21] Amazon's $185 billion pay-to-play system: "A new report shows that Amazon now takes 45 percent of all third-party sales on its website, part of the company's goal to become a monopoly gatekeeper for economic transactions."

    • Paul Krugman:

      • [09-19] Inflation is down, disinflation denial is soaring: So, is the denial fueled by people who have a vested interest in blaming Biden for inflation? The same people who always root for economic disaster when a Democrat is president (and who often contribute to it)? You know, Republicans?

      • [09-22] Making manufacturing good again: "Industrial jobs aren't automatically high-paying." They do tend to have relatively high margins, but whether workers see any of that depends on leverage, especially unions.

    • Harold Meyerson: [09-18] UAW strikes built the American middle class.

    Ukraine War: Since Russia invaded in February 2022, I've always put Responsible Statecraft's "Diplomacy Watch" first in this section, but there doesn't seem to be one this week. They've redesigned the website to make it much harder to tell, especially what's new and what isn't.

    Israel:

    Around the world:

    • Zack Beauchamp: [09-20] The wild allegations about India killing a Canadian citizen, explained: "The killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada has exposed a big problem for US foreign policy." There's a list here that limits foreign assassinations to "the world's most brutal regimes -- places like China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia," conveniently ignoring the US and Israel.

    • Edward Hunt: [09-23] US flouts international law with Pacific military claims.

    • Ellen Ioanes: [09-23] The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, explained: This is one of a half-dozen (or maybe more) cases where the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union eventually resulted in border disputes: this one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter including a region that is primarily Armenian. This developed almost immediately into a war, which has fluctuated and festered ever since. Several others revolted: in Georgia and Moldova, where Russia favored separatists, while brutally suppressing Chechen separatists. Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine also: they didn't detonate until the pro-west coup in 2014, but now are engulfed in what is effectively a world war. It would have been sensible to recognize these flaws at the time, and set up some processes for peaceful resolution, but the US has embraced every opportunity to degrade Russian power, while Russia has become increasingly belligerent as it's been backed into a corner.

    • Daniel Larison: [09-22] Rahm Emmanuel in Japan, goes rogue on China: When Biden appointed him ambassador to Japan, I figured at least that would keep him from doing the sort of damage he did in the Obama White House. And here he is, trying to start WWIII. For more details, see [09-20] White House told US ambassador to Japan to stop taunting China on social media.

    • Bryan Walsh: [09-22] Governments once imagined a future without extreme poverty. What happened?

    Other stories:

    Merrill Goozner: [09-12] As dementia cases soar, who will care for the caregivers?

    Anita Jain: [09-15] Should progressives see Sohrab Ahmari as friend or foe? He has a book, Tyrany, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty -- and What to Do About It, which I wrote something about but didn't make the cut in yesterday's Book Roundup. He's right about some things, wrong about others, a mix that gives him to obvious political leverage, so does it matter? The key question is whether he decides to be friend or foe, because if he aligns with the Democrats he can hope for a seat at the table, and he'll find people who agree with him on most of his issues (but probably not the same people all the time). But Republicans are never going to support his economic critique, not so much because they love capitalism (although about half of them do) as because they believe in hierarchical order, and rich capitalists are clustered at the top of that totem pole.

    Peter Kafka: [09-21] Why is Rupert Murdoch leaving his empire now? At 92, he's turned control over to one of his sons, Lachlan Murdoch. More:

    • Michelle Goldberg: [09-21] The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch: Draws on Michael Wolff's "amusingly vicious and very well-timed book," The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.

      In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. "Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal," writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch's helplessness was a choice.

      Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump's rise.

    • Alex Shephard: [09-21] Rupert Murdoch made the world worse: And he got very rich doing it.

    Omid Memarian: [09-14] Lawrence Wright on why domestic terrorism is America's 'present enemy'. Interview with the author of The Looming Tower, one of the first important books on Al Qaeda after 9/11.

    Osita Nwanevu: [09-20] The mass disappointment of a decade of mass protest: "The demonstrations of the last decade were vast and explosive -- and surprisingly ineffective." Review of Vincent Bevins: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Mostly not about America, although I can't think of any protests here that have been notably successful. But the author starts with Tunisia and Arab Spring, where protests were often brutally repressed, turning into civil wars and attracting other nations for bad or worse. But despite many bad tastes, not all of them have been failures. And even those that failed leave you with the question: what else could one have tried?

    Andrew Prokop: [09-22] The indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez, explained: "He and his wife were given gold bars, a car, and envelopes of cash, prosecutors say." How long before he joins Republicans in complaining about how the Justice Department has been politically weaponized? This isn't his first run in with the law. While he managed to dodge jail last time, and even got reëlected afterwards, Democrats should do whatever they can to get rid of him, especially as doing so wouldn't cost them a Senate seat. It would also get rid of the most dangerous foreign policy hawk on their side of Congress.

    Gabriela Riccardi: [09-21] Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away: "A new book surfaces their forgotten story -- along with their prescience in a new machine age." The book is Brian Merchant: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Ned Ludd's army has long been decried, becoming synonymous with the futile, kneejerk rejection of progress, but we shouldn't be so quick to insist that any new technology that can be created must be used. Indeed, we've already decided not to use a number of chemicals that have ill side effects, and that list is bound to grow. Certain weapons, like poison gas and biological agents, have been banned, and others like depleted uranium should be. There is growing reluctance to nuclear power. Biotech and AI raise deep concerns. Of course, it would be better to settle these disputes rationally rather than through breaking machines, but where no resolution seems possible -- the use of fossil fuels is most likely -- sabotage is a possibility.

    Rich Scheinin: [09-22] How Sam Rivers and Studio Rivbea supercharged '70s jazz in New York: "On the saxophonist's centennial, Jason Moran and other artists celebrate his legacy." I'd put it more like: jazz (at least the free kind) nearly was effectively on life support in the 1970s. Rivers, both by example and patronage, revived it. Of course, he wasn't alone. There was Europe, where the most important labels of the 1980s were founded. But in New York, it re-started in the lofts, especially chez Rivers.

    Dylan Scott: [09-22] Another Covid-19 winter is coming. Here's how to prepare. Also:

    Nick Shoulders: [09-24] Country music doesn't deserve its conservative reputation: "the genre isn't inherently right-wing -- it can also broadcast the struggles and aspirations of the working class." Shoulders is a singer-songwriter from Fayetteville, interviewed here by Willie Jackson. I grew up with a lot of Porter Waggoner and Hee Haw, but didn't take country music seriously until I met George Lipsitz, who was a leftist who became a country music fan through organizing. I didn't need much persuasion: all you have to do is listen. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't a market for jingoism in country music: any time someone cuts a right-wing fart, you can be sure it will go viral. Shoulders, by the way, wrote an In These Times piece in 2020: Fake twang: How white conservatism stole country music. I haven't heard his albums, but will check out All Bad, at least, for next Music Week.

    Jeffrey St Clair: [09-22] Roaming Charges: Then they walked: Starts with more horror stories of what cops do and get away with. One story from Reuters "documented more than 1,000 deaths related to police use of tasers." Much more, of course. There's a chart of new Covid-19 hospitalizations by state. Number 1, by a large margin, is Florida, followed by Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana. There's a fact check on a David Brooks tweet, complaining that a hamburger & fries meal at Newark Airport cost him $78: "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." Same meal was found for $17, but that didn't factor in the bar tab. If you can stand more: Timothy Bella: [09-23] David Brooks and the $78 airport meal the internet is talking about.

    I didn't bother reading any of the Jann Wenner scandal last week, but St Clair couldn't resist: "There's nothing more satisfying than to watch a pompous bigot, who has paraded his misogyny and racism for decades with a sense of royal impunity, suddenly implode with his own hand on the detonator." He then excerpts the interview, meant to promote The Masters: Conversations With Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend. A couple days later, Wenner was kicked off his board seat at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and denounced by most of the staff at Rolling Stone. Most likely he'll wind up as an example in some future book about "cancel culture." Also on Wenner:

    Jia Tolentino: [09-10] Naomi Klein sees uncanny doubles in our politics: An interview with the author of Doppelganger.

    After the Brooks flare up above, someone recommended a 2004 article by Sasha Issenberg: David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Saturday, September 23, 2023

    Book Roundup

    Last Book Roundup was on April 28, 2023, following only two in 2022. My practice then was to only post once I've accumulated a batch of 40 book notes. They aren't really reviews, because they are almost all based on reading about the books (e.g., but not exclusively, on Amazon). However, in recent years, I've added lists of related books to many entries, plus I add on an unmetered "briefly noted" list, so the absolute number of books mention has grown, making the posts huge. Last time I speculated I might cut the main list in half, to 20 books. This time I had 23 when I decided I should push this out, and much more due diligence to do, so I settled on 30. Next time will be 20 -- and hopefully less than six months. Draft file still has 88 partial drafts, 202 noted books. I've included a few books that haven't been published yet (dates in brackets) in the supplemental lists, but not as main or secondary listings.

    The books on the right are ones I have read (or in Clark's case, have started -- I'm about 100 pages in). Two of those are in the supplementary lists. The second Hope Jahren is more timely, but I read (and wrote up) the memoir first. The Ther book I hoped would offer more insights into Ukraine, but had more to say about politics in Germany, Italy, and Poland. Still, someone needs to write a book that lives up to the title.

    Several other books noted below are in my queue, waiting for my limited attention:

    • Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con
    • Franklin Foer: The Last Politician
    • Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity

    I should also mention, in my queue, Samuel Moyn's previous book: Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. If I didn't have so much pending, I'd seriously consider adding Naomi Klein: Doppelganger. The title is a bit too clever, but the notion of finding perverse mirror images in the right-wing fever swamp is profound, maybe because it articulates something that's been smacking us upside the head for decades now. The long list of books I filed under Rufo is full of examples. These are books that cry out not for political debate but for psychological intervention.

    As Klein notes, they often start with a kernel of truth -- often one that we on the left would at least partly agree with -- then twist it around, often blaming us for problems that their side actually caused, playing up their victimhood, less for sympathy from others than to stir up anger within their own identity cult. After all, it's not like they have any sympathy for suffering of victims outside their orbit. I've tracked quite some number of these right-wing tracts over the years, and they are clearly becoming more and more deranged.

    The supplemental Iraq list is unusual here, in that it includes some books that are quite old, simply because I missed them at the time. (Christopher Hitchens is an example I don't have to scratch my head over missing. Victor Davis Hanson is one that was pretty ridiculous when it was written, but all the more so in hindsight. And Judith Miller was one held back until she thought the coast was clear.) The implicit backdrop to this list is the long list of books I've noted previously. These are collected in one huge file (6398 books, 350k words). At some point I should split this up into thematic guides. (A grep for "Iraq" finds 323 lines, which is probably close to 200 books. "Israel" finds 601 lines. "Trump" 780. "Biden" 56.)

    Here are 30 more/less recent books of interest in politics, the social sciences, and history, with occasional side trips, and supplementary lists where appropriate:

    Michael D Bess: Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them (2022, Cambridge University Press): Fossil fuels and Climate Change; Nukes for War and Peacetime; Pandemics, Natural or Bioengineered; Artificial Intelligence. One thing that distinguishes all four is the need for international cooperation, which involves "taking the United Nations up a notch." He even tries to anticipate "rogues, cheaters, and fanatics," but only leaves six pages for the chapter on "What Could Go Wrong?"

    Christopher Clark: Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (2023, Crown): Major historical work (896 pp). I've moved on to it after reading EJ Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, which covered its six decades with remarkable concision, but didn't offer many details of the revolutionary events of 1848. People like to brag about how much wealth capitalism has bestowed on the world, but through 1848 only a very few had anything to show for it, and the new laboring class (including significant numbers of women and children) were mired in misery. Hobsbawm mentions various crop failures, famines, and crashes of the 1840s that did much to provoke revolt. But also, with nearly every nation in Europe gripped by absolute monarchy, the emerging business class had their own reasons, and ideology, for revolution. My thinking was that 1848 marked the end of an age of bourgeois revolution that started in America in 1775 and ended in 1848, after which the capitalists found they had more in common with aristocrats than with the newly militant proletariat, especially when the monarchies catered to the nouveaux riches they found themselves dependent on. One thing that Clark stresses is that even where the revolutions were successfully repressed, the victors were never able to restore their ancien regime.

    NW Collins: Grey Wars: A Contemporary History of US Special Operations (2021, Yale University Press): Tries to present a broad picture of how elite military units have been used going back to 1980 (Desert One), without giving away too much, least of all anything that might damage reputations or question motives. More on special ops and clandestine war:

    • Matthew A Cole: Code Over Country: The Tragedy & Corruption of SEAL Team Six (2022, Bold Type Books).
    • Annie Jacobsen: Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019, Little Brown; paperback, 2020, Back Bay Books).
    • Sean Naylor: Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (2015, St Martin's Press; paperback, 2016, St Martin's Griffin).
    • Ric Prado: Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior (2022, St Martin's Press): Ex-CIA.
    • Dan Schilling/Lori Chapman Longfritz: Alone at Dawn: Medal of Honor Recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World's Deadliest Special Operations Force (2019, Grand Central).

    Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023, Verso): Science fiction writer, with Rebecca Giblin, co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets, plus more listed below. First liine: "This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech." Unclear to me how you can do that (not that I don't understand the desire for interoperability), but his explanation of why is succinct and pretty compelling. Two parts: one about "seizing," the other answers to a bunch of "what about" questions.

    • Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (paperback, 2015, McSweeney's).
    • Cory Doctorow: Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment (paperback, 2020, Tor Books): Fiction, sort of.
    • Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (paperback, 2021, Medium Editions).

    Cara Fitzpatrick: The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (2023, Basic Books): Looking back, the surprise may be that public schooling ever got to be so popular in America in the first place. Before 1800 (or possibly 1830), schooling was largely the province of churches, and even then only for the training of a select few. But with the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 19th century, building on the enlightened liberalism of the nation's founding, public education grew, even if it was sometimes sold as a means to naturalize and domesticate unruly immigrants. Some religions, especially Roman Catholics, continued to hold out for their own schools -- when I was growing up, I knew kids who went, and was aware their parents fretted over the costs -- and the rich had their own private schooling. The private school movement got a boost with the fight against desegregation, and Republicans found political opportunities on at several fronts: vouchers would appeal to the Catholic voters they started courting as part of Nixon's "emerging Republican majority," and charter schools would fit their privatization propaganda, and hurt teacher unions (who tended to support Democrats). Since then, the Republican Party has only gotten dumber, meaner, and more self-destructive. I doubt that means the battle is over, as the world itself has only become more complex and demanding of expert knowledge (as well as judicious politics), and that stuff has to be taught. Also:

    • Justin Driver: The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (2018, Pantheon; paperback, 2019, Vintage Books).
    • Jack Schneider/Jennifer Berkshire: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (2020, New Press).

    Franklin Foer: The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (2023, Penguin Press): Journalist, writes for Atlantic, has three previous books, none with obvious political subjects (e.g., How Soccer Explains the World), so this effort at doing insider reporting of Biden's first two years is possibly novel, and almost unique compared to hundreds of scandal seekers who have gone after Trump. I've never liked Biden, so it may be faint praise to admit that he's the first president in my lifetime who has surprised me in pleasing ways -- of course, not always, and often not as much as I would have liked -- and I'm curious about how that happened. Foer seems to credit Biden himself for political pragmatism, but the bigger question is why they decided to respond to big problems in serious ways, as opposed to the studied downplaying of everything under Obama, let alone the madcap fits of Trump. Also on Biden (not much):

    • Gabriel Debendetti: The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama (2022; paperback, 2023, Henry Holt).
    • Chris Whipple: The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House (2023, Scribner).

    Meanwhile, the right has been busy pumping out anti-Biden tracts:

    • Nick Adams: The Most Dangerous President in History (2022, Post Hill Press): All you need to know about him is that he wrote Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization (2020).
    • Todd Bensman: Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History (paperback, 2023, Bombardier Books).
    • Jason Chaffetz: The Puppeteers: The People Who Control the People Who Control America (2023, Broadside Books): Pictured as puppets on cover: Biden, Schumer, Harris, Warren, Schiff?
    • Joe Concha: Come On, Man!: The Truth About Joe Biden's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency (2022, Broadside Books).
    • Jerry Dunleavy/James Hasson: Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden's Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End (2023, Center Street).
    • Jamie Glazov: Obama's True Legacy: How He Transformed America (paperback, 2023, Republic Book Publishers).
    • Alex Marlow: Breaking Biden: Exposing the Hidden Forces and Secret Money Machine Behind Joe Biden, His Family, and His Administration (2023, Threshold Editions). [10-03]
    • Mark R Levin: The Democrat Party Hates America (2023, Threshold Editions).
    • Kimberley Strassel: The Biden Malaise: How America Bounced Back From Joe Biden's Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years (2023, Twelve).

    Joshua Frank: Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (2022, Haymarket Books): Hanford Nuclear Reservation, in Washington, initially built as part of the Manhattan Project, the site along the Columbia River where the plutonium used on Hiroshima was created from uranium and extracted, a process that extended long after the war. The site now contains some 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, with a cleanup price tag of $677 billion (and counting).

    Thomas Gabor/Fred Guttenberg: American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence (paperback, 2023, Mango): They enumerate 37 myths, most of which you'll find dubious (many downright bonkers) even without the supporting documentation, in eleven chapters, each with its "bottom line" summary. We've been around this block several times before, so there's not much new to add, but:

    • Thomas Gabor: Carnage: Preventing Mass Chootings in America (paperback, 2021, Booklocker.com).
    • Mark Follman: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022, Dey Street Books).
    • Cameron McWhirter/Zusha Elinson: American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
    • Katherine Schweit: Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis (2021, Rowman & Littlefield; 2nd ed, paperback, 2023, Colvos).
    • Katherine Schweit: How to Talk About Guns With Anyone (paperback, 2023, 82 Stories).

    Peter Heather/John Rapley: Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (2023, Yale University Press): Heather a historian of the late- and post-Roman period, Rapley a political economist. Reminds me that Cullen Murphy wrote a similar book in 2007: Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Unlikely that any of these authors asks the obvious question: what good are empires anyway? Sure, when Rome fell, it was promptly sacked by Germanic tribes (most famously the Vandals), because that's how the world worked then. But fates like that have been rare since 1945, unless you consider the IMF analogous. Most Americans might very well be better off without an empire. Same for the world.

    Peter J Hotez: The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press): Doctor, has written several books on public health, and has stepped up recently to counter the vast torrent of anti-vaccine nonsense coming from all (but mostly right-wing) quarters. Note that Amazon offered me a "similar items" list: virtually all of them were by anti-vax quacks (most notably RFK Jr.). [09-19]

    • Peter J Hotez: Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (paperback, 2020, Johns Hopkins University Press).
    • Peter J Hotez: Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science (2021, Johns Hopkins University Press).

    Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk (2023, Simon & Schuster): Big biography (688 pp), by the "biographer of genius," or so the hype goes: his previous subjects include Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Jennifer Doudna, and Steve Jobs. You may think you know enough about him already, but this seems to be another case where the father almost makes the son sympathetic (others include Charles Koch and Donald Trump, though at this point they should be recognized as evil in their own right). Also on Musk:

    • Ben Mezrich: Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History (2023, Grand Central Publishing). [11-07]
    • Jonathan Taplin: The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (2023, Public Affairs): Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen -- "the biggest wallets paying for the most blinding lights."

    Hope Jahren: Lab Girl (2016, Knopf; paperback, 2017, Vintage): Memoir of growing up in a Norwegian-American household in Minnesota to become a paleobotanist, through grad school in California and teaching posts in Atlanta, Hawaii, and finally Norway, each with her main interest, a lab full of mass spectrometers and such. The most striking chapter is one on her pregnancy off the meds that kept her centered. Also chronicles Bill, her slightly more eccentric lab assistant who followed her from post to post. She also wrote:

    • Hope Jahren: The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here (2021, Delacorte; paperback, 2020, Vintage): Carefully balanced, one of the best written books on the subject, a clearheadedness which recognizes that the real solution for the problem of more is simply less.

    Siddharth Kara: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023, St Martin's Press): Investigation into cobalt mining in Congo -- a mineral increasingly in demand for the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used by everything from smart phones to vehicles, which Congo supplies 75% of the world market for. If you've read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, you may think that the exploitation of this former Belgian colony couldn't get worse, but independence under Mobutu defined the word kleptocracy, and since his demise, Congo has been ravaged by the world's longest and most devastating wars. And as always, nothing adds to human suffering more quickly than a rush for treasure.

    More recent books on Africa (actually very hard to search for on Amazon):

    • JP Daughton: In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad the the Tragedy of French Colonialism (2021, WW Norton).
    • Dipo Faloyin: Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent (2022, WW Norton).
    • Stuart A Reid: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (2023, Knopf). [10-17]
    • Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (paperback, 2018, Verso).
    • Walter Rodney: Decolonial Marxism: Esays From the Pan-African Revolution (paperback, 2022, Verso).
    • Henry Sanderson: Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green (paperback, 2023, Oneworld): Congo and Chile.
    • James H Smith: The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in Eastern DR Congo (paperback, 2017, University of Chicago Press).
    • Jason K Stearns: The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (paperback, 2023, Princeton University Press).
    • Susan Williams: White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonialization of Africa (2021; paperback, 2023, PublicAffairs).

    Naomi Klein: Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World 2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Canadian left-political writer, one who has regularly shown a knack not just for understanding our world but for formulating that in politically meaningful ways -- perhaps most famously in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). New book is more personal, based as it is on the public frequently getting her confused up with Naomi Wolf, who wrote the third-wave feminist classic The Beauty Trap (1991), and who, like Klein, was involved in Occupy Wall Street. Since then, Wolf has veered erratically toward the right, and especially promoting Covid misinformation. Odd, though, that the blurb info on this book doesn't mention Wolf by name. Not unrelated:

    • Naomi Wolf: Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age (paperback, 2023, Chelsea Green). [11-09]

    Melvyn P Leffler: Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (2023, Oxford University Press): A "fair and balanced" reappraisal of the debates and process that led to Bush's decision to invade Iraq, based on new interviews with "dozens of top officials" and "declassified American and British documents." Leffler has a long history of supporting American war policy. Some of his previous books, plus other recent books on Iraq:

    • Melvyn P Leffler: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992; paperback, 1993, Stanford University Press).
    • Melvyn P Leffler: The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (1994, paperback, Hill & Wang).
    • Melvyn P Leffler: For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (2007; paperback, 2008, Hill & Wang).
    • Melvyn P Leffler: Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015 (2017; paperback, 2019, Princeton University Press).
    • Lisa Blaydes: State of Repression: Iraq Under Saddam Hussein (2018; paperback, 2020, Princeton University Press).
    • Rolf Ekéus: Iraq Disarmed: The Story Behind the Story of the Fall of Saddam (2022, Lynne Rienner): Head of UNSCOM (Special Commission on Iraq): By one of the CIA operatives.
    • Sam Faddis: The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War (2020, Casemate).
    • Samuel Helfont: Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (2023, Oxford University Press): Naval War College professor searches through Iraqi foreign policy documents to try to build a case that Saddam Hussein had it coming.
    • Steven Simon: Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (2023, Penguin Press): Sounds a critical note, but credentials include NSC staff, State Department, RAND Corporation, and other "think tanks."

    Back on the 20th anniversary, I also collected this list of older Iraq books that I hadn't otherwise cited. Most of these are old, some embarrassingly so:

    • Thabit AJ Abdullah: Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos: Iraq Since 1989 (paperback, 2006, Zed Books).
    • Zaid Al-Ali: The Struggle for Iraq's Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy (2014, Yale University Press).
    • Nora Bensahel: After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (paperback, 2008, RAND).
    • Judith Betts/Mark Pythian: The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War (paperback, 2020, Palgrave Macmillan).
    • Hans Blix: Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004, Pantheon; paperback, 2005, Bloomsbury): Head of UN weapons inspection team.
    • Pratap Chatterjee: Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories Press): Went on to write a 2009 book on Halliburton's Army.
    • Don Eberly: Liberate and Leave: Fatal Flaws in the Early Strategy for Postwar Iraq (2009, Zenith Press).
    • James Dobbins: Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (paperback, 2009, RAND).
    • Jessica Goodell/John Hearn: Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq (2011, Casemate): Marine Corps Mortuary Unit memoir.
    • Peter L Hahn: Missions Accomplished? The United States and Iraq Since World War I (paperback, 2011, Oxford University Press).
    • Victor Davis Hanson: Between War and Peace: Lessons From Afghanistan to Iraq (paperback, 2004, Random House): Like "don't count your chickens until the eggs are hatched"? The section on Iraq is called "The Three Week War." It includes a chapter: "Donald Rumsfeld, a Radical for Our Time."
    • Christopher Hitchens: A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (paperback, 2003, Plume).
    • Bill Katovsky/Timothy Carlson: Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq: An Oral History (2003; paperback, 2004, Lyons Press).
    • John Keegan: The Iraq War: The Military Offensive, From Victory in 21 Days to the Insurgent Aftermath (2004, Knopf; paperback, 2005, Vintage).
    • Dina Rizk Khoury: Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press): Explores the near-constant culture of war in Iraq going back to the 1981-88 war with Iran.
    • Judith Miller: The Story: A Reporter's Journey (paperback, 2016, Simon & Schuster).
    • Ronan O'Callaghan: Walzer, Just War and Iraq: Ethics as Response (paperback, 2021, Routledge).
    • David L Phillips: Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (paperback, 2006, Basic Books).
    • Lawrence Rothfield: The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (2009, University of Chicago Press).
    • Nadia Schadlow: War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success Into Political Victory (paperback, 2017, Georgetown University Press): Case studies on 15 American wars, from Mexico (1848) to Iraq. There's a chapter on Afghanistan (before Iraq), but nothing on Vietnam.
    • Gary Vogler: Iraq and the Politics of Oil: An Insider's Perspective (2017, University Press of Kansas): Former ExxonMobil exec, ORHA oil consultant.

    Jill Lepore: The Deadline: Essays (2023, Liveright): Harvard historian, has written books on a wide range of subjects, from King Phillip's War to the Simulmatics Corporation, and to round it all out, These Truths: A History of the United States, all the while knocking out a wide range of historically astute essays for The New Yorker. This collects 640 pp of them.

    David Lipsky: The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial (2023, WW Norton): Seems like every batch has a hook on which I hang the most recent batch of climate change books. This is the latest "big idea must-read book," meant to finally batter down the door of resistance, even though he must know that the problem isn't resistance but diversion, all the sneaky little side-trips politicans can be enticed along rather than biting off a task that exceeds their patience and talent. His aim is to convince you through stories (he's mostly written fiction and memoir before this), and they're less about the underlying science, which you probably know (and are tired of) by now, and more about the arts of denial -- not that I doubt there's science behind it but I still insist it's mostly art.

    Other recent books on climate:

    • Neta C Crawford: The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions (2022, The MIT Press).
    • Geoff Dembicki: The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change (2022, Greystone Books): Reveals that at least by 1959 top oil executives were aware that burning their products will cause catastrophic global warming.
    • John Gertner: The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future (2019; paperback, 2020, Random House).
    • Robert S Devine: The Sustainable Economy: The Hidden Costs of Climate Change and the Path to a Prosperous Future (paperback, 2020, Anchor).
    • Jeff Goodell: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023, Little Brown): After several books that danced around the edges (Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet [on geoengineering], and The Water Will Come [rising seas, sinking cities]), he finally gets to the point. Kim Stanley Robinson, who led off with this very point in The Ministry for the Future, says: "you won't see the world the same way after reading it."
    • Mike Hulme: Climate Change Isn't Everything: Liberating Climate Politics From Alarmism (paperback, 2023, Polity): But it is one thing, a big one, one with a lot of momentum, making it hard to change even without an alarming level of political resistance.
    • Michael Mann: Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons From Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (2023, PublicAffairs).
    • George Marshall: Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014; paperback, 2015, Bloomsbury).
    • Anthony McMichael: Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations (2017; paperback, 2019, Oxford University Press).
    • David W Orr, ed: Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation (paperback, 2023, MIT Press): Foreword by Bill McKibben; afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson. [09-26]
    • Friederike Otto: Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change (2020; paperback, 2023, Greystone Books).
    • Geoffrey Parker: Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013; paperback, 2014, Yale University Press): 904 pp.
    • Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea: Visions of Our Vanishing Coastline (2023, Heyday).

    Michael Mann: On Wars (2023, Yale University Press): British-American comparative historical sociologist, wrote a series of books on The Sources of Social Power, presents this as a career capstone, surveying the entire history of war, from ancient to modern, asking why and concluding: "it is a handful of political leaders -- people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions -- who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results." While that's true enough of the past, when war was mostly fought for plunder, and as a contest for esteem among violent males, does any of that still make sense? Sure, we do still have would-be warriors, always with their minds stuck in past fantasies, but their track record over the last century (and perhaps much more) is so dismal they should be relegated to asylums (or professional sports?). An honest book, and I have no reason to think that this one isn't, would show as much, in endless detail, but the very question -- are wars rational? -- should be unthinkable, but lamentably is still here.

    John J Mearsheimer/Sebastian Rosato: How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (2023, Yale University Press): In order for the realist foreign policy to work, one must start by assuming the underlying rationality in all actors: that they understand their interests, that they can anticipate how various strategies will work or fail, and that they can adjust their strategy to their best advantage. Given that none of those assumptions are sound, it's hard to imagine why they call the resulting policy "realism." The authors have been critical of US foreign policy of late for being too bound up in ideology, and seek to rein that in with reason, but even their examples come out cock-eyed: Putin's decision to invade Ukraine may have been rigorously rational, but it was based on a set of plainly wrong assumptions, making it clearly a bad decision, one that has hurt Russia more than Putin could ever have hoped to gain. Same can be said for Bush in 2003 Iraq, except that the authors discard that decision in the irrational bucket. The two cases are remarkably similar, starting with the imagined own interests, the unacknowledged desire for independence, and the belief that overwhelming power ("shock and awe") would result in immediate capitulation.

    Samuel Moyn: Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023, Yale University Press): In the 1960s, I got very upset at liberals who supported the Vietnam War. Liberals were on top of the world in 1945, but by 1948 nearly all of them had been shamed, cajoled, and/or terrorized into turning on the left, both abroad, where the US converted failing European colonies into safe havens for further capitalist exploitation, and at home, where they allowed labor unions to be purged and curtailed. Liberalism's goal of freeing all individuals seemed revolutionary compared to the aristocracy, feudalism, and slavery that preceded it, but freedom was a two-edged sword, leaving losers far more numerous than winners. With the New Deal, some liberals started to bridge the gap with the left, offering a "safety net" to help tame the worst dysfunctions of capitalism. During the Cold War, liberals split into two camps: one turning neoconservative, the other still committed to the "safety net" but less so to labor unions, and not at all to solidarity with workers and the poor abroad. Moyn tackles this problem through six portraits of early post-WWII liberals: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling: not the first names I thought of, but suitable for purpose, which Moyn states clearly in his first line: "Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe -- for liberalism."

    Other recent books on liberalism (philosophy and its limits):

    • Russell Blackford: How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (paperback, 2023, Bloomsbury). [11-16]
    • Patrick J Deneen: Why Liberalism Failed (2018; paperback, 2019, Yale University Press): Conservative critic: note blurbs by Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Barack Obama; also note that Obama's is the most conventionally conservative. Deneen followed up with:
    • Patrick J Deneen: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023, Sentinel): Wherein he argues for replacing liberalism with a "pre-postmodern conservativism." I don't know which is more impossible: convincing the masses to give up on the promise of equality, or convincing the masters, having advanced through the "pursuit of happiness" (self-interest), to care responsibly for their charges.
    • Wolfram Eilenberger: The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times (2023, Penguin Press): Another batch of thinkers from Moyn's era, intersecting with Arendt.
    • Christopher William England: Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).
    • Edmund Fawcett: Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2014; 2nd edition, paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press). Author also has a mirror volume:
    • Edmund Fawcett: Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020; paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press).
    • John Gray: The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosopher with a long list of titles -- two I've previously cited are Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (2005) and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), but there are dozens more, including Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought (1996). [11-07]
    • Kei Hiruta: Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (2021, Princeton University Press).
    • Luke Savage: The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History (paperback, 2022, OR Books).
    • Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014; paperback, 2017, Belknap Press).
    • Brad Snyder: The House of Truth: A Washington Salon and the Foundations of Liberalism (2017, Oxford University Press): From 1912, with Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippman, etc.
    • Vikash Yadav: Liberalism's Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism (2023, University of Chicago Press).

    Samir Puri: The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World (2021, Pegasus Books): British, of both Indian and African heritage, an international relations professor with a background in diplomacy, has a newer book on Ukraine (see Zygar, below). The cover blurb by neo-imperialist Robert D Kaplan isn't promising, but there can be little doubt that the centuries of European imperialism have left lasting marks both on the former rulers and on the formerly ruled. I've argued that the essential mission of American foreign policy after WWII was to salvage the former colonies for capitalism, which mostly involved keeping local leaders on retainer, often arming them to suppress local rebellions, sometimes sending American troops in to do the job (as in Vietnam), and sometimes failing at that (ditto). The conceit that Americans still have of leading the "free world" is a residue of the imperial mindset. So was Britain's wish in 2003 to fight another war in Iraq. So is France's desire to "help out" in Mali and Niger. So is Russia's notion that Ukraine should be grateful for their civilization. For most people, imperialism was revealed as disaster and tragedy by WWII, but these residues linger on. It's hard to change bad habits until you're conscious of them. That I take to be the point of this book. Also (his book on Ukraine is listed under Mikhail Zygar):

    • Samir Puri: Pakistan's War on Terrorism: Strategies for Combatting Jihadist Armed Groups Since 9/11 (2011, Routledge).
    • Samir Puri: Fighting and Negotiating With Armed Groups: The Difficulty of Securing Strategic Outcomes (paperback, 2019, Routledge).
    • Samir Puri: The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World (2020; paperback, 2021, Atlantic Books): Original edition of The Shadows of Empire.

    James Risen: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys -- and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy (2023, Little Brown): A biography of three-term Senator Frank Church, the last Democrat from Idaho, an early critic of the Vietnam War, and perhaps best known for his investigations exposing all sorts of malfeasance by the CIA and FBI -- the Kennedys and the Mafia factor into this through the CIA plots against Cuba. No figure in American politics saw his reputation disintegrate more totally than J Edgar Hoover, and that was largely due to Church's discoveries. As I recall, the War Powers Act, much ignored by presidents from Reagan on, was another of his legacies.

    Christopher F Rufo: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023, Broadside Books): That's news to me, but so claims the guy touted as "America's most effective conservative intellectual [as he] proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation's institutions." The "ultimate objective" of this sinister conspiracy? "replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic 'diversity and inclusion' officials." In other words, this book is too stupid to even make fun of. Such a vast incomprehension is only to be pitied. (By the way, if you do want to make any sense of this, consider that the Marx and later leftists as the true apostles of Enlightenment liberalism, the ones who truly aspired to liberty and justice for all, as opposed to the would-be elites who jumped off the revolutionary train as soon as they secured their rights. "Thinkers" like Rufo recall that red-baiting worked once, so they assume it will work again. Had they actually read some Marx, they'd recall the quip about history repeating first as tragedy, then as farce.) Of course, there is more right-wing paranoid delusion coming your way:

    • Joe Allen: Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity (2023, War Room Books): Foreword by Stephen K Bannon claims the politics, although paranoia about globalists and cyborgs is not exclusively right-wing.
    • Glenn Beck/Justin Haskins: Dark Future: Uncovering the Great Reset's Terrifying Next Phase (2023, Forefront Books): Amazon flags this as "Best Seller in Fascism."
    • Jerome R Corsi: The Truth: About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation (2023, Post Hill Press): A list of subjects that nobody knows less about, starting with "truth."
    • Ted Cruz: Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America (2023, Regnery): US Senator (R-TX). [11-07]
    • Dinesh D'Souza: United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It. (2020, All Points Books).
    • Frank Gaffney/Dede Laugesen: The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party & Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (2023, War Room Books): "thanks to the American elites they have captured in every sector of our society."
    • Richard Hanania: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (2023, Broadside Books). [09-19]
    • Alex Jones/Kent Heckenlively: The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance (2023, Skyhorse). [10-31]
    • Jesse Kelly: The Anti-Communist Manifesto (2023, Threshold Editions).
    • Ian Prior: Parents of the World, Unite!: How to Save Our Schools From the Left's Radical Agenda (2023, Center Street).
    • Vivek Ramaswamy: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (paperback, 2023, Center Street): Republican presidential candidate.
    • Jason Rantz: What's Killing America: Inside the Radical Left's Tragic Destruction of Our Cities (2023, Center Street). Then why has living in them never seemed more desirable? (Or expensive?)
    • Michael Savage: A Savage Republic: Inside the Plot to Destroy America (2023, Bombardier Books): Presumably he's talking about someone else's plot that he imagines he has some insight into, rather than his own -- but after three Trump books, wouldn't a mea culpa be in order? [11-14]
    • Ben Shapiro: The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent (2021, Broadside Books).
    • Liz Wheeler: Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America's Kids (2023, Regnery): OANN host, a "titan of conservative media." [09-26] Previously wrote:
    • Liz Wheeler: Tipping Points: How to Topple the Left's House of Cards (2019, Regnery).
    • Xi Van Fleet: Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning (2023, Center Street). [10-31]
    • Kenny Xu: School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools & Why We Must Reclaim Them (2023, Center Street).

    It's worth noting that not everyone on this team right wants to seem insane. Some have written more sensible-sounding books, but they're usually based on the same paranoid assumptions. E.g.:

    • Greg Lukianoff/Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All -- but There is a Solution (2023, Simon & Schuster). [10-17]
    • Teresa Mull: Woke-Proof Your Life: A Handbook on Escaping Modern, Political Madness and Shielding Yourself and Your Family by Living a More Self-Sufficient, Fulfilling Life (paperback, 2023, Crisis Publications): Paranoia as self-help, including: learn to guard against "toxic empathy."
    • Dave Rubin: Don't Burn This Country: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia (2022, Sentinel). Also wrote:
    • Dave Rubin: Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason (2020, Sentinel).
    • Will Witt: Do Not Comply: Taking Power Back From America's Corrupt Elite (2023, Center Street). Also wrote:
    • Will Witt: How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies: Taking on Liberal Arguments With Logic and Humor (2021, Center Street).

    Paul Sabin: Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (2021, WW Norton): The New Deal produced a broad consensus that government could work with business (especially big business) and labor unions to benefit everyone. This was attacked relentlessly by conservative business interests, especially after 1970 when productivity slowed, inflation increased, and businesses decided they should be more predatory in order to maintain their expected level of profits. Nicholas Lemann sums up this shift in his Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019). Sabin's throwing another wrinkle into this story, arguing that the 1960-70s advent of "environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader" also contributed to the erosion of liberal faith in government. This strikes me as a bit far-fetched, as it's hard to imagine who they might expect other than a democratic government might stand up for public interests. It is true that the reputation of liberal politicians as public servants was damaged by various mistakes -- chief of which was the Vietnam War -- as well as a massive increase in corporate lobbying and media. But it is also true that "public citizens" accomplished much of what they had set out to before the political tide turned conservative. Where they failed was in not securing enough political power to protect the public's gains against the corporate lobbyists and political money.

    Joanna Schwartz: Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (2023, Viking): UCLA law professor, teaches courses on civil procedure, police accountability, and public interest lawyering. Police are very rarely held accountable for their prejudices, mistakes, judgment lapses, and unnecessary violence, as they are shielded by many layers, starting with their willingness to lie and cover for each other, their unions, administrators, lawyers (including prosecutors), judges, and enablers among the "law and order" politicians.

    More on police violence:

    • Justine Barron: They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up (2023, Arcade).
    • Devon W Carbado: Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment (2022, New Press).
    • Ben Cohen: Above the Law: How "Qualified Immunity" Protects Violent Police (paperback, 2021, OR Books).
    • Keith Ellison: Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence (2023, Twelve): Minnesota Attorney General, charged and convicted the police responsible for killing George Floyd.
    • Jamie Thompson: Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation (2020, Henry Holt).
    • Ali Winston/Darwin BondGraham: The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland (2023, Atria Books).

    Richard Norton Smith: An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R Ford (2023, Harper): A massive production (832 pp) for the House minority leader from Michigan, who got drafted to be Vice President to help bury the tarnished Spiro Agnew, then elevated to President to pardon and escape Richard Nixon, who then managed to hold off Ronald Reagan and secure the Republican nomination in 1976, only to lose to Jimmy Carter -- which set Reagan up nicely for 1980, in what really was one of the most adversely consequential elections of our lifetime. In his time, Ford was a guy who no one really hated, because he never was that important. But Republicans managed to name an aircraft carrier for him, and now he gets a big biography, even though the title admits he wasn't up to it.

    Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (2023, New Press): Author has several books on media, as well as two previous ones on war: War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005), and his memoir, Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters With America's Warfare State. This starts the selling of the Global War on Terror after 9/11, with how it was exploited when it was popular, and how as enthusiasm faded it gradually got swept out of sight. Still, one needs to look further back to get the point: Vietnam was touted as the "living room war" as daily broadcasts showed the war degenerating into a hopeless quagmire as dissent grew. If the military learned anything from that war, it was the importance of better managing the press. That seemed to work in the 1990 Gulf War, and the many embedded journalists in the 2003 drive to Baghdad did as they were told, but Iraq fell apart even faster than Vietnam, so the press was virtually shut down after Bremer left, with very few reporters free to dispute press office claims, and diminishing interest in finding out more.

    • Norman Solomon: False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era (paperback, 1994, Common Courage Press).
    • Norman Solomon: The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh (paperback, 1997, Common Courage Press).
    • Martin A Lee/Norman Solomon: Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (1990; paperback, 1998, Lyle Stuart).
    • Norman Solomon: The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in the Mainstream News (paperback, 2002, Common Courage Press).
    • Norman Solomon/Jeff Cohen: The Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News (paperback, 2002, Common Courage Press).
    • Norman Solomon/Reese Ehrlich: Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You (paperback, 2003, Context Books).

    Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (paperback, 2023, House of Anansi Press): Author of important books on democracy and the internet, activist in Occupy Wall Street and the Debt Collective, as sharp and as broadly knowledgeable as anyone writing today. These essays were written for the CBC Massey Lectures, but sum up a world view, for a world where politicians pride themselves as guardians of our security, while plunging us into ever greater precarity.

    Peter Turchin: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023, Penguin Press): Attempts to work out a scientific framework for comparative history, or rather claims to have worked one out, with a vast range of data points ("CrisisDB"), and is now intent on applying it to the anomaly that is present-day America. Much of this hangs on his concept of the over-production of elites (themselves a slippery concept, given that one can be elite in something without having effective power over anything else). The ability to jump so widely makes for a heady mix, but you mostly wind up grasping at hints.

    Mikhail Zygar: War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (2023, Scribner): A year after the invasion comes the first wave of books trying to explain how and why it happened -- most mixed in with more than a dollop of self-serving propaganda. This is one of the more credible prospects (at least I've found interviews with him to be credible): Zygar, a Russian now based in Berlin, has many years as an independent journalist, which got him close enough to write and distant enough to publish All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin. He starts here by going deep into history to show how Russians and Ukrainians came to hold very different views of each other -- a basic cognitive dissidence that American hawks, stuck with their own myths, show no interest in. Other recent books on the conflict (Matthews and Plokhy are most comparable, and Puri offers an interesting viewpoint; others are more specialized, running the range of views; none strike me as pro-Russian, but a couple are critical of the US):

    • Gilbert Achcar: The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China From Kossovo to Ukraine (paperback, 2023, Haymarket Books).
    • Dominique Arel/Jesse Driscoll: Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (paperback, 2023, Cambridge University Press): Noted as "new edition," but not clear when the old edition was published.
    • Yevgenia Belorusets: War Diary (paperback, 2023, New Directions).
    • Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict (paperback, 2022, OR Books): Co-founder of antiwar group Codepink.
    • Mark Edele: Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (paperback, 2023, Melbourne University Press).
    • Alexander Etkind: Russia Against Modernity (paperback, 2023, Polity): It's hard to disentangle Russia's war in Ukraine from the growth of a reactionary political philosophy (e.g., Alexsandr Dugin) that leads to such irredentism.
    • Ian Garner: Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth (2023, Hurst): Think tank guy, "focuses on Soviet and Russian war propaganda," believes it is believed.
    • Luke Harding: Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival (paperback, 2022, Vintage): Guardian journalist.
    • Maximilian Hess: Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West (2023, Hurst): Analyst for Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Key thing here is that the economic war has been going on since 2014. [10-15]
    • Andrey Kurkov: Diary of an Invasion (2023, Deep Vellum): Novelist, based in Kyiv.
    • Aaron Maté: Cold War, Hot War: How Russiagate Created Chaos From Washington to Ukraine (paperback, 2023, OR Books). Grayzone podcaster, works with Matt Taibbi. I think there's something to this, but Grayzone sells it so hard they come off as Russian propagandists. [12-05]
    • Owen Matthews: Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia's War Against Ukraine (2023, Mudlark): British journalist, former Newsweek Moscow bureau chief.
    • Jade McGlynn: Russia's War (2023, Polity): British "specialist in Russian media, memory, and foreign policy" at King's College, London.
    • Sergei Medvedev: A War Made in Russia (paperback, 2023, Polity): Based in Helsinki, previously wrote:
    • Sergei Medvedev: The Return of the Russian Leviathan (paperback, 2019, Polity): Putin and the "archaic forces of imperial revanchism."
    • Iuliia Mendel: The Fight of Our Lives: My Time With Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World (2022, Atria/One Signal): Ukrainian journalist, Zelensky's former press secretary.
    • Christopher Miller: The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (2023, Bloomsbury): Financial Times journalist, based in Kyiv.
    • David Petraeus/Andrew Roberts: Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Ukraine (2023, Harper). [10-17]
    • Serhii Plokhy: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (2023, WW Norton): Historian, has written books on Russia, also The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.
    • Bartosz Popko: Stories From Ukraine: The True Price of War (paperback, 2022, self-published): Collects 18 first-person perspectives.
    • Samir Puri: Russia's Road to War With Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires (2023, Biteback): British, of Indian heritage via Africa, was an international observer at five Ukrainian elections. Previously wrote: The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World.
    • Samuel Ramani: Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (2023, Hurst): British "Russia expert."
    • Serhii Rudenko: Zelensky: A Biography (paperback, 2023, Polity).
    • Gwendolyn Sasse: Russia's War Against Ukraine (paperback, 2023, Polity): "Einstein Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism" in Berlin. [11-20]
    • Philipp Ther: How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War (paperback, 2023, Polity): Covers a wide swath of European politics after 1989, as does his earlier book:
    • Philipp Ther: Europe Since 1989: A History (2016; paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press).
    • Serhiy Zhadan: Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches From the Ukrainian Front (2023, Yale University Press).

    Additional books, noted without comments other than for clarity. I reserve the right to return to some of these later (but probably won't; many are here because I don't want to think about them further).

    Michele Alacevich: Albert O Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography (2021, Columbia University Press): Second biography I've seen, after Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman (2013), reportedly stronger on Hirschman's economic theories.

    Charles Camic: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics (2020, Harvard University Press).

    Rachel Chrastil: Bismarck's War: The Frano-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (2023, Basic Books).

    James C Cobb: C Vann Woodward: America's Historian (2022, The University of North Carolina Press).

    Trae Crowder/Corey Ryan Forrester/Drew Morgan: The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark (paperback, 2017, Atria).

    Trae Crowder/Corey Ryan Forrester: Round Here and Over Yonder: A Front Porch Travel Guide by Two Progressive Hillbillies (Yes, That's a Thing) (2023, Harper Horizon).

    Sandrine Dixson-Declève/Owen Gaffney/Jayati Ghosh/Jorgen Randers/Johan Rockström/Per Espen Stoknes: Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity (paperback, 2022, New Society): "A Report to the Club of Rome (2022) Fifty Years After The Limits to Growth (1972)."

    Robert Elder: Calhoun: American Heretic (2021, Basic Books).

    Roland Ennos: The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (2020, Scribner).

    Samuel G Freedman: Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (2023, Oxford University Press).

    Newt Gingrich: March to the Majority: The Real Story of the Republican Revolution (2023, Center Street): Memoir of the 1994 election that made Gingrich Speaker of the House.

    Josh Hawley: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (2023, Regnery): US Senator (R-MO), famous Jan. 6 track star.

    David Horowitz: I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America (2021, Regnery).

    Robert Kagan: The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (2023, Knopf): Carries on from his 2006 book, Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy From Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

    Patrick Radden Keefe: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021, Doubleday).

    Cody Keenan: Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (2022, Mariner Books): Obama speechwriter, focuses on the speeches of 10 days in June 2015.

    Keith Kellogg: War by Other Means: A General in the Trump White House (2021, Regnery).

    Michael G Laramie: Queen Anne's War: The Second Contest for North America, 1702-1713 (2021, Westholme).

    Marc Levinson: The Box: How a Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (2nd edition paperback, 2016, Princeton University Press).

    Marc Levinson: Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed From Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (2020, Princeton University Press).

    Robert Lighthizer: No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers (2023, Broadside Books): Trump's US Trade Representative.

    Stephen A Marglin: Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory (2021, Harvard University Press): 928 pp.

    Ben Mezrich: The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees (2021, Grand Central).

    Walter Benn Michaels/Adolph Reed Jr: No Politics but Class Politics (paperback, 2023, Eris).

    Adolph L Reed Jr: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (2022, Verso).

    James Rickards: Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy (2022, Portfolio).

    Peter Robison: Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing (2021, Doubleday; paperback, 2022, Anchor).

    Kermit Roosevelt III: The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story (2022, University of Chicago Press).

    Julio Rosas: Fiery (But Mostly Peaceful): The 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America (2022, DW Books): Sees ANTIFA under every rock.

    Mike Rothschild: The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything (2021, Melville House).

    Marco Rubio: Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America's Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity (2023, Broadside Books).

    Kohei Saito: Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (paperback, 2017, Monthly Review Press).

    Kohei Saito: Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degworth Communism (paperback, Cambridge University Press): Argues that Marx had a long-suppressed ecological critique of capitalism.

    Craig Shirley: April 1945: The Hinge of History (2022, Thomas Nelson): Wrote Newt Gingrich's authorized biography.

    Thomas Sowell: Social Justice Fallacies (2023, Basic Books).

    David Stasavage: The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History From Antiquity to Today (2020, Princeton University Press).

    Greg Steinmetz: American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street's Biggest Fortune (2022, Simon & Schuster).

    James B Stewart/Rachel Abrams: Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy (2023, Penguin Press): The struggle for succession at Paramount Global.

    Cass R Sunstein: How to Interpret the Constitution (2023, Princeton University Press).

    Owen Ullmann: Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen's Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All (2022, Public Affairs).

    Volker Ullrich: Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis (2023, Liveright).

    Nikki Usher: News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (2021, Columbia University Press). Studying recent trends in newspapers, including the New York Times.

    Maurizio Valsania: First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press).

    Thomas D Williams: The Coming Christian Persecution: Why Times Are Getting Worse and How to Prepare for What Is to Come (2023, Crisis Publications): Catholic theologian.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Monday, September 18, 2023

    Music Week

    September archive (in progress).

    Music: Current count 40883 [40847] rated (+36), 28 [27] unrated (+1).

    New releases have started to pick up after the late-summer doldrums, so it's been easier to find things to listen to. One help was Robert Christgau's September Consumer Guide. Four full-A albums, three of them hyped enough I got to them previously: Olivia Rodrigo (A last week), Ashley McBryde and Speedy Ortiz (below, but written up, and commented on in Facebook, before the CG appeared). Both got multiple plays, with diminishing returns. Not that I can't hear why other people like them so much, but my own pleasure wore thin fast. I'm hardly the only guy to get cranky as he gets old, but felt it here.

    Nothing wrong with the Bobbie Nelson/Amanda Shires album, but doesn't strike me as a big deal either. Nor do I find comparisons to brother Willie's Stardust or Lady Gaga's Bennetts very helpful. As a jazz critic, I listen interpretations of standards all the time, so I need to be more discerning (or maybe again I'm just being cranky). On the other hand, I thought the Muldaur/Thompson record added something significant, albeit not revolutionary, to the original duets.

    The rest are below, aside from the ones I had previously dealt with: Rodney Crowell (**), Gloss Up (**), Killer Mike (***), Janelle Monae (A-), Thelonious Monk (B+), and Noname (A-, though I found several places where I hadn't updated the original *** grade). I might have given up too fast on the first two, but haven't rechecked. Discogs doesn't give a release date for my Monk box (3-CD), and the outside of the box doesn't help, but inside there's a hint that it came out in 1988. I can't find anything I wrote on it, so it was probably pre-2003. I also didn't grade the individual discs, as I sometimes did later -- but there's little to differentiate this set.

    I also picked up some suggestions from Brad Luen's Countrypop Life: Love and Theft. I still haven't tackled Morgan Wallen (or Bailey Zimmerman), and everyone else I'm either up or down on, but it's a good guide. I'll also note that I have tabs open for Christian Iszchak, Sidney Carpenter-Wilson, and Steve Pick -- none of which I've exhausted.

    I also took a look at Magnet's "30 for 30" lists by Dan Weiss and Thomas Reimel. Not very useful as checklists, as I've heard everything on the Weiss list, and I've only missed 2 items on Reimel's (although I had to look more up, as who remembers bands like Guided by Voices and Interpol?). I tried jotting down a list myself (or two, one comparable for non-jazz, one with zero overlap for jazz): in the notebook. I spent less than an hour on each, so they're pretty iffy -- especially the jazz one. I'd be delighted if Magnet had any interest in running my list. (I was assuming they had no interest in jazz, but I now see a review of Rempis Percussion Quartet's Harvesters in their Essential New Music section -- as well as another Guided by Voices album I haven't heard.)

    The new Lehman album is in a tight race with James Brandon Lewis's For Mahalia, With Love for jazz album of the year. It took me longer to get comfortable with, but that's the kind of prickly record it is. The other Lehman thing is one of the first things I noted in my infrequent "Limited Sampling" section, panned with a U-, so I was very surprised when it came through. By the way, the aforementioned Harvesters is currently a top-five jazz album this year.

    The Mike Clark album was another surprise -- not the first time he's surprised me, but he's got one of those names that gets easily mixed up with many others. Before I played Clark, I came within a hair of giving his long-time collaborator Eddie Henderson an A-, but afterwards this is the place to hear him.

    Still starting each day off with something old from the stacks. This morning: Tampa Red. Playing a new-old François Carrier/Tomasz Stanko box at the moment, which is sublime background.

    Another Speaking of Which yesterday (5894 words, 103 links). Got a late start Friday, as I spent Thursday cooking a small dinner for a friend's birthday. Just had a single dish: phat thai, something I make fairly often, as it's easy to keep the rice noodles in the pantry, shrimp in the freezer, eggs and scallions in the refrigerator (I buy fresh scallions every trip to the grocers, as they're always useful), peanuts, and the basic sauce ingredients. (We don't care much for the bean sprouts.) As it was a special occasion, I added a package of frozen sea scallops, and chunks of country ham I trimmed off the shank bone. For dessert, flourless chocolate cake. Couldn't be simpler, or better.

    Many oft-procrastinated projects await this week. The most important, and most daunting, one is getting mail working on the server. Weather around here is forecast to be neither hot nor cold, but rather wet.

    New records reviewed this week:

    The Chemical Brothers: For That Beautiful Feeling (2023, Virgin EMI): British techno duo, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, have been doing this a long time (debut 1995). Takes some time warming up, then overdoes it. B+(*) [sp]

    Mike Clark: Kosen Rufu (2022 [2023], Wide Hive): Drummer, like Eddie Henderson (who plays trumpet here) started with Herbie Hancock in the early 1970s, giving him a reputation for fusion that he's often strayed from. Besides Henderson, band here is an inspired mix: Skerik (tenor sax), Wayne Horvitz (keybs), Henry Franklin (bass), and Bill Summers (percussion). Hard bop, I guess, but not as throwback, some surprises here. A- [cd]

    Dave and Central Cee: Split Decision (2023, Neighbourhood, EP): British rappers, Dave Omoregie and Oakley Caesar-Su, two previous albums each (Dave's are much better), dropped this 4-song, 16:23 EP. B+(**) [sp]

    The Handsome Family: Hollow (2023, Loose): Husband-and-wife duo, Brett and Rennie Sparks, he from Texas and she from Long Island, he the singer (although he never seemed like a natural), eleventh studio album since 1994. They have a distinctive sound, but this seems slightly more refined, comfortable, and fascinated with the world. A- [sp]

    Eddie Henderson: Witness to History (2022 [2023], Smoke Sessions): Trumpet player, b. 1940, long career starting with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi fusion band, over two dozen albums as leader, several times that many side credits, notably since 2010 in the Cookers. Marks his 50th anniversary as a leader with this quintet: Donald Harrison (alto sax), George Cables (piano), Gerald Cannon (bass), and Lenny White (drums). Bright, powerful mainstream jazz. B+(***) [sp]

    Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (2023, Impulse!): Jazz group with poet-vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), eponymous debut 2017, core group: Aquiles Navarro (trumpet), Keir Neuringer (alto sax), Luke Stewart (bass), Tcheser Holmes (drums). Cosmic vibe rivals Sun Ra, but deadly serious words, and shooting star horns, and MVP bass. A- [sp]

    Laufey: Bewitched (2023, AWAL): Singer from Iceland, last name Jónsdóttir, mother Chinese, a classical violinist, second album, has some reputation in jazz but writes most of her material, most personal ballads ("the magic in the love of being young"). Does, however, include a cover of "Misty." B+(*) [sp]

    Steve Lehman/Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (2023, Pi): Alto saxophonist, a Braxton student, has a long list of outstanding albums from 2001, including complex octets and his African fusion Sélébéyone. ONJ is a venerable French organization, dating from 1986, directed since 2019 by Frédéric Maurin. I haven't followed them, but at least in this iteration, they're not just a budget big band. Maurin not only directed, but wrote 5 (of 11) pieces, as clever and tricky as Lehman's. This took me longer than usual, but surely will rank as one of the year's best. A- [cd]

    Ashley McBryde: The Devil I Know (2023, Warner Music Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2018. Her songwriting remains sharp as ever, but the drums hit you hard from the beginning (Christgau on her second album: "Nashville rock at its bigged-up schlockiest, with McBryde belting to match"). It's not all like that, but the half that is wears me out. And once that happens, the paean to whiskey and country music no longer seem so sharp. B+(**) [sp]

    Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023, Dead Oceans): Mitsuki Laycock, born in Japan with an American father who worked for the US State Department and dragged her around the world before settling in New York. Seventh studio album since 2012. One of the year's top-rated albums (Metacritic: 92/19), yet I find it almost totally opaque, requiring intense concentration to discern its artfulness -- orchestral shifts, background choirs, a real voice. B+(*) [sp]

    Victoria Monét: Jaguar II (2023, RCA): Pop singer-songwriter from Atlanta, first album after the 2020 EP Jaguar. B+(**) [sp]

    Megan Moroney: Lucky (2023, Sony Music Nashville): Country singer-songwriter (with help), from Georgia, first album, advance single won a CMT music award for "female breakthrough video of the year." Two self-deprecating songs feel ironic. Maybe she is lucky? B+(***) [sp]

    Jenni Muldaur/Teddy Thompson: Once More: Jenni Muldaur & Teddy Thompson Sing the Great Country Duets (2021-23 [2023], Sun): Maria Muldaur's daughter and Linda Thompson's son: she released albums in 1992 and 2009, he has a few more since 2000. They teamed up for a 4-song EP of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton duets in 2021, followed by another of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Those are rolled up here, along with four more from Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Aside from jazz (sometimes even there), we tend to deprecate repertory, but these sound great, near perfect till they ad lib a bit on "Pickin' Wild Mountain Berries," where they show more chemistry than Loretta and Conway could ever muster. A- [sp]

    Bobbie Nelson and Amanda Shires: Loving You (2021 [2023], ATO): Credit order given front, back, and center, but some sources insist on crediting the singer first, instead of the pianist, whose death last year gives the album meaning, as well as an excuse for a set of standards. Brother Willie drops in for a duet on "Summertime," which would be welcome on a mixtape of the fifty (maybe even thirty) best covers of the song ever. B+(***) [sp]

    Pretenders: Relentless (2023, Rhino): Chrissie Hynde, twelfth group album, band has turned over since 1978, although original drummer Martin Chambers returned, and guitarist James Walbourne co-wrote this batch of songs. B+(*) [sp]

    Joshua Redman: Where Are We (2023, Blue Note): Saxophonist (tenor certainly, usually some soprano), second generation, made a big splash with his 1992 debut. This one features vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa (front cover credit), backed by Aaron Parks (piano), Joe Sanders (bass), and Brian Blade (drums), with several guest spots. The songs come first, nice enough but not exceptional, the sax secondary, but every bit as nice. B+(**) [sp]

    Doug Richards Orchestra: Through a Sonic Prism: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (2022 [2023], self-released): Arranger and conductor, based in Richmond, running a standard big band with guitar, plus vocalist Laurie Ann Singh. Standard stuff, but very nicely, and credibly, done. B+(**) [cd]

    Jeff Rosenstock: Hellmode (2023, Polyvinyl): Singer-songwriter, fifth album, influenced by punk rock, not as austere, but noisy enough. B+(*) [sp]

    Speedy Ortiz: Rabbit Rabbit (2023, Wax Nine): Singer-songwriter Sadie Dupuis, plays guitar and synthesizer, plus a band that has completely turned over since their 2013 debut. Fourth album. Probably something there, but not for me. B+(*) [sp]

    Chris Stamey: The Great Escape (2023, Car): Pop singer-songwriter, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina; played in the Sneakers with Mitch Easter, but is best known for the dBs, with Peter Holsapple. Scattered records, first in 1982, more since 2013. Cover features a Pontiac GTO (1967?). B+(*) [sp]

    Teddy Thompson: My Love of Country (2023, self-released): British, but only one song here was written by a countryman, his father Richard Thompson. The others are what you'd expect: American, mostly country music hits, not what I think of as obvious classics but things I recognize, like "I Fall to Pieces," "Satisfied Mind," and "You Don't Know Me." B+(**) [sp]

    Tirzah: Trip9love (2023, Domino): British singer-songwriter, third album since 2018, produced by Mica Levi, similar to trip hop with more distortion. B+(*) [sp]

    Alex Ventling/Hein Westgaard: In Orbit (2021 [2023], Nice Things): Pianist ("home in both Switzerland and New Zealand" but based in Trondheim), in a duo with guitar. B+(**) [bc]

    Maddie Vogler: While We Have Time (2022 [2023], Origin): Alto saxophonist, based near Chicago, first album, all original compositions, sharp postbop sextet with trumpeter Tito Carrillo especially notable, plus guitar, piano, bass, and drums. B+(**) [cd]

    Morgan Wade: Psychopath (2023, Ladylife/RCA): Country singer-songwriter, from Virginia, second album, fine voice, solid-plus writing, a bit too much guitar-heavy production but not as annoying as McBryde. Christgau says this "exemplifies Nashville's evolution away from down home country toward a less regional style of autobiographical pop." That doesn't sound like a good idea to this old-timer, but the middle ground can still be fertile for someone with the talent to work it. A- [sp]

    Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

    Atmosphere: Sad Clown Bad Dub II (2000 [2023], Rhymesayers Entertainment): Minneapolis underground rap duo, still going, here with a new remaster of the 2003 authorized version of a bootleg. I figure they had three A- 1997-2002 albums. The beats and rhymes jump like they did back in that first flush of youth, but they don't all land. B+(**) [bc]

    John Blum: Nine Rivers (2013 [2023], ESP-Disk): Pianist, from New York, studied at Bennington with Bill Dixon and Milford Graves, also Borah Bergman and Cecil Taylor. Only a handful of records. This one is solo, harsh, dissonant, the first sounds suggesting prepared. B+(**) [cd]

    Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (1976 [1977], India Navigation): Tenor saxophonist (1940-2022), first album 1964, but during that period was closely engaged with John Coltrane, in a project that combined free and spiritual jazz. He recorded for Impulse! to 1973, then like many jazz musicians of the era, wasn't able to find another major label until 1998. This one came out on a small but important American label. Three pieces (40:20), with guitar (Tisziji Munoz), harmonium or organ, bass, and drums/percussion, with a vocal on "Love Will Find a Way." First side finds its groove. Second is a bit less successful. B+(***) [sp]

    Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah [Expanded Edition] (1976-77 [2023], Luaka Bop): This 2-LP reissue adds two live takes of the first-side piece, "Harvest Time," one from Middelheim, the other Willisau, with a quartet -- Khalid Moss (piano/electric), Hayes Burnett (bass), and Clifford Jarvis (drums) -- and the box includes a booklet I'll never see. B+(***) [bc]

    Old music:

    Steve Lehman: Xenakis and the Valedictorian (2020, Pi, EP): Early in the 2020 lockdown, Pi Recordings asked their artists to help fill the void with digital-only releases. Lehman contributed this "concise EP" (10 pieces, 9:06) of solo practice sessions, "recorded in the passenger seat of my 2011 Honda CR-V, from March 25 to April 15, 2020." The mathematician-composer Xenakis was on his mind, as he was thinking of his mother, unable to visit on her 80th birthday. She had "introduced me to an incredibly wide array of musicians and musical styles" -- he provides a list, but nothing nearly as far out as her choice of "Bohor" as theme music for his 10th birthday party. I hated the 46 seconds Pi made public on their Bandcamp page, but this turns out to be really remarkable. I'm even a bit reminded of an experience I had with Xenakis long ago, where I left with a visceral impression of what the eye of a tornado must sound like. A- [dl]

    Jenni Muldaur: Jenni Muldaur (1992, Reprise): Geoff & Maria Muldaur's daughter (b. 1965), got this one shot at recording a big-time studio album, with producer Russ Titelman pulling out all the stops: tapping David Sanborn for a sax spot, Andy Fairweather Low for a bit of slide guitar, letting Donald Fagen arrange the Brecker brothers for another. Nothing per sé bad, but not much personality emerges. B [sp]

    Grade (or other) changes:

    Otis Spann: Otis Spann Is the Blues (1960, Candid): Surprised, when Candid reissued it last year, I had this graded so low. Then I remember that the one I liked better was Walking the Blues (also 1960). [was: B] B+(**) [cd]

    Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

    • Jeff Coffin/Jordan Perlson/Viktor Krauss: Coffin/Perlson/Krauss (Ear Up) [09-15]
    • Caroline Davis' Alula: Captivity (Ropeadope) [10-13]
    • Tomas Fujiwara: Pith (Out of Your Head) [09-15]
    • Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (self-released) [09-15]
    • Elsa Nilsson's Band of Pulses: Pulses (Ears & Eyes) [10-06]
    • Brad Turner Quintet: The Magnificent (Cellar) [09-22]
    • Peter Xifaras: Fusion (Music With No Expiration) [10-01]

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, September 17, 2023

    Speaking of Which

    Started this on Friday, not with much enthusiasm, so many of the early links I collected are just that. The comment on Levitz under "Legal matters" is probably where I got started, after which I found the Current Affairs interview.

    I've tried of late to articulate moderate positions that one might build a viable political consensus around, but lately I'm despairing, not so much of the popular political potential as of the probability that nothing possible will come close to what is actually needed.

    Back when I was a teenage schizophrenic, I was able to pursue the two paths -- on the one hand I poured over political stats as nerdishly as Kevin Phillips, on the other I immersed myself in utopian fantasy writing -- without ever trying to reconcile them. As an old man, I find once boundless time closing in, and shutting down.

    Just a few years ago, I was thinking that the worst failures in American politics were opportunity costs: wasting time and resources that could be used on big problems while doing stupid things instead (like $800B/year on useless "defense" spending). But it's looking more and more like the problem is one of cognitive dysfunction, where there is little to no hope of convincing enough of a majority that problems are problems, and that their fantasies aren't.

    Top story threads:

    Trump: He was having a slow week, until NBC offered him a free infomercial (see Berman, below). He is now virtually assured of the Republican nomination, but also of a margin of free publicity even exceeding his bounty in 2016 and 2020.

    DeSantis, and other Republicans: The Florida governor has done little to justify being singled out, but Steve M [09-17] assures us: Ron DeSantis is still first runner-up, based on a recent straw poll. He also argues, "I'd like DeSantis to be the nominee, because he appears to be a much weaker general election candidate than Trump," and has some charts that seem to support his case.

    • Olivia Alafriz: [09-16] Texas Senate acquits AG Ken Paxton on all corruption charges: His impeachment moved me to ask the question, "when was the last time an office holder was deemed too corrupt for the Texas lege?" Since I never got an answer, I don't know whether they lowered the bar, or never had one in the first place. But this was the only opportunity since Nixon for Republicans to discipline one of their own, and they've failed spectacularly.

    • Jonathan Chait: [09-13] Mitt Romney and the doomed nobility of Republican moderation: "The party's last antiauthoritarian walks away." It's silly to get all bleary-eyed here. He isn't that moderate, noble, and/or antiauthoritarian. Chait quotes Geoffrey Kabaservice, totally ignoring the face that Romney ran hard right from day one of his 2012 (or for that matter his 2008) campaign, going so far as to pick Koch favorite Paul Ryan as his VP. And he's old enough to make his age concerns credible. And he's rich enough he doesn't need the usual post-Senate sinecure on K Street. That he also took the opportunity to chide Biden and Trump is also typical of his considerable self-esteem. But it also saves him the trouble of having to run not on his name but on his record -- much as he did after one term as governor of Massachusetts. Also on Romney:

    • Sarah Jones: [09-13] The enemies of America's children. This could be more partisan, not that Joe Manchin doesn't deserve to be called out, but he's only effective as a right-wing jerk because he's backed up by a solid block of 49-50 Republicans. Relevant here:

      • Paul Krugman: [09-14] America betrays its children again: "child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022." That's almost exclusively because "Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years." "Handful" seems a generous counting of two Senators.

    • Nikki McCann Ramirez: [09-14] DeSantis lived large on undisclosed private flights and lavish trips: What is it about Republican politicians that makes them think that just because they cater to every whim of their billionaire masters, they're entitled to live like them?

    • Bill Scher: [09-14] A shutdown will be the GOP's fault, and everyone in Washington knows it.

    • Matt Stieb: [09-15] New, gentler Lauren Boebert booted from Beetlejuice musical: Another reminder that the most clueless thing a politician can say to a cop is: "do you know who I am?" [PS: Later updated: "New, gentler Lauren Boebert apologizes for Beetlejuice fracas."]

    • Tessa Stuart: [09-16] The GOP is coming after your birth control (even if they won't admit it).

    • Li Zhou: [09-13] Republicans' unfounded impeachment inquiry of Biden, explained: "House Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed an inquiry despite no evidence of Biden's wrongdoing." More on impeachment:

      • Jonathan Chait: [09-13] Republicans already told us impeachment is revenge for Trump: "They did it to us!"

      • Peter Baker: [09-14] White House strategy on impeachment: Fight politics with politics. Steve M comments: "Are House Republicans really trying to impeach President Biden, or do they just want him under a cloud of suspicion?" The only way impeachment succeeds is if the other party break ranks. For a brief moment, Clinton seemed to consider the possibility of resigning, then decided to rally his supporters, and came out ahead. (In American Crime Story, Hillary was the one who straightened out his spine.) That was never a possibility with Trump, but at least the Democrats had pretty compelling stories to tell -- whether that did them any good is an open question. Now, not only is there no chance that Biden and the Democrats will break, the only story Republicans have is one their sucker base is already convinced of. So "cloud of suspicion" seems to be about all they can hope for.

    Biden and/or the Democrats: Big week for Democratic Party back-biting. I find this focus at the top of the ticket silly and distracting. True, Trump decided that "America is Great Again" the moment he took office, but Democrats surely know that inaugurating Biden was just the first step, and that lots of big problems were left over, things that couldn't be solved quickly, especially as Republicans still held significant levers of power and press, and were doing everything possible to cripple Democratic initiatives. So why do Democrats have to run on defending their economy, their immigration, their crime, their climate, etc.? They can point to good things they've done, better things they've wanted to do, and above all to the disastrous right shift in politics since 1980. Is that so hard to understand?

    • Liza Featherstone: [09-15] We need bigger feelings about Biden's biggest policies: "Anyone who doesn't want Trump to serve another term must learn to love the Inflation Reduction Act, and despise those who seek its destruction." This sentiment runs against every instinct I have, as I've spent all my life learning to deconstruct policies to find their intrinsic flaws and their secret (or more often not-so-secret) beneficiaries. IRA has a lot of tax credits and business subsidies for doing things that are only marginally better than what would happen without them. Even if I'm willing to acknowledge that's the way you have to operate in Washington to get anything done, I hate being told I need to be happy about it. But as a practical matter, none of these things -- and same is true of the two other big bills and dozens or hundreds of smaller things, many executive orders -- would have been done under any Republican administration, Trump or no Trump. And while what Biden and the Democrats have accomplished is still far short of what's needed, sure, they deserve some credit.

    • Eric Levitz: [09-13] The case for Biden to drop Kamala Harris: "The 80-year-old president probably shouldn't have an exceptionally unpopular heir apparent." What's unclear here is why she's so unpopular. The whole identity token thing may have helped her get picked, works against her being taken seriously, but probably makes her even harder than usual to dump. But before becoming Biden's VP pick, she was a pretty skilled politician, so why not put her out in public more, get her doing the "bully pulpit" thing Biden's not much good at anyway, give her a chance?

    • Andrew Prokop: [09-12] Why Biden isn't getting a credible primary challenger: "Many Democrats fear a challenge would pave the way to Trump's victory." Responds to a question raised by Jonathan Chait with my default answer, and pointing to four cases where incumbent presidents were challenged (Johnson in 1968, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and Bush in 1992) that resulted in the other party winning. Chait, by the way, replies here: [09-15] Challenging Biden is risky. So is nominating him. Steve M comments here: [09-15] Do we really want to endure the 2028 Democratic primary campaign in 2024? Evidently, there's also a David Ignatius piece, but wrong about pretty much everything, so I haven't bothered.

    • Katie Rogers: [09-11] 'It is evening, isn't it?' An 80-year-old President's whirlwind trip: Raises the question, will the New York Times ever again publish an article on Biden that doesn't mention his age? I don't know whether his trip to India and Vietnam was worthwhile, either for diplomatic or political reasons. I am not a fan of his efforts to reinvigorate American leadership after the chaotic nonsense of the Trump years: somehow, I rather doubt that "America's back" is the message the world has been clamoring for.

      I was taken aback by Heather Cox Richardson's tweet on this article (my comment here), but her write up on September 11, 2023 is exceptionally clear and straightforward, much better reporting than the NY Times seems capable of.

    Legal matters and other crimes:

    • Josh Gerstein/Rebecca Kern: [09-14] Alito pauses order banning Biden officials from contacting tech platforms. The case has to do with whether the government can complain to social media companies about their dissemination of false information about the pandemic. One cherry-picked judge thinks doing so violated the free speech rights of the liars whose posts were challenged, so he issued a sweeping ban against the government. (That's what Alito paused, probably because the case is so shoddy he knows it won't stand.)

      For a laugh, see Jason Willick: [09-15] Worried about Trump? You should welcome these rulings against Biden. This is bullshit for two reasons. One is that rulings like this are deeply partisan, so there's no reason to expect that a restriction on a Democratically-run government would also be applied to a Republican-run one. And secondly, Republicans (especially Trump) would be promoting falsehoods, not trying to correct them. We already saw a perfect example of this in Trump's efforts to gag government officials to keep them from so much as mentioning climate change.

    • Eric Levitz: [09-12] Prisons and policing need to be radically reformed, not abolished. This is not a subject I want to dive into, especially as I pretty much agree with all nine of the issues he talks about (6 where abolitionists are right, 3 where they are wrong). One more point I want to emphasize: we use an adversarial system of prosecutors and defenders, each side strongly motivated to win, regardless of the truth. More often than not, what is decisive is the relative power of the adversaries (which is to say, the state beats individuals, but also the rich beat the poor, which gives rich defendants better chances than poor defendants). Some of this is so deeply embedded it's hard to imagine changing it, but we need a system that seeks the truth, and to understand it in its complexity (or simple messiness).

      Levitz properly questions the desire for retribution driving long sentences, but I also have to question the belief that long sentences and harsh punishments (which is part of the reason why jails are so cruel) deter others from committing crimes. Sure, they do, except when they don't (e.g., mass murder as a recipe for suicide by cop), but the higher the stakes, the less motive people have to admit the truth. Also, as in foreign policy, an emphasis on deterrence tends to make one too arrogant to seek mutually-beneficial alternatives. A lot of crimes are driven by conditions that can be avoided or treated.

      Finally, we need to recognize that excessive punishment is (or should be) itself criminal, that it turns us into the people we initially abhor, a point rarely lost on the punished. And one which only makes the punishers more callous. The big problem with capital punishment isn't that it's cruel or that it's so hard to apply it uniformly or that some people don't deserve it. The problem is that such deliberate killing is murder, and as done by the state is even colder and more deliberate than the murders being avenged.

    • Ian Millhiser:

    • Andrew Prokop: [09-14] The indictment of Hunter Biden isn't really about gun charges: "Prosecutors are moving aggressively because the plea deal fell apart. But why did it fall apart?" Also:

      By the way, no one's answered what seems to me the obvious question: has anyone else ever been prosecuted for these "crimes" before (standalone, as opposed to being extra charges tacked onto something else)? Also, doesn't the Fifth Amendment provide some degree of protection even if you don't explicitly invoke it?

    • Li Zhou: [09-15] The fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants is caught in an endless court fight: "The high stakes of the latest DACA decision, explained."

    • Current Affairs: [09-15] Exposing the many layers of injustice in the US criminal punishment system: Interview with Stephen B Bright and James Kwak, authors of The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. Particularly check out the section on privatized probation companies, which have come about due to the belief that "the private sector can do things better than the government," and that "there is a lot of legal corruption at all levels of government."

    Climate and environment:

    The UAW strike:

    Ukraine War: I find it curious that despite all the "notable progress" the New York Times has claimed for Ukraine's counteroffensive (most recently, retaking the village of Andriivka), they haven't updated their maps page since June 9. Zelensky is coming to America next next week, to speak at the UN and to meet Biden in Washington.

    Israel: This is 30 years after the Oslo Accords, which promised to implement a separate Palestinian state in (most of) the Occupied Territories, after an interval of "confidence building" which Israel repeatedly sabotaged, especially by continuing to cater to the settler movement. The agreements put the Intifada behind, while seeding the ground for the more violent second Intifada in 2000, brutally suppressed by a Sharon government which greatly expanded settlement activity. The PLO was partly legitimized by Oslo, then reduced to acting as Israeli agents, and finally discredited, but was kept in nominal power after being voted out by Hamas, ending democracy in Palestine. Middle East Eye has a whole series of articles on this anniversary, including Joseph Massad: From Oslo to the end of Israeli settler-colonialism.

    Iran: One step forward (prisoner swap), one step back (more sanctions as the US tries to claim Iranian protests against police brutality and repression of women -- issues the US is not exactly a paragon of virtue on).

    Around the world:

    Other stories:

    Ana Marie Cox: [09-14] We are not just polarized. We are traumatized.

    Constance Grady: [09-13] The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions: "In Walter Isaacson's buzzy new biography, Elon Musk emerges as a callous, chaos-loving man without empathy." Proof positive that no one should be as rich and powerful as he is, and not just because he is who he is.

    Sean Illing: [09-12] Democracy is the antidote to capitalism: Interview with Astra Taylor, who has a new book: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.

    Noel King: [09-15] 5 new books (and one very old one) to read in order to understand capitalism: A podcast discussion. The old one is The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, which is somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated than is commonly remembered. (For one thing, the "invisible hand" is basically a joke.) The new ones:

    • Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Nov. 2023)
    • David Gelles: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America -- and How to Undo His Legacy (2022)
    • Martin Wolf: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023)
    • Jason Hickel: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

    I'm not sure what I'd recommend instead, but here are a couple ideas: George P Brockway's The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics is my bible on economics, so I'd gladly swap it for Smith. Zachary D Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes is all you need on Friedman, plus a lot more. There are lots of books on recent economic plunder. I'm not sure which one(s) to recommend, but Jeff Madrick's Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970s to the Present is good on the bankers, and the Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson books, from The Great Risk Shift to Let Them Eat Tweets, are good on the politics (also Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew). Hope Jahren's The Story of More is an elegant if somewhat less political alternative to Hickel.

    Dylan Matthews: [09-14] Lead poisoning could be killing more people than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined.

    Kim Messick: [09-09] The American crack-up: Why liberalism drives some people crazy.

    Andrew O'Hehir: [09-14] Naomi Klein on her "Doppelganger" -- the "other Naomi" -- and navigating the far-right mirror universe. Klein's new book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which starts by noting the tendency people have of confusing her with Naomi Wolf, then goes beyond that to show how much propaganda from the right picks up memes from the left and twists them for the opposite effect. Also:

    • Jacob Bacharach: [09-06] Is Naomi Klein's Doppelganger weird enough? Criticism that promises more than it delivers, perhaps tipped off by the by far most unflattering pics of the Naomis I've seen.

    • Laura Wagner: [09-11] In Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, Naomi Wolf is more than a gimmick.

    • Adrienne Westenfeld: [09-12] Naomi Klein's double trouble: An interview with the author.

    • Democracy Now: [09-14] Naomi Klein on her new book Doppelganger & how conspiracy culture benefits ruling elite: I watched this, which is a good but not great interview, but the reason I looked it up was a turn of phrase that struck me as peculiar. Klein notes that:

      When I would confess to people I knew that I was working on this book, sometimes I would get this strange reaction like, "Why would you give her attention?" There was this sense that because she was no longer visible in the pages of The New York Times or on MSNBC or wherever, and because she had been deplatformed on social media -- or on the social media that we're on -- that she just didn't exist. And there was this assumption that "we," whoever we are, are in control of the attention, and so if this bigot gets turned off then there's no more attention.

      Of course, the New York Times reference is the one that sticks in my craw, because I've never viewed them as "we," or even bothered to read the thing on my own dime (or whatever it costs these days, which is surely lots more). Klein's point is that there is a lucrative right-wing media universe that welcomes and supports people who lose their perch among the moderate elites. My complaint is that the Times excludes more viewpoints from the left than it does from the right, and those from the left are essential to understanding our world (whereas those from the right are mostly promoting misunderstanding).

    Jeffrey St Clair: [09-15] Roaming Charges: Just write a check. First fourth of the column is devoted to outrageous police behavior: example after example, impossible to summarize more briefly. Then he moves on to the War on Terror.

    Scott Wilson: [09-15] Outflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of Idaho. There are several such secessionist movements, including rural parts of Washington and California, where the population is so sparse their reactionary leanings have little effect at the state level. I only mention this because Greg Magarian did, adding: "Huh -- living in a state where your political opponents get to impose their values on you. I wonder what the &@%$# that's like." Magarian lives in St. Louis, so he very well knows what that's like. One could imagine St. Louisans opting to join Illinois. If that happened, and especially if Kansas City also defected to Kansas (which is closer to tipping Democratic than Missouri would be without its two big cities, and would also save Kansas from trying to poach their teams), the rest of Missouri might as well be part of Arkansas. In states where Republicans hold power, they're constantly passing state laws to disempower local governments that may elect Democrats. Florida and Texas have gotten the most press on that front lately, but they've done that all over the map, a bunch of times even here in Kansas. I'm not aware of Democrats behaving like that.

    I finished reading EJ Hobsbawm's brilliant and encyclopedic The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Only disappointment was that I expected more details on the 1848 revolutions, but Hobsbawm just tiptoes up to the brink, satisfied as he is with the "two revolutions" of his period (French and Industrial, or British). I still have Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 on the proverbial bedstand, but I also have several more books I'd like to get to. I need to make a decision tonight.

    Books post is still in progress, with 23 (of a typical 40) books in the draft main section, and 62 partials and 229 noted books. Looking back at the April 28, 2023 Book Roundup, I see that I was thinking of cutting the chunk size down, perhaps to 20, to get shorter and more posts, but also because the length of 40 has grown significantly with supplemental lists. I need to think about that. I certainly have much more research I can (and should) do. The current draft file runs 15,531 words, of which about 1/3 is in the finished section.

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