The French romanticists, as well as the German, always spoke scathingly of bourgeois morality and philistine life. More than that, they wore long hair, flirted with a green complexion, and for the ultimate shaming of the bourgeoisie, Theophile Gautier put on a sensational red vest. —Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Greetings from the far left coast where the Rose City ushers in summer with Rose Festival 2022: fireworks, concerts, parades, CityFair, the Starlight Run, dragon boat races, and a bunch more stuff.
My poem "This Flare of Existence" appears in Steam Ticket Vol. 25 Spring 2022.
Cinema Desk. Three films with Virginie Efira.
Victoria (2016). Also known as Sleeping with Victoria and In Bed with Victoria. Dir.: Justine Triet. Victoria (Efira) is an attorney, divorced, with two young daughters and a chaotic life. Against her better judgment she agrees to represent an old friend accused of stabbing his girlfriend at their wedding party. At the same party she runs into a former client she got out on a drug charge. She needs a babysitter, the former client is jobless and needs a place to stay, so she takes him on as her au pair boy. Her ex-husband writes autofiction with confidential details about former clients and sleeping with judges during her sex maniac phase. Meanwhile, she has dates in her bedroom with guys she meets online who are put out of the mood by her incessant chattering. Her therapist and her tarot card reader are no help with any of it. A wacky comedy, frivolous but entertaining.
The other two are more substantive.
Night Shift (2020). Orig. title: Police. Dir.: Anne Fontaine. Also features Omar Sy and Grégory Gadebois. Three Paris police officers with an array of personal baggage among them experience a crisis of conscience when assigned to escort a refugee to the airport to be deported to Tajikistan where he will probably be executed. Suspenseful, intense, with fine performances all around.
The Sense of Wonder (2015). Orig. title: Le goût des merveilles. Dir.: Éric Besnard Louise (Efira), a widow with two young children, is struggling to pay off debts and save her small farm. Her life takes a turn when she hits a strange man who runs in front of her car on a country road near her house. She takes him to the house to bandage a scrape on his forehead. From the start his behavior is bizarre, not threatening, but by turns endearing and annoying. Soon it seems she cannot be rid of him even after delivering him to the bookshop where he lives and the old bookdealer who takes care of him. This one is a really nice little film with charm I could not resist.
Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, proposes a fresh take on the debate about race, racism, and race relations in a recent article (America Needs Anti-Racialism, May 26, 2022):
Although there is widespread agreement that the state of race relations in America is a matter of urgent concern, there is deep disagreement over the nature of the problem. Is it the persistence of racial disparities in income, wealth, and elite representation, regardless of whether they’re the product of state-enforced racial discrimination or the uneven distribution of social capital across families and informal networks at a given point in time? Or is the problem the brightness of the boundaries separating minority ethnic groups from the societal mainstream? Call this the distinction between anti-racists and anti-racialists. Both want racial progress, but they have a drastically different understanding of what racial progress would look like.
While Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones come immediately to mind as prominent proponents of anti-racism, it is among white liberals that anti-racism has its real foothold.
Over roughly the past decade, anti-racism has made huge inroads in liberal institutions, including universities, media, and the Democratic Party. This shift has trickled down through the wider Democratic electorate, especially among educated and affluent Democrats, for whom anti-racism has become an intellectual lodestar.
Salam cites research conducted by a doctoral student in political science at Georgia State University (okay, a grad student, but heck, I'm here writing like I know what I'm talking about) showing that
white liberals consistently express stronger agreement with many tenets of the anti-racist worldview than do minorities. More generally, as the Democratic Party has become more and more identified with anti-racism, it has actually shed support among nonwhite people, especially Hispanics.
He proposes a distinction between whiteness and mainstreamism, "a more inclusive and capacious concept":
anti-racialism speaks to the emergence of a new multiethnic mainstream, which marks a departure from the system of minority- and majority-race relations that prevailed for most of American history. Put simply, mainstream American culture is no longer "white" in any narrow sense.
The heart of the argument is that expansion of the mainstream is what matters to many members of nonwhite minority groups and the tenets of anti-racism work against that expansion:
If liberal anti-racism is grounded in the idea that raising the salience of race is essential to achieving racial justice, anti-racialism holds that heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress.
It's a short piece, worth reading in full and pondering.
Two new blog posts:
- The Right to Procure Means to Annihilate Our Fellow Humans for Whatever Twisted Reason Possesses Us. May 25, 2022. Within less than a fortnight we have nineteen children and two teachers dead in a Texas school plus the shooter's grandmother, surviving in critical condition, ten people killed in a Buffalo supermarket, a random slaying on a New York subway…read more>>
- Strategic Interests and the Better Angels of Our Nature. May 31, 2022. Critics of US support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian hegemony span the ideological spectrum from MAGA right to doctrinaire left. Their number is small but vocal, and in some quarters well funded. Their capacity to influence public opinion and shape policy may well grow…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: corner of 3rd and Jefferson, downtown Portland, across from Lonsdale Square Park (I think that's the one)
