Books can reflect the times in which they were written, but they also show us the author, and no one can accuse Roth of ever hiding who he was: American, Jewish, obsessed with sex, obsessed with death, funny, angry, wise, profane, imaginative, cruel.… Reducing him to one aspect of his biography is like reading the York Notes version of his books. There is a difference between reckoning with the past, and seeing only one colour of the rainbow. —Hadley Freeman, A new biography ‘unveils’ Philip Roth as a misogynist. Tell me something I don’t know, The Guardian, April 3, 2021
Good grief, it's the 15th already. How did that happen? Good news from the left coast is that we are enjoying a stretch of wonderful weather. I'm running in shorts. Temperature is to creep up into the 80s over the weekend. Less good news is that it is unusually warm and dry for this time of year out where the coffee shops flourish and anarchist mobs maraud. This does not bode well for summer and the fire season.
My recent blog post The Writer at Work opens with a lengthy digression about the denunciation of John Berryman in The New York Review of Books for writing in blackface with Henry's alter ego Mr. Bones in The Dream Songs, a series of poems Berryman began writing in the 1950s, collected and published in 1969 (Kamran Javadizadeh, 'The Roots of Our Madness'). After publishing the essay I had second thoughts about including those opening paragraphs. It might have been better to use them as the basis for a separate essay about current fashions in literary criticism and sociological analysis. Berryman's remark that you never know if the writing is good is the relevant point for last week's piece.
The Georgia election law is objectionable on numerous points. We could do without the hyperbole and loose rhetoric that gets the debate bogged down in wrangling over whether it does or does not represent a return to Jim Crow..
Here are a few articles that I found useful for reference:
- Zack Beauchamp, Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad, Vox, April 6, 2021
- Nick Corasaniti, Reid J. Epstein, What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does, The New York Times, April 2, 2021
- Jonathan V. Last, Reading the Republican Autopsy, The Bulwark, April 13, 2021
- Andrew Prokop, Why some Democrats are quietly unhappy with the House’s big voting rights bill, Vox, April 5, 2021
- Derek Thompson, The Truth About Georgia’s Voter Law, The Atlantic, April 8, 2021
- Kim Wehle, Here’s How the Texas GOP Wants to Restrict Voting, The Bulwark, April 14, 2021
Corasanti and Epstein at The New York Times provide text of specific provisions of the legislation and succinct analysis clarifying elements that are genuinely problematic. Prokop examines HR1, the voting rights bill passed by House Democrats, which has problems of its own.
Zack Beauchamp contends that while liberal/progressive critics of overblown criticism make some good points, those points are minor in the context of a law whose existence is predicated on a fabrication:
The Georgia bill is not merely the sum of its provisions in a country where 60 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election "was stolen" from Trump through voter fraud—it validates a lie that is corroding American democracy. It also extends and deepens a much older Republican campaign to rig the system in their favor.
"The conversation is something like the mid-2000s debate over whether torture works. It basically doesn’t, but to even have that debate is to have surrendered something" (Seth Masket, political scientist at University of Denver, quoted by Beauchamp).
I may sometimes come off like a PR flack for The Bulwark. That happens because the website publishes some really sharp people. Kim Wehle and Jonathan V. Last are two of the best. Both wrote columns on Republican efforts to restrict voting that are worth reading in full. Wehle's conclusion:
It’s a sad reality that the Republican party is no longer even pretending to justify voter restrictions based on elusive fraud—that horse was beaten to death in the dozens of failed lawsuits following the November election. Nor is the GOP aiming to strengthen its influence by expanding its base with attractive policy initiatives and reforms. There is only one major political party left in America that is committed to a representative democracy. The other is stealthily lobbying for a different kind of government altogether—and it’s an ugly one. (Kim Wehle)
Last examines Republican calculations for winning the White House in 2020 while losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College:
You can win the presidency even while getting blown out in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, provided your party:
- Controls the House and Senate.
- Constitutes a congressional majority in 26 states.
- Has sufficient raw political will.
Conclusion:
This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law—where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power.
And here is a serious question: If Republicans managed enough votes to sustain an objection to counting Electoral Votes, what would our recourse be? Crossing our fingers and hoping that the Supreme Court steps in?
What we are seeing—in broad daylight—is another proof of the idea that democracy runs on the honor system. If you have two parties and one of them is openly attempting to subvert democracy…well, good luck.
The time to fight against authoritarianism isn’t December 2024. It’s now.
The BBC reports that Israeli public radio cited intelligence sources saying that the attack on Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz was a Mossad cyber-operation. Israel's aims would be to sabotage US attempts to renew the nuclear deal and, more ambitiously, draw the US into war within Iran. There is also speculation that Netanyahu hopes that a crisis with Iran will lead the country to rally around him, which could help the beleaguered hack stay out of jail.
L'affaire Matt Gaetz. Ah, greatness. MAGA MAGA. Enough said.
The San Francisco school board's proposal to rename schools, which I examined briefly in A Spirit of Inquisition, has been unceremoniously dropped for the time being. The board's president acknowledged in a statement that mistakes were made and said that historians will be engaged for "a more deliberative process" when the issue is revisited at some future date (Associated Press, San Francisco school board drops plan to rename ‘injustice-linked’ schools, The Guardian, April 7, 2021). Let us celebrate a small victory.
Keep the faith.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: scene from the neighborhood happened on during afternoon wandering
