Stop Press! Mencken’s Obituary for William Jennings Bryan

Shortly after the famous Scopes Trial, the first trial ever broadcast live on national radio, William Jennings Bryan died. H.L. Menken was less than kind to him in this anti-thesis of a eulogy. This is easily the most vicious, scathing obituary I have ever read.

William Jennings Bryan

It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him -- that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.

When I first encountered him, on the sidewalk in front of the Hicks brothers law office, the trial was yet to begin, and so he was still expansive and amiable. I had printed in the Nation, a week or so before, an article arguing that the anti-evolution law, whatever its unwisdom, was at least constitutional -- that policing school teachers was certainly not putting down free speech. The old boy professed to be delighted with the argument, and gave the gaping bystanders to understand that I was a talented publicist. In turn I admired the curious shirt he wore -- sleeveless and with the neck cut very low. We parted in the manner of two Spanish ambassadors.

But that was the last touch of affability that I was destined to see in Bryan. The next day the battle joined and his face became hard. By the end of the first week he was simply a walking malignancy. Hour by hour he grew more bitter. What the Christian Scientists call malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a stove. From my place in the court-room, standing upon a table, I looked directly down upon him, sweating horribly and pumping his palm-leaf fan. His eyes fascinated me: I watched them all day long. They were blazing points of hatred. They glittered like occult and sinister gems. Now and then they wandered to me, and I got my share. It was like coming under fire.

II

What was behind that consuming hatred? At first I thought that it was mere evangelical passion. Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love. But even evangelical Christians occasionally loose their belts and belch amicably; I have known some who, off duty, were very benignant. In that very courtroom, indeed, were some of them -- for example, old Ben McKenzie, Nestor of the Dayton bar, who sat beside Bryan. Ben was full of good humor. He made jokes with Darrow. But Bryan only glared.

One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe. That foe, alas, refused to be alarmed. It insisted upon seeing the battle as a comedy. Even Darrow, who knew better, occasionally yielded to the prevailing spirit. Finally, he lured poor Bryan into a folly almost incredible.

I allude to his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I'd never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic -- and once, I believe, elected -- there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at! The artful Darrow led him on: he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. A tragedy, indeed! He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool.

III

Worse, I believe that he somehow sensed the fact -- that he realized his personal failure, whatever the success of the grotesque cause he spoke for. I had left Dayton before Darrow's cross-examination brought him to his final absurdity, but I heard his long speech against the admission of expert testimony, and I saw how it fell flat and how Bryan himself was conscious of the fact. When he sat down he was done for, and he knew it. The old magic had failed to work; there was applause but there was no exultant shouts. When, half an hour later, Dudley Field Malone delivered his terrific philippic, the very yokels gave him five times the clapper-clawing that they had given to Bryan.

This combat was the old leader's last, and it symbolized in more than one way his passing. Two women sat through it, the one old and crippled, the other young and in the full flush of beauty. The first was Mrs. Bryan; the second was Mrs. Malone. When Malone finished his speech the crowd stormed his wife with felicitations, and she glowed as only a woman can who has seen her man fight a hard fight and win gloriously. But no one congratulated Mrs. Bryan. She sat hunched in her chair near the judge, apparently very uneasy. I thought then that she was ill -- she has been making the round of sanitariums for years, and was lately in the hands of a faith-healer -- but now I think that some appalling prescience was upon her, and that she saw in Bryan's eyes a hint of the collapse that was so near.

He sank into his seat a wreck, and was presently forgotten in the blast of Malone's titanic rhetoric. His speech had been maundering feeble and often downright idiotic. Presumably, he was speaking to a point of law, but it was quickly apparent that he knew no more law than the bailiff at the door. So he launched into mere violet garrulity. He dragged in snatches of ancient chautauqua addresses; he wandered up hill and down dale. Finally, Darrow lured him into that fabulous imbecility about man as a mammal. He sat down one of the most tragic asses in American history.

IV

It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.

But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.

End of H.L. Mencken's eulogy of William Jennings Bryan.

via: National Center for Science Education (here); and, Peenie Wallie (here)

Images: NR

[ed. Sounds like a future obituary I can imagine. They say history doesn't repeat itself exactly but does echo. When the dam breaks, sometimes it happens suddenly. WJB, McCarthy (Joe), many others. We'll see.]

Rainbows

via:

Elvis - '68 Comeback Special

[ed. From his famous '68 Comeback Special. Did anyone wear leather better than Elvis (in his prime)? Charisma to burn! Many more, like this one.]

What Time Is It?

The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era

In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?

During the past weeks, I’ve been casting about to see what ideas are already out there. Suggestions I’ve found include the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. The novelist William Gibson coined “the Jackpot” in his 2014 novel “The Peripheral” for a near-future period of intersecting apocalyptic crises, when everything seems to be happening at once. In 2016, the scholar Donna Haraway deemed our time the Chthulucene, inspired by a word derived from ancient Greek, “chthonic”—of or relating to the muddy, messy, impenetrable underworld. The artist and author James Bridle titled their 2016 book on technology and our collapsing sense of the future “New Dark Age,” taking a phrase from H. P. Lovecraft.

For Bridle, our era is defined foremost by the utopian promise of the Internet and the subsequent disappointment. Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,” Bridle writes. Part of what feels so particularly jarring about living right now is our ability to follow news events everywhere in the world at once as they’re broadcast in real time on social media. The crush of stuff happening only underscores our lack of agency in relation to it. “In history, humans as animals have lived in uncertainty and helplessness, but we haven’t had it demonstrated to us on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s hard psychologically to deal with it,” Bridle told me. In the past few years, the term “new dark age” has been used to encompass the decay of democracy and the increasingly blatant impact of climate change. The name represents “a smack in the face to the idea of progress. That there can be a dip in the line—that alone terrifies people,” Bridle said. (...)

The urge to name reflects the urge to understand. In February, Liz Lenkinski, a social strategist in Los Angeles, began referring to our era as the Age of Unhingement in conversations with friends. The phrase stuck, and she started an Unhingement-themed newsletter. “It makes me feel saner to talk about it,” Lenkinski told me. She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to. This knowledge can cause a kind of spiritual infirmity. “The unhingement comes from not being able to know what’s next,” Lenkinski said. “Since 2020, it feels like we have all just collectively been through one nightmare after another.” The emergencies vary drastically in scale, impacting every facet of our lives: news about climate change commingles with that of warfare, inflation, and supply-chain delays, not to mention everyday incidents like neighbors stealing your Amazon packages. “If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there,” Lenkinski said. (...)

A sense of historical chaos might just be a perennial phenomenon, a cultural pendulum that swings forth every so often without much grounding in reality. (“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre,” Michel de Montaigne complained of France, in the midst of the Renaissance.) Faced with a name like the Terrible Twenties, many people might point out that humans today are in some ways far better off than they’ve ever been: life expectancies are up, on the whole, compared with a century ago (though they dipped during the pandemic); extreme poverty has sharply declined. It seems possible, though, that both interpretations are true simultaneously: we are living through a time of unprecedented health and prosperity and through a time of historic anxiety and calamity.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker
[ed. Winter of Our Discontent? Age of Delusion? The Great Fracturing? Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment?]

tokyo fishbowl
via:

$700 Million Dollar Man - Eventually

Shohei Ohtani Is My Favorite Athlete, But Paying Him $700 Million Is Bonkers (Intelligencer)

No matter how inured you are to the absurd money that’s thrown around sports, no matter how much you’d rather see the revenue sports generate given more to the players on the field than the owners in the skyboxes, no matter how much joy one gets from watching Shohei Ohtani play baseball in a way no one on earth has ever played it — his new $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers can’t help but make you gasp.

$700 million. 700. That’s $700 million over 10 years, $70 million a year. That’s actually twice what Jamie Dimon makes! Not only is it the largest contract in baseball history — over $270 million more than the extension Mike Trout signed with the Angels in 2019, and that deal was spread out over 12 years rather than 10 — but it’s the largest contract in the history of sports, edging the one Lionel Messi’s signed with FC Barcelona. The previous highest salary for a single season by a North American athlete was the $60.9 million the Bucks’ Damian Lillard will make in the 2025-26 season. Ohtani is going to beat that by nine million for each of the next nine years. No baseball contract has approached this one. There are reports that the contract is heavily deferred, theoretically devaluing the deal in real dollars down the line, but $700 million is $700 million.

No baseball player has even remotely resembled Shohei Ohtani, either. Comparing him to Babe Ruth isn’t fair … to Ohtani. Ruth never was a star hitter and pitcher at the same time, let alone over multiple seasons like Ohtani. We’ve never seen anything like Ohtani before. He is my favorite athlete in sports right now.

But this contract is insane.

This is not to say that a baseball player shouldn’t make $700 million. As The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal pointed out, that such a contract exists at all is a sign of the general financial health of the sport and, again, if someone’s gonna get that money, you’d rather it be someone actually wearing a uniform. Ohtani isn’t just the best baseball player in the sport, he’s the most famous and the most marketable; the income he’ll generate off the field will be substantial in addition to what he provides on it.

But Ohtani is a far riskier proposition than he is being treated, not just 10 years down the line, but even five. There are certain players, like newest Yankee Juan Soto, who are easy to project future performance on, with a consistent skillset that we have seen in players for generations; Soto gets on base, hits for power and makes solid contact. Barring catastrophic injury, he’ll be doing that five, seven, 10 years from now, particularly because Soto is still so young, only 25 years old. Soto is a safe bet.

Is it being a killjoy to argue that Ohtani is anything but? First off, Ohtani will turn 30 next year, which is obviously not old, but, generally speaking, is when players at least start to show signs of decline. Fun fact: Of the 20 top finishers in MVP voting this year, only three—Marcus Semien, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman — were 30 years or older. This is, and really has always been (with the brief and notable exception of baseball’s Steroid Era), a young man’s sport, like all sports are. Because Ohtani has only really emerged the last three seasons, there is a sense that he is younger than he is. He’s almost 30. By the end of this contract — when he will be making $70 million, or, if the reports about deferrals are true, even more than that — he will be 40. There are only two players currently on MLB rosters over the age of 40. Maybe science will be dramatically different in 2033. But 40 is still 40.

by Will Leitch, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Images: here and here

[ed. Normally I'd have the same reaction. But that passing mention of a deferred payment schedule is important. $680 million of that $700 million comes after 10 years - ie. when the contract is complete (see: Shohei Ohtani to defer $680m of $700m Dodgers deal to help new club build - Guardian). I've never seen anything like it, and it does wonders for the club's ability to acquire other important players. Crazy money aside, that strikes me as a pretty selfless gesture (given that he could probably have gotten the same amount or close to it without that clause). He's still going to make a ton of money from annual endorsements and a small annual salary, so granted, selfless is a relative term, but still...how many athletes do you see doing something for the greater good of their teams now days (Bobby Wagner and  Geno Smith of the Seattle Seahawks are the only ones that immediately spring to mind). Contrast that with John Rahm's hypocritical decision to jump to the Saudi LIV golf league for upwards of half a billion dollars after denying repeatedly that he would in fact ever do that, and stressing over and over the value of tradition and real competition. Now he puts the PGA Tour in an even more compromised position, just because money was/is his primary and overriding metric. I mean, how much do you need, really? So, in the end, I have nothing but the highest respect for Mr. Ohtani and am so gratified to see that money doesn't always rule the day (these days).]

The Implosion of the American Evangelical Movement

I had begun to tune out the main-stage speakers by the time Jim Jordan was introduced.

It was the second day of Road to Majority, the annual symposium organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, and this year’s headliners were doing more wailing and gnashing of teeth than usual. Donald Trump was the show-stealer, naturally, vilifying his former vice president, Mike Pence, and egging on the crowd to boo their longtime Christian comrade for his refusal to subvert the Constitution eighteen months earlier. The dozens of other politicians and evangelical leaders who stepped to Reed’s podium were only slightly less unhinged: warning that it was open season on Christians, denouncing the satanic agenda of the Democratic Party, urging attendees to vote Republican in the upcoming 2022 midterms and end the reign of those godless, child-grooming, America-hating liberals.

When it was his turn, Jordan, the collegiate wrestling champion turned Ohio congressman, hit all the same notes. He slammed “the lefties” who “don’t like freedom” and “have disdain for the folks in flyover country.” He observed that, “Next to Jesus, the best thing that ever happened to this world is the United States of America.” It felt like the teleprompter had been stuck on the same page for hours. I stood up to leave the ballroom.

“I love the comment that Cal Thomas made one time,” Jordan told the audience.

Just like that, I sat back down. Of all the names I expected to be invoked at Ralph Reed’s shindig, Thomas’s would have been the very last.

Jordan continued, “Cal Thomas had a great line. He said, ‘Every morning, I read the Bible and the New York Times, so I can see what each side is up to.’ ”

This was close enough to the quote Thomas had famously given during a 1994 C-SPAN interview promoting his book The Things That Matter Most. A witty and wily observer of American life, Thomas was at one time among the most-read journalists in the country, with a syndicated column that appeared in more than five hundred newspapers nationwide. That particular quip about the Bible and the Times, delivered with a playful smirk, was a nod to his past. Thomas had spent five years working as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s spokesman at the Moral Majority. He was an evangelical Christian and a political conservative—and, once upon a time, he had used those labels interchangeably.

What Jordan didn’t mention is that five years after giving that C-SPAN interview, Thomas wrote another book. It was a contrition-laden confessional called Blinded by Might, coauthored by Pastor Ed Dobson, the onetime Liberty University dean and Falwell confidant who had been present at the founding of the Moral Majority. The authors provided a damning window into the rise of the religious right: Given how the Scopes Trial had humiliated fundamentalists in the 1920s, and how progressives had hijacked both Church and culture in the 1960s, Thomas and Dobson recalled believing that Ronald Reagan’s presidency represented “the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians” since the dawn of the twentieth century. “We were on our way to changing America,” the authors wrote. “We had the power to right every wrong and cure every ill.”

But they didn’t change America—at least, not in the manner they had hoped.

Thomas and Dobson acknowledged, in the pages of their book, that they had not ushered in the sort of kingdom-on-earth spiritual utopia about which they and so many American evangelicals fantasized. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the country was angrier, more antagonistic, more fearful, more divided—less Christlike—because of the Moral Majority. If Jesus was known for hating sin and loving sinners, American evangelicals were known for hating both. The movement’s short-term electoral gains had come at a steep cost. Not only had the culture moved further away from them; the Church had sacrificed its distinctiveness in the process. “We think it is time to admit that because we are using the wrong weapons, we are losing the battle,” Thomas and Dobson wrote.

What they called for was radical: “unilateral disarmament” by the religious right. Christians need not be “political quietists or separatists,” they wrote, but a wholesale reestablishing of boundaries and priorities was in order. The Moral Majority’s use of shameless scare tactics had tempted the masses of American churchgoers to put their faith in princes and mortal men. This “seduction by power,” the authors wrote, was sabotaging the message of Christ. Winning campaigns had become more important than winning converts; scolding the culture had become more important than sanctifying the Church. Mustering some fire and brimstone of their own, Thomas and Dobson warned their old boss Falwell—and his many descendants, biological and otherwise—to stop confusing “spiritual authority for political authority.”

The book’s publication in 1999 caused a furor inside American evangelicalism. Christianity Today, the venerated magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, devoted an entire issue to a debate of Blinded by Might. (The cover asked: “Is the Religious Right Finished?”) Defending its thesis were former Reagan aide Don Eberly; Paul Weyrich, who had coined the term “Moral Majority” during that fateful meeting two decades earlier; and Thomas himself. Prosecuting the case against the book were Falwell Sr.; Focus on the Family chieftain James Dobson; and Reed, whose Christian Coalition had grown to become the nation’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential evangelical-political organization.

Reed’s piece was especially telling. Its headline: “We Can’t Stop Now.” Listing their many victories in recent years, Reed boasted of how he and his allies had defeated pro-gambling initiatives in numerous states. It would be another six years before Reed was exposed for taking millions of dollars in laundered payments from Indian tribes who enlisted him to mobilize Christian voters against rival gambling initiatives in nearby states. This was but one part of the sweeping scandal that took down and imprisoned Reed’s close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Although Reed had technically broken no laws (if duplicity were criminal, he’d be serving a life sentence) the revelations confirmed many a suspicion about the man and his movement.

Hence my surprise to hear Cal Thomas’s name mentioned at Ralph Reed’s event. I couldn’t think of anyone who would be more repulsed by this right-wing revival than Thomas.

A few months later, I met him for breakfast in Washington. The U.S. Capitol Building—its post–January 6 protective fencing having been removed—was visible a couple of blocks away. As we sipped coffee, Thomas, tall and slender and sharp as ever approaching his eightieth birthday, asked what I’d been up to. I told him about attending Reed’s event. He put his coffee down.

“When Trump mentioned Pence and the evangelical audience booed their brother in Christ, I said to myself, this is the final compromise,” Thomas told me. “Here is your brother. Here is a man who worships the Lord that you claim to worship. Here is a man who goes to church every Sunday. Here is a man who has had only one wife and never been accused of being unfaithful. And you’re booing him? As opposed to a serial adulterer? A man who uses the worst language you can think of and does every other thing you oppose? Explain that to me from a biblical perspective. Please.” (...)

“I got a letter the other day when I wrote something critical of Trump. The guy accused me of not even being a Christian,” Thomas said. “You can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump. Because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.”

What’s interesting, Thomas added, is that nobody went all in on Trump quite like Pence did. Once a respected arbiter of ethical matters, the former vice president forfeited his reputation—not to mention some longtime friends and admirers—by subjugating himself so thoroughly to his boss. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the MAGA mob. The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him. Thomas found himself pitying the former VP.

I did not. Pence, I reminded Thomas, described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.

Thomas wore a stoic expression. Then he began to nod. (...)

All those years ago, as a new Christian, Thomas faced a similar choice. He was involved with something corrupt, unethical, rotten to its core. Rather than stick around in the interest of reformation, he chose to walk away. Eventually he went even further, blowing the whistle while publicly atoning for his own offenses. In doing this, Thomas told me, he hoped to find peace. And yet today, as he surveys the wreckage of American Christianity and reflects on the unraveling of the religious right, all he can think about is what more he might have done. (...)

It would prove a halting journey. Like so many D.C. contemporaries, secular and Christian alike, Thomas was a political addict. He saw no issue with fusing the zeal of his Christianity with the convictions of his conservatism. This was how he came to fall in with the Moral Majority. Falwell Sr. needed an ambassador to the Washington press corps, someone reporters knew and liked and trusted. Thomas, with his deep connections to the city’s social and political scenes, fit the bill; he was that rare firebrand who regularly dined with his ideological counterparts and considered them close friends. Thomas, adrift since getting axed by NBC, joined the Moral Majority in 1980 and rose to become the organization’s vice president. At long last, he felt fulfilled.

Until he didn’t. There was no Road to Damascus moment, Thomas says, that made him question his work with Falwell Sr. Rather it was a steady accumulation of doubt, a growing sense of guilt about how the furiousness of their messaging—on any given subject—did not reflect the realities of the matter at hand, never mind the example of Christ Himself. Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.

“I would go to these fundraising meetings. They would start in prayer and end in manipulation,” Thomas recalled. “We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”

Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.

“You get these letters: ‘Dear Patriot, We’re near collapse. We’re about to be taken over by the secular humanists, the evil pro-abortionists, the transgender advocates, blah, blah, blah,’” Thomas said. “They’re always the same. ‘If you donate, we’ll do a double-matched gift!’”

Little has changed. There were emails in my inbox at that very moment—from Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, from Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins—that deployed similar language.

“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”(...)

“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”

by Tim Alberta, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image:Khoa Tran

[ed. Too little too late (as always). I loathe the term "if only I'd/we'd known back then". A non-mea culpa mea culpa. Weaponized religion, Iraq, climate change denial, pick any major issue... Anyone paying attention knows what's what. It doesn't matter, because... Winning. Money. Power.]

Passion Requires Slow Cultivation

I’ve been pretty flat for a few weeks now. I keep looking for inspiration but I can’t touch it, can’t feel it. I keep trying to use my old tricks in my writing and nothing works. And when I can’t write, I don’t want to do much else. So when I remembered that I had a voice lesson on Tuesday morning, I had an urge to skip it. What an expensive indulgence, and you’re behind on your deadlines. Why sing? What’s the point? And while I’m questioning everything: Why write another book? Why even read another book? What’s so good about books? There’s too much work, infinite work, and what does it add up to? You’ll never be that good, and no one cares, and all will be forgotten. Everything you do is erased and erased and erased as you go.

Inspiration is more rare than I often like to pretend it is. And right now, I’m not pumped up over some new goal, some new destination.

But even that disappointment is a kind of a gift, because it forces me to face this reality: Gaining mastery of a new skill is mostly drudgery. You sit down and do the hard work and you marvel at how bad you are, day after day. That’s the road, and there is no end point, there is just more road, endless road. Even though we talk about passion like it’s this heavenly blast of light and sound that drives you forward to greatness, real, genuine passion often feels more like some Cormac McCarthy novel where things go from bad to worse and you never arrive anywhere at all. But somehow (also like a Cormac McCarthy novel!) the bleak trees, the pavement, the bitter cold wind, all of these things are weighty, lustrous. You are almost dead of course, always almost dead, but somehow more alive than ever.

***

On Tuesday, I practiced my new song with my voice teacher. I’m taking voice lessons over Zoom, which is extremely weird and awkward. I disliked it for months, but it’s been over a year now and my voice has slowly improved.

It’s sometimes hard to tell that I’m improving, since my voice teacher isn’t one to overpraise. This makes sense, since he coaches young Broadway hopefuls at the highly celebrated musical theater program of a nearby college. He leads budding divas along the path to stardom every hour of the day, and then he takes a one-hour break on Tuesday mornings to get on Zoom and watch a middle-aged woman in bad yoga pants sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

You could say there’s something a little broken and pathetic unfolding in that hour of his day. You might even say that my voice teacher is almost like a ragged microphone plushie that this overgrown toddler of a middle-aged woman drags around with her, in order to imagine that she, too, is a budding diva on the path to stardom. And yet, like all of the best stuffed animals and lovies and woobies, he sits patiently and quietly and watches while she belts out

“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”

And it’s true. I never thought I’d come to this, singing to a complete stranger over Zoom. What’s odd is that I enjoy it so much. I don’t mind that my view of myself on my computer screen is so horrific that I need to avert my eyes. I don’t mind that my gestures as I sing range from amateurish to flat-out tragic. I look like one of those 12-foot-tall, orange, air-tube people that flail their arms around outside used car dealerships.

It just feels so nice to sing, even in my bad yoga pants, in my empty dining room, where the acoustics are the best.

I have no dreams of Broadway. At this moment, I am low on dreams in general. So it can feel foolish to try to improve my voice, when I don’t have unrealistic fantasies or delusions of grandeur to guide me. Maybe I’m just being an idiot.

But on Tuesday, after we warmed up with some scales and then my voice teacher said, “Let’s get to some repertoire” (I mean can you imagine the ACTING, the absolute DRAMATIC CHOPS it must take to say the word REPERTOIRE with a straight face to a weird frizzy-haired stranger in her dining room?), I stood up and sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” And I hit most of the high notes in a belt I didn’t have a month ago. And my voice teacher said

“Wow!”

Which he never says.

***

So then he decided it was time to add some performance and acting notes to the piece. We didn’t have much time, so we went through the first four lines and I wrote down what I thought the emotion of that line was:

I don’t know how to love him (Vulnerable)

What do do, how to move him (Frustrated)

I’ve been changed, yes, really changed (Surprised)

In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,

I seem like someone else. (Fearful)

Now if you ask me, that’s a lot of emotions to pack into one verse of a song, to the point where this very sweet tune could start to look like a cabaret act or something a street mime high on too many espressos might dream up before hitting the major tourist thoroughfares.

But when I sang the first line while thinking VULNERABLE!, my voice sounded clear and sad and better than usual. So of course I burst into tears.

If I were a Broadway hopeful, my voice teacher might’ve thought, “Hmmm, we really have our work cut out for us, to get this song ready in time for her big audition.” Instead, he had to watch me weep and sniffle for no reason at all. I mean, IMAGINE! Imagine the inherent, palpable, unavoidable ludicrousness of being an esteemed professor of the vocal arts on a ZOOM call with this strange flailing air-tube of a human and having to pantomime patience, for no good reason at all!

But if that were his vibe, I wouldn’t still be taking lessons. I’m not paying him to play make believe with me, no matter how strange these Zooms would look to a stranger who just walked in. If I wanted undue praise, he would’ve bailed a while ago. If he served up insincere praise, I would’ve bailed.

Instead, every two weeks, my voice teacher reminds me of an important truth: When you have a genuine passion for something, you can summon that passion in many different contexts. Tapping into that passion feels good. You care a lot, even when the stakes couldn’t be lower. (...)

New things are almost always scary, even when the stakes are low. Maybe low stakes make them even more frightening sometimes. Because MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, YOU FOOL?

But our time was up. So he told me to write down emotions for the rest of the song and practice it with those emotions. Then we said goodbye. And for a while after that, I sat there feeling

Vulnerable

Frustrated

Surprised

Fearful

Then I stood up and sang the song again. And no, I didn’t feel like a diva headed for Broadway, but I also didn’t feel like an air-tube outside a used car dealership. I didn’t feel like Mary Magdalene, singing about how many, many men she’s had before Jesus (yes queen yes) but I also didn’t feel like an over-caffeinated mime.

I felt like a regular person who cares so much about singing that she can care about it in almost any context. And when I sang

“I NEVER THOUGHT I’D COME TO THIS!”

I lifted off from the mundane world, into some sublime realm where vulnerability, frustration, and fear add up to something bigger, something transcendent. That’s what the song is about, after all: surrendering to a force that’s bigger than you, a force you can’t control with your old tricks.

by Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly |  Read more:

Image: Seashore (1969) by Helen Lundeberg
[ed. The process is the reward. See also: Rick Rubin on taking communion with Johnny Cash and not rushing creativity (NPR).]

‘It’s Gone on Too Long'

'Push me over the edge': Diana Rigg’s dying wishes in the grip of cancer.

I will never forget the look in my mother’s eyes that day near the end; the “north face of the Eiger”, as my family christened it. You have seen it in Game of Thrones, that look. As the Queen of Thorns, she used it to great effect. Fixing me with it for the first time in these last months, she said: “Rachie, it’s gone on too long – push me over the edge.”

She had by then been on end-of-life drugs for four days. I felt sick. I knew what she was asking me to do. I had made a promise when I was quite young, that I would one day put a pillow over my mother’s face if she ever asked me to. It was a joke for years. Until now. And I couldn’t do it. It was the one and only time she showed anger or bad temper in any of her suffering. She died the next day.

End of life is not for wimps. When Ma was very weak and the nurse came to insert her catheter, I sat listening from my bedroom next door. My mother still wanted dignity and privacy when she could get it. It was only afterwards that I realised the nurse had inserted it without offering anaesthetic cream or any local pain relief, but my mother was too tired to protest. I was furious. Unnecessary pain was the thing I’d promised I would protect her from. Unnecessary suffering. It was a promise that I could not keep.

Quite apart from the lack of bowel control, by the end her dehydration was such that her mouth was dry and cracked and horribly ulcerated. We dabbed it constantly with gel on a sponge atop a lollipop stick, but still she suffered. By the time the doctor said she could have the syringe driver to comfort her and to help her toward death, she had suffered as much as I have known any human to suffer. She was terribly weak and woefully thin. By the end it hurt her to even smile, let alone laugh. “I think I’ve rather gone off God,” she said slowly and painfully, the day before she died. “I think he’s fucking mean.”

I had known of my mother’s views on assisted dying for years. In her last few months she became increasingly adamant that the law should be changed, and so we recorded her statements on assisted dying to be released after her death. (...)

“I have cancer and it is everywhere, and I have been given six months to live,” she says. “Yet again we found ourselves in the bathroom this morning, my beloved daughter and I, half-laughing and half-crying, showering off together, and it was loving, and it was kind, but it shouldn’t happen.

“And if I could have beamed myself off this mortal coil at that moment, you bet I would’ve done it there and then.”

She adds that nobody talks about “how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death.” (...)

At her request I had explored every avenue. Dignitas, which she had been a supporter of, was a bureaucratic nightmare. My mother would be dead by the time she was allowed go to Switzerland to legally die. Then we discussed hiring a swanky house and a dodgy doctor. We discussed every possible scenario. We howled with laughter, of course, but came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to pop your own clogs without it being plainly barbaric or painfully inefficient.

I recorded her saying to the doctor who had delivered the bad news, “I will pursue, in the end, an end to my life that I have chosen.” Finally, she agreed to come home to live out her last, and to die with me and my family.

My boys welcomed her with open arms. She slept in her own bed, now in our house, in a room surrounded by her favourite pictures and her creature comforts; a radio by the bed and Narcisse perfume sprayed in abundance if she didn’t feel up to a shower. We put a telly in there which she hoped would, and indeed did, entice my son to hang out with her. I fed her when she wanted to be fed but never forced food on her. She loved those cold yoghurt drinks when solids became too much. After a while she had no appetite at all, and so she began to take control of her circumstances. Not eating was also a way of making sure she never needed the lavatory. (...)

But the truth is, in the initial aftermath of her death, the press and the public wanted to remember Diana Rigg as she once was. It was too soon to associate Emma Peel with physical decline, or the only Mrs James Bond with incontinence. But it was the indignity of incontinence which made my mother want to end her life. For her, and I know this isn’t the same for everybody, the tipping point in her quality of life was the inability to control her bowels. It depressed her so completely that her dignity was, on a daily basis, stretched beyond breaking point. She simply didn’t want to be here any more.

by Rachael Stirling, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: The Avengers/Wikipedia/Moria

[ed. I don't know what factors will finally force a change in society - maybe just more people dying and loved ones experiencing that process - but it will happen, eventually. We're taught from the earliest of age to control ourselves, our impulses, our bodies. Then that control is wrested away when we need it the most and appropriated by the government. It's forced torture, and for who's benefit? Not the person dying, that's for sure. Band-aids like Dignitas simply exist to give the illusion of an alternative - workarounds with nearly insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles (eg., only 540 British people in the last 20 years). It's just insane cruelty. In this day and age.]

Diana Rigg will always be Mrs Peel to me. My first real crush. Obituary here.

Too-Muchness

Balenciaga Reveals the Dad Shoes of All Dad Shoes: the 10XL Sneaker (SF)

Images: Balenciaga

[ed. Retail $2100. Probably pairs well with a 10-gallon cowboy hat. See also: Balenciaga’s Creepy (and Cool) Take on Hollywood Culture (The Cut). It could be worse:]

Defender: monster truck of sneakers

Daria Chernyshova

via:

Was It Worth It, Kevin?

And now, the end is near

And so I face the final curtain.

Come on! You know the Sinatra classic. Croon along with me as we emotionally gird ourselves for the closing act of Kevin McCarthy’s long, disappointing stint in Congress.

Having spent most of 2023 as a punching bag for his conference’s right flank, Mr. McCarthy has finally reached his pain threshold. At the end of this month, he announced on Wednesday, he will pack up his toys and flee the House, having made history as the first speaker booted from the job.

But do not cry for the former young gun. He has too few regrets to mention. As he bravely cheered his own performance in a Wall Street Journal essay announcing his departure, “I go knowing I left it all on the field — as always, with a smile on my face.”

Boy, did he. In his fevered pursuit of the gavel, Mr. McCarthy time and again prostrated himself before the altar of Donald Trump, sacrificing basically all the things that matter: his dignity, his integrity, his values (such as they were), his soul — you name it.

Now, looking back on each and every highway the congressman traveled to reach this point, I feel compelled to ask: Was it worth it, Kev?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Mr. McCarthy came roaring into Washington from California in 2007 with big dreams and enormous promise. Alongside Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, he was part of a new generation of fresh, feisty conservatives looking to overhaul what they saw as a stale, out-of-touch Republican Party.

Like an adorable boy band, the three pals each had a persona: Mr. Ryan, the policy wonk; Mr. Cantor, the blossoming leader; and Mr. McCarthy, the political animal. Mr. McCarthy was less concerned about policy or ideology than about mapping out the wins — for his team and, above all, for himself. Riding high in the mid-Obama era, the trio wrote a book, titled, of course, “Young Guns,” that boldly demanded to know: “America urgently needs a new direction. But who will provide it?”

Spoiler alert: none of these guys.

Instead of remaking the party, the party wound up remaking the young guns — or, in some cases, simply kicking them to the curb. Mr. McCarthy hung on longer than the others, which was a real tribute to his ability to shape-shift as circumstances dictated. (...)

Of course, a shape-shifting, flip-flopping, overpromising, self-serving politician is nothing new. Where Mr. McCarthy truly distinguished himself was in his willingness and ability to debase himself in the service of Donald Trump — even as he occasionally pretended to still have a spine. “My Kevin,” as Mr. Trump so delighted in calling him, certainly did his part to aid Mr. Trump’s political revival after the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol. In a turnaround so dramatic it must have given him whiplash, Mr. McCarthy went from saying that Mr. Trump needed to “accept his share of responsibility” for his role in the attack to, some weeks later, slinking down to Mar-a-Lago for a grotesque photo op with the former president.

What could be more pathetic than this little field trip? Mr. McCarthy’s attempts to justify it. In “Oath and Honor,” the new book by Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman and Trump scourge, she dishes some dirt about confronting him.

“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” she asked, according to CNN.

“They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy offered. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”

Betraying democracy because the MAGA king’s appetite was off? Wow. Just wow.

Give Mr. McCarthy his due: All that butt smooching worked, kind of, allowing him to wheedle his way into his dream job for 11 not-so-glorious months. But having handed his leash to the right-wingers, he had no room left to do his job leading the House. And the moment he dared to cross them, using his deal-cutting, coalition-building skills to hammer out a bipartisan debt limit agreement and avoid crashing the global economy, he was a marked man. The extremists were on the prowl for any excuse to take him down, and come late September, the stopgap funding deal he cut to prevent a government shutdown filled the bill. A few days later, they snatched the gavel back from him, along with the last remaining shreds of his dignity.

It’s hard to dispute that this is the ending that Mr. McCarthy deserved. By contrast, the American people don’t deserve the damage that he has done to the House — and, really, the nation — that will linger long after he is gone. By empowering the most extreme elements of the Republican conference, he made an already fractured, fractious chamber even more dysfunctional. Worse, by shoring up Mr. Trump after Jan. 6, he helped put America back on a crash course with a dangerous, antidemocratic demagogue looking for political revenge.

These are Mr. McCarthy’s legacies. If he is remembered at all, it will be as a cautionary tale about what happens when one leaves it all on the field in the service of little more than blind ambition.

by Michelle Cottle, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
[ed. Good luck with that Wikipedia page. Power is such an intoxicating drug (really, the absolute worst). People are still jockeying for Trump's favor despite all evidence they'll eventually end up being smeared, humiliated, in court, or broke - just like everyone else who enters his orbit. It says all you need to know. Bottom feeders at the bottom of the barrel. See also: California hometown sheds few tears for retiring McCarthy: ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Kevin’ (The Guardian).]

"Local Republican officials have been quick to sing McCarthy’s praises since the announcement of his retirement from Congress, calling him optimistic, unafraid of hard work, a patriot, and a “tremendous advocate for the Central Valley”. But others less beholden to him have been notable mostly by their silence.

Bakersfield’s mayor, Karen Goh, who has been photographed with McCarthy on passingly few occasions since she took office seven years ago, issued no statement. When invited to comment on ways in which McCarthy had helped the city in his 16 years in Washington, she told the Guardian she was too busy to respond."

Urban China

[ed. Whatever you imagine Chinese life to look like, it's probably not this. But...]

"Americans, used to their own shabby infrastructure and dowdy downtowns, often view these videos — or their own trips to these cities — as signs that China is “way ahead” of the West.

And so it may be. But there are a couple important subtleties that tend to get missed when people drool over these glowing skylines.

The first is about China’s style of urbanism. The montages of Chinese cities tend to look very different from montages of other Asian cities like Tokyo or Seoul or Hong Kong or Singapore, where the shots tend to focus on pedestrian spaces. There’s a reason for this; China has generally chosen a different approach to urbanism from other Asian countries. It’s more car-centric, with lots of giant highways and thoroughfares. The retail tends to be clustered in malls or other giant showpiece shopping centers rather than along walkable streets. Residential areas tend to be far from retail and commercial areas, clustered in ultra-high-density “superblocks”. This form of development has sometimes been referred to as “high-density sprawl”.

You can really see this when you look at ground-level videos of Chinese cities. Foot traffic tends to be concentrated in shopping malls or dedicated promenades, while the centers of cities are dominated by huge roads filled with cars. What walkable mixed-use pedestrian-friendly areas do exist tend to be very old, like Shanghai’s Bund and Old City. The skyscrapers and bridges do have plenty of spectacular LEDs on them — LED lighting has become very cheap in recent years — but this is perhaps necessary to break up the imposing, impersonal scale of these cities.

The reason these cities look like they were built for giants instead of people is that…well, they were. The “giants” here are corporations. As Michael Pettis would probably tell you, China over the last three decades has been a producer-centric economy, where the needs of construction companies and developers outweigh the needs of consumers. Giant skyscrapers and highways and concrete promenades and bridges and malls maximized the throughput of Chinese companies, so that’s what got built.

This type of urbanism surely showcases vast production capacity, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily makes Chinese cities amazing places to live, when compared with other Asian cities.

The other thing these videos neglect is capital depreciation. The more you build, the more you have to maintain. In 20 years, these glittering new buildings and infrastructure will begin to show their age; at that point, China’s government will have the choice to spend a lot of GDP upkeeping and rebuilding them (as Japan and Korea do) or letting them start to look a bit shabby, worn, and old on the outside (as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States do).

Depreciation isn’t a mistake on China’s part; every country has to deal with it. But the cycle of new construction followed by depreciation does seem to give a lot of American visitors a very predictably biased impression of whether a country is “rising” or “declining”. In general, a city that looks like the “city of the future” is just one that was recently built.

But anyway, the LED skylines of Chinese cities are still fun, especially when set to some nice music."

~ Some Thoughts on Chinese Urbanism (Noahpinion)

 Image: Tops of Shanghai (Explore 2013-05-02) /魔都之巅 by Brady Fang on Flickr. via:

Paul Kos, Sound of ice melting (1970)
via:

Masahisa Fukase, "Family", a commemorative photographic collection of Fukase’s family taken between 1971 – 1989.
via:

The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back

A friend of mine, a screenwriter in New York, believes Get Back has a catalytic effect on anyone who does creative work. Since it aired, he has been getting texts from fellow writers who, having watched it, now have the urge to meet up and work on something, anything, together.

This is strange, in a way, since the series does not present an obviously alluring portrait of creative collaboration. Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on. As we watch them hack away at the same songs over and over again, we can start to feel a little dispirited too. And yet somewhere on this seemingly aimless journey, an alchemy takes place. (...)

Watching extraordinary people do ordinary things is also just oddly gripping. I loved witnessing the workaday mundanity of The Beatles’ creative life. Turning up for work - for the most part - every day, at an agreed time: Morning Paul. Morning George. Taking an hour for lunch, popping out for meetings. Sticking up your kid’s drawing by your workstation. Confessing to hangovers. Discussing TV from the night before. Fart jokes. Happy hour at the end of an afternoon. Coats on: Bye then. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.

Immersed in all this banality, a funny thing happens to the viewer. As we get into the rhythm of the Beatles’ daily lives, we start to inhabit their world. Since we live through their aimless wandering, we share in the moments of laughter, tenderness and joy that emerge from it with a special intensity. When they get up on that roof at the end of the final episode we feel exhilarated, joyful, and almost as thrilled as they look. I think we learn something along the way, too: that the anomie and the ecstasy are inseparable.

Let’s remind ourselves about how unwise, or if you prefer, insane, the Twickenham project was. The Beatles had only just finished a double album, the White Album (that was its nickname - I love hearing the Beatles call it “The Beatles”). It was a huge project and they had plenty of arguments in the making of it. Fortunately, it sold boatloads - their most commercially successful album to date. Paul and John have new girlfriends they’re very serious about. George is with Patti and hanging out with Dylan, Ringo has two young kids. In other words, they had every excuse, and every reason, to take six months or a year off. But no. In September, they enjoy making a promo for Hey Jude in front of a live audience, which rekindles their interest in performing, and they come up with a vague plan to do a TV special in the new year.

The initial idea was to perform songs from the White Album. That makes sense: using a show to perform songs from the album they just made is what ANY NORMAL BAND WOULD DO. But no. John and Paul get together before Christmas and decide they have to create a whole album’s worth of new songs, learn to play those while being filmed, and then perform them. That would be hard enough to achieve in three to six months. But because Ringo has to make a film they end up trying to cram all of this - writing, learning, rehearsing, show-planning - into three weeks. And they choose to do it all in an aircraft hangar.

The Beatles’ allergy to repetition, their relentless instinct to seek out the new rather than repackage the old, is here taken to such an extreme that it puts them in an absurd position. As a group, they were terrible at making non-musical decisions. They were much better at saying what they didn’t want to do than at making sensible plans for what they did want to do. So they ended up in this trap. As we watch the four Beatles try to escape from it, we are moved, because we see, for the first time, quite what a fragile creative entity they always were, and how hard they worked to stay together.

Nearly every Beatles album was perfect or close to it, a succession of immaculate conceptions. The Beach Boys, perhaps their closest artistic rivals, made some jewels, some stinkers, and some just-OK albums. That was typical, even for the best artists. There was something mysterious and implacable about The Beatles’ ability to keep a high standard at a high volume of output. It baffled their peers. Brian Wilson said of them, “They never did anything clumsy. (...)

Let It Be, the album that eventually emerged from the Get Back sessions, and the last new Beatles album to be released, has always been the closest thing to a glitch in this long run of jewels. Unfinished by the group, it is messy, uneven and incoherent by their standards, even though it contains a few songs that would be enough to turn most bands into legends by themselves. Today, Let It Be exists in various iterations, none of them definitive. One effect of Jackson’s Get Back is to find, or restore, a purpose to this loose strand from The Beatles’ recording career, by letting us in on a secret: they didn’t know what they were doing.

At one point in Get Back, during the endless discussion about why they’re all here, George Harrison reminds the others that The Beatles have never really made plans: “The things that have worked out best for us haven’t really been planned any more than this has. It’s just… like, you go into something and it does it by itself. Whatever it’s gonna be, it becomes that.” I think this represents a profound truth about The Beatles. They moved through the world in a dream, and the world became their dream.

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Get Back

[ed. Thinking of re-watching this, but more closely this time instead of in big gulps.] 

Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever

Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever (NYT)

Image: Hokyoung Kim
[ed. This will get written into history - the reason AI alignment fails. If it does. How will we ever know?]

100 gecs

Doritos & Fritos

Leaving Twitter

Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist. It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all - indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.

Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitter, but though a better product was pretty easy, the network effects were too strong and none of them really worked. Instead, we unbundled use cases one by one. As Andrew Parker pointed out in 2010, a whole range of people from Airbnb to Zillow to Tinder unbundled separate pieces of Craigslist into billion dollar companies that didn’t look like Craigslist and solved some individual need much better. This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better - they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.

Hence, Mastodon has been around since 2016 without getting much traction, but slices of conversation, content or industry have been unbundled to Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, Discord or, more recently, Substack, which someone joked was Twitter’s paywall.

Meanwhile, Twitter itself drifted aimlessly for a decade, becoming known in Silicon Valley as a place where no-one could get anything done. This is a big part of why Elon Musk was able to buy it - $44bn was a top-of-the-market price, but even Snap was worth $75bn in January 2022, when he started building a stake - how much bigger should Twitter have been? And so, when he made his bid, there was, briefly, a lot of enthusiasm in tech: pent-up frustration with the existing product and a sense of how much better it could be; enthusiasm that there could be innovation and new product ideas (and, from a small but noisy group, frustration with the politics of Twitter’s content policies, of which more in a moment).

It didn’t work out like that. The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down - and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.

There are various diagnoses for this.

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Parker

[ed. Money will always have strange effects on people. But, not just money. Power. Musk controls one of the largest media platforms on the planet. Trump gets elected President. Nazi's make a comeback in the US (less than 75 years after WWII). AI charges full speed ahead with no apparent brakes. Weaponized capitalism is pervasive. Economic inequality is stratospheric. The world heats and burns. Meanwhile, trivia, celebrity, technological toys/distractions, sports and games rule the day. Overall, a civilizational mental health crisis/breakdown. See also: Elon Musk offers $1B to Wikipedia if it changes its name (The Hill):]

"Billionaire Elon Musk offered Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, $1 billion under the condition that it changes its name to “Dickipedia.”

2023 Person of the Year

2023 Person of the Year, Taylor Swift (Time)

"Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion. And as a celebrity—who by dint of being a woman is scrutinized for everything from whom she dates to what she wears—she has long commanded constant attention and knows how to use it. (“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks tells me. “She doesn’t need it.”) But this year, something shifted. To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world."

[ed. Well, not sure about all that but give her time. Loved this one comment, though: "Time named Taylor Swift its 2023 Person of the Year, and somehow made her look like Nicole Kidman on the cover." Haha. See also: Why Does Taylor Swift Want More? (Freddie deBoer):]

"I think it’s fair to say that Taylor Swift and her team ran a full-court press in 2023. You had the brief but massive success of her concert film, the continued release of the “Taylor’s version” series of re-recordings of her old material, absolutely constant media visibility, and of course the relentless publicizing of her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The latter is a good example of choosing to expand your media footprint. There are some conspiracy theories that suggest that the relationship is all a sham; Kelce, at 34 years old, is clearly looking to set up a career as a media personality after football, and the endless shots of Swift in a luxury box at NFL games have taken her inescapability to a new high. I have no opinion about and no interest in those theories. I do want to stress, though, that had she wanted it, that relationship could have been much quieter. She certainly has the juice to say to the NFL “I want to sit in privacy in the back of a luxury box with no cameras on me, and plus let my team in the back of the stadium with no publicity.” She chose to do the opposite and make this romance as public as possible. That’s generally been her MO in 2023 - whenever she’s had the opportunity to go bigger, get richer, get more famous, harvest more attention, she’s pursued that opportunity with gusto.

Hey, look! Yet another august academic institution is giving a course on Taylor Swift! That’s fun! Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we all having fun? (...)

It’s also the case that I think this stuff has reached a level of absolute madness, that the sense that no matter how obsessed we are with this woman, it’s never enough, is genuinely creepy and reflects a deeply diseased society. I’m genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life. Personally, I think people are fixated on Swift in this way because they’re lonely and directionless and lack any source of transcendent meaning, and have tried to invest celebrity with the hopes that once accrued to God or country or the party, and I further think that this is bound to result in inevitable disillusionment and sadness."

I’m interested in a different issue: why does Swift harbor such a palpable feeling that she needs even more success? 15 years after “You Belong With Me” was released, she’s grinding more than ever, clawing for more and more presence in the national popular consciousness. Her vast professional apparatus has worked relentlessly to make sure that she stays in said popular consciousness. And my question is… why? For what? What does she want, that she does not already have? What need could she fill that hasn’t already been filled? She has more of everything than almost any human being who has ever lived. Why does she need more than more?

[ed. Because that's what she does? The satisfaction of running a well-oiled, precision machine? Of your own making? It's not complicated.]