Pass the sickbag stuff. Note in particular all the guff about “the Verizon family of companies”. Family as in mafia.
Daily Archives: September 10, 2017
Rose-tinted views
Republicans: always in favour of small government — until the hurricane strikes
Nice point by Joe Stiglitz:
In responding to the hurricane – and in funding some of the repair – everyone turns to government, just as they did in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Again, it is ironic that this is now occurring in a part of the country where government and collective action are so frequently rebuked. It was no less ironic when the titans of US banking, having preached the neoliberal gospel of downsizing government and eliminating regulations that proscribed some of their most dangerous and anti-social activities, turned to government in their moment of need.
There is an obvious lesson to be learned from such episodes: markets on their own are incapable of providing the protection that societies need. When markets fail, as they often do, collective action becomes imperative…
Empty vessels
Cambridge, early September.
What poetry is for
One of my rules is that whenever Louis Menand writes anything in the New Yorker, I drop tools and read it. IMHO, he’s the best literary critic living today. In July he wrote a marvellous review piece on a whole raft of books about the role and importance (or lack thereof) of poetry. I was struck by this para:
One of [Ben] Lerner’s chief examples of misplaced expectations for poetry is what he calls “nostalgia for a poetry that could supposedly reconcile the individual and the social, and so transform millions of individuals into an authentic People.” He says that this kind of poetry never existed. To which there is a one-word response: Dante. The Divine Comedy is a first-person poem about a man who suffers a crisis (“I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost”), which he resolves by undertaking an imaginary journey that he pretends has been made possible by the soul of a dead woman he loved. That poem, written in the vernacular in the fourteenth century, is still at the heart of national identity in Italy. As the Iliad and the Odyssey were for ancient Greece, and as the Aeneid was for Rome.
Towards the end of the piece Menand quotes from a poem by Frederick Seidel in a post-election collection of 50 poems edited by Amit Majmudar. This is how it goes:
And you could say we’ve been living in clover
From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama
Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes
We the people voted in has taken over.
Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover,
From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times.
It’s over.
The new Democrats who hate Trump — but also hate trade unions
This morning’s Observer column:
One of the stranger sights of June was watching the titans of Silicon Valley meekly obeying Trump’s summons to a tech summit (dubbed his American Technology Council) at the White House… Some attendees looked pretty sheepish, as well they might. Many, if not most of them, abhor everything the president stands for. The meeting, as with many of Trump’s other round-table assemblies, brought to mind footage of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet in session. But while it was clear that many of those present would have preferred to have been elsewhere, they were also chary of being seen to snub a populist hero. So the aphrodisiac effect of power was much in evidence.
For politically-savvy observers, the delicious irony was that many of the tech crowd were known Democrat supporters and donors. We’ve known this for a while…