Archives: briefs

My interests in American history and culture have never led me to serious attention to the Kennedy family or the Kennedy White House, so I didn’t expect to be drawn in especially deeply by last week’s new Know Your Enemy recording, a conversation Sam and Matt have with (ahem, comics scholar and ever-lovin’ Canadian) Jeet Heer about Garry Wills’ writing on the subject — appended below.

There’s a lot going on in this episode, but what took me particularly was the discussion’s occasional turn to something you might think I’d have given at least a little thought to before now: the clues the elements of cultural affinity between JFK and a guy like Bill Buckley or the pre-war politics of Kennedy dad Joe Sr., FDR’s late-1930s ambassador to the UK and friend of Nancy Astor, offer toward a coherent story of the United States’ ambivalence (or essential non-opposition, rather) toward fascism. That troubled national posture, with widespread popular tendency to less than straight telling of our recent history that follows, is one subject much on my mind for several years. You might indeed think it would have occurred to me to look into the Kennedy position, but it never has.

Not germane in the course of what Matt, Sam and Jeet have to talk about but point of curiosity my mind quickly ran to while listening was whether there might be a ’60s-period connection between Philip Johnson and the Kennedys.

It’s some years since I’ve read anything about Johnson. Chances are that I knew at some point that the JFK cenotaph in Dallas, 1969, was his work, or of his close association with Jacqueline Onassis in ’70s New York and to end of her life. If so, though, I’d managed to forget it. Some territory for exploration presents itself here, then, if I can make time eventually.

Been getting a strongish dose of Steely Dan the last few weeks — a lot of it as ear-worm, in my head. Snatches of ‘Home at Last,’ ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ &c. kick in as I’m waking in the morning or at random while at daily work when not otherwise accompanied auditorily. For better or worse, this music is never far from me right now.

I probably owe being any kind of Dan listener to begin with, compared to the average American acquainted with classic-rock-station fare I took moderate helpings of often enough a couple of decades or so ago, to long-time online friend Darrell’s repeatedly coming back to Becker & Fagen on his blog over the years. But the near occasion for being a shade more than usually casually attentive to the band’s catalogue is the video below — which, let me go ahead and say, is great stuff, eminently worth the ~10 min. of play time.

I’m a follower of Turner’s channel and those of some of the other Brooklyn-based young performers he’s most associated with (Neely, the bassist, I’m able to follow on Nebula, happily), but this item escaped my notice until some months after it went up. I’ve been preoccupied this year. And I’m nothing like a big enough Dan fan to have known the story of the abandoned track or the forgotten tape’s coming to light before hearing it in Turner’s telling. If you are such a fan, please pardon me the passing along old news.

I love this group’s pains at respectable homage (whatever the level of accuracy they achieve, a question well beyond my ability to evaluate) and the pure fun they have in going for it. I’ve played the recording quite a few times. What I’m struck by in the end, though, top-notch as the video is, is how unlike listening to a Steely Dan track this effervescent tribute collaboration turns out to be. This isn’t a reflection touching ‘fidelity’ but a sense stemming from some other point altogether, to do with inter-communicative ‘energy’ and contrasts between the scene this music was conceived in a short half-century ago and the one Turner, Neely and friends are making their careers as music-nerd ‘creator’ artists in today. But I have no intention of trying in this post to put my finger on whatever that thing I’m dimly sensing is.

In the world of American Evangelicalism, I’m of a generational cohort tending to abandon the fascination with schemes of the eschatological, surging in the decades immediately after WW2 and shaping our upbringings, and to go instead very sober and historical-minded (as we supposed) about our Christian faith and thinking — away from the know-nothing pietistical and enthusiastic, toward the ecclesiastically ‘confessional’ and the ‘orthodox.’ The LaHaye & Jenkins Left Behind publishing phenomenon, for instance, launched when I was in mid-twenties, I avoided altogether. I’m long in the habit of tuning out ‘end-times’ noise.

I have a certain tendency too, not coincidentally, somewhat to tune out liberal-Christian critics of Evangelicalism like James Tabor when the topic is examination of that modern American end-times obsession I was raised with. Their criticisms may be agreeable to me, but the whole business is a little tedious nevertheless. So though I’d been vaguely aware of a Bible prophecy series Tabor started on YouTube a few months ago, I’ve paid it no attention — until, that is, this week, as media concern with Evangelicals and Israel continues intensifying. (The biblical prophets themselves, it’s important to say, are by no means reducible to the various accounts of ‘last things’ the texts coming down to us offer, as a talk Tabor recorded well before beginning this series may help to show.)

The video series is linked below. Something I hardly anticipated, listening back through earlier items in the collection over the last few days, was to hear any mention of American-scene popular illustration and cartooning — let alone to be introduced to a cartoonist of great influence whose name I hadn’t previously really known. The cartoonist in question was, it happens, both a person highly placed throughout mature working life as a leader in Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, a church group Tabor also had involvement with as a young academic, and also a notable precursor to and source for such celebrated ‘comix’ figures as Crumb and Spiegelman: Basil Wolverton. Remarkable.

I’d have known about Wolverton if I were more inclined toward the Mad Magazine ideal or to gross-out humor, no doubt. But I never have much been so inclined. I have a good deal to learn here. (Further reflections in a longer post to come, maybe, if I can get to it.)

Turns out, by the way, that Basil Wolverton’s son Monte, my parents’ age (and Tabor’s), is likewise a career cartoonist — and though far from comparable to his father in reputation, he is curiously somebody whose name one might encounter in news and commentary around Israel-Palestine conflict just at the moment.

In February 2011, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Wael Ghonim, a Google executive and organizer of Egypt’s ongoing protests, ‘Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?’ ‘Ask Facebook’ was Ghonim’s reply. ‘If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.’

Few predictions have aged as poorly, though Ghonim’s optimism was understandable at the time. Instead of being a force for liberation, tech has been a force for oppression and, at times, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Disinformation, we now know, spreads as easily, if not more easily, than genuine news; social media’s algorithmic hoodoo seems geared toward helping lies achieve escape velocity. And at Musk’s bare-bones Twitter, which has a skeleton crew manning its trust and safety desk, anything goes.

That’s from something in The New Republic yesterday, reflections on where things stand with the internet as sickening terror upon terror of Israel-Palestine war resumes in our news feeds. Link below.

Social media, it’s been my inclination to suggest and the business of others to demonstrate, is not dying. The profit-optimized media / commerce platform offered for consumer use as universal social network is a project with problems people like Cory Doctorow have characterized persuasively for a lot of us. These are problems that mean erratic traffic patterns, waves of uncertainty and opting out, at some stage a general atmosphere of publics adrift perhaps. But market collapse? No.

Might profit-optimized platforms be in the end the only real possibility for shared internet experience of ‘the social’ hyphenated with ‘the media’? Nah. Don’t buy it!

I couldn’t have told you so before probably a few days ago, but Ben Tarnoff is somebody notable for having turned in the last few years to fixation with the thought that we could do all this differently. Tarnoff and spouse Moira Weigel write books, sometimes jointly, and have acquired considerable reputation with start of Logic(s), a hip magazine about which I’m afraid I know very little. I do know Know Your Enemy and, by way of it, friend-show Ordinary Unhappiness (hosted by another young couple involved with a hip new magazine), where Weigel guests on a July episode I’ve just come to this week. The ep is a ramble about historical space marked at one end by the Frankfurt School, 1923, with forms of mass-media critique its figures became known for, and at the other by internet consternation and new labor-organizing phenomena observable in the U.S. today. I recommend the whole long thing. You can play it below.

[UPDATE: Tarnoff has been on Paris Marx’s show several times in its several-year run. I ought to have caught this at some point, since I appreciate Marx’s project generally. But the fact is that he’s not a favorite listen, and I have missed a lot of what’s in the show’s catalogue. Anyway, Marx and Tarnoff’s conversation about Tarnoff’s Internet for the People is good, and the link’s included below now.]

Jeepers, the internet is crashing, wh– wh– what’s happening?

So yeah, not really the internet crashing of course, just some trouble and confusion we’re seeing much of a set of economic arrangements we all once too quickly got used to thinking of as what the internet’s there to provide for continue tortuously to undergo. This belongs, it’s important to say, to a larger story of economic conditions under contestation, in which some of our moment’s elements are repeats of earlier moments’ and some arguably really new and different. One of the people today doing useful work to help us sort out what to push for practically at our own point in this tumult of many decades, generations long, is Cory Doctorow. At end of this post, below, video of a podium talk on his popular ‘enshittification’ theme given at a big tech event last month. Here’s a bit from the middle of it:

The Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ have published new merger guidelines which ban anti-competitive mergers that have been the norm for 40 years. Now, if you’re only cursorily paying attention to this, you might have gotten the impression that the amazing chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, is thrashing indiscriminately and losing big tech mergers — like the Activision-Microsoft merger that she tried to block. But the reality is, Khan is trying to make new law after four decades of complacency and a bias in favor of monopolies. She is taking swings no one has taken since the Carter administration. . . . But it takes a long-ass time to do these breakups. It took 69 years to break up AT&T. I don’t want to wait that long for a new, good internet. And we don’t have to, because tech is different. It’s universal, it’s interoperable. And that means we have options that we’ve never had before, when we were fighting rail barons and oil barons and the Whiskey Trust. Those options are interoperability-driven, and they will devolve control over technology from giant companies to small companies or co-ops or nonprofits or communities of users themselves. Interop is how we seize the means of computation.

You can read a policy study on Amazon by pre-FTC Khan (whom I knew of thanks to the work of Stacy Mitchell and ILSR) and listen to quite a fine Douglas Rushkoff talk, an interesting companion to Doctorow’s here, among posts in my short-lived ‘Notes’ series from several years back.

I was very impacted by reading Emmaia’s piece about the history of the organization, and also just thinking about these long tenures in which the ADL has been really fundamentally opposed to the left. And I’m just not convinced, like, the organization has it in its DNA to become a very politically vibrant and just organization that could fight antisemitism and fight for civil rights and fight bigotry more broadly. What’s complicated, then, when we regard this Musk stuff, is that it’s just kind of an exercise in holding tension for a lot of people, right? Like, if you’re a reporter and you’re writing something about this, it’s complicated, ’cause what context can you give? Can we say, okay, yes, this right wing is insidious and the way they’re going after the ADL, and that Musk is abetting it, is actually bad and problematic and is relying on these antisemitic tropes, but also, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to suddenly pump up the ADL and support these other actions that they take or, like, go to them as an automatically unbiased leading voice on antisemitism in other situations?

I started listening to Know Your Enemy while still living in NYC, where I was (without secure social footing) in social circles that overlapped with the hosts’. I had no occasion to cross paths with Sitman or Adler-Bell. I have, on the other hand, met Mari Cohen — still in Chicago when I moved here in the couple of years after New York, then doing some work with South Side Weekly among other things. (She was organizer for a comics journalism one-day workshop I managed to attend. The paper did a corresponding special issue that summer.)

Now it’s Cohen who’s in New York — and more power to her. She’s part of a crew doing important stuff at Jewish Currents for the era of Trump and an increasingly aggressive, ever more ethically-degraded global right. Above, part of her reply to the focal question of the KYE episode below.

I’m not Jewish. My background’s a lot like Matt Sitman’s, rather (though more Southern, more overtly Lost-Cause-inflected than his). I’ve come all too gradually to a grasp of the impact of struggle over the telling of Jewish history on accounts of Christianity like those Sitman and I were brought up with.

But if you follow me here at all, you already know how much the subject weighs on my mind.

[UPDATE (17 Oct ’23): KYE has a new conversation with John Ganz up, about Buckley’s 1992 In Search of Anti-Semitism. A bit disheartening, frankly, especially if your personal path begins on the right as mine does, but interesting contrastive companion to the one on the ADL nevertheless. Link added below.]

Is it too pat a thing, where we are today, to observe that religion isn’t really so simple a category — that, say, religion isn’t ever at any point in history, past or present, something that can just be cleaved off from prevailing accounts of the political existence or the economic, &c.? My feeling is the contrary. We’re a long way yet from hearing this observation expressed often enough or widely enough.

I don’t mean to suggest that attempts, in Christian Europe and its colonial excrescences in the wake of Reformation and conflicts of the era, to restrict religion by definition, to designate for religion its own (receding) place and lines in the interest of achieving rationalistic re-founding of the whole of social and civil order, are so much mere deprecable bunk. Not at all.

But this is not a post for sorting all that out! Below, a lecture given at venerable (by U.S. reckoning) Jesuit institution Boston College last week. One thing usefully illustrated in it is the thorough dependence on Arab-Islamic civilizational attainment of what with us today it’s still all too common to think of as global culture whose arrival in our time is just Western evolution manifest, ‘Judeo-Christian’ at stem. That prior and accompanying Arab-Islamic world civilization is where much of what’s most potent in Jewish life and thought, continuous from the early medieval into the modernity we struggle to make sense of around us, was first nourished and able to flower. Central chapters of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ story are written in Arabic.

[UPDATE: Adding here, directly below (before video), a link to quite a different listen featuring Decter, a Theatre Dybbuk podcast interview throughout which voice-actor readings from translated medieval verse narrative are woven in. Something for getting perhaps a little of the flavor of the distant time and place Decter studies.]

From following French comics illustrator Olivier Coipel on Instagram, I learn that Marvel has a retelling of Captain America origins by J. Michael Straczynski set to launch next month.

Besides standing apart for quality of work, simply, among the ‘variants’ (in N. American comics-market jargon) the issue’s getting, Coipel’s cover art is remarkable for a couple of things. One is exceptional accuracy in calling forth the spirit not, plainly, of the cheap-labor illustration used in comic books among which Captain America first appears in 1940, but rather of much mainstream magazine and advertising illustration — or, say, of murals decorating public building interiors — of the century’s pre-WW2 decades. (Jack Kirby couldn’t do the kind of high-end illustration dominant in the world of his childhood. What he would do instead as a mature graphic artist comes to belong profoundly to America’s second half of the century.) The other, unusual in Coipel’s comics work, is how distinctly (if understatedly) this cover evokes the kind of homoerotic matter his own ‘NSFW’ alternate Instagram account is devoted to — which in turn perhaps recalls from a different angle aspects of the environment of America’s pre-WW2 graphic art for mainstream audience, suggested e.g. by the life of celebrated painter J. C. Leyendecker.

Shouldn’t be too quick to judge without having seen it, but I’m doubtful, frankly, about the forthcoming Marvel series. It’s one thing for Jewish kids Joe Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg to offer comics readers in their own day the idea of a United States arisen to fight back the fascists. It’s quite another for us, now especially, to be telling the story of the America of that time as though anti-fascism indeed somehow was ever or enduringly rooted in the national character.