Barack Obama gave the best speech of his presidency last Monday at the Inauguration. He put the Tea Party on notice that they don’t own the Founders or the story of America.
In today’s lead article, I’ll spell out the two main ways to turn history into a motivating myth. The Tea Party tells a fundamentalist myth about the founding of America, full of larger-than-life heroes and prophets whose achievement we have corrupted and degraded. Their program then revolves around repentance for our socialist sins in hopes of returning to the Founders’ Eden.
In the Second Inaugural, Obama told a progressive myth of American history: The Founders left us not a perfect Republic, but a vision that neither they nor anyone since has fully achieved. We are on a centuries-long journey towards that Promised Land, and our journey will not be complete until everyone has the liberty that the Founders managed to guarantee to straight white male Christian property owners.
In the weekly summary, I’ll also describe how the Senate wimped out on filibuster reform, and why that might have very immediate consequences. (That piece is still growing and may turn into its own article.) Also: a strange new legal argument against same-sex marriage, Kerry’s bold testimony on climate change, Republicans might fail to gerrymander the Electoral College, and Bad Lip Reading takes on the NFL.
Happy Inauguration Day!
I expect to have all this week’s articles posted before President Obama’s speech, so I won’t say anything about that until next week. This week, I’ll just comment on the more aggressive tone I expect to see in the second term. No more “I Hope you’ll be reasonable so we can Change things.”
Also, this week the post-Newtown talk about guns started turning into action. New York State passed a new law, and the Obama/Biden plan came out. To the great surprise of paranoids from coast to coast, Obama didn’t issue an executive order confiscating all the guns. I guess that will delay the armed rebellion for a few weeks.
But this week’s main article is a double book review wrapped up in commentary. Tentatively titled “How do you know what you know?”, it discusses why the information explosion isn’t leading to more wisdom and consensus. I realize it’s no great revelation to point out that we’re not trending toward wisdom and consensus, but if you’d never seen an information explosion, you might think we should be. If stuff is easier to find out, wouldn’t that lead people to know more, understand more, make wiser choices, and agree on some basic facts? Why isn’t that happening?
Nate Silver starts The Signal and the Noise by looking back at the last info-revolution, Gutenberg’s, and observing that it also led to polarization and strife. You can look at that book and Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel as training manuals for mitigating the problems that come from information overload.
It looks like we’re going to be talking about guns for a while. Last week I presented a bunch of my own thoughts, so this week I’m mainly collecting what other people are saying — including a hilarious Onion article about how gorilla sales always spike following a major gorilla attack.
The other thing everybody has been talking about this week is the trillion-dollar coin. I’m not sure how these things happen. Two weeks ago this was a fringy topic, the banker-and-economist version of science fiction. In the last few days, though, it has turned into something every pundit needs to have an opinion about. The White House has even had to deny its intention to mint the coin. Now if only House Republicans would deny their intention to prevent the nation from paying its bills by failing to raise the debt ceiling. The two ideas are both nutty, but at least the coin is harmlessly nutty.
I was going to use the coin/ceiling as an example of a larger point I somehow never express convincingly: the difference between rules and norms in a democracy, and how our norms are dangerously eroding. Fortunately, Chris Hayes did this for me on his show Saturday morning, so I can quote him instead.
In the short notes: the Greek economic problem isn’t overspending; Obama refuses to build a Death Star; Jon Stewart destroys the 67 Republican congressmen who voted against Hurricane Sandy relief; and a new report spells out just how bad American health is compared to other rich countries.
After taking Christmas Eve off and using New Year’s Eve to review the year, I’ve fallen behind on two major stories: (1) the Obama vs Tea Party conflict we used to call “the fiscal cliff”, but we’re now calling “the debt ceiling”; (2) the post-Sandy-Hook discussion about guns.
So today I’ll try to catch up. The cliff/ceiling article should go up first, probably in an hour or two. The gun article is still in notes and fragments, so it may not appear until after noon.
It’s time for the Yearly Sift, when I go back and take the longer view of what I’ve been doing week-by-week in 2012. The Story of the Year, of course, was the election, and I’m going to claim that the Sift did a reasonably good job helping its readers pay attention to the right things and not freak out over every outlying poll or surge by the Republican candidate-of-the-week.
The Theme of the Year was privilege. It was all summed up by September’s “The Distress of the Privileged“, the Weekly Sift’s most popular post ever. But those ideas came together because they had been brewing all year long. And there were a few lesser themes, like religion and economics.
I’ll also list the 21 books the Sift either reviewed or recommended this year, with links to what I said about them. And I’ve collected all those pithy little quotes that have led off each week.
Like the week, the Sift will be dominated by talk about guns and murders. Sorry if you’re already sick of it; that’s just what’s up. I promise not to rehash the details of this week’s two shootings or speculate on things that are still unknown about the shooters, like their motives and their general psychological conditions. There’s already way too much of that.
Instead, I’ll make a few one-step-back points about our overall reaction to gun violence and the unhealthy state of our political discourse. Most of that is the weekly summary (titled “Enough?”), but one point demanded to be a separate post: “Don’t politicize tragedy is itself partisan rhetoric.”
In addition, this week has two holiday-themed articles: “Books to Ask Santa For” and “Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask”.
Unless some unexpected inspiration strikes and refuses to be aside, I’m taking Christmas Eve off. So (probably) no Sift next week. In two weeks, I’ll do my traditional Yearly Sift.
The Sift will come out slowly today. I spent a bunch of this week turning the themes of “The Distress of the Privileged” into a sermon for the First Unitarian Church of Athol, Massachusetts, which I presented yesterday. (The text will eventually show up on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.) So I arrive at Monday morning with a lot less of the Sift done than I usually have.
Speaking of “Distress of the Privileged”, it was discovered by a new group of people this week and picked another 20,000 hits, running its total over 160K. (For comparison, “A Short History of Racism in the Two-Party System” did well by ordinary Weekly Sift standards, getting just under 1,500 hits in its first week.) I have fallen way behind in responding to comments on “Distress”, and I apologize.
Today’s main article (I’m still fiddling with the title) will be called something like “Repainting the Bubble”. This week I saw a lot of talk from the conservative pundit class about how the Republican Party is reforming itself and putting forward new faces and new ideas. Meanwhile, in the real world, a campaign to rally grass-roots paranoia stampeded 38 Republican senators into blocking ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The arguments against the CRPD treaty were entirely of the death-panels variety, so it’s clear that the inmates are still running the asylum in the GOP.
What was everybody talking about this week? The fiscal cliff, as always, but since any real action in the negotiations is secret, pundits are stretching for anything worthwhile to say about it. And Jim DeMint leaving the Senate with four years on his term, for none of the usual reasons. Plus, you can expect a better-than-normal collection of short notes, with some book recommendations.
Everybody I know is coming out of the great new movie Lincoln with cognitive dissonance: In 1864 the Democrats are the party of slavery and the Republicans the party of emancipation and racial justice. So how do we get from there to the parties we know today?
The answer will be in today’s article “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System”. Short version: Like any evolution, it takes a long time, with a period of punctuated equilibrium from LBJ to Reagan.
What was everybody talking about this week? Mostly the same stuff as last week: fiscal cliff, aftermath of the election, and Republicans trying to manufacture a scandal out of Benghazi. Also: a conservative live-blog of election night produces a fascinating record of life inside the bubble, and maybe we’ll even manage to reform the filibuster a little.
“Short History” is the kind of article I can futz with endlessly before pushing the button, so it’s hard to predict exactly when it will appear. Today. Definitely today.
This week I took some of the time off that I’ve been promising myself since the election campaign. So while there will be a Weekly Summary, all the articles it links to will be written by other people. Topics: a surprising number of the people I read reacted to the recent Gaza hostilities with disgust or sadness, rather than taking a side; for all the articles being written about the fiscal cliff and all the speculation about how a deal might look, we’re getting almost no useful information; and while we’re all focused on the mostly imaginary dangers of the U.S. debt, the march towards a global-warming catastrophe continues.
Since I don’t have any articles to finish writing, the Weekly Summary should come out by 10 or so.
BTW, I have to crow a little: In Foreign Policy magazine’s list of “100 Top Global Thinkers“, Thinker #91 (dana boyd) mentions me and says that “The Distress of the Privileged” gave her an “aha moment”.
Because I want the Weekly Sift to be a counterweight to the mainstream media, I try not to pile on to stories that are already getting way too much attention. So last week, I just acknowledged the Petraeus scandal without saying anything about it. This week, it’s still making headlines and I still don’t care who slept with who.
Then I saw the Onion’s Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal and realized that while Petraeus’ sex life still isn’t news (by my lights), it does provide a good hook to start talking about some important or interesting things. So the main article this week, “Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal”, will look at how easy it is for the FBI to invade an American’s privacy, the non-sexual moral issues Petraeus’ career raises, how Petraeus got such a larger-than-life image to begin with, and the “spiritual fitness” program that channels so much of the Pentagon’s money into Christian evangelism.
Last week I gave a one-word explanation of how the Republicans could hold the House of Representatives while getting fewer votes than the Democrats: gerrymandering. This week I look at how that works in theory, and then how it worked in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both of which returned Republican majorities to Congress while voting Democratic.
Finally, I review ESPN’s brilliant documentary “Ghosts of Ole Miss”, which follows the 1962 University of Mississippi football team through an undefeated season that is remembered mainly for James Meredith, the lethal riot against integration, and the 82nd Airborne’s invasion of campus. The narrator, a white Mississippi native, artfully traces the boundary between nostalgia and shame.
The articles should start coming out soon, and I’ll have everything up well before noon.
The Weekly Sift 