Social Justice Noncombatant

 

Song sheet, 1915, via ww1online.

It's world famous moral philosopher David F. Brooks, in his just-the-tip wokeness phase, looking for a morally more satisfying alternative to being a Social Justice Warrior, which just ends up hurting people's feelings ("A Christian Vision of Social Justice"):

Like a lot of people, I’ve tried to envision a way to promote social change that doesn’t involve destroying people’s careers over a bad tweet, that doesn’t reduce people to simplistic labels, that is more about a positive agenda to redistribute power to the marginalized than it is about simply blotting out the unworthy. I’m groping for a social justice movement, in other words, that would be anti-oppression and without the dehumanizing cruelty we’ve seen of late.

Some kind of political equivalent of Modern Monetary Theory that claims you could issue significant quantities of power to one group of people without making anybody else feel their power is threatened.

And he's actually found something interesting, in the work of a New Testament theology professor from evangelical Wheaton College and occasional Times contributor, Esau McCaulley (who is also African American, as Brooks characteristically doesn't say but shows us by including a picture, uncaptioned, that you can identify as him by comparing it with the portrait on his Times page), but of course he doesn't get it right.

Notes from the commentariat continued

Eli Valley's Passover cartoon (Gut yom tov!) featuring Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss.

Then there was Mr. Bret Stephens, complaining about how Big Government is stopping folks from feeding children ("Covid-19 and the Big Government Problem"):

Katie Wilson, a deputy under secretary at the Department of Agriculture in the Obama administration, is the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, a nonprofit that works with the country’s largest school districts to improve the quality of student nutrition. Her topmost concern is with the millions of poorer children and their families for whom school meals are essential to diets and budgets alike.

In this pandemic, she has a message for government bureaucrats in Washington and every state capital: Stop getting in the way.

Note how he makes the Urban School Food Alliance sound like some nice little private thing, "a nonprofit", as opposed to a nonprofit institution that is a pretty big slice of government in its own right, a confederation of (not "with") the nation's 12 largest school districts with an almost billion-dollar budget used to "leverage our purchasing power to continue to drive food quality up and costs down while incorporating sound environmental practices."

The Four Clarifications

Via haggadot.com.

My favorite Passover tradition is the Clarification of the Holocaust Remarks

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) April 11, 2017

The first Spicer is the wise Spicer, who explained that Hitler wasn't gassing his own people. True! He didn't think Jews were people. /1 https://t.co/j2EMNk5bwk

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 12, 2017

The second Spicer is the wicked Spicer, who suggested that you just don't use airplanes on innocent people because gas chambers are better?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 12, 2017

The third Spicer is the simple Spicer, who was worried about using airplanes on population centers instead of "Holocaust centers"?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 12, 2017

And the fourth Spicer is the one who forgot, "What is the question?"

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 12, 2017

Passover without Jews

The Four Sons. From An Amsterdam Haggadah, 1695, via University of Chicago.

Just three years ago, former New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a Passover column in which he managed not to mention the story of the first 18 chapters of Exodus, the biblical narrative of the Hebrews' escape from slavery in Egypt that is central to this key Jewish holiday—instead he made it about the rest of the book, in which God gives Moses the Law, which is celebrated on a completely different holiday later in the year, Shavuot or the Feast of Weeks.

Today he makes up for it with a Passover column (a couple of weeks early, it begins April 10) in which he manages to discusss Exodus without mentioning Passover ("The Unifying American Story"), or Jews at all, let alone Egyptians, like the Trump administration celebrating the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 without mentioning Jews. It's a very remarkable performance:

Unleavened Prose

Shraga Weil, 1963, Four Musicians (but they're the four sons of the Haggadah: Wise, with shofar; Wicked, with drum; Simple, with a "horn", maybe some lengthy double-reed instrument; and the One Who Does Not Know How to Ask with rattles). Via Jewish Heritage Online Magazine.

Could the GOP be facing an intellectual Exodus? Forty years ago, neoconservatives started migrating toward the Republican Party. Is a reverse migration possible? —Daniel Drezner, Washington Post, April 19 2016. H/t Driftglass.

Each year at the blessed season of Passover we remember the story of how God led the people of Israel out of bondage in the fleshpots of Egypt to the promised land, thousands of years ago, but we also think of the experience of those who have gone through similar kinds of oppression throughout history, and the hope of redemption held out to all, from the enslaved African Americans in earlier days of American history to the victims of war and violence in our own world today. Or the neoconservative intellectuals who toiled for generations under the whips of their ruthless capitalist overlords until at last the weight of their chains grew too great and they rose to free themselves.

I mean, fleshpots being fleshpots, it wasn't that bad in some respects, but they did have to spend literally minutes each week typing things on impenetrable and disgusting subjects like climate science and gynaecotheology when all they really wanted to do was urge on the troops to kill Arabs, make fun of stupid liberals and their ill-fitting clothing and theoretically complicated sexual habits, and handicap vice presidential candidates.

Sexy Seder

Parting of the Red Sea. Lego Bible.

Brooks:

Correction: April 3, 2015 

An earlier version of this column misidentified the sea that God parted in the Book of Exodus. It is the Red Sea, not the Dead Sea.

Hahaha. Actually I'm pissed off because I didn't notice the error this morning before it was corrected, as I certainly should have done, and it makes me feel somewhat less entitled to mock him than usual.

Today is a Passover column in which world-famous postmodern Rabbi David Brooks takes on the meaning or perhaps deconsruction of the holy day, which he seems to think is mainly about singing, storytelling, and sex. I'm with him on the storytelling part. To me the Seder is all about the unspoken answer to the First Question:

Ties that re-bind

Homemade matzoh, via BetterBatter.

Shorter David Brooks, "A Long Obedience", New York Times, April 15 2014:

Passover is such a liberal holiday, with all this emphasis on slaves escaping to freedom and getting to do whatever they want, so I prefer to ignore it, and get an early start on Shavuot instead.

A remarkably rich and insane column, seriously suggesting that the feast of the Passover is mistaken in celebrating the Hebrews' escape from their Egyptian bondage when it ought to be celebrating God's giving to Moses of the Law (613 count 'em 613 commandments) 40 years later (and seven weeks later in the Jewish calendar, when it has its own holiday, as Brooks surely knows, the Feast of Weeks, June 3-5 this year), which Brooks says was a "re-binding", as clarified in the commentaries of Rabbis Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin: