The Rightness Lag

Via.

David Brooks has changed his mind ("The Case for Reparations"):

Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?

But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.

Then he calms down a bit. He's got the theological idea, which I really do, no snark, appreciate, that systemic racism is a sin, for which white society needs to atone, but he's more interested in Christian confession and absolution for himself than Jewish atonement and repair for the victims: looks like it's not the money that he expects to do the job, but the process of talking about it:

Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.

It'll make him feel all tingly, as David Brooks might say. So that's nice, and better than what his friends have done with the Universal Basic Income idea (used it as an excuse for planning the devastation of the social safety net), but it's pretty Brooksish in the end, and I'm not swooning.

Also it occurs to me that at the beginning of the week he seems to have read something about the Sanders "Medicare for All" proposal with "mild disagreement" and "all sorts of practical objections" and concluded that it was an "impossible dream". Does this mean that sometime in 2024 he's going to decide that it needs to be done, or at least discussed, after he has a conversation with an elderly diabetic who's been condemned to death by the price of insulin?

Come to think of it, wasn't it around 2008 that Brooks decided George W. Bush had made some "bad calls" at the beginning of the Iraq war? (He was applauding the "courageous and astute" 2007 surge)? Is Brooks installed with some kind of five-year rightness lag?

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Who Does General Kelly Resemble?

Unveiling of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, 28 May 1890, via Danish Wikipedia.

After General Kelly's somewhat thoughtless remarks about the Civil War to Laura Ingraham on the TV—

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly told Ingraham. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

—everybody's dumping on old Kelly.

(I should mention that no, it was not always loyalty to state. The Union Army called itself the Union Army because it believed that the Union trumped the individual state, and the language of the Constitution, including the oath sworn by guys like General Lee, backed that up.)

Not just exposing his deep and startling ignorance of history as Ta-Nehisi Coates did  (in tweets repeated at TPM). No, people are accusing Kelly of being, disappointingly, no different from Trump himself. Not to mention refusing to apologize for his public false statements about Rep. Frederica Wilson. Chris Cillizza, of all people, the most slack-minded, smirky politics fashionista in town, accuses Kelly of being Trump's "Mini Me":

increasingly, it seems as though Trump is drawn to Kelly for another reason: Because they see the world similarly. Trump likes people who affirm his views and who are willing to battle political correctness and the media at every turn. Kelly appears to be ready and willing to take up arms in those fights.

So in the name of simple fairness, I'd like to clarify that General Kelly's thinking is not like Donald Trump at all. It's more like David F. Brooks.

Brooks on Coates

Result of Googling "courageous white people". Via Trend-Hunter.

I really feel like giving David Brooks a break for his brave effort to tell people how it feels to be a white person reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me ("Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White"). It's right up there with Fredrik De Boer ("what white people talk about when we talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates", a bit more successful than an earlier effort) as a searing account of a kind of experience that few are willing to explore.

No, seriously, he's very respectful, and manages to trot out the word "privilege" almost like one of us:

A shande far de goyim

Updated 4/8/2012

The four sons: "the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who doesn't know how to ask... the question" From Point of No Return.

When a Jewish or Jewish-identifying American says something harsh about the Likud party and its coalition, as happens fairly often to me,* she or he runs a risk of being attacked as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew, as if Binyamin Netanyahu somehow represented all of suffering Jewry and to criticize him were equivalent to accepting the Blood Libel.

To the contrary, the reason so many leftish JOJIAs get so upset about Bad Israelis like Netanyahu that they appear instead to be identifying with Palestinians is that Bad Israelis misrepresent Jewry in a way that brings shame on the race; they are a shande far de goyim, a scandal seen by the gentiles.** I think of Netanyahu as a gangster cousin whose parents should have [jump]

*I'm only patrilineally Jewish--Jewish enough, as you might say, for Hitler, not for Chabad.
 **That's far corresponding to German vor meaning "in front of", not fur corresponding to für.