Protesters in Austin, 2013, against back-door creationism in public schools. Photo by Patrick Michels/Texas Observer.
This was some headline, in the
Texas Tribune, which is a treasure of an online newspaper:
Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick
in lecture
Like an "accusation" of such a crime is enough to get you in trouble with the
administration.
The professor, Joy Alonzo, an expert in opioids, wasn't even at her own
institution; she was giving a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical
Branch in Galveston, to a class of first-year medical students including the
daughter of Dawn Buckingham, Texas Land Commissioner, a former state
senator from the time when Dan Patrick was a state senator too, and a friend
of Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp. Shortly after the lecture ended around
noon and she was driving home, Buckingham was on the phone with Patrick, and
also to the system's vice chancellor for government relations; Sharp opened an
investigation, sending Patrick a text a couple of hours later:
“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re
firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”
At 4:22, the course coordinator in Galveston had sent an email to the class
with a "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE":
Yesterday's discussion
has gotten very "interesting" from the standpoint of our pugnacious new friend
Alfredo, but my understanding of what's interesting is different from his, and
I'm bowing out of it after one last word, suggested this morning at
Roy's place: the
last word being "n****r-lover".
The progress from “n****r-lover” to “woke” as the favored pejorative of
bigots could make for a book-length study; but I will say the earlier,
cruder version had this much going for it: It didn’t come with a bunch of
alleged intellectuals trying to explain it.
Except I don't think it needs a book. Rather, the progress involved is pretty
simple: "woke" means "n****r-lover" with deniability. That is, it is
"n****r-lover" for those who would like to deny that they're the kind of
person who uses "n****r-lover". With the scent of Black English Vernacular (as
I noted somewhere in the comments) giving it a Trumpy kind of pungency (like
Trump's use of "nationalist"—"but I'm not supposed to use that word"—when he wants to confess, with deniability, that
he's a Nazi). Much more satisfyingly vulgar than the whiny old standby
"politically correct".
This is from behind a paywall at Vanity Fair, but I'm reading it at Alternet: Rod Dreher, writer at The American Conservative now living as an expatriate in Hungary, has been fired as a columnist at the instance of the donor who has paid his 6-figure salary for the last 12 years, banking heir Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who felt Dreher's columns (published by special arrangement directly to TAC's website "without any revisions or legal oversight," we're told) "had simply gotten too weird."
He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is 'profoundly evil;' detailed the 'formal' Catholic exorcism of a friend's suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate's uncircumcised penis.
The last was the memorable reference to the "primitive root wiener" in October 2021, which may be what Ahmanson regarded as the coup de gross. Rod will continue to function as an editor at large, but has taken his writings to Substack.
I don't have anything particular to say about it, except to note once again, for the record, that when cancel culture really strikes it tends to attack from the right.
Album cover by the Japanese-American ska punk band Kemuri.
This is kind of hilarious but also important, from a team at
Washington Post: the January 6 committee found, in extensive interviews with social media
employees, according to a memo prepared by committee staffers but not among
the things the committee made public (the Post has posted it here), that, far from censoring rightwingers,
the companies worked really hard at not doing it, violating
their content moderation rules to avoid offending Trump and his supporters:
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially
Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent
rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing
conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of
reprisals.The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps
to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite
clear red flags across the internet.
“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were
exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to
the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms
enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up
conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”
I won the war against Russian fascism last night, going to my first concert since 2019: brother-in-law's brother-in-law had tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and couldn't go, so he passed them to me, and I was feeling kind of funny about going, because the conductor was Valery Gergiev, longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he became friends with the then deputy mayor, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in 1992, which has been pretty good for his career (he's been the third wealthiest Russian on the Forbes list of celebrities), but it hasn't been so good for his reputation internationally when he's appeared in Putin's campaign ads, denounced the members of the Pussy Riot group, or failed to address the Russian "gay propaganda" law of 2013 making it a crime to distribute "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships", which has led to protests when he appears in New York, one of which I witnessed a while back (I felt like I was crossing a picket line), as well as dark questions about the relationship between art and power, as Alex Ross (whose account I am shamelessly stealing from here) told New Yorker readers in reference to a 2013 Gergiev performance of Dmitry Shostakovich's 8th symphony:
We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his terror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a conductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypocritical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense.
Anyway, in the end, I got to go to the concert and Gergiev didn't get to conduct it. I should have known—it was reported in The Times on Thursday: Gergiev is canceled.
Vienna dumped him for the orchestra's current US tour, he's losing gigs in Milan and perhaps Munich and Rotterdam, and last night he was replaced by the genial Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, while the very young Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho stepped in for the Russian Denis Matsuev (who has expressed support for the annexation of Crimea). It was a kind of schlocky program but one that goes beautifully with the famous warmth and richness of the Vienna band and the Carnegie acoustics, of the two most warhorsy of Rachmaninov's warhorses, the second piano concerto and second symphony, and it worked really really well.
It also started really late, I guess because we had to enter in single file in a line stretching almost around the block as everybody's vaccination status was verified, and it wasn't surprising at the end when Nézet-Séguin turned to the audience and said, "You want an encore? Come back tomorrow night!" It was a giddy, funny moment, and it honestly did feel like a feeling of victory for Ukraine, leaving us tired and a little punch-drunk but happy, as if we actually had been at a well-fought battle, against the grim forces trying to overwhelm us in this dark time.
Drawing by
Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, June 2021.
You know how upset conservatives are about "cancel culture" and how they've
reacted to this menace by going on a spree of banning thoughtcrimes like
"critical race theory" and their proponents from educational institutions
(it's not an attack on freedom of speech, it's just for the children's
sake)
Btw still haven't heart a word about this shit from the anti-cancel-culture
crybabies.
It's weird to imagine terms like "culturally responsive teaching" or
"abolitionist teaching" or "free radical therapy" or "normativity" in an
8th-grade classroom, or a 12th-grade one either. Why wouldn't they ban them in
the teacher training institutions where they might get used? I'm glad they're
just banning the words and not the practice—abolitionist teaching sounds like
a good thing
It really struck me, on this one, where the Dumbest Senator, Ron Johnson (United Russia–Wisconsin) complains about the treatment he's been getting for his amazing trick of explaining how he wasn't scared of the 6 January Capitol insurgents because he knew they were all good people who would never break the law (as they were flagrantly breaking a large number of laws and threatening to murder the vice president and Speaker of the House and whatnot), in contrast to those awful people from the Black Lives Matter, bad people presumably who break the law whenever they get the chance (though I don't know of a single example except Bree Newsome climbing that flagpole, and I'd offer to punch anybody who criticizes her for it but she could probably do it more effectively). When he said, you know,
The trouble right now is intellectual segregationism, where conservatives
are excluded from academic life, working class voices are excluded from
mainstream media, the Marxist left and theological right are marginalized,
groupthink is practiced by all, and writers are expected to act as the
representatives of a group, the left even more conformist than the right,
and 62% of Americans are afraid to share their beliefs. Fortunately there's
an obvious solution, in which the voices of nonconformity exclude everybody
who doesn't want to subscribe to their SubStack or Patreon site and make
lots of money from their self-selecting audiences.
It's intellectual feudalism replacing intellectual capitalism, a landscape
dotted with castles dominated by figures of daring and resistance like Yascha
Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Judd Legum, Matt Taibbi, Jonah Goldberg, and David
French defending themselves from behind their moats and battlements. That'll
show those segregationists. Or, as David Brooks says,
Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump
tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few
rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.
I would like
the record to show
that Judd Legum did not leave ThinkProgress, which he founded, because of
its relentless cancel culture, but because he got sick of being an editor in
chief, with which I can certainly sympathize:
the young throwback artist Bari Weiss, representing the liberalism of the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and Alan Dershowitz, takes her departure from the New York Times editorial board, to an extremely gloomy response from National Review's Rich Lowry
They warned Trump would bring fascism to America even as they implemented their own exquisite system of thought control https://t.co/D6HITsn7bp
and Squeaky Ben Shapiro the Straw Man King has emeritated hinself from the helm
of the alleged publication he's been associated with, "The Daily Wire" (I have
to admit while I haven't seen any proof it exists, I haven't looked very hard)
We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years.
Actually, no. As Brussels-based deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1990 to 1994, Brooks got his byline on exactly four articles mentioning the Soviet Union, suggesting two visits to Moscow (and none after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991):
A puff piece ("It's too late for a party congress", 2 July 1990) extolling Ilya Saslavskiy, a Ukrainian Oxford graduate and member of the National People's Congress, calling him a "combative intellectual" and "New Soviet Man" representing the "real action" in the Communist Party. Saslavskiy became an American and was working for BP's Russian operations when he and his brother Oleksandr were arrested for spying on behalf of the US and Ukraine in 2008—not because they were actually spies, but because Putin found it useful in his campaign to turn BP into Rosneft. I'm glad to report the brothers (who were sentenced to two years probation) seem to be OK, see photo at top. The Soviet Union, of course, had no future.
A review ("The Soviet Reality: Murder, Apathy, Dishonesty", 17 July 1990) of Stanislav Govorukhin's 1990 documentary We Can't Live Like This which, Brooks notes, was applauded by the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
A lengthy opinion piece ("In USSR, possession is better than the law", 16 May 1991) illustrating the collapse of rule of law with the case of an astrophysicist, "Maxim Hlobov", who succeeded in stopping the KGB from stealing his new apartment. He got the name wrong (should be Khlopov—he's in France now, working in the Astroparticles and Cosmology Laboratory of the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique de Particules).
A travel piece ("An American in Moscow: Hard-currency god", 21 May 1991).
