The paranoid style in American politics

The title of this post is that of a very influential lecture by Richard Hofstadter that he gave in 1963 that was later revised and expanded into an essay and was later published in an abridged form in 1964. The full essay can be found in the collection of his essays Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. What is noteworthy is how remarkably relevant it is to what is going on today. It is a long essay and I have excerpted below just the main aspects, omitting much of the historical arguments that he provides to support his case.

We are currently living in a time in the US when we are awash in grand conspiratorial theories that are being pushed by prominent individuals, like Donald Trump about the election being stolen, to anonymous creators of fantastical ideas such as that there is a vast conspiracy of pedophiles at the highest levels of government and public life or that there is an organized movement to replace white Christians with people of color and other religions or that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created and released and that the vaccines to combat it is also part of some diabolical plot. Going by Hofstadter, these are the just the most recent manifestations of a long-standing tendency in US politics.
[Read more…]

Taking great risks for the enjoyment of others

A stuntman has died during a performance.

Chris Darnell, 40, was driving the “Shockwave Jet Truck” while racing two planes during the Field of Flight Airshow in Battle Creek. The truck, capable of reaching speeds of up to 300 MPH, crashed during the maneuver and flipped off the runway. Darnell died at the scene.

The Shockwave Jet Truck show is a family-run business that travels the nation performing at airshows and events. Chris’ father, Neal Darnell, is also a driver and pilot. He posted a note on the company’s Facebook page, “We are so sad. Just one month ago Chris turned 40. He was so well-loved by everyone who knew him. Chris so loved the air show business. He was living the dream’.”

There are some jobs that are necessarily dangerous but need to be done. But then there are people (tight rope walkers, trapeze artists, etc.) who enjoy doing things that put their lives at risk just for the entertainment of others. There must be something about risking death that they find exhilarating. There are also people who get vicarious pleasure from watching other people take risks. Hence it is inevitable that given the existence of an audience willing to pay to watch them, the risk takers have an incentive to take it up as a career and do it again and again, sometimes raising the risk level.

I am very risk-averse. I also do not enjoy watching other people take risks just for my enjoyment. Hence I never watch live performances of people who do such things. I did not like circuses as a child because I always worried about people falling from a height or getting attacked by ferocious animals, as sometimes happens. As a child, I wished to avoid the horror of seeing such a thing. As an adult, a new concern has been added. I feel that I would be complicit if such a tragedy should occur because without an audience, some of those people would not have done those things in the first place.

Film review: American History X (1998) and the neo-Nazi movement

I finally got around to seeing this film that had long been on my list of things to watch. It tells the story of a young man Derek Vinyard (superbly played by Edward Norton) who, under the influence of an older neo-Nazi, gets drawn into a skinhead gang in Los Angeles with swastika tattoos and all, and becomes a leader and recruiter for the gang. He ends up killing two black men and goes to prison where he undergoes a change in views that causes him to abandon his prior beliefs. When he emerges, he tries to change the beliefs of his younger brother who idolizes him and, in his absence, has joined the gang that he had been in, under the influence of the same older neo-Nazi. What struck me most about this film is that though it was made in 1998, how contemporary it is in terms of the neo-Nazi ideology it articulates.

There are three powerful scenes (they are in black and white like all the flashback scenes). One is a flashback to the family dinner table where high-schooler Derek describes his excitement about his English course where he is reading the book Native Son. His fire fighter father advises him to reject the teaching of his charismatic black teacher because it is all propaganda designed to advance black people at the expense of white people. The film implies that this is what starts Derek down the road to racism.


[Read more…]

Rat makes more sense to me now that I am older

(Pearls Before Swine)

I went camping just once. There were about ten of us and it was just after we had finished our final exams at college, before the results were released and we had to start work. We camped on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka next to the wonderful warm and calm ocean and the golden sandy beaches. The whole area was empty of people, just coconut trees and other vegetation. Sleeping in the open near the ocean under the night sky where we could see so many stars that were invisible in the city was a real experience. None of us really knew much about camping and any seasoned camper would have been horrified at our ineptness but I recall that we all had a great time.

A few years ago, I returned to that same area that we had camped as students . It was unrecognizable. It has now been utterly transformed with luxury hotels all along the beachfront. All that remains of what I remembered are the sandy beaches and the warm, placid ocean.

Some of my friends on that trip still enjoy camping but I have no desire to do so anymore. In particular, a decent bathroom is one thing that I am very reluctant to voluntarily do without.

Measure B’s defeat shows importance of each vote

Readers may recall a recent post of mine where I described the heated emotions about the move to add a bike and pedestrian trail in the small town of Del Rey Oaks that I live in that would provide easier access to a small body of water accurately called the Frog Pond. Opponents of the move had put on the ballot an initiative known as Measure B that would have prohibited the trail and the vote was held on June 7th. Since California routinely allows mail-in voting, it takes a long time to get the final results and just this past week the official results were announced and Measure B had been defeated, which means that construction of the trail will proceed.

The result was a squeaker, with 387 ‘Yes’ votes and 399 ‘No’ votes, a narrow margin of 12 votes. Noteworthy was the fact that the total number of people who voted was 799. Since the town has a population of only 1520 with 1216 registered voters, the turn out was 65.7% of registered voters, more than twice the countywide average of 31.1%. This shows the intensity of the feeling that the Frog Pond generated. Leading up the the election, the only people who came to my door to canvass were those on both sides of this issue, not any of the candidates for office. Also, the overwhelming amount of literature that I received was about Measure B.

Of the 799 people who voted, for unknown reasons 13 did not vote on this particular issue, greater than the margin of the result. In big elections, it is is easy to feel that one’s vote does not matter and decide not to bother. It is small town elections that reveal the importance of voting.

“Nice testimony you got there. Too bad if anything happened to you after you give it.”

During Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that has been highly damaging to Trump World, committee vice chair Liz Cheney mentioned two messages that potential witnesses received before that day that contained veiled threats to pressure them to not say anything damaging to Trump and his enabling cronies. We now learn that Hutchinson was the recipient.
[Read more…]

Anchovynado?

Maybe because of my love of puns and other forms of wordplay, my brain, whenever it encounters any ambiguity in a sentence due to its construction or punctuation, immediately seizes upon the more bizarre meaning, rather than settling on the more reasonable interpretation. Take for example this story about fish falling from the sky.

Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame. 

Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.

Local fishers and researchers are blaming seabirds that, because of an explosion in the anchovy population off the coast of the Bay Area, now have more fish than they know what to do with.

My attention was caught by the line about someone saying that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus”. My thoughts went along the lines of: Why was the fish waiting for a bus? Was it in order to get back to the ocean? What did this person do to the fish that it tried to hit them? How does a fish hit someone anyway? With its tail? Its fins?

That is the way my brain works. Newspaper headlines are often my biggest source of raw material because their enforced brevity makes them ripe for misinterpretation for warped minds like mine.

How the Republican party became the white grievance party

In a detailed profile of Florida governor Ron DeSantis who is clearly running for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, Dexter Filkins writes that he is following the path that Trump opened up, that seeks to motivate base voters by being fiercely combative. The difference is that DeSantis is more articulate, determined, and focused.

For decades, the Democratic Party had commanded a majority of Florida’s registered voters. But the state was changing, as Trump’s election helped energize a shift in political affinities. The Republican Party’s rank and file became increasingly radical, and G.O.P. leaders appeared only too happy to follow them. “There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy,” Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. “They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.
[Read more…]

Just another day in the Trump White House

White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on Tuesday of Trump’s obnoxious behavior of throwing food and dishes and overturning all the content of a table when he is displeased reveals more than that of an adult who is childish. It also shows the utter contempt he has for people, such as the valet for his private dining room, who have to clean up after him. Needlessly creating work for those who work for you and having no concern for them is a sign of a narcissistic personality. But of course, we already knew that about Trump.

I notice that in all the attempts by Trump supporters to discredit her testimony, this description of Trump’s behavior has gone unchallenged, perhaps because it is so believable from what we already know about him.