Tag Archives: Andrew Sullivan

Sheeple Speak

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The sheeple have spoken. It is deemed correct. We must all cower in fear, wear masks, and wait for Armageddon.

My faith in humanity has been sorely tested over the past three years. I am all but done done with my fellow humans. The exception comes when it becomes absolutely necessary to interact with them: work, and some rare exceptions I’ll decide on.

People who I thought might have some redemptive qualities have come unglued over the past six to eight weeks. I can’t spend any time on Facebook, since it resembles a catalog for bad-looking masks that won’t do shit other than signal the wearer’s virtue. That’s the platform at it’s best these days.

A couple of articles I read this week made sense to me. Ironically, the first one comes from a Catholic, which is rich for someone like me, an agnostic at best. There are things to fear more than death. Ironically, so many progressives are pretty fucking selective on the lives they value.

It doesn’t really matter what I post in this space anyways, since no one appears capable of reading anything longer than 250 words, especially here.

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Sullivan for quite some time. When he writes, I usually read.

Perhaps some sanity and reasons for hope present, soon.

That rare person I still harbor some respect for posted this on his Facebook page (perhaps the only thing of value I’ve found there during Krona, except Bob Marley videos).

I’ll end with this musical non sequitur.

I saw the late Scotty Weiland and STP at the old CCCC in Portland. Melvins opened up for them, which was awesome!

Weiland and the boys were late coming on and the crowd was restless, waiting. Then, STP came out and they ripped it up. I can still hear Scotty singing “Crackerman.”

This is my favorite from their catalog. I got out the electric this afternoon and worked my way through the song’s chords and riffs. It was a healthy diversion for me.

Books and Reading: An Antidote

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I’ve written about subscribing to a “real American newspaper.” The paper that gets dropped at the end of my driveway every Saturday and Sunday is one of the “failing” papers that our always-aggrieved president regularly runs down for its “fake news.”

To call journalism “fake” exposes our bloviator-in-chief for the shallow huckster and carnival barker that he is at his essence. A man with small hands, a smaller heart, and who is totally clueless about the history of the nation he threatens to run into the ditch once and for all. For him, news is always “fake” when it’s not intended to flatter behaviors that are unflattering at best.

To malign reading and intellectual breadth and depth as “elitism,” is a solipsistic sleight-of-hand employed by lazy, shallow dolts who don’t, won’t, or can’t read. Bringing facts to these types is like arriving at a gunfight with a knife or worse: a sheet of paper.

But, to be well-read opens up a well-lit vista that is ever-expanding, rather than the world of the those striving at nothing. For the latter, their realm is a darkened square where the walls continue constricting, forcing out necessary oxygen.

I don’t expect every Saturday (or Sunday) to be a banner news day or one where The New York Times Book Review is bursting with books I want to run out and pick-up. Today, however, was a day when my book supplement had me jotting down notes and making plans to add to my ever-growing pile of “books to read.”

Saturday newspaper reading.

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Good Journalism

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Years ago (it was actually in 2003), I began blogging. I tried to consume the best bloggers in the blogosphere at the time. One of them was Andrew Sullivan.

His blog became a daily stop for me. There were few writers covering issues and writing about them with his clarity and erudition. He’s one of the few writers/journalists that I’ve found whose work regularly countered ideological defaults.

I recently signed up for a year-long subscription to New York magazine. Why? Because I’ve consistently been directed to stories on their website. Rather than be a “taker,” I figured a subscription was the least I can do to support what remains of viable journalism in America.

I wasn’t surprised that when my first issue arrived in my mailbox (replete with Clarence Thomas staring back at me from the cover) that there would be a Sullivan-written article on opioids.

New York Magazine cover (Feb. 19-March 4)

It’s the best writing on the topic I’ve read up to this point.

America’s in tailspin on multiple fronts. Simply talking about a crisis like the one afflicting the country won’t solve it, and like Sullivan points out, neither will trying to win it with a “declaration of war,” as has been tried with dismal results in the past.

Then there’s this:

One way of thinking of postindustrial America is to imagine it as a former rat park, slowly converting it into a rat cage. Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. That dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation.

That’s not going away, as technology—which has overshot its intended mark time and time again—with its incessant over-promising and under-delivering, has left America awash in people and lives destroyed by opioids.

Read Sullivan and weep.