I wish I could tell you that I had a shortcut for getting people to care about solutions

Hi all --

I had just finished writing about Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright" when I started doubting its utility. It's a poem which presents a kind of nationalist founding myth. In our time, various cranks can act on any idea about what makes a nation. One would think that would be justification enough to write on the subject; it makes sense to reflect on some peculiar, if somewhat obscure, rights and wrongs.

Still, I found this story, "The War on Solar is Coming to a Town Near You," (h/t Jamelle Bouie) useful as an addendum. People have embraced a militant nostalgia, paranoid that solar farms will mean the end of traditional farms. So they're creating situations where literal farmers lose their acreage because the farmers aren't allowed to contract with solar companies to pay their bills:

“People in Green Township moved there to see cornfields. They moved there to see apple orchards. They did not move there to see solar panels,” one township official said during the debate over the project.

What strikes me is how there's a specific vision of what the land should be, and this vision resists people's actual needs. It's funny how Frost posited a surrender to the land which, we can assume, is more "real" than being dominated by the British (e.g. you do not receive dictates from someone else's imagination). But here, we have Americans who conceive of the land through patriotic/cinematic imagery, and that imagery has an almost unyielding grip.

Project 2025 and "Porn"

Two things can be true, even if they're somewhat in tension: 1) more needs to be done at a local level, e.g. support libraries, support people after they've completed their sentence 2) there needs to be more awareness of what's happening nationally. Some very small, radical, and powerful groups sense they're close to having massive power, and they've announced in advance that they seek "retribution."

You've probably heard now about the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025." In brief: former Trump officials have a really nasty plan for everyone else when they get back into office. John Oliver has a good primer on one part of it, the replacement of non-partisan civil servants with explicitly partisan appointees. I thought Melissa Gira Grant's "The Real Targets of Project 2025's War on Porn" was excellent in illustrating other crucial details. An extremely expansive definition of "porn" seeks to stir moral panic so librarians can be jailed, websites can be shuttered, and hosting services and telecom companies can be threatened. In short, an aggressive and uncompromising play for power is planned, with no less than the federal bureaucracy implementing it. (I suspect a post about how small government was a giant lie and cannot be trusted as rhetoric for the foreseeable future is necessary.)

Real People Are Worried the President is in Cognitive Decline

Again, two things in tension can be true. It absolutely is the case that major media outlets, left-punching (and genocide-affirming) centrists, and weirdos who want to create a Democratic version of Fox News are saying the President must stop his campaign. It also is the case that nearly everyone else is saying or thinking some version of that too, even if they don't have a fantasy about doing the primary over.

Osita Nwanevu's "Democrats don't just need a powerful candidate. They need a reckoning" has some lines that hit the problem of our all-encompassing gerontocracy on the head. It isn't just the Democratic party that needs these words:

It’s clearly difficult for Democrats to dislodge their most important figures even when political realities suggest that they should; all told, the Democratic party is best understood less as a political party organized to enact or protect specific policies than as a professional association committed to protecting its most valued members.

"A professional association committed to protecting its most valued members" includes so many failed workplaces, whether we're talking about the Democratic National Committee or a Hot Topic full of drama because the managers only hire their friends.

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, Ryan Broderick's take on the debate is extremely insightful. He and Gene Park both noticed how Biden was responding to Trump the way someone extremely online–someone trapped in a bubble, perhaps–would:

...Biden spent the 2020 campaign and initial years of his presidency in a COVID bubble, which he replaced with an ideological one last year once Americans — and his own staffers — began protesting the conflict in Israel and Palestine. And all the while he has continued to rely on the social media playbook the Obama administration cooked up in the 2000s. Would you prefer a Kamala Harris pantsuit bi flag or trans flag coffee cup? Both go well with your Dark Brandon T-shirt, which you can wear while you watch Dark Brandon video edits his team is panic-posting to TikTok, the video app he’s already signed a law banning.

You want to read the whole thing. Broderick's kicker is even more devastating than this, and this accuses Biden of using a playbook that's over a decade old.

Kelly Hayes: "Work the problem like someone who cares more about getting it right than being understood as right."

I gotta confess that I never thought I'd see so many so-called adults be smugly satisfied that a horrible thing happened on the news. The "adults" in question simply list loudly and frequently all the bad things that could possibly happen. Of course one of those things must happen, so voila!–they're a prophet now. (A prophet who can't admit that the gutters need replacing.)

I think it's safe to say that for most of us, this is the value of being right. It's entirely a formality. There's no investment in the truth. As an educator, it is extremely disheartening when you see someone demonstrate these tendencies. A major part of making an educational environment work is getting people to see the consequences of the truth. The truth is so powerful that it can't be understood only as a formal proposition. It has a grip on the world that sometimes takes years to realize.

I wish I could tell you that I had a shortcut for getting people to care about solutions rather than their ego. Recently, though, a friend became unemployed and others started piling on with fantasies of what exactly they would do if they were unemployed. What comes in the guise of well-meaning advice is a combination of panic and arrogance. You can tell because the people talking sound like they would be millionaires if you gave them 50 cents and a bank account.

All I can say is that, for me, the truth which matters most nowadays is why things sound so much easier than they actually are. The truth lies in that gap, and perhaps only there.