The Sunday New York Times, Washington edition, is delivered to my house sometime before 7:00 a.m. most Sundays—a gross extravagance and ecologically catastrophic sin for which there can be no moral justification or atonement. Here are some things I gleaned from that paper, in all my decadent shame, ink-smudged and coffee’d up and unbothered by my children’s pleas for attention.
43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter is Revealed
When is something news and also not news? On the “not news” side of the ledger, we have: an event that happened more than four decades ago; an event that many people had already made up their minds about; an event described by a single source presented without meaningful corroboration. On the “news” side of the ledger, we have: a person with no clear reason to fabricate such a story revealing that he went on a secret foreign tour during which he met with foreign leaders on behalf of the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign to tell Iran not to release 52 American hostages before the 1980 presidential election. So, news and also not news!
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
This account does not prove that Reagan, or even his closest campaign advisers, knew about the trip or directed the conversations as described, but it certainly implies that Reagan toadies or toadie-hopefuls were willing to extend the hostage crisis as long as it took to make Carter look bad and Reagan look good. Which…this would be illegal, right? Something in the vein or treason, or a violation of the Logan Act, or something? It’s certainly unseemly! The fact that the hostages were held all the way to inauguration day suggests a further rubbing of sand in the eyes of the Carter administration to the political benefit of Reagan—whose administration would go on to illegally sell arms to the embargoed Iranians. In hoping to avoid an October surprise that benefitted Carter—a triumphant freeing of the hostages in the weeks before the election certainly wouldn’t have hurt him—would Reagan himself, or his closest allies, work at cross purposes to American interests to ensure their own victory?
Of course they would! This is not a serious question! People will do anything to get elected—not just because they want power, which they do, but because they usually genuinely believe that they will do a better job for the country than the other guys will. Reagan and his pals would likely argue that such machinations were ultimately in the national interest, because they are incredibly certain of the righteousness of their own cause. The presidency is a prize worth paying almost any price for, especially when the cost is borne mostly by 52 people who were already being held captive, anyway. Kennedy probably “had help” winning Illinois and maybe Texas in 1960, SCOTUS decided Florida in 2000, Donald Trump, Jr. had that meeting where he gleefully accepted Russians’ offer of help in digging up more dirt on the Clintons. The Southern Strategy, Swift-boating, Willie Horton—every presidential campaign is more interested in winning than in maintaining perfect fidelity to norms and ethics.
That said, the above thread rubs me the wrong way. It is one thing to be skeptical of power and political sausage-making, to reasonably doubt that everything is on the up-and-up. It’s something else to allow that skepticism to calcify into certainty. A precocious child’s intuition that there’s more to the story than we’re being told does not translate into real-world evidence of conspiracy and criminal activity. Sometimes the world bears out your incredulity, and sometimes it does not. It is perfectly fine to build a worldview around doubting what you are told, especially when actual evidence points to the contrary. But when all you have is innuendo and circumstance, being certain in your cynicism simply breeds contempt for even the idea of the feasibility of functional institutions. Sometimes having your priors confirmed—getting to shout “I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG”—only closes off avenues of curiosity and open-mindedness going forward. And treating the story of someone confessing for the first time to the thing you were so sure of all along as old news is just smarmy condescension. We didn’t know this before. Now, we know a little bit more.
Also, Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential election by 489 Electoral College votes to 49 Electoral College votes, and by nearly ten percentage points of the popular vote. This all happened before I was born, and I realize that the hostage crisis really gripped the American psyche for a year before the election, but would the freeing of the hostages certainly have flipped such a huge margin of defeat? I don’t know! Seems like a big ask, considering how the rest of the presidency had already gone.
Also also, Peter Baker getting this one published below the fold on the front page probably really grinds his gears. This is quite a story! But I think what relegates it to second-fiddle status—to a “20 years on, ‘member the Iraq War” story—is the fact that it’s mostly a single-source story about an old man confessing to something lots of people had long-assumed was the case in a big picture sort of way, even if they weren’t sure of the details.
‘Everyone Is a Created Being of Their Own’
This is an Opinion Guest Essay by a rabbi named Elliot Kukla, who calls themself “transgender and nonbinary.” Its print headline is above—online, it is headlined “Ancient Judaism Recognized a Range of Genders. It’s Time We Did, Too.” The piece links to a number of reports that claim that trans and nonbinary children who are affirmed in their identities are less prone to suicidality. He asserts that a lack of acceptance is what drives these children to death. “It’s not being transgender or nonbinary that kills young people; it’s the shunning, lack of acceptance and transphobia they encounter in the struggle to be who they truly are.”
This is probably not true, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Once you account for other mental illnesses, there’s little reason to believe that affirmation impacts suicidality one way or another. But even arguing about this is considered transphobic, is considered not caring about trans lives, is considered murderous. “Lives are at stake,” we’re told over and over again, not in a good faith effort to save lives, but to shut everyone else the fuck up.
This piece goes on to detail some over-reaching laws being enacted by conservative legislatures, and makes an appeal to the ancient gender wisdom of the Jews, which is noxious in its own way. “The Torah had names for intersex people, and men who were castrated, so all this gender stuff is actually very normal and good” is actually a non sequitur to the question at hand.
“Trans liberation is a gift to everyone, because it expands the categories for what it means to be human.” There is no need to expand the category of human. There never has been. Humans have dignity and individual rights by virtues of their individuation and self-conception. Sometimes those rights have been or will be denied or ignored, which is unjustifiable and antithetical to justice. Being trans or nonbinary or intersex is not an expansion of humanity. The life has worth because it is a life—segmentation through identity isn’t expansion, just wordplay.
The claim that any conversation about how to approach children experiencing “gender distress” is opposition to their survival and ability to thrive is just a rhetorical device designed to scare people into submission. This is tyrannical behavior operating outside of reason, a religious crusade that believes that being asked to rationally explain itself is akin to calls for genocide. Identitarianism is not humanism.
Trying to Define a Label
This video went viral, as predicted by the lady who stars in the video. Much fun was had at her expense, and many columns have been written in the aftermath in an attempt to do what Bethany could not do in the moment—briefly explain what the hell anybody means when they talk about “woke.” Ross Douthat makes an effort to do that in this column. I won’t quote from his definition because he doesn’t really offer one—instead, he presents it as a lengthy thought exercise in which he explains a wide, multi-pronged worldview. He concludes with the following:
If you find a lot of this narrative persuasive, even filtered through my conservative mind, then whatever “woke” describes, it probably describes you.
If you recoil from it, welcome to the ranks of the unwoke.
The human craving for the ideological binary, especially in public-facing life, never ceases to amuse and delight. “Woke” itself, of course, is strictly facially binary—either one is awake, or one is not. The term leaves no room for the liminal space that the vast majority of people occupy in their actual lives, instead insisting that wokeness is an all-in or all-out condition. This goes for its original(-ish?) use as a sincere expression of being aware of systemic injustices, its often jokey use in modern African American Vernacular English, and for its use as a derisive put-down by conservatives—”woke” always connotes awareness of certain claimed truths, and the attendant desire to spread them.
But this is a nonsense framing, as nonsensical as its descendant “racism vs. antiracism” binary that insists that every human behavior, action, system, statement, and desire must be understood to be racist or anti-racist based on whether or not it produces a “racist” effect or outcome. A person can find aspects of Douthat’s articulated woke worldview persuasive and find it unconvincing on the whole. One need not even reject any of the claimed propositions to also believe that the prescriptions are bogus. There is not actually any line, for most people, where upon crossing it they have been “awokened.” This is not They Live, there are no magic sunglasses that reveal that there is an underlying reality to our false world that only the woke have access to.
People have conflicting, often contradictory ideas about the world. Recoiling from one or more of a series of ideas does not make you automatically not one thing or another except as defined by people who have accepted these stakes for their own ends. There is no binary—this isn’t math (or sex), it’s culture. It’s sort of like the way we were always taught to think about gender until five minutes ago—there are lots of ways to be a boy, and lots of ways to be a girl, and no one has any right to tell you that girls can’t do _____ or boys only do _____. Also, penises and vaginas are real. These are different conversations. Not everything is “woke” or its inverse.
And “woke” is actually pretty easy to define, I think, in the way it is most commonly understood in the parlance of our times. There isn’t actually much confusion about it, either, and it’s odd to suggest that there is. It is the general belief that there are systems of control or oppression in place that make life unfair for different people in different ways, and that those systems must be fought against and dismantled to create a more just world. The confusion arises when you try to make it your boogeyman for everything—from banks to school boards to nutritional information—a confusion that is only amplified by the fact that the honest brokers of the revolution similarly claim that yes, in fact, we mean everything. In other words, the problem arises from listening to the people who insist that anything at all can explain everything. Unsurprisingly, we have arrived back at religion, I guess.
The Boys Who Cried ‘Woke!’
And then there’s Jamelle Bouie, popping up once again to insist that none of this is actually happening, or that to the extent to which it is happening, it’s just a distraction. I share Bouie’s disdain for the conservative claim that “wokeness” is what caused Silicon Valley Bank to fail. I did an opening to the podcast all about it, in fact. I’m less convinced by his conclusion.
The people who blame wokeness for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention from the real questions toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.
This, again, is just one example of how bad actors and interested parties try to obscure serious questions about the structure of our society with claims that serve only to muddy the waters. You don’t have to look hard to find others.
Put simply, you show me a scene from the so-called culture wars, and I’ll show you what’s behind it: a real issue with real stakes for real people.
The idea that conservatives are just making all this shit up is hilarious. The idea that they are doing so because they want to distract you from their nefarious plans is presented as self-evident, so I’ll simply say in response, “No, it’s not.” There is an attention economy, and outrage works on the brain better than nuance. The culture wars are not a function of a controlling class trying to obscure their influence and power-hoarding—they are a response to the market! People love this shit! We have built an attention economy over top of everything because our lives have grown existentially easy by any reasonable measure when compared with every other moment in human history. This is what we choose to do with our decadence, because we are profoundly stupid animals. Does it perhaps benefit those with real power, that we are so excited to squabble about nonsense? Sure! That doesn’t mean that the Republicans are trying to distract us from their alliance with the banksters—they’re just genuinely really into this shit.
Also, if it’s all just manufactured to obscure the truth, is it therefore not actually reactionary? Are we making social progress, or not? Reactionary-ism is reacting to something that’s happening, isn’t it? Or is it all in their imaginations? Are social justice movements doing the good work to fight against the forces you claim are distracting us from real issues, and the only defense of the status quo is manufactured culture war stuff? Or is it possible that some “social justice” movements are just as invested in the performance of culture war as the right is, for similar reasons? Am I rambling here, without purpose and direction? Yes! But this is a lazy-ass column Jamelle wrote, so turnabout’s fair play.
Bouie has made this point before—mostly on Twitter, and not in a column, I don’t think—and I’m always mystified by it. He really seems to genuinely not think “the left” engages in culture war the way “the right” does. What “the left” does is just advancing righteous political causes. What “the right” does is manufacture culture war cover for the real seats of political power. This is not at all in keeping with my lived experience! I assume he comes by this blindness honestly.
Where $250,000 Gets You Dinner
Initiation fees for dining clubs are $10,000 to $250,000, and mounting as demand rises.
Acquiring a golden ticket to Palm Beach country clubs with golf or tennis can take years: Long waiting lists, piles of required recommendations from members, and persnickety committees drunk on power all slow the acceptance process. But memberships to the dining clubs can be fast-tracked if the applicant knows the owners or key members.
The dining club expansion in Palm Beach mirrors the trend among upper-crust urban sets across the country. At Casa Cruz in New York, San Vicente Bungalows in Los Angeles or the new Carriage House in Palm Beach, members have monthly house accounts and never suffer through a delayed table reservation.
Speaking of the awful things we choose to do with our decadence! It is entirely outside the bounds of my imagination—creative or moral—to wrap my head around the idea of paying to be in a social or dining club. This is insanity, and I have no idea why a person would choose to associate with anyone who would try to socialize or dine this way. I wouldn’t even dream of paying eight bucks a month for a Twitter blue checkmark, and these lunatics are paying tens of thousands of dollars, or much more, to be able to go out to dinner regularly at a particular place. I would be so ashamed of myself, to show up to that place with all those people who also paid a great sum to be there and pretend like it’s all very normal. This probably also speaks to the reason that I could never imagine joining a fraternity. I don’t identify as anything, never mind paying some asshole to tell me that I belong. Don’t do this, you maniacs! What a racket!
