too many words

I. Stop Using Facebook

Nobody talks about the karmic pressure of social media. This is an internalized pressure. This is the watching and liking and savoring of other people's virtual window-dressing, and then realizing, aha, I'm offering nothing myself. I am a selfish media user, quaffing the heady drams of others' self-exposure. Avowedly anti-Facebook, I'm now publishing my daughter's picture on Instagram with regularity. I've sold my daughter for likes. I've reciprocated unspoken expectations, my gratitude of others' anonymous vulnerability (so...not vulnerability?) urging me to assume other people care about my life because, it turns out, I care about the megapixels of theirs. 

There might also be such a thing as regression to typical dad who is typically proud of his daughter, likelihood of regression to increase by the hour from hour one. Ah, well. The middle-class, on some front, gets most of us in the end.

Some decent links this week. Some politics, so put on your disagreement hats. Personal hot air at the end, as usual. 

II. No, You're the Midwest

An examination of America's "bread basket" that situates the term "bread basket" in its proper capitalist myth-making context, and a whole lot more on the Midwest than you could have hoped for; come for the distinction between different kinds of rust-belt erasure, stay for salient pivots to current social dynamics:

A regional identity built on its own denial, on the idea of an unqualified normality: This sounds, of course, like whiteness—a racial identity that consists only of the absence of certain kinds of oppression.. . . 

Midwestern history is a study in racial quarantine. Midwestern cities often dominate in rankings of the country’s most segregated. And though the region has seen its share of Klan activity and outright lynching... the Midwest’s racism most frequently appears in the history books in the form of riots: Detroit, 1943; Cleveland, 1966; Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Detroit again, 1967; Chicago, Cincinnati again, and Kansas City, 1968; Detroit again, 1975; Cincinnati again, 2001; Ferguson, 2014; Milwaukee again, 2016. A riot is, among other things, a refusal to be quarantined.

III. Wealth Re-Distribution

Huh. Pretty straightforward, then:

For all the bill's complexity, its underlying math is relatively straightforward: "By 2027, people making $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion cut," The New York Times reported, summing up analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). It's an almost perfect one-to-one transfer of money from the vast numbers of Americans in the middle class to the far smaller population that occupies the upper fraction of the top 1 percent.

Indeed, our current (and looming) inequality hearkens back to the halcyon days of the 20s, when socialist sympathizing was rife for (ahem) some reason. 

IV. Does This Mean Coldplay is a Young Life Band?

U2 is the world's most famous praise band, I guess. From the New Yorker:

The story of U2 might be this: having begun as a band that was uncertain about the idea of pursuing a life of faith through music, they have resolved that uncertainty. Their thin ecclesiology has become thick. Today, they are their own faith community; they even have a philanthropic arm, which has improved the lives of millions of people. They know they made the right choice, and they seem happy. Possibly, their growing comfort is bad for their art. But how long could they have kept singing the same song of yearning and doubt? “I waited patiently for the Lord,” Bono sings, in the band’s version of Psalm 40. “He inclined and heard my cry."

V. On Conscience

I'm not going to spend a long time bemoaning the awful state of conversation regarding this current Roy Moore debacle. I have almost too many thoughts, starting with frustrations about "family first" conservatives continuing to sell out to sexual predators, and ending with some rant on the general collapse of any notion of social good outside of consumerism, whether it's the right's destructive reduction of even the sacred to market measurements, or the left's belief that if your consumerism is woke enough, it isn't vapid materialism. (One of these is much worse, in my opinion; both suffer from a root disease.) But that's off track, because Roy Moore is bad and men and women supporting him have lost all notion of what conscience means. I say the word somewhat technically, in the sense that John Henry Newman describes:

 Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself.

A long-sighted selfishness, with some frippery about caucus politics, is exactly the cover too many of these clowns, elected and electorate alike, are using. Most can't even summon the integrity to put on a posture of consistency. They preach, and then they vote, and the one does not follow the other. There's an essay here about how we've all turned into utilitarian pragmatists, and how utilitarianism is the ethical system most liable to defend genocide, but I've gone on too long already. Suffice it to say, we should all read more Elizabeth Anscombe (Thomist flavor) or Philippa Foot (atheist flavor) and restore virtue to its rightful cultural prominence.

Or, I mean, we could at least scan essays about them and then bloviate into a newsletter. 

Recommended Reading: Margaret Avison!