Claire Dederer/Paris Review:
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
We’ve all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.
I wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man. He’s the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public’s mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner’s Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner’s work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?
And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered unconsumable by their maker’s transgressions—how can one watch The Cosby Showafter the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it’s technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?
On this Thanksgiving weekend, here is a terrific First Nations map of US and Canada. Click on where you live and learn more about the tribes whose land you are living on (in my case, both Golden Hills Paugusset and Lenape, both of whom were part of the Wappinger Confederation — place name Wappingers Falls, NY).
The Guardian:
Sarah Silverman: ‘There are jokes I made 15 years ago I would absolutely not make today’
Sarah Silverman’s comedy has always aimed a laser into the dark corners of sexism, racism and religion. But now she’s using her wit to make sense of the huge issues facing America.
On I Love You, America she travels to the homes of Trump voters and listens to their views, before getting into good-natured arguments with them, “once all of our porcupine needles are down. Then I’m able to go: ‘Brandy! You cannot still think that Obama was born in the Serengeti.’ Because by this point we’re family, and then they’re more open to information, whereas arguing and spewing facts in their face… facts don’t change people’s minds. Emotions do. And the thing is that facts have now become opinions. And people are also taking their opinions and making them into facts.” Not that she finds this phenomenon remotely funny. “Did you see that fucking Scaramuccipost: ‘Were Jews killed in the Holocaust?’ There was literally an official poll, basically, did the Holocaust happen? Like it’s a matter of opinion. We live in a time when truth just has no currency at all.”
(Michael Freeman is a conservative ex-GOP speechwriter & communications consultant).
Vox:
Penn-Wharton thinks gimmicks will reduce revenue
The tax bill has a three-part structure:
- There’s a permanent tax cut for business owners.
- That’s offset by a permanent tax increase for individuals.
- In the short-term, the tax increase for individuals is offset by a temporary middle-class tax cut.
The goal, then, is to deliver a big business tax cut without increasing the long-term deficit. Penn-Wharton’s model suggests that this won’t work as well as the bill’s authors believe it will work, since individuals — especially rich ones who pay a lot of taxes and have good accountants — will engage in deliberate income shifting to take advantage of the temporary tax cuts, as well as “reclassification of income to exploit differences in marginal tax rates, potentially permanent or due to sunsets.”
In short, the Senate GOP leadership wrote a bill that’s designed to game the system with phase-ins and phase-outs, and Penn-Wharton thinks taxpayers will respond in kind — gaming the gamed system, reducing federal revenue, and increasing the long-term deficit.
The Hill:
White nationalist leader Richard Spencer has been banned from entering 26 countries in Europe, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Spencer said in an interview that he hasn’t received government confirmation about his ban from the more than two dozen countries in Europe’s visa-free Schengen area, including Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden.
“I’m being treated like a criminal by the Polish government. It’s just insane,” Spencer said. “I haven’t done anything. What are they accusing me of?”
Spencer said he would try and contest the ban, which would last for five years, according to the AP.
Ryan Lizza/New Yorker:
A Russian Journalist Explains How the Kremlin Instructed Him to Cover the 2016 Election
During the 2016 election, the directions from the Kremlin were less subtle than usual. “Me and my colleagues, we were given a clear instruction: to show Donald Trump in a positive way, and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in a negative way,” he said in his speech. In a later interview, he explained to me how the instructions were relayed. “Sometimes it was a phone call. Sometimes it was a conversation,” he told me. “If Donald Trump has a successful press conference, we broadcast it for sure. And if something goes wrong with Clinton, we underline it.”
A notable, if awful, apologist column from Tom Friedman/NYT:
Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last
The crown prince has big plans to bring back a level of tolerance to his society.
Guardian:
Activists will launch a last-ditch effort to prevent Donald Trump’s tax bill from passing in the Senate on Monday, with scores of groups planning to lay siege to politicians’ offices. b
Indivisible, the progressive group that aims to use Tea Party tactics to thwart the Republicans, has called for a day of action to stop the tax legislation, which the Senate is expected to vote on in the week after Thanksgiving.
According to some estimates, the GOP bill would actually raise taxes on middle-class workers over the next decade, and leave 13 million more people without insurance. A different tax bill passed the House on 16 November.
“Republicans are trying to rush this tax bill through,“ said Angel Padilla, the policy director at Indivisible. “And this is kind of standard practice for Republicans now – trying to rush things without any real public input. That’s what we saw on the healthcare bill and that’s what’s happening now.”
When conservatives cite ”rushing through Ocare” after a year of hearings and public debate, they’re lying:
In contrast, the ACA was debated in three House committees and two Senate committees, and subject to hours of bipartisan debate that allowed for the introduction of amendments. Peterson told us in an e-mail that he “can’t recall any major piece of legislation that was completely devoid of public forums of any kind, and that were crafted outside of the normal committee and subcommittee structure to this extent”.
When we say they’re rushing through profound policy changes without proper debate and regular order, we’re not. The process differences couldn’t be more profound.
Eve Fairbanks/BuzzFeed:
We'll Be Paying For Mark Halperin's Sins For Years To Come
Reports of sexual harassment destroyed his reputation and his career. But I want to talk about the deeper, subtler, more insidious effect Mark Halperin had on our politics.
The Note purported to reveal Washington’s secrets. In fact, its purpose was the exact opposite: to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand. It replaced normal words with jargon. It coined the phrase "Gang of 500," the clubby network of lobbyists, aides, pols, and hangers-on who supposedly, like the Vatican's cardinals, secretly ran DC. That wasn't true — power is so diffuse. But Halperin claimed he knew so much more than we did, and we began to believe it.
Once you believe that, it’s not hard to be convinced that politics is only comprehensible, like nuclear science, to a select few.
Of course, as bloggers, we have always believed the opposite. We believe our eyes and our own experience, not to mention data.
Vann R. Newkirk II/Atlantic:
Donald Trump’s Eternal Feud With Blackness
In a presidency defined by its unpredictability, one of the few constants is the president’s eagerness to attack black people for failing to show deference.
Ten months into Trump’s presidency, everything has changed, and everything has remained the same. In the onslaught of the 2017 newscycle, perhaps the one constant has been the president’s use of his expansive bully pulpit to target prominent black people. In addition to Lynch, Trump is also feuding with LaVar Ball, the brash celebrity dad of LiAngelo Ball, a UCLA player whose shoplifting arrest in China turned into a minor international incident. In a bizarre feud, Trump attacked Ball and his family for not being quite grateful enough to the president for securing the younger Ball’s freedom. LaVar Ball has refused to apologize or thank Trump, and has used the spectacle to engage in more carnival-barking, this time via a CNN interview.