n+1: Notes on a News Cycle

Kristin Dembock on the Giffords shooting:

René Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that people never look more similar than they do when they’re fighting. Violence is mimetic. And mimesis, Girard argued there and elsewhere, is where violence comes from in the first place. Not from difference, which is what we usually think, but from sameness. We only become who we are by imitating others, which means we imitate even their desires (we want their things, their careers, the girl, the political power, even the power to tell the story, to find the answer), and then in that moment when we reach for the same thing, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of the other and want to smash it.

[via George Lazenby]

The Vulture Transcript: Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on Why He Loves Twitter, Thinks Facebook Is ‘Like a Mall,’ and Much More -- Vulture

On the tea party:

Any thoughts on why the tea-party movement is so successful right now? Why is everyone so upset?
It helps to have a black guy in the White House. Any black guy. If you want to do an old, grumpy white folks party, get a black guy in the White House. You get your old grumpy white folks to turn out.

So has this been simmering and now’s the time for it to come out?
Basically. The Civil War was scarcely more than 150 years ago. It’s yesterday. Race in American hasn’t been sorted out. This used to be a country that was run exclusively by white guys in suits. It’s not going to be a country that’s run exclusively by white guys in suits, and that doesn’t have anything to do with politics, it’s just demographics. That makes some people very uncomfortable. The tea party is like the GOP’s Southern strategy coming back to exact the real cost of that strategy.

Christine O'Donnell Delaware Primary - Charles P. Pierce on Delaware Primary - Esquire

Christine O'Donnell is a sideshow freak:

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

[via Daring Fireball]

The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

An astonishing bit of anti-elitism and faux-populism. The American Spectator reinvents Tea-Partiers, Fundamentalists, and ultra-right wingers as a naive and guileless "Country Class." Victimized by the left and the Democratic party, and unrepresented and therefore magically freed from sharing in the culpability of the Bush Republicans, the Country Class are entirely good, distinguished by their "non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others" which is nonsensical to the point of meaninglessness.

Despite the author's protests, what this so-called "country class" wants is not self-rule but freedom from self-awareness and uncertainty. What they really object to are not the orthodoxies of the left, but the collapse of their own traditional relationships to God, country, race, labor, and family.

This is not about the evils of the non-existent "ruling" class, but the crisis of a Boomer-led majority who long ago sacrificed civility for anti-social contrarianism and consumer individualism, while simultaneously retreating into the soft therapy of God, guns, and military "honor." All the while the economy collapses, the earth warms, and the gulf fills with oil. But rather than accept responsibility for the mess they've created, their dysfunctional value system, they seek solace in blaming others, and particularly the great villainous Other - college educated, progressive, feminist, spiritual but agnostic, and now laughably caricatured as the "Ruling" class. As if.

In short, the history of the US is the history of this very class running amok, and those of us who actually care about and understand the implicit values of American Democracy being forced to clean up after them.

The Millions : Orwell and the Tea Party

How to read Orwell:

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent.

On the one hand, yes, you have to understand Orwell in his context, but as a writer he is a quote machine whose novels are otherwise shallow and flat. Effective, positive propaganda, but not exactly art.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Tea Party | Mother Jones

Tea Partiers are pro-corporate and opposed to anything that helps ordinary people:

Here's the thing: as near as I can tell, tea partiers are not, in fact, especially put out by bailouts to the wealthy. Santelli's founding rant, as Continetti points out, was aimed at homeowners being bailed out of mortgages they couldn't afford. And as Continetti himself admits just a few sentences later, tea partiers don't have much to say about Wall Street banks. That's pretty odd for a movement supposedly opposed to big bailouts. The reality is quite different: if the tea partiers are really upset that Congress hasn't yet reined in the financial sector, they sure have a funny way of showing it. All the evidence I've seen suggests just the opposite: most tea partiers think not that Obama's financial reform proposals are too modest, but that they verge on socialism. They think he wants to take over the banks the same way he took over the car companies.

Rasmussen: Colorado Has Greatest Percentage Of 'Tea Party' Voters

This explains a lot. 33% of Colorado voters claim to be Tea Partiers.