AMERICAN ESSAYS

Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 2004, edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menard (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) ("From Susan Orlean, "Lifelike"(originally from The New Yorker, 2003): "That there a taxidermy championship at all is something of an astonishment, not only to the people in the world who have no use for a Dan-D-Noser and Soft Touch Duck Degreaser but also to taxidermists themselves." Id. at 203, 204.).

Nicholson Baker, The Way the World Works: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012) (I especially recommend the twenty-one essays grouped under three headings: "Reading," "Libraries and Newspapers," and "Technology.").

Jesmyn Ward, ed., The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (New York: Scribner, 2016) (From Isabel Wilkerson, "Where Do We Go from Here?": "And now police assaults on black people for the most ordinary human behaviors--a father tasered in Minnesota while waiting for his children; a motorist shot to death in North Carolina while seeking help after a car accident. It is as if we have reentered the past and are living in a second Nadir: It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the worst decades of the Jim Crow era. There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It's been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days." Id. at 59, 60-61.).

TRUMP'S UNAMERICAN VALUES AND EXECUTIVE ORDER

The Cosmopolitan Lawyer is outraged!

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SARTRE ON FRENCH ANTI-SEMITISM: "An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, translated from the French by George J. Becker, with a new preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995) (Reading Walzer "Preface" is critical. Sartre "produced a philosophical speculation variously supported by anecdotes and personal observations." "The result, however, is a powerfully coherent argument that demonstrates how theoretical sophistication and practical ignorance can, sometimes, usefully combine There is much to criticize in the essay . . . " "But Sartre's book should not be read as a piece of social science or even (as I have described it) as a philosophical speculations. His best work in the 1940s was in drama . . . , and Anti-Semite and Jew is a Marxist/existential morality play, whose characters are produced by their dramatic interactions . . . " Id. at vi-vii. "Characteristically, Sartre, who visited the United States in 1945 and wrote The Respectful Prostitute immediately after, saw in American pluralism only oppression and hatred: racism was the anti-Semitism of the new world. He was not entirely wrong, not them, not now. The (relative) success of religious toleration in breaking the link between pluralism and conflict has not yet been repeated for race and ethnicity. But there seems no good reason not to try to repeat it, given the value that people attach to their identity and culture." Id. at xxiii.).

HERE'S AN IRONY FOR YOU.

IN MUCH OF THE WORLD, THAT IS, OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, "GLOBALIZATION" HAS PRETTY MUCH MEANT "AMERICANIZATION".  THUS, WHEN THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT TRUMP AND HIS SUPPORTERS ARE AGAINST GLOBALIZATION, THEY ARE AGAINST AMERICANIZATION. SO, AS ALANIS MORISSETTE SANG, "ISN'T THAT IRONIC?"

CRITICAL THINKING IS DIFFICULT

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar & Raymond Obstfeld, Writings On the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White (New York: Liberty Street, 2016) ("Embracing reason is an uphill battle for humans. Almost 400 yeas ago, philosopher Francis Bacon said, 'The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be greater number and weight of instances to be found in the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects . . . " Recent studies explain why nothing much has changed since that diagnosis . . .  It's both stimulating and addicting to reject, without examining, any information contrary to our beliefs. Id. at 34-35.).

SCOTS-IRISH AMERICANS: A CULTURE IN CRISIS, OR BEING WORKING-CLASS WHITE IN AMERICA

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016) ("The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, 'In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown m mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that's occurred nearly everywhere else.' This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits--an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country--but also many bad ones, We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart." Id. at 3 (citations omitted). "Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown's temptations--premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: 'It's not your fault that you're a loser; it's the government's fault." "My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my application, I had 'pretended to be black or liberal.' This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen. We should hardly be surprised that as attitudes like this spread, the number of people willing to work for a better life diminishes." Id. at 194.).

AN INDEPENDENT MIND

Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("If this book aims to highlight any subject outside that of Jane Jacobs herself, it is that of the independent mind in conflict with received wisdom." Id. at 13. "A charge sometimes laid against her was that, middle-class to her toes, she didn't acutely feel the weight of injustice that bore down on so many. 'She was blind to issues of class and race,' says Herbert Gans. Jane did have populist leanings. She mistrusted the airy pronouncements of the powerful. 'If planning is good for human beings,' she said in 1962, 'it shouldn't keep hurting them in the concrete and helping them in the abstract.' She felt wisdom flowed up as often as down, from the many as reliably as from the few. She understood that may people didn't get a fair deal. She asserted true, right, and good things: 'Any child is more important than any idea.' She was good, thoroughly decent. Bigness riled her. So did brute authority, stupidity exerted by the world's bullies and simpletons. Still, her empathy for the unlucky and oppressed was probably not as urgent as to is among some; she's been too lucky, too favored by fortune and circumstances." Id. at 396.).

IS THIS BOOK BURNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE?

Trump’s White House Website Takes Down Official Pages on Civil Rights, Climate Change, LGBT Rights

LET ME POINT OUT WHAT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS . . .

A TRUMP PRESIDENCY, WITH ITS PAROCHIAL, NATIONALISTIC (AMERICA FIRST), SMALL-MINDED, POPULIST RHETORIC AND APPROACH TO GOVERNANCE, CAN ONLY BE VIEWED AS PERVERSE AND WRONGHEADED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE COSMOPOLITAN LAWYER!

"HOW CAN YOU TELL A SINCERE MAN IN POLITICS?"

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006) ("Here was the problem that had driven Robespierre mad: How can you tell a sincere man in politics? When the language of those who work for the public good is so easily adopted by those who only work for themselves, who can tell a true for a false patriot? And how? Robespierre, absolutely sincerely, did not see himself as the leader of just another faction. He saw himself as one of the persecuted, someone who had fought for the republic against 'tyrants. men of blood, oppressors of patriotism.' After his death his enemies turned the very same words against him--he became the tyrant, the man of blood, responsible for the worst excesses, if not the entire system, of the Terror. He would not have been surprised. The slipperiness of language, that great gulf between what is said and what is true, was precisely what he complained of in this last of his astonishing speeches." Id. at 344-345.) Food for thought for the 2016 presidential election where the bullshit reached new lows every day, and where the choice was between a chronic bullshiter and a pathological liar. Is this the future of American politics?).

Francois Furet, Revollutionary France 1770-180, translated from the French by Antonia Nevil (Oxford, UK, & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).

REVOLUTIONS: ASSORTED AND . . . SKEWED

Mark R. Anderson, The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America's War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776  (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 2013) (From the book jacket: "In this dramatic retelling of one of history's great 'what-ifs,' Mark R. Anderson examines the American colonies' campaign to bring Quebec into the Continental confederation and free the Canadians from British 'tyranny.' This significant reassessment of a little-studied campaign examines developments on both sides of the border that rapidly proceeded from peaceful diplomatic overtures to a sizable armed intervention. . . Anderson closely examines the evolving relationships between occupiers and occupied, showing how rapidly changing circumstances variously fostered cooperation and encouraged resistance among different Canadian elements. This book hones in on the key political and military factors that ultimately doomed America's first foreign war of liberation and resulted in the Continental Army's decisive explosion from Canada on the eve of the Declaration of Independence.").

Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015).

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804  (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016) (See Gordon S. Wood, "White Man's War," NYT Book Review, Sunday, September 10, 2016: "A Pulitzer-winning historian shows how the American Revolution worked  against, blacks, Indians and women.").

FADE TO GRAY

Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (New York: Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin, 2014) ("My mother tells me this as we fold laundry, white towels separated from the colored ones. Each a threat to the other and I remember the time I spilled bleach on a blue towel, dotting it forever. The pale pink towel, a memory of when it was washed with a red one. Maybe there is something, after all, to the way some people want to remain--each  to its own kind. But in time maybe everything will fade to gray." Id at 293.).

Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn: A Novel (New York: Amistad, 2016).

FREEDOM RIDE

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (New York Doubleday, 2016) ("The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel whence woke. Lumby's words returned to her: If you want to see what this nation is al about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness." Id. at 262-263. Also see Juan Gabriel Vasquez, "Freedom Ride," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/14/2016.).

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (art), The March: Book One (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Production, 2013).

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (art), The March: Book Two (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Production, 2015).

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (art), The March: Book Three (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Production, 2016).

GENDER, RACE, CLASS

Margo Jefferson, Negroland: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015) ("Civil rights. he New Left. Black Power, Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing." "So I won't trap myself into quantifying which matters more, race, or gender, or class. Race, gender, and class are basic elements of one's living. Basic as utensils and clothing; always in use; always needing repairs and updates. Basic as body and breath, justice and reason, passion and imagination. So the question isn't 'Which matters most?,' it's 'How does each matter?' Gender, race, class; class, race, gender--your three in one and one in three." "Being an Other in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths." Id. at 238-239.).

Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016) ("Chicago is one of the most segregated yet diverse cities in America. Chicagoans typically don't live, work or play together. Unlike many ofter major U.S. cities, no one race dominates. We are about equal parts black, white and Latino, each group clustered in various enclaves. Chicago is a city in which black people sue over segregation and discrimination, whether it concerns disparities in public schools or not being admitted to hot downtown spots. Some people shrug off segregation because they say racism and white supremacy will still exist. I concur. But segregation amplifies racial inequities. It's deliberate, ugly and harmful. The legacy of segregation and its ongoing policies keep Chicago divided." Id at 1.).

THE BLACK FOLK ROOTS OF JAZZ DANCE AND THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF COPYRIGHTING DANCE

Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis, MN: U. of Minnesota Press, 2008) (From the Preface: "The roots of this project lie, in some respects, in the Chicago-area dance studios at which I spent much of my childhood and adolescence. Although i studied ballet and modern from an early age, jazz dance was my greatest love, something about the physicalization of rhythm always felt the most gratifying to me. While I soon noticed that different studios and teachers had different conceptions of what jazz dane entailed, the focus on articulating rhythm was a constant. The jazz class I attended shared another feature: none provided any historical context for the form. In these predominately white spaces, no mention was made of the African American origins of the idiom, although the recorded music that we used was more often than not opposed or performed by African American artists." "It was not until my junior year at Carleton College . . . when I took a course title 'Black Dance: A Historical Survey," that I confronted the racial dynamics that went unspoken in those suburban jazz dance classes. Using Lynne Fauley Emery's Black Dance from 1619 to Today as our main text, Professor Mary Easter led us through a survey of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy (the first I had heard of this racist and popular form of entertainment), the social history of the Lindy Hop, the pioneering concerts dance efforts of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, and the more recent achievements of Alvin Ailey and Bill T. Jones. Like a news flash, it became clear just how much jazz dance, that quintessential American form, owed to African-derived traditions. Excited by this new knowledge, I realized that the same issues that interested me in my literature and history courses--the artistic and cultural implications of America's complicated and disturbing racial history--were woven into the very fabric of my extracurricular activities. At the same time, the fact that this was a revelation vexed me. Why had it been so easy to participate in and become passionate about a dance form without learning its history? How had my white body become the site for the continued erasure of black bodies from the received history of American culture?" Id. at ix-x. Food for thought . . . for all of us! How do we particulate in and contribute to the erasure of contributions blacks and other minorities make to American culture?).

Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2016) (From the back cover: "Choreographing Copyright is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases out their raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. [] Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers a fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility").

EMPTINESS

Guy Newland, Introduction to Emptiness: as Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's Great Treatise Upon the Stages of the Path, 2nd. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2009) ("Why is it hard to distinguish between a person who happens to be acting rudely toward me and a person who is my enemy because of being fundamentally, essentially, permanently one who is there to harm me? Wisdom teaches us that our real enemies are never other living beings. They are ignorance and its minions, including greed, hated, anger, pride, and envy." Id. at 12.).

Jeffrey Hopkins, The Tantric Distinction: A Buddhist's Reflection on Compassion and Emptiness, rev'd ed., edited by Anne C. Klein (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999) ("It is important to consider any religious system as a challenge to one's own thought, rather than take the culturally deterministic viewpoint that we are confined to the system that is currently prevalent in the culture of our birth." Id. at vii.).

CONFIDENT PLURALISM AND FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY

John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2016) (Confident pluralism argues that we can, and we must, learn to live with each other in spite of our deep differences. It requires a tolerance for dissent, a skepticism of government orthodoxy, and a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. Confident pluralism asks that those charged with enforcing our laws do better in preserving and strengthening our constitutional commitments to voluntary groups, public forums, and certain kinds of generally available funding. It also challenges each of us to live out the aspirations of tolerance, humility, and patience in our civic practices." "Confident pluralism does not give us the American Dream. But it might help us avoid the American Nightmare." Id. at 125.).

John D. Inazu, Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("In light of the constraints described above and the social and constitutional history of the right to assembly, I propose the following definition: The right of assembly is a presumptive right of individuals to form and participate in peaceable, noncommercial groups. The right is rebuttable when there is a compelling reason for thinking that the justifications for protecting assembly do not apply (as when the group prospers under monopolistic or near-monopolistic conditions)." Id. at 14 (italics in original).).

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BLACK MAN IN AMERICA?

Please view the Ken Burns, David McMahon & Sarah Burns documentary film, The Central Park Five.

Wesley Lowery, "They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore  and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (New York: Little, Brown, 2016) (But . . . they will try.).

Michael Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education (New York: Nation Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: When Trayvon Martin was killed, Mychal Densel Smith had just turned twenty-five. He had not prepared for life at twenty-five, believing, simply, that he wouldn't make it that far. Too many young black boys never reach adulthood. But Mychal realized he had an opportunity and an obligation to ask himself, How do you learn to be a black man in America? [] Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching is Mychal's attempt to answer that question. . . . ").

John Edgar Wideman, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File (New York: Scribner, 2016) ("The fact that Till, McMurray, and the other alleged perpetrators were colored, plus the fact that Till and McMurray were reported in the vicinity of Civitavecchia the night of the crimes occurred, is enough to convince army officers the accused are guilty. No further burden of proof is demanded from the prosecution. Privates Till and McMurray are sentenced to death on the basis of being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong color, wrong place, wrong time, a mantra. A crime that over the course of our nation's history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people." Id. at 106.).

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN & LEONIDAS DONSKIS: LIQUID EVIL

Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis, Liquid Evil (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2016) (From the back cover: "There is nothing new about evil--it has been with us since time immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterize our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends--ends that were at time horrifically brutal and barbaric. In out contemporary liquid-modern societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvas woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in the countries black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cut-throat competition and mutual estrangement have replace cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds, In its present form, evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist, It seduces us by its ordinariness and them jumps out wither warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later, but we have no idea when and where hey will occur." Query: Does that not sound like the domestic aspects of the so-called war on terror? We know that the terror is out there, and we also know that the government's circumscription of our liberties and principles in the name of fighting terror is occurring, we just don't when a terror attack will occur and what anti-freedom steps the government has taken in the name of fighting terror. Both the terror threat and the unregulated, boundless, parameter-less war against terror are, in essence, liquid-evils. The war on terror has itself become an industry. From the text: Donskis: "[W]hen it refer to liquidity of evil, I mean that we live in a deterministic, pessimistic, fatalistic, fear-and-panic-ridden society, which still tens to cherish its time-honored, albeit out-of-date and misleading, liberal-democratic credentials, The absence of dreams, alternatives and utopias is exactly what I would take as a significant aspect of the liquidity of evil. Two ideas of Ernst Bloch and Karl Mannheim proved prophetic: whereas Bloch regretted that modernity lost the warm and human spirit of a utopian dream, Mannheim strongly felt that utopia were effectively translated into political ideologies, thus stripping them of alternative visions, and confining them to the principle of reality, instead of imagination, The liquidity of evil signifies the divorce of the principle of imagination form the principle of reality, the final say being conferred upon the latter." Id. at 5. Query: What is the saying? When you lose your dreams, you die. Have we as a society lost our dream? "People gladly publicize their intimate life in exchange for momentarily having the spotlight turned on themselves: such feats of exhibition are possible only in an age of unsteady, twittering connections and of unprecedented alienation. Some of those who expose themselves on Facebook are like those whose blogs resemble burps and belches in which they, full of narcissism, heave up their crises and frustrations; others are merely temporarily overcoming their feelings of isolation and insecurity. In this sense, Facebook was indeed a brilliant and time invention, after all, Just when social separation and isolation became unendurable, when it was no longer bearable to watch bad television and to read the sadomasochistic press, Facebook came into the world." "But wit it also came possibilities of mortal danger and fatal evil For Facebook embodies, as you might say, the essence of the DIY phenomenon: do it yourself. Take off your clothes, show us your secrets--do it yourself, of you own free will, and be happy while doing it, DIY. Strip for me babe." Id. at 9. Yeah, look at me my 200 BFFs!).

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: SELFHOOD?

Zygmunt Bauman & Rein Raud, Practices of Selfhood (Cambridge, England, & Walton, Massachusetts: Polity, 2015) ("How does an individual understand her or his position in the world? Are we determined by our genetic heritage, social circumstances, and cultural preferences--and only tricked into believing that we make our own choices? Or are we autonomous--wholly or partly--and, if so, then to what degree? Are we or are we not autonomous enough to control and change the legacy fare has landed us with? How does selfhood emerge? Does it follow the same pattern of develop,met in all people, all cultures, all ages? Or is it itself a socio-cultural construct that should be viewed in its historical context? If so, them what is happening right now--are the patterns of selfhood changing in the present world? Does contemporary technology allow us more autonomy--or does it tempt us to give up the freedoms we have?" "A host of questions . .  . All the dilemmas form thwack they arise could be plotted on the same axis--one end of which is designated by fate and the determination and the other by choice and freedom." Id. at vii-viii.).

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: ON IMMIGRANTS

Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2016) (From the back cover: "Refugees from the violence of wars and the brutality of famished lives have knocked on other people's doors since the beginning of time. For the people behind the doors, these uninvited guests were always strangers, and strangers tend to generate fear and anxiety precisely because they are unknown. Today we find ourselves confronted with an extreme form of this historical dynamic, as our TV screens and newspapers are filled with accounts of a 'migration crisis', ostensibly overwhelming Europe and portending the collapse of our way of life. This anxious debate has given rise to a veritable 'moral panic'--a feeling of fear spreading among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society." "In this short book, Zygmunt Bauman analyses the origins, contours and impact of the moral panic--he dissects, in short, the present-day migration panic. He shows how politicians have exploited fears and anxieties that have become widespread, especially among those who have already lost so much--the disinherited and the poor. But he argues that the policy of mutual separation, of building walls rather than bridges, is misguided. It may bring some short-term reassurance by it is doomed to fail in the long run. We are faced with a crisis of humanity, and the only exit from this crisis is to recognize our growing interdependence as a species and to find new ways to live together in solidarity and cooperation, amidst strangers who may hold opinions and preferences different from our own.").

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: "CULTURE"?

Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2011) (From the back cover: "In its original formulation, 'culture' was intended to be an agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating 'the people' by bringing the best of human thought and creativity to them. But in our contemporary liquid modern world, culture has lost its missionary role and has become a means of seduction it sees no longer to enlighten the people but to seduce them. The function of culture today is not to satisfy existing needs but to create new ones, while simultaneously ensuring that existing needs remain permanently unfilled. Future today likens itself to a giant department store where the shelves are overflowing with desirable goods that are changed on a daily basis--just ling enough to stimulate desires whose gratification is perpetually postponed." [Comment: In short, we are existing in a "consumer culture," where we are constantly on the make for the next "new" thing. Yet, worse than that, we ourselves have become "consumer goods," constantly marketing ourselves, repackaging ourselves, updating our brand, fighting for better shelf space.]).

ZYGMUNY BAUMAN & LEONIDAS DONSKIS: ON EVIL AND MORAL BLINDNESS

Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2013) (From the book cover: "Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme stress. Today it frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one's ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases." From the text: "The most displeasing and shocking truth of today is that evil is weak and invisible; therefore, it's much more dangerous than those demons and evil spirits we knew from the works of philosophers and literary writers. Evil is toothless and widely dispersed. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that it lurks in every normal and healthy human being. The worst is not the potential for evil present in each of us but the situations and circumstances that our faith, culture and human relationships cannot stop. Evil takes on the mask of weakness, and at the same time it is weakness." "Lucky were those times that had clear forms of evil. Today we no longer know what they are and where they are. It all becomes clear when somebody loses their memory and their capacity to see and feel. Here's a list of our new mental blocks. It includes our deliberate forgetting of the Other, our purposeful refusal to recognize and acknowledge a human being of another kind while casting aside someone who is alive, real, and doing and saying something right beside us--all for the purpose of manufacturing a Facebook 'friend' distant from you and perhaps even living in another semiotic reality. On that list we also have alienation while simultaneously simulating friendship; not talking to and not seeing someone who is with us; and using the words 'Faithfully yours' in ending letters to someone we don't know and have never met--the more insensitive the content, the more courtly the address. There's also wishing to communicate, not with those who are next to you and who suffer in silence, but with someone imagined and fabricated, our own ideological or communicational projection--that wish goes hand in hand with an inflation of handy concepts and words. New forms of censorship coexist--most oddly--with the sadistic and cannibalistic language found on the internet and let loose in verbal orgies of faceless hatred, virtual cloacas of defection on others, and unparalleled display of human insensitivity (especially in anonymous commentaries)." "This is moral blindness--self-chosen, self-imposed, or fatalistically accepted--in an epoch that more than anything needs quickness and acuteness of apprehension and feeling." Id at 10-11. "To us it seems that evil lives somewhere else. We think it's not in us but lurks in certain places, certain fixed territories in the world that are hostile to us or in which things endangering all humankind take place. This naive illusion and type of self-deception is present in the world today no less than two or three hundred years ago. To represent evil as an objectively existing factor was long encouraged by religious stories and mythologies of evil. But even today we refuse to look for evil within ourselves. Why? Because it's unbearably difficult and completely overturns the logic of an ordinary person's everyday life." Id. at 7. [QUERY: Think of the implications had George W. Bush not so simplistically divided the world into "US" and the Evildoers"? Or had American politicians and citizens not embraced the jingoism of Saddam Hussain as "The Great Satan"? Or if Ben Carson, at the Republican National Convention, had not stupidly characterized Hilary Clinton as "Lucifer"? The evil is always the Other. Yet note, we are someone else's "other". To borrow a line: I have seen the evil, and it is us. It is me, it is you.])

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: LIVING WITH UNCERTAINITY, LIVING IN FEAR

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2007) ("At least in the 'developed' part of the planet, a few seminal and closely interconnected departures have happened, or are happening currently, that create a new and indeed unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, raising a series of challenges never before encountered. [] Second, the separation and pending divorce of power and politics, the couple that since the emergence of the modern state and until quite recently was expected to share their joint nation-state household 'till death did them part'. Much of the power to act effectively that was previously available to the modern state is now moving away to the politically uncontrolled global (and in many ways extraterritorial) space; while politics, the ability to decide the direction and purpose of action, is unable to operate effectively at the planetary level since it remains, as before, local. The absence of political control makes the newly emancipated powers into a source of profound and in principle untameable uncertainty, while the dearth of power makes the extant political institutions, their initiatives and undertakings, less and less relevant to the life problems of the nation-state's citizens and for that reason they draw less and less of their attention. Between them, the two interrelated outcomes of the divorce enforce or encourage state organs to drop, transfer way, or (to use the recently fashionable terms of political jargon) to 'subsidize' and 'contract out' a growing volume of the functions they previously performed. Abandoned by the state, those functions become a playground for the notoriously capricious an inherently unpredictable market forces and/or are left to the private initiative and care of individuals." Id. at 1-2. [COMMENT: I have notice the increasing reference (often bordering on self-reference) to the presidency of the United States as "Commander-in-Chief"--which is true by defining in the Constitution--and "the most powerful person in the world--which is not defined by the Constitution and, thus, is more of an empirical question. Let me suggest, that if one has to keep reminding people that the president is the commander-in-chief and the most powerful person in the world, then perhaps he or she is not really such or, at least, that there may exist a crisis of confidence. Let me suggest that the American presidency is not the most powerful position in the world, assuming such a concept even make sense. Moreover, to borrow from Chuck Berry, "Rollover Henry Luce and give the president the news. The American century is over. Its ending began in the early 1970s, it ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was buried on September 11, 2001. Ever since that latter day, America has been living on fumes trying to propped itself with memories of, and attempts to revive old glories. Is not that what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have really been about? Let us call these wars by their true names: THE VIAGRA WARS. Trying to prove we still can.]).

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: WASTING AND WASTED LIVES

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and iIts Outcasts (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2004) (From the back cover: "The production of 'human waste'--or more precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts--is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity." "As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population i the 'developed countries.' Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the further lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek--in vain, it seems--local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of modernity has given rise to growing qualities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means o survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Once the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing rile played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda." [QUERY: Might those American workers who have not yet recovered--and probably never will recover--from The Great Recession of 2008 not only fear immigrants, asylum seekers, terrorists, etc., but also fear--if not know--that they themselves have become redundant, wasted lives? Donald Trump's "make-America-great-again" could be seen as pandering (and offering no real solution) to this fear. Clinton, though trying to strike a different tone, is no different when, for examples, she too attacks NAFTA and other trade agreements that, supposedly, fail to bring jobs to American workers. Are those manufacturing jobs every going to return? No! Globalization has made such jobs redundant.]  From the text: "'Overpopulation' is a fiction of actuaries: a code name for the appearance of a number of people who, instead of helping the smooth functioning of economy, make the attainment, let alone the rise, of indices by which the proper functioning is measured and evaluated all that much more difficult. The numbers of such people seem to grow uncontrollably, continually adding to expenses yet nothing to gains. In a society of producers, they are the people whose labour cannot be usefully deployed since all the goods that the existing and prospective demand is able to absorb may be produced, and produced more swiftly, profitably and 'economically', without keeping them in jobs. In a society of consumers, they are 'flawed consumers'--people lacking the money that would allow them to stretch the capacity of the consumer market, white they create another kind of demand to which the profit-oriented consumer industry cannot respond and which it cannot profitably 'colonize'. Consumers are the prime assets of consumer society; flawed consumers are it most irksome and costly liabilities." Id. at 39. "Refugees are human waste, with no useful function to play in the land of their arrival and temporary stay and no intention or realistic prospect of being assimilated and incorporated into the new social body; from their present place, the dumping site, there is no return and no road forward (unless it is a road toward yet more distant placed, as in the case of the Afghan refugees escorted by Australian warships to an island far away from all beaten tracks). A distance large enough to prevent the poisonous effluvia of social decomposition from reaching places inhabited by their native inhabitants is the main criterion by which the location of their permanently temporary camps are selected. Out of that place, refugees are an obstacle and a trouble; inside that place they are forgotten. In keeping them there and barring all leakage, in making the separation final and irreversible, 'compassion by some and hatred by others' cooperate in producing the same effect of taking distance and holding at a distance." "Nothing is left but the walls, the barbed wire, the controlled gates, the armed guards. Between them they define the refugees' identity--or rather put paid to their right to self-identification. All waste, including wasted humans, tends to be piled up indiscriminately on the same refuse tip." Id. at 77-78. "On a nutshell, prisons, like so many other social institutions, have moved form the task of recycling to that of waste disposal. They have been reallocated to the front line of the battle to resolve the crisis in which the waste disposal industry has fallen as a result of the global triumph of modernity and the new fullness of the planet. All waste is potentially poisonous . . . .  If recycling is no longer profitable and its chances . . . are not longer realistic, the right way to deal with waste is tor speed up its 'biodegradation' and decomposition while isolating it as securely as possible form the ordinary human habitat." Id. at 86-87.).

INFORMATIVE VIDEO

• Trump: An American Tragedy?iqsquared166,244 views

  1:32:11

THE POLITICS OF DENIAL MAY BE THE OPERATIVE FORCE DURING THE TRUMP YEARS

Michael A. Milburn & Sheree D. Conrad, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2016), originally published as The Politics of Denial (1996) (From "Introduction to the 2016 Edition": "Twenty years ago . . . we presented our initial search supporting what we now call 'affect displacement theory.' Our results suggest that attitudes toward some political issues might be determined, in part, by emotion rather than reason. We found, specifically, that men with a history of being brutalized in childhood seemed to both deny the pain of their own experience and their anger at the perpetrators, while simultaneously displacing that anger onto political issues that involve an element of punishment--the death penalty, the use of military force, punitive policies towards women seeking abortions, attitude with a large symbolic component of power, toughness, and retribution. Of course, not all conservatives who hold the attitudes have a history of childhood mistreatment, and not all conservative issues attract the same degree of emotion--it is particularly those issues that offer a perceived opportunity for retribution against those seen as transgressing social norms and moral imperatives." "The glorification of toughness is typical of individuals who held the views and displays the traits of authoritarianism, a personality type first identified by researchers studding anti-Semitism following World War II. Authoritarianism develops from rigid, punitive childbearing and involves denial of the reality of harsh, even terrifying parents and of one's own anger toward them coupled with displacement of the anger one disputed minorities in the society. The unforgiving rage toward out-groups grows in times of heightened stress form real social and economic instability." Out model helps to explain a paradox in U.S. public policy: although prevention worlds much better than punitiveness does in solving problems, punitive policies have generally succeed at the polls for the last thirty years. The displacement of anger, in some cases triggered by real economic and social instability, influences public support for punitive policies, and we have seen many politicians who have been willing to exploit punitiveness in their campaign rhetoric and policies, using scapegoating an exaggeration of danger, and leading to support of punitive public policies such as mandatory sentencing, three strikes and you're out, carpet bombing the Middle East, and the targeted killing of the families of terrorists--a war crime." Id. at xi-xii (citations omitted).).

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: LIQUID MODERNITY

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2000, 2012) (From the backcover: "In this important book Zygmunt Bauman introduces the concept which, more than any other, has come to define his vision of contemporary societies: liquid modernity. The transition from 'solid' to 'liquid' modernity is the shift from a world in which human beings were seeking to create a well-ordered world of state structures to a world in which the very idea of order and stability no longer have any purchase, a world in which  change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred yeas ago, 'to e modern' meant to strive for a state of perfection; today it means to modernize compulsively, perpetually, with no final state in sight and none desired." [Query: What is the role of law in such a liquid modernity?] From the text: "Shopping is not just about food, shoes, cars or furniture items. The avid, never-ending search for new and improved examples and recipes for life is also a variety of shopping, and a more important variety, to be sure, in the light of the twin lessons that our happiness depends on personal competence but that we are [] personally incompetent, or not as competent as we should and could be if only wee tried harder. There are so many areas in which we need to be more competent, and each calls for 'shopping around'. We 'shop' for the skills needed to earn our living and for the means to convince would-be employers that we have them; for the kind of image it would be nice to wear and ways to make others believe that we are what we wear; for ways of making new friends we want and the ways of getting rid of past friends no longer wanted; for ways of drawing attention and ways to hide from scrutiny; for the means to squeeze most satisfaction out of love and the means to avoid becoming 'dependent' on the loved or loving partner; for ways to earn the love of the beloved and the least costly way of finishing off the union once love has faded and the relationship has ceased to please; for the best expedients of saving money for a rainy day and the most convenient way to spend money before we earn it; for the resources for doing faster the things that are to be done and for things to do in order to fill the time thus vacated; for the most mouth-watering foods and the most effective diet to dispose of the consequences of eating them; for the most powerful hi-fi amplifiers and the most effective headache pills. There is no end to the shopping list. Yet however long the list, the way to opt out of shopping is not on it. And the competence most ended in our world of ostensibly infinite ends is that of skillful and indefatigable shopper." Id. at 74. "We live in a world of universal flexibility, under conditions of acute and perspectives Unsicherheit, penetrating all aspects of individual life--the sources of livelihood as much as the partnerships of love or common interests, parameters of professional as much as cultural identity, modes of presentation of self in public as much as patterns of health and fitness, Safe ports of trust are few and far between, and most of the time trust floats unanchored vainly seeking storm-protected havens. We have learned the hard way that even the most carefully and laboriously made plans have a nasty tendency to go amiss and bring results far removed from the expected, that our earnest efforts to 'put things in order' often result in more chaos, formlessness and confusion, and that our labour to eliminate contingency and accident is little more than a game of chance." Id. a 135-136. [Query: Again, what is the role of law--and lawyers--in such a liquid modernity?]).

THE STATUS OF THE BOURGEOIS

Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("My own point of departure begins with modernity as the site of a unique type of human being, one entirely unknown to the ancient and medieval worlds that I want to call the bourgeois. I realize that the term 'bourgeois' is contested and currently out of favor, but it is something I would like to resurrect. I use the term not in the Marxist sense to mean owners of 'the means of production' but to indicate members of an urban middle class that began to think of itself a constituting a distinctive culture with a distinctive way of life and set of moral characteristics. Among the traits that character this bourgeois way o life ar the desire for antinomy and sell-direction, the aspiration to live independently of the dictates of habit, custom, and tradition, t accept moral institutions and practices only if they pass the bar of one's critical intellect, and to accept ultimate responsibility for one's life and actions. . . . These are traits of character that arose initially in the early modern period and are uniquely attached to the constitutional democracies of the West. "The character traits described about have come to be most fully identified with the American way of life. . . .  "The thesis that I develop in this book is that modernity has created within itself a rhetoric of antimodernity that has taken philosophical, literary, and political form. How did the idea of the bourgeois, once considered virtually synonymous with the free and responsible individual, became associated with a kind of low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism? It is this dialectic that I hope to explore." Id. at ix-xi. ).

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "There's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative rich of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. "Why? Most economists . . . attribute the Great Enrichment since 1800 to accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. 'Our riches,' she argues, 'were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.' Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove 'trade-tested betterment.' Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of 'add institutions and stir' doesn't work, and never has. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas--ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre liberal idea of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and unending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, the bourgeoisie look took up that Bourgeois Deal and we were all enriched.").

CABLE'S RESPONSE TO EMILE REGARDING RACIAL HATRED

As we move into 2017, there is a great deal of racial animosity bubbling no longer beneath the surface. When so many speak of "America" and "Americans," or speak of the "real America" and "real Americans," mean only the parts of the country and those people who are just like them--white, native-born, mainly protestant. For now they tolerate Jews and catholics, and few model minorities. How long with even that tolerance last once those real Americans feel secure in their counter-revolution, taking America back to pre-Brown v. Board of Education, pre-Roe v. Wade, pre-Fourteenth- and Fifteenth Amendments? Americans dislike being called racist, so let us just acknowledge that Americans are not good on race. We must learn how to teach the next generation of Americans to be, if not good on race, at least a little better on race. No one is born a racist. No one is born bad on race. One has to be taught to think, talk and act in racial terms.

"EMILE: What makes her [that is, Nellie] talk like that? Why do you have this feeling, you and she? I do not believe it is born in you. I do not believe it.

CABLE: It's not born in you! It happens after you're born . . . (CABLE sings the following words, as if figuring this whole question out for the first time.)

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in you dear  little ear--
You've got to be carefully taught!

You've got to taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly shaped,
And people whose son is a different shade--
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate--
You've got to be carefully taught!
You've got to be carefully taught!"

From Richard Rodgers (Music), Oscar Hammerstein II (Lyrics), and Oscar Hammerstein I & Joshua Logan (Book), South Pacific: A Musical Play, reprinted in Laurence Maslon, ed., American Musicals 1927-1949: The Complete Books and Lyrics of Eight Broadway Classics (New York: Library of America, 2014), at 521, 590-591.

SUPPOSE WE GIVE PEACE A CHANCE IN 2017?

Lawrence Rosenwald, ed., War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writings, with a foreword by James Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Americans have been at war for most of our history as a people. Wars of conquest gave way to wars of empire, the Civil War to the World Wars, and the Cold War to the War on Terror. Our national anthem celebrates heroism under fire, and martial imagery permeates our politics and our pasttimes. But in every turn in this history, Americans have questioned and resisted both particular wars and justifications for war in general. Taking up the pen instead of the sword, they have produced a body of literature of great passion and power, a homegrown American tradition that refuses the proposition that war is the inevitable price of liberty or prosperity--that dares to envision a world where people learn war no more. Gathering essays, letters, speeches, memoirs, songs, poems, cartoons, leaflets, stories, and other works by nearly 150 writers from the colonial era to the present, War No More brings this extraordinary writing together for the first time in a single volume, a 'conversation,' in the words of editor Lawrence Rosenwald, 'not yet fully described by historians, not fully available to activists, but living in these pages.'" From Nicholson Baker, "Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War, 736, 755, reprinted from The Way the World Works: Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012): "When are we going to grasp the essential truth? War never works. It never has worked. It makes everything worse. Wars must be, as Jessie Hughan wrote in 1944, renounced, rejected, declared against, over and over, 'as an ineffective and inhuman means to any end, however just.' That, I would suggest, is the lesson that the pacifists of the Second World War have to teach us.").