In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans . She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH: “Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant. “In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said. It's hard ...

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed . Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just a...

Starting with the original line that Jack Teixeira's online group was a bunch of right-wing racists. (Teixeira is a Hispanic surname, from any of the places in Portugal and Spain named Teixeira ). The US Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as either someone with a surname that is carried on the Bureau's list of Hispanic surnames, or someone who lived in a household where he or she spoke Spanish as a child. Perhaps the New York Times, among others, could revive the term "white Hispanic". But beyond that, subsequent accounts have quoted a member of his online group that described him as "Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what’s going on,” which would actually fit Christian antiwar protesters of past generations like the Berrigan brothers, Roman Catholic priests who led the antiwar and antidraft movements during the Vietnam War. Neither was a right-wing racist. But that leaves aside the bigger question of just what the...

So after two weeks of radio silence, Anheuser Busch sent out its US CEO to issue a bland non-apology for the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. I went looking for pictures of Brendan Whitworth, and what I found was what you'd expect -- he's a pretty boy, there to look good at employee town halls, but someone else is running the show. People have been parsing out just what he intended to say in his statement , but I think the real lesson in this episode is that everyone has a boss, including the US CEO of Anheuser. Over a two-wwek period when Bud Light went radio silent on social media, yuou can bet there was a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter between New York and Brussels, where Mr Whitworth's bosses are, about the impact of the Dyhlan Mulvaney controversy, with Whitworth giving happy talk, the way pretty boy CEOs do, about how this is just a blip, it'll all blow over, and so forth. Finally the bosses in Brussels lost patience and told him to say something, except by this point h...

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place. Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night: “I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.” ...

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run. I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic , she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said, I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just...

I spent my last two years of high school in Bethesda, which even in the 1960s was in the vanguard of secularism -- where I definitely lucked out was that even though my sister went to the exclusive National Cathedral School, some of my acquaintances there went to Sidwell Friends, and my college roommate went to St Albans, I went to one of the county public schools, although the culture there was equivalent (I dated the daughters of the DC Bar Association president and the US Ambassador to Mali). Somehow in that culture there was a sense in the atmosphere that the human race was evolving, and it was time to leave behind any childish or primitive reliance on religion. It wasn't just Hugh Hefner who argued that religious proscriptions on this or that were of a piece with Old Testament dietary restrictions, which were perfectly fine for their day as a way to prevent food poisoning and such, but now we have refrigeration, so we have to rethink these things. By the same token, tradit...