Politics and theory

In The New York Times, Casey Williams, a graduate student in English, writes about “theory” and Donald Trump:

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

The reductive version is simpler and easier to abuse: Fact is fiction, and anything goes. It’s this version of critical social theory that the populist right has seized on and that Trump has made into a powerful weapon.

I’m not sure that there is much difference between the two versions: if making truth is an exercise in power, then “anything goes” — or anything we say goes — would seem to be an exercise in absolute power. It’s what I call postmodernism with a vengeance.

Williams loses me when he argues not for an insistence on fact but for the continuing usefulness of “critique”:

Some liberals have argued that the best way to combat conservative mendacity is to insist on the existence of truth and the reliability of hard facts. But blind faith in objectivity and factual truth alone has not proven to be a promising way forward.

Even if we felt comfortable asserting the existence of something like “truth,” there’s no going back to the days when Americans agreed on matters of fact — when debates about policy were guided by a commitment to truth and reason. Indeed, critique shows us that it’s doubtful that those days, like Trump’s “great” America, ever existed.

Notice how Williams frames the argument: an insistence on fact is turned into mere “blind faith in objectivity and factual truth alone.” (With no appeal to values?) And that blind faith, Williams asserts, “has not proven to be a promising way forward.” Not proven how? By whom? By what standards can we agree or disagree about that?

And if I doubt the reality of Donald Trump’s lost “great” America, it’s not because of “critique.” It’s because I’m aware of too many elements in our history — call them facts — that contradict any simple claim to greatness.

A joke in the traditional manner

What was the shepherd doing in the garden?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the mustard-fetching dogs? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What kind of dogs do scientists like? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Fred Astaire never drink bottled water? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why do newspaper editors avoid crossing their legs? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the mustard-fetching dogs, the produce clerk, the amoebas, the worms, the scientists’ dogs, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, Fred Astaire, and Santa Claus.]

NYT morgue

“I’m about 10 years behind in my refiling”: a visit with the caretaker of The New York Times morgue. Or as the Times calls it, the “morgue.”

Definitions and politics

Kory Stamper, writing in The New York Times about dictionaries, politics, and Merriam-Webster’s tweets:

It made no difference how dispassionately we tried to present the data (“Lookups for ‘wiretapping’ are up 98,000 percent after Spicer told reporters that Trump wasn’t using the term literally”). We were accused of abandoning our job of writing definitions and subtweeting, trolling and owning members of the administration.

“I literally pasted a definition to Twitter,” said my colleague Lauren Naturale, the social media manager at Merriam-Webster, “and somehow that’s political now.”

Well, yes, that’s political now. The surprised tone here seems to me disingenuous, especially because, as Stamper goes on to say, “the writing of dictionaries in the United States has always been political.”

Insisting that a word means something, and not something else (or that one word, and not some other word, describes reality), can be political. Just as insisting that two plus two make four, not five, can be political.

A related post
A review of Kory Stamper’s Word by Word

Lucy, hygge

[Peanuts, April 18, 1970.]

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts. Nearly forty-seven years ago, Lucy appears to have anticipated the recent North American interest in the Danish idea of hygge.

OMGiraffe

At Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, NY, a giraffe is about to be born. Like, soon.

“Spare the finger-bowls!”

Wycliffe “Wick” Cutter is a member of the “fast set” in Black Hawk, Nebraska: gambler, money-lender, ruiner of hired girls. Mrs. Cutter (no first name) has other interests:


Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

“This is the truth”

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918).

There’s a similar but much bleaker passage in the third part of Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). There, Godfrey St. Peter is the voice of the darkest, deepest truth: ”Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths.“ As St. Peter observes the setting sun or a tree root or the changing leaves, he says, “merely,” “That is right” or “That is it” or “That is true; it is time.”

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Plagues

I went to a seder the other night. (I’m a non-believer among friends.) A passage from the Haggadah, listing contemporary plagues, “the plagues that threaten everyone everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts,” resonated strongly with me, so strongly that I took out my phone to take a picture so that I could share the words here:

The making of war,
the teaching of hate and violence,
despoliation of the earth,
perversion of justice and of government,
fomenting of vice and crime,
neglect of human needs,
oppression of nations and peoples,
corruption of culture,
subjugation of science, learning, and human
    discourse,
the erosion of freedoms.

From A Passover Haggadah, ed. Herbert Bronstein (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1982).

And now it’s thirty-five years later.

Hours of outage

Our cable and wireless were out for many hours today. The outage was widespread. Instead of switching the box back on (again and again), I called the tech-support number (again and again) to check if the problem had been solved. And each time, before I could hear the recorded report that the outage continued: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you are calling in reference to.”

So highfalutin. Better: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you’re calling about.”

Does anyone else remember when people on the telephone used to ask, “May I ask what this is in reference to?” And “Whom should I say is calling?”

Related reading
All OCA telephone posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, that should be who.]