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Entry tags:
Nonfiction
Peter Biskind, The Sky Is Falling: This is touted as a work of cultural criticism about how aliens, vampires, etc. represent our cultural moment. To the extent I can get a thesis out of it, it’s that extremist views are now dominant in US popular culture, rather than centrist/quietist/trusting authority views. Unfortunately, Biskind selects his examples apparently at random from successful and not-so-successful media, and it’s hard to figure out what work his sorting of media into right-wing, left-wing, and centrist is supposed to do. Also, though he attempts to show that there was a centrist period in US popular culture, he doesn’t address the question of whether it is that centrism, rather than today’s extremism, that represents an outlier. There were occasional flashes of insight—I appreciated his point that in 2016 politicians weren’t saying “middle class” as much, as if acknowledging that this group was mostly gone, and replacing it with “everyday Americans.”
Sarah Krasnostein, The Trauma Cleaner: The biography of a remarkable woman (who seems to use the label transsexual; she transitioned decades ago and is apparently quite conservative, for Australia) who runs a business cleaning up homes where people have died and decayed, or where hoarding has created unsafe conditions. Sandra Pankhurst extends compassion to all her clients, making connections with them; Krasnostein interweaves accounts of various cleanup sites with Pankhurst’s history as abused child, young husband and father, sex worker, trophy wife, and ultimately trauma cleaner. She cautions that Pankhurst’s memories are often nonexistent (like many a noir heroine, Pankhurst thinks that the best way to deal with a bad past is to deny it entirely) or at best unreliable, but it’s quite a story nonetheless.
Ta-Nehesi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy: Collection of Coates’ essays over the past few years, with some introductory notes. He’s a great writer and everyone should read his article on reparations (and the intro note here is especially interesting, given what he says about the lack of nobility in being a victim, the inapplicability of moral desert in claims for reparations for wrongs done to a group, and his own lack of knowledge about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, to which he made comparisons in the initial essay). His basic message: “To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder.” In some ways, his most powerful insight is that what white people fear most isn’t black criminality, but “black respectability, Good Negro Government,” because it might actually empower black people; this prospect is what triggers backlash, so no amount of individual uprightness will overcome white supremacy. Good Negro Government was what Trump has set out to erase, far too successfully. Obama’s ultimate failure to anticipate just how racist so many whites could be, Coates argues, stemmed from his bone-deep acceptance of a narrative of white benficience and innocence unavailable to most African-Americans. “The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.” As Coates points out, at the time his parents had him, in large parts of the country, the sex that produced Obama wasn’t just illegal, it would have put his father in mortal danger.
Coates also has an essay about Bill Cosby’s conservatism—he says in the intro that ignoring the rape allegations was the biggest failing—discussing how the diagnosis of the failed black family has persisted for over a hundred years, even as today’s conservatives appeal to a fabled glorious past. The essay about the black family in the age of mass incarceration makes clear that the plunder is viciously ongoing—just for example, as the sanctions for having a criminal record increase along with the likelihood of criminal encounters for young African-Americans, the rate of successful completion of parole has fallen by half in recent years. As he points out in that essay, “the world of the black middle class is—because of policy—significantly poorer [than that of the white middle class]. Thus to wonder about the difference in outcomes … is really to wonder about the difference in weight between humans living on the Earth and humans living on the moon.”
Coates is ambivalent about his writing’s appeal to white audiences like me, and he’s not hopeful, but he’s always worth reading.
Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions: Hari argues that we don’t really know what the relationship between serotonin and mental states is, contrary to what popular science writing of the past 20 years indicated. More to the point, he argues that cultural, economic, and psychological factors are far more significant to many cases of depression than purely “endogenous” depression. Hari himself was on antidepressants for years, and suggests that they work for some subset of depressed people, but says that the evidence for long-term utility is far less than that for short-term assistance. He also argues that biologizing an explanation is not going to lead to more cultural acceptance by pointing to an experiment in which people who were told that mental illness was a result of biochemistry “zapped” a subject they perceived to be mentally ill more than people who were told that the illness was a result of what had happened to them in life. I want more data, but I’m open to persuasion.
As Hari points out, when upper-class white women complained of “the problem with no name” in the 1950s/60s, they had everything that their culture told them they were supposed to want. The problem was that their culture had crappy values, and adhering to those values was depression-making. Similarly, economic insecurity, huge inequalities, and constant media exposure to the life we “should” be living is depression-generating for many people today. So is trauma; he tells the heartbreaking, and Freud-evoking, story of an obesity doctor who started to ask people what else had happened to them around the time they started to put on weight, and heard numerous rape/abuse stories; he was then chastised by a colleague for believing his subjects. But for them, obesity seemed like a solution to the problem of being the target of predatory men; telling them to learn how to eat right would be “grotesque.” More generally, Hari considers depression “a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us”—the powerlessness at work, the lack of feeling that you matter, the constant comparisons to richer and better-looking people in ads, the insecurity that means you could lose status at any moment. These are the things that we ultimately need to fix, along with generating authentic connections to other people through volunteering and other kinds of social engagement. Hari concludes that we shouldn’t tell ourselves that, until those fixes exist, pills are likely going to be enough.
Sarah Krasnostein, The Trauma Cleaner: The biography of a remarkable woman (who seems to use the label transsexual; she transitioned decades ago and is apparently quite conservative, for Australia) who runs a business cleaning up homes where people have died and decayed, or where hoarding has created unsafe conditions. Sandra Pankhurst extends compassion to all her clients, making connections with them; Krasnostein interweaves accounts of various cleanup sites with Pankhurst’s history as abused child, young husband and father, sex worker, trophy wife, and ultimately trauma cleaner. She cautions that Pankhurst’s memories are often nonexistent (like many a noir heroine, Pankhurst thinks that the best way to deal with a bad past is to deny it entirely) or at best unreliable, but it’s quite a story nonetheless.
Ta-Nehesi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy: Collection of Coates’ essays over the past few years, with some introductory notes. He’s a great writer and everyone should read his article on reparations (and the intro note here is especially interesting, given what he says about the lack of nobility in being a victim, the inapplicability of moral desert in claims for reparations for wrongs done to a group, and his own lack of knowledge about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, to which he made comparisons in the initial essay). His basic message: “To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder.” In some ways, his most powerful insight is that what white people fear most isn’t black criminality, but “black respectability, Good Negro Government,” because it might actually empower black people; this prospect is what triggers backlash, so no amount of individual uprightness will overcome white supremacy. Good Negro Government was what Trump has set out to erase, far too successfully. Obama’s ultimate failure to anticipate just how racist so many whites could be, Coates argues, stemmed from his bone-deep acceptance of a narrative of white benficience and innocence unavailable to most African-Americans. “The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.” As Coates points out, at the time his parents had him, in large parts of the country, the sex that produced Obama wasn’t just illegal, it would have put his father in mortal danger.
Coates also has an essay about Bill Cosby’s conservatism—he says in the intro that ignoring the rape allegations was the biggest failing—discussing how the diagnosis of the failed black family has persisted for over a hundred years, even as today’s conservatives appeal to a fabled glorious past. The essay about the black family in the age of mass incarceration makes clear that the plunder is viciously ongoing—just for example, as the sanctions for having a criminal record increase along with the likelihood of criminal encounters for young African-Americans, the rate of successful completion of parole has fallen by half in recent years. As he points out in that essay, “the world of the black middle class is—because of policy—significantly poorer [than that of the white middle class]. Thus to wonder about the difference in outcomes … is really to wonder about the difference in weight between humans living on the Earth and humans living on the moon.”
Coates is ambivalent about his writing’s appeal to white audiences like me, and he’s not hopeful, but he’s always worth reading.
Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions: Hari argues that we don’t really know what the relationship between serotonin and mental states is, contrary to what popular science writing of the past 20 years indicated. More to the point, he argues that cultural, economic, and psychological factors are far more significant to many cases of depression than purely “endogenous” depression. Hari himself was on antidepressants for years, and suggests that they work for some subset of depressed people, but says that the evidence for long-term utility is far less than that for short-term assistance. He also argues that biologizing an explanation is not going to lead to more cultural acceptance by pointing to an experiment in which people who were told that mental illness was a result of biochemistry “zapped” a subject they perceived to be mentally ill more than people who were told that the illness was a result of what had happened to them in life. I want more data, but I’m open to persuasion.
As Hari points out, when upper-class white women complained of “the problem with no name” in the 1950s/60s, they had everything that their culture told them they were supposed to want. The problem was that their culture had crappy values, and adhering to those values was depression-making. Similarly, economic insecurity, huge inequalities, and constant media exposure to the life we “should” be living is depression-generating for many people today. So is trauma; he tells the heartbreaking, and Freud-evoking, story of an obesity doctor who started to ask people what else had happened to them around the time they started to put on weight, and heard numerous rape/abuse stories; he was then chastised by a colleague for believing his subjects. But for them, obesity seemed like a solution to the problem of being the target of predatory men; telling them to learn how to eat right would be “grotesque.” More generally, Hari considers depression “a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us”—the powerlessness at work, the lack of feeling that you matter, the constant comparisons to richer and better-looking people in ads, the insecurity that means you could lose status at any moment. These are the things that we ultimately need to fix, along with generating authentic connections to other people through volunteering and other kinds of social engagement. Hari concludes that we shouldn’t tell ourselves that, until those fixes exist, pills are likely going to be enough.