Again Last Night I Dreamed the Dream Called Laundry

• From last year, welcome to fucking Giftmas season.
• As I type this Planet and Earthgirl are watching the new Gilmore Girls. Everyone is still relentlessly topically witty. The actress who plays the daughter still can't act. Kill me.
• My fucking free blogging platform changed it's dashboard and added emojis. 😡 This first and last time. Fuck me.
• Changing leaves, still dreaming, sad life.
• This is how democracy ends: This is where the real risks lie. It is not possible to keep behaving like this without damaging the basic machinery of democratic government. It takes an extraordinarily fine-tuned political intelligence to target popular anger at the parts of the state that need reform while leaving intact the parts that make that reform possible. Trump – and indeed Brexit – are not that. They are the bluntest of instruments, indiscriminately shaking the foundations with nothing to offer by way of support. Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.
• This is how democracy ends: This is not to deny the reality of structural racism or xenophobia or the intolerance shown to Muslims or the antisemitic undertones of Trump’s campaign. I am myself a person of color with a Muslim-sounding name, I know the reality and I am as frightened as everyone else. But it is crucial that our cultural elite, most of it aligned with the New Democrats, not be allowed to shirk their responsibility for Trump’s success. So let us be as clear about this electoral defeat as possible, because the New Democratic elite will try to pin their failure, and keep their jobs, by blaming this largely on racism, sexism – and FBI director Comey. This is an extremely dangerous conclusion to draw from this election. So here is our silver lining. This is a revolutionary moment. We must not allow them to shift the blame on to voters. This is their failure, decades in the making. And their failure is our chance to regroup. To clean house in the Democratic party, to retire the old elite and to empower a new generation of FDR Democrats, who look out for the working class – the whole working class.
• Blame the Russians. 
• If Putin is to blame....
• Jake was a Teenage Nazi Wannabe: In addition to being a weirdo too fascinated with images of the Third Reich, I was, as admitted, the fortunate child of my town’s professional elite. I knew racists like Trump and Bannon, but they belonged to the country club. These are golf-course back-slappers whose vile misogyny and crude racist jokes are a form of rich-guy virility. They have no interest in internet Nazis except as an instrument of media relations. Watch them toss these suckers overboard to prove to middle-class Jews they don’t mean any of it. Meanwhile, they’re going to go right on bombing the hell out of majority Muslim countries and engage in regular old racism: surveillance of Muslim communities; drug war excesses; voter suppression; deportation and discrimination against the undocumented. These, by the way, are mostly bipartisan evils—if the Republican versions are more egregious, they are rarely unique or new. They are the sort of thing that too many of us tolerate too readily.
• The free trade fallacy.
• Ravitch on charter schools.
• They kidnapped themselves.
• Bawstin Hughma featuring L'il Tommy.
• Gravity's Rainbow, page 539.
• The 200 Best Songs of the 70s?
• James Merrill ▼