"Cults are in style again. Or at least it's trendy to call things cults... America has always been haunted by cults...."

"...because modernity and then postmodernity have been disrupting American institutions for centuries. But in certain periods the disruption has been particularly potent. One was the Jacksonian era. Another was the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. A third is the moment we're living through now. Each of those periods saw scads of new species germinating in the cultic milieu, and each of them gave us cult scares.... A decay in a society's dominant institutions can produce... an 'authoritarian reflex'... xenophobia and the desire for a strongman. Both are on display in the MAGA right. But secular centrists are also capable of longing for old certainties and for the institutional power that protected them—of looking at those unfamiliar alternatives sprouting around us, fretting that we've entered a 'post-truth era,' and calling for controls meant to herd everyone into the 'common reality' they imagine we shared in the past. That past never existed. The human race has always lived in a patchwork of sometimes drastically different mental worlds. But as those worlds mix and multiply, the old authorities become more anxious; and anxious people often project their fears onto an external enemy with a name. One of those names is that traditional American demon, the cult."

From "Cult Country/Is this a new age of cultism—or a new cult panic?" by Jesse Walker in Reason.

"Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment...."

"... I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere. McCarthy was never in the Communist business; if nobody else knew that, he did. The show-trial aspect of McCarthy’s patriotic crusade was merely its theatrical form. Having cameras view it just gave it the false authenticity of real life. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment. McCarthy was an impresario, and the wilder the views, the more outrageous the charges, the greater the disorientation and the better the all-around fun."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.

ADDED: From the Wikipedia article "Stocks": 

Public punishment in the stocks was a common occurrence from around 1500 until at least 1748. The stocks were especially popular among the early American Puritans, who frequently employed the stocks for punishing the "lower class." In the American colonies, the stocks were also used, not only for punishment, but as a means of restraining individuals awaiting trial. The offender would be exposed to whatever treatment those who passed by could imagine. This could include tickling of the feet. As noted by the New York Times in an article dated November 13, 1887, "Gone, too, are the parish stocks, in which offenders against public morality formerly sat imprisoned, with their legs held fast beneath a heavy wooden yoke, while sundry small but fiendish boys improved the occasion by deliberately pulling off their shoes and tickling the soles of their defenseless feet."

In the book of Job, we see God accused of using stocks: "He puts my feet in the stocks, he watches all my paths."

Job comes up in "I Married a Communist" — at the end of a rant about betrayal:

Professionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It’s a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of the Bible. What’s that book about? The master story situation of the Bible is betrayal. Adam—betrayed. Esau—betrayed. The Shechemites—betrayed. Judah—betrayed. Joseph—betrayed. Moses—betrayed. Samson—betrayed. Samuel—betrayed. David—betrayed. Uriah—betrayed. Job—betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don’t forget the betrayal of God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn.

The only thing to freak out about is freaking out itself.

I'm reading From "Opinion: Don’t freak out about inflation yet" by Catherine Rampell (WaPo). Key point:

If everyone interprets recent price spikes as temporary shocks that will disappear as the economy reopens and production ramps up, then inflation and overheating concerns should fade. But if people start to freak out about inflation, then inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Businesses start preemptively raising prices and wages, because they expect everyone else to do so, too.

So if there's inflation, it will be our fault. Calm down, settle back. It's only going to be a problem if you make it a problem. 

ADDED: It's all in the mind, so....

How shocking is "And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter"?

Trump used that phrase yesterday at the Roundtable on Justice Disparities in America (transcript). Context:

In Minneapolis, they went through three nights of hell. And then I was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work. It was like a miracle. It’s just everything stopped. And I’ll never forget the scene. It’s not supposed to be a beautiful scene. But to me, it was after you watched policemen running out of a police precinct. And it wasn’t their fault. They wanted to do what they had to do, but they weren’t allowed to do anything.... I said, “I’m sorry. We have to have [the National Guard] go in.” And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter, right through, boom. I’ll never forget. You saw the scene on that road wherever it may be in the city, Minneapolis. They were lined up. Boom. They just walked straight. And yes, there was some tear gas and probably some other things and the crowd dispersed. And they went through it by the end of that evening. And it was a short evening. Everything was fine.... So I just want to tell you that we’re working on a lot of different elements having to do with law, order, safety, comfort, control, but we want safety. We want compassion. We want everything.

As I drove home from my sunrise run this morning...



... I had "Morning Joe" on the satellite radio, and he was riffing emotively on that phrase "it was like a knife cutting butter." Joe acted as though the phrase connoted murderously cutting into human flesh, and Who talks like that?!! In Joe's vivid nightmare, Trump is unfathomably evil. Joe said it's as if Trump were "running for President of the Confederacy" and Trump has decided to speak only to "angry white men — angry old white men."

Joe is 57, by the way, so that's a bit old, and he is also white and angry, so maybe he knows whereof he speaks, and yet he does not mean that he hears the siren call of Donald Trump.

But let's look at this phrase "like a knife cutting butter." It's an idiomatic expression! It means it was easy. You see the context. It doesn't mean the National Guard was sadistically injuring people. It means all they had to do was show up and walk straight in and everything worked out just fine.

It wasn't even a hot knife....



The inability to understand metaphor is, of course, highly selective. A commentator like Joe has to use what Trump gives him. He must scan the transcripts every day, looking for something to pretend to be anguished about.

How many protesters does it take to "pack" Washington D.C.?

According to The Washington Post, the city is "packed" when there are "more than 10,000."



That's the WaPo headline as displayed at Memeorandum. The headline is no longer written like that. Now, it is "'Defund The Police' painted on D.C. street as tensions among protesters flare."

Now, my question is: How bad did it get for WaPo to write "tensions... flare"?

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation’s capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality.... The cause even led to flares of tension among Washington’s protesters, with some embracing a party atmosphere while others furiously spray-painted “Defund The Police” in giant yellow letters a block from the city’s “Black Lives Matter” display....

So there was some graffiti. What else? Turns out it was just a few protesters who were irked that others weren't acting angry:

Kenny Sway, a D.C. musician who had calmed thousands a few days before with his rendition of “Lean On Me,” pushed through the crowd, yelling at everyone he could see to stop dancing and start marching.

“This is not a festival!” he shouted into a microphone. “This is not a f---ing festival!”

The dancing demonstrators mostly ignored him, except for one woman who rolled her eyes and complained to a friend.

“Who made him God?” she asked. “You can’t police a protest.”

She took a puff of what appeared to be marijuana and again swung her hips to the music.

One street over, at the corner of H and Vermont streets, Zamzam Elzain stood on her tiptoes, lofted a sign reading “Silence is betrayal” and yelled desperately at the people meandering by with strollers and cigarettes and, it seemed, little conviction....

“If this is a protest, we get an F!” she yelled at passersby. “This is not supposed to be a block party!”

A man looked up, briefly, then returned to the bag of chips in his hand.

It sounds like the tension was about the lack of sufficient tension!

Other confrontations unfolded as night fell.

So... other than the confrontation about the crowd not being confrontational enough... okay...

There's really only one more "tension" vignette: A white protester guy tells a black Secret Service agent that he ought to quit his job. The agent retorted: "What does your white privilege taste like?"

UPDATE: WaPo changed the headline again. Now, it's "Protesters throng D.C., vowing to be heard after George Floyd’s death." It still hasn't captured what's in the article! There are fascinating vignettes in the article, which I've tried to highlight. I'd like to compliment whoever wrote them. I see the article was written by "Samantha Schmidt, Jessica Contrera, Rebecca Tan, Hannah Natanson and John Woodrow Cox." But I'm going to assume that what I'm enjoying there was written by John Woodrow Cox — not because he's the only man on that vast committee — "vast" is satire — but because when I mouse over the names, his is the one that gets "Enterprise reporter with a focus on narrative journalism." I don't know what "Enterprise reporter" means, but I think what I'm enjoying is "narrative journalism."

ADDED: Wikipedia says: "Enterprise journalism is reporting that is not generated by news or a press release, but rather generated by a reporter or news organization based on developed sources. Tied to 'shoe-leather' reporting and 'beat reporting,' enterprise journalism gets the journalist out of the office and away from the traditional news makers."

And: "Narrative journalism, also referred to as literary journalism, is defined as creative nonfiction that contains accurate, well-researched information.... Mainstream newspaper publications are still wary of supporting narrative journalism too much due to time and space constraints, and will often print the occasional narrative in a Sunday features or supplemental magazine." The names Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe come up.

AND: Here's a piece written by John Woodrow Cox solo — in WaPo 3 days ago — "‘I’m black before I’m anything else’: A police officer’s passionate exchange with protesters."

“My heart walks with you guys because I’ve been this,” Watts told them, pinching his skin, “since the day I came out of my mama. … I’m proud of each and every one of you guys.”

“Keep marching,” he continued. “Do it for me. Do it because right now I’m here and I can’t do what you’re doing. But understand, my heart is over here with you guys.”