'Dazzled by the Fireworks'
The Sunday Night Reader for 7/3/22
There’s a moment in the movie Junebug where Amy Adams’ character tells her struggling husband: “God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.”
That’s probably as good a definition of patriotism as any. It’s a deep love that refuses to overlook complicated history or contemporary failings. It’s an active love that, in America’s case, especially on Independence Day, demands better of ourselves and our leaders. It’s an abiding love that isn’t silent.
Patriotism fights because it won’t let us stay this way.
‘Even Their Future is Under Surveillance’
The New York Times looks at China’s surveillance state and the predictive algorithms that are further tightening the authoritarian grip. Draw your own parallels.
“While largely unproven, the new Chinese technologies, detailed in procurement and other documents reviewed by The New York Times, further extend the boundaries of social and political controls and integrate them ever deeper into people’s lives…
The new approach to surveillance is partly based on data-driven policing software from the United States and Europe, technology that rights groups say has encoded racism into decisions like which neighborhoods are most heavily policed and which prisoners get parole. China takes it to the extreme, tapping nationwide reservoirs of data that allow the police to operate with opacity and impunity…
‘This is an invisible cage of technology imposed on society,’ said Maya Wang, a senior China researcher with Human Rights Watch, ‘the disproportionate brunt of it being felt by groups of people that are already severely discriminated against in Chinese society.’” Read more.
‘She Chose to Pay Deference’
A longread from ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education on the president of Boise State University and her leadership of a public university in a hostile political environment. The women in statement glasses — scholars of xenophobia in Victorian England — meet the men in statement belt buckles — with their claims that there is no racism in their lives because they looked up to Black sports figures when they were college students.
It doesn’t go well. Read more.
An Appreciation: Devil House by John Darnielle
It turns out that John Darnielle, the guy from The Mountain Goats, is also a novelist. Devil House is a fictional true crime novel in which the true crime novel being written by the main character becomes fiction. That’s a mouthful that sounds like it might veer into magical realism or something, but that’s not the game at all. It’s not played straight; it’s got interludes and key changes and multiple narrators. But it’s grounded in and consumed with the rollicking sadness of feral youth that’s so often in Darnielle’s songs.
The main character asks: “What would my work be like if I had to keep returning to the same story every time. [If] there was only the one place, a place where, every time I told the story again there was some new thing to learn about it, some overlooked ripple or wrinkle or speck that fleshed out the details, that brought them more full to life: but with the provision, present in the process, that nothing could help, nothing would change, no one would be unburdened, or healed, or made whole…These moments are tidal in their force, I knew from long study: those unsteadied by their flow come to think of them as inevitabilities, as natural forces, energies whose actions can be resisted no more profitably than the rising of the sun…
[I]t matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.”
Heavy Rotation
You Love to See It…
Say It Plain…
