Drinking the Sand
The Sunday Night Reader for 8/21/22
Uglier Still
It’s important to remember that we aren’t seeing “sneaking authoritarianism” or a clash of policy differences. We have seen one of our two major political parties turn explicitly, consistently, and publicly anti-democracy. It is their policy to end democracy — and, uglier still, our aspirations to become more democratic than the founders who gave the franchise to a very slim group of people and were willing to own another group of people — in order to control the country as a minority. This dispatch from Arizona by the New York Times’ Robert Draper makes it clear. Here’s a chunk that illustrates the ways in which many Republican elected officials and rank-and-file see “democracy itself at fault:”
“Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman and nursing teacher at Yavapai College who was running for a State House seat…‘I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,’ Bliss said. ‘And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.’ She then said: ‘We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.’
It once would have been jarring to hear a candidate for state legislative office ignore the usual parochial issues — property taxes, water access, state funding for universities — and instead repudiate the very idea of democracy in America. But Bliss’s view was hardly out of place here. [An] activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: ‘Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!’ [M]ost of the G.O.P. candidates seemed to share Bliss’s fears of majority rule as well as a desire to inflict harsh punishment on those they perceive as threats, deviants and un-American…
One guest on OAN’s heavy rotation over the past year has been the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who appeared on a broadcast last September to discuss the State Senate audit of the 2020 election, accompanied by a chyron that read, ‘Exposing the Crime of the Century.’ In July, I drove to Fountain Hills, where Finchem was speaking at a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Women of the Hills. Finchem sidled up to the microphone with a pistol conspicuously strapped to his right hip. After describing his work history in law enforcement, the private sector and Arizona politics, he then offered a different sort of qualification. With a grin, Finchem said, ‘The Atlantic put out a piece yesterday: I’m the most dangerous person to democracy in America.’
The article Finchem was referring to did not designate him ‘the most dangerous person’ — but rather as one of ‘dozens’ of election-denying candidates who ‘present the most significant threat to American democracy in decades.’ Regardless, the notion of Arizona’s G.O.P. secretary of state front-runner [he’s since won the nomination in the Republican primary] as a threat to democracy was received rapturously. Several women in the audience yelled out ‘Whooo!’ and applauded.” Read more.
Sifting
Record collections, ‘zines, geometry homework, good advice, and faxing your dad in Taiwan. Check out this excellent personal essay by Hua Hsu that happens to feature a Champaign-Urbana connection.
“[O]ne day I realized that my parents spoke with a mild accent, and that they had no idea what the passive voice was. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf—one that we could also use against them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness: the calm and composed child laying traps with a line of questioning; the parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.
I spent a lot of time with my mom. She drove me all over the South Bay, to cello lessons, cross-country meets, debate tournaments, record stores. She taught me how to shave. Every Friday, we went to Vallco, our local mall, starting at Sears and working our way to the food court for dinner. If store employees talked to you, she said, you replied, as cheerfully as possible, “I’m just browsing,” and they left you alone. I would tell her what everyone at school was wearing, and we would try to figure out where you could buy those clothes.
Later, I realized that we were both assimilating at the same time, sifting, store to store, for some possible future — that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never quite be perfect.” Read more.
Brought to You by Chevron
Subscribe to your local paper — imperfect as it is — or suffer the fate of West Texas. The Permian Basin is oil-rich and news-poor. Of the 61 counties in the region, “at least 13 have no local news sources. That’s more than 20% of counties in the region, double the overall rate for the rest of the state. Of the remaining 48 counties, the overwhelming majority — 42 — have only one source of news; most of those sources are a weekly paper,” according to Gizmodo.
Chevron has stepped in to fill the gap with a “local news site” that is written by a PR firm a thousand miles away. Read more.
Circling Back…
You Hate to See It…
Heavy Rotation
The internet is the worst thing in the world, except for the fact that you can go find an absolutely killer Chicago show from 1970 and watch it from start to finish. Then it’s the best thing in the world. Terry Kath, man.
