[FRIAM] summer reading

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Dear FRIAMMERS,

 

I am off to the Mosquito-Infested-Swamp (Hereafter, "MIS") soon and probably
won't be able to participate in THUAM this Thursday.  I will try to rejoin
you at least by the second week of June, if for only as long as my car
battery can hold out.  

 

I leave you with two podcasts from Ezra Klein.  I can hear your eyes rolling
because there can hardly be anybody more elitey than Ezra Klein.  And
nothing is more eye-roll inducing than elites-interviewing-elites. 

 

Still, I think he is on to something here.  The first interview is with a
hard right notre dame professor, and the second is with Anne Applebaum,who I
guess is a liberal historian.  Both speak to a manner in which the right and
the left might seem to agree.  That all the talk about freedom both on the
left and on theright  misses the point that "freedom is just another word
for nothin' much to loose." Modern society has become cytolytic and the
internet has become a kind of centrifuge that spins out the cell fragments
into an organization alien to their form.  Universities are kinda like that.


 

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-does-the-post-liberal-right-actua
lly-want/id1548604447?i=1000561003813

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anne-applebaum-on-what-liberals-misund
erstand-about/id1548604447?i=1000561763183

 

Applebaum, channeling Arendt, speaks of "loneliness", not as a phenomenon of
not being around people, but of having lost a sense of common purpose in the
people around one.  Hence this atavistic longing for the Good Old America.
Now what nobody in this conversationseems to remember is that these cells
were often bound to gether by hatred of one another.  When we moved into the
MIS a half a century ago, there were two camps, two well defined THEY'S
which were not accompanied by equally well defined WE'S.  But one said was
loosely catholic and the other loosely protestant, and so they each had a
church to go an grumble in.  Now, even those camps have been dissolved.  

 

I am wondering if there was ever such a thing as a community that was not,
in significant part, based on a hatred for the communities around it. 

 

Nick 

 

 

 

 

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

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