Culture

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up. In the Pennsylvania Wilds — the romantic name a tourism agency gave to the hick region of the state where I reside — things go boom year-round.

I’m Facebook friends with a woman who has been in Democratic Party politics since we attended high school together. Since then, she’s worked for power politicians, (unsuccessfully) run for office, and played a central role in the public takedown of an elected official. She has a degree from an Ivy League institution, as does her husband, who works in finance. Hers is the quintessential lifestyle of the urban elites. And boy, do I mean elite. There are vacations to Italy and the UK, foodstagramming at prominent eateries and bars in major cities, shows on Broadway, and weekend excursions to country estates. There’s the constant churn of attendance at upper-crust city events at beautiful historic locations. And that’s just since the economy started tanking earlier this year.

The nation is entering a Galilean moment. Public and private authorities stubbornly pursue make-believe about race, ethnic loyalties, families, men and women, and civic adhesion. They deny the limits of nature. It’s not the first time that human vanity has taken a run at truth and punished those who don’t fall into line. To avoid prison in 1633, the astronomer and polymath Galileo recanted his defense of Copernicus’s discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. “And yet it moves,” Galileo is reputed to have said later, and bitterly, silenced by haughty thought examiners.

It would be too much to say that wokeness lost Roe for progressives. There is of course a contingent in American politics and the population at large that views abortion as murder or murder-adjacent, and this is the camp that has, for the time being, gotten its way. But if you’re looking to sort out how the ostensibly pro-choice side got complacent enough to let the right to choose get overturned, look no further than the sorry state of contemporary feminism. If even so-called feminists think the typical American woman has it too easy, what hope is there for the fight for women’s rights?

There's a well-done, nasty piece of filmmaking available on Hulu right now called Pistol, ostensibly a Sex Pistols biopic but so much more. The series is only partially about the Pistols themselves and more about the post-war Britain that formed them. Pistol seems to suggest that all that anger and despair was going to have to come out somewhere, either repressed and hidden, crunched deep down inside, or allowed to lance out as "music," more screaming than lyrical. I wonder if America isn't somewhere similar. Post-war Britain was a terrible place to grow up.

Sunday was Juneteenth, a day named in honor of an event that took place on June Nine-teenth (see what they did there?) but is being observed this year on June Twent-ieth (see what they didn't do there?). The name of this holiday is one of its least confusing attributes. Despite being identified as a nearly 160-year-old celebration — it commemorates June 19, 1865, when the last slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom — it was only recognized as a federal holiday last year. By President Joe Biden. Why making Juneteenth a federal holiday didn’t occur to Barack Obama, our nation’s first black president, and why Biden coincidentally chose to make it one following the 2020 riots surrounding George Floyd’s death, is a mystery for the ages.

Three black college students were arrested for shoplifting, and a culture war erupted at Oberlin College in Ohio. After six years of legal wrangling, ultra-liberal Oberlin recently lost, and now owes $33 million in damages to the surviving white people (two additional plaintiffs died of old age while the trial dragged on) who own the bakery it defamed over racial issues. It was 2016 and Donald Trump had just been elected president. Everyone was certain that Trump's victory was the End of Democracy and was anxious to claim their victimhood in the New Order. Enter Oberlin College, arguably the most socially liberal school in America.

The Satanic Temple is petitioning the City of Boston to fly their newly designed Satanic flag over City Hall. After a court ruled that the city had to fly a Christian group’s flag, the Temple insisted that it also had the right to display its banner during “Satanic Appreciation Week” from July 23 to 29. According to Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s founder, “A public forum that allows for religious expression can either announce a dedication to religious pluralism or it can signal a decline into theocracy by allowing public representatives to dictate limits on the civic capacities of some religious identities by exercising exclusive preference for others.” If Mr.

Cockburn could not be more unnerved. He just happened to catch a clip of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on RuPaul's All Stars Drag Race. Not to be confused with actual drag racing, with cars that blur by quickly, the 100-second-clip, like Pelosi herself, dragged on slowly and painfully. But for once — or twice, this is her second time on the show — Nancy wasn't the most artificially made-up person in the room. What Pelosi told the "queens" was also um, something: My honor to be here, to say to all of you how we proud we are of you. Thank you for the joy and beauty you bring to the world. Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about. I say that all the time to my friends in drag.

Twenty-nine years ago, Congress held hearings on violent video games that descended into farce. The absurdity was best captured by Senator Joe Lieberman, who at one point pulled out a plastic arcade gun and began waving it at the witnesses (he didn't shoot them, thankfully, lest he have to insert more quarters). Lieberman, who chaired the hearing, said he was deeply concerned about violence in video games. Less so about violence in Iraq, where he voted to send American sons and daughters nine years later. Yet while the hearings have been widely ridiculed, they did give us something valuable. Fearful of government intervention (and of losing health points to Senator Lieberman), the video game industry created the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

Two days after a May 24 elementary school shooting left nineteen children and two teachers dead and another seventeen injured, the wife of Britain’s Prince Harry made an unannounced visit with her camera crew to the Texas town of Uvalde. Vanity Fair said, “She was spotted placing a bouquet of white flowers near a makeshift memorial,” not bothering to rewrite the press copy. Was spotted? In real time during the outing, aggressive publicists at Archewell were shopping and circulating copy and photos to media, getting instant pickup by Yahoo News, People, Elle, and other outlets worldwide. “The forty-year-old Duchess of Sussex — wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a blue baseball cap — reached down with her head bowed,” articles said, one after another.

Cockburn is not a parent, at least so far as his public records are concerned. However, even he knows that taking children to a Pride parade is not the best idea for a family field trip. Heather Tirado Gilligan, the author of this Fatherly article, disagrees. She writes, “Pride Parades and the Pride festivals that follow are noisy and crowded. They’re filled with sights that may be new to kids, like public nudity and kink.” If Gilligan wanted any chance at all for her point to succeed, why would she mention “public nudity” and “kink” in the first two sentences? Taking a kid to a sex parade is like bringing a baby to a gun range: it sounds just a bit like bad parenting.

The trial that captured the attention of the country — or at least a handful of TikTokers — came to an end yesterday. A Virginia jury found that actress Amber Heard defamed her ex-husband Johnny Depp and vice versa. While both parties were held to be liable, Depp was awarded $15 million in damages whereas Heard was only awarded $2 million. It was a major defeat for Heard who expressed her disappointment in a statement shortly after the verdict was read. “I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband,” she said. The “mountain of evidence” Heard is referencing might not have been enough to sway the jury, but it was somehow enough for the Washington Post.

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which if you work for the government or for woke capitalists, you probably already knew. It’s a time, we are told, not only to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans, but as HR departments and Diversity, Inclusion and Equity offices declare, to help us understand the racism Asian Americans face as “persons of color.” One such example of the many trials and tribulations endured by Asian Americans as objects of micro-aggressive racist behavior is what a 2021 New York Times article referred to as “The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian.’” This apparently occurs when non-Asians misidentify one Asian for another Asian, typically in the workplace.

Stepping off the plane at LAX, the protagonist in Christopher Buckley’s comic novel Thank You for Smoking breezily observes that “arriving there always made it feel like Friday, even in the middle of the week facing a full workload.” There’s just something about LA’s perfect weather, attractive people and sense of living for tomorrow that instantly lifts your spirits. Born and raised in Boston and having spent most of my adult life within the narrow mental and professional confines of the Acela corridor, I used to be the typical East Coast snob when it came to America’s second-largest city. Sure, I acknowledged, the temperature is always a sublime seventy-two degrees. But how can you endure the traffic? Yes, it’s difficult not to stare at every other person.