Culture

Eighty years ago in January, fifteen men sat around a table at a villa near Berlin and decided to eradicate a nation. To be precise, they decided how to eradicate a nation. Their decision, their “solution” as they perversely termed it, would lead to the murder of more than six million European Jews, though that is the easy-to-remember round number to which we so often default. The murders had started long before the Nazi leadership met at Wannsee in January 1942: this was not the first time a group of European leaders had planned to rid themselves of the Jews. The meeting clarified not just the goal of wiping out Europe’s Jewry, but the path to solving the “Jewish problem” by modern means.

Americans in 2021 spent more time watching TV than on any other leisure activity (outside of sleeping). Presumably those numbers increase during the holidays, especially given a hot NFL playoff race and endless bowl games (are you ready for Duke's Mayo Bowl?). Yet for me what stands out are not the touchdowns or halftime shows, but the commercials. Practically every commercial over the course of a three-hour football game features more people of color — blacks, Asians, Latinos — than whites. Many in the media and advertising are celebrating this for increasing diversity and inclusion, while others claim it undermines meritocracy.

It is a custom to offer a blindfold to prisoners facing a firing squad. Just so, the authorities covered the statue of Teddy Roosevelt that has stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History before it is carted off to its new home in North Dakota. Everywhere one turns, America’s past is being dismantled. Just last month, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had graced New York’s City Hall for 187 year was removed.  At schools and colleges across the country, images are being covered or removed, buildings renamed, history rewritten. It’s open season on the past. Back in June 2020, I wrote about the decision to remove the statue of Roosevelt from in front of the institution he help to found.

A new edict has just been handed down by our woke betters. According to an article at the Huffington Post, it is now forbidden to use the (distinctly holiday) phrase "let's work off ___," as in "let's go to the gym and work off those seventeen snickerdoodles and entire burlap sack of peppermint bark we ate yesterday." Per HuffPo, such fat-shaming, "while surely intended as a lighthearted joke, is seriously problematic, according to experts." It's the "according to experts" that always slays me there. And while I don't want to pit the authorities against each other, the doctors I've talked to have all warned that one consequence of engorging on sweets is that eventually you do turn into a lardass.

“Why are the Wisest ever the most easy and content to die, and the Weak and Foolish the utmost unwilling? Is it not, think you, because the most Knowing perceive, they are going to change for a happier State, of which the more Stupid and Ignorant are uncapable of being sensible?” Thus wrote Cicero in On a Life Well Spent, a 2,000-year-old essay. The English version I possess was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1744, and it was beloved by the Founders, one of the most remarkable generations to have graced the North American continent. Well, so people used to think.

You can 3D-print your own suicide pod now. No doctor’s note required. And it’s legal in Switzerland. One woman featured in the official announcement video called the pod “utopian.” According to one of the numerous news pieces covering Sarco (as the device is known), those who die by this and similar means are “cared for,” not “killed.” And yet that same article included the phone number of a suicide hotline along with a disclaimer: “If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has had thoughts of harming themselves or taking their own life, get help.” But why? Is suicide bad or isn’t it? And if it isn’t, why are you telling suicidal people to get help?

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is that you don’t have to put yourself through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. For example, I don’t have to pretend that moving from New Jersey to Manhattan to find a new job was, for a free black man in the nineteenth century, the same thing as an Irish immigrant boarding a “coffin ship” hoping to survive the Atlantic journey, knowing his only alternative was to die of starvation during the Potato Famine.

When I was 16, I threatened to carry out a school shooting. Okay, not really. I was sitting in math class with my hand up, trying to get the teacher’s attention. He called on one student, then another, then another. After the fourth or fifth time he failed to take my question, I became frustrated and said to myself something along the lines of “Oh my God, I’m gonna start shooting people.” I had no plans to harm anyone. It was a dumbass thing to say, even under my breath. You were 16 once, and I’m sure you said your share of dumbass things too. The timid farm girl in front of me overheard my comment and reported it to the principal. I was suspended for a few days and had to get a letter from a shrink saying I posed no threat to my fellow students. Soon, I was back in school.

We hear lot of talk these days about anti-natalism: the ethical view that procreation is morally wrong. Young women and men are choosing not to have kids and, in extreme instances, choosing sterilization in their late teens. “I got my uterus thrown out voluntarily at 19!” a young woman boasts on an internet forum devoted to this topic. Climate anxiety often tops the list of reasons cited by contributors. Call them the “baby doomers.” When I went down the rabbit hole to read what these young folks are saying, they sounded exactly like me in my twenties. My climate anxiety peaked in the early 2000s (thanks, Al Gore). The inconvenient truth is that I loudly told anyone who would listen that I was never having children.

After thirteen years, the queen of pop is free. Britney Spears is liberated from a court-ordered conservatorship that gave her father immense control over her personal life and finances. This is a victory for Spears, for the fans who have campaigned for her — and for other, less famous Americans who are trapped in conservatorships. Spears recently requested a court remove her father, Jamie, as conservator, testifying in March that the conservatorship was “abusive” and that she was “depressed” by the lack of power she had over her own life. The court ruled to remove Jamie in September and dissolved the conservatorship in full on Friday. For Britney’s fans, the ruling couldn’t have come soon enough.

Last weekend, eight people were killed and over 300 were injured at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Houston, as the crowd surged toward the stage. If a nine-year-old boy who fell from his father’s shoulders fails to emerge from his medically induced coma, the death toll could increase to nine. Scott took the stage at 9 p.m. By 9:38, authorities had deemed it a “mass casualty” situation. Instead of stopping the performance and attempting to defuse the situation, as musicians often do, Scott continued performing for another 37 minutes. An ambulance entered the throng. The crowd chanted “STOP THE SHOW!” Two concertgoers climbed on stage screaming “People are dead!” at a camera crew.

I'm holding a Polaroid taken at a Halloween party at one of my early State Department assignments in the 1980s. One of my diplomatic colleagues is in blackface. He’s done up to look like the minstrel player who was on the "Darkie" toothpaste boxes then for sale in every drugstore in Asia. You can see a photo of the packaging: the white teeth against the minstrel player's face were supposed to show how good the toothpaste was. My other colleague is dressed as the Frito Bandito, a caricature of Mexicans used to sell corn chips. The costume theme for the night was advertising icons. In the 1980s, these were acceptable ways to advertise and acceptable costumes for Halloween. Looking at the photo now, I realize it is a weapon.

Two years ago, I went to a megachurch service at Liberty University. Its guest speaker was Ben Shapiro. I asked some conservative students in the crowd what they thought of him. ‘He’s stupid smart,’ one said, ‘way smarter than me.’ The words have stuck with me ever since. ‘Stupid-smart’, a progression from ‘super-smart’, is the kind of compound modifier we’ve needed for years. How better to describe the small army of commentators, authors, critics and activists who now comprise the majority of the pundit class? Thanks to the internet, intellectual debate has been made dim, and we’re living in in the age of stupid smartness. Across the media landscape, professional megabrains pop up like big mushrooms.