Culture

’Tis a ritual of late summer, fitting somewhere between tossing the last of our CSA-farm kohlrabi into the compost bin and the first pit forming in my stomach when I contemplate the beginning of a new school year — even though my shade hasn’t darkened a classroom door for many a decade. I refer to my purchase and mirthful reading of the Athlon Sports college football preview magazine, which retails for a cool $11.99. First thing I do is check the forecast for the trio of teams I have pulled for since I first laced up (and tripped over) cleats: Brigham Young (though I am not Mormon), Army (though I am a pacifist) and Notre Dame (though I am a piss-poor Catholic). Next I pour myself a tumbler of rotgut and settle in with the names, these glorious names.

I get what socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought she was doing. She shows up to the Met Gala, the glitziest event of the year, where tickets are upwards of $30,000 and a table can run nearly a quarter of a million bucks, wearing a white dress with the words ‘Tax the Rich’ scrawled along the back. How cute, she thinks she’s trolling, you know, like the kids do. Except none of the kids on her side are any good at it. AOC, their leader, also proved Monday evening she doesn’t understand how a joke works. That put her in good company. Increasingly like the pop stars and celebrities she spent the evening hobnobbing alongside, her dress stunt showed she, too, bleeds tedium. Take, for example, a comparable incident from last week.

Have you ever wondered what American schools teach about 9/11? Here is a partial answer. I’ve reviewed five of the most popular American history textbooks for high school.

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’ Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too.

Georgetown University announced Tuesday that it is canceling its fall homecoming festivities 'out of an abundance of caution' due to the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19. To my alma mater I say: trust the science — give us back our homecoming. A college campus, particularly Georgetown, is one of the safest places in the country to be if you are worried about the pandemic. Students, faculty and staff were required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine before they were allowed to step on campus this fall. The data tells us that the vast majority of hospitalizations and nearly every death from the coronavirus is among the unvaccinated.

The Biden administration fired a stern warning to five states on  Monday afternoon, warning them that forcing all students to wear masks every day might violate the students’ civil rights. Just kidding! That’s what would happen in a country with health policies that weren’t stupid. In America, we have Anthony Fauci. Too bad. No, the Biden administration’s letter to state officials in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah is health policy as a bureaucratic Matruschka doll: the administration seeks to ban states from banning school districts from banning unmasked faces. Now, masking schoolchildren may or may not be good health policy (it’s not, but indulge Cockburn in the hypothetical for a moment). But isn’t it just that, a health policy?

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early in 2020 — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread-price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency. Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day.

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one. There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.

I started my visit to Japan’s north country deep in the mountains, in hot water in a bath the size of a swimming pool. Quietly simmering, I was intrigued to notice that the glass which formed the outside wall was not misted up, though the water was steaming. Through the darkness I could make out trees, bushes and the glint of the lake below. I waded over and reached out my hand, only to discover that there was no wall. One side of the bath was entirely open to the air. For the Japanese no journey, particularly to the north, is complete without soaking in as many hot springs as possible. The mineral-rich waters are the upside of the geological turbulence that brought about the devastating tsunami of March 2011. Today everyone knows the name ‘Fukushima’.

You can get goat in parts of New England. Consumers of Portuguese origin create a market unparalleled elsewhere in the US. In Boston, as I recall, Savenor’s used to sell camel and kangaroo. Few meats are too un-American for New York City. Ottomanelli, purveyors to whatever is left of the Four Hundred, still has venison of the quality they sold to the Upper East Side in the Gilded Age. Los Paisanos in Brooklyn stocks alligator, turtle and caribou. But the great days of the 1950s, when a club in New York served porcupine, caribou, muskrat and armadillo, are fled. With the closing of the American mind has come the narrowing of American appetites. Americans’ self-image is of enterprise, pioneering, innovation, adventure and the call of the wild.

What’s liberal about liberal arts education? That question is not easy to answer; for one thing, really to answer it you have to know what the word ‘liberal’ means. Has any word accumulated more conflicting meanings than ‘liberal’? Deciding what ‘education’ means is no simple task, either. In my experience, the more you think about those simple words, the more elusive their meanings. According to James Madison, ‘liberty’ and ‘learning’ belong together. They ‘support’ each other, he says, and their connection supports a free society. In various forms, the nexus between liberty and learning is a very traditional idea, with epistemological and existential as well as political dimensions.

'Please. I beg you. It’s not worth seeing. Avert your eyes. It’s all laptop screensaver crack smoke. Just please don’t make me write about Hunter Biden’s artworks.' Such were this critic’s fevered thoughts as the news of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation came across the Twitter-tape. And so we turn to another artist manqué. This time, he is a builder, a builder of works on the order of the Romans of the 1930s. And now, these works will remain unappreciated (such is the fate of true artists). So, let’s appreciate. 'Excelsior', this governor scrawled across the edifices and tunnels and apps of his numinous creation. 'Ever Upward', he helpfully provided just beside it in translation. 'It’s Latin!

Who is on top of the gold medal table at the Tokyo Olympics? China? The United States? According to former European Parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt, it is, in fact, the European Union that is triumphing at the games. While you have to go down to seventh place in the Olympics leaderboard to find an EU country (Germany), Verhofstadt appears to have his own scoreboard: 'Fun fact,' he wrote on Twitter: 'EU combined has more gold medals than US or China'. Verhofstadt went on to say that he would 'love to see the EU flag next to the national on athletes’ clothes'. Cockburn wonders whether this is all just a ploy to ensure that Verhofstadt's Belgium — which has so far won just a single gold at the Games — stands a chance of beating Great Britain, which has 16.

Last month the New Yorker published an essay about a grotesque experiment that took place in West Germany in the 1970s, in which young boys who had been taken from, or abandoned by, their parents were placed with known pedophiles. It was no accident. It was quite deliberate. The powerful sexologist Helmet Kentler believed that pedophilic guardianship would foster an open and unashamed attitude towards sex that would preclude the development of fascistic attitudes. As the New Yorker says: ’Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”’ A sensible reader could guess what happened to the boys.

Just a few days before the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony, my mom and I watched the gymnastics comedy Stick It. The movie is about a star gymnast fighting for redemption after dropping out of a World Championship right before the floor event. Reality seemed to mirror fiction on Tuesday when Simone Biles, the star of the US gymnastics team who is widely considered the greatest gymnast of all time, withdrew from competition during the Olympic team final. Biles botched her vault attempt, not performing the full trick she planned to do and taking a huge step upon landing, before being led away from the floor by a team trainer.

Can Trumpists still believe in ‘America First’ if they root against America in the Olympics? Yes, apparently. The US team had a rough start in the opening week of the Tokyo Olympics. For the first time in 50 years, not a single US athlete won a gold medal on day one of the Summer Games. So who was kicking our butts? That’s right, Asia. Eleven gold medals were handed out Saturday, with the first being won by Yang Qian from China for the 10-meter air rifle competition. She bested Mary Tucker, the American ranked second in the world, who ended up placing sixth. American Eli Dershwitz lost the bronze to Kim Jung-hwan of South Korea for saber despite also being No. 2 in the world.

This country is experiencing a long overdue racial reckoning — and the city of Cleveland and Major League Baseball have failed another major test. The new name for the professional baseball franchise in Cleveland — Guardians — must go. As several states work to remove imperialistic statues of cis white men, the city of Cleveland has reached into its racist past to honor them. This is not the progress that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been dreaming of. The new mascot, for the team that will henceforth only be referenced as the ‘Cleveland Baseball Team’, is supposedly a reference to four giant stone statues that ‘guard’ the Hope Memorial Bridge just outside the city’s stadium.