We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Douglas Young has very mixed feelings about Bill Maher’s book.
Bill Maher has been a major political humourist for over thirty years. After a number of guest spots on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher ran on Comedy Central and then ABC from 1993 to 2002, and since 2003 he has hosted HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He has also authored several books, the latest of which is What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, a collection of monologues from his present program, updated and edited.
Maher is a traditional liberal who is consistently libertarian on sex, drugs, and free expression (“I’m never for censorship”). While usually upsetting conservatives with his caustic wit, in recent years he has angered leftists as well. His new book claims “it’s not me who’s changed, it’s the Left, which is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will.” In fact, echoing commentator and author Dennis Prager, Maher contends that “wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism, it is more often its opposite,” and he compares “today’s Woke Revolution and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution” for their mutual censoriousness and historical presentism.
Though Maher’s latest book has too many f-bombs, several sentences ending with a preposition, and at least one split infinitive, the Cornell English graduate’s prose is generally excellent and often quite funny, with each chapter covering a distinct topic. It is especially endearing to find an author not anchored to one political team. Asking, “When did liberals become the Fun Police?,” Democrat Maher sides with Republicans against helicopter parenting, censorship, educational indoctrination, canceling academically gifted programs for “equity,” seeing “racism” everywhere, racially segregated dorms and graduations and national anthems, “diversity quotas,” men competing in women’s sports, banning various Halloween costumes, and condemning folks for “cultural appropriation.” Indeed, Maher asserts that “Not everything is about oppression. Stealing natural resources from Indigenous peoples: yes, that’s exploitation.
But I swear, not one Beach Boy song resulted in any Hawaiian having fewer waves to surf.” Refreshingly, Maher also rebukes Israel-haters, defunding the police, the Covid lockdowns, “hormone blockers and genital surgery” for children, and over-regulation: “China sees a problem, and they fix it. They build a dam, we debate what to rename one.” Ridiculing leftist “Guardians of Gotcha,” Maher boldly notes that, “If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they’d be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK or RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr.” Similarly, he observes that “J.K. Rowling used to be a villain to the Right because she wrote books about witchcraft; now she’s a villain to the Left because she has this crazy belief that there’s more to being a woman than pronouns and lipstick.”
Also rewarding is when Maher acknowledges complexity, like being a football fan who does not deny how dangerous the game is. Likewise, though all for gun control, he recognizes that sexual frustration and loneliness contribute to mass shootings, and he skewers Hollywood’s hypocrisy on guns: “It’s funny, Hollywood is the wokest place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility… But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence: crickets. Weird, the only thing we don’t call a ‘trigger’ is the one that actually has a trigger.”
His critique of universities is superb: “Let’s get real about what ‘higher education’ in America really is: a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class…. And yet, no one knows how to change a tire.” He also chastises the “emotional haemophiliacs” too many colleges produce, observing that:
the people who can’t take a joke now aren’t old ladies in the Bible Belt – they’re Gen Z at elite colleges. Colleges, where comedy goes to die. Kids used to go to college and lose their virginity – now they go and lose their sense of humour… Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry the Cable Guy have all in recent years. Stopped playing colleges. That’s right, a Jew, a Black man, and a redneck walk into a college campus and they all can’t wait to get the hell out.
Nor does Maher ignore today’s “panic porn” news media, Facebook, or Twitter, positing how “We all see it – groups of friends out together at a bar or eating in a restaurant and they’re all staring down at their phones. Imagine how rude that would be if, instead of a phone, you brought a magazine to the table and read it.”
→ Continue reading: Wittily Conflicted: a review of Bill Maher’s What This Comedian Said Will Shock You
Douglas Young gives us an even-handed review of Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me.
As a life-long Sir Elton John fan, it was exciting to see that his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, had penned an autobiography, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me. Whereas Beatles John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney were the 1960s’ top composers, two of their disciples, Elton and Bernie, would be the 1970s’ reigning songwriters. This is all the more notable since the duo’s wordsmith was only in his early-to-mid-twenties when Captain Fantastic ruled FM radio with an incredible run of hit singles and albums from 1970 through 1976. Indeed, Taupin wrote the lyrics for “Your Song” as a nineteen-year-old virgin. The pair have continued to produce plenty of hits over the decades, and Taupin has occasionally written the words to songs for other performers, such as Alice Cooper, Starship (“We Built This City”), Heart (“These Dreams”), and Willie Nelson.
But as outrageously public as melody maker Sir Elton has been, his lyrical partner has generally stayed stubbornly backstage, making his memoir somewhat of a revelation. Though reared in rural England, Taupin was always in love with America’s music, movies, pop culture, and Wild West. These influences saturate his lyrics and, as soon as he could afford to, he headed for Hollywood: “I left because I wanted an alternate lifestyle and was driven by an Americanism that was always in my soul. I excommunicated myself from a culture that I didn’t feel I belonged to or was terribly interested in and embraced one that had inhabited my imagination since I straddled a broom and galloped across my old front lawn.”
By far Taupin’s longest love affair has been with America, and it is touching how grateful this immigrant remains. Of his SiriusXM program, “American Roots Radio,” he explains that “Preserving the heritage of consequential Americana had always been of the greatest importance to me,” crediting how “it served me well as an inspirational arsenal.” Taupin has no patience for fellow expats who ridicule American culture, bluntly telling them, “Don’t pillory the fabric of a nation that has invited you with open arms and p*$% on its pastimes.” Instead, having lived the last three-plus decades in a rural part of southern California, Taupin displays deep affection for his adopted homeland: “The Santa Ynez Valley is still quintessentially small-town America… They still wash your windows and pump your gas at the local Chevron, the coffee shop knows what I want without asking, and I know everyone on a first-name basis at the local market. I’m indebted to it and its inhabitants for giving me a stable and concurrently ordinary life. Everyone knows who I am, yet no one panders or fawns. I might garner a little extra attention, but in every other way I’m just another neighbour. They’re hardworking, good-natured people intrinsically patriotic in their respect for American tradition.”
Yet so much of the book is dominated by anecdotes about a huge variety of famous artists and entertainers Taupin has met, including John Lennon, Sir Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Katharine Hepburn, Stevie Wonder, the Rev. Al Green, Bob Marley, Billie Jean King, Freddie Mercury, and loads more. Many vignettes are quite revealing and fun. For example, surrealist painter Salvador Dali referred to himself as “The Dali,” doodled a delightful drawing on a restaurant napkin, and tossed it to a grateful Taupin, only for his hotel maid to mistakenly launder it.
→ Continue reading: A review of: Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me
Douglas Young gives us a review of Jimmy Failla’s Cancel Culture Dictionary
Jimmy Failla’s Cancel Culture Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Winning the War on Fun is a remarkably well-reasoned, witty, and surprisingly serious takedown of cancel culture. The book defines it, explains how it came about, profiles its tactics and contradictions, demolishes its arguments, and shows how to successfully push back against this dangerous assault on our freedom of expression since, as Failla sees it, “If speech ain’t free, neither are we.”
Echoing books last year from fellow anti-woke comics Kat Timpf, Greg Gutfeld, and Tyrus, Failla’s thesis is that “we need to stop appeasing the censorship brigades because they keep narrowing the lanes in which we can enjoy ourselves.” Indeed, “we absolutely need to get back to a time when the world knew the difference between a joke and a hate crime. Because any society that can’t take a joke is destined to become one.”
Superbly organized with subjects grouped alphabetically, the book quickly pinpoints the forces abetting the rise of cancel culture. A major one is iPhones, leaving Failla nostalgic for growing up in the 1980s when “the only one who spent all day obsessing about their phone was E.T.”
Of course, iPhones are merely a means to the narcotic of social media which “has created a world where what you say is way more important than the things you do. Empathy has become a brand instead of an actual character trait.” Furthermore, “social media made it trendy to look at ourselves as victims and blame society for all of your shortcomings.”
The rise of this cult of victimhood has armed the censorship warriors with a hyper-sensitivity to the remotest possibility of a slight. In fact, “a world that champions victimhood… [h]as taught way too many people to look for things to get offended by instead of living their lives in search of joy.”
So, while many years earlier comedienne Roseanne Barr got away with trashing the national anthem and satirically wearing a Nazi uniform, by 2018 a social media mob got ABC to cancel her TV series over a single ugly tweet about Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. In fact, standup comics now face fake fans armed with iPhones “to get attention for calling a joke out as offensive” by unleashing it on social media with no context to try to destroy a career.
Failla further contends that helicopter parenting germinated a generation of completely coddled children convinced they should be protected from ever hearing anything they dislike. Couple this with the Left’s equating words with violence and you have an ideal climate for a cancel culture mob to be generated by a single upsetting statement or even word.
All this toxic brew bubbled over when the Left’s nightmare candidate was elected president in 2016 “after breaking every social media rule there was.” Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House so shocked and enraged progressives that they became unhinged in their fanatical drive to destroy anyone deemed an enemy.
Failla is particularly perceptive about the sad, empty lives manning the cancel culture brigades who he sees as a misfit gang that is dangerously angry, bored, and narcissistic:
an online rage mob that knows nothing about you, save for the fact that they want to destroy your existence in the name of getting likes and showing the world they know better. That’s cancel culture in a nutshell. A collection of people who wake up every day looking for something to get offended by so they can leverage their victimhood into your firing and their clout. The trend has become so prevalent in society that scientists have a word for people who do this: they’re called losers.
Failla is convinced this lonely lot cares nothing about whatever issue happens to be trending on social media that day. It is only interested in cheap virtue-signalling and scoring the “digital dopamine” that comes with “destroy[ing] anyone who achieves something in showbiz that they themselves couldn’t dream of pulling off.”
Recalling Kat Timpf’s You Can’t Joke About That, Failla chronicles what is likely the worst trait of “the outrage mob,” a merciless bloodlust to ruin lives for a typically trivial verbal faux pas because, “whenever somebody says something dumb, online prosecutors always recommend the career death penalty.” This is not only grossly disproportionate, but “losing one’s job the first time you say something stupid isn’t a great strategy for any of us to endorse in the long run, given how flawed we all happen to be.” More ominously, “If someone is so devoid of nuance and empathy that they’re willing to destroy your livelihood for one step out of bounds, do you really think they won’t be on board with jailing you for it someday down the road?”
→ Continue reading: Savvy and Witty: a review of Jimmy Failla’s ‘Cancel Culture Dictionary’
Douglas Young reviews George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle
How swell to at last have a major biography of that most aloof of all rock stars, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle, by respected pop music historian Philip Norman, and how sobering to learn that the reclusive rocker’s feet were all too completely made of clay. Though this book is quite detailed and very well written, I now know far more information about Harrison than his underlying motives. Alas, what is still a worthy biography could have been splendid if not for several shortcomings.
Perhaps the book’s top theme is George Harrison’s remarkable cornucopia of contradictions, something he alluded to in the “Pisces Fish” song on his superb last album, 2002’s Brainwashed:
Sometimes, my life it seems like fiction,
Some of the days it’s really quite serene,
I’m a living proof of all life’s contradictions,
One half’s going where the other half’s just been.
Massive contrasts define Harrison’s story. With bomb craters from World War II still decorating his neighbourhood, he grew up in a crowded little Liverpool apartment with no bathroom, whose only heat came from a “small coal fire,” and where the weekly bath was in a backyard bucket. But massive musical success would earn him enormous wealth. Harrison was the Beatle most in the background whose growing songwriting abilities were largely ignored by the group’s leaders, John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. But after the Fab Four’s 1970 breakup, the lead guitarist would stun everyone with his astonishing All Things Must Pass triple album to become the most critically and commercially successful Beatle of the early 1970s.
It is comforting to learn how Harrison was usually kind, caring, and giving. Not only did he co-write “It don’t come easy” and “Back off Boogaloo,” two of Beatle brother Ringo Starr’s biggest solo hit songs, but he did not even ask for a (quite lucrative) songwriting credit for either. Even when sick in bed dying of cancer, he offered to visit the drummer’s ailing daughter. But Harrison was a stubborn loner who was often moody and brutally blunt. As Ringo put it, “There was the love and bag-of-beads personality and the bag of anger. He was very black and white.” Indeed, when Beatle brother John Lennon queried his bandmates on what they thought of his girlfriend and future wife, Cynthia Powell, Mr. Curt remarked she had “teeth like a horse.” While the second Mrs. Lennon, Yoko Ono, conceded “George was very nice,” she still complained how “very hurtful” his caustic comments could be, to which John would shrug, “That’s just George.” And on a long flight when a stewardess asked the softly chanting Hindu convert if she could get him anything, Harrison snarled, “F#%& off, can’t you see I’m meditating?”
The supposedly most spiritual Beatle who publicly sang warnings about “Living in the Material World” privately luxuriated in a 25-bedroom gothic mansion, and the Beatle purportedly most at peace as a devout Hindu nevertheless smoked lots of marijuana, drank loads of liquor, snorted copious quantities of cocaine, and chain-smoked French cigarettes. He was also an inveterate adulterer who cheated in his own house when his first wife was home and even with his closest Beatle brother Ringo’s wife. This was a conquest too far even for licentious Beatle brother John who denounced it as “virtual incest,” and the affair led to the Starrs divorcing the next year.
Surprisingly for the superb composer who wrote so many beautiful love songs, including the classic “Something,” George did not appear to be all that passionate or romantic. He not only routinely betrayed both of his spouses but did not seem to mind losing his first wife to his closest friend, Eric Clapton – who remained his best buddy. While enjoying most of his time in the world’s biggest band for all the easy camaraderie with his bandmates and being too shy to perform on his own, by the latter 1960s Harrison firmly rejected any more concert tours and had grown deeply bitter that more of his compositions were not allowed on Beatle albums. Later calling himself “the economy-class Beatle,” he felt liberated when the group finally broke up and would never seek a reunion. Asked to help Sir Paul perform
“Let It Be” at London’s 1985 Live Aid Concert, George’s typically tactless retort was that his Beatle brother “didn’t want me to sing on it ten years ago, so why does he want me now?”
→ Continue reading: Marvellously melodic but mercurial: a review of Philip Norman’s George Harrison: the Reluctant Beatle
The Triumph of a Libertarian Comic: A Review of Greg Gutfeld’s The King of Late Night by Dr. Douglas Young, U. of North Georgia-Gainesville Political Science Professor Emeritus
Political comedian Greg Gutfeld’s new eighth book, The King of Late Night, explores what he sees as many recent U.S. cultural “flips” helping his TV show, Gutfeld!, trounce its late-night American competition. Throughout, the author offers sage advice to wannabe comics while making brilliant cultural and political observations exposing a surfeit of societal double standards demanding to be satirized. Despite warning of the lethal threat to our civil liberties posed by woke leftists, the book is laden with laughs since Gutfeld makes his points with humour as opposed to the angry ad hominem attacks so de rigueur today. All this makes for a most satisfying read.
Central to Gutfeld’s enduring TV and writing success is perhaps the most pronounced flip of all. Though U.S. Humor, Inc. had long been dominated by rebellious, edgy liberal firebrands like Richard Pryor and George Carlin, too many of today’s American liberal comedians have pretzeled themselves into unfunny political propagandists to appease the career-cancelling woke mob while gutsy conservatives and libertarians like Gutfeld poke fun at leftist shibboleths. Indeed, as Gutfeld sees it, “if Richard Pryor or George Carlin were alive, they would run screaming from campuses, chased by a crowd of nonbinary Oberlin students.”
This is because the Left has become the boring home of angry, intolerant, and utterly “humorless” censors while rightists have morphed into the creatively funny rebels taking on the establishment. As Gutfeld sees it, “the Left, once the haven for free speech, is now a bounty hunter for the truly outspoken – tracking the violators, and destroying careers…. The Left is now the old fart pushing censorship, and the Right is the side championing the offensive.” As proof, how bizarre that TV’s Comedy Central network is arguably not remotely as cutting edge or funny as Gutfeld’s programs (Red Eye, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Gutfeld!) have been on the Fox News Channel. In woke America, liberal comics have become the stuffy parents while the libertarian and conservative clowns have evolved into the hip outsiders gleefully pointing out the woke emperor has no clothes.
Gutfeld contends that cowardice has compelled his late-night TV competitors to castrate their comedy since Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, and James Corden covet being part of the establishment clique and fear being fed to the wokesters if they ever make fun of President Biden or any other leftist sacred cows. Though thoroughly funny in his own right, Gutfeld repeatedly concedes that his rivals have cravenly sacrificed their humorous gifts to become scowling, strident blowhards content to score easy political points with a loyal but small audience of rabid partisans. Explaining his decision to enter the late-night comedy arena with Gutfeld!, the author concluded that “Comedy at night was no longer comedy: it was propaganda thinly disguised as entertainment.”
The backlash against the humorless Left provides another flip since it is coming from older, more established comics who can afford to be much more anti-establishment. Bill Maher, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Gutfeld have been on stage for decades – thus, “the old guy is now the daredevil and the young ones are delicate daffodils.” How ironic but understandable that most young comics are too scared to risk the wrath of uber-sensitive wokesters eager to pounce on anyone daring to poke fun at them or their dogmas. As Gutfeld acknowledges, younger, less established comics can far less afford to risk career cancellation, especially when social media make past public statements so easily accessible.
The backdrop to all this and perhaps the ultimate recent societal flip Gutfeld dissects is how the Left has become the American ruling class zealously protecting powerful establishment elites against the underdog out-groups now championed by the Right. So it was Democrats hysterically pushing government mandates and bolstering big business during the Covid panic while folks on the right defended individuals’ freedom not to get vaccinated, locked down, or masked. Some Iowa college students were even “protesting that they wanted more Covid policies on campus” and, in a rich Orwellian irony, “the pro-mask protest was organized by the ‘Campaign to Organize Graduate Students,’ or COGS.”
Gutfeld sees the woke incarnation of leftism as “the ideology of punishment. There’s something addictive about telling people how to live their lives.” Observing how National Public Radio (NPR) even “developed a system to snitch on coworkers who aren’t complying with the very pro-mask-wearing policies,” he posits this is a mighty McCarthyist means to neurotically enforce leftist diktats. What a flip that the same libs who protested President Bush II’s Iraqi War are now the biggest backers of ever more U.S. military aid to Ukraine despite the risk of direct U.S. involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Conservatives have become the anti-war skeptics, though Gutfeld suspects the Left would reject U.S. Ukrainian policy if a President Trump was pushing it.
Yet another flip begging for satire is what Gutfeld calls “the changing face of women’s sports (which now comes with a five o’clock shadow)” since woke feminists now insist on biological men’s supposed right to dominate women’s sports under the banner of transgenderism. Conservatives and libertarians have become the real feminists trying to protect female athletes from having their hard-fought dreams dashed by far bigger men loaded with testosterone. The book boasts a bounty of trenchant cultural and political points, perhaps chief of which is something conservative alternative media trailblazer Andrew Breitbart argued — that culture drives politics. Gutfeld holds that “it’s really all about culture. And we need to win some of it back. Or it will be all gone soon.” Contending that everyone enjoying free speech must stand up to the wokesters or we will lose our rights, he also agrees with author Dennis Prager that what drives the Left is its endless lust for power and that we cannot let it redefine language in its Orwellian drive to dictate the terms of debate since “Words are to ideas what fetuses are to
babies.”
→ Continue reading: The Triumph of a Libertarian Comic: a review of Greg Gutfeld’s The King of Late Night
Comedy is a serious subject: A book review of Kat Timpf’s You can’t joke about that: Why everything is funny, nothing is sacred, and we’re all in this together (2023)
By Dr. Douglas Young, U. of N.GA-Gainesville political science professor emeritus
Comedienne and libertarian commentator Kat Timpf’s first book is a serious examination of comedy that is also quite funny and challenges many well-intentioned but mistaken myths about social taboos. A regular on TV’s Gutfeld! and former National Review writer, Timpf taps personal experiences, extensive observations, a slew of studies, and relentless logic to make a convincing case that humor has remarkable power to help us heal, face our fears, grow, and come together. Despite some disappointments, You can’t joke about that: Why everything is funny, nothing is sacred, and we’re all in this together makes a reliably witty, warmly candid, and solidly convincing case that the present censorious atmosphere surrounding comedy harms us on many fronts.
Indeed, Timpf persuasively argues that our society is mired in an unprecedentedly restrictive cultural climate constipating so much of our public and private dialogue, including comedy. As proof, she cites a passel of comics’ careers recently destroyed due to a single joke that upset the cancel culture mob on social media, as well as survey data documenting that over three times as many Americans say they censor themselves today than in the supposedly straitjacketed “1950s – the era of McCarthyism.”
Despite their self-righteous boasts of being devoted to protecting “marginalized” communities, Timpf contends that today’s “woke” censors are generally totalitarian bullies virtue-signaling in the pursuit of power. In fact, she argues: “[c]laiming ‘words are violence’ is a tool to dictate and control, all while engaging in a massive fraud that they are on the side of compassion.” The reality as she sees it is that “[t]he words-are-violence crowd doesn’t want conversation – at least not one that is an equal playing field… They want to make you afraid.” Noting instances of even violence against individuals for mere controversial jokes, Timpf posits this is in fact inevitable because, “[w]hen you say that words are violence, you inherently are saying that violence is an acceptable response to words, because violence is universally considered an acceptable response to violence.”
Interestingly, she holds that:
[H]umans have actually treated words as violence for most of our history. From the caveman days all the way through the Civil War, duelling to the death was a socially acceptable way to deal with a dispute. If you consider words violence, you’re not a forward-thinking progressive; you’re a knuckle-dragging troglodyte. It’s only as we have become more modern and civilized over the past few hundred years that we have moved away from this, opting to instead respond to words that insult us with words.
At the core of the book is its case for the healing power of humor. Citing a plethora of personal experiences, as well as a multitude of observations and respected studies, Timpf believes poking fun at even our most painful ordeals not only can relieve stress through laughter but knock down walls to create connections with others. Of her early days performing stand-up comedy when her life was a miserable mess, she fondly recalls:
[T]here was only one thing to do: Go to open mics and tell jokes about my dumpster-fire life onstage. Everything was awful, but I’ll never forget how great it felt to turn my pain into jokes that made me — and other people — laugh about all of it. During the loneliest time of my life, comedy became my means of connection. It was my one refuge from hopelessness, the only thing that gave me power over the things that were making me feel so powerless… I didn’t feel powerless or lonely when the audience was laughing along with me.
Reflecting the book’s title as she examines lots of times when humor helped her endure a variety of traumas, Timpf boldly asserts that “[t]he darker the subject matter, the greater healing that laughter can bring, disarming the darkness and making the people who are feeling isolated by their trauma feel less alone.”
To further reinforce this theme, perhaps the book’s best and most brilliantly original chapter points out many parallels between comedy and religion, including medicinal ones. Regretting the loss of the comforting Catholic faith of her youth, Timpf confesses that “the closest thing that I have to any sort of religion is comedy,” and cites research showing both worship services and laughter “are associated with an increase of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in people’s brains, making them feel happy.” As to “[t]he power of comedy in terms of coping emotionally with difficult or even traumatic situations,” she cites U.S. “Vietnam War prisoners who claimed making jokes about their captivity was even more helpful than religion in getting them through it.” Timpf goes on to reference research showing that, like religious faith, “laughter can make a difference in terms of physical healing, too.”
→ Continue reading: You can’t joke about that… a review
Konstantin Kisin is a former stand-up comedian who, along with current stand-up comedian Francis Foster hosts the YouTube channel Triggernometry, which is partly a political interview show and partly a comedy show. His thoughts have even been referred to a couple of times here on Samizdata. Kisin is also a Russian who moved to this country when he was eleven to study, oddly enough, at the same English public school that produced Earl Haig.
And now he’s written a book. I have only just started reading it so these are initial observations hence the Part I bit. There may be a Part II but I promise nothing. Kisin is a good writer (all the comedy stuff showing through?) and a thoughtful one. As he says:
If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your judgement about right and wrong to appease your tribe. I refuse to do so.
Kisin’s essential argument is that we in the West don’t know how lucky we are. We don’t know what it is like to live in non-Western countries. We don’t appreciate how much better life is here. And if we do we don’t know why it is so much better. Kisin has seen Russia and he has seen Britain and it is not difficult for him to decide which is better. Which is why he is so angry when well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) activists start playing around with our traditions and institutions. They – the well-meaning ones – think that they’re just improving things. He thinks that they are playing a game of civilisational Jenga – at least he does since Foster came up with the analogy. Jenga’s the one where you have a tower made of sticks you remove them one by one and eventually the whole edifice collaspses, isn’t it?
So far I’ve read chapters on the Soviet Union, slavery (and the Soviet Union) and free speech. All good stuff. Or mostly. In one bit he says, “Think of it like Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 – which forbade the promotion of homosexuality in Britain in 1988.” That’s not how I remember it. I remember it as local councils not being allowed to promote homosexuality as “a pretended family relationship.” Otherwise people were free to promote homosexuality to their heart’s content. And did. He also seems to think that people were broadly-speaking equal in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union of my imagination has Zils, dachas and shops for party members only. Not equal at all. I suppose this is how distorted history gets propagated down the ages but that is the subject for another blog post.
Mark Honigsbaum reviews Viral by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley in the Guardian:
The tragedy is that in their desire to make a plausible case for a lab accident, Chan and Ridley neglect the far more urgent and compelling story of how the trade in wild animals, coupled with global heating and the destruction of natural habitats, makes the emergence of pandemic viruses increasingly likely. That is the more probable origin story and the scenario that should really concern us.
Edit: The Guardian is not allowing comments to Mr Honigsbaum’s review. But his tweet about it is open to comments and is receiving them.
A Google search for the words “unflinching depiction” got me 57,100 hits. Not so long ago “unflinching” was only just edged out by “edgy” as a term of praise for a work of fiction. Novelists prided themselves on their willingness to probe the depths of the human psyche. No criticism by a reviewer stung more sharply than to say that the characters in a novel were “sanitised” or “bowdlerised”.
We know better now. And how uplifting that our modern novelists submit to the judgement of the people and engage in spontaneous self-criticism!
“Elin Hilderbrand asks for Anne Frank reference to be cut from novel after complaints”, reports the Guardian.
It features a short passage in which Vivi, as a child, is planning to stay in her friend’s attic. “‘You’re suggesting I hide here all summer?’ Vivi asks. ‘Like … like Anne Frank?’ This makes them both laugh – but is it really funny, and is Vivi so far off base?”
Judging from the extract quoted, I will not be rushing out to buy Ms Hilderbrand’s latest even after it is cleansed of the fictional depiction of one child making a tasteless joke and another child laughing at said joke. There are some things one cannot forgive. The novel appears to be written in the present tense.
My mother was in her early teens in World War II. I once asked her what it was like not to know who would win. Alas, I cannot remember in detail how she answered, but among the things she said was that she did not speculate about it much because any such discussion would have been instantly quashed by her father, a former soldier, with some words along the lines of “There will be no defeatist talk in this family, young lady!”
Yet this atmosphere of stern patriotism did not stop her openly reading a translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the principle of “Know thy enemy”.
“Owning a book isn’t a declaration of belief,” writes Janice Turner in the Times.
Journalists own a lot of odd books. Some are sent to us unsolicited, others we buy to illuminate a news story. That Michael Gove, a former Times columnist, has The War Path by Holocaust-denying historian David Irving nestling among Alastair Campbell diaries and Stalin biographies does not alarm me. But the online outrage at a photograph showing this book on Gove’s shelves does.
Because if I’d covered, say, the 1996 libel case brought by Irving I’d have bought his work, too. Why? Curiosity; the desire to quote from original sources; to hear Irving’s authorial voice; to understand how he magicked away mass murder. Later, my piece written, I’d have squeezed it in my unruly shelves with Mike Tyson’s Undisputed Truth and Naomi Wolf’s Vagina.
At this point I feel I ought to mention that the original Times article has that last word in italics.
Yet owning Irving’s book was to activist-journalist Owen Jones a window into Gove’s dark soul. On Twitter, people questioned why you’d read Irving rather than his many critics, as if they couldn’t trust their own minds not to be swayed. Gove was accused of “proudly displayed” antisemitism in his home. But books are not posters or cushions, mere expressions of personal taste.
What is the correct thing to do when you’ve read this book, in case some visiting fool concludes you’re a Nazi? Donating it to a charity shop risks further dissemination of evil. Well, you could burn it. That always goes well.
Here is Owen Jones’s tweet in all its glory.
Which of the books on your shelves would make you wish you had enabled the “blur background” function before turning on Zoom?
Apart from the obvious – a copy of Chavs by Owen Jones – I have three coffee-table books of reproductions of selected articles from the English language edition of Signal magazine, issued by the Wehrmachtpropaganda from 1940-1945. (It continued to publish an English language edition even after the US entered the war, ostensibly for the benefit of the Channel Islanders.)
How about you? Confess all and the tribunal will be merciful.
Volume 9 of of the collected works of Kim Il Sung is now out, and Mick Hartley is having a hard job containing his excitement:
Let’s hope the book maintains the powerful tradition in Korean revolutionary literature of keeping sentences long, with plenty of clauses which further elaborate on the idea first mentioned in the opening clause, thereby ensuring that the original idea becomes ever more entrenched within the consciousness of the reader as the theme is expanded upon and elaborated, very much in the way that a piece of music takes an original theme which is then embellished and repeated in different formats and combinations, which serves to increase the power of the music and can similarly be a powerful device to increase the power of a revolutionary thought or indeed instruction from a Great or Dear Leader, even if there is a risk, among those perhaps insufficiently devoted to the drive towards a successful and dynamic socialist country, that the original thought that started the sentence may have been forgotten by the time the reader comes in, panting but nevertheless certainly wiser and also older, to the end of the sentence.
Hartley has also been very good on the lockdown.
Found on the 8-12 shelf, Space Case by Stuart Gibbs is a science fiction adventure story set on a realistic moon base in which its twelve-year-old protagonist helps to solve a murder mystery. Its sequel, Spaced Out, is about a missing person mystery. A relatable protagonist, some science fiction with proper science, a location with opportunity for adventure and an engaging mystery: these ought to be great ingredients for a book my son could enjoy.
The first problem, however, is that the protagonist is very negative about living on the moon. It would be possible to complain a bit about the poor food and the lack of space while also being excited and in awe of the achievement of living on the moon. But no, there is no upside. Even the boredom is only relieved by terrible events, leading the protagonist to yearn for boredom once more. And he’s not an inspiring chap who faces his challenges head on, with aplomb. He mostly moans about things or is scared. Instead of being relieved to get out of the micrometeorite storm alive, after the discovery of a hole in the top layers of his suit, the author dwells on his fear and dislike of returning outside even when the threat of incoming meteorites disappears.
Minor spoiler in the next paragraph…
→ Continue reading: Spaced Out review
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