Just Say Yes!

This inspiring piece from journalist Melissa Kirsch appeared this weekend in The New York Times' The Morning newsletter. It speaks to an approach to life that can be uplifting. It recalls for me a tenet of improv acting from my theatre-training days and that is to always respond to anything coming at you with "Yes, and..."

Offer accepted

By Melissa Kirsch

This past week, true to my vow to continue engaging in summer activities until the equinox, I picked raspberries and flowers at a farm under the impossibly clear September sky. I was joined by my friend Aliza. I knew Aliza would be up for the outing because she operates on a policy that dictates if something is “on offer,” you should avail yourself of it. Of course, berry picking is not a hard sell. But I’ve been observing the way decision-making becomes simpler if you default to accepting what’s on offer: taking the slice of pie, staying out just a bit later, stopping at the strange little fair you happened to drive past. All tiny things one could easily decline, all things with potential for pleasure.

We spend a lot of time hemming and hawing, coming up with reasons we shouldn’t do things, even things that fall under the rubric of “Things We’d Probably Enjoy.” We decide not to try the dance class, afraid of looking foolish. We skip the picnic because we don’t know any of the people going. We consider the downsides and decide to stick with what’s familiar.

As much as I try to be a “yes person,” I have an unfortunate talent for turning opportunities into obligations. “It’s on offer” is such a gentle (and British) way of considering what’s available. I might decide I am, in fact, too tired or not interested in whatever’s on offer, but I’m examining the opportunity as an option, a gift, an offering — not viewing it as a problem.

“I think it’s a protection against regret, or too much judgment — often my go-to feelings,” Aliza said when I asked her about her position. She reminded me of a day this summer when we were wandering around a town we’d never been and came upon a run-down winery. A guy with a guitar was belting some off-key Jimmy Buffett covers on the patio. Should we stop and try some suspiciously inexpensive rosé? It was on offer! The wine was not great, but that wasn’t the point. By taking what was on offer, we took a departure. What could have been an otherwise unmemorable day was made indelible.

One should not, it seems worth noting, be doctrinaire about taking every single thing that’s on offer. Breadth of experience can come at the expense of depth, and what’s on offer could end up being expensive, or dangerous. I’m thinking of “take what’s on offer” as a default that can be overridden. It feels of a piece with a question I’ve taken to asking myself when I’m worried about something: “What if it all works out?” This is my attempt to shift my thinking from worst-case scenarios to best- or better-case ones. Being open to what’s on offer is similarly optimistic. This stand-up comedian could be terrible, this party could be boring, this offering could be one I will wish I’d refused. But it could also be great.

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/briefing/offer-accepted.html

"The fight against ‘woke’ is really conservative gaslighting"

I found this opinion piece from author Clay Cane very insightful...

Opinion: The fight against ‘woke’ is really conservative gaslighting
Opinion by Clay Cane
Updated 7:35 AM EDT, Wed April 5, 2023

(CNN) I was at the barbershop recently when Childish Gambino’s 2016 track “Redbone” popped up on a playlist. Singing about infidelity, Gambino — also known as Donald Glover — belts out, “Stay woke!” in the chorus. As we nodded our heads in unison to the song, someone asked, “How did ‘woke’ become the new scary term? Do they even know what it means?”

We all had a wry laugh about language that has been misappropriated over the years, but the distortion of “woke” has been particularly insidious.

I must give credit to the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, MAGA, Q-Anon and all the other iterations of conservatism that Republicans have transmogrified into over the past five decades: They are masterminds at coming up with messaging that scares the Jim Crow hell out of their base. “Woke” is their latest stunt.

In the 1960s, it was “Black Power,” a term about empowerment and self-reliance popularized by Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael. Conservatives rebranded the term, which became a catch-all phrase to scare White voters that “Negroes” were taking over. Those two words would then be twisted by “White Power” adherents who, according to the ADL, deliberately mimicked the term “Black Power.”

Some years later, former California governor and later President Ronald Reagan famously deployed the “welfare queen” narrative, framing public assistance as a Black issue, even though more White people than Black have been helped over the years by those federal aid programs.

After Reagan, George H. W. Bush invoked the name of Willie Horton, a convicted Black man on weekend release from prison to rile up his base, during the 1988 presidential campaign. The Bush team made Horton a symbol of allegedly lenient prison furlough programs that were supposedly sending murderers and rapists into the suburbs.

Bush rocketed in the polls, framing his opponent, Democrat Michael Dukakis, as weak on crime. Bush won the presidential election and the Willie Horton television commercial — an ad General Colin Powell described as being “racist… cold political calculation” — was a turning point in the campaign. Yet again, Republicans had found a potent symbol of how to effectively manipulate voters’ fears.

Over the past several years, co-optation of language by the GOP has been on overdrive, due in part to the advent of social media. Once upon a time, politicians hammered incendiary language in speeches and interviews; Today, they have the ability to disseminate a similarly noxious narrative almost instantly online. Lee Atwater -— the brain behind the Willie Horton ad and other Southern Strategy tactics — would be proud. As he lay dying from cancer in the final months of his life, Atwater reportedly said he regretted the Horton ad, but the legacy of his racist actions lives on.

The current list of terms that conservatives have weaponized is long and growing: Black Lives Matter. Defund the police. Critical race theory. Intersectionality. Now, add to it the ubiquitous — almost inescapable — word “woke.”

To be clear, woke is not political, but it has been politically weaponized by bad-faith actors, mostly on the right. Being “woke” is not a term exclusive to the realm of social justice; it’s a decades-old slang in Black communities, meaning to “be aware.” For example: “I heard your man is cheating — stay woke!”

Blues icon Lead Belly, at the end of his recording of the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” talked about the need to “stay woke” after Black men and children were wrongfully accused of raping two White women in Alabama.

In other words, be alert, keep your eyes open and watch your back — figuratively and literally.

The mangling of “woke” cannot be solely placed on politicians. Celebrities and comedians have played a role: Bill Maher, Sean Penn, Russell Brand, Kanye West and Dave Chappelle to name a few, have all misused the word in recent years, contributing to the despoiling of a cherished cultural term. Either out of willful ignorance or arrogance, they deploy the term out of context, often while pouting about “cancel culture.”

Meanwhile, pushing back against “woke-ism” has become a profitable business model for anti-woke warriors. John McWhorter wrote a 2021 book titled, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” this New York Times bestseller was partly popular because a Black writer was denouncing “wokeness.”

Bethany Mandel recently released “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” which, according to her, included a whole chapter on “wokeness” yet she famously struggled to provide a definition in an eye-rolling television interview. She later complained about being lampooned on Twitter — but also bragged about how many copies of her book that she had sold as a result. Journalist Bari Weiss, meanwhile, who rants incessantly about wokeness, has been dubbed an “anti-woke warrior” and is a co-founder of the “anti-woke” University of Austin.

What’s more dangerous than any of the misappropriation, however, is the way that attacks on “woke-ism” have made their way into policy.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the “Stop WOKE Act,” which is wreaking havoc on Florida’s colleges, universities, libraries and schools. “Woke-ism” now somehow has expanded to encompass sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s even being cited as the real reason for prosecuting the former president on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Even the most anodyne mention of civil rights is suppressed, as seen recently with revered figures like Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges.

The boogeyman framing around “woke” is intentional. In 2021, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott complained about “woke supremacy,” a term with inescapable echoes of “White supremacy”— creating a deeply racist, false equivalency that pandered to a faction of the GOP in his state.

It was a move that perhaps was not all that surprising coming from the only Black Republican in the US Senate, who is fond of saying that his family had gone from “cotton to Congress” when he downplays racism in his party. Not even Lee Atwater could have predicted the Southern Strategy tactics being used by Black politicians.

There are no “woke” villains attempting to take over America. Is there sometimes unnecessary word policing? Can people be oversensitive? Can corporations overreact to the latest scandal or a trending topic? Absolutely, but that is not “woke-ism.” Labeling so-called overreactions or something you don’t like with a term rooted in Black communities, racializes — and shuts down — discourse many people claim we need.

Here’s what my friends at the barbershop say about right-wing politicians, conservative media outlets, privileged celebrities, Twitter trolls: You can’t have the word “woke.” It doesn’t belong to you, and never did. Be creative and think up your own dog whistles. What you refer to as “woke-ism” is old school, political gaslighting.

I will keep using “woke” in its proper context. And if you don’t understand it, then maybe the word is not yours to use.

Thank you, Clay!

Link to original article:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/05/opinions/woke-weaponized-racism-gaslighting-cane-ctpr/index.html

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation by John Lewis

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

By John Lewis
Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral.

July 30, 2020

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html

The War On Science Has Been Long And Hurts Us Now

Foes of science faced ridicule at the Scopes trial. We’re paying the price 95 years later.

Opinion by
Max Boot
Washington Post Columnist

July 8, 2020 at 11:01 a.m. PDT

Why is the United States the only wealthy country where novel coronavirus cases are hitting new highs while elsewhere the virus is being contained? A lot of it has to do with the rejection of science by many on the right. A Gallup survey reports that while 98 percent of Democrats reported wearing a mask outside the home, only 66 percent of Republicans did. The same denialism extends to other important issues: A Pew survey reports that 75 percent of Democrats regard climate change as a top policy priority, compared with only 25 percent of Republicans.

President Trump — who rejects his own government’s warnings about global warming and keeps insisting that the coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear on its own — is more a symptom than the cause of the problem. The right’s reign of unreason long predates his presidency.

This week marks the 95th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial — the most famous battle of the early 20th century between science and religious fundamentalism. The story is well told in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” which is even more timely now than when it was published in 1997.

On July 10, 1925, high school science teacher John T. Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While “Modernist” (liberal) Protestants and most Catholics and Jews had accepted evolution as a manifestation of God’s design, conservative evangelicals known as “fundamentalists” insisted that God had created the earth in six days and denied that mankind is related to monkeys. At the urging of the fundamentalists, Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The prosecution of Scopes was a test case contrived by the town fathers of Dayton to put their sleepy burg on the map.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two of the most famous orators in America volunteered to try the case — William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, “attorney for the damned,” for the defense. About two hundred reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the carnival-like proceedings, which were broadcast on radio and filmed for newsreels, and later inspired the play and film “Inherit the Wind.”

The culmination of the trial was Darrow’s July 20 cross-examination of Bryan — a populist on economic issues but a conservative on social ones — about whether he took the Bible literally.

“Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” Darrow asked about a biblical passage that speaks of a miraculously lengthened day.

“I believe what the Bible says. I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?” Bryan replied.

Darrow first feigned innocence (“I don’t know”) and then sprang his trap: “Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?”

“No,” Bryan replied. “The God I believe in could have taken care of that.”

Darrow: “Don’t you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?”

The jury found Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court vacated the fine on a technicality but upheld the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books until 1967. But the popular verdict was that the anti-evolution side had been defeated by being made to look ridiculous. As Harper’s Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost … and the slow drift from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”

It’s true that fundamentalism became less assertive after the Scopes trial, but it hardly went away. By the 1980s, it had migrated to the Republican Party (Bryan was a Democrat) and had become a political force to be reckoned with. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, actually thought that Bryan was a sellout for admitting, under Darrow’s cross-examination, that the world was not created in six 24-hour days. Falwell said that Bryan “lost the respect of Fundamentalists” for conceding that the Book of Genesis was referring to longer periods of time.

Today, the theory of evolution is accepted by most Americans — including most religious believers — but still resisted by a significant minority. According to a Pew poll in 2018, 18 percent of American adults deny the theory of evolution. Among white evangelical Protestants (a core part of the Trump base), 38 percent say that humans have always existed in their present form. Having 18 percent of the adult population in the anti-evolution camp might not seem like a lot, but it translates to roughly 37.6 million people — the population of Canada — who reject a core tenet of modern science.

I suspect there is a lot of overlap between anti-evolutionists, anti-maskers and climate deniers. That hostility to science, found far more on the right than the left, makes it much harder to deal with major crises such as global warming or the coronavirus. Ninety-five years after the Scopes trial, the foes of science are more potent politically than ever — and we are all paying the price.

Link to original article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/foes-science-faced-ridicule-scopes-trial-were-paying-price-95-years-later/

Mayor Pete Flew Sky High by Frank Bruni

I am a little heartsick about Pete dropping out, but this wonderful article by Frank Bruni at the NY Times sums it all up.


Mayor Pete Flew Sky High
The youngest of the Democratic candidates did the grown-up thing, and dropped out.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist

To Pete Buttigieg’s many other virtues, add these: He’s not delusional, and he can see beyond himself.

He looked at what happened in South Carolina on Saturday. He looked at what was likely to happen in the many states that will vote on Tuesday. And he recognized that he had no path to the Democratic presidential nomination and that staying in the race would probably help Bernie Sanders, the rival he had branded a dangerous nominee.

So on Sunday he got out. Just like that. No praying for a miracle. No waiting too long. No protracted melodrama or slow-building drum roll of hints. No, the youngest of the Democratic aspirants did the grown-up thing.

I can only imagine how bitter that felt, given how high he had flown. And I can only hope that he and the rest of us never minimize that altitude.

Some other Democrat will carry the party’s hopes in November. Some other Democrat — please, God — will replace Donald Trump in the White House and both dull the memory of him and clean up his mess.

But no other Democrat will be able to claim a more surprising, disarming showing in 2020 than Buttigieg can. After the first two contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, he had more delegates than anyone. He finished in the top four in all of the first four states to vote.

That was despite the fact that his highest political office was mayor of South Bend, Ind., with only about 100,000 people. That was despite the fact that he’s 38 and would have been the youngest person ever elected to the presidency.

That was despite the fact that he’s married to another man. For many Democrats Buttigieg’s sexual orientation made him a trailblazer and was cause for excitement, but for others it made him a risk and was cause to turn away. The degree of success that he nonetheless enjoyed reflected his ability to rise above stereotypes, to soar above identity politics and to pull voters up with him.

Buttigieg was the first major openly gay presidential candidate, and he challenged and changed Americans’ preconceptions of what such a candidacy would look like, as I wrote in a column just before the Iowa caucuses. One of the wonders of his unprecedented campaign was how little his sexual orientation was talked about as his bid progressed. That spoke to the range of political talents he brought to the contest and the breadth of the issues he engaged. He was a novelty who resisted being just that, a symbol who wouldn’t be content with mere symbolism.

Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, was more deviation than norm when he gawked at the hypothetical scenario of Buttigieg, as the Democratic nominee, “kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump.” Mr. Man? In a Buttigieg-Trump face-off, only one face would glow oddly orange, and only one head of hair would appear to be the work of a dozen tipsy sprites.

Of course Buttigieg, ever dexterous, had the perfect retort when asked about Limbaugh’s ugliness during a CNN town hall. “The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values, I mean, sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse,” he said. “They want to debate family values, let’s debate family values. I’m ready.” Was he ever.

While some of his critics on the left conducted an offensive discussion about whether he was gay enough, he performed an important balancing act, integrating his gayness into his candidacy without letting his candidacy be defined by it, seizing teachable moments without ever becoming tendentious or tedious, showing the world that being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or queer is an essential part of who we L.G.B.T.Q. people are but not all of who we are.

On Sunday night in South Bend, where he delivered a poignant valediction to his campaign before hundreds of cheering supporters, he noted that it had “sent a message to every kid out there wondering if whatever marks them out as different means they are somehow destined to be less than.” They could look at him, he added, “and see that someone who once felt that exact same way can become a leading American presidential candidate with his husband at his side.”

He was talking about the experience of being in a minority and being marginalized — about the sorrow and the fear — and one of the great disappointments of his candidacy was his inability to build a bridge between himself and others who have had that experience. He was getting better and better at it, though. He was ever more attentive to that crucial task — in his last debate, for example, and in his speech on Sunday night.

I listened to it and realized that what most impresses me about him isn’t his intellect per se — the fancy degrees he has, all the languages he speaks — or his crazy poise or the manner in which he handled the unconventional aspects of his candidacy.

It’s his thoughtfulness. I first met him in 2016, when I traveled to South Bend and spent half a dozen hours over two days in his company, and I remember being struck above all by how deeply he had examined and how carefully he spoke about issues like freedom, globalization, automation. He was a walking tutorial, and a sweetly earnest one at that. I wondered then if he could upsize that trait for a presidential campaign. Over the past year, I — and the rest of America — got the answer.

Sure, he turned prickly and even somewhat overbearing at times during the most recent debates, taunting Sanders, talking over him and trying to break through beyond Iowa and New Hampshire as the clock ticked down. But still he wrestled eloquently with the meanings of things.

I think that’s why my inbox was so crowded on Sunday night and Monday morning with emails from admirers of Buttigieg’s and by their expressions of regret. One email came from my friend Bob Kerrey, the former governor and senator from Nebraska and a onetime Democratic presidential candidate himself. He shared with me the daily reflection on events in the news that he writes to his teenage son. Monday’s was about Buttigieg.

“This morning I regret not throwing my support to Pete instead of Joe,” Kerrey wrote, referring to Joe Biden. “We need a generational change and with him out of the race, that is not going to happen. We need an outsider who knows that Washington must change, but now that is also not going to happen. We need a president who can speak the language of other nations, but now that is not going to happen.”

“I do not think my support of Pete would have enabled him to win,” he added. But, he wrote, “It would have made me feel a little better about his loss this morning. Americans have missed an opportunity to turn the page to a much different future. We should feel remorse at losing that future.”

On Sunday night Buttigieg said: “Politics at its worst is ugly. But at its best, politics can lift us up. It is not just policymaking. It is moral. It is soul craft.” At his best, Buttigieg demonstrated that.

He has an opportunity over the coming months to demonstrate it further. “I will do everything in my power,” he said, “to make sure we have a new Democratic president come January.”

Mayor Pete, I’m holding you to that. We all are. Because your power is remarkable.


Yes, I agree...his power is remarkable. And when I got on the Pete train, I vowed that I would ride it as far as we could make it go. But if it could not reach the White House, I always said that Pete is young, and he has a whole political career ahead of him. Governor, Senator, Congressman, and yes, another run at the White House! Potential and possibilities, that is all he has ahead of him.

I thank you too, Pete...now run for something else, because you will make a difference, even more than you already have!

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/opinion/Pete-Buttigieg-speech.html

The Washington Post: "The Squad’s’ defenders argue for a better America than Trump does"

From The Washington Post:


‘The Squad’s’ defenders argue for a better America than Trump does
By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
July 17

President Trump is once again in a rage, because the House of Representatives just voted to condemn his racist attacks on four nonwhite members of Congress. In a new tweetstorm, he offered a new set of claims to contrast the two visions of America that are the deeper subject of the big public argument we are now having.

So, let’s be as clear as possible: The vision of America represented by the “Squad” and its defenders in this dispute is a better one than the vision of America that Trump is defending.

The historian Jill Lepore has a new book out, in which she calls for a recommitment to a “civic and constitutional patriotism” that she believes is required as a rebuttal to Trump’s illiberal ethnic and racial nationalism. Winning this argument, Lepore writes, requires us to “make a case for the nation” on those grounds, that is, to tell a story about a better country than the one Trump is telling a story about.

The reason the new House resolution condemning Trump’s racism is significant is that it tries to meet this challenge. This is also why it’s significant that House Republicans almost uniformly voted against the resolution, going all in with Trump in this dispute.

The new House resolution basically tells a story about this country that is in keeping with the civic patriotism — also sometimes called “civic nationalism” — that Lepore’s book discusses. The basic story is that this country was founded on universal ideals of liberty and equality, and the act of belonging to this nation is defined mostly through a commitment to these ideals, as opposed to being defined by blood, race, ethnicity, religion or mystical devotion to soil.

National stories are always to some degree myths, and our actual history has been an unending struggle to bring us in line with those ideals, a struggle that continues today. As Lepore puts it, those who have been “left out” of this “vision of the nation” have unceasingly battled for inclusion in it, and “our nation is that battle.”

The text of the House resolution generally constitutes a restatement of this view. It outlines a commitment to that vision of America, and condemns Trump for “racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

To support this, the resolution cites Trump’s labeling of immigrants as “invaders” and his declaration that the four nonwhite lawmakers should “go back” to their countries of ancestry. Those four are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.), the first three of whom were born in the United States.

President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both face battles with four Democratic Congresswomen, known as the "squad." Here's what you need to know. (Elyse Samuels, Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
Virtually the entire House GOP caucus voted against this resolution. And some Republicans claimed Trump didn’t engage in racism at all. GOP Rep. Sean P. Duffy (Wis.) piously insisted that he saw “nothing that references anybody’s race” in Trump’s tweets, while also claiming the congresswomen are “anti-American.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) — the top Republicans in the Senate and House, respectively — both stated that Trump is “not a racist.” And Rep. Dan Meuser (Pa.) wept that the resolution was “harassing” Trump, who is always, invariably the real victim.

It’s worth pausing over what these Republicans are really defending here.

WHAT REPUBLICANS ARE DEFENDING

It isn’t enough to just say these lawmakers are nonwhite. The additional point here is that the lawmakers Trump targeted are united by the fact that they are all members of ethnic, racial or religious minorities. Trump suggested that by virtue of this fact — by virtue of their heritage — they don’t belong to the American nation.

Trump tried to fudge this point by claiming — falsely — that they weren’t born here. But the lie itself, which to my knowledge he hasn’t disavowed, underscores his real meaning. And in any case, he has continued to rage that if they want to continue criticizing America, they should “LEAVE,” that is, go back to where they come from, further emphasizing the point that they fundamentally don’t belong.

In doing this, Trump embraced a contemporary version of the illiberal, exclusionary, white-nationalist and ethno-nationalist vision of America, one that has a long and terrible history in this country, one that runs through slavery and through the national-origins quota system on immigration (which was based in part on theories of eugenics) and through Jim Crow.

This vision contrasts with the civic patriotism that the Dem-sponsored House resolution seeks to enshrine. And House Republicans could not bring themselves to condemn Trump’s vision, or even to call it out for what it is. The Republican Party is increasingly becoming a white-nationalist party.

THE NEW TRUMPIST ARGUMENT AGAINST "THE SQUAD"

In his latest rage-tweets on this matter, Trump just echoed a new argument that is revealing about the broader dimensions of this dispute. Trump approvingly quoted GOP Sen. John Neely Kennedy (La.) claiming “the four Congresswomen think that America is wicked in its origins” and that “we are all racist and evil.”

This conception of the country does have a role in the historical debates involving various forms of nationalism and the historic injustices that have defined the nation. But as Gary Gerstle’s book “American Crucible” details, the tradition of civic patriotism or civic nationalism has throughout our history regularly repudiated the idea that the American founding is irredeemably tainted by its origins amid slavery and white supremacy.

Instead, at the core of the tradition of civic patriotism is the essential idea that the country can, and will, be continually improved, and further brought in line with its ideals.

The argument Trump just tweeted tries to separate the four members of Congress in question from that tradition. But in fact, many of their criticisms of Trump — over his racism, over his abuses of migrants, over his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law — put them squarely within it.

This is the tradition the House resolution reaffirmed. And it’s the one that Republicans are in the process of breaking from, while increasingly embracing Trump’s white nationalism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/17/squads-defenders-represent-better-america-than-trump-does/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.501407a41b38

"Our Orlando Sentinel endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump | Editorial"

Our Orlando Sentinel endorsement for president in 2020: Not Donald Trump | Editorial
By ORLANDO SENTINEL EDITORIAL BOARD
| ORLANDO SENTINEL |
JUN 18, 2019

Donald Trump is in Orlando to announce the kickoff of his re-election campaign.

We’re here to announce our endorsement for president in 2020, or, at least, who we’re not endorsing: Donald Trump.

Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent.

Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.

After 2½ years we’ve seen enough.

Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.

So many lies — from white lies to whoppers — told out of ignorance, laziness, recklessness, expediency or opportunity.

Trump’s capacity for lying isn’t the surprise here, though the frequency is.

It’s the tolerance so many Americans have for it.

There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.

Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).

According to a Washington Post database, the president has tallied more than 10,000 lies since he took office.

Trump’s successful assault on truth is the great casualty of this presidency, followed closely by his war on decency.

Trump insults political opponents and national heroes alike with middle-school taunts. He demonstrates no capacity for empathy or remorse. He misuses his office to punish opponents, as when he recently called for a boycott of AT&T to get even with his least favorite media outlet, CNN. He tears down institutions, once airily suggesting the U.S. should try having a leader for life as China now allows. He seems incapable of learning a lesson, telling an ABC interviewer last week — just two months after Robert Mueller’s report on election interference was released — that he would accept dirt on an opponent from Russia or China.

Trump has diminished our standing in the world. He reneges on deals, attacks allies and embraces enemies.

This nation must never forget that humiliating public moment in Helsinki in 2018 when the president of the United States chose to accept Vladimir Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 election over the unanimous assessment of the American intelligence community.

Such a betrayal by a U.S. president would have been the unforgivable political sin in normal times.

As if that’s not enough, Trump declares his love for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, a genuine villain who starves and enslaves his people and executes his enemies with antiaircraft guns and flamethrowers.

But he wrote the president a “beautiful letter.” Flattery will get you everywhere with this president, and that’s dangerous.

Domestically, the president’s signature issue — immigration — has moved in fits and starts. Happily, he abandoned pursuing an outright — and unconstitutional — ban on Muslims entering the U.S., opting instead to restrict travel for people from a handful of nations, most of them majority Muslim.

He’s tried separating families, sending troops to the border and declaring a national emergency. For all of that, illegal border crossings are, as the president himself calls it, at crisis levels.

He blames House Democrats because casting blame is Trump’s forte. But Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for two full years. That seemed like an ideal time to fix what the president believes ails our immigration laws.

Even with Democrats now controlling the House, where is Trump’s much-touted deal-making mojo, an attribute he campaigned on?

“But the economy!”

Yes, the market has done well since Trump’s election.

The S&P 500 was up about 21% between Trump’s inauguration and May 31 of his third year in office. Under President Obama, it was up about 56% in that same period.

Unemployment is headed down, as it was during seven straight years under Obama.

Wages are up, and that’s a welcome change. But GDP increases so far are no better than some periods under Obama. Deficit spending under Obama was far too high, in part because of the stimulus needed to dig out of the Great Recession. Under Trump, it’s still headed in the wrong direction, once again pushing $1 trillion even though the economy is healthy.

Trump seems to care nothing about the deficit and the national debt, which once breathed life into the Tea Party.

Through all of this, Trump’s base remains loyal. Sadly, the truest words Trump might ever have spoken was when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters.

This non-endorsement isn’t defaulting to whomever the Democrats choose. This newspaper has a history of presidential appointments favoring Republicans starting in the mid-20th century. Except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the Sentinel backed Republican presidential nominees from 1952 through 2004, when we recommended John Kerry over another four years of George W. Bush.

As recently as 2012 we recommended Republican Mitt Romney because of what seemed at the time to be Obama’s failure to adequately manage the nation’s finances.

If — however unlikely — a Republican like Romney, now a senator from Utah, or former Ohio Gov. John Kasich successfully primaried the president, we would eagerly give them a look. Same if an independent candidate mounted a legitimate campaign.

We’d even consider backing Trump if, say, he found the proverbial cure for cancer or — about as likely — changed the essence of who he is (he won’t).

The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump. But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.

We can do better. We have to do better.

Link to original article:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/editorials/os-op-sentinel-not-endorsing-donald-trump-2020-20190618-63ya7cyb5ngf3irllodwxnznui-story.html

Amateur Hour At The White House: A Danger To The Nation

Republicans’ deal with the devil will cost them their soul

By David Brooks

New York Times

Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.

They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media. Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.

But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.

In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration.

Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address.

The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policymaking.

The administration has swung sharply anti-trade.

Trump’s economic instincts are corporatist, not free market.

If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump’s foreign policy involves actively running away from global engagement.

Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident.

Second, even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.

It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming.

Third, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.

The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the refugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico.

Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there.

Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty.

The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.

None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”

The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.

Trump exceeded expectations with his Cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax.

Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on.

With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-republican-fausts.html

Prince and Bowie: Other Ways To Live, Other Ways To Be A Man

Two thoughtful, spot-on essays about Prince and Bowie.


Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man
By Alyssa Rosenberg April 21 at 3:47 PM for The Washington Post

When the news came this afternoon that Prince had died at 57 at his home in Minnesota, a chorus went up that it was the latest cruelty of 2016, a year that already feels merciless in those it’s claimed, four months along.

But if the deaths of Prince, and Bowie, and Chyna, and Harper Lee taken together feel like a moment of catastrophic generational turnover, the loss of Prince and Bowie represent a more specific calamity. We’re in a moment in American politics consumed by gender panic, from Donald Trump’s menstrual anxieties to the rise of and backlash to a movement for transgender rights. And now we’ve lost two men who had an expansive, almost luxuriant vision of what it meant to be a man and lived out that vision through decades when it was much less safe to do so.

Both Prince and Bowie often seemed more than merely human. Bowie was an ageless vampire in “The Hunger,” a human manifestation of an alien being as Ziggy Stardust, the rock star from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Prince left language behind to adopt what became known as the “Love Symbol” as his moniker; his death prompted many people to remark that mortality seemed like the only garment that didn’t fit him, that he had transubstantiated or ascended rather than truly died.

But if conventional notions of gender were only one of the things that didn’t constrain Bowie and Prince, their transcendence of this particular category is still a particularly significant part of their legacies. In the clothes they wore, the lean bodies they lived in, the way they positioned themselves in their music and art, their relationships to LGBT communities and in so many other ways, Prince and Bowie were living arguments that there is no one way, and no correct way for a man to dress, to move, to decide what he values, to choose who he loves or where he stands in relation to that person.

And that transcendence and transgression weren’t just about what Prince and Bowie did in their own lives; it was in what they made other people want to do to them. Mick Jagger may have had an affair with David Bowie, but everyone wanted to sleep with Prince, even when they didn’t want to want him.

The critic Hilton Als began his 2012 essay in Prince in Harper’s with a long recounting of a 2002 stand-up comedy special from Jamie Foxx that gets at the sexual panic Prince inspired. In the joke, Foxx talks about going backstage at a Prince show, looking in the Artist’s eyes, and trying to manage his own reaction: first, denying that what he felt for Prince made him gay, then insisting that if they had sex that Foxx would be the active partner.

Fourteen years ago, when Foxx aired that routine, marriage equality wasn’t yet the law in a single state, much less the settled law of the land. Foxx’s special was just three years removed from the trial of Aaron McKinney for the killing of Matthew Shepard, where McKinney’s lawyers tried to use a so-called “gay panic” defense. And Prince had been inspiring that sort of unease for decades.

There are wry notes of regret in Als’s essay, about the choices Prince made to become famous and when he became famous, about the sacrifice of “the girl Prince had been before he stopped being a girl: outrageous and demanding.” But even when Prince stepped onto larger, more mainstream stages, his presence could still be radical.

It’s true that in recent years, the Super Bowl halftime show has often been a showcase for women in the midst of a clash between men. Madonna, trying to make what was once seem daring relevant in a changing culture; Katy Perry’s schlocky self-coronation; Beyoncé’s transition from packaged pop as part of Destiny’s Child to militant excellence as a solo artist. But if these performances act as an argument that men and women can each be powerful in their own spheres and on their own terms, Prince’s appearance on the Super Bowl stage in 2007 was an argument, at this particular worship service dedicated to traditional masculinity, for a vastly huger range of possible ways for a man to command the nation.

What other person could take that very particular stage in a head wrap and end his performance with his guitar posed as a symbol of male sexual virility — which, of course it was — silhouetted on a giant scale and make it all feel like an effortless, coherent whole, without a hint of overcompensation? I adore Bruce Springsteen, but his crotch-first slide into a television camera two years later felt decidedly less vital.

57 is awfully early for anyone to die, but it feels especially so for Prince; he never reminded us that he was growing older by trying to seem young. Now he’s gone before we could possess him as fully as he always invited us to. But we’ll continue on into the weirder, more beautiful world he seemed to be living in decades before the rest of us arrived there.

Originally in The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/04/21/mourning-prince-and-david-bowie-who-showed-theres-no-one-right-way-to-be-a-man/


Prince and David Bowie showed us another way to live
By Nate Scott April 21, 2016 3:29 pm for USAToday

David Bowie and Prince are dead.

If feels unreal. The feeling of denial abounded on Thursday, after the death of Prince was confirmed: No. This can’t be real. This is all a bad dream.

I felt it as strongly as anyone. It couldn’t be real because both Prince and Bowie never really felt real. People that talented, that beautiful, that unique … they couldn’t be of this earth, and thus, they couldn’t die. They were otherworldly. As I wrote of Bowie when he died in January, he “never felt like a person who was born … he simply appeared, materialized from the ether, a magical embodiment of everything creative and cool in the universe.”

It also felt unreal because of what the two artists meant to so many people. For anyone who ever felt strange, or like a misfit, Bowie and Prince were more than people. They were gods. They were two musicians who meant more than their music; they were meaningful because of who they were.

They showed us that there was another way to live.

Many of us believe we are special flowers. We are not. Very few people on earth can resist the urge to latch onto a movement, whatever that movement may be. We define ourselves by the people we admire, by the things we like, but we define ourselves by others. There is nothing wrong with this. We all do it. We do this because it’s easy, and we do it because we are all very desperate to not be alone.

Prince and Bowie didn’t do that. They had no interest in it, really. They did their own thing. Prince wore purple blouses and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and rode around in light-up roller skates because he thought it was beautiful and interesting and it all made him happy. David Bowie dyed his hair pink and bleached his skin and imagined himself an alien sent from outer space. They checked no boxes. They adhered to no existing ideas about identity, or masculinity. They created it as they went.

This is terrifying, if you think about it, and sort of insane. Think about how genius you have to be, think about how confident you have to be to decide that you will not adhere to what anyone else on earth thinks is acceptable or cool. You will define what is cool. That is nuts, a little bit. You may think you look good, but what if everyone else just thinks you look like a crazy person? If you’re the only person alive doing it, how would you ever even know?

There is bravery in the way Prince and Bowie lived, and foolishness, but for people who grew up feeling like they didn’t fit in, it was liberating. When I first saw Prince wailing away on that paisley Telecaster, or saw Bowie, snowy white, singing Starman, it blew my mind. They were cool. They were the coolest. I knew that inherently, even as a kid. And yet they were unlike anyone I knew who was cool. How was that possible?

The loss of these two artists feels especially tragic because of the year in which we lose them. We like to curse 2016 for taking these two men, as if a year can be responsible, but at a time when political movements are built on anger and the ostracizing of others, when laws are being passed out of fear of those that are different, we need more people like Prince and Bowie. People who can show us it’s OK. It’s OK to define yourself however you want to.

And because this is 2016, and this is the internet, there will be backlash. Bowie was rightfully criticized for his relationships with underage women. I’m sure Prince has moments that will haunt him. Sinead O’Connor says she and Prince once got in a fist fight over the song Nothing Compares 2 U. It’s details like these that can break the spell around these men, and remind us that indeed that’s what they were — men. Living souls who were imperfect, and who are now gone.

We all must make our peace with Bowie and Prince, and all the other artists we adore who are flawed. Some people can’t do it. Others can. What’s more important, I think, is that now, even in death, these two men will continue to show other people that originality is real, that art is alive, that cool is what we make it.

In small towns across America, around the world, there are kids who feel like they don’t belong. They haven’t been to New York City yet, or London or Tokyo or Johannesburg or Berlin, haven’t seen the weirdos and the freaks, and they don’t know that there is something else out there. And then one day they’ll stumble across Prince, or Bowie, or maybe both, and they’ll see that there’s more, and they won’t feel so alone.

Originally in FTW!Culture USAToday
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/prince-death-dead-david-bowie-music-originality-art

"A Point of View: When does borrowing from other cultures become 'appropriation'?" by Adam Gopnik

This is a great, thoughtful article by writer Adam Gopnik--a transcription of his regular Radio 4 show "A Point of View"--which appeared on the BBC website.

A Point of View: When does borrowing from other cultures become 'appropriation'?

You may have heard of the current kerfuffle here in America about the sin of what is being called "cultural appropriation". Some students at Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in chilly Maine, were punished recently for wearing Mexican sombreros at a Mexican theme party. They had appropriated Mexican culture as a white person's prerogative.

Then, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the practice of trying on a kimono for a selfie in front of a Monet painting of a French woman wearing a kimono was declared verboten for Boston, so to speak. It was a form of cultural appropriation of what belongs to Japan, while a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado" was closed down for the same reason. It showed only a racist stereotype of Japan, as imperially imagined by Victorians. There have been more incidents, many at liberal arts colleges, involving Chinese food and the art form we wrongly call "belly dancing" and even the hugely popular practice of yoga. They belong to Others, and we cannot have them, or take them, for ourselves.

Now, I am not about to launch into a tirade against the "politically correct". I am old enough to recall that political correctness actually began as a term of self-mockery used by the hyper-sensitive, ruefully, against themselves, lightly guying their own good efforts at eliminating the casual sadism of daily interactions. "I guess I'm just being a little politically correct here, but…" someone almost always a woman) would say in the 1980s, and then point out an instance of unconscious sexism somewhere in the room. And in truth, "politically correct" is almost always these days synonymous with "sensitively courteous". We know this because when someone says "I am not going to be politically correct!", what he - and it is always a he - really means is, "I am not going to be sensitively courteous to anyone's feelings except my own and that of my gang!" We have a demonstration of this principle every night on our screens over here these days, and it is a nightmare.

Nonetheless, I would be lying if I did not say that the practice we call PC has its absurd aspects. It is funny because it puts more weight on the words we use than the actions we take, always a mistake. My son's dormitory at his liberal arts college has a live-in resident of deliberately indeterminate gender who wants to be referred to neither as "he" nor "she" - they are imprisoning patriarchal categories - nor as "it "(that would be an objectifying put-down) but as "they" and " them". This is at least convivial. When he - no, she - no, they - are there, it's always a party.

There is something funny about this undue weight given to words, because we can't be endlessly sensitive and attentive and courteous in every interaction we have in life. People who try end up seeming insipid and exasperating rather than entirely admirable. My own wife, Martha, for instance, who does try to be so in every exchange, is, though much loved, also famous for the length of time it takes her to extricate herself from a social occasion, having first to be certain that she has been nice to everyone. This leads her, perversely, to avoid many social occasions for fear of wearing herself out from attentiveness - the price of such niceness can be very high. Prolonged punctiliousness is exhausting to all, particularly to husbands - er, mates - er, partners - er, co-habitating life colleagues.

But the idea that cultures - recipes or poses or even hats - belong to one group rather than another is something worse than a moment in a comedy of manners - or, rather, it misses the way that a larger comedy of manners has always shaped what we mean by culture. Cultural mixing - the hybridisation of hats, if you like - is the rule of civilisation, not some new intrusion within our own. Healthy civilisations have always been mongrelised, cosmopolitan, hybrid, corrupted and expropriated and mixed. Healthy societies seek out that kind of corruption because they know it is the secret of pleasure. They count their health in the number of imported spices on their shelves.

One of my favourite stories of how healthy cultural hybrids happen involves Japan and the West, though not, in this case, the Mikado. You know those beautiful 19th Century Japanese prints, by Hiroshige or Hokusai or their friends, poetically depicting everyday events, or favourite places, all in charming comic book colour, with Mount Fuji often delicately if secretively included in every view (like a kind of sublime Where's Wally). Those delicate black-edged figures and long almost cartoonish faces, those startling juxtapositions of foreground and distance, that informal and haiku-like lyricism - Japanese prints had, as everybody is taught in class, an enormous influence on French Impressionist art in the middle of the 19th Century. They were, exactly, an exotic appropriation.

Well, it turns out that they weren't really exotic at all. They were the product of the Japanese infatuation with Western perspective drawing and graphics, which had only recently arrived in Japan on ships and boats as part of the Japanese opening to the West. The Japanese artists saw them, and saw expressive possibilities in them that the Western artists were too habituated to the system to notice. The Japanese appropriated Western perspective in ways that Westerners would never have imagined. Then the Japanese pictures got sent back to Europe, where they looked wonderfully exotic, and re-made the Western art they originally hailed from. It's exactly the same process that happened in our own lifetime when Howlin' Wolf and Big Bill Broonzy records sailed over to Liverpool and the suburbs of London and were heard by boys who barely understood their context but loved their attitude. Ten years later you got Mick Jagger and John Lennon. Innocent imitation is always the engine of cultural innovation.

Nor is it just that the borrowings can be beautiful. The things we borrow show us the things we are. Having passed through Chuck Berry, The Beatles and the Stones could better claim their own distinctive Englishness. In the same way, distinctly English food - all those real beers and farmhouse cheddars - has only gotten better because restaurants that served real Italian food helped showed how wonderful a coherent seasonal market-based cuisine could be. If we want to be ourselves, we have to travel - and nowadays, we do much of our travelling internally.

If all you know is your provincial culture, you don't know enough to know if your culture is provincial or not. When it ceases to be, you're not wise enough to recognise it. Appropriation is far more often empowering than oppressing. There's no cheaper way to get the drop on a bad guy than to borrow his hymns and habits and make them your own. That's what diaspora Jews have done throughout their history. It's how German bred with Hebrew to become Yiddish and Yiddish became the great language of Jewish folk tale and protest.

So cultures cannot be corrupted enough, civilizations cannot be appropriated too often. Nor is this only seen in heroic acts of original innovation. It's a nightly act of healthy practice. Last night, for instance, I made a Burmese curry, which combines Indian spices - cumin and turmeric - with the Chinese technique of stir-frying. The ingredients came from our local New York City Greenmarket - and I always mix butter in with the cooking oil, a habit picked up in Paris. The recipe also calls for yogurt, but my wife, of Icelandic extraction, prefers skyr, and it's all put together by me, while I amuse no one but myself by doing my very bad international accents. So it's actually a Jewish-Icelandic-Chinese-Indian-Burmese -French emigre-New York state stir-fry. All in one pot, and five minutes.

That's the norm of cooking. That's the norm of life. Blurring the boundaries of culture is what cooking does. When we do the same thing in ways that last longer than dinner, we call it art. Done often enough, it makes what we call civilisation.

So wear sombreros and kimonos and Mormon underwear beneath, if you so like. Eat Chinese food with Indian spices and French butter and celebrate the range of being human. We are mixed in nature, many in our very essence. We can't help it. To be human is to be hybrid. It is as close to a rule of life as you can ever hope to find.

Original article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35782855