Benj DeMott

Known & Unknown

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Donald Rumsfeld’s death sent me back to his memoir, Known and Unknown. I wasn’t grabbed by his counterattacks on his critics and colleagues in the Bush Administration. (Years after disasters in Iraq, I doubt anyone would be won over by his case that nation-building-was-not-his-job-and-Bremer-Condi-were-incompetent.) What struck me were his (few) moments of clarity about his own dimness. Such as his reflection on his failure to check in with his wife on 9/11:

“Have you called Mrs. R.?” More than 12 hours after the attack on the Pentagon—I had been so engaged I hadn’t thought of calling her. After 47 years of marriage one takes some things—perhaps too many things—for granted…[A Defense Department official] looked at me with the stare of a woman who was also a wife: “You son of a bitch.” She had a point.

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It’s Tricky: Thinking Through “Dear Comrades”

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When Putin was re-elected in 2018, Andrei Konchalovsky, director of Dear Comrades—the acclaimed historical drama about an atrocity erased from history during the Soviet era—spoke on RT of his “extraordinary joy” (though he sounded dutiful rather than giddy). Putin’s win, per Konchalovsky, was proof Russia was “going the right way.” I didn’t see his election spin on RT until after I’d watched Dear Comrades so it was a shock to hear him express disdain for the “fuss” made by Putin’s “paranoiac” critics since his film about the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre limns what happens in a country where no-one’s allowed to disturb powers-that-be.

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True Vines (& a Secret History of Our Time)

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Americans aren’t known for their sense of history, but Delegate Stacey Plaskett made the past present during the trial of Trump when she invoked UA Flight 93. Plaskett recalled how she’d been working as a staffer in the Capitol twenty years ago on 9/11 when passengers on UA 93 sacrificed themselves to stop a terrorist attack on the building. Her memory let her roll with those patriots’ “love of country, duty, honor, all the things that America means” as she linked Trump and MAGA mobsters at the Capitol with mass murderers who saw our country as the Great Satan.

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Light Of Day: D.C. Riot & de Maistre’s Heirs

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The climax of the Youtube video below, which documents the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by U.S. Capitol police during the insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday, is beyond chilling. There’s the stunned look on the late Ms. Babbitt’s face as she lies on her back — her arms up like she’s a prisoner of forever. Then comes the cruelty of fellow rioters/voyeurs who shine their lights in her face, out to capture the moment when she’s done…But there’s more to the video than its End (which has been shown on network tv and at the Times website). The rest adds shadows to the distinguished thing on Ms. Babbitt’s blankening face.

Click to watch here

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Brotherman Thinking: Obama’s “A Promised Land”

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Barack Obama’s A Promised Land tries to do God’s work as per Simone Weil:

It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—”The Need for Roots”

Take the following essay on Obama’s memoir and the complementary posts on the legacy of Charles and Shirley Sherrod as a modest attempt to make First of the Month into another very human mechanism of historical transfer.

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Stanley Crouch & The All-American Skin Game

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Late in his life Amiri Baraka once mused that he knew he was old because he’d begun to feel sad when his enemies died.  Their obits reminded him of passionate struggles in his past and made the present seem like a diminished thing.  Baraka didn’t outlive Stanley Crouch but I bet he’d’ve felt bummed to know another one of his contras had split. In the case of Crouch, though, Baraka’s sadness might’ve been deepened since Crouch offered him more than an olive branch before both of them departed.

Not that cultural powers-that-be took that in…

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Fact-Check

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Writing in the socialist journal Jacobin, a Mr. Savage mocked “today’s liberals” whose “default approach to combating the Right is to fact-check the Right.” Savage insists facts are stupid things outside of “narratives.” He urges liberals to stop worrying about the Right’s “malign information system.” There’s no point in calling our lies or exposing traitors or following the money. What liberals must do is ape conservatives’ “willingness to embrace populist storytelling.” No doubt Savage believes in History (and means to be on the left side of it), but his pitch for radical fabulism seems incredibly impertinent now.

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On Verra Ca: Balla Sidibe R.I.P. & Orchestra Baobab’s Legacy

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Balla Sidibe—one of the original front men of the legendary afro-pop band Orchestra Baobab—has gone to see what’s coming for all of us. You can watch the late Sidibe sing lead (and dance) here as Baobab does a charming version of a song that dates back to the 70s, “On Verra Ca.” 2020 is the 50th anniversary year of the band’s founding.

This next song is another Baobab classic. It’s the track that got me on board their train to heaven.

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The Comedy of Modern Life: Conner O’Malley’s American Breakdowns

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Comic Conner O’Malley caught the MAGA moment on the wing a few years ago in a series of Vines (collected here). In these six-second shots: “O’Malley — playing a deranged car-and-wealth-obsessed man — would pull up to befuddled Manhattan businessmen in sports cars, scream guttural praise for their public display of opulence, and then bike away before they knew what hit them.”

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Pouring Salt on a Wound (Media Criticism)

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A Salt Lake City cop was filmed throwing an elderly bystander to the pavement in the first 50 seconds of the video posted below. It’s just one of many brutal acts that have been committed by cops under pressure from protesters in cities all over America. (I’m not claiming that pressure has been all good. I doubt the woman who blew up a police van in New York with a molotov cocktail is George Floyd’s sister under the skin.) What distinguishes this scene of brutality, though, is the nada response of one reporter who witnessed it.

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