Benj DeMott
Patriotic Culture (and Cant): George Bancroft’s History of the American Revolution
How loud did “the shot heard round the world” sound when you were young?[1]
Radical Conservatism: Thinking Through V.S. Naipaul’s Haters and Counterparts (Pt. 2)
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.
Quintessential Mesopotamian Protests
My old friend Charlie Keil emailed me–“See why you like Kanan Makiya. Love those lions.”–after he read Makiya’s recent piece in the Kenyon Review, “The Dying Lion.”
Devil in the Grove (Redux)
In 2013 I published an essay (sparked by Obama’s public responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin) that took in Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove–the book behind last week’s pardons of the Groveland Four. What follows is a Devil-centric excerpt from that 2013 post.
Judge Kavanaugh and Adventures of the Dialectic
“Oh Fuck!” Senator Coons reportedly said when he learned last Friday morning his friend Jeff Flake would vote to send Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate for a final confirmation vote.
Aretha (& “the blacks”)
Aretha’s “Tree of Life” (see below) has a new poignancy since her death. No need for me to break down her funky, Pan-African, pantheist promesse de bonne heure, just press play (please).
Home Truths: David Ritz’s Essential Aretha Biography
Originally published in 2015…
What Happened (Kiarostami in Tokyo & Obama in Johannesburg)
The late Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Falling in Love (2012) was originally titled “The End,” which would’ve underscored the final scene’s go-to-smash upending of viewers’ presumptions. The film, set in Japan, works like a gently penetrative Ozu-y character study until it’s transformed utterly by a sudden act of violence in the last second(s).
The Little House We Live In (& On the Rez)
Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder traces the Little House books’ role in American culture wars.
Telltale Signs
I only recently caught up with Ed Schultz’s swerve from “prairie populist” to pro-Kremlin anchor-man. He got his change in the summer of 2016 after he’d lost his gig at MSNBC. Schultz’s plasticity has always been apparent. (I posted on Big Ed’s persona—“250 pounds of ham and main chance”—back in 2010.)