Dan Riley's Blog, page 2

On Hiatus, Week 18

Another Christmas long, long ago...
Timmy and Danny

Reflecting back on one of the great Christmas memories of my life seems the right thing to do in this year where Christmas like everything else we hold dear hangs in the balance. The last line seems especially poignant. 

My One New Year's Resolution

Going Greek...an Ostracon from ancient Athens...
a vote to ostracize someone from society.

Sorry to say, this will not be a cheery holiday post. 

First, a little background: When I was a fervent young Catholic boy, I poured my righteousness into the editorial page of my high school newspaper for which I had been elected the rare underclassman editor-in-chief. It was in an editorial calling on my fellow school mates to ostracize those of our peers who took part in underage drinking. I believe ostracize was the first word I ever learned to use from a thesaurus, and the editorial may have been the first thing I wrote that got serious adult attention. The editor of the local town paper called to interview me about the editorial and reprinted it. Among my peers it received mixed reviews. A few upperclassmen pulled me aside to tell me in effect to “Stay in my lane"  (had that been an expression back then). I was undaunted, as the righteous tend to be, and continued to write editorials that called upon me to express moral indignation at the behavior of others. 

Fortunately that habit got tempered with time…and humility and maturity and a broader, less upper-case C Catholic, more lower-case c catholic understanding of humanity. Yet, here I find myself on the verge of 2021 being pulled in that familiar direction for my one and only New Year’s Resolution. I’m not only resolving to have nothing to do with any supporters of Donald Trump in 2021, but I’m calling on all my peers...The Resistance if you will...who have also opposed this grotesque disruption of our democracy to do the same. 

This resolution will save us the agonizing of trying to figure how to deal with the Trump supporters in our lives…family, friends, co-workers, classmates, etc. It should be straightforward…anyone with sympathies for this corrupt, incompetent, treasonous bigot assumes ownership of all that. There is no such thing as I was only in it for my 401k or I only voted for him because I couldn’t vote for a Democrat or I just wanted to shake things up in Washington. There is no mitigating your endorsement of someone who was so clearly unfit for office from the start and only confirmed his unfitness nearly every hour of every day he was in office. There is no amount of party chit-chat, social obligation, or forced decorum at the dinner table that can cover over the fact that anyone who supported Trump supported his gross negligence in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, his ongoing assault on the Constitution and democracy, his grand theft from the public till in broad daylight, and his total disregard for common human decency. 

I’ve already broken Godwin’s Law regarding Nazi analogies. So I don’t mind repeating myself here:

It was Good Germans, after all, who made Hitler’s concentration camps (and ovens!) possible. The “Good Americans” who walk among us in blissful/willful ignorance make the wretched conditions at our border possible. They turn away when the media covers it because they find it too unpleasant. They shut down conversations about it when they arise because they don’t like talking about “politics”. They persuade themselves that the problem is too big and complex for them to deal with and so they leave it to the authorities. That’s how Good Americans arrive at a place where they can allow awful things to happen in their name without a pang of moral pain. 

We’re not just talking about those who silently acquiesced to Trump’s outrages, of course; we’re talking about those who actively participated through their votes, donations and open advocacy of the cruelty, deception, and treason. They have bought into his narcissism, denying science, national intelligence, legal findings, and common sense to do so. 

Can we force our way through casual conversations about culture, cooking, children, etc. with such people, knowing that their core values support bigotry, fraud, and authoritarianism? I can’t. These people are carrying a virus as surely as if they tested positive for Covid. Get within six feet of them, and you’re bound to be infected…and forget about masks. They don’t care about protecting you, so why on earth should you care about protecting them with social grace?  Don’t put that thing on me, the song says. Indeed.  

For all the real and understandable longing for national healing, 2021 also has to be a year of consequences for all those who enabled this hideous episode in American history. The wheels of justice should take care of those at the top. Ostracizing those at our own level should be the least we can do. If they don’t pay a personal price for selling out America, they’ll do it again.  

Here's to a happy, purposeful New Year. 

On Hiatus, Week 17

Yesterday's news that 126 US Congressmen and 17 state Attorneys General joined in a lawsuit to overturn a clean and legal election in order to extend the rule of a corrupt, incompetent authoritarian bigot brought this passage to  min d and made this week's choice of an old Nob to highlight an easy one. 

Has the US Congress, like the German Reichstag in 1933, passed an Enabling Act, granting the leader virtual dictatorial powers? No. (Well, not yet anyway, but we’ll have to check back on this in a week or so.)

My own voice... Now Playing Black Panther

  

American Dirt

 

Oprah and the book that launched a thousand angry tweets

This week I was going to break my hiatus again to recommend a book I had just finished reading (listening to!), American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. In advance of writing the post, I went looking for a graphic to accompany it and in doing so was surprised to learn that American Dirt had been at the center of a roiling controversy between the publishing world and Latinx activists. Wow! Literate man that I am, how had I missed that?

Though I read a lot…an awful lot, I don’t pretend to know everything that’s going on in the world of literature. I get a regular mailing of New York Times book reviews, but probably look at it once a month and usually only if there’s an author or subject matter that suits me. So, I never heard of American Dirt until an audiobook I had checked out of my local lending library about some big city millennials coping with American life failed to hold my attention. I returned to my library's list of available audiobooks and after perusing about two dozen I settled on American Dirt, totally prepared to return it as quickly as I returned the prior book if it failed to grab me. But grab me it did…

“From the first sentence, I was IN … Like so many of us, I’ve read newspaper articles and watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.” 

That’s not my take…that’s OprahWinfrey,  giving voice to my exact reaction in explaining how she chose it for her book club. My book club is slightly smaller…it’s the handful of you out there reading this blog. But I feel strongly about passing this book along because I really believe it can help in communicating the migrant experience to unsympathetic Americans. Why? Because of its sheer storytelling strength. It unfolds like a Netflix series with all the necessary ingredients—identifiable heroes and villains, high stakes gambles and dangers, plot twists, and just enough true story elements to make it instructive. In other words it’s a rare piece of mass entertainment with the potential for changing hearts and minds on a crucial issue of our times. 

So why the controversy? In covering it, Vulture summed it up this way:

The conversation surrounding American Dirt’s “ripped from the headlines” approach to telling this migrant story in an American voice for American readers places it within ongoing debates in the lit world about who can tell what stories.

Who can tell what stories is an intellectually offensive concept, driven by activists who want to turn every damn thing into politics. In reporting on the phenomenon as regards the outrage directed at the movie Green Book, The Hollywood Reporter put it in proper perspective this way:

A hot-button question that society — or at least Twitter — has been debating for years enveloped the Oscar race last season: Who is allowed to tell which stories?

The key phrase there—at least Twitter—tells all you need to know about “the controversy” over whether white folks can tell brown folks’ stories or men can tell women’s stories or a fully functioning human can tell the story of the halt, the lame, or the blind. Twitter is where any guttersnipe with a following of at least five equally angry intellectual delinquents and a swaggering hashtag can bully, harass and mug anyone that crosses them. 

Book Twitter reacted to the announcement with swiftness, although perhaps not in the way Oprah’s team would have wanted, citing the recent #OwnVoices movement. American Dirt has been the subject of controversy and criticism since 2019, when early readers first offered their opinions after seeing advance copies. The book has been called “stereotypical,” and “appropriative” for “opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically” telling the fictional story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a cartel murders the rest of their family. One of the more common knocks is that the book engages in “brownface,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.” 

Without Twitter mob rule, it’s hard to imagine an enlightened society founded on freedom of expression seriously debating who gets to tell what stories. 

Octavia Spencer, the Oscar-winning actress and a producer of Green Book, who is black, [said]: "When does one get to tell their story? This is actually Nick's family's story. It's bound to someone else's story, but if this white man can't tell his own story, then I don't know where we're headed. Should Asian people only tell Asian stories? Should African Americans only tell African American stories? I don't think we should ever get in the business of saying who should be telling certain stories. It's crazy to me."

Amen, Octavia. It’s crazy to me, too. If “lived experience” is the necessary criteria for who can tell which story, then Donald Trump Jr. has the right to write about his father and Bob Woodward does not. This is the way to Stalin-like diktats that all art extoll the virtues of the socialist state. It mirrors on the left the culture warrior nonsense practiced on the right by the likes of Dinesh deSouza and Newt Gingrich who portray any literary critiques of colonialism and patriarchy as attacks on their Western Civilization. 

The critics of American Dirt insist that this is not Jeanine Cummins’ story…that she has appropriated and/or exploited the story of real migrants who risked everything to make their way to the United States. Which is like saying Steinbeck exploited the victims of the Dust Bowl to write Grapes of Wrath. 

In a panel discussion Oprah Winfrey hosted on her book club show three Latina critics of the book attacked it for not showing that the drugs and guns portrayed in it came from the US, that Mexico was described as a place to escape while the US was a refuge, and that its happy-ever-after ending denied the reality of migrants and their children held indefinitely in border cages. One of the critics fairly well whined, “I’m a real Latina. I’ve written on the same subject. Why aren’t my books elevated like Jeanine Cummins’ book was?”

The panel discussion ultimately revealed that the anger of the critics was more appropriately aimed at the publishing world’s dismal record for employing Latinx editors and publishing Latinx authors. American Dirt had become a lightning rod for decades of pent-up frustration with systemic suppression of non-white voices. That’s all well and good, and Cummins’ publishers promised to do better in the future in addressing those legitimate issues. They also did a good job of both protecting their author and accepting their own blame in creating the humiliating position they had put her in through their insensitive marketing of the book.

But left unsaid after the entire discussion because the publishers, Cummins, and Oprah were all trying to accommodate the critics was this basic truth of bookselling: American Dirt succeeded so well because it was a good story well told. A large audience responded to it even if it didn’t explore how the US War on Drugs created the premise of the story. An audience that wanted that could go to Netflix and find that in Narcos. Audiences did not find it objectionable that Mexico was portrayed as a place to escape and the US a place of refuge since the very reality of all those migrants in cages at the border gave witness to that. And the publisher did not “elevate” this book over books by Latinx authors…it bid for a story it liked against eight other publishers who liked it as well and was rewarded for this gamble when a mass audience responded so favorably to it. 

Most importantly, contrary to the prediction of a shamelessly elitist critic writing in The Atlantic, American Dirt has and will change hearts and minds. Oprah confirmed this by polling her audience on the question, much to the chagrin of her Latinx panel. And I can attest to this through my "lived experience" as an old, white, suburban born and bred male.   

And here's my own voice... Now Playing Black Panther

 

On Hiatus, Week 16

 

Got into a discussion over the Thanksgiving holiday, mercifully NOT about politics. It was about what was the best HBO show ever. Fortunately I had already given that considerable thought and devoted a Nobby post about it here. But that discussion reminded me that The Wire wasn't the only HBO show I'd dedicated posts to over the years. There was this one and that one again and then again before it even became an HBO show here. Game of Thrones also earned three bare naked Nobby takes...here, here, and here. That doesn't even touch on a whole host of great HBO shows that I never got around to writing about...The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Girls, Veep, Rome, Chernobyl, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Young Pope and The New Pope and on and on and on. Did any brand ever better earn its tagline: It's not TV; it's HBO. 

And... Now Playing Black Panther

 

On Hiatus, Week 15

 Nearly 90% of Trump supporters agreed with a Rand Corporation survey statement that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does.” 

The past week's reveling in election fraud claims has revealed that the nation's pandemic of  logical fallacies is still spiking and there's no vaccine in sight.   

On Hiatus, Week 14

 

In this the 14th week of the Nob on hiatus, it's just a short trip in the way-back machine to March so I can repost this sentiment: 

But here’s the thing…here’s the biggest reason I’m embracing Biden…and would be the big reason I would be embracing Bernie had he won: Simply by beating Trump in November, Joe Biden will go down as one of the greatest presidents in American history. 

On Hiatus, Week 13

I guess I've got a bit of the masochist in me...probably from my father's side. How else to explain my reposting this exercise in self-flagellation? In re-reading it I'm rather in awe of how deeply under the spell of reason, logic and common sense I was at the time. But when I wrote it in September of 2016, who had any idea the Russians were coming...the Russians were coming...along with this self admiring Prince of Probity. 

Something not so scary: Now Playing Black Panther

 

On Hiatus, Week 12

 

As a life-long student and former teacher, I have firmly held to the belief that education was the way forward...specifically I believed to my core that teaching people to think critically and avoid logical fallacies was the key to making a less gullible electorate and a more enlightened society. The insane politicization of wearing masks to get through the pandemic has shaken this conviction to its foundation. 

On Hiatus, Week 11

 

Need more reviews!

Except for being about twice as long and totally self-inflicted, this election season is like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Like then the situation is dire and survival of the nation hangs in the balance. Here's hoping there's a teenager out there (hint...hint Benjamin Grant...hint...hint Avery Sofia Grant) who might one day turn living through the crisis into comedy as I managed to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis here. 

Still on sale!