metazine

Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life. And partly because this disaster was unacknowledged—editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading large-scale violence, remained entrenched, and even received promotions—it is being reenacted today in the Western media’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza: another war that has ignited a bonfire of international legal and moral norms and deadened and perverted consciences.

In the weeks before the convention, I felt as if I wanted to break into my television, to shake history—like the phantom accelerator reaction one makes with incompetent drivers, I mouthed words for the president during the June debate, trying to influence him from afar.

The tableau was sickening and, of course, telling. On one side, a congressional representative and mouth-frothing agent of the religious right. On the other, a liberal cosmopolitan and leader of an Ivy League, and in this case, an Egyptian baroness and former VP at the World Bank. Two distinct and supposedly clashing cultural expressions of elite power, speaking in vastly discrepant registers—each one smirking or even scowling at the other. But they converged on a vital point: The time had come to smash the campus Palestine movement.

I increasingly wonder how often we've labeled protesters as “anti-globalization” who were, in fact, advocating for alter-globalization, and were critiquing the lack of labor or environmental protections in major international trade agreements, or in WTO decision-making processes, and so forth, but were not necessarily opposed to economic interdependence. So on top of the critiques of the decolonizing world and the Global South, we also see this reinvestment of grassroots energy from the left.

Let me be the first and only critic to point out that Reagan, a three-year-old biopic on the life of the fortieth president of the United States that’s just getting released now—a film directed by a man whose other movies include Casper Meets Wendy, Bratz, and Field of Lost Shoes—is a better movie than Deadpool & Wolverine.

When Jane McAlevey died on July 7, aged 59, the left lost a brilliant organizer, author, teacher, and comrade. After early experience in environmental justice and anti-apartheid activism, McAlevey found her calling in the labor movement, starting in the 1990s.

These conflicts tend to recur every ten years or so, with a different cast of characters, but always involving the idea that taxpayer money is being spent on a public institution that undermines the private authority of parents—abortion clinics, child care centers, public libraries, public schools.

The way I’ve begun to think about this is that it’s just not possible to have a US imperial fortress state with Rainbow Coalition characteristics—the most multiracial genocidal coalition in the history of the world. It’s a strange fact, and it can’t be resolved.

On Wednesday, September 25, join n+1 contributors Emily Witt and Tony Tulathimutte for a discussion of their new books, Health and Safety and Rejection . Both books are available for preorder from the n+1 bookstore and will be published in September.

On Monday, September 9, join n+1 senior writer Richard Beck in conversation with former n+1 coeditor Nikil Saval at McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport location in Manhattan.

It feels good to be a role model, she reflects. Young people need examples they can emulate, otherwise they risk nihilism. Melancholy historicism, as has been documented by several big-data projects on the counterintuitive ratio between happiness and hunger in the Global South, is an obstacle to upward mobility and success. The morality tale about her crackhead sister, her cousin Pookie, and her death-dealing nephew Bar-b-que goes over well with the conservatives. On special occasions, at a Juneteenth celebration or a mass funeral, she might even hum a few bars from “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” or sing off-key “Lift Every Voice and Sing, ” in homage to her community.

Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone can get away with driving 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that car culture isn’t really about sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. Car culture is really about death.

Out last night with Deja for a drink at a new bar near campus. The bar is nice but cannot decide who it is for. Drinks too sweet. After two my head was heavy. Hers too perhaps. I feel so grateful to have met you, she said. It’s when she says things like that.

How is my going to Goodwill and coming out with a garbage bag full of clothes any different, really, from ordering several $2.99 items from a company like SHEIN? Because I drove there in my electric car?