Today’s “book” will be a collection of a few periodical
articles hitting the press shows Sunday.
First, for The Atlantic, Sept. 2017.
Most important is “How America Lost Its Mind” by Kurt
Andersen. Truth from science and logic was for the
robotic elites; human truth came from
the gut. That sounds to me like the
balanced personalities (Rosenfels-speak) won out – those attuned to reacting to
social needs around them than to what is their own heads. The “Age of Reason” weakened starting in the
60s. We saw this with doubts about
civilized living and modernity from the terrorists. Eventually we got a huckster like Donald
Trump who could win other people under his wing. Young men find that the modern world offers
them little, so they get picked off.
Then why are a number of talented young men that I know in the arts and
sciences, very much into their own worlds, still so sociable? Alan Truing, remember, with his Asperger
nature and outside the normal world of social interaction, still had enough
charisma to use his brains to save us from the Nazis.
Also Peter Beinart leads off with “The Rise of the Violent Left” with his piece on Antifa on p. 13, where he emphasized the supposed
anarchy of the group as playing into the hands of authoritarians. Look at how the “Unite the Right” event in
Charlottesville goaded them to fight, into tragedy. Antifa believes everyone who doesn’t join
them against “systematic oppression” is an enemy.
The New Yorker, on Aug. 21,asks “Out of Action: Do ProtestsWork?” (p. 70) The general answer might be, well, no. Heller manages to review Mark Lilla and “The
Once and Future Liberal” (Harper) who was on CNN this morning. I’ll leave the long piece on Wikileaks and
Julian Assange for another time.
But the previous issue by Robin Wright (Aug 14) had asked “Is America Headed to a New Kind of Civil War?” which she discussed this morning on Reliable
Sources on Jake Tapper’s CNN. There are
estimates of a 35% chance of major breakdowns of law and order in the next few
years, but we already saw that with Sandtown in Baltimore, and with Ferguson.
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