v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Learning About Jack Youngerman

 

 

Reading The Slip made me hunt down information and art images from some of the artists in the book. Highly recommended.

Writer of The Slip, a book about the artist culture that developed in   in the mid-fifties, Prudence Peiffer writes a reminiscence Jack Youngerman, one of the artists who lived there with his family:

I began talking with Jack Youngerman three years ago, as research for a book on the artist community that emerged at Coenties Slip in downtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What I imagined might be a few conversations turned into regular sessions: he was a generous philosopher of art. He’d moved out to Bridgehampton, on the East End of Long Island, full time in the ’90s, and it was there, in a kitchen that was always sunny and warm no matter the season, with a cuckoo clock singing the hours and his wife Hilary Helfant’s sculptures gracing the round table, that we talked about his childhood, his art apprenticeship in Paris, and his early days in New York City living in an old sailmaking loft by the East River, next door to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.

Youngerman grew up poor in Kentucky and didn’t see any art in person until he was 19. He was immediately smitten. He went to Paris in 1947 on the GI Bill to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the fellow American Kelly. The two often played hooky, with the city itself as their school: visiting museums and cathedrals, seeing the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse at the Salon de Mais, and making pilgrimages to the studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Arp. Paris was just waking up from its World War II nightmare, and cafés were crowded with arguments about politics, the war, and art. Youngerman absorbed it all. He met Delphine Seyrig, an ambitious French student and actor. They fell in love quickly and were married.

Youngerman and Kelly discovered abstraction in France, in the art and artists that surrounded them and through a series of experiments with how to compose pictures through found images and chance operations. (See Youngerman’s beautiful Untitled drawing from 1953, above, in MoMA’s collection.) Kelly returned to New York first, hopeful that Abstract Expressionism, like a powerful storm front, had cleared the air for other kinds of abstract thinking. Youngerman followed with his wife and six-month-old son Duncan a few years later, with a promise from Betty Parsons that if he moved to New York she would show him at her gallery. On a tip from Kelly, they moved in next to him at Coenties Slip, settling into one of the illegal loft spaces in the oldest neighborhood of Manhattan, a spot so secluded that Youngerman spoke about going “back into the city” when they needed supplies. Well before loft-living became a signature of artists’ life in New York, the Coenties Slip group fixed up the rough warehouse spaces. Youngerman found furniture on the street and splurged on a picnic table from Sears Roebuck at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. (In one of our conversations, he mentioned offhand that he still had part of that table, and pointed outside to the back porch, where the 60-year-old bench held pots of herbs.)

The friendships at Coenties Slip changed each of the artists there forever, and in turn changed American art history—how we now understand abstraction, Pop art, Minimalism, textile art. But that’s another story. Kelly was a particularly important figure for Youngerman, both from their time together absorbing so much art history in Europe and from the experiments and breakthroughs that each came to individually as artists making their way in New York. Youngerman would go on to work with sculpture and prints, but it was his paintings at the Slip that set the course of his thinking.

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A Poem by Ahlam Bsharat

 

Colonial soldiers,
what have they been doing
to my poetry all these years
when I could have easily killed them
in my poems
as they’ve killed my family
outside poetry?

Poetry was my chance
to settle the score with killers,
but I let them age outdoors,
and I want them to know decay
in their lives, their faces to wrinkle,
their smiles to thin out,
and their weapons to hunch over.

So if you, dear readers, see a soldier
taking a stroll in my poem,
trust that I have left him to his fate
as I leave a criminal
to his many remaining years,
they will execute him.

And his ears will execute him
as he listens to me reciting my poem
to grieving families,
he won’t be able to slink out
of my book or the reading hall
as the seated audience stares at him.

You will not be consoled,
soldier, you will not,
not even as you exit
my poetry event
with slumped shoulders
and pockets full of dead bullets.

Even if your hand,
tremulous as it is
from so much murder,
fidgeted with the bullets,
you will not
produce more
than a dead sound.

                                        —Ramallah

 

From The Baffler 2021

 

Fady Joudah's Poem that The New Yorker refused to Publish in 2021

 

Remove

 

You who remove me from my house
are blind to your past
which never leaves you,
yet you’re no mole
to smell and sense what’s being done
to me now by you.
Now, dilatory, attritional so that the past
is climate change and not a massacre,
so that the present never ends.
But I’m closer to you than you are to yourself
and this, my enemy friend,
is the definition of distance.
Oh don’t be indignant,
watch the video, I’ll send you the link
in which you cleanse me item after limb
thrown into the street to march where
my catastrophe in the present
is still not the size of your past:
is this the wall
you throw your dice against?
I’m speaking etymologically, I’m okay
with the scales tipping your way,
I’m not into that, I have a heart that rots,
resists, and hopes, I have genes,
like yours, that don’t subscribe
to the damage pyramid.
You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs.
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love my body,
my body, my house.

 

 

Link to the story at LARB

Louise Gluck's Has Left

From NYT,

Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.

Her death was confirmed by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Richard Deming, a friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the cause was cancer.

Ms. Glück (pronounced glick) was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel. She began publishing in the 1960s and received some acclaim in the ’70s, but she cemented her reputation in the ’80s and early ’90s with a string of books, including “Triumph of Achilles” (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; “Ararat” (1990); and “The Wild Iris” (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her work was both deeply personal — “Ararat,” for example, drew on the pain she experienced over the death of her father — and broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader reading public. She served as the United States poet laureate from 2003 to 2004.

“‘Direct’ is the operative word here,” the critic Wendy Lesser wrote in a review of “Triumph of Achilles” in The Washington Post. ”Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”

Her early work, especially her debut, “Firstborn” (1968), is deeply indebted to the so-called confessional poets who dominated the scene in the 1950s and ’60s, among them John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

But even as Ms. Glück continued to weave her verse with an autobiographical thread, there is nothing solipsistic in her later, more mature work, even as she explored intimate themes of trauma and heartbreak.

“The poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role,” she said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.”

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From LA Riview of Books, a review by Eric Gudas  of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, a great book from last century that only recently is receiving the attention it so deserves:

NATALIA GINZBURG’S novel-cum-memoir, Lessico famigliare (1963), masterfully translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon, plunges its reader into a maelstrom of fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems. Often, Ginzburg remembers, their mother “recited poetry or sang” after dinner; at other times, the whole Levi family “had heated discussions over how ugly or good-looking someone was.” This cacophony of words sometimes verges on pure sound, as when the narrator’s father “let[s] out a long roar” in the shower each morning, or when her friend Lola eschews words for a “guttural and affectionate dove cry.” Gradually, a sense of time and place — Italy between the 1920s and ’50s — emerges from this barely controlled aural chaos, just as the hesitations and unfinished sentences of James Joyce’s Dubliners reveal glimpses of turn-of-the-century Ireland, or the brutally formal dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novels Ginzburg revered, gestures toward Edwardian social hierarchies. In the author’s “Avvertenza” (“warning”) that opens the book, Ginzburg states rather elliptically, “Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer.” Indeed, Family Lexicon recalls the great modernists’ reimaginings of childhood — Joyce, Compton-Burnett, Katherine Mansfield, parts of Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, and, farther back, Swann’s Way, which Ginzburg translated into Italian while in exile and then in hiding during World War II.

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home. (The chronological straightforwardness of my last three sentences differs totally from Ginzburg’s own mode of narration.) But it would be wrong to classify Family Lexicon as a historical memoir — say, My Childhood in Mussolini’s Italy — or the portrait of a writer as a young woman, since Ginzburg, one of Italy’s best known and most beloved postwar writers, ruthlessly downplays her own artistic development. In fact, Ginzburg announces that she has left out “much that concerned [her] directly”: “I had little desire to talk about myself. This is not in fact my story but rather, even with gaps and lacunae, the story of my family.”

Family Lexicon doesn’t so much narrate that story as immerse us in a language-world of dialect (Triestine and Milanese), memory (of Ginzburg’s own childhood, inextricable from her parents’ retellings of their childhoods), and, above all, conflict. When the Levis aren’t squabbling about their friends’ relative ugliness, they have “ferocious arguments over politics, which ended in tantrums, napkins hurled into the air, and doors slammed so hard the whole apartment shook.” McPhee’s translation expertly retains what critic Lorrie Goldensohn has called Ginzburg’s “own indelible voice-print,” a “tough, residual boniness carried over from the original sentences [that] gleams through even as they move in their new English sound.” That “voice-print” is intimately connected with her characters’ speaking voices, and in particular with a “brutal frankness” prized both in Ginzburg’s own family and subsequently in all of her writing, where it erupts on almost every page, often peppered with exclamation points. Family Lexicon is studded, for instance, with her father’s caustic barbs, including my absolute favorite, uttered at various times to different members of his family: “You’re bored because you have no inner life.” And in the novel’s leftist milieu, where characters accuse each other of being “bourgeois” time and again, Lidia Levi candidly and hilariously critiques herself: “‘If Stalin came to take away my maid, I’d kill him,’ my mother said. ‘What would I do without my maid? I, who don’t know how to do a thing?’”

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Interview with Charlie Smith

 

 

From an interview with poet/novelist Charlie Smith in Bomb Magazine in 2010:

JR Okay. Let’s see, my first question for you: the relation of poetry and novels. There seems to be some kind of mystical connection, poets as novelists—apropos here, James Dickey, E. E. Cummings, Jessica Hagedorn. Insights?

CS I don’t see that very often—novelists writing poems that have any kind of power and authority particularly, and vice versa. Many of the poets I know don’t read novels at all; they don’t read any fiction. And my close friends who are novelists don’t read any poems; they are not even interested in reading mine. So I don’t know if there is that kind of crossover. It’s not necessary, in fiction, to concentrate in the same way—to bring the same intensity, spirit, language, into the line—as it is in writing a poem.

In my case, I just happened to write both right at the beginning. I was exposed to both as a youngster and then, in boarding school, we were required in ordinary assignments to write short stories and poems. I fell in love with both, and began to write both on my own. What I began to see was that the two disciplines could cross over to a certain extent. Poems can cross over to fiction, but I haven’t seen fiction cross over to poems much. A fiction line in a poem—I mean, you sometimes run into what passes as poetry, which is often just prose chopped up into lines, but it doesn’t have intensity. Real poems can’t exist anywhere but in the lines of the poem. If you try to take a fiction line and insert it into a poem, it’ll sag like a swayback mare. I found that to be pretty strictly true, at least in my case. But it’s possible to take poems and shift them into fiction; I used to take poems and de-line them like you debone a trout. Then, I’d just lay them into a page of fiction and they would pass perfectly well. I did it in most of my earlier novels: Canaan (1984), Shine Hawk (1988), The Lives of the Dead (1990) . . . There may have been others. Before poetry broke loose from the continental shelf, it was the easiest thing to haul lines over to the fiction side.

I try to bring as much energy and penetration into my fiction as possible. To hold onto the line of expression as earnestly as possible, like you’re holding onto a mustang out in the desert, letting it be fully itself but, as firmly and inevitably as possible, bringing it into the remuda. Because I also write poems, I have access—if I’m lucky—to those particular acts of imagination that take place in a poem—I can sometimes see that things that appear to be disparate actually are connected.

I tend to like fiction that jumps and yips, fiction that moves around, that’s got language barreling through it. The best at it in my generation are probably Denis Johnson, Javier Marías, and Martin Amis. Maybe if I’d never written a poem I would still seek something like that out. I hope I would.

Guidi's Thinking

From MACK website,from Guido Guidi and Antonello Frongia’s conversation in Di sguincio, 1969–81 by Guido Guidi    :

AF: For a long time you took photographs without looking through the viewfinder, using a Leica or a Rollei 35mm and a small flash mounted on the bottom of the camera. Did you have any models for this type of work?
 
GG: At some point in the 1970s, I think I saw Joel Sternfeld’s colour photographs taken at night with a flash in Camera and, later, Mark Cohen’s black-and-white ones. In Friedlander’s self-portraits too, if I remember rightly, the projected shadow clearly reveals that he doesn’t always hold the camera to his eye, but keeps it detached and consequently isn’t framing the shot through the viewfinder. But most of all, I was influenced by my meeting with Nathan Lyons. He pushed us in this direction on a course held in Venice in 1979, encouraging us to photograph by looking through the viewfinder and then without it. Ultimately, it’s a bit like Matisse, who’d sometimes blindfold himself after spending a long time drawing a face and do it again on a sheet of paper pinned on a door, with his eyes closed, to test his mastery of the subject. And, as we can see from Brassaï’s famous photographs, Picasso also drew figures in the air by moving a lamp, without being able to control the result immediately. Even Walker Evans secretly photographed travellers on the New York City subway, in the late 1930s, without looking through the viewfinder.
 
AF: The uncertainty of the outcome is consequently an important aspect of this work.
 
GG: It is an attempt to rely on chance. It reminds me of a remark by Harry Callahan: chance, he said, is fundamental, it’s beautiful, it’s like turning the street corner and bumping into an old friend – you weren’t expecting it, and it’s wonderful. To me, chance is also when someone else asks you to photograph something, like Padua’s city walls for example. But the walls are long, they go all around the city. So you go to Padua but you arrive at a random point, because you’ve taken a certain route and it’s convenient for you to stop in the shade of a tree. You’re there and chance begins to prompt you. You’ve come out of your house, your room, your shell, out of yourself, in short, and you have an opportunity to make contact with the outside world, to encounter the other.
 

Ginzburg's Allure

 

Alexander Chee writes about Natalia Ginzburg, Italian novelist and essayist from the the 30's and 40's, also a favorite of mine:

I began reading Natalia Ginzburg in translation in 2015, and as a result have read many introductions to her works by now. With each one I came to learn at least one new detail about her. She was born Natalia Levi in Palermo on July 14, 1916, and published her first short story at the age of seventeen.

She was raised in an anti-fascist family in Turin, and in her author’s note to Family Lexicon, she describes the relief of being able to write it as a Turinesi. She had left Turin only after the exile of her family due to the same fascist Racial Laws that had her publish her 1942 debut novel, The Road to the City, under the pen name Alessandra Tornimparte: Italian Jews were forbidden from publishing. By the time her second novel, The Dry Heart, appeared in 1947, she was able to publish as Natalia Ginzburg as she would for the rest of her life, until her death in the fall of 1991.

I have heard it said of Natalia Ginzburg that she is easier to translate than some other Italian writers because her style is simple. My Italian isn’t good enough for me to judge the original texts, though it is true that in general one does not find the baroque descriptions one might encounter elsewhere, such as in the work of Alessandro Manzoni, the famous Italian novelist she took as the subject of her novel The Manzoni Family. I think instead there is an extraordinary precision, which you might experience as austerity if it wasn’t itself so satisfying.

Can you fall in love with a writer just from her author’s note? Maybe so, if it is her. Her distilled directness is disarming and even tender to encounter, and perhaps instructive too on the question of her style and whether it is simple or not. For her essay collection, The Little Virtues, she tells us every essay in the book is directed to a friend she will not name but who is also not in the essays, either. She adds that she did not revise the essays because she is no longer the person who wrote them.

For her novel Voices in the Evening she says, “The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have they ever lived, in any part of the world. I am sorry to say this having loved them as if they were real.” In both we see Ginzburg anticipate the questions a reader might ask and answer them, creating and then speaking to a subtext, which has the feeling of a clairvoyant making your fortune in front of you before you can ask any questions at all. She constructs a game around the reader, anticipating questions and reactions, and playing off of them as she constructs the next ones. If she is droll or spare or laconic, it is the eyeroll of a magician as she pulls your nickel from your ear.

I am sorry to say that Valentino has no such magical author’s note from her. I first discovered it in Open City, William Weaver’s 1999 anthology of seven post-war Italian writers that he’d known in Rome. Valentino is included there in its entirety, as translated by him—all of the translations are his—and each selection is prefaced by a photo of the author. In hers, her face looks carved out of stone, her hair cut short.

Weaver begins the anthology with a memoir of his own, of how he came to Italy first as an ambulance driver during World War II with literary ambitions and gradually became a literary translator, an American expat deeply immersed in the literary culture of Rome. He tells the story of how he met all of the writers, in turn. Ginzburg he meets at a dinner party in the home of Elena Croce, the writer and translator credited with having helped rescue Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard from obscurity.

The young Ginzburg is with a professor of English literature at the University of Rome, Gabriele Baldini, who will become her second husband. She has just begun dating him (and will marry soon after this dinner party). He introduces her to Weaver, who describes himself as made shy by her—she is already formidable to Weaver for her heroism, but also because of his knowledge of a letter that makes him feel as if he has intruded on her intimate life.

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Rigged Capitalism

A review of Martin Wolf's new book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Jonathan Kirschner at the LARB :

Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. This is plutocracy, and aside from the injustice it visits on societies, it is also profoundly dangerous, because in democratic plutocracies (like the United States today), the simmering frustrations of mass polities will at some point lead to the voluntary election of an autocrat: “[I]nsecurity and fear are gateways to tyranny.” Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy.

Economic inequality, on the rise for 50 years, has soared to ever greater extremes in recent decades. As Wolf reports, from 1993 to 2015, the real income of the top 1 percent of the population in the United States nearly doubled; for everybody else, over those same years, aggregate real income grew by 14 percent. More pointedly, as the very rich got much, much richer from 2005 to 2014, 81 percent of US households had flat or falling real income—a weighty reminder that we continue to live in a world defined by the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath. Returning to the terrain of The Shifts and the Shocks, Wolf observes that the Wall Street titans who caused the crisis “mostly walked off with large fortunes, while tens of millions of innocent people’s lives were ruined”—a catastrophe exacerbated by the swift, misguided application of austerity measures as soon as it became clear that a complete financial meltdown would be avoided.

The role of the Global Financial Crisis (and the dismal political management of its aftermath) in exacerbating trends in inequality—and, at least as important, further fueling perceptions that the system was corrupt and fundamentally unfair—ought not be underestimated. Nor should it necessarily surprise. Wolf shows that the 1931 international financial crisis served as a tipping point in public support for the Nazi party in Germany, which won 2.6 percent of the vote in 1928 and 37.3 percent in 1932, and he cites a fascinating new academic paper that underscores this chilling point. The 1931 crisis, a global upheaval that sent the world economy reeling, started in Austria and then spread to (pre-Nazi) Germany, leading to the collapse of that country’s second largest bank. This accelerated the Nazi movement, according to the study, as “localities affected by Danatbank’s failure voted significantly more for the Hitler movement.” In any event, with or without this sobering parallel, as Adam Tooze argued in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), the norm-shattering American presidential election campaign of 2016 can only be understood in the context of the widespread revulsion at the 2008 crisis and that which followed. The emergence of new, powerful, populist movements from both the left and the right (and the inconceivable nomination of an inexperienced, ignorant reality-TV celebrity to be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer), is directly attributable to those societally backbreaking events.

Moreover, the 2008 crisis was not an exogenous shock; it was an accident waiting to happen, encouraged—and indeed rendered virtually inevitable—by the (politically buttressed) financialization of the American economy. It is hard to overstate the consequences of the rise of finance—and its transformation from a crucial facilitator of economic activity to an end in itself (for some). The pernicious metastasization of finance throughout the economy contributed to an orgy of reckless speculation—seen, to take one example, in the explosive growth of the (purported) value of derivatives transactions from $72 billion in 1998 to $653 billion a decade later. As Wolf archly observes, “[l]ittle of this expansion of financial balance sheets went into financing fresh investment,” and he finds it “hard to disagree” with the assessment that much of this activity is “socially useless.” This echoes John Maynard Keynes, who long ago reminded readers that, in a capitalist society, “the proper social purpose” of finance is “to direct new investment” towards productive enterprises. But “when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

This is no small matter, as the financialization of the economy, especially after the 1990s, and the fortunes amassed from that process, were part and parcel of a larger shift towards “rigged capitalism”—the emergence of which The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism places at the heart of the matter. In a remarkable (and laudable) intellectual evolution, Wolf, who welcomed and celebrated the Thatcher revolution in Britain, and not so long ago penned the book Why Globalization Works (2004), now attributes the crisis of our time to “what Adam Smith warned us against—the tendency of the powerful to rig the economic and political systems against the rest of society.” Superseding a well-ordered market society, rigged capitalism—a toxic brew of developments and practices including financialization, winner-take-all markets, reduced competition, increased rent-seeking behavior (the use of concentrated economic power to extract monopoly profits), tax avoidance and evasion, and the erosion of ethical standards—has led to a widespread loss of confidence in the legitimacy of democracy.

The Shifts and the Shocks decried a system in which “well-connected insiders” are “shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.” Democratic Capitalism emphasizes that this problem transcends the financial sector. In a country with half a million people in jail for minor drug offenses, “the members of the Sackler family,” who “bear heavy responsibility for […] probably the worst drug-related scandal since the opium wars,” are “not going to prison, but are just losing some of their billions of dollars.” As Wolf incisively (and inarguably) observes, “[s]uch power without accountability is a monstrous privilege, redolent of feudalism more than of a contemporary liberal democracy.”

These pathologies run deep, and well below the headlines. The use of political power to undermine competition—which must thrive at the heart of any capitalist society—is an endemic attribute of rigged capitalism. (And it is why we pay higher prices for most things than a “free market” would levy.) Many if not most giant corporations are now monopolies or near-monopolies, a situation that, as any card-carrying professional economist of even the most conservative stripe would agree, generates inefficiencies, rent-seeking behavior, and outright exploitation. Many markets have become shielded, protections reinforced by access to the corridors of power, with wealth extracted from consumers (and workers) in consequence: consider the atrocity of unskilled workers in fast food restaurants being forced to sign “non-compete” clauses, an act of collusive wage suppression.

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Dismantling Democracy Bit by Bit

 

From Jamelle Bouie in the NY Times:

The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over “wokeness” and “D.E.I.” is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the country’s most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

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