CxD #156: The Foreseen: "This Is Who We Are"

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1A. This conversation on the Pod Save America podcast provided the most clear-eyed analysis of the last few days in America, which includes despair and hope and everything in between.

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1B. In case you missed it: more people voted in Georgia than ever before; the non-Presidential Senate run-off election had 90% as many voters as did the Presidential one, an unheard-of special election number, and it’s not even close. And for the first time, a Southern black man and the first Jewish man from Georgia and also its youngest, will represent the state in the US Senate.

Since we need a blueprint for resurrecting the country from ashes, Georgia and Stacey Abrams are delivering it to us on a silver platter. Will we learn its lessons and extend them to the rest of the Union?

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1C. The most insightful piece I’ve read about our delusional views about “who we are”:

The insurrection lasted four hours. (As of Friday, there were five dead.) Once the Capitol was cleared, the solemn assurances that “this is not who we are” began. The attempt at self-soothing after such a traumatic event is understandable, but it is delusional. Was Charlottesville not who we are? Did more than seventy million people not vote for the Inciter-in-Chief? Surely, these events are part of who we are, part of the American picture. To ignore those parts, those features of our national landscape, is to fail to confront them.

Are you ready to confront all these parts, both internal to you and external to you, woven of the same American fabric?

Source

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2. This is the CxD banner over yonder on Twitter, the social media platform that Trump used to rise to power and the one that just permanently banned Trump.

Or if you prefer Senator Graham’s version:

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3. I write for The Motley Fool’s Investment website and cover Twitter, as a public company in which people can invest. These were my thoughts about their decision to ban Trump:

Twitter just suspended Trump's account permanently.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/twitter-trump-...

My take: if your business at its core is information and news and community, and there's a cancer that spreads disinformation with death and riot and chaos as a direct consequence, you remove the cancer just like a doctor's duty is to remove it in a sick body. If there's a problem employee in your company, it is a dereliction of duty to appease the employee as they contaminate the rest of your company.

The gravest mistake that Twitter made was taking so long to protect the integrity of its business, because the evidence of the cancer was explicit and clear for over four years.

For those tempted to engage in false equivalency analogies: Yes, it's okay to say "I don't like the color of your hair" but it is not the same "freedom of speech" to say "those who believe in police brutality and racial inequality, and falsifying records are fine people." We must protect freedom of speech; we must also be wise enough to know that free speech is not hate speech. If you don't know the difference, consider staying silent and not using your big brain to disingenuously engage in sophistry.

Twitter still has a shot, now, at being one of the few social media platforms that does the world more good than harm. Better late than never. Let's see how it goes.

Simultaneously angry, dispirited yet Hopeful

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5. Let’s turn our attention to a metaphor I used above. Cancer the thing itself is something that happens through natural mutation and which grows without limit. Eventually it kills the larger system it is part of. It comes in many forms. One is cellular cancer. Another is “individual freedom at all costs.” Another is “money at all costs.” May this poem by Wendell Berry offer us refuge.

From SABBATHS by Wendell Berry

III. (Santa Clara Valley)

I walked the deserted prospect of the modern mind
where nothing lived or happened that had not been foreseen.
What had been foreseen was the coming of the Stranger with Money.
All that had been before had been destroyed: the salt marsh
of unremembered time, the remembered homestead, orchard and pasture.
A new earth had appeared in place of the old, made entirely
according to plan. New palm trees stood all in a row, new pines
all in a row, confined in cement to keep them from straying.

New buildings, built to seal and preserve the inside
against the outside, stood in the blatant outline of their purpose
in the renounced light and air. Inside them
were sealed cool people, the foreseen ones, who did not look
or go in any way that they did not intend,
waited upon by other people, trained in servility, who begged
of the ones who had been foreseen: ‘Is everything
all right, sir? Have you enjoyed your dinner, sir?
Have a nice evening, sir.’ Here was no remembering
of hands coming newly to the immortal work
of hands, joining stone to stone, door to doorpost, man to woman.

Outside, what had been foreseen was roaring in the air.
Roads and buildings roared in their places
on the scraped and chartered earth; the sky roared
with the passage of those who had been foreseen
toward destinations they foresaw, unhindered by any place between.
The highest good of that place was the control of temperature
and light. The next highest was to touch or know or say
no fundamental or necessary thing. The next highest
was to see no thing that had not been foreseen,
to spare no comely thing that had grown comely on its own.
Some small human understanding seemed to have arrayed itself
there without limit, and to have cast its grid upon the sky,
the stars, the rising and the setting sun.
I could not see past it but to its ruin.

I walked alone in that desert of unremitting purpose,
feeling the despair of one who could no longer remember
another valley where bodies and events took place and form
not always foreseen by human, and the humans themselves followed
ways not altogether in the light, where all the land had not yet
been consumed by intention, or the people by their understanding,
where still there was forgiveness in time, so that whatever
had been destroyed might yet return. Around me
as I walked were dogs barking in resentment
against the coming of the unforeseen.

And yet even there I was not beyond reminding,
for I came upon a ditch where the old sea march,
native to that place, had been confined below the sight
of the only-foreseeing eye. What had been the overworld
had become the underworld: the land risen from the sea
by no human intention, the drawing in and out of the water,
the pulse of the great sea itself confined in a narrow ditch.

Where the Sabbath of that place kept itself in waiting,
the herons of the night stood in their morning watch,
and the herons of the day in silence stood
by the living water in its strait. The coots and gallinules
skulked in the reeds, the mother mallards and their little ones
afloat on the seaward-sliding water to no purpose I had foreseen.
The stilts were feeding in the shallows, and the killdeer
treading with light feet the mud that was all ashine
with the coming day. Volleys of swallows leapt
in joyous flight out of the dark into the brightening air
in eternal gratitude for life before time not foreseen,
and the song of the song sparrow rang in its bush.

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