RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/two-americas-california-florida-desantis-newsom/

What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office.

You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. “Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.” Maybe Amerigo Vespucci, that mapmaker, had Florida in mind, though Vespucci would have struggled to imagine a future figure such as the forty-sixth governor of the state, Ron DeSantis.

Or, “Linguistically, America is an abbreviated form of the United States of America, a political union that traces itself to a local rebellion of thirteen British colonies in the eighteenth century, which grew into territorially aggressive entity.” Eventually these practitioners of settler colonialism found their way to the western extremity of the continent, revolted against Mexican rule and founded the California Republic, which was soon subsumed into the United States where it became the personal vineyard of the entrepreneur and founder of PlumpJack wine store, Gavin Newsom.

Other adverbs come to mind. What is America politically, culturally, geographically, musically, economically, militarily? It is an open book exam. But don’t forget the Articles of Confederation, Gilligan’s Island, and Afghanistan.

Putting on my anthropologist hat, I’d point out that the measure of any society is what divides it — and a culture consists of the most meaningful disagreements among people who have to pay attention to one another. To take a famous literary example, when Jonathan Swift’s intrepid explorer Gulliver washes up on the island of Lilliput, he finds the inhabitants committed to the practice of breaking their eggs on the little end. Yards away lies the island of Blefuscu, similar in every respect to Lilliput except that Blefuscian tradition decrees that eggs should be broken on the big end. War between Big Enders and Little Enders has persisted for generations. To outsiders like Gulliver — and presumably Swift — these poignant differences seem trivial. But that’s bad anthropology. The perpetual war over which end an egg should be cracked first is vital to the lives of these islanders.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-your-irs-at-work-tigta-report-treasury-inspector-general-for-tax-administration-audit-inflation-reduction-act-11660943317?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The new Inflation Reduction Act has many damaging provisions, but for sheer government gall the $80 billion reward to the Internal Revenue Service stands out. The money will go to hire 87,000 new employees, doubling its current payroll. This is also doubling down on incompetence, as anyone can see in the official reports of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta).

We’ve read those reports for the last several years so you don’t have to, and the experience is a government version of finding yourself in a blighted neighborhood for the first time. You can’t believe it’s that bad. The trouble goes beyond the oft-cited failures like answering only 10% of taxpayer calls, or a backlog of 17 million unprocessed tax returns. The audits reveal an agency that can’t do its basic job well but will terrorize taxpayers whether deserving or not.

***

Consider the agency’s chronic mishandling of tax credits. By the IRS’s own admission, some $19 billion—or 28%—of earned-income tax credit payments in fiscal 2021 were “improper.” The amount hasn’t improved despite years of IRS promises to do better.

• A January Tigta audit found that an estimated 67,000 claims—totaling $15.6 billion—for the low-income housing tax credit from 2015 to 2019 “lacked or did not match supporting documentation due to potential reporting errors or noncompliance.”

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/retrieving-the-human-condition

 The point of a university is to educate students and produce new knowledge about the world. The point of a cultural institution is to preserve and perpetuate some significant part of the creative endeavors of humankind. When the heads of businesses, universities, and cultural institutions allow themselves to be swayed by factions within and without their organizations who believe that “racial justice” must be prioritized above all (above profit, above knowledge, above culture), they threaten the very existence of the institutions they are supposed to safeguard.

So why haven’t we seen more push-back from these leaders, a refusal to cave to the often unreasonable demands of race activists? Surely they’re afraid of damaging their institutions’ reputations and their own by running afoul of these activists. But if they stuck to their guns and did refuse to cave—refused, for example, to implement equity-based hiring policies and instead hired whoever they judged to be the best candidate, regardless of race—they might find as much or more public support as they do approbation. If, as John McWhorter and I have discussed previously, the woke tide turns, then these leaders might find that they are suddenly going with the drift of the culture rather than against it.

This is speculation, of course. But I don’t think it’s unfounded. In the following excerpt from my latest conversation with John, we discuss the limited and limiting conceptions of art and human experience at work in institutions that allow themselves to be dominated by cookie-cutter ideas about race. If we’re going to preserve and revive classic works of art and learn to produce new ones, we’ll need a vision of humanity broader than our current racial politics can offer.

https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-infidels-will-not-be-silenced/

The infidels will not be silenced Like Salman Rushdie, I choose freedom.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the fatwa with glee.

I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.

In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.

And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.