Partial Readings: The World Has Changed
Partial Readings: The World Has Changed
Partial Readings: The World Has Changed
The 2009 census data unveiled a few weeks ago revealed a troubling, if unsurprising, fact: one in seven Americans is now below the poverty line?and when the number of those now sharing homes is included, the figures are even starker. There is one glimmer of hope amid the grim news: senior citizens have actually seen a rise in income?a testament to the effectiveness of Social Security as an anti-poverty program. The safety net for families with children, especially those with single mothers, has proved far less effective; and a new Pew study illuminates the dire economic straits in which former prison inmates and their families find themselves. The effects have been exacerbated by rising incarceration rates: ?1 in every 28 children (3.6 percent) has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children?s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.?
Ed Miliband beat out his brother David to win the leadership of the British Labour Party last weekend. Mike Rustin evaluates the selection and its political implications in two articles at Open Democracy. In the first, he looks at the role unions played in electing Ed and calls for them to play an even larger role in resisting the austerity program proposed by the Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition.
In the second, Rustin makes a series of proposals for the new (though not New) Labour configuration, holding out hope for a united party dedicated to ?a mature and generous social democracy, committed to greater equality and social justice, diverse in its culture, striking sensible balances between the public and the private, and encouraging active involvement by its citizens in every field of life.?
The Attack on Sexual Tradition?
In the new issue of the Utopian, Damon Linker analyzes the conspiratorial nature of contemporary conservative arguments about sexual mores.
According to most social conservatives, the sexual liberalization of the past several decades has?been brought about through the organized effort of decadent liberal elites in the nation?s education and media establishments to impose a hedonistic ethic on the country through antidemocratic means (especially through the courts, which have repeatedly overturned laws that previously regulated sexual behavior).
Linker argues for a liberal corrective to this narrative:
On the contrary, the?liberal state was perfectly willing to enforce traditionalism?s morality of ultimate ends so long as there was an overwhelming consensus among the American people in favor of that morality. It is the breakdown of that consensus in American society, and not the imperialistic ambitions of the liberal state, that has led to the depoliticization (and thus privatization) of sexual morality in the United States. The liberal state is not predisposed to defend and enforce sexual liberation; it is predisposed to stymie the efforts of a part of society to use state power to impose its vision on the whole of society.
Whatever Happened to Literature?
Elif Batuman makes an impassioned and inspired case against what creative writing MFA programs have wrought.
Because writing is suspected to be narcissistic and wasteful, it must be ?disciplined? by the programme….The workshop?s most famous mantras??Murder your darlings,? ?Omit needless words,? ?Show, don?t tell??also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ?craft?: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, perhaps even working-class skill, as opposed to something every no-good dilettante already knows how to do. Shame explains the cult of persecutedness, a strategy designed to legitimise literary production as social advocacy, and make White People feel better….As long as it views writing as shameful, the programme will not generate good books, except by accident.
