Partial Readings: Leave All Leftists Behind

Leave All Leftists Behind
Will Obama’s charm soothe the progressives while his policies cater to the Blue Dogs? Dayo Olopade discusses Obama’s management of the Democratic base, Ed Kilgore wonders if the left still holds any sway over the administration, and Michael Tomasky suggests that Obama’s independence from his liberal commitments can only last so long.

Life Is Precious, Not Priceless
Peter Singer on the overlapping logic of rationing health care and prostitution: “Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars? She reflects for a few moments and then answers that she would. “So,” he says, “would you have sex with me for $50?” Indignantly, she exclaims, “What kind of a woman do you think I am?” He replies: “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.” The man’s response implies that if a woman will sell herself at any price, she is a prostitute. The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives–but is that stance tenable?”

When Leisure Class Means Working Class
Contemplating what’s changed since Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, Daniel Gross finds that “in the contemporary money culture, to be at leisure, to be idle, is to be irrelevant…among Type-A, self-made members of the leisure class, there’s a sort of reverse prestige associated with leisure. At Davos, which is filled with conspicuous consumers, the only people who ski are the journalists.”

The Diplomacy of Food
While Obama mended racial tensions at home over a set of domestic beers, Bill Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il negotiated the release of two imprisoned Americans over a two-hour long mystery meal in Pyongyang. Meanwhile from the Department of Kitchen Counter Manifestos: Michael Pollan rhapsodizes the home-cooked meal. “Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place…Sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, all served to civilize us.”

Fugazi 4 Life
Mark Greif relives punk and post-punk: Fugazi “felt like a protective, preemptive assault, a use of musical violence, swinging outward, when the world would secretly do violence to you, pushing inward. Their sound was a bat skillfully wielded against projectiles; a cudgel to smash a kind of glassy or icy envelopment. Or, recognizing that the abuse had already inevitably made it inside you, they tried to make you puke it out.” Never heard of Greif’s beloved Fugazi: listen up!