I detest Steve Bannon. He stands for everything I deeply dislike. But the author of Fire and Fury depicts Bannon in such a way that I have started harboring warm and fuzzy feelings towards him (or, rather, the character called “Steve Bannon” in the book). I need a reality check after each chapter because I don’t like where the book is taking me. And Wolff isn’t even a particularly good author. He’s wordy, he’s repetitive, he is extremely pompous. And yet 200 pages of reading about how Bannon is an idealist, a working-class fellow who is rejected by snobby, cynical elitists and how Trump is a big old softie whose heart is “a marshmallow” (that’s a direct quote from the book) and who feels deep compassion for Syrian children is starting to have an effect.

I’m still hoping to get to the end of the book but the moment I start developing warm feelings towards Kushner, that’s where I draw the line. There are places that I refuse to go, and that’s one of them.

It’s impossible for a mother to conceal what she feels from an infant or a toddler. I have learned that I can’t afford to be anything but completely cool and relaxed no matter what happens. The electricity and heating go out on a freezing winter night, but I’m totally fine. The flight gets cancelled 6 times, but I’m in a happy place. Three enormous Baskerville-type dogs are charging straight at us and I go, “Look at the beautiful doggies! Hi, doggies!”

My reaction to dogs used to be completely physiological and visceral. I’d have adrenaline gush out of my ears whenever I saw even a little puppy. But it’s easier to train myself not to feel that than to deal with an anxious toddler. And it has to be completely sincere because it’s the emotions they catch, not the narrative.

So now all the people in the neighborhood think I’m some sort of a crazy dog lover. They bring dogs for me to pet, so I have many opportunities to practice my zen state. 

Is he really that crazy or is he faking it?

“This big wave of public content has really made us reflect: What are we really here to do?” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “If what we’re here to do is help people build relationships, then we need to adjust.”

Is the bastard so deranged that he thinks he  “helps people build relationships” or is he just pissing in our faces with this comment?

I hate the Messianic rhetoric of “cool capitalism.” When capitalists said honestly, “I’m just here to make a profit,” I could respect them. But all this grandiose blabber about changing the world and helping people is beyond disgusting. 

The shift is the most significant overhaul in years to Facebook’s News Feed, the cascading screen of content that people see when they log into the social network. Over the next few weeks, users will begin seeing fewer viral videos and news articles shared by media companies. Instead, Facebook will highlight posts that friends have interacted with — for example, a photo of your dog or a status update that many of them have commented on or liked.

This stinks! Every time I think FB couldn’t get any more inconvenient and weird, it proves me wrong. I detest it when FB forces me to spy on friends by exposing me to comments they made someplace else and didn’t ask me to see. It’s very uncomfortable to see interactions that were not intended for me and that people don’t even know I’m seeing.

I also don’t want more news items from friends. I already know what they read. I read all the same stuff. It’s a total echo-chamber already. The only thing that’s going to happen now is that everybody will be shown the same darn article a hundred times in a row because all of one’s friends saw it and liked it. 

Did you, folks, see this beautiful story about a comedian and an angry troll? It’s very touching.

OK, so remember the essay contest? The one with the essay I really loved? It didn’t win. The essay that won was the only one of the bunch that I didn’t finish reading.

Now, please, understand that I’m a literary critic. I’m trained to read every word. Skipping anything is so hard for me that it’s an effort not to read every word on a menu. But this essay I couldn’t finish. It was truism meets bromide meets platitude. Everything in it was so unimpeachably true and so excruciatingly obvious that I was assaulted by bouts of mouth-rending yawns with every new sentence.

Apparently, though, everybody else loved it. Nobody else on the jury was a scholar of literature.

To me, worthwhile reading is the kind that surprises me. If you can’t give me any fresh content, try for an engaging, exciting format. But these sad good-kid essays that rattle off trivial ideas one was told are correct drive me up a wall. 

This is why I love teaching Spanish. The material is so new to the students that the work they produce is free from the shackles of received truths. 

A fellow on TV declares, “There are thousands of opioid deaths in this country every month. That’s what people care about and not some stupid border wall!” 

He probably started as a completely rational person but then repeated this crap so much that he now believes it himself.

This is a quote from one of Bannon’s post-election speeches as quoted in Fire and Fury:

“I think the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global market place with open borders, but that we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for being. I think that’s what unites us.”

From the time when the nation-state project was born, there were fierce battles over who’ll get to define this “culture and reason for being” of each nation. My very first research project was analyzing how this battle for the construction of national identity was waged among Spain’s intellectuals. Conservatives and progressives duked it out for 200 years. What’s important, though, is that none of them doubted that it was absolutely crucial to define / invent / manufacture / name the “culture and reason for being” of their nation. 

As we can see in Bannon’s speech – and everywhere around us – the conversation has shifted from who will get to define the “culture and reason for being” to whether it’s something worth doing. Moreover, the argument against defining it is not so much that it’s a useless or boring thing to do but that attempting to do it puts one beyond the pale of the reasonable and acceptable. As a result, the only people who are trying to define it are those who, like Bannon, have been far outside the limits of the acceptable for a very long time. 

Of course, Fire and Fury is written from a very Bannonite perspective, so I don’t suggest we take this discussion as being literally about Bannon. The really important issue here is that the nation-state only exists for as long as we passionately believe in it. The moment we stop, the chaotic and fluid market state wins once and for all. I want neither that nor a nation-state defined by Bannonite ideology. We are being pushed to accept that these are our only options. But that’s not true. 

This is a nifty trick that’s being pulled everywhere today. People are being told they’ve got to choose between market-state and some form of rabid white supremacy because these are the only options. This is precisely the narrative that keeps Putin in power for decades, for instance. And people go, “Well, if it’s between the market-state and another Hitler, then I know what I choose.” (And there is a minority that goes, “I choose Hitler”, forgetting to mention that they’d choose Hitler no matter what.) But the entire narrative is false. We have other options here, we’ve always had them. Now is the time to reject this entirely spurious idea and make the discussion our own.