Everybody is excited over this post by Chimamanda Adichie but I don’t like it. It begins with some utterly trivial, catty complaints about former fans who overstepped their bounds. You don’t even have to be all that famous to have a litany of stories like this to tell. Making a big deal out of them publicly is kind of pathetic. Yes, people will try to use you to advance themselves. Welcome to the human race.

The part that everybody is gushing over is not that great either. Chimamanda never says who these “people” she is criticizing are:

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy. People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. 

Who are these “people”? What is the name of their ideological orthodoxy? Without any specificity in this description, the very “people” Chimamanda is trying to criticize are going to use her words to clobber their opponents.

This is not a both-sides issue. There is one side with the power and the license to destroy people for disagreeing. It’s the left, the Democrats, the “Democratic Socialists.” Let’s stop pretending that these are just some “people” that spontaneously sprout in the most unexpected places. There’s a very concrete political force that produces this behavior. And it counts on our terrified, embarrassed silence to stay in power.

It is a major political issue in less important countries how many minutes and seconds the president of the US talked to their president in the hallway at G7. In Spain, for example, people are going nuts today, calculating the length of time Pres. Biden gave to Pedro González in the hallway and trying desperately to figure out what it all means.

This is why Putin hates America. He wants to be the person everybody lines up to talk to at the G7. He perceives it as extraordinarily unfair the US should play that role. Once you understand that, everything he does becomes very clear.

And by the way, I Married a Communist is really not about politics. The whole point of the novel is that the main character’s Communistic ideas are a result of his personal pathologies. And his downfall is less a result of McCarthyism than of him being a gigantic prick.

Folks, did you know that Niall Ferguson is married to Ayan Hirsi Ali? I had no idea. Usually, the spouses of famous, big thinker types are there to facilitate the careers of the famous big thinkers. And here they are both famous big intellectuals. Fascinating.

When Philip Roth split up from one of his wives, she got upset and wrote a memoir trashing him. You got to be really dumb to write something against one of the best writers of the twentieth century. But the wife was an actress, so clearly incapable of seeing the limitations of her extremely modest literary gifts.

Roth got mad over the memoir and wrote I Married a Communist to satirize the annoying ex-wife. It turned out to be one of his best novels. And herein lies the downfall of his plan to punish the ex. An artistic gift is stronger than the frail and fallible human being that possesses it. The novel didn’t care much about what Roth wanted it to say. It portrays him as the villain of the story and a first-class dickwad.

I Married a Communist is a complicated, beautiful work of literature. I don’t like Roth’s heavily postmodern stuff but I do love his The American Trilogy, of which this is the second novel. Roth is still a postmodern writer just like we are postmodern readers whether we like it or not but he tells a darn good story in the novel and he tells it well.

Now I’m battling the temptation to reread The Human Stain, the third novel in the trilogy, for the third time.

In Illinois, two-year-olds will continue to get masked in daycare until they can be vaccinated.

Why?

Here’s the explanation from the governor’s office and I quote: “Now that fewer adults get infected, COVID might move on to infecting kids.”

Because apparently COVID is sentient and rational. It thought about its options and decided to become dangerous to kids in an exercise of free will.

So the Putinoid plant apparently won the presidential election in Peru and will now proceed to turn Peru into another Venezuela.

Venezuela was destroyed because it had oil. Peru will be destroyed because it has minerals. Of course, the people who keep voting for these bastards are to blame but it still hurts.

Every year when the heat comes, it takes my body 7-10 days to adapt. Until it happens, I feel sluggish, somnolent, slow, stupid, and sick (but still capable of alliteration).

Then I adapt and it gets better.

This is why I’m not brimming with profound insight at the moment. I’m just trying to get through the day.

This is an assignment given in the public schools in my state:

This is precisely what I mean when I say that today’s leftism equals austerity. This smug, Soviet-style garbage is given to children in lieu of normal education. A friend’s kid is in a local public high school. This is what kids are taught in every subject. Business, art, mathematics – it’s all this.