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Article: Living in a Trailer [longform.org]

Living in a Trailer [longform.org]
http://holidaymag.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/living-in-a-trailer-by-james-jones-july-1952/

A big, gentle, bearlike man, he lived with his wife and three small daughters in a big thirty-three-foot Spartan. He had lived and taught in the same small town in Minnesota all his life, until he got the idea that he didn't know enough about his own country to teach. It oppressed him so much that he finally quit his job and sold his home, packed his family in the trailer, and started out to see the country. He would teach a couple of years in one place and then move on and teach a couple in another. Sometimes he had trouble getting teaching jobs because he lived in a trailer. When he did, he took other jobs. His family loved it all as much as he did; they were seeing the country too. I think he taught civics. But it was probably "Philosophy-Made-Understandable-for-Teen­-Agers" when he got through with it. When I knew him, he had just gotten a job teaching after six months of pushing a concrete buggy on a construction job and was filled with an intense enthusiasm for the build­ing trades and the people who worked in them.

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His friends had finally gotten Mr. Breitbart to leave the National Reviewparty, which was at members-only club in downtown St. Paul and where despite his self-proclaimed outsider status Mr. Breitbart seemed to know half the room. Next stop: the National Journal party in Minneapolis.

"It's a really exciting thing to find out that they exist," he continued. "And to then take on those people that created an environment that you had to be that hidden about your point of view in this country. You know this is America and to find out that the artists that don't reflect the hard left are intimidated. There's a parallel, and absolute parallel in American academic institutions. Try and find a conservative on a college campus. Try and find somebody who's read Hayek on a college campus. There are provably false political tracks that are taught to this day. Marx, you know, to this day is read 100 to 1 over Adam Smith if that. So Academia and Hollywood, wherever you get the hard left you get totalitarianism, and wherever you get that there's a great romance in the rebellion against it."


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d davos man

The most essential variable may be one that Schwab introduced unwittingly. In Davos, he established a setting for a perpetually subdividing game of status, a minuet of subtle distinctions. There is something almost Warholian in his apparent guilelessness. (Just substitute Tom Friedman, Shimon Peres, and Larry Summers for Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Rotten Rita.) The anxiety of exclusion pervades. It is the natural complement to the euphoria of inclusion. The tension between self-celebration and self-doubt engenders a kind of social electricity. It is one of those places, like New Orleans, where you may find that you hardly need sleep. After twenty-four frantic hours, I felt as though I had unwittingly walked into an Ecstasy party—why did all these people keep touching each other? (Not literally: collegial as everyone may be, I saw one hug all week, and it was an ironic one.) It's not the whisper of conspiracy as much as it is the thrum of mutual regard—of proximity to power, money, and expertise. But insecurity sets it all alight.

d davos man


People like to project onto Davos their fears and fantasies about the way the world works. Right-wingers see insidious, delusional liberalism, in its stakeholder ethos and its pretense of world improvement. They picture a bunch of Keynesians, Continentals, and self-dealing do-gooders participating in some kind of off-the-books top-down command-control charade. Left-wingers conjure a plutocratic cabal, a Star Chamber of master puppeteers, the one per cent—or .01 per cent, really—deciding the world's fate behind a curtain of heavy security and utopian doublespeak. The uninvited, the refuseniks, and even many of the participants see a colossal discharge of hot air, a peacock strut. They all deploy, with a sneer, the term Davos Man, coined by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, who decried a post-national wealthy globe-trotting élite. Davos Man can be either a capitalist oppressor or a Commie conspirator. Either way, he is a windbag, a pedant, and a hypocrite. Businesspeople who have never been to Davos find many ways to be dismissive of it: "I can't do business there." "It's too political." "It's not what it used to be." The translation may be that that person has not been invited. Non-businesspeople assume the same. "Solipsistic wankers," one person wrote me. "Kill the bastards," wrote another.

Article: Modern Family [longform.org]

Modern Family [longform.org]
http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201111/polyandry-plural-families?printable=true

Nowhere was this truer than at Eamon's birth. The two men aided Jaiya in a natural, "orgasmic" labor in an outdoor hot tub that lasted 20 hours—with Jon sitting behind her at one point, massaging her anus and feeding her, and Ian in front massaging her nipples and clitoris, until at last Eamon passed into this world through one long climax while the Santa Anas blew and a pack of stallions whinnied nearby. Jon and Ian are two men who have shared one of the most intimate moments imaginable. They see each other every day. But at brunch, they speak in turn to Jaiya—never to each other. They rarely make eye contact.

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Article: Why Women Aren’t Funny [letsgetcritical.org]

Why Women Aren't Funny [letsgetcritical.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701?currentPage=all

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren't that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she's just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)

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Article: The Recruiters’ War [longform.org]

The Recruiters' War [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/09/recruiters200509.print

One of Sergeant Eriksen's more outrageous fraudulent enlistments, he recalled, involved advising a young recruit to explain away a long, zigzagging abdominal scar by telling the doctors at MEPS that he'd fallen off his bike. In reality, he'd fallen off a ladder and caught his stomach on a jagged piece of metal. It lacerated his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery. He also fractured his skull, suffering a major concussion and losing all sense of taste and smell. "He would have been absolutely disqualified," Eriksen said. "I knew the doc would try and disqualify him just from looking at that scar." With the bike story, however, it would be the recruit's word against the doctor's. "By then I was so used to the game I said, 'Look, here's the deal. You say this: This is how it happened. This is when it happened. This is the hospital I went to.'" Eriksen said he gave the recruit a letter from a local hospital that destroys its records after several years so the recruit could explain why he had no records of being treated for the "bike accident." Did the screeners at MEPS really fall for that? I asked. "They knew," he said. "Come on. The counselors [at MEPS] are all ex-recruiters and station commanders. They all know. It's a great big game. Everybody knows. Nobody says." The recruit involved, who served two and a half years, confirmed this story to me.

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