We were warned

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem in the Dec. 15 London Review of Books:

...Are we to reach out to the Trump voter in tender empathy for their fear and pain, which is surely experienced as real, yet was partly cultivated by lies? Or should we do so out of cynical realpolitik (we need those states)? They’ve smashed themselves in the face again, electing this craven, gold-plated Ponzi-capitalist. But they’ve smashed us in the face too. Perhaps all empathy should be nipped in the bud, in righteous condemnation of the racist and sexist complicity---the betrayal of American idealism! of American exceptionalism!---reflected in a Trump vote. 

Anyhow we’re pretty sure that, taking account of lynchings, internments, black ops, waterboarding, drones, inequities, America was never great to begin with. The clearest evidence is also the nearest to hand: all the intolerant voters in the woodwork. This is our Naked Lunch, then, in William Burroughs’s words, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork"...

When the time comes, we’ll all report ourselves to the registry as Muslim: since we’re all Spartacus around here, that’s the way we roll. Sanctuaries for the persecuted are being readied, as well as vibrant protests; we’re scheming from within our own woodwork, from under the floorboards, and trust me, we’ll be heard from. I could tell you more, but then I’d have to, you know, empathise with you.

Such mania is the only antidote to despondency and disassociation, but, really, we’re taking both the poison and the antidote in one cocktail on a daily ‘hair of the dog that bit me’ basis. We should have known, of course. We were warned by Richard Rorty in 1998:

Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for---someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

Scott Wiener undermines local control on housing

Scott Wiener

From the Berkeley Daily Planet:

Local control of development now threatened in California

by Zelda Bronstein

January 13, 2017

2017 is already shaping up as a year in which local control of development will come under unprecedented assault in California and in the Bay Area in particular.

We have rookie State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 35, submitted only a few hours after Wiener was sworn in to office on December 5. Still in placeholder form, the measure would put legal teeth into the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation and force cities to “meet” the allocation allotted to them by the state. This radical proposal—as Tim Redmond has observed, it could set off a housing war—did not appear on Wiener’s campaign website, nor, to my knowledge, did he ever mention it on the campaign trail.

And now a new, Bay Area-centric attack on local control is on the way, via the Association of Bay Area Governments’ proposal to have the U.S. Economic Development Administration certify our region as a federal Economic Development District (EDD). Planning for this initiative began in June 2015, when ABAG staff broached the idea to the agency’s Executive Board and Regional Planning Committee...

Rob's comment:

Wiener has always been an elitist, though his intellectual credentials are questionable. See Supervisor Wiener: Worst city legislator---again

The art of restoration

The Metropolitan Museum of Art restores a painting by Diego Velasquez:

From this...

...to this

From the NY Times: Velázquez’s Infinite World in a Handful of Portraits