Today at the Editor’s glance: This is the Monday of the year that has no business existing. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a week of Sundays. Except for retailers, where the rage of materialism rages on. There, shop floors turn stock exchange for the masses as shitty gifts are exchanged for shittier ones (a gift is redeemed by the thought behind it; an item received in exchange is redeemed by nothing more than grasping). Nevertheless, would you believe court is in session? Circuit Judge Terence Perkins has a list of arraignments as long as the roster at Angola prison, and even a sentencing. Cheer up, defendant: it’s a deferred prosecution agreement, the first step to having your charges dismissed–if you behave: the defendant is being released on his own recognizance to a recovery center for drug treatment. Still astounding that in 2021, verging on 2022, we are criminalizing drugs as wantonly as we did when Nixon declared his crusade, as futile then as Peter the Hermit’s against Muslim heathens a millennium ago.
Now this:
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“After all, it wasn’t Black music that Motown’s founder and chief architect, Berry Gordy, had envisioned. 4 He wanted what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk wanted: to make American music. Jazz artists of previous generations had strived, for years, to redefine the all-purpose “American” label, only to realize that their Blackness had been made incompatible with Americanness. The white inventors of race understood that in order for them to remain triumphant atop the mountain, somebody else had to stay put at its feet. But we’re talking about paradoxes here. Conscripting jazz to the category of “Black music” just made white people all the hungrier for it.”
–From “Music,” by Wesley Morris, in “The 1619 Project,” ed. Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021).
Jim says
Pretty accurate, except that he lives on a yacht and drives a Maserati. I guess the rest of us can just eat cake.