Posted on 03/13/2019 3:24:17 PM PDT by Rummyfan
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, asked staff writer Lawrence Wright to “explain Texas.” Why would Wright choose to live there? “I hope this book,” says Wright, “answers the question.” But the book—God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State—does not explain Texas. It does not even explain why Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker chooses to live in Texas, a question of limited interest. It is not, as it proposes to be, a meditation on the culture and politics of Texas and their influence on the wider American scene. It is an overflowing slop-bucket of ignorance, laziness, and snobbery in the shape of a book.
The structure of the work will be familiar to those obliged to read books produced by columnists and broadcast-media figures: a series of mostly disconnected essays and vignettes repackaged as a monograph, lightly stitched up with newly written connective material and punctuated every fourth page or so by something the author doesn’t realize is hilariously stupid or obviously wrong. As with chainsaw sculpture, the process leaves its mark on the product: columns and essays are arranged in a particular order and then written through (sometimes by the author, often by a junior editor) two or three times until the recycled material smells fresh enough to put a cover and title on. Wright has spent decades writing about the politics and personalities of Texas, and this book is a kind of greatest-hits album underneath a thin wash of the now-familiar indignant moral hysteria induced in the NPR crowd by the Age of Trump.
(Excerpt) Read more at claremont.org ...
Sounds to me we won’t be dropping an eyeball on the Costco book tables for this one when next we go.
They did mention that Austin ain’t Texas.
More that they do not want to I believe.
Excellent review. Williamson gets it.
Austin is not Texas
“It is an overflowing slop-bucket of ignorance, laziness, and snobbery in the shape of a book.”
That sounds a lot like the Trump-despising Kevin Williamson’s own essay about the white working class Americans whom he also despises.
Williamson is one reason, along with Jonah Goldberg, why the once proud National Review needs to go out of business.
“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/02/06/white-working-class-move/
“For the past year or so, I have been involved in an on-again/off-again debate with a number of conservatives of the “paleo” tendency, Michael Brendan Dougherty prominent among them, on the question of what to do about economically stagnant and socially dysfunctional communities. This has taken place in the context of the election year’s attention to what we euphemistically call the “white working class” (its main problem is that it is not working) and its attraction to Donald Trump’s anti-capitalist populism. The answer I have come up with — that people should leave those communities, if they can, and seek better lives for themselves elsewhere — has scandalized some of my friends on the right.
1. The two people who really drag down NR these days are Conrad “Delusional ex-con” Black and Victor Davis “Get off My Lawn” Hansen.
2. If you choose to sit around depressed in your dying home town complaining about being an oppressed victim, you have more problems than some mill closing.
Guess you weren’t a Trump voter, eh?
I like getting Lone Star in the bottle and solving the puzzles.
Wow. I understand what he means about the twisted logic of trying to prop up businesses which can no longer make a profit on their own. But blaming the drug scene on lower class whites is just weird. Sounds like he has a blind side there.
To paraphrase an old sayin.....
“When Texas needs an enema”....We'll stick it in Austin!!
You’re not a real Texan until you’ve drank a can of Lone Star after it’s rolled around under the seat of your truck until all the paint’s knocked off.
I happen to enjoy Conrad Black, Kevin Williamson, and especially Victor Davis Hanson.
Yes, but you were also a Rummy fan.
Still am!
[smiley face emoji]
” But blaming the drug scene on lower class whites is just weird. Sounds like he has a blind side there.”
It’s a testament to his utter lack of Christian charity and reasoning. A moral state common among libertarians, whose ‘religion’ is the flip side of the very same materialism worshipped by the adherents of Marx.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never cared for Jonah Goldberg either
For what it’s worth, I’ve never cared for Jonah Goldberg either
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