Weekend Recommendations
On David Sirota's terrific new podcast and other suggestions.
On the cusp of weekend I wanted to share two works that have nourished my mind and heart.
The Long Shadow of 2008
I’ve long felt that we’ve yet to come to terms with how the economic meltdown of 2008 and the flawed response are at the root of contemporary political discord. All over the world, right-wing authoritarian movements have gained traction after the mainstream politics showed themselves unequal to the challenges of the great recession.
Which is why I’m grateful for Meltdown, a new podcast by reporter David Sirota and documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney available here. The series meticulously traces how a bipartisan failure to protect those most harmed by the recession coupled with a willful refusal to prosecute powerful individuals responsible for the economic collapse created the current crisis of democracy. As Sirota notes, “the meltdown of 2009 is this generation’s pivotal moment. Not the bank failures or the stock market crash in 2008. Those were obviously disasters. But the political disaster that came after. Our government stopped working for its citizens during a moment of profound crisis. We need to unbury this moment, to reexamine it. Because the failure of government then gave us the world we live in now.”
The series has Sirota’s characteristic tough-mindedness and willingness to criticize political allies if the truth requires it. It confronts uncomfortable facts that need to be understood and acknowledged if any progress is to be made. It’s all the more urgent given the fact that 2021 is shaping up to be a lot like 2009, with an unstable Democratic coalition confronted problems passing policies need to solve deep-seated economic problems.
Her Father, the Catholic Priest
The poet Patricia Lockwood had an unusual childhood, to put it mildly. Her father was a Catholic priest. Not that he did anything untoward. Rather he married his wife, became a Luther pastor and then, on his completing his faith journey’s convolutions, converted to Catholicism. In her memoir Priestdaddy, Lockwood recalls leafing through a photo album and seeing, “A picture of my father standing at the altar in a lamb-white robe, ready to accept an unseen blessing and enter his life as I have always known it: an oddity, an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. Catholic priests, by definition, aren’t allowed to be married, but my father snuck past the definition while the dictionary was sleeping and was somehow ordained anyway. An exception to the rules, before I ever understood what the rules were. A human loophole, and I slipped through him into the world.”
Priestdaddy is one of those books you can’t help but share. If you live with someone, you’ll find yourself reading passages of it aloud. It’s funny and also heartfelt. I’ve already enjoyed Lockwood as a poet and literary critic. It’s been enormous fun to discover she’s also a wonderful memoirist.
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"I’ve long felt that we’ve yet to come to terms with how the economic meltdown of 2008 and the flawed response are at the root of contemporary political discord"
....and then a black president got elected, which almost half of America viewed as a disaster because he tried to govern by bipartisan consensus instead of by Right wing Fiat... Then in 2016 the pendulum again swung back towards Hobbesian Reality while also swinging towards a Machiavellian modus operandi in the Trump years.. Democracy started to erode because Democracy is a government by consensus in its most protean design.