State of the Discussion

The next few lines too, which I love for how they render the mess of us.

...
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.

And a part of you,
For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.

What strikes me about that part of the speech, though, is that it says the exact opposite of what they will try to spin it as saying.

Oh yes. I'm tempted to say "subtlety is not their strong point" but in reality, basic comprehension is not their strong point. Nor would it be the first time they spun something as precisely the opposite of what it actually is. (Or the second, or third, or fifteenth.)

“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”

seems like this is not too far from the original meaning of "woke", and the related "overstand" from black American culture.

you're alert and aware of the situation. you're not hiding from the truths that make it what it is. that gives you some power to change things.

Fletcher - (Give it five minutes or so, and you’ll hear US Republicans zeroing in on a single word in that entire speech — communist — and firing up their outrage engines accordingly.)

I'm sure you are correct. It saves their listeners the burden of checking out the speech for themselves and trying to make sense of it.

What strikes me about that part of the speech, though, is that it says the exact opposite of what they will try to spin it as saying. Carney is mentioning Havel's greengrocer as a way of saying that he's no longer signaling compliance. He's not calling for quiet, Czech-like endurance, he wants more active resistance.

We all get that because we can read (or listen). The RW pundits' purpose, though, is twofold: to keep their listeners from seeking it out for themselves, and to spread their misrepresentation widely enough and repeat it enough times that they can game the AI bots into giving their disinformation more prominence and make it seem reasonable and valid.

Michael Cain - I think Carney is talking about Canada's energy reserves in order to set them up as an alternative. He's basically outlining the game theory of multilateral and iterative trade as an antidote to the US strategy of All Prisoners Dilemma All The Time. I think it's a plea for the middle people to look to each other and isolate the bullies.

wj - as far as future histories go, John Shirley's Eclipse Trilogy is by far the most on-the-nose thing I have seen as an alternative perspective from which to see our current moment, which is why it continues to scare the crap out of me. I think Paolo Bacigalupi also does an excellent job of future history, and is equally depressing.

What we really need is more gritty anti-dystopian futures, and more optimistic visions in which the world manages to choose Door #2 and it somehow works and creates a better world. Those are the works that nurture hope while we take down the signs in the window that pretend that the old stories are still working.

Is Donald Johnson the same person as Donald of yesteryear? If so, it's really good to see you back.

Here is Carole Cadwalladr on the Carney speech. She also included a transcript at the end, which I have deleted. I hope I've taken out enough links so that this won't go into moderation:

A rupture, not a transitionMark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it’s already yesterday’s news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I’d suggest it’s this.
It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world.
It’s a huge relief to have a world leader simply naming what’s happening. That is the first step. But, it actually goes further in that it calls out the “lie” of the “rules-based order” that the “rules” were for some but not all.
That’s been so abundantly proved by the global response to what’s happening in Gaza but it’s also not an outlier. America has been the world’s policeman and sometimes that’s looked less like a Victorian bobby on the beat and more like a beat-the-shit-out-of-you ICE officer and calling that out is a refreshing blast of honesty.
He begins it with the story of a shopkeeper living under Communism from a book by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident turned President. The news reports focussed on what Carney said about NATO’s article five but it’s what he has to say about truth that’s even more urgent and important.

“Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

"Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

“So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

“This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

The end of the speech includes a call back to the Havel story:

“We are taking a sign out of the window.

“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”

“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending…”I lived in then-Czechoslavakia in 1990. It was less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, and inevitably I read a lot of Havel. I’ve been thinking about that time recently, not least because of the great historical fortune I had to be young and free in a hugely exciting moment in which the world was literally opening up before us.
So exciting that I took a year out of my degree to go and teach English to a bunch of sports journalists who worked for the newspaper affiliated with Havel’s party.
It’s why I found Carney’s choice of story so interesting because I suspect that the book that this is taken from, The Power of the Powerless, is a text that is going to increasingly speak to us in the months and years to come.
Words matter.
That’s one of the central points of Havel’s essay. And also the outcome of it. After its publication in 1978, his idea that “living in truth” was both a radical and an achievable act reverberated across Eastern and Central Europe. This account, published by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, describes its direct galavanizing impact on Polish factory workers.
We can’t respond and act to this hugely consequential geopolitical moment if we are complicit in the denial of our leaders and media. This is a week in which the world we have known has swung on its axis. We cannot simply carry on as if it’s business and normal.
It’s why Starmer’s underplayed reaction is so deeply dangerous. We can all understand why, we see the reasons clearly, but not speaking the truth, now, is deeply corrosive. That is the subtext of Carney’s speech. And there is a deep and dark hinterland behind it.
We’ve been lucky through a golden age of peace and prosperity but as he so clearly articulates, that age is gone. Ahead lies dragons.
It’s why we have to listen to these voices from the past. In my newsletter on Monday, I said that the most powerful and on point thing I’d read or heard was an interview in the New Yorker by the conservative historian Robert Kagan.
Given the inadequacy of the UK response, I emailed Robert to see if he’d speak to me about what we should be doing in this moment.
This is the impromptu Zoom call I had with him which we published in The Nerve yesterday. It’s a quick watch or listen - 17 minutes - but like Carney he names what’s happening and he’s very very clear on the risks: to both the US and Europe.

i think the US will recover from Trump pretty well. he's exposing a lot of cracks in the foundation, sure. but we've discovered and fixed a lot of such cracks before.

Over half a century ago, Robert Heinlein's "Future History" included a period where the United States was in the grip of a totalitarian theocracy. Sadly, the only part he seems to have missed was that it is not (yet) religion based. At least as far as its initial leader is concerned.** Sadly, the only question yet to be answered is how the succession will be determined.

I realize that, as the resident optimist, I should be talking about how we will bounce back once Trump leaves the scene. Certainly I hope that happens. But it's increasingly difficult to expect it. Alas, Carney is probably correct about where the world goes from here.

** Well, he also predicted the US would be totally isolationist (as in cutting off all interaction with the rest of the world) throughout this. The rest of the world, at this point, probably hopes it works out that way. And sooner rather than later.

it's shocking how fragile all of this is: that a single dimwitted blowhard like Trump could knock it all down. and that nobody in the US has both the power and the inclination to rein him in.

heckofajob, Framers.

GftNC -- he has enriched himself to the tune of $1.5 billion. Wow, brazen corruption in full view. It’s almost funny after the accusations about the Biden Crime Family:

Well, it's been true since the beginning of his first campaign for President that every accusation he made was actually a confession. This is just a small addition to an enormous pile. He simply cannot imagine that anyone would fail to exploit anyone and anything they could, just like he does.

Biden's cabinet was qualified and within normal parameters, and he at least was competent in his lucid moments. Trump's are all Project 2025 dictator wannabes and Coup Cuck Clansmen, and he himself has always been awful.

ask Grok to make you a list of all the times Biden threatened to blow up NATO because one of our allies wouldn't give us part of its territory.

Weimar was also far progressed beyond imperial Germany in cultural things (including full equal rights for minorities, in particular Jews, and full equality for women seeming just around the corner).
Then came the Nazis and after WW2 a conservative restauration under Adenauer. Women reached de jure equality not before the 1970ies (before that husbands still had veto power despite nominally equal rights as per the West German constitution).
A throwback of a half or even a full century is thus easily possible and the US reactionaries have imo a fair chance to achieve that in our lifetimes.

If you doubt that progress has been made, consider what the chances would have been, in 1960, of a major political party nominating a black man for President. Let alone of him winning. “Inconceivable” is the word.

I'm not sure how much we can bang that drum to indicate our inherent goodness. The fact that he was the first nominated (by a major political party) and went directly on to being elected makes him seem more like an outlier than a true indicator.

russell -- I’d like to think we have somehow moved past the white supremacist legacy of our history, but I don’t think we have. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of re-remembering, I don’t think it ever went away. Trump just gives it permission to come back out in the light of day.

I think that, as a nation, we are in the process of moving past it. I say "as a nation" because, while I think that more and more of us have moved past it, clearly there are still a huge number who have not. A huge but decreasing number, which is why I say "in the process." Still huge, but decreasing -- not just as a portion of the population, but as a portion of the white population. That's what has people like Miller frantic.

If you doubt that progress has been made, consider what the chances would have been, in 1960, of a major political party nominating a black man for President. Let alone of him winning. "Inconceivable" is the word.

But would we have the same time for the person who points to accepting white South Africans to the US as springing from the same sort of impulse?

No. There is no rational justification for making that case, unlike the Ukraine example.

I quickly dashed off my comment before bed, so let me expand on it a bit.

I can understand cleek's reaction, and the acceptance of Ukrainians was/is a humanitarian impulse. But would we have the same time for the person who points to accepting white South Africans to the US as springing from the same sort of impulse?

Because of the disjunction of the Trump presidency, anecdotes don't really work here. And with the example of Reagan, who I detest, perhaps the only way to move forward is to turn away from what actually happened and come up with bullshit narratives about our past and how we somehow are 'the greatest" of nations.

WRT the Toni Morrison reference in the title, her "rememory," and my research about trauma has made me aware of how "remember" can be thought of (figuratively, not as a literal etymology) as "re-membering." When we remember trauma we should be thinking about how to restore wholeness to a psyche that has lost a part of itself. It's the psyche's equivalent of an amputation. The old narrative that gave one's life continuity has been severed and a part of oneself that once seemed intrinsic has become an object outside of one's control.

This sort of figurative thinking plays into my focus on restorative justice. People and societies need to be made whole, or be remade or given back a sense of wholeness.