Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

yes, we know you are inured to the bloody Chief Executioners' deeds

quotidian murder, soooo boring, you shitbag

The irony is that Mishra several times in that piece accuses Coates of writing stuff that is only true because they are banal. But with foreign policy, 'hey, don't kill other people' is all of a sudden the deepest insight of all.

if it was good enough for Moses...

Moses killed his own nephews because they were sacrificing the wrong kind of incense...

Or something.

13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Sorry, I'm working my way through the torah at the moment :)

now who's playing an old song

jk frederik I don't really care. I did think the mishra piece was better-written and supported than a lot of the other lefty Coates critiques in this thread

Yeah, I would agree with that. It's definitely worth a read.

https://tenor.com/view/michael-jackson-ilove-this-song-gif-4463897

Here is another old song for just you, Fred:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42843897

He prevented an economic collapse and neglected t o prosecute those largely responsible for that collapse. He ended state-sanctioned torture but continued the generational war in the Middle East.

hmmm I wonder which writer wrote this in the introduction to his new collection

It's more frustration than anger this time, because the good parts of that review are really good, but then there's paragraph after paragraph that has nothing to do with Coates and could have been a part of any anti 'liberals' piece of the last few years. There's five lines on Coates, then several paragraphs on writers being pro-torture fifteen years ago.

The thing is though, the problem isn't to connect racism with Iraq and 'despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia'. The problem is to take that equation, and then connect it to Rwanda, Srebenica and Syria. Once you've done that, you've got something. And I can't do it, and neither can anyone here, I think.

jesus fucking christ

fred, could you outline a few of the things you mentioned you liked about the piece?

Well, for one he has clearly read the book... His arguments about Coates' place in history is at times almost more perceptive than Coates' own musing on it in We Were Eight Years in Power, the link to Salman Rushdie was great. But then it does seem to do almost every thing it accuses both Coates and his critics of doing once we get to the end - demanding that Coates be everything at all times in his writing, and wallowing in banal truths.

Over lunch at the White House, he assured Coates that Trump’s victory was impossible. Coates felt ‘the same’.

Damning - seven years of learning and this is where we got to? Mishra had to be joking with that last sentence.

The thing is though, the problem isn't to connect racism with Iraq and 'despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia'. The problem is to take that equation, and then connect it to Rwanda, Srebenica and Syria. Once you've done that, you've got something. And I can't do it, and neither can anyone here, I think.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, February 14, 2018 8:07 PM (fifty-two minutes ago)

what the hell does this gibberish even mean

I like that Mishra piece just for reminding of all of the horrible warmongery horseshit proffered in ostensibly liberal spaces back then, moreso than I remember

There's five lines on Coates, then several paragraphs on writers being pro-torture fifteen years ago.

tbf this is kinda the LRB/NYRB form, isn't it

it's called context

<sniff>

to be absolutely fair it's also kinda how I review movies myself.

'The Shape of Water is Benecio del Toros best film since Pans Labyrinth, perhaps even The Devils Collarbone.

Water Monsters have a long history in the seventh art...'

These radical critiques of Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to me to put more on his shoulders than any writer could possibly bear. https://t.co/AnsZFx5vnu

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 14, 2018

i have liked pankaj mishra stuff before i think but that piece is really overwritten and sloppy. trying to tie TNC to neocons in really sketchy ways like “Goldberger ... now Coates’ diligent promoter”

goldberg has been his editor at the atlantic for several years now: TNC has several times thanked him as a friend and a mentor

so the link is certainly there (and well known), whether or not not PM fills in the details

when i get a moment -- sadly probably not before the weekend -- i'm going to spell out mishra's argument, now that everyone is piling on (and none of his critics in the thread seem to me at all to be grappling with it)

PM is tying tnc to Obama, who was an elite technocrat that continued neocon policies (that we are still living with now so I don't get "old song", whether you know this stuff or not).

PM clearly likes tnc (highlights that he is a voice that is self-educated, which is very rare to see), thinks his project of self-education is of value (guessing because he has amassed readers and is taking them on a journey) and he wants to see where he goes next.

mark s, the reason I'm not grappling that much with pm's argument is because we've kind of done that a thousand times on this thread already.

There seems to be some tension in Mishra’s piece between wanting to say there’s something uniquely American about its gross projections of power both overseas and over its own disempowered minorities, and wanting to say that it’s sadly a fairly universal human phenomenon, usually limited only by lack of the ability to behave unilaterally.

goldberg has been his editor at the atlantic for several years now: TNC has several times thanked him as a friend and a mentor

so the link is certainly there (and well known), whether or not not PM fills in the details

― mark s, Thursday, February 15, 2018 5:42 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but TNC doesn't write about foreign policy (and the few exceptions where he does write about it he is critical of e.g. obama drone policy in yemen): his writing is historically-grounded analysis on race in america. mishra posits that he is 'americas preeminent public intellectual' and then makes a big deal of him not writing about FP. on twitter max said the piece was about how no one talks about iraq anymore, which is a good thesis, but why shoehorn TNC into it? only makes sense to me in the context of left writers making a sequence of halfassed attempts to slime TNC.

PM clearly likes tnc (highlights that he is a voice that is self-educated, which is very rare to see), thinks his project of self-education is of value (guessing because he has amassed readers and is taking them on a journey) and he wants to see where he goes next.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, February 15, 2018 6:30 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't get this impression at all, i hear a note of derision throughout. the paragraph is an abonimation of bad faith out-of-context misreading:

For a self-aware and independent-minded writer like Coates, the danger is not so much seduction by power as a distortion of perspective caused by proximity to it. In his account of a party for African-American celebrities at the White House in the late Obama era, his usually majestic syntax withers into Vanity Fair puffs: ‘Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number.’ Since Clinton, the reflexive distrust of high office once shared by writers as different as Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald has slackened into defensiveness, even adoration, among the American literati. Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama’s staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a ‘feeling’, that ‘this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.’ Not so incomparable if you remember Tina Brown’s description of another power couple, the Clintons, in the New Yorker in 1998: ‘Now see your president, tall and absurdly debonair, as he dances with a radiant blonde, his wife.’ ‘The man in a dinner jacket’, Brown wrote, possessed ‘more heat than any star in the room (or, for that matter, at the multiplex)’. After his visit, Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Showgirls and Basic Instinct, exulted over the Clinton White House’s diverse workforce: ‘full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics’. ‘Good Lord,’ he concluded in American Rhapsody, ‘we had taken the White House! America was ours.’

in proper context, those quotes introduce a critical and ultimately disappointed elegy (centred around race) of Obama's presidency with scenes of celebration among black comedians and musicians at the president's farewell party organized by BET

I just read that chapter in We Were Eight Years in Power and it doesn't read obeisant at all. These critics forget that Washington was the capital of the slave power, and this party written about in the last chapter is a flaunting of black elite the likes of which the nation had never seen.

otm

mishra posits that he is 'americas preeminent public intellectual' and then makes a big deal of him not writing about FP.

This is a gap (especially given that so much of the work of the President has an effect on many parts of the world in a way that almost no other country has). Hence Mishra on internationalism and the work of other black intellectuals such as CLR James.

i didn't get this impression at all, i hear a note of derision throughout.

Possibly - but I do think Mishra recognises the power of tnc's writing and that he is able to amass readers in a way that someone like Mishra has cannot.

i'll be honest with you i am sure there are a lot of good points made by people in the burgeoning "criticism of ta-nehisi coates" industry but most of it, from the left or right, parses to my ears as "you shouldn't listen to him! you should listen to me!" coates is a brilliant writer but let's not fool ourselves about the level of public discourse we're dealing with in america today.

It's also almost completely overlapping with the "Well actually, Obama sucked" industry.

who on the right cares about TNC?

"industry"

(outspoken left O critics are a pretty tiny minority AFAICT)

Yes, I am sure that rushomancy was being 172% literal about the phrase "burgeoning industry"

it's almost as if their volume is inversely proportional to the number of people who agree with them

Pankaj Mishra is Indian, and his article was in the London Review of Books. Has nothing to do with public discourse in America, and unsurprisingly, yeah, it was a lot better than usual. North American leftist discourse is an embarrassment, I agree with that fully.

north american leftist discourse == ?? jacobin, CTH, the nation, alternet, democracy now?

+ the baffler

This looks like an interesting essay:

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no4/between-obama-and-coates

Because each of these frameworks divorces racial inequality from political economy, Obama’s post-racialism and Coates’s case for reparations promote a politics that is responsible for the widening gulf between the nation’s haves and have-nots, whatever their race.

Mind. Blown. Nobody has ever written anything like this before, truly truly interesting stuff.

Mind. Blown.

I thought only Christopher Nolan's films blew your mind - a major achievement.

Once you get past the not-great introduction it makes some pretty interesting points. Saving it to finish later

I started that essay but it's like 900,000 words long, and anyway I knew Frederik would dismiss it as pointless in a sentence, so why bother, right?

I don’t know about you but ALL my open tabs get read to the end eventually, dammit

unperson - don't let Fred drag you to his level.

Once you get past the not-great introduction it makes some pretty interesting points.

― El Tomboto, 25. marts 2018 16:21 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Copy-paste or it didn't happen. I'm simply done reading about that point from the introduction, it's been done to death and it's always pushed by people who seems to have never read TNC.