Friday Round-Up of Reads and Listens
Should Biden give a speech on abortion? New music from Thursday, and more.
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Today’s post is a round-up of some of my favorite writing (and music) from this week. Please check out the links below, and be sure to follow the writers and musicians responsible for them.
Over at The Handbasket, Marisa Kabas makes a strong case for why President Biden should issue a primetime address on abortion rights. I think it makes a lot of sense politically and morally to contrast his position with that of Donald Trump.
“Biden should do a primetime address on abortion” (The Handbasket, Marisa Kabas, 4/12/24)
Now is the time for Biden to put aside any personal misgivings and focus on the greater good. Now is the time for Biden to draw clear lines that say: “In a second Biden term, abortion will be legal in as much as the country as possible. In a second Trump term, it will be illegal for millions of Americans.”
The best part about this approach, for Biden at least, is that he doesn’t actually have to modulate his personal views at all. He’ll be able to distinguish himself from Trump just by stating facts backed up by history. Trump has no such history to fall onto, and quite the contrary: Despite his Wednesday assurances that he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban, no one in their right mind believes him. Abortion access is as safe with Trump as it would be with the ghost of Phyllis Schlafly.
Biden has come out strong this week, releasing an ad featuring Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who has denied an abortion and nearly died shortly after the procedure was banned in her state. Zurawski has become one of the faces of the crisis. At the end of the ad, text flashes across the screen that says: “Donald Trump did this.”
At his great
newsletter, W. Kamau Bell has some smart criticism about Fox News host Jesse Watters and Watters’ smug dismissal of fast food workers as somehow being overpaid. Check it out.“Jesse Watters Doesn't Add Up” (W. Kamau Bell asks, ‘Who’s With Me?’, W. Kamau Bell, 4/11/24)
So Jesse Watters says to the crew …
“If you’re making $20 an hour to work at a fast food restaurant… is that six figures??”First of all, if my nine year old kid said that, I would be like, “Okay, let’s stop right there. Lemme get some paper and a pencil.”
But Patrick Bet-David quickly tells him that $20 an hour at 40 hours a week is $40,000 a year. That would be for 50 weeks. Apparently Bet-David is assuming people who work for $20 an hour also want two unpaid weeks off. At that wage, I don’t think you can afford two unpaid weeks off.
Then Jesse resets himself like an old PC computer that you won for free in a raffle in 1998, and he says…
“Okay, then if your husband or wife is also there… you’re making $100,000 as a family.”
WHEW! This pile of human goo and hair products couldn’t do the math of 40,000 + 40,000. If my nine year old daughter got that wrong I would ask for a meeting with her teacher. Seriously, I just asked her after I typed this. She immediately said, “80,000.” When I told her that I asked her because an adult couldn’t do that math she said, “Well… that’s just… something.” Like me, she starts with diplomacy.
Jesse is corrected AGAIN, and he is told that the actual number is $80,000. At that point Jesse demonstrates the only skill that he has - his inability to feel shame. He continues to make the (stupid) point that he was going to make anyway. He wants to make sure he dies on the hill that people who make $20 an hour to work at fast food restaurants are making too much money. Again, he makes this point, even though his math is literally not math-ing. All over social media I see talk of “girl math.” Well, this is MAGA math.
One of my absolute favorite bands since high school has been this post-hardcore/punk/rock/whatever-you-want-to-call-them group of guys called Thursday. I just love them, and what’s even better is that they’re fantastic human beings to boot. Last night, they released their first new music in 13 years, and I wanted to share that with all of you.
please never try
to see it through
and I’ll try
to stay, too
Speaking of Thursday, their guitarist Norman Brannon (who was also of the really great band Texas is the Reason) writes anti-matter, a hardcore punk magazine that now exists as a Substack. He recently wrote a really beautiful post about Donna Lee Parsons, who ran Rat Cage Records in the 1980s, and being queer in the hardcore community. Even if none of this is usually your jam, I think it’s worth checking out.
“True Trans Soul Rebel” (anti-matter, Norman Brannon, 4/2/24)
I’ve often said that the history of LGBTQ+ people in the hardcore scene is like the history of LGBTQ+ people everywhere: We are sometimes hidden and often erased. These days, it seems almost normal to start one’s public life as an out queer or trans person, but for most of recorded history, this was simply not the case. Whether we struggled in private or in front of the world, the outcomes have varied to the extent that there will always be some things we may never know about the people who came before us. That’s because while many of us did eventually come out—as queer, as trans, or in some other way—many of us didn’t. Some of us had “traditional” marriages and kids. Some of us struggled with gender dysphoria our entire lives. Some of us died naturally. Many of us killed ourselves.
As it turns out, Donna Lee Parsons was always hiding in plain sight. Kenny Klein, an older New York fixture who was there, describes Donna as “a brilliant character, who became well known in the East Village scene not only for Mouth of the Rat and Rat Cage Records, but also for wearing his girlfriend’s dresses while recklessly skateboarding along Avenue A, narrowly avoiding drag queen death under the wheels of speeding cars.”
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of baseball. And as you may know, I’ve highlighted some of the chaos that’s come with the roll-out of some less-than-stellar new uniforms for this MLB season. Over at his UniWatch Substack, Paul Lukas has a really great post about blame and the perception of reality that goes beyond just baseball. It’s interesting!
“What the MLB Uniform Fiasco Says About How We Process Reality” (UniWatch, Paul Lukas, 4/12/24)
As we all know by now, the rollout of Major League Baseball’s new uniforms has been a disaster. I recently responded to that disaster by writing an open letter to Nike, because their design changes are the source of most of the problems. I followed up a week later by writing an open letter to MLB, because they are reportedly the source of one particular problem, plus they signed off on all Nike’s design changes.
I did not write an open letter to Fanatics, which is manufacturing the uniforms at their Pennsylvania factory, because, as far as I can tell, Fanatics is not responsible for most of the problems we’re seeing. This same factory, with the same equipment and the same staff, produced MLB’s on-field uniforms last year, and the year before that, and for many years prior. So nothing has changed on the production side. And the factory has been owned by Fanatics since 2017, so nothing has changed on the ownership side either. The changes have come from the design side, because Nike has rolled out a new tailoring template, new jersey fabric, standardized lettering sizes, and more. As I’ve tried to explain in a series of blog posts, Fanatics is simply following the design specs that they’ve been given (just like they did last year, and the year before that, and so on).
Here’s yet another music-themed post for you. This one, from Chris Dalla Riva, is about how “selling out” used to be the worst thing a band could do. Now, it’s been destigmatized, but remains out of reach. Give it a read.
“Let Me Be a Sellout” (Can’t Get Much Higher, Chris Dalla Riva, 4/11/24)
The discourse around Beyoncé’s latest album Cowboy Carter has been nothing short of astonishing. I’ve not only seen people reacting to the album, but I’ve seen people reacting to how other people are reacting to the album. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also people reacting to the reactions. Regardless, I think one of the most fascinating things about this album has nothing to with the album itself but rather how the first single was announced, namely a Verizon commercial during the Super Bowl.
You might not think this is that strange. Global superstar partners with a billion-dollar corporation. Makes sense. But it got me thinking about how we are so far from the notion of caring about if a musician sells out that it’s not really even possible to do so anymore. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack.
Thanks for reading!
Jesse Watters is such an idiot. The Daily Show had a clip of his performative outrage over Trans Visibility Day, him claiming it was a blasphemy against the sacred tradition of Easter, "When Jesus died, or was resurrected, or whatever." Ah yes, our sacred tradition of, you know, that thing, the... whatever.
In an address to the nation about abortion, Biden needs to make one thing clear. "I am a practicing Catholic and my church is against abortion. But my support for reproductive freedom is based on my further belief that I have no right to insist that others who do not share my religion be forced to follow its beliefs. I would never counsel a relative to get an abortion, but I would also never deny her the right to make the choice herself."
He obviously has to refute the bit about "full term" abortions, not to mention "executing" newborns. Roe did NOT authorize "full term abortions." It merely held (along with Casey) that until the fetus reached viability it didn't have "rights" that were greater than those of the mother to make her own choices. AFTER viability, states could make laws that BALANCED the rights of the fetus and mother, but did not privilege the former over the latter: each case would be individually decided between doctor and patient. So as long as a state passed an "anti abortion" law dealing with post-viability fetuses, those would be consitutional so long as that balancing was allowed.