Dispatches From the Culture Wars – December 5, 2023
- The Comic Book Bard Who Saved Brazil
- Israel, Palestine and Politics
- Florida High School Students Walk Out for Trans Rights
- History is a Battlefield
- Women Held the SAG-AFTRA Strike Together
- The Fall of an Arizona Border Wall
- Thinking About Free Speech
- It’s Hard Down Here for a MAGAt
- Kids Tell Moms for Liberty to Eff Off
- Remembering Amber Hollibaugh
The Comic Book Bard Who Saved Brazil
By Rich Johnston
Bleeding Cool
“This journalist was saying that I do have apparently quite a big following in Brazil. And would I write a letter explaining why everybody should vote for Lula rather than Bolsonaro to end fascism in Brazil forever? ... I wrote this letter that started dearest Brazil and I really wrote my heart out. Apparently he sent it to da Silva and da Silva posted it... and got in by a very very narrow margin.”
Israel, Palestine and Politics
- Left and Right By Avishay Artsy, Vox
- AIPAC Being AIPAC By Amos Barshad, The Lever
- Gaza and the Memory of the Holocaust By Enzo Traverso, Verso Books
- Zionism and the Great Denial By Dylan Saba and Darryl Li, The Baffler
- How to Read the Israeli “Kidnapped” Posters By Greg Grandin, The Intercept
Florida High School Students Walk Out for Trans Rights
By Richard Luscombe
The Guardian
Hundreds of students at a south Florida high school walked out of lessons on Tuesday in support of a principal and senior staff who were reassigned for reportedly violating Ron DeSantis’s law on transgender athletes. The students staged a short protest on school grounds at lunchtime, many wearing pink clothes and carrying placards with messages including “Free Cecil” and “Let her play.”
- Texas Myths By Henry Gass, The Christian Science Monitor
- D. W. Griffith’s Distorted Lens By Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch
Women Held the SAG-AFTRA Strike Together
By Cynthia Littleton
Variety
Some did it out of a sense of obligation. Some did it out of fear of being idle. Some leaned on maternal instinct, and some acted purely out of anger. Whatever the motivation, female writers and showrunners stepped up in record numbers to serve as strike captains during the Writers Guild of America’s five-month contract battle.
The Fall of an Arizona Border Wall
By Makepeace Sitlhou, Trilce Estrada Olvera and Hakob Karapetyan
Yes!
The Arizona governor used his office to invoke an executive order that authorized the state to build a border wall on federal land to “mitigate the disaster” of migrant influx. A resistance movement spread through traditional word of mouth, and thus the crowd of local activists, artists, and concerned citizens grew by the day.
By Lorna Finlayson
New Left Review
The most vociferous opponents of ‘cancel culture’ have been strangely silent – or worse – in recent weeks on the suppression of speech in support of the Palestinians or critical of Israel. ‘Free speech’ has a political function. Elaborate twists, somersaults and pirouettes are performed to make this most sacrosanct of freedoms do the bidding of those who invoke it.
It’s Hard Down Here for a MAGAt
By Amanda Marcotte
Salon
Men who love Donald Trump struggle on the dating market. This is neither surprising nor regrettable. Supporting Trump is a repugnant habit that makes you repulsive to normal people. Yet our sexist culture remains too enamored by stories of female self-sacrifice to accept that it's just fine if Trump voters never get laid.
Kids Tell Moms for Liberty to Eff Off
By Chris Walker
Truthout
Students at a school in the Seattle Public School District sent a batch of letters to Moms for Liberty, encouraging the recognized hate group to end its crusade against LGBTQ people. Instead, the organization blasted the school in a social media post that included images revealing the school’s address, and falsely claimed that the letters were part of a classroom curriculum that was “indoctrinating” students.
By JoAnn Wypijewski
The Nation
Amber Hollibaugh, a self-described “lesbian sex radical Marxist ex-hooker incest survivor rural Gypsy working-class poor white trash high femme dyke”, spent a lifetime breaking silences around sex, insisting that not only is ecstasy fundamental to human being but that any political movement that fails to grasp the totality of people’s complex desiring lives will never achieve the goal of liberation.