Weekend Things, S01E11
The global awfulness outbreak continues more or less unabated, so let’s just take a moment, or a day, to appreciate the fabulousness of Michelle Obama, marvel at Katie Ledecky (thanks Peter Collingridge), be hopeful about a new dementia vaccine and fall in love with Kate McKinnon.
Ever since it was announced, the new Ghostbusters film has attracted all sorts of utterly ridiculous blowback from moronic man-babies who feel wounded that in this edition, the Ghostbusters are all women. This week, Twitter fiiiiinally banned Milo Yiannopoulos, a conversative tech journalist, troll, and utter shit-head, for his part inciting a campaign of racist and sexist abuse directed at one of the stars of the film, Leslie Jones.
Laurie Penny, an “unfriend” of the odious Milo, accompanied him to a Queers for Trump event during the Republican National Convention and wrote about it in I’m With the Banned. Every single sentence of this article made me feel more sick and anxious about the near future than the one before it. “Weaponised insincerity” is a useful phrase.
I have come to believe, in the course of our bizarro unfriendship, that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete — not even in free speech. The same is reportedly true of Trump, of people like Ann Coulter, of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: They are pure antagonists unencumbered by any conviction apart from their personal entitlement to raw power and stacks of cash.
The awful people are winning 2016.
Let’s take a breath and contemplate what it would be like to live in a nice remote lake house in rural Ontario, for example, or to spent a weekend in this Californian guest house. Wouldn’t that be better than obsessively refreshing Twitter? (I need a break; this weekend we’re heading to Sea Ranch for a few days, and I hope there’s no internet whatsoever.)
Tony Schwartz ghost-wrote The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump, and I guess he’s regretting it. This week he said a bunch of unflattering things to the New Yorker about Trump’s personality and credibility, and now Trump’s threatening to sue. This would be an amusing side-show if it weren’t for the oh-my-god-he’s-going-to-be-President-isn’t-he problem.
Zadie Smith’s Brexit diary. I was slightly uncomfortable when Smith speculated about the motives of one of her London neighbors, who seemed to resist the possibility of a relationship between them:
I didn’t know how to penetrate what I felt was the fear and loathing she seemed to have for me, not because I was black — I saw her speaking happily with the other black mothers — but because I was middle class. She had seen me open the shiny black door to the house opposite her housing project, just as I had seen her enter the project’s stairwell each day.
Maybe Zadie Smith’s daughter bites, and that’s why the woman didn’t their children to be friends! Maybe she was worried that Zadie Smith would write about her in the New York Review of Books! Of course, this is Smith’s background too — the anecdote is really a way of channeling her own class anxieties, and she’s almost painfully aware of her own tendency to paranoia, but it reads oddly.
It reminded me a little of that cringe-inducing Elliot Perlman story at one of the early Wheeler Centre gala nights, during which he basically fantasized the reasons behind an immigrant’s decision to eat lunch in his car (I know).
Big week for the Paypal Mafia: Elon Musk reveals his next ten year plan for Tesla, while Peter Thiel gets up on stage to support Trump at the Republican National Convention.
I’m not sure if I share Musk’s vision for the future, and he probably overstates the degree to which he’s executed his last ten year plan, but at least he’s a creative, mostly positive force. Thiel, on the other hand, is just a terrible person.
Roald Dahl’s stories for adults are still among my favorites, although it’s been a while since I last read them. The New Yorker reflects on what makes them so good.
