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The Weekly Arc: April 28, 2017

Welcome to Arc’s newsletter, sent out once per week, highlighting the best and most interesting stories from around the web.

Arc Digital
Arc Digital
11 min readApr 30, 2017

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Trump’s Tax Proposal

The AP, via the White House, on Trump’s tax plan:

Trump’s First 100 Days

Under the politics section, we include lots of analyses of Trump’s First 100 Days. Don’t forget to read those.

The House GOP was kind enough to tweet out one of our pieces on this very topic:

Whatever you think of this arbitrary marker in a president’s first term, it does seem to give us a chance to make some early assessments about a presidency’s effectiveness coming out of the gate.

Confederate Monuments

Berny Belvedere:

On Monday, the city of New Orleans began the process of removing its four major Confederate monuments. …

This is a good thing.

The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson disagrees, writing Tuesday that despite assurances to the contrary, this is not about “unity or tolerance,” but about “power and politics.” …

Davidson is right to notice that, for some, the application of both kinds of censorship — toward monuments and toward speeches — stems from the same illiberal impetus. …

[But…]

I applaud New Orleans’ decision to remove — and eventually relocate — its Confederate monuments because I make a distinction between backward-looking and forward-looking monuments.

Backward-looking monuments are those specifically intended to teach the lessons of history. Forward-looking ones can also memorialize, and can reflect historical realities, but they have an additional feature that backward-looking ones do not: Forward-looking monuments promote our core values and herald American virtues.

Forward-looking monuments are those we use to proclaim what is best about us, to signal who we are and to project into the future who we will continue to be. These are the ones we canonize because embedded within them is the set of virtues we wish to continue to be associated with.

Viewing monuments this way allows for historical reflection as well as moral striving. As an approach to our national iconography, it strikes a balance between an extreme self-flagellation over our past sins (“we have always been terrible”) and an ahistorical jingoism unwilling to acknowledge any past transgression at all (“we have never been terrible”). There is value in looking back and value in looking ahead. And history, despite its association with the past, furnishes us with the symbols we need for both sorts of activity.

Museums should hold those artifacts whose original usage we find problematic today. A statue erected in a city space, on the other hand, is a paradigmatic example of a forward-looking monument — one that is supposed to herald something about us moving forward.

Another way of putting it is that some monuments are primarily pedagogical and others are primarily presentational.

Here is my thesis: For its self-presentation, America should utilize only images and symbols that promote our core values. Our iconography should embody American virtues, not challenge them. These should be the monuments we use to project into the future who and what we are striving to be.

Confederate Monuments Belong in Museums, Not Public Squares

On Monday, the city of New Orleans began the process of removing its four major Confederate monuments: a statue of…

www.weeklystandard.com

Fyre Festival of Horrors

In early March, a friend of mine texted me to ask if I wanted to be a talent producer for the Fyre Festival. I’d never heard of it, but the gig involved going to the Bahamas and being paid extremely well. So I said yes and packed my bags. The festival was supposed to be a luxury music retreat where elite millennials could mingle with “influencers” and models. Tickets cost between $1K and $125K, gourmet food and accommodations were promised. I was planning to spend the next two months working on the festival, but a mere four days after I arrived I was back on a plane to New York because the whole thing, as everyone now knows, was a complete disaster. I was briefly involved in the planning of the event and got a front-row seat to chaos.

On March 14, I flew from Miami to the island of Great Exuma to get the planning started. I was excited, at least at first. Flying in, the water looked beautiful — but I was almost immediately warned not to go near it because of a rampant shark problem. That was an omen I regrettably missed.

After we landed, we drove to the festival site to assess our goods. When we arrived, my initial reaction was “huh.” This was not a model-filled private cay that was owned by Pablo Escobar. This was a development lot covered in gravel with a few tractors scattered around. There was not enough space to build all the tents and green rooms they would need. There was not a long, beautiful beach populated by swimming pigs. There were, however, a lot of sand flies that left me looking like I had smallpox. Still, I had hope.

My job as a talent producer was to coordinate travel and on-site logistics with the artists who would be performing: Blink 182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, among others, had already signed on. I would be working with an 11-person team and a few of the festival executives. The production team was all new hires and, before we arrived, we were led to believe things had been in motion for a while. But nothing had been done. Festival vendors weren’t in place, no stage had been rented, transportation had not been arranged. Frankly, we were standing on an empty gravel pit and no one had any idea how we were going to build a festival village from scratch.

Pending disaster aside, I started working from an island rental house. I contacted the booked artists’ tour managers to start to coordinate. Almost all of them had the same question for me, which was along the lines of, “Hey … Where’s our money??” I tried to email the business manager to get an answer, who said something like “stand by” for three days in a row. By the end of the week it became clear they would not pay the people they owed.

On Wednesday, Ja Rule arrived for a “site visit.” I don’t know if he actually visited the “site” but he did spend a lot of time on a yacht, according to his Instagram. Meanwhile the event planners were holed up indoors putting together a game plan and a budget. With so little having been prepared ahead of time, the official verdict was that it would take $50 million to pull off. Planners also warned that it would be not be up to the standard they had advertised. The best idea, they said, would be to roll everyone’s tickets over to 2018 and start planning for the next year immediately. They had a meeting with the Fyre execs to deliver the news. A guy from the marketing team said, “Let’s just do it and be legends, man.”

How was Chloe Gordon, the author of this excellent New York Magazinepiece, able to discuss all of these things openly? The Fyre Festival management forgot to have her sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement!

Read the whole thing here.

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This Week In History

April 29

1954 — Jerry Seinfeld, comedian and star of one of the most successful TV shows ever, is born.

1980 — Alfred Hitchcock (b. 1899), legendary filmmaker and master of suspense, passes away.

April 30

1789 — George Washington, for many the greatest American who ever lived, is inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America.

1883 — Edouard Manet (b. 1832), celebrated French painter, passes away. Read about him and see some of his best work here.

1945 — Adolf Hitler (b. 1889), one of the worst humans to ever live, kills himself before he can be captured.

May 1

1931 — The Empire State Building opens in New York City.

May 2

1519 — Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452), one of the most brilliant all-around intellects and artistic geniuses the Western world has ever known, passes away.

2011 — Osama bin Laden (b. 1957), the architect behind the 9/11 attacks, who, like Hitler, is one of the worst humans to ever live, is killed by U.S. special forces.

May 4

1929 — Audrey Hepburn, an on-screen icon during the Golden Age of film, is born.

1979 — Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, becomes the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Quote

Alfred Hitchcock:

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

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Arc Digital
Arc Digital

Written by Arc Digital

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Arc Digital’s editorial board consists of editor in chief Berny Belvedere and senior editor Nicholas Grossman.

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