five quotes (12.19.25)

it's christmas break, y'all

These stances are connected. They come from the conviction that whatever challenges the United States faces from China in the 21st century, rerunning the paradigm of the Cold War, with the traditional European allies and China in lieu of the Soviet Union, is the wrong way to do it. Not only is this paradigm inadequate to grasping the nature of the challenge from China, it also is dependent on a coherent concept of Western civilization that no longer reflects existing conditions in Europe. About that much, the National Security Strategy is clear. Yet the real shocking part of it is that the conclusions it draws about Europe also apply to the United States.

—Nathan Pinkoski, “The Real Clash of Civilization” (Compact)

Fascinating article. The first time I visited it, I could access it fine. The second time it was paywalled. Broadly, Pinkoski argues that our real civilizational clash is not with the Chinese but with a crumbling Europe. As our close political allies continue on their own paths of decadence and dissolution, the clash of civilizations morphs into a civil war.

But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.

These days, though, that dream is in tatters. Millions of people seem to have determined that Las Vegas has become corroded—its joys less accessible, its humiliations too dire. And that is precisely why I, a longtime devotee of the city, found myself at the Luxor for a three-day stint in October. If Las Vegas was truly in decline, I wanted to see for myself what had gone so wrong. And boy did I.

—Luke Winkie, “Lost Vegas” (Slate)

You will not catch me wasting any tears over the downfall of Las Vegas. I hate that city and everything it represents. However, what was most interesting about this article to me is how fittingly it serves as an example of a growing trend: destinations, hotels, resorts, and theme parks are increasingly catering their services to the wealthy and are no longer realistically middle-class options. Vegas used to be notably cheap. Today, like the fast pass at a theme park or the wealthy adults (sans children) jacking up prices at Disney, Vegas is no longer accessible to the people who used to constitute its main demographic.

This may sound like nitpicking, but it reveals a discrepancy between Plunkett’s critical approach and the way his subject thought about poetry. Frost talked and wrote about what he called a poet’s ‘freedom of the material’, the freedom to ‘move about’ within a wide range of reading, ‘to establish relations in it regardless of time and space’, to let a detail from somewhere unexpectedly remind you of a detail from somewhere else. Plunkett prefers systematic accounts of influence, structural explanations. In Memoriam is an ‘organising principle’ of A Boy’s Will; there is an underlying ‘logic of grief’ to the book. What’s odd is that significant local connections do exist. The ‘Old Yew, which graspest at the stones/That name the underlying dead’ in Tennyson’s second lyric may well, as Plunkett observes, have inspired the ‘stones out under the low-limbed tree’ that Frost pictures in ‘Ghost House’; similarly, the ‘stars’ that ‘blindly run’ in Tennyson’s third seem to return in the sightless, impassive night sky in Frost’s ‘Stars’. But it’s as if allusions of this order – the possibility that Frost might have seized, magpie-like, on single images of Tennyson’s, or had a subconscious memory of them – aren’t grand enough.

—Claire Bucknell, “Discord and Fuss” (London Review of Books)

I love this observation, not only about Frost’s poetry but about literary criticism more generally. Bear with me, if this strikes you as too niche of a genre. In today’s academy, literary criticism thrives on drawing grand theories from dubious analysis and synthesizing disparate ideas. It privileges creative, intertextual links over more modest linguistic analysis. To take the example above, it is not enough that Robert Frost read and appreciated Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam” (as you should read and appreciate it, too!), it has to become the “organizing principle”of an entire book of poems. Anyone who has trafficked in literary theory has felt this temptation. In my final semester of graduate school, I read John Gardner’s brilliant Beowulf spin-off, Grendel. There are some overt references in that novel to William Blake’s fever-dream, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I noticed those connections and tried to mine them for a deeper understanding of Grendel that added to the scholarly conversation regarding both works. It turns out, Gardner just liked Blake.

Airplanes. Sporting events. Libraries. They all seem to have been transformed into spaces only suitable for adults—adults who are comfortable with raunchy, explicit, and violent content, at that.

Take airplanes. It seems travelers are free to watch whatever content they want, often courtesy of the airline. It’s been almost three years, and my daughter still talks about the expletive-filled subtitles featured in the movie the man sitting next to her was watching on a transatlantic flight. She tried to look away, but it upset her. She was 11.

—Ashley McGuire, “Explicit Culture” (Institute for Family Studies)

Preach. I know I might be a bit precious in this complaint, but I cannot believe the movies people watch on airplanes. There is no sense of owing anyone anything. If I want to watch this movie, the girl behind me can deal with it. There is so much vulgarity everywhere in our world. And it is so childish. It’s like we’re all 12-year-old boys getting a cheap thrill out of the transgressive words in some rap song. Grow up, people, and care about how your actions affect others. We have almost finally finished off whatever modicum of decency remained to us.

So, when people like Bouie write that “what substantively seems to annoy silver is the existence of people with principles”, they’re getting it wrong. No, what annoys me is people like Richardson or Bouie who don’t understand the is-ought distinction between the world they think ought to exist — where Biden won a commanding reelection victory and Trump is in jail — and the messy political world that we’re really living in. But who, at the same time, are not particularly principled when it comes to recognizing bad behavior on their own side. And who have other poor epistemic habits, including sometimes spreading misinformation themselves. I’d have more admiration for Richardsonism if it were either ruthlessly effective at politics or meticulously clear-eyed and consistent about its principles. It often winds up somewhere in between, squaring the circle with garden-variety Democratic Party partisanship.

—Nate Silver, “What Is Heather Cox Richardsonism?” (Silver Bulletin)

Nate Silver is cool and worth reading almost purely for his taxonomies like this one. To achieve success politically, pragmatism is needed. True believers might prefer for it to be different or to wish this situation away, but it’s true. You need to build a coalition that blends the passionate and the indifferent. Silver’s critique of Richardson is that, although she mostly acts as a cheerleader for straight-blue politics, she does not seem at all interested in what would be required to persuade nonbelievers that her politics are best for our nation. It’s fun to complain about all of those racist Republicans, but it is not particularly helpful when it comes to advancing your actual agenda.