Just a couple of timely articles for you this weekend, one a pocket history of Irish Catholicism on the occasion of the pope’s visit, called It’s too late. Not even Pope Francis can resurrect Catholic Ireland by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, the other Peter Beinart’s explanation of Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt in The Atlantic. Beinart:
In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
Beinart’s thesis is that
for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies….
and he points to Fox News’s prominent coverage of the Mollie Tibbets story on the morning after the Cohen and Manfort court proceedings:
The Iowa murder … signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men.
and to Trump supporters’ revulsion at Hillary Clinton:
Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.
•••••
It promises to be a lovely pre-fall weekend in southern Appalachia, low humidity, nighttime lows below 60 (15C). Wherever you are I wish you well and I’ll leave you for the week with one more problem to chew on.
Damrak, Amsterdam.
Too much tourism:
Amsterdam edition.
Venice edition.
Prague edition.
Iceland edition. (I write about the scourge of “Puffin Shops” in Out in the Cold, too.)And it’s not just Europe. There’s the
Thailand edition.
Philippines edition,
USA edition, even an
Adelaide edition.
See you next week.
Common Sense and Whiskey 