Author: James Livingston

I once had some respect for David Palumbo-Liu.  Sure, we mixed it up at Facebook, but I never doubted his intelligence or his good intentions.  Now I have to question both because he’s written a response to THE LETTER that is stupid and malicious.  It’s pasted below. DP-L makes three moves.  Each carries equally ugly doses of malice and stupidity which are in turn amplified by his own pedantry.  First he says the signatories are “celebrities thoughtlessly piling on to sign a ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting ‘Open Letter.’”  Thoughtless, ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting.  Oh, and, like dumb jocks in pads and helmets, they’re “piling on.”  They’re not people on the other side of an intellectual divide, they’re brutes.  I went through the signatories, and didn’t recognize half the names. These are celebrities?   More to the point, they’re quite diverse by any measure, race and gender to be sure but also by their political positions. Second,  DP-L claims that the letter has no cause–there are no “real events” here, he announces, no “solid facts” that would allow for genuinely open debate on the cultural crisis the signatories cite as their motive in writing.  He says this immediately after quoting an entire paragraph of worrisome incidents that any reader of Harper’s–any sentient being who doesn’t rely on FOX News–would recognize, and might well have endured. Third, most maliciously and most stupidly, DP-L turns...

Fans of Showerman** know what he knows, that cleanliness is next to Godliness, and not as if He’s your next-door neighbor to be called upon when a shortage of flour is discovered mid-recipe, while cooking, nor when a shortage of intelligence is discovered mid-life, while listening to NPR as you run out of flour, no, cleanliness is, for Showerman, just about every goddamn thing, from Alpha to Omega 3, and all the good fats in between, some of which, he is told, can be squeezed from fish, cooked or cured. Now, Showerman believes in the blues as the place where the pentatonic scale, the root of African and Celtic music, met on the desolate soulscape of the American South, Faulkner’s home field, where enslaved Africans and Scots-Irish immigrants congregated and found common aural ground, inventing a music that, in time, became the soundtrack of liberation. But Showerman does not believe in the blues up his ass, which is what he recently discovered upon entering the temple, which, as fans, or, if you will, disciples, will know, is the bathroom, where the tools of cleanliness, personal hygiene as it is called in this narrow space, are stored, and where, most importantly, the ritual of the shower is performed. Showerman cannot describe this ritual in detail (see: Showerman, Season. 1, Episode 3), but he can explain how it was disrupted, detained,...