Walking backwards.
It's a health thing but now also a rising political movement.
There’s quite a lot of chatter going on about how the left has to reverse course if it hopes to regain the confidence people once had in it as a better way forward.
I’m not hopeful. The people who care most about the left’s future have their heads so far up their asses I’m pretty sure they’re not capable of moving in any direction.
Coincidentally, walking backwards has become a thing, for your health. I’m doing it to help with a twinge-y knee and I must say it’s helping. It might work for whatever ails you. I find you need to do at least 200 steps to feel any kind of effect, daily, preferably in a row.
But if you really want to change the political climate, you might need to make a bigger investment like these guys: Marty Verlaan, or Plennie Wingo.
Some people might consider reversing course to be like admitting defeat, back peddling or retreating, but I disagree with those negative Nancys, and I’m not alone. Compact Magazine has an article by Antonio de Loera-Brust that shows how Jesse Jackson had similar ideas to Donald Trump that the U.S. should stop shoring up foreign powers militarily, e.g. NATO. De Loera-Brust thinks the Left needs to show they care more about the people who vote for them than they do about leveraged global dominance and saving the world’s refugees.
Personally, I think the left could start with the low hanging fruit, like walking it back from niche causes, hysterical threats and violent bullying. Once upon a time the left shared an idea of the common good. Feels like a land far, far away now.
Speaking of lands far, far away, I came across this copy of the New Yorker on my bookshelf this past weekend. I unsubscribed maybe a year and a half ago, repelled… not the right word… bored maybe? by the insufferable woke skew of practically every article. (Has it infected everything?)
Looking at just this cover, for example, should we try a bit of art criticism?
The drawing technique (crayons?) is not just child-like, which might be quaint in an outsider art sort of way, it’s childish; not naive enough to be innocent, just immature, tweenie. Unconvincing the way 12 year old’s drawings are.
The New Yorker itself says somewhere on its online submission portal, “Yes, you need to know how to draw hands.” Everyone except this guy apparently.
The composition is mind-numbingly boring, so rigidly symmetrical as to be… authoritarian?
The colors? Psychedelic would be a complement but I’m pretty sure the artist isn’t taking or talking about LSD.
And the overall scene: hysterical (white) couple in gas guzzling monster screaming down a syrupy candy highway, trapped between impenetrable fences of lurid GMO grasses reinforced by gender bending pink and blue (mountains?), plummeting rollercoaster-like toward an empty vanishing point.
If this is what New Yorkers now consider “an adventure,” run!
Okay, wait, I just looked up the artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and not only is he my fucking age, he’s done a bunch of NYer covers since the 1990s and quite famous. So shame on me.
What am I not getting? Is Mattotti mocking the virtue-signalling DEI hires who have taken over the NYer by giving them a glipse of their myopic hallucination of a future?
You tell me.
An enjoyable read!
“screaming down a syrupy candy highway, trapped between impenetrable fences of lurid GMO grasses reinforced by gender bending pink and blue (mountains?), plummeting rollercoaster-like toward an empty vanishing point.”