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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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22 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
1. Neera Tanden, mon semblable, — ma sœur! Like @sunraysunray I had some complicated feelings about Tanden's failed nomination. I don't agree with her politics but (for obvious reasons) also don't like to see a fellow obsessive tweeter crash & burn.
2. Tanden business is rife with irony: her political identity over last 4 years has been as a centrist anti-Trumper punching left while trying to build coalition with GOP Never Trumps. Yet her nomination wasn't scuttled by Bernie but by Manchin, Romney, Murkowski etc.
3. The other irony is that Tanden is being scapegoated for Trump's sins. Official Washington was never able to tame Trump's tweets & GOP went along (only Twitter itself put an end to it). But establishment, of which Tanden is part, wanted to show tweets can be punished.
4. Also lost in the larger narrative is that the real problem was never Tanden's tweets (strongly worded but usually within bounds of fair comment) but the truly unhinged Tanden Trolls that she cultivated and encouraged. But you have to be as online as her to know that.
5. I had originally wanted to pay tribute to the hymn "Nearer, My God, To Thee" by titling this "Neera, My God, To Tweet." But I was victimized by cancel culture so now it ran The Importance of Logging Off. thenation.com/article/politi…
6. Speaking of the problems of social media, I should mention that @leninology's The Twittering Machine is excellent and didn't get (I think) the attention it deserves. A very deep book. versobooks.com/books/3229-the…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
20 Mar
1. Really good thread on how fundamental anti-monarchism is to USA political culture & how odd it is that American right has now embraced the crown. But that also has roots worth thinking about.
2. Buckley up people, we're doing an old style Jeet tweetstorm. Some thoughts on American monarchism, William F. Buckley's spanking fantasies involving the Queen of England, Spanish dynastic politics, fascism, George Wallace and Jack Kirby.
3. So, the praise of the British monarchy from American sources like National Review & Heritage Foundation has struck many people as strange. Aside from long-standing USA anti-monarchism, the American right has long had a powerful anglophobe strain.
Read 19 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
20 Mar
Nobody draws the Irish this way anymore. I blame cancel culture.
In greater seriousness, I know the whiteness literature is a little out of fashion right now, but it's hard for me to look at 19th century art & not conclude that Anglo-American WASPs racialized Irish Catholics.
Some people have noticed that the woman (Bridget McBruiser, an example of Irish depravity from Samuel Wells' 1866 New Physiognomy) looks like the Grinch. That's not an accident.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
17 Mar
1. People are starting to wake up to the fact that Bernie Sanders is now one of the most powerful political figures in America. Here's Politico.
2. And here's the LA Times: Bernie Sanders, Power Broker.
3. Bernie the Power Broker cuts against two nominally opposed positions. There's the Hillary Clinton position that Bernie is just a whiny outsider that no one likes (in fact he's an effective parliamentarian) & the Sorelian left view that "politics is over" after 2020.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
15 Mar
1. I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I'm not against cos-play or LARPing if it is done in the right spirit, as dorky hobbyists who like to dress up on weekends. What I object to is foreign policy LARPing.
2. By foreign policy LARPing I mean the concerted attempt to model USA/China relations on the high cold war. There are signs of this everywhere. A new anonymous "Longer Telegram" (not a telegram but, yes, long) modelled after George Kennan (aka Mr. X)'s long telegram
3. In the Washington Post we hear calls for using putative China threat for a new Sputnik moment of financing education & science. Also, absurdly, a repurposing of NATO to contain China.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
14 Mar
1. For paying customers only, but this @lionel_trolling post raises one of my pet theories, that Preston Sturges was a conflicted Keynesian. johnganz.substack.com/p/reading-watc…
2. The key biographical fact about Sturges, the explanation for his extraordinary ability to capture the comedy of clashing classes, was that he was an economic yo-yo, going from riches to rags to riches to rags etc.
3. Sturges' dad was a stolid stockbroker, his mom a bohemian arty type (& gal pal of Isadora Duncan). So Sturges had a twin inheritance of 19th century stern austerity and modernist expressiveness, which played out in his work
Read 9 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
12 Mar
1. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer has a chapter titled "Married To Tolstoy" about favorite Rothian theme of the pain great writers inflict on the near & dear. Could easily be Married to Dickens, Married to Woolf, Married to Cheever, Married to Naipaul, etc.
2. But if being in the shadow of genius is hazardous, an arms length proximity can be nurturing. Consider Glenn Gould & Robert Fulford who were next door neighbors & best friends at age 9 going forward.
3. By Fulford's account, even when he was 9, everyone around Gould expected great things about him. There was even a teenage Salieri in the neighborhood who bore a grudge against the budding Canadian Mozart.
Read 4 tweets

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