September 2018

DAVE LINDORFF—Republican backers of this clearly flawed and truth-challenged candidate are insisting indignantly, in the case of mounting charges from alleged victims, that he’s entitled to a “presumption of innocence” as several women claim he assaulted and harassed them as a teenager and perhaps when he was older, and amid evidence that he had a “runway model” standard for hiring female clerkship applicants as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC which led Yale Law professors to recommend that female student applicants to clerkships for Kavanaugh “dress accordingly.” (As one prominent professor is reported to have told such students, “There’s a reason all his female clerks look like models.”)

SANDY ENGLISH—One book on the philosophical conceptions in Martin’s A Game of Thrones has called it a “genuine exploration of human nature in uncertain times.” And certainly, many people have the sense that we live in uncertain times now.
But the times in Game of Thrones are not our uncertain times, or any historically concrete uncertain times—neither the end of the Roman Empire nor the age of peasant rebellions in China—that ever existed. Even the wildest fantasy has to correspond, in the end, to the way life is for us. The series does not present the “human nature” of specific classes in specific societies. The “feel” of history is not the same thing as the drama of human beings acting within definite historical circumstances. Great drama presents the collision of social forces as it finds particular expression. The element of necessity is missing here.

DAVID WALSH—Neither the Times nor the majority of its middle-class readership has ever expressed this degree of outrage about the past quarter-century of bloody, neo-colonial wars and occupations pursued by American imperialism, which has led to more than one million deaths and the displacement of tens of millions more. The destruction of societies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond does not keep this social element awake at night. Drone strikes, “kill lists,” NSA spying, the persecution of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange—none of this merits more than hand-wringing or the occasional tsk-tsk, if not outright assent.