I don’t keep up with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets, having decided long ago that there were more pleasant and constructive uses of time, like lighting fire to my eyelashes. But I’m rethinking that judgment now. M.T.G. really does have something to say — or, rather, to tell us.
She tweeted a doozy the other day. Actually, she routinely tweets doozies, which I realized when I caught up with her Twitter account, bingeing on it the way I would an overlooked HBO Max series, if the series were an endless sequence of garish sights and ghastly sounds that robbed me of my will to live. This tweet garnered headlines — that’s how I came to it — and deservedly so. Audaciously, incoherently, M.T.G. used it to try to turn Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard accused of leaking national security secrets, into a victim.
The leaks in question divulged classified information about U.S. surveillance of Russia that’s vital to our assistance to Ukraine, where there are true victims, an entire ravaged country of them. And Teixeira’s alleged actions didn’t seem to have any high-minded prompt. He’s more post-adolescent punk than principled dissident by my read.
But then my lens isn’t M.T.G.’s. I don’t wear her thick, cracked goggles of grievance, which reveal Teixeira as a martyr.
“Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar,” she tweeted, capitalizing on her professed faith without properly capitalizing it. “That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.” Her tweet, wanting for a good copy edit, went on to beseech its readers: “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine?”
President Biden isn’t waging war in Ukraine. That’s what Vladimir Putin is doing. And Teixeira’s gender, color and religion have nothing to do with his arrest and looming prosecution, nor are they relevant to a legitimate, necessary debate about the degree, nature, costs and long-term usefulness of our aid to Ukrainians.
But they have everything to do with the manner in which an alarming fraction of Americans regard and respond to political developments today. They look for evidence of offense to, and persecution of, whatever group of people they identify with. They invent that proof when it’s not there; when it is, they upsize it. Either way, their predetermined sense of grievance is the prism through which all is passed and all is parsed. It’s their Rosetta stone. It’s their binky.
M.T.G.’s tweet is an extreme example from a self-infatuated extremist, but it’s an example nonetheless. A reckless brat is arrested, President Biden arches an eyebrow, a bluebird falls from the sky: M.T.G. can see the lefty secularism and reverse racism — the wokeness, in a polarizing word — in any turn of events.
So can many others on the right, which has no monopoly on willful misreads, but is currently conducting a scary and profoundly dangerous master class on them. Witness their conspiracy theories, their militias, their actions on — and then revisionism about — the Jan. 6 rioting. Witness the evolution of Donald Trump’s blather, which leans ever more heavily on the insistence that investigations of him are really attacks on his supporters, who confront the same horrible oppression that poor Airman Teixeira does.
Witness less flamboyant versions of this paranoid mind-set. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has built his brand around identifying the supposed threats to non-woke traditionalists and crafting or calling for measures that foil and punish their liberal oppressors. He trades aspiration for retribution, optimism for resentment.
He, too, wears goggles of grievance. They’re just a little bit lighter than M.T.G.’s. A little bit looser. And they’re not lined in fur.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., Drew Sheneman wrote that the name of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire buddy, Harlan Crow, brings to mind someone who perhaps “made his fortune through a combination of cattle rustling and owning the haunted theme parks on Scooby Doo. Wait, I just checked, it’s real estate. Same difference.” (Thanks to Mary Alice Schiller of Randolph, N.J., for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Kim Bellware and Brittany Shammas examined “the frustration some ‘Succession’ fans felt when they dutifully avoided Twitter only to have the plot spoiled some other way; no one likes catching a spoiler in the wild.” (Thomas Beck, Dorado, Puerto Rico)
In The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz paid tribute to one of the creators, in the early 1970s, of a national advocacy and support group for parents determined to embrace children who disclosed a sexual orientation that was maligned and misunderstood: “You could fit most of the solar system into the chasm between how the average American of the era would have reacted in that hypothetical situation and how Jeanne Manford responded upon learning that Morty was gay.” (Madeline Bauer, Victorville, Calif.)
Also in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane described how principal characters in the new movie “Air,” about Nike’s development and unveiling of the Air Jordan sneaker, gaze upon the finished footwear: “They’re like shepherds in a Rembrandt Nativity, lit by the natural radiance of the Christ child. And they’re looking at a shoe.” (Stephen Chapman, West Tisbury, Mass.)
Within just hours of The Times’s publication of Maureen Dowd’s column about Rupert Murdoch and Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against his network, Fox News, I’d received dozens of nominations for the following sentence: “At long last, after a shameless career built on spreading poisonous lies about everything from climate to Covid to Trump’s stolen election blather, King Rupert, as Vanity Fair calls him, may be losing dominion over his dominion because of Dominion.” (Leslie Flattery, Katy, Tex., and Jean Sommerfield, Manhattan, among many, many others)
Sticking with The Times, David Brooks nailed the anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan bent of many Republican politicians today: “The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.” (Judy Fore, Black Mountain, N.C.)
Michelle Cottle drew a zoological contrast between the current and previous speakers of the House: “Ms. Pelosi was a once-in-a-generation leader with a rare gift for herding the cats. Mr. McCarthy and his crew, by contrast, look more like the dog that caught the car.” (Chet Zenone, Salem, Ore., and Mary Shuford, Brooklyn, N.Y., among others)
And in Literary Hub, Ed Simon defended — and modeled — a rangy kind of writing: “Within a long sentence — clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up — there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun.” (Shari Kulha, Toronto)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Listening To and Reading
The popular podcast “You’re Wrong About,” which looks afresh at misremembered and misunderstood events and figures from the past, has its highs and lows; a recent zenith, at least for me, was an episode that re-examined the singer and songwriter Sinead O’Connor. Allyson McCabe, the author of a new book, “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters,” appeared and eloquently made the case that O’Connor paid an exorbitant price for her irreverence, which doesn’t look as outrageous in hindsight. Listening to McCabe and reflecting on it all, I was struck by the fact that O’Connor was canceled long before we called it that and by the sexism in much of the condemnation of her. I was also reminded of how much terrific music she made. I still listen occasionally to my three favorite albums of hers, “The Lion and the Cobra,” “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” and “Faith and Courage.” And I highly recommend them.
A good friend of mine who, like me, struggles to explain the pleasure of being devoted to a sports team recently stumbled upon this 1987 article in The Times by Richard Gilman about precisely that. It’s a beauty.
Few scholars have been as smart on the subjects of contemporary narcissism and young people’s relationship with their gadgets as the social psychologist Jean Twenge, whose books include “iGen” and “Generation Me.” Her new book, “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” is chockablock with interesting, surprising insights. It will be released on Tuesday.
On a Personal Note (Odd Neighborhood Names)
The many great examples of strangely or strikingly named streets and subdivisions that you’ve sent in since I first wrote about the topic have given me enough material for additional installments of this occasional feature, which appeared in this newsletter and this one. To build on those:
Some streets and neighborhoods in Carefree, Ariz., take their cue from the city’s name in a manner that seems paradoxically labored. There’s Tranquil Trail. Easy Street, of course. Also, “Ho Hum Drive comes to a fork and becomes Ho Road and Hum Road,” Paul Payton of Chatham, N.J., wrote in an email. I thank him for flagging these strenuously becalmed appellations.
They speak to how emphatically a cluster of domiciles — or whoever developed them — can work a theme. The Gingerville Manor subdivision of Edgewater, Md., includes Cinnamon Lane, Tarragon Lane, Cardamon Drive, Fennel Road, Thyme Drive, Peppercorn Place, Coriander Place, Saffron Place and Oregano Drive.
For a similar commitment to a given conceit, check out the so-called “Disney Streets” neighborhood of Midway Hills in Dallas, where you’ll find Cinderella Lane, Pinocchio Drive, Peter Pan Drive, Snow White Drive, Dwarfs Circle, Elfland Circle, Fantasia Lane and Wonderland Trail. (Neva Flynn, Dallas, and Diane Barentine, Dallas, among others)
Street names can be bestowed in a less gauzy and romantic spirit, which was the apparent case with Maalox Court in Louisville, Ky. It’s within a few hundred feet of a road that alludes to a powerful anti-inflammatory: Indocin Court. Perhaps the developer had indigestion, coupled with gout. (Andrew Melnykovych, Louisville)
In Holbrook, Ariz., Bucket of Blood Street was apparently christened in the aftermath — and in reference to — a violent bar fight. (Robert Phillips, Broomfield, Colo.)
Peggy McLellan of Okemos, Mich., pointed me toward an equally eerie artery: “Before cars had GPS, a friend and I took a wrong turn in the vast nothingness of Wyoming. After what seemed like days of still more wrong turns, we came upon Poison Spider Road. We opted not to drive on it.” And a thousand black widows wept.
Given our country’s litigiousness, it’s perhaps appropriate that there is a Supreme Court — by which I mean a road, not a judicial panel — in Moyock, N.C. And in Charles Town, W.Va. And in Springfield, Va. And in Owings Mills, Md., where it’s just a few paces from Circuit Court. I checked out the neighborhood map and was disappointed that developers didn’t have the full courage of their jurisprudential convictions. Why not District Court, Appellate Court, Probate Court and, naturally, Traffic Court?
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance
Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance
I don’t keep up with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets, having decided long ago that there were more pleasant and constructive uses of time, like lighting fire to my eyelashes. But I’m rethinking that judgment now. M.T.G. really does have something to say — or, rather, to tell us.
She tweeted a doozy the other day. Actually, she routinely tweets doozies, which I realized when I caught up with her Twitter account, bingeing on it the way I would an overlooked HBO Max series, if the series were an endless sequence of garish sights and ghastly sounds that robbed me of my will to live. This tweet garnered headlines — that’s how I came to it — and deservedly so. Audaciously, incoherently, M.T.G. used it to try to turn Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard accused of leaking national security secrets, into a victim.
The leaks in question divulged classified information about U.S. surveillance of Russia that’s vital to our assistance to Ukraine, where there are true victims, an entire ravaged country of them. And Teixeira’s alleged actions didn’t seem to have any high-minded prompt. He’s more post-adolescent punk than principled dissident by my read.
But then my lens isn’t M.T.G.’s. I don’t wear her thick, cracked goggles of grievance, which reveal Teixeira as a martyr.
“Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar,” she tweeted, capitalizing on her professed faith without properly capitalizing it. “That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.” Her tweet, wanting for a good copy edit, went on to beseech its readers: “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine?”
President Biden isn’t waging war in Ukraine. That’s what Vladimir Putin is doing. And Teixeira’s gender, color and religion have nothing to do with his arrest and looming prosecution, nor are they relevant to a legitimate, necessary debate about the degree, nature, costs and long-term usefulness of our aid to Ukrainians.
But they have everything to do with the manner in which an alarming fraction of Americans regard and respond to political developments today. They look for evidence of offense to, and persecution of, whatever group of people they identify with. They invent that proof when it’s not there; when it is, they upsize it. Either way, their predetermined sense of grievance is the prism through which all is passed and all is parsed. It’s their Rosetta stone. It’s their binky.
M.T.G.’s tweet is an extreme example from a self-infatuated extremist, but it’s an example nonetheless. A reckless brat is arrested, President Biden arches an eyebrow, a bluebird falls from the sky: M.T.G. can see the lefty secularism and reverse racism — the wokeness, in a polarizing word — in any turn of events.
So can many others on the right, which has no monopoly on willful misreads, but is currently conducting a scary and profoundly dangerous master class on them. Witness their conspiracy theories, their militias, their actions on — and then revisionism about — the Jan. 6 rioting. Witness the evolution of Donald Trump’s blather, which leans ever more heavily on the insistence that investigations of him are really attacks on his supporters, who confront the same horrible oppression that poor Airman Teixeira does.
Witness less flamboyant versions of this paranoid mind-set. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has built his brand around identifying the supposed threats to non-woke traditionalists and crafting or calling for measures that foil and punish their liberal oppressors. He trades aspiration for retribution, optimism for resentment.
He, too, wears goggles of grievance. They’re just a little bit lighter than M.T.G.’s. A little bit looser. And they’re not lined in fur.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., Drew Sheneman wrote that the name of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire buddy, Harlan Crow, brings to mind someone who perhaps “made his fortune through a combination of cattle rustling and owning the haunted theme parks on Scooby Doo. Wait, I just checked, it’s real estate. Same difference.” (Thanks to Mary Alice Schiller of Randolph, N.J., for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Kim Bellware and Brittany Shammas examined “the frustration some ‘Succession’ fans felt when they dutifully avoided Twitter only to have the plot spoiled some other way; no one likes catching a spoiler in the wild.” (Thomas Beck, Dorado, Puerto Rico)
In The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz paid tribute to one of the creators, in the early 1970s, of a national advocacy and support group for parents determined to embrace children who disclosed a sexual orientation that was maligned and misunderstood: “You could fit most of the solar system into the chasm between how the average American of the era would have reacted in that hypothetical situation and how Jeanne Manford responded upon learning that Morty was gay.” (Madeline Bauer, Victorville, Calif.)
Also in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane described how principal characters in the new movie “Air,” about Nike’s development and unveiling of the Air Jordan sneaker, gaze upon the finished footwear: “They’re like shepherds in a Rembrandt Nativity, lit by the natural radiance of the Christ child. And they’re looking at a shoe.” (Stephen Chapman, West Tisbury, Mass.)
Within just hours of The Times’s publication of Maureen Dowd’s column about Rupert Murdoch and Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against his network, Fox News, I’d received dozens of nominations for the following sentence: “At long last, after a shameless career built on spreading poisonous lies about everything from climate to Covid to Trump’s stolen election blather, King Rupert, as Vanity Fair calls him, may be losing dominion over his dominion because of Dominion.” (Leslie Flattery, Katy, Tex., and Jean Sommerfield, Manhattan, among many, many others)
Sticking with The Times, David Brooks nailed the anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan bent of many Republican politicians today: “The G.O.P. is a working-class populist party that has no interest in nurturing highly educated bobo boom towns. The G.O.P. does everything it can to repel those people — and the Tesla they drove in on.” (Judy Fore, Black Mountain, N.C.)
Michelle Cottle drew a zoological contrast between the current and previous speakers of the House: “Ms. Pelosi was a once-in-a-generation leader with a rare gift for herding the cats. Mr. McCarthy and his crew, by contrast, look more like the dog that caught the car.” (Chet Zenone, Salem, Ore., and Mary Shuford, Brooklyn, N.Y., among others)
And in Literary Hub, Ed Simon defended — and modeled — a rangy kind of writing: “Within a long sentence — clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up — there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun.” (Shari Kulha, Toronto)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Listening To and Reading
The popular podcast “You’re Wrong About,” which looks afresh at misremembered and misunderstood events and figures from the past, has its highs and lows; a recent zenith, at least for me, was an episode that re-examined the singer and songwriter Sinead O’Connor. Allyson McCabe, the author of a new book, “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters,” appeared and eloquently made the case that O’Connor paid an exorbitant price for her irreverence, which doesn’t look as outrageous in hindsight. Listening to McCabe and reflecting on it all, I was struck by the fact that O’Connor was canceled long before we called it that and by the sexism in much of the condemnation of her. I was also reminded of how much terrific music she made. I still listen occasionally to my three favorite albums of hers, “The Lion and the Cobra,” “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” and “Faith and Courage.” And I highly recommend them.
A good friend of mine who, like me, struggles to explain the pleasure of being devoted to a sports team recently stumbled upon this 1987 article in The Times by Richard Gilman about precisely that. It’s a beauty.
Few scholars have been as smart on the subjects of contemporary narcissism and young people’s relationship with their gadgets as the social psychologist Jean Twenge, whose books include “iGen” and “Generation Me.” Her new book, “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” is chockablock with interesting, surprising insights. It will be released on Tuesday.
On a Personal Note (Odd Neighborhood Names)
The many great examples of strangely or strikingly named streets and subdivisions that you’ve sent in since I first wrote about the topic have given me enough material for additional installments of this occasional feature, which appeared in this newsletter and this one. To build on those:
Some streets and neighborhoods in Carefree, Ariz., take their cue from the city’s name in a manner that seems paradoxically labored. There’s Tranquil Trail. Easy Street, of course. Also, “Ho Hum Drive comes to a fork and becomes Ho Road and Hum Road,” Paul Payton of Chatham, N.J., wrote in an email. I thank him for flagging these strenuously becalmed appellations.
They speak to how emphatically a cluster of domiciles — or whoever developed them — can work a theme. The Gingerville Manor subdivision of Edgewater, Md., includes Cinnamon Lane, Tarragon Lane, Cardamon Drive, Fennel Road, Thyme Drive, Peppercorn Place, Coriander Place, Saffron Place and Oregano Drive.
For a similar commitment to a given conceit, check out the so-called “Disney Streets” neighborhood of Midway Hills in Dallas, where you’ll find Cinderella Lane, Pinocchio Drive, Peter Pan Drive, Snow White Drive, Dwarfs Circle, Elfland Circle, Fantasia Lane and Wonderland Trail. (Neva Flynn, Dallas, and Diane Barentine, Dallas, among others)
Street names can be bestowed in a less gauzy and romantic spirit, which was the apparent case with Maalox Court in Louisville, Ky. It’s within a few hundred feet of a road that alludes to a powerful anti-inflammatory: Indocin Court. Perhaps the developer had indigestion, coupled with gout. (Andrew Melnykovych, Louisville)
In Holbrook, Ariz., Bucket of Blood Street was apparently christened in the aftermath — and in reference to — a violent bar fight. (Robert Phillips, Broomfield, Colo.)
Peggy McLellan of Okemos, Mich., pointed me toward an equally eerie artery: “Before cars had GPS, a friend and I took a wrong turn in the vast nothingness of Wyoming. After what seemed like days of still more wrong turns, we came upon Poison Spider Road. We opted not to drive on it.” And a thousand black widows wept.
Given our country’s litigiousness, it’s perhaps appropriate that there is a Supreme Court — by which I mean a road, not a judicial panel — in Moyock, N.C. And in Charles Town, W.Va. And in Springfield, Va. And in Owings Mills, Md., where it’s just a few paces from Circuit Court. I checked out the neighborhood map and was disappointed that developers didn’t have the full courage of their jurisprudential convictions. Why not District Court, Appellate Court, Probate Court and, naturally, Traffic Court?
Source: Read Full Article