Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Gazans Return Home . . . to Nothing”
The Financial Times reports on the extent of destruction in Gaza in the wake of the temporary “ceasefire”: “About 1.9mn of Gaza’s 2.3mn residents have been displaced. The UN says that 92 per cent of homes are destroyed or damaged, and estimates that there are more than 50,000,000 tonnes of rubble that could take up to 21 years to remove and cost about $1bn…There is no clear plan for postwar reconstruction. The massive undertaking of simply clearing the rubble depends on the longevity of the ceasefire, which is in an initial six-week phase.”
“One year before the war began, Abu al-Baraa, a police officer, bought a piece of land in the al-Balad neighbourhood of his hometown of Rafah and built a house for himself and his wife and children. He furnished it and planted a tree in the garden. The day the war ended, he went back to the place where the new house had been. It was in the strip of the city along the Egyptian border that has been designated by Israel as a no-go zone, known as the Philadelphi corridor. Before an Israeli quadcopter began shooting in his direction, he managed to get within 300 metres of his house, but the rubble from all the destroyed buildings was piled so high in front of him that he could not see what remained.”
Here is one of the images of Gaza featured in the article:
“Empire’s Critic”
At The Nation,
offers a thought-provoking review of Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson’s 2024 book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World. He sympathetically summarizes their core arguments and praises their writing style. However, he questions the validity of “propaganda model” developed in Chomsky’s work with Edward S. Herman in the 1980s and carried forward in this recent book. Bessner asks: “But even if propaganda abounds, is it accurate to say that most Americans believe it? Do Americans really consider US power abroad to be a beneficent force? There is ample evidence to suggest they do not.”He continues: “The fact that young people have become ever more skeptical of US hegemony indicates that Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model no longer accurately reflects reality. Besides the undeniable damage caused by American belligerence worldwide, a major reason for this is that the era of mass media in which Chomsky and Herman wrote has ended. Essentially, the ‘mass’ media has been displaced by a ‘social’ media that skirts many of the norms that had previously enabled mainstream newspapers and television news programs to manufacture consent for US empire.” I made a related argument last year in my essay, “The Era When Nothing Ever Ends”: “Deprived of its ability to consistently manufacture consent, the 2020s ruling class—defined more than ever before by big tech and high finance—now seeks to manufacture crisis in order to maintain its grip on power.”
Bessner concludes: “If the left ever hopes to change US foreign policy, it needs to move beyond the shibboleths of the past. We must stop fetishizing information politics and mass protests and instead must develop an institutionalist understanding of how state power functions. And when we look to institutions, we can see that the US national security state has been specifically designed to prevent the solutions that Chomsky and Robinson propose from working. To make a long story short: In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the architects of the national security state, anxious about the impact that a supposedly ignorant public could have on US foreign affairs, established a series of institutions—from the National Security Council to the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency—that were intentionally insulated from public opinion and, in many instances, from Congress itself. Marches and publicity campaigns alone will not turn these institutions around; only political—that is, state—power might.”
“Elon Musk Is an ‘Evil Person,’ Steve Bannon Says”
The New York Times reports on Steve Bannon and the broader populist MAGA right’s increasing tensions with tech billionaire Elon Musk: “Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Musk: ‘He’s a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.’ The insults reflect broader tension on the right in the United States about the direction of the movement that Mr. Trump has championed and fears that Mr. Musk—the world’s richest person and the owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter—could use his influence to sideline powerful figures within that movement to promote his own agenda. Mr. Musk does significant business with the federal government as the chief executive of SpaceX, and also runs the automaker Tesla.”
“Mr. Bannon said that Mr. Musk, whom he described as having ‘the maturity of a child,’ had lost the policy debate over the [H-1B] visas. He also questioned whether the tech billionaire should limit his involvement in U.S. politics because he was born and grew up in South Africa during apartheid. ‘He should go back to South Africa,’ Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying.”
For more on the rift between Bannon and Musk and the topic of H-1B visas, see my recent article, “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People.”
“Men, Women and Social Connections”
Pew Research publishes survey findings on social support networks among American men and women. One major takeaway is that men and women report similar levels of loneliness but women are more likely to reach out for emotional support:
One’s partner or spouse is by far the most likely source for emotional support, but, as another Pew study featured last year on Handful of Earth demonstrates, young men are almost twice as likely to be single as young women: “When looking at age and gender together, 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group.”
The study also found that women are more likely than men to keep in regular touch with their friends:
For more on social life and alienation, see my Special Edition Weekly Grounding on this topic last week.
“Requiem for a Revolution”
Tsogo Kupa reviews Johan Grimonprez’s recent film, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, at Africa Is a Country: The film explores the complicated relationship between postwar American jazz and anticolonial struggles in Africa. “Soundtrack begins its chronology of events with The Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia in 1955. Hosting a consortium of leaders from newly independent colonies from Africa and Asia (a line-up of heavyweights including Egypt’s Nasser, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and China’s Zhou Enlai), the prestigious heads of state are gallantly paraded on-screen as champions of the new world, forebearers of a new international order that’s neither East nor West but Non-Aligned. Concurrently, Dizzy Gillespie announces a fake bid for the presidency, with his cabinet featuring (among others) Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. Both events are played for spectacle, which risks trivializing the force behind the genesis of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet the euphoria of the time, emphasized by the unburdened expressionism of the post-bebop jazz sound that scores most of the film, presents the future as one malleable towards the imperatives of Black and Brown people from Mississippi to Mumbai. Soundtrack manages to celebrate the valor and vision of those post-colonial leaders while painting a picture of Cold War realpolitik that made those promises impossible to realize.”
Among other observations, Kupa writes that “Soundtrack often breaks its visual harmony to display dazzling modern-day adverts for the latest iPhone smartphones and Tesla vehicles, made from Congo’s cobalt reserves, as well as the current war waging in the East, articulating something the film is self-aware enough not to elaborate over a title card: colonialism has never left Congo.”
“In Effigy, In Loving Memory”
reflects on Alice Coltrane’s music at : “There are events in the life of Alice Coltrane that could undermine the way she is branded, as the almost voiceless beacon of deliverance through jazz’s pseudo pop spirituality™, and scare off the vultures of industry, but we don’t discuss such things in polite company. She is oversimplified, placated past her mystery and misery and recovery to be used for comfort, healing, or the mere near-martyred idea of these things as improvised music with a sensibility that feels syncretic enough for even casual listeners to assimilate. She is mis-cast as sentimental in the places where her asceticism made her sharp and expansive. We police her image just enough, so that it’s easy to forget that she was born and raised in Detroit, that she suffered when her lover died so young. The harp he gifted her arrived at their house shortly after he’d departed, and with it we are offered visions of her fingers bleeding as if stabbed by thorns during self-imposed marathon rehearsals, her will bifurcated into near-starvation as she trained herself on the instrument, plucking and praying her love back to life with the siren’s focus, spellbinding herself in the process. All of this labor and care has been dumbed down and betrayed, distributed and mass marketed as if casual or bohemian, as if hers are the songs that just happen to come with awakening and breakthrough, not the ones earned in the face of terror, dread, and isolation.”Holiday continues: “Alice Coltrane’s music harnesses the blisses of sudden change before they give way to erratic, naive longing, and makes them dance in the bellow-tempo of despair becoming ecstatic before realizing what it was before, that it hurt, that it had to be different to endure. Her mediator between realms (between the monastic and the unbearably lush) is divine love, the kind that is brutal, the tenderness few can cope with without shattering or recoiling into the brash; the intensity most don’t want or deserve or have the capacity to access and sustain, the scar the effigy leaves leaking into carbon/oblivion, an arbor for an absentee chorus, her muses, her mouth of strings.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Very interesting reads Vincent. I did a piece on Tesla and the Congo. BTW, agree on Gaza but that photo is likely AI acc. to my discerning eyeballs.
https://worldyturnings.com/2024/09/21/teslas/