Quentin's Weeknotes 5/4/19-5/10/19

This Week:

• My boy and I attended an ancient festival, celebrated across the land. Thanks to the
  Secret Comix Cave in West Oneonta for putting on such a great shindig.
• I read Alex Pareene’s piece in The Baffler entitled “Teenage Pricks," in which he thinks through the ways in which Trump’s behavior has impacted children, especially teenage boys. It’s an interesting and well-written essay, but I was especially struck by this paragraph, discussing why the modern conservative movement has such a youth problem:

“Trumpism’s pitch to young white men is thus a stirringly amoral sort of syllogism: we can’t give you anything material, because we stole it all and are hoarding it, but we can create a world in which you can regularly act on your worst impulses and get away with it. Some city kids are coming to town; here’s a way to racially mock them that won’t get us in trouble.”

This is essentially a bite-sized and modern version of David Roediger’s argument in “The Wages of Whiteness”, itself drawn from W.E.B. Du Bois’s assertion of a “psychological wage” given to white workers after the Civil War, to offset their lack of material gains (and to keep them from forming a multi-racial labor party). History repeats itself.