On swimming techniques - Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:
‘When the world first met Vance less than a decade ago, he was a relatively clear-eyed critic of the dysfunction of the people around him during his childhood in Ohio and Kentucky. In Hillbilly Elegy, a painful look at his own past, he did not shy away from the kind of messages about personal responsibility that long characterized conservative politics. But those criticisms were leavened with a certain understanding that good people can become trapped by bad circumstances.’
(…)
‘His observations struck some critics as the smugness of a man who escaped a shipwreck and now has some thoughts about the swimming techniques of the people behind him who drowned.’
(…)
‘So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.
Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.’
(…)
‘He can ask us to believe he has changed his mind, and that is his right—but he can never again ask anyone to take him seriously.’
Read the article here.
Well, we should know by now that we should take the clowns who become politicians seriously, unless we want to become fulltime fatalists. Which is understandable but probably unwise.
To comment on the swimming techniques of the drowned is a bit awkward indeed.
On the other hand, the fact that the language of victimhood has become perverted, probably always was, is clear as well. Navigating between the illusion that you can shape your own life if you try hard enough and the language of victimhood that gives you the questionable comfort of an enemy (the system, patriarchy, the world, the elites) and an excuse for everything in matters of seconds, appears to be the only remedy left.
The obvious solutions, affordable health care, affordable education, will not turn society into a paradise of equality but it will make it easier for so-called disadvantaged people to engage in the sport of upward social mobility.