Nightmares and Banalities

I wear stripes. He wears stripes. He sports facial hair. I sport facial hair. His bangs fall to your left. My bangs fall to your left. And those stylish spectacles! It could only be My First Bloggingheads Feat. Matt Yglesias…

With the benefit of 24 hrs in retrospect, I must say there is something lingeringly, hypnotically bizarre to me about the specter of Dick Cheney leading a new new Republicanism that’s soft on group marriage and torture. Could it really be getting less and less silly to say this is where the country’s collective headspace is headed? Horrors: Dick Cheney, clutching the zeitgeist by the whosenwhatsen…

I think I came off about as soft on Sotomayor as I wanna be, but, again, I’m really offput by the way some of Sotomayor’s offhand remarks seem to presage a world in which our nightmares are more banalized and our banalities grow more nightmarish. Saying “aspiration” instead of “inspiration,” without skipping a beat, is strangely unnerving even in a post-Bush America; many of our quantitatively superqualified, from high school on up, seem somehow to be qualitatively slipping. Never before has a culture been so credential-clogged yet so colossally casual. I’m still thinking — as the footage reveals — about how to best make sense of this. I will say I love the note of hope and healing on which Matt and I manage to end, shortly before my headset died.