Furtive Reading

We all know the cliché of the kid reading the forbidden comic book under a blanket with a flashlight, or hiding a magazine behind a textbook. (Now I guess they’d both be replaced with screens. Alas …) I was lucky in that Mom’s attitude toward reading -- quite progressive at the time -- was that it’s better for kids to enjoy reading than to think of it as grim duty, so if that means bringing home Mad magazine for the kid to devour, then that’s what it means. So from an early age, I developed a habit of moving between genres without apology.

To what extent that shows in my writing, I’ll leave to my sympathetic readers.

Still, part of the culture of higher education remains monastic. There’s still a sense that literally everything should be work-related somehow. I may have been able to read silly stuff openly as a kid, but now it’s harder not to feel like I need to hide fun books under blankets.

My “fun” reading has changed, of course. Mad magazine has gone to the great newsstand in the sky, though to be fair, I don’t think I read a full issue since high school. At this point, anything that isn’t directly about higher education feels decadent.

After the mad dash of the end of the spring semester, the long holiday weekend -- gray, cold and rainy in these parts -- offered the adult equivalent of a blanket and a flashlight. I was able to turn off the academic administrator part of my brain for a bit, and pay some attention to the political theorist part. It had been a long time.

The best weekend book, by far, was Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us. It’s a nonfiction piece about the opportunities we all lose -- including white people -- to racism. The central metaphor McGhee lands on is a municipal pool in St. Louis in the early 20th century. Back before air-conditioning made it to the masses, white people in St. Louis would frequent the pool in the summer. Black people were forbidden to use it. In the middle of the century, a court ruled that the city couldn’t block access to the pool by race. The city responded by draining the pool and filling it in with dirt. The white community decided that it would rather swelter in the heat than share the pool with Black people.

McGhee’s central question -- “Why can’t we have nice things?” -- has a depressingly consistent answer throughout the book. Whether it’s national health care, great public schools or even swimming pools, too many people who would otherwise benefit are willing to go without in order to spite Black people.

I liked McGhee’s framing a lot, because it lends itself to concrete instances. A phrase like “structural racism” can seem abstract, but there’s nothing abstract about a drained pool on a hot day. It’s the kind of example that can work with people who recoil from abstractions. And it shows the basic absurdity of racism in a way that a child could understand.

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is a quick read, and a good one. It’s a sort of field guide to fascism, full of helpful hints on what to do if you see it encroaching. The short version is to recognize that tyranny thrives on panic. Developing good social networks, taking ethics seriously and learning to take the long view can help dissipate panic, and thereby starve authoritarians of the terror that fuels them. (I kept flashing back to a great line in Animal House: “There’s a time for thinking, and a time for acting. And this is no time for thinking!”) Snyder points out, correctly, that the 20th century offers plenty of raw material for understanding authoritarian regimes; it would be foolish to leave that material unused. The fact that the book was published several years before the Jan. 6 insurrection only makes it that much more compelling.

I’m still making my way through Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. It’s an argument for remaking voting procedures in the U.S. to make third and fourth political parties more viable. In our current system, in which single-member districts create winner-take-all elections, third parties are often reduced to spoilers. That tends to lead to the “lesser of two evils” calculation in which many voters believe, justifiably, that their positions aren’t really represented at all.

Which is true, as far as it goes. From a global perspective, the fact that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Manchin are in the same party is absurd. But if you have 330 million people and only two parties, that sort of thing will happen.

So far, though, it’s a deeply odd book. Drutman spends the first half of the book detailing ways in which the two-party system leads to disappointing outcomes. That part could easily have been about four pages. It felt a bit like reading a 300-page book about cancer, of which the first 150 pages argue that cancer is bad. Well, yes, it is. We already know that. That point isn’t in dispute. As an editorial decision, I don’t get it.

I slogged through the part about various different voting systems (ranked choice, party slates, proportional representation, multimember districts, etc.), but haven’t yet reached the part where he presumably explains how any of his proposals might actually happen. If he comes up with anything good, I’ll post an update.

Ultimately, though, the weekend wasn’t really about the content of any of those. It was about dusting the cobwebs off a part of my brain that used to get a lot more air. I don’t know that any of those will help me do my job, but that’s sort of the point.

Now, back to work …