Trendlist: Althouse

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Althouse

I scrolled through TikTok (so you don't have to), and I've selected exactly 3 items.
"Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"
"[A]n 1885 anti-vaccine banner that read 'Pure blood and no adulteration'; and activists who asserted that vaccination was 'pollution of our veins.'..."

I scrolled through TikTok (so you don't have to), and I've selected exactly 3 items.

Posted: 20 Feb 2022 09:29 AM PST

1. A little boy is dressed in a miniature version of the outfit his father wears every week and the father reacts. Possibly a set up, but how about we say it's not?

2. A dramatic reading of an obituary written by a bot (actually it's a page from the book "I Forced a Bot to Write This Book: A.I. Meets B.S.," written by the humorist Keaton Patti).

3. A man explains how "uncut gems" — which is about the way one actress pronounced 2 words — went viral and got oversaturated within a week, and he goes from distanced and rational to hopelessly infected within the space of 3 minutes.

"Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"

Posted: 20 Feb 2022 08:51 AM PST

"Unfortunately he had no way of knowing that Mao was just then readying a major political 'rectification campaign (整风运动)' against 'incorrect thought (错误思想)' that would make self-expression among Communist intelligentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics. In fact, Mao's 1942 treatise, The Yan'an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party's quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Under its shadow, writes Ai Weiwei, 'everyone sank into an ideological swamp of "criticism" and "self-criticism"' in which the bourgeois tendencies of his father's art marked him indelibly as being politically unreliable.... Then, like half a million other intellectuals, he was 'sent down (下放)' to the Great Northern Wilderness (北大荒)....

Ai Weiwei, then only two, accompanied him.... He would spend... two decades with his father, in effect a juvenile political prisoner in internal exile.... As China careened toward the Cultural Revolution, Ai Qing found himself under renewed attack. Red Guards put banners outside their shack that read, 'Expose Ai Qing's True Counter-Revolutionary Colors!' Then the sons and daughters of many other exiled 'literary types' who'd once been regular guests in the Ai home began ransacking their house. 'Now that the political storm had arrived, they were first to trim their sails to the wind, betraying and slandering people around them, in the hope of enhancing their own position,' writes Ai Weiwei...."

From "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei's memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" by Orville Schell (reviewing "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows")(NYRB).

"[A]n 1885 anti-vaccine banner that read 'Pure blood and no adulteration'; and activists who asserted that vaccination was 'pollution of our veins.'..."

Posted: 20 Feb 2022 05:51 AM PST

"The association of 'pure,' 'natural' and 'good' would have made perfect sense at the time, since natural goodness and unnatural evil were standard in popular discussions of health. In his immensely popular 1867 book 'The Philosophy of Eating,' homeopath Albert J. Bellows blamed all illness on impurity and in a chapter titled 'Impure Blood' explained how good health depended on 'natural food' and 'pure water.' Illness was the result of 'unnatural drugs or medicine.' The same associations remained powerful in the mid-20th century, when opponents of water fluoridation complained about unnatural adulteration of what should be pure. Their position — described by social scientists at the time as 'naturalist syndrome' — was so mainstream that Stanley Kubrick skewered it in his classic 'Dr. Strangelove,' wherein the lunatic Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper bemoans how fluoride corrupts the 'pure blood of pure Americans.'"

From "How the phrase 'natural immunity' misleads us about real risks and dangers/Antibodies to the coronavirus are not better just because they are 'natural'" (WaPo, September 29, 2021).

That's written by Alan Levinovitz, an associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University and the author of "Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science."