Armas Weekend Reader

27-28 May 2023

Feminine personification of “Westward the Course of Empire,” 19th-century color print: AI-generated image.

This week: the Republican Presidential contest kicks off for real, the horror of inner-city schools, social media and youth, life and death on the eastern front, the fall of Bakhmut, social justice eats therapy, our decaying Navy, one perfect scene, the Cornish language, and more. Let’s go — 

1) “The Republican nominating contest is about to start in earnest with Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the race tonight. And while the polling shows Donald Trump to be a strong frontrunner, the most interesting uses of polling are not about calling races 9 months into the future. They’re about highlighting the various pathways various candidates have to rise or fall, about the ways the polling might change in the next nine months.”

The six Republican parties

 2) “In recent private conversations with donors, DeSantis has praised Trump’s policies but said he can’t win, according to people familiar with the talks, articulating a message he plans to emphasize publicly. The challenge for DeSantis is to not alienate too many Trump supporters in attempts to convert them.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-trump-successor-president-3e9df9d6 

3) “I lived a different story, whose terrifying immediacy held at bay the grand abstractions through which we are urged to interpret our lives. When a second-grader’s grandmother sent him to school with a loaded gun because he was being bullied, I didn’t see a vestige of white flight. I saw a second grader bringing a loaded gun to school at the direction of his primary caretaker. When Kenyon was transferred into my class mid-second year with an enormous file explaining how his gross-motor problems were in part the product of his mother holding a curling iron to his feet as a baby to stop him from crying, I did not experience that as a consequence of redlining, whiteness, or bourgeois complacency. And when I learned soon after that Kenyon could not read past kindergarten level, nor write his name properly, I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes. I processed these things as horrors.”

Taught For America

4) “Properly considered, then, this New Left is not in competition with the Right. It is at war with the West—with the moral, intellectual, and social foundations on which our entire civilization rests.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/burkean-nationalism/ 

5) “The nation’s top health official issued an extraordinary public warning on Tuesday about the risks of social media to young people, urging a push to fully understand the possible ‘harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/health/surgeon-general-social-media-mental-health.html 

6) “Soldiers on the front in Ukraine adhere to a maxim that grows more sacrosanct the longer they survive: If you want to live, dig. In mid-March, I arrived at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes. Artillery had churned up so much earth that you could no longer distinguish between craters and the natural topography. Eight infantrymen were rebuilding a machine-gun nest that Russian shelling had obliterated the previous week, killing one of their comrades. A torn piece of a jacket, from a separate blast, hung on a branch high above us. A log-covered dugout, where the soldiers slept, was about five feet deep and not much wider. At the sound of a Russian helicopter, everyone squeezed inside. A direct hit from a mortar had charred the timber. To refortify the structure, new logs had been stacked over the burned ones. Ukrainian soldiers often employ netting or other camouflage to evade drone surveillance, but here subterfuge would have been futile. Russian forces had already pinpointed the position and seemed determined to eradicate it. As for the infantrymen, their mission was straightforward: not to leave and not to die.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine