What Happened Today: April 25, 2022
Macron’s wins—now what?; Musk’s Twitter takeover; Dish washing in America
The Big Story
Strong support from elderly voters helped France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, win reelection Sunday in a decisive victory against his challenger, Marine Le Pen, which also revealed that her brand of right-wing, nationalist politics remains a viable and defining force in France. This is the second time that the centrist establishment figure Macron has defeated Le Pen, making him the first French president in 20 years to win reelection, but his margin this time—58.5% of the vote compared to Le Pen’s 41.5%—was down nearly 8 points from 2017. That may not sound like much in a contest that Macron won by more than 15 points, but Le Pen’s gains reflect the deep polarization in a country that has seen the complete collapse of its traditional political structure. The center-left and center-right political parties, which had dominated French politics for decades, earned a collective 6.5% of the vote in the first round of the latest elections. Further, some 43% of Macron’s voters are of retirement age, while Le Pen won a majority of votes from those aged 25 to 64, which suggests her National Rally party may pick up more votes in the French legislative elections that begin on June 12.
Macron has now twice defeated the insurgent, populist politics that were represented in the United States and the United Kingdom by Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Brexit, but his success, rather than representing a strong national consensus behind his leadership, is a product of the divisions among his opponents. There is still a strong taboo against voting for Le Pen, whose efforts to rebrand as a populist nationalist have not erased the memory among French citizens of her father’s political career as an apologist for fascism with a fondness for Holocaust jokes. Macron will lead a country that is sharply divided along lines of class, age, and education level, in which left and right have been replaced as primary markers of political identity by the division between the beneficiaries of globalization who see it as a positive force, and the people outside of hub cities who see themselves as its victims. That division was visible at Macron’s victory celebration on the Champs de Mars, where observers note that half of the celebrants waved European Union rather than French flags and, in a reprise of Macron’s 2017 win, the anthem played was the European Union’s “Ode to Joy.”
Read it here: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220425-five-takeaways-from-france-s-presidential-vote
In The Back Pages: Dishwashing and Murder in Netflix’s Ozark
The Rest
→ It’s a new era at Twitter after the company announced Monday afternoon that it would accept a roughly $44 billion offer from Tesla owner, Elon Musk, to buy the social media platform. This is exactly where Twitter did not want to be at the beginning of the month when the company—which controls a primary arena of public political discourse and has already demonstrated that it has both the power and will to ban a sitting U.S. president—deployed a “poison pill” to block Musk’s attempted takeover. That effort failed when Musk, who remains notably outspoken and un-housebroken by billionaire standards, secured the financing for what could turn out to be one of the largest hostile takeovers in history. After an initial halt to trading, Twitter stock was up 6% Monday following the announcement.
IN THE SCROLL TOMORROW—ELON MUSK BUYS TWITTER: JACOB SIEGEL ON THE ‘FUCK-YOU MONEY’ FINALLY WAKING UP
→ The body of Texas Army National Guard soldier Spc. Bishop E. Evans was recovered Monday after a week of search and rescue efforts. The 22-year-old went missing last week after he tried to rescue two migrants who were attempting to illegally cross the Rio Grande and might have been engaged in drug smuggling. Evans, who enlisted in the National Guard in 2019 as a field artilleryman, was participating in Operation Lone Star at the time of his disappearance, a border security mission ordered by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people into Texas.” According to local news outlet The Texan, the illegal migrants whom Evans died trying to save “are now in custody and suspected of international drug trafficking.”
Read it here: https://thetexan.news/texas-army-national-guard-specialist-bishop-evans-22-found-dead-after-ultimate-sacrifice-in-rio-grande/
→ Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv Sunday to promise more U.S. military aid to Ukraine as the country’s war against Russia enters a new phase focused on its eastern provinces. The meeting was referred to as “secret” in multiple press accounts because U.S. officials declined to publicize it until after it had taken place, but in fact it was hardly a secret since Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders discussed it openly in the press. As a result of the meeting, the United States will provide Ukraine with “more than $300 million in foreign military financing and … a $165 million sale of ammunition,” according to the Associated Press.
→ Underscoring what’s at stake in the battle over Twitter, the social media platform announced a new policy on Friday banning ads from parties that contradict the “scientific consensus” on climate change. That may not seem so bad, but if you recall that the scientific consensus was against masking before it was for it before it was against it—much as it was against investigating the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab before it was tentatively for it before it moved on to aggressively ignoring the subject altogether—you can see how such a policy may not be ideal for public discourse.
→ India has the third largest defense budget in the world, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported today. India spends $76.6 billion per year on its military—a considerable sum that still puts it well behind China ($229 bn) and the United States ($773 bn). The growth of India’s military budget, which has increased 33% in the past 10 years, is worrying the West, which has been watching warily as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government forges closer ties with Russia and China. Modi and President Putin met in December of 2021 and announced a new security cooperation agreement despite U.S. objections; since then, and in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has not condemned Putin’s war, nor has it embargoed Russian oil. To the contrary, India, which has a long-standing strategic alliance with Moscow dating to the Cold War, has made the most of this international crisis, deepening its friendship with Russia and China and buying up cheap Russian energy that the West has left on the table.
→ Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, and a Mormon from Utah who wore a mezuzah necklace and once wrote a Hanukkah song, died on Saturday at the age of 88. “The mezuzah reminds me of the affinity that I, as a member of the Mormon faith, hold for the Jewish people and their history,” Hatch said in a 2018 speech delivered on the floor of the Senate after former President Donald Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
→ Never a bad time to invest in real estate.
→ In another sign that investors are looking beyond the stock market for more diverse and lucrative investment vehicles, Blackstone announced the $13 billion purchase of American Campus Communities, which owns and manages university housing across the country. The purchase, which was finalized last week, comes as interest rates continue to climb, causing the value of such privately held real estate companies to decline. Beyond “buying the dip,” or investing as the company’s value is low in the hopes of pulling in a large return—and aside for what this signals about the corporatization of the American college campus—Blackstone’s purchase underscores the increasingly prominent role of real estate investments for private equity and financial firms.
→ A gunman who opened fire on a high school in Washington, D.C., on Friday took time, during the rampage, to post on social media and memorialize the shooting on Wikipedia. Students at the Edmund Burke School, an elite preparatory program, were forced to shelter in stairwells and beneath desks for several hours while the gunman shot off more than 100 rounds from a window across the street, injuring four people and traumatizing hundreds of students while editing the school’s Wikipedia page to note that “[a] gunman shot at the school on April 22, 2022. The suspect is still at large.” He killed himself shortly thereafter.
The Scroll’s David Sugarman on the conclusion of Netflix’s Ozark and the Deep Significance of Dish Washing
Done for the day with laundering the cartel’s money, Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), the couple at the center of Netflix’s Ozark, which will premiere its final season this Friday, sit down for a family dinner and then do dishes. In the Snell household too, the Byrdes’ nemesis Darlene (Lisa Emery) washes her plates while the difficulties of cleaning her baby’s bottle is the subject of some discussion. “I can’t even figure out how to open up his fucking sippy cup,” Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) complains to Jonah Byrde (Skylar Gaetner), standing beside the dish rack.
To wash dishes is to encounter the byproducts of our domestic lives. Wendy Byrde serves chicken, surely producing plates full of bone and skin and gristle. Also another less obvious byproduct: the familial intimacy that comes from sharing, however unhappily, in the mundane, tedious, dirty work required to keep a household running.
The Byrdes enjoy wine with their meals (also without their meals), a response to their stressful work on behalf of a Mexican drug lord. As they hand-wash cabernet glasses and towel-dry plates, they elliptically discuss Wendy’s brother, whom she had killed and cremated to keep her children safe and protect her family’s interests. It is only as they clean up supper’s mess, shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen sink, that this unspeakable subject becomes broachable.
Dishwashing, an act rarely dramatized on-screen, also happens to be our most common and time-consuming chore—a daily necessity that follows almost every act of eating. One survey (conducted by a West Coast dry cleaning chain) found that the average American, including those with a dishwasher, spends 5.5 hours doing dishes per week. It is surprising, then, that we don’t see more dishwashing on television and that our culture rarely considers a chore to which we dedicate so much of our lives and which has probably instigated more domestic turmoil than money or infidelity ever has.
Keeping a family safe, fed, clothed, is a constant labor, which Ozark dramatizes against the backdrop of lurid and terrible crimes. It takes ceaseless vigilance just to survive and see to the sustenance of others. Parents of young children in particular will be intimately aware of what “child care” requires.
Who, after forcing the kids into their beds, hasn’t looked into the swirling abyss of the kitchen sink, water backing up as food blocks the plug, and considered the terrible tedium of existence measured out in minutes? Who, seeing scraps of animal floating across the water, hasn’t wondered at the extraordinarily wasted effort of the thing?
Market research conducted by Joy detergent in 1956, shortly before the dishwasher would become a widely available household appliance in North America, confirms this close connection between dishwashing and despair. Joy hired the Institute for Motivational Research, overseen by Ernest Dichter, the pioneer of psychological investigations into commodities and brands, to oversee the study. Analyzing “women’s feelings about dishwashing,” the research team noted that “[w]omen are now reminded about dishwashing too frequently and regularly every day.” It was women charged with tending house—second-wave feminism was still a few years away, when Betty Friedan would describe, in The Feminine Mystique, “the problem that has no name, a vague undefined wish for ‘something more’ than washing dishes.” The market researchers realized something similar and wrote that women wanted to “resist being reminded of [dishwashing] again by ads, as we have found they resist ads for cemeteries, toilet paper, and other ‘necessary evils.’” Dishwashing, the team concluded, sits in the consciousness beside defecation and death.
Ozark, a show about committing “necessary evils” to keep one’s family safe, doesn’t decide if the work is worth it. Does sustaining oneself and one’s family justify our ruinous impact upon the world? Asked again, while washing a plate, if she would like to talk about the brother she killed—a “necessary evil” she would rather not acknowledge—Wendy sets down the sponge and leaves her husband to do the dishes alone.
You would be shocked at how many husbands in normal marriages do such and similar chores
Just imagine if the West, 'course led by the States had really wanted to preserve the integrity and national independence of the Ukraine through the stationing of troops within that country. With the high probability, should that had been the case, Russia would not have dared to invade and get involved with an actual conflict.
However, with our present culture, that appeared highly improbable. The Left, with particularly the NGOs would have been screaming. So, jus' continue the policy of paying others to do the fighting for the West.
Says helluva lot 'bout the West, an' more particularly where it is heading.
Philip Brown
26 Apr 2022