It happened
There were many, many hot takes in the wake of the UnitedHealthcare shooting and the coverage that followed. Among those, however, I did find that the commentary from comedian and TikToker William Flannery was kind of unique. Flannery is a comedian and video creator with the stage name Dr. Glaucomflecken. And much of his content in recent years has centered around UnitedHealthcare, and its abysmal and draconian approach to denying perfectly reasonable coverage by any means necessary.
So naturally, he felt compelled to take to the stage and make his own comments.
Flannery acknowledges the complexed and nuances emotions we may have all felt when the news came out. And those are valid and difficult and even a little contradictory. But his position can be summed up by this quote:
It happened, so let's take advantage of it
This can be interpreted somewhat radically I think, and on first glance it has a nihilistic, or even factious, bend to it. But when you think about the long historical arc of change, the peaceful transformation of society we all imagine is possible—and has been possible—is not that old. It's essentially an outgrowth of modern society.
I grew up in an era of rewriting history. The post-Reagan era through the present day saw basically all of human history refracted through modernity resulting in the culmination of progress fully "realized" as a combination of capitalism and democracy. This has obviously come into serious question in the last decade or so, but it was essentially the dominaint way of thinking throughout my childhood. It was in the history textbooks.
We called it the end of history. We took the status quo of the cold war era and basically said this is it, this is what we've building for and this is how things will always be.
But again, this is a rewriting of history. It's not even how our country was created. That's not how historical cycles play out. Things will not remain calm and stable and proceed towards incremental progress. History is fits and starts.
And so much of it is basically, something happening, and then people taking advantage of it. I really think Flannery is just properly situating this moment. I don't know what kind of change we'll see but if we fail to take advantage of it because of some sort of unreturned adherence to decorum, we may never know.
Notes From this week
I cracked open the works of Andre Bazin and Walter Benjamin, which I haven't really read since college. I really love what Renoir had to say about Bazin:
In the days when kings were kings, when they washed the feet of the poor and, by the simple act of passing by, healed those afflicted with scrofula, there were poets to confirm their belief in their greatness. Not infrequently the singer was greater than the object of his singing. This is where Bazin stands vis-à-vis the cinema.
There aren't many critics that have managed to give such meaning to film.
As I continue reading through Lord of the Rings, I watched The Two Towers extended edition. I continue to be struck by the special effects, which really do hold up for the most part (lighting on Gollum aside). But there is a considerable drag from the books
With the new Bob Dylan film out, I like this quote from an interview in the 70's:
We’re all wind and dust anyway… We don’t even have any proof that the universe exists. We don’t have any proof that we are even sitting here. We can’t prove that we’re alive.