Page 4 - Issue 45 News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.

For the first time in my life I would be an official roadie. I wasn’t merely in charge of the driving: I would also help build and dismantle, lift and position, carry and fetch — armed with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. My writing would be full of self-mockery and rich with funny observations about my wife. Moreover, having experienced the splendor of the gig, my dispatch would be transformed, alchemically, into an essay that contained a series of pointed, even revolutionary, observations about art.

One way of reading the AKP’s progress is as a two-step process of privatization. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatized a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has moved to make the state itself the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase — standard neoliberalism — won the AKP applause from the Western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher. 

When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.