“To understand the State of the Union, we must look not only at where we are and where we’re going but where we’ve been. The situation at this time last year was truly ominous. […] First, we must understand what’s happening at the moment to the economy. Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe; they are the inheritance of decades of tax and tax, and spend and spend. […] The only alternative being offered to this economic program is a return to the policies that gave us a trillion-dollar debt, runaway inflation, runaway interest rates and unemployment.”
-The provenance of this quote will delight you.

This should probably become an international incident soon, right? (So far, British politicians and Amnesty International have, to be fair, spoken out strenuously.) “Malawi’s High Court refused on Thursday to release on bail a gay couple from a maximum security prison where they have been held for a month, saying it had denied their request for their own safety…. Police arrested Steven Monjeza, 26 and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, in late December for getting engaged in a traditional ceremony. They were charged with unnatural practices between males and gross public indecency.” This is the second time they have been denied bail. The punchline about the “their own safety” part is about how they are being beaten up in jail.

This has since been deleted-and then reposted!-but we thought we’d still share. [Via]

Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Matching Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj softcore robot Barbie sex-dolls. Again, Nicki Minaj kinda weirds me out with the Marcel-Marceau stuff. But, in this track that came out early this week and has, unexpectedly, been growing on me ever since, she doesn’t shrink an inch next to Mariah and her rhymes are good. And then, at the end, the video’s director, Mariah’s husband Nick Cannon, pays homage to his starmaking turn in 2002’s Drumline. Hammy stuff. But… oddly and inexplicably? I like it.

The New Yorker has made the 13 stories they published by Salinger available to everyone. Here, to revisit, is Janet Malcolm’s 2001 defense of the post-Catcher Salinger. And here is that horrifying article from a few months ago about how the kids can’t even read him. Also, here are two more immediate reactions to his life and death.

The first is from Alex Balk:

I’ve spent the last twenty years or so being embarrassed about J. D. Salinger. His thoughts are so clichéd! The language is so dated! There is nothing he has written that would seem insightful to anyone but a searching, frustrated teenager! Thinking about that in light of his passing, it’s fairly obvious that those reactions are all part of having read and loved almost everything Salinger wrote when I was a searching, frustrated teacher. The embarrassment I feel when I think about J. D. Salinger is actually the embarrassment I feel when I think about that kid who loved those books and felt like they finally helped him to understand a world that seemed so unfair and incomprehensible. I don’t know whether or not that makes Salinger a Great Writer In The Canon, but if someone has so much of an impact on you at a tender age that you’ve essentially incorporated the reading of his work with that specific moment of your life I think it’s probably fair to say that he was at least a great writer. I wouldn’t go back and read those books any sooner than I’d go back to that point in my life, but, on reflection, yes, that writer was pretty great.

The second is much shorter, but equally profound.

by Hamilton Nolan

John Duddy is the fightingest Irish guy in New York. This, as historic stereotypes go, is right up there with being the chop suey-cookingest Chinese guy in San Francisco. Duddy, furthermore, fights with a fists-forward style that lends him a certain resemblance to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish mascot, minus the jaunty little suit.

This is all for the best. John Duddy is a boxer, and boxing is the world’s last respectable cauldron of bloodthirsty racial pride. Soccer is for patriots; boxing is for tribes.

The best boxing tribes are based in places that have been stepped on a bit throughout history-not necessarily oppressed into a tepid stupor, but shoved by a bully just enough to make them mad. Ireland is an angry, underdog place. So, in their own ways, are Puerto Rico, and Mexico, and every inner city of America, and the various ethnic enclaves of New York City, each of which is its own training ground and support group for fighters to go out into the world and do battle on their behalf. The fighters are the warlords and we fans are their willing foot soldiers.

On Saturday night at Madison Square Garden’s underground arena, Duddy fought on the undercard of a nine-bout fight night. The top two fights were carried on HBO. Each of the eighteen fighters came from a recognized boxing tribe. A 6’6″ Puerto Rican methodically mashed a 5’9″ Philadelphian’s face. A young Long Islander managed to pick apart a gangly Mexican, despite a man screaming instructions at him throughout the entire fight in a horrific Long Island accent. A white guy from Queens easily beat an out-of-shape Midwesterner with blond highlights, who clearly took the fight on short notice. (The mushy Midwest is a very weak tribe). Jorge Diaz, out of Jersey City, walked away with an easy win after his opponent’s knee popped out garishly in the first round. An Italian New Yorker with ads for a local nursery on his trunks shook off two rounds of brutal ass-whupping by an angry, muscled South Carolinian belt holder to dance his way to victory in the latter half of the fight. Pawel Wolak, a Polish guy who looks like 85% of the more thuggish young men in Greenpoint, executed his trademark maneuver of wading into the chest of his opponent, crouching down and pounding hooks into the ribcage for eight consecutive rounds. His 30-something opponent, Ishmael Arvin of Baltimore, was too old to spin off, and had no choice but to try to pick off Wolak’s unceasing shots with his elbows while tossing halfhearted uppercuts that succeeded only in knocking out Wolak’s mouthpiece a few times and annoying the referee. Arvin should perhaps consider retirement.

Duddy’s fight was next. The next-next-next pace of the fights slowed. Everything had to be fussy and just so. Duddy brings in the Irish crowd. New York City must always have a resident Irish fighter to be cheered on by all the motherfuckers who pack Irish bars and John “The Derry Destroyer” Duddy is that man, for the moment. His fight was not to be shown on HBO, but he’d sold a lot of tickets, and for that, the crowd was entitled to a grand entrance. The announcer made sure to say the word “Ireland” as many times as humanly possible, bringing rousing hollers from the seats. Duddy came out in his green trunks with the shamrock and a bagpiper and an impressively Celtic-looking mustachioed man waving an Irish flag. (The same impressively Celtic-looking mustachioed man came out two fights later waving a Puerto Rican flag, and I saw him on TV later in Vegas waving a Mexican flag in yet another bout; he is apparently a full-time flag-waver-boxing’s Sean Hannity).

The word among the guys who know was that Duddy-despite selling, probably, more tickets than even the headliners that night-was just here as a warmup for his upcoming and much bigger fight on the Manny Pacquiao undercard in March. Consequently, they said, Duddy had been handed an easy opponent, a warmup guy, a patsy, really, just there to dip and dodge but not very well equipped to challenge the clean-cut Irishman who, while not possessed with the best hand speed you’ve ever seen in a middleweight, does not mind aggressively punching it out all night, a thing that the fans love. Therefore Duddy was paired on this night with a Mexican fighter by the name of Juan Astorga, who I decided to nickname “Grimace” for the expression that involuntarily flashed across his face every time a fist came into his general vicinity.

Astorga took a knee just seconds after the bell as a result of what appeared to be a grotesquely delayed reaction to a jab that Duddy had thrown some time in the last decade. Halfway through the first round Duddy bent to his left and sunk a big huge lefthanded body shot into Astorga’s belly, just as deep as you can push one of those things without taking a glove off and scraping your opponent’s intestines out with your fingertips. Astorga dropped and that was it. Two minutes and Duddy looked as fresh as if he’d just stepped out the shower and cut a nice slice off his Irish Spring soap, smelling like victory.

The promoters had not expected it all to go that fast, so everyone had to sit around for 40 minutes until it was showtime on HBO for the two headline bouts. A young Cuban named Yuriorkis Gamboa, easily the best fighter I’ve ever seen live, brutally destroyed an overmatched Tanzanian named Rogers Mtagwa, despite Mtagwa’s very strong turnout of ecstatic Tanzanian fans dancing in the aisles during the 40-minute pre-fight wait.

Finally, a skinny but tenacious Mexican, Steven Luevano, gave Puerto Rican hot shot Juan Manuel “Juanma” Lopez seven strong rounds before Juanma stunned him with an uppercut, then ran in with a strong right and left hook that sent Luevano, who can certainly hold his head high for his effort that night, tumbling partway through the ropes, knocked the fuck out.

Most of the time we instinctively feel that we should downplay how people look and where they’re from, on the noble and correct principle that humanity is a brotherhood that can only be undermined by highlighting our superficial differences. But another principle that I like to think is well-grounded in human nature says: better to scream for a member of your tribe to do his very best to kill a member of a rival tribe in a clean, ring-based setting, while wearing gloves, than in a war-based setting, with machine guns. Catharsis is a good thing.

The real racism: of the nine fights that night, all nine boxers fighting out of the red corner won. When will we begin to appreciate The Fighting Blues?

Hamilton Nolan is the media editor of Gawker.

Exactly correct. (via)

Has Knifecrime Island’s trouble with drink reached epidemic proportions? New figures show that alcohol-related deaths in Britain have doubled since the 1990s. And everyone’s getting in on the game: Almost 42,000 cases of hospitalization in three years for those under 18 (or “35 children every DAY,” as the Mail has it) were related to alcohol, “middle-class professionals” drink 13.8 alcohol units a week (surpassing their proletarian countrymen, who average 10.6), and 20% of British women over 65 admit to drinking alone on the days they consume the most alcohol. It seems fairly shocking. In related news,

A pub chain is to promote large wine glasses, equivalent to a third of a bottle, in a bid to draw women aged 35 and over into its bars. The controversial decision by Greene King is part of a feminine revamp that will see some bars adorned with flowers, glossy magazines and complimentary toiletries….One of the key changes will be to promote ‘much larger’ wine glasses for these 35+ women who have been labelled SWAGs — Sassy, Wise and Grown Up.

Well, at least that will get them out of the house.

*

Here is a mixtape about pronouns and antecedents. (Although, oftentimes, it turns out, in the popular music, “it” stands for sexual intercourse and/or genitalia.) The author notes, regarding the music of today: “I’m sorry, you want it what way? What is the this that’s not it? Wait, what exactly won’t you do?”