“May you live in interesting times:” it is a benediction and a curse.
These are disorienting times, of casual injustice, alternative facts, and “no collusion.” And in the gloaming twilight of our planet – so preventable, yet increasingly inevitable – we have arrived at the Orwellian political moment when “ignorance is strength.” These are times of political choices. As he was writing 1984, George Orwell observed of his own times that “there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues….” If anything, that is even more true today.
Culture is cultural politics; all art – even, it seems, superhero movies – is political art. Shopping for groceries, dining out, choosing what clothes to wear, what to name our children, what to watch on Netflix – we know better than anyone that these are all ethical, indeed political, choices.
These are dark times, much like the times described by Hannah Arendt, framed by “the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and no outrage,’ the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse.” Yet Arendt noted that “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.”
Our goal is to bring some flickering light to these dark times, and to help illuminate our choices. The Typescript is a journal about art, politics, and culture in interesting times. We will try our best to think independently, despite our mediated moment, and strive toward a politics of radical inclusion, committed to social justice, humanity and common decency.
It is not our purpose to proclaim ourselves the leaders of the #resistance, or to advance a narrow politics defined in the most exacting detail. Rather, we aim to provide an open forum of ideas, tolerant of many perspectives; where the personal, in all its manifestations and variety, is political, and the political personal.
We have a great deal to talk about, and much to record. Welcome to The Typescript.
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Photo © Matthew Friedman