…progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.

I am a lot more conservative-minded in my 30s than in my 20s, so much so that my 20s version would be mad, and my 30s self, well me, would be annoyed by the younger. That’s not to say I have much in the way of conservatism at all in my politics. The modern Republican Party, like under the Bush years, is a death cult that wants to take us with them as they sacrifice themselves on the altar of capitalism and sell it to their followers, who they don’t give a shit about, as a millenialism ala evangelical Christianity.

But so it goes.

I am not a radical. Fighting for radical change in the world is a good way for me to die and nothing to change.

Sigh.

I think this is where I see some real commonality with Zadie Smith in this collection of essays. She’s incredibly rational in her thinking (and when she does do her literary criticism, I find it quite compelling). Her first essay uses Tony Judt, British historian and public good in government savant who died a few years back to all our detriments, as a model for the value and righteousness of the public library, not just a space to find book but as a public space and common good.

She also writes about Jay Z, the elder stateman of hip hop and living proof of growing into early middle age is ok, Key and Peele, Get Out, and many many more topics you might very well be interested in and that I was most certainly interested in.

(Photo: https://nikkigphd.com/2015/01/02/zadie-smith-cool/)