House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long kept silent as to whether President Joe Biden should cancel student debt — but that changed in late July. “The president can’t do it — so that’s not even a discussion,” she said during a news conference, stunning colleagues. As we detail in this week’s Weekend Reader, The Intercept discovered Pelosi made the announcement after she received a private memo from Democratic megadonors.
Find out about that memo and much more in this Weekend Reader, exclusively for paying subscribers below.
I read The Atlantic's long essay about professional decline. The author is a highly accomplished rightwinger in sheep's clothing. He's a former head of the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of corrosive neoliberal thought leadership. As such, I view him as immersed in a universe of moral filth. It's like the old gag about one fish swimming past another. "How's the water?," asks the first. The other replies, "What's water?" The author, though, swims not in water, but in sewage.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff observed that tyrants don't see themselves as evil. I'm sure the same is true of their enablers, such as this author.
The author ruminates about the fear of professional decline, his privilege exuding from every pore. There's not a glimmer of concern or even awareness for anyone or anything outside his elite social and economic class.
I wonder if Sirota himself chose to link us to this two-year-old piece, which btw I still found quite interesting. (Thank you!) Being a creative knowledge worker, I felt few echoes of personal existential crises on which the author was musing. I'm well past "retirement age" yet still feel as if I'm performing at the top of my game. (True, who knows? And if true, for how long?)
My dad, a creative PR guy and relentless brainstormer, still had a client or two into his 80s. Years earlier, he'd confided: "I love what I do. I don't tell my clients this, but if they didn't pay me, I'd do it for nothing." I can relate. When Dad was eighty-something, I had a client that was seeking a new name for their technology company. I invited my elderly father to participate. Most of us came up with a few names each. Dad? He faxed me page after page, scrawled with names. Over 600 names.
So much for professional decline.
Regardless: if Sirota picked this particular piece to share with us, I wonder if it was because he felt the same echoes of personal existential confrontation I did, the same still small voice worrying about maybe, just maybe, suffering professional decline at some point in life's journey.
While the personal challenge seems shared by the author and me, and perhaps Sirota, at least the latter two of us have some degree of social conscience.
At least, we're not swimming in sewage.