Charles Dickens’ Hard Times; Trumping the pro-choice vote; a 1963 Ska hit, “Carry Go Bring Come.”

Prompted by the New Yorker’s weekly “Take Three” column, where one of their staff writers summarizes three things they’re into this week, here’s Week #5 of my own version.

1) In last week’s installment, when I was obsessing over Friedrich Engels’ Manchester exposé, The Condition of the Working Classes in England, I noted that Engels’ poetic writing was giving me everything I could ever hope to get from a Dickens’ novel—and without the Byzantine plot lines.

Well, burn on me. Or at least a dose of irony: It turns out, I was clearly craving the excitement you get from fictional dramas and characters. This week, I can’t get enough of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), a class-conscious novel set in a fictionalized Manchester, Coketown. I was initially drawn in by the novel’s circus outcast Sissy Jupe, but as I read on and the book introduced: 1) a House of Commons sub-plot, 2) a mysterious old lady who’s spying on capitalist cheiftan Josiah Bounderby, and most of all, 3) a downcast Coketown factory “Hand,” laborer Steven Blackpool (whose Dickensian name ties right back to Engels’ purple prose about Manchester’s beshitten streets), I’m hooked.

2) Doubt and pessimism. I can’t help turning last week’s pro-choice wins in Red states (Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky), and this week’s equally excellent news about a trans rights win in rural, Republican Texas (!), into an ominous realization: What I think we have learned from pro-choice wins in Red state's is not the Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that MAGA is pro-choice. They are more libertarian and libertine than evangelical.

What we’re witnessing in these Red states is a libertarian lean that may actually align them with pro-choice—and even pro-trans voters. Sure, they’re apparently willing and ready to throw women and queers under the bus in a Presidential election year (because, again, they don’t care about women and queers), but big reveal: Trump districts do not toe the Christian conservative line. This means, while Democrats are banking on pro-choice voters to help carry the day for Biden and the Ds in 2024, it’s not going to work because plenty of them will vote for Trump.

Trump voters are drawn to something else. As opposed to “family values,” what’s actually motivating the populist right is an angry mix of racism, Nativism, and the lawless bravado of Trumpist ideology that conjures a laissez-faire fantasy of (white) American liberty. I’m scared, and obsessing that this line of resentment politics will trump any pro-choice vote next year.

*UPDATE, 12/5/23: Having had more time to sit with this unwieldy theory, I’ve gotten slightly more articulate about it:

This recent NYT headline: "Talk About Abortion, Don’t Talk About Trump: Governors Give Biden Advice" gives me an opportunity to make a scary prediction about 2024. I think what we've actually learned from the recent string of pro-choice wins in Red states isn't that Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that lots of MAGA voters are pro-choice. Certainly, the evangelical wing is anti-abortion, but the basic MAGA voter is more libertarian and libertine, and they don't want the government butting into their private lives. I predict that 2024 exit polling in swing states like AZ (where Democrats are planning to run pro-choice initiatives) will show that tons of pro-choice voters overlap with pro-Trump voters. Sure, Democrats will come out to vote pro-choice, but the measures will not siphon Trump voters. Meanwhile, the measures will also bring out more evangelicals, and they'll tip the balance. This will be the stunned pundit class analysis on the morning that Trump wins it. : ( P.s. I think the recent, surprise pro-trans win in a Red, small town outside Dallas, TX reflected a similar MAGA voter sensibility.

3) Another dispatch from piano practice: I’m not reveling in Justin Hinds & the Dominoes 1963 Ska hit “Carry Go Bring Come” as much as I was recently reveling in Lorde’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon” and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” (two earlier obsessions to make this list). But I am obsessing over this Jamaican pop number, nonetheless.

Here’s what’s going on: The sheet music arrangement I’ve got for “Carry Go Bring Come” doesn’t match the record so well. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time lovingly experimenting with the score to make it align with the jumping recorded version that first drew me to this early Ska tune.