FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Dick Shawn and Barrie Chase dance to the Shirelles' "31 Flavors." 

Thanks to Norman Jewison Stanley Kramer, of all people! (And @benzero, who sent it me.)

•  Hey look, another wingnut doesn't like Between the World and Me. R.R. Reno's pitch at Catholic-con mag First Things is that "our liberal establishment is aflutter" (the sissies!) at Ta-Nehisi Coates because he is engaged in "an extended effort to keep the wounds of racism open. Coates is not glad for the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner or the other black men killed in recent years. But he cherishes their martyrdom." So, same old story: Why do these black people insist on cherishing their centuries-, decades-, years-, months-, weeks-, and days-old grievances? But Reno distinguishes himself with a rhetorical device:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a lot more in common with Allen Tate than James Baldwin. Like I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto Tate and his friends wrote to defend white Southern culture against absorption into the soulless materialism of Northern prosperity, Between the World and Me should be read as a nostalgic hymn to the writer’s culture—black America’s solidarity in fear and wisdom in suffering.

If you're of a charitable turn of mind, you may think this is Reno's version of (speaking of Jewison!) "You’re just like the rest of us, ain’t ya?" from In The Heat of the Night. But this is one of those terrible ideas that actually gets worse as it's teased out, e.g.:

The indictments of America (of which there are many) get aired again and again because they are an integral part of [Coates'] distinctive Afrocentric mythology, just as in Tate’s generation, a certain mythology about Northern aggression was part of a white Southerner’s heritage.

And:

[Coates] writes of being “haunted by the shadow of my father’s generation.” Malcolm X presides over his life in the way Robert E. Lee did for generations of Southerners, a symbol of dignified resistance and a refusal to allow defeat and subjugation to have the final word.

And:

Add the relative youth and fertility of immigrants, as well as rising rates of intermarriage, and we get an emerging social reality as threatening to the black heritage cherished by Ta-Nehisi Coates as to the culture dear to the Daughters of the Confederacy: One out of ­every four children born today has one parent not born in America.

It goes on and on, but I'll limit myself to one more (be warned -- it's a dilly):

Coates wants that to be true for his son. “Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of the trans-Atlantic rape.” Never forget. Never forget. As Coates repeats this refrain again, I could hear in my mind the words of that other tenacious, desperate American effort to resurrect the past: “The South will rise again!”

Slavery = The Confederacy. Well, if you're the kind of person this is pitched to (it's a cinch Reno wasn't counting on any black readers), I suppose it's worth a try.

•  Speaking of the Confederacy, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds explains why the youngs like Bernie Sanders to USA Today readers, who are probably wondering. Apparently there's a poll that shows millenials don't really like "wealth redistribution," so what the kids really want is that other lovable coot Ron Paul, only they don't know it, so they're only voting for Ben & Jerry's Stalin by accident. This is so ridiculous that I took the trouble to click through, and found Reynolds got the idea from Nate Silver. "Like Sanders, Paul drew more support from poorer voters than from wealthier ones in 2012, although that’s not true of libertarianism more generally," goes Silver's biggest howler. Libertarians dream of being wealthy cuz they're "makers" and deserve it, Sanders voters dream of justice for all -- same diff, really! There are some things sabermetrics can't figure out, apparently.

•  Re: the above segment, commenter Andrew Johnston finds that Silver is right about the makeup of libertarians, and suggests I did not think so. I should have been clearer that by "howler" I didn't mean Silver was wrong on that point, but that he was funny -- "that’s not true of libertarianism more generally" particularly: Contra Silver's wider point, there are all kinds of reasons poor folk will vote for a candidate, and what animates the working-stiff Sanders voter and the working-stiff Paul voter doesn't have to be the same thing, though I know the conventional wisdom in our Trump-is-Bernie era is that the rabble are all alike. Also, I found another vote for Sanders as the invisible Paul vote at Reason. "Ironically, implausibly," says Matt Kibbe, "Bernie Sanders has become the 'new' Ron Paul.." Well, at least he's half right on the adverbs. I guess Rand Paul must be the unloved son of the Hero, like Ron Reagan Jr.