U.S. Economy Added 243,000 Jobs

Republicans Sharply Question Bernanke for Fed’s Focus on Job Market

“I think this policy runs the great risk of fueling asset bubbles, destabilizing prices and eventually eroding the value of the dollar,” said Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee.

“The prospect of all three,” Mr. Ryan said, “is adding to uncertainty and holding our economy back.”

Mr. Bernanke was calm and careful in his responses, but he did not back down. He told the committee that the economy, and the housing market in particular, would need help for years to come from the Fed and Congress.

Writers at the Ramparts in a Gay Revolution by Dwight Gardner

It’s hard to believe that this story — about the tangled lives of men like Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Tony Kushner and Mr. Kramer — has not been combed and braided into a single narrative before. Lesbian literature is not dealt with here; Mr. Bram is probably correct to suggest that “it needs its own historian.”

This country’s gay revolution, Mr. Bram notes, “began as a literary revolution,” far more so than did the civil rights or women’s movements. America’s literary past is filled with brilliant, closeted gay and very possibly gay writers: Henry James, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Hart Crane. But the story Mr. Bram sets out to tell commences in the late 1940s.

“Before World War II,” he says, “homosexuality was a dirty secret that was almost never written about and rarely discussed.” The year everything changed, he persuasively argues, was 1948. That year the first of the Kinsey Reports appeared. So did two groundbreaking gay-themed works of fiction: “The City and the Pillar,” by Mr. Vidal, and “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” by Capote. The men would become bitter rivals.

How to Fight the Man by David Brooks

On thing to notice about gays and "fighting the man" that many brilliant gays were on the Left and fighting for civil rights and democracy like Bayard Rustin. The rightwing and fascism often contained manly, closeted gays who bashed homosexuality in public and were/are sadistic and mentally unstable. See J. Edgar Hoover or Roy Cohn. (By the way there's a weird, factually incorrect meme out there that the German Nazi Party was created by masculine gay men although it did include some.)

But to Brooks's broader points:

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label. If your college hasn’t provided you with a good knowledge of countercultural viewpoints — ranging from Thoreau to Maritain — then your college has failed you and you should try to remedy that ignorance.  

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

Kenyan Socialism (need link) is embedded in the tradition of fighting for democracy and economy justice. This includes the recently successful civil rights and feminist movements.

What Brooks doesn't acknowledge in his columns is the tradition of the left in fighting for gains that today people take for granted.