Weekly Digest

WBH Bi-monthly Digest 2024-04-19: Bring Back the Assholes

A long post from M. C. A. Hogarth on how well the Princess and the Frog holds up fifteen years later.

The Princess and the Frog isn't a great fit for the Heroine's Journey, which is good, since checkbox-style scripts or plots are the death of the imagination. However, I think what you can see that Tiana gains knowledge and not power on her quest to not be a frog anymore, which fits the feminine mode of adventure stories.

As one of the commenters on this post noted, letting the police rough up suspects was a load-bearing element of policing. I wouldn't argue that Miranda was disconnected from real abuses and injustice, but I don't really think that an honest accounting of both costs and benefits is widely known.

John J. Reilly noted that one of the effects of Miranda was to make the length of sentences the only possible adjustment our society could make in response to crime. Most of the tools of policing have been steadily taken away.

This Substack is currently private, but the Internet Archive has copy of this great post on what the other tools of policing are, because most Americans probably genuinely don't know they exist.

The Long View: How to Prevent a Civil War

One of the things John J. Reilly often said was that Western culture and politics in the twentieth [and now twenty-first] century was "blocked", unable to proceed through a perverse combination of incentives and philosophical positions. The way the Miranda decision constitutionalized policing is just one example of how this has happened.

As a further an example, look at this now thirty-year-old essay from John J. Reilly, How to Prevent a Civil War. It is still absurdly topical.

Contemplations on the Tee of Woe: Let's talk about Civil War

Alexander Macris reflects on the recent Civil War movie in topical resonance with John J. Reilly.

The most recent episode of I Might Believe in Faeries featuring Jonathan Geltner and Gregorio Montejo overlaps nicely with my recent series on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Two notable points are: how you can experience a story all at once, like a musical score, or as a sequence of moments like a performance; and how typology can unlock the richness of stories.