Alabama Song.

How does the search for the next whiskey bar factor into Bourbonism, Greg Fischer-style?

Has Fischer resigned yet?

Brecht Was a Revolutionary, by Marc Silberman (Jacobin)

Not only did Bertolt Brecht transform German drama, but his work captured his radical commitment to socialist politics and the emancipation of working people.

... Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian, but an artist-intellectual who developed his critical faculties through the experience of political reversals and historical ruptures. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified socialism identified with it is a powerful indictment of traditional left utopianism. But Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society never sought to provide answers on how to make the world better. Rather, his writings are scripts for how to ask questions, how to formulate the right questions for a given situation that is untenable and therefore must be changed.

While Brecht believed in the power of reason that enables people to recognize the problems around them and to solve them, he was neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against the function of emotions in traditional theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s belief in reason is a functional concept that enables individuals to determine their interest and to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of reasoned action excluding neither passion nor emotion ...