Jew of Oklahoma

If you appreciate Kinky Friedman then you’ll certainly enjoy Mark Rubin of Bad Livers fame. The seamless confluence of many styles is an authentic distillation that marks this debut out for serious consideration, shot through with a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor. The interesting/revealing thing is that given the prevailing (crude and superficial) social ontology, i.e., “basket of deplorables” — Mark would easily fall into that “category” (regardless of his actual politics). This brings to mind the Twain/Maslow quip that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”. This then is the problem with vulgarly rationalistic identity politics — either a single irrelevant collecting feature is invoked, or there is a bloated ontological slum — as Quine said. One can’t even call it conceptual creep, there is no concept!

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