Introducing Cahiers du Sinema

Are you a liberal who thinks liberalism is too liberal? You came to the right place!

WallpaperFlare

Welcome to our bold new adventure in publishing, Cahiers du Sinema. We apologize for the cheeky name, but it was just too perfect to avoid. We mean, we don’t necessarily endorse Senator Sinema or her politics, such as they are — but then again we do like, and we guess that means we sort of do endorse, the idea, or rather the vibe, of Kyrsten Sinema — that is, her sense or ethos or teleology of being someone who stands among liberals, but not of them, especially when it’s time to vote.

We are a magazine for those who are in some sense or vibe “liberal” (whatever that means) but feel abandoned by the radical liberal Biden liberals, notwithstanding we also share a sort of sense, or maybe more of a vibe or a glimmer, of camaraderie with them based on songs and TV shows we used to enjoy with them back in college and also the homely little rituals of fraternity life, and some basic in-a-sense liberal but not too liberal precepts from which we believe (as deeply as we believe anything, which to be frank isn’t much) they have strayed, or rather lost the vibe or charge or spark or thing.

As we sit back of an evening in a fancy urban boîte in the major blue city we call home (though don’t get us wrong, we’d gladly relocate to a red state if we could find suitable educational alternatives for Crispin and Iphigenia and a decent Laotian restaurant that delivers), we feel (or grok or intuit) a pang of loss at that which separates us and causes our radlib ex-friends to not invite us to their social events, notwithstanding they like to think of themselves as “tolerant.”

But from the lemons they have given us we are making Limonata. Whereas our radical liberal former-we-guess-up-to-them-really friends are steeped and cosseted in cancelculture and defunding and transphilia and all the modish symptoms of radical unpopularist radical liberalism, we have freed ourselves from such conventions, shibboleths, partis pris, and what have you, which leaves us unencumbered of tiresome party-platform buzzwords like “equity,” “reproductive rights,” and “solidarity.” Not that we don’t believe, or rather vibe or shine or namecheck these things, but that we recognize that to elevate them to the status of principles would make us as hidebound as our old Delta Epsilon brothers. And that we will not do (not that we’re making a moral judgement about it). We must above all be flexible, as our yoga teacher keeps telling us, and able to entertain the bold new ideas advanced by the youthful and sociable young intellectuals whom our hackneyed former friends disparage as “theocons” and “neo-Nazis.”

We invite you to peruse our inaugural masthead, and see for yourself whether our free-flowing, unfettered, imagistic, stream-of-consciousness (in the political sense, we mean; our editorial standards are as exacting as that of the Atlantic or the New Republic) approach is for you:

Ignoring the Crime Vibe. Liberals are all hung up on “crime statistics” that say crime is not rising significantly in big cities. But what about how ordinary people — not privileged people like me and, and I must assume since you’re reading me, you — feel about crime? When normal non-liberal people can’t go out at night because they believe (and who are you to say their beliefs are not valid?) that they might get murdered, and sit home watching endlessly repeated news clips about crimes in cities within 100 miles of them, and they get an all-over-body vibe that bad dudes could come at any moment to murder them, what can you say to them — especially since, surprise, they’re also minorities, ha ha! Gotcha.

Cancelculture High School: A Modern Problem. The kids at Furshlugginer High School are much like you were in your teenage years — but unlike you, they have a heightened sense of the importance of their own feelings, indulge in unreasonable personal vendettas, and hurt each other’s feelings — and these unprecedented pathologies are all because of cancelculture! A young woman foolishly gives her boyfriend a nude and gets mad when he shows it to his buddies and calls him out, sparking a debate over who the real victim is here. You’ll come away thinking maybe Elon Musk has a point.

Let Me Explain by Andrew Sullivan. The famous contrarian gay marriage advocate who has boldly challenged cancelculture and transphilia and other modern radical liberal excesses now finds himself in the crosshairs of conservatives who are understandably outraged that drag queens are reading to their kids and that Sullivan has not agreed to ban it and them. The author of Love Undetectable graces our inaugural issue with an apology to these concerned parents and his new, revised position on when and where drag queens should be allowed to practice and what punishments are suitable when they exceed those limits.  Now, if that isn’t outreach, what is?