When Brecht wondered whether, the people’s confidence in government having failed, it might be possible to dissolve the people and elect another, he was being ironic. Jacob Weisberg appears to really mean it.

Without giving anything away to those of you who can’t watch “Friday Night Lights” Season 4 until it airs on NBC in late spring, let me just note that the trajectory has wound up in an extremely appropriate spot as of this week. It’s very in tune with the national mood. I don’t know when these episodes were written and shot, but it’s kind of eerie.

There have been spots over the course of the season where I’ve felt the series had lost its way and was just fooling around with characters it knew the audience was fond of. But it’s become clear that actually they did have an arc for the season that made a lot of sense. That trajectory actually becomes apparent within the first episode: it’s a season about what it’s like to lose, where the basic reason you’re losing is because you’re poor. This is not feel-good TV. It was a hard-assed and correct decision to take the series in that direction. There have been a number of series in recent years that, I think for the first time in American television history, have been unafraid to take on class divisions without cloaking them as mere cultural or stylistic differences, hiding their raw asymmetries of money and power, or keeping them at a safe distance by setting them in the past. FNL is one of them.

Julian Sanchez has the germ of a solid argument here. But only the germ. It is in fact true that the observed stupidity of the American people in, say, refusing to vote for cheaper and less discriminatory health insurance for themselves presents a problem for liberals. Basically, if people can’t engage in effective collective action to get themselves systems that benefit everyone, then why believe in collective action as a philosophy? If the American people really are too dumb to do anything for themselves, why try to do anything for them? Why not get a job on Wall Street, rob the taxpayer blind for a few years, and retire at 40 with a cool billion in a Cayman Islands account? Or whatever it is that Republicans do? Doesn’t the failure of collective action at the political level show that people, or Americans at least, are incapable of acting collectively and are best served by a system that ruthlessly screws over the less gifted and wealthy, while affording great opportunities for those of us who had the wisdom to be born into upper-middle-class families and attend Ivy League schools?

Sanchez thinks his own position is consistent because he’s “never been all that big on the intrinsic virtues of democracy” and thus thinks nobody is harmed when corporations get the ability to mislead us all with their expert demagoguery and obfuscation, at budgets of $100 million a buy. We’re so stupid we’d be getting conned by somebody regardless, so why not corporations? I’m with him on the skepticism about the intrinsic value of democracy. But the thing is that the type of regime I think might be better than democracy is a wise nationalist-fascist regime on the Chinese model, run by a political class interested in national greatness and not beholden to a particular class, sector or province. The corporatist model, on the other hand, is doomed to cronyism and collapse, because the bosses will sell out the nation for those Cayman Islands accounts every time. Because I don’t really care about the welfare of the individual and am only interested in national greatness, my position that corporations should be barred from political activity of any kind is more consistent than his.

This is a picture from an expensive Hanoi shopping mall built with Ukrainian mafia money, but I think it could have been taken in about a hundred emerging-market countries.

That is an actual human girl sitting there being an advertisement for Levi’s jeans, or for some kind of retro lifestyle involving reel-to-reel tape decks and Stratocasters that Levi’s wants you to associate with their jeans, or something. Her name, if I recall correctly, was Verka, which was unusual-sounding, and she comes from somewhere in Russia. She said she’s studying at university here for a year.

I’m constantly shocked at the things some companies and people in some places don’t even think to be embarrassed about doing. This is a sort of Amsterdam Red Light District motif? Or something? What are they going for here?

I’m drinking a rosé from Myanmar. And it tastes goooood.

By “evildoers” obviously I refer to people who make or drink rosé.