Category: Commentary

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“A court that will do what it is told”

Five years ago, I wrote this post about my thoughts on reforming the Supreme Court. My thoughts were intended as an “intro” to the topic, and I got some interesting commentary response. I have been thinking about the topic again, because the Court is an even bigger problem now, to the point that addressing its problems is rapidly becoming essential, once–and if–saner voices take elective power in Washington. I present below the text of that original post of mine, a lot of which I still think might be a good way of approaching things; lifetime tenure needs to go away, but so does the “accidental” nature of which President gets to make a lot of appointments to the Court and which one does not. I also gave a lot of thought to the shenanigans of one Senator Mitch McConnell, who used the power of the Senate to simply deny a Democratic President a Supreme Court appointment. My attempt to address this got some interesting pushback, and I’m open to suggestion, but I still believe that fundamentally the Senate cannot be allowed to do nothing when an active Supreme Court nomination lies before it. Maybe in addition to requiring a vote, and forbidding the Senate to adjourn while a nomination lies before it, we also change the voting procedure so the vote is not one to confirm, but to deny, with a 3/5 majority required to decline a nomination. Also, re-reading my post, I see that I wrote against expanding the Court. I have changed my mind, and frankly, expanding it to 21 would be OK with me.

Before delving into my own thoughts, though, here’s a video on the topic of our corrupt Supreme Court by the always-brilliant Jamelle Bouie. It’s always worth remembering that our government was structured such that each branch’s power would be checked and balanced by the other two, and that the current state of affairs–in which Congress, run by Republicans, has completed abdicated its responsibility to check or balance anything–is a voluntary one, and also a political one. Nothing in the US Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as a de facto royal body that governs by decree, and in fact, there is a great deal of power that the Congress holds over the Court.

Here is my original post from five years ago:

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: how I would fix the Supreme Court. Obviously, I’m not an expert and am quite possibly wrong in many ways, but you have to start SOMEWHERE, right? Here’s my proposed Amendment which would fix the Court, with interspersed commentary.

WHEREAS it is sufficiently clear in 2021 that the current structure of the United States Supreme Court has proven too easily forced by concerted effort by various factions to extended periods of ideological extremity, I propose the following alterations in how the Court is structured.

While I’m sure American conservatives are all kinds of gleeful that they have finally, after years of focus and hard work, managed to create a Court majority that will favor their ideological goals for quite possibly decades to come, I hope most Americans will agree that this is not a desirable state of affairs.

 

1. The Supreme Court shall consist of 9 seats, with each Seat being held by one Justice.

Why 9? Why not engage in the current liberal wishlist of bumping it up to 13, thus allowing President Biden to name four liberals and immediately grab the balance of the Court back? Well, as much as I’d be on board with that concept in my angrier moments, I’m trying for a more nuanced approach right here. Currently the number of Justices is set by Congress, and there’s no reason to believe that even if the Democrats in Congress pulled this off right now that a future President Hawley (God help us all) and a Republican Congress to come wouldn’t just do the same thing right back, and somehow find a weaselly way to make it worse. Remember, they were quite content to engage in reverse Court-packing by holding the number of Justices at 8 until they could control the nominee. I’d hardwire the 9 into the Constitution at this point. Also, there’s math involved. And why am I referring to nine seats, instead of nine Justices? Read on! We’re getting to the meat of it now:

 

2. One Seat on the Supreme Court shall be vacated on July 5 of each year numbered Oddly, to be filled by an individual named by the sitting President of the United States, with the nominated Justice taking the vacant Seat upon confirmation by a simple Majority vote in the United States Senate.

3. The Senate shall bring any nomination of a Supreme Court Justice to its Floor for a full Confirmation vote within TWO WEEKS of the President’s official Nomination of said Justice, regardless of whether the Senate has concluded its Business in the course of Advising and Consenting. In the event that the Senate fails to confirm a nominated Justice or Judge on three consecutive Votes, the President shall name an APPOINTED JUSTICE to serve on that Seat until either the swearing-in of the Next Senate or the beginning of that Seat’s next term, whichever comes first. No Nominee for the Court, having been rejected by full vote of the Senate, shall be eligible for Renomination before the beginning of a new Senate. 

4. Upon confirmation and installation, a Justice shall hold their Seat for a single term of EIGHTEEN years, at the conclusion of which their Seat shall become again vacant and the sitting President shall name their Successor.

OK. Let’s unpack. What am I getting at here?

First: No more lifetime tenure to the Court for judges. That shit is OVER. No more nominating young judges who will then sit for thirty or forty years or longer. Yes, I’m quite annoyed at the fact that I may well need to adjust my diet to include large amounts of broccoli at this point if I have any hope of seeing a liberal court in my lifetime. Moreover, I don’t think a President, any President, should be able to extend their legacy so far into the future, either through chicanery or by accident of timing or some combination thereof.

It is utterly absurd to me that our 45th President, in his one disastrous term, was able to name three Supreme Court Justice while Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama combined for four in their twenty combined years in office. That 45’s nominations came respectively via Mitch McConnell’s gaming of the rules, Anthony Kennedy’s oddly convenient decision to step down, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing (which gave McConnell a chance to demonstrate just how low his actual commitment was to his previous deeply held principle of not voting on Judicial nominees in election years) isn’t relevant, but we should make sure that this kind of gamesmanship is much harder to pull off, moving forward.

However, while I do favor eliminating lifetime tenure, I do think it’s important to remove the Court as much as we can from the normal cycles of political life in Washington. So I have Justices serving eighteen years: a good long term that gives them political independence that lasts well beyond the reahc of a single Presidential term. As of this writing, eighteen years has spanned four Presidents, two from each party.

Next: Well, since we already know the Mitch McConnells of the world will simply change rules any which way they need to in order to make sure that Republicans are the ones controlling the judiciary (and not just the Supreme Court–look at the ways they changed rules for Federal judicial appointments constantly starting in 1995 and then with each subsequent time they either had the Senate, the Presidency, or both), I suppose we need to hard-wire into the Constitution that the Senate will vote on Supreme Court nominees. As a writer whose work involves occasional villains, I have to admit that McConnell’s simple tactic of just not voting at all on Merrick Garland was some Class-A villainy in its ruthless cunning. So, that shot having been fired once, I’d like to take that one permanently out of circulation.

But! Here’s the thing: since 1981–the last forty years–only 22 of those years, barely more than half the time, has seen a President and the Majority of the United States Senate serving from the same party at the same time. It’s easy to see a Republican Senate saying to a Democratic President: “OK, we’re required to give your nominee an up or down vote, so we’re just gonna keep voting your nominees down and run out the clock that way.”

Well…no dice there, either. Three times in a row and the President gets to fill the seat on the Court temporarily, until either the Seat’s term ends (i.e., the 18 years ends) or a Congressional election happens and a new Senate is seated. Then the whole thing starts up again, and the President can nominate the person he or she chose in the first place. Also, note the required time frame: just two weeks, and the Senate is required to vote. If they can’t figure out if they’re on board with a Justice or not within two weeks, they shouldn’t be in that job, and obviously the possibility of any filibustering has to be neutered right in the Constitution. (But ixnay on the President just nominating the same person three times and then seating that person anyway. We still need to take the Senate’s “advise and consent” thing a little seriously.)

Oh, and I said up above that there’s math involved in picking nine judges? Well, assuming an 18-year-term, if you have more than nine judges, then eventually you get to a situation where multiple seats are opening up in odd years. This system guarantees that every President will make some mark on the Supreme Court, as every President will name at least two Justices. But I don’t want a President naming as many as eight. Of course, you could get around this by extending the term of a Justice’s service to twice the number of years as there are sitting Justices, but then terms start getting uncomfortably long again.

All right. We’ve got our Justices serving one eighteen year term on the Supreme Court. Also note that they’re ineligible to hold any other judicial position in the country after they leave! I’m not sure if that would be a big deal or not, but you wouldn’t get to have a Republican President give us a bitter pill like Brett Kavanaugh and then, if his term happens to end during another Republican presidency, just get re-nominated for another 18 years. Also, the eighteen-year-term refers to the seat on the Court, not the specific Justice holding it. In this respect it would be like the Presidency: the term is four years, but if the sitting President dies and the Vice President becomes President, they don’t get four new years: the Presidential term ends at noon on January 20 every four years, no matter what. Likewise, if a Justice dies fifteen years in, obviously you need a replacement–but you do not get to reset the clock with someone to your ideological liking. No getting around it: eighteen years. That’s it. So we would have this provision:

 

5. In the event that a Seat on the Supreme Court becomes vacant sooner than the conclusion of its Eighteen Year Term, the sitting President shall name a Justice to that seat, also pending Senate majority confirmation, to serve only the remaining time in that Seat’s term, at the end of which that Justice shall leave the Court.

Now, we well know that for all the “the Courts are apolitical!” talk we hear a lot, the fact is that the Courts and people on them are as much a part of the political life in this country as anyone else. But to help foster as much political independence as we possibly can, I’d add this:

 

6. No person, having held any portion of a Seat on the United States Supreme Court, shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position upon leaving said Seat, or for any Judicial position in the United States; also, no member of that Justice’s family shall be eligible for any Senate-confirmable position for a period beginning with their assumption of that Seat until five years after their departure from it.

In short, no “Hey Judge, I’ll make your kid or your wife Ambassador to the Bahamas”, and no “Hey Judge, if you’re looking to retire early, I might need a new Ambassador to Sweden”. Also, once you leave the Supreme Court, that’s it for your legal career. And really, there’s nowhere else to go after that but write your books and be on a corporate board or two, right? No, I’m not worried about what our Justices will do in their now-much-longer retirements. They’ll make out just fine, I suspect.

Of course, if you’re going to limit the terms, then you have to schedule the terms as well. If we just wait for the existing judges to die or retire and then start the eighteen year thing, then you’d have nominations clustering at eighteen year intervals from whenever those passings happen. So, one seat will open on the Supreme Court every two years, during the odd-numbered years to minimize the degree to which federal-level elections play a role in the politics.

 

7. The transition to this prescription for Supreme Court tenure shall begin on July 5 of the first odd-numbered year following Ratification of this Amendment, with pre-existing terms ending in reverse order of service on the Court.

You have to make your transition some way, right? For my purposes, if I could wave my magic wand and instantly ratify this amendment, then Clarence Thomas would get the boot on July 5, 2023.

As noted above, I’m sure I’ve missed something, and I’m sure there are ways this system would work badly, but…we’ve got to start somewhere, right? And while I yield to no one in my anger at the way Republicans have been gaming our democracy against us (and are still doing so, to what I expect may be our eternal regret, and sooner than we think), I do not want to just shift the gaming-of-the-system to the Democrats just because I’m currently on their side. If there’s one thing the post-2016 era has shown me, it’s that our Constitutional systems are nowhere near as robust as they need to be to withstand the threats confronting them now.

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A thought

It seems to me that “Cops have the right to kill you if you inconvenience them in any way” is not any kind of fundamental principle for a healthy society. It is, however, an excellent fundamental principle for an authoritarian police state. An awful lot of Americans would do well to give some thought into what kind of country they really want to be living in.

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2025: Was that what 1861 felt like?

Well, here we go: it’s time for my annual look back at the year that has just ended. On a personal level, I didn’t have that bad a year at all. Which is nice, because I don’t just exist on a personal level, now do I?

Let’s get right to it:

Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I have entered every year for the last, oh, ten or so with the intent to get better at planning and structuring my life. This has always been a struggle, and I can report that I am, in fact, getting better at this. Late in every year I buy a new planner for the year to come, and every new year I start using that planner, only to peter out at some point and then come back to it and peter out again. But, over the last several years, the “peter out” phases of this cycle have become (a) shorter, and (b) less frequent! So I am getting better. Maybe 2026 is the year I actually “put it all together”! We’ll see.

When it comes to resolutions, I’m not really a fan of those. I’m more about setting goals, and maybe (or maybe not) achieving them. So, goals this year include:

  • A bit of weight loss (not much, we’ll get back to this below)
  • Trying a bunch of new recipes
  • Eating vegetarian/pescatarian for a whole day, at least once per week
  • Stop allowing the chairs and the desk in my library to become collecting points for stuff
  • Starting The Song of Forgotten Stars, book six
  • Get my damnable sweet tooth under control (this is the struggle of my life…I have a wicked sweet tooth and a brain that refuses to take a sensible approach to serving sizes, so this will be a thing)
  • Relaunching my newsletter (likely on a different platform because Substack has issues)
  • Take 10,000 photos (Why 10,000? I dunno, it’s a nice big round number. I don’t know if this one’s really going to be doable, but we’ll see. The main thing is I will be shooting a lot, even more in 2026 than I did in 2025, and I shot a lot in 2025.)
  • Focus my reading life on books I already own (and as I write this, it’s the day after I went to the library and checked out nine books, so, yeah)
  • Reading: 52 books, 200 poems.
  • Creating content, including more video. (I’ll have more to say about my new approach to social media in an upcoming post!)
  • Selling photography prints

That sounds like a lot, and you might think, “Wow, maybe you should do one thing at a time.” Well, as characters often say in Aaron Sorkin scripts, “I don’t have time to do one thing at a time!”

Did anyone close to you give birth?

No, unless we count a number of people I follow on social media. It’s funny: I’ve seen several instances lately of a reliable content creator going dark for a bit, and then resurfacing with a video in which they say something like “Hi everyone, I’m so sorry for disappearing, but now I think it’s time to come back and tell you what’s been going on….” And then they stand up and turn to the side, revealing their “baby bump”. That’s always nice.

Did anyone close to you die?

No, thankfully.

What countries did you visit?

We went to Canada last April and we hope to go again this spring!

What would you like to have this year that you lacked last year?

I wouldn’t characterize it as a “lack”, but I’m strongly considering making a big upgrade this year in terms of my camera gear. I feel like I’m achieving consistency with Miranda that indicates that I have, in fact, leveled up a bit. I’m excited by this prospect.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

It turns out that 2025 wasn’t really a year of “big achievements” for me. It was more a year of moving the needle slowly toward where I want to be. And that’s not nothing!

What was your biggest failure?

I endured something of a “crisis of confidence” in terms of my writing life, to the point that I was wondering if I was still a writer at all. More recently, I’ve come to the new-ish realization, alluded to above, that what’s at work here isn’t a lack of confidence in writing, or a loss of desire, but a lack of clarity about how to fit writing into a creative life that just three years ago at this time I didn’t see expanding the way it has. And that’s where the “structure” mentioned above comes into play. I will likely have more to say about this, moving forward.

What was the best thing you bought?

I don’t think I’ve written about them yet! Weird…I need to get on that. I even have the content in mind, but I’ve done it a few times on video and not shared it yet. Anyway, there’s a specific pair of vintage overalls that I bought back in April that make me really happy. Also, a pair of white overalls by the Hisea brand that I got this year. And some new shirts. It wasn’t a big year for buying stuff. Oh, I did get a new shoulder-sling bag that I like a lot. It’s not specifically designed for cameras, but I may be able to make it work as such when I upgrade my camera kit, which I’m hoping to do in 2026.

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Americans who continue to resist and oppose what often feels like the relentless march toward an end of democracy and the dawn of authoritarianism in America.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

The people who are marching in lockstep with the administration.

Where did most of your money go?

Food, drink, new overalls and shirts, and gifts and stuff along the way.

What did you get really excited about?

Going to Toronto in April was an absolute thrill. If I were guaranteed a decent living in a city outside of America and I had to go there and never return, Toronto would be my choice.

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

I don’t mean to be wishy-washy here, but…both. And I’m not joking! Seriously, it’s both. Aspects of life are getting better, and other aspects are getting worse. I imagine that balancing act isn’t sustainable for life, but, as the Zen master said, “We’ll see.”

Thinner or fatter?

You know what, this one’s kind of funny: based on my official weight last time I visited my doctor (just a month or so ago), the answer is, neither! My weight has stayed basically the same, literally within no more than a pound or two, for over a year now. 

Richer or poorer?

Richer, I suppose, but not by much.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Photography, reading, listening to music, going places with The Wife, hanging with The Kid, and any pie-throwing at all would have been nice!

What do you wish you’d done less of?

You know, a day’s gonna come when I actually don’t have to think about Donald Goddamned Trump at all. I keep hoping for that day to come.

How did you spend Christmas?

Quietly, with family. Basically the way we do every year. Sometimes I envy people with large families and relations close by…but mostly, I don’t.

Did you fall in love last year?

Don’t I always? I mean, haven’t you ever been sittin’ across from someone, just trying to have a normal conversation, fighting every urge inside yourself to just scream out, “YEAH!”?

How many one-night stands?

As James Bond once noted, “That’s not the sort of question a gentleman answers.”

What was your favorite TV program?

Shoresy and Resident Alien are ruling the roost right now.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

If there is, they’re probably a Republican of whom I was unaware a year ago.

What was the best book you read?

Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel, Written on the Dark.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

No one specific artist or composer, really…but I’ve been listening to a few playlists of music that was heard on the show Shoresy of late, and it’s a lot of Canadian rap and techno and dance music. Some of it goes right through one ear and out the other, but some of it…really does hit. It “slaps”, as the kids say. (Are they still saying that? How the hell do I know?)

What did you want and get?

The Kansas City Chiefs faceplanting in the Super Bowl, and then having a crappy season this year. Also, I got a lot more experience with the camera and I got a lot of shots that make me very happy.

What did you want and not get?

Any conclusive sign that America is shifting toward sanity, a Super Bowl championship for the Bills, a new owner for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and a pie in the face.

What were your favorite films of this year?

We didn’t watch it until 2026, but Wake Up Dead Man, the new Benoit Blanc mystery movie, made us happy.

It occurs to me that in 2026 I need to do a lot better job recording what we actually watched, because as I write this, I’m drawing a blank and I’m kinda too lazy to go look up the “watch history” on Netflix….

What did you do on your birthday?

We always celebrate my birthday by traveling to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region for the Apple Harvest Festival and some wine tasting and other fun, which we did this year as well…but this is the first time those events actually coincided with my birthday! We set out for our three-day-weekend right on my birthday, which was nice.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019?

Overalls Conquers The World. Or, when I wear my favorite white poofy shirt under a pair of hickory-striped overalls, “Bridgerton Plus Trains”.

What kept you sane?

Good lord, I have no idea. I’m not sure anything did. Creative pursuits, maybe. Walking around a lot with a camera in my hand or hanging around my shoulder.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I’ll go a little off-kilter here: I’ve been following Luke of the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel for a few years, and I’ve liked his no-nonsense and enthusiastic approach to exploring his nook of the world and his pursuit of his passions and his explanations for why and how he does what he does. At the end of one of his videos, about how to dig a snow cave for yourself and survive in the wilderness in a deep freeze, he says that you should do your homework and your research: “I’m just a guy on the Internet who has managed to not kill himself yet. What do I know?” Luke pretty much ended his own channel in 2026, mainly due to burnout and the physically draining nature of the content he made for years, and I salute his work. 

What political issue stirred you the most?

Climate change, the loss of democracy, trans rights, human rights of all sorts, racism, sexism, the strife in Gaza and the inescapable twinge of anti-Semitism, and who should be mayor of Buffalo.

Who did you miss?

Mom and Dad. Always. (Dad isn’t gone yet, but I haven’t written about him yet…so I’ll just note that I’m not sure there’s anything sadder than dementia.)

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned last year:

There’s usually a big block of stuff I paste in here every year, but 2025 was different (and as I write this, 2026 is not off to a promising start). This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lord of the Rings movies, and this speech by Samwise Gamgee at the end of The Two Towers is a great one. I just wish it wasn’t so constantly applicable.

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

You know what? I was just about to call this answer done and actually publish the post, but I just remembered something. There’s a brilliant creator named Amanda Nelson who posts a lot on various social media platforms. I believe she’s a historian by training, but I’m not sure on that point. She is always thoughtful and measured in her content, and what I strongly appreciate about her is how even-keeled she is; Ms. Nelson will point out that yes, we’re in a really bad spot, but she’s still not particularly given to the kind of “We’re doomed” rhetoric that often dominates my side of the aisle. At one point this year, and I cannot for the life of me remember in which video she said this and she makes so much content that I have no intention of taking the time to find it, she said something that I have thought myself in various ways, but never put so succinctly. This really hit me between the eyes:

“America is not a thing that happens to us.”

Think about that.

If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:

I’m going to relocate these to the concluding 2025 Photography Recap post, which will appear tomorrow. I’m doing this for one very important reason: WordPress’s “block” format gets a bit unwieldy with long posts like this, and I don’t feel like struggling with it anymore this morning! Harumph.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

This one has been tripping me up for a while, but I think I got it. You see, finding a song to sum up 2025 is tough, because 2025 was a year of serious absurdity, in which some of the most consequential things of my lifetime, events and policies that will define life for decades to come, are being imposed and enforced by complete idiots. Seriously: we are being governed by people who, without exception, think and believe things that are simply false, objectively untrue, and therefore utterly stupid. I keep coming back to this moment from the movie Glass Onion:

So, what kind of song could possibly align to times like these? It wasn’t a good year at all, but to note that it wasn’t a good year isn’t enough; the year was made un-good by people who aren’t serious, who aren’t smart, and who have never had any kind of genuine human feeling (other than hate) or any kind of genuine human thought. Everything about this time in which we’re disastrously living is just dumb and absurd and just…pedestrian. That’s what irritates me the most about these times: our villains are pedestrian dullards.

Thus, I needed a song that’s kind of pedestrian and somehow absurd. And that’s where my train of thought stopped.

And then, as Ray Romano once noted, “Sometimes, material presents itself.”

First, the song. There was a one-hit wonder in the mid-2000s that you may remember. This song was everywhere. For a while you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it at least once, someplace, and American Idol used it for its “Goodbye” segment every week when someone was eliminated. The song was, of course, Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”.

Yup, that’s where I’m going, because in 2025, America had a “bad day”.

But where’s the absurd part, the fact that our collective bad day was brought upon us by a giant collection of nitwits and nincompoops?

Enter a content creator I’ve been following for quite a while now, first on Instagram and now on Tiktok. She goes by “Capture Calliope”, and the other day I saw this recent video of hers:

@capturecalliope2

And in goes another tray of cookies😂 #decompress#holidaybaking#homebaker#bakersoftiktok#relatable

♬ original sound – Prime Video UKIE – Prime Video UKIE

So, there it is. What song lyric and song makes me think of 2025? Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”, as performed by Alvin and the Goddamned Chipmunks. That’s the kind of freaking year 2025 was.

“Because you had a bad day, you’re taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don’t know, you tell me, don’t lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day, the camera don’t lie
You’re coming back down and you really don’t mind
You had a bad day
You had a bad day….”

Yeah. Tell us about it.

Anyway, here we go, into 2026. As I write this we’re ten days in and ICE has already murdered someone and the usual suspects are telling us that she had it coming. Another year in America.

But remember:

America is not a thing that happens to us.

America is what we choose it to be.

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On rethinking the year as a series of Festivals (a repost)

NOTE: As stated in the title, this is a repost of something I wrote a couple years ago toward the end of summer. Now that Thanksgiving 2025 is in the rear-view mirror and most people who took the long weekend are going back to work tomorrow (except me! I took Monday off! HAHAHA!!!), we’re solidly into The Christmas Season, or The Holidays, or whatever you call this time of year. Now, I’ve always been one to factor Thanksgiving mentally into “The Holidays”: after all, that term is plural, and for me it includes not two but three separate holidays that all reflect a common theme of people coming together to celebrate one another. (In my view, celebrating Christmas absent the actual Christian content of the day is not a bad thing at all.) I hear it every single year, the vexation at Christmas-themed content before Thanksgiving, and the complaint that “We should keep our holidays separate!” That does not work for me and never has, for various reasons that I think pertain to our societal view of Time and what feels to me a hard-wired suspicion of anything that isn’t directly related to what we’re SUPPOSED to be doing with our time, which is WORK. Anyway, here’s how I tend to see the year as we move through it.

(Image credit: “Father Time”.)

It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.

First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.

But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.

I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.

And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.

That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.

Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.

Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.

As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.

And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:

September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.

November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving: Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.

Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.

January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.

February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!

March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)

May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.

June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….

August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.

And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.

Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.

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“Divisive”

President Barack Obama runs down the East Colonnade with family dog, Bo, on the dog’s initial visit to the White House, March 15, 2009. Bo came back to live at the White House in April.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
(image via)

This photo is one of my favorites from Barack Obama’s time in the White House. It was taken less than two months into his administration. I love Presidential photography and always have; glimpses into the inner life and the humanity of the people who hold the office of President and those who serve the President are always welcome. I find now, though, a certain tragic note as well in photos like this, and not just of Obama but of Presidents Biden and Bush and Clinton and Bush the Elder and even Reagan, Carter, Ford, and hell, even Nixon, who as weird and skeevy as he was at least looked like a human being sometimes. The guy liked to bowl, at least. The current guy? There’s not a human moment to be found in the man. His White House is bereft of art and music and humanity. He has no dog, no cat, no pet goldfish. Looking for humanity in President DJT is an exercise in futility. It’s one of the things about him that I find the most baffling, in terms of who he is and how he has been so thoroughly embraced by millions of Americans he wouldn’t dream of embracing in return.

Of course, the photo is also sad because of the components in the photo, only one–President Obama himself–still exists. Bo the dog passed away several years ago, and President DJT had the East Colonnade demolished last week in favor of building his colossally stupid ball room.

I’ve had President Obama on my mind of late, for various reasons…and not just because I find myself wistfully looking back on a President who wasn’t, well, garbage in every way. I’m thinking about him because of a talking point that I see over and over again from right-wingers.

I rarely try to plumb the depth of right-wing logic anymore, because generally the right (at least in the US, I’m not sure about elsewhere) increasingly bases its ideas on pure, unadulterated fantasy coupled with constructs of logic that are about as sound as the present-day hull of the RMS Titanic. But one talking point that I have heard a lot in recent years that actually does pose an interesting look into just how the American right views the world is their idea that the most divisive political figure in recent American history is not Donald Trump, or Mitch McConnell, or Steve Bannon, or Stephen Miller, or JD Vance. No, for them the most divisive political figure in recent American history (or in all of American history, depending on who is spouting the talking point) is former President Barack Obama.

When I’ve encountered this notion, I’ve pretty much laughed it off because it just doesn’t make any sense…but I keep hearing it and I keep hearing it, to the point that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I had to figure out just how on Earth President Obama is supposed to have been a deeply divisive person, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it.

Maybe this is the most obvious thing ever, but…the man is Black.

Yes, I know. But why would he be divisive just by being Black?

This is where the white “entitlement” comes into play. Because Barack Obama didn’t just be president while being Black. He also talked about his Blackness. He talked about race. Did he talk about those things a lot? Probably not. Did he talk about those things enough? In my opinion, definitely not. But for many Americans, and almost all of them on the right, his error was in ever talking about his Blackness in particular and about race in general at all.

Barack Obama was elected President for many reasons: his predecessor had made a thorough mess of everything; he was an energetic new voice who spoke with eloquent relish about rising to the challenges facing the country; and yes, he is Black. For many Americans, if not most Americans, the prospect of President Barack Obama was an opportunity to embrace a future that was unthinkable just years before, certainly within my lifetime. The problem is that for a great many Americans, and quite possibly a majority of white Americans, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States wasn’t just about making a big step in our nation’s long struggle with race. No, for many–and certainly for everyone on the right, even if they never once considered voting for him–the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency was about ending our nation’s long struggle with race.

With Obama’s election, race was over. It was done. We had finally defeated racism, for all time. How could a racist country elect a Black man to its highest office? Obviously it couldn’t…which means, ergo, that America was no longer racist. All such talk was now off the table permanently. “See, Black people? We did it! We let one of you be President! Now it’s all done and none of you can complain anymore!”

That is absolutely the logic that the American right took when Obama was elected…and so, when it turned out that no, we were not done with our racial struggle, not by a long shot, not by any damn sight, that meant that it was all Obama’s fault. He was supposed to get into office and declare racism over, but he didn’t. Racial things still happened, and worst of all, Barack Obama talked about it. He brought it up.

And that is where the division, the divisiveness, comes in. Because by electing Barack Obama, White America finally gave itself permission to not think about race anymore. The slate was clean, atonement was achieved, and all wrongs had been addressed. And now this uppity Black President thinks that he gets to talk about race more? He thinks he gets to keep–gasp!–playing the Race Card?

(That’s what “playing the Race Card” means. You realize this, right? You know that when a white person complains about a Black person “playing the Race Card”, the white person is actually saying, “That Black person mentioned race in a way that I do not personally approve of.”)

Ultimately, Barack Obama is seen as “divisive” because white people don’t want to have to think about race anymore, and he made them think about it. White people don’t want to talk about race anymore, and he made them talk about it. White people want Black people to just calm down and be quiet about all that unpleasantness, see. Race is over, see. Why do you gotta keep bringing it up?

Why can’t you people just stay in your lane? Why can’t you people just stay where you belong?

They think Barack Obama is divisive because he didn’t quiet down and he dared set the direction of the national conversation. Which is what Presidents of the United States are supposed to do, isn’t it…unless. Unless they’re Black. In that case, a President is supposed to prioritize the comfort of white people. He was divisive because he didn’t maintain the national conversation in a way that they preferred.

As for me…well, I wonder if President Obama wasn’t divisive enough. I, for one, am deeply tired of all of the factors holding America back, and one of those is very much the “comfort of white people”. Maybe it’s time for more discomfort. Maybe. Just maybe.

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“Meh, who cares, halftime is when you use the bathroom and get more food anyway”

I’ve observed the loudly negative reaction to a Puerto Rican rapper named Bad Bunny being named the performer at halftime of the upcoming Super Bowl with…not amusement, actually. More of a headshaking, “There they go again” kind of thing. The reaction of America’s right to anything cultural is obnoxious because it’s rooted in white supremacy, obviously…but it’s also tiresome and just plain boring.

I do note one specific “talking point” I’ve heard a lot about this: people demanding how can this guy be the halftime show at the Super Bowl?! They’ve never heard of him! Surely the NFL could pick an actual huge star! The fact that Bad Bunny actually is a huge star can’t be explained to these folks. They haven’t heard of him, and that’s all that matters.

That’s the part that actually does amuse me, because what you have here is people being genuinely rocked to their core to realize that popular culture has left them behind. And they do not like this.

Oh, my sweet summer children.

The reason this amuses me is that a lot of these people are my age and generation: It’s Gen Xers, suddenly being confronted with the same reality that our parents had to confront way back when. I remember my parents expressing consternation with some of the heavy metal music I used to listen to during the 1980s. (Music that you can now hear in the aisles of grocery stores, by the way…which is a major reason my general feeling on “the kids and their music these days” is simply, “the kids are alright”.) I doubt either of my parents had any idea who Nirvana was, and the first time either of them heard of Kurt Cobain was when he died.

And I’ll bet the same was true of their parents when they were listening to the Four Aces and Bill Haley and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.

This is one of those “the wheel turns” moments, isn’t it? “How can there be a gigantically huge star playing the Super Bowl and I haven’t heard of them?!”

Sweetie. Sit down. Let me hold your hand.

This is the way it’s going to be. Get used to it.

And you know, that’s fine, isn’t it? Our job can be to wave the flag of the stuff that went before, the stuff of ours that the kids still need to discover. Somebody’s got to be around to explain what hair bands were all about, and why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was so huge, and other stuff, too.

And besides, doesn’t the halftime show usually suck, anyway? That’s what I’m told, every year. I dunno, I never watch the Super Bowl anymore, and even when I did, see the title of this post. Jesus could have made his Second Coming entrance at the Super Bowl halftime show and I’d have missed it, because I was off relieving myself and getting another drink and putting more wing dip and chips on my plate.

(In terms of Bad Bunny himself, I don’t know anything at all about him. I had to confirm his name for this post. I was going to refer to him as Brown Bunny, and that’s not just wrong, it also refers to a notoriously bad movie.)

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Tabular Enclosification

It’s time to close out some of the tabs I’ve had open for a bit.

::  This first grouping is about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, which I have been reluctant to address in any major way, and I suppose I’m going to keep not much addressing it. It’s phrasing things mildly to say that I was not a fan. I do not think that Kirk injected any particular level of intelligent insight into the national conversation; I found his views to be a typical MAGA blend of virulent toxicity, white supremacy, sexism, creepy evangelicalism, and a general lack of factual correctness. I also think Kirk was Exhibit A in my ongoing belief that debates, as we generally see them in American discourse, are a complete and utter waste of time that reward talking-point facility, quick speaking, and general loudness over developing and advancing serious argument. (I differentiate greatly between debate and argument.) In short, I do not believe that Kirk made America a better place; rather, he played a starring role in the political forces that I believe are relentlessly making everything that has ever been good about America worse.

But I am appalled and disgusted by his murder. The man should be alive. His wife should still have a living husband. His children should still have a living father. And the person who murdered him should never have been able to get hold of the tool he used to do it. (Assuming that the person in custody truly is the one who committed the act, an assumption that I see no reason to question.)

Here are several pieces that I read in the days following Kirk’s murder (which, in a sign of the times, I learned about on Tiktok):

Jamelle Bouie, New York Times: Charlie Kirk didn’t shy away from who he was. We shouldn’t, either.

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

Elizabeth Spiers, The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning.

Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long as you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

AR Moxon, The Die-ers. (This piece is not specifically about Kirk, and was written two years ago. I think it still applicable to the current moment.)

Supremacy is a belief system that rests on what I’ve called foundational lies: the lie of separation, which insists that we bear no relation to one another; the lie of scarcity, which insists that life must be earned; and the lie of redemptive violence, which insists that those who have not earned life owe a debt to those who have earned life; a debt that is best paid with violence and hard use.

It’s a belief system that lets me believe that other people don’t exist in the same way that I do—that they aren’t people, in fact—and makes that case so subtly, I don’t even have to tell myself that’s what I actually believe; makes it so subtly, I can be outraged and offended when I reveal this belief to others without even knowing I’ve done so, and people who have learned to detect the assumptions behind my mountainous inhumanity inform me that they’ve detected mountainous inhumanity in me.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair: Charlie Kirk, redeemed: A political class finds its lost cause. (Amazing piece. You may need a paywall-bypass site to access it.)

Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

Rebecca Solnit on debate (link is to a Facebook post):

Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, aand it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it’s dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there’s the free-for-all versions….)

Was he good at it? He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport–a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups–could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. Adding a link in the comments of him being solidly trounced at Cambridge, thanks to Christopher Knight. Where the Brit is actually using facts and logic and kind of showing what debate should be, and Kirk is flailing.
 

Laurie Penny: “No, I will not debate you.” (Another older piece, but one which speaks directly to my personal distaste for “debate” as it’s mostly framed these days.)

There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.

Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.

Tad Stoermer, “The Absolutist Trap: How free speech became anti-Democratic” (paid Substack):

Ezra Klein’s argument that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” perfectly embodies this destructive thinking. Klein celebrates Kirk’s willingness to “show up and debate” as if the form of engagement somehow sanctifies whatever gets said, regardless of its content or effects. This is the abandonment of democratic values — or, at the very least, an ignorance of them — in favor of procedural worship. It’s a genuflection at the altar of democracy as ritual.

What’s most striking about Klein’s position—and the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination—is how it reveals our complete abandonment of the contested tradition that once defined American approaches to speech and power. Contemporary commentators treat absolute free speech as if it’s some foundational American principle, when in fact it represents a radical departure from centuries of ongoing struggle over what speech deserves protection and why.

Nekimi Levy Armstrong, The Minnesota Star Tribune: “The blunt truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy“.

When the machinery of the state chooses to grieve selectively, it teaches the public whose humanity is recognized and whose is disposable. That hierarchy is not new. It is deeply familiar to those of us who live at the intersections of fate, race, gender and justice.

The rush to sanitize Kirk’s legacy is not an isolated phenomenon. America has a long history of smoothing over the sharp edges of those whose influence was harmful. Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery were reimagined in textbooks as honorable men defending “states’ rights.” Richard Nixon, forced to resign in disgrace, was later eulogized by political elites as a statesman whose “legacy will endure,” with Watergate reduced to a footnote. Even George Wallace, who once pledged “segregation forever,” was later softened in memory as a “complex” figure rather than a lifelong architect of racial terror.

::  Setting aside Mr. Kirk (and honestly, I plan to never speak of him again, as I assume his memory will fade until no one will think of him any more than anyone really thinks about Rush Limbaugh these days), but the news is still depressing: How the Current Administration is dismantling American cancer research. In the long run, the most damaging thing about the current administration may well be Robert F .Kennedy Jr. and his ongoing jihad against vaccines and health in general.

::  Finally, because this is getting long, a tip of the hat to a voice I’m sorry to see retiring: Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous creator of the comic strip Nancy over the last seven years, is stepping down.

Since 2018, “Nancy” has been penned by an enigmatic cartoonist who uses the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes. The reclusive creator modernized the strip, which has been in print since 1922, and its characters: the always sassy, sometimes grouchy Nancy Ritz, her aunt Fritzi, and best friend Sluggo.

But last week, we noticed black-and-white reruns on GoComics running in place of Jaimes’ bright, spare colored panels. These were “Nancy” strips from the Ernie Bushmiller days, who wrote and drew the comic from 1925 until his death in 1982. Wait. Where’s Olivia?

True to her mysterious ways, Jaimes quietly exited the strip and officially announced her retirement.

This makes me sad, though I’m happy to note that Jaimes leaves behind a seven-year-long body of work that is compelling and artistically interesting in the best Nancy way, as well as being often downright funny, which is the whole point, isn’t it? During Jaimes’s run, Nancy introduced a new cast of schoolmates for Nancy, as well as modernized her interests (Nancy was a member of her school’s robotics team!) without ever leaving behind Nancy’s trademark self-centered, but still somehow kind-hearted, nature. (Esther, Nancy’s new-ish best friend, had better make the transition to the new artist!) I also noticed that Jaimes played with the comic strip’s relationship with time: in a daily strip, obviously time passes (you can’t have Blondie and Dagwood just living in the 1940s forever), but you can’t have the characters aging while time passes. Jaimes observed this with great facility, allowing her characters to subtlely change and even mature over time (witness Nancy’s relationship with Mildred, her counterpart at the local magnet school) while no, nobody ever aged in the strip.

Olivia Jaimes’s true identity has thus far not been revealed, and while I am not clamoring for that to happen (unless Jaimes wants it to be so!), I am clamoring for Olivia Jaimes to have many successful future projects that are at least somehow clearly indicated as being Jaimes’s, if they choose to do any. I’d like to follow their work. (I also want a collection of all of Jaimes’s Nancy strips!)

That’s all for now…and my tabs are STILL overflowing, fancy that….

 

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