Category: Commentary

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The Odd Pathology of the Politician’s Mind

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about all day. It’s a video of Senator Ted Cruz cheerfully walking up the aisle at Yankee Stadium, as Yankee fans make their opinions of him loudly known, right to his face.

There’s a LOT of very salty language here, so be careful…but what gets me here is Cruz’s demeanor here. He looks like he’s having the time of his life and that he’s surrounded by loved ones and supporters who can’t get enough of him or his presence…and nobody, not one single solitary soul, is the least bit happy to see him. At all.

I get that politicians have to cultivate a thick skin and all, and that this sort of thing is probably par for the course sometimes. But there’s just something about Cruz here that…how can I put this…it’s like he has a mental ability to simply remove it from his perception. He’s acting as if he genuinely doesn’t even notice this reaction. It’s not the mean enjoyment of it that wafts from Mitch McConnell’s body like a putrid death-stench; Cruz doesn’t strike me as enjoying being this hated. He strikes me as being completely unaware of it.

I guess this isn’t terribly surprising, given his history of sycophantic groveling and his cheerfulness as he spouts complete and utter nonsense that is so redolent of bullshit it often stuns other people in their tracks as they try to parse together enough of his absurdities to amount to something easily refuted. But this just really puts it front and center. He’s looking around, grinning and waving when the only people around are the ones shouting obscenities at him; he looks like he’s trying to shake hands with nobody who is offering their hand in return.

Someday, when the historians chronicle this period we’re being dragged through like prisoners in a chain gang, there will be entire chapters dedicated to attempting an explanation of Ted Cruz. If I were writing such a history, the entire chapter would simply be this:

CHAPTER 22: SENATOR TED CRUZ

That was some weird shit and there is no explanation for any of it.

Moving on….

 

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A long time ago, in a Queue far, far away….

Credit: npr.org. Mourners in the queue to pay respects to Queen Elizabeth II.

Respect the Queue.

You may only enter the Queue at the end. Attempt no other point of entry.

Do not stop moving along the Queue, for any reason.

Do not allow anyone to join you in the Queue.

Do not question the Queue.

Do not make eye contact with the Queue.

The Queue, as long as you are in it, is your world.

The Queue is your life.

This is my Queue. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My Queue is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I master my life.

Queue: the final frontier.

The Queue is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

In the beginning was the Queue, and the Queue was with God, and the Queue was God.

It was the best of Queues, it was the worst of Queues.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in a Queue, must be in the Queue.

People will come, Ray. They’ll come to The Queue, for reasons they can’t even fathom.

The Queue is inevitable.

They say the Queue is cold, but the Queue contains the hottest blood of all.

Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer Queue.

No man steps in same Queue twice, for it is not the same Queue and he is not the same man.

The finger pointing at the Queue is not the Queue itself.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a Queue runs through it.

May the Queue be with you.

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Of Elbows and Tables

“Don’t put your elbows on the table!”

Anybody know where this shit came from? Because it’s dumb.

Back in my college days, our musical groups all had their own odd quirks and traditions. One of the Wartburg Choir’s stranger ones (I do not know if they still do this) was that when they were traveling as a group someplace and they were eating or having some kind of fellowship time, usually in a church’s fellowship hall, if any choir member spotted another with one or both elbows on the table, they’d shout something like “Hey [Name], get your elbows off the table!” and then the offending party would have to get up and walk around the entire perimeter of the room while the choir sang some goofy song about elbows on the table. (I’m not getting the particulars exactly, but it’s been 30 years and I was only present for this weird practice two or three times. And no, it was never me being called out.)

I was thinking about this yesterday while we were eating at 110 Grill in Henrietta, NY. (Yes, we road-tripped 80 miles to Henrietta just to eat at that restaurant, because their food is good and they have a big assortment of gluten-free options for The Wife. You do what you have to do when you have certain appetites and a food allergy that makes them difficult to indulge.) I ordered the fish tacos, which were (a) really delicious, and (b) really messy. The best way to manage this was to either eat them with the knife and fork (which looks absurd–I mean, really, who the hell uses knife and fork for tacos?!), or to eat them by hand and lean way over the plate while doing so. Obviously, I took option B, but I found that to comfortably assume that stance, it was frankly easiest to plant my elbows right on the table.

And this whole “No elbows on the table!” thing is so ingrained that I was feeling self-conscious about it the whole time I was eating. Yes, I was sitting in a public restaurant wearing a poofy Renaissance-faire shirt under a pair of vintage Hickory-striped overalls, and the thing that I was self-conscious about was my elbows on the table. What a dumb rule.

Oh, here are the fish tacos in question.

 

 

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Everybody on the Bandwagon!

A metaphor for the concluding thirteen seconds of the Bills’ 2021 regulation-time season.

So, the NFL season kicks off next Thursday! And playing in the 2022 season’s very first game are the Buffalo Bills, taking on the defending Super Bowl Champion LA Rams! Wow!

It’s been an interesting ride with the Bills in the last five years or so. The fifteen or so years before that were pretty much of an unending era of bad football. Somehow every year the team would manage to do something in the offseason to make fans think “Hey, maybe they’re turning the corner, maybe they finally won’t be crappy this year,” and yet…every year another terrible season. Records like 6-10 and 7-9 as far as the eye could see. Every year, picking somewhere between 9th and 13th in the draft, and yet somehow never getting better.

Longtime readers will remember that through all that, I simply stopped watching them. There was a weaning process that took place over several seasons (where I’d watch the first few games but eventually stop), but when the 2009 Bills took the field in a home game against the Cleveland Browns, and held the Browns’ quarterback to just two completions, and still managed to lose 6-3, I started thinking that the Bills were not a worthy use of my time.

Well, long story short, eight years later they drafted a quarterback named Josh Allen from Wyoming who has turned out to be an unimaginable stud of a player, and they put a whole bunch of talent around Josh Allen, and lo and behold, the Bills are good again. In fact, as I write this, they’re a common pick by “experts” to, as Tom Berenger once said in Major League, “win the whole f***in’ thing”.

Obviously, this region’s mood is…very different now, as far as football is concerned. Bills-mania is everywhere, and especially this year, where the Bills may be about to field the single most Super Bowl-ready roster in their history. It hasn’t felt like this around here* since the early 1990s, when the Bills famously went on their run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances (none of which produced a championship, but hey, it was still fun to live through).

During the long run of football futility, Bills merchandise would show up in stores in August and September, and then usually quietly disappear except for a few key items by November. Ohhhhh, not so this year! The Store is constantly getting in shipments of Bills stuff, to the point where we’re struggling with where to put it all. Last year there was a special run of a certain toy made with a Bills theme, and The Store got pounded on the day this was released to the public. Now, we’re all wondering, “OMG, what’s it gonna be like if they actually do win the Super Bowl?”

(I’m not making any predictions, by the way. This isn’t any fear of “jinxing” things, but simply acknowledging the reality that the NFL can be a wide-open free-for-all once the playoffs roll around. Last year saw both conferences’ fourth seeds make it to the Super Bowl, so…you never know!)

One thing about fandom, though. I saw this sentiment on Twitter the other day, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen this type of thinking:

Yeah…folks, ignore this. If you’re out there cheering for the Bills because it’s fun and you just love that everybody around you is happy about it, and somebody tries to gatekeep your fandom by asking you if you watched the Bills fall to the Patriots 34-20 on the last day of the 2013 season to wrap up yet another shitty 6-10 campaign, just tell them to feck off.

Seriously.

I have posted the following several times, always as a reminder to sports fans that if their team sucks, they are not required to support them or watch them play or do anything at all. This flies in the face of the notion that “If you’re a fan you’re always there for your team!”, which I think is just a big waste of time. There is no virtue at all in being a staunch fan when your team sucks, and your joy when the team wins is no better or worse in comparison to whatever suffering you may have chosen to endure or ignore.

When the Bills were eternally crappy, I finally just stopped watching the games entirely. At the time I imposed a rule: I would start watching again whenever the team reached a point where they were no fewer than four games over .500. (Meaning, only when they would have won at least four more games than they’d lost.) At the time I imposed this rule on myself, I honestly didn’t think it would take that long for them to get to that point. If memory serves, I came up with that rule in 2010 or 2011, and the Bills did not reach my new rule for watchability again for something like eight years. By that time I was so accustomed to not watching football that…I just went on not watching football. Hence my new version of sports fandom, where I only read about it, like folks did before teevee and even radios everywhere.

But I remember a lot of mocking when I would tell people about my four-games-over-.500 rule, with the most common being a derisive comment along the lines of “Oh, so you’re just a fair-weather fan now.”

And now, I quote my earlier remarks:

The Buffalo Bills aren’t friends of mine; I have no personal connection with them at all, and therefore, I see no reason to assume that they deserve a greater commitment of time or emotional energy from me than I’m willing to give them. The idea that I must devote three hours a week to watching a bunch of guys who aren’t very good at their jobs, or I’m not a “fan”, strikes me as deeply bizarre. I can be a “fan” of a restaurant, but if they start serving consistently bad food, I’m not going to keep eating there because that’s what a good fan does. That just doesn’t make sense. Being a “fairweather friend”, only there to support and help a friend in good times, is a bad thing to be. But fandom isn’t friendship. Never has been, never will be.

Believe me, it can be a real downer to hang around with football fans the Monday after a representative Bills game of late, which is another reason I stopped watching. Why would I want to feel like that, when I can do something else instead? One fan friend of mine questioned this once, saying “Well, it’s not like I’m doing something great and important with those three hours,” to which I replied, “Nobody said you had to cure cancer in that time, but maybe doing something else means you’re not spending the rest of Sunday and Monday morning in a funk over a football game.” Seems to me that, all things being equal, subtracting things from life that regularly make us angry is a good thing.

So go ahead, Bills fans, or fans of any crappy team out there! Turn them off! Watch something else! Do something else! And if your “fandom” gets questioned, so what? If and when your team wins the Ultimate Championship, there will be no Fan Police in the streets to stop you from dancing because you didn’t watch each and every crappy game they lost six or seven years earlier. When you die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls you will be denied entry because you chose not to witness every down of their fifteenth consecutive losing season.

It’s OK to jump off the bandwagon, and get back on it. The team won’t notice you’re there. You don’t owe them shit. You have zero moral obligation to watch any more or less of a team’s games than you want to, and nobody gets the right to judge your “fandom” on the basis of their personal yardstick for voluntary suffering. For those calling me out for not watching this team, I hope you’ll remember this next time you’re sitting inside on a stunning fall afternoon watching your team lose 38-10 in the fourth quarter, or in December when you’re insisting on watching every minute of a 42-3 laugher as the Bills fall to the Broncos.

I note now that this advice goes both ways! If they’re crappy and watching them brings you no enjoyment at all, it is totally OK  to turn them off! But if they’ve been crappy for years and you stopped paying any attention because really, why spend three hours a week staring at a turd floating in the porcelain bowl, but now they’re actually good again and watching them not only doesn’t fill you with torpor and existential ennui but actually starts making you feel something akin to actual joy, go ahead!

And if there are people around you who chose to suffer for all those years who are now getting pouty because you’re back on the bandwagon, enh, screw ’em! Jump on that bandwagon! Be a fan, if you want! Screw the gatekeepers! There are no gates!

(But don’t do that table-jumping thing. God, that is some dumb shit.)

Go Bills!**

*I didn’t actually live in Buffalo during the Super Bowl run, so I’m kind of guessing as to what the local mood was. During those years I alternated between college and my then-home in the Southern Tier.

** I’m not especially in love with our regional adoption of “Go Bills!” as a greeting of choice for all social scenarios. I’m sticking with a mix of Detective Sipowicz‘s mechanical “How’s it goin'”, or Wayne‘s “How are ya now?”

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“And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day”

Yeah, I’m pretty much back to normal this morning. I’m not planning on testing myself again until tomorrow, but it’s really looking like I’ve weathered my own personal COVID storm pretty well. I’m one of the lucky ones for whom it was “just a cold”. Since the worst of my cold passed on Monday, I’ve basically been enjoying what is turning out to be a lovely August week–albeit, a week when I can’t interact with anyone except my immediate family. It’s like house arrest, but without the ankle monitor. Oh well! Writing is also starting to go passingly well again, but more on that in another post.

Meanwhile, the open tabs are starting to pile up, so let’s clear out some stuff. That’s right, folks, it’s a GRAB-BAG POST! Yay!!!!

Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er:

::  The value of owning more books than you can ever read.

I love articles like this, because they justify this book-buying lifestyle of mine. I make no apologies. None! Give me all the books! (I do need to do some weeding soon, though. That’s a project for my annual Autumn Vacation.) This article justifies large numbers of unread books in a way that I’d not thought of before in quite this way, however:

These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.

People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are 80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.

A large personal library as an expression of acknowledgment of our own ignorance? I like that.

::  On lesbians and overalls. (“Dungarees” in the article; I believe the author is British and that’s the word they use over there.) I don’t have much of anything to add, but I did note during the 2000s and the 2010s–when overalls almost completely disappeared after a solid three decades of their being somewhat common, and downright ubiquitous in the 90s–that the only people really keeping them alive were the gays. I thank them for that! I couldn’t do all the heavy lifting myself, after all.

::  Loose lips sink ships. A typically superb essay by Jim Wright, a former Naval intelligence officer who now writes about politics and current events on his own.

What did Trump take?

I don’t know. But the very fact that he could walk out of the White House with classified material shows you that we as a nation need much better oversight and control of this process.

Trump’s own supporters often talk about “our way of life.”

And that’s ironic, because the very foundation of our way of life is that the president is not a king and he can’t just wave his hand and make it so.

This material does not belong to him, it belongs to us.

The president is not above the law.

Shortly after the 2016 election–and by “shortly”, I mean, minutes later–I started believing that that single election might well turn out to be the biggest self-inflicted wound in American history. The ripples from 2016 will be echoing through history long after I’ve joined the Choir Invisible, and I see to this day a reluctance on the part of Americans to admit that in a democracy, the blame always should go to us.

::  The real home run record is 73, not 61.

I’ve been paying more attention to baseball the last few years than I had basically from 2000 to, oh, 2015 or thereabouts. In the 90s I loved baseball and I almost always had a game on the teevee if there wasn’t something else we were watching (and it was baseball season, of course). While I’m not much for televised sport anymore, I’ve found it appealing to follow sport the way people probably back in the days before television: they read about it! You can do this, after all. I find that I can know just as much about what happens without spending three hours watching various sporting events by reading the work of all the fine people out there who write about sport. And then there are the box scores! I’ll let Fox Mulder explain:

 It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947.

Of course, no box score is perfect; sometimes you just have to see the weirdness that the box score can’t capture. Like this moment, which I just saw this morning: a minor league batter takes a swing at the ball, makes contact, and the ball goes…nowhere.

Well.

Back to the link above, this year there’s a player named Aaron Judge who plays right field for the Yankees. He’s already been known as a good power hitter, having hit 52 home runs in his rookie season in 2017. But this year he’s on an even more torrid (“torrider”?) pace. As of this writing he has 46 home runs already, which roughly translates to 64 home runs if he maintains that pace for the balance of the season. The famous single-season home run record for many years was Roger Maris’s 60 home runs in 1960, a record which stood until the late 1990s, when it was first broken by Mark McGwire and then also superseded by Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, who set the current record at 73.

But.

Those players were all implicated in the steroid scandals that swamped baseball in the early 2000s, and therefore, a whole lot of people view their accomplishments and records as being tainted. None of those players has been elected to the Hall of Fame, despite near-universal acceptance that Bonds was one of the very greatest players in the entire history of Major League Baseball. This has led many to simply set aside the numbers Bonds and the others put up, and re-establish Maris’s mark as the real record to beat.

The linked writer, Will Leitch, disagrees. Strenuously.

You could make a plausible argument that Judge is having the best home-run-hitting season of all time. McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds all accomplished their feats during an age of unprecedented home-run and scoring rates. And in 2022, nearly every pitcher in the game is throwing 95 mph cutters with late movement, and ultra-specialized relievers mean your final at-bat of the night is usually against some 23-year-old kid who throws 102. Pitching right now is as good as it has ever been. The leaguewide batting average this year is .243, the lowest since 1968, a.k.a. the “Year of the Pitcher” — making Judge’s mammoth blasts all the more impressive. If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.

The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.

I tend to agree with Leitch. I always found MLB’s tippy-tap dance around PEDs rather disingenuous–“There’s a thing we’d like you to not do, but we’re not going to actually make it a rule that you not do it, nor are we going to undergo any procedures to verify that you’re not doing it, and if you happen to enjoy spectacular success that brings good teevee ratings to us in a time when wow, we could really use some good teevee ratings, well, what’s the harm!”–and I find the resulting annual moralizing bullshit by Hall of Fame voters really cloying and ultimately nauseating. Every year we’re subjected to thinkpieces about “Why I’m not voting for the steroid guys again“, and every year–even moreso, really, with the passage of time–this crap reads more and more like the protest nonsense of self-appointed gatekeepers and guardians whose mission in life is to make sure that baseball’s history is always and forever whitewashed with just the right shade of sepia.

(I also have some suspicions as to the degree to which the public’s distaste for honoring Barry Bonds’s accomplishments stems from his being a black man who, let’s be honest, never put much effort at all into being what white people consider “pleasant”.)

(Oh, by the way, the X-Files episode I reference above, “The Un-natural”, is one of my favorite episodes of any teevee show, ever. If you can track down just that episode, watch it. It’s a stand-alone that requires zero knowledge of that show’s weighty mythology.)

::  OK, I gotta talk about this a little.

I’m not going to get into all the many ways this “I am TOO a man of the people!” Dr. Oz moment is a campaign gaffe for the ages (but seriously, it reminds me of the 2000 Senate NY senate race when that nitwit Rick Lazio thought that storming across the debate stage to force a pen into Hillary Clinton’s hand to sign his bullshit compaign-tone pledge was a great idea). You can read about his failure to even know what store he’s in (resulting in his mashing together the names of two real stores into one name of a store that doesn’t exist), and his absurd notions of what constitutes a veggie tray, and his goofy ideas about prices and how to shop, in lots of other places. You can also dig elsewhere into the current Republican trend of ignoring that inflation is a global trend because they want to blame whatever they can on Joe Biden.

I just want to focus on…Oz’s shirt.

Who the hell wears a Henley shirt with all the collar buttons done up?!

The whole point of a Henley is that the collar opens! It’s why you wear one! There is literally zero point to wearing a Henley shirt if you’re going to button up the collar. At that point you’re better served wearing a long-sleeve tee or a sweater. Just go with a friggin’ button-up shirt, you weirdo–or, if you must, a polo or a golf shirt. (My own personal suspicion of men increases directly with the number of golf shirts in their wardrobes, but that’s just me.) It’s just one more detail in a campaign video in which every detail screams out, “OK, guys, I gotta go where and do what, now? OK, how do I dress for that? Fine, is that my size? Does this look OK? It does? OK, let’s go!”

After this, Oz said something about his bungling of the store’s name along the lines of “Getting the names right doesn’t say anything about my ability to lead the Commonwealth.” This shows that he doesn’t even understand what he’s running for. Senators don’t lead their states, Doc. They represent them.

Seriously, at some point Oprah Winfrey has to account for giving this clown the public life he’s enjoying now.

::  Finally, here are two cats being jerks.

That’s Carla’s bed.

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A learned hatred in service of a small god

I, like many others, am disturbed and horrified by the attack on author Salman Rushdie that took place at the Chautauqua Institution, a place I’ve been to a few times, which is just an hour’s drive away on the lovely shores of Lake Chautauqua. Hatred and religious extremism no know boundaries and can flourish anywhere, though this wasn’t a local hatred; from what I can tell, some guy checked where Rushdie was going to be, went there, and attacked.

I haven’t read any of Rushdie’s novels, but I’ve read a few of his essays and other pieces over the years. He has always struck me as a nuanced thinker and a fine writer, and that he could be attacked in this way is appalling…as is, quite frankly, the entire “fatwa” placed on him in the first place. The whole concept of blasphemy has always struck me as deeply, deeply weird. I have never been able to wrap my head around the idea of God–a being so vast and powerful as to be able to create the entire Universe–nevertheless being apparently so thin-skinned as to be offendable by anything some being says, thinks, writes, or does down here on Earth. It just doesn’t make sense to me, and I can’t understand why anybody would even want to believe in a God like that in the first place. It seems to me we should ask more of our supreme beings.

There’s a cartoon online that sums up this point in pithy fashion. I tend to agree. If you think blasphemy is even possible, and that it’s something that needs to be enforced in God’s name here on earth, something is wrong with both your religion, for its small and limiting view of God, and with you, for having chosen that religion.

One final thing strikes me about this whole affair: the fatwa against Rushdie was pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, 43 years ago. The man who drove a few hundred miles to execute the fatwa yesterday is 24 years old. He was taught this hatred. He was taught it, and he took it into his heart willingly.

Many people tend to think that such religious extremism is bound to die out just by a kind of atrophy. And maybe it will, in some inevitable course. But it’s clear that this will be a very long process, and in the meantime, there are plenty of self-minted extremists rising to do evil in the name of their small-minded God who commands it.

 

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What a, very strange, piece of writing

Setting aside all the various issues with its interpretation–and honestly, I’ve pretty much conclusively come to the conclusion that it should simply be repealed entirely–I realized anew that other day just how weird the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is. It’s just a strange piece of writing, even for its time.

I came to this when I read news of an unfortunate encounter with a police officer that took place in Rochester. (I know, a bad police story, big shocker there.) Summing it up: a cop parked his cop car in a space outside a hospital’s Emergency entrance that is marked for ambulances and EMT vehicles only, because…it doesn’t matter. I’ve long observed that cops take it as a given that they get to park wherever the hell they want, for any reason. But now an ambulance comes in with a patient, and in parking, bumps the cop’s car. This pisses off the cop, who can’t think the actual thing he should have thought: “Yikes, I shouldn’t be parked here, my bad.” No, the cop jumped out and started being all “KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!” while the EMT was all “I really gotta get this person into the hospital for treatment.” And since the EMT did not KNEEL BEFORE COP!!!, the cop put the EMT in cuffs. (The cop is now on desk duty. Personally, I think he should be on laundry duty, but that’s just me.)

As I have always noticed how cops tend to view themselves as somehow above the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, I looked up the Second Amendment and recast it as follows:

“A cowed populace, being necessary to the security of a police State, the right of the constabulary to do whatever it wishes, shall not be infringed.”

I wanted to make sure I got the wording exactly the way I wanted it, complete with the Amendment’s phrasing and punctuation. And that’s when I realized, typing it out, how strange a piece of actual writing the Second Amendment is. I mean, look at it:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

There is, quite famously, no helpful text to explain just how the first clause relates to the second, which has naturally caused all manner of unfortunate shenanigans in American history. And what is with all those commas? There are three commas in this single sentence, separating this thing into four distinct language clauses. Just on its own, the Second Amendment is a linguistic calamity. I can’t believe anyone at the Convention didn’t look at this thing and say, “Guys, this makes no sense as written and we need to clarify it.” That was a room full of good writers (as well as drunkards and nitwits), and yet, this terribly-written Amendment was allowed to stand. Why? Well, maybe they thought the meaning they intended was so clear and unlikely to change that it would never be an issue. Or maybe they figured, given the general ambivalence to the Constitution at the time, that it would be fixed on revision anyway. Or maybe…well, who cares. Fact is, we’re saddled with it. As is. Which is itself absurd, but hey, 21st Century America is, if nothing else, a great national monument to absurdity.

I also glanced at the other Amendments surrounding the Second. Were they all this badly written? Why…no! Here’s the First:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s pretty damned clear. The commas are used logically, and the clauses clearly relate as part of the same sentence. Odd capitalization abounds, but that was just a Thing back then. (I assume there was some Rule by which those writing chose which words to Capitalize.) But the First reads very clearly: Congress is forbidden to do this.

The other Amendments are all pretty specific in the way they limit government, except for the Ninth and Tenth, which are clearly intended to forestall arguments down the road of the “Well, the Constitution doesn’t specifically SAY you can’t do this, so you CAN!” or vice-versa. (Pssst, Messrs Jefferson et al: It didn’t work.) So then I look back at the Second, aghast anew at is appalling lack of specificity, its foggy language, and its unique phrasing (nowhere else is the construct “shall not be infringed” used).

Bad writing has consequences, folks. Especially when a big part of your country’s population has decided to treat a certain piece of bad writing as if it was handed down by God on a third tablet.

(For an amusing bit of Constitutional comedy, here is John Mulaney in one of his SNL monologues. The relevant bit is at the 3:52 mark:

I love the line, “They knew how to make a pen, they were just being jerks.”)

 

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Tab Closing Day

Time to close out some tabs I’ve had open for a while:

::  The Future Republicans Want

A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:

The fundamentalist religious fervor perhaps extends most strongly to gay rights and others of alternative sexual lifestyles. The platform directly declares that “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” §§ 143–144 (p. 21). The Republican platform seeks to ban gay marriage.

And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.

::  The Message of the Republican Party: Don’t Tread On Me, I Tread On You.

The press does not want to have a direct conversation with you about what’s really at the heart of Republican messaging. As a former Republican who now consistently votes for the Democratic Party in US elections, I will. When I came to realize what the true message of the Republican Party was, I was out, and have been voting Democratic ever since.

Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:

  1. They can tell people what to do.
  2. You cannot tell them what to do.

This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (we will discuss this later in the piece), but this is the basic formula.

::  Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked.

::  Bill Altreuter, a Buffalo trial lawyer, on the Supreme Court:

I don’t see the path out. Even if we were able to pack the Courts with jurists who believe in now outdated concepts like stare decisis all that would mean would be that we would be acknowledging that the Supreme Court is an unelected super-legislature. It actually always has been, but before this there were recognized limits on how far the Court could go. That’s gone now.

Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?

::  Roger’s thoughts on Independence Day are not much rosier than my own.

::  ‘An old strain of English magic had returned’: stars on why they fell in love with Kate Bush

This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.

In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.

My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.

And that just means I have something new to explore!

::  Meet Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo’s new–and first ever–poet laureate!

::  And finally, fireworks…in space!!!

Not fireworks, actually:

Since July 4th is a time when many enjoy fireworks, here is this image of a supernova that looks a lot like a fireworks explosion. Explosions of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, and deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2015, astronomers have studied one particular explosion that may provide clues to the dynamics of other, much larger stellar eruptions. This is an image of GK Persei, an object that became a sensation in the astronomical world in 1901 when it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days.

Amazing!

 

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Do you remember America?

“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”

“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.

“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.

And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”

And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.

But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.

And they’ll wonder. Maybe.

 

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