Tag: Events of the Day

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“I’ve learned so much”

In Larry McMurtry’s great Western novel Lonesome Dove, for much of the novel the point of view changes between the main story (a group of Texas cattlemen leading their herds north for selling) and a secondary plot in which we follow the nasty adventures of Dan Suggs and his brothers, who are a murderous trio of guys, killing and robbing their way across the prairie. About two-thirds of the way through the book, our lawful cattlemen meet Suggs and his brothers, and they manage to subdue them quickly and make ready to hang them from the nearest tree. But to their surprise, they find that a friend of theirs, a guy named Jake, has fallen in with the Suggs crew.

Jake is not a bad guy, but he’s something of a ne’er-do-well who makes his living lurching from town to town, gambling and drinking and whoring and doing it all some more. It’s been a while since I read the book, so I don’t remember how it is that he falls in with Suggs and his brothers, but he does, and McMurtry captures his disquiet well as he witnesses murder and crime after murder and crime.

But when our heroes, William Call and Augustus McCray, defeat Suggs and company and get them all tied up in order to mete out cowboy justice, this brief conversation transpires:

Call went over to Jake. Deets [one of their companions] seemed hesitant to tie him, but Call nodded and covered Jake with his rifle while Deets tied his hands. As he was doing it Pea Eye and Newt [two more of their companions] came over the hill with the horses.

“Call, he don’t need to tie me,” Jake said. “I ain’t done nothing. I just fell in with these boys to get through the Territory. I was aiming to leave them the first chance I got.”

Call saw that Jake was so drunk he could barely sit up.

“You should have made your chance a little sooner, Jake,” Augustus said. “A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.”

I’ve been thinking about that passage ever since our President made a video, aimed at his fans, regarding his experience with COVID-19 and his intention to leave the hospital later today. After having spent the last bunch of months spreading all manner of misinformation about the pandemic that is gripping the world, decided to record a video for his fans last night, in which he said, among other things, that he’s “learned so much” about the disease.

He’s “learned so much”.

Imagine that. This many months after the pandemic began, this many months after lock-downs and scenes of horror in New York City, this many months after case spikes and the death rate never going down to zero, this many months of America just existing with this damned thing, arguing over masks and “mah rights”…now our President has “learned so much”.

The time to learn so much would have been the beginning, sir. The time to learn so much would have been in the very beginning, when you would have learned so much from the pandemic team the previous administration left in place, had you not dismissed it.

You should have made your chance a little sooner, Mr. President. A man that will go along with two hundred thousand deaths is “learning so much” a little slow.

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The Moment

 Obviously there is zero chance that I will vote for anybody other than Joe Biden this November (or October, really–early voting, here I come!), but I do want to highlight this segment of his acceptance speech last night. How strange a time it is, that we have to celebrate the very notion of electing a President of the United States who can feel genuine human emotions.

Let’s go, Joe. I’m ready.

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RIP, Pizza Hut

Every Pizza Hut restaurant in Western New York has permanently closed.

I’m not going to pretend that this is a loss, except in the sense that this is a few hundred jobs down the drain. I worked for Pizza Hut back in the 1990s, when we lived in Olean, NY, and I posted years ago what that was like. It wasn’t a horrible place to work back then, but it sure wasn’t great, either; pay was a joke, and for all the lip service paid to the idea that Pizza Hut was supposed to be a step above fast food, it was clear that even then the higher-ups had no idea what they were doing with respect to the shifting restaurant scene.
I have no idea how long it’s been since I’ve even eaten at a Pizza Hut, and it’s something of a long-running joke in this region that the number of buildings that used to be Pizza Huts far outnumbers those that house actual Pizza Huts.
Oh well. Support your local pizza joint, folks. Let the chains figure it out on their own.

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On Masks

Mask!

So, among everything else, 2020 has become The Year We All Wear Masks.
Or it should be that, but an awful lot of people are proving wildly resistant to the idea, on various bases. There are the always-entertaining libertarian types who are loath to follow any governmental guideline, no matter how wise or just or sensible, because it’s from the government. There are the fact-challenged skeptics who refuse to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is real, or they accept that it’s real but overblown, or they simply believe themselves to be relatively bullet-proof and take a “Let’s just roll the dice!” attitude, without considering that with a disease like this, you’re not just rolling your dice but the dice of people around you, some of whom are likely loved-ones.
As for me? Well, I’ve largely been fine with wearing the mask, though I honestly can’t say I would have adopted the mask as quickly and readily as I did had my job at The Store not made them a requirement (which they did, in turn, based on an executive order by Governor Cuomo). I like to think that I would have heeded the strong recommendations from the CDC and other officials, but I have my pig-headed moments too, so maybe I wouldn’t have been as wise on this as I would like to imagine. Luckily for me, I’m not going to find out.
I never liked Halloween costumes that involved masks when I was a kid, and the first day I had to wear one at work, I had similar difficulty. It took a couple of days for me to figure out the ins-and-outs of the masks, which started out as the disposable paper ones. My glasses were a problem, of course! I realized that if I kept moving, the force air circulation would keep my glasses from fogging up. As soon as I stopped, though, then I’d fog up instantly. This also happened with the washable and reusable masks my company soon provided. I started carrying my glasses case with me, because I could just take the glasses off when I was working on something close, like doing a repair on a piece of equipment or…writing.
The bigger problem I had with those masks was that the elastic cords and bands that went around my ears made them ache something awful. I could wear the mask for about an hour before I had to take it off to give my poor ears a break. There are workarounds for this, of course, but right about this time an online friend named Zace Myers, who is an artisanal clothing maker in Ohio who makes, among other things, really amazing bib overalls (and I am years overdue in blogging about his overalls!), decided to apply his skills to mask design. After a couple trials and refinements, he settled on the design I’m wearing in the photo above.
The elastic bands go around the head, and not the ears, which is the main thing! And the brass nose-piece is great because you can easily bend it to properly shape your particular nose. The upshot is that now my glasses never fog up! There is a small tradeoff here: the mask does push my glasses up on my face just slightly, so they’re a tiny bit north of where I usually position them. In most cases that wouldn’t be a problem, but my glasses are transition lenses, so the mask pushing them up results in the glasses not quite lining up with where I best look through them. This is not a big deal, just a tiny, minor thing. My poor ear cartilage not feeling like it’s on fire is the major thing. (Here’s where to buy them, if you’re so inclined!)
As for breathing, I find that after wearing masks for most of the day, every day I’m at work, I’m actually getting used to them. The extra heat inside them doesn’t faze me much (and I might even like that aspect come winter, if we’re still masking as I assume we will be), and I have zero difficulty breathing in them. The act of breathing feels slightly different, obviously, and I think that a lot of people are so used to completely unencumbered breathing that they assume difficulty where there is none. I know that my pulse-oxygen levels have not suffered one bit from wearing the mask, and in truth I am at the point where I even forget I have it on.
I see some snarking online here and there about masks, and one that especially irritates me is “You don’t have to wear one when you’re driving by yourself, Sheeple!” I’ve responded several times, with varying degrees of politeness (I was, I’ll admit, not at all polite in responding to some MAGA-Republican running for Congress someplace), that if I’m making multiple stops I don’t want to be putting on the mask, taking it off again, putting it on again, taking it off again, lather rinse repeat, everywhere I go. What I don’t get is people who rip the mask off the second they exit a place, whether it’s a store or whatever, and make this show of gasping for air. Come on, folks. Let’s get a grip.
Well, this has gone on long enough, I guess. Mainly my take on masks boils down to: I wasn’t thrilled to have to do it, but now that I do, well…could be worse. It’s an easy thing to do, it’s not at all a major imposition on my life, and it’s a perfectly valid means of helping to protect others. This last point is what gets me about all this: The resistance to mask-wearing has really provided a fascinatingly specific case study–not that we needed yet another one, but here we are–in the ever-depressingly American resistance to thinking in terms of collective benefit. Our centuries of mythology about “rugged individualism” is either going to be set aside and soon, or it’s going to lead us to erasing ourselves from the march of human history. I’ve believed this for years. I just never thought that something like “Wear masks for a while, or millions will die” would be the thing that would prove it.
Wear your masks, people.

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4 July 2020

Of all Independence Days, this one is something else, isn’t it? I personally find it hard to celebrate this year, for oh so many reasons. About the most positive feeling I can muster this year is a grim resolve, the vow that no, this ain’t over, not by a damn longshot. I’m not giving up on my country forever, but it’s hard right now to see it ever becoming the land to which it aspires (and, for a certain population, believes it always was until something went awry, hint hint wink wink nudge nudge as to what that might be).
Anyway. Happy birthday, America. 

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

—The American President, written by Aaron Sorkin

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Yes, #BlackLivesMatter

Well, you can’t escape what’s been going on. You can’t ignore it, short of completely disconnecting and retreating to the wilderness somewhere. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Anyone who has at least the possibility of escaping what’s going on, even in a momentary dream, is a person indulging the perk of privilege.

Random stuff. This is in no particular order.
::  I’ve never actually met Roger Green, but he and I have been mutual blog-friends for years, and with the recent ugliness I’ve been thinking a lot about Roger and his family. What a hell of a world it is we’ve made, where the Roger Greens of the world–a retired librarian from Albany, NY who likes getting around town on his bicycle–has to worry about raising his kid in a shitty racist world. That’s what gets me: entire generations of children who have to learn, in addition to everything else that’s a giant challenge in this world of ours, that large segments of the world will hate them on an a priori basis, and that–even worse, maybe–much of our societal infrastructure is specifically built to reflect that hate.

But I’m also rather annoyed with white liberals who are shocked, SHOCKED that police abuse still takes place. Haven’t you been paying attention? And they’re sending me solutions – “this is a chance for REAL dialogue!” I’ve been having “real dialogue” at least since my sister Leslie and I, as high schoolers, went to the nearly lily-white Vestal (NY) Junior High School to talk to the choir kids.

People Need to STOP Saying “All Lives Matter”. And they REALLY need to quit with, “That’s not what Martin Luther King, Jr. would do.” Remember, they killed him, too.

::  Another name for the list: Maurice Gordon, 28, of Poughkeepsie, NY. Apparently shot to death while waiting for a tow truck. He was unarmed, and he was not under arrest or being detained.

The transformation began after the 2012 homicide spike. The department wanted to put more officers on patrol but couldn’t afford to hire more, partly because of generous union contracts. So in 2013, the mayor and city council dissolved the local PD and signed an agreement for the county to provide shared services. The new county force is double the size of the old one, and officers almost exclusively patrol the city. (They were initially nonunion but have since unionized.) Increasing the head count was a trust-building tactic, says Thomson, who served as chief throughout the transition: Daily, noncrisis interactions between residents and cops went up. Police also got de-escalation training and body cameras, and more cameras and devices to detect gunfire were installed around the city.

::  Kevin Drum has numbers–here and here–that demonstrate part of our problem. We have more police officers by far than we probably need for our level of crime, especially violent crime, which has been plunging for three decades now. Drum is convinced that the big factor in the decrease in violent crime since 1990 has been the reduction in lead emissions from gasoline engines and from lead paint, and the evidence on this score is actually pretty convincing.
::  I could write more on this, but I think there are other voices to whom the world should be listening right now. I’ll close with this: if someone says “Black lives matter,” and your thought is to reply with some variant of “Don’t all lives matter?”, you might want to step back and consider why you find it uncomfortable to seriously engage with just why someone thinks that an entire segment of our society has been made to feel, over and over and over again, that it doesn’t.

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“It wasn’t a miracle. We just decided to go.”

That may be my favorite quote from the movie Apollo 13. Jim Lovell says it to his wife as they relax in their backyard, after all of their guests have gone home from their watch party for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Lovell’s amazement at the feat of landing on the moon isn’t just at the fact of the location, but that all it took to get there was a decade-plus (well, with a lot of stuff coming before) of applied human ingenuity.

The human presence in space hasn’t quite gone according to the plan my six-year-old brain thought it would, way back when I first became aware that space wasn’t just some grand cosmic realm where the mysterious stars lay; it was just a gigantic place of which we were a part, and we humans could simply go there. When I was six, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that within a short time–thirty years? forty? fifty, tops!–we’d have permanent space stations, the first moon bases, and maybe even the makings of a colony on another planet, maybe Mars. Of course, it didn’t go according to plan, did it? Nothing big ever does.
We humans lost a bit of focus on space, and we made some choices that weren’t obvious or perfect, and we have proceeded in fits and starts. As we lost the Cold War impetus that drove so much of that initial development, an impetus of which I was unaware when I was six, it seemed that we lost a lot of focus. The space shuttle was initially exciting but it became less and less so, until one of them exploded; then it settled back into routine until another one failed on re-entry. America had a small space station, that didn’t last long; the Soviets had one that lasted a bit longer. Then a bunch of countries got together to build the “International Space Station,” which is somehow both amazing and…well, it seems just a bit small to the part of me that still dreams in the same way that I did when I was six.
But it can still be exciting. We got a big reminder of that today, when NASA and SpaceX teamed up to finally succeed in launching a rocket carrying American astronauts into space. Ever since the shuttle was retired, Americans have been hitching rides with the Russians. That may be good from an international cooperation standpoint, but America still needs its own launch capability if it’s to maintain a presence in space, and the SpaceX rocket has seen increasingly promising results for the last few years. No longer are multi-stage rockets just dumping their spent stages to fall into the ocean; not only are the stages recoverable, but they actually land on their own power to live to fly another day.
Today, America returned to space under its own power. Maybe I’ll get to see those moon bases and Mars colonies yet!
Here are a few screenshots I took from my phone as I watched live streaming coverage of the launch this afternoon (and really, how amazing a sentence is that?):
Just over a minute into flight.

At left, the second-stage engine firing; at right, the first stage’s re-entry rockets firing.
More than any aspect of this launch, this blew my mind.

They briefly lost the signal from the ship where the first stage was to land, alas!
But they got it back to show the first stage having successfully landed. At right,
our astronauts in their capsule.

Second stage separation.

The second stage falls farther and farther behind. Ahead, Earth orbit and ISS rendezvous!

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On Memorial Day

An annual reposting of some things pertaining to Memorial Day. First, a remembrance of a soldier I never knew.

Fifteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him and clearly never knew him, because he was killed four years before I was born.

Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.

One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.

When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we passed, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.

That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.

I looked online and found these images, first of Mr. Havers’s obituary and then of Mr. Havers himself. The things you remember. I wonder what kind of man he was. He has been gone for more than half a century. His name is not forgotten.

Mr. Havers’s service information can be found on the Virtual Vietnam Wall here. He was born 14 October 1946 and died 29 October 1967, in Thua Thien.

Next, my annual repost for Memorial Day.

Tomb of Unknown Soldier


Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“The Green Field of France”, by Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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