And Congress did...

For context, I sent a variation of this letter to both my senators and my representative this month, sometime after Renee Good, but before Alex Pretti. If you'd also like to write to your Congresscritters, find out who they are here. Feel free to use the basic points brought up in this letter -- but please use your own words. I believe that's always going to be more effective than passing on someone else's thoughts.

 * * *

Dear Senator,

You happen to be one of my Senators, for whom I voted to represent me in Congress. So let's chat for a bit, shall we, about a small fraction of the things President Donald Trump has done and what Congress has done in response, in the last year alone.

Trump sent Elon Musk and his band of DOGE hackers to "clean up" the "waste, fraud and abuse" in government, rather than doing it the way all sane administrations have done in the past, by conducting a government audit. They broke dozens of useful organizations in the process, including USAID. I've lost count of how many people around the world have starved to death because we summarily yanked food aid to them with no warning. And Congress did nothing.

Trump famously loves "the poorly educated," and to that end he is dismantling the Department of Education and threatening to yank the funding of our world-class research universities unless they bend the knee to him. And Congress did nothing.

Because he presumably couldn't get the military to act against its own people, Trump spun up ICE under the Department of Homeland Security as a band of masked thugs who seem to answer only to him. They have been given a budget exceeding the total military budgets of most other nations. They've done fun things like assaulting and deporting non-citizens without due process, refusing to identify themselves, hassling and assaulting citizens, firing on peaceful protesters, and now murdering an unarmed woman by shooting her directly in the face. And Congress did nothing.

Starting in April, Trump has yanked tariffs around like they're his own personal hot and cold taps, claiming the fig leaf of "national security" to raise the price of everything on every American and make every working day in the United States absolutely unpredictable. His unhinged on-again, off-again tariffs have ruined the American economy, damaged a generation of American farmers, and ground the engines of industry down to an anemic trickle -- and then he has the chutzpah to lie to our faces about how the price of our gas and groceries is getting better, as though his saying so somehow MAKES it so despite the evidence of our own eyes and our wrung-dry bank accounts. And Congress did nothing.

Tariff monies haven't been enough to satisfy Trump, so he has turned the White House into a revolving door of grift, Hatch Act be damned. All anyone, from any organization or government, need do is waltz in and offer Trump a shiny golden cookie of some kind to get a favor done. And because he always wants more cash and cookies and fawning praise, he is constantly whinging about being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he will never deserve or receive, offering to level Gaza so it can be turned into a seaside playground for the rich, threatening and bullying some of our nation's most trusted allies, including Canada and Denmark, trying to get them to cede territory to him solely because he demands it. And Congress did nothing.

He has ditched our allies in Europe as Putin leers hungrily at Ukraine, forsaken Taiwan as China sharpens its bayonets, winked at Netanyahu as Israel commits genocide, and otherwise made America smaller, less powerful, more insular and more focused on grabbing other people's territory in its own hemisphere. And Congress did nothing.

He threatened, cajoled and otherwise bullied everyone in Congress into passing the Big Ugly Bill, which has looted the pockets of the poor and middle class in order to further enrich the wealthy (including himself, of course). And Congress? CHEERED.

He shut down the government for weeks rather than even talk to the Democrats in Congress, cynically pulling food aid to the poorest Americans and financially starving members of the Armed Forces, who went unpaid during the shutdown. And Congress, instead of fighting him, rolled over and capitulated.

He has, through inaction and the vague promise of "concepts of a plan," allowed subsidies for the Affordable Care Act to expire, causing health insurance costs to absolutely skyrocket for the average American. He's allowed Robert F. "Brainworm" Kennedy, Jr. to destroy our public health measures. He's taken the right to choose away from American women and is actively stoking the fires of bigotry against trans people. And you know what Congress did about it? Nothing.

Trump is manifestly one of the unhealthiest presidents in modern history. I don't care what his prevaricating staff and lackey doctors say; anyone with a brain and a pair of eyes can tell he's seriously unwell, both physically and (increasingly) mentally. He is incapable of sticking to the point in a speech, he is incapable of staying awake in Cabinet meetings, and he is increasingly incapable of making sane or logical decisions -- throwing tantrums (and, if rumor is to be believed, ketchup bottles) rather than attempting to reason or think his way out of a crisis. He should be removed from office for his utter incapacity to lead. But you guessed it, Congress. Did. Nothing.

He has been so afraid of the presumably vile stuff in the Epstein files being made public that he's fired back at his most loyal voters, played hide-the-whoremonger with Ghislaine Maxwell, dribbled out highly-redacted sections of the files rather than fully complying with the law, has attempted to smear people he dislikes, torn down the East Wing of the White House, shut down the government, and literally tried to provoke war with Iran and Venezuela -- without getting permission from or even informing Congress of the decision. And guess what Congress did?

Trump undermines the rule of law every day. He does whatever he can to run the country by executive fiat. He has snatched the power of the purse and the ability to declare war away from Congress. He makes friends of our enemies and enemies of our friends. He is making all of us poorer, sicker, less educated and more afraid, each hour he remains in office. He is a mentally unstable stochastic terrorist; far from holding the highest office in the land, he should by rights be serving time in prison for numerous felony convictions. You are a member of a co-equal branch of government, meant to enact the checks and balances that keep despots like Donald Trump from doing many of the things he has already done. Yet every day, as one of our designated representatives in government, you come to work, collect a hefty paycheck and sumptuous benefits, and -- YOU. DO. NOTHING.

What kind of calamity will it take to shift you? Another pandemic? A nationwide general strike? More Americans being summarily executed in the street? Perhaps a major American city being leveled with nuclear weapons by one of our erstwhile allies?

At risk of sounding disrespectful to a duly-elected official: GET OFF YOUR ASS AND DO YOUR JOB. NOW. Before Trump decides he should just run everything from the Oval Office and doesn’t need a Congress any more.

Furiously,

Soozcat

Sorry, it's been a minute

As the little banner in the sidebar points out, this blog is written by a human, not an AI. And this particular human is very, very tired.

What's it like to live in the United States right now? In a word, exhausting. Every day we're jerked around another corner by the madman at the wheel, all of us hoping against hope that he won't plow us all into a brick wall just for funsies. And even as I write this, I recognize that many other people with less social currency than Captain Midnight and I are having it SO much worse under this regime that it seems boorish even to complain about what we've experienced.

Perhaps I'm so tired simply because I know it's all likely to get far worse before it gets better. And I don't know if I'll live long enough to see things improve.

Since November 2024 I have thought, very seriously, about moving to another country. Let's just say there are some logistical issues with the idea. We used money from the sale of my family home to put a down payment on a house in 2022, which means we're tethered here by a mortgage. While Captain Midnight has looked into overseas employment, it's been difficult to find jobs outside the United States where he could command even a small fraction of the salary he was paid last year, and I've been out of the regular workforce long enough that I don't have much by way of useful skills to recommend me as an immigrant. Then too, I'm both a Type 2 diabetic and a bariatric patient, which means I'd have to choose a country where the medications I need to survive are readily available. We're both in our fifties, which means emigration to certain countries is simply barred to us (places like New Zealand, for instance, strongly prefer young families with children). Finally, we stay anchored to the USA because of numerous family members and friends. We're both loath to leave the nation we were raised in, even though it's becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.

I did attend one of the many Hands Off protests that occurred on April 5. That was, actually, quite cheering. The nearby small town I went to had so many protestors in attendance that the main street was completely blocked to vehicular traffic. I know that at least some of the people there voted for our current Dear Leader, so I have hope that the cultlike attitude toward him and his ilk is starting to sour. We'll see.

Blam This Piece of Crap Day: cancelled for 2025

If you can blam the piece of crap that is the current situation in the United States of America right now, well, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Notes from the Oak Table Cafe

HERE'S a place in Silverdale at the top of a hill, overlooking the valley and Dyes Inlet, called the Oak Table Cafe. It serves only breakfast and lunch, and it usually has a long wait time because the food is fantastic. Anyway, since my brother was in town and since we were all hungry, we went to Oak Table for some delicious brunch (if you're interested, I had the eggs Casey; Captain Midnight and Tim-my-brother opted for corned beef hash).

It had been a very long time since I entered the dining area of a restaurant; I've been very careful during the pandemic to stay masked in public and not to linger too close to strangers for very long. Looking around the room, I noticed literally no one in the very busy dining area was wearing masks or social distancing, which gave me the willies.

When CM and I first moved to Seattle, I learned some history about the city. In 1889, there was a huge fire that destroyed practically all of the central business district. After the ashes and rubble were cleared away, the city fathers urged business leaders to build back higher than the shoreline so there would be less trouble with flooding and sewage issues (the tides had a tendency to back up all the city's toilets), but as soon as they could, people began rebuilding right back on the flat again. Nothing would convince them to work in the best interest of all Seattleites; they wanted to get back to making money immediately.

At the time I couldn't understand why so many people would act in such a short-sighted fashion. But now I get it. All these places across the United States are reopening without Corsi-Rosenthal boxes or any other kind of viral mitigation measures, as the Covid pandemic continues and as we prepare for a potential H5N1 pandemic. No one will take even basic measures to guard against more people falling ill. Because it's been a few very lean years and damn it, they want their money.

It makes me wonder whether cities that want serious viral mitigation should do what the city of Seattle did to fix their problem. Since they couldn't force shop owners to rebuild higher than their original storefronts, they chose to rebuild the infrastructure--namely, the streets--twelve feet above the front doors of the new shops, requiring pedestrians to use ladders to cross the streets. This situation was so awkward that it soon became evident to shop owners that they had better do what the city government had asked for in the first place. Maybe, if you couldn't reopen your business without several Corsi-Rosenthal boxes in place and running, you would do what you needed to do to get back to serving customers. Because clearly, most people aren't going to do what's right unless it's making them money, they're being legally dragged to it, or they're shamed into doing it.

Why Twitter? (WHY, Twitter?)

Some of you know I've had a Twitter account since 2009. I originally joined to hawk my wares on my now-defunct Etsy site, but stayed for the comments and other silliness.

And now I'm leaving.

With the changes being implemented by its new Musky overlord, Twitter shows signs of circling the drain. People are leaving in droves, and the ones who choose to stay will have to fight an uphill battle.

While Twitter is often crazy-making, I will miss it for many reasons -- one of which is the atmosphere. Every social media platform has its own peculiar atmosphere -- kind of the way every new place you move to has its own quality of light, its own sense of safety or danger, a particular scent to the air.

Facebook is being stuck in a huge room with all your family, friends and acquaintances, most of whom want to show you their photo books. There are a few "privacy" booths, but it's very easy for Gramma to accidentally meet your secret "friend" because NO COMPARTMENTALIZING ALLOWED.

Nextdoor is what happens when "Old Man Yells at Cloud" and your local paper's Letters to the Editor section have a baby. A very whiny, very entitled, often racist baby that makes you want to retroactively un-meet all your neighbors. (Can you guess it's not my favorite? Yeah.)

Instagram: BEHOLD MY GLORIOUS LUNCH. 'Nuff said.

Blogger: HAHAHAHAHA wait, people still blog in 2022? (...uh, yes. I do. So there)

I like Goodreads, if only as a place to keep track of what I've been reading (where DID that book go?), but social engagement on the site is sadly lacking. I don't even engage much on the site with the real-life friends I'm following on Goodreads. Anti-social media, maybe?

Then there's Twitter, AKA short-attention-span blogging. The character restriction leads people to scream slogans at each other rather than engaging in active discourse. The algorithm is designed to provoke anger and outrage. They keep tweaking the UI, moderation is, uh, uneven, and Elon just welcomed back Agolf Twitler.

It was kind of a hot mess even before the recent changes. So why will I miss it?

Because occasionally, Twitter did wonderful things. It would connect you with the account of a famous medieval poet who tweeted in Middle English. It would introduce you to people who shared short videos about cute fuzzy animals and humans being kind. It would put you in the way of up-and-coming comedians, famous horror writers, sassy food bloggers, Florida men whose beards ate combs for breakfast and who talked about Rule 303, amateur plumbers who'd tell you what to do about that knocking sound, and people who did their best, in 280 characters or less, to support each other and lend their strength in hard times.

Then there's the other kind of information. George Floyd's murder was shared on Twitter, and #drivingwhileblack began here too, showing how police profile black drivers. News about COVID-19 broke here, as well as the first medical strategies to fight it. And when Dolt 45 attempted a stochastic coup, Twitter (although it dragged its feet) was the first social media platform to ban him; once it set the example, others followed.

Twitter was the kind of place where you could scream a question into the void and (along with a share of random responses from bots and edgelords) you could get valid answers and links to more information from a half-dozen experts on the subject. And they didn't even have to be following you. If you let everyone reply, just about everyone WOULD reply. Some were jerks, but others were helpful, thoughtful, wise, kind. The kind of people you'd want as friends.

As with all social media platforms, your individual experience largely depended on the type of people/accounts with whom you chose to interact. But Twitter, despite its many failings, did a great job of connecting up people who might never have met otherwise. I don't know whether I'll find that particular atmosphere on Mastodon, or BlueSky, or Tribel, or any other proposed Twitter substitutes being bantered about right now. And although Twitter could sometimes make me feel crazy, I think losing its particular atmosphere is something to mourn.

Just something to think about.

P.S. - If you're interested in joining Mastodon, I can be found there at Soozcat@vmst.io.

On privilege and noblesse oblige

[I composed the skeleton of this post on social media, but since I liked the idea and since I'm not sure the original message will stay there, I've brought it over here. So there.]

America was founded on the precept that "all [humans] are created equal." Yet everywhere one looks in the USA, there are clear signs of a two-tiered society, with one set of rules for the poor and underprivileged, and another set for the rich and overserved. I've been thinking about the wealthy, that first-tier group in American society, and how immature and tone-deaf its members often act in public places. And it's occurred to me that, in the absence of true egalitarianism, we need to bring back the concept of noblesse oblige.

If you already know what that phrase means, hear me out. If you don't, let me explain.

"Noblesse oblige" (French: "nobility obliges") is the expectation that those who enjoy wealth and privilege in society also perform the social responsibilities that come with their station, especially with regard to the people around them who are less privileged than they. Or, to put it in a quintessentially American way, "With great power comes great responsibility."

The notion of noblesse oblige has a long history in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the USA. The feudal lord who protected the peasants who worked his land? Noblesse oblige. The tradition of British monarchs and their families to serve in the military, even though they could easily get out of doing so? Noblesse oblige. The Boxing Day holiday, where one gives small gifts to people in the service industries? Noblesse oblige. The tendency of wealthy families to start charities and donate large sums of money to social causes such as curing or preventing deadly illnesses, housing the homeless, or caring for orphans? Noblesse oblige. The reason why the word "noble" is a synonym for kind, generous, gracious, and self-denying? Noblesse oblige.

Why do I think we need to bring this concept back? Because there are way too many self-focused Karens in the world, the kinds of people who throw adult tantrums in Starbucks because their convoluted coffee order was one degree colder than what they demanded, or who scream and flip tables when their wills are in any way thwarted. When such people throw fits in public and/or are brutal to people in service jobs merely to flaunt their privilege, they just end up looking like entitled asshats. Also, nothing says "new money" like vulgar insecurity acting out. When you order the world's first ultramegasuperyacht with your billions just to flaunt your cash liquidity before other wealthy people, they may say aloud, "That's a big boat," but privately wonder whether you're overcompensating for something. No one is overawed with your ability to maintain a laser-like focus on your own navel.

People with generational wealth and privilege have often been taught the concept of noblesse oblige from childhood. While some of these can still be oblivious to all the perks and privileges that come with their station, they still tend to be thoughtful, gracious and generous to the people around them. They have nothing to prove, so they don't act out like spoiled toddlers, and they realize that kindness is a true sign of quality.

Of course I would prefer a truly egalitarian society over the two-tiered mess we currently have. I believe in that promise of equality and I'm not going to stop working to make it reality. But even our current unequal society would be much more tolerable if the overserved among us were to recognize and uphold the responsibilities that came with their social privileges.

The war on Halloween

Content warning: if you avoid discussions of Christianity, hypocrisy or any combination thereof, give this one a pass.

Right, you've been warned.

Shadow Marxism

(Originally written in response to a Marxist literary theory class I took in college, circa August 2004. No, it was not my favorite class. Yes, I was verily bugged about it. This is more or less a snapshot of my thoughts at the time, some of which have since changed -- which is only to be expected after accumulating another seventeen years of life experiences.)

Before making less than complimentary remarks about a dead man, I should in all fairness disclose some information about my background, natural bias, and education. I am not an expert on Marxism, nor do I claim to be -- just a student of human nature and somewhat capable of reading between the lines.

Hey kids! It's your ol' buddy Karl!

I will freely admit that I am biased against Marxism. Even before I knew anything about what Karl Marx had written, I wasn't a big fan. Maybe it's because I've been able to witness applied Marxism in my lifetime -- the shortages and shoddy quality, the oppression, the constant fear. And that's the best-case scenario. (If atheists can point to the Crusades and the Inquisition as an indication that Christianity is rotten, I can certainly point to Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler as indications that communism ain't all it's cracked up to be. As Eric Raymond puts it, "if the road to a Christian hell is paved with good individual intentions, the road to totalitarian hell is paved with communitarian idealism." But I digress.)

I should also admit that my current understanding of Marxist philosophy, while more comprehensive than it once was, is only at a pop-culture level. I have not read all of Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto in English, much less in the original German, and I doubt I will ever exercise the patience to do so. However, I have spent the better part of the summer studying Marxist theory as applied to literature and have also checked my notes carefully against the Youth for International Socialism page, so I believe my understanding of Marxist philosophy is about as accurate as any garden variety, well-read non-Marxist is likely to have.

With all that disclosed, here's what I know about Marxism, courtesy of my still-incomplete education:

Marxism is an economic philosophy with a twist. Were it not for that twist, Marx would be studied only by pointy-headed economics professors. You see, Marx wrote that everything is based on economics -- that all human social activities can be broken down to issues of finance. Money, according to Marx, is the base from which all other social structures -- religion, morality, education, politics, law, etc. -- eventually grow. All of these social structures, called "superstructures," are designed to reinforce notions of private property and of capital. This doctrine of the universality of Marxism is one reason why Marxist thought has invaded nearly every organization and soft-science discipline: Marxist literary theory, Marxist philosophy, Marxist psychology, even the ultimate oxymoron of Marxist Christianity.

The Marxist view of history is one of inevitable economic change. According to Marx, all societies go through four stages: feudalism, in which the peasants labor for the luxuries of the wealthy; capitalism, in which the working class labors for the financial gain of the middle class; socialism, in which the masses revolt and create a dictatorship of the working class; and pure communism or "workers' paradise," in which private property is abolished and all humankind works together for the common good. Marx stressed that all these stages led inexorably to the workers' paradise; it was, for lack of a better term, fated to be so.

Marx also claimed that in post-Industrial Revolution capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie (loosely, the middle class) get and keep their money by continually exploiting and oppressing the proletariat (the blue-collar working class). The only way to change this state of affairs, Marx claimed, was for the proletariat to gain control through violent revolution. There was no point in trying to change social superstructures, since they were all part of the capitalist base -- instead the proletariat must rise up and take control of the means of production, freeing themselves from capitalist slavery in the process.

Although Marx claimed his view of history was inevitable, he also owned it was quite possible that economic change could be indefinitely delayed by societal forces pushing hard for the status quo. Thus, it would be necessary for the proletariat to rise up in revolution immediately, so that workers' paradise could be achieved in their lifetimes. He also claimed that it would be impossible for revolution to take place in isolation -- global industry would require a global revolution, until the entire world was one huge workers' paradise. (Cue John Lennon's "Imagine" and fire up the patchouli incense.)

So is everyone asleep now? (Man, economics really is a dismal science. Spending money is fun, but talking about it is always boring for some reason.)

As I first studied Marxist thought, my initial response was one of incredulity. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?" Sounded nice, but would it really work? From what little I'd seen of human nature, I'd determined that people who have no financial motivation or inner drive to work usually don't work. Somehow I didn't think "the greater good" would provide sufficient impetus to keep the world running smoothly for long. Studying Marx's socialist stage of history, I wondered how the proletariat dictatorship would determine how people were to be fairly rewarded for their work, how they would decide to price items, what would be manufactured and who would get them in what quantities. That would be an extraordinary amount of work to decide. And when Marx claimed that the proletariat dictatorship would eventually voluntarily disband, I snorted out loud. Since when have human beings ever voluntarily relinquished power?

In fact, I began to think Marx was an incredibly stupid man. Here I was, a mere humanities major, and even I knew that money isn't at the core of human social activities. In fact, money is only a placeholder for one of the primary motivators of human activity -- power. If Marx didn't understand that much, he wasn't very intelligent; certainly he knew almost nothing about human nature.

But as I've continued to consider, I think I could make a case for Karl Marx being quite cunning and a careful student of human nature. And yes, I now believe he was well aware that many human activities can be broken down to a desire for power. He purposefully didn't write about power as a motivator, though, because he didn't want to draw attention to that fact. Beneath the veneer of overt Marxist thought there lies a deep shadow -- and concealed in that shadow, I have come to believe, is the true purpose of Marxism.

Why did Marx write what he did? After all, he came from a petty bourgeois family -- the very class he claimed to despise. He did not seem to be averse to money, though he clearly did not understand how to keep it -- he blazed through two inheritances in his lifetime, continually borrowed from friends and admirers, and was notorious for being unable to balance his own checkbook. Perhaps this was where his obsession with capital first arose.

In his life, Marx must have observed large numbers of what he called "the proletariat" -- what I would call the uneducated, working poor, laboring under inhumane conditions for little pay. He must have realized how desperate these people were, how much they yearned for a better way of life, and how there were no rules or laws in place to help them attain that life. He must have noticed, too, how many of them there were. At some point he must have realized what a powerful latent force was contained in the masses, especially if they were united and working toward a single goal.

And so, I believe, he wrote that goal for them. It was a simple idea, one that even the uneducated masses could grasp, and it could be popularized easily without significantly watering down the message. It told them that they were worse than slaves under capitalism, and that religion was merely a drug to keep them in their places. It claimed that money was the problem, a problem that could only be solved through violent upheaval. It promised them that after the revolution, they would have better living conditions and a modicum of dignity. It whispered to them that they would run the world as they saw fit. It told them that all they had to lose was their chains. In other words, it told them exactly what they wanted to hear -- that without any need for industry, education or piety, the poor would inherit the earth. And the people ate it up with a spoon.

Marx wrote with the full intent of having his ideas put into action. But, I believe, he was not wholly honest about his motivations. He encouraged the masses to rise up and, by virtue of their greater numbers, take over society, knowing full well that such a mob -- uneducated, often undisciplined, and completely inexperienced in leadership -- would quickly fall into chaos. Without the bourgeoisie to guide them, there would be no one qualified to run the factories and farms and other means of production. Society would grind to a halt as the new dictatorship of the proletariat floundered in its unfamiliar role. The workers of the world would need help. They would need someone with an education, someone more familiar with the mechanics of production, yet still sympathetic to their cause, someone who would come to their aid and, with his greater knowledge and expertise, run their brave new world for them. In other words, they would need someone just like Karl Marx.

In my opinion, Marx wrote about money because he knew the proletariat -- the cannon fodder who would accomplish his revolution for him -- were obsessed with money, and he realized that promises of its abolition would stir them to action. He wrote only indirectly about power, if at all, because acquiring power for himself was his chief end in inciting revolution. He wrote about changing human nature and about a mythical workers' paradise the way one dangles a carrot in front of a donkey; he knew full well that pure communism would never come to pass -- but once he and those like him had gained control of the new socialist order, they could run the people's lives any way they saw fit for as long as they liked. What Marx was forwarding, under the veneer of mutually beneficial communal living and labor for one's fellow man, was an old-fashioned meritocracy where all the rules of the game were written with the express end of awarding Marx the crown.

I believe the majority of rank-and-file Marxists understand only the surface of Marx's theories -- they gladly swallow what he promised to deliver, despite the fact that no practical application of Marxism has ever delivered the so-called "inevitable" workers' paradise Marx promised. Nor will it ever do so, regardless of how many times it is tried, because Marx never fully stipulated the conditions under which it would appear -- only the conditions to create the socialist order he desired. But what about the upper-class, highly-educated people who recognize "shadow Marxism" as I have described it in this editorial -- and who are still ardent Marxists? These are the people whom economist Thomas Sowell describes as "the anointed" -- those who, like Marx himself, believe they were meant to rule over others. They are likely to espouse socialism as a means to an end, to hold democracies in contempt precisely because they reflect the will of the people and not of the ruling class. These opportunists are the ones to watch like hawks. They would love to stir up the common folk to violent revolution, waiting with pale brows and clean hands until the deed is done and their coronations can begin.

To quote Dr. Sowell again (he is eminently quotable): "The left takes its vision seriously -- more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep." If you consider yourself to be one of Marx's proletariat class, in the name of all that is holy, don't be a sheep. If you've read this far and understood it, you're smart enough to get a post-secondary education and take control of your own life. You don't have to wrest control from others through acts of violence and thuggery, only to be stepped on by the anointed once you've done their dirty work for them. You don't even have to agree with everything I've stated here. But don't let yourself be used by those who are not forthcoming about their true motivations.

Remember: it is power, not religion, which is the true opiate of Marxist thought. And like any opiate, it is deadly addictive.

(ETA: if today's events in Washington, DC have taught me anything, it is that the opportunistic "anointed" can come from the political left OR the political right. Trump et al. seem convinced that they have the right to rule indefinitely, regardless of the people's votes, and are more than happy to rile up "the base" to achieve that end -- using violence and thuggery if they deem it necessary. HARD PASS THANKS.)

While I still can....

 ...goodbye, 2020. You won't be missed.

The Three Pigs: a modern fairy tale

Once upon a time there were three pigs. (They had convinced a few folks that they were sheepdogs, but really, they were pigs.)

Because some folks thought they were sheepdogs, these three pigs had managed to get a sweet gig keeping watch over sheep. They were supposed to treat all the sheep fairly and honestly, but these three pigs happened to like white sheep more than black sheep. And so, one day while they were all hanging out at the donut shop, they decided to have some fun and build a few structures to allow them to take care of the sheep the way they liked.

The first pig got a whole lot of straw. He built a big scary-looking black sheep out of it, which he put on display. This black sheep, he argued, was naturally criminal, lazy, stupid, more likely to fight and harm his own as well as others. He and his brothers had no choice but to crack down on these sheep for the good of the whole community. After a while, he used this straw-sheep argument to convince many in the community that he was right.

The second pig got a whole lot of sticks. Sticks are useful tools. You can use them to beat down anyone who gets in your way, even little black lambs who carry toy sticks in public places. And if you bind the sticks together in a bundle, you can make a very useful tool called a "fasces." This fascist pig used his bundle of sticks to corral black sheep so that they didn't get to go places he didn't want them to go. He could even build little pens and keep the non-white sheep in there for as long as he wanted. The second pig got very, very good at stick-ing it to the black sheep whenever and wherever he liked.

The third pig got a whole lot of stones. He knew that for his brothers' structures to work, they would need one big structure to keep everything in place. And so he built a huge stone wall for the pigs to hide behind any time the sheep complained to the shepherd that they were being unfairly treated. As long as the pigs stayed silent behind the wall, the shepherd couldn't act to stop them. Stone-walling was probably the best and most useful structure of all for the pigs.

This went on for some time, until one day the pigs got caught on camera, stick-ing it to another black sheep. When all the sheep, black and white alike, saw this, they were angry and decided to protest against the pigs' mistreatment of some sheep. They wanted the pigs to know and respect that black sheep mattered. Little did they know that some wolves, dressed in sheep's clothing, had joined the protest and started breaking and destroying and looting things.

The pigs were furious. Since they weren't really sheepdogs, they couldn't tell the sheep and the wolves apart, so they just started stick-ing it to everyone. But the more angry and violent they became, the more upset the sheep got and the more protests started to spring up. Pretty soon there were too many protests for the pigs to beat down with their sticks. And the stone-walling they were used to doing didn't seem to be working that well.

The sheep decided they had to do something to beat the pigs at their game. So they asked the shepherd to make some new laws taking away the source of the pigs' fun: the straw, the sticks and the stones. The sheep figured that if they de-funned the pigs, they wouldn't be able to mistreat the sheep any more.

Meanwhile the wolves in sheep's clothing were still doing damage and making a mess, and the pigs did nothing to stop it because they were too worried about being de-funned.

So, now the shepherd has given you a chance to vote against the pigs. The pigs keep telling you they'll protect you against the wolves, but is that really what they're doing with the resources at their disposal? Are the structures they have created benefiting us or them? Do they even know how to tell the wolves from the sheep? Have they learned anything at all from this experience?

Or is it time to de-fun the pigs?

You ask me, it's time to yeet those pigs into next week.

Pandemic: lies, damned lies, and...

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

--Mark Twain, who mistakenly attributed this quote to Benjamin Disraeli

Lately I've been struggling with the way American deaths from the pandemic are being reported in the USA -- specifically, the not very subtle way certain groups are trying to spin them. Inevitably, people who want to downplay the damage being done by the spread of COVID-19 (and the numbers of people who have died from it) express the total number of dead as a very small percentage of those who become ill -- or worse, as an even smaller percentage of the overall population of America or the world. The suggestion is that losing such a small percentage of people isn't that big a deal, and we shouldn't worry about it or blame this administration for it.

Let's set aside for the moment that getting COVID-19 is not a binary experience -- it's not just two options, death or complete recovery. Let's ignore the concerns of long-haul COVID-19 patients who are still suffering from lingering symptoms nearly a year after contracting the disease. Let's pretend we can make "herd immunity" work even though there are documented instances where people have gotten sick, recovered, then contracted another mutation of the virus and died.

Because I just want to talk about percentages. Let's talk about how percentages can be used.

Here's an interesting example: the Holocaust.

If you're about my age, you probably know quite a bit about the Holocaust. You studied it in school, read about it in books, saw documentaries or historical fiction films that discussed it in detail. You know the names of extermination camps like Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz; you know what Zyklon-B was used for; you know about the experiments and the torture; you know what murderous form Hitler's "Final Solution" took. For those of you who don't know, the most accurate estimate to date is that the Nazis systematically killed about six million Jews in the Holocaust, in an attempt to wipe them out completely as a people.

And six million seems like a lot, until you think about it as a percentage of the world's population. In 1938, before the war started in Europe, there was an estimated world population of around 2.2 billion people.

6 million out of 2.2 billion? That's just 0.27% of the population. Not even a full percentage point.

What if we add in all the other people the Nazis systematically wiped out? The Communists, the pacifists, the LGBTQ people, the Roma, the people who were caught harboring Jews in their homes, anyone the Nazis considered misfits, racially impure or socially undesirable? That's another 5 million, which adds up to 11 million dead. But even adding in the others, that still brings the Nazi death camp toll to a mere 0.5% of the world's population.

That doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

Here's the thing: there are actually people who try to justify the murderous Nazi purges of World War II by expressing those deaths as a percentage. Just like certain people are trying to justify the rising death count in the USA by expressing those deaths as percentages. The trouble is, expressing unnecessary human deaths as percentages of a total is a pretty bald attempt to pretend that real human lives are merely statistical data, that "excess deaths" are not traumatic, horrifying experiences for family and friends of those thousands of people who died alone, struggling to breathe. It's led to the callous argument that since a large percentage of people who have died to date were over 70 and had medical comorbidities -- heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, cancer -- their deaths don't really count, since they were just sick old boomers who would've died anyway. (It seems wise to insert a gentle reminder here that the argument "they would've died anyway" is a very slippery slope indeed. Because if you choose to normalize death this way, it's possible to rationalize a number of truly horrific acts, since all human beings eventually die.)

When you use percentages to downplay deaths, you are suggesting that unless the percentages get to a certain arbitrary size, those deaths of real people don't really count. That it's not really a tragedy, just a statistic. That we should all shrug, pick up our tools and get back to work.

Because work sets you free, I guess.

I'm not saying you folks are Nazis or anything, but if you don't want to be tarred by association, you might not want to stand that close to Dr. Mengele.

 

Numbers convey
the tragic scale
even as they
render the weight
manageable.

Fifty thousand is
a horrid number
but it is still
just
a number.

If the dead were
never counted
but only
and always named
it would break us. 

--ZML, "Plague Poems"

Pandemic: really. Take it seriously.

[I originally posted this on social media, but after a set period of time I deliberately delete posts there. This one I thought was important enough to keep.]

ERE'S the one thing I want you to know this week: you need to take coronavirus seriously.

SARS-CoV-2 is not a hoax. It's a real virus that has caused and is causing a real pandemic. It's sneaky, it's dangerous, it can spread through people who are asymptomatic or not yet symptomatic, it can cause strokes, blood clots that require amputation, long-term debilitating symptoms and permanent damage to the lungs, and it's unpredictably fatal.

I live near Seattle, Washington, where the coronavirus pandemic first hit hard in the United States. As such, our family and many of our neighbors take COVID-19 very seriously. The death toll in King County has been high enough that nearly everyone in this area knows somebody who has died of COVID-19.

When scientists, doctors and public health officials tell you you need to stay home, wear a mask if you must go out, wash your hands regularly and maintain appropriate social distance, they're not trying to ruin your fun, nor are they trying to be political. These are basic public health measures to avoid spreading a virus we can't yet vaccinate against, to stop making more cases of a disease we can't cure, to try to keep our hospital ICUs from being overwhelmed with desperately ill COVID-19 patients. And these officials are not trying to take your rights away. They're trying to make sure YOU STAY ALIVE to exercise those rights after the pandemic is over.

People from Seattle, from New York City, from New Orleans who have been warning the rest of the country for MONTHS about how bad this stuff can be are getting used to feeling like Cassandras. There are too many people outside the hot spots who are convinced that COVID-19 isn't real, that it's "just like the flu," that it only kills old people and the sick (and even if that were true, don't you have someone you care about who's old and/or sick?), that those of us who advocate for public health measures are "living in fear," that it's all a political stunt to steal your job and/or your freedoms.

None of these things are true.

You don't want your town to get like it was here in March and April, where we heard ambulance sirens every night. You don't want it to get like it was in New York City, where at least 18,000 people have been confirmed dead of coronavirus (there are certainly more) and many, many others are living with permanent damage from their bout with it. You don't want it to get like it was in New Orleans, where Mardi Gras was probably a super-spreading event that passed the virus all over the city. And you don't want liberal passage of the virus to allow it to adapt to its host, mutating to become ever more virulent and capable of seriously sickening or killing even more people than it does now.

We've seen what this virus can do. But there were precious few people able to spread the word to us that the pandemic was already here. You don't have to go through what we did.

The measures may be annoying, but they're not hard: Stay home if you can. Wear a mask if you can't. Keep at least 6 feet away from others. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Stay alive until we get a cure or vaccine.

Please. We love you.

Human bias: bug or feature?

It's time to come clean. I have a bias.

I'm not really proud of this fact, but it still intrudes into everyday life. And I've heard many times that the first part of getting over any kind of bias is admitting you have one. So, here it is:

I'm screamingly biased against people who drive late-model BMW, Mercedes and Lexus cars.

I don't know what it is, but whenever I'm out on the road and some doofus cuts me off in traffic, slaloms between lanes like it's the Auto Olympics, passes everyone at 30 miles over the posted limit in the slow lane, swerves in front of me only to romp on the brakes, and other random stupid human tricks, the offender is almost always driving a car from the Top Three Suspects List mentioned above. (As I have muttered to my honey more than once, "There's a reason why BMW stands for Break My Windshield.")

I have a pet theory why the operators of these particular makes of cars are so -- shall we say problematic? No, let's just call them total jerks -- and it's related to the cost of the cars. Specifically, mid-range luxury vehicles appeal to a certain kind of douchebag. There are plenty of bad drivers in junker cars, but there's a performance limit to the damage they can do. Likewise, the drivers of very fast, very high-end sports cars aren't likely to be foolhardy with precision machines that cost more than some people's houses. Which leaves the mid-range luxury cars -- just fancy and fast enough to be expensive, but not so pricey that they're beyond the reach of some entitled jackweed looking to show off to total strangers by driving slightly worse than a trained circus monkey.

"Rich kids toys" by Alan Farrow.
Public domain image as of 1 June 2020. Original image here.

Yes, OF COURSE I know people who drive BMWs, Mercedes and Lexuses (Lexi? hmm) who aren't total jerks. And yes, OF COURSE I have seen people driving execrably in other makes and models of cars. But they're the exceptions to the rule. Overwhelmingly, when I see a driver pull some jaw-droppingly stupid move on the freeway or a surface-street route, that driver is almost always behind the wheel of one of the Big Three Offenders.

Sorry if you drive one of these cars and my bias annoys you. But, y'know, if the shoe fits. Fight me.

* * *

All right, perhaps I write with tongue a little bit in cheek (but only a little bit). Still, I'm like a lot of other human beings; as a species, we're remarkably subject to biases. That might be because biased thinking -- that is, reasoning from very small data sets to determine our beliefs -- is hardwired into our brains. And while that causes all kinds of problems in a modern social context, historically speaking, bias might have been what kept our species alive.

Imagine Cave Dad, basking in the glow of a late evening fire pit, watching over his mate and small children. Suddenly, a wild saber-toothed cat appears! Cave Dad has never seen such a beast before, and he has little time to react when the animal seizes his smallest daughter and drags her away, never to be seen again. Cave Dad doesn't need to observe many saber-toothed cats, nor does he need to lose any other family members to predation, to develop a set of beliefs about these predators: that they are dangerous, that they will kill and eat humans, that they must be killed or driven away for the safety of the tribe. The ability to reason from small data sets gave early humans the evolutionary advantage of identifying and responding quickly to dangers in their environment, helping them avoid or destroy predators. In the context of simple survival, bias in human thinking was a feature.

Fast-forward to the modern era. There aren't many saber-toothed cats around these days, but bias can still be a useful tool in the modern world. (Raise your hands, technical support folk who have ever asked a customer, "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" Works 90% of the time!) However, while bias may still have its uses, it functions far more often as a kind of mental computing bug -- a persistent, dysfunctional mental structure that keeps human beings from thinking as clearly or acting as compassionately as they might without the bias in place.

A common problem associated with human bias is a particular kind of failure of the imagination. It's not failure to imagine the future you hope for, nor even the future you fear. It's failure to get inside someone else's skin -- the inability or unwillingness to imagine the life experience of someone who is markedly different from you, the first step toward feeling empathy. Let's consider a handful of common examples:

• why white people can't understand black people's widespread fear of the police (though, hey, this is starting to change)
• why men don't understand women leaving social media because they're sick of death/rape threats, doxxing, online stalking, being repeatedly called a slut/whore/cunt by complete strangers, etc.
• why left-wingers and right-wingers mutually distrust one another
• why trans women and trans-exclusionary feminists mutually distrust one another
• why people of faith and atheists mutually distrust one another
• why American Christians who have never met a Muslim are convinced Muslims are intent on destroying America (this bias isn't just about misunderstanding unfamiliar religious beliefs; some American Christians harbor the same fear about their co-religionists from Latin American countries)
• why city dwellers don't understand why country dwellers don't give up their cars/trucks and just take public transit (hint: there aren't any buses or light rail systems in Back of Beyond, Montana)
• why country dwellers don't understand why city dwellers can't move out of their cramped, expensive apartments and crime-ridden neighborhoods and just move to a cheaper place (hint: most of those cheaper places don't have the kinds of jobs city dwellers have skill sets for)
• why young gay men wince when older gay men use words like "tranny," "dyke" and "faggot," and why older gay men think young gay men have no right to police their language choices unless they too survive a horror like the AIDS crisis
• why my uncle, bless his heart, reflexively hates "blacks, Mexicans and people from Ohio" (yes, this is a direct quote) even though he knows very few people from any of these groups
• why some people want to "make America great again" without deeply considering what that phrase really means, what makes America great, how the people who popularized that phrase intend to make America different from the way it is now, and how varied implementation of this idea might change their country -- and its people -- for better or for worse
• why some people will absolutely not wear face masks, even though doing so greatly reduces the spread of COVID-19, protecting the people most at risk of dying from it
• why folks who say they would never have tolerated Nazi concentration camps or the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII stolidly look the other way as generations of Native Americans languish in poverty and squalor on reservations, and refugees from Mexico and Latin America are separated and caged under horrific conditions at our southern border. (And why are there no similar detention centers at our northern border? Could it be that most folks who cross the border illegally from that direction are white English speakers who can blend into American society without being detected? They're still here illegally, though, so if you say you don't want ANY "illegal aliens" flouting U.S. immigration laws, better get busy building that northern border wall and cobbling together detention cages in Wisconsin and North Dakota, eh? Just a thought.) 

What we're seeing right now in the USA is a massive failure of imagination leading to horrific, society-destroying consequences. People who are well-treated under the current system of policing often never give a second thought to those who habitually receive terrible, illegal and occasionally fatal treatment at the hands of the police. Peaceful individual protests provoke the wrath of politicians and systemic blacklisting by employers. Widespread peaceful protests are disdainfully described as "riots" and often escalated to violence not by the protestors, but by the police. Too many people in charge -- including a mentally-myopic, impotent president furiously tweeting from a bunker -- are intent only on quelling what they see as an irrational internal rebellion, and not enough are asking themselves why the protests occurred in the first place, nor how they became so widespread, so quickly. They cannot see injustice because they themselves never experience it, and they cannot imagine a world beyond their biases; all they can see are "weak" governors, mayors and police chiefs, and "thugs" that need jailing.

While political scientist Raymond Wolfinger once famously said, "The plural of anecdote is data," he was also constantly searching for better data. It's useful to remember, then, that the more anecdotes you collect, the more accurate your data should become. If you let your brain go on autopilot after collecting a few meager anecdotes about a person or group -- or worse, you let someone else feed you such anecdotes secondhand -- you are allowing bias to program your thoughts. But it's also possible to reprogram your thought processes so that you recognize your own biases when they emerge. For instance, if you hear about a particular group of people in a crisis situation and immediately respond with some variation of the phrase "Why don't they just" -- put the brakes on your biases for a second and consider why it might not be possible for the members of that group to "just" do what you propose.

Otherwise, you might just be letting your biases drive you out of control.

Pandemic: The Bully

I was having a chat with my sister Julie earlier this evening and she made a comment that stuck in my head. I mentioned that I'd heard so many people nonchalantly claim COVID-19 is "just like the flu," and she responded, "Yeah, it's like the flu... if the flu were a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on steroids." ("And with 'roid rage!" I added, and we laughed.)

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that vivid mental image of Ah-nold on steroids, with full-on 'roid rage, connects to a pretty solid analogy. So here it is.

COVID-19 operates a lot like an aggressive bully. (I know a little bit about bullies, as I was a target of their ire all through grade school). It's mean, it's relentless, and it's unpredictable. Most people are afraid of the bully, even if it leaves most people alone, because the bully has a way of elbowing through the crowd to pick on folks seemingly at random: the fat kid, the guy with the inhaler, the girl with diabetes, the skinny boy who has to sit out sports because he has a bad heart. Like all bullies, it preys on the weak -- and it pummels them. Sometimes it's a single harsh blow, but sometimes the bully's targets are beaten so badly they have to recuperate in the hospital. Some receive permanent scars from the damage. And some die.

Bullies can only get away with the things they do because nobody knows who they might pick on to hurt next. The unpredictability of the bully's attacks puts people on edge, makes them nervous. They might want to help those who are targeted by bullies, but what can they do?

This is what they can do. Everyone can band together to form a physical line of defense against the bully. Maybe they can't defeat the bully this way, but they can protect the kinds of people the bully likes to hurt or kill. In the meantime, they can formulate a plan to beat up the bully so thoroughly that it can't hurt people again.

COVID-19 homemade face mask. Image by Olgierd Rudak.
cc-by-2.0 license as of 1 June 2020. Original image here.

This is exactly why wearing a mask in public places is so critical right now. It doesn't necessarily protect you against the bully that is COVID-19, and it's certainly not a fun activity, but it keeps the coronavirus from elbowing through crowds to pick on others. When enough people do it, the bully can't operate -- it can't spread to cause more harm. Wearing a mask is a way of saying, "We can't stop COVID-19 right now, but we can protect vulnerable people from it until we find a way to kick its butt -- through a vaccine or other treatment that stops it cold."

And what of those people who boldly declare that they'll never, ever wear a face mask?

Well, have you ever noticed that real-life bullies have their -- what shall we call them? Retinues? Entourages? Hangers-on? Toadies? -- anyway, the sniveling little jerks who laugh at whatever the bully says, who cheer on whatever the bully does, because by allying themselves with the bully they hope not to be among its victims? I think of people who don't wear masks in just that way. By focusing on their own needs first and always, by refusing to do any little thing that in the least inconveniences them, by failing to protect the weak and vulnerable among us, they have chosen to ally themselves with the bully. They help spread the scourge. They are COVID-19's toadies.

And having seen what COVID-19 can do, I frankly wouldn't give them the time of day.

Pandemic: Robbed

20 years ago this week, Captain Midnight and I got invited to a goofy party at Rob and Marie Cummings' house in Bellevue. Rob was turning 37, so he decided to host a Monty Python-themed "Old Woman" party (watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail a few times and you'll get it) and he asked all partygoers to come dressed as their favorite characters from any Python sketch. If I remember correctly, I dressed up as the deranged chef from the Dirty Fork Sketch, and CM went as the random street flasher (with a large sign reading "BOO!" under his trenchcoat). It was just as silly and fun as you might imagine; I think everyone had a great time.

So today is Rob's 57th birthday.

He isn't here to celebrate it, though. He died last month of congestive heart failure.

As his widow, Marie, expressed it, "While he did not die directly of COVID-19, he delayed seeking medical help because of his fear of contracting it."

We didn't get to see him one last time. We didn't get to thank him for his friendship or say goodbye.

We weren't even able to attend his funeral service.

Let me put this in terms Rob might appreciate: if the coronavirus were Mr. Creosote, I'd give it a wafer-thin mint and calmly watch it explode. It needs to die, and it needs to die now.

Rethinking Titanic

[I first wrote this in... hmm, maybe 2002? earlier? I dunno. It's been sitting in limbo on my computer for some time, but I've decided to give it a place to live on the blog. Because reasons.]

NOTE TO TITANIC FANS: You may not want to read this. It's not pretty.

When first released in 1997, Titanic broke all kinds of box-office records. This love story between two people of different social classes, set aboard the world's most famous doomed luxury liner, seemed to resonate with audiences all over the world. Moviegoers watched the three-hour film multiple times in first-run theatres (some of them quoting lines right in sync with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio), teenage girls designed their prom dresses after post-Edwardian fashions, college students were compelled to change their majors. Most of Western society was seduced by Titanic; nobody seemed surprised when it swept the Oscars in 1998.

And I have to admit that, at least for a while, I was seduced right along with them. The movie does have its problems -- it's big to the point of being overblown, riddled with tired love-story clichés, and there's one hour of '70s disaster movie plopped right in the middle of the romance. And yet, somehow, the whole appears greater than the sum of its parts. While you watch it, the film works. Your understanding of reality is temporarily placed on the back burner while you are immersed in James Cameron's vision of 1914.

All this, despite the utter odiousness of Rose DeWitt Bukater.

It's true. When you step out of the narrative spell and really think about it for a minute, Rose is one of the most selfish characters ever articulated in cinema. We are clearly meant to identify with Rose and sympathize with her situation -- trapped in a rigid upper-class society, she yearns to be free but seems unable to break the chains of her social strictures. Yet Rose begins as a wholly self-centered creature, and remains so throughout the film. As my sister likes to say, "it's all about her."

From her earliest recalled memories as a 17-year-old girl, Rose is spoiled, self-involved and bitingly sarcastic to all around her. Brooding on her impending loveless marriage to Cal, a wealthy cad (and trust me, they would so deserve each other), she feigns boredom when first faced with the size and grandeur of the Titanic. All she can see is a prison ship, leading her away in the chains of unhappy wedlock. Rose has nary a good word for anyone, tartly smarting off to her mother, her fiancé, and the other wealthy passengers in first class. As we soon discover, Rose has been urged into this marriage by her mother, a widow trying to conceal her penury, who is saddled with her late husband's remarkable debts (Rose's selfish gene seems to have been passed down by both parents). Yet far from owing any real sense of duty to her mother, Rose soon decides to commit suicide rather than marry her odious fiancé. She is only pulled from the brink by Jack, who actually does have a strong sense of duty -- willing to save a total stranger from the icy water, even if it means risking his own life.

Once Rose falls for Jack, she flouts her mother and societal expectations to do just as she chooses with him. She even has him sketch her in the nude -- outrageously, while still wearing her fiancé's engagement gift around her neck. Then she further slaps courtesy and decorum in the face by taking Jack's sketch and presenting it to her fiancé as a gift. As the ship sinks, Rose makes the conscious choice to walk away from her family and friends forever in order to go with Jack. Yet Rose's selfishness extends even further, allowing her to discard the man she ostensibly loves in order to survive. When they find a piece of ship buoyant enough to hold one or the other of them, but not both, Rose does not behave as you would expect a woman in love to do -- wouldn't she have preferred to take her chances in the icy water, rather than watch her lover freeze to death beside her? Yet this latter is precisely what she chooses, and her lover excuses away her self-serving behavior even as he perishes. Rose's utter lack of principles is neatly summarized in her final scene with Jack. Only an instant after she promises, "I'll never let go, Jack," she in fact does let go, so Jack's frozen corpse can sink slowly and prettily into the depths of the Atlantic.

After her rescue, Rose continues to walk her chosen path of pure self-involvement. She never again attempts to contact her penniless mother, preferring to let her believe "Rose DeWitt Bukater" perished aboard the ship, and leaving Mom to her own devices. Rose marries a man without ever revealing to him her past life, and (as intimated in a sweeping series of black-and-white photos) continues to do exactly as she chooses for years. At the end of her life, when the salvage crew brings her back to Titanic, she gets to spill the beans about the whole event without betraying even a glimmer of guilt about her choices. Finally, the coup de grace -- rather than bequeathing the priceless Coeur de la Mer to her granddaughter, or giving it to Brock, the man who's spent years of his life and millions of dollars searching for it, she carelessly tosses the necklace into the ocean. She even gets to die warm in her bed, just as her sacrificed lover predicted she would.

Yep, it's all about her. And, human nature being what it is, chances are good that you were rooting for the selfish brat all through the narrative. Perhaps that is really what makes Titanic so remarkable as a film -- it features a thoroughly unlovable character who makes you care about her anyway.

Pandemic: ephemera

OME minor odd things I've noticed regarding pandemic conditions, which may or may not be forgotten by history unless someone (say, me) writes them down:

• Decluttering is tough right now. There's plenty of time to do it, but thanks to widespread states of depression or dysthymia there may not be much internal motivation to do it. And then there's the problem of disposing of all those unwanted but still-useful items. Due to fears of COVID-19 contamination, Goodwill and other secondhand stores aren't accepting donations right now. Unless you want to break out the bazillion Amazon boxes in the garage and start trying to sell items one by one on eBay, you're kinda hosed.
• So. Much. Flour. With lots of free time on their hands and a strong yen for comfort food, many Americans have rediscovered baking -- which means that flour, yeast and other ingredients for baked goods have vanished from stores almost as quickly as face masks and toilet paper. (Fortunately for me, the chocolate supply is still holding up!) I'm no stranger to this activity; a few weeks ago I picked up some instant yeast online, and since then this household has feasted on homemade bread, cookies, calzones made from homemade pizza dough, and Swedish apple cake. (You know I can cook.)
• I get tired of cooking all the time, and sometimes other family members spell me off, but every now and then nobody wants to take the responsibility and everyone's hungry. That's when we yell TO THE TACO TRUCK! and light out for Westside Park. Someone in our neighborhood cut a deal with several area food trucks, so nearly every weekday around lunchtime there's a truck parked at Westside, slingin' hash and takin' names. We've seen some familiar faces from the neighborhood while waiting in line for lunch (maintaining good social distance, of course).
• I've noticed you can now tell where other grocery shoppers are getting their news. Most people around here wear masks. Above the face coverings, their eyes are concerned, resolute, occasionally friendly. They keep a respectful 6 feet of distance from other shoppers and apologize when they get too close. Conservative media fans, on the other hand, tend not to wear masks in public (though this will change in the coming week, as King County is making it a requirement). Their expressions range from confusion to frank disdain of their fellow shoppers with masks. They don't maintain reasonable social distance, they never apologize for coming too close, and they tend to get angry when people ask them to move away.
• Last week I had a run-in with one of these clowns, an older man with no mask, at the grocery store. I was boxed into the produce section (another shopper was blocking the exit behind me) and I couldn't get past him safely, so I waited for him to back away and let me out. But Grampa Boomer wanted something next to me and wasn't willing to wait for it, so he got really close and started passive-aggressively coughing in my direction. I had to push past him to get away (with a single-word opinion on the status of his parentage, I'll admit), but if I had a do-over I would've gotten a closeup photo of his face. DUDE. Deliberately coughing at someone else during a pandemic is a form of assault. You are old and have lived your life, and if you want to play tiddlywinks with COVID-19 that's your call, but I have a family to take care of. How dare you put me and them in danger because you want your broccoli 5 seconds faster?
• In the same vein, I'm continually amazed at the people who are out protesting life-saving quarantine measures for reasons I can only describe as frivolous. I'm not talking about protests due to concerns most people would recognize as valid (resuming needed medical treatments, financial assistance to get through lockdown, fear of increased domestic abuse, etc.). I'm talking about people losing it because they "need" a haircut, a manicure, a massage; they are demanding the return of summer camp and the reopening of Disney properties not because it's safe, but because they're already sick of their kids. *sigh* ... really? I know, I know, these conditions have never before happened in your lifetime. They've never happened in mine either, and I can think of hundreds of things from "normal life" that I'm missing right now and would dearly love to have back, but not at the expense of other people's lives. I don't think Patrick Henry would've been on board with milling around in front of the capitol building, yelling GIVE ME PEDICURES OR GIVE ME DEATH through a bullhorn.
• Quarantine has been fantastic for Charlie-cat. I honestly think he's going to have some kind of feline nervous breakdown the first time all three of us humans leave the house at once. He's adored all the extra company, attention, toys and treats he's been getting for the last two months. (As I typed this, he hopped onto the computer desk, curled up next to me, leaned his head on my left arm and is now purring contentedly. D'aww, fuzzy beast.)

Pandemic: on El Papagallo, hot sauce, Clorox and Lysol

When I was still in grade school, we had a fairly popular Mexican restaurant in town called El Papagallo, and one night it burned to the ground. Here's the gist of a conversation I remember having with my mother right around the time it happened:

Me: One of my friends at school said there was a big pot of hot sauce on the back of their stove and it got too hot and burned down the restaurant.
Mom: I don't think so, honey. I read in the newspaper that it was a grease fire.
Me: No, it was too-hot hot sauce!
Mom: I'm pretty sure the newspaper people talked to the owner of the restaurant.
Me: That doesn't make any sense. It had to be the hot sauce!

After several rounds of this my mother just sighed, said, "OK, honey," and allowed my grade-school brain to believe whatever it wanted to believe. And because she'd quit arguing, I was convinced I was right, because after all, my friend had said so and it made the most sense. What did adults know?

That same sense of rock-solid, absolutely misplaced self-confidence was on display during the President's press conference today, when he forwarded the ideas -- which he clearly felt were intelligent, well-founded and in no way insane -- that people should try to kill off a coronavirus infection by introducing bright lights into the body, and clean their lungs by injecting disinfectant. He has exactly the mindset of a stubborn grade-schooler who is convinced of his own brilliance and rightness, and no journalist, no epidemiologist, no scientist is going to tell him otherwise. It amazes me that he's gotten to this stage in life without ever getting clocked in the head by reality, but it seems money really can shield people from the consequences of their own stupidity.

The thing is, no one hung on my every word in grade school. Nobody decided Mexican restaurants were dangerous or started grassroots campaigns to shut them all down because of my personal, absolute belief that a batch of hot sauce had destroyed El Papagallo. My infantile beliefs weren't important to anyone but me, and my mother knew it, which is why she simply stopped arguing with me. But millions of Americans actually listen to, and believe in, this stubborn, unhinged moron's random rantings of the day. Somebody's going to go out and try gargling Clorox tomorrow because Trump was so convinced his homegrown hunches about COVID-19 were better than the lifetime studies of brilliant scientists working to find a cure. Somebody's going to start touting tanning beds as the cure for coronavirus. And somebody's going to die painfully because she injected herself with Lysol.

The only thing scarier than COVID-19 is realizing that the President of the United States is mentally unhinged, yet still convinced of his own competence... and that a sizable number of Americans are willing to follow anywhere he leads, even right off the precipice.

Crossing the line

(I've been sitting on this minor rant for a while. Enough time has gone by that I'm not actively angry about it any more, but I still think the experience is worth sharing.)

It's early June, 2015, and I'm looking for dorm appliances for my college-bound niece at our local Bartell Drugs. In the next aisle over, an old man -- probably in his eighties, tall, skinny, with wavy gray hair and glasses -- sidles up to a Bartell's clerk in a red vest. "You're working late," he says jovially. She stares at him.

So far, there's nothing really untoward in the exchange. He could just be an old family friend. But something about it doesn't feel quite right. And while still looking through the rice cookers and electric teakettles, I can sense that the conversation in the next aisle is already getting strained. I don't hear everything he says, but I notice the old man is blowing raspberries with his mouth, a weird, off-putting compulsive act. And when he gets a little too close to the clerk and says, "You're very pretty, though," in a tone that has nothing to do with being polite or complimentary, I suddenly have the sensation of my stomach being flooded with ice. I know what I'm witnessing isn't a friendly conversation, or even playful banter. It's harassment.

The clerk knows it too. She snaps into him immediately. "You were already told that if you ever came back in here again to bother me or anyone else, you'd be banned from this store," she says, loudly enough to be heard by other customers. "I want you out of here right now."

And as I watch, the old man's demeanor changes completely. His tone and expression switch from lascivious to innocent in less time than it takes some sports cars to get from 0 to 60, and he begins to protest, gently, that he doesn't understand, that his words must have been misinterpreted, that he's done nothing wrong. And I can feel myself getting angry. I've seen this behavior before, and I've seen it often, because the people who regularly get away with harassment have discovered that it works for them.

Let's just say that it didn't work for him that day.

The manager on duty got a full report of what I'd witnessed. I also indicated that I'd be happy to make a statement to the local police, backing up the clerk, if she chose to press charges. Separately, I sent a message to the Bartell Drugs corporate offices reporting what I saw and repeating my offer to speak to the police if necessary. (They later indicated to me that, while the clerk did not press charges, the man in question had been permanently banned from the premises.)

My local Bartell's did a great job of taking this case of harassment seriously and taking quick action to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Other businesses or organizations may not display as much concern. This is why I'm convinced it's vital for everyone to report every case of harassment whenever it's witnessed, and to as many people as possible -- managers, corporate, local police -- until someone takes the report seriously and acts on it. I know it's uncomfortable to do this, and that most people would prefer to look the other way and pretend nothing happened. But harassers have been emboldened by years of people looking away. In fact, they depend on it. The way this particular old man operated, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that he'd successfully harassed people for decades, with little or no consequence to himself.

To my mind, there's an interesting behavioral correlation between harassers and shoplifters. Both are curious to see what they can get away with, and neither want to pay the real price for their activities. And just as stores prosecute shoplifters for theft, serial harassers need to be told that they've crossed the line, to be made just as uncomfortable as they make their victims, to understand that there's a real, steep social cost to their actions. Otherwise they'll go right on acting creepy and playing innocent for as long as they're allowed to get away with it.

Dance like nobody's watching! (Freak.)

Ah, internet aphorisms. They're always fun, aren't they?

Within my lifetime, the phrase "Dance like nobody's watching" has passed into aphoristic immortality. (You can tell a particular affirmation has achieved this level of notoriety when it gets attributed to multiple wits, and this one has been pinned to both Satchel Paige and Mark Twain -- I guess it isn't quite smooth enough to be believable as an Oscar Wilde. For what it's worth, the phrase originates from the lyrics to "Come From the Heart," a country song written in the '80s by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh.) Despite the wild popularity of this phrase, I suspect a lot of people don't understand it very well. Too many people seem to think that this phrase assumes your ability to channel your inner Michael Flatley -- that if you dance like a spaz in public, people will be impressed by your sweet moves, whoop and rise to their feet and cheer you on like that scene in Napoleon Dynamite.

Not even sorta.

Truth is, if you dance like a spaz in public, most people will raise their eyebrows but say nothing. Others, Nelson-like, will laugh and point at your mad gyrations. A few will be mean and call you a freak or worse. So why tell people to do it at all? Why encourage them to boogie down like a complete goofball and endure public humiliation for it?

Well, I'm going to make the argument that the public humiliation is not a bug, but a feature of this advice. Goofball dancing in public (or other forms of gotta-be-me silliness -- about which, see more below) isn't necessarily going to win you lots of new friends. But it does work pretty well at winnowing out the people in your life who don't "get" you, or who are too concerned about being cool to put up with your unique weirdness in public. And it helps you build up the mental toughness to handle that rejection (which is inevitably going to happen) and keep being who you're meant to be.

No, it doesn't have to be dance specifically. I don't usually dance in public or private, since dance is not my preferred form of creative expression. But if I'm in any public place and they play Billy Joel's "Tell Her About It," my life will temporarily turn into a musical as I break into song for the next 3 minutes and 52 seconds. If you have to make yourself scarce during that time, I'll try to be understanding -- but it's still gonna happen because nearly four decades on, that song (and pretty much everything else on the Innocent Man album) is still A BOP. #sorrynotsorry

The other day I picked up an oversized bubble wand for $1.10 at a craft store, because reasons. I was set to pick up a few groceries and go home, but it was a nice cool evening, I didn't need to be anywhere right away, and the bubble wand needed breaking in... so for about half an hour, people got to laugh at this crazy middle-aged lady randomly blowing bubbles in a grocery store parking lot. Some just sped past me not making eye contact, and I thought, "Welp, there lies the man with heart so dead." Some, such as the Francophone couple who didn't know or care that I could understand what they were saying, got into their car making arch comments about "the idiot blowing bubbles." A few teenagers laughed, pulled out their phones and filmed me from a safe distance. (No, I don't want to know if I ended up on social media.)

But most people got it. Their eyes lit up. They smiled. They sang "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" at me. They giggled and chased floating bubbles on the wind like sugared-up kindergartners (and not just the kids, either; a couple of big, beefy, heavily-tatted guys who looked like they could have been in a gang were grinning and popping bubbles like it was going outta style). Or they just walked by to say, "That looks like fun!" At the least, I made their Monday night grocery run a little more interesting. And how many other fun things can you do in public for just $1.10?

Yeah, I live in my own little cosmos. So do you, probably. And doing silly stuff that makes you happy, in a place where other people can see, helps you decide who you can trust inside that cosmos and who gets denied entry. That's what I think "dance like nobody's watching" really means. Because people do watch... and the ones who like you anyway, even after seeing you flail about like a dork, are the ones who deserve to get in on the fun.