Wallace for President

Henry Agard Wallace

When it comes to political celebrities, they don't make them like they used to.  Reading Clay Risen's Red Scare, I was introduced to a figure from the 1948 US Presidential election, FDR's second vice president (serving in this third term from 1941 - 1945), Henry Agard Wallace.  FDR chose Wallace after a falling out with the VP of his first two terms, conservative Texan John Nance Garner.  From Risen's chapter on him, Wallace was "a curious cornstalk of a man from Iowa.":

He was born on a farm in 1888, the son of Henry C. Wallace, the U.S. secretary of agriculture for much of the 1920s. Young Henry was a wizard of the land and all its bounty. He studied agriculture at Iowa State University, then went to work for his family’s publication, Wallaces’ Farmer. He became known around the Midwest for his uncanny ability to meld science and economics, business and old-school farming smarts into new insights that helped him grow wealthy—as it did many of his readers, who followed his prescriptions religiously. On the side he founded a seed business, the Hi-Bred Corn Company, producing highly efficient hybrid crops. He held on to it through his decades in politics; at the end of his life, in 1965, it was estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. 

 “You feel that he would not tell you the time of day without first searching his soul to see if it agreed with the clock,” read a profile in The New York Times.”

I was not aware of Wallace's challenge to Harry Truman, who as FDR's 3rd Vice President had succeeded Roosevelt when he died in office barely 3 months into his fourth term and was now, having terminated the second World War by dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seeking re-election.  Following the defeat of Germany with the close collaboration of Stalin, the winds of favor toward communism and the Soviet Union in the United States government had shifted dramatically, and the haberdasher from Missouri, Truman had been just the man to ride the current.  Keeping ahead of the anti-Red sentiment that was winning elections for Republicans, Truman initiated a Loyalty Oath and background checks for over 2 million government employees-- mandating the termination (and often ruining the careers) of employees refusing the oath or found to have had communist affiliations and influences in their histories.

In Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC) became a permanent committee under Democratic leadership.  It had been around in one form or another since 1918 when it was formed as a bulwark against subversive European ideas such as particularly, Marxism and anarchy and revived for periodic "witch hunts" to out sympathizers and spies with the anathema ideologies and agendas of the day including, perennially, communism and at the approach of World War II, Nazism. At the conclusion of the war with Hitler defeated, the emphasis returned to heresies of the left.  (A proposal in 1946 to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as Un-American was dismissed with committee Member John Rankin of Mississippi saying, "After all, the KKK is an American Institution.")  Un-American came to mean strictly affiliation past or present with the Communist Party and Pro-Soviet sympathies in particular.

To Henry Wallace (whom FDR had appointed to the anodyne position of Secretary of Commerce when he demoted him as VP in an effort to broaden his appeal beyond the New Deal coalition with the more middle of the road Truman as his 1944 running mate, and continued to serve in Commerce after Roosevelt's death until September 1946 when he was fired by Truman over disagreements about policy toward the USSR), this burgeoning cold war attitude taking shape among the establishment of both parties was a mistake:

Declaring himself “neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian,” [Wallace] said that a “get tough with Russia” policy would fail. The only solution, he said, was to cede global security to the United Nations, including the network of U.S. and British air bases strung across the world—in essence, disarmament. “Under friendly, peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike,” he said from the podium.

On his dismissal from Truman's cabinet, Wallace founded the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) an organization devoted to promoting a foreign policy that maintained relations with the Soviet Union as well as a domestic policy broadening the social programs of the New Deal.  He immediately entertained an ambition to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination largely on the basis of providing a countermeasure to Truman's growing antagonism to the Soviet Union and to members of the American communist party.  Rejecting the belligerence of the Democratic party leadership toward Russia, Wallace, speaking in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden, declared that Congress "is asked to rush through a momentous decision as if great armies were already on the march. I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace.”

Per Wikipedia:

Wallace's supporters held a national convention in Philadelphia in July, formally establishing a new Progressive Party. The party platform addressed a wide array of issues, and included support for the desegregation of public schools, gender equality, a national health insurance program, free trade, and public ownership of large banks, railroads, and power utilities. The party was described as "progressively capitalist".

Wallace's campaign received the endorsement of future Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern of South Dakota, entertainers Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and even movie star Ava Gardner.  American Communists, too, were a natural constituency for the party, and while the Communist Party did not openly endorse Wallace, the PCA became a harbor for its members and for progressive minded Democrats many of whom voted with their feet to express their disapproval of the Democrats' growing antagonism to Russia and to the socialist ideals of American leftists. Wallace called his supporters "Gideon's Army" evoking the Old Testament story of the prophet who turned Israelites away from the idolatry they had fallen into and subsequently led a troop of 300 to victory over the vast Army of the Midianites. 

Again Wikipedia describes the flavor of Wallace's iconoclasm:

Wallace embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to support his candidacy, encountering resistance in both the North and South. He openly defied the Jim Crow regime in the South, refusing to speak before segregated audiences. Time magazine, which opposed Wallace's candidacy, described him as "ostentatiously" riding through the towns and cities of the segregated South "with his Negro secretary beside him".

The response of mainstream Democrats to the possibility of excitement that Wallace's campaign might arouse among the rank and file was the creation of a counter organization, Americans for Democratic Action, nominally in favor of the expansion of New Deal benefits and social programs but primarily supportive of Truman's anti-communist foreign and domestic policy measures.  Even labor in the person of Walter Reuther of the UAW was loath to side with the candidate supported by Communists.  The hysteria being raised by both parties and the media-- as well as a well timed exposure by a Republican leaning newspaper of embarrassing private correspondence between Wallace and Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré and spiritual leader of the controversial Theosophy movement from Wallace's time as Secretary of Agriculture in Roosevelt's first 2 terms-- undermined the momentum of his campaign.  The prevalence of Communists among his supporters became as even Wallace came to concede, "a liability."

From Risen's Red Scare:

In September 1948 Leon Henderson, the [PSA] chairman, warned Truman that his campaign against Wallace was creating a hysterical anti-Communist atmosphere that would last long after the election was over. Worse, he feared that Truman’s loyalty program was being used to political ends, cracking down on innocent people as a way of demonstrating the administration’s anti-Communist bona fides. “We urge you meanwhile to make clear to administration officials that political considerations must have no part in the grave business of determining a man’s ‘loyalty to his country,’ ” Henderson wrote.

In the final analysis, the PSA was barely a spoiler on election day.  In only 2 states that went for the expected winner Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, did Wallace's performance come within the margin between Dewey and Truman.  Truman won the popular vote, beating Dewey 49.55% to 45.07%, as well as the electoral vote (301 to 189).   Wallace with only 0.29% of the vote was shut out from electoral votes and came in 4th behind Segregationist Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrat Party with 2.37% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes.

Truman with a stronger anti-Communist message than Dewey carried the day.  Furthermore, as Risen notes:

Over the coming years, a person’s support for Wallace in 1948, let alone membership in the PCA, would become a mark of suspicion for anti-Communists. The Pittsburgh Press, a conservative afternoon daily, printed the names of local signatories to a Wallace petition—a list that would pop up in the files of many red hunters.

Wallace himself continued in politics only briefly after his defeat.  In the anti-red atmosphere, he continued to face accusations of softness on communism, and was called to face accusations that he had encouraged Chiang Kai-Shek in 1944 to form a coalition with Mao Tse-Tung's communist party.  He ultimately repudiated his pro-Soviet politics calling the Soviet Union in a 1952 article "utterly evil."  He refused to endorse any democratic candidates until Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, although he disapproved of Johnson's Vietnam policy.  Of Cuba, he said, "We lost Cuba in 1959 not only because of Castro but also because we failed to understand the needs of the farmer in the back country of Cuba from 1920 onward. ... The common man is on the march, but it is up to the uncommon men of education and insight to lead that march constructively".

Wallace died in 1965 after a furious battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig disease, which also afflicted Stephen Hawking.

 Returning to 1948, Risen concluded:

Truman understood that, like it or not, the United States had no choice but to fulfill its new role in the world, to go once more into the breach. But in doing so, in steeling the country to stand up to the Soviet challenge, he chose not to dispel the accompanying fear—and, during his 1948 run for the presidency, he did much to exacerbate it. Alone, Truman’s attacks on Wallace did not cause the Red Scare. But by lending it a bipartisan cover, he made it easier for tens of millions of Americans to join the hysteria.

It Comes Around

It cannot be a revelation to anyone that YouTube shorts can be an addictive thing.  Between all the AI Slop and ads for manscaping tools, anti-sag bras and pillows, there are of course dance trends, comedy clips, teasers for new music, genuinely panic inducing extreme sports feats like breakneck skateboarding down busy San Francisco streets, and of course, Gaza.  I don't know about you but for me the videos about Gaza had been among the top categories of shorts in my feed until recently (neck and neck with ICE related abominations) when they started to be eclipsed by Iran. Originally documenting the impact of Iraeli and US missiles on Teheran and other Iranian cities, I've noticed a new category piercing through the din, and these are hits on Tel Aviv in particular from Iranian missiles breaching Israel's Iron Dome and making direct hits on military and civilian targets. While I could easily be convinced that some of these are AI generated videos, some direct hits have been confirmed.  AI or not, it could be my algorithm but I notice that the comments in these videos from around the world, the US included are nearly 100% on the side of Iran.  In contrast, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reports with dismay that 93% of Israelis support Israel and the US's war of choice against Iran and Lebanon in which 800,000 Lebanese and 3.2 million Iranian civilians have already been displaced from their homes (on top of the nearly 2 million in Gaza) many of them by the makings of an ecological disaster caused by the firebombing of Iranian refineries.   Before Israel's US-enabled genocide in Gaza, I never would have thought I would one day be cheering the destuction of Israeli architecture along with random commenters from Ireland, South America, Scandinavia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia, but here I am.  And yet, I am also aware that this quick turnabout in the world's tolerance for Israel's aggressions is the stuff of tragedy that could have been avoided,   It has been brought upon Israel by Israel itself, aided and abetted by the United States.

Kyle Kulinski has been chronicling the implosion of support for Donald Trump, highlighting in a recent video the viral bemoaning of a Florida former MAGA man for "Uncle Joe" as an indication of how far Trump's esteem among the electorate has fallen.  Indeed polls indicate a 48%-40% lead for Biden over Trump in popularity.   One poll has indicated that if the election were held again today, Kamala Harris herself would beat Trump by 8 points.  For my part, while I applaud any acknowledgement that America made the wrong choice in November 2024, the recent surge is nothing for either Democrat to be proud of.  On the contrary, it was Joe Biden's enabling of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Harris's refusal to give the smallest sign that her administration would be different that is largely responsible for her defeat, as it has been recently revealed her own team privately acknowledged in its own post mortem.  And it was her defeat that enabled this dark era of American authored apocalypse around the world.

While I still regularly grieve over the difference a Harris administration would have made to the alternate history of the world, I do not share Florida MAGA man's longing for "Uncle Joe."  To the contrary, I am rooting for the slim possibility that a sizeable chunk of the remainder of Joe Biden's life is consumed with the question of what he thought he was doing greenlighting, funding and stocking Israel's genocidal response to Hamas's October 7 2023 attack on its breach of Israel's apartheid wall around Gaza, and  fostering a repression of American dissent via state (and State Department) sponsored conflation of Anti-Genocidal protest with Anti-Semitism.  It stretches credulity to think that someone as Inside Washington as Biden was for a very long career (one that bumped up fondly against the closing of the Segregationist era of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms) would have had as shallow a motivation in his unwavering support of Israel than mindless Zionism, and yet, while a venal reflex to not go against AIPAC surely played a part, it is also patently obvious that Biden was of the mistaken belief that he was doing a good thing.  This makes the consequence of his mistakenness all the more tragic.  If he was helping Israel, it was to burst out of the closet as a world class force for Imperialistic Evil.  If he thought he was playing his part in the ongoing restitution of European Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust that Israel's creation was eternally supposed to represent, he was tragically doing the opposite. Israel's conduct since October 7 has lost what remained of the world's good will and instead through its violent hostility to an ever growing list of enemies that its own sociopathic behavior has studiously cultivated, stubbornly engendered a recognition around the world that the tiny state has been and appears to intend to continue to be the source of much of a growing danger to the future of humanity.  By not distinguishing herself from Biden's naïveté if not psychopathology with respect to Israel's imperialism-- not even to the slightest degree-- Kamala Harris paved the way to the even more insane and twisted dysfunctional collaboration of the Trump Administration with Netanyahu's Israel. 

Israel has long thrived on its demand for the acquiescence of the world to its privileged special pleading, so much so that it had come to expect it.  It is a bitter irony, that we can only hope the world survives long enough to enjoy and learn from, that its very confidence in its entitlement to misbehave is the cause of the ill will radiating toward it from every corner of the earth.

Adventures in Maleness

Some highlights from the World of Fellas:

Jeff Bezos becomes a billionaire by disrupting bookselling with his online emporium.  He then shaves his head a la Lex Luthor, buys the Washington Post and in addition to firing a third of the newspaper's staff, shuts down the Post's storied weekly supplement of reviews,  Book World.

Fox News pretty boy and famed drunk Pete Hegseth is unaccountably honored by Trump in his second term with his nomination as Secretary of Defense (approved in spite of himself by a compliant Senate).  He proceeds to rename his purview the Department of War and to immediately wage war on the rest of the world.  Highlights: Conducting war against Houthis in Yemen over the public Signal app; Illegal bombing of Venezuelan fishing boats under false pretenses and when it got blowback blaming it on subordinates; Internet troll-like obsession over purging military of wokeness;  Hectoring and creating a culture of paranoia over the military's tolerance for zhlubbiness. 

On the other hand, ICE under the direction of professional racist Stephen Miller reduced its standards of fitness to accommodate the surge in recruitment it was expecting from the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazi ranks found generally in their mother's basements, who then promptly commenced to dressing up in army surplus, masking up and driving to other states, disrupting the lives of decidedly non-criminal immigrant neighbors, colleagues and friends, while also managing to kill protesting American citizens.

Speaking of ICE, Subramanyam Vedam whose parents immigated to the US in 1956 but was born in India in 1961 when his parents briefly returned for the death of his grandfather was brought back on his parents return to the US shortly after his birth.  In 1982, he was wrongly convicted for the 1980 murder of his roommate.  After 43 years in prison, Vedam having engaged the services of the Innocence Project was exonerated by new evidence.  However on his release from prison, before he could celebrate his freedom with his family, he was arrested by ICE and is being held pending deportation to India for a lack of paperwork he could not complete due to his imprisonment.

Erstwhile Playboy Mansion hanger-on Bill Maher, glass of scotch in hand, invited a group of kids (with apparently extremely permissive or naive parents) to his boozy, pot-hazed YouTube podcast Club Random for an hour of politically incorrect hijinx on the topic of kids and technology.  He told a girl who said she liked to watch Korean TV on her phone that she should refrain since America is a melting pot in which we're all supposed to melt into Americanness.  He told an 8 year old she should watch Game of Thrones; he recommended Elvis Presley as a bad "MF" to another child; he observed to one kid about the Modern Family actress, "Sofia Viagra, she's hot, huh?"  The famous TERF comedian asked 2 children if they'd transitioned yet.  In the weirdest stream of consciousness, he debated a couple of elementary aged girls about internet surfing suggesting that googling global warming  "leads to weather. Then you’re looking up stuff about the weather. Then it leads you to Stormy Daniels… Now you’re into porn. Now you’re into a porn site. What do you do?”  The kids to their credit appeared to have politely rolled with the weirdness of their creepy, damaged host.

The US Men's hockey team won its first gold medal since 1980 defeating Canada in Milan last week.  (No Russians to thwart them this year.)  The US Women's team has won 3 gold medals in the last 3 olympics including in Milan.  At the men's victory, FBI director Kash Patel in attendance at the games on the public's dime crashed the locker room celebration, and former Epstein BFF President Trump, a hero of several of the team's outspoken players called, inviting the men to the White House and to the State of the Union.  As for the women's team, Trump quipped, "I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” he said. “You do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited]." inviting the laughter of the men's team.  Responding to the controversy, the White House did then indeed extend the same invitation to the women's team, and was declined due to scheduling conflicts.

%%%%%

In contrast, here's Shy Girl by Haute & Freddy:

Emphasis on Repair

The recipient of this letter (one of an estimated 20,000 Federal Employees who received similar notification on Valentines Day 2025-- less than a month into the new administration) reported it was prepared with no input from his supervisor or HR Contact.  Several thousand summarily terminated Employees were subsequently temporarily re-instated with backpay due to court injunctions, only for many of them to be fired once again in April with a less incendiary and more truthful notice of (a still illegal) Reduction in Force-- at great expense and no value to taxpayers.  Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect had said of the administration's treatment of Federal workers, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected... When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.”  Spoken like a villain.

"We as Africans are creditors, not debtors. Our energies fuelled the Industrial Revolution" - Jesse Jackson

Sasha Abramsky's American Carnage (whose title turns the phrase from Trump's first inauguration speech back on the fascist criminal himself) tells the story of several highly trained and experienced but recently hired or promoted government employees whose probationary employment status made them vulnerable in the early months of 2025 to the illegal decimation of the Federal government's workforce by the Administration's agents of chaos DOGE in the early days of Trump 2.0 following the playbook of Project 2025. Abramsky also reminds us of the obsession of Trump, his enablers and staff and the sympathetic punditry that lubricated America's nethers for another round of MAGA with Wokism, CRT,  DEI (on which Trump was quick to gratuitously blame the crash of an army helicopter and a commercial air liner over the Potomac in the early days of the admin-- a harbinger of the rough days to come) and in particular the galling advancement of black women.  One of DOGE's casualties featured by Abramsky was Adrian M, a career public health worker who had only recently gotten her dream job with the CDC when she was summarily fired with a canned, baseless probably AI generated letter informing her she was a poor fit for her position. 

“I’m being called a poor performer, and my knowledge and skills don’t meet the needs of the agency,” she said, incredulously. “My knowledge and skills came from the agency. I wouldn’t have had my job if my skills weren’t good.”

The idea that she, as a Black woman from the South, had somehow had it easy in life because of her skin color made her laugh, it was so absurd.

The contemporary normalization of the Trump orbit's thinly veiled racism attempting to masquerade as an issue of free-speech and reverse civil rights for the white and privileged is case in point that 160 years after the abolition of slavery, white America has never recovered from its lost prerogative to own an African and still has it in for black people.  To a great extent, the denial of universal healthcare, the stinginess of public spending on childcare, education and home ownership and hostility to a well compensated federal workforce-- deficiencies that hurt everyone-- have their root in America's pathology against black well-being.

All of the above redounds to the thesis of Dorothy Brown's recent book, Getting to Reparations, that America has yet to pay not only for the crime against humanity of its recalcitrant reluctance to break its habit of slavery only after Civil War in 1865, but for its continued punishment of descendants of slaves and others Americans of African descent for the crime of being black-- from post Reconstruction era Jim Crow to enshrined and hallowed practices of financial redlining to keep black people out of white neighborhoods and schools, down to our own era of rescinding of voting and other civil rights, gerrymandering, mass incarceration and police brutality.  Brown knows what she's talking about.  Her previous book, The Whiteness of Wealth exposed ways in which our taxation laws have been designed to keep black people poor without a single mention of race in the code.  Brown advocates for reparations as partly some form of financial compensation to individuals (amounts, population and logistics to be determined by a healthily diverse, deeply informed and soul searching council of citizens) and most importantly by investment in black neighborhoods, schools, communities and businesses.

Before I read Brown's Getting to Reparations, I was undecided on the basis of what I knew I didn't know.  Brown, whose book provides a test case for persuasion, describes late in the book an exercise she uses in workshops on reparation, in which the participant, before hearing the arguments assesses their own feelings about whether reparations should be paid on a scale of 0 for complete agreement to 10 for absolute disagreement, with the same exercise repeated for a post-assessment.  I would say that having once been a 6 (based partly on the class-based reasoning of Adolph Reed as well as a pessimistic assessment of the feasibility of reparations by Matt Bruenig), I was talked down to a 3 by Marianne Williamson's impassioned case for making reparations a large part of her policy platform in 2020 and 2024.  But even before learning of Brown's self-assessment scale, half-way through her introduction to Getting to Reparations, I was converted to a 0.  I only needed to hear Brown's argument that the debt that America owes blacks has only deepened since 1865, and that reparations have been paid by the United States many times over to several groups, among them the families of Japanese internees in World War II, the Italian American victims of anti-Sicilian lynchings in Louisiana in the early part of the 20th century, and to some extent (and naturally sparingly and with great reluctance) to First Nations tribes.  The clincher was learning that while Andrew Johnson saw to it that the floated promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slaves was broken before a single person was recompensed, the government paid reparations of up to $300 per lost slave to slave holders.  

This was more than enough information to convince me that there was something pathological about America's unfinished business of repairing the harm of slavery and its lingering legacy to black people.  Moreover, Brown reminds us that black people are not the only ones broken by this unpaid debt.  My family on both sides came to America only after slavery was abolished, and yet to a person we have undoubtedly benefited from our whiteness.  I have relatives whose first generation racism contributed to the post-slavery carnage of black Americans by whom they were able to parlay their whiteness into a comfortable life of privilege.  But even my own bleeding heart immediate family has received advantages from the color of our skin through no particular effort of our own.  I don't live in fear of me or anyone in my family being murdered by the police for driving while European.  I have the luxury of ignoring my complexion when I walk through a new neighborhood or enter a store or apply for a college education or a job or a loan.  (Affirmative action as Brown points out has never been for blacks only and in fact has demonstrably benefited white women the most.) These are the privileges of whiteness I'm aware of, but it stands to reason there are many more that I'm not.  

The point is not that whiteness is a crime, but rather that American society in particular by the entrenchment of this difference in the way whites and blacks experience their lives is an indication that something is broken.  The resentment that so many whites of the legacy slave-deprived class feel toward blacks stems to a great extent from this brokenness itself.  Brown makes an excellent case that repairing the festering wound of white privilege by finally compensating blacks for the harms of slavery and post abolition racist policies will be a balm for the all too common proclivity of some (such as our current racist in chief) to evade the issue of this unfinished business by redirecting the butt hurt of their unacknowledged debt into anti-wokeness, anti-DEI and the suppression of Critical Race Theory as a way of avoidance of ownership of the melanin tax on their black brothers and sisters.

It's time, America.  It's time.*

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* Some may object that white families have experienced cycles of poverty as well.  Shouldn't they too get reparations from those who have benefited from their misery?   Very probably, Brown says, and that is a topic for another discussion.

 

Blood from a Turnip

On January 31, 84 year old Nancy Guthrie of Tucson, Arizona, after having taken an Uber to her daughter's home for a Saturday evening dinner was dropped off back at her home by her son-in-law at 9:48 pm.  When she did not attend church Sunday morning her family was called.  After failing to find her at home, the family placed a 911 call to report her missing.  On finding signs of forced entry, police suspected foul play and first publicized the disappearance at 6:48 PM.  CNN's first report of the story was broadcast Monday morning, February 2, centering the interest on the detail that Nancy Guthrie is the mother of NBC Today Show host Savannah Guthrie.  On Monday evening, a local Tucson station and tabloid news outfit TMZ each reported receiving a ransom note for the elder Guthrie, demanding money with a deadline of Thursday evening and a second deadline of Monday February 8.  On Thursday, February 5, police reported that blood found on the front porch of the home was determined by DNA testing to be Nancy Guthrie's.  The FBI offered $50,000 for information leading to a resolution of the case. On Friday, the Tucson television station reported receiving a new email whose contents it was unable to discuss.  On Monday, the Guthrie family released a new plea for their mother's return with no mention of a ransom note. With the Monday deadline passed with apparently no ransom money changing hands, the FBI disclosed that it was unaware of direct communication between the family and any party claiming to be responsible for the disappearance.   On Tuesday, February 10, police released footage from Nancy Guthrie's front door camera showing a man about 5'9'', average build wearing a ski mask and what police later described as a black, 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack, attempting to cover up the camera with a plant dug up from the front yard.   The same day, police questioned a man detained at a traffic stop south of Tucson and then released him, giving no information by the next day about why he was stopped or released.  On Thursday, February 12, the FBI doubled its reward for information leading to the arrest of person or persons responsible for Nancy Guthrie's disappearance to $100,000.  Recently it has been reported that Savannah Guthrie will take an extended leave of absence from hosting the Today Show to be with her family and deal with the situation.

You now know everything there is to know about the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Tuscon Arizona home between 9:48 PM Saturday January 31 and 11:00 am Sunday morning February 1.   So why has CNN for the past two weeks done nothing but report on Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance?*   What have they reported on and what have we learned?  Let's focus for a minute on Jake Tapper, the nasal voiced totem of CNN's particular brand of late neoliberal capitalist mediocrity whom CNN sent to Tucson for breathless on-the-scene milking of the fibers of a story that has refused to develop.

I asked Google and got this list of professional experts and a few individuals whose proximity to the events plausibly conferred witness status (for the purposes of filling airtime) that Tapper has questioned: 

• Jeff Lamie: A neighbor of the Guthrie family, who discussed the neighborhood's reaction and provided observations on the case.
• Shari Botwin (LCSW): A trauma expert and licensed social worker, discussing the emotional toll on the family and the significance of finding potential clues after 10 days.
• Bryanna Fox: A former FBI agent, who analyzed the challenges of verifying potential ransom notes.
• Nick Barreiro: A forensic analyst who examined new surveillance footage from the home.
• Richard Kolko: A former FBI special agent and crisis negotiator, who discussed the, at times, unverified messages sent to local media.

And what did Tapper ask all these experts and on what has he been reporting?   Again Google supplied a summary of the highlights:

• On the Evidence: Tapper reported on the "chilling" doorbell camera footage showing a masked, armed person at the front door and the discovery of blood on the porch.
• On the Investigation: He has questioned the validity of tips and reported on the massive number of leads (over 30,000) being investigated.
• On the "Influencers": Tapper has delivered sharp criticism of social media influencers and individuals spreading unverified, false, or "nonsense" information about the case.
• On the Search: He highlighted the, at times, difficult, 24/7 search by the FBI and local authorities, including the searching of desert terrain and the examination of DNA.

Lastly, what have we learned from Tapper's extensive reporting?:

• No Clear Suspect Initially: For nearly two weeks, there were no named suspects or persons of interest, although a man in a mask, seen on camera, was identified as a key suspect.
• Evidence and Clues: The investigation centered on a masked person at the home, a missing camera, and blood found on the property. A "significant" DNA breakthrough was later reported, with investigators finding DNA that did not belong to anyone in close contact with Guthrie.
• Suspect Description: The FBI described the suspect as a male, 5'9" to 5'10", wearing a black, 25-liter "Ozark Trail Hiker Pack" backpack, which is sold at Walmart.
• A "Thriller" Stuck on Buffer: Tapper's coverage reflected the frustration of a case where, despite the high-profile nature, information was slow to materialize, leading to a "tight-lipped" approach from authorities.
• Ransom Hoax: It was confirmed that at least one person was charged with sending a fake ransom note, which was a "distraction" from the actual investigation.
• FBI Focus: The FBI increased its reward to $100,000 for information leading to a resolution. On the Ransom Notes: Tapper reported on the, at times, unverified messages demanding Bitcoin and the subsequent arrest of an individual for sending a fake threat. 
• Law Enforcement: Tapper has regularly cited information from Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and the FBI. 

To summarize: We've learned that there isn't much that we've learned.

Tapper has since returned to New York, but not before being asked by a Pima County sheriff's deputy to leave the Guthrie property where a search was ongoing.  While we sincerely hope for the safe return of Nancy Guthrie to her family, the squeezing of water from the stone of this story continues unabated.

~~~~~~

* With brief respites updating developments in the Bad Bunny halftime show controversy thrown in.

I.Q. Zoo

Argos the dog can look where I point if I spot the toy he's looking for before he does.  If I spot the toy in the kitchen, I can go to the living room and tell him where it is and he'll retrieve it.  He invents games and teaches his humans how to play them.   He knows each of us by name.  He's so good at understanding our speech that we frequently have to spell words in front of him if we don't want him to know what we're talking about, but he's beginning to learn how to spell.  

He can't operate a door.   If a door he needs to traverse is opened a width he can't fit his face through he will stand patiently by until one of us pushes it open for him.  It doesn't matter how badly he wants to be on the other side of it.  He will not operate the door himself.  It's almost pathetic.  Is he stupid?  He is demonstrably not.  Our theory is that when he was a puppy, some parts of the house were off limits to him but not to our cats who preceded him in the family, so we propped the doors open a cat's width with weights on either side of them and he learned (unintentionally on our part) that the door was not a technology that he was permitted to use even as more doors became open to him.  He's not stupid; he's polite.

My cats on the other hand, generally unconfused by the workings of hinges on a cracked door,  have a predilection for an open closet.  If one is unattended for even a minute, there is a good chance a cat will be inside of it when the door is closed and latched.  Whenever this happens, it goes generally unnoticed until the furthest reaches of sleep are disturbed suddenly by the awareness, vague at first, then increasingly certain of meowed calls of distress that force you to rise in search of the source.  The regret that I feel on rescuing a cat from a situation I may well have made by carelessly closing a closet door without first getting a visual on both cats can be repeated as soon as the following night, but it will be revisited over and over again, no matter how heartwrenching the cries the last time the same cat was trapped.  How could the universe have failed to give the cat a mechanism to avoid what was surely traumatic by, for instance, teaching it to steer clear of any open closet door that it comes across in the future.

The answer is not obvious but eventually it comes to me.  The cat is not traumatized or trapped.  The incident happens on purpose.  The closet is entered because it beckons.  The closing of the door is part of the pleasure.  There's no need to panic-- scream loud enough and a human will come.

I tend to believe that the answer to the problem of how humans seem to have gotten the greater part of the available supply of intelligence on the planet is that humans have gotten the human brand of intelligence*.  Bees have the bee intelligence.  Haddock have all the haddock intelligence.  To say that human intelligence is superior to ostrich intelligence is to miss the point.  A salamander with requisite salamander intelligence is as gifted salamanderily as an intelligent human is humanly. It takes bat intelligence that I do not have to locate moths by sonar.  It takes human intelligence to conceive, invent, build and operate a door, but dog intelligence is equipped to experience a door doggily just as cat intelligence is all a cat needs to know how to summon a human to open the damn door for it.  

The popularity of dogs has a lot to do with the communing that we do with them.  Dogs engage and experience us with their intelligence and we return the effort with our own.  Cats don't have to impress us with their ability to display human intelligence, which is an attitude toward us that it takes a certain kind of empathy to appreciate.  They will get attention on their schedule.  They have other priorities.  

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* Such as it is.

Prairie Power

From 2016, the Prairie Fire Choir of Minneapolis with guest artist Matt Latterell sing Lou Reed's Satellite of Love.