North by Northwest: The Art of Survival

 As streamlined legend has it, Alfred Hitchcock commissioned a script from Ernest Lehman that would begin with a murder at the UN and end with the protagonist hanging off the face of Mt Rushmore. (Working title: The Man in Lincoln’s Nose)  From that premise, Lehman crafted the iconic twists and turns that Cary Grant's character, Roger Thornhill endures in North by Northwest.   To give heart to aspiring screen writers everywhere, it took Lehman a year, and it was a year of struggle and writer's block, belying the apparent seamlessness and breeziness of the finished product.  This being a Hitchcock thriller, the plot incorporates mistaken identity and intrigue involving a cool blonde, the coldly competent and worldly enigma Eve Kendall, played by Eva Marie Saint.  All of it arguably just an excuse for one of Bernard Herrmann's greatest scores:

It's still a thrill to watch, but it invites a question:  Could a Roger Thornhill of the twenty-first century undergo what the Roger Thornhill of 1959 endured?   Updating the story to today (versus remaking it) would be an interesting challenge and it’s not immediately apparent that such an adventure would still be possible given advancements (and regressions) of the present time.  (Note: Spoilers may follow).  Some obvious opportunities for re-imagination present themselves immediately.  Smart phones would obviate the mix-up at the hotel bar that sets the plot in motion.  They would also make it unlikely that a truck stolen in the flat heartland would make it all the way back to Chicago without being stopped.  The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in the lobbies and halls of hotels  and for that matter everywhere would complicate things for someone evading police.   The omnipresence of security at train stations, public gatherings and official spaces like the UN would pose special challenges to one trying to sneak onto transportation, disrupt an auction or make a hasty getaway from the scene of a very public murder (let alone commit one).  

These are trifles compared to some of the other changes in American society since Roger Thornhill first appeared on screen that would call for a vastly different approach to the suspense.  What would replace the cold war politics?  What information would be worth transporting in a physical object that couldn't be more efficiently procured cybernetically from the safety of the home country?  Is the UN as relevant to American audiences today as it was then?  For that matter, what foreign power poses as much of a threat to everyday Americans as that of homegrown corporate evil-- and that being the case what could be done with contemporary Roger Thornhill's complicity in it as an adman?  There's a mini theme in the original concerning the assistance that workers -- cabbies, redcaps, maids, bellhops, valets and maitre d's-- provide in evading the authorities and the thugs or making things happen-- often for a price, but always with a subtle finger flipped to the powers that be.  Isn't that still a thing?

I'm not saying it would be impossible to update the story (if one were up to the challenge), but to match-- or realistically merely to emulate-- the knowing punch of the original would take some serious remapping.  What you would wind up with would not be the elegant sophistication of Hitchcock's North by Northwest.  It would be pointless to do unless you were using the inspiration of the original to explore the question of what present day menace would be the counterpart of the cold war threat of the original and what obstacles of the given surveillance state would inspire a contemporary Roger Thornhill to make it through to the face of Mount Rushmore with grace and wit to spare.  Sounds just crazy enough that someone who cares to do it right (without pretending to want to "improve" the original) just might ought to someday give it a try.

Staying Alive

A sentiment I'm hearing a lot toward the year soon ending: Fuck you, Year! I'm hearing it on the left, on the right and in the middle.  I have some sympathy for the thought, but probably not as much as I could. I am lucky to have a job that can be done anywhere, including from home.  Here I've been since March, which is kind of where I've always wanted to be.  Not everyone in my family has been as lucky with their livelihoods.  The youngest and oldest especially.  But together, we've managed.  

Life in America is so cruel usually.  It was unusual to say the least that even in this cruelest of eras, presided over by a petty mean small band of know-nothing thugs, the structure of so many workplaces, so many lives, was rearranged so quickly in the service of human safety.  Not as thoroughly as it could and should have been  of course.  Not without a toll for many; not without empty gesturing and divisive posturing on the part of those in a position to help people shelter in place, but whose aid to those most in need of it was stingy when it came at all; not without knee-jerk resistance; not without the already financially bloated managing to profit excessively from the new circumstances (disappointingly typical for them).  This is America after all.  

But looking back over the course of the year, it's astonishing that human society the world over was rejiggered so violently in the service of protecting the species from a new sudden threat to its mortality.  You could argue (and you'd be correct) that we humans had it coming -- we made the threat by the way we exploit animals to keep our vast impoverished global labor force alive.  For decades, we denied or ignored that our activity was causing the warming of the planet and could also be marshaled to mitigate it until it was too late to make a difference; but you have to hand it to us, we responded to a virus many of us never saw with astonishing swiftness.  (Leaving aside those who exploited and exacerbated the situation as a gamble for their own political gain.  The worst offender ultimately lost the bet in November.)

It's unimaginable that there won't be some permanent change, but humans will be humans so who knows.  What we need more than anything to combat this and future threats to our health is universal healthcare, but our stagnant ideology prevented the implementation of even that small obvious measure this year.  The string pullers are used to exerting their influence while quarantined from us in the best of times anyway.  Physical separation of the rest of us from each other is an obstacle to solidarity which poses an extra challenge to the advancement of change;  but observing the immediate impact of the nationwide protests that erupted following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor largely without further spreading of the virus was inspirational.  If we haven't learned anything from this sequestration about how to be disposed toward each other, let alone about how rapidly and thoroughly drastic change can happen, I'll be pissed.

The year started for me on a note of hope, in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, which coincidentally with the novel coronavirus was gaining momentum throughout the winter.  Its emergence and spread in the early primaries too was met with swift, sudden, well-coordinated countermeasures that succeeded in nipping it in the bud before it threatened to completely infect the electorate, almost as a throat clearing exercise on the part of the professional managerial class for the public health crisis that erupted at nearly the same time.  How differently would the crisis have been managed if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic counterpoint to Donald Trump throughout the spring instead of the hibernating eventual nominee, who was too wise to botch things for himself by appearing in public in those early months of the crisis.  His career was built on letting things happen, and with his opponent Donald Trump predictably unable to stifle himself when checking out might have served him better, it worked for him again this time.  No question that the infection rate and death toll in the US would have been lower with someone else at the helm of the opposition, and without the president and his party aggravating the situation.  I think Bernie Sanders as an opponent might have inspired Trump to step up in response (a possibility we might be catching glimpses of on his approach to the exit ramp as he shames congress to up the stimulus payments to $2000 from the measly $600 that it had been barely able to muster without his input), and it might have done him as much good as the country.  But in spite of the obstacle that the Trump administration was to public health, a sane swath of the country fell in line to help stem the spread until a vaccine could be found. 

I cringe a little when front line workers are thanked for their service. It's a bit too easy for a conglomerate of any kind to promote the practice in advertising or on TV, but for those regular people who take them up on it, it's surely heartfelt, well intended, and may strike the thanker as the least that can be done.   Many on the front line, to be sure, particularly in health care are called to their work; mere thanks are inadequate when supplies to do the work and for their safety are not forthcoming.  As for essential retail, food and factory workers, if my circumstances forced me into front line exposure to the virus on a daily basis for almost certainly not enough pay, at risk to myself and to my family I don't know that thanks would make up for it.  But thank you all anyway.

For myself, a natural hermit, I can't deny that 2020 with its enforced separation has had its perks.  It's been something of an antisocial dream-come-true to see myself being universally avoided in public nearly to the extent that I have spent a lifetime avoiding others.  Nevertheless, I am looking forward to my daughter's generation getting another chance at living life as adults among each other.  I will not miss not shaving.  I will not miss masks. I will not miss Zoom.  I will look forward to seeing family in person and to traveling freely and to getting haircuts when necessary and to indulging occasionally in public entertainment.  But while I don't wish ill on my fellow humans, if and when we re-emerge from this episode, truth be told, I will sort of miss the distance. 

Hot Takes

In the interest of meeting an impending deadline and in the spirit of continuing writer's block, we give you yet another listicle: 

• There's been an intense war raging on the left recently over a suggestion made by a popular contrarian YouTube channel host that "The Squad" in congress-- the burgeoning leftist bloc-- should withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House in exchange for a floor vote on Medicare-For-All and that if they don't it's because they are lying gaslighting traitors.  Hot Take: The first part of the suggestion is fine as a starter.  The rest of it, which is what underlies the schism that's erupted from it is the problem.  I'll give the Purgers this, they are the loudest side in the fracas that's ensued.  They have commandeered the histrionics.  They own the bombastics. Theatrics R Them.  I'm not going to complain about how Medicare for All happens as long as it happens; but to make the question of how it happens interesting, I'm going to put my money on "The Squad". I've been to DSA meetings and know I am outmatched. Trust socialism to the actual socialists.
• Some public intellectuals and figures in the media such as Bill Maher, Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, and the members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" for starters, are fixated on promoting the notion that the single greatest threat to democracy and to the future of the country is Cancel Culture and in particular, its supposed proponents The Millennials.  Hot Take: I'd point out that most of the voices critical of millennials are baby boomers.  The ones who aren't are children of privilege. Let me repeat, the ones complaining about how spoiled the millennials are are boomers and preppies!   Are you rolling on the floor yet?
• In a zoom meeting with black leaders recently, President elect Joe Biden lectures that he's optimistic that things are changing for the better in America because "three or four out of seven commercials [are] biracial commercials."  Hot Take: I too have noticed a sharp uptick in the featuring of biracial couples in tv ads during the Trump administration. Does Joe realize these are actors and their relationships are fictional? Conclusion: Casting for tv commercials is woke. Why? Because along with foot deodorant, we're being sold a myth of a post racial America precisely to undercut the struggle for substantial meaningful change like police reform, healthcare for all, a green new deal and a living wage for everyone.  What does a potato chip have to do with it?  Because if you're busy applauding the biracial couple snacking on it, you may not notice the deforestation that production of the palm oils used in making the chips are causing in Southeast Asia.
• The Wall Street Journal has mocked Jill Biden for insisting on being addressed and referred to with the Dr title when she is only a PhD, not a doctor of medicine.  Hot Take:  Never mind that there is ample precedent for the president elect's wife to go by the prefix bestowed on her by her education.  I don't care if you're a Doctor of Philosophy or Medicine, enforcing your title is an asshole-y way to be.  Traditionally by acceding to the formality of addressing you with the honorific we are acknowledging your achievement.  True, it is an achievement that some of you worked so hard for so many years for the right to be addressed with the title.  It's also pretty pathetic.  Lots of people work hard; only assholes demand constant respect for it. In any case, please leave me out of your twisted status grubbing.

"Where'd you go to school to get a title like that?"
(Benjamin Schwartz, New Yorker) 

This won't hurt a bit

As long as we're talking vaccines, what are the prospects for applying our models of medical advancement toward eradicating any of the following:

• Tolerance of capitalism - Why is capitalism tolerated?  Its beneficiaries are few, whereas the havoc it brings upon society is all-encompassing. The model of capitalism isn't the entrepreneur (whose talent is figuring out how to monetize the fruits of the labor, research and creativity of others for himself-- something that we ought to deem a criminal activity when you think about it), but the vampiric private equity firm that hunts for enterprises they don't give two shits about to buy at the end of their life cycle in order to figure out how to liquidate assets, fire whoever remains,  screw the employees of their pensions with little to no notice and make themselves and their shareholders a tidy profit. Capitalism is the tax cut supposedly proffered as a stimulus for the economy that is instead spent on stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Capitalists are diseased.  The disease is capitalism.  It infects not just the capitalist who does not know to seek help, but all of society, causing cultural stagnation,  sowing bellicose aggressions in the pursuit of resources to fuel the affliction, limiting the imagination of our academies, cheapening life for everyone.  Someone get on this.

• For profit insurance - You know how melanoma is a cancer but has its own researchers? Low hanging fruit in the pursuit of the elimination of capitalisms ought to be battling hindrances to the establishment of single payer healthcare.  This is largely a mental virus but the toll it wreaks on society is devastatingly physical.  Can't something be done in this country about it as it seems to have been conquered everywhere else?

• I generally acknowledge that language belongs to all of us.  I agree with the viewpoint of my daughter who said to me the other day, "Language is my bitch, not the other way around."  The job of the listener to try to understand is no less a burden than the job of a speaker to try to be understood.  But can we work out a vaccine for misuse of  "Disinterested" anyway?   Disinterested as of this writing still mostly means having no stake in a thing, a prerequisite for objectivity; but more and more I'm seeing it used almost exclusively as a synonym of uninterested, as in bored by a thing.  It would be great if we could get this one eradicated before it slips into the dictionary, although we may be too late.

• Meritocracy. Those who believe in meritocracy would like you to ignore the fact that what demonstrates merit in the model of earned privilege is willingness to subvert one's soul to the projects of elites.  What elites find meritorious, the rest of us should find absolutely odious.  In the words of Noam Chomsky, a “combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, [and] self-serving disregard for others.”  Those are the underlying factors that let's hope would provide a way in for development  of a vaccine.

• Have you noticed how often in a YouTube video on some dumb cultural thing like a pop song, a scene from a superhero movie or rom-com or a Saturday Night Live sketch, someone always puts a pause on their day, directs brain activity to their fingers, and exerts effort to say something to the effect of "[X celebrity] is [adorkable / going all in / being a bae / throwing serious shade / everything] and I am here for it."  Can we find a prevention for the impulse that compels a multitude of people to type the exact same 10 comments on every YouTube video they are impelled by the algorithm to watch? 

• State murder

• The impulse on the part of elected officials at the first sign of crisis to provide stimulus for the wealthy, austerity for everyone else.

• Writer's block

• Adamant reflexive wrongness.  I'd be first in line for that one.

Julia Kent: Gardermoen

From her 2007 album, Delay (video by YouTube user allthingsbigandsmall):

 

Quality Time

Say, I forgot to mention I finished reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr which I started not long after we went into quarantine.  You might be thinking, “You’re still reading that?”  (No I finished it! ^_^)  but seriously folks, a while ago I’m reading my book on my phone and after a little bit I get a notification from the eBook app itself completely unbidden to the effect that I have reached my daily reading quota!   I confess that, Dumas that I am, the news that I had made a daily reading quota without breaking a sweat stroked my ego.  The unsolicited notice began appearing daily each time I picked up the book,  and in almost 0 time became the signal to me at each session that I was done reading for the day.  

The first day it seemed effortless. The second day I may have been on the lookout for it enough to realize that it was not my imagination that my daily reading goal was hella easy to reach.  By the third day I figured out that the quota had nothing to do with pages or anything related to my own idea of how much effort one should ideally put into book reading each day (I’m always certain I’m way under par) but instead was some default setting that amounted to 5 minutes.  

That’s right the ebook app was rewarding me for sticking it out for a full 300 seconds.  It didn’t matter that I thought that that was an absurd standard; what happened was that I used the appearance of that little notice as my get-out-of-jail free card and I’d say to myself, “Welp!  Goal met!  Quota read!”  and I’d set the book down for another day.  

The weird thing is that I greatly enjoyed the book.  It was not a chore at all.  So why did I permit myself to have my reading habits dictated to me by this impersonal default configuration that just appeared without my asking for it on my phone one day and began on its own proffering an opinion (a super mediocre if not inferior opinion) on my reading habits?  Why did it not occur to me that this unsolicited default low bar of achievement might be Apple's way of discouraging a daily ad-free habit among its multitude of users of keeping oneself informed and intellectually sharp?  A service to its entrepreneurial class and not to the consumers of its products. Because it was making me feel good about myself.  'You're a good reader!' it lied to me.  I didn't even have to ask for its opinion!  But truth be told it stretched out my reading of this book by many extra weeks, and telling you about this, I’m ashamed of myself.   

That would be the end of the story except my next challenge was Rick Perlstein's 1120 page true crime book Reaganland.  I know how it turns out but it's too good to put down.  If I want to live to see the end of it, though, I've got to read it the hard way, under my own steam.  I can't bring myself to turn off the daily affirmation from my phone about my superior reading habits, but vanity only gets you so far-- about 4 tiny e-pages, mere gulps of this vast ocean of words-- and I have a long, long way to go.  Now, if you'll excuse me I have some reading to do.

Notes from Underground

I've seen some surly and depressed leftists in the past few weeks since it became clear that Trump, despite the pains his people are taking to forestall acknowledgement of it, failed to stave off failure at the polls with the consequence that Biden actually squeaked out a victory this time.  Some of the mournful are purists I presume who may genuinely rue the outcome of the election -- I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they'd be almost equally unhappy if Trump had won-- but some I imagine are apprehensive about the prospect  that the lesser evil might actually be demonstrated to produce less evil, belying their admonitions to fellow leftists about the consequences of participation in 2020 presidential electoral politics.  I don't read minds and it's way too early to gloat.  But I've also accepted and preferred the chances with sleepy Joe and I'm hopeful; not that the best is yet to come but that the worst has been averted-- for now.  For myself, on the whole I am feeling a bit beaten down by the state of the world and prospects for change which surge and ebb unpredictably.  Since the outcome of the election has been settled, they aren't exactly surging but the ebbing has possibly ebbed. 

Following the conclusion of the Sanders campaign, I found myself loading up on leftist journalism and podcasts and scouring the usual sites for activity and discussion on what's to become of the left.  My conclusion is that the snooze button has been hit. Until the primary I was feeling very optimistic about a movement building and expanding beyond its borders.  Bernie’s defeat was a serious blow to the momentum.  I haven’t seen anything rising in the past few months anyway  in its place.  The vast majority of Sanders supporters who voted I'm sure followed Bernie's lead and voted for Biden to try to prevent Trump 2 in spite of active ostentatious alienation on the part of the rest of Biden's team as a measure of courting the white centrist suburban vote.  In Bernie's primary loss, the left was dealt a blow that I don’t quite see how it can recover from while we try to prevent needless suffering and further horrors in the meantime.   I console myself that Biden is probably too weak to actually preside.  Who knows.  My point though is that I felt I was able to vote for Biden without actually voting for Biden.  Yes we do get Wall Street in the mix which is terrible but we stanch judicial hemorrhaging perhaps, probably greatly improve things at the border, maybe grab COVID-19 by the germ balls.  The bullshit doesn’t end, but it is diminished appreciably right  off the bat.  The alternative was Trump, not some leftist movement that was going to rise up to do what Bernie was not able to.  Bernie was the guy who could have done it and we didn’t let him.  The left had its chance in Bernie and they blew it.  (Yes there were DNC shenanigans and corporate funding and suppression and media insanity but that wasn’t supposed to matter, right?)    

 I might also feel a bit inadequate in my ability (and my record) at participating in making change happen.  And frustrated that people like Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden and the Clintons and Pete Buttigieg and Barack Obama  and money people and  media people and etc. are still actively working to wreck those chances and may be successful at this time again as they always have been to date, and their supporters probably don’t know what the shit is happening or they’d be Bernie Sanders supporters.  Seeing the beauty of the vision of a system that works for everybody that nobody else seems capable of being seduced by is flustrating as shit, am I right?!  

Not knowing what else to do with myself, I attended a DSA meeting this summer.  It was so easy to participate in Bernie’s campaign; socialism is work.  I didn’t really participate to a full extent.  I joined with my camera off and my mike muted and only unmuted it to give a brief self-intro (name, town, favorite revolutionary work--  i.e, book, film, artwork, play)  (eight; the suburbs; bugs bunny.)  (I kid on the last one.  I fortunately did not go first because I didn’t have (and still don’t have) a favorite revolutionary work of art that I could name.  I took a cue from someone who went before me who mentioned a Noam Chomsky book I’d never heard of to mention the only nonlinguistic one I could remember, which I hadn't read but which I did once watch a documentary about.  Then I listened to everyone else having a meeting.  I had a daffy notion going in that it was going to be more like a Bernie Sanders meeting—i.e., a bunch of folks not knowing what exactly they were doing but compelled to try to figure out something to do, and I suppose it was, but the caliber of people trying was at a far far higher level than I was anticipating.  I, a naturally timid person, was intimidated.    When it came time to exchange email addresses I procrastinated so long that the meeting ended before I could.   And I fully supported the major initiative that came out of it which was to email a list of demands to our county taskforce on policing in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, all beautifully drawn up unsolicited by a first time attendee informed by his job as a public defender.  I felt very superfluous.  I was definitely the odd man way out.  People were of all ages but everyone was already actively engaged in the revolution.  Thank goodness for them, but afterward I got to thinking, if I feel this way, how is there any hope of bringing my neighbors, coworkers and family along? Is there a place in the revolution for the atrophied and slothful and timid?  If not, how does it happen?  I am unusually, egregiously timid and slothful, so perhaps it’s just that there’s no place for me in the revolution.  As long as it doesn't mean the revolution dies without me, I can live with that.  While I wait for it, it's not inconceivable that some extra-financial way for me to contribute will yet occur to me.

I've been reading Rick Perlstein's chronicle of the rise of the right starting with the shaky if scary first steps of Goldwater '64 and reaching its apotheosis in the crushing success of Reagan '80.  In the intervening years, those guys and gals were creative and disciplined, often taking their cues in strategy and tactics from the earlier improbable successes of their mortal nemeses the Communists.  In 1960, 30 years on from the New Deal, the only success mainstream Republicans had had for decades was in proffering candidates promising  Roosevelt-light in a way similar to how Democrats have adopted Reaganism as an iron lung to keep the party alive in these times.  The rightist response to Eisenhower Republicanism was a well-organized, well-funded, innovative long game in which personal diverse sometimes conflicting agendas were sublimated to the long term goal of advancing the political cause of conservatism until it swept the country (including Third Way democrats) from the 1980's on.  And this was with an agenda that objectively stank for most people.  Contrast this with the current state of the left in which virtue battles, infighting, cynicism and genuine contempt for ideological impurity keep us from advancing the cause of rescue of the planet from the ravages of rampant capitalism perpetrated against it by a tiny fraction of lopsidedly powerful assholes.  I get the reverence for individualism and free thought and identity exertions and what not but might our mutually exclusive eccentricities and antipathies be keeping us marginal as a whole?  Might we not find more success in setting aside the piddly ass squabbles for just a bit in order to lefticize this motherfucker for a change?  Seems impossible considering the preciousness of certain factions' priorities.  And also the sense that I can’t fight your struggle so I won’t do jack squat for it.  Perhaps we as a whole do need a bit more inclusion.  Not I, if you will so much as We.

Where have I heard that before?

It has to be said

Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election. That's the boring part of the story.  

The most amazing thing about it is that Donald Trump has lost the 2020 presidential election.  Nobody realizes this.  In fact, he hasn't just lost the 2020 Presidential election.  He lost it in the biggest way that anyone has ever lost an election.  No one in the history of the world on either side has ever had such a tremendous loss as Donald Trump has had in the 2020 presidential election.  People are amazed by this

Actually I take that back.  Donald Trump is not the only one who has lost a presidential election in such a bigly bigly way.  Mike Pence has also lost the 2020 Presidential election.  But he was really just along for the ride.  It's really Donald Trump who gets most of the credit for this one.  People can't believe how big an achievement this is.  Trust me, it's huge.  They're going to be talking about this for a long, long time because no one has ever seen anything like it. 

How did he do it?  Part of how he did it is that he told every one that he was going to throw out every vote that was counted after November 3.  This was how he made sure that everyone voted early.   And let me tell you, a lot a lot of people early voted.  Huge numbers all over the country.  They did this because Donald Trump told them what he would do if they didn't.  No one would have thought of this. 

People have elections.  They try to win.  Sometimes it happens.  I don't think Donald Trump has ever not won.  The biggest hugest loss in election history is a pretty big win.  And against sleepy, creepy Joe Biden, too.  I mean, come on, man!  Am I right?   I'll be honest, I don't think anyone could have done it except for Donald Trump.  Well, Mike Pence did it too, but he was just taking advantage of Donald Trump's political strategy.  Good job, Mike.

Some people think I'm going to miss hating Donald Trump now that he's lost the biggest election anyone could possibly lose.  I think I'll manage.

Raymond Scott: Cindy Electronium

Hot sounds from 1959: Cindy Electronium by Raymond Scott,  

His pioneering of electronic music was a second career for Scott who was born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn , NY in 1908.  Previously he was a composer and bandleader of jazz, under the auspices of his 7 piece band, the Raymond Scott Quintette (he preferred the sound of it to Septette).  In 1943, he sold his musical catalog to Warner Brothers. The studio's house composer Carl Stalling immortalized it thanks to frequent quotes of such Scott tunes as Powerhouse in Warner Bros. Cartoons:

Here's a seasonal tune with the Quintette, Ectoplasm, recorded in 1948 and rereleased on a Populuxe hi-fi anthology a decade later:

Canidae versus Felidae

The New Yorker periodically hosts a debate on the crucially relevant topic Dog or Cat?  To definitively settle the question (per the organizers' hype), they invite celebrities (New Yorker famous celebrities) outspoken in their preferences to represent their respective tribes.  Learning about one year's event, I was somewhat surprised to discover within myself a stake in the outcome.  I've had dogs and cats all my life.  I probably slightly if not more than slightly prefer the idea of cats myself (sorry, Argos), though of course I love my dog just fine (Sorry Blanche and Rizzo).  But truthfully, it's not so much dogs that bother me as do dog people.  I'm talking about the dog enthusiasts, who almost fetishize the animal, who advertise their fancy on their bumpers, who are stung when you forget to ask about their pet, who feed their dogs from their own mouth. What kind of sick fuck must one be to actually prefer the obsequious neediness of a dog to the mere is-ness of a cat?  Honestly, I like dogs in spite of their bullshit, not because of it.  But as usual, reading through the comments on the website announcing the contest, I realized that setting aside the cat vs dog question, what I really hate is people.

A few years ago, my brother who shares my ambivalence about the matter collaborated with me on a list of dog versus cat responses to a hypothetical opinion survey of preferences.  To give an indication of the time frame, we had a vague notion of seeing if we could create some viral email spam with it.  We both bristled at the internet phenomenon of the Lolcat who spoke a misspelled pidgin baby talk.  In our view, this was how humans spoke to cats.  Not how cats would speak to us if they deigned to fill us in on their thoughts.  Our view of cats and dogs was formed mostly from experience with them, but as for cultural influences, it had more in common with the Warner Brothers conception of them than the soulless Disney view.  A sample of some of the survey questions might give a flavor of our feelings on the matter:

 Food:

• Dogs: Cheerios 
• Cats: Pomegranates

Favorite Musical Artist:  

• Dogs: Carrie Underwood
• Cats: Bjork

Book:

• Dogs: How to Win Friends and Influence People 
• Cats: The Prince

Denomination:

• Dogs: Presbyterian 
• Cats: Zoroastrian 

Color:  

• Dogs: Beige   
• Cats: Aubergine

Movie: 

• Dogs: Titanic 
• Cats: Salo: 100 Days of Sodom

Number:

• Dogs: 1  
• Cats: e

Song from the 60s: 

• Dogs: Bend Me, Shape Me   
• Cats: Walk, Don't Run

Dance: 

• Dogs: The Jerk   
• Cats: The Twist

Transportation:  

• Dogs: Motorcycle Sidecar   
• Cats: Zeppelin

Vacation: 

• Dogs: Alaska    
• Cats: Easter Island

Religio-Political Philosophy: 

• Dogs: Antidisestablishmentarianism  
• Cats: Contra-antidisestablishmentarianism-ology

Midnight Snack:  

• Dogs: Dagwood Sandwich  
• Cat: The hamster

Returning to the New Yorker debate, to my memory, when audiences vote on the proceedings, dogs generally win.  If dogs only knew, they would be thrilled.   Cats, I'm pretty sure,  could give a shit.

Lesser Evil 2020

Unfinished ramblings:

After a year of pandemic including a spring and summer of quarantine, plus the weirdest most anticlimactic democratic primary ever, followed by freakish conventions of the two major parties, the threat of the end of feasibility of liberal influence on the supreme court for potentially decades to come, anxiety and aspersions cast on the voting process by the president himself, culminating in the recklessness and indifference of a president to a disease that his inaction has permitted to slay nearly a quarter million of his citizens and made him and his inner circle sick in a way that he seems determined to empower him, I think I have reached a sputtering stage, so this could be a month for extremely light posting, but before I ramp down, I wanted to take a moment to make an endorsement for the November presidential election.  (as long as you don't hold me to it.)

I have voted in 10 presidential elections since I first reached the age of suffrage.   I voted in 4 primaries until I went independent before Bill Clinton's second term in a state that has closed primaries, and did not re-declare as a democrat until 2016 (so I could vote for Bernie Sanders). My primary choice has never won.  As for the General Election, I'm batting .400. So I don't expect to win this time either. 

One party is actively engaged in hurting people.  The other's harm infliction is a bit less active.  One party is tromping in oversized clodhoppers down the path stomping on every ant, snake, ladybug, toad, mouse,  immigrant, poor person and child it sees.  The other is tromping more seriously, eyes straight ahead on the path of righteousness.  If it also kills everything in its wake, it's unfortunate but its intentions were good. (There are other parties whose existence seems to be just therapeutic for those who require their vote to balm them-- their harm to everything in their path is more indirect.)

Does it matter who the president is?  I've never heard a convincing argument that it doesn't, and yet it is true, of the two parties who win, one is actively trying to hurt you, the other considers your pain collateral damage toward a goal toward which it is pushing that even if it is reached you will never benefit from, but the hurt feels the same. 

If you voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary (but not if you are Bernie Sanders), you may balk at the notion of voting for the lesser evil.  If you keep voting for the lesser evil, your thinking may be, you are still voting for evil.  You are still helping the slide to the right; that is, to the side of Evil.  But the reality is, if you do not vote for the lesser evil, you will surely get the greater evil.  Vote for lesser evil.  If you live in a safe state and expect those in swing states to do the dirty work for you, vote in solidarity with them.  No matter what happens at the end of the day, come January, roll up your sleeves and get to work.    It will be easier with less evil in the air.  With the resistance retired, the work will be more productive.

Words by E.J. Dempsey (as W.R. Winspear); Art by Claude Marquet (1916)

Let me count the ways

 It's a sad sign of the state of my mental block that the above cartoon is what I feel compelled to write about but we must find inspiration where we can, mustn't we?  Is political cartooning not one side of a dialogue anyway?  I can't organize my thoughts into a coherent whole but I can list some of them.  Here follow some artless notions that the above compels in me.  "There's a lot to unpack" as the youngsters are wont to say. ^_^

• I sense some bitterness here.  Is the cartoonist okay?

• Is this a prediction?  Is there supposed to be a point?  Is it just moaning?  If it's just moaning that's okay.  I'm not sure I get the point if it's supposed to be an argument.

• This looks like it might be the artist's conception of how voting for "the lesser evil" will go. Can you imagine for a moment how it will go if "the greater evil" wins?  Is it better or worse? 

• There seems to be a suggestion that we know how things will go if Biden wins.  There's a recycled feeling to the proceedings.  Recycling will be bad. Okay.

• Who is this cartoon trying to convince?  Is it vote shaming true believing dems?  Is it an argument against voting for Biden aimed at fence-sitters and nose-holders?  I'm starting to think it could really just be moaning.

• What did the cartoonist expect?  Biden has already said nothing will fundamentally change. We already mourn that this is the best we can hope for in the next couple of weeks.  It's still a change that we hope for.

• Maybe the message is more subtle than I'm giving it credit for.  Maybe it's an entreaty to Biden himself to be better than the cynics expect him to be.  That could work!

• I suppose the point of the piece is that we all die in the end.  I can't argue with that.

• I'm trying to imagine the me in 2024 that suddenly gets the message that the cartoonist was trying to send me from 2020.  2024 me is feeling nothing.  

• Dying really showed the Democrat!  

• It's nice that the artist portrays the Democrat as caring about the dead person's vote.  From my perspective it's a problem that real-life Democrats in non-cartoon world aren't demonstrating enough concern about  non-voters.

• Why do I not feel sad about the death of the passive complaining Biden victim.  Has my heart become so hardened?

Dance Anthem of the Daisies

YouTuber The Wrong Music has ingeniously combined two of my favorite things into one beautiful spectacle-- Regina Spektor's Dance Anthem of the '80s, from the 2009 album far, and Czech director Věra Chytilová's frenetic opalescent pearl from 1966, Daisies, featuring Jitka Cerhová as Marie I (the brunette) and Ivana Karbonová as Marie II (the redhead). Enjoy!:

 To The Wrong Music: Thank you!

All Together Now

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (may she rest in peace) may have been tragically foiled in her plan to thwart a right wing takeover of the Supreme Court merely by surviving a Trump presidency.  That is the mythology that will surely be her legacy.  Then again, she may have died simply exerting her privilege to hold the office for life.  She is the 36th of 106 former Supreme Court Justices in history to die rather than retire after all (bringing the proportion for this mode of vacancy to 34.0% of the total).  Her passing creates a weird echo to the last Supreme Court justice to vacate the office the hard way-- her good friend and legal rival Antonin Scalia whose death in 2016 (the 35th in office) came even earlier in the last year of Obama's administration than Justice Ginsburg's has at the end of Trump's current term.  Although the coincidence provides anyone who needed it (I didn't!) an illustration of the looseness of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's adherence to any kind of principal and ethics over the perquisites of wielding political power-- with months to go before November, he noisily refused to allow hearings on Obama's nominee until voters had had a chance to elect a new president, whereas without yet knowing who Trump's nominee to replace Ginsburg would be, he promised to push the confirmation through as swiftly as possible with less than 45 days to go before the election-- it's uncharitable to believe that the satisfaction of this demonstration of McConnell's cravenness is the outcome she would have wanted.  To say that McConnell is being inconsistent is disingenuous when his position on this as on every other question in his purview is in perfect keeping with his single minded determination to use his legislative authority to exert hostility toward the powerless majority.  Had Ginsburg retired in time for Obama to replace her with a younger justice as she was reportedly implored to do as early as 2013, she may have missed becoming a cultural icon and hero of the pussy hat brigade, but she might also have forestalled rather than hastened the end of federal protection of a woman's right to choose an abortion in all 50 states.  In short, the last laugh is not yet hers.

It has not been a complete failure, however.  After a week of hagiography, iconography and lionization, culminating in their fallen hero being the first woman in the country's history to lie in State, the resistance was treated to the rare spectacle of Donald Trump facing actual citizens in the wild outside of one of his staged rallies, as he visited the Supreme Court to pay his respects and was greeted by a chorus of boos from mourners.  "Vote him out! Vote him out!" they chanted like sweet music.  Then in true liberal fashion it occurred to someone that the mob voice could be harnessed for a constructive message:  "Grant her wish! Grant her wish!" they admonished the executive in reference to what  Ginsburg's granddaughter reported was a direct quote from the Justice days before her death, to wit: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”  

Hah!  As if!

I have fantasized many times about what I would say to Donald Trump if he had to listen to me.  It would probably be a sputtering mess of vitriol, but it would be a relief to have even just the chance to sneer a venomous heartfelt, "You suck!" to his face.  Why do I hate him so much?  It isn't just a political, philosophical difference (whatever his is anyway). It's more personal.  I want to wipe the smug off his face.  I'd like to do whatever I can to bring as much failure into his life as possible.  Truthfully, it's not even a Donald Trump thing.  I'd feel the same pleasure telling Nancy Pelosi off to her face if I were given the magical gift of spontaneous truth telling, or Ted Cruz or Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Bill Clinton*, and while we're fantasizing, Chris Cuomo, Jake Tapper,  Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, the remaining Koch Brother.  And what the hell Derek Hough (just because).  These are the beauties that we let run the show.  These are the turkeys lucky enough to have their hands on the reins who are too stupid to know what to do with it.  Donald Trump is particularly bad because his mediocrity as a human being is in your face.  But if I let myself unleash a spew of hatred on him, one thing I do know is that as good as it would make me feel it would have 0 effect on him.  There's no penetrating that skull.

That is why, given the choice between "Grant her wish" and "Vote him out" my vote would always be for the one that at least makes me feel better.  Vote him out.  Please.

~~~~~

* Democrats outnumber Republicans on my list not because they're necessarily worse but because their treachery is something that as a person who has voted Democratic most of my adult life I take more personally.  I have a longstanding prejudice that Republicans are the way are because of a mental or personality defect, whereas for neoliberal Democrats, the problem is due to a character defect.

Feeding Flow

Rizzo-adjacent Medieval Troubador Cat

As soon as I had conducted an analysis on the feeding pattern of the two cats in my household a couple of summers ago, I began to drift toward the unconscious creation of a system of feeding them that would automatically provide each of them with a fair and equitable variety of meals. To recap, both cats share a self-feeder filled with dry chicken kibble, but for wet food, which they get in the morning and at night, it's got to be fish, and it can't be the same fish meal after meal.  To summarize the parameters, Rizzo is an older male who has been eating a half can of wet food at each meal from the start of living with us.  Blanche is a younger female who was introduced to wet food (after at least a couple of years without it) with a quarter can at each meal and never outgrew the portion. Consequently I dole out a total of 0.75 can of wet food at each meal.  

The irregularity of it inspired me to analyze the feeding pattern.  The analysis revealed that Rizzo received at least half of each can that was opened, but since he sometimes got half of a freshly opened can in the morning and the other leftover half of the same flavor at night, without my taking care to mix up the distribution a bit, Blanche in particular was at risk of being deprived of a flavor from time to time.  Unconsciously, I refined my feeding method which had been characterized by the purchase of a wide variety of seafood (had to be pâté), arranging it haphazardly in stacks and doing my best to mix it up.  I guess one day it occurred to me to stack by flavor.  I started buying a 24 pack mix of 3 flavors, Ocean Whitefish, Salmon, and Cod & Sole, which, when unloaded to fit into the cupboard, made an arrangement of  2 stacks of 4 cans each (totaling 8) per flavor, into a structure 4 cans high, 3 flavors wide and 2 stacks deep.   

Thanks to my earlier analysis I realized that 3 flavors were not enough.  Since 3 cans are consumed over 4 meals, it would still require planning, memory and decision making on my part-- you know, thought -- to ensure that Blanche got at least one meal of each flavor in the course of 12 days.  I found myself throwing in an extra flavor or two here and there just to increase the chance of variety for both of them, but at some point, I settled on one additional flavor-- Seafood Feast.  When the cupboard got bare, I would now replenish it with two 4-can stacks each (one stack in front of the other) for all four flavors, in this order, left-to-right: Seafood Feast, Ocean Whitefish, Salmon, Cod & Sole.  The stacking is a crucial preparation since new cans are always taken in front-to-back, top-to-bottom, left-to-right order, ensuring a different flavor than the last each time a new can is opened.

At some point, I observed that I had stopped thinking about what I was feeding each cat.  Instead, at each meal, I would look in the fridge to see if there was an open can of food.  If so, there would be at least a quarter, sometimes a half, and sometimes 3/4.   I would give Rizzo half a can if I could, and Blanche the quarter.  If there was less than 3/4 of a can left, I would use it up, then look at the stack of cans in the cupboard and locate the leftmost can in the top row of the forward-most array of cans, open it and feed whoever was not fed from the cold can.  The flow chart below diagrams the decision tree (click to enlarge):

I drifted into this system, but with my earlier analysis on my mind, I started observing that without my thinking about it, Blanche was getting some of each flavor at least once every 4 days.   It was time for another analysis to seek confirmation:

  

Confirmed!  Over the course of 4 days, 8 meals, 6 cans, each cat is getting a taste of each flavor.  No more than half of the meals for each cat is cold; half are fresh.  But the analysis does demonstrate that it takes 8 days (16 meals, 12 cans) to work through a whole cycle.  The situation can be thumbnailed by using upper case A through D to represent fresh cans of each of the four flavors and lower case a through d to represent cold cans of those same flavors. The sequence of flavors and the pattern of cold and fresh meals is different for each cat: 

Rizzo:        ABbcDAabCDdaBCcd

Blanche:    AaCcDdBbCcAaBbDd

Rizzo gets a day of fresh followed by a day of leftovers as he cycles through his flavors.  He gets a different flavor most of the time but every 4 meals is a leftover repeat of his last.  Blanche gets a fresh breakfast of flavor A on one day followed by leftovers of A for dinner.  The sequence of fresh to cold repeats for another flavor each of the next 7 days, but the sequence of flavors changes in the second half of the cycle.  At the end of the cycle each flavor represents 25% of each cat's diet.

What have we learned?  What is the point?  At this juncture, I am not prepared to say.  Maybe next time.

Blanche-like Zen cat (Hishida Shunso, Black Cat, 1910)

Ludic Freedom

On vacation in the woods recently, I was inspired to contemplate the mosquito.  Required by the state we were vacationing in to quarantine (i.e., to vacation) for most of the time we were there, we decamped to a house deep in the forest which had been sealed since early winter well before the outbreak of COVID-19.  Consequently aside from spiders whose moth-littered webs trimmed every window it was devoid of life. Perfect! It being uncharacteristically hot and steamy for the region when we arrived and with no air conditioning at our disposal, we immediately set about putting screens in the windows, whereupon every mosquito in the woodsy vicinity proceeded to attempt to penetrate the membrane of screen to get at our virgin blood.  The inevitability of it was striking, inspiring me to instantly start crafting sentences in my head describing the algorithm that surely drove mosquitoes to descend upon us as soon as we showed up regardless of what they had been doing at the time or how they may have felt about it.  Indeed, mosquito ethologists describe the component of mosquito behavior called thermotaxis that impels the individual toward the source of any heat detected in the environment in the range of human body temperature.  The question of how such a complex behavioral framework is supported in such a small and frail package aside, the blunt simplicity of the result created a journalistic itch in me that wanted to be scratched.  Being cut off from the internet, and with only a limited supply of reference material at my disposal for the time being, I noted the questions that I wanted to explore to prepare for a short piece on the topic when I got back to civilization..

This was my plan.  And then, before I had a chance to write a word of it, I learned that David Graeber had died.  Graeber, an American anarchist anthropologist teaching at London School of Economics (since famously being fired without cause when he was up for tenure by Yale in 2006 probably for writing in support of a student expelled for activities organizing the Graduate Student Union at the university) had written iconoclastic books-- Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs among them-- and was credited with the genesis of the phrase "We are the 99%" that inspired and outlived Occupy Wall Street.  I'd read Debt which delivers the earth shattering news that the principle of debt upon which much of our social hierarchy and economic system has historically been based and which enriches so few (who alone are free to flout its obligations) and immiserates so many around the world is, in spite of the formidable state apparatus we've erected to enforce it, simply a moral choice we've made and as we've suspected all along, not a very good one. 

Reading about Graeber's influence and impact in an excellent appraisal by Nathan J Robinson of Current Affairs, I was alerted to a short almost speculative piece Graeber wrote for the Baffler in 2014 called What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?  In the essay, Graeber discusses an alternative theory to the prevailing one on consciousness and cognition.  He takes philosopher Daniel Dennett as representative of the materialist point of view.  Less hard line on the question of free will than some of his more strident fellow "anti-choicers" (to coin a term), Dennett subscribes to the more forgiving variety, Compatibilism, which holds that free will is not incompatible with a materialistic determinism after all, granting that what we experience as choice may be at the core the product of mechanistic forces with a dose of quantum uncertainty thrown in, but that this does not discount our experience of it as choice (a state summarized by Arthur Schopenhauer with the phrase "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."). This state gives us what Dennett calls, "Free will worth wanting" and makes engagement in acts of moral persuasion worthwhile pursuits. Some philosophers have introduced an intermediary step between the purely mechanistic and the apparently conscious experience of free will, to wit "emergence"-- a threshold beyond which the less deterministic properties latent in the structures underlying pre-consciousness emerge to be experienced and exercised as will.  

Graeber rejects determinism even in its most palatable compatibilistic form, and takes issue with decreeing will emergent on the basis that it explains nothing.  He instead entertains as an alternative what is termed sometimes panpsychism, sometimes panexperientialism (for instance by the British philosopher Galen Strawson).  This is the surprising notion that everything in the universe to the most elemental level, far from being inert matter at the whim of whatever physical law might be operative in its locality at a given time might in fact itself be imbued with rudimentary  "will" or specifically a propensity to take whatever fork in the decision-tree of its circumstances that it fancies.  Choice for its own sake, which Graeber suggests might be the essence of what objective human observers might term "fun" might be at the heart of everything.  How else to explain how matter which tends to inertia and entropy might on its own team up with other matter in configurations of ever increasing complexity (culminating in the improbable configuration I like to call Myself).   The freedom at all levels of the universe to choose based on whim, pleasure, the pursuit of fun is what Graeber calls "ludic freedom" (from the latin ludus - sport, which is also the root of ludicrous-- itself perhaps a maligned word? Ok, let's not go crazy.).

For a pretty confirmed materialist, I have to admit that as cursory as my understanding of the concepts of ludic freedom are based merely on a speed reading of Graeber's essay, I was instantly prepared to drop my deterministic convictions to embrace this notion of freedom.  Recognizing that that might be a bit hasty, it suffices for me to say I take my readiness to jettison what was nearly a given for me to be an encouraging sign that the stakes have lowered for me, which I take to mean Graeber might have found an opening in me to yet new and unexpected truths-- illustrating a gift that characterizes much of Graeber's life work.

I once wrote a meditation (just for the hell of it) on how life might have arisen from conditions on earth however many billion years ago, and trying to jump the gap from inert matter to self-replicating life, I found myself wanting to use language not unlike what I encountered in Graeber's article, so perhaps I am receptive.  In any case, imagining how the universe might operate with this sort of physics invites new, exciting perspectives on chemistry, biology and human behavior.  Subatomic matter finds pleasure in the company of like matter, and decides to team up to create molecules which makes the universe suddenly a lot more interesting.  Molecules find solidarity in the composition of proteins; proteins collaborate on organisms (Graeber rhapsodizes on the liberating implications for the philosophical exemplar of dull robotic existence, the lobster).  Eventually, we get humans whose whimsical, creative wills thanks to ludic freedom have a framework for being capable of concocting surprises in perpetuity.

The implications for all kinds of ethologies previously considered inevitable, rote, mechanical, is endless.   Could the mosquito, for example,  just find the prospect of annoying giant hot hairy apes with its itchy saliva amusing as hell?  Maybe to mosquitoes, the pursuit of human flesh is an extreme sport. If even the lowly mosquito is capable of what Nietzsche calls the will to power, might thermotaxis be experienced not so much as an algorithm to which the mosquito is inexorably subject but  as a belief system to which it ecstatically subscribes?  Or is the prospect of writing about the tedious predictability of mosquitoes just no longer fun?

Host: "Helen, Ted, May I introduce Melania Victor."
Guest: "Zzwwrrrzzwwrrzzt!"
Host: "What's that?  Oh, I'm sorry, Malaria Vector!"
(Harry Bliss - New Yorker)

Red Sky at Morning

If you happened to catch the tail end of the Republican National Convention this week, perhaps you will understand when I tell you I'm feeling doubtful about November.  I am not the target audience for either the RNC Convention or the Democratic counterpart the week before, but I watched the conclusion of both and I have no memory of Biden's speech or the aftermath, whereas I can't unremember Trump's largely teleprompted uberramble and the spectacle that followed it-- the most amazing fireworks display I've ever seen (probably Chinese fireworks as a guest on Bill Maher pointed out the next day) over the Washington Monument, a fantastic mystery tenor crushing patriotic songs, opera and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, draped flags stirring majestically in the breeze, unmasked crowds cheering shoulder to shoulder (including an epically sweaty Rudy Giuliani) on the artistically lit South Lawn of the white house.  Ethically squishy (as usual for this bunch) but, so what? For political visuals it would be tough to beat.  Joe Biden was reportedly not the beneficiary of a post-convention bounce from his speech and convention -- to the contrary, his double digit lead had eroded before things had even gotten underway for the republicans-- but if Trump doesn't get a bump from his, he's in deeper shit than we thought..

Michael Moore was moved to tweet the bad news to Twitter that the history of 2016 might be repeating itself, urging those within hearing distance who'd like to avoid that outcome to "ACT NOW.:  As in 2016, his warning to Dems was met by a predictable chorus of boos from the Blue No Matter Whos who seem to prefer to conflate pessimism about Biden's chances with a desire for Trump to win, preferring to believe once again, perhaps more so, that Donald Trump's self-evident unfitness for office dooms his project of reelection to failure. Any expression of doubt in the ranks about Joe Biden's preeminent fitness for office translating to victory over Trump will be blamed if anything goes wrong in November.  From which I conclude that the stakes are actually higher for Michael Moore and those sympathetic to his panic than they are for the democratic party faithful, their ostentatious Trump derangement notwithstanding.

Inspired by a genuine fear of the horrors that would be in store if a lame-duck second term for Trump is enabled, I am feeling stirrings of involvement rising within my bosom which I feel would have to take the form of engagement with on the fence voters--with a very real understanding of their hesitation-- to enjoin them if they're able, to resist inertia and do what they can to help keep a Trump re-election from happening, but they are being fought against by a very real uncertainty about how to marshal the requisite enthusiasm to sustain me through even one pitch on Biden's behalf.  What could I say?    Sure Biden is worthless.  He has been a senator since he was 30 years old.  Believe him when he tells you that he has no imagination, no empathy for the average voter.  He proved again and again in his long monotonous career that he is all about primping and preening, willing to be rhought courageous enough to threaten your security and your well-being in order to demonstrate his seriousness to his class.  He stands for nothing except for when his donors enter the room. His working class stiff routine is an act. 

Sure, Biden has no principles.  Trump is a menace.

I don't know if it will work but it has me convinced.

Chronicles of an August

I've returned from vacation in another state.  The conditions for the visit imposed by the health authorities there were that I either needed to document a clean bill of COVID-19 health taken within 72 hours of arrival or self-quarantine for 14-days.  Plans A & B for testing both fell through. One site required a referral which we did not have, another was too costly.  We learned of a reputedly "free" method for testing but between the distance from our base, the availability for an appointment and the prospects for receiving results, our window for certification disappeared.  Fortunately we had access to private quarters so sheltering in place it was.  There was no internet where we were, no cable, the telephone was not connected and cell-phone service was spotty at best, so we went cold-turkey on media saturation, news and our usual diet of information.  Hard to believe but we survived.

Before I left, I'd helped a friend with setting up a transfer between an unemployment account and a bank. The magnetic strip on the card issued by the municipality through which they were receiving benefits had stopped working though they'd had it for a only a short while, their efforts to get a new card after months of working to get the first had not yet panned out and their straits were getting dire.  I witnessed the completion of the transaction, went on vacation, on my return, they still had not received the money from the unemployment account in their regular bank account.  Had they maybe not dotted some i on the transaction like missed a final ok button or something?  There had to be a simple explanation for it.  While I was speaking to them about it, they reminded me that I had told them while they were going through the process that the managers of the system would not have made the process easy.  I had no memory of saying this.  Sure enough the site left many steps unexplained that required either some knowledge of how online financial processes generally work or a degree of ESP in order to figure out.  I had a bit of the former.  The holdup in getting their funds moved to their usual bank account was in small print on the site: transactions take up to 30 days. Figures.

Why had I prior to my vacation correctly surmised that the process for accessing funds to which one was entitled would be difficult whereas post-vacation I was annoyed by the difficulty?  Answer: because before the vacation I was adapted to the poverty of life under a capitalist online regime, whereas in the intervening weeks my acquiescence had worn off even for the brief time I had been in unconnected quarantine. In quarantine, time unfolded naturally, with the rhythm of the sun. moon and stars.  Back in civilization everything happened once again in "real time": lightning fast for outgo, glacial for income.

While I was away, I learned through a notification delivered in the interstices of a shoddy 4G reception first that Joe Biden's VP pick was immanent, and second that it was Kamala Harris.  I greeted both pieces of information with indifference. I felt I had made up my mind about the election. I knew what I was dealing with.  No VP choice this turkey nominee could pick would disappoint me as much as his conquest of the nomination had.  I had a small place reserved for shock should he have upset expectations by picking someone not already being bandied about but more to my liking.  Biden has one speed so of course he picked among the non-entities already on the list.  Who gives a shit?  Apparently some people do because I was met more than once with an expectant, "Kamala Harris!  Am I right?" from people, to which I had to hesitate long enough for the subject to change.  From what I gather her gender and ethnicity are sufficient reason to be excited.  I was hoping for a bit more in terms of a signal that she would be a concession to the Bernie wing of the party who actually voted in the primary.

The Democratic convention started. They're not pretending anymore. All the usual suspects are featured, plus 6 Republicans in as clear a sign of Democratic priorities as I've ever seen. AOC got 60 pre-recorded seconds.  If I want to hear Republicans I'll wait til next week.  If even democrats aren't pretending there's hope for you and me in this rotten, diseased, capitalistic shithole of a country, why should we?

Come on, man!

Donald Trump and Joe Biden have both gone and opened their mouths again this week.  Donald Trump in an interview with Axion's Jonathan Swan characterized 150,000 plus deaths in the US from Coronavirus since March as "it is what it is", had only to say about the Civil Rights icon John Lewis's recent death the petty complaint that Lewis chose not to attend Trump's inauguration (like nearly everyone else), said no one had done more than Trump for black people except perhaps Abraham Lincoln (if him), declared himself perhaps the clearest thinker that Swan had ever interviewed, and got very cagey about prospects in the very little time he has left before the election to achieve his campaign promise to end US participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other places.  In a Fox and Friends call-in the next day, he asserted incorrectly that children were basically immune from coronavirus and should go back to school, the same day that a Georgia second grader was reported to have died from the virus within days of having returned to school.  For his part, Biden, fresh from a town hall with SEIU members in which he declared that no racist had ever been elected president until Donald Trump, testily replied when asked by CBS reporter Errol Barnett whether he had taken a cognitive test like the president:

No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man.That’s like saying you, before you got in this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?  ... I know you're trying to goad me, but I am so forward-looking to have an opportunity to sit with the president or stand with the president and debates, I am very willing to let the American public judge my physical as well as my mental fitness and to, you know, to make a judgment about who I am.

For Trump, November (if he's not able to postpone or preferably cancel it) is about seeing that his vanity presidency continues.  He cares little about anything that matters to anyone other than himself, and his lack of curiosity and involvement is exactly what his handlers see in him.  He does deliver on the most dastardly policy impositions of his base.  He doesn't know or care that he shouldn't be racist.  Racism comes naturally to him and truthfully has never not worked for him so he persists in it.

Biden is vain*, but it's not clear what he thinks he's doing running for president at this stage of his game.  He is a standard issue Democrat as though these were standard times.  Democrats win occasionally,  usually lately while imitating Republicans-- a trick Biden has been in the vanguard at playing throughout his overlong Washington career.  The mojo of the alpha republicans who devised the cool cruelty of socialism for the rich and austerity for everyone else might account for some of the Beta pale imitators’ success among the strategically timid element of their base-- the irony that seems to be lost on the operatives is that with everyone else it's mostly the mere opposition to the alphas, not the imitation that accounts for the bulk of their support--  but democrats have fixated on the strategy of imitation for years, never facing up to the significance of it: they have no ideas to speak of, they have no principles, they have no mojo of their own.  The only life that has been breathed into the democratic party in the last 30 years was imported from independent socialist Vermont, and it was snuffed out by a collective effort of the full spectrum of the remainder of the 2020 field from A to B.  It's pathetic really.

What's left to vote for "is what it is." The reason to vote for Biden is that he might very well be a vegetable by inauguration date.  If conditions merit the unexpected expedited implementation of Medicare for All, Biden may be in such a state that in spite of his insistence that he will veto it with every last fiber of his cognition that remains-- his handlers might just be able by January to commandeer his hand into signing the bill into law.. That is something that would never happen in a Trump second term.  Without the whisper of an incentive to pander to voters for the sake of the next campaign, it is frightening to think where a second Trump term with Trump free to be Trump might lead. 

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* He knows it's unseemly to openly proclaim racism for instance.  He lets his 50 year record do the talking.

Vote Fraud

Donald Trump suggested in a tweet this week that due to the risks imposed by the threat of the coronavirus with in-person voting and in an abundance of caution about the possibility of fraud due to mail in voting, perhaps the November election should be postponed.  He doesn't have authority to do it, but it's not far fetched to think that he inspired the Hong Kong government who the next day announced that they would be postponing their own elections for a year to the objections of the pro-democracy opposition.

The reasons behind Trump's sudden concern about the threat of COVID-19 in the context of voting (he hasn't demonstrated a great deal of concern about the virus in any other contexts to this point) can easily be discerned by a glance at the polls.  At the moment, as the walls come crumbling down, the country is registering disapproval at Trump's handling of the crisis.  The economy is tanking.  People are hurting worse than they were at the end of his predecessor's 2 terms in office and voters are not happy about it.  Things can and will change in the time left in the 2020 campaign -- it would be foolhardy to guess how at this juncture-- but if the election were held today, or alternatively if things don't improve in the next 100 days, the results may not be as ambiguous as it would benefit Trump for them to be.

The aesthetics of a president postponing his own election in an ostensible democracy are not good.  Donald Trump couldn't care less about aesthetics or democracy, but it's legitimate to ask the question, what would be the harm of delaying the election? These are unprecedented times-- do they not call for unprecedented measures?   Indeed whereas 49 countries have proceeded as planned with their 2020 elections, 68 have postponed planned elections due to concerns about the coronavirus.  But the arguments for it are not just suspicious in the American president's case, but weak.

It would of course be too much to ask this administration to take the lead in ensuring that states actually secure a safe, fair, on time and accurate election in the face of the COVID-19 threat-- a threat largely of the administration's own making.  That initiative would require some vision, competence and leadership-- three qualities that were never seriously promised by the president, never demanded by the constituency that elected him and certainly not about to be delivered voluntarily at this stage of the game.  In the vacuum of leadership, many states have already been stepping up.  The 2020 primaries in many states were postponed during the first peak of the virus (not before Joe Biden's nomination was secured of course) but many states acted rapidly to tweak the process to promote voting by mail as a socially distanced alternative to in person voting, with virtually no fraud reported.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Trump and his minions persist in casting aspersion on the concept of mail-in voting.  Their goal is to delay the inevitable at worst; at best to stall until the economy can be propped up enough to make the inevitable somewhat avoidable.  Failing the postponement of facing the vote, they aim.not to ensure the integrity of the process but to undermine public confidence in the outcome.  It is all but a foregone conclusion that the proven effectiveness and fairness of mail-in voting will make it a primary feature of how the November election will be carried out. Credit for the success of the process to date is at least partially due to the US Postal Service itself-- one of the Federal Government's most consistently excellent public services.  Naturally the current administration would love to add dismantling the Postal Service to its list of dystopian accomplishments before November, but the clock is running out.

Tampering with an election should be more than an aesthetic violation in a democracy, but you have to wonder, is this a democracy?  Donald Trump was elected in 2016, and Hillary Clinton lost, because there was arguably a case to be made that Donald Trump as an amateur would have to be better than the more-of-the-same-and-then-some  that Hillary Clinton represented.  As it turned out, Trump was not a revolutionary; just an incredibly incompetent pretender and the results of his incompetence are lying in embers all around us.  Bernie Sanders offered himself as the locus for a bottom-up revolution that would restore the government to the hands of the people where it has always wanted to be, but in spite of the power of his message and the growing momentum behind the movement, the members of the political class united behind Sleepy Joe Biden, the elder (and I'm talking elder) representative of their tribe as their standard bearer, the rank and file obligingly fell into place and the dreams of  the "Not Me, Us" revolution were postponed yet again.  I'd like to know if revolution is possible as the ballot box.  If it is, then you have a democracy.  If it is not, then you do not..  

I fear we do not.