Coming Apart

Freddy Gray was 25 when he was critically injured due to rough transport by Baltimore police on April 12, 2015.  Gray was a victim of over-policing.  He was arrested for fleeing bicycle cops who thought he looked suspicious who found him to be in possession of what was subsequently determined to be a legal switchblade.  Witnesses described the police as "folding" Gray and pinning him with a knee by his neck in the act of detaining him.  Already injured, when he was placed in the police van, he was handcuffed but not secured to his seat against newly implemented police regulations.  The van was deliberately driven roughly causing multiple injuries to Gray as he was blindly thrown about the metal interior.  From Wikipedia:

In the following week, according to the Gray family attorney, Gray suffered from total cardiopulmonary arrest at least once but was resuscitated without ever regaining consciousness. He remained in a coma, and underwent extensive surgery in an effort to save his life. ... According to his family, he lapsed into a coma with three fractured vertebrae, injuries to his voice box, and his spine 80% severed at his neck. Police confirmed that the spinal injury led to Gray's death. ... Gray died on April 19, 2015, a week after his arrest.

On May 1, Prince released a video for a new song, Baltimore, composed of images of the protests that rocked the city for days as details spread of the part that Gray's deliberately negligent treatment by police played in his death.  

In the aftermath of the Baltimore protests, six officers were charged in Gray's death.  In separate trials, 2 were acquitted, a judge declared a mistrial in a third before dropping the charges, and charges were dropped for the remaining 3 before they were brought to trial.  All 6 officers sued the prosecutor who charged them for malicious prosecution, defamation and invasion of privacy.  The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the officers' suit to be dropped on the basis of prosecutorial immunity.  The City of Baltimore paid a $6.4 million settlement to the family of Freddy Gray.  Because Freddy Gray looked suspicious to a bunch of cops. 

Prince died suddenly, shockingly nearly a year to the day after Freddy Gray, on April 21, 2016 at Paisley Park in Chanhassen, greater Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was 57.  What would he have had to say about the murder of George Floyd last week in Minneapolis?

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Imagining the possibilities of a Sanders presidency throughout 2019 was like a months long dream for me that was rudely interrupted by 2020.  Seeing Donald Trump acquitted in the farce that was his impeachment trial, the way the dems circled the wagons around Joe Biden to keep Bernie Sanders from raising the last serious challenge to the status quo (squelching the last chance of a dying republic), the truly unprecedented way that COVID-19 changed everything overnight and the way it caused our elected representatives to scramble to serve their own kind while giving the finger to the rest of us, and not least, the very precedented murder of George Floyd before our eyes by the Minneapolis Police as a particularly vivid illustration of the violence and injustice and thuggery inherent in the system, it's difficult to sustain the charade that getting back to normal is what we want or need. The curtain has lifted, the chrome paint has flaked off the plastic at the core of the American "dream".  It's not worth the effort to try to sustain it.  I never wanted that dream anyway.  That corny unbidden dream was put in our head by hucksters.  They're very practiced at it and are paddling like crazy with their identical somber piano heart tugging tv spots to keep us thinking they've still got a handle on it, but I'm not so sure they're going to be quite as successful with everybody going forward.

The propaganda arm of the corporatocracy is pushing videos demonstrating the determination of our cities' elected officials to preserve order in these trying times.  It's made me think.  I don't think I've ever voted for anybody as a way a to keep the order.  Why is it always the first thing that any new mayor or local official tries to do?  I'm trying to upset the order when I vote.  This order has got to go, but it's finally dawning on me that voting has not traditionally been a very successful means of bringing it about. Maybe it's not the best way to go about it.  Make those votes count while we've got them, but let's get our masked heads together and figure out how to make the change that we truly seek this time.  Time to quit fooling around. Let's get busy.

Tooth marks

I am frequently asked conversationally, in zoom meetings for instance, how I'm doing with isolation.  I try to give stock human sounding answers, but between you and me, I feel I may have been made for social distancing.   Truthfully there have been some perks.  I get to work from home.  I got a reprieve from jury duty.  And perhaps best of all, a dentist appointment I had for the end of March was postponed indefinitely because the office is closed due to the threat of coronavirus except for emergencies.  I am fine with that.

I am told I was born with teeth.  By virtue of this I consider myself an expert, and therefore you can believe me when I tell you this: nothing could provide better evidence that there is no benevolent omnipotent creator god than human teeth.  Oh, they don't do a lot: they're just supposed to keep you alive by chewing your sustenance for you.  You only eat every meal of your life with them.  They only need to last you a lifetime.  You get three strikes in baseball, three rolls in a bowling frame, three guesses and the first two don't count.  With teeth you get one do-over when you're a kid and that's it.   And a lot can go wrong with them. They come in crooked, hurting all the while.  They chip, they twist, they drift, they come apart.  They fall out.   They do among the dirtiest jobs of any part of your body -- and they hurt and they stink and they disappoint-- and you still have to smile with them.

They are high maintenance control freaks.  Without obsessive catering to their fragility and fickleness several times a day, shit sticks to them and goes rancid and makes your face smell like the gates of hell for those unfortunate enough to have to deal with you.  The intricate activity that they engage in assures that even with the most meticulous care, a residue of spit, foodstuff and used toothpaste will radiate at least somewhat from every mouth.   (I'm telling you this as a friend: Your breath stinks.)  And your words have to pass through them.

They are accomplices in a web of extortion that haunts you all of your days.  They can rot in your head for weeks acting like nothing's happening until one morning you wake up and find that your cheek has inflated like a gluteal prosthesis because of one of them and you now have to scramble to pay a professional an absurd amount of money to make the problem go away.  For this reason, it behooves you to schedule regular appointments with a coterie of professionals trained to make you worry about your dental hygiene.  What sort of people spend their days sorting out the conditions in other people's smelly pieholes?   Well-compensated people, I assure you.  I don't think you'll find a lot of fans of universal dental care among DDS's. Speaking for myself, though, you couldn't pay me enough.

I'm not the best dental patient.  When my dentist and I were both younger, he brought a certain zeal to his work and took seriously his role as dispenser of oral counsel.  And I listened.  But live long enough and you observe that a low tech and mechanical science like dentistry when applied to the high concept yet overwhelmingly futile task of preserving teeth will have diminishing returns with even the most diligent practitioners.  A situation pronounced an emergency one visit will turn into something to monitor the next even when the advice in urgent conditions was completely ignored.  Meanwhile, a tooth that your dentist wouldn't give the time of day on your last appointment has conveniently hollowed out from decay for the dentist's benefit in the intervening months and provides an excuse for an emergency filling next week. The teeth have a mind of their own when it comes to the whimsical prognoses and methods of dentistry.  Once my dentist capably played the role of steward of my oral health. Nowadays, he takes a look at the current state of things in my mouth, shrugs and says, "It is what it is."

My hygienist is young, and her spirit remains to be broken.  She instructs me at every appointment in the ordeal of tooth care and I nod my head and act like it's the first time I've heard the information and pretend to make a note to myself to apply myself to proper performance of the rituals until my next visit, but she and I both know that this is a charade.  Too late in my life I learned the simple trick of spraying a stream of water at my face as a method of dental care, and this seems both to have added an element of excitement to it and to have reduced the twice a year lecture time considerably.  But it's also made me too cocky for my own good and I still get scolded.

This is why I have a codicil in my will that stipulates that upon my death my twice annual dental checkups shall cease.  

A dearth of imagination

If you want proof that Donald Trump is an idiot, I don't think you have to look any further than his response to the coronavirus crisis in this election year.  I can't believe I'm saying this, but thanks to his bizarrely dysfunctional steering of the ship, it's not impossible that he could actually blow it and lose to Sleepy, Creepy Joe Biden!  Can you imagine the difference to his favorability and chances for re-election if instead of being his best The Donald -- i.e., an incompetent, weak baby whose one trick is to appeal to the die-hard white supremacist ingrained by our culture in people of all walks of life-- he or someone influential to him had seen the incredible opportunity opened up to him by the jackpot of a crisis he could have nailed but for his narcissistic obtuseness and acute (if well-placed) inferiority complex. What if someone on his team had seized this moment for greatness-- what if with the bottomless stores of treasure that he and his vultures diverted to the pockets of his billionaire enablers, he instead had mobilized industry to produce the ventilators and protective equipment urgently needed by those tasked with caring for the virus’s victims, pushed through a universal basic income to see people through, decreed an open-ended implementation of single payer healthcare and medical leave on the government's dime to see that isolation was easy for people and that those who fall ill would be able to seek treatment so that society could manage the spread.  

He could do this to benefit himself in the form of votes, approval and genuine adulation on the part of Americans and a place of honor in the history books.  Congress would leap at a chance to support a president being unexpectedly presidential.  His own gain would coincide with lives improving for an America eroded by 40 years of trickle down neoliberalism.  In consequence, his actions would result in a gush-up boost to the economy from the beneficiaries of his largesse, the isolated masses adequately supplied with cash for survival.  His detractors on the left wouldn’t know what hit them until they got what they wanted. As for his reactionary base, it would be a test of his proposition that he could shoot someone in the face on 5th Avenue and his fans would still love him. I think he would pass the test.

He wouldn’t do this though, even though by doing it he would sail to victory on a tidal wave of approval from Americans  thirsting for a new and better age who would flock in gratitude for bold, new leadership away from their tepid reactionary acquiescence to entreaties to support the alternative.  As surprisingly sure-fire as this tack would prove for the Republican incumbent, I don't think the Democrats need fear that they will be out-lefted by the right (which sadly would be the only thing that would ever inspire them to scramble to reclaim their leftist credentials).   This level of meaningful subterfuge is not a job for Mr Trump Steaks. It's not the subversive nature of it that makes it an unlikely re-election strategy for Trump.  His whole thing is subversion of the office of the presidency after all.  Rather it's the possibility that it could actually be a good thing for the marks.  

The mark of a true criminal is that their success is measured by the degree of pain they inflict upon others.  If the best con in the world results in the easing of pain for strangers you’re not trying hard enough at your criminality. 

Alas.

The Emancipation of the Stupid

The sight of a swarm of angry, armed, unmasked Michigan protesters storming their statehouse demanding of their democratic governor an end to coronavirus quarantine and an immediate return to business as usual even as the pandemic ravages Detroit and continues to spread in the state forces atrocious thoughts into my mind.   I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling an involuntary eagerness for reports of the first COVID-19 deaths among the protesters.  It would vindicate the governor,  the science, and indeed, me.  But what if it never comes?  What if the governor throws up her hands and gives in, or anarchy ensues, business goes back to usual in Michigan and a coronavirus resurgence among the whiter, Trumpier parts of the state never happens.  Are they lucky? Or are they vindicated?  How disappointing would that be!

Shame on them (and those who bid them to do this) for making me have these thoughts.  On the other hand, let's for a moment entertain the notion that there is something to their beef with the state for forcing them to isolate for their own good.  It might require activating the troglodyte part of your brain.  The smart, sciency part of my brain tells me that the unusual asymptomatic transmission of the virus which contributes to the rate of its spread, the unavailability of testing, the lack of treatment and prevention and the brutal severity of what's known about its effects call for the precaution of extreme isolation.  What we're learning about the disease is frightening and it's best to think of fellow humans as potential carriers. (How else are you going to get it?) Furthermore, especially with the healthcare system we have in this country, we are as usual taking a peashooter to a gunfight.  Hospitals are actually closing in the middle of this because as Briahna Joy Gray noted in a recent conversation with Current Affairs editor Nathan J Robinson, "there is no profit in treating the sick."  The Trump administration and our leaders in Washington are under-equipped to handle this, so naturally the Professional Managerial Class who run our municipalities and provincial governments have been forced to take matters into  their own hands.  This is the smart, sciency view.  But the troglodyte in me can easily club the rational side senseless long enough to see how a person could become indignant at some elite telling me when I can get my hair cut and go to the mall and the Sonic without putting a sissy mask over my face.  

What makes elites think they know better?  Humans have been idiots for most of our existence and look how far it's gotten us.  

There might be a little something to the thought that with enough numbness to the consequences, humans could power through this coronavirus thing with only half of our wits engaged. Not all of us would get the virus probably.  Of those of us who do, some would inevitably succumb (to achieve herd immunity we're told it would have to be a phenomenally huge number, a disproportionate percentage of them people of color and no doubt many of them the essential workers who have to deal with the virus face-to-face whether their fellow humans take it seriously or not) but some number would recover with antibodies, and some of those who by the genetic luck of the draw were not susceptible to the disease to begin with would conceivably live to perpetuate their super power into future generations.  As for the ones who succumbed, they would be remembered in photographs and stories, some in song and maudlin poetry by what survivors of theirs remain.  Our progeny who survive will get the annual corona vaccine along with their annual flu shots.  Same as always.  And if in the future some obscure bird disease in the amazon rain forest mutates into a microbial face-eating parasite that spreads asymptomatically to humans across the globe in a span of weeks, we'll deal with it then. 

If reckless disregard for public health works out for them without taking its toll on them, I'll be pissed.  Things always seem to.  But it will mean those of us who have survived can put away our literal masks sooner than we anticipated for the next pandemic and, though we might not fully recognize the world we'll emerge back into, we can put back on our figurative masks and get back out there to some of the communal activities we've missed for a little while.  

If it doesn't work out for them, shame on them for making me feel like gloating.