Never Swat a Fly

Marjorie White and Frank Albertson as D-6 and RT-42 perform Never Swat a Fly from the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930). (Music by Ray Henderson; Lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva and Lew Brown)

For a flavor of the movie which involves an excursion to Mars in 1980, here's a montage set to another fine number from the musical, The Drinking Song:

Conventional Folly

I'm of two minds about Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last night.  On the one hand, I am genuinely impressed with how she has risen to the occasion in the 4 or 5 weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside from the campaign and threw his endorsement  for his replacement behind his Vice President.  I don't think it can be a huge revelation that I did not know she had it in her.  It’s now clear to me she has it in her.  

On the other hand, what is the it that she has in her?  I'll admit, my optimism about the difference that she would make as President has not been perfectly cautious.  My hopes had been involuntarily raised.  In that spirit, I am taking it for granted that there may be divergences from the current admin that she might have to sit on until she is sitting in the Oval Office.  But if you take her speech at face value, there was a lot in it to dislike.  Too much to dislike to really leave a lot of room for any reveling in what there was to like.  I think she was effective in making a case for herself versus Trump from the perspective of “Trump’s a dangerous nut who will make your life worse and I’m not.”  But I was turned off by a few things (and I’m not even talking about the rest of the night/convention with its absence of a Palestinian and the presence of Republicans and military wackadoodles like Leon Panetta and that sheriff from Michigan).  

But just in Harris’s speech, I hated the formulation of economic policies around the middle class and opportunity and affordability.  I mean maybe my ears have been un-tuned from that kind of talk—I don’t hear it as sweet music for the masses, I hear it as fuck you if you’re not in the middle class or if you don’t have what it takes to be.  I’ll grant she’s trying to sing to people who get horny when you talk about that stuff including our punditry and too much of our Pavlovian electorate, but to me it sounds like garbage. The domestic stuff wasn’t all bad, it was just not good enough.  The international part of the speech just sucked pretty much from one end to the other.  Why are we still talking about NATO in 2024?  Even my CNN-watching wife said she threw Gazans under the bus with her comments about Israel.  That’s pretty bad.  But the rest of it sucked too.  I hated it.  Nevertheless, again you could argue she’s not performing for me.  

The thing is she thinks she’s got me.  She thinks “The left will hate this (including the snub of the Palestinians) but they’ll eat shit.  They always do.  The AIPAC wing?  Middle-America Independents?  Suburban Republican women unhappy with Trump?  They won’t eat shit, but the left will.”  Therefore, only the left are fed shit.  Our palate for it is not appreciated, it is taken for granted.  Meanwhile, even in 2024 after all we've been through, extreme care is taken to see that not a molecule of shit pollutes the feast laid out for the small but loud asshole wing of the Democratic Party.

I would have forgiven the pandering to straw dolts (is anybody who matters really impressed by that military and immigration bullshit?) if they had let the Palestinian speak. It was a calculated fuck you really.   A performative fuck you performed for the benefit of assholes.  The thing is if they had let the woman speak (Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian elected to the Georgia house who is on the record pro-Kamala and whose speech was perfectly palatable to all but the most sicko Zionist) it would have given a boost to the people they needed to boost.  Instead it’s now a problem that they have to either fix or let fester. As Sam Seder put it last night, finding room for a 2 minute speech “would have cost them nothing” and made a huge difference. It was a mistake.  Plain and simple.  They fucked up and made a bad choice.

Instead they chose to pander to a certain type of  Dem.  While they told those opposed to the genocide in Gaza to go to hell for a bit, the people they didn’t want to tell to go to hell are idiots who have to be told not to go to hell or else they’ll fucking do it.  I can’t help but think about a Matt Karp study of 2020 that basically confirms that they’re not wrong in a way.  The ficklest elements of the dem electorate have a thick stupid streak that responds to triggers, and yet they are needed in order for Dems to win.

Non sequitur alert: While thinking about this, my brother thirteen who has been looking for work for over a year sent me this infographic about candidates for employment:

I didn't see the point of comparing two lists nearly identical but for the ordering,  but my brother thirteen said that he discerned a decided shift away from autonomy and leadership skills in 2018 and toward obedience.  Probably requires experience with the job market in 2024 to pick up on that, but I see how he got that.  I do think a parallel can be drawn between that list and the menu of stuff at the DNC last night-- the showcase night.  The stuff that doesn't concern you except abstractly-- maintenance of American global dominance at any cost; mitigation of the fact that very poor people from the parts of the world our way of living is making uninhabitable are at our borders clamoring to do any shit work we have for them in order to live here-- we’re not really trying to sell you on, but by making it the centerpiece of our convention we are trying to emphasize that since it is the preoccupation of your government we want you to feel that we will be capable of continuing to carry it out better than the other guy.  And my point is, just as shifts in emphases on our resumes indicate our own acquiescence to losses of power in the workplace, the bar for our political support of a mainstream candidate / party might be getting lower and lower.

20 Books

I have become aware of a challenge on social media to post the covers of "20 books that have influenced your life" with no comment-- just the covers.  I'm not on social media, so I will present them here.  And I'm too lazy to figure out how to screenprint 20 covers and manageably arrange them in a post, so I'll just give title and author for most.  I might as well have not even bothered, right?  I needed a topic anyway, so be that as it may:

Chicken Soup and Rice - Maurice Sendak

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N - Leo Rosten

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

The House of Blue Leaves - John Guare

Blues People - Leroi Jones (better known as Imamu Amiri Baraka)

Inter Ice Age 4 - Kobo Abe

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Canapé-Vert - Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin

Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker - Victor Bockris

No More Police - Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie

Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

Orientalism - Edward Said

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

Democracy in Chains - Nancy MacLean

Pictures at a Revolution - Mark Harris

The End of the Road - John Barth

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I feel like I'm leaving something out.

Car Talk

In the 70's Ron Popeil invented Mr Microphone, a wireless transmitter shaped like a microphone that would play your voice over any FM receiver in your vicinity, such as the radio in your hi fi system, effectively turning it into an amp for your voice.  As the ubiquitous advertisement demonstrated, with this device, your car's radio set to FM could become a public address system, enhancing your own ability to be a public nuisance behind the wheel.  To a pubescent aspirant driver, the possibilities for enhancing the communication experience of driving seemed endless.  Imagine possessing the ability to let the other guy you were supposed to be watching out for know pre-emptively how you felt about him.  Of course any experienced driver can immediately spot the flaw in this line of thinking-- driving is the one socially interactive activity in which those who value their life can be grateful that communication is kept to the barest of minimums.

To this purpose, various methods and accessories have been devised to convey just the amount of information necessary for any interaction behind the wheel.  From the beginning, a convention of hand signals extended out the driver's rolled down window have been used to communicate one's intention to other drivers. As automobiles became more common, communication features were added to the design of cars militating against the need for drivers to risk their limbs for the cause of safety.  Turn signals on the front, rear, and now side mirrors of cars were added to convey one's intention to obstruct or impede the flow of traffic in order to exit the straightaway.*   Flashing "hazard" lights in the front and rear (aka "flashers") could be engaged to draw attention to a sudden need to reduce speed or to be temporarily stopped. Honking horns were added as an automotive way to express one's disapproval of the asses who forget to use turn signals or flashers.  

To these voluntary instruments of communication, a couple of automatic signals could be added.  First, whenever the driver steps on the brake pedal,  bright red brake lights at the rear of the car intensify as an automatic message to the driver of the following vehicle to apply their own brakes (thus initiating a chain of calls and responses that extends the length of the trail of cars behind the car that initiated the round of Telephone).† Second, placing the car in reverse engages a set of non-colored lights that unambiguously indicate to those approaching from behind the reverse direction of the car.   Trucks and some recent passenger car models accompany the lights with a sequence of warning tones or of short punctuated beeps of the horn.  The automatic nature of these brake and reverse gear signals might have an analog in human communication of such involuntary physical responses as a flushed color to signal embarrassment,  dilated pupils to indicate attraction or a yawn to convey, "You're boring me."  

Before the feature was added to passenger cars, some drivers supplied the reverse beeps on their own by means of staccato taps on the horn.  In short, the horn is the feature most commonly resorted to for voluntary communication, and reflective of this is the variety of messages that a horn can convey.  Along with the two already discussed, the sounding of a horn can mean:

• "I'm backing up!"
• "You're getting on my nerves!"
• Closely related to the above: "Move!" or "Get out of my way!"  (A shorter tap is a way of adding an unspoken "Please" to the request.)
• To forestall a collision: "I'm here!"
• As a designated driver on an outing, to avoid getting out of the car when pulling up to the curb to pick up a friend: "I've arrived!"  If  the friend takes too long to emerge: "Come on! Let's go!"
• When spotting a friend or acquaintance in the wild: "Hi! It's me!"

As to the last meaning, I don't know how common it is, but in my family there's a tradition of giving the horn 2 short blasts when driving away after a visit as a way of saying, "Goodbye!  Thanks for everything!"   As my daughter has observed, this makes a friendly toot of the horn the "Aloha" of the language of cars.  It should also be noted that some drivers use the horn as though it were a hyperspace button on a video game or a disintegration ray should they find themselves behind someone stopped  for perfectly legitimate reasons such as yielding the right of way to pedestrians.  The message seems to be "Be gone!"  Such rudeness is frequently met with a blast from the offended offender to the effect of "How do you like it!"  To all of the above, it can be added that a contextless honk of the horn can be interpreted as a general, "Hey! Pay attention!"

There is a quieter alternative to many of the horn's denotations, to wit: the flash of high beams.  While the sound of a horn can be varied to convey the emotion or urgency behind a message, there is not much you can do to add paralinguistic touches to the utterances of a high beam flash.  Nevertheless, a single flash can convey a fairly wide range of meanings.  Starting with the horn overlaps:

• "In case you didn't notice me, I'm here."
• "Coming through.  You're in the passing lane and I want to pass you"  (Rude, maybe, but better than a horn at high speeds that are probably exceeding the speed limit)
• "After you. I insist."
• "Permission to cut in front of me granted."
• "Your high beams are on."
• "You need to turn on your headlights."

Most drivers through experience know the range of meaning of a high beam flash though they might have to flip through the possible alternatives in their mind to arrive at the likelihood that the flash was directed at them and what their expected response should be.  When no context can be ascertained, making the flash of an oncoming car seem random, it's a good bet that the meaning is a camaraderly "Watch out!  Speed trap ahead!"

When it comes to automotive communication, context is everything.  And when one's meaning is in doubt, one can always resort to classic hand gestures to provide emphasis and clarification.

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* Turn signals have for years been designed to automatically turn off on making the turn.  When they don't,  they raise expectations, rather like a stray eyelash causing a person sitting in a bar to wink involuntarily at strangers.

† Brakes can also be tapped to convey two voluntary meanings:  1) I'm slowing down and you should too; and 2) You're following too close.  No matter how the latter is intended, it's hard not to receive it as an aggression