Je ne regrette rien

Albrecht Dürer 

Just in time for my monthly deadline, I saw a Tweet today in my vicarious twitter wanderings* to the effect of, "Do you think the ppl who voted for Biden are regretting it?"  I didn't see the context, but it's not hard to imagine it was occasioned by Biden's failure to extend a national moratorium on evictions in spite of an alarmingly high number of people -- "millions" by most accounts-- who are likely to be screwed by his passive permission of it, aided and abetted by a do-nothing congress, immediately upon the lapse of the current moratorium-- i.e., tomorrow.  The most easily avoided and therefore excessively disappointing of a series of disappointments since January 20.

Predictably, the facetiously raised possibility of regret among Biden voters was met by a cynicism-affirming chorus of "not those heartless bastards" by followers of the account. It's clear based on the wording of the question that the tweeter did not seek or expect an honest appraisal from anyone willing to admit they had voted for Biden in November.  I am, as I say, running out of time to meet my July quota, so I will volunteer.   Mind you I am not a casual Biden voter, and I have never been a fan let alone a True Believer-- and I don't much care for the implication that the "Biden voter" is an identity that can be spoken for in the response to a tossed off rhetorical question. 

Am I happy that Biden has moments that exceed the bad that I thought he was going to be?  Of course not.  Did I expect that he would when I voted for him?  Absolutely.  Do I regret voting for him then?  No I do not.  Regret implies an aching for an alternative.  In the matter at hand, there was only one other possibility-- and no, I do not regret that Trump did not win re-election.  Do I believe presidential politics matter in our broken system. Sadly I still do.  (In line with the twitter user's question, it must somewhat matter or the voter would never have cause to regret their vote.)  As for myself and the previous election, I still do believe the tiny margin of better for the vast majority of us and for the planet that we are getting from Biden compared to Trump-- or to put it more accurately, the margin of worse that we avoided by electing Biden matters.   Both Trump and Biden are faux populists, Trump to a more sexily spectacular extent.  Both are in fact perpetrators of the dreadful status quo who act primarily at the behest of the excessively rich and powerful (and in Trump's case, the self).  Trump's politics are worse.  Is Biden still bad?  Yes.  It's complicated.  But on the question of regret, I have a long way to go to be convinced that Biden winning was of the two vastly more likely outcomes of the November election the regrettable one.  I just don't buy it.  

No question at all that presidential politics is a cesspool of pain, disappointment, irrelevance in material ways to most people.  This is the nature of this sickening duopoly that we live under.  But stewardship of this ridiculously over important office is perhaps the least anyone can do as long as we do not yet have a dictatorship of the proletariat.  

I would not rise to the bait of this question if I weren't a bit irritated by how perfectly it illustrates the tattered state of the left since the end of the Bernie Sanders' campaign a year and a quarter ago.  It's yet another example of some asshole on twitter purity trolling.   My single vote did not elect Joe Biden (hence perhaps nothing to regret) but was done for my own mental health, in good conscience, with eyes fully open about the flaws of the candidate and in hopes that it would aid in an outcome that would not be regrettable.  Disqualify me on that basis from participating in building an alternative to our debased system, but I am certain I'm not alone.  Are we really going to require confessions and repentance from our brothers and sisters before we can accept their solidarity?  Doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me.  Then again, it's just Twitter.

~~~~~

* I am not a member, but I latch onto twitter accounts for lols when I'm invited to.

Sans Souci

Peggy Lee sings Sans Souci-- a recording that begs to be the soundtrack of an awesome claymation:

This was the B-Side of a 45 produced in 1952.  (The A-Side was River River.). The Sonny Burke tune with lyrics by Lee was arranged by Gordon Jenkins, whose stamp on mid-20th Century American popular music is a bit more etched than his name recognition might indicate.  Among other highlights of a long career, he wrote Crescent City Blues, unmistakably the source material for Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.  

It's a beautiful iconic tune, but it's the over-the-top exoticism of his arrangements such as the above that really gets under the skin.  For instance, dig Jenkins' unhinged 1960 exotica arrangement of Duke Ellington's Caravan featuring Marshall Royal on alto sax (a recording memorably used in a first season episode of Mad Men):

 

Jenkin's arrangement for Frank Sinatra of  It was a very good year, a sweet tune first recorded by the pop folk group the Kingston Trio transformed it into a transcendent epic of a particularly American longing.  Amazingly footage of the actual recording with an audience in attendance and Gordon Jenkins conducting one Los Angeles evening in late April 1965 is available, providing a glimpse into the casual way that Sinatra and his collaborators tossed together an essential of  American music.

Free to choose

plaguedoctormasks.com

We have been on vacation in another state again.  The state we visited has had no statewide requirements for the wearing of masks as protection against COVID since May 24.  Nationally, as of this writing a few municipalities still have requirements in place, but although some elected officials and bodies have either banned requirements all along or lifted them as early as March, most provincial health departments concur, voluntary mask wearing for the unvaccinated is recommended.  In the state we visited, in public retail and dining establishments, most but not all workers wore masks and few to no customers did.  Coming from a state that still had some requirements, we at first erred on the side of caution and kept covered but, being vaccinated ourselves, were soon seduced by entreaties to forgo masking if we desired.  I confess, I desired.

In the two fairly rural counties of the state we visited where we spent most of our time, more than 70% of persons had reportedly had a least 1 dose of a vaccine.  The one we spent our nights in has as of this writing a somewhat more than 50% rate of full vaccination.  This is comparable to the large suburban county we live in, where mask wearing is similarly voluntary for the unvaccinated, but still quite de rigueur we noticed on our return, even though the state mask requirements have been lifted since July 1.  Even having tasted freedom and breathed free on vacation, I comply.  When in the suburbs, I do as the suburbans do.   Moreover, our county was hit particularly hard in the thick of the pandemic, has struggled to come out of it and has had an uneasy relationship with the capitol from the outset during the crisis.  I understand the reluctance to trust that everything is back to normal just because the governor says it is.

I'm never on the vanguard of fashion.  I resisted making the transition to mask wearing last spring but when the CDC's recommendations finally gelled into coherence, I had the confirmation I needed that wearing a mask like a doofus was warranted.  Now that I've been fully vaccinated since the end of May, I'm likewise not about to pioneer free-facing it.  As always, my motivation is selfish and stupid-- I don't want to stick out.  But while I know that interaction with me is safe for an unvaccinated person, they don't know that, so as long as the prevailing winds are with precaution, I'm down with it.

Looking through the status of mask mandates by state, I'm reminded that not everyone has health as a priority in setting public health mandates.  It's a pretty thoroughly politicized thing in this country, reflecting the polarization that is a hallmark of this precarious era.  At the base of things, I can't help but think we've got to be much more alike about this than our divergent attitudes, which fall along very predictable faultlines bordering the expected shades of the political map, would indicate.  Nobody having gone through what we've just been through wants to end up dead from the fucking thing.  But by the same token, neither should anyone look askance at those who cast a leery eye at the Professional Managerial Class that monopolized information about the disease as a means of orchestrating a coordinated national response to the threat it posed to the status quo.  Banning common sense requirements of mutual protection by edict in the throes of a pandemic is clearly a contradictory and asinine response to the notion of safeguarding public health.   But if you're wearing a mask as a pussy hat for the face, you're doing it wrong, too.

Playing at war

Glenn Greenwald is turning into a huge pain in the ass.  Always a bit of a sour puss, he used to at least be relevant.  Lately, he has been lurking at the turnstiles of the Intellectual Dark Web looking longingly in, usually on a tear against political correctness, often popping up at the center of a Twitter storm of his own making, churning up indignation among the bros at the latest outrage from whatever figure on the left has inadvertently stepped into it.  

In a recent discussion with Ben Burgis the title of whose new book, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns no doubt caused involuntary drool to form at the corner of Greenwald's mouth, Greenwald took issue with Burgis' proposition that the propensity of some on the left to reflexively police any perceived infraction of a rigid code of social justice was counterproductive to the project of increasing leftist power by arguing that on the contrary, the left had never been more powerful-- with socialists winning seats in Congress, making tremendous progress in presidential politics in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and in fact victorious in the Culture War as surely evidenced by the sheer dominance of Cancel Culture.

Here's something it surprises me that the guy who facilitated the data dump of Edward Snowden and the release of Lula da Silva from Brazilian prison doesn't appear to know: The culture war is not a real war.  There is nothing to win in that war. It is a distraction.  It is a very successful distraction because it never fails to draw people away from actual struggle.  The result is that actual struggle is undermined; real revolution is stalled.  What this means is not that the left is bad because it is engaged in mere culture wars.  Wars have two sides.  One of the sides is often an aggressor.  It is my view that the aggressor in the culture war, which is an old struggle which has origins in the first stirrings of the John Birch society and has continued decade after decade since is in fact the right.  Like most of the wars originating on the right these days, it is a never-ending war.  Its perpetuation depletes the left and engorges the right.  And the left, which should to the greatest extent possible ignore these attacks (take as your mantra, "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."), takes the bait and engages.  And being composed largely of very clever, expensively educated, sensitive types, its defense becomes a moist spectacle that both titillates its opponents and drives normal people, who would otherwise be much needed potential allies away. 

As the late Michael Brooks pointed out in a video on the topic of an earlier Greenwald controversy, we should not confuse Glenn Greenwald's project with that of the left.  The left Brooks reminds us is properly concerned with advancing the cause of the working class against the capitalist class usually in conflict with whoever is in power, including Democrats; Greenwald's project is always the exposure of corruption wherever he finds it.  His mission coincides with that of the left when it challenges authoritarian regimes and institutions; when it is focussed on the American power structure, as it has been primarily for the past several months, often appropriately enough in appearances on Tucker Carlson's Fox show, it is arguably consistent with his anti-corruption mission, but more and more lately diverted to irrelevant tangential beefs with the left.   

Inasmuch as Greenwald's critique is appropriately directed at the soulless leadership of the democratic party, I find it useful and justified.  The premise that a few progressives in congress or the unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders in drawing attention to progressive policy goals in the past 2 presidential primaries represents the victory of socialism and therefore the justness of opposing it  as if it were a mere component of the neoliberal power structure, or that a reflexively woke Twitter user is an exemplar of the corruption of the left, to be a jaw-droppingly juvenile conflation of leftism with the democratic party that not only invents corruption where it does not exist, but plays perfectly into Carlson's ultimately repressive and authoritarian agenda.   

The chimeric victory of the left in the unending Culture War seems to be behind Glenn Greenwald's current derangement.  But don't be distracted by his distraction.  

Murder on my mind

Do other countries have murder shows?  Because this one surely does.  Channels of them.  I know that murder is as old as the species, and fascination with it is slightly older than that.  The propensity of humans (mostly men) to murder other humans (often women) is a theme that has run throughout literature since the first AP English class at Cro-Magnon High.  So surely murder documentaries are among the fare of other countries.  But are they a cash cow?

I'm not saying I don't watch them.  I never choose them,  but I don't have to because they get chosen for me. But as I'm usually messing around on my phone while I'm sitting there and they don't demand more attention than I have for them, they frequently fit the bill perfectly. They first became a thing in my Nielsen household -- I'm thinking sometime in the Cheney era-- when weekly news shows which used to occasionally actually cover stories in the news, started to focus exclusively on True Crime-- i.e., old news.   An occasional notable true crime documentary done well had always been suitable entertainment, but in that first decade of the new millennium, the stories became less and less about the crimes you were already aware of and that you perhaps wondered about*, and more and more about the worst things that ever happened in the lives of people you had no other reason to know about. And they were horrible gruesome things. It felt voyeuristic and exploitative to me.  Would I want my tragedy, my sorrow, my shame made into fodder for the prurient interest of strangers?  The commercial aspect of it, the trafficking of other people's pain-- made my complicity in watching it particularly troublesome and I would sometimes object-- usually too late for changing the channel to be an option.  After countless hours of passive intake of the shows, I've become inured to it. 

Watch enough of them and tropes and conventions will start to emerge. The husband / boyfriend / weirdo neighbor did it.  Whoever is identified by name in the first police interrogation is probably the one who will wind up guilty even if he did not immediately implicate himself.  Look for the parties whose stories change with helpful theories about the crime, and memories that are conjured at convenient times.  As for the narrative of the tale, any detail that would give it away if revealed too soon is withheld until a sufficient number of commercial breaks have transpired. You can predict when they'll break out the results of the luminol test.  Families of the victims are generally reluctant to change theories even after an early suspect is cleared. It's almost unheard of for a victim's family not to insist on the death penalty for the convicted-- so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking that the prevalence of these shows is to make you think that murder is rampant in this country and that capital punishment is the only fitting response to it.†  Moreover, if you watch enough of these (and I have), you start to think about everything out of place in your experience-- the sight of someone walking by herself down a quiet road at dusk; a couple arguing a bit too loud in public; a van that hasn't moved for days-- in terms of the likelihood that it could become part of a future episode of Dateline.  

I intend to avoid an appearance on a murder show myself, which I like to think shouldn't be too hard to do.  I maintain an image of myself as someone not worth the hassle of murdering and intend to keep things that way.  As for committing the act, I recognize that as a presumed human, murder is in the toolkit and must be vigilantly warded against as a recourse in conflicts that arise, but I don't think it's unrealistic of me to promise never to do it.   I understand that some people lack any empathy for others, and for some of them murder might be a fetish or a compulsion or more likely just no big thing and therefore wouldn't automatically be ruled out as an option to help cover up a crime.  Killing people is not my jam, but given the multi-textured, variously shadowed fabric of humanity I can imagine that some folks will be like this.  Other than that, I suppose I can see how someone who feels threatened by someone might react in a panic in a way that puts that threat to an end.  As for crimes of passion, I've experienced rage a few times in my life, usually toward someone on the other end of a telephone conversation (probably sitting in a debt collection office or a customer service center or in the boardrooms that make those wonderful kinds of interactions possible), but while it's never occurred to me to terminate that person's life when I can just hang up on them and get on with my life, I suppose I can stretch my imagination just enough to see how murder in the heat of the moment is a thing.  In short, while I would never consider uncontrollable murder an optimal response, I can still see how given the sloppiness of human nature it sometimes occurs.

The ones I really struggle to understand are the one offs.  The premeditateds.  The schemers.  I do have empathy for creatures other than myself.   I say "Sorry" to people who bump into me.  If I accidentally nudge someone I am traumatized.  Murder is a whole other level of inconvenience that I feel I would be too mortified to perpetrate on someone else.  Aside from that, the presumed nasty messiness and effort involved in the act are prohibitive in themselves.  Never mind the prospect of having your life permanently, irreversibly sidetracked by forced atonement for your bad decision when you're found out.  So I can't get into the head of the person who looks at someone in their life and thinks, "I need you dead, and I need me to get away with it."  

If you are such a person, you need a better plan.  Don't worry about me; I'll find something else to watch.

~~~~~~~~~~

* The Iraq War or the corporate sector shenanigans paving the way to the impending financial meltdown for instance. 

† In truth of course, the actual state of murder in the country is not reflected in the demographics, race, gender of victims in cases selected for murder shows-- not even close.

Mid-summer Alternate Reality Dance Phantasm

Let's confuse the algorithm!

Alice Longyu Gao - Karma is a Witch

The Castaways - Liar, Liar

Lezginka Showgroup (Caucasus) - Water Jug Dance  

The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony (Mike Rish Remix)

Nurullah Çaçan- Superman - Zaouli Dance (Côte d'Ivoire)

Yaeji - Waking Up Down

The Incredible Staggers - Wild Teens

Lido Pimienta - Eso Que Tu Haces

Florin Salam - Eu Sunt Bomba Nucleara

Laurie Anderson - Drum Dance & Smoke Rings (from Home of the Brave)

Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song

Suburban Lawns - Janitor

Slack Bird - Ievan Polkka

Santigold - Run the Road

Odett és a Go Girlz! - Pontos

The Mae Shi - Remarkably Dirty Animals

Eiffel 65 - Living in a Bubble

Cheese and crackers

Legos-- small interconnectable bricks of a material called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene that are manufactured in Denmark, Hungary, Croatia, Germany and China-- can be found (usually by accident, on the floor, barefoot, in the dark) virtually anywhere in the world.  It therefore behooves the cosmopolitan citizen of the planet to have handy a list of ways to express the eventuality of unexpectedly encountering such an object in a variety of languages.  Native English speakers are not really required to say anything other than "Ouch!" on such occasions, but if you express yourself in the idiom of the district you are visiting, the locals will appreciate the effort.  What follows is a collection of ways to express pain in a multitude of tongues.

(Corrections and additions are welcome.  Transliterations are in Italics)

Arabic - !أوه (Auh!) or !آخ (Akh!),

Albanian - Uf!

Basque - Ai! or Aupa!

Chinese - 哎哟 (Āiyō!)

Croatian - Jao! (Yow!)

Danish - Av!

Finnish - Aijai! (Aye-yi!)

French - Aïe! (Ah-EE!)

German - Aua!

Greek - Ωχ! (Okh!) 

Hawaiian - Auē! 

Hungarian - Jaj!  (Yoy!)

 Icelandic -Átjs!

Indonesian (and Malay) - Aduh!

Italian - Ahi! 

Japanese - 痛い!  (Itai!)

Korean - 아야! (Aya!) or 아이구! (Aigu!)

Latin - Heus!

Navajo - Ayáo!

Quechua - Atatáu! or Atatáy!

Romanian - Vai!

Russian (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian) - Oй! (Oy!) 

Spanish - Ay!

Swahili - Eh! (customarily responded to with "Pole!")

Swedish - Aj!

Tagalog - Aray!

Turkish - Ah!

Vietnamese -Ục ục!  (Ook ook!)   

Yiddish - !וי (Oy!)

Yoruba - Yéèpàrìpà! or Yee!

Zulu - Hawu!

I nominate Quechua for the universal expression.