Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Sleep schedule is shot because of this damned cold and ear infection. I napped this afternoon from 5 to 7:30 and am now wired. It’s weird, feel fine right after a nap, then two hours later I hit a wall and feel like hell. Off to the doctor tomorrow!
On another note, I have no idea where everyone went. Might have to send up some smoke signals for MM, DougJ, Tim F., and company.
As the old saying goes, Nothing can be made completely foolproof, because the fools are so ingenious. Suicidal neighbors, too also, per Peter van Buren:
US Air Travel Snarled by One Guy Not a Terrorist
Luckily ISIS has never thought to employ psychotic contractors in a bid to mess with America. ‘Cause that apparently works.The problems in America’s creaky infrastructure started Friday morning when Brian Howard, an FAA contractor, wandered into the radar facility in Aurora, Illinois that serves Chicago’s O’Hare airport, one of the busiest in the world. Howard, seen on surviellance video dragging a suitcase and can of gasoline that did not seem to alarm anyone, then set the center on fire in an apparent suicide attempt. Paramedics said a shirtless Howard was in the process of slicing his throat with a knife when they found him in the basement of the burning facility. The fire destroyed 23 of the center’s 29 computers.
The result was chaos: Massive flight delays and cancellations at one of the nation’s busiest airports could last for up to two weeks. On Sunday, more than 700 flights in and out Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport were canceled, bringing the number of scrubbed flights to 2,000 since Friday’s sabotage. Even as of Monday, three days after the attack, O’ Hare and nearby Midway Airport were running at only 60 percent capacity, mucking up air traffic across the United States and causing millions of dollars and lost revenues.
The attack did not take place without warning. “Take a hard look in the mirror, I have. And this is why I am about to take out ZAU (Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center) and my life,” Howard wrote on Facebook. His account has since been taken down. The Facebook message was posted to Howard’s wall a half-hour after he entered the facility, from inside, and one of Howard’s relatives sent the message to local police.
The incident “is no terrorist act,” the Aurora police quickly announced to the media…
The problem isn’t “security”, as in “keeping track of 100% of the potential evildoers 100% of the time”. The problem is, our Modern Ruling Class have decided it’s not cost-effective to run air traffic control at less than seriously-overstretched capacity, or to pay living wages rather than rely on contract labor, or to provide public services that might convince the meat-cogs who eventually fail under the pressure of the first two factors to reconsider grand suicidal gestures.
But, of course, “we” will now call for more funding to be shifted to SECURITY!, because what if it had been…
Sure, Ms. Franklin is no longer in her twenties, but news of a new album from her makes me happy regardless. I can enjoy the Queen even when she’s singing the Worst Pop Standard Ever:
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Apart from musical debate, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Remember Contessa? I posted a bleg from her person, Karen, a couple of weeks ago:
I’m in a bad situation… I have a 14 year old kitty named Contessa who is diabetic.
I have Rheumatoid Arthritis. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in April… I’d be getting a double mastectomy. My whole world stopped from that moment and was only about the cancer. I gave Contessa as much of myself as I could but it wasn’t what she deserved or needed…
When I went in for surgery, I had something set up where a pet sitting person would feed Contessa, inject the insulin and do the litter. Between the hospital stay and the rehab to rebuild my strength it was almost three weeks til I got home. She was very angry at me but I tried as hard as I could to make it up to her. I had someone that was still handling the care of her because I was weak as a kitten but I thought eventually I’d be able to take care of her again…
I am getting help in paying for the care of her but that can’t last forever. My RA has progressed with a vengeance to the point where I’ve fallen three times in two weeks and I need to use a rollator everywhere. Taking care of myself is difficult since I live by myself in independent living and I have no help. The help I’m getting to pay for the cat care can’t go on forever and I can’t take care of her myself so I’ve come to the realization that I need to give Contessa up.
Another BJ commentor has volunteered to re-home Contessa, but Karen needs some help to get Contessa’s medical care up to date. She’s set up a GoFundMe site, here:
…Between the vet bills, the food, the insulin and the pet care person I’ve had to pay to take care of my Contessa, the amounts are reaching $500 already and that was just in 30 days. I’m on disability and I’m having to put all these costs on my credit card. I’m also going to have to reimburse the G-dsend who will be driving here from New Jersey and take Contessa to her new home…
Any help you can spare would be much appreciated!
WTF is going on with the Secret Service:
The man who jumped the White House fence this month and sprinted through the front door made it much farther into the building than previously known, overpowering one Secret Service officer and running through much of the main floor, according to three people familiar with the incident.
An alarm box near the front entrance of the White House designed to alert guards to an intruder had been muted at what officers believed was a request of the usher’s office, said a Secret Service official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The officer posted inside the front door appeared to be delayed in learning that the intruder, Omar Gonzalez, was about to burst through. Officers are trained that, upon learning of an intruder on the grounds, often through the alarm boxes posted around the property, they must immediately lock the front door.
After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters. He then ran into the 80-foot-long East Room, an ornate space often used for receptions or presidential addresses.
Are they underfunded? Understaffed? Or are they just plain bad at their jobs?
I just joined the public beta of the Ello, which seems to be a wannabe hipster alternative to Facebook. Seeing as I never got Facebook, and despite my utter lack of hipster-tude (now and forever, amen), I thought I’d see if it made any sense to me.
It doesn’t, at least not yet, but I thought I’d try it out as a kind of public commonplace book. And then I thought that, given that I’m going to be spending the next couple of years in the bunker trying to get a couple of large projects actually done (finally getting going on a long promised book, for one), this seemed like a way to keep a conversation going here, which I hope you won’t mind too much.*
So here goes: the first of what might be just one — or who knows how many — brief notes on things that I encounter on my way to doing (or avoiding) the work I ought to be accomplishing.
Giving that a try (again, and let me hammer this point, with no promises of consistency) here’s something. I’ve just started in on a book that’s been on the periphery of my “hot could you not have read this” list for a long time, Leo Marx’s classic, The Machine in the Garden. (Oxford University Press, 1964, 2000)
Very early — first half dozen of pages or so in, he starts to draw the distinction between the mass-culture version of the pastoral ideal and the one expressed in foundational works of American literature.
Marx was writing (as he notes in an afterward) out of an biography that included a Harvard education in the last class to graduate before the US entry into World War II, and service in the US Navy that ended a few months after the bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Marx’s trajectory from ’37-’45 exactly matches that of my father, by the way; Marx and dad were friends, which is an odd the-world-is-much-smaller-than-it-appears grace note to all this. There’s a story there, or actually more than one, that Marx told me the one time we’ve met. Perhaps for another post..)
Ideas about the tricky relationship between the facts of the unbelievably rapid technological transformation of American life from independence, and the dream (fantasy?) or vision of life within unspoiled nature take on particular force in the wake of the bomb and the lived memory of industrialized war. It’s no wonder, it seems to me, that Marx as a literary and cultural scholar would wish to “describe and evaluate the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience.”
What did stop me in my tracks, though, as I read my way through his first chapter — “Sleepy Hollow, 1844” — is the degree that his account of the cynical, for-popular-consumption use of the pastoral ideal maps directly onto our political landscape, right here and now, more than half a century after Marx published the book. Just check out this passage:
“The first, or sentimental kind [of pastoralism] is difficult to define or even locate because it is an expression less of thought than of feeling. It is widely diffused n our culture, insinuating itself into many kinds of behavior…An inchoate longing for a more “natural” environment enters into the contemptuous attitude that many Americans adopt toward urban life (with the result that we neglect our cities and desert them for the suburbs). Wherever people turn away from the hard social and technological realities this obscure sentiment is likely to be at work. We see it in our politics, in the “localism” invoked to oppose an adequate national system of education, in the power of the farm bloc in Congress, in the special economic favor shown to “farming” through government subsidies, and in the state electoral systems that allow the rural population to retain a share of political power grossly out of proportion to its size….” (p. 5)
There’s a hint of datedness to that passage. But if Marx’s concern about the ’50s growth of the suburbs doesn’t quite track with the issues central to the urban-exurban divide today, still, look at how well he captures the basic shape of American politics today. We’re five weeks out from an election in a country that in many ways is utterly transformed since he wrote that passage. But in just as many ways, we’re still stuck in the same damn cycle of stupid. The point being, of course, that old power, like an old habit, hangs on with the grim urgency of a nicotine jones. Which, in our current predicament, is depressing as hell.
*And if this does bug you, I’ll be happy to refund every cent you spent on this stuff…
Image: J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken, 1839.