Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Stepped away from events to watch the latest episode of Severance. I see that Schumer got eight Nevilles Chamberlain to vote for cloture along with him. I could make the obvious Severance-related joke about wanting to have a chip in my brain so I can skip to 2028, but this meme that references a different hit TV show is more fitting:
A bit dark, maybe, but what isn’t these days?
Open thread.
“Ah! Well, nevertheless,” remains undefeated, it seems.
From over here it feels like something has snapped between me and the home country. I’m now a small craft adrift from the big boat. More numb than grieving so far. The big, immediate anxiety for me is financial: I rely on US-based clients, and higher tax and a weaker dollar could leave me unable to meet bills over here even if I keep all of them. I’m already looking for more UK-based work and talking to an immigration lawyer about naturalization.
I’m worried about my trans relatives, about my parents’ healthcare, about my in-laws and other loved ones who are green card holders or recently naturalized Americans — Stephen Miller has made it clear he wants an office of denaturalization. I’m worried about my daughter’s US citizenship rights and mine, and so much more besides.
I hate “self-care” talk — nowadays it smacks of influencers and elaborate bubble baths and related bullshit. But I’ve been reminding myself all day to complete basic tasks, so I’ll share those reminders with you:
You really cannot give from an empty cup.
If you are in a dark and completely hopeless place, please follow John’s advice from earlier and call for help.
The LGBT National Hotline: (888) 843-4564
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255
Tell us in the comments, please, one good, non-politics thing you saw today – anything that gave you even a picosecond of relief. Here’s mine: Monty and the current regular stray I’m feeding, Crusty Oliver, seem to be on a foes-to-bros character arc. This morning they were sleeping on the patio table in proximity to one another. This is a photo of them hanging out on my garden shed from the other day:
I’ll get that wily little scruffball to the vet yet.
"Banality is like entropy; everything collapses into it in the end. And so the organization premised on relentless self-congratulation for the capacity to offend leaves us with this: respect mothers." https://t.co/KeUAKwDkoe
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 17, 2023
Yes, you *have* heard the name Bari Weiss before, at least if you’ve skimmed the posts sharing my unhealthy compulsion to mock Bari and all her cronies. On the other hand, their ‘ideas’ are so weightless and insubstantial that perhaps they slide off your minds, unregretted.
It’s the end of the weekend, after one chaotic week and facing into another, and mocking the deserving is as much energy as we can spare… (Bonus: Elon Musk’s most mock-worthy ex!) From Kerry Howley at NYMag, “Scenes From the End of the Sexual Revolution”:
The question “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed” contains within itself a number of other questions (failed at what? Failed whom? Why are we talking about this?), precisely none of which were answered Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where 1,600 plaid-skirted e-girls and be- khakied normies and the aspiring canceled paid as much as $165 a seat to hear a British ideologue, a deft Dimes Square shape-shifter, an ex-Muslim podcaster, and Techno Mechanicus’s mother debate the resolution. You can’t really fault the organizer, even if the organizer was Bari Weiss. It ought to have worked. An ill-defined proposition, half of Red Scare, a random British lady very upset about BDSM, and Grimes? No notes…
The alt-right’s inchoate longing for sexual repression in the absence of religion remains mysterious. Fifty-six percent of the audience, polled beforehand by text at an event featuring four ambitious women and moderated by a queer married media mogul, agreed that the sexual revolution had “failed.” The debate was drawn from Louise Perry’s book, serviceably titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which takes as its presumed reader an extremely credulous liberal raised up in isolation from any information beyond the feminist blogosphere circa 2004 and who needs to be informed, at truly extraordinary length, that men are, on average, physically stronger than women. Women have been pressured to “fuck like men,” a situation that leaves alpha males very happy but all women depressed, abused, vulnerable, and commodified. If there is nothing here that went unsaid by Kay Hymowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers in the dark heyday of the hookup-culture think piece, at least everything sounds better in a British accent.
Sunday Night Funnies Open Thread (Extremely On-Line Social Media Edition)Post + Comments (99)
Let’s review:
The first confirmed COVID-19 death on US soil occurred on March 1, 2020. four p.m. EDT on April 2, 2020, the United States’ cumulative coronavirus death toll hit 5,808. Four days later, that number crossed the 10,000 line. There’s a long history behind the saying that while any one death is a tragedy many deaths —a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million— become statistics, but it certainly applies now: the American pandemic has entered its statistical phase.
This much is known about the tragic start to America’s epidemic. The first person to die was a man in his fifties, who had been hosptialized in King County, Washington. His name was not been released at the time, but it’s possible to reconstruct a part of his story: he was someone in the middle of a life who, only a week or two before its end, had no reason to think he faced his last days on earth. That’s a story we can tell ourselves; a loss we can recognize; a human being, however anonymous, we can mourn.
That one death is a marker in more than just timing. Health officials noted one key fact about that particular case. The dead man had no connection to the original coronavirus outbreak in China. He caught his disease here, from someone else in the United States who was already infected, in what is called “community transmission.” President Trump reacted to the news of his death within hours—by imposing travel restrictions on Iran. That gesture was preceded by reckless inattention, to be followed by a disastrous series of performative decisions by the Trump administration that has produced the current best-case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 Americans dead by summer.
It’s virtually impossible to grasp the losses implicit in such large numbers. When quantities break the bounds of ordinary experience they begin to disappear from view. That’s the challenge: to see into what’s happening now, to extract from mere numbers both memory and meaning.
Here’s one way to do so: on September 11, 2001 2,996 people were killed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC. As I write this on April 3, the US has already suffered almost two 9/11s.
Another: between 1956, when the first American died in the conflict, and 2006, when the last American fatality attributed to the war was recorded—half a century–58,220 members of the US armed services died in the Vietnam War. COVID-19 has climbed to ten percent of that casualty count in a single month.
Looking forward, if the most optimistic current projections hold, coronavirus will bring between thirty and seventy 9/11s to the United States, or two to six Vietnams. At those heights, the sheer scale of the misery again turns particular memories (where I was when the towers fell, what it felt like to run my fingers along the wall) into abstractions.
And beyond such numbers, should the best case scenarios fail to pan out, we’ll find ourselves in territory at the limits of national mourning. It took 405,000 American lives to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And should the US epidemic wholly overwhelms the still-patchwork effort to contain it, the only remaining national memory to measure our tragedy against will be America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, in which an estimated 750,000 Americans lost their lives.
Back on the first of March, just one man lay dying of this awkwardly named new disease. Those who knew him could mourn him in his human singularity. Glimpsed now, through the lens of almost six thousand more dead, he is the unknown soldier in this viral campaign.
More than three 9/11s.
And counting.
Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562
The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus UnitsPost + Comments (83)
I was raised by a guy who had a really hard life as a farm boy, dealt with a lot of death, and pretty much was never fazed by much during his career as a small town doctor. When he retired, his colleague, who was an incredibly talented physician, good friend, and fitness buff, said that whenever there was a crisis, everyone felt better when my old man showed up, because his indomitable confidence made them all think everything would be OK. Dad gave the eulogy for his younger friend after he died in his 60’s of a very malevolent form of cancer.
Two of my brothers had lymphoma in their mid-40s. One of them almost died on the operating table as they were inserting his port prior to treatment. The other had complications that required chest surgery and two weeks in a specialty hospital. Both were in perfect health before diagnosis, and, in each case, their lymphoma was diagnosed late because doctors seeing hoofprints were late to see the zebras. They are both fine today. My mom is currently fighting lung cancer even though she never smoked, was on no medicine, and was fit and flexible when she was diagnosed at 79.
Dad is still around and he was the voice we listened to when my brothers and mom got sick. We first got sad and angry about the diagnosis, then we listened to the experts, informed ourselves as best we could from reliable information sources, made our best treatment decisions, and moved the fuck on with the ugly work of dealing with cancer.
What we sure as hell didn’t do, by nature and by conscious decision, was panic. My Dad is pretty easy going with his kids, by my God I couldn’t imagine the anger and withering disapproval he would have had if any of us had panicked. Because everyone dies. And someone dies every moment of every day. Only blithering idiots think they can dodge death, or that there’s some justice in who the grim reaper chooses to hack into pieces. Panic wouldn’t save anyone. Panic would make us stupid, and we all needed to use our brains if my brothers and mom were going to live.
It’s with that perspective that I view the current virus panic. We can’t do anything about the cowards in charge (except work to vote them out), but we certainly can avoid being infected by panic. We can also plan for something good to come, and make sure that we hang every stupid, cowardly move they make firmly around their over-entitled, moron necks.
So, put your makeup on and fix your hair up pretty, because you’re alive today and odds are that you’ll be here tomorrow, no matter what any of the pants shitters in DC have to say.
Lamar Alexander’s rationale for the preordained conclusion that will probably be ratified today is that Trump’s behavior was “inappropriate” but didn’t rise to an impeachable offense. “Inappropriate” is what a high school teacher tells a student cussing in class. It’s what a manager tells an employee who wears jeans on a day that isn’t casual Friday. It’s not the word for the rampant criminal activity perpetrated in this White House.
We all know that the next time Republicans control the House, a Democratic President will be impeached, for something. And we know that if a Democrat wins the White House, he or she will be picked to death about minutiae like clothing, attitude and perceived slights. We know that having a Senate majority will mean that some of our agenda will get passed, but not all, because some of the same Democrats who appear poised to vote to acquit Trump have to appease Republicans.
And all this in a country with a clear majority wanting the Democrats to rule. As the X-rays clearly show, this was broken long ago — the vote to acquit will just make it clear to everyone: IOKIYAR is the law of the land.
Trump wanted to get rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, ?@PhilipRucker? and ?@CarolLeonnig? report in their new book. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump said. https://t.co/BzXfUyGZiA
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 15, 2020
I’m kidding, of course — we know most of this crap already. But kudos to the authors on the timing of their release…
President Trump reveals himself as woefully uninformed about the basics of geography, incorrectly telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.” He toys with awarding himself the Medal of Freedom.
And, according to a new book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, Trump does not seem to grasp the fundamental history surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor…
“A Very Stable Genius” — a 417-page book named after Trump’s own declaration of his superior knowledge — is full of similarly vivid details from Trump’s tumultuous first three years as president, from his chaotic transition before taking office to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation and final report…
The book by the two longtime Post reporters — who were part of the team that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Trump and Russia — was obtained ahead of its scheduled release Tuesday.
Many of the key moments reported in the book are rife with foreign policy implications, portraying a novice commander in chief plowing through normal protocols and alarming many both inside the administration and in other governments.
Early in his administration, for instance, Trump is eager to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin — so much so, the authors write, “that during the transition he interrupts an interview with one of his secretary of state candidates” to inquire about his pressing desire: “When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?” he asks…
In spring 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.
“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”
The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”
The book, the duo writes in an author’s note, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 200 sources, corroborated, when possible, by calendars, diary entries, internal memos and even private video recordings. (Trump himself had initially committed to an interview for the book, the authors write, but ultimately declined, amid an escalating war with the media).
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday…
Potential Book Club Material: “A Very Stable Genius”Post + Comments (103)