A great free lecture at Richland Library on Friday

Leave a reply

History teacher Mike Burgess speaking at the museum last year.

What does Brad do when he’s not blogging? Well, lots of stuff. Some of it involves work for ADCO‘s clients, one of which is the Relic Room.

For the past year I’ve been particularly wrapped up in a project I particularly enjoy, which is arranging, coordinating and publicizing the frequent live programs on military history that we call Noon Debriefs (they used to be called “Lunch and Learns,” but there was no actual lunch, so it was changed).

They are free lectures featuring such speakers as veterans, historians and others about some aspect of military history bearing on South Carolina. This is one of my favorite things to work on, because I always learn from them. They’ve been a bit of a challenge, though, since last June, since the room usually used for lectures at the museum has been tied up by renovations.

But that’s been an opportunity to reach out to the wider community, and Richland Library has generously let us use the Theater room at their main location, which is a fantastic venue for such programs. To simplify the transition, we relied at first on museum staff as speakers, but we’ve recently resumed our usual practice of having quest speakers from outside. There, we’ve presented such lectures as:

  • Joe Long, curator of education at the museum, on American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton, stressing prisoners with South Carolina connections.
  • Joe again, talking about “The Unpronounceable Patriot,” Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and his SC involvement during the Revolutionary War.
  • On this past Veterans Day, Fritz Hamer, former curator of history at the Relic Room, spoke about the Battle of Ia Drang at that time of year in 1965. That’s the battle that the film “We Were Soldiers” was about.
  • Joe again on “Wade Hampton’s Great Beefsteak Raid” in 1864, which may have been the biggest cattle-rustling episode in American history.
  • Moss Blachman (the first at the library with a guest speaker) on his experiences as an Air Force intelligence officer in Vietnam in 1965-66. This was a return engagement after a presentation Moss made at the museum last year.

We’ve got another great guest speaker tomorrow at noon. Mike Burgess, who has in recent years been dubbed the best history teacher in the state more than once, will talk about the increasing difficulty of teaching the subject in public schools amid America’s roaring political battles over our past.

Mike addresses the subject quite fearlessly, as I can tell you based on the similar lecture he gave at the museum last year. And the past year, of course, has only made his job more difficult, as the Kulturkampf flames have been fanned ever higher.

Anyway, since his topic is the very nature of history itself, and why it is essential in a functioning republic, I figured this would be a good time to give y’all a heads-up on these programs. I assure you it will be an informative one.

We’ll continue to present such fascinating programs at Richland Library in the coming months, and perhaps even after we get the Education Room at the museum back. And in May, we’ll branch out further, with a couple of programs at the Cayce/West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Libary.

If you want to learn, as I have been doing, come on out. Oh, and we’ve started offering something extra the last few times — a free tour of the Relic Room itself, following the program. If you haven’t been to the museum before, you should definitely take advantage of that. I particularly urge you to check out the Vietnam exhibit in the Cistern Gallery (which is one reason so many of our recent programs have emphasized the experiences of South Carolina veterans in the conflict)….

Moss Blachman spoke at the library Feb. 14 about serving as an intelligence officer in Vietnam.

‘Abby Someone… I’m almost sure that was the name…”

Leave a reply

Screenshot

I’m having my annual physical next Monday, so yesterday I went in to have blood drawn. You know, the standard “fasting lab.”

The fun thing about having medical tests done these days is that you don’t have to wait to learn the results. You can diagnose yourself, and make bets whether it will turn out you were right when you see the medico. I could have seen them last night, but I forgot to look until I was eating lunch today.

I like the way they inform you if any of the results are just a bit off. Off course, it would seize my attention even more effectively if the “ABNORMAL” were in a red box rather than plain buff, and it flashed, and was accompanied by a loud klaxon sound.

It would cause one to respond, “I say: What’s all this then?” And you might even click and look at the results. In my case, I’d have opened it without the warning sign, because I’m always curious about a couple of the data points. And yes, it turns out I am still low on both sodium and choride (“abnormally” so on the chloride), so I can keep having all the salt I want. In fact, I’d best get right to it.

As for the “ABNORMAL” bits, well, they’re kinda dull when you look at them. Oh, maybe one day one of them will be something bad, but you can’t tell by looking at them. Or I can’t.

Anyway, the point of this post was that it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies.

Enjoy.

Behold my fig tree grove!

3 Replies

And now, today, behold — leaves!

Well, the jury is still out on whether I properly pruned (or destroyed), the two fig trees in my yard.

But while I’ll be very sorry if I killed them, particularly the one my uncle gave me not long before his passing, some small comfort is on its way — thanks to our friend Scout.

OK, you can probably see the leaf structure better here…

You’ll recall I ran into Scout at the recent demonstration. I mentioned to her the recent pruning incident and my concerns about it, and she said she would be glad to let me have some cuttings from the trees in her yard. Which was welcome news, because I’d seen those trees in the summertime, and they were just exploding with figs.

Whereas my trees produce barely a dozen figs each per year. You can’t feast on them, or make fig preserves, which I love. (Although in their defense, they do provide a nice, moderate snack now and then.)

So I went over last weekend, and Scout and her husband not only let me take some cuttings, but gave me a container of root accelerant they had in their garage.

I only took four, but I researched rather carefully how to turn cuttings into trees, and amazingly, I think maybe I did it right (with my wife’s careful guidance).

Take a look at this grove, this plantation, this forest of growth I’ve got going on. I put four sticks, with a slight greenness at the tips, into the soil, on Ash Wednesday. See below. The image at the top is a mere four days later, and you can see identifiable leaves coming out at the top.

At this rate, before long, I’ll have enough fig leaves to open a clothing boutique in the Garden of Eden. Can fig preserves be far behind?

Ash Wednesday: Mere sticks, with the slightest bulge of green at their ends…

 

 

DeMarco: USAID merits reform, not demolition

2 Replies

The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

I’m no foreign policy expert, but I have an advantage over most Americans trying to understand the shutdown of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I have seen its work overseas. In February 2020, I was part of a small group of doctors and medical students from the University of South Carolina who traveled to Tanzania to work in one of the nation’s major referral hospitals.

In my two weeks there, I discovered that Tanzania’s health system is decades behind ours. Due to the lack of medical infrastructure, Tanzanians suffer and die of diseases like HIV and TB at much higher rates than Americans. I met an American couple, both doctors, who had chosen to work for several years in a clinic run by Baylor University dedicated to the prevention of HIV and the care of children and families already infected. Baylor had built a welcoming, modern clinic on the campus of the hospital. One of the funders of the clinic was USAID.

This young couple and their small children were not part of a “criminal organization” as Elon Musk posted on Twitter on February 2nd, nor were they working for one that was run by “radical lunatics” as Donald Trump said the next day. These were exemplary, highly trained Americans serving sacrificially far from home, in a way that should make us all proud.

It is Trump’s prerogative to shape agencies according to his governing philosophy. It is reasonable for him to roll back programs that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion as he said we would in his campaign. I may disagree with the hysteria over transgender Americans that Trump was glad to stoke. I may support the simple idea that diverse groups are usually stronger and more productive than homogeneous ones. But Trump won the election, and I respect his right to make changes that will perturb me.

What I object to is a purge of an organization that is so important to America’s standing in the world. USAID has more than 80 missions in approximately 130 countries. As of this writing, all of them have been closed. USAID workers, both those devoting a few years like my friends in Tanzania, and others who have spent their careers overseas, are now locked out of their offices, unsure of their next paycheck, and trying to make contingency plans thousands of miles from home.

There is a sensible way to reform USAID. Conservatives have long complained that USAID is too autonomous and that some programs, such as funding for Palestinian NGOs, were not aligned with American interests. This is a legitimate policy dispute. Some would argue that we should provide humanitarian assistance to families ravaged by a war they had no part in making, others would argue that too much of the aid would end up in the hands of Hamas.

Let’s have those debates. Let’s consider the pros and cons of putting USAID under the control of the State Department. But let’s do it without upending the lives of American citizens abroad or putting the lives of our allies at risk.

Endangering the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is particularly egregious. PEPFAR was created in 2003 by George W. Bush and has been the most successful anti-HIV effort on the planet, saving millions of lives and preventing untold numbers of cases of HIV, including the most devastating, maternal to infant transmission.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued waivers for critical humanitarian assistance, but there is much confusion about what the waivers will cover and how the new funding streams will operate. It is certain that many patients’ daily HIV medication supply will be disrupted.

Any interruption in PEPFAR services could be disastrous. One of the weaknesses of current HIV therapy is that when patients stop taking their medication, the virus can become resistant and much more difficult to treat, resulting in complications and even death.

HIV has, thankfully, been reduced to a controllable chronic disease here at home. Most people who are diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. can live a normal lifespan. I have about a dozen HIV-positive patients in my practice. All of them have their HIV controlled with a simple daily regimen. Many of us have forgotten what it was like at the peak of the epidemic in the 1990s when thousands of young people were dying, emaciated and terrified. But HIV is still poorly controlled in some of the developing world such as sub-Saharan Africa and India, where USAID is doing lifesaving work.

I’m disappointed by my evangelical Christian brethren, most of whom voted for Trump. Churches usually ask for a 10% tithe. USAID’s budget is less than 1% of the total budget of the United States. The vast majority goes to work that Jesus asks us to do in the 25th chapter of Matthew – feeding the hungry, inviting in the stranger, caring for the sick. So much for Christian nationalism when it comes to how we treat our neighbors around the world.

All of this was easily predictable and preventable. But that’s no concern for Trump and Musk, who seem locked in a battle for who can demonstrate the least empathy. The shutdown of USAID exposes the current administration as incompetent and cruel.

A version of this column appeared in the February 19th, 2025 edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.

The Doctors DeMarco: Paul and his daughter Grace, then a 4th-year medical student, in Tanzania…

We’ll be killing a guy by firing squad in two days

14 Replies

A communist insurgent is blindfolded and executed by firing squad, Cuba 1956./Wikipedia

We’ve discussed this before, but now we have a fresh reason. From last week:

COLUMBIA — South Carolina’s death penalty history could be rewritten March 7 if condemned state inmate Brad Sigmon is executed by firing squad, as he has chosen.

Though the firing squad is authorized as an execution method in five states, it has been used only three times since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976. All three took place in Utah, with the last one in 2010.

Sigmon, 67, has picked a shooting death over electrocution or lethal injection, according to documents he filed Feb. 21.

He was given a death sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, Gladys and David Larke, at their home in Taylors in April 2001. Gladys Larke was 59 and her husband 62…

When we’ve talked about firing squads in the past, I’ve brought it up in large part because of people saying how “barbaric” it is. Which, within the context of other such practices in which our state engages, is nonsense. I’ve gone into that before:

Between the lines of the reporting and comments I’m hearing what I perceive as a flavor of “Firing squad? How awful! How barbaric!”

To which I’m going, Yeah, so? My God, who wouldn’t choose that? I know I would. In fact, of all the forms of execution current in this country, the firing squad is by far the least objectionable from the point of view of the condemned. It’s quicker and more certain than hanging.

And to me, lethal injection is by far the worst, the most blood-chillingly terrifying, the most cruel and unusual way to take a man’s life.

It’s so cold, so sterile, so deliberate, so clinical, so pseudo-nonviolent and therefore most morally chilling. Like, we’re going to kill you, casually and dispassionately, in a staged setting that makes a mockery of the healing process.

This, of course, is related to my fear of giving blood, which I overcome every time I go to the Red Cross. It’s the cold, clinical, deliberateness of that that has always chilled me. What if the point of slipping that needle into my vein was to kill me, deliberately and legally, with all due ceremony?

Maybe it doesn’t strike you that way, but it seems the most evil, Room 101 thing you could do to another human being.

But a firing squad, the straightforward, quick, honestly retributive violence of it, is to me the most morally defensible form of capital punishment. I don’t believe in ANY form of execution, but if I were king and had to choose for someone else, or if I were given the devil’s own choice of deciding for myself, that’s definitely the way I’d go.

When I started my newspaper career, executions were banned in every state in the union. We had followed other civilized countries (and in the ’70s, this was a civilized country, disco aside) in putting that behind us. Then Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah in 1977 — by firing squad.

You young folks might find it hard to imagine, but it was a huge deal when the country took that big, atavistic step. Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, which was made into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. I never read the book or saw the movie. I felt I knew enough about it.

The most vivid memory for me comes from a time in, I believe, 1979, when I went to Death Row in Nashville (at the old state prison that looked like something out of an old movie, or perhaps a nightmare) to interview some of the condemned. After a long interview with one, I paused in front of the cell of another of the condemned and chatted for a moment. He had a picture of Gilmore attached to his cell wall. This prisoner agreed to my taking a picture of him. It’s pretty creepy, and if I run across that image, I’ll share it with you. The guy I was talking to was standing in exactly the same position in his cell as Gilmore was in the picture on the wall.

Oh, by the way, before you folks who think it’s A-OK for the state to kill people by the numbers cry that I’m “romanticizing” the condemned or ignoring what they did to their innocent victims, you’re wrong. Those two guys I just mentioned were as bad as anyone I’ve ever met. The guy posing like Gilmore wanted his wife dead, and had hired the guy I interviewed at length to kill her — which he and an accomplice did, in a particularly brutal and inept manner. She was still barely alive when, after raping and choking her, they stuffed her into the trunk of a car and left the car in the parking lot of the main Memphis public library, where she was found dead days later.

They both got the chair for it, and if ever anyone deserved it, they did. But whatever anyone deserves, the state has no business degrading itself to their level by killing them — not when they’re safely locked away, and present no danger to the public.

But if the state is going to do it, the firing squad is the way. At least that way, we all know what it is we’re doing, and no one can pretend it’s “humane.”

Well, now I know how to say it (I guess)…

1 Reply

This kind of cracked me up.

This morning I was rereading one of my Patrick O’Brian novels over breakfast (yes, I AM reading other things, but I LIKE these), and saw a reference to HMS Indefatigable (the 1784 version, not the 1901 version that was sunk at the Battle of Jutland).

Of course, the ship’s name is a word I’ve read and understood my whole life, but have never had occasion to say out loud. So I thought I’d take a second and find out how to say it out loud.

I’ve found YouTube helpful with such things in the past, but the voice telling me how to say the English word doesn’t usually sound like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

Or maybe like this guy below on “The IT Crowd.” Anyway, now I know how to say it, if I ever want to do so while speaking on ze pheun…

I’m guessing it was like this

3 Replies

Screenshot

Someone this morning sent me something that I had to look for in my email Inbox, which I seldom visit. The Boston Globe regularly sends me headlines via email, so I saw this:

Elon Musk is not a Cabinet member. But as he addressed Trump’s meeting, it was clear where real power resided.

I didn’t have time to read it, but I did have a reaction: Trump has a Cabinet? (You know I haven’t been keeping up with such details lately.)

The idea of what Trump’s Cabinet would look like, all assembled together, now that he’s totally off the leash intrigued me for a second. But I almost immediately realized the answer to that. See the exclusive video below. Of course, it’s not exactly the same. Gov. Le Petomane was hilarious. There’s nothing funny about President Donald J. Trump or what he and his pals are doing to the country and the world…

Say buh-bye to those Google ads

6 Replies

Screenshot

For years I tolerated those Google Adsense ads on the blog. Even though they were not a very rewarding proposition for me. Every few months, whenever their Scroogish algorithm things added what they owed me up to more than $100, they would send that amount to my checking account.

Yeah, $100. For every few months. I would not sell a solitary ad here for anything close to that rock-bottom price for one month, much less for several, and this was a bunch of random ads, not merely one.

But… it cost me no effort at all — I didn’t have to sell the ad, post it on the blog, send out invoices or anything, really. So, as another blogger persuaded me, why say no to, say, another buck every couple of days if it cost no sweat on my part?

So I allowed the ads in, and they were no trouble. I even sort of enjoyed watching the way the AI worked, posting ads that the algorithm imagined were related to something I had put on the blog. Occasionally, the stuff was tacky or even offensive (to me; I didn’t like seeing an ad favoring some political movement or politician I disapproved of appear here, just because I had recently mentioned said movement or pol). But it was more often amusing. Here are some of the comments I’ve made here about them in the past.

But then, Adsense started going overboard. First, the banner ads got bigger, so that you couldn’t even see my top headline on the first screen. Then, a year or so ago, they started with the pop-ups:

Screenshot

I almost ended the relationship right then. But I thought it would be trouble to figure out how, and decided to wait awhile.

Then, the finally went too far: They started putting multiple ads in the main body copy, as opposed to just one, as they used to do. Often, multiple copies of the same ad. You’ve seen this on plenty of other sites — which has increasingly destroyed any enjoyment I get out of reading those sites. And they seemed to have a special mad, destructive genius for placing these nuisances right in the middle of an important transition in the text, not only making it ugly but ruining the flow of the argument. Like, you know, why did I even try?

So I’ve had it. I closed my account today. They said the ads would be gone within 24 hours:

Screenshot

They’d better be. Because I don’t want to waste time trying again to do something that ought to be easy, although they do their best to make it look complicated.

In the meantime, though I have carefully placed my own relevant images where they needed to be in the text to explain my points, they will likely be interspersed with rude, random ads that make the whole post look like visual gibberish. When I saw them place one between the last words of my last post and the image of the late Chris Carrizales that the words went with, that really was the last straw. That’s what made me act today…

Screenshot

Thanks for letting me know about this public servant, Sam

8 Replies

Earlier one of our friends posted a long and thoughtful comment on a previous post, and among many other points he noted the importance of “investigative reporting” to “help restore trust” in our society.

Well, yes and no. The investigative stuff is important, or at least it used to be. Woodward and Bernstein have been heroes of mine since the start of my career in the mid-70s. But I hope you’ll notice that it doesn’t mean as much today. Woodstein reported the truth about Watergate, and Nixon resigned rather that be impeached. Media expose outrage after outrage after outrage about Trump (which doesn’t take much investigation, since he boasts to the world of his sins — he is even impeached, twice, and gets conficted of crimes.

And what’s the public’s reaction? They cheer at his rallies, and elect him again.

And you know, an overemphasis on investigative journalism in my generation — the post-Watergate generation — has something to do with that. Every cub reporter (or at least, most of the ambitious ones) entering newsrooms since 1974  has come in busting to rip the cover off public officials, and they’ve done a lot of it, constantly. (I told one reporter who wanted to drop everything to chase after a lead because he wanted to “hit a home run” that he needed to stop swinging for the fences, and concentrate on getting on base. I wanted him to cover his beat. Even in those days of full newsrooms, I was never fully satisfied with my people’s coverage of the everyday stuff.)

And you know what resulted from all that fervent investigation? The public at large came to believe that that was all government was about — corruption. Say “They’re all a bunch of crooks” to the average guy, and he’ll nod his head.

Journalists knew better. We were out there covering public officials up close. Sure, there were slimeballs out there, but we knew most of them were decent, honest people doing their best to serve the public. But that’s not the way we covered the public sphere. Decent, honest folks don’t give you home runs.

That’s why I appreciated a feature we had at The State when I first arrived in the late 80s, back when had not only plenty of people but loads of space. We had a weekly page in the special Sunday section that included in-depth stories about the past week, the opinion pages, and related stuff (back then, all papers had these sections, and gave them names like “Perspective,” “Impact,” “Insight,” “Review” and such.) In that section, my team (governmental affairs) had a full page to fill about goverment and politics.

And we had a centerpiece feature on it that in the newsroom we called “bureaucrat of the week.” That’s because we considered it a pain in the posterior. We passed the duty around among the staff, everybody having to write one, and each reporter groaning when his turn came up again. (They’d rather be out there swinging at the fence for something on the front page.)

But I thought it was great. It was a weekly profile of one of the thousands of little-known people out there working hard at state agencies, explaining what these people did and why they did it instead of earning more money out in the private sector.

It was an example of a type of public journalism (or civic journalism, or community journalism; it was called different things and defined different ways, but I tend to think of it in communitarian terms), a movement that arose in the 90s because some editors were smart enough to realize that people were getting a skewed view of the world. It was about covering all that went on in a community, not just what went wrong, giving the public a full, holistic picture of reality.

Well, it was a noble goal, and I believed in it, but I seldom really practiced it day-to-day. Even in those flush days, resources — people, space and time — were finite, and you had to cover the plane that crashed, couldn’t afford to cover all of the thousands that land safely.

I say all that to explain why I appreciated this Facebook post by Sam Johnson, a young local attorney who was a close aide to Steve Benjamin during his years as mayor of Columbia. He wrote this about a neighbor of ours who died this week:

True public servants lie in the shadows. You often never know their name. Or, that they were even there. They weren’t there for that reason…for you to know them or the recognition. In today’s world, these types of public servants are rare breeds. They serve because they believe in something bigger than themselves.
Chris Carrizales was a true public servant. He was a brother. He was a friend. He didn’t care about the accolades. He wasn’t posting every cool interaction he had for the clout. And, while he was often in the shadows serving our country and serving Columbia, he very much deserves his flowers.
And, when you are serving together, others might just see the highs…but true brothers see your lows. Chris was there for the lows…with you. My wife, just yesterday, reminded me of several.
Chris worked in the last two mayoral administrations here in Columbia. In short, he was family. He never met a stranger. He cared. He did the work. Often it was an all day, more than a mere 9-to-5 requirement. Like I said, he believed in service. And, he did it all with style, grace, and class. My brother was special and he will truly be missed.

There was a similar accolade posted on the city website.

I didn’t know Chris Carrizales, but I miss him now. And I appreciate Sam for taking the time to bring him, and his years of devoted service, to our attention.

 

Giving the birds a chance

5 Replies

This just in…

I complain mightily about the squirrels that regularly hog the seed in the bird feeder, despite all my countermeasures, and I always rush out to chase them off when I see them.

But I enjoyed this peaceful scene a few minutes ago.

Finding the feeder empty this morning, I replenished it, thereby making it extremely attractive to squirrels… and, you know, birds.

But I just looked out there, and was pleased to see this guy stretched out on the deck (on a cushion, of course), sunbathing.

And of course, the feeder crowded with birds, just a few feet away.

I thought this was impressively magnanimous of him, kicking back for awhile and letting the birds have a chance at that fresh seed. And smart, too. That sun had to feel good, since it was 37 degrees out there.

And no, he wasn’t sick with bird flu or anything (can squirrels catch that? — I dunno). Shortly after this was taken, he lifted his head, scratched himself a bit, and climbed down and ran around as usual.

I watched for a while to see if he would now take a flying leap at the feeder, but he didn’t. Not then. Still being magnanimous.

Not that he won’t before the day is out. But you know what? When he does, I might give him a few minutes to gorge himself before I go out and holler to make him flee. He’s a pretty decent squirrel…

I keep getting these vapid appeals for contributions, alas

7 Replies

I’ve gotten pretty aggressive about responding “STOP” to appeals via text for political contributions, and I think the volume of them has noticeably dropped. But I still get them. And as usual, they generally do little to improve my overall impression as to the perspicacity of Homo sapiens.

This one from yesterday is a good example:

It’s Ro Khanna. I really need you to read this text.

(But if you’re short on time, please kick in $15 to replace the abysmal Republican House before you log off: rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O )

I don’t need to tell you that Congress is broken. Republicans have done a great job of that.

So instead, I’ll tell you my plan to fix it:

✅ Ban *all* PAC and lobbyist money from Congress
✅ Ban Congress members from trading stocks
✅ Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices
✅ Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists

Hear me when I say this: So long as Republicans are in control, my ambitious plan to hold members of Congress accountable is dead in the water.

So today, I’m calling on my grassroots supporters to replace the catastrophic Republican Congress with progressive Democrats who will actually do their jobs.

I need 185 gifts before my midnight deadline to stay on track. Can I count on your $15? >> rokhanna.us/218b?t=JBZO6O

Thanks,
Ro

Text STOP to quit

OK, so you start out bemoaning “the abysmal Republican House,” suggesting that’s why you’re running, as a Democrat, for office — that is, for re-election to office. The implication being that you are the answer to the problem.

But you don’t talk about how the Trumpistas are tearing our country and its magnificent constitutional representative democracy apart — which is, you know, the problem with that other side.

No, you trot out a list of hoary alienated-populist proposals that make you sound for all the world like you are one of them:

  • Ban all PAC and lobbyist money from Congress (because we don’t trust people with money)
  • Ban Congress members from trading stocks (because we don’t trust markets or business people in general)
  • Enact term limits for Congress members and SCOTUS Justices (because we don’t trust anyone in power, which doesn’t say much that’s good about you)
  • Ban Congressmembers from ever becoming lobbyists (because we wouldn’t want people who know the system to help groups out there to make their cases to elected representatives)

(Remember my old column from the ’90s about how most of our problems in America wre the result of the decline of trust? Well, now that things are exponentially worse, I regret to say I told you so.)

Admittedly, the first two items would appeal to Democratic populists more than Republican ones, but hey, that’s why I’m not a fan of Bernie Sanders, either. But the third one is right out of the right’s playbook.

But more than that, it’s right out of the playbook of alienated people who don’t trust our system, don’t trust anyone in the system, don’t trust experts, and really don’t have the slightest understanding of any of those things.

Think about it. Those are Trump’s people. I mean, seriously: Do you really believe that the problem with this Republican Congress is that it’s full of the old populist stereotypes who start out all right, but get “corrupted” after any extended period in the system, and no longer care about the will of the people who elected them?

Set aside the fact that’s always been an absurd notion. If there’s a problem with a lot of people who have been in office for multiple terms, it’s that they are so interested in staying in office that they become mindless slaves of polls, which means they’ll do everything they can to do EXACTLY what the folks back home want. And to me, that means they are no longer worthwhile representatives.

A good representative should of course know his constituents, and keep their values in mind. But he should NEVER go to Washington (or Columbia) with a lot of half-baked notions about this and that specific issue held by good (or bad) people who have never studied such issues.

A representative should arrive with wishes and plans, but also humility, because he knows he has yet to study complex issues in any depth, or — and this is critical — engaged in extended debate with smart people who don’t see it the way he or his constituents do, and just may have greater understanding of the details than they do. And that is the rule more than the exception — capital cities are crammed with smart people who actually do know the issues better than the average guy on the street.

People such as lobbyists, to name one category (along with good staff people, academics, etc.).

Yes, all of us can cite cases in which big corporations with deep pockets hire armies of lobbyists that easily overwhelm the scrappy Mr.-Smith-Goes-To- Washington folks opposing them.

But scrappy groups that look out for the interests of the poor, the elderly, children, the environment, and whatever your favorite cause may be, have lobbyists, too. And the interests of the people and causes they represent are well served by their work, even though they may not be (OK, they are NOT) as numerous or well-paid as those who represent Big Pharma. If you don’t think they do good work, follow Sue Berkowitz of SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, or our own Lynn Teague of League of Women Voters as they make their rounds, and become educated.

But I’m letting myself run off on tangents and pound on some of my personal pet peeves, and failing to explain what’s REALLY wrong with that text:

He calls the Republican Congress abysmal, and he’s absolutely right. But why is it abysmal? It certainly not because of the things he’s proposing to address, particularly not because of staying in office too long. The problem is yahoos who just got there and don’t know squat, and actively hate people who do know squat.

If you could bring back some of the Republicans who served for many years before this new crop of nihilists came along — people like Lamar Alexander, Howard Baker, Bob Inglis, Richard Lugar and on and on — Congress and the nation would be in fine shape today. Any decent Republicans — ones who might have filled the shoes of such as those — who are still around today have either quit running for office, or they tremble in fear of the ignorant, unprincipled yahoos with the torches and pitchforks who could replace them in a skinny minute in the next primary. Especially in the House, thanks to Republicans having succeeded a bit too well at redrawing districts so that the primary IS the election.

And their fear gets even greater when they see what the fear itself can do: Look at what happened in 2023 in the U.S. House itself. The five or so craziest members of the caucus managed to take down the speaker. Why? Because more sensible (to various, modest degrees) Republicans were too terrified to stand up to Matt Gaetz el al. Their own cowardice has since led them to be more afraid than before. The terror snowballs, at an exponentially increasing rate.

Give me people who have managed to stay in office for 30 years or more — since long before Trumpism, or the Tea Party — and while they will inevitably include a healthy share of mediocrities (as a result of too often consulting polls so as to follow popular opinion), I will take them any day before the kind of people who rush in these days to try to take their elders down — and succeed.

I probably haven’t persuaded anyone who didn’t already agree with me. Issues such as these tend to divide people almost as much as abortion, or guns — but with less intensity, of course.

The problem isn’t the system, even as much as it’s been damaged by the real problem — a general electorate that has lost its sense of responsibility as voters.

But I guess it’s hard to come up with a simple four-point plan to address that.

Today’s demonstration at the State House

17 Replies

 I went down to the demonstrationTo get my fair share of abuseSinging, “We’re gonna vent our frustrationIf we don’t we’re gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse”

— You Can’t Always Get What You Want

That’s a really generic headline, but I don’t have a terribly clear idea of what it was all about. I didn’t hear anything about it in advance. When I did hear this morning, I didn’t see that I had time to attend it. I was really booked today. I tried to find out more about it online, but couldn’t find anything more substantive than this poster:

But I figured a way to get away for an hour. That would allow me to drive downtown, park a couple of blocks away, walk there, get some pictures and head home. Which isn’t great, but I did it for a couple of reasons.

First, our regular correspondent Scout sent that poster to me, and said, “Hey Atticus, do you know that there is a protest today? It seems like something you might be interested in. Just fyi. I am going.”

Normally, I wouldn’t have been much interested in an event organized by Peace and Progress in South Carolina to Reject Fascism and Tyranny. It didn’t sound much like anything that would do much good with regard to the fix the nation and the world are currently in.

Y’all know I’m not terribly enamored of street protests. Not that they can’t be valuable — very, very, VERY rarely. A lot of civil rights protests in the early ”60s accomplished good. So did the King Day at the Dome march in 2000. I’m not really qualified to comment on why the early ’60s protests were so good because I was in grade school. But the one in 2000 had meaning because the crowd was diverse (politically as well as in the usual Identity Politics sense) and communicated the idea that ordinary folks, who lived their own quiet lives and minded their own business believed strongly enough that the flag should come down that they left their homes to go downtown and say so.

That’s what the world needs to see, if you want change. Oh, and contributing to the force of the event was the fact that it was the biggest demonstration I’ve ever seen in South Carolina, by far. Here’s what it looked like. It was something that couldn’t be dismissed or ignored. And that summer the flag came off the dome. (Tragically, it took the deaths of nine innocent people 15 years later to get it off the grounds entirely.)

Well, I didn’t expect that kind of turnout, but since Scout was going, and some of her friends, that meant something — since Scout is one of the most reasonable people I know, and one of our very best commenters. That meant the event might be different from something attended only by the usual ones-and-zeroes folks who love to protest on a regular basis, and attend all the demonstrations they can.

Was it? Well, Scout was there, incognito as usual. I liked her sign:

And there were other folks who likewise didn’t seem like the sorts who do this as a hobby. And it was a good turnout. Several hundred. Nothing like this, but good.

On the other hand, guess who was talking when I walked up? Our old friend Brett Bursey. Nothing against Brett — he’s an earnest kind of guy. But during my brief time there, no one appeared at the microphone who seemed to balance out Brett and make this seem A General Uprising of the Full Range of People of America.

There were individuals besides Scout with sensible messages, of course, although they didn’t speak. I liked this one:

I didn’t ask that lady for her name, but she told me she didn’t mind me using the image. That’s my kind of message — not only because I agree with it wholeheartedly, but because it’s something you don’t have to be an ideologue to believe in.

There were the usual humorous sorts that were a tad more confrontational, I enjoyed one I saw for a split second as I was crossing Gervais to get there, which ended with something like “Deport Musk to Mars.” Seemed a kindly enough message to me, seeing as how he wants to go to there.

Anyone who was there long enough to get a fuller impression, please share. After it was over, Scout texted me to say, in response to something I’d said earlier (and y’all have heard from me many times):

I understand what you are saying about street protests. They are not my first instinct either and they bring out people who are a bit more extreme than I am which may be what you were saying. But right now it seems like just showing up is helpful. At least I hope so. It feels hopeful to be trying to do something anyway….

More evidence for the multiverse cascades down upon us

10 Replies

Screenshot

I was chatting with a work friend earlier today, and she said something along the lines of “Don’t talk to me about politics! Did you hear that Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed?”

On the first point, she sounds just like me. And I keep being excessively irritable with folks when they try to talk to me about what’s happening in Washington — and not only Washington, since it regularly erupts and spills out upon the rest of the world, like a volcano emerging through a septic tank. “No, I’m not following that,” I say. “So please stop bringing it up.” I don’t mean to hurt feelings on the point, but sometimes that reaction on my part just bursts out like… well, like a volcano emerging, etc.

But I don’t ignore it entirely. And as to my friend’s second point, yes, I’m aware of the Tulsi development, I and said what I had to say about it yesterday when it happened:

I almost started airing to my friend my complaint that I never expected to live my senior years on the Bizarro World, but then I realized I might have to explain about Superman comics, and not everyone is into comics, and some who are into comics turn their noses up at DC (or at least at Silver Age DC, which is my frame of reference). In other words, I held back upon the verge of one of my conversational digressions, because this had at least started out as a work conversation.

However, digressions are what the blog is for.

Nevertheless, we don’t have to talk any further about the Bizarros — although comments on the topic from y’all are welcome. I’ve moved on.

Let’s talk about the multiverse.

In a moment, that is. First, a digression from the digression… I was watching a bit of light entertainment after dinner last night, before my wife came in and, after politely watching with me for a few moments, suggested something more serious. (The serious thing was very good, by the way, and I recommend it. Look for “Housewife, 49” on Prime.)

Back to the silliness — there was an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” in which Leonard went on Ira Flatow’s radio show and spoke a little too frankly about how the field of physics wasn’t making much (or any) progress on anything world-shaking, despite the billions he and his colleagues were spending. Everyone — especially the development people at his university — got really mad at him. So did Sheldon, but then Sheldon started scribbling on whiteboards about dark matter, super-symmetry and such, and realized theoretical physics really wasn’t making any progress, and then both of our heroes got depressed, and then drunk on some Romulan booze one of them had bought at a comic-con.

This brings me to the multiverse, a theory that we now see being proven to us hundreds, if not thousands, of times daily. In fact, incidents proving the existence of the multiverse are exploding around us in numbers that rival the uncountable number of theoretical universes.

There’s no need to go deeply into quantum mechanics on this. There are (fittingly) multiple ways of thinking about the multiverse, and what it seems like we’re seeing now is the phenomenon in which you’re in one universe that branches off and leads to another — or multiple others. (And don’t lecture me and explain that’s not the way the multiverse works, because no one knows, and I seriously doubt you understand the theory any better than I do. Remember, the cat is both dead and alive…)

In other words, for all our lives we were living in the same universe as Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and the rest, and this grand experiment in having a republic that functions well in spite of the manifold sins and failings of mankind was working beautifully. There were strains upon it, which we could enumerate in yet another maddening digression, but then BANG! We suddenly, in 2016, found ourselves in a different universe where none of that good stuff worked anymore.

The strains that caused this split had been building for some time, of course. But 2016 was when it really went, as I say, bang. While, for instance, such dangerous phenomena as (to give just one example among many) the new practice of allotting delegates by way of primaries rather than conventions had been eviscerating our political parties since at least 1972, the universe in which a place like the United States of America could thrive was still possible. We were still able to rely upon notions such as “the wisdom of crowds.” It held together. And then it didn’t.

We thought, in 2020, that that was just a glitch, and we were back in the universe in which a pluralistic, deliberative, rational republic — rather than a savage state of nature in which everyone (and I do mean practically everyone, not just one side of the political spectrum) sought a majority of 50 percent plus one so they could cram what they wanted down the throats of those who objected — could securely exist.

The signs were all around us. No evidence — no impeachments or Jan. 6 or multiple criminal convictions or anything else that in our previous universe would have utterly slammed the door on a political career — could deter a majority from developing around the unspeakable notion of again electing someone who, this time, would not be constrained as he was before by the presence of ministers and advisers who still remember that old, rational universe.

And so we have things such as the Tulsi Gabbard confirmation. I keep talking about that one because it involves, of all things, the word “intelligence.” (You could not have included that word and her name in the same thought in the old ‘verse.) But you can mention Bobby Kennedy’s kid, or that Hegspeth guy, or the plethora of executive orders, or the resumption of kissing Putin’s posterior, or whatever.

Somehow, we took a wrong cosmic turn. That’s my point. And you don’t have to accept my assertion that the existence of the multiverse has been proved, because after all, I don’t have the math. I got through calculus in school, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t enough. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I did learn in all my math courses after Algebra 1 and plane geometry.

So, to back up, you can just say we’ve somehow traveled to the Bizarro world. That works, too…

Trump Plaza Gaza? OK, now you’ve got my attention

13 Replies

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been avoiding paying attention recently to the chaos descending on the country I love as its system of government is being dismantled. I don’t see anything I can do about it at the moment, so why waste my time writing about it? And if I’m not writing, why dwell on it?

I used to believe I could help. I used to believe in ideas, and facts, and rational discussion. But then over the last few months I realized that almost nobody was interested in that, and that facts had no force in a country that was dazzled by the promise of magic beans and that actually, truly believed that they were entitled to their own facts. Maybe Daniel Patrick Moynihan could argue them out of that, but he’s not around anymore. So I’ve been biding my time, hoping that the fog of foolishness would dissipate enough that we could see each other again, and have a nice, long talk.

But news seeps in, when you subscribe to four or five newspapers and a couple of serious magazines (I haven’t dropped that habit, alas). And other people around me have been paying attention on purpose, and babbling about it within my hearing. And I try to be patient, but often fail, especially when people say something like, “Did you hear he did THIS? I can’t believe it! I never expected THAT…!”

To which I sometimes explode with some variation on, “You didn’t? What DID you expect? Have you not been paying attention at ALL for the past eight years? Did you really not notice? Did you really not believe anything he said (to the extent it was intelligible to an English speaker)? Did you not realize the first term was mild, compared with what he WANTED to do, because the grownups kept stopping him? What did you THINK it would be like this time, with no grownups?”

And so forth… but then I’d distract myself with something — a novel, or a history book, a long walk, or something bingeable on the Boob Tube — and calm down a bit.

But this time he got my attention:

President Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave, one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.

Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, Mr. Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel’s campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”…

Notice that nice, conservative language the folks at The New York Times used in that first graf. I refer to the phrase, “one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.” I don’t know who chose those words for the lede — there are three names in the byline — but that writer and his or her editor was just too flummoxed, too blown away and rattled, to be any more precise than that.

So we get “one of the most” instead of “the most,” and “in years” rather than a particular date. This thing is so utterly wild that it’s impossible to place it clearly into the context of history.

As a longtime opinion writer, I have a bit more leeway to describe it. But I tend to want to stick with what I always say about this guy: We have never, ever before had anyone this crazy, unqualified and clueless in the White House, so we’ve never heard anything this wild. Oh, there were points when Nixon and George W. tried the strategy of convincing enemies and potential enemies that they were crazy to do anything, so you’d better not mess with the U.S. of A. But those gambits didn’t work out in the long run, and subsequent leaders went out of their way to convince frieds and adversaries they would never pull stuff like that. (The Obama national security team even had their own private guiding slogan for that.)

Basically, there is no precedent for this. But we can look back to things that have some degree of similarity. The first place I would point to would be the Indian Removal Act. Andy Jackson is a hero to the current fellow, to the extent he knows anything about him. You can say a lot of things for Jackson, and even more against, and I generally focus on the latter. He did get us through the Nullification Crisis, so good one there, but his most visible lasting effect on the nation was moving the Indians west of the Mississippi.

I mean, the Battle of New Orleans was still much celebrated when I lived there as a kid, but didn’t have the same lasting effect — and not just because it happened after the war was over.

But the removal of the descendants of the original human inhabitants of this hemisphere had an effect that we can look around us and see. Sure, I know we still technically have Indians in South Carolina — a fact reasserted and affirmed by our governor just yesterday — I basically grew up on this side of the Big Muddy without seeing people with noticeably Native American features. I fully realized this when I lived in Kansas in the mid-80s, in a city that was originally a major gathering place for pow-wows between tribes. I regularly saw people who looked something like this guy, and the impact of Jackson’s actions came home to me.

Well, this is kinda like that. An entire population forced to move out of their homes to an unknown destination. But that’s about it. That, after all, happened domestically. Here, we’re going to the oldest part of the Old World to empty a country — or a sort of country, when you consider the Strip’s unusual history — of its entire population. True, a lot of these folks consider their actual homes to be next door in Israel — some are quite insistent on that point (consider that to be my entry in the 2025 Understatement of the Year competition), but I suspect they’d pretty much rather be where they are than wherever Trump wants to put them.

This proposal has certainly made one guy happy — Benjamin Netanyahu. But he’s hardly alone; a lot of Israelis are with him. And one can understand why (unless one is among those college students who thought staging demonstrations to damage the Biden administration was a good move for improving the plight of Palestinians; but those folks are pretty thick). Assuming such a wild and improbably thing could be pulled off, nothing like the attacks of October 7, 2023 would ever happen again. And Israel would never again be forced to defend itself against an enemy that deliberately hides among a civilian population, thereby ensuring that the whole world would condemn Israel, and make anti-Semitism respectable again.

That’s how crazy this is — it has its tempting aspects.

Of course, aside from the various objections that will arise from folks who actually understand such things as international relations, diplomacy, war, and ethics, there’s the problem that such a thing happening is practically impossible.

Of course, our president doesn’t care about that. He cares about how it plays. If it boosts his popularity, why not?

And when he said it, the guy next to him was smiling, so… success!

Do you like David Lynch’s work? No offense, but why?

7 Replies

By that “no offense,” I mainly mean, “no disrespect to the recently departed.” But I also mean, “no offense to you if you like his stuff.”

People I know and respect and even love like his work. My daughter is a “Twin Peaks” fan, and she’s smart and creative and I love her with all my heart.

But I just don’t get the appeal. I’ve tried, in these recent days with streaming services going out of their way to offer me Lynch works (that’s Max that you see above), to give him one more chance — you know, outta respect.

But I never get farther in than a few minutes, before I make a firm decision not to spend any more of time I have left in life at the age of 71 on this.

What’s the problem? Take your pick. There’s the acting — if you want to call that “acting.” There’s the direction — which I think consists mostly of telling actors to “be as bad as you can possibly be, like you’re doing a comedy skit about bad acting, only without the humor.” There’s the editing, the weird pacing, the odd lighting, the special efforts made to make sure people think, “something’s not right here.”

Yeah, I get that he’s trying to make us uncomfortable. But isn’t there enough of that in real life? And if he’s trying to comment on all the awkwardness in real life, couldn’t he represent the real awkwardness more recognizably? This is like the diet Pepsi of awkwardness — something of a cola flavoring, but with a terrible artificial aftertaste.

I’ll admit that a lot of my dislike arises from his having shafted a generation of sci-fi fans by getting their hopes up, and presenting them with the worst major motion picture in history, his “Dune.” Yes, I’ve mentioned that before, but I’ll add a new twist: It is so bad that it makes a new “Dune” look great, despite it starring Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides. I mean, weirding modules? Where the hell did that come from?

Not to mention those pustules on Baron Harkonnen’s face. Why are we looking at those? Do you really think we wouldn’t get the idea that the Baron is a really gross guy whom you would cross a galaxy to avoid without lingering on those pustules?

Of course, I’ve learned something — or been reminded of something — by those films Max has offered. In watching a bit of “Fire Walk With Me,” and even less of “Blue Velvet,” I realized that’s a trademark move of his — finding something gross to zoom in on, sometimes microscopically, and linger upon, for no particular reason.

(I had never seen “Blue Velvet,” but had always meant to, thinking anything with Isabella Rosselini and Dennis Hopper’s got to be good. Well, no it doesn’t, it turns out. I had probably forgotten that Kyle McLachlan’s in it, too.)

Hey, I can take looking at gross things. I watch a lot of murder mysteries, and sometimes those bodies have had some pretty nasty things done to them, and the camera doesn’t shy away (how could they, after the expense of creating the effect?). I consider “Saving Private Ryan” to be a masterpiece, and the first 20 minutes of that can really test your ability to stomach blood and guts. But there’s a reason for it. This is one film that refuses to shy away from the horrors of war.

Lynch’s grossness seems to be there just because he wants it there, just as Tim Burton wants to see a lot of prison stripes on the screen. (And no, I don’t like him much, either.)

And yet… a lot of folks like it. Or they like something that’s eluding me. In a way, it feels a lot like the way I reacted to Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” I saw it as part of the American Film Theatre series back in the ’70s (my wife and I had season tickets to that, largely because they were really cheap for college students), and thought it one of the most offputtingly pointless things I’d ever seen. I mentioned that to my good friend, the late Dan Henderson, who was very much the aesthete. Dan said, “You just don’t get absurdism.” I allowed as how he was probably right about that, given all I’ve seen and read of the Theater of the Absurd.

Because of that similar feeling, I considered Lynch as an absurdist. No, it’s not that. Pinter is that, but Lynch isn’t quite. And even if it he was, it wouldn’t make me feel better. Tagging a label on somebody doesn’t really ring my bell.

But enough of my rant. Some of you like this stuff, and I want to ask you, why?

Also, how about giving me your list of Top Five Movies (or TV shows) by David Lynch.

Maybe there’ll be something there I will like. After all, I have a faint memory of having mildly enjoyed “Wild at Heart.” But that was a long time ago now, and I can’t be sure…

If you’re looking for something to do RIGHT NOW

Leave a reply

This is just for those of you who see this immediately after I post it and are free between now — I mean RIGHT NOW — and about 2:30 p.m.

And only those among you who have an interest in swords, swordfighting, history, and the blacksmithing trade.

It’s called SwordFest, and it’s the biggest event at the Relic Room each year. And it’s free, including admission to the museum. There will be tours concentrating on the varied kinds of real, historical blades on display, all the way back to the oldest artifact in the museum — a 400-year-old katana taken from the body of a Japanese officer on Iwo Jima in 1945.

And I highly recommend checking out the newest part of the museum, the Vietnam War exhibit, focusing on the experiences of South Carolinians who served in Southeast Asia.

But there will be plenty of activity that is only happening today, including modern sport fencing, and various live enthusiasts portraying soldiers, knights, pirates and more — and giving demonstrations. Plus interesting vendors and displays.

And be sure to check out the blacksmith, working at his glowing forge to fashion a sword in the 18th-century style, as you watch.

Here’s a release about the event. And here’s a story aired by WACH last night.

And here’s a schedule:

10:00: Introduction to Events
10:15: McAuley Broadsword: Demonstration Class
10:30: Carolina Historical Fencing Association
11:15 Dan Bernando: Iaido (bamboo cutting demo)
and Well-Within Martial Arts Italian Stick Fighting
12:00 Columbia Fencing Club (sport fencing)
12:45 Swordmasters Group Picture (Demonstrators and Living Historians)
1:00 Neill Rose: 19 th Century Mounted Saber
1:30 Pirates! : Theatrical style duel
2:00 Palmetto Knights Steel Combat Team

Note that you’ve already missed a little bit of it, sitting there wasting time looking at a blog! But seriously, I had planned to be there myself this morning. When my plans shifted to later, I decided to take a few moments to post this, just in case it benefits someone who’s interested….

Did I do the right thing?

Leave a reply

Did I cut too much? Not enough? Just right?

I mentioned going up to Bennettsville over the weekend. The house up there where my grandparents lived when I was a kid, and where my uncle lives now, had a couple of fig trees that used to bear fruit bountifully all summer.

And I never saw anyone prune them. Maybe they did it when I wasn’t there, but it looked like it grew natural and wild — a fluffed-out explosion of long, tall branches that almost gave each tree the profile of a gigantic tumbleweed. A lot of the figs were beyond my reach, although I guess that doesn’t mean all that much from the perspective of a kid.

But now, figs don’t seem to grow the way they used to. Not the ones I grow here, anyway. Some years we get no figs, sometimes we get a few. Last summer was a sort of bounty year for us — maybe a couple of dozen figs from each, all summer long. Maybe that brick wall is bad for them. Maybe they’re not at the right angle to the sun. One of those in B’ville had grown on the site of a former chicken coop, which is an unfair advantage. We don’t have chickens. I don’t think they’re allowed in our neighborhood. Anyway, I dunno what the problem has been.

I love figs. I want more of them. A lot more.

We have a couple of different varieties. There’s the unfamiliar (to me at the time I bought it) cultivar you see above. I bought it, potted, from the State Farmer’s Market way back when the market was where it was supposed to be, maybe 20 years ago. I forget the name of it. Some Greek variety, I think. When we have figs, they get pretty big, but they never turn color — they’re still green when they’re fully ripe.

The Brown Turkey (I think) that my uncle gave me.

The other, smaller one at right is of a more familiar type — Brown Turkey, like we had in the Pee Dee. Although the figs do grow bigger than I remember. And they bear better. We have some every year, and usually more than the other tree bears. This plant was a gift from my uncle who died in 2016, so I really don’t want anything to happen to it.

But yesterday I undertook the plunge, hoping that I could make these plants healthier and more productive than ever. I think I chose the perfect time to prune — a cold day for South Carolina, but not as cold as the next few days would be.

I hope I did right. Mainly, I hope I didn’t kill them. Having them do better than they have been thus far would be a bonus.

Any experts out there? What do you think? Did I do the right thing?

An extreme closeup of one of the wounds I inflicted. I’m worried abou that green tinge around the edge. Was it really dormant?

Something South Carolina can be proud of

8 Replies

I was busy yesterday and while I noted the fact, didn’t have time to comment on Joe Biden spending his last full day as president in South Carolina.

He was in Charleston, and I was up in the northernmost reaches of our state. I took my mother up there for the graveside services for Micah Caskey’s grandmother. Mary Jo and my mother were close friends when they were schoolgirls in Bennettsville, growing up right across Jordan Street from each other. It was a beautiful service, and I was glad the weather gave us a break so we could get up there to our hometown.

So I didn’t focus on Joe’s time in the LowCountry until I read about it in The New York Times this morning:

President Biden spent his final full day in office in South Carolina, a state he credits for helping catapult him to the White House and where he returned in his final hours as president to urge his supporters to stay engaged in the fight for a more just nation.

During visits to a historically Black church and an African American museum, Mr. Biden reflected on his history with a place that he said had played a pivotal role in his life and career and that pushed him in his efforts to restore “the soul of the nation.”…

Yep, we are the state that reversed the crazy trend toward less-suitable candidates for the Democratic nomination, and launched the right choice to the White House. And I’ve never been prouder of South Carolina than I was on Feb. 29, 2020. Here I am celebrating with some friends that night…

And here’s Joe that same night, on the stage with Jim Clyburn, who had done more than anyone else to spur that victory (yeah, the picture quality is sorry, but it’s grabbed from video of a raucous moment)…

Screenshot

And here they are together yesterday in Charleston. (I’m just linking to it since I don’t own the copyright.)

Back to our subject. Did Joe restore “the soul of the nation?” Well that’s what he had decided to do, after the shame of Charlottesville. Joe had done more for his country, and was more deserving of a peaceful retirement, than anyone I knew. But he stepped forward, and gave his all. I don’t know if we can say he saved the nation’s soul, given the way the nation behaved over this past year. But he certainly resurrected it after its ignominious death in 2016. And for those four more years of life — from 2021 to this day — the United States was again a nation its Founders could take pride in having established.

And I will always be profoundly grateful to him for that. Joe Biden is my hero.

It’s interesting (to me) that he made his appearance yesterday in Charleston, since that’s the place I saw and spoke with him last. That was when he came to campaign with James and the rest of us in October 2018. So while I’m thanking him, I’ll thank him again for that. And close with this picture from that day. I’ve shown it to you before (and it’s always there at the top of my Twitter page), but I’ll always treasure it, so here we go again…

A brief explanation to the reader

5 Replies

In writing, ‘The main thing is to know what to leave out.’ I’m still working on that part…

I like it when writers offer explanatory notes to their readers. For instance, y’all know how obsessively fond I am of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, and he frequently offers explanations about the history of his period, or about his writing process, before the opening of the work (here’s most of one of those). All add illumination and enjoyment to the story.

But my favorite might be this pair of notices from Huck Finn, facetious as they may be in part:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

EXPLANATORY

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

Well, I’m no Twain or O’Brian, but I think it’s nice to pause and explain what I’m doing, if only to head off some of those “What the hell is going on here?” comments. I don’t want y’all developing calluses on your fingertips.

You may have noticed lately, as I’ve gotten rolling again after the holidays, that there’s been a change in what I write about — not a huge change, but noticeable.

I used to blog like a journalist (remember the Virtual Front Page?), and specifically like a journalist who’s dealt over the years with electoral politics more than any other subject. But you’re not going to see as much of that anymore.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, nobody’s paying me to keep people informed anymore. Second, I’ve realized people aren’t that interested in being informed in an era in which we have technology that enables them to be exposed only to what they want to hear. Third, journalism — and particularly political, opinion journalism — is based on the assumption that people are rational and persuadable, and therefore benefit mutually from some civil back-and-forth on the issues of the day, which makes all participants wiser, and better citizens. That is too seldom the case these days.

Then there are the personal reasons. Putting it briefly, I’m not interested in that stuff anymore. Or at least, I’m not interested in engaging with it when everyone’s consciousness is saturated in the ocean of nonsense that they get from media today. And no, I’m not just beefing again about the deleterious intellectual effects of social media. The MSM have in these rough seas lost their own ability to sort out what’s important to talk about.

I’ve told you over the last few years of my growing disgust with what is seen as “news,” and how it is presented, as the field of journalism has rapidly decayed. I am now holding myself back with both hands from offering examples of what’s wrong, because I’m trying to get back to my point (think like Twain! think like Hemingway!)

All of these harmful trends have accelerated in the past year. And for my part, I’ve gotten less patient in my eighth decade, and I prefer to spend what little time I can find to devote to this enterprise on things that interest me, and still seem worth the effort.

That includes such things as history, of course, and offshoots of history such as genealogy. And my love of popular culture (and even occasionally higher culture) has never waned. And there’s evolution, particularly of our own species, even as it seems to be collectively leaping off a developmental cliff.

And religion, of course. That one’s going to really chafe at some of you, both among the faithful and others who just don’t want to hear about it.

And if you don’t like any of this stuff, you can just go elsewhere. On some level you will be missed, but I don’t want to make you miserable, and despite recent developments, this is still a free country. At least until this coming Monday, and possibly beyond.

Note that, as that last sentence hints, current events — even political current events — will sometimes come up. (In keeping with my belief that everything, and I mean everything, is connected.) I’ll just be focusing on it from a different angle — one that interests me more, and perhaps will interest some of you.

As for the rest of you, I wish you not only a good day, but a wonderful life from here on. God bless you.

A few words about ‘free speech’ on the Web

3 Replies

In case you understandably have trouble reading the above hand-written version:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

I just thought you might want to have that handy as I raise the following topics. I put them there in case you’re inclined to get up a high horse to do battle with “censors,” or to assume unwarranted power to shut somebody up, so you can glance and see what the Constitution actually does and does not protect before you mount up.

Anyway, since his good piece that I praised a couple of days back, I’ve kept an eye out for columns and such written by the NYT’s David French. Or maybe an ear out, as I listened to both of these while walking today:

  1. The Case for Banning TikTok
  2. Texas Has a Point About Online Pornography

I admit that I haven’t had a lot of interest in, or tendency to opine about, TikTok during these years in which so many have hollered back and forth on the subject. The medium leaves me cold. I am passionately opposed to video presented vertically, in profile mode (we can discuss that later), so I’m unlikely ever to look at it.

But of course, what I think (or what anyone else thinks) of the app’s content is neither here nor there with regard to the case currently before the Supreme Court. Mr. French makes that case quite ably, and correctly, early in what he says at that first link:

But the reason why, even though I am a lifelong free speech advocate, I support the ban on TikTok, this particular law, is because the issue here really isn’t about the content of the speech on TikTok. Everything that’s on TikTok, you could put on Instagram, and it would be fine. Facebook, it would be fine. Maybe not fine from the standpoint of it being worthwhile content. There’s a lot of trash on TikTok. But constitutionally fine.

The issue here is control. Can we allow a social media company that the government believes to be under the direct control of the People’s Republic of China to have that kind of access to American data and to the American public square? And that’s the real issue, in my view. Who controls TikTok is of enormous consequence. And the Chinese government does not have a constitutional right to operate in the American public square. And in fact, there’s a lot of potential dangers and problems if we allow China to have that continued access…

In the rest of the piece, he backs up those statements quite ably. It’s not about content. And moreover, it’s not about whether you or any other American citizen is allowed to post whatever sort of video you like on the Web. You have an enormous multitude of free ways of doing that, starting with, for instance, YouTube. That site will even allow you to post vertically, blast the louts.

Of course, unless you’re among the 170 million or so Americans who delight in TikTok, you may not be passionate about that one. But you might want to express yourself — in a calm and civil manner, which is all that is allowed here — on the second topic. Writes French:

When does freedom for adults become cruelty to children?

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, that raises exactly that question. The Free Speech Coalition (a pornography industry trade association) is challenging a 2023 Texas law that requires sites offering pornographic material to “use reasonable age verification methods” to check whether a user is at least 18….

At first glance, the law is simple common sense. As Texas noted, all 50 states bar minors from purchasing pornography. Offline, identification requirements are common. Showing a driver’s license to enter a strip club is routine. Zoning restrictions can push pornographic establishments out of neighborhoods and away from schools and other places where kids congregate.

Online, though, it is the Wild West. Children have easy access to graphic and hard-core pornography. There’s a certain difficulty in writing about this issue — merely describing what children see online can be too much for adults reading family newspapers to tolerate…

Since I’ve spent half my life as an editor at some of those fussy “family newspapers,” I also have a rule against unnecessary use of profanity here on the blog. But I don’t guess I have to actually type the letters to tell you where you can stick your “right” to porn when such unrestricted availability endangers children.

Arguments to the contrary are offensively pathetic. I hope the link I gave you works for you, because French takes such arguments apart rather effectively — but I’ve already stretched the bounds of “Fair Use” in what I’ve quoted so far. I’ll just give you a few links to studies on the effects of exposure to pornography on kids. If you find those effects acceptable, then I will simply tell you that I strongly disagree.

Of course, we could argue all day about the Constitutional angle. Or you could. I’ve spent way too much of my life listening to people make ridiculous claims regarding the scope of the First Amendment.

I’ll leave you with this: If you had told the Framers that they were guaranteeing the right to expose American children to videos showing… well, one more quote from the column:

As one teenager wrote in The Free Press in 2023, in fourth grade she was exposed to “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.”…

… those Framers might have moved quickly to limit your freedom by having you locked up in one of their era’s particularly unpleasant institutions for the insane. At the very least, they’d have moved away from you there on the Group W bench.

And if you had insisted to them that their work said Congress may make no law barring a Chinese company from doing business in the United States when that business is deemed a threat to national security, they’d have wondered what had gotten into the water in our troubled 21st century.