Author Archives: Brad Warthen

Centrifugal bumble-puppy, and other games

My grandfather’s team, circa 1910. That’s him squatting at the far right of the seated row. Notice that in those days, they didn’t even bother to go out and buy matching uniforms. They just came and played ball.

Over the weekend, I was out running errands after a long day of working in the yard, and I decided it would be a good day for us to have a takeout dinner. So once that plan was approved by headquarters, I called La Fogata and placed the order. I was told it would take 20 minutes.

I was easily within five minutes of the restaurant, so I drove in the other direction, looking for a way to kill time. I decided to visit the park behind North Side Middle School, and see what was going on there — I figured that this time of year, there’d be some action on one or more of the ballfields.

I was right. I drove through the parking lot, and had to pick my way slowly and carefully because of all the boys, who were generally within a couple of years of 12 I’d guess, and parents who were apparently returning to their cars after a game that had just ended.

And then I noticed something: Their progress back to their cars, and my progress through them, were both impeded by the gear they were hauling. And by the elaborate gear for hauling that gear.

The most cumbersome were the wheeled contraptions that held bags, coolers, bats and such. They looked like people preparing to sell things from a barrow. Those were the most noticeable, but everyone had an unusual amount of gear. The lightest were elaborate, specialized backpacks many of the players were wearing. The packs seemed full, and each had two bats sticking up from the pack, one on each side.

Back in the day, when I played ball, you brought yourself and your mitt to the game, and that was it. (Unless, of course, you were the catcher.) The coach would have a duffel bag full of bats and balls, and sometimes conscientious players (who were perhaps eager for more playing time) would help the coach by carrying that bag from coach’s car to the dugout.

But now, every player or player’s parent I saw was hauling at least as much as the coach would once have, and often more. I don’t even know what some of that stuff they were carrying and pulling was. But there was a very great deal of it.

Of course, all this brought to mind one of the books I’ve been rereading lately instead of the books I was supposed to read this year: Huxley’s Brave New World. If you’ll recall, in this super hyped-up extrapolation of Western consumer culture, all the games — like centrifugal bumple-puppy, and electromagnetic golf — require elaborate, expensive, easily-broken equipment to play. Everyone is conditioned from birth to want to play these games at every opportunity. Not to keep themselves in shape or exercise sportsmanship, but to keep them buying the stuff.

And I got to thinking about the various social influences that must have been at work over recent decades to convince these kids, and parents, that they had to have all this stuff to play baseball. Huxley had sleep-conditioning to bring about this effect. I don’t know what happened with these folks.

We used to have this wonderful, simple, pastoral game called baseball. Originally, there weren’t even gloves. Just a ball and a stick for everyone to share. And even after the gloves came along, for a long time players would leave them out in the field while batting rather than carry them back and forth to the dugout.

No more. Now there’s all this junk, and all this hauling back and forth. And don’t even get me started on the designated hitter…

Two generations later — about 1969. That’s me in the back, standing next to the coach on the far left. By this time the uniforms matched, but we mostly only brought those and our gloves.

DeMarco: Lindsey Graham, the weathervane of the New Republican Party

12 Replies

The man who was: 26 March 2013

The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

In September 2009, I attended a town hall meeting in the gymnasium of Francis Marion University featuring Lindsey Graham. It was about six weeks after the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Graham was the only Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee to vote for her and one of nine Republicans to vote in favor in the full Senate. When he took questions from the audience, an older man sitting behind me in the bleachers stood and grimly asked, “Why did you vote for that judge,” and here he paused to derisively enunciate each syllable, “SOH-TOH-MAAY-ORR”

Rather than try to placate his disappointed supporter, Graham forcefully rebutted him. “Elections have consequences,” he shot back. “If you don’t want liberal judges on the court, then elect a Republican president. I don’t agree with Justice Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, but my job as a senator is to determine whether she is qualified. She is qualified, so I voted for her.”

Of the many conversations I have heard and participated in with my elected representatives, this exchange stands out as one of the best. Graham had a chance to dodge or pander; instead he was truthful and forthright.

Back then Graham was keeping company with another maverick senator, John McCain, and although they are both more conservative than I, I admired their respect for their office and their roles as guardians of our democracy.

I was also heartened by Graham’s eviscerations of Donald Trump during his short-lived presidential campaign in 2015. Back when he was speaking his mind he said things like, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” and “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He also tweeted “I also cannot in good conscience support Donald Trump because I do not believe he is a reliable Republican conservative nor has he displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as Commander in Chief.” That statement strikes me as remarkable for two reasons. First, for its eerie prescience in light of the January 6^th attack. Second, for Graham’s complete abandonment of his own good advice: after Trump’s election, he became one of the president’s closest allies.

Many commentators have rightly criticized Graham for his lack of integrity. But, if you agree with the premise that we get the leaders we deserve, then Graham is not the only one at fault. Elections, as Graham once frequently reminded us, do have consequences. We could have elected Graham as president. A Graham-Clinton match-up in 2016 would have been an interesting and difficult choice for me. But our enthusiasms and our votes buoyed other candidates in the 2016 Republican primary. Graham never polled above 1% and dropped out in December 2015. I saw most of the remaining front-runners as they came through Florence in early 2016 including Kasich, Carson, Rubio, Cruz and Trump. Trump’s crowd almost filled Florence Center, holding as many supporters as all his rivals combined and more.

Graham got the message: he could no longer speak his mind about Trump and remain a senator. The Republican Party had moved far enough from him, especially from his conciliatory and bipartisan approach on immigration, that he risked a successful challenge by a conservative Trump supporter in the 2020 primary if he didn’t move with the party.

If you are a Democrat, you should take this as a lesson. In 2016, Democrats flirted with an extremely progressive candidate in Bernie Sanders, a man who described himself as a democratic socialist. The farther to the edge your standard bearers are, the harder it is for idiosyncratic politicians like Graham to remain true to themselves.

Do we want our parties to be cults of personality in which the thing that trumps (ironic that that’s the right word here) all is one’s allegiance to the party leader? How have we come to the place that acquiescing to Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election is the current Republican litmus test?

The wholesale transformation of the Republican party is summed up in Graham’s suppression of his better instincts by voting against the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson. It’s worth noting that just last year, Graham voted to confirm Jackson as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit. That was an under-the-radar vote that he knew few of his base would notice. But with the voters watching, he renounced the principle that had guided him for more than two decades and voted against her.

If you are a Republican, understand how I offer this assessment. My hope is for both parties to be strong. My desire is that Republicans will right the ship and recognize their mistake in supporting a president who is actively threatening the fabric of our democracy (which, I fear, is more delicate than I learned in school).

Our country is more secure and more likely to thrive when the two parties allow representatives to vote their consciences. Demanding ideological purity creates parties for which compromise is impossible and intransigence is perversely celebrated. Since absolute victory is rare in policy debates, stymieing the opposition has become the accepted substitute for legislating. Democrats are not immune. Both parties have succumbed to such a rigid dichotomy on the issue of abortion that pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans, once fairly common in Congress, are virtually extinct.

We cannot be party robots. Our future lies with men and women like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who put country over party. The Graham of old demonstrated similar laudable conviction. His recent choice to elevate his party over country has indelibly stained his legacy.

Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, S.C. Reach him at [email protected]. A version of this column appeared in the April 27^th, 2022, edition of the Florence Morning News.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Something about this made me think of this old clip, from May 15, 2007. It’s John McCain at an event in the Vista, calling Lindsey “that little jerk,” which was the way he frequently referred to friends and allies. But it’s the question that made me think of it: Where, indeed, is that little jerk? What happened to him?

The Roe decision leak

102 Replies

Since everywhere I turn, people are going on and on about this (I had to do a good bit of clicking to find stories that weren’t about this on my NPR phone app today) — even though it hasn’t actually happened yet — I’ll offer a few random thoughts about it:

First, why the leak? What exactly happened, and why? My first thought, of course, was that a pro-Roe clerk leaked it for any one of a number of reasons — to cast an aura of illegitimacy upon the decision by having it revealed unconventionally; to damage the court overall by tossing a grenade into the system of trust and discretion that has always been observed by those who work there; to try to exert direct and indirect pressure on justices to amend the decision by causing such a splash; and so forth. Or for that matter, someone on the other side thought, “This is going to be so huge that we should let people get used to the idea first.” But there doesn’t have to be a political angle. Someone might have simply been unable to keep a huge secret. Some people are like that. In any case, I hope Roberts can get to the bottom of it and make it amply clear such a thing is not ever to happen again. And of course, this is to be the end of the career of the perpetrator.

Democrats need to calm down. As you know, one of a number of reasons why I’m not a Democrat is this issue. It’s not simply that we disagree; it’s that they tend to be so rigid and adamant on the subject. The fury at any opposition to their position is over-the-top. And predictably, Democrats are saying a lot of foolish things, because they’re upset right now. As I have said every election year for the last few decades, the last thing we need this year is to have an election that is all about abortion. It’s also the last thing Democrats need. They need to stop talking like they absolutely don’t want a single person who disagrees with them on this to vote for them. Because if they keep it up, not a single one will (more or less). And Trumpism will be triumphant. I just wish I could get them to understand one thing: As adamant as their own base is, almost every word they utter to please that base alienates others who might have voted for them. If they could see what I see as a strongly pro-Biden Catholic, all this would be obvious. We wouldn’t even be talking about Trumpism, or whatever you want to call the insanity that has gripped the GOP, if it weren’t for the fact that — against all reason — about half of Catholics voted his way, because of the position that Democrats take on abortion. If not for that, and Trump’s willingness to exploit the situation, no Trumpist would ever be in hailing distance of an electoral victory.

What will happen next, legally? This is a subject I generally try to avoid because I believe far too much public conversation tries to make predictions, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. But to touch upon the subject — one of the ways some Dems are reacting is to say other Kulturkampf issues will now go the other side’s way — same-sex marriage and the like. Because, you know, that’s the way they think. Ones and zeroes. It seems more rational to think that issues actually related to the legal underpinnings of abortion would be on the line. Such as the imagined right to privacy that Griswold gave us. But we’ll see.

What will happen next, politically? Well, it’s going to be awful. In every state, and nationally. (Even though it will become more of a state issue, do you think people on the national level are going to quiet down? They will not.) And it will be ugly, and it will go on and on, and no one will have the energy to expend breath on things we might be able to get people to agree upon, because they’re too busy shouting about the things that divide us the most. Of course, things have been this way for awhile.

I’ll stop now. I’m not even going to go into the substance of the draft decision, because I’m satisfied to wait and see the final decision. But I thought I’d provide a place for y’all to talk about it.

The Stupid Decade, and how it happened

31 Replies

Well, I just used up my last free read on The Atlantic — if I were to take out one more subscription, it might be that one, but I’ve really been overdoing it, so I’m holding myself back — and the piece was worth it.

One of y’all — was it Barry? — brought it to my attention the other day, and I just got around to reading the rest of it. The headline is, “WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID.”

Which they have, as we all know. Or at least, all of us who were adults long enough before the last 10 years that we can tell the difference. If we were around that long, and really, truly paying attention, we know that a lot of really crazy stuff went down before the past 10 years, as a sort of a warmup, but we can tell that these last few have truly been stupid and yes, uniquely so.

Here’s a key bit that sort of sets up the piece. I include the subhed because always like to pat people on the back for citing Yeats. That poem has been profound since it was written, but more and more now the human race is living like we’re determined to act it out fully:

Things Fall Apart

Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009….

Yep, you see where it’s headed, right? We’re getting back to the Rabbit Hole.

And each time someone explores the Hole more thoroughly, I nod a little more, as it becomes clearer that this explains so much of what had been puzzling me since 2016.

You know that book I keep talking about, Sapiens? This piece makes similar observations, such as the fact that before all this stupidity, human history could be largely summed up by saying, “there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.” Yep, there was. But this piece is about how things suddenly — extremely suddenly — went wrong.

I was rereading Sapiens a bit more today, and suddenly realized that Harari didn’t realize that this megatrend had hit a major snag. That’s because his book was written in 2011 (and came out in English in 2014). So the unique stupidity hadn’t kicked in yet. In fact, Jonathan Haidt, the author of this piece in The Atlantic, considers 2011 sort of the arguable “high point of techno-democratic optimism.” Then things fell apart.

Anyway, if you’re already with me on the whole Rabbit Hole thing, you don’t need to read all of this to be convinced — although you might enjoy it.

But I know some of you aren’t convinced yet, so I urge you to read the whole thing. Yeah, it’s more than 8,000 words, but as newsroom wags used to say about an overly long piece, it reads like 7,000….

Addressing the abominable conditions at Alvin S. Glenn

15 Replies

Attorney Stuart Andrews speaks at the press event Thursday.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, y’all. Yeah, I know you haven’t seen a post in awhile. I’ve just been busy. A lot of stuff going on, some of it quite important. I thought I’d post an example. This is about a news story I’ve been helping an ADCO client with this week.

Just wanted to make sure you’ve seen the coverage of the lawsuit about the brutal conditions for detainees with disabilities (and for everyone else, although this legal action comes at it from this urgent perspective) at the Richland County jail.

Here’s an excerpt from The State’s story by Travis Bland, “Richland jail is ‘dangerous, inhumane’ in treatment of people with mental illness: lawsuit:”

Locked up in ‘moldy, filthy, infested’ cells, bitten by rats, and strapped to chairs so long they are ‘forced to urinate on themselves.’

These are some of the “dangerous, inhumane” ways people with mental illness detained at the Richland County jail have been treated, according to an extensive lawsuit filed Thursday morning.

Richland County is being sued in federal court by Disability Rights South Carolina, an advocacy group for people with disabilities. Attorneys Stuart Andrews, Nekki Shutt and Sarah J. M. Cox of the Burnett Shutt & McDaniel law firm are representing Disability Rights SC.

Detainees with mental illnesses at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center suffer cruel punishment and restraints; don’t get needed medication; aren’t properly supervised, even when on suicide watch, and are subjected to a heightened risk of harm because of “dangerously low staff levels,” the suit says. The lawsuit asks that the federal court take over the jail and oversee that Richland County implement fixes…

And this is from the version by Mike Fitts at the Post and Courier, “Mentally ill detainees face brutal conditions in Richland County jail, lawsuit alleges:”

COLUMBIA — Richland County’s jail subjects detainees with mental illnesses to brutal conditions including misuse of restraint chairs, shower stalls being used as cells and unsupervised solitary confinement, a federal lawsuit filed April 28 alleges.

The lawsuit, the latest in a series of issues at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, has been filed to get the county to provide better care, not for financial gain, attorneys in the case said.

The special jail section where detainees with mental illnesses are kept at the jail is laden with mold, pests and standing water, thanks to broken plumbing, the attorneys allege….

Here is the full lawsuit as filed Thursday, and here is a press release about it. You can view video of the presser here. If you look at it, I call your attention in particular to what attorneys Stuart Andrews and Sarah J.M. Cox have to say. They add some details you might miss in the coverage, details that illuminate just how bad things are. Please listen in particular to Sarah’s description of how people who are on “suicide watch” are treated in ways that would make anyone, mentally ill or not, feel suicidal.

I call your attention to the fact that, as Mike notes, no one’s looking for money here. They’re looking for change. Stuart made that clear, emphasizing the plaintiffs — Disability Rights South Carolina — would like very much for the county to work with them to address these problems. Meanwhile, the complaint asks the federal court to assume jurisdiction and require that the problems be addressed.

How am I involved in this? A couple of ways. Burnette Shutt & McDaniel law firm is a client of ADCO. Beyond that, I have a very personal interest. My daughter is a public defender who spends a great deal of time visiting her clients in the jail. This is a constant worry for us, knowing what conditions are like there.

A number of things to keep in mind:

People in jail — as opposed to prison — have generally not been convicted of any crime.
People with mental illness are often there simply because they are mentally ill, and authorities have nowhere else to put them. (At this point we could go off on a long side discussion about deinstitutionalization and related issues, but for the moment I’m trying to stay on the subject of the jail.)
The jail is overcrowded, and alarmingly understaffed. As the lawsuit states, “It is not uncommon for a single frontline security officer to be directly responsible at one time for supervision of up to four housing units consisting of more than 150-200 detainees.”
People on suicide watch are not being watched. Instead, there are being subjected to forms of confinement that greatly increase their distress. But as Sarah noted, not sufficiently constrained to reliably prevent them from harming themselves. Which, you know, is why they’re supposed to be watched.

Anyway, I’m very glad Disability Rights and the folks at Burnette Shutt have taken this action, and I fervently hope it leads to real improvement.

How many ‘unblessed’ square inches are still left?

14 Replies

The view from my dorm room, taken in 2006, just before they tore the Honeycombs down. This, kids, is from the days when dorm rooms were a bit like prison cells, and were located on the actual campus.

I’ve probably mentioned this a few times before, but…

Often when I pass by the defunct K-Mart on Knox Abbott (it’s between my house and my older son’s), I think of the expedition I undertook to that location during my one semester as a student at USC, the fall of 1971.

My uncle in Bennettsville, which I visited most weekends, had asked me to get some vacuum cleaner bags for his machine, and the only place where he knew he could get them was at that store. (No, kids, there was no Amazon for such things.) That being a bit far from my dorm, the also defunct Snowden, I had to find a ride. So I asked my older roommate, who knew everyone on our floor (I was a freshman, he a junior), and he referred me to a guy who, as I recall, was the only one on the floor who had a car. How I persuaded this stranger to take me there I don’t recall, but that’s how I got the bags.

Of course, today every freshman at the University drives one (and possibly more than one) SUV that is no more than a year old. As a result, any trip across Columbia requires some strategy in order to avoid the hordes of erratically driven SUVs.

Frequently, I ponder whether the city would seem to be completely choked with kids between the ages of 18 and 22 if it were not for the traffic jams. Maybe not. Maybe walking down Main Street would just feel like being in the film “Logan’s Run,” in which everyone seems to be walking around in a mall and all humans are put to death at the age of 30. But I don’t know for sure.

I just know the high rises keep rising, with no end in sight. I’m all for having a thriving university, and I know that since the Legislature no longer supports “public” universities the way it did back when we didn’t have cars, a growing enrollment is pretty much essential. So it’s complicated.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking when I replied to this tweet from Mike Fitts:

There might be a few square inches in the area that have not yet been blessed with such an edifice…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) April 19, 2022

That said, I thought I’d check and see if y’all had any thoughts on this…

The ‘barbarism’ of the death penalty in S.C.

45 Replies

On Friday, Caitlin Byrd from The State tweeted out the above photo with this explanation:

The S.C. Department of Corrections just released this photo showing the renovated Capital Punishment Facility as seen from the witness room. The firing squad chair is on the left. The covered chair is the electric chair, which doesn’t move.

I was struck by how amazingly boring the photo managed to make such items appear. My friend Ashleigh Lancaster had something more interesting to say: “Weird thing to release on Good Friday, no?”

Yes, it was. And Ashleigh’s tweet reminded me that I had meant to post about the recent release on this subject from my diocese.

Here’s the entire release, to give you the full effect:

April 8, 2022
Statement from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston regarding the scheduled execution of Richard Moore on April 29
CHARLESTON, SC – The Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston released the below statement in response to the South Carolina Supreme Court scheduling an execution date for Richard Moore. He will be the first person executed by the state of South Carolina since 2011.
“The Catholic Church stands firmly in opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision and the use of the death penalty in South Carolina. Mr. Moore must choose his means of execution – between the firing squad and electric chair. This is modern-day barbarism.
“The tragedy caused by Mr. Moore’s actions is not justified by killing another human being. Justice is not restored when another person is killed.
“Capital punishment, along with abortion and euthanasia, is an attack on the inviolability and fundamental dignity of human life. Respect for life is, and must remain, unconditional. This principle applies to all, even the perpetrators of terrible acts.
“The Catholic Church will continue to stand for the inherent value of all life. We beseech the state of South Carolina to commute Moore’s death sentence and conduct a meaningful review of his case. The Church prays for the day when the state reverses its decision to end the cruel and unjust practice of capital punishment.”
###

Yep.

The essential problem, of course, is not the choice — it’s the death penalty itself. That’s the barbarism.

Requiring the condemned to choose the method is just an added little sadistic twist. Personally, I’ve always thought the firing squad is a less objectionable method than the electric chair, and definitely less twisted than lethal injection. If you’re going to kill a man, be honest about the violence by which you are dragging all of society down to the level of his crime. Don’t do it by a mock medical procedure.

But bottom line, the whole thing is barbaric, and beneath what society should always strive to be.

Forgive me for thinking of a movie quote while discussing something so grim, but deserve’s got nothing to do with it. It’s not up to us to become killers in order to give him what he “deserves,” if we can securely detain him for the rest of his life.

I’d like to find some more books like ‘Sapiens’ to read

24 Replies

The most impressive bit of prehistoric art I’ve ever seen, from the Cave of the Hands in Argentina.

Or to spread it more broadly, like that — by which I mean Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari — and like some other, similar books I’ve read in recent years. They include:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, the sequel to the previous.

Remember how I said my New Year’s resolution was that I would finally start reading all those many fascinating books I had put on my Amazon list in recent years, and my loved ones had so kindly given me? I said I would start with the ones I received for Christmas (pictured on the post), and go on from there.

In that post, I mentioned that I had just finished, on New Year’s Eve, reading Sapiens. And stated my intention to charge forward and spend the whole year reading other interesting new books that would broaden my mind, instead of rereading things I’d read multiple times before, such as the volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novel series.

So what have I been doing? Well, the last few days I’ve found myself rereading Sapiens. And I’m again being thoroughly fascinated by all the interesting things I had already forgotten, even though I had read it so recently. (An aging thing, I guess. I never had trouble in school remembering things over summer vacation. But I guess I don’t retain things that easily now, being less “impressionable.”)

Just this morning, I was reading again how we humans messed up our lives with this whole Agricultural Revolution thing. And how we couldn’t help ourselves. But this time I took time to leaf to the back to check out a footnote, and found it was referring to… Guns, Germs and Steel. Yeah, I thought I had read something else that told me giving up hunting and gathering was a raw deal… not that we can do anything about it.

There’s a connection here somewhere to my decreasing interest in the “news” of the day, and the same stupid, overly simplistic arguments about what’s going on around us being offered by “both” sides — you know, the ones and zeroes people. (Not that I ignore current events entirely. For instance, this morning I learned a lot from a piece in The Wall Street Journal about the shadow war being conducted between Israel and Iran — something I had known next to nothing about.)

More and more, I’m interested in the Big Picture. I’m more fascinated, for instance, by how sapiens outlived (and quite likely of course, killed off) the Neanderthals — except for a few bits of DNA that I and other people of European ancestry are anachronistically carrying around. That interests me more than, say, how the billionahuhs are exploiting the proletariat — or, if you prefer the “other” interpretation (among the two and only two that we’re allowed), how the job-creators are building a better world.

I’m not sure that what I’m talking about here is “Big History,” which I’ve heard a good bit about recently. A lot of that has to do with all those billions of years before our ancestors came along and started walking on two legs. And those eons seem a bit… sterile… to me. I’m more interested in the last few million years — and particularly the millennia between what Harari calls The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution (between about 70,000 and 10,000 years ago), and what happened in the few millennia after that, shaping the world we now live in.

The books I’ve listed at the top of this post fit right in that sweet spot. So, to some extent, does one of those books I asked for for Christmas: The Discovers, by Daniel Boorstin. I started to read it long before I developed this recent interest, and remember being impressed at his description of one of the greatest bits of “progress” that has ever oppressed us: the measurement of time. But before I finished it, I misplaced my copy, and have been wanting for all this time to get back to it.

I also want to read those novels in that small stack as well. I mean, I know what happened to Thomas Cromwell, but I’m interested to find out how Hilary Mantel tells the tale.

But I want to read more in what I think of as the Sapiens category — the story of how humans got from hunting and gathering to where we are.

I’m particularly hoping Lynn Teague reads this, and has some good ideas. She’s the only archaeologist I know, and these books fit largely within her field…

DeMarco: Salkehatchie Summer Service and the hope for a new Church

45 Replies

The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

I wrote in a previous column about my disappointment over the decline of my denomination, the United Methodists. We are not alone. Our shrinking membership is paralleled by the majority of other church groups in America.

Longtime church members tend to blame external forces – the banning of prayer in schools, ever-loosening morality, competition from sports and other entertainment, and the evaporation of Sunday as the Sabbath day.

But I lay the burden squarely at our own feet. It’s not Jesus’ fault; his life and teachings remain perfectly relevant. We Christians, like the original disciples, have failed to understand who He was.

Teenagers, which is the group one must convince for a church to survive, have an intense need to belong. The church seems like a natural fit for them. It offers a family of usually well-meaning people who hold up a suffering servant as their Lord. “Come to Me,” He says, “all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” This is a compelling invitation to teens, whose lives are often a tumultuous search for identity.

But we have bollixed up our evangelism so badly as to obscure the profound love that Christ offers. Ask young people what they think of Christians and many will tell you we are hypocritical and judgmental, especially towards LGBTQ people. Unfortunately, their criticisms are too often accurate.

The “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach has failed miserably. Too many of us cannot hide our palpable distaste for people that Jesus asked us to love the most – the different, the despised, the immigrant, the homeless.

Those of us who wish the church to endure have essentially two options. The first is to keep doing what we are doing, claiming that we have been right all along and that any deviation from traditional Scriptural views (from a Bible that endorses polygamy, the death penalty for adultery and homosexuality, second-class status for women, and implies that the earth is roughly 6,000 years old) is the work of a permissive, Satan-infused culture. Good luck attracting young people to that view of the world.

The second is exemplified by Salkehatchie Summer Service. “Salk” as it is known to participants, was started in 1978 by John Culp, a United Methodist minister. Rev. Culp was led to gather adults and teenagers to renovate substandard homes in Hampton County as a way for participants to live out their faith. It has grown from that single camp to more than forty camps in every region of South Carolina.

Salk allows young women and men 14 or older to test-drive their faith in a potent and beautiful way. The rhythm of the week is both invigorating and exhausting. We awaken in darkness, pray, eat, work, eat, work, eat, worship and fellowship, sleep, and awaken to do it again.

Young people of every generation, but this one more than ever, are not content to accept and obey. They are adept at seeking information and opinion through the web and social media. They have many skeptical questions about traditional beliefs and scriptural inerrancy.

The focus of Salk is not words on the page but people in their homes. Poverty does not need to be believed in. It can be observed and wrestled with. Most Salk campers have never been confronted by the kind of poverty they experience at Salk. They are invited into homes with buckets arrayed to catch rain through leaky roofs, rotten floors, gaping windows, and unsafe porches. Conversations about poverty that they have heard from us adults are often superficial and tend to the extremes of “lazy and shiftless” or “industrious but oppressed.“

At Salk, campers often spend hours with the homeowners, sometimes working side by side. This can result in a reversal of the description of a “poor person” to a “person who is poor.” Campers can no longer talk about poverty without acknowledging its humanity.

Differences are accepted at Salk in a way they might not be back at the teen’s high school. Gay and transgender youth participate in Salk and are embraced-literally. It’s impossible to make it through the week without being hugged dozens if not hundreds of times. Every year, I look forward to my first embrace from a towering young adult who renews our friendship by bear-hugging me and lifting me off the floor.

That said, Salk has a diversity problem. Its leaders and campers are primarily white. The lack of diversity is a symptom of the churchwide racial divide. My challenge to Salk would be to make real John Culp’s founding vision in which teams of black and white Christians working together were to be the rule, not the exception.

If young people are going to choose faith, to respond to that desire for meaning that Methodists believe has been planted in all our hearts, the places they will gather to worship and serve will likely look like Salk. The new church will be a community that reflects the fullness of God’s creation, seeks out those who have been made to feel unworthy, and makes the building of God’s kingdom on this Earth its core mission.

Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, S.C. He is a layperson who has been participating in Salk since 2008. His comments are his own and do not reflect an official position of the United Methodist Church or Salkehatchie Summer Service. Reach him at [email protected] For more information about Salk, go to https://www.umcsc.org/salkehatchie/.

My favorite Google AdSense ad this week

3 Replies

AdSense doesn’t allow me to click on the ads it posts on my blog, but this one made me so curious I had to resort to a workaround: I right-clicked, copied the link to the site, and called it up on a different browser.

It was disappointing. The chainsaw being advertised isn’t really that small. Dang. Although it looks like it could be useful for certain tasks, and the tiny one doesn’t seem too handy. Just cool. Or hilarious. Or something. In any case, it made me look.

In any case, gimme more of these kinds of ads, Google. I like them better than, say, the one I’ve been seeing all week tying critical race theory to Marxism. It was getting kind of tedious…

So you’re saying it’s the Raskolnikov Syndrome? Maybe, but that doesn’t explain 2016

17 Replies

Georgy Taratorkin as Raskolnikov in a 1969 Russian film adaptation.

As you know, people have been bat-poop crazy lately. We’ve discussed this a good bit.

It’s complicated by the fact that we’re looking at two separate developments, and sort of running them together.

I’ve been searching ever since 2016, trying to understand how this country elected — to the presidency — someone who at any previous time in our nation’s history would have been laughed off the stage the first time he stood up and said “I’m running.” A guy who had been known as a famous doofus since the ’80s. Elected to be the most powerful person on the planet.

I still haven’t arrived, although I did feel I got a lot closer to the answer when I heard that “Rabbit Hole” podcast.

Over the last year or two — starting in 2020, the year we (at least for a little while), corrected the 2016 insanity — we’ve been talking a lot about something else, which is the deleterious effect of the pandemic on human behavior.

I just read another good, thoughtful piece on that in The Atlantic: “Why People Are Acting So Weird.” It begins:

Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral asshole-on-a-plane video that week.

In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this goddamn town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of shit” and storming off.

During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased…

You see what happened there? As you will find if you read on, most of the piece is a discussion of what’s happened “during the pandemic.” But the political problem that predates the pandemic by four years comes up as well: “…before calling his fellow passenger a ‘liberal piece of shit’ and storming off.” Do you wonder who that guy voted for? I don’t. I mean, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I know.

So yeah, behavior has been pretty bad during COVID, but that doesn’t explain 2016.

However, I did pick up something interesting that I hadn’t though of before, in terms of explaining the pandemic craziness, and that’s why I’m posting this. It comes up here:

We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us

The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. “We’re more likely to break rules when our bonds to society are weakened,” Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who studies social disorder, told me. “When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public.”

The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too….

Though it’s been a lifesaving tool throughout the pandemic, mask wearing has likely made this problem worse. Just as it’s easier to scream at someone on Twitter than in real life, it’s easier to rage at a masked flight attendant than one whose face you can fully see. “You don’t really see a human being so much as you’re seeing someone masked,” Sampson said. Though one study found that face masks don’t dehumanize the wearer, another small experiment found that they do impair people’s ability to detect emotions….

I read that, and it hit me: Whoa! They mean the Raskolnikov Syndrome! Why didn’t I realize this before? After all, I’ve been thinking about it, and sometimes talking about it, since I was in college — although I don’t think I actually wrote about it until 2012. Here, in part, is how I set out the idea at that time:

I’ve long had this theory that people who do truly horrendous things that Ordinary Decent People can’t fathom do them because they’ve actually entered another state of being that society, because it is society, can’t relate to.

Quite simply, people like James Eagan Holmes are able to spend time planning a mass murder, prepare for it, gather guns and ammunition and explosives and body armor, and actually go to the intended scene of the crime and carry it out, without ever stopping and saying, “Hey, wait a minute — what am I doing?” because they’re not interacting enough with other human beings.

This allows their thoughts, unchecked, to wander off to strange places indeed — and stay there, without other people making social demands on them that call them back.

I think there’s a quality in the social space between people that assesses the ideas we have in our heads and tells us whether they are ideas worth having, or so far beyond the pale that we should stop thinking them. This vetting doesn’t have to be conscious; it’s not like you’re overtly throwing the idea out there and seeking feedback. I think that in your own mind, you constantly test ideas against what you believe the people around you would think of them, and it naturally affects how you regard the ideas yourself. I think this happens no matter how independent-minded you think you are, no matter how introverted in the Jungian sense. Unless, of course, you are a true sociopath. And I believe a lack of sufficient meaningful interaction with other people you care about plays a big factor in turning you into one of those.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov was the perfect case, fitting all the criteria we keep hearing about. Brilliant young mind, but he suffered a series of setbacks that embarrassed him and caused him to draw away from his friends. Living hundreds if not thousands of miles from his family, he was forced by lack of money to drop out of school. Rather than make money doing the translations his friend Razumikhin tried to throw his way, he fell to brooding in his ratty garret, or wandering alone through the crowded city, thinking — and not sharing his thoughts.

His murderous plan started with a provocative, if not quite mad, idea that he wrote an essay about — setting out the theory that extraordinary people who were destined to do extraordinary things for the world had a right, if not a duty, to step over the normal social rules and boundaries that restricted ordinary people. Had he been in contact with friends and family, they would have challenged him on this, as Razumikhin did late in the book, when he learned of the essay. Maybe they wouldn’t have changed his mind, in the abstract, but if he had been having dinner each night with his mother and sister, and going out for drinks regularly with Razumikhin, it would have been impossible for him to have carried it to the next level…

I explained further, including sharing the passage that “proved” the theory to me, and I’d love for you to go back and read the whole thing. But that’s the essence.

So yeah, the piece in The Atlantic is referring to a form of that Syndrome. Which is cool, and helpful. I feel like I understand the pandemic-behavior problem a bit better now.

This is particularly an eye-opener to me because, as an introvert, I haven’t minded the isolation of the last two years at all. I haven’t found it stressful, and in many ways — such as not going to an office every day (or at all, really) — I’ve seen it as pretty awesome.

But I had forgotten about my own theory about Raskolnikov. Now I get it.

But to repeat myself, that still doesn’t explain 2016, or the fact that so many millions of people did that again in 2020, and can’t wait to do it again in 2024, whether the pandemic is still affecting our lives or not.

So, I’ll have to keep looking. Because helpful as it is, “Rabbit Hole” doesn’t explain it all — does it?

Sorry, but I won’t even call back ‘Silverado’

9 Replies

For the longest time, most of the spam calls I received claimed to be coming from towns in South Carolina — Clover, Jackson (which I didn’t realize was a place in SC before that), Camden and so forth.

Lately, they’ve been coming from California. Don’t know why. Maybe the algorithm got confused between the two USCs.

Have y’all noticed that happening?

Anyway, I got one a few minutes ago, while on a work-related call, and of course I ignored it. But I was intrigued. It claimed to come from “Silverado.”

I don’t know about y’all, but I loved that movie. Coming out as it did in 1985, I saw it as a collaboration of young actors (all about my age, or slightly older) who had grown up on Westerns, but had never had a chance to act in one. So they made an oater that was packed with every trope you could think of — the roving gambler, the saloon, the wagon train of sodbusters, the evil rich guy who ran the town, the gunslinger, everything.

I thought, briefly, about calling back. I imagined myself talking to “Emmett” or “Paden,” or if I really got lucky, “Hannah.” (Then I could say, “All I did was talk to the girl.”) But with my luck, it would end up being “Sheriff Cobb.”

So never mind…

Graham’s clown act during hearing wasn’t just an act. He meant it.

54 Replies

So many people were better people before 2016. Lindsey Graham is one of our country’s more dramatic and tragic examples.

Especially with regard to judicial confirmations. Before Donald Trump and his supports assumed total control of the Republican Party, our senior senator was one of the few senators of either party who could be relied upon to support qualified candidates nominated by presidents of the opposite party.

It was what he was known for. He was more likely than anyone to say “elections have consequences” and vote to confirm, say, Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor.

Although he let his country down, bigtime, in failing to fight his leadership over Merrick Garland, the fact is that he stood out among senators in supporting the Democratic nominees he did support.

For years — including before Trumpism — Graham has walked a tightrope as a Republican from South Carolina. He took brave stands on court nominations and immigration, while at the same time trying to signal that he could be as big a yahoo as anybody. Sometimes, the attacks on “Grahamnesty” caused him to back down, but he was known for the times he stood his ground as one of the Gang of 14.

That fell apart when he decided that his political path forward involved developing a national reputation as Trump’s best buddy and most loyal toady. But he would still occasionally take a stand against the insanity, such as when Trump betrayed our allies in Syria.

So when he did something like trying to be the biggest, loudest clown in the room in giving Ketanji Brown Jackson a hard time during the recent hearings, I would wonder how much of it was just an act to give himself cover before quietly acting like Lindsey Graham and voting for her — since there was no legitimate reason not to.

But today we found out he didn’t have the guts to do that:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Thursday that he will oppose Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, marking the first time the GOP senator will vote against a nominee for the high court since joining the Senate.

“I will oppose her and I will vote no,” Graham said from the Senate floor.

So the madness that has gripped our country just took another step deeper into the abyss…

How Will Smith brought out tribal sensibilities with that slap

6 Replies

I almost didn’t read this piece this morning, because of the headline, which said, “The Will Smith slap says more about us than him.”

Molly Roberts

There was nothing wrong with the headline. It perfectly fit what Molly Roberts was saying. My problem was that I misread the word “us.”

I thought this would be written from the perspective of one of the many cultural and political tribes into which our society has divided itself, and would tell us — as individuals — whether we were good or bad people based on which of these tribes the writer belongs to.

But no, it was a way of decrying the fact that we have divided ourselves this way. It invited “us” — as a society — to realize how stupid we have been to thus divide ourselves. So I liked it, and recommend it.

Some excerpts:

Some takes surely came from the heart, but a lot of others appeared to come from the head, with everyone sorting through the slew of mini-screeds online to determine what was the right thing to think. A young woman… might have balked at the sound of flesh hitting flesh, but then reconsidered when she saw a post about Black hair, and then reconsidered again when she saw another about toxic masculinity…

Society has separated into so many groups with so many identities that sometimes we spend more time scrambling to ensure we’re aligned with whichever we consider ours than we do figuring out what we actually believe. How are we supposed to reconcile our anti-violence, and our anti-racism, and our anti-anti-feminism, all at once?…

Indeed. So we have the feminist decrying the fact that Will robbed his wife of her “agency,” and reminding us that she could defend herself just fine. And inevitably we also have the advocate of “toxic masculinity” — someone we once might have referred to as “a guy” — saying, “Yeah? I didn’t see her doing it,” which leads to a thousand indignant tweets in response as the guy struts back and forth making Tim Allen noises.

And all sorts of other people anxious to demonstrate that they’ve got their minds right, according to the standards of this or that group. So we are again reminded that social media are seldom about the expression of thought, and too often about the signaling of conformity.

Or, to use the terms I so often use these days, telling people whether we’re a one or a zero.

Here’s how the column ends:

The reaction to an event so strange, so personal, really does take place in the gut, and there’s little point in trying to take it out and put it somewhere else. The way we feel about things doesn’t always have to prove that we’re progressive, or conservative, or a crusader for or against cancel culture, or woke or still asleep. Sometimes it proves only that all of us are human.

Absolutely. And as I say even more often, people are complicated…

Open Thread for Tuesday, March 29, 2022

52 Replies

Here we go again:

Signs of Progress in Russia-Ukraine Talks — Which sounds good, although this portion of the subhed doesn’t sound great: “Ukraine Offers Potential Concessions.” The terms should be “Russia pulls out, and leaves Ukraine alone forever.” Doing that without any “concessions” out of Kyiv should weaken Putin to the point of ending his regime, which would leave the world better off. But of course Zelenskyy has to deal with reality, not perfection. I do like the part about Moscow saying it will lessen pressure on the Ukrainian capital. Translated from the Russian, that seems to say, “We now know we can’t take Kyiv”…
Mick Mulvaney gets new gig with major TV network — Further proof that the standards at “major TV networks” have really plunged dramatically.
Lindsey Graham went off the rails when questioning Ketanji Brown Jackson — Kevin Fisher’s “City Watch” column steps beyond the bounds of the city, and mostly I agree with it. And before 2016, Graham would have agreed as well. Of course, that’s when he went off the rails, not last week.
Our cameras turn to the world of sports… This happened days ago, but this is my first post since then. I’ll just say what I said after the disappointment of watching St. Peter’s lose: “At this moment, I very much look forward to watching Duke take the Tarheels apart…” Meanwhile, the Lady Gamecocks continue toward their inevitable victory.
But was Will Smith wrong to slap Chris Rock? — He’s apologized, as gentlemen will do. But do gentlemen really sit still for disrespect directed at their wives?

Open Thread for Wednesday, March 23, 2022

36 Replies

Here I am doing an Open Thread twice in one week. It’s almost like I’m getting serious about this blogging thing again. Well, that remains to be seen, but I hope you enjoy it…

Joe goes to Europe — Here’s hoping the sane countries of the world continue to show a united front against Putin, and that it has a salutary effect. As long as they’re meeting, maybe they can suggest to Germany another place where it could go to buy its gas.
Meanwhile, Jackson hearings go on and on and on — But I already complained about that in my previous post. I suppose U.S. senators were occupying their time like this — you know, performing for their respective bases — in early December 1941 as well…
The Zelenskyy-Churchill comparison — Several times over the last few days, I’ve heard or seen discussions of the Ukrainian leader, and Churchill comes up. Which I enjoy. My fave was something I heard on NPR with a British participant who said “extraordinary” a lot — like every sentence or two — and I love the way that sounds in RP. But why always Churchill? Just because we know he was a European leader who was in a tight spot against an authoritarian invader, and it had a happy ending? I guess it’s better if we see him as Winston than as Paul Reynaud. Oh, you never heard of Reynaud? Well, that’s my point… Or maybe it’s because Churchill also addressed Congress. I dunno…
I’m finding myself sorta, kinda cheering for Nancy Mace this time — Which is not what I or anyone else would expect. I mean, I always got along with Nancy personally, but that was years before she first ran for public office. Anyway, there are two reasons for this sorta, kinda position: 1. Her opponent is Katie Arrington. 2. Donald Trump seems to be really, really for Katie Arrington. Of course, this “sorta kinda” thing only goes so deep. I sort of cringed when NBC called Nancy “one of South Carolina’s rising stars.” I mean, I remember when national media called Nikki Haley that — actually, they still do. And I remember when they thought Mark Sanford was serious presidential fodder….
How about that huge trans-gender athlete thing in the State House? — My main reaction is that I look around at South Carolina, and I try to figure out why either side gets so passionate about something that so rarely crops up. Meanwhile, we’ve got people talking about taking funding away from the people who are supposed to be keeping our roads drivable, so they can pander by saying they lowered taxes. I wonder whether some of those who want to abandon a core responsibility of government are also pushing hard on the high-school sports thing?
Anybody gonna go see James Taylor? — I did, when he was here three years ago. Great show. I saw him decades ago in Memphis as well — one of my kids still has the T shirt, I think — but this was even better. So I recommend it…

James Taylor at the Colonial Center in 2019. It was great. I was far away, but they had those big screens…

Graham’s questioning Jackson AGAIN? Why?

7 Replies

This may be a stupid question (actually, I know it’s a stupid question), but why is Lindsey Graham questioning the Supreme Court nominee AGAIN, just now? I just grabbed the less-than-ideal image above from the live feed on The Washington Post site.

I’ve done my best to ignore these hearings for quite a few years, because I find them to be such torture (I don’t think I’ve followed one closely since Clarence Thomas). That’s the only excuse I have for not understanding how they work.

But I’m aware that Lindsey had some time with her Monday. And again on Tuesday. I mean, near as I could tell from the info that slipped through as I was trying to ignore it. So… why is he on again?

These hearings do so little that is of any value, and do so much harm to our country — both in terms of fueling destructive partisanship and undermining confidence in our courts — that it really, truly seems they should be streamlined. Each member gets some time with the nominee (and they’ve each met with her privately before the hearings, right? what is this but a show for strutting before the base?), and we’re done. One day, tops.

You’ll say, that will never happen. But I know of one way to change that. Bar TV cameras from the hearing room. That would guarantee that the hearings would resume to simply conducting business, as required by the Constitution.

But of course, that will never happen either, will it?

Open Thread for Monday, March 21, 2022

6 Replies

At the moment, apparently, there’s nothing to watch…

Have I even done one of these this year? Well, I’m doing one now:

Ukraine Refuses to Surrender Mariupol; Thousands Trapped — Or, I could have brought up one of many other angles. I don’t know what to say beyond the fact that I want it to end as soon as possible — with Russia as the clear loser. I fear that second condition would take awhile, though. But Putin must fail.
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Hearings Begin — As y’all know, confirmation hearings are not one of my fave things. But a lot of folks out there take interest in them — may even be watching them. Thoughts? (That is to say, original, non-talking-points thoughts?) Have at it.
Thoughts on NCAA tournament basketball? — If so, y’all bring them up. I tried bringing up the topic earlier, but y’all weren’t interested. For my part, here’s the thing that makes me the happiest to have been wrong on my bracket: St. Peter’s. Here’s the thing that makes me saddest to have been right: Memphis losing to Gonzaga.
And the Lady Gamecocks won again — If you’ll recall, this is the full text of my NCAA women’s “bracket:” “But if you want to know who’s going to win, it will be the Lady Gamecocks. Duh…” So, you know, no surprises yet.
Thoughts about Frank Martin, or his replacement? — Yes, a record third basketball headline in a row. You’ll note that the link is to a story about Murray State’s Matt McMahon. So, what’s the thinking: That after this weekend, maybe they can get him cheaper?
Film recommendation — “De Gaulle.” — A new feature, if y’all are interested. I’m thinking about highlighting films I’ve found that maybe no one else has mentioned to you. Anyway, one thing I like about Amazon Prime is that it surprises me sometimes with something I’d never heard of. This weekend it was “De Gaulle.” Not only was it engaging to watch, but I learned a lot. Stuff I should have known, but didn’t, about such a key figure in such recent history. It’s in French, but if you’re a subtitles guy like me (I always have them turned on), that shouldn’t matter.

Stop nagging me, Netflix!

I think this was my first post-COVID dream…

3 Replies

I think the setting was supposed to be the old State newspaper building, but wildly different on the inside…

Well, we know I have long COVID, which consists of some post-COVID physical symptoms.

But I think I just had my first post-COVID dream. (Actually, this was Thursday night, but I’m just getting around to posting it.) So I thought I’d better set it down for the sake of medical science.

I have work dreams, or perhaps I should call them stress dreams, all the time. In terms of the way they feel, they’re related to the cliché dreams that everyone who has been to college has — it’s the end of the semester and you have to go take an exam, only you’ve never been to the class, and you’re afraid to ask anyone where it is, because then they’ll know you haven’t been to the class, etc.

At least, that’s the way those dreams work with me. And with me, looking back on my college career, they’re not that different from reality. But they’re stressful.

And the work dream I had last night was like that, but it had a new, post-COVID wrinkle. By the way, I should mention that these dreams are almost never related to any work I’ve done in the last few years. They’re drawn from the intense situations I encountered daily in the decades of my newspaper career — sometimes from the early days in the newsroom, and occasionally from my time later on the editorial board.

This fit in that genre, but with a twist that is very much pandemic-related. It’s not that I’d had COVID in the dream, it’s that my work habits were what so many of us have experienced the last couple of years. And it’s not that — as in the college dreams — I didn’t know where the office was. I knew the place well, but I just hadn’t been there in a really long time. And things had changed radically.

(In this sense, it’s a little like my current life. We shut down the ADCO office when the pandemic started — in mid-March 2020. Sometime later, we shut it down for good. But in the last few months, my colleagues opened a new office. Nobody goes there as often as they went to the old one. I don’t go there at all. Except for two meetings and one case where I went and took a picture of a client, I haven’t encountered any work that can’t be done in my home office. Anyway, those circumstances seem to have imposed themselves on this otherwise standard newspaper dream.)

It started with a phone call. Someone called me from the office — an office I hadn’t been to on a long time. He wanted to discuss a backup editorial (a short item that ran below the lede editorial, back when such things existed) he was writing for the Sunday page. He wanted some sort of guidance on it. I found this call disconcerting on a number of levels. First, it was ridiculous that he seemed to think he needed urgent help at this time, because it was a Monday afternoon — normally we wouldn’t even have identified a topic for such an edit at that point. Secondly, the call cut off before we could get the matter settled, and I couldn’t seem to reconnect with him.

But the worst part was that I had no idea who this guy was. And I was aware that there were a number of such people at the office now — new associate editors and editorial writers I had never met, but whom I was supposed to be supervising. It dawned on me that this was probably an unacceptable situation. I decided I should probably start going in to the office and sort all this out. I didn’t want to, but it seemed the responsible thing to do. At the very least, I needed to find out who this one guy was, so I could address his question.

I needed to go there and find Cindi Scoppe, who was the only person I knew who still worked there. (Of course, in real life, even though she was the last member of my team to get laid off, at this point she hasn’t been there either, for several years.)

I went there, and I eventually found her. She was outside a door to the editorial department. I peered in through a window in the door, and saw a place I’ve never seen before. A confusing, chaotic place, crowded with old desks jammed together, and strangers wandering among them. I had hoped to infer somehow which of them had called me, but I couldn’t. Nor could Cindi. She knew these people — she named some of them to me — but had no idea which had called me. I was going to have to get past that door somehow — it was locked — and engage these people in conversation until I sorted out which was the right one, and answered his question.

Eventually, I got in, and engaged with some of these strangers. My first problem is that I had no idea where to put down my laptop, because I couldn’t figure out where my office was. I finally realized that none of these people had offices (we all did back in my newspaper days) so maybe I just had a desk among all the others. I found this disconcerting, and was already missing working at home, but worse, I couldn’t sort out which was mine, so I couldn’t put down the things I was carrying.

And of course, I couldn’t ask anyone. Cindi had wandered off, and I couldn’t say anything to these strangers that indicated that I didn’t know where my workplace was, and I had no idea who any of them were.

Anyway, you get the idea. Like in the classic college dream.

The weird thing is, in real life, I’ve experienced no such difficulty working from home. I talk to people and I write things. With very rare exceptions, of it is easily accomplished using the phone, or perhaps Zoom on my iPad, and my PC — all right here in my office.

But in the dream, it seems I had thought everything was working fine before the dream started, and the main point of everything that was happening was that I was finally realizing what should have been obvious.

This doesn’t worry me, because I have these work/stress dreams all the time. I’m just setting this one down as the first in which the stress seems to have been driven by things we’ve experienced during the pandemic — in this case, by my favorite part of the “new normal,” the part where I don’t have to go to an office outside my home any more.

Anyone else have any such dreams?

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits