Can you prove Trump understands ANYTHING?

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I’m on vacation, but I still follow what’s going on, and for the last couple of days I’ve been worrying about something. Both Bryan and Phillip touched on it yesterday. They said,

OK, they may not have touched on it directly, but they got me going with the worrying again, and here’s what I’m concerned about…

Well, if I’m reading these accounts correctly, the case is built on him UNDERSTANDING he lost the election. So he was lying when he said he had won it, making his efforts to overthrow the results — and incite the crowd to disrupt the process — an act of intentional criminality.

That worries me. Because I’m not sure you can demonstrate he understands ANYTHING…

With him, it gets back to the questions I’ve been asking about this guy since 2016. When he does the things he does and says the things he says, is he demonstrating that he is:

Evil? In other words, when he says something wildly untrue and acts upon it, does he actually know the facts, and is pretending not to?

Stupid? Does he say and do these things because he is so amazingly dumb that he doesn’t know any better?

Crazy? Is his brain damaged or does he have the wrong chemicals flowing through it, and that causes him to do and say things that are inexplicable and inexcusable to a sane person?

Of course, the more I think about it, the more I realize that these are neat, separate categories only in our own imaginations. They can overlap and bleed over into each other.

But that’s not my point. My point is, is this indictment, about something of supreme importance to this nation, based on a shaky foundation? Can a prosecutor satisfactorily prove that this idiot whack job was actually lying when he kept telling gullible people that he truly believed the election had been stolen from him, and them?

I’m not sure any of this can stick if they can’t prove that. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe I’m being kind of dense myself. I hope so. Tell me that, and convince me.

So far, the things I’ve read — this, for instance, or this — feed my worry.

Because if this case can’t be presented so that it results in such a convincing “guilty” verdict that even his loyal supporters understand and accept it, this country is never going to be able to move on from the trauma of the last few years.

And that would put the continued existence of the United States at serious risk…

Open Thread for Friday, July 28, 2023

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Meant to do this earlier, but got sidetracked. Oh, well. Nobody reads blogs on Friday afternoons, anyway. Here you go:

  1. New Charges in Documents Case Add to Trump’s Legal Peril — Here’s where one of my readers “there you go again, obsessing about Trump.” Personally, I don’t recall the last time I said anything about his indictments and so forth. Usually, I ignore it — how is it news that this guy’s a crook? But at this point, I sort of feel like I have to take note of the avalanche, you know? And of course, there’s likely more to come. Which of course raises the next question…
  2. GOP support for Trump softens as the former president’s legal troubles mount — Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it. This seems pretty thin to me. Of course, in the relatively sane world in which we lived before 2016, this is what you would expect to happen (back then, he would have fallen off the radar at the time of the Access Hollywood revelations, way before these “legal troubles). Today, I’d have to see more than what’s in this story to convince me the sanity effect is kicking back in in the GOP.
  3. Harvard “legacy” tradition should end — That’s what Jennifer Rubin said, but I say it, too. But to me, this is not because of the affirmative action policy that was struck down. The legacy policy never, ever made sense, and that was long before anyone ever thought about affirmative action. I see no point to legacies, beyond courting the money of the kids’ affluent parents — which short-sighted and even shameful. This is supposed to be the nation’s best university, and it should be admitting the nation’s best students (and of course, finding a way to help them pay for it). Of course, a lot of the best students would be the children of former best students. But plenty would not. Ditching the “who’s your daddy?” consideration would be fair, it would be good for Harvard, and I suppose it would be good for the nation’s intellectual gene pool, because the smartest would have a fairer chance to get into the best school.
  4. The war in Ukraine is spurring a revolution in drone warfare using AI — This is a good story in the Post, and I know a lot of you can’t read it. But basically, it says, “Drones empowered with artificial intelligence hold huge promise for Ukraine’s military but could also benefit nefarious non-state actors like terrorists and drug cartels.” And this is very true. It gives an advantage to Kyiv, but does the same for a lot of bad guys out there. Which is something that has worried me for some time. There are tradeoffs with everything, I guess…
  5. Tim Scott’s amendment passes key vote. But he didn’t vote on it. This is where he was. — This one isn’t about Tim Scott. It’s about the headline itself. This is a particularly egregious case of abandoning the basic journalistic value that you tell a reader all you can cram into a headline. That has been replaced by heds that tell you little, and entice you into clicking. How would the Old School, inform-the-reader-style hed have been different? Well, instead of “This is where he was,” it would have said “He was in Iowa.” It’s not only shorter, but it tells readers the main thing they want to know. Which means, of course, that they wouldn’t click. This is how the world has changed. Well, one of the ways…
  6. The IT Crowd is coming to Britbox — I get WAY too many promotional emails from all the streaming services to which I subscribe, but this one excited me today. I had been watching this over and over on Netflix for years, and while that might not be the healthiest, best practice for someone who knows he needs to work on his time management, I always got a kick out of it. But then suddenly it quit working. Netflix had dropped it. And I couldn’t get it to play anymore, even when I turned the Netflix app off and turned it back on again. So I’m looking forward to Thursday. You say you’ve never seen The IT Crowd? Well, you should remedy that. Personally, I’d consider the subscription fee to be worth it, just to see this one series.

Them danged bureaucrats, and the folks who hate them

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Dang them bureaucrats!

I had a good, brief discussion with our friend Lynn Teague the other day on what was — way back then (or at least, earlier this week) — called “Twitter.”

I asked her if she minded my sharing it here, and she didn’t, so here goes…

It started with her reaction to someone who was commenting on a truly off-the-wall proposal by a guy who styles himself as a “U.S. presidential candidate” (God forbid!):

Rather than embed all the back and forth that followed, I’ll just quote it.

I responded, “And anyone who can’t understand that is distressingly deficient… Why on Earth would anyone want someone in a position of responsibility who knows nothing about the job?”

Of course, being me, I went on: “I think these people think of a job as some sort of goody that is handed to people like candy. And they don’t want anyone hogging the goodies. They don’t see it as SOMETHING IMPORTANT WE NEED A QUALIFIED PERSON TO DO.”

Lynn came back with: “I’m afraid you are right, Brad. They aren’t aware of the actual jobs that are done and the skills needed to perform them. When they are aware, they don’t value things like knowing how to get water supplies to hurricane victims or help someone with federal pension issues.”

ME: “Actually, it’s worse than that. They see public service as something contemptible, and think only contemptible people would want to do it. So they don’t want those people to have that cushy goody…”

LYNN: “Yes, I’m afraid these folks read Atlas Shrugged at an impressionable age and believe the unconstrained business superhero sits astride a world of those who SC Gov Hammond called ‘mudsills.’Most voters don’t know that they are regarded as mudsills.”

ME: Well… I think these people DO suspect, on some level, that they are regarded as belonging to a lower order, whatever term is applied. And they think elites, and those danged bureaucrats, are the ones who regard them as such…”

And dang it! I can’t find my conclusion! Did it disappear from the site formerly known as Twitter?

That’s what made me thing of this — when Ken said something about Southern history, it reminded me of what I had said….

I’ll try to reconstruct it. It went something like this, elaborating on my last point…

These folks think, “at least I’m better than those bureaucrats!” And when these folks are Southern voters, there’s a sort of hereditary background for this kind of thinking. Their “betters” (folks like Mr. Hammond) somehow persuaded them to think that however low they might be in the social order, they were better than somebody, because they were white…

I think that was it…

Open Thread for Monday, July 24, 2023

57 Replies

Some of us were quite pleased on Feb. 29, 2020. Let’s do it again — but earlier!

Yet another one of these. Here you go…

  1. Protests Intensify Across Israel After Measure to Weaken Judiciary Passes — This is a huge deal, and a profoundly serious crisis. An NYT headline before the vote said, “Israel’s Identity Hangs in Balance Ahead of Key Vote on New Law,” in response to which I tweeted that Yes, it does. Our ally is on the ragged verge of throwing away its status as the only liberal democracy in a region that desperately needs such a bastion. The region needs it, the United States needs it, and the world needs it. And Bibi is trying to destroy it. That was before the vote. AFTER, we see a nation hurling toward irrelevance at best. If you can read it, I recommend Tom Friedman’s column on the subject, “Only Biden Can Save Israel Now.” Of course, I would add Israel itself to that equation.
  2. Thoughts on SC being the first Democratic presidential primary? — Although it happened a while back, it occurs to me we haven’t talked about this (have we?). Anyway, I was reminded of the subject by an E.J. Dionne column today, which was about how those people up in New Hampshire are still in an uproar about South Carolina getting to hold the first primary — instead of, you know. Tough. I think it’s great. South Carolina Democrats are my favorite Dems, and they should get the spotlight — and the influence. You will say, Aw you just like it because the last time around, black voters in South Carolina saved Joe Biden, and then saved the country by making him president. And you’re almost right. I am very proud that my dear neighbors stepped forward to do that (and I helped). But I don’t just like it for that reason. I think it’s good for the country as well.
  3. Welcome to the grievance-packed world of electric vehicle charging — It tells of the mad, dog-eat-dog scramble for a very limited resource: public charging spots. This being from The Boston Globe, it says, “EV drivers are hogging chargers… Think post-snowstorm parking in Southie — only the green version.” Anyway, this points to the biggest reason I wouldn’t buy an electric car — yet. I mean, aside from the cost. If I had money to spend on a new car, I might get a hybrid. But I wouldn’t go the full electric Monty until it’s as easy, and quick, as gassing up. We don’t have the infrastructure now, unless you’re at home. I dunno. Do you have an electric? What’s it like for you?
  4. He was an undocumented immigrant. He became ‘your excellency.’ — I hope you can read this, but if you can’t, I’ll just tell you: It’s about Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, the new auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Washington, who finally made it on his third try to get into the United States when he was 19. He got here, and did what most of these folks do — he worked hard at any job he could get, regardless of the way he would be exploited because of his illegal status. Eventually, he got an education and entered the priesthood, and is now a shepherd to nearly 700,000 Catholics in the District and parts of Maryland. An inspiring story. And if you can’t read it in the post, there’s a short bio about him among the other auxiliary bishops on the diocesan website.
  5. Finally, a plea for technical advice — Y’all who are not twitter addicts probably won’t care, and therefore won’t know, but if you do, maybe you can help me, or at least tell me whom to blame: What I want to know is, Why can I no longer tweet directly from the NYT and Washington Post apps on my iPad, which I’ve been doing for ages, but can’t now? Is this the fault of an Apple update (I wish they’d stop “improving” things), or the work of Elon Musk? What happens is, I click on the “share” thing in the newspaper app, choose Twitter, write the tweet, and when I try to send, it fails. But then I go to Twitter, and find what I wrote in the drafts, and send it from there. Not the hardest thing in the world, but it takes about an extra minute for each tweet. And it doesn’t have to. I asked about this on Twitter, and I got a like, but no help…

Wikipedia on the Thirteen Colonies

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Sure, Alexandria had a nice library, but that was peanuts next to Wikipedia…

A lot of people criticize Wikipedia. Ironically, if you’d like to know what they say about it, the most convenient thing to do is to read the “Criticism of Wikipedia” article on, of course, Wikipedia. It begins:

Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed toward its content, community of established users, and processes. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of the articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias….

And so forth. The article goes on and on.

But I appreciate it, greatly. That’s why I responded positively to one of the service’s periodic fund-raising appeals several years back, and that’s why $3.10 flows out of my credit union account monthly. It is, quite plainly, the least I can do.

First, this is the greatest reference work in the history of humanity. I remember that on “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan used to go on and on about the burning of the library in Alexandria in antiquity, which was surprising for a show that was about science, not history. He seemed to regard it as the worst thing that had happened, ever. And no doubt it would have been better if someone had had a fire extinguisher handy. But while I have no way of quantifying this for you number people, I suspect that the library’s store of knowledge was peanuts compared to what you find on Wikipedia.

I LOVED these…

Do you always find everything you wanted? No. That’s impossible. But it gives me what I’m looking for far more reliably than any other reference work I’ve ever encountered. And I’m a long-time connoisseur. I used to pore through encyclopedias before I could read — and when my parents purchased the Golden Book Encyclopedia for me when I was 6 (as I recall, a grocery store had a promotion going that sold them on a sort of subscription basis, and you got another volume each week), I was engrossed, reading and rereading what I imagined to be the compendium of all knowledge. To me, this was fun.

Later, after I started working at The State, I wrote the “South Carolina” articles each year for the yearbooks of a grown-up encyclopedia. I’d tell you the name of the encyclopedia, but I don’t recall, and don’t see them around me on my bookshelves, because why would I need them now?

Let’s face it: Encyclos were pathetic compared to Wiki — as flat and dead and limited as a folded-up, tattered map from the gas station in 1957, compared to Google Maps.

Generally, I rely on it mainly for the most basic bits of routine, objective information — say, if I’m trying to remember who Adlai Stevenson’s running mate was in 1956 (just now, I was thinking “Estes Kefauver,” and I’m glad to see I was right), or the details regarding that miraculous Wednesday night in 1965 when “Lost in Space,” “Green Acres” and “I Spy” all premiered (a big deal to an 11-year-old). For the most part, I guess, I use it to look up things I think I know to make sure I know them, before I make a fool of myself by writing the wrong thing.

And while there are many sites that provide medical info, if a doctor prescribes me a new medication, I find Wiki far more helpful in giving me an overview of key information such as chemical makeup, what it’s for, contraindications and side effects. Needless to say, I haven’t consulted a PDR in many years. It tells me everything I’m looking for in a structure that makes it all eminently accessible.

Anyway, what got me onto this subject? Just a routine lookup this morning. I don’t remember now what got me thinking about it, but I wanted to check and make sure my memory of which states were among the original 13 colonies was correct (I was thinking, everything on the Eastern Seaboard except Maine and Florida, plus some of those sad little landlocked New England states). I was for some reason doubting myself on Maine, but was quickly reassured.

But I found something a little unusual. I only needed a list of the 13, but what I found was an article, “Thirteen Colonies,” that had something else I love, but seldom seek from Wikipedia: wholeness. This might not strike you when you read it, but it hit me rather forcefully.

I’m not saying this was elegant, novel-style story-telling, but it tied things together in ways that would lend understanding to the reader, not just a hodgepodge of facts. There were some facts I didn’t know, but not that many. What impressed me was that whoever was involved in putting it together, he or she (sure, it could have been any number of people, but there was a unity to it that suggested a single mind) helped the reader grok the big picture, in the way it briefly told the stories of the 13 colonies and how they became the 13 states.

Since what I’m trying to describe here is something holistic, it’s hard for me to give you quotes demonstrating what I mean. But take a look at this graf about how the French and Indian War was simultaneously a unifying experience, but at the same time led to loyal British colonists deciding to declare independence in a remarkably short time:

The British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe. The colonists’ loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, disunity was beginning to form. British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder had decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself. This was a successful wartime strategy but, after the war was over, each side believed that it had borne a greater burden than the other. The British elite, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonists paid little to the royal coffers. The colonists replied that their sons had fought and died in a war that served European interests more than their own. This dispute was a link in the chain of events that soon brought about the American Revolution.

Among other things, you’ll notice how well and simply the piece sets out the paradoxes. How could it be both a unifying and supremely divisive experience? Well, here’s how, in few words. And it’s very understandable. Or I think so, anyway.

By now, if you got this far, you’re going, what the hell am I reading? This topic isn’t just out of left field, it’s beyond the bleachers, and apparently originated in a cow pasture a couple of miles from the ballpark.

But I just was impressed by this small, obscure thing, and thought I’d say, “Way to go, Wikipedia!”

Also, as I’ve no doubt mentioned before, I believe that gross ignorance of history is possibly the greatest problem facing this country and endangering its future. I’m not talking dates and names and facts — I’m talking about real understanding of history, how it all fits together and what it means.

And I thought if I can get one person out there to stumble across this and read that Wikipedia article, that would be one person who would better understand this nation’s origin story…

Some quick observations about ‘The Flash’

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I mentioned in a previous post that I might go see “Oppenheimer” or “The Flash.” I ended up taking my younger son and my grandson to “The Flash.” I’ll see Oppenheimer soon. Bryan says he saw “Oppenheimer” today, and maybe he’ll post here about it. I hope he does. If not, I will when I see it.

But now, some quick observations about “The Flash.”

It was fun. We enjoyed it. One would hope so, when that much money and that many people are involved. More about the many people in a moment. Here are some bullets:

  • Since seeing it, I’ve answered each person who’s asked me about it that it was “weird, but we enjoyed it.” To elaborate on the weird… As much as I enjoy watching a movie, that, among its other attractions, features pretty much everybody who has ever played Batman on the big screen, the overly bizarre twists — such as multiverse realities colliding with all sorts of dazzling visual effects, and similar people in those other universes having very different lives and relationships — gets a bit wearying. You eventually wonder what your eye should be following, and whether there’s really ONE version of a character seen multiple times that you should care about. Why so much baffling complexity? Isn’t normal life complicated enough? I think the answer is fairly simple: When you keep investing your huge production budgets in the SAME stories about the SAME characters over and over — including multiple renditions of the “origin story” — you have to go to extremes to keep pulling people in.
  • I mentioned Batman. You think, Batman? I thought this was The Flash. Well, another way Marvel has found to deal with the repetition of telling the same story over and over about one guy — say, Spider-Man — is to mix superheroes together, say through such devices as the Avengers. This makes the simple stories about single characters more complicated by having them interact with each other. It also brings, say, Thor fans in to see a movie about Iron Man. And sure, it’s fun to see these familiar characters interact. (My favorite example? Watching the Avengers sit around exhausted eating shawarma after the credits of the first “Avengers” movie.) Anyway, it’s worked for Marvel, so DC has adopted this practice with a vengeance. Their vehicle for this is the Justice League. There’s not just Batman, there are multiple Batmen, and Supermen. And the treat of the stunning Gal Gadot appearing in a cameo — there are lots of cameos — as Wonder Woman. She makes Flash tongue-tied, quite understandably.
  • I mentioned a lot of people being involved. I also mentioned the nice bits that occur AFTER the credits, in Marvel movies at least — meaning that even people who are not habitual credits-readers stay until they’re over. Last night, as with other such CGI spectaculars, I watched as oceans of names of people washed across the screen, most of them working on effects. And something occurred to me last night as I watched… One of the great advantages of CGI, I’ve heard, is that you don’t have to hire hundreds of extras to be an army or a crowd at a football game or whatever — you can just fake them. But here I was watching all these names of people hired to work on the movie, and it occurred to me that with this many people on the payroll, you could stage just about any kind of crowd scene you wanted. And then, you wouldn’t need CGI — for that purpose, anyway. Which is ironic. And doesn’t it cost more to hire people who can write code than to hire extras to stand around? So tell me again how the studios are saving money by not hiring extras…
  • A lot of those tech people — a surprising number of them, it occurred to me — had Indian names. I don’t mean like Geronimo. I mean like Rajesh “Raj” Koothrappali, the character on “The Big Bang Theory.” This small trigger made me think of something totally irrelevant — that if you DID put all these guys in the credits in a crowd scene, they’d look kind of homogenous. Not that they’d all look Indian, but that they’d all little like all the main characters — Indian, caucasian, Jewish, and occasionally (but not often) a woman, such as Amy Farrah Fowler. (Or like the Geek Squad at Best Buy.) But not Penny. The Pennys are all in the acting credits, and wear spandex.
  • A side note about aging. Flash is played by a young actor I’ve never seen before. Which is probably why he was surrounded by stars who have played Batman, etc. The studios can’t take chances on people staying away because there are no stars! Among the supporting characters were his parents. And you know who played his Dad? Ron Livingston. You know — the jaded young hero of “Office Space!” And a leading figure among the legion of young actors featured in “Band of Brothers!” But those guys worked at Initek 24 years ago. And “Band of Brothers” first appeared on HBO in 2001. So now he’s the Dad of the hero. This is disconcerting. It was almost as big a shock as when Marisa Tomei appeared as Aunt May in one of the Spider-Man movies. I mean, come on! This is Marisa Tomei. And this is Aunt May. How can this be? (Of course, they worked it out by having Aunt May look like this, which I suppose was a very Hollywood thing to do.) Anyway, I want all these people to stop getting old, right now.
  • Of all the name actors who appear, the biggest is Michael Keaton, who appears of course as one of the Batmen — the best one, the one you paid to see. This was a tremendous gimmick that the makers came up with, and it delivered. It does not disappoint. I’d tell you why, but I’m holding myself back from spoilers.
  • Oh, I mentioned the young actor who plays the Flash. Looking up details about the movie today, I ran across a rather appalling recent record, which apparently caused great concern among the makers of the movie, although they proceeded anyway. Look at the list of incidents and allegations on Wikipedia, which you find when you click on “controversies surrounding Miller” in the main story about the movie. Wow. I don’t see how one person could have been involved in this many kinds of alleged misdeeds. I don’t think Keith Moon could have kept up with such a record, even when he was at his most destructively energetic. And it’s a shame. I mentioned recently that with AI, we may face a future in which no new, young actor makes it big, because all the movies can star Harrison Ford and Clark Gable and Ingrid Bergman. But this kid gets a break like this, and yet seems to be self-destructing. Assuming any significant percentage of the allegations are true.

I guess that’s enough. Back when I reviewed movies, I never wrote on this long.

Again, I enjoyed it. (The best part? Michael Keaton, of course.) When something else like it comes out, I’ll probably see that too, if the young guys let me come along. But there is a good bit of weirdness…

Of course, the reason to go is to see Michael Keaton. He does not disappoint.

Open Thread for Friday, July 21, 2023

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Click on the image to see actual video of Walter Johnson.

It’s just one Open Thread after another around here. No major developments, just some things that grabbed my attention:

  1. Report: Graham likely to face GOP challenger amid conservative grumblings — So… basically, he just hasn’t acted crazy and unprincipled ENOUGH for them. Lindsey should take this opportunity to retire. But he won’t. And this challenger will fall like the others. You know how he’ll do it? By turning up the crazy.
  2. Why can’t Canada just put the fires out? — A dumb question, I suppose, but most of us don’t know much about fighting forest fires. And I’ll bet a lot of people are asking this. And since this is presented by NPR, you can get the answers for free.
  3. 100 years ago, Walter Johnson became the first member of the 3,000 strikeout club — This is a personal thing. Just a chance for me to say again that when he was a young boy, my Dad played catch with the Big Train himself. Dad’s cousin, who lived right behind him, had married Johnson’s son, and his uncle was kind enough to give the little guy a heads-up when her father-in-law was visiting. As I said, personal. Increasingly, I write things like this as a way of passing them on to my kids. As a genealogy fanatic, I enjoy it when I find that people in the past have left little anecdotes like this one. Oh, another link to the legendary Senator: I think my Dad’s grandfather, who was in the construction business there in Kensington, Md., built Walter Johnson High School.
  4. Barbie — I don’t have anything to say except it opens today — and as I am typing this, my wife, my youngest daughter and my youngest granddaughter are all at The Nick watching it. From what I’ve read, I expect they’ll enjoy it. I’ll probably wait for it to appear “free” on one of the streaming services I subscribe to. Meanwhile, I might go see “Oppenheimer.” Or “The Flash.”
  5. Tony Bennett, Champion of the Great American Songbook, Is Dead at 96 — I can’t say I was a huge fan, but I always liked and respected the guy. And he was pleasant to listen to. He was great when he was young, and he became a model of persistence and excellent work as he aged.

Open Thread for Wednesday, July 19, 2023

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The former Fort Lee has a museum, which is always interesting: the Army Women’s Museum…

Some things that have grabbed my attention today:

  1. Russia strikes Odesa for a second day after withdrawing from the grain deal — Putin is aiming to starve not only the Ukrainian people, but the other people who depend on the grain that Ukraine exports. The effect of these latest actions — which include threatening to attack merchant ships coming to get said grain — has of course been to send wheat prices up sharply. Just in case you’re struggling to figure out who the good guys and bad guys are here.
  2. ‘Active club’ hate groups are growing in the U.S. — and making themselves seen — Our society continues to slide downward. There is just so much aggressive stupidity out there, and now at the paramilitary stage. And thanks to the Internet, these people are able to get together and reinforce their deviance, making themselves feel “normal.”
  3. Army base once named for Lee now named for two black South Carolinians — Which is fine, but I wonder — why South Carolinians, when Fort Lee was in Virginia? These were certainly not the only two non-Confederate soldiers to have distinguished themselves in the Army. Irrelevant digression: It’s too bad there are no Air Force bases named for Confederates (are there?). I’d be advocating to rename one for Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., probably best known for commanding the Tuskegee Airmen. I want to add that “I knew him,” but that would be an exaggeration. My Dad worked for him as part of Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and I used to walk by his house on the way to catch the bus to school. Also, when I worked at the base golf course, I was once assigned to clean his golf clubs. I guess it’s silly, but I’ve always been kind of proud of having that thin connection to him…
  4. Is It Ever Morally Acceptable to Visit a Confederate Historical Site? — Since we’re on kind of a theme here today. I was grabbed by this question in the headline of an email from the NYT’s “Ethicist” today. The simple answer is that of course it is morally acceptable — and even imperative, given the widespread, appalling ignorance about the past in our society — to visit any and all historical sites, to understand history better, or even a little bit. But that question doesn’t fully explain the dilemma posed in the reader’s question. This particular site is operated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and they charge admission. So no, I wouldn’t go to there. Want to learn about the Confederacy — and the Union, and everything else have to do with that conflict? Go to Gettysburg. I highly recommend it.
  5. What we know about Travis King, the U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea — Well, we know he’s not a candidate for promotion. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to be creative in demonstrating his unsuitability. Apparently, seeing as how we know he had just gotten out of the stockade for having “punched a South Korean national.” But I was drawn to this because of the “what we know about” language in the headline. That made this hed a close relative of the “what you need to know” headline that is all about getting you to click. Headlines used to TELL you something, rather than urging you to click in order to learn something. (An old school hed would have said, “U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea, was imprisoned for violent behavior,” or something along those lines.) Anyway, in this case as in so many, “what we know” is not much. Of course, you click wanting to know WHY he did it. How can we ever fully know what’s going on in such a person’s head?

I guess that’s enough, except that I’m thinking about adding this next thing as a regular feature, I’ve been having so many of these lately.

Today’s Earworm — A slight departure from my usual recent obsessing about the Zombies and the Moody Blues, today I woke up trying to remember the tune to Heart of Oak, the anthem of the Royal Navy. The words were in my head from having read a reference to it before going to bed. So I went to YouTube, went “yeah, that’s it!” You’ve probably heard the tune many times, generally as background music in historical movies. Anyway, it’s been stuck since then. England expects that every man will now go listen to some sea shanties.

 

 

 

OK, it’s hot enough for me now. Thanks for asking…

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Sure, here in West Columbia, it’s only 93 degrees at the moment, according to my phone app, But my PC claims it’s 95.

In any case, hot enough, and in fact too hot. What, by the way, would I consider to be acceptable? A high of 80. I realized that on our recent trip to Dominica. It was pretty much that every day. Reminded me of Hawaii. I only every got hot once when I lived on Oahu, and that’s because I spent the day at a rock festival down in the Diamond Head crater — the walls of which blocked off the trade winds.

But I digress…

Of course, hot as it is — and it’s hot enough that I haven’t met my 10,000-step-a-day goal since Monday, July 10 (which is embarrassing) — it could be worse. Consider:

So yeah, it’s hot enough. I’m very thankful for air-conditioning, and I’m especially glad that there’s a vent right over my elliptical trainer here in my home office. Which will be handy if I get up off my butt and starting making up some of those steps. Which I might do in just a few minutes. Really.

Sure, the weather is not considered the most exciting of conversation topics, but this is special weather.

And I was wondering how the rest of you are handling it…

Another way to look at our loss of the Garden of Eden

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Hey, Michelangelo: I thought they were wearing fig suits when they left the garden…

The Gospel reading at Mass yesterday got me to thinking about ancient agriculture:

“A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,
and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Back in those days, it seems, farming was kind of haphazard. Seed was scattered in ways that today would seem quite haphazard. Whenever I read that passage, I think, why didn’t they put the seed IN the ground? Had the dibble not been invented, or what?

Which reminded me of my theory of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

It suddenly hit me as I was reading one of those books about the history of our species, from hunter-gatherer days until now — which as y’all know I frequently mention. I don’t remember whether it was Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, or what. But it was one in which the idea that the big move to agriculture was a decidedly mixed blessing.

Oh, it afforded advantages to the cultures that embraced it, in a competitive sense. As Jared Diamond stressed, the peoples who moved the earliest, and the most successfully, to food and fiber production dominate the world today. That’s how Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire with a handful of Spanish soldiers. He not only had the guns and the steel, but smallpox had spread ahead of the Conquistadores and had hit the Incas pretty hard just before he arrived. More than that, he had writing — not him personally, but the scribes he had along. He knew how Cortez had taken down the Aztecs, and followed suit. Emperor Atahualpa hadn’t known either the Spanish or the Aztecs existed.

It’s why Maori conquered and wiped out the Moriori — former Maoris whose forebears had moved away and gone back to hunter-gathering — on Chatham Island. You may not have heard about that, though, since the Maoris themselves were eventually dominated by European newcomers.

But that’s not my point. The point is that some of these things I’ve been reading make the argument that the big advantage that farming offered had a steep price. Basically, the farming life sucked compared to hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, people worked less each day, and on the whole ate better. They went about and gathered what they needed, and had plenty of time to chill after that. They didn’t think about the future. They didn’t worry about their land, or the weather over the coming months, or the price of cotton. They weren’t the slaves of the farms they worked day and night to keep going.

I was thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me — that’s what the first chapters of Genesis were about. In the Garden, Adam and Eve could just stroll around naked and eat their meals off the bounty of their property, and life was good. Then they fouled up — they couldn’t obey one simple rule — and got booted out. And then they were cursed with farming, in no uncertain terms:

Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Which certainly sounds like a raw deal to me.

And it hit me: The people who composed the story of Adam and Eve — and later wrote it down — were on some level remembering the switch to agriculture, and saw it pretty much as Yuval Noah Harari did, thousands of years before he wrote that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” And they saw it as the ultimate human fall from natural grace.

So did I make some great discovery? No way. This was too obvious, and had been too obvious for ages. Search for “garden of eden hunter-gathering,” and you’ll see this idea all over the place. I liked this summary:

Apparently, the trauma of this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a huge and lasting impact on humanity. We’ve never forgotten it. It’s burned into our consciousness. And, that’s why it’s the subject of the Bible’s foundational story. The Torah tells us that when humans were first created, we lived in the Garden of Eden, where we ate the fruit that God provided for us. We didn’t have to work hard or grow anything on our own. In other words, we were hunter-gatherers….

I don’t know where I was when everybody else was talking about it. All I can say in my own behalf is that I realized it on my own. All the talking that people do about Adam and Eve — usually, unfortunately, in the silly arguments between biblical literalists and those who think a story about the Earth being created in six days means all faith is bunk (both sides seem to have trouble grasping the concept of allegory) — and I’d never heard a reference to this.

And it sort of blew my mind. I love it when I see connections to things I had not previously seen as connected — such as the Bible’s foundational story of life on Earth, and the findings of secular scientists and philosophers in our own age — and this was the Mother of All Connections. It tied everything about the origins of humanity and our world together.

And the most amazing thing is that it appears as though the originators of the Eden story had some memory — consciously or unconsciously — about what had happened to people ages earlier, long before writing, before Abraham, much less before anthropology, archaeology, DNA testing or carbon-14 dating.

I marvel at it…

So, did I read this right? Should I have hung in there?

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The only decent picture I could find illustrating the setting of the anecdote. No, I’m not in the picture.

It’s anecdote time. But first, a few words from Nicholas Kristof:

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Many Americans and Europeans flatter themselves by seeing the war in Ukraine through a false prism.

Too often, we think we have sacrificed for the Ukrainians. We pat ourselves on the back for providing expensive weapons and paying higher heating bills to help Ukrainians win their freedom — and we wish they’d get on with it.

In fact, what’s clear here in the Baltic countries is that it’s the other way around: The Ukrainians are sacrificing for us. They’re the ones doing us a favor, by degrading the Russian military and reducing the risk of a war in Europe that would cost the lives of our troops…

The whole piece is worth reading, but only those first three grafs are relevant to the memory that they stimulated…

It was a few months ago, maybe even in 2022. It’s hard to pin down, because it happened at Lowe’s, and I go there a lot.

This time, I wanted to copy some keys, and was using the self-serve machine devoted to that purpose. So for a minute or two, I was standing there, unable to easily evade folks who come up to strangers and initiate conversation.

There are a lot of people like that. And seriously, I try to go along and be nice to these folks. I get the impression sometimes that they are lonely. Maybe they live alone, and only get to speak to other people when they are out and about. And this is bad for everyone — but (or so I understand intellectually) especially painful for extraverts. (Although it would be great if some of them would stop whining about it! Oh, wait — I’d better add one of these… 🙂 )

This guy, whom I’ll describe as an older (as in, near my age) white guy, was at least topical. He comes up and without prelude (although maybe I’m just forgetting the prelude), he asks me who I thought would end up paying for all this aid we send Ukraine — us, or the Ukrainians.

I simply said, well, I assume we will, since we are the ones with the money as well as the goods. At that point, I could have gone on at length about how important it was for us to do so, and to keep doing so.

But I didn’t, because I sensed I was standing at the precipice, and one more step would take me into a spontaneous, fruitless argument with another isolationist. And I get into enough of those.

The conversation ended at that point. I don’t recall whether he just had no rejoinder — he may have been hoping to connect with someone who would say “It’ll be US, dammit! AGAIN! Those damn’ foreigners!” and didn’t know how to respond to my more neutral response — or I found some easy way of extricating myself.

Anyway, I now regret that I didn’t wait to see what was going on. It would only have taken a moment to find out whether I was in “America First” territory (in either the Trumpian or Lindbergh sense). I could have extricated myself at that point. Or perhaps I could have gotten him to see a broader picture (OK, everybody, stop laughing hysterically).

Or maybe he would have responded by saying “Hallelujah! Finally, somebody who’s not an isolationist!” And we could have had a high old time slapping each other on the back in mutual congratulation. That probably wasn’t where we were going, but let’s admit the possibility.

I think what chased me away was the thought that here’s a guy who comes up to busy strangers and starts conversations with something as likely to lead to acrimony as that. Made me wonder whether it was wise to stick around. Although I appreciated that he wanted to talk global affairs, rather than the weather or the Gamecocks.

But rather than keep kicking myself, I’ll close with Kristof’s words:

We’re right to celebrate a successful NATO summit. But especially if Ukraine struggles to recover large swaths of territory in this counteroffensive, there’ll be feckless grumbling in Western capitals about the price we’re paying and the favors we’re doing Ukraine. Anyone tempted to think that way should listen to the Baltic leaders, because they’ve learned the hard way how best to manage unruly bears.

 

Open Thread for Wednesday, July 12, 2023

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Just a few quick thoughts:

  1. Despite Successes at NATO Summit, Divisions Remain — So yay for Sweden, and yay also for Ukraine, but no membership there. And I’m sorry Ukraine’s not in, but I think I understand the rationale for being cautious.
  2. Idle, Anachronistic Thought of the Day, with a SPOILER ALERT — At the end of Catch-22, would Yossarian have taken off with the intention of paddling a rubber raft from Pianosa to Sweden had he known that Sweden wouldn’t always be neutral? I think yes, since he only needed to get through 1945 in a safe location. So, never mind…
  3. Convicted murderer back in custody after secret judge order released him 16 years early — I’m still not sure what happened here. Are you? Anyway, the guy was a fugitive for two months after the state Supremes voided his release. But no more.
  4. Giant sloth pendants indicate humans settled Americas earlier than thought — This is just a followup on the pre-Clovis post earlier. Now Brazil is weighing in, with prehistoric pendants that supposedly depict critters long extinct during the Clovis era.
  5. Will found in Aretha Franklin’s couch is valid, jury says — And yes, I’ve already written to complain to my attorney that he neglected to tell me I could do this. But upon reflection, I agree with him that this is probably not the best strategy for setting the future course of one’s estate. Especially if it has $80 million in it — which mine will not have, but Aretha’s did.
  6. Gratuitous baseball post — As one of the world’s least-engaged baseball fans, I went and took a look at the standings for the first time in a while. (I like to look at the big picture.) And my Red Sox are at the bottom of the AL East — but their percentage is better than the best team in the AL Central. And they’d be in third place in the West. So make allowances. Meanwhile, my Braves are dominating over the National League…

Hey, they’re in a tough division…

When did people get here, and how?

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You know, it’s hard to find accurate pictures of those earliest boats. So I went with this one…

I’m making a point of reading new books these days — by which I mean books I haven’t read before. For instance, right now I’m reading Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’ trilogy on TR, released in 2001. I’m getting to it about a decade after reading the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. But I guess that’s OK, since it took Morris way longer to get to writing it; the first book came out in 1979. I’m very much enjoying it, but at a leisurely pace.

That doesn’t mean I no longer indulge in my favorite way to waste time — reading the same books, over and over. And lately I’ve been drawn back to books about homo sapiens and how the species and our world developed. Right now, Guns, Germs and Steel is sitting on the kitchen table, and I thumb through it while eating (something I wasn’t allowed to do as a kid, but I’ve made up for that lost time).

And that got me onto this subject. I was reading a passage about the settlement of this continent, and Jared Diamond made a brief reference to archaeological discoveries that place humans here way before the Clovis culture came along. You see, the conventional thinking as he was writing was that people got here in about 11,000 B.C. Meanwhile, we have sites, including right here in South Carolina, that show indications of human presence as early as tens of thousands of years before that.

Diamond, writing in 1997 — well before some of the more startling claims about Topper — was sort of dismissive of these kinds of sites:

I wondered whether Diamond would be any more impressed by these more-recent claims. But I don’t know Diamond, and I don’t have his mobile number. So I reached out to the only archaeologist I know around here, our own Lynn Teague. I went over to her Twitter feed, and changed the subject by asking about what was on my mind. Looking back, I suppose I could have shown a little more interest in what she was writing about, but you know, the number count is limited on tweets. Lynn answered right away:

Yeah, just what I was thinkin’, Lynn. But I went on to ask…

Lynn’s answer satisfied me as much as one can be satisfied with regard to this question. Of course, that’s a minimal level of satisfaction. If I ever get a time machine, one thing I’d like to use it for would be to take a bunch of Dick and Jane books to the first modern humans just as they prepared started to break out of Africa and into Eurasia — long before they got here, by anyone’s reckoning — so that they could take up reading and writing and leave us some records.

I figure that by now, their books would be available in paperback, and maybe even free on Kindle…

Whoa! Slate needs to review its hiring and promotion policies

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A person who scores 220 on the Slate News Quiz should never be designated a “winner.”

And yet that’s what Slate did this week, when I racked up that painfully humiliating result. That’s because the publication’s designated staff “ringer” only scored 191. This one even holds an “editor” title. I think maybe she was asleep or something.

Of course, I still shouldn’t have been crowned the “winner,” since the average score, we are told, was 377.

I’ve never been fond of this quiz, because I seldom do well on it. But now I’m really starting to doubt its legitimacy…

Here’s why it’s hard to get things done…

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Here I am, finally, at the public library here at the beach, after two days in which I was unable to open my laptop during the few hours that my post-stroke brain allows me to do real work each day. First there was the Fourth of July, during which I scraped the rust off my grill long enough to build a fire and cook hot dogs and corn on the cob in the middle of the hottest day in the history of the world. After that, I only had energy to rewatch the first two epidodes of HBO’s “John Adam” with my wife and two of my daughters — which I thoroughly enjoyed, I’ll admit. That’s what everyone should do on that holiday.

Then, on Wednesday, there was the packing up and driving to the beach. We decided to come here a couple of days ahead of a cousin’s wedding in Conway on Saturday. That was tiring, especially since the rainstorm started while we were having lunch in Lake City, and didn’t end for the rest of the day.

So now I’m here at the library, with no distractions, where I can work, right?

Well, no. Never having been confined to a sensory deprivation tank, I’ve never been anywhere like that. I often claim, with some justice I think, to be the most easily distracted person on the planet.

For instance, look at the shelf next to me, since I made the mistake of glancing at it.

I think, That might be interesting. Not because of the stuff everybody knows about Mr. Shoe Business but I’m also thinking, I’ll bet it deals fairly extensively with his time as a newspaperman.

Which is something I only know about because of my own brief time as a reporter, in the late 1970s, before my long decades as an editor.

And it was just a chance thing that I learned it. It was during my time as “chief” of the Gibson County Bureau of The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun. That grand title meant that I was a lone reporter who was based 30 miles away in Trenton, charged with covering everything that happened in five counties to the north of Jackson. I think the “chief” part was because I had a secretary, who divided her time between me and the circulation and advertising departments. (I didn’t really need a secretary, but she tried hard. Once or twice, I pulled out multiple clippings that I needed to write a story and spread them over my desk, and stepped away to the men’s room down the hall before starting — only to come back and find she had refiled them all.)

I had a lot to do in those five counties, sometimes causing me to work more than 24 hours at a time — what with covering multiple things all day, writing them all overnight, and working through deadline the next morning. But that did not excuse me from the rotation that required everyone to do periodic human interest stories. Talk about distraction — not that I didn’t find them occasionally interesting.

I had found this old guy in one of my counties (and when I say old, I mean perhaps even as old as I am now) whose story interested me. He was retired to the country after a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency. This interested me a great deal as a fan of le Carré and Deighton, so when my turn came around, I went to interview him.

But what I remember now had nothing to do with intelligence work, because he had another career before the war, before even “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS existed, even less the CIA. He was a copy boy at one of the New York papers that doesn’t even exist any more. Maybe this one, but I don’t recall.

I, of course, particularly love one story he told from those times, because I’m probably the youngest journalist you’ll ever meet who actually started his career in that traditional manner — although by that time, thanks to the second wave of feminism, we were called copy clerks. (But it remained, despite that one girl who joined us some nights, a very boyish line of work.)

It so happened that the sports editor at that paper was Ed Sullivan. Hearing that was news to me at the time — I just saw him as that unlikely impresario, to use the book’s title (but once I learned that, the sports editor title seemed to fit him better than the later role). Anyway, one night Ed was hard up, and had no one to go cover the prize fights. So he sent this kid, my interview subject, giving him strict orders on the basics, telling him how to take notes, and just come back and write what happened. He was probably anticipating no more than a simple listing of who won which bouts. I mean, the kid should be able to handle that, right?

But that night, with no one there to cover it but this kid, a fighter was killed in the ring.

So the kid came back, and wrote what had happened, and his dreams were exceeded by this horrific occurrence — Ed and the other editors not only ran his story, but gave him a byline, which wasn’t something just handed out to anybody. I don’t have my story handy, but I think he even made the front, maybe even the lede.

So the copy boy in me was in awe. The biggest thing I ever got to do was once, on a holiday, I was sent to collect “the agate” — which meant going to the cop shop and the courthouse and coming back and typing up such dull stuff as property transfers and court filings.

That was a big day for me, in which I felt strongly the burden of responsibility. But what this guy was telling me was the stuff of legend…

Anyway, I’ll try to stop and do some work now…

Open Thread for Friday, June 30, 2023

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Alan Arkin as Yossarian, in 1970’s “Catch-22.”

Just a few quick thoughts:

  1. Affirmative Action — The court’s decision on this is the most significant of several this week, and if I had the day off I might try to write something about it. But I don’t, so I’ll leave it to y’all for now. If I were one of the ones-and-zeroes people, I could rip something out quickly, because all I’d have to do is copy and paste from my “side’s” talking points. But I acknowledge the painful complexity of this issue, so I’m neither cursing nor cheering. There’s a lot to explore here… (If y’all can get beyond the impulse to castigate me for perceiving painful complexity…)
  2. Goodbye, Yossarian — This item, as much as anything, prompted me to put up an Open Thread. I’ll miss Alan Arkin, and I hope you will, too. I can’t think of anything I ever saw him in that I didn’t think was great. But I still think of him as Yossarian, in Mike Nichols’ brilliant film adaptation of Catch-22. Months before I saw the movie — multiple times — in a theater, I read a cover story about it in TIME magazine, to which I subscribed in high school. After 53 years, I still remember a sentence from that story more or less verbatim: “Fear rides on his back like a schizoid chimp,” the writer said of Arkin’s suitability in the role of the famed Assyrian. I was proud to look it it up a moment ago and find out my memory had it right. Later, he became known for his brilliant performances as crusty old guy. I’d like to have had the chance to tell him how good I thought he was before the end, but he probably would waved the praise off, saying something like “Argo f___ yourself!”
  3. Still brooding over history — Just another heads-up, like the last one, that you’re likely to be reading a lot more about history here. Increasingly, I see Americans’ gross ignorance of history and civics as being a national crisis likely to bring an end to this country much quicker than we’re likely to get our feet wet from rising sea levels (to mention something other folks rightly worry about). This week the concern was kicked off by this passage from a George Will column: “The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. ‘the nation’s report card,’ for 2022 shows that a decline that started in 2014 (do not blame the pandemic) continues: Just 13 percent and 20 percent of eighth-graders met U.S. history and civics proficiency standards, the lowest rates ever recorded, erasing gains made since the 1990s.” And that’s one of the less alarming things I’ve read on the subject lately. Can you get a harrumph outta this guy, George? You bet. HARRUMPH!
  4. As the South Stews, Temperatures Are Set to Rise in the West, Too — Well, why should we be the only ones to suffer?…
  5. Indiana Jones — Hey, this movie might be great, but when I saw the image from it shared below this morning, it freaked me out a little. I usually try to not to panic over this AI stuff, but this morning I couldn’t help responding, “Oh, come on people, stop it with the fake imagery. What’s next? Are you going to ‘de-age’ him another 20 years for a ‘prequel’ to ‘American Graffiti?’… ‘The Roots of Bob Falfa?’…”

 

 

Some opportunities to learn some history, TODAY

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This isn’t the tunnel rat who will be speaking, but another guy who did the same thing, and it captures the essence…

Before I get to my work today, I need to post one more quick thing. Or two or three quick things, since Paul has reminded me that today is June 30…

Lately, my attention has focused less on the things that seem to get folks stirred up today, and more on history. And that’s made me take even more interest in the communications work I do for the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. And in the next few days, they have several really interesting things going on — and two of them are happening today…

  • First, at noon today, there is a free lecture by a guy who is a real-life Tunnel Rat — or was a real-life Tunnel Rat, back during the war in Vietnam. That means he made a regular practice of doing something I cannot imagine myself ever doing — plunge deep down into a hole in the ground, alone, with nothing but a flashlight and .45-cal. pistol, to search for the Viet Cong who (equally unbelievably) lived down there. He gave this same talk a couple of years back, and as I recall, he got somewhat into having a less-than-positive self-concept in those days that at least in part led to such self-destructive behavior. But the fact that anybody did it, for any reason under any circumstances, is what blows my mind. Anyway, you can hear him speak in just a little over an hour from now. Here’s the release I wrote about it…
  • Something else is happening today that you have more time to take in. A new exhibit is opening, and the remarkable thing about it is contained in the headline of the release I wrote: “Actual photos of Revolutionary War soldiers!” It’s no joke, and there’s no time machine involved. Or maybe, in a way, there is. It’s the display of some remarkable, high-quality daguerreotypes of men in their 90s who had fought in the Revolution when they were in their teens, or at most their 20s. This one particularly grabbed me because I’m fascinated not only by military history, but by early photography. I just love it that someone thought to take, and preserved, these photos of these men at the very ends of their long lives, and the very beginning of photography — two things that barely overlapped for a very few years.

There’s another one I want to tell you about, but it’s a few days off, and I’ve gotta get to work…

Here’s one of those early photos from the impressive collection of W.C. Smith III.

DeMarco: Who owns the rainbow?

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The Op-Ed Page

Found this on Wikipedia. It’s by someone named Eric Rolph, at English Wikipedia…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, remember the other day when I posted Paul’s abortion post, I said I had another one from him that I hadn’t even looked at, but would post soon? After which I didn’t have time for several days to think about posting on the blog? Well, this is it, and Paul just texted me to tell me it had to do with “Pride Month,” which he said was ending today. Sorry, Paul. Here you go…

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Remember when a rainbow was just a rainbow – happy surprise after a downpour? I sometimes long for the simplicity of those pot-o-gold days.

But we live in a complicated and changing world. Which means we sometimes we have to share symbols that our tribe has felt we owned. Christians are struggling with the appropriation of the rainbow, which for us evoked the story of Noah’s Ark. Every child that has ever attended Sunday School has been taught this story, often with images of happy animals strolling symmetrically up the gangplank.

I wrote a column in April in response to one of those Christians, the Rev. Michael Goings. Rev. Goings, whom I’ve not met, is a fellow citizen columnist for the Florence Morning News. He wrote a piece in March (“The Sacred Sign of the Rainbow”) in which he objected to the “thievery” of the rainbow by the LGBTQ community. He castigated its use as a symbol of gay pride as a “blatant act of defiance and desecration” claiming that it is “almost unpardonable, abominable, and dishonoring to the Almighty.”

I can understand some mild annoyance at the muddling of the rainbow imagery for young Christian Sunday School students. Kids can ask the darnedest questions, and a Sunday School room can be a dicey place to answer. But for me, that annoyance is overwhelmed by the enormous pride that the LGBTQ community is now able to express through the rainbow flag. Over the past decade, the ubiquity if the flag has paralleled their acceptance into the fabric of American life.

For Rev. Goings and others, rainbow imagery that supports LGBTQ people induces fear, rage, or the sense that apocalypse is nigh. Many Christians cannot accept that gay people are worthy in the sight of God. Some, like Lauren Boebert, have seats in Congress. When the Air Force recently tweeted support of Pride Month with an image of an airman saluting against a rainbow background, Boebert responded, “We salute one flag and one flag only in the United States of America. It isn’t the ‘Pride’ flag.”

I think it’s fair to describe Boebert as a Christian nationalist. At a Christian conference in Woodland Park, Colorado in September of last year, Boebert said, “It’s time for us to position ourselves and rise up and take our place in Christ and influence this nation as we were called to do.” Later she spoke of the end times: “We know that we are in the last of the last days. This is a time to know that you were called to be part of these last days. You get to have a role in ushering in the second coming of Jesus.”

Of LGBTQ people, she said they are “spitting in God’s face.”

Goings and Boebert read the Bible one way, a literal interpretation to which they are entitled. They believe that God sent a great flood that wiped out all of humanity except for Noah’s clan. Once the waters receded, God sent a rainbow as a sign of a new covenant with His people.

I read the Bible as literature, much of which I believe is divinely inspired. But it is filtered through flawed, limited human authors. Some of the Bible is confusing and some of it is simply wrong. Of many examples, I will give one – Ephesians 6:5: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

So here is this layman’s take on the story of Noah and the rainbow. There was no great flood (almost every geologist backs me up on this point). This story falls in line with flood myths that had been written and told for centuries before the Noah story. It is a way of trying to understand how a divine being or beings interact with their creation.

Like many Bible stories, this one is full of contradictions. Noah’s family, the best God could find on Earth, immediately shows God just what He has wrought in his second attempt at civilization. In Genesis 9:17, the ark account ends with God saying to Noah about the rainbow, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.” Four verses later, Noah “became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.” It is reassuring that God would choose someone as imperfect as Noah as the father of his new creation. He’s barely off the ark when he is found by his sons completely blitzed and naked. It tells me that God has a keen understanding of human frailty, an unending tolerance for our mistakes, and a bodacious sense of humor.

If you believe that men who love men or women who love women are reprobates warped by their sin and a danger to society, you have a right to your opinion. From that position, you have a couple of options. One is to try to completely shield yourself from the corrupting influence of gay people. Don’t listen to any music or consume any news, TV, movies, or social media produced by them. Don’t buy any products designed or services offered by them. I wish you luck. Or, more profitably, get to know a gay couple. Actively recruit gay people to your church so you can see who they really are. See if your opinion doesn’t change.

In my reading of Noah’s story, the rainbow is a sign of God’s new approach to humanity. This is the God of Love. Yes, there is still the God of Wrath who makes his presence known through the Old Testament (see, for example, Psalm 137). But here is our first glimpse of the God of Love who will later be personified in the New Testament in his Son, Jesus. In that light, the rainbow makes perfect sense as a symbol for gay and queer people.

If you like, you can cling to the few verses about homosexuality being an “abomination.” But, remember, God had much more to say about adultery than homosexuality – including that adulterers be put to death. Consider the possibility that these warnings come from a different time and were written by men who had little understanding of psychology and human relations. If, like Rev. Goings and Rep. Boebert, you are so willing to denigrate homosexuals, why not adulterers, who receive much more Biblical condemnation?

I have a brand new decal on my car’s back glass with a version of the rainbow flag. It advertises a new LGBTQIA+ advocacy group in our region called Pee Dee Equality. I’m hoping it will flourish. Our corner of the state could use a place that advocates for the dignity of every person.

This column is based on one that appeared in the April 26th edition of The Florence Morning News.

I’m glad I found these pictures I didn’t know I had…

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Before I actually get back to work after finally posting Paul’s column, a few words as to why I haven’t been posting.

Mainly, it’s been three things, although there’s plenty of other stuff going on:

  • I’ve been trying to rearrange my home office, which mainly has consisted of building new bookshelves of my own rather unusual, rustic design (made mostly with treated wood left over from the revamp of our deck a couple of years ago, which my wife has been eager to see me use or take to the dump). That, and cleaning out the big closet in the same room, space that could be much better used. This project alone, which is still in progress, would have been enough to keep any normal person from blogging.
  • In the middle of all that, we had new windows installed in our house. So I had to rearrange the wreckage in the office so the workmen could get to the windows, and do the same in varying degrees with furniture all over the house. The biggest part was taking down all the louvered wooden shutter-type blinds in most of the windows. The windows are in, and since that happened last Wednesday, we’ve been installing curtains to replace the blinds, which went to the Habitat ReStore.
  • And in the middle of those things, after a week in which hours were wasted in struggling to reconnect to our wifi, we switched internet providers. This has been fubar in most respects since the start. We’re on I think our fourth new router. The second was FedExed to us to replace the faulty first one. When that one didn’t work (something Spectrum was able to confirm, again, remotely), an increasingly frustrated repair guy spending a couple of hours installing a third one, and, when that didn’t work either, a fourth one. Since then, part of every day has been spent reestablishing contact with one or more of the dozen or so devices in our home that depend on wifi. I’m down to one that still isn’t working, and I’m trying to get in touch with the device’s manufacturer.

And lots of other stuff. For instance, this morning we were on the phone with our old internet service provider to make sure we knew how to send back their equipment so we don’t have to pay some outrageous sum for it.

Of course, there have been good things about all this. One was that, when I was moving some books onto one of those new bookcases, an envelope fell out of one of the books, and I opened it and found these two pictures, above and below.

Well, y’all know how much I liked John McCain, so I was glad to find them. I didn’t know any pictures of him and me together existed, much less that I had a couple of prints of them.

Obviously, because of the setting — The State‘s editorial boardroom — this is before or after an interview with the board. Probably an endorsement interview, given some of the people I see in the room. The question was, 2000 or 2008?

Then, in looking closely at the one below, I saw it was 2000, just before South Carolina’s Republican primary. You may notice that in both pictures, you can barely see that there are people standing directly behind both McCain and me, like shadows, making it look like our heads and shoulders are kind of doubled around the edges. But in the one below, the figure behind McCain is emerging slightly from full eclipse, and I can see that it’s Fred Mott — who was my publisher in 2000, but long gone in 2008.

Ironically, Fred is the reason Sen. McCain didn’t get our endorsement that year. Fred wanted to back George W. Bush. The fateful decision was made in a board meeting immediately after this interview. We normally worked by consensus, but this time, being so divided, we actually took a counted vote. It was something of a mess, since some in the room (my good friend Robert Ariail, for instance) weren’t technically members of the board under normal circumstances. But anyway, it was a 50-50 split. And I could see no graceful way to dispute the idea that in a 50-split, the publisher’s side wins.

Let me be clear — Fred is a great guy, for whom I have great respect. He was just wrong this time. If you want to know the reasons why, I’ll let you know if I also find the 4,000-word memo I sent him several days before this meeting. Anyway, I lost that one, but we endorsed McCain in 2008.

Anyway, I’m glad to have these pictures. Now, back to work…

DeMarco: The Boys’ Club takes on abortion

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The Op-Ed Page

EDITOR’S NOTE: Paul sent me this with an apology, calling it “a somewhat dated column.” And it was when he send it, on June 11. So I now offer my own apology, since I’ve hardly touched the blog since then, and now it is a REALLY dated column. I’ve been really, really busy lately, a condition that I think is now lessening, slightly. Anyway, here you go. He actually sent me another right after this, which I will do my best to post today or tomorrow…

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Most Americans are rightly conflicted about abortion. Those who favor more restrictions prioritize the welfare of the fetus. Those who favor less restriction, including most physicians, prioritize the welfare of the mother. As King Solomon knew, when he was confronted by two women who both claimed to be mothers of a newborn, there is no splitting the baby.

There is also no avoiding a decision. The irony for South Carolinians is that we had it about right. Our previous law, a 20-week ban that passed in 2016 during Nikki Haley’s tenure, successfully balanced the competing values of mother and fetus. Our current Legislature, which is more than 85% male, felt the law was too generous to women. It passed a 6-week ban which Governor McMaster signed on May 25th.

The 27 to 19 vote to pass the bill in the senate was accomplished without a single female senator’s vote. This wasn’t especially challenging, given there are only five female voices in the chamber. It’s not hard to believe that some of the supporters of the bill are striving to put women back in, what they consider, their rightful place. I don’t know what was in these men’s hearts, but I have some questions. By opting for an elective abortion, a woman is often saying, “I don’t believe I can successfully raise a child right now.” If the ban was to protect these children, why wasn’t it accompanied by a strengthening of our social safety net to ensure they are not raised in poverty?

How many of our male senators know women who have chosen to have an abortion? Let’s imagine, gentleman, that the woman in question is your daughter, whom we will call Elizabeth. Let’s drop your income to the poverty line so you have little ability to help Elizabeth. Surely if with one hand you have the power to force Elizabeth to have your grandchild, with the other you could strengthen her safety net by expanding Medicaid, providing affordable child care and preschool programs, and funding public schools equitably.

I’m not arguing that it is wrong for the senators to oppose abortion. Belief that life begins at conception and that God has known us since before we were born is beautiful idea that is scripturally based. However, that religious belief cannot be imposed on women who don’t share it. A Christian woman who supports abortion could ask, for example, “If God knows us from before we enter the womb, why are there almost as many miscarriages as there are abortions in the US?” She also could reasonably object to the belief (held by 35% of Republican voters in a 2022 Winthrop poll) that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape, presumably because God created that child.

Her conception of God and childbirth might be shaped by a different view of God, one that recognizes the difference between a fetus and a child and one that would never force a woman to endure a rape and then a pregnancy. As a Christian abortion opponent, you have every right to advocate for what you believe to be a life that God ordained before the beginning of the world. You have a right, and according to your faith, perhaps a duty, to preach about it, to publish your message on social media, to build crisis pregnancy centers-to do whatever you legally can to convince women not to have abortions. But, in America, you don’t have the right to impose your religious belief on women who don’t see the world as you do.

In your opposition to abortion, I would suggest you let women do most of the talking. I’m sure there are men who come to this issue with a pure heart. However, I have been with men in locker rooms and many of them talk, well, like Donald Trump says they talk. I also know Christian couples who believe the man is the head of the family and his wife has a scripturally enforced subservience, an arrangement to which they both happily adhere. Both of these approaches to women, as prey to be hunted or as servants to be dominated, are undoubtedly present in our state senate.

In an interview with The New York Times, Republican Katrina Shealy, one of the bipartisan group of five female senators who voted against the 6-week ban, recalled that during her tenure one of her male senate colleagues, Tom Corbin, had made derogatory comments to her like “women should be home barefoot and pregnant” and that women are a “a lesser cut of meat.”

Men like Senator Corbin, who remains in the Senate and who on his website describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative, (and) a family man” are threatened by the rise of women in every sector of society. They remember a time when almost every important political or business decision made in the state was made by a man. They may still worship in churches where women are barred from the pulpit. It’s not a big stretch for them to gather together in a male-only effort to control and diminish the lives of women.

Here’s what I would ask the good senators. If you, like your daughter Elizabeth, could get pregnant, would you have voted this way? If your birth control failed or your self-restraint failed or you were temporarily impervious to the reality of pregnancy because you were young, or intoxicated, or heedless, would you force yourself to live with the consequences of that decision for the rest of your life?

A version of this column appeared in the May 31 edition of The Florence Morning News.