He Said "Less"

These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff,  Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.

Virtual School + Halloween Candy = Nap Time

Another wonderful day of online teaching-- accompanied by a proliferation of Halloween candy, which is an unavoidable temptation when you're talking to a screen-- but there was one highlight and I thank my colleagues (and the candid and comical WhatsApp English teacher chat) because they warned me that admin was popping into virtual classes . . . and they weren't popping in at the beginning of class, when they could catch us setting up creative lessons; making Channels and break-out rooms and other virtual groups; communicating instructions clearly, and all that good stuff-- they were popping in for the last five minutes to see if teachers were ending early or teaching online until the bitter end of class . . . so I was prepared and told my students, that had some work to do in the Channels, to come back to the General meeting with five minutes left and-- lo and behold-- an administrator showed up in the waiting room and I let him in while I was teaching the most English teacher thing in the universe in the chat-- MLA format citations and punctuation-- and kids were asking questions on how to cite oddball situations-- quotes within quotes and all that-- and I was demonstrating all this in the chat . . . it was a great moment in American education-- because generally, whenever an administrator walks in your room, virtual or not, even if you've just executed the best lesson in the world, they come in at some weird awkward moment and you get all pissed off that no one ever sees you teaching properly . . . anyway, virtual school still sucked but at least there was one nice moment, and once it was over, I ate a bunch of Halloween candy and took a nap, and now I'm off to the pickelball scouts for my third day in a row-- I miss early morning basketball and I can't believe we did this kind of shit for over a year, I think I've erased most of it from my memory (but luckily it lives on the blog!)

Sports Potpourri

Catherine and I inhaled a lot of sports in the past two days-- with a mixed bag of results-- yesterday we stopped at the HP soccer game, just in time, to see Ian score a wild back-heel flick volley goal off a long shot . . . and this was an easy 6-0 win so we left at half-time to go to the Rutgers/Nebraska game-- we parked at the edge of town and decided to walk over (we had subs and drinks and we were meeting our friend Dom at the Greek Church lot to tailgate) but someone told us the entrance to the park was flooded, so we hightailed it through the train trestle tunnel (which has no walking path) and then walked on the muddy rutted path parallel to River Road-- and Catherine wiped out in the mud and banged up her knee (before even consuming any alcohol!) and then we realized that the walk along River Road to the church lot was not only miserable and muddy but also really long (3 miles?) and we were walking next to all the game day traffic-- but we made it to the tailgate, cleaned up Catherine's knee, had some food and drinks (Cat made our drinks in ziplock bags, so we could dispose of everything once we were done drinking!) and then walked back to the stadium and met my buddy Haim and his wife (who gave us the tickets) and watched an absolutely awful football game-- a million penalties and TV timeouts, just slow as fuck-- but Rutgers was in it so we stayed until the end, only to see them throw an interception on their last drive, down by one point-- blech-- and then because we stayed so late, the traffic was insane, so we walked back to the car . . . after a nearly four hour game (and I was only wearing a t-shirt because it was so hot walking over, but then it got really cold-- I've been to two Rutgers games this season and that might be it for me, football is fun to watch on TV, when you can do other stuff, but it's pretty drawn out in person (although it was fun to talk to all the Nebraska folk at the game . . . I only know one thing about Nebraska-- that the Ashfall Fossil Beds are one of the greatest paleontological sites in the world, just astounding-- so I brought them up and the guy sitting next to us said he lived an hour south of them, so I had something to chat about-- then this morning I went over to see HP play Timothy Christian and this was a wild and exciting game, which HP finally won 4-3 . . . and Ian scored a great goal, he received a through ball, took a couple dribbles, and then finished nice and early-- before the defense converged on him, and shot a rocket past the big keeper from the eighteen-- he should have scored a couple other but the keeper made a great fingertip save on one headed to the upper corner and he was about to finish a follow and got clobbered (no foul) so Ian is having quite a season-- he scored the game winner the other day against Wardlaw-Hartridge-- and most importantly, he's playing a lot of minutes and his speed and defensive hustle look really good, and-- knock on wood, because he's only 130 pounds-- he hasn't gotten hurt.

 

Stacey Summons the Dead

Stacey and I have the same schtick when we begin Hamlet-- we both play the role of Horatio, who-- in the opening moments of the play-- is skeptical of ghosts and the supernatural . . . Marcellus explains, "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, And will not let belief take hold of him" and Horatio, in reference to the apparition, confidently asserts "tush, tush, 'twill not appear" but, moments after he says this, the ghost of Old Hamlet DOES appear and, after some good natured "I told you so!" by Barnardo (How now, Horatio! You tremble and look pale.Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on't?) Horatio admits that "Before my God, I might not this believe without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes" and just before the apparition enters, Stacey and I always ask the class if they believe in ghosts, then chastise the believers for their irrationality and then we try to summon the dead, call upon the spirit world to strike us dead and stop our hearts, etc . . .  and there are usually a few kids who get upset by this-- who don't think we should fuck around with the netherworld, whether we believe in it or not-- but we've never been haunted or struck dead . . . until now-- apparently last week, the night after Stacey did her ghost bit, she was visited by a spirit in the night, a little girl in a green sweatshirt that hovered over her bed-- twice!-- and she woke her husband up but he didn't see her and now she wonders if there might be spirits walking the earth, and she wonders if she has summoned them . . . but of course, I think she was dreaming or saw a shadow or whatever, as I am a logical and rational man-of-logic who would never be perturbed by such rubbish.

Pandemic Stuff

Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:

The CDC was avoiding controversy

Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.

In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking

Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .

All Thinking is Flawed

He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”

Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.

Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.

My Job is a Hot Zone

“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.

You Need to React Quickly

“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.

Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.

Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon

They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.

It Could Have Been Worse

So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”

Politics Played a Role

But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.

Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape

“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,

In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:

You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.

It Wasn't Just in Italy

On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”

Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”

Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.

half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier. 

In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.

Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead

Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.

The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.

American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;

“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which

You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”

He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.

Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.

Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty

My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year  The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:

there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .

Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .

When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country. 

Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.

John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:

Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.

he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .

on imagery

We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"

on the stupid geese in the park . . .

Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.

on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:

In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.

on the past and the future

And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)

Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.

a sports essay that made me cry

Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.

and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .

And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.

Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.

more on lawns . . .

more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.

Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!

There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”

and he writes about my favorite poem . . .

There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, 

And I dropped down, and down - 

And hit a World, at every plunge, And

Finished knowing - then -

and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:

“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons. 

and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .

Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

I gave John Green's new book five stars!

Gladwell Does It Again . . .

I didn't think I was interested in the new Malcolm Gladwell book The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War until my friend Cunningham recommended it and i started reading it-- and then I was like: how does this guy do it?-- Gladwell claims he's not the greatest writer, but he's the greatest rewriter, and it shows-- he really knows how to take his material and revise it into something perfectly organized, juxtaposed and memorable-- in this one it's the battle of a moral idea in WWII-- let's bomb precisely so we can take out important wartime industries and avoid civilian casualties-- and a pragmatic approach to war: the shorter the duration the better it is for all nations involved . . . and you know what happened: the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man-- Curtis LeMay's barbaric practicality won out over General Haywood Hansell's faith in the accuracy of the Norden bombsight . . . the book is just the right length for a history book (I couldn't make it through Thomas Asbridge's definitive history of the crusades, though it's an excellent book, because it's just too damn long) and it lays bare the human error in tactics, strategy, and information during wartime . . . for a longer version of this, read Mark Bowden's book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam . . . the moral of the story is, you had to be there, you had to be brave, you had to be flexible, and you might as well throw out all your convictions because you're involved in humanity's stupidest method of solving national problems.

The Specter of Walt Disney Raises Awkward Dave from the Grave

In the past decade, I've tamed Awkward Dave to some degree, but he still occasionally rears his ugly, awkward head; one of these times is when adults-- grown-ass adults--  proclaim their love of Disney World; this boggles my mind and-- unfortunately for my awkwardness-- we've got a bunch of these people in our school (and there are several in the English department!) and some of them visit Disney every year-- it's like a religious pilgrimage-- and some of them visit Disney World and they don't have children . . . and while I understand taking your kids there once so they don't feel alienated and neglected-- although my wife and I refused to go and swore we would never take our kids until finally my parents actually dragged us all there and footed the entire bill . . . I had a lot of problems with the experience, but I'm an extra-high-maintenance pain-in-the-ass . . . but that's not what this sentence is about, it's about the awkward fugue-like state I enter when adults mention their love of Disney World . . . I start saying crazy, insulting, and awful things right to their faces, and these are people I work with and see every day; here are some examples of things I start spouting to perfectly nice co-workers: 

-- I rant and rave about how lame it is to share a bunch of antiseptic engineered memories with the rest of the Philistines in the park; 

-- I explain how happy I was when an alligator ate a small child at the Disney Grand Floridian Resort and Spa because it injected some reality into the fantasy;

-- I told someone they were totally fucked in the head because she was touting the merits of the Epcot food and wine festival . . . I told her for that amount of money you could go to Italy and have real food and wine!

-- I like to call out people who claim they are feminists yet worship the princess culture;

so I've decided this can't go on . . . if people want to spend their hard-earned money on Disney vacations, so be it . . . I need to be more tolerant; also, I don't think they can help it-- I wish I could claim to have noticed this myself, but it was Chantal who pointed out that all the devout Disney worshippers are practicing Catholics . . . so maybe there's some tie-in between actually practicing religion and loving Disney-- and we all know you can't control whether you have that "belief" character trait . . . I don't have a lick of it and I think it saves me a lot of trouble (in fact, I just read a great little piece in The Atlantic about how politics has replaced religion in America . . . and Disney is better than politics, I suppose).

2020 Winds Down . . .

2020 is winding down in typical form:

1) I wanted to heat up my leftover half-burrito last night and when I opened the aluminum foil I found the roll to be empty-- one of the children finished the foil and then put the box back-- and since foil is required to heat up a burrito ( I wasn't going to risk it in our brand new air-fryer) I had to go to the store and it was busy;

2) though I've only got eighty pages left, I'm not sure sure I'm going to finish my 54th book (2020 was a good year for reading books) because I might abandon it . . . it's a fantasy novel by J.K. Jemisin called The Fifth Season and the subtitle is "Every Age Must Come to An End" and it won the Hugo Award in 2016 so I thought it would be a fitting end to this weird and stunted year but it's a bit too apocalyptic and cruel and depressing . . . though it's set in an alternate universe of fissures and tsunamis and volcanoes and an oppressed group of "orogenes," people with the ability to sense and manipulate the wild and restless thermal and kinetic energy that is par for the course in this world-- they can quiet these disasters . . . or set them off-- now that I'm summarizing, I realize it is a pretty great book-- just painful-- and I will probably finish it because of the last kick in the balls from 2020;

3) it is raining and it is going to rain and it will continue raining until well into the New Year.

I Give Up: Here's a Bunch of Random Stuff From "Why We're Polarized"

I highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Why We're Polarized for both liberals and conservatives-- and it should be the last thing you read that mentions national politics for a long while; warning, this post is going to be epically long-- because I dog-eared so many pages in the book and then used the Google Doc "voice-typing" tool to input all the information into the computer and while it was pretty fun to read aloud and watch the text scroll, the post is a total mess; you're not going to get accurate quotations, as I didn't take my time, but I'm going to boil down Klein's words into a sort of plagiaristic of Dave/Ezra Klein that is perfectly fitting for this ridiculous blog medium; while Klein is a self-avowed liberal (and usually a vegan . . . but not when he travels) who co-founded Vox and is a regular on the podcast The Weeds, this book is not a liberal paean . . . it's an explanation and the take-away is this: stop following national politics like it's more than a football match or a soap opera and-- if you truly want to enact political change-- start worrying about your hometown and the things going on in the state in which you live-- Jersey pride!-- these are the things you can actually influence; anyway . . . here is some stuff from the book, partly paraphrased, partly with Klein's wording, and partly insane rambling;

1) America used to be full of ticket splitters-- and you knew plenty of ticket splitters-- so you didn't identify too heavily with either party;

2) policy was a mixed bag . . .  Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes for instance that would be unthinkable in today's Republican Party-- almost every elected Republican official has signed a pledge promising to never raise taxes under any circumstances; Bush also sign the Americans with Disabilities Act into law and oversaw a cap-and-trade program to reduce the pollutants behind acid rain; Reagan signed an Immigration Reform Bill the today's Democrats venerate and today's Republicans denounce; Reagan supported amnesty for illegal immigrants; President Bill Clinton' stance on illegal immigrants was much akin to Donald Trump's position; Clinton launched his administration with a budget designed to reduce the deficit and an all-out effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA . . . he famously ran against the left-wing of his own party flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged inmate and publicly denounced the rapper Sister Souljah; in 1965 a Democratic president created a massive single-payer healthcare system for the nation's elderly-- but as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution-- it still received 70 Republican votes in the house as well as 13 Republican votes in the Senate; Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney's reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas relied on private insurance for the bulk of its coverage expansion and it ended up sacrificing its public option but the legislation didn't receive a single Republican vote in either the house or the Senate;1982 Senator Joe Biden voted for a constitutional amendment that would let States overturn Roe v Wade, etc. etc.

3) Policy and ticket splitting is no more . . . it's ALL identity politics on both sides-- and we're going to have to get used to and live with it . . . or maybe not because you probably don't live near people from the other party: House Democrats now represent 78% of all Whole Foods locations but only 27% of Cracker Barrels . . . it's easy to overstate the direct role partisanship is playing in these decisions, and while it's true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, people are still people . . . they look at schools and housing prices and crime rates and similar quality of life questions . . . BUT the big decision they make-- or their parents have made-- is whether to live in an urban or rural area . . . and as the parties become more racially, religiously, and ideologically sorted into geographically different areas the signals that tell us a place is our kind of place heightens our political divisions . . . most Republicans (65%) said they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby, while a majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping; that's a preference that seems non-political on it's face but adds to the stacking of identities; 

4) psychology doesn't predict political opinions among people who don't pay much attention to politics, but it's a powerful predictor of political opinions among those who are politically engaged; unengaged citizens vote logically-- they look at what a candidate's policy will do for them or their community, while politically engaged people vote using identity and emotion . . . that's damn crazy and why the best way to think about the presidential election is to ignore it for 3.99 years and then take a quick look at each candidate's platform and decide which platform is better for you;

5) it's a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action-- as we become more political we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity; it's not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests, it's that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual's goals when forming a policy opinion; 

6) politicians are not equally responsive to all their constituents-- they're most concerned about the most engaged people who will vote for them  and volunteer for them and donate to them and the way to make more of that kind of voter isn't just a focus on how great you are-- you need to focus on how bad the other side is; nothing brings a group together like a common enemy . . . remove the fury and fear of a real opponent and watch the enthusiasm drain from your supporters; 

7) it turns out that there's only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal views actually are; one reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don't have very strong views about policy: it's the rare hobbyist who thinks so often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve-- but all of us are experts on our own identities;

8) Bill Clinton had the same "draconian" stance as Trump on immigration;

9) one study shows that Democrats and Republicans cared more about the political party of a student vying for a scholarship than the student's GPA  . . . partisanship simply trumped academic excellence;

10) another study found that Democrats and Republicans performed better at math when the math skills helped them find an answer that boosted their ideology-- say gun control for liberals-- and the better the person was at math, the dumber they got when getting the problem wrong would NOT bolster their ideology . . . yikes;

11) it's become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but if you look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now, then you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces-- the fear is not that the government is regulating speech, but that protesters are chilling speech, the Twitter mob rules the land looking for an errant word or a misfired joke . . . in our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we've lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of the politics and indeed much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear;

12) Klein summarizes the first half of the book thusly: the human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference; it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups; the deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we make sure our group wins . . . making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our groups advantage over other groups . . . the parties used to be scrambled both ideologically and demographically in ways that curbed their power, but these ideological mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America's peculiar and often abhorrent racial politics; the success of the Civil Rights Movement and its alliance with national Democratic party broke that equilibrium and destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party and triggered an era of party sorting; ideological Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn't true in 1955; partisanship is in part a rational response to the rising party difference-- if the two sides hated and feared each other less 50 years ago, well that makes sense they were more similar 50 years ago, but that's sorting has also been demographic today the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural and psychological lines . . . there are many many powerful identities lurking in that list and they are fusing together and stacking atop one another so a conflict or a threat that activates one, activates all of the characteristics and since these mega-identities stretch across so many aspects of our society they're constantly being activated in an era of profound powerful social change; a majority of infants born today in America are non-white and the fastest-growing religious identity is "no religious identity at all"; women makeup the majorities on college campuses; foreign-born groups are rising in population and rising in power and they want their needs reflected in the politics and culture; other groups feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they've in the past when America was "great" and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties; Obama's presidency was an example of the younger more diverse Coalition taking power and  Trump's presidency represented the older whiter Coalition taking it back;

13) an Essential Truth Klein has learned: almost no one is forced to follow politics-- there is some lobbyist in government affairs who need to stay on the cutting edge of legislative and regulatory developments to do their job, but most people who follow politics do it as a hobby in the way they follow a sport or a band; political journalism has to compete with literally everything else for retention; Rachel Maddow is a war with reruns of The Big Bang Theory; Fox competes with Xbox; time spent reading this book is time not spent listening to the podcast Serial;

14) misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party; Democrats believe 44% of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year-- it's actually 2%; Republicans believed that 38% of Democrats were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual-- the correct answer is about 6%; Democrats believe that more than four out of every 10 Republicans are seniors-- in truth seniors make out about 20% of the GOP; Republicans believe that 46% of Democrats are black and 44% belong to a union and reality about 24% of Democrats are African American and less than 11% belong to a union; what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, then the more mistaken they were about the other party . . . it makes sense if you think about the incentives driving media outlets . . . the old line on local reporting was if it bleeds it leads, but for political reporting the principal is if it outrages it leads-- and outrage is deeply connected to identity;

15) people have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the national discussion; people should be involved in local politics and be most engaged in the tangible states of the politics nearest to their experience . . . of course you're likely to donate to defeat the politician who serves as the villain in the political dramas you watch rather than some local legislator whose name you can't remember . . . of course the stakes of national politics with their titanic clashes of good vs. evil, the storylines omnipresent on social media and television, dominate consciousness . . . but it's counterproductive;

16) people in America used to identify with their state more than the country-- but this has changed-- and it would have confounded the Founders . . . at the core of this newfound nationalization is an inversion of the founders most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state and with our country . . . a guy named Hopkins proved this with a text analysis of digitized books-- state identity came up WAY more than national identity until recently. . . so I'm bringing that back: I'm Jersey strong and Jersey proud and Bruce and Bon Jovi and all that shit and the rest of the country can do what it wants;

17) America's political system is unusual in that it permits a divided government and is full of tools minorities can use to obstruct governance; imagine that you work in an office where your boss who you think is a jerk needs your help to finish his projects, but if you help him he keeps his job and maybe even get the promotion and if you refuse to help him, you become his boss and he may get fired; now add in a deep dose of disagreement. . . you hate his projects and believe them to be bad for the company and even the world and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss will be mad at you if you help him--  that's basically American politics right now, bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but the rationale for the minority party is to stonewall; it's a hell of a way to run a railroad, but this was our structure during much of American History because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority;

18) famous political pundits Ornstein and Mann mince no words in explaining that while both parties partake in bipartisanship, the Republicans have gone off the rails, to summarize their words: today's Republican Party is an insurgent outlier; it has become ideological extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all the declaring war on the government. . . . The Democratic party, while no Paragon of civic virtue, is more ideological centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashion through bargaining with Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties . . . 

19) crucially the Democratic party isn't just more diverse in terms of its members, it's also more diverse in its trusted information sources and 2014 the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents 36 different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each; liberals trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC,  The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Yahoo . . . conservatives only trusted a handful of sources: Fox News, Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, the Sean Hannity show, The Glenn Beck program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show.


20) Democrats are often derided for playing identity politics, but that is not in truth a difference between the parties . . . Republicans have built their coalition on identity politics as well, but the difference between the parties is at the Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities and more skeptical voters than Republicans do successful National Democrats construct broad Coalition and that's a practice a cut against the incentives of pure polarisation what national Republicans have learned to do its construct deep coalitions relying on more demographically and ideologically homogeneous voters . . . Republicans, instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters they win the power by winning the votes of most places

21) Republicans appeal to voters significantly to the right of the median voter but it's forced them into a dependence on an Electra that feels its power slipping away and demands a response the portion it to its fears this is the way in which the parties are not structurally symmetrical and that's why they have not responded to a polarizing are in the same ways Democrats simply can't win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans Democrats can move to the left and they are but they can't abandon the center in December 2018 well into the Trump era Gallup as Democrats and Republicans whether they wanted to see their party become more liberal or conservative or more moderate by a margin of 57 to 37% Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative by a margin of 54 to 41% Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate

22) the relevant factor I'm urging you to pay attention to his identity what identity is that article or Twitter thing or video invoking what identities making you defensive what does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity can you notice it when it happens you log on to Twitter nine times a day can you take a couple of breasts at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on the ID here has become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us. There are reams of research showing the reaction to political commentary and information we don't like his physical. Are breathing speeds up, are pupils naira, our heart beats faster. Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is it necessary first step to gaining some control of the process. That is not to say we should become afraid of our identities being inflamed or strong emotion being Force for its to say we should be mindful enough of what's happening to make decisions about whether we're pleased with the situation sometimes it's worth being angry sometimes it's not we don't take the time to know which is which we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others

24) For all our problems we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history you do not need to go back to the country's early years when new arrivals from your drove out and murdered indigenous peoples brought over millions of enslaved Africans and wrote laws making women second-class citizens to see it just a few decades ago political assassinations were routine in 1963 President John F Kennedy was murdered on the streets of Dallas in 1965 Malcolm X was shot to death in a crowded New York City Ballroom in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed as was Robert F Kennedy in 1975 Lynette Squeaky Fromme standing about an arm's length from President Gerald Ford aims her gun and fired the bullets fail to discharge Harvey Milk the pioneering gay San Francisco city Supervisor was killed in 1978 President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 the bull shattered rivet punctured alone for much of the twentieth century the right to vote was for African Americans no right at all lynchings were common Freedom Writers were brutally beaten across the American South police had to escort young African-American children into schools as jeering crowd shouted racial epithets and threatened to attack violence broke out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention urban riots ripped across the country crime was Rising the United States launched an illegal secret bombing campaigning campaigning in Cambodia National Guard members fired on and killed student protesters at Kent State Richard Nixon Road a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement into the White House launched an Espionage campaign against his political opponents provoked a constitutional crisis and became the first American President to resign from office by impeachment proceedings this is not a counterintuitive take on American history by the way among experts that is closer to the consensus the varieties of democracy project

25) American democracy was far less Democratic and far less liberal and far less decent than today; Trump's most intemperate outbursts pale before the opinions that were mainstream in recent history and the institutions of American politics today are a vast improvement on the regimes that ruled well within living memory . . . if we can do a bit better tomorrow we will be doing much much better than we have ever done before.

The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Adam Alter's book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked doesn't offer up any big surprises-- it just slowly overwhelms you with the details until you have to agree-- many, many people have behavioral addictions centered around technology and digital connectedness; and the big problem is because addiction is not as character-based as you might think, and much more dependent on the environment-- and we can't escape the bottomless and ubiquitous environment of the internet-- we're going to need to be creative with solutions; while I try to put up the good fight-- I stay off social media-- aside from two blogs-- and I check my email once a day (I was astounded at how many times workers check their email on average . . . 36 times an hour?) but I've adopted some wearable tech-- a FitBit-- and this book helped me understand that one of those gadgets can lead you down some weird roads-- people get really obsessive about their step-counts and their runnign streaks-- so I'm trying to have some days, usually after tennis or running, where I try to keep my steps as LOW as possible-- really rest my feet and legs-- there's no reason to ALWAYS get 12,000 steps-- some days are for stretching or lifting or resting-- and while I'm not a gamer, I got fairly obsessed with low-stakes online poker at the start of the pandemic-- so I removed all those programs from the computer and gave that up-- it's not worth the time-- and now I'm playing a couple games of online chess each day (but only if my kids won't play) and this is a result of Netflix and "The Queen's Gambit" and I'm being very careful not to bingewatch shows-- you have to break the cycle of the cliffhanger by watching the first five minutes of the next episode and then stopping . . . and while these are first-world problems and it's the rare sort who develops a full-blown life-threatenign World of Warcraft addiction, I am hooked on the NYT Mini Crossword-- it's the crack of crosswords and there's no way I'll ever give it up . . . anyway, Alter points our that we've become far too goal oriented, there's too many ways ot keep score, and we've got to be constantly vigilant about this stuff eating up our time-- and the only way to replace one habit is to find another, when the cue happens and you usually play Candy Crush, you've got to have something else-- a ten minute yoga video or something . . . but enough of this: online chess is calling me (I'm also annoyed that my job is now on a screen, so that when I get done with my job, i have little motivation to record music or write my blog-- because it's just more screens . . . but I've set up my physical loop pedal and analog amplifier again, so that I can get back on the guitar and do some layers of sound, without getting back on a screen . . . again, first world problems but that doesn't mean you can't solve them).

Deacon King Kong: Read It!

Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:

“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese. 

and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:

When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,” 

At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime. 

At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine. 

Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team. 

and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:

you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses. 

and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:

Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless. 

and various kind of crime:

“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”  

“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?” 

“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.” 

Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!” 

“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now. 

and superstition:

His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.” 

“How you know Hettie done it?” 

“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.” 

“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.” 

“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.” 

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”  

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.” 

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.” 

“Step backward over a pole ten times.” 

“Swallow three pebbles . . .” 

They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them. 

“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .” 

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.” 

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.” 

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .” 

They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died. 

and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:

“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.” 

“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind. 

the dark side of the drugs: 

Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh. 

and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:

"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.” 

He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”  

Scary Story Contest 2020: The Safety Dance vs. The Chinese Curse

Yesterday afternoon, the EB English Department held our 9th Annual Scary Story Contest. Thanks to the Soders for hosting! They had a stand-up propane heater, a fire, and a few well-placed umbrellas to shield us from the rain. We will certainly remember the Covid Scary Story Contest for time immemorial-- as the stories were great and the mood was spooky.

To summarize the contest: we write scary stories on a theme, throw in twenty bucks, read them anonymously, and then vote and award prizes.

This year's theme was "It's Perfectly Safe" and I had no desire to write anything, let alone a fully developed short story. I was sick of screen time because of the technological soul-sucking abyss of hybrid school. Stacey and I usually collaborate, but we couldn't find time to flesh out her idea.

So instead of a story, I wrote a scary poem. I framed it as a Facebook post, ostensibly written by a woman who thought she might have some magical powers and wanted to use them to change the course of this fucked up year. Over the course of the post, she descends into madness (of course).

It was fun to write, but, I didn't realize how hard it would be to read. The poor lady who was randomly assigned my piece (Cunningham) nearly descended into madness trying to perform it. I snagged third place, which was an accomplishment-- the stories were really good this year.

Here it is-- I think it's both appropriate for Halloween and the looming thing which may not be spoken of. If you like it, post it on Facebook . . . maybe it will work.

                                                 The Chinese Curse

What’s on your mind, Blair?

video photo feeling

What’s on my mind? Do you really want to know, Face-suck? 

Or do you just want to mine my data? 

What’s on my mind?

The Chinese Curse, that’s what. May you live in interesting times. 

October 31st, 2020. Interesting times. Four more days until the election. Two more months left in this mess of a year.

Interesting times suck. I can't get them off of my mind. Or out of my mind.

But maybe, I can change things. Have some control. Do some lexical magic. 

At least over you, my so-called Facebook friends . . . in my so-called life during this so-called pandemic. Maybe you’ll pass my incantation along and this year will turn itself inside out.

What if I could cast a spell?

Dissipate this weary hell?

I should at least give it a try. My mom used to do tarot readings. I might have some kind of gift.

Hocus-pocus, maybe I can learn to focus?

Zuckerberg’s clairvoyant vision

Find this with your algorithm:

Make my post go super-viral

Pull us from this deadly spiral.

It was the year of twenty-twenty,

It is the year of twenty-twenty . . .

Twenty-twenty, twenty-twenty

Why do you rub me

in this way?

Why can’t you love me?

You push and shove me

Day by fretful day by day.

Boil and bubble, Trump is trouble, 

O Lord don't let him win the double

Yes! Let my soul turn to lead 

and sink to hell if he were dead.

If he were dead, if he were dead.

Banish these thoughts from my head!

My busy brain should not be fed

By such bitter vengeful bread.

Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies 

covid covid we all fall down . . .

Safety, safety, safety first

Safety dance, the Chinese curse

Living safely is the worst

But is it better than the hearse?

Lady liberty not Trump tower

Used to give our country power.

Hippies filled their hair with flowers.

Now . . .

abortion makes Coney Barrett sour.

Blues and reds, they all glower--

Children at the border cower.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword.

But what if the Populus is polarized and bored?

Pandemic, plan-demic

A fiction Democratic.

You have my word 

November third

It disappears like magic.

Meatpackers work, shoulder to shoulder

The policy gets colder and colder.

Carcass, virus, 

virus, carcass . . .  

Cut that meat or they will fire us.

Covid covid, we all fall down.

Black lives matter, blue lives matter,

George Floyd’s ashes we must scatter.

Pitter-patter pitter-patter

The blood of Rayshard Brooks did spatter--

Tasers, guns I’ll take the latter.

Breonna Taylor’s door got battered.

Some say the world will end in fire,

But for migrant workers, 

ICE will suffice.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake,

Birds and snakes and aeroplanes,

Dave Chapelle is not afraid

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn

While the outback burns and burns.

It’s the end of the world as we know it,

Grandma don’t feel fine at all.

Covid covid, we all fall 

down.

Fly of Pence, tongue of Stone,

Bannon’s nose hair

Kushner’s throne

Ivanka’s fabric

Mnuchin’s money

Tongue of Miller

Pompeo’s arm

Mix these for a deadly charm.

Yes! Let my soul turn to lead 

and sink to hell if he were dead.

I make this bargain readily,

Like Faustus with Mephistopheles . . .

I wear my mask and then I sneeze

Don’t stare at me, pretty please.

Here we are now, entertain us.

TV shows to make us famous,

Social feeds will try to change us

We bare our souls, can you blame us?

Bail out the airlines and the banks,

To Donald Trump we give our thanks.

The rest of us must share the wealth--

And hope he subsidizes health.

Plumes of smoke, tear-gas, fire

Men in armor, guns for hire

We're all so very very tired

But am I preaching to the choir?

Twenty-twenty when you end

Will our fractured country mend?

Or have we gone around the bend?

I see two paths, both portend.

Yes, two roads diverged in yellow wood . . . 

One repulsive, one not so good

Three roads, four roads, five roads, six,

There will be no easy fix

Epstein’s minors turn their tricks.

Safety dance, safety first

Safety is the Chinese curse

Will November make it worse?

What rough beast slouches towards Washington to be reborn?

Once I pondered weak and weary, on a scientific theory

Then I learned of QAnon and thought: “Fuck yeah! IT IS ON!”

Now I fight the pedophiles,

Me and Trump, we do battle

The rest of you are sheep and cattle

Do your research on Seattle

Protesters, they mass and gather

Law or chaos, would you rather?

Widening on the turning gyre, 

the center cannot hold

Things fall apart, it’s getting cold

The virus once again grows bold

Airborne particles

Fake news articles,

Winter is coming, enjoy the carnival.

My thoughts grow wild, I can’t control them, 

I wish that I could turn them off,

I wish I were allowed to cough 

I wish that I could turn them off 

I wish I were allowed to cough 

until my lungs come out my ears and throat

The devil is inside a goat

Bubble, bubble Trump is trouble

Will he be elected double?

Twenty-twenty, a dozen more?

Will he change the terms to four?

Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan

Let’s enact a travel ban!

Illhan Omar and AOC

Want us all to work for free.

Socialism . . . not for me . . .

We mourn the mighty RBG.

Twenty-twenty, you have offended,

But in a year, will all be mended?

Perhaps we have just slumbered here

While these visions did appear?

No . . . this is no idle theme--

It’s not a dream, it’s not a dream

I give you full consent to scream.

Stop these thoughts, away begone!

Yet they continue on and on . . .

What’s on my mind, Facebook feed?

I can’t choose which way to proceed.

I cannot do a single deed.

I’m paralyzed and by booze and weed

Safety safety, safety first

The safety dance, the Chinese curse

Living safely is the worst

My brain won’t stop until it bursts.

I poke and scroll on my phone

There’s no such thing as home alone.

O lord I feel so weak and weary, fatigued and futile, eyes so bleary,

My mask lies soiled and forgotten, dirty, dusty smelling rotten

Fallen from the special spot on my car mirror to the floor--

Now I need it, I must retrieve it, I’m on an errand to the store.

But can I enter? Dare I enter? I do not want to touch the door--

The doorway entrance, a deadly sentence, full of germs I can’t ignore.

What’s on my mind?

Only this and nothing more.

Facebook-- make this post go super-viral,

Release me from this deadly spiral,

I’m feeling mad, my mind is wild,

Like a surly red-faced child--

I want to stomp and throw a tantrum--

Redrum, redrum! REDRUM!

Murder mayhem bloody-mary

Twenty-twenty, you shock and scare me

Like some spider black and hairy.

I can’t sleep my way through this disaster

Twenty-twenty: you are the master

Of my whirling anxious brain--

Release me from this grisly reign.

Dash these thoughts against the stones,

Let them live among your phones,

Free me from these dreadful times

Cast this spell, release these rhymes.

What’s on my mind, what’s on my mind?

It was the year of twenty-twenty,

It IS the year of twenty-twenty.

Only this and nothing more.

Post