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The Rules

January 9, 2022 //
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The rules are inconsistent and contradictory. This is by design. Following the rules does not make it more likely that your life will be easy or consistent. (Likelihood decreases the farther away your are on various spectra from being a mediocre white male.)

Talking with my mother last night, we got on the topic of Novak Djokovic, stuck in a quarantine hotel in Australia because, per the indistinct chatter of social media, he refused to get vaccinated. The bigger picture, which best beloved mentioned over supper, is that Djokovic refuses on grounds that he’s already recovered from COVID and that he was granted a medical exemption. The Australian government, feeling that the exemption was a technical foul, has detained the player.

Part of the issue with the complexity of the rules is that it makes for stories like this one that distract us from the real news going on. As Frank Zappa once put it, Politics is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex. The news (and social media, for that matter) is another arm of that entertainment industry. These stories keep our eyes off the matter of the defense budget (for example). We just came to the end of the longest war in US history and the defense budget still increased. No extra money for teachers and social housing and food banks, but Lockheed Martin and GE still get there share. We saw it happen in 1990 as well. Peace dividend? Please.

Of course in 1989, we went to Panama and in 1991 to Iraq. There’s always a war to wage.

There are other sets of inconsistent rules from top to bottom. Try being Black in America and your chances of ending up like Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor are rather higher than if you’re any brand of white. Try being trans and Black. That’s the next case of the rules, isn’t it now? The one in which the rules we know are written to be explicitly against certain classes of people. Try being female in a frum (pious) Jewish community who has an idea of not being confined to those roles. Or queer in the same situation, for that matter.

Tom Robinson and crew preaching on the subject.

Following the rules to the letter doesn’t guarantee your life safety. This is where If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide goes head to head with Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And Authority wins over Compassion every time. Every single time.

In the volume When I Grow Up, Ken Krimstein illustrates six stories written by Jewish teenagers in the period just before World War Two. (The tale behind this collection is fascinating in and of itself. Krimstein tells it in this episode of podcast The Shmooze.) In one of the stories, a girl tells of her father and all the worlds he opened up for her, and concludes it with how the elders shouted her down for daring to recite Kaddish for her father at his funeral. The rules for women in that place and time were different than in the conservative Los Angeles synagogue I was raised in. And such rules are probably why there are non-Orthodox denominations at all. Following them didn’t make you any more free, give you any greater intrinsic value. History is littered with those who claim there is more than one avenue to the divine.

And this brings us back around to the rules in today’s America. The vote is supposed to provide greater representation in the various legislatures. But the votes, for example, of a few thousand West Virginians steam roll those of millions of voters in other states, and provides akn object lesson in ‘why we can’t have nice things,’ as if we needed another. And this is before we talk about gerrymandering, the BS in Georgia and several other things. The right to vote, if you can exercise it within the increasingly arcane rules of the American franchise, doesn’t get you a voice.

Categories history, Judaism, morality, Politics, United States

Fireworks and personal responsibility

January 1, 2022 //
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Despite a well-publicized COVID-related ban on New Year’s Eve fireworks in the Netherlands, there were dozens of displays visible from my house alone (and injuries and deaths justifying the ban). I don’t think Leiden is an outlier, either. Throughout the day there were booms audible from carbide cannons and other noisemakers that had me and the Mrs. on edge. Note that having lived in the Netherlands for almost 15 years, this was the first year we spent NYE at home. Usually we spend it with college friends somewhere in the UK with lots of hiking. (Last year, we spent most of December near the in-laws and planned to be home before Brexit went into effect, but a testing snafu kept us two extra days and we returned on the second.)

With regards to the crazy noise making in the face of the aforementioned ban, I think there’s a connection between how we’re treated as children and how we take responsibility as adults. Parents often say, ‘if you do what you’re told, you can have this thing or that that you want.’ (There’s a different discussion that covers how and how well parents deliver on what they promise.) As adults we often treat ourselves with a similar responsibility/reward system. Freud has a few things to say about this, but I’m writing on the assumption that you often manage to get through unpleasant tasks by identifying a reward, even if it’s just ‘I can have a drink when I make it through the week.’

Societies both function and fail to function on the same principle. The current plague is a good example: If we (governments with the help of people following guidelines) keep the hospitalization numbers down, then we can reopen fun things like movie theatres and pubs. But populations act increasingly like children long denied the promised reward for good behavior. We’re aggrieved by a situation in which no amount of individual adherence prevents the punishment of further lockdowns. We take the opportunities to let off steam or break various rules because we deserve a treat, even if it means further spread of the virus (at a societal level) and further restrictions (at a personal level). Instant gratification seems to take over.

There’s a related issue where we’re told to take personal responsibility for our contributions to environmental degradation. Recently I saw the number floated that 71% of greenhouse emissions are created by corporate activity. While I’m not finding a source for this number in the moment, it’s not the first time I’ve seen similar figures reported. What this means is that even if every person made every possible change to reduce their carbon footprint, we’d still be up to our necks in the results of corporate behavior. Yes, I know this isn’t precisely true – that much personal change would redound on how corporations make their profits. It’s also highly unlikely. Most individuals, even collectively, can do bupkes to influence this issue. 

No matter what we do to change our own habits, we’ll still be inundated by the news that the polar bears are still going extinct and temperatures are still going to rise and the weather is still going to mess us up.

And this being the case, we’re still going to do all the wasteful things, or engage in behaviors that are harmful to ourselves and to the community, and do so in the name somehow deserving either a treat or a lapse in responsibility for those around us. I’m not sure how expressing this makes a difference. We’ve never been good at engaging in short term inconvenience to achieve the benefit of long-term personal, much less societal, good.

Categories Politics

More podcasts!

April 23, 2021 //
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Last week I mentioned Maddow and O’Donnell, Penfriend’s Attention Engineer, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy. This week I look at more music, some food, and more politics.

Martyn Ware’s Electronically Yours. Ware was a founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17, and his British Electrical Foundation project relaunched Tina Turner’s career in the early 80s. He mostly interviews his own contemporaries (Thomas Dolby, Gary Numan, Vince Jackson), but he’s gone farther afield with Sandie Shaw, and Tony Visconti. Sometimes he’s a little too fond of his own self, or he hasn’t yet decided to edit out his own meanderings, but in general the interviews are fascinating. In his interview with Tony Visconti, Ware admitted early on that Visconti had produced 12 of his 20 all time favourite albums, but he generally did a good job of letting Visconti tell the stories.

Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat (author of Salt Fat Acid Heat) and Hrishikesh Hirway. I learned of this great podcast from Hirway, I’m guessing – I think he must have mentioned at the end of an episode of one of his other podcasts, Song Exploder (which I also love). I didn’t know anything about Nosrat and her amazing cooking journey. The two of them started this podcast at the beginning of the pandemic with the idea that they’d do four episodes talking about their favourite foods and answering listener questions. Four has so far turned into 15. Really delightful and sweet. And mouthwatering.

I said I’d mention a political podcast, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve not listened to much beyond Rachel and Lawrence. But in the category of longer form political discussion, I really like Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara. Bharara was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, fired at the beginning of the last administration. He is both articulate (not unexpected in a trial attorney) and an astute interviewer. His discussion with conservative columnist David Frum at the earlier this year was especially interesting.

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Categories food and drink, Music, podcasts, Politics

Bartleby’s Plague Year

February 21, 2021 //
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In last week’s Economist (13-19 February, 2021) Bartleby gives us a month by month set of memories of the past year. As if we ourselves hadn’t already lived through it.

The thing is, memories of learning Zoom etiquette and how to mute ourselves and others in meetings ceased being funny a long time ago. The sameness of days working from home has long since ceased to be news, and the columnist pointing to June as the month when we started feeling ‘Groundhog Day Syndrome’ doesn’t make it any more ancient history.

Canceled holidays and the rollercoaster of lockdowns followed by eased restrictions followed by more lockdowns – well, almost all readers of the Economist know what that’s like. And we’re all suffering from the continued effects of the entitled thinking that a period eased restrictions means that the world with Covid is actually safer. The fact that we’re still dealing with this shit means that we as an office-dwelling species don’t get it and never have gotten it. I’m not the first to say that eased restrictions means there’s room in the ER or A&E for you.

I have expat friends who have long complained that a large segment of the population of this country don’t wash their hands. A survey in May (well into the pandemic) indicated that half the Dutch hadn’t gotten the message. Have they yet? Who knows? But our infection numbers go reliably up when restrictions are eased and reliably down when they’re not.

I got on my high horse at the beginning of this thing and said (only to my wife who pays for the Economist subscription and understands the nature of the system far better than I do, and alluded to it on this blog) that the only way to conquer this thing was to go on a war footing, put in the restrictions and move manufacturing to getting PPE and support to medical staff. ‘Yes, the economy will take a hit, but then we can get back up and moving again.’

But I don’t understand human nature any better than anyone else. I know I still forget a mask sometimes and feel ridiculous about going back for one, but I bloody well do it. I don’t understand the refusal of our societies to support the front line folks first (medical, educational, retail). I don’t understand why there’s a question about how quickly to vaccinate teachers, nurses, and supermarket workers. If I did, I’d be an economist or a financier, and not a tech writer.

I wasn’t the first to note that DJT would have won the election had he lifted one finger to handle the pandemic with sense and reliance on experts. Is there a blessing in the fact that he didn’t and is therefore no longer president (his own rants notwithstanding)? I don’t know. Half a million dead in the US might prefer that he’d just once acted in the interest of the country and not his own. But because he couldn’t, here we are.

The Economist column concludes with the suggestion, ‘Perhaps at some point in 2021 Bartleby will be back on the London Underground, crammed like a sardine while waiting for the platform to clear at Earl’s Court. Suddenly social isolation doesn’t seem so bad after all.’

For much of the working world, the thought of being on a crowded commuter platform (or movie theatre or concert or fast-food joint or anywhere else that keeping distance is rendered impossible) isn’t a point of humor but the opening salvo of an anxiety attack. For another large part of the working world, that anxiety and the associated Covid risk are facts of life that won’t be letting up any time soon.

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Categories Covid-19, Economics, Politics

The state of the parties

February 12, 2021 //
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The topic of this Chomsky quote is very much on my mind these days. It’s not an original thought to say that in the US we have a fascistic party (the one we keep calling the Republican Party, though their behaviour in the last 12 years at least would horrify such stalwarts as Eisenhower, and, heck, even Reagan and Nixon), a right-wing party whose interest are aligned with the financial industry and what used to be law and order (formerly the Democratic Party), and a budding medium left-wing party of folks like Bernie and AOC.

About that middle point: If the Democrats aren’t the party of the finance industry, why was their VP choice in 2008 (the year the financial industry screwed over working Americans in very large numbers) the man who was rightly accused of representing MBNA and Citicorp rather than the people of Delaware? (Note that the state of Delaware has such lax banking laws that many banks use post office boxes there as their corporate addresses.) If Democrats aren’t the party of law and order, why is it that in a year that saw massive uprisings against more and more flagrant police brutality the Democrats’ VP choice was the former California AG and San Francisco DA who has a long record of siding with the police over the citizenry of the City and then the state.

I’d love to support a left-wing party in the US, but we don’t have one right now, so I’ll support Nancy Pelosi and the other conservatives over the fascists when that’s the choice for getting the fascists out of the way. The problem, of course, is that getting rid of fascism is more complicated than that. In my fantasies every one who was part of that deadly idiocy at the capitol on January 6th would be tried for sedition. Ditto for all of the members of Congress and the Senate who played along. I don’t see that happening, especially the latter.

On yesterday’s Stay Tuned With Preet, Preet Bharara interviewed David Frum, a conservative from way back who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and an advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. As far back as 1994, however, he’s written about the problems of supply-side economics and evangelicals.

Frum’s views evolved to be pro same-sex marriage, and he’s pro-gun control (and, yeah, I’m getting a lot of my info about him from his Wikipedia page, but I’ve listened to him on Left, Right and Center for years. These views aren’t new for him). Despite misgivings about Palin, he voted for McCain in 2008, and has distanced himself from the party since the craziness that ensued after Obama was elected.

That said, in a way he’s putting his money where his mouth is as part of a group of classic Republicans (aka fiscal and tangentially social bootstrap conservatives) who are trying to form a new Republican party. As you might guess, I find these efforts attractive on a certain level, but what precisely is the goal? Reclaiming the party of Lincoln or the party of Reagan? If you support gun control and marriage equality and fiscal responsibility, why isn’t the current iteration of the Democratic Party doing it for you? Is a minimum wage that a person can live on too much? Was Eisenhower too much of a lefty? Is healthcare that doesn’t drive a person to bankruptcy with one accident or one out of plan ambulance call too much to ask? National parks (Thanks, Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican) that aren’t sold to the highest (if the treasury is lucky) bidder for drilling rights? I’m failing to see which policies of the Democratic Party are too much.

Oh yeah, there’s the union question, of course. Unless it’s the police unions. Can’t step on those, can you?

I know the big target is abortion rights, and that it’s a step too far for a lot of people. I could take a big left turn and write the obvious article about how if you take care of things like birth control and sex education, and a few other things, the abortion rates plummet. That’s fodder for a different blog entry.

The need for another party or two or three in the US is not new, but it’s certainly a far more vital issue now than it has been in generations. I don’t see Frum’s efforts doing much to move the needle, but I’d be very happy if they did something to dilute the country’s burgeoning fascism.

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Categories Politics, United States
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