Boulder to Bear

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

— Thomas Merton

This week, as we await word of the Boulder shooter's motive, millions of Christians will devote thought to the Passion of Christ.

Catholics, in particular, will recall the crucifixion, Christ's tortured body nailed to the cross.

Catholics have venerated that image for over 1,600 years, often to the point where—pun intended—it crosses with porn. (They weren't always so literal. For 400 years, Catholics simply interposed the Greek letters tau and rho to depict Christ's crucifixion.)

Catholics' intention has always been to display front and center Christ's self-sacrifice, believing it will sustain you on the hard road to glory.

"The crucifix reminds us that there is no resurrection without the cross, and that we are called to pick up our own crosses and follow after Jesus," says the contemporary theologian Philip Kosloski.

But the 20th century monk Thomas Merton warned against such a violent image. "You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image," he wrote.

Emptying your mind of images is a noble, but "vain task," Merton said. "Only pure love can empty the soul perfectly of the images of created things." And pure love is impossible.

Nonetheless, you must try—and violent images like that of the crucifixion are good ones to start with. 

"The delicate action of grace in the soul is profoundly disturbed by all human violence," Merton said. "The most dangerous violence is that in which we seem to find peace."

If you can't empty your mind of images this week—and who can?—forget the crucified Nazarene's suffering and think about Boulder, lest we forget and find peace in violence.

Christ sculpture courtesy of John Sheridan. The artist donates half his online sales proceeds to Oakland, California's Ceasefire.

Pleasant Valley Sunday

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere.

— Gerry Goffin

Facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit, Donald Trump's wormy shyster Sidney Powell now says "no reasonable person would conclude" her claims of election-rigging "were truly statements of fact."

Yet, thanks in part to Powell, 64,829,709 adult Americans believe Trump won and are backing bills in 33 states designed to suppress Democrats' votes in the future.

What's wrong with them? How can they be—to borrow Powell's defense—so unreasonable?

A logician would say they're guilty of the fallacy known as the argument from incredulity.

These 65 million adult Americans claim that, since they can't believe Trump lost, to say he did is simply false. 

Their flawed reasoning looks like this:

1. We can’t explain or imagine how this thing—Trump's loss—can be true.
   
   
2. If we can't explain or imagine how the thing is true, then it must be false.
   
   
3. Therefore, this thing is false.

Their second premise is clearly unsound. (I can't explain or imagine, for example, how a paper cut can be worse than a knife cut; but I don't therefore deny that it is.)

Why 65 million adult Americans can be so patently illogical is mystifying—until you consider the Pleasant Valley pseudo-reality in which they live.

As conceived by philosopher Josef Pieper, a pseudo-reality is a deliberately maintained "fiction," a pathological interpretation of reality. 

A pseudo-reality allows anyone who lives in it to shape the world to suit his biases, and to accommodate others who, like himself, can't accept the world as it is.

A pseudo-reality is, in effect, a playground for psychopaths. It can persist, Pieper says, only as long as the kids outside the playground—in other words, the normal kids—don't challenge it.

Writing in the 1970s, Pieper's prime example of a pseudo-reality was Nazism. 

Today's prime example is the GOP. 

Its members are all delusional psychopaths, water-carriers for a destructive lie. As such, they cannot be logical. 

Because logic only applies to the real world.

No Time for Fascists

Nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge

from an association between us.

— Bertrand Russell

Social media provides no sanctuary from fascists. They lurk behind every rock.

An example.

I'm a new member of "Steven Wright Quotes," a Facebook group that recycles the "best of" the quirky standup's material.

Fascists have joined the group for the countless opportunities it offers to comment on Wright's old gags—even though they're apolitical.

Lines like, "I planted some bird seed; a bird came up," and "I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

Facebook is funny 24/7; but I don't have that much time.

And I have less time for fascists.

In 1962, the head of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, invited the philosopher Bertrand Russell to debate. Russell declined by letter:

Dear Sir Oswald,

I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. 

It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from an association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

So, you might ask, how do you spot a fascist?

It's easy.

Based on the work of historian Robert Paxton, a fascist is:

• Obsessed with community decline and his own victimhood
  
  
• Obsessed with the need for "cleansing" lower social groups
  
  
• Obsessed with plots and the need for redemptive violence
  
  
• Obsessed with the tropes, metaphors, code-words, and jargon he learns from fascist propagandists
  
  
• Obsessed with the need for a national chieftain, who alone can incarnate the nation's historical destiny
  

When you encounter a fascist, do not engage; because, as Russell said, "nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge."

UPDATE: Since publishing this post, I have dropped out of "Steven Wright Quotes." The administrators cannot keep up with the fascists who leave their Troglodytic comments there.

White Noise

When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of the women of the South, the lynching will stop.

— Rep. Thomas Sisson

I despise Sen. Ron Johnson.

He postures as a "maverick," when he's merely a chickenshit White Supremacist who thinks it's gutsy to preface race-baiting with "this could get me in trouble."

Were he brave, he'd speak with candor, as Rep. Thomas Sisson did a century ago during the Congressional debate of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Instead, he employs tropes.

Fortunately, Sen. Bob Menendez has called Johnson out on the Senate floor.

"I get no one likes to be called racist, but sometimes there's just no other way to describe the use of bigoted tropes that for generations have threatened Black lives by stoking white fear," Menendez said. 

"For one of our colleagues to cast those who attacked the Capitol as harmless patriots while stoking the fear of Black Americans is like rubbing salt in an open wound."

The gutless Johnson has denied he race-baits, saying, "There was nothing racial about my comments, nothing whatsoever.

"This isn't about race. It's about riots."

Sheer disingenuousness.

Imagine Rep. Sisson saying, "Lynching isn't about race. It's how Southerners practice knot-tying."

Crawl back into Mom's rectum, Sen. Johnson. 

We're sick of your white noise.

Hardened

To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.

― Adolf Hitler

After the Las Vegas sniper took out 60 concert-goers three years ago, Bill O'Reilly called the killings "the price of freedom." 

"Government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people," he said.

To protect ourselves, according to O'Reilly, we need guns, the more—and more lethal—the better. 

"The Second Amendment is clear: Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons."

The two latest mass shootings prove to me that, for fascists like O'Reilly, freedom is dear—and life, cheap.

That's a degree of callousness most Americans find hard to swallow.

Callous, by the way, was borrowed seven centuries ago from the Latin callosus, meaning "thick-skinned." 

Callous means "unfeeling" and "hardened in the mind."

Callousness is a personality trait, I've noticed, among all fascists. 

Psychologists say it stems from self-loathing.

They're probably right.

Pulp Fiction

If these yarns were trash, then they were the best trash. 

They were trash for connoisseurs of trash.

― Don Hutchison

Frank Munsey dreamed big.

A mid-level manager for Western Union, Munsey quit his job and moved to New York in September 1882, with the dream of becoming a publisher. 

In less than two months he launched Golden Argosy, a monthly boys' magazine he conceived as a replacement for the "dime novels" so popular at the time.

But Munsey had to scramble for readers—boys worked long and hard to spare a dime in the 1880s; and many couldn't—and after four years found himself going broke.

Rather than give up his dream, Munsey repackaged Golden Argosy.

His decision gave birth to an industry. 

First, he shortened the name of his faltering magazine and shrank its physical dimensions by 60%. He also replaced its expensive cotton-paper pages with wood-pulp, a move that allowed him to price Argosy at just five cents a copy.

Most importantly, Munsey expanded the magazine's audience to include adult men.

Argosy became a runaway hit, attracting over 500,000 monthly readers. 

To keep his audience coming back, Munsey made sure his "pulp" dished up every sort of story the American male craved—romances, adventures, sex stories, war stories, crime stories, mysteries, Western tales, historical tales, and sci-fi thrillers.

Appearing in droves, copycats soon launched competing pulps—by the hundreds. 

Within a few years, they crowded the racks of drugstores, newsstands, tobacco shops and confectioneries nationwide. 

Their titles included such gems as Black Mask, Marvel, Nick Carter, Clues, Dime Detective, Nickle Western, Fight Stories, Railroad Stories, Pirate Stories, Saucy Stories, Pep Stories, Spicy Adventure, Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Dare-Devil Aces and The Mysterious Wu Fang.

Not only did publishers cash in on the pulp-fiction craze, but writers did, too.

About 1,300 of them wrote short stories for two cents a word, in order to feed men's insatiable demand for escape.

While most pulp-fiction writers are forgotten today, some are well remembered—even lionized.

Among the latter are William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Earle Stanley Gardner, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke.

A paper shortage during World War II, the debut of the 25-cent "pocketbook," and the proliferation of movies, radio programs, and TV shows displaced the pulps.

Bleeding readers, magazines like Dime Detective and Dare-Devil Aces simply shuttered.

Those that didn't abandoned fiction altogether, moving into the category of "men's magazines" and devoting their lurid pages to topics like Nazi sadists, serial killers, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle. 

I still remember seeing those throwbacks in the confectioner's stores in the early 1960s, on the racks above the comic books and the copies of Mad. 

By then, the age of the pulps was over.

"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters were forced to be literate," pulp-fiction writer Isaac Asimov lamented.

Attractive Nusiance

I count religion but a childish toy and
hold there is no sin but ignorance.

— Christopher Marlowe

After his arrest this week, Atlanta gunman Robert Long told police he merely wanted to wipe out temptation.

His vicar has said Long's actions were "the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind" and "completely unacceptable."

Bull.

While liberals ballyhoo about pistols and prejudice, I don't hear an outcry against the real culprit: Christianity.

It's time to outlaw it.

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad," Friedrich Nietzsche aptly said.

Long found the world ugly and bad, and merely tried to better it. 

His only real crime was childishness.

Fortunately, there is solid ground upon which to ban Christianity: the doctrine of “attractive nuisance."

Dating to 1841, the doctrine holds a property owner responsible for a child's injuries when the owner fails to eliminate a "nuisance" that lures the child to trespass.

Attractive nuisances typically include swimming pools; artificial ponds and water fountains; trampolines; treehouses; merry-go-rounds; building equipment and debris; discarded appliances and cars; and unsecured animals.

In the case of Victims v. Long, the vicar of Crabapple First Baptist Church (as well as Long) should be found guilty. 

Long pulled the trigger, yes; but the vicar lured him into doing so, by dangling the "attractive nuisance" known in his trade as "eternal salvation." 

The Crabapple First Baptist Church should be shuttered and demolished, and the congregation's assets awarded to the plaintiffs.

For once, let's get to the root of things.

Shake Your Booty

The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

— Sen. Dick Durbin

The filibuster is a Senate procedure invoked by the minority party to "pirate" a popular bill.

This act of piracy used to be difficult, but no longer. 

Until 1975, senators could block a bill only through the “talking filibuster.” Today, they can call for a "virtual" one. No one need talk. 

Joe Biden wants Senators to filibuster like they did "in the old days," talking until they're exhausted. Republicans disagree.

Hard or easy, piracy lies at the very heart of the filibuster.

Filibuster derives from flibustier, the 17th century French word for "pirate." A 1684 memoir by buccaneer John Oexmelin popularized the word in America.

By the 1850s—when Manifest Destiny was on everyone's mind—militia leaders like William Walker were called filibusters. (If there's something strange in your neighborhood who you gonna call?) To filibuster meant to wage a private war; a filibuster was an insurrectionist.

Three decades later, the filibuster was formally introduced in the Senate. Southern obstructionists would use it to "pirate" debates over civil rights bills, spurring ruthless, minority-led "insurrections."

Filibuster is closely related to freebooter, derived from the 16th century Dutch vrijbuiter, meaning "plunderer." Vrijbuit meant "free booty." Booty derived from the 14th century French butin, meaning "plunder taken from an enemy in war." And boot derived from the 11th century German busse, meaning "penance."

Today we call pirates "freebooters."

Grass Makes Girls

I did not wonder when I was told that this region was called the England of Pennsylvania.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

After decades living in and around Washington, DC, my wife and I are still getting used to new stomping grounds.

We're both delighted those grounds are within the Brandywine Valley.

It's crazy, but most natives I've met, with the exception of a few Dupont descendants, wonder aloud why anyone with any sense would choose to live in the area on purpose.

Our reply would be complex, but front and center is the wish to live our remaining days as country squires, lolling in pastoral torpor.

Gas is cheap, the hospitals are good, and there are also excellent eateries all around.

But most of all the place is pretty—not in DC's stately, Beaux-Arts way, but in a quiet, Arcadian manner. 

It's like a pleasant parcel of rural England was picked up by a tornado and dropped on the doorstep of Philadelphia.

And, believe it or not, the grass is also greener.

I'm not the first to note that fact.

On September 18, 1862, the physician, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes received a telegram stating that his son, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been shot through the neck the day before at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland.

Holmes immediately left his Boston home by train, heading for Maryland in search of his son, one of Antietam's 23,000 "maimed pilgrims."

Holmes arrived at the battlefield four days later, only to be told his son was nowhere to be found. 

Absent evidence, Holmes guessed his son might be in Philadelphia, resting in the Walnut Street mansion of a friend named Charlie.

Reaching Philadelphia, Holmes indeed found the mansion packed with wounded soldiers, none of whom were his son. 

He decided to go back to Maryland to search all the field hospitals, and asked Charlie to join him.

"I must have a companion in my search, partly to help me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely," Holmes said.

The two men promptly left Philadelphia on a train bound for Harrisburg. It took them through the Brandywine Valley, which Holmes described in detail:

"By and by the glorious valley which stretches along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me.

"The grazing pastures were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this region was called the 'England of Pennsylvania.'

"The people whom we saw were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked round and wholesome.

“'Grass makes girls,' I said to my companion.

Two days later, Holmes found his wounded son, safely aboard a train parked in the Harrisburg railroad station. He took him home to recuperate in Boston.

Atonement

Slavery is the next thing to hell.

— Harriet Tubman

My teachers, the Jesuits, have vowed to raise $100 million to benefit descendants of the slaves they once owned, according to The New York Times.

The pledge represents the largest effort by the Catholic Church to atone for buying, selling and enslaving Blacks, church historians told The Times.

Jesuits in America relied on slave labor for more than three centuries to sustain themselves, and sold slaves to finance the operation of schools, including Georgetown University, the nation’s first Catholic college.

“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. 

“Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.”

The Jesuits have already contributed $15 million toward the $100 million pledge, and have hired professionals fundraisers to bring in the $85 million balance during the next five years.

The money will be disbursed in the form of scholarships, cash payouts to the old and infirm, and grants to organizations devoted to racial reconciliation.

In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the Jesuits believed slaves, though humans, were valuable assets. Buying and selling them was considered moral.

But some Jesuits objected.

Fr. Antonio Viera, for example, argued that anyone who enslaved others "enslaved his own soul," and that anyone who sold slaves "sold his own soul.

"The price for which they are sold is sin," Viera said.

Big Shots

That any considerable degree of protection against influenza was conferred by the vaccine seems unlikely.

— Jordan & Sharp

In November 1918, as the Spanish flu swept through American towns and cities, epidemiologists raced to confirm that the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine—the state of the art at the time—really worked.

Most doctors had their doubts.

Lacking standards for what constituted a valid clinical trial, physicians couldn't say whether the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine did any good.

Most trials in 1918 were ridden with faults, doctors knew. 

Selection bias in both experimental and control groups was common. So were sloppy vaccine mixing, patient observation, and data collection.

Determined to test the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine rigorously, two University of Chicago scientists, E.O. Jordan and W. B. Sharp, took the unprecedented step of injecting the vaccine into more than 5,000 inmates of two Illinois mental hospitals.

Jordan and Sharp chose the hospitals because, relative to outside populations, the inmates had been spared exposure to the Spanish flu, and because none of the inmates had participated in a previous vaccine trial.

Based on their willingness to be jabbed, the hospital inmates—including many young children—were divided into experimental and control groups and given three shots in the course of three weeks. 

Half the shots contained the vaccine; half contained water.

To supplement the trial, Jordan and Sharp also inoculated over 500 residents—all children—at a school for the blind and a school for the deaf, under the same precise conditions.

Trial-participants at the hospitals and schools were then observed for six months, to see how many would come down with the Spanish flu.

Just about all did, prompting Jordan and Sharp to conclude that, despite enthusiastic claims by its proponents, the Pfeiffer bacillus vaccine was a bust.

Without an effective vaccine against the Spanish flu, medical and public health professionals across the US turned to other measures to combat the disease. 

Quarantines, school closures, bans on public gatherings, and mandatory mask-wearing became common in the winter and spring of 1919. 

By Easter, with 675,000 Americans dead, the disease had run its course.

No one knew why.

"Herd immunity" was suggested, although Jordan and Sharp were doubtful.

It was not until 1942 that epidemiologists Thomas Francis and Jonas Salk discovered a vaccine against the Spanish flu. 

They found that by injecting people with a half-dead virus, they could create immunity.

Like Jordan and Sharp, they tested their vaccine on psychiatric patients, inoculating 8,000 inmates at Michigan mental hospitals. 

Unlike Jordan and Sharp's, Francis and Salk's vaccine worked, increasing immunity 85%.

Thank goodness we don't have to wait two decades for an effective Covid-19 vaccine to appear. It's here. 

I received my first dose yesterday.

Too bad big shots don't get it.

Magic Mushrooms

Our parents read us stories like Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and are suddenly saying, "Why are you taking drugs?" Well, hello!

— Grace Slick

Pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins have discovered psilocybin cures depression.

They treated 24 people with a history of depression by giving them two doses of psilocybin, the psychoactive component in magic mushrooms, two weeks apart.

Each treatment lasted five hours, during which the subject laid on a couch wearing eye shades and headphones that played music.

Of the 24 people, 12 were no longer depressed after a month and four showed a 70% reduction in symptoms.

Psychiatrist Alan Davis said “the magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market.”

He added that, since most other treatments for depression take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, the findings "could be a game changer."

UPDATE, MARCH 18, 2021: Oregon announced the formation of a Psilocybin Advisory Board this week, according to The New York Times. The board will oversee the therapeutic use of psychedelic mushrooms in licensed facilities.

Sunday Painters

If people call me a Sunday painter
I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week.

— L. S. Lowry

Thanks to the critics, Winston Churchill and Bob Dylan share the label "Sunday painter."

A label neither deserves.

Lacking degrees from accredited art schools, both took up painting in their late 30s, when they were already celebrities. Both sought a new field that challenged them afresh, because celebrity had failed them. Both were determined to succeed.

If those are shortcomings, tell me where to sign up. 

No one who studies painting in earnest wants to be called a Sunday painter—a hobbyist, a dabbler, a dilettante, a wanna-be. 

Even if useful, in a world of ready critics and trolls the label can lacerate the very thickest of skins.

Fortunately, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-blooming painters I've encountered aren't put off by critics and labels. 

And, like Churchill and Dylan, the late-bloomers I've met have these things in common: they're self-confident, having already flourished in another career; they so love what they're doing, they can't be deterred; and they're vigilantly self-critical.

These late-bloomers also share what developmental psychologist Carol Dweck calls the "growth mindset," the belief that competence in any endeavor increases with effort and repetition.

There are Sunday painters, to be sure; unabashed optimists who are blind to their faults, deaf to advice, blissfully ignorant and content with gaucheness.

They're in it for fun, not to sweat over details.

And, more often than not, they'll move on once another "bright and shiny object" crosses the path.

The rest will keep trying and failing and trying and failing... until one day they don't.

Subversives

I don't know what they have to say;
It makes no difference anyway;
Whatever it is, I'm against it.

— Groucho Marx

"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous," historian Henry Steele Commager observed. "They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."

But all subversives aren't alike.  

Some enrage; others merely entertain.

Karl Marx did the former; Groucho Marx, the latter.

Challenging the status quo—as Karl did—rattles its guardians to no end; saying something delightfully pointless—as Groucho did—does, too.

It's mostly a matter of degree.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, when subversion could get you imprisoned or hanged, rich Europeans clandestinely collected the subversive writings of hacks, including snarky religious tracts, satires of court life, erotic books and pamphlets, and manuals of the occult. 

Living under an authoritarian church and state, the European elites thought that collecting the writings of witty upstarts was chic—a titliating form of entertainment; an urbane, but harmless, hobby. 

Then along came the sincerely subversive Condorcet to inflame the French Revolution and put a damper on the elites' collecting.

The 19th century saw the comparably cantankerous Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzshe attack church and state from their wholly new and explosive vantage points. These philosophers produced subversive ideas that shook society in the 20th century, and today inform the "woke" movement. 

Guardians of the status quo were not amused—and still aren't.

But, whether critics or clowns, subversives contribute to our wellbeing by making our efforts to conform to authority bearable, says political scientist John Christian Larsen.

Subversives act as steam valves to reduce pressure on our psyches.

"Letting off steam might be more important in social life than we’ve recognized," Larsen says. 

"Suppressing what we really think is widely understood to be bad for our emotional health. People who have had to hide their thoughts in order to appear as conformists to the prevailing orthodoxies have often developed deep psychological problems, which in turn can lead to ‘explosions’. 

"Meanwhile, if people can express themselves, even only clandestinely, they might be relieved of this pressure."

Reading and Survival

The man who can read and remember and ponder the big realities is a man keyed to survival of the species.

— John D. MacDonald

Worse than threatening democracy, illiterates threaten our species.

A fictional character aboard a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale concluded that 34 years ago.

In 1985, the National Endowment for the Arts asked the prolific paperback mystery writer John D. MacDonald ("John D" to his millions of fans) to contribute an essay promoting literacy.

John D described the 30-page result, Reading for Survival, as a "bad-tempered mouse of 7,200 words" that portrayed "the terrible isolation of the non-reader, his life without meaning because he cannot comprehend the world in which he lives."

The essay depicts a deskside conversation between John D's two best-known fictional characters, the freelance crimefighter Travis McGee and his brainy sidekick Ludweg Meyer.

Meyer does most of the talking. He theorizes that the human brain evolved into a warehouse of memories, because memories allowed prehistoric man to cope with the environment.

McGee responds, “Man learned and remembered everything he had to know about survival in his world. Then he invented so many tricks and tools, he had to invent writing. More stuff got written down than any man could possibly remember. Or use. Books are artificial memory. And it’s there when you want it. But for just surviving, you don’t need the books. Not any more.”

Meyer counters, no; books are essential. 

"The world is huge and monstrously complicated," he tells McGee. "Like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we—as a species rather than an individual—are uniformed, or careless, or indifferent to the facts, then survival as a species is in serious doubt.”

McGee doubts anyone could possibly comprehend today's complex environment.

"How do we relate to reality?" Meyer replies. "How do we begin to comprehend it? By using that same marvelous brain our ancestor used. By the exercise of memory. How do we take stock of these memories? By reading, Travis. Reading!"

Non-readers, Meyer continues, threaten the whole human species' survival. They're flat-footed and incompetent and, worse, give birth to more non-readers, who "become a new generation of illiterates, of victims." 

Non-readers' ignorance creates immanent risks, too, Meyer adds, because it makes them gullible. "Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept."

"And you have a cure for all this, of course," McGee teases.

Meyer's only solution (true to form) is to drink away their sorrows. "Let us trudge back toward home, and stop at the bar at the Seaview for something tall and cold, with rum in it," he says.

Flash forward three decades and our need to drink rum is only stronger.

The Pew Research Center says the population of non-readers in America is growing. Right now, one in four Americans doesn't read a single book—or even a part of a book— annually. That's up from one in five 10 years ago. No surprise, most of these non-readers are poorly educated and broke.

But not all. 

A lot of educated and well-off Americans have become non-readers, too, says Adam Garfinkle in National Affairs. Thanks to their "always on" digital devices, they are unable to read analytically. They have, for all purposes, given up "deep reading."

"Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural," Garfinkle says.

"If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital 'life,' and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently 'zoned out' person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle."

John D. was right—more than he dreamed. Our nation of one-time readers is going full zombie.

As a species, we may be doomed.

Poison

Fox News' latest conservaturd: the decision by the estate of Dr. Seuss to stop printing six of the author's books represents "cancel culture at silliest."

"A whole bunch of childhood legends are suddenly being put on cultural trial," Fox commentator Howard Kurtz says. 

"Past generations produced artists and politicians who upheld ideas that are utterly unacceptable today. But we have more important things to do than constantly trying to whitewash every book and show produced by our flawed past."

I'm happy to chide the champions of witless wokeness. But Kurtz and his network—as always—are dead wrong.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises made its decision not because it wants to "cancel" its sugar daddy (why would it?) but because, as a spokesperson said, the six discontinued books "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

But, racist zealots that they are, Kurtz and his network refuse to admit kids are influenced by books—and that some of those books are poison.

As caring parents, we keep poisons out of kids' reach for good reason. And poisonous books, too.

Consider, for example, The Poison Mushroom, a children's picture-book published by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. 

Used in German classrooms between 1938 and 1945, The Poison Mushroom enjoyed a vast, captive audience until the Nazi's defeat and the Allies' "denazification" initiative.

The book explains how, just as it's hard to tell a poisonous from an edible mushroom, it's hard to tell a Jew from a Gentile. 

The Poison Mushroom teaches kids to identify Jews through their purported actions: they abuse servants; kidnap, molest and murder children; rape pubescent girls; torture animals; cheat naive customers; and worship money and Karl Marx.

During the Nuremburg Trials, one jurist called The Poison Mushroom "obscene."

Given the strong resemblance between Julius Streicher's and QAnon's beliefs, I wouldn't be surprised to see Kurtz and his network next rail against last year's "cancellation" of The Poison Mushroom by Amazon.

Perhaps it's time to cancel Fox News.

Keynes Reigns

The rich, to be blunt, are shitting bricks.

Democrats' American Rescue Plan will jazz the economy by putting $2 trillion into the hands of peasants.

The rich aren't used to such unfair treatment. Pish posh.

What's it mean? 

Reaganomics is dead. Keynes again reigns.

Keynes claimed spending—by households, businesses, and the government—is the driver of the economy. That's spending, not siphoning, accumulating, banking, or hoarding. When households and businesses don't spend, government must.

Prepare for the brainless lackeys of the rich—the GOP—to begin recycling their three foundational cracker-barrel wisdoms:

• The government is a family. Families must not deficit-spend. Just think what would have happened had June spent more than Ward's salary. Wally and the Beaver would have lived their entire adult lives in poverty. (Don't bring up the fact that the Cleavers couldn't print money, set interest rates, or levy taxes.)
  
  
• Government only builds "bridges to nowhere." All government spending is wasteful. (Don't you dare mention the national highway system, space exploration, or the Internet. They were fake news!)
  
  
• Peasants are your moral inferiors. The rich shoulder the weight of the whole world, while peasants just loot from them. Handouts will only incent the latter to laze all day, sipping wine, texting, and birthing more brown babies. (Don't remind us the Kardashians do those things, too.)

Don't listen to the GOP's stale and quite stupid malarkey. 

Celebrate, instead, the triumphant return from exile of John Maynard Keynes.

On Junk

Buy buy, says the sign in the shop window.
Why why, says the junk in the yard.

— Paul McCartney

In the 14th century, the English word junk meant "old rope." British boat builders repurposed junk as caulk, threading it throughout hulls to ensure they didn't leak. The word was borrowed from the Latin iuncus, meaning "reed."

The meaning of junk was extended over the next three centuries to include any "nautical refuse;" and, by the 19th century, to include any "refuse you can reuse." Trash—an Old Norse word meaning "deadfall"—was worthless, junk was not.

Junker, meaning a "beat-up car," is an Americanism that came into use in the 20th century. I once asked my late father-in-law, a native Mississippian, why Southerners always kept junkers in their front yards. He patiently explained that, in the South, when cars ceased to work, they automatically became storage lockers for spare parts.

Up North, where I grew up, we were less practical: we hauled junkers to the junkyard. And we called them not junkers, but jalopies. Jalopy is another 20th century Americanism. In the 1920s, longshoremen in New Orleans called the abandoned cars they shipped to the junkyards of Jalapa, Mexico, jalopies. The name stuck.

I now live in the North again, in a pretty subdivision with an HOA. The HOA prohibits jalopies; indeed, it prohibits many things, and homeowners can only change their yards and houses with the express permission of an Architectural Control Committee.

I'm not currently a member of the committee, but I would love to be. Were I a member, I would print business cards bearing the title "Commissioner of Good Taste." That's a job I've wanted for as long as I can remember.

Italians have Commissioners of Good Taste. They work for regional governments and ensure local builders and residents don't junk up the piazzas and side-streets of their picturesque, ancient towns. 

If Italy can have Commissioners of Good Taste, why can't my HOA? I'd make it my mission to apply the brakes to what Edith Wharton called the "general decline of taste," and would use the power of my office to arrest shoddiness in all its manifestations—beginning with junk journalism.

Today I encountered this dreck in the morning news: "Governments in several countries used the pandemic to consolidate control, squashing opposition press or social media."

The journalist should know you squash a bug, but you quash an opponent. Squash means "to flatten;" quash, "to suppress."