Ratlines

Ratlines: a series of rope steps by which men aloft reach the yards.

— The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea

In the old navy, ratlines (pronounced "rattlin's") referred to rope ladders attached to the masts. When a sailing ship began to sink, those ladders would offer the only safety to sailors who'd missed the lifeboats, so ratlines came to mean a "means of escape.”

In today's military, ratlines refer to an enemy's means of escape—particularly clandestine escape. Ratlines in this sense were used by combatants during the Iraq War, the Yemeni Civil War, the Somali Civil War and the War in Afghanistan.

But by far the most infamous ratlines were those used by members of the SS at the close of World War II.

The SS called their ratlines Klosterrouten ("cloister routes"), because sympathetic Catholic clergy ran them. They allowed SS to escape the Fatherland through Italy, Spain and Switzerland, then sail under fake names to safe havens in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The Nazi ratlines were organized as early as 1943 by a Croatian priest and an Austrian bishop, with the blessing of Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, and the acquiescent blessing of Pope Pius XII. Without voicing despair, these men foresaw Germany's fall and hoped to set up Nazi governments in exile.

The ratlines helped as many as 300 SS escape, including Josef Mengele ("the angel of death"), Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon") and Adolf Eichmann ("the architect of the Holocaust"). Ironically, forged papers allowed many SS to pass themselves off as Holocaust survivors. 

Hans-Ulrich Rudel (who became a top advisor to Argentine President Juan Perón) openly praised the Catholic church for operating the ratlines in a speech in 1970. 

"One may view Catholicism as one wishes," he said, "but what the church, especially certain towering personalities within the church, undertook in the years after the war to save the best of our nation must never be forgotten. 

"With its immense resources, the church helped many of us go overseas in quiet and secrecy, thus counteracting the demented victors' mad craving for revenge and retribution."

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of retribution, the world's only Nazi-hunter, Brooklyn-born Efraim Zuroff, is still on the trail today, even though living Nazis are few. In four decades of detective work, he has tracked down over 3,000 of them in 20 countries. "The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers," he told The Guardian this month.

God's Jury

When did you stop beating your wife?

— Unknown

True to the tenets of capitalism, anti-racism consultants are cashing in.

One New York-based consultancy, Pollyanna, charges $1,750 per hour to curriculum-wash, starting the process with a 360-degree review of a school’s faculty.

You know something's wrong when the $1,750-an-hour consultants turn into inquisitors.

During the 360, the Pollyanna's consultants ask faculty, for instance, to answer the question, "Do we talk about diversity and equity and inclusion too much at our school?"

This is an example of the infamous loaded question.

The loaded question seeks to change a person's mind by stealth. To answer it, the person must accept what the questioner merely presumes.

The favorite interrogation device of detectives, journalists, salespeople, extremists and witch hunters, the loaded question contains the seeds of the answerer's downfall:

"So where did you hide the gun?"

"Why are you content to bow to Iran?"

"Do you want a one- or two-year contract?"

"Why do you endorse the murder of unborn babies?"

"Why didn't you give up heresy when you knew it was sinful?"

Interrogators during the Inquisition were aware how unfair the loaded question was, but that didn't stop its use. They even encouraged widespread use of the loaded question in the handbook Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches).

According to philosophers, the loaded question (plurium interrogationum) is a trick question, a fallacy always to be avoided. 

It's a trick because the loaded question contains one or more question-begging presuppositions; for example, "So have you stopped grooming pretty eighth grade girls?" You can't answer the question without either lying or accepting statements you would deny.

The loaded question also lets the interrogator slip claims into his rhetoric without needing to prove them, or acknowledge their falsehood when unproven; for example, "Why does the media hate all conservatives?"

Like a loaded gun, a loaded question is a dangerous thing. 

In the hands of inquisitors, it's terrifying.

Chump Change

Only stupid people don't change their minds.

— Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Kathleen Kingsbury, Opinion editor of The New York Times, announced this week she is canceling the term "Op-Ed."

"The first Op-Ed page in The New York Times greeted the world on Sept. 21, 1970," she writes. "It was so named because it appeared opposite the editorial page."

For 50 years, the Op-Ed has let writers "from outside the walls of The Times" speak their minds, she explains. Since its inception, tens of thousands of Op-Eds have run in The Times, and this odd-sounding name for an outsider's contribution has grown storied.

"But it’s time to change the name," Kingsbury writes. "It is a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design. So now, at age 50, the designation will be retired."

So what will "Op-Eds" be called?

“Guest Essays."

OMG. At the risk of seeming stupid, what the hell is Kingsbury thinking?

Does "Op-Ed" trigger her gerontophobia? And what has she got against anachronisms, anyway? We use them all the time. 

Inbox. Dashboard. Brand. Logo. Icon. Cliché. Blueprint. Horsepower. Icebox. Gaslight. Rewind. Typecast. Ditto. Above board. Hot off the press. Cut and paste. Pull out all the stops. Glove compartment. Kodak moment. Lock, stock and barrel.

Sure, anachronisms are fossils, but they satisfy us perfectly well. When we say, "What a doozy," do we worry no one drives a Duesenberg any more? We do not. And if you do worry, maybe you should start calling the morning "paper" the morning "electron mass," and the "front page" the "upper screen."

How ironic that Kingsbury has chosen to cancel "Op-Ed" right now because, in her words, "the geography of the public square is being contested" (italics mine). Watch out, Times readers! The rabble is gathering to cancel anachronisms!

Worse yet, what's up with "Guest Essay?" Could you possibly ask for a name more jejune, juvenile and barren? It sounds like something you'd leave the manager at a Marriott when checking out.

Kingsbury claims she's cancelling "Op-Ed" because it's "clubby newspaper jargon."

"In an era of distrust in the media, I believe institutions better serve their audiences with direct, clear language. We don’t like jargon in our articles; we don’t want it above them, either."

But would you call these "Guest Essays?"

"I asked Mandela if, when he was walking away from confinement for the last time, he felt hatred. He said, "I did, but I knew that if I continued to hate them as I drove away from the gate, they would still have me.' Our world is awash in 'us' versus 'them' thinking. Nelson Mandela’s life remains a rebuke to that kind of thinking."

— Bill Clinton, from a 2018 Op-Ed in News24

"The Mole in the Oval image is not as crazy a theory as it was a year or two ago. The president clearly has something to hide. While Trump is not an 'agent' of the Russian Federation, it seems at this point beyond argument that the president personally fears Russian President Vladimir Putin for reasons that can only suggest the existence of compromising information."

— Tom Nichols, from a 2019 Op-Ed in USA Today

"Americans are not good at talking about death. But we need to be prepared for when, not if, illness will strike. The coronavirus is accelerating this need. Our collective silence about death, suffering and mortality places a tremendous burden on the people we love. We should not be discussing our loved one’s wishes for the first time when they are in an ICU bed, voiceless and pinned in place by machines and tubes."

— Sunita Puri, from a 2020 Op-Ed in The New York Times

"Despite what my Republican colleagues may claim, the reality is that when you take into account federal income taxes, payroll taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes and property taxes, we have an extremely unfair tax system that allows billionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than many workers. That must change. We need a progressive tax system based on the ability to pay, not a regressive tax system that rewards the wealthy and the well-connected."

— Bernie Sanders, from a 2021 Op-Ed in CNN Business

In my book, these aren't "Guest Essays." They're impassioned critiques, heartfelt lines in the sand. They'd blow any Marriot manager's mind—as they're meant to blow ours.

They're Op-Eds.

To her credit, I suppose, Kingsbury believes in her "Guest Essay" label sincerely, because she's focus-grouped it. "Readers immediately grasped this term during research sessions and intuitively understood what it said about the relationship between the writer and The Times," she writes.

I'd only remind her New Coke focus-group tested well, too, and it caused Coke-aggedon.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity," Einstein said. "And I'm not sure about the former."

Stay tuned (another anachronism) for Op-Edggedon.

The Good Old Days

To realize how fumbled the current vaccine rollout is, we can look back to 1947, when a single case of smallpox in New York City led to the vaccination of six million people in less than a month.

— Marc Siegel

As of today, Americans have received 231 million jabs. We're bungling our way through the pandemic.

When blowhards like Marc Siegel insist America can't manage its way out of a paper bag—that we can't do anything like we did in "the good old days"—my blood pressure surges.

Does he think we were always "exceptional" during past crises? That our execution was always flawless?

We weren't. It wasn't. 

Consider only one crisis.

During World War II, over 52,000 Americans died in aerial combat; another 26,000 died in training accidents. 

Training accidents. These dead never saw a German or Japanese target.

It's no surprise. 

We hired companies like GM and Packard—which had never produced a single airplane—to rush-ship planes by the tens of thousands, planes that were rife with design flaws; and then asked men who'd never been in an airplane to fly them. 

With the massive and hurried increase in aircraft production came a commensurate increase in crashes. America lost 23,000 planes in aerial combat; 42,000 in training accidents.

Anxious airmen in training gave the clunky B-24—the most-produced of American bombers—the dreary nickname the “flying coffin.”

So much for exceptional. 

So much for flawless.

We've always bungled through.

And will again.

Travesty

This disease controls my life.

— Dietrich Hectors

As depicted in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new documentary "Hemingway," a wartime concussion—one of five he suffered in his time—left the writer with a little-discussed condition: tinnitus. 

Even the documentary fails to discuss it. Hemingway's chronic tinnitus gets one mention in six hours of narration.

Debilitating tinnitus—not just “ringing in the ears,” but buzzing, hissing, whistling, swooshing, and clicking in the ears—afflicts 20 million Americans, according to the CDC.

Who pays attention? 

Almost no one.

But tinnitus, "the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present," drives millions of Americans to despair and leads some sufferers to suicide, even though medical researchers deny a causal connection.

Last month, Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor killed himself after Covid-19 left him with tinnitus. 

In recent years, tinnitus has led many other distinguished people to end their own lives, including rock musician Craig Gill, management consultant Robert McIndoe, graphic designer Rick Tharp, and industrial engineer Dietrich Hectors (who left a heart-wrenching "farewell letter" on Facebook).

I wouldn't suggest Hemingway's 1961 suicide stemmed from his chronic tinnitus. 

The writer suffered from a mountain of other maladies, including traumatic brain injury, hemochromatosis, and alcoholism. Medically speaking, he was an unmitigated mess. 

But tinnitus could only have worsened his torment.

According to the American Tinnitus Association, when you consider lost earnings, lost productivity, and medical outlays, tinnitus costs the nation $26 billion a year. Yet tinnitus goes unrecognized by Medicare and Medicaid, and federal funds for basic research are paltry—stifling innovation and the chance of a cure.

Last year, the feds spent only $400 million on hearing-related research. In contrast, it just spent $500 million on Covid-19 relief in St. Louis—alone.

How so atrocious an affliction can remain ignored is a travesty.

NOTE: If you suffer chronic "ringing in the ears," contact the American Tinnitus Association for help.

Adultifying

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

— Thomas Szasz

The mayor of Columbus, Ohio, is under assault for calling Ma’Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old fatally shot by police this week, a "young woman."

The mayor is guilty of “adultification bias,” a form of discrimination against Black girls.

Adultifying Black girls makes them out to be "more adult-like than their White peers," according to The Washington Post.

“We as a society view Black girls as grown women who aren’t capable of being talked to and respected and protected as children,” Ijeoma Opara, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, told The Post.

The professor failed to mention that Bryant had been stabbing people with a knife when she was shot.

We learned earlier this month that Brandon Hole, the 19-year-old "FedEx shooter," was obsessed with the fictional Applejack of the TV show “My Little Pony.”

“I hope that I can be with Ap­ple­jack in the af­ter­life, my life has no mean­ing with­out her,” Hole wrote on Facebook less than an hour before he killed eight people and himself.

I won't make the mistake of calling Hole a "young man," because he wasn't. He was a baby who wielded rifles.

Parents and teachers at large are doing a crappy job. 

They're infantilizing kids and permitting tantrums in public—some of which turn fatal.

When I was 19, I didn't obsess over a fictional pony. I obsessed over my girlfriend, the atrocity of the Vietnam War, where I'd earn enough money for rent, and whether I should major in psychology or something else.

I was far from mature; but my world was an adult's, not an infant's, world.

The 14th-century word adult comes from the Latin adultus, meaning "grown, ripe, mature."

We need young men and women to quit acting like two-year-olds—particularly when they're armed.

It's time for more adultifying, not less.

Saved by the Cell

Publicity is the very soul of justice.

— Jeremy Bentham

Journalists have voiced near-universal praise for Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed the murder of George Floyd with her cell. 

Her footage all but convicted Floyd's killer.

She deserves our praise. 

Her cell made the law work.

Eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought the law's purpose is "to govern;" that is, to keep us safe. 

But to govern, the law must be enforced—and enforcement is everyone's responsibility. 

The law, he said, "governs through the governed."

Because it depends on the governed, the law is highly fallible—because we are. The corrective, Bentham said, is publicity. 

Publicity, he said, "keeps the judges on trial."

"It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security. Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless."

Without publicity, the law is toothless; but with it, the law can prevail, as it did yesterday.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Jon Meacham for inspiring this post.

Kidnapped!

The inventor of the PDF, Chuck Geschke, who died last week at 81, was kidnapped at gunpoint from his workplace 30 years ago.

On a Tuesday morning in May 1992, in the parking lot of Adobe's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Mouhannad Albukhari and Jack Sayeh beckoned Geschke to their car. 

The two Syrian terrorists snatched Geschke at gunpoint, blindfolded him with duct tape, and drove him first to a local motel, then to a bungalow "safehouse" sixty miles away.

Over the following four days, Albukhari and Sayeh repeatedly phoned the executive's home demanding $650,000 (the amount Geschke thought his wife could raise).

The FBI told Geschke's family to pay the ransom. So on Friday night, Geschke's daughter put the money in a bag and drove 75 miles to the seaside town of Marina, where she dropped the bag on a dead-end road. Mouhannad Albukhari was hiding in wait just a few feet away, unaware the FBI had set up a dragnet. Nine hours later, after a roundabout helicopter chase, FBI agents nabbed him.

"After a gentlemanly discussion," an agent told the Associated Press, "he agreed to do the right thing and to take us to where Mr. Geschke was being held by Mr. Sayeh."

Geschke was freed and the two kidnappers arrested and convicted for life.

Geschke said at the sentencing, “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that these two individuals planned to murder me."

NOTE: A gripping, moment-by-moment account of Gescke's ordeal can be found in this four-part newspaper series from 2009:

Part 1: A dramatic kidnapping revisited
Part 2: Two days of terror, uncertainty
Part 3: Chuck’s dramatic rescue
Part 4: Aftermath of a kidnapping

Woke Me When It's Over

A sixth grader's father has caused a tempest in uptown Manhattan by mailing an angry letter to the 650 parents whose kids are enrolled in Brearley, an elite private girls school that costs $54,000 a year to attend. 

Recipients of the letter include Chelsea Clinton, Tina Fey, Drew Barrymore and Steve Martin.

"Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley," wrote Andrew Gutman. 

"We no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development."

Gutman went on to say the school "has completely lost its way."

"The administration and trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob," he wrote.

The mob Gutman had in mind: the advocates of woke.

Last week I attended my first woke training course. 

I'm embarrassed to say I almost fell asleep.

The silliest portion of the training, by far, came when the presenter shamed herself for describing things as "crazy," pledging never again to use a word offensive to psychotics. 

Her self-mortification generated a couple dozen red-heart emojis and prompted one participant to pledge never again to describe things as "lame," a word offensive to cripples.

As far as the training went, he took the word right out of my mouth.

Woke's roots lie in French "post-structuralist" philosophy, which claimed that truth and righteousness are the solely property of the marginalized.

Many great philosophers contributed to post-structuralist thought.

But sadly, in the hands of hacks, their contribution to Western thought has devolved from insight to idiocy.

Woke training is inane.

Worse, it's a form of rhetoric philosophers call "moral grandstanding."

"Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion," says philosopher Brandon Warmke. 

"Moral grandstanders have egotistical motives: they may want to signal that they have superhuman insight into a topic, paint themselves as a victim, or show that they care more than others."

Rather than mending society, moral grandstanders' soapboxing is divisive.

"Moral grandstanding contributes to political polarization, increases cynicism, and causes outrage exhaustion," Warmke says.

Moral grandstanders are also "free riders," Warmke claims. 

"They get the benefits of being heard without contributing to any valuable discourse."

Andrew Gutman's letter, although harsh, comes, I believe, as a predictable gut-reaction to moral grandstanding by Brearley.

"I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs," Gutman told The New York Post.

While worried about his daughter's "indoctrination," what actually set Gutman off was the school's insistence he attend woke training, which he called "simplistic and sophomoric" and likened to Mao-like rehabilitation.

Too bad he didn't realize he simply could have napped through the training. 

Please, woke me when it's over.

Beyond the Pale

Both dove-like roved forth beyond the pale.

— John Harington

I'm reading Revelations, the new biography of British painter Francis Bacon. 

The book opens by recounting how Bacon's parents, always the nomads, settled in Ireland in 1900, when the country was "still regarded as a colony," where they rented a manor in one of the horsey counties that surrounded Dublin, a region known as "the Pale."

The Pale—a 600-square-mile area referred to by the British king as his "four obedient shires"—was colonized in the 12th century. To mark his colony, the king drove wooden stakes, called "pales," into the ground. Eventually, the pales were replaced by a deep ditch and a hedgerow, but the name "the Pale" stuck.

If you lived inside the Pale in the 12th century, you lived under the protection of the crown, in a genteel environment safe from the savageries of the Irish. If you ventured beyond the Pale, well, good luck: you'd exited civilization.

Poet John Harington cemented the phrase beyond the pale in a 1657 work entitled The History of Polindor and Flostella. A character in the poem retreats to his manor for "quiet, calm and ease," but with a reckless girlfriend "roved forth beyond the pale," where he and his lover are immediately attacked by thugs.

Beyond the pale soon became synonymous with "outside acceptable behavior."

Two centuries later, Rudyard Kipling published "Beyond the Pale," a short story described by Kingsley Amis as "one of the most terrible in the language."

"Beyond the Pale" describes the forbidden affair between an Englishman and an Indian. Desperate to see his lover one night, the Englishman knocks at her window, only to see her thrust out two stumps where her hands had been. Shocked, the man doesn't notice an invisible assailant, who stabs him with "something sharp" in the groin.

The lovers pay heavily for roving beyond the pale. "A man should keep to his own caste, race and breed," the narrator advises.

While mores differ from those of the past, it's still easy to venture beyond the pale. Crooks, coaches, clerics, celebrities, journalists, CEOs, politicians and police officers do it every hour of every day.

Closer Than Ever

In the threatening situation of the world today, it would not be at all surprising if sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by "visions." 

— Carl Jung

CNN reports that the Pentagon has acknowledged the existence of UFOs, after classified videos of flying saucers were leaked. The generals will report their findings to Congress in June.

Why this announcement isn't the lead of the day mystifies me. Perhaps, thanks to decades of lying, the federal government no longer has credibility.

Steven Spielberg in fact had Watergate in mind when in 1975 he pitched the script for a political thriller he eventually entitled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Much different than the final cut of the film, Spielberg’s first draft followed Claude Lacombe, a Pentagon contractor who blows the whistle on a coverup. Lacombe's employer knows aliens visit Earth, but doesn't want the public to know.

Lacombe was based in part on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the civilian advisor to Project Blue Book who developed the "scale" for alien encounters.

According to Hynek, a "close encounter of the first kind" was a UFO sighting; a "close encounter of the second kind" was the discovery of hard evidence; a "close encounter of the third kind" was contact.

Hynek—who served as Spielberg's technical advisor and enjoyed a cameo in the film—believed UFOs were real. He called them "M&Ms."

"I hold it entirely possible", Hynek said, "that a technology exists which encompasses both the physical and the psychic. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man's. 

"I hypothesize an 'M&M' technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology."

Comics and the Code

Happiness is a stack of comic books.

— Charles M. Schultz

A mint-condition copy of Action Comics #1—the comic-book premiere of Superman—sold for $3.3 million this week, according to Antiques & the Arts Weekly.

Before this week's sale, the 1938 book had changed hands three times, selling for $1.5 million in 2010, $1.8 million in 2017, and $2.1 million in 2018.

The comic survived in pristine shape because it had been tucked inside a film-fan magazine for five decades. A collector bought the magazine at an auction in 1980, unaware of the hidden gem inside.

"This book launched the superhero genre," auctioneer Vincent Zurzolo told Antiques & the Arts Weekly. "There’s a reason collectors and fans will always be obsessed with it."

If you missed this week's auction, or can't spare $3.3 million for a comic book, I suggest you at least spend $16 and buy a copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

That extraordinary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—inspired by the story of Superman’s creators—recounts the big-city adventures of two young oddballs who arrive in New York on the eve of World War II, hoping to cash in on the latest American craze: the superhero. You'll learn more about the origins of comic-book publishing than you'd care to know, but will find Chabon's tale spellbinding.

While I never had $3, much less $3 million, to spend as a kid, I remember buying comic books religiously. They cost only 12 cents and—given the gripping stories and lavish, cover-to-cover illustrations—were well worth the price. Find eight empty soda-pop bottles, redeem them for the three-cent deposits, and you could go home with two!

Always a festive day, a new batch of titles would show up every other Tuesday at the neighborhood confectionery. My friends and I would rush to the store after school, to make sure we didn't miss out on our favorites. 

Mine were without doubt The Fantastic Four; Detective Comics (featuring that ethereal night-creature Batman); Strange Tales (featuring Dr. Strange); Tales to Astonish (featuring Ant-Man and The Incredible Hulk); Classics Illustrated (retellings of great books like Kidnapped, Mysterious Island and The War of the Worlds); Our Army at War (featuring the broody, brawny Sgt. Rock); and the always rip-snorting Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandoes.

Happiness indeed was a stack of comic books. Little did I know the comics I loved were unloved by millions of parents.

Parental displeasure stemmed in large part due to Seduction of the Innocent, a 1954 best-seller by a crusading disciple of Freud, Dr. Fredric Wertham.

Dr. Wertham's book convinced parents that comics—packed as they were with vivid depictions of nonconformity—turned decent, all-American kids into rebels and juvenile delinquents. 

Dr. Wertham's call for federal oversight of the comic-book industry gave rise to Congressional hearings and to the Comics Code Authority, an effort by publishers to censor themselves.

The authority was superheroes' Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Publishers would submit their comic books to the authority and, if approved, include its seal on the covers. The seal on the cover proved to distributors, retailers, parents and readers that the a comic book had met the authority's ironfisted code.

Among other things, the code prohibited comics from presenting cops, judges, lawyers and government officials "in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."

It also required that "in every instance, good shall triumph over evil;" that "if crime is depicted, it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity;" and that, if the cartoons illustrated violence, none were "lurid, unsavory, or gruesome." 

Depictions of "nudity in any form" and of "sex perversion, abnormalities, and illicit sex relations" were all strictly taboo. So were depictions of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, cannibals, zombies, and women's cleavage.

The Comics Code Authority remained the industry's arbiter until 2001, when the censors made the mistake of rejecting an issue of Marvel Comics' X-Force. After the rejection, Marvel quit submitting comics for approval, and other publishers soon followed suit.

Despite efforts to police itself through the Comics Code Authority, the mid-century comic-book industry was too inherently anarchic to save the children. 

In 2003, cultural critic Edward Said wrote, “I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result. Everything about the enticing book of colored pictures, but especially its untidy, sprawling format, the colorful riotous extravagance of its pictures, the unrestrained passage between what the characters thought and said, the exotic creatures and adventures reported and depicted: all this made up for a hugely wonderful thrill, entirely unlike anything I had hitherto known or experienced."    

No Vaccine for Vanity

Vanity costs money and is a long way leading nowhere.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Planners of scientific and medical meetings are captivated by yet another band-aid fix for flagging attendance: vaccine passports.

Vaccine passports will bring back the crowds, they insist.

But one such planner, Ben Hainsworth, has called vaccine passports a "red herring." Planners should instead be focused on their value proposition. 

“If we have vaccine passports, but we are still thinking about events in the same way we did in 2019, the recovery will be a big flop," Hainsworth says. "We need to think about the unique value of face-to-face and start re-pitching and redesigning our meetings."

It's no surprise scientific and medical meeting planners love vaccine passports. For daydreamers like them, vaccine passports are the panacea of the month. Naysayers like Hainsworth are simply that—naysayers.

But is he? I think not. When you consider their elements, today's scientific and medical meetings offer attendees little of real value: they draw no leading practitioners, provide no unpublished research, and appeal to practically no one but job-hunters. Why would they recover after the pandemic?

I saw these gatherings lose their value long ago, while working for scientific and medical meeting planners back in the '90s. 

A smug bunch, the planners I worked for clung vainly to the status quo, repeating tired formulas and delegating the crucial work of program-design to volunteers. Content to live in the "fairyland" of federally subsidized science and medicine, they denied that meeting attendance was declining—geometrically—and that my research was showing first-world practitioners found their events irrelevant.

Two real-world movements drove the decline and irrelevancy: open science and managed care. But these vain planners would have none of it. They bristled when presented with the fact that their events were subsisting on job-hunters, grad students, and a few third-world practitioners, while pointing with pride to their swelling exhibit halls, a boon to hospitals in search of equipment. But there were hidden economic pressures on equipment-makers, too, thanks both to managed care and the inherently unaccountable nature of tradeshow exhibiting.

Flash forward to 2021 and the chickens have come home to roost. The pandemic has already up-ended meeting planners' reality and experts are predicting that by 2025 the world will be a world of "tele-everything." Practitioners, yearning for safety and convenience, will work from their homes and private offices, travel less frequently, and make few forays into public spaces. Live scientific and medical meetings may be nothing more than a pale memory.

Too bad there's no vaccine for vanity.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Warwick Davies, principal of The Event Mechanic! for alerting me to Ben Hainsworth's remarks.

Many Mickles Make a Muckle

Nothing in nature is more true—
"many mickles make a muckle."

— George Washington

In a post last May—when the lockdown was novel—I asked: What possible good can come from Covid-19?

My answer asserted that the virus was an "ugly duckling" from which would emerge a new normal "prettier than we ever imagined." As proof, I predicted:

• The environment would refresh itself
• The planet's animals would reassert themselves
• Parents would rediscover their children—and vice versa
• Neighbors would reach out to neighbors
• People would rediscover art, architecture, books, and bikes
• Family members would sleep longer and eat better
• Citizens would recognize government wasn't the enemy

Since my post in May, an additional 470 thousand Americans have died of Covid-19; and 8 million have become poor. 

But are the rest of us in a better spot? Is the new normal prettier than imagined?

Yes, I believe it is, and in a major way; because things—little things—add up.

Many mickles make a muckle.

Muckle comes from mickle, Old English for a "big deal." 

In Beowulf's time, Brits would say Grendel was a mickle; call the Justinian Plague  a mickle; or name a big village Mickle-something, as we would call New York "The Big Apple" or New Orleans "The Big Easy."

The thriftier Brits even had a proverb: "Many a pickle makes a mickle," by which they meant, "expenses add up quickly." 

The Scots, speaking of thrift, pronounced mickle as muckle. We get our word much from muckle.

George Washington, prone to mangling English, in a 1793 letter to his manager at Mount Vernon coined the proverb "Many mickles make a muckle."

The thrift-minded Washington, intending to scold the man for piling up expenses during his time away from the plantation, meant to write "Many a pickle makes a mickle," but instead wrote "Many mickles make a muckle," failing to remember the two words are synonyms, not antonyms.

Washington's confusion aside, things do add up, even little things. Especially when you're in a pickle, as we are today.

But things aren't all bad. Covid-19 has in fact ushered changes long overdue:

• Virology and telemedicine have blossomed
• E-commerce and white-collar productivity are booming
• Science and distance learning are no longer gated
• The skies and waterways are healing themselves
• And—an unmitigated blessing—Donald Trump is history

Many a pickle makes a mickle.

Pickle by the way denotes a "wee bit." A 17th century Scottish word, pickle referred to the grain on the top of a barley stalk.

Scotsmen also pronounced pickle as puckle, a word they still use to mean "bit."

Where we'd say "I want a bit of ketchup with my fries," a Scotsman might say "I want a puckle of ketchup with my fries."

Thoughts and Prayers

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.

— Ernest Hemingway

Boulder, Atlanta, Springfield, Midland, Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, Virginia Beach, Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh, Annapolis.

Alongside these place names, the abstract words thoughts and prayers are indeed obscene (obscene, adjective, from the Latin ob ("in front of") + caenum ("filth")).

We're embarrassed to hear them any longer. As we should be.

Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice. We had heard them and had read them now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages."

Let's retire thoughts and prayers. Permanently. 

We have heard them now for a long time and can no longer stand to hear them. 

They're words that have become obscene.

Voter Suppression Has My Vote

Let the rabble amuse itself by voting.

― Aldous Huxley

Right-wing columnist Kevin Williamson grabbed headlines this week by recommending "categorical" voter suppression.

"The republic would be better served by having fewer—but better—voters," he wrote.

We believe it's a mainstay, but voting is at best a "sedative," Williamson argues.

"It soothes people with the illusion that they have more control over their lives and their public affairs than they actually do," he writes.

Denying the vote to progressives and populists would get us out of the mess we're in, Williams argues. He would begin reform by raising the voting age to 30.

I'm all for categorical voter disenfranchisement, too. In fact, with Socrates, I long for a republic in which "guardians"—not mudsills—appoint philosophers to rule the state.

So to whom would I deny voting rights? Here's my Top 10 list:

1. Inattentive parents
2. Conspiracy theorists
3. Overachievers
4. Wyoming residents
5. People who reflexively "reply all"
6. Brand ambassadors
7. Ayn Rand fans
8. Incompetent Zoom users
9. Road hogs
10. Suze Orman

How about you? 

Does voter suppression have your vote?

Short People

They got little hands and little eyes

And they walk around telling great big lies

— Randy Newman

"Cancel culture" isn't new.

It's been around since Dicso.

In 1977, singer-songwriter Randy Newman was cancelled for "Short People," a novelty tune that rose to Number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and became a gold record.

"Short People" so enraged the thought police, it was banned from the radio in major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston. 

A Maryland legislator introduced a bill prohibiting the song's airplay statewide.

"'Short People' has run into a wave of protest almost unique in the history of popular music," The Washington Post wrote at the time. 

The composer even received death threats. 

"Newman will be lucky if he reaches April Fool's Day without rope burns around his neck," The Post wrote.

The song, of course, was a tongue-in-cheek condemnation of bigotry; but morons took Newman's satire literally.

"His real mistake was to give this particular poem a catchy melody and a bright, upbeat arrangement that won it a lot of exposure on radio stations that specialize in brainlessness and appeal to brainless people," The Post wrote. 

"There, amid the endless jangle of disco tunes, the song stood out like a giraffe at a convention of frogs."

"They got grubby little fingers and dirty little minds," Newman's final stanza concluded. 

"They're gonna get you every time."