Toxic Masculinity

I have a bad feeling about this.

— Han Solo

"Toxic masculinity."

I overhear this phrase in coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants more than any other single phrase.

I don't know why it's on the top of women's minds right now—at least the minds of the women who frequent coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants—but it definitely is.

I don't know what's happening to women; but—whatever it is—I have a bad feeling about this.

Perhaps you can blame their wrath on Andrew Cuomo, Jeffery Epstein, or Texas's Republicans.

But, whatever the cause, I think men are soon up for a collective asswhuppin' (defined by Urban Dictionary as an "intense physical retribution involving heavy bruising, put upon a person in need of a life-lesson in civility, politeness, and manners"). 

The phrase "toxic masculinity" was coined 36 years ago by farmer and writer Shepherd Bliss. He thought it described the authoritarian streak displayed by his absent, career-military father.

Over the decades since, however, the phrase has come to denote practically all the attitudes and actions of men, who by dint of gender are not only vulgar and sloppy, but aggressive, competitive, homophobic, sexist, and misogynistic.

That's seems awfully harsh; but I'm not most men's target.

Novelist Norman Mailer, fairly macho himself, believed that contemporary American males were toxic because they were without honor.

"Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain," he wrote in 1962. "And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. 

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."

I think Mailer was onto something.

Somewhere on the journey to manhood, American men forgot about honor.

Come on Sunday without Fail

Since on this ever happy day, all nature's full of love and play,
yet harmless still if my design, 'tis but to be your Valentine.

— World's Oldest Printed Valentine Card

While there's a Valentine's letter from 1477, the world's oldest Valentine card dates from 1790, a time when literate lovers of every social class secretly exchanged soupy notes.

The card features the word Love and a hand-drawn dove and hearts on the front, and inside a handwritten poem that begins, "Life they say is but a span, let's be happy while we can." 

The sender probably cribbed the poem, as in the 18th century you could buy books full of suggested verses for lovers.

The world's oldest printed Valentine's card, dating from 1797, features hand-tinted cupids on the outside, surrounded by the verse quoted above.

The card was sent by a certain Miss Mossday to Mr. Brown of Dover Place, Kent Road, London. 

Inside she wrote, "As I have repeatedly requested you to come, I think you must have some reason for not complying with my request. But as I have something particular to say to you, I could wish you make it all agreeable to come on Sunday without fail."

Clearly, she didn't copy that from a book.

Two centuries later, we still send our squeezes cards on Valentine's Day. 

Most of us rely on Hallmark to express our feelings.

But if you're feeling lovey-dovey this Valentine's Day, you might consider buying a blank card and using Poem Generator to pen a love poem.

I tried it, and here are the results:

For My Lovely Rose

A Love Poem by Bob

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Ladies are lovely,
And so are you.

Orchids are white,
Ghost ones are rare,
My speech is free,
And so is your hair.

Magnolia grows,
With buds like eggs,
Hands are shapely,
And so are your legs.

Sunflowers reach,
Up to the skies,
Your grin is foxy,
And so are your eyes.

Foxgloves in hedges,
Surround the farms,
My air is warm,
And so are your arms.

Daisies are pretty,
Daffies have style,
A baby is cute,
And so is your smile.

Torpedoed

Sometimes a little subterfuge is in order.

— Justina Ireland

I despise subterfuge. Despise it.

And I despise the developers who so often use it.

Developers in Alexandria, Virginia, are about to torpedo a favorite old haunt of mine, the Torpedo Factory, evicting the artists who've occupied it for 40 years.

In their relentless pursuit of profits, the developers will replace the artists' studios with Burger Kings, Cinnabons, and Gap Stores—even though these sorts of dumps are already within five minutes' walking distance.

Reading the naïfs on the city council, the developers used the cause of the month, diversity, as a ruse. 

The Torpedo Factory, they claim, isn't diverse: the artists are all White.

They've hung a big banner on the grounds demanding "A Torpedo Factory for All" and have promised to engineer diversity into their newly commercialized Torpedo Factory.

Their chicanery sickens me. And their hypocrisy.  

The developers are all White, as well. Lilly White.

The City of Alexandria, which owns the building, wants to earn a profit from it, too—even if that means evicting the artists.

The developer's promise of future profits for the city is yet another subterfuge.

A local waterfront preservationist told ALXnow, "Looking at the Torpedo Factory as a negotiable source of revenue that we would farm out to some developer who would make the future profits is a grave mistake."

The art community isn't happy with the plan, either.

"We’re being asked to step aside and sacrifice our livelihood and this institution in the name of development," one artist told The Washington Post.

NOTE: For accuracy's sake, I'll acknowledge there's in fact one Black on the developer's 48-person senior staff. Odd, for a firm using diversity in its self-promotion.

Cracked

The older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am.

— Roxane Gay

What failing do flat-earthers, antivaxxers and "big lie" believers share in common?

They all lack what psychologists call intellectual humility, the ability to admit you're fallible.

Just this week, I have heard a flat-earther insist Earth couldn't be round, else we'd see it curve when we climbed a hill; an antivaxxer insist Covid-19 can't be defeated, because it's invisible; and a "big lie" believer insist big data indisputably prove Trump won.

Duh.

While it's tempting to dismiss these kooks as childish, uniformed, or just stupid, psychologists would have us look deeper.

People who lack intellectual humility, psychologists have discovered through seven decades of research, usually also have a screw or two loose.

People who lack intellectual humility may also lack the abilities to evaluate evidence, enjoy learning, tolerate ambiguity, brook disagreement, appreciate expertise, or recognize the boundaries between reality and their egos.

In other words, they're cracked.

People with intellectual humility—the majority of us—realize they're fallible, according to the research. 

They spend more time contemplating their beliefs, questioning their assumptions, and seeking out proof than those who lack intellectual humility.

People with intellectual humility in general are curious, inquisitive, tolerant, empathetic, forgiving, and cerebral.

People who lack intellectual humility, on the other hand, are self-absorbed, judgmental, dogmatic, over-confident, arrogant, combative, and carnal.

They're also—as we well know—less able to distinguish truth from hoax.

Fortunately, although lack of intellectual humility is partly inherited, psychologists say there's hope for sufferers through cognitive behavioral therapy, which seeks to undo the bad influence of parents and teachers.

But can the rest of us wait for that?

And what about the influence of world events on those who lack intellectual humility?

Sadly, psychologists have discovered that lack of intellectual humility worsens in the face of economic downturns, pandemics, wars, terrorist threats, and mass migrations.

Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.

More and more crackpots are heading your way!

The Lonely Sailor

Privilege implies exclusion from privilege.

— Robert Anton Wilson

Call me a libtard: I don't care much for unbridled privilege.

My closest encounter with it came in the National Gallery of Art on on a March evening in 1998, when I spotted a frantic Bill Gates.

It was Sunday, around 7 pm, and the building was officially closed to the art-viewing public. All the galleries were dark and cordoned off.

I was standing with a friend in the hallway in a long line for an after-hours chamber recital when Gates and his wife walked up alongside us.

They paused at the door of one of the galleries and Gates said, "That's it," pointing at a huge Winslow Homer seascape inside the darkened room. Without thought, he unhitched the velvet rope that blocked the door and shooed his wife in.

A young Black security guard appeared suddenly and said, "Sir, sir, the gallery's closed." "We just want to look at the painting," Gates snapped and stepped into the gallery. The guard repeated his warning to no avail, shrugged his shoulders, and wandered off for reinforcements. Gates and his wife spent five minutes inside the room examining the Homer, then left. The reinforcements never arrived.

The following morning, Gates' DC visit made the headlines of The Washington Post. He was in town to testify on Capitol Hill about Microsoft's monopoly over Internet access.

Two months later, Gates made the headlines again, this time for buying a Winslow Homer seascape for $36 million—in 1998, the greatest price ever paid for an American artist's painting.

Lost on the Grand Banks, the last major Homer seascape in private hands, was believed at the time to be destined for the National Gallery's permanent collection. But Gates got his hands on it first. (He still owns it today.)

I realized why he'd been so keen to examine Homer's seascape in the National Gallery that Sunday evening in March. 

He was planning to buy one of his own.

The thing that galled me (and still does) wasn't Gates' ability to buy a $36 million Winslow Homer, but the notion that he was entitled to let himself into an art gallery—the National Art Gallery—after hours, as if it were his living room.

But, to his mind, it is. After all, he's a man of privilege.

Privilege entered English in the 12th century, derived from the Latin privilegium.

According to the Laws of the Twelve Tables—the source of Ancient Roman law—a privilegium was a right conferred by the emperor on one man, a "law for an individual."

The Romans called the privilegium precisely for what it was: favoritism.

To have privilege today is to be favored, entitled, endowed, advantaged, exempt, immune, or just plain special.

You know, like Bill Gates.

Gates grew up in a privileged household, so his sense of entitlement was strong to begin with. But his runaway success in business no doubt supersized it.

Business success often goes to people's heads, you've probably noticed. Successful business leaders frequently feel they're superior—distinguished from others in their ability and willingness to do endless battle against chill winds and harsh seas. They, the lonely sailors, have singlehandedly brought the boats home. Everyone else is just ballast.

And so we like to say, "It's lonely at the top." One art critic, in fact, has suggested that Bill Gates had to acquire Lost on the Grand Banks because he feels so alone.

"In his bunkered isolation from the rest of us," the critic writes, "the image of the solo sailor is paramount."  

Above: Lost on the Grand Banks by Winslow Homer. 1885. Oil on canvas. 32 x 50 inches. Collection of Bill Gates.

Lonely

 

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Solipsism—the belief that nothing exists except my self—would feel comfortable were it not for the fact that beliefs are social in nature.

And yet we often feel alone sometimes, and frighteningly so. 

The lockdown has heightened the feeling.

Despite solipsism's logical impossibility, loneliness has held center stage since Ancient times.

It's a key part of the picture of the world drawn by poets, lyricists, novelists, and philosophers.

Theologian Paul Tillich called loneliness our "destiny."

"Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies," he said. "And being separated means being alone."

Psychiatrists worry that our "hyperconnected" state is making us even lonelier.

Mobile phones and computers are amplifying our tendencies toward solitude, anonymity, isolation, social distancing, and the willful avoidance of others.

Those behaviors, in turn, are increasing the instances of mental disorders like anxiety, depression, and paranoia.

Psychiatrists call this phenomenon the "Internet Paradox" and suggest that social media isn't social at all, but antisocial.

Social media is worsening our craving for loneliness.

The Internet Paradox could explain the sharp rise in severly abusive comments appearing on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

It could also explain the sharp increase in impulsive and aggressive behaviors on our streets and public forums.

Supply Chain Problem

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

— Louis de Bernieres

Novelist Louis de Bernieres' marvelous notion of civility as "surplus kindness" arrived in my inbox today thanks to photographer Peter Ralston. 

The word kind, meaning "doing good for another," derives from the Old English word kynn, meaning "family." 

Kynn was borrowed from kunją the ancient German word for "kinfolk." (Kunją survives today in the German words Kind, meaning "child," and Kinder, meaning "children.") 

Just as telling, the word kindness in Old English (kyndnes) also meant "surplus."
 

So "surplus kindness" is a redundancy. 

Except that there's a shortage of kindness in our nation today. 

We need to fix our supply chain problem. 

Quickly.

Love, Work and Bullshit

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity.

— Sigmund Freud

In 2017, I predicted the "gig economy" would soon enforce downshifting and make a universal guaranteed income mandatory.

But Mother Nature had other plans. 

She used a pandemic to enforce downshifting and PPP to guarantee income.

The pandemic has also unpredictably spurred a popular uprising known as the Antiwork Movement. 

Marxist in nature, the Antiwork Movement calls for an end to slavish, fear-based jobs in favor of "idling" and finds voice within industries like high tech, hospitality, and healthcare—the same sectors leading the Great Resignation.

Whether Covid-disruption or the Antiwork Movement have lasting traction is anyone's guess. 

My money says they don't. 

Covid will soon morph into a common cold, and there will remain plenty of workers eager to step into jobs abandoned by "idlers" (we call those eager beavers "immigrants").

What Covid and the Antiwork Movement have done is cast a bright light on "bullshit jobs." 

Bullshit jobs are those make-work occupations first described in 2013 by anthropologist David Graeber: stupid jobs such as concierge, bailiff, closet organizer, medical coder, tax attorney, Instagram marketer, and human resources executive; demeaning jobs so pointless they represent, in Graber's words, a "scar across our collective soul."

As 2022 progresses, I predict, we will see Covid-19 and the Antiwork Movement run out of steam and be replaced by an Antibullshit Movement.

We'll see more and more workers move from meaningless, dead-end jobs into jobs that combine Freud's cornerstones, work and love. Jobs like school teaching, woodworking, art conservation, investigative journalism, firefighting, farming, fundraising, truck driving, and hospice working.

And we'll see fewer and fewer workers becoming dog washers, pizza deliverymen, telemarketers, community organizers, diversity trainers, celebrity chefs, and professional shoppers.

Idling, too, will fall from grace.

After all, there's no money in it.

Biologism

We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.

— Heinrich Himmler

The belief that links all white supremacists worldwide and throughout time is the belief in biologism.

Biologism insists that genes determine destiny; that nurture holds no sway; and that race, gender, sexuality, and ability are all natural endowments.

The Nazis gave biologism a bad name. But it's still with us, like a bad pfennig.

Biologism rears its ugly head at rallies like the one in Charlottesville in 2017 and the one on Capitol Hill in January, where members of the master race gathered to wreak havoc and reinstate their churlish champion of biologism, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—normal people who know nurture trumps nature every time—shake our heads and wonder: what's wrong with these loons? Didn't they get the memo?

Biologism's roots are old: Aristotle believed in it in the 4th century BCE; so did Linneaus in the 18th century and, to a degree, Darwin in the 19th.

But as a result of its "practical application" in the 20th century by the likes of Madison Grant and Adolph Hitler, biologism crescendoed. Its decline after 1945 was a rapid and irreversible.

Only misfits believe in it today.

Freedom

I am my liberty.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Surrounded 24/7 by unapologetic victims, it's easy for us to forget that freedom is everyone's birthright.

For celebrants, Christmas is the season of charity and compassion—or ought to be.

But both virtues assume victims require our philanthropic gestures, when, in fact, they're free: free to resist injustice; free to work for change; free to run away; free to cheat, rob and steal, if need be; free to rebel; free to displace you, or me, or whoever oppresses them.

Journalists, priests and fundraisers prey upon our compassion at Christmas, just as retailers prey upon our guilt and greed.

They can't help themselves.

But no one preys upon our connate freedom.

It takes an Existentialist to do that; to remind us we're born free and remain free every moment of our lives; to remind us no one is born a victim—or even becomes one unwillingly. 

We choose the mantles we wear.

"Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings," the guru Ram Dass said.

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you," the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said.

Remember compassion this Christmas; but remember freedom, too.  

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

The Real Danger of Inflation

I filled my gas tank yesterday and realized it costs 33% more to do so than when I bought the car five years ago. 

A lot of the price increase has come recently.

I'm as wary of inflation as the next guy.

But the real danger of inflation isn't to our pocketbooks.

It's to our republic.

As columnist David Brooks observed this week, run-of-the-mill, white-shoe Republicans are in a lather over federal spending, and will vote for Trump simply to damper it.

They're unaware of the evil Trump and his followers embody.

To these naïfs, he's just a good Republican. 

If inflation becomes chronic, they'll rally to him.

You'll recall from your history books a troubled time in Germany after World War I. 

The government had been forced, by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to pay war reparations to the Allies.

To fund that debt, the German government printed money—tons of it—sparking runaway inflation.

At one point, German housewives burned piles of Reichsmarks, because they were worth less than firewood.

The inflationary spiral gave rise to extremist political leaders and movements, in particular Hitler and the Nazis.

Burning money soon gave way to burning books and, eventually, to burning people.

Don't think for a minute it can't happen here.

It can.

Inflation—and pocketbook-issue voters—can return Trump to office.

Forever Young

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Psychotherapist Carl Jung called him the puer aeternus.

The eternal youth.

The adolescent who never grows up.

Peter Pan.

Bro.

Jung warned against the puer aeternus.

Living the couch surfer's life, and without an inner senex (old man) to tell him to check his childish impulses, the puer aeternus soon becomes the slacker, the hooligan, the terrorist, and, eventually, the fascist destroyer of societies.

Jung had two pieces of advice for these neurotics: get a job and deal with your mommy issues.

Meantime—as the neurosis reaches epidemic proportions—what will we grownups do?

Combating Stupidity

I don’t like shaking hands with these disgusting people.

— Donald Trump

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis for his participation in Operation Valkyrie, understood stupidity and the danger it poses to freedom.

In his essay "On Stupidity" (unpublished in his lifetime), Bonhoeffer offered his conclusions after a decade of witnessing the sorts of Germans who rallied behind der Führer.

They were all adamant.

Stupidity is dangerous because it is adamant, he said; unassailably so.

"Against stupidity we are defenseless: neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything," Bonhoeffer said. 

"Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed; and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as incidental. 

"In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous."

Stupidity isn't related to brains, education or economic class, according to Bonhoeffer. Stupidity is a voluntary defect. People "allow this to happen to them," he wrote.

And stupidity isn't a solitary pursuit. It flourishes within parties. Stupidity is a disease of the psyche wrought by historical forces that propel people, willingly, to surrender their autonomy to a leader and his wims. 

"Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere infects a large part of humankind with stupidity," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell."

Therein lies the danger in stupidity. 

"Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Diabolical leaders manipulate the mindless for their own ends, "expecting more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Wise and responsible people can only respond to such manipulation through political acts, Bonhoeffer believed; god-fearing "acts of liberation" designed to unchain the stupid by undermining their leaders. 

We should forget trying to convince a stupid person he's being stupid: combating stupidity head on is "senseless." 

"Internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it," Bonhoeffer wrote.

That's why he joined the plot to remove Adolph Hitler—and why he was hanged.

Mary Had a Little Turkey

If I may talk turkey, let's give credit where credit is due. 

The author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was also the author of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Hale was an early feminist and the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine in America before the Civil War.

The war, when it came, incensed Hale, who took it upon herself to write President Lincoln a letter in September 1862 stating that only he had the power to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and “permanently an American custom and institution.”

Heeding Mrs. Hale, five days later Lincoln ordered that, henceforth, the fourth Thursday of November would be marked by the national observation of Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day had long obsessed Hale, who grew up observing it in New Hampshire. 

For more than a decade, she had written yearly editorials in Godey's about the holiday, imploring government officials to fix it forever on the country's calendar.

She believed the national holiday would smooth the bitter rift between the North and South.

It took a bloody war to make Hale's dream come true.

Thanksgiving has fallen ever since on the fourth Thursday of November, except in the years 1939 and '40, when, as a means of combating the Depression, FDR moved it up a week, to extend the Christmas-shopping period.

He caved to criticism two years later, and moved the holiday back to the fourth Thursday of November.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was based on actual events? As a young woman, Sarah Hale taught elementary school near her home in New Hampshire. A student named Mary brought her pet lamb to school one day, inspiring Hale to write and publish the poem. Forty-six years later, a Mary Elizabeth Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, emerged to claim she was the Mary of the poem, and that a local boy had written it. Sawyer was quickly proven a fraud, but not until Sterling had erected a statue of a lamb in the town center.

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.

Smoke

Be sure where books are burned, people will also be burned.

— Heinrich Heine

This week I found a used copy of the famously-banned Stranger in a Strange Land on Thriftbooks and gave it to a sci-fi fan who's never read it.

Were it to grab his attention, that act would put me in the sights of right-wing ideologue Rabih Abuismail, the Virginia school board member who is calling for objectionable books to be burned.

Why book burning is the go-to act of the self-righteous is well understood.

Book burning (also known as libricide) fills the need to terrorize a mainstream culture and represents a baby step toward genocide.

Why Mr. Abuismail, a purported Christian, feels compelled to murder fellow Americans escapes me. 

But have no doubt that's where he and his mob of right-wing brothers and sisters are heading.

Where there's smoke...

The Committee on Lunacy

In 1883, Pennsylvania formed the Committee on Lunacy to supervise the state's treatment of the the mentally ill.

The Committee was particularly focused on the way asylum-keepers were handling the "criminally insane," who in the 19th century were housed with the general population of lunatics.

The Committee, which succeeded in building separate institutions for the criminally insane, was eventually disbanded, but the time has come to reconvene the group—and give it national oversight.

I'm calling on you to volunteer your time and join the Committee on Lunacy 2.0.

Our mission is simple: to find ways to isolate the criminally insane from the rest of the population.

Although dangerous lunatics abound, under our committee's immediate consideration are four persons of particular interest:

• Republican Congressman Paul Gosar, who posted a video to social media that depicts him killing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden with a sword.
  
  
• Teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who pleaded not guilty to six charges of first-degree homicide in the shooting deaths of two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15.

• Rapper Travis Scott, who incited 50,000 fans to stampede the stage at a Houston concert last weekend, resulting in the deaths of eight people. The victims were trampled to death.
  
  
• Former President Donald Trump, who in the final year of his administration promoted his bellhop to run the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), deputizing the 29-year-old to ferret out political enemies. Trump aides compared the PPO under the bellhop's control to the Gestapo. (Before his promotion, the bellhop had been fired from the White House for concealing large gambling wins from the FBI, but Trump promoted him anyway.) 

I you wish to join our committee, please send me an email. 

Please note, you must be able to silly-walk.

The Whiniest Generation

 

During World War II, Winston Churchill imposed "double British summer time" on the UK, adding an hour to the clock in winter and two in summer. His edict stayed in place for more than five years.

Erik Larsen describes the effects in The Splendid and the Vile:

"Winter mornings always were dark at this latitude, but a change in how Britain kept time during the war made the mornings darker than ever. The previous fall the government had invoked 'double British summer time' to save fuel and give people more time to get to their homes before the blackout began each day. The clocks had not been turned back in the fall, as per custom, and yet would still be turned forward again in the spring. This created two extra hours of usable daylight during the summer, rather than just one, but also ensured winter mornings would be long, black, and depressing, a condition that drew frequent complaints in civilian diaries."

Britain's Greatest Generation may have whined in their diaries, but they were no match for today's Americans, who I will dub the Whiniest Generation.

Yesterday, 322 million Americans gained an extra hour of daylight every morning and complained about it.

USA Today in fact reported last week that millions of us complain about the ill effects of the time-change. 

It seems the time-change messes with us big time.

The paper cited one scientific study linking the time-change to heart attacks; another linking it to strokes; and a third linking it to cancer.

Besides affecting their physical health, the switch from Daylight Savings to Standard Time hampers Americans' abilities to concentrate, evaluate risk, problem-solve, make decisions, operate machinery, take tests, keep appointments, and control their emotions.

But it has no effect on Americans' ability to whine—incessantly.

No power on earth can stop that.