Thoughts and Prayers

I am a proud supporter of the Second Amendment and will do everything I can to oppose gun grabs by the Far Left.

— Rep. Tony Gonzales

Tony Gonzales represents Uvalde, Texas, where the morgue is stuffed this morning with young children.

Most are so badly shot up, the coroners can't identify them.

Gonzales used Twitter a few hours ago to provide constituents an 800 number to call, if they feel distressed and "need to talk." 

A call to the number will be answered by a federal employee who works at one of the 180 "Lifeline" call centers operated by the US government. 

Each call costs taxpayers $82.

If every adult in Gonzales' district were to call the 800 number just one time, taxpayers would owe nearly $63 million.

That's how Republicans spend our money?

Anyway, from his biography, Gonzales looks like an admirable guy.

He used the US Navy to climb out of poverty and today champions hard work and education. He's married to a woman named Angel and has six children.

My thought for the day is that, although his fellow party members would deny it, Rep. Gonzales and the GOP stand squarely behind the Uvalde shooter. You could say the GOP's finger was on the trigger.

My prayer for the day is that Gonzales finds the words to explain to his six children why so many other kids have to die every month to prevent "gun grabs by the Far Left."

Good luck with that, Congressman.

Monetizing Mania

The grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a breaking point.

— President Joe Biden

Marketing guru Mark Schaefer thinks businesses can cash in on Americans' mania.

Mania may be "the biggest marketing megatrend of the decade," he says. "It’s bigger than the metaverse because it impacts almost everybody."

Businesses can monetize mania in any number of ways, Schaefer suggests. They can:

• Offer customers spas, massages, and "stress-relieving activities like yoga, meditation, and running;"
  
  
• Provide them sleep aids, alcohol, comfort food, and games;
  
  
• Offer psychological counseling (both online and in-person);

• Support customers' hobbies (painting, knitting, cooking, woodworking, etc.); and
  
  
• Deliver products and services that capitalize on nostalgia.

"If you think this through," Schaefer says, "the changes being forged by stress and mental health could impact how, when, and where customers shop, how they consume content, and who they trust."

I think Schaefer is onto something. 

The pandemic has brought about a sea change. 

Every day is now a Manic Monday.

In response, I believe, businesses can take steps now to attract and retain crazed customers:

• First, redesign your frustrating telephone tree. Allow customers the option of skipping all announcements and dialing the CEO. Encourage them to leave him verbally abusive messages and offer weekly prizes for the most creative ones.
  
  
• Retrain all customer service reps (CSRs) to impersonate Mr. Rogers. Retain only those whose impersonations are dead on.  
  
  
• Provide cannabis-laced cookies and brownies in your reception areas and waiting rooms. Serve customers only CBD-infused coffee and tea.
  
  
• Imprint punching bags with the faces of your senior executives and place the bags throughout your offices.
  
  
• Send post-purchase surveys that allow only complaints.
  
  
• Instead of tee shirts, give away branded straight jackets.

Mania represents the marketing megatrend of the decade.

How will you cash in on it?

POSTSCRIPT: I don't make light of America's mental health crisis, only marketers' urge to monetize it. Should you be suffering, find a quiet room, grab a cool beverage, and sit down and read Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. 

Unwritten

Sometimes we regret our failure to write
about things that really interest us.

— E.B. White

Leaning on mutual experiences, writers often neglect to describe what's most vivid to them, because those things are usually trivial, ephemeral, and even embarrassing:

The blueberry and lemon pie that was baked in an Amish woman's kitchen. It remined me why humans have 10,000 separate taste buds.

The emerald-tinged background a Zoom caller used. It made her appear mighty and powerful, like a female Wizard of Oz.

The $300 check the state mailed to my house. It was a "gift" to help pay for gasoline. Delaware has more idle cash than Elon Musk.

A passage in The Searchers describing a harrowing skirmish with Comanches. "Sleep is good and books are better," R.R. Martin says. I love naps, but he's right: books are better. 

Speaking of books, the autographed first edition of Rabbit Run that I snagged off the web for $22. It arrived in the mailbox with the check from Delaware.

The Red Cross worker who spoke my first name every time she uttered a sentence. She either really liked me, or kept repeating my name to prevent her from labeling my blood-bag with some other donor's name. (There were four of us on her tables at once.)

The news from Odessa that Ukrainian soldiers digging a trench unearthed a trove of Ancient Roman amphorae, all in pristine condition.

The art teacher who told me that you're damned lucky to be married to such a beautiful woman.

The red fox in your backyard, out searching for a snack at twilight.

HAT TIP: This post was inspired by E.B. White's 1930 essay "Unwritten."

Vemödalen

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes

A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our culture.

Photographers have a word for that wistful feeling: vemödalen.

Vemödalen—the feeling everything has already been done—was coined by the Swiss blogger John Koening, whose Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines "emotions we feel, but don't have words to express."

According to Koening, vemödalen is "the frustration of photographing something amazing, when thousands of identical photos already exist."

Those thousands of precedent photos turn mine into "something hollow, pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."

By this definition, vemödalen (a word doubtless derived from the Swedish vemod, meaning "melancholy") is a kind of weltschmerz that mistakes every work of art as another flat-pack item from Ikea.

It's easy to understand where vemödalen comes from.

Unoriginality is baked into human existence, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger proved in Being and Time.

Heidegger calls the self of our everyday being the "they-self" (Man-selbst).

The they-self is a conformist and unoriginal way of engaging with the world.

Heidegger claims that I am not myself as I go about the tasks that preoccupy me every day. 

I am, instead, the they-self, a worker among workers, a productive citizen, a member of the crowd.

The they-self, he says, represents "concerned absorption in the world we encounter. 

"The 'they' prescribes our way of interpreting the world."

In other words, I don't encounter the world: they do. 

"It is not 'I', in the sense of my own self, that 'am,' but others, whose way is that of the 'they,'" Heidegger says.

While being a they-self feels comfortable, Heidegger insists, remaining one is a choice: a choice to surrender your soul to the "dictatorship of the they;" to surrender, sheepishly, to conformity, mediocrity, practicality, and ingenuousness.

In a real sense, Heidegger says, we wear a disguise our whole lives: the disguise of the they. And that disguise—that inauthentic self—tricks us into believing "there's nothing new under the sun" when, in fact, everything under the sun is new every moment of every day, if only we open our eyes to it.

.
"It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die," Oscar Wilde once wrote. 

"Most people are other people. Their life is a mimicry."

Above: Orange. Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches.

Wokescolds

When the left becomes grimly censorious,
it incubates its own opposition.

— Michelle Goldberg

During an interview with a professor of English yesterday, I asked whether the late novelist John Updike belongs in the modern canon.

Wryly he answered, "It depends on whose canon."

The cause of his caution was obvious: not knowing who I was, the professor wanted to be spared another bashing by a possible wokescold.

Wokescolds—those busybodies who bash you for any show of disinterest in their causes—are the bane of the Democrats.

They're why the party will lose the midterm elections.

Wokescolds are dangerous because they're smug and obnoxious.

While they relentlessly shame us for our indifference to special-interest issues like "transgender equality," "microaggression," and "cultural appropriation," they remain blind to the fact that most of us care more about guns, gas, and the stock market.

They're dangerous because they make ready targets for right-wing hipsters, who can mobilize uninformed voters with post-apocalyptic visions of a Stalin-style government—even though 8 of 10 Millennial voters don't know who Stalin was.

So here's my two cents.

Wokescolds should take a vacation. 

A long one.

I recommend Mexico. 

With its tropical beaches, boutique hotels, and feisty cuisine, Mexico offers the ideal spot for a getaway.

Just ask Ted Cruz.

And while on vacation, I recommend that the wokescolds bring a little light reading.

Aristotle's Rhetoric would do nicely.

That's where they'll find these morsels of wisdom:

A statement is persuasive either because it is directly self-evident or appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case, it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades. 

But no art theorizes about an individual. Rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual, but with what seems probable to a whole class of people. 

Rhetoric, too, draws upon the routine subjects of debate. The duty of rhetoric is to deal with key issues in the hearing of persons who cannot take in a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Got that, wokescolds?

And if Aristotle doesn't convince you to drop the smug and obnoxious rhetoric, maybe you should stay in Mexico—permanently.

After all, you'll love it down there. 

I hear the Mexicans are debating transgender bathrooms.

Aged to Perfection

 

Who can forget the last line of the 1973 film Soylent Green?

I worry that with the ever-rising price of groceries and Millennials' open contempt for Boomers we may be heading for the ghastly future the movie portrayed.

And why not?

From a public policy standpoint, converting old people into grub makes fiscal sense, when you consider the cost Boomers will soon impose on our nation.

As of 2022, the average retired man in this country has only $118 thousand in savings; the average retired woman, only $57 thousand.

Among retirees, 14 percent of men, and 24 percent of women, have less than $10 thousand in savings.

The average nursing home costs $108 thousand a year.

Safety nets for indigent retirees are in place, of course; but there are nearly 70 million Boomers still living—after the Millennials, the nation's second largest population group.

Who can possibly afford the cost of those safety nets?

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking is typical of children up to five,
after which reality begins to predominate.

— American Psychological Association Dictionary

Every day I encounter magical thinking.

It makes me cringe.

Here are three examples I encountered in only the past 24 hours:

• An executive coach told a young realtor, "If you just go to networking events, you'll be a millionaire." That's malarkey. 
  
  
• A keynote speaker at a conference told businesspeople, "When followers love what you love to do, the money will follow." That's also bull.
  
  
• A woman angry about last week's Supreme Court decision Tweeted, "Since women have no contractual rights, I need no longer pay my student loans." That's foolishness.

Our society is hip deep in magical thinking—the kind that ruins people's lives (remember when Trump said household bleach could cure you of Covid?).

We've always been surrounded by magical thinking—witness the 1990s' Beanie Babies Investment Craze—but things seem to have worsened of recent.

Magical thinking—the belief that your thoughts, words, or actions can shape events—assumes a causal link between the subjective and objective.

Of course, sometimes your words and actions do shape events. (Just tell your boss his hair plugs are obvious; or cross the street without looking.)

But most of the time events have a mind of their own.

Since the advent of science in the 16th century, we've tended to associate magical thinking with infants, religions, and "primitive" cultures. 

But magical thinking pervades popular culture, too.

Freud blamed magical thinking on the Id, which seeks favorable outcomes without regard to the "reality principle."

Reality aside, maybe magical thinking isn't magic at all, but only an instance of wishful thinking—the error in judgement known to philosophers as the "ought-is fallacy."

The ought-is fallacy assumes that the way you want things to be is the way they are, no matter the evidence.

Examples of the ought-is fallacy include the belief in angels and the healing power of crystals; the belief that trickle-down economics works; the belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election; the belief that hard work pays off; and the belief that no one is evil.

The next time you're confronted by someone's wishful thinking, ask him, do you believe in magic?

Time Tunnel

How are we free, under these circumstances?
How can any of us be free?

— Roxane Gay

If you're over 55, you know time travel is possible, because you saw it every week on The Time Tunnel.

If you pick up your TV Guide, you'll learn that in this week's episode a gang of right-wing lunatics wearing black robes seized control of the Time Tunnel and have set our destination for the year 1800.

So you can say goodbye to women's rights—including the vote. To gay and interracial marriage. And to civil rights, equal rights, privacy rights, workers' rights, and the emancipation. 

Those liberties all stemmed from Liberals' delusions.

Say hello to women in their place at the workbench; to gays in the closet; to workers working 70-hour weeks; and to Blacks back out in the cotton fields.

Writing yesterday in The New York Times, opinion columnist Roxane Gay praised the unnamed individual who leaked the Supreme Court's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

"Whoever leaked it wanted people to understand the fate awaiting us."

She's absolutely right about that: women are about to lose "bodily autonomy."

But—being young—Gay does not understand that this is only the beginning of the ride, and that five crazed justices have seized the dials which control the Time Tunnel.

Fasten your seatbelts, folks.

"I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end," Gay writes, "but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies."

I do know where the retraction of civil rights will end: the year 1800, the last year White American men of wealth called the shots.

In those men's eyes—as in the five reactionary justices' eyes—America went decidedly downhill after that.

Most Americans today have their heads in the sand, to put it nicely.

They're ignorant and naive, and don't know why we enjoy the many civil liberties we do.

They don't know that Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 by persuading votes that rich White men, if unchecked, could—and would—eventually enslave everyone.

They don't know that female "shirtwaist workers" in 1900 dodged bullets and beatings to form a union.

They don't know who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was, or that Jim Crow wasn't a brand of whiskey. 

They don't know what the Stonewall Riots were; or that, before 1973, a coat hanger was the customary means for aborting a fetus.

But they're about to learn. 

We all are.

We're about to relive all those events and more on the next amazing episode of The Time Tunnel.

POSTCRIPT: Okay, I hear you saying, "He's cra-cra." But, trust me, the Constitution is no match for five right-wing lunatics bent on turning back the clock. The justices can—and will—overturn not only prior Supreme Court decisions, but Constitutional amendments as well. Under the 5th Amendment, they hold that power. They will surely use it.

Political World

We live in a political world.

— Bob Dylan

The notion behind this post came to me a week ago, but I felt no urgency to pursue the idea until yesterday, when POLITICO announced that the Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade.

My notion is simple: even though we can’t escape the latter, painting and politics don’t mix.

My proof of that statement is my difficulty selling Judging Amy, a still life I painted in October 2020.

It commands a lot of attention at art fairs, but no one has ever asked about its price (like all my small paintings, $140).

Despite it’s stopping power, I just cannot sell it.

Convincing arguments in favor of political painting most often claim that when a painter depicts a political truth—as Picasso did in Guernica—it’s truthier than the same political truth as told by, say, a journalist.

The late historian Howard Zinn made this argument.

“Artists lend a kind of spiritual element to reality which enhances the truth,” he told Resonance Magazine in 2003.

“There are huge numbers of people in the world whose lives are lives of sheer misery, sickness and violence. In order to change that you need to have artists who will be conscious, who will use their art in such a way that it helps to transform society. Art may not be a blunt instrument, but it will have a kind of poetic effect.”

But just as convincing are the arguments that disfavor political painting.

They most often point to the self-indulgent nature of it: political paintings display a vacuity that mirrors politics itself.

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl made that argument in 2006.

“My problem with political art is not that it’s bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics,” he told Guernica Magazine.

“What are we talking about with a political artist? We’re talking about a closeted person with minimum contact with reality—who has trouble tying his fucking shoes! And he’s supposed to be political? A bus driver has a better perspective on things. Artists are completely indulgent.”

As an example, Schjeldahl pointed to Velázquez, who painted many political paintings.

Velázquez only managed to avoid ugly self-indulgence because he was “the greatest painter who ever lived.”

In contrast, his contemporary Rembrandt, “the second greatest painter who ever lived,” painted captivating pictures aimed solidly at his middle-class patrons.

“He invented the bourgeois art market,” Schjeldahl said.

I must admit I have to side with Schjeldahl.

After the unsalable nature of Judging Amy, I need to remind myself: if I ever feel like climbing on my soapbox again, I’ll stop.

Maybe I’ll paint it, instead.

It worked for Warhol, after all.

Above: Judging Amy by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Brillo Box by Andy Warhol. Oil on wood. 17 x 17 x 14 inches.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

— George Ball

I belong to several Facebook groups that relish the past. 

"Abandoned Homes America," for example.

"Paperback, Pulp and Book Collectors Anonymous."

"The Golden Age of Hollywood."

These groups attract fellow aficionados: people avid about old houses, books and films.

But they also attract whiny weirdos who can't handle the here and now.

"As many of us get older, we might hearken back to simpler times," blogger Michael Kwan write in Beyond the Rhetoric. 

"We may look upon the present with a certain level of disdain. We might admonish 'kids these days' for ruining everything. But, are we all just falling victim to the golden age fallacy?"

Nostalgia, also known as the "golden age fallacy," insists we'd be more content in times gone by.

Nostalgia drives malcontents and misérables to look backwards for happiness.

Nostalgia a disease of longing. 

It's so crippling that philosopher Karl Jaspers blamed the most heinous sorts of crimes—murder, arson, and child molestation—on it.

Not every contemporary psychiatrist believes nostalgia is a mental disorder.

But I do.

That's why I'm disturbed by the relentless Facebook posts like, "We have too much today an overindulged society, as kids we ate what was on the table" and "Bring back Aunt Jemima, screw the woke crowd!" (both verbatim quotes taken from "The Golden Age of Hollywood").

I see those crabby statements and think, with Jaspers, "There's a potential child molester."

Michael Kwan calls wistful reminiscence a "flaw in the romantic imagination of people who find it difficult to cope with the present."

I think it's a much deeper—and darker—flaw.

A flaw in character.

Clueless

The reason people do not know much is that
they do not care to know.

― Stephen Fry

I was scammed last week out of $500; a first, for me.

I received an email appearing to come from the president of an association I belong to. 

She asked me, as a favor, to buy $500 worth of gift cards and send them to a veterans charity on behalf of the association. She was supposedly swamped and couldn't get to it. I'd be reimbursed for my out-of-pocket expense promptly.

I helped her out the following day.

As a volunteer on several nonprofit boards, I receive frenzied requests from other association officers frequently.

Hers seemed fairly routine.

Only when I received a second request from her to send another $500, did I suspect a scam.

My credit card issuer has determined I was duped by a "credible imposter," so I don't feel completely stupid; only partly stupid.

By placing a few phone calls, I learned within moments of sensing a scam that the association's leaders knew for days about the imposters, but covered up their activities from the association's members.

They had also—years ago—posted all the members' names and emails on the association's website, making them easy pickings for scammers.

I informed the president she had committed an egregious breach of trust by exposing members' personal information and then covering up the scam.

But she didn't—and doesn't—get it. 

The term breach of trust means nothing to her. 

She only wanted to know whether to cancel my meal at next month's annual lunch, since I was resigning from membership.

Some folks simply have no business running a nonprofit.

If you are asked to do so, I suggest you first educate yourself—just a little.

It's easy!

There are hundreds of free resources at your fingertips.

Show you care enough to become informed.

Or stay on the sidelines.

You have no business trying to lead.

Mushrooming

Feed your head.

— Grace Slick

Mommies are mushrooming, reports Harper's Bazaar.

"This is a time of psychedelic renaissance, of mushroom mania," the magazine says. 

"It’s a time when people are increasingly turning to psychedelics not for recreation but for healing—and many of them are parents."

Raising kids apparently so stresses millennial mommies they must take shrooms to cope.

Magic mushrooms—in my youth the illicit leading edge of consciousness-expansion—have become a trendy substitute for tranquilizers.

But "getting high is not the point," the magazine says: better parenting is.

Parenting is rough, after all, a "sleep-deprived, tedious, anxiety-riddled road, recently made all the more difficult by the pandemic."

Ingesting magic mushrooms can counteract the "malaise of modern parenting."

"The mushrooms allowed me to feel vulnerable," one angst-crippled mommy told the magazine. 

Shrooms took her to a "place of peace and love and real clarity."

Research scientists of recent have been keen on shrooms, according to Harper's Bazaar.

"A steady thrum of studies has illuminated the potential benefits of psychedelics in helping with myriad mental-health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder," the magazine reports.

Two years ago, pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins announced that psilocybin can eliminate depression; while the FDA in 2023 is slated to approve ecstasy for treating PTSD.

So many mommies are turning to shrooms to cope, the magazine says, a nationwide mushroom movement is forming.

Some call the movement "psychedelic parenting;" others, "plant parenthood."

Critics worry that it lacks medical supervision.

But advocates point to the fact that Indigenous healers have used shrooms for thousands of years to heal troubled tribespeople without medical credentials.

Supervised or not, the movement is mushrooming: over 30 million Americans have ingested psychedelics, according to the Johns Hopkins pharmacologists—many of them mommies.

I now understand why I see so many moms in the supermarket talking to the cereal boxes.

Above: Shrooms. Oil on fiberboard. 10 x 8 inches. Score now! 

Then He Goes Stage Right

There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.

— Ricky Roma in "Glengarry Glen Ross"

Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life selling and working with salesmen, I've long thought that David Mamet's 1984 play "Glengarry Glen Ross" is one of the the greatest American plays of the 20th century, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

"Glengarry Glen Ross" depicts the dark side of capitalism, where scrappy salesmen use wile and cunning and ride the backs of hapless suckers.

Though in the minority, I've seen salespeople who are like that. They earn the profession a bad name.

For its realism, “Glengarry Glen Ross" is a masterpiece.

 

But what's up with Mamet?

As reported by The New York Times, the playwright has gone loco, becoming an ardent backer of the conman extraordinaire: Donald Trump.

Now, a playwright backing libertarian causes is questionable enough.

But backing the conman Trump?

It's loathsome.

America's greatest 20th-century playwrights—O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were all unequivocally liberal.

Mamet is the odd man out.

And odd he is—or has become.

Appearing on Fox News and HBO recently, Mamet has been mouthing absurd, right-wing theories, the kind you'd expect from an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He claims, for example, that all schoolteachers are pedophiles, keen to "groom" young children for sex; that ruthless Democrats "staged" the outbreak of Covid-19; that the media is "statist" and was planning to foment an armed rebellion had Biden had lost the election; and that Broadway has "canceled" him—even though a revival of Mamet's 1975 play "American Buffalo" opened on Broadway a week ago.

Mamet also claims Trump did a "great job" in the White House, and only lost a second term because the election was "questionable."

Mamet first mouthed many of these theories in magazine essays which he's collected under the title Recessional, a book The Wall Street Journal called an exercise in "paranoid didacticism."

The once-liberal Mamet's volte-face isn't new. 

It dates to 2008, when he announced in The Village Voice that he was "no longer a brain-dead liberal." 

In that essay, Mamet defined liberals as "idealists;" conservatives as "tragedians."

Liberals, he said, are "perfectionists" who want to achieve absolute morality; conservatives are realists who just want to "get along with others."

We live in a divided America, Mamet said: "one where everything is magically wrong and must be immediately corrected; and the other made up of people reasonably trying to maximize their comfort."

"I realized," Mamet concluded, "that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."

Fair enough. Some of us thrive in a marketplace. And none of us likes fussy moralists—unless we're ourselves fussy moralists.

I myself don't prize equitability or diversity over justice and liberty. 

But Mamet's recent rants tell me he has gone off the rails. 

Totally.

And that's a shame.

He's given America many literary gifts.

But in the third act he's ruining his reputation.

April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here. 

Common Sense

It don't make much sense that common sense
don't make no sense no more.

— John Prine

My keyring holds two identical looking keys. 

One unlocks the front door; the other, the back.

Murphy's Law governs my keyring.

No matter which door I'm hoping to unlock, I always choose the wrong key.

That defies common sense.

But common sense is passé, anyway.

Today, we're "structurally stupid."

Or are we?

When I use my housekey, I do so in the firm belief that it will open the lock.

Even though it never does the first time, I believe it will.

I presuppose that turning the key will unlock the door.

Why do I believe so?

Experience. 

Know-how.

Trial and error.

The very same trial and error that underpins science.

I have an inductive means for making judgements about cause and effect in the real world.

Those means aren't perfect, but they're good enough to get me into the house.

They go by the name “common sense.”

No, we're not structurally stupid.

Some of us just prefer to be assholes.

Illth

Americans—Republican voters, especially—romanticize the rich. 

They're held up as titans, when in fact they're just lucky.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin felt that Englishmen of his day were equally guilty of romanticizing the rich—and were wrong to do so.

Rich people hoard, Ruskin argued, taking their wealth out of circulation.

But wealth is only useful in circulation.

"If a thing is to be useful," Ruskin said, "it must be not only of an availing nature, but in availing hands. 

"Usefulness is value in the hands of the valiant."

Ruskin, leaning on his Classics education, defined the "valiant" as the "valuable;" as those who "avail towards life." 

In a word, workers.

Ruskin thought the rich were worse than just idle: the rich are like "dams in a river" and "pools of dead water which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people."

Ruskin wondered why English didn't have a word for the harm caused by wealth. 

He suggested illth. 

Illth, Ruskin said, is the "devastation caused by delay." 

By hoarding their wealth, the rich postpone its use until after their deaths. 

In this sense, Ruskin believed, the rich act as "impediments" to the flow of wealth.

From their great country houses, nothing ever "trickles down."

Ruskin published these thoughts in 1860, 12 years after Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. 

But whereas Marx's essay, published by a small society of fellow travelers, was largely ignored, Ruskin's, published in a popular magazine, created a firestorm.

The English critics despised it.

Ruskin's essay was declared "one of the most melancholy spectacles we have ever witnessed."

"Absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility," and "intolerable twaddle," the critics wrote.

One critic called the author himself "repulsive," adding that Ruskin was the "perfect paragon of blubbering; his whines and snivels are contemptible."

But was he contemptible in condemning the rich for fostering illth?

I don't think so. 

Illth, you could say, is the underbelly of wealth.

Wealth is a 13th-century word meaning "prosperity." It derived from another Old English word, weal, meaning "health."

Ill, also a 13th-century word, came centuries later to mean "unhealthy;" but its original 13th-century meaning was "wicked." 

Illth, therefore, means "wickedness." 

Ruskin's point was clear: when you look at their underbellies, the rich are wicked.

They block our way to prosperity; they don't create it.

Will Republicans ever get it?

HAT TIP: Thanks to copywriter Nancy Friedman for introducing me to illth.

Stupid Lasts Forever

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

— Aristophanes

A Tennessee Republican this week held up Hitler as the paradigm of self-improvement.

State Senator Frank Niceley defended a bill to ban the homeless from public parks by invoking Hitler's time as a tramp in Vienna:

"I wanna give you a little history lesson on homelessness," Niceley told his colleagues. 

"In 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. 

"So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. 

"So, a lot of these people, it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life. I support this bill."

If Niceley wanted to live up to his name, he'd also sponsor a bill to provide Tennessee's homeless with free toothbrush mustaches.