Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

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.

The Man Who Would Be Scrooge

I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off until the master passion, gain, engrosses you.

— Charles Dickens

Just as real people inspired the creators of Sherlock Holmes, Jean Valjean, Dean Moriarity and Norman Bates, an actual man inspired Dickens' Scrooge.

John Elwes was a notorious Parliamentarian whose miserly antics entertained Londoners seven decades before Dickens lampooned him in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.

Elwes learned skinflintery from his mother, who died of starvation despite having inherited £12 million, and a maternal uncle whose fortune exceeded twice that amount.

Elwes inherited both his mother's and uncle's money upon their deaths and, to Londoners' delight, set about hoarding it.

Elwes' stinginess was the stuff of legends. 

Too cheap to pay for a coach, he walked everywhere, even in the rain and snow. When he traveled to London from his country estate, he always took the long way, to avoid turnpike tolls. He routinely ate moldy bread, rancid meat, and rotted gleanings from the harvest; refused to see doctors when he was ill; and, despite being a Member of Parliament, wore a single, ragged suit and a ratty wig he'd found in a gutter. (His fellow Members of Parliament observed that, since Elwes only had one suit, they could never accuse him of being a turncoat.)

Elwes would spend his evenings sitting beside a woodfire in his kitchen, to save on candles and coal; and would find his way to bed in the dark. He let his several townhomes fall into ruin, rather than pay for their upkeep, and relocated each time one became uninhabitable, which they all did. He quit Parliament after only 12 years, because he thought it too costly to remain a Member.

When he died in 1789, Elwes' net worth exceeded £38 million. His obit said his name would become "proverbial in the annals of avarice." But it didn't. 

Instead, the name Scrooge did.

Dickens took that name from a grave in Scotland.

During a visit to Edinburgh in 1841, the novelist spotted a headstone with "Ebenezer Scroggie" carved on it, and took mental note of the odd-sounding name.

Although the real Ebenezer Scroggie wasn't a miser—quite the opposite—Dickens made him one.

The Future

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

— George Orwell

Justice Sonia Sotomayor told her Trump-appointed colleagues on the bench last month that the Supreme Court wouldn't "survive the stench" of overturning Roe v. Wade.

She meant that, if the Court caved to right-wing Catholics and Evangelicals on Roe, it would lose its authority as the nonpartisan expounder of the Constitution.

Chief Justice John Marshall established that authority in Marbury v. Madison. 

The 1803 decision has remained, with few exceptions, unquestioned ever since.

But the Trump-appointed justices don't care. They'll readily sacrifice Marbury for the sake of unborn fetuses—and to consecrate their definition of civil and personal rights: namely, that there are none.

Trump's favorite president, the demagogue Andrew Jackson, also readily sacrificed Marbury.

In 1832, the Court decided in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokees in Georgia had a legal right to their land, by virtue of a federal treaty. 

But Jackson disagreed and in 1838 used the military to remove the Cherokees to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

Rather than use his power to carry out Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson violated the Court’s decision, signaling that he, not the Court, is the unquestioned authority in matters of Constitutional rights.

So, if the Court overturns Roe, you can expect its legitimacy to fall into question and fade.

And, if re-elected, you can fully expect Trump to use the military to quash citizen's rights.

Kai Hogan, Craftbuster

Two Seattle artists face federal charges for falsely representing themselves as Native Americans, according to Hyperallegic.

The story inspires me to pitch a TV series, Kai Hogan, Craftbuster.

As a kid, I loved watching reruns of Racket Squad, "real-life stories taken from the files of police racket and bunco squads." The show's gritty portrayal of cops and confidence men captivated me.

My series, set in 2050 in a dystopian Seattle (the city is largely underwater), follows the adventures of Special Agent Kai Hogan, an undercover investigator who works for the Indian Arts & Crafts Board, an agency of the Interior Department.

Agent Hogan's job is to chase down fraudsters in the Native American crafts industry. He carries a molecular scanner in an antique leather holster that, when inserted into a suspect's mouth, instantly detects the suspect's ancestry. Whenever he uses the device, Hogan snarkily says to the suspect, "23 and bite me.”

Meanwhile, Kai harbors a dark, personal secret: by purposely scanning himself one day, he has learned that he's less than 1% Native American, which means he's lied to the government to qualify for his job.

It's Blade Runner meets Racket Squad.

Hollywood, I hope you're listening.

But there's nothing funny about this kind of fraud. 

Lewis Rath and Jerry Van Dyke, the two real-life bunco artists, claimed they were Native Americans, although neither had tribal heritage, according to the Justice Department.

They were nabbed after US Fish & Wildlife agents made undercover purchases of jewelry and sculptures they were offering at two Seattle galleries.

Rath and Van Dyke have been charged with violating the Indian Arts & Crafts Act (IACA) of 1990, a truth-in-advertising law, and face four and two counts respectively of Misrepresentation of Indian Produced Goods & Products.

Each faces up to five years' imprisonment and $1 million in fines.

“By flooding the market with counterfeit Native American art and craftwork, these crimes cheat the consumer, undermine the economic livelihood of Native American artists, and impairs Indian culture,” a spokesperson for the US Fish & Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement told Hyperallergic.