The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space
The Weird Times Issue 19, September 19, 2020
"Don't be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time."—Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(Bijou Karman painting from The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2019)
“The first time she appeared before the court, she quoted nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimke: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.””
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing shattered millions of thinking, feeling Americans, and cheered millions of others. I mourn her death. Her work was monumental, her intellect towering, her strength of will as powerful as any human’s could be. Her death is another signpost of where we are and where we are going. This is a grim and terrible time. Many will remind us that we have the power to alter our own destinies. This is hard advice to follow right now, but we must.
There is no way but forward.
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“It will be bare-knuckles politics from the right. Do or die. By any means necessary. To replace Ginsburg with a young right-wing extremist. And for the Democrats to have a chance of thwarting them, they must realize that this fight is not only a matter of persuasion. They will not win by writing well-reasoned op-eds. Cable host tirades will be of little use. Panel discussions will be irrelevant. Clever ads highlighting GOP hypocrisy won’t do the trick. Angry editorials in the New York Times won’t help. Not even a freckin’ David Brooks column (“conservatives should realize they have an interest in preserving democratic norms!“) will do them any good. Passionate speeches on the floor of the US Senate? Fuggedabout it.
This is about power.”
To Honor Ginsburg, Democrats have One Choice: Go Nuclear, David Corn, Mother Jones, September 18, 2020
Think about what is at stake. The right will organize incredibly powerfully in support of their right to alter the social and economic future of the country through the Supreme Court. Women’s rights, health care, DACA, all at risk, all well known to us. But where this all comes from is the dream of economic libertarians, spearheaded by the Koch brothers for the last forty years, to shape the courts to place choke holds on democracy for their economic benefit. In short, the court system, topped of course by the Supreme Court, has been stacked with idealogs who interpret the law in favor of the ruling class. This has been a concerted effort and why Trump has been allowed to play unfettered in the presidential sandbox by the Republicans.
The only antidote to this right wing takeover of democracy is people power on a massive scale. Now is the last chance for Democrats, independents and progressives to exercise their power before it is too late. This is our 1776 moment to avoid what happened to Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.
“We should honor the life of RBG, American hero, by refusing to give in, refusing to back down, fighting for the civil rights of all people & demanding our leaders honor the rule of law. This is our fight now.” Joyce Vance, former US Attorney
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“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it…" – Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings
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“I would describe myself as an optimist… That means something like this: I see the chances as 51 percent that thirty years from now you’ll find a world worth living in, and 49 percent that you wouldn’t want to be alive.”
—JARED DIAMOND
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This week I have to admit that I am finding it more difficult to be optimistic, my customary outlook. Forgetting the idiot-in-the-White-House for just a moment, if that even possible, I want to highlight the most important issue of our time--climate.
The headlines say it all.
New York Times: A ‘Crossroads for Humanity’: Earth’s Biodiversity is Still Collapsing.
Santa Fe New Mexican:Cause of New Mexico Bird Deaths Sought
Ensia: HOW DO CLIMATE CHANGE, MIGRATION AND A DEADLY DISEASE IN SHEEP ALTER OUR UNDERSTANDING OF PANDEMICS?
Sally live updates: ‘Catastrophic flooding’ continues as tropical storm lumbers inland
Wildfire smoke leaves lung damage long after air clears
Vulnerable Kansas bird populations are a canary in a coal mine for climate change
Of course, as the climate crisis looms over all, the authoritarian crisis is front and center on a daily basis.
Barr told Prosecutors to Consider Sedition Charges for Protest Violence (NY Times, 9/17/20)
Attorney General William Barr told the nation’s federal prosecutors to be aggressive when charging violent demonstrators with crimes, including potentially prosecuting protesters for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. It’s threat with little basis in reality meant to chill legitimate protest all over America.
Barr may be the single most dangerous person we face today. Washington Post, September 17, 2020: Barr Accuses Justice Department of headhunting and meddling with politics – his own Justice Department, which he is twisting into an unrecognizable form for the benefit of his authoritarian vision of America!
“In the course of his denunciation of officials who would seek to criminalize politics, Barr never mentioned how often his boss, the president, calls for people he dislikes to be charged with crimes. When he was a candidate in 2016, Trump’s rallies frequently featured chants of “lock her up” in reference to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Since he became president, the list of officials Trump has called to go to jail has expanded to include former FBI director James B. Comey, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and others at the FBI involved with investigating his campaign.”
And engineered reality: Faked videos shore up false beliefs about Biden’s mental health. The Conversation, September 17, 2020
“The Trump campaign and its surrogates have seized on Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s age and have been painting him as mentally unfit for the presidency. Videos of Biden falling asleep during an interview, misspeaking about the dangers of “Joe Biden’s America” and appearing lost during a campaign event have bolstered the belief, particularly among Trump supporters, that Biden is in cognitive decline.
There’s just one problem: None of these videos are whattheyseem, and some of the events depicted didn’t happened at all.”
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I write a lot about the philosophy of living in a fact-based reality, explaining the Enlightenment idea that we can move society forward only by evaluating fact-based arguments. Replacing facts with fiction means that as a society we cannot accurately evaluate new information, and then shape policy according to solid evidence. But the Trump administration’s attempt to hide reality under their own narrative reveals a more immediate injury. You cannot make good decisions about your life or your future if someone keeps you in the dark about what is really going on, any more than you can make good business decisions if your partner is secretly cooking the books.
Knowledge truly is power. —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, September 13, 2020
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Here’s a “surprise” for all you Facebook users. Facebook is basically in the tank for Trump, as reported in Ad Age:
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg gets the Alfred E. Neuman treatment on the cover of the Sept. 21 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek—which includes a headline, “What, Me Partisan?,” that plays on Mad Magazine mascot Neuman’s famous catchphrase (“What, Me Worry?”) Alfred E. Zuckerberg, let’s call him, is shown wearing a Make America Great Again hat, while a sarcastic subhead drives home the gist of the cover story: “How a 100% totally super-neutral social platform friended Trump.”
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'TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL': A comic book about how Trump ignored science, planning, and his own team when the virus struck. And how 194,000 Americans paid the ultimate price.
Josh Adams and Anthony Del Col, Sep 14, 2020, Business Insider.
The United States has recorded nearly 200,000 deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands more Americans are dying week after week.
Months of an uncontained coronavirus pandemic have left the US in far worse shape than other wealthy developed countries.
The US practically invented the playbook of how to confront pandemics.
Presidents — both Republican and Democratic — worked to ensure that if a pandemic came, there would be an effective plan to respond. Yet while other countries used that playbook and succeeded in doing what was necessary to get the coronavirus under control, the Trump administration threw out the plan.
What happened?
To help Americans understand precisely what went wrong, Insider hired the comics creators Anthony Del Col and Josh Adams to depict the Trump administration's course of action that put America into this position.
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Author and social philosopher Doug Rushkoff writes a newsletter, RushkoffList. From his most recent mailing:
As computer scientist Norbert Wiener foretold, we’ve gone from command and control to cybernetics. Our relationship to power is more like a feedback loop, where everything is both the cause and effect of everything else. It’s impossible to parse whether the public is responding to the President, or if the President is responding to a Tweet, because it’s both. BLM protests are a response to white abuse, yet white fear is also a triggered response to Black protests, leading to more abuse, and then more protests. There’s no longer a point of origin. It’s as if no one and everyone is responsible. The feedback loop spins out into a cycle of plausible deniability. The crazy 17-year-old is on the streets with a rifle, and people can’t agree whether he's a victim, a terrorist, or both.
These feedback loops are what spun out the Tea Party and Occupy into the current culture war, only now, fully divorced from conditions on the ground or class consciousness. It’s all “out there” on Twitter and cable TV, in symbolism, framing, and word choice. But there's an actual way things are, which gets thrown out in the process. These culture wars concede reality itself. No one has any ground for discussion or engagement. And this is largely social media's fault, in that we accept our algorithmically derived profiles as some measure of who we are.
But when we pull back and look at what’s going on here, we see a whole bunch of poor, disempowered people of every color being programmed by social media to fight against one another instead of against their mutual oppressors. And sure, they can each see how the other side is being manipulated—but can’t see how they, themselves, are being radicalized the same way.
As this all spins out of control, we find ourselves on the brink of what a full third of Americans believe may even become a civil war. People actually shooting each other in the streets based on crazy ass fake bullshit—and giving more ammunition to a President and media that both thrive off this artificial and unnecessary conflict. Chaos and violence work in their favor—that’s what the administration says out loud—because then cops get more nervous, shoot more Black people, who then protest, who then bring out the Trumpers, who then create more chaos and violence.
But as with all feedback loops, there’s a way to stop them.
Just like when a musician hears that awful screech of feedback on stage, we must pull the microphone away from the speaker, or the speaker away from the microphone. It’s that simple. Break the cycle. That doesn’t mean ignoring the news or our president’s online antics (though we could all ease up on the doom scrolling right now) but maybe engaging with them in a different way. Not poised to reflexively tweet and retweet, but to slow down, pull back and understand.
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You don't see why your world has no love to give
Well, what goes around comes around
I know sometimes you get so caught in a dream
But now it's time to wake up from this
It's time to make up for it
It's time to wake up from this
Yes it's time to wake up from this
It's time to make up for it
All we ever do
Is all we ever knew
All We Ever Knew – The Head and the Heart
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a glass of 3 cards
data
lip balm
tums
talking clock
stepping stool &
rosary
grasps a curvature confessional
its bands of slanted bars of green
through shades of
day breaks you & I
on a kitchen wall
two heads bobbing a sea of white cotton
auburn & grey flounce pillows
chuckling
Sandy at bed foot
snaps our photo
now
without
staging
lighting
we seem to float
your talking clock
your stepping stool to bed
Maureen Owen
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The Cure At Troy
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
Seamus Heaney’s translation of
"The Philoctetes," by Sophocles
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My demon
My demon has no brothers, no sisters, no kin.
My demon thinks time’s just a waste and a sin.
When God had made the worlds good enough,
My demon sat down in the grass for a laugh.
Cut his toenails in two in a dance,
And saw the whole world glide by in a glance.
Hugo Ball (1886-1927)
(Translated from German by Johannes Beilharz, copyright © of translation by Johannes Beilharz 2010. The photo shows Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916.)
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Your Voice is Your Superpower by Jessica and Sandy Bohrer is now available. Jessica wrote a great piece for Forbes, TEACHING CHILDREN ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH – a crucial topic for our time when we are in the midst of such a crisis in our politics.
As a divided nation endures violence, protests and crackdowns on freedom of expression, there could not be a more important time to teach young children about the importance of freedom of speech.
The First Amendment and the concept of free speech can sometimes be challenging to comprehend and appreciate, but freedom of expression is as relevant today as it was when the Bill of Rights was adopted on December 15, 1791. Individuals can exercise their First Amendment rights in various ways—from writing a letter to a government or community leader, to marching in a protest, putting a sign on their lawn or kneeling for the national anthem.
UNITED STATES - JUNE 06: Demonstrators are seen on Constitution Avenue while marching to Freedom Plaza from Capitol Hill to honor George Floyd and victims of racial injustice on Saturday, June 6, 2020. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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If you are a thinking, feeling human being today, it is impossible not to be living in a constant state of barely suppressed rage.
