Risen

Dawn Staley, college basketball coach: “He is risen.” 

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States: “Open up the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or get ready to live in Hell.”

Happy Easter, amirite? 

*****

We are just home from Easter Mass. I’m trying to get back in the habit of attending Mass every week, rather than whenever I feel like it because I seldom feel like it. I’m still mad at the American Church because I hold it largely responsible for the cancer that is MAGA, but I don’t want to disappoint Pope Leo. I know he keeps track. 

Easter has never been my favorite holiday, coinciding as it does with crippling Spring anxiety. But there’s the silver lining - Spring isn’t bothering me a bit this year. The Year of Our Lord 2026 has been one long panic attack, and Spring can’t hurt me. Do your worst, Spring. 

No, don’t. That was just a joke. As you were, Spring. Carry on. 

*****

On Friday night, my fellow Philadelphia public school graduates and I were ready to ride at dawn for Coach Dawn Staley. As they say on the internet, we do not play about Coach Staley. 

I had hoped that South Carolina would win yesterday, but Coach Staley and her team will be back. And as always, her post-game interview was pure grace and generosity. Win or lose, Dawn Staley is what Philadelphians call “a class act.” 

I was surprisingly invested in college basketball this weekend. My son and I spent part of Sunday afternoon glued to the DIII men’s final between the University of Mary Washington and Emory University. UMW is a Marymount sports rival, including basketball and swimming (the Saints beat the Eagles this year, for the first time ever), and we were all in for them. The last few minutes of that game were heart attack-exciting, and Mary Wash came away with the heroic buzzer-beater win. I love DIII sports. 

*****

And the rest of Easter was lovely, too. Dinner was very good, and everyone ate and enjoyed themselves. As much as I hate everyday cooking, I do love hosting holidays. I love watching my people enjoy the food and festivities that I make possible. 

*****

It’s Monday morning now, a day off for me. I had a dream in which I looked up at the sky above my house, and it was suddenly filled with hundreds of military aircraft. An Air Force jet, flying very low to the ground, ascended suddenly just as I thought it would crash on my neighbor’s lawn. That’s when I woke up. 

*****

The rest of Monday proceeded without incident. A family lunch out that included both sons and my nephew was the highlight of an altogether pretty good day. I read my book, I went outside and touched grass, I went shopping, I followed Artemis II, and we ate Easter leftovers for dinner. 

And now it’s Tuesday and the weekend is really over and the President is threatening to level an entire country. He makes empty threats all the time, so maybe he’ll back down under some fake pretext. God, I hope he’ll back down, or that someone will stop him. But he’s bloodthirsty enough to do it, and no one seems able or willing to stop him from doing whatever he wants. 

*****

Well, that was a day. Thank God that we didn’t blow up a whole country, I guess. Dodged bullets aside, though, the United States (the entire world, really) is in the clutches of an absolute raving madman, an evil and unstable non-genius who is going to keep threatening mayhem until he gets bored with idle threats and decides to just kill us all and let God sort us out. JD Vance is on yet another taxpayer-funded European vacation so he will not be leading a 25th Amendment charge today; and I don’t think one single member of Trump’s Krusty Kabinet Krew would support that effort even if Vance had the courage to initiate it. We’re trapped in a semi driven by an orangutan. The orangutan didn’t drive us off a cliff yesterday, but we’re still locked in the truck, and that fucking orangutan still has the keys. If only we had other government institutions or structures - something like branches - that could oversee the White House. If only there were some sort of system of checks and balances. 

*****

And now we’re threatening the Pope? How does that even work? Do they plan to assassinate him and install a pretender in a new seat in Washington, where Vance and Hegseth can keep an eye on him? Or are they planning to send an armored division into the Vatican to do battle against the Swiss Guard? I would not put either option past these raving lunatics. And now I hear that not only is Pope Leo not coming for the America 250 celebration (leaving us with nothing but WWE and another half-assed Trumpy parade), he’s apparently planning to avoid the United States altogether until Trump and his henchpeople are no longer in power. The threat must be real because Pope Leo of the South Side of Chicago does not strike me as a person who is easily intimidated. Meanwhile, now that Coach Staley received a proper apology, we’ll need to ride for Pope Leo instead. Don’t come for this Pope unless you want to fight every working class Catholic in the United States. We will throw hands even if we’re holding rosaries. 

*****

Such a week it’s been. It’s Friday now and who knows what the insane clown posse has in store for us this weekend. I will not speculate. Coach Staley is (as always) right - He is risen. What’s the worst that could happen? 

Do NOT answer that. 

Artifice

Have you heard about “work slop”? Work slop is AI-generated work product that looks really pretty and professional but is actually - wait for it - slop. LinkedIn is all abuzz about work slop. People are shocked - shocked! - that people who would use Gemini or ChatGPT to write their memos or their slide decks or their data tables would also not bother to check their work and to correct what doesn’t make sense. 

Not long ago, I was handed a pile of work slop. Someone asked me to edit a document and I realized just a few words into the first paragraph that I was reading something whose only human contribution was the initial AI prompt. I had to rewrite it completely. 

Part of me felt vindicated. AI thinks it can take my job, does it? Well until they come up with a generative AI application that can write like a human being who actually uses and understands the English (or any other) language, good luck to it. 

But I’m me, of course, so I immediately imagined a worst-case scenario. The WCS is my default setting. What if AI becomes so dominant that it no longer needs to try to mimic us, because we will be mimicking it? What if we all end up speaking and writing - and even thinking - in the language of AI-generated social media scripts and marketing collateral? 

*****

A few months ago, I read The Portrait of Dorian Gray for the first time. Dorian Gray was published in 1890, so we can’t say that preoccupation with the superficial and desire for an unnatural level of physical perfection are 21st century phenomena. Oscar Wilde recognized obsession with youth well over a hundred years ago. I wonder what he would have made of Kristi Noem or Martha Stewart or that crazy tech CEO dude who spends millions of dollars trying to stay young forever (unsuccessfully, I might add - he’s in his 40s, and he looks like he’s in his 40s - he could have achieved those results for free). 

I’m thinking about how AI would figure in a modern retelling of Dorian Gray. Maybe instead of a portrait, there’d be an AI double who would deteriorate with age while the real Dorian Gray built billion-dollar electricity-gobbling data centers and exploitative gig work platforms and sports betting empires and cryptocurrency exchanges. The forever-young Dorian Gray would have 1b followers on social media watching him hustle and grind and self-optimize, and wondering how he manages to never look older than 21. The AI Dorian Gray would look like Stephen Miller at age 80. Real Dorian would employ Blackwater mercenaries to guard the safe room where the holographic AI Dorian is projected on a wall, aging in real time. 

Look at me, out here writing fan fiction. 

*****

“Have you ever heard about the dot com bubble?” That was my 24-year-old son to me at dinner the other night. Yes, I had heard about it. I lived through it lol. My son believes that we’re sitting on top of an AI bubble, and he can’t wait for it to burst. He might be right. If enough people have to read and edit the kind of “writing” that I dealt with this week, and if enough people start to notice that their electricity and water bills are much higher than they should be, and if enough older people like me understand that AI is a big part of the reason why their new college graduates cannot find jobs, and if everyone finally realizes that the AI edgelords actually don’t have our best interests at heart, then the AI backlash could gain steam. 

I read somewhere that Microsoft “invested” in OpenAI by giving them “credits” for free use of Microsoft supercomputer labs. Microsoft then claimed those credit redemptions as “revenue.” If one company claiming an imaginary multi-billion dollar “investment” in another company and then calling that company’s use of its imaginary credits “revenue” isn’t the clearest ever example of fake accounting, then I don’t know anything about anything. And I don’t know anything about anything, really. The stock market and the futures markets and the currency markets have always been black boxes to me, completely incomprehensible. But I have a grasp of the basics, and one of the basics is that bubbles that burst are usually built on dodgy financial practices. 

*****

It’s all very grim, but despite my initial WCS projection, I am uncharacteristically optimistic, at least about this one thing. I think that people are going to push back, and we’re not going to let AI take over and do all of our thinking and creating for us. Other than a certain very creepy college professor, I don’t know anyone who actually wants to watch Tilly Norwood on screen. 

911

It’s September 11. I'm working from home today, and even though it’s a really bad idea, I have news on in the background. 

Since it’s the 9/11 anniversary, the networks (alternating between MSNBC and CNN) covered the memorials at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA. But the murder of Charlie Kirk is dominating every broadcast. 

It feels like we crossed (yet another) Rubicon yesterday. I don’t know why. Certainly, political violence is nothing new; and people die at the hands of gun-toting maniacs all the time. And as of this writing, I can’t even be sure if it was political violence. The shooter is still at large. Charlie Kirk was an outspoken MAGA activist, but he wasn’t a politician or an elected official. I think it’s likely - probable - that Mr. Kirk was targeted for his political beliefs, but I don’t know this for sure. No one other than the killer knows for sure, though the usual people are out here blaming “violent rhetoric on the left” as if there’s no such thing as violent rhetoric on the right and as if people don’t die by gunfire every day, for all kinds of reasons but mostly for no reason at all. 

Charlie Kirk’s beliefs were abhorrent to me, but murder is always evil, 100 percent of the time, no exception. Gun violence is always bad, 100 percent of the time. Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be murdered. I’m sorry for his wife and his young children and his parents and everyone else who loved him. I’m even more sad and sorry for my country. 

Fighting the Power

I’m going to a protest today. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing that down, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be advertising my opposition to this regime. But a protest is a public thing, so here I am. If they want to come get me, they can.

What should I write on my cardboard sign, I’m wondering? Deport Elon? Trump is a Chump? Impeach 47? Any of those will work. I’m not going to waste time trying to be clever. I’m going with Impeach 47 on one side, and Deport Elon on the other. The simpler, the better.

The weather is uncertain today. It will be warmer than usual, which is great from my perspective; and it might rain. Or it might not. I have to figure out what to wear now, which should not be a problem. A person with as many clothes as I have should not have any trouble assembling an outfit for pretty much any occasion, from work to social gatherings to fighting fascism.

*****

Well that was a blast. I arrived at the protest about 10 minutes late. I’d expected to join a scrappy little group of 25 or maybe 50 at most. But there were at least 300 people on our side of Georgia Avenue and the crowd overflowed to the other side of the street. The protestors were mostly older and mostly white, but we had some young people, too, including some children. I had a delightful conversation with a 9-year-old girl who proudly showed me the colorful signs she’d made for herself and her mother.

A few of the older people out on the street yesterday were really old. Walker and wheelchair and cane old. Their various infirmities didn’t stop them from joining the crowds and holding up their signs, and they seemed absolutely delighted to be out. A lady in a wheelchair held up a beautifully hand-lettered sign that read “Hail to the Chief,” with the H and the C crossed out and replaced with a J and a T. Another older woman, tiny and wiry and energetic - the kind of lady who will be mall-walking circles around the rest of us when she’s 100 - had hand-painted signs for herself and her husband. Her sign was an angry polar bear with the caption “Welcome to Greenland - Come and Get Us.” I don’t remember what her husband’s sign looked like, but both were works of art, and the woman’s husband told everyone who would listen that his wife is an artist and that she made their signs. They were both adorable. As was a lady with a walker, flanked by her daughters, who said “Will we be on Rachel Maddow? We have to watch on Monday!”

*****

The weather was really ideal - just slightly cool with a tiny bit of mist. The sun peeked out every so often but it was mostly overcast. A few of the organizers walked a patrol, making sure that people had water if they needed it, and reminding everyone to stay on the sidewalk on very busy Georgia Avenue. Traffic was heavy, as it always is on Georgia Avenue, and at least 80 percent of drivers honked and waved in support. A few people seemed oblivious, while others stared studiously ahead without looking to the right, which was really funny when the light changed and those people were stuck at the red light trying to pretend that nothing was happening, nothing at all. One person flipped us off as he sped by, and the crowd laughed and cheered. Altogether a perfect afternoon, and I plan to do it again at the soonest opportunity. Meanwhile, I’ll await my direct deposit from Mr. Soros. The economy is in freefall right now, and every penny counts. And of course, I'll watch Rachel tomorrow. Maybe we'll all be on TV.

Proverbial forks in proverbial roads

My gosh this month has been a lot. A lot. A LOT. It’s January 30 now. Yesterday, all of the feds where I work received the infamous “Fork in the Road” email. I hope that no one falls for that because I don’t know nothing about nothing but I do know that responding “RESIGN” to a spam email sent from an illegal server is not a good way to exit a job, federal or otherwise. There is absolutely no way that OPM or the personnel directorates in all of the Executive Branch agencies are prepared to manage a mass spur-of-the-moment exodus. Most people seem to understand this, though. I know a lot of federal employees, and I mean A LOT of federal employees, and I’m pretty sure that no one is falling for this. 

*****

Last night, a passenger jet and an Army helicopter crashed in mid-air over the freezing Potomac River. First responders worked all night and were not able to rescue anyone. At this point, it’s a recovery effort. 

*****

As everyone knows now, no one survived that terrible crash. It’s Friday January 31 and they’re still pulling bodies out of the Potomac River. I love living in the DMV - I always have - but it’s hard this week. It’s a dark time in Washington DC and environs. 

*****

I normally telework on Tuesdays and Fridays. Soon, I will have to say that I used to telework on Tuesdays and Fridays because we have to return to full-time in-office work at the end of February. As a contractor, I will not be eligible for a parking pass, so I’ll have to take Metro to work. Metro fare and parking are about $3500/year. I live six miles from the base, but the commute will take an hour each way, at least. I’m looking at all of my expenses and all of the ways that I spend my time and planning to make the adjustments that will - I hope - make the commute time and the expense and the loss of telecommuting privileges sustainable. Almost everyone I know is dealing with similar challenges, and we’ll get through it. There are worse things. 

*****

I won’t even bother addressing Trump’s response to the crash because what else would we expect from him? Decency? Compassion? Concern? He’s capable of none of these things and his comments about DEI hires were really the least shocking thing I’ve seen or heard all week. But JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy standing in front of microphones and cameras straight-faced claiming that ending DEI initiatives is all about hiring the most qualified people - that is quite another thing. I would love to hear any of these tiny little men explain exactly how they are the MOST QUALIFIED PEOPLE for the jobs they currently hold. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. It rained all day yesterday and after a morning trying to power through a bad headache, I took the afternoon off. It won’t be long before Elon Musk decides that sick leave is socialism, and so I might as well use a few hours of it while I still can. 

For four hours, I did almost nothing. I moved from my desk to the couch, and I watched “Vera” on BritBox, and I drifted in and out of sleep in a kind of twilight state. By 4:30, I felt better, so I got up and started doing things. Doing things always helps. And now it’s a beautiful mild sunny Saturday morning. The dirty weeks-old snow has finally melted and the ground is clear for the first time in weeks. January is finally over. Spring is around the proverbial corner and even Donald Trump can’t stop the cherry blossoms and the forsythia and the daffodils from blooming. 

*****

The week that was

I swore I wouldn’t look at even one second - not one second, I tell you - of Trump inauguration coverage, but of course I got up and turned on CNN as soon as I had coffee in hand. After five minutes, I switched to C-SPAN and then I remembered that C-SPAN 2 does unfiltered coverage of major events, so I watched a few minutes of blissfully silent video of the clear cold Washington DC streets between Blair House and the White House and the Capitol. 

And I do mean clear. It’s a small consolation, and Trumpity Trumpsters will never admit that the sparseness of the crowds is a result of anything but cold weather, but I’ve lived here for a long time, and it’s always cold on Inauguration Day, and I’ve never seen anything like this. People are lined up no more than one deep along the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue. There were actually gaps in between spectators - if you wanted to go watch the motorcade, you could pretty much stand anywhere you wanted. 

It’s 10:35 AM. Trump will be President again in less than an hour and a half. 

*****

Well. 

I was texting back and forth with my cousin and sister yesterday. We’ve had an ongoing “Can you believe this shit” group chat since November 5. Finally, my cousin, a Philadelphia police officer, had to leave to get ready for work. She texted “I’ll talk to you guys later. I gotta go. Jesus Christ.” And with that, she provided my closing line for pretty much every conversation for the next four years.

*****

I don’t even know where to begin, honestly, except to say that I can’t get George Orwell out of my head. We’ve been a nascent oligarchy for 20 years now, but it became official yesterday, with a bunch of smug centibillionaires sitting front and center at the indoor swearing-in ceremony yesterday. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

And we all saw what we saw on the stage at my beloved Capital One Arena. I’ve seen every possible gaslight rationalization for what was clearly and obviously a Nazi salute, including my very favorite, which was that Elon Musk is neurodivergent and didn’t know what he was doing. I know a lot of neurodivergent people, and they all know a sieg heil when they see one. George Orwell (again) said it best: “The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

*****

It's Wednesday now and I'm back in the office, where the network is down for the second straight day. Weird, right? Probably just a coincidence. Meanwhile, I see that the President pardoned an international drug trafficker - a handsome well-educated white conservative Eagle Scout international drug trafficker, but an international drug trafficker nonetheless. It's fine, though. I'm sure that if Kamala Harris had won the election and pardoned Luigi Mangione on her second day in office, it would have been fine with everyone. I also read that we're apparently going to invest $500b in AI infrastructure. Let's not worry about actual physical infrastructure in a country in which a ship collides with a bridge, which then collapses. And where's the executive order on grocery prices? Will no one think about the eggs? Well, at least the broligarchs are getting their money's worth. 

*****

We had tickets for the Capitals game on January 18, a Saturday night, against the Penguins, and we sold those tickets. Let me tell you that we don't skip a Saturday night game, and we don't skip a Pittsburgh game. But based on videos of MAGAs partying in Chinatown and Penn Quarter that I saw later, we made the absolutely correct call. Instead, we hung around a bar in Arlington with Saints parents and swimmers, celebrating senior day and a win in the pool. Absolutely the right call. And the Capitals beat Pittsburgh, so they didn't need us there anyway.

*****

Last Saturday reminds me a lot of the last Saturday before the pandemic really hit. On Saturday, March 7, 2020, I went to my son’s very first high school baseball game, a JV scrimmage against a much better team in Frederick County. I don’t remember the score, but I do remember that it was a chilly but clear and sunny early spring day here in Montgomery County, and that it was at least 15 degrees colder at Thomas Johnson High School, and the other mothers and I sat together, cheering on our freshman boys and kicking ourselves for not wearing warmer coats. Fortunately, we were all experienced baseball parents and we all had blankets in our cars. We needed those blankets. We knew, at that point, that the nascent pandemic was soon going to affect our daily lives, but we didn’t know how and we certainly didn’t know how long it was going to last. None of us had any idea that we were sitting at the last high school athletic event for the next year. 

*****

For the foreseeable future, I will be doing Sarah Sherman’s Nosferatu hand gesture every time I make a stupid joke. 

*****

It's Friday now. It was a week. No adjective will really cover it so I'll just call it a week. 

I'm at Catholic University now, in the Raymond DuFour Athletic Center, watching Marymount vs. Catholic University. Marymount barely lost this meet last year in large part because their top fly swimmer had COVID and so the medley relay came in second. A relay is worth a lot of points. I got here just in time to see the relay win. The rest of the meet will be back and forth. These are pretty well matched teams. Meanwhile I need to run out of here as soon as my son's last event ends.  There's a lot going on at work.. There's a lot going on everywhere.

*****

Marymount lost to Catholic, although the men’s meet was very close. Spring sports will have to step up if we’re going to take back the Pope’s Cup. IYKYK. I was only there for about 90 minutes - I arrived just in time for the medley relay, and left just after the men’s 100 breaststroke, which my son won by .02. It was his second best time and at the end of this season, he will occupy 3 of the top ten 100 breast spots in the program record book.

I had planned to take the day off but I was needed at work and I didn’t mind changing my plans. It’s nice to be needed. On Friday morning, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to get away at all, but my bosses and colleagues were willing to cover for me, and I was available by phone, and so I was able to get to the meet and see that amazing race, which was the highlight of this very very dodgy week. It’s Saturday now, and we have one more regular season meet today, against a very strong Mary Washington team. Just for a few hours today, I will pay attention to nothing else except what’s happening at Goolrick Pool at the University of Mary Washington. Go Saints. 

On Freedom

I talked to my brother last week. We don’t talk that often, but we stay in touch via text and the occasional phone call. This phone call was about plans for my mom’s next visit here, but we ended up briefly discussing the election. “It doesn’t matter who’s president,” my brother said. “They’re all the same. Two wings on the same bird. That’s why we have the eagle as the national symbol.” 

My gosh, right? I restrained the urge to call him an idiot, because he’s not an idiot. He is a smart person who, like the rest of us, occasionally says idiotic things. And that? Was one of the most idiotic things I’d ever heard. 

I could tell by his tone that this was his final word on the subject, so I just told him that I think he’s wrong and then changed the subject back to the original reason for his call. I’m sure that he hung up shaking his head and thinking that his sister is an idiot. It would not be the first time. 

*****

“‘Everything is shit.’ Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system.” 

This is Timothy Snyder, in On Freedom. I wrote very briefly about this book in an earlier post, but I have a lot more to say about it. Snyder has the perfect word for my brother’s attitude, which many people share. The word is “notalitarianism.” While “totalitarianism claims to have the one truth that unites everything,” Snyder explains, “notalitarianism denies any truth or values…Notalitarianism is seductively snide. Believing in nothing is presented as intelligence.” Exactly. Every “it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same, voting is the opiate of the masses” cynic I’ve ever met is convinced that they are just too smart to fall for anyone’s propaganda. These are the same people who use the word “sheeple,” who say things like “Open your eyes,” and “Are you awake yet?” 

*****

Snyder understands that a reasonable standard of living is a prerequisite of freedom. People can’t be free if they don’t have a decent roof over their heads, nor any way to provide for their basic needs, nor any way to take care of themselves when they get sick. But that doesn’t mean that money necessarily confers freedom - it can only make it possible to eliminate the conditions that obstruct freedom. I thought about this as I watched “Black Doves” on Netflix, with its inconceivably rich villains who live in bunkers and spend all of their money and time and energy escaping justice, avoiding assassins, and protecting their ill-gotten wealth. I thought about it when I read yet another story about the crazy dude who spends $2 million a year and pretty much all of his time trying to live forever. Snyder argues, correctly, that immortality is the last thing a person should want, because it makes life meaningless: “Forever is the wrong time scale. Freedom requires a sense of time that extends into the future, through one life and into the next generation or two…” The world is full of rich people who are nowhere near free. 

Maybe because they completely lack any understanding of freedom, many of these same rich people reject the very idea that people have a God-given right to a decent life, and that freedom is impossible without food and shelter and education and healthcare. They oppose social safety nets and welfare state programs because they claim to want to break the cycle of “dependency,” as if any one of us was not dependent on the entire rest of the human race. They perpetuate the lies of trickle-down economics, the unfettered free market (Timothy Snyder points out that only humans, not markets, can be free), deregulation, tax cuts – and our economic system grows more and more unfair, and the inequality becomes worse and more unsustainable all the time. 

*****

Solidarity, as Snyder points out, is the key to real freedom, because a fair and just and decent and more equal economic system benefits all of us and makes us all equally free. Redistribution is good. But with such a vast divide between the very rich, who are growing more and more powerful; and the rest of us, solidarity becomes less and less possible. If you are a middle-class person - even upper middle class - then you have no solidarity with Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy or Mark Zuckerberg or any other greedy grasping billionaire, no matter what they tell you. Your solidarity is - or should be - with the people who pick up your trash, and harvest your produce, and generally do the work that makes life possible for the rest of us.

I don’t know, really, why this isn’t obvious, but it isn’t to a lot of people, who think that their natural alliance is with the rich and powerful. This is an aspirational delusion - if I align myself with the oligarchs, then they’ll see me as one of them, as part of their club, and then I’ll actually be part of their club. It’s shocking to me that working and middle class people still vote for and support deregulation and so-called “free market” policies that only benefit the richest and that have only ever benefited the richest. Snyder puts it best: “The notion that freedom is state inaction makes sense only for the tiny minority who can protect their families without a representative government.” IOW: Donald Trump and Elon Musk will be just fine no matter what happens, and they don’t care at all about the rest of us. 

Actually, it’s more than that they don’t care. They absolutely want to restore early Industrial Revolution pre-Progressive Era conditions. They want a tiny handful of people to have all the power and all the money, and they want the rest of us to work 80 hours a week for as little as they can get away with paying us. And they’re not going to give us anything in return, other than the bare subsistence minimum. At least the early 20th century robber barons had a tiny bit of conscience. They used some of their ill-gotten wealth to build parks and universities and hospitals. Andrew Carnegie was a rapacious capitalist but at least he left us some nice museums and libraries and concert halls. The new ruling class billionaires want the noblesse but not the oblige. They want the Gilded Age without any of the gilding. 

*****

It’s all pretty bleak, really. It’s December 20, and I should be in a holiday mood. Maybe tomorrow - my son comes home this weekend, and it’s also cookie weekend. I hate making cookies, but I like eating them, and I like watching the people I love eat them. But the only thing I’m thinking about now is that we are once again on the brink of a government shutdown and I once again have no idea if I’ll be working beyond today. I was going to take most of next week off anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that a bunch of billionaire cartoon villains are running the country, and half of my fellow Americans voted for them. Oh, I know that Trump voters think that they didn’t vote for Elon Musk but they did. And if the government does shut down, Elon and his assistant Donald Trump and all of their little Republican henchmen in the House of Representatives will look right at the TV cameras and blame the Democrats, and people will believe them even though all you have to do is look at Mike Johnson’s smarmy little insincere smile to know that he doesn’t believe the words that are coming out of his own mouth. I’ll turn it over to Dr. Snyder once again: “Let the liars lie and the truth perish…Let the world end with a smirk.” 

*****

I love quoting “The Princess Bride.” What’s more fun than shaking your head at a kid who tells  you “I’m starving,” and saying “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What’s more fun than showing up at an event and writing “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” on the little name labels, right below the word “HELLO.” But my favorite Princess Bride quote is this: “I’ll tell you the truth. It’s up to you to live with it.” Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson and Sherilynn Ifill and Robert Reich and Eddie Glaude Jr and lots of others are out here telling the truth. And we might have to live with it for now but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever. We can’t stop the liars from lying, but we don’t have to let the truth perish. 

A modest proposal

I'm at the doctor's office again. This is a doctor who is new to me so I don't know what to expect. Since I'm old, I have to get a routine colonoscopy and this is the consultation appointment. 

I've been through this once before but with a different doctor whom I really did not like. I was prepared, however, to see this doctor again because it's a 15-minute consultation followed by a procedure through which I will be unconscious so who cares, right? But as it turns out, my brilliant primary care doctor doesn't like him either and she referred me to someone new so here I am. 

I'm in the examining room now. A lovely African nurse came in to take my blood pressure and vitals, and we ended up commiserating about the dreadful election results. It's still raw.  She and I agreed that this country is just “not ready" for a woman leader. It probably never will be. India, Pakistan, Israel, Germany, the UK (twice), Ireland (twice), New Zealand, Finland, and Mexico have all managed to elect women to their countries’ highest offices. Not sure why we can't manage to do it here. 

*****

Or maybe I know exactly why we can’t manage to elect a woman President here. 

BTW if you are not familiar with the “your body, my choice” meme, then do yourself a favor and stay off the internet. Maybe forever. 

*****

I deactivated my Instagram account for a while. I’ll miss the funny cat videos and profane Elmo yelling “get the fuck outta my way” and the “white women ain’t scared of shit” guy,  but it’s for the best. Meanwhile, the new doctor was lovely and the appointment was fine other than the absolutely disgusting discussion of what to expect during the colonoscopy prep. But I guess that a gastroenterologist who is that enthusiastic about bowel movements is a gastroenterologist who really loves his job. If a dude is going to be scoping my large intestine, then I want someone who is really committed to his work. 

*****

Speaking of shit shows, Donald Trump will be President again in 72 days. I trust Joe Biden to use the time well, and I have some excellent suggestions: 

• Pack the Court right now. Expand it to 13 Justices, and appoint four immediately while you still have the Senate. 
• Make Kamala Harris one of those four. 
• Pardon Hunter because fuck Fox News.
• Pardon a whole bunch of other people.
• Order the Department of the Interior to claim Mar a Lago and turn it into a National Park.
• Get some rich Democrats to indemnify Marla Maples so that she won’t have to worry about her NDA.
• Issue executive orders left and right, including orders to protect the careers and pensions of the many military officers and civil servants who have angered Trump. 
• Resign on about January 15 or so, making Trump the 48th President and rendering all of the Trumpity Trumpsters’ 47 merchandise obsolete (this idea is not mine, but it’s excellent)..
• My favorite: Order the IRS to release the tax returns - not just Donald, but Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka and Jared (ESPECIALLY IVANKA AND JARED). 

OK, some of this is probably totally illegal. I guess he could only get away with it if he had some kind of Presidential immunity. 

LOL. 

Well

It is 7:17 PM on Election Day 2024, and I’m nervous. We have a neighborhood association board meeting tonight for God knows what reason (well it’s because it’s always on the first Tuesday of the month but still) and I am the secretary of the association and so I have to pay attention to the proceedings and just lol. I had a glass of wine with dinner, which is a thing that I don’t normally do on a Tuesday night, and it feels like not enough. The edge is still there. 

It was a beautiful day today. I worked from home, and after conquering my nervous distraction, had a very productive afternoon. That’s all shot to hell now. The returns are starting to come in and I am boycotting Indiana and Kentucky as if I’d ever visit either of those places to begin with, but still. 

My Kamala t-shirt got in the way of some sauce and I sprayed some stain remover on it but I’m not taking it off. This t-shirt feels very talismanic. This t-shirt is holding my body together right now. If I change my shirt, I might undergo a rapid unplanned disassembly. Maybe just one more glass of wine. What is the worst that could happen? 

*****

Well wasn’t that a prophetic and obviously unwise question because I jinxed the entire country. It’s weird how today, November 6 2024, I am feeling the exact opposite of happy, healthy, confident, and free. 

The board meeting ended much earlier than is typical for those meetings, which was all to the good, but of course within an hour I was wishing that I was back on that call or really anywhere except in my family room watching election returns. I did have another glass of wine, which absolutely did not take the edge off. The edge is sharp. 

Like many people, I’m sad and furious and expect to be so for some time. But I’m going to just keep doing everything I need to do, and I’m going to try to be there for others who feel just as bad or worse. I’m going to try to be kind, as much as I can. But I do want to point out that if a person voted for Trump, that person is a Trump supporter. That is the definition of a supporter. I’ll have very little patience with anyone out here saying that “I voted for him because (immigration, inflation, crime, transgender prison surgery, blah blah blah) but that doesn’t mean that I support him.” Yes actually it does. Live with it. And I will lose my shit with the first person who tries the gaslighting “that’s not what he means” trope with me. Yes it is what he means, all of it. The FA part of this timeline was no fun whatsoever. I hope that the FO part won’t be as bad as I fear. 

Vacation reading (with meandering and spoilers)

I’m always trying to stay ahead of the book list, because one day, I’ll publish it in January. It’ll happen. Maybe even next year. 

I read four books during my recent vacation; or rather, I read 3.5 books because I didn’t finish the fourth one until later. I always read a lot during my vacation, because I can. Thanks to the temporary loss of my Kindle, happily recovered a few days later, I read Murder on the Orient Express, the only book on the beach condo’s bookshelf that didn’t actively repel me, and it was delightful. I might read a few more Agatha Christies, just for fun. I have no interest in American murder mysteries, but British murder mysteries are a different thing altogether. 

On the first and second days of our vacation, I read Anne Applebaum’s newest book, Autocracy Inc.. It’s a short and very well researched explanation of autocratic governments in the 21st century, which are far more concerned with accumulating and keeping wealth for the autocrats and their friends and families and henchpeople than with any particular political ideology. Ideologically, as Applebaum explains, autocrats are all over the place, from the far left of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to the far right of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But ideology is secondary to money in an autocratic regime, which exists to hold on to its power and to further enrich itself. With money comes a firmer grasp on power, and the power enables further accumulation of money. In the autocratic countries that are still within the traditional world political order, the autocrats become wealthy by legitimate means in markets manipulated and regulated to favor their interests. In pariah countries, the money is outright stolen, or gained through criminal enterprises - drugs, human trafficking, arms sales. 

One of the biggest differences between dictatorships in the 21st and 20th centuries, as Applebaum writes, is not so much the utter disregard for truth as the lack of concern about world opinion that seems to be a defining characteristic of 21st century autocrats. As she reminds us, dictators used to at least lie about their motives and to try to convince the world that their people were better off than the citizens of free countries. Now, not only do dictators do whatever they want - steal, kill, stifle the media, rewrite election laws to solidify their grip on power - they don’t care what anyone thinks, at home or abroad. They don’t care about their “position on the world stage,” if that even means anything anymore. 

Just as I was wondering if there was any hope at all in a world in which the powerful can operate with near total impunity, Applebaum also reminded me that we do still have ways to save our own democracy, and to pressure the dictators to change their behavior. Laws that punish individuals and companies that do business with autocratic thugs, and enforcement of existing laws and sanctions, can make a huge difference. Anne Applebaum has been writing about dictators for a long time, and although she is realistic and clear-eyed about our tenuous grasp on freedom and democracy, she’s also optimistic. 

*****

I wanted to read a companion piece to Autocracy, Inc., so I downloaded Twilight of Democracy. And then I lost my Kindle for a few days, and had to turn my attention to a murder on a luxury train from Istanbul to Paris in the years leading up to World War II. Murder on the Orient Express is one of the best-selling novels of all time, and I was familiar with the basic premise but I had no idea how it was going to turn out, although I did have some guesses, which turned out to be partly correct. And just as I was about to read the final whodunit chapter, my Kindle appeared in the cushions of a chair in which I had not even sat, and so two mysteries were solved in the same day. I learned exactly who killed the vile Mr. Ratchett, and then I started another Anne Applebaum book. 

Anne Applebaum wrote Twilight of Democracy amid the craziness that was 2020. The book begins and ends with parties, at the beginning of the then-new 21st century and the end of the pandemic, if it ever actually ended, because I know at least 10 people who have had COVID this summer but I digress. 

2020 seems like a long time ago, and like yesterday, simultaneously. One of the defining features of that year was the way in which so many people just lost their minds, and apparently, this was not unique to America, though it was probably worse here thanks to you know who. In Poland, the collective mind-losing seems to have started earlier. Applebaum writes about family divisions and broken friendships resulting from politics, and pinpoints those divisions to conspiracy theories around the Smolensk plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski. I won’t even try to recount the details but to boil it down to oversimplified basics, conspiracy theorists claimed that the plane was deliberately targeted by assassins, aided and abetted by Kaczynski’s political opponents. I don’t know a thing about modern Poland, but I know all about once-reasonable people adopting conspiracy theories as truth, and defending their beliefs with religious fervor, and turning their politics into a cult. 

*****

The years since 2017, and more so the years since 2020 have been a challenging time for the idea of truth. We might have expected that advanced technology would make it harder for people to tell lies and get away with it, and in some ways that is true. You can’t really fake a resume anymore. You can’t claim to be a Harvard graduate or an Olympian or a war hero unless you actually are one. Factual claims about one’s life and background are very easily proven and disproven, thanks to the Internet. 

But of course it’s very easy to fake evidence to support a false claim that someone said or did something, and it’s also very easy to alter evidence so that it “proves” whatever claim you want to make or supports whatever “truth” you want people to believe. Even smart people can be easily fooled by clever deep fakes and sophisticated image manipulation. Stupid people are even more easily fooled.

By the way, I’m not saying which one I am, because it varies. Sometimes I’m brilliant and sometimes I’m a fucking moron. Just keeping it real, because I always keep it real.

*****

I remember reading some Christian apologetics essay that points out a key reason to believe in the claims of the faith, that reason being that the early Christians and many martyrs since have gone to their deaths rather than recant their faith. The argument here is that a person might be willing to die for a belief that isn’t true, but they won’t do so knowingly. People won’t risk their lives for a lie that they know to be a lie. It’s a pretty solid argument, but I don’t think it holds up given the bloody history of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st. 

Although maybe it does hold up. Taking Nazis and Communists, for example, because the 20th century is always my default frame of reference - many millions, of course, genuinely believed in these causes and died accordingly. But others, I would suggest, government officials and military officers and politicians, supported Hitler or Stalin for reasons of convenience, and believed, incorrectly, that their positions in the government or the party or the upper echelons of society, would protect them from the wrath of the despots. Some believed that they could play both sides against the middle, faking devotion to the Nazi or Soviet cause while simultaneously exploiting the true believers and protecting their own power and their own self interest. The gulags and concentration camps were populated with plenty of those people, lots of whom went to their deaths having once supported lies that they knew to be lies and only realizing their mistake when it was too late. 

*****

Yes, I know that Trump hasn’t sent anyone to a concentration camp. Yet. But the Hitler and Stalin analogies are still apt here because they illustrate the phenomenon by which certain unprincipled or cowardly people convince themselves that they can get in bed with the devil and still wake up clean and safe and well-rested. And no matter how many times they see those who have gone before suffer the rude awakening find-out moment after the reckless fucking around, they believe that they are different, that they will be fine as long as they are useful and loyal. In the FAFO lifecycle, the FA phase is always a lot more fun than the inevitable FO phase. That’s free advice to JD Vance, who probably won’t heed until it’s too late. Hey JD, give Mike Pence a call. He can fill you in. Maybe he can hook you up with a competent barber, too. 

*****

See what happens? I was supposed to be talking about books, but I got distracted. Don't say you weren't warned, though, because the disclaimer is right there in the title. Caveat emptor. 

But let’s get back to the vacation reading: Two non-fiction books, two novels. One classic novel, one contemporary novel. A few weeks before our vacation, I bought a Kindle copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow because antisemitic “pro-Palestine” (scare quotes intentional) influencers mounted a boycott campaign against its author, Gabrielle Zevin, for no discernible reason other than that she is Jewish. Having bought it, I had to read it, and I’m glad I did, because it’s very good. I went in not knowing a thing about it, and I was very surprised to find a novel about video game designers so absorbing, because this is a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. But of course, the video game industry is just a setting, a way for Zevin to tell a story about two brilliant young people and their decades-long on-and-off friendship, and their place in the time in which they lived, that being the waning days of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. I’m not finished with this book yet but I have an idea of how it’s going to turn out, and I have a further idea that it will end very differently from how I want it to end, because I always want a happy ending. 

SPOILER ALERT. Not a happy ending. But the tragedy was foreseeable, and so we don’t have another Ian McEwan Atonement situation on our hands. I’m not mad at Gabrielle Zevin. Ian McEwan, on the other hand, remains on my list. I can't stay on message to save my life, but I can hold a grudge until the end of time. 

Feudal

Did you know that it’s possible to write a whole darn thing and then forget completely about it? Yesterday, for example, I started compiling my 2022 book list, and I started writing about Cloud Cuckoo Land, thinking to myself that it was one of the few books that I had read and not written about. And then as I started to write about it, I remembered that I actually HAD written about it. 

Did you also know that Google Docs will allow you to give two different documents the very same name? That doesn’t seem wise. 

Anyway, here is what I wrote about Cloud Cuckoo Land, the book; by way of “Heartburn,” the movie, just about a year ago. There’s a connection, however tenuous, I promise. 

*****

Last week on the very cold MLK Day holiday, I watched “Heartburn” on Hulu. I wrote about the Nora Ephron book upon which this movie is based right here. I don’t think that the movie was particularly popular or well-received when it was released in 1986, but it’s a good movie, as 80s movies go. Or maybe it’s not so much a good movie as a movie worth watching because of the great acting and the amazing scenery and sets and costumes: upper middle class homes and gardens, and spot-on bourgeois bohemian fashion, and mid-80s Washington and NY street and restaurant scenes. So I enjoyed watching “Heartburn,” but of course, it doesn’t hold up in a lot of ways. Few 80s movies do. 

*****

In the first act wedding scene, which takes place in Rachel’s father’s dream of an Upper West Side pre-war apartment, I noticed a Black guest. The actress who played her looked like Anna Maria Horsford (and I later looked her up on IMDB, and she was Anna Maria Horsford, thus explaining the resemblance). I thought that maybe Mike Nichols, who directed "Heartburn," thought that representation was important, and that’s why he made sure that his wealthy and artsy but powerful characters had Black friends who would naturally be invited to their weddings. 

LOL, no. Eventually we learn that Horsford’s character is not a wedding guest at all. She is Rachel’s father’s housekeeper, Della. There’s a scene in which we see poor Della minding her own business, doing her job, when Meryl Streep's Rachel (who has just left her philandering husband, played by Jack Nicholson) blows into the apartment like a hurricane, hugely pregnant, all wild hair and maternity sack dress and oversized big-shouldered jacket, with a toddler in one hand, and a Kenyan sisal tote bag* slung over the opposite shoulder. She takes up a lot of space. In five seconds, the large room is filled with nothing but Rachel. 

She flings her jacket and her bags and her personal belongings all over the apartment that Della is trying to clean, and immediately asks Della to babysit so that she can run right back out the door to do New York writer things. There is no mention of any additional compensation for the extra work, which is exactly what you would expect from Rachel and her ilk, now and then. What makes the scene typical of the 80s is that there is no real acknowledgement that for the housekeeper, caring for a toddler IS extra work in the first place. Spoiler alert: Della agrees to take care of the baby, of course, because what choice does she have? 

*****

In some ways, the whole movie is like that, all about the pretty much feudal relationships between upper class Washingtonians and New Yorkers and the people who clean their houses and care for their children and deliver their groceries. We don’t know if Rachel’s own nanny, Juanita (played by the same actress who played the housekeepers in “Clueless” and “Regarding Henry”) receives vacation pay or Social Security or any of the formal acknowledgements of the dignity and worth of her work that Rachel and Mark take for granted, but it’s safe to assume that she doesn’t. It was widely accepted then (as it is now) that only certain occupations are worthy of respect and therefore worthy of fair compensation, job security, dignified working conditions and treatment, and benefits. 

Still, working class people were better off then, in a lot of ways. Even if Juanita doesn’t receive benefits, she at least knows who her employers are. They interact with her daily. They pay her directly, cash in hand, not through a third party and certainly not through a mobile app. The grocery delivery man receives a tip from Catherine O’Hara, but he also gets a paycheck from the grocery store. He’s not subject to the vagaries of a five-star rating system designed by software developers whom he will never meet and who will never have a clue about any aspect of his job. 

*****

Wait, did you not come here for Soviet social realist film criticism? Yes, sorry, that took a bit of a turn. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is that I was an adult–a barely formed adult, but still an adult–when that movie came out, and the world that it depicts is almost completely gone. And in some ways, good riddance, obviously. But the gap between the working class and the well off, though it was wide enough at the time, still seemed bridgeable. Now that gap is more of a chasm, vast and ever widening; and the system of work and compensation has been so disrupted by the high tech industry (and not for the better) that it feels like the rich and powerful will continue to get richer and more powerful and the rest of us will be ever more subject to their whims until in 30 years or so we become a 5G feudal state. 

*****

I thought that maybe I had made up the phrase “5G feudal state” but I Googled it and found that of course somebody else got to it first. Did I say thirty years? Make it ten.

*****

Sometimes after I watch a movie, I’ll read the book upon which it is based but I have already read Heartburn and as we have already established, the book doesn’t hold up any better than the movie. It’s not Nora’s best. I like her essays better than her fiction. 

Instead, I read Cloud Cuckoo Land. I started this book with absolutely zero knowledge of the plot or the characters or the themes or anything at all. A friend whose taste I share recommended it and so I just opened it and started reading. My friend was not wrong - it’s a great book. The plot bounces around in time and space, moving the reader back and forth between 20th and 21st century America and the (of course) post-apocalyptic future and 15th century Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul). 

I won’t reveal any plot details except that there’s a part that involves an infectious disease and a quarantine. I don’t know if Anthony Doerr started writing Cloud Cuckoo Land before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but I guess that he did because the research and plotting for a book this complex must have taken more than two years. Well, it would have taken me more than two years, anyway. 

*****

The Cloud Cuckoo Land plot line that involves the virulent disease takes place in the post-apocalyptic future and given the last two years of plague, you’d think that this would be the most compelling part of the book. But it’s the 15th century scenes that seem most modern and relevant to me right now, filled as they are with desperately poor vassals and slaves and indentured servants who are utterly powerless and subject entirely to the whims and demands of their wealthy and powerful overlords. I don’t think that it’s likely that a small remnant of humanity will end up on a spaceship on a decades-long journey to a possibly hospitable planet (OK, one spoiler) but I do think that it’s likely (very) that we will return to a late middle ages social and economic and political system. It’s already happening. The 5G feudal state is under construction. 

*****

Again, I wrote most of this about a year ago, when people still thought Elon Musk was a genius. Things change in a year. 

We just had a three-day weekend, so we drove back to Philadelphia where we had just been two weeks ago so that my high school senior could visit Villanova. My sister lives ten minutes away from Villanova and she is also an alumna. My son is interested in several schools but his aunt is pushing him toward Villanova. 

My children are quite different from one another in many ways, including politics. My older son is a Bernie Sanders and AOC fan, and very attracted to radical progressive ideals. My younger son hates Trump but has no other thoughts about or interest in politics. 

Older son is a student at the University of Maryland. He's opposed to private colleges and universities, on principle, but he's still on winter break so he tagged along for the trip. We stopped at the bookstore and I asked him jokingly if he wanted a Villanova sweatshirt. 

He scoffed. "No," he said. "And I also don’t want golf clubs or a sailboat or a Vineyard Vines belt with little whales on it.” 

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “If you’re out here wearing a Villanova hoodie, you can’t stick it to the man because you are the man.” We said the “because you are the man” part in unison. This is one of my favorite jokes, and my children know it well. 

*****

And so I’m still hopeful for the future. Young people aren’t going to knuckle under to high -tech feudalism, not without a fight. Yes, they're all scrolling TikTok all the livelong day, but they’re not stupid. They are immune to the charisma of genius tech bro disruptors. They are wise to the gig work sector’s false promises of “flexibility.” They are neither afraid of nor awed by the Internet. They are less materialistic than their parents and grandparents, less worried about the right house and the right car. They aren’t afraid to fight the power, whatever and wherever and whoever it is. They aren’t afraid to stick it to the man. 

*****

* I used to have one of those tote bags. I bought it in 1985 when I was a student at Temple University, after months of seeing them on the shoulders of the most stylish students on campus. Some things never change. 

On the road again

It's Saturday morning and I am sitting in a huge conference room at the Westin Hotel, Tysons Corner, Virginia. A Tysons hotel conference room with a giant screen displaying the first slide of a PowerPoint presentation screams 8 AM on Wednesday not 10:30 AM Saturday (IYKYK), but I'm not here for work. It's Machine Aquatics Parent - Swimmer Day, and I am a Machine Aquatics parent. My swimmer is sitting next to me, examining his Machine Aquatics gear, which includes two t-shirts, a cap, a car magnet, and a bag tag, all packed into an orange nylon and mesh Speedo bag. It’s a pile of swag, and he’s pretty pleased with it. I’m thinking that two grand is a lot of money to pay for a drawstring bag and some t-shirts, but it’s early for a Saturday and I’m a little salty. 

Why am I salty? I mean, it’s not that early. And the money is not a big deal either, lucky for me. I’m salty because I had to drive to Tysons Corner, which means driving the Capital Beltway, and I really hate driving the Capital Beltway. 

*****

Last week, I had lunch with some coworkers, one of whom regaled us with stories of her side job as an Uber driver. People, I tell you. The stories. One by one, our other coworkers chimed in with reasons why they could never be Uber drivers. One person could never be an Uber driver because she's very particular about her car and would not want to allow strangers to sit on her upholstery. “I don’t know where these people have been,” she said, shuddering. Another person couldn’t drive for Uber because she’s heard horror stories about people getting robbed and beaten by their Uber passengers, and she would fear for her personal safety. Another said that she couldn’t drive for Uber because she gets lost even with voice-narration GPS. 

That last one is true for me, too. But that’s not the real reason why I can’t drive for Uber. Well, the real reason is that I just really don’t want to be an Uber driver. Should circumstances ever demand that I take a second job, I’ll do it without complaining, but I won’t be driving for Uber. Maybe I’d be a barista. That might be fun. Or I’d work at the front desk of the aquatic center because I’d like seeing all the kids coming in for swim practice. Happy memories. But let’s say that I wanted to drive for Uber or that I was at least not unalterably opposed to the possibility of doing so. I still couldn’t because I am just not a very good driver anymore. 

This is why I hate driving the Beltway. It’s because every time I get on 495, I am once again reminded that I was once a good driver, and now I am not. This is one of any number of things that are true even though I wish they weren't.  

*****

The Beltway was fine on Saturday. We got to the Westin on time and without incident, and I found outdoor parking, which is always my goal. I never used to mind driving the Beltway but I have always hated subterranean parking garages and now I hate them even more, because dark, cramped parking garages are no place for terrible drivers. Anyway, we arrived safely, and we returned home in much heavier traffic, and I kept a grip, literally and figuratively. My hands were white-knuckle clinging to the steering wheel at 10 and 2 like barnacles attached to the hull of the gosh darn Andrea Doria, but my demeanor was calm. If you didn’t notice how tightly my hands were clamped to that steering wheel (they still hurt), then you would have mistaken me for a reasonable person who didn't have a care in the world. People mistake me for a reasonable person ALL THE TIME. 

*****

All’s well that ends well. I got us from Point A to Point B and back again, all in one piece, and no one knew that I was terrified the whole time and it seems to me that both of those things represent victory. For now.

*****

 

God Save the Queen

I'm not a nostalgic person. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I am occasionally, selectively nostalgic. Sometimes I miss places that no longer exist. Sometimes, I miss having little children. But most of the time, I am clear-eyed and unsentimental about the past. Things change, as they should. Time marches resolutely on and that's mostly to the good

I'm especially not nostalgic for the 20th century; at least not for most of my life during the last half of that century. But I miss a shared frame of reference. I miss the feeling of a solid foundation beneath my feet. 

For my entire life, my understanding of the world included knowledge that across the ocean Queen Elizabeth reigned over the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Her reign began years before I was born, and continued sometimes eventfully and sometimes quietly but constantly either way for the next five decades. The Queen was part of the landscape. She was a structural element. She was, almost literally, an institution. I'm an American, through and through, and even I feel disoriented and a little unmoored today. I'm sorry for England's loss but it's our loss too, a little bit. It's a loss for everyone in the world who doesn't remember or who has never known a world without Elizabeth Il. God save the Queen.

Cities of Girls

Did you ever read a book by mistake? I've done this more than once. Two years ago, I reread Bergdorf Blondes, which was apparently so unmemorable the first time that I did not actually remember having read it previously, except when I noticed that the ending seemed very familiar and wondered how the author had gotten away with such an obvious plagiarism, but then I realized that I had actually just read the same stupid book again. 

This time, what I did was to read the wrong author altogether. Someone on the Twitter posted something about an Elizabeth McCracken novel, which got me thinking about how I'd never read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work, and I decided to remedy that right away. And I got a digital copy of City of Girls and was about 25 pages in before I realized that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote City of Girls. And I still haven't read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work. 

I’m not sure how I mixed up McCracken and Gilbert, which are not really similar at all. UNLESS of course, the Twitter person tweeted that McCracken and not Gilbert wrote City of Girls and I searched for it only by title and didn’t realize until later that I had the wrong Elizabeth. That’s probably it. That’s totally it. 

I’ll do anything to avoid actually writing about something, won’t I? Ridiculous. 

Anyway, I’m finished with City of Girls now. That title is reminiscent of late 90s/early aughts chick lit (much like Bergdorf Blondes, which is also all about NYC girls), am I right? Like a pink book jacket illustrated with a mid-century-looking fashion advertisement drawing, and the title in an elegant (or playful) black script. I expected a book about a girl working at a fashion magazine, oppressed by a haughty and dictatorial boss, who spends her scarce free time drinking too much with her hilarious but heedless best friend, maxing out her credit cards, and scheming out a plan to get her rich and handsome scoundrel of a boyfriend to marry her. Spoiler: He does not marry her, but she realizes that she’s better off without him. She leaves her terrible job for a much better job, gets her life and her finances in order, and goes on to achieve great professional and personal success, while the former boyfriend leads a stultifying suburban life with the beautiful but dull woman whom he married instead of our heroine. If you are not familiar with the genre, I just abstracted a novel that incorporates every chick lit story line into one paragraph. That was a tour de force, don’t you think? 

Anyway, City of Girls was pretty good; rather, it’s not bad. It’s all told in the second person, meaning a first-person narrator tells her story to another person, not directly to the reader. In this case, the other person is the daughter of a man whom she (the daughter) suspects had an affair with the narrator. No spoilers, but the narrator has to tell the daughter her whole life story in order to make sense of the supposed affair. 

The protagonist and narrator, Vivian Morris, is an early 20th century archetype; an upper-class wild girl who rebels against her wealthy family and their bourgeois plans for her life. She fails out of Vassar and is banished to New York City to live with her bohemian aunt. In New York, Vivian lives a predictably wild and colorful life and then a less-predictable, still-unconventional but much more quiet and peaceful life. Both Vivian and the man whose daughter hears her story, make youthful mistakes that haunt them for many years after, but Vivian moves on and makes the best of her life, while the man, a WW 2 veteran, is paralyzed by guilt complicated by his physical and psychological battle scars. The story’s ending is neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. But it doesn’t matter because the story probably isn’t the point. 

Elizabeth Gilbert famously wrote Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t think I ever read it. No disrespect, it’s just not my kind of thing. Maybe I should read it because Gilbert is quite a good writer but maybe just not a novelist. City of Girls, it seems, is less a novel than a sort of poetic and beautifully written commentary on the prisons we build for ourselves, and how some of us escape those prisons early, some escape later, and some sad souls never escape at all. Really, this is why I think the book is only not bad. I liked it but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. When I read a novel, I like to be all in, and I wasn’t all in on this one,  and I think I know why. I think that Gilbert was more interested in the message than the story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad novel; it’s just that it could have been much better if the story and the characters led, and the ideas followed. 

I thought about getting out of the early to mid-20th century and back to the present day, but then Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels came up in my queue, and I’m right back where I always am, in the immediate pre-war 20th century, when the whole world was about to fall apart and only a few people seemed to really know what was about to happen. I feel like one of those people right now, and I wish I didn’t. 

Nothing to see here

The thing is, you guys don’t follow the Internet the way I do. That is my big takeaway from today’s J6 hearing; that and checking off my insurrectionist Members of Congress pardon request bingo card (surprised that Boebert and Cawthorn weren’t on the list but I got the rest–just like Oscar night). 

As much as I am absorbed in the hearings (and I am completely absorbed in the hearings), I’m also consumed with anxiety and dread. I never realized how much of my identity is entwined with the idea of being American, but it is. If America no longer exists, I don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t know who my friends and family are anymore, either. My son wants to visit Texas A&M as a possible college to attend. I don’t want him to go there, not just because it’s so far away from Maryland (it is too far away from Maryland) but because I think that civil war is a real and looming threat, and I don’t want my son on the wrong side of the frontier when it happens. 

I’m really not kidding. 

*****

Well that was yesterday, before shit got real, meaning really real with today’s Roe v. Wade decision. My husband and all of my Catholic friends are texting me, thinking that I must be so happy about this decision and I suppose I would be if I thought for one second that it had anything to do at all with respect for the sanctity of human life but it doesn’t. 

In a pro-life country, 19 children in Texas would be enjoying their summer vacations right now. Or maybe they’d be suffering and complaining through summer school. Or maybe they’d be a little bored. But they’d be alive. 

I don’t wish any harm on any of the Justices, nor on any of the Republican leadership. But it occurs to me, as I read of security concerns arising from the reaction to this decision, that they should all receive exactly the same protection that they would afford to public schoolchildren. Armed teachers should be dispatched to the homes of Justices Kavanaugh, Barrett, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch. House Members and Senators who feel threatened should be offered the same protection. The timing couldn’t be better, really. Local school districts are on vacation for the summer, and teachers might welcome the chance to earn extra income. Recruit some teachers, issue handguns and assault rifles, train the teachers thoroughly (an hour or so should be sufficient) and dispatch them to the homes of our distinguished public servants to stand guard against all enemies and invaders. Everyone will feel much safer, I’m sure. Good guys with guns and all that. 

But let's not be ridiculous, K? There’s nothing to worry about. They won’t re-institute a poll tax, or take voting rights away from women and minorities. They definitely won’t overturn Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia or Griswold v. Connecticut. No reason to get all worked up. No reason to be hysterical about all this. It’ll all be fine. 

Memorial

It’s Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend and for the first time, I feel like I actually DO have problems that even summer can’t solve. I’m not looking forward to summer the way I normally do. I’m not exactly dreading it but I’m not looking forward to it either. I kind of miss winter and if you know me you know that this is completely uncharacteristic and counter to all of my most dearly held beliefs and principles. 

Do you know how far gone I am? I almost hyphenated “dearly held.” A hyphen after an -ly adverb. Who am I? What is happening?

*****

It’s Sunday now. Yesterday was a more pleasant day than I expected it would be. It was sunshiny and bright after days of gloom. The sun and the warm temperatures are starting to dry things out a bit and it’s not so swampy anymore. That’s what it was like last week - swampy. I woke up early and walked in the slight chill of the early morning. Later in the morning, it was pleasant to be home with the sunlight streaming in through the windows, just writing and cleaning up and doing laundry and paying bills and catching up on life. 

And the pool opened yesterday, too. I didn’t feel like going, oddly enough, because I always feel like going. I also know that you don’t hyphenate an -ly adverb to form a compound modifier, but apparently, things change and I’m a different person altogether now. Still, after a morning and early afternoon of housekeeping and errands, I was hot and it seemed like it would have been a shame to miss the first day of the season, so I put on a suit, packed my pool bag, and rolled up to the pool.. 

My neighborhood pool is one of my favorite places on earth. During the winter, I think that it’s just the water that I miss, the water and the sunshine. But it's more than that. It's the roses and the sunflowers in the flower beds at the entrance. It's the makeshift lending library filled with paperbacks and magazines and picture books. It's the sweet teenage lifeguards at the front desk, all of them either my children or their friends. It's the old-fashioned pool house with its high wood framed windows for ventilation and its rustic summer camp-like showers. It's my neighbors and their families lounging on the blue and white striped deck chairs. And yes, it's the water and the sunshine, together. 

I breathed in the smell of roses and lilac and honeysuckle and lovely chlorine, found an empty chair next to a friend, and just like that, it was summer. But it still wasn't quite right. The pool deck was a riot of happy children, demanding the end of despised adult swim. They seemed unaware of the adults watching them, beaming at their beautiful faces. They probably wondered why no one was yelling at them to stop running and stop playing with the foot showers and stop making so much noise. Children can do anything they want right now. 

The water was cold but pristine, clear and sparking, free of leaves and debris and cicada carcasses.  I couldn't swim as fast or as far as I usually do but I'll get my speed and endurance back as the summer goes on. 

I swam on Sunday and Monday too. On Monday, I ran into my lovely elderly Russian neighbors, with whom I have been sharing swim lanes for 17 years. I said hello and waved as I always do, and they seemed happily surprised that I was still friendly toward them. I don't know them very well but I think they are Soviet-era Russian immigrants. In any event, they’ve been here for a very long time. They didn’t invade Ukraine. Putin isn’t their fault. 

It’s quite hot now, so the water is warming up a little bit every day. And just as it gets to be exactly the right temperature, the weather will change, and the water will get cold again. It’s OK. I’m not going to complain about cold water. 

In fact, I’m not going to complain about anything. I’m sad all the time and summer doesn’t feel like summer except during those precious few minutes that I’m in the water, and it doesn’t feel like anything will ever be right again. Maybe that’s OK too. Maybe nothing should ever feel right again. Maybe 19 children tore a hole in the universe when they succumbed to the gunfire last week and nothing will ever repair that hole until we are willing to do anything, give up anything at all, to make sure that nothing like that will ever happen again. Maybe I should stay out of the water and the sunshine and spend the long hot summer indoors, doing penance for a world that moves on when children die so violently. How can we move on? 

Project planning

Last winter and spring, I started work early every day, and I usually finished my day at 4. (I still start early but I don’t finish early). I would go for a walk outside, returning home by 5 when it was still deep winter and a bit later as the days grew longer. My sons and I would reconvene after we finished our remote work and school days from our desks in various corners of the house. Then my husband, who was no longer working remotely, would come home. I would make dinner and we’d spend the evening in the family room, sometimes watching a game or doing an online crossword puzzle together and sometimes entertaining ourselves separately. 

Weekends were completely unscheduled. As restaurants began to re-open, my husband and I would go for sushi at our favorite local place. We’d go together to pick up groceries or other supplies and then we’d return home for a quiet evening in semi-lockdown. There was a lot of reading. There was a lot of Netflix bingeing. Someone was always napping on a couch. 

The thing was that I knew at the time that this state of suspended animation was artificial and temporary. And I wanted it to be temporary. In fact, despite how pleasant it sometimes was, I really couldn't wait for it to end. I wanted to go places and do things and see people. I wanted to take the mask off. I wanted my normal, busy, over-scheduled life.

*****

Now, of course, in a case of “who could have predicted this,” I am nostalgic for early 2021. But this is not just me being neurotic and ridiculous, and it’s not just “be careful what you wish for.” I’m not just missing the slow pace and lack of scheduled obligations. It’s something else. 

In the early spring of 2021, things seemed to be taking a little turn for the better. The vaccines promised an eventual end to pandemic restrictions and a return to whatever constituted normal pre-COVID. TFG was gone from the public spotlight, or at least he was no longer the center of attention. He couldn’t even tweet. I walked around my neighborhood in the sunny early spring chill, and the cherry blossoms seemed to promise a new beginning. 

Last week, my son’s high school sent an email about a coming delivery of free test kits, and I was like “what? COVID tests? Still?” I know that the pandemic is not over yet. As a matter of fact, when I called her on Wednesday to get her shopping list, the old lady I shop for helpfully told me that I should be careful because there’s a new variant coming because of course there is. Still, COVID seems like a dim and distant memory now. Even the dreaded Omicron surge of late 2021 seems ages in the past. And amid 24/7 coverage of the dreadful war in Ukraine and the worsening humanitarian crisis and the growing danger that we’ll end up in a bloody ground war or nuclear war with Russia, the quiet mid-pandemic languishing of early 2021 seems like the gosh darn good old days. 

*****

Two years ago, on the first Saturday in March, my son played in his first high school baseball game, a scrimmage against a Middletown school. Middletown is in Frederick County, about 30 miles north of Silver Spring, and according to Google, about 200 feet higher in elevation. I remember that it was chilly when we left our house in Silver Spring and that it was absolutely freezing cold in Middletown. The other Rockville mothers and I huddled in our folding canvas chairs, bundled in winter jackets and wrapped in blankets. Later that evening, I shared pizza and spinach-artichoke dip and a bottle of wine with two other mothers while our gang of young teenage boys, who weren’t yet able to drive on their own, celebrated a friend’s birthday at the Stained Glass Pub. That was the very last normal Saturday before March 13, 2020, when Maryland and most of the rest of the United States shut down.  I remember almost everything about that day. And now it’s Saturday morning and the sun is shining and although it’s cold, it will warm up today to a spring-like 60 degrees. Rockville will play its first scrimmage later today, against Winston Churchill. We have Capitals tickets. I have errands to run. The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom and I have even started to see a little bit of yellow on the forsythia bushes. It’s a prototype of a normal early spring Saturday. 

Spring used to be a time of crushing anxiety and panic attacks for me. Part of this is related to an old trauma that happened in the spring. Part of it was just over-scheduling and over-commitment and too much to do. The trauma part is long in the past now, so far in the past that I hardly ever think about it. The spring onslaught part is very different this year, because my younger son now drives and has his own car and so all I need to do is show up at his games and cheer with the other parents. I don’t have to drive him back and forth to practice, and I don’t have to get him to his games 90 minutes before they actually start and then try to fit as many errands or to-do list items into that 90 minutes before I return to watch the game. I just wave goodbye and watch him drive away. 

That’s it, I guess. Other than the worry and sadness about the state of the world and the plight of Ukraine, I am acutely conscious that I’m almost done with all of this, the school concerts and sports and PTA and all of the other mom things that have made my life very busy and very good for the last 21 years. Pretty soon, I’ll wave goodbye and watch them drive away knowing that it will not be hours, but days or weeks or even months before I see them again. Last spring, when the world was on hold, my children seemed years away from adulthood. Just one year later, and they’re already 80 percent out the door. I guess I just don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when they’re out on their own. I guess I’ll need a project. 

February 2022

I was writing something yesterday, a thing that I started a few days ago, and when I returned to finish it this morning, I realized that I didn’t care one bit about it because right now, all I can think about is Ukraine. 

Let me be clear that I know practically nothing about Ukraine. I know that it’s in far eastern Europe or in the far western part of the former USSR depending on how you look at political geography. I know that it’s next door to Poland. I know about the man-made famines of the 1930s. I know that the Ukrainian people suffered badly during Stalin’s purges and during WW2. I have a few Ukrainian friends. That’s about it. 

I know a little bit more about Russia, and I know that Vladimir Putin is a kleptocratic autocratic homicidal despot and that no reasonable person should trust a single word he says, not a word about Ukraine and not a word about anything else. I know that there are plenty of theories about his nostalgia for the former Soviet Union’s central place on the world stage and his longing to reunite the former Soviet republics and lead a great world power again blah blah blah, but I don’t believe any of that. I think that Putin’s only objective, his only belief, his only guiding principle, his North Star, is power. 

I can’t stop thinking about this; about families huddled in subway stations hundreds of feet below the street in Kyiv, about explosions and air strikes and hand-to-hand combat in the streets. I should be working right now but I’m watching the President’s address. I have a meeting in 7 minutes, so I hope he makes it quick. 

I also hope that we sanction the bloody hell out of Russia. I hope that we shut down every financial avenue available to Putin and his henchmen. I hope we seize their Swiss chalets and their Paris pieds-a-terre and their London townhouses and their yachts at Cap D’Antibes and every penny they have in Western institutions. I hope we shut down their power grid and their internet and their broadcasting capacity. I hope we find all of the oligarchs’ children in their private boarding schools and their Ivy League universities, tell them that their semesters are over, and put them all on planes back to Moscow and St. Petersburg. I even hope that we order my beloved Russian hockey players back to Russia until Putin pulls every last soldier out of Ukraine. 

I don’t want to see American troops fighting in Russia or Ukraine or Belarus, but this man cannot be allowed to rule a large part of the world and if we allow him to get away with this outrage, he will do exactly that. I hope we don’t let him get away with it. I hope we shut this madman down right the heck now. 

The Final Frontier

I was working this morning. MSNBC was on in the background, and the top story was a nonegenarian's imminent launch into space aboard a rocket shaped like a penis. 

Hey don't yell at me. I was not part of the design team. I didn't build the penis-shaped rocket. I'm just describing it. Accurately. 

Anyway, I was about to join a meeting, and I walked into the family room to turn off the TV, just as the liftoff countdown passed T minus one minute. OK, I thought, I have a minute. I can watch Captain Kirk cross the final frontier. So I did. 

*****

As a technical achievement, the launch of New Shepard is pretty remarkable. I watched, amazed, as the velocity meter passed 1,000 MPH and the altitude took the rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere, and I imagined the crew watching out the tiny windows, seeing the Earth fall into the distance, ever smaller, just a green and blue orb. I turned off the TV and got on my call just as the Amazon astronauts were about to enjoy their zero g float around the spacecraft.

But you know what they say, right? Well, here's what I say: Just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. 

Just because you can accumulate more money than any other person ever has, doesn't mean that you should. But if you insist on grabbing a huge portion of the world's wealth all for yourself, making it possible to establish your own private little space force, OK, fine, it still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, you're bound and determined to grab everything for yourself and then use your riches to build your own proprietary NASA, making it possible to fire a 90-year-old man out of the Earth's atmosphere, fine. It still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, fine, you have all the money and you have your space fiefdom, and the 90-year-old man really wants to get on the rocket, so just go ahead. Just go ahead now. 

But if you’re asking me and I know you’re not but if you are, then DON’T, I’m telling you, just DON’T build a spaceship that looks so much like a giant penis that when it returns to Earth it appears to be literally screwing the entire world. That’s just plain common sense. 

*****

I’m glad William Shatner is OK, as far as we know. If you can think of another useful or productive thing that came out of this, then you’re a better thinker than I. If you can think of anything else, ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL that billionaires could do with their ill-gotten wealth, be sure to let them know. There has to be something. 

Blinded with Science

A few weeks ago, I took my mother-in-law to get her first COVID vaccine dose. It didn’t go too well. My husband made a mistake with the online registration form and although he corrected the mistake, and called the hospital to explain the mistake and confirm that we could still proceed with the appointment; and although we checked in without incident and a volunteer escorted my mother-in-law to the room where the shots were being administered and she waited there for 40 minutes with her sleeve rolled up, the hospital staff decided that the error on the paperwork was significant enough to force them to send her home without the shot. 

It’s a long story, and there’s no way to make it short so that it still makes sense. But no matter. It was several weeks ago, and she has since gotten the vaccine and has an appointment scheduled for her second dose. All’s well that ends well. 

*****

I wrote this a few days ago, with the idea that I'd tell you all about the people I saw at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, and how they looked and dressed and behaved. I never tire of people watching, and a hospital is people-watching central. But now I'm in the car, waiting to be called in for my dentist appointment, and I'm thinking about the vaccine itself. I'm listening to NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, who is interviewing Walter Isaacson, who just wrote a book (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race) about Jennifer Doudna, who discovered a thing about mRNA that made the COVID vaccine possible. 

Jennifer Doudna won a Nobel Prize for her work in mRNA research and gene editing; and as Isaacson says, she wasn't looking for a vaccine or a gene editing tool or anything else, really. She was doing pure science, trying to figure out what mRNA could do, and what it was for. I'm sure she thought about the possibility that she might discover something useful. But she started out by trying to learn something about how something works, just for the sake of learning it. 

I haven't read the book yet, but I think I need to add it to my list. What I got from the interview is that Doudna's work contributed to the invention of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). I won’t even try to grasp what this actually means in terms of the nuts and bolts science, though I do know what a palindrome is, and I suppose I could start from there. I’m more interested in the audacity of the very idea of editing genes. 

Editing genes strikes me as a classic example of a thing that we should not necessarily do, just because we can do it. Of course, there’s the miraculous possibility of editing bad genes to treat or even cure disease; and who wouldn't want to do this? But there is a worrisome and slippery-slope downside, too. We can also edit genes to select for what we would consider desirable traits and to eliminate less desirable traits, giving rise to the obvious question of who gets to decide what is desirable, and what is not, in terms of human traits. The possibility of productizing people is very real. Vladimir Putin, who would naturally consider himself an arbiter of desirability in human traits, thinks so too. During the "Fresh Air" interview, Isaacson said that Putin suggested that it might be possible to edit a man's gene sequence to make him a better soldier. Vladimir Putin has almost limitless power in Russia, and it’s easy to imagine him ordering involuntary gene therapy on unwitting subjects so that he can create a master-race army. 

Jennifer Doudna anticipated this misuse of gene editing science, too. She had a nightmare in which a man asked her to tell him more about gene editing. When she looked up, she saw that the man was Adolf Hitler. Because of course he was. 

*****

My 19-year-old son, who is very political, is also very sure that there is a man-made solution to every problem that plagues humanity; and that all we have to do is find and implement those solutions and we’ll have a world free of poverty, ignorance, illness, and suffering. And I remind him that it’s a fallen world, and that although we are obligated to serve others and to try to alleviate suffering wherever we find it, that we will never eliminate it altogether; and that every single attempt to create a perfect world has ended in disaster, in the gas chamber and the concentration camp. 

*****

I have great respect and admiration for science and scientists. I’m grateful that there are people who seek knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of its eventual benefit to humanity. I’m glad that a person is smart enough to  figure out that mRNA can be used to develop a vaccine that will confer immunity from a disease that has paralyzed the world for over a year. But I’m more glad that a scientist as brilliant as Jennifer Doudna is also thoughtful enough to know that science can be a tool for evil as well as good. I’m glad that there are scientists who understand that science without humility and without wisdom is a dangerous and potentially violent thing.