Gross People

These parents of the young murderer in Michigan are all kinds of gross.

I can appreciate having enthusiasm for sporting activities, and wanting to share that enthusiasm with your child in hopes that they will also become enthusiastic. I tried to inspire my children with my particular likes, to limited success.

In so doing, I had and have a responsibility to them. Riding bikes (which they both kind of hate) is not a license to crowd the sidewalk and do tricks in public plazas. Another of my youthful passions was reading, which is hard to think about becoming a danger to the public in any way, so that’s not a great example of how my thrill-seeking comes with responsibility.

If I got my kicks from guns (I don’t, and never have, and my father would never have permitted it anyway, as he was a man of medicine and guns are built to do great harm), I would have a very high level of responsibility.

Beyond the responsibility of keeping them in a safe place, etc. there is the moral/ethical responsibility to use them only in a sporting way.

And beyond the gun-owning responsibility, at which these parents failed so tragically, there is the simple being-a-citizen responsibility of when the school district wants to send a kid to counseling because of the school’s (entirely reasonable) concern about a kid being an imminent danger to themselves and/or others.

And beyond that responsibility lies the being-a-citizen responsibility of owning up to your actions. So when the police say they wanna make an arrest of ya, turn yourself in. I bet you all a dollar that these ratfinks would have been the first to say of Jacob Blake (the now-paralyzed man in Kenosha) and his brethren that they should have simply complied with the popo rather than resist.

So like that rapist from Darien, Connecticut a dozen or so years back, these folks not only abetted a crime by supplying the lethal weapon but also by failing to avert a predictable tragedy by being minimally parental in their oversight of their miserable progeny. Say what you will about mental health; the facts are that the VAST majority of those who suffer from mental illness pose no threat to others, nor even that often themselves.

If we all use just a little bit of self-awareness and respect for the other people in our community, we will be able to do better than these absolute failures. Both as parents for raising such a useless kid, but as neighbors in creating and enabling such a danger to the community. And now the families whose children were murdered (even if they were mean to the useless kid, death is a harsh punishment) have had their families and lives shattered, with who knows what kinds of after-effects for themselves and those around them.

The Problem with History

I should have pursued the study of history.  It is extremely clear to me now, in my late middle age, that that is what I should have done.  Too late now!  Oh well.

I come to this epiphany upon reflection of the classes I took in high school and college and law school and which have resonated with me through the long decades since.  I also reflected on my work during my “career” (occasioned by one of my employees filing for retirement) and noticed that I always always always have made a study of the history of every organization I have ever worked for.

To understand something, I must know what happened before now.  I sought out sources and research the conditions that caused people to decide we needed an organization to promote lung health and advocate for people with TB.  Did the same with Red Cross, two zoos, an international poverty-relief org, and on and on.

Often, but not always, I get disillusioned by what I learn.  When I don’t, I am lit up like a rocket.  But I am a tender lamby, and when I am disappointed I am dejected like a dog with a cone of shame on.

A dear friend gifted me an excellent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, and as I read it, I remembered being confused in high school about the various scandals during his Administration, and completely demoralized about the failure of Reconstruction.  Now I see that the persistence of implications of crookedness is bound up with the defeat of Reconstruction.  The capitalist press has skin in the game; they profit from misery.  More on that later…

More than most people, I develop a strong rooting interest for ideas and people in the past, and it grieves me when I see those ideas and people snuffed out by venal competitors.  Mr. Cormeny, one of my favorite teachers, said that he loved history because you don’t need to take sides.  I could never do that.  I’m always on a side.

I used to think that the US is a young country, and I was impressed by the history evident in everyday life in places like Vienna, where I spent a few months in college.  It struck me that Vienna still saw itself as the capital of a vast empire, only the world did not see it that way.

Boston, being one of the oldest cities in the country, has a self-regard (settle down, every dogpatch in the country does too), and they crow about the fabulous things in their past, most of which are far less fabulous the more you learn about them.

The challenge is, what is our duty when we learn that our parents, grandparents an so on all the way back to our revered Forefathers were all flawed humans who did bad things.  We owe them all the honor of seeing them clearly and correcting their mistakes.  

We are seeing today the fruits of more than 400 years of racial slavery culture.  It need not lead to more bloodshed.  I worry that it will.

MSM is a 7th Grade Cafeteria

I’m totally serious about this, by the way.  When I was a young buck, I learned that writers at NYT and WaPo, then known by their fuller names because we all had time to say words all the way to the end, as our brains were not yet made into mush by social media and texting, wrote in 7th grade level English.

This infuriated me.  Back in those days, I was pretty much in a rage all the time (unlike now: I’m only irate when I’m awake), so it did not really make any impression on the people around me that I ranted to.  Frankly, none of my ranting seems to have ever made any fucking difference except to irritate and annoy the people who could hear me, but that’s a topic for another day.

So now it’s decades later, and finally something profound has occurred to me.  Psychologists have noted that schoolteachers tend to display many of the same perspectival limitations of the people in their classes, so that a 7th grade teacher sometimes acts like a 7th grader.

That may help explain the teachers who “fall” for their students, among other commonly-remarked upon situations.

If you spend your time and energy translating a complex and troubling world into 7th-grade language, what does that do to your comprehension of that world?  Does the endless process of oversimplifying things affect your ability to understand and communicate nuance?

I say yes, of course, you will begin to diminish in your capacity to understand and explain.  Truly great teachers are capable of carrying on adult lives outside the classroom, and their adulthood informs and enriches their classroom selves as well, but how many of us have been fortunate to have even one truly great teacher?

For those who know me well (i.e. have suffered longest) may well be surprised to hear me call out passionately for maturity in perspective. (I happen to have a valid reason for being so delightfully impish, and, since it’s not my fault, I don’t intend to do anything about it).  Nevertheless, I am not on the hallowed television on a nightly basis, mis- or disinforming people for great googobs of money.  Nor am I swanning around the world and/or country on someone else’s dime, perpetrating that same crime of dis/misinfo in print or electronic media.

Over and over and over again, as I hear about a MSM take on a matter of public importance, I have to struggle to peel away the gibberish to get at the actual facts which provide the sometimes-feeble scaffold around the gelatinous mess they call a “story.”  Often, the unstated assumptions carry more weight than the observed fact and the story collapses.

An easy trick is to omit adjectives and adverbs.  What happens to the piece when all the emotive words are gone?  Is there anything of any consequence left?

The best reporting will rely on observed fact, and the best writers will step back and have the witness(es) tell the reader what they witnessed.  Neither of these commodities is common, so don’t get your hopes up.

Perform a little test of this for yourself if you don’t believe me.  Take any newspaper you like, and pick any story in it.  Do as I suggest and remove the unnecessary words (do you *need* to be told that a murder is “brutal”? Is there a gentle and kind way to usher someone off the mortal coil without justification???).  Reflect on the information conveyed to you in that article.  Is the event described because it is singular or novel?  Pick the same publication on any other date and see if the same subject is covered on that date.  I’ll wait; it will have been.

The newsroom is just like the cafeteria in 7th grade.  Jocks still talk jocking, nerds still talk nerding, etc.  Every dog day, the same damn topics cycle endlessly.  Didja see the game/show/movie?  No, no, and no, and I am heartily glad I did not.  My life would not have been enriched one iota by sharing in watching that “unforgettable” whatever it was that you will forget in a day.  I do watch games and shows and movies, mind you, and I *do* enjoy them; I do not find any value in being the first to have something to say about these experiences.  I find even less value in *hearing* what YOUR take might happen to be on them.

Now, back to the newspaper article: if there is any sort of organization (governmental agency, business or anything like that) named in the piece, ask yourself how much of what you are reading was written by the journalist taking credit for the piece, and how much was written by flacks paid by the org to put them in a better light?

Is there any inherent perspective that that org brings to the subject?  Are there other perspectives on that subject?  Yes, we know what MADD will say about drunk driving.  What do the drunks have to say?  How about the EMTs who get paid mad bills to save asses?  Or the sanitation workers who are paid to clean up all those accident scenes?  Only sorta kidding about this example; different perspectives almost always enrich understanding of a situation.  Funeral home directors might have an angle on traffic deaths…

Back to the article: What happens when you try different formations of the crucial sentence of the piece?  Are there other ways to express that information?  What biases or perspectives might have been served by minimizing or maximizing the threat or problem or issue described?

What happens to your own perspective when you try to approach things from different perspectives?  YOU FUCKING LEARN, YOU GODDAMN DOLT.

MSM is populated by 7th grade teachers, then, and only part of the reason why you hated all your teachers in 7th grade was your *own* hormonal/maturation situation.  The rest of it is probably that your 7th grade teachers were perpetual 7th graders themselves, and therefore palpably awful.

What Propublica, the 19th, and others ARE doing, and what Substack and Medium are promising to do (and what Huffington Post and the Intercept once seemed to be (but are NOT, mostly) offering): actual journalism.  Making a record of events to offer the reader a greater understanding of those events and the larger story of the times in which we live.  I follow a few blogs on Substack and elsewhere and podcasts along with the AP and the “publications” up above in order to curate for myself a better understanding of what the actual fuck is going on.

If I wasn’t lazy as shit I would tag all those places I follow, and would provide links to help you weaklings find that shit.  But you know what, you lazy asses?  You can Google with the best of ‘em.  Have at it.  Yeah, I know my SEO score sucks and I don’t care and fuck you.

I don’t subscribe to Russia Today or any other propaganda outlet (looking at you OANN, FOX, etc.) in order to “balance” my perspective, because a turning to pathological liar or sociopath for information is not likely to produce anything of value.  But I do try to keep tabs on what is going on.  It’s a lot of work, and I don’t get paid to do it, except that I feel like I have some remote sense of what is happening.

And guess what?  I’m pissed off.

Kryptonite

Ol’ Superman became a lil weakling (to which I can relate frfr) when he was confronted with the rock of his exploded home world. Having that one weakness kinda made the comicbook hero a little more relatable, I guess.

Achilles had his heel, after all, in a Greek epic poem kinda way. I always found that detail of the Iliad seriously lacking. Maybe the ancient mind worked differently or something, but the notion that you could cut a guy’s major leg tendon is not that big of an insight.

Communism as a political/economic system has its own Kryptonite: individual incentive. At least, dedicated capitalists see it that way. To the ambitious type of person, it is normal to be endlessly greedy, and it is inconceivable to them to be any other way.

That is their obsession, naturally, and those of us who do not yearn to own everything or control everything see things quite differently. There is plenty of personal satisfaction to be gained by performing well within a community-oriented social/political framework. But the point is that personal satisfaction isn’t the sole aim of life.

You cannot explain happiness to a greedy Gus in terms other than having more of whatever it is they crave: money, power, fame, control or poontang. There is no convincing them. Leave them to wallow in their obsession and move on to connecting with reasonable people who realize that we all matter or none of us do.

This whole pandemic thing has demonstrated how interconnected we all are, excepting those greedy Guses I spoke of. Forget them – do the right thing by your neighbors and keep your hands clean (literally and figuratively).

If we build up the idea that working with and for others is a good thing, we will all be better off.

1797>1789>1776

Symbolism is what leads people to wear buffalo horn hats and storm the US Capitol. It rots the brain.

We pledge allegiance to the flag every day before school as kids, but the words of the pledge become mush in the minds of many. Too often, the thing itself becomes an idol and the “republic, for which it stands” means nothing.

The real beginning of our flawed republic is not the 4th of July, 1776, but the 4th of March, 1789. That was the day that the ratified Constitution of the United States became effective. That should be the day that we celebrate the triumph of democracy over monarchy.

People like to cite the Revolution as a rebellion against tyranny, but in practical terms, it was undoing monarchy as our form of government.

Even that change was not finalized until March 4, 1797, when the first President of the United States peacefully ceded power to the second. George Washington could have ruled the US as long as he lived. He could have made “President” mean the same thing as “king,” but he chose a different path.

We should make March 4th a national holiday, because in two different years of critical importance to the idea of democracy, that day was the day the republic was made.

Credibility

How often must a person tell lies before they are known to be a liar? What about the moron who isn’t even creative enough to think up the lie but gladly repeats it? Then there’s the poor schmucks who are so dense they believe the lies and also spread it to their dopey pals.

Integrity matters. In this age of being able to publish ourselves using a phone or computer, what prevents us from disseminating falsehoods? Discipline in communication takes work, and if there’s anything we know about Uhmurrica, it’s that aversion to work is the state religion. Entire industries and gigantic fortunes are made on the premise of “saving work”. Even lying down is too much work for these unbelievable slobs, and they pay high prices to have furniture that will lay down FOR THEM.

Speaking of industries, what would you say about an entire field whose business model is built on conflict? Not direct conflict, like a corporate mercenary entity (though that is a thing too), but in extending conflict and sometimes even creating it out of whole cloth.

In the nineteenth century, newspapers in the U.S. were often described as “yellow journalism” and subsequently derided as incredible by echelons of history teachers and professors. Some of those even take a smug satisfaction that nowadays, of course, those things are impossible.

The nature of story is such that an emotionally charged tale carries more weight and travels farther than a cheerful one does. The nature of temptation is such that if something is rewarded, a repetition is almost guaranteed. So, if a newspaper or TV news program is expected to be profitable, it will always present us stories of conflict. This is as inevitable as gravity. To expect any other outcome is madness.

Even the established “non-profit” news sources like PBS and NPR mimic the mainstream for-proft press, a fact that reflects their leadership having been trained in that mode and unable to break free of it.

There are a number of independent news outlets that have sprung up of late that hew to a different model: that of telling the truth to its audience. Some have defined niches for themselves, like the 19th (referring to the Amendment and presenting stories about women and their struggle for equality). Others have a defined mission, like ProPublica, which pursues investigations and presents us their results in online-newspaper form. Still others, like Bellingcat, are collectives of online researchers and reporters whose work is presented in social media posts or email newsletters.

Consumers of information should do the work of understanding the perspective of whatever they read, and putting that in a larger context. But that is work, and work is something we cannot expect Uhmurricans to do.

Are We Coup?

Chauvinism prevents Uhmurricans from seeing ourselves as we see other countries. We mythologize ourselves as somehow select or special (in a good way).

It’s quite common for Uhmurricans to set apart their particular hometown as extra-super special or great, and they usually get annoyed or offended if you question their premise.

That leads to jingoism etc. and the end result is failure to participate meaningfully in the democratic process. Which, in turn, leads us to the present moment, in which a wannabe fascist is staging a slow-cooked coup. He’s doing so with the active participation of the political party which had once been known as the champion of the rule of law, and which was founded on the premise of justice for all.

Midwives to the destruction of democracy are the media, which by and large are the comms ops of the billionaire class, and even more suspect than any of the major sports leagues.

If we make it through this, it will be only down to mid-level bureaucrats with honor, and black voters. This author believes that we crackas owe a long-standing debt to black people, and that we better pay while the price is still low.

The Problem with Elites

People have different levels of ability in every possible dimension of human activity.  This subject has enough fascination to a great majority of people apparently, but I confess I am deeply mystified by this.

Clayton Kershaw throws the ball a lot harder than I do.  (So does the softest-throwing girl at St. Bertha’s School for Emaciated Girls, but never mind that.)  Michael Jordan plays hoops better’n me. Tiger Woods, Tom Fucking Brady etc etc etc. From sports we pivot to the arts, and we have Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Marlon Brando, Pablo Picasso and on and on.

Are these capable people deserving of admiration for their abilities?  Yes, without a doubt. But is it right and good that we should adulate them to such a degree that they are exempt from moral, ethical or even legal boundaries on their behavior?

Harvey Weinstein is not possible in a society in which people are valued equally.  The desire to exert raw power over another person is completely toxic and never laudable.  That will be more explored in another essay, however. For the current purpose, let’s focus on elitism as a thing.

For many high-performing academics, elite schools serve to weed out the dull motherfuckers and to allow these special Hogfarts fuckforks to suck each other’s dicks.  I went to a fully middlebrow state school and remember well having frustrating conversations with people nominally engaged in higher learning yet entirely absent from the radar screen at my level.  And that level ain’t exalted, people; I dragged home a D in precalc.

I revel in being able to relate well to a person who wields a mop for a living about as well as I do with someone who commands a gigantic corporation or foundation.  But I don’t value these two types differently.  One makes a floor clean; the other goes to meetings and decides things.  I have a practical bent of mind and I value a clean goddam floor.

I do not kid myself that academic credentials are somehow beyond reproach.  The education that public school students get varies tremendously from one district to another, and within each district as well.  Some are fortunate, as I was, to reside in an area well-served by its schools. Others are thoroughly screwed by an indifferent society, usually for racist reasons.

I once interviewed (and got) a job raising money for an independent school.  I told the head that if she was looking for somebody to sell people on getting Binky into Yale, she can keep looking.  But if she wanted someone to help create a truly equitable society through education, I might be her boy.

We’ll get back to her in the chapter on power, but in the end I was able to raise some good money for this school, as they had an explicit ethic around equity and I appealed to parents on that score.

Returning to the notion of one human being worth more than another – it’s ludicrous enough to value one over another on the basis of ability, but it is staggeringly dumb to do so on the basis of wealth.

Wealth as a proxy for quality is utterly laughable.  All the Binkies at Yale whose Mummies and Dahling Daddies swan around in fancy clothes and belong to country clubs can bite me.

Most elitist institutions do not weed out the less-excellent.  They circle the wagons around the hopeless Spaldings who would have no hope in a world truly decided by merit alone.  Being born in the right family is not a value I treasure (and, yes, very much influenced by my having been born in a deeply not-right-family).

Country clubs, private schools, Daughters of the Uhmurrican Revulsion, and the list could go on a hell of a lot longer, seem so very innocent and lovely to the lily-shaded people whose bank balance would support ten thousand hungry children in perpetuity, and yet to me they serve a darker purpose, to create an exclusive group who seek to consolidate their vast holdings by merging one family with another to create mega-rich dynasties out of merely super-rich families.

I know and love many people who were educated at elite universities, and many of them find my views on elitism troubling.  They congratulate themselves (justifiably, most of them) for having done well academically as well as seeking to challenge themselves to greater accomplishment.  Both very laudable things – but all of these lovely and wonderful people were shaped by the privileges they enjoyed as a result of the accident of their birth to a family with means.  That they made good use of that advantage does not erase the advantage.

Consider my ill-begotten family.  For all the negatives we can boast (and BOY, can we ever make negatives), we are super-privileged.  Dad was a medium-successful Army Medical Corps officer so we had steady money and a smidge of prestige.  Most importantly, we are white, which makes the practical matter of money and a glimpse of access almost untouchable.

Despite these baked-in advantages, my sibs and I did not grow up to be world-beaters by any means.  If I was capable of shutting up long enough to let people’s assumptions about my possibilities impact my career, I would be way more successful.

From the lofty heights of inborn advantage, people are only too willing to believe their advantages are justly given and rightfully wielded.  What seems like a simple and laudable thing, like helping a friend’s kid get that job, or introducing the neighbor’s kid to an influential person, actually is tightening the screws of privilege down so that a poor kid, an outsider, a minority, is less able to get ahead even though they may have immense talent and possibility. 

It is impossible to claim elites are a good thing for society without also implicitly supporting exclusion as a good thing for society.  I strongly believe that exclusion is bad for society, and that it serves to inhibit the public’s benefit from the expression of talent of all of its people.

The Problem with Celebrity Worship

Before I get all the way into this topic, allow me to state up front that I am a hopelessly middle-class fella, with a belief in the possibility that people of talent could rise to the level of their ability, if only the system did not prevent that for no good reason (to say nothing of the awful people who will prevent others from succeeding for less reason than that).

Celebrity worship begins early and gets deeper over time.  Particularly in households in which televisions play ceaselessly from dawn until well past a reasonable bedtime, Uhmurricans lurve them famous peoples.  While also at the same time loathing them.

It begins at school, where boys get better treatment than they deserve (this is even true if they’re black or brown, although the margins for them are much tighter), and girls have to frickin yell to be heard above all the “actually”-ing.  (This is not the essay about misogyny, but it sure is colored by it.)

By middle school (or junior high, as it was in my boyhood), boys have been sorted into those with athletic ability and those who don’t matter.  Girls, as I hinted before, don’t matter until they grow tits, and then it’s only the tits that matter. Okay, a sweet ass helps too. (Girls with athletic ability are dikes and don’t matter).

If a boy demonstrates an awful lot of athletic ability, his treatment becomes simply incredible.  No amount of misbehavior or poor grace will be punished in any way, to the point of tolerating and even abetting criminal activity.  While the lowly common boys will be expected to follow the rules, the ruling class of boy will be bound only by their personal code of ethics or morals.  And there are fewer Orel Hershisers than O.J. Simpsons among elite athletes.

So this society which pretends not to be a class-based one has created a class of person who does not have to follow the same rules: the star athlete.  

A second area of proto-celebrity is developed later in school, when drama class gives the more attractive boys and girls the means to display themselves to everyone.

Long ago, the founders of this great nation looked to Enlightenment thinkers for how to organize a political system not built around having royals, nobles and class as its basis.  Being a dude was crucial, as was owning land. That got away from having the unwashed rabble and chicks ruining everything with their community-improving foolishness.

Not having a monarchy means not tying political stability to heredity and suffering whenever a ruling family runs out of eligible heirs.  This was mostly brilliant for a good long time, until Uhmurricans started to worship celebrities and the wealthy with the same idiotic fervor that simpering pro-monarchists lick the boots of the ruling class.

So now we have created a neo-feudal society in which being famous amounts to a peerage, and those of us who are not “known” are expected to do the bidding of the famous.  This has deep political and social effects – the rule of law is weakened when Michael Jordan doesn’t get called for breaking the rules. The NBA made way more money when they stopped enforcing rules on the stars.

The NFL and the NCAA (and to a lesser extent the NHL too) have also adopted the “if you’re a star, they let you get away with anything” attitude that has long been true of Hollywood.

It’s also true for politically prominent people.  The Kennedys make a fine example. The patriarch made his money in a criminal enterprise: smuggling an illegal product into the US.  If we said he was a drug smuggler, there might be a different connotation to it, but essentially that’s what he was. We give him a pass because the product was booze and we all love booze so NBD.  He did business with Al Capone, and we have freaking bus tours to visit sites made famous by his crimes.

Imagine if someone were to suggest starting a bus tour through the South Side of Chicago to visit places El Rukn guys shot Gangster Disciples.  But this isn’t about racism, though, and we’ll come back to the never-ending abuse that African-Americans have had to put up with for hundreds of years.  In a whole different essay.

If rules don’t apply to some people for no reason (and I don’t count “making money” as a valid reason to prefer one person over another), then the rules lose their meaning.

The anarchists have won.  We live in an oligarchy in which money runs the whole game and nothing any of the normal schlubs care about has any meaning.  Some people have replaced reverence for country or polity or community with absurd and meaningless sporting teams. People actually fight one another about fucking sports, and not only when they had money on one side or another.

I believe man was created equal, and by “man” I include everyone in the human race.  Don’t @ me with any “but dunking/sprinting/ball-throwing” bullshit either. When food and shelter were solely provided through brute strength, caveman rules maybe made sense.  But we have fucking tools now so calm the fuck down about your muscles already. Oh, and guess what? Caveman big hunter not so much – studies show that nutrition of prehistoric humans and pre-human apes were very much fed by gatherers, i.e. the skirts.

If we are all equal, we govern ourselves according to an agreed-upon set of rules.  In our former system (now dead), within the bounds of those rules we were ALL free.

But if we are not all treated equally, then NO ONE is free.  If those rules are not enforced on everyone equally, then NO ONE is free.  If the rules are devoid of meaning then we are REALLY VERY BADLY FUCKED.

Alla yall who love pretending that the Wild West was won by upstanding paragons of virtue have really gotta crack a book once in a goddam while.  The West was people by no-hopers and last-chancers and terrible people who couldn’t get along with others in their original homes. When they were beyond the reach of ordinary society and its rules, they adopted a universally shitty (and ancient) method of settling disputes by resort to violence.

Well, if you all keep on licking the backsides of the famous, you’re gonna get your goddam wishes and live in your so-revered Wild Fucking West, and see how you like unchecked toxic masculinity.  I sincerely hope I’m wrong, if only because I’m one of the craven townspeople who will get shot in the first scene of this movie just to establish what a badass the heavy is.

IF you believe that democracy (as a political system, in which one person gets one vote, etc.) is better than oligopoly, or corporacracy, or kleptocracy, or or or, then you must also have a belief in the rule of law, which is the thing that creates the system in which democracy can happen.

The only interesting thing about reality TV is how primitive people get about politics.  Any human system, no matter how informal or temporary, is a political system with its own rules.  The ACTUAL gummint system we gots here in Uhmurrica is on its last legs.

As I write these furious few lines, voters in 53+ US states and territories will largely ignore the election, leaving the desperate few to do the work of the entire polity.  The stakes could not be any higher, and yet most of the mulish dolts that pass for citizens in this benighted backwash of a backwater will not bother to participate.

Here we go again

Well, I guess it’s time. Eleven years ago, I stopped publishing as DannyWanny for a variety of reasons. That world now seems impossibly innocent, and a LOT of the stuff I bitched about on that first blog have gotten worse.

For one thing, some previously-respected outlets of mainstream media have gone from being simply dumb to being actively evil. That’s a little distressing.

Nuance has become rarer in public discourse, as has patience and forebearance. Some of that is down to garden-variety panic, frustration, and other petty emotions that infect us all. But some of that is down to agents of dissension who operate to sow and extend discord among Uhmurricans, who are only too glad to be led into pointless and self-destructive conflict with other Uhmurricans.

If you are seeking conspiracies to cling to, seek elsewhere and never darken my (virtual) door again. If you are seeking a perspective to help you retain your healthy skepticism while still also retaining the ability to believe in something worthwhile, then welcome.

I will not post every day, and I will post a variety of types of discourse. Mainly essays, but the occasional screed or rant. I had been in the habit of posting my transportation funtimes on social media, but after a period of transition on the one site, which is thoroughly and completely devoted to evil and must be broken up with a blunt instrument, my musings on the vagaries of riding the CTA will appear only here. There will be attempts at humor. In every category, your comments are welcome until they are not.

I will not hesitate to throw you out of here if you engage in name-calling, hatefulness, misogyny, racism, monarchism, or any other vile thing that I decide must stop.