Brilliant at Breakfast Rebooted

The Infinite Brisket Project: A Passover Story

2024-04-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

I received an invitation from the local Humanistic Jewish group to their Passover seder potluck. "That might be fun," I thought. "An excuse to make a brisket!" So I prepared for a trip to Costco to get a brisket.

Then I received an email from the organizer of the seder asking if I could make either a halal or kosher brisket, since there will be three observant Muslims as guests. Well sure, I can do a kosher brisket in the name of shining some light in the darkness that is the Middle East these days; the question is where I can find one. So I posted on the Triangle subreddit -- "Where can I find a kosher brisket?" It's not that I didn't want to find a halal brisket. And the event as a whole was not kosher. But apparently Muslims can eat kosher meat but not the other way around. And honestly, I go to Middle Eastern markets a lot and they skew towards halal chicken and lamb, and not much beef at all. And brisket isn't really the Official Meat of the Middle East the way it seems to be for Jews of eastern European ancestry. The best answer I got was "Ask Chabad."

So I call Chabad in Raleigh, and they say the Food Lion near them has it. Great! I call the Food Lion and they say yes, we have it. But then I remember that I have been sick since the day after I got home from Florida, and the thought of shlepping to Raleigh makes me want a nap. So I think "Where can I get one online?" And after minimal searching, Goldbelly seems like the most likely bet, and sure enough, they come through via Charm City Kosher. Of course I had to take out a small mortgage and cut off an arm to pay for it, but I was able to order a 5 lb. glatt kosher brisket to arrive Tuesday the 16th.

Then I start thinking: brisket cooks down to nothing, and there will be 40 people there. Even if only half eat brisket, that's still not a lot. And since my motto for feeding a crowd is Go Big or Go Home, I decide to get a non-kosher brisket too, just in case. And I'll label them accordingly. So I go to Harris Teeter and get their last brisket.

The next morning there's an email from UPS that my package from Goldbelly is delayed. "Shit," I think. "It's going to be thawed and ruined when it gets here because it's 80 degrees out, and then I'll have to fight with both UPS AND Goldbelly." I remembered that a friend had told me that Trader Joe's has kosher brisket. So I run over to Trader Joe's and get two 2-lb. briskets.

By this point I have spent spent almost $250 on brisket.

The next day, UPS says they'll be delivering that day. At 2 PM, the box arrives. All the dry ice is gone, but the brisket is still frozen. HUZZAH!! Except now I am here with 13 pounds of various brisket. I start thinking of who I will be able to palm some of this off on.

Thursday I start cooking. I go over my recipe with The Wifely Person to make sure that everything is OK for Passover, because if I'm going to spend all that money on kosher brisket, I'm damn well going to keep it kosher. The ketchup has sugar, not corn syrup, so that's OK. I take a break because I'm wondering what the problem with corn is, and I consult with Dr. Google about kitniyot.

Via Exploring Judaism I learn that kitniyot are loosely translated as legumes and refer to foods like beans, corn, rice, and others. The major concern of the authorities at the time was that these items could become mixed with the prohibited items and one might accidentally eat something they shouldn't.

But it gets even better, because only Ashkenazic (Eastern European ancestry) Jews are forbidden to eat kitniyot on Passover. For Sephardic Jews (see my post on Jamaican Jewish food) it's OK. But apparently some rabbis have decided that it is OK after all to eat kitniyot on Passover. And now I am thinking that rabbis arguing for hundreds of years about what is kosher for Passover and what isn't has to be the most Jewish thing ever, because if you know one thing about Jewish people, it's that we argue about everything. The most loving Jewish families will argue. It's in our DNA.

Now at this point I have to remind you that I am not religious AT ALL. I didn't grow up religious. I don't sing the prayers because they have tunes and I don't know the tunes so even transliteration doesn't save me. I am like the goy at the shabbos dinner except that I'm supposed to know this stuff and I don't. This tends to give me very strong I Do Not Fit In Anywhere vibes, which is kind of distressing these days.

But I digress.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure if I would have needed kosher wine, but as it turns out, it doesn't matter, because I somehow remember that Muslims can't even use wine for cooking. So I have to find a substitute, and I really don't feel like running out to a grocery store for pomegranate molasses. I start thinking maybe some beef broth with some vinegar, but I then remember that most vinegar is just sour wine, and I'm not sure I can use that.

I consult various YouTube videos and web sites, where I learn a lot also about halal that I didn't know before. Different sheikhs and other experts on halal agree on vinegar about as much as the rabbis agree on kitniyot, and at this point I am thinking about the Middle East and wondering what the hell we're fighting over because aren't we awfully similar, especially the arguing? And actually, that kind of makes it all make sense when you think about it.

I call two Middle Eastern groceries and ask what vinegars are halal. The owner of one of them says he doesn't know, and the other says all vinegars are halal because they cannot make you intoxicated. And yet some of the YouTube experts said differently.

Anyway, since at this point I want to be sure our guests can eat this brisket (assuming they aren't vegetarian but one wheelhouse at a time), because far be it for me to make matters worse. So one web site suggests cranberry juice. BRILLIANT! I just happen to have a bottle. So I mix a half-cup of cranberry juice with a half-cup of water, toss in about a teaspoon of sugar, and what I get is a reasonable approximation of cheap pinot noir from Aldi, which is my cooking wine of choice.

At last I am prepared to make my customary brisket recipe (below, and it works for any pot roast), satisfied that it will be OK for all but the Orthodox, but this seder is for Humanistic Judaism which is kind of Judaism for atheists, agnostics, the intermarried, and other heathens. I make the recipe using the Trader Joe's briskets and four oven-hours later it's done to perfection and lo and behold, the cranberry juice worked!

I made the other brisket the next day, and brought a huge pan of brisket and carrots, with gravy consisting of the pan juices, onions and carrots pureed with an immersion blender, and people commented on how moist it is, which is really, along with cake, one of the rare times you WANT to hear the word "moist."

And you too can make this delicious brisket. Use any pot roast cut you like, it's just as delicious. Cook the onions longer than it says to; you want that sweetness when they start turning a bit brown.

For those celebrating, I wish you a zissen Pesach! And I hope that someday we can all stop arguing.

It's been a while...

2023-10-11T14:42:00.013-07:00

I doubt that anyone still reads this blog. After all, I haven't exactly been edifying in the last few years. I've written some things at Facebook that I just didn't have the energy to port over here, but mostly I just find that the minute I try to opine on this crazy world, all I want to do is take a nap.

October 5, 2023 marked 10 years since Mr. Brilliant departed this mortal coil. It's hard to believe that it's been a decade. If I look at specific events, I can fathom the elapsed time, but that it is ten years and I am now closer to age 70 than 60 is simply incomprehensible. In these years, I moved to North Carolina, made new friends, retired nearly six years ago, and became eligible for Medicare. The two young cats I moved here with are now old cats, one of them likely on the cusp of hyperthyroidism. It seems impossible that it's been 10 years since I dealt with this with Maggie, and that SHE is gone nearly a decade.

I thought that the 5th this year would somehow feel different from earlier years; as if 10 years is somehow momentous. But the truth is that time is a sneaky thing. 10 years didn't feel much different from 9 or 8. Mr. Brilliant is gone, he's not coming back, and more of his things have been jettisoned every year. What I do notice is that fall, slow to come to North Carolina, has a melancholy feel that it didn't have before Mr. B. died. Perhaps it's because pushing age 70 with a steamroller is the autumn of my own life, and we all know what comes next.

It seems silly to be talking about insignificant things like how I feel about having lost a husband ten years ago when there are people being murdered in Israel and once again, it all comes down to the toxic stew of religion and politics.

I am what I call "culturally Jewish." Perhaps it's dangerous to even SAY the "J" word out loud, given the rise of neo-Naziism in not just the right-wing fringes of the hinterlands, but in the actual Republican Party leadership. Buried yesterday in the news about all-out war in Israel as the result of a suspiciously large assault by Hamas over the weekend, is the news that 23-and-Me data specifically identifying Ashkenazic Jews in the US was leaked on the dark web, which to me is an indicator that the forces of Hitleresque Naziism really ARE on the rise and this time there will be no hiding. They are no longer the fever dreams of paranoiacs like my mother, who insisted that the reason she couldn't make friends in the same town where I built a robust friendship circle after moving here 15 years later is because "they don't like Jews here." Last week there was a bomb threat at the Reform synagogue/JCC here in town, and a number of neighborhoods have seen anti-Semitic flyers distributed recently. Hatred of Jews has come to this liberal enclave in North Carolina.

My particular cultural Judaism is a function of our history, which has created an anxious people, cognizant of the fact that when push comes to shove, we are going to be blamed for everything. It has been like this for 2000 years and there are no signs that it will ever disappear.My Jewish identity is also about food, and the irony and sarcasm we carry within us, best encapsulated as "They tried to kill us, we survived, now let's eat." It's bagels and brisket and matzo ball soup and the mystery of gefilte fish which no one likes but many feel obligated to eat. It's a certain Yiddish-inflected speech pattern made famous by mid-20th century Borscht Belt comedians. It's a sense of humor so dry and often bitter that it's the verbal equivalent of the horseradish used at the passover seder. And it's a feeling deep in our souls that we are part of this long and trouble-filled thread of humanity.

Last night I happened to catch the end of "Schindler's List," a movie I've seen at least a half-dozen times in the last 30 years since its release (can it really be 30 years?). The scene where the film goes from monochrome to color, and then the Schindler Jews who were alive in 1993 and the actors who played them put stones on Schindler's grave just rips me to shreds every time. And I broke into the kind of gut-tearing sobs that I only have when it hits me yet again that Mr. Brilliant is gone and I will never see him again, and those have lessened over time. I cried for those murdered by those people who seem to always exist just to wipe Jews off the map. I cried for the relatives in old sepia home movies who returned to Poland from what may have been a visit, or may have been an immigration, only to die in the camps a few years later. I cried for the dead at the Tree of Life synagogue, and for the countless Jews and Palestinians who continue to die in this endless conflict over a piece of land in the desert. And I cried for our miserable species, that just can't seem to ever successfully harness our better natures on a large scale.

Israel Brum and Chana Jakubowicz Brum
my maternal great-grandparents
Died in one of Hitler's camps

About a week before Hamas somehow breached Israel intelligence and to date massacred nearly 2000 people in their own would-be Final Solution, The Wifely Person told me of her confidence that the increasing number of Israelis protesting the Netanyahu regime would eventually prevail, and that I should consider Israel as a safe Plan B for when, as seems inevitable, the white nationalists take over the US. I've been skeptical about just how safe it would be in a country where the autocratic corrupt leader is allied with religious fanatics as much as the would be autocratic corrupt leader in the US who wants to be restored to the White House is. The reality is, as it has always been, that if you have one drop of Jewish blood, there are always a sizable number of people who want you dead, want your children dead, and want all memory of your existence wiped from history. And I recommend you click the link above because The Wifely Person knows a lot more about the history of that piece of land than I do, even taking the religious aspect out of the equation.

I do know this, however: I know that Hamas doesn't give a rat's ass about the Palestinians. They have done NOTHING for the Palestinians. Using the Palestinian people as pawns and as human shields and an excuse to eradicate the state of Israel is vile. And violence begets violence, as we see now. But when you have babies being beheaded, and women being marched through the streets with blood flowing from between their legs because they have been raped to mutilation -- and then beheaded, and the rest of the horrors we've seen, compassion for people who have been used at pawns by butchers requires a degree of level-headedness that even the most lapsed Jew who has turned their back on the religious part of Jewish being and Jewish life, is going to find challenging.

I know that out of the gate there were those who wanted to "both sides" this; to assume that this was just another incidence of "If you poke the bear enough, sooner or later the bear will wake up" under the idea that it's up to Israel to stop this -- as if they could. As if Israel refusing to fight back when the rockets are fired from Gaza -- as if turning the other cheek, as we're always supposed to do, would work. It never has. The Jews in Germany and Poland in the 1930s tried to turn the other cheek, and look what happened to them. I'm willing to state that most of those who live in Israel would LOVE to live in a land where they don't have to be afraid; would LOVE to not have to worry about when the rockets will hit their home. But the keyword is "live." And that is something Hamas does not want.

Mr. Brilliant worked for an Israeli company for a while in early 2001. He had to go to Jerusalem, where they were headquartered, for training. He would email me telling me of sitting on his balcony at the King David Hotel watching the explosions. A few months after he returned, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 16 Israelis, including 7 children, and wounded 130 at the Sbarro pizzeria where he'd stopped while he was there most evenings for pizza on his way back to the hotel from work. But for a few weeks time, he might have died then. Kind of makes me feel thankful he made it to 2013.

The cycle of violence that has characterized the Middle East for certainly as long as I've been alive, has proven futile time after time after time after time. And I find myself feeling like the exhausted parent who says "I've had it! I don't care who started it, it stops NOW!!! Now both of you, go to your rooms until you can behave!" But there's no "both sides"-ing this. This is not about wayward children or even claims to territory. Today it is about terrorism. It is a holocaust with a lower body count (so far). And let's face it -- it's hard to argue AGAINST the existence of a Jewish state, when the desire among not just the Islamic world, but also the Christian one, to see Jews eradicated, rears its ugly head again and again and again. Whether it's through terrorism or being driven into the sea when Jesus comes back, it's always about the extermination of unconverted Jews. It has always been thus.

After 9/11, Americans rallied behind George W. Bush. I hated Bush with the fire of a thousand suns. I knew all about the National Guard business, and the Roger Stone/Matt Schlapp-masterminded Brooks Brothers Riot. In fact, an explosive Newsweek article about the Florida election shenanigans hit the newsstand the day before the attacks. But I remember saying to Mr. Brilliant, "I know we hate him, but we're stuck with him and all we can do is hope he knows what he's doing." So I can't even be in opposition to those people who were protesting a week ago but now are rallying behind the Netanyahu regime, because they may hate him, but they're stuck with him for now and hope he knows what he's doing. It's what you do when your country is under attack. The other stuff has to be put aside for now.

It's not easy being someone with a strong Jewish soul but without the religion. I can't even describe what it is, but I know I feel it. But it's difficult, because if it's not about the whole Biblical thing, and about a deity-ordained right to a piece of land, and about the rituals, then what is it. Is it just about feelings and the generational PTSD that manifests itself in free-floating anxiety? Is it just respect for the struggles of those who came before? Or something else? I do not know. But here's what I do know. I know that my heart hurts. I know that I feel disappointed that the world is still doing this. I know now what I always denied when my mother was alive -- that there really are an awful lot of people in the world who hate me and everyone like me. And I know that I can sit here with my non-Jewish last name and my atheism/agnosticism, but that doesn't change the fact that Hamas, and Iran, and yes, the white nationalist Christian Dominionists here in the US, and all those like them, want me dead BECAUSE I AM DESCENDED FROM JEWS, irrespective of my ties to some kind of undefined Jewishness.

I admit that I am a conflict avoider and people pleaser. I spent my childhood desperately wanting quiet, in a home where there was constant fighting and screaming and arguing, followed by years when all I wanted was to avoid having my mother explode with rage over some minor infraction. I am on a break from Facebook and most cable news and have hesitated to write anything about this because the last week has made me feel like that 9-year-old that I was over a half-century ago, sitting under the kitchen stairs hugging my knees and just wishing for the screaming to stop. I'm tired. And I'm frustrated. And I am terribly, terribly sad. And I am, for really the first time in my life, terrified. Because until now I've been able to hide from the reality that a good chunk of the world wants people like me dead. There's no hiding anymore. All that's left is to hope that when they come, they make it fast.

The Movie that Changed My Life

2023-02-13T17:07:00.005-08:00

It's hard to believe it was 25 years ago. I'd been one of those Titanic rivetheads since the age of 11, when I read A Night to Remember in the sixth grade. I remember reading the book multiple times, though I can't remember what made this story so interesting to a girl who was beginning to have crushes on boys, who'd just begun wearing a bra, and who was alas, the first in her class to sprout pimples. But it was. Perhaps that was the beginning of my social conscience.That was 1966.

Fast forward to 1997. I'd been waiting for Titanic to come out ever since I first heard that the guy who directed "Aliens" would be directing it, that Kate Winslet, who I already adored from "Sense and Sensibility" and Leonardo DiCaprio, who had already shown serious chops in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy's Life and The Basketball Diaries (all of which I'd seen) were going to star. Clearly this wasn't going to be just another throwaway treatment.

Like so many others, mostly women, I walked out of my first viewing a blubbering mess. I was 42 years old, I'd been married for a decade already, and I'd never been a starry-eyed romantic. So at first I didn't know what it was about this movie that touched me so much. I knew the background story, I had never believed in love at first sight, so what the hell was it?

In this quest to find out What It Was About This Movie, I became a writer.

The Aftermath, Part I: In Which I Become A Film Critic

When I need to work something out in my head, I start writing. And before I even knew what I was doing, I'd written my first movie review. I submitted that review of Titanic to a now-long-gone site called Virtual Urth that was looking for writers, and lo and behold -- I was brought on a film critic (unpaid, of course, as most internet writing STILL is). That one dashed-off review led to another, and then another, and then an invitation to join the Online Film Critics Society. Through the OFCS, I met a number of other online film critics,, many of whom are still toiling away decades later. I had started designing and building web sites for my REAL job, so I departed Virtual Urth and until 2005, wrote reviews at two of my own web sites, both of which no longer exist, thanks to rising hosting fees and the end of static web sites. A bunch of us later went off and created the pretentiously-named Cinemarati: The Web Alliance for Film Commentary, which hosted a lively messageboard, held annual awards (which enabled us to get cool things like Academy Award screeners and press passes to film festivals) and showcased the best of our collective work.

I saw Titanic two more times in the theater, and by then I was a regular on all the movie messageboards. And reading what people who might not have read everything they could for the last 30 years about this particular sinking eventually made me realize what moved me so much: It was that photo montage at the end of the movie and what it symbolized.

Over time, our Cinemarati web host was collapsing, our messageboard software and database proved to be not sufficiently robust, and we'd reached the end of my ability to manage it. So Cinemarati fell by the wayside, and in 2005, so did my nascent career as an unpaid film critic.

But I digress.

The Aftermath, Part II: The Fictioning

I noticed something while I was reading the Titanic messageboards that bothered me, and it was the number of young women who both truly believed that Jack was Rose's One True Love and that she pined away for him forever. That this was missing the entire point of the movie, even the sledgehammer moment (in retrospect) of the "Madame Bijou" sketch, never occurred to them. Now I hadn't yet dealt with tragedy in my own life, but I was old enough to understand that life consists of a certain amount of Getting On With It.

I'd always had a certain amount of contempt for fan fiction. I'd never been able to write fiction worth a damn myself. I had no idea how one came up with characters, never mind stories for them. Nevertheless, fan fiction, because of its pre-existing characterizations, seemed a kind of cheat -- something not really creative and a rip-off of someone else's work. I knew that fan fiction was a big thing in sci-fi circles, but in my literary snobbery (and lack of sci-fi fandom myself), I never would have considered writing any.

Until....

Titanic was a movie that spawned a thousand fan fictions, and they tended to fall into two categories: "Jack lived and they lived happily ever after" and "Rose never got over Jack and she was sad forever." I was 43 years old and I was long over being attracted to tragic love stories. Besides, this wasn't one of them. There is a short clip near the end of the movie where we see a montage of photos of Rose's life after Titanic. Of course we see her riding a horse with the Santa Monica pier in the background, but there's also a headshot, a photo of Rose in aviator gear next to an airplane, and numerous photos that indicate a life filled with travel. And THAT was the story I wanted to tell. I've always found tragic love stories to be more than a little toxic. There were always girls who had read Wuthering Heights a million times and were madly in love with Heathcliff. That wasn't me. There was a real woman, a real story in Rose and damn it, I was going to be the one to tell it. None of this pining away crap. Rose was going to Get On With It.

There was a skeleton of a story there already. For me it started in California, because I'd always been interested in the silent film era. So I did research. Lots of it. I wanted no anachronisms and I wanted to include some actual history and actual people. I found a site called Taylorology, which still exists and that went into excruciating detail about the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the entire scandal-ridden Hollywood of the 1920s. I bought books about Iowa. I included actual shops there that appeared in those books. I included popular songs with links to sound files. And as I wrote, suddenly I was creating characters: Rose's eventual husband was named Charlie and he looked kind of like a young John Cusack. Charlie was a young widower who lived with his much-older sister Margaret who I envisioned as being Sarah Plain and Tall-vintage Glenn Close. And there were more. I'd be out in the yard planting impatiens and suddenly there was a character. It was as if they were unincarnated souls to whom I had opened my mind and they were asking me to tell their stories. And then my mind would "cast the movie," and as soon as I had the actor's voice, I had the characterization.

There were others of us -- a small army of women in their 20s through 40s, all writing our own version of that "and then what happened?" story. And some of us were pretty good. I teamed up with a young woman I'll call Kate, who was also an American social history buff who had the same vision that I did. And we came up with an outline that evolved into plans for a multigenerational sweeping family epic. We took a few liberties with the source material, but what we envisioned was a ripping yarn indeed.She was great at place and setting, and I had a way with dialogue. We'd edit each other's work and it was a truly collaborative effort.

So much of any fan fiction is abysmal, but there were a few of us who had some ability to write. I still have what some of the others from our informal little collective wrote. Some of it is pretty good. And we put it all online. I was lucky that I had a writing partner in Kate who was far more versed in web site creation than I was, and set up a beautiful site for us that was up for a very long time. And people liked it. I would get emails from people who loved what we were doing, and in fact, there is one reader from Hong Kong who STILL emails me every now and then, mostly about politics, but that's staying power.. Alas, not even the Wayback Machine has it anymore. But I do, at least the parts that I wrote.

Of course we never finished it. Just like Rose, Kate got married and had two children, and I got a job where there was actual work to do, and I was being an aspiring film critic, and then a blogger. But there was one original character who came to me and all these years later she is still wanting me to tell her story.

This character is a young widow, and from the minute she came to me, I knew her. I felt her in my bones. Her husband dies by suicide during the Great Depression, and I swear I felt her grief in my own chest. I KNEW her grief in a very profound and visceral way. And when Mr. Brilliant died nearly a decade after I created her, and I experienced that heaviness first hand from my own loss, it felt oddly familiar. And I will always wonder how. This character is spoiled and self-indulgent and she goes through hell before coming out the other side. There's a lot of me in her, but she's a before-getting-a-lot-of-good-therapy me. Her story isn't the same as mine, but she and I do have this common experience of being widowed. Perhaps we really ARE in a multiverse and I am the alphaverse me, who has been able to deal with what life has thrown at me. She is pre-multiverse Evelyn from Everything Everywhere All at Once, unhappy and stuck. I know her parents' story too. Again -- I have no idea how. I truly believe that I didn't create these people, but that they chose me to tell their story.

The Aftermath, Part III: 25 Years On

Kate and I probably stopped writing together around 2005. She had two children, I had actual work to do at my job, and with people having moved on from Titanic, the readership wasn't there to put the effort into the project. We've now been friends for 25 years, most of it online. We talk every now and then about reviving it, and we even made a short-lived attempt at bringing back the site at one point. .

And now it is 25 years later, and there's a new Titanic 3-D release that opened this week, and I'm having a kind of "returning to where it all began" sense that I should go see it on the biggest screen I can find. This is despite the fact that after all these years of premium cable, I can probably recite every line in the movie at this point as if it were the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But can you go back? Gloria Stuart is dead, David Warner is dead, Bill Paxton is dead, Billy Zane's career is dead (deservedly, after his performance in this film), Leonardo DiCaprio is now a middle-aged, fleshy creep dating teenagers, and what's left of the wreck of the Titanic, like the 9/11 memorial, is a crumbling tourist site. If there were ever a time to bring the site back, it would be now. But I'm guessing this re-release will be gone in a week, given the way the industry is today

The only movie I can think of now that has come close to being the cultural phenomenon that Titanic was in 1997-98 is Black Panther. Yes, James Cameron's Avatar and its sequel have grossed over $5 billion between the two of them, but they don't seem to have had the cultural impact that the first Black Panther had, or that Titanic had in the late 1990s.

Titanic enriched my life in so many ways. Without this movie, I never write movie reviews. I never meet the many other people who also wrote online movie reviews back in the day, some of whom are still at it and a few of whom were able to make a career of it. I never try my hand at fiction writing. I never meet Kate and watch her children grow up. And I probably never start the blog that in its own way led me to what I'm writing here today.

Fan fiction isn't limited to the sci-fi world anymore. Back in 1990s, many of those writing Titanic sequels labored under the delusion that their work could be published, only to find that as a derivative work, even self-publishing could lead to lawsuits. Then a woman named E.L. James parlayed her fan fiction about Bella and Edward from Twilight into a little book called 50 Shades of Grey. In 2017, The Daily Beast called fan fiction "the future of publishing."

When I spun off my original co-lead-character into her own story, Rose was still there, only her name became Ruth and I jettisoned the whole "society girl from Philadelphia" thing. But I left everything else about their interaction intact from its fan fiction roots. Kate and I used to talk about changing our original huge outline to remove Rose's connection to the movie and writing it as its own story. We'd given her a compelling story arc that stood on its own, and surrounded her with fleshed-out, vivid characters.

I'd love to think that young people today will be swept away by the sheer spectacle of this movie once again on the big screen. I'd love to think that an entirely new generation will sit down to write the way we did 25 years ago. After all, if seemingly everyone in Gen-Z can be reduced to tears at Bill and Frank's story in Episode 3 of The Last of Us on HBO, why not this?

My Facebook Jail Novel of Eternal Torment

2022-07-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

I used to post at least one blog entry every day. From mid-2004 until 2014, I'd grab my coffee, go sit in my office, take a quick look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a few other places, and my brain would go into writing mode. My focus and concentration went kerblooey after Mr. Brilliant became ill, got worse after he died, and never came back. If in those last days he was off in a Jamaica of the mind with his spirit guides, when he left 20 minutes after they stopped pumping oxygen down his throat, he took my ability to concentrate with him. I don't know what he planned to do with it, but I wish he'd left me at least a little.

Most of my rantings have been on Facebook lo these last few years. Why that's easier than blogging, I have no idea, except that posting links that contain nice photos along with a few paragraphs just seems easier. But that has to change.

I have spent the last 48 hours in Facebook Jail. This is what happens to you when you run afoul of the algorithms developed by the techboy douchebags who decide who needs to be punished for saying things that run against the techboy douchebag ethos, whatever that may be. So what were my crimes, specifically?

I posted a comment on a predatory real estate company ad that I would burn my house to the ground before I would sell it to a company like theirs. By predatory real estate company I mean deep-pocketed investment companies that swoop into residential neighborhoods, outbid everyone else by huge numbers, waive all inspections and contingencies, and then turn formerly owned houses into rentals. The aggregate result of this is that it locks individuals out of homeownership, which historically is the main source of wealth for an increasingly strapped middle class. Here in the Triangle area of North Carolina, up to 20-30% of homes sold in the last year have been to real estate investors.

Now did I threaten to burn down a house? Absolutely not! I love my house. And when I'm ready to sell it, I hope to sell it to someone who will love it as much as I do. Not only am I NOT a destructive person, but I was referencing this scene in Gone With The Wind.

The line I was referencing didn't make it into the movie, but in the book, when Tara's former overseer, Jonas Wilkerson, now essentially a predatory real estate investor, comes by to tell Scarlett O'Hara that she has no choice but to sell to him, Scarlett says "I'll tear this house down, stone by stone, and burn it and sow every acre with salt before I see either of you put foot over this threshold,"

I guess not everyone has a brain littered with bits and snippets of obscure popular culture references. But that's what I was paraphrasing, and you have to admit that it IS an appropriate metaphor.

But the thing that put them over the edge was when I commented on a post about Facebook guilt-tripping. You all know what that is -- it's when someone copies/pastes canned text about suicide, or cancer, or whatever the cause is, and at the end the text is "I'll bet none of my friends share this" or "I'll know who of my friends cares about [cancer/autism/suicide/heart disease/fill in cause of choice here] by who shares this."

I hate that second one most, because it implies that pasting canned text into a box and hitting "Post" is somehow "proof" that you care about the particular cause in question. I started posting nasty comments about these back when I was driving Mr. Brilliant 46 miles each way to chemo while holding down a demanding and stressful job, and was somehow supposed to believe that because I didn't share canned text, I somehow didn't care about cancer. That I had already convinced Mr. B. that he'd never pass a psych test for assisted suicide because of his depression, that he wasn't terminal, and that foregoing treatment would be agonizing pain until he got to terminal status, was immaterial. On Facebook, it's "Show you care by copy/pasting canned text."

I can still get angry about it just typing that, and it may be why I refuse to participate in what I call "performative activism" -- protests and marches that make us feel all solidarity-ish and activisty but ultimately don't really change anything because the Powers That Be don't care about protests and marches. Facebook guilt-tripping is just another form of performative activism. And I'll bet many of the people who insist we show how caring we are by copying/pasting text are the first ones to ghost friends whose spouse or child is diagnosed with cancer. But hey, they care! They pasted some text and hit "Post"!!

So I posted a comment that people who do Facebook guilt-tripping should be beaten with sticks. This too is an obscure reference that I should have known NO ONE would get. It's a phrase that at least USED TO be used by the great Charles P. Pierce, whose politics commentary at Esquire is the ONLY reason to subscribe. The concept of "beaten with sticks" is basically one of mild corporal punishment, much as someone would punch someone in the arm who says something tactless. It is by no means a "threat of violence." But such are the times we live in, and I had the bad timing of saying this the day after yet another angry white boy who left a social media trail o'clues a mile long decided to kill a bunch of people attending a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois. Because the sarcasm of a 67-year-old grey-haired Jewish woman is EXACTLY THE SAME THING. But I'll give Facebook this one. After all, the few days after a mass shooting are always a sensitive time, until the next mass shooting happens and the miserable cycle starts all over again.

Back during the post-9/11 year, George W. Bush administration officials told us we needed to "watch what we say, what we do." It was a time of "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists," and it was a direct threat from the then-government that questioning its policies could get you in a heap of trouble. Today we really ARE all under surveillance, not by the government this time, but by a bunch of techboy douchebags who probably identify as Libertarian. These guys write the algorithms that allow medical disinformation, Trumpian lies, the violent fantasies of mass shooters, and threats against anti-Trump politicians to be shared freely, while sarcasm and metaphor must be stamped out at all costs. For six-and-seven figure techboys, who even as I type this are marching like zombies towards my true blue home city, threatening to turn it purple over taxes, only speech that benefits them is allowed.

So seriously, folks. Be careful what you post on Facebook. Twitter at least tactfully lets you know that what you want to post is perhaps not cool: "Most people don't tweet posts like this," they say. And then you can go back and edit out whatever curse word is causing the Twitbots to clutch their pearls today. There's no rhyme or reason to that either; a few days ago I responded to Ted Cruz' "thoughts and prayers" about Highland Park by calling him a "craven, cynical monster." I guess on Twitter, you can still tell the truth.

For 25 years people have thought I was a drama queen about this

2022-05-04T06:36:00.001-07:00

I remember a news report from about 25 years ago. It was about another anti-abortion case that was brought before the Supreme Court. The reporter was talking to young women about it, and every last one of them was blithely dismissing the danger, insisting that "they can't make it illegal now" and "they'll never put that genie back in the bottle."

It's been about 15 years since the right to abortion became irrelevant to my particular body. And believe me, it's been tempting to just say "the hell with it; you don't care about your rights; why should I?" But then I remember that every generation rolls its eyes at being lectured by the previous one about "the way it used to be." After all, isn't "You kids don't realize what it was like when an unwanted pregnancy meant shame and guilt and either putting your health in danger by having an illegal abortion or putting it in danger by having a baby before you're even mature" just a variation of "You kids don't appreciate what we did in World War II," as my late father-in-law used to lecture us? Isn't it just another rendition of "both ways, uphill, in the snow"?

And yet here we are, on the precipice of a country where college women will go back to bargaining with God to bring on their periods, where women with ectopic pregnancy will die because too few people understand that there can be no baby, where women were utter slaves to our own anatomy. Except that this time, it's going to be worse.

My mother had an illegal abortion in 1949. Why she became pregnant, got married, and THEN had the abortion is anyone's guess, but with my father in grad school and her being a newlywed and already suffering from the depression that plagued her for her entire adult life, a baby was more than she could bear at that point. She was lucky. Somehow she managed to find an actual doctor to perform the procedure and went on to have my sister and me. So I grew up in a household that supported women's bodily autonomy long before it was even mentioned.

It's a fallacy that everything was just fine until Donald Trump was able to put Anne Gorsuch Burford's son, a man who is a credibly-accused rapist with obvious anger management issues, and a woman whose faith group has been accused of being a hotbed of emotional and sexual abuse on the Supreme Court. The roots of the Dominion Theology theocracy we are now staring in the face date back to the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan, when the Christian Right used abortion as a shield to hide their real agenda, which was perpetuatins segregated schools. A candidate who started his campaign in the very town where three civil rights workers were murdered told them loud and clear that the actor-turned-California governor would be the savior of segregation.

The Christian Right may have lost (at the time) their battle for segregation, but being anti-abortion warriors gave them a weapon that served their agenda almost as well -- putting women back into their place.

I didn't always know that what I was jumping up and down and screaming about for a quarter century was at its core, a theocratic movement, though that's been pretty clear all along to anyone who paid attention. I am not a religious person, at least not in the established religion sense, and especially not an adherent of any of "the big three" religions that came out of the Fertile Crescent. I have never hidden that I have a strong cultural Jewish identity, but as I tell people, I have all the food and all the neurosis and none of the religion. My spiritual system involves "Make people's lives better as best I can while I'm here and not leave too much of a mess when I'm gone." I don't fault people for being religious. Whatever gets you through what Mr. Brilliant called "this God-forsaken level of reality" is A-OK by me. Just leave me, and leave government, and leave others who do not believe the same way, out of it. And I have never understood why people who profess strong faith need everyone else to march in lockstep with them. And yet, here we are in the 21st century, with robots that have faces and CGI people and phones that play movies and electric cars -- and we're fighting off having a country run by Iron Age mythology.

I needn't go into gory details about what the implications of overturning Roe and sending the abortion issue back to the states are, because much ink and video has gone into it from even the corporate media that have been complicit in the tiptoeing around theocracy that has affected both political parties as well. Of course there are some things that HAVEN'T been covered in detail, such as the implications that affirming "states rights" could have in, yes, the re-legalization of segregation, and perhaps even slavery. (Do you think THAT couldn't happen? Are you still asleep at the wheel even now?) The women who are screaming about child support haven't thought through the nightmare of being tied for the next 18 years and perhaps beyond to the man who raped you, to the ex-husband who beat you, to the father who impregnated you when you were 12. Men who spew sperm into a woman get visitation and custody every single day no matter what their status is in that woman's life. Ask anyone who practices family law in Florida, where "fathers' rights" seem to supersede everything else.

You know what? I'm tired. For 25 years I've voted, I've sent money to candidates, I've argued with people about the bigger implications of essentially deciding that a pregnant woman ceases to be a human being and is nothing but a uterus with legs. I've marched and sent letters to the editor and blogged and stuffed envelopes and canvassed and done all the things you're supposed to do. And here we are. And I'm tired. And I don't know where we go from here.

"To those who left us....and who brought us together"

2021-09-25T07:49:00.008-07:00

I think the worst part of getting older is the parade of departures from this mortal coil moves ever faster. And now I have to write about yet another one.

I'm writing today to talk about Karl. I'm not going to mention his last name out of respect for his family's privacy.

Two weeks after Mr. Brilliant died in 2013, I joined a social group for widows and widowers. I didn't want to join a grief group. I felt they were all too churchy and I truly did not want to sit in a room full of crying people. Some would say I should have, that I pushed grief away and that is why it's been squeezing out in manageable doses over eight years.

I also didn't want to join "singles" groups. I already knew that dating wasn't in the cards for me. It had been horrible in my 20s, and I knew that it was going to be even worse for an overweight woman pushing 60 So when I found a group on Meetup whose mission was to build friendships with people who "get it" in a safe space, but by sharing enjoyable times, it was exactly what I needed.

We've all known people who are like the mayor of whatever the group is. "The mayor" is always someone whose very presence signals that you are welcome. He's the first one with the smile, the extended hand, the "tell me your story" when someone new comes into the room. Karl was that person. He wasn't hitting on people, he was all about welcoming. I've realized how important this is, after joining a group here after I moved where the men don't talk with any women they're not interested in fucking, and the women seem to see all new women as interlopers. The group in NJ was nothing like that.

Every Wednesday for two years I had dinner with these people, and Karl was always right there, showing genuine delight at being with everyone, and extending that smile, that hug, that warmth, to the new and the tentative. He had an unfailing instinct for where people's boundaries were and respecting them, while providing just the right amount of comfort. And last year during that long, cold winter, I was able to host Zoom calls for the group and see them all virtually. I am now particularly glad that I had that opportunity. I had no idea that the last Zoom I hosted would be the last time I'd see Karl.

I was at one of these dinners when I got the call that my father had passed away. I'm glad I was.

Karl and I shared an enjoyment of jam bands, especially the New Jersey-based Railroad Earth. I went with him and our friend Stacey to see Hot Tuna in Stroudsburg, PA in 2014, retracing the steps and the restaurant Mr. Brilliant and I had traced a few years earlier for a different show. Karl and I weren't on the same page politically, and to be honest, I'm glad I never had to have political discussions with him during the Trump years. But upon reflection, he really did test my "You can't support Trump and still be a good person" doctrine.

Karl always closed every "widder dinner" with this toast: "To those who left us...and who brought us together." Our friend Stacey, who has endured far more than her own share of tragedy already, noted today that he has now joined them. Perhaps he will now bring THEM together in an alternate universe version of the camaraderie those they had left behind shared.

My heart hurts today for Karl's loved ones, for Stacey who was such a close friend, for Carolyn and Carol and Bette and Kurt and Susan and Dan and Lynne and Gordon and Elsa and all the others I haven't met in person and who are new, and who I just can't remember right now, for they are the ones who have to face the empty space at the table every Wednesday. His loss makes grieving just that much more difficult for those who will no longer have his smile to welcome them and show that even in the face of indescribable grief, there is warmth and friendship and hope.

Right Wing Anti Vaccine Death Scorecard Episode 4, or COVID Is Nowhere Near Done With These People Yet

2021-09-14T05:25:00.002-07:00

Today's entry into the death pool is Bob Enyart, Colorado wingnut talk show host and pastor of the Denver Bible Church, who died this week from COVID-19.

According to the Denver Post, Enyart had refused to be vaccinated because of his concern about abortion, believing the lie that COVID vaccines are made of aborted babies.

The term "Good riddance" certainly applies to Bob Enyart, a man who once read the names of people who died of AIDS while playing Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."

So let's give this paragon of right-wing hate the proper send-off, shall we?

Honorable mention: Victoria Wolski, known for posting QAnon banners from bridges and demanding that she be treated with Ivermectin while in the hospital.

Honorable mention 2: Josh.

And now it's 20 years. Same shit, different angry men

2021-09-11T06:28:00.001-07:00

It seems that every year, the annual ratings grab of 9/11 coverage starts earlier. Before we can turn around, it'll be a whole season. Maybe it'll start at the Summer Solstice, but more likely, as with this year, it'll start around Labor Day, which is the unofficial start of fall. Maybe eventually it'll be a shopping season. Who knows?

A year is really just an arbitrary designation of time passing, though it seems that the "fives" and "zeroes" have special meaning. As I sit here on the sixth of September, 2021, which this year doubles as Labor Day, I've already noted that CNN has rebroadcast the excellent Naudet brothers documentary that was supposed to be about a probationary fireman in New York, but turned out to be a gripping and horrifying documentation of that terrible day. It's also run a discussion with the now-adult school children to whom George W. Bush was reading "My Pet Goat." One of the premium channels is running Paul Greenglass' film United 93, a movie I could never bring myself to watch. Spike Lee's HBO docuseries NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½ is in heavy rotation.

Lee is no stranger to controversy, and much has been made of his excision of most, but not all, of the "9/11 Truther" content n the series. My own relationship with 9/11 Trutherism is complicated, especially in the context of the direct line from that particular movement down into the QAnon/deep state/2020 election was rigged/etc. lunacy that has received far too much oxygen and still thrives.

Let me explain: I have freely admitted to my belief in what was then known as LIHOP ("let it happen on purpose"). My belief was constructed from the following facts: 1) that a Newsweek article had just hit newsstands and mailboxes detailing the events leading up to the Supreme Court decision that made George W. Bush president; 2) Bush's already-dropping poll numbers; and 3) his aides' clearly known desire for a war with Iraq.

Bush, another president with an interesting psychological family dynamic in which he'd been the Designated Family Shithead(TM), had inherited the Iraq Liberation Act from Bill Clinton, had surrounded himself with neoconservative warmongers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and a war with Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein would both impress his father and at the same time outdo him.

So when the infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" was ignored, and 9/11 happened, it served Bush's interest in all three of the above. The information that was coming out about the 2000 election no longer mattered. A war president ALWAYS has improved approval ratings. And his aides got what they wanted. It was all just too convenient.

Do I believe 9/11 was an inside job? No. And I don't believe ANYONE banked on the magnitude of what happened. But I do believe that that something along the lines of the 1993 bombing was expected -- something that would serve the purpose, but with a manageable body count. In a case like that, the cost/benefit ratio may have been deemed to be acceptable (when you're talking about cynical people like the Axis of Cheney). But then it all went to hell, and at least in the short run, served their purpose perfectly.

I can't help but feel that over the last twenty years, Muslims in the US have felt like Jews at Eastertime -- in a cringe position, waiting for that day every September when everyone Brings All That Up Again. Where I live now, there are many groups doing great work to pave the path for about 1000 Afghan refugees -- long-term indirect casualties of the Bush Bungle in Afghanistan -- to resettle here. Yes, there is some bleating from white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, and of course the Jesus of Mar-a-Lago, about these people coming here, but the virulent anti-Muslim sentiment in the mainstream seems to have calmed down, at least somewhat.

After all, it's kind of hard for American Angry White men to have any kind of moral authority about religion-based terrorism when your own political agenda consists of setting up a Dominionist theocracy -- an evangelical Christian state implementing their interpretation of Old Testament law combined with enforced belief in Yeshua of Nazareth as the literal son of the Old Testament deity -- by force if necessary. So in the wake of the January 6 attack by white Americans, mostly male worshippers of Jesus of Mar-a-Lago, Americans contemplating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 need to consider the broader context. Because now, the word "terrorism" no longer has the cold face of a well-trained religious zealot ready to face his own annihilation in the name of his delusion. The face of American terrorism is now the face of the very same people who went nuts in the flyover states after 9/11, convinced that Muslim terrorists were going to fly planes into the local Dollar General. It's now a face that's pasty-white except for the pink gin blossoms on the nose and cheeks, twisted with unfocused rage and hate, hiding the soul of a two-year-old who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas.

I've been writing about 9/11 on and around the anniversary for a decade and a half, in 2005. 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010, and that's just what I wrote around the anniversary. I've been pondering the long-term implications and yes, some truthing, for as long. Most years, I'm of the "Enough already" school of thought. Not that the day should be forgotten, but there comes a time when it's about death porn, not about any kind of solemn remembrance. Too many cynical politicians have made too much political hay over the last twenty years by using 9/11 as a cudgel with which to beat people they don't agree with for it to be solemn, at this point.

And yet...

Last night I watched part of the Naudets' film. I'd seen it when it first came out in 2015, but I'd avoided any 9/11 coverage over the last few years, except for my annual reflections on whether it's time to stop the big observance. There's something to be said, though, for watching it now, after Joe Biden has finally, belatedly said "Enough" to the money-gobbling meatgrinder known as Afghanistan (and been pilloried by the press for it. ,

There's something to be said about watching it happen after years of avoiding it. It reminded me of just how utterly sickening that day was and how a sure way of life no longer seemed sure -- and the guy in charge was a dimwit. There's something to be said for revisiting it after four years of Donald Trump's Muslim-baiting. It's worth revisiting the fear and unsettling sense of the world being tilted off its axis that we felt in those days as we look at the GOP having morphed from a party of just greed and war into one of outright lunatic fascism. If we'd been paying attention after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; if the press hadn't pilloried Barack Obama's Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano for a report detailing the growing threat of white nationalism; if we hadn't been 100% focused on what people who pray differently and wear clothing unfamiliar to white Christians were doing; if the press hadn't joined the pile-on and bought into the idea that the guys cosplaying as soldiers with huge caches of weaponry were somehow "patriots" while people who wanted universal health care and a better life for all were just dirty fucking hippies; if we'd been honest about these angry white men, perhaps January 6 might not have happened.

The days surrounding 9/11 are fraught for me, for different reasons. Eight years ago on 9/11, Mr. Brilliant was just ten days away from the stroke that would end up taking his life. I know what those early days of widowhood are like, so I've always had empathy for those who lost loved ones that day. But as I am finally BEGINNING to emerge from the hideous tape loop that's been repeating itself in my head endlessly for eight years that consists of nothing but the last three weeks of Mr. B's life, I can't even imagine what it must be like after twenty years for the widows, those now elderly who lost their children, the now-grown children who hardly or don't remember their fathers or mothers, to have their loss replayed on national television year after year after year. I can shut out my tape loop after eight years with some effort of will. They have to pretty much just close the blinds and unplug for two weeks if they don't want the reminder.

Max Giaccone, whose father died that day, was 10 years old at the time. He says:

“I don’t watch video of the buildings from that day. I’ve seen it all enough for it to be engrained in my psyche. Sometimes people just putting those things in articles makes me mad. I appreciate the argument that by showing history we are helping not repeat it, but I don’t know besides sensationalism what value it brings. I also try and stay away from are images of people jumping from the building. It has always been one of my biggest fears, and probably plays into my fear of heights....”

The Oklahoma City bombing survivors don't have to endure the replays. The Sandy Hook Elementary School parents and relatives don't have to endure the replays. The Survivors of the Pulse shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors don't have to deal with this. Their losses are no less profound, and are no less a symbol of Things That Changed Us just because the body count is lower and it didn't play out on national television.

Thanks to Joe Biden, the 9/11 era in foreign policy is over. The lives of those left behind -- the 9/11 families, the families of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- will never be the same. So what do we owe them? We owe them the gift of having learned something about terrorism and about who we are as a nation. But it appears we have learned the wrong lesson, for once the dust was cleared, we showed that we have learned nothing.

Phil Schaap (1951-2021)

2021-09-08T14:51:00.010-07:00

When I lived in New Jersey, especially after Mr. Brilliant died, there were two evening radio shows I listened to frequently. One of them was Rich Conaty's Big Broadcast on WFUV on Sunday evenings, and the other was Phil Schaap's Traditions in Swing on Saturdays on WKCR, the Columbia University station. Conaty's show was about ALL popular music from the 1920s and 30s, while Schaap was all about jazz. And on Saturday nights, he'd go into the roots of the music that characterized the Big Band era. It used to make Mr. Brilliant crazy when I'd listen to either one of them, because he had that particular disease that so many in my generation had of hating the music our parents listened to, and his father was one of those WWII vets who thought Glenn Miller was the ne plus ultra of musicians for all time. (Fun anecdote: Years later, when Mr. B. would talk about the Grateful Dead in similar terms, I would occasionally remind him of this.)

I've loved 1920s jazz for a long time. I could go into my whole thing about how I believe that the feeling of "coming home" that I have when I listen to the Hot Fives, the Hot Sevens, Bix Beiderbecke, and others, is a past-life memory, but I'll spare you all that. Suffice it to say that everything I know about early jazz and swing, I learned from listening to Phil Schaap on Saturday evenings. I learned about Bix and Tram (Frankie Trumbauer) and everything about Louis Armstrong's early music, and people I wouldn't have heard otherwise, like Ben Webster and Sidney Bechet and Stuff Smith and Bunny Berrigan. The man was a walking, living encyclopedia of jazz music and jazz musicians and had more anecdotes about them than could be stored in a million books or tapes.

Rich Conaty died in 2016. Phil Schaap died yesterday after a four-year battle with cancer.

When it comes to the complete, comprehensive history of jazz, it was all stored in Phil Schaap's brain. His death is the 20th century music equivalent of the Library of Alexandria burning to the ground.

And yet another one: Remembering Peter Hochstein (The New York Crank)

2021-09-08T07:54:00.001-07:00

This blog reboot doesn't get much traffic, but when I look at my stats, I always see referrals from The New York Crank. It occurred to me this morning that I hadn't checked out the Crank in a while, so when I clicked over there and found that nothing had been posted since March, I kind of already knew why.

The New York Crank was the nom-de-blog of one Peter Hochstein, a prolific and peripatetic author of books and (his words) "corporate histories, personal and corporate biographies, book-length premiums, brochures of substance, and other long copy projects that others find too daunting." He was also a book author with a penchant for catchy titles, such as Up From Seltzer: A Handy Guide to 4 Jewish Generations, Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate At Nazi Sex Orgy: A Memoir and No Biz Like It: from gofer to producer in just 57 years.

Peter first contacted me in 2010 to thank me for linking to a post on his blog. Every time I linked to his blog, he emailed me to thank me. In November 2013, after Mr. Brilliant's death, we began an intermittent correspondence, because it seemed we had something in common other than political leanings: Both of us had lost our partners in the same neuro ICU in the same hospital. I was far more confident about Mr. B's care than he was of the care his love, Roberta, had received three years earlier, but we shared the same doubts, wondering, and having had to make The Decision No One Should Have To Make.

Peter would check in about once a year and occasionally he'd comment on something I posted on Facebook, under his Facebook-specific nom-de-Facebook, Etoain Shrdlu. In 2018, he checked in after I started this new blog, revealing that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (yet something else we had in common, since a) my father had died from NHL just three years earlier; and b) I had been working on NHL studies before retiring earlier that year). He said then that he didn't expect, nor did he want to be, around for much longer, though at that time he didn't yet know if his was an aggressive or indolent form. About the latter, he said "I love that word," indolent," as if the medical community is chiding it for not taking its victims out a bit more industriously."

How I wish he'd done a chronicle of his journey through his illness. There is something about Jewish fatalism that makes us get funny at times of crisis, and in his last months, the Crank went pretty gonzo.

Last Thanksgiving I held a "family and friends" Zoom to which I invited him. He emailed me the next day that he'd been unable to connect to the link. I wish I knew why, and I wish he'd been able to attend.

Peter is one of the few bloggers who have left us whom I actually knew as a person, however peripherally. I feel badly that I didn't know about his death until now, but given that his last blog entry was March 17 of this year and he died on April 9, I take some comfort in knowing that however bad his last days may have been, there weren't many of them. And I hope that as he wished, he exited the way his father did -- by simply going to sleep and never waking up.

Peter was a terrific writer, an entertaining blogger, and for me, a good online friend at a time when I needed people who truly understood what I was going through was like. I'm saddened by his death out of all proportion to his role in my life, and I feel badly that it took me this long to check in and find this news. We may not have been close, but it was nice to know he was there.

I'll leave you with Peter's own words, from his Amazon page:

I became a writer because that was the only thing I ever learned how to do. In retrospect, it's amazing I could even do that, given the focused-on-failure mindset of my immediate family. They were nuts. On the outside they seemed, well, merely a bit uptight. But trust me, my parents, and especially my mother, were batshit crazy.

Evidently it ran in the family. I learned only recently, years after my mother's death, that my mother had a sister who had been sent away to a state insane asylum before my birth. The poor woman was never mentioned in front of me. After a lot of prying I learned recently that her name was Gussie, short for Augusta. She was the real life equivalent of the fictional crazy aunt locked up in the attic.

You want an example of crazy? My mother was terrified that I would do something, or say something, or live someplace that would reflect badly on her. And her standards of what reflects badly were indecipherable. That may explain why, wherever I lived, she wept bitterly. She wept bitterly at my first apartment, a small townhouse studio in Greenwich Village, looking out on a charming flagstone courtyard. Later, she wept about an apartment on a high floor with sweeping city views. Still later, she wept when I bought and moved with my now ex-wife and child into a large two-bedroom apartment with a chichi Park Avenue address.

Nor was the problem that she hated city living. I spent nine years as a suburbanite, in a big house with a large back yard and beach rights - and that, too, brought her to paroxysms of tear-gushing grief.

But I was talking about writing. I became a newspaper reporter when I was 18. I sold my first book - thank God under a pseudonym! - when I was 22. I got out of the journalism business for a very long stretch and went into advertising, at the age of 23, because it paid better than journalism.

These days I do almost anything that involves putting my fingers on a keyboard and wiggling them. I still write TV spots, and brochures, and junk mail. I report and write occasionally for business publications. And I turn out books. I ghostwrite autobiographies. I write biographies on commission. Of course, I also write my own stuff. Why?

Because it's fun. And I've always figured that if I'm having fun writing, people will have fun reading my stuff. So please do order my books and have a few laughs before it's too late. Remember, nobody's getting out of here alive.

Pregnancy as Punishment and the Misguided Worship of Motherhood

2021-09-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

I have never in my life wanted children. I never played with baby dolls. I never wanted a baby doll. My dolls were Madame Alexanders, and later, Barbie, who was a stewardess and a nightclub singer and a nurse. Yes, all of Barbie's careers were "acceptable" female careers, but my Barbie never had children.

In college I wrote a paper for a "Marriage and the Family" class called "Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage." The professor was a former pastor, and I expected a bad grade, but instead I got an A-minus, the minus only because he wrote "Well-researched, well-argued. I do hope you will change your mind someday."

I never did. Oh, there were times when I assumed I would have children someday because it was what people did, but my vision of parenthood was sitting in a rocking chair in the dead of night trying to settle a colicky baby. I ha

I don't know why I never wanted children. It could be just that I'm wired differently. It wasn't that I was what we then called a "tomboy." I was lousy at sports, I hated playing outside, I hated getting my hands dirty, I was afraid of everything. But I wanted a Kenner Bridge and Tunnel Building Set more than I wanted a new doll. At the same time, I loved fashion. I made paper dolls with clothes copied from the fashion spreads in Life and Look magazines. I made dollhouse furniture out of construction paper but had little interest in putting actual dolls in the houses. The indications that motherhood was not in my future were always there.

I don't know how much my own mother had to do with it. She always told me that she'd really wanted babies, but I never felt she particularly enjoyed motherhood. It's clear when I look at old photos that not only was my parents' marriage already pretty much over by the time I arrived, but that she was not exactly nuts about the homely, cranky baby that had come out of her the second time around. She always told me that I'd screamed nonstop until I was four, but I have to wonder who exactly was doing the screaming, because my early childhood memories are not of fun times with Mom, but of parental fights and my mother drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes.

Mom worked as a legal secretary for as long as I could remember. It's not that she loved being a secretary, but she was good at it and liked feeling competent at something. I think she knew that she was lacking something in the mothering department, for all that she always defended herself later on as being better than most mothers (which if true is kind of scary). In some ways she suffered from 1950s young adult woman syndrome, but she was also a victim of her own mother's lack of mothering skills.

Mr. Brilliant, who apparently came from a similarly dysfunctional home, also never wanted children, and for 30 years, 27 of them married, we had a satisfying life without children. After he died, some people (showing the customary tactlessness people use with the bereaved) asked me if I now regretted that I hadn't had children. Of course my answer was "No," and it was the truth. I would have been a terrible parent, and so would Mr. Brilliant. We both would have passed on our own baggage onto yet another generation, and it is a blessing for the world and for the children that never happened that we did not. I have had to live in my head for 66 years, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, never mind my own children.

I've never understood, or even cared to understand, why I'm missing that motherhood thing. I'm capable of deep love and caring for pets, but I have NO patience for children. Perhaps it's because pets are animals and I don't expect them to be rational, but as I saw my friends have children and deal with their tantrums and their screaming that the same soup they eat for lunch every day was somehow different today, I realized that children are not rational and I do not have the patience for them.

I'm not a "childfree" activist, for all that I DID resent that the workplace is far more forgiving of the needs of pregnant people and new parents than it is of someone who has to care for a sick spouse. I'm fine with paying taxes for schools because it's part of being in a community. I don't have to prove that my decision is right for everyone, unlike those who need to write articles about how many parents regret having had children or that some would tell their friends who are on the fence not to bother. I know I'm an outlier.

I'm all for people who want children and have the emotional tools to parent them well to have them. I know some of these people and they amaze me. But I can tell you from experience that a life lived as the product of someone not equipped to be a good parent can be pretty damn hellish. Yes, there is therapy, but that doesn't get rid of that critical parent for whom you were never pretty enough, talented enough, good enough. You can grow up and know it's because that parent was so damaged, but you're left to survey the wreckage and try to rebuild yourself as an adult as best you can, with every day being a battle to keep that long-dead voice from taking over your head.

We need to trust women who do not want children to know what they're doing. And while we're on the subject, having children so you have someone to care for you in your old age is a terrible reason to have children. Imagine having to live up to a contract you never even had a chance to read, but that someone forged your signature on. I can't imagine anything more selfish than doing that to a child. I at least have to be a cold, hard realist and recognize that unless I am phenomenally lucky, I will be cared for by strangers in my final days, and my hope is that I will be kind to them, and they to me. I don't have the luxury of deluding myself that I will die beautifully in a cozy bed, surrounded by people who have uncomplicated love for me. It doesn't always work that way.

I regret nothing, at least not where that's concerned.

I remember the years before Roe v. Wade. I remember the girls in high school who developed poochy bellies and were suddenly "visiting grandma for a while." They'd come back with flat bellies 9-10 months later and never talked about it. I remember the crying college girls bargaining with God to please let their periods come. And this was in the days when even small colleges had clinics where the women could go to get free condoms, contraceptive foam, and diaphragms. Women of reproductive age don't remember the days when girls "had to get married," or went through a pregnancy and then gave their babies up for adoption, because being a teen mom meant dropping out of school and a ruined life. I remember around 30 years ago, during one of the many challenges to Roe that have come up over the years, seeing a young woman on the news blithely say, "Oh, they'll NEVER make it illegal again." Well, here we are. Except now it's going to be worse.

At least in my lifetime, for all that abortions were illegal, women who were fortunate enough to have one done by a medical practitioner weren't prosecuted. The doctors weren't prosecuted as long as they were discreet. Abortion happened but no one talked about it. Even when women without access to underground "safe" abortions ended up crouched dead on the floor bleeding out with a coat hanger still protruding from their vaginas, it wasn't talked about. My own mother had one before she was married. It was done by a physician and my father's mother cared for her afterward. Today, if it were Texas, my grandmother could have been sued by any Christofascist freak who wanted to.

That is just one reason why today is different. Abortion has always been with us. Perhaps the relative lack of availability of safe abortions and the corresponding likelihood of women who have them, or attempt to self-abort, being "punished" by injury or death, made these pre-Roe "under the table" abortions acceptable.

Roe allowed for the availability of safe abortions and codified a woman's right to full, complete personhood, with the rights of the fetus only coming into play at such point as it is no longer dependent on being in the uterus to survive. As vague and even sometimes increasingly problematic as this is, given advances in neonatal technology, it at least attempted to strike a balance without ever turning women into mere vessels.

You need not dig very far to realize that the evangelical-dominated anti-abortion movement has NEVER been about the sanctity of human life. Randall Balmer wrote in Politico in 2014 about how the evangelicals didn't fuss about Roe until Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1979, promising an expansion of school desegregation. As with just about everything that causes conflict in this country, even the fetophile movement (which is what I call them), stripped away of all its veneers, has as its origin story the Fear of a Black Planet, and as its core, misogyny and theocracy. Frank Schaeffer, whose father was a founder of the Christian right, warned us of this just the other night:

This week, Texas passed two laws, both of which are fundamentally at odds with the so-called "sanctity of human life." One of them allows anyone to carry any kind of gun in public without a permit or even training, and the other one puts bounties on the heads of women who dare to seek to end a pregnancy via threat of lawsuits of anyone who even talks to them about how to do it. And this in a state where the governor who signed both into law has opposed ALL efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Can there be any doubt that race and misogyny are at play here, and the relentless march of old white men towards a theocracy that will entrench patriarchy in our society and government forever?

The right to choose not to have children, whether a permanent choice as mine was, or a temporary choice because one is only ten years old, or was raped, or was simply not ready for a child, or another child, is a vital part of every woman's life. ANY law which says that a woman ceases to be a human being with the human right of self-determination at ANY point in her life is an existential threat to ALL women.

Right-Wing Anti Vaccine Death Scorecard Episode 3, or Here I Thought I'd Be Blogging About TV and Cats and Yeah...Hurricanes

2021-08-30T14:43:00.002-07:00

Yesterday was the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans "celebrated" in its own unique way by getting clobbered by yet another Category 4 hurricane, this one with the diner waitress name of "Ida." I'd say I don't know how people live there, except that I have a cousin who does (thankfully, he and his family evacuated and their home is still standing), and they have cool things there like funky people and Mardi Gras house floats in a pandemic and I'm told they have great food (though I've never been there yet) and of course they have my beloved Villalobos Rescue Center, which has a facility in New Orleans itself and another in Assumption Parish, which I believe had the eye pass if not over, then very close. Villalobos could really use donations since they are not filming their TV show.

Ida is making its way across Middle Trumpekistan before brushing the Italian-American Diaspora of Northern New Jersey and then making its way out to sea or expiring, whichever comes first. Of course, those great anti-government, Trump-lovin' good Christian denizens of Trumpekistan will be the first to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and rebuild their own Little House on the Flood Plain with their bare hands, thereby living up to the same bullshit American mythology that they demand of others.

Yeah. Right. And I am Marie of Rumania.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues as macho Men Without Masks continue to drop like flies, including, of course, talk show hosts, which makes me wonder how the QAnon nutballs haven't gotten around to blaming the Clintons or George Soros yet. The latest one of these is a guy named Marc Bernier, who went so far as to refer to himself as "Mr. Anti-Vax" and insisting that government advocacy of COVID-19 vaccines for the benefit of public health was JUST LIKE Nazi Germany. I'm telling you, these guys would have been the FIRST ones ratting out their Jewish neighbors in the REAL Nazi Germany. Mr. Bernier has joined his compatriots Phil Valentine and Dick Farrel in wherever hatemongers go to await the form of their reincarnation. We can only hope it's something like garden slug, which would at least be appropriate.

Then there's Robert David Steele, a former CIA officer and QAnon dupe who prided himself on being the first to call COVID-19 a hoax and insisted that Trump would be reinstated, has died of COVID-19 A friend of his insisted that "Steele’s doctors hooked him up to a ventilator only to make Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, look bad."

I have to wonder if we are going to turn into a nation of widows before this is all over. Yes, there are women dying from COVID, but the preponderance of right-wing anti-mask, anti-vaxx, Trumpazoids who are dying seem to be men. Is this resistance just part of the Great American Male Tantrum that has been going on this country since a black man was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2008 and has never really stopped? Or are these all men with underlying health issues like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and such, exacerbated by rage, who have stubbornly refused to ever see a doctor and when COVID hit, they paid the price?

Meanwhile, one of the angriest of angry men, young Madison Cawthorn, who the people of North Carolina's 11th district in a fit of madness decided was fit to serve in Congress, is taking his frustrations about his own questionable manhood out by advocating another January 6 insurrection, highlighted by breaking out those jailed for the first one out of jail. This is the fantasy of incel gamers, not something that one used to expect from a sitting Congressman, but Mr. Cawthorn is all about clicks, outrage and attention (what he calls "comms") instead of, say, actual legislating, which may be why Nancy Pelosi is letting him throw his tantrum and ignoring him. The jury is still out on whether this is wise, though perhaps betting on an uneducated boy with anger management issues who once beat the crap out of a dead tree to prove himself a tough guy focusing on saying outrageous things instead of, you know, Congressionmanning, is ultimately far less dangerous. I'm not so sure. Enough people in hippie Asheville found his story "inspiring" despite press before the 2020 election revealing his pattern of lying about pretty much everything about himself being available.

Right-Wing Anti Vaccine Death Scorecard Episode 2, or What's It Going To Take To Make These People Wake Up?

2021-08-27T19:41:00.003-07:00

Today's scorecard starts with Lexington, Kentucky pastor Tim Parsons, who died after his church had advised parishioners not to worry about COVID because "God is in Control."

As someone who does not believe in the Great White Alpha Male In The Sky Who Micromanages Individual Lives and Grants Wishes like a Bottle Genie, this kind of thing makes me nuts. I've never had patience with this, and I started having less after Mr. Brilliant was diagnosed with bladder cancer in March 2013 and I was plowing through online communities looking for other people for him to talk with and every time someone would go into remission, it would be because "God is good." I always wondered how that made the people feel whose cancer didn't respond to treatment or who had a recurrence. I see it in the moyamoya groups now, where successful cerebrovascular bypass is credited to God and the skilled neurosurgeon who DRILLED INTO THEIR SKULL is ,what, chopped liver?

This morning I watched this lovely video of how The Neurosurgeon Formerly Known At The Old Place As Dr. Chess Club saved a baby from a DIFFERENT congenital brain disorder, and if the parents had credited God instead of the good doctor, I think my head might have exploded.

It's infuriating because this belief in a micromanaging deity protecting the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers from COVID because they pray, or go to the right church, is not just causing unnecessary deaths, but these people see their pastors, their kids' teachers, and the owner of the local convenience store die, and yet they still somehow think their deity doesn't want them to wear a mask. I just don't get it.

Then we have this rocket scientist, Georgia police captain Joe Manning, who died this week at age 57, leaving behind a wife, three children, eight grandchildren, and a Facebook page full of anti-vaccine messages and advocacy of Ivermectin as a COVID treatment.

Why are these people so UNwilling to try to prevent COVID, but so eager to try whatever snake oil QAnon kooks and right-wing talk show hosts can cook up? Distrust in the medical establishment is nothing new; the growth of the anti-vaccine movement has been occurring for at least a decade and a half, with high-profile anti-vaxxers such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and possible future Jeopardy host and "nerve supplement" snake oil pitchperson Mayim Bialik disseminating erroneous information from a since-discredited study about vaccines and autism. Then there's the Great Conspiracy (TM) to keep "natural cancer cures" -- plants you can grow at home -- away from us in the name of Big Pharma Money, never explaining how pharma is keeping plants anyone can grow away from us.

Yes, some drugs have adverse effects, and some cancer treatments don't work,, or don't work for all kinds of cancer, and occasionally there is data manipulation and big drug scandals like DES and thalidomide (the latter of which has demonstrated effectiveness in some forms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma) and Baycol. And yes, the active ingredient in the statin drug lovastatin (monacolin K) comes from red yeast rice, which meant that all red yeast rice supplements sold in the US have this removed. BUT....when was the last time you saw someone with a new case of polio? Never, right? Especially if you are under 40. You know why? Vaccines.

And now we move onto our third tragedy of the day in the person of Caleb Wallace. Wallace has been hospitalized with COVID-19 since early August after self-medicating with vitamin C, zinc, an inhaler, and -- wait for it -- Ivermectin. According to his wife on the family's GoFundMe page, he will be moved to comfort care tomorrow. If this is anything like the comfort care Mr. Brilliant had, it will involve removal of the ventilator and what's called palliative sedation -- enough fentanyl to allow the person to let go painlessly.

This one punches me in the gut because I've been in Jessica Wallace's situation (only I wasn't eight months pregnant the way she is), and it's awful. Caleb Wallace may be an archetypal Trumpazoid:

In addition to the rally, Caleb organized "The San Angelo Freedom Defenders," a group "to educate and empower citizens to make informed choices concerning local, statewide, and national policy and to encourage them to actively participate in their duty to secure God-given and constitutionally protected rights," as stated on the group's Facebook page.

...but his wife is not. I can't fault her for not nagging him to change his mind, because men will dig in their heels the more you nag them. Or perhaps she tried and took the path of least resistance. In the latest update on the GoFundMe page, she says "I prayed he’d come out of this with a new perspective and more appreciation for life. "

How do you grieve for someone who put erroneous beliefs, politics and fealty to a carnival barker over being there for his wife and kids? I am not about to judge a woman with three small children and another one on the way who has hospital bills piling up, a husband for whom she has had to make "the decision," who has to deal with the vitriol of people venting their frustration about anti-vaxxers and who has to resort to crowdfunding to keep her head above water -- especially one who ISN'T an anti-vaccine anti-masker. I'll be thinking of her tomorrow because I do know what it's like.

What's it going to take? When is this madness of horse dewormers and bleach drinking and other assorted fuckery hawked by people with no expertise going to stop? When is self-destruction going to be decoupled from the idea of "freedom"? I already know the answer, and it's "never." Because when we didn't care enough about 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut to do something sensible about guns because people like the guys now dying of COVID in the name of "freedom" are so terrified of a Black Planet that they have to pack an AR-15 to go to Walmart, that's when we should have realized that in the United States of America, "Christian conservatism" is a death cult.

Right-Wing Anti Vaccine Death Scorecard Episode 1, or Sure, What The Hell, Let's Do This

2021-08-22T08:52:00.009-07:00

Two weeks ago I pondered how much compassion we should have for those who chose to refuse COVID vaccination for political reasons and then became seriously ill. Since I mentioned Tennessee right-wing talk show host Phil Valentine, a particularly vile breed of climate change-denying, faux-deficit-hawk, Hillary-hatin', and yes, vaccine-avoidin' hatemonger in that post, I should now mention that he will never be able to become the most "pro-vaccine person who ever lived" because he died yesterday after being on a ventilator, his lungs destroyed from COVID Delta, for two weeks.

In December 2020, he wrote on his blog (not going to link to it; you can find it yourself:

How's that America workin' for ya now, Phil? How'd that "personal health assessment" go?

Then on Thursday, a South Carolina legislator with the It Doesn't Get Any More Southern Than This name of Presley Stutts has died after six days on a ventilator. Before he was put on the ventilator, he was tweeting Big Lie and COVID conspiracy theories right down to the bitter end.

Here he is calling vaccination an "ungodly initiative" in June:

And this racist hatemongering from July 23:

I could screenshot for days the bile that this particular MAGA cretin spewed out, but I'll just leave you with this delicious piece o'irony:

I have to wonder how many other people guys like this infected before they were hospitalized. Look, if these guys think that Dying for Trump (and that's essentially what this is) is what they want to do, because freedumb, well, that's between them and their families. I frankly don't care if a few more voices of misinformation, white supremacy and misogyny are silenced. But since they can be contagious days before becoming ill, and even after they are being hospitalized, they are putting everyone else they come in contact with in danger -- some of them NOT willing to Die For Trump (even in Tennessee and South Carolina), I'm sure.

Valentine's brother Mark expressed his opinion of what he THINKS his brother WOULD have said had he been able, But we don't know that. Valentine was "taking Vitamin D like crazy" and had a doctor agree to provide a prescription for Ivermectin (a horse de-worming medication), neither of which have even the degree of study that the vaccines have, but Phil Valentine was unwilling to be vaccinated.

I remember when Lee Atwater, who was basically the architect of the racist-dogwhistle GOP that gave rise eventually to Donald Trump, and the architect of the forever-infamous "Willie Horton ad" of 1988, was dying from glioblastoma -- arguably the worst, most terrifying cancer in existence. I remember seeing photos of him, his face bloated from steroids and practically unrecognizable. I'm honest enough to say that I thought he got what he deserved, but I'm also human enough that I felt badly for him. Part of the reason for that was that Atwater at least acknowledged the damage he'd done to the body politic before he died. Phil Valentine did not. And Pressley Stutts was posting racism, The Big Lie, and white resentment on Facebook right up until the propofol kicked in and the vent was inserted, thus silencing him forever.

Another blogger gone too soon...R.I.P. Mike Finnigan

2021-08-11T20:31:00.001-07:00

I am absolutely gutted to learn of the passing of the talented and generous-of-spirit Mike Finnigan.

I didn't know Mike as a musician. I didn't even know how prominent and well-known a session guy he was or that he was a performing musician until quite recently. How I didn't know is surprising and how Mr. Brilliant didn't know is even more surprising, given that he was far more knowledgeable about such things than I was.

I only knew Mike Finnegan as one of the progressive bloggers with a sizable following who always extended a hand to us little folks down the blogging ladder to drive readers in our direction, via his regular feature Mike's Blog Round-Up at Crooks and Liars.

We've lost so many of the best bloggers. Mike joins a group of incisive commentators who left us too soon and who we miss every day. Steve Gilliard, Jon Swift (Al Weisel), Skippy (Gil Christner), "Doghouse Riley", and Maggie Jochild. Their voices would be so valuable in these weird times.

I'll end this memorial with this incredible cover by Mike Finnigan of Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come.

Rest in music, sir.

What should be the limits on our compassion?

2021-08-07T16:40:00.010-07:00

[UPDATED 8/22/21] One side effect of the last nearly eight years since Mr. Brilliant died is that I seem to have developed an empathy deficit. It's not that I only care about my own small problems, it's more that I no longer have patience with people for whom every small inconvenience is a trauma of equal proportion to, say, a personal tragedy.

At one time, this would have been, say, simple irritation with someone who sees a great cosmic conspiracy against them because the toilet valve needs changing. But of course for the last year and a half, it's been about the lunacy surrounding the simple task of wearing a piece of cloth on one's face to protect oneself AND others.

Mother Nature, who has clearly had enough of our miserable species, has brought us first SARS-CoV-19, and when that didn't hit home that we need to clean up our act, has now decided to throw Delta, a more aggressive variant, into the mix.

After having put up with the lunacy that is QAnon, the insult to our intelligence and just plain common decency that is Donald Trump, and being essentially alone for a year and a half (which those of you bitching about how your spouses are driving you crazy might want to think about now and then, because no matter how INFJ we might be, too much solitude is toxic), I have little sympathy for willful ignorance.

I needn't go into the litany of crazy reasons people have for refusing the vaccine, from the Bill Gates microchip delusion, to the infertility misinformation, to the "owning the libs" lunacy, and my personal favorite, believing that the vaccine is designed to create a zombie apocalpyse. There are people who eat Kraft mac 'n' cheese and McDonald's Chicken McNuggets every day of their lives who won't get vaccinated because they don't know what's in it -- this despite the fact that the CDC actually TELLS you what's in it, at least for the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen vaccines. Of course none of these people understand what they're reading, but when a society reaches the point where misinformation found on Breitbart and Twitter and OANN and "my friend's uncle" on Facebook is more trusted than the CDC, we have a problem more serious than a bunch of armchair biologists.

Two nights ago, Republican pollster Frank Luntz went all heartfelt and full-frontal snowflakey touchy-feely Leo Buscaglia about how we have to treat the "own the libs" crowd with sympathy and compassion, whereupon Don Lemon earned, as far as I'm concerned, the Purple Heart for Valor by sitting and listening to this horsepuckey. Remember, these are the same people who shouted "Fuck your feelings!" at people disappointed at the 2016 election result; you know, the ones who DIDN'T storm the Capitol to try to prevent the Electoral College from certifying. But now we're being told about how we have to coddle THEIR widdle fee-fees, to the point of suggesting that Joe Biden invite Donald Trump to do a PSA and give Trump full credit for the vaccine, conveniently forgetting the 600,000 corpses from COVID-19 that occurred while the orange-faced shitgibbon was insisting that either a) it would go away; b) people should consider ingesting disinfectants, or c) that they should just get sick and get over it.

This is just plain nuts at this point. It's as if Donald Trump got elected and suddenly we became a nation of tantrum-throwing two-year-olds.

Here in Durham, NC, a new mask mandate goes into effect on Monday, August 9. Here I was, just starting to get my social mojo back after a year of living more like Ted Kuczynski than like Perle Mesta, and here we go again. And IT DID NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

So what do we owe these people, and how much compassion should we have for these people? Why should we be kind to and "understand" the misinformation charlatans and the willfully ignorant who will believe that a giant sky-man created the earth in six days and micromanages individual lives but won't believe, even 225 years after Edward Jenner first inoculated a 13-year-old boy with cowpox, thus creating the first smallpox vaccine; even 61 years after school children (including Your Humble Narrator) lined up AT SCHOOL to eat a sugar cube containing the Sabin oral polio vaccine, that vaccines work. These are the same people who talk about Second Amendment remedies and tote assault rifles to Walmart, but a one-second needle in the arm sends them screaming in the other direction. How much compassion should we have?

Last week I donated to the GoFundMe for the family of Michael Freedy, a Las Vegas man who succumbed to COVID after a family vacation to San Diego, leaving behind a fiancee and five children. I didn't feel sorry one bit for this guy, but I could not find it in my heart to close it to the woman who loved and relied on him. I know what losing your partner in life is like, and I had financial security and no children to worry about. This was not, to my knowledge, necessarily a Trump cultist family. They were simply people who wanted to wait to see how the vaccines shook out in the marketplace. That is not, or at least until recently was not, an unreasonable thing to want to do. I worked nine years on clinical studies so I know a bit about how the drug development sausage is made, and I wanted to wait -- until it seemed that the only path to a normal life was vaccination. I have STILL not had the Shingrix vaccine for shingles, because, yes, I wanted to give it a few years in the marketplace.

Yes, there are those like Travis Campbell, who's been all over the news advocating vaccination, who just kind of never got around to getting vaccinated despite CVS having vaccines and being open late most evenings, but what about some of the others??

What about Texas Republican Executive Committee member H. Scott Apley, who just days after posting an anti-vaccine meme on Facebook, succumbed to COVID and whose wife only NOW is telling people to be vaccinated?

What about right-wing radio host Phil Valentine, a vocal anti-vaccine troll with a fairly wide audience in Tennessee, who has been on a ventilator since July 28 and whose brother, in true Trumpian syntax, says that when/if Valentine gets back to the microphone, he'll be the "most pro-vaccine person you’ve ever seen"? [UPDATE 8/22/21: Phil Valentine has died.]

What about Florida radio host and former Newsmax anchor Dick Farrel, another anti-vaccine troll who changed his mind just before dying of -- wait for it -- COVID.

What about Olivia Guidry, a 24-year-old UNvaccinated ER nurse in Louisiana who had posted on social media that messenger RNA used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was "recombinant DNA" that somehow changes our genetic structure, which is simply not true. Anyone who ever took a high school biology class knows that RNA is ribonucleic acid, not recombinant DNA (which is really just synthetic DNA anyway). You'd think a nurse would know better, but apparently even those with some medical knowledge are susceptible to utter horseshit if delivered by their political idols. The hospital is disputing that she died from COVID, but she tested positive and a month later there has been no further coverage or autopsy results, so YOU do the math.

Or what about 31-year old Daryl Barker from Missouri, who now seems likely to recover and has vowed to get vaccinated, but avoided the vaccine because his is "a conservative family"? What does conservatism have to do with the COVID vaccine, other than loyalty to Trump and to people like H. Scott Apley, Phil Valentine and Dick Farrel?

These are the same people who think that THEIR daughter's abortion is NECESSARY (not like those dirty sluts), and that THEY deserve their SNAP benefits, not like THOSE PEOPLE. These are the people who see COVID as a hoax until it affects THEM. It's all part of the nation of two-year-olds that has resulted from four years of the biggest two-year-old of them all.

I'm tired of having compassion for these people. I'm tired of being told to care about the feelings of the "Fuck your feelings!" crowd. I'm tired of ignorance. I'm tired of this idea that somehow the magic sky-man doesn't want them to take a life-saving vaccine that in theory, their magic sky-man who micromanages individual lives gave to the people who developed it. I'm tired of Google being used to confirm the conclusions people have already come to being regarded as synonymous with research. I'm tired of charlatans and liars and the gullible, willfully ignorant people who believe them.

No, science DOESN'T have all the answers. But at least it keeps looking. I felt better about the vaccines after I read more about mRNA research and how it's been under development for 30 years. These are unusual times that call for unusual measures.

So I've ordered another box of N95 masks to take to medical appointments and other places where people gather (which I guess I have to start avoiding again now). But all this seems that this next round of forced solitude at the hand of idiots is some kind of cruel irony, just another way of being doomed to re-live my mother's life no matter how hard I try to do otherwise. So I find myself having difficulty empathizing with even these Johnny-come-latelies. And as for the rest of them, well, quite frankly, the hell with 'em.

Who Am Us Anyway? A stream-of consciousness pandemic rant

2021-08-04T06:49:00.004-07:00

Starting in about 2014, I found myself posting more and more on Facebook instead of doing long-form blogging. I found it much easier, in these Years Of Unfocused Widow Brain, to just share articles with a short comment instead of having to, say, put together coherent thoughts. I started this blog in a moment of weakness, but found that the time between my closing of the old place and when I started this did little to assuage my sense that the whole thing was just a slog. To this day, the most-read post here is a memorial for a young woman I didn't even know.

Unless you've kept up with your blog continuously, the landscape has changed. And that may provide a degree of freedom. With no readers and no ad feeds, there's no pressure to crank out content. It's become clear to me that 90% of people simply do not want to know what's going on in our country or in the world. It's so much easier to just draw inward, to focus on our families and our friends, and live day to day, because after all, what impact can any of us really have when everything around us is falling apart? What's the point of reading about it all, thinking about it all, having concerns about it all when it really does seem as if there's nothing we can do to change it?

Writing has always been an outlet for me, and it seems I'd forgotten about that. In the old days, I had dreams of being one of those Big Name Bloggers who either successfully monetized their blogs or got plum gigs at either nascent or prominent publications. As a lifelong Frustrated Would-Be Journalist, I had dreams. I coulda been a contenda, except that I also wanted things like a house and a retirement plan and health insurance. So long-form blogging allowed me to do both. But blogging was like The Job That Ate My Life in that the more successful you are at it, the more you want more. In 2007 I went to the conference then known as Yearly Kos and discovered that I had a bit of a decent reputation in the world of political bloggers. I was "known," if not famous. In 2008 I was laid off from my Real Job and got the Job That Ate My Life. After two years I was given a promotion, which meant a bigger bonus plan. Then four years after that I was given another one, with an even BIGGER bonus plan. And the thing is, I LIKED it. I liked the recognition. And I sure as hell liked the money.

When I started blogging in 2004, it was because I'd been reviewing movies online since 1997 and THAT had become a slog. Even a wonderful film like Jet Li's Fearless had me hamstrung about what to write. For a decade, I cranked out content, some of it good, some of it great, much of it mediocre. But I think it's time to come home. If people want to read what I write, they'll either find it or ask me. And on Facebook, I'll do what everyone else does and share nature photos, cat videos, and funny memes. If social media is about bread and circuses, I'll juggle on a unicycle in a clown suit throwing pieces of challah at my friends the way everyone else does.

So all that out of the way, here we are in August 2021. We are 17 months into the Great COVID-19 Pandemic of Seemingly Forever, and this virus has shown itself to be The Thing That Wouldn't Leave. What people have never understood about The Thing That Wouldn't Leave is if you keep feeding it, it WON'T leave.

One time back in maybe 1985, Mr. Brilliant ran into an old high school friend at a bus stop and brought him home. And the guy stayed for 4 days, our apartment becoming littered with Chinese food containers, cigarette butts and pot resin. We'd stand in the kitchen and joke about how this guy was turning into The Thing That Wouldn't Leave, but it was four days before Mr. B. finally told him to go home. Perhaps if we'd brought in Chinese takeout for only ourselves, he'd have left sooner.

But here we are, with a new virus variant whose name is largely shortened to just Delta (which gives it a certain Greek frisson, unlike the vaguely Jewish sounding "COVID," which has always seemed unfortunate to me given that the GOP is rotten with anti-Semites who only need to keep Jews around for their apocalyptic delusions). And thanks to most of the Republican Party and all of the right-wing media echo chamber, the same people who put Donald Trump in office have joined with the Great Medical Conspiracy "natural healing" contingent to make people skeptical about getting vaccinated, instead preferring to buy worming medicine for horses at the feed store because Michael Flynn's brother told them to use it. Every news report seems to have another GOP governor who has finally woken up and realized that rather than "owning the libs", vaccination refusal is simply killing off his own voters, being heckled by the ignorant, the deluded, the crazy and the misinformed.

Look, I understand vaccine hesitancy. I worked on clinical trials for nine years at the Job That Ate My Life. I know a little something about clinical research, and how long it takes, and how only about 14% of compounds that make it into human trials make it to approval and only about 3% of cancer treatments. And I too was hesitant at first, because yeah, they DID seem rushed to market, and then there's the question of the CDC and FDA reporting to Donald Trump for most of the pandemic's duration up to that point. But unlike people for whom research just means Googling conclusions you've already come to, I read about how mRNA research is not just something that a lab pulled out of its ass yesterday, but has been in the works for 30 years. Messenger RNA is like a teacher which tells your immune systtem how to fight this novel virus that it doesn't know what to do with. And of course you can see why this has focused on cancer therapies until now. After all, a treatment that can target just one kind of cell (cancerous) and leave healthy cells alone could go a long way towards reducing toxicity, right? So why NOT take 30 years of research and apply it to a vaccine? Once I knew that, I started doing whatever I had to in order to get this vaccine, and it bought me a few months of normal life, until people who have no idea how to read a protocol or a study decided that Google = research and that they knew better than anyone who actually had, well, knowledge.

I used to dream about Mr. Brilliant often. Sometimes I'd remember them, but more often not. I'd wake just with the realization that I'd dreamt about him. Often there would be other people in the dreams. Or he wouldn't be in them, but there would be other people in them. I spent about 10 months of the pandemic napping during the day because I was so busy at night. After all, my real-life social life was all but on hold other than on Zoom, but I was living a very full life in my sleep. Once I started being able to socialize again, I dreamt of him less. But here we are, with every social gathering bearing an undercurrent of existential dread despite vaccination (especially for those of us having exceeded the designated six months of confirmed protection), and isolation looming again, and there he goes again -- coming back from the dead in my dreams. The good news is that when he does, I can enjoy his company now instead of obsessing about having to buy him socks, underwear, and a new phone.

This is what isolation does to the widowed.

I could go on. I could talk about the Democrats' cluelessness about voting rights, and about corporate media, and about Andrew Cuomo being an asshole, and why Democrats are always held to a different standard and what does it buy us, and so on. But I have to save something for next time.

So join me as I shout into the void. Or not. You still have a choice.

Why Meghan Matters

2021-03-08T17:08:00.004-08:00

It's always amusing the day after there's a televised interview of some celebrity to see the inevitable tweets by people who you KNOW tuned in, but still feel they need to harrumph about how stupid it is to be interested in these people. And when these people are part of British royalty, Americans go almost as nuts as the British do.

Yes, I watched the whole thing. But this wasn't a piece of fluff. This was a metaphorical bomb lobbed right into the rebuilt metaphorical door of Kensington Palace that a soon-to-be-former princess named Diana virtually detonated in 1995. That inbred bunch isn't going to go quietly. They'll keep putting those doors back up until the stones holding them up crumble.

The US may have had its birth in a declaration of independence from a king, but it seems that for the entire time I've been alive, we've been trying to get back to a monarchy. I came to awareness during the Kennedy years, when the First Lady herself anointed her husband's White House as "Camelot." Americans loved the glamour of the Kennedy years, with a First Couple who looked great in formal wear and hosted concerts in the gilded East Room. Many people envisioned a Kennedy dynasty, with Bobby reclaiming the throne in 1968, and other Kennedys, who were a constant presence in those days, taking over from there. But the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, followed by l'affaire Chappaquiddick, Joe III's messy divorce, JFK Jr.'s plane crash, and on and on and on, have pretty much banished the would-be Kennedy dynasty to the dustbin of history.

And yet the quest for dynasties continue. Caroline Kennedy dipped her toe in the waters for a while. There's always talk of Chelsea Clinton. Michelle Obama may have been the only person who could have defeated Joe Biden last year. The Bush family snagged two presidencies and might have had a third, had Donald Trump not brought his entire circus down that gilded escalator in 2015. And had Beau Biden not died tragically from brain cancer at far too young an age, we might be looking at yet another Biden running for president in 2024 or 2028.

And then there's the Trumps, whose aspirations clearly go far beyond a genteel political dynasty and into a kind of grotesque parody of a monarchy, in which Ivanka would forever be a princess and Don Jr. the heir apparent -- all the jewelry and none of the noblesse oblige. Such royal pretentiouns should have been met with mockery, but our fascination with monarchy and dynasties still hasn't died, even after 244 years.

The most pervasive and insidious manifestation of this is the ubiquity of the Princess rite of passage for girls in the US. We're rotten with princesshood. Every little girl in the country cuts her teeth on one Disney princess or another. For girls like me -- chubby, homely, weird, cranky -- being a princess meant being pretty and slim. It meant being able to wear pretty new clothes instead of their sisters' hand-me-downs It meant fabulous gowns and a guarantee of happiness, and perhaps most importantly, it made you Popular.

Watch any episode of TLC's Say Yes to the Dress and you'll see at least one Jersey Bimbo with big hair, surgically-enhanced breasts, 4" impeccably manicured talons, a voice like a foghorn, and $15,000 to spend on a jeweled gown so she can "feel like a princess." Or you'll see a Barbie-lookalike blond who wants to "feel like Diana" on her wedding day. Yes, that last one still happens even now that we know that Diana walked down the aisle looking to see where Camilla was. Or you'll see a size-22 who brings in a photo of a bejeweled gown on a size 0 model and cries when the dress she loves doesn't come in her size. The whole Bridezilla thing is nothing but the Princess Myth writ large. I thought back in 1997 that the princess nonsense would finally also die in that twisted wreckage in the tunnel in Paris, but it keeps rising from the dead like supply-side economics. Princesshood is so pervasive, and so practically ingrained into our DNA at this point, that while covering Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding, two perfectly respectable women journalists did this:

After all, isn't a royal wedding the ne plus ultra of princesshood, combining the entire Disney princess trope with the the mystique that is the Bridal Gown?

And yet here we are now, with the giant turd that Harry and Meghan have laid in the Royal Punchbowl, and never has a punch bowl more richly deserve to be turd-ed. Because the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Mountbatten-Windsors have to be the most dysfunctional familiy in the world not named "Trump."

Full disclosure: I've always had kind of a soft spot for Harry. Mr. Brilliant and I had been married just shy of 11 years when Diana died, and I knew how much Mr. B's mother's death when he was twelve impacted his life. And while I was watching Diana's funeral, because of course I did, I kept looking at that little boy, compelled to walk, stone-faced, behind his mother's coffin on worldwide television. You don't get over that. Mr. B never got over his mother's death either, though the story I was told about her changed in his last months from him being her favorite until she died to her always having been cruel. I can tell you, though, that on his last conscious evening in this world, which doubled as our 27th anniversary, he spent our entire anniversary dinner talking bitterly about having to spend five days sitting in front of his mother's open casket at her wake when he was 12. You don't get over that. So I kind of get it. Now imagine living through that at age 12, growing up, getting married and finding it happening again WITH YOUR OWN WIFE.

I realize that we put suits of metaphorical clothes that suit our own agendas on celebrities whose lives interest us. But watching Harry in the second part of last night's interview, my theory that his choice of Meghan Markle was, however unconsciously, his ticket out of the dysfunctional clusterfuck that is his family and the institution that has trapped them, became highly plausible.

I'll be honest -- I had no idea who Meghan Markle was until she showed up in Vanity Fair magazine in 2017. And I had no idea that she was a woman of color. At one time, someone who looked like her would have "passed for white" if she'd been so inclined. Hell, MY MOTHER had similar coloring and she was an Ashkenazi Jew.

Could Harry have really been so obtuse as to believe that this wouldn't matter in an institution that has become first and foremost about overseeing a colonialist Commonwealth disproportionately populated by people of color? I don't think so. By 2017, his brother William had two children, and Harry was no longer needed as "the spare." But leaving that crew without a damn good reason was unthinkable. And when he and Meghan committed the unforgiveable sin of being more charming, more popular and made "better copy" than the necessarily staid heirs, well, the ugly underbelly of the already-ugly-enough tabloid culture in the UK and its psychotically dysfunctional relationship with The Institution became the final stamp on Harry's ticket out of it all; the ticket he'd purchased when he chose this particular woman in the first place.

So why does it matter? Why did this interview feel weightier than other coverage of the weird American fascination with royalty? Because racism is insidious, and because the US doesn't have a patent on it. Because you can be the lightest-skinned woman of color, and you can still be treated by white people as less than human. Your in-laws will concern troll you about how it will LOOK if your baby has darker skin than they deem to be seemly. Your newborn will be branded as a chimpanzee or a monkey -- something which shows that even though slavery in England proper had largely disappeared by 1800 (though it it didn't in places like the West Indies), and interracial marriage was not illegal, the UK has nothing to pat itself on the back about compared to publications in the US that published drawings of our first Black president and his wife as monkeys.

It's been interesting watching the same sorry scenario of a woman unprepared for and unwilling to buy into the stifling, anachronistic formality of an institution that long ago outlived its usefulness, nearly destroyed by it. I don't think Diana was as strong as she wanted to believe she was, but she was strong enough to blow a hole in the myth of happily ever after as the inevitable outcome of a royal wedding -- and to get out of it. The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Mountbatten-Windsors could have learned something, and perhaps if Diana had lived, even if outside the Firm, they would have. But her death allowed them to once again close the door to modernity, to diversity, to enlightenment -- until a Black woman, as Black women did in the US in the 2020 election, showed up and tried to save The Firm from itself. Because it's always up to Black women to clean up the messes that white people leave behind. This time it didn't work. But the white people behind that closed door now have to live with their mess, while the Black woman gets to leave with her head held high.

When "the middle" is a Kansas church that uses white nationalist imagery, the hell with it

2021-02-10T07:26:00.011-08:00

UPDATE: Jeep has now pulled the Springsteen Jeep ad because it seems that Mr. Middle was busted for DUI last fall. Somewhere out there, Irony is laughing her ass off.

*************************

The Super Bowl has always been for me nothing but the first of three new year mileposts on the way to Spring Training, the other two being the Golden Globes and the Oscars. Of course in this Year Two of the coronavirus pandemic, with said virus seeming bound and determined to remove our miserable species from the planet, these Rituals of American Excess just don't have the same energy they usually do.

The latter two of these displays of American Excess, those festivals of hideous designer clothing and self-congratulation, are likely to be virtual this year, and the thought of movie stars accepting awards from their living rooms while dressed in chihuahua pajamas just points out how these awards shows really ARE just about the clothes. And with most of us having seen few if any of the nominated movies (how do you distinguish a movie from a TV show these days anyway), what's the point of spending three hours on JUST the self-congratulation? I have to admit a morbid fascination with the "In Memoriam" segments, mostly because I'm at an age where the cultural touchstones of my youth are dropping like flies, which just adds to my sense of being Next In Line For Oblivion. But overall, I think I'd be far better served by watching something I missed because my fascination with the Parade of Horrors that the final years of Orange Pinochet have been have had me glued to the news.

The only time I can recall being interested in the Super Bowl, or being at something resembling a Super Bowl party was in 2008, Giants vs. Patriots, when we had friends over and one of them assured me that even though Mr. Brilliant was adamant that he hated turkey meatballs, he'd love HER turkey meatballs, and she was right. It was a great game, actually, with the Giants winning in the last few seconds. Usually the game is such a lugubrious affair, relentlessly hyped for the two weeks beforehand, but inevitably resulting in a boring game played between two teams that nobody really likes outside of their cities, and a mediocre "Triumph Of The Will"-reminiscent, pyrotechnics-heavy half-time entertainment. Starting in the 2000s, these shows became less about a theme and more about what Major Star (TM) the NFL could get for it. It's been was a time of Major Stars indeed, with the likes of Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, and Michael Jackson upping the ante of big names. These days all I know about the halftime performers is their names, other than Bruno Mars in 2014, and that only because Uptown Funk was not only the Earworm of the Year, but because of the many YouTube mashups of classic film dance sequences to it.

Because the game itself is almost always boring, and because the lifecycle of the Huge Pop Star (there are no Huge Rock Stars under age 60 anymore) is so short, the Big Game has become about the commercials. That the Super Bowl is primarily a psuedo-holiday devoted to consumption of artery-clogging processed food in a house full of people or crowded bar made it difficult to market in this pandemic year. Far too many Americans are simply unable to buy the stuff they used to, or even the wings 'n' nachos; and celebrating barely weeks after a mob exhorted to violence by an on-the-way-out president came uncomfortably close to murdering various members of Congress, but chose as a consolation prize a Capitol police officer, beating him to death with a fire extinguisher, seemed just a tad inappropriate. So even the hype this year seemed kind of half-hearted, and so the ads did too.

And then there was this:

I'm not sure who Jeep was targeting this ad to, other than perhaps Joe Scarborough, who predictably spent the better part of an entire segment on Monday waxing rhapsodic about it. After all, the white male middle is Scarborough's stock in trade, and as everyone who watches Morning Joe knows, it's exactly the same kind of predominantly white, predominantly suburban, predominantly Christian middle that non-crazy white men long for these days. Jewish liberals like me were made queasy by the relentless Christianist iconography, particularly the shot of the cross over a stars-and-stripes-festooned map of the US, topped with the exhortation "PRAY AMERICA," which someone with a clue should have known is common among white nationalists. And what the hell does THIS image mean? Is it meant to depict the crucifixion? Is the barbed wire a symbol for Trump's wall? Or are these crosses waiting to be lit on fire?

WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SAYING HERE?

And then the cluelessness is compounded by the craggy, nearly-unrecognizable face of the aged Bruce Springsteen, an outspoken liberal from New Jersey who fancies himself, and indeed has been anointed by some, as the Second Coming of Woody Guthrie. While Guthrie, who died of Huntington's Disease at age 55, didn't live long enough to be come the Craggy Wise Elder, Springsteen has, and that is the look Springsteen and Jeep are going for here. Springsteen's heart is in the right place, and aside from an unfortunate and mercifully brief foray in the 1980s into the obligatory buff-muscled marry-a-fashion-model phase, he has done a good job of putting his money where his mouth is over the years. So it's hard to believe that even a Michigan-based ad agency was clueless enough to see Springsteen as someone that the people who go to that church in Kansas that's depicted in the ad will see as One of Them. I wonder if Springsteen got to see the ad after it was done, and frankly, I wonder if he realized what it looks like for those not in the targeted demographic. Because it is an ad that excludes people of color, urban people, women, those who realize that the middle is essentially where the Democratic establishment is, and anyone other than right-wing Christian males. It is an ad targeted specifically to those very white people who attempted to overturn an election and overthrow our institutions, asking them to buy a vehicle developed for the military, shilled for by a liberal rock star who lives in the New York tri-state area.

It's easy for me to think well, maybe I'm just being paranoid. I've often felt over the last eight years that I am doomed to re-live my mother's life, but until the pandemic forced relentless solitude upon me, with Zoom being only a partial balm, my active social life allowed me to think perhaps I'm not doomed to EXACTLY the same path. But now it seems that I am, and increasingly of late, I seem to be doomed to another of her less-charming traits, and that is seeing anti-Semitism around every corner. But of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T out to get you. Still -- was I overreacting? Not according to The Wifely Person:

"I really tried to look at this ad from a whole bunch of viewpoints. It didn't matter. The words did not match the images. The images were pretty clearly directed at Christian Whites, the ones who were still donating to Feckless Loser's campaign to overturn the election. Were they targeting that group subliminally to say, It's over; come back to the centrist position of the GOP ? Or were they telling them White Supremacy is the source of light and truth? It's not easy to discern which message is the target message when the images do not match the words.

"These guys spend tons of money on ads. This one is two minutes plus. There is no way you will ever convince me that the ad agency did not know what it was doing, or that Bruce Springsteen thought this was benign. It's inconceivable.

"There is nothing benign or harmless about this ad. Anything Springsteen has to say about it will be coached and probably apologetic, but all bullshit. They knew exactly what they were putting up and they were hoping We, the People would aw, shucks the Boss in his cowboy clothes. They were counting on the emotional impact, but not the one it appears to have punched."

If you're tempted to dismiss her as just another paranoid Jew, there's Phil Woodson, an actual Christian pastor, who saw it too -- and explains in excruciating detail, which I highly recommend you read.

I realize that I've just written a very long screed about a Super Bowl ad when I haven't been able to focus enough to write about the election, the insurrection of January 6, the inauguration of the first person of color and woman as Vice President, the miracle that is Amanda Gorman, or even yesterday's Impeachment Redux. Perhaps it's that these things are just too big for my brain to handle, given that I lost my ability to focus and concentrate one day in March 2013 when I received an email from Mr. Brilliant at work that said "The ultrasounds weren't good. Please call me" -- and it has never really returned. But this relentless focus on a middle that is ONLY about the white and the Christian as being an ideal that means All Is Right With The World is terrifying on a very visceral level to those who don't fit the description. At least this screed deals with something real and immediate. I COULD have written about that ad which uses Pete Seeger's paean to mill workers to sell Volvos to hipster douchebags who find parenting to be just too hard.

Every election is the most important of our lifetime, but this one really is - personal thoughts on November 2020

2020-11-03T04:36:00.008-08:00

I used to love fall.

By September or early October, I'd have had enough of summer and the cool weather made me come alive. There's something about the angle of the sun in the fall, the way it hits the changing leaves. There's a smell to fall too; it's the smell of fire pits and cinnamon and now the ubiquitous "pumpkin spice." It's cocoa and a good book and a fuzzy throw and the cats hunkered down all yin/yang on something soft or burrowed under the comforter.

2013 changed all that. Now I navigate the period from September 22 - October 5 with a kind of vague dread, reliving Mr. B's last days in the ICU year after year after year. This was the seventh anniversary (yes, really) and perhaps because of a song that's been played for a decade and a half but has special resonance for me forever, seven years seems particularly resonant.

After seven years, and the knowledge of how high a recurrence rate bladder cancer has, and about what real life is for many people with moyamoya is despite surgeries, I have come to where I can think "If Mr. B. were alive today, he wouldn't be alive today." There's a comfort in that. He was not a man who was going to be able to cope with recurrent metastatic bladder cancer, or with not being able to drive for X number of years due to history of seizures, or with having occasional TIAs. He was nowhere near ready to throw in the towel on working, but until recently not being able to drive would have been a career killer for him. There was never going to be a happy ending there; at best there might have been a delayed one.

Autumn in North Carolina is different. It stays warmer longer. We seem to have drown-or-drought. There are always trees that stay green all winter. The skies are bluer. And as November progresses, the overall pall of grey that seems to hang over New Jersey in that month is absent, and that helps leaven the memories with reminders that life continues.

This year is different, though. This year has had a mind-numbing sameness to it. I've been in semi-isolation since mid-March, due to the coronavirus pandemic, which the man up for re-election today has made sure may never go away in my lifetime. After building a life here in my chosen home in an attempt to not relive my mother's life, here I am, reliving my mother's life -- alone; my social contacts largely limited to Zoom calls, telephone, 15-minute driveway chats, and the occasional outdoor lunch. But it gets dark early now, and colder, and soon I will be hunkered down with the aforementioned fuzzy throw, the cats, and more streaming content than I can consume in a lifetime.

And today is Election Day, 2020. Four years ago, I was the only person I knew who thought Donald Trump would win, as impossible as that seemed. Why did I think that? Five words: IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS CLOSE.

If you hadn't spent the 1980s in the New York metropolitan area, you probably thought that Donald Trump was the successful businessman of "The Apprentice." Most Americans didn't know what he was. The media did, but they also knew he was good for delivering audience eyeballs to advertisers. It should never have been close enough for the Comey letter to make a difference, or Russian propaganda to make a difference. But it was. And it did.

And it is too close for comfort today.

We always say that this is the election of our lifetime, but this year it is. George W. Bush mused about things being easier if he were a dictator, and yes, people like me feared he might try it. But while we didn't realize it at the time, GWB had one thing that Donald Trump does not have: a basic respect for American institutions. Donald Trump doesn't, as we have seen over the last four years. Today there is absolutely no excuse for not knowing what Donald Trump is. And still -- nearly half of Americans support him. I used to say that there was a hard-core 31-32% that would never turn on the GOP and George W. Bush. This was the core of white evangelicals, and die-hard war hawks who would rather be drawn and quartered than vote for a Democrat. But now it's the "Trump Core", or "Trump Cult", if you will -- and it is 40-44%.

So no, I am not optimistic about today. This is the death knell of white male patriarchy. It is armed, and it is not going down without a fight. Joe Biden may squeak this out today. And who knows, John Roberts may decide that for all that he doesn't seem to care much about voting rights, he cares very much about his legacy. And Neal Gorsuch, who may only SEEM less doctrinaire because of the Trumpesque grievance philosophy of Brett Kavanaugh and the retrograde religious fervor of Amy C. Barrett, may also look at the big picture. But we are in for a very ugly few months, perhaps years, no matter what happens today.

And I am by no means confident that there won't be a smoking ruin where the United States of America used to be when it's over.

VOTE. And....

What is the extent of our obligation to know?

2020-09-24T12:20:00.005-07:00

I've always been a bit of a Cassandra. At times, if there's a silver lining, I'll find the dark cloud. How much of this is just my nature, how much of it is garden variety Jewish pessimism born of inherited Holocaust-related PTSD that at least one study has shown is an actual thing, and how much is born of the experience of having always been short, fatter than others, and always marching to a different drummer, I cannot say. But I've never had the sense that "everything will work out fine."

Everything DOESN'T work out fine. That's not to say that the worst possible scenario always occurs, because it doesn't. And once we get into the habit of worrying about things, that habit is hard to break. A very good therapist once told me that "Worry doesn't change any outcome. It keeps your mind busy so you think you have control when you really don't." I have had to remind myself of this over and over again, especially since early 2013.

There is a kind of pessimism I've noticed in life that seems to be uniquely Jewish. It is informed by a long heritage of "You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you." For thousands of years, there have been attempts to eradicate the Jews, and yet we persevere. It's something of which we are proud, but that pride always comes with a sense of unease.

I used to get irritated with my mother, who saw anti-Semites around every corner. There were very few gentiles that she ever really trusted. This was not because she was so religious, because she wasn't. What she WAS, was a very damaged woman whose own mother had seen her parents and three sisters come to the US, become homesick, and return home to Poland, just in time for Hitler. Home movies from my mother's early childhood show a happy child with a smiling mother. Yet somewhere along the line, that changed. I suspect that when my grandmother found out what had happened to her family, her grief and guilt destroyed her. With no therapists or support groups available in those days, she took it out on her husband and children. Certainly the dour grandmother I knew bore no relation to the woman in these videos. And the mother I had bore little resemblance to the happy child in the videos.

But when I look around me today; when the name "George Soros" is used as a dogwhistle that means "Jews", when I see a president who calls people who march in the streets chanting "Jews will not replace us" some "very fine people," I have to both rethink whether my mother was really wrong, and also give thanks that she is not here to a) see this; and b) gloat and say "I told you so." Because it often DOES feel unsafe to be even a lapsed secular Jew in this country today.

Whatever the reason, the feeling of being besieged is something that exists so deeply in my soul that all that therapy has been able to do is give me the tools to cope with it. And my way of coping has been not to worry, but just be cognizant of the dangers and then kind of shrug my shoulders and say "What is going to happen will happen."

Before going on, I want to make one thing clear: The many words spilled above on Jewish fear do not mean that Jews, American or otherwise, have some kind of a patent on suffering. I am writing this on the day after a grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky has refused to issue any charges against police officers who pumped six bullets into a young woman named Breonna Taylor while she slept, and months after the summary execution in the street of a man named George Floyd. This has been a summer of systematic and institutional eliminationism of Black Americans; one that has forced many of us whose skin is white, even those of us who are Jews, to examine the ways that we take for granted the benefit of the doubt that is given to us by virtue of our skin color. My view is that as people who have benefitted from white privilege while simultaneously dealing with the generations of reality of bigotry and eliminationism, we have a special obligation to fight alongside our Black Lives Matter kin.

We are suffering right now from grief overload, from outrage overload, from terror overload, and all this is combined with the isolation many of us are enduring from the coronavirus pandemic. I'm weathering this better on the surface than many people are, because most of the time I seem able to "compartmentalize" it all. I am steeped in news much of the time, whether it's having news on as background sound to help minimize my sense of aloneness, or because I've been a news junkie since I was twelve.

People have asked me, "How can you stay so calm?" I tell them it's because I can compartmentalize. I know where my burnout point is, and then I tune into TinyKittens or Kitten Academy or I watch reaction videos on YouTube or something else to quiet my brain down a bit. My blood pressure is still normal. I sleep well. So to some degree it's working. But not completely, because my hair loss in the last six months has been alarming. My old hair stylist in New Jersey used to say he could always tell when I was under stress because my hair was thinner on top. I think back to 2013, when I was dealing with Mr. B's illness and death and the loss of Maggie and Jenny, all while working an extremely high-stress job. Or 2015, when my father died before I could get to Florida to visit one more time. Or when I moved. Or when I was still working 14 hours a day from home and was so tired that I would look at my work and it might as well have been written in Aramaic. Yes, my hair would thin out, but not now, when not even the "old lady combover" I've been doing for the last five years, pulling everything to the front, covers what is happening.

Back in 2004, I started writing at the old place just after the 2004 Democratic National Convention because poor Mr. B. needed a break from my incessant ranting. These days, most of my ranting takes place over on Facebook, where some of even my closest friends and relatives have unfollowed me because they just can't deal with the things I'm sharing. It gets them too upset. Some of the people who have unfollowed me are just "not political" and don't want to read about the things I write about. As long as they have their jobs, and their spouses and kids are all right, and everyone's healthy, it's all good. Others just aren't able to stop the runaway train of anxiety that comes from being steeped all the time in the hellscape that is life in the Trump era. I get that; I really do. It must be sort of like those times when I was a kid when the certainty of eventual death would wake me up in the middle of the night. It's the terror of things we can't do anything about.

Here's the problem though: At what point do we have an obligation to stop looking away? Does looking away mean pretending that everything is OK? How do we find a way to be hyper-aware without it taking us down a psychological path that leads to emotional paralysis, or worse? How do we look away when our fellow citizens are being summarily murdered by those who job it is to protect them as well as us? How do we look away when the very institutions we profess to revere every time we hang a flag or celebrate a holiday are in very real and imminent danger of collapsing completely? How do we look at the hurricanes and wildfires and think that pulling the cellophane windows out of junk mail envelopes before recycling is going to make one iota of difference? Is there even hope? What does hope even mean today? What's the difference between hope and delusion? And what kinds of action are even effective at a time when demonstrable facts are given the same weight as utter horsepuckey?

Yes, it infuriates me when I see people who have children and grandchildren who either don't care about what's happening or else have embraced the GOP worldview because it looks more like what they're accustomed to. "DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT THE WORLD YOUR CHILDREN ARE GOING TO LIVE IN???" I want to scream. Yes, I care what's happening but does anything I do even mean anything? Will my money change a single vote? My Senators' staffs most of the time don't even answer the phone. I am one of those hyper-aware people. I KNOW. But does it even matter? Do we have an obligation to know when far too many of our fellow citizens choose not to? Or should we just join those who look away, live out our lives and let it all shake out the way it seems destined to?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Dead And I Don't Feel So Good Myself

2020-09-18T20:49:00.008-07:00

Seven years ago today, Mr. Brilliant had started a regimen of chemoradiation for his bladder cancer. He was three weeks out of the first of two planned surgeries for moyamoya disease, and though he was starting to have some side effects from the radiation, he was doing pretty well. Three days later, about mid-day, his speech would start to slur, his hands would be shaking, and he would outright refuse to go to the hospital or even call his neurosurgeon. By the next morning, he would have had a full-blown stroke. By the morning after that he would be no longer conscious, and two weeks later he would be gone.

Seven years. Seven years has gone so fast, wake me up when September ends.

Mr. B. never understood why I loved Green Day. It was just 3-chord punk, too poppy to be real punk. I couldn't have known then that hearing Billie Joe Armstrong's ode to his father's death would resonate so much with me in the years to come.

I am 65 now, and Mr. B. is forever 58. I'm too old for him now. I've let my hair go gray, it's starting to thin out now, and I can no longer pass for 45 in the dark with the light behind me.

This time of year is always difficult for me ever since then. In good years it's a vague sense of unease, and it lets up after October 5. This year it's been far worse than usual. Maybe it's because it's the seven years in that song. Or maybe it's the hellscape that we've been living in. Every day it seems like I wake up, look at the news to see what fresh horror has happened overnight, and every morning 2020 says "Hold my beer."

People think grief is something that happens and then you're done. But grief is an insidious little bastard. It's like that tough little cancer cell that stays behind, untouched by whatever you've bombarded it with, only to roar back later. And with it, when you're the one who had to make The Decision, comes the guilt, the recriminations, the late night second guessing that never really stops. And the sense that you'll never be whole again.

I went into a tailspin when Chadwick Boseman died, and I still don't understand why. But tonight, when the news came through that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I remembered from seven years ago hit me.

I'm not a drinker and I don't take drugs. But there I was, rummaging around the bottom of the pantry closet, looking for that little bottle of Wray and Nephew Overproof Rum Cream that I'd bought in Jamaica two years ago when I took Mr. B's ashes to be buried amidst the Mid-Shoals Reef off of the beach in Negril, Jamaica. I opened it up and just started swigging the sweet, fiery yet creamy room-temperature stuff right out of the bottle. And yeah, it did help my stomach relax.

I'm alone right now. The cats are asleep. It's cool enough that I don't have any fans running and the air conditioning isn't on. The only sound is the refrigerator running and the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. I feel very alone, and very frightened. Because if the death of Chadwick Boseman felt like the death of hope because of a fictional character he portrayed, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels like the final nail in the coffin of any chance that the country we were living in can ever be made even into what it used to be, never mind something better. During the Bush years, Mr. B. and I would talk endlessly about it. But he's not here now and the cats don't care.

I think back to those terrible days in September 2013. Yes, they were terrible for me; I had a husband in the ICU and didn't know if he was even still in there. I had a manager who, once I'd declined taking family leave because I had no idea what was in store for me in Mr. B's illness, refused to cut me any slack at all, and I was dealing with a fuckup of a religious fanatic data manager who was bitching about me to my manager all the time. But outside of my hellish little corner, things were pretty good. It was the first year of Obama's second term. The economy was in good recovery. The weather was nice that fall. The worst thing I would talk to Mr. B. about as he lay there unconscious with four anti-seizure drugs being pumped into him, was about how awful the finale of Dexter was.

I've been saying for the last four years that he was the smart one. He saw his opportunity to exit painlessly and he took it.

After he died, when people wanted to go to something and I wasn't planning anything because he hated funerals more than anything else to the point that during our last dinner together, he talked with still-raw anger about having to sit for five days at his mother's wake when he was twelve, I threw a memorial party at the local dive bar. He'd always said that the Irish do it right because they throw a party, and the Jews do it right because they get it all done quickly. So I decided that was what he would have wanted. I don't even know why that's relevant.

Most of the time in the intervening years, I've been pretty satisfied with my life. It's not the one I had wanted, but it's very good in its own way, with a good circle of women friends, two cats that keep me entertained, and no real financial worries. I'm fortunate, and I know it. But I've been thoughtful lately; taking stock of my life -- what I've learned and the person I've become. But sometimes the sheer breadth of the years hits home in a way that it can't on an ongoing basis because I don't have children to be that barometer of the passage of time. And I'd give anything to have them back. So many years I took for granted, both before I met Mr. B. and during the 30 years we were together. Despite our ups and downs, we had a marriage, and if it was at times like an old, reliable toaster -- dependable and functional -- there was a lot of comfort in that, and in having a like-minded soul RIGHT THERE.

I no longer have that comfort, or any other kind either. There's a scene in I, Claudius where Claudius' mother Antonia is saying goodbye to him before opening her veins:

Antonia: My mind is made up. I don't want to stay here anymore. I was born into a world of people. It's become a kennel of mad dogs. I've seen my splendid son Germanicus murdered, and my grandsons, Drusus, Nero, Gemellus. My granddaughters are degenerate beyond redemption, and your sister Livilla died by my own hand. That was the worst. I should have died then myself.

Claudius: Wait a while! Caligula's sick in his mind. Sooner or later...

Antonia: No, Rome is sick, sick to its heart. He's just the rash it's come out in.

That's kind of how I feel. I look at what my country has become, and I look at the continued pile-up of atrocities right out of Hitler's playbook, and I envy Mr. B. sometimes that he was able to exit what he called this "God-forsaken level of reality" before the shit really hit the fan.

I had little hope even before Ginsburg's death that we had any chance of stopping this relentless authoritarian goose-step, but with Mitch McConnell already stating that the Merrick Garland rule no longer applies when the president is of Mitch McConnell's party, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that whatever Federalist Society nutjob Trump puts on the Court (and it looks like it's going to be the Make Gilead Great Again theocratic lunatic Amy Coney Barrett) will be the one who will definitively turn this country into a permanent Trump Family Dictatorship, with carte blanche for that grifter family to plunder as much money out of the federal coffers as they can before climate change mercifully for our planet wipes our miserable species off the map.

In case anyone is concerned that I might be suicidal (and I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would give a shit; my existence is pretty insignificant in the larger picture, and I'm OK with that), don't worry, I'm not. But I guess I'm thankful that I don't fear death the way I did when I was a kid, when I'd sit bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and think I AM GOING TO DIE AND THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT. I've had a good run; better than I ever thought I would. I'd like to have more of it, even if it's just to cook and eat some good food, pet my cats, listen to some good music.

But oh, how I wish I could have some of those years back, hold them in my hand, and treasure them for the miracle they were; those years that I thought would just go on forever.

As it is, I just hope that when the Trumpazoid brownshirts come to round people like me up, they have the decency to just do a good clean shot in the head that I don't see coming.

Chadwick Boseman and the Death of Hope

2020-09-01T08:19:00.002-07:00

When Indian actor Irrfan Khan died earlier this year, I felt an uncharacteristic sadness. Khan was the kind of actor who even when he played a villian, there was an underlying kindness to him; a nobility; a preternatural and paternal calm that could make you feel that no matter what happened, things would be OK as long as he was in the world.

But that sadness was nothing compared to the gut-punch that has been the news of the death of Chadwick Boseman.

I am not one to grieve over celebrities. My cynical grounding in the real world taught me long ago that famous people are not our friends and that we really don't know them. The hand you shake, the autograph you get, the TV show you watch, these are not genuine connections. But sometimes an actor comes along, and a role comes along, and a concept comes along, and it all comes together at the exact right time in the zeitgeist, and something magical and transcendent and yes, important, happens.

Such was the case with Chadwick Boseman.

I first saw Chadwick Boseman in 2013 in "42." As a longtime baseball fan, I love a good baseball movie. Watching this one, I was blown away by this guy I'd never heard of who so inhabited Jackie Robinson that it was as if he were channelling the real one. The stoicism. The pent-up rage. The quiet strength.

It was the kind of performance that makes you sit up, take notice, and write down the name. I thought about that movie for days.

I have to admit that I didn't rush out to see "Black Panther." I knew it starred the guy who had impressed me so much five years earlier. But I'd grown tired of comic book movies years earlier after sitting through "Iron Man" with Mr. Brilliant. At that time, I figured that if Robert Downey, Jr. wasn't enough to offset the stunts and CGI and noise of which I'd grown weary, nothing was. So I didn't see it until enough people assured me that it wasn't going to be just another Marvel movie with a superhero and a Big Bad and a lot of Things Blowing Up Real Good.

There have been so many keystrokes spent on how this movie, with its fully fleshed-out, decidedly African universe that is more technologically advanced than anything that white people have ever come up with, and its nearly all-black cast, landed like an earthquake, that there's nothing more I can add. But if the kings of myth are, if not superheroes, certainly a touch above us mere mortals, then the minute Chadwick Boseman appears on screen, there's a sense that you are not just in the presence of an actor portraying a king, you are in the presence of a real one. And at the end, when King T'Challa addresses the United Nations, sounding for all the world not much different from Nelson Mandela in tone and cadence, that view is cemented in your mind.

It was late Friday night, August 28 when I made the mistake of one last Twitter check before going to bed. I was seeing a bunch of tweets from black journalists and activists I follow about how this is too much, about how 2020 just got that much worse, and I wondered what it was about. And then I saw.

After Mr. Brilliant died seven years ago, I felt for days as if my chest had been crushed. I would fear going to sleep because I feared I wouldn't wake up. Whoever coined the term "heartbroken" knew what s/he was talking about. This news felt like that, and I simply could not stop crying. This lasted all weekend, and I had no idea why. I'm not one to cry over celebrity deaths, no matter how cruel and premature they are or however much I may have enjoyed their work.

This was different somehow. This IS different somehow.

It's different because of the knowledge that this man, with his quiet strength, made this and six other films all the while knowing that time was going to run out for him sooner rather than later. He did this grueling movie while undergoing cancer treatments, which knock most people out flat. He visited kids with cancer knowing of his own diagnosis. He spoke at Howard University's graduation just months ago.

Somehow in the last two years, he BECAME T'Challa. And every time you'd see a photo of a kid crossing his arms across his (or her) chest, you knew that the strength, the dignity, the quiet, and the determination of this man had reached well out into the universe. Wakanda, with its sweeping vistas and beautiful waterfalls and ability to heal pretty much everything, seemed possible, and we weirdly thought he would be instrumental somehow in getting us there, even if only in a blockbuster sequel. Hey, no one said it was rational, but we WANTED Wakanda and its king to be real. And in that wanting there was hope that it COULD be real.

It's become harder every day in this annus horribilis to sustain that hope. I've been able during this pandemic to largely hold it together. I've been living day by day, forgiving myself for those days (like this one) when I'm online all day and get little accomplished. My blood pressure is normal despite all the news and social media I feed into my head every day. I have a limited, but still-active-for-social-isolation social life. I've described myself as "pretty zen about the whole thing." But we are now two months away from an election the results of which I do not think will be pretty. I'm quite honestly frightened. The barbarians are at the gate. Killmonger is in charge and will take power by any means necessary. And King T'Challa is not here to persevere and to light the way.

Of course that's absurd. And it's a terrible burden to place on ANY actor, never mind one battling cancer. But I think for a lot of people, that's what it felt like. All I know is that since I read the news on Friday night, I can't shake the feeling that all hope I may have had that we might get out of this mess has died too.

Dear Fellow White People: Virtue Signaling is Not Enough; We Have Work To Do

2020-06-03T07:08:00.002-07:00

I find myself feeling pretty damn irritable these days. Like everyone else, I'm a bit stir-crazy from nearly three months of my big excitement being going to Aldi on Thursday mornings when it's not busy. I've been angry about Trump for over three years. And then there's my just general customary cynicism. And then there's the last eight days, in which four policemen, no different from the many policemen who have been summarily executing black men in the street without trial, finally did it one too many times.

For the last eight nights, there have been demonstrations in big and small cities all over the country. The American people who aren't part of the Trump Cult have finally had enough. And predictably, the protests have been co-opted by the usual crypto-anarchists who always end up at these things, and in a more terrifying development, but the neo-Nazis and KKKers who have formed an underground army of loser incel white men, armed with guns to hide their anxiety about their tiny penises, trying desperately to cling to whatever privilege they have left after billionaires have sucked out their livelihoods, blaming people of color for their problems. It feels like the last stand of white patriarchy, and that patriarchy has made clear that it's not going to go down without an awful lot of blood being shed.

For those of us who remember, and in some cases participated in, the unrest of 1968, this is all depressingly familiar. We had hoped to live in a different world. We had hoped to make a difference. We failed. I don't know why we failed, but we did. The millennials want to say we all sold out to Ronald Reagan and Wall Street, but it's not that simple. The truth is that the hippies that the news media covered were NEVER the majority. And most of them DIDN'T sell out and become stockbrokers. The stockbrokers are the guys in the plaid pants who ratted out the kids who were walking out of school to go to anti-war protests.

But that's not what moves me to write today. Today I'm here to talk to my fellow white people about virtue signaling.

Yesterday, white people everywhere put black background images on their Facebook and Instagram pages for what was called "Blackout Tuesday." This was supposed to be a day for artists and companies to "pause and reflect." But people hate to let a good opportunity for virtue signaling go to waste, so most people replaced their cover and profile images with a plain black background. Most of them kept on posting all day anyway, which meant that the advertisers for whom YOU are the product, much as TV programming is simply a vehicle for delivering your eyeballs to advertisers, got their money's worth.

I did NOT change my cover and profile images, because I knew damn well that I wasn't going to "pause and reflect" while reporters were still being attacked in the street and police were advancing on peaceful protesters spraying them with tear gas and pepper spray as if they were that 2" long hornet that found its way into my windowshade in my home office last year. A lot of bad shit can happen while white people are pausing and reflecting. I didn't succumb to this exercise in self-righteousness because it seemed not all that much different from those "I'll know which of my friends care about [cancer / domestic violence / autoimmune diseases / animal cruelty / domestic violence] by who shares this" memes that people insist on perpetuating. I call this, variously, "Facebook Emotional Blackmail" or "Facebook Guilt Tripping." The idea that clicking "Share" on Facebook is the ONLY way to TRULY PROVE you care about the cause in question, and that sharing a black background is the ONLY way to show you recognize what Black people are going through, is emblematic of the kind of facile, drive-by "caring" to which social media lends itself.

As Madison Malone Kircher noted yesterday at Vulture.com:

That day is today and instead of using this movement to reflect on how Black artists fuel culture and sharing resources support ongoing solidarity protests around the country, #THESHOWMUSTBEPAUSED has been co-opted by well-intentioned Instagrammers clogging up the #BlackLivesMatter feed. If you search the hashtag on the app, you’ll find almost nothing but black square posts. A number of black artists, including Kehlani and Little Nas X, have pointed out how this is ultimately an ineffective way to help, given that Instagram is a vital tool for organizing. A great example is the @justiceforgeorgenyc account, a centralized hub for information on daily protests in New York City. A flood of black squares wastes useful digital space that could be devoted to the real cause.

But more importantly, blacking out social media during days of demonstrations, which in an age of corporate media, is often the ONLY place to get eyewitness reporting on the ground, is to black out possible useful information about the protests. But why let logistics get in the way of a good way for white people to feel all "woke" and virtuous and caring?

Yesterday, the food blog Serious Eats participated in some world-class virtue signaling:

As a food website that publishes international recipes and runs reported feature articles, personal essays, and the like, we’ve long had a commitment to celebrating global culinary traditions. But while we’ve endeavored to be sensitive to issues of cultural appropriation, to represent diverse voices, and to assert that food is always, at its core, deeply political, we are also part of the problem.

Serious Eats has no Black people on staff at this time, and we’ve never had a Black editor. The underrepresentation of Black voices in food media is well-known and often remarked and reported upon, yet it remains endemic to our industry. That’s not a coincidence, nor is it an idiosyncrasy of media broadly or food media in particular: It is a reflection of the power structures that define the United States, and it is not okay.

We are committed to making more Black voices heard on our site, to honoring Black foodways, to being a home for Black stories, and to standing back and shutting up to listen to Black voices elsewhere. What that actually means is that we’ll be refraining from publishing new content this week and instead using our homepage to provide a list of links and resources to help people get involved in the necessary fight against racism in this country. We’ll also be using that time to have difficult conversations about our organization and the content we produce, and to plan for the future accordingly.

Wow! "Difficult conversations!" How virtuous! How "woke"! Look, I'm not trying to single out Serious Eats, a site I really enjoy. But seriously -- they're just noticing NOW that they have no Black people on staff? THEY DIDN'T NOTICE BEFORE NOW? They didn't notice when any of the OTHER Black men and women who have been murdered by police over the last decade that they didn't have any Black people on staff and weren't publishing content by Black authors? George Floyd had to DIE for them to notice this? And yet, they publish a letter like this, and all over social media, white people are kvelling about how wonderful they are.

I understand the need to find some light in the universe right now. I don't want to be a complete Debbie Downer. I too decided to follow young Jalen Thompson after seeing how he recruited his town's police chief to march with him in O'Fallon, Missouri. I too am moved at the sight of demonstrators embracing police offers as a gesture of reconciliation. But I'm not kidding myself that any of this means anything in the long run IF WE ALL DO NOT CHANGE.

Pointing out these "points of light" are the "All Lives Matter" of the current moment. It's dismissive of the reality that people of color living in this country deal with every day. Yes, not all cops summarily execute black people in the street -- or in their beds, as in the case of Breonna Taylor. But enough of them do, and those who don't are doing nothing to stop them. Yes, not all white people are gun-totin', Trump-supportin' lunatics. But we have not done enough to say "Enough." We have not taken enough action inside our own heads.

Virtue signaling is fine, when it's part of an overall soul-searching of how we contribute to the structure that has made the murder of George Floyd and others possible, and how we benefit disproportionately from it. I'm no paragon of racial virtue, believe me, and black backgrounds on Facebook won't make me so. Only I can do that. I MUST do that. Do or do not. There is no try.

I spent most of my life in northern New Jersey. In all that time, I never lived in a neighborhood that had any more than MAYBE one or two token black families. The town where I spent most of my childhood had a "black section" on "the other side of town." It wasn't till I got to high school where I had any interaction at all, most of it through political activism, with people not the same skin color as mine. The town I moved here from is still 96% white. The next town over from that one, a pretty tree-lined suburb with a thriving downtown, was for years regarded as less desirable because it has "a black section," tucked away behind the hospital. It's a pretty, tree-lined neighborhood, but it's "the black section." To my Jersey eyes, moving here was an eye-opener, because Durham, at least, is less segregated than northern New Jersey is.

But when you grow up without significant day-to-day interaction with Black people, you absorb the messages of the larger culture in spite of yourself, and no matter how bleeding-heart-liberal your parents are. And then you grow up and you clutch your purse more tightly in the elevator when the Black bike messenger gets on. Or you feel a pang of fear when you go to Caldor after dark and there's a young black man walking from his car behind you. It's practically reflexive. And you don't even think about it. Until you realize that you have to. If you've ever said "I'm not racist but....", you're racist. You might not be an alt-right, Charlottesville tiki torch racist, but you're racist. And so am I. Until that little gut-twist goes away, we're racist.

Racism is a sickness, and it infects far too many of us. It's hard to acknowledge that. But we have to. Symbolic gestures are fine, but we've had symbolic gestures for years. They're not effective. Dealing with racism starts in our own heads, in our own communities, and at the ballot box. We may never be "past all that." We can't erase the history of this nation. But we don't have to perpetuate it. We know what we have to do. It's up to us to do it.

No, I can't possibly know what it's like. And that's the problem.

2020-05-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

Last night Chris Cuomo got all sanctimonious about how Minneapolis erupting in violence is where it stops being a protest. It was archetypal whitesplaining, and pretty cringeworthy. In the handoff to Don Lemon, the latter gently chided Cuomo for just that.

It's an important segment for white people to watch. In an even sadder and angrier vein, Elie Mystal wrote at The Nation yesterday that the only possible conclusion is that white America likes its killer cops. It's a hard read but a necessary one.

The truth is that we white bleeding heart liberals like to think that we're somehow better, that we know what it's like for black people in this country because we are aware and because we don't defend bad cops.

Yes, I'm afraid of police. I'm afraid of police because I had them barge into my residence and trash the place back in 1984 when Mr. Brilliant got caught up in a friend's pot bust and they thought they'd busted up a huge pot ring, instead of his friend who was dealing small quantities and Mr. B., who had just purchased under 25 grams for his own use. This was followed up by months of wiretapping our phone, which caused me to spend lots of time on the phone with my women friends gossiping about this and that and boring the cops to death. After all that, both guys pleaded guilty to disorderly persons misdemeanor charges, paid fines, and had their records expunged after 10 years. (The cop who busted them went on to become Chief of Detectives and a rather colorful career, peppered by rumors of corruption and apparent business dealings with Mob figures, eventually stepping down in disgrace.)

I'm afraid of police because in 2009 when I was sideswiped by a speeding car on the Garden State Parkway, the officer refused to hear my account and wrote up the report based solely on the account of the 21-year-old male (who was more like the cop) who hit me, who said I cut him off (not possible given where the damage to my car was) and wrote up the report with me as being at fault.

But IN NEITHER OF THESE EXPERIENCES DID I FEAR THAT I COULD BE KILLED BY THEM.

If I should ever get pulled over for a busted tail light, I'm a little old white lady who needs to get her car fixed. I'm not going to be asked to get out of the car. I'm not going to be frisked, put on the ground, and beaten. Or have a knee put on my neck. Or have my shoulder dislocated. I will not be summarily executed in the street because I am white.

Here are things I can do that black people don't seem able to without risking their lives, and the ones who either died or could have died for doing the same things (copied from a friend on Facebook):

I can go birding (#ChristianCooper).
I can go jogging (#AmaudArbery).
I can relax in the comfort of my own home (#BothemSean and #AtatianaJefferson).
I can ask for help after being in a car crash (#JonathanFerrell and #RenishaMcBride).
I can have a cellphone (#StephonClark).
I can leave a party to get to safety (#JordanEdwards).
I can play loud music (#JordanDavis).
I can sell CD's (#AltonSterling).
I can sleep (#AiyanaJones, #Brionna Taylor)
I can walk from the corner store (#MikeBrown).
I can play cops and robbers (#TamirRice).
I can go to church (#Charleston9).
I can walk home with Skittles (#TrayvonMartin).
I can hold a hair brush while leaving my own bachelor party (#SeanBell).
I can party on New Years (#OscarGrant).
I can get a normal traffic ticket (#SandraBland).
I can lawfully carry a weapon (#PhilandoCastile).
I can break down on a public road with car problems (#CoreyJones).
I can shop at Walmart (#JohnCrawford) .
I can have a disabled vehicle (#TerrenceCrutcher).
I can read a book in my own car (#KeithScott).
I can be a 10yr old walking with our grandfather (#CliffordGlover).
I can decorate for a party (#ClaudeReese).
I can ask a cop a question (#RandyEvans).
I can cash a check in peace (#YvonneSmallwood).
I can take out my wallet (#AmadouDiallo).
I can run (#WalterScott).
I can breathe (#EricGarner).
I can live (#FreddieGray).

I CAN BE ARRESTED WITHOUT THE FEAR OF BEING MURDERED. (#GeorgeFloyd)

Even in 2020, judging people, especially African-American men, based on color is still entrenched in our power structures. My anger is white liberal anger; it's the limited way of empathy without similar experience. When Mr. B. first died people said dumb things about how they knew how I felt, but the only people who REALLY knew what I felt were other widows. When a friend's daughter died, a mutual friend said "You can't possibly know how she feels because you don't have children." And I replied, "And neither can you, because you get to go home and tuck your very much alive kids into bed tonight." We can feel badly for the plight of others, but it has limits, because we have not been there.

Like you, I am horrified and sickened at the video taken of George Floyd, begging to be allowed to breathe as his life ebbs away on a street at the hands of people who are supposed to be protecting him as much as others. I've forced myself to watch it a number of times. But I'm white. I can turn it off. I don't have to watch it. It triggers my humanity, but not my experience. I don't have to live it. But every black male in this country lives with that fear. Christian Cooper could have lived it the other day simply because he asked a woman to leash her dog in accordance with the law.

Seeing photos of unconscious people on ventilators and their families having to make "the decision" during this pandemic has triggered my memories of Mr. B.'s last two weeks because that was my experience. I get it. But this? This is not my experience. It can't be. I can't know what it's like. And that is a problem.

The list of Black Americans killed by police keeps growing and growing and growing. And one of the most horrible things about it is watching the people they loved and who loved them, on the news, speaking in a tone of resignation as if they always knew this would happen eventually. How does one live like that without going insane? And yet Black Americans do, every single day of their lives.

In the midst of this pandemic, I don't see Black people going around saying that wearing a mask to avoid spreading a deadly virus is tyranny. I don't see them saying that not being able to sit in a restaurant is against the Constitution. They simply do not have the luxury of saying so. In this pandemic, Black men are damned if they wear the mask and damned if they don't. They are more frequently cited for not wearing masks where it's required. And with black men in danger if they wear a hoodie, imagine what kind of police and civilian freakout will happen with black men in masks. Imagine if hundreds of black men carrying assault weapons marched on a state house, stopping afterward at a Subway for sandwiches, as white people did recently in Raleigh, NC. Imagine the white panic.

It's really easy for us white people to sit here and tut-tut-tut about rioting, and about how it makes black people look bad, and how it reinforces every stereotype that racists have about them. It's easy because it's not happening to us. I watched Chris Cuomo whitesplain the unacceptability of breaking the windows of a police car and cringed, because it was so utterly clueless. What Don Lemon did to his friend in the handover last night was far more gentle than I might have been in his shoes in explaining WHY people who are dark of skin are exploding. He wasn't excusing violence. But when we focus on the angry demonstrators instead of on the perpetrators of the original violence and on their victim, we play right into the racists' narrative of violent black people. Chris Cuomo should know better. We all should. Because if you're white, we don't know. We can't know. And we have no business whitesplaining what an appropriate response is when a president exhorts white people to violence every single day, whose criminal behavior and that of most of his cronies goes unchecked, while George Floyd is murdered in the street for passing a counterfeit $20 bill that he probably didn't even know was fake.