Eric The Blue

“I, too, dislike it”

“I, too, dislike it” are the first words of Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry.” She then hedges,

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

As an evidentiary exhibit, here is Billy Collins reading his poem, “To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old High School Girl,” which for autobiographical reasons relating to the age  and gender of my kids seems pretty genuine to me.

 

 

Through-line

I’ve been in Pennsylvania with one of my kids getting reintroduced, at the Best Western’s complimentary breakfast, to the commendable properties of the Fruit Loop. News gets around, however, including that of targeted political assassinations back home. What is it with these lunatics that leads them to cosplay as cops or soldiers? It’s a topic for abnormal psychology, not journalism, which only reports the signposts. George Zimmerman got himself assigned the armed security guard of a neighborhood watch group and, while “on patrol,” shot and killed a black kid who was guilty of … what? wearing a hoodie and disobeying his orders? I’ve forgotten the name of the teen-aged chud who travelled with his automatic rifle to Racine, Wisconsin, because there was rioting and apparently the real cops needed his help: he shot and killed someone, too. Both became heroes to wingnuts.

Now we have Vance Boelter, who spun for himself a fictional career as a security professional while living in a rented room for $220 per month. His firm had no clients, but it did have a website on which it was duly noted that he used the same kind of car (Ford Explorer) that a lot of police departments purchase for their patrols. I guess we were also supposed to be impressed by this:

We only offer armed security. If you are looking for unarmed guards, please work with another service to meet your needs better.

A friend of Boelter’s since their elementary school days told an interviewer, “He was always kind of into the military stuff, but it was just, we were always like that. Me and him, we would play army men.”

Playing army men. Playing cops. It’s a through-line for a familiar variety of right-wing nutcase. Think too of the middle-aged men who don camo gear to “train” in the farm fields of their rural communities. They’re in the “militia” and need to be ready for “something big.” But something big never happens. So sometimes they have to do something big themselves.

Translations

TRANSLATION: It’s surprising to me that Biden did not use his powers as president to screw over Elon, a leading political opponent of his. My corruption is so thoroughgoing that I cannot even conceive of decency, or of any principle besides self-interest.

An Elon X-tweet, subsequently deleted: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

TRANSLATION: I know, or am going to say I know, that Trump is a pedophile. Yet I did everything I could to make this pedophile President. I donated a quarter billion dollars to his campaign! After he won, I sucked up to him for months. But then he was mean to me, so I tattled on him. Then I deleted the social media post in which I tattled. I am an alpha male.

Marxist!

Judging by a tallying up of the name checks in the shouting points of wingnuts, I'd guess that Karl Marx is their favorite deceased bogeyman. I'm thinking of, for example, "DEI is Marxist pap," etc. At least Marx's ignominy is good news for Stalin.

I can't make out any connection between Marx and DEI. I think wingers just like to cram into single sentences the stimuli that make them pant. It's true that Marx's father was a Jewish lawyer who converted to Christianity--a law practice move, not a religious one, as his son Karl no doubt noticed. I mention this only because, as everyone was white, religious differences were the ones commonly associated today with DEI initiatives. To Marx, of course, the difference that mattered was class.

Neither Christ's second coming nor the communist revolution has occurred, but only the proclamation of the latter is thereby refuted. This isn't fair to Marx, who deserves a citation whenever someone says

It's the economy, stupid!

or

Follow the money.

I remember being annoyed in philosophy class, because I thought Socrates's interlocutors were like the opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters: just out there to be bedazzled. When the Theory of the Forms was being expounded, Marx should have been on the scene to insist, "It's the economy, Plato." He got a lot about this world right. For example, it's true that the churn of capitalism wrings profit from the system (think of the perennial cry, "Margins are slim!") so that continued gains and the way to fortune require growth (think: "mergers and acquisitions"). Thus the tendency toward monopoly, and its corollary, vast wealth inequality. Marx foresaw this.

What he didn't take sufficient account of was democratic governments choosing to blunt the predicted effects. There is a tendency toward monopoly, and we adopted anti-trust laws. The concentration of wealth has been somewhat mitigated by labor unions, a progressive income tax, the whole regimen of worker protection laws. Everything, in other words, that Marx's loudest detractors detest. They trumpet his "failure," the cause of which is the enactment of remedies they fight to rescind.

Scott Bessent speaks; I look stuff up

A statement like the one above, by treasury secretary Scott Bessent, practically invites skeptics to search for evidence, in social science and health statistics, that tends to support the claim that Floridians, compared to New Yorkers, are getting more for less.

Life expectancy: New Yorkers enjoy the third longest in the country, behind only California and Hawaii. Florida clocks in at no. 21.

Per capita income: New York has the sixth highest, behind Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, and Washington. Florida is no. 30.

Homicide rate: New York’s is the sixteenth lowest; Florida’s, twenty-fourth.

Firearm mortality rate: New York, fifth lowest; Florida is no. 19.

Percentage of residents without health insurance: New York has the ninth lowest (4.8%). Florida has the fifth highest (10.7%).

Infant mortality rate: New York’s is the eighth best. Florida comes in no. 31.

What else should I be looking up?

The best thing that can be said for Florida is that a lot of red states are doing even worse. If you click the links and root around a little, you’ll see that what might be called the usual suspects—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia—are among the bottom ten in virtually everything. Their policies are basically Florida’s, and they don’t get a statistical lift from a lot of relatively affluent and healthy retirees.

But it’s hard to find data supporting the claim that the country should be “more like Florida, less like New York”—assuming you want Americans to live long and thrive.

Memorial Day messaging

The President of the United States has a Memorial Day meditation:

One minor quibble: President Bone Spurs makes no mention of the soldiers the day is intended to honor. 

David Souter, 1939-2925, patron saint of bookish bachelors

David Souter, who died, age 85, a couple of weeks ago, in New Hampshire, was a justice on the Supreme Court from 1990 until he retired in 2009. When he was nominated by Geo. H.W. Bush to fill the vacancy created by William Brennan's retirement, the liberal line of attack depicted a bloodless intellectual with no understanding of life as lived by "ordinary Americans." Was he not, after all, a lifelong bachelor who lived alone in a rural farmhouse crowded with books and musical recordings? The subtext was the court’s decision in Roe, which the cloistered Souter was supposedly primed to overturn. Brennan had concurred with the 6-3 majority opinion in Roe.

At that time, especially, I had reasons to be unenthusiastic about an attack on bookish bachelors, and I was gratified when Souter ended up disappointing his supporters and delighting his former critics. In Casey v Planned Parenthood, he joined the majority in upholding the central finding of Roe. He also consistently opposed incursions upon the separation of church and state--he would not tolerate, for example, prayers before high-school football games. He was the kind of Episcopalian who, when the issue at hand was Christmas celebrations in public schools, directed attention to the sentiments of non-Christian students. He upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies. He dissented from the majority opinion in Bush v Gore. When he retired in 2009, one legal commentator called attention to his dissent in a case hardly anyone has heard of. A prison inmate who had been convicted of murder wanted to appeal and was told by a judge that he had until Feb. 27, 2004, to file his papers. He filed on Feb. 26. The judge, however, had erred: according to a statute about deadlines and the timing of actions, the papers should have been filed by Feb. 24. His case was thrown out, he appealed, and the matter eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Thomas, ruled that the inmate was shit-outta-luck: rules are rules, he shouldn't have relied upon the instruction of a judge. Souter, in his dissent, declared:

It is intolerable for the judicial system to treat people this way, and there is not even a technical justification for condoning this bait and switch. . . . I respectfully dissent. 

"No more Souters!" became a rallying cry of wingnuts. In their eyes, his final sin was to retire in 2009, soon after the inauguration of President Obama, who replaced him with Sonia Sotomayor: a lesson in Supreme Court history that seems to have escaped the notice of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

I enjoyed many of the anecdotes about Souter that were reported in stories about his death. In one, he was driving between Washington and his home in New Hampshire when he stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. One of the other customers, thinking he recognized Souter, approached and asked whether he wasn't a justice of the Supreme Court. Souter acknowledged that he was. "Yes," the man hurdled ahead, "you're Stephen Breyer! Say, what's the best part of your job?"

Souter thought for a moment before answering, "I'd probably have to say that it's been my greatest honor to have served alongside David Souter." 

Twolves in possession, 3-pointer on its way, off again

After turning off the Timberwolves’ game last night I had the thought, not for the first time, that since my mom is gone there’s no one to tell me that it doesn’t matter who wins these games: it’s just those millionaires against these ones, and why should anyone care? She’d say my loved ones now are as crazy as I am. “You can’t touch Shai,” says my daughter as he steps to the foul line yet again. Actually, you don’t even have to touch him. Was Jaden McDaniels in the frame as Shai slipped to the floor while changing direction? Two shots!

I agree with my mom in my head but it seems the bottom of the spine has veto power. Other things are like that, too. Probably the fear of death, for example. You can see how it would be favored by natural selection, but really, why worry? No one regards with horror the time before they were born. It won’t be any different later. Just wish that in the interim my lizard brain would let me regard with equanimity the sight of Shai shooting free throws at one end while “our guys” dent the backboard at the other.