Eric The Blue

this & that

"Well, it's better than it was," he said to himself after performing a half-assed cleaning of the bathroom the kids use. Self-satisfied, he sits down and cracks a cold one before sinking deeper into the chair to watch the Twins. That little mist of cold vapor that rises out of the new can makes him want to open another one soon as possible. But he's so comfortable. "Lydia!"

As a kid, I was always reading baseball articles, and I remember one that took up the question of what percentage importance the pitcher is compared to the other players. Judging from last night you'd have to say 100. Bieber unhittable, therefore his team wins. 

How cheap am I? Cheap enough, apparently, to risk getting my mitt stuck in the garbage disposal in order to retrieve one run-away blueberry that belongs on my ice cream.

You know why so many Americans have died of coronavirus disease? We do too much testing for death. 

Trump cancels on the Yankees

 

Brett LOVES Wisconsin, Mississippi and Minnesota. A good golfer - hits it LONG! https://t.co/JcBJJEWI0X

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

The above tweet is from last Sunday, July 26. So is this one:

Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th. We will make it later in the season!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2020

The New York Times has the plot twist to Trump's adroit navigation of work-life balance. Feeling diminished by Dr Fauci having been selected to throw out the first pitch of the new baseball season, Trump recalled that he had an open invitation to throw out the first pitch at a Yankee game. He's president, so later on the day of his diminishment he was on a dais with a mic and an audience, and he announced that he'd be throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on August 15. This was news to the Yankees. Luckily, they didn't have to clear the deck for the president, because it was also news to the White House staff. Someone had to tell Trump that he had official duties that day. Thus the second tweet concerning how he was going to be too hard at work to make it to Yankee Stadium on August 15.

Across America each day there must be thousands of people who worry about putting in for the open managerial position at work because they might not have the requisite emotional maturity for the position.

 

Focus group

Although I spent the afternoon watching Attorney General Barr's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, I'm still leaning toward Biden.

Statues and "cancel culture"

I just discovered that I cannot type the word "statues" without remembering a sorry incident from my work life. We had hired a consultant—that is how horror stories commence, "We hired a consultant. . ."—to help us "develop more efficient work flows" that would in turn enable us to "leverage our human capital," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know how those people talk. That's what you get for all the money you pay them: a new way of talking that some people think sounds smart. By the way, when I say "we had hired a consultant," I don't mean it was in any way my idea. But I had to talk to the consultant, which I resented, because the normal work, which did not disappear, was a fulltime job without having to spend hours explaining stuff to idiots. 

Anyway, the consultant was interested, naturally, in why we did many of the things we did. This was local government, and there were a lot of laws governing our work, so nine times out of ten the answer was "required by statute." This poor lady could not comprehend what statues had to do with our work processes. So I articulated more distinctly: "statUTES, like, you know, laws." She was still confused. Obviously not a word she knew and we forged ahead. Weeks later she produced a draft of a final document that included steps in our "as-is" work flow together with a corresponding column setting out the reason for each step, wherein she had inscribed, again and again, "required by statue," "required by statue," "required by statue." She asked me for comments about the draft. It had a million problems but all I could think to say was, "Change all the 'statues' to 'laws.'" 

I don't understand all the love for Robert E. Lee and his traitorous accomplices. Here is W.E.B. Du Bois (pictured above) saying, in 1931, what I guess still needs to be said:

The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments,—the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: "Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery." But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: "Died Fighting for Liberty!"

The whole point of "honoring" Lee, and Stonewall Jackson and Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood and Nathan Bedford Forrest, et. al., including the anonymous Confederate regular standing guard over the southern town square, is to inform African Americans that they should understand what we think of you by the fact that we put up a statue of him. These men are only known for one thing. None of them wrote the Declaration of Independence, or led the Continental Army against the British. Yes, many of the founders owned slaves, but they did not take up arms against our country—the one they founded—in order to defend slavery. It seems you have to question either the intelligence or the good faith of people who, like the current president, purport not to be able to make these kinds of distinctions. For those who argue that the South was fighting for some loftier principle than chattel slavery, here again is Du Bois to give that idea the respect it deserves:

Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest Confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing—one terrible fact—militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: "of course, he never fought for slavery." Well, for what did he fight? States rights? Nonsense. . . .

People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that is what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. . . .

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee. . . . Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not, he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor. . . .

It's a small point, but I like how Du Bois begins by referring to Robert E. Lee and then, when he's mostly done eviscerating him, drops the middle initial. It's weird how so many of these Confederate generals insisted on being known by their full name, including either the middle name or its initial, as if this somehow conferred upon them a dignity they could not justly claim. Robert E. Lee. Nathan Bedford Forrest. I suspect Du Bois intended "Robert Lee," no middle initial, as an insult, a vote for cancelling him.

More bifurcation

On Friday, I drove to a nearby park to pick up my kid from a sports practice: "ultimate frisbee." I know, whatevs, but at least you have to run and it involves teamwork. It was hot, and practice was running long, so I leaned against a shade tree by the wading pool and watched from across the park. Since I had just finished pedaling my stationary bike in the basement, I was wearing sweat-stained gym clothes, and my hair, which hasn't been cut since February or March, was matted. After a few minutes, a city worker who had been employed on some task at the wading pool approached me and asked whether I was waiting for my kid to be done with practice. When I answered in the affirmative, she mumbled something about watching the kids from a distance having seemed to her "potentially creepy."

What the hell! I know I wasn't looking my best, but a pedophile? I have a history with this kind of thing, too. 

Reading over what I wrote yesterday about Biden's campaign dilemma, I think I should have mentioned that an argument for the maximalist strategy is that it would be bad for the country if a "normal-sized" Democratic victory caused Republicans to conclude that all they need is a  tweaked message and a candidate less enthralled with making an ass of himself on Twitter. Maybe 400 electoral votes for the other side, together with another rout in the congressional elections, could persuade them to contemplate the example of, say, Eisenhower. But maybe not. It isn't as if Trump is something wholly new, a reckless flyer that they can sell and forget after reallocating to blue chips. I think it's been a dozen years now since the revered John McCain selected a manifest half-wit, the half-term governor of Alaska, to be his running mate. So the clown show goes back at least that far. 

Dems debate election strategy

I see that there is a debate within the Democratic party and the Biden campaign about whether to concentrate on the "core battleground"—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona—or instead seek a landslide by extending the campaign to Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa. Here are a few observations regarding the question.

(1) The issue is essentially whether the citizens of 40 states or 44 states should be ignored. Thanks electoral college! You need to be retired.

(2) The arithmetic: Hillary Clinton won 232 electoral votes. The six states of the "core battleground" have 101 electoral votes. 232 + 101 = 333, which is 63 more than the 270 needed to win. The four other states that are "in play" have an additional 78 electoral votes. 

(3) The lay of the land: The website Real Clear Politics aggregates presidential polling within the battleground states and publishes an average result. Currently the site shows Biden ahead in:

Pennsylvania (+6.7%)
Michigan (+8.2%)
Wisconsin (+6.4%)
North Carolina (+2.0%)
Florida (+7.0%)
Arizona (+2.8%)

And in the additional four the averages are:

Georgia (Trump +2.7%)
Texas (Trump +0.2%)
Ohio (Biden +2.3%)
Iowa (Trump +1.5%)

The campaign pros who I'll call "scairdy cats" look at these data points and conclude: we're ahead, but the game is still on—no "10-run rule” yet. The other side, more optimistic, thinks: Trump is down 7 in Florida? basically tied in Texas? trailing in Ohio? Let's run the table!

(4) Other considerations: If Biden wins, the Democrats need a net gain of three seats to become the majority party in the Senate—four if Trump is re-elected. In the six states of the "core battleground," there are three US Senate races: in Michigan, where Democratic incumbent Gary Peters appears to be safely ahead, and in North Carolina and Arizona, where Republican incumbents are in tight races. The four other states have four competitive Senate races, all with Republican incumbents, including both Georgia seats. In recent history, it's quite unusual for a presidential candidate to carry a state while a US Senate candidate of the same party loses. It happened exactly nowhere in 2016. 

(5) Conclusion: Which side do I think has the better case, scairdy cats or optimists? See (1) above.

Born on this date, Raymond Chandler

Megan Abbott, marking the birthday of Raymond Chandler on this date in 1888, directs attention to the following paragraph from The Long Goodbye:

"I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful."

A man who likes it that much probably should have left after just one. The Wikipedia article on Chandler includes this bit of biography:

Cissy Chandler [his wife] died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

Nothing gold can stay.

Bifurcated

Want to know a word assigned to every work shift, with the result that it logs more hours per week than should be permitted by federal law? Iconic. Its chief rival is perhaps ironic. Is there something about the sound these words make that is irresistible to any journalist within halloing-distance of the original meanings? It seems the former has lost its connection to worship and veneration and is now just notable after having exerted itself sufficiently to induce labored breathing. The latter is deployed in any circumstance giving off a whiff of the paradoxical / coincidental / counterintuitive / contradictory. Also, since I'm fault-finding, it apparently is a federal law that any favorable review of a book or movie must be unilluminated by luminous.   

Unrelatedly (obviously) (but I'll say so anyway), it's odd that so far as I know none of the women body shamed or otherwise insulted by our president has ever observed that, though supposedly rich, he seems to own just one golf shirt—a white one purchased before he ate his most recent 250 Big Macs. Maybe they're just thankful he never wears shorts.

David Kaiser, 1969-2020

David Kaiser, who died last week of brain cancer at age 50, was known to some as a crusading journalist whose essays in The New York Review of Books took on prison rape and the efforts of Exxon Mobil to cover up what the company knew about climate change. If you knew of him without being familiar with his contributions to the Review, then you likely are acquainted with the lineage of the Rockefeller family and the world of big dollar philanthropy: Kaiser was the great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller and the president of the Rockefeller Family Fund. His New York Times obituary, by John Schwartz, who covers climate change for the Times, is informative and affecting, never more than in its conclusion:

David Walter Kaiser was born on July 27, 1969, in Cambridge, Mass., to Neva Rockefeller Goodwin and Walter Kaiser. His mother, who survives him, is a distinguished fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center. His father, who died in 2016, was a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University.

In addition to his wife and his mother, Mr. Kaiser is survived by two daughters and a sister, Miranda Kaiser. 

Mr. Kaiser graduated from Columbia University in 1991 with a degree in American history. He and Ms. Corbett met in 2011 through the online dating service OkCupid. They discovered a shared interest in criminal justice reform, Ms. Corbett recalled, and Mr. Kaiser seemed startlingly open.

"I asked what the worst thing he'd ever done in a relationship was—and he told me!" she said. "I thought he was being so transparent, but there was a lot he wasn't telling me."

What he had left out was that he was a Rockefeller. She said that when he did tell her, months later, she wanted to break off the relationship; she was unable to see, she said, how "a person with a working-class background and leftist politics could possibly have a successful relationship with someone from a family of such privilege." They married in 2012.

In late 2018, Mr. Kaiser began experiencing episodes of forgetfulness, which led to his diagnosis early the next year. Ms. Corbett said that in recent months he had told her: "Of course I wish my life were going to be longer. I wish I could see who the girls will turn into." But, she said, he added, "I've also been an extremely lucky person—more lucky than most."

The above picture, taken in Maine in 2017 by Ben Stechschulte, accompanied the obit. David's hand is on his mother's shoulder. His sister Miranda is at the far left. I think it's an odd photo: three pairs, one a mother and son, another (center) a married couple (Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert and her husband, Michael), and then at the left Miranda and Peter Case. I've read and re-read Peter's wedding notice in the Times without grasping how he fits in. Maybe that's why he and Miranda, though paired, have a space between them. He got the message about the shirts, however. 

Don chats up Chris

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States, in elevated colloquy with Chris Wallace of Fox News.

I'm not sure whether this is hilarious or pathetic. I suppose another option, considering he's president, might be alarming. In another part of the interview, Trump goes on an extended riff about how all our coronavirus cases are the result of a testing regimen the likes of which the world has never seen, etc., etc. Wallace allows him to clatter on for a bit before interjecting that "testing is up 37% but cases are up 194%," thereby causing Trump to set sail on a new course of nonsense. I wish Wallace had said, "I suppose you also believe you're not fat until you step on a scale." He did pretty well, however. The transcript doesn't convey his evident bemusement—the twinkle in his eye, for example, when he answers one of the "hard" questions, "Ninety-three." 

John Lewis (1940-2020)

I've been reading around on the Internet about John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia Democrat who died yesterday at his home in Atlanta. Here's the section on his "early life" from the Wikipedia article:

John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.

As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older, though, he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy. However, Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was eleven, one of his uncles took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, and, afterwards, he was even more acutely aware of Troy's segregation. 

In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio, and, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott (led by King) began later that year, Lewis closely followed the news about it. Lewis would later meet Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.

The top of the article includes a note stating that, as its subject recently died, extensive revisions are in progress. That might account for why, when I read the article last night, it said that Lewis had never seen a white person till he was 6. My first thought was that seems almost unbelievable. My second thought was that my dad, born 7 years before Lewis in rural Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, had almost certainly never seen a black person when he was 6. If not for my attendance at a Twins baseball game as a kindergartner, I might not have, either. 

It's not taken up in any of the early obituaries and tributes I've seen, but the details of Lewis's early rise within the civil rights movement must be a good story. What did his parents Willie and Eddie, the sharecroppers in rural Alabama, think when their son, age 23, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the assembled thousands a few minutes before Martin Luther King delivered his most famous speech? Later that day, Lewis shook President Kennedy's hand in the Oval Office. The historian Michael Beschloss, speaking about Lewis on the television this morning, explained that Kennedy was nervous about the March on Washington. He had prevailed, barely, over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960—the popular vote had been essentially a tie, 49.72 to 49.55 percent, and the states Kennedy won had included North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. These states had been voting Democratic since the Civil War, on account of Lincoln having been a Republican. Kennedy wasn't eager to lose their support, and according to Beschloss, the White House welcome that day for King, Lewis, and the other civil rights leaders was "tepid." Kennedy had gone so far as to have someone in his Administration at the ready to drown out the words of any speech that got too radical—the method was to have been a Mahalia Jackson recording blared across the National Mall. The next year, 1964, Kennedy was dead and President Johnson is said to have muttered, as he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, "There goes the South." If he said it, he was right. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. The popular vote was again evenly divided, but the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, was almost shut out in the South: Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and both Carolinas; except for Texas, Johnson's home state, the rest of the old Confederacy gave its electoral votes to 3rd-party candidate George Wallace, the governor of John Lewis's home state who was most famous for having declared, in an inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Nevertheless when Wallace died in 1998 Lewis, by then a congressman from Georgia, eulogized him on the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times ran Lewis's article beneath the headline, "Forgiving George Wallace." The piece is notable for its tone of possibly strained respect and for what Lewis leaves out. "But the George Wallace who sent troops to intimidate peaceful, orderly marchers in Selma in 1965 was not the same man who died this week," he writes—eliding the fact that Wallace's troops had done more than just "intimidate" the marchers. Lewis himself was one of fifty-eight marchers beaten so severely as to require treatment at a local hospital, in his case for a fractured skull. In the below picture, he's kneeling in the foreground, holding the back of his head with his right hand. 

Penetrating analysis

Since I played golf yesterday, I've been thinking today about how I might shoot a lower score. One idea I've had is to make more than a bogey on fewer holes. If that doesn't work, I could also try to make fewer bogeys on those holes where I don't make more than a bogey. When you think about it, that would entail making more pars, which means more good shots, something that seems out of the question, at least for me, which is why I tend to favor the first option. If you can't make good shots, try for fewer truly awful ones. It's the Hippocratic Oath applied to golf: First, don't hit horrible shots.

I think my ruminations may have been affected by MSNBC on the TV, Steve Kornacki standing in front of a display exhibiting:

NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll 
Biden-----51%
Trump----40%

"What jumps out at you about the poll?" asked the anchor, whereupon Kornacki launched into an account of the respective candidates' level of support from respondents with skins of various hues and I left off thinking about golf in order to form in my brain the thought That's funny because what jumps out at me is that Biden is way ahead. For those interested in the details of the hip turn and the optimal position of the hands compared to the club face as it passes through the impact zone, apparently nonwhites dislike Trump as much as ever while Caucasians have grown less confused, possibly because Trump has been president for 3.5 years and everything sucks. 

Switching over to Fox

 

 

The other night I was double screening it, reading an article on my phone while sitting in front of the TV. The author of the article made the point that Fox News has to be watched to be believed: people who only form an idea about it, second-hand, cannot possibly imagine that it's as ridiculous as it is. Since the TV was on and the remote within reach, I switched to Fox, and, what do you know, Sean Hannity was interviewing the President of the United States! Hannity was in the middle of a long question concerning whether, in Trump's opinion, Biden has the "stamina" for "the toughest job in the world." I watched till the end and all Hannity's questions were long, the better to cue Trump about what his answer should be. But on the stamina question, Trump went off the script, rattling on about how he had "aced" a "cognitive test" he'd recently taken. The doctors couldn't believe how well he'd performed! They'd never seen anything like it! As he droned on it occurred to me that he thought a screening for dementia was actually something like an IQ test. I trust he's smart enough not to brag about knowing the answers to the questions in a dementia screening. So it must be that he just didn't have a clue about the purpose of the exercise. Presumably the test is supple enough to distinguish disease from just ordinary dumb fuckery. 

Hannity also asked Trump about his agenda for a second term. The long buildup for this one related to how he had recently asked Trump the same question, and that his answer had elicited a lot of criticism from "the left." Here is what Trump had said in Take #1:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was pretty widely recognized, not just on "the left," that this was more dumb fuckery, and so in a subsequent interview with Sinclair, another right-wing "news" outlet, Eric Bolling gave him a chance for a do-over. Here's what Take #2 looked like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so now here was Hannity again, in the director's chair, ordering up a Take #3. This time Trump had some bullet points, which he recited in that flat, unconvincing way he has when reading from a TelePrompter. After the set speech was done, he began edging into another unmowed linguistic pasture, causing Hannity to cut him off on the pretext that the interview was running long and he had to hand off to Laura Ingraham. He and Ingraham then indulged themselves in some cute idle chatter about how great the guest before Trump had been.

State TV can't make him look like an able person, but you sure notice the effort. 

Books of the Bible: Obadiah

While watching a football game, you never see, as the kicker pumps the extra point through the uprights, some nut in the crowd behind the goalposts holding up a big sign saying "Obadiah 3:16." There could be a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, the book of Obadiah is in the Old Testament, and, though I could be wrong, my sense is that the people displaying these placards are sort of nutty and that among Christians, who naturally prefer the New Testament, nuttiness is more prevalent than it is among Jews. I think I've noticed that Jews do not go in for hunting or fishing or camping, and maybe it's the same good sense that keeps them from buying end zone tickets for football games just so they can hold up a Bible sign directing TV viewers to, maybe, Micah 6:8:

He has shown you, o man, what is good, and what does the Lord require but that you do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God?

Another factor would be that nothing in the book of Obadiah is so plangent and alluringly extractable as Micah 6:8, to say nothing of the ubiquitous John 3:16.

And then the decisive factor: there is no such thing as Obadiah 3:16, not because the third chapter has just 15 verses, but because there is no third, or second, chapter—it's the shortest book in the Old Testament, one chapter, 21 verses, two pages, 1118 and the facing 1119 in The Oxford Annotated Bible that I had to buy in college and have open before me now. If in a spiritual crisis you determined, like St. Augustine, that God wanted you to open the Bible at random, so that he could speak to you through whatever verse your eye happened to fall on first, there's the slimmest chance, mathematically, that he'd speak to you through one of the 21 verses of Obadiah. 

The upside for our imagined "general reader" is that with Obadiah it's possible to sustain one's interest from the beginning to the end and report that the impression made is something other than, or in addition to, languorous incomprehension. It seems, for example, as if there could be two chapters, for there are two parts to the brief book, one about something that has happened, ending at verse 14, and another, starting at verse 15, about something that will as a consequence happen in the future. What's happened is the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, an event known to secular history—it occurred in 587 B.C., so the book was written after that. Instead of condemning the captors, as one might have predicted, Obadiah's judgmental anger is set against the Edomites:

The vision of Obadiah.

Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom:
We have heard tidings from the Lord, 
and a messenger has been sent among the nations:
"Rise up! let us rise against her for battle!"
Behold, I will make you small among the nations,
you shall be utterly despised.

So where is Edom, and of what are the Edomites guilty? The below map shows the area at the time of the divided kingdom. Note that Jerusalem is the capital of the southern kingdom, also known as Judah, and that Edom abuts Judah on the southeast, in what is now southwestern Jordan. Obadiah's "vision," therefore, relates not to the shortcomings of the chosen people but to those of their geopolitical neighbors:

. . . you should not have rejoiced over the people of Judah in the day of their ruin
you should not have boasted in the day of distress.
You should not have entered the gate of my people in the day of his calamity;
you should not have looted his goods. . .

It seems analogous to what, at the level of interpersonal relations, the Germans call Schadenfreude—Edom has too much enjoyed Judah's trauma, has taken pleasure in its neighbor's travail. That's the idea, and to me it's a little odd:

On the day that you stood aloof, on the day that strangers carried off his wealth,
and foreigners entered his gates and cast lots for Jerusalem, 
you were like one of them. . .

The "foreigners" are the conquering Babylonians. Their name isn't mentioned but the Edomites are called out and excoriated for, it seems, cheering on the wrong team. Rooting around a bit in the commentaries, seeking to corroborate this impression, one reads of speculation that the book reflects what would have been news stories of 585 B.C. about Edom taking advantage of disarray on its northern frontier, raiding Judah, "harassing the people and annexing territory."* At verse 15, the focus shifts to what in the future will be visited upon Edom for these offenses:

For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations. 
As you have done, it shall be done to you,
your deeds shall return on your own head.

If there are going to be just 39 books to the Old Testament, it seems a waste that one of them is devoted to geopolitical sniping in the Mideast of roughly 580 B.C. The criticism of Edom, even if true, is of the kind that places the critic in an unfavorable light. In the imposing core of Israel's prophetic tradition, the lantern shines inward, as in the memorable opening to the book of Amos. A genius for withering self criticism is an unusual asset. Obadiah is not a contribution to that body of Israel's literature, and one feels it's apt that the prophet himself remains a shadowy figure: no vivid personality is conveyed, and he'd be unknown but for the association of his name with one of the slightest entries in the Hebrew Bible.

*L.H. Brockington in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

Trump says "open up" so probably should "stay home"

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

 

I was unsure whether my kids' schools should open in the fall, but if that's what he thinks, bring on the distance learning!

Everyone knows by now that the president's Twitter feed is a biohazard, but it's also, according to the White House, a compendium of "official statements" by the President of the United States. So let's take the three sentences of this tweet one at a time in reverse order.

May cut off funding if not open! Schools aren't funded by the federal government. He has no power to do what he threatens to do. He could, however, read his daily intelligence briefings.

The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. A clear case of projection. Translation: U.S. schools must open before the Election—capitalized, like "God"—because it would be bad for me politically if kids were at home at 11 a.m. on weekdays to remind their parents of what they think of how I handled the coronavirus epidemic. 

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. Interesting that he thinks we should follow the example of all these socialist countries. He tweeted this today, July 8. Here, according to Worldometer, are the figures for new coronavirus cases on July 7 for each country named in his tweet:

Germany----------298
Denmark-----------10
Norway-------------11
Sweden-----------271
USA------------55,442

To the degree it's true that their SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS, it may be that, comparatively, they don't have a problem.  The best prospect of getting rid of our root problem was announced today by Cook Political Report. But we gotta vote. If like me you live in Minnesota, you can request an absentee ballot here. They mail you the ballot, you mark it and mail it back: simple. They won't send you the the general election ballot until sometime after the August primary, but you can request ballots for both elections now. 

Whiling away with Wikipedia

I had to work for a living, and it wasn't pleasant, but one good thing is that I got to spend a lot of time studying maps. I've always liked maps; I seem to remember having to take in elementary school "the Iowa basics," a standardized test that included a map-reading section on which I was competitive with the above-average kids from Lake Wobegon. Anything relating to maps excites me. Since I can't give a rational account of it, here is an example of what I mean. The Bruce Springsteen lyrics I will never forget aren't famous and familiar to all fans but, rather:

I met Wanda when she was employed
Behind the counter at the Route 60 Bob's Big Boy
Fried chicken on the front seat, she's sitting in my lap
We're wiping our fingers on a Texaco road map

Part of the reason it's lodged in my mind is that, notwithstanding the romance of the scene, I'm a little troubled by the desecration of a map. 

Anyway, you can imagine me now, in the 21st century, when I can carry around in my pocket a map of the whole world, zoom in, zoom out, fly over view of major cities, et cetera, et cetera. When reading novels with geographic references, I always have to get out my phone and see where exactly the characters are. Thanks to Elmore Leonard and Google Earth, I'm pretty good at the geography of Detroit, Michigan, and southeast Florida. Even with no baseball, I can easily entertain myself. It puzzles me a little that people like to travel. 

All the above is just an autobiographical preamble accounting for last night's exciting activity: studying the map of the modern Mideast. On account of the disputed territories, it's an unusually busy section of the world map. The area known as "the West Bank" (because of the Jordan River to the east) is shaped like a distorted figure-8 with the city of Jerusalem bumping against the skinny middle. The two biggest cities are Hebron, more or less in the middle of the bulbous southern part, and Nablus, more or less in the middle of the bulbous northern part. I knew nothing of either but have now read the Wikipedia articles. When you live in the American Midwest, you're a bit startled at how close together things are along our northeastern seaboard, but it's nothing like the Middle East. Nablus, for example, is just 40 miles east of Tel Aviv, which is on the Mediterranean. It's also just 75 miles west of Amman, Jordan, and 25 miles north of Jerusalem. You can see a lot in a day if you're not a Palestinian subjected to delays and indignities at the checkpoints.

I trust the facts and figures in Wikipedia but—holy crap!—do not rely on it for information relating to geopolitical controversy. Reading along in the article on Hebron, all seems well, it's this many feet above sea level, has such-and-such a population, is venerated by different religions for its association with Abraham, has a history dating to the Bronze Age, and then, coming to a section under the heading "Israeli Settlements," you read:

Post-1967 settlement was impelled by theological doctrines in the Mercaz HaRav Kook under both its founder Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, according to which the Land of Israel is holy, the people, endowed with a divine spark, are holy, and that the Messianic Age of Redemption has arrived, requiring that the Land and People be united in occupying the land and fulfilling the commandments. Hebron has a particular role in the unfolding 'cosmic drama': traditions hold that Abraham purchased land there, that King David was its king, and the tomb of Abraham covers the entrance to the Garden of Eden, and was a site excavated by Adam, who is buried there with Eve. Redemption will occur when the feminine and masculine characteristics of God are united at the site. Settling Hebron is not only a right and duty, but is doing the world at large a favour, with the community's acts an example of the Jews of Hebron being "a light unto the nations" (Or la-Goyim) and bringing about their redemption, even if this means breaching secular laws, expressed in religiously motivated violence toward Palestinians, who are widely viewed as "mendacious, vicious, self-centered, and impossible to trust." Clashes with Palestinians in the settlement project have theological significance in the Jewish Hebron community: the frictions of war were, in Kook's view, conducive to the messianic process, and 'Arabs' will have to leave.

If the author were not obviously Jewish, I'd think he went to my high school and was now my Facebook friend—it's the only place, besides Wikipedia, that I ever read stuff this crazy.  I love how the characteristics of the Palestinian people are placed in free–floating quotation marks, as if the author were referring to a higher authority than the bigotry required by his own goofy fanaticism. Similarly regarding "'Arabs'" who have to go—the scare quotes signify their unreality. Adam and Eve, however, were real people. They lie buried in the Garden of Eden, at Hebron. Read up on these facts in the encyclopedia.

"Just live with it"

The Trump administration has a new talking point on the coronavirus pandemic: "We just have to live with it." The upside of the new talking point is that it's hard to imagine what might happen that would make it look wrong and ridiculous. Back in April, the vice president predicted that by Memorial Day the pandemic would be behind us, and before that President Trump said warmer weather would kill the virus and the plague would lift "like a miracle."

Well, it's now the Fourth of July weekend, and we are having more new cases than ever—principally, in places where the weather is hottest.

We have about 4% of the world's population and about a quarter of the worldwide COVID-19 cases and deaths. But don't despair, the federal government's wishful thinking is now augmented by a dynamite new slogan that will never be disproven. Moreover, Trump went to South Dakota and read aloud, as best he could, the Wikipedia article on Thomas Jefferson.

How long before I can vote?

 

John Boorman's adventures

John Boorman is the English movie director best known, at least to me, for Deliverance. Reading up on him, I see that one of his other movies, Point Blank (1967), has like Deliverance been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry on account of being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." I know nothing about Point Blank beyond what I just read in Wikipedia: a crime thriller starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Carroll O'Connor (who would soon become famous as Archie Bunker), it was ignored on its release but later gained a cultish following.

Boorman also is the author of a memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. If the following passage concerning one of his misadventures with Lee Marvin is representative, it must be a rollicking good read:

We had arrived together in Lee's Chrysler station wagon. He was staggering, drunk. I begged him to let me drive. "Fuck you." He drew back a fist. He had a whole repertoire of violent gestures, many of them cribbed from his hero, Toshiro Mifune. I tried to grab the keys, but he slashed me with his imaginary samurai sword. These were movie blows an inch short of your neck or chin. 

I snatched the keys and got into the driver's seat, the women in back. "Get in Lee." Another battle of wills. How could he meekly submit, this warrior, this conqueror? We pleaded with him. He stalked and staggered around the car, raining blows on it. Finally he found a way of saving face. He climbed up and crouched on the roof rack. Despite our entreaties, he would not come down. I decided to drive slowly down the length of the pier, hoping that the cool ocean air might sober him up. I stopped as we got to the public road. I got out. He snarled at me, would not get down. I was at my wits' end. The streets were deserted. I drove slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Flashing lights in my rearview mirror—sirens. I pulled over. The patrolman approached the car, warily loosening his revolver holster. He looked up, then at me. "Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?"

The punchline is so good I almost forgot my amazement upon learning that Lee Marvin drove a Chrysler grocery–getter with a roof rack.

H/t Scott Shapiro, who retweeted John Frankensteiner's tweeted excerpt.

Hell's leading citizen

After seeing this picture somewhere, I took a few minutes to work up a composite of Hell's leading citizen: an outspoken bisexual Catholic lady who's devoted to her vibrator and drinks Chablis directly from the box.

His t-shirt says that coronavirus is God's judgment so maybe he should have added "old people with co-morbidities" to his list of degenerates.

Free advertising

Got out of my car and took a picture of this sign just so I could snottily observe that 35W and 1st Avenue are a block apart and parallel with each other. But now you know they're open (and their longitude). I also love how  the phone number was a faint after thought.

Since I'm having fun with their advertising campaign, here's some free publicity connecting with jillions of devoted readers: Hibachi Buffet is on Lake Street a block west of 35W. The sign was at 42nd Street & Bloomington Avenue, which is about three miles from there. I wonder how many of these signs they've stuck in the ground? 

I've never eaten at Hibachi Buffet but can vouch for the rice noodle soup at Pho Tau Bay, just on the other side of the KMart site. Once, as my daughter Claire prepared to salt her rice, the server grabbed the shaker right out of her hand and told her in Vietnamese to use soy sauce. So shocked that she reverted to her native tongue. Then, laughing at herself, but still somewhat agitated by what she'd almost witnessed, she set the soy sauce bottle in front of Claire and repeated herself, this time in English. Claire by now was sitting far back in the booth, bug-eyed. It was the first time anyone had objected to her ruining her rice.

She also puts chocolate syrup on orange sherbet.