Sitting here at the dining room table while, down below, workmen install a new boiler or, as I am more inclined to think of it, over-solve the problem of what I should do with my extra dollars.
I haven't plugged Scott Shapiro, my favorite social media personality, for a while. His view of Elan Musk is, shall we say, jaundiced, and he consequently appears to be switching his base of operations from Twitter to TikTok. Here he is on his new platform, presumably creating content for teens:
@scottjshapiro0 #philosophy #philosophytiktok #gilbertryle #hedonism #fyp #foryou #philosophyjokes ♬ original sound - Scott Shapiro
Shapiro teaches philosophy at Yale. But you'd already guessed, right?
I believe it was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an advisor to President Nixon and then, from 1977 to 2001, a Democratic senator from New York, who coined the phrase "defining deviance down." Thought of it today as a way of explaining why people seem to think it's not especially crazy that the last vice president just gave testimony to a grand jury investigating his former boss, the last president, for crimes committed against the United States. And that in around 14 months or so that indicted former president will likely be the nominee of the Republican party to be president again.
I don't get the strategy of Trump's legal team in the rape case now being tried in Manhattan. Their client loudly insists that the encounter never happened: it's a complete fabrication by a woman who, he says, "isn't my type." (What, is she smart and decent?) But in his cross examination of her, Trump's lawyer keeps trying to trip her up on the details of this nonevent. Why didn't she scream? Why did she joke around with Trump, telling him that he ought to slip on the see-through body suit? Sounds a lot like something that really happened.
To the clank and thud in the basement I've been reading this article, "How Doctors Die." Apparently they surrender faster than the laity, and the author's premise is that experience has taught them that hopeless is hopeless:
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call "futile care" being performed on people. That's when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, "Promise me if you find me like this that you'll kill me." They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped "NO CODE" to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
Why do so many of the rest of us do otherwise? The doctor/author has some ideas—the whole essay is of considerable human interest—to which I would add that it's easy to see how the determination to live a little longer at any cost is a trait that, while irrational, would be favored by natural selection. In this regard, it's like the emotion of sexual jealousy: only makes sense in the world according to Darwin, the one we inhabit.
I think I'm drawn lately to this lighthearted topic by the necessity of mailing copies of my dad's death certificate hither and thither in order to get money. Every time, before licking the envelope, I read over again the cause of death, complications of subarachnoid hemorrhage (non-operated), and feel a little twinge at the parenthesis that then dissipates when I proceed on to the drear list of "other contributing conditions." The things people have to endure when dying! Getting your head sliced open so that it happens in March instead of February—not recommended by Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, the author of "How Doctors Die," or my dad's offspring. Kids, if I don't make it to a lawyer, you can consider this my health care directive. Hope it's clear, I know you're not the most devoted readers.