Eric The Blue

DeLillo's Underworld: the conclusion

In the last pages of Underworld, two nuns pay a visit to a gay man, Ismael, who lives among the poor in the Bronx. One of the nuns seems disappointed that, notwithstanding his sexual inclinations, Ismael appears cheerful and in good health. He shows them how he has jerry-rigged an electrical current sufficient to run a TV in the abandoned building in which some homeless orphans take shelter. It involves a generator and a kid pedaling a stationary bike. The channel that comes on is a cable business show; switching the channel requires a surge that the kid on the bike isn't able to muster. DeLillo writes:

On the screen an image flicks and jumps. It is a man's discoid head, a fellow in a white shirt with blue collar, or blue shirt with white collar—there is a fairly frequent color shift. He is talking about the big board composite while numbers and letters flow in two bands across the bottom of the screen, a blue band and a white band, and the crew sits watching and the kid on the bike is bent and pedaling, a furious pumping boy, and the names and prices flow in two different directions with active issues blinking.

[Snip]

Ismael appoints four members of the crew to go with the nuns and distribute food in the area. But the crew is rooted right now. They urge Juano to pedal faster because this is the only way to change channels and they want to watch cartoons or movies, something with visuals better than a head. 

They're saying, "Go, man, fasta, fasta."

The bicycle boy bends and pumps and the picture wavers briefly but then springs back to the round announcer's face and the moving lines of prices. Ismael stands there laughing. He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets. He starts pulling kids off the cushionless sofa and stone-slinging them toward the door while the other kids keep urging Juano on. 

They're saying, "Fasta, fasta, you the man."

The boy cranks and strains, bouncing on the seat, but the numbers keep flowing across the screen. Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged. 

Eight hundred pages earlier, when the novel opens, it had been around 40 years earlier, 1951, and some non-baseball fan, bored in the upper deck of the Polo Grounds during the game in which Bobby Thomson would hit his famous homer, is tearing pages out of a Life magazine and letting them flutter down into the lower deck, where the print advertisements for stuff for sale fall upon J Edgar Hoover, guest of Giants manager Leo Durocher and the director of the FBI. Hoover is thinking about nuclear war. It's natural to wonder about the author of this "material"—according to the Wikipedia article, he was raised in an Italian Catholic family in the Bronx, and attended Fordham University, a Jesuit school with its flagship campus in the Bronx. The first twenty-some years of his life are Catholicism and the Bronx. At the very end of Underworld, one of the forsaken kids, the beautiful and elusive Esmeralda, is raped and killed, her body tossed off the roof of a building. The nun who had studied Ismael for signs of God's judgment upon him is devastated:

She sees nothing for the rest of that day and the day after and the two or three weeks after that. She sees the human heart exposed like a pig's muscle on a slab. That's the only thing she sees. She believes she is falling into crisis, beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between. The serenity of immense design is missing from her life, authorship and moral form. . . .

That Life magazine issue had included, in an article about "the glories of the Prado," a reproduction of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death, painted in 1564. This glossy page too falls on Hoover, along with the advertisements, and makes a strong impression on him. The stricken nun has the unusual name Sister Edgar, which tends to link her to the gay director of the FBI whose ruminations on Soviet missiles during a baseball game are interrupted by The Triumph of Death. As Underworld closes, it's tempting to think DeLillo's object was to create a kind of 20th-century American analog to Bruegel's painting, which, when it alights on Hoover, is described as "a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin."  Hoover is at first annoyed, can't understand why there'd be such a picture in a magazine called Life, but he can't stop looking at it. 

Sabato's crystal ball, take one

The Republican party in America is too detached from reality to allow confidence about what's going to happen next, but I have to say that I'm feeling good about having made this call about the governor of Florida when he was riding a wave in the way-back time of December, 2022. 

For those interested in early prognostications related to the 2024 presidential election, the Sabato Crystal Ball, named for the political scientist Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, pegs the electoral college competition at Biden 260, The Unknown Republican 235, with just 43 in the toss-up category. The four toss-up states, with their allotment of electoral votes noted, are: Georgia (16), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), and Nevada (6).

Since it takes 270 to win, you can see that, were this scenario to play out, Nevada is irrelevant: to win, the Republican needs to sweep Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia, because Nevada plus the larger two of the other three results in a 270-268 victory for the Blues. Though if it turns out to be that close, we'd have to consider what happens in Nebraska, since, while deep red, it awards electoral votes by congressional district, and by winning the one centered on Omaha the Republican could then pull into a 269-269 tie. But Biden won that district by more than 6 points, so if he loses it in 2024, he's probably losing Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, too. The working assumption here is that a presidential election is like an interrelated system in which the individual parts do not operate independently of the others. It follows that the winner of, say, Wisconsin, is a good bet to win Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, too. If that were to happen, in Biden's favor, then the ubiquitous blue-red map would be unchanged from 2020.

The most striking aspect of this preview is probably the shrinking number of competitive states.  Suppose we add to the list of toss-ups the states Sabato and his team think only "lean" one direction or the other. That captures only North Carolina (leans Republican) and, leaning the other way, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Michigan. There are then still 42 states that aren't competitive. At least many of the residents of those states might be spared from the advertising onslaught. I'm a little worried for myself, living as I do in the Twin Cities, with media tentacles extending well into western Wisconsin. 

It's odd how so much can seem to happen without altering anything. I might have thought that there's justice in the sorry plight of the DeSantis campaign, but it's not as if Republican voters appear poised to render an apt judgment upon his candidacy. Trump's an indicted criminal defendant, and it's going to happen again, and again, with overwhelming evidence of his guilt in each case—here, for example, is the audio and transcript of the phone call to Georgia officials in which he clearly solicits election fraud and makes thinly veiled threats about what could happen to them if they don't do as he says. Poor DeSantis is trying his best to be an a-hole, but how can he compete with that? He likely hasn't even raped anyone. 

Rereadings

I took off the shelf today a book I've owned for about 45 years, an anthology unambiguously entitled Eighteenth Century English Literature edited by Geoffrey Tillotson et al. Paging through it, and reading passages I had marked sometime around 1982, I see I haven't changed much: what seems to have most attracted my attention then still seems striking to me now. Can't remember now what bit I originally meant to track down but here are a few things I enjoyed again. From the opening to a poem of Swift's:

This maxim more than all the rest
Is thought too base for human Breast;
"In all distresses of our Friends
We first consult our private Ends. . . ."

If this perhaps your Patience move
Let reason and experience prove. . . .

Dear honest Ned is in the Gout,
Lies rackt with Pain, and you without:
How patiently you hear him groan!
How glad the case is not your own!

Dr. Johnson, in Rasselas, wrote:

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

His review of a work of theodicy, in which a confident and blithe theologian explained away the troubles of the world by asserting, for example, that God in His mercy had made the yoke of poverty easier to bear by endowing the afflicted with the virtue of hope, included this pointed critique:

The milder degrees of poverty are sometimes supported by hope, but the more severe often sink down in motionless despondence. Life must be seen before it can be known. This author and [Alexander] Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be born. The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes imbitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyments of the rich. They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh. 

I had put two exclamation points in the margin beside that paragraph. What I especially like now is the way in which Johnson's brocaded style, which sometimes perhaps approaches the border of the ridiculous, has the effect of highlighting the epigrammatic, scornful, "Life must be seen before it can be known."

The anthology reprinted David Hume's essay "On Miracles," which perhaps as much as anything he wrote earned him the title of The Great Infidel. The argument Hume advances is that an auditor, in evaluating reports of miraculous events (such as are narrated in the Bible), should attempt to determine whether it's more likely that the miracle occurred or that there is something deficient in the report of it. And he always decides against the miracle and in favor of a problematic report; for example:

It is strange, a judicious Reader is apt to say, upon the Perusal of these wonderful Historians, that such prodigious Events never happen in our Days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that Men should lye in all Ages.

There is at the back of the Anthology a section called "A Miscellany of Poems" that's free of my notations except for a grinning face I drew in the margin next to the following anonymous contribution to the art of poetry:

I have lost my mistress, horse, and wife,
And when I think on human life,
  Cry mercy 'twas no worse.
My mistress sickly, poor and old,
My wife damn'd ugly, and a scold,
  I am sorry for my horse.

Don does Lenny: more on Underworld

I’ve made it about two-thirds of the way through Underworld—in other words, there are around 560 pages behind me and around 280 to go. On some heavy-lidded evenings, looking ahead to see if I’ll reach a natural stopping place before the world news comes on public radio at 1 a.m., I’ve thought of Dr. Johnson’s judgment on Paradise Lost: “No one ever wished it longer.” There are many strands to the narrative and, for those who’ve read it, the one concerning Klara Sax and her arty friends bores me. I hope her first husband Alfred, the retired science teacher, has a larger role in the remaining pages, but even if he doesn’t I’m confident there will be more in the way of enjoyable surprises, such as:

January 11, 1955

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor, that can make its way across a county, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don’t know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fat, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

“If you’d been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you’d have visions too.”

There ensues an interview between Father Paulus and one of the main characters as a young Catholic school student in which my favorable impression of the priest suffers no diminishment. Twenty pages earlier, it had been a couple years later, October 8, 1957, to be exact, and

Erica did things with Jell-O that took people’s breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. The tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations through half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.

It then develops that while she’s working in Jell-O her teenaged son, a math whiz who will grow up to work for the government in nuclear weapons development, is diligently applying himself to the hobby most closely associated, among characters in literature, with Alexander Portnoy.

I think there is a strong whiff of Lenny Bruce in the disquisition on Jell-O—“Lime Jell-o is goyish, lime soda is very goyish”—and he soon appears onstage as well. The occasion is a stand-up gig in West Hollywood on the same evening, October 22, 1962, that Kennedy had addressed the nation on Soviet missiles in Cuba. The president used the phrase “full retaliatory response.” DeLillo has Bruce walk out on the stage and, in front of the mic, pause for effect before beginning, very gravely, “Good evening, my fellow citizens”:

“I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It’s a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can’t stop talking about it. . . .”

Wouldn’t wish Underworld too much shorter.

Jeopardy: cheering and sneering

Since there was no Twins game to watch, I queued up some Jeopardy shows I'd recorded and found myself pulling for the above pictured "social media coordinator from Minneapolis, Minnesota." She won her first game when, in Final Jeopardy, she went from last to first by being the only contestant to know that Lesotho, aka "the kingdom in the sky," is the only African country lying entirely above an elevation of 4000 feet. Actually, judging by the shocked happy look on her face when Ken announced that her response was correct, it might be that, strictly speaking, "guessed correctly" is more accurate than "knew." Kind of a hard question, no? I was clueless. I suppose her mental process was something like, "Well, 4000 feet is pretty high, so the country must be small in area, and Lesotho is small, and I'm running out of time . . . ."  

The above still is from her interview with Ken near the start of her second game, when she was telling him about what a big Timberwolves fan she is: she's hoping Anthony Edwards can lead the team to better things, and her cat is named for Naz Reid. She mentioned that she has season tickets, which I guess means she won't be facing imminent starvation even though she won less than $10,000 in her only victory—she was deposed by a medical student in her second game. 

In the game she won, she was trailing badly before pulling into contention when, near the end of the Double Jeopardy round, she answered, hesitantly but correctly, a couple questions in a category about math terms and symbols. All three players had been avoiding the category, and neither of the other two players, a public relations pro and an English teacher, ever rang in as she proceeded through the category.

I think she caught a break, however, on this item:

 

She responded, "What is greatest common denominator?" Ken said, "Or divisor, that's right" and she was credited with $1200. But is there any such thing as a greatest common denominator? The least common denominator of 1/2 and 1/3 would be 6 (since it's the least common multiple of 2 and 3), but the other common denominators would be all the multiples of 6: 12, 18, 24, 30, etc. There's no greatest. An all-around crappy item, imho, as "greatest common divisor," though a thing, is more commonly referred to as greatest common factor and, in any event, would rarely if ever be indicated by GCD.

Innumeracy at Jeopardy! I just googled "Jeopardy & greatest common denominator" and it looks like I'm the only egghead in the world who cares. 

All-star break

Usually these are for me the worst four days of the summer—all-star break, no ballgames—but I find that last home series against the Orioles is operating on me like an analgesic. No one wishes for the return of the sensation of flesh being torn.

The Orioles, however! (Twins look so bad I'm reduced to feeling attracted to their opponents.) Why aren't more people talking about them—or am I just missing the chatter? Two years ago, they lost 110 games. Then, last year, they improved to 83-79, but, probably because in their division that was only good for fourth place (of five teams), few noticed. This year, at the all-star break, they stand 54-35, two games behind the Rays in the AL East. Of 30 major league teams, only the Rays and Braves have better records than the Orioles.

The Orioles! Last time they were good, Cal Ripken was their shortstop, and for fun I could play in pick-up basketball games. They just beat the crap out of us on Saturday and Sunday, but it was Friday night's game that made me think it would be fun to be a Baltimore fan. The score was 1-1 when in a middle inning the first two Twin batters reached. Byron Buxton then hit what looked like a 3-run homer to left center, but the O's centerfielder raced back, leaped just as he got to the fence, brought the ball back into the ballpark in his glove for the inning's first out. The runner on second tagged and advanced to third, so we still had runners at the corners and just one out, but of course the next batter struck out and the one after that made the last out of the inning. Another zero in the line score for the home team.

Sometimes, you're watching the game, the count might be 1-1, the batter takes a close pitch, the umpire calls it either a ball or a strike, and the color commentator goes on a jag about the tremendous difference between a count of 2-1 versus 1-2. Okay, cool, but maybe leave something in reserve for the difference between a 3-run homer and an out. The score was still tied 1-1 when the Orioles came to bat in the top of the tenth, the gifted runner on second base. First batter muscles one out into right center, looks like an RBI single. But the guy hauls ass right out of the batter's box, our right-handed centerfielder has to run toward right field to get the ball, then twirl, and the Oriole beats the throw to second base: an RBI, yes, but also a hustle double. The next batter advances him to third with a sacrifice bunt. The next batter scores him with a medium-deep fly. Two run lead, ball game. 

Fun to win a game like that. The Twins do not win games like that. 

Ngl, my behaviors often stupid

In some kind of social science—behavioral economics?—experiment customers are told when checking out that the exact item they're buying is available for five dollars less at the store's "outlet center" (or some such thing) a couple blocks away. Will they proceed with the transaction or thank the clerk and head for the outlet center? Turns out that it largely depends upon how much the item costs. If it's a hundred dollars, and they can get it for $95, they'll just pay the hundred. But if it's, say, ten dollars, now they'll take the short walk to get it for $5. 

This doesn't make sense, right? In both cases, the question is whether you'll walk two blocks for five dollars. But something about the way the two "deals" present themselves to the mind makes one appear very attractive, the other, not so much. I can "feel" the conflict in my own self. I understand with my brain that five dollars is five dollars, but I also feel like $5 is nothing—especially nothing, emphatically nothing, if you're spending a hundred. 

They understand this at the car dealership—all that worthless stuff they want you to buy, and you might do it, because what's a couple hundred more if you're signing up for $40,000? You wouldn't flush $200 down the toilet at home but for some reason you'll hand it right over at the dealership.

I thought of this experiment today because of my minor adventures buying gasoline. I am the kind of person whose day is ruined if I pay $3.44 a gallon and then, before I get home, see it's selling for $3.39 at a station even closer to my house. I usually buy about 15 gallons, so the difference is maybe 75 cents, which isn't a lot considering that I'm probably on my way to Bob's Java Hut to spend $7 on a Mexican Mocha. If I'm going to sulk about "overpaying" for gas maybe I should stay out of the coffeeshop, too. Don't start in on having drinks with friends at a bar. God, I love bars.

Anyway, this morning I'm on my way to Bob's Java Hut, fuel light on as I approach a station at 40th & Lyndale. I see their price for unleaded is $3.39, which is 5 or 10 cents less than the most common going rate around south Minneapolis these days. I'm getting ready to turn in when I see the big tanker truck is there filling up the reservoirs and taking up most of the available space for gassing up—a couple of customers are using the only remaining spots. I swerve back into Lyndale and four blocks farther up, at 36th Street, there's a station selling gas for $3.29.

My day would have been complete if, when paying for a latte ten minutes later, it had turned out that my electronic punch card was full. Only the sixth, however, and it's either the tenth or eleventh that's "free."

In re Twins, Swifties

Younger daughter told me today, without evident irony or sarcasm, which is rare, especially in a speech act of hers containing the word "blessed," "I feel blessed to be alive at the same time as Taylor Swift."

I've not been doing monthly summaries of the Twins' progress through the baseball season, but I am paying attention, and, again thanks to Aaron Gleeman, I realized recently that I've been impressed, though insufficiently, with their pitching. We're now almost at the all-star break and they rank first in the major leagues—best of all 30 mlb teams—in the following statistical categories:

Earned Run Average
Strikeout rate
On base percentage against
Slugging percentage against
On base plus slugging against
Innings pitched per start
Quality starts (at least six innings pitched, no more than 3 runs allowed)

Alas, the best way to convey their woes at the bat is just to point out that, notwithstanding the above, their record for the season is 45 wins, 43 losses. I will add, however, that Twin hitters have struck out more than any other team—52 more times than the Giants, the team with the second most. The Giants meanwhile have struck out 47 times more than the team with the eighth most: that is, the gap between the Twins and the team with the second most strikeouts is wider than the gap between the team with the second most and the one with the eighth most. Three-hop grounders and bloops over the infield can be hits but it's hard to get lucky when you're striking out. 

Imagine how gaudy the stats for Twin pitchers would be if they ever got to pitch against the Twins. 

I'm too jaded to drop a word like "blessed" but I may spend more time than my favorite Swiftie scrolling around on my phone, finding music to, er, love. Never heard of Lake Street Dive until I typed into a search engine "covers of Prince songs" and found this (almost as fun as the bass fiddle and the voice of the lead singer is the horn player's impersonation, when it's not his turn to play, of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier):

 

Here's the genius performing it himself at a famous First Avenue concert, August 3, 1983, commemorating my 25th birthday:

 

One more Lake Street Dive cover. That girl can sing. Our country is full of talented people who are barely getting along, one reason C-SPAN is so depressing.

 

 

She wants a divorce!

I made a tofu dish for supper tonight (recipe), which the kids declined on patriotic grounds. I reminded them of the hot dogs we had for lunch, but of course, "What have you done for me lately?" Well, eat some bread, cuz we're not going to Dairy Queen, children's services is closed for the holiday, and HUAC was disbanded in 1975.

I can hear one of them in the kitchen right now making herself a milk shake. 

This article, by Ron Brownstein, concerning whether the United States will crack up like in the 1860s, is perhaps the tofu of Fourth of July political journalism. But it's Marjorie Taylor Greene who has called for a "national divorce," and if it would make her a foreigner, my ears are open, twitchy, and q-tipped. Ted Cruz wouldn't have to go skip out in a crisis as he would already be living in another land. 

But, as a political scientist quoted in the article asks, "What do you do with upstate New York? And Memphis?" What do you do with anywhere, really. The divide is not between regions of the country as it was in 1860. In Minnesota, we have 87 counties, and in the last election Trump got more votes in 74 of them. But in one of the other 13, Hennepin, home to Minneapolis and most of its suburbs, his deficit of about 327,000 votes was greater than his aggregate advantage in the 74 counties he carried, and he lost the state by 7 points. 

The above map, which I mentioned once before, here, is someone's version of what the family court settlement would look like in the divorce Marj recommends. The two "countries" resemble gerrymandered congressional districts—the blue one is mostly just population centers connected by land bridges. Before the last census, a congressional district in Ohio, the 9th, included Toledo, some suburbs west of Cleveland, and, in between, was often about as wide as the right-of-way taking for a highway. Blow air into that balloon and you get the above Blue Nation. I think the mapmaker's point might be to show that he's set himself an impossible task. Suppose Brownstein's political scientist had asked, "What do you do with Dallas?" The answer to that question, apparently, is you make it the capital city of the Red Nation—even though Dallas County is overwhelmingly Democratic. 

The geography of the mind is a different matter, and harder to make out, though the tells have accrued rapidly in the recent past. I remember that after the 2016 election, when Trump won despite having lost the national vote by around 3 million, some Republicans argued that it was no matter because Clinton had won California by about the same margin.  In other words, Trump hadn't really lost the popular vote, because Clinton's entire margin was secured in California, where the voters I guess aren't real Americans? It seems that being an American means agreeing with them about who's an American, but by what logic can only one side play the game? Let's instead discount the votes cast by white men residing in states that once seceded from the Union. Now she won by a lot more than 3 million. 

It's almost as if underlying the impulse to seek a divorce lies deep uneasiness about who can vote. 

 

I borrow money, develop a man crush on Karl Marx

I think of myself as a garden-variety Democratic voter, neither Joe Manchin nor a Bernie Bro, but once in a while something happens that nudges me toward Bernie or, indulging daydreams, into the arms of AOC. I recently had a $15,000 home repair—$15,350, to be exact, for a new "combi boiler." (I live in a 100-year-old house with radiators for heat; there's no separate hot water heater, the "combi" does it all.) I was going to transfer money around in order to write a check that wouldn't bounce, but then the company doing the work told me they offered 0% financing for 18 months. You can get about 5% on bank deposits these days, so I thought I might as well pay them slow, and I took the financing.

First sort of weird thing that happened is I got in the mail a credit card issued by Wells Fargo. So it's not actually the HVAC company that "offers 0% financing for 18 months." Rather, the HVAC company has some arrangement whereby they toss over to Wells Fargo their customers who don't have, say, 15 grand lying around. Uh-oh. I'm not using that credit card (though some people, especially if they're more desperate than I, might). 

Not long after that I get a statement in the mail. It's four pages long, very small print, and includes all the terms, which are apparently somewhat more complicated than "0% for 18 months," unless perhaps what happens after 18 months is positively Byzantine. I sit down to read it. Have to take off my glasses and hold the paper with the tiny print close to my face—ok, whatever, I'm old and both near- and far-sighted, but it's almost as if they want you to give up on comprehending. As you persist, so does the suspicion that the unknown authors don't want you to understand. I think I'm a pretty good reader, and I wouldn't say the document is impenetrable, but it certainly tends in that direction. Lots of people wouldn't understand it, or would grow weary of trying. For one thing, it uses a sort of private vocabulary for rather ordinary concepts, and defines these terms elsewhere within the document, so that instead of just reading something that makes sense you have to scan around to figure out what the weird stuff means and then make the needed substitutions as you forge ahead. There are many sentences along the line of, "Please note that 'accrued interest' may also be referred to as 'deferred interest' and 'subaccount(s)' may also be referred to as 'balances.'" Noted, thanks!

Well, I put in some time and feel confident that I grasp the principal details of the shit deal Wells Fargo has for the customers of their friends in the HVAC business. 

The reason they can say "0% for 18 months" is that I pay no interest if I give them something every month and the whole $15,350 by the "special terms end date," which is what they call the end of the 18-month period. That's it for the good news. I said the print is small and the language hard to understand, but one exception to that is a box at the upper-right of page 1 that says "Minimum Payment Due-----$505.75." I'm sure a common reaction to this information is, "Well, why would I pay them more than the minimum?" But notice that $505.75 x 18 = $9103.50 < $15,350. By paying the monthly minimum, you have only paid back about 60% of the debt at the "special terms end date," and now you pay interest.

The interest rate is 28.99%.

I guess that in my innocence I would have thought it was illegal to charge that amount of interest. It should be, but . . . lobbyists, Republicans, probably Joe Manchin. Willing lender, willing borrower, some will say. Not really. Remember, I got steered into this deal because I needed to heat my house and have hot water. I'm going to pay them off within 18 months but lots of people couldn't. According to Fortune, 57% of Americans cannot afford an unexpected $1000 expense. Wells Fargo: "Let's get these people to pay us for the rest of their lives!"

Send them a credit card in case they'd like to make some additional purchases.

I've now made two $900 payments, which is why my "special terms balance" on the portion of the statement shown below is down to $13,550. 

But the "deferred interest charge" of $502.65 puzzled me until I read, on a different page:

We begin accruing interest on a purchase with No Interest if Paid in Full Terms on the date the purchase posts to your Account. We calculate interest on the purchase balance. This amount is called the deferred interest charge (see "Deferred Interest Charges" shown in the SPECIAL TERMS CALCULATION section of your statement). The deferred interest charge will not be added to the regular balance unless you do not pay the balance in full by the end of the special terms period (see Special Terms End Date shown in the SPECIAL TERMS CALCULATION section of your statement). You may avoid interest on the balance by paying it in full before the end of the special terms period.

This means that, while I am paying them at a rate that will result in no interest, they are keeping track of what the interest payment would be on the unpaid balance. If my rate of pay slows, and there is outstanding debt when the "special terms end date" arrives, the 28.99% is not applied against only the amount that remains unpaid at that time. Instead, all the "deferred interest" is added to the balance due, going back to the first month, when the 28.99% was applied to an average daily balance of roughly $15,000, plus the next month, when the exorbitant rate was calculated on an average daily balance of about $14,000, and so on—a total of thousands of dollars of interest, since the rate is usurious. The impact upon someone seduced into making the “minimum payment” would be calamitous.

And that's if they don't accept the invitation to use the credit card sent to them in the mail.

A perennial argument between "liberals" and "conservatives" concerns the degree to which private enterprise should be overseen and regulated by the government. "Get big government off our backs!" cries one side—because, it appears to me, they want to be free to boost their bottom line by gouging vulnerable people of modest means who are prone to landing in desperate situations. And they're succeeding—they're gouging them. I mean, I assume this loan they have me in isn't breaking any laws, and in that case they aren't being regulated enough.