Don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared underneath. —Katherine Mansfield
Greetings from the far left coast where our wild winter continues. The temperature was 35 degrees last Wednesday when I set out on a short run in light rain and a snow flurry. Snow began to fall in earnest shortly after I was safely home. The trace of snow predicted by the weather psychics just kept coming, more than ten inches according to the National Weather Service, making it the second snowiest day on record (Snow blankets much of Western Oregon, creating treacherous roads, closing schools). Not much melting until the weekend with overnight temperatures around 20 and barely cracking the freezing point until Friday afternoon.
The masters of meteorology hedged their bets in subsequent days with snow showers predicted or "likely" through the coming weekend but temperatures sufficiently mild for any overnight accumulation to melt away during the day. And I'm making my list for Santa.
Secession talk. On President's Day the distinguished patriot and face of the Republican Party Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out a call to blow up the union:
We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.
What followed was not a formal position paper but an unhinged sequence of tweets whose vision of red state and blue state governance goes so far beyond caricature that another word is needed for it. What she appears to have in mind is not exactly secession but an extremely loose federalism on steroids or maybe amphetamines that amounts to unilateral dismemberment of the federal government dictated by MAGA ideology.
Among other things, "in red states, they could have different rules about product placement on national store’s [sic] shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes." Not a patron of Walmart, I was blissfully unaware of the company's placement of sex toys. I'll know where to look in if I ever find myself in one of their stores.
It appears that the federal government's primary role would be border security, presumably to prevent people who are not white and Christian from entering the country.
Unfortunately, there is an audience for this gibberish within Congress and among the populace. To the best of my knowledge, her Kevin McCarthy has yet to weigh in on with a public statement. We are left to guess what he has expressed privately to his Marjorie.
Greater Idaho. "With a wink and a smirk the Idaho House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a nonbinding memorial calling for formal talks between the Idaho and Oregon legislatures to discuss moving some rural Oregon counties out of their state and into Idaho." The Greater Idaho movement would have eleven or so counties in eastern Oregon become part of Idaho because "eastern Oregon is more politically and culturally aligned with Idaho than Oregon’s larger progressive cities in the western part of the state." The counties make up about 63 percent of Oregon's landmass but a minority of the population.
A rigid, puritanical mindset is a feature of our era. It infects the left, progressives, liberals, just as it does the right. What The Guardian calls "this wholesale Bowdlerization" of Roald Dahl's texts by the publisher is an example of what I have in mind when I say that I am not woke.
Charlie Sykes asks how stupidly offensive all of this is and defers to Salman Rushdie, "who knows a bit about the culture of intolerance for inconvenient words": "Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed." (An Act of Literary Vandalism, The Bulwark, February 20, 2023; see also Hayden Vernon, Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive, The Guardian, February 18, 2023).
Editing of the Dahl text was based on recommendations by "inclusion Ambassadors" at Inclusive Minds. Ambassadors "help identify language and portrayals that could be inauthentic or problematic, and to highlight why, as well as indicate potential solutions." Inclusive Minds denies responsibility for the hackery it promotes. The organization insists that it does not "edit or rewrite texts" and that its ambassadors are not "sensitivity readers." Responsibility for editing lies with the publisher, which as Sykes and others have pointed out, was done on Dahl text "with a passion that clearly exceeded their literary talents and their judgment."
A defense of sorts has been bruited about by apologists who hold that this is not censorship but rather the glory of capitalism at work. The publisher is simply obeying the capitalist imperative to maximize profits above any and all other considerations by making the books palatable to a population that objects to some of Dahl's language. The argument unwittingly illustrates the pervasiveness of rigid, puritanical thinking. Puffin now plans to publish both versions of Dahl's books in the interest of leaving no market unpursued.
I wonder if any research has been done on the extent to which extreme sensitivity to objectionable language and imagery is learned behavior. What might be called the socialization of trauma.
Furor at The New York Times. It seems that coverage of transgender issues has precipitated an uproar in the newsroom. Last week a letter "signed by hundreds of Times contributors and several current staffers…criticized the paper’s coverage of transgender issues, citing specific stories and who wrote them." The paper's executive and opinion editors responded with an internal email, writing that they "do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."
NewsGuild of New York (the union) president Susan DeCarava supported the earlier letter with a letter of her own asserting that the issue is concern about conditions that create a hostile working environment. Other Times journalists fired back at DeCarava in a letter with dozens of signatures, saying that her letter suggested a fundamental misunderstanding of their responsibility as journalists and undermined the ethical and professional protections journalists rely on to guard their independence and integrity.
Every day, partisan actors seek to influence, attack, or discredit our work. We accept that,. But what we don’t accept is what the Guild appears to be endorsing: A workplace in which any opinion or disagreement about Times coverage can be recast as a matter of "workplace conditions"…We are journalists, not activists. That line should be clear. (Charlotte Klein, Dozens of New York Times Journalists Hit Staff Union for Its Defense of Trans Coverage Criticism, Vanity Fair, February 21, 2023)
Times leadership has stood its ground, for which it is to be applauded.
Recommended reading. Timely articles by two favorite contributors to The Bulwark:
Spring training is underway. Exhibition games. Box scores. Phillie aces Aaron Nola and Zach Wheeler were sharp in their initial outings. All eyes are on 19-year-old phenom Andrew Painter, vying for a spot in the rotation. Hope springs infernal.
New Blog Post: Ukraine One Year On. February 24, 2023. Today I am left with Samuel Beckett: "nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (quoted by James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett). Well. Perhaps obligation is accompanied by desire to express solidarity with Ukraine on the anniversary of the Russian invasion…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
