I wrote the book on COFFEE, remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks. —Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady, per Howard Cunnell, "Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road." Tea refers to marijuana, not Earl Grey, green, or chamomile. Benny is the amphetamine Benzedrine.
Greetings from the far left coast, Portland, where black bloc anarchists roam the streets with impunity, coffee and cannabis shops abound, and we boast the most strip clubs per capita in the country. Sometimes I wonder what I am doing here. Well, coffee.
My right ankle came down with a bad attitude Saturday before last as I stepped down to the street to begin my run. The ankle has never again been like it was before I rolled it pretty badly toward the end of 2010. I worked through that first injury with the help of a physical therapist and ran two marathons afterward, 2014 and 2015, with no problem. But, as I said, the ankle has never been the same as before the injury. Always a little tightness, slight discomfort, feeling something where with the other ankle I don't feel anything. From time to time there must be something in the way I step that stresses something and I feel a bit more discomfort, sometimes a momentary, passing sharp pain, that can usually be resolved with a few ankle rotations in each direction after which I resume my run or walk. Not this time. I tried running last Tuesday and made it almost five miles before the ankle shrieked at me. Saturday a few strides were enough for even me to know to bag it. I continue doing the stretches and exercises incorporated into my routine during the 2011 rehab, and I am able to walk with no problem. Trying to practice patience with myself, not a quality for which I am known.
On a far brighter note, the latest order from Powell's arrived on Friday with Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War and the original scroll version, "the legendary first draft—rougher, wilder, and racier than the 1957 edition," of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Each promises to be a delight. This 2007 edition of On the Road comes with a fine introduction by Nick Cunnell that provides a wealth of detail about how the novel came to be written and among other things debunks the myth that Kerouac wrote it fueled by Benzedrine in three weeks on a single long roll of Teletype paper. I have not yet done any digging to find out if Cunnell's debunking is disputed. I will report on that when I review the scroll version down the road, so to speak.
With the arrival of Menand and Kerouac, seven of the eight books in progress have moved to the back burner. The eighth is the mystery novel read for diversion, Tombland by C.J. Sansom, set in England in 1549, featuring intrepid hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake who is commissioned by fifteen-year-old Elizabeth, younger daughter of the dead king Henry VIII, to investigate the murder charge leveled against her distant relative John Boleyn, a Norwich landowner, in the bizarre death of his strange and troubled wife Edith. Soon a spate of possibly related disappearances and deaths occur. Shardlake is threatened by Boleyn's sons, Barnabus and Gerald, a pair of psychopathic twins. Meanwhile, unrest is brewing in the countryside. The enclosure of common lands by wealthy landowners spurs the poor to rise up against the gentleman class. Kett's rebellion breaks out and Shardlake is dragged into it. Tombland is a hefty volume weighing in at 800 pages. Fortunately, it is a page-turner once it gets going.
Another high point came last week when I happened on Margaret Hoover's Firing Line interview with Irshad Manji, author of Don't Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars. Listening to Manji respond to Hoover's questions about hot button issues like diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, shaming, and critical race theory, I found myself thinking that she was saying exactly what I would like to say as she spoke of "treating all people as multi-faceted beings rather than as mascots of this or that tribe." Here are a few examples:
I’m an advocate of diversity. I love diversity. Diversity is a fact of life. There’s biodiversity, there’s diversity of thought. I’m an immigrant, a Muslim, a lesbian, a woman. I submit to you that God is not a manufacturer of widgets. A majestic creator produces majestic beings. This is a deliciously complex world that we’re living in.
In my book, though, I make a clear distinction between “honest diversity” and “dishonest diversity.” Dishonest diversity is about counting the types of individuals in the room. But honest diversity is about making each individual count. And ensuring that, as we practice diversity, we are not excluding the very people whom we have accused of excluding us. Because payback is not progress.
"Here is the bottom line: It’s not diversity of demographics that we ought to use as our metric of inclusion, but diversity of viewpoint."
Another good interview with Manji, this one a bit shorter, can be found at Philanthropy Today: Interview with Irshad Manji.
Our anarchists could be counted on to desecrate the anniversary of the death of George Floyd and desecrate it they did with blows against racism that included a dumpster fire, graffiti at the Justice Center, broken windows at Portland City Hall, bottles and fireworks hurled at police officers, and smashed windows at a downtown jewelry shop, Starbucks shops, a credit union, and Ruth's Chris Steak House. Five people were arrested and booked.
- Portland police declare riot, arrest 5, as marchers break windows on anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, The Oregonian/OregonLive, Updated May 26, 2021; posted May 25, 2021
- Suzette Smith, Portland Police Declare Riot Amid Trash Fires on One-Year Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder, Willamette Week, May 26, 2021
Strange bedfellows department. There was a time not long ago it would have been well-nigh unthinkable that I might write approvingly of William Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard who now writes for The Bulwark. The twice impeached former president and the descent of the Republican Party into conspiracist hysteria and naked commitment to minority rule has brought us together. Kristol argues that Democrats should recruit "future former Republicans"
to run for office as Democrats in seats and states where traditional progressive Democrats are likely to lose. These candidates don’t have to be literal former Republicans, though they could be. But they have to appeal to the, let’s say, 12 percent of Republicans who like Liz Cheney. Because if you can hold the traditional Democratic voters and pick up some of those Republicans, you can win Senate and House seats. (Towards a Real Democratic Majority, The Bulwark, May 28, 2021)
There is an unnerving possibility, maybe even likelihood, that Republicans will retake the House and Senate and maintain control of the majority of state governments next year, opening the door for the party to install the Republican candidate, whether that be the twice impeached former president, the statesman Tom Cotton, Commandente Ted "Cancun" Cruz, or some other blockhead, as maximum supreme leader in January 2025 regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election.
While it might look like a shitshow in Washington, the party is more like a hurricane gathering strength off shore that will wallop Democrats beginning in 2022. The Republican Party has a structural advantage in the House, Senate and Electoral College. It controls redistricting in a majority of states. Most ominously for Democrats — and democracy — it is using its power in statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country to pass voting laws that solidify these advantages. (Ryan Lizza, Tara Palmer, Eugene Daniels, Rachel Bade, POLITICO Playbook: It’s not a civil war; it’s a purge, Politico, May 14, 2021)
Charlie Sykes declares that the fight for the soul of the Republican Party is over:
The crackpots, conspiracists and bigots have won, and there is no point pretending that this is a party that can be salvaged anytime soon. As Jeff Greenfield notes in Politico, there is no civil war in the Republican Party — there is only a "purge." (Is This Working for the GOP?)
PBS NewsHour has a good interview with the vice chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors. He has strong words about the audit farce ordered by the Arizona state senate: Stephanie Sy, Republican Maricopa County official decries the ‘big lie’ behind third vote audit, PBS NewsHour, May 18, 2021
Another critique of the faux audit comes from Kaleigh Rogers at FiveThirtyEight:
For the past five weeks, workers from Cyber Ninjas, a small private cybersecurity company based in Sarasota, Florida, have gathered in an arena to re-recount all the ballots — nearly 2.1 million — at the behest of the state’s Republican senators. Auditors have reportedly scanned ballots with UV lights to look for secret watermarks that conspiracy theorists believe then-President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security placed on legitimate ballots to differentiate them from fraudulent ones; they’ve also inspected ballots for traces of bamboo to determine if they were imported from Asia.…
Audits and recounts are an essential part of our voting system, but what’s happening in Arizona isn’t. The state Senate that ordered the process is calling it an audit, and all the ballots are being recounted, but it’s not really an audit or a recount — it’s a partisan inquisition. Conducted by a company founded by an election-fraud conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter, the process is funded mostly by Trump loyalists and fails to meet any of the standards required for official recounts or audits by state law. (What’s Happening In Arizona Is Not Really An Audit Or A Recount. It’s A Partisan Inquisition May 28, 2021)
Joshua Tait shines the spotlight on William F. Buckley and National Review in a column about the history of conservative antagonism toward democracy:
…for present purposes, focusing on just the twentieth century and after, it is clear that there is a strong undercurrent of anti-democratic thought in American conservatism. And when the politics have been convenient, many conservatives have used their critiques of democracy to justify authoritarian regimes or deny citizens the vote on racial grounds in the United States and abroad. Which is to say that the democracy-denying beliefs and actions of today’s conservative Republican party—rejecting the results of the 2020 presidential election and seeking to manipulate voting laws nationwide in a cynical assault on the democratic process—have plentiful precedent in conservative history. (Anti-Democratic Conservatism Isn’t New, The Bulwark, May 28, 2021)
And from Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:
Today’s Republicans exist only to stay in power, not least so that their elected officials can avoid what they dread most: being sent home to live among their constituents. The conservative writer George Will is right that the Republican Party in 2021 has become “something new in American history,” a “political party defined by the terror it feels for its own voters.”
Republican legislators should be scared. Their base is an angry white minority that cares nothing about government; its members want their elected officials to rule by hook or by crook, the Constitution and democracy itself be damned, and they don’t want any guff about namby-pamby ideas or policies. They want the elections controlled, the institutions captured, and the libs owned. The rest, to them, is just noise. (The GOP Now Stands for Nothing)
So what is infrastructure? I would be surprised if there is not stuff in the president's infrastructure bill that could arguably be whittled down or cut out altogether. On the other hand, what counts as infrastructure in 2021 may not be the same as it was in 1975.
The Covid-19 pandemic has scrambled our lives, our economy, and what we expect from government. Across the country, what we want and need from infrastructure — the transportation and communication networks that keep us moving, talking and working — has changed, and is unlikely to revert to the pre-pandemic status quo.
And in this new way of looking at public systems and spaces, it turns out that lots of things we didn’t previously consider infrastructure, like street space for outdoor dining, have now become critical to the functioning of the economy. (Erick Trickey, How the pandemic changed America’s ideas about infrastructure, Politico, May 27, 2021)
Two new blog posts:
- Literary Adventure with Larry McMurtry. We were taught to make outlines in high school, maybe before that, as far back as fifth or sixth grade at Dutch Fork Elementary. Although I was a good student, adept at giving teachers what they wanted, the outline process never took hold…Read More
- The Israeli Peace Movement, Palestinian Nonviolent Activism, and What They Are Up Against. News coverage of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank tends to focus on Hamas raining rockets down on Israel and Israel in turn bombing the heck out of Gaza. Not much space is devoted to the Israeli peace movement and still less to Palestinian nonviolent resistance…Read More
Keep the faith.
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Pictured below: Mt. Tabor Park, a bit south of the upper reservoir, May 14, 2021