It was an eyebrow-raising headline even for Facebook, which has no shortage of them.
“NAACP Officially Endorses Trump for 2020 Election,” it read. The person who shared it had copied and pasted part of the story into the body of the post, a rambling quote attributed to an NAACP spokesperson. It talked about members being fooled into believing that “Trump will put you in chains,′ but eventually realizing the president “is a true friend of the black community.”
Having read just days before an official press release from the NAACP that applauded Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to proceed with articles of impeachment against Trump, I smelled something fishy.
It didn’t take long to find out what. All I had to do was click on the link.
The story is the product of a website that offers “satire for Flat Earthers, Trumpsters and Y’all Qaeda” and is stored in a folder labeled “Conservative Fan Fiction.” The NAACP mentioned in the story is the Norman Association for the Advancement of Coloring People, and the president is identified as one Donald Juniper Trump.
A few observations:
For one, I mourn the state of satire, a noble literary genre that has fallen on hard times from the heights of practitioners like Jonathan Swift and his “Modest Proposal,” or even Mad magazine, for heaven’s sake.
I’m not even certain what was being satirized here. The supposed naivete of some minorities who believe Trump actually cares about them? The NAACP for speaking out against Trump? The GOP for standing by their man in a way that puts Loretta Lynn to shame? Democrats for seeking impeachment so close to an election year?
I don’t know, and I’m not sure the author does either. The piece commits a cardinal sin of satire because it does not enlighten readers in any way, does not hold any one person or group up to ridicule, and isn’t funny.
I suspect “satire” is a cover the website uses in an attempt to legitimize what is nothing more than a propaganda machine. Readers aren’t meant to go beyond the headline, but rather just forward it, like some maniacal chain letter on steroids.
So a bigger concern is how a piece like this can quickly be weaponized by people who don’t read carefully or who support a cause at the expense of objective truth.
This is a problem across all social media, but nowhere more than on Facebook, where the policy regarding political ads is to have no policy, to let content flow freely to 2 billion worldwide users (although the site may begin flagging political content as not fact-checked, which is at least a start).
At no time in history has it been more important for readers to be discerning consumers of information than in an era when every basement-dwelling, chain-smoking conspiracy theorist has access to worldwide publishing at the touch of a button — and when more than a few of these people have started companies with no goal other than to obfuscate the truth and stump on behalf of a particular person or cause, no matter how spurious or injurious to the nation.
Despite all President Trump’s grousing about supposedly left-leaning news organizations, the truth is that any bias demonstrated by these media giants is minuscule compared to the slant offered by far-right-leaning — and, to be fair, fair-left-leaning — organizations that spin more stories than a washing machine spins clothes.
(Of course, if there is an actual hell, then a special circle is reserved for Fox News, where an uber-pernicious slant coupled with a huge budget and a sheen of respectability has done more to divide this country than any other single entity, Trump included.)
To the credit of my Facebook friend, he removed the faux-NAACP post shortly after I alerted him to its questionable nature. But that was only after it had been shared by several other Facebook users.
An old saying in the news industry is that the correction never catches up to the mistake. It’s never been more true, especially in situations where the mistake is intentional and malicious.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Friday, December 6, 2019
Excessive exclamations of enthusiasm ... whatever
Squint really hard and you will see a white flag fluttering over this column.
After a long and valiant battle, I am surrendering in my war against exclamation points. Longtime readers may recall that I’ve fought against their overuse for years, at least since 2012, when I wrote about how I allotted only two per semester, per student, in all written communication.
“Use them wisely,” I intoned, “because once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
I was fighting a losing battle even then against the forces of excessive enthusiasm. “I have to go home and shovel snow!” is not worthy of an exclamation point, even when people love winter.
Ditto “I hate broccoli!,” which looks silly with an exclamation point after the lowercase “i,” like a gremlin in the keyboard flipped the letter upside down and typed it again, although the enthusiasm would also be misplaced if the exclamation point followed “carrot” or “cabbage.” Some preferences don’t merit excitement, no matter how heartfelt.
Since I wrote that column, I have received countless emails — okay, six — where the writer starts by saying, “Please excuse me, but ...” or some variation, followed by information that ends with an exclamation point. Some of that news has been genuinely exciting, such as a child accepted to a prestigious school, and merited exclamation points. Other news, not so much. But who am I to judge?
My allocation of exclamation points has always been persnickety, anyway. Some semesters, in a rush of generosity, I dole out four or five. The point was to make them special so that they didn’t end up littering the compositional highway like so many McDonald’s wrappers.
What I failed to reckon with is the continual adaptation of language to new ways of communicating. Take, for instance, text messages.
Audiences understand punctuation differently in these situations than in more formal types of writing. A period at the end of a text can come across as cold and rude. (One study a few years back found that texts ending in a period were deemed “insincere.”)
Texts ending without a period apparently leave the door open for additional communication. Even a one-word text like “No” can be perceived differently with or without a period. Students tell me they are less likely to continue a texting conversation with somebody whose responses end in periods because that signals the person no longer wants to engage.
Exclamation points are a way of showing excitement is situations where the writer’s intent is hard to determine. They are, in effect, the precursors of emojis, which do the same. Exclamation points began as the Latin “io,” which means “exclamation of joy.” In a space-saving move, the “o” became a period and slid beneath the “i.” (The same consolidation occurred when “questio,” or “question,” was shortened to “qo” and then to today’s question mark.)
So if I’m so worried readers will miss my irony, cynicism, eye-rolling or whatever when I write “Way to go, Insert Imbecilic Politician Here” on Twitter that I add the appropriate emoji, then why am I so uptight about the exclamation point?
I guess I shouldn’t be. So I’m not anymore.
Don’t get me wrong. Exclamation points still don’t belong in formal writing, look ridiculous in newspapers, magazines and presidential tweets, and have no business in novels or short stories unless they are part of dialogue, and even then only sparingly.
Make the words do the emotional heavy-lifting, not the punctuation.
But in less formal communication, let the exclamation points take flight as often as writers like, provided they take into account the effect so much unbridled joy will have on more sober-minded audiences.
In the saccharin-sweet world of writing, I’m still a diabetic. But for those who aren’t, you have my blessing to rain down exclamation points with abandon. Not that you needed my approval — and not that you asked for it.
Here’s the place where, if I were pandering, I would say something clever and end with an exclamation point. But I’m not, so I won’t.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
After a long and valiant battle, I am surrendering in my war against exclamation points. Longtime readers may recall that I’ve fought against their overuse for years, at least since 2012, when I wrote about how I allotted only two per semester, per student, in all written communication.
“Use them wisely,” I intoned, “because once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
I was fighting a losing battle even then against the forces of excessive enthusiasm. “I have to go home and shovel snow!” is not worthy of an exclamation point, even when people love winter.
Ditto “I hate broccoli!,” which looks silly with an exclamation point after the lowercase “i,” like a gremlin in the keyboard flipped the letter upside down and typed it again, although the enthusiasm would also be misplaced if the exclamation point followed “carrot” or “cabbage.” Some preferences don’t merit excitement, no matter how heartfelt.
Since I wrote that column, I have received countless emails — okay, six — where the writer starts by saying, “Please excuse me, but ...” or some variation, followed by information that ends with an exclamation point. Some of that news has been genuinely exciting, such as a child accepted to a prestigious school, and merited exclamation points. Other news, not so much. But who am I to judge?
My allocation of exclamation points has always been persnickety, anyway. Some semesters, in a rush of generosity, I dole out four or five. The point was to make them special so that they didn’t end up littering the compositional highway like so many McDonald’s wrappers.
What I failed to reckon with is the continual adaptation of language to new ways of communicating. Take, for instance, text messages.
Audiences understand punctuation differently in these situations than in more formal types of writing. A period at the end of a text can come across as cold and rude. (One study a few years back found that texts ending in a period were deemed “insincere.”)
Texts ending without a period apparently leave the door open for additional communication. Even a one-word text like “No” can be perceived differently with or without a period. Students tell me they are less likely to continue a texting conversation with somebody whose responses end in periods because that signals the person no longer wants to engage.
Exclamation points are a way of showing excitement is situations where the writer’s intent is hard to determine. They are, in effect, the precursors of emojis, which do the same. Exclamation points began as the Latin “io,” which means “exclamation of joy.” In a space-saving move, the “o” became a period and slid beneath the “i.” (The same consolidation occurred when “questio,” or “question,” was shortened to “qo” and then to today’s question mark.)
So if I’m so worried readers will miss my irony, cynicism, eye-rolling or whatever when I write “Way to go, Insert Imbecilic Politician Here” on Twitter that I add the appropriate emoji, then why am I so uptight about the exclamation point?
I guess I shouldn’t be. So I’m not anymore.
Don’t get me wrong. Exclamation points still don’t belong in formal writing, look ridiculous in newspapers, magazines and presidential tweets, and have no business in novels or short stories unless they are part of dialogue, and even then only sparingly.
Make the words do the emotional heavy-lifting, not the punctuation.
But in less formal communication, let the exclamation points take flight as often as writers like, provided they take into account the effect so much unbridled joy will have on more sober-minded audiences.
In the saccharin-sweet world of writing, I’m still a diabetic. But for those who aren’t, you have my blessing to rain down exclamation points with abandon. Not that you needed my approval — and not that you asked for it.
Here’s the place where, if I were pandering, I would say something clever and end with an exclamation point. But I’m not, so I won’t.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Abortion foes tip their hand
One reason that authors of dystopian fiction pen such stories is because they hope these dark futures will not come to pass.
Lately, though, dystopian novels are more like Nostradamus-level predictions, and no author’s work more so than Margaret Atwood.
Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” posited a bleak world where a theocratic government suppressed women’s rights and, among other nefarious activities, put abortion providers to death. Regardless of how far-fetched this scenario may have been in 1985, here we are in 2019, facing Ohio’s latest attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade with a bill that would ban all abortions in Ohio and levy murder charges against doctors who perform them.
USA Today notes the bill has not been formally introduced, although it does have the support of 21 Republicans in the state House. The proposed legislation would likely trigger a lawsuit if passed.
It’s been a clear strategy of abortion foes to introduce more and more audacious and draconian measures in the hopes of gnawing their way to the Supreme Court, where await justices who may be more kindly disposed toward nixing Roe v. Wade than any in a generation.
Ohio Right to Life organizers feel the best chance of curtailing women’s rights — although they don’t couch it in quite that same language — will come from legal challenges to various “heartbeat bills” like the one Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in April. Last week’s more brazen attempt is the product of an extreme faction of abortion foes, one who will stop at nothing to stop a practice it believes is tantamount to murder.
Of course, these agitators apparently see no disparity between their beliefs about the sanctity of fetal life vs. the possible execution of medical professionals involved in providing access to a procedure that has been legal in this country for 46 years.
For too many conservatives, and especially those at the far right of the continuum, concern about life begins and ends at the womb. Once fetuses are born and become actual, honest-to-goodness children, they — and their parents — must fend for themselves in a world where many of the same people that fought for their right to live now seek to deny them adequate healthcare, equal educational opportunities and living wages.
They can drink polluted water and breathe filthy air, courtesy of repealed environmental laws. They can grow up poor, be swept away by the school-to-prison pipeline, and find their right to vote suppressed. They can be discriminated against because of the people they choose to love, denied rehabilitative services for any addictions, and find their options for food curtailed by a government that doesn’t believe they are working hard enough.
And all this is fine, as long as they had an inviolable right to come out of the womb after nine months. Think of it as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps before they even have bootstraps.
With so many other problems to deal with, it is telling that conservatives so often return to the abortion issue. If they would work as diligently and fervently to address life’s other inequalities, especially economic, they might find that the demand for abortions will drop precipitously, without the need for further laws.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
No, the point for too many of abortion’s foes has more to do with addressing what they perceive as society’s (re: women’s) failure to adhere to so-called Christian morality. For their temerity to have sex outside of marriage and for their insistence that they have autonomy over their own bodies, they must be punished by carrying fetuses to term, and we aren’t too concerned with what happens to them after that.
What we need are more people who are both pro-choice and anti-abortion. Create a culture where people of all income levels and colors are loved and protected from birth to death, where all women have free and unfettered access to all forms of birth control so they can decide when the time is right to have a child, and where doctors and patients have the privacy and autonomy to discuss sensitive medical issues without interference by mostly old, mostly white politicians — and where, it should go without saying (but can’t because of insanity), medical providers don’t have to fear for their lives when they provide options.
When we do that, we take a huge step away from dystopia and toward something sane, sustainable and life affirming.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Lately, though, dystopian novels are more like Nostradamus-level predictions, and no author’s work more so than Margaret Atwood.
Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” posited a bleak world where a theocratic government suppressed women’s rights and, among other nefarious activities, put abortion providers to death. Regardless of how far-fetched this scenario may have been in 1985, here we are in 2019, facing Ohio’s latest attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade with a bill that would ban all abortions in Ohio and levy murder charges against doctors who perform them.
USA Today notes the bill has not been formally introduced, although it does have the support of 21 Republicans in the state House. The proposed legislation would likely trigger a lawsuit if passed.
It’s been a clear strategy of abortion foes to introduce more and more audacious and draconian measures in the hopes of gnawing their way to the Supreme Court, where await justices who may be more kindly disposed toward nixing Roe v. Wade than any in a generation.
Ohio Right to Life organizers feel the best chance of curtailing women’s rights — although they don’t couch it in quite that same language — will come from legal challenges to various “heartbeat bills” like the one Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in April. Last week’s more brazen attempt is the product of an extreme faction of abortion foes, one who will stop at nothing to stop a practice it believes is tantamount to murder.
Of course, these agitators apparently see no disparity between their beliefs about the sanctity of fetal life vs. the possible execution of medical professionals involved in providing access to a procedure that has been legal in this country for 46 years.
For too many conservatives, and especially those at the far right of the continuum, concern about life begins and ends at the womb. Once fetuses are born and become actual, honest-to-goodness children, they — and their parents — must fend for themselves in a world where many of the same people that fought for their right to live now seek to deny them adequate healthcare, equal educational opportunities and living wages.
They can drink polluted water and breathe filthy air, courtesy of repealed environmental laws. They can grow up poor, be swept away by the school-to-prison pipeline, and find their right to vote suppressed. They can be discriminated against because of the people they choose to love, denied rehabilitative services for any addictions, and find their options for food curtailed by a government that doesn’t believe they are working hard enough.
And all this is fine, as long as they had an inviolable right to come out of the womb after nine months. Think of it as pulling themselves up by their bootstraps before they even have bootstraps.
With so many other problems to deal with, it is telling that conservatives so often return to the abortion issue. If they would work as diligently and fervently to address life’s other inequalities, especially economic, they might find that the demand for abortions will drop precipitously, without the need for further laws.
But that’s not really the point, is it?
No, the point for too many of abortion’s foes has more to do with addressing what they perceive as society’s (re: women’s) failure to adhere to so-called Christian morality. For their temerity to have sex outside of marriage and for their insistence that they have autonomy over their own bodies, they must be punished by carrying fetuses to term, and we aren’t too concerned with what happens to them after that.
What we need are more people who are both pro-choice and anti-abortion. Create a culture where people of all income levels and colors are loved and protected from birth to death, where all women have free and unfettered access to all forms of birth control so they can decide when the time is right to have a child, and where doctors and patients have the privacy and autonomy to discuss sensitive medical issues without interference by mostly old, mostly white politicians — and where, it should go without saying (but can’t because of insanity), medical providers don’t have to fear for their lives when they provide options.
When we do that, we take a huge step away from dystopia and toward something sane, sustainable and life affirming.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Going full-foodie for the holidays
Welcome to Day One of The Holifats, Chubbymas, or the YuleThigh season.
For somebody like me, with little to no self-control, the next few weeks will be a wonderful yet miserable orgy of consumption. Christmas cookies, pies, chocolates, pies, stuffing, pies and more pies will call out to me with their sweet, seductive voices, and like a sailor to the sirens, I will be helpless to ignore them.
Last year, I gained almost 15 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. This year, I won’t gain that much, but only because there is one fewer week between the Scylla and Charybdis of the holiday season. (Bonus points for two mythological references in two successive paragraphs.)
I’m writing this the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the Great Holiday Weight Gain has already begun.
My wife is busy making some delightful Thanksgiving pudding desserts, mixing pumpkin, Cool Whip and Oreo crumbs into plastic cups. Because I’m utterly inept in the kitchen, my job is to wash the dishes that accrue like weeds in the sink between batches.
This is where my dilemma begins.
I’m a batter licker and raw-dough-aholic. If it’s stuck to a spoon or a spatula, it goes directly into my mouth. Do not pass Go, do not collect Salmonella — at least not yet.
So while I’m washing my way through this Mount Everest of dishes, I’m licking utensils like a dog licks its ... uh, paws, gaining more calories with each swipe of the tongue than I burn off with all that scrubbing and sanitizing.
Last year, my wife went full Betty Crocker and whipped up about 100 batches of cookies. I might be exaggerating that number, but not by much.
The initial goal was to give them all away to family and friends. But these wonderful holiday packages, sealed so nicely in Saran Wrap, seldom reached their intended targets. Instead, I gobbled them up for breakfast, devoured them as full-meal snacks after work, and made them the centerpiece of double and triple desserts after dinner.
One sweet, delicious cookie at a time, except for the times when I double-fisted. So many cookies that they made my stomach hurt and then swell from all those excess calories.
By the start of 2019, my pants no longer fit. My belt broke. My shirts were riding up on the curve of my expanding belly.
And it was all because of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Well, it was all because of my lack of willpower and dearth of good sense.
The only good outcome was that I started exercising in earnest in January and lost all that excess weight, along with a few extra pounds I’d accumulated over the last few years. And I guess I can do it again if I have to.
But here’s a fun fact: To burn off one pound, a person has to burn about 3,500 more calories than they take in during a week. Running, my exercise of choice, burns about 550 calories an hour when the runner keeps a 6 mph pace, something I never do.
I’m closer to about 500 calories per hour, which means that if I allow free rein to my inner Gastrointestinal Grinch again this year, I will have to run the equivalent of 105 hours just to burn off my Yuletide indiscretions, provided that I’m able to return to semi-sane eating habits once the last ornament has been tucked away and the final carols sung.
Of course, all I really have to do is avoid sweets, which sounds so easy until I realize that in the 20 minutes I’ve been typing these words I have licked two chocolate-covered spatulas.
All I can say is that it’s going to be a long, hot 2020. I hope Santa leaves me a new pair of running shoes under the tree.
But he might not, because chances are good I will eat the cookies we leave for him.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
For somebody like me, with little to no self-control, the next few weeks will be a wonderful yet miserable orgy of consumption. Christmas cookies, pies, chocolates, pies, stuffing, pies and more pies will call out to me with their sweet, seductive voices, and like a sailor to the sirens, I will be helpless to ignore them.
Last year, I gained almost 15 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. This year, I won’t gain that much, but only because there is one fewer week between the Scylla and Charybdis of the holiday season. (Bonus points for two mythological references in two successive paragraphs.)
I’m writing this the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the Great Holiday Weight Gain has already begun.
My wife is busy making some delightful Thanksgiving pudding desserts, mixing pumpkin, Cool Whip and Oreo crumbs into plastic cups. Because I’m utterly inept in the kitchen, my job is to wash the dishes that accrue like weeds in the sink between batches.
This is where my dilemma begins.
I’m a batter licker and raw-dough-aholic. If it’s stuck to a spoon or a spatula, it goes directly into my mouth. Do not pass Go, do not collect Salmonella — at least not yet.
So while I’m washing my way through this Mount Everest of dishes, I’m licking utensils like a dog licks its ... uh, paws, gaining more calories with each swipe of the tongue than I burn off with all that scrubbing and sanitizing.
Last year, my wife went full Betty Crocker and whipped up about 100 batches of cookies. I might be exaggerating that number, but not by much.
The initial goal was to give them all away to family and friends. But these wonderful holiday packages, sealed so nicely in Saran Wrap, seldom reached their intended targets. Instead, I gobbled them up for breakfast, devoured them as full-meal snacks after work, and made them the centerpiece of double and triple desserts after dinner.
One sweet, delicious cookie at a time, except for the times when I double-fisted. So many cookies that they made my stomach hurt and then swell from all those excess calories.
By the start of 2019, my pants no longer fit. My belt broke. My shirts were riding up on the curve of my expanding belly.
And it was all because of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Well, it was all because of my lack of willpower and dearth of good sense.
The only good outcome was that I started exercising in earnest in January and lost all that excess weight, along with a few extra pounds I’d accumulated over the last few years. And I guess I can do it again if I have to.
But here’s a fun fact: To burn off one pound, a person has to burn about 3,500 more calories than they take in during a week. Running, my exercise of choice, burns about 550 calories an hour when the runner keeps a 6 mph pace, something I never do.
I’m closer to about 500 calories per hour, which means that if I allow free rein to my inner Gastrointestinal Grinch again this year, I will have to run the equivalent of 105 hours just to burn off my Yuletide indiscretions, provided that I’m able to return to semi-sane eating habits once the last ornament has been tucked away and the final carols sung.
Of course, all I really have to do is avoid sweets, which sounds so easy until I realize that in the 20 minutes I’ve been typing these words I have licked two chocolate-covered spatulas.
All I can say is that it’s going to be a long, hot 2020. I hope Santa leaves me a new pair of running shoes under the tree.
But he might not, because chances are good I will eat the cookies we leave for him.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Capes and criticism hound prestigious filmmaker
Martin Scorsese finds himself in the crosshairs of cape fans.
The famed director caught hell from some superhero aficionados recently for his opinion that Marvel movies — epics about Captain America, Thor, the Avengers, and the like — are not “cinema.” He clarified those comments in a Nov. 4 op-ed for The New York Times in which he said that, while he recognized Marvel movies are skillfully made by talented people, they are ultimately little more than product.
“What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger,” Scorsese writes. “Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
He also likened Marvel movies to theme parks, presumably because audiences get the same programmed thrills while watching them that they get from a good roller coaster — some predetermined highs and lows, a few screams, but ultimately a safe return to the ground.
Nothing in Scorsese’s comments indicates he is dismissive of Marvel movies, just that they aren’t for him, that they are indicative of a larger trend in movies and culture in general where singular efforts by auteurs increasingly take a backseat to entertainment by committee, where the goal is less about an original experience than about selling audiences more stuff at a later time.
Part of the problem, too, is that Hollywood, book publishers, the video game industry and television networks prefer serial fiction, where characters are chess pieces and where the board is eventually reset for the next match.
Spider-Man must always be angsty and tormented in his personal life, no matter how many triumphs he experiences when he puts on his costume. Superman must always fight for truth, justice and the American way. The Shadow has to know.
This is hardly new. Sherlock Holmes, whose first adventure was published in 1887, must always emerge triumphant and ready to solve the next crime or else forfeit being Sherlock Holmes. In which case, the stories stop, and the money to be made from new stories stops, as well.
This is a truth that Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle learned all too well when he killed the character in an attempt to transition to other types of writing. Reader response was so critically vocal that Doyle relented and brought the great detective back from the dead — and the cash cow continues to give milk today.
Sure, writers can upend the status quo and stretch the premise a little. Captain America might stop being a superhero for a year or two, Superman might reveal his secret identity to the world (something he is scheduled to do this month in the comics), and Iron Man might go broke.
But changes in serial fiction are, by and large, more about the illusion of change than about real change. Which is why secondary characters in various Marvel movies are often more interesting than the heroes themselves. These B-level characters can really evolve. They can take surprising action. They can die and stay dead.
The real heroes cannot, because if they do, they can’t be back in their appointed places a month or a year from now, ready to entertain in the next big saga — and to sell more toys, games, breakfast cereals and Happy Meals.
As a longstanding superhero fan, I accept these limitations as part and parcel of the experience, but it does affect my emotional investment in whatever big epic is currently conquering the box office. Iron Man’s death in the latest Avengers’ movie is emotional, sure, but I’ve seen him die, and come back, before, so I know that even if Robert Downey Jr.’s contract is up, somebody will eventually be Iron Man again.
And, as a result, while I enjoy the heck out of Marvel and DC movies, not a single one of them has ever cracked my top ten list of favorite films and probably never will, because nothing in them is ever permanent, and the only event that will ever truly kill these heroes is audience indifference.
Ultimately, low readership and poor box office receipts are a much bigger nemesis to superheroes than Martin Scorsese will ever be.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
The famed director caught hell from some superhero aficionados recently for his opinion that Marvel movies — epics about Captain America, Thor, the Avengers, and the like — are not “cinema.” He clarified those comments in a Nov. 4 op-ed for The New York Times in which he said that, while he recognized Marvel movies are skillfully made by talented people, they are ultimately little more than product.
“What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger,” Scorsese writes. “Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
He also likened Marvel movies to theme parks, presumably because audiences get the same programmed thrills while watching them that they get from a good roller coaster — some predetermined highs and lows, a few screams, but ultimately a safe return to the ground.
Nothing in Scorsese’s comments indicates he is dismissive of Marvel movies, just that they aren’t for him, that they are indicative of a larger trend in movies and culture in general where singular efforts by auteurs increasingly take a backseat to entertainment by committee, where the goal is less about an original experience than about selling audiences more stuff at a later time.
Part of the problem, too, is that Hollywood, book publishers, the video game industry and television networks prefer serial fiction, where characters are chess pieces and where the board is eventually reset for the next match.
Spider-Man must always be angsty and tormented in his personal life, no matter how many triumphs he experiences when he puts on his costume. Superman must always fight for truth, justice and the American way. The Shadow has to know.
This is hardly new. Sherlock Holmes, whose first adventure was published in 1887, must always emerge triumphant and ready to solve the next crime or else forfeit being Sherlock Holmes. In which case, the stories stop, and the money to be made from new stories stops, as well.
This is a truth that Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle learned all too well when he killed the character in an attempt to transition to other types of writing. Reader response was so critically vocal that Doyle relented and brought the great detective back from the dead — and the cash cow continues to give milk today.
Sure, writers can upend the status quo and stretch the premise a little. Captain America might stop being a superhero for a year or two, Superman might reveal his secret identity to the world (something he is scheduled to do this month in the comics), and Iron Man might go broke.
But changes in serial fiction are, by and large, more about the illusion of change than about real change. Which is why secondary characters in various Marvel movies are often more interesting than the heroes themselves. These B-level characters can really evolve. They can take surprising action. They can die and stay dead.
The real heroes cannot, because if they do, they can’t be back in their appointed places a month or a year from now, ready to entertain in the next big saga — and to sell more toys, games, breakfast cereals and Happy Meals.
As a longstanding superhero fan, I accept these limitations as part and parcel of the experience, but it does affect my emotional investment in whatever big epic is currently conquering the box office. Iron Man’s death in the latest Avengers’ movie is emotional, sure, but I’ve seen him die, and come back, before, so I know that even if Robert Downey Jr.’s contract is up, somebody will eventually be Iron Man again.
And, as a result, while I enjoy the heck out of Marvel and DC movies, not a single one of them has ever cracked my top ten list of favorite films and probably never will, because nothing in them is ever permanent, and the only event that will ever truly kill these heroes is audience indifference.
Ultimately, low readership and poor box office receipts are a much bigger nemesis to superheroes than Martin Scorsese will ever be.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Monday, November 11, 2019
Machine malfunction calls drunkenness into doubt
Australian broadcaster and author Clive James once said, “It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.”
The words will resonate with readers of a recent investigation into alcohol breath tests, which help to label, shame and incarcerate thousands of people each year. Yet the devices can sometimes present results that are 40 percent too high, The New York Times found.
The report by Stacy Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg looks at multiple instances where the ubiquitous breathalyzers, a go-to roadside tool of police departments across the nation, have proven to be unreliable. Reasons for the inaccuracies include programmer errors, poor maintenance and various anomalies of human metabolism.
Take the Intoxilyzer 8000, which sounds like the latest model of Terminator from a James Cameron movie and works about as reliably as the robots in those films. Engineers diagnosed improper air flow in the devices as the culprit behind inaccurate results. The solution? Drilling holes into the exhaust valve, a practice that was soon adopted for all machines that Kentucky-based CMI sold to Florida police departments.
As it turns out, the only reliable way to determine if a motorist’s blood-alcohol content is 0.08 grams per 100 milliliters (legally intoxicated) is “to draw blood, which requires a warrant,” Cowley and Silver-Greenberg write. “Breath tests are simpler.”
Of course, test inaccuracies likely don’t just flow in just one direction. If the tests are registering too high in some cases, it stands to reason they are registering too low in others, allowing drivers who are legally drunk to crawl back behind the wheel.
That’s more than just problematic. It can be downright deadly.
Getting a handle on how much alcohol is too much for drivers is difficult. Yes, “drunkenness” is determined by how much a person imbibes, but body weight and the type of beverage they consume are also factors.
How long to wait after drinking before driving is also more complex than the old “one hour per unit of alcohol” yardstick because some drinks contain more units of alcohol than others. Additionally, weight, age, sex, metabolism and general health impact how soon a motorist may be “road worthy” again.
A more important question might be to ask why any level of impairment is considered acceptable for a person operating what is, in effect, a 3,000-pound battering ram. If impairment varies so greatly from person to person based on a series of difficult-to-quantify factors, why not just say “no drinking and driving” across the board, that any level of alcohol is one’s system is too much to drive?
The answer, of course, comes down to money. People like to drink, and businesses like to profit from that habit. Establishments that serve alcohol responsibly, which is most of them, would cry foul.
The alcohol industry, too, which has benefitted from the positive public image generated from “drink responsibly” campaigns, would be less enthusiastic about a restriction that would actually cut into profits.
So Americans are left with another broken system where our trust in the supposed infallibility of technology has been misplaced. File this alongside computerized voting, Facebook ads, and hacking schemes.
If there are any silver linings in the dark cloud of breath testing, it is this: Motorists who are just slightly over the 0.08 breathalyzer threshold would be wise to request a blood test. They might just walk on a drunk-driving charge.
Of course, they should have been walking, not driving, with that much alcohol in their system in the first place.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
The words will resonate with readers of a recent investigation into alcohol breath tests, which help to label, shame and incarcerate thousands of people each year. Yet the devices can sometimes present results that are 40 percent too high, The New York Times found.
The report by Stacy Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg looks at multiple instances where the ubiquitous breathalyzers, a go-to roadside tool of police departments across the nation, have proven to be unreliable. Reasons for the inaccuracies include programmer errors, poor maintenance and various anomalies of human metabolism.
Take the Intoxilyzer 8000, which sounds like the latest model of Terminator from a James Cameron movie and works about as reliably as the robots in those films. Engineers diagnosed improper air flow in the devices as the culprit behind inaccurate results. The solution? Drilling holes into the exhaust valve, a practice that was soon adopted for all machines that Kentucky-based CMI sold to Florida police departments.
As it turns out, the only reliable way to determine if a motorist’s blood-alcohol content is 0.08 grams per 100 milliliters (legally intoxicated) is “to draw blood, which requires a warrant,” Cowley and Silver-Greenberg write. “Breath tests are simpler.”
Of course, test inaccuracies likely don’t just flow in just one direction. If the tests are registering too high in some cases, it stands to reason they are registering too low in others, allowing drivers who are legally drunk to crawl back behind the wheel.
That’s more than just problematic. It can be downright deadly.
Getting a handle on how much alcohol is too much for drivers is difficult. Yes, “drunkenness” is determined by how much a person imbibes, but body weight and the type of beverage they consume are also factors.
How long to wait after drinking before driving is also more complex than the old “one hour per unit of alcohol” yardstick because some drinks contain more units of alcohol than others. Additionally, weight, age, sex, metabolism and general health impact how soon a motorist may be “road worthy” again.
A more important question might be to ask why any level of impairment is considered acceptable for a person operating what is, in effect, a 3,000-pound battering ram. If impairment varies so greatly from person to person based on a series of difficult-to-quantify factors, why not just say “no drinking and driving” across the board, that any level of alcohol is one’s system is too much to drive?
The answer, of course, comes down to money. People like to drink, and businesses like to profit from that habit. Establishments that serve alcohol responsibly, which is most of them, would cry foul.
The alcohol industry, too, which has benefitted from the positive public image generated from “drink responsibly” campaigns, would be less enthusiastic about a restriction that would actually cut into profits.
So Americans are left with another broken system where our trust in the supposed infallibility of technology has been misplaced. File this alongside computerized voting, Facebook ads, and hacking schemes.
If there are any silver linings in the dark cloud of breath testing, it is this: Motorists who are just slightly over the 0.08 breathalyzer threshold would be wise to request a blood test. They might just walk on a drunk-driving charge.
Of course, they should have been walking, not driving, with that much alcohol in their system in the first place.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Friday, November 1, 2019
Musing over monsters for Halloween
Fans of “The Twilight Zone” may remember the line by Dan Aykroyd from the 1983 movie based on the classic TV show. Aykroyd delivers it right before he transforms into a werewolf/monster/ghoul and eats his traveling companion.
And if I’ve ruined the first five minutes of a 35-plus-year-old movie, I’m sorry. But it’s Halloween, a good time to ponder stuff that’s really scary.
As a kid, monsters really scared me, and I spent more time than was healthy watching them late on Fridays courtesy of WJW’s Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show, when I could stay awake, and on Saturday afternoons via WUAB’s Superhost, when I could convince my mom that creepy movies were more important than chores.
My favorites were the old Universal monsters. Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Werewolf were among my earliest exposures to “classic” cinema. The later Godzilla movies were all right, and they were the go-to programmers for Superhost, but I always preferred a more human scale for my monsters, thank you very much.
I read about monsters in comic books, magazines and those funny little paperbacks available only at school book fairs. I imagined monsters coming out of the woods behind my house, sneaking up on me while I played in the yard. I shivered at the thought of monsters lurking beneath the pine tree outside my bedroom, when every scrape of a branch on the window was some creature scaling the suburban heights of a one-story ranch house, eager to devour me.
I imagine my monster obsession is echoed by many kids, although perhaps not with the same fervor. (I’ve always been obsessive.)
Eventually, though, we grow up, and those pleasant shudders from tree branches on the shutters are replaced by more prosaic fears. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is transformed into anxiety over a flooded basement. Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in a lightning storm becomes dread over a higher-than-usual electric bill. Igor’s midnight prowling for body parts is overshadowed by distress over one’s own body — slowing down, malfunctioning, stopping completely.
I’m still a fan of monsters and, more properly, horror fiction and movies, but it’s harder now to miss the real-life connections in what once seemed like simple escapist fare. How those latex monster masks from films in the 1930s and ’40s reflected the country’s anxieties over returning veterans, some horribly scarred, from two world wars. How Godzilla is Japenese trauma over nuclear annihilation writ large and exported to the very nation that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or how “The Exorcist” at some level, is about the widening generation gap, and the inability of parents to comprehend these strange, smelly hippies that used to be their sweet children.
All genre fiction, at some level, codes beliefs and concerns about the present into symbolic language, even when the authors don’t recognize they are doing it. Maybe especially then. In horror, fear of the “other” — a different race, religion, ideology, or worldview — is at the bloody, beating heart of many a monster, and characters don’t rest — and audiences aren’t satisfied — until such creatures are beaten, burned or bombed into submission, and the prevailing order is restored.
At the risk of being accused of injecting politics into everything, I would argue that monsters have a tendency to be liberal, while monster movies (and books, comics, and whatnot) have a tendency to be conservative. It’s an interesting dynamic, endlessly exploitable, and no less true just because we never thought about it while watching or reading such stories.
Some of the best horror stories have politics and philosophy baked in — or, at least, half-baked. “The Twilight Zone” is a good example.
“Wanna see something really scary?” Dan Aykroyd asked. He could have been talking about the nightly news.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Father of the self-help movement (and expert kite-flyer)
Ben Franklin was a writer, printer, scientist and diplomat. He was also, it turns out, the great-great-grandfather of the self-help movement.
In the second part of his autobiography, Franklin writes about his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” First, he catalogs 13 virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility, and provides “precepts,” or rules, for each.
Under “industry,” for example, Franklin advises, “Lose no time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.” (This virtually eliminates Netflix and social media for modern readers.)
For “tranquility, he notes, “Be not disturbed at Trifles, or Accidents common or unavoidable.” It makes me ponder the many nights I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, replaying conversations in my head and worrying about whether I responded appropriately or inappropriately, too strongly or not strongly enough.
Once Franklin identifies his virtues, he goes one step further, making “a little Book” to chronicle his attempts at improvement. Each page has seven vertical lines, one for each day of the week, and 13 horizontal lines, one for each virtue.
Then, each week, he tries to achieve perfection in just one virtue, while allowing the others to slide. Nevertheless, he records a “little black Spot” for failures in these other virtues that week, marking them dutifully at the points where the lines for the day of the week and each particular virtue intersect.
On the week devoted to temperance, Franklin goes an entire seven days without once eating “to Dulness” or drinking “to Elevation.” However, he really drops the ball on five of the other virtues, most especially “Order,” where he gives himself black marks six times that week, and “Silence,” where he records five lapses.
While Franklin is surprised to see just how many faults he has, he is also pleased to watch himself improve under his organized efforts. And if that doesn’t sound like the comment a self-help guru makes right before asking for a check or credit card, then I don’t know anything about marketing.
Regardless, Franklin later undercuts his own success, perhaps ironically because of his adherence to another virtue, Frugality, where one must “Waste nothing.” The author attempts to “avoid the Trouble of renewing” his book of virtues by “scraping out” the old marks and reusing the pages, which results in a book “full of Holes.”
This could, I suppose, be Franklin’s sly commentary about the probability of achieving moral perfection, a sort of preemptive snarkiness toward the entire cottage industry of self-help, which wouldn’t reach full flowering until centuries later, when people had enough free time to perseverate about such matters.
Further in his autobiography, Franklin graphs his daily routine, which involves rising at 5 a.m. and asking, “What Good shall I do this Day?” For the next two hours, he ponders this question while bathing, planning the day’s business and eating breakfast. He works from 8 to noon; spends two hours eating lunch, reading and looking over his “Accounts” (and who in today’s world wouldn’t love a 120-minute lunch break?); works another four hours; and then spends the time from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. putting “Things in their Places, Supper, Musick, or Diversion, or Conversation, Examination of the Day.”
His evening question is similar to his morning query: “What Good have I done today?”
It’s easy in 2019 to subvert these dawn and dusk reflections, to ask simply “What am I going to do today?” and “What did I do?” But that’s not what Franklin is after here. Doing good is much different from just being productive. After all, people can stay busy wreaking havoc on others and on their work and home environments without doing one objectively “good” thing.
Franklin’s schedule indicates bed by 10 p.m., where he probably dreams of moral perfection, or at least of erasers for pencils, something that wouldn’t be invented until almost 70 years after his death and which would make it much easier to reuse pages in his book of virtues.
Or at least make it easier to erase the instances where he failed to live up to his own code, another problem that plagues self-help experts even today.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
In the second part of his autobiography, Franklin writes about his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” First, he catalogs 13 virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility, and provides “precepts,” or rules, for each.
Under “industry,” for example, Franklin advises, “Lose no time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.” (This virtually eliminates Netflix and social media for modern readers.)
For “tranquility, he notes, “Be not disturbed at Trifles, or Accidents common or unavoidable.” It makes me ponder the many nights I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, replaying conversations in my head and worrying about whether I responded appropriately or inappropriately, too strongly or not strongly enough.
Once Franklin identifies his virtues, he goes one step further, making “a little Book” to chronicle his attempts at improvement. Each page has seven vertical lines, one for each day of the week, and 13 horizontal lines, one for each virtue.
Then, each week, he tries to achieve perfection in just one virtue, while allowing the others to slide. Nevertheless, he records a “little black Spot” for failures in these other virtues that week, marking them dutifully at the points where the lines for the day of the week and each particular virtue intersect.
On the week devoted to temperance, Franklin goes an entire seven days without once eating “to Dulness” or drinking “to Elevation.” However, he really drops the ball on five of the other virtues, most especially “Order,” where he gives himself black marks six times that week, and “Silence,” where he records five lapses.
While Franklin is surprised to see just how many faults he has, he is also pleased to watch himself improve under his organized efforts. And if that doesn’t sound like the comment a self-help guru makes right before asking for a check or credit card, then I don’t know anything about marketing.
Regardless, Franklin later undercuts his own success, perhaps ironically because of his adherence to another virtue, Frugality, where one must “Waste nothing.” The author attempts to “avoid the Trouble of renewing” his book of virtues by “scraping out” the old marks and reusing the pages, which results in a book “full of Holes.”
This could, I suppose, be Franklin’s sly commentary about the probability of achieving moral perfection, a sort of preemptive snarkiness toward the entire cottage industry of self-help, which wouldn’t reach full flowering until centuries later, when people had enough free time to perseverate about such matters.
Further in his autobiography, Franklin graphs his daily routine, which involves rising at 5 a.m. and asking, “What Good shall I do this Day?” For the next two hours, he ponders this question while bathing, planning the day’s business and eating breakfast. He works from 8 to noon; spends two hours eating lunch, reading and looking over his “Accounts” (and who in today’s world wouldn’t love a 120-minute lunch break?); works another four hours; and then spends the time from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. putting “Things in their Places, Supper, Musick, or Diversion, or Conversation, Examination of the Day.”
His evening question is similar to his morning query: “What Good have I done today?”
It’s easy in 2019 to subvert these dawn and dusk reflections, to ask simply “What am I going to do today?” and “What did I do?” But that’s not what Franklin is after here. Doing good is much different from just being productive. After all, people can stay busy wreaking havoc on others and on their work and home environments without doing one objectively “good” thing.
Franklin’s schedule indicates bed by 10 p.m., where he probably dreams of moral perfection, or at least of erasers for pencils, something that wouldn’t be invented until almost 70 years after his death and which would make it much easier to reuse pages in his book of virtues.
Or at least make it easier to erase the instances where he failed to live up to his own code, another problem that plagues self-help experts even today.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Beep, beep, beep, beep, yeah!
Manufacturers of electric and hybrid cars are looking for a few good noises.
Maybe a swoosh or a beep or a chug-chug-chug. Or maybe the sound of a combat tank or a tanker truck.
Next year, a federal regulation will require electric and hybrid vehicles, which make almost no noise, to include sounds at certain speeds as a warning to pedestrians. Otherwise, drivers of such vehicles could sneak up on runners and walkers or people who are visually impaired and catch them unawares.
Last month, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration floated a proposal to allow manufacturers to substitute a “suite of sounds,” according to a New York Times piece by Niraj Chokshi, who reported on the challenges of coming up with just one sound, let alone a litany.
The proposal would allow the automotive industry to broaden its thinking and view this as a co-branding opportunity. Hybrid cars could be the sandwich boards of the 21st century, the aural equivalent of “Eat at Joe’s.” But instead of being worn by hobos and cash-strapped undergrads, these messages would emanate from cutting-edge, eco-friendly vehicles.
Imagine a little old lady starting to cross the street when she hears the familiar Liberty Insurance jingle. You know the one: “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty ... LIBERTY!” She swivels her head to the left to see a stylish Kia Niro, bearing down at 55 mph. Activating her orthopedic shoes and compression stockings, she leaps out of the crosswalk with the pantherish grace of a woman one-fifth her age, accident averted.
Or how about the McDonald’s theme song blaring from the vehicle’s grille? Or the stirring refrain of John Williams’ Star Wars theme, trumpeting Episode XXVII, or whatever number is assigned to the latest journey to a galaxy far, far away?
Not only would pedestrians associate said products with environmental friendliness, but they would also credit them with helping to save lives. It’s that most cliched of marketing outcomes — a win-win. (And if car manufacturers charge for different sounds at different speeds, so that vehicles play Advil commercials at 35 mph, Nike at 45 mph, and so on, it’s also a significant source of income, a true trifecta.)
It wouldn’t be long before politicians got in on the act. Imagine the Toyota Camry Hybrid playing only Bernie Sanders election ads, while the Chevrolet Bolt has an exclusive with Donald Trump. Area dealers could substitute local races and issues of note, so the air would be awash with the sounds of school-board candidates, liquor-license approvals, and levy requests, all accompanied by the legally required disclaimers, fading off into the distance as the vehicles crested the next hill.
Meanwhile, with many drivers still tooling around in their old gas-guzzlers, pedestrians would also be assaulted by the familiar and comforting refrains of missing tailpipes, screeching fan belts and idling engines.
Of course, with most pedestrians lost inside the sound of their own earbuds and headphones, few people will be listening anyway.
Before you think the nation’s automotive-industrial complex is above such shenanigans, consider this: A section of Route 66 in New Mexico plays “America the Beautiful” when driven over at 45 mph. It’s part of an effort by the state’s department of transportation, in conjunction with National Geographic, to stop motorists from speeding.
If they can do that, it’s only a matter of time before an electric car announces that “like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There” while riding another driver’s bumper in the passing lane.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Maybe a swoosh or a beep or a chug-chug-chug. Or maybe the sound of a combat tank or a tanker truck.
Next year, a federal regulation will require electric and hybrid vehicles, which make almost no noise, to include sounds at certain speeds as a warning to pedestrians. Otherwise, drivers of such vehicles could sneak up on runners and walkers or people who are visually impaired and catch them unawares.
Last month, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration floated a proposal to allow manufacturers to substitute a “suite of sounds,” according to a New York Times piece by Niraj Chokshi, who reported on the challenges of coming up with just one sound, let alone a litany.
The proposal would allow the automotive industry to broaden its thinking and view this as a co-branding opportunity. Hybrid cars could be the sandwich boards of the 21st century, the aural equivalent of “Eat at Joe’s.” But instead of being worn by hobos and cash-strapped undergrads, these messages would emanate from cutting-edge, eco-friendly vehicles.
Imagine a little old lady starting to cross the street when she hears the familiar Liberty Insurance jingle. You know the one: “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty ... LIBERTY!” She swivels her head to the left to see a stylish Kia Niro, bearing down at 55 mph. Activating her orthopedic shoes and compression stockings, she leaps out of the crosswalk with the pantherish grace of a woman one-fifth her age, accident averted.
Or how about the McDonald’s theme song blaring from the vehicle’s grille? Or the stirring refrain of John Williams’ Star Wars theme, trumpeting Episode XXVII, or whatever number is assigned to the latest journey to a galaxy far, far away?
Not only would pedestrians associate said products with environmental friendliness, but they would also credit them with helping to save lives. It’s that most cliched of marketing outcomes — a win-win. (And if car manufacturers charge for different sounds at different speeds, so that vehicles play Advil commercials at 35 mph, Nike at 45 mph, and so on, it’s also a significant source of income, a true trifecta.)
It wouldn’t be long before politicians got in on the act. Imagine the Toyota Camry Hybrid playing only Bernie Sanders election ads, while the Chevrolet Bolt has an exclusive with Donald Trump. Area dealers could substitute local races and issues of note, so the air would be awash with the sounds of school-board candidates, liquor-license approvals, and levy requests, all accompanied by the legally required disclaimers, fading off into the distance as the vehicles crested the next hill.
Meanwhile, with many drivers still tooling around in their old gas-guzzlers, pedestrians would also be assaulted by the familiar and comforting refrains of missing tailpipes, screeching fan belts and idling engines.
Of course, with most pedestrians lost inside the sound of their own earbuds and headphones, few people will be listening anyway.
Before you think the nation’s automotive-industrial complex is above such shenanigans, consider this: A section of Route 66 in New Mexico plays “America the Beautiful” when driven over at 45 mph. It’s part of an effort by the state’s department of transportation, in conjunction with National Geographic, to stop motorists from speeding.
If they can do that, it’s only a matter of time before an electric car announces that “like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There” while riding another driver’s bumper in the passing lane.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Can the GOP jump off the Trump train?
“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”
Viewers of Dr. Phil have probably heard him ask this to estranged family members. It’s also a question that applies to Democrats in Washington.
Dems are right about Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses, as reported by an anonymous whistleblower — and soon to be whistleblowers, I guess — to great consternation last month.
Following that bombshell, the White House released a transcript that catches the president red-handed, asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “a favor” — to investigate Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and Biden’s son.
This follows Trump’s admission, during a June 13 interview with ABC, that he would accept political help from a foreign government, which the chairwoman of the Federal Elections Commission on the same day said would be illegal.
And if that wasn’t enough, Trump doubled down last week and said publicly that Ukraine and China should investigate the Bidens.
So the Democrats have the president dead to rights, and impeachment inquiries are proceeding apace.
But will impeachment make the party happy?
Likely no. The GOP-controlled Senate would have to vote to impeach the president, something members have no interest in doing, a few outliers to the contrary.
To be sure, the impeachment imbroglio is high drama (or low, depending on one’s perspective regarding the state of national politics), but it could also serve as the death knell for Democrats’ chances in 2020.
Our Founding Fathers were concerned about foreign influence in the running of our nation. Hence, their insistence that the president be a natural-born citizen, the Emoluments Clause and the “high crimes and misdemeanors” language in the Constitution.
These safety features are earmarked for exactly the kind of grifter who now occupies the White House, a man whose businesses profit from the presidency and who isn’t above asking foreign powers to dig up dirt on his rivals.
Yet while the Founding Fathers were quite prescient, even they didn’t foresee a time when such a scoundrel would continue to command loyalty from his “troops,” a modern-day Macbeth whose Thanes do not flee from his monstrous missteps but instead embrace him all the more in spite of or because of them.
So if Democrats bring charges, which they must in defense of the rule of law and to keep such misbehaviors from becoming normalized with successive presidents, they risk being characterized as do-nothings, squanderers of their time in office, and obsessives over what Trump supporters characterize as an attempt to overturn the 2016 election.
If they look the other way at these current allegations and focus instead on advancing their cause, they stand a better-than-average chance of winning the White House in 2020, which would make them — and their supporters — happy.
But looking the other way is something they can’t do in good conscience. More than a few people believe that Trump’s public invitation to China and Ukraine last week to investigate the Bidens occurred because he wants to be impeached, knowing it actually boosts his chances for re-election among voters who still see him as a much-needed outsider sticking it to the man.
It would all be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
The only hope is that conservative Americans will recognize Trump’s antics for what they are, will decide that the country’s long-term viability is more important than any short-term economic gains, and will let their elected officials know they want justice served. If Republicans see their chances of re-election dwindle because of ongoing joyrides on the Trump train, they will exit, and quickly.
But as long as public support is there, they will not, enshrining graft and duplicity in the nation’s highest office.
Dr. Phil’s guests usually pick happiness, by the way, because the causes they are fighting over aren’t worth lost time with family. Unfortunately, Democrats don’t have that luxury. They are in a battle for the very soul of the nation, so they must be right-fighters, regardless of how much it hurts them moving forward.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Viewers of Dr. Phil have probably heard him ask this to estranged family members. It’s also a question that applies to Democrats in Washington.
Dems are right about Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses, as reported by an anonymous whistleblower — and soon to be whistleblowers, I guess — to great consternation last month.
Following that bombshell, the White House released a transcript that catches the president red-handed, asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “a favor” — to investigate Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and Biden’s son.
This follows Trump’s admission, during a June 13 interview with ABC, that he would accept political help from a foreign government, which the chairwoman of the Federal Elections Commission on the same day said would be illegal.
And if that wasn’t enough, Trump doubled down last week and said publicly that Ukraine and China should investigate the Bidens.
So the Democrats have the president dead to rights, and impeachment inquiries are proceeding apace.
But will impeachment make the party happy?
Likely no. The GOP-controlled Senate would have to vote to impeach the president, something members have no interest in doing, a few outliers to the contrary.
To be sure, the impeachment imbroglio is high drama (or low, depending on one’s perspective regarding the state of national politics), but it could also serve as the death knell for Democrats’ chances in 2020.
Our Founding Fathers were concerned about foreign influence in the running of our nation. Hence, their insistence that the president be a natural-born citizen, the Emoluments Clause and the “high crimes and misdemeanors” language in the Constitution.
These safety features are earmarked for exactly the kind of grifter who now occupies the White House, a man whose businesses profit from the presidency and who isn’t above asking foreign powers to dig up dirt on his rivals.
Yet while the Founding Fathers were quite prescient, even they didn’t foresee a time when such a scoundrel would continue to command loyalty from his “troops,” a modern-day Macbeth whose Thanes do not flee from his monstrous missteps but instead embrace him all the more in spite of or because of them.
So if Democrats bring charges, which they must in defense of the rule of law and to keep such misbehaviors from becoming normalized with successive presidents, they risk being characterized as do-nothings, squanderers of their time in office, and obsessives over what Trump supporters characterize as an attempt to overturn the 2016 election.
If they look the other way at these current allegations and focus instead on advancing their cause, they stand a better-than-average chance of winning the White House in 2020, which would make them — and their supporters — happy.
But looking the other way is something they can’t do in good conscience. More than a few people believe that Trump’s public invitation to China and Ukraine last week to investigate the Bidens occurred because he wants to be impeached, knowing it actually boosts his chances for re-election among voters who still see him as a much-needed outsider sticking it to the man.
It would all be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
The only hope is that conservative Americans will recognize Trump’s antics for what they are, will decide that the country’s long-term viability is more important than any short-term economic gains, and will let their elected officials know they want justice served. If Republicans see their chances of re-election dwindle because of ongoing joyrides on the Trump train, they will exit, and quickly.
But as long as public support is there, they will not, enshrining graft and duplicity in the nation’s highest office.
Dr. Phil’s guests usually pick happiness, by the way, because the causes they are fighting over aren’t worth lost time with family. Unfortunately, Democrats don’t have that luxury. They are in a battle for the very soul of the nation, so they must be right-fighters, regardless of how much it hurts them moving forward.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
A trip to Mars for Ohioans?
The Mars bar. Really?
Now I understand the favorite trick-or-treat offerings of some other states. Texans love a 10-gallon hat full of M&M’s, California is purring for Kit-Kat bars, and 12 states recognize that chocolate and peanut butter are greater than the sum of their individual parts with Reese’s.
I can even see how Tootsie Pops could shoot straight to number one in Vermont and Montana. Although I personally find them disgusting, they are at least a high-profile candy, thanks to a decades-old advertising campaign that asked, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? (Who cares? Throw them away before you get to the ghastly middle.)
But I can’t possibly understand how Mars clawed its way to the top of both Ohio and Pennsylvania. I have lived in northeast Ohio all my life and have never once seen anybody eating one, let alone handing them out on Beggars’ Night.
The map in question originated with Bid-On-Equipment in Illinois, which noted in a blog post that it had used the Google AdWords site — now known simply as Google Ads — to analyze “search volume trends for more than 100 different types of candy” from September 2018 to October 2018 in all 50 states.
So apparently more folks in Louisiana searched for Air Heads than any other candy during that time period, just as people in North Carolina and South Carolina surfed for information about Milk Duds, and North Dakotans improbably were burning to learn more about Hot Tamales while their South Dakotan neighbors went digging for news on Gummy Worms.
It all sounds highly suspect to me.
And again I say — Mars bars?
I am trying to wrap my mind around the paradigm-shifting injustice of it all. When I tweeted the Bid-On-Equipment map, I called B.S. on the results. (That’s Bachelor of Science to anybody who is offended.)
One respondent noted that nobody Googles candy they are already familiar with, so maybe the map is more reflective of state residents’ curiosity than their favorites.
That makes sense, but still leaves me wondering why, over a 13-month period, Idaho residents looked up SweeTarts often enough to make it number one, or why Swedish Fish surfaced so frequently in Kentucky searches.
It just sounded bogus.
But then came my epiphany. What if “Mars” wasn’t a reference to one particular candy, but rather to all the candy made by Mars, Incorporated?
According to Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know), Mars Inc. produces Milky Way, M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers and Twix. If Ohioans were looking up these, and Google captured them under the Mars umbrella, we would go from the doghouse to the penthouse of good taste.
But it can’t be that either, as Snickers and M&M’s make the list separately in several states.
So either the entire study is wonky (but not Willy Wonka-y, because those didn’t make the list either) or Ohioans really were jonesing for their Mars bars last year.
All I know is, based on the vacant stares I’ve received when talking about all this, if your Halloween plans include handing out Mars bars, you’d better be ready for a swift kick to Uranus.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
This column slaps
I learned a new meaning for an old word recently.
Not surprisingly, I must credit my students, who keep me contemporary even as they marvel at how linguistically inept I am for a guy who teaches English.
In class last week, a student said that a particular appetizer at Applebee’s “slaps.” A few other students agreed.
Rather than feign understanding (as I often do when confronted with shifting youth lexicon), I confessed my confusion. Was the appetizer too spicy? Too expensive?
“No, Mr. Schillig, it just means it was ... you know, good,” the student clarified.
“Really good,” another student chimed in.
“So if this class slaps, that’s a compliment?” I wondered.
Students weren’t ready to make a judgment about the course, especially to the person who grades them, although a few did roll their eyes at the out-of-touch bald geezer using a word reserved for people under 18.
I then asked if it was acceptable to say that something — a song, a book or a movie, maybe — was “slapping”? Would several enjoyable things lumped together, like dinner and dancing, “slap,” or did it always have to be “slaps”?
They assured me “slapping” was OK, and that two things “slap.” I told them I would try to be less tragically unhip and incorporate the word into my lexicon, maybe telling my wife that the next meal she makes “slaps.”
Before using my new compliment, however, I did a deep dive — well, maybe more of a shallow swim — through the etymology. I didn’t want to throw around a word with unsavory connotations.
The online Urban Dictionary notes “slaps” means “good as (an Anglo-Saxon word for intimacy that is inappropriate for a family newspaper).” So the term is already on shaky ground for the next staff meeting or the Thanksgiving dinner table: “This sales report is slapping, Jorge!” or “This gravy slaps, Grandma!”
As “slap,” the word is centered on music and music systems. It can refer to “tight music, something you can go dumb to.” This definition sent me scuttling to find definitions for “tight” and “going dumb,” both of which are positive in this context.
As “slapping,” the word can be applied specifically to playing loud music from a car. So “Beethoven’s Fifth was really slapping from those factory-installed speakers in your 1977 Nova” would be something that one could theoretically say, although probably wouldn’t.
An interesting aside involves SLAP, all caps, which is internet slang for “sounds like a plan.” When you text a neighbor to ask that his semi-feral cat pretty please stop fertilizing your flower beds, and he responds with SLAP, you can rest assured that the problem is solved.
Until the cat does it again, that is.
This discussion and my research remind me English is a living language, and changes come quickly. Some stick, some do not. Some even open the door for increased understanding.
For example, far more profound than a new sense of “slap” is the use of plural pronouns “they” and “them” for individual people who prefer not to be identified by the gender-specific “he” or “she.”
This shift in usage received a shot in the arm recently. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary of choice for the Associated Press, announced it would include this sense of the word in its publications going forward.
In the past, I’ve opposed the use of “they” and “them,” to refer to one person, not because I was against the rights of anybody to identify as nonbinary, but because they can lead to confusion. If I’m told “they” will be waiting for me at the corner, I might expect more than one person, until I get there and see just one.
However, such instances would be rare, with most misunderstandings easily deciphered through context. And “they” has a long history of being used as a singular pronoun already, especially informally. When compared with the alternatives — ignoring the earnest entreaties of nonbinary people or introducing a new pronoun (“ze,” perhaps) for these specific situations — it’s preferable to go with “they.”
Plus, if I can accept and understand that a slapping appetizer is a compliment, then I can wrap my mind around “they” as a singular.
Because increased empathy slaps.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Not surprisingly, I must credit my students, who keep me contemporary even as they marvel at how linguistically inept I am for a guy who teaches English.
In class last week, a student said that a particular appetizer at Applebee’s “slaps.” A few other students agreed.
Rather than feign understanding (as I often do when confronted with shifting youth lexicon), I confessed my confusion. Was the appetizer too spicy? Too expensive?
“No, Mr. Schillig, it just means it was ... you know, good,” the student clarified.
“Really good,” another student chimed in.
“So if this class slaps, that’s a compliment?” I wondered.
Students weren’t ready to make a judgment about the course, especially to the person who grades them, although a few did roll their eyes at the out-of-touch bald geezer using a word reserved for people under 18.
I then asked if it was acceptable to say that something — a song, a book or a movie, maybe — was “slapping”? Would several enjoyable things lumped together, like dinner and dancing, “slap,” or did it always have to be “slaps”?
They assured me “slapping” was OK, and that two things “slap.” I told them I would try to be less tragically unhip and incorporate the word into my lexicon, maybe telling my wife that the next meal she makes “slaps.”
Before using my new compliment, however, I did a deep dive — well, maybe more of a shallow swim — through the etymology. I didn’t want to throw around a word with unsavory connotations.
The online Urban Dictionary notes “slaps” means “good as (an Anglo-Saxon word for intimacy that is inappropriate for a family newspaper).” So the term is already on shaky ground for the next staff meeting or the Thanksgiving dinner table: “This sales report is slapping, Jorge!” or “This gravy slaps, Grandma!”
As “slap,” the word is centered on music and music systems. It can refer to “tight music, something you can go dumb to.” This definition sent me scuttling to find definitions for “tight” and “going dumb,” both of which are positive in this context.
As “slapping,” the word can be applied specifically to playing loud music from a car. So “Beethoven’s Fifth was really slapping from those factory-installed speakers in your 1977 Nova” would be something that one could theoretically say, although probably wouldn’t.
An interesting aside involves SLAP, all caps, which is internet slang for “sounds like a plan.” When you text a neighbor to ask that his semi-feral cat pretty please stop fertilizing your flower beds, and he responds with SLAP, you can rest assured that the problem is solved.
Until the cat does it again, that is.
This discussion and my research remind me English is a living language, and changes come quickly. Some stick, some do not. Some even open the door for increased understanding.
For example, far more profound than a new sense of “slap” is the use of plural pronouns “they” and “them” for individual people who prefer not to be identified by the gender-specific “he” or “she.”
This shift in usage received a shot in the arm recently. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary of choice for the Associated Press, announced it would include this sense of the word in its publications going forward.
In the past, I’ve opposed the use of “they” and “them,” to refer to one person, not because I was against the rights of anybody to identify as nonbinary, but because they can lead to confusion. If I’m told “they” will be waiting for me at the corner, I might expect more than one person, until I get there and see just one.
However, such instances would be rare, with most misunderstandings easily deciphered through context. And “they” has a long history of being used as a singular pronoun already, especially informally. When compared with the alternatives — ignoring the earnest entreaties of nonbinary people or introducing a new pronoun (“ze,” perhaps) for these specific situations — it’s preferable to go with “they.”
Plus, if I can accept and understand that a slapping appetizer is a compliment, then I can wrap my mind around “they” as a singular.
Because increased empathy slaps.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Running around the issue of bias
“The Heart of a Swimmer vs. the Heart of a Runner,” read the headline.
Here we go, I thought, clicking on a recent New York Times article by Gretchen Reynolds. When you’re a runner, as I fancy myself to be, you grow accustomed to people scolding you about how awful the activity is.
Hard on the knees and joints. Too much pounding. Increased risk of heart attack for those just starting. Too much exposure to the sun.
These same people tout the advantages of cycling and swimming, even when I tell them I find cycling too inconvenient and that I sink whenever I come into contact with water. (At least I’m not a witch.)
So I was prepared for Reynolds’ article to be more of the same, an excoriation of my hobby based on some egghead’s idea of hard science. Surely, thought I, the heart of a runner has been found to be deficient, just as his knees and joints are.
And then I had an epiphany, just as the article opened on my screen and I was starting to read, already disgruntled by what I was certain would be there. My revelation was this: I was biased against information that I hadn’t even read yet.
I had identified a personal prejudice, some weird kissing cousin of confirmation bias, where people seek out only information that supports what they already believe. In my case, I was discounting information out of hand because I was preemptively certain it would contradict me.
Suddenly aware of this glitch in my thinking, I monitored my reading and reactions carefully. The article began with an acknowledgement that the hearts of both elite runners and swimmers were more efficient than the hearts of sedentary people. Okay so far, I thought.
Reynolds proceeded to note how a recent study had found “interesting if small differences” in the left ventricles of swimmers vs. runners. My inner eye rolled in anticipation, even as a more objective part of myself noted the cynicism and lack of objectivity I was demonstrating.
Surprisingly, however, the article found that the left ventricles of runners were more efficient than swimmers’, likely because running is performed vertically, while swimming is done horizontally. A runner’s left ventricle, then, must battle gravity to move blood back to the heart, which means that it becomes stronger and more efficient than a swimmer’s.
Reynolds even noted that it might behoove swimmers to add some running to their regular workouts.
As I read, I could feel my mental defenses lowering, allowing me to become more accepting. The science agreed with me, so it must be right, something I was far less willing to concede when I thought the research would go against me.
The scientific bottom line is that both elite swimmers and runners have cardiovascular advantages over people who don’t exercise. Researchers hope that the same is true for those of us who are far less elite participants.
More compelling for me, however, was the cognitive bottom line — how quickly I was ready to deep-six information based on a cognitive bias.
Cognitive bias helps to explain how so many people can be snared by fake news. Those who are absolutely certain, for example, that human-influenced climate change is a hoax will be more likely to write off even the most compelling evidence that it is real and to hang on every word of less authoritative sources. Likewise, parents who believe vaccinations cause autism will cling to anecdotal “evidence” in the face of overwhelming consensus from the scientific community that no such link exists. Supporters and detractors of President Trump will continue to fortify themselves behind their respective walls built by right- or left-leaning news organizations of dubious reputations.
And for readers who believe they are exempt from such fallibility, there is a name for this misconception, too — a bias blindspot.
The implications for vigorous and healthy debate aren’t good. We may smile and nod when presented with alternative viewpoints because we’ve been taught to be polite, yet we internally consign such information to the cerebral dustbin, even as we fancy ourselves as open-minded.
Trying to dissuade anybody of a deeply held belief in the course of a 750-word column or even a two-hour debate is asking too much. Maybe the best we can hope for when talking with somebody whose views are diametrically opposed to our own is to move the needle of their belief ever so slightly, to have them at least entertain the possibility that some small part of what we say has merit.
Think of it as swimming against the tide or running uphill — difficult to do, but worth it for our health.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Here we go, I thought, clicking on a recent New York Times article by Gretchen Reynolds. When you’re a runner, as I fancy myself to be, you grow accustomed to people scolding you about how awful the activity is.
Hard on the knees and joints. Too much pounding. Increased risk of heart attack for those just starting. Too much exposure to the sun.
These same people tout the advantages of cycling and swimming, even when I tell them I find cycling too inconvenient and that I sink whenever I come into contact with water. (At least I’m not a witch.)
So I was prepared for Reynolds’ article to be more of the same, an excoriation of my hobby based on some egghead’s idea of hard science. Surely, thought I, the heart of a runner has been found to be deficient, just as his knees and joints are.
And then I had an epiphany, just as the article opened on my screen and I was starting to read, already disgruntled by what I was certain would be there. My revelation was this: I was biased against information that I hadn’t even read yet.
I had identified a personal prejudice, some weird kissing cousin of confirmation bias, where people seek out only information that supports what they already believe. In my case, I was discounting information out of hand because I was preemptively certain it would contradict me.
Suddenly aware of this glitch in my thinking, I monitored my reading and reactions carefully. The article began with an acknowledgement that the hearts of both elite runners and swimmers were more efficient than the hearts of sedentary people. Okay so far, I thought.
Reynolds proceeded to note how a recent study had found “interesting if small differences” in the left ventricles of swimmers vs. runners. My inner eye rolled in anticipation, even as a more objective part of myself noted the cynicism and lack of objectivity I was demonstrating.
Surprisingly, however, the article found that the left ventricles of runners were more efficient than swimmers’, likely because running is performed vertically, while swimming is done horizontally. A runner’s left ventricle, then, must battle gravity to move blood back to the heart, which means that it becomes stronger and more efficient than a swimmer’s.
Reynolds even noted that it might behoove swimmers to add some running to their regular workouts.
As I read, I could feel my mental defenses lowering, allowing me to become more accepting. The science agreed with me, so it must be right, something I was far less willing to concede when I thought the research would go against me.
The scientific bottom line is that both elite swimmers and runners have cardiovascular advantages over people who don’t exercise. Researchers hope that the same is true for those of us who are far less elite participants.
More compelling for me, however, was the cognitive bottom line — how quickly I was ready to deep-six information based on a cognitive bias.
Cognitive bias helps to explain how so many people can be snared by fake news. Those who are absolutely certain, for example, that human-influenced climate change is a hoax will be more likely to write off even the most compelling evidence that it is real and to hang on every word of less authoritative sources. Likewise, parents who believe vaccinations cause autism will cling to anecdotal “evidence” in the face of overwhelming consensus from the scientific community that no such link exists. Supporters and detractors of President Trump will continue to fortify themselves behind their respective walls built by right- or left-leaning news organizations of dubious reputations.
And for readers who believe they are exempt from such fallibility, there is a name for this misconception, too — a bias blindspot.
The implications for vigorous and healthy debate aren’t good. We may smile and nod when presented with alternative viewpoints because we’ve been taught to be polite, yet we internally consign such information to the cerebral dustbin, even as we fancy ourselves as open-minded.
Trying to dissuade anybody of a deeply held belief in the course of a 750-word column or even a two-hour debate is asking too much. Maybe the best we can hope for when talking with somebody whose views are diametrically opposed to our own is to move the needle of their belief ever so slightly, to have them at least entertain the possibility that some small part of what we say has merit.
Think of it as swimming against the tide or running uphill — difficult to do, but worth it for our health.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Opening our national parks to electric bicycles
Edward Abbey must be turning over in his grave following the newest announcement regarding national parks — even if almost nobody knows where he is buried.
Abbey was an old-school naturalist whose book, “Desert Solitaire,” ranks as a contemporary “Walden.” In its pages, he extols the beauty of the natural world and argues passionately for its preservation.
He likely would be unhappy with last week’s announcement by the National Park Service, expanding the use of electric bicycles in the country’s 419 national parks. The bikes, some of which can travel at speeds of 28 mph, will now be allowed along any trails where regular, foot-powered bicycles are used.
The decision was lauded by advocates for the elderly, the disabled and the physically unfit, who say the bikes will allow visitors in these groups better access to taxpayer-funded parks. The bikes are also better for the environment than cars and motorcycles.
But many other groups are crying foul, advocating for e-bikes to remain only on designated trails for reasons of safety and aesthetics.
Without a doubt, slower-moving hikers coming into contact with e-cyclists moving at three times their speed could result in injuries to both parties. And the bikes, which emit a low, humming sound, will be a source of noise pollution for people attempting to escape the modern world.
Yet the inexorable forces of “industrial tourism” appear poised to win out.
Abbey, who died in 1989 and who was buried secretly by friends in a desert west of Tucson, loathed such “progress.” To him, industrial tourism referred to all the little — and big — amenities that encroach on man’s attempt to get back in touch with nature. These include paved roads, hotels, restaurants and convenience stores in and around national parks to cater to visitors in their “back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs,” Abbey-speak for automobiles.
He claimed that industrial tourism threatened the nation’s national park system by changing the fundamental nature of ... well, nature. But he also thought industrial tourism robbed tourists themselves by making it impossible for them to actually escape their “urban-suburban complexes.”
He was also critical of marathon visitors whose goal is to cram visits to as many parks as possible into a two-week vacation, believing they would be better served to slow down and savor one or two locations, exploring them by foot and, yes, by bicycle.
But he didn’t envision the advent and quick proliferation of the e-bicycle industry, which has fought hard for the recent rule change for reasons of shareholder self-interest.
Abbey was no ingenue, at peace among the trees and unaware of market forces. He recognized the inevitability of big money corrupting our parks system and applying the same pressures there as it has in all other facets of local, state and national legislation. Advocates of industrial tourism, he wrote, “look into red canyons and see only green, stand among flowers snorting out the smell of money, and hear, while thunderstorms rumble over mountains, the fall of a dollar bill on motel carpeting.”
Abbey argued for no more cars and no new roads in national parks, and for allowing park rangers to get back to the serious work of policing and educating the public about our natural heritage. Recent rollbacks in environmental policies, of which this recent e-bicycle decision is but one small reminder, would have appalled him.
Appalled, but not surprised.
All the way back in 1967, in the introduction to “Desert Solitaire,” he noted that the book should not inspire readers to seek out the scenes of natural beauty that he described so lovingly, because they were already gone or going away. The book, he wrote, was “not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy.”
Today, that observation seems more prophetic than ever, as we whizz along trails on our electric bikes and bring more and more of what we seek to leave behind with us when we commune with nature.
Nowhere, it seems, is immune to the clarion call of cash.
Abbey was an old-school naturalist whose book, “Desert Solitaire,” ranks as a contemporary “Walden.” In its pages, he extols the beauty of the natural world and argues passionately for its preservation.
He likely would be unhappy with last week’s announcement by the National Park Service, expanding the use of electric bicycles in the country’s 419 national parks. The bikes, some of which can travel at speeds of 28 mph, will now be allowed along any trails where regular, foot-powered bicycles are used.
The decision was lauded by advocates for the elderly, the disabled and the physically unfit, who say the bikes will allow visitors in these groups better access to taxpayer-funded parks. The bikes are also better for the environment than cars and motorcycles.
But many other groups are crying foul, advocating for e-bikes to remain only on designated trails for reasons of safety and aesthetics.
Without a doubt, slower-moving hikers coming into contact with e-cyclists moving at three times their speed could result in injuries to both parties. And the bikes, which emit a low, humming sound, will be a source of noise pollution for people attempting to escape the modern world.
Yet the inexorable forces of “industrial tourism” appear poised to win out.
Abbey, who died in 1989 and who was buried secretly by friends in a desert west of Tucson, loathed such “progress.” To him, industrial tourism referred to all the little — and big — amenities that encroach on man’s attempt to get back in touch with nature. These include paved roads, hotels, restaurants and convenience stores in and around national parks to cater to visitors in their “back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs,” Abbey-speak for automobiles.
He claimed that industrial tourism threatened the nation’s national park system by changing the fundamental nature of ... well, nature. But he also thought industrial tourism robbed tourists themselves by making it impossible for them to actually escape their “urban-suburban complexes.”
He was also critical of marathon visitors whose goal is to cram visits to as many parks as possible into a two-week vacation, believing they would be better served to slow down and savor one or two locations, exploring them by foot and, yes, by bicycle.
But he didn’t envision the advent and quick proliferation of the e-bicycle industry, which has fought hard for the recent rule change for reasons of shareholder self-interest.
Abbey was no ingenue, at peace among the trees and unaware of market forces. He recognized the inevitability of big money corrupting our parks system and applying the same pressures there as it has in all other facets of local, state and national legislation. Advocates of industrial tourism, he wrote, “look into red canyons and see only green, stand among flowers snorting out the smell of money, and hear, while thunderstorms rumble over mountains, the fall of a dollar bill on motel carpeting.”
Abbey argued for no more cars and no new roads in national parks, and for allowing park rangers to get back to the serious work of policing and educating the public about our natural heritage. Recent rollbacks in environmental policies, of which this recent e-bicycle decision is but one small reminder, would have appalled him.
Appalled, but not surprised.
All the way back in 1967, in the introduction to “Desert Solitaire,” he noted that the book should not inspire readers to seek out the scenes of natural beauty that he described so lovingly, because they were already gone or going away. The book, he wrote, was “not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy.”
Today, that observation seems more prophetic than ever, as we whizz along trails on our electric bikes and bring more and more of what we seek to leave behind with us when we commune with nature.
Nowhere, it seems, is immune to the clarion call of cash.
Long kiss is extended by controversy
Call it the longest kiss in the history of pop culture: It started in 2010 and continues today.
The liplock between Hulkling and Wiccan, two characters in “Avengers: The Children’s Crusade,” originally was published by Marvel Comics in magazine form nine years ago. It was reprinted in the collected edition of the series in 2017.
But only last week did the smooch really start to turn heads.
Hulkling and Wiccan are both male, a fact that so concerned Marcelo Crivella, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, that he ordered law enforcement agents to seize all copies of the collection from the city’s International Book Fair. The raid was a bust, however, since all copies were purchased by buyers ahead of the raid, likely in anticipation of how much the book would sell for on the secondary market now that it had been targeted.
Crivella is also a preacher, and he believes books like this “need to be packaged in black plastic and sealed” before purchase, making him the latest in a long series of misguided people who believe that just because something offends them personally it must be hidden away from view or restricted for the rest of the world.
Now the situation is worming its way through the Brazilian court system, with one judge ruling that Crivella could not seize books in the future or revoke the book fair’s permit, and another judge ruling that he could, according to the New York Times.
The situation is worth noting here in the United States, where similar attempts to restrict content are more common than readers might think. Later this month, the American Library Association will mark Banned Books Week, an annual effort to spotlight First Amendment rights of Americans to read what we want without censorship.
Many censorship attempts occur in public school libraries, where parents will protest the inclusion of particular books and request or demand their removal or restriction. Some school administrators and school boards, eager to head off bad publicity, will accede. When they do, the book has been banned. When they do not, the book has been challenged, based on the ALA’s definitions.
Hence, some readers found their right to read the following books jeopardized in 2018: “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, seen as too negative toward police officers; the “Captain Underpants” series by Dav Pilkey, too encouraging of disruptive behaviors; and “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher, too focused on teen suicides.
But far and away the No. 1 reason for the top books on the list to be challenged is the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual themes. LGBTQIA+ was cited in five of the top 11 most-challenged books last year.
Let’s be clear: Parents have the absolute right to restrict their own children’s access to any books, movies, or online content they find offensive. What they don’t have the right to do is to restrict other parents’ children from accessing those materials.
And censorship is that slipperiest of slopes: Once you start down the path of determining what is offensive to a community, it’s hard to know where to stop. One person’s vulgarity is another’s realistic depiction of life. The drawing of lines needs to extend no further than the door to each person’s home.
And a few points to keep in mind about Mayor Crivella’s attempts:
To my knowledge, no pop-culture depiction of two same-sex characters kissing ever made a reader gay. It might have made him or her aware that other people are gay, or that it’s acceptable in most social circles in 2019 to be gay, and that people shouldn’t judge other people for being gay, but it never made a heterosexual person say, “I think I’ll be that.”
Secondly, when you call attention to an alleged problem, be sure you’re ready to accept the unintended consequences. In this case, I’m sure Marvel Comics will be happy to accommodate readers who want to see what all the fuss is about by going back to press on a nine-year-old story.
And so the long kiss continues.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
The liplock between Hulkling and Wiccan, two characters in “Avengers: The Children’s Crusade,” originally was published by Marvel Comics in magazine form nine years ago. It was reprinted in the collected edition of the series in 2017.
But only last week did the smooch really start to turn heads.
Hulkling and Wiccan are both male, a fact that so concerned Marcelo Crivella, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, that he ordered law enforcement agents to seize all copies of the collection from the city’s International Book Fair. The raid was a bust, however, since all copies were purchased by buyers ahead of the raid, likely in anticipation of how much the book would sell for on the secondary market now that it had been targeted.
Crivella is also a preacher, and he believes books like this “need to be packaged in black plastic and sealed” before purchase, making him the latest in a long series of misguided people who believe that just because something offends them personally it must be hidden away from view or restricted for the rest of the world.
Now the situation is worming its way through the Brazilian court system, with one judge ruling that Crivella could not seize books in the future or revoke the book fair’s permit, and another judge ruling that he could, according to the New York Times.
The situation is worth noting here in the United States, where similar attempts to restrict content are more common than readers might think. Later this month, the American Library Association will mark Banned Books Week, an annual effort to spotlight First Amendment rights of Americans to read what we want without censorship.
Many censorship attempts occur in public school libraries, where parents will protest the inclusion of particular books and request or demand their removal or restriction. Some school administrators and school boards, eager to head off bad publicity, will accede. When they do, the book has been banned. When they do not, the book has been challenged, based on the ALA’s definitions.
Hence, some readers found their right to read the following books jeopardized in 2018: “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, seen as too negative toward police officers; the “Captain Underpants” series by Dav Pilkey, too encouraging of disruptive behaviors; and “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher, too focused on teen suicides.
But far and away the No. 1 reason for the top books on the list to be challenged is the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual themes. LGBTQIA+ was cited in five of the top 11 most-challenged books last year.
Let’s be clear: Parents have the absolute right to restrict their own children’s access to any books, movies, or online content they find offensive. What they don’t have the right to do is to restrict other parents’ children from accessing those materials.
And censorship is that slipperiest of slopes: Once you start down the path of determining what is offensive to a community, it’s hard to know where to stop. One person’s vulgarity is another’s realistic depiction of life. The drawing of lines needs to extend no further than the door to each person’s home.
And a few points to keep in mind about Mayor Crivella’s attempts:
To my knowledge, no pop-culture depiction of two same-sex characters kissing ever made a reader gay. It might have made him or her aware that other people are gay, or that it’s acceptable in most social circles in 2019 to be gay, and that people shouldn’t judge other people for being gay, but it never made a heterosexual person say, “I think I’ll be that.”
Secondly, when you call attention to an alleged problem, be sure you’re ready to accept the unintended consequences. In this case, I’m sure Marvel Comics will be happy to accommodate readers who want to see what all the fuss is about by going back to press on a nine-year-old story.
And so the long kiss continues.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Monday, September 2, 2019
Everything old is ... well, still old
You know you’re getting old when most of your conversations about landmarks and destinations include the word “old.”
Like, when our cat got sick over the weekend and my wife and I had to take it to an emergency veterinarian a few cities over. The vet was located in the old Outback Steakhouse, next to the old Circuit City, just down the street from the old Best Buy.
Or last weekend, when we went to eat at A-Town Burgers and Brews, which I told friends is in the old Wally Armour budget lot, which is the old Waaa Daa Hot Dog Shoppe, which is the old Denny’s.
Speaking of Waaa Daa, which I looked up because I couldn’t remember if “Waaa” had two a’s or three — there is no limit to the lengths I will go to ensure this column is accurate, I tell ya — I was reminded that the plastic hot dog that once adorned the roof was moved out of storage in 2016 and taken to LeSage, West Virginia.
There, it has been put to good use, or maybe just use, at an establishment called Hillbilly Hotdogs. I have been told that this fine-dining emporium has been frequented by at least one prominent Alliance citizen in recent months, who traveled there by motorcycle only to learn that no matter how much you dress up a hot dog, it’s still just a hot dog.
By the way, in The Review blurb about the plastic weiner’s transfer, “Waaa Daa” was spelled “Waada,” so even at this late juncture, some controversy remains about the ill-fated shop. Or shoppe.
But, back to “old.”
If you’ve been around town, any town, long enough, lots of stuff can be described by what used to be there. Downtown Alliance is a good example. Various buildings there have been home to other ventures, sometimes two or three.
A church now resides in the former Sears building. A secondhand store now makes its home in the old Kidding’s Automotive store. And a flea market is in the old Grimm’s Furniture Store, which was the old Murphy’s, which was probably a few other old things before that, too.
This isn’t surprising. Businesses go where people are, and people are notoriously mobile. So when traffic patterns shift, businesses follow, leaving a lot of old in their wake. And most of that old is old-timers like me who remember where stuff used to be and find it easier to talk about ill-fated ventures that exist now only in our minds.
And into our minds are where businesses have been moving for the last 20 years or so, following a migration of consumers from physical buildings into cyberspace, where they shop from home and have it all delivered, or go no further than a business’s parking lot, where employees load it directly into the car.
Welcome to the era of Grubhub, Doordash, Walmart Grocery Pickup, and Amazon. No rubbing elbows with our neighbors. No serendipitous encounters in aisle seven. Just our own homemade bubbles to contain our homemade realities.
It’s enough to make a body feel ... well, old.
But that’s pretty heavy stuff. To recap the lighter messages, then:
Hot dogs are just hot dogs, even when handcrafted by hillbillies.
Waaa Daa — three a’s, then two.
A-Town Burgers and Brews — worth a visit.
And the cat’s just fine. Thanks for asking.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Revised verse for a course reversal
English teachers, rejoice! Sonnets finally are headline news!
Last week, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, offered his interpretation of a key passage from “The New Colossus,” the 14-line poem by Emma Lazarus carved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
(As an aside, have you ever noticed how many folks in this administration are “acting”?)
To Cuccinelli, the term “teeming masses” refers only to European people, which was his odd way of defending the latest round of restrictions this regime wants to impose on immigrants. Basically, if they can’t stand on their own and can’t survive without the help of any form of public assistance, ever, they can say goodbye to their green cards.
The policy proposal prompted me to seek out Lazarus’ original sonnet and make some updates for a new century and a new sheriff in town. Of course, the amendations (in brackets) will require changing the likeness of the statue. I trust it won’t be hard to guess the new image that should greet visitors to our shores. If anybody’s ego is worthy of a giant statue, it’s his.
***
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
[but more like the gaudy casinos emblazoned with the family name],
With conquering limbs astride from land to land
[And Cheeto-orange skin and fly-away hair at hand];
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates [forget the gates, gimme a Big Beautiful Wall, paid for by diverted military funds ... I mean, by Mexico] shall stand
A mighty woman [let’s make it a man, one with off-the-rack suits and too-long ties]
with a torch [and a flame-thrower, and a big big big machine gun with the NRA logo emblazoned on the side], whose flame
Is the imprisoned [because the poorer you are, the more we like to imprison] lightning, and her [his] name
Mother of Exiles [Father of Outrageous Tweets]. From her [his] beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome [or scorn, especially if you’re from one of those ”(expletive)hole” countries]; her [his] mild [yet strong, powerful, healthy and virile] eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she [he] [but really, we’d rather have your light-skinned, wealthy European storied pomp, especially if you are a really hot, blonde immigrant who likes older men — va va voom!]
With silent lips. “Give me your tired [but not too tired for all the jobs that nobody already living here doesn’t want], your poor [but not poor enough to qualify for public assistance, and if you do qualify, you’d better not ask even if your kids are hungry or sick or whatevs, cuz we’ll tell you and them to go back where you came from, even if you came from here],
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free [and, thanks to environmental-regulation rollbacks, to breathe smog, exhaust and other carcinogens too — but don’t you dare complain because we’ll boot you out faster a lefty, antifa protestor at an election rally, don’tcha know],
The wretched refuse [we prefer only aliens ... I mean, immigrants who win, of course] of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless [and vermin, invaders, and rapists — don’t bother], tempest-tost to me [what’s a tempest, anyway, and is “tost” what I have for breakfast along with leftover KFC while setting foreign policy based on Fox and Friends?],
I lift my lamp [and my crowd numbers and my Electoral College numbers, both bigger than anybody else’s — numbers, I have the biggest numbers, I really do] beside the golden door!”
***
Granted, these new words take away most of the poem’s beauty and lyricism, not to mention a guiding principle under which many people first came to this country, but one could argue that 45 has all but eliminated beauty and lyricism from public discourse, anyway. Besides, all that sentimental slop is for losers.
Don’t like the revisions? Well, that’s a problem, because the original words don’t apply to anything going on with immigration policy proposals today.
Better just to tear down the statue and put up a 151-foot STOP sign. In English only, of course, because we only speak American here.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Monday, August 19, 2019
Looking back to analyze school daze
Did you enjoy your high school years?
A former classmate asked this on Facebook a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since. This has been challenging because my high school memories are growing fuzzy, like a picture viewed through a frame covered in decades of dust.
What I do remember is that I approached school like a job, which sounds harsher than I intend because I like working. Work gives people purpose. So if school was my job, then I enjoyed going there, showing up every day, being a good employee and doing the assigned tasks. Like many workers, I goofed off sometimes and was written up occasionally, but for the most part, I was probably considered eligible for rehire.
I had friends in high school, took some good and not-so-good classes, made memories of both the smiling and cringing varieties, and experienced the four years without much fanfare. (College felt much the same way.)
American society has fetishized school in general and high school in particular through a series of sitcoms, movies and comic books designed to make those years more significant than they already are. “Happy Days,” “American Graffiti,” “The Blackboard Jungle,” “Archie,” and dozens (hundreds?) more have entrenched high school into pop-culture parlance — the jocks, nerds, mean girls, greasers, goths and preps. Everybody had a role to play and a place to play it, be it the science classroom, study hall, Big Game or Big Dance. The really scary kids acted out their roles in the bathrooms or the alley out back, of course, but they too are part of the popular conception of high school.
Most comedy or drama results from people stepping outside their comfort zones, so a jock interacting with a goth in the hallway or a mean girl partnering with a nerd for the science fair is a source of numerous angsty conversations or witty one-liners, depending on the genre. How much this happens in real life is the subject of some debate, especially if those roles are exaggerated anyway.
One unintended consequence of all this media attention is to super-size many teens’ expectations for high school, making those eight semesters the Mount Everest of existence before they’ve even had a chance to experience them. To have a great high school career is to have a great life, and if every moment isn’t absolutely saturated in fun and zaniness ... well, there must be something wrong with you.
Ironically, or maybe inevitably, the other side of that high school mountain is populated by people who reached the peak of life in their teen years and who believe, in the words of the immortal prophet John Mellencamp, that “oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.” These are the folks drawn to the past like a hypnotized mark to the swinging watch, seduced by the halcyon days of lettermen jackets and pompoms, where such objects have an almost totemic appeal.
They are attracted by the alleged simplicity of high school, before marriage, mortgage and the other challenges of adult life. They are the bar sitters, the wistful what-if-ers, and the targets of many a weight-loss, hair-growth and sports-car ad campaign.
My own high school memories are complicated, too, by the fact that I’ve spent 20 years of my adult life as a teacher, watching my students navigate the sometimes treacherous, sometimes wonderful, route to adulthood.
In this context, the question “Did you enjoy your high school years?” becomes much more vital, especially with the school year about to begin.
I want my students to enjoy their high school years, not because the time is the be-all, end-all of their existence (it’s not), but because people do better at something that they like, with people they like being around.
Enjoyment doesn’t have to mean unbridled joy at every turn. It does mean that students are engaged in something that they find value in, either because it relates to their life today or to an activity or job they want to pursue tomorrow.
Sometimes — maybe even often — this engagement is hard work. It requires putting off activities that bring instant gratification (an evening of Fortnite) for something that will pay dividends later (an evening of calculus).
In this regard, all of us — relatives, friends, neighbors — can help the young people in our lives to engage with school. We can ask them about their day, classes and the future, and then really listen when they answer. We can help them find the resources they need — academic, social, mental-health, financial — to persevere. We can limit their exposure to negative influences and give them opportunities to grow in positive ways.
And we can remind them, no matter how great or how dismal their school experiences, that these years are just one part of what will be a long and fruitful life.
That way, 20 or 30 years later, maybe they will be able to see past the media-induced stereotypes if they are ever asked, “Did you enjoy your high school years?”
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Sunday, August 11, 2019
'New normal' results in same tragic headlines
I hate the new normal.
At restaurants, bars, movie theaters or beloved local festival events, I hate scanning for exits and wondering who might be carrying a weapon and nursing a grudge, and if this might be the day or night when the American culture of mass shootings personally affects me or those I love.
I hate the ping of news alerts on my phone — three dead at a garlic festival in California on July 28; the one-two punch of 22 fatalities in El Paso on Saturday, followed by nine more in Dayton on Sunday.
I hate that “thoughts and prayers” has become a sick punchline for inertia.
I hate that someone, somewhere, even as these words are being typed, is mouthing the tired argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and making a smarmy comment about the damage somebody could inflict with a sledgehammer, a steak knife or a chair leg.
I hate that the incidents that get the most attention are the ones with multiple fatalities, that so many one-offs — a guy with a gun blowing away his spouse or ex-girlfriend, a neighbor shooting a neighbor over loud music or barking dogs — hardly raise an eyebrow, just business as usual here in the Wild West of 2019.
Mostly, I hate knowing that gun violence, singletons and multiple homicides alike, will happen again and again and again until something is done.
What that something is can take two broad directions.
Direction number one is more guns. If more people were armed, goes this argument, and if more people did so under concealed-carry and open-carry laws, so wannabe-shooter psychos, craven to their very cores, would apparently stay at home.
A major flaw with this premise is that America, home to an estimated 327.2-million people, already has 390-million civilian firearms. The oft-repeated “good guy with a gun theory” doesn’t seem to hold water, unless the argument is that we don’t know how many psychos were deterred by the hypothetical presence of weekend warriors sporting weapons at craft shows and malls.
It seems more likely that the proliferation of guns in this country is part of the problem, not part of the solution. In other countries where guns are not as prevalent, incidents of gun violence, while not unheard of, are far less common. In the lexicon of Occam’s razor, this isn’t even a close shave.
How, then, to curtail access to guns without limiting the rights of law-abiding Americans to own them? (As an aside, a 2012 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin explains how our modern understanding of the Second Amendment owes more to “an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation” by the NRA and others in the 1980s then to centuries of prior legal precedent. But I digress.)
For one thing, we have to agree that the Second Amendment does not give citizens the right to own assault weapons, high-capacity magazines or accessories that increase their killing power.
Here is where gun aficionados love to bog down the argument with technical specs on what is or is not an assault weapon. To save a lot of emails, let me concede that any gun owner knows more details than I do. In plain English, any gun or attachment to a gun that allows it to kill a lot of people in a ridiculously short time is something civilians don’t need — not for personal protection, not for sport.
Secondly, we need to close loopholes in background checks so that they apply to all gun sales and transfers, and require that checks be completed before new owners take possession of weapons. Yes, this will slow down the process of buying and selling, in much the same way that new security procedures slowed down air travel after 9/11 — a worthwhile inconvenience because it made us safer.
The government also needs to expand the categories of people who cannot buy or own firearms to include individuals who are guilty of hate-crime misdemeanors and dating partners convicted of domestic violence. This will help curtail those tragedies that don’t always make front-page news.
The most common-sense changes can be found in the Brady Plan’s Comprehensive Approach to Preventing Gun Violence. At eight pages, it is short and eminently readable. It is also freely available online.
Will this be the series of tragedies that prompts a real discussion — from our coffee shops to Congress — about much-needed reform? And will we hold our elected lawmakers responsible for standing up to the NRA?
I hate to think it’s not, and I hate to think we won’t.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Mueller testimony is political Rorschach test
“They have information — I think I’d take it.”
With these words, President Donald Trump confirmed in June what opponents have suspected for years, that he is morally bankrupt and incapable of putting loyalty to country above loyalty to self (or, perhaps more accurately, loyalty to self-interest, as a friend puts it).
Trump was speaking to ABC News when he was asked how he would handle a foreign government approaching him with dirt on a political opponent and whether he would contact the FBI.
He said he would contact authorities in such a situation only if he “thought there was something wrong,” not realizing or perhaps not caring that an overture from a foreign power falls squarely into this category.
The June exchange was never far from my thoughts as I listened to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress last week.
Mueller, who has been roundly criticized by both parties for appearing unfamiliar with the details of the report to which he’d signed his name, nonetheless laid out a sweeping case of foreign interference in the American election process.
He haltingly, yet authoritatively, dispelled a prevalent belief among Republicans that the report fully exonerated Trump. He objected to the characterization of his investigation as a witch hunt, noting Trump could be charged once he leaves office. He condemned Trump’s approval of WikiLeaks.
Yet it wasn’t long before Trump, who said earlier in the week that he wouldn’t watch the testimony, proved that statement, too, was a lie. He tweeted and crowed throughout the day, appearing at one point to misunderstand an important clarification that Mueller made regarding the ability to indict a sitting president, saying that Mueller had instead walked back an earlier statement about indictment after leaving office.
Of course, the whole Mueller affair did little to sway anybody’s opinions. Those who supported Trump before the testimony still did, and those who did not, still didn’t. One commentator called it a political Rorschach test, probably the most accurate summation of the day’s testimony.
Of course, it’s not really over for Trump, investigatively. In a piece in the New York Times, Caroline Frederickson, president of the American Constitution Society, spelled out the legal and ethical concerns still facing him. These include ongoing cases against many people named in the report, the president’s past and present business deals with Russia, and how much he and his campaign may have coordinated with WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails.
Mueller, for his part, called Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks “beyond problematic.”
In many ways, Mueller’s report and his testimony could be seen as an indictment of unfettered capitalism, where the cutthroat, competitive nature of the business world lends itself to strange bedfellows and situational ethics.
In such an environment, one takes any advantage over an opponent, including insider information from disreputable sources.
Not surprising, then, that some in the Trump election team, well-versed in pages from corporate America’s book of dirty tricks, might resort to the same tactics in politics, perhaps without even knowing that such shenanigans, when undertaken with a foreign country intent on disrupting an election, might be more than unethical. They may be treasonous.
Proving this, however, has been challenging. The smoking gun, if one exists, is well-hidden. And the public seems to have grown weary of the search.
Less challenging is the issue of obstruction. Mueller laid out a damning case for that, including his opinion that the president’s written answers to investigators indicated Trump “generally” was not being truthful.
But there, too, Democrats have to proceed with caution. To impeach the president for attempting to cover up incidents that can’t be proven to have happened in the first place is a tough sell, and they must realize they would never garner the two-thirds Senate majority necessary to remove him. Pursuing the other concerns that Frederickson noted could lead to a stronger case, but it must never take precedence over genuine governance.
Focusing on the 2020 election is likely the better course of action, but still fraught with peril, especially if Trump continues to control the narrative via tweet and bumper-sticker-ready rhetoric.
Yet the president’s own words could also come back to haunt him. If the Dems make election security a key issue — and they should — then Trump’s June statements are as effective a condemnation as any impeachment hearings.
As a bonus, Dems don’t have to prove anything: He already indicated in that interview just how bereft of ethics he truly is. As Maya Angelou said, “When somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Many Americans, especially Republicans, haven’t done that with Trump. How about now?
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Does binge-watching come with directions?
Gotta face facts: I don’t know how to binge watch TV.
Which is really weird because I have no trouble bingeing in other ways. I binge ice cream. And chocolate chip cookies. And comic books. (I have the palette and aesthetics of an 8-year-old. Sue me.)
But binge watching TV is apparently a bridge too far.
My students often tell me they are bingeing a particular show. Some have watched every episode of “The Office” — all 201 of them — multiple times. One knocked out two seasons of “The Handmaid’s Tale” in as many weeks. Another spent a weekend watching four complete seasons of some reality show whose name escapes me.
I, on the other hand, am attempting to binge watch “Star Trek: Discovery.” I borrowed it from the library a few weeks back. Since then, I have watched one-and-a-half episodes. Pathetic, huh?
It took me two attempts to get through the first episode because I kept falling asleep. I’m having the same trouble with episode two.
It’s not that I don’t like it. The show’s pretty good. They’ve made Trek all grim and gritty, not your father’s Trek, yadda yadda yadda.
But pretty soon, I’ll have to return the set so other people can borrow it. They’ll probably finish all 15 episodes overnight or pace themselves over a weekend, in between full seasons of “Breaking Bad.”
My completion rate is significantly slower.
In the past few months, I’ve “binged” one Hulu series, “The Act,” about a mother who forced her child to use a wheelchair when she didn’t need it. The show had eight episodes. It took me about three weeks.
I also “binged” an eight-episode series from the Oxygen channel, “Dirty John.” It’s about a slimy conman — is there any other kind? — who wriggles his way into the life of a trusting woman and her daughters. I really whipped through that one, comparatively speaking, in about 10 days.
Both shows, by the way, are “based on true stories” or “inspired by real events” or “somewhat tenuously connected to something that might have happened to somebody, somewhere, at some time.” And they’re both enjoyable, but I’m not sure you should take the recommendation of somebody with such limited TV-watching experience.
I appreciate shows that have only seven or eight episodes because I feel like I can commit to them with a reasonable chance of success. Shows with more installments start to feel like a job that you hate — picking mushrooms out of the yard, cleaning the gutters or getting a colonoscopy.
I have a laundry list of failed programs in my wake, series that I have started and then abandoned or that I promise to get back to “someday.”
These include all of the Marvel series, including “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” and “The Punisher. They include the WB’s adaption of “The Flash,” which I really like, despite being three or maybe four seasons behind. I peaced out of “The Handmaid’s Tale” after six episodes, all of which I enjoyed but found too depressing to continue.
My turtle-speed watching is mostly because I don’t prioritize TV viewing. I’d rather be reading or doing something outside, especially in the summer.
Also, I’m more of a movie guy. A 90-minute or two-hour commitment strikes me as more reasonable, a complete story that doesn’t require the broadcast equivalent of a promise ring to see through to the final credits.
Even so, I have an alarming number of movies sitting around, both physically and digitally, that I may get to, at my present rate of consumption, some time in my 70s or 80s.
It’s gotten so bad that my wife and I recently made the decision to move our TV out of the living room. When we watch the news, which is really my must-see TV, we use a tablet or phone, so why build a room around a big black relic?
Earlier this month, we lugged the TV into the basement and plunked it down in front of an old couch. We’ve gone down there to watch three times since. Once was to watch a movie.
To nobody’s surprise, I fell asleep.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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