President Trump was photographed wearing a mask last Saturday, and the internet went wild.
He was visiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when the media captured the history-making moment. It didn’t take long for the derision to kick in.
Some online wags were pleased the mask shielded the public from the president’s weirdly-shaped mouth. Others cheered because they said he looked defeated and deflated.
I don’t know about that. In a rare move for me, I’m going to applaud the president for having the courage — just this once — to lead positively by example.
Of course, we can’t discount the possibility that his decision was politically motivated. Trump’s calculus about such matters is as shrewd as it is often accurate: Like a wounded animal with its paw caught in a trap, he knows when it serves him to act in a certain way, whether to endear himself to his base, to own the libs, or both.
So the mask may be an act of political expediency. Or not. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that, by wearing it, he paves the way for the typical Trump supporter to do the same, to reverse course and put on a mask even after long, drawn-out Facebook rants about how our rights are being compromised by a piece of cloth over our mouths and noses.
Who knows how many lives Trump will save and how much illness he will prevent by the simple choice to wear that mask, even if only for a few minutes, even if in his secret heart of hearts, he still believes a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine and bleach works better.
Less publicized but just as significant, Trump told CBS News a few days after the hospital visit that Americans should listen to the CDC. “If it’s necessary, I would urge them to wear a mask and I would say follow the guidelines,” he told reporter Catherine Herridge.
While this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the efficacy of masks, it’s another step in the right direction. How exhausting it must be for Trump’s handlers to nurture anything like empathy in the man. Almost as exhausting as it is for the public to watch him slowly evolve into somebody with an iota of compassion — a case of one step forward, two dozen steps back.
Let’s face it, Trump needs some wins where the coronavirus is concerned. His administration’s handling of the pandemic has been horribly uneven, which is a euphemistic way of saying it has been a near-total disaster leading to more illness, fatalities and economic disruptions than necessary.
The national shutdown last spring, intended to give the country time to ramp up COVID testing and contact tracing, was instead so squandered that some experts now speculate a second shuttering of non-essential businesses and activities may be needed. By advocating for the nation to reopen too quickly, in defiance of his own administration’s plan to wait until 14 days of declining numbers, Trump presided over a Titanic-level catastrophe and spawned a Frankenstein-monster patchwork of state and local regulations festooned with red tape and contradictions. Meanwhile, President Nero waded into the culture wars, crowed about his ratings and pouted over his rally attendance.
His most definitive COVID action, announcing travel restrictions to and from China at the end of January (they went into effect on Feb. 2), could be seen as merely an extension of his usual America-first nationalism. In other words, he used COVID as a cover story.
Another bold action with a similar not-so-hidden agenda was a recent attempt to ship foreign college students back to their countries of origin if their courses were entirely online in the fall. His administration walked that back recently after threats of litigation and, one assumes, realization that these students subsidize many American students’ bills.
But timeout. I came to praise Trump, not to bury him, or however that line goes.
So ...
At least he’s wearing a mask and advising others to do the same. That’s a start. And while it would undoubtedly have been better had this realization hit him two months earlier, his detractors — if they truly desire best-case outcomes where the virus and the country are concerned — should encourage the better angels of Trump’s nature to unfurl their wings a little more often.
If that means admiring the emperor’s new mask, so be it.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Let's move cautiously on school reopening
Accepting the idea of schools reopening normally in the fall requires a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, we have leaders at various levels, including President Donald Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and their down-ticket ideologues, who argue that education at all levels — from preschools through universities — must resume face-to-face classes in a few weeks.
Their rationales are varied. The one that sounds most plausible — because it appears to put children’s needs first — is the emotional and educational toll the pandemic has taken on students.
To be sure, this is an important consideration. Children and young adults, like all of us, are social beings who thrive on interactions with others. Even self-described introverts have recognized the challenges of being isolated for long periods during this pandemic.
Students also don’t all experience school shutdowns in the same way. Minority students and children living in poverty have had a tougher time. Some students have limited or no access to the Internet, and some have taken on caregiver or even breadwinner responsibilities, making it harder to stay current with their studies.
Buttressing this concern about student welfare (some might even say superseding it), is the argument that schools are necessary to the nation’s economic fabric. Not going back to school, or going back on a staggered schedule, would mean that parents have to make tough decisions about employment and daycare.
These choices would have a dramatic effect on the country’s financial welfare, especially in an election year when votes will be predicated as much on economics as public health.
Recognizing this reality, President Trump has in recent days resorted to public shaming, calling out Harvard for its decision to go mostly online for the fall and threatening to cut funding for schools that don’t reopen. We’ve seen attempts by his administration to force universities’ hands by vowing to send international students back home if they take only online classes, knowing that these students, who are more likely to pay full tuition and therefore subsidize lower rates for American students, are financial linchpins for their schools.
At the primary and secondary level, we’ve seen a curious reduction to the oft-repeated social-distancing rule, from six to three feet, to acknowledge the reality that the former is unfeasible in most schools.
We’ve seen the Ohio High School Athletic Association replace one leader who expressed a more cautious attitude about the resumption of high-school sports with one who is perhaps more willing to get players back on the fields and courts.
And we’ve seen a lot of passing the buck, from the federal to the state to the local level, to make the hard calls about how to enforce recommendations for safety in schools, with little or no money — and sometimes less funding — to implement them. Plausible deniability for those at the top, perhaps.
The cognitive dissonance stems from these actions and decisions about education occurring even as, around the country, officials are stalling and even reversing plans to reopen other institutions because of growing numbers of COVID infections.
As I write these words on July 7, new cases are up 72 percent from 14 days ago, while new deaths are down only 8 percent over that same period. Governor DeWine has mandated public mask-wearing in seven Ohio counties, with more likely to come.
Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry (COSI) has delayed its reopening. The on-again, off-again Canfield Fair is off again. A growing number of GOP senators won’t attend the Republican National Convention next month because of virus concerns, even as the Trump administration has attendees sign waivers saying they won’t sue if they catch COVID at one of his mask-optional campaign rallies.
COVID outbreaks are often traced to situations where people have gathered in large numbers or where they live in close proximity — parties, funerals, nursing homes. These are the same sorts of clusterings that will occur when students return to campuses and classrooms this fall.
Little has been said of students who live with parents who may be at higher risks for complications from the virus, or the 7% of students who live with their grandparents.
Nor has much consideration been given to teachers and other staff, many of whom are in elevated-risk categories based solely on age. For instance, 37% of college faculty are 55 or older (compared with 23% of workers in general). Protecting the adults who interact with students must also be a priority.
As many people who read this column regularly know, I am a full-time high-school teacher and a part-time college instructor. I want nothing more this fall than to look out over multiple classrooms of students, conversing with them and allowing them to interact with each other.
I also recognize that “safety” is never assured. There always will be some degree of risk associated with anything worth doing — from crossing the street to sitting in a lecture hall.
But given all the unknowns with COVID — the concerns over how long it lingers in the air, the radically different ways it affects patients, the surging numbers even in the heat of summer, the lack of a vaccine or even effective treatments — and even acknowledging the emotional and educational needs of students, it would be prudent to take an overly cautious approach to school this fall.
Start slowly. Limit face-to-face interactions to a few times a week with smaller numbers of students, mandatory face coverings for all, frequent cleanings between classes, and an efficient system of shifting between in-person and online environments if or when infections spike.
It’s not perfect, but it’s not forever. Better this way than roaring full-throttle into the great unknown.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
On the one hand, we have leaders at various levels, including President Donald Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and their down-ticket ideologues, who argue that education at all levels — from preschools through universities — must resume face-to-face classes in a few weeks.
Their rationales are varied. The one that sounds most plausible — because it appears to put children’s needs first — is the emotional and educational toll the pandemic has taken on students.
To be sure, this is an important consideration. Children and young adults, like all of us, are social beings who thrive on interactions with others. Even self-described introverts have recognized the challenges of being isolated for long periods during this pandemic.
Students also don’t all experience school shutdowns in the same way. Minority students and children living in poverty have had a tougher time. Some students have limited or no access to the Internet, and some have taken on caregiver or even breadwinner responsibilities, making it harder to stay current with their studies.
Buttressing this concern about student welfare (some might even say superseding it), is the argument that schools are necessary to the nation’s economic fabric. Not going back to school, or going back on a staggered schedule, would mean that parents have to make tough decisions about employment and daycare.
These choices would have a dramatic effect on the country’s financial welfare, especially in an election year when votes will be predicated as much on economics as public health.
Recognizing this reality, President Trump has in recent days resorted to public shaming, calling out Harvard for its decision to go mostly online for the fall and threatening to cut funding for schools that don’t reopen. We’ve seen attempts by his administration to force universities’ hands by vowing to send international students back home if they take only online classes, knowing that these students, who are more likely to pay full tuition and therefore subsidize lower rates for American students, are financial linchpins for their schools.
At the primary and secondary level, we’ve seen a curious reduction to the oft-repeated social-distancing rule, from six to three feet, to acknowledge the reality that the former is unfeasible in most schools.
We’ve seen the Ohio High School Athletic Association replace one leader who expressed a more cautious attitude about the resumption of high-school sports with one who is perhaps more willing to get players back on the fields and courts.
And we’ve seen a lot of passing the buck, from the federal to the state to the local level, to make the hard calls about how to enforce recommendations for safety in schools, with little or no money — and sometimes less funding — to implement them. Plausible deniability for those at the top, perhaps.
The cognitive dissonance stems from these actions and decisions about education occurring even as, around the country, officials are stalling and even reversing plans to reopen other institutions because of growing numbers of COVID infections.
As I write these words on July 7, new cases are up 72 percent from 14 days ago, while new deaths are down only 8 percent over that same period. Governor DeWine has mandated public mask-wearing in seven Ohio counties, with more likely to come.
Columbus’s Center of Science and Industry (COSI) has delayed its reopening. The on-again, off-again Canfield Fair is off again. A growing number of GOP senators won’t attend the Republican National Convention next month because of virus concerns, even as the Trump administration has attendees sign waivers saying they won’t sue if they catch COVID at one of his mask-optional campaign rallies.
COVID outbreaks are often traced to situations where people have gathered in large numbers or where they live in close proximity — parties, funerals, nursing homes. These are the same sorts of clusterings that will occur when students return to campuses and classrooms this fall.
Little has been said of students who live with parents who may be at higher risks for complications from the virus, or the 7% of students who live with their grandparents.
Nor has much consideration been given to teachers and other staff, many of whom are in elevated-risk categories based solely on age. For instance, 37% of college faculty are 55 or older (compared with 23% of workers in general). Protecting the adults who interact with students must also be a priority.
As many people who read this column regularly know, I am a full-time high-school teacher and a part-time college instructor. I want nothing more this fall than to look out over multiple classrooms of students, conversing with them and allowing them to interact with each other.
I also recognize that “safety” is never assured. There always will be some degree of risk associated with anything worth doing — from crossing the street to sitting in a lecture hall.
But given all the unknowns with COVID — the concerns over how long it lingers in the air, the radically different ways it affects patients, the surging numbers even in the heat of summer, the lack of a vaccine or even effective treatments — and even acknowledging the emotional and educational needs of students, it would be prudent to take an overly cautious approach to school this fall.
Start slowly. Limit face-to-face interactions to a few times a week with smaller numbers of students, mandatory face coverings for all, frequent cleanings between classes, and an efficient system of shifting between in-person and online environments if or when infections spike.
It’s not perfect, but it’s not forever. Better this way than roaring full-throttle into the great unknown.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Saturday, July 4, 2020
A quick trip around the world, COVID-style
I’m catching up with old friends this summer.
Their names are Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, protagonists of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.” I last sort of read the book in grade school, when I cheated my way through a report with the Classics Illustrated version. But coronavirus lockdown makes strange bedfellows, so now I’m reacquainting myself.
As the name indicates, the novel follows Fogg’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an amount of time that would have been fast to readers in the nineteenth century and appears glacial to readers in the twenty-first.
Their names are Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, protagonists of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.” I last sort of read the book in grade school, when I cheated my way through a report with the Classics Illustrated version. But coronavirus lockdown makes strange bedfellows, so now I’m reacquainting myself.
As the name indicates, the novel follows Fogg’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an amount of time that would have been fast to readers in the nineteenth century and appears glacial to readers in the twenty-first.
A quick Google search — hey, it’s the Internet, so it can’t be wrong — indicates a similar trip around the Earth in 2020 would take 45.5 hours, plus time to refuel the plane.
Santa, of course, does it all in one night. But I digress.
Fogg, the epitome of stiff-upper-lip British privilege, spends a large part of the voyage, whether by boat, train or elephant, playing whist, a card game I don’t even pretend to understand, and ignoring the cities and countries he visits.
By contrast, his loyal French manservant, Passepartout, is much more enamored by people and cultures along the way, and is hence more relatable. A classic fish out of water, he mistakenly sets foot in a forbidden temple in Bombay and passes out in an opium den in Hong Kong. (I’m not sure this last part was included in the Classics Illustrated version.)
One scene near the end of the novel speaks eloquently to our current pandemic.
Fogg and Passepartout are traveling across the Rockies by rail when the train stops. One of those challenges that happens exclusively in adventure stories is about to occur: The suspension bridge ahead is too rickety to cross.
The only option is to walk 15 miles around the river, estimated to take six hours, and catch a replacement train on the other side of the tracks. Passengers will be delayed, and Fogg and Passepartout will miss their 80-day deadline, but it’s the safest, most prudent course.
Then the engineer, described by Verne as “a true Yankee,” offers an alternative. They can cross the bridge anyway, safety and prudence be damned, trusting in the train’s speed to carry them through.
Passepartout tries to offer a sensible compromise, but nobody wants to hear it. Indeed, before he can explain his idea, he is shouted down, accused of cowardice. The decision to cross quickly is made.
This is as apt a metaphor for today’s coronavirus situation as one could imagine. We Americans are all on a train, chugging toward a rickety old suspension bridge, which represents a patchwork system of local and state reopening plans, an uneven and ineffective federal response, the politicization of masks, the desire to get back to our restaurants, department stores, schools and sports so strong that we ignore science and expert opinion.
Below the bridge, mounting infection rates, prolonged economic distress when businesses must again be shuttered, and more death.
On the other side, “normalcy.” Our orderly, scheduled lives.
Other countries, many of which have weathered the virus and its fallout more readily than we, are demonstrating how a more unified approach is safer and more effective. They’re shaking their heads — and closing their borders. Like Passepartout, they are finding our “proposed experiment a little too American.”
And for a growing number of states, the recovery train is careening off the tracks, either because the locomotive —emphasis on the “loco” — is going too fast, because the plan is too weak to support it, or both.
As for the scene in the novel?
Well, the engineer’s plan works, even though it would make a better metaphor if it didn’t.
The conductor backs up the train for almost a mile and then barrels toward the bridge, hitting it at 100 mph. “The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station,” writes Verne.
But no sooner does the train cross than the bridge collapses.
Passepartout’s plan, by the way, was to have the passengers disembark, cross the bridge on foot, and then send the train across.
It’s the equivalent of a slow, careful reopening of America, based on the best recommendations of epidemiologists and other health officials, not the fantasies of business leaders and campaigning officials.
Yet nobody wants to hear Passepartout’s plan, and few Americans, it seems, want to hear people — “sheeple,” as we are disparagingly called — begging for more caution, more testing and, at the very least, masks in public.
Instead, it’s full steam ahead in the battle with a virus that has also gone around the world in about 80 days.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Santa, of course, does it all in one night. But I digress.
Fogg, the epitome of stiff-upper-lip British privilege, spends a large part of the voyage, whether by boat, train or elephant, playing whist, a card game I don’t even pretend to understand, and ignoring the cities and countries he visits.
By contrast, his loyal French manservant, Passepartout, is much more enamored by people and cultures along the way, and is hence more relatable. A classic fish out of water, he mistakenly sets foot in a forbidden temple in Bombay and passes out in an opium den in Hong Kong. (I’m not sure this last part was included in the Classics Illustrated version.)
One scene near the end of the novel speaks eloquently to our current pandemic.
Fogg and Passepartout are traveling across the Rockies by rail when the train stops. One of those challenges that happens exclusively in adventure stories is about to occur: The suspension bridge ahead is too rickety to cross.
The only option is to walk 15 miles around the river, estimated to take six hours, and catch a replacement train on the other side of the tracks. Passengers will be delayed, and Fogg and Passepartout will miss their 80-day deadline, but it’s the safest, most prudent course.
Then the engineer, described by Verne as “a true Yankee,” offers an alternative. They can cross the bridge anyway, safety and prudence be damned, trusting in the train’s speed to carry them through.
Passepartout tries to offer a sensible compromise, but nobody wants to hear it. Indeed, before he can explain his idea, he is shouted down, accused of cowardice. The decision to cross quickly is made.
This is as apt a metaphor for today’s coronavirus situation as one could imagine. We Americans are all on a train, chugging toward a rickety old suspension bridge, which represents a patchwork system of local and state reopening plans, an uneven and ineffective federal response, the politicization of masks, the desire to get back to our restaurants, department stores, schools and sports so strong that we ignore science and expert opinion.
Below the bridge, mounting infection rates, prolonged economic distress when businesses must again be shuttered, and more death.
On the other side, “normalcy.” Our orderly, scheduled lives.
Other countries, many of which have weathered the virus and its fallout more readily than we, are demonstrating how a more unified approach is safer and more effective. They’re shaking their heads — and closing their borders. Like Passepartout, they are finding our “proposed experiment a little too American.”
And for a growing number of states, the recovery train is careening off the tracks, either because the locomotive —emphasis on the “loco” — is going too fast, because the plan is too weak to support it, or both.
As for the scene in the novel?
Well, the engineer’s plan works, even though it would make a better metaphor if it didn’t.
The conductor backs up the train for almost a mile and then barrels toward the bridge, hitting it at 100 mph. “The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station,” writes Verne.
But no sooner does the train cross than the bridge collapses.
Passepartout’s plan, by the way, was to have the passengers disembark, cross the bridge on foot, and then send the train across.
It’s the equivalent of a slow, careful reopening of America, based on the best recommendations of epidemiologists and other health officials, not the fantasies of business leaders and campaigning officials.
Yet nobody wants to hear Passepartout’s plan, and few Americans, it seems, want to hear people — “sheeple,” as we are disparagingly called — begging for more caution, more testing and, at the very least, masks in public.
Instead, it’s full steam ahead in the battle with a virus that has also gone around the world in about 80 days.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Sunday, June 28, 2020
What evil lurks at the end of that cotton swab?
My wife was talking last week to somebody who is afraid to be tested for COVID-19 because it’s another way the government can implant tracking devices into our bodies.
I’m trying to imagine what this looks like. Maybe nanotechnology is lurking on the cotton swab used for the test, inserted up the nose and boring into the brain, all while some seemingly benign nurse or doctor makes small talk about the weather.
Or perhaps the trackers are implanted subcutaneously via a touchless thermometer that acts like a mini nail-gun — HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead! — opening a cerebral window for the government to exploit. We could then become unwitting assets for shadowy, alphabet-soup organizations, able to seize control of us whenever they want.
I’m not sure why any agency folks would want to spy on me, let alone use me as an assassin.
I mean, every once in a while I forget to recycle a milk jug and throw it away in the trash. I am a glutton for potato chips and french-onion dip. And I still owe Columbia House for a bunch of cassette tapes I bought for what I thought was just a penny back in 1984.
That’s about the extent of my nefariousness.
People who worry about tests and vaccines on the premise of pure privacy don’t realize how much personal information Americans willingly surrender every day.
We allow third-party apps on our phones to access a proverbial boatload of data about our whereabouts and shopping habits. Some of this information is used to match us to other products we might enjoy, and some of it is sold to still other organizations.
Much of the information is aggregated, so it can’t be (easily) matched to individual users. Still, those are a lot of data points and numbers for computers to crunch and for marketers to exploit.
And these are verifiable uses, not sci-fi extrapolations.
Let me go on record as saying I don’t believe the government is implanting tracking devices into our bodies — not through COVID-19 testing or any vaccines on the horizon.
How do I know? Well, I guess I don’t, except I know human nature. Perpetrators have been unable to stay quiet about far less complicated criminal activities, including a bungled burglary at the Watergate and alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election that seems obvious to everybody except Republicans.
The amount of coordination and collusion necessary to pull off the insertion of tracking devices into Americans — again, for the purpose of ... what, exactly? ... even if it were technically and financially feasible — would dwarf any past government secret initiative by a power of ten.
Yet such ideas persist, taking root in the country’s psyche much more deeply than any microscopic GPS device ever could.
Part of it is self-aggrandizement. We want to believe that we are more essential than we are, that somebody out there would find us important enough to track, manipulate, control.
Part of it is an appalling failure of the education system to teach critical discernment that could safeguard us from such conspiracy theories. The same phones and devices with which we so willingly share credit-card and social-security numbers give us, in return, access to a wealth of misinformation.
Much of this bogus material is trussed up in very appealing ways. It is cleanly typeset. It links to other sources, some reliable and many not, lending a sheen of authenticity to the spurious portions. Going down the Internet rabbithole is fast and easy, and what begins with facts quickly devolves into made-up stories about George Soros being a reptile and the Illuminati controlling our procreation.
We live in a society where the legitimate news media have been vilified — not completely without cause, I’ll grant you — and where unscrupulous players can use that vilification to cast doubt on everything we read and hear, including situations where contradictions are part of the natural course of evolving stories.
Take COVID infection and death numbers, which will fluctuate as monitoring systems become more robust. It is understandable numbers will change, sometimes dramatically, which does not mean that all the data is fabricated or that the coronavirus is a global conspiracy.
Ultimately, though, baseless conspiracy theories persist because they are just plain fun. So maybe your boss isn’t a scaly monster from Venus. But that guy who lives down the street? Hey.
Still, “fun” is not a valid reason to eschew science.
You’re not going to die from wearing a mask at the grocery store. You’re not going to get a tracker implanted from being tested for the coronavirus.
Let’s get real and focus on real problems.
Like murder hornets. Remember them? They’re still out there, and they still want to take our blood to their masters in the center of the (flat) earth.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
I’m trying to imagine what this looks like. Maybe nanotechnology is lurking on the cotton swab used for the test, inserted up the nose and boring into the brain, all while some seemingly benign nurse or doctor makes small talk about the weather.
Or perhaps the trackers are implanted subcutaneously via a touchless thermometer that acts like a mini nail-gun — HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead! — opening a cerebral window for the government to exploit. We could then become unwitting assets for shadowy, alphabet-soup organizations, able to seize control of us whenever they want.
I’m not sure why any agency folks would want to spy on me, let alone use me as an assassin.
I mean, every once in a while I forget to recycle a milk jug and throw it away in the trash. I am a glutton for potato chips and french-onion dip. And I still owe Columbia House for a bunch of cassette tapes I bought for what I thought was just a penny back in 1984.
That’s about the extent of my nefariousness.
People who worry about tests and vaccines on the premise of pure privacy don’t realize how much personal information Americans willingly surrender every day.
We allow third-party apps on our phones to access a proverbial boatload of data about our whereabouts and shopping habits. Some of this information is used to match us to other products we might enjoy, and some of it is sold to still other organizations.
Much of the information is aggregated, so it can’t be (easily) matched to individual users. Still, those are a lot of data points and numbers for computers to crunch and for marketers to exploit.
And these are verifiable uses, not sci-fi extrapolations.
Let me go on record as saying I don’t believe the government is implanting tracking devices into our bodies — not through COVID-19 testing or any vaccines on the horizon.
How do I know? Well, I guess I don’t, except I know human nature. Perpetrators have been unable to stay quiet about far less complicated criminal activities, including a bungled burglary at the Watergate and alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election that seems obvious to everybody except Republicans.
The amount of coordination and collusion necessary to pull off the insertion of tracking devices into Americans — again, for the purpose of ... what, exactly? ... even if it were technically and financially feasible — would dwarf any past government secret initiative by a power of ten.
Yet such ideas persist, taking root in the country’s psyche much more deeply than any microscopic GPS device ever could.
Part of it is self-aggrandizement. We want to believe that we are more essential than we are, that somebody out there would find us important enough to track, manipulate, control.
Part of it is an appalling failure of the education system to teach critical discernment that could safeguard us from such conspiracy theories. The same phones and devices with which we so willingly share credit-card and social-security numbers give us, in return, access to a wealth of misinformation.
Much of this bogus material is trussed up in very appealing ways. It is cleanly typeset. It links to other sources, some reliable and many not, lending a sheen of authenticity to the spurious portions. Going down the Internet rabbithole is fast and easy, and what begins with facts quickly devolves into made-up stories about George Soros being a reptile and the Illuminati controlling our procreation.
We live in a society where the legitimate news media have been vilified — not completely without cause, I’ll grant you — and where unscrupulous players can use that vilification to cast doubt on everything we read and hear, including situations where contradictions are part of the natural course of evolving stories.
Take COVID infection and death numbers, which will fluctuate as monitoring systems become more robust. It is understandable numbers will change, sometimes dramatically, which does not mean that all the data is fabricated or that the coronavirus is a global conspiracy.
Ultimately, though, baseless conspiracy theories persist because they are just plain fun. So maybe your boss isn’t a scaly monster from Venus. But that guy who lives down the street? Hey.
Still, “fun” is not a valid reason to eschew science.
You’re not going to die from wearing a mask at the grocery store. You’re not going to get a tracker implanted from being tested for the coronavirus.
Let’s get real and focus on real problems.
Like murder hornets. Remember them? They’re still out there, and they still want to take our blood to their masters in the center of the (flat) earth.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Monday, June 22, 2020
What About Scarlet and Elmer?
Talk about strange bedfellows: Both Scarlet O’Hara and Elmer Fudd are in the crosshairs of current culture wars.
For “fiddle-dee-dee” Scarlet, protagonist of “Gone With the Wind,” it’s that movie’s romanticization of Southern life that has become problematic. HBO Max pulled the film from its streaming service last week, with promises that the big-screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s antebellum classic will return with additional context, likely a disclaimer or a scholarly introduction. It came back within a week.
The film’s removal by HBO ignited some online kerfuffles, especially when former Fox News and NBC personality Megyn Kelly, she of the Santa-is-white and blackface-is-sometimes-OK sentiments, weighed in.
And here’s something you won’t hear me say often: I agree with Kelly’s assessment. She tweeted, in part, that “you can loathe bad cops, racism, sexism, bias against the LGBTQ community, and not censor historical movies, books, music and art that don’t portray those groups perfectly. Ppl understand art reflects life ... as we evolve, so do our cultural touchstones.” (The ellipses are Kelly’s.)
Suddenly, GWTW is hot again, shooting to the top of Amazon’s sales lists, maybe on the mistaken belief that it is going away forever. (For the record, I regularly see the movie in those ubiquitous $5 bins at Walmart, leading me to believe there are probably 1.27 copies of GWTW for each American who might want to own one.)
HBO Max is within its rights to reissue the movie with some sort of disclaimer or discussion of the movie’s racist undertones. After all, the film spotlights the struggles of one wealthy Euro-American woman over the anguish of all Southern enslaved peoples, and the entire film is a flowery love letter to a way of life that should be repugnant to all.
What would be wrong would be suppressing it completely and denying audiences opportunities to see and debate it.
Similar arguments could be made for the retention of the Confederate flag or statues of Southern generals in public venues, I suppose, but a key difference is that both statues and flags can be moved to museums, where the same level of critical context attached to problematic old films can be provided.
In a museum, the flag can be studied for its design or the statues for their craftsmanship, without having to subscribe to racist perspectives, often disguised as “legacy,″ attached to arguments for display in public parks and thoroughfares.
A disclaimer is no different, really, than the introductions added to books like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that explain Mark Twain’s use of the n-word. With GWTW, any pre-film explanation is similar in intent to the oft-mocked title scrolls across many classic cartoon collections, noting that they are “intended for the adult collector and may not be suitable for children,” as though the viewer were about to embark on a perusal of “Debbie Does Dallas” and not endless retreads of Bugs Bunny one upping Daffy Duck or the Coyote trying in vain to capture Road Runner.
And speaking of Warner Bros. cartoons, what about hapless Elmer Fudd, who fell into his own Acme vat of controversy recently, also related to HBO Max?
Word eked out that a new series of Looney Toons on the streaming service featured Fudd and Yosemite Sam without their deadly accoutrements.
At least one modern day Looney Toons writer noted that there weren’t many gags associated with Fudd’s rifle or Yosemite’s six-shooters that a) hadn’t already been done and b) would be appropriate in a society where gun violence has reached epidemic proportions.
That hasn’t stopped Elmer from suddenly appearing across social media sites, a modern-day, Second Amendment-supporting version of hapless Pepe the Frog, another character co-opted by conservatives to bemoan what they see as a loss of “traditional” values.
But new cartoons featuring classic characters behaving in different ways in no way invalidates the old versions. It’s not like those old cartoons vanished from collections; they’re still there, with the characters behaving in familiar ways.
It is a dangerous proposition to begin censoring art, and I’m willing to go to the mat in my insistence that commercial films like GWTW and vintage cartoons are just as worthy of protection and preservation as more high-falutin forms.
Sometimes, though, the venue and the presentation have to be tweaked, as is the case with older films and new presentations of old characters. It is up to the audiences, then, to debate the merits and shortcomings of each.
Censorship, no. Context, yes.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
For “fiddle-dee-dee” Scarlet, protagonist of “Gone With the Wind,” it’s that movie’s romanticization of Southern life that has become problematic. HBO Max pulled the film from its streaming service last week, with promises that the big-screen adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s antebellum classic will return with additional context, likely a disclaimer or a scholarly introduction. It came back within a week.
The film’s removal by HBO ignited some online kerfuffles, especially when former Fox News and NBC personality Megyn Kelly, she of the Santa-is-white and blackface-is-sometimes-OK sentiments, weighed in.
And here’s something you won’t hear me say often: I agree with Kelly’s assessment. She tweeted, in part, that “you can loathe bad cops, racism, sexism, bias against the LGBTQ community, and not censor historical movies, books, music and art that don’t portray those groups perfectly. Ppl understand art reflects life ... as we evolve, so do our cultural touchstones.” (The ellipses are Kelly’s.)
Suddenly, GWTW is hot again, shooting to the top of Amazon’s sales lists, maybe on the mistaken belief that it is going away forever. (For the record, I regularly see the movie in those ubiquitous $5 bins at Walmart, leading me to believe there are probably 1.27 copies of GWTW for each American who might want to own one.)
HBO Max is within its rights to reissue the movie with some sort of disclaimer or discussion of the movie’s racist undertones. After all, the film spotlights the struggles of one wealthy Euro-American woman over the anguish of all Southern enslaved peoples, and the entire film is a flowery love letter to a way of life that should be repugnant to all.
What would be wrong would be suppressing it completely and denying audiences opportunities to see and debate it.
Similar arguments could be made for the retention of the Confederate flag or statues of Southern generals in public venues, I suppose, but a key difference is that both statues and flags can be moved to museums, where the same level of critical context attached to problematic old films can be provided.
In a museum, the flag can be studied for its design or the statues for their craftsmanship, without having to subscribe to racist perspectives, often disguised as “legacy,″ attached to arguments for display in public parks and thoroughfares.
A disclaimer is no different, really, than the introductions added to books like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that explain Mark Twain’s use of the n-word. With GWTW, any pre-film explanation is similar in intent to the oft-mocked title scrolls across many classic cartoon collections, noting that they are “intended for the adult collector and may not be suitable for children,” as though the viewer were about to embark on a perusal of “Debbie Does Dallas” and not endless retreads of Bugs Bunny one upping Daffy Duck or the Coyote trying in vain to capture Road Runner.
And speaking of Warner Bros. cartoons, what about hapless Elmer Fudd, who fell into his own Acme vat of controversy recently, also related to HBO Max?
Word eked out that a new series of Looney Toons on the streaming service featured Fudd and Yosemite Sam without their deadly accoutrements.
At least one modern day Looney Toons writer noted that there weren’t many gags associated with Fudd’s rifle or Yosemite’s six-shooters that a) hadn’t already been done and b) would be appropriate in a society where gun violence has reached epidemic proportions.
That hasn’t stopped Elmer from suddenly appearing across social media sites, a modern-day, Second Amendment-supporting version of hapless Pepe the Frog, another character co-opted by conservatives to bemoan what they see as a loss of “traditional” values.
But new cartoons featuring classic characters behaving in different ways in no way invalidates the old versions. It’s not like those old cartoons vanished from collections; they’re still there, with the characters behaving in familiar ways.
It is a dangerous proposition to begin censoring art, and I’m willing to go to the mat in my insistence that commercial films like GWTW and vintage cartoons are just as worthy of protection and preservation as more high-falutin forms.
Sometimes, though, the venue and the presentation have to be tweaked, as is the case with older films and new presentations of old characters. It is up to the audiences, then, to debate the merits and shortcomings of each.
Censorship, no. Context, yes.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Whatever the Problem, Education Is the Solution
Years ago, I taught a writing class at a community college. One of the assignments was a problem-and-solution paper.
As the paper’s name indicated, students would select a concern in their personal lives, community or the world, and then explain steps that could be taken to solve or at least alleviate it.
The assignment was unfair. Many of these problems, in one form or another, have bedeviled society for millennia. Asking students to identify one and solve it in 500 to 750 words was unrealistic, even if they drilled down and dealt with only one specific aspect of a larger issue.
Students used to laugh at me because, as I wandered among peer-review groups and listened to participants read their papers aloud (reading aloud being the single best piece of writing advice I have ever received, and one that I try to impart to my own classes), I would always offer the same solution: education.
Homelessness? Education, for both the people living on the streets, to train them for in-demand work, to help them find resources to get them off the streets; and for the greater community, to help them realize the complex, underlying causes of homelessness, to develop empathy.
Obesity? Education, to help people recognize the relationship among diet, exercise and weight, and to help them recognize hidden biases they may have toward people based on size.
Climate change? Education.
War? Education.
Problems in education? Education.
Of course, there are solutions beyond education. Many of these problems need money thrown and a spotlight shone, so to speak, but both of those actions start with awareness, which is nothing but education with a “woke” name.
In some cases, I said, the only reasonable course of action was to point readers toward one or more possible solutions, with the caveat that getting the majority of people to move in one direction on anything is always harder than one thinks.
Fast-forward to 2020 and here we are, societally, struggling with another generations-old problem, racism, specifically as it has revealed itself through policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard a lot about “defunding the police,” a course of action that, as other commentators have pointed out, seems designed as a rallying cry for conservatives who want to indicate how out of touch progressives are with the “real world.”
I argue the issue is one of semantics, which in no way lessens the danger of saddling a viable solution with a loaded title. “Defunding” doesn’t mean — or doesn’t have to mean — actually abolishing the concept of police. Instead, it can and should mean shifting priorities and funding to deal with more of the health and welfare of underserved communities.
Of course, we still need police departments and people who are willing to protect our communities. But do police officers need access to full “battle rattle,” a level of armor and weaponry formerly reserved for the military, when some of our medical providers are battling COVID garbed in trash bags and recycled face masks? That money could be better spent addressing gaps in the American way of life — systemic racism, for example — and building a system of scaffolding to lift people out of poverty, substance abuse, and other challenges to upward mobility.
But before we do all that, we have to recognize there is a problem. And the best way to do that is — surprise! — education.
I’m continuing my own education on the issue of racism with a book that comes highly recommended from several fronts — “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do,” by Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford psychologist.
I can’t recommend the book myself as I haven’t yet read it. It’s on backorder,a good sign that others are also looking to increase their knowledge and understanding.
Of course, Eberhardt’s book is hardly the only one on the topic of hidden biases. I’m open to other suggestions, too, and I hope readers will share them.
If you search for The Next Big Idea Club online, that organization is offering a free e-study of “Biased.” I’ll be participating in that, as well.
This process of education takes time, and we are well past any reasonable deadline when systemic racism should have been dealt with. But we can’t let that stop us from taking the steps needed to make the world a better place for everybody, late though we are.
Defund the police? No. Reimagine and rebuild policing? Yes.
What that will look like is a problem worth solving.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
As the paper’s name indicated, students would select a concern in their personal lives, community or the world, and then explain steps that could be taken to solve or at least alleviate it.
The assignment was unfair. Many of these problems, in one form or another, have bedeviled society for millennia. Asking students to identify one and solve it in 500 to 750 words was unrealistic, even if they drilled down and dealt with only one specific aspect of a larger issue.
Students used to laugh at me because, as I wandered among peer-review groups and listened to participants read their papers aloud (reading aloud being the single best piece of writing advice I have ever received, and one that I try to impart to my own classes), I would always offer the same solution: education.
Homelessness? Education, for both the people living on the streets, to train them for in-demand work, to help them find resources to get them off the streets; and for the greater community, to help them realize the complex, underlying causes of homelessness, to develop empathy.
Obesity? Education, to help people recognize the relationship among diet, exercise and weight, and to help them recognize hidden biases they may have toward people based on size.
Climate change? Education.
War? Education.
Problems in education? Education.
Of course, there are solutions beyond education. Many of these problems need money thrown and a spotlight shone, so to speak, but both of those actions start with awareness, which is nothing but education with a “woke” name.
In some cases, I said, the only reasonable course of action was to point readers toward one or more possible solutions, with the caveat that getting the majority of people to move in one direction on anything is always harder than one thinks.
Fast-forward to 2020 and here we are, societally, struggling with another generations-old problem, racism, specifically as it has revealed itself through policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard a lot about “defunding the police,” a course of action that, as other commentators have pointed out, seems designed as a rallying cry for conservatives who want to indicate how out of touch progressives are with the “real world.”
I argue the issue is one of semantics, which in no way lessens the danger of saddling a viable solution with a loaded title. “Defunding” doesn’t mean — or doesn’t have to mean — actually abolishing the concept of police. Instead, it can and should mean shifting priorities and funding to deal with more of the health and welfare of underserved communities.
Of course, we still need police departments and people who are willing to protect our communities. But do police officers need access to full “battle rattle,” a level of armor and weaponry formerly reserved for the military, when some of our medical providers are battling COVID garbed in trash bags and recycled face masks? That money could be better spent addressing gaps in the American way of life — systemic racism, for example — and building a system of scaffolding to lift people out of poverty, substance abuse, and other challenges to upward mobility.
But before we do all that, we have to recognize there is a problem. And the best way to do that is — surprise! — education.
I’m continuing my own education on the issue of racism with a book that comes highly recommended from several fronts — “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do,” by Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford psychologist.
I can’t recommend the book myself as I haven’t yet read it. It’s on backorder,a good sign that others are also looking to increase their knowledge and understanding.
Of course, Eberhardt’s book is hardly the only one on the topic of hidden biases. I’m open to other suggestions, too, and I hope readers will share them.
If you search for The Next Big Idea Club online, that organization is offering a free e-study of “Biased.” I’ll be participating in that, as well.
This process of education takes time, and we are well past any reasonable deadline when systemic racism should have been dealt with. But we can’t let that stop us from taking the steps needed to make the world a better place for everybody, late though we are.
Defund the police? No. Reimagine and rebuild policing? Yes.
What that will look like is a problem worth solving.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Friday, June 5, 2020
Just Trump being Trump
When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes call me Maytag because I was such an agitator.
I could rile up her or my sister not with grandiose actions but with small ones — whispering the same word again and again, tapping a pencil on a counter, making some weird noise or facial gesture.
Over time, those small behaviors, repeated, would elicit angry responses. When they did, I was good at appearing innocent or acting aggrieved. In reality, I knew exactly what I was doing.
We are a few decades removed from Maytag making sense as a nickname — is the company still synonymous with the spindles in washing machines? — but it’s a sobriquet I use often where President Donald Trump is concerned.
In the last three and a half years, we’ve seen his tendency toward agitation many times. If Trump’s presidency were a symphony of disruption, then the volume has increased over the last three months, reaching what could be a crescendo in the last week.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Trump would say one thing publicly, and then slither back to the White House and tweet something contradictory. For example, he would announce support for plans to reopen the country slowly, based on science and evidence, only to tweet criticism of governors for doing exactly that and attaboys for protestors marching on statehouses, demanding immediate repeal of stay-at-home orders.
Just Trump being Trump, both his supporters and critics said. “Maytag,” I said.
Trump’s erratic, aberrant behaviors had become so accepted, so normalized, that most people on either side of the aisle just shrugged their shoulders. It was the price his followers felt acceptable to get a few more conservative judges on the bench and a few more tax cuts for the wealthy on the books.
But now Trump’s proclivity for agitation is being seen for what it is — a liability in a crisis. Coupled with the president’s thin skin and apparently deep-seated insecurities, it serves only to inflame already tense standoffs between protestors and police in cities across the country.
Last week, for example, Trump, smarting from his portrayal as a leader cowering in the basement of the White House (which led to an alliterative Twitter hashtag that can’t be printed in a family newspaper), decided a photo op was just the thing to strengthen his sagging poll numbers and calm a disgruntled nation.i
So after a weekend of tough-guy tweets and a raucous phone conversation where he called governors “weak” and advised them that they “didn’t have to be too careful” in dealing with their fellow Americans, he addressed the nation from the Rose Garden (more mostly Mafioso-style talk and threats of using the military domestically) and then sauntered over to St. John’s Episcopal Church.
But in a series of events that would be comical if they weren’t by turns so sad and alarming, police had been ordered to move peaceful protesters away from the church because they were standing where the president wanted to go.
So out came the flash grenades and the chemical sprays, clearing the area so the president could pose for a photo in front of the building, holding a Bible, maybe upside down, thus commandeering the iconography of religion to demonstrate ...
Well, nobody can be quite sure what President Trump was trying to demonstrate. Strength wrapped in scripture? God’s ninja enforcer? A modern-day savior driving out the money changers?
Whatever it was, it was roundly criticized by Episcopalian leadership, even as it was embraced by far-right Christian nationalists who were seemingly unfazed by the contradiction of violently removing protestors so the president could use symbols of peace as a prop.
At its heart, the entire incident was more time squandered that could have been better spent listening to protesters, hearing their legitimate concerns about systemic racism, and proposing substantive changes in the way police departments around the nation respond to people of color.
Instead, his ill-advised mission accomplished, Trump retreated to the safety of his Twitter bunker, where he could act aggrieved that coverage of the event wasn’t as glowingly positive as he had imagined in his fevered dreams.
Deeming it all “Fake News,” Maytag Trump has resumed his role as agitator in chief, retweeting his favorite Fox News talking points, along with “LAW & ORDER” and other examples of what passes for conciliation and hope in this long, sordid spin cycle.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
I could rile up her or my sister not with grandiose actions but with small ones — whispering the same word again and again, tapping a pencil on a counter, making some weird noise or facial gesture.
Over time, those small behaviors, repeated, would elicit angry responses. When they did, I was good at appearing innocent or acting aggrieved. In reality, I knew exactly what I was doing.
We are a few decades removed from Maytag making sense as a nickname — is the company still synonymous with the spindles in washing machines? — but it’s a sobriquet I use often where President Donald Trump is concerned.
In the last three and a half years, we’ve seen his tendency toward agitation many times. If Trump’s presidency were a symphony of disruption, then the volume has increased over the last three months, reaching what could be a crescendo in the last week.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Trump would say one thing publicly, and then slither back to the White House and tweet something contradictory. For example, he would announce support for plans to reopen the country slowly, based on science and evidence, only to tweet criticism of governors for doing exactly that and attaboys for protestors marching on statehouses, demanding immediate repeal of stay-at-home orders.
Just Trump being Trump, both his supporters and critics said. “Maytag,” I said.
Trump’s erratic, aberrant behaviors had become so accepted, so normalized, that most people on either side of the aisle just shrugged their shoulders. It was the price his followers felt acceptable to get a few more conservative judges on the bench and a few more tax cuts for the wealthy on the books.
But now Trump’s proclivity for agitation is being seen for what it is — a liability in a crisis. Coupled with the president’s thin skin and apparently deep-seated insecurities, it serves only to inflame already tense standoffs between protestors and police in cities across the country.
Last week, for example, Trump, smarting from his portrayal as a leader cowering in the basement of the White House (which led to an alliterative Twitter hashtag that can’t be printed in a family newspaper), decided a photo op was just the thing to strengthen his sagging poll numbers and calm a disgruntled nation.i
So after a weekend of tough-guy tweets and a raucous phone conversation where he called governors “weak” and advised them that they “didn’t have to be too careful” in dealing with their fellow Americans, he addressed the nation from the Rose Garden (more mostly Mafioso-style talk and threats of using the military domestically) and then sauntered over to St. John’s Episcopal Church.
But in a series of events that would be comical if they weren’t by turns so sad and alarming, police had been ordered to move peaceful protesters away from the church because they were standing where the president wanted to go.
So out came the flash grenades and the chemical sprays, clearing the area so the president could pose for a photo in front of the building, holding a Bible, maybe upside down, thus commandeering the iconography of religion to demonstrate ...
Well, nobody can be quite sure what President Trump was trying to demonstrate. Strength wrapped in scripture? God’s ninja enforcer? A modern-day savior driving out the money changers?
Whatever it was, it was roundly criticized by Episcopalian leadership, even as it was embraced by far-right Christian nationalists who were seemingly unfazed by the contradiction of violently removing protestors so the president could use symbols of peace as a prop.
At its heart, the entire incident was more time squandered that could have been better spent listening to protesters, hearing their legitimate concerns about systemic racism, and proposing substantive changes in the way police departments around the nation respond to people of color.
Instead, his ill-advised mission accomplished, Trump retreated to the safety of his Twitter bunker, where he could act aggrieved that coverage of the event wasn’t as glowingly positive as he had imagined in his fevered dreams.
Deeming it all “Fake News,” Maytag Trump has resumed his role as agitator in chief, retweeting his favorite Fox News talking points, along with “LAW & ORDER” and other examples of what passes for conciliation and hope in this long, sordid spin cycle.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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