Author: Aaron Weber

A red-letter day, marked in red on a calendar, is an important day. A black letter day, then, must be an ordinary day, an unimportant one. There are several recent-ish songs about it, notably by The Cardigans (“Black letter day, all the joy has gone away”) and Frank Black and the Catholics (“When the morning breaks, I wake and see it’s just another long black letter day”).

Those songs came to mind immediately when I saw this article in Wired about work-from-home fatigue sapping our ability to concentrate, focus, or create:

Every day is the same as the next, they say: stuck at home, which is also work, and failing miserably at being productive. They are experiencing a neurological phenomenon, chronic low-grade stress, which was triggered by the coronavirus lockdown, and has sent our bodies into overdrive and is wearing down creativity and concentration.

Vox of course is here with an explainer of the history and future of videochat.

Normal Activities

BLM protests have faded from the headlines, but in Portland, Oregon, unidentified paramilitary forces brought in by the federal government have been snatching protestors off the street for no apparent reason. I was skeptical of that statement at first, because I saw it from Twitter leftists rather than from reputable news sources. But it’s been picked up by Oregon Public Broadcasting and other major news sources.

What’s interesting is that not only is it unclear which of various federal security forces they belong to, but that state and local authorities have asked the feds to cut it out.

The other interesting thing is that the Department of Homeland Security states that these paramilitaries are necessary to stop “violence” which seems to be defined mostly as… graffiti and vandalism.

Anyway, the mayor wants them out, the governor wants them out, they have no actual justification to be there, and they’re still just sort of out there. The Washington Post describes the cracking of skulls:

The protester, armed only with a speaker, stood across the street from a line of officers clad in body armor in downtown Portland, Ore., on Saturday night. When they threw a canister his way, video shows, the protester calmly rolled it away. Seconds later, shots rang out, and he crumbled to the ground with blood gushing from his head.

The Times is on it as well:

Mr. Pettibone said he was terrified and that at no point was he told why he was arrested or detained, or what agency the officers were with.

US Marshalls denied that Mr. Pettibone had been detained. (I repeat: a man was briefly kidnapped by an unidentified paramilitary force and officials deny that it happened).

Duke Sociology professor Kieran Healy notes:

Quite honestly, if the country gets used to this sort of thing as a normal event that can happen to the wrong people, you’re one and a half steps away from people being thrown out of helicopters and into the sea. https://t.co/bIfTV0H4R2

Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) July 17, 2020

He’s not joking, nor are the fascist memelords hoping to give “free helicopter rides” to “globalists” (i.e. Jews) and liberals.

Interestingly, the cops are entirely focused on left-wing violence, despite obvious and clear indications that right-wingers have been instigating a great deal of it.

“Throughout the documents you see counterterrorism agencies using extremism so broadly as to mean virtually anything that encompasses dissent,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept. “There are instances in which people engaging in white supremacist violence get the benefit of the doubt as potential lone offenders, while people of color and those who dissent against government injustice are smeared as threats with guilt by association.”

We’re just out here having a normal one, but now it’s on video and harder to ignore. But we’re still ignoring it as best we can. Studiously. Resolutely.

Look harder. The Times has a compilation of NYPD attacks on civilians, but that’s just the ones that the Times deems important and New-York-Centric enough to highlight. There’s a Google doc of crowdsourced horror here. If you’re not yet nauseous, try scrolling through the Reddit board /r/2020PoliceBrutality, featuring such gems as “LAPD beats man in wheelchair.”

Cultivating Joy

You must be kidding. It’s just another long black letter day.

Ever find yourself unable to look away from the horrors of the news cycle? The term of art these days is “doomscrolling” and it’s a bad habit. Our president is a huge fan of war crimes. He’s in a hole and just keeps digging. Oh look, a profile of those gun-waving jerkasses in St. Louis — perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a history of being jerkasses. Hey, the brain drain caused by immigration restrictionism is really kicking into high gear.

OK, here’s one optimistic take — Maeve Higgins writes about living in the US for the Irish Examiner.

Longer reads

Foreign Affairs has twin articles this month titled “How a Great Power Falls Apart” and “How Hegemony Ends.” The first begins with a short summary of the work of underappreciated Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik and his insights into how impending collapse is invisible from the inside. The second is a rather more conventional geopolitical analysis:

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.

The New York Review of Books is excellent on the topic of fascism’s resurgence here:

As militarized police in riot gear and armored vehicles barreled into peaceful protesters in cities across America, and its president emerged from a bunker to have citizens tear-gassed on his way to a church he’d never attended, holding a Bible he’d never read, many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.

Interview speaks with Jia Tolentino:

INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?

TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.

Cultivating Joy
Gibbons fascinated by hedgehogs
This dog doesn’t look real
This cat hasn’t quite got the hang of being a cat yet
This dog floating in a pool
Blep

When the pandemic began, every email marketer was sending out an announcement about their upgraded cleanliness policies to their full list, even the unengaged contacts, and it got to be almost funny that every company I ever did business with ever was sending me pandemic-related something. I mean, seriously, eVacuumStore.com, I do not need to hear from you about this. I order vacuum bags from you once a year.

And the language just got to be almost rote, everyone borrowing from each other. And I began to wonder what phrase would still resonate later — what would be the title of the definitive memoir of the plague years.

Would it be “Out of an Abundance of Caution” or “These Uncertain Times?”

And now, we can say that it’s definitely going to be “These Uncertain Times.”

Just watch this ad from notoriously rude Chicago hot-dog stand The Weiner’s Circle, which begins with “In these uncertain times” and ends with “fuck you Corona, you sound like the name of a sneaky-ass bitch.”

Music for These Uncertain Times

For whatever reason, I never got into Bruce Springsteen. Did I just miss the age for The Boss appreciation? I’m not sure. But I’ve seen folks online joking that he’s the man for These Uncertain Times because his music is about being underemployed, alienated and horny. Anyway, I keep seeing the lyrics crop up in pop culture in odd places, like this juxtaposition of the lyrics to “Atlantic City” with Trump administration scandals.

Then NextDraft, recently my fave newsletter, did a whole issue with different news themed to different Springsteen songs, and one of them was Downbound Train, and when I looked it up on Spotify it offered me two versions – one by Springsteen, and a cover by Kurt Vile. That’s actually his name, no relation to Kurt Weill. Anyway, the cover’s pretty nice, give it a listen. I’ve had it on repeat for the past two days, because, well, don’t you feel like a rider on a downbound train?

News

Bloomberg: Coronavirus brings American decline out in the open

The U.S.’s decline started with little things that people got used to… They grumbled about high taxes and high health-insurance premiums and potholed roads, but rarely imagined what it would be like to live in a system that worked better….
The consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy.

Vox: What day is it?

Time, at least as we understand it, is also a byproduct of capitalism… as industrialization became the norm, time became a mechanized system that no longer served those who’d invented it. We increasingly served at the beck and call of time, for that is how those who possessed capital could best regulate those who performed the labor.

Muckrake: Deadly Paranoia: White America has been radicalized and prepped for violence, starring the couple with the terrible trigger control brandishing firearms from the front porch of their palatial mansion.

The point is, none of this is new. What happened in St. Louis is only an exposure of what has long infected the body politic of the country come to the surface. It is the ugly reality of who we are and where we have been. Only now, in an era of twenty-four hours news, the internet, and conspiracy theory as a means of political strategy and financial profit, the infection grows worse and worse, not to mention potentially deadly, by the day.

Bonus STL Magazine: Profile of said mansion’s restoration.

Nieman Lab: It’s time to change the way we we report on protests

On May 31, WUSA, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate, tweeted, “Pepper spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march honoring George Floyd” — suggesting that the pepper spray somehow acted of its own accord … So when Slate published a story with the headline “Police erupt in violence nationwide,” it was almost startling in its forthrightness.

Bonus: Slate article highlighting spreadsheet of police violence incidents.

Cultivating Joy

Very tiny dog

Taika Watiti holding Baby Yoda

Twitter tale about accidental wildlife cuddles

Dogs learn teamwork

Sound on for these tiny kittens meeting a big dog

The fallacy of Whig historiography is the idea that history is a progression, has a story and a point, a destination. It’s not. People do things, and things are done to them. Maybe we learn from those events, maybe we don’t. Maybe we take away the wrong lessons. Maybe the real treasure is the friends we made along the way. Maybe the real treasure is a trillion-dollar coin.

A senator calls for the military to be deployed against American citizens based on an imaginary threat from an amorphous philosophy, and the New York Times deems this idea worthy of discussion. The senator is running unopposed.

Former US spies announce that they see the warning signs of dictatorship looming, and they’d know, they’ve helped install dictatorships before.

The leading challenger to the current regime thinks maybe it’d be OK if cops shot people in the leg instead of the face.

Perhaps we are at a tipping point. Maybe we make it tip toward good. Maybe we don’t.

People keep getting this wrong. Frankenstein is the doctor’s name. The monster is Mitch McConnell. https://t.co/IsVNJdW2ZX

Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 23, 2020

Other Newsletters In Case You Don’t Get Enough Email
Pome: Daily poem
Letters from an American: This specific American is a professor of history
Popular Information: Independent journalist Judd Legum calls people and organizations to account

Best of Twitter
Family lore discussion: This person’s Grandma had an affair with…. Don Knotts?

/r/relationships advice: Who among us has not had a violent feud with a Waffle House line cook?

Dave Pell switched to edibles.

Literary games of Twitter: Quote the first sentence of a book, then add “and then the dragons arrived.” In these sorts of challenges I always go with 100 Years of Solitude: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to discover ice, and then the dragons arrived.”

Cultivating Joy
Komondor goes swimming
Muppet dog courtesy of /r/rarepuppers
Dogs working from home

Stay safe out there, friends.

Birds do it
Bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it
Let’s start a plague

— The Library Owl 🎄🎅🦉 (@SketchesbyBoze) March 1, 2020

What could possibly go wrong? While we wait for the end of the world (if not The Virus, then perhaps The Asteroid? Perhaps The Spider?) let’s take a quick look at why we deserve it.

Injustice System
If you recall the cop-flag from a few weeks ago, I’ve come across several additional good stories about it. The first is a comic about the evolution of the paramilitary commando fascist aesthetic; the second a warning about police departments using sociopathic vigilante superhero The Punisher as a mascot; the third is either hilarious or terrifying or both: Meet Blue Lives Mickey, the Worst T-Shirt in the World.

You may think you know terrible t-shirts from such places as Atlantic City or The Internet, but trust me. This is the absolute worst.

The Climate
Just like Brexit created zillions of unanticipated stupid hassles, the climate crisis is doing the same thing. Like, who owns land that doesn’t exist anymore? Can you legally fish in newborn rivers that used to be someone’s back yard? And why do we keep buying bigger and bigger SUVs and trucks, to the point that they no longer fit into our garages? Are we hitting the era of Peak Car and cool/sad automotive infrastructure photography? Is it too late to make a difference?

The Zeitgeist
Trust me, Patricia Lockwood is always worth a read. In this case, she’s writing about the hivemind of the internet in the London Review of Books.

Also the Washington Post on racialized dialect in sign language.

The Conversation: Humans Aren’t Designed to Be Happy. Stop Trying. (If design govern in a thing so small…)

The Cesspool
Lawyers, Guns & Money on soft authoritarian thresholds.
US leaves international accord on preventing road deaths.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Border Patrol has what amounts to a license to kill people on either side of the US/Mexico border with total impunity.
Tax breaks Jared lobbied for seem to have made him a huge amount of money for some reason.

Cultivating Joy
Dog & Owl Are Friends
Cat crams its face into a Pringles can
This kitten that seems very upset it hasn’t figure out how to move very well yet