Like a Rider on a Downbound Train

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

Uber, But For the Moral Arc of the Universe

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.

Secretly Ironic: Trust me on this one

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

Not Currently Anxious? Read This

Today’s post includes a substantial section of cuteness at the end to balance just how awful the news is right now.

Political Sewage

The only thing particularly unique about America’s illiberal turn is just how long so many desperately clung to the myth of its exceptionalism. They clung to it, one assumes, bc they could not face up to the depth of the darkness before them. There is no looking away now though.

Jasmin Mujanović (@JasminMuj) January 31, 2020

A map of congressional districts where elections were decided by margins smaller than the capacity of an Applebee’s restaurant

Arizona’s voting laws ruled to be explicitly racist.

A police accountability tool maps police shooting and notes “From 2013-2019, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed 34 black men and Oklahoma City Police Department killed 25 black men. This is an average rate of 7.0 per 100,000 black male population in St. Louis and 8.5 per 100,000 black male population in Oklahoma City – a higher rate than the 2018 US Murder Rate of 5.0 per 100,000.”

Foreign Policy magazine has an article titled “The American Empire is the Sick Man of the 21st Century,” which directs a broad range of invective at… well, everyone who’s gotten us to this parlous state:

Trump, as almost everyone at least privately concedes, is incompetent at fulfilling his most basic responsibilities and a global laughingstock…. Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments …His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. … Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome. But Trump is only a symptom, the most blatant and cartoonish example of how the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation.

I mean, you know things are bad when Slavoj Žižek is the most relevant political philosopher, as BLDGBLOG argues:

Žižek specifically highlights moments during those politically fake procedures—which were not trials in any real sense, but dramaturgical events, literal theater, administrative stagecraft—wherein Communist Party members broke out in laughter at the earnest replies of people trying to defend themselves against imaginary accusations.

Part of that laughter… was directed at the sheer absurdity of seeing someone take the trials seriously, of watching a person genuinely and truthfully engage with the charges—disloyalty, treason, betrayal, whatever. Party members witnessing these acts of earnest self-defense correctly perceived them as a perverse and comedic misunderstanding of the position those defendants found themselves in. It was the laughter of embarrassed disbelief: wait, you think all this is real?

The last time the Methodists had a schism, it was over slavery… and we all know how that went.

Long Reads
This rather long n+1 article about Instagram is well worth your time. It is subtitled “We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt-lift.”

Twitter Curation
This thread about Star Trek and tech bros and who deserves to be a person

This woman is very disappointed in her congressional representation… in eleven different places at once.

An immigration lawyer explains the standard operating procedure for immigration officials, including their most common official lies

Maybe today the Warren and Sanders people can unite in agreement that Buttigieg is a PowerPoint presentation that got its wish to be a real boy.

True Crime podcasts are counter-revolutionary (@edburmila) January 15, 2020

A public defender recounts a case in which his client faced years in prison based on a police officer’s perjury. The cop got probation and a stern slap on the wrist.

Pretty Good News
You can now delete most of the targeting & tracking data Facebook has about you.

Cultivating Joy
A certain retriever is running for First Dog
Dog steals GoPro
This cinematic masterpiece in eighteen seconds (sound on for soundtrack)
Turn your sound on again for this rapper, who has an entire album of similarly well-produced silly songs about dogs
Dog using a carwash brush to scratch its butt
Finnish reindeer get reflective antler paint for nighttime visibility

New Year, New War

I intended to assemble a round-up of year-end round-ups. I did not, although Jason Kottke has one. I briefly considered writing something about Iran. I have nothing to say on the subject but instead will recommend the Pome newsletter, which recently sent me the heartbreakingly topical 2013 poem “We Lived Happily During the War,” by Ilya Kaminsky.

In the last edition of this letter, I insulted Maryland governor Larry Hogan and felt bad about it, because what if he’s not actually that awful? Was I just waxing hyperbolic? Nah, he’s really that awful.

Other things that underline awfulness: Noah Smith livetweeting a conference panel about deaths of despair. A parent worrying about how to process the fact that their kid’s toy doctor set includes a debit card and point of sale system. Voting districts over-weighted in power because they’re filled with hundreds or thousands of prisoners who can’t vote. A new and gloomy analysis of Gen Z’s economic prospects by Malcolm Harris, author of the previous gloomy economic analysis Kids These Days.

I can’t tell whether this scathing indictment of the latest Star Wars movie is good or bad news, but I have been very much a fan of the scathing reviews of Cats, which have been numerous enough to warrant multiple summarizing roundups.

Cultivating Joy
99 very good pieces of news we tended to overlook in the gloom.
This dog has been trained to play Jenga.
This very soft looking cat.
This pupper tried to eat a bee, but he’ll be OK.
This list of people struggling with words had me weeping with laughter.

Newsletter: Watch Out For This Flag

We’re headed into the end of the decade, which means we’re going to see a lot of wrapups and retrospectives. “The Worst Takes of the 2010s” is at least fun. Ish. But my favorite meaningless speculation is about what we’ll call this next decade. Last time around, it was roaring. Of course, it was at least 1925 and probably closer to 1930 before people started calling it that. But my vote for this decade is burning.

Just as a reminder about the stakes here

Twitter comedy interlude

DOCTOR: I have good news and bad news

ME: Oh no, what’s the bad news

DR: The earth is dying and we will run out of natural resources in 10 years

ME: Uh wow, what’s the good news

DR: You won’t be around to worry about it

— Michael Enjoys the Work of Helen Hunt 🌶 (@Home_Halfway) November 27, 2019

The cruelty is the point

If you haven’t seen it on the back of pickup trucks recently, you ought to be aware of this flag, which is labeled as a ‘blue live matter’ flag. That blue line represents police, standing between society and disorder. Disorder, of course, represented by, you know… *looks around nervously* a bad element.

cop-flag

People who fly this flag claim to support the police, but they know what they’re doing: this is a taunt. When Black people assert that their lives matter, this flag yells back: “No they don’t.”It is, fundamentally, a fascist flag, asserting the primacy of the armed force of the state over civilian lives. That’s one reason why it’s so beloved by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, whose entire appeal to voters is that he stands between (Black) Baltimore and (White) suburban Marylanders.

So, if you don’t know, now you know. You’ll see the flag around. Watch out for people flying it.

I can’t actually tell if Trump’s “Jews are a Nationality” rule is just a weird Title VI end-run, but it certainly rhymes with ominous historical antecedents. That graphic novel about Weimar-era Berlin is seeming pretty relevant these days.

Cultivating Joy

At least this cat is cute
If you don’t already know them, I also recommend Bowie the Cat (who does bear a resemblance to David Bowie) and Fig, an incredibly tiny little dog in Philadelphia.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

I got a real full-time job not long ago, as a “Digital Content Strategist,” and it’s been great so far. I’m new, so anything wrong with the website isn’t yet my fault, and I can show up and say “I’m really looking forward to helping you with that!” and people will like me. I mean, also I have to actually do the work, but the people I’m collaborating with are inclined to trust me and collaborate with me, so it’s been a good start.

There are some oddities, though. There’s a jail right across the street from the office. It’s a very pretty jail. Designed not to look too penal, if you know what I mean. It’s not even labeled as a jail on Google Maps – it’s the “Jail Officers & Employees Association of Suffolk County.” But at any given time there are about 200 people locked up awaiting trial right across the street.

It could be worse. It’s a relatively new building. The prior location for the jail, just down the street, had conditions so notoriously bad that it was ruled a human rights violation in 1973… and then shut down in 1990. The old jail building is now the very fancy Liberty Hotel. Yes, the hotel restaurant/bars are named Clink, Alibi, and Scampo (escape). Get it?

A Word About Compromise
So, Joe Biden thinks that when he’s elected, maybe in a landslide, Republicans will return to a spirit of bipartisanship. As Jamelle Bouie points out, repeatedly, this is … what’s a polite word for “dumb as hell?”

biden’s entire campaign is “i was obama’s vice president” but he apparently slept through the entire eight years. https://t.co/AigMAdagVA

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) November 12, 2019

If you don’t trust a New York Times columnist on Twitter (and why should you? Any Florida county commissioner will tell you it’s all fake!) take it from middle-of-the-road neoliberal shill Matt Ygesias: “Republicans’ Smear Campaign Against Biden is Devastating to His Theory of Politics.”

Remember, we’re not talking about people who want to compromise. Republicans at all levels are, and I cannot stress this enough, really REALLY out there. Donald Trump runs fake contests to have lunch with him, and nobody cares, but Donald Trump Jr. was recently booed off stage by an even-more-right-wing crowd angry he’s not anti-gay enough. (The relevant historical metaphor here, if you’re looking for one, is Franz Von Papen thinking he could control Hitler).

Meanwhile, in St Louis
A police officer was assigned to go undercover at a civil rights protest as a sort of agent provocateur. He provoked someone, alright, and got the living daylights beaten out of him by a co-worker. Apparently he has trouble eating now.

The cop who beat him said in his defense that it was “nothing we all haven’t done and if it was a protester it wouldn’t be a problem at all” he said. Besides, “going rogue does feel good,” doesn’t it boys? (Not like St. Louis has a monopoly on police malfeasance – up here in Boston we’ve got an ongoing state police overtime-faking scandal that bilked the state for hundreds of thousands)

Doom
New South Wales edition.
Chesapeake Bay edition.
Peconic Bay edition.
Northern California/Oregon kelp forest edition.

Trust me
Poetry: October, by Louise Gluck
Pop culture: The history of the Ken doll’s crotch
High culture x Pop Culture: Werner Herzog loves WrestleMania
Heartbreakingly bizarre: The Wrong Goodbye

Cute
This cat video seems like a good metaphor for most internet arguments.
A crocodile hatching is… well, sorta cute?
Everything from Kitten Lady is pretty great, but my fave right now is this one.
Cat hiding in box of cornflakes.

Golden Age of Escapism

Old-school blog maestro Jason Kottke occasionally posts a list of what he calls his recent media diet. Just, here’s what he’s been interested in, and he hopes you might be too. He usually chooses pretty interesting stuff, which is sometimes intimidating. A lot of what I’ve been consuming recently is deliberately not that interesting.

But after a long day of global insanity it’s terribly nice to shut out the outside world. The Guardian says that “comfort TV” is a legitimate trend, and I am completely unsurprised.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a sweeping space opera series called The Expanse. It’s been bumbling around in my awareness for ages and is now more widely known because of a somewhat-popular TV adaptation from Syfy and (ugh) Amazon.

I’m obsessed. Right now I’m waiting for two more volumes of the series to arrive at my library. But it’s not a media food I can recommend unreservedly, in the way I recommend Becky Chambers to everyone even if they don’t like sci-fi. For one thing, the first book is heavily macho, featuring a hard-boiled detective dude, a washed-up military dude with lofty ideals, and a young woman in peril. Second, it’s enormous: eight volumes so far, each thick enough to stun an ox. By the time the novels begin to interrogate and mock the macho tropes laid out in the first volume, you’re already seven or eight hundred pages in. Key bits of the universe – the actual expanse of the title – don’t even begin to show up until volume four. “Give it two or three thousand pages” is a pretty big ask for most folks skeptical about the premise of intergalactic political intrigue.

On to the linkings.

How We Live Now
Briefings from the Justice Department have included articles from noted white nationalist website VDare
A Falun-Gong affiliated group has been spending heavily on pro-Trump ads on Facebook
Sydney Morning Herald: US in the Midst of a White Nationalist Terrorism Crisis
Dallas police recorded laughing as they killed a man they had arrested
An incoming Harvard freshman was deported on arrival because he’s Facebook friends with someone who has opinions that CBP didn’t like
Someone has felt the need to develop a fashion line designed to confuse automated license plate readers

Cultivating Joy
This very round bird is adorable
This kitten and dog are friends
There were once giant parrots in New Zealand
The “glamorous opossum lady” is living her truth and we should respect that
 

Hot new disaster trends for the burning 20s

We got to go to Delos this week, the highlight of a long-delayed honeymoon trip. The whole island is currently a museum and UNESCO world heritage site with maybe 14 residents, all of them archaeologists. Everyone else can visit for the day, usually via ferry from nearby resort-heavy Mykonos.

Delos been mostly uninhabited for centuries, but its status as the mythological birthplace of Apollo and Artemis made it an important holy site for almost a thousand years leading up to the first century BC. In 478 BC, it became the neutral capital of the Athens-dominated Delian League. Although it traded hands a few times, it prospered as a port and slave-trading center for hundreds of years, making it very wealthy indeed.

A series of pirate attacks culminated in 69 BC with a thorough sacking and looting. As trade routes shifted, people moved away. As worship of Apollo faded, people moved away. It simply didn’t matter any more. It’s been an archaeological site since 1872. What’s there is stunning: an entire town reduced to its crumbling walls, an enormous theater, faded mosaics of Dionysus in banquet rooms that undoubtedly hosted epic orgies. A number of key statues have been moved for preservation and replaced with replicas, including the melted-looking Naxian Lions and a famous depiction of Aphrodite smilingly beating Pan with a shoe. What’s missing is more significant: all the metal. All the wood. All the cloth. Even a lot of the stone. There’s a giant marble plinth with notes about the enormous statue of Apollo that it used to hold. The British Museum has a foot, the Athens Museum a hand. The head is long since stolen and lost. A lot of the body was apparently chopped up and used in other sculptures or buildings.

In other words, the entire place is a monument to hubris and a reminder of the fragility of empire and stone and everything we build or do.

And after a few hours of being humbled by ancient ruins, we turned around and got back on the ferry to Mykonos, with its new port served by cruise ships and its old port served by mega-yachts, the water coming up just to the edge of the charming bars and restaurants of Little Venice. And its adorable street cats. Not long after that, we got on a plane and flew halfway around the world, spewing carbon dioxide all the way. So today I feel humbled, and hypocritcal, and troubled by the rhymes of history.

(Coincidentally, the song “Mykonos” by Fleet Foxes is about someone failing to get sober after a trip to rehab in Mykonos. I don’t know why anyone would attempt rehab there. Mykonos seems like it would be one of the worst possible places in the world to get sober. Our hotel’s welcome book actually included a brochure for an IV rehydration hangover treatment.)

The collapse approaches
Climate change is shifting wine regions around.

Climate migration has begun to appear in the US, although it’s still more notable in Siberia.

Your context sets your expectation, which is why the climate apocalypse seems totally normal. (There are roughly half as many birds as there were just a hundred years ago…)

A second example: one Key Largo neighborhood, already used to intermittent fall flooding, has been substantially flooded for more than 40 days. “For us now, this is normal life,” one resident says.

Most maps of Louisiana are inaccurate; subsidence, erosion, and rising sea levels are shrinking the coastline faster than maps can keep up.

California’s blackouts are another glimpse into the climate change future. So are preparations for the Tokyo Olympics, where a badly timed heatwave would potentially kill spectators and athletes alike.

And also
A map of concentration camps in America.

Searing short memoir/long blog post about family, abuse, internalized racism, and redpill toxicity.

Fun
Not from The Onion: Fire sparks mass explosion of semen at cattle breeding centre.

This is just super cool.

Nothing is Real

I’ve been thinking recently about the end of objective reality. Not in any objective and real sense, of course. Objective reality is still out there. But how do we know what it is?

The New York Times, still the paper of record (or so I’m told) employs a columnist who thinks that masturbation is somehow harmful. (This is an actual thing he said, not some screenshot fake. I think.)

Schools are obliged to teach facts but abstain from opinion and religious instruction. So… they also avoid teaching about World War II, because that might not have actually been a thing? That dude got rapidly reassigned. At least, the totally fake Washington Post says he did. And how can we trust the news outlet owned by some rich dude with an agenda, especially one that can’t even report on a hurricane with any accuracy?

We can all joke about how this year is the 50th anniversary of when they faked the moon landing, but David Brooks is this very moment allying himself with the very reputable Jewish magazine Tablet to try and redeem the wildly antisemitic trope of “cultural Marxism.” Does the Prime Minister of Israel believe in the race “science” he’s been pushing? (I mean, someone claims he’s doing it? I mean, it’s still live on his official account, so maybe that’s actually a thing that’s happening?)

Did Kellyanne Conway actually just ask a journalist their ethnicity? Did journalists finally call the president on his environmental bullshittery? Is the veil finally coming off the Atwater-era lie about the Republican not being racist to its very core?

Did a Nobel-Prize winning economist just use the n-word six times in a single column in the New York fucking Times?

Will Deepfakes make these questions harder to answer and less relevant to ask?

Anyway, truth is dead and so are we. Eat Arby’s.

Cultivating Joy (Probably. These GIFs are too good to fact-check)
A squirrel began hoarding nuts inside this cellular antenna. It hoarded a LOT of nuts. Or maybe that’s just what anti-5G conspiracy theorists WANT you to believe!
Can a bird play peekaboo? Who knows. Could be faked. Don’t care.
Pretty sure humans are dumb enough that this is 100% factual.