Author Dusty

Art Schooled

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This was a bad school year.

It was a bad year for a number of reasons: I taught Freshman English for the first time in seven years, and it was a struggle. My students – nearly all of them – are addicted to their phones and generally unwilling to read, which made every class a struggle. My administration, which has changed – hang on – eight times in the last five years, changed again, and it was both unexpected and unwelcome, as the principal, who was a friend, had to leave the position for health reasons. But before he left, he asked me to take down a Facebook post for political reasons, which was gross, and he wrote me up for cussing at my class (which write-up was justified, because I did – well, I cussed about them in front of them, I didn’t cuss AT them, strictly speaking. But it deserved some kind of sanction.) and for leaving them unsupervised, which was NOT justified as I had just stepped out into the hall and was right outside the door, as teachers are instructed to do when we want to talk to a student individually. He left before the end of the semester, and a district admin filled in until the new principal started with the new semester: and that guy wrote me an email warning that he would write me up if I didn’t keep my classroom door closed and locked at all times. And on top of all that, Toni’s and my personal lives, specifically in relation to our families, was difficult all year, which made every stressor at school just that much harder to deal with.

And then, this spring, the school cut staff because our enrollment is projected to go down: and one of the first ones laid off was my wife, who had been the advanced art teacher at my school for the last three years, teaching an Honors/AP class and the only life drawing class offered in a public high school in Arizona. (We checked.)

That last one. That’s why I’m here writing.

Not because my wife lost her job: that sucks, it came as a shock and it ruined a very manageable system for our family, because it was very convenient for us to work at the same place, and it worked well for her to teach only part-time, and the income she earned on top of mine was enough to cover our expenses. No, I wanted to write about this because my school cut back their art program. Toni wasn’t the only art teacher, but the full-time art teacher (Who, to be entirely fair, had less seniority than Toni, and so Toni should have been offered her position rather than being cut first – but also Toni would have turned it down, because the full-time art teacher position includes teaching two levels of middle school art, which Toni did for three years the first time she worked at my school, and she will not do it again. But also, they should have offered her the position, if we are using the seniority rules that most schools abide by. But I digress.) will only be teaching Art 1, which is the usual survey art class most people get in high school, where you try a little of this and a little of that, and focus on nothing in particular – it’s a bit ADHD, really. Toni’s classes were the ones that really got into some depth, into the specifics of a form of art – drawing and painting, which are Toni’s specialties. And she knows them better than any high school art teacher: because Toni is a specialist, she doesn’t really want to do clay sculpture or weaving or whatever other art forms most high school art teachers include. But Toni’s students learn more about drawing and painting than they will anywhere outside of college – and in some cases, more than they would in college. Toni changes their way of thinking, their way of perceiving the world: it is her intent, and her students have attested to it. It works. She does it. She teaches them not only how to make art, but how to think like an artist.

My point is, our family’s personal situation aside, and my basic dander being ruffled over those buttheads RIFing my wife, my school had a unique art program. And they cut it. First thing. No, second thing; first they cut the Turkish language classes, which in some ways was even more shocking, as the school was founded by Turkish immigrants who were working in tech jobs here in Tucson, and started a STEM charter school with an international focus so that their kids could have a decent place to learn the STEM skills their engineer parents wanted them to have. The original charter for the schools includes a requirement that Turkish always be a language offered to the students. And they cut that too. But with Turkish, there may have been other reasons: the teacher struggled with the job in ways Toni did not, and the Turkish classes were not terribly popular, which Toni’s classes are; and there are two other languages (Spanish and American Sign Language) offered at the school still. So other than simply recognizing that the administration cut back on both languages and art, and they removed two different unique aspects of the school’s programs, I’m going to focus more on the art that they cut.

Because it was stupid to cut it. And damaging, both to the school and the students. I will note, along those lines, that they did also cut our paraprofessionals, who offer one-on-one assistance to our SPED students, and they cut our wonderful counselor/504 coordinator, who offered emotional and educational support to all of our students as well as to our staff. So they made the school worse in several ways, not just through cutting the arts and languages programs.

Now, of course, cuts had to be made: the enrollment is down for next year, and we get paid per student by the state. We’re losing something over 10% of our total student body next year, according to projections. We have always lost some number of students because we are a small charter school (Just so that everyone is clear on this, charter schools are public schools but we don’t have elected school boards and we don’t have a geographically fixed district to draw students from), and students who want to go to schools with larger sports programs or more elective options usually leave: every one of our high school classes (with some exceptions) is smaller than the one below it – we have fewer seniors than juniors, fewer juniors than sophomores, and fewer sophomores than freshmen. That’s expected. The problem is that we are losing students from every grade: and the puzzling thing is, so is every other public school in Tucson. One of the middling public school districts has had to cut millions of dollars from their budgets because so many students are leaving.

So the obvious question is: where are they going? If public schools were shrinking and charter schools were growing, that would make sense; it would show that parents wanted smaller class sizes for their children, and maybe a specific focus like my schools’ STEM identity. If charter schools were shrinking and public schools were growing, that would mean even more students than before wanted more elective options or maybe more varied social life and so on; also, there is definitely a number of students who are not successful at our school and who transfer to other schools hoping for a different outcome. But that goes both ways, as well; we usually get the ones who “get in trouble” and need to be removed from their friend group. And in Arizona, at least in Tucson, ALL public schools, charter and comprehensive, are shrinking.

So where are those students going?

Some are going to private schools. Some – more, I would guess, though I don’t have data – are going to online schools, or homeschooling. Some are probably just dropping out, though they may be lying about that, telling their prior school or the state that they will be homeschooled or attending online school, and then just going out and getting jobs instead.

And that’s where this all starts getting frightening.

Because this shows that public education is dying.

Probably not everywhere, though I highly doubt Arizona is alone in this; we’re just first, because we have pioneered the Republican party’s long, slow erosion of public education in this state, and we have pushed it a little farther and a little faster. Arizona has been in the bottom three for both test scores and teacher compensation for several years; now we are seeing the payoff. Especially when you include the fact that our business-friendly – sorry, make that business-sycophantic – state has cut taxes to the bare minimum and below (A trend exacerbated by the number of “snowbirds,” retired people from cold states who winter in Arizona and sometimes declare residency here and vote here, where they obsessively and virulently oppose all taxes, because they don’t need much from the state in the way of services and damned if they’re going to pay for those friggin locals), while also allowing families to create “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” which allow them to pull funding from public schools and spend their tax dollars on their children’s private schooling. So now we can see why private school enrollments are going up: because it is a well-established principle that our capitalist society believes that something you pay for is higher quality than something you get for free, so paying tuition at a private school clearly means their kids are getting a better education.

I mean, maybe not one with advanced art programs.

But now we don’t have that at our charter school, either, so. Might as well send my kids to that big Catholic school. You know they can maintain discipline. And they have a pretty good football team, too.

Those same ESAs help explain online schooling, as well, and I suspect there are at least some parents who take the money and make some idle gesture towards homeschooling – probably while telling their lazy kid to go get a job. Though honestly, I would guess most people who go the homeschooling route, or the drop-out-and-go-to-work route, either don’t know about the ESAs and how to access them or don’t care, and the money probably just stays in the system. What money there is in the system. Which really ain’t enough, even without families pulling it along with their kids, as though the only reason we pay taxes for schools is to educate only our own children.

Funny how those ESAs aren’t offering rebates to childless couples like myself and my wife. It’s almost like it’s intended to harm public schools, not to be “fair” to taxpayers in some way. Oh wait, that’s right: it is.

This is part of the long-term Republican project. You can see it happening faster, and a thousand times clumsier and stupider, in Trump’s attempted destruction of universities, with Harvard currently acting as the breakwater. Public education is bad for Republicans, you see, in a number of ways: first because educated citizens are harder to fool, and when your entire mission statement as a political party is to use cultural wedge issues to get elected, and then bait-and-switch so you can cut regulations and taxes for corporations and the wealthy, you need citizens who are easy to fool, or else you’ll never get re-elected. Secondly, public education tends to teach people how to question, how to reason, and how to research for themselves; all of which makes it harder to gin up a successful level of fear and anger with wedge issues. Someone who can Google competently, for instance, is far less likely to vote for politicians who promise to keep trans athletes out of sports: maybe because the competent Googler could find out just how miniscule is the population of trans athletes in sports, or one could discover that trans athletes do not have a persistent advantage in sports once they start hormone therapy, or that the divisions we have used in sports for the last century or so are not as black and white as the GOP would have us believe, as human biology and sex categories are neither simple nor clear-cut. And lastly, modern education, especially taken to the university level, tends to reduce people’s adherence to dogma, and to increase people’s empathy, not least because universities are where people meet other people who don’t look or talk or act or believe just like them. It’s easy to keep a childhood faith when you live in the same town you grew up in, where everyone goes to the same church every Sunday; it’s much harder when you go to college in a different state, and not only don’t have the exact same denomination of Christianity there, but also start meeting people from other nations, people who are Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or atheist. Especially when you learn real science, or history.

Oh: and then there’s the fact that uneducated people make more easily exploitable workers. Right? Because uneducated people in the Appalachians are always going to be coal miners, and uneducated people in the South are always going to be sharecroppers and farmworkers, and uneducated people everywhere are going to cling to the “good” jobs they can get – by which I mean being sexually harassed at Wal-Mart or having to piss in a bottle in an Amazon warehouse – because they know they won’t be able to find anything better. So they’ll absorb wage freezes and benefit cuts, they’ll live with reduced hours and a lack of promotions. They’ll (generally) oppose unions, because they don’t want to see their paycheck go down even as little as unions dues would take; and they’ll immediately and violently turn on darker-skinned immigrants who are “taking our jobs.” All of which serves the desires of corporations and the wealthy, and therefore the primary mission of the Republican party.

So for all of those reasons, the Republican party wants to destroy public education. I am now grown cynical enough to think that the Democratic party is on board with at least some of this project – because this has been going on for decades, and the Democrats haven’t made any of the structural changes that would be necessary to solve the problems, primarily a national school funding scheme and a national curriculum and free college tuition – but at least Democrats want to appear to support education, and so they don’t pull shit like trying to close Harvard or removing evolution from school curriculum.

But they’ll sure as shit agree to cut art. Which is why my wife got cut.

To be clear, the decision to cut the advanced art teacher specifically came from the district administration. As I said above, they have cut everything they could that makes the school a better place for students; because they district administration, unsurprisingly, are Republicans. That’s an assumption, but it’s not exactly a leap, based on every interaction I have ever had with said administrators. But just like when Republicans in Washington cut something – SNAP benefits, for instance – that Democrats support pro forma but not with any sincerity, there is some noise made about opposing the GOP, and then about reversing the cuts; but all they actually do is use those cuts as their own wedge issue, to get Democratic voters to vote for whichever corporate stooge the party wants to install in power, who will then make life easier for their wealthy donors, while making it harder for their poor voters; because even though Joe Biden didn’t create a national minimum wage, or create a national system of health care coverage, or tax the wealthy in any kind of rational way, or cut the military and end all wars and the American network of international political oppression – hey, at least he’s not Donald Trump, amirite?

My friends and I have joked – bitterly, and often humorlessly – that our administration is DOGEing our school: making stupid, short-sighted cuts that are going to do far more damage to the entire endeavor than they are worth in terms of money saved, and with reckless and almost gleeful disregard for the lives they are affecting with those cuts. But while I guess the Democrats in Washington are trying to oppose Elon Musk and the DOGE cuts, I didn’t see any real opposition from any of our administration to the cuts made at our school. Regret, sure; I saw that. Wishes that a way could be found to avoid the cuts, and plenty of blame for those mean ol’ district administrators who actually determined who would be RIFed. But no action. And not that I expect anyone to throw themselves on their sword and quit so that my wife could keep her job – after all, I didn’t do that (though I recognize that such a self-sacrifice would actually be self-defeating in our particular case) – but a friend of mine pointed out that all of the teachers were given a raise this year; not a substantial one, but several hundred dollars – and if you took $500 of that raise from all of the staff members at the school, that would basically cover my wife’s salary. So if my friend the teacher could find that money, I don’t really believe the administration couldn’t. No: they didn’t try.

Because the school administrators didn’t really disagree with cutting the advanced art teacher.

They did not cut the core teachers, of course. They DEFINITELY did not cut the STEM teachers – sorry, the STM teachers, as we do not currently have an Engineering program. They did cut the administration a few years back, when they combined the principal positions at the elementary school and the middle-high into one principal of both schools (another DOGEing, because it was a stupid cut that has caused nothing but inefficiency and problems at both schools), but they didn’t cut it more to meet this most recent budget shortfall. Even though administrators get paid two to four times as much as teachers (and an even greater multiple for my wife, who was part-time, or the paraprofessionals, who were paid less per hour).

They may have regretted RIfing my wife, because she is a wonderful person and a wonderful teacher: but on the inside, they agreed that cutting advanced art was the right thing to do. And cutting the third (and least-popular) foreign language. And cutting the staff who only serve some, but not all, of the students.

Because those cuts make sense, right? I mean, the people who serve the largest number of students are clearly the most valuable. And come on: it’s not like art is that important. We all know what really matters, what schools have to focus on: jobs. And STEM is where the jobs are, the good jobs, the career jobs like computer programmers and software engineers. Aerospace engineers. Mechanical engineers.

You know: the guys who work for Elon Musk.

I could go off on this topic for a very long time. I already have, frequently. Schools should not be focused on jobs: the task of education is to make life better for our students, and thereby to make the world better for all of us; and nobody is actually served by having students go into engineering. Sure, it’s a career; but is it actually a satisfying one? One that would serve to define the identity of our students, over and above any other element, all of which other elements we almost completely ignore? Job preparation, inasmuch as it is an appropriate topic for schools, should not be focused on STEM white collar jobs like engineers or accountants or science teachers or researchers: the real need in this country, and the real area of potential employment, is in the trades. And I would argue our students would be FAR better served by becoming trained mechanics, who would make as much or more as many engineers and scientific researchers – who would go home and read philosophy and compose classical music and act in community theater and, most importantly, PAY ATTENTION TO FUCKING POLITICS IN THIS WILD SHITSTORM OF PRIVATELY FUNDED GASLIGHTING WE PRETEND IS A NATION.

But school shouldn’t be focused on job preparation, not at the K-12 level. We need to do three things: give students the basic tools they need to succeed in ANY serious endeavor in their life, primarily the ability to think critically and to learn on their own anything they have not already learned; teach them to be decent fucking human beings; and expose them to as many different kinds of human activity, as many different modes of thought, as possible. We particularly need to focus on the exactly the ones they will not use at work every day of their lives: because if we teach them nothing but how to work, what will they do during their off hours?

You know what they will do: the same thing most of them do now, the same thing that too many of us do.

Nothing.

We should teach them how to make art (And music, and poetry, and everything else that we include in the “arts”), precisely because it is not the thing they will do 9-5 Monday through Friday throughout their lives. (And also, even at a small charter STEM school, let’s not pretend there are not at least a few students there who WILL make art into the thing they do 9-5, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives; and let’s be clear that the more people we can help move into that kind of life, the better off we will all be.) It is the thing they should do to express themselves in ways they cannot, during their 9-5 jobs, Monday through Friday, throughout their lives. It is the thing they should do to claim time and mental energy for themselves, even when they willingly sacrifice all of their free time, money, and energy to their future children. Because art is one of the most personal things we can do, and everybody needs personal time, and everybody needs personal expression.

Because art is fundamental. It is fundamentally something that makes us human: it defines us as humans, because no other animals make it in quite the way we do. Art allows us to express what is inside us that cannot be expressed, which forces us to find ways to express it: and if no ways exist, it forces us to create ways to express it, because that voice inside cannot be silenced once it is ever allowed to speak. Art makes us more human, because it forces us to think in ways we normally do not, and that adaptable, imaginative projection outside of our habitual thought patterns is our primary survival strategy, our defining trait, whether we are hunting mammoths or trying to survive in the rat race of society. If we intend art to be shared with others, then it forces us to think about how others think, and how we can communicate and affect other humans; and that improves our empathy and our cooperation, and it opposes our desire to exploit and oppress each other, because you can’t exploit and oppress people you see as your equals, as your fellows: as other people who can appreciate art as you do.

That’s why billionaires are never artists.

The job of schools should not be to channel students into specific pathways; that is limiting them, it is oppressing them – it is lessening them. Art expands us: it frees us, and ennobles us. It makes us greater. That’s why students love it, because they are dying to be more than they have been allowed to be: because they want, more than anything, to discover themselves and express themselves.

Are they supposed to do that in chemistry class? In computer programming class? In math?

My school does not understand what the task of a school is. Which means they will fail at their actual task, while they are pursuing, single-mindedly, the wrong task. And they will fail at that, too. And they will never understand why.

Because they, too, are not artists.

(I’ve been listening to this next one for more than thirty years, and always loved it, and never knew what it was about — because I never bent my mind in this particular direction. Now I love it even more. The audio here isn’t the best version, but it goes SO well with the image.)

And this one’s ridiculous, but — necessary. Entirely necessary.

Shock and Awful

Dusty 1 Comment
SHOCK AND AWE IRAN 2020
Okay seriously I Googled Shock and Awe to find a header image for this post, and I found this — and WHAT THE COWABUNGA IS THIS???

Here: maybe this will be better. It’s a chimp, and that’s not actually poop — but the source is awesome, too.

Poop-Throwing Chimps Provide Hints of Human Origins | WIRED
Read this. Really.

It’s so hard to get my head around it.

I’m good at understanding things: especially people. I am extremely empathetic, I am a student of human personality and interactions, and I try never to underestimate the complexity of a person and their actions and the motivations. Because of my vocation, I have spent time with and communicated in fair depth with thousands of people; and because of my avocation, I have spent countless hours imagining people and creating their actions and motivations. So I think about this a lot: why do people act the way they do? And normally, I think I’m pretty good at understanding why people do what they do, and making sense of it.

But I can’t make sense of Donald Trump.

It pisses me off, and that’s part of why I call him a shit-flinging gibbon: that is my own frustrated attempt to fling that would-be dictator, that narcissistic Nazi, that Cheeto-skinned charlatan, the hell away from me, to dismiss him as nothing more than a beast, an animal without complex motivations. He tries to have sex with anyone female for the same reason he tries to eat all the cheeseburgers he can: because he is nothing but instinct, pure id. Just basic survival urges in a primate that is not currently in a survival situation, and so, just as if you imagine that great ape in a fine restaurant, for instance, he screams and climbs on the tables and the wait staff, and he chucks the table settings and steals people’s food, cramming it into his mouth while he threatens to bite anyone who gets too close to him.

I like thinking of Donald Trump as a terrified primate who is trying to bluster his way out of danger so he can hide somewhere with the bunch of bananas he just stole. And based on much of what he does, I think it’s a pretty helpful way to try to understand him.

Take his reaction, for instance, when he was first asked about the Signal group chat where his top advisors and his Vice President acted like braggadocious buffoons, while clearly violating multiple federal laws by chatting about war plans, in advance of an attack, on a non-secure, non-governmental chat app that the Russians had already targeted for hacking – the Russians who are years ahead of us in cyberwarfare.

Trump reacts to Signal group chat: ‘I don’t know anything about it’

Now imagine that’s a monkey being threatened by a reporter aggressively asking it a question that it can’t understand at all.

“I don’t know anything about it,” which he repeats several times, is the monkey first grunting and then screeching, backing away and baring its teeth; the nonsense attack thrown out at the Atlantic “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business” is the monkey swiping with a paw at the aggressor; the line about “Well it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective” is the monkey trying to look taller, maybe beating its chest to appear tough.

See how well it works?

But it doesn’t explain everything. It’s fun to imagine, and there are some moments when, truly, Donald Trump acts like an unthinking animal just reacting – often overreacting – to what he sees as a threat or a challenge; but it doesn’t explain everything.

My biggest problem is trying to understand Trump’s plans and strategies. Obviously this is where the primate metaphor breaks down, because while the great apes are capable of planning multi-step tasks and so on, they’re still not very good at it; and as far as I know, they are double plus ungood at understanding abstract concepts, which Trump clearly thinks about quite a lot: he wants to be famous, he wants America to be great. He may not understand what he’s actually doing and what really makes America great and what does not, but he does seem to have a grasp on the concepts “America” and “great.” So in this situation, he’s not just a shit-flinging gibbon. But it is difficult for me to think about Donald Trump as a person with a plan, and with a strategy. But I know it’s unfair to consider him as the opposite: having no plans at all, having no strategy – just the shit-flinging gibbon. That’s not right either. I genuinely don’t get it: too much of what he does makes no sense, at all. Take leaving the Paris Climate Accords: all he has to do is ignore it, as every past president has done, even the ones who sign these well-meaning but toothless treaties; somehow we’ve never managed to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and never managed to reduce our dependence on individual cars, and never even tried to have a national conversation about our consumption of goods and how it produces excess carbon (Here’s a wild thought: what if the tariffs are really just a four-dimensional chess strategy to reduce America’s carbon footprint by cutting us off from our international consumer goods?). Ignoring the treaty, and then making an ad about American energy production standing in front of some oil-spewing well in North Dakota, right in front of a giant oversized American penis-truck, which is parked in front of, let’s say, a single-use plastics factory which is belching out black smoke, would do all Trump wants to do to own the libs and encourage his base in their worst habits; so why make America look bad internationally by leaving the treaty? It doesn’t make sense, which makes me want to understand Trump as an idiot.

But is he?

Let’s examine the data and try to extrapolate a strategy. It makes sense to me that Trump wants the support of his base. That source of power, that he can sway his base any way he wants, has been much of the secret to his rise to the White House twice (Also twice losing the popular vote); so when he says things that make them cheer, that makes him happy. Makes perfect sense. I like saying things that make people happy with me, that make people clap for me; who doesn’t? And as that base following his lead helps keep the GOP in line, it makes even more sense that he would do things that make them happy. So because they are white supremacists, they hate DEI: thus he tries to crush DEI. Being also intolerant evangelical Christians, they hate trans people: thus he tries to ban trans people from existence. Back on the racism tip, along with the backwards-looking (and insane) patriotism, they like Confederate monuments: he tries to bring back the Confederate monuments that were removed after the murder of George Floyd. I don’t believe Donald Trump, who is a racist but also doesn’t seem to particularly care about anything that doesn’t profit him directly, and doesn’t mind spending time with people of color if they do have something to offer him, particularly cares about all of this stuff, but his base does and he likes to make them happy, so he does these things. I get that. No problem.

Another example: Trump is supported by billionaires, and considers himself aligned with billionaires and the pro-business wing of the Republican party. They do not care about DEI or the existence of trans people (Some of them do, to be sure; there are some fundamentalist Christian people who are obscenely wealthy and would really like this country to be a Christian theocracy; Betsy DeVos springs to mind. But for the most part, they just want more money and less government control over them.), but they hate government regulation: so he tries to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and tries to shut down the EPA, and so on. Okay.

Then there is the crazy shit: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and Mount Denali, and trying to take over Greenland and so on. Now, to some extent, that is sticking it to the libs, which his base and the billionaires love; and it’s also trying to look tough, which his base loves; and the Greenland takeover offers quite a lot of untapped mineral wealth, which the billionaires love. But also: really? I can’t imagine that he actually sees any of that as critical issues for the US to confront, and I can’t see even his base particularly caring about Greenland or any of the names of national monuments and geographic features that most of us never refer to by any name.

And then there are the things he is doing that are clearly just fucking stupid: the tariffs. I know the billionaires don’t want that to happen; they don’t want any government regulation. The regular folks in the base still love anything Trump does, and he has talked for years about how great tariffs are, so okay – but you know what he hasn’t done? Lowered the price of groceries or gasoline. Which was the most important issue that got him elected, by far, among both his base and the Republican voters in general. And if he wants to achieve anything in his term, he needs the Republican party to maintain control of the Congress, and he clearly knows it as he keeps trying to push the GOP candidates in the special elections, and he took back Elise Stefanik’s nomination so she could stay in the House. So why the hell hasn’t he tried to push the grocery stores to lower the prices of eggs? Why hasn’t he reduced or removed regulations that would make it easier to import eggs? Why hasn’t he cut deals with oil and gas companies to reduce the price at the pump – or even easier, gotten Republicans to remove gas taxes to lower the price a few cents a gallon? Anything he could do on that front would cement his popularity, and make him ironclad against any criticism. Even ineffective but well-publicized attempts, which is mostly how he gins up support from his base, would solidify his popularity.

So why hasn’t he done it?

Why is he working so hard to help Israel slaughter the people of Gaza? Sure, the conservative Jewish population supports Israeli aggression in general, and the right wing has used the Hamas attack to beat the drums of paranoia in order to sell guns to right wing Americans (who really need to be scared of military age men coming over the border, because maybe they are going to start gunning us all down just like Hamas did to the Israelis). And there’s this whole bizarre thing about evangelical Christians making Israel very important in their worldview because the apocalypse will happen there, or something. But as I understand it – I am not an evangelical Christian, which is perhaps an unnecessary disclaimer, and I am also not going to investigate their insanity too carefully – the idea is just that the Jewish people must possess the land of Israel before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can occur. And there’s also supposed to be a bunch of war, and an antichrist (I got a candidate for you…) and a bunch of other things; but it seems to me that none of that requires the full removal of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and nothing else other than religious zealotry would even begin to explain the support for the genocide of the Palestinian people by the most famed victims of genocide in the history of the world. (I also cannot understand the desire of the Israeli government and military to literally just murder every Palestinian person. Don’t they ever get tired of revenge? Have they all just completely lost all humanity?) But there’s Trump, meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, sending all the weapons he can, threatening to rain down hell on the Gaza strip if Hamas doesn’t surrender all their leverage by giving up all the remaining hostages, authorizing (I mean, I assume he authorized it at some point, but maybe it was just Hegseth) attacks on the Houthis for their solidarity with the Palestinian cause – and talking about ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip so that he can build the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Okay, I get that last part. Trump is a real estate developer who specializes in gaudy, ostentatious, appalling displays of gross wealth and egotism; of course he’d see an opportunity in Gaza, which is beach front property on the Mediterranean. It probably felt like a task he could actually do well, as contrasted by everything political he can’t do, and who doesn’t like a chance to show off their actual expertise? I think he thought about it like a resort development project he was pitching, and he can’t understand why nobody else can see his vision; I bet he made at least one call to a model-maker whose services he has used in the past. And I bet he was stunned that nobody else agreed with his idea. All of which helps to show that he has the mentality of a child, and maybe he’s just pouting until everyone else decides his idea was the best and then they’ll come back and ask him to fix Gaza.

I mean, we literally did that with the Presidency of the United States. So I wouldn’t even consider it dumb for Trump to expect us all to come crawling back, asking him to do whatever he wants to do. I bet he’s counting on it. After all, when you’re a celebrity, you can do anything to them you want.

I hope all of the MAGA voters understand now what it feels like to be grabbed by a sexual predator. I’m sure the Palestinian people – everyone else in the world, really – would very much like to avoid that experience.

Now, if all of this is merely the actions of a shit-flinging gibbon, then that explains the stupidity of it all. There are some understandable motivations – power-seeking, for instance – which explains some of what Trump has done at least adequately. But I have not been able to think of an overarching goal which gets all of it to make sense. If tax cuts and regulation reduction shows a desire to help business, the tariffs fly in the face of that. If his real goal is to help (or just to please) the MAGA base, then that explains the racist culture wars, but not the lack of even attempted action on grocery prices or the cost of living. And if he really wanted to be a dictator for life, he not only wouldn’t have told the country that he was considering a third term, thereby tipping his hand, he wouldn’t have kept Hegseth and Mike Waltz after the Signal chat, because I guarantee you that what they did pissed off the military, whatever they may say in public (or not) and however they feel about Trump. Hegseth and Waltz – and Gabbard and Rubio and all the rest – actually genuinely put American pilots at serious risk of being shot down by the Houthis, who have advanced anti-aircraft weapons systems, and who have channels through Iran to Russian intelligence, which easily might have picked up the Signal chat PARTICULARLY SINCE STEVE WITKOFF WAS IN RUSSIA WHILE HE WAS PARTICIPATING IN THE CHAT.

One complaint I have about the Trump era: I don’t even know when to use all caps any more. Is that the most egregiously offensive aspect of the Signal chat? Or maybe it was the emojis? When is it time to yell? I want to yell all the time, but obviously I can’t do that.  I have outrage fatigue.

Now, there is an obvious answer here, which would have pleased Trump’s base since they love when he is a heartless asshole, and it would have pleased the military, and it would have pleased the Republican party in Congress: he could have just fired everyone in that group chat. He loves firing people. It’s not even like he doesn’t want to signal that he made a mistake with his cabinet picks: he fired like 80% of his own picks during the first term, and the rabble just hooted and hollered and clapped their chapped hands and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that it choked him, and he fell down at it. (Sorry: that’s a Shakespeare reference. To The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, which I have taught often enough to have memorized some parts. I will have to write another post showing the comparisons between that play and Trump – and I better do it before he gets Et Tu’ed in the Senate, or else nobody will be impressed by my acumen.)

But no: Trump didn’t fire anyone. Which lost him (I would guess) support in the military and in congress, and indirectly with his base, who do not actually care about Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard or Mike Waltz: they care only about Trump. But they do generally support the military, so again, to shore up his own power and reputation, Trump should have fired them all, and made a big deal out of it. Tell me he couldn’t find another half-dozen nutballs to replace those “advisors” with. Are there no other alcoholic womanizing hyper-masculine douchebags in the military apart from Pete Hegseth? Seriously? And I even have a suggestion for someone to replace Gabbard as National Head of Intelligence: Maria Butina.

If Trump wants to be a dictator for real, he will never succeed without the full-throated support of the military; I don’t have to know any history at all to know that, but of course I know enough history to know that literally every single successful coup, ever, was carried off with the military’s complicity or at least tacit agreement and inaction.

So yeah, I don’t get it. Trump doesn’t make any sense to me.

But then I remembered this book I read with my book club. (By the way: I would HIGHLY recommend a book club like the one I am in. Half a dozen smart, involved people, and we read books that help us make sense of the madness of the modern world. It is – not necessarily comforting, because we read a lot of really disturbing shit; but it feels so very good to know that other people are thinking like you are and feeling like you are. Plus we get to have snacks, and the members who host our meetings make DAMN good snacks.)

The Shock Doctrine

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

This is a fascinating and deeply depressing book. It explains the economic paradigm known as neoliberalism, championed most effectively by the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, and the effect that paradigm and Friedman have had not only on the United States, but on nations around the world. The title comes from another – uh, “expert” – whose ideas have had enormous influence on our world, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed that people who had suffered terrible trauma in their lives, and who suffered the natural and inevitable consequences of that trauma, could be “cured” by replacing their traumatic memories with a tabula rasa: a blank slate. No memory of trauma, no psychological or emotional damage. He thought he could rebuild the person afterwards into a healthy and well-adjusted citizen. He experimented, therefore, with different ways that one could destroy a person’s memories, and eventually, a person’s whole personality, because the personality kept stubbornly resisting the attempts to erase the memories – almost like memory is an essential part of personality, or something. And so the process didn’t work, as any sane person could have guessed it wouldn’t; his attempts to erase a person’s memories and personality essentially just fragmented both, but never erased them. Klein doesn’t say because she doesn’t know what his real goal was, whether he wanted to help people and was just completely soulless, or if he was in fact a monster who wanted to destroy people, but when his theories didn’t pan out, he kept working on them – and ended up working for the CIA, finally creating for them a handbook on torture based on his work. The idea of it was that you could disorient someone so terribly that they would lose the ability to remember things like loyalty to their country or cause, or the consequences of revealing secrets they might have, and would therefore, in an incoherent state following the application of repeated and awful torture, be excellent sources of information because they wouldn’t even realize that they were revealing secrets, and so wouldn’t have to be coerced; and because they wouldn’t know who they were or what they were doing, they wouldn’t do things like conceal key pieces of information or lie at specific moments in order to protect whatever they were telling the CIA about.

The reason Klein talks about Cameron is because the basic system he created was what Klein calls the shock doctrine: in various tortuous and traumatic ways – frequently just literal electroshock, and frequently psychedelics administered without the knowledge and consent of his targets – Cameron would start with an incredible and overwhelmingly destructive attack on the psyche of his victims. He realized – or maybe it was the CIA that realized – that the most effective way to do this to a person was to remove anything that could be used as a solid base to stand on, mentally and emotionally speaking: Cameron is the reason why torturers now disorient their victims as much as they cause suffering, because that makes it easier and faster to eliminate any sense of self, any sense of identity: disrupt sleep, disrupt a sense of pattern or time passing, take away the victim’s knowledge of where they are, of what time it is, of what to expect, of who they are talking to, of anything and everything at all: do it all at once, as rapidly and overwhelmingly and completely as possible. This shock, either electric or psychological, was supposed to create the tabula rasa. And as I said, it didn’t, but it did effectively destroy people’s ability to resist control, and thus interrogation. And Klein’s insight was to recognize that Friedman and the neoliberals he taught and trained, and the political actors they influenced – there are several in the book, which is long and thorough, but perhaps the two most effective examples would be the George W. Bush administration, and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from his 1973 coup through his overthrow in 1990 – used the same concept as a way to effectively short-circuit the democratic rule of law in countries they wanted to control.

Pinochet does it first, and he does it with the explicit assistance and advice of Milton Friedman himself, who advised Pinochet on how to establish a capitalist paradise after Pinochet had assassinated the democratically elected leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Friedman’s advice was to take advantage of the shock of the coup and the violence that followed – Pinochet had been a general before his takeover, and so he knew very well the value of the military in overthrowing a legal government; he then used them to silence dissent by jailing political opponents, torturing them (of course) and in his own signature atrocity, having his enemies thrown out of flying helicopters – and force through the changes as rapidly as possible, before the people and any potential resistance could recover their balance and begin to push back. Pinochet did it, and it was largely effective (I’m leaving out a lot of this, of course – I recommend the book), and so it became the standard: the Shock Doctrine. Overwhelm people with something so outrageous, so devastating and unbelievable, that they won’t know up from down, day from night, or friend from foe, and then ram through your agenda before any potential resistance knows what’s happening. Exactly how Ewen Cameron taught the CIA (Who, of course, actively supported Pinochet, who replaced a leftist government with a far-right capitalist one – rule of law and liberties be damned) to overwhelm a person with a complete assault on all of their senses and touchstones, any sense of reality, so that their personality and therefore their resistance could be destroyed.

The book is a little out of date now; it was published in 2006. So of course the last use of the Shock Doctrine by neoliberal political actors that Klein talks about is the George W. Bush administration and 9/11. The terrorists created the shock: and the neoliberal Bush administration followed up with their agenda, mostly the USA PATRIOT Act and the rise of the surveillance state, along with, as Klein explains at length, the capitalist takeover of the military, pushing it through before anyone even knew what was happening, let alone how to resist. If Klein had written the book just two years later, she would have had another perfect example from the same actors: the way that the Bush White House got the TARP program passed directly after the economic collapse of 2007, which simply handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the very same corporate actors who had destroyed the global economy, as the administration enabled the Fed to purchase the “toxic assets” of companies that were, of course, “too big to fail.” If she had written the book fifteen years later, she could certainly have made much hay with the COVID-19 pandemic, though also I would argue that the incompetence of the first Trump administration, and the imperfect allegiance to neoliberalism that was held by the Biden administration, meant that less was done to change this country, and that opportunity was – uhhh, “lost.” I guess. But you can definitely see small instances of the Shock Doctrine being utilized, first in the Paycheck Protection Program that allowed anyone who wanted to get free money to apply for loan forgiveness; and then in some of the more controversial executive orders that both Trump and Biden used – such as Order 42, which kept asylum seekers in Mexico in order to quarantine them indefinitely.

But the neoliberal grip on the country, which probably peaked during Bill Clinton’s presidency if not George W. Bush’s (Every president since Reagan has been a neoliberal, regardless of party. George H.W. Bush was bad at it, possibly because he was actually concerned with helping the country; and Joe Biden moved away from his neoliberal roots, partly because he was influenced by our own Wizard of Oz, Bernie Sanders. Trump is a neoliberal, but also a shit-flinging gibbon, so not nearly as effective as Clinton or Reagan or even Obama.), has been slipping, under both Trump and Biden. So I don’t necessarily see the same unified, effective effort to achieve neoliberal goals (Complete laissez-faire economy, total free market – for details, read the book, or listen to Unfucking the Republic, who have a special, warm hatred for Milton Friedman) happening under Trump the first time, and especially not now – the tariffs are, if there is a God and any justice, making Milton Friedman flip over and over and over in his grave – but in thinking about Trump, and why anyone would want to support him in EVERYTHING that he is doing, I remembered this book.

And so now I’m wondering.

Let me also clarify: I do believe that Trump has handlers. The first term it was Steve Bannon, primarily, and maybe it still is; maybe it’s Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Bannon and Vought are both white supremacists who seek a theocracy, Vought including a neoliberal paradise and Bannon imagining a full-on Reich. I think anyone with more brains than morality, which includes almost everyone in Washington and certainly everyone in the administration (To be fair, Trump has, I suspect, very little in the way of functioning brain cells – but he is entirely amoral and frequently immoral, so “more brains than morality” is so low a bar it’s basically just a floor for the Donald), can manipulate Donald Trump as easily as breathing: tell him he’s a genius, make him feel like he is about to be asked to explain something but you won’t ask him if he just makes this very smart, very good decision, and then when he agrees not only that he should make that decision but it was originally his very smart idea, praise him for his intelligence and his ungodly machismo. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can’t imagine that everyone who wants to wield power in Washington would give up this golden opportunity to be the power behind the idiot.

But I can’t believe anyone would want all of what Trump is doing – or that someone who really wanted to control him would be unable to stop or blunt or reduce some of his stupid fucking ideas. If Vought wants the federal government eliminated so that white supremacy can reign again, why wouldn’t he want the dipshits in the Signal chat to be fired? (Though as I write that, I remember that incompetent government advances the agenda… so maybe this is the right guy to look at if we want to find the puppetmaster.)

So I’m wondering. What if Trump himself, and Elon Musk and DOGE, this whole administration, with its incredible stupidity and its incessant destruction of everything good, carried out entirely haphazardly and with brainless abandon – and yet ALL BAD as though it really was planned – is actually just the shock? What if the goal is to disorient us all so much, to make us all lose faith in so many things, that we don’t resist when the actual agenda is put into place, because we won’t even know who we are or where we are, let alone what is being done to our country?

I don’t know that this is true – I’m a little thrown, now, by realizing that a lot of this might fit in with Vought’s agenda – but I think it does make sense. I’ve always thought of Trump as the distraction: the gibbon flinging shit is impossible to look away from, and hey presto, tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare. That last was stopped, finally by John McCain, who, I suspect, was not very susceptible to the disorientation of being tortured. (RIP, Senator. We miss you. Even if we don’t miss all of your policies and positions.) And maybe that’s all it is – but the problem is, if I’m right and ALL of this is the distraction, all of it part of the grand application of shock to the whole country and maybe the whole world, then either the plan is already happening while we are reeling – or it hasn’t started yet. And if it hasn’t started yet, I have to assume it is intended to be something so much worse than what we are currently dealing with, that they can’t try to put it in place until after the full shock has sent us all into a tailspin of confusion and desperation, unable to resist control.

I think I need to get my book group to read Project 2025.

And maybe The Handmaid’s Tale.

How the Handmaid's Tale Sheds Light on Our Own Dysfunctional Relationships - One Love Foundation

The Price

Dusty 1 Comment

I saw an opinion piece which stated that schools today don’t teach enough economics.

Fair enough. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem – I will argue, probably in future posts, that the lack of humanities education is at least partly responsible for the loss of empathy which is at least partly responsible for the rise of Trump – but it’s certainly true that schools don’t teach a whole lot of economics.

But you know what? Even though I didn’t learn economics in school – not one jot, not one tittle; I knew nothing whatsoever about macro or microeconomics by the time I finished my compulsory education – I did learn how to learn: and I have learned some of the basics of economics on my own.

I have learned enough now to correct the mistaken argument I accepted from my students in Oregon over a decade ago, which was part of the impetus for me to learn some economics, because I hate losing arguments, and I hate feeling stupid, and I thought, back then, that my students had won an argument and made me look stupid in the process. They were saying that immigration caused inflation, which I thought (without any strong factual basis, just vibes) was false; they said, “But immigration means more people buying things, which raises demand.”

“Right,” I said, waiting for them to get to the point.

“Raising demand raises prices,” they said.

“Right,” I said, still waiting for them to get to the point.

“…That’s inflation!” they said, and then chortled when I turned red and flapped my open mouth uselessly, unable to reply. I felt dumb. They won that argument.

Well, kids, it’s not that simple, and I know it now. Now I would say, “Increases in demand only raise prices when there is a restriction in supply; once the supply increases to match demand, that should level out prices unless there is some other upward pressure on the prices. So if immigration is slow over time, and spread out over an area as large as the US, it probably wouldn’t change prices at all: it might lead to a temporary spike in any given location, but once the supply chain adjusted, then all that would happen is a greater volume of sales, spurred by more customers, who also enter the supply side of the chain by getting jobs and adding to the aggregate productivity – and we call that growth. Not inflation.”

What’s that? You say the actual information, the specific content, which I gained during my primary education wasn’t nearly as useful as the skills I gained??

BUT ANYWAY.

(I don’t doubt, by the way, that I have made some errors in the above long-awaited rebuttal to students who couldn’t possibly remember the original argument; none of them will even see this post, I’m sure. My economics understanding is far from complete. But it still feels good to say that, so I’m going to leave it there.)

Here’s something I do understand, and would like to discuss now that we have some better idea of what the numbers are: the costs, and the benefits. We’re looking for a balance: and preferably greater benefits than costs. Right?

So what has Trump cost us? Compared to how we have benefitted from his election?

When Trump got into office, and I learned from at least one friend on Facebook that their vote had gone to Trump in hopes that he would bring down grocery prices and restore the (apparently) wonderful economy that we had in his first term, I decided I would keep track of the prices people wanted to elect this man for. Because I understand: I have spent most of my adult life not making quite enough to be comfortable, not enough to have it easy; things like price hikes and tax increases and wage freezes, furlough days and interest rates and insurance – I have been pinched by all of them, and slammed by some – have all caused pain and worry. Not to mention what I’ve had to go through with student debt, house debt, deferred maintenance costs, and medical bills – including medical bills for my pets. I get it, I really do, I understand why kitchen table concerns override most ideals, no matter how important those ideals may be. I understand that people are hurting: believe me, my family is too. We have debt. We have a mortgage. We have family medical costs, now. My mother, who will turn 81 this summer, is working, full time, to pay off her mortgage and her back tax bills. (I will mitigate that last one slightly by saying that my mom is a nurse, absolutely loves being a nurse, and the work she is doing now is in-home hospice care, mostly things like keeping an eye on someone overnight or while family caretakers are away. It is not heavy work, and she likes doing it. But she’s fucking 81, and she is still working. Full time.)

But now that we are two months in, almost two-thirds of the way through that “First 100 Days” marker that we like to make so much of, I think it is time to look at different prices. To be specific, I think it’s time we looked at the price we are paying for Trump: what it is costing us to have Donald J. Trump as our president, this second time around.

Ready?

First, gas and eggs:

As you can see, they have not gone down. Egg prices shot up because there has been an outbreak of avian flu, and millions of chickens have died or been put down to prevent further infection; eggs are in comparatively short supply right now. They will remain in relatively short supply until the chickens can be replaced: which means that even more of the eggs that might go to market will instead have to be used to hatch new egg layers (Not directly, of course, because the eggs we eat aren’t fertilized: but some clutches, some hens, some broods, however the egg farmers arrange and measure this, will need to lay fertilized eggs instead of unfertilized eggs, and that means fewer eggs produced for sale. And we are talking a LOT of chickens, and thus a LOT of eggs.), and then we’ll have to wait until those new chicks get big enough to lay eggs themselves. So it will be a while. And all of that assumes the bird flu which caused the problem gets resolved, the chances of which don’t look great right now. But while we are waiting on our egg prices to drop, it is also true that grocery prices in general have not dropped. Grocery price tracker: Inflation trends for eggs, bread and more during the Trump administration

It is to be expected that, assuming that some (or all) of the tariffs remain in place, prices will go up, which will include grocery prices. Trump Tariffs: The Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War

It is to be noted that Trump’s constant promises to lower grocery prices starting on day one appear to have been lies: this has not been his focus since taking office.

Gas prices have also not gone down, because again Trump has done nothing to lower them. “Drill baby drill” means nothing if you are looking to drill within the continental US; our oil is the wrong kind to make gas. And Trump has proposed a 10% tariff on Canadian energy – which is where we get most of the crude oil we turn into gasoline.

Why Trump’s fix for gas prices won’t work | CNN

“Why don’t we just start using American crude oil? Champagne oil sounds so nice!” Because oil refineries are set up to handle certain products, and changing them to other products is either too expensive, too slow, or just impossible. I mean, in theory the federal government could step in and use tax dollars to make the changes or subsidize private refineries so they could make the changes…

But that would require actual reliance on, and responsible management from, the federal government.

So: gas prices are not going down, probably will go up. Egg prices are not coming down for a long time, months if not years before all of the supply chains are back to where they were before the avian flu (and that also assumes there won’t be any other price shocks in the egg industry, or the grocery industry, or anything else – like changes in interstate commerce, or retaliatory tariffs, or hell I don’t know, a nuclear war with Russia).

How else are we paying for Mr. Trump’s return to power?

Well there’s the stock market.

United States Stock Market Index – Quote – Chart – Historical Data – News

You can go look at the graph. The stock market jumped up right when Trump was inaugurated, and climbed slowly upward to a new high a month in, on February 19th – and then, tariffs. And the Dow Jones took a dive. It’s coming back up, the last couple of days, because the Fed announced they still plan to lower interest rates this year, because the overall economy is still strong and improving; but the temporary stays and exemptions Trump put on his own tariffs expire in two weeks.

So we’ll see.

The stock market is not the economy, and the market is volatile, so I don’t intend to use this as the only or even the main measurement of the cost of Trump; but it’s surely been a jolt to people with retirement savings in mutual funds.

I wonder how many of them voted for Trump?

So what else is there?

Well, there are all the people who have lost their jobs. And while I’m sure that hardcore Trump supporters will argue that these are actually benefits to the American people, because we are saving money by cutting these people off the government payroll, I’m going to look at the other side: we are losing their services.

DOGE Cuts Update Today: Social Security Changes, Pentagon Slashes Jobs – Newsweek

Let’s see: the Pentagon is cutting 60,000 jobs, which is actually fine with me in terms of our military budget and activities; I would like both to be curtailed. But that sure is a lot of people to put out of work. I’d really rather see those people still working, and maybe a couple fewer aircraft carriers and whatnot.

The EPA is cutting 1,000 scientists. The Department of Education is laying off 1,300 employees – and now Trump has issued an illegal order to shut down the department entirely. 24,000 probationary employees were fired; several of them will go back to work because the administration lied about having fired them for cause – but also, by the time the cases work through the courts and these people are allowed to go back to their jobs, many of them will have found other jobs, because who wants to wait several weeks or months to go back to work for somebody who fired you with a goddamn email from Elon fucking Musk?

The IRS is cutting 20% of its workforce, 18,000 jobs – which is great if we don’t want to find waste, fraud, and abuse among billionaire tax cheats and corporations contorting through loopholes and government contracts – and the USPS is cutting 10,000 people, which is great if we don’t want to, you know, communicate and stuff. But that’s fine: nobody even wants to know what’s happening now. We don’t want to watch this shit show.

The Veterans’ Administration is cutting 80,000 workers. I have no jokes at all to make about that. I have spent the last year and a half, with my wife, trying to work a claim for her mother, who is the widow of a veteran, through the VA’s system. I tried to do it myself. I couldn’t do it: after thirteen months of trying to make it work on my own, I finally got help from a VA counselor whose expertise is in helping people finish their claims. He got it done for us in two months. Now my mother-in-law is receiving the widow’s benefit she deserves, and needs.

Was that guy cut?

He is a veteran himself, and now he helps fellow veterans and their family members get into and through the system. He is kind, and professional, and very easy to work with and to talk to. He helped us.

So you tell me: if he was cut (and I honestly don’t know if he was, but 80,000 is a big fucking number, and I have no idea how many of these counselors and account managers are going to be cut in the future even if they weren’t thrown out in this first round), was that a benefit to our country? Or a cost?

How about the Social Security Administration? There are cuts coming: they are closing regional offices, and they are reducing workforce – firing people, that is. Oh, and also they are making it impossible to verify your identity over the phone, which means people who need to talk to the SSA will have to actually go into an office and talk to someone to get help with their account.

Right when they close offices and cut the number of workers available to help people.

How about that one? Cost, or benefit?

How are those eggs looking now?

My problem with all of this, of course, is that I don’t see any benefits: I only see costs. I see our economy getting battered, and people being callously thrown out of work, and services that I know directly are incredibly important to the point of life an death being cut. I guess people who hate the government are happy, but as I understand it, people hate the government mainly because it doesn’t help people: and while I’m sure that is the experience some people have, it is not the experience that others have; and surely, we can see that ripping the whole system into tatters is not going to help people more. Trump claims that there will be benefits in the future, but Trump is a known liar; and to my knowledge, he has never explained clearly what benefits will come from all of this, or exactly how they are supposed to arrive. Are we really supposed to believe the same old trickle down economics lies? That if we cut taxes for the richest 1% then the rest of us will be better off? It didn’t work the first time Trump did it, or when George W. Bush did it, or – EVER. So I’m not going to accept it now.

So if anyone actually knows what benefits there are to all of this to offset these costs, please, write me and let me know. I would really like to know what the upside is.

I would love to learn.

The Trump Doctrine: Bullshit, and Fling Shit

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay. Let’s talk. Honestly. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The truth.

I’m trying to get my Freshman English students to do that. To talk honestly. They don’t – ever – but I think it’s mostly because they don’t know how.

See, what we have done in education over the last ten or twenty years is reward lying. Reward cheating. To a certain extent that is not new: I lied constantly when I was a teenager, especially to my teachers and my parents, and I would guess that most teenagers had similar experiences. And for the same reason: schools reward lying and cheating. For as long as schools have been product-focused, rather than process-focused, we have given students an opportunity to achieve all the rewards of school (All the apparent ones, at least) without doing the difficult parts. My grade in my classes was based on the work I turned in: which means that if I can find a way to cheat on those assignments, then I get the exact same grade I would if I did the work myself, the hard way. And sure, we also try to stop students from choosing to cheat, through threats of dire consequences if they get caught; but that “if” in what I just wrote is a humming, glowing, throbbing beacon of glorious light. Because teenagers are dumb: we think that we can get away with anything, even while we are actively not getting away with it. The very first time I caught students cheating – and they were cheating on a small, simple, easy assignment, a set of study questions that came after a reading, which they did with the reading in hand, in class – I realized while I was reading their responses that three young women, all friends, had given identical, word-for-word answers. They had copied. And the giveaway was they had used the word “oasis” completely out of context – something like “and the oasis of the story was the courage the characters had.” One of them – the one who had done the work and given it to the other two, the source student – had written “basis,” in cursive, and the other two had misread it. So I gave them all zeroes for copying, two for doing it and one for letting them, and when I handed the work back, I told them they had gotten zeroes. But instead of confessing, they argued with me. Vociferously. Angrily. Denying that they had ever done such a thing. I hadn’t handed back their papers, choosing to keep them as evidence, and just informed them of their grades; when they demanded I show them the evidence, I realized I had left the papers in my other classroom (Like many first-year teachers, I got the crappiest job assignment, so I floated between three different classrooms and taught two different remedial classes), and they insisted on coming with me to see the evidence; they yelled at me the whole way across campus, about how dare I accuse them, and they would never do that, and it was not fair, and so on. We got to my other classroom, I showed them their papers, pointed at where they wrote “oasis” and said, “Explain that.”

And they actually tried. They tried to come up with some bullshit on the spot about how “oasis” was meant to represent the safe space that had been created in the story by the characters… the girl who was talking trailed off in the middle of the sentence. I just shook my head and said, “No.” And they left. Grumbling. Still denying that they had done what they couldn’t actually prove that they hadn’t done – because they had done it.

But what happened? The student who had done the work had her mother complain to the administration, and I had a meeting with one of the vice principals and this mother. Who told us that her daughter was under a lot of stress, and after all, she had done the work, and then had made the poor choice to let her friends copy because they all just wanted so badly to do well. That’s not really bad, is it?? So, as per the decision my administrator made, that girl got the grade. The other two had a chance to make up the work and get a grade. They got a warning.

A few days later, one of the boys in the class told me that he had actually let the first girl, the source girl – the one who got the grade – copy his work.

So. This is the structure we have built for students. Cheating is overlooked; copying is standard; getting “help” with the answers is encouraged. Because the product is what matters, not the process by which you create that product. (It’s the perfect conceptual framework for a life cut short by working yourself to death in order to get the company more profit. But surely that’s just a coincidence…) And onto that structure we have added the internet, with all of its access to perfect information and perfect writing; and now AI, the same perfect information and perfect writing, but now both customizable – and untraceable. And we still grade students on product, not process. We still assign homework, so they can complete the assignments in privacy, without supervision, with full access to resources like AI and Google. We use the same assignments year after year, so students can pass on work they did to the next year’s class. And we tell them that what really matters in school is getting good grades, so you can get into good college, so you can have a good job and make money. Oh, we tell them they need to learn, they need to master the skills; but that’s just talking. Every single reward in school is derived directly from product. (With the exceptions of PE, the arts [which sometimes reward product, but not always – my wife’s Life Drawing class is graded only on process, her AP Art class graded largely on process… though in that last case that’s because if she graded their art work as she would grade a college student’s work, they’d all fail. She has high standards. And we don’t work at an art school.] and a few classes like foreign language, where students are graded on their conversation and pronunciation and so on: performance metrics.) And almost every product can be completed with some kind of corrupting assistance, whether it is copying from a friend, getting help from a family member, or using the online resources they have available. Even just using the excuse of “Oh no, my paper didn’t upload!” to get extra time to complete it and turn it in, with permission, a second time. Because after all, I can’t blame a student if the WiFi went down, right?

Right.

So I’m trying to get my freshmen to think about lying, and whether it is good or bad. They all, without exception, think it is good in the right circumstances, which are always two: to spare someone’s feelings – the classic “Do I look good in this outfit?” conundrum – and to save yourself from getting in trouble. They do usually offer a third circumstance: when someone threatens to kill you if you don’t tell them something, like where you hid the money, then it is acceptable to lie to save your life. Thank you for including that hypothetical, children; surely an important one. But it’s that middle one, the lying-to-get-out-of-trouble, that I want them to think about. Actually, the first one, too, because I gave them the counterargument: if you tell someone they look great when they look terrible, then you’re telling that person to walk around proudly, while they look terrible, and don’t know it. They didn’t have an answer to that. They’re not ready to admit what I think is the answer, that honesty really is the best policy, and the key to getting along is knowing how to speak truth without being harsh and insulting – you don’t have to say “Damn, you look terrible!” when someone looks terrible in an outfit, but you should not lie and say they look perfect when they look terrible – and the key to not getting in trouble is… not doing things you shouldn’t do. I don’t think they’ll all come over to my side, but I want them to think about it, because they lie to me constantly, and I’m sick of it.

But then, last night, I watched our President stand up in front of Congress, his words broadcast to the whole world, and tell lie after lie after lie. After lie. After lie. For ninety minutes. And the whole time, without exception, the Republican majority clapped and cheered for his lies. The two grinning dolts behind him, Mike Johnson and J.D. Vance, grinned and laughed – because Donald Trump didn’t just lie, he was also needlessly, gleefully cruel, and appallingly stupid, again and again and again, and clearly that stupid cruelty was even more popular than his lies. Because the cruelty won’t even get the apathetic next day fact-checking that his bullshit has gotten today; the cruelty we just let go, maybe frowning a little at how our President doesn’t show the same decorum we enjoyed so much from President Obama (When he wasn’t bombing people in the Middle East or deporting families from the US), who was always polite and well-spoken and never overtly cruel and bullying like this guy, with his goddamn shit-eating grin when he tells some joke about innocent people he’s going to harm, because it will save money, or because it will win him points with his equally cruel, stupid, bullying base. But he won’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies or his stupidity or his cruelty; he did all the same things last time, and we elected him again. Because eggs were too expensive.

(Please understand – and know that I am in the middle of writing a piece about that, about grocery prices and inflation and Trump’s broken promises regarding the issue, but I had to address this absolute horror show of a “speech” – that I recognize the genuine damage and stress that inflation and high prices inflict on those of us who are on the edge of not having enough. I am a high school teacher: I can’t afford eggs. I am also a partial vegetarian: eggs are one of my primary sources of protein. So I get it. I only mock the idea of egg prices as a reason to vote for Trump because even if we do see that as a valid reason to elect a president – and I will argue all day that presidents just don’t have that much control over prices in our system – it ignores SO MANY other things about Donald Trump. I get the need for relief from the cost of living: but that’s not the only thing that matters. That’s why I say it. If you disagree with me about the right priorities to focus on for a vote, then so be it. We’ll discuss this more another time.)

For now, let’s start with talking about what Donald Trump lied about last night in his address. This is easy to find, of course – here’s a good source FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress – FactCheck.org, that gives a clear list followed by more careful analysis – but while they do include some of the things that sometimes slip past fact checkers, like that Trump ignored the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on creating the economic situation that the Biden administration dealt with, they focused on the specific lies Trump told in the speech: and that means they don’t talk about the lies he has used as the justifications for his actions thus far, which he then discussed in the speech. And that’s where I want to focus.

But let me also list out, if you are not interested in following the link – if you believe, as many people do, that fact checkers are unreliable, that only independent media sources are believable, which means you have not thought a whole heck of a lot about why “independent” is more important than “part of an organization whose business model relies on truthful reporting rather than garnering attention” – some of the more egregious falsehoods that Trump spouted.

First, the savings he and Elon Musk have found through the “work” of “DOGE.” They have not found hundreds of billions in waste: they have “saved” about $20 billion, claimed $105 billion, and proved that exactly none of it was savings from eliminating fraud. It’s all “savings” from firing employees. Which, sure, that saves money – but it also eliminates work and productivity. If you have three people working for you and you fire one, you save one-third of your payroll costs – AND YOU LOSE ONE-THIRD OF YOUR PRODUCTION. Seems like this would be already known by two guys who run such huge and successful companies, but maybe not. They do both seem to believe that they personally do the work which is actually done by their employees, so, maybe they’re unclear on the concept.

Or maybe the only fraud here is the one being perpetrated by Trump and Musk and DOGE.

Kabosu, Dog Behind Famous 'Doge' Meme, Dead at 18

Next: Social Security. Trump went on and on and on about the MILLIONS of people who Social Security “believes” are over a hundred years old, including some that he said were older than the United States. So let’s be clear on this: when we say that “Social Security” “believes” these people are impossibly old… who are we talking about? Is Social Security the name of the person in charge of the organization? Is it the hive mind of all the bureaucrats who work there? Is it the AI who runs the database? Is Social Security here in the room with us now?

No: social security is the much-beloved system whereby we ensure that senior citizens don’t have to starve to death in shantytowns after they stop working. And it is also the biggest “entitlement” in the Federal budget: and therefore it is the one the Republicans most want to cut. But since so many of their voters are senior citizens, they can’t cut it without facing the wrath of their voters: so they try to turn their voters against social security. By talking about it like it’s the Avatar of bureaucrats, and that it’s stupid enough to “believe” that there are impossibly ancient people still getting social security checks.

Here’s the truth: the social security database is enormous. Tens of millions of people receive checks every month; hundreds of millions of people make payments into the fund for those checks every month. When people pass away, there is a form that one’s survivors are supposed to fill out and file with SS to let them know that someone on the roll has passed and no longer need checks. But: people don’t consider that to be an important job, especially while grieving, so they don’t always do it. Also lots of people don’t have loved ones to file the form. I would guess millions of people, over the years. The ancient people in the database are not people that Social Security “believes” are alive, they are people who were on the rolls as alive, and who have never been confirmed to be dead. See the difference?

Trump doesn’t. Well: he does, he just lied about it, and pretended these two different things are the same. They’re not. If you want to see this as a moment when Trump is monumentally stupid instead of a liar, I’m fine with that. And yes, it’s monumentally stupid: if someone told me there were people on the SS database who were over 120 years old, I would assume there was a mistake in the data, not that Social Security “believed” there were Americans living over 120 years old. Especially not the millions whom Trump gobbled about.

And while thousands of those people – thousands out of the millions, which is fractions of a percentage point – may still get checks, and some of them get checks because living people are using the name of a dead person to collect social security (Frank Gallagher does this with his dead mother in Shameless.), which is fraud, the rest of the millions of unconfirmed-dead people on the roll are just – on the roll. In the database. They don’t get checks. Money is not wasted on them, and it would not be saved by cleaning up the database. Of course cleaning up the database would be a good idea, but how many man-hours would it take to confirm that millions of people are actually dead? And if you decide to remove everyone who is over, say, 100 years old, there will be at least 80,000 people who will want to have a word with you.

Centenarian, older adult population change by state | Northwell Health

Several of Trump’s other lies were of a less serious nature: claiming that 38,000 Americans were killed during the construction of the Panama Canal (5,600 workers died during construction, mostly from diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Not all of them were American. Special Wonders of the Canal – PMC), that Biden inherited a great economy and Trump inherited a terrible one twice, that Europe has given less than the US to the Ukraine and that the US has given $350 billion – these are just bad facts; they’re definitely lies, but they are small, because none of them change people’s minds, and none of them serve as the primary justification for Trump’s bad policies: he wants to take us to war over the Canal because China has an influence there, not because some number of Americans died during construction; he constantly lies about his accomplishments and, especially last night, about Biden’s failures, but that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion about either man; Trump is going to give as much of the Ukraine to Russia as he can, because he wants to be allies with Putin, not because of how much Ukraine costs to defend. And he doesn’t want to be allies with Putin to save money, it is to make himself into a strongman, in appearance if not in fact. (Though I have to note here that when I said last night that Trump wanted to be Putin, my wife’s immediate response was “Trump will never look that good with his shirt off.” Savage, she is. But: she ain’t lyin’.)

But the lies I really want to get to with Trump’s speech are the ones about people who are disenfranchised in this country. Such as people who are described, by that shit-flinging gibbon and his handlers, as representatives of DEI: like General C.Q. Brown, whom Trump fired from his position as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whose fucking resume looks like this:

EDUCATION
1984 Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
1991 U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
1992 Squadron Officer School, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
1994 Master of Aeronautical Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla.
1997 Distinguished graduate, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2000 Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2004 National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
2008 Air Force Senior Leadership Course, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C.
2012 Joint Force Air Component Commander Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2014 Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2015 Pinnacle Course, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.
2017 Leadership at the Peak, Center for Creative Leadership, Colorado Springs, Colo.

ASSIGNMENTS
1. May 1985 – April 1986, Student, undergraduate Pilot training, 82nd Student Squadron, Williams Air Force Base, Ariz.
2. May 1986 – July 1986, Student, lead-in fighter training, 434th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, Holloman AFB, N.M.
3. August 1986 – March 1987, Student, F-16 training, 62nd Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, MacDill AFB, Fla.
4. April 1987 – October 1988, F-16 Pilot, 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, South Korea
5. November 1988 – April 1991, F-16 Instructor Pilot, wing electronic combat officer, and wing standardization and evaluation flight examiner, 307th and 308th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, Homestead AFB, Fla.
6. April 1991 – August 1991, Student, U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course, Nellis AFB, Nev.
7. August 1991 – August 1992, F-16 Squadron Weapons Officer and Flight Commander, 307th Fighter Squadron, Homestead AFB, Fla.
8. September 1992 – October 1994, Weapons School Instructor, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner, F-16 Division, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nev.
9. October 1994 – July 1996, Aide-de-Camp to the Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
10. August 1996 – June 1997, Student, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
11. June 1997 – September 1997, Student, Armed Forces Staff College, National Defense University, Norfolk, Va.
12. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
13. November 1999 – June 2003, F-16CJ Instructor Pilot and assistant operations officer, 79th Fighter Squadron; Weapons and Training Flight Commander, 20th Operations Support Squadron; Operations Officer, 55th Fighter Squadron; and Commander, 78th Fighter Squadron, Shaw AFB, S.C.
14. July 2003 – June 2004, National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
15. June 2004 – June 2005, Deputy Chief, Program Integration Division, Directorate of Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
16. July 2005 – May 2007, Commandant, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, 57th Wing, Nellis AFB, Nev.
17. May 2007 – May 2008, Commander, 8th Fighter Wing, Kunsan AB, South Korea
18. June 2008 – May 2009, Director, Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff Executive Action Group, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
19. June 2009 – April 2011, Commander, 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano AB, Italy
20. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
21. April 2013 – February 2014, Deputy Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command; Deputy, Combined Force Air Component Commander, U.S. Central Command, Southwest Asia
22. March 2014 – June 2015, Director, Operations, Strategic Deterrence, and Nuclear Integration, Headquarters U.S. Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, Ramstein AB, Germany
23. June 2015 – July 2016, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Air Combat Command, Southwest Asia
24. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
25. July 2018 – July 2020, Commander, Pacific Air Forces; Air Component Commander for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and Executive Director, Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii
26. August 2020 – September 2023, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon, Arlington, Va.
27. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS
1. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a major
2. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a brigadier general
3. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a lieutenant general
4. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

FLIGHT INFORMATION
Rating: command pilot
Flight hours: more than 3,100 including 130 combat hours
Aircraft flown: F-16A/B/C/D and 20 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft

MAJOR AWARDS AND DECORATIONS
Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Distinguished Service Medal
Defense Superior Service Medal
Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters
Bronze Star Medal
Defense Meritorious Service Medal
Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Aerial Achievement Medal
Joint Service Commendation Medal
Air and Space Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Combat Readiness Medal
National Defense Service Medal with bronze star
Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
Korea Defense Service Medal
Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal
NATO Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Tongil Medal)
Republic of Singapore Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) Meritorious Service Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Samil Medal)
Brazilian Order of Aeronautical Merit (Degree of Grand Officer)

PUBLICATIONS
“Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force: Creating Synergy and Minimizing Seams,” Air University Press, September 2005 “No Longer the Outlier: Updating the Air Component Structure” Air University Press, Spring 2016

Yeah. That guy was a DEI hire.

People who are endangered by the anti-vaccine movement that Trump supports and promoted last night – which is all of us, but is especially those who can’t work in close proximity to others, for any of a thousand reasons (permanent disability, mental illness, inability to travel, along with being immunocompromised, again for a thousand potential reasons), but who do work, and who who now have to return to work because Trump is a cruel idiot and a liar who claims that “not coming IN to work” is evidence of laziness or fraud. It is not clear to me whether the real goal here is just to fire valuable workers for a reason that Trump’s base can stand behind, so that Trump and Musk can channel the money “saved” from payroll into tax breaks for billionaires, or if it is to undermine the very idea that a person who cannot come into an office can nonetheless, in this day of complete interconnectedness online, still be a productive worker because that idea is, I dunno, woke or some shit. Either way, it is a stupid lie that is cruel to those who need the accommodation of remote work – and also cruel to those who just like it better, because what the hell is wrong with working from home if you can do the work?

Trump is going after people with neurodivergence, in addition to attacking those who need to live in a vaccinated world, by lying about the history of autism diagnoses, in conjunction with his comments about naming the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a post for which he is not only unqualified, but entirely unfit. It is not true that “not long ago” 1 in 10,000 children had autism; it is true that 50 YEARS AGO we did not understand autism nor how to diagnose the entire spectrum of conditions associated with the term. It is also emphatically not true that autism is a disability that would justify removing or changing the vaccine schedule, as Trump was implying. The entire argument that parents would rather risk their children dying of measles than “becoming” autistic because of the MMR vaccine is disgusting, along with being a thoroughly debunked and incredible lie. Even where autism does present as disabling, ask a parent of an autistic child whether they would rather have their child living or dead – and then duck, before they quite rightly punch you in the face. Though I’d be really happy if all of those theoretical punches landed on Elon Musk, and also on whoever suggested that Elon’s Nazi salute was a sign of Musk’s own autism. Remember: “Always Punch Nazis” includes punching those who argue that being autistic explains away Nazism.

But I will admit that, despite all of the terrible and cruel and stupid things that Trump said in that speech, the lies that actually bothered me personally the most were the transphobic ones. Maybe because they got the loudest cheers. Maybe because he seemed proudest of his anti-trans policies like the declaration that there are only two genders in the U.S. – which is both a lie, and a cruel and stupid statement. Or his executive order keeping men from playing women’s sports, which, HOLY GOD THAT I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CAN WE STOP? Can we just stop? Can we just agree to never again allow anyone to repeat the absolute and utter nonsense and poppycock that there are “men” playing “women’s” sports? There are women playing women’s sports. Nothing more. And 99.99% of those women are those who were assigned female at birth. And also, this is fucking sports we are talking about. Not something important. Sports are entertainment. They are inconsequential. They don’t matter. They matter plenty to the people who play them, both professionally and passionately, and therefore they are worth consideration for the sake of those people; but the idea that a national policy, as a focus of what is essentially a state of the union address, would make such a deal of opposing the existence of trans people, particularly in relation to sport? What the hell are we doing here?

The answer is simple: we, and by “we” I mean that orange-tinted shit-flinging gibbon and his flying monkeys and most definitely not me, are attacking and belittling and trying to destroy and torment and kill anyone whose destruction would make the stupid, cruel base of the Republican party feel stronger and meaner, which is how they want to feel. Trans people are not the danger, regardless of what nonsense some goddamn volleyball player claims (Want to know how many volleyball players get hurt every year? About 35,000. Volleyball Related Injuries in Adolescents: A Decade of Data | Published in Orthopedic Reviews How many of those injuries were caused by trans athletes? Conversely, how many trans athletes suffer injury and abuse and death because of the way they are objectified and demonized and ostracized and assaulted in every way by the entire Republican establishment of this country? I bet it’s more than the one injury Trump claimed was caused by a trans athlete.)

I don’t know why this one upsets me more than the other loathsome false accusations and attacks that Trump launched at everyone who is morally and ethically and humanistically better than he is himself. But it does. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it bothers me, any more than it matters why the base and the Republicans and the shit-flinging gibbon himself chose trans people to try to destroy: it’s just that they found someone they can harm, and I have found someone – millions of someones – whom I want to help protect from that harm, in whatever way I can assist. I don’t really need to justify which fight I choose to take on: I just need to be aware of who my real target is.

It’s not just Trump. Just like Adolf Hitler, who was a uniquely effective figurehead for the Nazi party and the apparatus that rose during the Third Reich, but neither the brains behind that apparatus nor the one in control of it, Trump himself is not the cause of the problem, he is simply the most visible pimple on the very wide flabby ass of the MAGA movement. It is possible that, after Trump is gone (Hopefully before the end of his term, though personally I’m hoping for impeachment and jail rather than the death that many others think he deserves), JD Vance or one of the other flying monkeys will take over as the chief shit-flinger; and that might even be worse. It’s not even the billionaires who back Trump and who are taking advantage of the distraction he is because of the shit he flings – shit that is flung like no one has ever seen before – because the wealthy have always been there, trying to control things, trying to take advantage of every opportunity to have wealth and power, without being in the spotlight themselves. I know it’s not Elon Musk: there’s a reason why the real power brokers don’t ever do what he is doing, and put themselves out front. It’s because when people get mad enough to pick up the torches and pitchforks – and the more effective Musk is, the sooner that will happen, as it always does when inequality gets too extreme – they look for an obvious target for their anger. We all know who Elon Musk is. Who the hell is Rebekah Mercer?

(Is it wrong of me to point out that, were she to become known to those with torches and pitchforks — or, let’s say, were she to get targeted by the next Luigi Mangione — nobody would miss the ENORMOUS target that is her head?)

Natural History Museum Curators Revolt Against Trustee Rebekah Mercer for Funding Climate Change Deniers | Artnet News
Now we know what Megamind’s mom looked like

What I oppose is what Trump represents and distills. It is stupidity, chosen because it is easier than learning, and more comfortable than truth – because stupidity lies to us, even as we lie to the stupid. It is cruelty, because cruelty, also for the sake of ease and comfort, brings the displaced self-hatred of the stupid crashing down on the innocent; and not only do we then have that many more victims, some of whom will lash out at other disempowered people, but we also have those among the stupid who now cannot face enlightenment because then they would have to admit what they did to people who never deserved anything but the kindness and empathy due every one of our fellow human beings, and so those angry, cruel, stupid people will be even more incapable of changing what they are doing, no matter what truth is put before them and no matter what pleas for mercy they hear and ignore.

The worse we act, the less likely we are to stop acting badly. That’s why Donald Trump is the way he is: because he’s always been this way, he’s just been getting worse, for his entire life. And he’s an old, evil, man, now.

And everything he says is bullshit.

Upon Further Consideration

Dusty Leave a comment

*Let me give one disclaimer: I use a lot of ways to call someone crazy in this piece. At no time, not even for one second, not in any instance or in any way, am I actually referring to someone with mental illness or neurodivergence. I’m using every form of “crazy” to mean only someone who holds a position or acts in a way that I don’t agree with, and generally that I can’t understand. That’s it. Okay?

Okay. Here we go.

Conservatives are crazy.

charlize theron – foolish watcher

Okay, not ALL of them. And they’re not crazy about everything: taxes and regulations can be onerous, and while society absolutely needs to progress, it needs to do it in a way and at a pace that allows people to grow comfortable with change, which is never easy.

But conservatives created the monstrosity that is President Donald Trump. And before that, they created neoliberal economics, generally known as “trickle-down” economics, which has been devastating people in this country and around the world for the last half-century or more. And they just kept supporting it, that entire time, all facts to the contrary notwithstanding. Libertarians are conservatives, for the most part, and so was Ayn Rand — and between Rand and Trump, I don’t need to say anything else to show that conservatives, broadly speaking, are crazy. A few sandwiches short of a picnic. Daft. Cracked. Meshugge. Bonkers. Non compos mentis. The cheese fell off their cracker a long time ago.

They think that we’re crazy, of course, mostly in how we accept things that seem so obviously counter to what conservatives call common sense — like the existence and worth of trans people, for instance, or like believing the government can do good things and can be trusted (in some ways — we know about the Tuskegee Experiment, too), or thinking that guns are somehow to blame for gun violence — and partly how we are so entirely hypocritical while we accuse them of being the real hypocrites.

I gotta pause on that last one, because — really, y’all, there are some pretty upsetting things that we argue, and never even think about. Like how we argue that guns should be banned in order to reduce gun violence, but that drugs should be legalized in order to reduce drug crime. Abortion and the death penalty is another one: we mock conservatives for being pro-life with fetuses, but very happy to kill people on death row, but somehow we never talk about how we hold exactly the same apparently contradictory positions, just in reverse — we are willing to accept the death of the unborn, while we work to preserve the lives of the worst people imaginable. And that’s not to say that the left is wrong on those issues and the right is right; but it is — I’m going to say disingenuous — that we don’t actually engage with our own apparent hypocrisy while we are simultaneously aghast that the right doesn’t engage with their apparent hypocrisy.

To be clear, since I brought up the examples: the ban on drugs is different from a proposed ban on guns mainly because the users are entirely different. I suppose some gun owners could be characterized as addicts, though I think they wouldn’t enjoy that description; but mainly, drugs create a market for themselves, the members of which have very little chance to refuse to consume the substances. Certainly there are forces that push people to buy and use guns, and certainly those forces would make it impossible to remove all illegal guns from the country, should guns ever be banned here; but they are not the same forces that have made the drug war unwinnable. That’s the essential difference, and the details are worth thinking about and talking about. And with abortion and the death penalty, it is only necessary to point out that “pro-choice” is not and never has been “pro-abortion.” The left does not wish the unborn to die, any more than we wish murderers to die; that is the unknotting of the apparent paradox in our opinions. And I also have to point out that the apparent contradictions in conservative stances can be just as easily explained away: it’s just that they make assumptions that the left doesn’t make, like the idea that innocence makes a child’s life worth more than an adult’s life, or that an armed citizen is the best defense against an armed criminal. Or more simply and more importantly, that God and the Christian faith should be an important part of our political consciousness.

The point is, there are things the left accuses the right of being crazy about, which the right is not at all crazy about, and there are also things that the left thinks which are batshit insane — a whole bunch of people in the Democratic establishment who thought that Hillary Clinton made a better candidate than Bernie Sanders, for instance, and then that Joe Biden also made a better candidate than Bernie: and then that Joe Biden should have ever been a candidate for a second term. Bat. Shit. Insane. And a lot of us swallowed and set our faces right and stood in line. I did.

I have decided that I have been wrong.

I don’t need to rehash the last several elections, though; as I have said several times, Joe Biden was a much better president than I thought he would be, and MUCH better than he gets credit for being, and I don’t know that Bernie could have beat Trump either in 2016 or 2020, and I’m not sure anyone could have beat Trump in 2024. I don’t understand how that could be true, considering all of Trump’s baggage, but the truth seems to be that the economic situation in this country ensured that only a Republican could win in 2024 — and as the primary showed, Trump had ensured that of all the Republicans in this country, only he can be on the top of the ticket.

Because conservatives are crazy.

I’m not going to back off of that, not even with my both-sidesing liberal and conservative positions and arguments: there is no other way to see how the entire right side of the political spectrum in this country has embraced Donald Trump so completely other than as totally nuts; and the way people still — still — STILL!!! accept trickle-down economics as viable even after FIFTY FUCKING YEARS of increasing inequality and the resultant social unrest is proof that those same people are either insane or so utterly drool-fountain stupid that there’s no reason to even talk to them any more, because they can’t understand anything stated in standard English — only things that look or sound like this:

(I would say that conservatives are crazy because they listen to country music — but a lot of country music is good, so that’s not enough to prove that conservatives are crazy. Also, I first heard this song on Dr. Demento in the 80s, so really, who’s the crazier one? The one who listens to country music, or the one who listens to a guy named Demento who also played this?)

I guarantee you nobody in middle America listened to that garbage. I’ve been listening to it since I was in middle school. I think you see my point.

But you don’t, because in my usual inimitable way, I have failed utterly to get to my point. So let me stop screwing around and make it now.

I have for DECADES now thought that conservatives — specific ones, especially the ones in Washington — were crazy because they refused to compromise. Compromise, I hope we all know, is good. Compromise is how people get along, and how things get done. Compromise respects the value of both sides of an issue, both the humanity and the intelligence of people who happen to disagree, which makes it the best possible outcome — two heads are better than one, after all. I have essentially never entered an argument where I was totally unwilling to compromise. Okay, there have been a few online debates, sure — I’ve argued against normalizing pedophilia, and I’m not gonna meet them halfway on that one — but in real life, I have never drawn a line in the sand, put my foot down, in a place I was utterly unwilling to move. I am always willing to compromise, because in every case in my life, I have argued against other rational human beings, who deserve as much consideration as I do; so how could I do any less than be willing to compromise with someone? What on Earth makes me so much better, so much righter, than them that I would not take even a step in their direction? On a larger scale, how can you have a society where people don’t compromise? How do people get along if they can’t agree on at least some elements of their disagreements?

That’s what I thought. And I still think that, because it’s true — you can’t have a society without compromise — but also, that’s a social truth, and a practical idea.

It’s not good politics.

In politics, refusing to compromise is the right thing to do. Compromise is dangerous. And self-defeating.

My point today is this: it is time, and past time, and long past time, that Democrats specifically and the left in general started doing what is actually good politics.

I listened to an episode of Pitchfork Economics — an outstanding podcast which I recommend to everyone; though I would say you probably shouldn’t do the absurd (crazy?) thing I’m doing, which is listening to the entire archive from the beginning, in 2017; it’s a little strange that I have been listening to this podcast for two or three years now, and they still haven’t reached Joe Biden’s election as the 46th President — and they interviewed Professor James Kwak, whose books I now have to read. (One of them is free online! Nice!) But more to the point for this particular writing, in the interview Professor Kwak was talking about the Democratic party, which he both called the most important political party in the world, as the only thing standing in the way of full-on fascism on the part of the Trump GOP (My words, not the professor’s; he said the Dems were the most important party, but was more polite about the rest.) and also described as having drank the Kool-Aid of neoliberalism (Again, my wording) around the time of Bill Clinton’s administration, and thus gave up being the actual party of the people, of labor, of the poor, of progressivism and liberal ideas.

Here, if you are interested. It’s a good interview.

How neoliberalism captured Democrats (with James Kwak)

As I listened, I thought the professor was right: the Democrats have had a critical job especially for the last eight years, because it was up to them to stop us from having President Donald Trump, and for two of the three chances they have had to step up and do that critical task, to preserve the United States, to protect the rule of law and government of the people, by the people, for the people — they failed. Pretty badly, really.

And I thought, Maybe the Democratic party is really bad at this politics thing.

It’s not the first time I’ve had this thought. I listen to another podcast which I’ve talked about frequently before, called UNFTR, UnFucking The Republic. One of the essential claims from that podcast is that the Democratic party is bad at politics, and a bad bulwark against Trump and the rise of fascism; but because they are one of the only two parties with full access and the full machinery to mount and win a national political campaign in this country, the answer is not to create a third party: the answer is to take over the Democratic party, much as the Tea Party and then the MAGA movement have taken over the GOP, from the inside, and then turn the Democratic party into what it should be, but currently is not. Progressive. Successful. A party for the left.

But I’ve never been willing to follow that thought to the end, and to start actually arguing against voting for the compromise candidate — for Hillary Clinton, for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris; none of whom I supported, all of whom I voted for and encouraged others to vote for.

That’s where I’ve been wrong.

In talking about how conservatives differ from liberals in the U.S., and how conservatives have managed to become so incredibly dominant, Kwak said that there were several things that conservatives had done over the last fifty years which had enabled them to become this unstoppable force that managed to sweep Trump back into the White House despite everything (Again, the interview is now five years old, so Professor Kwak is not actually talking about the current travesty in Washington, but it’s not any different, it comes from the same strategy and worked in the same way): and the main one was that they were willing to stand for their ideology, even if it cost them elections. He said that the right had been putting up more conservative candidates against moderates in primaries even when the more conservative candidate was less likely to win the general election. Which sounded crazy to me — but the result is that the right is seen as dedicated to their beliefs, their ideals, where the left is seen as — wishy washy. Because the left will back a politician who doesn’t represent all of the ideals we ourselves espouse, where the right is not generally willing to do that: you can see it in how the GOP has purged all of the members unwilling to support Trump, like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. Their choice to throw every single bit of their support behind Trump is crazy: but the way they do it is impressive. It shows determination, and dedication, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own preferences or ambitions for what you see as the greater good. And before this, you could see in how the GOP starting in the 80s forced all national politicians on the right to sign Grover Norquist’s oath never to raise taxes, for any reason — which was one reason George H.W. Bush lost his reelection to Bill Clinton. Which, I mean — that’s crazy.

But it got them the right reputation. A reputation that can resist anything, even facts. This is why the right is seen as willing to fight for what they believe — and why the right is seen as more reliable on the issues that they all stand for, like opposing immigration and making the economy work for people. Do they do those things? Not always: but they ALWAYS stand on those principles, and they ALWAYS stand together, and cast out those who are more willing to compromise.

They’re crazy. The shift in the GOP from the conservative party to the party of Trump has been unbelievable to watch: it has felt like a Soviet purge, removing everyone who did not fawn at the feet of the Great Leader. And the rise of Trump has definitely shown the downside of the GOP’s strategy of absolute loyalty to the ideals of the party.

But on the other hand, they fucking win elections. And then gerrymander the districts so they can win every election in the future. Which the Democrats do, too, because our system is deeply corrupt: but the main difference is that, most of the time, in most states, the Democrats DON’T win elections. And it’s partly because the left is more willing to compromise. So we’re seen as wishy washy. Soft. Unreliable. And in worse cases, or as the stakes rise and the rhetoric gets harsher, as hypocrites, and as liars.

And even worse, as corrupt, unreliable politicians who are willing to do whatever it takes to retain power, whether that requires compromise of our apparently most important ideals, or lying about what is at stake in an election, as we argue that Trump is a fascist who signifies the end of this country — and then the second he takes power, FIFTY-EIGHT FUCKING DEMOCRATS VOTE FOR THAT BULLSHIT LAKEN RILEY ACT. Fifty-eight. How many Republicans voted for Biden’s priorities? Or Obama’s? And, I mean, we claim to believe that white men should not be put ahead of, or above of, women or people of color; we chastise the right for their overwhelming whiteness and maleness. And then what do we do?

We nominate and elect Joseph R. Biden.

And then Biden waited until after the election was lost to do a whole heap of things that he should have been willing to do on day one — if he really believed in what he claims to believe. Only at the very end did he hand out the pardons. Only at the end did he warn us about the technocrat oligarchy. Six months before, he was still taking their campaign contributions.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being strategic with the support a politician has, and the public opinion of the things they want to do; that’s necessary. I love the idea of going in and just doing whatever the hell one wants, what one knows is right — but also, that’s how Trump does it. It’s not good strategy.

It’s just why he wins.

But I don’t think Biden did anything wrong, in waiting until the end of this term to, for instance, commute the sentences of people on federal death row. But when the other side is so bold, so forward, so utterly confident in their rightness that they will do whatever they think is right at any time and damn the political consequences — well. The decision to be strategic in any way certainly seems like political manipulation. Not wisdom.

And while I do not want to imitate the right, because they are crazy, I also do not want to continue losing elections to them.

So this is where I think we need to adopt an aspect of their system, of their overall strategy, that works for them.

I want to stop compromising.

Not on everything: but there have to be some issues that the left is not willing to negotiate on, that we are unwilling to accept anything else because we know, down to our blood and bones, that we are right, and the right is wrong. That anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. That we can discuss ways and means, to some extent, and even compromise on that sort of thing — or on the timeline, or the order of specific priorities; the details can almost always be discussed. But the central idea, the heart, the essential concept: that never goes away. It never stops being the ideal, and we never stop fighting for it. For them. Think of the heroes of the left: the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; think of Bernie, whose appeal was based partly on this fact, that he never, ever changed what he was saying about economic inequality and the need to address it. Not in fifty years. THAT. THAT is what we need to do, that is how we need to fight for our central ideals. (It’s why we should have nominated Bernie, but I guess that train has already left the station, huh?)

I have some ideas about what those things should be — five of them coming directly from UNFTR — but I want to think about them some more before I take a stand. Because once I take a stand on these things, I don’t ever want to back down from them. Not ever. Not for any reason, not under any circumstances. Even if it costs us votes in a specific election — because look at what compromising has gotten us. It’s gotten us fucking Trump, and a Republican congress, and a ludicrously “conservative” Supreme Court. We supported the moderate candidate in order to protect the things that mattered most, like the right to choose; and we lost the things that mattered because we lost the elections. And I think this is quite a large part of why. It’s not all of it, this isn’t the only thing we need to do: but I think this is part. I think we need to do this.

Compromise in politics, on the most essential ideas, is a path only to losing. Which protects nothing, not even the compromises we tried to fight for. Look at Obamacare. Do we think that’s going to live through the next four years? John McCain saved it last time. And John McCain is gone, along with everyone else who thought the way he did, on the right. No disrespect to Senator McCain, who was a remarkable man and a man of principles, who died sadly of a terrible disease; but I think we know that if he had lived, he would have been voted out of the GOP for opposing Trump. Just like everyone else who did so, who was willing to compromise with the left. Jeff Flake. Mitt Romney. Liz Cheney. All gone. They all lost. Just like us.

So I think we should stop compromising, and start winning.

Now we need to decide what we will not compromise on. It can’t be everything: but it has to be something. And once we decide, we can’t ever back down. We can’t every compromise, not on these things.

And then there’s this: it makes sense to me not to compromise with the party of Trump. After all — they are crazy.

Wrong.

Dusty Leave a comment
Youre Wrong GIFs | Tenor

This isn’t about Trump. (That GIF aside.)

There’s going to be a lot about Trump, for the next four years (and then, with any luck at all, there will be NOTHING about Trump, ever again; I mean, I don’t care if he goes around the country on a Fuck The Libs Resentment-Palooza tour until the day he dies, but I very much want him to be irrelevant politically after this second term in office) and I’m certainly not going to apologize for that; I have been accused before of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I will be so accused again, but every accusation of TDS rests on the mistaken supposition that Trump is not, in fact, the biggest single influence on American politics and culture right now, and the speaker allegedly with TDS is making an issue about Trump when it’s not about Trump. But he is the biggest single influence on politics and culture right now: not only do half of this country’s elected officials kneel to kiss the ring in all decisions, but somewhere between a third and a half of the voting populace base their identity on him, in part or in total. If I keep bringing up Trump, and blaming Trump for things that go wrong for the next four years, it’s not because I’m obsessed with Trump: it’s because there has never been anyone more successful at taking over this country, mind and soul, in the past. Ever.

God, that’s depressing. The most successful and popular public figure in American history is that fucking stooge.

So when Trump comes up, and we complain about Trump and his actions, that’s not TDS; that’s reality. It is all about Trump. We on the left would really much rather that not be true, believe me. We really don’t want this country to revolve around that asshole. It just does. And so, therefore, does our conversation.

But this? This post, this argument? This isn’t about Trump. Honestly. And I’ll prove it, as soon as I get into the specific argument I want to make.

To show that I’m not simply targeting conservatives (I know, nobody who reads my blogs would think that – except wait…), and not even because Trump is not a conservative (But he’s not) and does not represent conservative thought or values (as he does not), but to show that I’m not simply targeting Trump or his supporters, I’m going to start with myself. I’m going to start with a confession, and then I’m going to proudly declare my innocence of wrongdoing, because that’s apparently what shows that I’m not only innocent, but above reproach.

Okay, that last one was about Trump. More about his supporters. But that’s not the subject.

The subject is wrongdoing.

I did wrong, recently. A couple of times. I have done wrong in the past: not often, because I generally get caught, and then I get in trouble, and I have an almost pathological need to avoid disappointing people – but when I was a kid, I stole, I vandalized, I trespassed; I consumed illegal substances; I threw a big ol’ keg party while my mom was out of town and my “guests” wrecked the house and drove the neighbors to call the cops. I’ve lied, though not a lot and never officially; I’ve certainly been nasty to people in various ways, insulting them or ignoring them or taking advantage of them.

That last one is the kind of wrongdoing I have done recently. On this most recent Election Night, I posted on Facebook, out of a sense of rage and outrage that my countrymen would re-elect the worst president, and the most dangerous man, to hold the office in better than a century (I’m going back to Andrew Johnson for the closest rival to Trump for that title of Most Dangerous, though Warren G. Harding may take the taco for “worst.” Still a century ago.), and I made – something like a threat, I suppose. It wasn’t a threat, but I worded it like a threat: imagine if I said, “If you say that about my mom, I’m going to fluff your pillow until you can’t lie down flat!” See? Sounds like a threat, and in context with the rest of the sentence it might be taken as a threat, because clearly I’m mad about what you’re doing, even though I’m just saying I would fluff your pillow. It isn’t important exactly what I said on Facebook and I don’t want to repeat it, because when I posted it the first time, someone complained to my employer, saying that I was giving the school a bad name, posting political statements and “threats” online. My boss called me in for a meeting to take the post down, which I had already done before the meeting; that resolved the problem because it is clear to anyone who knows me that I do not make genuine threats and I do not cause harm to people, not even over politics, so the only problem was the post.

But the post might, conceivably, have been bad for my employer, because people might have taken it the wrong way, and that might have done harm to my employer’s reputation and so on. So okay: I did wrong. I did the wrong thing in putting other people at risk for the sake of my online statement of my opinion in a less-than-friendly way. I got consequences, then, for my wrongdoing: I got called in by my boss for it, and asked to remove it. Not a serious consequence, but about what the act deserved. My boss was very cautious in that meeting, partly because he and I were friendly and he didn’t want to upset me, but more because I could have raised a big ol’ stink about my freedom of speech and censorship and so on; but I didn’t do that. I accepted that my act was wrong, if not very wrong, and a natural consequence of that was that I should eat my words – or delete them, rather. So be it. Deleted.

Then I got in more trouble for something else I did. That one I don’t want to talk about, because I dispute part of what I was accused of, but not the other part; and again, I don’t want to put my employer or my employment at risk by talking publicly about what happened. It was not that severe, please believe me; my violations fifteen years ago (Wow! Is that really how long ago it was?! Yeah, 2010. Wild. Back when Trump was just a shmuck in New York with a bad reality show, rather than the guy who turned our entire country into a bad reality show.) were much worse, and I’ve written about those in detail before. All I want to say is, I got written up for that recent one, a warning placed in my employee file, and I acknowledge that I shouldn’t have done what I did. My actions – my words, to be a little more specific – were wrong.

When I violated the rules in Oregon fifteen years ago, I acknowledged that, too. What I did was this: I posted angry, insulting things about my students during class, from my school computer, which I should not have done; I named three of my former students and insulted them in a second post a month later. After four years of wrangling, I was found to have committed gross neglect of my duty as a teacher and an employee of the St. Helens School District, and I served a 30-day suspension without pay for it. I accepted that punishment, even though I still think it was undeserved. I mean, sure, I shouldn’t have used class time to write angry things about my students; but how many times have people called friends and bitched about work while at work? How many private messages and emails, and letters and diary entries, have been written by people on the clock, complaining about the people who own the clock? I always thought the violations in Oregon should have been handled the same way these more recent (less serious) violations were: I should have been called in for an uncomfortable meeting; my violation should have been put into my employee file so my future employers can know what I have done in the past; I should have been asked to remove the offensive posts – which I also did, in that case fifteen years ago. Give me a warning, get me in trouble, so I won’t do the same thing again.

It’s funny, though: I thought, when I got called in for that meeting in Oregon about my online activity, that I was going to hear about a complaint filed against me by a local political figure whom I had lambasted a couple of times on my blog, and who I figured would absolutely go to my employer about his ire over my words; I was ready and willing to defend my First Amendment rights, that time. It went further than that because my superintendent was advised by the district lawyers to report me to the state, mainly to cover her and the district’s asses; and, my union lawyer told me, the state wanted to make an example of me because it was 2010 and they wanted to establish a precedent regarding teachers on social media: and my case connected to both a blog and Facebook. (That was another parallel: I had posted something – certainly more insulting, but also ENTIRELY unrelated to the blogs – on Facebook, something which got reported to my district by an irate homeschool parent who had a bone to pick with public school teachers. The district Googled me and found my much-more-offensive blogs. Guess I haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut, huh?) So essentially, mine was a political prosecution: it was a savvy political move for my district, and then an aggressive political move for the state agency. They went after me to serve their own agenda, not because my actions deserved that punishment, not because there was any real risk of me being in front of a class. I spent the entire four years between my offense and my punishment teaching, successfully, without any further incidents. I did nothing else wrong. As I said, nobody who knows me would believe that I would actually do harm to a student, nor to my employer.

But whether my actions were justifiable, or whether the punishment was deserved, or whether I was thrown under the bus for political reasons, or not, the fact is that I broke the rules, and I got punished for it. And I accept that: I accept my punishment as what should have happened to me in response to my wrongdoing. I accept it because there are worse people, doing worse things, and they should also get punished for their wrongdoing, because they actually do harm, which I maintain that I did not do (Mainly because nobody, certainly not the students in question, ever read those blogs.), but if I get away with doing wrong by breaking rules, then it makes it easier for them to get away with doing wrong by doing harm. It is not lost on me that, at the very same time my district was throwing me under the bus for saying mean things on a blog, there was another teacher at the school who was receiving multiple complaints for acting inappropriately with students, but the school ignored those complaints and did not punish that teacher at all; ten years later, I had moved out of the state, and that other guy was in prison for sexual abuse of a student.

And I got called morally reprehensible. (To be fair, I don’t know what they called that other guy. It was probably worse.)

That irony, though, that discrepancy between my crime and punishment and the abuser’s crime and punishment – that injustice – does not mean that I should have gotten away with what I did: it means that both the other teacher and I should have been punished for our actions, preferably in an appropriate way. I should have been written up; he should have been at least fired and banned from being around children, and maybe arrested (I do not know if he had actually broken the law and harmed a student when the complaints were made. Neither does the district: no investigation was carried out.). He did harm. I broke the rules. We both should have consequences.

We live in a society of laws. I actually could have stopped at “We live in a society,” because society does not exist without rules of some kind; and the important ones that restrict the misbehavior of everyone in the society should be called laws. Without laws, there is no society. (I invite any anarchists to explain to me where I’m wrong on that, but not here and not now.) That is not to say that I think that humans are inherently evil and will always do the wrong thing without a threat from the state to keep us in line; but I think we all do wrong things, often without realizing what we are doing. I honestly didn’t even remember doing the thing I got written up for recently, just as I didn’t remember the blogs I had written in violation of the rules in Oregon when I first got called in for a meeting with the superintendent. But now that I have gotten in trouble for doing those things, I can guaran-fucking-TEE you that those things will not happen again: because I do not want to get in more trouble, and now I know clearly what actions of mine will get me in trouble. It’s not just that I don’t want the trouble, either: I don’t want the other consequences of committing those acts again. I do not want to have the reputation of someone who would break the rules like that. I do not want to lose my job, my career. And I recognize, and regret, whatever harm I have done, both actual and theoretical: because I can see that someone who read what I wrote in Oregon could have been genuinely hurt by it, even though I don’t think anyone did. It could have happened, which is why I shouldn’t have written what I wrote and posted it.

Okay. That kind of sucked, honestly; I don’t like talking about the things I’ve done that are wrong: I want to justify all of them, to explain or excuse everything that I have done, so that nobody thinks I am less than a good person. I want to be a good person, and be known as such. It’s important to me. I would hope it would be important to all of us, even if there weren’t direct consequences for misbehavior. But it’s not, not for all of us. Which is why the rules have to apply to everyone, both people who will not do wrong again, and people who will, but who might not want to have consequences again after they have them the first time.

Now let’s talk about Trump.

Donald J. Trump is a felon. He was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, tried, and convicted by a jury of his peers. He is still appealing the decision, under the argument that some of the evidence in his trial should have been inadmissible because the Supreme Court decided that the President of the United States – specifically Donald J. Trump – is above the law (HA I wrote “against the law.” Thank you for that, subconscious. But it is not what I meant. More’s the pity: we’d be a lot better off if Donald J. Trump was against the law.), and that appeal may bear fruit, because every other judge in this country does what the Supreme Court majority has failed to do: actually follow precedent and respect the rule of law and the role of the courts. So if that appeal does bear fruit, then Trump’s conviction will be overturned. And then the breaking of our society will be complete: because then Trump will actually be entirely above the law, untouchable and unrestrainable.

Please understand me. I am not talking about what Trump will do as President; part of me – the cynical, angry, irony-loving part – is looking forward to that, because I want everyone who voted for cheaper eggs to see what they actually brought down on all of us; and more importantly, I want the actual villains, the bastards who want to tear down the government so they can abuse all of us for profit, and who installed Donald Trump (because he was able to bring together all of the disparate parts of his base to vote for him and because he distracts everyone who opposes those profit-driven bastards) to regret the achievement of their actual goals: because they will make the world a worse place, and no matter what they think their money will insulate them from, they still live in the world they are fucking up. There will be consequences for their actions, and I want those billionaire corporate overlords to suffer those consequences along with the rest of us. (I’m tempted to just drop a picture of Luigi Mangione here, but I don’t want anyone to take this as a threat. I don’t think what Mangione did was right, he is a murderer; but it is an example of the consequences you risk when you make the world a worse place, and then live in that same world. I will also note that Mangione is facing the consequences for his actions.) The people that support Trump and who use Trump to achieve their own agenda want him to get away with anything he wants to do because they want him to keep doing what he does: mainly flinging shit everywhere he can, because that’s what distracts the rest of us from the agenda going on behind Trump. I mean, come on: the Gulf of America? Conquering Greenland? He’s just a gibbon flinging shit, and we can’t tear our eyes away.

But when the specific way that Trump is enabled is to take away the consequences for his actions, the damage done is so much more serious than Trump making a fool of us all on the international stage. So much more serious than Trump increasing oil drilling in this country, even though that does nothing good and creates irreparable harm. Trump’s backers only did it, I don’t doubt, so that Trump could keep flinging shit (That’s why the Supreme Court left themselves as the arbiters of what should be considered an official act, and therefore immune to prosecution, so that if a president whose name is NOT “Trump” pulls any shenanigans, the Court can send them up the river), but what they have done is create a situation where there is no consequence for breaking the rules, and more important, no consequence for doing harm.

To be entirely clear: the case where Trump was actually convicted was a rule-breaking case. He didn’t do any immediate harm with that one. But the rules he broke were about election finance, and transparency, and to allow those rules to be broken without consequence allows other people to do the same: and that does unimaginable potential harm in the future, because it allows even worse people than Trump to hide where they got their money, and how they spent it, in pursuit of power. That’s the scary part. And the MUCH WORSE part is that the other cases, the ones that have been dropped or dismissed, those were even closer to doing actual harm: and the January 6th case was entirely about Trump doing actual harm. People were hurt on January 6th. People died. Our country, our democracy, was endangered. Trump was partly responsible for that harm. And Trump got away with it. Without any consequence, at all. The Senate refused to impeach because he would face criminal charges – and then he didn’t face any criminal charges because the Senate didn’t impeach, which allowed him to run for the White House again. And he won because Americans wanted cheaper eggs, and forgot about everything Trump did wrong: because there were no consequences, so there was no clear line drawn as to what is allowed and what is not. If what Trump did was allowed, then he did no wrong: and if he wasn’t punished, then it was allowed. That’s the situation that was created. That’s the damage.

And it was done for Trump, but the problem going forward is not only Trump: it’s everyone else who might now do the same things, or much, much worse, and get away with it because Trump got away with it. I am definitely not saying that Trump should have been singled out for his actions, or that Trump should have suffered extra undue consequences; I don’t think the courts or his conviction should have stopped Trump from running for office, for example. I said, well over a year ago, that I didn’t want Trump to lose the election by going to jail: I wanted us not to vote for him.

I guess the rest of the country doesn’t have my hangup about disappointing people. Or at least 75 million or so of you.

I do think Trump should have been impeached. But when he wasn’t, I was willing to accept that, because I was sure he would be tried and convicted for his crimes; even when the trials got delayed and delayed and delayed, I wasn’t worried, because I was sure he wouldn’t be elected again. Surely people wouldn’t support that guy, the one who did all those wrong things. But since so many of you all did, I don’t want the courts to take away the choice, the votes, the will of the people. As a result of the last election, I now want Trump to be president, and I’m not saying otherwise in this argument.

No: I am saying one thing. Trump was accused of crimes. Credibly accused of crimes, because in all four criminal prosecutions, he went through a grand jury process and was indicted: for falsifying business records in New York, for conspiring to suborn elected officials and steal the election in Georgia, for taking and keeping and mishandling classified government documents in Florida, and for conspiring to overthrow the government in Washington, D.C. Those accusations should have all gone to trial, unless there was a reason in advance to discard the accusation without trial (And the dismissal in the Mar-a-Lago documents case was not, in my opinion, valid, because the judge, an inexperienced political appointee with loyalty to Trump, based her dismissal of all charges on the idea that the special prosecutor does not have authority to investigate and bring charges: and that’s horseshit. But I’ll tell you what, I would be willing to accept the court’s ruling on the appeal that Jack Smith brought to overturn that dismissal and reinstate the charges, because I trust that other judges are willing to do what Aileen Cannon is not, and follow precedent and respect the rule of law and of the courts. I’d even be willing to accept it if our corrupt Supreme Court did their bullshit again and upheld Trump’s invulnerability, because that would be another dagger that might help to get rid of those particular destroyers of our society, which should absolutely be the consequences for the Supreme Court majority’s wrong actions – and the three other prosecutions would have gone forward. I would accept that BECAUSE I ACCEPT THE RULE OF LAW.). The trials should have offered Trump a chance to face his accusers, to see all those who testified against him, and to be competently defended. The proceedings should have been ruled over by an impartial and competent judge, in every case. Trump should have been convicted – or acquitted – by unanimous vote of a jury of his peers, randomly selected and vetted by both Trump’s accusers and his attorneys. And he should then have the right to appeal, to object to any injustice in the procedures: as he has been doing all along, and as has borne him fruit, quite spectacularly.

And then, if any of those convictions happened and held through appeal, Trump should have been punished.

His punishment should be appropriate to his crime. In the case of his sole criminal conviction, I think the punishment given to any first-time felon would be acceptable in this case; I’d expect it to be a fine, maybe some community service, maybe some probation. Maybe an auditor, of some kind, to watch over his business records and make sure he doesn’t do the same thing again. And he should have, and bear, the label “Felon.” The reputational damage, and the consequent damage to his career. I mean, 75 million people decided that Trump was above the law and that he should be put back into the White House to get us cheaper eggs and destroy the lives of as many people as possible, and that’s – well, it’s not “fine.” But it is part of our system: being a convicted felon is no bar to running for, winning, or serving in the Presidency, and I accept that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

This is the part that drives me nuts, the worst part of all of this. I hate Trump and what he stands for, and I hate what he has done to my country, and I dread what he will do to my country in the next four years. But the thing that makes me start yelling cuss words, out loud, even when I’m just listening to podcasts and walking my dogs, is hearing about how Trump has taken such an enormous shit on our justice system: and how it has broken under the weight of Trump’s feces. Forgive my continued scatological metaphors, but they show both the contempt, and the filth, that Trump has dropped onto the fundamental structure of our society, by breaking the law, and getting away with it, with the help of his supporters and backers. Gotten away with doing wrong, without consequences. Of any kind.

Have other people done it before him? Of course: in our capitalist society, there have always been two tiers of justice, justice for the poor and justice for the rich; and Trump already enjoyed all of the protections of wealth – it’s how he was able to delay three of his four trials until after the election, and how he has been able to delay or avoid actually paying all of the money in his two civil cases (He has posted a bond that will pay E. Jean Carroll if he loses his final appeals to her two successful lawsuits, and the other case for falsifying business records, which ended in a $454 million fine, was reduced to $175 million, which he paid. Why did he only have to pay a third of the original fine? Because he’s rich, that’s why.). But now there are three tiers of justice: one for the poor, one for the rich, and one for Donald J. Trump. Maybe for future Republican presidents (Forgive my cynical assumption that our current Supreme Court would be much more willing to find that a Republican president’s criminal acts are immune than a Democratic president’s acts, but – come on. We all know who and what we’re dealing with, now.), but for now, Trump is the only one who gets to get away with everything.

For now.

Again: I don’t want him removed from office for his crimes. (Other than the January 6th case. That crime was sedition, and someone guilty of sedition should not be in elected office of this country. He should have been impeached for it. He wasn’t because of partisan politics, not because he wasn’t guilty or didn’t commit a wrong act. But since the actual charges were conspiracy and obstruction, I am still willing to accept that a conviction of those crimes would not equate to sedition, and would not bar him from running for office. Though in that case I’d be yelling a lot more.) I am not opposing Trump here on political terms. Let him run the country: let him fuck it up and show all of you who supported him what you have done. And hey, if he manages to do some things right, as he did some things right in his first term, I will applaud him for those things. Go ahead and reform prisons more. Release money to the general public to help us endure a crisis, like a good Socialist would. Love it. Thank you for that, Donald. Do it more.

And I am in no way singling Trump out for any of this. You want to put Biden and Obama on trial for having documents in their homes? Do it. If they committed wrong acts, then they also should suffer the consequences for what they did. (Just bringing documents home is not a wrong act. No one is saying that is all Trump did, other than Trump. And he’s lying.) Any Democrat who claimed that Trump’s win in 2016 was illegitimate, who argued that the government should in some way block his election because he received assistance from Russia, and who the right has since accused of obstructing or conspiring to overthrow a legal election – put them on trial, too. Or rather, go through the process: have an investigation, put the facts to a grand jury, and have anyone who is then indicted put on trial, with attorneys, with the full protections of the law.

Right after Trump goes to trial for taking and mishandling classified documents, and for conspiring to overthrow Joe Biden’s legitimate election win in 2020. Because his trials were already in motion. He had already been indicted by four grand juries. He already had attorneys defending him, and judges overseeing the cases – three of them impartial. I’d like to see him go to trial for sedition, too, since he’s guilty of that; but I’m willing to accept the process, and the DOJ’s determination that Trump should be prosecuted for conspiring to obstruct and overthrow the election, and I want him to go to trial for that.

Because I accept the rule of law.

More than that, in fact: I cherish it. I believe in it. I know that society needs it. And whatever may occur with a president who makes bad political decisions, who cuts taxes to raise the deficit and concentrate wealth in the top 1%, who destroys environmental regulations and makes climate change even worse, who flouts international diplomacy and all norms of politics and decent behavior, I will accept all of that. All of it. Because the law in my country says that Donald Trump was twice elected President, and that means he gets to fling shit everywhere he wants to, and we all just have to clean it up. Or live in the stink.

But I will not accept that Trump has gotten away with committing crimes, and suffered no penalty for it. (He is innocent until proven guilty, so even though I’m PRETTY GODDAMN SURE he would have been found guilty in the Georgia case [where he was on tape committing the act] and the Mar-a-Lago documents case [where the crime was photographed sitting in his goddamn bathroom, and he is also on tape committing the crime], I will accept that he has not yet been found guilty of those crimes: but he sure was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and he should have had a punishment for that. First time offender or not. 34 fucking FELONIES. So I get to say that he has committed crimes. And the fact that the judge in that case had to forgo any punishment because it would interfere with Trump performing the office of the Presidency is horseshit: and it’s why I get to say he got away with committing crimes without punishment.) The fact that he has done so undermines the basis of our entire society. Trump has broken the rule of law, and without law, we do not have a society. Everything the most rabid conservative, who thinks every Democrat is a Marxist Socialist unAmerican Commie, accuses the left of doing, the right has done in uplifting Trump while he committed crimes and avoided paying for other crimes. The outrage over the tearing down of the DOJ and the FBI, the way the Supreme Court just fucking spit on both the Constitution and the separation of powers in deciding that Trump should be immune to prosecution for all of his acts while President, should have been deafening, and it should have come from the right: from those who (loudly) support law and order, who cherish the traditions of our country, who defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. I can’t accept that law enforcement watches this guy commit every crime possible, and cheers when he gets away with it. I can’t accept that military members, in large numbers, watch him destroy this country’s entire system, and still salute him. And vote for him. It is insane. It is deranged. It shows how damaged our country is, by all of this, how broken our society is, now.

75 million people voted for Trump, and even more supported him, even though he committed crimes, simply because people want him to be in office, because they think he will be good for the economy, or hard on immigration, or a strong defender of this country. (All political reasons. Political reasons to oppose the due process of law.) But no matter how much he fights for what he calls America, Trump is destroying it, he is destroying us, because he is destroying the rule of law.

I won’t accept that.

And neither should you. Whether you voted for Trump, whether you support him politically, or not.

No one should be above the law. Not me, and not Trump. Or else there is no law. And no America. At least no America worth defending. And nobody is worth that. Not even Donald J. Trump.

ACKCHYUALLY I Love “Love Actually”

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay. This is my Christmas present to myself. I’ve been struggling with finding the time and energy to write, and so I’m going to make it as easy as possible: I’m going to wade into the debate about the movie Love Actually.

Ever since it came out in 2003, Love Actually has taken a lot of heat — and also a lot of praise. It has gained entry into the ranks of Christmas classics (sometimes with “cult” in the middle there, for extra alliteration credit), and it has gotten a number of takedowns. Here’s one:

Why Love Actually is not the heartwarming romcom you’re remembering

And this one is… really angry about this movie.

I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You

On the other hand, this one does — well, what I’m about to do, but I’m going to be more effusive and less hesitant in my praise. Because I actually like this movie (I know, I missed a golden opportunity there — but I’m not going to lie, because I’m writing this on Christmas day, AND ON CHRISTMAS YOU TELL THE TRUTH — and I don’t love this movie, not all of it.), and this one treats it like an insane trainwreck — literally uses that phrase when talking about the worst plotline from the movie — which you can’t look away from. It’s also got some useful information about the filmmaker, if you’re curious.

‘Love Actually’ Turns 20: Revisiting Its Incredible, Awful Greatness

So to be clear, this is not my favorite Christmas movie. It is top five, but it’s definitely behind A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life, and probably behind The Family Man. If we’re counting Charlie Brown’s Christmas, Chuck Jones’s Grinch and the Rankin/Bass oeuvre, and if both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are Christmas movies, then it isn’t even top ten.

But it’s a nice movie. It has a good message, and it presents that message in a genuinely interesting and honest way, which you almost never find in rom-coms or Christmas movies, and I respect the hell out of that. It is heartwarming, and sometimes heartbreaking, and it has Bill Nighy as one of the best characters of the last 25 years, something even the proudest Love Actually haters will admit (Not that Jezebel one, but that one’s really shouty). It’s got an incredible cast pretty much all the way through, which makes up for some of the absurdities and offenses that are almost inevitable in a rom-com, and definitely inevitable in a Christmas movie: and this is both.

I think, honestly, that’s the big problem people have with this movie: it is cheesy. It is cringey. It is unrealistic. It is cliche. But of course it is: it is a rom-com AND a Christmas movie. Rom-coms are supposed to make us believe that love is possible, and Christmas movies are supposed to make us believe that miracles are possible, AND that good things happen to good people. Love Actually is going to make those particular sins even more intense because it is a montage movie: it is a collection of nine vignettes about individual characters with individual stories, which means that no one story gets more than about ten to twenty minutes of screen time; that means there is not enough space in the film for actual development of actual characters with actual plotlines. That’s why I like The Family Man more: because it is a Christmas rom-com which tells only one story. So it does the same thing better. But Love Actually does something else, something nearly impossible.

Go ahead. Tell me a romantic story in fifteen minutes without relying on cliches.

Oops, sorry — wrong movie.

While you’re at it, tell me ANY Christmas story that isn’t cringey. There are bad moments in Love Actually, but there’s nothing in it like this heap of crap:

(And this song was turned into a Christmas movie. With Rob Lowe. Get outta here with your Love Actually hate.)

Okay. Let me get into specifics. (Spoilers, of course, but I assume if you’re still reading, you’ve seen the movie, maybe several times.) I’m not going to respond directly to every one of the points raised in any particular argument, I’m going to run through the storylines, acknowledge the issues that exist, and give my opinion on each. Ready? I’m going to use Wikipedia’s article as my organizing principle because why not.

And I’m going to use this guy as my muse.

The movie begins in the airport, which the Jezebel review hates; I admit I’m not in love with the opening, because I too hate airports: but you know what? the best moment of any trip, ANY trip, I’ve ever taken on a plane, is when I get to come home and my wife comes to pick me up, and I get to meet her and see her for the first time in days. So I get where this movie is coming from. And I like the title drop, coming in the sentence, “Love actually is all around.” Remember that: that’s the message.

Then we get into the storylines. Starting with this:

Billy Mack And His Manager Joe

Billy’s the best part of the movie. Bill Nighy plays him perfectly, and the character provides a necessary puncturing of the saccharine Christmas motif that is otherwise pumping through the veins of this movie. The song he is remaking is awful (AND I JUST FOUND OUT IT IS A REAL SONG BY THE BAND WHO MADE “WILD THING” holy shit I always thought it was written as a joke for this movie) and his desire to re-release it for Christmas in order to revive his career and fame and bank account is such a perfect parody of everything that Hollywood and corporate “arts” makers in every field do as often as they possibly can, most often with things just like this movie, works using the themes of love and Christmas; so I love that Billy is upfront about it, and hates himself for doing it, and asks people to join him in his self-loathing abuse of his own career and art. This is exactly what this kind of shit deserves, and Billy goes for it, full speed ahead. And Bill Nighy’s degenerate’s laugh is pure art. The movie that starts with this story is not taking itself too seriously. Neither should we.

The end of this story, when Billy leaves Elton John’s debauchery-fest and goes back to hang out with his manager Joe (And may I just say, all of the attacks that take the movie to task for fat-shaming Natalie [A point against the movie, I agree wholeheartedly] NEVER mention Billy’s constant description of Joe as his “fat manager,” or when he calls Joe the “ugliest man on Earth.”), presents maybe the best iteration of the movie’s message: Billy calls Joe the love of his life. No, he does not mean it romantically. (Another sort-of reasonable knock against this movie is that it is entirely heteronormative; true, but so is EVERY OTHER ROM-COM IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA THROUGH 2003) He means that love has different forms, and for him, his most stable, most reliable, most considerate friend is the love he needed most. Because that’s what love is: and that’s why it’s all around us.

Going on (though pausing to make Christmas dinner — ziti with roasted vegetables, YUM!!).

Juliet, Peter, and Mark

Love Actually star Keira Knightley says she knows who Juliet really chose - Smooth
In complete honesty the worst part about this whole story line is their clothing.

This story line gets the most undeserved shit from haters of the movie. Okay, sure, it is pretty gross and weird that Mark is in love with his best friend’s fiancée and then wife — except no, it’s freaking not. This happens. It sort of happens all the time. It is perfectly reasonable and honorable that Mark tries his best to hide his feelings, and it is even more reasonable that he is bad at doing so. This story maybe suffers the most from the format of the movie, because without time to show the long buildup of Mark’s affection for Juliet, it just comes off as unrequited and hidden, which is creepy (Except it’s NOT because he is trying not to move in on his friend’s love, and that’s why he never says anything about his feelings, but clearly if he separated himself from Juliet he would never get to see his friend Peter and so he tries to push away his feelings and he can’t — how is that wrong?? Is he wrong for feeling attracted to someone he can’t have? Then I have bad news for EVERYONE WHO LOOKS AT KEIRA KNIGHTLEY IN THIS MOVIE.), and then the movie makes the unfortunate but entirely understandable choice, given the actress and the medium, to focus on how absolutely lovely Juliet is as a way to show that Mark has feelings for her. Every time I watch this I don’t think, “Ermagerd dude umm stop looking at your best friend’s new wife?! Ewwww!” I think, “Jesus, it would be hard to be in this situation, to feel that way about these two people and never show it.” And then when he gets caught? And looks like a creep because he thought he was concealing it, and clearly was concealing it because neither person has a clue??

Now I grant you, the posterboard scene is cringey. And hard to believe, as well. But I’ll tell you what, as someone who has actually written notes to ask people on dates, and not when I was in middle school BUT WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, there are times when people are completely fucking cringey. And hard to believe. I agree with the critics that Christmas is not actually the time to tell the truth — but I do think truth is better than lies, and especially in important and close relationships, so I see Mark’s gesture as a good-hearted one. I do not see it as a play for Juliet, an attempt to win her away from Peter, and I do not see it as pushing feelings on her which he shouldn’t talk about; he tried not talking about his feelings, and it didn’t work because he got caught (because unlike actual stalkers and real creeps, he’s bad at concealing himself and his feelings), and now the secret is out. It’s already freaking awkward, and pretending that none of this happened is not going to make it less awkward; his only other option is to sever all ties with his friends. And I don’t see that as a better choice. I don’t like that Juliet kisses him: I think it’s a weird way to tell him that everything is okay; but I think of it as her telling him something kind, that in a different world he would be a fine choice. This way he doesn’t feel ashamed of his feelings, even though they are not returned and never will be, and it allows him to keep some of his shredded self-esteem. Because after she kisses him, see, she runs back to Peter: so she is gone from Mark, this will never come back, he will never kiss her again — but he’s not an absurd fool for feeling desire for her, as she could in theory return it. It’s weird, but it works. I love that he just turns and walks away and says intently to himself, “Enough. Enough now.” He has to stop this pining, and he knows it, and now that he has revealed his feelings to Juliet, and she has rejected him — kindly — he may be able to move on.

Sometimes that’s what love is: messy as hell. But it is both Mark’s and Juliet’s love for Peter that allows them to have this awkward, ugly situation between them, and to try to make it work anyway, for Peter’s sake. To me, that’s sweet. It’s not romantic, and despite the (pretty awful) attempts to make the posterboards funny, it’s not comedic, either. But you know what it is? It’s Christmas. It’s another kind of love.

Oh: and for those who complain about this situation being inappropriate because Keira Knightley was 17 when she made this movie? Allow me to explain what acting is. The character was not underage, so the story is not inappropriate. If the actress was underage, and the movie put her in the inappropriate position of being an object of desire for the audience, that was maybe a poor choice for the filmmakers, so feel free to blame them for doing so — but Ms. Knightley chose to take the part, knowing what the character was and why she was being picked for it.

Jamie and Aurélia

Why Colin Firth's Love Actually Storyline Is So Good – Even If It's Not Realistic

This is another one that suffers from the short screen time. Sure, the romance between these two is not based on communication, because they can’t speak to each other intelligibly. But first of all, Aurelia works in Jamie’s home, and he works at home, and so they spend all day together; there are things you learn about a person when you spend time with them, even if you don’t talk. Since the story is short, we don’t get to see the multiple adorable interactions between the writer and the house cleaner over the course of the weeks they spend together, but it is not any more reasonable to assume that there aren’t any such moments than it is to assume than it is reasonable for Aurelia to strip before she jumps into the pond, but for Jamie to go in fully clothed. I agree that scene is a bit exploitative: but also, it isn’t the worst in the movie, and to me, the most absurd part is not her taking off her clothes to jump into the water — it’s her moving the paperweight and letting the pages fly away to land in the water, not realizing, apparently, what would happen when she moved it. I mean, come on: have you never been around paper before??

Also, more to the point for the movie: exploitative or not, that scene (it’s not the only one) makes clear that this woman is lovely. And I hear that Colin Firth is generally seen as easy on the eyes. So sure, their romance might at first be based on being attracted to each other: but that’s not all it is — AND THAT’S NOT AN UNCOMMON THING. Allow me to introduce you to a certain play set in Verona: which also gets the same attacks, about the romance and therefore the marriage being shallow because it is based on mutual attraction: but people have to understand just how incredibly powerful attraction can be. And also, think about how lonely Jamie is, and maybe Aurelia too. So okay, maybe this marriage won’t be forever — but I can see it happening. This is sometimes how love actually works, even if it doesn’t work out. It’s still love.

I won’t accept any of the shit about Jamie not speaking Portuguese very well, at the end. or Aurelia’s family being ridiculous. He tried to learn the language in like a week: he does quite well. And if you think no family would be that absurd, well. You don’t have any in-laws.

NEXT!

John and Judy

Joanna Page breaks her silence on Love Actually sequel rumours - as she admits she only watched the movie for the first time this Christmas | Daily Mail Online

Okay, two things: first I’m going to veer away from the Wikipedia article, and put the sillier storylines in here, and then end with the four big ones; and second, I admit that I don’t like either this storyline or the next one very much. This one bothers me because — well, because I’m kind of a prude. These two being naked around each other and talking about traffic makes me pretty uncomfortable. But of course, that’s the joke. And these two actors do it very well. Is the job they are portraying real? Of course not, there’s absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t have the actual porn actors stand in place and mime sex while they set up the lights and all; but this story wouldn’t be cute if they were actually making porn and talking about traffic, and slowly leading up to a first date.

Though that would make a pretty good romance…

Never mind. The heart of this story is two things: the perfect casual way they work around the awkwardness of their nudity and mimed sex acts, and the utterly sweet, innocent kiss that ends their first date, with Bilbo — sorry, Jack — cheering as he jumps down her steps. That is rom-com gold, and if you can’t see it because their job isn’t realistic, Jesus Christ, take it up with rom-coms.

Colin, Tony, and the American girls

Love Actually/Hate Actually #4: Colin/America – The Avocado

This one is also a bad story line. Colin is annoying and stupid, and it’s bothersome that these women find him so very appealing, and absurd that they all dive into this orgy housemate scenario, and it’s certainly offensive that Colin brings back another hot girl as a gift for his other British friend at the end of the movie. I think this is the dumbest part of the movie, so I’m not going to try to defend it.

But I will say a couple of things. First of all, all great movies have bad parts, so the existence of this bad story is not enough to make Love Actually a bad movie; this is just the time when you go get another snack or head to the bathroom. Secondly, this whole thing is played tongue-in-cheek, totally absurd; take it that way, and the scene in the image above, where the three girls are cooing over how Colin says “bottle” and “straw” but are disappointed that he says “table” the same way they do, is hilarious. I think this can be seen as a pretty good parody of both the way some people melt over accents AND NOTHING ELSE, and also the way movies frequently throw attractive women at unattractive dudes and have the women act as though the idiot is God’s gift to their love lives or sex lives or both.

And I won’t point out that both of those things are sometimes true in real life.

This is a bad story line. In a good movie.

Sarah, Karl, and Michael

Love? Actually? - Ranking the Couples From Love Actually. — OMID

This is another story line I have a hard time watching, but not because I’m a prude (Though I am uncomfortable seeing that guy nearly naked, because DAMN does he make me feel like a raw potato): just because it’s so painful watching Sarah make this choice. But this is one of the best moments to examine and recognize what this movie is really trying to say about love.

First, love is all around us, and not always where we expect it. Sarah has been in love with Karl since she started working for this company (And that exchange, where Alan Rickman’s character Harry asks Sarah how long she has worked there, and how long she has been in love with Karl, and her answers reveal that she fell him fifteen minutes after she started working there, is absolutely brilliant, and a wonderful piece of acting by both Rickman and Laura Linney), and has never acted on it; she finds out that Karl has known all along, or at least for a while, and so do the rest of their coworkers; this means, in usual movie/TV dating scenarios, that she has failed to conceal her true feelings, has not played hard-to-get, and is therefore doomed, and will have no chance with that guy, ever. But no: Karl approaches her, he asks her to dance, he is enchanted by her, he goes back with her to her place, and none of it comes off as sleazy or exploitative (I mean, other than the gratuitous near-nudity of this Brazilian hunk, but we’re not concerned about the exploitation of male actors. [Really. We’re not.]), it’s just — romantic.

But then Sarah turns away from the hottie in her bed because she feels that she has to answer the phone call from her mentally ill brother. And Karl leaves.

It’s funny to me because the critics castigate Karl for that, for stepping out after Sarah rejects him twice, choosing to take the call instead of the sex; because I see that as Sarah’s mistake and bad behavior, not Karl’s. I think when she tells her brother during the second call that she is not busy, that she is ready to talk to him, while sexy Karl is sitting all naked-adjacent right next to her in the bed, that it is a clear message of how she feels for Karl right then, and I think it is respectful of him to accept her choice and leave, and also the right response when a mood has been killed that hard. No, I don’t think it should be on Karl to find a way to make the relationship work around Sarah’s commitment to her brother: she made a clear choice, he respects it. In the rom-com world, she would have to go to him, hat in hand, and apologize and make some grand gesture to win him back; in the real world, he’ll just go pick up somebody hot in a bar somewhere. Somebody who will turn off their goddamn phone in order to have sex with someone they have purportedly been in love with for years.

But though this story line hurts a bit to watch, I think it is essential for the movie: because this is actually love. She chooses self-sacrificial family love over personally satisfying romantic love, and Lord knows lots of people do that; and while it is to be pitied and denigrated in a romantic movie, there is nothing more Christmas than spending time with your family instead of the hot Brazilian man. Romantic love is not the only love. And sometimes the choices we make for love are not healthy for us — but that is not the fault of the love. Sarah’s commitment and dedication to her brother is laudable, even though it is also toxic for her; in a perfect world she would find a way to have both things, and many people do that. But many people don’t: and it’s still actually love. That’s what the movie is trying to say. Love is multi-faceted, wildly variant, and not always healthy or good. But it is love. It is strong. Stronger than sex.

And that’s pretty damn strong.

Harry, Karen, and Mia

But while love for Sarah is stronger than sex, sex, for Harry, is stronger than love. And this story line shows that. And it shows it pretty perfectly.

It is not clear to me why Mia wants to sleep with Harry. Maybe she finds him attractive — Alan Rickman was certainly not an ugly man, and not everyone finds age gaps unappealing (though in our modern world, with our fascination with and also our deep-seated aversion to pedophilia and sexual exploitation, we keep acting as though two adults who have disparate ages is as terrible, or even as icky, as an adult assaulting someone underage — and it is NOT) — and maybe she finds his position, his wealth, his power appealing; maybe she just wants to mess with him, and maybe she wants to be a homewrecker; any of them are possible, all of them are things that people do, even things that attractive young women do with older married men. But in the situation where the woman he works with wants to sleep with him, and is aggressive in trying to show it, Harry does what probably the majority of men would do: he considers it. He flirts with the idea, though he is also very clearly uncomfortable with it — when he calls her to say he’ll get her a Christmas present, and she tells him that she will give him all of herself, but if he’s going to buy her a present then she wants something pretty, he is neither smooth nor particularly sexy in his replies; he is fumbling and silly, like most married men would be when trying to flirt with someone they shouldn’t be flirting with.

But he does the wrong thing. And he breaks his wife’s heart, and ruins his own family, and Emma Thompson shows that so perfectly that even people who hate this movie love this segment, though they won’t admit they love it, because they hate Harry for what he does to Karen. But that kind of response shows that the movie is successful: the story works, the acting is wonderful, the audience’s response is exactly what it is supposed to be. I like this story for that reason, though of course I also get pissed at Harry and feel so sorry for Karen — her final shot at him, when she says he made a fool out of her, too, is just brilliant.

Let me also say that you cannot dislike both this story line and the Colin story line: they are polar opposites. That one is stupid; this one is smart. That one is a parody; this one is completely realistic. The Colin story is pure happiness, because Colin’s dreams come true; this one is pure sadness, because Karen and Harry’s lives are ruined, at least their romantic and family lives. You can’t criticize both in the same breath.

Okay. Next.

David and Natalie

Love Actually writer shuts down big fan theory about Prime Minister and Natalie
I could have picked a lot of pictures for this story — but how could I resist that octopus? The Nativity Octopus, no less??

This one is the rom-commiest story in the movie, and it’s everything that rom-com romances are: shallow, because the movie is never long enough to show a real buildup of a romance; unrealistic, because no prime minister looks like Hugh Grant and no housemaid looks like Martine McCutcheon; more than a bit offensive, usually because part of the idea of overwhelming romance is that it has to break through barriers, and barriers are often taboos, so rom-coms frequently break taboos — in this case, the posh, upper-class Prime Minister having an upstairs/downstairs relationship with the housemaid who’s from around the way; and if we feel like being humorless sourpusses, we can describe this as exploitative or derogatory to the person in the inferior position, in this case the woman.

Yeah yeah yeah.

The genuine criticisms of this are the fat-shaming of Natalie, who doesn’t deserve it, though of course no person ever does; and the rather horrifying scene where the American president, played all too well by Billy Bob Thornton, sexually harasses Natalie and David does nothing about it in the moment, but even worse doesn’t tell her not to when she later apologizes for the situation. And I agree: they make too much of her being fat, and she’s not, but the whole point of that is to show another “obstacle” that their love overcomes, namely that she is not as classically beautiful as someone might want her to be, but he loves her anyway. And sure, the actress doesn’t fit that, because she is in fact classically beautiful; but first, I guarantee you that despite all the scoffing from the critics, that actress has indeed been constantly fat-shamed throughout her acting career precisely because she is not built like, oh, say, Keira Knightley; and second, every goddamn movie with a story like this fails because of the actors being inhumanly attractive. You ever see My Fair Lady? Where the flower girl, Eliza, is at first “deeply unattractive,” until she gets to take a bath and put on pretty clothing — when it is revealed that said flower girl is actually Audrey Freaking Hepburn, one of the most beautiful human beings in all of history? Sure, a smudge of dirt on her cheek makes Audrey Hepburn unappealing. Of course it does. Just like when the nerdy girl takes off her glasses and turns out to be a stunning beauty.

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, 1964
Come on, bro, her hair’s messy, she’s a three at best.
389 Audrey Hepburn My Fair Lady Photos & High Res Pictures - Getty Images
THAT’S THE SAME WOMAN??? Whoa — she sure, uhhh, cleans up nice.

I do think the sexual harassment scene is gross, and David does handle it badly. But again, rom-coms do this: the hero fails the maiden in her moment of need, and must then put on a Show of Love and Act of Contrition in order to prove to her that he actually loves her; and David goes through her neighborhood looking for her, door to door, singing “Good King Wenceslas” to three girls who ask him to carol, and then when he finds her, he goes with her to her little brothers’ Christmas pageant — featuring the above-pictured Nativity Octopus. That’s full on rom-com, in every way. And it’s cute, damn it. It’s rom-com cute. I saw a tweet that criticized David as Prime Minister for endangering England’s most important alliance for the sake of a harmless little sexual harassment, and — I mean, please just fuck off, at that point.

YARN | It's a movie. | The Sopranos (1999) - S06E08 Drama | Video clips by quotes | cf6bfd9b | 紗

Daniel, Sam, Joanna, and Carol

Joanna Page (actress in Love Actually) – Matt Lynn Digital

I saved this one for last, because I think this is the heart of the Christmas movie, as the David/Natalie story is the heart of the rom-com. This story is my favorite. Though even here, there is a flaw, and it’s Claudia Schiffer showing up at the end to melt the heart of Liam Neeson; that’s a weird thing to do to a character that starts the movie speaking at his wife’s funeral — though not as weird as making that dead woman into the villain at her own funeral by having her insist on the Bay City Rollers as her farewell music, which would be pretty funny IF HER TEN-YEAR-OLD SON WEREN’T THERE. He is there, and that scene and that joke is fucked up, I agree. But this also is pretty classic rom-com concept, because it is Daniel’s love for his wife overriding his sense of propriety, but he does it and introduces the appalling music choice because that’s what the woman he loved wanted. Very British rom-com, really.

But other than Claudia Schiffer (which I also don’t like because it’s too meta that Daniel uses her as the jokey-joke representation of what it would take for him to move on after Sam’s mother, and then Claudia Schiffer BUT IT’S NOT CLAUDIA SCHIFFER IT IS CAROL PLAYED BY CLAUDIA SCHIFFER shows up to make googly eyes at him and even apparently go with him to the airport at the very end which is even weirder), I think this story is lovely. Sam is in love, and of course he’s not, he’s bloody ten years old; but ten-year-olds won’t accept that fact as Sam doesn’t: and the right thing to do is exactly what Daniel does, which is take him at his word, take him seriously, and try to help without actually making him feel stupid or uncomfortable. The reality is that this brief crush will pass away, as every ten-year-old’s crush does; and if in the moment Sam learns to play drums, there’s nothing on Earth wrong with that. It gives the boy something to focus on other than his dead mother, and that seems like a good thing to do. It treats love as a real thing, and Sam’s feelings as real things, and that is DEFINITELY a good thing to do. The critics say that Daniel should encourage Sam to talk to Joanna, like a grownup with a romantic attraction; that strikes me as pretty damn disingenuous as a criticism, and also very much a weird thing to tell a ten-year-old to do. That is absolutely what you should tell a teenager, or a grown person to do; but what is going to happen if this kid tells this other kid that he loves her? She’s going to laugh at him, roll her eyes, and then make fun of him with her friends. So Daniel doesn’t tell him to do that. He plays along, and encourages Sam, while also trying to keep him grounded.

It ends up with a chase through an airport and a kiss because it’s a Christmas movie. And in Christmas movies, miracles happen.

But what this story is really about is these two people, Sam and Daniel (Who is Sam’s stepfather, by the way) learning to be a family together. At the end, Sam calls him Dad, instead of Daniel, and when Sam gets his kiss from Joanna, he leaps into Daniel’s arms and gets a genuine hug: and it’s beautiful. That story line is done very well, and is incredibly sweet, and I love it. It also gives me a reason to enjoy “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which I associate with my favorite part of this movie I enjoy; it makes Mariah Carey season a whole lot easier to take.

So that’s it. It is not a perfect movie: I don’t really like that it is both a rom-com and a Christmas movie, because that does some weird things to the story lines — the romance between Sam and Joanna is WAY too romantic because it’s in a rom-com, where in a Christmas movie it would just be innocent and sweet, as it should be — but I think it is a decent version of both things individually, with all the inherent flaws of those two genres; and I think all on its own, it is an entirely unique movie. One that is worth watching. Every year, if you really like it.

If for nothing else, then it is worth watching for Rowan Atkinson. The funniest part of the entire movie, hands down.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch The Family Man. Merry Christmas, everyone. And good night.

Waking Up

Dusty Leave a comment

I had a nightmare the other night.

We all had one two weeks ago. But that one is just beginning.

I don’t have very many nightmares. Although, I don’t remember my dreams very often, so it’s possible that I am running through a constant string of terrifying dreams all night and then blanking my mind of them when I wake; I do suffer from insomnia, and so I frequently wake up in the middle of the night and think anxious and frustrated thoughts for a while before I manage to get back to sleep — if I do get back to sleep. That might be from that hypothetical string of nightmares suddenly reaching some kind of tipping point, driving me out of sleep and into waking anxiety.

Hmmm… a series of nightmares that build up to a climax of anxiety which ruins sleep. That does sound like the current situation of this country, doesn’t it?

In my nightmare the other night, my wife and I were going through a zombie apocalypse scenario. I don’t remember the whole thing, but at the end, we were hurrying through the halls of a Generic School-In-A-Dream™, and it was right at the point of the zombie plague where you look around, and you realize that the people around you are not people, but are rather zombies: and not only that, but the people are giving you that sullen, angry stare that zombies tend to have right before they charge. In my dream it was particularly creepy because the one I saw and recognized as a zombie was a child, and the signal that the kid was zombied up was a bloody rip across his cheek. In the dream, Toni and I ran; but we didn’t get very far.

Zombie children staring at cell phones in dark theater. - Stock Image & Prompt | 2Moons
Not the kind of zombies I was thinking of — but also, isn’t it?

I am scared of zombies. Of course I am, and not just because the idea of being eaten alive is utterly horrifying; I am also scared of the zombie apocalypse because I know how it would go: I would die. Quickly. I have no survival skills, I have no combat ability, I have nothing that I could even offer to a group of survivors that would make them want to take me in, other than how well I could correct their grammar and help them interpret poems: two skills that I expect will not be highly prized in the apocalypse.

As they are not prized now.

But that is much less frightening to me than this: what would happen to my family?

My wife is a badass; she can fight, she can shoot a gun (which I never have), she is tough as nails. She could make it, at least for a while — as long as I was not slowing her down. But she wouldn’t leave me, so I would definitely be slowing her down; and that means I would have to worry about her survival, because I would be a liability for it — I would be putting her at risk. And then, even if we decided we would run for the hills or something, we also have pets: two dogs, a great big tortoise, and a tiny bird in a cage. Okay, the tortoise I could release into the wild; he would probably be fine — would zombies even eat tortoises? (Note to self: story idea — zombie turtle. Talk about slow zombies.) — but my dogs and my bird would not be fine. And I wouldn’t leave them. And that, of course, makes me think about the horror of watching my loved ones get hurt. Which is, far and away and always, the worst nightmare imaginable.

And that — watching people we love get hurt — is also the current situation of this country.

So look: I said in my last post that, if you were looking to solve certain problems and thought voting for Donald Trump and the Republicans was the way to solve those problems, that doesn’t by itself make you my enemy. I don’t agree with you, but if you did it without meaning harm, I don’t have to consider you that way, with full and vituperative enmity. But the thing is, voting for Trump was unquestionably voting for someone who will do harm: and while that doesn’t mean you wanted harm to be done, it sure as hell means you accepted the fact that harm will be done. Maybe you lied to yourself, and convinced yourself Trump would not do harm; but that was a lie, and you probably know it. The man not only did harm to people in his first term, he promised extensive harm for this term, and he has been accused and found liable for causing quite a bit of harm entirely separate from the trials he was able to maneuver out of because too many people voted for Trump over the rule of law. Again, I assume that if you voted for Trump, you weren’t actually thinking, “I don’t want the rule of law any more!” Maybe you even thought that Trump and the Republicans are the law and order party; which is fine, in some ways they are — but Trump himself is not, and you should have been cognizant of that.

More likely was that you expected harm would be done, but you expected it will not be done to you or your family, and you were willing to accept that outcome. If you weren’t willing to accept that outcome, obviously, you didn’t vote for Trump. If you voted for Harris, thank you, and I’m sorry; if you didn’t vote, well. You’re not my enemy. But you’re pretty damn pathetic. And if you voted for harm that won’t fall on you, then I want you to think about that, for the next four years, and then hopefully for the rest of your life.

(And don’t try to both-sides me: I recognize that voting for Harris was voting for harm to continue in Gaza with American support. I would have been thinking about that for the rest of my life. I probably already will be, as I voted for Joe Biden, who has been supporting that genocide for a full year now.)

So, when I had this nightmare about the zombies rising up to kill my wife and I, I woke up scared. I realized immediately that it was a nightmare and it wasn’t real (Unlike the current situation in this country, which feels just like a nightmare but unfortunately is quite real), but like an idiot, I thought this thought: What if the situation were real? How would I actually deal with a zombie apocalypse? And while most of the time (I don’t think about zombie apocalypse survival strategies all the time, but I have thought of them, when it isn’t 3:00 am on a school night) I can fool myself (See? I do it too.) into thinking that I would escape by hiding or running or just being super clever, on this particular night, lying in the darkness, I faced the truth: I’d be screwed. I would die. Probably in an awful way. And I would have to either hope to die first (which would break my most important promise to my wife), or I would have to watch my loved ones killed in awful ways in front of me, while I couldn’t do anything about it.

And that feels just like the situation in this country today.

I know that there are people who would read this and think, “Psssh. You’re just being dramatic. Come on, comparing the second Trump term to a zombie apocalypse? That’s ridiculous! He’s just gonna lower taxes and deport some people. Maybe ban trans people. Maybe go after abortion and birth control. No big deal! He’s not gonna end the world!” To be fair, maybe people who would think that way wouldn’t read this, but my point is that there are people, probably the majority of the 76 million people who voted for Trump, who would think I was exaggerating with this analogy.

You know those people in zombie movies who act like complete idiots? Who refuse to accept the truth? They deny that the zombies are rising, or that they are eating people; they refuse to accept the obvious danger, or to accept that their own actions — making too much noise, for instance, or opening doors without knowing what is on the other side — are unacceptably risky? You know how those people almost always get other people killed before themselves succumbing to the ravenous horde?

Humans vs. Zombies: Fight of the living dead – Basement Medicine

Right. This country has at least 76 million of those people.

No, I don’t know if that is true. Not all the people who voted for Trump are fools who think he won’t do any harm. Many of them want him to do harm. They are gleefully rubbing their hands together in eager anticipation of all that harm he will do; they probably have a list of intended victims they are especially eager to enjoy the suffering of. Maybe they have a pool, and are laying odds on who will get it, and who will be first. (To be clear, these people are my enemies.)

You know those characters in zombie movies who are rooting for the zombies, and hoping all of humanity dies in hideous agony?

Right: you don’t. Because there aren’t any people like that in zombie movies. There are no people, in a story of struggle between humanity itself and the vile corruption that is bent on destroying humanity, who want humanity to lose. (Note to self: zombie movie in which some people actually want the zombies to win and talk about how much cheaper eggs will be when most of the population has been eaten. Maybe include the zombie turtles in this?) Which just tells you that some proportion of Trump’s voters are even worse than the people in zombie apocalypse movies.

Which is pretty damn terrible to think about.

I really don’t understand it. I understand (though I condemn) the partisanship that kept people from being able to vote for Harris or any Democrat; I understand (though I deplore) the willful ignorance that allowed people to “forget” that Trump will do harm, or the barely concealed hatred and aversion that allowed people to accept the limited harm they think Trump will do, which they think won’t affect them directly. I understand and agree with the anger that I know many people felt over the DNC’s choice of Kamala Harris, who is not and never was the best candidate the left could have produced for President; though also, I have to say this: people are nervous about what Trump will do now that he doesn’t have the same guardrails keeping him in line as he had the first time, and the truth is that the biggest guardrail Trump had to get over was — us. We are the guardrail. We are the defenders of democracy and freedom in this country, because the actual political power in this country resides in our votes. And we had one job: to vote against Trump’s return to the White House. As people trying to get our apathetic, lethargic, cynical, disjointed, selfish political class to produce an actually good candidate who could provide actual positive outcomes, we had several things we could have and should have done; but as defenders of democracy, we had one job: don’t let the would-be tyrant get back into power.

And we failed. We let the zombie virus out of the lab. For the second time, too, because this is the sequel: and as with every sequel, the stupidity of those who fail to take the zombie apocalypse seriously has to be even more appalling and egregious — because Jesus Christ, we already went through this once, weren’t you paying attention when all those zombies were eating people?!? — and the violence and gore the zombies inflict on people has to be even more shocking, even more horrendous, either more disgusting or on a much wider scale; because the sequel has to up the ante from the first installment, or there’s no point to having a sequel. Right?

Zombieworld 2 - Movies on Google Play
Love the zombie in the bottom right looking the wrong way.

What kills me is the breadth and depth of Trump’s win. I can’t just blame those frickin Pennsylvanians: every swing state went to Trump. My state, Arizona, went to Trump. There are Trump supporters all around me, wishing harm but not talking to me about it. You know how the worst thing in a zombie movie is when the people are actually turning into zombies, and you don’t know who is going to turn next? Who has already been infected? Who is suddenly going to surprise you by revealing themselves as your enemy, as the person who wishes you harm, or even as the monster who is going to do you harm themselves, who is going to take a bite out of your shoulder on the way up to your jugular? Everyone looks the same, all looking normal, all talking about things the same way — and then suddenly someone’s eyes roll up in their heads, their skin turns chartreuse, and they groan and start nomming on their neighbors? Don’t you think that’s the worst part of zombie movies?

Okay, no, the worst is probably when people get dragged screaming into a horde that tears them apart and eats them alive.

I hope that there won’t be anything even metaphorically like that in this situation. It is just an analogy; I don’t think the world is going to go through even a human apocalypse, let alone something like a zombie apocalypse. I know we will survive this.

But also, Nazis marched in Ohio this past weekend. So I’m really not sure there won’t be a scene of savage and shocking violence where someone innocent is dragged screaming to their horrible bloody death.

So my dark-of-night thought about the zombie apocalypse was: I’d probably just give up. I’d run for a while — if we’re starting with my dream, I’d be with Toni — and then I’d end up giving in to despair, and I’d have to do one of those hideously sad scenes where two people say goodbye and then let themselves die together. And when I heard the election results, I thought sort of the same thing: maybe I should just give up. I mean, this is clearly what the people of this country want, more than I want to believe they want it. But they do. I don’t just think ignorant and evil people voted for Trump; I think there were rational people, good people, who made a bad decision, but who thought it was the right decision. I want to think that, given a chance to talk to them honestly and openly, I could convince those people that they made a bad decision: and then maybe they won’t make the same kind of mistake again — but also, I failed to convince them before this election. I failed to make any difference in this election. However hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough; I wasn’t good enough to solve the problem, to prevent this terrible outcome, to protect people from harm. I thought, Why would I try again when I failed the last time?

And that’s actually why I recognized this parallel between Trump’s election and the zombie apocalypse, and why I wanted to write about it.

Because what zombies represent is hopelessness.

The basic concept of the zombie trope is this: people, who are unique and special and valuable individuals, become zombies, a horde of identityless, soulless, lifeless husks, taken over and corrupted by some vile invader — a virus, an alien parasite, Disney. Having been corrupted, the former humans stalk other humans relentlessly, and turn those individual people into more indistinguishable members of the horde. It represents all of our fears of losing our selves, our identities, in the larger society, which grinds us up and devours us (along with the visceral horror of cannibalism, the idea of being devoured, reduced to mere sustenance and then destroyed and consumed by those who should shield and succour you). Zombies are seen as representing our fear of the future, particularly of technology, and the advancement and growth of our society into something that either doesn’t recognize our individual human value — or doesn’t care about it. Zombies don’t care that I am a teacher, or a husband, or a writer, or a man who loves animals; to them I’m just meat. And zombies are the meat grinder.

Zombies are the Machine. Zombies are the Man, in the abstract sense of an authority that doesn’t respect or value us, that sees us only as grist for the mill, or at best fuel for the engine.

But none of that is the horror of zombies. (That’s not true: much of the horror of zombies is in the eating, particularly in the eating alive, which is just appalling in and of itself.) The horror of zombies is in their relentlessness: the horde keeps coming after you, and nothing can make them stop. They do not get tired or bored or distracted (mostly), because they are lifeless and thoughtless and devoid of all desires other than hunger. They can not be killed, can not be scared off. You can sometimes destroy them, such as with the famed head shot, or with something like an explosion, a consuming fire, a bulldozer: some kind of overwhelming force, far more than would be needed to stop a human who was coming after you, which shows the sheer power to be found in giving up (or losing) humanity. But even if you fight the zombies, and win the battle, you can’t win the war, because you will run out of ammunition, you will use up all of your resources, and the zombies will keep coming: because we got the guns, but they got the numbers, to misquote the Doors. And of course, every one of ours we lose is one that they gain. You can outrun them — but eventually they will catch up with you, because you will get exhausted, simply because you are alive and therefore you need to rest. The dead — or rather, the undead — do not need to rest.

That’s the main horror of zombie apocalypse stories. There is no escape, and no way to stop what is coming for you. What is going to eat you, or turn you into another part of itself. And the result of that inevitability, (I have to link that clip. Also, the third movie is an interesting re-interpretation of the same fear, being consumed and turned into the corrupted enemy.) of course, is despair: a loss of hope, and the subsequent surrendering to apathy and lethargy and numbness, and then death and destruction.

Hm. Sounds like depression. Also sounds like the situation in this country right now.

So that’s what I felt, what I thought, when I heard that Trump had won the election. Fortunately, because I spend most of my time outside of politics, I didn’t feel that total despair, I didn’t lose all hope — because hey, the zombie hordes aren’t outside my door. They aren’t stalking me. I understand that some people don’t have that luxury, that solace, because the hordes are stalking them, and they are in real danger; but, without being selfish or trying to sound callous, I am glad that I can take solace in that I can still live. I can still teach — and while some of my students are a different kind of soulless zombie horde, many of them are vital and wonderful young people who learn from me. So there is hope there. I can still write, even though it is harder to find the time and energy to do it, these days. Because this is neither a movie nor my dream, I do not in fact need to sacrifice my wife, or hold her while we both die; actually, we are both quite healthy, which is nice to say. And the pets are safe and well. So no, it is not the apocalypse, not for me. I have hope, and hope means I can fight.

And it is not time to give up hope.

I mean that. While many of the guardrails that held Trump back from his worst impulses last time are gone now, and he will act like what he is, a cross between Veruca Salt (not the band) and a shit-throwing gibbon (Note to self: that would be a good punk band name.), there are still guardrails in place. We should be disturbed by the ones that are gone, and we should work to put them back in place, or even replace them with improved versions; but don’t think that Trump will be able to do all the worst things he or we could ever imagine. He won’t. The military will not betray this country, the Constitution, and their oaths, for Donald freaking Trump: and without the military, he can never have a coup or become dictator for life. He can get every single one of the Proud Boys, and the 3%ers, and the Neo-Nazis, and the Karens for Trump or whatever, and march them all on Washington: and a single armored division would wipe them out in minutes. So he cannot overthrow the government. And while the Supreme Court, themselves corrupted by something vile and awful and alien — namely a level of arrogance that we haven’t seen, I think, since literal nobles before the French Revolution — have given Trump the green light to do whatever official act he wants — they also reserved for themselves the right to decide what is an official act. And if you think they would ever give up that control over Trump, or any other President, well. You haven’t seen any movies with the nobility in them. Honestly, the people backing Trump don’t want him to overthrow the government and destroy this country; this country is where they keep their money. The Supreme Court serves that crowd, the billionaire class who want to retain the rule of law because that protects their billions — and, not coincidentally, the Court’s own power. So anything that looks like Trump trying to overthrow the Constitution and set himself up as a king will be thrown down by those who already consider themselves our overlords.

Let Them Make Mistakes: Marie Antoinette's Life and Wedding
Is this the Supreme Court — or is this:
This Week in Genre History: Mars Attacks! wanted to destroy Earth a bit too much | SYFY WIRE

So no, Trump won’t destroy the country, or our democracy.

But he’ll hurt people. A lot of people. Starting with the immigrants he deports, the women he strips of rights, and the trans people he tries to exterminate by allowing bigots to say trans people shouldn’t exist. And all of the people who love them, and will have to watch those people get hurt.

So in the face of that, we shouldn’t feel helpless or hopeless, and we shouldn’t despair.

We should feel sober. And frightened, especially for those who are in Trump’s crosshairs, although that may not be us and our families; it is surely people we know and care about, and people we should protect, support and succour.

We should feel so. Fucking. Angry.

And we should then focus that anger, that fear, that seriousness, on the task at hand: to fight the horde. To stop them from breaking down all of the doors, tearing down all of the walls, and especially to stop them from devouring people, whether they are our people or not. Because now it’s down to this: you are human, and you are unwilling to sacrifice those who are threatened for your own sake, especially for your own convenience, or for something as trivial as the price of eggs — or you are not. If you are not, you are of the horde, and you are our enemy.

All of you humans, all of my kin and friends and allies: don’t stop. Don’t give up hope: this horde will be defeated. This will be one of those zombie apocalypses where the zombie plague is cured, or something happens to wipe all the monsters out. You know why?

Because Donald Trump is an unhealthy 78-year-old, who very carefully and determinedly built a cult of personality around himself. For reasons I can’t really fathom, he was incredibly successful at that — more successful than any demogogue since 1945, probably. He turned the United States of America on its head, and got us to choose the path that leads to our own destruction — twice — and to cheer while we did it. It’s goddamn 1984. (And by the way: I’ve read 1984. And I understood it. My allusion is accurate.) But the best and most secure guardrail that will help protect us from total collapse into the evil and anarchy of Trump’s world vision is that Donald Trump will not live forever — and while he is alive, he is old, and unhealthy, and lazy. Half the stuff he could do, he won’t do, because he’ll be too busy watching Fox News and telling his cronies that he really is smarter than everyone else. And because only he himself is the focus of that cult of personality, nobody else will be able to step into his shoes when he dies.

In the meantime, before he leaves office with his diaper and his hands full of his own feces, or before he drops dead of a massive coronary, he will do harm. To people we know. To people we love. To people. And so that is our fight. To stop that harm when we can, to mitigate it when we can, and to balance it always by being so fucking aggressively kind that even the zombies would decide not to eat us, would instead pick us a flower and smile with their broken teeth in their rotted mouths, and say, “Thaaaaangk yyyooouuuuuuuu!”

Cartoon Green Zombie Monster with Flower Stock Vector - Illustration of death, yellow: 75571689

I’m going to shoot for that result with my classes, too. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

As for me? After I thought I would give up in the zombie apocalypse, and then told myself that I would never give up — and then thought that I am too weak, too ignorant, too pathetic and lame to actually be of any use to anyone in that dystopian scenario, I remembered something. I remembered a different post-apocalyptic book I read, years ago: one where the collapse is due to a disease that simply kills people, not one that reanimates the dead — you know, a much more realistic book. Science fiction, of course, as the most accurate and truthful books often are. And in that book, the main character is, at first, a conman, a liar who manages to get accepted into the broken anarchic society that replaces our modern one after the collapse; he gains food, shelter, allies — a life. And he does it first by lying. And then, he does it by storytelling, and entertainment: he puts on plays for the fortified groups he visits; he recites poetry. As years turn into decades, he helps to teach the children born into this terrible world, and because he travels from place to place, around and around a particular circuit, he becomes something of a messenger, helping these small, isolated communities to build connections, and to unite, in the end, against the common foe.

By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the conman, the entertainer, has actually done something genuinely valuable for the people he thought he was just lying to: he has given them hope. He has inspired them to keep going, even in the face of despair, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. He has brought people together, and reminded them of what it means to be human, to be more than savages slaughtering each other for food and warmth. To be people, rather than part of the faceless horde.

The name of the book is The Postman, by David Brin, a wonderful SF writer. It was turned into a reeeaaalllllyy bad movie with Kevin Costner in the lead role; it was so bad it has probably been entirely forgotten. But the book was actually good.

The Postman - Wikipedia

And you know what? I can do that. I could do all of that. (Not the lying, hopefully, because I am not good at it and I very much hate doing it. But I can.) I can be entertaining, and I can bring people together, and I can maybe inspire people to keep going, even in the face of despair and the seemingly insurmountable numbers of the horde.

I can survive the zombie apocalypse.

We all can.

Let’s go.

Indie Film Box Office: 'Shaun Of The Dead' Lives In Bloody Good 20th Anniversary Re-Release

The Enemy, Within

Dusty Leave a comment

Listen. I’m not your enemy.

it may seem at times like I am. I get pretty mad about politics, and I say some aggressive and accusatory things, and also some pretty damn insulting things. We disagree, very strongly, about a number of issues; and you may see some of my opinions as representing a threat.

For instance, you see Donald Trump as the best choice for the next President. I see him as an orange fascist, a shit-flinging gibbon, who may be a threat to this country’s continued existence; though I admit, Trump’s not actually the threat; it’s the people who come crowding in with him, who, while we’re all staring at the shit-gibbon, are sneaking around in the shadows trying to make our lives worse so they can gain more of what they already have, wealth and power and the protective bubble of privilege. I don’t understand why you can’t see the threat of those people behind Trump. Though I understand why you’re staring at Trump: we all are. I went to the San Diego Zoo when I was a kid and watched a chimp pee in its own mouth. We like watching primates fling excrement. It’s wild.

I know that you think Kamala is the threat to our country; or, even more likely, you see her the same way I see Trump: you think she is a low-IQ failure, a Communist/Marxist liar who got her start in politics by spreading her legs for Willie Brown, and who never even won the nomination, just stepped in when Joe dropped out, conveniently for Kamala too late for the DNC to run a new primary but not too late for her to take the money he raised; and you think she is mainly a distraction whose job it is to open the door for those same shady characters I mentioned before, who, you think, will strip away our freedoms and the things that make us who we are, that make us the greatest country on Earth.

You worry about what she’s going to do to the economy, and how that will affect the people of this country.

I worry about what he’s going to do to the people of this country while we’re all focusing on the economy.

So, we disagree. Strongly. Often.

But we’re not enemies.

Neither one of us is trying to destroy the country, though we both accuse each other of doing exactly that. I think the threats you see, the things you believe will destroy the country, are absurd non-issues — like preventing trans people from playing sports — and I can’t understand why you don’t focus on the real threats that I see — like climate change. And yes, you guessed it: you can’t fathom why I believe in these things that are barely even real, like climate change, and why I ignore the moral collapse of this country, caused by the rise of DEI and drag queen story hour.

I know that the issue of trans rights is not the biggest issue on your mind, I know that it is the economy, immigration, and crime, in that order; I’m trying to show the starkest differences between us — because people on my side are also concerned about the economy and about immigration in ways I personally don’t agree with. So look on the bright side: you already won both of those arguments, as you won the argument about defunding the police. Whoever gets into office, Trump or Harris, Democrats or Republicans, they will cut taxes (though they shouldn’t, they should raise taxes on corporations and use it to fund Medicare for all, which will then save us more money and, more importantly, more headache than any tax cut ever could — but I also recognize that you think this is socialism gone wild, and you can’t believe I would ever trust the government to do anything important like provide real health care to real people; and I can’t believe you would trust corporations to do it instead of the government — and here we are.), and they will definitely pass that hard-on-immigration bill that the Dems handed the Republicans before Donald Trump told them not to pass it. He’s been taking shots for months, now, about that bill, so you better believe he would pass that same damn bill — except with the wall stuck in there somewhere. So you will get a tougher stance on immigration, and you will get a tax cut, and you will get a better economy (Because the economy during any presidency is largely built by the one before, so whoever wins this election will be hailed as a brilliant economic president because of the work that Biden has done for the last four years. But we can disagree on that, too.). One of the other places we disagree is trans rights, and that one I think is still up in the air; that’s why I used it as an example. I could have picked abortion: but I don’t think we actually disagree on that, not substantively.

I’m explaining this because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to paint you in a terrible way by talking about trans people playing sports or reading to children: I am not. I disagree with you. (If you are a trans person, or an ally and a supporter of trans rights as I am, and you think I am cozying up to people who want to remove your right to exist, hold on. Trust me. Read on to the end. I am not your enemy, either. [I’m just going to go ahead and assume that anyone who actually is trans is not on the Trump side politically. Not really.]) I do not think you, whom I disagree with politically, are my enemy.

I would like you to recognize the same thing about me.

Let’s talk about our disagreements a little more, and see if you can see this my way.

What makes someone your enemy? For me, it boils down to one thing: your enemy intends you harm. They wish to harm you. People who are not our enemies may (and often do) harm us, but they don’t intend it; that’s the difference. Anyone who intends you harm is your enemy.

So look at where we disagree. Start with immigration, because I don’t mean to ignore what many people think is a very serious issue. Here’s my opinion on it: there are too many illegal immigrants coming into this country.

Ha. Didn’t expect that, did you? Want me to really blow your mind? I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, too.

Where we disagree is what should be done about illegal immigration. I do not think illegal immigrants are bad people. I am tempted to explain that position by saying that I am not a racist, because I think a LOT of people who oppose illegal immigration hold that position because they are racist; but not everyone does, by any means. Many people oppose illegal immigration because it is illegal; many people oppose it because they think our country doesn’t have the room or the resources to support countless immigrants, and priority should be given to those who come here legally. I disagree with the first argument because laws can be changed: what matters to me is harm, not the fact of a law prohibiting specific behavior. I talk to my students about laws and morality all the time, and every single one of them thinks that some laws should be broken when the law is bad or the need is severe or the cause is righteous; I presume we agree on that, as well. I don’t like holding one position in one context and then changing it in another context; that is hypocrisy. So the issue is, if illegal immigrants are doing harm, their actions should be illegal, and they should be stopped; but if they are not doing harm, then it doesn’t matter that their actions are illegal: harmless actions that are illegal imply the laws should be changed, not that the actions and the people are bad somehow despite the lack of harm.

The harm illegal immigrants may be doing is taking limited resources. And as I said: I think there are too many illegal immigrants. (I kind of think there are too many people in this country, period, but then I don’t like people, so I’m not going to pay much attention to that thought of mine.) I will only say that illegal immigrants may be taking limited resources because it isn’t clear to me that illegal immigrants are the problem: they are emphatically not the cause of inflation or the housing crisis. But it is possible they are taking too many limited resources, and if so that should stop: one way would be if they should be reduced in number.

Here’s how I think we could do that, if it is the right thing to do: work permits and the right to migrate freely across the border, in either direction, for employment. Doing that would eliminate as an area of concern all of the people who immigrate and reside permanently in the US simply for economic reasons: because they could travel here, work, and then go back home with their families for vacations or when they have enough money. They wouldn’t bring their families here, because they would only come to work and send money home. Most people don’t want to move their family to a whole new country just for a job: they do it because if someone comes to the US for a job, they can’t ever go back, because then they could never return to work more. People used to cross the border to work when the agricultural season called for more workers, and then return to their native country when the season ended. We are the ones who stopped that, and it was stupid, and it caused millions of people to immigrate here with their families, permanently, reluctantly, because they had no economic opportunities in their home country and they didn’t want to be separated from their families forever. But go to the U.S. alone, just to work for a couple of months for picking season? No big deal. And then the only people who migrate here permanently would be those actually seeking asylum, seeking an entirely new life: a MUCH smaller number.

So. That’s my view on illegal immigration. I think immigration does no harm when it is handled reasonably; because of that, I think handling it reasonably is the best thing to do. Not build walls, not deport people, not militarize the border. (We are not, by the way, talking about fentanyl trafficking or human trafficking: one of the ways that we get twisted in politics is by conflating multiple issues that should be considered separately. This is just the immigration discussion.) Work permits and freedom to cross for work.

Maybe you still disagree with me. Maybe you think illegal immigration is illegal and so there should be a penalty involved, because breaking a rule is in itself harmful; okay. Maybe you think that immigrants with work permits would still take jobs that should go to Americans; okay.

Can you see that, even if you hold these opinions, or some other opinion that makes you disagree with my idea — can you see that I don’t intend you any harm? That I don’t mean to harm anyone? I want to make it easier to separate those migrants who want to work and then leave, from those immigrants who want to come here permanently, and I want to make it easier for both to get what they want. I believe that will do the most to decrease harm. (And, not coincidentally, it will reduce the harm done through human trafficking and drug smuggling, because much of that is done through exploitation of desperate people, and if we reduce desperation we reduce exploitation. But this is just the immigration discussion. I just want you to know I’m not ignoring the other problems.) That’s my full intent: and so even if you think I’m missing a critical concern of yours with my solution, I’m not planning anything that is intended to cause you harm. Or to cause anyone harm, but we’re talking about you.

That’s why I’m not your enemy.

Want to do another one? Take climate change. You may oppose the Green New Deal because you think that it will make everything too expensive, and that climate change can’t be affected by making you buy an electric car. You may think that Democratic politicians are using the Green New Deal to give kickbacks to the shady people standing behind them (Though if you do, you are ignoring that one of the biggest recipients of sweetheart environmental laws and policies is Elon Musk, who is not a friend to Democrats.), and you may think that electric cars suck and you don’t ever want to own one. (You may tell yourself it’s because EVs don’t have the range, or that the batteries are dangerous and lithium mining is toxic, or that the power to charge them comes from fossil fuels used to generate power in the first place — but it’s really because EVs don’t make the cool sounds that gas cars do, and you know it. Right, JB?)

I do not believe in a Green New Deal. I think it is a political statement that is now toxic. I wish it weren’t, because I believe in what it represents; but I don’t need the statement, I just want the results. I believe the government should support and encourage the US to move towards a greener economy and a greener infrastructure. I do not want Democrats giving kickbacks or sweetheart deals to their corporate cronies; they are bad at picking them, because they picked freaking Musk and made him the richest man on Earth, and he then fucked up Twitter. I really liked Twitter, so now I hold a grudge. (Mostly against Musk, who sucks for a plethora of reasons.) I believe the government has a role in educating the public, and especially in making sure that the corporations which profit from causing climate change do not get to lie about climate change, as all of the oil and gas companies have been doing for generations now. I admit I think that EVs are better and cooler than gas cars, and specifically because they don’t make the same noises that gas cars do.

It’s okay if we’re enemies on that score.

But again: can you see how I don’t intend to cause you harm? We may have different ideas of what should be done, and how it should be done. I want education. I want encouragement and support, but I want the change to come from the people and the companies of this country, not to be imposed by the government. I want that because government imposition of changes so vast and momentous doesn’t work: and I really think our actions on climate change need to work, and they need to work now. But I’ll bet you anything that we could find a reasonable compromise on the specifics of this issue.

Because I am not your enemy.

Go down the line: you will find the same thing, again and again. I hear pundits and people on both sides say that we are all Americans and we are not that different; I don’t actually agree, I think we are that different. I think we disagree on a whole lot of stuff. But I don’t think we are enemies, because I don’t think we intend each other harm. I don’t think most people intend anyone harm, other than those they see as enemies. I don’t think people who want to deport illegal immigrants want to harm those people, I think they just want to protect this country and they think immigrants are harming the US, and that deportation (and a wall) are the best way to prevent that harm. I know that people who want to impose EV mandates and so on are not intending any harm for those who might get affected; they want to prevent the much greater harm of the onrushing environmental collapse. Talk to citizens who support the idea of a Green New Deal about something like subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy an electric car, to make it possible to switch to an EV, and I guarantee they’ll agree immediately; and if you think that’s socialism, well. Tell me who it harms, and how.

You know what made me realize this? It’s abortion. Over 60% of this country’s citizens support abortion rights. That’s more than all of the people in either party, Democrat or Republican. The people I sometimes think of as white supremacists, the people I sometimes think of as religious fanatics (Don’t blame me for thinking that, you guys have Mark Robinson on your side.) — large proportions of them, of you, support abortion rights. And yet there are whole states — which may not have 60% support for abortion rights, but sure as hell have more than 0, which is the number of abortions some states seem to want to allow — trying to ban abortion entirely.

Even those people, most of them, don’t intend harm. They are trying to prevent harm. I think, vehemently, that they are wrong, that they are causing more harm than they are preventing; but I can have that debate with them. And other than the fanatics who actually want to murder people, I think they would be willing to have the discussion with me, too. Because we’re not enemies.

Now: let me say that there are people who intend harm. There are people who oppose immigration because they are racist; they want to militarize the border because they want people to die trying to cross into the US; they want there to be camps built to hold immigrants because they want immigrants to suffer and die. Those people are my enemies. As I think they are yours. There are people who want to prevent trans athletes from playing on teams with their identified gender because those people hate trans people, and think trans people shouldn’t exist. Those people intend harm to trans people: therefore they are my enemies. But I don’t think that’s you, either. I think most people who oppose trans rights think that it’s fine for trans people to exist; they think trans people shouldn’t play on sports teams, and they think trans people shouldn’t be around children. I disagree with those ideas — but I don’t think the people who hold them intend harm. I think those ideas actually do cause harm, quite severe harm; but I don’t think it’s intentional harm. Where it is intentional harm, where people think trans people — or those they mistake for trans people, like drag performers — should be killed? Those people are my enemies. And they should be yours. Murderers, even would-be murderers, do not get a place in the debate.

But I really don’t think that most people want to commit murder. And I think if you don’t want to kill people, we can talk.

So this, I think, is how we should think about this going forward. I disagree with you, a lot, and I will fight you, tooth and nail, over political points — but not literally, because I do not intend you harm, and you do not intend me harm. We are all Americans, even though we are very different. We are not enemies.

But you know who is my enemy?

People who try to convince you that I am your enemy. People who say that I am, intentionally, destroying our country, which I love dearly. People who say that I should be destroyed, that I should be jailed, or killed, for my beliefs and my political ideas.

People like Donald Trump.

So understand this: I don’t hate people who vote for Donald Trump — though I don’t like you, either. But I don’t think that most of you are my enemies. Some are: the racists are, and the anti-trans bigots, and the ones who want people to suffer and die because they disagree politically with Trump and his ilk. Donald Trump, however, is my enemy: because by trying to make you think that I am your enemy, he intends me harm. If you think the same thing about Kamala Harris, then I accept that she is your enemy — though I doubt you think that unless you think that all Democrats are out to kill all Republicans, and if you think that, you’re probably my enemy already. Trump is Kamala Harris’s enemy, and so she says things about him you wouldn’t say about people who aren’t your enemy: and he deserves them.

Because he is the enemy.

You’re not.

So if my enemy wins this election, I’m going to oppose him, and I’m going to be fighting those who supported him because he is my enemy, and I think he intends harm. But then after he is gone — and even if he wins this election, he will not destroy this country, because he has too many enemies and not enough allies — we will need to come back together, and hopefully find a new set of leaders to elect who do not tell any of us that we are each other’s enemies. Hopefully that type will never rise again.

Hopefully it won’t be you.

But I don’t think it will. Because we’re not enemies.

Do you agree?

Deep Breath — Now Hold It… Hold It… Keep Holding…

Dusty Leave a comment
I bet this would work.

***

Wow. It’s been so long since I’ve written a post that I got logged out of my own website.

I would apologize, but first, you all are sick of hearing me apologize; as I say to my students when they offer an apology for their behavior, “I don’t need you to apologize, I need you to do better.” And I can’t promise that I will do better: because the reason I haven’t been posting is that I’m too busy drowning in work and responsibilities. I haven’t caught up on the work, and the responsibilities aren’t going away; so I won’t be writing much any time soon. Though I do have a break a week from now, so I may be able to find some time there to post some more; I do have several ideas for things I want to write.

But this one has to come first. Because, you see, a large part of my problem with keeping up this school year is that I am extra exhausted: and a large part of that problem is that my students are extra exhausting. I’m back teaching 9th grade English, for the first time in 8 years; and the last time, it was an Honors class. I don’t have my lovely fantasy/sci-fi elective this year; not enough students signed up for it — though I can’t imagine who wouldn’t want to take a class in which you get to read “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth.” (And I BEG you, if you like swords and sorcery and epicness beyond the known realms of epic, click on that link and go read the story. It’s lengthy, but it’s SO good.) The class was fun, and therefore easier to teach; the classes I have now are mostly not fun, and mostly not easy. And though I don’t want to sound like an old man shaking his fist at a cloud, I have to say that part of the problem really is my students, their attitude about school, and the way they treat me and my class.

But another factor — a more difficult one — is how my administration directs me to deal with those students.

For the sake of this post, which I want to keep shorter and more to the point than my usual logorrhea, I’m just going to share the text of a … friendly lil email I got from my administration. Let me preface this by saying that I actually like my administrators very much, first on a personal level and then second (and somewhat less than the personal) on a professional level. They work very hard, even harder than I do; and they, like me, like everyone in education, have enormous and ridiculous demands on their time and energy. One of the demands on my administration is for them to implement the systems that the higher-up administrators want them to implement; and at my school, as at many schools, one of those systems is PBIS.

I have written before about PBIS. But there is nothing I could say about it that would communicate the full level of insipid uselessness that it imposes on teachers. The basic idea of it is that we need to praise students for the things they do right, more often than we need to criticize them for the things they do wrong; and that’s fine — but the idea of it being a system that we need to impose on teachers? Processes that require training? The idea that it will produce data which we will then analyze and use to form data-driven decisions that will surely improve school for everyone? My god, the pile of steaming bullshit in that is larger than Mount Olympus. I already praise my students when they do things right. I do it because I am a kind person, and I care about both my students and the work we are involved in, this pursuit of their best selves. So it already happens. Any system, any process, any practice that teachers are trained in, is inevitably going to be artificial, and therefore undermine the actual relationships that teachers form with students, and which are far and away the best chance we have of changing the way they act, changing their attitudes and reducing their misbehaviors. Relationships, guys. Not PBIS.

When my students are being resistant, or obstructive — or just little freaking jerks — they don’t really need me to be nice to them and find something in their behavior to praise. They need me to tell them to shut the hell up, and make it stick: they need me to have a relationship with them that means they will listen to me when I tell them they need to shut the hell up. That is 99% of the problem with student behavior. For the sake of contradicting the image of me as old man shaking my fist at a cloud, let me say this: students today aren’t worse than they were ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty, when I was a student (Okay, thirty-five…): but they aren’t any better. They are sometimes, some of them, intentionally cruel; that is a separate and more serious issue that has to be dealt with individually and more emphatically. They are frequently distracted and detached, and that sometimes has to be dealt with, though I still generally believe the best way to handle that is to let them not learn anything for a time, and point out to them that they have not been learning anything, and maybe they should do something about that. But really, the problem that comes up in every class, every single day, and which requires a reaction from me, a reaction I am VERY tired of giving, is: they make too much goddamned noise. They just need to shut the hell up. That’s it. Otherwise they are basically fine, and usually good.

Or, as my administration put it in an email I recently received:

As we continue working together to create a positive and productive learning environment for all of our students,

Off to a great start. Also, I thought I was teaching them English?

But please, go on.

I want to emphasize the importance of using Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) when addressing behaviors around our SSA campus. One key aspect that often impacts the success of these interventions is the tone we use when interacting with students. At times, incidents can escalate unnecessarily due to an improper or harsh tone. I encourage each of us to be mindful of how we address behaviors, focusing on de-escalation rather than confrontation. A calm, respectful approach can go a long way in turning potentially challenging moments into opportunities for growth and learning. It’s also crucial to remember that our students deserve the same level of respect we expect from them. When we address students with kindness and respect, we not only model the behavior we want to see, but we also build stronger relationships that can lead to more positive outcomes inside and outside the classroom. I’ve included some behavior interventions that can be helpful when dealing with defiant or disrespectful students.

Oof. Okay. First, I hope we all know that the least effective sentence in the English language is “Calm down.” It never, EVER, makes anyone calm. It is much more likely to piss the person off and add that to whatever agitation they are currently going through.

Second, I have to point out that I strongly suspect a particular interaction between one of my fellow teachers and one of our high school students, which happened the day before this email was sent out, was a large part of the impetus that led to this particular email: because that interaction was not positive, and was not de-escalated by the two people involved. So there was cause for some means of addressing that issue.

But — and this is third, but it should be first, last, and every number in between, when discussing how my administration works with their teachers in ways they should not — any particular issue with any particular teacher SHOULD BE HANDLED SPECIFICALLY WITH THAT TEACHER. Don’t talk to me about being calm; I am too calm. I need to lose my temper more often. Know how I know that? My students tell me that. Talk to me about not confronting my students when they misbehave: that is something I have trouble with. Don’t say that to my colleagues, several of whom are extremely good at addressing issues when they rise, and most of whom do it calmly.

Last, and best, don’t do what the email went on to do, and which it does in this first part as well: don’t tell us to be positive and respectful and several other handy pieces of trite advice, while doing none of those things in the email telling us to do them. Pedagogy experts are legendarily bad about this: almost every teacher training I have had in 25 years in this business has been largely about how to keep students connected to n involved with the learning, presented by people who fail to connect us to or involve us with the learning in any way. The most famous example is the trainers who teach teachers by showing us PowerPoint presentations with blocks of text on every slide, which the trainers then read to us verbatim while we are looking at the slides. Every teacher I know who assigns PowerPoint presentations would fail every one of those presenters. I myself just think about how much better it would sound if I read it for them.

So. Here are the specific pieces of advice this email then offered us. Ready? Here is How To Deal With Students Misbehaving 101. With notes by me, illustrating how I would put these nuggets of wisdom into practice. (If I ever put these into practice. [Not bloody likely. Not as they are worded here.])

Here is your hypothetical situation requiring my intervention: one of my students is talking too much, too loudly. That student needs to shut the hell up. Here is how I would say it, adopting my administration’s guidance. [Said guidance will be quoted preceding each example.]

– Stay Calm and Maintain Neutrality
Responding with a calm demeanor can prevent the situation from escalating. Take a deep breath before addressing the behavior to ensure you remain composed.

*Takes a deep breath, then, composedly,* “Shut the hell up.”

– Give Clear and Specific Directions
Sometimes students react negatively due to confusion or misunderstanding. Make sure your instructions are clear, direct, and specific.

“[Student name]: shut the hell up. Shut your mouth, with the words inside. Lock your throat into silent mode. Do not make the speaky-speaky noises. Am I being clear? Shut the hell up if you understand me.”

– Use Positive Reinforcement
Acknowledge and praise positive behavior when you see it. Often, recognizing what students are doing right can prevent future defiance.

“Good job shutting the hell up. Keep it up.”

– Provide Choices
Offering choices allows students to feel they have some control over the situation. For example, “You can either take a break for five minutes or finish your task quietly.”

“You can choose to shut the hell up, or you can accept that you have no control over this situation, and shut the hell up because I told you to. Your call.”

– Restate Expectations Respectfully
Respectfully but firmly restate your expectations, reminding students of classroom rules while remaining respectful and kind.

“I expect you to shut the hell up. Respectfully.”

– Active Listening
Take time to listen to the student’s perspective. Sometimes defiance comes from frustration or a lack of feeling heard. A few moments of active listening can de-escalate the situation.

“I am now prepared to listen to you shutting the hell up. I am actively listening for absolute silence.”

– Have a Private Conversation
Address the behavior in private whenever possible to avoid embarrassment or defensiveness. This can help maintain the student’s dignity and prevent power struggles in front of peers.

*Takes student out into the hall.* “Stay out here. Shut the hell up. Learn to have some dignity, and some respect for your fellow students, and for me.” *Returns to class where silence prevails. Teaches respectfully. Student’s embarrassment, standing alone in the hall while other students walk by and snicker, helps to enforce that their behavior was unacceptable. Student learns.*

– Teach Problem-Solving Skills
Help students reflect on their behavior and guide them in developing solutions for similar situations in the future.

“The problem with your behavior is that you are not shutting the hell up. Can you offer any potential solutions to this problem? Here’s a hint: it rhymes with ‘Butt the shell pup.'”

– Offer a Reset
Give the student an opportunity to reset their behavior without consequence by offering a short break or a moment to collect themselves.

“Let’s reset your volume to zero by shutting the hell up. Feel free to take a short break from talking. Collect your lips together into a single, unbroken unit.”

Look. At least some of this is valuable advice. For teachers who don’t know how to handle student misbehavior. Which is not all of us. More to the point, if all you had to do to teach somebody something they don’t know, and get them to adopt it as part of their pattern of behavior going forward, was show them a bulleted list, then *Takes a deep breath as advised* I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY STUDENTS A LIST OF STATEMENTS THAT READ “SHUT THE HELL UP” AND WE WOULDN’T HAVE ANY MORE PROBLEMS. Also, I would give them a list of ways to write essays and read books, and how not to waste their lives and potentials and their very minds and souls on screens and social media, and a whole lot of things would be a lot better. (I have another list for Donald Trump. I’d really like for him to read my list, and absorb everything it says.)

And if you think I’m exaggerating about the prominence of the doesn’t-shut-the-hell-up problem, let me just say that the confrontation that might have led to this email was started by the student making loud noises in the hallway during class time. So.

I will end this by including the last paragraph of the email in question, which is almost everything I would want our administrators, or any colleague, to do when talking to their peers and coworkers. The only other thing I’d like to see with this is a statement that the administration will be working on these problems with both individual teachers, and all the students, who also clearly need to learn these steps in how to de-escalate a situation and treat people with the respect they expect to receive from those people. And for this whole email to never have happened at all.

Let’s continue to create an environment where respect and kindness are the foundation of all our interactions, and where every student feels valued and understood. Thank you for all you do for our school and our students. I appreciate all of you! 

“I appreciate you shutting the hell up.”