What Is Cancel Culture?

What is cancel culture?

Michelle Goldberg wrote recently: "the conservative government in Britain declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal. 'We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,' said the Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. 'Any school which (sic) teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which (sic) promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.'"

On The Meaning Of Life 1

 Have you ever wondered if life has meaning? It's the kind of thing people think about but don't bring up at breakfast. 

I sometimes talk about finding the meaning of life, as if it had been mislaid, and what I should do is search for it, starting in the garage. 

How To Govern

 Whether American workers will get a minimum wage of 15 dollars an hour is now in the hands of  the senate parliamentarian, an appointed office. Turning this decision over to an employee is ludicrous, but the parliamentarian will make her ruling, and that will be that.

The vice-president has the power to overrule the parliamentarian, but Biden has made it clear that Kamala Harris will not do that. He won't let her. 

In the past a Publican VP named Rockefeller over-ruled a parliamentarian, but the Publicans have something the Democratic party lacks: the balls needed to govern and get the job done. 

NeeraTanden Made Me an Independent

 Pres. Biden's decision to name Neera Tanden to run the Office of Management and Budget may have run into a low wall. The problem seems to be that Tanden is intensely disliked by human beings. She's the Democrats' version of Ted Cruz.

The Publicans hate her and the progressive wing of the Democratic party resents her for the nasty trashing Tanden has given them over the years. Also she tries to balance the budget by cutting back on aid to people in need. She's one of the reasons I left the Clintonic Democratic Party (but that's just me). 

Ferlinghetti

 

Ferlinghetti died yesterday, the last of the Bohemians, living ancestor of the beats.  Consider the ending of "The Dog Trots Freely in the Street."

The dog trots freely in the street

and has his own dog’s life to live

and to think about

and to reflect upon

touching and tasting and testing everything

investigating everything

without benefit of perjury

a real realist

with a real tale to tell

and a real tail to tell it with

a real live

              barking

                         democratic dog

engaged in real

                      free enterprise

with something to say

                             about ontology

something to say

                        about reality

                                        and how to see it

                                                               and how to hear it

with his head cocked sideways

                                       at streetcorners

as if he is just about to have

                                       his picture taken

                                                             for Victor Records

                                  listening for

                                                   His Master’s Voice

                      and looking

                                       like a living questionmark

                                                                 into the

                                                              great gramaphone

                                                           of puzzling existence

                 with its wondrous hollow horn

                         which always seems

                     just about to spout forth

                                                      some Victorious answer

                                                              to everything

tRump Dines Out

Judy, my friend, sent me this clipping.

The Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman published an article today in which Trump Hotel employees recount their experiences waiting on the former president and his allies. The best details were the "Standard Operating Procedure" guidelines by which employees had to abide whenever The Donald stopped in to dine at his perennially reserved table. First the mythical Diet Coke button, now this:

Directions for pouring the soda were detailed in a process no fewer than seven steps long—and illustrated with four photo exhibits. The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other. Once poured, the drink had to be placed at the President’s right-hand side. “Repeat until POTUS departs.”

And forget standard-issue ketchup packets:

The manual instructed the server to open mini glass bottles of Heinz ketchup in front of Trump, taking care to ensure he could hear the seal make the “pop” sound.

But the fine-dining menu wasn't enough to satiate the president:

A tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.

The best part? Trump orders his steak well done. 

Cruz

Many people are saying that Ted Cruz and his wife flew to Mexico because Ted's father killed JFK.  But when they got there, Ted saw how ugly his wife was, and he flew back to Texas alone on the same day. You know that's true. Everyone knows it.  

Teachers

On TV today I've seen scientists who claim that we should send the teachers back into the trenches right now, because they don't need to be vaccinated. And there isn't enough vaccine available to make teachers immune. But of course that's a transparent lie. I don't get it. 

To date more than 40 million Americans have been vaccinated. There are about 3,000,000 teachers in the USA. Vaccinating all of them might take several days. Why not do that? It's a choice we can make.

A Lesson In Grammar

A woman wearing pearl earrings enters a bar, and the bar maid, impressed, says, "Hi. Where're you from?"

"I'm from a place where people don't end their sentences with prepositions," the woman replies.

"So . . . where're you from, bitch?"

My Kinsman

In the 1830s Nathaniel Hawthorne published a short story titled "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." It told the story of a Robin, a young man who journeys to Boston to take a job offered by his kinsman. He doesn't have Molineux's address, and as Robin wanders around Boston, no one will tell him where to find his kinsman. At the end he is standing on a corner when a mob rushes wildly by, some in costumes.  

"A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, and came rolling slowly towards the church. . . .Then a redder light disturbed the moonbeams, and a dense multitude of torches shone along the street, concealing, by their glare, whatever object they illuminated. The single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword, rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated countenance, appeared like war personified: the red of one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets. A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the procession in, and several women ran along the side-walk, piercing the confusion of heavier sounds, with their shrill voices of mirth or terror."

In the midst of this lynch mob Robin sees a  tarred-and-feathered man in a cart, and Robin starts to laugh and then recognizes Molineux, who recognizes him.

In our day the house and senate were breached by a costumed  lynch mob. Seven people died. Some in the mob wore horns. Many were wearing Trump hats and waving Trump flags and shouting that Trump had sent them. But had he? We may never know. It's a fucking mystery. 

Amidst them is a man they have tarred and feathered. 

s

Washingtons

In 2000 if you had gathered in one place the 160,000 Americans with the surname  of Washington, you might  have noticed that 90% of them were black. Around 1865 the name had been chosen by newly  freed people themselves. Hence, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Denzel Washington and so on. 

Another common choice was Jefferson. 

The claim that freed black people adopted the surnames of their former owners is nonsense. Why would they do that?  I suppose this fanciful tale is part of the Lost Cause mythology about grateful slaves. 

We do not know why Washington and Jefferson became popular choices among freed black people. Both men were racists. Both had owned many human beings. Both were tall. Washington had, in his will, set free his enslaved people--but not until after the death of Martha Washington. Jefferson had admitted privately that slavery was wrong, but he had mortgaged his enslaved people. Sp he could not free them. He did free the children he fathered with Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his dead wife. (The life of a plantation owner was, in those days, socially complicated.)

Oaks

 The San Francisco school board has decided  to change the names of the public schools. The board has called for suggestions for new, anti-racist names.

I side with the one board member who pointed out that no human name is free from taint. That's why I've suggested to the school board that they rename public schools for different species of local oaks. There are at least 20 native California oak species and another 20 hybrids. Plenty of names. Some species live blameless lives of more than 600 years. George Washington High could become Quercus kelloggii or Black Oak High. Their basketball team might be called the Acorns. Lincoln could be renamed Coast Live Oak School, and they could be the Fighting Acorns and so on.  

Meanwhile the underfunded school district is planning to reopen during the pandemic. One problem--they are running out of soap. 

Resident Alien

 The new TV show that has caught on with me is RESIDENT ALIEN, a dark comedy on the Science Fiction channel. An alien arrives in a small town on Earth with the mission of exterminating all humans. Circumstances make it necessary for him to take a human form and pretend to be a medical doctor. He behaves unsuitably. 

CRT

Critical Race Theory (CRT) holds that race is a social construct used by white people to further their interests at the expense of people of color. From CRT we get the current discussion of structural racism, reparations, white supremacy, Black Lives Matter,  etc. 

Experts argue that racial inequality grows from the social, economic and legal differences white people create between the so-called races. These differences, according to CRT,  help maintain elite white interests in wealth and politics and give rise to poverty and criminality in some but not all minority communities. 

CRT began in legal studies but has become a major influence in education, gender studies, sociology, etc.  In fact, CRT floats in the air that we breathe, although we may be unaware of it. There are debates going on in and around CRT, and like any theoretical system, it's flawed.   But I suspect that CRT is what led to the needed diversity in my granddaughter's high school.

• 

  'Firefly Lane' gives Katherine Heigl the right kind of soapy TV…

  

  Google's cloud business is losing money