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TV and Trump

March 31, 2026

Isaac Asimov’s 1951 Foundation sci-fi trilogy had a character called “The Mule.” Initially a ridiculous figure, he had one special ability — actual mind reading. Soon he ruled the galaxy.

I saw this as showing the absurdity of psychics’ claims. Anyone truly possessing such paranormal abilities would not be hustling for nickels and dimes.

Trump was likened to The Mule, in skewing history’s trajectory, at a program at the New York State Writers Institute’s recent film festival. An interview with author James Poniewozik about his 2019 book, Audience of One: Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.

The film festival, like NYSWI’s book ones, is always a great event. Held at the State University’s Campus Center, after several years I’m finally getting the hang of its labyrinthine layout, finding my way from one venue to another. This time I mostly viewed “experimental” short films. One, “All American Ruins,” concerned an ending gay relationship; I was struck by one brief flash, a face full of intense anguish. The animated “Stuck at the Spaceport” depicts an alien world so engagingly vivid, it was too short.

Back to Poniewozik: he basically situates Trump as a phenomenon of the TV age. Which has already sort of passed, superseded by the internet age. But in TV’s heyday it was a unifying force, with everyone watching just a few channels. America’s culture more uniform than ever before or since (leaving apart non-whites). And with simultaneous nightly news broadcasts, people had little choice but to watch them, exposing them to more substantive — and factual — pictures of the global landscape than most get today.

In contrast to that monoculture, today’s society is fragmented among plethoras of divergent eye candies. Not “e pluribus unum” but its opposite — with people at each other’s throats over issues of which they have little genuine grasp. Literally impressionable — forming opinions based on mere shallow impressions.

Also, TV shows in those 1950s and ’60s tended to be homilies, morality plays, with a hopeful ethos, good always prevailing. Think of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. This too helped shape the culture. Later, shows became more bleak and cynical — think of the Sopranos. Such romanticization of criminality would have been unthinkable previously.

Perhaps priming America for a Soprano-istic presidency. It’s long seemed that Trump attracts many voters not in spite of his transgressiveness but because of it.

Meantime, TV also cemented his image as a highly successful and powerful business personage, with his show The Apprentice. Endowed with all the accoutrements — the plush boardroom settings, the contestants groveling for his approval. Never mind that his actual business career was bankruptcy-laden and shambolic. To this day, his cultists still venerate this “successful businessman.”

Not only did Trump bootstrap into power by exploiting TV, he himself is TV fixated. Filling his regime with people he’s seen on Fox News. Watching it seems to be his principal White House pastime. Lately his acolytes have been giving him a daily briefing on the Iran war — in video format, natch — mainly images of things being blown up, which he dotes on. Probably the true reason he launched this war.

I keep coming back to the 2006 comedy film Idiocracy. How prescient. I don’t see us getting out of this cultural syndrome.

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Posted in history, life, Politics, Society, stinking piece of shit | 3 Comments »

The Answer for Long Airport Lines: Abolish TSA

March 25, 2026

Because the regime won’t negotiate reasonable restrictions on its ICE paramilitaries, a partial government shutdown has hit not ICE but TSA air travel security operations. With agents unpaid, many skip work, causing long lines at airports.

The regime’s answer is deploying ICE to airports. Just the thing to reassure travelers! While most ICE guys are standing around there doing nothing.

Here’s a better solution:

Abolish TSA. Or, at least, greatly curtail its role, eliminating security lines and all that X-raying. Like at customs checkpoints — allow travelers to walk right through, with some agents stopping only ones who seem suspicious.

What TSA does instead has been called “security theater,” because rather than providing any actual safety, its true role is to create an illusion of it.

There was always something fundamentally bizarre about this picture. Airplanes are a near-miraculous triumph of human technological rationality. Accompanied by a huge system to keep people from deliberately crashing them. Huh? (As if the latter system did that anyway.)

It’s been a quarter century since 9/11. In all that time, there seemingly hasn’t been a repeat, or threat of one. You might suggest TSA is the reason, making another 9/11 impossible. But surely that’s not so. The TSA system is full of holes. Test runs have shown much gets through, and clever determined terrorists can presumably foil it. Moreover, the idea of hijacking planes seems an archaic chimera today. Hacking into computer systems, or using drones, would be better terrorist options. Making TSA’s security theater all the more irrelevant.

So why does it still exist?

One reason is simple human inertia. Doing what we’ve always done, because we’ve always done it. We’re so accustomed to TSA we just don’t stop to question its continuing logic.

We even still have to remove our shoes because decades ago one pathetic schlub put explosives in his (but couldn’t even manage to detonate them).

We have trouble rationally assessing risks against costs. Life is full of risks. Of course we should do everything reasonable to minimize them; but “reasonable” includes consideration of cost. Would you spend $1000 to avoid a 1% chance of breaking a finger? In fact we do the equivalent all the time.

Suppose TSA did in fact prevent one 9/11 every decade. A 9/11’s costs are certainly large, including the value of lives lost. (Society does implicitly put a dollar value on a life; that’s what the 9/11 victim compensation scheme did.) But what does the prevention cost us? How much taxpayer money? And that’s far from the only cost. Billions of hours of people’s time wasted in lines has a cost too. And missed flights. Et cetera. The total cost of preventing that one episode surely far exceeds what the episode itself would cost us.

If that sounds callous — in fact we blithely accept far greater tragedies. Car crashes are not even a theoretical risk but a certainty. Killing about 38,000 Americans annually (far more than 9/11). There are things we could do to greatly reduce that carnage. Probably a better bargain than TSA security theater. But we don’t do them.

In 1973 I had a blind date to Mexico. I’d previously bought the ticket, with a different name on it; the airline didn’t even care. You just showed the ticket and waltzed onto the plane. No security theater. Remember those days?

Let’s have them back.

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Posted in Economics, history, life, Society | 1 Comment »

“The Librarians” — Versus Right Wing Culture Vandals

March 9, 2026

“The Librarians” is a 2025 film by Kim Snyder. My ex-librarian wife and I attended a screening, with a panel discussion, by the New York State Writers Institute. It’s about book purgings, with school librarians attacked by right-wing political agitators. Texas and Florida are epicenters.

“Moms for Liberty” is a leading front group. They like to sound grass-roots, but this is part of a well-funded national effort, pouring money into local school board elections. It’s not originating with concerned parents, but rather whipped up by calculating political operators, exploiting this as a wedge issue. Books in libraries were never previously a problem.

While many major societal institutions have crumpled to Trump regime dictates, librarians seem to be a major exception. Heroically bearing up to attacks that aren’t just verbiage. Quite a few have lost their jobs; many threatened with physical violence.

The film portrays mostly the librarians, but the other side gets a fair hearing, in their own words (which don’t do them credit). They want to ban any books about race issues, or having to do with sex or sexuality, especially non-conforming. Labelled “pornography,” with librarians accused of “grooming” children for aberrant sexual abuse.

Thus the mantra of “protecting children,” a constant right-wing trope, across a range of issues. It’s dishonest. They’re sure not protecting kids from ICE’s depredations; many who are U.S. citizens have had parents torn away; in fact many children themselves have been victimized. And while anti-abortion activists like to say they’re protecting the unborn, once born those children are of no concern to these crusaders, supporting policies that impoverish their families.

The whole “grooming” panic is a fraud too. As if kids are forced to read deviant pornography so they’ll be willing pedo victims. Never happened. Librarians may help youngsters by suggesting appropriate books, but don’t shove books at them. And their attackers, mounting moralistic high horses to beat upon the word “pornography,” don’t know what they’re talking about.

The film portrayed one movement activist, Courtney Gore, elected to a Texas school board determined to battle pornography in libraries. But, assiduously investigating, she could find none. Reporting this publicly, she was viciously attacked.

What this movement is trying to “protect” children against is learning about life and reality. About the diversity of human beings.

Another woman was shown, at a public meeting, vehemently invoking the Bible to condemn any portrayal of gays in library books. Then we meet her gay son, who was kicked out of the family. He speaks at another meeting, of how as a child he’d been inculcated with the Bible — a book full of murder, rape, genocide, slavery, and other horrors. His mother was present there too but kept her distance, unrepentant. This seemed very very sad.

This whole book-banning movement is spurred by Christianity and supposed Biblical dictates. Actually much sexual stuff okayed in the Bible would outrage any normal person today — treating women as commodities — while the book hardly even mentions same-sex relations. But these Bible-thumpers latch onto that (while ignoring so much else) because they’re hung up about sex in general and freaked out in particular by gay and transgender people. With whom they can’t relate as fellow humans.

“Hate the sin but love the sinner” is not their mindset. (Not that gayness is sinful in any rational moral sense.) What the film depicts is downright hatred. Showing us yet again that religion, far from promoting morality and goodness, often does the opposite, so scrambling believers’ brains that they can’t tell right from wrong. Their whole moral vision skewed by falsehood.

What they also want to “protect” children from is racial concerns. Thus the effort to ban any books by or about Black people — especially addressing slavery. It’s ironic that folks who screamed that removing Confederate monuments was “erasing history” want to erase slavery’s history — as though the Civil War had nothing to do with that anyway! Now the racist Trump regime is pushing this great cover-up.

They oppose portraying American history as all bad (“bad,bad,bad,bad,” one voice in the film said). But they want to make it all good, zero bad. However, America’s greatness does not lie with a sanitized version of our history — rather, with an honest one, showing that we’ve progressed, faced up to our past failings, and worked fix them. That made me proud of my country.

Those history scrubbers plead against making white kids feel bad about themselves over slavery. Well, slavery was a monstrous crime, which everyone should feel bad about. But that’s not the same as personal guilt. One panelist discussing the film, Roger Green, said the movement underestimates children, who are perfectly capable of understanding this.

It’s actually these white nationalists themselves who are still fixated on slavery and race. Slavery and its reverberations continue looming large in American society today, because they can’t let it go. They’re the ones who cannot put it all behind us and move on. Just like with gay and trans people, they can’t relate to Blacks as just fellow human beings.

As ever, the ugly racist behavior of white supremacists proves them the inferior ones. And that racist hostility toward non-whites is the core ethos of today’s right-wing Republicanism. Everything else is window-dressing.

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Posted in history, life, literature, Politics, Society | 6 Comments »

America’s Political Landscape: No Bullshit

March 5, 2026

Last April I wrote about a wonderful New York City conference run by James (“It’s the Economy, Stupid”) Carville’s “Democracy Matters” organization. My wife Therese and I attended another on March 3, intensively dissecting the political landscape.

Upon arrival, at the luxury Lotte Hotel, we encountered Carville in the elevator, which did not stop at the correct floor. Therese found how to get us all there. (We later learned these were the first working elevators in America!)

I wrote that the previous event had not a single word of bullshit (contrasting with the Republican side). That was true again. And while Democrats then were reeling from the 2024 election, this time the vibe was more upbeat.

We’ve wondered when the MAGA cult fever would break. Today it’s riven by divisions, as Trump’s approval ratings sink, from so much awfulness — tariffs, Epstein, ICE, now the Iran war. And while Democrats were even less popular, that too seems to be changing. So winning the House of Representatives looks highly likely (despite gerrymandering), and Senate prospects brighten. Dems need to gain four seats, and more look in play than previously thought. I’m starting to smell a “wave election.”

Begala

Paul Begala, former Bill Clinton advisor and legendary political strategist, did many interviews. First with Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, participant in the famous video reminding military folks not to obey illegal orders. Crow now heads the Democrats’ congressional campaign; seems doing a great job recruiting electable candidates, many from outside politics who’ve really done something. And he said many who’d voted Trump now realize he’s stabbed them in the back.

Polling expert Molly Murphy said many 2024 voters thought the economy had been better under Trump; but it’s not now; and they’re not buying his blaming Biden. Twenty percent of Trump voters say they regret that vote (something quite unusual).

Carville quoted Texas senate candidate Jasmine Crockett saying non-white Trump voters showed a “slave mentality.” Not the way to win their hearts! He opined that Harris lost not because she’s a Black woman but because voters wanted a change, and she wasn’t offering that.

Much discussion focused on working class voters and young men in particular. Today’s big electoral dividing line is educational level; and while most highly educated voters back Democrats, they’re a minority. High percentages of young men feel very stressed, unable to meet societal expectations to be family providers and protectors. Needing multiple jobs to keep heads above water. Vulnerable to homelessness. Only a quarter think Trump is delivering.

Another panel addressing these matters included former DNC Chair and Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and ex-Governor Steve Bullock of Montana. Arguing that one’s politics are often shaped by culture. There’s much feeling that flush educated elites exploit the rest; student loan forgiveness, for example, seen as unfairly benefiting better-off people at the expense of ones worse off.

Former MSNBC host Katie Phang discussed how the right gained media dominance — with extreme voices to the fore. Creeps like Nick Fuentes; Andrew Tate; and Nick Shirley, whose very dubious video alleging Minneapolis day care fraud sparked much of the mayhem there. One I’d never even heard of, “Clavicular,” just turned twenty, is a big if weird thing online. Fuentes says Trump is not Nazi enough. This crap is disgracefully pushed at people by Social media algorithms.

But MAGA cultists are not just insane. Their main attractor is being part of a group or community, their new families. (Such is the vibe at Trump rallies.) Providing a sense of validation and power which they otherwise feel the culture denies them.

Phang pointed to the “election fraud” nonsense as a “through-line,” resulting in Trump elevating really sketchy people, and feeding into the war on immigrants. Looking to deploy ICE and other armed forces during voting. Assaulting freedom of information, as with the arrests of journalists like Don Lemon. While “mainstream media” is often intimidated, neutered, and even taken over outright by powerful pro-Trump operators.

Begala interviewed noted historian Heather Cox Richardson. Who opined we’re actually on the cusp of a new progressive era, a reaction against widespread feelings of societal unfairness. Trump was supported as an antidote, the radical right’s fantasy president. But they increasingly realize he’s a wrecker (epitomized again by the Iran war). Richardson noted that in polls, an extraordinary 51% now strongly disapprove of him. But it’s hard for cultists to face that they’ve lived a lie for so long. The crazier your beliefs, the more you have to believe them.

Richardson said ideas change the world. And the “heteronormative” nuclear family has never truly reigned in America; a better policy orientation for Democrats would center upon children. Globally, the post-WWII world order is falling apart, replaced by a “variable geometry,” with groups of nations working together and separately at the same time. (Trump’s horrible alternative is a world ruled by three giant spheres of influence.)

There was mention of Vance’s presidential prospects. In the Q&A, I asked why Donald Junior wouldn’t run? And win the nomination? (Just based on his name.) But he was dismissed as lacking the capability. More likely: Tucker Carlson.

Yikes.

Okay, not entirely uplifting. But the evening sessions were. Begala interviewed two terrific gubernatorial candidates. Florida’s David Jolly was a Republican Congressman (2014-17) who switched. He explained he’d had three basic values: an economy working for everyone; government improving our lives; and everyone’s rights protected and dignity respected. Like me, he left the Republican party when its ethos became perverted against those values. (How sad that so few Republicans have done likewise.)

Iowa’s Rob Small was all about connecting with people on a personal level; making it inclusive, not exclusionary (like Republicans do). Partisan invective doesn’t help. He said people vote their values, not necessarily their economic interests (something I’ve long said when left-wingers whine that voters betray their economic interests).

The finale was Begala with Kentucky Governor (and presidential possibility) Andy Beshear. He said people are not as political as we think (echoing previous points about culture’s salience). They’re most concerned with life issues. We mustn’t mistake kindness for weakness. And Democrats must talk like normal human beings — like, saying “hunger” rather than “food insecurity.”

As the program and dinner were ending, Texas senate primary votes were being reported, with the moderate (more electable) Democrat, James Talarico, beating Crockett. Carville stood up, got the room’s attention, and shouted, “We’re gonna win the fuckin’ Senate!”

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Posted in history, life, Politics, Society | 2 Comments »

Honoring Lincoln on President’s Day: Character Matters

February 16, 2026

Here is a commentary, from August, by former White House correspondent Christi Parsons; condensed by me:

They might seem like a president’s performative gestures: A quiet visit with a wounded soldier’s wife. A conversation with a battlefield nurse or a kitchen worker. A hand extended to a Black woman who had been enslaved.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t publicize these moments. Even as he held the Union together with the force of his will — even as he buried his own child and bore the weight of a nation at war — he made time for mercy. He listened to the voices of those without power, a practice that steeled him for wielding his own.

Empathy is getting a bad rap these days. Elon Musk declared it the “fundamental weakness” of Western civilization, summing up the ethos of the administration. Even those who defend empathy speak of it mainly as a private virtue.

But in the hands of a great leader, empathy can become a powerful political force. Whenever America has begun to fray — during war, depression, civil upheaval — the country has rallied behind a president who focused on the disenfranchised. If we’re to survive our current crisis of division, our civic leaders need to do the same. And, as citizens, so do we.

How did Lincoln cultivate the trait of empathy? Partly by surrounding himself with compassionate people. That’s according to “Loving Lincoln,” a new biography examining his story through the lives of women who were his key influencers. Which, historian Stacy Lynn writes, “offer evidence of Lincoln’s kindness and sensitivity, his patience, his moral center, his social and political virtues, the breadth of his compassion, and his inspirational legacy.” His White House became a place of mercy and goodwill.

President Lincoln welcomed Black people there. Urged to visit camps where newly freed families lived, he went. To meet the gaze of all these people, to shake their hands, to give them audience — these were not symbolic gestures. They were radical acts of inclusion. Meaningful for us today, in our moment of deep national division.

Lincoln spoke publicly of the need for love and compassion. He surrounded himself with confidantes who embraced it. And he took action on it, emancipating millions from bondage.

In the grand scheme of things, it was just a few years ago that Lincoln led our country through something much worse than what we’re now experiencing. Then he spoke of binding up our wounds, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” How powerfully his words land in our hearts today.

* * *

This commentary, predating Trump’s vile response to the Reiner murder, and Minneapolis atrocities, so aptly highlights how we’ve gone off the rails. The stark contrast between Lincoln and Trump shows how character matters. All human history can be seen as the story of how we view and treat each other. This is my humanism speaking: feeling myself part of a great striving to lift ourselves up. All of us.

This was Lincoln’s ethos. I had believed it was, most fundamentally, America’s. But while Lincoln remains a plaster icon, few Americans today understand what he truly represented. We’ve turned our backs on it by empowering his total antithesis. Summoning not “the better angels of our nature,” but our demons.

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Posted in history, life, Philosophy, Politics, Society, stinking piece of shit | 6 Comments »

Justice, Accountability, Reckoning — Or Forgiveness?

February 8, 2026

A periodic gathering of old friends was discussing — inevitably these days — our nation’s “situation.” How it’s unfolded, and what’s the way forward?

Why did half of Americans choose as they did? Their grievances understandable, yet so ill-served by who they entrusted. But, one asserted, “they hate Democrats more.” True, Democrats have often seemed waylaid, by other (sometimes misguided) concerns, from their core of seeking a better deal for struggling everyday Americans. But at least their hearts are still in that right place. Whereas Republicans pay it lip service while cynically betraying it.

“I am your retribution,” Trump told those aggrieved folks. Never mind that what they (should have) wanted was help, not vengeance. And it was his own he really craved, not theirs. A man handed everything in life, going from (undeserved) triumph to triumph, the world kissing his ass, nevertheless so consumed by resentments. “Treated very unfairly” an obsessive mantra. (Recently saying it about whites vis-a-vis Blacks. Though I don’t recall many whites lynched by Black mobs.)

But back to retribution — central in that friends’ conversation was a felt need for justice and accountability, regarding this regime’s criminal outrages. Hoping the next one provides a proper reckoning and reset.

A thirst for justice is deeply embedded in human nature. Programmed by evolution into our early forebears, living in small bands in tough circumstances, social solidarity was vital for survival, so violations of it could not be tolerated. Hence our hunger to see them punished. (This is why Hell was invented. People frustrated by imperfect justice on earth were consoled by imagining evildoers punished later.)

I have this justice lust myself, in spades. (Maybe part of why I became a lawyer.) Further, the concept of accountability is integral to democracy. The idea that rulers are not free to do as they please; only if they are not can the citizenry be free. Thus the principle, “no one is above the law.” Everyone accountable.

But life is not so simple. And while I shared the group’s zeal to mete out justice for this regime’s transgressions, I found myself doubting that’s what we need most. This nation does need help more than retribution.

Trump and Republicans made great political hay with cries that machineries of justice were improperly “weaponized” against them. Yet Trump in particular was guilty of real and serious crimes, and the true perversion of justice was his escaping penalties. That’s what Democrats may really be faulted for, not playing hardball like Republicans. Who now themselves show us how “weaponization” of justice is done, persecuting political targets with phony legal cases.

This escalating cycle of political recrimination must stop. It’s tearing apart America’s social fabric.* And we can’t expect relief to come from Republicans, the primary culprits.

Jesus may not have been a real person but his preachings in the Bible are salient here. Rejecting “eye for an eye” mores in favor of “turning the other cheek.” The latter may be a bridge too far, but not humility, mercy and forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a difficult concept. It does not require blinding oneself to wrongs done, as though they never happened. Rather, it means choosing to put that aside, closing the book on it, and going forward afresh. Because that serves us better than does recrimination. It is not justice; but justice is not the sole paradigm for living our lives.

This might seem like Democrats again playing nice while Republicans play rough; and they may well take advantage, pocketing the forbearance and showing none in return. But we can only be responsible for our own behavior, not that of others. Doing what we deem right and good, even if they do not reciprocate.

The forthcoming Democratic House of Representatives should refrain from impeachments — however merited — but futile since a two-thirds Senate conviction is unattainable. And while Trump has pardoned many bad people for bad, even corrupt reasons, Democrats should make clear their administration will forego at least some prosecutions, not because that’s just, but to help heal the nation. Like when Ford pardoned Nixon.

This seems the only pragmatically hopeful path forward for this nation, out of the ugly morass into which we’ve fallen. It’s a war neither side can win; neither can be beaten into submission. One side at least must come to grips with that reality.

* A mainstay in a hobby club just told me he’s quitting because its president made a pro-Trump remark.

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Posted in history, life, Politics, Society | 3 Comments »

My Survivor’s Guilt

February 4, 2026

In 1975, at 27, I met “Paula,” 19. My girl chasing had been going nowhere. I made a date with Paula, only to cancel, having found a hotter prospect. Which soon duly fizzled. However, my uncharacteristic “bad boy” behavior toward Paula intrigued her. She gamely contacted me again.

We quickly formed a nice bond, my first lasting relationship, and after a year moved in together. That frisson of unconventionality tickled me; marriage wasn’t discussed.

But being unmarried proved corrosive for her, especially after her job situation soured and she became financially dependent. She fell out of love. Long after, I stumbled upon an accidentally left-behind jotting where she’d vented searing pain at feeling trapped.

We struggled with the relationship for another decade, through some pretty rough patches. I offered marriage but it was too late. Yet meantime I was also trying to extricate myself. She too, via military pen pals. Finally one jelled, and she left to marry Dan in August 1987.

Our parting was ostensibly amicable. But I too wrote down some deep resentments. The next May a phone argument over some bank details pissed me off enough to mail her those harsh words.

Most regrettable thing I ever did. Paula cut off communication. My apologies did nothing. Finally she threatened legal action if I contacted her again.

Meanwhile I got a wonderful happy marriage. As though my pain with Paula was the price for that. It certainly prepared me for it, making me a more mature person. But still Paula nagged at my conscience. Mindful of the price she too had paid. (Indeed, she’d left a lot of stuff behind; we still use some of her childhood furniture!)

More than three decades passed.

Paula’s existence, out there, was unfinished business, a wound on my heart. I’d often ponder what it would be like just to speak with her again. One Christmas I dared to send a card (to the last address I had), asking whether the passage of so many years mightn’t have mellowed her feelings. It didn’t come back, but she didn’t reply.

Then on December 21, 2021, an email popped up from her. What a jolt to see it! My heart leaped into my mouth.

The message opened with profuse remorse for how she’d treated me in leaving. Saying the past silence had been dictated by Dan — “A true psychopath . . . violent, controlling and exploitative.” Who finally absconded after 25 years, with all their assets; leaving a daughter disabled by his abuse.

Wow. Reading all this was a gut-punch.

But there was more. She needed money (surprise) or she’d lose her house. A lot of money.

I immediately showed the message to my wife, who judged it sincere. Then I phoned Paula and we had a nice long pleasant chat. Weirdly, it felt nothing like a third of a century had intervened. With my wife’s concurrence I sent her the full amount, plus some extra.

We’ve since had further talks, hours long. Mostly Paula venting about Dan, and her legal battles in that realm (she achieved divorce and custody). But she’s also recounted remarkably vivid and fond memories of our time together.

Perhaps strangely, my own subsequent life is not discussed. I’ve kept shtum on that, because of what feels like survivor’s guilt. She’d leaped from the frying pan into the fire — while for me things turned out beautifully.

As though that was at Paula’s expense. Her exit made it possible, the necessary precursor for my happiness and my wife’s as well — and our daughter’s. A positive utilitarian calculus, like a trolley problem with Paula the one sacrificial victim.

I can’t help thinking about the “what ifs.” And thinking that if I’d somehow been a better partner, she would not have felt impelled to that leap into the fire. We’d actually had the makings for a good relationship, saving her from all the subsequent pain and suffering. Or — what might her life be like if we’d never even met?

So in all those ways I do feel a kind of guilt. Certainly more than I already did during those 33 incommunicado years. After the intense intimacy we’d shared, it had felt unsettling to have no idea what was going on with her. Now that I know, it sure doesn’t feel better.

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Posted in life | 5 Comments »

Book Spurning

January 14, 2026

Socrates denounced writing as undermining people’s faculty for memory. Nevertheless, writing and reading spread greatly in the ensuing 2400 years. Now that’s gone into reverse.

Decades ago some feared TV rotting our brains. But today people are ensorcelled by blizzards of distractions oriented to the visual, and with instant gratification. Acculturated to a pace so quickened that if a stimulus does not pack an immediate punch, people swiftly move on.

That applies to prose. A word few nowadays might know. A recent piece in The Economist begins by noting a test wherein the opening of the Dickens novel Bleak House confuzzled many readers, unable to make sense of the words. And those were University English literature students! “Barely even literate,” snarks the article.

In the wider population it’s worse yet, with ever fewer reading books (or much else). The newspaper landscape too is contracting. Indeed, so is prose itself: The Economist did an analysis, finding declining word counts in published sentences generally.

I strive for concision in my own writing. However, we’re seeing shorter sentences not because writers are improving but because readers are less receptive to longer ones, which they’re less able to grasp.

Not so long ago, few could read at all. Then came a more educated era, where masses embraced reading as a route to self-improvement and advancement, boosting one’s ability to engage intelligently with the wider world. Hence the broad “middlebrow” Book-of-the-Month Club phenomenon. That light is flickering out. The Economist cites surveys showing younger people in particular call reading “a chore” or “boring.” So schools assign less of it. Making for a doom-loop.

Also another propellant for inequality. Today’s reading decline most strongly harms those already suffering socio-economic disadvantage, widening the gap between them and the affluent (who read more).

The Economist says reading is one of life’s great pleasures. I love seeing how other writers do what they do. But more importantly, it’s been central in my lifelong project of trying to understand people and the world. Something that others today — an era of “smart” phones, social media, and TikTok — could use more than ever.

Instead we see a great dumbing-down. We once thought the “information age” would make us more informed. Ha-ha. And it’s not just a matter of factual knowledge, understanding true reality. The Economist says declining ability to read complex prose leads to diminished general ability to handle complex ideas; decreased literary sophistication lessens political sophistication. People becoming, politically, unguided missiles.

And the public square is increasingly polluted with lies and fake news, metastasized by Artificial Intelligence. My own first line of defense against falsehood is my understanding of how reality works, honed by a life of reading. So when Trump says other countries empty jails and nut-houses to send those inmates to us, I don’t have to think twice whether it might be true. It just flies in the face of how I know the world works. But ever fewer people have such understanding.

One might counter that it isn’t people getting less information, it’s just different information, in a different format. Well, sorry: funny little TikTok videos people addictively scroll ain’t “information” (in the word’s common sense). Many say they get their news from TikTok. That’s not equivalent to The New York Times. And only 38% of Americans surveyed say they pay attention to news at all (and many of those are probably lying).

Walter Lippmann, in his 1922 book Public Opinion, noted that journalists chronicle facts and events — but that’s not the same as truth. Grasping truth requires more effort. Mere facts — not to mention “alternative facts” — can become highly misleading without proper context. And it’s context that reading broadly provides.

Here again Artificial Intelligence doesn’t help. Students increasingly use it in their education, to answer questions and do work for them. Studies already show that this blunts one’s critical thinking faculty. Artificial Intelligence diminishes the real kind.

Something else looming: online porn has long been a big distraction, but AI has only just started metastasizing this, making it far more enticing. Also reducing readership for the likes of Bleak House.

America is going off the rails, our civic culture collapsing. Becoming the Idiocracy of the 2006 comedy film. I don’t expect everyone to read Bleak House. But when people aren’t reading much of anything, maybe it’s not so surprising they’d elect a lunatic who tried to overthrow the government, and deploys masked goons seizing folks off the streets. I can’t imagine those past book club devotees voting like that.

And this is not just an American syndrome; the same factors are making voter behavior irresponsible in countries like Britain, Germany, France, etc.

Culture wars debate what people are allowed to read. A greater concern should be how little they read. Why ban or burn books when they’re not read anyway?

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1984

January 11, 2026

Yes, the book, Orwell’s 1949 novel. I read it, like, 60 years ago. But one of my book groups recently picked it — for obvious reasons. So I read it again. Unfun.

Set in a then-future London, this is a classic dystopia. Ruled by an oppressive, all-controlling “party,” led by “Big Brother” (probably not an actual person) who, on omnipresent posters, “is watching you.” Through telescreens everywhere. (Would require, like, half the party to do all that watching, but those viewers are never mentioned.)

This was somewhat modeled on Stalin’s USSR, written before its horribleness was much known to the outside world. A pervasive feature is people made “unpersons” — “vaporized.” In vast numbers, mostly for “thoughtcrime” (or any vague hint of it). Yet meantime 85% of the population are “proletarians” (“proles”) living a hardscrabble existence and actually largely ignored by the regime.

From the earliest pages I was struck by just how extreme Orwell’s picture is. No subtlety or notionally redeeming glimmers, but dark in every detail. The food bad tasting; the liquor vile; every utensil “greasy.” Even the air itself nasty in this 1984 London. It all felt overdone. And it only got more and more extreme.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, ironically combines a quintessential Everyman last name with that of a heroic icon. Winston, 39, lacks memory of a pre-“Big Brother” time. To this reader he seemed something of a cipher, a character without character. Like the soulless guy in Camus’s The Stranger.

The book is a meditation on the human condition. The world of party creatures Winston inhabits is thoroughly inhuman. Which he comes to see when he hooks up with lover Julia, a prohibited relationship; realizing that only the wretched proles retain their humanity. The book shows us how alone we all truly are —however much involved with others, ultimately imprisoned within our own skulls. And the one line that stuck with me, from my long-ago reading, was Winston’s, under torture: “Do it to Julia.”

Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, which of course is a ministry of lies. His job involves revising past documents in conformance with the regime’s current story. That is, altering the past, particularly erasing any record of unpersons. (Stalin famously had Trotsky and other fallen people scrubbed from old photos.)

This is a huge undertaking, with Smith a small cog. But I wondered why the effort was even deemed needed. It didn’t seem people in this society would have much access, anyway, to that past documentation, so why bother altering it? Just feed people the crap you want them to swallow now. (There’s war, against Eastasia. Until suddenly it’s against Eurasia. Why would the party see fit to make that change? But never mind; the point is that everyone adjusts their brains to the altered “reality.” Proving the party’s power over it.)

This resonates for today’s America. Most notably our regime’s huge effort to revise the history of what occurred on January 6, 2021. Brazen nineteen-eighty-fourization. Showing that not even here is there any need to, as in Orwell’s dystopia, go back and falsify the original news reports of that day. Or the damning congressional inquiry report.* The regime simply spews out its very different story, and its cultists believe it. Lincoln did say, “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”

Now the Renee Good killing. Video shows an ICE agent’s obviously unjustified shooting. “Self defense” says the regime. That’s “garbage” as the Minneapolis mayor says. Yet all MAGA world buys it. Seeing is believing, but for many people what they believe dictates what they see.

Back to 1984: one could fathom the party’s vaporizing the insufficiently loyal. Yet the extent of this is, again, extreme; swallowing almost everyone eventually. And with such cruel brutality that Orwell’s account here again seems over-the-top. Winston’s interrogation, with torture, goes on for months and pages and pages. What is the point — if all such victims will be shot in the end anyway? But that very question is the point; Winston himself asks it. The answer he gets from his high-placed torturer makes no sense from any rational standpoint. It’s totally insane. While Winston is told the purpose is to cure his notional insanity.

A critique of the novel is the inclusion of many pages from a book Winston obtains, by Goldstein, the anti-party rebel. Analyzing the society and party. I found this tedious and unnecessary; actually detracting from the unnerving mysteriousness of it all. But I did note Goldstein’s characterizing the party man as “a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph . . . the mentality appropriate to a state of war.” A fair description of the MAGA mindset plaguing America.

Doubleplusungood.

* The commemorative plaques honoring the January 6 police heroes have been disappeared from the House of Representatives.

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My Blog Suspension

January 8, 2026

Visitors here in recent days have gotten a screen saying this blog is suspended for violating terms of service.

I learned of it yesterday when I tried to post a new piece and hit a nasty red box. I do write some feisty stuff, but always try to be responsible. My wife suspected I’d finally been busted by the regime. I expressed confidence that we still (largely) have freedom of speech, and that whatever had happened, it would be fixed in a rational system.

I tried to contact WordPress, the host. Then an email arrived, saying I’d been warned several times — I hadn’t received those messages — but now explaining the suspension, and inviting my response.

It concerned not anything I’d written, but comments! In 2017 I’d posted “Why So Many Blacks in Ads?” A serious question which I tried to discuss seriously. This proved to be my most visited blog post ever — attracting the most comments — by far. Continuing thus over the years.

Mostly hair-raisingly racist comments. Believing in free speech, I have refrained from censoring them; and here I wanted to leave those comments up, so people can see just what extremes of vicious racism are out there. I’ve even sometimes pointed to them.

WordPress, however, said I had violated terms of service by not deleting those comments. I replied that I would abide by their requirements. They answered that the suspension is lifted, and specifying some mysterious browser rigmarole I needed to do, in addition to deleting the comments. I replied that I was able to do the rigmarole (I think) but found the blog actually still suspended, blocking my comment deletion. (In the exchange, I believe I was interacting with an AI.)

Then, lo, this morning my e-mail included a routine notice of a new comment (on “Why So Many Blacks” of course). How did that happen? Seems the blog was now indeed unsuspended. So I went in, to delete all the ugly comments. I thought I did it, yet it seems most are still there. Will follow up.

Meantime, oddly enough, I’d been planning to post, as a joke, a fake notice of blog suspension, calling me “Freaky Franky” and a “lunatic leftist scumbag,” ordered by the President with Trump’s signature. I think I won’t do that now.

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Posted in life | 3 Comments »

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