Lance Mannion

Men of Little Self-Worth

Posted Friday morning, July 24, 2020.

“You’re GREAT just the way you are---LOSERS!”: Trump at his Tulsa rally back in June. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP via the Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2020.

Trump’s appeal is to the worst in his voters. It extends beyond their racism, bigotry, sexism, hatefulness and heartlessness in petty and soul-shrunken ways that inflect those more egregious vices. He gives them permission not to strive and self-improve. Assures them they’re fine as they are---GREAT as they are. There was no need to have gone to college or send your kids there: it’s all liberal “indoctrination”. (He’s looking into it.) And no need to listen to experts. What do they know? He tells them to embrace their resentments, nurse their grievances, and look for reasons for more resentments and to feel even more aggrieved. He encourages them to see themselves as heroes---warriors, he calls them---without their having done anything heroic and to swagger around like tough guys when in fact they’re not even bullies, just part of the gangs of weaklings who adopt bullies as their leaders and cheer them on. They all could have been contenders, he says, if it weren't for THEM!, and the could have been is as satisfying to them as if they had not only contended but won, at least a moral victory. He’s rallying a mob of Walter Mittys. In short, he tells them to see themselves as versions of himself, and he’s a man of no worth---no moral standing---even, maybe especially, in his own eyes, which makes part of his appeal leading them to see themselves as having no worth in their own eyes.

Radio Richard II. Act 1: Seeing voices

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Monday night July 13, 2020. Posted Thursday night, July 23.

[Editor’s note: When I posted the Twitter thread that I used as notes for this post, I misremembered important plot points of “Edward II’ and mixed up King Edward’s role with his usurper and murderer, Mortimer’s. Surprised myself when I re-read the play. I thought I had a better memory than this. I’ve incorporated the corrections in the post.]

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, I saw then twenty-five-year old Patti LuPone in a production of Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II".

She played Edward's young teenage son who would become the boy-king Edward lll. That's her, center, huddling against “his” ineffectual, self-indulgent but affectionate father (played by Norman Snow), while his treacherous but loving mother, Queen Isabella (Mary Jo Negro), looks on.

For most of the play her Prince Edward was a boy and a good son to both his parents, struggling to understand the conflict between them and his father’s failure as a king and his mother’s betrayal of her husband and England. I remember vividly her re-entrance in the final act when, after his father’s murder, Edward has returned from exile in Franceto take his place on the throne and thwart the plot of his mother’s lover Mortimer to have himself crowned King.

She marched in, all five feet nothing of her, at the head of a loyal contingent of armed knights and lords, all very much the prince’s senior in age but all very much deferring to him as their commander, looking every bit the warrior-king Edward III would turn out to be. It was a thrilling moment.

I was reminded of that moment listening to the Public Theater's radio production of "Richard II" tonight.

An actress, Miriam A. Hyman, is playing Bollingbroke (Henry IV-to-be whose head will uneasily rest when he wears the crown in his own two-part sequel), and it's not working for me.

I’m a longtime proponent of women playing men’s roles in Shakespeare (although Sarah Bernhardt made the case before me by a hundred years), with or without gender-bending. I would loved to have seen Elizabeth Marvel as Antony in the Public’s Trump-inflected “Julius Caesar”, and I’m glad the director of this “Richard II’ chose to cast a woman as the gruff and manly (and definitely male) warrior Bolingbroke rather than going with the more obvious choice and casting her as the poetical dreamer (read that as more feminine) Richard. And it's not that Hyman isn't a good actress. It's that hers is very much a woman's voice

The Public was planning to stage "Richard II" as one of their summer Shakespeare in the Park productions, with this cast, and I imagine that on stage, in costume, she'd have made a convincingly male Bollinbroke. But with just her voice to carry her in the role, I'm just not buying it. Maybe as I get used to hearing her I'll be more able to suspend my disbelief. WNYC is broadcasting the play in four parts, between tonight and Thursday.

But it's not just Hyman. It's a general problem. Except for Andre Holland, who plays Richard, none of the players who've had their entrances and exits so far has a good *radio* voice...

It's not enough to cast good actors. You have to cast the right sort of voices. It's the same with voice actors for animated movies. Makers of feature-length cartoons make this mistake regularly. They think having someone famous voicing a character is all they need…

Thanks to video film critic Lindsay Ellis, I've taken to calling this the Robin Williams effect.

(A bigger mistake, which Ellis points out in her video on Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame'' is thinking that because they have famous actors voicing the characters they don’t have to work hard at writing dialog. They rely on audiences just getting a kick out of hearing stars’ voices come out of the mouths of cartoon characters.)

But like I said, I might just need to get used to it. I'm going to stick with it. The production isn't bad. It's just not as compelling as it could and I think would be with different voices at work. We'll see - or, rather, hear…

But speaking of seeing and hearing, has anyone seen and heard the BBC's Hollow Crown series? I think I'm going to check out their "Richard II".

Ben Wishlaw plays Richard, and he looks as though sad stories of the deaths of kings would be all about him to him, which is how it should be. Richard is often played as effeminate, as if his tragic flaw is not being manly enough. But I think it's his vanity, which often expresses itself in long outbursts of florid poetry full of self-pity and self-aggrandizement that no one appreciates as much as he does himself.

But speaking of great voices…

I want to watch just to hear Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt deliver the Sceptered Isle speech. 

Maybe that's what I'll do now. It's streaming on Amazon.

It's the ones willing to finish the fight for him who worry me

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday, July 19, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, July 21.

"That's for me to say and you to find out": Trump looking cagey as he listens to reporter's question on the White House lawn on July 15, 2020, a few days before his familiarly disturbing and characteristically unmoored sit-down with Chris Wallace. Patrick Selansky/AP.

President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look ... I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on ”Fox News Sunday.” “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.” --- AP. July 19, 2020.

I don't think it will matter if Trump refuses to "accept" the election results if he loses. Who knows what goes on under that weave but I just don't see him putting up a real fight.

By it won't matter if he refuses to accept the election results, I simply mean it won't keep him in office. What Joe Biden say: Trump doesn’t get to decide. The American People do, and under their orders “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” It will matter because whatever amount of fight he manages to put up, it will cause the American people pain, suffering, turmoil, chaos, confusion, and across the board damage to the body politic it will take years to repair.

He'll throw a tantrum of course, type RIGGED on his cell until the screen cracks, gibber and blather on Fox about the FAKE NEWS and the DEEP STATE, shriek and shout things to any audience he can gather meant to incite riots, call for Second Amendment solutions, send for his lawyers and fixers, but before the marshals come knocking he'll fall into despair and fold.

That's his history.

He likes to call himself a fighter. He loves it when his sycophants and apologists call him one too. He's a counter puncher, they boast on his behalf.

But what he is is a sucker puncher. He hits when you're not looking or before you're ready or after you've got him already beat and are heading back to your corner…

Then he runs for the nearest open door...

Leaving it to others to finish the fight for him if they're inclined.

Discretion has always been the better part of valor with him

It's the ones willing to finish the fight for him who worry me.

His mobs of hideous men eager for an excuse to use the guns they take pride in scaring little kids with the sight of.

And the true and committed fascists in his administration like Barr and Pompeo, Mark Meadows and Chad Wolf and Betsy DeVos, and the probably many others we don't know about.

And the smart, ambitious, vicious, and truly bold and therefore truly dangerous ones in the House and the Senate, like Dan Crenshaw and Tom Cotton.

And the ones in the military and the others in the police forces. And the corrupt and incompetent but reliably partisan judges packing the courts.

And the right wing loons at their microphones egging them all on...

I think they'll lose in the end but it will be violent if not horrifically bloody…

And then Trump will poke his head out from wherever he's been hiding to tweet, "Don't blame me. I had nothing to do with it. They were a pack of incompetent losers. Want to buy a membership in one of my clubs?"

Unless...

Posted Monday afternoon, July 20, 2020.

Model of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian.

For some reason this seems relevant...

Later, as we know, just after the flight of Sputnik, Eisenhower brought in James B. Killian as the Scientific Adviser to the President, together with a scientific advisory committee. This form of organization has persisted, and it certainly provides a direct means by which the President can obtain promptly the best of scientific advice on any problem before him. It will not work, of course, unless the President wants to use it.

---Vannevar Bush, among other things in a long and distinguished career, chair of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, writing in 1970 in his memoir “Pieces of the Action”.

Six Degrees of Separation From Albert Einstein

Mined from the notebooks, Friday, June 21, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, July 19, 2020.

Via Memento.

Another note from the Department of Lost Time, Friday, June 21, 2019. Round about a year ago, we were up here on a visit to the Old Homestead and I started reading one of the books I’d decided I’d inherited from Pop Mannion: Jennet Conant’s “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II”...

Some folks play Six Degrees of Separation From Kevin Bacon. I play One Degree of Separation from Albert Einstein. The object of the game is to reduce the number of people who stand between me and direct acquaintance with Einstein, which currently stands at two---or three, depending on whether or not Pop Mannion actually took a seminar with Hans Bethe. I remember Pop’s telling me that he did and downplaying that connection, the seminar having lasted only a week. I’ve always had an excellent memory, reinforced by a habit of writing stuff down in my notebooks and in long letters to friends and family, and, for the last fifteen years here on the blog. But memory is unreliable even at its best, and mine’s been slipping lately as screws inside my head have been loosening. It still seems true that Pop knew Bethe, if only briefly, and, if he did, the degree of separation between me and Einstein is two: Pop to Bethe to Einstein. But if Pop didn’t take that seminar with Bethe, he took one with John von Neumann, and the degree of separation is still two. It’s possible, even probable, Pop knew both Bethe and von Neuman, and there are two two-degree paths from me to Einstein. Otherwise, though, it’s three: Pop to his doctoral dissertation adviser at RPI, Richard Erlich, who worked at Los Alamos directly under Robert Oppenheimer, to Oppenheimer to Einstein. Either way, two through Bethe and/or von Neumann, or three, it’s been stuck there for the many decades since I first became aware of it when I was in high school, and it’s likely to remain stuck there for however many I have left.

At any rate, it’s not why I started reading “Tuxedo Park” tonight, it’s just something I was curious about---if there was another set of scientists who worked at Loomis’ secret lab during the War separating me by only a few degrees from Einstein. Using the index, I determined there’s not. The only scientist I've heard of who passed through there connecting me to him is, redundantly, Bethe. What I did find is that, still through Pop by way of Bethe, there are only two degrees of separation between me and two other great physicists, Ernest Lawrence and Niels Bohr---or, again, if I discount Bethe on the grounds of faulty memory, three: Pop to Erlich to Oppenheimer to Lawrence and Bohr.

But, as it happens, there are only two degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon.

Maybe.

Depending.

Back in the day when the young women I dated could still be called girls, I dated a girl whose older sister, an aspiring actress, had a bit part in “Animal House”. She played the roommate of the dead sorority girl Otter pretends to be the grieving fiance of in order to seduce whichever sorority sister offers the most sympathy. That turns out to be the roommate. My girlfriend’s sister didn’t have any scenes with Bacon, but she might have gone to the wrap party. I like to imagine Bacon began working out the steps he would use a few years later in “Footloose” dancing with her.

By the way, my girlfriend was prettier than the sister. Just FYI.

Seagulls in the Outfield

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Twitter feed, Thursday, July 18, 2019. Posted Saturday morning, July 18, 2020.

"Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner works against the Mets during the first inning July 18, 2019, in San Francisco  (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Via CBS 5 KPIX.)"

On this date in baseball history, we found out what one of Keith Hernandez's all-time favorite movies is, and, oh yeah, the Mets lost a tough one. Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, July 18, 2019:

Mets and the Giants went 16 innings tonight, 11 of them locked in a 1-1 tie. For the first 3 ½ the Mets were ahead 1-0. Mets had 11 hits, the Giants 14, but spread out over 16 innings that’s not a lot of action. At one point a flock of seagulls settled in the outfield. That’s probably a regular sight there in the Giants’ ballpark, situated as it is right on China Bay, but from the way Mets announcer Gary Cohen talked about it, I got the impression this was somehow different, that the gulls were in closer and were staying put longer than usual. But maybe Cohen was just trying to liven up what he was worried we fans at home might be writing off as a boring game and was hoping to stop us for reaching for the remote by rousing a story or an insight out of his broadcasting partner Keith Hernandez who had grown almost morosely silent. It took some prompting on Cohen’s part, but he finally engaged Hernandez’s interest. Cohen might have expected Keith to talk about what it was like growing up in the Bay area and if the gulls were a problem when he played baseball as a kid. Or maybe he thought Keith might have compared playing in Oracle Park today to visiting Candlestick in his playing days with the Cardinals and Mets. But knowing Hernandez as well as he does, he probably wasn’t surprised and was maybe even happier when Keith’s first comment wasn’t about baseball, it was about---movies.

“Where’s Tippi Hedren?” Keith asked.

This led to a brief discussion of Hitchcock and “The Birds” and to Keith’s confessing that it was the brunette Suzanne Pleshette and not Hitchcock’s favorite golden blonde of the moment Tippi Hedren who caught his young eye. He had a lifelong crush on Suzanne Pleshette that started with seeing her in “The Birds”.

There’s another point of affinity between Keith and me, along with an interest in history, although I’m a few years younger than he is, and my crush on Suzanne Pleshette began with seeing her in “Blackbeard’s Ghost”.

One thing leading to another, Cohen wound his way round to asking Keith what his favorite movie was when he was a kid. Hernandez didn’t hesitate.

“Horatio Hornblower” starring Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo.

(That would be “Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.”.)

He didn’t say whether a crush on Mayo had an influence on his affection for the film, but it would be understandable if it had.

For the record, the Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, on his way to hitting 53 home runs and being named National League Rookie of the year, clobbered one in the top of the 16th to put New York up 2-1, but what was at that point in the season true to form, the Mets let the game get away. The Giants went ahead on back to back doubles and a single and won it 3-2. By that time the only fans left in the stadium might have been the seagulls.

San Francisco Giants' Donovan Solano (7) celebrates with San Francisco Giants' Pablo Sandoval (48) after hitting the game winning walk-off single in the 16th inning of their MLB game at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, July 18, 2019. The San Francisco Giants defeated the New York Mets 3-2 in the 16th inning. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group) Via the Mercury News.

Bumgarner didn’t get the win, of course. He was long gone from the game. But he did get several standing ovations while he was on the mound. There was speculation that he was going to be traded soon, with the trade deadline coming up and the Giants in need of some power hitting, and his being a free-agent at the end of the season. The expectation was this was Bumgarner’s final home start as a Giant and fans were determined to give him a rousing send-off. As it turned out, he finished the season with the team. If there’s anything of a season this year, he’ll be pitching for the Diamondbacks.

This morning's Morning Song is a mad song by William Blake

Posted Friday morning, July 17, 2020.

Detail from “Wanderer above the sea of fog” by Caspar David Friedrich circa 1817. Kusthalle Hamburg, via Wikipedia.

No idea what birds scorning the earth were keeping an insomniac Blake from going back to bed in 1783. Here in 2020, it’s a riot of blue jays whistling, croaking, and cawing their good mornings to each other…

The wild winds weep, 

         And the night is a-cold;

Come hither, Sleep,

         And my griefs infold:

But lo! the morning peeps

         Over the eastern steeps,

And the rustling birds of dawn

The earth do scorn.

 

Lo! to the vault

         Of paved heaven,

With sorrow fraught

         My notes are driven:

They strike the ear of night,

         Make weep the eyes of day;

They make mad the roaring winds,

         And with tempests play.

 

Like a fiend in a cloud 

         With howling woe,

After night I do croud,

         And with night will go;

I turn my back to the east,

From whence comforts have increas'd;

For light doth seize my brain

With frantic pain.

 

---"Mad Song" by William Blake.

A philosopher, a writer, and a comedian walk into a society

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, May 17, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, July 16.

Notes from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, Sunday morning, May 17, 2020:

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”

---Aristotle, "Politics".

 

That’s where people get it wrong. Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well…human beings.

---Terry Pratchett, “Men at Arms”.

"Human beings like to be close together, because it makes it easier for us to judge and criticize…”

---Jerry Seinfeld, on CBS Sunday Morning, May 17, 2020.

They knew what he was

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, July 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday evening, July 15.

The Displeasure of His Company: Donald Trump and then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan looking less than happy with each other's company. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP via Politico. It's undated but it's probably from 2018 after Ryan called it quits in April.

In 2016, when the Republicans made their deal with the devil, they knew what Trump was. They knew everything about him that made him unfit for president, practically unfit for life outside a mental ward or a jail.

But they thought he would lose. What they wanted out of him were his coattails. He could lose but as long as they survived, they were fine with nominating an immoral, incompetent, corrupt, racist lunatic.

Just in case, they sent Paul Ryan to talk to him and make sure he would stop with the populist nonsense and pledge to be a true conservative. He would sign the tax cuts, deregulate everywhere, and help repeal the ACA. Which he was glad to do.

And they were fine with this. They figured that if, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, he did win, they could control him.

By control him, they meant simply keep him on the conservative straight and narrow. They didn't care if he went on being an immoral, incompetent, corrupt, racist lunatic on Twitter or at his rallies, just as long as it didn't cost them politically and financially.

Like I said, they knew all his flaws, foibles, and vices, and they judged that none of them, not even all of them taken as a whole were unmanageable or detrimental to their agenda…

But they underestimated one. They may have even overlooked it.

His self-destructiveness.

All his life, apparently even when he was a kid, he's had a penchant for self-sabotage. And anyone who was near him would suffer for it.

He was a self-suicide bomber and if you were close to him when he blew himself up, you were caught in the explosion.

He's been doing it all along since he took office. Every single time he's had something like a success, within days he's caused himself a new problem and created a bigger mess.

And now here he is, doing it again but on the grandest of scales. He seems determined to take the whole country with him. He's become the crisis we knew he wouldn't know how to handle when it came, threatening to destroy us as a nation and a people. Like Rick Wilson has written. Everything Trump Touches Dies

The Republicans could have foreseen this. Should have foreseen it. But all they chose to see was how they could use him to manipulate their base.

"The Killing of a Colorado Rancher": Fact as fiction, fiction as fact

Posted Wednesday morning, July 15, 2020.

Detail from an illustration by Hokyoung Kim for “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, a story by Rachel Monroe in the April 2020 issue of the Atlantic.

Our families are supposed to be the people who know us best, but that often isn’t the case. Sometimes the hardest people to see clearly are the ones we’re closest to.

After the discovery of Jake’s body, and the multiple and confusing confessions from his family members, what seemed to upset his friends most was how they mischaracterized Jake. According to Deb, her son was a drug addict and a drunk, a violent MMA fighter, someone who physically assaulted her and threatened to kill his sister and her family. According to Steph, Jake was a worthless waste of space, lazy and useless. No wonder Jake clung so strongly to his friends. His chosen family was perfectly aware of his flaws—his stubbornness, his arrogance—but equally attuned to his loyalty, generosity, and dedication…

---from “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” by Rachel Monroe.

Couple years ago, in August of 2018, the week after Pop Mannion's funeral, I was looking at a stack of books I’d inherited from Pop. It stood nearly waist high and included "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov", "The Complete Short Stories"" by Muriel Spark, several collections of stories by John Updike, several more by Stephen Millhauser, and one each by T.C. Boyle and Julian Barnes,.

After studying them perplexedly and with indecision, trying to think if I would keep all of them and where would I put the ones I kept, what would I have to clear from the bookshelf to make space for them, what would I do with the books I took down, and, most pressingly, when would I have time to read any of the new ones? After brooding for a minute, I reflexively reached for the book on the top of the stack, the Nabokov and opened to the table of contents, seeing if a story title caught my eye. As I did, I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “here’s the deal. What I’m going to do is read a story a day, from one book or another, every morning, and when I’ve gone through them all, I'll go back and do it again. I figure it will take me at least a year, and we’ll see where that gets us when we get there.”

The self I was talking to and making the deal with was my forty-year-old self. That’s the self who, finally discouraged by rejection notices, broken-heartedly gave up writing fiction and with that reading any fiction he wasn’t paid to review. The deal for the moment was only for me to read that one story a day, but implicit was that doing so might lead to me, my present self, might try my hand at writing short stories, picking up where he’d left off. I had his notebooks and a goodly number of unfinished drafts of stories he’d started, and this, I fantasized, might be a way for him to get back to doing something he’d loved. So I started to read the first story in the Nobokov collection right then and there.

I have to admit, in the two years since, I’ve been less than diligent about keeping to the terms of our deal. My forty year old self has grounds to sue. But I have been reading short stories, for my own pleasure as well as his. Not that many. Certainly not one a day or even every other day. Averaged out, it’s been at most one every couple of weeks. (I’ve also been secretly writing short stories. My own too. Not revisions of his left-overs.) And not all the ones I’ve read---in fact just a handful of them---have been ones in that set of books. Our deal didn’t specify they all needed to be. At any rate, I just finished one this morning. It wasn’t in a book. It was in a magazine---the Atlantic. A very good one by a writer I hadn’t read before. Rachel Monroe. It’s called “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, and it reminded me of stories by Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, and T.C. Boyle. The difference between Monroe’s story and theirs is that theirs are fictions. Hers is journalism and all facts.

A thing I’ve come to believe over time is that journalists can tell better stories than most fiction writers and fiction writers can tell stories that contain more truth than even some of the best journalism. To put it simply, both fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same line of work, describing and explaining the condition and problems of being a human being living among other human beings, and that what they write both count as literature. Hardly an original insight, but it was a salutary one for me, and I wish I’d come to it before I went to Iowa for my MFA.

At any rate, I think Monroe’s story counts as a short story and a good one. But see what you think. Here’s the opening to get you started:

It was weird that no one had heard from Jake Millison in a few days.

Maybe someone who didn’t know him, an outsider to Gunnison, a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo. But Jake’s friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine. If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, he’d text you on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid kits. He definitely wasn’t the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type.

Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his family’s property just outside Gunnison. He’d drive into town most evenings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke, because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close-knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. They’d shoot pool for a couple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. “Everything was like clockwork with him,” his friend Antranik Ajarian told me.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2015—five days since anyone had heard from Jake—his friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway, then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk, and moose, testaments to the property’s glory days as a hunting camp. They didn’t see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo.

In the horse corral, they spotted Jake’s mother, Deb, a wiry woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasn’t responding to their texts because he’d dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with them…

To read Monroe’s whole story, follow the link to “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” at the Atlantic.

Masks equal love

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Posted Monday afternoon, July 13.

“YOUR HEALTH is NOT More important than MY Liberties!!”: An SUV in the anti-lockdown protest parade in Hartford, Connecticut in April with a hand painted message in what looks like neon pink poster paint on the rear window. Photo by Brad Horrigan, the Hartford Courant, via Snopes. Yes, Snopes, they checked it out, because even though the photo appeared in the Courant, the message was so egregious that many people believed it had to have been faked. Snopes confirmed it was real. Note the little KEEP KIDS SAFE slogan on the plate.

Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, Wednesday, May 13, 2020:

Today on his Daily Faith Sharing video chat on Facebook, Father Martin reproved the tough guys refusing to wear masks. Normally genial and mild-mannered almost to a fault, you could hear the steel enter his voice as he said you don’t wear a mask to protect you. You wear one to protect others.

Taking John 15:1-4 as the text for his impromptu sermon--- “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.--he said, ‘What do we have to do? We have to prune that part of ourselves, to help us grow, and to help the vine grow, the whole vine.”

“I wear a mask,” he continued, “I don’t wear them for me. It protects me a little bit...I wear them for the other person...because maybe I’m infected, maybe I have coronavirus, maybe I’ve been infected and I don’t know about it, I’m asymptomatic. It’s an act of charity. The other day someone said it’s a sign of cowardice. No. Masks equal love for the other person. So we need to prune ourselves of the desire to do whatever you want. It’s something that needs to be pruned so that the whole vine can flourish.”

With gently smiling approval, he read a couple of viewer comments scrolling on his screen: “‘We wear a mask out of a consideration for others.’ ‘Masks equal love.’”

Doctor Fauci's mistakes

Posted Tuesday morning, July 14, 2020.

Dr Anthony Fauci getting better “ratings” than his maroon of a boss as he listens to Trump spout nonsense and lies about the prospects of a vaccine for the novelcornonavirus back in May when it still appeared he was in Trump’s good graces. Photo by Jabin Botsword, the Washington Post, sometime in May 2020.

In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” --- “Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic”, the Washington Post, July 11, 2020.

Fauci’s first big mistake was the same one many others who’ve gone to work for Trump have made---thinking he could control him in the rooms where it happens. Then he made the mistake of contradicting him, not just in private, but in public. Then he became more popular than Trump. He got better “ratings.” He was the reason people were watching the press conferences. Nobody was much interested in what Trump himself had to say. They wanted to know what Dr. Fauci had to say. Finally, his mistake was being known as Doctor Fauci. It’s the mistake all intelligent, competent, successful high-achievers make by their very existence: reminding Trump that he is none of those things. But at least Fauci had the good sense not to do it while being black or female or both. Trump is the most insecure and self-loathing of men. His vanity, egomania, grandiosity, lying boasts, and obvious attempts at self-delusion are defenses---he’s trying to drown out the voice of his monster of a father sneering in his head, “Idiot. Coward. Loser!” And everyone who disagrees with him, suggests he’s wrong, or points out how he’s screwed up is a manifestation of Fred Trump’s scornful ghost. Fauci’s overall mistake was not being a psychotherapist---or an exorcist.

The world as it is...or maybe is not

Mined from the notebooks, Friday, July 19, 2019. Posted Monday morning, July 13, 2020.

A very short essay, recalled from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, Friday, July 19, 2019:

Most of us aren’t good at seeing the world as it is, because we’re too concentrated as on seeing the world as we’re experiencing it at the moment.

Weather Report. Friday, April 17, 2020: Again??????

Lifted from the album, Friday morning, April 17, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, July 12.

Friday. 6:38 a.m. 32 degrees. Wind 7 mph WNW. Snow flurries overnight. Again????? Again.

Giving propertied people a bad case of the jitters

Posted Sunday morning, July 12, 2020.

Detail from a contemporary political cartoon depicting the progressive economist and author Henry George, who was one of Theodore Roosevelt’s two opponents in the 1886 race for mayor of New York City, strangling the snake or corruption that had its coils wrapped around City Hall. Via Wikipedia.

In 1886, just shy of turning twenty-eight, Theodore Roosevelt returned to New York from his sojourn as a rancher in the Dakota Territory, ready to plunge headlong back into politics. He ran for mayor of New York City in a three-way race that included the progressive economist Henry George as one of his opponents. I think McCullough is understating George’s effect on “propertied people” here:

[TR] was also being asked by the Republicans to run for mayor of New York, almost from the moment he had his bags unpacked, an offer he at once accepted...even though [as he] appreciated, he had little chance of winning...It was to be a three-way race. His opponents were the Democrat Abram Hewitt and a Labor candidate, Henry George. Hewitt, distinguished in manner, admired as an “enlightened” businessman, had been a friend of [Roosevelt’s] father and appeared the likely winner. Henry George was the author of Progress and Poverty, famous as the great exponent of the single-tax scheme, and a fiery speaker who drew huge street corner crowds and gave newspaper editors and propertied people a bad case of the jitters.

---from “Mornings on Horseback” by David McCullough.

Kevin Durant's Achilles tendon and what big brothers are for

Mined from the notebooks, June 10, 2019. Posted Saturday, July 11, 2020.

"Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant (35) reacts as he leaves the court after sustaining an injury during first-half basketball action against the Toronto Raptors in Game 5 of the NBA Finals in Toronto, Monday, June 10, 2019. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)". Via yahoo!sports.

A bulletin from the sports desk of the Department of In Search of Lost Time, June 10, 2019: One of the things I miss about basketball is the querulousness of ESPN analyst Jeff Van Gundy’s announcing.

Game 5 of the NBA finals tonight. Raptors came in up 3 games to 1. Looking like it was a she wrote for Golden State,all over but the shouting. But Kevin Durant was back, after a month on the DL, while his injured calf healed, and it was like he was never out. He scored 11 points in 12 minutes of play, which caused analyst Mark Jackson to observe that having Durant on the floor gave the other Warriors confidence. Jackson compared it to when he himself was a kid out on the street after dark with his big brother. He felt protected

Van Gundy said it was the opposite with him and his big brother, former Heat, Magic, and Pistons coach and current studio analyst for ESPN, Stan Van Gundy. If any trouble arose when he and Stan were out on the street, Jeff said, “I knew we were getting our asses kicked, no matter what.”

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Durant re-injured his calf before the half. First report is that it’s worse than the first time. Probably a tear in his Achilles tendon. But Steph took charge, playing 41 minutes and scoring 31 points. Klay Thompson had 26, and Draymond Green had 10 rebounds and 8 assists. DeMarcus Cousins, coming in off the bench to take over for Durant, scored 14. The Warriors went on to win what Kawhi Leonord turned into a very tight game, nearly wiping out Golden State’s 14 point lead by scoring 10 of his 26 points in the fourth quarter. Green saved it for the Warriors by getting his hand on what looked like a game-winning shot by Kyle Lowry in the final seconds. The final score was 107-106. So the Warriors have two more games to pull off their third championship in a row. I’m not hopeful.

To read the complete game story, follow the link to "How the Warriors Survived Game 5 of the N.B.A. Finals" by Marc Stein at the New York Times. For more details on Durant's injury, go over to yahoo!sports to read the AP story "Durant returns from injury _ then hurts his Achilles" by Tim Reynolds.

On the train platform something like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart

Posted Saturday morning, July 11, 2020.

Waiting for the train. New York City, March 2020. Photo by Gabriella Bhaskar for the New York Times.

At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds,
First on one foot, then the other, in unison,
Like any other unnamed someones, as if poised
For a firing line, until someone thinks he knows
A train is coming in the sparrow-morning light,
And someone else taps a pack of cigarettes
Against his gloved hand, not exotic,
But it’s as if he’s slipped into captivity. One
Of those corner-of-the-eye, white-sky
Days, late winter a hammer against the
Platform, and gathered above the grave-
Line of the gap enough snow
To consider the blue clouds floating,
Like forgiveness, above us all. Only two
Are cresting at this moment, one a show
Of hands, an explosion of clapping, the
Other a mask of a baptismal face
Failing behind the city’s blood-brown
Skyline. Whoever screamed just then,
Then quieted, then shouted, high, like a crow,
Leaves me filled with absence, listening
For silences, cupping my ears. For
A moment, nothing is being celebrated,
Nothing undone, or measured, nothing
Moves, or rings, in the air, and in the next
Moment sirens are continually dying in
The distance. In the time it takes the train’s
Doors to open, and close, and for the train
To swirl us all off, half in, half out, of
Our own wills, underground, something
Like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart,
And whatever feelings each one of us has had
Goes off into the daylight without us.

----”Men Waiting for a Train” by David Biespiel, courtesy of the New Yorker, May 11, 2020.

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Filed under Morning Song.

Photo up top is from a feature story in the New York Times by Christina Goldbaum and Lindsey Rogers Cook that includes many more terrific photos by Gabriella Bhaskar. To read the story and view the photos, follow the link to "They Can’t Afford to Quarantine. So They Brave the Subway."  at the Times website.

Václav Havel on the power of the powerless

Posted Friday morning, July 10, 2020.

Greetings from the Velvet Revolution: "Young Czechoslovak people wave from a tramway in support of Václav Havel for [president of what was then still Czechoslovakia] during a protest rally on 17 December 1989 near Wenceslas Square in Prague." Lumobir Kotec/AFP via the Independent.

I’m guessing that by “free creative activity and its communication” Havel had in mind plays like his own and the music of the underground psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe whose cause he championed after its members' arrest in 1976 for “ organized disturbance of the peace”:

Over time, some political opponents of the communist regimes came to understand these inherent weaknesses of Soviet-style totalitarianism. In his brilliant 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” the Czech dissident Václav Havel called upon his countrymen to take advantage of their rulers’ obsession with total control. If the state wanted to monopolize every sphere of human activity, he wrote, then every thinking citizen should work to create alternatives. He called upon his countrymen to preserve the “independent life of society,” which he defined as including “everything from self-education and thinking about the world through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied, free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organization.” He also urged them to discard meaningless jargon and to “live in truth”---to speak and act, in other words, as if the regime didn’t exist.

---from “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956” by Anne Applebaum.

The anti-experts, a follow up appointment

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, July 9.

Another jamoke of an anti-masker (left) protesting his right to get sick and get other people sick, waves a kiddie flag at Dr. Erich Bruhn, holding a sign that says “You Have No ‘Right’ To Put Us All At Risk GO HOME!”, at a demonstration and counter-demonstration---I can’t tell you who was countering-whom---in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, 2020. Photo by Leah Millis/Reuters, via ABC News.

More from the Department of In Search of Lost Time. May 13, 2020:

Following up on my previous post:, Another even shorter very short essay…

If you think you’re smarter than your doctor, it’s time to get a new doctor.

The anti-experts

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, July 8.

I wonder which type of anti-experts these three jamokes are, What Makes You So Smarts? or You’re Not the Boss of Me’s!: Scene outside the Connecticut governor’s mansion in Hartford, April 20, 2020. Big guy (center) wearing a purple shirt and shades holds a hand-drawn sign that says, “MY BODY MY CHOICE” and “Scared? YOU stay home!” with a cartoon of a surgical mask crossed out. Photo by Dan Haar, Hearst Connecticut Group, courtesy of the Middletown Press.

From the Department of In Search of Lost Time, April 20, 2020, another very short essay:

Two types of anti-experts: Types who won’t accept that anyone is smarter than them and types who think it’s a crime for anyone to be smarter than them. Both are of the same more general types: The Oh Yeah, What Makes You So Smarts?, the Why Should I Listen to Yous?, and the Who Made You the Boss of Me’s?