Lance Mannion

Fifteen years-worth of weather reports

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, January 19, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, January 21, 2021.

Going back through old posts and notes that never got worked up into posts. I’m not impressed. Strikes me that my “gift” as a blogger is a knack for getting it right at the same time I’m getting it wrong. My defense has always been that the blog should be read as an open notebook: it’s a record of the progress of my thinking about the world as I’m passing through it on the way to somewhere. My opinions are reactions to things I encounter along the way, and those things and my thinking about them are as passing as the weather. So what you’re reading is the top of a file of fifteen years worth of weather reports, some of which are literally weather reports.

Taxonomy of birds in my neighborhood

Posted Saturday morning, January 15, 2021.

Blue jays are sociable, neighborly birds, and that’s how I think of them, as my neighbors. The sparrows that flock in the bushes outside the front door are tenants who probably regard us as indifferent landlords whose best quality is our habit of minding our own business and leaving them alone to mind theirs. The catbirds think they own the place, the robins do too, but they make it a practice of looking in the window disapprovingly, as if we’re riff-raff who are wasting our lives and neglecting the property. Mockingbirds come around just to mock me. Cardinals are like those couples who live up the street who seem to be enjoying more pleasant lives and are younger and more attractive and more accomplished than you. Geese are like the large family at the other end of the block who's always arguing about everything at the tops of their voices. The woodpeckers are like the people who work in your building whose jobs are more interesting and who do them better and with more diligence and less complaint than you do yours. The only birds I think of as friends are the chickadees and nuthatches, but they don’t visit as much anymore. I wonder what I did to offend them.

Photo up top of a Black-capped Chickadee is courtesy of FotoRequest/Shutterstock, via the American Bird Conservancy. For real Chickadee info, follow the link to Remarkable Bird Brain at ABC. Maybe they’re just too smart to want to bother with the likes of me.

THE Pirate Story

Posted Friday morning, November 13, 2020.

Charlton Heston as Long John Silver and Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins in the 1990 TV movie adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island".

In happy memory of the teller of THE pirate story, who was born 170 years ago today...

Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing

  Three of us aboard in the basket on the lea.

Winds are in the air, they are blowing in the spring,

  And waves are on the meadow like the waves there are at sea. 

Where shall we adventure, to-day that we’re afloat,
   Wary of the weather and steering by a star?
Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat,
  To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?

Hi! but here’s a squadron a-rowing on the sea—
  Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a roar!
Quick, and we’ll escape them, they’re as mad as they can be,
  The wicket is the harbour and the garden is the shore.

---”Pirate Story” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

A very smart post

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, March 3, 2020. Posted Friday morning, March 27.

People think they’re smart. Dumb people think they’re smarter than smart people. Most smart people think they’re smarter than they are. The smartest people know they aren’t that smart, but then they forget and end up being dumber than the dumbest people. Trump is the epitome of a dumb person who thinks he’s smarter than smart people. His base agrees with him because it makes them feel smart to have voted for him. Social media is the minute by minute record of people showing how dumb they are by thinking they’re being smart.

“I’m smart so whatever I say, tweet, or commit to paper or screen must be smart. Here’s the link to an article I wrote.”

Isn’t this a smart post?

I’m so smart.

Sadly, we let human beings vote

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Thursday afternoon, March 5, 2020. Posted Friday morning.

It would be nice if picking a president was just a matter of identifying the smartest and most competent candidate with the best ideas and most workable plans, and then let her run strictly on the issues, but, sadly, we let human beings vote.

Photo of Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally by Damon Winter/New York Times.

First Reminder: They want us to die

Posted Monday morning, February 24, 2020.

Detail from “Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio. Circa 1603. The Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Via Wikipedia.

Re: their plans to gut Medicare and Medicaid, eliminate the ACA, and privatize Social Security so bankers can play with our money and lose it:

They want us to die. They need us to die. They need scapegoats and human sacrifices. It’s how they assure themselves they’re good people and propitiate their angry and lunatic sky-demon of a god. It’s how they know we sinners are going to hell while they continue to be rewarded on earth with good health and good fortune. They are that superstitious and that selfish and that cruel.

They are Republicans. Trump is their front man and head priest.

On the most corrupting influences in politics

Posted Monday evening, November 18, 2019.

Another very short essay:

The most corrupting influences in politics aren’t money and power.

They’re vanity and ego.

Money and power are next.

But right after them are family and friends and the feelings of loyalty, obligation, responsibility, sympathy, love, and guilt they engender.

What friends are for

Posted Monday morning, September 25, 2018.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, almost looking as though he has a conscience to oppress him. Undated and uncredited AP photo via the Boston Herald-American.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Just because a friend never did a bad thing in front of you or to you doesn’t me he didn’t do it when he was with other friends, the stupid pals, buddies, amigos, jerks, dopes,assholes, and other bad influences he should have known to steer clear of but for some reason didn’t.

One of the ways we get in trouble is to put ourselves in the company of bad company, out of sight of our true friends who care about us. This happens to us all our lives, not just when we’re seventeen. It gets worse as we get older, in fact, and the bad company doesn’t include just false friends but neighbors, coworkers, and bosses. We’re always tempted to go along to get along and hide the fact that we’re tempted from the friends who could help us resist the temptation.

Twitter Basic: They read it

Sunday, August 12, 2018.

“Arguing the Point (Politics on the American Frontier)” Detail from a lithograph by Nathaniel Currier. Mid-nineteenth century. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

[Editor’s note: Gee, I wonder what inspired this.]

Twitter/Facebook/Comment Section/Social Media Basic: That article/book/post/poem you’re sure the idiot you’re arguing with needs to read to learn he’s an idiot and you’re way smarter than him? Chances are he’s read it. He’s also probably seen the movie, watched the show, followed the news, attended the concert, worked on the campaign, or held the job. He’s read, watched, and seen things you haven’t. He was there when you weren’t.

The March of Folly

Posted Friday morning, April 6, 2018.

Been reading a lot of history lately. You might have noticed. Not a new practice for me. Not finding comfort in it. Not that I read history for comfort. Not much comfort to be found, except for the fatalistic kind of comfort to be found in re-readings of the Book of Ecclesiastes, my favorite book in the bible, by the way. History and the Preacher deliver the same message: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and seeking after wind.” The great historian Barbara Tuchman aptly named her classic collection of essays on the time immemorial habit of governments to pursue policies detrimental to their own interests and people’s willingness to follow leaders determined to take them down the path to destruction and ruin.

“The March of Folly.”

Unless you're a Vulcan

Posted Tuesday afternoon, March 27, 2018.

Unless you’re a Vulcan, everybody’s most well-thought out, deeply reasoned, and informed opinions are really just high-minded words masking a tangle of feelings arising from self-interest, vanity, biases, and prejudices. Everybody’s!

Note to political journalists: Attempts to correct for this usually result in contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake or a view from nowhere...again, unless you’re a Vulcan.

Trump in a nutshell

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Wednesday, March 21, 2018. Posted Friday night, March 23.

Image of President Trump’s Tweet: AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!

This is him in a nutshell, isn’t it? No compassion or even acknowledgement of victims and their suffering, only a macho identification with first responders whose shoes he isn't fit to shine.

He's actually celebrating. What he's celebrating is toughness. And in that celebration is a hidden claim he's a tough as the cops and firefighters. In effect he's taking credit for their heroism as if their having done their jobs is due to his being president.

This is one of the ways he's made America great again: first responders inspired by his leadership are responding with renewed energy and force.

Wrongs are being righted, lives are being saved, and most important bad guys are being violently punished, and it’s thanks to him.

His adoring mobs of angry, insecure, self-loathing men eat this up with a spoon since macho posturing and taking vicarious credit for others' achievement is what they’ve been taught to place of self-respect.

An effect of over valuing male toughness is that you can’t measure up in your own eyes and you wind up seeing yourself as a coward and a weakling, so…

Like voter, like President.

A criminal enterprise

Posted Tuesday night, March 6, 2018.

Donald Trump has always been a criminal. I used to think he was sort of an accidental criminal. He couldn’t make money doing business honestly so he trimmed and he skimmed, lied and contrived on the fly, gradually getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble to the point that only the Russians were willing to dig him out. But now I think I was naive. He was as accidentally a criminal as your average mobster. The theft and fraud weren’t expediencies he resorted to when his deals fell through. Theft and fraud were always his main business. Real estate, the casinos, the hotels, the airline, the USFL, the Trump Foundation, Trump University were simply the hooks. Now the White House is the hook and his Presidency is the criminal enterprise.

We think we’re so smart

Posted Friday night, November 24, 2017.

Conservatives get stupid because they don't think and go with their feelings. But Liberals think their way into being stupid. This explains why the smartest among us can come up with the stupidest ideas. They don’t do their homework, because they know they already know the subject better than anybody. They don’t check their work, because they’re too smart to make mistakes.They just have to do what they’re confident they do better than everybody else: think deep thoughts. And then they’re so proud of how smart their thinking is they fail to notice it has nothing to do with reality and is based on nothing except their own faith in how smart they are.

Most people are hobbits

Posted Saturday morning, October 28, 2017.

Apropos of nothing...Well, apropos of a longer post on ambition and the meritocracy I'm working on:

Most people are hobbits, and remember Tolkien meant for the hobbits to be the heroes because they were not as a rule heroic. Most people don't want lives full of adventure and achievement and the acquisition of treasure. They want to stay at home in the Shire. They want lives full of comfort and contentment, in the company of family and friends. The lives the educated elite want for themselves and their children depend on leaving the Shire and are anything but contented---discontent fuels them. Each promotion is a step to the next. Each achievement is prelude to the next. Families ties are elastic, friendships are temporary and based on mutual advantage. Not a meeting of like minds but a meshing of careers. Networking more than bonding. Other people are means to an end. Old affections are forgotten with each move to chase the better job.

Ambition and self-aggrandizement are the root of all evil in Middle Earth. They are the base metals from which the rings were forged. The elites live lives of constant anxious self-promotion. Every update of one's resume, each new line added to a c.v. Is an advertisement for the self, a boast of continual self-improvement. Hobbits are self-effacing. They don't feel compelled to improve either themselves or their position in the world.  Being satisified with one's lot includes being satisfied with one's self.

On the other hand, contentment can be hard hard to distinguish from complacency. Being satisfied with one's self is not the same as being self-satisfied, and the latter is much more common. The contented and comfortable owe their contentment and their comfort or at least the conditions in which they can make themselves comfortable to the ambitious and the restless.

They aren't politically correct because they aren't political

Posted Tuesday morning, October 10, 2017.

Conservatives, especially right wing conservatives, don't have political beliefs. Not by their lights. Political beliefs are what liberals have. Conservatives just have beliefs. And those beliefs are simply in what is, and what is, is what God and nature intended. What this means to them is that what they believe is always right and to challenge them is to challenge what's ordained by God. Dissent is disobedience and defiance. To slap it down isn't being political. It's putting things right.

So if the players say they're taking a knee during the anthem to protest the way the country condones any act of police violence against any of its black citizens and conservatives say that taking a knee during the anthem is an act of disrespect towards the flag and our troops----apparently in addition to being a sacred flag ceremony, an act of idol worship, as far as I'm concerned, playing the anthem at sporting events is done to honor the troops. When did that happen?---in conservative-think that's not a clash of political beliefs. It's the players defying and disobeying and conservatives simply---pardon the pun---standing up for what's right. And there's no questioning or arguing with them, because like I said they believe that what they believe is right just because they believe it.

This is what makes the Republican Right such a threat to democracy. There's only one way to do things in their view, their way, which is the the right way, which is God's way, and there's no going against that.

On the contraception exception: What they sincerely believe

Posted Sunday afternoon, October 8, 2017.

Their "sincerely held" religious belief isn't some vague notion that contraception is wrong somehow, some way, for some reason. It isn't simply that God doesn't like it. It isn't that it promotes "risky behavior". It's that sex outside of marriage is a damnable sin and within marriage it's only for procreation and women's main, if not only, purpose is to have babies and their husbands get to decide when and how many and everybody who isn't their version of Christian still has to abide by the rules dictated by their sincerely held religious belief.

Mannion in Purgatory

Posted Friday morning, September 8, 2017.

The bishops are mad at Steve Bannon, and can you blame them?

Bannon was raised Catholic.

He was also raised a Democrat. And he was raised to be a human being. Look how that’s turned out.

There I go again.

It’s low on the list, but one of the things I despise about Trump and his gang of thugs, thieves, racists, sharpers, and malevolent fools is that they tempt me to commit the sin of Pride.

Next to them I feel like a saint.

And of course I’m not. I’m a rotten human being, and I can prove it.

Not being as rotten as the rottenest human beings going is not grounds for canonization. Still, here I am, day after day, on the internet, publicly polishing my halo.

It’s probably costing me another few thousand years in Purgatory if not outright damnation.

Thanks, Donald.

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Click on the image to jump to the CNN story or follow the link to Bannon on Catholic Church's DACA support: 'They need illegal aliens to fill the churches'.

Like I said up top, the bishops aren’t taking this kindly. Cardinal Dolan, for one, is especially angry. To see how angry, follow the link to Cardinal Dolan rips into Bannon for 'insulting' remarks about Catholic Church and immigrants at Politico.

Here’s the official response to Bannon and Trump’s ending of the DACA from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: On Care for Migrants and Refugees. The last paragraph directed at me would have this former altar boy running for the confessional like his soul depended on it:

Our pro-immigration stance is based on fidelity to God's word and honors the American dream. For anyone to suggest that it is out of sordid motives of statistics or financial gain is outrageous and insulting."

Sad and lonesome Lance

Posted Friday night, August 11, 2017.

My notebooks are bursting with posts about politics, but all I want to write about is how sad and lonesome I am. This means instead of writing a post, I should write a short story, or a poem, or a country western song.

Riverworld

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, May 21, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, June 4.

Felt my mortality weighing heavily on me this morning. Tried to keep the demons at bay by telling myself I could be around for another 30 years.  The demons laughed. What's the point of that? they asked mockingly. I had to grant them the point.

Thirty more years? Might be a pleasanter prospect if I and nobody I knew were going to age and things would continue on pretty much the way they are. Not a lot to look forward to as it is.  Not much I'm going to contribute with my persistent presence. I'm done. It's somebody else's turn. Don't want to die but not excited about living. Lately I've caught myself having fantasies that are influenced by Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels except that instead of dying and being reborn down river I'm reborn back upstream and wake up as my twenty year old self, a young hero with prospects again.

These were pre-dawn thoughts. As soon as it got light I got in the car and headed for McDonald's. We're up at the old Mannion Homestead for the weekend so I drove down to the river and had my coffee on the riverbank, looking at this:

I don't see much point in living thirty more years. Or twenty. Or ten. But contemplating a view like this? With a good cup of coffee? Continuing on another day seems like a good idea.