Oh, the Irany
Iranians (if not brutally repressed, a strong possibility) might seize democracy even as we surrender it.
Iran admits shooting down airliner: such a bizarre twist.
This is such a crazy story in so many dimensions. I’ve had a jumble of thoughts about it. A few of them:
- The uproar about it, compared to the killing of, say, Afghan civilians at a wedding by a drone strike. This upsets the heard-from world so much more—I would guess because the vulnerability of being in an airplane is such a universal experience . . . for the relatively educated, cosmopolitan, and affluent who make viral uproars.
- Even if it had been caught red-handed, the United States would never, ever have come clean about such a terrible error and expressed remorse. (UPDATE: In the comments below, KngFish says the U.S. did and did.)
- That Iranian officials, caught red-handed, did so—and that much of their public did a 180 from their brief unity with their rulers over Soleimani and resumed furious protest—suggests to me (among other things) something about Iran being, deep down, a civilization.
- But this is also being used to vindicate American meddling—our cherished self-image as the colossus bestriding the world, the pumped, pro-freedom, semiautomatic-toting Rambo—and to reinforce Trump’s reelection.
“Democratic intra-party cannibalistic stupidity of gnawing their own limbs off”
This writer who has always defended Joe Biden got fed up and dared to say that Biden lies—makes up stories that make him look good—that “I just don’t think he is at full mental acuity or capacity anymore,” and therefore that Biden is “not . . . the best choice.” She got savagely trolled on Daily Kos, of all places. She has a personal beef, but she’s right about Biden, and right about the Democrats.
These self-identified progressives at Daily Kos et al. are the social media equivalent of the same infantilizing intellectual “safe spaces” that many colleges are promoting. . . . These coddled middle-class suburban white kids often go from their parents’ home, where they’ve been kept from all manner of perceived “danger” and accountability — babysat by the most dangerous predator of all, their iPhones . . . to a college where they are insulated from the ideological meanies who dare to have a different opinion. Finally, to their own little apartment where they tell themselves that the bubble of “progressive” pals and pundits they chat with in the dark amount to actual human contact. They then think, without any introspection at all, that the terror they feel every time they are confronted with the “other” is the appropriate way to feel, that their childish reactions are the way one is supposed to deal with actual flesh-and-blood human beings.
There’s a reason the right was able to get political traction around the “snowflake” trope when referring to the left, and this is it. Regardless of your place on the political spectrum, this fragility of voters’ constitutions is individually and socially destructive. A healthy democracy is not timid. It’s not biased and ideologically pure. It’s not terrified of differing opinions or perspectives. It is not cruel. But unrealized people are.
UPDATE: Here the same writer, Gayle Leslie, documents some contradictions in Bernie Sanders’s political biography—in the 1990s he was tough on crime (voting for mandatory minimums) and easy on guns (voting against the Brady Bill). By saying that these old white guys aren’t the best bet, is she just indulging in the mutual assured destruction the headline decries? She seems soft on Hillary and hard on Russian interference, so if those things set you off you may dismiss what she’s dug up on Bernie. I’m not so sure you should.
If defeating Donald Trump is the only thing that matters, should Democrats refrain from legitimate criticism of flawed frontrunners?
What if they are too flawed to defeat Donald Trump?
UPDATE 2: Biden holds a wide lead among African Americans. He is “far and away their favored candidate.” Bernie is second—and leading among people under 35, just as with younger white voters. The same divide between cautious, change-weary elders and revolutionary, more change! youth. And only old white men to represent both points of view.
UPDATE 3: Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart learned from his Aunt Gloria that blacks have a pragmatic, not exactly cynical, but at once fatalistic and strategic reason for preferring Biden: “‘The way the system is set up now, there is so much racism that it’s going to have to be an old white person to go after an old white person,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘Old-school against old-school.’”
.
Now THIS made me nostalgic
for having a “cover photo.” [If I make the photo bigger, it gets vertically squished. You can zoom it on your screen.]
This was Kagami Biraki, a lung-busting New Year’s training (January 4) followed by a dojo cleanup and a party featuring sake and mochi and a traditional soup whose name I don’t know.
Passing the tippy ritual sake vessel (it’s a test of wrist strength and balance to sip, not dump it down your front) . . .
Photos by Asae Takahashi
. . . reminded me incongruously of this:
Old Friends
We’ve reached the age when that’s something to brag about.
With Margaret Harris, whom I have loved and admired from day 1—freshman year in high school, 60 years ago. Photo by Phil Straus, her husband and fellow photographer, activist, world traveler, grandparent.
With Miriam Gerber Kaplan, my college roomie, former attorney, current grandparent, art collector, world traveler, mindful mensch in Memphis. We clock 56 years.
The Simon and Garfunkel song is poignant, but it’s also, comically, a very young person’s dire view of older age. “How terribly strange to be 70”? Actually, no. “Preserve your memories, that’s all that’s left you”? 😂 🤣
What are your rules for giving on the street?
In this country with its ever more “shredded social safety net” (in the words of an article I just linked), we are largely taking care of each other, dollar by dollar. Leave home, where your inbox is full of pleading worthy causes and GoFundMes, and every walk down the street is a gantlet of accostments by need, and every subway ride has an audio track of homeless disabled veterans’ pitches and amplified mariachi or rap performances. If you can indulge yourself in a $5 latte and don’t worry about having a roof over your head, you can feel like part of the problem. But if you relented for every charity busker, street musician, and panhandler, you’d soon need food stamps yourself.
What are your unwritten rules for when to give or not give, or do you rely on mood or spontaneous response?
I broke one of my own rules yesterday, which made me realize that there are rules (a necessity to sort out the chaos and resist the giant sucking sound of a society circling the drain) and wonder what they are.
I am now a member of Greenpeace, which I didn’t want to be. (Nothing against Greenpeace, it’s just not on my current list of revolving causes and subscriptions.) Two young people stepped into my path on the way home from karate and asked if I cared about climate change. I began to make a wide berth around them, my standard practice with those clipboard-toting less-than-minimum-wage makers. Yes, it’s an awful job, but it’s an awful idea to hold hurrying people up and shake them down in public.
I was giving them my usual surly, “Yes, but I don’t do this on the street” when the young woman gestured at the young man and said, ‘It’s his first day. I’m training him. You’d be his first.'” Well, that was too auspicious—for both of us—to pass up.
They looked to be in their 20s. She was small and pixieish, with short blond hair, skim-milk skin, a twice-pierced nose, and long glitzy fingernails that forced her to tap her tablet with the sides of her fingers—a mash-up of punk and Walmart cashier. He was tall, rugged, with an inert handshake (shy but resigned to this insult to his introversion), biracial or mildly black. He gave his pitch well, and with real conviction. They both gave the impression that they not only needed the job but cared about the cause.
They showed me a “report card” of the various 2020 candidates’ climate policies. Bernie got A+; Warren, Steyer, and Booker, A–. They proudly said Greenpeace itself had talked Biden up from a D to a B+. Buttigieg and Gabbard got solid B’s. Klobuchar and Yang were C+, Bloomberg D+. Trump of course got an F (we agreed the F was for the rest of us). The girl said Bernie was her first choice, Warren second. I suddenly loved these fresh young people and wondered if Greenpeace, a “mature” charity with (perhaps) a well-paid CEO and a top-heavy bureaucracy, deserves or is just exploiting them.
The form on their tablets signs you up for a recurring monthly donation, and the default suggestion is $25. No way! I suggested $10. She said their minimum is the desired minimum wage: $15. So I signed up for that. I can support Greenpeace for a few months and then opt out.
This made me think about my rules more generally.
- I always give to street and subway musicians (most of whom, as Polly points out in the comments, are aspiring, not necessarily starving, artists) if they move me; they’re working for a living and it’s a helluva better entertainment budget than a subscription to Lincoln Center.
- I tend to give to panhandlers who seem depressed and don’t have the heart for a polished pitch. I’ll sometimes walk half a block past them and turn back. Conversely, I’ll often give to panhandlers who unfailingly say “God bless you” even to those who won’t look at them. That works on me.
- I tend NOT to give to hardened, able-bodied coin-shakers or the guys who open the bank door for you. They’re imposing themselves and it’s annoying.
- I’ll sometimes give to a young homeless person with a dog or a cat if the animal looks well-treated and devoted. (There used to be an older man sitting on the West 4th Street subway stairs who exploited kittens. He always had a fresh box of them to attract donations. I shudder to think what he did with them when they got too old to be super cute. We ratted him out to the precinct a couple of times before he gave that up.)
And what gets you to break your unwritten rules? A little middle-aged man said he was hungry and asked me for a dollar for a hot dog or hamburger—”I’m going right over to McDonald’s”—and I gave him two. Why? I think because he came up close and mumbled his request as if it were a confidence. He got enough inside my personal space (without aggression) to make the appeal personal. I gave him two bucks, and, in plain view, he turned around and scuttled right into the CVS! All I could think was, What on earth can he get over-the-counter in there that will ease his craving?
And what’s with the guy who sits with a huge water jug and singsongs tirelessly, “One penny is all we ask. A fellow human being should not go hungry”? What’s his story? Is he the “fellow human being” he’s talking about? And if not, who are his beneficiaries? It’s a mystery. I suppose I could ask.
There are endless stories of these uneasy encounters between those inside and outside society’s privileged shelter. It renews my admiration for the courage of my friend Sachiko Hamada, who, in the 1980s, involved herself in the lives of a community of homeless people and made an award-winning film about them. It’s called Inside Life Outside.
How Trump is Dumbing Down his Opponents
as well as his followers, opines David Brooks:
This is Trump’s ultimate victory. Every argument on every topic is now all about him. Hating Trump together has become the ultimate bonding, attention-grabbing and profit-maximization mechanism for those of us in anti-Trump world. . . .
Most of this week’s argument about the Middle East wasn’t really about the Middle East. It was all narcissistically about ourselves! [related . . .] Democrats defend terrorists! Republicans are warmongers! Actual Iranians are just bit players in our imperialistic soap opera, the passive recipients of our greatness or perfidy.
Underneath the theatrical enmity Trump whips up, Brooks sees the left and right converging on an isolationist populism: “The real high-risk move is the one both parties are making together: that if we ignore the world it will ignore us. (It won’t.)”
New York’s disease, “high-rent blight” . . .
. . . comes to San Francisco, with a tech twist.
The intersection of Church and Market streets is where many San Francisco neighborhoods come together. . . . In the last decade, splashy apartment complexes have shot up all over the area. The neighborhood must have gained hundreds, if not thousands, of new residents. But the businesses in the area have been dying off.
In 2017, about one in every eight storefronts here was empty, and more businesses seem to have vacated since then. . . . Elsewhere, too, long-term leases timed out, rents increased, and the old neighborhood hangouts disappeared. . . .
As a result, a kind of noncommittal capitalism has moved in.
One of the saddest statements in the article:
Meanwhile, most of the residents in the lofty towers above are probably ordering their necessaries from Amazon Prime and their food from the delivery service Caviar. (Or no one is living in the condos at all: a recent report found there are roughly 38,000 empty homes in San Francisco – three to five times the city’s number of homeless people.)
What a paradox: more and more people are moving to cities, even as cities are committing “urban suicide.” Maybe the vitality is centered in ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods that haven’t yet been discovered by the hip and by the realtors who learned from the story of SoHo that hipsters are merely the truffle-sniffing pigs of the next real estate gold rush. Sunset Park appeared to be such a place when I visited it a couple of summers ago, but it’s already in the gunsights, as you’ll see at the link. (Sunset Park has a best-kept secret, the greatest view of Manhattan you will ever see. It’s just a matter of time before “pencil buildings” are offering that view for million$.)
(Someone recently told me that New York’s luxury realtors have overbuilt. Prices are coming down; units once for sale are being rented and incentives, discounts and abatements offered. It’s still far from affordable housing.)
UPDATE: My bro David sends me a piece documenting an “urban exodus” OUT OF New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and the factors driving it.
Amazing Stuff
Ronni Bennett more modestly calls hers “Interesting Stuff” (I am more into hyperbole) and I really recommend you bookmark her blog Time Goes By and search the sidebar for “Interesting Stuff” (a weekly feature) if you’re on the lookout for great finds to post to your friends. I admit to getting this one from her. It is . . . amazing.
One more of Ronni’s great finds. You’ll cheer on the valor and perseverance of this little mouse.
√
BIG REVEAL: Bananas are better cold!
√
When David texted me this video, my response was, “Not to be essentialist or anything, but somehow you just know those aren’t female kangaroos.”
To which his response was: 😂😂
√
Fewer Than a Third of American Voters Can Point to Iran on a Map, Survey Shows
[poll taken AFTER assassination of Soleimani]
Just 28 percent of registered voters were able to accurately label Iran on a zoomed-in map of the Middle East and Europe . . . that figure dropped to 23 percent when voters were asked to identify the country on a larger, also unlabeled, global map. A graphic showing respondents’ guesses showed that some believed Iran to be in Africa, others said it’s in France, and some thought it was in the Irish Sea. The global map even showed that some respondents think Iran is in the United States.
It helped to be affluent, educated, and/or male—women were almost twice as dumb as men on this question.
√
LEAVE ME ALONE!
Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate??
“A Psychological Tip”
from Piet Hein:
Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No - not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping.
Go see more, they are delightful. I can’t resist one more:
NAIVE Naive you are if you believe life favours those who aren't naive.
Ambiance 