Last chance to recalibrate
Many years ago, I met a woman who had had the kind of experience you ordinarily only find in fiction. As a young adult, she was in a serious car accident, resulting in a head injury. She suffered a period of total amnesia, followed by months of convalescence. When she recovered, she was never the same: Her family relationships weakened; she cut out former friends and found new ones; she moved halfway across the world; her interests and tastes changed; she became more outgoing and less self-conscious; she no longer cared much what other people thought about her.
Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no—the injury had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life.
Arthur C. Brookes, How to Have a Happier Post-Pandemic Life (The Atlantic)
This intriguing opening led me into an okay essay — an essay that might profitably be expanded.
I agree with the author that the pandemic had given a lot of us a chance for introspection, and even more broadly that Brookes undertakes.
Essential workers
Among the less imaginative "takes" on the pandemic are (1) how essentially nobody could self-quarantine for months in the last pandemic because "remote work" wasn’t feasible; (2) how scientific knowledge facilitated development of vaccines with astonishing rapidity, further lessening the effect of the pandemic.
What I think remains under-covered in the pandemic is about how the truly essential workers in our economy are those who must show up in person, including not only nurses (who have gotten a reasonable amount of good press), but grocery store cashiers, shelf-stockers (is that the gender-neutral term?), bus drivers, police, fire, paramedics. A lot of these people not only must show up in person, but must do so for a second full-time or part-time job to make ends meet.
Economists, especially of the Austrian school, will hate this, but I’ll say it anyway: a lot of these people are underpaid for the risks they took.
Brett Kavanaugh
The Atlantic’s McCay Coppins has moved on from speculating about Trump to speculating wildly about Brett Kavanaugh. The Advisory Opinions podcast and legal blogger Josh Blackman have both pushed back, the former as Kavanaugh fans, the latter somewhat skeptical.
I think Kavanaugh got treated very badly on the supposed sexual misbehavior and that it was a mere understandable human lapse, poor form but not disqualifying, for him to have lost his cool at the end of all that indignity.
But his adolescent aspiration to become alcoholic got treated too gently. I avoided underage drinking (three or four lapses between 18 and 21, zero drunkenness) because it was illegal (kind of a litmus test for a future lawyer/judge, don’t you think?), and I’m pretty scornful of a guy who upholds the law for everyone but himself.
Doing real good versus limelight-grabbing
I recently started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. When he’s good, he’s very good.
My Little Hundred Million, is very, very good. Just listening to it is instructive, but you could spend a lot of time thinking about other applications of the insights (Gladwell gives several).
Low-valence geezer
I resist bonding with fellow liberals because it gets to feeling too comfy, sitting and murmuring in unison about Mitch McConnell and how devious and evil he is, so I say, quietly, “The real problem is that he’s smarter than the others. There is an art to obstruction and he is an artist.” So they start unloading on Trump and I listen and then I put my oar in: “ Donald Trump is an original, nobody like him before or since. All the others, either party, are variants of a type, but Trump came along, boasting, wearing his contempt proudly, and enough people loved him for that to elect him. Other presidents took the job very seriously but he was more like a sultan or an emir. And here he is, the most admired man in America. Democrats approve of Biden; Republicans adore Trump. No comparison.”
This statement lets some air into the conversation. You sit around on a terrace with your fellow liberals and the conversation turns choral and my job is to soloize, offer dissent in a minor key ….
I now turn toward political matters. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Not worth the powder to blow them up
I would feel differently if NRO was a religious journal, especially if it were explicitly Roman Catholic, but somehow it smells exceedingly fishy when political journal National Review Online is constantly meddling in whether President Biden should be denied communion (Thursday’s installment) because of his support of legal abortion.
This is doubly so because "pro-life" Republicans haven’t really done a damn thing for the unborn beyond (a) confirming judges thought to be hostile to abortion, (b) proposing that Catholic Democrats be excommunicated. They’ve been playing pro-life voters for suckers. I wish I could remember the guy who first threw that in my face in 2002 so I could apologize for my hostile reaction. (They’ve been playing all social conservatives for suckers on all issues. Remember you heard it here first.)
Perhaps if the GOP truly does "permanently become the Party of the Working Class" (see below) that will change, but I wouldn’t bet on it considering its odd idea of who is "working class."
Trump > truth
The calculation was pretty straightforward: The need to stay on the good side of Trump voters and donors—which necessarily means staying on the good side of Trump—was greater than the need to tell the truth about January 6, the “big lie,” or Trump generally.
Staying on the good side of Trump is more important than truth-telling? You know what I say about that? Die, GOP, die!
Working Class Republicans
I have seen it suggested that most of the country doesn’t know who Liz Cheney is and that in a few months, nobody will remember or care about her ouster. There may be some truth in that. Heck, there may be a lot of truth in that.
I also recall confidently announcing that Election 2016 meant that some major political realignment was underway, and by that I meant
- working-class voters migrating to the GOP
- suburban soccer moms migrating to the Democrats and
- other things beyond my imagination at that point (sort of implied by "major realignment").
Well, Kevin McCarthy wants the GOP to "permanently become the Party of the Working Class." (If you don’t know Liz Cheney or Kevin McCarthy, why are you reading?) That was kind of predictable, as one of the big stories of 2016 was how many had come on their own.
So the GOP got a real working man running for governor of Virginia (he typed with a smirk on his face). Read all about it in the first of three items here.
The ambiguous adjective 45 has earned, fair and square
I have never wavered on whether 45 (he who shall not be named) was a suitable President of the United States (or candidate, for that matter). But I think, considering his continued reach and inexplicable popularity, that I must allow him the ambiguous adjective "consequential."
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 