The Electron Pencil

Lots of people on my side of the fence loathe big pharmaceutical companies — and, don’t get me wrong, Big Pharma has committed more than its share of mortal sins. But deep-pocketed drug manufacturers are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to research, mainly because the citizenry of this holy land has decided scientific inquiry and higher education…, hell, all education, aren’t worth spending too many of our tax dollars on.

A number of my pals who are working diligently at Indiana University trying to tease out medicinal benefits from the cannabis plant have to beg like paupers for grants to continue their delving. It seems these scientists are always thisclose to having to shut down their labs because they just may run out of scratch.

Anyway, the Bloomington Science Cafe will convene this Friday at Bear’s Place, where George Rebec will talk about “Hope For Huntington’s.” Eyeball this quote from the BSC communique:

Huntington’s disease, a fatal neurodegenerative condition that strikes in the prime of life, is caused by a single gene defect. The mutant gene was identified in 1993 but hope for a cure was far from assured as subsequent research revealed an amazingly complex role for this gene in brain function. Now, a positive phase I clinical trial and a $45 million bet from Roche suggests a reason for optimism.

Bloomington Science Cafe, Friday, Nov. 2, 2018, 6:30pm, Bear’s Place.

See that? F. Hoffman-La Roche AG, a member of the Big Pharma gang if their ever was one, is risking 45-large on experiments and tests for a possible avenue to a possible drug that may — only may — offer some hope to Huntington’s sufferers. I don’t see many other big corporations playing 21 with that kind of dough on research.

I’ll be at Bear’s Friday eve. at 6:30. See you there.

▼

Loony?

You think things are weird today?

Lemme tell you a story. The Loved One and I took the hounds down to Lake Monroe yesterday evening. It was getting near dark when we pulled into the parking lot on the peninsula at Paynetown SRA. A woman was standing on the point peering at something through binoculars.

As I got out of my hot rod, I noticed a bunch of birds hanging out at the shoreline. “Hey, honey,” I called out as she was dancing off with Sally the Dog, “the place is full of killdeers.”

TLO was unable to check them out w/ me because Sally was yanking her toward some irresistible scent. But the woman sauntered over and scoped the birds. “No,” she announced after a few moments, “they aren’t killdeer. They have long beaks, about one and a half times the size of their heads that turn up. They’re some other species. It’s getting too dark for me to be sure about them. They have those beaks because they flip through the sand and gravel on the shore — they’re a type of shorebird — looking for grubs and shells and worms.”

Paynetown’s home to scads of killdeer.

She went on like this for some minutes, talking about rings around their necks, and their light-colored underbellies. By and by, she announced proudly that the day before she’d spotted a loon. “They don’t live around her,” she explained. “It was passing through on its migration south.”

Clearly, the woman loved and knew birds. She loved even more expounding on them. It was a neat little encounter.

It hit me as we drove away that back when I was a little kid, in the mid-1960s, that kind of woman — she was wearing a baseball cap and cargo pants and had her trusty binocs strung around her neck — would have been an object of ridicule on sitcoms. If you’re of my generation, surely you remember laugh tracks going wild at the sight of Miss Jane of The Beverly Hillbillies and her gang of weirdo birdwatchers, togged similarly. Funny elderly ladies in sneakers looking at birds was a stale trope by the time I was ten.

The message? You never wanted to grow old and be a birdwatcher. You never even wanted to know anybody like that. The were ridiculous, clowns even.

Things maybe be weird around this world today but, hell, 50 years ago things were just as weird or even weirder.

▲

The New York Times reports today that social media sites have gone bonkers these last few days since the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. Anencephalics from all corners of this mad, mad, mad, mad globe are spewing their anti-Semitic venom, blaming the Jews for everything from 9/11 to the common cold.

This raises the charge that social media platforms have been lax for lo these many years in policing their sites for hate-mongers and dangerous loons.

Oh sure, alleged goofball Robert Bowers, who the cops say opened fire on worshippers at the Tree of Life Congregation, did a lot of his communicating on a site called Gab — nope, no link; tough shit — devoted to those who reside under slimy rocks. But the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others have hosted their shares of repugnant opinions and suggestions proffered by the type of lunkheads from whose  numbers arise crazed shooters.

Those mainstream social media platforms say they’ve done their best to police their users’ posts but the fact  is they’ve been obsessively concerned with naked ladies and a lot less worried about reprobates calling for actions against minorities.

Take this quote from the NYT article:

Facebook said this year that only 38 percent of hate speech on its site was flagged by its internal systems. In contrast, its systems pinpointed and took down 96 percent of what it defined as adult nudity, and 99.5 percent of terrorist content.

Great. Thanks, Facebook.

Look, I dig the 1st Amendment the way Trumpists slobber over the 2nd but, for chrissakes, the people who, for the last ten years or so, have been posting Birther insanity, antisemitic memes, rape threats, and all manner of flat-out lies are now certifiably dangerous. As US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a 1919 decision:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

When you’re tittering about rape, when you’re blaming the Jews for this or that, when you claim the duly (and popularly) elected president of the United States wasn’t born in this country, you’ve lost your Constitutional protection of free speech. That kind of talk is the same as shouting “Fire!”

▼

Meatheads

Where do I do my best thinking? Several places.

In the AM, the first thing I do after hauling my creaking carcass out of bed (well, the first thing after one or two certain functions) is to stand at the kitchen sink, peer out the window at the big expanse of green behind Chez Big Mike, and wash the dishes. I find it a comforting ritual and extremely conducive to philosophical musing.

I also think deep thoughts while showering. What is it about me and water when it comes to cogitation?

The third place for solitary thinking is in the car as I gallivant around these parts. I like, for instance, to get up to Indy maybe once a week. The run up SR 135 from Nashville is perfect for mulling especially when, north of Morgantown, the landscape becomes Midwestern flat.

Anyway, I was thinking recently of all those people who’d voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and then — dang, mang, I still don’t get this — voted for Li’l Duce in 2016. Okay, fine, I get those who voted for BHO the first time and then, when he came up for reelection in 2012, went with Mitt Romney. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem such a baffling turnaround, considering there really wasn’t all that much to distinguish between the two. Hell, Obama’s signature health care plan was essentially lifted in toto for Romney’s own med. plan when he was Gov. of the state of Mass.

But how in this crazy, mixed-up world does one go from wanting as president a well-educated, soft-spoken, former community organizer whose strength was hearing the people’s voice, who was a domestic-issue wonk, and one who bridged the heretofore irreconcilable worlds of America’s blacks and whites to then hoping a notoriously ill-informed, crass, unread, incurious, nativist, divisive, utterly self-centered greed monkey will become this holy land’s Dear Leader?

It’s downright bizarre.

In fact, the only analogy I can think of is it’s like someone saying, “Y’know, I’m a vegetarian,” and then asking if you want to come out for a steak dinner.

I hope to hell those people try to atone for their sin Tuesday.

▲

Okay, whoever picked the under in yesterday’s post (I set the over/under for President Gag even mentioning the bomb plot against Dems/libs at Saturday) wins a lifetime subscription to this global communications colossus. He condemned, in general terms, any domestic terrorist acts on Wednesday.

Hey, give Li’l Duce credit: He’s learning on the job. Learning how to be something less than a complete and utter jerk.

Oh, wait, now comes news that The Leader of the Free World today has blamed the news media for creating the toxic environment that can push lunatics over the edge and do things like send bombs to a Democratic former president, a Democratic former vice president, the imagined villainous financier of the liberal plot to take over the world, the Democratic New York governor, the black woman Democratic member of the US House whom the Right has elevated to Satanic status, an outspoken liberal actor, and a perceived purveyor of liberal propaganda (as seen by the paranoiacs of the Far Right), among others. All objects of the President’s own delusional, aggrieved appeals to the worst possible nightmares of a notoriously incurious, uninformed, panic-driven electorate — you know, the one that put him in office with a minority of votes.

In other words, he’s (take your pick) gaslighting or blaming the victim.

That credit that I almost gave P. Gag three grafs up? I take it back. He remains a complete and utter jerk.

▼

Online & On The Air

Big Mike’s B-town, my monthly column in Limestone Post (really, it’s every four weeks but, y’know…),  runs today in the online mag. It’s about the proposed cohousing development slated to to be built on the city’s south side, on South Maxwell Street, to be exact-ish.

BM’s B-town usually focuses on a single person but this time you get two for one: the person who co-founded the Bloomington Cohousing Project, Marion Sinclair, and the developer, Loren Wood, who’s making the project go.

When finished, the cohousing development will look something like this.

And, as always the column runs concurrently with the airing of the week’s Big Talk on WFHB, 91.3 FM. Since the column has two subjects, I spread the related Big Talk coverage over two weeks. Last week, we aired the Wood interview and this week, at 5:30pm today, we’ll play the Sinclair program.

You can get a sneak preview of my chat with Marion Sinclair by clicking on this podcast link. Otherwise, tune your radio to ‘FHB and listen immediately after today’s edition of the Daily Local News.

▲

So, several bombs have been either mailed or dropped off to the bete noires of the paranoiac, lunatic Right: the Clintons, Barack Obama, and George Soros.

Not much is known about these terrorist acts as of this writing.

A pipe bomb like this was hand-delivered to Soros’ home.

I do know this, though: President Gag will say nothing about them today.

In fact, I’m setting the over/under for his first utterance on the incidents at three days. So he won’t comment about them at all until Saturday. That is, if he follows his normal M.O. The Saudi rubbing out of journalist Jamal Kashoggi, for example, was a non-event in his eyes for many long days

It took the few sane people in his admin. that long to convince him the President of the United States ought to at least say something about the assassination, considering the Saudis are our dearest pals and we supply them with tons and tons of weapons with which they can slay civilians in Yemen and other locales. Hell, they may be prone to employ our American-made guns & ammo on their own folks should the need arise. The Saudi Royal Family, like all such bloodliners, is far more interested in maintaining absolute power and wealth than in trivial nonsense like the continued health and free speech of their citizenry.

Okay then, anybody who picks today, tomorrow or Friday as the day Li’l Duce mealy-mouthedly condemns the bomb senders — and the President-on-a-technicality actually does say something — wins a lifetime subscription to this global communications colossus.

▼

Sweet Music

I just discovered a neat little band producing some sweet sounds reminiscent of a shotgun marriage between Julee Cruise and Brian Eno with a touch of sunshine pop thrown in. The band is called LDYCP.

Do yourself a favor and check ’em out.

https://soundcloud.com/ldycp/09-dark-water

▲

Is it my imagination? It seems there are more yard signs being displayed during this election season than I’ve ever seen before. I base this observation on my travels throughout southern Indiana.

Hell, I even caught sight of a Joe Donnelly sign on some rural homeowner’s lawn a few days ago.

Anyway, I just thought you should know there are some compellingly monikered candidates vying for office in these parts. I motored down to Salem yesterday to start writing a Limestone Post piece (due today, so what in the hell am I doing spending my precious time on this?). It was a glorious, deep-blue-sky fall day and perhaps I was feeling rather giddy but the yard signs for these pols tickled the hell out of me:

Butch Love Republican for Clark County Assessor

Brittney Ferree Republican for Clark County Council

Scott Groan for West Clark Community School Board

I’d almost be tempted to vote for a Republican for the first time in I don’t know how long just to say I was a Butch Love guy.

And let’s hope ol’ Butch is savvy enough to adopt this ditty as his official campaign song:

▼

Cohousing Talk

It’s odd: Nobody seems to know about the cohousing community that’ll soon be going up on Bloomington’s south side. The 3.5-acre tract will feature several dozen smallish homes centered around a common green and a community house. Cohousing’s been a big deal in Scandinavia for more than fifty years and now is spreading throughout Europe, Canada, and this holy land.

The idea is neighbors will share a lot of amenities and responsibilities, engendering a heightened sense of community, something that, quite frankly, has been disappearing from our modern world for a few centuries now, thanks in large part to the Industrial Revolution and some other dehumanizing advances our bizarre species has made in that time.

The Bloomington development will be the first such cooperative community in Indiana. Cohousing’s more common on the coasts and in Colorado, especially in college towns and other progressive, crunchy locales.

So, if you want to bone up on cohousing click on over to the podcast of yesterday’s Big Talk featuring developer Loren Wood of Loren Wood Builders. It’s Part 1 of a two-part series on the nascent community. Part 2 will air next week, Thursday, October 25, on WFHB, 91.3 at 5:30pm. My guest for that show will be Marion Sinclair, co-founder of the Bloomington Cohousing Project.

That same day, click on over to the Limestone Post for my piece on Sinclair, Wood, and the project in this month’s edition of Big Mike’s B-town.

▲

Here’s PJ O’Rourke’s take on the internet:

Whose bright idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?

Which pretty much encapsulates the whole phenomenon in this mad, maddening year of Somebody’s Lord, 2018.

As if to prove the humorist’s point, WFHB News revealed yesterday that someone — either in or out of local government; no one’s been fingered yet — created a phony Facebook page called “Monroe County Elections.” The page is down now but, acc’d’g to county GOP chair William Ellis, it could have been mistaken for an official page.

Dead Horse Strike No. 3,629: Our Dear Leader’s propensity to pull crazy/fictitious/fraudulent/criminally inaccurate/misleading bosh straight out of his 3XL bottom and present it to the citizenry via Twitter, speech, or press release has given license to the rest of the world’s non-elected a-holes to do the same. I’m not saying people didn’t lie before Li’l Duce became President Gag on a technicality, just that now the nation’s loons have been tacitly authorized by the Leader of the Free World to create the scary dystopia of their wet dreams.

As Gob Bluth states in Arrested Development, (Episode 4; Season 3), “I heard the jury’s still out on science.” As well as the most minimal understanding of the word truth.

▼

Circles Jerk

Perhaps my fave story of the year ran in the Herald Times this AM. Apparently, Bloomington police officers espied a man wanted on an outstanding warrant outside a west side grocery store last night. Before they could put the arm on him, the man jumped into his pickup truck and sped off, leading the officers on a chase into a field northwest of the city off Vernal Pike. The man drove off the road and into the open field where he commenced driving in big circles for an hour.

A BPD spokesofficer said the man wasn’t driving recklessly or aggressively, he just refused to stop. The officers fired pepper spray at the truck, a tactic whose purpose eludes me unless they wanted to make him sneeze uncontrollably, but whatever. After an hour, the cops shrugged their shoulders and went to fetch a resisting arrest warrant against the man, who by this time surely was feeling a tad dizzy.

Nearly an hour after that, neighbors called the police to report the man was still out in the field, driving in circles. With Indiana State Police troopers backing them up, the Bloomington cops, using their own vehicles, put the squeeze on the loopy fugitive. He was arrested and is being held on a $4500 bond.

Humans (need I even say this?) are truly a fascinating species.

▼

Big Talk

Tune in this afternoon for Part 1 of a Big Talk two-parter on the proposed Bloomington Cohousing neighborhood under development on South Maxwell Street. Cohousing is an idea that originated in some Scandinavian countries back in the early 1960s and it has since spread across Europe, Canada, and this holy land. These neighborhoods consist of a couple of dozen smallish homes centered around a common green and a common house containing a shared community kitchen, dinning room, library, crafts room, day care center, etc.

Proponents say its a great way to revive the old, tight neighborhoods we’ve all heard about from the fuzzy past. One observer once wrote in support of cohousing: “Children should have 100 parents.” — which either is or isn’t a selling point for the concept.

Anyway, scads of folks are excited about this idea. The city’s signed off on it and groundbreaking is expected sometime later this month.

My guest this afternoon will be developer Loren Wood, proprietor of Loren Wood Builders. Next week’s guest will be Marion Sinclair, the woman who co-founded the organization that got this thing going, the Bloomington Cohousing Project.

Tune in to Big Talk today at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM, or catch the podcast (a link will be provided here tomorrow morning). And don’t forget to read all about the plan in my Limestone Post piece on Sinclair slated to run a week from today.

▲

I voted yesterday — and the joint was packed! The county’s early voting polling place on 7th St. had a line snaking out the door. But I’ll tell you this, they’ve got the operation down. From getting in line to attaching the “I Voted, Have You?” sticker to my shirt, a total of a mere 15 minutes elapsed. They’re running an assembly line, babies.

So what can I conclude from this experience? Well, we need some more data points:

• I’ve been hearing this time and again since early voting started this time around: the polling place has been crowded every day
• Women came out in droves for the May primary
• Taylor Swift gave the pop music crowd a…, well, swift kick in the pants the other day and there ensued a significant bump in millennials’ voter registrations

That enough for you? We’ll see in 20 days. The Pollyanna in me sez scads of voters from sea to shining…, or should I say non-voters; those who went AWOL in 2016, opening the door for this holy land’s first Jerk Presidency, are suffering from well-deserved senses of humiliation and shame and are eager to atone for their mortal sin.

Women are more enraged than ever now that President Gag’s second Supreme Court nominee — that’s right, the Wannabe Corporate Fascist has installed two associate justices on this nation’s highest bench — skated through sexual assault charges and got hisself confirmed by a bunch of alabaster he-men.

For the most part, Hillary Clinton, the greatest lightning rod for borderline psychotic hatred in American history, is pretty much sitting this campaign out. Natch, she’s not running but, thankfully, she’s also largely keeping her mouth shut, giving the hate-mongers little ammo on that front.

In any case, maybe — just maybe — there will be a Blue Wave next mo.

Then again, I should have learned two years ago never again to make election predictions.

▼

A Brainy Pol

Loyal Pencillistas are well aware that I’ve rarely dodged an opp. to lambaste our town’s reigning mayor. For chrissakes, I’ve practically begged a certain county official to throw her hat into next year’s mayoral race.

Nevertheless, I’ve got to say this about the Honorable John Hamilton: the dude is a reader, kids. F’rinstance, he’s devouring a biography of the Hoosier State’s own Wendell Willkie, and if you don’t know who that cat was, y’all oughtta at least look him up on Wikipedia. He ran for president in 1940 against two-time incumbent Franklin Roosevelt and then tried to run for the Republican nomination in ’44 but fell embarrassingly short. He was what we in a later day might have called a Rockefeller Republican, meaning he was rather progressive on social issues. Almost alone among GOP-ers in the days leading up to America’s entry in WWII, he was a strong proponent for our land’s international involvement.

The Book.

The Mayor.

Mayor Hamilton eats that kind of stuff up as well as some of the most important and compelling fiction, both classic and modern. Hell, he’s almost as well-read as his bride, law school prof. and former Clinton and Obama administration shingle Dawn Johnsen. The two of them bounce into the Book Corner on any given Saturday and chatter about all the impressive tomes they’ve read.

In the long run, I want my public officials to be readers rather than barely functionally literate louts like, well, you know who.

Barely Functionally Literate Lout.

▼

Gas Money Guzzlers

I dunno if the laws have been changed recently but I notice a disturbing new trend at gas stations. Seems a lot of them are posting phony prices on their signs.

Like you, I’m an inveterate gas shopper. By & large, I stop at the cheapest station so long as it’s not some cut-rate purveyor of rubbing alcohol. Finding the best deal on motor juice ought to be a simple procedure — simply find the lowest price posted. But some stations these days are pulling a fast one. A few months ago when gas prices topped $3.00 hereabouts, I saw one sign proclaiming the fuel’s availability for $2.65. Bingo — I squealed into the joint and stuck the nozzle in my gas hole. Lo and behold, the price registered as $3.05. Some quick detective work revealed that the $2.65 quote was for “Members Only,” a caveat in the smallest possible type on the station’s main sign. Now that’s fraudulent kids, no matter what the law says.

When I’m careening down the boulevard at 53 mph, I ain’t got time to read the fine print.

There ought to be a law.

▼

My KInd Of Town

Spent the afternoon in Indy yesterday after dropping off The Loved One at a downtown hotel for some professional conference or another.

Make no mistake, Indy — for a big city — is awfully nice and awfully manageable.

First off, this state’s capital missed the building boom of the 1980s and ’90s, meaning all its old, quaint, pretty structures from the later years of the 19th Century and the opening anni of the 20th, weren’t yanked down, higgledy-piggledy, to be replaced by soulless glass and steel boxes. So when Indy’s downtown renaissance finally did come, it was at a time when we all were attuned to the historic and esthetic values of heretofore underused Art Deco structures, modernist towers, neo-classical public buildings, and even Palladian cultural centers.

Then there’s Indianapolis’s refreshing dearth of crowds. Like the town’s award-winning airport, the city is fabulous because, in the main, nobody’s around mucking up the place. There’s everything you can want in a big city: live theater, museums, monuments, tall buildings, fine restaurants, and the one or two hundred people who do traverse downtown Indy’s streets are representative of many of the world’s races, creeds, colors, and toupee styles. Traffic moves swiftly, there’s rarely a tie-up, thousands upon thousands of pedestrians aren’t converging on your hot rod the nanosecond the light turns yellow, and so motoring through the central city is a dream.

Now get this, I had to pick up TLO at five o’clock, normally an apocalyptic hour in any other big city. Somehow, though, I knew that if I drove directly up to the big downtown hotel where her meeting was, I’d be able to stow my iron remarkably close to my destination.

Y’know what? I found a parking space half a block from the hotel and, to top it all off, there was an hour and a half left on the meter!

That’s a city I can love.

▲

I want to throw this out there for discussion.

In this day and age of gender fluidity, we’re realizing that much of what Identifies us as either female or male is imposed on us by conventional cultural “wisdom.” There’s no reason why females should prefer pink and males blue other than some stale traditional lore. Girls who excel in math, say, or chemistry are breaking a mold created by elders from the distant past for no good reason other than to aggrandize themselves. A lot of the ways our binary gender system makes us think and feel are no more valid than the societal commandment that females use one toilet and males another.

That said, we still do, in more ways than we can count, think like women or men.

For instance, when Christine Ford told the tale of her alleged encounter with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, she said he tried to rape her. The incident, she implied, scarred her for life. The memory of it haunted her, adversely affected her attitude and behavior, sabotaged her relationships with men, and drove her to enroll in intensive psychological counseling sessions.

Women around the country — hell, around the world — embraced her. They sympathized. They empathized. Even if they hadn’t experienced such a trauma themselves, many females knew that’s precisely how it would have marked them.

The key concept in Ford’s testimony was Kavanaugh tried. He — or whoever her assailant(s) was/were — didn’t rape her. She got away. She pushed and shoved and strained and struggled and through will, muscle power, and wile, got away from her attacker(s). My own first reaction was to think, Man, if I’d dodged that bullet, I’d have been strutting around telling myself how strong, how smart, how lucky I was.

In other words, it wouldn’t have been a trauma. It wouldn’t have left a scar. It’d be a badge, a reminder of what a potent agent I could be. Hell, I’d think, one or two guys tried to harm me — and I beat them! I won!

I’d brag about the story for the rest of my life. I have no doubt most of the other males I’ve known well might very well react the same way.

So, why the disconnect? Is this discrepancy hard-wired in our brains or is it an artificial construct of our patriarchy?

I’m eager to hear what you think.

▼

Two-For-One

BTW, today is You Go Girl Day.

Oh, and it’s National Sausage Pizza Day.

▲

Ben Fountain is an author whom Malcolm Gladwell has declared a genius. Fountain wrote the short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, his first book, published when he was 48 years old. He followed that up with the novel, Billy Lynn’s Long halftime Walk, that was made into an Ang Lee blockbuster.

Ben Fountain

Now he’s recently released a non-fiction work entitled Beautiful Country Burn Again, in which he states that this Trump era is just about as much a crisis for our holy land as was the Great Depression or even the Civil War. I agree with him. The perfect storm election of Li’l Duce, his victory on a technicality, is the result of an unholy alliance between greedists, the Taliban-like Christian fundamentalists, the Rand-ian corporatists, and white nationalists. It’s a repudiation of all the progressive advances this country has made since, oh, the Trust-Busters and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, through the New Deal, integration and voting rights, the Great Society, the women’s movement, gay liberation, and all the things I’ve held near and dear that occurred both before I was born and while I’ve inhabited this mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Now that the Republicans have hijacked the United States Supreme Court, accomplished by staging a junta-lite with the Senate’s refusal to vote on Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, the laws of this country will be interpreted by a gang of scary ideologues for decades. With the ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the transformation of our universities into vocational training centers whose products are millions of malleable, debt-ridden consumerists, the modern-day concentration camps that our privately-run prisons are becoming, and the coming climate change-spurred catastrophes, the wealthy had ought to build their gates and walls high and strong between now and, say, 2050.

In any case, Fountain has succinctly described where we are today — and perhaps where we were always headed for decades, nay, centuries prior:

Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.

Sorry kiddies, that’s America today. And maybe that’s been America forever but at least we tried — or pretended to try — that we had higher goals and loftier aspirations. No more.

▼

All In Lear’s Head

I heard an interview with Norman Lear on the NPR program Here and Now this afternoon. Those of us d’un certain âge remember Lear, now 96, as the brains behind the cultural landmark that was the sitcom All in the Family. Honestly, those born after AITF can have no idea how huge the show was, both as a ratings bonanza for CBS and as a mirror held up to our American society. Hell, the first time the sound of a toilet flushing ever emanated from our living room TVs, it was on All in the Family.

Carrol O’Connor as Archie Bunker.

Me? I detested All in the Family. Why? Shoot, if I wanted to see that kind of polarized, family drama all I had to do was sit down to dinner with my own nuclear kin. My old man, in fact, had the exact job Archie Bunker did — shipping and receiving dock manager. Oh, and Daddy-o and Archie saw about as eye to eye as any two humans possibly could on things like race relations, women, gays, Vietnam, and any of the other American cultural flashpoints of the early 1970s.

My father loved Archie Bunker. Loved him.

My old man on my sister Charlotte’s wedding day, 1960.

The Here and Now interviewer asked Lear how he managed to portray Archie Bunker as the narrow-minded, incurious, frightened, gleefully ignorant lout he was, spewing out pejoratives like coon, chink, spic, and fag, and have the TV audience get the joke and understand such verbal daggers were weren’t meant to be blessed for general public use by their RCAs and Zeniths.

INTERVIEWER: When you dealt so openly, through Archie Bunker in All in the Family, with racism, there’s racist utterances coming from him in every program, obviously you trusted the audience would get that, that the audience would react appropriately.

LEAR: I had no doubt the audience would get that.

Norman Lear is full of shit.

Keep in mind, AITF premiered in January, 1971. By that fall, it had rocketed to No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings and remained atop the heap for the next five seasons. It would never finish lower than twelfth in the ratings by the time it went off the air in 1979. Everybody watched AITF (‘cept me, natch).

Make no mistake: a huge percentage of its audience, perhaps even a majority of it, loved Archie as much as my father did. They didn’t “get that.” They, too, tossed word bombs like coon (or, even more likely, the N-word), chink, spic, and fag. They loved Archie because he was them. And even though Archie regularly got his comeuppance in each episode, they dug that too because it fed into their nascent sense of aggrievement, a sense that has become paramount in American life these days.

Look, a mere year and a half after AITF premiered, the American electorate reelected one Richard Milhouse Nixon president by the greatest landslide in American history to that point. The Nixon voter was Archie Bunker.

Archie’s president.

It wasn’t just liberals chuckling about the benighted Bunker that made AITF the number one show on television. It was my Dad, along with a few tens of millions of like-minded souls, saying, Look, that’s me on the TV screen!

BTW: Lear’s original intent was for the Mike Stivic character, played by Rob Reiner, to be the centerpiece of the show. It was only when Lear started getting sacks for of mail telling him how much viewers dug Archie that he switched the show’s focus to the Bunker dad.

Have I mentioned Norman Lear is full of shit?

▲

After all that, it looks like Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed by the United States Senate and will take a seat on the Supreme Court of this holy land.

And, yeah, this land has gotten that much holier since the unholy Li’lDuce has taken over. Of course, I’m using the term holy in a couple of different and contradictory ways here. The American Christian Taliban finally has achieved its version of nirvana — it has, through the ballot box, the idiot box, and a little bit of hook and/or crook, become the ruling party of the United States. It’s got most of the statehouses, most of the governors’ mansions, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House, and the highest court in America.

Wanna bet they’re still going to be running around crying about how they’re so all put-upon and discriminated against and everybody from feminists, blacks, drug-running Mexicans, transexual bathroom-goers, and, for chrissakes, everybody who is not precisely they, is getting their way and boo-hoo-hoo, poor us?

My take? Good old RBG had better stay alive for at least the next two years and possible even the next six.

▲