Monthly Archives: September 2022

09/29/2022
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Bill Burr, Bill Maher, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

1000 Words: Contradictions

I enjoy watching the program, Real Time with Bill Maher, for two reasons: 1) I often agree with Maher whole heartedly and 2) I often disagree with him…, well, wholeheartedly.

That dichotomy appeals to me as a thinker. In this year of somebody’s lord, 2022, internet habitués are, by societal law, compelled only to watch, listen to, read, or otherwise consume content that fits so precisely in line with their own cherished notions that even the merest variation therefrom is seen as prima facie evidence the notion-er is a child molester.

To borrow from that old Dickens character, I say, Bah!

That whole echo chamber thing is why I steadfastly shun outlets like The Huffington Post or MSNBC with its star, Rachel Maddow. This even though the two dovetail so nicely with my worldview. I don’t need a website or a TV news program to validate my opinion. Plus, I want to hear what the other side has to say. Truth is, my opinion might be wrong. I may be misinformed. I’m willing to change my mind.

Maher

In politics and culture, if all sides are mad at you, you have to know you’re on to something. Maher, a contributor to the Democratic Party and advocate for many progressive causes, often is pilloried by those very Democrats and other progressives. He’s anti-vaxx, for instance. In that, per me, he’s as wrong as he can be. He feels the whole mask and vaxx thing in response to the COVID pandemic was (is?) a sham. In this way, Maher joins Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the progressive darling of my youth, Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy fils, in fact, has written a book entitled A Letter to Liberals, telling them in no uncertain terms how misguided and silly they too often are.

BTW: they are. We are. Way, way too often.

And the funny thing is, Bobby Kennedy, liberal icon of 1968, before that was never confused with a liberal, progressive, leftist, bleeding heart. From birth through November 1963, he’d been a brawling, tyrannically righteous, insensitive, unforgiving almighty pain in everybody’s ass. It took a near-nervous breakdown following his brother’s assassination and years of soul-searching for him to become a more decent human being.

Which brings me to another of my own cherished notions: a person who can change, can grow, can admit she/he’s been full of shit prior to this moment, is worthy of my utmost esteem.

I like people who say I was wrong. I’ve changed. I like them as much as I like people who say I’m sorry. Then again, there are those who say I’m sorry almost as a mantra. They fetishize apology. Lots of liberals, progressives, etc. do that. There’s a tipping point after which the words I’m sorry mean nothing anymore.

Someone very close to me endured spousal abuse. Vicious, ugly, horrifying, criminal spousal abuse. And after each episode of violence, her husband apologized profusely, tearfully. It took many years for the woman to understand that her husband’s apologies were nothing at all besides disturbances in the air. One day I apologized to her for forgetting her birthday. She snapped at me. “Apologies don’t mean anything to me,” she snarled.

I have a friend who describes himself as a Bill Maher-Bill Burr Democrat. Both Maher and Burr say things that are considered inexcusable by whichever melange of Dems, libs, progs, lefties, etc. you may care to listen to. For instance, here’s Burr on domestic violence:

The generally accepted axiom is There’s no reason to hit a woman.

Burr responds: I can think of 17 reasons right off the top of my head.

Lots of folks may be horrified by this line. Even though Burr stresses several times it’s not right to hit a woman, he acknowledges that female domestic partners may, on occasion, drive their mates to thoughts of mayhem. Any of us can infuriate another person. The civilized among us resist those urges to lash out physically against someone who enrages us.

But that doesn’t mean the rage, the urge to hit, should be nonexistent or dismissed. As Burr explains:

Obviously I’m not saying hit a woman. But saying there’s no reason, I think that’s crazy. When you say there’s no reason, that kills any sort of examination as to how two people ended up at that place. You say there’s no reason, you cut out the build up, you’re just left with the act. How are you going to solve it if you don’t figure it out? … How come you can’t ask questions?

You may say he’s treading perilously close to victim blaming. That’s true. Nevertheless, he brings up a certain particularly male perspective on domestic violence. Does it not merit consideration?

I find refreshing truth in Burr’s bit. I also find so much to dislike, to disagree with it.

Debra Morrow, the outgoing executive director of Middle Way House, Bloomington’s resource and sanctuary for domestic violence victims, herself was a battered spouse. Charlotte Zietlow worked for Middle Way House when Morrow showed up as a client, years ago. Morrow was frightened, timid. Her eyes darted. Her shoulders were hunched. Her head bowed.

Morrow went to work for the organization and after several years she’d transformed herself into an erect, confident, determined human being, so much so she was tabbed to run the whole operation. That earlier incarnation of her, that beaten down, nearly defeated soul surely bore no blame for the condition a criminal, immoral reprobate had put her in.

Burr’s question doesn’t shift blame. At the same time, his whole bit minimizes a type of strutting, menacing masculinity. I’m left pondering the possibility that one day, he’ll forget that it’s not okay to hit a woman.

Then again, in a domestic relationship where one partner is asymmetrically superior in physical strength to the other, isn’t that the eternal tension?

Burr’s bit made me think, even though much of it is, in its way, unthinking.

Back to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He may be right that liberals and progressives too often are misguided and silly. But that doesn’t mean they’re always misguided and silly. And because he’s right about that narrow point, that doesn’t mean he right about everything. His book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, a half-assed screed against an exaggerated bête noire, is proof of that.

There are truths. There are falsehoods. And nobody on this Earth has a monopoly on either.

09/23/2022
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Brett Favre, Colin Kaepernick

1000 Words: Unforgivable

Big Mike’s Note: This might appear, at first glance, to be a sports story. It’s much more than that.

The two most villainous players to don National Football League uniforms this century have both been black men.

The two men are quarterbacks Colin Kaepernick and Michael Vick. In 2007, the latter pleaded guilty in criminal court of hosting a dog fighting ring on his property. He spent 21 months in federal prison, missing two years in the prime of his career. After his release, he signed on with the Philadelphia Eagles, won Comeback Player of the Year and was named to the Pro Bowl. He continued throwing passes and rushing for yardage until his career ended after the 2015 season. It’s a safe bet many football fans today don’t even remember that he’s a convicted felon and helped run a brutal, cruel enterprise.

The former has not played football since 2016. A scant three years before that he’d led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl. He was a competent passer and might have expected to have a long career extending ten more years. Many quarterbacks like him have played until they were 39 or 40. Kaepernick last threw an NFL pass when he was 29 years old.

Problem was, he’d committed an unforgivable sin.

Kaepernick’s crime was far more horrifying than Michael Vicks’s, at least in the eyes of the NFL’s decision makers. See, he’d had the evil within him to kneel while the national anthem was played before his team’s games during the 2016 season. He’d hoped to bring attention to the rash of police shootings of unarmed black men and to raise awareness of police brutality and of racial injustice and oppression in the United States.

To make matters worse, Kaepernick sported a magnificent Afro, surely dredging up memories within the rich, old white men who run the NFL of dangerous, uncontrollable black men from the 1960s and ’70s. Think of the Black Panthers in 1967 or an angry Bobby Seale, bound and gagged during the 1970 Chicago Eight trial.

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Towering, in-your-face Afros for more than 50 years have been symbols of pride for Black people and of terror for most whites.

By the way, that rash of police officers killing unarmed black men has continued unabated to this day. And systemic, institutionalized racism and oppression similarly have continued uninterrupted.

Vick and Kaepernick have not been the only NFL players to be suspended or otherwise disciplined by the league for their criminal or anti-social actions. Since the turn of this century, the number of pro football players who’ve been caught on camera, accused of, charged with, and/or convicted of battering women is astounding. The number of NFL players who’ve been found to grab, squeeze, fondle or otherwise sexually assault women is equally astounding.

Many of the players found to commit these acts were welcomed back with open arms after they’d served grudging punishments.

In fact, one fellow, quarterback Deshaun Watson, in the last two years has been sued by some two dozen women for sexual harassment and sexual assault. He has agreed to financial settlements in 20 of those cases. Nevertheless, This past offseason, he was traded to the Cleveland Browns and signed to a five-year contract for $230 million, one of the most lucrative deals in NFL history.

As soon as Watson completes an 11-game suspension and pays a $5 million fine, he will be free to return to the playing field. Meanwhile, fans in Cleveland eagerly await his first game in the team’s uniform. A number of fans, before and during Browns games this season, have worn shirts, displayed placards, and even set up displays of mannequins with erections in support of Watson.

It’s a good bet he’ll play in the NFL until he’s nearly 40 years old.

This year, Colin Kaepernick is 34 years old, meaning he might have had another six years to ply his trade as a quarterback, had he not committed his unforgivable sin.

Quarterback Brett Favre played in the NFL until he was 41 years old. During his last year in the NFL, Favre was accused of sending sexually suggestive texts and photos of his genitals to a female employee of one of the teams he played for. The NFL investigated the charges and Favre not only refused to cooperate in certain aspects of it but actually lied to investigators. The league fined him $50,000 for lying but claimed to find no evidence that he’d engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior.

I can’t imagine too many football fans remembering that stretch of Favre’s career.

In any case, Favre was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Now an elder statesman of the game, Favre finds himself in hot water. In 2020, the FBI began investigating a series of misallocations of federal funds intended to benefit the poor in Favre’s home state of Mississippi. The state’s former governor, Phil Bryant, has been implicated in the scandal. As has Brett Favre. Thus far, investigators have uncovered millions of dollars in payouts to Favre for speaking engagements he didn’t show up at, financing for a business he’d invested in, and the building of a gymnasium for a school Favre’s daughter attended, all from those federal welfare funds, and none of which, allegedly, were legal.

The state has sued Favre for his part in orchestrating this scam. One piece of evidence turned up by investigators was a text message sent by Favre to his friend, the former governor. It read: “If you were to pay me is there anyway the media can find out where it came from and how much?” (sic)

The scandal has received a fraction of the attention Kaepernick’s did in 2016. Favre continues to enjoy his status as an elder statesman of the game.

Favre (L) and Donald Trump, whom he endorsed for President in 2020.

Here’s what we now know: The crimes and misdemeanors of watching dogs kill each other for sport, for physically abusing women, for sexually molesting women, for sending unwelcome sexually suggestive texts to co-workers, and for stealing money from the poor to pay for vanity projects and personal investments are all excusable.

Kneeling during the national anthem is not.

09/19/2022
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Consumer Culture, SmartPhone, Technology

1000 Words: Useless

Loyal Pencillistas are well aware that I am the last human being on this planet who does not own a smartphone. I am the proud possessor of a flip phone. Not terribly long ago, I went into the Verizon store to report my phone wasn’t taking a charge well anymore. When I whipped out my flip phone the clerk recoiled, ever so slightly, as if I’d pulled a tarantula out of my pocket.

Certain tribespeople from the deep Amazon rainforest, members of isolated societies that have had scarce contact with the modern world, would snicker upon being told I own and use this thing:

I’ve already run the laundry list of reasons I don’t want to get re-reeled into the smartphone opium den but, for those not in the know, here they are again:

  • I have no desire to be tethered to the internet 24 hours a day
  • I am neither a neurosurgeon, US Air Force nuclear wing commander, nor 911 emergency call answerer so there’s no need for me to be in constant communication with anyone
  • I do not need or want a news feed that reminds me incessantly what an insufferable pack of idiots we humans are
  • I struggle with certain addictions already and do not need another
  • I won’t have my brain wiring altered

That enough for you? Oh wait, here’s one more: I’m not an obedient, easily malleable consumer.

There. That oughtta be enough of an argument for anyone who thinks my eschewing of the device is idiosyncratic. Well, it is idiosyncratic, but in a healthy, rebellious way, not in a Jeez, is that guy psychotic or what? way.

People might say that if I had kids I’d long ago have jumped on the device bandwagon but I’d like to think I’d be even more anti-smartphone. Trust me, all these generations of kids with smartphones who are shackled to their parents’ smartphones are in line for years of expensive shrink sessions trying to understand why they can’t individuate yet at the age of 42. Either that or they’ll have long been dead because they’d been smushed by a car when crossing the street while staring obliviously into their screens for the latest Harry Styles news.

Styles

And see? I don’t have a smartphone and I know who Harry Styles is. I know, bizarre, right?

Now let me explain that “re-reeled” reference five grafs above. I owned a smartphone for a short period of time five or six years ago. That fact that I felt a constant impulse to go to it during conversations, while driving, while evacuating my bowels, when waking up in the middle of the night, while eating — you know better than I do, you smartphones users — scared the crap out of me. I felt as though I was losing touch with time and place. There was, in fact, no more here and now for me; everything was there and then.

Not only that, I cracked the screen within the first year of owning the thing. Replacement phones ranged from a few hundred dollars for a cheap knock-off to well over a grand for the real thing. Like I said, I’m no obedient consumer. I’d rather spend that kind of dough on pizza and a certain botanical.

In any case, I got to thinking about this mania we have for technology and devices when our new range was installed. The manual for it runs to nearly a hundred pages. I wanted to boil a kettle of water for my morning coffee and had to stop because — swear to god — you need to program the stovetop. Not only that, the thing has remote capability.

I thought, For pity’s sake, people are too lazy to haul their huge butts off the sofa to turn the burner on or off?! And, believe me, my butt is as wide as it can get and I can barely walk thanks to hip arthritis and several other obstacle-ish maladies but I get up off my titanic derriere to turn the burner on or off.

See? Technology. Just because something’s possible doesn’t mean it’s needed. It’s like self-driving cars. I read all these articles about how it’s possible and it’s coming and I say, Why?

Take self-service check-out at the grocery store. I never recall anyone saying, My god, I can’t bear standing there while the clerk scans my tomatoes! If only I could do it myself. Nevertheless, Kroger and Publix and Meijer and Target and all the rest sank gobs of dough into the technology — not because they were wringing their hands over our convenience and comfort, but because they wanted to reduce labor costs. For that, read: cut jobs.

There are always unintended consequences from emerging technologies. Do you think Lenoir and Otto mused, when they were inventing their internal combustion engines, Hmm. I wonder if this machine may one day alter the planet’s climate to the extent that it threatens the existence of millions of species?

The parking meters in my fair adopted town of Bloomington, Indiana more and more are becoming programmable, meaning they won’t take coins or bills or credit cards but will only work with smartphones. The world is turning into a device-industrial complex. Even if an idiosyncratic nudge like me wants to thumb my nose at smartphone technology, I’ll still have to join up if I want to park my car somewhere.

To this date, if you have any mental capacity whatsoever, you keep a small pile of coins in your car so you can feed the meter. That’s not too onerous a practice. Again, it’s not as if the multitudes have been shaking their fists and shrieking for remote technologies to free them from the ordeal of carrying currency.

And here’s the kicker: the company that runs Bloomington’s smartphone-activated meters says you can use the meters even if you don’t have a smartphone. Simply use its “automated phone system.” Only you’ll have to determine the correct local phone number by consulting its website, pre-register online, and complete the process by using the company’s app. In other words, you need a goddamned smartphone!

Somebody’s benefitting from all this and it ain’t necessarily me.

09/12/2022
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Dr. Phil, Robert Reich, Social Media, Television

1000 Words: Just Say No

Robert Reich was the Secretary of Labor Under President Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. Clinton was the grand marshall of the neo-liberal, conservative-leaning Democrat parade that has swept the nation in the last few decades.

Oh sure, you might argue that Jimmy Carter was the first Democratic president to take the Oath wearing an erstwhile Republican tuxedo. But Carter was a piker compared to Clinton. And Clinton turned out to be an elementary schooler compared to the people who steer the Dems these days.

As a reminder of the shift in our country from something resembling centrism to a distinct Rightist nation, here are some of the planks in the Republican national platform, approved at the 1956 GOP national convention:

  • The federal government must continue to provide economic assistance to low-income communities
  • The United States should provide asylum for refugees from other countries
  • The minimum wage should be protected in the future and raised right now
  • Unemployment assistance should cover more people
  • There should be tougher laws ensuring more people can join labor unions
  • Women should receive equal pay for equal work

For pity’s sake, some of these planks are too far to the Left even for certain Democrats these days!

Robert Reich

Back to Reich. He was the most Left-leaning of all the people Clinton brought to the White House with him in 1993. Clinton was the Right’s worst nightmare: a charismatic, Southern, pro-business, free-marketer who’d drain votes from the more reasonable edge of the Republican Party. Which he did. In the 1980s, the possibility that a Democrat like Bill Clinton might one day emerge so terrified the plutocracy that certain high-rollers actually strategized and bankrolled a smear campaign against whomever that bete noir might turn out to be. Lo and behold, Clinton popped up in the very early 1990s. That campaign was swung into immediate action, as elucidated by journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in their 2001 book, The Hunting of the President.

Clinton was my last choice among the nine contenders and pretenders for the Dem nomination in ’92. At the time, I reasoned if I wanted a Republican president, I’d vote for a Republican. The GOP tuxedo fit Clinton extremely well throughout his eight-year run as the Leader of the Free World and America’s chief horn dog.

Reich, though, alone among the Clinton Cabinet and other contemporary Dem standard-bearers, steadfastly kept the liberal, even Leftist, flame alive. As time went by during Clinton’s term, the Prez became less and less patient with the labor sec’y’s Leftness. In 1997, after Clinton was inaugurated for a second term, Reich handed in his resignation saying he wanted to Spend More Time with His Family, traditional code for I was gonna be fired but the boss let me quit first.

After leaving the Clinton Cabinet, Reich found work in academia, first as a professors at Brandeis University, then at the University of California-Berkeley. He’d already served as an instructor, back in the ’80s, at Harvard University, where he gained his national rep. as a super liberal. In fact Reich as a kid had been bullied because he was so short (he’s 4’11”, a symptom of multiple epiphyseal dysplasia). He was protected by an older kid named Michael Schwermer, who’d go on to international fame as one of the three northern civil rights workers murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi in 1964. The care Schwermer offered him inspired Reich. He devoted himself to, in his words, “fight the bullies, to protect the powerless, to make sure that the people without a voice have a voice.”

There hasn’t been a white guy with such chops in a presidential administration since Reich handed in his resignation.

Reich wrote a book about his time in the Clinton Administration, entitled Locked in the Cabinet. In it, he characterized the Democratic Party as being “owned” by Big Business. Not much later he even repudiate his own work in pushing for congressional passage of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) that’d been opposed by organized labor. I’ve always liked people who can change their minds and admit they’ve been wrong.

Anyway, Reich puts out an eponymous Substack blog. Today he writes about being invited to appear on a Dr. Phil episode. You may recall Dr. Phil. He was one of the many self-described experts pushed into the national consciousness by Oprah Winfrey. Most of them either turned out to be, or were from the get-go, as tethered to reality as palm readers or faith healers. Think Rhonda Byrne or Dr. Oz.

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One of the producers of Dr. Phil’s show contacted Reich and asked him to guest on an upcoming program dealing with some kind of perceived edge being given, these days, to people of color in the workplace, in schools, and in every corner of America. The producer, naturally, assumed Reich’d be skeptical of such a conceit. Surely there’d be fireworks if Reich appeared on the show.

TV producers and their sisteren and brethren, professional click-baiters, love fireworks. As many researchers into the effects of social media have found of late, strife, disagreement, grievance, and rage not only are great for business, they are actually changing the wiring of our minds.

To Reich’s credit, he has turned the Dr. Phil offer down. He writes:

I’m sending my regrets.

My bigger regret is that the national conversation is in the hands of producers chasing ratings and advertising dollars, with no regard for how they’re distorting the public’s understanding of what’s important or the core choices lying ahead.

Imagine that! Someone is actually refusing to go on national television to explain to millions of people how smart he is, how right he is about some chosen topic, and how people who disagree with him are destroying America.

Robert Reich simply doesn’t want to do those things. The poor man. He might be a decorated university professor, but he doesn’t understand that revenue is far more important than either mental health or civility.

 

09/12/2022
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Declaration of Independence, John F. Kennedy, Polls

1000 Words: The American Art Form

One of the recurring themes of this global communications colossus is my dearly held opinion that we humans, by and large, are full of shit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m as full of shit as anyone else. With exceptions, of course. There are, after all, people whose full-of-shitness borders on the awe-inspiring. Need I mention, for instance, a certain former Commander-in-Chief?

Speaking of former C-in-Cs, I was thumbing through a biography of John F. Kennedy the other AM. It’s called JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century and it’s the first of a two volume set. The second hasn’t been released yet. Interestingly, the author, a fellow named Fredrik Logevall, in his introduction, claims that despite the fact that the 35th President of the United States has been analyzed and gossiped about as much as any other Oval Officer, there really haven’t been any in-depth, comprehensive biographies penned about him. Logevall, ergo, decided to be the guy to right that perceived wrong.

Now then, as for we humans who are so naturally full of shit. Logevall revealed a startling factoid in his intro to JFK. In his words:

By the middle of 1963, close to 60 percent of Americans claimed that they had voted for Kennedy in 1960, although only 49.7 percent had actually done so. After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent.

Kennedy’s oft-disputed victory over Richard M. Nixon in the ’60 presidential election was one of the very tightest presidential contests in our holy land’s history. Acc’d’g to Britannica, a scant 120,000 votes separated the two after all the ballot boxes, stuffed or not, had been emptied. That’s out of a total of 68.8 million votes cast that autumn. As I scroll down the list of tight races throughout our glorious history, Kennedy’s squeaker over Nixon appears to be the closest of all, in relative terms.

For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter if Kennedy won by 120 thou or 120 mill. The thing is, as his presidency progressed, the populace became more and more enamored of him to the point when pollsters rang up people to ask who they’d voted for in ’60, thousands of them flat out lied and said they did.

Perhaps they answered in a more creative, imaginative way than the act of simply telling the truth would have demanded. Perhaps they reasoned, Hey, I like the guy. He forced those dirty Russkies to back down over Cuber*. So if I got a second crack at it, I woulda voted for him. That counts, right?

( * Sorry, occasionally I lapse into JFK’s Boston accent when I think about him.)

No, it doesn’t count. The pollsters asked, Who did you vote for in 1960? And after Kennedy was snuffed at Dealey Plaza, an overwhelming majority of Americans either tried to convince the pollsters they’d voted for him or had somehow convinced themselves they had.

Either way, they were full of shit.

Like I said.

Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Lying is in our nation’s DNA. To be sure, the Germans, the Botswanans, the Laotians, the Micronesians, and the habitués of every other land on this globe regularly lie and/or are willingly lied to. But we raise the sin to an art form.

Only the United States, in its Declaration of Independence, proclaimed All Men Are Created Equal, the words written and ratified by a bunch of men who owned human beings.

Imagine if there’d been social media back in 1776. Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five would have been laughed off the internet.

Then again, knowing Americans as I do, countless 18th century netizens would have said, C’mon, man! They mean one day. Y’know, in the future. (And not the too-near future, BTW; we don’t wanna rock the boat too much!) Or others’d chime in, Nuh-uh! They don’t own slaves. Those Africans wanted to be kidnapped, chained, whipped, and stripped of their rights and dignity. Working the fields for the Founding Fathers would look great on their resumes!

Thomas Jefferson, et al, were full of shit. Even if their aspiration for a limited egalitarianism was novel and forward-thinking some 250 years ago. And it was.

 

09/09/2022
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British Monarchy, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth

1000 Words: Pastimes

Years ago I had nothing but contempt for people who cared the slightest iota about the British monarchy.

As recently as 1997 when Princess Diana died, I was dumbfounded by the worldwide emotional reaction to the event. Sitting in the living room of my Near West Side Chicago apartment with the redoubtable former teenaged touring Frisbee champion, African parrot owner, and the only person I’ve ever met who actually read Douglas Hofstadter‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning dense tome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, from cover to cover, Sidney T. Feldman, the two of us watched breathless coverage of the auto accident, mouths agape, and could only respond by agreeing to create a new game we called “Who’s Next?” Participants would be obliged to select three celebrities whose deaths within the next calendar year would be, in their opinion, likely. That first night, I chose Roseanne Barr, Courtney Love, and Ronald Reagan. I lost.

Anyway, I have always found the whole notion of the monarchy ridiculous, they being winners of a bizarre genetic lottery but otherwise unremarkable save for their propensity to engage in scandal and idiocy. I’d snort that this holy land, the United Sates of America, was created largely on the idea that kings and queens and princesses and princes and what in the goddamned hell ever else the royals call themselves (There are earls and baronets and dukes, although I think those characters might not be royal. Whatever. They’re all of a stripe as far as I’m concerned) were to be eschewed. That bloodline aristocracy was a stale relic of a long-past unenlightened age that we of the 21st Century found ludicrous.

Apparently not. As mentioned, the whole world wrung its hands over the tragic snuffing out of Princess Diana’s life. And now, a quarter century later, the world again is crying into its pillow for the death of the 96-year-old queen.

During that 25 years, my feelings have softened. Slightly. I still hold that the monarchy is ridiculous and those who follow the soap operas therein would behoove themselves to do something more productive with their lives, like staring at a blank wall. But I don’t run around spouting that philosophy anymore. It came to me a few years ago that I spend an inordinate amount of time fretting over, analyzing, predicting, mostly lamenting and occasionally celebrating the fortunes of a bunch of baseball players.

How much more ridiculous is it to know who Meghan Markle is than to be obsessively knowledgable about the accomplishments of one Koyie Dolan Hill of Tulsa, Oklahoma who spent six spectacularly unproductive years as a catcher for the Chicago Cubs?

I know way too much about this fellow.

Okay, I figured, I’m no better than someone who knows precisely who Camilla Parker Bowles is. Neither of us has spent time considering the intellectual and creative connections between Kurt Gödel, M.C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach and how those connections illustrate the complex intertwining of human behavior and brain architecture.

Nevertheless, royal watchers and baseball aficionados are engaging in a human necessity: giving ourselves over to pointless inanity. We worry about heavy things throughout most of our lives. How am I gonna pay the bills? Is it safe to walk down the street? What’s that lump in my breast? Are my kids gonna be fried, drowned, frozen, or blown away by hurricanes caused by climate change? We need silly, stupid pastimes to escape from the heaviosity (a word coined by Woody Allen in Annie Hall).

Still, the entire top half of CNN’s home page yesterday was given over to the death of Elizabeth. The New York Times ran a six-column-wide banner headline on the death, with at least a half dozen supporting sidebars and features. And every local newspaper and TV station ran obligatory “Queen’s Passing Touches Many Lives Here” stories. I’m thinking the onset of nuclear holocaust will merit less ink and electrons.

Kids still are brought into the bookstore looking for princess coloring books, sticker books, and pop-ups. “I wanna grow up to be a princess,” a lot of the kids will say. Of course, that aspiration is not at all as common anymore as the many variations on the Girl Power theme, which heartens me. But a significant percentage of kids continue to be in thrall to crowns and gowns and the dream of people waiting on them, hand and foot.

I have one friend, a successful professional woman, who regularly posts about the royal family on social media even when no one of import has died or whatever scandals extant are fading from worldwide attention.

It doesn’t figure.

But, as I say, neither does my deep concern over the state of the Chicago Cubs’ bullpen this season.

Hell, some people build replicas of the Cutty Sark out of matchsticks. There are trainspotters, soap carvers, competitive duck herders, cosplayers, palm readers, firearms collectors, ferret racers, and any number of other seemingly pointless pursuits. Pointless to you and me, but of monumental importance to the practitioners thereof.

The Cutty Sark at the Matchstick Marvels Museum in Gladstone, Iowa.

None of them is more silly than my devotion of brain cells to the merits and drawbacks of the Three True Outcomes baseball philosophy.

Then again, I doubt there are more than ten people alive and awake in Iraq, a former British colony (then called Mesopotamia) that proudly gained independence from the monarchy in 1932, who have the slightest idea of what the Three True Outcomes are. Not many more Iraqis would even know what or who the Chicago Cubs are.

Yet, guaranteed, millions of Iraqis know who Elizabeth was. And a healthy bunch of them may even be mourning.

I’ve got to say it: I’m dumbfounded once again.