07/31/2024
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Chappell Roan, Drag Queens, Petro-masculinity

506 Words: They’re Drag Queens Too!

I’ve just become hipped to a couple of things that may be familiar to a good number of people. I guess that’s the price I pay for not having a smartphone; I’m not alerted 24 hours a day to the emergence of every single new pop star or the outrage I should be feeling over one cultural phenomenon or another.

Anyway, the two things:

  1. Chappell Roan
  2. Petro-masculinity

At first glance, they may be two of the most disparate concepts imaginable. But I’m here to tell you they are two sides of the same coin.

Alright, in case you are currently as oblivious to them as I used to be:

  1. Chappell Roan is the hottest of hot new pop stars, wowing ’em from Coachella to the Tonight Show. Her star became a supernova when she adopted a drag queen look. She employs as many over-the top, stereotypical feminine signifiers as she can in her stage persona. She reminds me of all the parading drag queens I used to see walking down Broadway Avenue in Chicago back in the ’80s, their habiliment, their gait, their attitude all screaming an exaggerated, cartoonish woman-ness. The Roan phenomenon is all hugely fun and rebellious; she appeals to 16-year-old girls and 18-year-old gay boys who dance and scream and adore her. When the camera pans the crowd at a typical Chappell Roan show it’s a scene of pure delirium.
  2. Petro-masculinity is…, oh, man, this is weird…, it’s a cultural moniker describing the most zealous climate-change deniers in America, white macho-men. They loathe environmentalists, acc’d’g to a 2011 academic study, to “protect their cultural identity.” Virginia Tech University political scientist Cara Daggett invented the specific term in 2018. Men, she reasoned, were solely in charge of the world from the Industrial Revolution onward, a time when the universe moved thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. Taking away fossil fuels just to save the planet, these guys hold, robs them of their exalted place in society. They scream an exaggerated, cartoonish male-ness.

This whole swath of the American populace gets tumescent over huge pickup trucks with rifle racks in the cab, that can “roll coal,” and sport “truck nutz.”

These fellows parade about displaying every conceivable symbol of what they consider masculinity. And, almost to a man, they dig a certain ex-President of the United States and harbor a general affinity for authoritarianism.

Their ethos is certainly not fun and rebellion ala the Chappell Roan gang. Nevertheless, they and the teenaged girls and young gay boys who swoon over the legally-named Kayleigh Amstutz are joined at the hip.

This petro-masculinity business is as over-the-top as the lineup of featured performers any Saturday night at the Baton Show Lounge.

And whereas the Chappell Roan crowd celebrates a harmless burlesque of gender typing while the petro-masculine-ists cry out for an oppressive gender toxicity, they are to each other what a photograph is to its negative.

Petro-masculine guys are, to be sure, just male drag queens!

It’s all a stage performance, although neither Chappell Roan’s show nor the Baton on a Saturday night stinks of diesel fumes.

07/29/2024
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Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Laughter

900 Words: Don’t Laugh

The two-time popular vote loser whose name I’m often loath to say/print/hear has quickly found a hammer to beat Kamala Harris over the head with. He now calls her Laughin’ Kamala Harris, adding cachinnation (yep, swear to god, it’s a real word — look it up!) to his dependable bag of slurs and characterizations that include Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary, Stone Cold Phony Beto O’Rourke, Snowman(woman) Amy Klobuchar, Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and…, and…, well, there’ve been way too many to list here.

The 45th President of the United States has a lengthy track record of failures — marital, personal, business, political, and…, and…, well, again there’ve been way to many to list here. He is a master, though, a virtuoso, an artist, a prodigy of insults. He makes the bully you might remember from high school look like Marianne Williamson.

Harris, apparently, emits huge guffaws, deep gut, from the heart, kitchen table salvos of laughter. The convicted felon, serial stiffer of contractors, and proud pussy grabber finds such uninhibited emotion something to ridicule.

Soon after it became apparent Harris would be the new Democratic candidate for president, the GOP standard=bearer said: “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh…. She is nuts.”

This new line of affront should come as no surprise inasmuch as the man spewing it never, ever, ever laughs. I mean really laughs. He’s clearly incapable of feeling and expressing pure joy. He cannot, it is obvious, let himself go. He’s as tightly wound as the hawsers of an ocean liner at port. Not only that, he never really smiles. Oh sure, he smirks a lot, especially when, for instance he asks the crowd at one of his rallies what we should do with all the people coming over our southern border and someone responds, “Shoot them!”

But smirking is not smiling. Smiling communicates happiness, something that runs counter to his message and the visceral appeal he has to a sizable portion of the American electorate. He — and they — are much more comfortable living in their cesspool of rage and grievance. To smile, to laugh, to say “Ah, I feel good this morning,” is foreign to them.

Perhaps it’s generational.

Many Trumpists are aging white people, the kinds of folks who recall their parents telling them about the Great Depression and World War II. I’m an aging white person (who, natch, does not count himself among that sulky set). I recall those of my parents’ generation telling tales about bread lines; soup kitchens; unemployment; meat, sugar, and tire rationing; global bloodletting, Nazis, sneak attacks, the Holocaust, and any number of other horrors they faced everyday starting in 1930 and lasting for the next 15 years. That so-called Greatest Generation might have found laughter a luxury. How can one belly laugh when nobody can find a job and 60 million people are being slaughtered?

My father, for example, was made uncomfortable by the sound of children’s laughter. Any number of times, when my brother and I would be off giggling in another room, Dad would shout from his recliner, “Stop that laughing!”

Even as an eight-year-old, I found that downright bizarre. I never felt, when so scolded, that I was doing something wrong. Dad, I concluded, was a miserable crank.

As I grew older, I’d tell others of my generation about this and they’d say, “Oh yeah, my Dad yelled at us all the time for laughing too! It was so weird!” It was a phenomenon common to working class families. My old man and the millions of his generation grew up squeezing pennies, being forced to go to work at the age of 13 and 14, then getting drafted to fight in bitter cold, African deserts, and South Pacific jungles. When peace and prosperity came at last, they had to spend most of their waking lives working at unrewarding jobs in soulless factories, where their health was endangered and their spirits crushed.

The sound of kids laughing must have been, to guys like my father, worse than the 120-decibel din of fingernails on a blackboard.

The Republican candidate for President of the United States is 78 years old. His old man imparted to him a deep abhorrence to laughter. Mary Trump has written that Fred Trump warned his son against laughter. To do so, the old man said, “is to make yourself vulnerable. It’s to let down your guard in some way.

Which is true. We do become vulnerable when we laugh. We do let our guard down to guffaw. These are necessary releases, as important to our health as fresh air, clean water, a balanced diet, exercise, and a good lay every now and then.

“Laughter,” senior editor Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones writes, “is pretty much universally seen as positive. Indeed, the list of prominent people who have spoken and written of the value of laughter is long. It includes Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolfe, and on and on. Perhaps more relatable to Trump would be Andrew Carnegie, who is credited as saying: ‘There is little success where there is little laughter.'”

How sad that an entire population of men grew up in dread fear of laughter. How sad that tens of millions of us want one of them to become our leader — again.

 

 

07/23/2024
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2024 Election, Bigotry, Kindness

639 Words: Random Thoughts

● I dunno about you, but I feel as though I can breathe again. Joe Biden announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race marked the first time I’ve felt upbeat about the November election.

● Kamala Harris is a spectacularly uninspiring speaker. That said, she just may be the perfect foil for Donald Trump, inasmuch as she’s a calm, cool, collected former prosecutor. Her best play over the next three-plus months is to hammer away at the ex-president’s lengthy record of spewing misinformation and outright fabrications, his criminal conviction, the civil judgements against him, his history of stiffing contractors, his numerous business failures, and his fraudulent “university” and “charitable” foundation. If she does this in an understated, relentless manner, she just might drive him to start raving like a maniac again.

● Secret Service boss Kimberley Cheatle has just resigned. Good. The single most important job of the Secret Service is to protect the president and candidates for the office. It didn’t do that on July 13th. And while nobody or no agency is perfect, the Secret Service’s miscue in allowing a lunatic kid armed with a high-powered rifle to take up a straight shot position on a roof overlooking the platform where Trump was speaking was inexcusable.

● Sticking with the assassination attempt, Biden flubbed it when he immediately declared confidence in Cheatle in the aftermath of the shot. That was as dumb as George W. Bush’s, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job” remark even as millions tried to recover from Hurricane Katrina despite FEMA’s blunders.

● One last thought on the shot that bloodied Trump: I don’t buy that it was a bullet that hit his ear. A bullet fired by a high-powered rifle travels so fast, creates such a powerful localized field of atmospheric turbulence, and is accompanied by such a powerful sonic blast that if perchance the bullet did strike DT’s earflap, it would have knocked him clear off his feet, caused significant damage to that side of his face and head, sent him snoring with at very least the mother of all concussions, and even possibly causing potentially fatal brain damage. No, my guess is one of the bullets fired by the little bastard struck an object — perhaps a teleprompter screen — that shattered, with a shard hitting Trump.

● I’m betting Kamala Harris tabs PA Gov. Josh Shapiro as her VP running mate. Imagine: between the two of them, the 2024 Democratic pair will be Black, Indian, female, and Jewish. And you thought the most deplorable of the Trump basketful went apeshit over a nice, suburban, Anglo presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Just watch how they react to this year’s melting pot ticket!

● JB Pritzker, governor of my home state of Illinois, also has been mentioned as a possible Harris veep. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Fat people do not do well in national politics. In fact, the last two generally tolerated bigotries in this holy land are those targeting fatties and atheists. Anyway, have you heard Pritzker’s commencement address at Northwestern University in 2023? He speaks plainly and boldly about the different between kind people and, in his word, idiots. Here it is:

● Pritzker, Part II: I like him a lot. And I wouldn’t hold his girth against him. I just don’t like the idea of another billionaire running things.

● Tomorrow will mark the 55th anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 11. Fifty five freaking years, people! For perspective, 55 years before that event in 1969 would have been — hold on a minute while I whip out my calculator — 1914. That was the year the first regularly scheduled airplane passenger service was initiated, connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa, a 23-mile air trek. Oh, and some loony Bosnian Serb nationalist shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off the first of the 20th century’s two world wars. We are, to be sure, a confounding species.

 

07/19/2024
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2024 Election, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

440 Words: American Exceptionalism

As much of the rest of the world rejects strongmen, totalitarian regimes, right wing reactionaries, and outright jerks, our holy land look to be hurtling headlong into a second, non-consecutive term for the unlikeliest president of my — or your — lifetime.

And, make no mistake, Donald J. Trump is nothing if not a wannabe strongman, aspiring boss of a totalitarian regime, currently a right wing reactionary, and, yeah, an outright jerk.

Somehow, some way, by the weirdest, most unforeseen sequence of events, the largely innocuous presidency of Joe Biden has become indelibly etched into the minds of most American voters as a failure, a disaster, or at least an administration led by a doddering old coot with a foot in the grave and a mind in the grip of severe senility. Image is everything and that picture of the sitting prez is the one tens of millions of folks’ll be bringing into the voting booth this coming November.

That is, if Old Joe stays in the race, a potentiality growing less likely with every passing day.

Or not. Maybe — just maybe — Biden will stay in for the long haul. The result may be a real haul for the Trump Party (forget calling  it the Republican Party anymore because it’s his and his alone). The TP may just snatch the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate this fall.

My brother emailed me a few days ago asking if I thought the shooting attempt at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally last Saturday was the tipping point for the race this year. I responded that I won’t make any predictions as I’d learned my lesson in 2016. The very idea of a numbskull like Donald Trump eight years ago becoming President of the United States of America, that bright shining light on a hill, the arsenal of democracy, the melting pot, this unique experiment in representative government…, and,  hell, whatever other grandiose descriptor you can think of, was a joke. Yep. Matt Groening got yuks out of cartooning a future America wherein Trump had become president in a 2000 episode of “The Simpsons.”

What a riot! And I’m not referring to the January 6th Insurrection at the US Capitol in the wake of Trump throwing a tantrum because he’d lost the 2020 election.

Lo and behold, Donald Trump appears a good bet to become the 47th President.

Again, how in the hell did this all come about? As France, the UK, and Iran have snubbed far right candidates this year, and Poland and Brazil have done the same previously, we Americans seem to be ready to embrace one. I guess contrarianism is in the American DNA.

07/13/2024
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Marathons

955 Words The Running Craze

I’ve never understood marathons.

My go-to comment whenever anybody brings up the topic is: You know there are cabs, don’t you?

Or buses. Or the el. Or bicycles. Or private cars. There’s tons of technologies that can transport us 26-plus miles. I just cannot figure out why people would subject themselves to the rigors of the more than three-to-five-hour ordeal that is a marathon.

Hell, if you want, you can hitchhike 26 miles.

Yet thousands, tens of thousands, for chrissakes hundreds of thousands of people run marathons each year. Take, for instance, the top eight marathons in the United States in 2023. Here are the total entrants or finishers for each that year:

  • New York — 51,402
  • Chicago — 48.398
  • Philadelphia — 34,000
  • Boston — 30,000
  • Honolulu — 25,000
  • Washington, DC (Marine Corps Marathon) — 23,000
  • Los Angeles — 22,000
  • Orlando (Walt Disney World Marathon) — 12,690

That’s a grand total of 246,490 poor, tortured souls who slogged their way through the streets, alleys, and paths of those cities. I could only find precise totals for New York, Chicago, Orlando, and Boston (that city places a limit on the number of entrants). As for the rest of them, who knows? Maybe marathon organizers look upon their final figures the way governments and historians view war dead, as grisly estimates. War, I would imagine, cannot be much more hellish than running 26-plus miles at a crack.

More than a thousand official marathons are run each year around the globe. That doesn’t even include half-marathons, which might seem a tad more sane than running a full one but, then again, that’s like saying the person who is splattered on the pavement at the foot of a skyscraper was half-pushed, half tripped off the roof. No matter, the gory result is the same.

More than 120,000 masochists applied to enter Chicago’s 2024 marathon, to be run Sunday, October 13th. Back when I lived in the artists’ enclave of East Pilsen on the city’s South Side, the marathon course went right past my house, the runners’ and their massed cheerers’ racket disturbing my beauty sleep at an ungodly hour. Don’t these damed fools know, I moaned every year, that I was out drinking last night? The nerve!

Anyway, I bring this up because a dear friend this past week informed me she is going to run in the Every Woman’s Marathon in Savannah, Georgia this November. She seemed to be in full possession of her wits and sanity — that is, up until the moment she broke the news to me. I looked at her as if she’d announced she’d drunk a bottle of Lysol™ the night before so as to cleanse her digestive system.

Of course, I didn’t say outright she’s nuts, although that’s certainly what I think now. I congratulated her and wished her well. She’s excited. She’s run marathons before, she told me, proudly. She must train for weeks, even months prior to each event. This is over and above her normal running routine.

I tried jogging a few times back in the mid-1980s. I quickly stopped it in deference to my hips, knees, lungs, heart, and mental health. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy running. I played baseball back then and loved sprinting around the bases and galloping in the outfield in pursuit of fly balls. The act of motoring through the field via my legs was exhilarating. Not only that, I was a bicycle freak in those days, riding even through the harshest of winters. In 2000, I pedaled in the 500-mile AIDS ride from Minneapolis to Chicago. But jogging seemed so pointless, such a waste of my time.

So, I’m not averse to actually using my muscles to get around on this planet. It’s just that…, well, I’m sensible — at least in that regard.

Natch, I’m loony in tons of areas of my life. I try to resist the urge to overindulge in countless ways but I succumb to excess and even addiction in many. But running 26-plus miles on a Sunday morning? Uh uh.

So, what the hell is it that drives these maniacs?

ABC News posed the Q to marathoners prior to the NYC event in 2022. One veteran replied “When it’s so tough, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, why did I put my body through this?'”

The BBC asked the same thing. A respondent, a veteran of nine marathons and author of a book for those wishing to get into the sport, called himself a “delayed gratification junkie.” Junkie being the key word here, I guess.

The fellow explained his irresistible attraction to marathoning: “”There is a surge to it you don’t get from other sports, because the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into a single marathon dwarfs that of an individual soccer game or tennis match. Can you push yourself through enough hell to finish is the only question.”

Hell. Like I said.

See? Even marathon runners think they’re loony.

Then comes the payoff, acc’d’g to the ABC report: “[T]he ‘runner’s high’ is no myth as the hormonal aspect of marathon running plays a big role in why people feel compelled to join in. Running is known for giving athletes a rush of endorphins, and crossing the finish line of an hourslong race can be described by some as euphoric.”

For my dough, a good, strong Bourbon cocktail does the trick.

But, that’s me. And who am I to want to deny anyone their deranged obsession?

You know what? I hope my dear friend does well in that Georgia marathon. I hope she runs her fastest ever such race which, I understand, is the big goal. If she does so, she can brag to me about it and I’ll slap her on the back and say Hooray!

Really, I’ll be happy for her.

But she’s still a loon.

06/29/2024
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Authoritarianism, Radical Right Wing

912 Words: I’m scared

It’s time.

Usually I resist urges and calls and demands for fear, plenty of which have been trumpeted and shrieked over the past, oh, 248 years. In other words, for the entire history of this holy land. A democracy that purports to cherish free speech will always have as white noise predictions of doom, gloom, and the end of civilization.

And, to be sure, there have indeed been dark times when our little experiment in nation-ing has dipped perilously close to either splintering or falling into the clutches of bad men. The nation broke in two for a brief period of time in the 1860s. And then, business and gov’t conspired to violently crush labor movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then there were the federally tolerated — even sanctioned — Jim Crow laws and anti-semitic covenants. The United States of America has committed a couple of mortal sins peculiar to it: they being the Native American holocaust and slavery. Its many other sins are those shared by every other land in this bizarre world.

But throughout our history, there’s always been an underlying hope, even among people getting the crap kicked out of them, that this nation was both aiming for and on its meandering way to being a haven for those craving freedom, equity, justice, and, as Jefferson put it, happiness.

Maybe we still are. Maybe the events and conditions of the year 2024 will be seen as a blip on the way to that earthly utopia.

But we’re headed in the wrong direction, here and now. And we’re in for a rough go over the next ten years.

Our current president, Joe Biden, is doing a fairly decent job, save for a few idiotic blunders; for instance, cheerleading Netanyahu’s murderous temper tantrum in Gaza. Other than that, he’s done nothing to turn any appreciable segment of the voting population against him. Under normal circumstances, that is. But in this Fox News/social media/hyper polarized age, he’s the enemy, a villain, “the worst president this country has ever had.” (Worse even than Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan, for pity’s sake?!)

Add to that his abysmal showing in this week’s presidential debate, during which he mumbled and stumbled and proved himself to be a doddering old man. All the while his opponent, Donald Trump, uncharacteristically, even shockingly, played the temperate, reasonable, disciplined human being, descriptors that have never, ever, ever been employed re: him throughout his life.

The truth is, Trump is barreling toward a November victory. Should Joe Biden somehow reverse the trend and stage an upset, it’ll be a bigger surprise than when Trump himself overcame the flawed juggernaut that was the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

An aside: a better bet than hoping — praying — for a Biden upset would be for the Democrats to lean on the incumbent to drop out of the race and focus their efforts on someone, anyone, else. Kamala Harris, for instance, or Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg. Biden may indeed be in full command of his faculties but a swiftly growing portion of the American public thinks otherwise and, of course, in politics perception always triumphs over reality.

Up to two of the aging Supreme Court justices just might up and die or decide to hang up their gavels during the next presidential term, giving Trump a total of five picks over his two presidencies. And we know what his so-far three nominees, transforming the Court into a radical, activist, right wing, pro-corporate, anti-people sledgehammer, have meant for the country and its future.

The presidency, though, isn’t the only thing to be jittery about. The states of Louisiana and Oklahoma in recent days have endorsed mandates to impose Judeo-Christian biblical propaganda in public schools. That’s not a small step toward theocracy; it’s a giant leap.

An ungodly number of Republicans and other authority idolators love Vladimir Putin to pieces. As far back as 2008 when then-VP candidate Sarah Palin compared Putin favorably to Barack Obama, the right has been drifting into the arms of the Russian strongman.

Closer to home, rural merchandiser Tractor Supply Company. has officially declared itself free of any duty to diversify its workforce or even to sponsor such horizon-broadening efforts such as Pride fests. The company thinks so little of such things that it issued a manifesto saying, essentially, fuck the Human Rights Campaign. Tractor Supply even added it will “withdraw our carbon emission goals,” meaning the whole world can burn or flood or be battered from pole to pole by hurricanes, tornadoes, and extinctions so long as we can do whatever the hell we want, primarily enrich our stakeholders.

The Heritage Foundation last year issued a 900-plus page “Mandate for Leadership,” also called Project 2025, laying out a strategy to “save our republic.” The Project explains why someone like Trump has to be president, lays out a plan to dismantle the federal regulatory infrastructure, dramatically expand presidential powers, spend scads more dough on the military (as if we don’t do that enough already), re-unleash the Wall Street investment banks to plunder the global economy as never before, limit voting rights, and, basically, turn the keys to this country over to the 1% in a way that makes our current stacked deck look like a hippie commune.

The Foundation hollers: “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections.” No, it wants conservatives to reign.

We’re driving toward an authoritarian nation. So, yeah, I’m scared. Fingers crossed it’s just another detour. Fingers-crossing, though, ain’t enough

06/14/2024
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Black Lives Matter, Lauren Spierer

983 Words: Some Lives Matter

Twenty years ago, maybe more, when CNN was my go-to news source (it ain’t anymore, now that it has become a penny-ante contrarian knockoff of Fox News) I started noticing its obsession with missing or dead pretty young blonde White women. If someone answering to that description was found strangled or hadn’t contacted her family in a week — bang! — her grinning photo’d be right at the top of that day’s website and the lead image on that night’s newscast.

I could have predicted (and pretty much did) the emergence of Black Lives Matter because of it. And if I have to explain the connection, you’ll never get it anyway.

In any case, this week’s New York Times bestseller list, paperback nonfiction, includes at no. 8, College Girl, Missing, by Shawn Cohen. If you’re in Bloomington, you know the basics of the story. For those outside the town, the missing person in question is Indiana University student Lauren Spierer, whose disappearance on a June night/early morning in 2011 was huge news in these parts, in no small part because she was a pretty young blonde White woman.

Lauren Spierer: Her Life Mattered.

Plus she came from big East Coast dough. Her parents hired private investigators to dig into the case and, no doubt, university honchos chewed their fingernails to the bone worrying that moneyed families from New York and New Jersey might think twice about sending their kids to college out this way, a trend that has kept IU’s cash registers ringing for years.

Colleges and universities, once lavishly funded by their respective states, now are pretty much on their own and forced to market themselves like high-end department stores or gourmet restaurants. Ergo the influx of ungodly rich East Coast and Chinese students able to pay now-extravagant tuitions. If you haven’t wandered around big college campuses of late, you’d be surprised to see how many undergrads are tooling around in Maseratis. Cheap ramen soup is no longer the college kid’s stereotypical dinner but Balenciaga sneakers at $1300 the pair on fashionable freshman feet have become increasingly common.

Back to Lauren Spierer. The fact that this now-13-year-old story remains hot enough to be the subject of a bestselling true crime book shows that the missing blonde girl trope still holds strong. Hell, there was even a 2023 Lifetime movie called Black Girl Missing, recounting the contrast between the disappearances of two college-aged females, one Black and one White. The story primarily is about the efforts of the Black girl’s mother to get reporters and for-profit media outlets to pay a bit of attention to her daughter’s case*, all the while TV and newspapers are tripping over themselves covering the killing of Gabby Petito who, needless to say, was White.

Gabby Petito: Her Life Mattered.

[* For the life of me, I can’t figure out if the “Black Girl Missing” story is based on a real young woman’s disappearance or if she’s fictional. No matter; the point remains.]

Cohen’s choice of a title is a kick in the stomach to all those Black families missing a college-aged daughter. Of all the possible titles Cohen could have selected, did he have to rip off the one that indicts for-profit news media for its preoccupation with Barbie dolls?

Cohen makes no bones about the fact that he’s joined at the hip with the Spierer parents, Rob and Charlene. He was a reporter for the Westchester County, New York, Journal News at the time of Spierer’s disappearance. In the book’s preface, he recounts wooing the Spierers. He writes: “We became close to the point Ron and Charlene, raising two daughters in the same suburbs where I grew up, felt like family….”

No sin there.

Clearly, though, Lauren’s Spierer’s entire case is rife with sin. Seemingly within hours of her disappearance becoming known, several male IU students — Lauren’s boyfriend, his rival for her affections, and a few other lunkheaded hangers-on — lawyered up. At the time, I asked a dear friend who happens to be a big shot lawyer in town about it and this person said, essentially, Golly, gee, of course, everybody should get a lawyer at a time like that. Which is precisely what any lawyer would say, except the rest of us understand that those who lawyer up generally have something to worry about.

The truth of the matter is I read Cohen’s book through the end of the first chapter, in which he recounts moment by moment Lauren Spierer’s actions that fateful night/early morning, and then I was finished with it.

See, when I was Lauren Spierer et al‘s age and drifting in and out of various colleges and universities, I avoided people like her and her pals as if they carried a brain-eating virus, which, for all intents and purposes, they did. These are/were kids who, when they reach the age of 50 and are asked what was the last book they read would cite the last one they were assigned in senior year and whose college years were a whirl of binge drinking, coke and crushed-pill snorting, puking, using Mom & Dad’s credit cards to buy bottles of energy drink, and forgettable sport fucking. And they loved it.

My crowd loathed that gang and they, in turn, loathed me and my pals, which was fine by us.

The reason I put the book down and won’t take it up again unless I’m assigned to write something more about it is I couldn’t care less about these people and their vapid lives. As a reader, you have to feel something for the protagonist — even a missing, presumed dead one — and I didn’t in College Girl, Missing.

I needn’t tell you how horrible it is for a parent to lose a child. Every recounting of Lauren Spierer’s case drives that home with a sledgehammer. I wish Lauren Spierer were still alive, no matter how much I couldn’t — and can’t — stomach her gang.

 

 

06/08/2024
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Apollo 8, Bill Anders, Earthrise

460 Words: Far Outhouse

Bill Anders died yesterday at the age of 90. He was solo piloting a small aircraft when it crashed into that big watery, island-y area north of Seattle just after noon. I like to think an old bird like him died happy, doing exactly what he loved to do, rather than wasting away in a nursing home or a hospital bed.

Anders was the NASA astronaut who snapped one of the most famous photographs in history, that of the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon as his Apollo 8 spaceship orbited our natural satellite. Here are two shots of “Earthrise,” as it came to be known, in sequence (the second, color image is the one made famous) as well as a Hasselblad camera similar to the device Anders used on Christmas Eve, 1968:

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That first black and white image was taken by Anders’ crewmate Frank Borman while Anders scrounged around the capsule looking for a roll of color film. Anders’ shot was displayed in newspapers and on TVs all over the world. It was the first time the billions of us alive at the time could see our world as it is: a colorful ball set in a lonely void of blackness.

I recall thinking it was such a shame the Apollo 8 crew, also including Jim Lovell, couldn’t land on the Moon, considering how far they’d travelled and how close they’d come to its surface. I didn’t realize at the time that Apollo 8 took off without a lunar module. It was the first human space mission to escape the gravity of the Earth. It took the ship 68 hours to get to lunar orbit. On the way, Apollo 8 reached a speed of 24,593 miles per hour. Fortunately, no trans-lunar traffic cops were on duty those days or Command Module pilot Lovell would be on the hook for a hefty fine.

Anyway, Anders’ death got me to thinking about the US crewed space program, in full swing back then. Here’s a fascinating, if rather unsavory fact about the Gemini and Apollo missions, most of which lasted days and even weeks. When US Navy frogmen reached the splashed-down capsules and popped the doors open, they were hit with a blast of awful stench. NASA had yet to figure out how to eject the astronaut’s piss and shit and so said excreta remained on board throughout the mission.

NASA’s found a way, since then, to off-board urine but has yet to come up with a way to shoot the solid stuff off into space. With the US hoping to launch a Mars mission within the next few years, a trek that’s been estimated to last anywhere from eight to 34 months, they’d better get that done soon

And you thought keeping your own bathroom clean was an miserable task.

06/03/2024
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Childhood Misconceptions, Fear

783 Words: A Nation of Involuntary Drunkards and Other Nonsense

Following swiftly on the heels of my last post, CNN this morning ran an online story about a terrifying new disease. The article was placed at the top of the right hand column, a position normally reserved for news that’s a hair less urgent than Putin making a nuclear threat or Taylor Swift dating that football player. In other words, CNN sees it as Big Big News. Just not Big Big Big News.

So, what’s this horrifying malady we all have to cry ourselves to sleep over now?

It’s called auto-brewery syndrome, as you can see by the headline. Apparently, if you have it all the carbohydrates you ingest in a normal day ferment within you, just the way vintners ferment grapes or brewers ferment hops or whatever the hell they make beer out of these days. Acc’d’g to Wikipedia, the thing is also called gut fermentation syndrome, endogenous ethanol fermentation, or drunkenness disease.

Also, if you have it, you’re in peril of failing a blood-alcohol road test even if you haven’t had a pop in days, weeks, or months. Years, even. That can be a tad annoying should a state trooper pull you over and make you blow. For pity’s sake you could lose your license for two full years in the state of Indiana for a first offense.

You think there’s scads of grown men on those little putt-putt scooters on SR 46 now? (Indiana allows people convicted of DUI to motor down even 55-mph roadways w/o a drivers license — a state law only marginally less absurd than open carry.) Just wait until all the jillions of folks nailed simply because their bellies are the equivalent of wine vats.

A person suffering auto-brewery syndrome, essentially, can be denied driving privileges or even jailed in certain circumstances simply for eating buttered toast in the morning.

Thank god in heaven CNN’s editors and reporters are hot on this story. How much of our innocent population is at risk? A fifth? A  third? More than half?

Turns out — again, acc’d’g to Wikipedia — there’ve been four reported cases since 2001. Add to that one case of urinary fermentation wherein the sufferer peed a positive alcohol test.

So five. Five goddamned people have had this disorder in the entire 21st century. Five.

Okay, maybe six, since this woman mentioned on the CNN website today isn’t included in Wikipedia’s case studies.

So, six.

Six out of 336,526,049 people, this holy land’s population per the US Census Bureau (when you go there via the link, you’ll see a different figure as the total is constantly rising). That is one in every 56,087,674.8 Americans, using this AM’s figures.

Does that even merit a mention on one of this nation’s premier news outlets?

Is it worth scaring the crap out of at least a certain percentage of readers and viewers?

I guarantee a significant few folks are, as we speak, fretting over whether or not they have this illness. Okay, they may be neurotics, sure, but does CNN need to push their buttons?

I said it the other day and I’ll say it again: Please stop tring to scare the hell out of us!

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What bizarre misconceptions did you have as a child? I had a whole basket-full of them. Here’s one:

I taught myself how to read by thumbing through the World Book Encyclopedia. I was fascinated by the volume that showed a cut-away view of the Earth (probably in the E volume, one of the thinner tomes — the C volume was huge as was the M; it took me a couple of years to work my way up to those challenges).

Anyway, I learned that the very thin layer upon which we walk and drive is called the Earth’s crust. I started seeing the Earth as analogous to a loaf of Ma’s homemade bread.

Ma’s Homemade Bread Was Crusty, Too.

Then one day, I saw workers jackhammer a big hole into the pavement on Natchez Avenue, our street. The concrete looked to be about six or so inches thick. Below it was a seemingly endless depth of mud or clay. Naturally, I assumed the concrete was the Earth’s crust and that wherever there wasn’t pavement or concrete, other workers had already broken up and hauled away so much of the Earth’s crust.

Therefore, our backyard was the bared layer (the mantle, as I’d learn when I finally got around to that M volume) that exists below the crust. Our front yard too. The Earth, I concluded, in its natural state was covered with a six-inch layer of concrete. Dirt or lawn or whatever was an unnatural state made by workers with jackhammers.

Hey, I was a city kid; whaddya want from me?

05/29/2024
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Fear, News Media

677 Words: For The Birds

I suppose we all agree: things are pretty fucked up. Climate change, the rise of right wing authoritarianism, the wealth gap, gun violence, war, racism, nativism, this-ism, that-ism. The list goes on, ad infinitum.

Truth is, things are really no more fucked up today than they were yesterday, last year, last century, and last millennium.

Since we became human, we’ve been killing each other, oppressing each other, raping the land, fouling the air and water, owning slaves, dropping bombs, sticking our noses in other people’s sex lives, slugging our spouses, and every other atrocity you may care to name.

Listen to, watch, or read the news on any channel, on any website, (I almost wrote in any newspaper but who reads them?) and you’ll want to jump off the roof of a tall building. Kids don’t walk home alone from school anymore, people don’t hitchhike, and everybody’s barricading themselves in their living rooms and dens because The World Is A Dangerous Place.

Many Americans think crime has gotten crazily out of hand. Yet, law enforcement statistics show that the crime rate has steadily declined since the end of the pandemic and, even before that, it had been plummeting since the 1970s.

Truth is, the real danger is the news on any channel, on any website, and — yes — in any newspaper (for the six or seven of you who still do that old thing).

Listening to Morning Edition on NPR yesterday morning, I learned about a horrible disease that threatens everybody in this frightened nation. Public health experts and medical scientists are working feverishly to determine the range and scope of this next epidemic. Reporters are interviewing people at risk. Politicians must be made aware of this existential threat. Oh, what are we to do?

The disease? Bird flu. NPR spent three minutes on it, next to a lifetime in electronic media.

Y’wanna know how many people have gotten bird flu this year? Two.

Two human beings out of a United States population of more than 336 million.

Twenty people, on average, are killed by lightning each year in the United States. More than a hundred people drown in their own bathtubs each year in the US. So, thunderstorms and taking a bath are far more dangerous to us than bird flu. In fact, two people were killed by shark bites in the United States last year, making that peril much more scarifying than bird flu, considering bird flu hasn’t killed anybody this year.

And if I were an NPR radio news reporter, I’d be obligated to append “Yet…” to that statement because, god knows, bird flu might be the next disaster in the making.

Two people, for chrissakes!

“Stop scaring us!” I shouted at the radio as the true nature of the bird flu menace became apparent.

In fact, that’s the whole aim of the news these days, to scare the hell out of us. When corporate and mainstream media pose everything as a threat to our lives, we become less and less able to identify the real dangers out there.

If Trump becomes president, we’re doomed. If Biden remains president, we’re doomed. If Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito aren’t kicked off the US Supreme Court right now, we’re doomed. If teenagers keep on wondering about their genders, we’re doomed. If we continue to drive cars and ride in airplanes, we’re doomed. If sea levels rise, we’re doomed. If we mow our lawns too much, we’re doomed. If we forgive college loan debt, we’re doomed. If we let people mail in their ballots in the November election, we’re doomed.

Make no mistake, there are existential threats. For instance, burning fossil fuels since the onset of the Industrial Revolution has indeed put us and much of the world’s life at some sort of risk over the next few decades. But, jeez, not every freaking thing is going to wipe us all out. Certainly not shark bites, bathtub drownings, lightning strikes, Biden’s second term, or bird flu.

Trump regaining the presidency? Well, lemme think about that one for a bit.

 

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