"There are three things I've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."
-Linus Van Pelt
It's Halloween up here on the hill, 32 degrees already from a low of 28 when Peg walked out the door a little while ago. Well, more than a little while. I fell asleep again. What's up with that?
The weather outside lends itself to hibernation.
Not to mention the discernment one experiences in listening to those around us. Yesterday I represented a lawyer in a Zoom mediation, with an old friend Mike as the mediator. Mike's 68 now, and in his opening always makes a point of observing that he seems so youthful (and he certainly does) because he hasn't practiced law in something like twenty-five years. Then when we broke into caucus, waiting for the mediator to return, I fell into a conversation with my client, a nice guy who handles big transactional stuff in Dallas and never sets foot in a courtroom. He told the story of when he was a young lawyer, and the associate in the office next store, a litigator, would receive a nasty letter from opposing counsel. The other litigation attorneys on her team would assemble to review the letter, cast aspersions at the author, and outline their own two pages of invective in return. And so it went.
"I don't know how you guys do that, day after day. It's just so negative."
Most guys my age don't, because it's corrosive to one's soul. Assuming the existence of a soul, of course.
So maybe coming back up here for a few days, taking advantage of the time difference and the solitude, not to mention the sheer physical distance from the office, is restorative. Maybe I just need to accept the need to rest a little more than usual.
It's also sort of nice not to be in the middle of the lunatic asylum that is the north Florida political scene at this moment. I'm not sure they've noticed the decline and fall of their guy in the presidential election polls; I'm not counting him out personally; like the monster in a horror movie I'm just waiting for him to spring from the primordial muck just as we think we're done with him.
Two interesting essays online this morning, from two very different viewpoints, caught my eye. The first came from the Atlantic, and shone a light on the ignorance of average, "real" Americans when it comes to matters of foreign policy.
The scene was an eatery in the congressional district of our new speaker, not exactly an incubator of deep thought (go ahead and name one prominent writer, intellectual, or scientist from Shreveport. I'll wait). These folks are excited that their Clark Kent representative promises to slash aid to the Ukrainians so we can spend it back home.
Except, except . . . the amount of money we spend on foreign aid is negligible, compared to what we spend on things like potato chips and online gambling. And that money isn't being handed to the fuzzy foreigners in briefcases--it's being spent on bombs and bullets, which in turn are indirectly benefiting us by killing the enemies of the Republic. You can almost hear the rust belt stirring back to life, with shop floors filled with crates of newly produced howitzer shells (the NYT ran just such a photo, from Scranton, PA, yesterday). It's not like cutting off the Ukrainians would lead to additional investment in our own citizens, particularly by a party that has made it an article of dogma that we shouldn't be investing in our own citizens.
Fifty percent of the human race has an IQ below 100. I've got to remember that, as well as John Stuart Mill's quip that most of them are conservatives.
On the other hand, the Intelligencer page of New York Magazine ran a piece that may well result in a debate on our porch as we hand out candy.
It turns out, the evidence is beginning to emphatically suggest that lockdowns were a huge social experiment that did very little to prevent deaths during the worst of Covid. There was a principled argument for keeping them to "flatten the curve", and prevent overwhelming the hospitals, but the statistics don't bear out the conclusion that they prevented excess deaths overall, given that for every Covid death prevented there was a cancer undetected, a surgery postponed, a suicide by a despairing teen locked in a house for a year. So, oddly, the DeSantis policy of a short term lockdown to prevent a surge was the right answer, so long as it was paired with an aggressive vaccination policy. In other words, Trump's overall approach to the problem.
But we've gotten so used to treating our problems as politically binary, we were never going to get to that response. The blue states would lock down, force us to eat "Cuomo Fries" (another funny story there), and boast high vaccination rates. Their death rates overall were far lower than the red states, where "open for business" coupled with low vaccination rates, along with a fat, junk food eating population, led to a pile of unnecessary corpses. But the cost to us as a society might have been far lower if we'd spent a little time evaluating what actually worked, instead of villainizing the other side's approach.
Next door in the crack house, a baby cries inconsolably. Over the shrieks I can hear the loving young mother, taunting her offspring. "That's it baby. Cry, cry, cry."
This is a youngster who'll grow up and make the news brandishing an AR-15 in a shopping center one day. A pity.
But here at Tara, it's time for a last minute push for Halloween fun. We already missed the big bonfire party, unfortunately, thinking it was tonight when in fact it was last Saturday. Another pity.
Later I'll rig up our holographic ghost projector, which inhabits our second floor windows with terrifying images almost guaranteed to make a five year old pee the Iron Man costume his mom bought him at Wal-Mart.
These things really are damned scary, even to me. I wonder what Lucia, or maybe Thomas if he's still hanging around, think of the posers we've rigged up to float past our windows? Probably that they'd do a better job, but won't be objectified or exploited for our amusement in that way.
We also have an entire champagne bucket full of candy. And yes, it's a champagne bucket-; we're talking about my Peg, after all. As she dumped the bag of mini-candy bars into the silver receptacle last night, she commented that if we didn't get any trick-or-treaters tonight, "they'll all be getting fat on these things at Arnot when I bring them to work."
I have no idea what she's talking about, what with my deep and abiding love of mini-candy bars. Thankfully she didn't bring any of my personal favorites, Heath bars with all their delightful toffeeness. I'd need an insulin pump to get through November, and there would be nothing to share with her colleagues over in Elmira.
Time to go clean the Traeger after Sunday's brisket adventure, then try to work a little.
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