The safety net

In yet another pointless, heartless, and cruel move by the Trump administration, a budget proposal includes a directive by the Department of Health and Human Services to cut funding for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.

Let's put this in perspective.  Forty percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers surveyed said they'd considered suicide within the last year.  One in ten attempted it.  This is four times higher than for straight teens (and those lower rates are disturbing enough).  But how, exactly, are these numbers shocking to anyone?  We have a government passing laws right and left specifically to deny rights to queer people.  There is a vocal minority of Americans who advocate making same-sex relationships illegal; one (Pastor Dillon Awes) gained national notoriety for saying that gays should be "lined up and shot."  Less overtly violent, but more pervasive, are strategies like the ones in multiple states to remove library books about the queer experience, or even fiction with queer characters.

Pastor Awes wants to kill us; but I'm not sure how much better the people are who simply want us erased.  That queer youth are feeling hopeless about the situation they're facing is hardly a surprise.

But let me be completely clear, here.  You people who still support Trump and his cronies -- you no longer have the right to call yourselves "pro-life."  What you are is pro-birth, because you don't seem to give a flying rat's ass what happens to kids after they're born.  What, do a person's rights begin at conception and end at birth?  Oh, to be fair, if they're the babies of straight white wealthy Christian conservatives, you're just thrilled to pieces.  But anyone else?  You've advocated reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits to feed low-income children.  You've voted to cut Head Start, which gives underprivileged children better access to early education.  This government's ICE thugs deported three children who had birthright citizenship (which, allow me to point out, is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution), including one with stage 4 cancer.  And as far as the proposed elimination of support for LGBTQ+ teenagers -- well, let me put it this way.

You fucking frightened little MAGA types, we are not trying to turn straight kids into queer kids.  We're trying to make sure queer kids don't turn into dead kids.

But deep inside, you know that, don't you?  You know queerness isn't a choice, because when you hit puberty, you didn't sit down and "choose to be straight."  Your support for this kind of government is based on hate, pure and simple.  So I misspoke earlier; Trump's elimination of a suicide hotline for queer youth isn't pointless.

The cruelty is the point.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Allow me to get personal, here.  I was one of those queer kids who almost did turn into a dead kid.  Twice.  I attempted suicide when I was 17, and again when I was 20.  There was no safety net for me, and I came damn close to succeeding.  My mom felt like the appropriate thing to do was ignore it.  Her take on things was a dismissive, "What do you have to be sad about?"  It was never talked about; to my knowledge, no one besides her and my dad ever knew about it.  Both times were during summer, so there weren't even missed school days to red-flag anyone.

But if I hadn't gotten scared, and had taken the whole bottle of sleeping pills rather than just a handful, I wouldn't be here right now.

My depression, and my suicide attempts, were not solely about being a closeted queer kid in a place and time where coming out would have put my safety at significant risk.  My childhood, looked at from the outside, seemed pretty placid, but from the inside... well, let's just say that depressed people are chameleons, and so are emotional abusers.  I never felt safe, not for a single moment, neither at home nor at school.  And when I hit those catastrophic downward-spiral points at 17 and 20, I felt like I just wanted out, permanently, whatever it took.

If I had had someone I could have trusted to reach out to -- a counselor, a sympathetic adult, someone on the other end of a hotline -- my life would have played out very, very differently.  I might not have come so very close to ending it.

And the fact that Trump and his cronies want to pull that safety net away from this generation of queer young people is cruelty for cruelty's sake.

So Trump supporters: don't you ever, ever in my presence call yourselves "pro-life" again.  Not until you disavow the vicious and ugly attacks this administration is making against the most vulnerable of us.  Maybe you should revisit the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, in that book you profess to care so much about:  "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'  The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

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Freefall

Well, voting day is done, and although the dust has yet to settle, it appears to have gone as badly as it possibly could have.

I'm sick to my stomach right now, and it's going to take me a long time to process this.  The nation I live in, and thought I understood, has apparently chosen to hand the reins of power to an egocentric, megalomanic sociopath who has never cared about a single thing other than his own self-aggrandizement.  He has no morals, no ethics, no conscience, and over half the United States thinks that he's who we want (for a second time) as leader.

To say I'm sick at heart is a vast understatement.  I'm also deeply, deeply mystified at how nothing this man does ever seems to alienate his followers.  How could what he's done not make a difference?  You MAGA types claim to be "values voters," so where are your values?

Very early on, Trump publicly mocked a disabled reporter,  He called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" -- then was asked about this comment at a debate by (very conservative) moderator Megyn Kelly.  He gave a waffling answer, but afterward said about Kelly in an interview with Don Lemon, "She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions.  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."  Worse, he -- now infamously -- said in an interview that when you're famous, women will let you do anything, up to including "grabbing them by the pussy."

None of this, apparently, was enough to convince you that this man is amoral.

He's a convicted felon 34 times over, faces numerous other charges that have yet to go to trial, is an adjudicated sex abuser and a multiply-accused rapist, including of under-age girls.  Of course, now he's certain to pardon himself for everything, but the fact remains that these convictions and allegations stand.

And that wasn't enough, either.

He claimed that failing to clap for his speeches was "treason."  He called the press "the enemy of the people" and just last week said that he wouldn't object if his followers "shot through the fake news" -- as well as specifically aiming their guns and firing at Liz Cheney, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of Trump and MAGA.  He said outright he'd be a dictator "from day one," and that his first priority would be exacting revenge against his critics, whom he calls "the enemy within."

We tried to lay out the obvious parallels with pre-World-War-II Nazi propaganda, but you weren't listening.

Speaking of the World Wars, in 2018 on a trip to Europe he refused to go to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the fallen American soldiers, and he said, "Why should I go to that cemetery?  It's filled with losers."  His contempt for veterans is incontrovertible; he commented on John McCain's service with a dismissive comment of "I like people who weren't captured."  This from someone who was deferred from service because of apparently imaginary bone spurs.

But that didn't do it, either.

He's stated that he's going to hand over economic control of the government to the man who took one of the most successful social media platforms ever created and drove it into the ground and the control of health care to a raving lunatic who wants to end vaccination and remove fluoride from tap water, and his response to the escalating climate crisis is "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!"

Those apparently don't alarm you in the least.

It seems like any one of these should have been sufficient, but the fact is, all of this stuff put together didn't make a single damn bit of difference.  He still had fervent support from evangelical Christians despite in an interview being unable to come up with a single Bible verse he liked, and calling the New Testament book "Two Corinthians."  He's a pathological liar, a serial adulterer, a financial cheat, and he and his kids were found guilty of stealing money from a children's cancer charity.  And yet the religious subset of MAGA acted as if he were the Second Coming of Christ, even creating images like this one:

This is the man you've chosen to run our country.

I'm angry, scared, confused, and lord have mercy, I am exhausted to the core of my being.  The voters have handed our country to monsters -- not only Trump, but right-wing extremists like J. D. Vance and the architects of Project 2025.  We are going to see the United States turned into a place where women, minorities, legal immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, atheists, and dissenters are not safe.

You voted for that.  I don't give a flying fuck what your reason was; you MAGA types chose to cast your vote for everything he represents and all the long, long litany of horrible things he's said and done.  And whatever happens next, you own every last bit of it.

I don't know what else to say.  I, and other moderates and liberals, feel like we're in freefall right now.  

I will continue to speak out, to my last breath.  But right now, mostly what I want to do is weep.

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Pretzel logic

Many of us here in the United States have been appalled and dismayed by the response some people are having to the recent double-whammy of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the attempts afterward to clean up the mess.

First, we have the fact that the meteorologists who were instrumental in predicting the hurricanes' paths, and who almost certainly saved lives by doing so, are being inundated with threats alleging that they're covering up the fact that the hurricanes were created and/or steered by operatives in the United States government itself.  Alabama-based meteorologist James Spann describes being told to "stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else."  

"I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather," said Michigan meteorologist Katie Nickolaou.  "I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of ten thousand nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that.  But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed...  Murdering meteorologists won't stop hurricanes.  And I can't believe I just had to say that."

Proving the truth of the observation that "everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how stuff works."

Then there's William James Parsons, the lunatic in North Carolina who threatened to kill FEMA workers who are trying to help residents who lost everything during Hurricane Helene.  News sources are saying Parsons was part of a "militia" -- why they don't call him a "domestic terrorist," which is more accurate, I have no idea.   "This is unprecedented," said Craig Fugate, who headed FEMA from 2009 to 2017.  "I know we’ve had individuals, but not an area or a group that’s threatening FEMA."

My first reaction to all of this was much like Katie Nickolaou's; utter bafflement.  How does it make sense to have a violent response to a fact I don't happen to like?  I can remember being in college classes where I became intensely frustrated by concepts I couldn't manage to understand, and not enjoying that one bit; but even then, I knew my problems would not be remedied by my punching the professor in the face.

But with regards to the current situation, I realized upon reflection that my initial reaction -- that the actions of the people making threats against meteorologists and FEMA workers were completely illogical -- is wrong.  What they are doing follows its own peculiar, twisted logic, that when you view it from a historical perspective makes total sense.

When far-right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh first really took off back in the mid-eighties, they did two things.  The first, which to a quick glance seemed the more dangerous, was to spew ultra-conservative talking points -- anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-equal rights, anti-LGBTQ, pro-corporate, pro-military, pro-unrestricted, unregistered gun ownership.  The other was far quieter, bubbling right beneath the surface, but threaded through the entire message.  And although it was subtler than all the bluster about specific issues, in the long run it was far more insidious.

"Listen to me," Limbaugh said, again and again.  "I'm the only one brave enough to tell you the truth.  Everyone else is lying to you."

Honestly, it's a genius strategy.  Once you have someone disbelieving the facts, and certain that everyone else is lying, they're in the palm of your hands.  

After that, you can convince them of anything.

What we're seeing now is the end game of that strategy.  Donald Trump and his wannabe fascist allies have taken it and stretched it to the snapping point -- and yet it seems to be showing no sign of breaking.  He can say "Haitian immigrants are eating your pets," and instead of laughing at him, his followers make threats against Haitians who are here legally -- and anyone who dares to publicly support them.  He can talk about the media as "the enemy of the people" and his followers obligingly start beating up reporters.  People like the astonishingly stupid Marjorie Taylor Greene can say "They can control the weather.  It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done," and rather than people saying, "okay, now I see you're talking complete bullshit"...

... the MAGA extremists start threatening meteorologists and the FEMA workers sent to help the innocent victims of storms.

While it's maddening and infuriating and any number of other synonyms for "what the actual fuck?", what it's not is illogical.  It's the end result of forty years of being told over and over, "The scientists and politicians and news media are lying to you."  Not, some of them may be lying or are misinformed, so use your brains and the available hard evidence to form your opinions; they're all lying, every last one, all the time and about everything, for their own nefarious reasons.

Oh, except for me.  I'm telling you the truth.  Obviously.

What is kind of hard to understand, though, is that these types call the rest of us "sheep."  That's a truly monumental scale of irony, but not one I'd expect them to acknowledge, or even recognize.

I'm honestly not sure how to combat this kind of pretzel logic.  The Trump wing of the Republican Party long ago ceded its entire identity, heart, and brain to one man's control, and now anything he says is de facto gospel truth.  At this point, he could ask them to do just about anything, and they'd acquiesce without a moment's hesitation.

Which is terrifying -- and an urgent call for anyone who is as appalled by this as I am to get yourselves to the voting booth on November 5.  This man, and his fanatical cult followers, can't be allowed ever to get within hailing distance of public office again.

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The laughter weapon

In the episode of the original Star Trek "The Day of the Dove," a malevolent alien entity traps 38 members of the Enterprise crew on board the ship -- along with 38 Klingons.

It sets them up with weapons, convenient grievances (some of which were manufactured by the entity, who can manipulate memories), and a preternatural ability to heal from wounds.  As it turns out, the entity feeds on rage.  It's set up the ship as a feeding station, fueling the anger of the Federation and Klingon crew, getting them to fight with each other so it can gain strength.

The end of the episode is interesting -- especially in light of recent events.  Kirk and Spock realize that the creature is promoting their fury for its own malign purposes, and the only way to defeat it is to refuse to play the game.  In the end, what works best is laughing at it.  Faced with derisive laughter, it is defeated by being starved of what it needed most, which is fear and anger.

I was immediately reminded of "The Day of the Dove" by the discombobulation we're seeing amongst the GOP over being labeled "weird."  The parallels are obvious.  The GOP message has been nothing if not consistent; keep voters angry and scared.  Keep your eye on those depraved atheists and LGBTQ+ people, they warn.  Watch out for the influence of Jews and Muslims.  Look out for the caravans of illegal immigrants, which, strangely enough, never seem to arrive.  (The rhetoric that illegal immigration has increased is false; illegal immigration has been level since 2007.  I'm not saying it's not a problem, but the idea that the Democrats have opened the borders simply isn't true.)  

What the recent "call 'em weird" approach has highlighted is that fascism is, at its heart, humorless, arrogant, and deadly serious.  I remember thinking back in 2016 that what needed to happen was that during one of Trump's speeches, when he uttered one of his countless lunatic pronouncements, the entire room should have burst out in a deafening uproar of laughter.  Trump doesn't mind an argument; he positively thrives on being combative.

But being laughed at?

No wannabe dictator can survive that.

It's already flooding social media.  Over at Bluesky, it's taken the form of "The Republicans have been the party of normalcy my entire life, especially when..."

• "... MTG and Lauren Boebert got into a vicious argument over Jewish space lasers."
• "... Donald Trump apparently believed that he could change the path of a hurricane by drawing on the forecast map with a Sharpie marker."
• "... Trump created trading cards depicting himself as various superheroes."
• "... Louie Gohmert claimed that the Democrats want to jail all Christians for belonging to a hate group."  (Despite the fact that about seventy percent of Americans self-identify as Christian.)
• "... Trump confuses 'asylum seeker' with 'insane asylum' and keeps bringing up Hannibal Lecter and acting as if he's a real person."
• "... DJT Jr. championed the views of Dr. Stella Immanuel, who believes that gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons."  (Yes, this is actually what she believes, and Trump Jr. did support her enthusiastically -- I wrote about it here a couple of years ago.)

And so on and so forth.  

Lest you think I'm exaggerating by calling them would-be fascist dictators, though, you might want to familiarize yourself with Project 2025, which sets the agenda for a second Trump presidency -- and which, despite Trump's recent efforts to backpedal, remains closely aligned with the MAGA leadership's goals.  In fact, Trump's running mate, J. D. Vance, has multiple connections to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is one of Project 2025's main architects.  Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts's upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light, and includes in it a thinly-veiled call to violence: "It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine.  But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets."

So I'm serious when I say they're scrapping for a fight.  But what they do not seem to have been prepared for is the simple response of ridicule.

I'm not saying that ridicule is enough; but pointing out to undecided voters that these people are not just dangerous, they're downright crazy, seems to be helping.  It pulls the teeth of their main weapon, which is convincing everyone that (1) we're in danger, and (2) the GOP are the ones who know how to fix what they just now made us all scared of.  It's no wonder that the Nazis suppressed comics and satirists; Hitler preferred to be worshiped, but failing that, was fine being feared.

But the one thing he couldn't tolerate was not being taken seriously.

Trump is cut from much the same cloth.  Perhaps fortunately, he lacks the brains of a Hitler, Mao, Stalin, or Mussolini, and that's not even taking into account the signs in the last year that he's experiencing some profound cognitive decline.  And to be clear, laughing at him and his cronies doesn't mean we shouldn't treat the threat they represent as if it weren't real.  Like in the science fiction setting of "The Day of the Dove," the fact that the solution was to laugh at the entity didn't obviate the need to address the danger it represented.  MAGA, just like the nameless creature in Star Trek, is perfectly happy to incite their followers to bloodshed in order to fulfill their goals.

It's just that the best option at this point is to keep the focus on the fact that at their core, they're total nutjobs.  These people are so extreme that if I were to hop a time machine and go back ten years, and write a novel detailing what's happened in those ten years, my publisher would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

I'll end with another fictional reference -- this from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.  Toward the end, the main character, Mark Studdock, has been accused of murder and imprisoned in the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, where he is being worked upon (with the desired end of brainwashing him completely) by the sinister Dr. Frost.  Frost, like the MAGA leaders, is a humorless, desperately arrogant man, who demands that others treat him with the seriousness and deference he feels he merits, despite his actions being nothing short of fatuous.  Mark realizes the solution, but too late, given that he's a captive, and at the mercy of Frost and his cronies.  Lewis writes, "Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question."

Luckily for rational voters in the United States it's not out of the question for us.  So keep laughing... and for heaven's sake, vote this November.

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Indoctrination

By now, I'm sure you've all heard that my former home state of Louisiana has passed a law requiring all public school teachers to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.  The argument, if I can dignify it by that term, is that the Ten Commandments represent a "historical document," not a mandate of religious belief.

Shall I refresh your memory about what the First Damn Commandment says?

"I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me."

How, exactly, is that not a mandate of religious belief?

Others include "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," and also "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor shalt thou covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox, nor anything else that belongs to him," which has the added fun of being a tacit endorsement of slavery and the subjugation of women.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The latest in this christofascist attack on separation of church and state -- a principle which, allow me to remind you, is mentioned explicitly in the Constitution of the United States, unlike God and Jesus -- is a sparring match between CNN anchor Boris Sanchez and Louisiana state representative Lauren Ventrella, wherein he tried to corner her on various points revolving around the secular basis of the United States and the fact that the new law is inherently discriminatory against non-Christians.  Of course, you can only corner someone with logic if they're arguing from the standpoint of facts and evidence, so it was bound to end in failure.  Ventrella did what the MAGA types always do; launched into a Gish gallop of irrelevancies such as what Sanchez's salary was, the fact that "In God We Trust" is printed on the dollar bill (neglecting to mention, of course, that it was only added in 1956), and ended with her solution for people of other religions (or no religion at all) to a clearly religious document posted on the classroom wall, which was, "Then don't look at it."

Fine, that's the angle you want to take, Representative Ventrella?  Two can play that game.

A teacher wants to put a Pride flag up in the classroom, and you don't like it?  Don't look at it.

You don't like books representing racial or religious diversity, or ones that feature queer people?  Don't read them.

You think drag shows are immoral?  Don't attend one.

You're against gay marriage?  Then the next time a gay person proposes to you, say no.

Or does that approach only work when you're trying to shoehorn Christianity into public schools?  

And more importantly, are these people really so stupid they don't see how easily their arguments could backfire on them?  

The problem here is that christofascists like Lauren Ventrella only want students exposed to straight White Christian... well, anything.  Fiction?  Of course, that goes without saying.  Non-fiction, too -- Florida's banned books list included biographies of prominent People of Color and LGBTQ+ individuals, for no other apparent reason than their not being about straight White people.  History has to be whitewashed to emphasize the benevolence of White Christians and downplay (or ignore completely) anything that casts them in a negative light -- or anything that brings up the contributions of other cultures.  

So they're not against indoctrinating kids; quite the opposite.  They love indoctrination.  They just want to make sure the indoctrination lines up with the way they were indoctrinated.

And that's not even getting into how the hell the leaders of a state that ranks 49th in education think this kind of nonsense is the priority.  Or the screeching hypocrisy of the same people who want the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and who claim to follow an incarnated deity who said "Let the little children come unto me," regularly voting against aid for underprivileged youth and subsidized school lunches.

Seems like the idea is keep 'em poor, hungry, uneducated, and brainwashed.

I hold out some hope that the inevitable lawsuits this is going to trigger from the ACLU and the FFRF will strike down this law as unconstitutional, but given the unabashedly far-right leaning of the Supreme Court, I have no confidence that they might not end up siding with Ventrella et al. on this.  The only thing we moderate and left-leaning people can do is to get our asses to the polls in November and vote.  Vote like the future of democracy in the United States depends on it -- because it does.

Otherwise, I fear that the christofascist takeover of the country may well be a done deal.

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Nostalgia

I was talking with a friend this past weekend, and the subject of children's television came up.

"It all sucks," he lamented.  "There's nothing around any more that's the quality of what we had when we were growing up."

I certainly see what he was talking about.  In my opinion, the adventures of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are up there in the top ten funniest comedy writing ever (not to mention brilliant animation, incredible voice-overs, and impeccable comic timing).

Classic episodes like "Duck Amuck" and "The Rabbit of Seville" and "Bully for Bugs" still make me howl with laughter even though I've seen them dozens of times.

Another winner was Bullwinkle, which combined completely offbeat, goofy humor with sharp political satire.

The problem is, this kind of nostalgia only works if you've got a really selective memory.  There were some truly horrid children's shows when I was growing up.  One that sticks in my memory, because it not only was terrible but was, to put it bluntly, really fucking weird, was H. R. Pufnstuf.

If you've never seen this show, it's the adventures of an odious little twerp named Jimmy who has a magic talking flute, and somehow ends up in a land where the mayor is a green dinosaur with a Tennessee accent, and most of the characters are wearing full-body costumes supposed to be people, animals, or... pieces of furniture.  Oh, yeah, and the villain -- I shit you not -- is named "Witchiepoo," and is played by an actress named Billie Hayes who evidently was told by the director to pretend someone had made the Wicked Witch of the West drink six cups of espresso.  It also had a really creepy fake laugh-track, so you knew when something funny had happened, because heaven knows there was no other way to tell.  To get a sense of the overall effect, imagine what would have happened if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for Barney and Friends while tripping on acid.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this little excerpt:

The whole thing was dreamed up by Sid and Marty Krofft (the latter, sadly, died just a couple of weeks ago), who also came up with The Banana Splits, which was similar not only in its frenetic, seizure-inducing pacing, but in its psychedelic content:

So I'm not quite buying the "things were so much better back then" argument.  We naturally tend to look at our own past in a sentimental fashion, so a lot of our memories are colored by that.  (Although I do wonder how much of my own sense that the world is a weird and chaotic place was generated by watching shows like H. R. Pufnstuf when I was eight years old.)

On a more serious note, isn't this the same thing that drives the whole MAGA phenomenon?  "Make America Great Again," by returning to... when, exactly?  When was America so great that we'd jump in a time machine and head back there?  The prosperous Fifties -- when minorities could be legally denied their rights as citizens, and queer people couldn't be out without risking their lives?  The Roaring Twenties -- with its viciously-enforced class stratification and reckless economic policy that led directly to the Great Depression?

Even earlier?  No matter where you look, it was all a mixed bag -- as it is now.  There has never been a time that was unalloyed good, and there have been plenty of times in the past when it has been significantly worse than it is now.  Consider, for example, what it was like for your typical feudal peasant.  When we think of medieval times, we tend to picture lords and ladies in fancy dress dancing the galliard, but fail to consider that this represented maybe two percent of the population -- and the other ninety-eight percent spent their lives in backbreaking labor and lived in squalor.

So if I was offered a one-way trip in a time machine, I'd stay put, thank you very much.  If I were forced to choose, my criteria would be practical ones -- some time after the invention of indoor plumbing and general anesthesia.  Call me a stick in the mud, but I'm just fine right here.

And now, I need to take advantage of another wonderful modern invention, which is recorded music. Because if I don't do something to get that stupid fucking "Oranges Poranges" song out of my head, I'm going to lose my marbles.

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The avalanche

I always give a grim chuckle whenever someone on the far right calls us liberals "snowflakes," because when it comes to taking offense over absolutely everything, there's nothing like a MAGA Republican.

If you think I'm overstating my case, you have only to look at what's currently happening in the state of Florida to see that if anything, I'm being generous.  The right-wing elected officials in Florida are so pants-wettingly terrified of any viewpoints other than their own Christofascist agenda that they don't even want anyone finding out there are people who think differently.

Take, for example, the school principal in Tallahassee who was forced to resign because she had the temerity to show students in the sixth grade a photograph of Michelangelo's David. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michelangelo artist QS:P170,Q5592 Jörg Bittner Unna, 'David' by Michelangelo Fir JBU005 denoised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

David was originally commissioned to be placed in Florence Cathedral.  In, to make it abundantly clear, a Christian house of worship.  But it was soon considered such a masterpiece of art that it was taken out -- and placed in the public square outside the Palazzo Vecchio, so it could be seen by everyone.

But now?  According to the elected officials of Florida, whose sensibilities haven't even caught up to the sixteenth century, we can't have sixth graders see a world-renowned piece of sculpture, evidently because then they'll find out that people have genitals.

Then there's book bans.  Clay County School District just announced a new list of books that are officially banned from any school in the district, bringing the total up to 355.  Here are the new additions:

It doesn't take a genius to notice a pattern, here.  Anything dealing with LGBTQ+ themes (Heartstopper, Radio Silence, One Man Guy), anything to do with the Black experience (Americanah, Notes from a Young Black Chef, Punching the Air, and Black Brother, Black Brother, among many others), anything criticizing Republicans (Russian Hacking in American Elections), and anything written by an outspoken liberal (The Fault in Our Stars, Slaughterhouse Five).  

Apparently we can't have anyone finding out there's a world out there besides those who are straight, white, Christian conservatives.

You'd think if these people were as confident in the self-evident righteousness of their own beliefs as they claim to be, they wouldn't be so fucking scared of the rest of us.

I think the problem here is that we've allowed the purveyors of this narrow-minded, bigoted bullshit to portray themselves as the valiant defenders of the cause, instead of calling them what they are: craven cowards.  They are constantly, deeply fearful, afraid that any exposure to a view beyond their own tiny, terrified world will cause the entire thing to come crashing down like a house of cards.

It's pathetic, really.  No wonder so many of them carry assault rifles when they go to Walmart.

When it comes down to it, though, isn't all fascism about fear?  Why would you be so desperate to build an autocracy if you weren't afraid of dissent?  Yeah, there's the attraction of power and its perks, I get that; but really, the desperation to crush all opposing views is born from a deep-seated and terrified knowledge that if people find out there are other ways, they'll realize they've been lied to and start demanding scary stuff like free speech and free access to information.

So to Ron DeSantis and his cronies who are so determined to erase those of us who aren't like them: I'm sorry you're so bone-shakingly terrified.  I do feel badly for you, because it must be a horrible way to live.  But just because I pity you doesn't mean that I and the others like me are going to stand silent and let you erase us.  You want to fight?  Well, battle joined.

I think you're about to find out that a bunch of snowflakes together create an avalanche.

****************************************

A pandemic of conspiracies

I have to admit that COVID-19 has me a little skittish.

I know all the reassuring bits -- that most people who contract it have few or no symptoms, that the mortality rate is only 2% (contrast that with 70% mortality rate for a monster like Ebola-Zaire), that the flu is worse and we don't panic about that every year.

But.  I've read The Stand and watched Outbreak, and the similarities are alarming, not in the symptoms or severity, but in how the government is handling it.  Outright incompetence, coupled with attempts to muzzle the news media, along with reassurances that are almost certainly false ("a vaccine will be widely available soon").  There was a cluster of cases in Kirkland, Washington -- where I lived for ten years -- and just this morning there was the confirmation of a case...

... in Manhattan.

So at the moment I'm oscillating between "guarded" and "freaking right the fuck out."

At least I keep telling myself to go back to the facts -- what the CDC has discovered about the virus, recommendations for avoiding getting sick, maps of actual cases.  Which is more than I can say for a few other people.

Situations like this always seem to be prime breeding ground for conspiracy theories.  My explanation for this is that people are happier believing that there's a cause for Bad Stuff Happening even if the cause itself is kind of horrifying than they are believing that bad things just happen because they happen.  Global evil is, for some reason, more comforting than simple chaos.

But still.  There are some people who should, in Will Rogers's words, never miss a good opportunity to shut up.

Top of that list is New Zealand-based evangelical Christian preacher Brian Tamaki, of the Destiny Church of Auckland, who said this weekend that COVID-19 wasn't actually a virus, it was an airborne demon, and that therefore True Believers were immune.

"Satan has control of atmospheres unless you're a born-again, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, Holy Ghost-filled, tithe-paying believer," Tamaki said, with special emphasis on the "tithe-paying" part.

"You're the only one that can walk through atmospheres and have literally a protection, the PS-91 protection policy."  PS-91, by the way, isn't a medication.  It's code for Psalm 91, wherein we read, "Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare or the deadly pestilence."

Because that worked out so well for people during the Black Death.

Tamaki, though, was hardly the only one who's been saying that coronavirus wasn't an ordinary epidemic.  The announcement by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic was followed nearly immediately by Donald Trump announcing at a rally that the outbreak is a "hoax" by the Democrats to discredit him.  How the Democrats created a virus in China and then spread it all over the world is a matter of conjecture, but the MAGA-crowd isn't exactly known for their critical thinking skills, so there was an immediate outcry against those evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  Then when someone pointed out that it was odd, if the epidemic was caused by the Democrats trying to gain political advantage, the first states to have confirmed cases were strongly liberal-leaning -- California, Oregon, Washington, and New York.

"No," the MAGAs responded.  "The Democrats did that on purpose!  They're making themselves sick so they can blame it on Donald Trump!"

Because that's how evil we liberals are.  Mwa ha ha ha *cough, hack, sneeze* ha ha ha ha ha.

But no one has a better conspiracy theory (and by "better" I mean "completely batshit insane") than the one my wife found a couple of days ago.  Because a summary wouldn't nearly do it justice, here it is in all its glory:

"Digitized RNA activated by 5G waves."  "Remote assassination."  "Smart dust from chemtrails."  "ID2020."  "Weaponized technology from the Space Force."

And, of course, rejecting vaccines.

Look, I know it's scary.  I know it's natural to try to find reasons for things, because once you see the reasons, you can control the fear.

But that is no excuse for making shit up.

Let's all just calm down, take as many precautions as we can (including, most importantly, wash your damn hands).  Panicking and inventing crazy fairy tales and conspiracy theories doesn't solve anything or help anyone.  There's no reason to overreact.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm off to put on my hazmat suit and enter my underground bunker for the next three months.

*****************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Raising the dragon

I've been trying to stay off the topic of politics lately.

Besides being depressing, the subject has lately been fraught with overtones of futility.  The followers of Donald Trump are more and more becoming a cult, where Dear Leader can do no wrong and his supporters cannot tolerate any criticism.  I have seen, I kid you not, images of Trump as a muscle-bound shirtless prizefighter, and as a Jesus-like figure with robes on a white stallion.  The near impossibility of getting the Trump Party members to see this man as the amoral, lying, narcissistic grifter the rest of us see was discovered last week, to his chagrin, by Joe Walsh, former Illinois representative and staunch conservative Republican.  Walsh, who is running for the GOP nomination -- not that you could tell if you talked to most Republicans -- was speaking to a crowd of GOP supporters in Iowa prior to the primary, and got a reception he described later on Twitter:

I spoke in front of 3,000 Iowa Republicans last night.  It was like a MAGA rally.  I told them we needed a President who doesn’t lie all the time.  The crowd booed me.  I told them we needed a President who wasn’t indecent & cruel.  The crowd booed me.  I told them we needed a President who doesn’t care only about himself.  The crowd booed me.  I told them the Republican Party needed to do some real soul searching.  The crowd booed me.  I told them that, because of Trump, young people, women, and people of color want nothing to do with the Republican Party.  The crowd booed me.  I told them I’m a pro life, pro gun, secure the border conservative, but we need a President who is decent and represents everyone.  The crowd booed me.  I got booed, yelled at, jeered, and given the middle finger for the 3-4 minutes  I spoke to these 3,000 people.  Afterwards, I realized again that 99.9% of these folks don’t support me.  They don’t care that Trump lies, they don’t care that he’s cruel, they don’t care that he cheats to get re-elected, they don’t care that he attacks the free press, they don’t care that he increases the debt, they don’t care that his tariffs have killed Iowa farmers, they don’t care that Trump abuses the Constitution and acts like a dictator.  Afterwards, I realized again that my Republican Party isn’t a Party, it’s a cult.  I realized again that nobody can beat Trump in a Republican Primary.  And most importantly and most sadly, I realized again that I don’t belong in this party.  I have no home in this party.  And I realized again that something new needs to begin.  Whether it’s a political party, or a movement, I don’t know.  But there needs to be a home for conservatives who are decent, principled, and respectful.  Conservatives who embrace all God’s children, acknowledge that climate change is real, get serious about our debt, abide by our Constitution, and tell the truth.  I hope to be a part of this new party.  This new movement. But job #1 in 2020 is to stop Trump.  And all of us from across the political spectrum need to come together to stop Trump.  Let’s make sure Trump is defeated in 2020, then we get back to respectfully debating issues.  Instead of talking about Trump everyday, let's put aside our differences on certain issues now and understand that Trump is the single greatest threat to this Republic.

While I find it unfortunate that Walsh was treated discourteously, and even more unfortunate that no one was taking his message to heart, I have a hard time feeling sorry for the GOP as a whole.  They, and their mouthpiece Fox News, have created a perfect storm of conditions that is so reminiscent of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany of the 1930s that anyone who doesn't see the parallels must be either ignorant of history or else willfully blind.  The whole thing brought to mind the wonderful quote from novelist Stephen King (which I then tweeted at Walsh, not that he responded to or probably even read it): "Those who have spent years sowing dragon's teeth seem surprised to find that they have grown an actual dragon."

And very few people have done more in the dragon's-tooth-sowing effort than Rush Limbaugh -- who on Tuesday evening was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DonkeyHotey, Rush Limbaugh - Caricature (5337997122), CC BY-SA 2.0]

I haven't been surprised by much in these chaotic last few months -- Trump's defiance of the rule of law, Mitch McConnell's smirking, wink-wink-nudge-nudge defense of him, the Senate's decision to acquit him of charges that make Watergate look like a seventh grader shoplifting a piece of candy from the local grocery store.  But the awarding of the Medal of Freedom to the likes of Limbaugh took me off guard.

Limbaugh's hate-filled rhetoric has been inflaming the Right for decades, convincing them they're threatened (and that their opponents are amoral America-haters) in terms that are nauseating in their quantity and sheer ugliness.  A sampler:

• To an African-American caller on a radio program: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."
• Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society. 
• There are more acres of forest land in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492.
• Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain, this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair because I have talent on loan from God.
• Styrofoam and plastic milk jugs are biodegradable.  You know what isn't biodegradable?  Paper.
• The NAACP should have riot rehearsal.  They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.
• The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.
• There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history.  Does this sound like a record of genocide?
• All composite pictures of wanted criminals look like Jesse Jackson.
• Let me tell you something.  They say [Oliver North] lied to Congress.  I can think of no better bunch of people to lie to than Congress.
• [The torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison] was sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank.  Sort of like that kind of fun...  I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release?  You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
• Look it, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.  There, I said it.
• Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns.  I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled.  If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have.  Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals, take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em, don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun, and control their speech.  You would wipe out 90% of the crime, 85 to 95% of the hate, and a hundred percent of the lies from society.

There you have it.  The man that Donald Trump awarded with one of the highest honors given in the United States.  The man Trump just put in the same category as Rosa Parks, Norman Rockwell, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Redford, Carl Sandberg, Eudora Welty, Elie Wiesel, Grace Hopper, and Jonas Salk.

It's almost certain that Trump chose Tuesday night, the same night as the State of the Union speech, to give the award because Limbaugh just announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (after being a lifelong smoker -- and scoffer at the connection between tobacco use and cancer).  I wouldn't wish lung cancer on anyone, after watching the agony two of my uncles went through while dying of the disease, but the fact that he's a very sick man doesn't change the fact that he has spent his entire adult life spewing a venomous message with the sole purpose of fomenting hate.  Joe Walsh's reception at what turned out to be a MAGA rally shows how successful Limbaugh and his colleagues have been -- people like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Glenn Beck, amongst many others.

And the fact that someone like Limbaugh was given a prestigious award for service to his nation shows just how far in the downward spiral we've gone.

I don't know what else to say.  I'm saddened, sickened, and disheartened by what my country has become and is becoming.  I fear that we haven't reached bottom yet, something I find profoundly frightening.

In fact, I think the dragon the GOP has grown is just beginning to rear his ugly head.

*********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]