A sixth true thing about education reform

 Nearly 13 years ago, I wrote a very serious and not at all sarcastic blog post titled, “Five True Things About Education Reform,” which holds up pretty well because, like Jesus Christ, education is the same yesterday and today and forever. Now, as then, greedy teachers, evil unions, and lazy poor people are some of the biggest problems with public education in America. But thanks to groups like Moms for Liberty, I've discovered it's high time to add a Sixth True Thing About  Education Reform:

6. Teachers are racist groomers from whom we must protect children.

Shocking but true. Whereas in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, teachers were mostly bad in the screwing-taxpayers kind of way (by demanding to be paid living wages within school systems that have adequate infrastructure, safe conditions, and sufficient supplies), in the 21st century, teachers have begun to reveal a whole new level of evil as they implement their true Secret Agenda: using woke indoctrination to turn kids into trans, reverse-racist, liberal deviants who hate America. Teachers have many tools at their disposal in the pursuit of this agenda, including but not limited to: critical race theory, sex education, social-emotional learning, school libraries, rainbow flags, pronouns, Michelangelo’s David, drag story time, the word gay, posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman, rap music, the New York  Times, CNN, condoms, Mickey Mouse, Barbie, the green M&M, Bert & Ernie, Dumbledore, vaccines, masks, Juneteenth, Pride, atheism, globalism, Karl Marx, and of course, history, science, and books. But we have two powerful weapons with which to beat these godless, perverted teachers into submission: Jesus and gerrymandering. Remember what a great man once said: “He alone who owns the youth gains the future.”*

* Hitler, as quoted by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing ed reform group that is not afraid to tell you who they truly are.

Source

Poetry Slam: Me vs. ChatGPT

One of these was writ by me,
The other by ChatGPT.

Last year, when I was sick in bed with Covid and feeling like crap would feel if crap had Covid, I wrote the pastiche of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that T.S. Eliot would have written if T.S. Eliot had Covid. Today it occurred to me to wonder how my poem would compare to one written by an AI, so I put it to ChatGPT. Below is the prompt I gave, followed by two poems. Decide for yourself who or what did the better job. To find out which is mine, scroll down my blog.

The Prompt

Write a pastiche of the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, incorporating ideas, themes and imagery related to Covid-19, the pandemic, lockdown, social media, and 21st century technology. Use enough language from the The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock so that the reader can recognize the source material, but also use enough original language so that the resulting poem would be considered a new and original work.

Poem 1

Let us scroll then, you and I, 

Through the endless feeds of social media high, 

Like a digital ether that numbs the brain; 

Let us waste away the hours and days, 

With likes and comments in a virtual haze, 

In the blue light of screens that drain.

Let us scroll, through memes and news, 

The endless posts with no real views, 

And the endless stories, where the filters never fade, 

The emojis that replace human emotion, 

And the gifs that keep us in perpetual motion.

In the chat rooms, the conversations start, 

With no real connection, just words apart, 

And fingers tapping, messages sending, 

Asking, "Are you there?" with no pretending.

And indeed there will be time 

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" 

Time to turn back and descend the stair, 

With a phone in hand— 

(They will say: "How his eyes are strained!") 

My headphones on, blocking out the mundane—

(They will say: "But how his mind is always preoccupied!")

Do I dare 

Disturb the universe? 

In a time of pandemics, technology and vice?

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 

And I have seen the endless feeds get thicker, 

Inhaling the doomscroll, exhaling the rage, 

But still, life goes on, albeit in a digital cage.

Would it have been worth while, 

To have put down the phone with a smile, 

To have lived in the moment, not for the screen, 

To have seen the world beyond the virtual scene?

The notifications pile up so fast, 

Distractions and temptations that last, 

But we succumb, and we keep scrolling on, 

Lost in the digital world, until it's all gone.

I grow old, I grow old, 

I shall wear the wearables, and hear the data told. 

Shall I post my life online? Do I dare to disconnect? 

I shall tweet and like and share, and live in neglect.

I have heard the algorithms humming, each to each. 

I have seen the social media creeping, trailing on the beach. 

But I have the power to log off and disconnect, 

And so, let us go, and live in the present, not regret.

Poem 2

Let us stay then, you and me,

When the waiting room is spread against the screen,

Like a patient seeking telemedicine;

Let us stay, in certain nicely done-up rooms,

The muttering retreats

Of endless days on droning video calls

With coffee mugs and Zinfandel.

Rooms that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question.

Oh, do not ask, “Am I muted?”

Let us sit until we’re rooted.

In the Zoom the women glitch and freeze,

Talking of their NFTs.

The bluish light that rubs its back upon the laptop screens,

The bluish glow that rubs its muzzle on the smartphone screens,

Clicked-on links to fill the emptiness of the evening,

Lingered on Twitter memes and TikTok tunes,

Let fall upon its queue whatever falls from algorithms,

Slipped by the sort order, made a sudden beep,

And, seeing that the battery was dangerously low,

Curled once about the bed, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the bluish light that slides along the line,

Rubbing its back upon the laptop screens;

There will be time, there will be time

To mask your face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to contact and expose,

And time for all the works and days of lungs,

That leave contagious droplets on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred failed inspections,

And for a hundred infections and reinfections,

In restaurants while taking toast and tea.

In the Zoom the women glitch and freeze,

Talking of their NFTs.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to apply a background of my choice,

And a filter to enhance my voice – 

(They will say: “How her face has grown fat!”)

A fancy blouse, some makeup and my cat,

My face composed while on my phone I chat --

(They will say: “Even her cat is fat!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the Twitterverse?

In a minute there is time

For tweets and retweets which a keystroke will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Asynchronous lectures, webinars, livestreams,

I have measured out my life with quarantines;

I know the voices fading as connections fail

Leaving silence shouting from the laptop screen.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

The eyes that peer above the mask begging to be seen,

And when I am vaccinated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am jabbed, rejoicing, at the mall,

Then how should I begin

To face the variants that soon come on in waves?

And how should I presume?

And I have known account names, known them all—

Selfies edited with automated care

(Removed are age lines and some graying hair!)

Is it pictures from a trip

That I would like to skip?

Selfies taken in a crowd, no masks in view at all.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched miasmas rising from the lungs

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a valiant Antifa

Marching along the streets of mad cities.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Dulled by TV binges,

Biopics of singers,

Edgy standup comics, blood-soaked fantasy.

Should I, after comedies and spoofs,

Have the strength to make the nation face its truths?

But though I have masked and distanced, vaxed and boosted,

Though I have seen my hair (pandemic grown) resume its natural shade,

I am no influencer – my content’s undisplayed;

I have seen my viral moment pass and flicker,

And I have seen the eternal A.I. flag my post and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the chat, the messenger, the Skype,

Among the pizza boxes, among the endless hype,

Would it have been worthwhile,

To have logged off the webcam with a smile,

To have squeezed the internet into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I’m David Bowie, CGI’d from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” -- 

If one, settling a MyPillow by her head

Should say, “That is not what I meant at all;

OK Boomer, not at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worthwhile,

After the riots and the protests and the insurrections,

After the shootings, after the terror, after the blood that spilled along the floor –

And this, and so much more?--

It is impossible to type just what I mean!

But as if an Oculus Rift threw the vid directly on my eyeballs:

Would it have been worthwhile

If one, whose All Lives Matter t-shirt falls,

And turning toward the browser, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

No, I am not Captain America, nor was meant to be;

Am a nameless extra, one that will do

To fill a crowd shot, start a fight or two,

Back up the star; no hero, not super,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Fine for exposition, but no backstory; 

Almost, at times, a blooper.

I’m not here… I’m not here…

I’ve looped a clip I took last year.

Shall I dye my hair orange? Do I dare to eat indoors?

I shall wear Manolo Blahniks and walk upon the floor.

I have heard the people clap for health care heroes. 

I do not think that they will clap for me.

I have seen them surfing nowhere on their phones,

Checking for comments from people never met,

And whatever’s pinged the saved searches they didn’t set.

We have lingered in the matrix of the net

By viral memes we give a thumbs up or thumbs down

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

On gender: You don't know what you don't know

Two things I generally avoid: Getting into it with transphobes on social media, and using my personal story to prove anything. But for some reason, a comment I saw recently on a friend's social media account made me want to break both those rules. My friend had reposted this viral post about the science behind the complexities of gender, and someone commented:

Not sure why that, of all things, really got me going. But it did. So here's my reply:

Hi. You don't know me. My name is Tamar. As a rule, I don't usually answer comments coming from your perspective, because frankly, it's exhausting. But your specific comment resonated with me in a surprising way. So I figure, what the hell, rules are meant to be broken. I'll say my piece, for whatever it's worth to you or anyone else. So pop some popcorn, pour yourself a libation, put up your feet, here we go.

Twenty-four years ago, I became the mother of twins I presumed were boys, and 18 months later, a child I presumed was a girl. As a teenager, one of the twins came out as a transgender woman. Believe it or not, having been through this makes me understand the thinking behind your question better than you'd imagine. And in a weird way, it makes my better able to empathize with you.

The subtext of your question about birthing babies (everybody knows women have the babies!) is based on a logical fallacy, one that people use all the time: the appeal to self-evident truth. It seems to you crystal clear that certain things are true, in this case, that anatomy = gender. You know what you know. You have no patience for the sophistry of those who would argue otherwise, whom you presume to have ulterior motives.

It may surprise you to learn that I understand your thought process, though not your conclusions, in my very bones. My reasons may have been different than yours, but when my daughter came out, my brain screamed, loudly and insistently: I KNOW WHAT I KNOW. The truth is self-evident.

Like you, I was raised in a world that had so marginalized transgender people that I had never thought deeply about the whole matter. Unlike you, I suspect, I supported the right of trans people to live as the gender they know themselves to be, and I believed them when they proclaimed their true gender (or so I thought). But as it turned out, I held a whole lot of faulty assumptions about what transness was, and who was trans. I knew what I knew. Transness is obvious from childhood; trans kids are deeply depressed and often suicidal; trans girls have always been effeminate. None of this applied to my kid.

My brain was screaming at me because I had dedicated my life to being the best parent to my kids that I could possibly be, and the biggest part of that was to truly and deeply KNOW my kids. And here is this kid telling me she is a girl? How could I not have noticed that? I felt like a terrible failure, a bad parent who had missed something so incredibly important. I will not lie, it took me awhile to get over myself and really listen to her, and to others, and come to understand that our children are unique individuals with complex inner lives that we cannot fully know.

Beyond that, there was the terror. I wanted what every parent wants for their child: love, comfort, confidence, a chance to thrive. And SAFETY. I kept thinking, the world will be so cruel to her. Doesn't she know that? I know that! Everyone knows that! Can't she just...find some safe middle road?

Because I love my child (all my children) with all my heart, the most important thing to me was to treat her with kindness, support, and seriousness. We found all kinds of professional help for all of us, including support groups where we could discuss, really discuss, our innermost thoughts and fears. (Maybe there are some parents out there who adjust to a child's transition easily, but I have yet to meet them.)

The most important thing I've learned is that sometimes, we don't know what we don't know, which is very hard and scary to admit. Our culture, our language, and most importantly, our own feelings and experiences ingrain in us notions of gender that we take to be obviously true. But they are subjective. They are not universal.

So you do not know what you think you know. Your world view tells you that gender, sex, and anatomy are all neatly packaged in one certain way, and that anything else is, at best, a misguided untruth, and at worst, a perversion of nature. But your world view is narrow and false. Your world view is as flawed as those who believed that illness was caused by imbalanced humors or that whales are fish.

You probably think that, if transness were real, it wouldn't have just popped up out of nowhere all of a sudden. That, too, is false. Trans people have always been here, but they have coped with cultural taboos as best they could. And if you think widespread taboos are proof of some natural order, please keep in mind that widespread human beliefs perpetuate all manner of horrors. Slavery. Misogyny. Racism. War. The MCU.

I have lived through letting go of what I thought I knew -- including having to admit to myself that I didn't know my own kid as completely as I'd assumed. It's so, so hard. (But I have also discovered that the human being she is is the human being she always was, with the same loves, talents, sense of humor, intellect, etc, and she's more open than ever, which is wonderful.) I hope that you are a person capable of empathy and open to reason (including the reason on display in the original post), and that you can acknowledge that you might have much to learn.

Here endeth the lesson.

A Prufrock for the Covid Era, or, How I Spent My Day in Quarantine

Prufrock's Streaming Consciousness
By Tamar Wyschogrod

(With apologies to TS Eliot)

Let us stay then, you and me,

When the waiting room is spread against the screen,

Like a patient seeking telemedicine;

Let us stay, in certain nicely done-up rooms,

The muttering retreats

Of endless days on droning video calls

With coffee mugs and Zinfandel.

Rooms that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question.

Oh, do not ask, “Am I muted?”

Let us sit until we’re rooted.

In the Zoom the women glitch and freeze,

Talking of their NFTs.

The bluish light that rubs its back upon the laptop screens,

The bluish glow that rubs its muzzle on the smartphone screens,

Clicked-on links to fill the emptiness of the evening,

Lingered on Twitter memes and TikTok tunes,

Let fall upon its queue whatever falls from algorithms,

Slipped by the sort order, made a sudden beep,

And, seeing that the battery was dangerously low,

Curled once about the bed, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the bluish light that slides along the line,

Rubbing its back upon the laptop screens;

There will be time, there will be time

To mask your face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to contact and expose,

And time for all the works and days of lungs,

That leave contagious droplets on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred failed inspections,

And for a hundred infections and reinfections,

In restaurants while taking toast and tea.

In the Zoom the women glitch and freeze,

Talking of their NFTs.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to apply a background of my choice,

And a filter to enhance my voice – 

(They will say: “How her face has grown fat!”)

A fancy blouse, some makeup and my cat,

My face composed while on my phone I chat --

(They will say: “Even her cat is fat!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the Twitterverse?

In a minute there is time

For tweets and retweets which a keystroke will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Asynchronous lectures, webinars, livestreams,

I have measured out my life with quarantines;

I know the voices fading as connections fail

Leaving silence shouting from the laptop screen.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

The eyes that peer above the mask begging to be seen,

And when I am vaccinated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am jabbed, rejoicing, at the mall,

Then how should I begin

To face the variants that soon come on in waves?

And how should I presume?

And I have known account names, known them all—

Selfies edited with automated care

(Removed are age lines and some graying hair!)

Is it pictures from a trip

That I would like to skip?

Selfies taken in a crowd, no masks in view at all.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched miasmas rising from the lungs

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a valiant Antifa

Marching along the streets of mad cities.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Dulled by TV binges,

Biopics of singers,

Edgy standup comics, blood-soaked fantasy.

Should I, after comedies and spoofs,

Have the strength to make the nation face its truths?

But though I have masked and distanced, vaxed and boosted,

Though I have seen my hair (pandemic grown) resume its natural shade,

I am no influencer – my content’s undisplayed;

I have seen my viral moment pass and flicker,

And I have seen the eternal A.I. flag my post and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the chat, the messenger, the Skype,

Among the pizza boxes, among the endless hype,

Would it have been worthwhile,

To have logged off the webcam with a smile,

To have squeezed the internet into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I’m David Bowie, CGI’d from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” -- 

If one, settling a MyPillow by her head

Should say, “That is not what I meant at all;

OK Boomer, not at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worthwhile,

After the riots and the protests and the insurrections,

After the shootings, after the terror, after the blood that spilled along the floor –

And this, and so much more?--

It is impossible to type just what I mean!

But as if an Oculus Rift threw the vid directly on my eyeballs:

Would it have been worthwhile

If one, whose All Lives Matter t-shirt falls,

And turning toward the browser, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

No, I am not Captain America, nor was meant to be;

Am a nameless extra, one that will do

To fill a crowd shot, start a fight or two,

Back up the star; no hero, not super,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Fine for exposition, but no backstory; 

Almost, at times, a blooper.

I’m not here… I’m not here…

I’ve looped a clip I took last year.

Shall I dye my hair orange? Do I dare to eat indoors?

I shall wear Manolo Blahniks and walk upon the floor.

I have heard the people clap for health care heroes. 

I do not think that they will clap for me.

I have seen them surfing nowhere on their phones,

Checking for comments from people never met,

And whatever’s pinged the saved searches they didn’t set.

We have lingered in the matrix of the net

By viral memes we give a thumbs up or thumbs down

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Kornacki Tint My World (from the Election Horror Picture Show)

It was great when it all began

I didn’t care so much about who ran,

I thought that anyone could beat a man,

With glued-on hair and a bright orange tan,

Now the only thing that gives me hope,

Is that New Jersey legalized the dope,

Steve Kornacki tint my world

Cuz he’s the only thing that’s keeping me sane.

We knew results would be coming late

With zen-like patience we would have to wait,

We still need news from just a few more states,

To call a winner and reveal our fate,

Orange man complains the vote is fixed,

And somehow now we’re at November sixth,

Steve Kornacki tint my world

Cuz he’s the only thing that’s keeping me sane.

So much drama!

Help! Obama!

We’ll build, you’ll see,

A post-racial society!

Health care for free,

We’ll listen to Fauci,

End our misery,

Just tell us Biden won!

Vote counts increase,

As more results are released,

There’s so much unease,

About the course we’ll steer,

There’s no decision,

Just hatred and division,

And a thing that clouds our vision,

Trump’s greed is so sincere…

White House Social Media Summit

Seen here for the first time, shocking footage from the recent White House social media summit.

MAGA hat kid vs chanting Native American. I weigh in.

Do I know with certainty why MAGA-hat kid smirked creepily at chanting Native American man? No, I do not. Neither do those who insist that an innocent kid was victimized by social media gone mad and liberal media turned hateful toward white boys. The kid’s motive is known only to him. It is not a fact that can ever be established.

Here’s what I do know:

1. Donald Trump panders to racists. Not only don’t people who wear MAGA hats mind —  that’s why they wear MAGA hats. They’re the ones to whom he’s pandering. A MAGA hat is a public proclamation of allegiance to a fascist-leaning president who routinely uses “Pocahantas” as an insult and treats Wounded Knee as a joke. To an authoritarian buffoon who whips up fear and support in his base by characterizing Mexicans as violent rapists and urban (read black) America as a pit of crime and depredation. To a corrupt autocrat who rode to power courting white supremacists and who put Breitbart and the alt-right in the White House. To a president who praises foreign dictators and disdains democratic allies. A MAGA hat is a statement, just like a KKK hood is a statement. It speaks volumes. When you are wearing it, you are by definition non-neutral. You are saying something. This is a fact.

2. It’s beyond obnoxious for a Catholic school to send a bunch of teenage boys to protest abortion. If they tell a 14-year-old boy that he is qualified to dictate family-planning morality to adult women, it’s not unreasonable to infer he’s been raised with a sense of privilege that would make him act like an entitled brat when confronted by soapbox extremists and Native American activists. This is inference supported by reason, but not hard fact.

3. A bunch of sheltered Kentucky boys from an overwhelmingly white, largely Republican town came to the Big City. They encountered some batshit-crazy soapbox preachers. In New York, we’d have called that Tuesday. Or possibly Wednesday. Or Any Day. In fact, Black Hebrew Israelites were a Times Square staple for ages. We Coastal Elites know fringe nut jobs when we see them. But of course, if you’ve led a sheltered life in a mostly white, Republican Kentucky town, and been weaned on Fox News, you’d probably think this miserable little group of black men represented an entire race bent on destroying you and your whole way of life. Instead of ignoring them (if you haven’t been moved away from them by responsible adults, as should have happened), you’d engage them, and in your adolescent wisdom, you’d think school spirit cheers were a clever, passive-aggressive way to express yourselves while your MAGA hats do the real talking. Fact-based inference again.

4. Since the D.C. event went viral, other information has emerged about Covington Catholic that reflects a school culture that conforms to what one might expect of an elite Catholic boys’ prep school: sports-obsessed, aggressive bro culture. Whatever you think of this video of a basketball game or this photo (Is that kid in blackface? Are they verbally harassing a black player? Or is it just some school tradition of body paint combined with the usual displays of aggression boys are taught to make at sporting events?), it sure puts into perspective what this school considers to be “school spirit.” Fact, some inference.

5. The first time I ever saw someone whom I could readily identify as Native American was in a Wyoming diner in the mid-1970s. A Native American woman ate while her two young children played on the floor under the table, bothering no one. A white waitress approached the woman and yelled at her to “keep her brats quiet or get the hell out.” It was one of the most blatantly racist moments I’ve ever witnessed. It created a prejudice in me. Ever since, I have been disposed to take the word of a Native American over that of a white person in interpreting the racial subtext of an encounter. Of course, in any given encounter, the Native American could be wrong and the white person could be right. A prejudice is not rational. Personal bias. But...

6. MAGA HAT. FACT.

Birthright citizenship, fascism, and Trump

This is about birthright citizenship — how my family was nearly wiped out for the lack of it and was saved by a country that had it. But of course, this is really about Donald Trump and his threat to end birthright citizenship in the United States by executive order. Yes, I know, he can't really do that; it's an election-season stunt. But it's nevertheless important to understand what he is saying, why he is saying it, and to whom it's meant to appeal.

Trump and his followers would have you believe that this is a simple numbers game — that it's about the right of a sovereign nation to protect itself from an overwhelming number of immigrants becoming a burden on society. But what it's really about, now and historically, is not numbers of citizens, but kinds -- as in, keeping out the wrong kinds. If you doubt it, look at the 1898 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the 14th amendment should be applied to all people born on American soil: “The Fourteenth Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.”

Justice Horace Gray recognized that the case before the court was aimed at making it possible to withhold American citizenship from non-white people by excluding them from the birthright defined by the 14th Amendment. In fact, the 14th Amendment was a Reconstruction measure guaranteeing citizenship rights in response to to questions about the status of former slaves following the Civil War. Whatever specious arguments are brought against birthright citizenship today, in reality, the attempt to end it is still about giving the state the ability to keep out certain kinds of people. In promising to end it, Trump is telling his followers that he will stop at nothing to keep America white and Christian. The moment we require American-born children of non-citizens to apply for citizenship rather than be automatically granted it, we open the door to denying them citizenship for reasons like “race or color.” Trump’s followers get that, loud and clear.

Which brings me to my own family history.

My father arrived in the United States on July 4, 1939, with his parents and brother, refugees from Nazi Germany. It was a miracle they made it — and the lack of birthright citizenship in Europe played a major role in their harrowing tale. You can hear my father tell the whole story in the video below, but here are the key elements as they pertain to the citizenship question.

My father’s father’s parents were Poles who emigrated to Austria in the 1880s, where my father’s father was born. Since there was no birthright citizenship, my father’s father was a Polish citizen by virtue of parentage. He grew up in Vienna. He spoke German and learned no Polish. As an adult, he moved to Budapest, where he married, and where my father’s brother was born. He, too, was a Polish citizen — no birthright citizenship. Eventually, the family moved to Berlin, where my father was born — also no birthright citizenship.

In the 1930s, there were tens of thousands of Jews who were Polish citizens living in Germany. I don’t say Polish Jews, because many of them, like my father’s family, had never been to Poland, spoke no Polish, and had no affinity for that country. After all, they had fled what had been, until the Nazi era, the more virulent anti-Semitism of Poland for the greater tolerance of Germany.

But as Nazism took hold of Germany, Poland anticipated that all those Jews with Polish citizenship would come flooding back from Germany, and they weren’t too keen on the prospect. They announced that they would require any Polish citizen who had been out of the country for an extended period to obtain a special note from a Polish consulate before being admitted to Poland. But Jews couldn’t get that note. Essentially, Polish Jews in Germany were left stateless. Germany, meanwhile, was interested in ridding itself of as many Jews as possible. Deporting Polish Jews seemed like a good place to start.

On October 28, 1938, the SS knocked on the door of my grandparents’ apartment in Berlin, handed my grandfather a deportation order (pictured here), took him away, and put him on a train bound for Poland, a country totally alien to him. The Germans had decided to deport all Polish Jewish men over a certain age, whether the Poles wanted them or not. My father was too young for the deportation. His brother, while old enough, got away with lying to the SS about his age, and was not taken. But my grandfather was given a few minute to pack some belongings, forcibly removed from his home, and deported within hours.

German persecution of the Jews always took place within the framework of its own laws. The Germans prided themselves upon being a nation of laws, as we do. But laws can be made to serve evil ends. The targeted, anti-Semitic deportation of Polish Jews was simply the selective enforcement of a sovereign nation’s right to expel non-citizens, most of whom were Poles simply because birthright citizenship did not exist.

Months earlier, my grandparents had begun a desperate attempt to obtain visas to the United States. Miraculously, they succeeded — but only after my grandfather’s deportation. My grandmother, father, and uncle were in Berlin. Four American visas were at the embassy in Berlin. But my grandfather was stuck in Poland. In order to receive his American visa, he had to appear personally at the embassy in Berlin. Had he not devised a risky scheme to re-enter Germany, rejoin his family, pick up the American visas, and hightail it out of there, it’s likely my grandmother would have elected to join my grandfather in Poland rather than emigrate to America without him. The whole family would probably have perished in the Holocaust. How they managed it is a long story (which my father tells in the video below, if you’re interested), but suffice to say, they did. That’s how it came to pass that my father had his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July, 80 years ago.

By awarding citizenship based on blood line rather than place of birth, European nations in the 19th and early 20th centuries were preserving their ability to enforce a narrow, exclusive idea of nationality — of who belongs and who does not. It was the perfect tool for fascists. Trump’s backward nationalism is a throwback to that ideology, and it’s no wonder he landed on the issue of birthright citizenship as a means of telegraphing that. Make no mistake: Trump is signaling a promise to preserve white, Christian dominance of the United States. Given his fear-mongering and dog whistles about immigrants, non-Christians, and non-whites, who can doubt it? His rabid base know exactly what he’s getting at -- and they love it.

Would you believe me?

This is about what we remember and what we don’t; what we say and what we don't; whom we believe and whom we don’t. It’s about something that happened to me. It is 100% true, but I could not prove it if my life depended on it. It’s also about Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and Me Too.

Forty years ago, the summer I was 16, I took a trip from New York to California with my older brother, traveling partway by car with friends and the rest of the way by bus, mostly putting up in cheap motels and campsites along the way. That’s how we came to stay one night at a campground in Monterey, California. I couldn’t tell you the date, or the name of the campground, or its exact location. It was, after all, 40 years ago.

We struck up a conversation with the guy at the neighboring campsite, who was alone. I don’t remember his name. We agreed to pool our food and have dinner together. At the time, it seemed like one of those nice things that happen when camping — helping each other out, being neighborly, sharing. My brother and I contributed Hebrew National hot dogs. I don’t remember what he contributed. We ate together by the fire in our campsite, chatting. When we were done, my brother volunteered to go wash the dishes at the outdoor faucet by the bathrooms.

As soon as he was gone, the demeanor of our new “friend” changed completely. I don’t remember what he said, or if he said anything. I just remember that he shoved me across the picnic table, pinned my arms above my head, and smashed his mouth against mine. I remember the feeling of the hard wooden table under my back. I remember our teeth clicking together. I remember being scared. Kicking and squirming, I managed to get out from under him and flee. I ran to the bathrooms and found my brother. I told him what had happened.

I don’t remember my brother’s exact words, but I know he was angry and wanted to confront the man. I told him not to. I didn’t want to make a scene. I told him to just stick with me and not leave me alone. We returned to our campsite. The guy was nowhere to be seen. Presumably, he had retreated to his tent. We got into ours and went to sleep. The next morning, when we got up, he and his tent were gone. There was no sign he’d ever been there. We ate breakfast, broke camp, and continued on our way.

It never occurred to me to report the incident to the authorities. I wouldn't have wanted to disrupt our trip, let alone my life, but I probably didn't even consider that. I simply didn’t think one reported such an event — a near miss. I didn’t think a crime had been committed. It would have been like calling the cops to say that a car whose license number you didn’t get had almost hit you on the highway, but you’d swerved and avoided the collision. It would have been reporting a non-event.

I never mentioned the incident to my brother again. It would have just made him uncomfortable, and anyway, what would have been the point? Nothing had happened.

Except something had. It didn’t damage me in a profound way. I didn’t become phobic, suffer PTSD, or develop an anxiety disorder. But I became much more cautious about being alone with strange men in isolated places. Like all New York girls, I had been raised with the usual warnings: Don’t walk alone at night; don’t get off the subway at the wrong stop; carry your keys sticking through your fingers; don’t walk too close to the buildings where someone can pull you into an alley or doorway; don’t hitchhike; don’t make eye contact; don’t wear revealing clothes; don’t go into bars alone; don’t go to the wrong neighborhood; always carry cab fare; boys only want one thing. So even though I was the sort of person who liked adventure and risk-taking, I took this experience as a check on my reckless nature -- a lesson in sensible precautions. I followed all of the self-defense advice. I cultivated a tough “Do not fuck with me” face, which I wore around the city, especially in the subway. I showed no fear, believing that to show fear was to make oneself vulnerable.

As time went on, I frequently thought about what might have happened if I hadn't gotten away, about what I had narrowly escaped, my understanding of the event increasing as I learned more about the world. Still, I didn’t tell anyone about it. It made me uncomfortable to think about. I probably mentioned it to no one for at least 20 years; the only person I recall specifically telling, even then, was my husband. But it was only recently that I came to think of it explicitly as what it was: an escape from an attempted rape.

When I began writing this, I messaged my brother, asking, “The summer we traveled cross-country, we spent a night at a campground in Monterey. Do you remember anything about that?” His reply: “I certainly remember Monterey but I don’t remember a campground.” And why should he? I’m sure that, at the time, he would have seen the incident much as I did: a close call, a non-event. Since it didn’t happen to him personally, with the accompanying fear and adrenaline, it didn’t impress itself on his memory. And I never mentioned it again. So today, he doesn’t remember it. To him, it never happened. I understand that. I can only imagine how many incidents people have told me about that were significant to them, but that I’ve forgotten completely.

To review: I don’t know the name of my attacker. I don’t know the exact location, other than a campground in the vicinity of Monterey, California. I don’t know the date, other than the summer of 1978. I don’t know details like the time or the weather. I can’t describe the man beyond a vague sense of his height, build, and age. The only corroborating witness I can name doesn’t remember the event. But it happened. As surely as I am alive, it happened.

And if I DID know who that guy was, and if that guy were nominated to the Supreme Court, or ran for president? I’d do whatever I could to make sure people knew what he did that night in 1978.

Would you believe me?

Are we heading toward an American version of Romanian orphanages?

The cruel, inhumane, “zero-tolerance” Trump immigration policy, under which children are taken from their parents at the border, has already been much compared to Nazi Germany. I don’t object. It ought to go without saying that there’s absolutely no point to “Never Again” if one isn’t allowed to invoke the Holocaust until there’s an all-out Holocaust.

The problem I have with the comparison is that it’s too broad to be instructive. Yes, it’s part of Trump’s campaign to vilify and dehumanize a vulnerable population in order to stir ultranationalist sentiment. But what, exactly, does this particular chapter in our history say about who we have become and where we’re headed? I’d like to offer what I think is a much closer and more useful comparison: Romanian orphanages.

In 1991-1992, my husband and I spent nearly a year in Romania, which was just emerging from a Communist regime that was even more brutal and bizarre than what most of the Soviet bloc had experienced. My husband was a newly minted pediatrician when the news reached the West of more than 100,000 Romanian children living in squalid conditions in so-called orphanages. (Many, if not most, were not actually orphans, but had been institutionalized by parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t care for them, but had not relinquished custody.) Worse still, a pediatric AIDS epidemic had spread through those institutions. My husband joined a small group of pediatricians who scraped together some funding for a study, and that’s what brought us to Romania. He gathered data for the study and provided medical assistance in several orphanages and hospitals in Bucharest and Galati; I served as a woman Friday, providing logistical and administrative support to his efforts, alongside my own writing projects.

Perhaps you’ve heard the stories: tens of thousands of children warehoused in facilities where they were, at best, neglected, and at worst, abused. Children up to age six or seven or even more, small with malnutrition, spent their days in white metal cribs, rocking and banging themselves against the bars in an effort to self-stimulate, because no one interacted with them, no one held them, no one played with them. Infants had flattened heads because they spent their whole lives lying on their backs in those cribs. Eerie quiet hung over rooms full of children who never cried, because crying brought no response; no one ever came for them. Children with AIDS were transferred from bleak orphanages to even bleaker hospital wards, where they died not from the disease, but from exposure, because their fatal illness became an excuse to deprive them of even the most basic necessities like clothing, food, and heat.

It’s all true. I was there. I saw it. It was a nightmare of inhumanity.

By all reports, the American institutions where immigrant children are being held today are very different. They are, for now at least, only temporary, and the children receive food and clothing and have access to toys, television, and activities.

But here’s the thing: Once upon a time, the Romanian orphanages weren’t that bad, either. There was a long history of orphanages in Romania, and even in the early Ceausescu years, they had not yet become hellholes. But government policy, dictated by an unhinged megalomaniac with his own strange agenda, created the crisis the world saw when the Iron Curtain fell. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, determined to increase Romania’s population in order to grow the work force, banned contraception and abortion, causing a spike in unwanted births and the mass abandonment and institutionalization of children. As children poured into the overburdened system, conditions deteriorated. In a nation where propaganda and rumors replaced facts, where people lived in fear, and where resources were scarce, the disaster inside the orphanages went unchecked.

It seems like a stretch right now to compare Trump’s America to Ceausescu’s Romania, but there are important similarities. Trump is another pompous, self-serving, reality-denying leader who implements inhumane policies to further his own bizarre agenda. He rose to power by stoking fear and hatred of immigrants, particularly those from Muslim and Latin American countries. He believes that, by playing the strong man at the expense of vulnerable immigrants, he’ll reinforce his popularity among his virulently xenophobic base. He’s not interested in what happens to the system as a flood of children hits it, and like the Romanian dictator, he lacks the empathy to concern himself with the effect on the children. Also like Ceausescu, he’s demonstrated a singular willingness to pick the pockets of the masses in order to line his own.

Still, these detention centers, which were originally created to house unaccompanied minors who crossed the border before Trump even became president, provide only temporary shelter and are well supplied, right? No one is going hungry, and the kids eventually move on. What’s the fuss?

As many have already pointed out, any forced separation of a child from a parent is traumatic and can have lasting impact. Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in no uncertain terms after visiting a facility in Texas that what the children there had been subjected to was “a form of child abuse.” No amount of food, toys, or TV change that. These aren’t children whose parents don’t want them or who have hurt them. In many cases, they haven’t even committed a crime (seeking asylum is not a crime, which is why previous administrations didn’t prosecute people for it). The practice of separation, in and of itself, temporary or not, is both unethical and damaging to children.

But more than that, numbers tell the story about where we could very well be headed. Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy is bringing more and more children into an already overtaxed system. From October 2017 to April 2018, 700 families were split by the Trump administration, and from April 18 to May 31, 1,995 children were taken from 1,940 adults. The temporary housing facilities are bursting at the seams. The government has already opened one tent city in Texas; more will surely follow. While the policy is to eventually release the children to family members, many of those relatives are undocumented themselves and are afraid to come forward to receive the children, lest they run the risk of deportation. Foster care is an option, but that system, too, will inevitably max out. Now there’s talk of deporting the parents without their children. How long before we see in America the beginnings of Romania’s nightmare scenario: an explosion of institutionalized children left parentless due to stupid government policy, with conditions deteriorating due to underfunding and neglect? It’s not hard to imagine. We’re already hearing about staff who believe they’re not supposed to pick up or handle young children, who are being left to cry inconsolably for their absent parents. Maybe it would never become the living hell that Romanian orphanages became, but how close is too close for comfort?

And then you have to wonder: Who would work in such places, and how would they treat the children?

When we first arrived in Romania, my husband and I were plagued by one question: How could anyone treat children like this? The caregivers, administrators, and medical staff came to work every single day and maintained a status quo that made outsiders sick to their stomachs. We didn’t personally observe any physical abuse, but what we did see was more than enough: rows of cribs filled with undersize children with vacant eyes who were permanently developmentally delayed and whose most basic needs were not being met.

Not only did orphanage workers fail to show any tenderness or compassion toward their charges; many stole what little they had. Again and again, we heard the stories from foreign aid workers. One in particular stands out. Soon after the fall of Ceausescu, a group of Dutch nurses arrived at a hospital in Galati to work in its pediatric AIDS ward, where HIV-positive children were transferred from the local orphanage to live out their final months. The nurses brought with them many donated supplies, which they stored on the premises, and they retrained the Romanian staff, who began to demonstrate a more caring attitude toward the children. But early on, the nurses made a critical mistake: The entire group traveled to the Netherlands for several days to attend a conference. When they returned, everything they’d brought was gone: medicine, clothing, blankets, even the electric washing machines. They had to start over from scratch.

Eventually we, like all the other aid workers we encountered, began to understand the twisted logic by which this world operated. First, there was the process of self-selection. The people who worked in the orphanages for any length of time lasted precisely because they could tolerate it. No one was there to advocate for the children; everyone worked in service of the system, which demanded only that these unwanted children be kept out of sight and out of mind, and at very little cost. Meanwhile, Ceausescu was busy perpetrating countless other violations of the rights and dignity of the entire nation, sowing terror, demanding absolute fealty, and creating a society where the social contract had entirely broken down. It was every man for himself. Theft and black-marketeering were a way of life in every workplace, and no one hesitated to put their own needs and those of their family ahead of others. And if there were some really horrific bad actors who would commit even worse abuses in the orphanages, we had no doubt that blind eyes would often, if not always, be turned, because no one wanted to rock the boat, attract attention, or cause trouble that could cost them their jobs and even their personal safety.

If you think none of that could happen in America because of some higher moral standard, you’re kidding yourself. Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric has given the stamp of approval to those who value blind obedience and fatuous patriotism over fairness and the rights of individuals. Already, Americans relegate the poor and the mentally ill to prisons and to the streets. We allow health care and education costs to bankrupt families. We shrink our social safety net, leaving kids without food security. Is that so far from warehousing children in inhumane conditions? As detention centers for immigrant children multiply, and as Americans become ever more distracted by our financial troubles, addictions, culture wars, and manufactured fear of the Others who are supposedly stealing our jobs and threatening our security, the separation of immigrant families will become background noise, and the children will be treated in whatever manner the Trump administration sees fit. Not only could it happen; it could happen quickly. This is no time for complacency.

UPDATE: Just hours after publishing this piece, I read this: "The former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News that migrant parents separated from their children at the border are sometimes unable to relocate their child and remain permanently separated." And so it begins...

Riddle me this: What do Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Star Trek Discovery have in common?

You wouldn’t think two of my favorite shows, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Star Trek, have a lot in common. But as of recently, they share one very interesting feature: Both are asking die-hard fans to pony up a lot more money than one normally expects to pay for such entertainment. MFMM, after three seasons on Australian TV with international streaming distribution, launched a crowdfunding campaign to make a feature film (and hit their goal within days). After five Star Trek series on ad-supported broadcast TV and 14 films, Star Trek Discovery is being used as the flagship series of CBS’ new streaming service, CBS All Access, on the theory that Star Trek fans will be willing to pay a monthly fee.

What’s even more interesting is the very different reception these strategies have gotten. With MFMM, it’s very positive. Fans are eagerly pledging, with some even kicking in thousands of dollars in exchange for a chance to appear onscreen or get a piece of wardrobe after the shoot. The tone of the chatter on social media is excited and hopeful. The press coverage emphasizes the dedication and enthusiasm of the fan base rather than the fact that thousands of people are paying a lot of money, most for very minor incentives like a postcard or access to “inside info” (more or less a fan club), so they can get to see a movie they would otherwise have paid 12 bucks for at the theater.  ("Put your sassy magnifying glass away because there’s no mystery here, fans are absolutely humming for a ‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries’ movie,” says this HuffPo article.)  

But the response to ST:DSC on CBS All Access has been far more negative and cynical. Even die-hard ST fans who plan to pay for the service (like me) seem to be resentful. While fans on social media debate whether the series is likely to be any good (as ST fans will), the response to putting it on CBS All Access for U.S. viewing (it will be on Netflix elsewhere) is universally negative. There’s a lot of grumbling about CBS’ greed and abuse of the franchise. The tone of media coverage is more like, “Will rabid ST fans fall for CBS’ money-making ploy?” ("CBS hopes that fans will embrace that vision — and, with credit cards in hand, help build a new business to carry the company forward,” says Variety.)

There are some obvious reasons for the disparity, like the fact that MFMM fandom feels like the little engine that could, since the show isn’t widely known, and the fandom is young and hasn’t been overtly exploited for decades. Also, a crowdfunding campaign on the front end of a project feels voluntary, while a streaming distribution scheme for a finished product feels like being overcharged. The different responses the two efforts have received are more psychological than anything else; MFMM feels inclusive and optimistic, while ST:DSC feels coercive and mercenary.

But in the end, they’re not actually so different. For whatever reason, the producers are calculating that a dedicated fan base will pay well above market price for access to this particular product because they want it so badly. What’s more, MFMM fans are handing producers their hard-earned money with no guarantee they will actually get a movie. (Do people realize that Kickstarter itself offers no guarantee that a project will be completed? I wonder how many people have actually read the terms of service? “The creator is solely responsible for fulfilling the promises made in their project. If they’re unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may be subject to legal action by backers.” In other words, if you sent the creator money and they didn’t make the thing, you could sue them. Good luck.) At least with ST:DSC, you don’t have to pay a dime until the product actually exists (which it does; the premiere is a few days away!), and for that matter, until the product has actually been seen and reviewed. And yet, people are more negative about the ST:DSC model. Humans are funny that way.

Interesting thought experiment: What if the two were reversed? What if ST:DSC had had a crowdfunding campaign and MFMM were being used to anchor a paid streaming service? Would the responses be reversed as well? Possibly not, because MFMM is still relatively small and hasn’t already been monetized to death the way ST has. But still, I wonder.

The end of the line

This morning, a Facebook friend posted this wonderful New York Times article from 2008 called “The Curious World of the Last Stop.” Reporter Andy Newman rode to the end of every subway line in the city and wrote about what he found there. Reading it, I was reminded of my own end-of-the-line story. I think about it surprisingly often, but I’ve never written it down before.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to spend summers in a rented beach bungalow in Far Rockaway. She was one of a shrinking group of old folks from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who still did that. The neighborhood out there was getting rougher and rougher, and those who could afford it had long ago started summering farther out on Long Island or at the Jersey Shore. But my grandma never left Williamsburg and Far Rockaway. That was her world.

When I was little, my father used to take me to visit her there. Sometimes, we’d go just for the day; sometimes, Dad would leave me with Grandma for a little vacation. I'd stay a few days, going to the beach and playing skee ball on the boardwalk. As I got older, we stopped going. But when I was in high school, I decided it would be nice to visit Grandma in Far Rockaway, maybe one last time. I called her and told her I was coming. She was so excited. I knew she'd be out buying fruit and stale marzipan as soon as we got off the phone. She insisted she would meet me at the subway stop so I wouldn't get lost finding her bungalow, so I gave her an arrival time.

This was the 1970s. No internet with interactive trip planners, and no cell phones. I was a Manhattan kid. To me, a long subway ride was, like, 45 minutes. So off I go: transfer to the A train, get a seat, I'm all set. I ride. And ride. And ride and ride and ride. The time I gave Grandma comes and goes. And still I ride. I'm starting to feel kind of bad, because now I'm late, and my old grandma is standing there waiting for me. I figure I'm going to keep her standing for 15 minutes…no, 20…no, 25. No. ONE HOUR. The ride to Far Rockaway, the end of the A line, was a full hour longer than I had thought possible. And when I finally arrived, Grandma was standing there with a big hug and a smile. She never said a word about the time. We walked to her bungalow, where there was fruit and stale marzipan, which I ate gratefully. It tasted like humble pie.

To this day, I can't even tell this story without feeling horrible. Forty years later, this is still my greatest regret -- I made Grandma wait for an hour at the end of the line.

That mysterious pain is an underregulated industry kicking you in the face. Again.

Freeze your credit, they said. That'll protect you from identity theft, they said. Except: "A security freeze doesn’t protect you if the thieves break into the vault of the company that maintains the freeze. That’s what happened here, and we will now spend years seeing what happens next."  (NY Times) Yup. The bastards broke into the system where they keep the magic PIN that unfreezes your credit file.

That said, you should still freeze your credit, on the theory that maybe you're not already doomed. Not a very sound theory, but what the hell, hope springs eternal. That’s what they told my husband and me to do when we discovered we had an identity-theft problem. I believe their exact words were, “When you’re done waving goodbye to all your horses as they run down the road, never to be seen again, why don’t you go ahead and lock that barn door?”

You can freeze your credit with each agency online, by phone, or by snail mail. (More info here.) Depending on state law, it might cost a little money. Based on a sample size of two (my husband and me), each method offers advantages and disadvantages.

Online: You get your magic PIN immediately (for all the good it does you — see above). But you feel all queasy about sending your social security number and other identifying information over a system that seems less secure than the diary you had in junior high with the little lock and the key you kept in the special-treasures box in your desk drawer. And for some reason, sometimes after you input all your info, the damn thing still says “Sorry, Charlie, no can do,” forcing you to try calling anyway.

By phone: It’s still an automated system, only you have to wait to get your PIN by snail mail. But for some reason, it might work even when the online one doesn’t. Same queasy feeling applies. Plus there’s that robotic voice reminding you that your finances are actually overseen by AI gnomes from the uncanny valley.

Snail mail: Didn’t do it, but I suspect you’ll send off your request and forget the whole thing until you get a reply. If you get a reply. And that queasy feeling isn’t going away. Especially given the fact that one of the easiest ways to steal someone’s identity turns out to be putting in a change-of-address request for them, because the U.S. Postal Service has no security whatsoever. My husband and I learned this the hard way. In no time at all, all your mail could start going somewhere else. Oh, the post office will notify you of the change…AFTER it’s been made. And good luck getting it changed back. But I digress…

Be warned, the credit agencies' websites will do everything possible to direct you toward their credit-monitoring products, which cost money. They make it really difficult to find the free and/or cheap stuff, like requesting your free credit report or placing a freeze. That's because, unless and until you pay for their monitoring service, you are not their customer, you are just a pain in their ass. In fact, you (or your data) are the product they are selling to their real customers, the lenders. So when you freeze your credit, you’re making it harder for them to make money off you. Navigating credit agency websites is not unlike trying to find the bathroom in a casino. You just want to take care of urgent business that should cost you nothing, but somehow you keep winding up back at the slot machines.

WHY ARE WE NOT REGULATING THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF THIS INDUSTRY????

(Hint: "The Wall Street Journal reports that in the months leading up to the attack, Equifax spent at least $500,000 lobbying federal regulators and Congress to relax regulation of credit-reporting companies. Among the focus of its requests? Data security and breach notification, cyber security threat information sharing, and the coup de grace: limiting the legal liability of credit-reporting companies.")

PS — In an effort to control the free-fall of its reputation, Equifax has dropped its credit-freeze fees for those unfortunates in states where such fees are legal. For 30 days. And they’re not paying your fees at the other two agencies. But hey, you can always still pump quarters into their slot machine.

PPS -- The Equifax website told me my data was probably compromised, so I signed up for the free credit monitoring. That process was suspiciously quick, and the confirmation message said only something like, "your request has been received," so I suspect my data just went to a holding pen to be dealt with later. Probably a dot matrix printer in back of a Denny's somewhere. Which is probably more secure than whatever they were using before. And if those bastards start charging me for the monitoring service after the free year is up, so help me god, I will blog about it so hard. Not like it matters anyway though. A free year of credit monitoring is like saying, "This bank is protected by armed guards. Who go to lunch in an hour."

If the Star Trek series were beers

TOS: Heineken. It’s the first beer you discover that actually tastes like something, and you fall in love. You order it again and again and again. It certainly beats that godawful piss from Anheuser-Busch. Lord knows there are times when you overindulge and later have regrets, but that’s ok. You have standards, and Bud is not gonna cut it. After awhile, you discover there are other good beers – maybe even better beers – and you stop ordering Heineken. But now and then you go back to it for nostalgia’s sake. Yep, still satisfying. In some ways, your first love is always your favorite.

TAS: Shandy. Is it beer? Is it soda? The answer is YES! You feel like, as an adult, you shouldn’t be drinking it at all, but it becomes a guilty pleasure. Hiding underneath all that fizzy lemonade is a unique buzz you come to enjoy – a combination of sugar and alcohol that you keep coming back to. But you don’t tell people because, let’s face it, you’re putting soda in your beer.

TNG: Amstel Light. Finally, a new beer! After all those Heinekens, everyone is talking about how great this is going to be. And it looks so classy in that brown bottle with that impressive coat of arms. You try it – and it tastes like nothing. It’s not bad, exactly. It’s just bland. Inoffensive. A watered-down version of a decent beer. All around you, people are guzzling it like it’s the greatest thing ever, and you just can’t figure out why. But still, you’re just grateful people are finally branching out a bit, so you keep your opinion to yourself, and when offered an Amstel Light at a party, you just smile and say thanks.

DS9: Sam Adams Boston Lager. Damn, that is good beer. This is what happens when you really let beer be beer. At first, you think you will never need another beer. But suddenly, there are lots of good beers all around you. Sam Adams is great, yeah, but – it’s not always what you want. Some days, you admit privately, it lets you down. There are all these little craft beers constantly beckoning. “Try me!” they say, and sometimes you do, and sometimes they’re great, and sometimes they’re awful. But you keep coming back to that Sam Adams, because more often than not, it delivers.

VOY: Corona. OMG it’s like Amstel Light all over again! It’s the holodeck of beers, conjuring up a fantasy of lounging on a deserted, white, sandy beach with your impossibly hot sweetheart, toes in the water, sun in your eyes. You reach out, grasp an ice-cold bottle just deposited there by some mysterious, invisible hand, take a sip, and…nothing. It’s a nice dream, and you check in with it from time to time just for the pretty, but usually you leave disappointed and unfulfilled.

ENT: Guinness. Either you love it or you hate it. It’s rich, dark, and robust – but not to everyone’s taste. What’s more, a lot can go wrong with it. If it’s not fresh, or it’s not poured just right, or it’s too cold or too warm, it can be downright foul. But when it’s good, it’s so, so good. Complex, deeply satisfying, with a thick, creamy head you could just take a bath in. Maybe not the beer you want to drink every day with all your meals – but one that holds special rewards when you’re willing to give it the attention it deserves.

Embarrassment is sort of embarrassing, when you think about it

Embarrassment is a really weird emotion. It’s related to shame, but it’s not exactly the same. Shame is an emotion you can feel about something even if no one else knows about it. It’s connected to your internal sense of right and wrong. Which isn’t to say that shame can’t be influenced by outside factors like cultural norms, religion, the disapproval of others, etc. But whether originating from without or within, shame is about how you feel about what you did.

 Embarrassment, on the other hand, is entirely about how you feel about what other people saw you do. And it’s not even entirely about right and wrong. Sure, you can be embarrassed about getting caught doing something shameful. But you can also be embarrassed about being seen doing something that is totally an accident and not your fault, like tripping on the sidewalk or a bird pooping on your head. Those are misfortunes. We worry people will judge us to be clumsy, or our condition will revolt them. We’re not even sure why we feel so bad. We just do. And the feeling can be really intense, even about something relatively trivial -- as strong or even stronger than the shame we feel about having intentionally harmed someone or failed in a responsibility. Most of us probably still cringe at the memory of some embarrassing moment that happened when we were children, despite our adult knowledge that it was no big deal and is in fact a common occurrence in children (like, say, peeing the bed or forgetting a line in the school play).

 The downside of being social creatures, I guess. Humans are weird.

It's art, it's history, it's art history

This article about a pilgrimage to Spiral Jetty made me pull out my college art history textbook: Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 7th edition. Back then, Gardner was divided into five parts that reflected the West's idea of history: the Ancient World; the Middle Ages; the Non-European world; the Renaissance and the Baroque and Rococo; and the Modern World. When it was my textbook, Spiral Jetty was just about a decade old. I remember staring at the black-and-white photo; the book is filled with such photos, which paradoxically utterly fail to capture the art they represent. Also paradoxically, the inadequacy of that photo made it one of my favorites. It appears on page 869 out of 889 total (excluding glossary and index). The chapter is called simply, "Painting and Sculpture After World War II." 

From the epilogue: "The transformation of the world by science and technology is the signal fact that separates the modern epoch from all of the past....The iconic, mythic, and social function of representation has been monopolized by mechanical media -- photography, motion pictures, television. By these means images have been produced and reproduced in countless millions. The art object itself, through sophisticated means of reproduction, loses its uniqueness and it's 'space,' like the original sound of an orchestral performance reproduced in high-fidelity recording....Meanwhile, the Tradition has been dismantled." 

How many more pages are there in Gardner today? The Internet tells me there are now multiple editions; one is called A Global History and another The Western Perspective. 

We had no idea of the deluge that was to come, just as now we have no idea of the deluge that is to come. Like Spiral Jetty.