You Know Who, Preacher, sobriety-mimicry, and Harper Lee in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

(Two people were murdered on a MAX train and a third almost died when they tried to intervene when a man was screaming abuse at two teenage women, one of whom was wearing a hijab. It happened at my train stop. That’s too much to unpack right now. Tabled. This skips over it.)

Newt Gingrich tweeted today:

Every foreign leader attacking Pres Trump over leaving Paris Accord -further proof the deal was one sided and better for foreigners than US

Jesus. Yes. That is the only possible explanation.

(I used to hold a tiny speck of appreciation for this guy - despite… oh, lordy - because at least he wanted a Moon base and was interested in space. But it turns out that wanting a Moon base only goes so far. And these days there is no bottom.)

Look on the bright side. The whole rest of the world, bar Nicaragua (who didn’t think it went far enough, because it is, after all, completely voluntary, with each country setting its own target) and Syria, signed on to this thing. It looks like most of them are going to ratify it at home. And of course coal isn’t going to start back up in a big way no matter what, and solar is going to continue to expand…

This concludes our reference to the bright side.

The rest - such fodder for colorful commentary. Horrifyingly so.
I said the manner and charm of Trump’s meeting with world leaders was like a bathtub with several bobbing bath toys and a turd.

I can’t even go into my amazement at how Trump has now made Germany and Europe think they may have to consider America an unreliable ally - how they even have to plan in case the U.S. might become a potential adversary - how that level of trust in the U.S. has been shaken that much. Well, I could. At length. LENGTH. Different mood.

I was so deep in editing I don’t think I ever wrote about my shock and agony when Trump’s budget proposal, for Congress’s deal to fund the government, would have shut down so much funding for science and so on.
Well, the Republican Congresscritters (many of which may have been secretly shocked themselves) didn’t have the votes, they had to deal with the Democrats to get votes, which lost them all the hard-right votes, which meant that they had to deal with the Democrats even more… so the whole nightmare just went away.
And I inwardly celebrated. But since then I have found that Trump’s proposal for the 2018 budget contains the same proud, blind idiocies.

And all the foreign translators who translate Trump as accurately as they can manage are in continuous danger of being thought bad translators and being fired. Soon only the treacherous and the creative will survive.

Honestly, it incentivizes a capering silliness in the imagination. Coping. However, I am finally done with what turned out to be an eight-month project, and I am now planting the vegetable garden with black tomatoes and Mediterranean cucumbers, so some of it is perhaps glorious decompression. And of course summer is here.

I am getting more mileage out of rewatching the first season of the zany, absurd, blasphemous fantasy/black-comedy show Preacher - and watching the teaser for the upcoming second season - than a fully sane mind would be capable of.

Here - though there’s no reason at all but whimsy to show or to look - is an idea of what I’ve been balming myself with - (who knows, maybe you’re in a silly-seeking-coping mood too):

The pilot episode of Preacher, the beginning of the first season:

And (but only for the virtuous heroes who watched that!) the 30-second teaser for the second season:

Whimsy, yes.

(For the marijuana I would be depressed not to grow even though it’s silly, I am going to plant “Northern Lights”. No more of last year’s ridiculous so-very-logical experiment where I chose a strain that turned out to give such a clearheaded high that you could only detect that you were under the influence at all if you thought it over for five minutes - and perhaps not even then. Very strong, because it only took a single small inhaled puff to induce the . . . near-flawless mimicry of sobriety. And I’ve now emptied all the Mason jars of perfectly cured, completely useless ganja straight into the compost-tumbler. “Clear-headed enough not to interfere with work” - yes! - but I don’t work under the influence regardless! And given that I couldn’t even tell, what would be the point?!? No, this time I am going to grow pot that will be giggly, and boneless, and evening-only, and undeniably there.)

But still the strangenesses of humankind at this juncture keep crowding in around the door. There was what happened on the train. And here is something I wrote a week ago:

So I finally read Go Set A Watchman. How I got hold of a copy:

I was walking from home down to Hollywood to the transit center there, and on the swoop down a hill there was one of those little free library cabinets. I had left my house without preparation - leaving an argument with my mom - and I wasn’t carrying a book as I do usually. To remedy this deficiency and get my mind off the silly dispute, I stopped and looked carefully. Crap - dull stuff - crap… holy cow, Harper Lee.

So I opened the cabinet and took out Go Set A Watchman.

A woman came bustling down from the house, smiling. It became plain that she knew which book I had taken out, and I think she might have known from watching my expression as I looked in the little window and then fixated. She approached me in sort of the manner of a church usher - to say something:

She said that she thought the reviews had been wrong. “The reviews said he was a racist in the book. That’s not right. He wasn’t a racist. It was just the culture. So I think the reviews got it wrong.”

Well, I spent the next couple of hours reading it and finished on the MAX coming back.

The book - which is really not a sequel and definitely not a first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, although the characters do match; it’s the novel she wrote before she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird and got it published - is about a young woman’s return to her home town from college… and her stunning discovery that the town’s white residents have revealed a racism, previously invisible to her, in suddenly truly full-fanged form in the face of NAACP activism and the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision.

And, to her horror and astonishment, the elderly Atticus Finch is right in the middle of it and agrees with it. She finds a racist booklet amid his books, titled The Black Plague. She sees him sitting at the front table at a “citizen’s committee” meeting next to a frothing racist speaker. Toward the end of the novel he explains his views, which are less frothing in style but quite definitive. In a disturbing scene earlier, when the son of his former housekeeper has run over a person with his car, she overhears Atticus deciding to represent the boy… and explicitly talking about getting him in prison before the NAACP can get involved and start agitating for black people on the jury.

Not racist? The reviews weren’t merely right - it’s actually what the book is about. And Harper Lee refers to it by name.

But here’s this woman bustling down her driveway to the sidewalk to tell me this. It was important… The reviews are wrong. It was just the culture.

This when Lee wasn’t merely writing about the general racism of Alabama over an extended time, but about an acute eruption of it.

The social absorption of the message “racism is bad” has had, by its very success, the weirdest paradoxical effect in some white quarters of boosting the message “racism isn’t bad” - in the form of “racism isn’t racism.”

There is this mirror maze of “me and mine are okay” that leads to an end condition where accusations of white racism are false even when they’re true.

And in this case it is not some situation in reality - reality always being ambiguous if only in the sense of being pre-characterization. This is a test tube where… in the text… Lee specifically laid out and specified the white racism and its undiluted form.

But “he’s not racist, that was just the culture.”

It’s as if, in this situation in which ego met morality, the very relationship of words to meaning has given way to resolve the dilemma.

Last updated June 02, 2017