It declines to offer a way out of the evil

Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos reported that Gene McGee, mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi has said he will not give the Madison County Library System a budgeted $100,000. The reason is the library has several LGBTQ+ books. He’ll block the money until the library gets rid of the books. His reasons is the books go against his Christian beliefs. Sigh. We’re not over this nonsense yet. Or conservatives have somehow been emboldened by national politics. City Council members dispute the mayor has the authority to override an already approved city budget. They don’t agree with him and will challenge the legality of his withholding the money. The book Maus (German for “mouse”) by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel depicting the Holocaust. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that the book had been the centerpiece of an eighth grade module of the Holocaust in McMinn County, Tennessee. Had been because the McMinn County School Board, in a unanimous vote, banned it for containing the word “bitch” and other vulgar words. Many are puzzled by that reason, convinced the real reason is because the topic is the Holocaust. Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the book, is baffled by the move, calling it Orwellian. He used to refuse interviews, but started speaking out because of the nasty guy. Clawson quoted author Neil Gaiman who tweeted:

There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

Gaiman’s Twitter feed included a link to a thread by taber about Maus. What he says is the reason why I didn’t buy the book when I first saw it in a bookstore 25 years ago. taber wrote:

I think Maus intimidates some Americans because it declines to offer a way out of the evil, never touches a Christian redemption for sin, and most of all, offers no peace in the crushing weight of death or the unlikely absence of it. you're not lucky to live or saved to die. Maus isn't a story told to celebrate any heroism or offer any salvation. It's not told from the perspective of a victim. It's told from the perspective of a Jew, and it's told Jewishly, with what joy may come derived from the minor ways to antagonize the machinery of destruction.

That Tennessee school board may want a more “appropriate” book because the Evangelical theology focuses on the hero and savior. This book has none because from the Jewish view there was no hero in WWII. Though there were many small heroic actions by the Jews these are tiny gestures in the face of the insistence of the murderers. Jeff Tiedrich tweeted:

fun historical fact: when my uncle spent three years in a Warsaw basement, hiding from the Nazis, it wasn't because they wanted to vaccinate him

Kurt Anderson, writing for The Atlantic, discussed human sacrifice through history and compared it to the current pandemic. Since the pandemic there have been comments about human sacrifice, such as those workers who showed up to keep a business working even though they risked their lives (we used to call them heroes). Human sacrifice is defined as a society doing organized killing of people to please a supernatural being. In the past all of those chosen to die actually died. Today there is only an increased chance of death. Anderson listed several key features of societies that practiced human sacrifice. He also discussed how well America in 2021 fit into each feature. * They were relatively advanced and had a large enough population they could dispose of people without a big loss in numbers. Most victims were elderly or of low status. * Sacrifices were often in response to a natural calamity, such as an epidemic. This is based on the belief that calamities were punishment by the supernatural. * Sacrifices happened in societies where a highly supernatural religion was deeply intertwined with state governance. * The sacrifices were of enormous scale. The Aztecs killed perhaps tens of thousands. * Those who volunteered were promised a special, honored place in the afterlife. This is “sacrificial trickery.” Of course, many of those killed didn’t volunteer. * The victims rarely understand the reasons or goals of the sacrifice. They didn’t know to which god they were being sacrificed or how their death would bring about a better life for those left behind. * Sacrifices are much more common in societies with a strong social hierarchy. The killing played a central role in helping those at the top control those at the bottom. Yes, Anderson found America fits quite well into the features of a society that practices human sacrifice. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the word sequela. It means a long term condition that is the result of a disease. After the original illness a sequela may show up months (hearing loss after mumps), years (a brain disorder after measles), even decades (shingles after chicken pox). The 1918 flu pandemic caused a wave of depression a couple years later and increased heart disease in males born during the pandemic that showed up six decades later. We know about long COVID. However, because the virus infects so many parts of the body, nasty surprises may show up for a long time. Even if a condition is rare, because so many caught the virus, the numbers dealing with ongoing conditions could be enormous. The effects of this virus will be with us for decades. Gabriel Hébert-Mild tweeted:

We are running the craziest clinical trial in history right now, which is to see how many emerging variants modern societies can handle before a larger scale disaster happens.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Zack Beauchamp interviewing Lee Drutman on Vox (I guess these are Drutman’s thoughts). A reason why the GOP has been taken over by an extreme faction is because we have a two party system. Republicans have been quite thorough in demonizing Democrats. So if a Never Trumper doesn’t like the extremes of his party he goes along anyway or switches to the enemy. That wouldn’t be such an issue of there was also a center-right party. Conan O’Brien tweeted:

It’s a slippery slope from woke M&M’s to Same-Skittle marriage.

They were alive six months ago

A couple days ago I mentioned the Detroit Memorial on Belle Isle. Today I went to see it.

Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River and has been a park since 1879. It has been and is the city’s playground. It hosts the Detroit Grand Prix and there’s a boat race in the section of the river between the island and mainland (though neither was held this year).

This memorial is to remember the 1500 city residents who have died of COVID-19. The city asked families to submit pictures and got over 900 of them. They were enlarged to four feet by four feet and placed around a couple main drives of the island. I think I heard they were spaced twelve feet apart. A little math says such a display would be more than two miles long, though by putting photos on both sides of the road for much of the route the total length was over a mile.

I was on the left side of the one way road, so I’ll start with a view of the left side. This shows how big the posters were.

A break in traffic allowed me to see the right side of the road. This gives a tiny bit better idea of how big this is, though doesn’t close to the enormity of it. This shows maybe 25 pictures out of the 900. There was just no way to capture it all on one picture, no place to stand for that to happen.

Moving slowly past the photos gives one time to think. Each one of these photos shows a vital person. It’s one thing to say the virus killed 1500 people in Detroit. It’s quite another to see the faces of 900 of them. They were alive six months ago. They aren’t now. Detroit was hit hard early in the pandemic when we were all learning about it. But I feel those that died in the last three months probably would not have if our federal response had been adequate. I’m thankful that the state response has been good.

Though I’ve lived in the Detroit area for almost 40 years I think this is only my second time on Belle Isle and the first time was over 30 years ago. So while I was there I also looked around a bit. This photo is off the west end of the island, near Sunset Point looking towards downtown Detroit and the tall Renaissance Center. To the left of this view is downtown Windsor, Ontario, but that picture didn’t come out as nice.

I stopped at the Belle Isle Conservatory, a beautiful building designed by Albert Kahn and completed in 1904. It is, alas, closed for now.

Most of the roads to the east end of the island are closed (I think for maintenance), so the only way was past part of the memorial display, then to the northern road, temporarily set up for two lane traffic. That took me past the Detroit Yacht Club. Then again through part of the display (which went smoothly by staying in a middle lane) and across the bridge and on home.

Let’s not let them take our compassion or our humanity

Today’s topic is death tolls. You’ve been warned. Skip it completely or skip to the quote at the end if you don’t want to read about it.

After hearing and writing about what the nasty guy is doing to make the coronavirus pandemic worse and hearing the death toll has passed 75,000 and could end up above a million I wondered how the nasty guy would rank among world leaders who caused mass death. Fortunately, he doesn’t. Yet.

I first went to the site What Culture, which listed eight deadly despots. Then I visited the site Pop Ten for their list. I’m not linking to either of those sites because I found one that documents sources. This is Wikipedia and its list of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll. There are several lists on these pages, starting with what looks like every war ever fought by humans ordered by the number dead. And WWII, with at least 60 million is at the top of the list (the number depends on whether indirect deaths are included).

A list of more interest is the Anthropogenically exacerbated outbreaks of disease and famine. That is defined as “famines and disease outbreaks that were caused or exacerbated by human action.” Most of the entries in this list are famine, though a few include disease. At the top of the list is the Great Chinese Famine that was a part of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The death count is somewhere between 12 million and 55 million.

We could already add the coronavirus in the US to this list because the event with the fewest deaths is 50,000 and we’re now past 75,000. However, this could take a consensus that the actions of the nasty guy were either malicious or incompetent (either qualifies as human action), which this country may not be ready to do (though some of us are quite ready!).

There is also the list of political leaders and regimes by death toll. The top entries:

Mao Zedong of China, perhaps 50-70 million.

Genghis Khan, Timur, and Kublai Khan, three in the Khan dynasty that ruled much of Asia and invaded Europe. Their rule and conquest resulted in 20-40 million dead.

Adolph Hitler, up to 26 million dead.

Chaing Kai-Shek of the Republic of China (ousted by Mao), 18 million dead.

Joseph Stalin, perhaps up to 15 million dead.

Hirohito Emperor of Japan during WWII, up to 15 million dead. Other lists attribute maybe 5 million dead to Hideki Tojo, the head of the Japanese military.

I’m a bit puzzled by the totals for Hitler and Hirohito. Their dead add up to 41 million and WWII cost 60 million lives. I would think the two of them would be responsible for nearly all of them (Mussolini’s contribution is comparatively small and doesn’t make up the difference).

Leopold II of Belgium forcibly colonized the Congo in the last 1800s to extract its rubber and minerals, perhaps up to 13 million dead.

Ranavalona I of Madagascar, the first (only?) woman in the list. Her forced labor policies and military campaigns killed about 2.5 million.

Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge killed up to 3 million in Cambodia.

Wikipedia list the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire, though other sources say one of them, Ismail Enver Pasha, did most of the killing. It was for this guy’s actions that the term “genocide” was created. The best known is the Armenian Genocide, though there were also Assyrian and Greek genocides. About 2.5 million dead.

Kim Il-Sung, his son and grandson, of North Korea, up to 3.5 million dead.

Also in the list causing at least a million deaths are Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Suharto of Indonesia, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong. Other names that are familiar are Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, and Henry VIII. Towards the bottom of the list are Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Claudius.

The US is in some of these lists for Indian massacres, 16 thousand, and the dead in the American Indian Wars, perhaps up to 60 thousand. There is also the genocide of the native Americans (both North and South) mostly due to disease, though also forced labor, wars, and massacres. This total is perhaps 138 million for both continents.

I don’t want to see the nasty guy added to these lists (though I believe he already qualifies for one of them) because I don’t want to see that many dead.



Leah McElrath tweeted a thread that seems appropriate after all that.

I can’t be the only one who is preoccupied by the fact that patients with #COVID19 are having to die alone.

(I know healthcare workers are doing what they can with FaceTime and everything, but it’s simply not the same as having your loved ones with you.)

I can’t be the only one who is gobsmacked by the absence of empathy or even any recognition at all with regard to the ill and their loved ones.

No national mourning, no flags at half staff, no proclamations by politicians in their memory. Nothing. Just...nothing.

We are being intentionally desensitized to mass death happening within our own communities.

We’ve previously been intentionally desensitized to mass death happening elsewhere (like Iraq).

Expanding the desensitization to include our own neighbors?

That’s a VERY dangerous step.

This [an image of a sign saying "Open”] is the message from the Trump administration.

No deference to the loss of approximately 75,000 Americans so far or to the mourning of our people.

This is ghoulish.
...
This virus and the disease it causes have taken enough from us.

So has Trump, his administration, his enablers, and his supporters.

Let’s not let them take our compassion or our humanity.

Fear and legacy

Michelle Allison is, according to her Twitter page, a dietitian in Toronto and is half American and half Canadian. She wrote a Twitter essay that caught my attention because she succinctly asks a question to which I’ve been proposing to answer for quite a while.

Why, in a supposedly egalitarian democratic society that is quite hierarchical and unequal, would those resting near the very top of the hierarchy (largely white, male technophiles) be the ones clamoring for more? Why are the Thiels of the world, for one e.g., obsessed with upending the (barely functioning) democratic institutions that extend to the rest of us a tiny, imperfect modicum of liberty in favour of an explicitly autocratic vision that would have us be serfs and slaves? Like WHY do the people who have EVERYTHING in the current system, WHY must their shitty futuristic fantasy influence an election, when there are tons of people who have more ethically defensible visions of a future with expanded rights and equality for all people? Why do the people who have it all, who live on the bleeding edge of technological advancement, contribute in massively influential ways to our culture, who are massively financially rewarded, NEED EVEN MORE? To the point of doing away w/ enlightenment ideals and democracy itself?

I’m pretty sure the phrase “the Thiels of the world” refers to Peter Thiel. I had to look him up and, of course, found a Whkipedia page on him. He has a husband. He started PayPal, so is rich, worth about $2.6 billion. He is a devout Libertarian (a viewpoint I summarize as: I’ve got mine, too bad you don’t have yours) and a strong monetary supporter of GOP candidates. He wrote the book The Diversity Myth criticizing political correctness and multiculturalism and claiming it dilutes academic rigor. So, yeah, we know what kind of guy he is.

I would offer a different perspective on Allison’s question of why do people who have everything need even more. In my understanding it isn’t that they want more, it’s that they want us to have less. They want to make sure the chasm between their more and our less cannot be crossed.

Back to Allison and her question…

I’ve been answering her question with my understanding of ranking, the belief that there should be a hierarchy in society with men over women, white over black, straight over gay, Christian over non, rich over poor, etc. Though we are taught to rank it is something the human brain accepts quiet easily. Ranking is a strong force – people are willing to go so far as to kill to protect their rank in society.

Allison may supply a reason why ranking is such a strong force: we’re totally freaked out about death.

It seemed impossible to understand, and then my index card reminded me: because when you can't navigate your fear of death, can't even SEE it, nothing is ever enough. You can reach the top of the existing hierarchy and at the end of it, you're still human, still going to die.

Thiel is terrified of dying, openly invests in technologies that offer immortality. The neoreactionary platform has several literal immortality mechanisms baked in: futuristic AI, the technological singularity, transhumanism. It's The Highlander all over again. Nerds.

But the current system doesn't offer as direct a path as they would like to this glorious, immortal future--even though it's the one the rest of us need (and need to fight tooth and nail to expand, given how un-egalitarian it actually is) in order to have any rights at all. They've climbed to the top of the shitty hierarchy we currently have, that is at least democratic in name, and now demand an even less democratic, more hierarchical system. Because even though they have every systemic advantage a human can have, they're still not quite immortal.

The antidote to this is MORE democracy and egalitarianism, not less, and the hierarchical structure of our current system is what enabled these people to climb to the top and ram through their vision of an even less equal future, while others fought and died to have basic rights. If you give people a ladder to climb to be nearer the gods, they will climb up it, realize the gods are still not near enough, then set the thing on fire until it consumes them like a pyre. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except usually the ladder is made of other people. I don't believe in immortality, and I don't consent to being a burnt offering. That's all.

I also had to look up The Highlander. It is a 1986 movie about immortal Scottish warriors.

I’ve read about this fear of death in one other area. John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop, wrote about the fear of death in his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die. I bought the book at a convocation of LGBT people in the United Methodist Church and read it maybe 7 or 8 years ago.

Spong worked from the theory that fear of death underlies all religion. Even in modern culture, where the hold of the church has lessened, our societal mental health is still strongly influenced by our fear of death.

I’ve just experienced six family deaths in just over two years. Death is indeed on my mind a lot. But should we fear it? Christians say there is a life after death that is glorious! Why would we fear it? I roundly reject an afterlife of Hell – a loving God would not condemn us to that. If He did, He wouldn’t be loving. Is our fear of death a sign we don’t trust the promise of an afterlife? Atheists say there is nothing after life, so again nothing to fear.

There is a scenario that does make me fearful – something catastrophic is about to happen and within a few minutes I won’t exist in this world anymore. An example is the 1986 space shuttle disaster in which the rocket engines exploded yet the crew likely didn’t die until the orbiter hit the water a few minutes later. A modern scenario would be hearing about an incoming nuclear missile (what Hawaii erroneously heard last week). So let me die in my sleep.

Again, back to Allison…

She describes “immortality projects,” which she defines as attempts to “leave a legacy” or belief systems that offer the possibility of some form of afterlife. One aspect is various aspects of culture are immortality projects because the objects or ways of doing things endure beyond a single human’s lifespan.

The immortality projects that fascinate me, however, are the ones that create systems of inequality, and use the strategic oppression and marginalization of a group of people as the foundation upon which those who think of themselves as superior can stand and reach for eternity. … I just know that the part where some people get shit on and other people get a path to heroism and leave a legacy is what interests me.

But maybe it isn’t the fear of death but the fear of living a life without much consequence. How much of a legacy do we leave that touches more than our our family? Will those in the future know us beyond our names in a genealogy database or on a headstone? Does anyone alive know anything about any of my great-grandfathers? The last one died when I was five. Did any of them change much in history?

And what will be my legacy? Will anyone read my writings or play my music even a decade after I’m gone?

I’ve been saying ranking is strong enough to prompt people to kill and otherwise make the lives of those below them in the hierarchy quite miserable. Allison is saying the fear of death prompts people to attempt to scramble to the top of the hierarchy in hopes of creating a legacy that will live beyond them. Is being taught about hierarchy (a teaching that happens constantly) strong enough to make us killers? Is the fear of death and a need to leave a legacy that strong?

I’ll be pondering this for a while.