Broken so many parents’ most basic instincts to protect their children

We (well, some of us, including me) made it through 2021. Happy New Year! I had a quiet evening. I livestreamed some TV station, tuning in about 11:54 (and turning off the sound for a bunch of commercials) to watch the ball drop in Times Square. I turned it off at 12:04 and went to bed. Yeah, that’s my exciting life. Today I watched the Rose Parade, then did my usual daily stuff. I’m glad 2021 is behind us. I’d like to say 2022 can’t be worse, though I know full well (based on what I’ve been writing about these last several years) that this year could indeed be worse. I hope it is better. We all need it to be better. So hang on tight – curves ahead. Some blog statistics: In 2021 I wrote 266 posts. The folder with the text of all these posts is 7 Mb. Last year I wrote 333 posts and the folder is 12 Mb. In 2019 I wrote 296 posts and the folder is 3.6 Mb. That last one seems strange – more posts but overall fewer words. That was back when I tended to divide up the day’s writing into a post for each topic. During the early days of the pandemic I stopped doing that. I finished the book How to Mars by David Ebenbach. In the afterward he wrote about his inspiration for the story. Back in 2015 an organization called Mars One announced they would send twelve people to Mars on a one way journey. A while later the group said they had 200,000 applications. Some time after that the organization folded. Ebenbach doesn’t know whether it was visionary or fraudulent. One Mars One rule was the new residents of Mars were not allowed to have sex. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Ebenbach took that whole idea as the basis of his novel, though he cut the number of participants to six and ... one of the women gets pregnant. That’s even after she has been told she is infertile and the man had that little operation. Much of the funding for this mission came from the TV rights. Audiences on earth would be able to watch what happens to the humans on Mars. But, after the first year live on Mars was so boring the show was canceled. Until the pregnancy was announced. Interspersed with the action are chapters of the handbook of Destination Mars! the organization that set up the book’s trip. The handbook is to advise those who apply to go and actually make the trip. One of the first chapters is What You Can’t Bring With You as a way to remind participants they have only so much room in their personal luggage, and to remind people what they would miss, so maybe they don’t want to apply. You can’t take your favorite chair, your pets, the view out your front window, the future you set aside to pursue this one, the weather, or a comprehension of what is to come. The start of this book seemed snarky and I thought I might get tired of that. But the book ended up deeper than the first few chapters suggested. I also finished the book Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. It is a graphic novel, so while there are 230 pages, there isn’t a lot of text on each page and I finished it in two days. When the book came out in 2006 I heard about it through Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper. At the time Bechdel wrote a comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, that appeared in BtL. I didn’t buy the book then. The dealership where I get my car serviced is near a library, so instead of sitting in their waiting room (where I consider the TV to be too loud) I would ask how long the service would take, then walk over to the library to read. I read perhaps 30 pages of this book on one day. When my next service came due six months later this book was, alas, gone. In that library I’ve since started in on a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, reading 60-90 minutes at a time every six months. That stopped in 2020 because the library closed. It wasn’t because of COVID, but mold. Last I checked there was no info when it might reopen. I did see the Broadway musical based on Bechdel’s book when it came through Detroit back in 2016 and enjoyed it. The show won Tony awards and the book topped best seller lists. So when I saw the book on a table in a bookstore during Pride Month I decided it was time to buy and read it. The book is about Bechdel’s complicated relationship with her father. She didn’t find out he was gay until she was in college and wrote home to say she was lesbian. He died several months later. Since he taught literature there are a lot of literary connections. He also worked in the family funeral home, where the kids, when by themselves, put the “fun” in “funeral.” The book circles around their relationship, looking at moments from different angles, and teasing out evidence of her dad’s gayness and her mom’s unhappiness through remembered incidents. An example is a visit to New York City and the family staying with friends near Greenwich Village. The kids are put to bed while Dad went out for the evening. The whole thing is much deeper than one would expect from a graphic novel. I see she later wrote a book about her relationship with her mother. I’ll have to add that one to my wish list. Hunter of Daily Kos reported that the modern Republican Party has only one goal – please the nasty guy. The current example is in Alaska. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted to impeach him after the Capitol attack. Now Governor Mike Dunleavy has been given a stern choice. He can get the nasty guy’s endorsement only if he shuns and denounces Murkowski.

For a party so supposedly obsessed with rebelling against authority, it remains pretty damn odd that you're not allowed to so much as exist within the party if you're not willing to abide by the weird orange dude's every uttered burp. It feels like Trump could easily be supplanted as American fascism's leader by literally anyone willing to stand up and mock him as an incompetent twit, showing the emperor to have no clothes; Trump, on the other hand, has spent the last four years of his life sending minions after anyone in the party who he even suspected might be capable of such a thing. So it's a near-certainty Dunleavy will go along with this. He has to. If he was the sort of person to have any guts at all, he would have cut Trump loose after the whole “attempted to overthrow the government” thing.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has found an issue his fellow Republican House members can run on – A Parents’ Bill of Rights. He wants to demonstrate his party is for Parents and Education. Yeah, the party for pulling books that discuss icky things out of libraries and burning them. Eleveld wrote Republicans will likely overplay that had. Daily Kos/Civiqs did a survey asking what was an appropriate age to teach children about racism. A solid 62% of respondents say the topic is appropriate for middle school and younger.

Meanwhile, just 31% of respondents believe those teachings should begin in high school or, in fact, never be taught at all. In other words, the type of exuberances we are already witnessing from GOP officials and lawmakers are likely to play to a very fringe audience next year, which certainly won't help Republicans in the dwindling number of competitive districts and could easily kneecap them. Democrats would do well to continually remind voters that the GOP’s “Parents’ Bill of Rights” really means handing the keys of their child’s education to a bunch of nutter fascists at the local level.

Though the House might try to be the party of burning books, in the Senate Moscow Mitch appears to have just one idea – thwart Biden. Eleveld reported Mitch made that clear at a meeting of donors and lobbyists back in November. They asked what Mitch’s plans are. He dodged the question, then said the party will release an agenda ... next November ... after the midterm election.

What grows more apparent with each passing day is the fact that congressional Republicans don't have any policies popular enough to sell, particularly in a broader statewide setting. ... All those dismal donors who think Republicans have a bunch of fresh ideas but simply won't share them will ultimately donate anyway. And when they do, they will have exactly nothing in hand to hold Senate Republicans to their word. Because Senate Republicans dare not speak their agenda ... and it might not exist anyway.

Brandi Buchman of Kos wrote a timeline of what happened on January 6 (nearly a year ago!). I’m linking to it as a reference, not because I want to comment on it. Meteor Blades wrote another Earth Matters column for Kos with lots of stories for those wanting to protect the earth. I’ll mention only a tweet from Greenpeace:

We should not go back to normal, because normal was the problem.

Kos of Kos, in his Anti-vaxx Cronicles quoted the media thread that has a justified rant. The first post shows a photo of a 12 year old sitting in a church (with back to camera). His mama isn’t beside him because she’s in the casket. She didn’t get the vaccine. Four weeks before the boy sat in the same spot because his daddy was in the casket. He thought he was a big, healthy, active coach and didn’t need the vaccine. What is wrong with these stupid people who keep orphaning their children? The community prayed for the parents when they were sick. Didn’t work. What does work: the vaccine. Kos wrote:

I’ve written it before, and unfortunately, I’m seemingly doomed to write it again and again: The most horrendous part of this pandemic era’s right-wing noise machine is how it has broken so many parents’ most basic instincts to protect their children at all costs. They listened to the nonsense spewed on Facebook and left their 12-year-old orphaned, traumatized, bereft, and unnecessarily disadvantaged for the rest of his life. And they were both teachers! They should’ve known better!

Alas, it isn’t just the loud anti-vaxx crowd. Sometimes they have help from organizations that are supposed to be protecting us. I reported that the CDC changed its guidance on how long people should quarantine after exposure. They reduced the number of days but many complained the left out a crucial part. Leaving quarantine isn’t just about the number of days and having no symptoms. It should also be about having a negative COVID test. That omission prompted a large number of appropriately snarky tweets beginning with “The CDC says...” Aysha Qamar of Kos collected a bunch of them. I’ll let you read them, though I’ll quote from Mike Cella:

the CDC says it's not omicron unless it comes from the Omicrônne region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling covid

I enjoyed that one because it is so similar to what I quoted just a few days after the 2020 election. Rémy Anne tweeted:

it’s not actually a coup unless it comes from the coup d'état region of france, otherwise it’s just a sparkling authoritarian takeover

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted an article (editorial?) in the New York Times about the fight over masks in Enid, Oklahoma included this:

But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

I add that a big part of that question is this: Is America a place where people can be free of oppression or is America a place where people are free to oppress? And which people must be oppressed and which get to do the oppressing? Michigan’s Independent Redistricting Commission has selected their maps for the 2022 election season. The legal challenges will soon begin. On the whole I’m pleased – many state legislature districts are now competitive and Democrats have the overall edge, appropriate in a state where more voters are Democrats. However, I (and many others) are annoyed at how many state legislature districts include a part of Detroit and a part of a suburb, reducing the chance of a black politician being elected. Even with my complaints it is good to hear praises of the results in news outlets. An example is this one by Eleveld of Kos. I’ve mentioned a few times that Ghislaine Maxwell, a partner of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It is good to hear her trial ended in conviction. April Siese of Kos reported she was found guilty of such crimes as conspiracy to transport individuals under the age of 17 across state lines with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity. According to the women who had been victimized in their youth Maxwell wasn’t an unwitting associate of Epstein. She was very much involved in the crimes. Texas is big, but this is bizarre – and a sign of climate troubles. Avery Tomasco, who does the weather report in Austin, tweeted that at 3:12 this afternoon the temperature in Amarillo in the north of Texas was -6F and Brownsville in the southern tip was 95F. That’s a 101 degree difference. Yeesh! Asher Perlman is a cartoonist for the New Yorker. He tweeted a bunch of his favorite and most popular cartoons for 2021. My favorite features the unicorns.