Let the bro say it

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated Tuesday. I get the data here. The peaks in new cases per day show a trend in a good direction. For the last few weeks the peaks are 2544, 1954, 1821, and 1623. Deaths per day remain at a low level and a couple weeks ago that included one day dipping into the single digits (I figure the data for last week and this week are still being gathered). Back on October 8th (five days ago) Leah McElrath tweeted a video from Iran that she says looks like it could be a tipping point – In a protest in Tehran the police joined the protesters. Rebekah Sager of Daily Kos reported that people who can get pregnant can’t secure the right to abortion care by themselves. They need male allies. Several organizations are there, creating advertisements featuring men explaining the situation to men. And that seems to have an impact. Wrote Sager:

Political data scientist at Civis Analytics, Josh Yazman, a Democrat-aligned research shop, tells Vox that when compared to traditional pro-choice ads that featured women, ads that featured male characters did better with men. Yazman explains that in one ad featuring a mom, aged 40, versus a “bro” talking about his fear for the women in his life losing the right to an abortion, “The bro’s overall appeal was similar, but a lot stronger with men, Republicans, and younger voters, while the mom did better with more traditional pro-choice audiences.”

I had mentioned the saga of Herschel Walker of Georgia running for the US Senate. He is very anti-abortion yet paid to allow a girlfriend get an abortion. And the Republicans of Georgia are quite willing to overlook that lapse in morals if they are able to get control of the Senate. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Anthea Butler of MSNBC, who added:

You’re not alone if you find this all hard to understand. You may be like those politicos and opinion writers who took white evangelicals at their word when they professed to have strong beliefs about morality, family and abortion. But the historical truth, as I have shown in my book, “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” for evangelicals, is the politics of morality isn’t about their candidates’ morality. It’s about legislating their particular brand of morality for others who are outsiders to the faith.

A few cartoons to share. Andrea Abwob tweeted a cartoon by Mike Luckovich. On the street, walking along and minding their own business, are a gay couple, a woman wearing a headscarf, a man in a turban, a Jewish man, and a mixed race couple. In amongst them is a white man in a red cap with two rifles and a sash of bullets saying “I feel threatened...” Florida Gov. Ron DeathSantis is now famous for flying immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. But after Hurricane Ian caused so much damage to the state a lot of workers are needed for the cleanup. And who is good at such work? Immigrants. There are cartoons here and here showing that irony. I lived in Germany for two years. Though I didn’t become fluent in German I did learn enough to go into a restaurant and understand the menu and speak to the waitstaff in German. Through interactions with my German office colleagues I also learned that word for word translations don’t always get the right meaning across. The example I remember best is the phrase “must not” and its direct translation of “müß nicht.” The English phrase means required to not – one is forbidden from doing it. The German means not required – doing it is optional. I heard my German colleagues using the English phrase in my presence and after a while I realized the meaning they intended was not the one I was hearing. So I was intrigued when Naomi Lewin of NPR presented the story of translating the hit musical Hamilton into German. First problem is the sheer size of the project – there are 23,000 words that go by at top speed. Second is the English idioms, internal rhymes, and rap rhythms. Third is the difficulties of such phrases as “I am not throwing away my shot.” One rap song is built around that phrase and, as Lin-Manuel Miranda (who wrote the musical and was included in this story), said:

Over the course of that one song alone, it means gunshot, opportunity, liquor shot, and several more along the way and past tense of being shot.

And the directly translated German word has some of those meanings, but not all. Kevin Schroeder is a German playwright and specializes in translating musicals. But he didn’t think he could do this one alone. He teamed up with German songwriter and rapper Sera Finale for a great team. Schroeder, also heard in this story, said of the “shot” puzzle:

By making Hamilton the gun, now a version - somehow becomes the gun, and then it suddenly starts to make sense. I only got this one shot. I'm a loaded gun about to blast off, but I only got one shot.

Miranda said:

Every three months, we would get a three-column list on the latest songs they had translated - my lyrics, their German translation and then a literal translation of their German translation so that I could understand the metaphors they were changing, the ways in which the phrases were different from mine, and I could literally see it sort of lined up.

The German version is now playing.