Good morning. Hello. How are you? #662

Fasism angst, a brewing grand unification theory, adventures in Walmart and CVS lines

Good morning there, friend. How are you this fine Friday? I am good. A friendly word of advice: Friday is an absolutely fine day to come back from a vacation. Gotta go back to work? All good! You only gotta do it for a day. It’s the tops, I tell you.

I did not watch the Jan 6 hearing last night, I chose to watch The Orville New Horizons, which was maybe a mistake as… well, no spoilers but The Orville was very confusing. My wife rightly pointed out there is a trend in post pandemic TV where seasons are coming so far apart that no one can ever remember what happened in the last season. Oftentimes, that doesn’t really matter, as they do a good recap, but The Orville a) picks up pretty much right after the last season and b) doesn’t catch you up, and c) offers contradictory evidence as to what the actual situation is these days. Like I vaguely remember some big war last season and I legitimately can’t tell if that war is still going on or not.

But back to the January 6 hearings, after seeing the Twitter chatter, and realizing that they were decently scripted and flowed and not just a normal public congressional hearing with the intolerable, absolutely intolerable questioning from Republican blowhards, I want to watch them now? Maybe? I guess in hindsight, given the Republican’s relationship to this committee, that should have been obvious. A colleague said in a Slack chat that they weren’t sure what the point of the hearings were, everyone has made up their mind, but I don’t think that’s true. I think the media often makes us forget that only 25% of Americans are Republicans (remember this, whenever the media says “half of Republicans believe in Jewish space lasers” or something — this only means 13%, at best, of the population). Most people, even as our democracy is crumbling, aren’t paying attention. Anything that gets them to pay attention, anything, is worth trying.

I also believe that it is important to document what happened, and by that I mean the events of January 6th, but also the events afterward, the efforts of the little-d democrats of America to stop this inexorable march toward fascism. To document what we tried.

You know, this all has happened before, Father Coughlin and the American Nazis and the idiots in charge of the country in the great depression and the profound sense that the country was teetering on the edge of communist revolution unless the assholes stopped ruining everything for everyone, then we voted in FDR — who routinely quipped it was either him or communism — and things started to right themselves.

On the other hand, this has happened before, with the Civil War, where a bunch of evil people who thought it was okay to own other humans brought the country into a horrible war that killed more Americans than any other war ever.

So which one is this gonna be?

In these dark times, I like to think more about FDR and the New Dealer’s peaceful trouncing of the American fascists of the mid-20th century. But I am aware there’s no guarantee our non-violent tactics are going to win this time round any more than they did during the Civil War. And if they fail, we need our historical documents. We need our version of The Diary of Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt and Shirer and the dry historical documents that give Tooze what he needs to write The Wages of Destruction. Even if we ultimately fail this time round, there will be another time, and the information the January 6th committee uncovers will be useful.

Depressing argument, huh?

I have a cocktail of existential angst brewing in my head at the moment, swirling together the January 6 hearings, the absoutely terrifying ramfications¹ of the book I’m reading, Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works,² the endless, idiot obsession with “free speech” “culture wars” as evidenced by ridiculous arguments such as the one the Substack CEO Hamish made this week, writing a completely neurotic 4,000+ word post (and this is coming from me) about Luke O’Neil’s departure from the platform, and the recent spate of op-eds about how it’s just dandy to keep having kids because of god, magical thinking, and “things were worse in the past.”

(Pro tip: If a racist bar opens in my town, and I do not go to the racist bar, and I shout from the rooftops that the racist bar is bad, and I tell the bartender he should stop allowing racists in his bar, that is not a “free speech” issue, that is a racism issue. It is the same online. It is the same if you swap “racist” out with “asshole” or “Glenn Greenwald.” It only becomes a free speech issue if I say — as no one does — “arrest those people in that bar for saying things.”)

I’ve been fighting an urge to write some grand unification of modern nihilism these days, but I don’t think it’d be super healthy. I think, ultimately, that I am still choosing to distinguish between hope and optimism, I still have hope, and I will still operate as if there is hope. Yet I will not let that hope transmorgify into blind optimism, I will not let that hope blind me to the dark reality of the situation on this planet, and I will not pretend everything is going to be okay, because it is absolutely not going to be okay.

Did my errands yesterday, it was lovely. Thank you to my kind wife for covering for me for breakfast. Walmart was pretty much how I left it, still no Peach Iced Tea Ice Breakers, alas. Thursday 9 Am not a good time to go to the local Walmart. They do their “all hands” company meeting in the back then, and all the registers were closed, so like two dozen of us were in line for the self-checkout. People kept not believing such a dire scenario was possible, so they kept leaving the line and going and looking at all the other registers, thinking at least one had to be open, even though there was a steady stream of shoppers coming back from the exact selfsame excursion reassuring them that nope, no other register was open. But they kept doing it. I chose to listen to the warnings and stayed the course, and I rapidly ascended the ranks of the line, just by using my ears. There is a morality tale in there somewhere. The manager came out and assured everyone that our giant line had nothing to do with the fact that he had just called a company meeting in the back, but that they were “short staffed.” He seemed to think that was a better excuse, that Walmart couldn’t hire people. Never mind at that moment there was him, three people monitoring the self checkout area, and two greeters, and one of them could have easily opened another lane. I mean, no skin off my back, I got through it quickly, but boy, people were pissed.

Seems I missed the arrival and departure of the 4K HD DVD of The Northman, which is sad, but I did pick up the 4K HD DVD of The Batman, who — and not a lot of people know this — is actually the reincarnation of The Northaman, they are the same person. I also picked up some waterproof masking tape, since all my gorgeous labels on my garden bins are peeling. It is yellow, which is not really my color, but hey, maybe it’s time, at fifty, for a splash of color in my life. Start small.

I also have to say that the North Chatham Walmart has a higher ratio of people wearing masks than downtown Cambridge, MA, so do what you want with that information.

Oh that reminds me I have to take today’s covid test.

Next I went to CVS where I also bypassed the main line of cars waiting to do drive-up covid tests and I went to the special second line that is always closed, but open today. The line gods were smiling on me yesterday. The second line is great because it uses a pneumatic tube and who doesn’t love pneumatic tubes they really add something to your day. CVS is heading toward a class-action lawsuit or a federal investigation, mark my words, they keep refilling medications, on which I have autofill turned off. All the time. They just ignore it. I called the woman working on it. She handed me three prescriptions I did not ask for, I asked how I turned off autofill, playing dumb, and she said she’d handle it, came back and said they’re all off now, I asked how many it had been on for, and she said one. And I continued to play dumb (there was no one behind me in line) and asked her how it was I was getting three medications when I did not ask for them and she just laughed and said “no idea.” I have a good friend at CVS, and I feel bad bashing on them, but it is insane, and I am tired of it. I literally have four bottles of statin lying around now, it’ll take me all of 2022 to work through them, and I did not ask for them.

Also managed to book my dentist and eye doctor’s appointments, god I need the eye doctor appointment so badly all my glasses are so bad. Spent a bunch of time arguing with Ford dealers throughout the state about DOC fees and additional dealer markup.

Played a lot of the latest challenge in No Man’s Sky, quality day-off action. It’s a Groundhog Day sort of scenario and it’s maddening but also a pretty good time. When you’re doing a Groundhog Day scenario in a game, it’s a lot harder to do the montage thing where 100 iterations later the character’s really good at a bunch of things, because you’re the character, you have to do the 100 iterations, and you can’t really montage your way out of it. Hello Games did some interesting tricks to mitigate that, and while they’re a bit confusing, they are pretty clever too. Never really seen that mechanic before. But also, on some things, you do get a lot better as the Groundhog Day cycle repeats and it is really kind of thrilling. You feel a bit like Bill Murray. In Space.

Okay just another justa mix today, what with it being release Friday and all. Half new stuff, half old, mixed together, with a general thrust moving from guitar to synths. The pivotal moment is the Buffalo Tom into Metric bit. I’ll confess I haven’t listened to all the new songs all the way through yet, I mean, it’s 8 AM what do you want from me, but each one of them sounded pretty good in my skimming. I will issue the requisite apology on Monday should any one of them turn out to be garbage. Let’s have a little faith in the bands we like!

Okay have a lovely weekend. I am going to make a gardening video, do actual gardening, and try and get my podcast done. Is that an ambitious weekend agenda or a conservative one? I know not, yet, but we will find out!

1. I’ll talk about them eventually but I need to finish the book first, and I’m desperately hoping Smil finds a means with which to end on a hopeful note. It is not looking promising.

2. Regarding my previous dilemma about where to link to for a book reference, I am trying out Kirkus Reviews this week. Let me know your thoughts. Super into the fact they seem to have absolutely zero affiliate links.