Friday, September 15, 2023
In bed at 9:45, awake at 4:54, up at 5:10. 55°, high of 74°, sunny much of the day ahead, AQI=22, wind SW at 8 mph, 1-12/21. Sunrise at 6:31, sunset at 7:02, , 12+30.
The complexities of NFL fandom. I was reminded of this by reading Adam Gopnik's excellent article in the current online New Yorker, "No, Not Aaron Rodgers!" Reading it, I was reminded for some reason of the great Damon Runyon and his narrative powers though Gopnik's style is more classical with references to Hector falling to Achilles and the Trojans battling the Achaeans. The reaction of Gopnik and his son Luke to the season-ending injury to Aaron Rodgers reminded me of just how important NFL football is to its millions of true-blue long term fans whose allegiances to their teams is personal, deep, and historical. The game itself is interesting, entrtaining, and strategic requiring many different skills on the part of the position players, most notably the extraordinary precision skills of passers and receivers. It's easy to get hooked and, once hooked, to stay hooked. On the other hand, there are the serious and often lifelong injuries that are an intrinsic part of the game now, with very large, very fast athletes crashing into one another play after play, game after game, season after season. And on top of it all, the billionaire owners like the owner of the Jets, Robert Wood "Woodie" Johnson, of the Johnson & Johnson dynasty, (Forbes' reported net worth of $3.2 billion) Donald Trump's appointee as his ambassador to the U.K.'s Court of St. James, who, like Trump himself, is known to be both racist and sexist and almost surely insensitive to the physical and mental costs of playing to his employees, the players. After all, they are very well paid and they know what they are risking by playing in the big league. So what's the problem? Right? Right.
LTMW at a plethora (Three Amigos😀) of bird visitors, especially downy woodpeckers, but also goldfinches, house finches, cardinals, and chickadees, waiting for the little red-bellied and big white-bellied nuthatches and still looking for the first snowbird. The male goldfinches are still a bright yellow but I expect that to start changing soon. Good neighbor John was out walking Dorothy at 6:15 this morning. Lilly gave them a couple of admonitory but muffled 'woofs.' . . . Thrill of the day: at 12:30, a huge flock of wild turkeys, about 20 hens and immatures, walked across our front yard. I tried to get a photo but by the time I got up and to the window, most had passed on to the neighbor's yard. I got the tail end of the flock, but filtered through the window screen.
And, BTW, if I had any doubt about the safflower seeds being more in demand than the black-oil sunflower seeds, this photo of the short tube feeder when I filled it this afternoon resolved any doubt. New seeds on top, loaded with safflower seeds, the ones on the bottom, loaded in this morning. safflowers almost completly gone, sunflower seeds left.
Biden's Age, Mendacity or Confusion, Reelection Bid, and World Welfare. The other day David Ignatius devoted his regular op-ed piece to urging Joe Biden to stand aside and let some other Democrat take on the Republican nominee for the presidency, probably Donald Trump. I don't know whether Ignatius is a fan of Biden's but he is certainly not an enemy. In today's WSJ, Peggy Noonan, who I daresay is not a fan of Biden's, devoted her weekly column to discussing Biden's weakness as a candidate, including references to his problem with speaking truthfully. She raises the question all must wonder about: if Biden a serial liar, like Donald Trump, or simply an aged confabulator who gets his facts and imaginings mixed up, or as she puts it, after referring to one of his recent lies about his actions after 9/11:
After 22 years memory might scramble things, but CNN followed up with a report on other recent false claims, citing three in a single speech last month, one of them “long debunked.” It’s possible Mr. Biden has been telling these stories so long he’s become convinced they’re true. The disturbing consideration is that while repeated lying is a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.
A few years ago, Fintan O'Toole wrote a long piece in The Atlantic about Biden's lies (or mistakes, take your pick). O'Toole's essay contributed to my inability to warm up to Biden, despite my appreciation for the politicies he has pursued in the presidency. Biden's performance in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill fiasco started it In any event, here we are with him in his 80s, perhaps approaching his dotage, intent on running for reelection to a second term that would end with him at age 86, if he doesn't die, resign, or become disable and replaced before then. This selfish, insane insistence on running again at his age only increases my antipathy towards him. He is pulling a RBG, who insisted on staying in office so long that she gave Donald Trump his 3rd Supreme Court appointee, the religious whacko Amy Coney Barrett. Will Biden's refusal to bow out and give a chance for election to a younger, potentially more popular Democratic candidate with a more popular vice-presidential candidate, give us a second term for Donald Trump? I think it's highly likely and for this we ought to despise him.
As I recall, the O'Toole article on Biden made quire a point of Biden's fondness for fancy homes and fancy cars, a fondness that some might think of as a character weakness. Peggy Noonan focuses on it, too.
I close with the fact that whenever I think of Mr. Biden’s essential nature and character I think of “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s great history of the 1988 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s first. . . . Thirty years after publication, it presages a great deal of what we observe each day of Mr. Biden, and it is suggestive of the origins of the Hunter Biden problems and allegations.
For one thing, Joe Biden has always been obsessed by real estate and fancy houses, and money was always an issue. On a house he would buy a few years into his first Senate term: “The house is gorgeous, an old du Pont mansion in the du Pont neighborhood called Greenville, outside Wilmington. It’s the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building—hand-carved doorways, a curbing hand-carved grand staircase that Clark Gable could have carried a girl down, a library fit for a Carnegie. . . . And a ballroom—can’t forget the ballroom.” He bid more than he had, “but Biden never let money stand in the way of a deal. He got in the developer’s face and started talking—fast.” He got the house—he always got the houses—and thereafter scrambled to cover its cost.
He wanted it all and had a sharp eye for how to get it. There is a beautiful speech Cramer presents as Mr. Biden’s. He was sitting around a back yard in Wilmington with friends when his sons were young, and Mr. Biden asked, “Where’s your kid going to college?” His friend said, “Christ, Joe! He’s 8 years old!” Another implied it wasn’t important. “Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”
A lot of hungers, resentments and future actions were embedded in that speech by Joe Biden, Syracuse Law, class of ’68.* They aren’t the words of an unsophisticated man but of a man who wanted things—houses, power, the glittering prizes—and who can’t always be talked out of them.
She is right on.
* Very near the bottom of his class, after almost being expelled for plagiarism. He's lied about his academic record, too. How telling.
Coming apart at the seams. There is a story in today's WaPo about the "Greater Idaho Movement", an initiative to redraw the border between eastern Oregon and western Idaho - "Outflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of IdahoOutflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of Idaho" The situation in eastern Oregon reflects a problem throughout much of the United States today and it derives in large measure from our tendency to live in geographic areas where politically like-minded people live or, in other words, our tendency to segregate ourselves along political lines. Of course, it's undeniable that there are few areas that are purely liberal/progressive/Democratic or purely conservative/Republican, a point about which Sarah Smarsh made quite a point in her memoir Heartland. But it seems undeniably true that many, perhaps most, geographical areas are quite predominantly liberal or conservative, witness Wisonsin's WOW counties surrounding Milwaukee County. Witness my own inability to imagine moving to Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Idaho. What accounts for the location of state, county, and municipal borders? Mostly historical and political factors at work when the borders were laid out plus geographical or topographical factors, especially waterways, like the Mississippi and Ohio rivers predictably serving as dividing lines between so many states. How is it that the Upper Peninsula of Michigan remained a part of Michigan when Wisconsin was created a state out of the old Michigan Territory even though the UP is contiguous with Wisconsin and separated from 'mainland' Michigan by the Mackinaw Strait between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron? Political and economic reasons surely. The location of boundary lines may not be terribly important much of the time but in other times, especially times of deep political polarization, borders can become matters of life and death, as for example the Ohio River border between Ohio which was a Free Labor state and Kentucky, a slave state. Every now and then we hear talk of secession from Texas radicals, including Governor Greg Abbott and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green has suggested that the country needs some sort of 'divorce agreement' between Red and Blue states and just recently went further and urged states to 'consider seceding' from the Union. Of course, states seceding from the Union is no more possible now than it was in 1861 but there is a very real issue of how we all are to live together in one polity when we are as radically politically polarized as we are now. Our federal government has in large measure lost the capacity to govern effectively. How do we go on like this with so many needs requiring some sort of governmental action - like immigration, climate change, gun violence, and what have you. The future for the Un-united States looks pretty grim.
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