How Did We Get 'Here?'

12/11/2019

Indiana Jones gets the guy with the sword

I’ll let you define “here.”

There are thousands of factors from "there" to "here," but I’m going to list four random indicators that something was happening.

One. My wife went to the movies with some fellow teachers, circa 1981 -- "Raiders of the Lost Ark." She watched as Harrison Ford blew away a guy who was wielding a sword, in front of a crowd, and she felt he did it with a smirk, for yucks, and the audience laughed, and she felt tears. Something is different, she said. Life means less.

The Simon Guy

Two. I was clicking through the cable channels around 2006 – no doubt looking for a ball game or a soccer match – and happened upon a talent competition.
We had these things when I was a kid, Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts – first prize being a week on his morning radio show. Godfrey was generally genial on the air (well, except when he fired his singer, Julius LaRosa, live, to teach him some “humility.”)

In 2006, a talent competition was different. A British guy named Simon was sneering and making remarks about the competitors, and also about the wisdom of his fellow judges. I had never seen such sheer nastiness on the air; the show was about this Simon guy, not about the contestants singing or dancing their hearts out.

I had never seen a reality show -- knew they existed, but avoided them, scrupulously. Only thing I could say about sneering Simon was “If he acted like that in the schoolyard where I played basketball, somebody would have popped him one.” But Simon seemed quite popular.

Three. I did hear there was a comparable reality show on the tube, starring a guy who grew up near me in Queens. He was rather yappy; friends of mine who lived next door told me that. I never saw him in the schoolyard.

Later, I heard he had been staked by his successful builder father to a rather large allowance to look like a successful businessman. He owned a team in a low-scale pro football league; his wife (first wife, as it turned out) had to correct all the things he did not know about his team.

Then I heard the guy had his own reality show, on which he postured and preened, Simon-like, dismissing candidates with a curt “You’re fired.” I heard it was popular but I never saw it. After all, I had met the guy. People in New York didn't take him seriously. We knew.

Four. Starting in 2009, I started to read about new members of Congress who had run for the House or Senate because….they did not much like centralized government and the use of taxes to run the country, to help other people.
Once elected, they were obligated to go to Washington for a few days here and there, but to show their disdain for centralized government they bragged about bunking in with friends, maybe even sleeping on couches in their offices, until they could get back home to God’s Country, away from the Deep State. These advocates of minimal government were labelled The Tea Party by Rick Santelli of CNBC. Last elected rep to leave, please turn out the lights.

That brings us to today, when the country seems to be divided between elected public officials who seem to have studied and respected the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and other elected public officials who seem to have a Tea Party twitch to shut the whole thing down and turn it over to Our Masters – particularly the guy on the reality show.

I guess it goes back to laughing at bodies being blown to bits by Indiana Jones, back to contestants and fellow judges being mocked by the Simon guy, back to Tea Party types who don’t believe in the separation of powers of government, who do not respect the public servants who make government run.

It’s been coming on for a long time.

charlie vincent

12/12/2019 11:53:54 am

It IS painful to be HERE. I am so flummoxed as to be uncertain of where we are exactly that I can not answer the question of how to get back to where we came from. Those who have led us here are only the tip of the iceberg -- those elected officials who preen before the cameras...they know their base, sadly, those back at home who see themselves as put upon by THOSE people -- foreigners, whether born abroad of in the USA; the needy and helpless, who seek to leech on "hard working folk"; those who impose all those rules, the ones that impinge on "everyone" by hoping to provide safer drinking water, cleaner air, accident free work places, honest mining and the preservation of nature at the detrement of unfettered drilling. Those folks back at home believe people like Trump, McConnell, Cruz and the rest have their best interests at heart. Why they believe that is beyond me -- I think probably it is simply because they think those who preen before the cameras in Washington will protect them from those OTHER people, the ones who are not exactly like them. I don't know if I am more angry or more sad.

George

12/12/2019 01:38:20 pm

Charlie: clearly you have anger-management issues, just like the Time Person of the Year. You didn't used to be that way. What has happened?
I know other people who didn't used to curse. Now the sight of McConnell or Jim Jordan or The Fool....
I see hard-working people all the time in my town. Many of them speaking Spanish. But thank goodness we have truly good Americans like Wilbur and Mnuchin and DeVos on the Cabinet, taking care of their investments. That's hard work, too.
How did this happen?

charlie

12/12/2019 05:43:04 pm

George: I triy to find solace in an occasional rum and a good cigar. Alas, the beneficial effect is short-lived.

George

12/12/2019 06:55:37 pm

Charlie: The Mets got me through the season, entertaining enough with some admirable players (DeGrom, McNeil, Alonso).......and on long, dark evenings now I am reading a lot and trying not to listen to the guy braying on the news. GV

Randolph

12/13/2019 08:41:45 am

George,

Do you not listen to the “ guy braying on the news”. His words are toxic to the mind.
I now look for small things in the world around me to counter the evil of the Big Turd in office.
Today I will drive to a Buddhist temple hidden in the woods of rural Virginia. I will pick up a little man in orange robes, who speaks multiple languages, but English “ Not so good”. I will take him to the doctor and serve as hillbilly translator for a kind human from Thailand.

It is good medicine for me and counters the ”braying” that surrounds us.

Kiss Ms. Whipple for me.

RF

George

12/13/2019 05:24:42 pm

Randy: Thanks for the advice. Your relative is starting to mute the Earworm-in-Chief so we don't hear his tone-deaf disturbed cadence.
Good on you for driving a saffron-robed guy through VA..and translating. I used to translate for your relative when we were visiting Eastern KY. I'll tell you a story sometime....GV

Ed Martin

12/13/2019 10:32:50 pm

GV what’s to say? I do not and have not listened, if he comes on in NPR news show I turn it to inaudible, or the Classical Music channel. It is just as bad with anyone parroting the lies. Instead, I read the NYT online the WP and the local, mostly, sadly, non news papers as they slowly shrink before my old eyes. I can control fact input pretty well that way. Even the opinion columns have to carefully vetted. I know what is happenining, but avoid the noise and redundancy.Fortunately, we have found programs on NETFLIX, mostly from other nations, such as “Broadchurch” a UK police show, to anchor us in the real, if fictional, world. Keep the Faith as ACP used to say.

George

12/14/2019 03:44:45 pm

Ed: ACP=Adam Clayton Powell?
I used to say "Keep the faith" in the late 60s.
My friend Bill Robinson with the Yankees also taught me:
"Gimme Five ----and Two for Soul" with appropriate hand gestures.
I taught that to our three kids.

The thing abut the Earworm is that he does not sound abrasive to half the country -- as I posit, inculcated by abrasive types in movies and TV.
Keep the Faith, indeed.
GV

bruce

12/15/2019 09:33:47 am

george,

g'day.

i was horrified by reagan and bush2. didn't love bush2 either.

trump has trumped all of 'em.

it'll be interesting to see how much he's soiled america when he leaves office--or if he will if he loses.

horrifying to think what he'll do if he doesn't have to worry about re-elected.

he probably gave trudeau a bump by comparison during the canadian election two months ago..

his main opponent has just resigned. fine upstanding morally superior man who was using party funds to help pay for his five kids' schooling.....he is a serious catholic who had to dance around about his feelings about gay marriage, global warming.

goes without says he's a conservative and by canadian standards too much so unless you live in the prairie provinces.

funny you should mention raiders.....i thought that scene was odd at the time and it felt even odder when i watched it on cable about a week ago.

always interesting to watch films years apart to see how you've changed.

bruce

Alan Rubin link

12/15/2019 08:08:32 pm

For all the needed programs that President Obama tried to accomplish during his presidency, he must share the blame for the election of President trump. Our current president took offense to some good-natured kidding at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner and "The Donald" vowed to get even.

History always seems to turn on the little unexpected things.

One need only read “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal” by William J. Burns, a well-respected diplomate, to imagine what could have been. He offers many examples of how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton consistently kept her cool in trying situations and was able to focus on the essence of issues.

We could certainly use her cool head and wisdom of experience in the Oval Office during these dangerous and trying times.

bruce

12/15/2019 08:28:24 pm

alan,

i place the blame on people who too often seem to escape it....the republicans who enabled him to win the nomination and then all who voted for him in the general election.

anybody with a scintilla of awareness had several decades of evidence what kind of terrible person he'd been.

and who the hell could vote for a man who had won by insulting all his opponents, lying every time he opened his mouth, put everything into pathetically simplistic terms and made ridiculous promises?

mexico would pay for the wall?!! trade wars were simple to win, the previous 44 presidents--including the kenyan--had brought the usa to its present awful state.

with the exception of jackson who, as we all know, wasn't too happy about the civil war.

finally, before trump became potus the usa had the strongest military in the world as well as the most robust economy.

and look where the country is now.

oh, wait, they still have both.

blame lies with americans who voted for him.

pretty much exclusively.

bruce

Hansen Alexander

12/17/2019 03:25:25 pm

George,

An excellent overview of of the violent tendencies and misdirection of a country long kept alive by a group of elites who understood the world, but like in the State Department purges during the McCarthy era, now being hunted out and smeared in order to justify the conduct of a president who literally said last week, "I can do anything I want."

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

How Did We Get 'Here?'

Categories

Buy the Book