All posts by Steve Stern

A Couple, Three, or More Tweets

Uncategorized

Donald J trump was kicked off of Twitter about a year ago – January 8th, 2021 to be exact – and Margery Taylor Greene got kicked off last week so I wanted to make a couple of coments. I really like Twitter, it is my  social media indulgence and I really don’t like Margery, still kicking people off bothers me. I know she was warned five times to stop yelling inflamatory fasehoods the same as Trump, I know that Twitter is a private company and not subject to the First Admendment, and I have no alternative plan, but it bothers me. Twitter is,  in many ways, a public space and controlling who gets to say what seems like a slippery slope. But I like Twitter and they have to do something and it’s not a easy job.

I like Twitter because, it has it’s own, improbable, personality  A couple of days ago, when I opened my account, these were the first three Tweets. 

The Bill McKibben article is well worth clicking through to but the headline, alone, is enough to brighten my day. But, even without the article, seeing Shoebills popping up in my feed makes me realize that the world is a wonderous place. Shoebills, by the way, are about four and a half feet tall and members of the pelican family although they used to be classified as storks. Enjoy.

Happy 2022

Uncategorized

Most reported U.S. Omicron cases have hit the fully vaccinated -CDC The headline to the article quoted below from Reuter’s.

Everyone I know is really blue. We’ve run out of resilience. The world feels small and fragile. A Tweet by Susan Orlean @susanorlean Writer, writer, writer. Oh, I also write.

I was going to say that Michele and I are feeling a general malaise this new year, but it’s more like a low-grade panic, sort of an ongoing “Oh! Fuck, not another round of Covid. This can’t be happening, when IS it going to end?” We have spent the Holidays cloistered at home with not much to do except look at the Christmas tree and think about what 2022 is going to bring. I think it is going to be another interesting year1, sort of like last year but with less Covid and an election. Although I’ll admit, my predictions are probably somewhat warped because my influences are mostly from what I am fed on the web and the various algorithms are filtering what I get.

Reading about the misnamed Spanish flu, however, has made me a little more sanguine about the pandemic. The 1918-19 flue just seemed to fade out, getting weaker and usually more contagious each time around. With the Omnicron variation, this seems to be what is happening with Covid. From the Covid’s point of view, a healthy host is much better than killing off the host quickly. Between people dying off, people getting Covid, recovering and becoming somewhat immunized, and people getting immunized by vaccine, the pool of Covid recipients should get smaller. We should go back to leading almost normal lives, free to wander around again (although we’ll probably be wearing masks inside for a while). That’s what we all hope, anyway.

The problem is that the world without Covid will not be normal, not by the standards of fifty years ago anyway. Now we have a large group of disgruntled citizens who say that Trump won the election and a smaller but very loud group who say they are willing to resort to violence to bring the country back to what they consider normal, and, obviously, that’s not normal, the violence part isn’t anyway. Now we have a climate that is not normal and getting further from normal every day. In both cases, we have a government that is split into two groups; one group that doesn’t think this abnormality is abnormal and the other group that does think it is abnormal but doesn’t seem capable of doing anything to tackle the problem.

Speaking of the climate not being normal, one thing – well, maybe two things – that are sort of crazy this year is that the orchids on our front porch started blooming in the middle of December and the leaves on many of our trees haven’t dropped yet. At first, I thought they hadn’t dropped because of no rain to knock them off, but we’ve had much more rain than normal and the leaves are still hanging on. I’ve started rooting for the leaves to hang on long enough to see what happens when the trees start to grow in another month. I’m only guessing on the month part. The acacias used to bloom in early February but that bloom date has been moving forward, last year, they were starting to bloom by mid-January.

It should be interesting to see how the country reacts to January 6th as the details continue to dribble out – often by Liz Chaney – my guess it will infuriate those of us who are already convinced January 6th was actually a failed insurrection try, a large portion of the populus will not pay much attention, the Trump diehards will remain Trump diehards, and the country will slide slightly to the left. I think that because in the ’60s and early ’70s, the violence was coming from the left and the negative reaction to that violence helped elect Ronald Reagan. People wanted Law and Order and saw the left as violent. Now the violence is coming from the right and I think people will react to that by moving slightly left (or to the Democrats even if many of them are not at all left).

What does worry me is that a lot of the people who participated in the failed insurrection, seem to be getting pretty cushy sentences. I remember a Tweet, I’m not sure by who, that said something along the lines of When an attempted insurrection goes unpunished, it is only a rehearsal.

I have a tendency to think in binary terms – most of us do, actually, that’s how the world is presented to us – either the Democrats win this November and we pass all kinds of much-needed legislation, or the Republicans win and ignore climate change while continuing to arm the populous – reality will be, probably, not either one. I don’t think that the body politic wants bi change, well, yeah, we all want the other guy to change but we don’t want to change our own lives. Not when it involves real sacrifice. There are too many self-interests – and I mean that in the worst as well as the best ways – too many antibodies built into the system to make change easy. Just as important, most media organizations have a vested interest in keeping the country agitated and divided so they fan the flames of those divisions.

We’ve had a lot of rain so far this year and I love it, but it also means a lot of grass and undergrowth which, if we have a dry, hot, summer which we probably will, will mean a lot of fires. Big fires. At least CalFire – California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection – thinks so, their budget will be almost three billion this year and they are hiring lots of people, everything from foresters to cooks. Speaking of hiring, I think there will be a labor shortage this summer and more pressure for companies to raise the pay for so-called low-skill jobs. That pay increase should ripple upwards somewhat.

In the ripple upward department, I think Chinese food is starting to go upscale and so will Mexican restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll still be able to get cheap Chinese and Mexican food, but, just like hamburgers and fried chicken, there will be more fine-dining Chinese and Mexican eateries. There will also be more high-end movie theaters, the kind with soft leather seats and available cocktails. And more electric cars and bigger TVs.

In the end, whatever the year does bring, we will be more outside to see and feel it. We’re getting used to Covid and adjusting so, even if this year is not anywhere near normal, either are we. Happy 2022.

  1. I’ve read that there is a Chinese curse, “May you live in an interesting time.” that I find hard to believe, one thing you can’t change is the time you live in.

Joan Didion RIP

Uncategorized
Michele taking a sandwich break along the Applegate Cutoff of the Oregon Trail

It was immeasurably important to me to have a role model who was a woman. Besides showing me what the architecture of writing nonfiction could be, Joan Didion made me feel it was possible to have the life and career I dreamed of. A Tweet by Susan Orlean who defines herself as Writer, writer, writer. Oh, I also write.

There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. Zadie Smith in The New Yorker.

I didn’t know that Joan Didion was such a giant, I think I thought she was a fringe player, maybe nothing more than a cult favorite, so I was surprised at the number of people, especially women, especially women writers, who were inspired by her. She made her living by writing and I – then ensconced even more in my white male bubble than I am today- didn’t understand how hard it was for a woman to make a living writing fifty years ago. I loved her writing but I didn’t always love what she wrote. It often made me uncomfortable.

Didion was a true Californian, a fifth-generation Californian – one set of her ancestors was actually part of the Donner Party until they left the main group, near the Humbold sink, to go north, taking the Oregon Trail in the fall of 1846 – and she was pretty haughty about it, but she didn’t see the same California that I did. She saw a darker California, a California that I didn’t want to acknowledge, that didn’t match the fantasy that I still hold on to so tightly. Still, the way she wrote, that was a revelation to me.

Democracy was the first Didion book I read and I loved it’s take on politics, but Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the second and, while I won’t say I hated it, I sure was bothered by the pictures of a California I didn’t want to exist. When she writes about a young woman from San Bernardino, who killed her husband, This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book … the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past, it seems so nasty, so petty and even today, I don’t want it to be true and am so afraid that it is a spot-on description of inland California.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading excerpts – highlights if you will – of her writing and I keep being reminded of why I liked her so much when I first read Democracy, and then Play it As It Lays which starts with a paragraph that, somehow, has been tattooed on my brain. Maybe that is the best place to end this post, with a typical Joan Didion paragraph in which everything is wrong – what does it even mean? Why does she say she would not ask about snakes and then ask about snakes? what is she trying to say? and where the hell are the question marks at the end of the questions? – and the paragraph is perfect. So ominous, we have no idea what is happening, but we know that it’s not going to end well. What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask. Another example, one that springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pigmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable ever since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract snakes. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive, while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not anymore.

Champion Max Verstappen & Risk

Uncategorized

They sort of gave the race to Verstappen, on the other hand, he did have a better season and probably should be champion. From an email from me to Linda Melton.

Max Verstappen is the new Formula One Champion after winning the last race, on the last lap, in Abu Dhabi. Without going into the gritty details, Michael Masi, the FIA Formula One Race Director, let five cars that were between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, but were one lap down and would hold Verstappen up, get out of the way so that Verstappen on new, soft tires, could have a free shot at Hamilton on old, hard, tires. It was a one-off decision, similar to the Supreme Court ruling that Bush the Younger had won Florida in 2000, and Mercedes is appealing to the FIA – Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile – International Court of Appeal.

I think it was a bad decision on the Race Director’s part and a controversial way to end a race but it would be even more controversial if the Championship changed on a court ruling so I’m in favor of just getting on with it. When things like this happen, I’m always in favor of just getting on with it. It makes me realize that I’m not anywhere as competitive as somebody like Toto Wolff, the Mercedes Team Principal. On the other hand, the rumor is that Hamilton, to no avail, has asked the team to drop the appeal and he is super competitive.

While Mercedes is appealing, the earth continues to spin on its axis, every day becoming a less hospitable place to live. A major tornado plowed through Kentucky killing scores of people and leaving more than 1,000 families homeless- a “once in a lifetime event” that will probably happen again, sooner rather than later- a major ice-sheet in Antarctica is breaking up unexpectedly quickly threatening to raise sea level sooner than predicted, the temperature topped out at 127.9°F in Kuwait last year, a new but not welcome, record – it is 68°F today, BTW – two major hurricanes slammed into Honduras killing a hundred people, to scratch the surface; It all makes thinking about who won an auto race seem pretty trivial.

As the Earth heats, our country’s political life goes on: among other things, the House Committee investigating January 6th is releasing information that indicates the White House and several members of Congress knew about and participated in the Insurrection, Covid deaths in the U.S. have passed 800,000 and a new variety is scaring almost everybody else, Derek Chauvin has pleaded guilty to violating George Floyd’s civil rights during a Federal hearing, and over at Fox News, they are complaining that a mural that shows black revolutionaries is in the background of the swearing-in ceremony of the new Chief of Police. The strife and controversy over who won the Championship seem petty. But Next Year! Next year, Hamilton will win.