The Weekend in Foolish Attention
DATELINE: Saturday, February 26, 2022
My father-in-law came to Vegas this week. He’s a great guy and I love him. We had some of the finest breakfast foods and craft beers the region has to offer as well as some deep, older guy conversations.
At one point, he with a beer and I with a pipe, he asked “Is it possible for humans live free or do we require some sort of authoritarian governance to thrive?”
It’s a question worth pondering. Democracies in general don’t have a great shelf life, historically speaking and, as we talked around the totalitarian rule of China, he mentioned that “China has been a dynasty for thousands of years. Historically speaking, America is merely a bad hair day for them.”
I read recently that belief in democracies worldwide is on the decline and autocrats are pushing more authoritarian regimes with more popularity. Our global response to COVID did not give liberal democracies a glowing report card as the Big Dog in Democratic Rule had a pretty miserable vaccination rate because, you know, freedom.
One of the threads in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is the consistent failure of advanced civilizations from the Greeks to the Romans to the Mayans. Is the United States another stone on the cairn pile? Is it inevitably so? Can we, as Rodney King implored, “just get along” or are we doomed to keep trying and failing at the concept of self rule only to have a child’s need for authority to keep our worst impulses in check?
The Generational Divide Widens
The Texas Governor and Attorney General have this week called any medical gender-transition treatment for minors “child abuse” and asked for people to report suspected cases.
“The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has now confirmed in the enclosed opinion that a number of so-called ‘sex change’ procedures constitute child abuse under existing Texas law.” Gov. Greg Abbott writes. “It is already against the law to subject Texas children to a wide variety of elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs.”
Parents in the fifties looked to education to teach their children to be respectful, fall in line, learn a bunch of skills to be better workers, and platform them to be productive members of a society they may or may not embrace. By the seventies, the expectation that teachers also behave as babysitters for increasingly burdened parents now forced to work two jobs to get by yokes educators to less education and more management. Incrementally, parents and their children began to feel more entitled to challenge teachers on a view of fairness that was more and more self centered rather than societally advantageous.
Today, both parents and students demand to be in control of what is taught, how it is taught, what teachers can say, how much indoctrination is appropriate or not.
Is it any wonder that teachers in Florida routinely have sex with minors and parents are freaking out about CRT and trans activism in the schools?
If you’re too young to financially support yourself, too young to have sex with your middle school science teacher, and too young to get a tattoo, you’re too young to determine on your own to take gender transforming drugs. Also, if you haven’t masturbated to both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you aren’t bisexual, you’re just trying real hard to be cool.
On the other hand, Greg Abbott is a shill and is smashing poorly thought out legislation to appease mostly reasonable parents who are watching their kids spin out of control. Maybe they should stop watching Euphoria?
Hey, LADY!
Jerry Lewis’s Costars Speak Out: “He Grabbed Me. He Began to Fondle Me. I Was Dumbstruck”
Connie Stevens, who starred with Lewis in 1958’s Rock-a-Bye Baby and 1966’s Way…Way Out, has pleasant memories of her time with the comedian—but caught glimpses of his dark streak too. “If you didn’t go for his joke or if you didn’t respond to him, he could be cruel,” says the actor, who recalls female crew members on set suddenly quitting. “I had heard that he was pretty rough on females. He wasn’t on me. Consequently, I was the only actress at his funeral.”
I grew up watching Jerry do his telethon. I’d stay up the entire night—it was almost an annual competition with myself to see if I could remain awake and watching the entire time.
I loved Jerry’s earlier movies. To hear that he was a skeeve, a bully, and a notorious pussy hound is jarring but, in light of so many in that stage of Hollywood who were all those things, unsurprising. Of course Jerry was a sexual harasser.
I can’t wait for the exposé on Captain Kangeroo and Jim Henson. Shattering the image of childhood heroes is the past time of the second decade of the 21st century, gang!
Putin on the Blitz
My in-depth knowledge of foreign policy is maybe a three on a scale of ten if Madeline Albright is a twelve and the guy at the 7-Eleven looking for change to buy some meth is a .5, so what the fuck do I know?
My gut tells me that Putin’s invasion has little chance of success. Today’s Russia is not the Russia of the Cold War—Texas has a higher GDP than Moscow and 190,000 troops sounds like a lot but his people aren’t thrilled with the invasion of peaceful neighbors and the Ukrainians are pumped and ready to defend their shit. Methinks it’s a bit like Vietnam with snow.
So why?
Putin and the Chinese have some back channel stuff going on and I think this is a test to see how weak America has become in our divided state. If we limp along in response to his aggression it signals China that they can take Taiwan without so much as a silent fart in response.
Speaking of responses,
And I thought Gal Gadot’s Imagine sing-a-long was embarrassing.
Maybe I’ll compose my own video poem to Putin entitled “Dear Putin, If I Finger-banged Your Mother.”
That’s the week in my world!
As my wife said to me this morning “If WWII is coming, I think I’ll lay down.”
My break (you know, I quit my job and wanted a week or two to decompress from white papers about contact-level intent data and generating leads from website visits) is nearly over and then—Hol-ee—we’ll get some industry for cash in the works!
Have a great week and share this Substack if you dig it.
DH