Month: August 2021

Tell me if you think this sounds unreasonable.

The select panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection took its first step in obtaining phone records on Monday, asking an array of telecommunications companies to save records relevant to the attack…

Telling phone companies not to destroy records that may pertain to a crime is a routine step for investigators and detectives. It’s certainly not a violation of federal law. But, in this case, there is something with little to no precedent. Some of the phone records in question belong to members of Congress, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.

That certainly informs McCarthy’s response to the request.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday threatened to use a future GOP majority to punish companies that comply with the House’s Jan. 6 investigators, warning that “a Republican majority will not forget.”

…He asserted that such a forfeiture of information would “put every American with a phone or computer in the crosshairs of a surveillance state run by Democrat politicians.”

This is nonsensical. “Every” American isn’t a participant or witness to the January 6th coup attempt. “Every” American is not a member of Congress. It’s hard to see how our rights are impacted negatively by a telecommunications company cooperating with a congressional investigation of these crimes.

But McCarthy pretends to see things differently.

“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy said in Tuesday’s statement. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”

That’s a pretty big threat, and a credible one since the Republicans stand a decent chance of regaining a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2022 midterm elections. It’s also obstruction of justice, because McCarthy is flat-out lying about the request being a violation of federal law, and he’s interfering in an investigation in which he is a key witness.

On the substance of McCarthy’s complaint, congressional committees have routinely used subpoena power to obtain data from private companies, including phone records, emails and other communications. The Jan. 6 committee has not identified whose communications it is seeking, but it has made clear that members of Congress are among the potential targets, which would be a departure from past practices — one that members of the panel have said they believe is warranted in this case.

The Democratic-led committee’s investigators are looking for a fuller picture of the communications between then-President Donald Trump and members of Congress during the attack. McCarthy is among the Republicans known to have spoken with Trump on Jan. 6.

Since Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, I’ve grown almost numb to this type of routine. Republican politicians continuously do things that would be a clear-cut crime if not for the position they hold. Trump constantly obstructed justice during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, but he couldn’t be charged with a federal crime while in office so he got away with it. Now McCarthy is relying on position as a leader in Congress to shield him from what would otherwise be considered as obviously criminal interference in a congressional investigation.

More substantively, he’s going to argue that members of Congress have protections concerning their phone records that are not enjoyed by ordinary citizens. He’s doesn’t want to come right out and make that argument, which is why he’s suggesting that somehow “every” American’s privacy is at stake here, but a special exemption for congresspeople is the only kind of argument he could hope to win in court.

Honestly, I don’t even know what his end game is here. Is he just desperately hoping that his threat will work and the records will be destroyed rather than turned over? Is he setting a predicate for injunctive relief in the far-fetched hope that the courts will prevent the records from changing hands? Is he just trying to distract from what those records will reveal?

What it does, is it makes him look very guilty. It’s never a good look to be trying to shield the truth from the public. It could be that he’s shielding other members who talked to President Trump on January 6, or the days leading up to the insurrection. Whatever his motive, it’s unlikely to work or have been worth the effort.

Hi all! Hopefully you are getting through the week in one piece, or fairly close to it. I’m on a bit of a retrospective mood at the moment, and thinking a bit about the music that I was listening to quite a lot right before that fateful summer day in early to mid September 2001 that would change us in ways we’re still trying to sort out. This is a track by Matthew Shipp. This is a nice one to showcase what he could do as a pianist at the time (and he continues to get better with age), and was one of the last pieces he’d record before being tapped to curate the Thirsty Ear Blue Series, a task he still manages. Pastoral Composure, as an LP, was certainly a prelude to what would come next.

To say that my tastes are eclectic is, I suppose, an understatement. At the time, I was listening to a lot of jazz, ambient, EDM, and some underground hip-hop. These days, I will still make time for that, and delve into my more distant past (hard rock, prog rock, punk, postpunk, minimalism) and exploring work of newer artists who are carrying the torch of those who still want to be creatively dangerous.

Cheers!

It was just a month ago that Sunisa (Suni) Lee became the first Hmong American to win an Olympic Gold Medal. She credits her step-father, John Lee, as her best friend and biggest supporter. In light of the events in Afghanistan over the last couple of weeks, his story is poignant.

John was 7 [in 1979] when his parents brought him and his siblings to the U.S. from Laos…John’s father was a Hmong soldier who fought alongside the U.S. military during the Vietnam War in what is now known as the Secret War.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Secret War” that took place in Laos from 1961 to 1973. It has been fairly widely reported that “the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.”

But the reason why the war was a secret is that the operation was carried out by the CIA – not the U.S. military. As Joshua Kurlantzick chronicled in his book, “A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA,” it was “the largest covert operation in U.S. history.” During a conversation with NPR’s Dave Davies, he talked about how Laos was one of the first casualties of the so-called “domino theory.”

Laos’s civil conflict, which had started basically in the ’50s, began to get larger and larger, and finally there was a coup in 1960 in Laos by a lower military officer, not necessarily a communist, but one who definitely wanted to change the system. So now you have, in American policy circles – which have already committed to this fear that communism is going to spread west through Asia, possibly into Thailand, maybe even into India and Indonesia – there is this fear that now Laos is going to turn communist.

As Kurlantzick explained, Laos became a “perfect storm of opportunity” for the CIA.

The main host of CIA operatives continued to be drawn from a northeastern elite, Ivy League colleges, etc. and were analysts and intelligence agents. And the CIA was nowhere near the actor in U.S. foreign policy as the Department of Defense or the State Department. But with the Laos war, it was kind of a perfect storm of opportunity for the CIA. The CIA’s deputy director who said it was a great place to have a war, which is where the title of the book comes from. I don’t think it was a great place to have a war, but the CIA did.

The perfect storm was you had a country in Laos that was clearly important to U.S. foreign policy-makers at that time. But the State Department and the Defense Department didn’t really know much about the country. They hadn’t been that involved. The CIA had been a little bit more involved in the country – playing with elections in the late ’50s and other things like that. And then, suddenly, you have this possibility from this extraordinary guy named Bill Lair who knows the area, connects with the Hmong. He’s got a plan to train the Hmong. And it all comes together in this way.

And I think senior CIA leadership saw this as – this was a place where the CIA could control policy-making, where they could become more involved in what we called paramilitary activities – essentially military activities, but not the actual conventional war – and where the CIA could radically remake its central sort of being.

So the CIA recruited and trained Hmong soldiers, who initially fought communist forces in Laos, but went on to rescue downed pilots flying those bombing missions and worked to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. Over the course of this “secret war,” some 40,000 Hmong soldiers were killed, an estimated one-fourth of the men and boys.

Kurlantzick described how it all ended.

Nixon and Kissinger made a deal with North Vietnam, a peace deal, and that deal covered Vietnam…[but] didn’t really bother to utilize the Laotian leaders in it at all. After the deal was signed at Paris, Kissinger and other officials came to Laos and basically said, hey, we signed this deal, and we’re going to be downgrading your assistance and pretty much cutting you off from the war effort. So you’re going to have to sign your own deal with North Vietnam. Make the best that you can do. It was a pretty serious abandonment.

With that, more than 120,000 Hmong people became refugees in their own homeland.

But for the CIA, their first paramilitary operation was deemed a success.

[H]aving worked in Laos was now good on the CV because Laos was the place where the CIA gained power, had shown it could manage a paramilitary war, had boosted its budget.

And people who had been in Laos went on to new operations in Central America in the ’80s – in Afghanistan in the ’80s when the United States was assisting fighters against the Soviet-backed government. And even into the early days of post-2001 Afghanistan.

When you read about the CIA’s paramilitary operations in Central America, keep in mind that it all began in Laos.

Back in the 1990s, I worked with a lot of Hmong young people who were from John Lee’s generation. They recounted horrific but awe-inspiring stories about how, as children, their families fled Laos – which meant crossing the Mekong River – to get to refugee camps in Thailand. Many of them spent their childhood in those camps, waiting to gain admission to the country their parents had fought for.

Life was hard initially for Lee’s generation (and his father’s). But now there are over 325,000 Hmong people living in the U.S. – primarily in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California. As Suni Lee’s generation demonstrates, they are making major contributions to this country. I am in awe of their courage and determination.

I know the right is gearing up to have a massive panic attack about an influx of refugees from Afghanistan. This, of course, immediately called to mind the Vietnamese Boat People of my youth. When Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, I was finishing up my last semester of kindergarten, and that didn’t jibe with my memory of the timing of the Boat People crisis, so I looked it up.

Sure enough, the height of the exodus took place in 1978 and 1979, corresponding to my time in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, an Ivy League town with a large international population, but I don’t remember going to school with any Vietnamese kids. In fact, I can recall kids from most other Far Eastern nations, but not Vietnam. My memories of the crisis are entirely colored by the breathless news coverage and video footage of overcrowded boats filled with desperate people fleeing regional war and communism. There was a compassionate component to this coverage but also a distinct sense of invasion. Somehow, the Vietnamese language sounded especially foreign to me, which added to the sense that these people would be difficult to integrate. I know I worried about this, although probably not more than for a few minutes after exposure to the news.

My first real exposure to the consequences of the Boat People came in the early 1990’s, when I sampled a Vietnamese hoagie at a Philadelphia restaurant. As far as I know, they were never responsible for any terrorism and there hasn’t been much crime associated with their communities, at least relative to other immigrant communities.

I can’t be certain the same pattern will follow with Afghan refugees, but I don’t think we should be overly worried about how they’ll impact the country. Mostly, I look forward to the cuisine.

It is interesting to note, however, that the flow of immigrants peaked three to four years after the fall of Saigon. The Taliban are wisely on their best behavior right now, as they want to make sure the Americans leave and are hoping to get international aid. It could be a little while before they show their true colors. As a landlocked country, however, we won’t be seeing Afghan Boat People.

For those who can get out by plane, they’ll already have some paperwork. A more likely scenario is an exodus by foot, like we’ve seen with the Royinga people of Myanmar. They are persecuted for their ethnicity and Islamic faith and seek refuge in neighboring India and Bangladesh. Among Afghans, the Hazaras most neatly fit this description. They’re ethnically and culturally distinct, and practice Shia Islam, which the Taliban consider heretical.

But the Taliban consider many things heretical, including music. Here’s how that goes:

The Taliban killed a popular Afghan folk singer just days after the group said it hoped to ban music from being played in public in Afghanistan, according to a former minister.

Fawad Andarabi was “brutally killed” on Saturday, said Masoud Andarabi, who was the Interior Minister under former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, in a Twitter post.

He was reportedly dragged from his village home in Andarab, near the Panjshir Valley, before being shot dead, according to LBC News.

As you can see, there’s a long list of people who have reason to flee Taliban rule. This will become more urgent with time, as the Taliban consolidate their power. The immediate concern is understandably for those who helped or “collaborated” with occupying forces, or who served in the former government. These are the folks who have the strongest claim for refugee status in America, because we directly owe them something. Next in line are women in general, as they cannot enjoy a free and normal life under the Taliban. But neither can the men, really, if they don’t conform. Fawad Andarabi’s violent death clearly demonstrates this.

So, the right can scream and panic all they want, but I don’t agree that we need to severely limit how many refugees we take from Afghanistan. I learned that type of fear is overwrought when I was still in Elementary School.

With all of the focus on events in Afghanistan, not much attention has been paid to the fact that German publisher Alex Springer bought Politico for approximately $1 billion. It might be a marriage made in heaven.

Politico has been on the front lines of ramping up hysteria about chaos in Afghanistan.

Politico has no reporters on the ground in Kabul — none. yet in its news coverage it states definitively that Biden administration is lying about conditions on the ground in Kabul.

after 15 breathless paragraphs, Politico concedes nearly 60K evacuated https://t.co/XplalXY62S

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 24, 2021

They even went so far as to cast doubt about White House reports on the number of people who have been evacuated from Afghanistan – with zero evidence the reports were inaccurate.

Over the years, this is the kind of story Politico became known for:

President Joe Biden is getting trashed by Democrats over the Middle East!

Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t acknowledging her Asian heritage!

Those were two breathless dispatches Politico posted this week, as the Beltway insider outlet did its best to gin up drama surrounding the Democratic administration. Apparently still longing from the non-stop news cycle of the Trump era and the relentless controversies and scandals that came with it, Politico has decided that during the No Drama Biden era the best strategy is to just make stuff up and post it as news.

In both gotcha articles it became abundantly clear that Biden is not being trashed by Democrats regarding the Middle East. And Harris is not being widely criticized for downplaying her Indian roots. Both premises are fabrications. How do we know? Because neither article contained evidence to back up the click-bait headlines.

The company that purchased Politico, Alex Springer, is a media conglomerate based in Berlin. Their flagship publication is the tabloid Bild, the highest-circulation newspaper in Europe with a daily readership exceeding 12 million. Here is how Thomas Meany described the publication:

The experience of reading Bild is a sugar-rush of gossip, accompanied by the clanging gong of headlines. As is traditional, scandals are designated for the front page, but in Bild’s current iteration, fear-mongering appears to be privileged over celebrity soup…

According to the Bild worldview, the best way to counter the left is to portray its demands as totalitarian, and the best way to kill off the far right is to cannibalise its grievances…

Bild’s competitors on its right today come from Breitbart-esque news blogs such as Politically Incorrect. Bild seems to have done its best to outflank these outlets by covering the same kinds of stories as them, often in much the same tone. In more than one case, these articles have been false. In 2017, the paper ran a story about a mob of Arab men assaulting women in a Frankfurt restaurant, which police subsequently confirmed never happened.

To give you some idea of the approach Bild has taken to the coronavirus pandemic, their editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt made a video this month in which he asked forgiveness from the children of Germany for the measures that have been taken to reduce the spread of COVID.

To the millions of children in this country for whom our society is responsible, I want to express here what neither our government nor our Chancellor dares to tell you. We ask you to forgive us. Forgive us for this policy which, for a year and a half, has made you victims of violence, neglect, isolation, and loneliness. We persuaded our children that they were going to murder their grandma if they dared to be what they are, children. Or if they met their friends. None of this has been scientifically proven. When a state steals the rights of a child, it must prove that by doing so it protects him against concrete and imminent danger. This proof has never been provided. It has been replaced by propaganda presenting the child as a vector of the pandemic.

Of course, that message wasn’t really meant for the children of Germany. It was a back-handed way of suggesting that the government had abused them. There is nothing more deplorable than using children to score points against your political opponent.

We don’t know what the owners of Alex Springer have in mind for Politico. But it won’t be much of a leap to turn it into an American version of Bild. What we’ll have is a publication that bills itself as balanced and nonpartisan while it exploits fear, portrays the left as totalitarian, and pretends that the far right is part of the political mainstream. If so, move over RealClearPolitics, you’ve got a new competitor.

At its most defensible, the religiously principled opposition to abortion isn’t based on a rejection of a right to privacy but on an insistence that a pregnant woman is not one person but two, neither of which has a has a greater claim to the body. When a choice absolutely must be made, for reasons of health or life, most anti-choicers (though not all) will side with the mother, but the idea that the mother can act with autonomy is rejected.

This moral calculus which divides a woman in two is far from clear-cut, especially because it immediately requires someone other than the mother to be an arbitrator of what constitutes a sufficient reason for her to assert full autonomy. Suddenly we’re investigating why an unwanted or problematic pregnancy was terminated, or trying to verify that the mother played no active role in a miscarriage. Beyond the infringement of personal liberty, this implicates medical and personal privacy.

Of course, it’s generally understood that as a pregnancy advances there comes a point in healthy fetal development where the mother has a legal obligation to cause no harm. but my point in bringing this up is not to delve into all the moral, medical and legal quandaries of abortion. Rather, I want to highlight that the anti-choice Christian Right is very insistent that there are limits on a woman’s liberty to act as she chooses if her actions have the potential to injure or kill.

Yet, when the subject is vaccination against a deadly virus, this limitation on personal autonomy is completely rejected. Ir’s a point raised by David French in a new essay on the irresponsibility of the evangelical movement with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a kind of hypocrisy easily missed by the pro-choice left simply because we don’t accept the first premise that the state has the right to insert itself into a woman’s reproductive decisions at all points of a pregnancy.

But it’s nonetheless a glaring distinction once you know to look at it. The decision not to get vaccinated causes harm to others, which is clearly seen both by how the virus spreads and by how it fills our hospitals with COVID patients crowding out the availability of treatment for other illnesses and maladies. This should be a clearer moral question than abortion. We’re not dealing with the complexity two people in one body, but a much more straightforward situation where the actions of one body harms another, entirely separate body.

We don’t struggle to condemn someone who speeds recklessly on our roadways, imperiling other drivers. We easily understand limitations on personal liberty in many contexts. Evangelicals insist on limitations when it comes to reproductive choice, but they won’t allow for any limitations when it comes to COVID-19.

Here, we’re left with a distinction between the right to do something and the right not to do something. Maybe I can accept that I have no right to  drive my car far over the speed limit, but can I be compelled to get a driver’s license? This distinction doesn’t hold water, however. Imagine trying to argue that you have no right to drive a car that has bare tires and worn brakes but you can’t be compelled to have your car inspected. If your actions imperil others, there’s a legitimate reason to remove your liberty to take those actions. You can be forced not to do things, but also required to do certain things to protect others.

There can certainly be religious beliefs that imperil others, and a refusal to use vaccinations is one of the best examples. It’s really no different from a religious belief against seeking any kind of medical care for a child. The state can step in in those circumstances to protect the child even though it impacts the religious liberty of the parents.

So, what becomes clear is that there’s a very inconsistent application of principle by evangelicals when it comes to when personal liberty can be restricted for the greater good. They easily embrace the idea that a woman’s body can be divided against itself, but they insist on the liberty to harm others when it comes to COVID-19. Therefore, they can’t be asked to get inoculated, to wear masks, to socially distance, or anything else because it violates their autonomy. For a movement that argues that women who exercise reproductive choice are criminally selfish, they sure do embrace selfishness with an appalling amount of gusto.

We are all grieving the loss of life that resulted from the terrorist attack by ISIS-K in Afghanistan on Thursday. But while Republicans scream about President Biden having “blood on his hands,” let’s take a step back and ponder the viewpoint of those who are putting their lives at risk.

https://twitter.com/M_Breen/status/1431062103893311488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431062103893311488%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F

Those serving in Afghanistan are in the business of saving lives – fully aware that it might cost them their own. That strikes me as the most noble venture a human being can undertake. But even AFTER the bombing, when warnings continued about credible threats, they didn’t let up. On Friday, another 6,800 people were evacuated, bringing the total to 111,900. As Breen said, “that is honor.”

Take a look at what one of the civilians involved in transporting refugees from Germany to the U.S., Delta Airlines pilot Alexander Kahn, had to say about his involvement.

As the son of a Holocaust survivor, Delta Airlines pilot Alexander Kahn says helping Afghans evacuate was "special."

"I was able to put myself in their position," he said. "This is going to be a frightening experience … But it has the potential to be an excellent experience." pic.twitter.com/IXwJdqYYY5

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) August 27, 2021

When those refugees reach Dulles airport, Chef José Andrés is there to meet them with a hot meal.

What’s happening in Afghanistan breaks my heart…but the outpouring of support from people across America helps glue it back ❤️‍🩹 Our @WCKitchen team at Dulles Airport saw even more refugees today….They had to go bring hundreds of extra meals & are still serving! #ChefsForAfghans pic.twitter.com/hpRJmAYhl6

— Chef José Andrés 🕊️🥘🍳 (@chefjoseandres) August 27, 2021

Some of the refugees will have family or friends, who have been terrified about their fate, waiting to greet them.

https://twitter.com/Smartypants60/status/1431316059873701890?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431316059873701890%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F

While so many in the media are obsessed with the narrative about chaos and calamity and right wingers politicize the entire operation, let’s not forget what this is all about. Members of the U.S. military are risking their lives to evacuate people from Afghanistan while other Americans are stepping up to support them in that journey. Don’t let the haters rob us of the stories about these heroes.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle, UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now completed the surrounding greenery, reflections and path. I have also revised the causeway. The painting is now done.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

A few months ago, my son introduced me to Reddit and one of its funnier subreddits (I’m still getting acquainted with the terminology, so bear with me), Toilet Paper USA, and I have a regular visitor to the site ever since.

As you probably already know, there’s a grand tradition of shitposting at Reddit, and as you also probably know, I am a frequent shitposter. So when I saw a subreddit titled Herman Cain Award, I dove right in—it is a bottomless and ruthless well of shitposting about Covid deniers, anti-vaxxers, and proponents of quack medicine. Specifically, each post is made up of screenshots from these folks’ social media accounts. Each one is the same: a series of posts about how “the vaccine doesn’t work,” “Fauci needs to go to jail,” “I have an immune system that works,” and so on, ultimately culminating in “I need your prayers, I’m in the ICU,” and then “This is So-and-so’s wife. He died yesterday, and I will miss him forever.”

The pandemic has made me a harder, angrier, and meaner person overall. Between leaving my home in Tennessee, spending winter in near-total isolation in Vermont, and not being able to see my kid in person for 18 months (that’s two summers, his high school graduation, and more, time that can’t be replaced), the sheer rage I feel toward Covid-deniers is unmeasurable. So I have to admit—and I know this reflects poorly on me—that the first few posts I read, I was nodding my head in approval. What did you expect, dumbass?

But these stories, as I said, almost always end the same way: unimaginable grief for the decedents’ family and friends. It rapidly becomes a hideously depressing account of unnecessary death and suffering left behind by gullible, foolish, and utterly pig-headed people. And as mean as I may be, I can’t revel in the suffering.

This fellow left a wife and kids, one of who is “texting God to bring him back.”

This one left her lifelong friend mourning.

This one ends with RIP MY SWEET HUSBAND. I will forever miss you.

This married couple left behind four children, two of who are orphans at 11 and 16. That’s the one that broke me.

Every single one of these individuals did it to themselves—but their deaths ripple through their families and communities. In some cases, the friends or spouses tried to convince their loved ones to get vaccinated or wear a mask. Many recant their previous beliefs once it’s too late—there are quite a few that end with “I wish I’d worn a mask, I wish I’d taken the vaccine.” It’s hard, for me, to muster sympathy for these people. Their selfish decisions, borne of ignorance and partisanship, have extended the pandemic far longer than necessary, have severely damaged our economy and job market, and contributed to some of the worst and most aggressive divisions I’ve seen in my lifetime—and some of the damage simply can’t be fixed. I don’t trust my fellow Americans anymore, and likely never will again. And yet I don’t feel any happiness or joy in their passing—instead I find myself grieving for their survivors. It is horrifying to watch one person after another go down, and each in the same way. “It’s not real; It won’t happen to me; I got it, but I’ll be OK with these quack cures; I’m in the hospital, pray for me.” And always, always, followed by a brief post from a friend that the person in question died.

But more horrifying is that right now, we have people like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Fox News, as well as the likes of Senator Ron Johnson and many other GOP politicians who know better, egging these people on like marks at a carnival game. They are like Macbeth, “in blood stepped in so far that, should [they] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” These self-inflicted deaths, in my opinion, rest on the shoulders of those lying politicians and media figures (including social media like Facebook, where Covid- and vaccine-denying groups are proliferate like a parallel pandemic) who deliberately spread deadly misinformation. And for what? If anyone should be on a ventilator or intubated—or better yet, in prison for their rest of their lives—it is those liars.

Someday there needs to be a reckoning. A lot of people were convinced to kill themselves, for all intents and purposes. Someone (a whole lotta someones) need to pay for that.

I almost didn’t open Jordan Hoffman’s Vanity Fair criticism of Spike Lee’s new HBO series on the September 11 attacks. The fact is, I generally won’t read or watch anything related to 9/11 because I have a physical revulsion to thinking about the topic. There is no way in hell, for example, that I would ever sit down at watch a program on 9/11, whether it be a multipart documentary or a fifteen minute explainer.

Hoffman’s criticism isn’t particularly interesting either, but it boils down to a concern that in a pre-final cut screening, Hoffman felt that too much credence was given to folks who subscribe to implausible conspiracy theories about why WTC7 collapsed. It seems likely that Lee will make some adjustments to that episode before the series is released, so I don’t much care.

It got me thinking about why I can’t think about 9/11 though, and it isn’t really related to the horror of the day itself.

Sometime shortly after the second tower collapsed a crowd assembled around my work space at the Sarnoff Corporation where I was working as a low level manager in an Integrated Circuit Lab. They knew I was pretty politically attuned, and they wanted to know what the government was going to do. I remember what I told them. I said that I hadn’t voted for the Bush administration and as Texas oilmen they were probably the worst possible people to have in charge at such a moment, but that we were going to have to trust them to get us through it. We had to pull together.

I stand by that. I told them we had to unite politically, but also that we shouldn’t think that the government would necessarily make good decisions. I wasn’t calling for blind trust, but more for giving them some leeway to deal with a very difficult situation.

That’s the seed of my present aversion to thinking about 9/11. All the wrong decisions were made. My good will wasn’t reciprocated. Even the person who performed most admirably on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani, has descended into criminal madness.

The current state of Iraq, Afghanistan, and our nation’s politics, is a testimony to the folly of trusting that anything would be handled correctly after the September 11 attacks.

I remember later that afternoon sitting alone in my living room watching the news coverage and having a profound sense of dread about what it going to do to our country. I’m talking about the reaction. I knew the reaction would be very bad and likely not go well. I could foresee things like making torture “acceptable” again and the Patriot Act and disproportionate uses of violence. I knew many of my countrymen would support these things and that, politically, little could stand in the way.

The reason 9/11 makes me sick is not because I can’t stand watching all those people die, but because it’s all tied up with my heartbreak about what it did to us as a people.