Forgive me, Reader, for it has been almost two years since my last Note from Self. That is officially a Long Time between updates. The pandemic has been declared over — but is it? I haven’t been wearing a mask out and about — but every time I see someone else doing so, I wonder, is it time for me to return to combat mode?
It takes me back to March 2020, when no one knew the power of COVID, what the worst would be like, or how we would fare. There was a lot of fear in the air — we washed our produce in the laundry room before bringing it into our kitchen. Now this didn’t sound silly at the time, maybe a bit Kosher, though I don’t know what that’s like either.
Everyday Americans behave as if “the worst” is now over, but anecdotal references to the Great COVID Resurgence are mounting. One friend told my spouse how their choir recital led to half the choir contracting COVID. In this light, we just scheduled COVID/flu shots at CVS and hope we’ve done it in time, before choirs around here start coughing their notes out. So here we go once again doing our liberal duty for ourselves and the public, protecting us from others and vice versa, as it were.
We must have a dozen COVID test kits that one of us ordered during the pandemic, which I hope will go to waste. (You no doubt have a few too.) If every U.S. citizen were to stack our unused COVID tests end-to-end, the resulting tower of nose-swabs could have poked a hole in the Chinese balloon that did or did not spy on us earlier this year. Now that would teach the Chinese to keep their viruses to themselves. Tik Tok that!
An aside: I recall my parents fretting over things, but I never recall them trying to “time” or “optimize” things like we have done over our lives. For my parents, life was all about “dealing with” — and one either dealt with or didn’t. The whole idea of timing and/or optimizing one’s life choices is probably a Boomer phenomenon, enabled by those who brought us into this world, thinking we should have a better shot at things than they did. Or maybe our being not only compelled to but entitled to optimize our lives was born of frustration with how older generations seemed resigned to so many things.
Answering such questions with finality is why God created anthropological sociologists and sociological anthropologists, not to mention arthritic socialists and social arthropods. Two‑by‑two on the Ark they boarded.
But back to reality. Talking about the pandemic and its sequelae seems so dated, as if the millions who lost more life-years than they should have were mere statistics, and isn’t it time we all just moved on! (Or, as a 1967 MAGA pop psychology book might have put it, “I Don’t Care, You Don’t Care.”)
The right-wing revisionist history of the pandemic grates on me and should grate on you too: the narrative that virtuous red states didn’t panic like teary children and stayed defiantly wide-open, basking in their hard-won freedom, while fearful blue states shut things down and destroyed their own economies to save people who were going to die anyway!
That is precisely the message of Political Social Influencer (the most accurate description of him) Ron DeSantis. DeSantis, and other Republicans like him who emulate Trump, control the narrative by assuming the role of Playground Bully while pleading the case of Playground Victim. Stop stepping on white folks’ toes, whines DeSantis and the MAGA elite, because half of you don’t belong in our country, the country everyone knows we made and is ours to do with as we choose! Stay put, Venezuelans, unless you’re looking for a long and uncomfortable bus ride!
Regards global affairs, I haven’t yet mentioned the Israel-Hamas War. This reflects (a) my lack of expertise in the political-social dynamic of the region, and (b) my conviction that enlightened people should have risen to the task decades ago and negotiated a two-state solution when there was at least a possibility of mutual give-and-take. Some tried, but there would arise no Lincoln of the Middle East. And thus co-intransigence lapsed into tragic stupidity.
Wow, it has been a long time since my last Note from Self, I say, as I wipe the rhetorical spittle off my freshly-shaven chin. I was going to delete that whole political segment but decided it was truthier not to.
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I am a faithful listener of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown podcast but I am def not into his dog-lover bits. I am Lucy when it comes to dog kisses:
Meanwhile, my site Pet-Free Hotels is attracting visitors from various IP addresses across the US. Not quite sure how folks are finding the site, but clicks are definitely ramping up. I understand that, statistically speaking, readers of The 100 Billionth Person are likely to own pets and thereby may be unsympathetic to the objective of Pet-Free Hotels, but what can I say. My spouse and I have the comfort of knowing the spittle on my chin is of human origin, even when we’re on the road.
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Lastly, returning to this here blog, you may have noticed a number of changes in the layout and navigation of The 100 Billionth Person. It was long-past time for a more readable, larger-print, and easier-to-navigate site, with a similar look-and-feel on both desktop and mobile. That said, I still have a number of quirks to fix, so your patience is appreciated as I continue to tinker.
No credit to myself, but I have read so much about the geopolitical origins of Palestine, Israel and Gaza in the past few days, thanks to accessible and even-handed articles in Wikipedia, that my prior ignorance of the many factors leading to the present war is almost shameful.
While I chide myself for not having more fully researched the history of Palestine, I also take issue with the tens of millions of Americans — if not the majority of us — who offer our knee-jerk support for the state of Israel along with our hand-wringing sympathy for Palestinian refugees, and then leave it at that, as if there is nothing else to be said.
No discussion about Israel and Palestinian Arabs ever seems to get very far in the U.S. without devolving into shouting matches. Criticism of Israeli policies or defense actions is a political and social third rail in this country, almost approaching the status of banned speech, never mind our First Amendment. Expressions of support for the human rights of displaced Palestinians must necessarily begin with the phrase, “Of course we reject Hamas and Hezbollah and terrorist acts.” But even that prefatory remark does little to open ears.
Protestors for each “side” in this conflict have been gathering in many cities and college campuses to air their respective viewpoints. Those supporting the cause of Palestinians are at a disadvantage in the public eye, because support for Palestinian human rights has been successfully re-cast, by Israeli hard-liners, as opposing the existence of Israel. And where do you go from there, when you have the Holocaust as your trump card.
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To be somewhat fair to myself, it’s not like I hadn’t done any reading on the Middle East before now. A decade or so ago, when our attention was focused on Iraq, I read Quataert’s “The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922” and then MacMillan’s “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World” — I highly recommend the latter as a chronological starting point for the mess that became the Middle East.
Next, you might go down the same path I did last week and start with the Wikipedia article Mandatory Palestine. There you will find valuable offshoots like the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 Palestine War, the Palestinian expulsion and flight, and Occupation of Gaza Strip by the United Arab Republic. Please indulge your curiosity, take time and read.
The fact that these articles felt like unfamiliar, untold stories to me is because U.S media covers Israel — and the U.S. government handles Israel — as if it were our 51st state; whereas Arab Muslims are cast as pariahs if not terrorists-in-waiting. The information and intonation imbalance is striking.
One thing I will say, without malice to my Brit friends, but Sirs, your early 20th-century Empire did its ignorant best to bollox up the world big time, on each and every continent you stepped foot on. The human toll of your arrogance may very well outlast that of our own. Thank God the U.S. does not (usually) combine such lofty ambitions as yours with such colossal stupidity.