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Zipcode 30303: Charlie from Atlanta
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A recent book review mentioned the cliché of “Minnesota Nice.” Although the book discussed people, things, and situations that are anything but nice, it also showed characters rather endearingly clinging to the ideal of talking “nicely,” at least in public, avoiding words like “anger” and “despair” even in discussing the normal reactions people have to bereavement.
The word “nice” has had an interestingly complex
history in English. For some
generations it meant “foolish:” or “tedious.” Its core meaning seems to have
been “elaborately detailed.” I remember writing a paper about Ellen White’s
writing, in a guidebook for Christian school teachers, that “Disciplining is
the nicest work” entrusted to teachers. She didn’t mean that correcting
students was teachers’ favorite thing, as some students have probably always suspected.
She meant that knowing when and how to correct students is a difficult,
complicated, delicate .task, like one of those elaborate needlework patterns
where overlooking one tiny loop or tangle can make a yard of careful stitching
fall apart. That is not what I mean by “nice” here.
“Nice,” for the purpose of this blog post, means
“emotionally pleasing to the person speaking.” It’s important to clarify this
because in practice “nice” is often used in toxic communications where someone
claims the power to define “nice” as “emotionally pleasing to me” and demands that others accept this
definition of “nice” to include things that are, in fact, abhorrent to them. One reason why I distrust “nice” is that
it is so often hurled at introverts by extroverts; it’s also hurled at children
by child molesters. “Nice” should, perhaps, always imply that things are only fluffy, sugary, and contributing to
efforts to deny harsh truth. It would be nice
if it did. In practice “nice” can mean active collaboration with evildoers.
“Nice” is therefore different from good, true, right, fair, or even legally allowed. In practice “nice” is
not only different from but sometimes opposite to all of those things.
Thus the old traditional protest song:
Feminists, when I was a larval one, proudly
affirmed that they were not nice. We wanted to be good women, not nice girls. I
quickly associated this distinction with C.S. Lewis’s observations of “the
[lesser] good becoming the enemy of the best.”
I found the distinction in other places, sometimes
less well explained. There were clumsy
sociological efforts to write about “different value systems” in ways that
would sound scientific while being anti-Christian, improbable dystopian
“lifeboat” and “dilemma” stories. Extroverts, apparently, understand “right”
and “wrong” to mean all sorts of things, mostly having to do with their
ever-present fear of Other Humans, in the absence of a natural internal sense
of right and wrong. Meh. If anyone ever finds a way to teach extroverts these basics,
which may be like teaching blind people about colors, I’m sure they’ll let us
know.
Susan Cooper’s then-new Dark Is Rising series made a similarly unconvincing distinction: A
character called Will is warned that what sounds like a stray dog whining outside
the door is a deception by the enemy, which he must ignore, to illustrate that
what “good” means in this story is not necessarily the kind of “good” he’s been
taught about as a child—in other words what I’d call “nice,” being docile and
mimicking the way someone who had actually developed a sense of empathy would
behave. I remember liking this awareness of the transition from “nice boy” to
“good man” for Will, but thinking there might have been more of a challenge
about it. Any modern child can understand that a recording of a stray dog, or
even a friend pleading for help, might be used by an enemy. Will ought to have
had to stand up to something, at least peer pressure.
Most of my classmates didn’t feel ready to talk
much about the ideals of Good and Bad, and of course they’d been taught not to
presume to judge living people as being either; but they did use “nice” to
describe people. Usually it was used as the word for someone you had no reason
to dislike but found completely uninteresting. If you had a friend who wanted
to date someone you considered repulsive, you said that person was a nice guy or
girl. Likewise if you found the person your friend wanted to date attractive,
but you weren’t going to compete with your friend. Likewise if you wanted to
organize a group or project that would actually accomplish something besides
merely making people feel good about themselves: “He’s a nice guy but he’s the
second understudy.”
Perhaps as a result of this “nice” sometimes meant
“something less than adequate,” as in “Small student band X have nice voices...Small student band Y get
the special scholarship.” This “nice” could be made more pejorative by adding
“little,” as in “nice little Sunday School stories” meaning “...that no
mainstream publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.”
As a writer I’ve always seen a connection here.
When writing tries to be “nice” in the sense of being bound by taboos against
expressing or arousing anger or despair, it becomes nice-as-opposed-to-good.
Sometimes it can seem that there’s more of a market for nice, compliant little
writings than there is for the good ones, which are likely to arouse those
not-nice emotional feelings. Usually there’s nothing really wrong with nice writing. It can be
pleasant for writers, as well as sponsors, if writers will just nicely
cooperate with corporate censorship and write nice little sponsor-approved
things that...might be useful to someone in some way. The world needs math
books, and even though the facts of math have not changed since the series of
math books the school was using last year was written, if the author of those
books has died why shouldn’t the school pay a living writer like you for the
books they use, rather than paying old Wossname and Whichever, or their estates.
If you need money and you’re offered a good price for writing nice, safe math
books, that’s not a bad choice. At
least it depends on how much your internal sense of right and wrong bothers you
about the need to educate people about the hazards of some corporate sponsor’s
product.
A few years ago, as careful observations of my
celiac-like reactions convinced me that they were being caused by
glyphosate...I was between publishers. I’d been paying the bills by writing for
one hack writing site. (Others had higher pay schedules even then; I’d stuck
with the one site manly because of introvert inertia.) When that site ran up
against the tax code I went directly to another low-paying site. When that site
exhausted its original funding and stopped paying, I had some honest doubts
about how it was going to be possible to survive. Around that time, no actual
offers of promises were made, but an e-friend of an e-friend started tweeting
about wanting to pay people to write novels. The proposed start date for the project
kept slipping further ahead, as this person kept observing how different
writers actually did at goals the person claimed to share with me—networking
and promoting the work of other writers, especially, and maintaining an active
presence on at least two major social media sites. The observation process
lasted about as long as it took for Google + to be dismantled and Twitter to
develop a censorship policy. Bayer’s goons started blocking people associated
with Glyphosate Awareness. My following on Twitter dropped and the e-friend who
wanted to pay writers disappeared.
Person may have been real for all I know. Person’s
screen name came from European history, but that seemed like simple
prudence, and person claimed to be European
and might even have had some hereditary claim on the name in real life. It
wouldn’t even surprise me if person had been real and sincere, had intended to
employ an international group of writers, and had been advised to limit the
payments to European writers for tax reasons. The timing of person’s cyber-life
was certainly convenient for Bayer, anyway, and gives us further insight into
what scum they are.
Bayer could at least have tried paying me to stop
tweeting about Glyphosate Awareness. I can even picture that working...if Ralph
Nader’s Public Interest Research Group and Robert Kennedy’s Children’s Health
Defense group had expressed interest in taking over Glyphosate Awareness, I
would have been glad to hand it over to them. They had more money, more name
recognition, and better security already, and I would had preferred to be known
for writing nice little historical romances rather than for hosting the
Glyphosate Awareness Live Chats. I was not, after all, brought up to be
primarily an activist. I was brought up to be a Southern Lady with activist skills.
But that did not happen, and although I’m glad and
grateful that RFK and Nader and the PIRG got involved with Glyphosate Awareness, in their eagerness to move on
to other topics I see a certain lack of commitment. That would be as in the old joke about ham and eggs: the hen was involved, but the hog was committed.
Well...coronavirus and its vaccines were certainly
handed to bloggers on a silver platter. I’m particularly grateful also to an old
Tea Party e-friend, Norb Leahy, who’s been posting almost nothing but
coronavirus statistics for two years now. A glance at my blog feed keeps me up
to date on those and helped unmask someone who was hiding a different sort of
activity behind a more cursory COVID statistics log. The statistics have become
depressing and produced painful cognitive dissonance for those Tea Partiers who
wanted to believe coronavirus was a hoax. Leahy’s voice has never faltered and
his thread’s never broken. I’m grateful, too, for Ellen Hawley, Cornwall’s gain
and our loss, whose analyses of the statistics have been consistently cautious,
scientific, public-spirited, and also witty.
Nobody ever even offered us COVID bloggers and
tweeters money for documenting the unfolding fabricated crisis as an unwilling
public absorbed the new immunological understanding that, yes, we need to
restructure at least our work spaces and social etiquette to protect the
vulnerable from silly little chest colds. Bird flu. A virus so selective as to
disable or kill about one person in twenty (usually not affecting schools or workplaces, since the
weakest person in twenty was likely to be in a nursing home) while the other
nineteen need a blood test to know for sure that they’ve had it.
For the question readers keep asking me about the “pandemic,” I still don’t have a good answer. Their question is “What really killed Gate City’s best known COVID victim?”
Well, coronavirus did; he was in the nursing home when coronavirus got in, end of story.
“But is it really? Didn’t you know him, if not closely, at least longer than most people did. Wasn’t he a relative? Haven’t you talked to his brothers and sisters about what, when he wasn’t even eighty years old, he was doing in a nursing home in the first place!”
Well, yes, it’s not news; he became ill in a very peculiar way. Symptoms suggested a rare disease that’s been described but not explained in medical literature. All I know about the disease is what everyone else can find, on the Internet or in the A.M.A. Home Medical Encyclopedia, but yes, he was one of the neighbors whose property the Bad Neighbor wanted to buy up. And I do know firsthand that the Bad Neighbor’s harassment does include poisoning human beings, which raises some questions not only about the man with the mysterious rare disease, but about exactly what sort of contaminant made Grandma Bonnie Peters’ last skinned knee so horrific.
And also about my chimney fire. I carelessly left a creosoted stick in the kitchen stove because I’d done that many times before and, though it overheated the stove and scorched things on the warming shelf, it did not cause fires...and the Fire Chief did observe that what he saw in the attic didn’t look like a normal chimney fire, to him. At the time I had more to think about than asking him what in (Berrien Springs) he thought it did look like.
The Bad Neighbor is a very bad man and it would be appropriate for all of the COVID victim’s relatives to come after him for harassment, trespass, vandalism, and elder abuse alone, and I will bear witness to all of those things and more, but ten years after the fact it will be hard to prove whether or not the COVID victim’s illness really began with poisoning. Though that may well be the case.
Which brings us back to glyphosate, the Bad Neighbor’s
primary attack on me ever since I found witnesses to his threats about the alleged
“fire hazards.”
I know Robert Kennedy’s following are primed to want him to expose some sinister corporate plot about the COVID vaccines. (Never drag in malice to explain what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but the public do need to know that incompetence has to be expected for the first several years of developing new vaccines. Yes, there was some risk. Yes, there needed to be some system of indemnification. No, there wasn't one.)
I know Carey Gillam is the young golden girl who dreams of fame for busting open some sort of international spy-fiction scenario in the COVID story, and if any such thing could be proved...and if it couldn’t, too...Go with God, our High Queen and Empress, is all I can say to her.
I
know Nader is awesome for still taking up new issues, and the PIRG has a fresh
lot of students to feed every summer, and the students are great kids who earn
their keep (I ought to know that, I
was one of’m), and the students and the big funders alike are saying,
“Well...Bayer has promised to pull glyphosate off the market next year anyway, and glyphosate
research is scary, look at what’s happening to Priscilla King, and wouldn’t it
be cool to market biodegradable algae-based substitutes for plastic, instead?!” It would. It may be a hard job when the switch to electric cars more walking is being forced upon us, two major cultural changes at once, but it would be cool.
Meanwhile, Gentle Readers, doing Glyphosate Awareness has changed my whole perspective on “pesticides” and other volatile chemical pollutants. I think I started out far too nicely.
One point. As we’ve all seen from the COVID
melodrama, medical issues are very much individual things. Glyphosate does me
and some of my relatives much more
immediate and obvious harm than it does to most people, because we are the one
in every ten thousand Irish people
who have a gene that’s fairly well limited to people with Irish ancestors. Not
just any Irish ancestors either—only a select few! However, as the old Romans
used to say, Hodie mihi, cras tibi.
Me today, you tomorrow. Before I had nasty reactions to glyphosate residues and
“Roundup Ready” corn, some people had nasty reactions to the bacteria spliced
into BT corn. Some people got Parkinson’s Disease from exposure to malathion,
cancer from exposure to DDT.
When I started posting and tweeting about glyphosate, I wanted to do it the nice way, examine the unbiased science, look at what one chemical spray at a time is doing to human beings. So, what happened? Right away everyone grokked that glyphosate is very, very bad for human beings, even though it affects us in different ways.
So all the companies immediately recalled all glyphosate products and advertised their programs of compensation to victims, right? Hah.
Paid shills to insult us while censoring
us on Twitter and encouraging goons to harass us in real life, more like, while
stalling and waffling and backing and filling. Glyphosate was pulled in 2020,
then marketed again, more aggressively, in 2021. Supposedly Bayer will
voluntarily pull it off the market again in 2023. In the absence of a legal
ban, look for it on the market again in 2024. Meanwhile nastier poisons will be
rolled out for sale to those who believe they need chemical help to control “weeds.”
And will complaints about the damage those poisons do generate an objective look at the science, prompt recalls, and liberal compensation? Hah. Hah.
Maybe the long-term results of the coronavirus panic will help put it to them in a forceful enough way to penetrate what these people have in the way of minds. You do not, ever, need any chemical to control “weeds.” Trying to poison weeds only breeds more and bigger ones next year. You need to eat the weeds. Most of them are palatable and nutritious. Even Spanish Needles. If you have stupidly bred Spanish Needles with glyphosate? You can eat them—and your neighbors can and should make it dang hard for you to afford any other vegetables until you do! Most weeds that are not edible have some medicinal or textile value. The few weeds that aren’t good for anything else can be dried out and burned. If you’re afraid to handle poison ivy, rent a goat—they all say it tastes much be-e-etter than grass. That’s controlling weeds. Spraying poison BREEDS weeds. If we had no other reason to oppose the use of glyphosate, we ought to oppose it because it gives nasty plants like kudzu and jimsonweed an unnatural competitive advantage over nice plants like violets and clover.
There is not and has never been a chemical “-cide”
spray that hasn’t had harmful effects on some people. A few years ago a
gentleman whose Glyphosate Awareness was just starting to develop said, “I
never heard of anybody having asthma
before that spray came into use.” Maybe not, because he grew up in a
city, but my generation had asthma as a reaction to a then-popular insecticide
called chlordane, which was supposed to kill cockroaches, though as I recall it
didn’t noticeably discourage Florida roaches. Chlordane was pulled off the market
along with about a dozen other then-popular sprays, most of which caused acute
allergies similar to those associated with dicamba and had also been pinned as
pro-cancer factors, as have dicamba and glyphosate.
Parkinson’s Disease is a horrible way to grow old but, in the absence of repeated exposure to malathion or parathion, its
progress can be slowed down with medication and a restricted diet, allowing
many people who developed the disease after age fifty a fair chance at a
normally active old age.
Because of the
hateful corporate response to what Glyphosate Awareness uncovered, I now
believe we need to be demanding a total ban on open-air spraying of any substance, including paint, perfume,
and mosquito repellent. Don’t let corporations keep raking in fools’ money
while the most severely injured victims die. We need to criminalize spraying. Period. Any "right to spray" ends where food other people eat, water they drink, or air they breathe begins. If it’s not pure water
or a decent grade of alcohol, and the person spraying it can’t prove it’s water
or alcohol by drinking a litre of it straight down, the sprayer needs to be in
jail, while everyone in the vicinity who becomes ill in the next month or two
has a chance to join the list of people owed a share of the sprayer’s worldly
goods.
The way to paint surfaces outside of a building
you own is to apply liquid paint with brushes or rollers.
The way to repel mosquitoes outdoors is to apply a
little non-aerosol, non-volatile liquid or lotion you can shake or squeeze from
a bottle into your hand.
The way to deal with wasps in my part of the world
is to slow down and make friends with them, but the idea of killing attacking
insects by spraying vodka on them is too good to waste, especially when I
consider the idea of spraying idjits being forced by the police to
drink a litre of vodka and then becoming very disorderly, as in sick, and being
put in the drunk tank. “Someone bailed you out, so on condition that you report
for trial you may walk home from Duffield right
after you’ve cleaned up the police car" is the sort of thing in-laws
who married too far above themselves can understand. Right. On wasps people
should retain the right to squirt vodka through a non-aerosol squirt bottle. If they're not intelligent enough to work with the animals.
What people do about roaches and termites in their
own homes should continue to be up to them—but they have no right to do it
outdoors.
We need to work on legislation specifically
denying that there is or ever was such a thing as a “right to spray.”
One of my favorite lines in the Into the Woods score by Stephen Sondheim is sung by Little Red Riding Hood as she has met the wolf in the woods on the way to Grandma's house. He spun quite a tale and seemed very nice to her. In the aftermath she sings a line, "Nice is different from good." Boy, it fits a lot of situations.
ReplyDeleteYes, it does! Thank you for visiting, Jeanie.
ReplyDelete