Title: Ten Minutes from Normal
Author: Karen Hughes
Date: 2004
Publisher: Viking Penguin
ISBN: 0-670-03305-7
Length: 335 pages
Quote: "The most important thing you do in life is choose your loves and order them very carefully. I reordered mine when I came home to Texas."
While campaigning with George W. Bush, Karen Hughes visited a town called Normal. Hearing a train conductor announce that they were "ten minutes from Normal" gave her the idea for a book about campaigning, or about advising her candidate after his election. Ten Minutes from Normal is both.
Some readers might have hoped that Mrs. Hughes would tell tales on W Bush, or wither him with faint praise, in the way the Clinton staff did. Those readers will be disappointed. Mrs. Hughes is a twentieth-century-conservative wife and mother whose business relationships with men are strictly professional, and a political campaign manager who knows better than to say anything indiscreet...so you might have known that the worst story she'd tell would be about how she told W to stop using a certain line in his speeches, and he finally saw the wisdom of her suggestion (page 87). The topic of her advice is usually communication; the content discussed in the stories she tells is very "safe."
Mrs. Hughes didn't "quit," and she wasn't fired, when she left Washington. She discovered the joys of telecommuting. She didn't want to be judged by her co-workers according to how well she lobbied for one specific office space. She was embarrassed by being told that, as an assistant to the president, she now ranked "roughly equivalent to...a three-star general," when "my [D]ad had retired after thirty-six years and three wars as a two-star general." She missed a favorite chain restaurant that hadn't (yet) invaded Washington. She wanted more time with her son. She didn't like having to start work early: "I sure like to stay in bed until 8:00 to 8:30. By that time, the [former] president has run three miles, walked two more, made coffee, read the papers and had his morning intelligence briefings." And she was "horrified" that her fifteen-year-old son thought of living in Washington as "like being away at boarding school": "It's hard to imagine being fifteen years old and having where your family lives or whether you are happy make any difference whatsoever to the president of the United States."
And of course the fact that the Hughes family were in Washington during years of official near-constant alarm and despondency had nothing to do with this...Mrs. Hughes describes the autumn of 2001 as a public event during which she mourned for other people's losses, noting poignantly that Barbara Olson had been just one year older than she was. Although both the anthrax mailer, later that year, and the snipers, a year later, turned out to be troubled individuals without political motivation, anyone familiar with the Arab concept of vengeance as a duty would have been afraid for W Bush and his staff.
Possibly the staff, themselves, genuinely repressed their fear from consciousness and hid it behind tactful displays of empathy for other people. Sometimes acting with courage requires a certain amount of sublimation of natural feelings.
Left-wing readers may think Ten Minutes from Normal airbrushes too much. Well, there was a war on; information about a war is supposed to be airbrushed during the duration of the war. When Mrs. Hughes describes how glad she was to be back in a "normal" home in Texas, as a wife and mother who still occasionally went to Washington to advise the President, as of 2004, I incline to believe her. Otherwise, there's a fine line between evading ugly facts and respecting the feelings of living people; I think what Mrs. Hughes does in this book is the latter.
This does not, of course, make for the most exciting memoir you've ever read. On the other hand, it offers high-level validation to those who've chosen to simplify their lifestyles, even and especially if we've chosen to do it without bashing Washington. Karen Hughes demonstrates that you don't have to be a failure, a quitter, a coward, a fanatic, excessively (or even noticeably) introverted, or otherwise inferior to eager-beaver yuppies in any way, to appreciate telecommuting.
On behalf of all those who may never be asked to advise the President of the United States, but who hate traffic, global warming, office politics, wasted time, and schlepping things that would be safer if stored in one place or another, Ten Minutes from Normal is warmly recommended.
Showing posts with label Washington DC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington DC. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Why Can't People Eat on Metro?
Last week I mentioned being disgusted by a scofflaw encouraging a child to lick a sticky sweet on Washington's Metrorail. I was disgusted because everyone learns that, even on Metrobus, there is a very real possibility of attracting literal "bugs in the system." Many parts of the city are overrun with German roaches. People who dsn't want these "friendly" little insects crawling from a sewer right up their legs. in pursuit of the warmth and chemical odor inside their laptops, have fairly intense feelings about the idea of attracting roaches to the public transportation system.
But a glance at an old newspaper I was about to burn reminded me that Metrorail has an additional reason to be vigilant about food and drink on the trains.
Several, actually. Trains move. Crowds jostle. Food and drink spill. Nobody wants to step in other people's snacks, nor do Metrofolks want to scrub it off floors.
Then there's the fact that Washington is full of small restaurants and snack wagons run by nice people who need money, and if you feel a need to eat while you're in the city, you are supposed to pick a local entrepreneur to support. Noshing on packaged snacks is tacky. Everything has been done to attract the tourist's eye to all the nice places to sit down and eat the city offers. If, as it might be because you're on a one-week temporary job that is the first temp job you've had in a month, you do feel obligated to carry your own food around town, for goodness' sakes don't advertise the fact.
But the reason why Metrorail is more vigilant than Metrobus is that Metrorail runs on electricity. Food and its containers are fuel that could easily catch fire.
"In 1987," Richard Garrison of Arlington informed the editor of the City Paper, "31 people died in London's King's Cross underground station in a fire...caused by rubbish beneath wooden escalators being ignited." Metrorail's escalators are not wooden, but the prospect of all those electrical wires catching fire while people are somewhere in the middle of 160 steps is an effective way to suppress any normal appetite.
Metrocops have been somewhat inconsistent about enforcing the law. There's been a tendency to avoid getting involved if top government officials or big-spending tourists violate local laws, while enforcing the laws strictly on private local citizens. While most Metrocops are Black themselves, this still adds up to an unacceptable frequency pf Black youth going to jail for offenses like eating or littering on Metrorail, while older and richer-looking people might be politely ignored or, at worst, required to go to court and pay a $50 fine. So it's very likely that tourists ignore the law, stuff their bloated faces on Metrorail, and go home to tell their friends that city laws are enforced only by dirty looks and an occasional unfriendly comment. The sad truth is that those people probably don't even care that they're participating in a little sociological drama that is elitist, not racist, but is perceived as racist by ghetto youth.
Like it or not, violating the law while rich and pale-complexioned is a way of grinding the faces of the poor into the fact that you are lapping up the benefit of prejudice that works against them. Not that people who think they are entitled to munch, slurp, and dribble in public places care.
They won't care unless they are trapped in an elevator during a fire, and while that's a development all Washingtonians--even the ghetto youth--want to avoid, there would probably be some small compensation in considering that some two-legged swine deserve to be trapped halfway up a 500-foot elevator shaft in a fire.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Book Review: The Neighbor
Title: The Neighbor
Author: London Clarke
Date: 2021
Publisher: Carfax Abbey
ISBN: 978-13939-17694
Length: 419 pages
Quote: "I'm the only one now who can protect my children while they're inside the house."
And Claire does a terrible job of it. But that's normal. This is horror fiction. Main characters make terrible mistakes. Usually they can correct their mistakes by the end of the book. First-person narrative is usually a hopeful sign...
Let's admit it: I like this book a lot more than I usually like horror fiction. I read it, I give people some indication of the level of horror they have to face if they want to buy something with just the right chill factor, but horror stories I've read twice are just about limited to Dracula, Frankenstein, Stephen King, Charles Williams, and things I forgot reading the first time. After reading this novel I did not immediately want to delete it off the Kindle; that says a lot for The Neighbor.
Maybe it's because I'm living in my own bad-neighbor story. Why has it not ended decisively by now, as real-life stories of bad neighbors usually do? Because my bad neighbor inherited the same kinds of intelligence from the same ancestors I did. Because I don't have much money to spend on the kind of technology local law enforcement want to see used and don't want to supply. I've seen some of that "Are you sure you're not just obsessed with this man?" kind of thing the characters in the novel encounter (and yes, they are obsessed with the evil man). I'm not. I'm interested in solving a real-world crime, but if I ever feel attracted to another man, it won't be one of my cousins. As long as they keep their health they are good-looking men, but to me they're relatives. It's mutual. Sometimes bad-neighbor situations really are entirely about the real estate. Maybe some part of me was craving a story about a fictional bad-neighbor situation that was about sex and sin and repentance and salvation.
I want to say this on behalf of women who are single, widowed, divorced (like Claire), estranged, temporarily separated, or just working different shifts from their husbands, and are having to deal with creepy male neighbors. There is a tendency, promoted by very bad fiction, to think that any conflict between people of different genders are "really" about sexual attraction to each other and will be resolved by indulging that attraction. Even when they feel such an attraction, sleeping around doesn't solve any problems, except to the extent that it distracts people from their original problems by creating worse ones. We all need to admit that after about grade six, nowadays when people feel free to admit and act on their attractions, conflicts between a male and a female are likely to be really about whatever they're about, on the surface: sales, promotions, top grades, scholarships...real estate...
Anyway, whether or not there is an attraction to be acted on, conflicts between a male and a female have to be resolved in the same way conflicts between people of the same sex and/or family have to be resolved. The Neighbor acknowledges this. Claire's husband has just dumped her for another woman; the bachelor who moved in next door, Steel, is attractive; the attraction is mutual. Given a pretext to speak to each other, they flop into bed. Then a stuffed toy cat Steel gave Claire's youngest child starts haunting the whole family, and her eldest child starts sleepwalking, and the computer starts showing random creepy images that seem to stir up the deepest fears of the person looking at it...and then the really scary events of the story begin.
Gunnar thinks a drink is a drunk; for some people it is. When he leaves, Claire feels free to "enjoy the taste of wine." Gunnar seems all too ready to ascribe all the bad things that happen to his ex-wife and children to the Demon Alcohol. In the reality of the story I was hoping he'd have to face the different kind of demon Claire and the children are dealing with. He doesn't, but it's a series. There could be a sequel where he does.
The story takes place in the Hump of Virginia, where Claire soon realizes that along with her demon "lover" she's also dealing with the Demon Development. A more distant neighbor's property is under construction, but the job never gets done because a bottomless sinkhole can't seem to be filled. Claire's Korean immigrant friend tells her that this is because there are "too many holes" in the neighborhood, not physical holes but portals to the underworld through which evil spirits are getting in. The sinkhole is the physical manifestation of the spiritual holes in everyone else's lives, not only Claire's. After talking to Steel another couple will be violently attacked, a new baby will be born dead, and other bad things will happen. Claire can only protect herself and her children.
And she's only a social worker. Claire became a social worker because she wanted to believe that her father developed a mental illness after tormenting mental patients with exorcisms of demons that didn't eist; she didn't want to believe either in demons or in God. She wants to believe she can help people by observing their unhappiness with detachment, never raising a finger, only ever handing out psychological cliches. Before the story's over Claire will be forced to confess sins and ask people for prayers and even pray, herself.
No, that doesn't make this a Sunday book. The classic cliche of horror fiction is that religious faith, usually embodied in Catholic forms but generally understood as just faith in some sort of higher power of goodness, is always what saves the survivors. The focus of horror fiction is not on the faith but on the feeling of horror, though. The effect on readers' souls may be cathartic but is not inspirational, rhough it's an interesting psychological question why people don't report feeling inspired to pray and do good works after exposure to horror stories. Traditional morality is usually a solid motif in horror stories--Claire's horrors begin with a reckless sex act, in other stories it's a theft or an outburst of unrighteous anger or a show of disrespect toward a parent--yet somehow the emotional effect doesn't seem to be to motivate readers to be chaste or honest or patient or loyal. Unless, of course, they consciously think about it
Anyway every one of those 419 pages is well written, reinforcing traditional morality if you consciously look for it. Claire's life starts to behave like a computer infested with Windows 10 during one of Microsoft's "update" fits, only, unlike Windows 10, the chaos has an explanation that can be brought under control. Claire has to do the kind of "emotional work" she has presumably guided patients through but hasn't done for herself, facing the trauma that motivates what has seemed like a foolish but harmless quirk: she likes to sneak around town at night pretending to be someone, anyone, other than herself.
She does not, in the story, have to confess and repent of her sins, but Clarke is a good enough writer to suggest that she's doing that somewhere offstage where denominational bickering about the process of confession won't spoil the story for readers. Some things are best left to readers' imagination and it takes a skilled writer to activate readers' imagination, rather than spelling out every detail.
And, local readers? Local writer.
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Book Review for 8.15.24: Fatal Legislation
Title: Fatal Legislation
Author: Ellen Butler
Date: 2018
Publisher: Power to the Pen
ISBN: 978-0-99841935-0
Quote: "For an overweight man in his early seventies, he walked at a relatively brisk pace."
Little does Karina, a lobbyist generally in favor of more tax funding for more expensive drugs, know that Senator Harper's brisk pace is being stepped up by a hacked pacemaker. (An Internet of Things makes it theoretically possible that not even your worst enemy, but perhaps a malfunctioning thermostat or washing machine, could hack your pacemaker. I may need one, some day; I don't think I'll want one.) And the underground tram has been diverted. And the guards who should be watching the tunnels have been distracted. Senator Harper is about to die at Karina's feet and, because she tries to use his cellphone to call for help and carelessly sweeps it into her bag with her personal junk, she's a suspect--a red herring the police can smell a mile away, but still...
Most of fictional Washington accepts that it was just Senator Harper's time to go, and Karina keeps it a secret that she was trying to summon help while she watched him die, when another Senator's chauffeur mysteriously rams their car into a train. A Cabinet Secretary Karina's never liked will join the body count, too, before Karina can prove that these people are being murdered because they've supported legislation she supported too.
Political points are scored--the fictional President is still a "tweeter in chief" and, in the splendid real-world tradition of haters showing the world how profoundly confused they always were, a man with a Nazi screen name turns out to be Israeli--as Karina and her realistically mixed collection of friends fight crime with the valor of a fluffy house cat who has just seen the opportunity of a lifetime to show the world how brave he really is. Like the cat, they ought by rights to get killed, but from sheer surprise at their daring they'll win. They'll be safe because the dear old Post will publicize their whistle-blowing until the whole city has their backs. And here's to tax-funded overpriced drugs for all.
If you like a fast-moving mystery with lots of physical danger but only one shooting (of a side-view mirror), Fatal Legislation is for you. It's a worthwhile reminder that, although our legislators can pay for better security than the average person, there can be reasons why they don't dare to stir a wing, open a mouth, or cheep. Usually the reasons have more to do with campaign funds and benefits than with physical terror, but some corporate goons are desperate enough to hire horribly competent assassins. We never know.
It's been a few years since (in the 1970s) a man with enemies in high places reportedly shot himself in the head a few times before feeling desperate enough to chain himself to weights and sink himself in the Potomac, and the case was officially ruled a suicide, case closed. But it did happen. And the dear old Post that would have defied the corporate goons, once, and publicized things like the harassment of Karen Kingston or the deliberate poisoning of me, sold out to the said corporate goons with the "Trusted News Initiative," which is best explained as "If you've not seen a hard-hitting story about glyphosate in a newspaper recently, don't trust it, don't buy it, and don't read it."
Meanwhile, Butler's book was a bestseller and boosted its series up Amazon's charts, and Butler put it on Book Funnel free of charge because she wants blog readers to know that she's done other series, too, historical spy stories and romantic comedies and more. It's all fiction but it all shows a pleasant obsession with fact-checking.
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Bad Poetry for 1.12.24: Senryu Sequence with Boats
It should have been a
requirement for all classes,
some way or other:
English: "Write about
Anacostia clean-up
day. Describe your haul."
sunshine on shoulders
glimmering on the water
gleam of metal cans
(Photo from Experience Prince Georges)
Math 1: "Average weights
of everybody's clean-up
day hauls. Compare months."
the paddle eases
the plastic bag's handles off
the cottonwood branch
Math 2: "Calculate
if estimates are correct,
how much trash escaped."
if one canoe tows
the shopping cart on a chain
and others' paddles
push it from behind,
can they land it on the bank
without getting wet?
Nursing Assistants:
"Describe hygiene procedures
used on clean-up day."
Hector found a bright
ball between tree roots; it bounced;
his kid dived and swam
sick two days; still alive
tough kid, takes after Papi
who felt worse than he
Bulding Maintenance:
"List sanitary measures
your buildings must use."
bright unnatural colors
flowing over the bike trail
where two dead trout float
Remedial work
for adult education
for social reasons:
"Sketch and discuss cool
looks for protective gear kids
wear on clean-up day."
Giselle made a date
in tight wet T-shirt; now how
to erase skin rash?
Office Assistants:
"Design posters explaining
why 'catch-and-release.'"
heron glares, stands ground
kayak scrapes smelly sandbar
there must be a nest
College-bound students:
"Draft legislation that will
address pollution."
however many
bags of trash you haul in, it's
tip of the iceberg
plastic is real,
chokes fish and birds, but you know
chemicals kill more
(My husband and I lived near enough to the Anacostia River, around the turn of the century, to share many pleasant, romantic memories of happy afternoons fishing garbage out of the historic scenery...and seeing up close that garbage is the least of the Anacostia River's problems. We didn't have the freedom to make this part of any classes either of us taught or tutored. Very few students actually participated. The river cleaners who took foolish risks were townsfolk, not students. But I think it would be a good thing if regular river cleaning were a requirement for graduation or GED in the DC schools...with adequate, fair warnings.)
(Though it's counting here for 1.12.24, this is a new bit of Bad Poetry provoked by the Dverse prompt from 2.7.24: https://dversepoets.com/2024/02/06/poetics-sail-into-a-poem/ . Lots of poems will be linked there.)
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Mark Warner's Progress Report
From U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA):
"
Friends,Often, the news just shows you the flashbulb moments, like when a bill is finally signed into law. When a tragedy first begins to unfold. When a huge gaffe is made. You may not hear as much about the progressive improvements brought to you by Congress. I want to take a moment to check in with you about our bipartisan infrastructure law. Over the past year and a half, the law has paid dividends for Virginia.For those struggling with the cost or accessibility of internet coverage, the law has lowered internet bills, and you can see if you qualify for a rebate here. It’s also expanding broadband, as Virginia is using funding to create a strategic plan to get coverage to more homes. Once that plan is completed, there’s more money available to enact it, getting more Virginians high-speed, accessible, and affordable internet.Drank water recently? Virginia is receiving $46 million to remove lead pipes and lower lead levels in some Virginia drinking water. Virginia also got $22 million to reclaim abandoned mine lands, which will limit acid mine drainage in local water while also revitalizing mining communities.For those that use public transit, we’ve made wide-reaching investments in transit systems across the Commonwealth. In Northern Virginia, you may have heard that the Metro recently opened seven new stops in six months… a pretty remarkable pace. This follows a guaranteed eight-year investment in WMATA. But it isn’t just NoVA that’s getting cash… smaller communities across the entire Commonwealth – from Staunton to Bristol to Lynchburg – are getting guaranteed funds to improve their systems.For air travelers, we’ve seen scads of investments in improving airports. From smaller ones like Luray Caverns to the most busy – Dulles, Norfolk, Richmond, and more – airports across the Commonwealth are getting funds to expand and make overdue upgrades.For those interested in equity and urban planning, the law secured grants for Richmond and Hampton Roads that will begin to reconnect two historically Black communities displaced by the development of the interstate system. You can learn more about these investments from this 13 News Now reporting.To be frank, there’s a lot more things I could list here… huge across-the-board investments in road and bridge quality, coastal resilience and flood mitigation, electric vehicle infrastructure, and more… but I don’t want to write you too long of an email. If you’re interested in learning about more of the successes from this law, check out my webpage here, which compiles some graphics and press releases about what this landmark law has accomplished.If you want to get in touch with me about infrastructure or another issue that is important to you, you can reach out to me using the form on my website. You can also stay in the loop by following my Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you.Sincerely,
[nice signature graphic Google doesn't like] Mark Warner
"
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
Book Review: Testimony
Title: Testimony
Author: Jon Ward
Date: 2023
Publisher: Brazos/Baker
ISBN: 978-1-5874-3577-5
Length: my advance review copy was an unpaginated e-file
Quote: "The kingdom of God wasn’t just words to me. But what I was seeing from the American church in 2016 was at odds with what I had been taught."
This is a well written book that should interest everyone who is now, or has ever been, identified with any of the following terms: evangelical Christians; charismatic Christians; nondenominational church; storefront church; startup church; Montgomery County, Maryland; Gaithersburg; Rockville; Wheaton; Silver Spring; Takoma Park; church school; homeschool; Montgomery College; University of Maryland; Republican; Democrat; Donald Trump voter; Hillary Clinton voter; Barack Obama voter; Sarah Palin voter; Yahoo News; Fox Channel; Newsmax; Charles Colson; C.S. Lewis; Keith Green; Phil Keaggy, Amy Grant; 1980s.You will enjoy reading what Ward has to say about these things, whoever you are. The rest of my comments are about the religious and political ideas to which Ward testifies. You may want to see how far it's possible to disagree with a book and still thoroughly enjoy it. You may just want to read the book, which is fine. My comments won't be on the test.
In many churches, Jon Ward explains to those who don't know, part of many church services is time for members of the congregation to tell stories or "testimonies" of their conversions and other spiritual experiences. In the Yahoo News man's life, spiritual experiences and other life experiences led him away from the church in which he grew up, into the idolatry of Big Government that he perceived would be more useful in his job...
No, really. The "social gospel" that prioritizes helping the poor above other aspects of the Faith is a valid and very appealing part of Christianity, and it's not unreasonable for someone who's always lived in and near Washington, D.C., to accept the claim that the most efficient way to help the poor is to give government agencies whatever they say they need for that purpose. And as a writer I know all about how quickly intelligent people burn out on any trace of the cultlike emotional atmosphere churches acquire when they demand what Ward calls "happy-clappy" celebration at all times, even while one is being verbally abused by the alpha verbal bullies of the pack. That much of Ward's story I beieve.
But I suspect him of hamming it up. I've never seriously believed that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have a reporter murdered outright. Both are smart enough and rich enough to have more efficient ways of shutting up the reporter. I have heard credible claims that Vince Foster had some help committing suicide, but I'm more inclined to suspect the co-workers against whom he was starting to throw accusations about more than I do his old school friend Hillary, and by all accounts it sounds as if he had Prozac Dementia, which in 1993 would have looked just like paranoid schizophrenia, which is incurable, in any case. But if, as a reporter, I were seriously afraid of having my career ruined by one of the two, I'd be more afraid of Clinton. Trump generates enough hate to create a backlash of sympathy for anyone he bullies. Clinton's trademark combination of genuine Background, genuine myopia, and the blonde mystique would allow her to twirl a metaphorical knife slowly in your metaphorical wound while everyone thought she was being nice. And I don't believe a grown man ever seriously suffered from physical fear that Trump was going to morph into Hitler and have the grown man machine-gunned, either. Trump comes across as far more likely to use up his angry energy yelling at a reporter he disliked, posting a few mean tweets, and moving on.
Ward's memoirs sound credible enough when he's talking about growing up inside a nondenominational local church in Maryland. He'd be very close to my sisters' age. I heard some of the speakers and read some of the books that he says influenced his father's more charismatic and dominating friend's takeover of what started out to be his father's church. This friend, whose name I think I would have recognized if it hadn't been one of the names Ward mentions having changed, was later accused of abusing other members of the church in several ways that amounted to crimes.
The situation he describes is pathetic. Ward doesn't claim to have been abused; he says only good things about his parents, who he says were more victims than emotional abusers in a church that gradually grew into a bit of a personality cult around his father's friend. But he was sent to a "Christian" school in Rockville, the Devil's Town, where fears that any exposure to non-church-members' kids might lead him into the Church of Satan were not, in fact, exaggerated. There really was a Church of Satan. Anton LaVey said it was supposed to be about rebellion in a responsible way, not evildoing; that crowd accomplished more than their reasonable share of evildoing, anyway. My heart aches for the poor little stifled-while-endangered boy who was Jon Ward.
Mr. Ward's story was the one my father refused to live out. A sincere and independent Christian, he launched a "storefront church" that attracted many people who'd turned against one denomination or other. They were charismatic Christians, very sincere in their emotional displays. Jon Ward came to feel that education, and closer ties to historic Christianity, would have improved the emotional experience of having a church that was based on the vagaries of emotion, which of course soon became forced displays of emotion not felt, frantic efforts to manipulate God into keeping the emotions miraculously flowing beyond the normal ninety-second half-life of an emotional mood. Joshua Harris's popular, since retracted, book I Kissed Dating Goodbye generated a new fad in which people who hadn't been doing too well in the dating game anyway decided all their relationships would be either friendship or courtship, which Ward seems to think made his adolescent social life more awkward than average, though he falls short of convincing me that that's possible. (It actually worked for him; he was apparently able to be a virgin bridegroom and have been happily married since.) There was a strange combination, he says, of contempt for jobs other than evangelism, distrust of books other than church material, and real fear of music and pop culture, which he found stultifying to his creative, writerly mind. And also, because the church was too new, small, and underfunded to have much of an active ministry, there was a tendency to blame poor people and very little effort to help them. Mr. Ward loved Jesus and wanted to help his flock, but he didn't have the connections to do all that he wanted to do. He let his flock down, and his more extroverted, less scrupulous friend stepped in to fill in the gaps with cultlike emotional abuse, brainwashing, and exploitation.
The Ward children got out, Jon Ward says Could they be blamed? He carefully avoids saying whether all of them got out unscathed by the alleged sexual abuse of some children in the church. He sticks to his own story, telling how he wanted to be a "creative" writer but, when he did not immediately sell a novel, was sent to journalism school instead. There he would have learned about the other storefront churches in Washington that had very active urban missions. There, too, he would have learned that advocating smaller government in Washington is downright un-neighborly. If you want to publish your writing under your own name, in the city, it's prudent to accept an ever-expanding government as a fact of life, like climate change, and all those Republicans whose real religion is racism, and other myths circulated in support of ever-expanding government.
But consider the facts. Ward was not at Yahoo when Yahoo was cheating me out of money, but did his concern for the poor ever lead him to do some investigative reporting on the Associated Content writers to whom Yahoo still owes money? And what's he done about glyphosate, anyway? And does he really suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome in anything like the way he claims?
I don't know that it's a mortal sin to join the political party to which most of the people with whom you work belong. Certainly it's neither a sin, nor even an unpopular act, to say "I disliked President Trump personally, for good and sufficient reasons well known to everyone in Washington." There were reasons why Trump was able to campaign as a so-called outsider; lack of money or connections were not among them. He could afford to hang out where Washington's leading socialites were, and he did, and he was detested. He ruined Alexandria's waterfront, for mercy's sake. He was blamed for the more-than-a-mile of shame along Route 1 in Baltimore. There's an ancient Washington tradition of stereotyping New York as tacky, and Trump was a walking definition of New York tacky.
But if you really understand how our government is supposed to work, you understand that it's designed to incorporate people like Trump into the system...to minimize the effect individuals' tackiness can have on the government as a whole. And if you're going to get into situations where shaking someone's hand is expected, a flat refusal to shake hands makes a big bold statement of contempt, and a warm handshake makes a big bold statement of Christian willingness to imagine that the person's professed religious conversion may have been sincere, but saying that at least it was a frigid, grudging handshake sounds flat-out childish.
Ward is correct in saying that some Christians' personal loyalty to Trump goes beyond what is either their Christian duty or Trump's due. Yes, economically a lot of people did benefit from the Trump Administration as a much needed relief in between Obama's economic mess and Biden's economic trainwreck. Yes, some R's do have the fortitude to say that, and some D's should only have the fortitude to hear them.
And when D's talk about the Trumpist "insurrection," by no means the biggest or deadliest riot Washington has survived while Ward and I were there, it really spoils the whole effect for them to assert, as if able to know, that "the elections were fair and honest." Very likely some of them were, but nobody can possibly say that all of them were.
How much blame does Ward deserve for hamming up emotions that come straight out of a partisan playbook? Is it possible that he does sincerely feel these emotions, even though some of them are based on outright lies?
Is it possible that a forty-year-old newsman still believes one party holds any monopoly on outright lies?
I don't know. I enjoyed this book for the nostalgia and gossip, but I think Christian readers should distrust, if not altogether discard, its main political argument.
Ward found that there are churches (not only in Washington) where it's perfectly acceptable to be a Democrat. Cheers. And now that the left-wingnuts have decided to sacrifice women in favor of the "trans women" and their campaign donations, to try a last-ditch effort to get young women into baby-factory mode in hopes of saving Social Security (as if all those babies would be able to get jobs!) and prioritize getting rid of any acknowledgment of a "right to privacy" even above pampering the men who want to start babies and let women endure abortions, the Religious Right can stop screaming and hissing that anyone who votes for any D is a "baby" killer. In fact I'd agree with Ward that it would be a very good thing if people on both sides reclaimed the art of discussing ideas, with detachment, rather than pitching battles (if only babble-battles) about whose candidate is an angel and whose is the Devil.
I just don't think it helps when D's go into full crybully mode about how silly it was to be afraid of their candidate and how sensible to be afraid of the R candidate. Even if they genuinely had those emotional reactions, they have to know they were reacting to some combination of party rhetoric and personal memories. And those reactions don't make the rest of their arguments more convincing. We do need the intellectual rigor that makes it possible to understand the rational reasons why people don't agree with us. For example, people in our nation's capital need to understand that people in the rest of the country want to reverse the overgrowth of the federal government for exactly the same kind of reasons that people in Washington want...well...not to make it a main talking point, anyway. Nowhere in his book does Ward acknowledge the existence of fiscal conservatives who, far from being obsessed with abortion, may actually be pro-choice on the grounds that aborting unwanted babies is cheaper than making them wards of the state. It helps to begin by admitting that people on both sides tend to vote for their interests.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Lies, BLEEP Lies, and Silly Statistics
This post was prompted by a Washington Post Style Invitational humor contest. The prompt was "Make up silly statistics that aren't true, but are funny because they remind us of something else."
To make it easier for all Internet readers to spot the statistics that aren't true, I'm borrowing an old linguistics convention: A sentence that's "wrong" is flagged with an asterisk. Example: * These is false statistics maid up for chokes.
1. * "The world will come to an end in twelve years," wailed the most junior member of Congress, picking one of her 350,000 long black hairs out from between 3 of her 37.5% oversized front teeth. "Lighten up, Al," suggested another junior member. "But it will," wailed the Congresschick, "because I'll be too old to have babies."
2. * "America is 40% greater than it was in 2016," bellowed a fellow in a red baseball cap. "Say what?: one of his Tweeps obligingly sqiawked. "I'm thinking like a rich man," the Trump fan explained. "The more debt you're in, the more credit you have, which makes you greater!"
3. * Due to ethical constraints on sacrificing any more innocent animals to glyphosate testing,t he product was tested on 250 senior employees of chemical companies. Of these, 47% developed gastrointestinal reactions, 53% developed respiratory symptoms, 16% developed skin lesions, 8% suffered kidney damage, 9% developed thyroid symptoms, 2% became completely paralyzed, 3% developed tumors in sex-specific body parts, 5,6% committed suicide, and 0.4% developed a persistent delusion that he was Donald Trump's vermiform appendix.
4. * Following the experiment described above, 99.8% of the cmpanies' remaining employees have been working on weeder robot technology, and 0.2% have gone int hiding.
5. * As a result of the radical redirection of the chemical companies, a large-scale survey indicates that 2.22 million Americans reported feeling 100% better, 2.7 million reported feeling70-95% better, and 35,479 are currently suing one or more chemical companies.
6. * A YouGov poll found that 23% of all free online courses re taken int he names of domestic animals and 4% are actually taken by the animals. Priscilla King's missing cat Heather, who had taken four freshman courses from Harvard Online with a GPA of 3.6, was found on Harvard's main campus, meowing for admission to regular classes. (In real life the cat died by misadventure.)
7. * 99.4% of the population of Takoma Park, Maryland (17,462) have higher IQ scores than 95% of the population of Rockville, Maryland.
8. Brett Favre, Jerry Rice, and Tim Tebow together have scored 216 touchdowns. (Google says this is true. I thought these statistics would be funnier if there was a real one on this page, somewhere.)
9. * 91% of Montgomery County Metrobuses run on or within 2 minutes of schedule, 85% or more of the time. 75% of Arlington Metrobuses run within 5 minutes of schedule, 75% or more of the time. 87% of Alexandria Metrobuses run within 10 minutes of schedule, 90% or more of the time. 51% of Fairfax County Metrobuses run within 5 minutes of schedule, 55% of the time. 40% of downdown DC Metrobuses run within 2 minutes of schedule, 90% of the time. Any resemblance between the observed behavior of Prince Georges County Metrobuses and their schedules is coincidental.
10. * According to a recent survey of sixth grade students, 59% could not find Canada on a map, 71% thought British was a foreign language (and 17% thought it was written with kanji characters), 6% were able to name their own state capitals, and 45% failed to spot the misprint in the US first edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which states that 42 is the product of multiplying 7 by 9. However, 84% self-identified as Democrats, 63% thought they might be homosexual, and 91% thought male-to-female transsexuals should be counted as women. Upon the release of the results of this survey, 21 sixth grade teachers attempted to leave the US.
11. * According to a survey conducted by off-duty DC traffic police officers, 51% of DC drivers have never had a DC license, 42% have never had a Maryland or Virginia license either, 33% indicated lack of familiarity with the term "license," 22% were drunk or stoned, and 49% were diplomats. Only 24% correctly answered questions about the rules for turning left on a red light in DC, Maryland, or Virginia. When asked how tourists should get around the city, 99% said "Ride Metro."
12. * 99% of Marylanders surveyed did not know that February was National Return Shopping Carts Month. 98% of Marylanders didn't know that Virginians think they push all those shopping carts into rivers themselves. 95% of Marylanders did not know that, when you call a store to report a shopping cart stuck in a watercourse, the Chesapeake Bay Monster makes one of your wishes come true.
13. * Taking primary responsibility for house cleaning, especially scrubbing bathroom floors, extends male sexual activity by an average of 13.6 years.
14. * You can lower your WSSC water bill by $40 per person per month if you flush your toilet by filling a quart container with water from the sink (while washing your hands) and dumping it into the bowl. (This is enough water to activate the flush mechanism without completely refilling the bowl, which can be done whenever one anticipates a need. I've tested this method. It really did lower my bill dramatically, but I'm not aware of any real statistical studies.)
15. * You can lower your Pepco bill by $50 per month if you think of all electronic devices as room heaters. When you turn on the air conditioning, unplug the TV sets and computers until the day of the first frost. (Again, that this lowers the bill is true; statistical studies of how much it lowers the bill were made up.)
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Book Review: Thank You for Smoking
Title: Thank You for Smoking
Author: Christopher Buckley
Date: 1994
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0-6789-43174-8
Length: 272 pages
Quote: “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”
Naylor, a maker of nails. Cigarettes, known in twentieth century slang as coffin nails. Nick, a typical Bright Young Thing—at forty, still frequently described as young—in Washington, lost a job on a TV news show after hastily delivering an inaccurate news announcement. Then he was hired by a tobacco lobbying company as the “smokesman” who, in the 1990s, went on TV to argue that it wasn’t absolutely certain that cigarettes caused cancer.
Obviously, all Glyphosate Awareness people now know, this satirical novel is very relevant to our time. Nick is much nicer than some of our opposition. He’s also much nicer than some of his co-workers. Therefrom arises the plot.
We see Nick doing his job, lying like a premium-grade Persian rug on the TV talk shows, torturing a superordinate who obviously wants to replace him, feuding with a U.S. Senator who seems like a parody of Ted Kennedy, deftly manipulating movie producers and a British Prime Minister who might be a parody of Margaret Thatcher, keeping his son enrolled at St. Euthanasius, maintaining less than loving but polite relationships with a demographically inclusive catalogue of women. (He’s mostly over Gazelle, the Black one, currently taking speakerphone messages from Heather, the redhead, and Jeannette, the ice blonde, while in bed with the one who’s not on the phone; in the past there was a Paula whose complexion is not described, and some of the suspense comes from wondering whether he and his real friend Polly will stop acting as if they were still married to other people,) He finds consolation in the company of two good friends, Polly from the alcoholic beverage lobby and Bobby Jay from the firearms lobby. The three of them, and sometimes lobbyists for other controversial causes, get together to commiserate about being insulted by opponents. If the opposition were to go beyond insults, would they still stick together?
They would, it turns out. The old saying, “Welcome to Washington! If you want a friend, adopt a dog” is not applicable to Nick. If he had to pay his own legal expenses rather than relying on company funds, Polly would sell her investments to help him. Bobby Jay would draw his pistol. And Nick would back down from a confrontation rather than let Polly lose her savings or Bobby Jay go to prison.
They’re brought to the point of showing exactly how loyal they are to one another when Nick is physically kidnapped and forced to give up his cherished cigarettes by a near-death experience. Recovering from a week of torture while spinning it for all it’s worth, he starts to find out what his co-workers are really like, too. The boss, a prematurely old cardiac patient who has seven daughters and calls Nick his “son,” keeps raising Nick’s salary. His supervisor keeps giving Nick increasingly impossible assignments. And what about Jeannette? Is she really starstruck by his talent and fortitude, or does she just want his job enough to play filthy tricks to get it?
It would be a pity to spoil the suspense so all I’ll say is that, on the fourth reading just before I wrote this review, I still laughed out loud. So will you.
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
Book Review: Legion
Years ago, I read two of the most horrific works of fiction ever written about Washington. Worse than (the candidate you most oppose)'s campaign biography, even. William Peter Blatty's Exorcist and its sequel, Legion, are horror stories. At least The Exorcist is a horror story; Legion qualifies as another one, but in Legion the diplomat-turned-novelist seemed to be trying to explain what he really believed about the Christian theological concepts his fiction exploited. Anyway I said this web site would never sell The Exorcist, because (I grew up with the various violations of taboos that made the movie so controversial, but) I could not endorse even a fictional depiction of anyone giving a child that much of those drugs. Right. But I did sell Legion, despite having better books by Arab-American authors including Blatty's presumably nonfiction memoir, and here's the review.
Title: Legion
Author: William Peter Blatty
Date: 1983
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: none
Length: 248 pages
Quote: "He stared at the sun coming up behind the Capitol, streaking the Potomac with orange light, and then down at the outrage."
Twelve years after the end of The Exorcist, surviving characters see a new outbreak of horrific senseless murders. And who's doing them? Physical evidence found on one victim seems to implicate a little old lady. A neurologist with a brain tumor sees and meets his double, which became a harbinger of death, according to superstition, because it's an hallucination associated with the kind of cancer that's killing Dr. Amfortas. Some of the murders involve medications in use in a psychiatric hospital, where one of the doctors is definitely an evil person, but is he a murderer? And then, deep inside the maximum-security psychiatric unit in the hospital...
Blatty, a Christian Arab-American, focussed on the Jesuits at Georgetown University in The Exorcist; the main protagonist, Father Karras, reacted to the satanic murders as a Catholic priest. Readers undoubtedly remember what happened to him. In Legion the main protagonist, Bill Kinderman, is Jewish, with a cosmopolitan philosophy, a snarky sense of humor, and a tendency to use a wider Yiddish vocabulary than the average American has...and a philosophical preparation for the idea that what he thought for all this time had happened to Karras just might have happened to someone else.
Although its ending is in some ways less horrific, and its medical science is less outrageously wrong, Legion is still a sequel to The Exorcist. It's not meant to be a pleasant read, not even an enjoyably scary "Aren't you glad such things don't really exist?" sort of horror story. Sadistic, satanic, serial murders do exist. Evil, as well as good, lurks in the hearts of men (and women) in the real world, as in the world of these novels.
What you'll like, if you read this book at all: the sense of place, Kinderman's philosophical musings, that making a movie of this one wouldn't require a child to act out things children shouldn't know about.
What some readers will love, and some will hate: Legion is literary fiction. It starts out like a detective story, but doesn't follow the rules for one. I've toyed with the idea of writing a detective story where the murderer is clever enough to use different methods. Legion goes further outside the rules than that.
What you probably won't like: it's about evil. Evil is banal. Fictional murders are tedious reading.
If you want to read a novel that takes you back, mentally, to dear old D.C., Legion will do that, and the fact that most of the bad things happen in snooty old pay-more-for-less, rather-be-killed-in-city-traffic-than-risk-outsiders-coming-in-by-Metro Georgetown might be considered a plus point. (Contractors who commute all over the Metropolitan Area fantasize about bad things happening to Georgetown.)
In a way, despite having a Jewish protagonist, Legion can be considered a Christian book. So could The Exorcist--although in my judgment it was a bad one, and when a bookseller rates a book too bad to be resold at a profit, it's very bad indeed. In a way Legion might be considered a palinode, a retraction of some things Blatty seemed to be saying in The Exorcist about the nature of good and evil.
His views of good and evil are, however, his own. They're not the doctrine of the Church. They're not heresies; they're just the musings of an individual Christian, as distinct from the doctrine of Christianity. At the end of Legion Blatty seems to have reached the point of saying what I often say about "devils" or "demons": I don't claim to know that such creatures exist in any "real" or personal sense, but some human behavior can only be rationally explained by postulating some sort of Evil Principle. Blatty goes further: In the Bible a person suffering from the kind of painful self-destructive insanity then identified as "a devil" says to Jesus, channelling the man's "devil" or devils, "Our name is Legion, for we are many." Blatty locates the "many devils" within humans. Kinderman asserts toward the end that "we," including Kinderman, "are Legion."
Well, yes, ultimately...Churches I attended called the sort of points most Christians concede to the Evil Principle a matter of temptation not possession. If evil "possesses" Charles Manson enough to make him delight in murder, it's lucky to get as far, with most of us, as suggesting "Someone else will take care of your job." There are, however, Christians who think it's generally healthy to remind people that keeping a library book a day overdue might be genuinely uncharitable (whether anyone else has shown any interest in that book in the past ten years, or not) and the thought "Lots of people keep library books overdue" might come directly from the Evil Principle. Other Christians concede that this may be true but think it's an uncharitable, unhelpful thing to say...and some Christians get into debates that generate heat rather than light, and Blatty goes home and writes Legion.
It's not a Christian book.There must be more edifying Christian books to read.
Monday, April 19, 2021
Morgan Griffith on D.C. Statehood
I agree with him. The capital city of these United States was meant to be nobody's home, but a place where people went to work for a few years. Part of this was that full-time residents were not given a separate representative in Congress but, originally, people who lived on the Arlington side were counted as Virginia residents, and people on the Washington side were counted as Maryland residents, with a vote for the representative from the appropriate State. Why either D.C. or Maryland would object to reviving this original system to guarantee D.C. residents the full benefits of citizenship has never been explained to me. I would expect it to have benefits for both.
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