Pun Salad

Last week, 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said she wanted to explain “white privilege” to suburban white women. I would be happy to sit in on the lecture (assuming men are allowed) because, apparently, nobody is more privileged — nor more disliked for it — than old white men. Like me.

In fact, I recently did a quick Google search (yes, I know how to do that) for “old white men,” which turned up a horrifying list of angry screeds against people like me. There’s “No Country for Old White Men and Good Riddance,” a T-shirt that tells everyone you’ve “heard enough from old white men,” and The New York Times wondering whether “a white man be the face of the Democratic party in 2020?” — which, for the Times, is an improvement over hiring editorial board members who tweet about “how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

This barrage of vitriol speaks to the recent cultural milieu in which, at best, there is something suspect about the decisions, the motives, and even the very existence of old white men. At worst, there is a presumption that we are malevolent, parasitic oppressors of those who are not like us.

Well, speaking as an old, white man — I beg to differ.

E-cigarettes have proven effective at helping people quit smoking, a massive potential public health gain, considering nearly half a million people die every year from smoking-related illnesses. The big question is: How can we help smokers quit and at the same time discourage young people from taking up either smoking or vaping?

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has paid some lip service to “preserv[ing] e-cigarettes as a tool to help adult smokers while snuffing out the teen smoking epidemic,” but it’s difficult to believe Gottlieb or the FDA when they’ve been lying to us so far.

Teen smoking remains a concern, but let’s be honest about the size and scope of the problem: There is no teen smoking epidemic.

While defenders of bias reporting systems often point to their supposedly non-punitive nature, both FIRE and Schneider warned of the chilling effect they can have on student speech. As FIRE wrote in 2017, “Bias Response Teams create—indeed, they are intended to create—a chilling effect on campus expression. Even if a Bias Response Team does not have the power to take punitive action, the prospect of an official investigation may make students and faculty more cautious about what opinions they dare to express.” Schneider expresses similar concerns, adding that “Complaints go down in permanent, often public, records, which can affect future employment prospects. Most bias-response systems don’t offer any process by which the accused can clear their names.”

You know the legend of Faust. He was a man of great learning who wanted to be a man of great power, who made a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for perfect worldly knowledge and the commanding position that goes with it. The story has been treated most famously by Marlowe and Goethe, but also has held the imagination of everyone from Paul Valéry to Václav Havel.

It should be performed weekly in Washington, because what Faust ultimately sought was not only knowledge and magical abilities but political power — the ultimate end to which he meant to put his ill-gotten capacities. Faust envisioned a new kind of government, above and separate from the vanities and schemes of mere kings and emperors, one that would be universal and based on science, which at the time was so closely related to magic as to be nearly indistinguishable in the popular mind.

When my first couple novels came out, I lobbied to add some kind of notation about "fair use" and "limitations and exceptions to copyright" on the copyright notice page and was told not even to try because legal would never allow even the slightest variance from the boilerplate; apparently Steve Stack is better connected than I am, because his book 21st Century Dodos, has a copyright notice that is full of whimsy and gags, as Rebecca discovered and documented.