Pun Salad

Kat Rosenfield is insightful: Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie. (archive.today link)

Kat goes on to observe Rebecca Good's later wail at the ICE agents: “Why did you have real bullets?”

Kat is sympathetic, and good for her on that front. I'm less so.

My Google LFOD News Alert brought up a related story from my local drama-queen front: Episcopal Bishop Tells Clergy To Write Their Wills, Prepare To Become Martyrs Over Stopping ICE.

"Stark warning"? I'm not sure if that wordplay was intended, but the Bishop did, indeed, apparently invoke General John Stark's most famous quote:

You have been created wholly in the image of the divine. Whatever race, whatever gender, whatever orientation, straight, queer, trans, you have been made in the image of the divine. God has always and will always protect you no matter what happens. So live in that fear. God supports you, protects you, and loves you with a power and a presence that is stronger than death. That is how we live free or die. Amen.

Here's hoping his flock does not take him seriously, imagining themselves in a movie.

Also of note:

• An unexpected place to see LFOD. It's Architectural Digest, for goodness' sake. When Politics Drives You From Home: 5 Americans Who Uprooted Their Lives Because of the State of the Nation. Their reasons are varied. But here's a guy who (now) lives just a few miles down the road from me:

  When Eric Brakey moved to Maine in 2011 to work for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, he was thrilled to be part of a grassroots movement. That run “cemented a real Libertarian wing of the Republican party in Maine,” Brakey, 37, remembers. Paul lost, but Brakey was inspired by the effort and ran for local office in Auburn, serving three terms in the Maine State Senate as a Republican—though, like Paul, he identifies as a Libertarian (they typically believe in limited government intervention, free-market economies, and individual sovereignty).

  Over the past decade, Brakey grew disheartened as he watched out-of-staters move to southern Maine, and felt that the state was “lurching very aggressively in a more progressive direction.” After COVID, when Maine and many other nearby states enacted policies around masking, vaccines, and social distancing, Brakey saw New Hampshire as his out, or as he calls it, “the only state in New England moving in a direction of freedom.” He was particularly interested in the Free State Project, a movement to establish a voting bloc large enough to have a significant political impact. “It seemed to me to be the only Libertarian strategy working in the country,” he says.

  And, yes, here it is:

  It’s not all welcome wagons and easy politicking, though. Brakey knows there is “tension, primarily with left-wing progressives who would like New Hampshire to be more like its neighboring states.” He prescribes a love-it-or-leave-it approach. “They want it to be a progressive state, to which we say, ‘If you really don’t like the live-free-or-die spirit of New Hampshire, there’s every other state in New England.’”

  Eric is now the FSP's Executive Director. We haven't met, but I will keep my eyes open.

• If only it were that easy. Frederick Alexander offers a decoded version The DEI Phrasebook. He lists 10 phrases and what they really mean. I have a comment about this one:

  4. “Educate yourself”

  You’ve probably come across this rebuke in a comment section at some point. Perhaps it was directed at you after saying “all lives matter” in what you thought was a noble, unifying sentiment we can all agree upon. Educate yourself.

  This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

  What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

  Real education, of course, involves weighing evidence, considering counter-arguments, and risking being wrong, which is why the progressive ideologues hate it.

  I picked this one thanks to some opinionated signage I saw this morning on Maine Route 236 coming north out of Kittery: "Educate before you vaccinate". Which is not a slogan commonly employed by "progressive ideologues". But Frederick's characterization holds true otherwise, I think.

• Just a reminder. There will be plenty of one-year summaries of Trump II coming to your local media outlets. Brian Doherty is a few days early with his unsparing take: Year 1 of Trump's second term was a libertarian's nightmare.

  A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.

  Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.

  Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he's declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.

  He doesn't sound like a fan.

• Attack of the killer tomatoes? No! According to the Ars Technica headline, the real threat is from a different phylum altogether: Wild mushrooms keep killing people in California; 3 dead, 35 poisoned.

  A third person has died in a rash of poisonings from wild, foraged mushrooms in California, health officials report.

  Since November, a total of 35 people across the state have been poisoned by mushrooms, leading to three people receiving liver transplants in addition to the three deaths. Health officials in Sonoma County reported the latest death last week.

  When you're immersed in MSM headlines that begin "Guns kill…" it is only a baby step to headlines that imply evildoing to mushrooms.

  Consumer tip: don't eat death cap mushrooms. There, that was easy.

Recently on the book blog:

I'm really straining for the proper words to describe Steve Martin's writings here. Maybe an example? I stuck a Post-It next to this paragraph, which describes a New York City party attended by Mirabelle, the heroine of Steve's novel Shopgirl:

As the evening loosens, confounding the normal progress of a party, the conversations gel into one, and the topic, rather than jumping wildly from politics to schools for kids to the latest medical treatments, also gels into one. And the topic is lying. They all admit that without it, their daily work cannot be done. In fact, someone says, lying is so fundamental to his existence that it has ceased to be lying at all and has transmogrified into a variant of truth. However, several of them admit that they never like, and everyone in the room knows it's because they have become so rich that lying has become unnecessary and pointless, Their wealth insulates them even from lawsuits.

What do you think? Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, right? But it is (I think) witty and sharply observed. That's probably as close as I can get to a book description. While adding in that the book often leans toward the offbeat and ludicrous.

The book collects some previous work, including two novels, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company.

I had previously read Shopgirl in pre-blog days. It's the story of Mirabelle, who sells gloves at the Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. She has artistic aspirations, but her life is otherwise pretty barren. Until she meets Ray Porter, a rich but lonely businessman. The rise and eventual fall of their relationship is chronicled. As mentioned above, it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny, although one bit revolving around mistaken identity is pretty good.

I found The Pleasure of My Company to be more accessible and interesting. The protagonist, and first-person narrator, is Daniel Pecan Cambridge, living in a downscale Santa Monica apartment, and sufferer of some pretty serious neuroses. For example, he cannot navigate curbs. To cross a street in his neighborhood, he has to find two driveways exactly lined up on either side. He has obsessions: magic squares, counting ceiling tiles, making sure the illumination in his apartment is a certain wattage. He's somewhat obsessed with three women: Clarissa, a shrink-trainee who comes periodically to (unsuccessfully) counsel him; Dorothy, a real estate agent trying to lease apartments in the complex across the street; and Zandy, who works at the pharmacy he frequents. Of these, only Clarissa knows Daniel exists. Although that changes as the book progresses.

Interspersed with the two novels are some short pieces, some old (and published in the New Yorker), and some not previously published. These are often bizarre. Example: "Shouters" imagines people who (unrequested) follow people around and shout works of literature at them. Like "Airport" or "Being and Nothingness". Okay. Glad Steve didn't expand that into a novel!