Gary Shteyngart Plus Nobody Puts on Pride Parades for the Incarcerated

Neighbor Ed back from peregrinations to Palo Alto, Providence and Cambridge.

We met to eat ribs and talk politics.

Except I’m not following politics so much these days.

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I thought about watching the Democratic candidate debates.

And then I thought, Why? What exactly would that accomplish?

More and more, I’m resenting the forced colonization of my mind with what I can only call maya, these frenzied updates from the hivemind: This is rilly, rilly important!!!!!! Except it’s not important. It’s a transient blip in a transient culture. If I blink a couple of times, something else will be rilly, rilly important.

I really wish the fuckin’ Democrats would get it out of their minds that they are standing in an ice cream store, choosing their favorite flavor. This election should be about getting Trump out of office.

Instead, people are arguing about it as though it really matters that they like Elizabeth Warren and that Biden reminds them of that creepy great uncle who was always clicking his dentures in their ears.

Biden might win. Warren won’t.

It’s that simple.

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Following the second debate, Kamala Harris’s star is on the rise.

As far back as 2005, Harris was blithely ignoring recommendations from her own assistant DAs in San Francisco that past misconduct on the part of law enforcement be disclosed in order that defendants receive fair trials, the so-called Brady policy. This came back to bite her in the ass in 2010 when they had to throw out thousands of convictions because of a rogue crime technician.

Harris’s prosecutorial career is just littered with instances like that.

Here's the deal with the criminal justice system: It's the one area where a politician's actual concern for constitutional rights is most purely on display because there really is no such thing as a lobby. Nobody puts on pride parades for the incarcerated!

I think Harris is awful.

But would I vote for her?

You bet! ‘Cause she’s not Trump-level awful.

Meanwhile, my own favorite remains Pete Buttigieg. Best on policy by a long shot and a decent guy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a snail’s chance in the Sahara Desert of capturing the nomination, and if he did by some chance, he would lose in a landslide. The U.S. is much too homophobic to elect an openly gay President.



In the evening, I went to hear Gary Shteyngart at Oblong.

Little Failure is a great book, and I recently started Lake Success—mostly because one of the houses in it was apparently modeled after the house where signorinakatina grew up.

Shteyngart is a deeply, deeply hilarious guy, and rather Puckish and good-humored, too, which most professional satirists are not. He caught me taking pictures, and as you can see, he obligingly mugged.

He wasn’t there to talk about his own book but rather to interview a writer named Rebecca Godfrey who’d written a true crime book many years ago about feral teenagers in Victoria. Why a leading literary satirist was enlisted to interview a relatively obscure true crime writer is beyond me. Plus everything that needed to be said about feral teens living in backwaters was already said by the brilliant and hideously depressing movie River’s Edge 30 years ago. Really, subject closed! Nothing else needs to be said on the subject. Ever!

Godfrey got Shteyngart to read the male detective’s dialogue.

“I’ve always wanted to be a Canadian Mountie!” he confided to the audience and tore into the dialogue with relish, liberally sprinkling it with ehs and aboots (for about.)

It was pretty funny, but, of course, when I got home, I found myself meditating for a long time about that wavering boundary of coincidence that distinguishes success from failure. A line drawn in the fata morgana. Does any of it matter? Soon we’ll all be dead!