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Dreamed that Marybeth was telling me why she would never, ever speak to me again: a betrayal concerning Susan that was so deep, every ounce of affection of the considerable affection she had once borne me had vanished in the snap of a finger.
Snap!
“I don’t know how you could do it, Patty,” she said in a dispassionate voice, shaking her head. She wasn’t even mad. Her total lack of emotion bespoke a contempt and scorn far more potent that any rage.
I was completely panicked, of course, because I could not remember what this betrayal of Susan was that she was talking about.
If I couldn’t remember it, then I couldn’t dispute it. Couldn’t explain it. Was doomed to that underworld where the shades of false friends float.
It was very unsettling.
###
Did not watch the Democratic debate.
Think Democratic debates are a bad, baaaaad idea.
Eventually, one of these candidates is gonna get nominated.
And then every negative thing the other candidates ever said about the nominee is gonna get dredged up by the Trump campaign: Even the members of his/her own party think…
Oh, the memes!
They are playing right into Trump 2020 campaign hands.
This is so elementary and obvious that they probably deserve to lose except that if they lose, we’re gonna have four more years of concentration camps along the Mexican border, exaltation of Big Oil/Big Pharma interests, and the dismantling of the social safety net that certainly kept me alive during those dark, dark days in 2010 and 2011.
(Hey! I paid plenty of taxes into the system! I wasn’t ashamed.)
My dream ticket at this point would be Buttigieg and Somebody Else, but I grow more and more certain it will be Biden and Harris.
I also kinda like Tulsi Gabbard who has the misfortune to be the daughter of a rabidly homophobic Hawaiian politician. In her blind puppy days, she supported her Daddy’s rhetoric for which Twitter will never forgive her. She has since changed, but social media prefers its politicians to spring like Athena, fully formed, from the agenda in somebody’s forehead. Learning curves are simply not tolerated on the American political scene.
###
Had an interesting conversation with Adrienne last night who has completed her FDR library research and will be moving on with her life today.
“So! Will you miss the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?” I asked.
“I will, and I won’t,” she said. “Physically, it’s very beautiful. But there are too many ticks. Plus I don’t see very many people who actually look like me.”
Adrienne is Vietnamese.
As a PhD student in an essentially old white male institution—academia—she has perfected the art of passing to such a degree that I have often wondered privately to what degree she identifies with being Vietnamese. Her parents fled to the States in 1975; she was brought up in Orange County in California, in Irvine, maybe 10 miles away from the Hare family manse in Tustin.
Orange County is kind of a weird place. On the one hand, it’s the most plastic, materialistic, pre-fab place you could possibly imagine, just endless miles of lookalike housing developments, malls, and freeways.
On the other, it is home to vast numbers of Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean, Philippino, and Indian immigrants.
Are the pre-fab soullessness of the place and the number of immigrants related?
Perhaps.
When you’re uprooted from a home you love, perhaps you want to go to a place that has no past.
Adrienne giggles a lot. I’d pegged that as her accommodation mechanism.
Once you get past the giggling, she’s pretty incisive. Scathing when it comes to analyzing the small manifestations of racism we white folks take for granted in the everyday-above-ground around us.
We talked a lot about the nature of humor.
I told her about the now-archetypal conversation I had with Max in which I descried the humorlessness of the Social Justice Warriors’ version of our brave new world, and his eyes lit up.
“But won’t it be worth it to have a world without humor if we can also have a world without racism, sexism, and homophobia?” he'd asked.
“Yes, yes! That’s it, exactly!” cried Adrienne. “It would be worth it!”
Well, it wouldn’t be worth it to me, but of course, I’m old and irrelevant.
I like to think of myself as marginalized. That’s where that whole enlightened-anthropologist-from-the-planet-Mars schtick comes from, I suppose.
But, of course, I’m only as marginalized as I want to be because at any moment I can stop dying my hair purple, start wearing twin sets, pearls, and sensible shoes, and pass as a common, garden variety white female sexagenarian.
It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.
Snap!
“I don’t know how you could do it, Patty,” she said in a dispassionate voice, shaking her head. She wasn’t even mad. Her total lack of emotion bespoke a contempt and scorn far more potent that any rage.
I was completely panicked, of course, because I could not remember what this betrayal of Susan was that she was talking about.
If I couldn’t remember it, then I couldn’t dispute it. Couldn’t explain it. Was doomed to that underworld where the shades of false friends float.
It was very unsettling.
###
Did not watch the Democratic debate.
Think Democratic debates are a bad, baaaaad idea.
Eventually, one of these candidates is gonna get nominated.
And then every negative thing the other candidates ever said about the nominee is gonna get dredged up by the Trump campaign: Even the members of his/her own party think…
Oh, the memes!
They are playing right into Trump 2020 campaign hands.
This is so elementary and obvious that they probably deserve to lose except that if they lose, we’re gonna have four more years of concentration camps along the Mexican border, exaltation of Big Oil/Big Pharma interests, and the dismantling of the social safety net that certainly kept me alive during those dark, dark days in 2010 and 2011.
(Hey! I paid plenty of taxes into the system! I wasn’t ashamed.)
My dream ticket at this point would be Buttigieg and Somebody Else, but I grow more and more certain it will be Biden and Harris.
I also kinda like Tulsi Gabbard who has the misfortune to be the daughter of a rabidly homophobic Hawaiian politician. In her blind puppy days, she supported her Daddy’s rhetoric for which Twitter will never forgive her. She has since changed, but social media prefers its politicians to spring like Athena, fully formed, from the agenda in somebody’s forehead. Learning curves are simply not tolerated on the American political scene.
###
Had an interesting conversation with Adrienne last night who has completed her FDR library research and will be moving on with her life today.
“So! Will you miss the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley?” I asked.
“I will, and I won’t,” she said. “Physically, it’s very beautiful. But there are too many ticks. Plus I don’t see very many people who actually look like me.”
Adrienne is Vietnamese.
As a PhD student in an essentially old white male institution—academia—she has perfected the art of passing to such a degree that I have often wondered privately to what degree she identifies with being Vietnamese. Her parents fled to the States in 1975; she was brought up in Orange County in California, in Irvine, maybe 10 miles away from the Hare family manse in Tustin.
Orange County is kind of a weird place. On the one hand, it’s the most plastic, materialistic, pre-fab place you could possibly imagine, just endless miles of lookalike housing developments, malls, and freeways.
On the other, it is home to vast numbers of Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean, Philippino, and Indian immigrants.
Are the pre-fab soullessness of the place and the number of immigrants related?
Perhaps.
When you’re uprooted from a home you love, perhaps you want to go to a place that has no past.
Adrienne giggles a lot. I’d pegged that as her accommodation mechanism.
Once you get past the giggling, she’s pretty incisive. Scathing when it comes to analyzing the small manifestations of racism we white folks take for granted in the everyday-above-ground around us.
We talked a lot about the nature of humor.
I told her about the now-archetypal conversation I had with Max in which I descried the humorlessness of the Social Justice Warriors’ version of our brave new world, and his eyes lit up.
“But won’t it be worth it to have a world without humor if we can also have a world without racism, sexism, and homophobia?” he'd asked.
“Yes, yes! That’s it, exactly!” cried Adrienne. “It would be worth it!”
Well, it wouldn’t be worth it to me, but of course, I’m old and irrelevant.
I like to think of myself as marginalized. That’s where that whole enlightened-anthropologist-from-the-planet-Mars schtick comes from, I suppose.
But, of course, I’m only as marginalized as I want to be because at any moment I can stop dying my hair purple, start wearing twin sets, pearls, and sensible shoes, and pass as a common, garden variety white female sexagenarian.
It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.
