I was at a friend’s house Saturday, and as we paddled around in her backyard pool — been doing a lot of swimming this summer — she confessed that she’d mostly given up social media. She’s already someone who pays only glancing attention to the news, and said Instagram was eating her alive, so she just…gave it up. (Mostly.)

I’m starting to see the utility of that. The more Elon Musk screws up Twitter, which could be infuriating but was still mostly entertaining, the easier it seems. I’m not ready to go all the way yet, but hell, maybe I’ll do a few tests fasts or diets or something. See if I can find the good in my fellow man again.

Who am I kidding. There is no good in these dipshits.

That’s the WashPost (gift link), on its millionth Cletus safari of the modern era, circulates through the crowds at an Iowa county fair and learns — YET AGAIN — that nope, they’re still down with the clown:

During a hot, sunny weekend at the Boone County Fair — where hundreds of Iowans came together to eat funnel cakes and corn dogs and to watch their children and grandchildren show off animals from their family farms — the range of Republican voters’ views on Trump, the undisputed front-runner in state and national polls, was on full display. Interviews with GOP voters in the rural county, which Trump carried by double-digit percentage points in 2016 and 2020, show that Trump continues to have a tight grip on the party, even among those who have grown weary of his rhetoric and legal troubles.

…(Vickie) Farmer has been a Trump supporter from the start, but in the years since Biden came into office, her support for the former president has only grown. She said she’s most worried about the economy, because she sees her adult children living paycheck to paycheck and at times struggling to juggle food and gas costs.

“I was very happy with the way things were going. I don’t think he is guilty of nearly all of the things they’re accusing him of,” she said, sitting next to a table she set up with her husband to sell scented wax melts and other home goods. “I think there’s a smear campaign to try to keep him from getting into office.”

Oh, fuck off, Vickie. If you’re dumb enough to believe that returning a psychopathic felon to office will free your children from wage slavery, you’re really too dumb to vote at all.

The point of this story is that in this vast crowd of Iowans, there were a few who confessed to being “sick of the drama,” but will probably vote for him if he’s the nominee, and to these good Germans I say fuck off as well.

In other oh-eff-off news today, there’s this:

Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert, was in a panic.

The Texas A&M University professor had just returned home from giving a routine lecture on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch in March when she learned a student had accused her of disparaging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the talk.

In the few hours it took to drive from Galveston, the complaint had made its way to her supervisors, and Alonzo’s job was suddenly at risk.

Don’t you just hate left-wing political correctness? Oh, wait, this isn’t it?

And the thing is, no one can even say what it is she said that was “disparaging” of the lieutenant governor. Other students can’t remember anything. But one little informant in the crowd disapproved and called her mommy.

For free speech advocates, health experts and students, Texas A&M’s investigation of Alonzo was a shocking demonstration of how quickly university leaders allow politicians to interfere in classroom discussions on topics in which they are not experts — and another example of increasing political involvement from state leaders in how Texas universities are managed.

You don’t say. And this overheated hellhole is where Americans are flocking? No thanks.

Other than that? It hasn’t been a terrible week so far. Nice swim this morning, not too punishingly hot in the afternoon. But I’m crawling to that hump, and will be very happy to see the weekend, when Kate and I will see “Barbie.”

How about you?

I just looked at the weather forecast for the week ahead, and it is…grim. Starting to climb tomorrow, then topping 90 at midweek. It’s our turn in the barrel, which I realize may fall on unsympathetic ears for you guys in the southwest, but trust me, it’s pretty miserable. Although it’s also…summer weather, so you can’t complain too much. That said, I will. Complain, that is. It’s my right as an American, and as a senior citizen.

But a good weekend, all things considered. Made some time for friend relationships, and got in an otter swim with Bill. A freighter went by as we were getting dressed to leave.

The St. Clair River was bracing (70 degrees), but left me feeling a little…filmed, if you know what I mean. A shower took care of it, but you gotta wonder what the hell was doing that. There have been some gully washers lately, and those tend to scour the grosser parts of an urban infrastructure. Whatever. I showered, and that was that.

Speaking of showers, I felt like I needed one after reading this thread, by a young reporter who left the biz earlier this year.

Ok here goes it: During my time as a Capitol reporter in Lansing, I faced burnout, anxiety, and depression, as well as relentless harassment. Despite this, I kept it all to myself, feeling like it would make me seem self-centered or incapable. I finally broke down in Jan. (1/x) https://t.co/ts2IveJJVe

— Allison R. Donahue (@donahual) July 23, 2023

The precipitating incident she obliquely refers to is this, when a state senator made a crude remark to a 22-year-old reporter. She wrote about it, and the usual happened: Other women, including his colleagues, had similar stories. As it turned out, it was a nothingburger, consequence-wise — he lost his committee assignments, but he was term-limited, so he played out his string and ran for Macomb County prosecutor. Which he won.

The 22-year-old, however, didn’t do so well. The usual happened to her, too: Rape threats, FaceTime calls where the caller was masturbating, and — this is particularly galling — “a woman on a livestream making a call out to get people to send me porn,” and there’s a special place in hell for that one, eh? That’s a lot for a 22-year-old to handle. God, what a hideous movement.

And with that, I’m commencing a busy week. I hope yours is cooler and less so.

Alan spent several hours today replacing the battery in my iPad mini, and right now he’s making sure the adhesive adheres. It occurs to me you could get a pretty good sense of us from this random selection of heavy books from a nearby shelf:

Dunno if Italy will happen this fall. We have a wedding in St. Louis on September 30, and we lost our dog sitter when Kate announced she’s going on tour during October and into November, not as a musician, but as the sound tech for a Canadian band. They’ll tour western Canada and the same part of the U.S. So maybe it’ll be spring before we get there, but we’ll get there. I kinda wish I was hitting western Canada with her, frankly. I’ve never been to Vancouver.

Anyway, that leaves us in Michigan for one of the prettiest months of the year, so I can’t complain. We’ll do some weekends here and there. It’ll be fun. I hope.

Meanwhile, news is breaking here. The state attorney general just announced charges against the 16 fake Trump electors from 2020, a group that includes the former vice-chair of the state GOP, and a national GOP state committeewoman. I remember watching live video of them marching to the Capitol on December 14, when the real electors were meeting inside. A state police officer refused to let them in. Later stories would emerge that they’d discussed secretly sleeping in a sympathetic legislator’s office overnight, so they could say they met “in” the Capitol, as the law requires.

One final note: The youngest fake elector is 55, the oldest, 82. There’s your MAGA demographic, right there.

News is breaking elsewhere, too. This story, from the Israeli paper Haaretz, may be paywalled, although I was able to read it this morning, when I nearly woke Alan chuckling over it. The gist: In 2019, the Israeli government loaned some rare antiquities to the White House, lamps made from clay, as part of a Hanukkah celebration. The loan was intended to be short-term, but then the pandemic started, everything shut down, but no fear for the artifacts. After all, they were in the most secure building in the world.

Well, guess where they are now? You get one guess, and it’s located in Palm Beach.

This guy. I mean, this fucking guy.

Here’s another guy, a local billionaire building his dream house. The details are galling, but what did you expect, a log cabin?

I didn’t expect a log cabin. But I probably didn’t expect a trampoline park.

OK, outta here. Into the midweek we go.

Well, this isn’t alarming at all, is it:

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

That’s a gift link, and I encourage you to read it. It details, with receipts, exactly what the velociraptor wing of American politics plans to do with their puppet king. It’s grim.

And you know what? I hate to keep sounding the alarm on this, I really do. I absolutely despise having this stuff in my head, and I despise even more knowing that it’s not limited to Trump. If he strokes out taking his morning dump tomorrow, this will apply to whoever steps into his lifted shoes. I’d much rather be musing about summer movies – Team Barbie here – than this, but like they’re always braying at us, freedom isn’t free. I only wish we had a deeper bench, and a younger quarterback.

What a way to start the week.

Oh, and if you’re a lurking Trump fan, here’s your guy:

Trump is asked by a supporter in Iowa what he would do to save farmland from CO2 pipelines. He seems to have no idea what she is talking about but claims that he “has a plan.” pic.twitter.com/qlp4PsESof

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) July 7, 2023

What would it have taken to say, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t been briefed on that. Give my staff some time, and I’ll have a better answer soon.” Character, that’s what. But this guy is such a natural-born liar that he just can’t stop himself.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr., that croaking fucker:

“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately … COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese … We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

…I’ve seen a number of Kennedy fans, a few of them Jewish, defending these remarks because, they argue, he doesn’t specifically claim that someone deliberately engineered COVID to spare Jews. He just says that there’s “an argument” that it was targeted. But, who knows? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Again, many people are saying …

…Kennedy also makes the general remark that China and the U.S. are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “ethnically targeted bioweapons,” as though this is a given, even if his other claims about sparing the Jews may be surprising to some people. I can’t claim to know just what the U.S. or China are or are not doing in what are presumably secret programs. But I’ve been around DC and the national security chatosphere long enough to know bullshit at a distance. Again, I can’t know. Great Powers likely study or consider all sorts of crazy stuff at some hypothetical level. But this kind of talk is generally the fantasy or agitprop of warmongers and xenophobes. I mentioned earlier the factitious nature of Kennedy’s speech. He routinely peppers his comments with “there are papers” or “I could show you papers.” But these papers either don’t exist or don’t show anything remotely like what he claims. In this case he mentions a paper which supposedly backed all this up but which actually notes broadly that some viruses could have differential presentations in different ethnic groups.

Grrr. Monday! I ask you!

So there was a domestic-violence incident in Oakland County the other day, which probably wouldn’t have made the papers were it not for one of the parties involved (a high-ranking Ford exec) and the weirdness of the accusation: He threatened to set two of her handbags on fire. The brand(s) were not named, but the wife reported each had a value of $10,000, which suggests Hermés, and that’s the last time I’m going to put the diacritic over the E, so sorry about that, Académie Française member readers.

My purse-expert friend further speculates they were probably Kelly bags, because a Birkin would have cost far, far more. However, a possible complicating factor would be whether it was purchased used (“pre-loved”) or not. But never mind that.

The wife issued a statement yesterday that confirmed what police know about domestic-violence incidents, i.e., that they suck:

The wife of a Ford Motor Co. executive who allegedly assaulted her over the weekend is defending her spouse, saying she loves and supports him, and that he’s never acted violently in the past.

Soo Louis-Victor issued a statement through her an attorney, Paul Stablein, about a weekend incident involving her husband, Franck Louis-Victor. In it, she called him a “loving partner and father.”

Of course. And yes, they were indeed Hermes:

According to a preliminary investigation and a criminal complaint, the victim told officers that she and Louis-Victor were in an argument when he threatened to burn two of her Hermes purses, each valued at about $10,000, with a butane torch. She told police after she took the purses from him, he turned the torch toward her and said he would harm her if he couldn’t damage the handbags, police said.

Later during the fight, he allegedly slapped her, headbutted her and struck her with a Google Nest Hub device, cutting her under the left eye. She sought treatment at a hospital.

I know domestic violence is a complex issue, that alcohol complicates everything, but this is not the way a loving partner and father behaves during an argument. The Google Nest Hub device did make me shake my head. Get out of the way, frying pans and rolling pins — flying Alexas are the new in-home weapon.

Whatever the reason, I think she’s going to have to pawn those bags before this is all over. A shame.

OK, then: The only other thing in the papers this morning that caught my eye was probably Michigan-specific, i.e., this piece about Gov. Whitmer’s plan to overhaul education in the state. Briefly, she wants to transform the traditional state-level department into a broader one focused on preschool-to-career, the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential, i.e. MiLEAP:

The new department will work toward “improving outcomes from preschool through postsecondary,” read a Wednesday announcement scant on details about how that might be accomplished. Governors don’t govern the state education department. It’s controlled by an elected state board and a state superintendent hired by that board, a source of frustration for governors of both parties. The new department will partner with, not replace, the state Board and Department of Education, Whitmer’s office said.

I like the idea, but I’ve been away from Lansing too long to immediately figure the what’s-it-about/what’s-it-really-about situation here. These grafs lower down are the meat of it:

Whitmer’s tactic could, possibly, move education to a new dynamic, one focused on accomplishment. Whitmer’s move could shift school policy more directly and quickly while focusing it more intently. It may give schools and teachers more flexibility to actually teach, and inspire kids to actually learn.

Possibly.

What happens with the still-existing Department of Education? Will the Republicans who backed Bollin’s proposal [who proposed eliminating that department entirely] fight Whitmer’s? Does this actually open schools to more political wrangling, or protests, or parental resistance? How will funding issues be resolved? And could all Whitmer’s efforts be overturned when conservative government inevitably returns to power in Lansing? Are these questions Whitmer considered? If so, does she care about those worries, or is she focusing instead on the chance of great reward?

Good ones to think about, no matter where you live, as the weekend draws near. Have a good one.

I see Dexter mentioned the Michigan Ball-Kicking Incident in the last thread. I haven’t checked the comments to see if it’s caught anyone’s fancy, but it certainly caught mine, so here goes the summation from ground-level Michigan: 

The state GOP is fighting. They’ve been fighting for a while, but now the rebels are fighting amongst themselves, a real People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean People’s Front type of situation, only stupider and not funny, unless you’re a Democrat. Earlier this year, the state party chairmanship was seized by the crazier of two crazy candidates, on the basis of this argument: Crazy person #1 ran for and lost the attorney general’s seat in 2022, and crazy person #2 ran for and lost the secretary of state’s race (by a bigger margin than the AG candidate), but! The AG wannabe, Matt DePerno, conceded his race on election night, and the SoS wannabe, Kristina Karamo, did not. Why should I concede I lost a race in a corrupt system? she asked the crowd at the state convention, and that did the trick. She won on the last ballot, as the cleaning crew was poised to kick everyone out because they ran way over their allotted time in the convention hall. That’s because they had to hand-count the ballots, because tabulators = EVIL. 

So even before this started, these were the folks in charge: The nuts. 

Then, the nuts began fighting amongst themselves. Karamo’s own vice-chair was splitting with her over financial issues. The party is flat-ass broke, the big donors have closed their checkbooks, and somehow the expected tsunami of small-dollar contributions isn’t filling the gap. There was some hiring and firing and this and that, and then this Saturday happened. The story’s paywalled, but here’s the gist:

As Michigan Republicans have been openly feuding over the party’s direction and the leadership approach of new Chairwoman Kristina Karamo, some were frustrated that the beginning of Saturday’s special meeting at the Doherty Hotel was limited to only members of the state committee.

In an interview, James Chapman, a Republican from Wayne County, said he traveled to Clare for the meeting but was forced to listen to it through a locked door.

Chapman said he and others said the Pledge of Allegiance together in the lobby outside the meeting and acknowledged he wiggled the knob of one door leading to the meeting room.

And then? And thennnnn?

Eventually, Mark DeYoung, chairman of the Clare County Republican Party, heard the wiggling and walked over to the door, where he saw someone flip him off through a small window.

DeYoung opened the door.

“He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door,” DeYoung said.

Not only that, Chapman then bum-rushed DeYoung across the room and slammed him into a chair, or something. (Allegedly.) DeYoung ended up in the ER with a cracked rib and presumably an ice pack on his business, and Chapman was suspended from his local GOP committee. MLive dug up a detail I hadn’t known, that snapped a lot into place for me: He was the guy who showed up at a 2020 Lansing protest of the governor’s Covid restrictions carrying a fishing rod with a nude, brunette Barbie-type doll dangling from the end, clearly meant to be Gretchen Whitmer. (Photo at the link.) The kidnapping story hadn’t broken yet, but this was too much even for the MAGA crowd, and he was asked to stash it. He’s got a criminal record, too. A real model citizen.

Bottom line: The crazies are still in charge, the checkbooks are staying closed, and I doubt we’ll see a Republican win the open U.S. Senate seat next year. 

The other major news of the week? The best possible suspect for Chicago’s Tylenol murders of 1982, James Lewis, is dead, apparently of natural causes. He never served a day for the murders themselves, although he drew a 12-year federal-prison term for trying to extort $1 million from Johnson & Johnson, in exchange for “stopping the killings,” which he never admitted to. I remember those, as should everyone who was alive and paying attention then. For those of you who weren’t, they are the reason we now have to break through multiple levels of packaging to get at an over-the-counter medicine today. The Sun-Times is “free,” but it can be a pain in the ass to get to. If you have an account, this column by a retired editor who was a reporter then is worth your time. Tom McNamee interviewed Lewis in prison: 

I felt a physical chill when, in the tone of a man who thinks he’s clever, Lewis offered to explain to me how any mope — though certainly not himself — could have safely and efficiently filled Tylenol capsules with deadly cyanide.

It was simply a matter of drilling holes in a breadboard, Lewis explained, and inserting half a Tylenol capsule shell into each hole. Then, he said, the mope — certainly not him — would brush the powdered cyanide across the board with a table knife, letting it fall into the capsules.

But you didn’t do it, James?

“No,” he said. With a smile.

Neil Steinberg detailed how the killings went on his blog today, too, in an excerpt from his book. 

And that’s about all I have for the day, which is slipping by. Better get some real work done.

End of the week, and I’m bound an determined to get a third blog done before the weekend. Fortunately, I have a couple things to recommend, and recommend enthusiastically.

First is “Casa Susanna,” the latest PBS “American Experience” thing, which Alan watched late one night after I’d gone to bed, and liked so much he watched again, so I could, too. Here’s the link. It’s about a long-gone Catskills retreat for transgender women, and to make it clearer, specifically heterosexual men who had no other outlet to present as women. It’s absolutely fascinating, both for the level of detail, empathy and understanding it brings, without being sentimental or cringey or any of the rest of it.

It’s also an answer to those who talk about gender dysphoria as though it’s some weird, baroque mental illness. These men/women were highly functional, accomplished individuals whose main problem was that they were living in the wrong bodies. But you watch. You’ll like it.

I mention this other thing mainly because I find myself in the extremely rare situation of agreeing with David French, in the NYT. He’s writing about why the MAGA movement is so hard for people like me to fully understand. By George, I think he’s got it:

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

He talks about the boar boat parades, too.

Believe me, I was as surprised as you to find myself nodding along.

OK, it’s nearly the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Attachment parenting was getting a lot of attention when I was mother to a young child. This is the school of thought that includes carrying the kid at all times in a complicated sling, extended breast-feeding and the family bed.

It wasn’t my thing, but it did get me thinking, on walks and bench-sits on the playground, about the idea of attachment. A child grows inside you, is born, and you hold it close for a few weeks, then put it down (but still hold it a lot). Then they start walking, you hold their hands, etc., until one day you realize you’re a TOTAL EMBARRASSMENT and your child would appreciate it if you’d just get lost for the next five years or so, and then eventually they come back to you as adults.

It’s the adolescence that most challenges you, because it’s then that you most clearly realize that in the act of creating a new human life, you’ve done just that — create a new life, separate from your own. You and your partner each threw 23 pairs of chromosomes on the table and let them fight it out, and something entirely different emerged. Your child may look like your mini-me, but they have their own mind, and what’s more, they’re growing up in a different era from you, so even if they’re good kids who respect their parents and never put a foot wrong, they’re reflections of their own time and generational peers, at least to some degree.

And this is a good thing. The world needs to change, and it needs young people to change it. You may not like every change, but you’re not on the committee, no one’s going to ask your permission. Sorry about that.

Now someone, please tell this to the Moms for Liberty.

They’ve been getting a bit of PR lately, for their surprisingly successful attempts to gain spots on school boards. Our own was overtaken by a conservative majority last fall, and while they’ve mainly been concerned with budget matters, a number of them stressed “parental rights” in their campaigns, and the M4L has a chapter here. (Although not sure how active/influential they are. They seem to do better in the farther-out hinterlands.)

It’s a little frustrating for a person who knows how education works, or is supposed to work. Teaching is hard, hard work, and one thing you can grant your child’s teachers is the grace to let them do the work they were trained to do. They cannot consult with every parent on every book on the English reading list or in the library, or whether the Civil War should be taught this way or that way. You have to trust educators to educate. It’s part of the letting-go process for parents: Your kid will not learn exactly what you did, because they are not you. If you have a problem with that, prepare to homeschool.

Here’s another thing that struck me as the mother of an infant: You give birth to this tiny, perfect individual. Their skin is nearly transparent, their digestive system little more than a tube. And if you’re lucky, you breastfeed exclusively for however many months, and it’s all fine. Breast milk is the perfect food for junior. The diapers may be copious, but weirdly, they don’t smell bad.

Then you introduce solids, and hoo-boy, hold on to your hat for that diaper, because it’s going to burn your eyebrows off. It seemed like a metaphor. I told Alan at the time, “Now begins the world’s corruption of our perfect child.” Soon she’d be watching more television than I was comfortable with, eating foods with too much sugar, all that. I made many, many mistakes raising her, like everyone does. But she turned out all right. Almost everyone does, if their parents aren’t abusive and they don’t roll bad genetic dice.

You never stop worrying. You never stop thinking, what could I have done differently? But if you’re lucky, you should be able to start letting go at some point. You have to. If you’re religious, you say they belong to God, and it’s out of your hands. If you’re more like me, you might tell yourself you can’t control teenagers, not really. Weren’t you a teenager once? Didn’t you do all kinds of stupid shit? I had a curfew, and in later life I was very happy my parents set that boundary, because the kids who didn’t — hoo boy, you can’t believe what they got up to. Some of my friends had something called the GOOTH Club. GOOTH stood for Get Out Of The House, which they’d do once their parents fell asleep, sometimes by climbing out windows, after which someone would take a car from the garage and they’d spend all night — all night! — driving around. Once they drove to Cincinnati and back. Then they’d go to school the next day. They were not good students.

I’m rambling. But I was thinking about all this after reading this New York Times piece (gift link) on the new battleground of the, get ready, school play. Of course the recent production in Fort Wayne was mentioned, but also:

For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.

You don’t say.

Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.

In emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).

Check out this story from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, where the board rejected “The Addams Family,” literally the most-performed high school musical in the country, over its “dark themes,” which the school-board president described thusly: “The fundamental thematic theme, for me that I could see, was moving towards darkness, embracing death, embracing despair, embracing the pain.” Jesus Harold Christ, you idiot, IT’S A JOKE. Imagine growing up in that house. I bet their kids are charter members of the GOOTH Club.

I know some parents who might more closely align with my beliefs have raised hell over things like racial slurs in Mark Twain and the plays mentioned above, but man, I am done with that shit. (I never was one of them, anyway.) Read Huckleberry Finn. Yes, the text has the N-word. Talk about it. Discuss why Twain used it, why it’s OK to use it between black friends, but not if it comes from others. Talk about the era in which Twain wrote. Ask why it’s OK that art is disturbing. Move on. Find another book that makes another group uncomfortable. Dive in, get dirty, learn something. You can’t keep children cosseted forever, and it’s a sin, it’s wrong, to even try.

Oh, well. It’s still Independence Day, and it’s nice to have a midsummer holiday in which we are expected to do little other than enjoy the day, eat some hot dogs, light some sparklers. We went sailing. It was very nice.

Speaking of Jesus Harold Christ:

This guy. I mean.

Also, as Abraham Lincoln once said: Don’t trust everything you read on the internet. The story of a lefty provocateur who wasn’t even real.

Enjoy the fireworks! Happy Fourth!

A holiday week, you say? I remember holidays, from the BeforeTimes, i.e., before I got a job. However, the work week barely stops for something as silly as “Independence Day,” always for me (who’s working the holiday?) and maybe for you (yeah, it’s me).

Why did we let work do this to us? And with that question, I could direct you to Barack Obama’s Netflix update on “Working,” but why bother?

Alan and I are watching “Blazing Saddles,” just for the hell of it, and it reminds me of the last time I saw it, I was in the “parents’ tent” at the Warped tour in Cleveland. The tent was smack in the middle of three stages, and the ambient cacophony in the parents’ tent was really something. Of course the subtitles were on, but most people weren’t watching, but knitting, reading or hand-lettering “Live, Laugh, Love” signs, although I may have made up that last one. I read whatever “Game of Thrones” novel I was on at the time and surfaced periodically to appreciate the classic scenes — the horse getting punched, Lili Von Shtupp, etc.

God, this movie is funny. Another one you’d be crucified for making today.

A couple long reads for the holiday weekend. You ready?

A fantastic New Yorker takedown of the submersible. If you have clicks to burn, burn them here, because it’s great.

One you’ve already heard about today, no doubt: A long Sally Jenkins saga of the friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. It’s just beautiful, a story of how some relationships, some friendships, are deeper and clearer than anything between spouses.

Something shorter: Neil Steinberg’s lovely piece on the business that found itself at the center of last year’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Ill.

Two out of three of those pieces will renew your faith in humanity. Which is what the Fourth of July should be about, right?

What a weekend, eh? It started with submersible clean-up and ended with a called-off coup. It’s amazing that I had time to go grocery shopping, but I did.

The more we learn about the OceanGate disaster, the more it becomes clear that Stockton Rush, born on third base with a long lead to home and a blind pitcher, was fortunate to the end, because the lawsuits his estate will be dealing with would leave him wishing he was dead. You could almost argue that anyone dumb enough to pay an arm and a leg to even go aboard is probably not smart enough to sue, but rich people have great lawyers. The detail that most struck me? The sub had limited propulsion, so landing in the right place to see the bow of the Titanic was pretty much a crapshoot. I learned this from a Detroit News story about a guy who took an earlier trip, which is paywalled, but I’ll quote the relevant parts:

On the day of the descent, the crew of five, including the OceanGate CEO serving as the pilot, were bolted into the submersible and sealed to avoid water leakage. A barge with the sub floated away from the ship, and the barge was sunk. The crew disconnected the sub to drop into the deep.

Weights sunk the sub for a more than two-hour journey to the ocean floor where the Titanic rests. Wortman could look out the single porthole, watching the “disco show” of red, green and blue sea life as the crew talked and listened to music. Wortman’s choice: Eminem.

Eventually, there was a complication. Wortman brought commemorative challenge coins to share and the passengers may have underreported their weight, and the sub fell faster than expected.

The faster descent meant the sub missed its destination. The hope was to land near the front of the ship. It landed roughly 300 yards off the back in a debris field of the Titanic. It was pitch black. With a light, Wortman could see ceramic tiles, wine bottles and one of the boilers. On the ascent, he saw the back end of the propellers, but the sub had to avoid getting caught in the metal remains of the vessel.

They spent about four hours on the ocean floor. A normal ascent required dropping the sub’s weights and floating to the surface, usually no more than three hours. But one of the weights didn’t drop during Wortman’s dive, consuming time to change the programming code to address the weight issue. It took 3 hours and 20 minutes to surface.

As a result, they didn’t see the bow of the ship, much of which remains intact. A later dive did see it. Hungry, tired and cold at 33-degree temperatures at the ocean floor, the passengers on Wortman’s dive agreed to return to the surface. Divers can’t recover the sub in the dark, and Wortman said he didn’t want to spend the night underwater.

Indeed. Man, remember when rich people felt they had a duty to leave a legacy behind? Carnegie libraries, major university endowments, scholarships? Also: Imagine being trapped in a minivan-size submersible listening to Eminem.

Well, Stockton Rush is plankton food now, so let’s surface and turn our eyes to Russia. Despite being something of a Russophile for much of my life, I have no idea what really happened here. A friend, who is not a cynic but sometimes leans that way, thinks the whole play was about money, that Putin had to put a nine-figure sum into Prigozhin’s Swiss bank account, and then and only then were the troops called back. Given that all involved are thugs and criminals, I wouldn’t be surprised. If this weakens Uncle Vlad, can’t complain. But as in all things Russian, beware what might be coming up behind him. As the U.S. has shown us, there are bottoms below the one we’re standing on now.

Speaking of which, Big Daddy is in southeast Michigan late this afternoon, if he isn’t here already. The Oakland County GOP is having a fundraiser with him as the big draw. They plan to give him a “Man of the Decade” award, which is something of a joke for people who can remember when he was here in 2016, and boasted from the podium that the last time he’d been in Michigan, it was to accept a Man of the Year award. Reporters, local burghers and others did their research and thinkin’, and no one could remember any such thing, or even any such award. But being bootlickers and ass-kissers of the first order, they’re going to do it for real this time, and add nine years.

The jokes, they write themselves.

OK, gotta make dinner for our little tribe of two before more world news breaks out.