My plan to cram all my work into one day a week didn’t work, this time, but I got my taxes done, so there’s that.
And thus explains my absence this week. However, I slept terribly last night, so I expect a day of sitting and staring gloomily into space. Which is to say, happy arraignment day!
I won’t be complaining about the inescapableness of it all, because it turns out cutting the cord was the best thing I could have done. Just seeing the screen grabs on Twitter of the O.J.-like coverage of it all disgust me. And after reading the stories about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s snow job of Lesley Stahl Sunday night, I’m pretty down on all legacy media these days.
With some exceptions.
But from what I saw of the Greene/Stahl encounter — clips, mainly — suggest it’s time to retire “60 Minutes,” or at least retire the elderly correspondents stinking up the room. When a lunatic calls Democrats pedophiles, the correct journalistic response isn’t “wow.” But that’s what the “60 Minutes” crew does — looks down its aristocratic nose and thinks a well-placed insult will do the trick. It won’t. She was unprepared. We are unprepared.
Yesterday I read Neil Steinberg’s column about Israel. It’s…not cheering:
Israel, a democracy-loving country, at least when it comes to Jewish people — non-Jews, not so much — has been convulsed with unprecedented protests, and unprecedented shocks like military reservists vowing they won’t serve a dictator.
A stable democracy sliding toward civil war over the return of a judiciary-wrecking would-be autocrat. Hmm, as with Brexit, there seems a subtle warning here to those of us in the United States.
…Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But as with any good horror movie, the monster you thought was buried in the yard is actually moving around the house somewhere. Republicans who hope Ron DeSantis shows up and saves them forget: a) DeSantis is a stiff and b) should it happen, they’ll be stuck with Ron DeSantis. Queen Elizabeth II dying did not mean the end of monarchy. Putin is in every sense a one-man ruler. Netanyahu is trying.
I was feeling pretty good after the elections last fall. Now I’m gloomy again. Part of this is a lack of sleep, as well as the near-certainty that the pool where I swim twice a week is going to close next year, thanks to budget cuts due to falling enrollment.
So let’s move on to the gloomy news, then, eh? Maybe this is more smug news, but you can’t beat Paul Krugman when he’s pointing out the obvious, in this case the drop in life expectancy in the U.S., but particularly in red states:
Now, Covid killed a lot of people around the world, so wasn’t this just an act of God? Not exactly. You see, America experienced a bigger decline in life expectancy when Covid struck than any other wealthy country. Furthermore, while life expectancy recovered in many countries in 2021, here it continued to fall.
And America’s dismal Covid performance was part of a larger story. I don’t know how many Americans are aware that over the past four decades, our life expectancy has been lagging ever further that of other advanced nations — even nations whose economic performance has been poor by conventional measures. Italy, for example, has experienced a generation of economic stagnation, with basically no growth in real G.D.P. per capita since 2000, compared with a 29 percent rise here. Yet Italians can expect to live about five years longer than Americans, a gap that has widened even as the Italian economy flounders.
Yeah, funny how that works.
OK, enough doom and gloom for one day. The good news: The rain may end today — we’ve been getting cats and dogs’ worth — and I’ll get a bike ride in. Hope your day is sunnier.