I owe Sherri Nichols of our very own commentariat for pointing out, months ago, some things about Brittney Griner’s arrest that I’ve not read anywhere else. The short version: The idea that BG would be carrying her own bags in Moscow, even coming off the plane, is unlikely; the WNBA player was a rock star in Russia — one reason she plays, or played, there. The team would have handlers greet her flight and she wouldn’t need to lift a finger.

I don’t know at what point in the entry process her bags were searched, but the point is: There would have been ample opportunity to plant a vape cartridge in there before she reached that checkpoint. And given the timing of her arrest, almost on the literal eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and during the troop buildup on the border) suggests this was a diversion dreamed up in the Kremlin.

You can really gauge the level of Putin love on the American right at how she’s being portrayed in that wing of the media: As a “lesbian pothead” (Rod Dreher) too stoned or dumb to know you can’t bring that shit into the country. First, we’re taking Russia’s word that her vape cartridge was cannabis? Maybe it was CBD. Maybe it didn’t exist at all. If Griner truly was a user, does anybody think those team handlers mentioned above couldn’t have gotten her a little weed once she was through customs/security? As to her guilty plea, it was explained at the time that it was a strategic move on her part, essentially throwing herself at the mercy of the court, avoiding a trial in hopes of a lenient, face-saving sentence of time served. It didn’t work. Big surprise.

As for Paul Whelan, whose glow-up on the right has been profound: We’ve been reading about this guy for a couple years here, as he’s a Metro Detroiter and his parents live near Ann Arbor. Mr. Clean Marine was dishonorably discharged from the Corps in 2008 for…let this excellent Detroit News 2019 explainer fill in the details:

He received a bad-conduct discharge in 2008 for attempted larceny and dereliction of duty. As a Marine clerk in Iraq, he had tried to steal $10,000 from the U.S. government, according to military court records.

He also used another person’s Social Security number to enter a military computer system and grade his own examinations, thereby advancing his rank and pay.

The court martial, along with the possibility Whelan was a spy, made lawmakers leery of getting involved in his Russian arrest, said his family.

Now. I want to say right here that it’s entirely possible, even likely, that Whelan was framed, too. From the same story:

Whelan was director of global security for BorgWarner until the auto parts supplier laid him off earlier this month in a corporate restructuring. He is an avid traveler who has visited Russia seven times in 12 years, his family said. He is interested in its history and culture.

In December 2018, he was in Moscow for a wedding when a friend, Ilya Yatsenko, gave him a flash drive, said his family.

Whelan thought it contained photos of a trip the men had taken to Yatsenko’s hometown a year earlier. Actually, it listed names of members of a unit of the Russian Federal Security Service, which replaced part of the KGB.

Given Whelan’s bad-conduct discharge and other marks on his record, it’s unlikely he was actually an American spy; I mean, what agency would want the guy?

His family has been working hard to make the case that, whatever his flaws, Whelan is not guilty and should be released. But he still stands convicted of espionage in a hostile country. It’s not the same as possession of hash oil.

The prisoner swap with Victor Bout was uneven, I’ll grant you. But he’s been out of the game 20 years; I doubt he’s returning to arms dealing like some Mafia soldier sprung from prison whining “I gotta earn.” Maybe he will, I don’t know. But he’s internationally notorious now. If he returns to his old job, we can put the Navy SEALS on his ass, I suppose.

It was just to release Griner, however. The repulsive temper tantrums among the Fox News crowd only show you the sort of people they are.

Georgia, and the country, dodged a bullet on Tuesday. I’m sure others here felt the way I did when I looked at the still-whisker-thin margin and thought: Lord, there were that many people willing to gamble on Herschel Walker? I can’t even look at photos of him for more than a few seconds; seldom has such a dim light shone from a man’s eyes. Of course, now the off-the-record rats are scrabbling to the nearest reporter:

Interviews with a dozen campaign staff members and Republican operatives working with the Walker campaign suggest that it wasn’t just the candidate who had flaws — the campaign itself was hampered by poor decision-making.

Some said that Walker and his wife, Julie Blanchard Walker, never fully empowered his team to make decisions, frequently questioning suggestions and plans by veteran campaign operatives. The pair insisted on spending what aides described as an “excessive” amount of time poring over proposals for every campaign stop, bottlenecking planning. That included wanting to spend significant time in heavily Democratic areas to woo Black voters, a problem that worsened in the runoff when staff wanted Walker to focus exclusively on mobilizing Republicans who had just voted for him in the general election.

Staffers said Blanchard Walker even suggested her husband should be winning as much as 50 percent of the Black vote in Georgia, regularly commenting that the campaign needed “to be getting him in front of his people, in front of his community,” as one person working on the campaign recalled.

A Republican victory in the Georgia Senate race — even with a Black nominee — was unlikely to involve the party winning over droves of Black voters. The overwhelmingly Democratic demographic propelled Warnock to office two years ago.

So farewell, Herschel. Go back to Texas and live out your life.

Meanwhile, in Germany:

The plan was to storm the German Capitol, arrest lawmakers and execute the chancellor. A prince descended from German nobility would take over as the new head of state, and a former far-right member of Parliament would be put in charge of a national purge.

To facilitate the coup, the electricity network would be sabotaged. Satellite phones to communicate off grid had already been bought.

That is what German prosecutors and intelligence officials say a nationwide far-right terrorist network was plotting before 3,000 police officers and Special Forces fanned out across the country on Wednesday to raid 150 homes and arrest 25 suspected co-conspirators. They included an active duty soldier, a former officer in the elite special forces, a police officer and at least two army reservists.

The prince looks like… about what you’d expect a member of German nobility to look like, which is to say, not exactly an übermensch, but rather a doughy Bavarian lout. And there’s this line, toward the end:

Germany’s intelligence services have for years said that the greatest threat to the country came from domestic, far-right extremist groups.

That’s what our intelligence services have been saying for a while, too, but not very loudly, because it might upset Jim Jordan.

Finally, this: BRITTNEY GRINER IS FREE. Hallelujah.

Because Twitter didn’t collapse in a heap five minutes after Elmo got the keys, there’s a fair amount of pushback from his weird fans. But I’ll tell you: I no longer get served ads for new movies, cars or from any other legit brand, even gambling. Rather, it’s all these super-fast-cut commercials for shit like miracle cleaning brushes, or a wrench that looks like a snowflake, or 25 Times Famous People Ate In Restaurants and You Won’t Believe What Happened.

So I think the longer view is that Twitter won’t collapse in a heap, but rather, be eaten away by glitches and bad user apples like Kanye. Musk will get bored if no one is paying attention to him, and he’ll sell it for pennies on the dollar.

Too bad. Twitter was fun while it lasted. Politics, jokes and cute animals:

Pretty sure to brighten up just about anyone's day!

One of our first videos we got back in 2019 when we started taking videos instead of photos on our trail cameras! pic.twitter.com/Z8iQpBq2iC

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) December 1, 2022

Thanks for all the back-care advice. Today, Friday, is the first I’ve felt on the road to recovery. PT starts week after next. Until then, no heavy lifting.

In my convalescence, I’ve been reading the news, oh boy. Two big stories here: One, the battle to lead the Michigan Republican Party, which is revealing that the MAGA wing learned nothing from last month’s election. Either that, or they don’t want to go back to work at their boring old before-times jobs just yet. The losing AG candidate and the losing SOS candidate both have announced their party-chair bids, along with losing U.S. Senate (in 2012) candidate Pete Hoekstra. You junkies might recall him as the guy who ran the “Debbie Spend-it-Now” ad during that year’s Super Bowl, which was so racist the Asian actor cast as Rice Paddy Girl issued a public apology the next day. And he’s the “mainstream” candidate.

The other is about the reshuffling of the Democratic primary calendar for 2024, in which Michigan’s place in the order will move closer to the front of the line. We’re hearing everything from second (after New Hampshire, which for some reason HAS to be first) to fourth, but anything is better than what it’s been in recent years. In 2020, my primary ballot had something like 13 candidates, all of whom had dropped out by the time I voted. Screw Iowa; we can do better than this.

And I guess everyone here has heard what happened when someone put Kanye West in front of a live mic yesterday. A shitshow.

OK, my back is starting to bark again, so wrapping this up. More muscle relaxers! Have a great weekend, all.

What started as a little lower-back pain is turning into Backpocalypse. Third straight day in bed most of the time, with occasional movement to stay limber. I can cook a meal (although taking a cast-iron skillet out of the stove last night was a struggle) and walk the dog (as long as she doesn’t want a long one), but not sit for longer than a few minutes.

Saw my doctor yesterday. He prescribed prednisone (not helping so far), muscle relaxants (really not helping so far), and an x-ray. And physical therapy, which I have to set up. We’ll see. I’m hoping for recovery by the weekend. This shit sucks, although I’m doing a lot of reading and watching old Sopranos episodes on the laptop. It’s been interesting, seeing James Gandolfini assume the role of his life, the antihero who ushered in the golden age of TV. I recall showrunner David Chase despairing at how many of his own fans described Tony as “a good guy.” He’s not a good guy, and even the earliest seasons underline that.

Oh, well.

Bedbound as I am, I’ve been spending some time reading the news. This is the one-year anniversary of the Oxford High School shooting out in the exurbs. I haven’t read a single word of the coverage. Anniversary journalism was created for editors, so they can plan for a day sometime in the future. I don’t want to read about anyone’s grief, I don’t want to read how the survivors are coping, and I especially never, ever want to see another hashtag like #(Name of city)Strong. I hate the way these events are so common now, all we do is read from scripts afterward. For years, self-appointed media experts have begged reporters not to write so much about the killers, but instead concentrate on the victims. The message has sunk in, so today I’m scrolling past photo arrays of the four students killed, because we heard it all a year ago. It was tragic when they were killed, and it’s still tragic. I don’t see this as news.

Meanwhile, the cases against the kid who did the shooting, and his parents, who are being charged with negligent homicide, continue to drag on. The boy pled guilty a while back, but his parents are still fighting.

So I turn the virtual page, and it’s all about the impending rail strike, and I feel insane just reading about it. Are you telling me, NPR and New York Times and all the rest, that we’re looking at a national strike over four days of paid sick time, and what’s more, that today rail workers have ZERO DAYS OF PAID SICK TIME? How the hell did that happen? How does any industry get away with that? Is there something special about railroad work that it can’t accommodate workers having four measly sick days? Can someone explain this to a woman flat on her back waiting for the anti-inflammatories to kick in? Because I’m done with the crossword puzzle already and I’m temporarily sick of Tony Soprano.

Longtime readers know that my husband and daughter share a birthday, and it was yesterday. I usually make a meal and cake, but for two years now, we’ve met at a local restaurant and brought a bakery cake. And it’s been pretty great. We gave Kate a white-noise machine to help her sleep, and she gave Alan this:

That’s a bottle of artisanal mescal with a scorpion in it. A scorpion for a Scorpio. Ha ha.

She bought it around Halloween, in Mexico City, where she and the band had a gig. Someone was asking how they’re doing? Pretty good. They just finished their second album, it’s mixed and mastered, and they’re looking for a lawyer/manager/agent, all that crap. Kate continues to play in a second band, GiGi, and they’re opening for Protomartyr tomorrow night, and if you don’t know those names, well, you don’t live here and haunt the half-dozen or so venues where bands like them play.

And man, for some reason it’s been a bit of a week, probably because I went to Canada for two days at the beginning of it. When I got back, I realized I’d have a buttload of stuff to do, and it was all complicated by sudden-onset, near-crippling lower back pain. To all you armchair physicians: I doubt it’s a disc. I just woke up feeling like the Tin Man, so sore that if I’d dropped a $100 bill, I’d have let the wind take it rather than try to pick it up. Today I forced myself to swim 45 minutes, and everything seemed to loosen up a tad. Walked the dog, got another tad out of it. And now I feel 42 percent better.

Personally, I think it’s my body getting cheeky. Just a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself, “It’s funny. I never get headaches and I rarely get backaches. Two days later, a days-long headache and now this. I had to see my doctor on another matter and told him about my headache. He felt the back of my neck and said it was like kneading walnuts and suggested a massage. Perhaps I should spend retirement investigating alternative medicine treatments, getting a little more Woo about the old bod. Acupuncture, massage, infrared saunas.

But enough about me.

I’m not a subscriber to Business Insider and won’t become one, but you can get the gist of this story from the Twitter thread: Put simply, a tech-centric version of the evangelistic “quiverfull” movement is quietly trying to fill the earth with their self-determined genetically superior offspring.

(1/5) A few months ago I got a tip: A source told me that Elon Musk had "more children" than the public realized. So I did some reporting, and… it was true! He'd had twins with one of his employees. But I always felt like there was more to the story. https://t.co/vX9VmVBwfX

— Julia Black (@mjnblack) November 17, 2022

I’m so old — how old are you? — I’m so old that this reminds me of the Nobel laureate sperm bank that one of these literal wankers put together in the ’70s, correctly sensing that large number of women would grow weary of singles’ bars and would seek to become single mothers by buying a shot at a clinic somewhere. As I recall, this literal wanker managed to get three of them (Barack Obama had yet to win, dammmmmn guuurrrrl), but the place had gone limp (sorry) by 1999. New York magazine tells us:

In 2001, journalist David Plotz began an investigation for Slate into the donors of Graham’s clinic, and what had happened to their prized semen. (He riffs that he earned the nickname the Semen Detective, and later published a book on it, titled The Genius Factory). All in all, not a single baby ended up inheriting Nobel DNA, yet 217 kids in total were born from the sperm bank. Each donor was identified in sperm-bank catalogues by a color — fuschia no. 1, for example, or coral no. 36. After Plotz put out his call on Slate, he began publishing articles like “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White,’” connecting with kids looking for their dads, as well as starting to reach the men who had donated to Graham’s sperm bank.

What he discovered was that just a few of the donors had produced a whole lot of offspring; for instance, one donor had produced as many as 30 kids, and that was just the ones Plotz knew about. He also found that the donors had been kind of a mixed bag. One man had falsely gotten into the bank by claiming to have an IQ of 160; another was the unremarkable son of a Nobel Prize winner; another was an Olympic gold medalist. As it turns out, after he failed to get the Nobel-winning sperm he sought, Graham began searching for donors on college campuses and recruiting young scientists, as well as hunting for “Renaissance men … donors who were younger, taller, and better looking than the laureates.” (In keeping with the sperm bank’s eugenicist legacy, all of the men were white). By the mid-1980s, Graham was accepting pretty much anyone who volunteered. “Forget about Nobel laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn’t wish on your ex-girlfriend,” Plotz writes. Ultimately, the sperm bank became kind of a scam, with women continuing to seek its services based on an illusory reputation that it couldn’t live up to.

If you’re still wondering whether you can get your hands on any of this mystery sperm, I’m afraid you’re out of luck; the bank closed in 1999, shortly after Graham’s death, and the frozen vials of sperm were incinerated.

Maybe humanity is getting dumber. After all, we dreamed up this silliness. And as anyone my age could tell you, sooner or later everything falls apart. And have you seen Elon Musk in a swimsuit? Eee-yikes.

OK, I think I’m going to call it a week. Happy weekend all, and let’s slide into the holiday weekend.

Well, we got through it. I do not want to crow or even chuckle, but I did not see this coming. I was feeling good about Michigan, but the night before Election Day, after my shift observing absentee ballot pre-processing, I stopped for a fancy cocktail at the fancy cocktail bar across from Huntington Place. Got to talking to another Democratic challenger, and confessed I felt good about the gubernatorial and Secretary of State races here, but the attorney general might be touch-and-go.

For non-Michiganders, our AG is a spiky lesbian who was born with no fucks to give, at least about what people think of her. And so she’s had some public incidents (overserved at a tailgate party, making jokes about drag queens in schools) that would make any campaign coach facepalm. She’s also been a stand-up comic, and not everyone shares her sense of humor. And being female, of course some simply think she should sit down and shut up.

However. All my worry was for naught. Gretchen Whitmer won by 10+, Jocelyn Benson (SOS) by 14+, and Dana Nessel, the AG, by nearly 9. All of these qualify as landslides. And, to be sure, all were extremely fortunate in their opposition, which was uniformly awful, and that’s not just me saying so. Here’s the conservative editorial-page editor of the Detroit News:

Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial hopeful, was the best of the bunch, and seemed to be making a solid run at Whitmer as the campaigning closed. A respected pollster put Dixon a fraction of a point ahead of the governor on the morning of Election Day. That turned out to be delusional.

Dixon started too late, and with too little oomph in her campaign. The challenger couldn’t raise enough money to truly compete with a Whitmer war chest that topped $36 million (Dixon raised $7 million).

The other two GOP hopefuls, Matt DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state, were abysmal candidates who had no business on a respectable ballot. Many organizations traditionally aligned with the Republican Party refused to endorse them. They raised and spent even less money than Dixon. “Money talks” is still true when it comes to politics.

Karamo was a religious nut job, who came with a steamer trunk of oppo, much of it from her own podcast, where she opined that extramarital sex, yoga and various other benign forces led to demonic possession. She also spent a lot of time blabbering about abortion, which isn’t even part of the job she was running for. DePerno was more grounded in reality but also had a long string of regrettable incidents in his past, including padding his bills and assaulting his own clients. But both were, yep, personally endorsed by you-know-who. As was Dixon, who was just as crazy but a little more presentable. She also had many on-the-record interviews and media appearances when she was trying to be a minor-league Fox News commenter. But even this year, on the trail, when she was making hay from dirty books in school libraries, she used as an example the time one of her kids got a book out of her own school library that included a section on… anyone? Divorce. Yes, divorce.

So with these three leading the ticket, the down-ballot races were more or less doomed, and newly drawn legislative districts stripped the gerrymander advantage from Republicans. Long story short: Both chambers of the legislature flipped blue.

Election night at Huntington Place was anticlimactic, though. As the counting went on, the various GOP-linked challengers ran around scribbling madly on their clipboards, but nothing came of it. Everything ran very smoothly. The only downside was a throbbing headache that sent me home around 1 a.m. By then, the lay of the land was evident and the air was rapidly leaking out of the balloon. I didn’t feel I was letting anyone down by booking early.

I still have the headache, which has waxed and waned since Sunday. Seeing my doctor tomorrow.

And now it’s a lovely, lovely November day and I’m going to take a final-ish bike ride.

What else? Here’s a Twitter thread I did early on E-Day, on the unique joy of visiting Mr. C’s Car Wash here in Grosse Pointe. Let’s try embedding the first tweet and see if it doesn’t break the coding:

It's my birthday month, which means new stickers on my license plate, which reminds me I need a clean license plate, which reminds me I haven't had my car washed in forever. So off to Mr. C's full-service wash. First stop after leaving my car? The hallway of stuff! pic.twitter.com/uEscaQnBx7

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) November 8, 2022

Otherwise, I’m gonna get on that bike. Hope your November day is equally lovely. See you next week.

You guys. I’m going to be scarce, or scattered, around here the next few days. For lo, election time is upon our nation and I volunteered to not only be a day-of challenger, but also a pre-processing observer, figuring, I’m retired, what else do I have to do? And not too much was a dumb answer, because chores and jobs are starting to pile up.

This weekend was the monkey wrench. I signed up for lifeguard training, and had to do the whole course again because I let my last certification lapse. It consumed the weekend like a ravenous beast, and isn’t even over. (The pool where we were supposed to do the deep-water stuff had mechanical problems, so that part is TBA.) But. I found time to attend two fun parties Saturday night, and had a couple drinks with a friend Sunday, so it wasn’t terrible. I’m just behind on everything else, relearning the lesson of my youth: Laundry will wait, but a fun party won’t.

I start ballot pre-processing observation this afternoon. And then it’ll be a sprint into Wednesday.

I’m feeling pretty confident about Michigan, a couple of nail-biter races notwithstanding. I’m not feeling good about the rest of the country, though. A doomy friend says these are the last good years in America. I’m increasingly thinking he’s right.

So to fill out the post, some pix from this weekend.

Learning infant CPR in lifeguarding class:

Me with a friend’s real baby and her grandmother at one of the fun parties. (He and his wife bought a convent and have filled it with massage therapists, facialists and artists. No one knew much about the elk, other than he was a native of Saskatchewan.) I’m dressed down because the earlier party was outdoors and extremely casual.

Finally, look what Alan found while vacuuming out a cold-air intake in our foyer. It’s in pretty good shape for having spent half a century in the bowels of our house:

If it’s worth anything, let me know. Otherwise I’m buying a lottery ticket.

Good week, all. I’ll speak up when I next surface.

Alarmed? Why would anyone be alarmed by this?

MADISON, Wis. — Hinting at his plans to overhaul how elections are run, the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin this week said his party would permanently control the state if he wins.

“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” construction executive Tim Michels told supporters Monday at a campaign stop.

Michels is seeking to unseat Gov. Tony Evers (D), who over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.

To be sure, Michels’ mouthpiece says he was only speaking abstractly, that the GOP’s policies would be so gosh-darn popular they couldn’t help but hold their seats forever and ever, amen. Which is, I’m sorry, a crock of shit.

Man, am I tired of election season. Which I won’t be working this year, at least for money. Still waiting to hear what my shift will be at the absentee counting boards.

In sad news of the day, did y’all hear about Julie Powell? Dead at 49, of quote-cardiac arrest-unquote, which as a former colleague once pointed out, is what everyone dies of. Still, she’d recently had a long bout of Covid, followed by the flu, and then, hmm, just dies? I’m going back to my pre-booster mask behavior, i.e., wearing one indoors, with certain allowances for living life, which is to say, I’m not giving up on restaurants this winter. But with restaurant prices what they are, I’m not eating out so much anyway.

Short entry today, because I’m tired. Let’s hope for better later this week.

Note: I started to write this for Deadline Detroit, trashed it, rewrote it, trashed it again – it seemed too obvious. But now, in the last days before the election, gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon has unearthed dirty books as a campaign issue. So, with a sigh, I say the obvious.

Defending books from those who would ban them, burn them, keep them out of libraries – that’s porn for a progressive. It’s so easy to step up for Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, all of whom have written something to cheese off right-wingers. It’s almost literal virtue-signaling.

It’s harder to do it for the terrible writers – hacks, pornographers, crap-merchants – who also get swept up in the net wielded by people like state Sen. Lana Theis, who last summer choked back tears on the MIRS podcast when talking about the filthy, filthy books that Michigan children are exposed to in their school libraries. Stung by her tongue-lashing from her Senate colleague, Mallory McMorrow, she sought to get a little of her own back by also crying to the Detroit News’ Ingrid Jacques, champion of put-upon conservative women everywhere. Wrote Jacques, in her last column for the paper:

Theis points to specific books that she knows are in some Michigan school libraries or being taught in the classroom. Books such as “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health” depict in graphic detail masturbation, sexual positions and LGBTQ relationships. It’s targeted to children ages 10-13.

Other books such as “Push” describe a father raping his daughter, also in great detail.

“Do you believe preschoolers and elementary school children should be exposed to complex sexual and gender identity issues?” she asks. “Or do you believe children should be able to maintain their innocence at those young ages?”

Innocence. Huh. In my experience, 10-13 years is the age when puberty arrives, early for some (mortifying) and later for others (equally mortifying). Once that happens, one’s brain becomes a fetid stew of confusion, and innocence – at least, the innocence of early childhood – flies out the window. A book that explains how one’s body is changing, not just in medical terms but in a way that at least acknowledges all the weirdness one might feel as a result, sounds like a welcome addition to any school library. (Also, please: If 12-year-old boys, and some girls, aren’t masturbating, I’m Marilyn Monroe.)

I was about 12 when a different book was passed around my junior high school, like Soviets sharing samizdat. “The Godfather” was a best-seller, the ‘70s version of the Mafia tale. The paperback was everywhere, copies stained with pool water dripped by summer readers and ketchup from lunch readers, spines scored with multiple openings and closings. But we all knew what we wanted. Our copies fell open to page 21.

It’s the scene where Sonny Corleone screws Lucy, a bridesmaid at his sister’s wedding. Author Mario Puzo doesn’t spare a detail in describing Sonny’s huge penis, “an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle” that penetrates Lucy and causes “unbelievable pleasure” as she receives the “savage arrows of his lightning-like thrusts” which of course – of course! – end in a “shattering climax” for Lucy, the first of her life. Of course.

Junior high was different then. Most of us were still virgins. Our health classes talked about reproduction, sperm and eggs, but nothing about blood-gorged poles of muscle, needless to say. The passage was titillating, confusing and terrifying. We all had enough knowledge to understand, theoretically at least, that we’d be having sex one of these days, but we feared for the integrity of our tender interiors, should it be with a Sonny Corleone. But Lucy felt unbelievable pleasure; it said so right on the page. From savage arrows. What is going on here?

Here’s another book Theis named in her tour of aggrievement, “Push,” by an author known only as Sapphire. It opens with this devastating passage:

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver. That was in 1983. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded. I had got left back in the second grade too, when I was seven, ’cause I couldn’t read (and I still peed on myself). I should be in the eleventh grade, getting ready to go into the twelf’ grade so I can gone ‘n graduate. But I’m not. I’m in the ninfe grade.

Clarieece Precious Jones, the child telling her story, is not innocent, needless to say:

“Father,” (the nurse) say. “What’s your daddy’s name?”

“Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the Bronx.”

She say, “What’s the baby’s father’s name?”

I say, “Carl Kenwood Jones, born in the same Bronx.”

I can see where “Push” might not be Theis’ cup of tea. But imagine you’re a child who’s enduring this sort of abuse at home – it happens, even in Howell – and you pulled this book down from a library shelf. You might feel less alone in the world. And maybe you are a well-loved child from an intact family, and you did the same. Maybe you’d feel like the world was wider than you might have thought.

And that is the whole point of literature. To hold a mirror to the world, all of it. Children should be guided in their choice of reading material by adults, but not dictated to. (You should have heard what my school librarian had to say about Nancy Drew mysteries, my absolute favorite for a while.) In a just world, any child entering a school library in search of reading material should be treated with trumpets and salutes. If a plain old book can cut through the static of TikTok, homework, over-scheduling and the million other things competing for their attention, give that author the Nobel Prize. That’s an accomplishment.

Theis’ cause is not a lonely one. I recently stumbled across a spreadsheet, file name “inappropriate library books,” compiled by FEC United, a hard-right group that has established a beachhead in Grosse Pointe, where I live. It contains “Push,” needless to say. And there’s the 1619 Project and various books about racism. All three of the authors I mentioned in my first paragraph are there. And now, late in the race, the flailing Michigan gubernatorial campaign of Tudor Dixon has seized on dirty books, which she describes as “books describing how to have sex” as an issue. I can’t really top Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s riposte to that (“You really think books are more dangerous than guns?”), but I will add that in my experience, no one needs to be taught how to have sex; nature has endowed us with the instincts to figure it out on our own.

Anyway, like I said, we can all get a warm glow from sticking up for Toni Morrison. But I rise today to stick up for Mario Puzo, crap-merchant. His lousy novel was the foundation of two of the best movies ever made; that alone is the basis for a decent term paper. Lucy the bridesmaid gets her own subplot, a weird medical detour to explain her too-large vagina, and no I’m not kidding. It scarred me for years, worrying that one day I could only be satisfied by a donkey-endowed man like Sonny Corleone.

If only it had been kept from me!

Earlier this year, when the GOP gubernatorial field was taking shape here in Michigan, four or five of them met for an event at the Mackinac Policy Conference, the thing up north where the legislature and the big swingin’ dicks of the business and nonprofit world meet to drink and jaw and plan the future.

(I attended once. Those plans? They never work out.)

Anyway, one of them, Kevin Rinke, who inherited his family’s vast auto-dealership empire, responded to an abortion question by claiming that “some states” were considering bills that would “legalize abortion up to 28 days after birth. Twenty-eight days!”

Later in the summer-long campaign, Rinke would emerge as the “reasonable one” on abortion, advocating for rape and incest exceptions. No one else did. Shows you where we are right now.

Of course, that is bullshit. But I was interested in where a seemingly sane, functional adult might have gotten that idea. Google a little, and you find it was all around the crazier corners of the right-wing internet. The AP explains, if that’s the right word, the confusion:

“To everyone saying it’s fake because it was posted on 4/1 just do some research. 99% of y’all don’t stay in Cali. It’s called The infanticide bill,” claimed a Facebook post sharing a screenshot of the headline on April 1 with over 11,000 reshares.

But the posts misrepresent the purpose of the bill and its potential impact. The bill eliminates a requirement that a coroner must investigate deaths related to suspected self-induced or criminal abortion. Coroner statements on certificates for a fetal death could not be used to pursue a criminal case against the mother.

The aim of the bill, introduced Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Democrat representing the East Bay, is to protect women who end a pregnancy or have a miscarriage from being investigated, persecuted or incarcerated. Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Wicks told The Associated Press in an email. “The bill is specific to pregnancy and pregnancy-related outcomes, and does not decriminalize the ‘murder of babies’ in the weeks after birth,” Ivie said.

So what that tells me is…well, there are several conclusions I can think of. One, that Rinke gets his news from the Gateway Pundit, et al. Two, that whoever prepped Rinke for the debate gets their news from those places. Or, far more likely, both the candidate and his aides know it’s bullshit, but figure hey, red meat for the base, who gives a shit.

Rinke didn’t get the nomination. This woman did:

The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan invoked a conspiracy that the Covid-19 pandemic and protests in the summer of 2020 after the killing of George Floyd were part of a decades-long plan by the Democratic Party to “topple” the United States as retaliation for losing the US Civil War, adding that the party wanted to enslave people “again.”

Tudor Dixon, a former TV news anchor, made the remarks on the far-right streaming news network Real America’s Voice, which hosts former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, in late June 2020.

In a six-minute monologue at the beginning of the show, Dixon said that after the “attempted creation of the Black House Autonomous Zone outside of the White House,” referring to a cordoned off area near the White House erected by activists, that Democrats were using this moment to “topple” the US.

“The country today is divided, and this was the plan. It’s been in the works for years. The idea that you can topple the greatest country in the world. But to topple a country like the United States of America, you must be planning this for decades,” said Dixon. “Why wouldn’t that come from the party that lost the Civil War? The party that wanted to own people because they viewed them as less than human? Do you think that the Democrats are over losing to the north?”

Most polls have shown the incumbent governor with a Secretariat-size lead, but the race is tightening, as they usually do as the election draws closer. When the gap was 17 points, many Republicans grumbled that they missed their chance when they failed to nominate Rinke. He could have faced Gretchen Whitmer and backed her down, they say, because He Is A Business Success. (JFC, am I tired of that argument. The last business success we had as governor bean-counted an entire city into lead poisoning.) Dixon claims to be a business success too, if you count working for her daddy’s steel firm (which failed) and being a commentator on a right-wing network so obscure I have to look it up, every time. She was also an actor in some B vampire pictures and…I forget. Also, a mom. (She says it that way, in italics.) I call her Brunette Ivanka for a reason.

So that was our choice in 2022, or at least, Republicans’ choice. Don’t get me started on the AG and SOS candidates, who make Tudor Dixon look like Winston Churchill.

Ah, well. My vote is cast. Let’s change the subject. I was going to talk about Kanye West, but realized I don’t care. Seldom has a celebrity interested me less. So I’ll just recommend this interesting essay on “The Raft of the Medusa,” art and politics, in New York magazine.

Here’s a Van Gogh from the DIA show, from an angle, and enjoy the rest of the weekend.