It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, or has read me for 10 minutes, that I hold no great regard for Mike Pence. I will always think of him as a haircut and an empty suit, and remember him primarily as a talk-radio host, because that’s what he was when I lived in Indiana.

He had a late morning spot on WIBC, the big talker in Indianapolis, and occasionally I would hear his show in my car in Fort Wayne, if atmospheric conditions are right and I was on the right side of town. He has described himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” but that means nothing — he was at least as far right as Limbaugh, but maybe couched his views in slightly, slightly more polite language.

That he made it to Congress was mainly a matter of name recognition, etc., and to the governorship, ditto. Indiana’s Democrats are thin on the ground, and once Evan Bayh stepped aside, that was pretty much the bench. But still, Pence barely beat — Googling… — John Gregg to win in 2012, and was on his way to defeat in 2016 when he was saved from obscurity by Donald Trump.

I will never, ever forget the images burned into my brain from early in the Trump term, of the shameless bootlicking, led by Pence, at every public appearance. How could we forget that first cabinet meeting? Sickening.

So while I am not inclined to do a 180 after all we’ve learned about the one good thing Pence did in his four years as vice president, I will say this: What a crazy-ass world we live in, when it’s saved by a boot-licking toady like him.

Yes, I just watched the Thursday hearing. Is this not the rancid cherry on the shit sundae, or what?

Eastman emailed Giuliani to ask that he be “on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” after Herschmann warned him to get a criminal lawyer.

If this is the reputation laundry that eventually makes Pence the 2024 nominee, and he is helped into office by Trump worshippers now serving at the state level, why, wouldn’t that be ironic, eh?

It’s 91 degrees outside, what else was I going to do this afternoon? The heat is supposed to ease, somewhat, tomorrow, and even more so on Saturday, which is good-good news, if you ask me.

Then back up into the 90s next week. Ah well, it’s summer in a time of catastrophic climate change. Can’t have everything.

Sorry I’ve been scarce this week. We’re having work done on the house, and it’s…loud. Also disruptive. But I’m still here, reading comments, glad to see all your smiling faces there. Keep it up. And have a great weekend.

Well. That was something.

I’m talking about the J6 hearing, of course. I couldn’t hear every word, because the contractors are finally here — after a 10-month wait, more or less — to do our bathrooms, and today was demo day. But between the jackhammers? Unreal, even though I didn’t learn anything really new. Rudy Giuliani is a drunk. (Everyone knows that.) Every person with two brain cells to rub together in the Trump inner circle knew he lost the election fair and square. (Another thing everyone knows.) Bill Barr’s testimony in particular should do damage, but won’t. The people who most need to know this aren’t paying attention. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

Imagine if you’d been one of the chumps who actually sent money for the “election defense fund.” It would be hard to admit you’d been conned. So you would stick your fingers in your ears and say NAH NAH NAH as loud as you could.

Gannett, which owns the Freep, has decreed that it wants to de-emphasize opinion journalism. Very very bad idea, that, reminiscent of the time a Knight Ridder executive told me he didn’t think people wanted restaurant reviews, but rather news about restaurants. (They want both.) He thought a critic shouldn’t talk about what they thought of the food, because after all, everyone has different taste, but rather what the decor was like, the prices, the parking situation. This would be a terrible mistake, in my opinion, because it would probably reduce the appearance of columns like these, which correctly points out that while we now know virtually no one other than the president believed the Big Lie, all of the surviving Republican candidates for governor of Michigan…do:

Earlier this month, when Michigan Radio’s Rick Pluta asked GOP candidates participating in their party’s first gubernatorial debate if they’d “accept the results of the August primary and the election in November as a fair and accurate reflection of the will of the voters,” only one committed to do so.

The rest agreed it’s too early to say whether the candidate who gets the most votes in those elections should be considered the legitimate winner.

…Now, less than two years later, impugning the legitimacy of the electoral process has become the Republican norm. The presumption is that any Democratic victory must be the product of electoral fraud, administrative error, or rigged voting machines.

This heads-I-win-tails-you-cheated mantra belies the confident attitude Michigan Republicans like to project as they approach this year’s mid-term elections. If a GOP comeback is as inevitable as GOP leaders assert, why are they so busy concocting excuses for defeat?

Exactly.

One piece of bloggage today, because I guess I’m working today after all. David Hogg grows up:

Hogg has learned that conservatives are more disciplined and proactive than liberals, and they tend to stay focused on a single goal rather than try to do everything at once. He and his fellow liberal activists too often find themselves reacting to outrages, he says, “timing the market” rather than building new political structures from the ground up. He cites conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation. “Liberals are organized the way that a bunch of six-year olds doing a group project together with a bunch of crayons are,” he says. “Conservatives are organized like SEAL Team Six.”

Hogg now thinks that curbing gun violence is going to require a multi-year, three-pronged strategy: focusing on state-level activism; expanding the movement to include responsible gun owners and moderate Republicans; and changing the culture around gun ownership in the United States.

‘fraid so, kiddo. Good luck anyway.

Also, on edit: Wow, Yellowstone.

All entrances to Yellowstone National Park are temporarily closed due to this developing situation. https://t.co/cJhLykXbct

— Sean Breslin (@Sean_Breslin) June 13, 2022

Well, that was something, last night, wasn’t it? Unfortunately, when I look through my various news feeds and contacts, looking for evidence that even one MAGAt watched, I get crickets. There was a brief shower last night, followed by a double rainbow, and I see copious evidence that everyone ran outside to get a picture, but pay attention to Liz Cheney? Not much.

I didn’t see the whole thing in real time (Kate had a gig, a repro-rights fundraiser.) But I listened to as much of it as I could on the radio and reconstructed the parts I missed afterward. My favorite moment was Ivanka’s hostage video, which apparently put her back on a first-name-last-name basis with dear ol’ dad:

Her former colleagues remember her pushing the need to “fight” on Election Night just before Trump went onstage to claim he did win the election pic.twitter.com/Frt6bTWxDd

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 10, 2022

Yesterday was wild all around. One of the remaining five GOP gubernatorial hopefuls in the race was arrested on J6 charges. I’m confident this will put him way out in front of the field.

Whattaguy:

Earlier this year, he appeared at a meet-the-candidates forum, and told the crowd that they should pay attention to what’s going on in their polling place, and if they see something they don’t like, to just march over to the tabulator and yank the cord out of the wall. As the person who ran the tabulator the last couple elections, I would add: Don’t do that.

It seems there is plenty to talk about, and I have a podcast taping to prep for. (This prep involves taking a shower.) Carry on. And have a great weekend. Here’s a picture of a hummingbird perched in one of our backyard trees to get you feeling weekend-y.

The Columbus Dispatch wasn’t a great newspaper when I worked there. After I left, it got better, a lot better. (I hope my departure didn’t have anything to do with that.) But even in the darkest days of being the Disgrace, as it was called, when the publisher commissioned hit pieces and the cartoonists drew ethnic stereotypes in cartoons and all the rest of it, I don’t think we ever did anything like this:

I mean, if I had written that headline, I’d have put a period after “Go get one.” There’s no sense in writing declarative-sentence headlines (of which I approve, btw) without properly punctuating them.

It’s kinda funny. The URL suggests the original headline was “Wendy’s Strawberry Frosty is out. Here’s how to order one” (again with no period). Maybe the powers that be thought that was stupid, because presumably the answer is, “Go to Wendy’s and say, ‘Gimme one-a them new strawberry Frosties.'”

Wendy’s is a local company; most Ohioans know that. When I was there, Wendy’s executives would sometimes leave the company and start their own fast-food restaurants, which led to an embarrassment of riches for people who, say, lived alone and didn’t cook much, i.e. me and sometimes Jeff Borden. There was one called G.D. Ritzy’s — their thing was griddle-style burgers and high-quality ice cream. Some of these efforts seemed to follow the Wendy’s founding model. Dave Thomas was a simple soul whose favorite food was hamburgers, so he set out to make a better one. Apparently the G.D. Ritzy founder loved smashburgers and ice cream for dessert. It didn’t succeed, but it was resurrected just a few years ago by the founder’s sons. One location, same basic menu, same idea. Fat and salt for dinner, followed by fat and sugar for dessert.

Then there was a place just a block or two away from the four-flat that Borden and I occupied, called Big Bite. It was pita-style sandwiches on flatbread. I always ordered the Big Natural, because it had more vegetables in it. Later I learned what the term “big naturals” means in the world of pornography, and I don’t think I could eat another one.

Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips had a big presence around town, and was one of Dave Thomas’ gigs before he started Wendy’s. Then there were the longtime brands — White Castle, and about a million other imitators. Can’t forget Skyline Chili, which oozed up I-71 from Cincinnati.

Back to this stupid story:

“We’re always listening to our fans and as the most-requested item, it was a no-brainer for us to bring the Strawberry Frosty to the menu this season,” said Carl Loredo, chief marketing officer for The Wendy’s Company, in a statement.

The Strawberry Frosty is available through July 3. Wendy’s is also offering a Summer Strawberry Chicken Salad, which combines sliced strawberries, bacon, grilled chicken, a crispy lettuce and spring mix. It’s topped with an Italian cheese blend, candied almonds and a sweet Champagne vinaigrette.

I like the way Champagne is capitalized, because surely this vinaigrette is only made with the real thing, from the Champagne region of France. Also, “a crispy lettuce and spring mix.”

It goes on and on like this. I give up.

Oh well.

And now we face Wednesday. I hope yours goes well. Why not order a refreshing strawberry Frosty? They’re only available for a limited time.

I paid zero, and I do mean zero attention to the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. I don’t have cable, for one, and while I understand that the trial was live-streamed over the internet, I refused to engage. Depp is one of those celebrities who, if I saw them in an airport, I wouldn’t think of engaging with; I mean, I’ve seen him here and there in this and that, but I’m too old to think about him as a lust object, and I can’t think of a single question I might want him to answer.

As for his ex-wife, I wouldn’t even recognize her as famous. Pretty and blonde, because so many actresses are, but otherwise, a tabula rasa.

As such, I welcomed the chance to ignore, completely, a news event and not feel guilty about it.

I’m starting to gather this was a mistake.

I should have known when I started seeing #JusticeforJohnny trending among a few MAGA accounts I keep tabs on. I should have known when, late in the trial, the role of certain so-called Influencers began getting MSM coverage. I should have known when I finally did pay attention, and learned this was a defamation trial, based on an op-ed Heard wrote that didn’t even mention Depp. I should have known.

Then the verdict came in, and well, now I know. Anything TikTok plays a leading role in should be assumed moronic and toxic on its face. These damage awards are fucking insane, like the time a Columbus jury found one pornographer defamed another pornographer and awarded him $40 million.

It was later knocked down to $4 million, and Bob Guccione’s plans to use the settlement money to build an Atlantic City casino were stopped at the steel-girder stage. I’m sure someone else took over the project, which was notable also for the fact it was constructed around a single residential house, the proverbial stubborn homeowner who wouldn’t sell for any reason. Googling…and someone did take over the project. None other than Donald Trump. Speaking of pornography.

I hope Amber gets her award knocked down on appeal.

Sorry I’ve been scarce of late. No time, no ideas, rather stare at the horizon and wait for some Eastern religion-type enlightenment wash over me.

So here’s this, for Monday.

A year or so before I signed on in Fort Wayne, the News-Sentinel ran a long investigation of a religious group called the Faith Assembly. They were a cult, I guess, with one charismatic leader, Hobart Freeman. They were at their peak in the early/mid-’80s.

Their weird kink was, they rejected medicine. All of it, from an aspirin to insulin, and even eyeglasses. It was all evil. Just pray harder! they believed, and if someone died, it was God’s will.

And they did die, a lot of them, something like 52 preventable deaths among the congregation. The diabetics went first, of course, followed by the heart patients. Indiana authorities decided hey, you can believe whatever you want, folks, enjoy the other side. Unfortunately, adherents applied these beliefs to young children, and they died, too, often of very painful illnesses like meningitis or pneumonia. That’s when the prosecutors said Enough, and began taking parents to court and charging them with negligent homicide. The trials had started by the time I joined the paper, and it seemed a week didn’t go by without a photo on Page One of crying white parents hugging one another in court one last time before being taken away to separate prisons.

After a while, Freeman died, of a preventable illness if I recall correctly. Ah, yes, here it is, and thanks Wikipedia: “Freeman died at his Shoe Lake home of bronchial pneumonia and congestive heart failure complicated by an ulcerated gangrenous leg, which in the weeks preceding had forced him to preach sitting down. He had refused all medical help, even to the removal of the bandages so his leg could be cleaned.” He was 64.

Gross. Imagine what that guy smelled like at the end.

I’d read that story before I joined the paper, months before. In a weird twist, I was working night cops on a Friday and making the rounds of the police station, which was still wide open for the most part. I walked into the juvenile division to check the reports and overheard a detective talking to a judge on the phone. They’d received a call from a woman who had just given birth at home to twins, prematurely. One was dead and the other struggling, and she wanted to know if it was legal to bury the dead one in a shoebox in the back yard. The police wanted an emergency order to take the other one to a hospital. The couple was in an Ohio offshoot of the Faith Assembly, with a different leader, but the same beliefs.

Anyway, I was reading the New York Times magazine story about the anti-vaccination movement, which has snowballed since Covid. It did not make me feel better:

Although it is convenient to refer to anti-vaccine efforts as a “movement,” there really is no single movement. Rather, disparate interests are converging on a single issue. Many reject the “anti-vaccine” label altogether, claiming instead to be “pro-vaccine choice,” “pro-safe vaccine” or “vaccine skeptical.” For some, there may be a way to make money by pushing the notion that vaccines are dangerous. For politicians and commentators, the “tyranny” of vaccine mandates can offer a political rallying cry. For states like Russia, which has disseminated both pro- and anti-vaccine messages on social media in other countries, vaccines are another target for informational warfare. For conspiracy-minded private citizens, vaccine misinformation can be a way to make sense of the world, even if the explanations they arrive at are often nightmarish and bizarre.

There was a long section on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of course:

Kennedy’s current position has moved away from scientific claims toward an even more unsettling assertion. Vaccine mandates and government efforts to manage the pandemic, he argues, are a form of totalitarian oppression. “We have witnessed over the past 20 months,” he said in a recent speech, “a coup d’état against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition, of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

…“What we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism,” he told his audience. “They are putting into place all these technological mechanisms for control that we’ve never seen before.” He continued: “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” But no longer, he suggested: “The mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so that none of us can run and none of us can hide.”

And the movement’s skill with manipulating social-media platforms:

California-based anti-vaccine groups had long used the hashtag #cdcwhistleblower on Twitter, a reference to the spurious claims of C.D.C. malfeasance that would be central to Wakefield’s conspiratorial documentary “Vaxxed.” But the hashtag only occasionally traveled beyond the confines of the anti-vaccine crowd. So different hashtags with broader appeal — #TCOT (top conservatives on Twitter), #2A (Second Amendment) and even #blm (Black Lives Matter) — were included in tweets. The tactic paid off. According to an analysis by DiResta and Gilad Lotan, a data scientist, there had not been much overlap between what they call “Tea Party conservative” and “antivax” Twitter before 2015. But around this time, a new space emerged between the two realms, a domain they labeled “vaccine choice” Twitter. Its participants were obsessed with the ideas of freedom and government overreach.

These online groups, quite small in number, proved to be very adept at leveraging the viral potential of social media to make themselves seem large. Although surveys have repeatedly indicated that the great majority of parents support vaccination, these activists fostered, DiResta says, “a perception among the public that everyone was opposed to this policy.” To her dismay, some California Republican politicians adopted this new rhetoric of “parental choice,” despite the fact that SB277 had several Republican co-sponsors. They seemed to have sensed a wedge issue, she says, “an opportunity to differentiate themselves from Democrats,” who held a majority in the Legislature. “It was pure cynicism.” Many of their own children were vaccinated, she points out. But the rhetoric galvanized people in a way that previous anti-vaccine messaging hadn’t.

And I thought: We’re there, aren’t we? The Faith Assembly is no longer a lunatic church in Nowhere, Indiana. It’s everywhere. From Hobart Freeman’s gangrenous leg a thousand poison blossoms bloomed, and wave among us. I think of this bag of meat lying in intensive care for seven weeks before dying, and am awed by the patience of those who had to care for her. As I write this, four candidates for governor are on Mackinac Island, preparing for a “debate.” All oppose vaccine mandates of any kind (but all support making abortion illegal, in all cases).

It’s stuff like this that makes me want to just give up on this stupid fucking country. Instead, I intend to meet a couple of friends for dinner tonight, and de-stress a little. It’s almost Friday. And I don’t belong to the Faith Assembly.

Have a great weekend, all. Keep your sunny side up.

When Alan was working in an office, I would get dinner ready to fire, then wait around for whenever he got home. Often I’d watch one TV show as I waited; it’s how I got through “The Americans” and a rewatch of two of “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos.”

Lately it’s “NYPD Blue,” only I watch it as Alan cleans up the kitchen after dinner. Because it was on a commercial network, it’s only about 43 minutes, so Alan can join me for the second, third and fourth act, and rarely misses anything. (Something I learned on my journalism fellowship: One-hour TV dramas have four acts, movies three.)

We watched “NYPD Blue” together when it dropped, in the early ’90s. Everybody who was paying attention to American TV probably remembers it was a pioneer in showing material previously forbidden on prime time (butts, side boob), and using spicier language. Some affiliates refused to run it, and I’m pretty sure everybody ran it at 10 p.m.

Anyway, “NYPD Blue” was a cop show, a collaboration between Steven Bochco and David Milch, and probably the only reason it got on the air was Bochco’s status as a cop-show hit machine. It’s interesting mainly as an artifact of Hollywood entertainment, as well as society’s attitudes about police.

The Hollywood stuff first: The casting precedes the era of wokeness. A transgender woman — treated by the retrograde Detective Sipowicz the way the monkeys in “2001” treated the monolith — is played by a biological one. An adult described as “retarded” is clearly an actor who is not disabled in any way. As the seasons pile up, it’s like “Law & Order” reruns, where you can always tell who the bad guy is, no matter how fleeting his or her introduction, because if it’s an actor you’ve come to recognize, yep, that’s the guy. Also, it was so obviously shot in Los Angeles. (The sunshine gives it away.)

As for the police, well. I’ve lost track of how many times one of the detectives threatens to beat the shit out of a suspect. And then gets the confession! In fact, the willingness of a “skell” to take the beating is seen as evidence he’s telling the truth. And it’s always a he, although female skells swing through the 15th Squad station house often. They don’t get beaten (although they’re often killed by the third act) and sometimes someone will peel off a few $20 bills and tell them to go straight to the Port Authority and buy a bus ticket to their sister’s place in Florida. Where is all this petty cash coming from? We don’t know.

Of the NYC apartments we will say nothing, as we all know how those are.

This is how Hollywood did Gritty Realism, once upon a time. And we wonder why cop worship is so widespread.

“We Own This City” — now there’s a realistic police show. (David Simon and George Pelecanos, HBO.) The Baltimore police beat people, steal like kleptomaniacs, abuse every regulation in the book and basically act like an occupying force. In other words, like cops we all know.

Memorial Day weekend, and when people say, “Let’s remember all those who gave their lives for freedom,” all I could think about were the kids in Uvalde. But I kept my mouth shut. Bike ride, stop at a friend’s swimming pool, then ribs on the grill. A quiet day. Hope yours was good.

I was reading the story Alex posted earlier, about the Indiana pastor who confessed “adultery” to his flock, and was rewarded with a standing ovation, until another member of the flock took the mic:

The woman, now in her 40s, also added an important detail.

“I was just 16 when you took my virginity on your office floor. Do you remember that? I know you do,” she told her longtime pastor, describing herself as “a victim.”

The dateline for this story is Warsaw. It rang a bell, and a moment or two of recollection, and it came back: Hephzibah House, a “Christian” “reform school” for girls that would occasionally attract attention from media, but, astonishingly, managed to stay open until just two years ago.

One of my colleagues did a piece on Hephzibah House, on the abuse that happened there – the corporal punishment, mostly, but also the “modest” clothing, the nutritional– I don’t know what to call it, but I recall some of the girls were given only some weird drink in lieu of food, as punishment. It had zero impact. Read the story linked above, and you can see they skated through many state inspections, even though they basically held young women prisoner for months or years at a time, while they beat the “worldliness” out of them. And they lasted until 2020. Apparently it was an episode of “Dr. Phil” that finally did them in. (Laugh, serious journalists, at your vast influence.)

Anyway, who is surprised that a preacher in the…what was it? Oh yes, that a man of the cloth in the New Life Christian Church & World Outreach would rape a teenager on the floor of his office? No one should be.

Note the comments on that story, too: I too am a survivor of this shit-hole. It was to be a 14 month program but at the end of my 14 month pastor Ron told my parents I was still to worldly to go home. I was kept there for 4 years. This place was ran by Christian slave owners who whores their own daughters out to the other pastors sons.

So that put me in a sour mood to confront the late-afternoon horror of another school shooting. Jesus Christ, fourteen eighteen nineteen kids. I just can’t, anymore.

When Alan was features editor in Fort Wayne, he had an intern one summer with a shall-we-say-foundational problem. She had no real instinct for a story.

One in particular sticks in my memory. A new freeway bypass was being constructed at the time, and of course it included many overpasses. When those are built, the ‘dozers pile up a lot of earth, leaving holes in the ground that become stormwater retention ponds. You’ve driven past approximately a million of these in your lifetime. In this case, one of the property owners whose land abutted this project had a dream, and worked out a deal with the highway department to make the retention pond near him just a little bit bigger, big enough to be the minimum size required to accommodate that dream: To host sanctioned water-skiing competitions. In that very pond.

I believe he had landed his first event, nothing Cypress Gardens-level, but still: A sanctioned water-skiing competition! In a freeway retention pond, the boats tracing extremely tight triangular patterns, with the traffic screaming by! Now there’s a story.

The intern could not be convinced. “It’s just a guy with a pond in his back yard,” she argued. “So he’s going to run a boat around on it. Big deal.”

I don’t think Alan won that one, and didn’t try to — any story written by any reporter who couldn’t see the humor and absurdity in that situation would be stillborn. But I thought about her when I read the comments on a short aggregation/rewrite I did for Deadline, of a charming story written for the Freep by my ottering friend Bill. He freelances a regular feature called Free Press Flashback, which is pretty self-explanatory. Sunday’s was on the time the city police department rolled out the red carpet for a Hollywood movie production, and the ensuing film, “Detroit 9000,” turned out to be a piece of crap:

A Black congressman from Detroit announces his run for Michigan governor in the ballroom of the Book Cadillac Hotel. After he collects $400,000 for his campaign in money and jewels from Black supporters, a group of masked robbers cleverly steals the loot.

That bold caper is the opening scene in “Detroit 9000,” the low-budget tire squealer that made big headlines in 1973. Hyped as the first locally filmed feature movie, it ended up embarrassing city officials and local celebrities who had fallen hard for Hollywood’s promise to splash the glories of Detroit across the silver screen.

After allowing filmmakers to use police assets from headquarters to horses, Mayor Roman Gribbs blasted the production team as “a garbage organization that produced a garbage movie.”

The police commissioner got a bit part, for which he will win no acting awards. Local celebrities got similar roles and walk-ons. And were rewarded with a film whose marketing line called their city “the murder capital of the world” — “where honkies are the minority race.”

It’s a funny story. Here are a few of the Facebook reactions:

So why bring it up?

Ya I know all about it. Do we really need to re live every one of these moments?? Certainly things are different now?

So.. Michigan is doomed, if all our media sources keep bringing up past filth and horrors. We’ve got to get past these garbage racist viewpoints. It’s too decisive and all it does is make this place slow and miserable.

Sigh. It must be terrible to go through life without a sense of humor. Like not being able to smell. Although I have to say, I’ve known reporters like that. Give them the job of writing about “Detroit 9000,” and they’d spend six paragraphs noting that a $400,000 fundraiser, in 1973, would be the equivalent of $2.6 million today, and that’s totally unrealistic for a single state-level function, plus it would be against the law to accept jewelry in lieu of cash.

I’m reading “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, because some state senator concerned about Dirty Books is hooked up with some people who want it out of school libraries. It’s a Morrison novel I had not yet read, so I thought I might see what the fuss is about. The problem is a scene depicting the incestuous rape of an 11-year-old. It made me recall my high-school English teacher assigning Maya Angelou’s memoir “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” in which the 8-year-old Maya is also raped. My teacher was a very prim and proper old-school sort, but she did not shrink from the horror of those passages, and we had a very serious classroom discussion about them.

Perhaps this is why I grew up to be a Democrat. I was forced to read dirty books.

“The Bluest Eye” is a masterpiece, step one on Morrison’s path to the Nobel Prize. I pity the idiots who see it solely as obscenity. I wonder what they read for recreation, if they read at all. I guess the Left Behind novels had to sell to someone.

Hope all had a good weekend, with lots of recreational reading.

One of the things I read, not for recreation, was the New York Times’ Haiti project:

(F)or generations after independence, Haitians were forced to pay the descendants of their former slave masters, including the Empress of Brazil; the son-in-law of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I; Germany’s last imperial chancellor; and Gaston de Galliffet, the French general known as the “butcher of the Commune” for crushing an insurrection in Paris in 1871.

The burdens continued well into the 20th century. The wealth Ms. Present’s ancestors coaxed from the ground brought wild profits for a French bank that helped finance the Eiffel Tower, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s treasury from Paris for decades, and the bank eventually became part of one of Europe’s largest financial conglomerates.

…How is it possible, many ask, that Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, with its underground subway system, health care coverage, public schools, teeming resorts and impressive stretches of economic growth?

Corruption is the usual explanation, and not without reason: Haiti’s leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain, legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world.

But another story is rarely taught or acknowledged: The first people in the modern world to free themselves from slavery and create their own nation were forced to pay for their freedom yet again — in cash.

I knew nothing of this history, and I found the whole package fascinating. I checked Twitter for the reaction and found it to be, shall we say, derisive:

"Historians say"; "leading historians"; "documents rarely reviewed by historians". The @nytimes stood on the backs of researchers of Haiti and the Caribbean who mostly aren't in the story but are relegated to another tiny link. Scholars deserve recognition.https://t.co/ic2iGN9DgN

— Rebecca Shapiro (@RebeccaJShapiro) May 21, 2022

OK, fine. Sorry I brought it up. Man, people are so damn touchy.

I guess that’s all. Do yourself a favor and read a dirty book today.

The involuntary manslaughter case against James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of the Oxford school shooter (this was last fall, in November, and I know it’s hard to keep them straight these days), continues to grind on. Preliminary hearing after preliminary hearing, we get to see the couple, still being held in the county lockup, sit in court and hear details of the case against them.

The latest was Thursday. Here’s what they’re asking:

James and Jennifer Crumbley also don’t want the jury to hear about their alleged affairs, pot smoking or drinking habits, horse hobby or messy house — all of which has been raised by prosecutors. None of that is relevant to their case, argue their lawyers, who filed five blistering motions with the court late Thursday in which they blasted Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald over her handling of the case, accused her of trying to smear their clients and taint the jury pool by disclosing inflammatory information, and sought to derail the prosecution case.

The “also” is because the lede of the story was that their son had written in his journal — found in his backpack after the shooting — that he hoped his act would result in the impeachment of “Sleepy Joe Biden.” The Crumbleys are afraid their family’s unified Let’s-Go-Brandon politics might influence the jury.

But the “messy house” was the detail that pierced me. I’ve probably mentioned it here about a thousand times, that while my house will occasionally get more cluttered than I like, it’s very very rarely so awful that I would be embarrassed to have someone else walk through it. I vacuum and dust on the regular, and the thought of a pizza box sitting on my coffee table for longer than 10 minutes makes me shudder. I can just imagine what their place looked like, to have the prosecutor mention it in court documents. And then they bought their weirdo 15-year-old boy a handgun. GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

Anyway, that’s my prejudice.

Sorry for the scant updates this week. I just took a very leisurely stroll with Wendy and tried to let the calm of the morning penetrate me. I didn’t sleep well last night, and skipped the morning swim. I should do that more often — the calm-infusion part, that is. My pandemic funk deepened over the winter, and hasn’t entirely lifted, even though we’re doing more to get away from the rut we dug for ourselves in the last two years. (Not eating out as much, though — restaurant prices just keep climbing here, and the $50-plus-tip I paid for the last two-bar-cheeseburgers-and-two-beers meal suddenly doesn’t seem worth it.)

And our financial positions have taken a hit, but I’ve ridden the stock-market roller coaster long enough that I’m not too worried. We’re still taking another long trip this fall. Most likely to Spain, so tips and advice are welcome. Madrid and Barcelona will be the home bases; the south is tempting, but every day spent moving between cities is a lost day, so.

I’m an empty cup today, I know. Sorry about that. So I fall back on the Midwesterner’s old faithful parting: Gonna be a hot one today. You turnin’ on that AC?

ON EDIT: Some bloggage that won’t make anyone feel better:

A Virginia lawyer is suing Barnes & Noble for selling a book he disapproves of.

The guy who sold the Buffalo shooter his weapon doesn’t feel guilty, no, why would you ask:

Even if Robert Donald were the rare 75-year-old who watches livestreams on Twitch, he would not have known that the video broadcasting at around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday had anything to do with him. The footage was from a camera attached to a person’s head and showed their point of view as they got out of a car, made their way through the parking lot into a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, and started shooting people with an assault rifle. Donald would not have recognized the Bushmaster XM-15 he sold earlier this year, partly because it had been modified to hold more ammo and a racial slur had been painted on the barrel. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” Donald told the New York Times, explaining that he did not even remember the person who bought the rifle. “But I feel terrible about it.”

Pennsylvania people: What’s going to happen in the gubernatorial race? Does Mastriano have a chance against Fetterman?

And with that, have a nice weekend. Ha.