Warning: I am only somewhat less incandescent with rage over the SCOTUS thing. However, I also had my second booster this week, which took out most of my stuffing for about 12-24 hours. I’m Team Pfizer, but my local CVS had only Moderna. I’ve read a few things suggesting that cocktailing the two vaccines may give the recipient wider immunity, and I’m all for that. However, while I had zero side effects from Pfizer other than the usual sore arm, this Moderna made me feel like a very old person with aches, pains, ague and zero energy.

As I recall, Kate got Moderna and suffered a bit, too. Maybe it’s in our genes.

Anyway, I now feel pretty immune to everything. But I’m still bothered by the Supreme Court.

I was in high school, a sophomore as I recall, when Roe was decided. I lived in an affluent area, and the standard operating procedure for girls who got pregnant was the one-day trip to New York City. An ACLU lawyer described it to me years later: The gate at the airport for the 7 a.m. flight, full of youngish women, teens and their mothers. They’d arrive in NYC mid-morning, take a cab to the clinic of their choice and all be back at the LaGuardia gate for the 5 p.m. flight back to Columbus. Everyone knew what was going on.

You had to go to New York because the earliest states to liberalize abortion laws were Republican-led, and that was the Rockefeller era. Democratic governors were beholden to the Catholic vote then, and as others have pointed out, Catholics were pretty much the only religious group opposed to abortion then.

But not everyone could get to New York, and so one night the wife of a friend of mine told me about the abortion she’d had, pre-Roe. She, too, was from a reasonably well-off family, but she went to St. Louis, and had her abortion in a hotel room. She didn’t share a lot of details, but I gathered it was a very unpleasant experience. Just thinking about it made me mad all over again.

And now we learn the prime mover behind the J.D. Vance endorsement: Tucker Carlson. Behold the former president of the United States:

After promising Trump that Vance was with him on the issues despite the candidate’s past anti-Trump comments, Carlson — according to three sources familiar with the matter — turned to a lurid closing argument. “You can’t trust” David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth and a top backer of Vance’s rival Josh Mandel, Carlson claimed. McIntosh had just concluded his own phone call with Trump during that same midday meeting. The reason, Carlson asserted, is that McIntosh has an embarrassing and “chronic” personal sexual habit.

Rolling Stone cannot confirm the claim and will not repeat it. But during that phone call, the twice-impeached former president spent a notable amount of time gossiping and laughing about the prominent Republican’s penis and how “fucking disgusting” and “fucking gross” he allegedly was.

Trump had already displayed a long, abiding interest in Mandel’s own sex life, having spent months privately regurgitating and spreading salacious, unverified rumors that he’s heard about “fucking weird” Mandel’s supposed debauched ongoings. Carlson’s comments about the proclivities of Mandel’s patron threw both Trump and his son into fits of laughter.

I’M MOVING TO MEXICO, CANADA OR WESTERN EUROPE ONE OF THESE DAYS AND GODDAMNIT YOU CAN’T STOP ME.

OK, time to take off the caps lock and prepare for the evening ahead. I believe we’re headed to Pontiac this evening for some Mongolian heavy metal and a potential face-to-face with LAMary’s roadie son. This should be epic. I’m getting a T-shirt.

Good weekend, all. Stay cool.

I don’t know what. I’m so tired, and yet furious. I slept badly last night because I was so angry. I’ve never had an abortion — although that’s none of your, or anyone else’s, goddamn business. My friends had them, oh yes they did. And because I’m old as hell, most of them had them before you had to walk a gantlet of screaming idiots to do so. But almost every one of them is a happy, well-adjusted mother of multiple children today. Successful. Confident. And (I’ve verified this) beyond regret over decisions they made when they themselves determined they weren’t ready to have a child.

And that’s what people like Justice Handmaid and Justice Rapist and Justice Steal-a-seat and Justice Strip Search can’t stand. The autonomy. (And when I say almost all of them are, etc., I don’t mean the ones who aren’t are messed up somehow. Some of them aren’t mothers, because they never wanted to be mothers. And still aren’t. Another thing that’s none of your business.)

God, I’m just furious. I’ve been furious all day.

As the Trump administration headed out the door, I thought back on its early days and came to the conclusion that Dems should have held their fire longer. The early “scandals” — OMG Kellyanne Conway put her bare feet on the Oval Office couch, OMG Ivanka has a West Wing office, etc. — burned people out to the point that by the time the really bad stuff arrived, voters were numb. I feel the same way about this. Yes, Roe will be overturned. Yes, probably same-sex marriage will be next. But no court is going to overturn interracial marriage or ban birth control, even though they believe those decisions rest on rotten foundations. In fact, they’ll use their tolerance of this fruit of the poison tree to show how reasonable they are, how hysterical it is to call them extremists.

And I just want to do something. Besides scream and be angry and pour another drink or write a check. If we’re two-thirds of the voting public, we need to do something.

Sorry, but I’ve been reading takes all day and I’m about taken out. And — as I might have mentioned — fucking furious.

Discuss? Discuss.

I guess Tuesday is the Ohio primary, correct? I suppose it’ll tell us a few things, unless it tells us nothing. Joe Blystone, “constitutional conservative” and cowboy-hatted dipshit with a Santa Claus beard, won’t make a dent in the governor’s race, but I’ve been amused by his candidacy ever since the Cincinnati Fucking Enquirer identified him as “Farmer Joe Blystone” in some earlier story. I just checked his campaign website. Of course one of his issues is?

Election integrity is a major issue on the minds of Ohioans. While the design of Ohio’s system has many strengths, we still have issues that draw attention to a need to do better.

There were two links in that statement. One took me to the Ohio section of the Heritage Foundation’s vast database on election fraud. It used to be hosted by WhiteHouse.gov, but isn’t anymore, teehee. For the hell of it, I clicked on the first case, from 2021:

Edward Snodgrass, a registered Republican and a Porter Township Trustee, was charged with one felony count of illegal voting after submitting an absentee ballot on behalf of his deceased father in the 2020 General Election. As part of his plea deal, Snodgrass pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of falsification, was sentenced to three days in jail, and fined $500.

Hmm. There’s one vote. (Never mind it’s a Republican.) Here’s the next one on the list, from 2019:

Yaakov M. Schulman, of Columbus, was found guilty of illegal voting for voting as an alien. Schulman was charged with one count of false election registration and one count of illegal voting, and was found gulty of illegal voting, a fourth degree felony, by a jury. He was sentenced to community control (probation) for two years, ordered to complete cognitive behavioral programming, and was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and $1,812 in court fees.

And so on. The list is full of stuff like this, but we’re so distracted we don’t even check. People see the Heritage Foundation has a database of 1,353 cases of voter fraud and assume HUGE PROBLEM. When the list is almost all penny-ante shit like this. But keep trying, Heritage Foundation. Here’s their splash-screen copy:

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country. Each and every one of the cases in this database represents an instance in which a public official, usually a prosecutor, thought it serious enough to act upon it. And each and every one ended in a finding that the individual had engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election hoping to affect its outcome — or that the results of an election were sufficiently in question and had to be overturned. This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list. This database is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.

“…hoping to affect its outcome” made me laugh. Isn’t that why people vote at all?

I don’t know who will win the gubernatorial primary in Ohio. It’s the Senate that everyone’s paying attention to. Don’t know that one, either, but whichever Republican it is, it’ll be a terrible, terrible one.

So. I guess the big talker over the weekend was the Tucker Carlson thing in the NYT — you can look it up if you haven’t clicked out yet this month. (Does the NYT free-articles meter reset on the first of the month, or does the 30 days roll over?) I’m still working my way through it. I don’t know if there’s any one thing to say about it, other than: Hmm, what an asshole, but anyone who didn’t know that already has been failing to keep up. Just did a Twitter scroll and discovered there is no shortage of wannabes out there stoking fear and anger, particularly about public schools and teachers. I know it’s trendy to say someone’s going to get killed over this, but from the tone and hysteria of the clamor, I think it’s only a matter of time.

And now I think I’m-a walk Wendy. I leave you with this excellent joke:

That cut to Peter Doocy…

“Everyone had to prove they were fully vaccinated and boosted. So if you are at home watching this and you wonder how to do that, just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here, vaccinated and boosted, all of them.” pic.twitter.com/kA56YzjiVU

— Matt Wilstein (@mattwilstein) May 1, 2022

And wish you all a good week.

Years ago, when I was younger, callow and a lazy newspaper columnist, I opened my mail one morning and a story fell into my lap.

The letter was from a former resident of the Pixley Home, a long-closed child welfare agency in Fort Wayne. Back in the day, if you lacked the resources to support your own children, you didn’t get cash or food stamps or other help from the government. Rather, the government would take over the care and raising of your children in a place like the Pixley Home, sort of an orphanage for children who weren’t orphans. This woman’s time at Pixley was sometime in the ’30s or ’40s, when the Depression, and then the war, disrupted many families. Kids at Pixley might have only one parent, often a widower father but sometimes a woman who had no family of her own to help with her burden. Child care outside of a grandmother or aunt was virtually nonexistent, so if you had to work to support yourself and had no one to watch your children? You surrendered them to a place like the Pixley Home.

If it sounds cruel to you, you’re not the only one.

Parents could visit their children, of course, on Sundays. And parents could get their children back, once they were back on their feet. I don’t recall what the process was to reclaim them, but I do know children generally stayed for months or years.

Anyway, the woman who wrote was trying to put together a reunion of Pixley kids, and hoped I could publicize it. I dug up a picture of the old building, called a few of the other residents that she had already tracked down, and wrote a column describing this merry, loving place, because that’s how my correspondent remembered it. She described it as something out of Little Orphan Annie, with stern-but-kind caretakers, big group dinners and so forth. It was like having a couple dozen brothers and sisters, all sleeping in dorms and bunk beds. About the worst thing she remembered was the weekly dose of castor oil everyone had to take.

The column ran, a few more Pixley kids were found as a result, the reunion went as planned and then, a few weeks after that, another letter arrived.

Like the first, it was written by an older woman. Only her memories of the Pixley Home were very different. She described a particular delivery man who would hang around after he’d offloaded his groceries and find a way to corner her in a quiet place. You can imagine what happened next. She certainly hadn’t forgotten it. She said she told the matrons about him, but nothing was done. It’s safe to say that decades later, she was still pretty upset about it. She certainly didn’t want to go to a happy reunion, and didn’t. But she wanted me to know.

Jeff has written about this elsewhere, and he’s right: Sexual abuse of children and women is absolutely nothing new, and was far, far more widespread than any of us know. My Fort Wayne neighbor’s mother-in-law was profoundly deaf from birth, and it happened to her. If you wanted a perfect victim, why not choose a girl who couldn’t talk? Or a girl in an institution? Or a servant or other low-status worker with no power and few resources to fight back?

The good ol’ days weren’t, in other words.

I thought of this other Pixley girl a couple years ago, when a father in one of the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings lunged at the defendant, calling him a son-of-a-bitch and asking for “one minute alone,” etc. He was subdued by deputies before he laid a hand on Nassar. So now his daughter, molested by Nassar at 13, has to further deal with the sight of her father being taken from the courtroom in handcuffs.

I want to tentatively raise my hand and ask a question: Is it possible to acknowledge every one of Nassar’s victims, to let them speak and describe how they were hurt by him, and still give them what they need to live the rest of their lives, not as victims, but as survivors? Because as creepy as having some doctor stick his ungloved fingers in you might be, having that define the rest of your life is far, far worse.

All of these stories are terrible, and some are unendurable. A father whose guilt over not protecting his daughter drove him to suicide. A victim who committed suicide herself.

When I read that ESPN piece about Todd Hodne, the rapist who played briefly at Penn State, I was struck by…well, by so many things. But what elevated it, in my eyes, was the careful attention paid to what happened to the women after they were raped by this behemoth. The girl who, at 16, successfully fended him off found strength in what she’d done, strength that has buttressed her throughout her life. Betsy Sailor, the woman who tried so hard through her terror to remember every detail, so she could testify later in court, similarly carried that good-deed-that-came-of-a-terrible-one into how she lived. Others were broken, or nearly so, by what happened. One woman remembered her mother, a Hodne victim, and the anxiety she was never able to shake afterward.

Of course you can’t blame those who didn’t turn straw into gold; no one knows how they’ll come through a trauma until it happens.

I was also struck, reading the Hodne story, that we’re finally getting better at how we treat women (and men) who endure these crimes. Victim impact statements are only part of it. We obviously have far, far to go. But there’s a glimmer of a bright side to look on, at least sometimes.

I don’t want to bring y’all down today, but the Pixley Home has been knocking around my head for a while now, and it needed to come out.

Bloggage?

In Michigan, the state GOP continues to delaminate. The guy in that story is deep in the DeVos organization, as I recall, and if he’s out, well, Katy bar the door.

If you were wondering if there’s a worse businessman in the world than Donald Trump, I do believe we’ve found him:

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.

Then-President Trump, an aviation enthusiast, took a keen interest in the new presidential jets, involving himself in everything from contract negotiations to the plane’s color scheme. As part of the deal, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract that required the company, not taxpayers, to pay for any cost overruns during the complicated conversion of the two airliners.

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was dismissed in December 2019, personally negotiated the Air Force One terms with Trump at the White House and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

P.S. Dennis Muilenberg left his “dismissal” with a $62 million exit package.

This weekend was pretty much perfect, weather-wise. Temperatures in the high 70s, sunny, really nice. So of course I woke up Sunday feeling lousy, didn’t get much better, thought I’d read a little until I felt peppier, then had a bad attack of vertigo. It lasted a couple hours, wouldn’t respond to any of the home remedies I tried. (It’s called the Epley maneuver, tried it three times, zilch.) Just had to wait it out, and it lasted two or three hours.

However, it was pleasant to lie on the bed with the birdies tweeting outside, writing my own obituary in my head, based on my assessments of exactly what sort of brain tumor I no doubt have.

At least I didn’t throw up this time. Progress!

The state Republican convention was this weekend. I checked the tweets from time to time. It started quiet, ended loud, and the two Trump-endorsed candidates for attorney general and secretary of state won the party’s endorsement. (They did an “endorsement” convention for some offices this year, to clear the decks for a full summer of campaigning, although the gubernatorial slate of 10 count ’em 10 candidates will have to fight it out in August.

The now-officially-endorsed AG nominee is a nightmare, fired from one firm for padding billings and equally unsuccessful advancing his election-fraud suits after 2020. The SOS candidate is a religious nut…

,,,with no election experience. She, too, has advanced claims of misconduct in 2020 not supported by any evidence. She also calls herself a college professor, because she teaches two classes at Wayne County Community College — public speaking and the how-to-be-a-college-student class you often find in community and junior colleges, where students are frequently first-generation students.

For the record, I doubt either one will win. But as 2016 demonstrated, one must never say never. Which brings us to this piece from a few days back:

In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.

The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.

But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.

And people like these will no doubt be very useful in the future. Which is why turnout in November will be very, very important and if the Democrats don’t start acting that way, I’m gonna scream.

Couple of updates:

Kevin has moved on. On Wednesday we had some work done on the house, a sagging staircase buttressed for the next 70 years or so. It would be POUNDING and DRILLING and STRANGE MEN GOING UP AND DOWN THE STAIRS, all of which would make Kevin basically MELT DOWN.

So I took him to daycare. I told the lady at the front desk his story, went home, and two hours later the phone rang. It was another staffer, saying he’d fallen in love and if I really wanted to place him somewhere else, would I consider him?

Would I consider him? A guy who could take him to all-day play every single day? Oh yes I would. And I think this is now a happy ending:

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A post shared by Camp Bow Wow SCS Lil' Campers (@camp_bow_wow_scs_lil)

Sometimes a match just doesn’t work out. On a day like today, when I had to spend hours in bed, I’m reminded what a good idea this was.

OK, into the week feeling faintly nauseated. Sounds about right. Hopes yours is better.

I’ve been wanting to write something about transgender issues. I’m waiting for the static in my head around the issue to stop being so staticky, but the more I read and think about it, the louder it gets, so here goes. I usually work through these things by writing about them, anyway.

Let me begin with a revelation that shakes me to my core:

I find myself largely in agreement with this Ross Douthat column.

People? That never happens. Until now.

It’s paywalled, and I’ll clip/paste/summarize as best I can:

After laying out some rather eye-popping statistics — that 21 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBT, he notes:

Here are three possible readings of these statistics. The first interpretation: This is great news. Sexual fluidity, transgender and nonbinary experience are clearly intrinsic to the human experience, our society used to suppress them with punitive heteronormativity and only now are we getting a true picture of the real diversity of sexual attractions and gender identities. (Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it.)

So the response from society should be sustained encouragement, especially if you care about teenage mental health: This newly awakened diversity should be supported from the time it first makes itself manifest, at however young an age, and to the extent that parents feel uncomfortable with their children’s true selves, it’s the task of educators and schools to support the kid, not to defer to parental anxiety or bigotry.

The second interpretation: We shouldn’t read too much into it. This trend is probably mostly just young people being young people, exploring and experimenting and differentiating themselves from their elders. Most of the Generation Zers identifying as L.G.B.T. are calling themselves bisexual and will probably end up in straight relationships, if they aren’t in them already. Some of the young adults describing themselves as transgender or nonbinary may drift back to cisgender identities as they grow older.

So we shouldn’t freak out over their self-identification — but neither should we treat it as a definitive revelation about human nature or try to build new curriculums or impose certain rules atop a fluid and uncertain situation. Tolerance is essential; ideological enthusiasm is unnecessary.

A third interpretation: This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating. These kids aren’t setting themselves free from the patriarchy; they’re under the influence of online communities of imitation and academic fashions laundered into psychiatry and education — one part Tumblr and TikTok mimesis, one part Judith Butler.

There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane. So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction.

I find myself solidly in Camp #2. Like most people I know, the second interpretation fits with my direct experience and observation. I have known trans people, know them now, see elements of it in younger people, and even in the young children of people I know. I am happy, proud even, to support trans people in every way I can. I’ll use whatever names or pronouns they might want, treat them with respect. Share a bathroom. Hell, share a locker room if that’s the ask. It seems pretty simple to me, very live-and-let-live. People exist across a broad, vast spectrum of individuality, and that’s what makes them so wonderful.

That said, I am uncomfortable with some of the radical treatments being made available to children, adolescents and even young adults. I’m talking surgery, hormones, puberty blockers, etc. I understand that an older trans man, weary of binding his chest, may opt for breast removal, and OK, your body, your choice. But I’m really leery of saying that to a 19-year-old, let alone a 14-year-old.

Here are some of the ideas and experiences that contribute to the static in my head these days. I offer them in no particular order, just as a slide show of my brain:

** Many conservatives like to say trans people are mentally ill. Having recently shared an evening with a trans woman (hi there, you know who you are), as well as many other encounters in recent years, I reject that out of hand. (Although I’m convinced this trans man has more than one screw loose, sorry. It’s impossible to look at the near-full-length photo of him, showing off the new, surgically constructed bulge in his tighty whities, and not see the enormous divot on his thigh, where the flesh to construct it was harvested, and not be appalled. That’s not to mention the still-obvious female waistline, and I shudder to think how that’s going to be rectified in some future operating room.) But mental illness? For living as a person of another gender? Sorry, no.

** I think back on, of all things, Edward Bodkin, whom you can google, although Hoosiers will remember him as the Huntington Castrator. In the less-edified fog of the late ’90s, there was lots of discussion as to who, exactly, would seek out the castration services of a man who practiced his craft on a filthy kitchen table. As I recall, the easiest answer was transgender women who couldn’t afford the services of a reputable surgeon. I also recall one of my colleagues hanging up the phone after an extended interview with the editor of some fetish magazine — was it Ball Club? Something like that — and coming over to my desk, rather shaken, for a debrief. The gist of the interview was basically that body dysmorphia is real, that it doesn’t always break down along clear gender lines, and that for whatever reason, some men might want to kiss their testicles goodbye.

** Not long after that, the Atlantic published a long story about people who seek out amputation of healthy limbs, sometimes by mangling the ones they have in self-inflicted injuries, out of nothing more than a sense that they are meant to be amputees.

** I’ve been told most people do not regret assuming genders other than those assigned at birth. I accept that. But I reject that this number is so overwhelmingly large that those who do have second thoughts are outliers we can disregard. This essay, recently published in the WashPost, seems noteworthy:

When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery. The callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age. But now I’m closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401(k), and dieting and exercising in the hope that I’ll have a healthy retirement.

In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person — yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.
There is much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people. Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now that I wasn’t old enough to make that decision. Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people, and their parents, to hear what I wish I had known.

There follows a list of regrets, and they boil down to: I wish I’d been able to come to terms with my homosexuality. She concludes:

What advice would I pass on to young people seeking transition? Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle. Fad diets, body-shaping clothing and cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people at some point have a hard time accepting their own reflection. The prospect of sex can be intimidating. But sex is essential in healthy relationships. Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.

Most of all, slow down. You may yet decide to make the change. But if you explore the world by inhabiting your body as it is, perhaps you’ll find that you love it more than you thought possible.

One reason I am sympathetic to this view is my direct experience with a member of our commenting community here. Alex commented on this essay:

If I’d been given the opportunity to change genders at adolescence, I would have gone for it. After a dozen or so years of psychoanalytic work as an adult, I’m glad I didn’t. The counseling I underwent taught me many things, but perhaps most important of all, to accept myself as I am. My identity is no longer tied up in the arbitrarily rigid gender norms that I grew up with, and I find this so much more liberating than if I had gone under the knife and endured a lifetime medical regimen in order to conform to a physical ideal that I would have fallen short of anyway.

Gender fluidity is a state of mind, and a perfectly healthy one that needs no surgical augmentation.

Honestly, I think no one can make an informed choice who hasn’t had a sex life or gained significant social maturity beyond young adulthood. Not an easy message to impress upon young people who fervently believe that a sex change is the one thing they need in order to find fulfilment when they’ve gotten it from nothing else. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and risk being called a stodgy old fart and a buzzkill if I can persuade even one young person to reconsider. Next to getting myself some good counseling, it was the best decision I ever made.

Alex and I exchanged a few emails over “In the Darkroom,” Susan Faludi’s outstanding memoir of her reconciliation and short-lived relationship with her estranged father, following his gender change. I won’t share them; if Alex wants to, he knows where to do it. I highly recommend the book, by the way.

** Conversations with gay men on this topic all seem to end, maybe after a drink or three, with a lowered voice, a glance around to see who might overhear, and a confession that while they are supportive, etc., they sure seem to know a lot of hot-mess trans people. Maybe that’s because they’re treated so badly by others, so misunderstood. It can’t be easy.

** I know I’ll clash with some of you over this, but I’m a feminist who wonders why, once again, women are carrying most of the burden for all this societal enlightenment. Yes, I’m talking about That Swimmer, but also the issues J.K. Rowling is raising: What about women’s prisons? Domestic-violence shelters? What about…identity? Graham Linehan is affirmatively anti-trans, but it can be useful to check in with these folks from time to time. Do scroll through his recounting of the story of Jaclyn Moore, and make your own conclusions.

I’ve known radical feminists who are deeply offended by drag culture, who find it, at base, a mockery of womanhood. I’m not among them, but I feel that way about Jaclyn Moore, sorry.

** Speaking of identity, you know another bad actor in all this? The fucking Kardashians, who have steamrolled through the culture with this insane version of femininity that, had I confronted it at age 14 or so, might have made me call myself non-binary, too. The plastic surgery, the dieting, the fucking waist trainers, the laxative teas, the injections of fillers and plumpers and slimmers and all the rest of it — just fuck them all the way out of town. They are not helping. Has femininity always been this rigid? I thought we’d learned something during the ’70s, and here we are 50 years later, making the same mistakes.

** Language. Oy, the language. Here’s my declaration: I will never, ever be able to say “pregnant people” or “menstruating people” with a straight face. Never mind the they/them stuff. You should hear me talking to Kate about some of her friends, it’s like the who’s-on-first routine: “They’re going with you? X and who else?” etc. Language should make messages clear. This language does not.

Finally, I guess my conclusions are that I have no conclusions. I just have static. Some people are indeed walking around in a body that feels all wrong, and if they accommodate it in some way that doesn’t hurt others, that’s perfectly fine. Young people should be in counseling, maybe for years, before they undergo surgery or drugs that will leave them forever changed. And that’s it for me, for today. How’s everyone else doing today?

Oy, what to do with Kevin. This is why I’m in such a mood of late — that and the cough that is now in day 10, but is oddly just-a-cough; I otherwise feel fine. (I don’t think that sentence was properly punctuated, but I don’t care.) Anyway, I find myself more sympathetic to Kevin, at the same time I wonder if we’re the right home for him.

His energy is boundless. (Ours is not.) His training is…sketchy. (Our expectations are higher, shall we say.) His attitude is stubborn. (So is ours.) Right now he’s whining at Alan because I’ve hidden his incredibly loud squeaky toy. And this is at the end of the day after a lot of fetch and a trip to the dog park.

So I feel like I need to look for someone who can fill those gaps. At the same time I’m trying to civilize him. He’s mastered Sit, some limited Stay and is working on Come. But he only does it under ideal conditions. Also, he nips. The little shit.

Then he jumps up on the couch with me and gives me the eyes:

I can’t help I got these long legs and too much energy. The other day he jumped on the couch and smashed me in the face in the process.

Ah well. We take it day to day.

Hope you all had a great Easter. It’s cold here. Supposed to snow tomorrow — three inches. It’s plainly going to be cold for the rest of my life. It is my curse.

So it was a good day to read this bone-chilling longform piece on a heretofore un- or little-known serial rapist to come through Joe Paterno’s Penn State football team. It’s a difficult read, but such a well-reported story. It doesn’t skimp on the details, but goes so deep, and covers the whole case without being exploitative. Set aside an hour, or a few days, to absorb it all.

That’s all I got — naughty Kevin and a rapist. We’re promised “a nice warmup” as the week goes on. We. Shall. See.

Man, it’s been a long week. I can’t tell whether it’s the dog, the cough or that I wrenched my knee on…Tuesday, I guess it was, in this blurry smudge of days. Some of you have Good Friday off, which makes me throw back my head and laugh and laugh and reflect I’ve never had Good Friday off in my life, except maybe from school.

Journalists get fewer holidays than anyone, because we all gotta work at least some of them.

But honestly, I don’t care. I could always quit. And I’m not quitting yet.

So. A friend gave me a copy of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome,” with a very long subtitle that boils down to “an oral history of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road.'” It’s been a while since I saw it, so I booted it up on Amazon Video Monday night, just to refresh. Then I remembered the GOP county delegate conventions were also being held Monday night, so I skittered between post-apocalyptic adventurer Max and GOP-convention Twitter, and it was a little hard to tell the difference:

I watched the absolutely unhinged Macomb County GOP convention so you don’t have to. Beloved Trumper Mark Forton was overthrown, with Eric Castiglia taking over as Chair. The meeting devolves into cursing & anger, one woman yelling, “You’re all for the New World Order! Fuck you!” pic.twitter.com/6WsTMt8IYx

— Left of Center MI (@leftofcentermi) April 12, 2022

Admittedly, that was the wildest, but that’s also the key MAGA county, Macomb, just north of us. The woman you hear on the video is Mellissa Carone, the messy-updo lady who was one of Rudy Giuliani’s star witnesses after the November 2020 election here. She’s gotten hard into politics in the aftermath, although she was just disqualified from her run for the state House, for submitting a faulty affidavit with her campaign finance report. She’s vowing to fight. We’ll see how that goes.

Macomb County is where the so-called Reagan Democrats were born, and you can see what they’re doing now – fighting viciously amongst themselves:

It was chaos tonight as the Macomb County (MI) GOP voted to oust party chairman Mark Forton. At various times, people were yelling “RINO” and “communist” at each other, among other things. pic.twitter.com/vYJQDMqqmC

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 12, 2022

What is one to do, observing such a spectacle? I’ll tell you: Not a damn thing. Other than note the resemblance between some members and Immortan Joe.

I’m so tired. I need to get out of the house more. Plus there was a police shooting in Grand Rapids week before last that is just now starting to be felt elsewhere, so there’s always a story in front of my face about it. Plus Trump endorsing Meemaw’s grandbaby, Elon Musk bidding for Twitter and Dianne Feinstein has full-on dementia. Is there no good news to be had in this rotten world?

Well, there’s this comedy bit:

TN Senator says Hitler made something of himself after being homeless & you can too. I’m going to have to apologize to the universe for this guy. Hey @MeidasTouch not a single day passes without TN GOP embarrassing the hell out of our state.😬 @meiselasb @meidasjordy @BMeiselas pic.twitter.com/SrNyGsS86B

— Rep. Gloria Johnson (@VoteGloriaJ) April 14, 2022

OK, you all. I’m done for now. Happy Easter, and I promise I’ll be better next week.

Something else my friend wrote me the other day, about the hard-right lunatic of our mutual acquaintance:

As for how to move on in a nation nearly half-filled with people who would vote for Donald Trump, I think it’s back to the basics of organizing: If you and your neighbor disagree on 10 vital questions but agree on two, there’s the start of a coalition on two issues.

I hear that a lot. It’s Counseling 101: Find the things you agree on, however slight, and work from there. I worry that I’m past that. That requires me to assume that the other side is dealing in good faith, and I no longer do, even as I realize the reason they aren’t, and can’t, is that they’ve brainwashed themselves. They’ve locked themselves into an information bubble so thick and impenetrable I’m not sure it can be breached. Something has to happen to make them unlock it from the inside and come out into the sunlight of facts.

And that’s where my thoughts are on what is, for 2022 anyway, a reasonably nice spring day. The sun is out, it’s chilly but not intolerably so, and I have something in my chest that is making me cough like a tubercular wino. No other real symptoms despite Despair Over This Dog, so I haven’t repeated my Covid test. Maybe I should. We’ll see how things develop.

The dog: Today Kate came over to print a couple of documents for her European trip (they leave tomorrow night). Kevin growled and barked at the printer as though it was an invading predator. He’s also doing it, still, when Alan comes to bed, which is usually an hour or two after I turn in (morning person / night owl). He cries non-stop in the car, and I’m talking about from the end of the driveway to destination, no matter how long or short the trip. Every day this week I open my eyes and think: Fuck. Kevin. What will today be like? No wonder I’m grumpy.

Ah, well. Neutering is bright and early tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes from here. My vet: “It’s the start.”

I joined a Facebook group for former employees of the Columbus Dispatch. This photo was shared today:

The copy desk was outsourced to some other place – maybe Texas – a while back, and I guess the workload is starting to strain capacity, eh? Either that, or someone started the Saturday-night party a bit early.

Finally, in what is turning out to be a mixed Sunday bag: I’ve been reading the reactions to the verdict Friday, the one that acquitted two defendants in the Whitmer kidnap plot and deadlocked on the other two. Of course this is being spun in MAGAville as COMPLETE EXONERATION, as though two other defendants weren’t so convinced they’d be going up the river for a long time that they didn’t plead to six years in return for their testimony. Ah well. The best thing I’ve read so far is this column by Brian Dickerson at the Freep. It’s paywalled so you can’t read it, but here’s the gist:

In her star-crossed 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton famously consigned half of Donald Trump’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables” that included “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” Trump pounced on her indiscretion, insisting that Clinton had slandered every Republican voter in the land. MAGA devotees responded by donning shirts and hats that proudly proclaimed their “deplorable” status.

But Clinton was giving voice to what has since become an article of faith among millions of Americans (including many Republicans): the conviction that, far from being a fringe minority, the paranoiac “deplorables” she spoke of have become a significant presence in thousands of communities.

And even before they began deploying their theory that Whitmer’s accused kidnappers had been snared in an entrapment scheme masterminded by FBI provocateurs, defense attorneys set out to convince the public that their clients were no more sinister or dangerous than the deplorables we encounter everyday at our workplaces, grocery stores and family reunions.

And:

In his closing argument, defendant Adam Fox’s lawyer sought to convince jurors his client posed no greater threat than the garden-variety deplorables in their own lives. “He isn’t a leader,” defense attorney Christopher Gibbons insisted. “He doesn’t have the equipment. He doesn’t have the skills.”

Gibbons was being diplomatic, but his subliminal message to jurors was unmistakable:

Look, Adam Fox and his friends are idiots. When Hillary Clinton spoke of those pathetic souls you’d cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk, she was talking about my client.

But hey, you all know people like my client. And if we allow the government to lock up all the Adam Foxes in the country, how long before your own neighbors and crazy uncles find themselves behind bars?

Sorry for the longer-than-usual snip, but: Paywalled.

Personally, I think the jury, freighted with Up North Michiganians, just couldn’t face their neighbors back home if they didn’t acquit at least some of them. So they did.

OK, then. Time to make Sunday dinner and maybe a cocktail. God knows I need it.

I’m getting Alan’s cold. It’s a chest-living variety, and yes, we both tested, him twice, and we’re both negative. People still get colds. Especially after two years of living behind masks. As if trying to civilize this fucking dog isn’t enough of a stressor, now this.

But I did get about 20 minutes of down time yesterday afternoon, and caught up in nostalgia, I did a little Facebook-searching for old colleagues, classmates, etc. — the sort of people I don’t stay in touch with, but am intermittently curious about from time to time.

I looked up a guy I used to work with, who I remember as a gentle soul who was certainly traditional and probably Republican — like 90 percent of Hoosiers — but the sort of Republican I remember from there, which is to say, wrong but not an asshole about it.

You see the punchline coming, right?

He’s fond of memes. This is the one that rocked me back on my heels:

Oh. OK. I sent this to a friend, who also worked with him, and he replied:

The greatest underrecognized impact of Trumpism is grief. I feel it so often when I look at all the people who taste-tested authoritarianism and decided they wanted more. They’ve been carried away by some kind of psychological contagion, but I remember so much else about them and share so much history and experience with them before the mess we have now become. In the shortest form, I stand by what I told (my wife) the morning after Trump’s election, when she demanded some kind of explanation from me, because I’d been pretty confident about an HRC win: “I guess there are a lot more rotten people in America than I thought.” I can posture as smug or contemptuous or dismissive, but five or six years later, more than anything else, I’m still grieving the loss of so much regard for so many people. Living with so many fellow citizens who are so diminished makes me feel diminished, too.

I think that is exactly right. It’s less so for me — I tend to skip grief and go straight to anger — but I, too, have that disorienting, dispiriting feeling of looking at someone you thought you knew and realizing: I didn’t know. Of course you don’t know, in the know-know sense, someone you work with. But every day we have to interact with people we aren’t intimately acquainted with, and that’s the feeling I’m talking about, of going through a day, buying groceries, working, commuting, walking in the park, and having to think: Is it you? Are you one of them?

The day after the 2016 election, I walked Wendy in the morning, still feeling utterly shell-shocked, and a man passed me on the street. He looked me in the eye and gave me a smirk-smile that I still remember. And that was before we knew how terrible Trump would turn out to be! In 2016, that smile said, “I hate Hillary.” Today it would say, “I’m OK with all of it.” I’ve lived deep in Republican country for most of my life. Like I said, I thought I knew these people. I didn’t know them.

Oh, well. Let’s uplift the mood a little, shall we?

I found this story, which someone in my network posted, the other day. I’m astonished this is the first I’d heard of it. Just the headline, OMG: The guitarist who saved hundreds of people on a sinking cruise liner, and it does not disappoint:

“I was calling, ‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’ and just waiting for somebody to answer,” Moss says.
A big, deep, rich voice eventually replied. “Yes, what is your Mayday?”

Relieved, Moss explained that he was on the cruise ship Oceanos and that it was sinking.

“OK. How long have you got left to float?”

“I don’t know – we’ve got the starboard railings in the water, we’re rolling around, we’ve taken on a huge amount of water,” Moss said. “We still have at least 200 people on board.”

“OK. What is your position?”

“We’re probably about halfway between the port of East London and Durban.”

“No, no, no, what are your coordinates?”

Moss had no idea what their coordinates were.

“What rank are you?”

“Well, I’m not a rank – I’m a guitarist.”

Why has no one made this movie? You know who helped him save all those people? His wife. His wife the bassist. It’s too good.

OK, off to shower and consider how I’m going to handle Kevin today. Yesterday started well and ended badly. Today is calm so far. We’ll see.

Good weekend, all.