How the Elderly Lose Their Rights

For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.”

Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages. Each morning, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom applying makeup and lotions, the same brands she’d used for forty years. She always emerged wearing pale-pink lipstick. Rudy, who was prone to grandiosity, liked to refer to her as “my amour.”

On the Friday before Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just finished their toast when a nurse, who visited five times a week to help Rennie bathe and dress, came to their house, in Sun City Aliante, an “active adult” community in Las Vegas. They had moved there in 2005, when Rudy, a retired consultant for broadcasters, was sixty-eight and Rennie was sixty-six. They took pride in their view of the golf course, though neither of them played golf.

Rudy chatted with the nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry, until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.

Rennie began crying. “This is my home,” she said.

One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue.

Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate that read “crtgrdn,” for “court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.

Without realizing it, the Norths had become temporary wards of the court. Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an exception to the rule that both parties must be notified of any argument before a judge. She had alleged that the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.” She submitted a brief letter from a physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating that “the patient’s husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient at home as his dementia is progressing.” She also submitted a letter from one of Rudy’s doctors, who described him as “confused and agitated.”

Rudy and Rennie had not undergone any cognitive assessments. They had never received a diagnosis of dementia. In addition to Freud, Rudy was working his way through Nietzsche and Plato. Rennie read romance novels.

Parks told the Norths that if they didn’t come willingly an ambulance would take them to the facility, a place she described as a “respite.” Still crying, Rennie put cosmetics and some clothes into a suitcase. She packed so quickly that she forgot her cell phone and Rudy’s hearing aid. After thirty-five minutes, Parks’s assistant led the Norths to her car. When a neighbor asked what was happening, Rudy told him, “We’ll just be gone for a little bit.” He was too proud to draw attention to their predicament. “Just think of it as a mini-vacation,” he told Rennie. (...)

The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, came to visit later that afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old mother of three sons, she and her husband run a small business designing and constructing pools. She lived ten miles away and visited her parents nearly every day, often taking them to her youngest son’s football games. She was her parents’ only living child; her brother and sister had died.

She knocked on the front door several times and then tried to push the door open, but it was locked. She was surprised to see the kitchen window closed; her parents always left it slightly open. She drove to the Sun City Aliante clubhouse, where her parents sometimes drank coffee. When she couldn’t find them there, she thought that perhaps they had gone on an errand together—the farthest they usually drove was to Costco. But, when she returned to the house, it was still empty.

That weekend, she called her parents several times. She also called two hospitals to see if they had been in an accident. She called their landlord, too, and he agreed to visit the house. He reported that there were no signs of them. She told her husband, “I think someone kidnapped my parents.”

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, she drove to the house again and found a note taped to the door: “In case of emergency, contact guardian April Parks.” Belshe dialled the number. Parks, who had a brisk, girlish way of speaking, told Belshe that her parents had been taken to Lakeview Terrace, an assisted-living facility in Boulder City, nine miles from the Arizona border. She assured Belshe that the staff there would take care of all their needs.

“You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!” Belshe told her.

Parks responded calmly, “It’s legal. It’s legal.” (...)

In the United States, a million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets, according to an auditor for the guardianship fraud program in Palm Beach County. Little is known about the outcome of these arrangements, because states do not keep complete figures on guardianship cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most jurisdictions, the court records are sealed. A Government Accountability report from 2010 said, “We could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive information on this issue.” A study published this year by the American Bar Association found that “an unknown number of adults languish under guardianship” when they no longer need it, or never did. The authors wrote that “guardianship is generally “permanent, leaving no way out—‘until death do us part.’ ” (...)

In Nevada, as in many states, anyone can become a guardian by taking a course, as long as he or she has not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy. Elizabeth Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has worked in guardianship law for twenty years, said that about fifteen years ago, as the state’s elderly population swelled, “all these private guardians started arriving, and the docket exploded. The court became a factory.”

Pamela Teaster, the director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech and one of the few scholars in the country who study guardianship, told me that, though most guardians assume their duties for good reasons, the guardianship system is “a morass, a total mess.” She said, “It is unconscionable that we don’t have any data, when you think about the vast power given to a guardian. It is one of society’s most drastic interventions.” (...)

The following month, Even Tide Life Transitions, a company that Parks often hired, sold most of the Norths’ belongings. “The general condition of this inventory is good,” an appraiser wrote. Two lithographs by Renoir were priced at thirty-eight hundred dollars, and a glass cocktail table (“Client states that it is a Brancusi design”) was twelve hundred and fifty dollars. The Norths also had several pastel drawings by their son, Randy, who died in a motorcycle accident at the age of thirty-two, as well as Kachina dolls, a Bose radio, a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a Peruvian tapestry, a motion-step exerciser, a LeRoy Neiman sketch of a bar in Dublin, and two dozen pairs of Clarke shoes. According to Parks’s calculations, the Norths had roughly fifty thousand dollars. Parks transferred their savings, held at the Bank of America, to an account in her name.

by Rachel Aviv, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Anna Parini

Kazuo Ishiguro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature 2017

"I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,"Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview ("The Art of Fiction," No. 196). "One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler."  (...)

The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. (...)

Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as "part of the package", even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?

Just below the understatement of the novel's surface is a turbulence as immense as it is slow; for The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend. Death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world. (In Wodehouse, even the Oswald Mosley-like Roderick Spode of the Black Shorts movement, as close to an evil character as that author ever created, is rendered comically pathetic by "swanking about," as Bertie says, "in footer bags.") The time-hallowed bonds between master and servant, and the codes by which both live, are no longer dependable absolutes but rather sources of ruinous self-deceptions; even the happy yokels Stevens meets on his travels turn out to stand for the post-war values of democracy and individual and collective rights which have turned Stevens and his kind into tragicomic anachronisms. "You can't have dignity if you're a slave," the butler is informed in a Devon cottage, but for Stevens, dignity has always meant the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master's. What then is our true relationship to power? Are we its servants or its possessors? It is the rare achievement of Ishiguro's novel to pose big questions – what is Englishness? What is greatness? What is dignity? – with a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath.

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

In Stevens's view, greatness in a butler "has to do crucially with the butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". This is linked to Englishness. Continentals and Celts do not make good butlers because of their tendency to "run about screaming" at the slightest provocation. Yet it is Stevens's longing for this kind of "greatness" that has wrecked his one chance of finding romantic love. Hiding within his rôle, he long ago drove Miss Kenton away into the arms of another man. "Why, why, why do you always have to pretend?" she asks him in despair, revealing his greatness to be a mask, a cowardice, a lie.

Stevens's greatest defeat is the consequence of his most profound conviction - that his master is working for the good of humanity, and that his own glory lies in serving him. But Lord Darlington is, and is finally disgraced as, a Nazi collaborator and dupe. Stevens, a cut-price St Peter, denies him at least twice, but feels forever tainted by his master's fall. Darlington, like Stevens, is destroyed by a personal code of ethics. His disapproval of the ungentlemanly harshness towards the Germans of the Treaty of Versailles is what propels him towards his collaborationist doom. Ideals, Ishiguro shows us, can corrupt as thoroughly as cynicism.

by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Remains of the Day
[ed. Repost. One of my favorite authors so I'm delighted to see him get this recognition. See also: Sealed in a World That's Not What as It Seems (Never Let Me Go) and Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times. Also, this short story: A Village After Dark]

Anton Van Hertbruggen
via:

Taking Up Smoking at the End of the World

I started smoking this year. In Berlin, where I lived before recently returning to New York, almost everyone seems to smoke, almost everywhere, almost all the time. It’s like a 1970s game show, but in German and with better hair.

It wasn’t the ubiquity of smoking that sold me as much as the opportunity to become excellent at rolling cigarettes — a simple task that is wildly impressive when done well. The most practiced rollers can assemble a factory-grade filtered cigarette in about ten seconds, packing it casually against a thumbnail while your own attempt looks like a slightly crumpled, pregnant snake, leaking tobacco from both ends.

I’ve watched Berliners roll cigarettes walking, standing up in a moving subway car, and even once while biking through traffic on Karl-Marx-Straße. A German friend claimed her father could roll a cigarette inside his pants pocket, which, bullshit or not, puts the bar for trick-rolling higher than I can even imagine.

Aside from being a cheap way to smoke — about €5 for a bag of decent rolling tobacco, plus €1 each for filters and rolling paper — it’s an excellent sideline for fidgeters, people like me who can’t help but curl straw wrappers into intricate fiddleheads, or peel the label off their beer bottle to fold origami fortune tellers. Cigarette rolling is a mini-craft project unto itself, repeatable and perfectible. I probably enjoy rolling cigarettes even more than I enjoy smoking them.

I don’t mean to be flip about the health hazards of smoking, which are illustrated in full color on every side of every tobacco product I’ve ever purchased, and rattled off by every serious smoker I’ve ever talked to about it. I was born in America in 1989; the only thing I know about smoking is that it’s bad for me.

My aunt Sid once said to me, lighting a cigarette, that if I ever started smoking she would beat me. That she was 60 years old and 90 pounds soaking wet should have underscored how serious she was. Sid is the last of the smokers in my mother’s family, the rest either died or quit. My great-grandmother Eunice, a champion needlepointer with an Elaine Stritch vibe, smoked until she died at 94 in Boca Raton. Eunice married rich after her first husband died, and lived the third act of her life in mink coats and diamond cluster rings. Even from her wheelchair, she spoke as if from a gilded litter, a cigarette her constant, smouldering accessory, two knotty fingers in a nicotine benediction. Still, she claimed never to inhale, which, if true, seems more than anything like a waste of cigarettes. (...)

Germans’ relationship to smoking has always seemed to me in conflict with their country’s place at the forefront of the global economy — a false dichotomy born of an early-1990s anti-drug moralism that hasn’t quite held water for me as an adult. Democratic socialism, leaders of the free world, sure — but they smoke?

Perhaps Europeans are, ironically, more temperate than their prudish American cousins, or at least more tolerant. But they appear, from an American outsider’s perspective, to be both more serious (rolling their own cigarettes, smoking in the kitchen), and less committed; they go days without smoking, only to roll and smoke a pack between Friday night and when they leave the club Sunday morning. No one says much about smoking, except to ask for an ashtray, and it manages to be, for an American, shockingly ordinary. Fabric pouches designed for carrying rolling tobacco, papers, and filters are a staple of twee urban flea markets, alongside tote bags, screen-printed tank tops, and €27 votive candles. German iterations of Pottery Barn and Bed Bath & Beyond carry ashtrays in fun seasonal colors. The opportunity to accessorize a habit can be as addictive as the substance itself, as the casual smoking wares of Berliners attest.

My own smoking has so far been more aesthetic than habitual — and to that end, more Marlene Dietrich than Marlboro Man. I always sit to smoke, which I find allows for the indulgent drama I require to excuse myself of such obviously unhealthy behavior. If I’m going to harm myself, I insist on doing so leisurely. I’ve taken on smoking as an almost entirely aesthetic endeavor: I bought a black enamel cigarette holder — an extreme, unnecessary affectation that only makes my habit feel, or at least look, glorious. With a cup of coffee or a glass of wine I’m perfectly staged, slouched in a chair on a deck or a balcony, watching the bluish smoke swirl around the ashy bud waxing along the length of white paper containing it. The trouble is that smoking feels great; thinking about it is what feels shitty. (...)

Last November, six time zones away from nearly everyone I knew, I watched the U.S. election results roll in, alone in my Berlin apartment, in a building in a city where the winter sun sets at 4 p.m. In the aftermath of uncertainty and anger, a glass of wine and a cigarette became a perpetual last meal, a requiem from the deck of the Titanic before a continually refreshed Twitter feed.

Hope is difficult to grasp even in the abstract, facing down as we must the proud evil of everyday life just by keeping up-to-date. Beyond the cartoonishly sinister dismantling of American democracy, near-daily news of terrorist attacks, mass shootings, climate disasters ongoing and foretold, and threats of mutual nuclear annihilation at the twitchy red-button fingers of weaponized child-men makes any future seem less than a foregone conclusion. What’s a cigarette, if we could all be dead tomorrow?

This year, my American friends quit drinking, did cleanses, took up yoga, and cut out dairy, gluten, and coffee, all in pursuit of health and stability. Find you a man who talks about you the way a person who’s stopped drinking milk talks about their bowel movements. I, meanwhile, have winnowed my diet to pasta, street food, and corrective leafy greens; I have no health insurance and have settled on self-medicating with marijuana as a mood stabilizer and nicotine to alleviate anxiety. I am headed steadfastly upstream against a current of body-wokeness.

A fellow exception to this trend is my boyfriend, who has smoked on and off since college. In fact his habit is the reason we met — in college he kept walking by my table in the student center for smoke breaks. Now that smoking is a shared vice, it’s also become alone time for us together. At the end of a day we pour ourselves some wine and light up in the late-night privacy of our bad habit, thick as thieves.

Jogging in the face of tyranny is a uniquely American solution to a uniquely American crisis. If we can just control our own bodies enough — detox; cleanse; cut out sugar, or gluten, or dairy, or egg yolks; join a boutique gym — we can survive a toxic society. A pioneer faith in individual destiny underpins many of America’s larger problems, from lack of universal healthcare to underfunded social welfare programs, wrongly imagining both success and failure as individual achievements. America has treated our current nightmare as just that — a state from which we’ll soon wake up, out of which we can pivot, by sheer force of individual good behavior. Europe, and Germany in particular, can afford no such belief in insurmountable decency, having witnessed — and dealt with honestly — human depravity on its very soil.

This is bus-crash logic: the fatalism of knowing life’s fragility. Why buy a house if its value will be under water in five years? Why invest if the next crash is around the corner, and no one responsible will be made to answer for it? I relayed this line of thinking to a friend — an uncorrupted nonsmoker — who asked, “So, Donald Trump made you start smoking?” Not exactly, but the fact of such a man in such a job makes the future a dim prospect. A long list of grim realities makes planning for anything feel like picking out curtains for a house I can’t afford: the systemic depravity of politics, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, any industry that starts with “Big,” the police; endless wars in countries most Americans cannot spell or find; and dire economic predictions for my entire generation. Pleasure is the only certainty. I can hardly think of a better time to start seriously smoking than this year, right now, today.

My casual attitude is due at least in part to my lack of up-close exposure to the long-term effects of smoking — Great-Grandma Eunice didn’t die of lung cancer, and Aunt Sid is still fit enough to beat me, probably. But bus-crash logic has its virtues: it unshackles pleasure from rationality, lets you stay at the bar with your friends for one more drink even though you have to be up early, buy a concert ticket you can’t quite afford, live for the sake of a joy that can’t be quantified.

by John Sherman, Longreads |  Read more:

Image: Getty

The Long Haul

Loveland Pass, Colorado, on US Route 6 summits at 11,991 feet. That’s where I’m headed, having decided to skip the congestion at the Eisenhower Tunnel. Going up a steep grade is never as bad as going down, though negotiating thirty-five tons of tractor-trailer around the hairpin turns is a bit of a challenge. I have to use both lanes to keep my 53-foot trailer clear of the ditches on the right side and hope nobody coming down is sending a text or sightseeing.

At the top of the pass, high up in my Freightliner Columbia tractor pulling a spanking-new, fully loaded custom moving van, I reckon I can say I’m at an even 12,000 feet. When I look down, the world disappears into a miasma of fog and wind and snow, even though it’s July. The road signs are clear enough, though— the first one says runaway truck ramp 1.5 miles. Next one: speed limit 35 mph for vehicles with gross weight over 26,000 lbs. Next one: are your brakes cool and adjusted? Next one: all commercial vehicles are required to carry chains september 1—may 31. I run through the checklist in my mind. Let’s see: 1.5 miles to the runaway ramp is too far to do me any good if the worst happens, and 35 miles per hour sounds really fast. My brakes are cool, but adjusted? I hope so, but no mechanic signs off on brake adjustments in these litigious days. Chains? I have chains in my equipment compartment, required or not, but they won’t save my life sitting where they are. Besides, I figure the bad weather will last for only the first thousand feet. The practical aspects of putting on chains in a snowstorm, with no pullover spot, in pitch dark, at 12,000 feet, in a gale, and wearing only a T-shirt, is a prospect Dante never considered in enumerating his circles of hell. The other option is to keep rolling—maybe I’ll be crushed by my truck at the bottom of a scree field, maybe I won’t. I roll.

I can feel the sweat running down my arms, can feel my hands shaking, can taste the bile rising in my throat from the greasy burger I ate at the Idaho Springs Carl’s Jr. (It was the only place with truck parking.) I’ve got 8.6 miles of 6.7 percent downhill grade ahead of me that has taken more trucks and lives than I care to think about. The road surface is a mix of rain, slush, and (probably) ice. I’m one blown air hose away from oblivion, but I’m not ready to peg out in a ball of flame or take out a family in a four-wheeler coming to the Rocky Mountains to see the sights.

I downshift my thirteen-speed transmission to fifth gear, slow to 23 mph, and set my Jake brake to all eight cylinders. A Jake brake is an air-compression inhibitor that turns my engine into the primary braking system. It sounds like a machine gun beneath my feet as it works to keep 70,000 pounds of steel and rubber under control. I watch the tachometer, which tells me my engine speed, and when it redlines at 2,200 rpm I’m at 28 mph. I brush the brakes to bring her back down to 23. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now. My tender touch might cause the heavy trailer to slide away and I’ll be able to read the logo in reverse legend from my mirrors. It’s called a jackknife. Once it starts, you can’t stop it. In a jackknife the trailer comes all the way around, takes both lanes, and crushes against the cab until the whole thing comes to a crashing stop at the bottom of the abyss or against the granite side of the Rockies.

It doesn’t happen, this time, but the weather’s getting worse. I hit 28 again, caress the brake back down to 23, and start the sequence again. Fondle the brake, watch the mirrors, feel the machine, check the tach, listen to the Jake, and watch the air pressure. The air gauge read 120 psi at the summit; now it reads 80. At 60 an alarm will go off, and at 40 the brakes will automatically lock or just give up. Never mind that now, just don’t go past 28 and keep coaxing her back down to 23. I’ll do this twenty or thirty times over the next half an hour, never knowing if the trailer will hit a bit of ice, the air compressor will give up, the Jake will disengage, or someone will slam on the brakes in front of me. My CB radio is on (I usually turn it off on mountain passes), and I can hear the commentary from the big-truck drivers behind me.

“Yo, Joyce Van Lines, first time in the mountains? Get the fuck off the road! I can’t make any money at fifteen miles an hour!” “Yo, Joyce, you from Connecticut? Is that in the Yewnited States? Pull into the fuckin’ runaway ramp, asshole, and let some
men drive.”

“Yo, Joyce, I can smell the mess in your pants from inside my cab.”

I’ve heard this patter many times on big-mountain roads. I’m not entirely impervious to the contempt of the freighthauling cowboys.

Toward the bottom, on the straightaway, they all pass me. There’s a Groendyke pulling gasoline, a tandem FedEx Ground, and a single Walmart. They’re all doing about 50 and sound their air horns as they pass, no doubt flipping me the bird. I’m guessing at that because I’m looking at the road. I’ll see them all later, when they’ll be completely blind to the irony that we’re all here at the same time drinking the same coffee. Somehow, I’ve cost them time and money going down the hill. It’s a macho thing. Drive the hills as fast as you can and be damn sure to humiliate any sonofabitch who’s got brains enough to respect the mountains.

My destination is the ultrarich haven called Aspen, Colorado. This makes perfect sense because I’m a long-haul mover at the pinnacle of the game, a specialist. I can make $250,000 a year doing what is called high-end executive relocation. No U-Hauls for me, thank you very much. I’ll take the movie stars, the ambassadors, the corporate bigwigs. At the office in Connecticut they call me the Great White Mover. This Aspen load, insured for $3 million, belongs to a former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact. My cargo consists of a dozen or so crated modern art canvases, eight 600-pound granite gravestones of Qing Dynasty emperors, half a dozen king-size pillow-top beds I’ll never figure out how to assemble, and an assortment of Edwardian antiques. The man I’m moving, known in the trade as the shipper, has purchased a $25 million starter castle in a hypersecure Aspen subdivision. He figures, no doubt accurately, he’ll be safe behind the security booth from the impecunious widows and mendacious foreign creditors he ripped off, but I digress.

I’m looking downhill for brake lights. I can probably slow down, but there’s no chance of coming to a quick stop. If I slam on the brakes I’ll either crash through the vehicle in front of me or go over the side. I want to smoke a cigarette, but I’m so wound up I could never light it, so I bite off what’s left of my fingernails. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’ve been doing this off and on since the late 1970s. I’ve seen too many trucks mashed on the side of the road, too many accidents, and too many spaced out-drivers. On Interstate 80 in Wyoming I watched a truck in front of me get blown over onto its side in a windstorm. He must have been empty. On I-10 in Arizona I saw a state trooper open the driver door of a car and witnessed a river of blood pour out onto the road.

The blood soaking into the pavement could be mine at any moment. All it takes is an instant of bad luck, inattention, a poor decision, equipment failure—or, most likely, someone else’s mistake.

If any of those things happen, I’m a dead man.

Those loud but lowly freighthaulers up on Loveland Pass would have mocked any big-truck driver going downhill as slowly as I was, but I’ve no doubt they were particularly offended because I was driving a moving van. To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.

I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

Putting myth and hierarchy aside, I will admit to being immensely proud of my truck-driving skills, the real freedom I do have, and the certain knowledge that I make more money in a month than many of the guys around the coffee counter make in a year. The freighthaulers all know this, of course, and that’s one reason bedbuggers aren’t part of the brotherhood. It even trickles down to waitresses and cashiers. A mover waits longer for coffee, longer in the service bays, longer for showers, longer at the fuel desk, longer everywhere in the world of trucks than the freighthauler. It’s because we’re unknown. We don’t have standard routes, so we can’t be relied on for the pie slice and the big tip every Tuesday at ten thirty. We’re OK with being outside the fellowship because we know we’re at the apex of the pyramid. In or out of the trucking world, there are very few people who have what it takes to be a long-haul mover.

A typical day may have me in a leafy suburban cul-de-sac where landscapers have trouble operating a riding lawn mower, much less a 70-foot tractor-trailer. Another day may put me in the West Village of Manhattan navigating one-way streets laid out in the eighteenth century. Long-haul movers don’t live in the rarified world of broad interstate highways with sixty-acre terminals purpose-built for large vehicles. We’ve got to know how to back up just as well blind-side as driver-side; we’ve got to know to the millimeter how close we can U-turn the rig; and we’ve really got to know that when we go in somewhere we can get out again. A mundane morning’s backup into a residence for a mover will often require more skill, finesse, and balls than most freighthaulers might call upon in a year.

Since I now work for a boutique van line doing high-end executive moves, all of my work is what we call pack and load. That means I’m responsible for the job from beginning to end. My crew and I will pack every carton and load every piece. On a full-service pack and load, the shipper will do nothing. I had one last summer that was more or less typical: The shipper was a mining executive moving from Connecticut to Vancouver. I showed up in the morning with my crew of five veteran movers; the shipper said hello, finished his coffee, loaded his family into a limousine, and left for the airport. My crew then washed the breakfast dishes and spent the next seventeen hours packing everything in the house into cartons and loading the truck. At destination, another crew unpacked all the cartons and placed everything where the shipper wanted it, including dishes and stemware back into the breakfront. We even made the beds. We’re paid to do all this, of course, and this guy’s move cost his company $60,000. That move filled up my entire trailer and included his car. It was all I could do to fit the whole load on without leaving anything behind, but I managed it. I do remember having to put a stack of pads and a couple of dollies in my sleeper, though.

How well a truck is loaded is the acid test of a mover. I can look at any driver’s load and tell at a glance if he’s any good at all.

by Finn Murphy, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty

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’Round Midnight

I’m just here to make some music and help out with the fucking.
—Yank Lawson

Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. A joyful noise in Chicago and well regarded as a recording-studio instrumentalist, Lawson was unknown to a jazz-club reporter looking to compose a program note. Was Lawson come to town to make for himself bigger money and a brighter name? Cut a record with Tommy Dorsey? Climb the stairway to the stars?

Lawson’s answer didn’t see the light of print, but Condon delighted in the tempo and the phrasing, scrawled it on cards sometimes stuck in a lower corner of the mirror above the bar. Where at the age of twenty in 1955 I found it with a sense of thanksgiving and relief. The next day I was returning as a senior to Yale College, where for three years my undergraduate questions about the purpose and meaning of life had most of them come back marked address unknown or return to sender. All but one, and that one off the books, the assurance that when bound up in the embrace of music, I knew and felt as fact—as in other times and places I assuredly did not—that yes, Virginia, and if it please the court, I am a human being. And if to become a being at least in some part human is the object of the lessons taught by poets and philosophers, then why not and better yet the high note hit by Lawson? Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation? (...)

Body and soul in unison is the news breaking from the stage of a Stones or Swift or Springsteen concert, but also, and these days probably as often, in reports from a hospital intensive-care unit or cancer ward. Vibroacoustic therapy alleviates the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s patients recall familiar songs more easily and accurately than spoken words; music increases and improves immune-system function; the Mayo Clinic employs the playing of a harp to relax and lower the blood pressure of patients undergoing chemotherapy.

Cicero relies on Pythagoras for the assurance that the music of the spheres is at all times present in the human ear; he goes on to say it comes and goes unheard because humankind has “become completely deaf to its melody.” Modern authority begs to differ. NASA’s orbiting X-ray telescope in 2003 picked up on a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C, emitted by a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies and reverberating across a distance of 250 million light-years in the key characterized by late eighteenth-century poet and composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart as “cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world.”

And if a music of the spheres can be dimly heard by a machine, who’s to say the sweet unheard melodies imagined by John Keats cannot be heard by human beings born among us for whom everything is music? W.C. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. No piano or organ in the District School for Negroes in Florence, Alabama, but in the nearby woods and fields there were robins carrying “a warm alto theme,” bobolinks singing counterpoint, mockingbirds trilling cadenzas, distant crows improvising “the jazz motif,” the moo-cow a saxophone, the whippoorwill a clarinet. (...)

In the winter of 1964, I was a contract writer for The Saturday Evening Post, allowed by its editor, Otto Friedrich, to chase rainbows likely to prove rewarding. I’d been listening to Monk live and recorded for ten years, knew he had influenced musicians as dissimilar as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, knew also he had suffered a siege of obscurity (time in jail, trouble with money, shunned by nightclub owners who thought him too sinister a shade of black) from which he had begun to reemerge into the limelight. Lulu was back in town, and probably a good story, his use of dissonance being taught in composition courses at the Juilliard School of Music. Friedrich agreed. He was himself a musician of no small means or consequence—“The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his no. 27, humbly, every six months or so”—and he suggested I take as much time as necessary to come up with something that didn’t read like a program note in DownBeat.

Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. To a disc jockey asking, “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he had been quoted as saying, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”

At the Five Spot, I introduced myself as a writer come to write about his music, said I was content to hang around and listen until it occurred to Monk to talk; it was three weeks before he stopped by the table to announce his opinion of critics. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”

An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. He wore a goatee, a purple shirt, a dockworker’s cap, and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. I asked him if it was true he never left home without a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the black silk sock on his left foot. He laughed, easily and good-naturedly. “Right foot,” he said, “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.”

I hung around for the rest of the winter, never knowing if or when Monk might entertain questions. Most nights I arrived around midnight after com­plet­ing the day’s lesson for Lipsky. Sometimes, when listening to Monk’s complex rhythms and the abrupt, far-fetched chord progressions, I could hear echoes of late Beethoven. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. When standing up to conduct his band, snapping his fingers, thrusting an open palm to call for a solo from Charlie Rouse on tenor sax or Butch Warren on bass, Monk never stopped moving. He looked like a man dancing on hot coals.

by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

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Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner's Legacy, Trump's Masculinity and Feminism's Sex Phobia

With the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner on Sept. 27, cultural historian and contrarian feminist Camille Paglia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in an exclusive interview on topics ranging from what Hef's choice of the bunny costume revealed about him to the current "dreary" state of relationships between the sexes.

Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?

No, I'm not a partygoer! (Laughs.)

So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?

Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.

So let's dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy's cultural impact?

Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.

Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.

Hefner's new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father's side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.

But Hefner's worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men's magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.

What could today's media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?

It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing. (...)

What do you think about the fact that Trump's childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?

Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It's a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his worldview.

But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It's a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure — which most young people attending elite colleges today have had no contact with whatever.

I instantly recognized and understood it in Trump because I had always been an admirer of Hefner's sexual cosmos. I can certainly see how retrograde and nostalgic it is, but at the same time I maintain that even in the photos that The New York Times posted in trying to convict Trump of sexism, you can feel leaping from these pictures the intense sizzle of sexual polarization — in that long-ago time when men were men and women were women!

My 1960s generation was the gender-bending generation — we were all about blending the genders in fashion and attitude. But it has to be said that in terms of world history, the taste for and interest in androgyny is usually relatively brief. And it comes at late and decadent phases of culture! (Laughs.) World civilizations predictably return again and again to sexual polarization, where there is a tremendous electric charge between men and women.

The unhappy truth is that the more the sexes have blended, the less each sex is interested in the other. So we're now in a period of sexual boredom and inertia, complaint and dissatisfaction, which is one of the main reasons young men have gone over to pornography. Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives, where the sexes are now routinely mixed in the workplace.

With the sexes so bored with each other, all that's left are these feminist witch-hunts. That's where the energy is! And meanwhile, men are shrinking. I see men turning away from women and simply being content with the world of fantasy because women have become too thin-skinned, resentful and high-maintenance.

And American women don't know what they want any longer. In general, French women — the educated, middle-class French women, I mean — seem to have a feminine composure, a distinct sense of themselves as women, which I think women in America have gradually lost as they have won job equality in our high-pressure career system.

Trump has certainly steadily hired and promoted women in his businesses, but it has to be said that his vision of women as erotic beings remains rather retrograde. Part of his nationwide support seems to be coming from his bold defense of his own maleness. Many mainstream voters are gratified by his reassertion of male pride and confidence. Trump supporters may be quite right that, in this period of confusion and uncertainty, male identity needs to be reaffirmed and reconsolidated. (And I'm speaking here as a Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein!)

Ultimately every culture seems to return to sexual polarization because it may be in the best interest of human beings, whether we like it or not. Nature drives every species to procreate, although not necessarily when there's overpopulation!

Gloria Steinem has said that what Playboy doesn't know about women could fill a book. What do you think about that?

What Playboy doesn't know about well-educated, upper-middle-class women with bitter grievances against men could fill a book! I don't regard Gloria Steinem as an expert on any of the human appetites, sexuality being only one of them. Interviews with Steinem were documenting from the start how her refrigerator contained nothing but two bottles of carbonated water. Steinem's philosophy of life is extremely limited by her own childhood experiences. She came out of an admittedly unstable family background. I'm so tired of that animus of hers against men, which she's been cranking out now for decade after decade. I come from a completely different Italian-American background — very food-centric and appetite-centric. Steinem, with that fulsomely genteel WASP persona of hers, represents an attitude of malice and vindictiveness toward men that has not proved to be in the best interest of young women today. (...)

Is there anything of lasting value in Hugh Hefner's legacy?

We can see that what has completely vanished is what Hefner espoused and represented — the art of seduction, where a man, behaving in a courtly, polite and respectful manner, pursues a woman and gives her the time and the grace and the space to make a decision of consent or not. Hefner's passing makes one remember an era when a man would ask a woman on a real date — inviting her to his apartment for some great music on a cutting-edge stereo system (Playboy was always talking about the best new electronics!) — and treating her to fine cocktails and a wonderful, relaxing time. Sex would emerge out of conversation and flirtation as a pleasurable mutual experience. So now when we look back at Hefner, we see a moment when there was a fleeting vision of a sophisticated sexuality that was integrated with all of our other aesthetic and sensory responses.

Instead, what we have today, after Playboy declined and finally disappeared off the cultural map, is the coarse, juvenile anarchy of college binge drinking, fraternity keg parties where undeveloped adolescent boys clumsily lunge toward naive girls who are barely dressed in tiny miniskirts and don't know what the hell they want from life. What possible romance or intrigue or sexual mystique could survive such a vulgar and debased environment as today's residential campus social life?

Do men need a kind of Hefner for today to give an example of how to interact with women in a sophisticated manner?

Yes. Women's sexual responses are notoriously slower than men's. Truly sophisticated seducers knew that women have to be courted and that women love an ambiance, setting a stage. Today, alas, too many young women feel they have to provide quick sex or they'll lose social status. If a guy can't get sex from them, he'll get it from someone else. There's a general bleak atmosphere of grudging compliance.

Today's hook-up culture, which is the ultimate product of my generation's sexual revolution, seems markedly disillusioning in how it has reduced sex to male needs, to the general male desire for wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am efficiency, with no commitment afterwards. We're in a period of great sexual confusion and rancor right now. The sexes are very wary of each other. There's no pressure on men to marry because they can get sex very easily in other ways.

The sizzle of sex seems gone. What Hefner's death forces us to recognize is that there is very little glamour and certainly no mystery or intrigue left to sex for most young people. Which means young women do not know how to become women. And sex has become just another physical urge that can be satisfied like putting coins into a Coke machine.

This may be one reason for the ferocious pressure by so many current feminists to reinforce the Stalinist mechanisms, the pernicious PC rules that have invaded colleges everywhere. Feminists want supervision and surveillance of dating life on campus to punish men if something goes wrong and the girl doesn't like what happened. I am very concerned that what young women are saying through this strident feminist rhetoric is that they feel incapable of conducting independent sex lives. They require adult intrusion and supervision and penalizing of men who go astray. But if feminism means anything, it should be encouraging young women to take control of every aspect of their sex lives, including their own impulses, conflicts and disappointments. That's what's tragic about all this. Young women don't seem to realize that in demanding adult inquiry into and adjudication of their sex lives, they are forfeiting their own freedom and agency.

Young women are being taught that men have all the power and have used it throughout history to oppress women. Women don't seem to realize how much power they have to crush men! Strong women have always known how to control men. Oscar Wilde said women are complex and men are simple. Is it society or is it nature that is unjust? This was the big question that I proposed in Sexual Personae, where I argued that our biggest oppressor is actually nature, not society. I continue to feel that my pro-sex wing of feminism, which does not see sexual imagery or men in general as the enemy, has the best and healthiest message for young women.

by Jeanie Pyun, Hollywood Reporter | Read more:
Image: Robert Mora/Getty Images; Courtesy of Subject
[ed. See also: Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner]

Tom Petty (1950-2017)

I'm watching the water. Watching the coast. Suddenly I know. What I want the most. And I want to tell you. Still I hold back. I need some time. Get my life on track. I know that look on your face. But there's somethin' lucky about this place. And there's somethin' good comin'. For you and me. Somethin' good comin'. There has to be. And I'm thinking 'bout mama. And about the kids. And the way we lived. And the things we did. How she never had a chance. Never caught a break. And how we pay for our big mistakes. I know so well the look on your face. And there's somethin' lucky about this place. There's somethin' good comin'. Just over the hill. Somethin' good comin'. I know it will. And I'm in for the long run. Wherever it goes. Ridin' the river. Wherever it goes. And I'm an honest man. Work's all I know. You take that away. Don't know where to go. And I know that look that's on your face. There's somethin' lucky about this place. There's somethin' good comin'. For you and me. Somethin' good comin'. There has to be.

[ed. Damn. Thanks for the music... Tom, Mike, all the Heartbreakers.]

What is 2,011km Long, Lasts 82 Days and Takes 20,093 Shots? Golf's Longest Hole

Adam Rolston squatted and measured his putt. The early evening sun at Mt Bogd Golf Club in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia still hadn’t quite dried the moisture off the green, and he approached the ball tentatively. Two hundred spectators surrounded the green, including locals, close friends and family as he holed a seven-foot putt perfectly. The longest hole in golf had finished after 82 days and 20,093 shots across Mongolia.

Rolston has played many rounds of golf in his life, but he knows he will never complete a more satisfying scorecard. A former rugby international for Hong Kong, Rolston and his caddie Ron Rutland played the longest hole ever completed across Mongolia, covering 2,011km of difficult terrain, playing through the desert, icy water, rocky ground and glaciers. The most obvious question remains: why?

“I was coming up to the end of my contract playing rugby for Hong Kong and was in Kenya playing a tournament,” Rolston said. “My friend Ron had previously done an incredible challenge where he cycled through every country in Africa, before arriving at the South Africa v Japan game in the 2015 World Cup. He was asked to do a talk in Kenya about this challenge and it got me thinking – could we do something together?”

Rutland and Rolston had both finished their rugby careers, and sat down at home in Hong Kong to think about what they could do next. They decided to try to break the world record for the longest hole in golf and chose Mongolia due to its wide expanses and nomadic heritage. Eight months later, after assiduous planning, they arrived in Mongolia, ready to tee off in aid of the Laureus Sport for Good and the South African Golf Development Board. If they were going to conquer this arduous hole, the two men wanted to raise money for causes they believe in.

Arriving at the first tee at the base of Khüiten Peak was not without difficulties. “We were in a rickety jeep for hours, then put our cart – with all of our equipment – on to a camel. Then had to get on horses until we reached basecamp,” Rolston explains.

“In my mind I was going to arrive at this stunning location with the sun shining, surrounded by glaciers to start the journey. In reality, we didn’t see the sun for four days and we were moving through freezing water pulling our equipment. In that first week, I was sometimes lying awake thinking: how are we going to complete this. Doubts crept in.” (...)

Beyond negotiating the difficult and relentless terrain, the two men were starting to face extreme physical difficulties. Rolston went through days of neck and back spasms, while his caddie suffered with a constantly inflamed hip dragging their cart through uncompromising surface. A chance encounter with a wild Mongolian dog they named UB helped to provide the perfect companion for the remaining 1,500km and lifted their spirits when they needed it most. Rolston said they couldn’t have asked for a better secondary caddie.

“We were followed by this beautiful wild dog, who stayed by our side and slept by our tents. This breed of dog is renowned in Mongolia as operating alone and at times fighting with wolves and coming off better than them, so we should have been apprehensive, but it became an incredible part of the trip. This dog was so loyal and protective to us throughout the trip. It really symbolised the nomadic spirit of this beautiful country and we were delighted to eventually leave him with a loving couple in Terelj national park.”

For weeks, as Rolston and Rutland stumbled slowly across Mongolia one shot at a time, they visualised the finish line in Ulaanbaatar. Dragging their by now battered clubs and cart, the pair were joined by friends as they made their way to their final destination in traditional Mongolian clothing. It has been said golf is a good walk spoiled but it helped Rolston and Rutland connect with a stunning country and do something many considered impossible.

by Jonathan Drennan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Andrew King

Two Dark Truths

Beyond the scores of people who have been killed and the hundreds who have been wounded in Las Vegas today, thousands of other people, though not visibly or directly injured, have had their lives changed forever. Children and parents. Husbands and wives. Brothers and sisters. Something is instantly and permanently gone from their lives. Co-workers and friends. Members of churches or sports leagues or the PTA. Customers and clients and students. Neighbors and casual acquaintances at the coffee shop or the bar. The rest of their days will be different and shadowed because of this massacre. “Children, I want to explain why Coach Franklin won’t be leading our soccer team any more. Something bad happened, and ...”

The dead and the wounded, and their family and friends, of course deserve most support and sympathy. But their fellow countrymen should reflect on two dark truths the episode underscores. I was going to end that sentence with “reveals,” but that’s not right: We know these things already.

The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse.

Five years ago, after what was the horrific mass shooting of that moment, I wrote an item called “The Certainty of More Shootings.” It was about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and after acknowledging the victims it said:

The additional sad, horrifying, and appalling point is the shared American knowledge that, beyond any doubt, this will happen again, and that it will happen in America many, many times before it occurs anywhere else.

That remains true now. I expect it to be true five years from now. I am an optimist about most aspects of America’s resilience and adaptability, but not about reversing America’s implicit decision to let these killings go on.

Decision? Yes. Other advanced societies have outbreaks of mass-shooting gun violence. Scotland, in 1996. Australia, in 1996 as well. Norway in 2011. But only in the United States do they come again and again and again. (...)

No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity.

Here’s the other dark truth about America that today’s shooting reminds us of. The identity of the shooter doesn’t affect how many people are dead or how grievously their families and communities are wounded. But we know that everything about the news coverage and political response would be different, depending on whether the killer turns out to be “merely” a white American man with a non-immigrant-sounding name.

That’s who most mass-shooters turn out to be, from Charles Whitman at the University of Texas tower back in 1966 onward. And from Whitman onward, killers of this sort are described as “deranged” or “disturbed” or “resentful,” their crimes a reflection of their own torment rather than any larger trend or force. They are “troubled” youths, like the white teenaged boy who shot up classmates in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, or the two white teenaged boys who shot up classmates in Columbine, Colorado, two years later, or the white teenaged boy who carried out the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut. Or troubled older people, like the white man in his 60s who shot up the congressional baseball game this summer, or (on initial reports) the white man in his 60s who murdered so many people today. A report on the congressional-baseball shooter described his “descent into rage.”

These people are indeed deranged and angry and disturbed, and the full story of today’s killer is not yet known. It is possible that he will prove to have motives or connections beyond whatever was happening in his own mind (as Graeme Wood explains). But we know that if the killers were other than whites with “normal” names, the responsibility for their crime would not be assigned solely to themselves and their tortured psyches.

• If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland.
• If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
• If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
• And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences.

This is who we are.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: David Becker—Getty Images

Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?

Mark Zuckerberg had just returned from paternity leave, and he wanted to talk about Facebook, democracy, and elections and to define what he felt his creation owed the world in exchange for its hegemony. A few weeks earlier, in early September, the company’s chief security officer had admitted that Facebook had sold $100,000 worth of ads on its platform to Russian-government-linked trolls who intended to influence the American political process. Now, in a statement broadcast live on Facebook on September 21 and subsequently posted to his profile page, Zuckerberg pledged to increase the resources of Facebook’s security and election-integrity teams and to work “proactively to strengthen the democratic process.”

To effect this, he outlined specific steps to “make political advertising more transparent.” Facebook will soon require that all political ads disclose “which page” paid for them (“I’m Epic Fail Memes, and I approve this message”) and ensure that every ad a given advertiser runs is accessible to anyone, essentially ending the practice of “dark advertising” — promoted posts that are only ever seen by the specific groups at which they’re targeted. Zuckerberg, in his statement, compared this development favorably to old media, like radio and television, which already require political ads to reveal their funders: “We’re going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency,” he writes.

This pledge was, in some ways, the reverse of another announcement the company made earlier the same day, unveiling a new set of tools businesses can use to target Facebook members who have visited their stores: Now the experience of briefly visiting Zappos.com and finding yourself haunted for weeks by shoe ads could have an offline equivalent produced by a visit to your local shoe store (I hope you like shoe ads). Where Facebook’s new “offline outcomes” tools promise to entrap more of the analog world in Facebook’s broad surveillance net, Zuckerberg’s promise of transparency assured anxious readers that the company would submit itself to the established structures of offline politics.

It was an admirable commitment. But reading through it, I kept getting stuck on one line: “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Zuckerberg writes. It’s a comforting sentence, a statement that shows Zuckerberg and Facebook are eager to restore trust in their system. But … it’s not the kind of language we expect from media organizations, even the largest ones. It’s the language of governments, or political parties, or NGOs. A private company, working unilaterally to ensure election integrity in a country it’s not even based in? The only two I could think of that might feel obligated to make the same assurances are Diebold, the widely hated former manufacturer of electronic-voting systems, and Academi, the private military contractor whose founder keeps begging for a chance to run Afghanistan. This is not good company.

What is Facebook? We can talk about its scale: Population-wise, it’s larger than any single country; in fact, it’s bigger than any continent besides Asia. At 2 billion members, “monthly active Facebook users” is the single largest non-biologically sorted group of people on the planet after “Christians” — and, growing consistently at around 17 percent year after year, it could surpass that group before the end of 2017 and encompass one-third of the world’s population by this time next year. Outside China, where Facebook has been banned since 2009, one in every five minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook; in countries with only recently high rates of internet connectivity, like Myanmar and Kenya, Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, the whole internet.

But, like the internet, Facebook’s ­vertigo-inducing scale, encompassing not just the sheer size of its user base but the scope of its penetration of human activity — from the birthday-reminder mundane to the liberal-democracy significant — defies comprehension. When I scroll through the news feed on my phone, it’s almost impossible to hold in my mind that the site on which I am currently considering joining a group called “Flat Earth—No Trolls” is the same one whose executives are likely to testify in front of Congress about their company’s role in a presidential election. Or that the site I use to invite people to parties is also at the center of an international controversy over documentation of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize. In one context, it looks and acts like a television broadcaster, but in this other context, an NGO. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester argued that for all its rhetoric about connecting the world, the company is ultimately built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers. This may be true, but Facebook’s business model tells us only so much about how the network shapes the world. Over the past year I’ve heard Facebook compared to a dozen entities and felt like I’ve caught glimpses of it acting like a dozen more. I’ve heard government metaphors (a state, the E.U., the Catholic Church, Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets) and business ones (a railroad company, a mall); physical metaphors (a town square, an interstate highway, an electrical grid) and economic ones (a Special Economic Zone, Gosplan). For every direct comparison, there was an equally elaborate one: a faceless Elder God. A conquering alien fleet. There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?

Nowhere was this confusion about Facebook’s and Zuckerberg’s role in public life more in evidence than in the rumors that the CEO was planning to run for president. Every year, Zuckerberg takes on a “personal challenge,” a sort of billionaire-scale New Year’s resolution, about which he posts updates to his Facebook page. For most Facebook users, these meticulously constructed and assiduously managed challenges are the only access they’ll ever have to Zuckerberg’s otherwise highly private personal life. Thousands of people cluster in the comments under his status updates like crowds loitering outside Buckingham Palace, praising the CEO, encouraging him in his progress, and drawing portraits of his likeness.

This year, Zuckerberg’s challenge has been to meet people in all the states of the U.S. that he hadn’t yet visited. His first stop, in January, was Texas; since then, he’s been to 24 other states. Zuckerberg has adamantly denied that the trips are a trial run for the campaign trail, and, having spoken with many of the people he’s met with over the course of his ­journeys—not to mention stern Facebook publicists — I tend to believe him. He limits his tour activity to interactions in private groups or unannounced visits — no speeches, no barnstorms, no baby-kissing. He’s issued no policy prescriptions and inserted himself into political debates rarely and in limited ways. And yet, the road trip sure looks like a campaign — or at least the sort of “listening tour” that politicians sometimes stage to convince voters, before even announcing, that their hearts are in the right place.

To some extent, of course, the media curiosity is his own fault. (After all, he did choose to be professionally photographed while eating fried food and staring intently at machinery.) But it’s hard for me not to think that the incessant speculation is a function of our own incomplete view of Facebook. The Zuckerberg-for-president interpretation of his project understands Facebook as a large, well-known company, from which a top executive might reasonably launch a political career within the recognizable political framework of the U.S. electoral process.

But if Facebook is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere company, surely his trip is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere presidential run. Maybe he’s doing research and development, reverse-­engineering social bonds to understand how Facebook might better facilitate them. Maybe Facebook is a church and Zuckerberg is offering his benedictions. Maybe Facebook is a state within a state and Zuckerberg is inspecting its boundaries. Maybe Facebook is an emerging political community and Zuckerberg is cultivating his constituents. Maybe Facebook is a surveillance state and Zuckerberg a dictator undertaking a propaganda tour. Maybe Facebook is a dual power — a network overlaid across the U.S., parallel to and in competition with the government to fulfill civic functions — and Zuckerberg is securing his command. Maybe Facebook is border control between the analog and the digital and Zuckerberg is inspecting one side for holes. Maybe Facebook is a fleet of alien spaceships that have colonized the globe and Zuckerberg is the viceroy trying to win over his new subjects.

Or maybe it’s as simple as this: If you run a business and want to improve it, you need to spend time talking to your customers. If you’ve created a hybrid state–church–­railroad–mall–alien colony and want to understand, or expand, it, you need to spend time with your hybrid citizen-believer-passenger-customer-­subjects.

by Max Read, Select/All |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Tom Petty Suffers Heart Attack

Singer-songwriter Tom Petty, famed for his songs about love and Los Angeles, has suffered a cardiac arrest. Initial reports that he had died were walked back by Los Angeles police after about an hour.

Petty was taken off of life support at a Los Angeles-area hospital on 2 October 2017 after being hospitalized following a heart attack. The gossip site TMZ stated that life support was pulled for Petty because of a lack of brain activity.

The Los Angeles Police Department said on Twitter that “initial information was inadvertantly [sic] provided to some media sources,” adding that it was not investigating Petty’s hospitalization. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the hospital declined to comment, and an e-mail to his publicist was not immediately returned. (...)

[ed. Hopefully this is all premature. Still, it sounds like a bad situation. See also: Report: Tom Petty Hospitalized After Cardiac Arrest.]

by Snopes.com |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. I think Wildflowers was one of his best efforts (and, in a way, had a part in starting this blog). See also: Crawling Back to You.]

Anchorage Evening, Len Saltiel
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[ed. Ahh, Anchorage. I love you. It's good to be back.]

Ikko Tanaka's Collection for Issey Miyake

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