Wednesday, June 19, 2019
If Donald Trump Is the Symptom...
Then what's is the disease?
Still, whether or not he gets a second term in the White House, he only seems like the problem, partially because no president, no politician, no one in history has ever gotten such 24/7 media coverage of every twitch, tweet, bizarre statement, falsehood, or fantasy he expresses (or even the clothes he wears). Think of it this way: we’re in a moment in which the only thing the media can’t imagine saying about Donald Trump is: “You’re fired!” And believe me, that’s just one sign of a media -- and a country -- with a temperature that’s anything but 98.6.
Since you-know-who is always there, always being discussed, always @(un)realdonaldtrump, it’s easy enough to imagine that everything that’s going wrong -- or, if you happen to be part of his famed base, right (even if that right isn’t so damned hot for you) -- is due to him. When we’re gripped by such thinking and the temperature’s rising, it hardly matters that just about everything he’s “done” actually preceded him. That includes favoring the 1%, deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, and making war (unsuccessfully) or threatening to do so across significant parts of the planet.
Here, then, is the question of the day, the sort you’d ask about any patient with a rising temperature: If Donald Trump is only the symptom, what’s the disease?
Blowback Central
Let me say that the late Chalmers Johnson would have understood President Trump perfectly. The Donald clearly arrived on the scene as blowback -- the CIA term of tradecraft Johnson first put into our everyday vocabulary -- from at least two things: an American imperium gone wrong with its never-ending wars, ever-rising military budgets, and ever-expanding national security state, and a new “gilded age” in which three men (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett) have more wealth than the bottom half of society and the .01% have one of their own, a billionaire, in the Oval Office. (If you want to add a third blowback factor, try a media turned upside down by new ways of communicating and increasingly desperate to glue eyes to screens as ad revenues, budgets, and staffs shrank and the talking heads of cable news multiplied.)
Now, I don’t mean to sell Donald Trump short in any way. Give that former reality TV star credit. Unlike either Hillary Clinton or any of his Republican opponents in the 2016 election campaign, he sensed that there were voters in profusion in the American heartland who felt that things were not going well and were eager for a candidate just like the one he was ready to become. (There were, of course, other natural audiences for a disruptive, self-promoting billionaire as well, including various millionaires and billionaires ready to support him, the Russians, the Saudis... well, you know the list). His skill, however, never lay in what he could actually do (mainly, in these years, cut taxes for the wealthy, impose tariffs, and tweet his head off). It lay in his ability to catch the blowback mood of that moment in a single slogan -- Make America Great Again, or MAGA -- that he trademarked in November 2012, only days after Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency to Barack Obama.
Yes, four years later in the 2016 election, others began to notice the impact of that slogan. You couldn’t miss the multiplying MAGA hats, after all. Hillary Clinton’s advisers even briefly came up with the lamest response imaginable to it: Make America Whole Again, or MAWA. But what few at the time really noted was the crucial word in that phrase: “again.” Politically speaking, that single blowback word might then have been the most daring in the English language. In 2016, Donald Trump functionally said what no other candidate or politician of any significance in America dared to say: that the United States was no longer the greatest, most indispensable, most exceptionable nation or superpower or hyper-power ever to exist on Planet Earth.
That represented a groundbreaking recognition of reality. At the time, it didn’t matter whether you were Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Marco Rubio, you had to acknowledge some version of that formula of exceptionalism. Trump didn’t and, believe me, that rang a bell in the American heartland, where lots of people had felt, however indirectly, the blowback from all those years of taxpayer-funded fruitless war, while not benefiting from infrastructure building or much of anything else. They experienced blowback from a country in which new billionaires were constantly being created, while the financial distance between CEO salaries and those of workers grew exponentially vaster by the year, and the financing of the political system became a 1% affair.
With that slogan, The Donald caught the spirit of a moment in which both imperial and economic decline, however unacknowledged by the Washington political elite, had indeed begun. In the process, as I wrote at that time, he crossed a psychologically taboo line and became America’s first declinist candidate for president. MAGA captured a feeling already at large that tomorrow would be worse than today, which was already worse than yesterday. As it turned out, it mattered not at all that the billionaire conman spouting that trademarked phrase had long been part of the problem, not the solution.
He caught the essence of the moment, in other words, but certainly didn’t faintly cause it in the years when he financed Trump Tower, watched his five Atlantic City casinos go bankrupt, and hosted The Apprentice. In that election campaign, he captured a previously forbidden reality of the twenty-first century. For example, I was already writing this in June 2016, five months before he was elected president:
“In its halcyon days, Washington could overthrow governments, install Shahs or other rulers, do more or less what it wanted across significant parts of the globe and reap rewards, while (as in the case of Iran) not paying any price, blowback-style, for decades, if at all. That was imperial power in the blaze of the noonday sun. These days, in case you hadn’t noticed, blowback for our imperial actions seems to arrive as if by high-speed rail (of which by the way, the greatest power on the planet has yet to build a single mile, if you want a quick measure of decline).Mind you, three years later the United States remains a staggeringly powerful imperial force, with hundreds of military bases still scattered across the globe, while its economic clout -- its corporations control about half the planet's wealth -- similarly remains beyond compare. Yet, even in 2016, it shouldn’t have been hard to see that the American Century was indeed ending well before its 100 years were up. It shouldn’t have been hard to grasp, as Donald Trump intuitively did, that this country, however powerful, was already both a declining empire -- thank you, George W. Bush for invading Iraq! Mission Accomplished! -- and a declining economic system (both of which still looked great indeed, if you happened to be profiting from them). That intuition and that slogan gave Trump his moment in... well, dare I call it “the afternoon sun”? They made him president.
“Despite having a more massive, technologically advanced, and better funded military than any other power or even group of powers on the planet, in the last decade and a half of constant war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the U.S. has won nothing, nada, zilch. Its unending wars have, in fact, led nowhere in a world growing more chaotic by the second.”
MTPGA
In a sense, all of this should have been expectable enough. Despite the oddity of Donald Trump himself, there was little new in it, even for the imperial power that its enthusiasts once thought stood at “the end of history.” You don’t need to look far, after all, for evidence of the decline of empires. You don’t even have to think back to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, almost three decades ago in what now seems like the Stone Age. (Admittedly, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a brilliant imagineer, has brought back a facsimile of the old Soviet Union, even if, in reality, Russia is now a rickety, fraying petro-state.)
Just take a glance across the Atlantic at Great Britain at this moment. And imagine that three-quarters of a century ago, that modest-sized island nation still controlled all of India, colonies across the planet, and an impressive military and colonial service. Go back even further and you'll find yourself in a time when it was the true superpower of planet Earth. What a force it was -- industrially, militarily, colonially -- until, of course, it wasn’t.
If you happen to be looking for imperial lessons, you could perhaps say that some empires end not with a bang but with a Brexit. Despite all the pomp and circumstance (tweeting and insults) during the visit of the Trump royal family (Donald, Melania, Ivanka, Jared, Donald Jr., Eric, and Tiffany) to the British royals, led by a queen who, at 93, can remember better days, here’s something hard to deny: with Brexit (no matter how it turns out), the Earth’s former superpower has landed in the sub-basement of history. Great Britain? Obviously that adjective has to change.
In the meantime, across the planet, China, another once great imperial power, perhaps the greatest in the long history of this planet, is clearly on the rise again from another kind of sub-basement. That, in turn, is deeply worrying the leadership, civilian and military, of the planet’s “lone superpower.” Its president, in response, is wielding his weapon of choice -- tariffs -- while the U.S. military prepares for an almost unimaginable future war with that upstart nation, possibly starting in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, the still-dominant power on the planet is, however incrementally, heading down. It’s nowhere near that sub-basement, of course -- anything but. It’s still a rich, immensely powerful land. Its unsuccessful wars, however, go on without surcease, the political temperature rises, and democratic institutions continue to fray -- all of which began well before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office and, in fact, helped ensure that he would make it there in the first place.
And yet none of this, not even imperial decline itself, quite captures the “disease” of which The Donald is now such an obvious symptom. After all, while the rise and fall of imperial powers has been an essential part of history, the planetary context for that process is now changing in an unprecedented way. And that’s not just because, since the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, growing numbers of countries have come to possess the power to take the planet down in a cataclysm of fire and ice (as in nuclear winter). It’s also because history, as we’ve known it, including the rise and fall of empires, is now, in a sense, melting away.
by Tom Englehart, Tom Dispatch | Read more:
[ed. See also: America’s Suicide Epidemic (Tom Dispatch).]
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
I Want a Friend
Maybe it was only the mood I was in that night—bitter, biting, yet full of loose energy—that led me back to the queer bar, a place I’d sworn I’d never go again. By then I had no grand hopes left for love, but was propelled instead by quite another purpose: I wanted a friend. Not just any friend. I wanted thefriend, the friend who is the stuff of movies and books and love songs—the friend who sees, the friend who gets, the friend to whom you have to explain nothing and who is yours until the end of time.
All afternoon and into the gloaming, I’d been sitting in the dark, watching my screen and polishing off a bottle of screw-top rosé, precisely the kind of blissful combination my other self disapproves of. What was the deal with Tony Soprano, finally and after all? So beautiful, so angry.
Then it was time to go. On the metro, two girls sat side by side in matching floral dresses and cursed each other over tiny hands made of butterfly wings. The exit tunnel and escalator smelled like important documents burning, which is the best description of Paris as a whole that I am capable of offering.
My potential new friend was a woman I’d met on Twitter when she’d liked a picture of my cat. Cute cat, she’d commented. What’s his name?
I told her his name—yes, like the angel—and she launched into a monologue about the Holy Trinity, which is my actual favorite subject to debate. Three into one, one into three. It makes no sense, yet it makes sense. I agree, utterly and totally, this woman said. In her little photo, she wore a droopy yellow bow in her hair. Here, I remember thinking, was a person who did not play by the world’s rules.
As usual, the filmmaker and her girlfriend stood in the street outside the bar smoking the cheapest possible kind of cigarettes. They greeted me with kisses in a tired kind of way, turning their faces to mine so that only the corners of our chins touched. Once upon a time, I had caused a lot of trouble here, both emotional and physical, so I understood their loyalty.
The signs asking for donations to fund the bar’s legal fees had come down, and I wondered what this meant. The bar had opened in a disreputable neighborhood that over time had become reputable, triggering a campaign from its new neighbors to close it down for reasons of sound and sexuality. But this argument does not play out the same way in France as it would in America, I have learned, for though the French surely have their own confusions of object and symbol, they are generally unimpressed by binary thinking. It’s an immunity I am still trying to acquire.
Over my large plastic cup of good beer, I watched the butch-femme couples kiss each other with their tender fish mouths and surveyed the gaggles of androgynes in vests made from various shades of denim who occupied the couches in the graffiti-soaked back room. I had the feeling again then, the only feeling that makes my other self shut up and listen.
Once, as a teenager in Virginia, after feeling the feeling for a whole year, I drove to a shooting range/gun store and looked at the big sign. GUNS, it said, ALL SHAPES AND SIZES. My friend’s older brother worked inside, and I knew I could be successful if I wanted to be. Success, in this context, would be a lovely rectangular gun, very small and possibly silver, held to the right side of my head and fired. Did I want to? My other self was silent as I sat in the car and silent when I pulled the car back onto the two-lane, back onto I-95 and through all the miles home. The decision was mine.
According to the clock above the bathroom with pictures of cats for numbers, my potential new friend was late. I saw one girl I thought was cute, in a black denim button-up onesie—little tits, no bra—which was just the kind of garment I would like to wear but never would. By the time you got the pants on and fastened in just the right way, you’d have no energy left for the top.
Here is the thing: I had a friend once, for three years. One day it was all, Let’s write our names on a cheap gold lock and lock it to this bridge. It was I who went to the hardware store and bought the lock, but she who wrote the initials in Sharpie and plopped the little key into the water. To be fair, the lock was so cheap that the U of it kept coming out altogether, so I helped my friend jam it back in once it was around the thin iron trestle. We also wrote vows, promising to bring more joy into each other’s lives rather than less and to remind each other that we are both special and talented and destined for great things. This is a kind of marriage, I said, and it means we are together now, until the end of time. Okay, she said.
All afternoon and into the gloaming, I’d been sitting in the dark, watching my screen and polishing off a bottle of screw-top rosé, precisely the kind of blissful combination my other self disapproves of. What was the deal with Tony Soprano, finally and after all? So beautiful, so angry.
Then it was time to go. On the metro, two girls sat side by side in matching floral dresses and cursed each other over tiny hands made of butterfly wings. The exit tunnel and escalator smelled like important documents burning, which is the best description of Paris as a whole that I am capable of offering.My potential new friend was a woman I’d met on Twitter when she’d liked a picture of my cat. Cute cat, she’d commented. What’s his name?
I told her his name—yes, like the angel—and she launched into a monologue about the Holy Trinity, which is my actual favorite subject to debate. Three into one, one into three. It makes no sense, yet it makes sense. I agree, utterly and totally, this woman said. In her little photo, she wore a droopy yellow bow in her hair. Here, I remember thinking, was a person who did not play by the world’s rules.
As usual, the filmmaker and her girlfriend stood in the street outside the bar smoking the cheapest possible kind of cigarettes. They greeted me with kisses in a tired kind of way, turning their faces to mine so that only the corners of our chins touched. Once upon a time, I had caused a lot of trouble here, both emotional and physical, so I understood their loyalty.
The signs asking for donations to fund the bar’s legal fees had come down, and I wondered what this meant. The bar had opened in a disreputable neighborhood that over time had become reputable, triggering a campaign from its new neighbors to close it down for reasons of sound and sexuality. But this argument does not play out the same way in France as it would in America, I have learned, for though the French surely have their own confusions of object and symbol, they are generally unimpressed by binary thinking. It’s an immunity I am still trying to acquire.
Over my large plastic cup of good beer, I watched the butch-femme couples kiss each other with their tender fish mouths and surveyed the gaggles of androgynes in vests made from various shades of denim who occupied the couches in the graffiti-soaked back room. I had the feeling again then, the only feeling that makes my other self shut up and listen.
Once, as a teenager in Virginia, after feeling the feeling for a whole year, I drove to a shooting range/gun store and looked at the big sign. GUNS, it said, ALL SHAPES AND SIZES. My friend’s older brother worked inside, and I knew I could be successful if I wanted to be. Success, in this context, would be a lovely rectangular gun, very small and possibly silver, held to the right side of my head and fired. Did I want to? My other self was silent as I sat in the car and silent when I pulled the car back onto the two-lane, back onto I-95 and through all the miles home. The decision was mine.
According to the clock above the bathroom with pictures of cats for numbers, my potential new friend was late. I saw one girl I thought was cute, in a black denim button-up onesie—little tits, no bra—which was just the kind of garment I would like to wear but never would. By the time you got the pants on and fastened in just the right way, you’d have no energy left for the top.
Here is the thing: I had a friend once, for three years. One day it was all, Let’s write our names on a cheap gold lock and lock it to this bridge. It was I who went to the hardware store and bought the lock, but she who wrote the initials in Sharpie and plopped the little key into the water. To be fair, the lock was so cheap that the U of it kept coming out altogether, so I helped my friend jam it back in once it was around the thin iron trestle. We also wrote vows, promising to bring more joy into each other’s lives rather than less and to remind each other that we are both special and talented and destined for great things. This is a kind of marriage, I said, and it means we are together now, until the end of time. Okay, she said.
by Emma Copley Eisenberg, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: Franz Lang
The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy,’ the Comedian and Michael Cohen
Senator Ted Cruz was running neck and neck with Donald J. Trump in Iowa just before the caucuses in 2016, but his campaign was expecting a last-minute boost from a powerful endorser, Jerry Falwell Jr.
Mr. Falwell was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and a son of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist and co-founder of the modern religious right.
Months earlier, Mr. Falwell had provided Liberty’s basketball arena for Mr. Cruz’s formal presidential announcement and required that the student body attend, giving the Texas Republican a guaranteed audience of thousands of cheering young religious conservatives.
With the caucuses now fast approaching, the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor who had taken the lead in wooing Mr. Falwell, alerted the campaign that Mr. Falwell had pledged to endorse his son.
But when the time came for an announcement, Mr. Falwell rocked the Cruz campaign and grabbed the attention of the entire political world. He endorsed Mr. Trump instead, becoming one of the first major evangelical leaders to get behind the thrice-married, insult-hurling real estate mogul’s long-odds presidential bid.
Mr. Falwell — who is not a minister and spent years as a lawyer and real estate developer — said his endorsement was based on Mr. Trump’s business experience and leadership qualities. A person close to Mr. Falwell said he made his decision after “consultation with other individuals whose opinions he respects.” But a far more complicated narrative is emerging about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the months before that important endorsement.
That backstory, in true Trump-tabloid fashion, features the friendship between Mr. Falwell, his wife and a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach; the family’s investment in a gay-friendly youth hostel; purported sexually revealing photographs involving the Falwells; and an attempted hush-money arrangement engineered by the president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen.
by Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angel Valentin/NY Times
Mr. Falwell was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and a son of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist and co-founder of the modern religious right.
Months earlier, Mr. Falwell had provided Liberty’s basketball arena for Mr. Cruz’s formal presidential announcement and required that the student body attend, giving the Texas Republican a guaranteed audience of thousands of cheering young religious conservatives.With the caucuses now fast approaching, the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor who had taken the lead in wooing Mr. Falwell, alerted the campaign that Mr. Falwell had pledged to endorse his son.
But when the time came for an announcement, Mr. Falwell rocked the Cruz campaign and grabbed the attention of the entire political world. He endorsed Mr. Trump instead, becoming one of the first major evangelical leaders to get behind the thrice-married, insult-hurling real estate mogul’s long-odds presidential bid.
Mr. Falwell — who is not a minister and spent years as a lawyer and real estate developer — said his endorsement was based on Mr. Trump’s business experience and leadership qualities. A person close to Mr. Falwell said he made his decision after “consultation with other individuals whose opinions he respects.” But a far more complicated narrative is emerging about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the months before that important endorsement.
That backstory, in true Trump-tabloid fashion, features the friendship between Mr. Falwell, his wife and a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach; the family’s investment in a gay-friendly youth hostel; purported sexually revealing photographs involving the Falwells; and an attempted hush-money arrangement engineered by the president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen.
by Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angel Valentin/NY Times
The Explorer
My birthday is tomorrow. I’m turning sixty-one, the Year of the Nap. A couple of gift cards for coffee and clothes, tip the pizza man, and that will be that.
Not that I’m ungrateful. I live in a big house in Kansas City, Missouri, with two teenagers and my ex-wife. Yes, you read that right. We’ve been divorced a dozen years — five more than we were married — and we know now what we didn’t know then: that family is what matters, that love is relative, that life is full of unexpected turns.
My ex and my kids are all I have, if I ignore my younger brother — which I can’t, because he’s outside tooting his car horn and blaring what sounds like a Robert Johnson blues song.
He told me he was going to buy a camper van, and here it is, a rusty tan Explorer, but the E and the X have fallen off the logo, leaving just “PLORER.” He says the roof leaks, which explains why it smells like a wet ashtray inside. My brother wears his usual getup: XXXL tie-dye T-shirt, King Biscuit Blues Festival ball cap, saggy stonewashed jeans. October in Missouri is not cold enough for his favorite full-length leather duster.
He’s only just arrived, and my head is already pounding.
My brother lives in the California desert but summers in a trailer in Tennessee, which is like swapping hell for the equator. He’s currently on the last leg of a circuitous cross-country run. Picture Dante’s Virgil visiting all nine circles of the Inferno in a camper van. At the end he’ll be back in the desert again, where the sidewalk doubles as a frying pan, but for now he’s here to help celebrate my birthday.
“Not bad, huh?” he asks, unlocking the van’s side doors.
He’s wanted a camper van ever since our dad died three years ago. Dad left us both some dough, and my brother didn’t waste any time spending his. He bought a modest house with an elaborate surveillance system (it may or may not have once been a meth lab) and now this van, which he got from an old hippie couple for five grand. He put another nine hundred dollars into the engine but ignored the mechanic’s advice about the transmission.
“Screw that dude,” says my brother, who’s no more of a mechanic than I am.
Our father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t raise us to have a lot of common sense. After our mother left him, his congregation asked him to step down, and he was just a man with two sons, no wife, and no church. My brother and I became his cult of two, watching sitcom after sitcom while he tried to figure out what to do.
My brother starts toweling off a pair of iguanas with a dirty rag. “This one’s Gilligan, and this one’s Mary Ann,” he says, letting the lizards cling to his belly as he lights his second Camel in five minutes. “And this,” he says, draping a seven-foot ball python around his neck, “is Lilly.”
He refers to them as his “family,” not unlike how Charles Manson did his followers.
While my brother leans into the van to grab a plastic bag of pet supplies — two heads of lettuce and a box of dead mice — I pick up his dirty terrarium to bring inside.
Our father disciplined us harshly as kids. He told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, but I don’t think anyone believed that. We all just passed the pain down: father beats older son, older son beats younger brother, younger brother brutalizes family dog, brutalized dog disappears.
Dad screamed at us for that, too.
My brother’s all about peace and reptiles these days. He delicately wraps tiny harnesses around his iguanas’ legs so they won’t escape.
I escaped home after graduation, got a job, and never looked back. My brother was too traumatized to get away, and our father took advantage of that, supporting (or enabling) him into his early thirties so that he, our dad, wouldn’t be alone.
Having suffered the self-inflicted wound of my divorce, I can sympathize with my father’s loneliness. And I apologized long ago to my brother for treating him the way I did: beating and belittling him and condescending to him. But dang if I don’t still feel bad every time I see him.
He carries a cane now. That’s new. Its handle is a silver skull in a top hat, like some souvenir from the Church of Satan gift shop. “I just use it for stairs,” my brother says, grunting up the six steps to my front door. Carrying three hundred pounds on arthritic knees and a bad back, he’s fifty-eight going on ninety. In fact, our elderly dad was in better shape, until his prostate gave out.
My precociously geriatric brother coughs, lights another cigarette, and takes a break on a porch chair, resting the devil’s walking stick beside him.
“Got a good deal on a dozen cartons of Camels,” he says, breathing hard, “but I’m almost out of meds.” (...)
Even as a grown man, my brother struggled under our father’s disapproval. Meanwhile Dad bragged to his friends about my career as a television-news reporter. He had no clue I was also a drug addict and a drunk.
I confessed all this a dozen years ago — not to my father and brother but to Jesus. The Gospel seed my father planted in us as children had finally sprouted. Since then, I’ve slowly, tenuously reconstructed my life and family and moved on from my past. But now, with our father three years in the ground and my brother sitting in front of me, low on meds and holding Satan’s scepter of the damned, the past is not so past. My brother pours Dr Pepper from a two-liter bottle into a thirty-ounce plastic Subway cup he never goes anywhere without, like a fast-food-sponsored athlete in training for a diabetes competition. He sips, stubs out his smoke, and pulls out his marijuana pipe, the stem of which is a Confederate flag, as if he bought it in a Klan head shop. Twice he has called me after getting arrested for pot: “Dude,” he said each time, “you’re not going to believe what happened.”
He was right. I couldn’t believe he’d made the front page of the local Tennessee paper for irrigating two acres of marijuana that weren’t his. And I couldn’t believe he’d thought his California-issued medicinal-marijuana card would keep him from getting busted for possession in Texas. (For something that’s supposed to relieve his anxiety, weed sure seems to be the cause of a lot of it.)
In my brother’s mind it wasn’t his fault he’d let some dude borrow his hose to water a pot crop, any more than it was his fault he looked like a central-casting drug dealer: long ponytail, purple-lensed granny glasses, Fu Manchu mustache. It was the cops’ fault. The crooked, profiling cops.
But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.
“Good luck sniffing that out,” he says, tapping the pipe’s bowl on the heel of his Teva sandal.
I don’t ask where he got the deer urine from.
Not that I’m ungrateful. I live in a big house in Kansas City, Missouri, with two teenagers and my ex-wife. Yes, you read that right. We’ve been divorced a dozen years — five more than we were married — and we know now what we didn’t know then: that family is what matters, that love is relative, that life is full of unexpected turns.
My ex and my kids are all I have, if I ignore my younger brother — which I can’t, because he’s outside tooting his car horn and blaring what sounds like a Robert Johnson blues song.
He told me he was going to buy a camper van, and here it is, a rusty tan Explorer, but the E and the X have fallen off the logo, leaving just “PLORER.” He says the roof leaks, which explains why it smells like a wet ashtray inside. My brother wears his usual getup: XXXL tie-dye T-shirt, King Biscuit Blues Festival ball cap, saggy stonewashed jeans. October in Missouri is not cold enough for his favorite full-length leather duster.He’s only just arrived, and my head is already pounding.
My brother lives in the California desert but summers in a trailer in Tennessee, which is like swapping hell for the equator. He’s currently on the last leg of a circuitous cross-country run. Picture Dante’s Virgil visiting all nine circles of the Inferno in a camper van. At the end he’ll be back in the desert again, where the sidewalk doubles as a frying pan, but for now he’s here to help celebrate my birthday.
“Not bad, huh?” he asks, unlocking the van’s side doors.
He’s wanted a camper van ever since our dad died three years ago. Dad left us both some dough, and my brother didn’t waste any time spending his. He bought a modest house with an elaborate surveillance system (it may or may not have once been a meth lab) and now this van, which he got from an old hippie couple for five grand. He put another nine hundred dollars into the engine but ignored the mechanic’s advice about the transmission.
“Screw that dude,” says my brother, who’s no more of a mechanic than I am.
Our father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t raise us to have a lot of common sense. After our mother left him, his congregation asked him to step down, and he was just a man with two sons, no wife, and no church. My brother and I became his cult of two, watching sitcom after sitcom while he tried to figure out what to do.
My brother starts toweling off a pair of iguanas with a dirty rag. “This one’s Gilligan, and this one’s Mary Ann,” he says, letting the lizards cling to his belly as he lights his second Camel in five minutes. “And this,” he says, draping a seven-foot ball python around his neck, “is Lilly.”
He refers to them as his “family,” not unlike how Charles Manson did his followers.
While my brother leans into the van to grab a plastic bag of pet supplies — two heads of lettuce and a box of dead mice — I pick up his dirty terrarium to bring inside.
Our father disciplined us harshly as kids. He told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, but I don’t think anyone believed that. We all just passed the pain down: father beats older son, older son beats younger brother, younger brother brutalizes family dog, brutalized dog disappears.
Dad screamed at us for that, too.
My brother’s all about peace and reptiles these days. He delicately wraps tiny harnesses around his iguanas’ legs so they won’t escape.
I escaped home after graduation, got a job, and never looked back. My brother was too traumatized to get away, and our father took advantage of that, supporting (or enabling) him into his early thirties so that he, our dad, wouldn’t be alone.
Having suffered the self-inflicted wound of my divorce, I can sympathize with my father’s loneliness. And I apologized long ago to my brother for treating him the way I did: beating and belittling him and condescending to him. But dang if I don’t still feel bad every time I see him.
He carries a cane now. That’s new. Its handle is a silver skull in a top hat, like some souvenir from the Church of Satan gift shop. “I just use it for stairs,” my brother says, grunting up the six steps to my front door. Carrying three hundred pounds on arthritic knees and a bad back, he’s fifty-eight going on ninety. In fact, our elderly dad was in better shape, until his prostate gave out.
My precociously geriatric brother coughs, lights another cigarette, and takes a break on a porch chair, resting the devil’s walking stick beside him.
“Got a good deal on a dozen cartons of Camels,” he says, breathing hard, “but I’m almost out of meds.” (...)
Even as a grown man, my brother struggled under our father’s disapproval. Meanwhile Dad bragged to his friends about my career as a television-news reporter. He had no clue I was also a drug addict and a drunk.
I confessed all this a dozen years ago — not to my father and brother but to Jesus. The Gospel seed my father planted in us as children had finally sprouted. Since then, I’ve slowly, tenuously reconstructed my life and family and moved on from my past. But now, with our father three years in the ground and my brother sitting in front of me, low on meds and holding Satan’s scepter of the damned, the past is not so past. My brother pours Dr Pepper from a two-liter bottle into a thirty-ounce plastic Subway cup he never goes anywhere without, like a fast-food-sponsored athlete in training for a diabetes competition. He sips, stubs out his smoke, and pulls out his marijuana pipe, the stem of which is a Confederate flag, as if he bought it in a Klan head shop. Twice he has called me after getting arrested for pot: “Dude,” he said each time, “you’re not going to believe what happened.”
He was right. I couldn’t believe he’d made the front page of the local Tennessee paper for irrigating two acres of marijuana that weren’t his. And I couldn’t believe he’d thought his California-issued medicinal-marijuana card would keep him from getting busted for possession in Texas. (For something that’s supposed to relieve his anxiety, weed sure seems to be the cause of a lot of it.)
In my brother’s mind it wasn’t his fault he’d let some dude borrow his hose to water a pot crop, any more than it was his fault he looked like a central-casting drug dealer: long ponytail, purple-lensed granny glasses, Fu Manchu mustache. It was the cops’ fault. The crooked, profiling cops.
But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.
“Good luck sniffing that out,” he says, tapping the pipe’s bowl on the heel of his Teva sandal.
I don’t ask where he got the deer urine from.
by Corvin Thomas, The Sun | Read more:
Image: Brody Scotland
Monday, June 17, 2019
Intense Garlic Hack Has Captivated the Internet
Peeling garlic is one of those cooking chores that chefs tolerate, painstakingly peeling off the paper-thin covering while dreaming up new ways to get the job done. While some chefs are content to smashing cloves with a knife and peel individual cloves, others opt for the shaking method or invest in a garlic press that doesn’t require peeling. Now, there’s a new addition to the garlic-peeling bag of tricks, one that some home cooks were not yet privy to.
On Sunday, Twitter user Twitter user @VPestilenZ posted their own rapid-fire method for peeling cloves off from a head of garlic. “As someone who makes a lot of Korean food, this is the best method for getting garlic peeled!” the person who posted the video wrote. In the video posted online someone held a head of garlic in one hand and a knife in the other. Using the pointed blade, they would stab an individual clove and pull, peeling the clove while freeing it from the head. It was easy, painless, and fast.
The internet was instantly smitten with the new—or at least previously unknown— garlic-peeling technique. Cookbook author and model Chrissy Teigen shared the tweet, commenting, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT” which mirrored many of the other comments online. Reactions varied from stunned amazement to something verging on anger that they never heard about this technique before. The technique has since gone viral so we shouldn’t be surprised if cooks experiment with it at home the next time they are cooking roast chicken, japchae, pesto, garlic fried rice, Lebanese toum, or any recipe that requires a lot of garlic.
On Sunday, Twitter user Twitter user @VPestilenZ posted their own rapid-fire method for peeling cloves off from a head of garlic. “As someone who makes a lot of Korean food, this is the best method for getting garlic peeled!” the person who posted the video wrote. In the video posted online someone held a head of garlic in one hand and a knife in the other. Using the pointed blade, they would stab an individual clove and pull, peeling the clove while freeing it from the head. It was easy, painless, and fast.The internet was instantly smitten with the new—or at least previously unknown— garlic-peeling technique. Cookbook author and model Chrissy Teigen shared the tweet, commenting, “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT” which mirrored many of the other comments online. Reactions varied from stunned amazement to something verging on anger that they never heard about this technique before. The technique has since gone viral so we shouldn’t be surprised if cooks experiment with it at home the next time they are cooking roast chicken, japchae, pesto, garlic fried rice, Lebanese toum, or any recipe that requires a lot of garlic.
by Melissa Locker, Time | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Pretty amazing if it works.]
[ed. Pretty amazing if it works.]
Criminalizing Compassion
How giving water to migrants became a religious freedom issue (Desert News)
Image: Charlie Riedel, Associated Press
Hong Kong Protests
Hong Kong is not China yet, but that feared day is coming ever nearer (The Guardian)
Image: Carl Court/Getty Images via
[ed. See also: How many really marched in Hong Kong? And how should we best guess crowd size? (Columbia Journalism Review).]
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Bob Dylan
[ed. As seen in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Review on Netflix (see here and here). Concert footage starts around 1:29. See also: Bob Dylan and Guests (with Tom Petty).]
How to Get a Banksy Off the Wall
As the last sheet of protective plywood is pulled off the painting, a cheer goes up from the crowd. TV crews from all over Europe have come to capture the moment. We’re inside a former police station that is being transformed into Britain’s first museum of street art. And the first exhibit is the corner section of a breeze-block wall from a garage in the steel town of Port Talbot, south Wales.
Earlier in the morning, under pouring rain and surrounded by a small knot of dog walkers and locals, I watched as the Port Talbot Banksy was hoisted on to a flatbed truck by a giant crane, and transported under blue light escort the two miles from the Taibach area to the city centre, like the pasosfloats that carry religious sculptures through the streets of Spain during Holy Week.
The analogy is not entirely facetious. For the people of Port Talbot, the sudden appearance of Season’s Greetings on 18 December last year was nothing short of miraculous.
“We don’t get given much in Port Talbot, except one recession after another,” says Plaid Cymru councillor Nigel Thomas Hunt, a giant of a man wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the Banksy image, which he sells in his nearby shop. “I can’t tell you the buzz there was in the town, the feeling of elation. It was like we had been given a gift.”Season’s Greetings – with its waif-like child gulping down ash – shone a spotlight on urban pollution. Located between the M4 corridor and the giant Tata steel works, Taibach lies in the most polluted part of the city. Gary Owen, who runs a community Facebook group, claims to have prompted Banksy to paint the mural by sending a message to his Instagram account about pollution.
“It’s an irony that the police have given an escort to a Banksy, which is a piece of illegal artwork, and that we are putting it into the old police station,” says John Brandler, a bow-tie-wearing gallerist from Essex, who bought the garage wall from local steelworker Ian Lewis.
Brandler, who owns several other paintings by Banksy, is on record as having paid a six-figure sum for Season’s Greetings. In February, in what some regard as a swipe at its removal, a second piece of graffiti appeared in Taibach. It depicted a Lego-like figure cutting out a section of wall decorated with an Emoji-like face, poking out a green tongue decorated with a dollar sign.
In the month after it appeared, the Banksy mural was visited by at least 2,000 people per day. Amid fears of vandalism Michael Sheen, a famous actor who grew up in Port Talbot, helped fund 24/7 security. This didn’t stop one visitor from attacking the plastic screen protecting it.
Debate surrounding the politics of street art can be intense. In Detroit in 2010, a Banksy showing a forlorn-looking African-American boy holding a paint pot and brush – next to the words: “I remember when this was all trees” – was cut off a cinder block wall with a masonry saw and an oxyacetelane torch. The local outcry was so great that the dealer who removed it had to hide the work.
When it became known that Ian Lewis planned to sell his Port Talbot Banksy, he was abused on social media. “There is a valid criticism that it should stay on the streets,” says Brandler, who was offered large sums to take the image elsewhere, but insisted it remained in Port Talbot. “But there is also an argument that it should be protected. We have found a compromise by bringing it into the town centre.”
In Italy, a technique called strappo is used to remove frescoes. This involves gluing layers of cheesecloth over the image, then peeling it off the wall, like sunburned skin. The corner of the garage featuring Season’s Greetings was simply sliced away. First, the floor was removed. Then the inside of the wall was covered in wire mesh and sprayed with resin, to prevent it from cracking. The wall, which weighed about 4.5 tonnes, was then encased in a steel and wood framework, which acted like a cradle when it was lifted. In the back of everyone’s minds was the fear that, like Girl With Balloon, auctioned at Sotheby’s last October, Season’s Greetings might self-destruct when removed.
by Simon Worrall, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Banksy and Matt Cardy/Getty Images
I Don't Actually Have to Sell This War With Iran, Do I?
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that intelligence reviewed by American officials showed that Iran was responsible for attacks earlier in the day on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, a critical waterway for the transit of much of the world’s oil.” — New York Times, 6/13/19
Let me cut straight to the chase: I’m tired. You’re tired. The world is overwhelming. We all have stuff we’d rather be doing. There’s tons of brand new original content on Netflix, for God’s sake. Don’t make me actually have to sell this war with Iran.
What do you want me to say? You really want me to pay lip service to some flimsy justification? You’re gonna oppose the war on moral grounds anyway, so what does it matter? I shouldn’t still have to bother with the same old talking points about how they have nukes, or some ship or tanker got blown up, or that I suddenly care about the religious freedom of some brown people. I’ve been wanting this war with Iran for years and it’s time it gets going, so let’s cut to the chase and get it going.
Is it the fact that it’s an unauthorized “war” that’s causing you to bump? Do we really have to go through this old song and dance about how only Congress can declare war? I guess I could concede and call it a “conflict” with Iran, if that’s really what you want, but it’s frankly insulting you’re even making me do that. Let’s get real. The troops are already in Afghanistan. They’re practically in Iran already. I’m not waiting around for Mitch McConnell to finish appointing every right-wing maniac with a law degree to preside over a federal court. Daddy’s got weapons to sell and his summer home in Belize won’t pay for itself.
I get it. I had to lie about every other war since Vietnam. And some of them were good lies, that I honestly took pains to cover up. But I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the energy anymore. I’m practically falling asleep on these cable news shows where I have to talk about war with Iran. There’s only so many ways you can talk about the importance of “spreading democracy” before it starts to become so dull and you start wishing you were anywhere else. Well, not anywhere. Wouldn’t want to be in Iran. That’s a good way to get yourself killed.
Maybe I can make some sort of effort to sell this thing. Maybe I can trot out some steely-eyed psycho general or a self-appointed Iran “expert” to make this whole war more palatable. I suppose I can pay the guys at the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal to write some pro-war with Iran op-eds. It shouldn’t be too hard — they just have to dig up their Iraq War pieces from 2002 and replace that “q” with an “n.” If all you need is some pseudo-intellectual drivel defending mass death, then great. That’s why those magazines exist. I’ll let those guys throw their backs out trying to climb up on a moral high horse. But I promise you, after a while, you won’t even notice we’re at war with Iran. Unless you’re the poor schmuck who has to actually fight the thing, this whole war can be pushed to the background of your mental landscape, like the last season of Game of Thrones and the children ICE keep in cages. I swear, a decade from now, you’ll see some footage of the war on Fox News in an airport and it won’t even register. You’ll be surprised how long it’s been around, like a browser tab you had open since 2010.
Let me cut straight to the chase: I’m tired. You’re tired. The world is overwhelming. We all have stuff we’d rather be doing. There’s tons of brand new original content on Netflix, for God’s sake. Don’t make me actually have to sell this war with Iran.
What do you want me to say? You really want me to pay lip service to some flimsy justification? You’re gonna oppose the war on moral grounds anyway, so what does it matter? I shouldn’t still have to bother with the same old talking points about how they have nukes, or some ship or tanker got blown up, or that I suddenly care about the religious freedom of some brown people. I’ve been wanting this war with Iran for years and it’s time it gets going, so let’s cut to the chase and get it going.Is it the fact that it’s an unauthorized “war” that’s causing you to bump? Do we really have to go through this old song and dance about how only Congress can declare war? I guess I could concede and call it a “conflict” with Iran, if that’s really what you want, but it’s frankly insulting you’re even making me do that. Let’s get real. The troops are already in Afghanistan. They’re practically in Iran already. I’m not waiting around for Mitch McConnell to finish appointing every right-wing maniac with a law degree to preside over a federal court. Daddy’s got weapons to sell and his summer home in Belize won’t pay for itself.
I get it. I had to lie about every other war since Vietnam. And some of them were good lies, that I honestly took pains to cover up. But I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the energy anymore. I’m practically falling asleep on these cable news shows where I have to talk about war with Iran. There’s only so many ways you can talk about the importance of “spreading democracy” before it starts to become so dull and you start wishing you were anywhere else. Well, not anywhere. Wouldn’t want to be in Iran. That’s a good way to get yourself killed.
Maybe I can make some sort of effort to sell this thing. Maybe I can trot out some steely-eyed psycho general or a self-appointed Iran “expert” to make this whole war more palatable. I suppose I can pay the guys at the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal to write some pro-war with Iran op-eds. It shouldn’t be too hard — they just have to dig up their Iraq War pieces from 2002 and replace that “q” with an “n.” If all you need is some pseudo-intellectual drivel defending mass death, then great. That’s why those magazines exist. I’ll let those guys throw their backs out trying to climb up on a moral high horse. But I promise you, after a while, you won’t even notice we’re at war with Iran. Unless you’re the poor schmuck who has to actually fight the thing, this whole war can be pushed to the background of your mental landscape, like the last season of Game of Thrones and the children ICE keep in cages. I swear, a decade from now, you’ll see some footage of the war on Fox News in an airport and it won’t even register. You’ll be surprised how long it’s been around, like a browser tab you had open since 2010.
by Matthew Brian Cohen, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: via
Tax Cut Windfall
Stephen Smith worked at an AT&T call center in Meriden, Connecticut, for over 20 years before the giant telecoms company announced it was closing the city’s three call centers in February 2019.
“At 46 years old, I’m looking for a new job,” Smith said. “They basically told us we either need to move south or lose our job. It was out of the blue. We had no idea.”
Smith and about 90 of his colleagues were offered severance packages or the option to relocate to Georgia or Tennessee. But for most workers who have spouses with their own careers, elderly parents nearby in need of care, or children still in school, relocating on a whim isn’t an option.
These sudden mass layoffs have become increasingly common for workers at AT&T and many other big firms. But it was not meant to be that way.
“At 46 years old, I’m looking for a new job,” Smith said. “They basically told us we either need to move south or lose our job. It was out of the blue. We had no idea.”
Smith and about 90 of his colleagues were offered severance packages or the option to relocate to Georgia or Tennessee. But for most workers who have spouses with their own careers, elderly parents nearby in need of care, or children still in school, relocating on a whim isn’t an option.These sudden mass layoffs have become increasingly common for workers at AT&T and many other big firms. But it was not meant to be that way.
AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, promised in November 2017 to invest $1bn in capital expenditure and create 7,000 new jobs at the company if Trump’s hugely controversial tax cut bill passed. Many opponents had slammed the cuts as a corporate giveaway that benefited the super-rich. But big firms lobbied for it, saying – as AT&T did – that it would fund job-creating expansions.
The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn. (...)
AT&T is among several large corporations whose CEOs announced support of the Trump tax cut bill by claiming if the legislation passed, their companies would ensure workers reaped benefits from it. But a report published on 22 May by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan thinktank for members of Congress, found the tax cuts did not significantly affect the economy or boost wages, but benefited investors more than anyone else.
“The evidence continues to mount that the Trump-GOP tax cuts were a scam, a giant bait-and-switch that promised workers big pay raises, a lot more jobs and new investments, but they largely enriched CEOs and the already wealthy,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. (...)
General Motors’ CEO, Mary Barra, was one of Trump’s economic advisers on tax reform, and the company vocally supported working with the Trump administration on tax reform “that is beneficial to the US economy, beneficial to US manufacturing and creates jobs”.
In November 2018, GM announced it would cease operations at five plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, resulting in the loss of more than 14,000 jobs in those communities. As GM is closing plants, the company has spent $10bn since 2015 on stock buybacks, and made a net profit of over $8bn despite paying no federal taxes in 2018. GM reported a tax windfall of $157m in the first three months of 2018 due to the Trump tax cut. (...)
Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank in the US by assets, tied a minimum wage increase of $15 an hour to the Trump tax cuts and pledged increased investments in workers. The company is estimated to save $3.7bn annually due to the Trump tax cut. The bank’s 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the costs of its minimum wage increases. Rather than invest in its workforce, Wells Fargo bought back 350m shares in early 2018, worth about $22.6bn, increased CEO salary by 36%, and announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas.
“Nobody here saw any of that benefit; if anything, quite the opposite. They changed our healthcare plans in 2019, so the costs for everyone went up, the costs for prescriptions went up,” said Mark Willie, a Wells Fargo office employee in Des Moines, Iowa.
The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn. (...)
AT&T is among several large corporations whose CEOs announced support of the Trump tax cut bill by claiming if the legislation passed, their companies would ensure workers reaped benefits from it. But a report published on 22 May by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan thinktank for members of Congress, found the tax cuts did not significantly affect the economy or boost wages, but benefited investors more than anyone else.
“The evidence continues to mount that the Trump-GOP tax cuts were a scam, a giant bait-and-switch that promised workers big pay raises, a lot more jobs and new investments, but they largely enriched CEOs and the already wealthy,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. (...)
General Motors’ CEO, Mary Barra, was one of Trump’s economic advisers on tax reform, and the company vocally supported working with the Trump administration on tax reform “that is beneficial to the US economy, beneficial to US manufacturing and creates jobs”.
In November 2018, GM announced it would cease operations at five plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, resulting in the loss of more than 14,000 jobs in those communities. As GM is closing plants, the company has spent $10bn since 2015 on stock buybacks, and made a net profit of over $8bn despite paying no federal taxes in 2018. GM reported a tax windfall of $157m in the first three months of 2018 due to the Trump tax cut. (...)
Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank in the US by assets, tied a minimum wage increase of $15 an hour to the Trump tax cuts and pledged increased investments in workers. The company is estimated to save $3.7bn annually due to the Trump tax cut. The bank’s 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the costs of its minimum wage increases. Rather than invest in its workforce, Wells Fargo bought back 350m shares in early 2018, worth about $22.6bn, increased CEO salary by 36%, and announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas.
“Nobody here saw any of that benefit; if anything, quite the opposite. They changed our healthcare plans in 2019, so the costs for everyone went up, the costs for prescriptions went up,” said Mark Willie, a Wells Fargo office employee in Des Moines, Iowa.
by Michael Sainato, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Lars Hagberg/AFP/Getty Images
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Dachshunds on Parade, 2019
[ed. Dachshunds on Parade Festival, 2019. Ellensburg, WA. More pictures after the jump (best viewed from a computer since not all are fully viewable on phones for some reason). Photos from 2015: here.]
Photos: markk
The New Sobriety
It seems not even sobriety will be saved from enjoying a made-for-Instagram moment, with new hashtaggable terms like “mindful drinking” and “sober curious.” No longer do you have to feel left out or uncool for being sober. You maybe don’t even have to completely stop drinking alcoholic beverages?
This is according to a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class.
Anonymous? Hardly. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. For these New Abstainers, sobriety is a thing to be, yes, toasted over $15 artisanal mocktails at alcohol-free nights at chic bars around the country, or at “sober-curious” yoga retreats, or early-morning dance parties for those with no need to sleep off the previous night’s bender.
Many will tell you they never had a drinking problem. They just had a problem with drinking.The simple act of waving off wine at a dinner party used to be interpreted as a tacit signal that you were in recovery, “on the wagon,” unless you were visibly pregnant or had known religious objections.
That was fine if you identified as an alcoholic. But what about people like Ruby Warrington, 43, a British style journalist in New York who spent her early career quaffing gratis cocktails at industry events, only to regret the groggy mornings, stumbles and embarrassing texts that have long been considered part of the bargain with so-called normal drinking?
After moving to New York in 2012, Ms. Warrington tried 12-step programs briefly but decided that “Ruby, alcoholic” was not the person she saw in the mirror. Three years ago she started Club Soda NYC, an event series for other “sober curious,” as she termed them: young professionals who were “kind-of-just-a-little-bit-addicted-to-booze.” (...)
She wrote a book called “Sober Curious” that was published in 2018, started a podcast and has staged subsequent Sober Curious events for what she calls the “Soho House crowd” at places like the Kripalu wellness retreat in Massachusetts, where participants also engage in heart-baring, 12-step-style testimonials.
Their fellow travelers band together at early-morning sober Daybreaker raves, held in 25 cities around the country.
Then there are the more than 18,000 Facebook followers of a nonprofit called Sober Movement, which promotes sobriety “as a lifestyle,” who post smiling pictures of themselves cartwheeling in the surf, or rocking ripped, beer-binge-free abs, appended with hashtags like #soberissexy, #partysober and #endthestigma.
Online, sobriety has become “the new black,” asserts a recovery site called, yes, Hip Sobriety.
The old idea that going dry is pretty dry would mean little to the 39,000 Instagram followers who feast on golden-hour beach shots from adventure travel retreats for sober or sober-curious “big life enthusiast” women in, say, Baja organized by The Sober Glow, a sobriety site run by Mia Mancuso, an accountability coach for women who consider themselves “gray area drinkers.”
“Once I removed the option of drinking, a whole new world opened up to me,” said Ms. Mancuso, 42. “I now live a life full of integrity, confidence and grace, which ironically was what I was hoping to find in all those pretty little cocktails.”
Some not willing to eschew liquor completely are trying what Rosamund Dean, Ms. Warrington’s compatriot, called “Mindful Drinking” in a 2017 book: a half-measure approach to sobriety where you drink less, perhaps think about it more.
“People invest so much of their identity in their lifestyle choices, and it’s the same with drinking,” Ms. Dean wrote in an email. “Everyone is either a wine-guzzling party animal or a clean-living health freak. Personally, I believe the middle ground is the healthiest place to be.‘Rules, No!’
This is according to a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s. To them, sobriety is something less (and more) than a practice relevant only to clinically determined alcohol abusers. Now it can also just be something cool and healthful to try, like going vegan, or taking an Iyengar yoga class.
Anonymous? Hardly. No longer is the topic of sobriety confined to discreet meetings in church halls over Styrofoam cups of lukewarm Maxwell House. For these New Abstainers, sobriety is a thing to be, yes, toasted over $15 artisanal mocktails at alcohol-free nights at chic bars around the country, or at “sober-curious” yoga retreats, or early-morning dance parties for those with no need to sleep off the previous night’s bender.Many will tell you they never had a drinking problem. They just had a problem with drinking.The simple act of waving off wine at a dinner party used to be interpreted as a tacit signal that you were in recovery, “on the wagon,” unless you were visibly pregnant or had known religious objections.
That was fine if you identified as an alcoholic. But what about people like Ruby Warrington, 43, a British style journalist in New York who spent her early career quaffing gratis cocktails at industry events, only to regret the groggy mornings, stumbles and embarrassing texts that have long been considered part of the bargain with so-called normal drinking?
After moving to New York in 2012, Ms. Warrington tried 12-step programs briefly but decided that “Ruby, alcoholic” was not the person she saw in the mirror. Three years ago she started Club Soda NYC, an event series for other “sober curious,” as she termed them: young professionals who were “kind-of-just-a-little-bit-addicted-to-booze.” (...)
She wrote a book called “Sober Curious” that was published in 2018, started a podcast and has staged subsequent Sober Curious events for what she calls the “Soho House crowd” at places like the Kripalu wellness retreat in Massachusetts, where participants also engage in heart-baring, 12-step-style testimonials.
Their fellow travelers band together at early-morning sober Daybreaker raves, held in 25 cities around the country.
Then there are the more than 18,000 Facebook followers of a nonprofit called Sober Movement, which promotes sobriety “as a lifestyle,” who post smiling pictures of themselves cartwheeling in the surf, or rocking ripped, beer-binge-free abs, appended with hashtags like #soberissexy, #partysober and #endthestigma.
Online, sobriety has become “the new black,” asserts a recovery site called, yes, Hip Sobriety.
The old idea that going dry is pretty dry would mean little to the 39,000 Instagram followers who feast on golden-hour beach shots from adventure travel retreats for sober or sober-curious “big life enthusiast” women in, say, Baja organized by The Sober Glow, a sobriety site run by Mia Mancuso, an accountability coach for women who consider themselves “gray area drinkers.”
“Once I removed the option of drinking, a whole new world opened up to me,” said Ms. Mancuso, 42. “I now live a life full of integrity, confidence and grace, which ironically was what I was hoping to find in all those pretty little cocktails.”
Some not willing to eschew liquor completely are trying what Rosamund Dean, Ms. Warrington’s compatriot, called “Mindful Drinking” in a 2017 book: a half-measure approach to sobriety where you drink less, perhaps think about it more.
“People invest so much of their identity in their lifestyle choices, and it’s the same with drinking,” Ms. Dean wrote in an email. “Everyone is either a wine-guzzling party animal or a clean-living health freak. Personally, I believe the middle ground is the healthiest place to be.‘Rules, No!’
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tracy Ma/The New York Times; Shutterstock
Friday, June 14, 2019
Drug to Replace Chemotherapy May Reshape Cancer Care
A class of drugs is emerging that can attack cancer cells in the body without damaging surrounding healthy ones. They have the potential to replace chemotherapy and its disruptive side effects, reshaping the future of cancer care.
The complex biological medicines, called antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), have been in development for decades, and are now generating renewed excitement because of the success of one ADC in late-stage testing, a breast cancer treatment called DS-8201.
The fervor over ADCs is such that AstraZeneca Plc in March agreed to pay as much as $6.9 billion to jointly develop DS-8201 with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co., the British drugmaker’s biggest deal in more than a decade. The investment was widely seen to be a validation of DS-8201’s potential -- and the ADC class of drugs as a whole -- as an alternative for chemotherapy, the most widely used treatment, for some types of cancer.
DS-8201, which will be filed for U.S. approval by the end of September, is so well-regarded that some analysts already predict it will surpass the $7 billion in annual sales for Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer drug Herceptin, which it aims to replace.
“DS-8201 may become one of the largest cancer biologic drugs,’’ said Caroline Stewart, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates sales of the drug to eventually approach $12 billion globally -- that’s a level attained by only a handful of biologics, which are drugs based on a living organism. “While the field has advanced and there are several companies focusing on ADCs, Daiichi in particular seems to have developed a unique expertise.”
Analysts say DS-8201 could triple the number of patients who get powerful targeted treatment for breast cancer, the most common tumor in women that kills more than half a million annually. As importantly, its ability to target cancer cells without affecting normal cells is a key advantage over the take-no-prisoners approach of chemotherapy.
Daiichi’s treatment has been seen to double survival time for advanced breast cancer patients to 20 months from 10, former UBS Securities Japan Co. analyst Atsushi Seki said in March. In trials, patients using DS-8201 experienced less nausea and hair loss compared with chemotherapy. (...)
Another Level
Daiichi Sankyo’s drug takes ADCs to another level. Its advantage is that it carries eight payloads stably to cancer cells, double the number of the industry standard, said Toshinori Agatsuma, head of oncology research at Daiichi Sankyo who led a team that discovered the therapy.
“Currently available ADCs are far from being perfect technically because the payload linked to antibodies aren’t properly delivered to cancer cells,’’ said Agatsuma. “We wanted to challenge and improve that. We were a latecomer in biotech, but I knew it was an area where we could catch up, compete and win.’’
About 2.1 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, according to the World Health Organization. Some 18% of cases are driven by a protein called HER2, and their first treatment is chemotherapy alongside Roche’s Herceptin and Perjeta, a related drug. While DS-8201 is currently in testing for later-stage cancer, the plan is to go up against the first-line treatment in the next two years.
“It would be transformative” if the drug were to become the sole first-line treatment, said David Fredrickson, president of AstraZeneca’s oncology business. “If we can eliminate the side effects associated with chemotherapy, that would be a tremendous benefit for women.”
Drugs like Herceptin only target high levels of HER2, and women with lower levels must rely on hormone therapy or chemotherapy. That’s where DS-8201 has the potential to serve far more patients, treating those with both higher and lower levels of HER2.
by Kanoko Matsuyama, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Science Photo Library
The complex biological medicines, called antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), have been in development for decades, and are now generating renewed excitement because of the success of one ADC in late-stage testing, a breast cancer treatment called DS-8201.
The fervor over ADCs is such that AstraZeneca Plc in March agreed to pay as much as $6.9 billion to jointly develop DS-8201 with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co., the British drugmaker’s biggest deal in more than a decade. The investment was widely seen to be a validation of DS-8201’s potential -- and the ADC class of drugs as a whole -- as an alternative for chemotherapy, the most widely used treatment, for some types of cancer.DS-8201, which will be filed for U.S. approval by the end of September, is so well-regarded that some analysts already predict it will surpass the $7 billion in annual sales for Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer drug Herceptin, which it aims to replace.
“DS-8201 may become one of the largest cancer biologic drugs,’’ said Caroline Stewart, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates sales of the drug to eventually approach $12 billion globally -- that’s a level attained by only a handful of biologics, which are drugs based on a living organism. “While the field has advanced and there are several companies focusing on ADCs, Daiichi in particular seems to have developed a unique expertise.”
Analysts say DS-8201 could triple the number of patients who get powerful targeted treatment for breast cancer, the most common tumor in women that kills more than half a million annually. As importantly, its ability to target cancer cells without affecting normal cells is a key advantage over the take-no-prisoners approach of chemotherapy.
Daiichi’s treatment has been seen to double survival time for advanced breast cancer patients to 20 months from 10, former UBS Securities Japan Co. analyst Atsushi Seki said in March. In trials, patients using DS-8201 experienced less nausea and hair loss compared with chemotherapy. (...)
Another Level
Daiichi Sankyo’s drug takes ADCs to another level. Its advantage is that it carries eight payloads stably to cancer cells, double the number of the industry standard, said Toshinori Agatsuma, head of oncology research at Daiichi Sankyo who led a team that discovered the therapy.
“Currently available ADCs are far from being perfect technically because the payload linked to antibodies aren’t properly delivered to cancer cells,’’ said Agatsuma. “We wanted to challenge and improve that. We were a latecomer in biotech, but I knew it was an area where we could catch up, compete and win.’’
About 2.1 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, according to the World Health Organization. Some 18% of cases are driven by a protein called HER2, and their first treatment is chemotherapy alongside Roche’s Herceptin and Perjeta, a related drug. While DS-8201 is currently in testing for later-stage cancer, the plan is to go up against the first-line treatment in the next two years.
“It would be transformative” if the drug were to become the sole first-line treatment, said David Fredrickson, president of AstraZeneca’s oncology business. “If we can eliminate the side effects associated with chemotherapy, that would be a tremendous benefit for women.”
Drugs like Herceptin only target high levels of HER2, and women with lower levels must rely on hormone therapy or chemotherapy. That’s where DS-8201 has the potential to serve far more patients, treating those with both higher and lower levels of HER2.
by Kanoko Matsuyama, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Science Photo Library
Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National
Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the sport at this magazine and at Sports Illustrated, once asked a colleague, on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. In 1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the broadcast.
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)
You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Leo Espinosa[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
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