[ed. Paul Davids is one of my favorite YouTube guitar instructors. Here he describes his new home studio (mine is quite a bit more utilitarian.]
Friday, October 9, 2020
An Earlier Universe Existed Before the Big Bang
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon.
They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes ‘leak’ radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely.
The timescale for the complete evaporation of a black hole is huge, possibly longer than the age of our current universe, making them impossible to detect.
However, Sir Roger believes that ‘dead’ black holes from earlier universes or ‘aeons’ are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking’s theories were correct.
Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes.
Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: “I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation.
“The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.
“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.
“So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.
“We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points.”
The idea is controversial, although many scientists do believe that the universe operates in a perpetual cycle in which it expands, before contracting back in a ‘Big Crunch’ followed by a new Big Bang. (...)
Sir Roger proved that when objects become too dense they suffer gravitational collapse to a point of infinite mass where all known laws of nature cease, called the singularity.
His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the theory of relativity since Einstein, and increased evidence for the Big Bang. (...)
Commenting on the prize, Prof Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, said it was sad that Prof Hawking had not been alive to share the prize.
“Penrose is amazingly original and inventive, and has contributed creative insights for more than 60 years.
“There would, I think, be a consensus that Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity.
“Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose."
by Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph/Yahoo News | Read more:
Image:APA Picturedesk Gmbh/Shutterstock/APA Picturedesk Gmbh/Shutterstock
Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon.
They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes ‘leak’ radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely.
However, Sir Roger believes that ‘dead’ black holes from earlier universes or ‘aeons’ are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking’s theories were correct.
Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes.
Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: “I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation.
“The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.
“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.
“So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.
“We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points.”
The idea is controversial, although many scientists do believe that the universe operates in a perpetual cycle in which it expands, before contracting back in a ‘Big Crunch’ followed by a new Big Bang. (...)
Sir Roger proved that when objects become too dense they suffer gravitational collapse to a point of infinite mass where all known laws of nature cease, called the singularity.
His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the theory of relativity since Einstein, and increased evidence for the Big Bang. (...)
Commenting on the prize, Prof Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, said it was sad that Prof Hawking had not been alive to share the prize.
“Penrose is amazingly original and inventive, and has contributed creative insights for more than 60 years.
“There would, I think, be a consensus that Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity.
“Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose."
by Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph/Yahoo News | Read more:
Image:APA Picturedesk Gmbh/Shutterstock/APA Picturedesk Gmbh/Shutterstock
Burning Injustice
Fifty four degrees centigrade is the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth. Registered in California’s Death Valley only two months ago, it signalled what was to come. The next day fires erupted in the north of the state that eventually snowballed into the largest single fire in its history. Among the shocking scenes of red skies and destroyed homes, we might forget that it was only as little as two years ago that the last fire season records in California were broken. The smoke from those flames clouded the skies as far away as New York City. Yet, the vision it presented of our future could not have been clearer.
Whether it is the flames of the wet Amazon or the fires of the frozen Arctic, wildfires have become the canary in the gold mine. The urgency of a fire is a far cry from the dry scientific language of global warming. They represent everything that is terrifying about climate change. Fire rips through the natural and physical world, leaving behind a blackened and uninhabitable landscape, like watching the next century play out on fast forward. All that is left is a wasteland, showing us, in the words of T.S. Elliot’s poem, “fear in a handful of dust”.
Of the 295,000 people that were evacuated in the 2018 California inferno, two names in particular hit the news. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were forced to abandon their $60 million mansion in the serene gated community just outside of Los Angeles, known as the Hidden Hills. The Hills are home to several Hollywood stars and celebrities, including Kylie Jenner (the world’s youngest billionaire), Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears.
When the fire finally started to die down, the couple found themselves having to put out the flames of their own publicity crisis. Reports started to enfold that the couple had hired a private fire team to protect their mansion, a decision they were publicly burned for as critics raged that they should not be able to pay for protection. In an attempt to stem the crisis, Kim Kardashian appeared on ‘The Ellen Show’ to present a $100,000 donation to a firefighter and his wife who had lost their homes in the fire, in a declaration of their devotion to the public Californian firefighting service.
Whether Kim and Kanye were wrong for going private is not really the issue here. But it does raise the question – why couldn’t they rely on the public fire service to protect their home? In answering this question, we will see that the climate crisis is a class crisis. As the world warms and becomes ever increasingly hostile to human life, class divides will be sharpened. This is not inevitable. But there are many features of the 2018 Californian wildfires that show the path we are on, an allegory for a century which will be defined by its relationship to the elements.
Fire Services Run by Insurers
During the fires, the Californian fire service was stretched well beyond capacity, having to call in backup from seventeen other states. This was in part due to the gutting of the public service in the era of privatisation. Starting in the 1980s, the US began to promote more and more private actors in the fire industry, under the neoliberal idea that going private would improve efficiency. By 2018, the National Wildfire Suppression Association – the main lobby group representing over 250 private fire-fighting companies – claimed that 40% of the country’s fire service has been privatised.
If there was one company that would be responsible for pioneering the private fire service it would be the American Insurance Group (AIG) – the world’s largest insurance company. In 2005, the AIG kickstarted the business model of getting rich people to pay a massive premium in exchange for a bespoke team. According to the group’s press release, the ‘Wildfire Defence Service’ serves thousands of homes across California and has been taken up by nearly half of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. That AIG was behind these developments is telling. Alongside its bespoke service, the company was also developing a financial product that would help to ultimately set the global economy on fire.
Insurance companies may sound like boring places of little importance, but they played a major part in bringing about the 2008 financial crisis. In the lead up to the crisis, AIG was making billions from reckless financial speculation. When things turned sour, AIG had to turn to the US government for a bailout, with taxpayers forking out $182.3 billion of public money to save the insurance giant. Many of the dodgy deals that led to AIG’s problems trace back to a division in their London office, run by a man called Joseph Cassano, or as the papers call him, “the man who crashed the world”. Despite losing billions, he left AIG without being held to account for his actions and with a massive financial payout: $280 million in cash and an additional $34 million in bonuses.
The story of the Californian wildfires is not just the usual story of privilege paying for protection. To fill the void left by 40 years of privatisation, the government had to rely on its bulging prison population to put out the flames. To this day prisoners make up a vast chunk of the Californian fire service and these prisoners are not just a token part of the force – nearly 40% of Californian firefighters are inmates. That is over 4,000 people. For their services, they are paid a token $1 an hour; receive no benefits; and if they die on the job, their families are given no compensation. Employing prisoners for barely a wage saves the US government $100 million a year.
California is infamous for its dramatically oversized and inflated prison population, having grown by 750% since the mid-1970s. According to academic Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the cause of this growth has nothing to do with rising crime rates, which actually fell during this period. The prison population increased because the government built new prisons, in an incarceration construction frenzy that developers proudly called “the biggest in the history of the world”.
The new prisons, paid for largely out of public debt which was never intended to be repaid, provided a new meaning for a state bureaucracy that was under the threat of privatisation. We can see the legacy of this today: California spends six times the amount to put a person behind bars than it does to put them through school. There are now more women in prison in California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970.
From flooding to rising sea levels, fires are not the only ecological threat facing us and science tells us that the damaging effects of climate change will intensify over the coming years. How we respond to these crises will depend on the economic and political institutions that now govern us. What we are witnessing in California is a particularly dystopian vision of the relationship between climate change and class. There, a millionaire class is protected for a steep fee by a multinational corporation that crashed the global economy but was bailed out regardless by taxpayers – who, in turn, have to rely on crumbling state protection. Meanwhile, growing numbers of the poor are locked up and risk their lives fighting the problem for just $1 an hour.
by Ben Tippet, OpenDemocracy via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: PA Images
[ed. Not to mention that former prisoners with a criminal record have significantly reduced chances of finding employment (fire-fighting or otherwise).]
Whether it is the flames of the wet Amazon or the fires of the frozen Arctic, wildfires have become the canary in the gold mine. The urgency of a fire is a far cry from the dry scientific language of global warming. They represent everything that is terrifying about climate change. Fire rips through the natural and physical world, leaving behind a blackened and uninhabitable landscape, like watching the next century play out on fast forward. All that is left is a wasteland, showing us, in the words of T.S. Elliot’s poem, “fear in a handful of dust”.
When the fire finally started to die down, the couple found themselves having to put out the flames of their own publicity crisis. Reports started to enfold that the couple had hired a private fire team to protect their mansion, a decision they were publicly burned for as critics raged that they should not be able to pay for protection. In an attempt to stem the crisis, Kim Kardashian appeared on ‘The Ellen Show’ to present a $100,000 donation to a firefighter and his wife who had lost their homes in the fire, in a declaration of their devotion to the public Californian firefighting service.
Whether Kim and Kanye were wrong for going private is not really the issue here. But it does raise the question – why couldn’t they rely on the public fire service to protect their home? In answering this question, we will see that the climate crisis is a class crisis. As the world warms and becomes ever increasingly hostile to human life, class divides will be sharpened. This is not inevitable. But there are many features of the 2018 Californian wildfires that show the path we are on, an allegory for a century which will be defined by its relationship to the elements.
Fire Services Run by Insurers
During the fires, the Californian fire service was stretched well beyond capacity, having to call in backup from seventeen other states. This was in part due to the gutting of the public service in the era of privatisation. Starting in the 1980s, the US began to promote more and more private actors in the fire industry, under the neoliberal idea that going private would improve efficiency. By 2018, the National Wildfire Suppression Association – the main lobby group representing over 250 private fire-fighting companies – claimed that 40% of the country’s fire service has been privatised.
If there was one company that would be responsible for pioneering the private fire service it would be the American Insurance Group (AIG) – the world’s largest insurance company. In 2005, the AIG kickstarted the business model of getting rich people to pay a massive premium in exchange for a bespoke team. According to the group’s press release, the ‘Wildfire Defence Service’ serves thousands of homes across California and has been taken up by nearly half of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. That AIG was behind these developments is telling. Alongside its bespoke service, the company was also developing a financial product that would help to ultimately set the global economy on fire.
Insurance companies may sound like boring places of little importance, but they played a major part in bringing about the 2008 financial crisis. In the lead up to the crisis, AIG was making billions from reckless financial speculation. When things turned sour, AIG had to turn to the US government for a bailout, with taxpayers forking out $182.3 billion of public money to save the insurance giant. Many of the dodgy deals that led to AIG’s problems trace back to a division in their London office, run by a man called Joseph Cassano, or as the papers call him, “the man who crashed the world”. Despite losing billions, he left AIG without being held to account for his actions and with a massive financial payout: $280 million in cash and an additional $34 million in bonuses.
The story of the Californian wildfires is not just the usual story of privilege paying for protection. To fill the void left by 40 years of privatisation, the government had to rely on its bulging prison population to put out the flames. To this day prisoners make up a vast chunk of the Californian fire service and these prisoners are not just a token part of the force – nearly 40% of Californian firefighters are inmates. That is over 4,000 people. For their services, they are paid a token $1 an hour; receive no benefits; and if they die on the job, their families are given no compensation. Employing prisoners for barely a wage saves the US government $100 million a year.
California is infamous for its dramatically oversized and inflated prison population, having grown by 750% since the mid-1970s. According to academic Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the cause of this growth has nothing to do with rising crime rates, which actually fell during this period. The prison population increased because the government built new prisons, in an incarceration construction frenzy that developers proudly called “the biggest in the history of the world”.
The new prisons, paid for largely out of public debt which was never intended to be repaid, provided a new meaning for a state bureaucracy that was under the threat of privatisation. We can see the legacy of this today: California spends six times the amount to put a person behind bars than it does to put them through school. There are now more women in prison in California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970.
From flooding to rising sea levels, fires are not the only ecological threat facing us and science tells us that the damaging effects of climate change will intensify over the coming years. How we respond to these crises will depend on the economic and political institutions that now govern us. What we are witnessing in California is a particularly dystopian vision of the relationship between climate change and class. There, a millionaire class is protected for a steep fee by a multinational corporation that crashed the global economy but was bailed out regardless by taxpayers – who, in turn, have to rely on crumbling state protection. Meanwhile, growing numbers of the poor are locked up and risk their lives fighting the problem for just $1 an hour.
by Ben Tippet, OpenDemocracy via Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: PA Images
[ed. Not to mention that former prisoners with a criminal record have significantly reduced chances of finding employment (fire-fighting or otherwise).]
Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie
In October 2017, two months after white supremacists had held a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both sides,’ Trump said, comparing the marchers – who carried torches and chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ – with those who had come out to protest against their presence.) In many quarters Kelly was taken to task. But when Trump’s (then) press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked about it, she concurred. ‘I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War.’
Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the notion of the ‘Lost Cause’. ‘Basically,’ Foote said at the start, ‘it was a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromising. Our whole government’s founded on it. And it failed.’
Foote was right, too, in a way: the history of federal compromise with the slave states went all the way back to America’s founding: Southern colonies refused to ratify the Declaration of Independence until Thomas Jefferson struck out a clause attacking the slave trade; the constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the Federal census, granting slave owners disproportionate representation in Congress; the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri and Maine into the US as a slave and a free state, respectively; the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers to decide whether or not slavery would be allowed in their territories; and so on. But what Foote – a novelist and popular historian who never held a position at a university – didn’t say was that slavery lay at the heart of every one of these compromises, that all of them favoured the status quo, and that, when the process finally broke down, it did so despite Lincoln’s best efforts to preserve slavery in the South, on condition that it not be allowed to expand into new territories. By this reckoning (which most historians outside the neo-Confederate fringe agree on) the North didn’t fail to compromise; it compromised all the way to the edge of a cliff.
But the Lost Cause – which holds that the war was fought to defend states’ rights and so to save the Southern way of life – won out anyway in the South, where monuments to soldiers who fell in ‘the war of Northern Aggression’ still stand in town squares, because it allowed white Southerners to pretend that men on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had fought honourably for their own noble causes. It won out in the North because, in theory, it paved the way for national reconciliation. Despite the best efforts of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, it worked its way into the textbooks, where it remained well into the 20th century. (When I was at school in New York in the 1980s, I was taught that the war had been fought over states’ rights; slavery wasn’t much mentioned.) Now Trump’s White House was invoking the Lost Cause again.
To his credit, Burns was quick to respond to Kelly’s statements. ‘Many factors contributed to the Civil War,’ he said on Twitter. ‘One caused it: slavery.’ By and large, his documentary had made the same point. But Americans who watched The Civil War (39 million of them when the series first aired, and many more since) could have been forgiven for drawing other conclusions – in part, because the avuncular Foote was given so much time to make the opposite case. It left the impression that reasonable people on both sides could have reasonable disagreements about the war’s causes.
None of this went unnoticed when The Civil War was released in 1990. Historians wrote papers. Symposiums were held. In 1996, Oxford published Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’: Historians Respond. Two of the essays, by Eric Foner and Leon Litwack, were scathing, but, for the most part, the book’s tone was measured; Burns and Geoffrey Ward, who had written the film’s script, contributed replies. But a funny thing happened as Burns made more documentaries: instead of making more of the views of historians, he shunted them to the sidelines. For all its faults, The Civil War featured 24 historians. Burns’s 2007 film on the Second World War, The War, had 15. The Vietnam War (2017) included two in its chorus of 79 talking heads, and Country Music – which premiered in the States last September and aired, in edited form, on BBC 4 two months later – has only one: Bill Malone, whose book Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (1968) provided the template for Burns’s documentary.
‘Going to a dance was sort of like going back home to mama’s, or to grandma’s, for Thanksgiving,’ Malone says, eight minutes in.
For the most part, they do tell it themselves: Bobby Bare, Garth Brooks, Roseanne Cash, Charlie Daniels, Little Jimmy Dickens, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Randy Scruggs, Connie Smith, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam – a who’s who of Nashville, Austin and Bakersfield turned out for Burns’s camera, 85 strong. They’re a pleasure to watch, and if they’re dishonest, they’re disarming about it. ‘Truth-telling,’ Ketch Secor says in the first episode, ‘which country music at its best is. Truth-telling, even when it’s a big fat lie.’ It’s the stuff in between interviews that’s a drag, because it’s dishonest, too, but in more insidious ways. (...)
There’s a lot more Burns gets wrong, or sweeps under the carpet, and that may be unavoidable, given the scale of his projects. (He tends to work on several at a time.) This one took six years to make, whittling six hundred hours of footage down to sixteen. The credits are 174 names long, not counting the interviewees. Surely, any mistakes must pale next to the effort and service that these films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet keep reappearing. That may be unavoidable, too, when you try to make apolitical films about highly charged subjects. But country music is about as politically charged as an American cultural subject could be because, in a sense, it’s the Lost Cause set to a I-IV-V chord progression: the broken heart longing for simpler times, mother and home, and some sense of stability (stand-ins for the old Southern manse, where the log cabins were also slave shacks); the lip-service paid to Christian values (coupled with belligerence, blood-lust, knee-jerk patriotism, and a native distrust of authority); the lingering persistence of minstrel-show stereotypes, melodies and songs.
Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the notion of the ‘Lost Cause’. ‘Basically,’ Foote said at the start, ‘it was a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromising. Our whole government’s founded on it. And it failed.’
Foote was right, too, in a way: the history of federal compromise with the slave states went all the way back to America’s founding: Southern colonies refused to ratify the Declaration of Independence until Thomas Jefferson struck out a clause attacking the slave trade; the constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the Federal census, granting slave owners disproportionate representation in Congress; the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri and Maine into the US as a slave and a free state, respectively; the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers to decide whether or not slavery would be allowed in their territories; and so on. But what Foote – a novelist and popular historian who never held a position at a university – didn’t say was that slavery lay at the heart of every one of these compromises, that all of them favoured the status quo, and that, when the process finally broke down, it did so despite Lincoln’s best efforts to preserve slavery in the South, on condition that it not be allowed to expand into new territories. By this reckoning (which most historians outside the neo-Confederate fringe agree on) the North didn’t fail to compromise; it compromised all the way to the edge of a cliff.
To his credit, Burns was quick to respond to Kelly’s statements. ‘Many factors contributed to the Civil War,’ he said on Twitter. ‘One caused it: slavery.’ By and large, his documentary had made the same point. But Americans who watched The Civil War (39 million of them when the series first aired, and many more since) could have been forgiven for drawing other conclusions – in part, because the avuncular Foote was given so much time to make the opposite case. It left the impression that reasonable people on both sides could have reasonable disagreements about the war’s causes.
None of this went unnoticed when The Civil War was released in 1990. Historians wrote papers. Symposiums were held. In 1996, Oxford published Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’: Historians Respond. Two of the essays, by Eric Foner and Leon Litwack, were scathing, but, for the most part, the book’s tone was measured; Burns and Geoffrey Ward, who had written the film’s script, contributed replies. But a funny thing happened as Burns made more documentaries: instead of making more of the views of historians, he shunted them to the sidelines. For all its faults, The Civil War featured 24 historians. Burns’s 2007 film on the Second World War, The War, had 15. The Vietnam War (2017) included two in its chorus of 79 talking heads, and Country Music – which premiered in the States last September and aired, in edited form, on BBC 4 two months later – has only one: Bill Malone, whose book Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (1968) provided the template for Burns’s documentary.
‘Going to a dance was sort of like going back home to mama’s, or to grandma’s, for Thanksgiving,’ Malone says, eight minutes in.
Country music is full of songs about little old log cabins that people had never lived in, the old country church that people have never attended. But it spoke for a lot of people who were being forgotten – or felt they were being forgotten. Country music’s staple, above all, is nostalgia. Just a harkening back to the old way of life, either real or imagined.Burns’s producers interviewed Malone in 2014. Two years later, a lot of Americans who were being forgotten, or felt they were being forgotten, voted for Trump, who promised to return them to the ‘old way of life, either real or imagined’. They were the people country songs spoke to; the people Burns’s new film seems to speak for. ‘It depicts our entire history,’ the singer-songwriter Vince Gill said when he appeared with Burns at the 92nd Street Y in New York last September. ‘And what’s beautiful about the way it’s been depicted is that it’s finally given the respect that it’s never had. As someone that’s kind of given their life to it, to finally see our story told with that is – it’s amazing.’ The filmmakers ‘weren’t part of the culture’, Gill said. ‘They weren’t part of the fibre. They weren’t part of the history. But they told it in such a profound and honest way that it’s light years more compelling than if we could have told it ourselves. I think we would have lied.’
For the most part, they do tell it themselves: Bobby Bare, Garth Brooks, Roseanne Cash, Charlie Daniels, Little Jimmy Dickens, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Randy Scruggs, Connie Smith, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam – a who’s who of Nashville, Austin and Bakersfield turned out for Burns’s camera, 85 strong. They’re a pleasure to watch, and if they’re dishonest, they’re disarming about it. ‘Truth-telling,’ Ketch Secor says in the first episode, ‘which country music at its best is. Truth-telling, even when it’s a big fat lie.’ It’s the stuff in between interviews that’s a drag, because it’s dishonest, too, but in more insidious ways. (...)
There’s a lot more Burns gets wrong, or sweeps under the carpet, and that may be unavoidable, given the scale of his projects. (He tends to work on several at a time.) This one took six years to make, whittling six hundred hours of footage down to sixteen. The credits are 174 names long, not counting the interviewees. Surely, any mistakes must pale next to the effort and service that these films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet keep reappearing. That may be unavoidable, too, when you try to make apolitical films about highly charged subjects. But country music is about as politically charged as an American cultural subject could be because, in a sense, it’s the Lost Cause set to a I-IV-V chord progression: the broken heart longing for simpler times, mother and home, and some sense of stability (stand-ins for the old Southern manse, where the log cabins were also slave shacks); the lip-service paid to Christian values (coupled with belligerence, blood-lust, knee-jerk patriotism, and a native distrust of authority); the lingering persistence of minstrel-show stereotypes, melodies and songs.
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet
In 1989, David Bailey, a researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario. Follow-up testing confirmed his findings, and today there is not really any doubt that he was correct. “The hard part about it was that most people didn’t believe our data, because it was so unexpected,” he says. “A food had never been shown to produce a drug interaction like this, as large as this, ever.”
That food was grapefruit, a seemingly ordinary fruit that is, in truth, anything but ordinary. Right from the moment of its discovery, the grapefruit has been a true oddball. Its journey started in a place where it didn’t belong, and ended up in a lab in a place where it doesn’t grow. Hell, even the name doesn’t make any sense. (...)
Grapefruit has long been associated with health. Even in the 1800s and before, early chroniclers of fruit in the Caribbean described it as being good for you. Perhaps it’s something about the combination of bitter, sour, and sweet that reads as vaguely medicinal.
This is especially ironic, because the grapefruit, as Bailey would show, is actually one of the most destructive foes of modern medicine in the entire food world.
Bailey works with the Canadian government, among others, testing various medications in different circumstances to see how humans react to them. In 1989, he was working on a blood pressure drug called felodipine, trying to figure out if alcohol affected response to the drug. The obvious way to test that sort of thing is to have a control group and experimental group—one that takes the drug with alcohol and one that takes it with water or nothing at all. But good clinical science calls for the study to be double-blind—that is, that both the tester and subjects don’t know which group they belong to. But how do you disguise the taste of alcohol so thoroughly that subjects don’t know they’re drinking it?
“It was really my wife Barbara and I, one Saturday night, we decided to try everything in the refrigerator,” says Bailey. They mixed pharmaceutical-grade booze with all kinds of juices, but nothing was really working; the alcohol always came through. “Finally at the very end, she said, ‘You know, we’ve got a can of grapefruit juice. Why don’t you try that?’ And by golly, you couldn’t tell!” says Bailey. So he decided to give his experimental subjects a cocktail of alcohol and grapefruit juice (a greyhound, when made with vodka), and his control group a glass of unadulterated grapefruit juice.
The blinding worked, but the results of the study were … strange. There was a slight difference in blood pressure between the groups, which isn’t that unusual, but then Bailey looked at the amount of the drug in the subjects’ bloodstreams. “The levels were about four times higher than I would have expected for the doses they were taking,” he says. This was true of both the control and experimental groups. Bailey checked every possible thing that could have gone wrong—his figures, whether the pharmacist gave him the wrong dosage—but nothing was off. Except the grapefruit juice.
Bailey first tested a new theory on himself. Felodipine doesn’t really have any ill effects at high dosage, so he figured it’d be safe, and he was curious. “I remember the research nurse who was helping me, she thought this was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard,” he recalls. But after taking his grapefruit-and-felodipine cocktail, his bloodstream showed that he had a whopping five times as much felodipine in his system than he should have had. More testing confirmed it. Grapefruit was screwing something up, and screwing it up good.
Eventually, with Bailey leading the effort, the mechanism became clear. The human body has mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.
Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This can take over 12 hours.
This rather suddenly takes away one of the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing.
And it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough, and the effect doesn’t seem to change as long as you hit that minimum.
None of this is a mystery, at this point, and it’s shockingly common. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some of the medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:
That food was grapefruit, a seemingly ordinary fruit that is, in truth, anything but ordinary. Right from the moment of its discovery, the grapefruit has been a true oddball. Its journey started in a place where it didn’t belong, and ended up in a lab in a place where it doesn’t grow. Hell, even the name doesn’t make any sense. (...)
This is especially ironic, because the grapefruit, as Bailey would show, is actually one of the most destructive foes of modern medicine in the entire food world.
Bailey works with the Canadian government, among others, testing various medications in different circumstances to see how humans react to them. In 1989, he was working on a blood pressure drug called felodipine, trying to figure out if alcohol affected response to the drug. The obvious way to test that sort of thing is to have a control group and experimental group—one that takes the drug with alcohol and one that takes it with water or nothing at all. But good clinical science calls for the study to be double-blind—that is, that both the tester and subjects don’t know which group they belong to. But how do you disguise the taste of alcohol so thoroughly that subjects don’t know they’re drinking it?
“It was really my wife Barbara and I, one Saturday night, we decided to try everything in the refrigerator,” says Bailey. They mixed pharmaceutical-grade booze with all kinds of juices, but nothing was really working; the alcohol always came through. “Finally at the very end, she said, ‘You know, we’ve got a can of grapefruit juice. Why don’t you try that?’ And by golly, you couldn’t tell!” says Bailey. So he decided to give his experimental subjects a cocktail of alcohol and grapefruit juice (a greyhound, when made with vodka), and his control group a glass of unadulterated grapefruit juice.
The blinding worked, but the results of the study were … strange. There was a slight difference in blood pressure between the groups, which isn’t that unusual, but then Bailey looked at the amount of the drug in the subjects’ bloodstreams. “The levels were about four times higher than I would have expected for the doses they were taking,” he says. This was true of both the control and experimental groups. Bailey checked every possible thing that could have gone wrong—his figures, whether the pharmacist gave him the wrong dosage—but nothing was off. Except the grapefruit juice.
Bailey first tested a new theory on himself. Felodipine doesn’t really have any ill effects at high dosage, so he figured it’d be safe, and he was curious. “I remember the research nurse who was helping me, she thought this was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard,” he recalls. But after taking his grapefruit-and-felodipine cocktail, his bloodstream showed that he had a whopping five times as much felodipine in his system than he should have had. More testing confirmed it. Grapefruit was screwing something up, and screwing it up good.
Eventually, with Bailey leading the effort, the mechanism became clear. The human body has mechanisms to break down stuff that ends up in the stomach. The one involved here is cytochrome P450, a group of enzymes that are tremendously important for converting various substances to inactive forms. Drugmakers factor this into their dosage formulation as they try to figure out what’s called the bioavailability of a drug, which is how much of a medication gets to your bloodstream after running the gauntlet of enzymes in your stomach. For most drugs, it is surprisingly little—sometimes as little as 10 percent.
Grapefruit has a high volume of compounds called furanocoumarins, which are designed to protect the fruit from fungal infections. When you ingest grapefruit, those furanocoumarins permanently take your cytochrome P450 enzymes offline. There’s no coming back. Grapefruit is powerful, and those cytochromes are donezo. So the body, when it encounters grapefruit, basically sighs, throws up its hands, and starts producing entirely new sets of cytochrome P450s. This can take over 12 hours.
This rather suddenly takes away one of the body’s main defense mechanisms. If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing.
And it does not take an excessive amount of grapefruit juice to have this effect: Less than a single cup can be enough, and the effect doesn’t seem to change as long as you hit that minimum.
None of this is a mystery, at this point, and it’s shockingly common. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some of the medications that research indicates get screwed up by grapefruit:
- Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium)
- Amphetamines (Adderall and Ritalin)
- Anti-anxiety SSRIs (Zoloft and Paxil)
- Cholesterol-lowering statins (Lipitor and Crestor)
- Erectile-dysfunction drugs (Cialis and Viagra)
- Various over-the-counter meds (Tylenol, Allegra, and Prilosec)
- And about a hundred others.
by Dan Nosowitz, Atlas Obscura | Read more:
Image: Stella Murphy
[ed. We used cytochrome P450 during the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a bio-marker for exposure. Interestingly, the by-products of it's metabolizing function can be more toxic than the original pollutant.]
Chamber of Commerce Quietly Supports a United Government Led by Democrats
One of the more underappreciated pieces of news in a week that exploded with news — leak of Trump’s taxes, the presidential debate, the presidential disease — was this, that a long-time strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has resigned over the Chamber’s decision to back 23 vulnerable House Democrats and to reduce financial support for Republican senatorial candidates.
From Politico:
Needless to say, “moving left” is not the same as “supporting Democrats.”Ryan Grim, writing at The Intercept, calls the Chamber’s transformation a “slow migration of the elite wing of the Republican Party into the Democratic fold.” This seems a much better explanation.
Hedging Their Bets or Trying to Influence the Outcome?
As Rising‘s Saagar Enjeti noted in the video above, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spends $100 million per year, is the largest lobbyist by far in the United States, doling out 30% more money than its nearest competitor.
In the past, all or almost all of that money went to Republicans — 93%, for example, in 2010. This year the Chamber is not only supporting many more Democrats; it’s supporting Democrats in a way that will make a difference in the partisan makeup of Congress. While the Chamber also supports House Republicans, the 29 House freshmen it is backing “are running in some of the most competitive races in the country, including 14 in districts won by President Donald Trump in 2016” according to CNN.
On the Senate side, the Chamber has greatly reduced its spending on vulnerable Republicans, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Politico notes that Reed’s decision to resign “was linked to the Chamber’s unwillingness to spend significant money on Senate races in the closing days of the election” and adds that Ms. Collins is receiving “far less money in 2020 than … in 2014, when [the Chamber] put tens of millions of dollars behind GOP Senate candidates.”
Politico has Reed saying the Chamber is “hedging its bets.” Voices on the libertarian right are much more virulent, calling this a “betrayal” and abandonment of “free market principles.” At the same time Republican leaders see the Chamber as, in House minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s words, “part of this socialist agenda that is driving this country out, and … fighting the president.”
Those are angry, empty words. Biden to Trump at the first debate: “I am not a socialist.” Progressives to world: “It’s true. He’s not. He’s a moderate Republican.”
Three Conclusions
From all this I think we can draw three conclusions, each leading to a different electoral thought.
First, that Ryan Grim is right when he says the elite wing of the Republican Party is being folded into the Democratic Party — not just in theory, but in practice, in dollars, as well. It’s clear that the Chamber and those who give it their money have made the calculation, at least for this presidential cycle, that their interests will be genuinely served by a Biden White House and a unified Democratic Congress.
In other words, they want a united government controlled by the Democratic Party. They know Trump is going to lose (Trump was scheduled to lose even before the recent Covid incident), and they’re working to both maintain a Democratic House majority and to sabotage the current Republican Senate majority.
There’s really no other way to read this news.
Second, as stated above, the Chamber of Congress and the big-league donors who support it know that a Biden White House and Democratic Congress will further their interest far more than a Trump-led divided or Republican government.
If the Chamber is right, progressives looking to “move Biden left” after the election, have their work cut out for them. The only “moving left” the administration will do is on identity issues. On issues involving money, it will “move left” only at the margins and for show.
For example, will Biden ban fracking? Of course not; there are too many big-donor dollars (and banking dollars) involved in that industry. For all his recent words, Biden seeks a “middle ground” on climate issues. It’s easy to promise carbon-free power by 2035,” fifteen years into a future in which he’ll be dead.
Finally, Biden will almost certainly be the next president.
I mentioned a “Trump-led government” above for a reason. Earlier I wrote (“Civil War? What Civil War?“) that almost everyone in the establishment regardless of party, from the military to the national security apparatus to the media to, now, the Chamber of Congress, opposes a return of Donald Trump to the White House. While they’re not working directly against him — that would be a bridge too far — they’re not helping out; in fact, they’re working to give him a Congress he can’t work with.
The truth is this: Donald Trump is such a terrible, unpredictable and embarrassing steward of the American hegemony project that no one with Establishment power wants to see him back. #NeverTrumpers are just a tip of the Republican side of that iceberg. This “betrayal” by the Chamber of Congress, one of the Republican Party’s most stalwart and reliable supporters, strongly supports that contention. (...)
You can bet that if the election is closer than the number of disputed ballots in key electoral-college states, there will be a way to hand the election to whichever candidate the Roberts Court prefers. Will John Roberts, a Republican, give the election to MAGA Republicans or to Chamber Republicans, if he could pick one or the other? John Roberts is a Chamber Republican.
by Thomas Neuburger, Naked Capitalism/DownWithTyranny! | Read more:
[ed. Assuming he survives, of course. See also: Washington’s worst-kept secret (Politico).]
From Politico:
Chamber of Commerce and top political strategist part ways amid turmoilPutting aside the dispute over whether Reed left or was fired, there are two explanations for what the Chamber is doing, and they’re not the same. Reed says he departed because the Chamber “moved left.” The Politico slugline writer says more simply that the Chamber was “shifting toward Democrats.”
Scott Reed, who had been with the business organization for most of the past decade, said it was shifting toward Democrats.
Scott Reed, the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Tuesday that he left the organization after a political shift at the business lobbying powerhouse.
The move comes amid mounting fears among Republicans — including many within the organization — that the traditionally conservative Chamber is moving to the left after endorsing roughly two dozen freshman House Democrats for reelection this year.
Reed explained his departure (the Chamber said he was “fired for cause”) this way: “I can no longer be part of this institution as it moves left.”
Needless to say, “moving left” is not the same as “supporting Democrats.”Ryan Grim, writing at The Intercept, calls the Chamber’s transformation a “slow migration of the elite wing of the Republican Party into the Democratic fold.” This seems a much better explanation.
Hedging Their Bets or Trying to Influence the Outcome?
As Rising‘s Saagar Enjeti noted in the video above, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spends $100 million per year, is the largest lobbyist by far in the United States, doling out 30% more money than its nearest competitor.
In the past, all or almost all of that money went to Republicans — 93%, for example, in 2010. This year the Chamber is not only supporting many more Democrats; it’s supporting Democrats in a way that will make a difference in the partisan makeup of Congress. While the Chamber also supports House Republicans, the 29 House freshmen it is backing “are running in some of the most competitive races in the country, including 14 in districts won by President Donald Trump in 2016” according to CNN.
On the Senate side, the Chamber has greatly reduced its spending on vulnerable Republicans, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Politico notes that Reed’s decision to resign “was linked to the Chamber’s unwillingness to spend significant money on Senate races in the closing days of the election” and adds that Ms. Collins is receiving “far less money in 2020 than … in 2014, when [the Chamber] put tens of millions of dollars behind GOP Senate candidates.”
Politico has Reed saying the Chamber is “hedging its bets.” Voices on the libertarian right are much more virulent, calling this a “betrayal” and abandonment of “free market principles.” At the same time Republican leaders see the Chamber as, in House minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s words, “part of this socialist agenda that is driving this country out, and … fighting the president.”
Those are angry, empty words. Biden to Trump at the first debate: “I am not a socialist.” Progressives to world: “It’s true. He’s not. He’s a moderate Republican.”
Three Conclusions
From all this I think we can draw three conclusions, each leading to a different electoral thought.
First, that Ryan Grim is right when he says the elite wing of the Republican Party is being folded into the Democratic Party — not just in theory, but in practice, in dollars, as well. It’s clear that the Chamber and those who give it their money have made the calculation, at least for this presidential cycle, that their interests will be genuinely served by a Biden White House and a unified Democratic Congress.
In other words, they want a united government controlled by the Democratic Party. They know Trump is going to lose (Trump was scheduled to lose even before the recent Covid incident), and they’re working to both maintain a Democratic House majority and to sabotage the current Republican Senate majority.
There’s really no other way to read this news.
Second, as stated above, the Chamber of Congress and the big-league donors who support it know that a Biden White House and Democratic Congress will further their interest far more than a Trump-led divided or Republican government.
If the Chamber is right, progressives looking to “move Biden left” after the election, have their work cut out for them. The only “moving left” the administration will do is on identity issues. On issues involving money, it will “move left” only at the margins and for show.
For example, will Biden ban fracking? Of course not; there are too many big-donor dollars (and banking dollars) involved in that industry. For all his recent words, Biden seeks a “middle ground” on climate issues. It’s easy to promise carbon-free power by 2035,” fifteen years into a future in which he’ll be dead.
Finally, Biden will almost certainly be the next president.
I mentioned a “Trump-led government” above for a reason. Earlier I wrote (“Civil War? What Civil War?“) that almost everyone in the establishment regardless of party, from the military to the national security apparatus to the media to, now, the Chamber of Congress, opposes a return of Donald Trump to the White House. While they’re not working directly against him — that would be a bridge too far — they’re not helping out; in fact, they’re working to give him a Congress he can’t work with.
The truth is this: Donald Trump is such a terrible, unpredictable and embarrassing steward of the American hegemony project that no one with Establishment power wants to see him back. #NeverTrumpers are just a tip of the Republican side of that iceberg. This “betrayal” by the Chamber of Congress, one of the Republican Party’s most stalwart and reliable supporters, strongly supports that contention. (...)
You can bet that if the election is closer than the number of disputed ballots in key electoral-college states, there will be a way to hand the election to whichever candidate the Roberts Court prefers. Will John Roberts, a Republican, give the election to MAGA Republicans or to Chamber Republicans, if he could pick one or the other? John Roberts is a Chamber Republican.
[ed. Assuming he survives, of course. See also: Washington’s worst-kept secret (Politico).]
The Making of an Hermès Kelly Bag
The Making of an Hermès Kelly Bag (NY Times)
Named for the actress Grace Kelly, who popularized the style in the 1950s, and modeled after a tote long ago used to carry horse saddles, the Hermès Kelly bag requires between 20 and 25 hours of handiwork by a single artisan to create. Such attention to craftsmanship, as illustrated in this video, is representative of the 183-year-old French house’s respect for the time and care that excellence often requires.
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
Eddie Van Halen (Jan., 1955 - Oct., 2020)
[ed. I've never been much of a Van Halen (band) fan, but Eddie was an innovative and exceptionally accomplished guitarist.]
Monday, October 5, 2020
The Last Empire (Hopefully)
Meanwhile……
The minimum wage should loosely be around $22 an hour to have kept pace with inflation and productivity (it isn’t even a third of that now). Diabetic individuals are indeed rationing insulin (despite water-like prices!). Parents are being expected to work full time, have young children at home doing online school–or send them in person during a pandemic! The social contract between citizens and this government seems to be written in a very small print that none of us adequately read before agreeing to.
All this and psychedelics are illegal. Any relief from this onslaught to your very soul must be in the form of a prescription, a liquor store receipt, or the ever popular, mindless scrolling dopamine delivery smart phone. A wonderful way to shut out all meaningful contact—physical presence, but mentally checked out. We are a mangled, disjointed species to be certain, but even we deserve better than this. The question is…..what next?
It seems no longer a question of if, but when as far as the disintegration of the American Empire. It’s truly happening now. Just looking around at the crumbling infrastructure, the raging homelessness, the everyday low level panic that the average American has knowing there is no viable safety net. One misstep and….well, things will go badly.
by Kathleen Wallace, Counterpunch | Read more:
Image: Nathaniel St. Clair
The 'Hinge of History'
Image: Getty
[ed. Haven't been on BBC Futures for a while, so this and a few others.]
Why Does Vladimir Putin Walk Like That?
Image: Yuri Kochetkov / Pool via AP, file
[ed. Gunslinger's Gait. See also: The movements that betray who you are (BBC Future).]
[ed. Gunslinger's Gait. See also: The movements that betray who you are (BBC Future).]
What Would the World Do Without GPS?
Image: NASA
Inside the Lincoln Project’s War Room
The week of Labor Day, the founders of the Lincoln Project, a super pac of Republican operatives who have disavowed their own party in order to defeat President Donald Trump, set up a war room in a location far outside Washington, D.C. Since January, the group, whose founders include the consultants Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, had been targeting Trump with the kind of merciless ads that the strategists had aimed at Democratic candidates throughout their careers. A spot titled “Regret” features the comedian David Cross offering such a long list of Trump’s flaws—“the blatant racism, and the crass sexism, and the deranged narcissism, and pandering to Nazis”—that the recitation is still unspooling as the ad fades out. This type of message is aimed at convincing Republican voters that Trump’s dangerous and divisive impulses imperil the country. Another type of ad is designed to unsettle a single viewer—the President himself—and often appears during TV programs he is likely to watch. “Shrinking” directly addresses Trump, saying, of his notorious Tulsa campaign rally, in June, “You’ve probably heard this before, but it was smaller than we expected.” The founders knew that they were getting to the President when he started tweeting and talking about them, predictably calling their organization the Losers Project.
The founders, who consider themselves Trump “anthropologists,” try to predict the President’s missteps, stockpiling material that can be deployed at the ideal moment. A recent spot, “P.O.W.,” contrasted images of honorable military service with Trump’s denigration of people in the armed forces. The ad débuted shortly before The Atlantic reported that Trump, during a 2018 trip to France, had refused to visit an American cemetery and had referred to the war dead as “suckers.” In the ensuing public outcry, the Lincoln Project tweeted, “Let’s show @realDonaldTrump what real heroes look like,” and asked its followers to tweet photographs of veterans, hashtagged #WeRespectVets. Within an hour, the hashtag had become the leading Politics topic on Twitter. (...)
The Project’s founders are a murderers’ row of conservative operatives. Wilson, who has worked for Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney, counts hundreds of elections, from “dogcatcher to U.S. Senate,” that he and the other founders have helped Republicans win. Schmidt served in the George W. Bush White House, where he was instrumental in seating the Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts. He is widely known for having suggested Sarah Palin as a running mate for McCain, in 2008. Schmidt clearly regrets choosing someone whose crude populism presaged Trump. He was a source for “Game Change,” a book about the McCain campaign that characterized Palin as unprepared and difficult; in September, he said that Palin represented “the beginning of the politics of cowardice and fear.”
Another founder, Reed Galen, whose father worked for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, oversaw with Schmidt the reëlection campaign of the California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver, a Texan whom the Democratic strategist James Carville nicknamed Meat Cleaver Weaver, spent a decade trying to get McCain elected to the Presidency. Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 race against Barack Obama. A notable early Project participant was George Conway, the lawyer who antagonizes Trump on Twitter—“You. Are. Nuts.”—and whose wife, Kellyanne, was a top White House adviser until she resigned, in August. The couple, citing family demands, receded from public life, and George Conway quit the Project.
The consultant Sarah Longwell, who heads a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, said, of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, “They’ve very successfully tapped into the rage that a lot of people feel, including me.” The Project’s scorched-earth approach distinguishes it from similar organizations: the founders, some of whom have entirely shed their Republican identities, have left themselves no clear path of return. (Wilson and Schmidt are now registered Independents.) Longwell said, “In many ways, this is their last stand.”
Most of the Project’s core founders are in their fifties and came of age under Ronald Reagan. They were drawn to Reagan’s optimism and to his belief in fiscally responsible government, which, as Galen points out, “doesn’t necessarily mean lower taxes—it means being smart with taxpayers’ money.” Socially, they favor individual liberty: worship however you want, marry whomever you want. They support responsible gun ownership and a judiciously interventionist foreign policy. Weaver served in the Air Force, and Wilson worked in the Defense Department, but all the founders revere military service. In 2015, Trump disgusted them when he mocked McCain—a fighter pilot who was a P.O.W. during Vietnam—by saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump. (...)
When Schmidt publicly left the Party, in 2018, he tweeted that the Administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was “connected to the worst abuses of Humanity in our history,” including slavery, and said that the current G.O.P. represented a “danger to our democracy.” Galen’s long-held concerns about Trump intensified as he watched the President unleash unmarked officers on Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He told himself, “That’s about as anti-Republican as you can get—unfettered federal power, applied at the state level.” The Project’s sole millennial founder, Ron Steslow, a political strategist, has said, “My generation is being forced to learn that democracy cannot be taken for granted.”
The small number of Republicans who initially assembled the loose coalition now known as the Never Trump movement tended to represent certain interest areas, such as veterans’ affairs. No group had what Galen called “the skills or the willingness” to fight Trump publicly—or to convey explicitly the constitutional dangers of a second term. “He will be unrestrained,” Schmidt said. “And he will be validated.” The Project’s founders felt that the Democrats largely lacked killer instincts. Watching the primary debates, they were dismayed that the candidates rarely mentioned Trump; by focussing on liberal policy divides, they were doing little to win over Republicans. (...)
Some progressives do not see the Project as righteous. They worry that its founders are pushing Democrats to repeat moral and tactical mistakes: tabling transformative proposals that galvanize the liberal base in favor of courting centrists with establishment bromides. The analyst Lincoln Mitchell, writing for CNN, recently observed, “If Biden wins, organizations like the Lincoln Project will have newfound influence and options.” He continued, “They will be well positioned to be a conservative counter to the progressives who would like to see a President Biden tack left once elected.
by Paige Williams, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; source photographs from The Lincoln Project / YouTube
The Project’s founders are a murderers’ row of conservative operatives. Wilson, who has worked for Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney, counts hundreds of elections, from “dogcatcher to U.S. Senate,” that he and the other founders have helped Republicans win. Schmidt served in the George W. Bush White House, where he was instrumental in seating the Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts. He is widely known for having suggested Sarah Palin as a running mate for McCain, in 2008. Schmidt clearly regrets choosing someone whose crude populism presaged Trump. He was a source for “Game Change,” a book about the McCain campaign that characterized Palin as unprepared and difficult; in September, he said that Palin represented “the beginning of the politics of cowardice and fear.”
Another founder, Reed Galen, whose father worked for Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, oversaw with Schmidt the reëlection campaign of the California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver, a Texan whom the Democratic strategist James Carville nicknamed Meat Cleaver Weaver, spent a decade trying to get McCain elected to the Presidency. Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 race against Barack Obama. A notable early Project participant was George Conway, the lawyer who antagonizes Trump on Twitter—“You. Are. Nuts.”—and whose wife, Kellyanne, was a top White House adviser until she resigned, in August. The couple, citing family demands, receded from public life, and George Conway quit the Project.
The consultant Sarah Longwell, who heads a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, said, of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, “They’ve very successfully tapped into the rage that a lot of people feel, including me.” The Project’s scorched-earth approach distinguishes it from similar organizations: the founders, some of whom have entirely shed their Republican identities, have left themselves no clear path of return. (Wilson and Schmidt are now registered Independents.) Longwell said, “In many ways, this is their last stand.”
Most of the Project’s core founders are in their fifties and came of age under Ronald Reagan. They were drawn to Reagan’s optimism and to his belief in fiscally responsible government, which, as Galen points out, “doesn’t necessarily mean lower taxes—it means being smart with taxpayers’ money.” Socially, they favor individual liberty: worship however you want, marry whomever you want. They support responsible gun ownership and a judiciously interventionist foreign policy. Weaver served in the Air Force, and Wilson worked in the Defense Department, but all the founders revere military service. In 2015, Trump disgusted them when he mocked McCain—a fighter pilot who was a P.O.W. during Vietnam—by saying, “I like people that weren’t captured.”
After Obama won his second term, the Republican National Committee commissioned a study that became known as the “autopsy report.” The country’s voting population was diversifying rapidly, and, the report said, young voters were “increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents.” It noted, “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” In a recent book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes, “How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans ‘rapists,’ and called for a religious test to enter the United States?” He goes on, “For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by ‘situational ethics,’ but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.” In January, Wilson told Trevor Noah that Trump “has broken the Republican Party—it doesn’t believe in anything.” Stunningly, the 2020 Republican National Convention put forward no new platform, signalling that the Party’s sole position was fealty to Trump. (...)
When Schmidt publicly left the Party, in 2018, he tweeted that the Administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was “connected to the worst abuses of Humanity in our history,” including slavery, and said that the current G.O.P. represented a “danger to our democracy.” Galen’s long-held concerns about Trump intensified as he watched the President unleash unmarked officers on Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He told himself, “That’s about as anti-Republican as you can get—unfettered federal power, applied at the state level.” The Project’s sole millennial founder, Ron Steslow, a political strategist, has said, “My generation is being forced to learn that democracy cannot be taken for granted.”
The small number of Republicans who initially assembled the loose coalition now known as the Never Trump movement tended to represent certain interest areas, such as veterans’ affairs. No group had what Galen called “the skills or the willingness” to fight Trump publicly—or to convey explicitly the constitutional dangers of a second term. “He will be unrestrained,” Schmidt said. “And he will be validated.” The Project’s founders felt that the Democrats largely lacked killer instincts. Watching the primary debates, they were dismayed that the candidates rarely mentioned Trump; by focussing on liberal policy divides, they were doing little to win over Republicans. (...)
Some progressives do not see the Project as righteous. They worry that its founders are pushing Democrats to repeat moral and tactical mistakes: tabling transformative proposals that galvanize the liberal base in favor of courting centrists with establishment bromides. The analyst Lincoln Mitchell, writing for CNN, recently observed, “If Biden wins, organizations like the Lincoln Project will have newfound influence and options.” He continued, “They will be well positioned to be a conservative counter to the progressives who would like to see a President Biden tack left once elected.
by Paige Williams, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert; source photographs from The Lincoln Project / YouTube
Lockdown Feels Pretty Different the Second Time Around
When Israel imposed a coronavirus lockdown in March, I walked home after raiding the supermarket and was able to hear the birds chirping on Dizengoff Street, one of the busiest arteries here.
The next day I spoke to my father in Jerusalem, where the country’s first death from coronavirus had just been recorded. We both danced around the fact that, since his age made him more susceptible to complications from the virus, it would probably be a long time before we could see each other.
Movement was restricted to within 100 meters (about 330 feet) from one’s home. I taped to our fridge a “schedule” for my children, who were 3½ and 1½, which included assembling puzzles in the living room, coloring on our tiny porch and tent-building in their room. Five days later, I scrapped the “schedule” because every unfilled task felt like a personal failure. When my husband got off work (our dining table became his home office), I would lock myself on the porch with the shutters down to write.
On May 26, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, eager to score a win after barely scraping by in the latest election, declared that we had managed to flatten the curve. Israel had suffered 281 deaths and more than 16,000 people had been infected, but the new infections had dropped to a few dozen cases. “Go have fun!” he said.
The government reopened schools, allowed indoor dining, stopped enforcing social distancing in shopping malls and permitted large weddings. These reckless decisions reversed the public health gains of the first lockdown.
Cases started to spike to over 8,000 a day and hospital beds filled perilously close to capacity by September, and it became clear that another closure was inevitable. On Sept. 18, the government imposed a second national lockdown. But it did not feel like déjà vu.
Whatever trust Israelis had had in the government to lead us through the pandemic has evaporated. The sense of national solidarity — the kind of wartime singleness of purpose that characterized the first lockdown — has been replaced by what can only be described as a free-for-all.
by Ruth Margalit, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Amir Cohen/Reuters
The next day I spoke to my father in Jerusalem, where the country’s first death from coronavirus had just been recorded. We both danced around the fact that, since his age made him more susceptible to complications from the virus, it would probably be a long time before we could see each other.
Movement was restricted to within 100 meters (about 330 feet) from one’s home. I taped to our fridge a “schedule” for my children, who were 3½ and 1½, which included assembling puzzles in the living room, coloring on our tiny porch and tent-building in their room. Five days later, I scrapped the “schedule” because every unfilled task felt like a personal failure. When my husband got off work (our dining table became his home office), I would lock myself on the porch with the shutters down to write.
The government reopened schools, allowed indoor dining, stopped enforcing social distancing in shopping malls and permitted large weddings. These reckless decisions reversed the public health gains of the first lockdown.
Cases started to spike to over 8,000 a day and hospital beds filled perilously close to capacity by September, and it became clear that another closure was inevitable. On Sept. 18, the government imposed a second national lockdown. But it did not feel like déjà vu.
Whatever trust Israelis had had in the government to lead us through the pandemic has evaporated. The sense of national solidarity — the kind of wartime singleness of purpose that characterized the first lockdown — has been replaced by what can only be described as a free-for-all.
by Ruth Margalit, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Amir Cohen/Reuters
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Cinema Therapy: The Sequel
Dee: Jane, do you ever feel like you are just this far from being completely hysterical twenty-four hours a day?
Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day.
— from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
— from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy!
— from Tootsie, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal
Man…2020 has been one long, strange century.
As Howard Beale once said, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Four score and seven years ago (back in March), when portions of America went into a pandemic-driven lock down and our nation turned its lonely eyes to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms in a desperate search for binge-worthy distraction, I published a post sharing 10 of my favorite “therapy movies”.
Now its October (where have the decades gone?) and things are…unsettled. The news cycle of this past week has been particularly trying for those of us who follow that sort of thing (which I assume to be “most of us” who gravitate to this corner of the blogosphere).
With that in mind, here are 10 more personal faves that I’ve watched an unhealthy number of times; films I’m most likely to reach for when I’m depressed, feeling anxious, uncertain about the future…or all the above. These films, like my oldest and dearest friends, have never, ever let me down. Take one or two before bedtime; cocktail optional. (...)
Harold and Maude (Amazon Prime) – Harold loves Maude. And Maude loves Harold. It’s a match made in heaven-if only “society” would agree. Because Harold (Bud Cort) is a teenager, and Maude (Ruth Gordon) is about to turn 80. Falling in love with a woman old enough to be his great-grandmother is the least of Harold’s quirks. He’s a chronically depressed trustafarian who amuses himself by staging fake suicides to freak out his patrician mother (wonderfully droll Vivian Pickles). He also “enjoys” attending funerals-which is where they Meet Cute.
The effervescent Maude is Harold’s opposite; while he wallows in morbid speculation how any day could be your last, she seizes each day as if it actually were. Obviously, she has something to teach him. Despite dark undertones, this is one “midnight movie” that somehow manages to be life-affirming. The late Hal Ashby directed, and Colin Higgins wrote the screenplay. The memorable soundtrack is by Cat Stevens.
Jane: Half the people I know feel that way. The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty-four hours a day.
— from Grand Canyon, screenplay by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
HAL 9000: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
— from 2001: A Space Odyssey, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
George Fields: [to Dorothy/Michael] I BEGGED you to get therapy!
— from Tootsie, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal
Man…2020 has been one long, strange century.
As Howard Beale once said, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” Four score and seven years ago (back in March), when portions of America went into a pandemic-driven lock down and our nation turned its lonely eyes to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming platforms in a desperate search for binge-worthy distraction, I published a post sharing 10 of my favorite “therapy movies”.
Now its October (where have the decades gone?) and things are…unsettled. The news cycle of this past week has been particularly trying for those of us who follow that sort of thing (which I assume to be “most of us” who gravitate to this corner of the blogosphere).
With that in mind, here are 10 more personal faves that I’ve watched an unhealthy number of times; films I’m most likely to reach for when I’m depressed, feeling anxious, uncertain about the future…or all the above. These films, like my oldest and dearest friends, have never, ever let me down. Take one or two before bedtime; cocktail optional. (...)
The effervescent Maude is Harold’s opposite; while he wallows in morbid speculation how any day could be your last, she seizes each day as if it actually were. Obviously, she has something to teach him. Despite dark undertones, this is one “midnight movie” that somehow manages to be life-affirming. The late Hal Ashby directed, and Colin Higgins wrote the screenplay. The memorable soundtrack is by Cat Stevens.
by Dennis Hartley, Digby's Hullabaloo | Read more:
Image: Harold and Maude
[ed. Glad to see Harold and Maude mentioned here (also, The Man Who Would Be King). Check out the initial post: Cinema Therapy: 10 Films That Never Let Me Down (which includes another all-time favorite: Local Hero). See also: Pathologizing Desire (Boston Review).]
The Masque of the Red Death
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. (...)
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death".
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. (...)
The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colours and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in "Hernani". There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulged in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
by Edgar Allan Poe, Project Guttenberg | Read more:
[ed. See also: The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House (New Yorker).]
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