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Snippets

I don’t know at what temperature my parents kept the childhood house, but I do remember that in winter, sheets, ironed by the mother, were very cold when I got between them at bedtime. I would lie as still as possible to warm the spot where I lay. I knew that if I moved, I would encounter those icy places that had not been warmed by my body. Even so, I never considered wearing socks to bed. That was just not done. Thus, my mortification when I had perhaps my only sleepover at John N.’s house. I walked across his room to the bed with my socks on. I was going to sit down and take them off, but before I got there, Johnny said authoritatively, “In this house, we don’t sleep with socks on.” I told him my intentions, which were true, but the protestation sounded lame even to me. That unjust shame has stayed with me ever since.

I have mocked the spouse many times for wearing socks to bed. But, in one of my many acts of marital devotion, I have always allowed her to warm her icy toes and heels on me. However, I have now seen stories, which must surely be fake, that wearing socks for sleeping is a good thing. Of more concern: there have been a few nights when my aging feet would not warm up under the covers, and I have had to put on socks to sleep. I have not yet said as a result, “Death Take Me Now,” but, really, this is totally unacceptable.

Perhaps it is still too early, but I would like to see a good study of the varying responses to the Covid pandemic, not just assertions by ideologues. States and localities differed in mask, social distancing, vaccination, and other requirements and practices. How did these correlate with outcomes such as hospitalizations and deaths? The rates of vaccinations varied. How much, if at all, did hospitalizations and deaths also vary? Different localities had different school policies. Have school test results varied in sync with the different policies? What side effects correlate with vaccinations? How frequent and severe are they? I would like good information on these topics, but it is sad but true, I don’t expect our present government to provide any.

Patrick McGee in his thought-provoking book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (2025), explains how Apple became enmeshed in China. Apple did not outsource in a traditional sense. It did not simply contract with Chinese companies for a product or a service. Instead, Apple, obsessed with quality and efficiency, sent design engineers and product designers into Chinese suppliers’ facilities often inventing new production processes and designing new custom parts in the process. The Chinese gained new practical know-how that they now use for more than Apple products.

McGee’s book follows in the footsteps of Erich Schwartzell’s, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (2022). Schwartzell documents how American filmmakers took things out of movies and put things in to satisfy the Chinese. The practices became so important and internalized that Americans were willing to change their product without being told to or being asked. Meanwhile, the Chinese film industry was being built and strengthened with America’s unwitting help.

More than the film and tech industry have tried to satisfy China. Many enterprises abide by Chinese censorship rules. For example, the NBA apologized when a team executive tweeted support for Hong Kong protesters who had been kicked out of an NBA exhibition game in China. A reporter was not allowed to ask the players how they felt about this. There are many more examples of U.S. companies kowtowing to the vast Chinese market, but these shall remain for another time.

Posted on by rjonakait

Twelve Ways to Win

In the last post, “77 Million,” I wrote that the real story of the last presidential election was not the switch to Trump, which was not large, but the “lost votes,” the many who had voted for Biden but did not vote at all this year. A story in a Pennsylvania news source neatly illustrates the point. A Philadelphia district that is overwhelmingly Black had shifted to Trump, but in that district Trump had gotten only three more votes than he had in 2020. Harris, however, had received 81 fewer ballots than Biden had four years earlier.

After the previous post, a friend said that he agreed with my analysis but wondered what my explanation was for the lost votes. I thought more about that and realized that I did not have a single overarching explanation but only a collection of partial possibilities. Here are some of them.

One. Donald Trump is a remarkable politician. His dominant qualities—liar, ignoramus, bully, fearmonger, bad economist, embarrassing dancer—should make him a laughingstock, but despite these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, he connects deeply with a broad swath of Americans. They are devoted to him like teenage girls to a K-pop boy band. There’s a major difference, however: American devotion to him has not been a passing fancy; we don’t seem to grow out of it. Other presidents—Reagan, Clinton, Obama—had devoted admirers, but not like Trump. To me the attraction is inexplicable, but I recognize his draw.

Two. Americans have short memories, and Trump benefited. In 2020, almost all voters held strong and accurate images of the Trump presidency. Despite the pandemic, the economy was about the same as it was under Obama, with some indicators stronger and some weaker than in the previous four years. (E.g., inflation was low under Trump, but it was even lower under Obama.) However, all was not well in the country. Crime had started to increase under Trump which was disturbing. Life expectancy had started to fall even apart from the pandemic. The border was a problem, and Trump had failed to fix it. Even Obama had deported more people than Trump had. Trump’s wall seemed a joke. His attempts to erase the Affordable Care Act were disturbing. Deficits skyrocketed. He played footsy with dictators, which was disturbing. His many grift-like actions were disturbing. A lot of things were disturbing, but that was all forgotten four years later. Moreover, of all the bad things that were predicted to happen because of his four years did not happen. For example, Biden continued the China tariffs that liberals had decried ruinous. Biden continued Trump border policies that were labeled ineffectual and heartless. More and more politicians supported the border wall. Trump was still the same Trump, but to many he did not look as bad as he had in 2020.

Three. Americans are not only forgetful; they are ignorant. Americans want simple answers, and Trump benefited. The border problem has many causes. We need a reform of our immigration laws. We need more border agents. We need more immigration judges. The problem is fueled by criminal gangs and political unrest in various countries. The problem is exacerbated by poor economies in various countries. It is intensified by the wider spread of media coverage that tells more and more people that they can find a better life if they can get to the U.S. And so on. Americans don’t want to confront such complexities. They don’t want to concede that the problem has been years in the making. They want a simple answer. And to many, the border problem is simply the fault of the Biden-Harris administration. (When conservatives refer to 2017 to 2021, they never say the Trump-Pence administration.)

More simplistic thinking follows: If the border were tightened, for example, we could tackle our fentanyl problem. (We have already forgotten that Trump promised to solve the fentanyl crisis when he ran in 2016.) Inflation. Well, inflation was the consequence of many complex events, but Americans didn’t want to understand that. Neither did we want to know that many developed countries had a worse inflation problem than we had, and that perhaps our inflation, bad as it was, was not so bad. Americans did not want to hear that gas and oil trade in an international market, that supply chains are international, and that the U.S. government does not control these markets. Instead, we want a simple answer, and that answer was that inflation was the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.

Four. Fear sells, and Trump benefited. Many campaigns have tried to make the electorate fearful about the consequences of the other side’s actions. In the first election I paid attention to, JFK stressed a “missile gap” at a time when nuclear concerns were high. (That gap seemed to disappear once he took office.) This year Trump and his acolytes did a much better job of spreading fear than the other side—fear of crime generally, fear of immigrant crime more specifically, fear of immigration, fear of fentanyl, fear of transgender people. That last fear should not be underestimated. For most of the election season, I was in Pennsylvania, a swing state for the presidential election with a closely contested Senate seat and several close House races. It seemed as if every third political ad — and the ads ran nonstop — by those on the right brought up Democratic support for trans people. They damned Harris for supporting government payment for gender-transforming operations. They hinted that Democratic candidates were going to allow trans people to play girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms. This country may have become more accepting of gays, but many, many Americans see trans people as unsettling and dangerous. Trump and his supporters benefited.

Five. The media has had a fixation on Trump, and Trump benefited. News sources, including, or perhaps especially, liberal ones reported at length whatever Trump was doing or saying. This was not totally surprising. In the run-up to the election, Trump was on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits including his conviction of 34 felony counts in New York. Nevertheless, this coverage overwhelmed coverage of Biden’s accomplishments (how many of us can summarize what is in the Inflation Reduction Act?) and explanations for problems like rising prices or the border. Since memory-impaired Americans seemed less concerned about the bizarre and dangerous behavior of Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020, the media did Trump a favor by focusing on him and not other things.

Six. We don’t know how to handle misinformation, and that benefited Trump, too. A higher percentage of misinformation came from the right than the left, and listeners ate it up.

Seven. Liberals and Democrats are poor at messaging. Who named it the Inflation Reduction Act? I know. I know. It was meant to reduce inflation, and it certainly did help. But it was hard not to hear it as a laugh line when the cost of milk and eggs and gas and mortgages was unusually high. Why didn’t they change the name and start focusing on all the good the Act accomplished?

Eight. But perhaps the chief cause of Trump’s (narrow) victory came throughout Biden’s term. While Americans were concerned about the border and inflation, Biden seemed indifferent to those problems. He might have been able to do little or nothing about them, but he should have appeared more concerned about them. He did not. And Trump won.

Similarly, every third ad against Harris I saw featured her being asked what she would have done differently from Biden. The response was the blank look of a doe in the headlights with the answer of “nothing.” It was powerful each time, and I saw it many, many times. Such a question had to be anticipated. How could she not have had a better immediate response? (Later on — too later on — she did.) There was also the never-ending clip of her crowing about the success of “Bidenomics.” Democrats should have been ready to explain what they were hoping to accomplish and what they had accomplished. They did not. And Trump won.

Nine. In the eyes of many Americans the Democratic Party does not stand for anything, and Trump benefited. Worse: Democrats were seen as the party that stood for trans rights, defunding the police, DEI, and critical race theory. But what else? For many, Democrats didn’t stand for anything that benefited “ordinary” people. Biden’s support for the United Auto Workers made no dint in this perception.

Ten. Covid hurt Trump in 2020. It helped him this year. His inconsistent and bizarre reactions to the pandemic were fresh four years ago. Now many have selective memories of that time. Unless personally affected, few seem to remember that one million American died. Instead, today Covid is remembered by many as a time of unnecessary school closings that harmed kids and strained parents; of unnecessary face masks; of governmental overreach on vaccines and social distancing. These are all reasons to distrust the government, and Trumps surrogates did a great job of reminding us of this distrust. At the same time, some see the Democrats as the ones who believe in big government of the sort that made Covid more hellish. Trump benefited.

Eleven. Many are not ready for a woman to be the Commander-in-Chief. We cannot discount that this country continues to have a strong strain of misogyny. Trump benefited big time from it.

Twelve. What do you think contributed? I’d love to hear them.

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Memories Put Back in Disorder

“Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.” Cyril Connolly.

I was wiped out on the first days when I had Covid. I mostly slept and ate. By day three, I had regained some strength. I read a lot, but I always read a lot. I watched a lot of television, but I always watch a lot of television. As the days hit mid-afternoon, however, I got tired enough that I could not concentrate for long on anything. By evening, I was tired and incredibly bored. I was too tired and bored to read any more, but not tired enough to fall asleep through the night. No streaming shows or movies held my attention. I just kept clicking the remote, and that is my explanation as to how I was on an obscure cable channel secreted in the 1270s on my system. I had landed on a half-completed episode of The Rockford Files.

Fifty years ago Rockford was one of my favorite shows, and I regularly watched it on NBC on, I think, Friday nights. Seeing Rockford’s car (a Firebird?) and hearing the theme music, I instantly recognized the show, which was confirmed when Jim Garner stepped out of the auto, windows always rolled down, wearing a trademark off-the-rack sports coat. Memories flooded back to our first Brooklyn place, which was referred to as a garden apartment (aka basement). We had little money, and we had built a loveseat and other seating out of milk crates, for which the spouse had made foam rubber cushions covered in maroon suede. I had found the suede in a leather warehouse in a part of Manhattan that now has multi-million-dollar homes. (We were not what you’d call sophisticated about upholstery. One evening a guest wearing white pants left our place with red suede dye all over the back of her pants. The spouse and I exchanged a look that indicated we would keep to ourselves what her backside looked like.)

Seeing Rockford brought back the memory of a real-life shooting incident. Back in the ‘70s I never felt particularly unsafe, but this event was a semi-serious one. One Friday night during a Rockford commercial, I went to throw out the garbage, and I found our street lined with police cars. I asked one of the officers what was going on, and he told me to go back inside because there was a report of gunshots down the block. I was concerned mostly for my car which was parked across the street with a cop crouched behind it using it for cover. It was a scrap heap, but still. I heard another cop very hyped-up say that he thought the shooter was on a rooftop on my side of the street and had fired his gun at him. It turned out whomever he saw was not the shooter but probably another cop. It turned out that the shooter was in an apartment building halfway down the block on the other side of the street. That man apparently had let off some random rounds not aiming at anybody. Negotiators came, but the shooter committed suicide without harming anyone else.

These half-century-old memories did not make me feel young, but then scenes from rest of the Rockford show reminded me further how old I am. At the beginning of this episode Rockford had been hired to do something, and he had felt set up by whatever had happened as a result. He sought out the woman who had hired him. She was another private investigator who was using Rockford to decoy police officers. After he learned that, Rockford told her that the two of them were going to the scene of the crime (or someplace). She was not happy about that but, protesting, got into the Firebird, with, of course, the windows rolled down. I began to wonder when air conditioning in cars became common and wouldn’t Rockford have had AC in Los Angeles? But, of course, the weather was always perfect wherever Rockford went. And besides riding with the windows down was super cool. When Rockford stopped at a light, his reluctant passenger pulled on the door handle to escape. He smiled that great James Garner smile and held up that little rod-like thing that you used to push down to lock the doors. He had apparently unscrewed it, and she could not get out. (Clever, that Rockford!) And so I wondered when that locking device (which some of my criminal defense clients knew how to spring open with the use of a bent coat hanger) had been sensibly replaced in cars. I could not remember the last car I had that had come equipped with them. But my attention returned to the show. I was intrigued what Rockford was going to do to keep the woman in the car when he pulled into a gas station. I thought that when he went to the gas pump, she would be able to scoot across the front bench seat to get out. But, of course, this was fifty years ago. A station attendant came to the car, and Rockford remained behind the wheel. Back in the day, you did not pump your own gas. (Still true in New Jersey, but nowhere else that I am aware of.) And Rockford said what–sick as I was–almost made me laugh. He told the attendant, “Three dollars’ worth.”