Posted on by rjonakait

Random Thoughts

Without Any Sense of Irony

Without any sense of irony, Trump announced from Mar-a-Lago that federal workers could not work remotely.

In E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1990), the great and tragic David Foster Wallace wrote that irony is “not a rhetorical mode that wears well. . . . This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. . . . Irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisy it debunks.” Wallace makes reference to Third World coups overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes without establishing a superior governing alternative. “All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I am saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say?”

Without any sense of irony, Trump blocks refugees into the United States but maintains that other countries should take in the people of Gaza. There is a lot of sparsely settled land fifty miles west of Mar-a-Lago that could easily settle a million Gazans. And if Trump thinks the Gazans would not like the Florida humidity, there is a lot of arid land in west Texas, Arizona, and Nevada where they could be settled. Of course, some of this is Native American land, but when has that ever stopped us?

Hair We Go!

We attorneys love to draw distinctions between situations. A precedent does not apply, we argue, because that situation is different from that of my client.  The spouse, although not having gone to law school, seems to have picked up the lawyerly trait. For example, when she looks at my disheveled, gray, wispy hair, and I say that the hairdo was good enough for Einstein, she draws a distinction.

Is this another reason to distrust the Bible? Proverbs 20:29 says, “The glory of young men is their strength, but the beauty of old men is their gray hair.”

The spouse did not want to go out last night, but her hair looked too good to stay home.

Super Bowl Retribution

I root against both Kansas City and the Eagles, so I may not watch the football game. Even so, I wonder if this will apply to the Super Bowl: “Philadelphia, where no good deed goes unpunished.” Steve Lopez, The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 15, 1995. Quoted in Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

Trans—gression

During the election season in Pennsylvania with contested presidential, Senate, and House races, I saw ad after ad of candidates seeking votes by promising to stand up to the trans people, focusing particularly on trans girls in girls’ sports. I wondered at the time how many transgender athletes are in girl sports and asked Siri. She gave me links to news articles that said that in 2023 there were maybe 100 in college sports and five in K-12. Five.

In the picture I saw of Trump signing an executive order seeking to end transgender girls playing sports showed him, pen in hand, surrounded by a crowd of pre-teen girls. I noted to myself that those girls in the signing photo are much more likely to encounter an abusive coach than compete with or against a transgender female. Oh, wait. They were standing next to a sexual abuser.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

As too often happens, my wispy hair, almost completely gray, was standing up and out at all angles, and I thought of what the spouse has never said: “You are as smart as Einstein. You should look more like him.”

A friend told me, “If your wife laughs at your jokes, you can be sure that you know some good ones or you have a good wife.”

Is this true? “If you believe that God made women without a sense of humor it is because then they could love men without laughing at them.”

Much is said about culture wars, which today seem to center on gender and gender identity. But not long ago we had culture wars about something different—evolution. What has happened to that? Did one side win, and if so, how? Did the anti-science battlers give up? Did the other side conclude that the Bible was literally infallible? Or is that culture war still going on?

“True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.” Unamuno.

David Foster Wallace wrote, “I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audiences are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” Is he right?

I was in college when I heard a classmate say that he was going to buy “an ice cream.” I had never heard that phrase before and thought it was silly. You can buy an ice cream cone. You can buy an ice cream bar. You can buy an ice cream sandwich. You can buy a pint of ice cream. You can buy some ice cream. But you can’t buy an ice cream. I hear that expression often, and it still grates.

For most of their history, beliefs of Southern Baptists were firmly antithetical to those of Roman Catholicism. Now increasingly the institutions are allied and similar. For example, when Roe v. Wade was decided, the Southern Baptists were not against legalized abortion. Now that Roe has been overturned, Catholics and Baptists find themselves on the same side of that issue. The Southern Baptists were firmly against public aid to religious schools. Now both institutions seek public moneys for their schools. Southern Baptists were opposed to their churches being involved in politics, but that, too, has changed, and the Baptists are like the Catholics. And now the news indicates a tragic way that Southern Baptists have become more like Catholics. The Department of Justice is investigating widespread sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention and its churches.

The philosopher was right: “You cannot humiliate a hog by throwing mud at him.”

At this time of year I wonder how the ant acquired its reputation for being extremely industrious when so many are on a picnic.

“None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.” Benjamin Franklin.