Oops

 Two vivid images from my personal memory: One, I am standing in the kitchen of my apartment in Medford, a couple years back. I have finished a long day and an even longer commute from Boston's north suburbs. I am desperately hungry, having ordered some Thai food several hours ago. After a long wait, the food has finally arrived. I have dished out the entire steaming pile onto a plate. Then, I spin around, intending to carry the dish to the table, where I will finally and gratefully snarf it down. 

Instead, the plate falls through my fingers. It shatters on the ground. In a flash, in a twinkling, the entire heaping, steaming pile of noodle deliciousness is scattered across my dirty kitchen floor. Rendered instantaneously inedible. And as I stare down at the shattered plate, its shards mixed in with the clear strings of pad-woon-sen, I can picture in my mind's eye the plate reassembling itself. Like, it should be possible to rewind time slightly. Don't I get a do-over? 

Richard Simmons' Ministry

There's a podcast I listened to years ago, when it first aired, and convinced myself at the time I didn't like. In the years since, though, I've found myself thinking back to it off-and-on, and if the measure of a show's quality is the extent to which it stays with you, this one clearly managed to make an impression. 

The pod in question is Stitcher's Missing Richard Simmons, produced in 2017, and I suspect my feeling of disappointment with it when it first aired had something to do with a sense of false advertising. In those days, we weren't yet so familiar with the concept of the "literary" podcast, which S-Town and the like were about to perfect and make famous, just a few months later. When we turned to that voice in the ear, back then, we weren't expecting profound insight; many of us were looking for sheer comedy or escapism. 

New blog

 Attention Turkey fans! I am now officially also blogging on Substack: please check it out here and feel free to subscribe if you like what you see! I'm still feeling out as I go what kinds of content I intend to publish there versus here. My initial thought is that the Substack account will be more narrowly focused on politics and human rights advocacy—in short, more strictly in keeping with my professional identity. Personal reflections, by contrast, may continue to show up here. 

My thought was also to keep the Substack geared more toward a general audience. So I'm trying to cut back on the extraneous allusiveness and pretension. Probably failing. Judge for yourselves:

https://propensity4selfsubversion.substack.com 

Productivity

 My sister has recently been telling me about the idea of the "laziness myth"—that is, the argument that, in the ultimate scheme of things, there is no such thing as "laziness"—and I think I'm starting to see the point. 

Now, admittedly, I have made my feelings plain on this blog before about the emergent cult of "doing nothing"—the new movement that seeks to bust what is known as "productivity culture"—as promulgated in New York Times op-eds and think pieces over the past two years, and as shared over a thousand Teams and Slack channels by colleagues whom one fears may have already taken its lessons too much to heart. 

To put it simply, I'm against it. And not just for knee-jerk cultural reactionary reasons (though these no doubt play a role)—but more seriously because it seems to be at odds with what we know about the psychology of human happiness, which consists—at least in part—in setting oneself achievable goals and meeting them on a daily basis; not just in lounging about and doing whatever one wants all the time. 

Too Late

No one can say Biden wasn’t warned. As soon as the administration announced in April that U.S. forces would imminently depart Afghanistan, human rights advocates—including those who opposed the war from the start, and the U.S. crimes perpetrated in the course of it—expressed fear for what would happen to Afghan allies of the U.S. war effort if left behind. They laid out comprehensive recommendations to the administration, calling on them to evacuate at-risk civilians to U.S. territory, using emergency parole until a path to permanent status could be found. 

The administration delayed. The result is that today Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, and only around 2,000 Afghan interpreters and other U.S. partners have so far been successfully evacuated. Untold thousands of others remain behind in desperate peril. 

"Scary, dangerous stuff"

 Today, I received a fundraising email from one of the innumerable progressive advocacy and Democratic Party-aligned mailing lists that I never directly signed up for, but who possess my information nonetheless through some web on online connections. In only three words, the message's subject line managed to encapsulate everything that is flawed and vaguely annoying about nonprofit marketing communications. It read simply: "Scary, dangerous stuff."

Did it "work"? Yes, I suppose I clicked on it. Did I want to know what this dangerous and scary stuff might be? Okay, sure, I read through it enough to find out. And did it live up to the hype? Did its subject matter really amount to "scary, dangerous stuff" after all? Yes, I suppose I would have to say so again. It was talking about unprecedented voter suppression measures being enacted by right-wing state legislatures around the country, which surely are both scary and dangerous. 

Byrd-Brained

As you may have heard, immigration advocates—including even such peripheral ones as myself—are currently engaged in a glacially-paced legislative struggle to try to attach path to citizenship provisions to Congress's budget reconciliation process. After years of focusing on abrupt and startling executive branch decisions (coming not only from Trump, alas, but also his successor), in which some horrible yet fast-developing news item would reliably break every Friday evening, just as we were ready to sign off, it has been strange to rediscover that there are still some policy-related news cycles that do not exhaust themselves within a 24-hour timeframe. The ones that drag on longer, we're re-discovering, tend to be those that depend on the two chambers of Congress to conduct the people's business. 

This particular slog involves the question of whether or not including path-to-citizenship provisions in the reconciliation deal will be approved under Senate rules. This ought not to be a problem; precedent exists for featuring immigration-related items in reconciliation, when the Republicans were in power. But there remains the possibility that the Senate parliamentarian may—for whatever reason—advise against these measures, under a Senate provision known as the "Byrd rule" (originally designed to limit the range of policy measures that can be enacted through reconciliation). If the parliamentarian does recommend against it, of course, all is not lost. But we would then face the much harder task of trying to convince the narrow Democratic majority and Vice President Harris (as the Senate's presiding officer) to overrule her decision.