Last night, an ad played for fifteen seconds at the start of a YouTube video—and I'm still kicking myself for letting it play to the end. I was effectively suckered in. Goddammit, their tricks worked on me.
The ad consisted of a series of wholesome images and awe-inspiring scenes, set to the sounds of a child's voice asking some very valid questions: "Why are we here?" "Is someone punishing us?"
Here's the thing about living with a loved one with terminal illness. They are still alive. You can wake up every morning and see them. If you are mourning their absence in advance, you can still go and give them a hug. That, surely, is something.
But it can also give one an illusion of normality. On a given day, you can catch yourself up in the miniature struggles for survival and daily living. You can lose yourself in your work. You can forget, for a time, that anything's changed.
In an essay on Emily Dickinson, collected in his Required Writing, Philip Larkin refers in passing to "the psychologists' assertion that an obsession with death conceals a fear of sex."
Larkin—whose poems evoke more than enough dread of both—may have known whereof he spoke.
I've never been a good barfer. I can count on one hand the number of times in my conscious (post–five year life old) life when I've thrown up.
Once was when I was on a bike ride for a DACA advocacy action for work, and I misjudged ahead of time my ability to bike several miles uphill without having the slightest prior physical training or exercise.
Jesus Christ! That was all I could think to say to myself, when I read the AP story this morning about Pete Hegseth's latest blood-curdling "prayer" to the troops.
Hegseth has a long history at this point of invoking God's name to defend his various wars and atrocities. ("Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks? To murder men and give God thanks!" as Robert Burns would put it.)
In the long weeks when Trump was telegraphing his coming Iran war, I argued against the idea of bombing another country on moral grounds. I said: the United States has no right under international law or justice to invade a country without any plausible theory of self-defense from an imminent threat. Nor did our government have any right to undertake an action that was so obviously fraught with risks to human life on both sides.
But what I didn't emphasize so much was the strategic or prudential case against going to war—largely because that's not the kind of thing I'm so good at thinking about. I didn't realize it would be such a disaster to the U.S. government from a purely self-interested standpoint too. I didn't realize it would play so terribly with Trump's own audience in opinion polling. I didn't realize that bombing Iran could upset the whole global economy. And so, now that all those things have come to pass, I feel I missed a chance to say "I told you so."
In that Erdogan Pizza book I've been talking about all week, John Dolan writes at one point about the perverse pride he takes in being a lapsed Catholic.
Emphasis on the Catholic. As in, it's not that he's proud to be a lapsed Catholic, so much as a lapsed Catholic. It's the specific confession from which he has fallen that constitutes the badge of honor.
