My dad is dying slowly in the living room. He's on twenty-four hour hospice care, and I pass his bed of sickness every time I get up for a meal or to refill my coffee. There's nothing particularly to do but wet his lips and administer doses of morphine.
Somehow, my brain has managed to normalize the situation. At some point, it sprang out of the gear of crisis mode, and I started to think about other things and pick up abandoned lines of thought.
This week brought us news of another AI-related controversy in the literary world. Apparently a number of readers are speculating that this year's winner of a major short story prize was actually created by (or with significant help from) a chatbot.
This seems to be part of the misery we all live with these days—and it wounds in both directions.
For those of us who write our own stuff and aren't winning literary prizes for it—we are jealous at the thought that other people are getting ahead and winning laurels by cheating.
It seems increasingly like our elite institutions are all pulling together to enable Trump's next act of aggression, imperialism, and robbery—this time, against the people of Cuba.
For months now, the U.S. has maintained a crippling oil blockade that has sabotaged the island's economy, leading to rolling blackouts and almost certainly causing the preventable deaths of Cuban civilians by interfering with life-saving medical treatment.
In the first chapter of his classic book of cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton studies a handful of folk tales in their earlier renditions, in order to get a glimpse into peasant mentalités under the Old Regime.
He takes from these stories the conclusion that peasant life in the seventeenth century was brutish and short—that the world for these men and women was unforgiving and remorseless, and so the tales serve primarily to warn against the dangers of naively trusting one's fellow people. The only virtues they applaud—in Darnton's telling—are those of low cunning; a sort of hostile pawkiness in the presence of one's neighbors.
The Russian government—that great exemplar of "Christian" and "Western" values, according to our neo-fascist Putin admirers in this country—recently sentenced a woman to eighteen months in a labor camp. Her crime? Writing K-pop fan fiction with a gay theme.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., our own Putin-inspired fascists are sending out criminal subpoenas against trans health care providers. The march of regress carries on.
Back when the Trump administration dismantled USAID—including its global health programs—many people sensibly asked: what happens if there's another major disease outbreak in the Global South? Who will monitor and contain it in its early stages?
Now, we appear to have our answer. Southern Africa is witnessing another major outbreak of Ebola. The World Health Organization has already declared it a global health emergency. And early reports indicate that the virus spread far past the point at which pre-existing monitoring agencies ought to have detected it.
Yesterday, the New York Times published an analysis article that places a few recent items of Trump's behavior in telling juxtaposition.
Let's see, he is obsessed with funding his ballroom construction project at the White House. He has used the privileges and powers of the White House to enrich himself and his family. He has publicly announced that he "doesn't think" about "Americans' financial situation" at a time of rising prices for basic commodities as a result of his war in the Middle East.
