Anthony Fauci
Rand Paul and other Congresscritters are piling on, making sure an 85 year old man, after decades of publlic service to the United States, cannot have one moment of peace, forcing the turn over of his cell phone and diary, then threatening him with contempt charges and prison when he stops speaking to them. And then ambitious, unhinged attorney generals of red states are getting in on the act too, despite the fact that they lack jurisdiction.
I Flash that in Trump universe, Rand Paul has sometimes been portrayed as the rational old timer, the man of the far right who is not a primitive crazy bully. But he is. The one thing in all this miasma I can get any kind of handle on is Paul's indignation about gain-of-function research. We sometimes weaponize viruses, insisting out loud that the purpose is not to kill people, but to design better vaccinations, antidotes and cures. I never believed that. It would be analogous to creating an artificial hurricane or tornado with ten times the destructive power of the real thing, then claiming that the goal is to predict them better, and to construct shelter that can withstand them. At the least, given human nature, it would be grossly negligent, knowing that some rogue human will eventually deploy them for murder.My unalloyed sympathy and sorrow for Fauci then admits a glimmer of a thought: there is also a side of my mind in which I (like Rand Paul) do not believe that anyone working for the government, at least that long, can be innocent.
But haunting Fauci's every waking moment is not needed to expose gain-of -function. You could subpoena him once, then move on to others involved in the research. This is a vendetta, hateful stalking by a very privileged and powerful American. There are no rational old timers who have clung to power in Trump world.
A Reebok delivery
In the 70's, at Columbia where there was a newstand which sold everything, I bought the National Review for a while, to monitor what the other side was thinking. (I would never today.) I remember being shocked that William Buckley devoted space in an opinion column to excoriate a manufacturer of luxury glassware, for refusing to place a custom inscription in the glass. I thought that using a supposedly intellectual-leaning publication to settle a personal score exposed who Buckley really was (a predecessor to Rand Paul, really).
Sometimes when I'm mulling over writing something, especially here, I pause and consider whether I am having a Buckley moment. I decided I'm not, so here it is.
I wear black Reeboks, once fashionable for young people, now extremely comfortable old people sneakers which are my main footgear every day-- some years ago I ditched my last pair of uncomfortable black dress shoes and even began wearing Reeboks to court. I wore out a pair, which had holes in the soles and were starting to creak when I walked. Trying to be virtuous and avoid chaotic, predatory Amazon (which has so little quality conntrol it would be possible to order not only a pair of gray market Reeboks, but possibly even counterfeit ones), I ordered them on the Reebok website instead.
I recieved a series of dramatic emails: "Your gear is on the way!" "Your gear is partly delivered", whatever that meant (presumably at a distribution warehouse on the way). Then nothing. I waited a few days and checked the website. It seemed to be insisting I install an unknown, untrusted third party app called "Shop" to check my order. With difficulty I found another way, and learned that delivery had "FAILED" because the recipient (me) had rejected the order.
There are some real world issues about getting deliveries where I live. The post office does not, for some reason, deliver mail to my neighborhood, but makes me use a post office box instead. This seems to result in store websites being unable to verify my address, resulting in a dialog where I tell them to use it anyway. Then, maybe because of the post office, gps systems sometimes glitch, and when programmed with my address, kick up houses in other Long Island towns with the same number and street. Probably my shoes had been delivered to one of those places and the owner said, "I never ordered these."
I was now wearing my holed, creaky shoes a week longer than I wanted to. Customer service lacked a phone number (of course). I emailed them-- each time I did, I got a bounce from the postmaster, saying the mailbox was full, though I also got prompt responses, so they were reading the rejected mail. I made two reasonable suggestions, so my shoes wouldn't go astray again: Resend them via US mail to the PO box instead; or have the driver contact me for guidance if having difficulty finding the place.
So far as I know, every company has the capacity to send products via US mail as well as the commercial carriers. And I well remember during the pandemic, a series of homey, pleasant conversations I had with a warehouse manager, to make sure that some UPS deliveries stopped going astray.
Within an hour, I got a response, in somewhat strange if correct English which made me suspect the rep lived on a foreign island, saying that the first was inconvenient and the second impossible, and suggesting I cancel my order. Which I did. I ordered my shoes from Amazon instead, which at least knows how to find me.
Reebok's problem may have been one I had encountered some years ago, at P.C. Richards: Software makes a last minute decision by which means to ship your order. The ability to tell a salesperson that you prefer US mail, or would rather pay for Fed Ex, is long gone. I had explained to a PC Richards rep that the Post Office would not deliver mail, and specified that I needed the rice cooker I was ordering sent by commercial carrier. I hung up thinking that was promised-- then the computer decided on US mail and the rice cooker never arrived. I canceled that order as well, and got the product from Amazon.
What makes this not a Buckley moment is the theme: Read Cory Doctorow on "enshittication". Automation makes customer service worse. Everything about the Reebok experience was far inferior to placing an order ten or twenty years ago. One takeaway is that companies are not really required to grow so large (or fixate on so much profit) that individualized customer service becomes inconvenient or impossible. You could run a company that stayed keyed to employing one rep per x thousand customers, and still be really rich.
Fascism and Totalitarianism
I Flash on a distinction between these: Fascism is a lot more work, as it presupposes a dedicated, sociopathic, large, tough following it takes talent and attention to grow, like Hitler's SS. But you can simply sink into totalitarianism. My sense that things will level out is based on the perception that Trump lacks the talent for fascism, and that the American people are too selfish and soft to be fit material anyway. But, truth be told, incipient totalitiarianism has never stopped growing, like a crystal, under Democrats and Republicans; the Flock license plate reader cameras, which track everywhere you've been (and everything you display, including your bumper stickers) are merely the latest technological instantiation. That is even what the phrase totalitarianism means: total visibility into every aspect of your life, and a complete absence of privacy, means of course total influence, that is authority, over you. Fascism is built, but people slide into tatalitarianism, and we have been sliding much longer than my lifetime.
Roads
In my 16,000 Mad Manuscript, the Roman Roads are a sort of speech miracle, carrying ideas, mail, culture from one place to another. But in my real world, paved roads will create roadkill for the rest of time, because rejected by nature, because in centuries and millenia animals will never accomodate themselves to the invasion, the violation. Roads also, in the time of sea level rise, are carriers for flood water that might otherwise be absorbed by sand or soil. I remember having a vision, at age 12, of the tragedy of pavement laid everywhere across America's beautiful forests, meadows and deserts, of the enclosure of an entire outdoors in concrete. I cannot walk on Napeague Meadows Road across from my home without seeing roadkilled turtles, snakes, birds and small mammals, all of which are memento mori, reminders that the life we have chosen is death-inflected.