"Until they show me evidence that people who have already had the infection are dying in large numbers, or being hospitalized or getting very sick, I just made my own personal decision that I’m not getting vaccinated..."

"... because I’ve already had the disease and I have natural immunity... In a free country you would think people would honor the idea that each individual would get to make the medical decision, that it wouldn’t be a big brother coming to tell me what I have to do. Are they also going to tell me I can’t have a cheeseburger for lunch? Are they going to tell me that I have to eat carrots only and cut my calories? All that would probably be good for me, but I don’t think big brother ought to tell me to do it."

From "Rand Paul: 'I'm not getting vaccinated'" (The Hill).

The most popular comment over there is: "Rand Paul's neighbor for Senate!" Celebrating violence... or at least laughing at it.

"This sounds pretty terrifying to me. It's a country full of alienated people, broken communities, and estranged families. Instead of fixing the broken social fabric..."

"... we are further retreating into our anxious selves and the mental health crises will undoubtedly worsen. Except for the tiny minority of students who can truly benefit from this, the effects of a broad move to online learning on the socialization of young people would be profound and I'd rather not imagine them."

Says one highly rated comment at "Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic/Some families have come to prefer stand-alone virtual schools and districts are rushing to accommodate them — though questions about remote learning persist" (NYT). 

Another comment: "If this last year has taught me nothing else, it's that the 'digital world' is not a life worth living, and I am an introvert. I did not exactly have a successful social life in school, but I would still never trade the experience for being a hermit at home. People need to learn to get along with each other now more than ever before. Online school is an acceptable back up for times when in-person schooling is not possible such as when a student is sick, what would otherwise be a snow day, pandemics, travel demands and the like, all of these are better than the prior alternative of no school. But that's all it is, a mediocre substitute for the real thing and real people."

It's worth clicking through to see the photography at the top of the article. I really can't decide what feelings and ideas the NYT meant to highlight. It's a mother enveloping her 11-year-old son in a hug. The sun is on his face and he looks blissful. The text says he suffers from some sort of mental condition that makes him "apprehensive around other students" and that he's loved the on-line school program. But, we're told, he's going back to school, so I'm going to say that the NYT means to say all-encompassing motherly love cannot be the end point. That boy needs to get back into the real world of other kids. Which is what the commenters are saying.

"Don’t assume you feel comfortable with the same things you felt comfortable with in the before times... You’re a different person now. We all are."

Says one expert quoted in From "The Back-to-Sex Special: How to Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Summer of Sex/It's time to have sex again. Here's how to get ready, according to the experts" (Inside Hook).

The Hot Vax Summer discourse makes it sound like everyone is about to have the horniest summer of their lives, and if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong.... For many people, the prospect of impromptu hookups with random strangers never held much appeal, and holds even less in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic....

“It might take some time to feel comfortable opening back up, and sometimes our mind might be faster than our body. So, honor your body’s pace.... Embrace the awkward..."...

“If your sex life has been mostly with yourself during the pandemic, you might be feeling a strange mix of emotions as you prepare to put yourself back out there — excitement, anxiety, maybe even dread — so it’s important to check in with yourself emotionally as you go,” says Kocak.

That said, remember that sex is something our bodies are literally built to do. No matter how long it’s been, you’re probably not as sexually inept as you fear. “It will be like riding a bike,” says Sparks. After all, she adds, “You never really forget how to have sex.”

It's not like riding a bike! You don't fall off if you're doing it wrong. And what makes you sure you were doing it right in the first place. With a bike, you were doing it right because you made forward progress and didn't fall. With sex, you rarely fall off and you aren't traveling from one geographic location to another — e.g., from your house to the park. You may think you're "traveling" through some abstract landscape from titillation to satisfaction — and there are probably towns in Pennsylvania called Titillation and Satisfaction — but you most likely began and ended at the same geographic coordinates. 

And if you've been assuming you're doing it right because it's "something our bodies are literally built to do," that's a crazily broad definition of what it means to do it right. But thanks for taking me back to the time when I was a little kid and asked my mother how babies are made. I have never forgotten her explanation, the sum total of it, verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are physically built."

What is "the Biden wall"?

I'm trying to read "Mexico’s coronavirus deaths are plummeting. The ‘Biden wall’ could be a factor" (WaPo) — just trying to understand what the headline means.

I'm glad to hear that the coronavirus situation in Mexico has improved, but why bring Biden into the picture and attempt to give him credit? He could be a factor. Because something he did is susceptible to being called a "wall." Can't we just be happy for Mexico and give credit to Mexico for competence? Why must it be about us? I have to presume that we are self-obsessed and partisan and WaPo is dedicated to making us click and then feeding us with pro-Democratic Party material.

Let's see if my presumption holds up. There's this in the 4th paragraph:

In addition [to things Mexico has done to control the virus], U.S. vaccinations appear to be blocking the southward spread of the virus.

Then, finally, in the 8th paragraph, we encounter the term the "Biden wall":

There may be another, intriguing factor. Malaquías López-Cervantes, a professor of public health at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, dubbed it the “Biden wall.” With nearly half the U.S. population vaccinated with at least one shot, he said, fewer infections are being carried to Mexico....

So... the "wall" is the way there are lots of people going back and forth between Mexico and the United States but because of vaccinations in the U.S., there is less virus going along with them. Quite aside from whether Biden deserves to have his name on the vaccination effort — why not Trump's?! — it's perfectly silly to call the continued flow of people between the 2 countries a "wall." 

I hope Professor López-Cervantes intended to make fun of Americans when he chose that hot word "wall" to hook us into his theory. I'm not doubting that the theory is correct — that less virus in the U.S. means less virus carried into Mexico — I'm just interested in his deployment of the term "Biden's wall" and the way The Washington Post snapped it up and propagated it. It's an idea-virus that made its way from Mexico to the U.S.

"Two times in the space of a decade, then, I became the beneficiary of one of the greatest acts of human altruism: living organ donation."

"Now, I find myself dependent on others yet again. This time, my health relies on people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. As a transplant recipient, I am one of the immunologically unlucky: those who derive insufficient or no protective immunity from vaccinations. We organ recipients take medications — typically anti-metabolites — that suppress our immune systems, specifically, the function of the body’s B cells, which are responsible for generating antibodies. These drugs are necessary to prevent the body from attacking implanted organs, thus blocking organ rejection. But this means that many of us produce no detectable defenses against covid-19."

From "Opinion: Vaccines probably don’t work on me. So I must rely on others to beat covid-19" (WaPo).

"In some U.S. counties, nearly all people over 65 are vaccinated."

 The NYT reports.

Two of the most populous 90-percent-plus counties are Jo Daviess County, Ill., across the Mississippi River from Dubuque, Iowa, and Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, the state capital.

Yay, Madison!

In Dane County, Joe Parisi, the county executive, said this week that a number of efforts contributed to his county’s success.... Officials strove to maximize access to the vaccine. They set up a mass vaccination site in December at the Alliant Energy Center, an arena and exhibition complex in Madison, and have distributed vaccines at health centers, pharmacies and mobile vaccination clinics.... Mr. Parisi said that the county worked with local hospital systems, health care providers, senior care centers and nursing homes to locate homebound people and help them get shots.

They did not encounter much hesitancy. “People wanted the vaccine,” Mr. Parisi said, “that certainly wasn’t the problem with that age group.” Even so, he said, fostering trust and answering people’s questions are very important, especially now that the most eager recipients are already done....

What's special about Dane County? I think it's the high level of education. Well-educated people get the vaccine. People around here who are older are educated. So keep educating the young.

There really is another choice.

The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do.

The choice is yours.

— President Biden (@POTUS) May 13, 2021

It's incoherent to demand that people follow science and to misrepresent the options. There's also the choice to avoid both the mask and the vaccination. Everyone knows that. If I had to defend the President, I'd say it's so obviously not true that no one takes it as true, so it doesn't count as a lie.

The Cal Ripken of television.

Thanks to all wishing me get well - hard to do since I feel perfectly fine, but I appreciate it! Most upset about ending my streak going back to 1993 of never missing a Politically Incorrect or Real Time episode. Oh well, even Cal Ripken had to sit one out at some point.

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) May 14, 2021

Maher has tested positive for Covid, but he's symptomless — and vaccinated — so it may be a false positive. In any case, I know from listening to him on the Joe Rogan podcast that he takes great pride in doing an hour-long live show, done without commercial breaks, in which he's actively involved in every segment. 

It really is an impressive achievement, and I wish he could just do his show — do it with distance. But I guess the show made a rule — everyone must be tested and test negative — and rules are rules. No exceptions. 

The lawyer in me says just make a rule where you're not within the rule: Every guest must be tested and test negative. The host is not within the rule. But you'd have to justify exposing the guests to the positive-testing host.

Still: What if all the guests are vaccinated? And distance is maintained. And Maher wears a mask? It might be hard to sell. First, Maher looks like an example of the vaccinated person who still catches the disease. Second, Maher needs to be funny, and he could bomb trying to be funny from behind a mask. We wouldn't see his smirk!

"I’m terrified... Terrified, and I do not scare easily."

I'm reading the top-rated comment at the NYT article, "Hundreds of Epidemiologists Expected Mask-Wearing in Public for at Least a Year/The C.D.C. said Thursday that vaccinated Americans no longer needed masks in most places. Other disease experts recently had a different message: that masks were necessary in public." 

The NYT seems to be stimulating fear in reaction to the CDC announcement. The survey the headline refers to was taken before the CDC took its new position, so these epidemiologists — 723 of them — were, I suspect, passing along the party line. Did they do their own studies? Even if they did, do they study the costs of the restrictions or simply, endlessly default toward caution?

Here's the full comment: 

This is a horrible, horrifying decision. There’s no way to prove who’s vaccinated and who isn’t. People are going to lie about their status. We were out shopping today and my husband saw a woman wearing a mask that said “This mask is as useless as my Governor.” Does she seem trustworthy? Does she maybe seem like someone who’d doff her mask at the first chance, whether she’d been vaccinated or not, because she’s an imbecile and has no regard for the lives of others?

What difference does it make? If you know you're vaccinated and you believe vaccines work, you're fine without your mask, and only the unvaccinated are at risk. Why are you obsessing about the mind of a stranger?

That's a social/political relationship, and it's got nothing to do with the science of disease. Ironically, you're scoffing at her lack of adherence to science while you yourself veer away from science. I know social life and politics are more fun, but if you get your jollies from imposing physical restraints on other people, you need to look into your own heart.

The comment continues:

I think that it’s moronic to lift the ban until enough of the population has been vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. I’m including the under-18s in that. I had Covid last August and it has ripped my life apart. I’m terrified of the prospect of getting it again. Terrified, and I do not scare easily. Fewer masks and fewer precautions means more chances for the virus to mutate. We don’t know if the vaccines will protect us from mutations. I do not know what having Covid again would do to me, but I’ll tell you up front that permanent damage to my sense of smell would be ample reason for me to give serious consideration as to whether I still want to live.

Oh, &*%$ hell. I haven't had Covid, but I've lived with a seemingly permanent loss of the sense of smell for years. I don't go around saying it makes life not worth living! What crazy hysteria! And from a person who claims not to be easily scared. I guess it's all relative. Maybe this person lives in a truly timorous community. In the land of the raving hysterics, the terrified man is equanimous.

I can’t let go of the fear of what could happen to my loved ones. I’m stunned that the CDC has acted so irresponsibly.

Why not just say you're stunned to hear the new announcement? What is the basis for judging it to be irresponsible? You seem to be substituting your emotion for science. I know, though. This commenter can say he's relying on the NYT survey of 723 epidemiologists. I wonder if there's a term for the pseudoscience of surveying large groups of experts. 

"In a sharp turnabout from previous recommendations, federal health officials on Thursday advised that Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus may stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most indoor and outdoor settings, regardless of size."

The NYT reports. 

“The science is clear: If you are fully vaccinated, you are protected, and you can start doing the things that you stopped doing because of the pandemic,” the C.D.C. said in a statement on Thursday.

The new advice comes with caveats. Even vaccinated individuals must cover their faces and physically distance when going to doctors, hospitals or long-term care facilities like nursing homes; when traveling by bus, plane, train or other modes of public transportation, or while in transportation hubs like airports and bus stations; and when in prisons, jails or homeless shelters.

In deference to local authorities, the C.D.C. said vaccinated Americans must continue to abide by existing state, local, or tribal laws and regulations, and follow local rules for businesses and workplaces....

Great. I hope my locality takes the cue.  

It's about time that those of us who've taken the vaccination get a return on our willingness to participate. The tables need to turn, so that those who are holding back are incurring the burden. There's no difficulty getting a vaccine for yourself now, so it's become unreasonable to demand that the vaccinated limit our freedom for the sake of the unvaccinated. Incentivize progress.

UPDATE: Our local newspaper says:

Dane County’s local COVID-19 mask order will remain in effect at least until May 18 as officials review new guidance from the the Centers for Disease Control that loosened masking rules for vaccinated people. 

It takes 5 days just to think about this — this, the same thing they've been thinking about for months. I'd say it shows they don't care how much they hold back commerce, social life, and individual freedom. They should have been ready to receive the new CDC report and declare an end to the mask mandate immediately. If they could think of the idea that we need to wait until at least May 18th, they could think of the idea of ending the mandate. It's not complex, given all this time and the new CDC report. Pathetic!

For the Annals of Lateral Thinking: Ohio makes vaccinating into a million-dollar lottery.

Governor Mike DeWine announces on Twitter: 

Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars.

The pool of names for the drawing will be derived from the Ohio Secretary of State’s publicly available voter registration database. Further, we will make available a webpage for people to sign up for the drawings if they are not in a database we are using. The Ohio Department of Health will be the sponsoring agency for the drawings, and the Ohio Lottery will conduct them. The money will come from existing federal Coronavirus Relief Funds.

To be eligible to win, you must be at least 18 years of age or older on the day of the drawing. You must be an Ohio resident. And, you must be vaccinated before the drawing. We will have further, specific details tomorrow and in the days ahead.

I know that some may say, “DeWine, you’re crazy! This million-dollar drawing idea of yours is a waste of money.” But truly, the real waste at this point in the pandemic -- when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it -- is a life lost to COVID-19.

You could spend $5 million on ads cajoling people — or shaming them — into getting vaccinated. One way or another, it costs money to complete the vaccination project. The great thing about the lottery idea is that it's an effort to reach minds that are not primarily oriented to science — people who are emotional and transrational.

Am I making up the word "transrational"? I had to look it up. I can't credit myself with coinage. There's a whole Wikipedia article, but let's see if it means what I — in my thwarted word-coining effort — had in mind:

Transrational... refers to the experience of phenomena occurring within the natural universe where information and experiences does not readily fit into the typical cause and effect structure; the kinds of experience that are often dismissed as unfathomable or superstitious. It differs from the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘rational’ in that it neither directly controverts nor affirms rational reason. A transrational experience is not pathological. One of the most popular examples of transrational experiences are individuals witnessing blessed/evil omens which turn out to become true, or feelings of extremely intense dread which helped staved an individual from disastrous catastrophes, even if the individual has zilch prior knowledge or context....

People are often so afraid of being considered "pre-rational" that they avoid and deny the possibility of the transrational....

Well, this particular Wikipedia article isn't written according to the usual Wikipedia standards. It's more like a blog post. There's an effort to flip rationality into irrationality: People cling to rationality out of fear. That's not an entirely irrational thing to say, but it's just interesting speculation. I happen to think many people irrationally believe in their own rationality, but the answer to that isn't to become "transrational," but to work endlessly on the rationality of your rationality, which is not easy.

The Wikipedia article ends with 6 examples of the transrational, beginning with this:

[After an account of human communication with animals and stones] “Of course, many of us shudder when we think of some of our companions who do talk with inanimate objects or invisible friends. Yet even here, I think that psychologists’ scholarly prejudices have often overcome their common sense and analytical skills. The point is not whether people talk to animals and plants, but the validity of the messages that are given and received.”

In that light, may I recommend the Haruki Murakami story "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey"? It's in this new collection. A man encounters a monkey who talks to him at some length — about how he learned to speak, about how his only sexual attraction is to human females, and about how he fulfills his sexual needs by "stealing" part of the name of each woman he loves. But can the man tell anyone about the talking monkey?

Why try if no one would ever believe me? People would only end up saying I was just “making up stuff again.” I also couldn’t figure out what format to use. It was way too bizarre to write about it as if it were real, and as long as I couldn’t provide proof—proof, that is, that the monkey actually existed—no one would ever buy it. That said, if I wrote about it as fiction, it lacked a clear focus, or a point. I could well imagine, even before I started writing about it, my editor’s puzzled expression after reading the manuscript, and the question that would follow: “I hesitate to ask you, since you’re the author, but—what’s the theme of this story supposed to be?” Theme? Can’t say there is one. It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs, enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names. Where’s the theme in that? Or moral?

That's not how the story ends. There's more, and it's quite satisfying.

"I do miss the quiet, the strange peace, the empty streets, the feeling of solidarity among those of us who stayed, who don’t have country houses or parents or fancy friends with guest rooms."

"Perhaps this is because it reminds me of the East Village I moved into 40 years ago, when streets were deserted at night; when you could make out on your doorstep for an hour and not a soul would pass to catcall; when you knew your neighbors, knew the shopkeepers. We’re all in this together, that was the feeling. Despite the dirt, the rampant crime (one block west boasted one of the city’s highest murder rates, as drug gangs fought for turf), we were a community. Just by buying bread at the bakery around the corner (sturdy semolina, nothing fancy), I was invited to dinner at Phyllis’s, the counterwoman’s, house and later to her granddaughter’s wedding. The block was bustling with seemingly indestructible old women—Polish, Sicilian, Irish, Spanish—who would, before sunset, drag folding chairs to the sidewalk to watch another day dwindle.... This is how it felt during lockdown. Passers-by might be few, but those of us remaining, we were in it together. Fear of crime might be replaced by fear of contagion, but if fear doesn’t drive people apart, it can drive them together."

From "'Sometimes I Miss the Lockdown' On silence, solidarity and a feeling, a year later, of life on thin ice in the city" by Thomas McKean

And the ones that you don't confirm — is that because they are not true?

I'm trying to untangle the partisanship that I have to presume infects this headline: "The Biden administration confirms some but not all of Trump’s Wuhan lab claims" (WaPo). 

Text: 

In its final days, President Donald Trump’s State Department made a series of highly controversial claims about the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, and its possible connection to the covid-19 outbreak. Now, the Biden administration has reviewed those claims, and is confirming some of the facts within them — but not, a senior State Department official has told me, the Trump team’s theory of how the pandemic broke out. These facts suggest that more investigation is needed into the lab’s possible connection to the outbreak. 

Ah! So it's not that you've determined that any of these claims are false. They're all either true or — you say — in need of further investigation. 

The article ends with 2 paragraphs — a quote from an unnamed senior State Department official preceded by the assertion that credits the Biden administration with an effort to be politically neutral (though, I'd add, the effort to seem neutral is itself political):

The origin of the pandemic is not just about blame. If the source of the outbreak can’t be determined, its true path can’t be traced and crucial scientific information for preventing the next outbreak can’t be learned. The Biden administration is trying to take a neutral stance on the issue, even though the fact-finding process has become entangled in domestic politics, as well as U.S.-China relations.

“We certainly care a great deal about the origin of this virus, not only for reasons of accountability, but also for public health implications going forward,” the official said. “If we are going to prevent future outbreaks, epidemics or, God forbid, pandemics, we need to know how the last one started. . . . Whichever theory the facts bear out, that’s where we’ll go.”

"Some days I loathed myself for loathing my time on the couch when others didn’t have the option. Some days I loathed myself for liking it."

"But I was so tired.... But as the months wore on I realized this wasn’t rest anymore. It was becoming my lifestyle. And it wasn’t making me feel better — I felt deeply, unsettlingly worse.... 'Can you have rigor mortis while still alive,' I typed into Google.... There are two kinds of fatigue.... One is when your mind and body are truly tired. The other is when that system tricks you into feeling tired because you are in a rut. When you’re tired, you need rest. But if you’re in a rut, you need to nudge yourself into action.... That’s why so many of us feel like we hit a pandemic wall — the fatigue we faced last spring, the natural reaction to shock and terror, has been replaced by inertia.... Pandemic ennui appears to be reorienting the economy overall, as we channel our angst into massage guns and candles and Fitbits. But the price of fitness is sneakers...."

From "Why I Stopped Running During the Pandemic (and How I Started Again)/Waiting to feel better wasn’t working. I had to act" by Lindsay Crouse (NYT).

"Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty in defining move of presidency."

 WaPo headline.

NYT headline: "To Juice the Economy, Biden Bets on the Poor/Mr. Biden’s bottom-up $1.9 trillion aid package is a sharp reversal from the tax cut bill that was President Donald J. Trump’s first big legislative victory."

"Early on, some likened the public health crisis to a blizzard, imagining that people would stay home, cozy up with their romantic partners and make babies."

"These playful visions have given way to a more sobering reality: The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause 'missing births' — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come.... Millions of parents are dealing with the stress of combining their work responsibilities with the need to supervise and teach their children who no longer attend school five days a week. This raises the 'cost' of rearing children and can be expected to lead to fewer siblings being conceived this year. Moreover, restrictions on social activities also mean some relationships that would have started in 2020 (and might have led to babies someday) never took root. We have no precedent to estimate changes in birthrates from these disruptions, but they will undoubtedly also contribute to a large reduction in overall births.... Some women and couples will have fewer children than they hoped, and some kids will grow up without the younger sibling they would have had otherwise. This could contribute to what some have referred to as America’s loneliness epidemic.... But the real societal challenge of a Covid baby bust will be a smaller work force.... In the absence of effective policies to meaningfully increase births, the most reliable and immediate way to shore up the U.S. population is through immigration, which brings its own political and social challenges...."

From "We Expect 300,000 Fewer Births Than Usual This Year/Signs are pointing to a sizable pandemic baby bust in the United States, with implications that will be with us for years to come" by economics professors Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine (NYT).

"The doctors-facts-science mantras have become familiar over the past year. The experts tell us, expertly, what we need to know, and we do it."

"At least until all this science starts to fog up our mental windshields and we, the people, start to wear out. Our irritability mounts; our attention wanes; the guide-rope in our mouth starts to chafe. It is then that the bawdy obstreperousness and its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy come into view — a single unit; maddening, infuriating, nevertheless fused. And Greg Abbott or someone else steps up to lead the beast forward, by instinct if not by Hoyle... The love of democratic citizens for experts shouldn’t be overestimated. The nature of democracy is preference for or deference to popular wisdom, however unwise that wisdom may prove in action. It’s been a long time since this pandemic started. People are tired. People want to see, and relate to, each other. That’s human nature. The human nature-affirmers like Greg Abbott, with a little luck and sense of timing, are likely to come out way ahead of their castigators and vilifiers, Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke conspicuously included."

Writes William Murchison in "Glory Hallelujah for Texas!/Gov. Greg Abbott takes a calculated gamble on we, the people against the experts" (The Spectator).

The Spectator is British, but Murchison is American. He even went to the University of Texas. I had to look that up because the use of "glory hallelujah" hit my ear as a foreigner's mistake. To me, the phrase — which you see in the title and the text ("its odd twin, the glory hallelujah, of democracy") — is entirely evocative of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and Texas was in the Confederacy. 

Puzzling, I ran across this 2018 NPR article, "How 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' became an anthem for every cause": 

There's an episode of The Johnny Cash Show from 1969 where the man himself makes a little speech with a pretty big error. "Here's a song that was reportedly sung by both sides in the Civil War," Cash says, guitar in hand, to kick off a performance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic.... which proves to me that a song can belong to all of us."

 

Cash was wrong, but in the years after the Civil War, the song came to be sung in church, at football games, and at labor union events. And on all sorts of political occasions:

Anita Bryant, the singer and conservative activist, used to perform the song at anti-gay rallies. During the 1964 presidential race, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater had to disown a campaign film that posed the election as a choice between two Americas — an "ideal" America, where the tune of the "Battle Hymn" scored images of the founders and the Constitution, and a "nightmare" America, featuring black people protesting and kids dancing to rock music.

On the flipside, the day before he was killed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, which he ended by quoting the song's first line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." His home church, Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist, took up the song after his death as an anthem to him and the civil rights movement.

"How people relate to patriotism is kind of how they come into the 'Battle Hymn,' " says professor Brigitta Johnson, an ethnomusicologist at the University of South Carolina who teaches in the schools of Music and African-American Studies. "For example, your white nationalists digging deep into heavy patriotism messages — they bring up things like 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and the 'Battle Hymn' and it becomes their battle cry, just as easily as it could become the battle cry for Ebenezer in Atlanta."...

"The kumbaya moment will not be happening across the aisles because of this song," [Johnson] says, "because it's really about supporting whatever your perspective is — about freedom or liberation, and having God as the person who's ordaining what we're doing. And 'glory, hallelujah' about that."

As Johnny Cash said in 1969, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is an anthem that belongs to everybody. But what really matters is what they're singing it for.

That meshes well with Murchison's point about human nature and human nature-affirmers.

"If a state decides to prematurely lift rules against the guidance of CDC, should it be eligible to receive federal help if it later needs it as a result?"

Asks NYT columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin (on Twitter). 

 A good answer: "Does your state allow steak to be served medium rare? No Medicare for you!"  

A terrible answer: "What Biden should do is make clear now: Do what Texas and Mississippi are doing, lose ALL your federal funding. With the threat of loss of highway funding, that's how the legal drinking age went from 19 to 21 in 1985...."

"We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad. But none of us even imagined just how bad they would be and how far left they would go."

"He never talked about this. We would have those wonderful debates. He would never talk about this. We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about actually.His campaign was all lies. Talked about energy, I thought I said, 'This guy actually, he’s okay with energy' He wasn’t okay with energy. He wants to put you all out of business.... Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history....  The Biden administration is actually bragging about the classroom education they are providing to migrant children on the border. While at the same time, millions of American children are having their futures destroyed by Joe Biden’s anti-science school closures.... He is cruelly keeping our children locked in their homes, no reason for it whatsoever. They want to get out... Joe Biden is only implementing [a vaccine] plan that we put in place.... Yet Biden said just a few days ago that when he got here, meaning The White House, there was no vaccine. He said, there’s no vaccine. Oh, good. Say it again, Joe. Now I don’t think he said that, frankly, in a malicious way. I really don’t. I actually believe he said that because he didn’t really know what the hell was happening."

From Donald Trump's CPAC speech.  

That's a clear demonstration of an approach to attacking Biden: He's not malicious. He just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about or what the hell is happening. That gives room for people who think Joe's a likeable good guy to feel okay about the criticism. Joe's not malicious. He's just very confused. When you get to the confusion part of the attack, be sure to include the words "what the hell."

Oh! That reminds me. It's March 1st. You know what that means. I lost my big bet. I told you back on January 27th about the bet I have here at Meadhouse: "Biden will oust himself from the presidency by March 1st." When did I make the bet? I'm not sure but I alluded to this bet on December 15th, when Biden gave an overlong speech: "There was no reason to make him go this long... not unless the idea was to make us get comfortable with the idea of phasing him out and swapping in Kamala at the earliest possible moment — say, around March 1st."

I got vaccinated.

 Just now.