Author Archives: Allison Hantschel

Mar 24 2020
2 Comments
Athenae, Big Damn Heroes, COVID-19

People Have This

This is great:

“I thought, ‘Tyler, you always wanted to feed people. That’s what you wanted to do, so keep doing that,’” he said. “There is good in this world. We will work together to feed people.”

So Sailsbery and The Black Sheep staff set up a free breakfast and lunch giveaway for those in need during the coronavirus pandemic.

The plan is to give away meals from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 until 9 p.m. every Tuesday through Friday “for as long as we can or until the schools reopen,” according to the restaurant’s website.

I just keep thinking about how good people are. Not just in this crisis but always. Everybody can share some dumb moral panic story about a kid being an idiot, or tell the tale of this one guy their cousin knows, but people are so, so good.

We want to help. We want to make things better. We want to do right and we have to be told at every turn by a propaganda machine run 24-7 for GOP money that help and better and right are fictions and STILL after 20 years of that drumbeat two-thirds of this country will, when the floor drops out, try to help the people on either side of them.

We have had leadership that has harnessed that capacity, and leadership that hasn’t, and we see how all of that plays out every single day. People have always fought back, don’t get me wrong, this is and always will be up to only us, one man alone who has had enough, etc, but sometimes we need a push to get out there. We need a direction for all our directionless energy.

I get so mad about George W. Bush and his creatures, still, because for about 20 minutes after 9/11 there was, in fact, a moment when people would have done ANYTHING. He had 90 percent approval for a few days, he could have told people to enlist en masse and they would have, everybody thought this was World War II again and we were all Captain America.

He told us to go shopping. We went to war with Iraq. Everybody working at Ground Zero started dying of cancer. We’ve been paying for that frustrated, stymied, miserable moment when all our good intentions and capacities were thwarted, ever since.

If you tell people this is the crisis of their time, you’d better be able to tell them what to do next. Otherwise you’re just riling them up and sealing them in, no one to listen or talk back, no work to put their hands into.

Yesterday one of my neighbors hung a sheet out his window, the words WE GOT THIS EVERYBODY painted on it in brilliant colors. Our local Facebook group, which a month ago was suspicious and vaguely racist in response to every loud noise, is organizing scavenger hunts: Go put this, that, the other thing in your window for kids to find on walks. People are donating supplies and materials, who needs this, I’m going out, do you need something delivered. We are a small country, my neighborhood, and we are caring for each other.

It could be like that everywhere. We could all be like that. Why don’t we see it? Why don’t we connect it, the caring you do for your neighbors, with what we are asked to do for each other when it’s roads and schools and healthcare? You’d share your food with the family next door, wouldn’t you? Some of you already do. The family next door is everybody.

From the story linked above:

Sailsbery got emotional when he recalled some of the messages he has received. Some families apologized for their need, and he said they shouldn’t feel bad.

“It’s hard,” he said. “You get messages like, ‘I need four meals for my kids. And is this just for kids because we don’t have any food either.’”

We have been in social isolation, as a country, for so goddamn long.

A.

Mar 22 2020
2 Comments
Athenae, Big Damn Heroes, COVID-19, Uncategorized

Who the Heroes Have Always Been

Last night I was putting Kick through her evening paces — bathing, teeth-brushing, cat-petting, story-reading, delaying, water-getting, more delaying, singing, one-more-hugging — and I heard my neighbors outside yelling Bon Jovi songs into the air.

My friends and I text each other constantly: You okay? I’m going out, need anything? Skype, chat, check-ins, bitching about small stuff, who said he was going to put the dishes away and didn’t. Whose kids are driving them crazy. Whose dog won’t stop barking.

Who’s still working, day and night, keeping people well or trying to. Teaching in prison. Caring for pets. Delivering food. Do you need a mask, I can make you one. I have extra sanitizer, I can leave it on your porch.

The world has shrunk to the ten, twenty people I love the most. Sometimes, when Kick and Mr. A and I are at the dinner table, the world shrinks to three. The tiniest circle there is. We don’t pray, but sometimes we hold each other’s hands, as if blood is salt and can protect us.

Friends miles away have tested positive. People I admire have tested positive. Loved ones of loved ones won’t stop going out, don’t believe this is real, and we despair: I can’t get on a plane to go see my dying sister, but you are going to the Cracker Barrel?

There’s so much longing for a crisis, in our culture. We fetishize what we do when the chips are down, when the earth is caving in: Then I’ll be in my element. Then I will feel important. Then I will do something that matters.

Then I, I, I, I.

We all think we’re gonna lead the rebellion, rebuild the city, become part of the brave band of heroes who will be lauded forever in history as if that’s a thing that has ever existed, as if we’ve ever been able to choose who gets the headline.

We wait for that moment when we can raise a flag and make a speech and we think that’s how the work gets done. Where are our LEADERS, we lament, and call out for Thai food, and forget to tip the man who brings it. We yell at the checkout girl. We mutter darkly about the boys on the corner.

Where is the crisis? It’s all around us. I interviewed a comedian, after 9/11, in those awful stunted days when nothing felt normal and we didn’t yet know how stupid it was all going to be. I can’t remember his name but I’ll never forget what he said when I asked about laughter, about how even:

“Every day is 9/11 for somebody.”

I am good, in a crisis. I always have been. I am comfortable where the disaster is. Six months later, when things have improved for me (when, goddamnit), a switch will flip, I will stop sleeping, stop eating, stop taking my pills, ask a therapist: why now?

Mental illness loves best the vacuum adrenaline leaves behind.

These things have such a long train, pulling behind them. So many died from Hurricane Katrina, years after Katrina; from Ground Zero, decades after the fire went out. Stress on bodies, skipped treatments or appointments. None of this is worth it to feel like you matter.

Keep your really bitchin’ charter schools and condos. I will take my friends.

I have tons of ideas about what’s to be done. I think every day about writing: A new WPA, for everything from bridge-building to archiving. What leadership is truly worth, why we clamor for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders to STEP UP AND LEAD when in truth we don’t know whose voice we’ll need til we hear it and we can’t hear it over the sound of Fox. I rage for a moment and then turn away.

We do yoga in the basement, poke things with sticks on long walks. The cats sleep on my feet. I put off drinking til 5, even on weekends. When the sun comes out I run outside and turn my face up to the sky.

We write thank-you cards to firefighters and sanitation workers. Kick and I watch every Disney movie twice while Mr. A snores on the couch.

The phone buzzes; my mother, Mr. A’s cousins, my high school friends: I’m okay. Are you? We joke, we make a time for Google hangouts, we game out future paychecks and toilet paper supplies and who still has cleaning products. We order pizza. We tip as much cash as we can scrounge. We wash our hands.

I would like to say when this is over — as if this is ever going to be over, as if over exists, as if it ever has — we will remember, we will be kinder, but I do remember, from the time before this, and the time before that, and the time before the time before the time before that.

We have always been all that we have.

A.

Mar 22 2020
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Uncategorized

Not Everything Sucks

I mean, kind of it does. but people have this phenomenal capacity: 

PARIS (AP) — In the age of confinement, Elisha Nochomovitz figured out a way to run a marathon anyway – back and forth on his balcony.

That’s right. He ran 42.2 kilometers (26.2 miles) straight, never leaving his 7-meter-long (23-foot) balcony.

He saw it as a physical and mental challenge, but he also shared the images online as a way “to extend my support to the entire medical personnel who are doing an exceptional job,” he told The Associated Press from his apartment in Balma, a suburb of the southern French city of Toulouse.

A.

Mar 17 2020
1 Comment
Athenae, Current Affairs, Guns, Uncategorized

You Already Know Where It Goes

So here’s what’s gonna happen.

A lot of people are going to get sick. They won’t know for sure if they’re sick, because there aren’t enough tests, and nobody can afford the ones that we do have.

Because nobody will know anything for sure, and a lot of people will be sick, most businesses will stay closed. Most will be unable to pay their employees, so a lot of people are going to be sick and broke.

Sick broke people make decisions aimed at not being sick or broke no more. Not all of those decisions will be harmless to themselves or others.

The prospect of sick broke people making bad decisions will freak a lot of upper class people out.

Those people will call their suburban police departments, which in case you haven’t noticed are strapped for war every second of the day even though their biggest call in a month is barely a moving violation. Those police departments will respond to every shoplifter like they’re John Dillinger and things will start getting out of hand.

A crime that would barely make a blip in a weekly newspaper’s police blotter will get blown up by the Rush/Fox/morning news industrial complex until I start getting texts from out-of-town relatives who already think living anywhere with two stoplights is asking to be robbed and murdered. Like six guys will knock over a liquor store and ordinarily that’s Thursday, but before the week is out your dad will have sixteen emails from the NRA all saying some variation on “DO YOU WANT YOUR WHITE WOMEN RAPED? CLICK HERE TO ANSWER NO AND GET A FREE T-SHIRT AND A GRENADE LAUNCHER.”

The same types of guys who were dragging their guns around the Virginia statehouse a month ago will be spray-painting LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT on their garages and then the politicians will start in with JUST ASKING QUESTIONS or some such. Those questions will not be about why people are sick and broke, by the way. The questions will be about how violent white people should get right now, and how few consequences they can possibly face for said violence.

I don’t know where we go after that.

A.

Mar 17 2020
Athenae, Congress, COVID-19, So Called Liberal Media

Every Genocide Needs a Soundtrack

A few years back I got irrationally obsessed with reading books about the Rwandan genocide including this excellent, harrowing one, and one thing that stuck with me from it was the role talk radio played in stoking violence and encouraging people to turn on their neighbors.

This is a transcript from one of those stations, assuring its listeners that no matter what they see and hear on other channels, THIS is the real story:

.. When talking, we should be aware that we are talking to other people, and to intelligent people. Because what will cause harm to the Rwandans, what will harm the politics of this country is that a person thinks that he is the only one who can play politics, he thinks that he is the only one who can speak, he thinks that he is the only one who holds the truth, that members of other political parties are not intelligent, that they are stupid, that they do not understand, that he should con them because he has the opportunity to talk, that he should say whatever he wants… Here, on RTLM, on your independent radio, we will hOt stand that. You will tell lies people, and we will tell them the truth.”

Does that sound familiar to you? It should: 

  • In a fearmongering, over-the-top opening monologue, Fox Business host Trish Regan claimed coronavirus is “yet another attempt to impeach the president” as “the chorus of hate being leveled at the president is nearing a crescendo.”

  • Fox Business host Lou Dobbs reported that coronavirus “has now infected 113,000 people … in 111 countries and territories around the world” and, in nearly the same breath, claimed that “the national left-wing media [are] playing up fears of the coronavirus.”

  • On Lou Dobbs Tonight, Siegel dismissed the World Health Organization as “overly political” and “incompetent,” arguing that coronavirus is being politicized to attack Trump.

We’re not yet at the stage where Fox is advocating that Trump nuke Wuhan but their listeners are already there and have been for a week or so. We’ve been talking since mid-2016 about how this stuff doesn’t start with the ovens. It starts with people whispering that there’s a secret only the worthy know, and Rush and his imitators have been saying that shit since the moment they went on the air.

A sane country would have shut down any broadcast knowingly disseminating false information in the name of public safety. This whole country is a crowded theater and they’re screaming fire.

BUH BUH BUH says you, a person who thinks reality is a simulation, BUH WHO DECIDES WHAT IS FALSE? Isn’t this always the pretext governments use to shut down dissent, that it’s unsafe? Well, this isn’t “dissent.” What Fox is doing is not opining on how the president should handle the crisis. They’re saying there IS NO CRISIS and then telling people to go out and make the nonexistent crisis worse.

There aren’t any equivalents to this. This isn’t a free speech issue. This isn’t an issue of civil rights. Before you throw internet conspiracies on the left in my face, consider the difference between six people on a blog saying “something seems dodgy here” and a NATIONAL BROADCAST NETWORK THAT’S ON EVERY TV IN THE AIRPORT, from which everyone takes their cues including THE PRESIDENT.

GO TO A RESTAURANT THE GUBMINT CAN’T CONTROL YOU, says the government, and had we the Republican party of even 20 years ago, much less the glory days, we’d have at least one or two people on ACTUAL BOTH SIDES saying look, this is insane, but no, the entire Senate and GOP House contingent has to take their cues from these people. Mike DeWine is a cock, okay, but I give him credit for acting like he’s in charge of people’s safety, unlike most of his colleagues. Look at this fucking prick. Great job, Kansas Republicans.

Lots and lots of people are going to get sick and die in the coming weeks. Fox News is encouraging this, if not actually making it happen. Once it does, and/or there’s violence or looting or reasonable responses like, say, a bunch of people getting really pissed and throwing things, then it will be time for law and order and suppressing the unruly masses, none of which, conveniently, will be white.

But god forbid someone suggest you forgo green beer and Buffalo Wild Wings and stop pouring hate into your ears like poison. I’ve read way too much about how this ends.

A.

Mar 17 2020
1 Comment
Athenae, Big Damn Heroes, COVID-19, Sports

Not Everything Sucks

It’s easy to imagine that in places where life is already hard, our current circumstances would make life harder. And they have, and they’ve made people braver, as well: 

Before long, word of the project had spread, and about two dozen people came together to help, working 13-hour days to turn the abandoned house into a welcoming checkpoint. “The house was full of 3-4 feet of snow,” said Bekoalok, who has limited mobility and volunteered from home as a coordinator. “They had to shovel the house out, and they put Visqueen on the windows, so that light comes in but the cold doesn’t.”

People donated hot plates, a generator, lights and a wood stove. They drilled a hole in the river for water, chopped firewood so that mushers would have a ready supply, and hung up a banner to welcome them. They put encouraging signs along the trail to tell teams they were almost there. “We had our youngest elders to babies hauling wood and water,” said Sookiayak, estimating that the youngest helpers were 4 years old.

A.

Mar 15 2020
5 Comments
Athenae, COVID-19, Religion

Laborare Est Orare, Motherfuckers

This National Day of Prayer.

I just.

You want to pray? Give money to a food pantry.

You want to pray? Call your parents, your siblings, anyone you’re lucky enough to love.

You want to pray? Put a note on your window, as one of my neighbors did yesterday, with your phone number: LOW RISK PERSON WILLING TO PICK UP MEDICINE OR GROCERIES, PLEASE TEXT.

You want to pray? Vote early or by mail.

You want to pray? My church cancelled communion LAST WEEK. They cancelled mass on Wednesday. That was prayer.

You want to pray? Drive someone to work so they don’t have to take the bus or the train. Drive yourself to work so you’re not on the bus or the train.

You want to pray? Give your fucking employees as many days off as you can. Bow your fucking head that way, you fucking fucks. God, I am so angry at everybody who’s got to barista right now. I am so angry on behalf of the gas station attendants whose workplaces never close, never ever, no matter what.

I am so fucking angry at everybody who wants to tongue-fondle Jesus on TV but won’t lift a finger to pay for free testing, and that includes politicians and the pastors who support them and the voters who fall in line while their parents and grandparents get sick. Joel Fucking Osteen could take what he spends on lunch and test everyone in this country. Jeff Bezos could do that AND pay everybody’s sick leave. But Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, amirite?

Our Father says Get Off Your Ass and bake a pie or something, in His holy name. This is such crap. Yes, in absence of everything else useful send some good thoughts skyward but there is so much to do and no one in any position of power deserves to be kneeling right now unless it’s to tie someone else’s shoes.

A.

 

Mar 15 2020
Uncategorized

Keep Taking Care

If there’s something you can do, or something you need, keep posting here.

A.

Mar 12 2020
14 Comments
Athenae, Do Something

First Draft Community Help Thread

On my way to work this morning I got on my usual bus, which was carrying its customary assortment of metropolitan itinerants in varying stages of consciousness and togetherness. At the next stop a young woman got on with a baby, maybe a little less than a year, and sat down, baby on lap. It was 8 a.m. and she had a look I’ve seen so many times in the mirror since I became a parent: The day has barely started and I am already so completely done.

The baby gummed fingers and pacifier and waved tiny hands in the air, and the homeless fellow across the bus took notice. Started talking to the baby. Leaning into the baby’s face, making silly noises, praising the baby. “Ooh, you’re a beauty. So pretty, so pretty!” The baby babbled happily back, and he started singing. The mother leaned back, head against the window, and closed her eyes. A moment’s peace. We can give that to each other.

Lots of us are going to be worn out by this, and not just emotionally, not just mentally. Lots of us are going to be, or already are, on the edge financially. On unpaid leave from jobs we can’t afford to stay away from, laid off because a conference or festival or expected customer doesn’t appear. I’d like to give us this thread as a way to help.

Are you in need? Can you help someone who is? Can we talk to each other, here, reply to a comment, post someone’s Venmo or CashApp or Paypal from another site, draw attention to a GoFundMe, ask if anyone knows anyone at such-and-such to help smooth the way?

Post it below. Don’t worry about asking, or if you can’t reply, but I thought it might be useful, while we’re all on this bus together, to offer a few words of encouragement to each other and maybe sing a song.

Mar 10 2020
2 Comments
Athenae, Congress, So Called Liberal Media

Bickering

I know, it’s Politico, I’m better off reading the inside of the wrapper of the “health” food bar I just ate for information on how stuff works:

Bickering. Or, as we call it in the world where we don’t pretend to be dumber than we are for hate-clicks, FIGURING OUT THE BEST WAY TO DO THIS. These solipsistic fucksticks know this, they know that what they call “bickering” is actually WORK in the sense that ideally politicians would bitch each other out and then compromise and get down to work but it’s hard to compromise when one side is like “but make the tests free tho” and the other side is all “THE PLAGUE IS GOOD AND WE SHOULD EAT IT ON TOAST.”

I don’t know why I expect the discourse about actual real things to be better than the stuff about elections. Smart people who should know better are posting things like, “Why won’t the Democrats propose paid sick leave and cheap/free health care” as if that’s not THE GODDAMN PARTY PLATFORM, basically. Democratic politicians have been proposing that for years and if you don’t HEAR about it maybe the problem isn’t the words they’re making with their mouth-holes. Maybe the problem is they can’t get coverage for anything that isn’t the T-word.

Again, forever, let’s spend all our time crabbing at the only people with a plan and hashtagging #WhereIsTheHouse, Nancy Pelosi’s at your mom’s, okay. And she’s busy.

Fucking hell, no matter what they do this is the message: Republicans are bad, Democrats are bad and also dumb about how they’re being bad, the two sides “bicker,” let’s infantilize grown adults and make everybody throw their hands up and say “who can change anything.”

Fucking schmucks.

A.

Mar 10 2020
Athenae, Sports

Not Everything Sucks

Quince Mountain is in the Idtitarod: 

In dog mushing — a sport where both humans and dogs compete regardless of gender — Mountain, 40, has found a welcoming community. It’s a privilege few trans athletes get to experience, he acknowledged, and one the musher has rarely encountered himself. Gender always posed problems for the athlete, who was assigned female at birth but described himself as a gender-nonconforming kid throughout his youth. He remembered trying out for the softball team at his Wisconsin high school. Despite being faster and more aggressive than many of the girls, he said he didn’t make the cut.

“I don’t know what it was, but I had a lot of trouble taking part in girls’ sports,” Mountain said. “I was often told that I was too aggressive, that I didn’t fit in with the team, wasn’t good for the cohesion of the team, that kind of thing.”

As an adult, Mountain found support in the small community of dog mushing. His fans, the “Ugly Dogs,” a group of mushing enthusiasts who follow him and his wife, fellow musher Blair Braverman, on social media, raised $57,000 for him to compete in the Iditarod and qualifying races. Whenever he’s feeling down or discouraged, he said he can turn to the Ugly Dogs for support.

My family used to vacation near Mountain, where BraverMountain Mushing is located, and it’s … people don’t believe me when I tell them suburban Wisconsin is far more Trumpist than the rural areas are. But out in the wild nobody cares about anything except what you can do, and everybody helps everybody else because everybody will need help at some point because that’s how it is.

I don’t know shit about shit when it comes to dogs, or sports, or outdoor anything (my idea of roughing it is a hotel without a pool) but I’m a sucker for good stories about unlikely victories in the face of impossible odds. I started reading Blair Braverman’s work last year, before her first Iditarod, and that’s how we all wound up mailing LEGOs to Alaska.

Follow Quince’s progress via the #Qditarod tag here.

A.

Mar 08 2020
2 Comments
Athenae, Elections, Stupid Everything Tricks, Twitter

Please Stop

I know “please everyone quit bitching on the internet” is like the least likely thing to actually happen but I figured I would try to talk about how awful we are all being about our preferred primary candidates right now.

Yes, all of us. Bernie Brothers. Even the Biden Bros. Maybe especially you three weirdos stanning Tulsi, whatever you’re about. What is the appeal?

I just log on every day and it’s “Biden is basically Trump” and “Bernie will never get anything done” and meanwhile the Republicans are over there debating how many people they can put on death-ships to offshore them so that the coronavirus numbers go down.

(Why are they even worried about that, honestly? We’ve been in a post-consequences-for-the-GOP world since approximately 1980 and 2016 made it clear that public opinion don’t matter for shit if Mitch ain’t moving. Stop acting like THIS ONE is gonna be THE THING that brings them down.

Nothing will bring them down but retaking the Senate so decisively that the five conservative Democrats who are always a pain in our asses don’t matter anymore, we get 75 Dems in there or nothing changes.)

We are spending all our time talking about how the Democratic Party is dumb and bad and rigged and conservative and can’t do anything right and I’m just … Can we please, while we are debating the best way to solve systemic racism and extreme income inequality, at least TRY to remember the GOP is fighting over who gets to hold the fire hoses and unleash the K-9s?

Maybe I just follow the wrong people but lately it’s just nonstop THIS IS WHY DEMOCRATS SUCK ASS every time crazy old Joey B. Shark eats his own kicks and I feel like REPUBLICANS HAVE GIVEN THEMSELVES OVER TO FASCISM BECAUSE THEY HAD TO LISTEN TO A BLACK MAN FOR 8 YEARS is getting lost here.

Can we direct some of the vitriol we’re pouring into our own coffees every morning into whatever human-based sludge McConnell has his leather slaves pump into him to keep him alive? Donate to Amy McGrath and THEN get on The Internet Dot Com to write a long post about how Kamala is a cop and Hillary should go away. Fucking Jesus, all I want to hear from now until the end of time is FUCK DONALD TRUMP, let this be our national anthem:

And I get that “Trump is bad” isn’t a platform or an argument except … kind of, it is? When nothing else gets through, when you can’t get coverage for anything that doesn’t have the T-word in it, when you pass hundreds of bills doing good things for America and YOUR OWN SUPPORTERS still bitch you out for not having a message or a plan and cable news idiots blame “gridlock in Congress,” you tell me how we should be spending our time.

I’m on record numerous times as saying I will vote for Bernie or Biden and likely in the IL primary Imma throw down for our first Jewish president because fuck health insurance, but if it’s Joe then it’s Joe because I don’t make these decisions by myself. If I did I’d be working at the President John F.President of You Kerry Presidential Center for Studying the Bizarre Hotness of Tall War Veterans or some shit.

We heard this shit with Kerry, too, so we all whined our way to another loss and then blamed him as if he personally suppressed votes in Ohio and then wiped his ass with the rule of law. We heard this shit with Hillary, as if she was responsible for not tickling your prostate just right when the future of America was on the line. When we have a nominee, I don’t want to fucking hear it anymore. I don’t want to hear it now. Pull your shit together, people. Joey Biden is going to have someone properly run the CDC. Bernard Sanders will take Stephen Miller out back and make him dig his own hole. Jesus, even Tulsi would protect reproductive rights.

Can we give our people a little credit, here?

A.

Mar 08 2020
Uncategorized

Not Everything Sucks

FREE BOOKS. 

I’m sure you all were on this way before I was but I figured out how to do this finally YESTERDAY and I’m already halfway through a book I’ve been thinking about reading for YEARS and I finished Gideon the Ninth which you all need to read so we can talk about lesbian necromancers in space and what everyone’s deal might actually be, so on the off chance you didn’t know you could do this, you should do this immediately instead of being on Twitter all day or in addition to it. It will improve your life.

A.

Mar 03 2020
1 Comment
Athenae, Food and Drink

Don’t Talk to Me About Fake News

Until you address this kind of crap, published on the notoriously dodgy internet website known as CFUCKINGNN: 

5W Public Relations said that 38% of Americans wouldn’t buy Corona “under any circumstances” because of the outbreak, and another 14% said they wouldn’t order a Corona in public. The survey encompasses polling from 737 beer drinkers in the United States.
In another survey conducted by YouGov, the firm found consumers’ intent to purchase Corona fell to its lowest level in two years. The survey also showed that Corona’s buzz score, a metric that that measures favorability, has dropped significantly since the beginning of the year.
Constellation’s Newlands said those reports do not reflect the company’s business performance, calling the “misinformation” about the virus’ impact on Corona’s business “extremely unfortunate.”
Online searches for “corona beer virus” spiked in early February, but have since declined.

Jesus Christ. After days of debunking, at least they fixed the headline, which spread across social last week lookin’ like this:

This kind of thing is horseshit and it’s a type of horseshit designed to appeal to people like me. College educated, middle class, no meteoric anything or other but probably not as dumb as the average bear. I’m deeply insecure because I know enough to know I’m not a supergenius, but look at all these idiots, who think Corona beer gives you coronavirus! HAR DEE HAR HAR.

This got shared all over amongst my fellow Xers with “we are a stupid country” and “this is how Trump got elected” and “man, people are dumb” and that the entire thing was designed for self-congratulatory shame-forwarding apparently didn’t ping anybody’s radar at all. That’s how canny it was: clickbait for people who are kinda smart. Like that Honey Boo Boo show or the Bachelor. Here’s a bunch of people to point and laugh at, you’re definitely not them!

And all of that is beside the point which is that we can have all the ethics panels we want about fighting “fake news” and teaching “media literacy” to children. As long as the ACTUAL NON-FAKE MEDIA have so little pride that they’re posting dubiously sourced press releases for traffic, nobody really has a keg to stand on here.

A.

Mar 03 2020
Uncategorized

Not Everything Sucks

Molly Seidel exists: 

Getting to the start line of the trials was a victory in itself. Seidel would not have believed it was possible just six months ago. “And if they told me, ‘You’re going to get second at the Olympic trials marathon,’ I’d be like, ‘OK, that’s funny.’”

Seidel has shared her struggles with disordered eating, and knew that recovery would not be easy. She told Runner’s World that she turned down sponsorship offers four years ago when she was not emotionally ready to turn professional despite her success at Notre Dame.

“Your long-term health is more important than running a fast 5K three months from now,” she said. “For people who are right in the middle of it, that’s the worst thing. It’s going to take a lot of time. I’m probably going to deal with it for the rest of my life. You have to treat it with the gravity that it demands.”

What a badass.

A.

 

Mar 01 2020
4 Comments
Athenae, Elections

We May Just Possibly Have to Get Over Ourselves

No, I am not writing about the Chapo thing, because it’s the usual “NYT anthropological expedition into a thing we know not of, for we are above the fray” bullshit but this is only going to get louder: 

This time around, the Bernie Bro charge is different. It’s widely known that Sanders supporters are extremely diverse in terms of gender and race and class, and the notion that only those “privileged” can afford to adopt a more radical worldview has been revealed to be absurd, as it always was. The second prong of the archetype has manifested again, though, but in a different form. Now the claim is that Sanders supporters online are disproportionately likely to be cruel and obnoxious, or bully and harass people.

Unfortunately I think this claim has some legitimacy. And I think that the many Sanders supporters online who are going to lengths to rationalize or defend the adversarial style are too plugged in to the incentives of social media popularity contests and out of touch with what it will take to win an election and build a sustainable leftist movement.

AND OH MY GOD, GET PAST IT.

I see a LOT of people out here going “vote blue no matter who” for assholes like Bloomberg but then appending “Bernie isn’t really a Democrat” or some shit, like that matters when literally the other candidate is Trump.

I am not a Bernie stan. But goddamn I will get there with a quickness if he’s the nominee. This is true of Joey B Shark and all the others, my preference for Warren notwithstanding. I will quit my job and follow Bernard around in a panel van. There are things about him that are cool as hell and I don’t care that his supporters are loud assholes. Come on, that’s not a reason to do or not do anything.

Because the other candidate is Trump and his merry band of blithering fucksticks.

I don’t care where on the doll Bernie touched you in 2016. I don’t care how unsuitable you think he is. If he’s ours, he’s ours. Jesus H. Tits, we can’t DO this again. I said this last week and I’ll keep saying it until the convention if I have to. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic; do you really think the Sanders Administration would hold a prayer meeting to deal with this? The difference between parties MATTERS.

Do you really think the Sanders Administration would appoint the cabinet we have now? This is important. Who someone brings with them is important. Had Trump surrounded himself with COMPETENT minions of Satan, we’d be having a lot fewer conversations about how we were all gonna die.

(Nothing matters if we don’t take back the Senate, so fuck you very much, Mikey B and Tom Steyer, for wasting all your money on your vanity candidacies, that’s the one internet bitch-fight I’m definitely picking a side in.)

You know what’s going to “destroy the left?” Losing to Trump. Losing to Trump and Mitch and another four years of these assholes. It’s going to destroy the left, the center, for what it’s worth the right, and seven people are going to get rich while lots more of us die. THAT is the destruction we have to be afraid of, not dudes being pricks on the internet.

I fully expect everyone to be on board with our future first Socialist Jewish President by the end of the summer if that’s the way the chips fall.

Because the other candidate is Trump.

A.

Mar 01 2020
Uncategorized

Not Everything Sucks

This guy exists: 

Stewart never expected this to become his life’s calling. It goes back to the Great Recession, which began in December 2007, when he was working as a veterinarian at an “economically challenged” animal shelter in Modesto, California, and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of stray animals who needed help.

He wanted to show his young son the importance of giving back, so one day, he went to a soup kitchen with his son and girlfriend and started asking people with pets if he could examine their animals.

“I knew then and there I was going to keep doing it,” he said. “There’s so much need out there.”

There’s a homeless man whose patch includes a corner near my office who has a tiny kitten with him at all times. Little thing is well cared-for and in fact generally eats better than its human, as people toss cat food into his donation box as well as money. Shelters won’t allow animals, and this man will not be parted from his cat, so they’re out there, rain or shine. Good on this vet for doing the work in front of him.

A.

Feb 26 2020
2 Comments
Athenae, Geek Cred, Television

Then It Comes, and Are You Ready

Because of some real-life stuff happening, ie real life is happening all the time right now and I’m doing my best with it, I can’t commit to weekly threads about this show but YOU SHOULD ALL BE WATCHING PICARD: 

What I loved about Picard’s immediate embrace of Dahj was that it speaks to everything Picard was in the television show: a generous soul with a sixth sense for when someone is telling the truth, no matter how outlandish. And after his trip to Starfleet archives, he very tenderly tells Dahj the truth: She isn’t human. Picard’s archival materials are a treasure trove for Trekkies: the Captain Picard Day sign and the model of the Stargazer, for starters.

To Picard, Dahj is every bit as deserving of empathy as Data was.

“If you are who I think you are, you are dear to me in ways that you can’t understand,” Picard tells her. “I will never leave you.”

I grew up on Next Gen but even before that I had an Authority Thing and an Older Man Thing and a Mentor/Student Thing and so Captain Picard pushed all the buttons. Teenage me would have thrown myself at him while he chivalrously drove me home and told me to concentrate on my homework. (Part of the appeal of crushes like that is that you know they would never.)

And you have to remember there was nothing GOOD on TV back then. Watch the Drumhead episode, the Borg storyline, the “Family” ep I still can’t re-watch without being completely destroyed, and yes, right now AMC and HBO give us that kind of depth and character development and goddamn Shakespearean glory every single week but back then? Imagine seeing this when all you’d seen was Growing Pains:

There was nothing like that, holy shit. The language blew my tiny baby-writer mind. My body was ready for Star Trek: Picard, is what I’m saying, and I still wasn’t ready.

HERE BE SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING UP TO TOMORROW.

Continue reading →

Feb 25 2020
Athenae, So Called Liberal Media

Stooooooooooop

I WENT TO THIS PANEL IN 2009 AND IT SUCKED THEN TOO.

There is a coordinated campaign to get people to distrust the press, it is being run by one political party for that party’s supporters’ express financial benefit through one major cable news network, this has been true for 30 years, but surely if we explain ourselves just ONE MORE TIME, people will love us again!

Jesus H. Christ with a side of sweet potato fries, I’m exhausted. For 30-plus years, Fox News has been blaring from every airport gate in every city in this country and a few overseas that every other news source is liberally biased and only THEY report and we decide. Only THEY are unbiased. Only THEY will tell you the truth. And you know what, for the critical 35 or so percent of the country that the GOP needs to stay in gerrymandered and destructive power, it’s fucking WORKED.

In the face of that assault, we have the journalism establishment, dithering at 8-foot tables about how maybe readers just don’t understand, maybe they just independently came to these conclusions:

media trust graph

What happened between 1989 and 1996, remind me, I forget, was it this?

Or this? 

But sure, let’s keep talking about this stuff like it’s the weather, like it just HAPPENED.

Maybe if we sincerely correct people angry at us, with the best of intentions, and show them how pure our hearts are OH FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK. I’m not excusing anyone ELSE’S malpractice (looking at you, CNN). I’m certainly not letting corporate consolidation and frantic flailing at every single industry trend in an effort to keep making enough money to hide the sexual harassment lawsuit payouts off the hook.

What I take issue with is the idea that there’s some kind of genuine ignorance, some kind of benign disconnect that can be remedied by yet another explanation of who we are why what we do matters.

We’re having a lot of dumb conversations with the Institute for Being Stuck Up Our Own Asses about What The Future Holds and Our Existential Threat and until we deal with the literal Fox in our henhouse those overall numbers of how many people loathe us are not going to get better or change.

We have spent eons justifying our existence. We have spent EPOCHS explaining why we do what we do. And not for nothing but we have spent 30 years being friendly with people who hate us. We have spent 30 years pretending they’re just joking, pretending their inflated sales numbers mean we have to pay attention to what they say, and in response we got “Rope, Tree, Journalist” and “peanuts for the animals” and “fake news.”

WHILE we were doing this we set generational brand loyalty on fire by systematically divesting from communities we’d covered for decades, where trust had been built and at least if people thought we were fuckers we were their fuckers, you know?

So now we come at them with the idea that somehow they don’t understand? They understand just fine. One “news” organization is coming at them from every television in every waiting room in every tire shop in the country, coming at them telling them things are life and death and WE ARE ALL THAT IS STANDING BETWEEN YOU AND DESTRUCTION. One network is relentlessly pushing itself in their faces with, where not outright fascism, authoritarian visions of the world around them which are basically heroin.

And in response we’re gonna plead poverty, beg them to subscribe, and EXPLAIN OURSELVES?

No. No way.

To its credit, the journalism summit referenced in the tweet that set me off down this YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME path did include people doing the very hard work of building something from scratch to address potential news consumers who nobody has ever given a single fuck about, which is why this is the only way forward.

That’s a start. The whole other part of this includes a series of very well-catered events (since that’s apparently where most of our Big Thinking About Journalism happens) detailing once and for all who is Journalism’s Friend. And how to respond to the people who aren’t, who have never been, and how it doesn’t matter if they’re nice to you at parties, if they go on the air the next day and call you biased liars.

Also, knock this the fucking fuck off:

Jesus.

A.

Feb 23 2020
Athenae, So Called Liberal Media

Finally, We Are Talking About Money for Journalism

I have been screaming about this since I last worked in newspapers, and lest you think that’s me exaggerating, here’s 200FUCKING6.

It wasn’t the internet. It never was the internet. All the internet did is make it impossible to hide the stupidity and greed anymore. Back when papers were drowning in money they could spend it on dumb shit and pay off sexual harassers and hand out consultant contracts to their idiot buddies and nobody would even notice. Now, well, the margins are still good but they’re not THAT good.

Look at those margins, though. THIRTY PERCENT. Do you know what most phenomenally successful businesses make most years? A ten percent margin is considered good, and that’s by the soulless standards of American finance. These guys are swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck and they’ve got their reporters out here telling readers if they don’t subscribe everyone will die of starvation and it’s infuriating to the exact degree that it’s unnecessary.

A.

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