The joys and sorrows of reading during the pandemic

I've found myself as a reader again during the pandemic. 

There are several reasons for this. One is that I overdosed on screen time early on, obsessing about every new development as the virus spread. That hasn't changed as much as it should, but I've learned that the best way to curb it is to go to a room -- or a park, or even just sit in the car at Sonic -- and leave all electronic devices, including my iPhone, behind.

The good news is I'm catching up on literature I've long meant to get around to. I reread THE FIRE NEXT TIME, and finally go to Toni Morrison's BELOVED. Right now I'm juggling Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS with THE SECRET GARDEN -- a family read -- and MOBY DICK. I'm loving everything. And I'm not bothering with books that don't capture me. I read 50 pages of a relatively recent novel last week, decided it wasn't for me, and returned it to the library. Life's too short.

On the other hand, life's too short. And I'm more aware of it right now than ever. From where I'm sitting, I can see books by Louise Erdrich, Gunter Grass, NK Jesmin and others waiting to be read. I want to read them. I feel like I should. But I can't read what I'm reading fast enough to get to them as fast as I want. 

I want to read everything now.

On the final hand: Life's too short. I'm going to die someday. And all this reading I've been doing ... will it die with me too? If so, what's the point?

I don't know.

But I'm going to keep reading anyway.

On John Bolton, and why 'virtue signaling' is a con

John Bolton is making a big deal of how bad the president is now. Why didn't he say this stuff when he saw it -- particularly to Democrats who were proceeding with impeachment at the time?

This confirms my long-held view that the term "virtue signaling" is a con -- a way to avoid acting virtuously, to hold virtue in contempt, while still preserving an air of superiority.

Don't get me wrong: Lots of people want to be seen as behaving admirably, and that can lead to hollow, performative acts. But a lot of times when people -- conservatives -- use the term, it's is because they disagree with the virtue being signaled (say, acting against racism) and hate to see people acting as though the virtue in question is actually admirable. They're not really against virtue, or acting virtuously, or a lot of people who use the term perjoratively would never go to church again. They just dislike left-of-center virtues.

Bolton's use of the term is even worse. Nobody was asking him to "signal" anything -- they want to know why he didn't take real-time action, potentially effective action, against corruption and criminality. In his hands, an already hollow term becomes an even more hollow slogan to provide cover against doing the right thing. And paradoxically, it becomes it's own signal -- Bolton may be criticizing the president, but he can still use the language of conservatives. He's letting them know he's still one of them.

You can't say #BlackLivesMatter and play college football this year

Slate's Joel Anderson offers up some chilling statistics:

This week, players returned to campuses all around the country preparing themselves for a season that almost certainly shouldn’t be played. Just look at the early numbers. Two weeks ago at Oklahoma State, three players tested positive for the virus. Last week, the University of Houston suspended workouts after six players tested positive. And Thursday at the University of Texas, news reports emerged that 13 players tested positive — an uptick from the six reported the day before.

I've long predicted that American sports leagues probably will try to resume playing soon, but that somebody will get sick, and everybody will shut down for the rest of the year. But it's ironic that efforts to resume sports are happening at the same time as the "Black Lives Matter" protests -- which started out as a policing issue, but have spread to hard discussions about racism and the exploitation of Black people in all sectors of society.

College sports should be one of those sectors. In the major sports, black and other minority athletes provide disproportionate share of the labor with relatively little compensation, considering the money they're generating for their schools. It's already an exploitative system. But now there's a chance that exploitation will lead to illness and, possibly, death. The excuse that young, healthy people don't face as much danger from the coronavirus, but the truth is there's still a lot we don't know -- and we're learning all the time that asymptomatic carriers of the virus might also face long-term health problems.

The coaches and other university officials need to stop this, now, or their words of racial harmony will ring especially hollow. You can't say that "black lives matter" and keep playing the games. Not this year.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sam Brownback and the GOP's view of "Sharia law"

Trump-adjacent conservative Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post says Republicans must defeat GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of her conspiracy-mongering views. Part of Olsen's bill of particulars:

Let’s start with her anti-Muslim bigotry. She has said there is an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government and that members of Congress should have to be sworn into office on a Bible. She slurred Muslim men, saying they can have sex with “little boys, little girls … [and] marry as many women as they want.” She said Muslims who “want Sharia law” should “stay over there in the Middle East” and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” She said on Wednesday that “Sharia Law” is “a real threat to our nation,” a blatant falsehood since there’s no effort anywhere in this nation to institute it.

Is opposition to Sharia law out of bounds in the Republican Party? If so, that would probably be news to a lot of Republicans. From 2012:

Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.

The law has been dubbed the “sharia bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code. Sharia, or Islamic law, covers all aspects of Muslim life, including religious obligations and financial dealings. Opponents of state bans say they could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims.

Brownback, incidentally, is now the "ambassador at large for international religious freedom," because irony is dead. But Kansas wasn't the only state to undertake such an effort. Less than a decade ago, conspiracy thinking about and efforts to ban sharia in the United States were pretty mainstream among conservatives. At one point, as many as 13 states saw bills introduced to ban sharia. Several states adopted the bans. I can't swear that all the bills came from Republicans, but Republicans were the main drivers of that effort.

Those efforts didn't just fade out. Here's Andrew McCarthy at National Review in 2017, arguing that immigration policy should deliberately shut out those he called "sharia supremacists": " To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution."

So the idea that Islamic law is a threat to the American way of life was, and appears to remain, a mainstream conservative position. Henry Olsen treats it as disqualifying. Did conservatives change their minds while I wasn't looking, or is Olsen just trying to make the GOP look less nutty than it really is?

If Trump were merely competent...

... he would be a lot more dangerous. And a bunch of DACA recipients would probably be preparing for deportation today.

SCOTUS today overturned Trump's decision to end DACA because he didn't follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act, which guides executive branch rule-making. If Trump and his lackeys had simply crossed their Ts and dotted their Is, it's a good bet they would've won today.

This is the pattern: 

I'm not sure that it's possible to elected a version of Trump that is more competent and less given to shortcuts -- Trumpism, to a large degree, is a set of impulses more than an ideology -- but just imagine if that actually happened. If somebody with Trump's inclinations and a bit of self-discipline took the White House (say, somebody like Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson) they would probably be much more successful at turning their inclinations into actual public policy. We're not dodging Trumpian bullets because he's wrong, but because he's so bad at the actual business of governing. That's too close a call.

The pure narcissism of Donald Trump

I know we know this, but still...

...it is remarkable the degree to which this president thinks everything is about him. I don't wear a mask when I go out because I don't like Trump. I do it to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in my community. And the Supreme Court didn't rule against Trump on DACA because of Trump, but because his administration bypassed the legal process for overturning DACA. To the extent that the latter ruling came about because Donald Trump doesn't like to bother doing things the right way, I suppose it is about him. But only indirectly. He could still be Donald Trump, and the court would've ruled in his favor if his administration just had its shit together. He's too narcissistic to understand that.

America is sinning against Indigenous women. Again.

Lot of news going on lately, but I want to make sure this sinks in. ProPublica:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians.

Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.

“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.”

America has a long - and relatively recent - history of mistreating native women and their offspring. I only became aware of this during the last year.

A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO finds that 36 women under age 21 were sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Two years earlier, an independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without her consent. PInkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.”

This kind of stuff is rightly regarded as genocide: Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. The others are "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group," "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," "imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group," and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

America's treatment of native peoples has included pretty much all of the above. Forced sterilizations certainly fit the bill. Separating native mothers from their children based on nothing more than their apparent ethnicity does too. This is a grave injustice. Unfortunately, for Native Americans, it's just more of the same.