What Just Happened?

 I don’t have a lot of followers here, but perhaps the most faithful one asked, “So when are you gonna write about the midterms?” If there is a party, I am usually late to it.

The problem with late arrival is that there is very little new to say. I have enjoyed some of the TV punditry. Mark McKinnon – yes, the guy with the hat – said that while President Trump wanted regime change in Iran, he got it here instead. Joe Scarborough talked about political athleticism in referring to the campaign skills of the winners. Bill Maher chided many Democrats for being too cautious in their expectations of victory, noting that he had consistently predicted a blowout.

While it was certainly anti-Trump, this election was about much more than that. Many have said it was a social and generational revolt, with younger candidates and minorities rising to the top, many of them women and quite a few military veterans. A fair number of the women are among those veterans.

Some commentators have compared this new crop to the Milwaukee Brewers, World Series winners who had conquered teams with much more money. The notion of “safe seats” in the House and the Senate may not be a thing in the future, and that’s as it should be. These elected positions have terms, which means that the seat holder theoretically has to face a challenger. Many of the prominent Republican losers on November 3 had not faced a credible opponent in many years and consequently, were not very good at campaigning. But these seats are not entitlement programs.

We can be grateful that our 250-year-old system held. This election even featured gracious concessions by many of the losers, in the spirit of the peaceful transfer of power – you know, how it used to be.

For the country, the ship of state has been righted, and we can look forward to seeing it bailed out. But there are choppy waters ahead. First, the newly elected cannot take their seats until January. In the meantime, the current Congress remains in place, and the President is still the President, a post he legally holds for two more years.

At this moment, though, let’s tip our hats to voters in Hungary, Serbia, and Brazil, who rejected authoritarian rule in their recent elections. They showed us the way. Here, we’ve been zigzagging on a long, and sometimes tragic, detour, but we know what the right course is, we just needed a little reminding.

 

 

A Different Game

The Lindsay Clancy trial, which has captured our attention for weeks, is now over, with a rather unsatisfying ending. Why didn’t our justice system work? But actually, it did!

It largely depends on how we view trials. They are not unlike football, baseball, and basketball games. Am I trivializing?

To start with, they happen in a court, and they typically involve two teams, and most of the time, there is a winner and a loser. Participants play by a very complicated set of rules.

Let’s use football for our example. The prosecution and defense attorneys are combined head coaches and quarterbacks who design and launch the plays. The trial judge is the referee. The objective of each team is to score points with the jury.

The rest of us are in the stands. Most of us expect to see a favorite team win. But as with all competitions, the plays called and executed by each team may not work as expected, contributing to unpredictability.

And then, there is the jury. In a criminal trial, there is one overarching rule of this game: jurors must reach a unanimous verdict to convict or acquit. This is a very high standard, and it is supposed to be. It’s not up to the trial judge to jawbone a juror who doesn’t agree with the majority. In the Lindsay Clancy case, the judge found that the lone holdout juror was following the law, so there was no alternative but to declare a mistrial.  It was almost like an unfavorable ref call we sometimes see at the end of a game.

Unlike in sports, the outcome of a court trial can set precedents - legal, moral, and even educational. It’s agreed by many now that post-partum depression is a real thing. True, not all mothers will kill their children, otherwise, quite a few of us wouldn’t be here.

I am not saying that such crimes should not be prosecuted, but I personally hope the prosecutor in this case just leaves it alone and does not seek a retrial. As for punishment, Ms. Clancy is paralyzed following her suicide attempt and would seem to have a rather bleak life ahead of her. That should be enough.

Were there pre-trial mistakes made? Was she overmedicated? Should the children have been separated from her for safety reasons?

It’s easy to fix blame, but this game is over and blaming is unproductive and not our business. What IS our business is learning something about human behavior. Life itself, for some of us, can be a rough game indeed.

AI - My Toes in the Water

Over many months now, whenever I have had to check my writing and editing work, a very pleasant female robot voice reads it all back to me. My vision isn’t so good these days, so this process helps me catch a lot of mistakes.

Another robot answers questions. Mostly I ask her factual ones, like when something happened or who did what to whom in history. She has many other uses, for example, when some software I depend on changes something and I have to find out how to return it to its usual state. Instead of having to watch long how-to videos in which my issue may or may not be addressed, bot-girl instantly comes up with the fix. This also applies to problems with equipment like phones, computers, or TVs.

Then I discovered something else. To lay some groundwork here, I lived in another state 50 years ago and worked with a woman who became a good friend. Later, she moved away and then died unexpectedly at age 29. I had no pictures of her – in those days we all didn’t walk around with cameras in our pockets. Eventually, her mother sent me a very pixilated black-and-white photocopy of her daughter’s newspaper obituary, which included a badly washed-out headshot. Years passed and computer photo-editing tools became available, but even with those, t I could recover only about half of the picture. Then came AI, and I wondered if that might help. I gave it a try.

It worked – not instantly. I had to tell the robot things like, the eyebrows should be a little thicker, or the hair should come down to her chin on both sides. But after about half an hour at the most, I came up with a very passable version of my friend – not quite the same woman but pretty damn close. Then, I had to figure out how I felt about this, or SHOULD feel. Am I Dr. Frankenstein, or was it just an effort to revive a distant memory?

Then I started having other thoughts. Among the first was, somewhere, some giant data center is sucking water out of the ground and driving up someone’s utility bill so that I could do my thing.

This is how it all works now. We enjoy a new level of tech-based convenience. but at a cost we don’t see, because it’s not right in front of us. So -- can I use AI and be a data-center protester too? I want to say, stop it, do I REALLY have to deal with all these heavy moral questions right now?

Well, you know what I did next: I asked the AI lady, and she said my concerns were “understandable.” But what do YOU think? Any feedback would be welcome here, just as long as you’re human. Thank you!

 

Saint Dolly

 

Hold on a minute, I’m not being cynical about that. Following Dolly Parton’s passing, we have witnessed an incomparable outpouring of love, honor, and respect that most famous people are not afforded. Our daily concerns simply stopped, or at least took a back seat for a time, ranging from a few minutes to many hours, depending on our acquaintance with her life and career. It has reminded us of how few people have actually done that. Just think about someone who has brought an involuntary smile to your face when you hear their name. even in their death. For me, Robin Williams is another such name that comes to mind. You may have had similar feelings about him or others.

So, what was it about Dolly? To be completely honest, she was never my favorite country singer. I didn’t particularly like her voice. But hey, I have never sung one note to an audience  nor written a single bar of music. If you want to keep going with this, I have never created one job nor established a single charity - which gives you an idea of just how un-Dolly I am.

Now she was human and had quirks, foibles, and personal struggles, but she seemed to have attained an almost perfect balance of accomplishment, humility, and generosity, mixed with a somewhat self-deprecating sense of humor. While all performers must pay attention to their craft and how it impacts audiences, it seemed like she was always perfecting a gift to share from a pure heart. Clearly, she was a great businesswoman, providing much employment and boosting the economy in her part of Tennessee with the creation of the Dollywood theme park, and was about lifting up rather than tearing down. She was famously non-political but did stand up for what she felt was right when necessary.

You might conclude that I have fallen for an image. But she wasn’t really crafting one. Most of us probably didn’t know about the extent of her charitable giving until it came out this week in the media eulogies. By the way, you don’t have to be poor to be something of a saint.

Sometimes, it takes the death of someone like Dolly Parton not just to turn the spotlight on them but also to reacquaint us with people whose values we appreciate, again, almost involuntarily. We know them when we see them. And some stars shine especially brightly when the darkness outside is approaching its deepest.

 

Dinner Defense

Watching a popular cable news show during a lunch break, I saw a panel of journalists I usually respect bash the latest version of the White House Correspondents Association dinner. I disagreed with them, something that doesn’t happen a lot.

Their message was, the event has outlived its usefulness. Part of their concern is that while it honors the work of current White House reporters and presents scholarships to up-and-coming student journalists, it has turned into just another Oscar-model awards show, of which there are already too many. I get that.

But then, the panel went on about how the dinner involves a phony coziness between the White House journalists and the institution they are supposed to be covering, and how respected organizations like the New York Times stopped participating in it years ago. And after that, the panel seemed to criticize the attendees. Why didn’t the prominent jurnalists at least boo when President Trump hurled insults at them? Why did they shake hands with Trump or even smile at him when accepting their awards? Why did journalists attend at all?

The award and scholarship parts were inspiring, but those are not what made the WHCA dinner a national television event in the past. We all wanted to see the roast part, where a comedian makes fun of the current occupant of the White House, and then the President gets to respond in kind. The Presidential roastees were sometimes funnier than the roasters, which we see when they show the clips of past dinners.

The difference this time was, the roastee was doing the roasting, actually more like frying, of his journalist adversaries. He pretended to be joking, but he meant it. We heard faint laughing and sometimes clapping. So there were some supporters there.

The cable panel maintained the mainstream journalists  were there because their corporate bosses wanted them there, and they had to behave. But I don’t think that’s all of it. I think a shred of the old spirit of decorum and at least temporary camaraderie that was the hallmark of this event was still in evidence. If reporters had stormed out of the building, they might have made Trump more of the story than he already was, as what he said was expected anyway. And if they needed revenge, they could get it later simply by doing their jobs.

Traditions often seem logically useless, but they remain because of their connection to the past. The WHCA dinner we just saw was not representative of the ones we’re used to, during the glory days when a sense of humor was allowed. I hope that when the time is right again, the dinner’s future chefs, so to speak, will return to the old recipe that made us laugh.

 

coughswitch · Dinner Defense

coughswitch · A Harrowing Journey

A Harrowing Journey

 

A few days ago, I connected with a friend who is a distinguished scientific researcher at a top American university. She is an Iranian who has lived here for a long time. But recently, she did something incredibly brave: she traveled back to her embattled native country to help care for her mother and sister, who were both seriously ill. The timing couldn’t have been worse. She had to miss her teenage son’s birthday, dropping everything here because her family in Iran desperately needed her.

Shortly after this war started last winter, the Iranian leaders shut down internet access. For days at her home here in the US, all my friend could do was worry in the dark. By the time the connection was partly restored, her mother and sister were struggling so much that she felt she must make the trip to be with them.

She packed her bags and took a long, exhausting, and indirect journey, involving a third country, to reach her war-torn homeland – and later, remarkably, returned to America. I don’t know how she did it. But she has asked me for a favor: Be my voice, she said.

Now I need to tell you that when this woman writes about her science research, I have no idea what she’s writing about, and I can barely pronounce half the words. But when it comes to life issues, she is one of the most eloquent writers of English I know. I feel a little unqualified to fulfill her request but will try.

She told me that the trip taught her a huge lesson: ordinary Iranians still trust each other to find their way, despite great differences in their political views. As soon as she arrived in Iran, she saw firsthand how the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement and quiet, everyday acts of protest have changed the country. Both women and men are changing how they dress and live, simply trying to hold onto their dignity. She was amazed by their grit as they struggled to keep their spirits up.

But she also saw through their brave smiles to the deep worry underneath. As the bombs fall and the destruction and death toll rise, their hope is almost gone. They have seen Iran called the cradle of civilization in history books, but some in the modern world see Iranians as terrorists. Many of the country’s 92 million residents, my friend observes, feel caught between a harsh government at home and greedy superpowers abroad. And what breaks her heart the most is what she calls the quiet indifference of the rest of the world to the human suffering the war has caused.

And the war has produced way more than human casualties. Persia, Iran’s previous name, was once a great empire with a rich culture dating back thousands of years. How many of the remaining ancient symbols of it have been damaged or destroyed in just a few months’ time, and how many more will suffer the same fate?

My friend is reminded of a message from a famous poem written by Saadi Shirazi back in 13th-century Persia. Its truth, she says, is as real today as it was then: Human beings are like parts of one body. created from the same essence. When one part is hurt and in pain, the other parts cannot rest.

And, especially these days, should not.