Tag Archives: Charlie Pierce

It Was Time for the Mask Mandate to Go.

Posted on by
The best mask to wear on an airplane

Personally, I’m just fine with pulling the plug on the public transportation mask mandate. At the risk of sounding like a raging, bug-eyed Trump goober — or Bill Maher — masks, as a universal mandate have served what purpose they could and it’s time to move on into the next phase of COVID protection.

How the mandate has been ended is a whole other story. I am not alone in thinking it bizarre-to-appalling that in a highly-developed society of 320 million people one strategically placed partisan with precious little legal and no medical qualifications can dictate/induce a health policy for everyone. Really folks, WTF? Can we get some half-baked judge somewhere to require every pot hole in the country get fixed today?

(This on the judge from Charlie Pierce: “You see, Judge [Kathryn] Mizelle is one of those folks that the Federalist Society sent up the pneumatic tube that led from its labs to the White House. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. She was 33 when she was nominated and confirmed as the 2020 lame-duck session was winding down. She was eight years out of law school and had never tried a case of any kind. Her husband was chosen to be acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security through his connection to that noted devotee of the Constitution, Stephen Miller. She had no experience, but she had the golden resume.“)

Have you read her argument on “sanitation”? What for godssake is the woman babbling about?

But the science of masked airplane travel has escaped me for a while. If every environment in which we spend time in close quarters with other humans was as well ventilated and filtered as an airplane I seriously doubt COVID would have spread as far and as deep as it has.

The larger point is that after two years, and after everything we’ve learned about the virus, after the vaccines and boosters and all that is readily knowable about transmission and individual vulnerability, we are truly at the point where it is up to each of us to protect ourselves. Pre-vaccine I wouldn’t have said so. But now I do.

Feel free to tell me how completely wrong I am, but two shots and two boosters later and with no underlying conditions (other than general mule-headedness and irritability) I’m not seeing myself as particularly vulnerable to serious infection from COVID as it exists today, even in its sub-variants. Likewise, based on my understanding, if I’m carrying any level of the virus, (which immunologically may actually help me avoid a more serious infection) my viral load isn’t potent enough to do much if any damage to another similarly vaccinated, otherwise healthy person.

Which gets us obviously to those who are either not vaccinated or afflicted with some other significant health problem.

At this point in the pandemic everybody has had enough time and has access to enough information to have made an adult decision about vaccinations. Not that “adult” means “good”, you undersatand.

For those still avoiding vaccination because of some utterly imbecilic hyper-partisan political reason (which usually covers both “religious” issues and athletes with “body purity” excuses) … well, good luck to you. If your fierce stand for “personal freedom” gets a tube jammed down your throat and an early grave, you can hope that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem or some other sociopathic right-wing grifter will show up and say a few appreciative words at your funeral.

For people with emphysema, diabetes, etc., they absolutely should continue protecting themselves with masks in public settings. More to the point, they should have been doing that before COVID. It unfortunately comes with their territory.

For the rest of us, we’ve followed science, as opposed to cable TV entertainment theory, and have every good reason now to move on. Exercising, mind you, similar basic cautions we use to avoid harm from… well, pick as many as you like … spinal meningitis, hepatitis, diptheria, measles, strolling blind across six lanes of freeway, jumping out of airplanes without a parachute, French kissing Matt Gaetz … (sorry about that last one) … and on and on … and on.

Point being, there’s something out there somewhere for everyone, given the right circumstances and bad luck.

Life is like that.

Paul Ryan Cashes In

Posted on by

Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.

 

 

The Spirit of The Village Voice is Alive and Well

Posted on by

Although it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise, news that the Village Voice, so long lefty hipsterdom’s bible of progressive rectitude, was no longer going to be published on paper set off a wail of laments. (Such as it is today, the Voice will still be published online.)

Certainly there’s an end-of-an-era quality to this news. But if the fear is that stories and attitudes distilled, amplified, incited by the Voice will no longer be covered, I just can’t buy that.

The Voice’s historical standing is secure. It is the first publication any informed person thinks of when they hear the phrase, “alternative press.” Loaded with a pantheon of terrific, cogent thinkers like Nat Hentoff, Robert Cristgau, Richard Goldstein, Jack Newfield, Alex Cockburn, Sylvia Plachy, Andrew Sarris, Teresa Carpenter and on and on, the Voice was irresistible reading for everyone hungry to know where the cutting edge of politics, arts and culture was in a given week.

The success of the Voice spawned a coast-to-coast legion of copycats, although few with the Voice’s social impact in their respective markets. Here in the Twin Cities several came and went. The Twin Cities Reader (where I worked) and City Pages competed for two decades, producing dozens of impressive features, hundreds of insightful reviews of film and music as well as, let’s face it, thousands of pretty junky advertiser-friendly “service journalism” plugs. (I accept my complicity.)

Point being, it wasn’t all glory.

The further point being that despite the Voice pulling down the curtain on print, the kinds and even the quality of writing on all of the Voice’s principal topics is available today in an astonishing profusion that I have to think would have gratified people like Hentoff and Jules Feiffer and Ellen Willis.

A daily mix of writing from the likes of Vox, The Daily Beast, Slate, Salon, Esquire (Charlie Pierce, baby!), Vanity Fair blended with the emboldened work of the Trump-era New York Times and Washington Post is, I’m arguing, as good and vital as anything the Voice produced.

Michael Musto — the Voice’s long time chronicler of the city’s gay scene — has a piece out (at the Daily Beast) poo-pooing the lament that all is lost. “Gay journalism” certainly is in some kind of golden age today.

He makes several interesting comments. Among them, this: “… the Voice—thanks to my then-editor, Karen Durbin–gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted about all of that, encouraging me to explore, titillate, and go against the big guns, all while celebrating the fringe characters and underdogs of the city. I was excited and ennobled by the weekly assignment.”

The sad fact of publishing’s economic life is that that kind of freedom — to be excessive, even — grows less and less likely with the overhead of print (and absurd ROI expectations). What writer among those of us who have worked in the Twin Cities hasn’t had the experience of the editor-as-dutiful, fearful accountant carving obscure cultural references, humor, point-of-view, snark and voice out of stories about culture, both political and artistic?

“Straighter yet” becomes the order of the day when your editors are less committed to an engaging, provocative product than to protecting long-term advertising contracts?

I’d like to see an on-line collective of that kind of provocative writing here in the Twin Cities. Obviously no one is going to pay much if anything for it. But someone could do worse than aggregate these cities’ abundant blog work onto a common forum, if only to see what comes of it.