thesearebobsthoughts - Tumblr blog

thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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March 30, 2020

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I have been making a daily inventory of my own body—what i’m feeling, what’s changed, what has remained the same—for the longest stretch in my lifetime. All of the nagging issues I might have ignored or powered through seem like bright red warning flags. That I’m running straight off the edge of some unknown cliff. Or not.

When I was a kid (and probably extending into my teenage years) I semi-believed that if I could slow down or even stop time with my mind. This magic was only available to me in the early morning, while laying in bed, though. The seconds and minutes ticked off the clock and approached the hour when I’d have to actually haul my ass out of bed and begin my daily ablutions, etc. before trundling off to school, but if I concentrated and focused, I could slow down time. Extend the precious seconds spent lolling around under the covers, safe as houses. I’d think to myself “time slow” or even “time stop” over and over again. Then I’d check my watch and by jeezum crow, it did feel like less time had passed. Of course, I wasn’t exactly enjoying the product of my heretofore-latent X-Men-like mutant skill, but rather frozen in place, reciting my own personal mantra.

How that effects the perception of time. The dreams that I had about dad prior to

some people gotta die https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1242134979859152899

a good Trump thread:

Learning about the pulmonary fibrosis.

https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1243405463737098240

Mom diagnosed with emphesyma five years ago. Sometimes more drawn out. Tthe optimism with the doctor. Dad losing his Ashkenazi genes. The iniitla CT test is needed then waiting 4-6 months to see deteroiioration. His is better than mom’s a “whole buncha” stuff” said mom. Starting at a good level. More resrve you have the better shape your in. Older people ccellerate much more quickly. So many variables. Even if he varies from the variables. All people don’t procede the same way still. By the way this is genetic. Jerry had it. And that’s waht probably caused his death. Smoking is a trigger.

TIt’s considered a rare disease. Therese

W=hen i was pregnant with you and working two jobbs and renovintg this house to get it ready. I went to the medical library and took out two textbooks on obstetrics and read them cover to cover. In the middle of the labor, suddenly, b/c you were the most incredibly difficult delivery b/c your were in a frank breech piotion. You were always difficult. in the middle 0ot all dr says to the nurse “get the pipers’ but in the back of one of those books on the top. ofthe page somewhere it talked abou t forceps delivers. Mentioned poioers the types the type of forceps you use. B/c it can cause hemragghing. or disfigurations or any old deformity. I was going to get you out without that no matter. What I was alsways going to prepare.

My god I’m I’m crazy.

Doctors office is closed now. They’re all closed now. I don’t know how much experience he’s had with these patients highly regarded NY hospital pulmonilgist. In his 70s.

Another dr. who karen knows works with one of the drugs. Up at Columbia presbyterian. “All of this is happening at a very awful time.”

The diff between what my father says, mother says.

Just to be clear, the politicians, commentators, and bankers arguing that capitalism ("the economy") is more important than some % of human lives have ALWAYS held that belief. That isn't crisis-thinking. It's always been built in to their logic and calculus. They're fine with it.

https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/1242846086106165248

Some more info from Mom:

Drew Magary here:

And I am powerless to stop it. I can rant all day and tell Mitch McConnell to go fuck himself on Twitter (and have I ever). I can yell at Democratic leaders for revealing themselves as nothing but a bunch of proverbial good cops. I can hold up yet another equivocating New York Times headline that fails to illuminate how fucked this all is right now. But my anger is no match for the steadfast determination of our leaders and of our moneyed elite to burn it all down. We can still save ourselves, but we won’t because a bunch of extremely rich people are angry that they’re not quite as rich as they were a month ago. We’re at their mercy, and they have so little to spare. So it’s not just the fear that’s eating at me. It’s the utter helplessness I feel.

Miles Klee here:

Except, in most ways, the damage is essentially done. A fifth of households have lost work, and we are positioned to hit a 30 percent jobless rate. We are not even far enough from the initial shocks to measure how bad they were, but signs point to an instant collapse that overshadows any in living memory. None of this can be reversed by forcing workers back into unsafe conditions as the risk of COVID-19 transmission continues to grow.

The ruling class is aware of this, and recovery is not really what they’re after, despite the death cult fanaticism evident in the chorus of Dow Jones defenders. No, what they want is to exploit the small and closing window between here and the peak in confirmed U.S. cases, pull a few last gains from the wreckage by squeezing us for blood.

The fight for the truth. https://t.co/X5ImkrTPsB?amp=1

But of course this was inevitably going to devolve into insane culture war bullshit. A huge chunk of Americans want people living in cities—which are stocked with immigrants, people of color, Jews, weirdo artists, and so on—to get nuked, global pandemic or not. STEEZE https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1243965781634723840

And so McKay Coppins got a bunch of red state types on the blower and asked them to unpack their hearts. What emerged was a ton of ignorance and hostility, thanks to a party whose ideology was reduced to Owning the Libs a long time ago.

At the driving range, while Frost and his like-minded friends slathered on hand sanitizer and kept six feet apart, the white-haired Republicans seemed to delight in breaking the new rules. They made a show of shaking hands, and complained loudly about the “stupid hoax” being propagated by virus alarmists. When their tee times were up, they piled defiantly into golf carts, shoulder to shoulder, and sped off toward the first hole.

Frost felt conflicted. He wanted to encourage the men, some of whom he’d known for years, to be more careful. “I care about their well-being,” he told me. “But it’s a tough call, just personally, because it’s become a political thing.”

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The food chain may not be disrupted altogether—despite the president's giddiness at the thought of an Escape from New York-type quarantine—but hoo boy, was it an ordeal to buy groceries online. Instacart workers are (rightly) going on strike, and the available canned goods from Walmart have dwindled down to creamed eels, corn nog, and wadded beef.

youtube

My order was supposed to arrive by 11, but like the blasted Juul pods, I’m still waiting. And of course, going downstairs to pick them up means putting on my jerry-rigged hazmat suit, and another bout of frenzied hand-washing and apartment-scrubbing.

UPDATE: The groceries arrived. Unless Amazon satisfies its workers’ demands, it’ll be the last one for a while, too..

First I had to prep myself to go outside. Put on a different set of clothes, gloves and a mask. Walk downstairs trying not to touch anything, and haul up the nine paper bags. Then I took the groceries out and put the paper bags into a garbage bag which was sealed air-tight, and stored outside my door for the next trip to the trash. Then I scrubbed down every grocery item with wipes and every place the bags and/or items touched, also with wipes,, plus the fridge and cabinets I touched. Then dispose of the clothes/gloves I wore in a different garbage bag, wiped down that bag, and put it in the closet for the next laundry cycle. Then scrubbed my hands with soap and water, and took a shower. Took about 30 minutes. Everything requires planning and effort, now, in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 days ago. This kind of dilligence and meticulousness is definitely not in my wheelhouse.

Remember back in 2005 When Christo covered Central Park in orange curtains. The art installation was so vital, he spent tktk years trying to coerce and strongarm various elected officials. In the end, tourists came in droves. Despite costing $21 million, New York turned a profit. (Please take any and all “economic activity” stats with a giant dose of Morton’s.

Anyway, Central Park is undergoing a different kind of makeover today.

Chinese deaths https://twitter.com/isaacstonefish/status/1244318477709725696

Hey, remember when half a dozen senators committed insider trading and profited off a fucking pandemic and now either everyone is too busy/wracked with the latest atrocity-du-jour to deal with it and anyone in a position to do something has pretended it never happened? That’s fun.

Good one, Bob.

Like the shmucks in Independence Day who gathered on the roof of that Los Angeles high-rise to welcome our new alien overlords, people wanted to look at the great big boat-turned-makeshift hospital and will soon be filled with sick people.

According to the New York Post, groups of people stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the fence of Pier 90 Monday morning to catch a glimpse and a photo of the USNS Comfort coming to shore. New York police officers reportedly stood by and did not disperse the crowd, but Mayor Bill de Blasio’s communications team directed cops to break it up after journalists started tweeting about the throngs of people.

Man, check that baby out!

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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May 5, 2020

Every day there’s a new article unearthing damning evidence of the months the Trump administration spent frittering away any chance at saving untold thousands of lives and staving off financial ruin. This entire administration has so much blood on its hands that even if you gifted each racist, dim sycophant in its employ their very own an industrial size jar of Lava with Pumice, it won’t wash off. Not ever. I know, because I read them all, like the true moron I am. (The Brits fucked this up, too lol.)

All of these stories include some bit of color like: in late February three senior advisors printed out easy-to-read charts in order to stress the severity of the problem. Following the briefing, the president got a thrice-divorced septaugenarian dentist from Palm Beach and a leathery, ghoulish real estate baron the phone. Sidney told Mr. Trump he “wasn’t concerned,” and the pair discussed their most recent 18 holes at Trump National, sources familiar with the conversation said.

But what if, and hear me out, wrecking any confidence in the ability of government to slightly improve people’s lives, let alone handle a national emergency, only serves to strengthen a strongman’s hold on power? What if the ongoing, entirely botched response to crises, whether self-inflicted or not, is a feature of authoritarian regimes, not a bug? (I do not and will not apologize for that gob of ham-fisted wordplay.)

As an answer to these purely hypothetical, maddenting questions, I present an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (of all places), which revealed that the Federal government is choking off Democrat-run states like they were a foreign country under sactions. One Massachusetts hospital was getting outbid by the Feds for PPE. So they paid way more than normal for the desperately-needed supplies and managed to get them shipped. Problem solved, right? Nah. The trucks were still hijacked by the Feds and the head of the hospital was interrogated by the FBI. If an MA Congressman hadn’t stepped in, the Department of Homeland Security would have successfully boosted the goods and redistributed them as poltical patronage. Eventually, the governor needed to borrow a jet loaned out by the New England Patriots to procure a million N95 Chinese masks. (And not all of those masks actually worked.)

The DHS cosplaying as DeNiro and Pesci in Goodfellas and ripping off 18-wheelers does provide some insight into the truly twisted Peak Business Insights offered by Jared Kushner during a now weeks-old presser. And yes, the daily Good-Time Medicine Show and Variety Hour will continue apace and be aired on every single goddamned cable TV network no matter how much rank bullshit is spouted, because ratings, or until the president gets bored.

UPDATE, May 22: I should have been able to forsee that “bad polling” might also convince him to ditch his grim stand-up act. It did.

Trump’s motivation is just as callow: He can’t stand being cooped up in the house all day and so they’re a substitute for his temporarily-shuttered, deranged rallies—a safe space to filli his diaper and whine about questions that aren’t sufficiently “nice.” That's it.

I promise we’ll get back to Jared in a sec, but when trying to suss out the motivation behind anything Trump does, there’s one and only one explanation: to momentarily quelch feeling angry or sad or both. In this sense, the president and a flatworm are more or less indistinguishable.

To watch this whey-faced trust fund Failson breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis while dispensing affectless and meaningless business-school jargon, is to see the collapse of governing itself in real time.“it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use," Kushner said, describing the federal government’s medical stockpile.

In his sui generis wheedling, reedy voice, he continued:. "So we're encouraging the states to make sure that they're assessing the needs, they're getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we've given them."

And of course, he acted on those beliefs. Kushner’s shadow cabinet commandeered FEMA, which returned desperately-needed medical supplies. Because this empty Ken doll thinks they belong to him. Despite getting busted for repeatedly lying while trying to get security clearance and despite wrecking every thriving business concern he’s stuck his grubby pillow-soft fingers into, SOMETHING Not much has changed now that he’s ascended to his current perch. Via The Daily Beast:

“He doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about. He has no idea,” said Gen. Russel Honore, a retired military general who helped direct the response on the ground during Hurricane Katrina. “He must have remembered something from some slide or some speech. But that’s why people created the national strategic stockpile in the first place. It’s for those days when we can’t predict what we need. What I see is a total misunderstanding by the White House that they have a responsibility to help maintain the stockpile and help states.”

nightmarish objective reality.

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1246102757003722752

It’s not even entirely clear that The Financial Times reported this week that Kushner argued early on that “testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/157728/jared-kushner-national-disaster-coronavirus

In his spare time, the flopsy Harvard muppet who’s only lifetime achievement was and forever will be his inheritance, is making sure his financial interests keep humming merrily along. Like larding tenants with debt, filing eviction lawsuits, and straight up kicking people out into the streets:

And if that’s not enough https://t.co/DASPiBqtps

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1249655328742006784

and finally https://t.co/PRmOliUC3r

We are so fucked https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

The speed of the news cycle and the poisonous way we (me, for sure) process information functions just as well as some MAGA-fied Winston Smith bowdlerizing history and shoving photos of unpersons into a burn bag.

One of the most frustrating things about the current crisis is that everything about it should be radicalizing but instead it’s deflating. We have to stay home, we can’t gather. We are being trained to be passive recipients of whatever our woefully inadequate leaders offer.

If you want to see the impact on a truly Galaxy Brained dipshit, over the course of a month. https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1246812006960726018

JARED rewriting gov’t language https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/strategic-national-stockpile-description-altered-after-kushners-remarks-163181

On Wednesday morning, there was a “Fox & Friends” appearance for the ages by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key behind-the-scenes role in the White House’s coronavirus response. “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this,” Kushner said, an astounding statement considering that, within the previous twenty-four hours, the United States had just hit more than a million confirmed infections and, in a space of weeks, surpassed the American death toll for the entire Vietnam War. “The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.”

To top it all off, the shadow pandemic response team Kushner installed was packed with useless McKinsey/Boston Consulting Group pals, none of whom had the requisite experience in procurement or dealing with FDA regulations or managing supply lines or anything besides hoovering up massive consulting fees while simultaneously larding companies downd with debt. Seems like there are real downsides when Galaxy Brained Fox News talking heads have access to the real levers of power:

Supply-chain volunteers were instructed to fast-track protective equipment leads from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists friendly to the White House, according to the complaint and one senior administration official.

“Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, for example, called two people he knew in the administration to pass along a lead about protective equipment in an effort to be helpful, according to two people familiar with the outreach. Fox News Channel host Jeanine Pirro also repeatedly lobbied the administration for a specific New York hospital to receive a large quantity of masks, one of the people said.

The Spectator reported that Kushner had asked his brother’s father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, for recommendations on responding to the pandemic: Kloss, an emergency room doctor, in turn asked a 22,000-member Facebook group, “Bad Ass Fucking Emergency Room Doctor,” for help. “Please only serious responses,” Kloss wrote. In another post, Kloss asked for a “name and contact for Disaster Medicine leader.” And the main goal of his ad-hoc Group Chat was to buffer Kushner’s tossed-off bullshit. One volunteeer was so freaked out by the rank corruption and mismanagement, they filed a complaint with the House Oversight Committee:

Even as the volunteer group struggled to procure protective equipment, about 30 percent of “key supplies,” including masks, in the national stockpile of emergency medical equipment went toward standing up a separate Kushner-led effort to establish drive-through testing sites nationwide, according to a March internal planning document obtained by The Post and confirmed by one current and one former administration official. Kushner had originally promised thousands of testing sites, but only 78 materialized; the stockpile was used to supply 44 of those over five to 10 days, the document said.

One White House official denied that a third of the stockpile went to Kushner’s initiative, but declined to provide details.

Getting a vaccine https://www.thedailybeast.com/kushner-botched-the-covid-response-now-trumps-tapped-him-to-get-a-vaccine-by-the-end-of-2020

“Jared has been vocal in meetings about wanting to engage the private sector on the development of a vaccine in a similarly successful way that the administration did on ventilators, PPE, and others,” a White House official said on Tuesday.

LOL https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed

quote attributed to an unnamed Trump confidant who is said to speak to the president frequently, it’s claimed: “Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it... That advice worked far more powerfully on [Trump] than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.”

ust because Real New Yawkuhs!

Over 36,000,000 Americans are out of work, including me. In 2020, 40 percent of all the jobs in newsrooms went bye-bye, a tenfold increase on the number of reporters kicked to the curb the year before. (I’ll write something about the sterling and shrewd career choices I’ve made over the course of my life another time.)

Trying to navigate the unemployment insurance website was fucking brutal—worse, somehow, than the glitchy, unparseable NEA access terminal we had to boot up in order to submit a grant application. For weeks, I couldn’t even determine if I was eligible for the one-time $1,200 Go Fuck Yourself check

But I did pass muster and now the meager checks are starting to roll in. And:

Whee!

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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December 15, 2020

[source]

I am worried about the current state of my mind. Now, this could very easily be chalked up to a lack of sleep, or stress, or too many procrastination-strewn days, but something in my head feels off. From time to time, I’ll find myself struggling to concentrate or it’ll take a second longer to bang out just the right turn of phrase or dredge up some obscure fact. And the thought that my intelligence might have been dimmed by COVID scares the shit out of me. Even as my beard turns gray and flab gathers around my midsection forevermore, at least my intellect would always remain razor-sharp—for a few decades more, anyway. Mom sending endless articles about the percenatage of COVID patients now suffering from some kind of congnitive impairment sn’t helping at all, either.

Equally trustrating and terrifying: I can’t be sure if I’ve identified a real problem or it’s all in my head (pun intended). And hoo boy do I need to know for sure. So of late, every time i write something, even a simple g-d text message, I find myself endlessly poring over the language and sentence structure, trying to determine once and for all if my mental processing speed has in any way been reduced. FIX poking at every detail, every loose thread, regardless what exactly it is you’re examining, you’ll inevitably end up finding some kind of flaw. And

It’s exactly the same kind of hyper- and self-conscious behavior patterns that absolutely borked my initial attempts at acting. Now instead of being wracked with the all-consuming need to do well onstage (or at least for others to validate my performance) I’m sending myself into a tizzy whenever I fail to instantaneously recall the name of the actress who plays Carol/Cheryl on Archer. (Judy Greer!) Here’s where this particular mental Ouroborous gets fun .Every time I’m hit a jagged, electrical jolt of fear—fuck me, that’s repetitive. See! It’s happening right now!—it spurs more fervid examination and judgment of my writing the desire to write well is in and of itself ia self-conscious act, which results in mannered and straight-up bad writing, thus confirming that I’m operating at less than peak intellectual capacity. Like a catcher with a bad case of the yips, panic begets poor performance spurring ever more panicking, which begets and poorer (perceived) performance. Since, I’m already obsessing over a slew of other possible health/COVID-related issues why not add “my brain” to the ever-epanding wellness checklist.

Maybe it’s nothing. (It’s probably nothing.) Maybe it’s the magnesium I’m ingesting every night, which drapes a layer of fuzz over my parietal lobe. Maybe I just need to get out of my head. Maybe I can’t begin to assess if anything is in fact actually wrong while constantly (and unconsciously) looking for examples of something being wrong. Heisenberg’s anxiety principle, let’s call it. [rim shot].

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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September 11, 2020

Photo of the day.

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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June 2, 2020

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I spend way too much time staring at screens. My work depends on excess screen-staring. When taking a quick trip to the terlet, I invariably tote along a smaller screen, which I stare at while defecating. Often, I chose to detox from all this glorious screen-staring by turning off both the medium-sized and small screen—both of which function as a firehose of near-constant horrors, even in the best of times—by plopping down on the sofa, grabbing a remote, and clicking on a larger, hi-def screen Needless to say, this is not beneficial to my health, both physical and mental.

The photo When America was rocked with massive antiwar protests in the wake of the Kent State shooting in 1970, not only were protesters still allowed at the Lincoln Memorial, but President Nixon even made a late-night trip there to talk with them personally. https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1267977010909007877?s=20

NY Times fascist screed Tom Cotton

http://archive.vn/DoIJX

The Warzel

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/floyd-protest-twitter.html

https://whatwentwrong.substack.com/p/why-the-cops-turn-protests-into-war

I am not alone

Roose stats: https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1267466861416861697?s=20

We’re all screaming mods mods NYT

The clip of Trump standing there dumbly, passing a bible back and forth in his hands with the trepidation of someone holding a squirming reptile

“Is that your bible?” He seems to forget there had been anyone watching him, anyone there at this photo op he’d hoped would prove his cowardice anything less than unconditional. “It’s a bible,” he mutters.

The state cannot stop a virus from spreading like wildfire. It can’t do squat when the economy craters. The state sure as shit can unleash the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, send them to every corner looking like extras from a bad Paul Verhoeven movie, and

Calling America a failed state isn’t entire accurate. It’s not running on free market or even neoliberal principlesm, but as a police state, everything is going exactly according to plan. If I was of a truly cynical, embittered mind, I might even suggest that one possible reason why the cops are flush with cash is that things like health care have been privatized and concierged, and so the last and only government function they require is a bunch of pissed off, heavily-armed goons who will protect their life and possessions from the gathering horde.

Via Osita Nwanevu:

To the extent it was the high-water mark of anything, it was perhaps the apotheosis, in political imagery anyway, of conservative social politics—the whole ideological infrastructure summarized and made plain within the space of an hour. No, we’ve been told, the state shouldn’t go out of its way to make the disadvantaged whole or bring law and order to an economy controlled by gamblers, gluttons, and cheats. But it can be brought to bear, with overwhelming brutality, against people conservative Americans deem to be inferior and unworthy of our government’s attention.

“Well people in hell want ice water, too,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) when asked about more rounds of stimulus payments, according to The Hill. “I mean, everybody has an idea and a bill, usually to spend more money. It’s like a Labor Day mattress sale around here.”

[source]

That’s what happens after Vietnam, after close to fifty years of being told that The Troops must be respected at all costs and above any other public servant.

SHOOT them https://twitter.com/THEKIDMERO/status/1267967251103322116

Colony in a Nation https://archive.is/phTbA

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

Text

May 31, 2020

It’s 11:14 am, and the steady thrum of helicopter rotors is the near-constant soundtrack in my tony Brooklyn Heights nabe. One possible reason for the lack of ambient noise: An estimated 40 percent of my neighbors have fled to higher, safer ground since this all began nearly three months ago.

Over 100,000 people have died from novel coronavirus. 40 million people, including me, are out of a job. And all across the country, people are protesting the killing of an unarmed black man by the police, only to be met with an overwhelming, indiscriminate response from the police. Elected officials can’t or won’t state the obvious truth, and instead are singing from a hymnal that’s been dated since the 60s. Namely, that these acts of civil disobedience and the howling rage have nothing to do with the honest, upstanding citizenry. No, nefarious “outside agitators” are not secretly plotting to rile up the normally-docile locals. It’s bullshit.

Sure, the far-right is jonesing for a race war and the anti-fascists’s hands aren’t exactly spotless, either. But the idea that a good-sized chunk of the population doesn’t crave justice and isn’t roiling with anger is deluded at best. For the last four decades, America has greedily sponsored state-sanctioned violence to defendi profit and capital at all costs. Anything resembling a public sphere has been sold off to the highest bidder and protest itself has been villified. The neoliberal agenda has shredded the social safety net, and, more importantly, the idea that government exists in any substantial way to make the our lives slightly less of a grinding, punishing slog, has been turned into a bleak joke. Of course the result is a failed state, or as Orwell predicted, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Speaking of predictions, here’s Hamilton Nolan in 2018:

These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more frequently. Read a fucking history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant.

But there is one public utility that hasn’t been defunded and/or ignored to the point of atrophy: the cops, who have been armed to the teeth and unleashed whenever the working class and/or brown people dare to suggest they won’t put up with this nonsense any more. Naturally, that selfsame militarized and unchecked police force is mewling that they’re the one’s who’ve been victimized, actually.

New York City’s feckless mayor, despite being loathed by the cops with the fire of a thousand suns, has dedicated the last 24 hours to spit-polishing their (jack)boots and squealing “Antifa!” Apparently, in addition to being incompetent and wildly corrupt, de Blasio has developed some kind of humiliation kink. All of this reinforces exactly why these protests are so necessary and justified to begin with. And yes, I am terrified that over the next few weeks these communities will be hit with a serious uptick in COVID-19 cases.

I can’t find anything—any words, any noble aspirations or best-laid plans—that might stem the constant, rolling horror and my utter dread that far worse is still to come. Especially when I’m sifting through an absolute deluge of misinformation online.

So, then, amidst the plague and the brutalism and the horror, here are some images and videos from the last few days. Memorializing them, remembering how lost and utterly futile it seems, may not amount to much, and it won’t change a goddamn thing for the bloodied bodies in the street.

(There are links to videos below. You can watch them by clicking on the word “[source]” in a bold font, but they depict graphic acts of violence and therefore I’m not going to directly embed them in this post.)

I feel helpless in the face of this much trauma. So I’m going to stop talking now.

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[A tweeted thread which includes many of the vldeos posted above, but seeing them all one after another after a fucking another is its own special kind of awful.]

Finally, because I, for one, needed a mental breath mint, behold: a new frontier in the art of Avant-Garde Standing.

UPDATE [12:39 pm]: Like many of the president’s tweets, he can’t legally do this. (Probably.) He smashed a few buttons on his phone to make himself feel better and throw a slab of red meat at his meathead, racist base. As with [gestures at everything] the consequences, though, will be no less real.

UPDATE [June 1, 12:02 pm]: a few more videos from Sunday and today of wanton police brutality, and direct or implicit state-sanctioned violence.

[source]

UPDATE [July 1, 7:19 pm]: In order to carve out a walkway and snag this photo op, the president ordered the cops and his praetorian guard to tear gas and club peaceful protesters. That’s fascism.

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

Text

March 29, 2020

I don’t know how much longer paramedics can keep this up. Via The New York Times:

One New York City paramedic described responding to a suicide attempt of a woman who had drank a liter of vodka after her cancer treatments had been delayed, in part because hospitals were clearing their beds for coronavirus patients.

Another paramedic said she responded to so many cardiac arrests in one shift that the battery on her defibrillator died.

“It does not matter where you are. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. This virus is treating everyone equally,” the Brooklyn paramedic said

***

Three weeks ago, the paramedics said, most coronavirus calls were for respiratory distress or fever. Now the same types of patients, after having been sent home from the hospital, are experiencing organ failure and cardiac arrest.

“We’re getting them at the point where they’re starting to decompensate,” said the Brooklyn paramedic, who is employed by the Fire Department. “The way that it wreaks havoc in the body is almost flying in the face of everything that we know.”

In the same way that the city’s hospitals are clawing for manpower and resources, the virus has flipped traditional Emergency Medical Services procedures at a dizzying speed. Paramedics who once transported people with even the most mild medical maladies to hospitals are now encouraging anyone who is not critically ill to stay home. When older adults call with a medical issue, paramedics fear taking them to the emergency room, where they could be exposed to the virus.

***

The husband frantically explained that he had tried to stay home and tend to his ill wife, but his employer had asked him to work because their facility was overrun with coronavirus patients.

Grudgingly, the man told the medics, he went to work. When he returned home after his shift that day, he found her unconscious in their bed. For 35 minutes, Mr. Almojera’s team tried to revive the woman, but she could not be saved.

Usually, Mr. Almojera said, he tries to console family members who have lost a loved one by putting his arm around them or giving them a hug.

But because the husband was also thought to be infected with the coronavirus, Mr. Almojera delivered the bad news from six feet away. He watched the man pound on his car with his fist and then crumble to the ground.

“I’m sitting there, beside myself, and I can’t do anything except be at this distance with him,” Mr. Almojera said. “So, we left him.”

Speaking of poor, non-white people getting the toxic end of this lollipop:

The numbers in the above map represent positive tests. The next one, showing the differences in deaths from COVID is going to be truly grim and absolutely divided along race and class lines, because America. Specifically, because poorer, browner New Yorkers have less access to well, everything: heath care, information, jobs that can’t be performed from home. All those people working in supermarkets and making deliveries, the “essential workers” are disproportionately poor. Social distancing? Sure, try that when you’re living on the streets or still trapped in Riker’s or even a huge public housing project with one or two goddamn working elevators.

Even those who do have insurance are about to be royally screwed. “No insurer, no state, planned and put money away for something of this significance,” Peter V. Lee, the executive director of Covered California, an state exchange that’s part of the ACA, said. Well then, maybe the insurance providers shouldn’t have eaten so much avocado toast at brunch. Ha ha. Just kidding. The current admin has decimated the ACA, which was a laughable excuse for a healthcare system to begin with, and has only grown worse since. 2010

Here’s a fun/funny story. I was running low on Juul pods and with the next shipment not scheduled to arrive till Monday I had to do something. So, scribbed my hands raw, I put on clothes that I’d feel comfortable incinerating if need be, strapped on a pair of brown leather gloves, and tied a scarf around the entirety of my face as if I were a Black Bloc anarchist. And then I stepped outside the front door for the first time in... ten days? I’m going to say ten days. It was stressful and enraging with some light terror tossed in for variety’s sake.

I scoped out the block for people like I was on a goddamn recon mission, and let me tell you, wealthy-ass Brooklyn Heights residents were not maintaining social distancing. Dads breezily lazily walking their dogs, unconcerned (somehow) if someone trotted right by them. Gaggles of people, laughing, chatting, shooting the shit as if nothing had changed. On more than one occasion, I had to sprint across the street to maintain proper spacing. At my local bodega—the only bodega anywhere within walking distance of my apartment which sells pods—a hand-drawn sign had been taped to the shelves containing cigs and e-cigs. “Please make your selection and leave as quickly as possible,” the sign read.

I did so, bolting back out, ticking off the seconds till I was back at 108 Pierrepont. My neighbor was idling at the front gate, trying to coax her large labrador retreiver up the steps. I waited till she’d gotten to the front door and asked how she was feeling.

My neighbor said “better.” Which, sure. The dry cough of hers seemed to echo through our shared (thin) wall less frequently now. Oh and her sense of taste and smell was slowly returning.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. I tried to gently explain that she fucking has it without flipping my shit at her for not immediately telling everyone in the building. I sent out a mass email the instant I started feeling under the weather and unlike her, I’ve never had two of the most common fucking symptoms. Standing outside the building, paralyzed, unsure how long I needed to wait to sprint into the building and up the spiral staircase. She wasn’t even wearing a scarf, let alone a mask. Every exhale was flooding the lobby with infection but somehow using a Clorox wipe to open and close the door was enough of a preventative measure in her mind.

So grabbed all the packages that were waiting for me and galloped up the staircase. (Stalling for two days before going downstairs to pick up my deliveries accomplished nothing, what with the co-op’s own personal Typhoid Mary going outside twice a day to walk the dog. I’m still livid, two days after the fact. It’s insanely irresponsible of her. ) l kicked off my shoes outside the door, then stripped naked and deposited every item in a plastic garbage bag, tying it as tightly as possible. After scrubbing down my hands like Hawkeye Pierce, I then scoured the packages themselves with a wipe, followed hard upon by every surface they’d touched. I washed my hands a second time, belting out two consecutive particularly antic versions of the Happy Birthday song. Then I opened the packages, wiped down the contents, and washed my hands for a third time before jumping in the shower.

70 percent of the tests run by Northwell Health are coming back positive, and thousands of people will likely die. "I don't see how you look at those numbers and conclude anything less than thousands of people will pass away," the Governor said on Sunday. Vulnerable parts of the population will be hit particularly hard. "I hope its wrong, but..."

This is the Jacob K. Javits Center now. Soon, the beds will all be full:

In the hopefully not-too-distant future, someone’s going to write a book detailing the ongoing failures at every level of the Federal government. (Who am I kidding? Everyone is going to write that book.) At least one will probably toss in a bit of color about the Javits Center: It’s where Hillary Clinton was on the night of November 8, 2016, getting ready to deliver her victory speech. The one that never came. Once the election was called, she sent John goddamned Podesta out instead. Ha ha.

On Wednesday, I spent a frantic afternoon getting epidemiologists on the blower to talk about ballplayers going under the knife and feeeling generally flu-ish and tired while doing so. [Editor’s note: stop trying to sound like you’re not incredibly fucking privileged and have less shit to deal with than the vast bulk of people in this city alone. You blogged whilst sick. Hero-type stuff, truly.]

It’s not in the article, but yeah. All these high-paid orthopedic specialists should be barreling toward the front lines and turning their top-shelf sports medicine facilities into something fucking useful.

Per Mom, on Facebook:

It doesn't just "look like" special privileges for the rich and powerful, it is just that. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and other healthcare resources are currently being diverted to parts of hospitals and other locations where they are needed. They are being called back from retirement to help fill the need. These resources could be used with urgency elsewhere and are not when such elective procedures are being done instead. Excellent article, Bob.

Thanks, Mom.

Mike Francesa has been radicalized. Back afta this.

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thesearebobsthoughts · 4 years

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March 19, 2020

Do you remember what it was like before? I find it increasingly difficult, which is stunning, jaw agape, that sort of thing. There was a time before COVID-19 became the entire world, before it infected everything. Last week, even. Sort of. I can dimly recall watching some game on ESPN or TNT, wondering if it might be the last one for a while. Still going about routine tasks and checking tasks off various lists. Still worrying about all manner of things now somehow long forgotten. My mother. My blessed mother, reseraching like a fiend, as she does with every known malady. The articles and the shared messages dredged up from her own personal corner of the internet mounting in my inbox. Actually, no. Two weeks ago. Yes, two weeks ago is enough time travel to approximate normaiity.

I wrote a story about the ridiculous bumbling basketball team I’ve rooted for since I was a small child. Back then, I cheered with all my heart, and wept when the large men I liked were traded away even though I could barely comprehend what was transpiring on the court. That story seemed important. It was published on the night of March 3, 15 days ago. Or a lifetime ago. I wrote it, quickly, in the offices of The Daily Beast, right after interviewing another ex-Knicks for a different article about his thriving marijuana concern. That too, will be published at some point and I’ll do all the dumb online “look at me!” gesticulating to hopefully garner some attention, or at perhaps give those that need it a brief respite from the constant deluge of casual and brutal horrors that keep washing over us, again and again. I liked the basketball player-turned-weed-merchant mini-profile. It feels like a relic from an ancient, long-since-gone civilization.

I want, as best I can, to document what’s going on. To remember this moment, these days, this time, when (If?) we can let them go. So a knockoff Luke O’Neil Hell World blog. One that I won’t share with anyone. For now.

I am scared. Saying it out loud (or in this case, writing it) is a way, I guess, to give myself permission to feel scared. I check my temperature and scan myself for any symptoms hour by hour, minute by minute. But here, too, I’m having trouble remembering how my body felt prior to... I guess Friday was when it hit home. When the narcisstic racist finally screwed on his best Taking Things Seriously face and put a brief stop to the cavalcade of lies. (For a hot minute, the man stemmed incessant airing of grievances on Monday—a cease-fire long enough to give blinkered cable news pundits a chance to applaud him for hurdling this still pathetically low bar. The bullshit and the refusal to accept any responsiblity picked right back up during Thursday’s presser, natch.

But the point of writing this, if there is one, is to record what’s happening day-by-day or at least give myself a task that feels like a mental breath mint. A distraction. Something. So yes, then. Where was I? Right. I don’t think I’ve got it. I may have it. There’s a cramp in my right leg and so I quickly Googled “muscle cramps + coronavirus” and “fatigue + coronavirus” and “[anything else that was jangling around in my head] + coronavirus” and sure as shit, yeah. Maybe. Any one could be a symptom. Maybe not. Maybe this is all just pinging my latent hypochondria in the worst way possible and the worst time imaginable. My throat is dry and I was dehydrated yesterday. Also symptoms found on various lists and handy charts, none of which do squat unless you can get a hospital bed, and even then. But anyway, tired. Low fever. No real cough yet. My neighbor’s hacking has been rattling through the wall we share like clockwork for the past three days. She’s convinced that she’s fine, somehow. I was too scared to ask. To really delve into where this sense of confidence comes from. Like Heisenberg’s g-d principle, I can’t tell whether all the checking of my temp and double-checking of my overall physical state is making me notice things I wouldn’t have otherwise or if they’re just real.

And the anxiety. Panic attacks. Not nearly as bad as the ones which crippled me, which sent me scurrying into school and home bathrooms, too terrified to move. Feeling, if I can accurately recall, like I was prone on the ground at the bottom of a foxhole with quasi-futuristic fighter jets blasting away overhead. Not at me, but certainly quite near to me, and somehow as long as I remained clenched in a fetal ball, my eye glued shut, not moving, ever still, I could generate a gossamer-thin bubble that would protect me from the barrage. So not that bad. But still, frightened of the unknown, of what’s still to come. Which may have led to the intermittent tightness of breath. Not difficulty breathing nor shortness of breath, mind you. A knot in my stomach that [checking] still hasn’t gone away this morning, after a night of fitful, intermittent sleep, no real apetite (!), and a window that cracked (nice passive tense, asshole) two days ago and is letting in gusts of cool air. Yesterday, I was terrified of someone entering the building who’d infect me. Today, I worry about poisoning him.

I thought about the people waking up Thursday morning only to be inundadated by the viral video of celebrities belting out Lennon’s worst song—the one with the line about a world without possessions. The famous faces did so while standing in front of delightful fireplaces and manicured gardens, smiling, full of hope. Ha ha. How funny. Let’s all laugh and point at the tone-deaf beautiful people, all of whom can get tested without getting entangled in miles of bureaucratic red tape or ever having to devote one iota of worry over spending five figures on treatment. Singing. Well-intentioned, probably, like the wealthy pro athletes who are skipping ahead in the testing line.

Remember when we could just dunk on a gaggle of silly actors/jocks for fun rather than it serving a necessary safety valve for the scores of too-online people cooped up in their homes?

That was a full-time job for some people. Hell, if I’m being brutally honest, it was to a lesser degree my job. Dredging up some awfulness from the dreck canals of Online, raising it high in the air and harrumping, “look at this crap!” I can’t even ditch the ambient waves of anxiety enough to do the best version of that job—real reporting. lol.

As I bang the keys this AM, I’m still tired. Partly I think because I kept waking up evvery two hours or so late last night, watching the celebs belt out a jaunty tune and whatnot, never really setttling into a decent stretch of good ol’ REM sleep. But then again, symptoms. They’re flitting about my every waking thought and all I want to do is get Karen on her flight so she doesn’t reconsider, or insist that she has to stay and take care of me. Not that I know for sure, and (for the moment) this doesn’t feel like a severe case, if it is one at all. Just a pile of clanging neurosis leaving me with the overpowering sensation that something has gone terribly wrong.

For the moment I need to keep all this (mostly) to myself. Until Karen’s flight lands in Canada and she can fire off a job memo. Tomorrow, then. Or maybe when (if?) the symptoms abate enough that I can blurt this all out without freaking out mom. It’s now Thursday night. Seems like I’m not breathing as deeply as I was earlier in the day. I can’t tell, though, and it’s maddening. What’s that line from The Cocktail Party? Oh right:

I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me. Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself, and that's much more frightening!

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thesearebobsthoughts · 8 years

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Some of The Things I Wrote in 2015

To all the fine online content providers that published my words in 2015, thank you. Here’s a selection of articles from this past year that don't make me want to recoil in abject horror and/or shame. And thank you all for reading.

Loser Wins Fistfight, the Daily Beast

Pro-DraftKings ‘Protest’ Was Astroturfed, the Daily Beast

Vigilante Justice Comes Back to NYC, the Daily Beast

Anthony Mason, Soul of the 90's, the Daily Beast

Carmelo and the Man in the Mirror, VICE Sports

The Daily Fantasy Sports Legal Battle Could Cost Sports Media Millions, Vocativ

HBO to Dolan: Why the ‘F You’ to Women? the Daily Beast

Mitt Romney ‘Loses’ Charity Bout Against Evander Holyfield, But He’s Still A Weirdo, the Daily Beast

18 Innings in Mets Purgatory, VICE Sports

The Knicks’ Crowning, Hilarious, Wonderful Failure, VICE Sports

NBA All-Star Review: Russell Westbrook Saves us from the Land of a Thousand Sales, the Guardian

How NBA's Free Agency Morality Play Screws Over the Players, the Guardian

Why Is MoMA Screwing Over Its Staff? the Daily Beast

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thesearebobsthoughts · 11 years

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Some Thoughts on the Worst Sportswriting in Recent Memory (Or, the Absolute Pinnacle of Trolling)

We live in dark times, my friends.

Dark, dark, dark times, indeed.

But in these dark times of darkness, there is light. A faint glimmering light twixt the darkness, brought forth by brave souls with the courage to navigate said aforementioned darkness, wielding nothing but the light-bearing light that is the torch of truth. Truth in the face of the darkness that plague’s men’s souls.

Charles Hurt is such a man. More than a man, really. A hero to us all. A warrior-poet. A modern-day Paul Revere.

Galloping out of the darkness that I referenced earlier, astride his mighty, muscle-bound, wind-swept steed – his pen – he has come forth to rouse the once great, once-noble, once-American American spirit.

A spirit best expressed by the sport of baseball.

Baseball is, as they say, America’s game.

Lest you doubt that (and if you do, I doubt that you, dear reader, truly are an American). But if your keen mind has been dulled by the nattering nabobs of negativism in the lamestream sports media and would dare affix your weary eyeballs upon lesser, less American sporting diversions, I beseech you now to listen or read or simply absorb via osmosis the words my close, personal friend Charles Hurt hath etched upon internet tablets (actual stone-type tablets. Not those infernal devices that the lie-brals favor):

Football has become all about the thuggery of human violence. Hockey is all about the fights among the Slavic snaggle-tooths. NASCAR has always been all about the fiery wrecks.

He is speaking my heart’s purest chyme. Football, formerly a game played by rugged, salt-of-the-earth lads and simple, country farm boys is now a paean to brutality – the thuggish brutality. The most brutal, sissified form of thuggery there is. It’s practically a homoerotic ballet of Ballanchine-ian proportions, what with the clearly defined shiny trousers that accentuate the buttocks and the groinal region, the padded shoulders only accentuating the totemic nature of the these, monstrous, sweaty, oily beasts as they slam into each other again, with greater fury and vigor and absolutely no regard for the damage they inflict on their sinewy, muscle-bound frames until they collapse in a spent, glassy-eyed heap.

The Canadian sport of hockey has been wrenched from its grasp – a grasp undoubtedly weakened by decades of shoddy, universal health care – by those pernicious Slavs. Slavs that don't have the universal health care to fix their hockey goon-mangled teeth.

And NASCAR. That’s bad too.

But not baseball. Baseball remains baseball. It, baseball, remains as such in the unsullied hearts of Americans because, as the éminence grise of the sporting press, Charles Hurt, so plaintively states:

Baseball is the last of unspoiled American goodness on a large, popular scale. It is the final redoubt that remains free from the litigiousness, whining, and nanny hand-wringing that has sapped the joy and good out of just about everything else. I mean, the local rodeoclown cannot even pull off one little goofy stunt without launching a national outcry over invented racism.

Preach on, Brother Charles! I too miss the days of litigious-free joy. Happy, happy days, they were, what with no nannies and not needing to buy hand lotion in bulk, what with all the wringing and enjoying the comedic stylings of the true greats, like Al Jolson and Ted Danson, before the jackbooted, PC Gestapo sucked the life-force, indeed the pure bodily essence out of life.

This is the dystopic, post-apocalyptic, blight in which we currently reside. This is the un-free bed we’ve made

For today, this great game of baseball, that bright, shining star to which we may point and say, “Yay verily, this game that defines what is best in all of us, what is the best in humanity,” – and by humanity I mean America and Americans – is once again under pernicious assault by the craven, slothful, slatternly, besotted, besmirched, befouled nanny-ing statists that have occupied (to use the terminology of the oh-so-useful idiots) this nation’s capitol.

Today baseball is teetering on the edge of a vast precipice. And in the foul, dank, dark crevasse below lies what. What rough, slouching beast, like a never-ending maw of never-ending teeth lies below? Is it the massive tax subsidies that allow billionaires to build stadiums on the very backs of the citizenry? Is the willful blind eye that the sport has turned to the use of performance enhancing cocktails of some sort? Is it the scruffy, three-day-hangover, paunchy, pit-stained Herbert Selby-esque appearance of Scott Atchison? Is it that Kirk Gibson hasn't been nominated for sainthood? Is it BENGAZI!!!!!!!!1

No. It is far worse than all of that put together.

As Master Charles Hurt, fevered, unceasing truth-teller elucidates:

We survived abhorrent British taxation. We survived savage attacks from Indians on the frontier. And we survived the Civil War. We survived all of that only to voluntarily give it all up in this, the easiest of times.

No, I am not talking about making a mockery of our “nation of laws” by granting amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens, most of whom bravely risked their lives to come here precisely because we are a nation of laws.

Nor am I talking about the staggering debts we have piled up so high that we have no realistic hope that even our grandchildren might one day pay them off.

And nor am I talking about this pernicious plot by the federal government to take over our healthcare system so that the last few Americans who can still afford to pay taxes will be on the hook for everybody else’s poor health choices and crappy eating habits.

No, I am talking about Major League Baseball’s decision to invoke video replay on virtually all calls made during the game. This means close calls at first, disputed infield fly rules, and whether the outfielder catches the ball or not. By castrating the umpires on the field, the league is destroying the sport.

Castrating.

Removing their manhood. The ump. The man in blue. A noble figure, worthy of our collective veneration, unlike the “Noble Savages,” the not-from-Cleveland ‘Native Americans’ that tried to choke the infant baby America in its crib. They are under direct assault by those tweedy, bespectacled, pencil-pushing bureaucrats. They who are definitely not men. Not men of substance. Not men like the ump. And these so-called men are trying to grab at the arbiters’ proud, swollen testes, lacking any of their own.

And what next? What indignity will we next have to suffer, we Americans, if the scourge of instant replay is allowed to spread like a vile pestilence, spread by an wheezing, ectomorphic, pocket-protectored hay-fever inflicted IRS regional examiner who refuses to cover his nose when he sneezes. What next, brave Sir Knight of the Round Keyboard, Charles Hurt?

By infecting baseball with an official avenue for appealing an umpire's call to some higher authority, the league institutionalizes the posture of grievance for all players and every manager. And the creepy fact that this higher authority will be huddled in some faraway office in New York City totally corrupts the sanctity of the stadium.

The game will pause and the crowd will wait for divine word from Oz while the shiftless eunuchs stand around savoring one more humiliation.

Eunuchs lacking shift, indeed. Strikes. No balls. And the Angels (not of California or Anaheim or Los Angeles of Anaheim), but rather the holy angels in God’s great heaven, weep a torrent of sanctified tears. Tears enough to cause a forty-five minute rain delay in the Lord’s backyard, the baseball stadium.

In America…

***

I’m sorry. I have to stop. I can’t do it any more. This is the dumbest, most pedantic, racist, homophobic article in the history of sports. I can’t believe it isn’t satire. Because if it isn’t, if this is serious, satire is deader than the turgid, self-righteous, insipid collection of wet rage-farts that Hurt’s trying to fob off as prose.

There’s an instinct when you read something like this is to laff it of as yet another in a series of countless hate circle-jerks that is the corpse of Andrew Breitbart’s fetid internet home for the colicky outraged and perennially fact-challenged (and even the normally seething commenters thought this article was a sack of derp), and you wouldn’t be wrong.

But I like to read about the connections between the world of sports and “larger” issues/questions/ideas and dreck like this just lends credence to the notion that sports itself is a self-contained universe upon which no greater meaning or insight can be gleaned.

So let us all now point a crooked finger at Charles Hurt and tell him he sucks donkey balls. And please, by all that is holy and good, tell him to please stop writing about the games we love; that he can leave his hackish, overwrought wordsmithery and straw man arguments and shitty grammar to a subject matter that deserves it – having a hissy fit about ‘Creeping Sharia,’ how many cubits Jesus wanted the double-wide electric border fence to be, or when people take umbrage with Caucasians churlishly defending their right to sling the n-word, they’re the real racists.

And let’s get this bro some followers on the Twitter. 772? That’s just sad, mang.

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thesearebobsthoughts · 11 years

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Some Breaking Bad Thoughts

Here’s my theory. Yes, it’s about Breaking Bad. In the midst of trundling down to the Laundromat, I had an inkling – a flash of insight – as to what’s going to happen in this, the final episode.

Okay, everyone has theories about what might or might not occur. If you have the time, take the deep plunge into Reddit or color-theory parsing articles such as this one or you can spend a few days going down the rabbit hole with every amateur sleuth and/or Division II Claire-Danes-on-a-Manic-spree-in-Homeland-creating-a-massive-connecting-bits-of-newspaper-plastered-on-the-wall-in-his/her-basement-type.

So perhaps saying, “I know what’s going to happen,” isn’t entirely accurate. It’s more that I think I’ve sussed out the mythic/archetypal structure that Gilligan's using for the final three episodes.

It started when the great netw3rk and I were chatting last night about the narrative problems of Robert Forster's fixer -- that it'd be pretty improbable for such a competent criminal to make a cross-country trek, putting his own fairly lucrative illegal enterprise (125k per vanishing) at risk, no matter how many fistfuls of ducats from Walt's bucket he was netting for each trip. You can read his further thoughts on the improbably 4400-mile journey here.

He’s right, but only if you assume what’s occurring on the teevee machine is meant to be realism. I think it isn’t. Forster's Walt-sitting makes sense if you realize that the episode “Granite State” was the second step in the story of Easter, of Christ's Death. This is Walt in Limbo. He died/was crucified in Ozymandias and he’ll be Resurrected on Sunday night at 9pm EST.

I’m going to assume if you’re reading this (and if you are, find something better to do on a lovely autumn day) that you’re fairly well versed in Walter White’s journey from Mr. Chips to Scarface, as was showrunner Vince Gilligan’s original pitch. And that like the rest of us Breaking Baddicts, you’re ready for what sure to be a gruesomely brilliant/brilliantly gruesome last chapter, so I’ll skip with a summation of the tale to date.

Let’s get straight to the clues/narrative indications that Gilligan’s picked the Greatest Story Ever Told as his framework.

At its heart, Breaking Bad has always been one of the most moral shows in recent TV history.

That may seem surprising, given the pile of corpses that Walt’s quest has accrued over 5 seasons, but the show is constantly pointing to the effects of Walt’s violence and the toll that it takes on him as a human being and naturally on the lives of those around him. It’s in many ways directly in opposition to The Wire and The Sopranos (the other contenders for Best. Show. Ever.), where “bad” people and bad deeds routinely go unpunished. Hell, in those realms, what we might view as sin is often rewarded.

I’m not slagging on either of those unfathomably outstanding shows. They’re dealing with more complicated (or even more realistic) depiction of the world. Breaking Bad is an epic tale. An epic morality play, Shakespearean in its size and scope – as an ‘average guy’ becomes a monstrous king only to be felled by his tragic flaws (in Walt’s case: his capacity for self-delusion and colossal ego/sense of victimhood.)

The first hint comes in the episode prior, To'hajiilee, where Director Rian Johnson lingers on the obvious Christ-like pose when Hank catches Walt.

But Walter White is the one who experiences a psychic death in the episode that follows, Oxymandias. Starting with the admission of his guilt/exculpating Skyler over the phone to the cops, his identity-erasing trek to New Hampshire, the devastating knife fight in front of Walt Jr., and all of the attendant brutality surrounding Hank's murder, the last vestiges of the adorably bumbling chemistry teacher disappear.

In Granite State, he's trapped in Limbo, as Andy Greenwald laid out in his recap. In fact, prisons/caves abound. Jesse's by the Nazis, the room that Walt/Saul share, even the constant repetition of Lydia's meeting back-to-back in diners, begging for Stevia.. Fun fact, Christ is described as residing after the Crucifixion as residing in "The Limbo of the Fathers.” So we can understand Forster's visitations not in the realistic/logical sense, but in the mythic sense -- the souls that Christ preached to during his time in purgatory

For the final episode, we're going to get his Resurrection.

After they found Christ's empty tomb (Walt's glass of whiskey at the dive bar in NH), the Gospels indicate that Jesus chose first to appear to women or a woman (The "Hello Carol" scene). He was not immediately recognizable (The Brooklyn Beardo look that Walt's rocking). The fact that we got a mini Deus Ex Macchina in the form of Walt’s original tormentors, the Schwartz’ on Charlie Rose, hinting at Aaron Ross Sorkin op-eds, of all things, leading to one final rising of Heisenberg. What that literally means in terms of ‘spoilerz’ I can’t begin to say, but one clue is this quote from the Apostle Peter:

"Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne.”

Jesse? Walt Jr.? Holly? I can’t begin to fathom, but my best guess is that his blue meth empire goes on, even if the man himself passes from this world.

More importantly, throughout the series, Gilligan has forced the audiences to see reflections of themselves in his beastly creation. Not to love him/hate him or root for him/long for his demise, but to see the absolutely precise plotting, the wholly logical/rationalizable decisions and the contradictions as reflective of all of us. I think Walt’s last actions on this mortal coil will be as the Apostle Paul stated:

"if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

I am far from a Biblical scholar so I’m sure there are further plot similarities that I haven’t caught – such as a parallel Jesse and “The Good Thief” – but given the epic scope of the morality play that Gilligan's written, it's perfectly within reason to think that he’d have the chutzpah to posit a drug dealing/manufacturing, lying cancer-ridden kingpin as Christ.

And if the point of Christ's return was/is redemption, who's going to be redeemed?

We’ll see in three hours.

Selah.

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