Finally! An Advantage of Getting Old! No Masks Anymore! (Well, Almost)

I've been looking for advantages in aging for as long as I've been considered "aging." It's been an uphill battle.

My hip had to get replaced, and hasn't healed well enough after six weeks; physical therapy now necessary. The other one now hurts, too. My prostate had to get shaved. I nearly died of excessive arterial plugging. It's been a long five years.

And, of course, Covid, the ultimate ogre, the hidden monster. The CDC finally came to the rescue, admitting as it did that it was behind the curve scientifically there for a while.

The signals it's sending are certainly hopeful, but actually bizarre. Now that I've been fully vaccinated, I can walk into a bar, sit down with people fully around me and drink as much as I possibly can to catch up on all the beers I've missed, but I need a mask inside the doctor's office and the hospital, where everybody's so disinfected they look bleached? Huh?

Okay, but let's slice through the confusion. For the most part, going maskless is now not a threat to me or from me. That's because I've been old enough to be among the first in line for my shots.

It's also because of a development highlighted by Laurie Garrett, a medical analyst who sometimes appears on MSNBC. A couple of days ago, she said that there was a growing chance that the vaccine actually puts antibodies in people's mouths and noses--the two routes by which the virus is normally spread (Also the eyes, but I have glasses, so blockage is there at least for me.). I'm guessing it was that discovery and verification that allowed the CDC to make the rather surprising announcement.

Businesses haven't caught up yet, a day after the ruling. We can't expect them to. They operate, most of them, from corporate headquarters that are sensitive to potential lawsuits. It'll take a while. So if you've had the two shots, I would carry a mask with me if I were you, at least for the present moment.

In the meantime, it's weird, I have to admit, to see people walking around with masks now. I feel for them. But if we're going to put this thing where it belongs, they still have to do it. I'm working on not approaching them with trepidation, after 15 months of needing to do so.

So I celebrated and had lunch at a counter of a greasy-spoon restaurant that I haven't entered in at least the last ten years. Still had great burgers with fabulous cooked onions. Still had great fries, though technically, I'm not supposed to have them. I took off my mask and announced to the waitress that I'd had my shots. Not sure that it mattered, but I didn't see any on the faces of any of the other customers, either. Things are loosening up.

Motorcycles are zipping around now. Traffic is backing up in places suddenly, maddeningly, but the kind of thing that happens when people are normally out and about. It's actually, for the moment, something to like.

I'm not going to gloat, but I am going to celebrate. There's a bar just half a block away in which I haven't ordered a beer since March 2020. Might even have two. It's hell getting old. Except for now.

Be well. Be careful. Even if you've had your shots, carry a mask with you. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

She Got What She Deserved--and That's What's Wrong

Make no mistake: Liz Cheney got what she deserved. About that, there can be no question.

Read that again. You know that's correct. That's what's wrong.

She stood up to the truth about the election, the truth which should be far behind us now, but an incredible number of people have cancelled that out of their minds--people with power, people who can enhance or reduce identity. They have made up a different reality, one that's far more comfortable, one they think they can continue to foist on us all.

I have no great liking for her. Her political views are pretty far from mine. But she does appreciate democracy, the give and take of ideas and the hashing out of them in the appropriate arena of the electorate. Under normal circumstances, this would be no big deal. We are not in normal circumstances.

Ideas are malleable, flexible, adjustable, discussible. Facts don't fit. Facts are established truth.

All she did was keep stating facts. In the twisted, absurd world of Republicans who are emotionally, not rationally, tied to our ex-president, she got one pass at telling the truth. Then she was supposed to shut up, become absorbed by their alternative reality, and ride out the lying for effect.

She was supposed to get behind the titular and phony party leader, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a slippery charlatan if there ever was one, for the sake of 'unity.' There is no room for deviation there now, no room for alternative discussion.

It's pretty scary. It's scary not only because of the way she was voted out--voice vote with loudmouths typically shouting, like followers of our ex- normally do, instead of a counted vote in which people go on record, a far more cowardly act--but of the way her narrative quickly became discounted, then condemned. She was thrown to the floor, then swept up and put into the trashcan. And millions think that's a good idea.

She says she will continue her narrative and try to persuade fellow party members of the errors of their ways. That ship has sailed, Liz. You are so, so late with that one.

I wonder what she'll do when that clear and decisive fact hits her. She's devoted to the truth, but some truths are harder to absorb.

She's being replaced with Elise Stefanik, a professional golddigger who has conveniently morphed herself into being another sycophant. Her grandstanding during the first impeachment trial of ex- paved the way. She's not a leader, she's a follower, and like the rest, she will be complimented only as long as she now kneels at his feet.

She cannot stay within the party, at least not the elected members of it. A group of a hundred or so party members, apparently, are going to issue a statement soon, condemning the absurdity of a continually contested election. Many of them are former officeholders. Not one of them are current officeholders. They have watched Liz Cheney get grilled on a spit, and they'd rather not, thank you very much.

They've learned. They're in with everyone else now--putting their heads down, avoiding interviews, and running into their group to hide from the rest of the world: sheepishly, ridiculously, but knowing that that's the only place they can operate now.

They're solid. They're protected by the Big Lie that's getting even bigger. From that base, they can tell even more--such as, for instance, that January 6 wasn't much more than typical tourism. Yes. Some are now saying that. In their world, time doesn't shrink falsehood: It expands it.

Liz Cheney would do well to join the objectors, at the very least so she isn't hanging out there by herself. She needs to belong to something now. But she cannot be in the Republican Party any longer. Once that voice-vote happened, they moved on without her. She's already in another solar system.

Maybe she'll catch on with a think-tank. There are several conservative-leaning ones that are well-established credentials. Now she'll have time to choose one that's rational, see the writing on the wall, and announce that she isn't running for re-election.

Because she's going to get buried back in Wyoming. The polling will tell her so. She will, momentarily, believe that her name will continue to get her into the front doors of county and local party cadres. And maybe, for a while, she'll be right. But those crowds will diminish. Wyoming's one of those places where people watch One America News and think it's reality.

It will take a while for all that to hit home. The Republican Party is not part of reality any longer. At least, the part of reality that the rest of us have accepted. And their commentary doesn't advance policy; it's still hung up on Dr. Seuss, which most of the rest of us have long since discarded and was falsely attached to Democrats anyhow. It doesn't have a point, it doesn't have a goal. It just opposes, well, something, anything, everything. No discussions or debates that make any sense.

They lock down on objecting to the "cancel culture," when in fact they have established their own--rigid, self-enforcing, final. Step out of line, and you are gone. You have to be very quiet to continue to belong to this group now; very quiet, very scared, and very loyal to a terrible person.

Liz Cheney will soon be dismissed as a victim of a dangerous movement of a whole political party which has thrown itself at the feet of a naturally dishonest, loud-mouthed, irrational liar due to his absurd hold on millions of people who don't really care enough about politics to see the damage he's doing. How this will end is anybody's guess now. It's become a form of mass hysteria, Salem writ large.

But from this point, there will be less said within their ranks, not more. The silence will be telling.

Liz Cheney got what she deserved. Will we?

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors for now. With luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

"Background with Quote Approval:" A New Twist in A Long Game

Beware of whatever comes out from the White House staff. Yes, even Joe Biden's staff. In fact, especially Joe Biden's staff.

Anyone who reads this knows how glad I am that the present president is, in fact, the president. So much tension has been reduced. But not all his ethics are 100% clean.

That's because of a practice that, truth be told, ramped up during Barack Obama's presidency; in fact, it was known for it. I lived in DC during part of Obama's second term, and the discomfort of the press with Obama's staff was palpable enough that a former member of the Washington Post's editorial staff (Leonard Downie, Jr.) wrote a well-documented report (published 10/10/13, through the Committee to Protect Journalists, cpj.org) and held a press conference complaining about it, with printed testimonies and the whole bit. It put the strong contradiction to Obama's previous claim that his administration would be far more transparent than that of Bush-43 even though he gave lip service to allowing journalists to do their jobs. 

It was also done during the last presidency, but with nowhere near the sophistication and thoroughness than Obama or Biden, probably due to a lack of experience (which would, I'm quite sure, be well addressed if the last president gets another shot at it, hostile toward the press as he generally was) and a surfeit of leaking that went unaddressed. One of the many things that our ex- lost track of was the degree to which people were telling tales of disorganization and undermining as soon as they knew them.

But now, any White House staff who are interviewed for any kind of story have to do so with "background with quote approval." This means, very simply, that anything they say must be run past the Biden communications team--which decides whether or not to allow such comments or edit them.

Which means: Any information you get directly quoting a member of the White House staff has been laundered and might not be the reaction originally expressed--unless, of course, it's okay with their bosses. This is, simply put, control of the news and a direct abrogation of the First Amendment.

Stories are supposed to be genuine. They're supposed to be a direct representation of what someone being interviewed thinks. Otherwise, who is actually doing the talking? We don't know. It could be good-natured, but it often isn't, especially when the news being revealed puts the government in a controversial light, which is far more often than not.

At first (says Politico Playbook), White House reporters accepted the practice because they thought it was being done with the best of intentions--you know, cleaning up inaccuracies. But when they came to see that it was actually being done to twist the reality of the original comments so as to obscure their meaning, they began to show some concern.

Something like this has taken place from time immemorial. But the negotiations about what gets into a story and what doesn't has normally been between the reporter and the person who's being solicited. Often, that person doesn't want anyone to know they're leaking information, so it's agreed that it's going to be revealed "on background," which means that the reporter will promise not to use names if the information is accurate.

It's a great way for reporters to get and retain sources. It's also a great way to get scoops, if the person doing the leaking is in a particularly sensitive situation. The leaker clearly wants to reveal the information, but also wants to hang onto the job they've been appointed to: that comes with considerable prestige. Deep Throat, a.k.a. Mark Felt, who was the center of the information leak that became known as Watergate, was one such person.

It's a game, one that reporters and sources have played forever (and doesn't just exist at the White House; plenty of such arrangements get made all over the country, at all levels of government). "On background" really began with FDR, when he would get reporters all around his desk and just start commenting. He refused to be quoted directly, but would allow information to be revealed by "sources close to the White House," or some such moniker, meaning himself but frustrating his enemies. Henry Kissinger, too, was a master at the practice.

A lot of things can get moving, or at least discussed, due to revelations: whether or not a bill will get vetoed; whether the administration will take some kind of action; whether or not someone within the administration is meeting or not meeting the approval of the president. The result is often to speed up processes or direct them such that some decisions will be made and the act of governing gets untangled, albeit temporarily. There are bars and restaurants galore within shouting distance of Capitol Hill, including lunchrooms within the office buildings themselves; that's where much of this takes place. Congress is full of leaks, some intentional, and some of the best reporting gets done there (Try the Punchbowl News, for instance).

Inside the NEA, there was often an attempt to hide information for best-timed release, so I understand the need. But it almost never worked. There was, or had to be, a mole inside the building who would tell a guy named Mike Antonucci. He was uncanny at getting information within 24 or 48 hours, despite members of the Executive Committee being told behind closed doors with obvious remonstrance to keep things quiet (I was briefly suspected of being the mole, but as God is my witness, that never happened. He contacted me once, in the limbo period before I got on the Executive Committee, but I did not respond.). Antonucci was, and is, staunchly anti-union, our sworn enemy. He delighted, I'm guessing, in running the information online in his blog. It was maddening. And the leaker had to be good, because I don't recall anyone finding him or her. 

But that's the point: Antonucci hung on to that source and milked it well. We had our own Deep Throat.

The reporters' choice, of course, is to get in some room, or to approach someone, which they like far more than whatever information that's revealed, however indirectly. But wide usage of the practice of "background with quote approval" is seen as unfair, which is beginning to get under the skins of White House correspondents. The specter of Big Brother looms, and that makes them--and should make us--pretty uneasy, regardless of who's at the top.

And Biden will exploit this as well as he can. As user-friendly has he's presently being, there's a limit. He understands the way reporters work as well as anyone, so he'll put up sufficient firewalls to make sure that one message will be told, one conduit will be used, and one meaning, however clear or unclear, will be understood. Just because he's a nice guy doesn't mean he isn't crafty--and because he's been around Washington since 1973, he's among the craftiest of them all.

What can reporters do? Nothing, as long as they remain self-competitive. If one does not follow the prescribed formula, he or she stands to be excluded from any information--as long as the Biden White House staff goes by the same concept as well. Or, any reporter can keep looking to find inside leakers, of which there will be far fewer in this White House, due to aforementioned savviness. With less monkey business going on, ironically, like the type happening inside the last White House, it will be more difficult to do so. But then, that's good for all of us. Kinda sorta.

The only other way through this is for a significant number of reporters, if not all of them, to refuse to play ball, refuse to go by the idea of "background with prior approval." Then whatever information they'll get will be had genuinely, without screening for phraseology that might be more than vanilla. It also means that it might be tougher to get, but that's what they're hired for. Leakers weren't disciplined much in the last White House; I think that will be the opposite with this one.

Just because the government has the philosophies and policies that most of us prefer right now doesn't mean that the basic nature of government-versus-press conflict isn't still there. Please remember: It's government's preference that all information released be its own and on its own calendar so it can control the message. It's the press' preference that information is fought for and released if and when it's most significant--as long as it's accurate--so that the voters can decide whether it's really using their tax dollars well.

I've previously praised the Cabinet as functioning well and serving the greater interests of the public, as opposed to the last one, which seemed to defeat that purpose from the get-go. The only way to insure that it continues is through a vigorous and inquisitive press, one that doesn't get along with government sources so much that they always seem to be on the same page. Then they're no more than obedient mouthpieces. If Biden and his ilk have nothing to hide, what's the big deal?

Biden's positive rating on the virus hit 70% last week, so it seems to me that he doesn't need carefully screened news to continue that. Not that he'll pay any attention. Or maybe he's trying too hard to maintain it. Governments, whether democratically and legitimately elected or not, usually do.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors for now. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Brandi's Insults and Larger Implications of Social Media of School, But Not in School

A 14-year-old goes off on Facebook, and it gets all the way to the Supreme Court. Amazing? Hang on.

Back in 2005, the Court also heard the case of a Juneau, Alaska teenaged smart-aleck who displayed a ridiculous, nihilistic sign that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" as the 2002 Olympic torch-passing parade took place. He and his schoolmates were given permission to line the streets and watch, so he thought he'd take the opportunity to act like a jackass.

The school suspended him, the parents sued for his First Amendment rights. None other than Kenneth Starr, late of the Clinton-Lewinsky dust-up, got called into Washington to argue the case for the school district. The Court came down on the district's side, because--it said--that the core message (not that there actually was one; go look again) was a pro-drug one, and so it was antithetical to what the school stood for.

I believed then, and as a member of the NEA Executive Committee and said so (and was roundly criticized for it), that the issue was certainly not drugs, but religion. If the sign would have said something like Bong Hits for Dubya, making fun of the then president, the Court would have been in a real quandary, that being political speech. But it said Jesus, which brought Starr running, he of the effort to morally purify most things, including a philandering president, whether he actually did so or not; remember, the ensuing impeachment ran into a dead end.

Legal eagles within the NEA actually called me aside and tried to lecture me about, I presume, going public in an e-mail in which I and other Executive Committee members were asked whether or not the NEA should have filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, defending the kid, and starting it by saying, as I recall, "What the hell is this case doing in the Supreme Court?" They thought of me as incredibly naive and not at all in the realm of reality. They were unsuccessful in their attempts, I'm guessing, to have me apologize. I thought it made them look a little out to lunch themselves.

In any event, tinged with controversy as it was and hovering with the possibility that some of our more religiously dedicated members would howl like mad and force the state presidents to explain what we did--strictly verboten; you never make a state affiliate president uncomfortable if you can at all avoid that--we voted (I the only one against) to refrain from filing. I still believe it to be a mistake.

What most people don't know is that the school district settled with the parents out of court, which is, of course, an admission that the whole thing wasn't worth it, except by then it was certainly worth something, at least the lawyer's fees (which must have been enormous). That brings us to the present situation, which originated in Pennsylvania in 2017. The girl involved was a freshman at the time, which means that she's graduated by now.

Nonetheless, she went on a vulgar rant, liberally using the f-word to trash school, softball (I guess she must have ridden the bench, or just didn't like the coach), cheerleading, and "everything," which, if you've ever taught freshmen, is something that's never far from their thinking and attitudes (and which, if you haven't had the same thought during the pandemic, you're a better person than I am). Except she posted that on Facebook, while not actually in school at the time. 

A number of states and school districts have made such postings, though not actually part of a school, subject to school punishments (like Little Rock, Arkansas, where I used to work as a teacher consultant, ten years ago). Another student, for instance, gave a printed copy to a high school coach, and the girl was suspended from cheerleading. These parents sued, too.

Two lower courts said that Brandi's (her name) free speech rights had been trampled (information on this case provided from The Week magazine), so up the ladder it continued. But it seems to me that the Supreme Court has already ruled, above, and its ruling against something as mild as a pro-drug message meets a pretty low standard, and frequent use of the f-word has to at least achieve that standard. So this should be open-shut.

But an insult to Jesus, now dead these two thousand years, doesn't equal that of a real human. A narrow ruling, recommended by Justice Brett Kavanaugh (He of transgressions early in his own life, remember?), might invite school principals to overregulate student behavior in the name of "morality," and set up an omnipresent language police. We end up right back in 1984, and students are stifled yet again, not even within the school's walls.

And of course, it's the f-word that's really at stake. If she should have said "screw softball," that would probably have resulted in a good talking-to, even a threat of removal, and the parents would probably have yelled but not sued with no actual penalties assigned. But f- is the ultimate, deserving of the ultimate punishment, I suppose.

Trashing individuals connected to the same school, though, which happens often and everywhere, is going on at atrocious rates. And kids have killed themselves due to the humiliations caused by the insults and bullying. So free speech, in the larger sense, is at issue. A line does have to be drawn, but it's tough to know where.

So is this: If Brandi cannot be regulated, if she or some other freshman or sophomore or whatever is allowed to widely use the f-word to criticize a publicly-paid for entity such as a high school sports team on Facebook, why wouldn't a former presidential candidate be allowed to utilize the same venue to insult others who have been elected, as he has endlessly, horribly, annoyingly, and obnoxiously these past several years (and within which he, in fact, has said "hell" once or twice, but that's about it)? Where would Facebook's justification of barring him, presently in effect, then land? And why wouldn't he take that same claim to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible?

Yeah, I know. It's a problem. Grey areas usually are. Hang on tight.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

NPR: One of the Great Things About the USA

NPR is 50 years old now. It feels like an old friend.

I didn't even know it existed until the 1980s. I was still stuck on the 'latest' news, the kind of tabloidism that infects us even today.

I'm not even sure how I learned about it. But its richness survives. It's more than just news. It tells stories that matter.

Its permutations survive, too: All Things Considered; Weekend Edition, still with the incomparable Scott Simon on Saturdays (and Liane Hanson, who graced our Sundays until ten years ago with her clear, decisive but also comforting voice). Other weekly daytime shows like 1A, from Washington, DC; Fresh Air, with another incomparable interviewer, Terry Gross; and humor shows, like Wait-Wait, Don't Tell Me, with the droll Peter Sagal; and Ask Me Another, with Ophria Eisenberg.

Those shows drive my week. They certainly kept me going through the pandemic. Because they weren't mindless drivel; they celebrated not only people's abilities to think but their need to. You could get lost in them and feel better when the hour had elapsed.

There is a map--you can get it--that shows the location and scope of NPR stations throughout the country. It served me particularly well in my travels with the NEA and working gigs elsewhere. You could play with the dial sometimes, and come up with early afternoon classical music, if the funding wasn't there, or recorded shows like Hidden Brain (Ever listen? Fascinating) if there was. It was always someplace between 88.1 and 92.9 FM. There's also a cell phone app that tells you where the nearest stations are and if you're coming up on another one.

On long drives, you were secure in the knowledge that if NPR wasn't quite there at the moment, it soon would be.

You could, and can, wake up to it every day. Here, in Milwaukee, there is 89.7, WUWM in Milwaukee, for NPR news and daily coverage. West of here, there is Wisconsin Public Radio, 90.7, WHAD, which has stations in Delafield and Milwaukee. During weekday afternoons into the early evenings, it serves the state with Central Time. Over lunch hour, there's a daily reading called Chapter A Day.

The effect has been, and still is, to slow life down a little, to explain it a more deeply, to provide badly-needed context. It has never majored in happy talk. It has never had to conjure, or work hard to find, good things going on. It seems to attract them.

It has attracted some of the finest female journalists of the last forty years: the late Cokie Roberts and her weekly musings, often subtly pointed, on the Congress; Nina Totenberg, with her detailed and deep analysis of the Supreme Court; Linda Wertheimer and Susan Stamberg, with their definitive voices (about which a new book has been written). It seemed natural that NPR became a haven for their flourishing.

During the last four years of the pointless nihilism created by the previous president and all that surrounded him, NPR did not indulge in counterattack as much as it kept going and explaining the nonsense as exactly that. There was an edge to voices that wasn't there before; you could feel it. But there was a line it wouldn't cross, and the integrity was preserved as a result.

We have all survived--for now--that onslaught of language twisting and bold-faced deceptions. NPR sails on, fortunately. But the Big Lie still has legs because it has been woven together within one of our political parties, and it is due to make another national appearance. NPR gives us at least one place we can go in an ongoing effort to discern the objective truth of things. With each passing day, it gains value.

It's said that America is known for three things: baseball, jazz, and the Constitution. Add to that a fourth--National Public Radio.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

What Would You Do With This Menace?

Facebook has a decision to make, and it will make it tomorrow: Do you close, forever, the account of the previous president? Or do you re-open it since the fear of violence after January 6, which he caused, is over?

That depends. It depends on whether you believe that (a) his free speech rights are being violated; (b) the aforementioned threat has been removed; and (c) the political fallout, ferocious in either direction, is tolerable.

Let's discuss the three. Are someone's free speech rights being violated if, based on clear and convincing evidence, the speaker incited a riot in the U.S. Capitol, designed to overturn a constitutional process honored every four years since 1800, just because he clearly and officially lost but claims that he won?

Rights in the Bill of Rights are rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by government, not by website. Facebook's obvious popularity has trademarked it in the American mind like Xerox and Campbell's soup--it's become synonymous with social media. Facebook can cancel anyone's status if it wants to; it does not have to justify it other than through its own principles.

If the government had a social media site, that would be another issue. It brings up another case, that of the previous president blocking those he didn't like on his infamous Twitter account. A court said that he couldn't do that because he was (unfortunately) the President, and public scrutiny and discussion must carry on in the most robust way.

So, he might reason, why wouldn't he have the legal right to go back onto Facebook? Because he's no longer the president. Because he's now just like everybody else. Besides, he abused his right by creating innuendoes and lies that inspired others on January 6 (admittedly, in court) to act in his behalf and because it would please him. They weren't just words; they were proddings. If it were otherwise, then politics themselves would be pointless.

But there are other soups, and they're plenty good enough (including low salt, which for people like me have become highly prized). There are other copying machines (like Hewlett-Packard) that work just fine. 

Are there other social media sites? Well, yes. None have the staying power or prestige of Facebook, but they're certainly welcome to try.

Does a former president need Facebook to put his views out there? One wouldn't think so. So far, he's managed to do that and have some of those views reported in mainstream media. That makes him better off than me, for instance.

The popularity of Facebook beckons someone like him to take full advantage of it. He certainly has, hasn't he? He's tried to get people to overthrow our government, then slip into the cracks and take it over again. Make no mistake; that's what he tried to do. If it failed, as it did, he could just settle back and make excuses that didn't rub up against him--on the surface. But he was the instigator, and no rational person can look at the evidence and pretend otherwise.

So the answer to (b) would have to be: Yes, that threat ended. BUT--

• way too many people are still addicted to the thinking that the election was stolen (the Big Lie), and might easily respond to further inspiration concocted by the Big Liar;
• Facebook is a major and evident, even if unwitting, purveyor of that conversation; and 
• the previous president's return to it would exacerbate and emphasize that Big Lie continuously, having its horribly damaging effects on our well-established (see above) political processes.

So what about (c), then? What about the fallout? Can Facebook absorb whatever results it causes?

I'm guessing it can. The very inertia that allowed the previous president to spew and spread his endless nonsense will continue. There will have to be a significantly well-established alternative site to take people who, angry and frustrated, might jump to. And that will take time and a real sense of purpose.

That begs another question: Can we handle the diminishment of Facebook? Can we end our own addictions to tapping into it, as surely as we take a shower or cross the street? Can we disconnect and be as alone as we've ever been, especially with the fallout from the pandemic still all around us?

If people give up on Facebook, it's usually because Facebook, in point of fact, raises our stress levels as much as it raises our connectivity. It's subtle, but it's there. I would be stunned if Facebook suffers a significant downturn in traffic. Unless, of course, the Big Liar is allowed to return. Then alternatives might be sought.

As for the perpetrator around whom all this revolves, he's enjoying the bother. If he's the subject of removal, he'll clearly respond publicly regardless; he'll continue his insults and drivel if allowed back on; and will gladly continue playing the role of the victim if he's not. So nothing, actually, will change about him, if we ever foolishly anticipated it might.

Which also means that, if he runs for president again (which he can) and gains the nomination, he'll try the same approach--which is to say, he'll plant the seeds of the corruption in deflection to that which he will be attempting, whether in plain sight or not. Policy aside, he's a horrible menace to this country, and the Republican Party should be ashamed of itself in its utter lack of leadership options.

The best way to return any integrity to our electoral system is to exclude this menace. He means nothing more and nothing less than to regain the reins of government to operate behind the scenes for himself and only himself--this time to utilize the weapons he overlooked to eliminate the influence of enemies. If Facebook's rulers haven't figured that out by now, they're either part of his minions or they've been hiding underground for far too long.

We'll see if Facebook becomes the cat's-paw, the avenue for him to return to ignominy which we may still be condemned to share. We'll see what kind of guts they have.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Is This Being 'Woke'? Someone Thinks So. Someone's Wrong.

When people use the word 'woke,' it's usually liberals saying that they've become more aware to unfairness or discrimination or the sufferings of people. That implies that somebody should do something about it.

But it's what, exactly, they've 'woke up' to, and how they place it into context, that makes all the difference. Without context, facts mean more in the short run, and much less in the long run, than the purveyors of those facts intend. And those errors belong just as much to the left of the political spectrum as to the right.

Let me give you two fairly recent examples, both regarding San Francisco, in their various ways. You know, San Francisco, the haven of liberal awokeness, but where some of the homeless must still defecate in the streets because there are no public toilets to service them, so maybe not quite as 'woke' as it needs to be.

Not long ago, the San Francisco school board voted to change the name of one of its schools from "Lincoln." (It also did the same to "Washington," but we won't deal with that here.) Yes, that Lincoln, not just some other guy named Lincoln (like Austin, Texas, in which one of its high schools is named Reagan, which assumes the fairly recent president, but in fact refers to the treasurer of the Confederacy--which should be changed anyhow, but you can see that flap miles away).

Why? Well, in an attempt at 'wokeness,' the board wishes to point out that Lincoln signed off on the hanging of 38 Native Americans in Minnesota in 1862. Why did he do that? Well, because they were waging war on the oncoming settlers in the southern part of that state then, Civil War or no Civil War. They had been forced onto reservations upon Minnesota being declared a state in 1857, and had had some of that land swindled from them to boot.

They descended upon the whites and slaughtered them near New Ulm, prompting Lincoln to send what he had left of the Union Army to suppress it. The army arrested over 300 Natives, and were going to hang them all.

Yup. Every last one of them. But wait, they didn't, right? Right. That's because Lincoln commuted the sentences of over 260 of them, categorizing them as war combatants rather than mere destroyers of property and life. He only ordered the execution of 39 Natives (the largest mass execution in American history; one was later suspended so the total was actually 38) because they were direct participants in the massacre of settlers.

So yes, Lincoln actively ordered in a mass hanging. But he also used judgment in saving lives. He was the president, after all, exercising his executive powers. And it's not like he had nothing else on his plate; he had plenty of other people getting killed elsewhere, too, in places like Shiloh and Fredericksburg and Bull Run.

And he did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, the document which created the force of human rights behind the war effort. The more you research that, too, the more remarkable that act is as well.

So do you take his name off wherever it exists in your school district? I think not. I think someone failed to do, or take proper notice of, additional research and recognition that being president, at any juncture but particularly that one, is not so simple. It's not conservative to think so, either.

They made a mistake. They should correct it.

The second misjudgment happened during a lecture I zoomed the other day. The speaker's point was that much of American history has been bleached white and a lot has been hidden. I cannot debate that wholly, but much of what he's claiming has, in fact, come to light during my teaching career, which began in 1973. I'm not sure he's right about not much of it being taught as it is the probability that maybe he, and others, weren't listening.

But much of what he claimed hadn't been included, was. Textbook creators have, in fact, managed to, here and there, insert injustices committed toward people of color. And they were pointed out by teachers, white and otherwise, far and wide.

He did, justifiably, point out that Wisconsin dictated to public schools that they were to have begun, if they hadn't already, to insert education about Native history within the state. The law didn't say how much, just that teachers were to have pointed it out. So we did so. He came up with some interesting facts, yes, and things that I didn't include, I must admit. But I did pay attention to reservations established in the state and how they got there. I could have done better. Schools could have done better.

But there's also the context: the rest of American history. And there are only so many days and hours to get it in. And most recently, there are the pressures of standardized testing present so that teachers are driven to cover what they have come to know as material that will be included on those tests. So minorities, people of color, will get the coverage that is required, not what they deserve.

That being said, the speaker also assumed that a whole bunch of other things hadn't been taught, either. That annoyed me, especially one regarding Japanese-Americans. I certainly did teach that, and what's more, I provided the appropriate context, which that speaker didn't do because he clearly didn't know it.

It's called the Gentleman's Agreement, reached between the U.S. and Japan in 1907. To wit: The American government would guarantee the desegregation of San Francisco public schools to include Japanese-American students if the Japanese government would actively discourage its citizens to move to the U.S.

The speaker expressed bewilderment as to why that would happen. We actually wanted someone to stop sending people to our land? Gee, has that ever happened since? It's happening right now. And yes, there is a racist tinge to it all. Too.

But there's a backdrop to that. And it had to do with what the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, had done earlier.

Japan and Russia had fought the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05. Much of it involved the islands strung on a curved line between the Kamchatka Peninsula and what constituted the Japanese main islands, known as the Kurils. There was also the very large, elongated island that comes quite close to the Russian mainland just northwest of those islands, Sakhalin. There was also iron-rich Manchuria, and the Korean Peninsula, and who might secure the rights to mine and settle there.

The Russians sensed the threat, and gathered their rather formidable navy, some 44 ships, and sailed them all the way around Africa and Southern Asia to take on the Japanese. The betting was on the Russians, since the Japanese were, and would be for quite some time, underestimated.

In the ensuing battle, called the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese navy literally laid waste to the Russians, sinking or damaging 42 of those 44 ships. It was the first major naval battle of that century, and the first time that an Asian nation had gotten the better of a European one. What's more, it gave Japan tremendous confidence, which it would extend quite aggressively, building an immense empire that would take the "island-hopping" strategy of the United States to curb and conclude in World War II.

In the meantime, though, expenditures on both sides were draining them. Roosevelt had made initial statements favoring the Japanese in this war, so they approached him to sit down and hammer out the settlement. The Russians agreed, two days after their navy was wiped out.

But the land war was being won by Russia--troops arriving across Siberia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad--and that made a difference in the negotiations. The war was finally settled by the Treaty of Portsmouth (NH) in 1905. The Japanese public, celebrating the great naval victory in nationalist style, were let down by some of the provisions of the treaty, and blamed Roosevelt because he was white and seemed to favor Russia, a white nation (see, racism works both ways, always with bad results), at least in terms of its government.

Thus: Roosevelt was dealing with a nation not happy with him (and one now filled with confidence and hubris), and he had the problem of dealing with a growing Japanese population in one of his own nation's most prosperous cities. American prejudice against Japanese was at least as intense as it had been against the Chinese, who had been flat-out banned from the country in 1883 (Which the speaker did point out, but again, under the assumption that teachers hadn't taught it. Not true, but when's the last time the Russo-Japanese War came up at dinner?).

So: Roosevelt struck the Gentleman's Agreement, which held no legal water, but it diplomatically calmed the rough seas between Japan and the United States, at least for that moment (and did not stem Japan's expansionist plans, as we know). And that's why it happened.

There. That needed to be said by the speaker. He needed to provide context. He didn't. But he also tried to cover lots and lots of ground, and the presentation was getting long--exactly the problem faced by teachers all over. 

To bring all that up isn't a bad idea. But there has to be sufficient follow-through. Without it, history becomes a grab-bag of trivia, just the thing the typical kid complains about. It might not be as ideologically pure than what one wishes, but few things are.

The above explanation would have obviously made it longer, but would have provided the listeners with badly-needed context. Besides, to be bewildered as a teacher is not to fulfill your mission or your goal. To teach is not to be bewildered, but to provide needed information or to guide others to find more if they're interested. The speaker did not do either. He should. Because, after all, he was teaching.

And this essay has gone on a long time, too. But knowledge and understanding take time and attention. That's what being 'woke' really is: Not only to know more and to give, perhaps, the benefit of the doubt to those who have not had it to this point, but to be sure to do it in a way in which the proper context is exposed. Otherwise, some information is almost worse than none, especially when it's used as a weapon to attack what's assumed to be unfairness.

Besides, if you don't do research well, it gives the other side an incredible advantage in refutation. They'll point out that you're 'woke' with just one eye open. That isn't how you win discussions. That's how you lose.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask inside. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark