I do believe we’re all exhausted about the impending election in a week. And there’s so much to read. I find myself wanting to encase this moment in amber so I can remember it because it all has the feeling of intense emotion that I will suppress, later.
That the election is in 7 days. After that we’ll be deeply in it as we resolve what the heck happens next. We either get our first woman President in January, or we get back a President who lost the last election but fomented a coup d’état and says he’d like to execute a massive deportation of people living and working in the United States as his solution to the border. Or some third option that would be more chaotic and tricky and terrible.
It’s a fraught political moment in my country. I’m hoping for the best.
I am getting over a cold. I think I got it because I hung out with a bunch of older baby boomers and didn’t mask. I didn’t check whether it was COVID–not because I don’t care, but largely because it doesn’t matter how I would address it. I have rested and hydrated, taken DayQuil and NyQuil and cough drops. And now I am better.
Yesterday I went back in the water. I rode some waves and felt better about everything. I got back to nature. That makes it sound serene and calm. The 1954 version of A Star is Born has the character played James Mason walk into the ocean. It looks serene and calm and beautiful but it’s the characters suicide. Never mind there are not quite Malibu homes with beaches that look like this adjacent. Online sources indicate it’s Laguna Beach. I’m not sure but it’s a secluded pretty sedate beach. Nevertheless, the music swells and we see his abandoned comfortable white robe and we know that he is dead.
That still is from the second version of A Star is Born. The first, 1937. The third, 1976. The fourth, 2018. And in 1932 there was a film What Price Hollywood with the same overall: a young nobody meets an alcoholic has-been, becomes a star, and the has-been dies by his own hand. The intervals between each successive retelling are getting longer. I suspect the next one will be another 40 years from now.
In the meantime I’ll keep getting in the ocean with no intention whatsoever to drown. It may seem that it’s my intention, but I assure it you that it’s not. The trauma of experiencing the aftermath of my cousin Eddie’s demise was the vaccine that cured me of suicide. Here’s a photo from Surfline me getting in the ocean yesterday to ride waves.
In the meantime, let’s quote some things that I appreciated so far this week. The first is from Marc Maron: The Democratic Idea:
The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers. Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant. They are of the movement. Whether they see themselves as acolytes or just comics doesn’t matter. Whether they are driven by the idea that what they are fighting for is a free speech issue or whether they are truly morally bankrupt racists doesn’t matter. They are part of the public face of a fascist political movement that seeks to destroy the democratic idea.
When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism. When someone uses their platform for that reason they are facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy.
This, from Ed Zitron: You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman are not, despite their achievements, remarkable people. They are dull, and while they might be intelligent, they’re far from intellectual, appearing to lack any real interests, hobbies or joys, other than Zuckerberg’s brief dalliance with mixed martial arts. They all read the same shit, they talk the same way, they have the same faux-intellectualism that usually boils down to how they’re “big thinkers” that think about “big things” like “intelligence” and “consciousness,” when what they mostly do is dance around issues without adding anything substantive, because they don’t really believe anything.
From the largest newspaper in Puerto Rico: Puerto Ricans should vote for Kamala Harris
Just on Sunday, as insults rained down on Puerto Rico, the Democratic candidate offered a message of hope, promising to maintain the interagency group dedicated exclusively to strengthening and creating new opportunities. She addressed key issues such as encouraging investment in the industries of the future, boosting small business growth, improving the health care system and uplifting Puerto Ricans. It also emphasized the need to achieve parity with the states in access to federal programs for the disadvantaged and the elderly. Clearly, the Puerto Rico Opportunity Economy Task Force would be independent of the current one established by Biden’s executive order.
And this endorsement from The Verge: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
It is extremely frustrating that the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.
Enough politics. I mentioned the Meeting of the Mats before, but I missed it. As mentioned, I was sick. Check out the after-action report over on SURFMATTERS.
Happy Tuesday everyone. Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.
