Tainted Love Day

I have to confess that I've always been cynical about Valentine's Day- it really comes across as a made-up holiday engineered to make people in committed relationships feel obligated to spend a lot of money and to make people not in committed relationships feel bad about themselves. I'm not as down on romance as the guys in Gang of Four, but I'm not really big on commercialization/commoditization. As a hilarious aside, one of my cousins used to put her relationship with her boyfriend on hold from Christmas to Valentine's Day so as to avoid the whole present-buying kerfuffle. She can't do that with her marriage these days, but she had a good run while she was still single.

A scant year ago, though it feels like a longer time, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting eclipsed the romantic holiday with its utter horror. The original St Valentine's Day Massacre could be snarked about, it was a gangland slaying and the victims were, as Dotard would put it, bad hombres. Another mass shooting in 1977 in my beloved New Rochelle remains largely forgotten.

The Stoneman Douglas massacre seemed to have marked a shift in the national discourse about gun violence- the survivors were eloquent and media savvy, the victims were heroic, those who lost their lives trying to save their students, their friends. Sadly, though, nothing substantial has been done, and mass shootings still occur regularly. There were attempts, thankfully failed, to portray the shooter as a victim of bullying, and repeated attacks on the survivors' character, which helped to make this past year seem like a slog. The real tragedy is that there will never be a normal for these kids, never a February 14th which will be about overpriced roses or chocolate samplers. Title taken from a classic of my adolescence.

Loss of Opportunity

I'd like to think that I am an empathetic man, but I have to note that I am sadder about the loss of functionality of a robot than I am about the death of a human being. Of course, the robot added vastly to the sum of human knowledge while the human was a pox on our society...

The Opportunity Rover has gone silent after fifteen years, rendered powerless by a dust storm which covered its solar panels. The rover was only meant to function for three months, but nevertheless it persisted for fifteen years, a decent lifespan for a cat or a dog, much less a Mars rover. Opportunity discovered evidence that liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars. Everyone should have such a long and storied career!

I confess that I feel a bit weird mourning the death of a cute little robot languishing in a distant extraterrestrial desert... I blame George Lucas.

The Crankiest Crank of them All

It looks like the biggest crank in American politics has died- it has been reported that Lyndon LaRouche died at the age of 1996. LaRouche was the living embodiment of horseshoe theory, he managed to be simultaneously far-left and far-right, and certifiably insane. The RationalWiki entry on LaRouche has a pretty good overview of his long, bizarre career in the public eye. It appears that he started out as a Trotskyite and ended up a Trumper. He ran in eight presidential elections.

It's been a long time since I've run into a LaRouchie in the flesh, though not for want of trying. The last time I saw a bunch of LaRouche supporters, I remember a handful of aging-hippies-gone-horribly-wrong handing out some whacky pamphlets. One of them shouted in my friend's ear, 'Fight for freedom.' He responded, 'Smoke my pole.' GOOD TIMES.

LaRouche has always been a presence on the political landscape that I have known, even though I still have no good handle on what he wanted, except that he was pro nukes, anti-England, and had some crazy ideas about teh J00s. It will be interesting to see if his followers can hold together some sort of movement, or will be subsumed by some other ideological freak show. At any rate, if a certain Hootchie Cootchie LaRouchie needs some, uh, comfort in this time of bereavement, I will make myself available. It's not like I've got a pet rabbit she can throw in a stewpot.

The Universe Being Weird, or Earworm Confirmed

Last Saturday, I was inflicted by an earworm, a song I hadn't heard in years, the title and artist unknown to me. I had a lyric to go by, a somewhat generic 'I want to tell you today'. Poking around the t00bz, I found the song, a dance number from 1983 called Tell You (Today) by a band named Loose Joints, which was musician Arthur Russell and a revolving cast of collaborators. It's a jaunty tune, with just a hint of wistfulness For the record, I found the concert I posted last Saturday by Googling vocalist Joyce Bowden and discovering that she had collaborated with Joey Ramone in The Resistance. Ever since Saturday, I've been binge listening to various versions of the song, remixes, even a cover by Robyn (but not the one you're thinking of). This evening, when I stopped at the H Mart in Yonkers, I heard a by-now once-again familiar song on the store's sound system:





It was weird to hear this song completely randomly so soon after I had rediscovered it... the universe is a pretty bizarre place, to be sure. As a sad coda to this post, I have to note that Arthur Russell, a multi-instrumentalist who worked in musical genres ranging from minimalism to disco, a perfectionist who often didn't finish projects, succumbed, like all-too-many artists in late 20th Century New York City, succumbed to AIDS in 1992. As a kid, I never found out his name, now that I am a fan, I lament that fact.

The Kids Are Alright... Or They Will Be When They Get Their Shots

Among the very worst people on the planet are the anti-vaccine crowd... they cite studies by discredited, even disgraced, individuals linking autism to vaccines and they place those around them at risk by degrading community immunity. There have been recent measles outbreaks in New York, Minnesota, and Washington. While measles is often portrayed as 'no big deal', it is a potential fatal disease that can cause long-term neurological damage. Tragically, the anti-vaccination movement seems to be one of the few things that unites raging righties and loopy lefties in this country.

The Kiwi Geniuses at Riddled cover a lot of 'alternative medicine' scams, and the anti-vaccine crowd is full of outright crooks as well as kooks... to make things worse, anti-vaccine propaganda has been pushed by Russian troll farms. Who needs to spend millions developing biological weapons when assholes will do your dirty work for free?

Thankfully, there is a movement of teenagers who have conducted research on vaccines and are rebelling against their parents by seeking inoculations. I guess that getting kicked out of the house by your asshole parents is better than going blind because of complications of an easily-preventable disease.

The post title is taken from one of my favorite songs by The Who:





Let's hope that this youthful rebellion grows, our country can't afford any more anti-science whackaloonery.

Missing Joey More than Ever Now

A major news story in these here United States is Chief Justice Roberts' surprise vote blocking a Louisiana law that would restrict abortion clinics. Predictably, Susan Collins was wrong about Barty the Boofer, proving how useless she is.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to post about... poking around the t00bz, I found a reference to a performance by Joey Ramone at a 1993 pro-choice benefit, fronting a pickup supergroup called The Resistance (Joan Jett put in an appearance playing guitar). The band played mainly covers,
from John Lennon to Sam Cooke to, in a case of foreshadowing, Louis Armstrong. I found an audio recording of the performance, which is wonderful:





Longtime readers will know that I have been a huge Ramones fan since I was a child, and it's nice to know that, while he played a cartoon lunatic delinquent in his band persona, Joey Ramone was a sensitive, articulate liberal. His monologue at the beginning of this performance is a testimony to his values, to his humane nature. We lost Joey to lymphoma on 4/15/2001, a loss which I took pretty hard (my brother Sweetums and I were returning to NYC from Easter at mom's house in Virginia, and when we heard the news on the radio, we blasted All the Stuff and More all the way home, singing along with tears in our eyes). Looking back, it was a loss for all of America. We could use more voices like Joey's, and I'm not just talking about his Queens-accented sorta-bleat/kinda-croon.

Virginia is For Loonies

I've stayed away from posting about the controversy over Virginia governor Ralph Northam's free-fall due to pictures surfacing of him in blackface or a KKK robe in a med school yearbook. The picture is despicable, and a med student is old enough to know better. To make matters worse, lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault by two women. The attorney general of the state also claimed to have worn blackface to imitate hip-hop legend Kurtis Blow. Predictably, this has led to mainstream media outlets pushing a narrative about (warning, Chris Cillizza post )the collapse of the Democratic Party in Virginia. For the record, Republican state senate majority leader Tommy Norment was editor of a VMI yearbook which contained racist content. Of course, VMI played a large role in the Confederate Army. Yonkers Boy James Comey, has indicated that the various racist scandals haunting Virginia are just the tip of the iceberg. Virginia has a long, sordid past as a major hub of the transatlantic slave trade, the CSA capital region, and a hotbed of segregation and Jim Crow laws. It is only recently that immigrants and Northern transplants such as my mother have turned the state purple.

With all that taken into consideration, the picture of Northam was revealed by a GOP ratfucking organization, the sort of outfit run by people who don't think Breitbart is nuts enough. While the picture is offensive, the whole sordid affair strikes me as a decapitation strike aimed at the state Democratic Party and an attempt to put an Republican in charge of the state. Northam's scandal wouldn't even cause a raised eyebrow if the man were a Republican. Republicans are only outraged about Northam because a Democratic politician didn't live up to the current standards of the Democratic Party. I'm of the opinion that the allegations against Fairfax are a lot worse than those against Northam, as they involve sexual violence. Currently, I'm of the opinion that Northam should tell those calling for him to resign to fuck off. In the meantime, the party needs to nominate more women and young people as candidates- the country really doesn't need more entitled aging 'bros' in positions of power.