Oh, Lord; we made the news again.
Welcome to Michigan. Masks optional, or otherwise, depends on who you ask. Guns, mandatory, to those with a certain mindset. Messages need to be sent loudly and clearly, just as speeches must be enunciated loudly and clearly.
Panic might well be in the air. But it's happening at the wrong time of the year. Michigan is just now coming out of hibernation. We're rubbing the sleep out of our eyes and waking up to a calamity.
I've lived in stranger places - I'm talking to you, Arizona - but most people haven't. You shouldn't fault entirely the crowd of unhappy campers who practiced antisocial distancing at the Capitol recently, because government in Michigan, at all levels, has always seemed a little too... eager to go on a rights-depriving spree.
Ask any legal scholar. Is Michigan among the worst-administrated states in the Union? Yes. Is the bureaucracy insufferable? Oh, yes. How about racial inequalities and dispar-- Yes. Draconian sentencing guidelines and high rates of incarcer-- Yes. Dropout rates, teen pregnan-- Yes. Yes, okay? Yes, yes, yes.
And the roads suck, too. And the schools are for shit. And the taxes are high. So are the crime rates. And insurance rates. The water is polluted. The infrastructure is rusting, crumbling, rotting. Just like the government. Welcome to Michigan, where the only thing you can bank on is hitting a deer with your car every two years.
Our elected officials, nearly all of them, have the nerve to act like they're doing us a big favor all the time. But we're neither lazy nor stupid here; we're just tired. Tired of things never getting any better. Tired of empty, unfulfilled promises consistently being undelivered by those who swore an oath to a Constitution about which they know (or care) precious little and so find it very easy to ignore.
It's not that we tolerate it so much as we've gotten used to it. You wake up each day, shrug, and go do your thing (weather permitting).
So when a pandemic hits, and the governor reacts more stridently than other governors (often unilaterally)... And gets into a tiff with our unmanageable president... And gets into another tiff with our state's Lilliputian Legislature... What happens?
Some folks, the ones with the gas money leastways, are wont to throw Old Betsy in the truck and head for Lansing. (That's the rifle, not the ex-mother-in-law.)
Welcome to Michigan. A well-known one-handed bass player in my neck of the woods once told me that blaming Ronald Reagan for bad government is like blaming Ronald McDonald for bad hamburgers. This is what we used to talk about at parties here.
If he was right - and he's sure he was - then it also stands to reason that blaming Michiganders for bad government is like blaming Ronald Reagan and Ronald McDonald for being clowns.
Something like that... Nothing makes much sense anymore, which is coincidentally the essence of pure Michigan, and welcome to it.
pH 5.o7.2o
***
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Spanning the Globe
Africa.
This blog has readers in African countries. Specifically, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana, Uganda, Zimbabwe. The World Wide Web, indeed.
How do I know?
Google. On the Admin side of it, I can see all kinds of information about those who read the Book of Charlie... What kind of OS they're running, which browser they use, which website pointed them in my direction... Where they are.
In elementary school, there was a really big globe on a table in the classroom. A globe with a topographic surface, so we pupils could feel the Rocky Mountains under our fingertips, like natural Braille. And for those of us who must have them, there were names on all the countries. I see so many of those names now on my screen.
Europe.
Germany. France. Belgium. The Netherlands. Spain. Portugal. Italy. Ireland. The U.K. Ukraine. Russia. More.
Places that have been devastated by war and the nightmares of authoritarianism. Places that were brutally civilized by the Roman Empire, then left to their own dark devices after the Empire crumbled. Places where the population outlasted the plague.
They know of a deeper historical suffering than any American could ever fathom. They know that borders are just stretches of land, lines on a map, all subject to the whims of those in power.
Turkmenistan.
Australia.
Vietnam.
Hong Kong.
Other Asian nations, too, obviously... but I am always struck when I see clicks from Hong Kong. The Communist Chinese government has them by the scruff of the neck, eager to extinguish those embers of liberty and self-determination.
The people of Hong Kong want what I have. That feels funny to me. Nobody should yearn for our experience, yet it seems like they sure do.
Idi Amin infamously, perhaps even jokingly, said, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
(That feels familiar to me.)
He also said, "If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning."
(So does that.)
I run these statistics, this geography primer, past my sister who lost her only son. I tell her, look, see how many people yearn for freedom? If that is really what we have?
"Oh," she said with a rare smile, "It's probably just medical students looking for medical schools in America." And we laughed. Not the most joyful sound in the world, but, something.
pH 5.o2.2o
***
This blog has readers in African countries. Specifically, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana, Uganda, Zimbabwe. The World Wide Web, indeed.
How do I know?
Google. On the Admin side of it, I can see all kinds of information about those who read the Book of Charlie... What kind of OS they're running, which browser they use, which website pointed them in my direction... Where they are.
In elementary school, there was a really big globe on a table in the classroom. A globe with a topographic surface, so we pupils could feel the Rocky Mountains under our fingertips, like natural Braille. And for those of us who must have them, there were names on all the countries. I see so many of those names now on my screen.
Europe.
Germany. France. Belgium. The Netherlands. Spain. Portugal. Italy. Ireland. The U.K. Ukraine. Russia. More.
Places that have been devastated by war and the nightmares of authoritarianism. Places that were brutally civilized by the Roman Empire, then left to their own dark devices after the Empire crumbled. Places where the population outlasted the plague.
They know of a deeper historical suffering than any American could ever fathom. They know that borders are just stretches of land, lines on a map, all subject to the whims of those in power.
Turkmenistan.
Australia.
Vietnam.
Hong Kong.
Other Asian nations, too, obviously... but I am always struck when I see clicks from Hong Kong. The Communist Chinese government has them by the scruff of the neck, eager to extinguish those embers of liberty and self-determination.
The people of Hong Kong want what I have. That feels funny to me. Nobody should yearn for our experience, yet it seems like they sure do.
Idi Amin infamously, perhaps even jokingly, said, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
(That feels familiar to me.)
He also said, "If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning."
(So does that.)
I run these statistics, this geography primer, past my sister who lost her only son. I tell her, look, see how many people yearn for freedom? If that is really what we have?
"Oh," she said with a rare smile, "It's probably just medical students looking for medical schools in America." And we laughed. Not the most joyful sound in the world, but, something.
pH 5.o2.2o
***
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