Another Week: Number 143

This was a pretty pleasant week weatherwise — warm enough to wear shorts again and slightly sticky, but not oppressive.

On Sunday, I overdosed on NFL football, first watching the Detroit Lions humiliate the Chicago Bears 52-21, followed by the Cowboys-Giants, Eagles-Chiefs, and Falcons-Vikings games. I have turned to sports in hopes of distracting myself from the national news, but the soul-grinding effects are not that much better.

Monday afternoon, I wore Amy‘s Bears T-shirt out in public in Kenosha and Racine. Most people just turned away as if to avoid some awful smell, but one guy in a produce section told me I had a lot of guts to wear the shirt after that game. I smiled and continued sorting through overripe oranges.

Also on Monday, I installed Apple’s new “26” operating systems on my laptop and phone. I have been reading about these “Liquid Glass” milestones for months. Now the moment has arrived, and the net effect for me is much rounder corners and somewhat klutzier buttons — a half-step backward. Warner Crocker correctly describes it as a “child-like appliqué on sophisticated devices that seem to beg for something more mature.” A few things broke as a result, but with some work, I have pretty much restored everything to nearly as good as it was before.

I went to Walmart on Tuesday to get my COVID, flu, and pneumonia vaccinations ahead of the loony ACIP meeting on Thursday and Friday. The Walmart pharmacy in Sturtevant has been wonderful for many years now, and still is: three shots in my left shoulder and I was on my way in about 10 minutes.

Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago Cubs clinched a wild-card spot, so there will be some bonus baseball in my birthplace.

Thursday night in Atlanta, the Indiana Fever won their first-round playoff series — a thrilling victory, especially in light of how many players they have lost to injury over the course of this season. Their games have provided a lot of enjoyment — I just wish the officials could curtail the roller derby collisions and decide video reviews in under ten minutes.

On Friday at dawn, the thin crescent moon was bejeweled by Venus in the eastern sky, and you could see why the Ottomans put it on their flag.

On Friday evening, Donald J. Trump announced yet another lethal strike on alleged ”male narcoterrorists” in the waters of the Caribbean. Is it okay now to simply decide that someone is bad and summarily blow them away with no legal proceedings whatsoever? Isn’t that exactly what some guy in Utah did to Charlie Kirk just last Wednesday?

I walked 9.8 miles this week.

A Story is a Deal, by Will Storr

Back in April, I read a piece written by Will Storr for The Guardian:

• Realising we’re all made-up characters in a story world helps me understand people

I enjoyed it, and it added to my understanding of the identity crisis I have been grappling with since Amy died. Also, I have been trying for a long time to understand how stories work. So I added Storr’s latest book to my long Amazon wish list:

• A Story is a Deal: How to use the science of storytelling to lead, motivate and persuade

Earlier this month, looking for something to read, I bought it for my Kindle.

It’s an engaging book and easy to consume. Storr lays out a series of precepts and then supports them with a copious supply of examples and anecdotes.

I began to fear the book would be nothing but examples and anecdotes. In the end, though, Storr does arrive at a rough framework. It’s not a complete course or anything, but there are at least some helpful guideposts.

He also is sometimes wrong — such as when he calls Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” outmoded.

ABC suspends Jimmy Kimmel

Roughly a decade ago, I began studying the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. My main question was how such a nightmare could happen in a civilized country of ostensibly intelligent people. Among other things, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I read Erik Larsen’s In the Garden of Beasts. And I read Book 1 and Book 2 of Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume, 2,084-page biography of Hitler. (I bought the Kindle version of the second volume because reading the first book in hardcover injured my wrist.)

Long story short, one of the key explanations I found was Kershaw’s “Working Towards the Führer” concept, which elucidates how Nazi oppression was not only imposed in a top-down direction, but really by everyone in the hierarchy, on their own initiative, all working to please the man at the top.

And Hitler wasn’t just assisted by government underlings. The Hugo Boss company supplied SS uniforms. An ordinary, “family company” built the ovens for Nazi extermination camps.

Even now, many shortsighted Trump supporters scoff angrily at the very thought of comparing their leader to Hitler — but the point of doing so is to recognize lessons of the past and use them to prevent a repeat before things grow completely monstrous.

We’re not doing very well. On Wednesday of this week, ABC announced it has suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! because of remarks Kimmel made regarding the MAGAverse’s knee-jerk spin on Charlie Kirk’s assassin.

What Kimmel said was not wrong — and it also wasn’t even the issue. The real problem is that Donald Trump cannot stand anyone criticising him, and will exercise his power in any way possible to silence them. He has made no secret of his intention to exact retribution on his opponents by leveraging Kirk’s killing.

And now FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and Disney’s ABC are working towards Trump. Someone said something once about those who fail to learn from history. 

After all the spineless compliance we’ve seen these past eight months, it’s time to drop the last two lines of our national anthem.