I’m writing my first think piece in quite a while. When I started Wise Madness it was my intention to write mainly think pieces. I discovered it’s hard to come up with something new every day, it’s even harder to remember the ideas, and posting them causes anxiety. I’m always afraid how people will take them. Despite that they are still the heart of what I do. Even when I write about music or baseball my goal is to make My Gentle Readers to think.
Thanks to Isaac Asimov’s science essays in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction I like to start with personal anecdotes. It makes it easier for me to write and perhaps easier for you to read. Asimov certainly knew about writing. So what’s happened to me since I last wrote?
I had my second PT session for my back yesterday. They made things for me and I improved my performance. One activity that’s easy to quantify is the stationary bicycle. The first session I did 1.9 miles in 10 minutes. That’s 11.4 MPH. This session the PT increased the time of the session and the resistance of the bike, the equivalent of lowering the gear, and increasing my speed. I biked 3.6 miles in 15 minutes, 14.4 MPH. I love tracking my progress.
Then I went shopping. I couldn’t decide between going to Aldi and Stop & Shop but decided on Aldi as I needed another fix of their amazing chocolate chip brioche. The store was less crowded than usual and I got out of their fast. I even considered going to Stop & Shop too but instead went home. When I unpacked and wanted to reward myself with a snack I discovered I had forgotten something, the chocolate chip brioche, my entire rationale for going to Aldi. Why? All together now. Because I’m an idiot. I don’t think people appreciate how difficult idiocy is; they think that anybody can do it.
Now that I’ve shown you how stupid I am I’m going to try and get you to agree with my way of thinking. That might not be the best plan of action but it’s what I got. You go to war with the brain you have, not the one you want.
I’ve been flooded of late with “Things were so much better when I was a young,” thinking. I see it every day when it comes to baseball; some people hate all the recent developments in understanding the game. I see rants against WAR and launch angle from people that long for the discussion to be about batting average. They don’t have rational arguments against them, their stance is based on a rejection of rationalism. They don’t want to hear why WAR is a better indicator of skill than BA or how launch angle affects a hitter’s effectiveness. They not only don’t understand them; they don’t want to understand them. They just want things to be like they were when the were learning the game.
They say the same thing about modern players that the “you kids get off my lawn” set did when I was young about the players now revered. “They don’t understand the fundamentals.” “They can’t bunt.” “They don’t appreciate the little things that matter.” I heard that about the players in the 60s and 70s, the players I now hear being revered as superior to the current players.
I see it in teaching math. People who no nothing about Common Core, hate Common Core because math isn’t taught the way it was when they were in school, which by assumption is the right way. People that teach math, like me, tend to love the Common Core methods. They teach kids the way to think about math. Once again this just an echo of what was going on when I was a kid when people railed against the New Math. There are real arguments over the way they were implemented. I know some of my teachers were not properly prepared for the New Math. They had been taught by the old methods and didn’t fully understand the new ones. I’m sure that goes on today too.
People get very upset that some schools are no longer teaching cursive. My reaction is that this took them far too long. I shouldn’t have been taught cursive. Most people cannot read another person’s cursive making it unsuitable for communication. There is a reason that forms always insist on print. I cannot remember the last time I used cursive for any purpose other than signing my name, and that’s not real cursive. Like most people I write the first letter then a bunch of loops and curves. But we were taught it as kids, therefore it’s the way things should be.
Many of you are saying, you aren’t like that at all. You are willing to change. Then how come you call the RFK Bridge the Triboro and the brand-new Mario Cuomo bridge the Tappan Zee? Even I won’t call the 59th Street Bridge the Ed Koch or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the Hugh Carey. There’s something basic in human nature that dislikes change and resents changes forced on us by them..
I already have some of you upset, it’s going to get worse.
On Facebook Reggie posted, “I drove into DC today on the Jefferson Davis Highway! Why?” My response was “There’s no Benedict Arnold Expressway.” To me that’s a perfect analogy; Honoring Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederates, is honoring people that betrayed and made war on the United States. I was shocked when I was a kid and saw it when I went to Virginia. I was outraged when I saw that states made Davis’s and Lee’s birthdays holidays but not Lincoln’s. But now the outrage is on the other foot. As these honors are taken away many people complain about their heritage being taken away. My question is, how much is this is about resistance to change? There’s no political or even social angle in New York when the names were changed to the Jackie Robinson Parkway or the Joe DiMaggio Highway, but people still object. Not as strongly, the usual reaction is to just not use the new names. But these weren’t done with outside pressure. Nobody was going to boycott the state because we called it the Interboro Parkway.
I’m not saying that racism is not a part of it. As much as internally you might want to keep your Confederate monument because it was always there in your life, you should be able to see how offensive it is to others. It’s offensive to me. But what I’m asking you to do is realize that every time you force people to make changes like that you are creating resentment that feeds the racism and prejudice. Trump’s core support is from feeding those resentments. And in the vicious cycle that resentment leads to more prejudice which leads to reactions against the prejudice which leads to more resentment. Every time we attack Trump we strengthen his support from his base. Of course we should attack Trump, not just because his base is a minority that can be overcome, but because what he’s doing is wrong. But we should never lose sight of the consequences.
In terms of our actions we should use our outrage wisely, not just because we can. In Yankee Stadium and at Flyers games they stopped playing Kate Smith’s version of God Bless America. As an atheist I always objected to the song. I’m not a fan of Kate Smith. But she is not a symbol of White Supremacy or racism like Jefferson Davis. She sang some songs that are now found offensive but weren’t at the time. One of the songs was also performed by black activist Paul Robeson. Are we going to stop playing his music? There were not large numbers of people offended every time they heard Kate Smith. Nobody would even know about the racists songs if someone hadn’t done research and unearthed them. What banishing her from Yankee Stadium does it increase the sense of victimhood by the right. I’m not guessing at this. I see my friends proclaiming their victimhood. This kind of thing is counter-productive. There is so much blatant prejudice out there; we have no need to search the nooks and crannies looking for crypto-racism. Fight the battles that matter, not the ones that are just about winning, as that means somebody else is losing, and the losers resent it, and then fight harder on the battles that matter.
None of this is original by me. The theme of this entry is covered in Those Were the Day, the theme song of All in the Family. It starts not with a longing for political conservativism, but for the music of Archie’s youth, Glenn Miller. Archie is the prototype Trump supporter, a working-class white man that longs for the days when that gave him status.
Wise Madness 