Category: Culture

Character in a time of fascism


Karis Nemik and Maarva Andor

Last week I finished watching the second season of “Andor” on Disney Plus. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. What sticks with me, though, is not so much the story. It’s the characters — and the character of the characters.

In a time of fascism, people sort pretty much into three groups: one, the eager fascists; two, the members of the rebellion; and three, those who can’t be bothered to care one way or the other. “Andor” is a brilliant character study of the first two types.

In this MAGA era, we all know some of the eager fascists. We also know people whose little lives are more important to them than anything happening in the larger world. What’s sad is that most of us who identify with the rebellion are so isolated. We’re frustrated that there is no meaningful role for us. This is a miserable vacuum in which stories can help us manage our isolation and frustration.

My guess is that those who created “Andor” know exactly whom they are speaking to — to those of us who would join a rebellion if there was a way to do it. There are times when the script of “Andor” breaks into a monologue and speaks to us directly.

Maarva Andor:

“There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore. It wants to stay.

“The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we are asleep. It’s easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it’s true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it’s too late. But I’ll tell you this, if I could do it again, I’d wake up early and be fighting those bastards from the start!”

Karis Nemik:

“Remember this, freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

“Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

“And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

“Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.”

Mon Mothma:

“I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.

“Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

“This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday … what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!”

Luthen Rael:

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion. I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

“What is my sacrifice?

“I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.

“So what do I sacrifice?

“Everything!”

The ugliest minds that ever existed

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Viking, 2025. 660 pages.

If ever there was a book (other than the Bible) that makes a sickening read, this is it. As I said to a friend, slogging through this book is like rolling around in a garbage truck that services an abbatoir and a pig farm. But it’s not the book itself. The book itself is a brilliant work of scholarship. What is sickening to any normal human being is — or ought to be — the subject matter.

If people knew the actual history of the church, as opposed to the rubbish that the church teaches about itself, we’d soon be rid of the church. This was already pretty familiar terrain to me. But my credibility as a person who despises the church requires knowing something about the history of the church and the sources of that history.

First, a disclaimer. Yes, there are some nice people in the church. And yes, some nice thoughts are attributed to Jesus. But that changes nothing. As early as Religion 101 (a required course where I went to school many years ago) one learns that there actually was nothing new in the teachings of Jesus. There were many contemporary cults in that part of the world whose teachings very much overlapped with the teachings of Jesus — the Essenes and the Pharisees, for example.

There are a million places to get mired down in the history of Christianity — for example, the question of whether Jesus existed at all. If you’d like to get mired down in that, a good place to start would be the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Personally I prefer to assume that Jesus actually did exist, and then move on from there to the history of the church.

Paul of Tarsus is a good place to start. He was a professional and zealous persecutor. To quote Galatians 1:13 (King James version): “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: (14) And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.”

We don’t know what form this “beyond measure” persecution took. It probably meant throwing people out of the temple, or encouraging stonings and beatings. During the occupation, the Romans actually put some restrictions on the liberal Hebrew use of capital punishment. But under the Torah many things could get you stoned: blasphemy, apostasy, violation of the Sabbath, adultery, or being a disobedient son.

But, if you pay attention to what Paul reveals about himself in his letters, his cruelty never goes away. It’s just that the targets of the cruelty changed. (Galatians 5:12, 1 Corinthians 5:5.) Yes, some of Paul’s cruelty may have been merely rhetorical. But he was still a horrid person.

After Paul and his letters, we get into the mysterious history of how the other books of the New Testament were written (and rewritten). From there we move from the contents of the Bible itself to the beginnings of the church and how its doctrines were decided (and decided again, and decided again, and decided again, and by what sort of ugly souls).

There is a vast amount of history, well recorded, about how Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome. One needs to get mired in this history to get a feel for why Christianity could be made into an imperial religion, just what Rome needed for its cultural genocides. See The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, by Catherine Nixey.

Doctrine

Soon madmen such as Augustine of Hippo (354-430) come into the story. Augustine was largely a free-lancer, but you’ll want to read up on official church doctrine, in particular the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 CE). Then it’s time to get mired in the history of the papacy. This will lead you to a history of the crusades, and the Inquisition. Eventually you will get to the Reformation. What were the Protestant complaints against Rome? Investigate the madness of some of the reformers: John Calvin, Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Karlstadt, John of Leiden (it was reported that he beheaded one of his wives because she wouldn’t accept his authority). You can safely assume that the history of the Reformation could not have happened without fanatics and authoritarians with many different axes to grind — and very ugly minds.

You’ll notice that, so far, I haven’t even mentioned sex.

One fascinating thing I learned from this book has to do with the history of the Moravian church (well known in Pennsylvania and North Carolina because of their early settlements). It’s called “the time of sifting,” and Moravians almost succeeded in purging it from the historical record because it is so embarrassing to them. I won’t get into it here, but it has much to do with the son of Nicholas Zinzendorf (1700-1760), whose patronage allowed the Moravian church to expand to America. The son was Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf. For some juicy details, all of it about sex, you’d need to see A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century, by Paul Peucker, Penn State University Press, 2015.

Sex

There is just no way to try to summarize the history of the church where sex is involved, whether that history has to do with doctrine, persecution, or the church’s own scandals. But it is a history that is always sick. It has cost many lives and has destroyed many millions more. As Christian “mission” work expanded from the 18th Century onward, this sickness was exported to the rest of the world, where the sickness took root and persisted even after the Christian empires were kicked out. The church has always sought to get its sexual doctrines codified in secular law, whether related to marriage, divorce, contraception, or homosexuality. Human societies are always vulnerable to panics, but sex panics are particularly contagious and malicious.

It’s making a comeback

Under Trump, Republicans are salivating to re-impose Christian authoritarianism and doctrine — using public money for indoctrination of the young, banning books, reversing Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges to recriminalize abortion and homosexuality, and weakening constitutional protections so that Christians can exert Pauline persecution against people they don’t like.

Even the recent popes seem to have some understanding that there is not much future in that. But in the United States there is a Great Renewal of authoritarian zeal. There are reports that the decline in churchgoing has bottomed, and that more young people have started going to church. Mainstream publications such as the New York Times and The Atlantic are publishing more articles than ever that are flattering to the church.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

In the Wikipedia article on Diarmaid MacCulloch, he describes himself as “a candid friend of Christianity.” OK. That’s a suitable posture for an Oxford scholar who studies the history of Christianity. I can’t help but wonder, though, how he maintains his sanity and avoids banging his head against the wall or throwing up a lot.

Every now and then in the past, someone has pressed me on my lack of religion. I now have a stock answer ready if it’s needed. It’s that I know far too much about the church to be religious.

I wish everyone did.

Outlasting them is the best revenge


Jefferson Griffin, vile fascist pig

Today, at last, a ruling by a federal court put an end to a six-months-long attempt by a swamp-scum Republican, Jefferson Griffin, to steal a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. It’s important to understand the absurdity of Griffin’s claims to be able to invoke the appropriate level of disgust for this man. I won’t rehearse the details here — the mainstream media coverage has been good. But adding to the disgust is the fact that Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court kept Griffin’s claims alive for months when it was so obvious that Griffin had no legitimate claims and was only trying to subvert yet another election for Republicans.

North Carolina is a purple state. My expectation is that North Carolina will become bluer and bluer between now and the 2028 election, as Republicans show the world that what they are now is fascists. One of North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis, is up for re-election in 2026. He seems to understand that he cannot win a statewide election now, so he is one of the few senators market-testing flaccid Republican attempts to stand up to Trump.

My track record on Trump predictions is not good, because I have always been too optimistic that someone would stop him. Again and again, for years and years, the courts have let him skate, and Republicans in Congress blocked impeachments twice. For what it’s worth, I expect the next three and a half years to be a horror. But I still cannot imagine that fascism in America can survive the end of Trump. The fools who voted for Trump deserve all the misery that they are likely to get. Hatred for Trump already has reversed two elections in two other countries, Canada and Australia. Americans are far more stupid and more gullible than the people of Canada and Australia, but I don’t think Americans like fascism any more than Canadians or Australians, once Trump teaches them what fascism and corrupt government are, and they slowly perceive that it was not what they were promised.

Actually, the media have been negligent on one angle of Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to steal an election. I’ve tried to find out who paid for that six months of appeals, which must have cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still don’t know. We need to know who is paying for these Republican attempts to subvert the law, the Constitution, and some of the most important principles of democracy.


2001 Honda Rancher TRX-350, 4-wheel drive, electric shift

I did not need an ATV

For several years I have fantasized about buying an ATV. Everybody has one here in the sticks, whether they can afford it or not. It’s considered essential equipment. I can by no means justify spending much money on an ATV, but I came across a 2001 Honda Rancher 350, well maintained with low mileage. I bought it from the shop that had maintained it. It had been parked for a year. It has new tires and got a thorough servicing including a rebuilt carburetor. It runs perfectly, and, like my 2001 Jeep, I expect it to still be running when I kick the bucket at age 104. It’s a classic.

I like the design of the older Honda ATV’s. The body has soft, curving lines, as opposed to the sharp lines of newer ATV’s. My 2001 model also has a kind — if slightly goofy — face, unlike the aggressive faces of newer ATV’s. I have plenty of woodland trails here to ride it on. I may get a little yard work out of it. And when I’m too lazy to walk the half mile to the mailbox and the half mile back, the ATV will get me there. It will get me outside more. Plus driving it is more of a workout than I would have thought. Steering it is far from effortless, and riding it in hilly woodlands requires a constant shifting of body weight according to the terrain. Maybe it will help keep me young, the better to outlast the fascists.

New glasses

At my age, part of outlasting the fascists is to take care of the brain. We now know how important good vision and good hearing are for keeping the brain healthy and active. It had been almost three years since I got new glasses. I have glasses for reading and glasses for driving, but I particularly notice the improvement with my new reading glasses (which I also use for the computer).

The book is Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford historian. I’ll have more to say about the book when I’ve finished reading it. It’s already pretty familiar terrain to me, though. When I claim that there is nothing on earth more cracker-fed delusional than the church, and when I further claim that there is no subject on which the church is more horsewash whacked than sex, I’m entirely serious. Anyone who doubts it either doesn’t know much about the history of the church or will believe pretty much any old thing as long as they’re told that it came out of the mouth of God.

My eye doctor is in King. That’s where the The Dalton bar and restaurant is, which I’ve written about before. (A Bistro and Bar in Trumptown). As usual, I had the grilled salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and grilled green beans.


I tried to talk the bartender into selling me a half shot of Oban 14, just so I could taste it. But he wouldn’t do it.

Mountain Laurel

Mountain laurel is very common all over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here in the foothills it is less common, but it is very abundant on the ridges and creek valleys around my house. The ATV gets me to places where I’m more able to appreciate it. Just now the mountain laurel is approaching the end of its blooming season. If I had ever seen mountain laurel bloom before, I don’t recall it.


Scottish pie from the high street bakery in Dunbar. One of these is a meat pie, and the other is a fruit pie.

Scotland calling

Travel is another thing that helps me outlast the fascists. I’ve booked a trip to Scotland in late September — a lovely time of year in Scotland. I’ll be hanging out with Ken, of course, near Edinburgh. But also an old friend from California is making his first visit to Scotland, so I’ll meet up with him and tag along for a few days in Aberdeen and Inverness. I have been to Inverness, but not to Aberdeen.


Scottish pie from the high street bakery in Dunbar

Ken is in the New York Times today


In September 2018, Ken and I hiked across the eight-mile width of the island of Ulva to get to the island of Gometra. This photo of Ken was shot on the Mull side of Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken’s article in the New York Times today is “What a Small Island Off the Coast of Scotland Could Teach America.” He writes:

“As an American who lived for years in North Carolina, I saw firsthand the decline of rural communities. The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and ‘No Trespassing’ signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they’re not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland’s Highlands and islands. Could community ownership let people reclaim control over their land and their futures in rural America?

“Some think it might. In the United States, federal and state governments can claim land using eminent domain, but we rarely see communities take control to provide affordable housing, let alone empower local residents to make it happen themselves. ‘It is impressive,’ said John Lovett, a law professor at Louisiana State University, who studies Scotland’s land reform laws. Scotland is ‘trying to achieve something that we just don’t even think about in the U.S. It’s creating a way for the government to enable or facilitate the disassembly or the decentralization of landownership. We’ve never tried that in the U.S.'”


Ken picking blackberries on Ulva, September 2018.

Jura


Jura Scotch, aged 10 years in American oak barrels that were used for Spanish sherry. More on the little shot glass below.

When I was in Scotland last fall, there was a pub downstairs in the little hotel I stayed in in East Linton. With advice from the bartenders and the people sitting at the bar, I sampled a good many Scotches. By far, my favorite was from the Isle of Jura. It’s impossibly smooth and incredibly complicated, with just the right amount of smoke. At about $50 a bottle in the U.S. for the Scotch in the photo, it’s not even on the high side of what good Scotches cost.

“Single malt” just means that the Scotch comes from one distillery. That’s as opposed to blended Scotches, which buy (I assume) less distinguished Scotches from multiple distilleries and blend them into something as pleasing as possible. But Scotch is to Scotland as wine is to France (or California). It’s all about what part of Scotland the Scotch came from and the choices and skills of the distilleries’ operators. I don’t have enough experience with Scotches to judge how the aging matters. Some Scotches are aged (in barrels) for more than 20 years. I stick with 10- or 12-year old Scotches to avoid bankruptcy.

I hope I remain healthy enough to visit many more islands on future trips to Scotland. I’ll probably make another trip this fall. I have been to Lewis & Harris, Skye, Ulva, Gometra, and Mull. I have not been to Jura, but Jura and Islay probably are next on my list. There’s a woolen mill still in operation on Islay that I’d like to visit. I have a jacket made from Islay tweed.

I bought the little shot glass on eBay. It’s made from uranium glass. It’s not very radioactive. My Geiger counter measures the glass’s radioactivity as around double the background radiation here, a perfectly safe level. Uranium glass is a distinctive green color that glows under ultraviolet light. The glass is tiny. It holds only an ounce if filled to the brim.

An exercise in moral reasoning


Luigi Mangione

After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?

First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”

I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.

In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?

Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.

Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.

It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.

Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.

Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.

Not your cinematic pour

I always laugh out loud when someone pours Scotch in a British movie. Almost always, a huge tumbler is involved, into which someone pours what looks like at least five or six ounces of whiskey. Yikes.

In this new advertising campaign for Glenmorangie Scotch with Harrison Ford, Ford pours the Scotch into a proper wee shot glass, and it looks like a standard shot — 1.5 ounces.

I’ve only ever bought Glenmorangie once or twice, because it’s pretty expensive. But I think that my next bottle of Scotch will be Glenmorangie, in appreciation of these videos.

My guess is that there will be spike in Scotch sales now, as well as an increase of tickets to Scotland this summer.

Episode 1 may require you to sign in because of an age restriction.

At least we’re smarter than they are


A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

Alcohol as an institution


At the Belhaven pub, Dundee, near the fireplace

I am nine days into a dry January. We all seem to be rethinking alcohol these days, and that can only be a good thing. But, speaking only for myself, I don’t think the time has come for me to give up alcohol.

A lot of ink has been spilled of late after the Powers That Be reversed course and told us that even light drinking has no health benefits. Most of what has been written, though, has a one-size-fits-all tone and seems to forget three important things.

The first thing is that, genetically, one size does not fit all. There are genetic differences in how people metabolize alcohol. This is a little complicated, but it’s worth understanding. The differences have to do with how quickly a certain enzyme cracks apart the alcohol molecule, and how quickly a different enzyme detoxifies the cracked-apart byproduct.

The second thing is that, genetics aside, we are all very different. How old are we? How healthy are we? How stressed are we? Do we tend more toward bad habits, or more toward good habits? When we drink, what do we drink, and how much?

These are all factors that change throughout our lives. The day probably will come when, at a certain age, I will stop drinking because of my age, just as I have realized that, because of my age, I should drink less. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. Her doctors advised her, at the age of 95, to stop having her evening cocktail. She was 96 when she died. I seriously doubt that alcohol shortened her life or impaired her health, even though, on average, Britain, like most countries, has a big drinking problem.

The third thing is that alcohol is an institution. Institutions provide social glue. Alcohol as an institution has many forms — a glass of champagne at a celebration, a pint at a pub with a friend, wine with dinner, cocktails at a reception. The growing of grapes and the making of wine are an art as well as an economic institution, as is the making of fine whiskey and the brewing of beautiful ales. Pubs are a social institution of which I highly approve. These institutions are ancient. People have been making alcohol for at least 10,000 years. Even the most important of Christian sacraments requires wine.

The genetic mutation that allows humans (and some other primates) to efficiently metabolize alcohol was definitely a good thing. That mutation occurred about 10 million years ago, and it allowed our ancestors to eat fallen fruit that had started to ferment. Other fruit-eating animals can metabolize alcohol — birds, for example. Dogs are not fruit-eating animals, and they don’t have the mutation. Bees, because they consume nectar, can metabolize alcohol, and to do it they use the same enzymes as humans.

In short, for humans and some other animals, it would be perfectly correct to think of alcohol as a kind of food, even though it’s an optional food and clearly not something that we can make a diet of.

As for my dry January, my goal is January 25, not January 31. That’s because January 25 is Burns Night, an annual Scottish institution (with toasts!) that I’ve been happy to adopt. Burns Night marks the death of Robert Burns, January 25, 1759. Burns was only 37 when he died. But I don’t think it was alcohol that did him in.

Midwinter pottage


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If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.