Goodbye to commenter Michael K.

Other commenters mark his passing in the comments to Tuesday night's sunrise post and in this earlier post that day.

This morning I'm seeing Neo's blog post, "RIP commenter 'Mike K'": "RIP Mike K, and all the commenters here who may have died but all we know is that they disappeared never to return."

Yes, I've mourned the unexplained loss of Bissage for 15 years.

Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

I appreciate hearing the specific news that a commenter has died, like when Gahrie's brother's dropped into a comments thread: "Hello.... This is my brother gahries account, and it appears this post was close to the last thing he read/saw before he passed away Sunday morning sometime after 130am...."

I miss Gahrie and Bissage and Michael K and many others who died or drifted away and even some of those who left in a huff. They, unlike the dead, can drop back in. Why don't they? It's not for me to figure out. The blog, like life itself, can only move forward, and the day will come when we will all be left behind. So thanks to all — except the actual trolls — who walked along this way as far as they did.

Goodbye to Gahrie.

From a comment submitted through Gahrie's account, to a post from last Saturday, "In the debate about whether to take the woke version of progressivism seriously as a revolutionary ideology....":

Hello. My name is Thom Kirby. This is my brother gahries account, and it appears this post was close to the last thing he read/saw before he passed away Sunday morning sometime after 130am. I am not sure how much you interacted with him but I know he always read this blog. I can be reached at tfkirby@gmail.com. He was a teacher and they will be creating a scholarship in his name at AB miller high school in fontana ca. I do not knwo this community and his part in it but if people wish they can email me their thoughts on my brother. 

He would want us all to get on with living our best lives.

Thanks for writing, Thom. And thanks to Gahrie for being part of the Althouse comments community. Thanks to everyone who has participated in this community, including those who may slip away some morning without a way to let us know you have gone. 

"Why are adults going to so many superhero movies? How could they possibly hold your interest? I’m genuinely mystified by this aspect of our culture."

I wrote, in last night's café. I got some answers:

1. "Do you read Homer? 'Cause, maybe it ain't Shakespeare, but it *is* Homer" (Unknown).

2. "It's a mythos of sorts, if we wanted to get all sophisticated Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey, what makes a hero — are they born or just rise to the occasion?" (narciso, with typos corrected).

3. "Ann, the reason is people are more [unintelligent] than they were in times past" (wild chicken, with rude term censored).

4. "Dreams of our youth. The military adventure, the hot girl who finally agreed to a date, the university for finding answers, hitchhiking across the country, getting into a fist fight, making money, all ended in disappointment. Why the hell does anyone go to [a movie], especially romantic movies? An escape from the disappointment with our dreams" (Limited Perspective).

5. "My best guess is that Robert Downey Junior, who riffs on the tough [sci]-fi actors of the 60s, and the other highly paid actors who portray silly superheroes, are to the 2010s what Dylan, who riffed on the tough Delta Basin singers of the 30s, was to the 1960s. When a trained actor like Downey filters an older art form, to the kids who are watching, that is ancestor worship. They don't know they are getting something that is not quite the original. They are impressed by the backstory. (Tolkien pulled this trick in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, in a different way - making you think that there was some great archetypal background to a story about a bunch of simple little Victorian hobbits running around a landscape, seeking to do good and defeat evil). I think that the superhero movies mostly sell to people in their 30s and below, which makes sense - not that they are kids, but compared to someone like Downey, who was an adult in the early 1980s, when all sorts of great actors and actresses, now long gone, were still alive --- well, they (people in their 30s) actually are kids, more or less. Hence, while 'Ironman' may be a joke to me, someone who is older than Downey, to them it is something like art. Also who does not like to eat movie theater popcorn and drink huge sodas?" (Anonymous).

6. "There is a (Super-Hero) shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus" (Ingachuck'stoothlessARM).

7. "I’m with Althouse, I don’t understand the appeal of these superhero movies either. Wife and I just finished binge watching 'Les Miserables' on PBS app and it was wonderful, great performances by Dominic Wast and Lily Collins, and perfect sets and costumes. You would literally think you were in 1830s France. Now watching season 5 of 'Bosch' on Amazon. Nothing in theaters as good as these shows" (MountainMan).

8. "I wholeheartedly agree. 47 years ago, I devoured all the Marvel comic books (cost .20/each), learned how to read and loved them all (Silver Surfer, The Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, et seq.) As an adult nearly 50 years later, watch these loud ass movies with teens at some multiplex? Bah" (Bay Area Guy).

9. "Some of the appeal has to be in the archetypes. Hulk is a comic representation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example ... and that story is about the duality of man. Civilization vs. barbarism. Jordan Peterson has a lot to say about archetypes in storytelling, and why they resonate so strongly with us" (Pianoman).

10. "For many of us, we grew up reading about these characters, and still love them. For others it the attraction is the story, a story as old as man himself...good guys versus bad guys and the good guys win. How could they possibly hold your interest? The same way women are fascinated by Harlequin romances and Fifty Shades of Grey. Who wouldn't want to be Tony Stark...rich, witty, super-smart and attractive to women. Or Captain America? Or Thor? The women in this universe are all smart, successful and heroic too. I’m genuinely mystified by this aspect of our culture. Don't look now, but your elitism is showing. At least you didn't call it deplorable" (Gahrie).

I'll go to 11 for Ice Nine: "Jeez, Ann, duh! Big explosions, and awesome car chases and crashes, and super cool magic flying guys, and hot shit outfits, and really easy to follow plots, and...Oh, you said 'adults' didn't you. Sorry."

"The professor was just offering up some red meat so the racists and phony hero's would crawl out of their caves and show their disgusting underbellies."

"This blog is one big troll and the commentariat are the unwitting subjects of a psychopathology experiment."

Said Howard in the post about the 5 teenagers who taunted and laughed and recorded video as a man drowned before their eyes.

I'll just say... The phony hero's what?

And let me give you an example of a commenter who used that thread as an occasion to tell a story of his own (phony?) heroism. Gahrie wrote:

I was a longterm substitute teacher at a middle school that took the entire 7th grade to the museums and beach in San Diego. The kids were allowed to go in the water, and at least half did. I was the only teacher in the water. Six kids, all of whom were chronic trouble makers I later discovered, got caught in a rip current and were trapped where the waves were breaking also. No one noticed but me, and I immediately swam out to them without thinking. All six grabbed on to me, and thank god I am a large man (buoyant), or I would not have been able to keep the seven of us up. The lifeguards eventually saw us and rescued all of us. They said I probably saved the life of at least a couple of the kids who were exhausted.

When I finally got the shakes and reacted, the scariest thing to me was that I didn't think about what I was doing, and instead just reacted.

And let's also see what the race-conscious analysis was like. (The drowning man was black, and people are assuming that the 5 teenagers are black.) First, here's Chuck:

I am going to give the [NY] Times a pass on their having not posted video. Although I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if a black man had been drowning and the monstrous do-nothing onlookers had been white, that the Times would have posted all of it along with three [new] columns on the state of race relations.

And here's Clyde:

[T]o play devil's advocate: In Florida, any sizable body of water such as a pond has a very good chance of having an alligator in it. There's a very good chance that the black teens don't know how to swim. It's apparent from listening to the video that the victim drowned quickly and would have been dead long before help could arrive even if they had called 911. And since they were at the park smoking marijuana, calling 911 would just have gotten them involved with the police, which they obviously didn't want to happen, and you can't call 911 anonymously.

And, responding to Clyde, YoungHegelian:

Yes, all this is true.

I'd like to add, in my experience with teen-age boys, & especially the black teen-age boys in the DC area, that sort of goofy bravado is default behavior when caught in an unfamiliar situation. It's like you never, ever show fear or concern, for such would be seen as a sign of weakness.

You have no idea how many times I've been out driving & some young black man will just step out boldly to cross against traffic. And you know what? He'll never look up the entire time! It's almost as if when he makes eye contact with a driver, the jig will be up. Hell, I'd look up & around when jaywalking just to make sure I don't get splattered by some clown who's looking at his cell phone & not the road. Not these guys.

And, yes, it gets them killed. In my county in suburban DC (Montgomery County, MD), each year more pedestrians are struck & killed by cars then there are victims of murder.

And here's Big Mike:

I want to add that I'm very distressed to see the comments that raise a racial issue (or potential racial issue). I grew up in [a] small Midwestern quarry town, and the white teenagers among whom I grew up would have acted no differently. Well, except fifty-five years ago they wouldn't have had cellphones, they'd have been smoking cigarettes and not weed, and there was no 911, no Internet, no social media.

Was that a "racist" costume at the University of Wisconsin football game last night?

Here's the tweet that got it started:

At the @UWBadgers game and there is a man with a mask of President Obama and a noose. This is racism, why was this allowed into the stadium? pic.twitter.com/zKEqhdDYny

— 😏 (@woahohkatie) October 29, 2016

And I see the UW twitter feed immediately responded: "Thanks for letting us know— Can you tell us what section you took this photo in?" and "We don't support offensive image of a noose, but this is a form of free speech. Guest Services asked them to remove & they did."

And the UW quickly put out this statement:



It was the night of Freakfest, Madison's Halloween revelry downtown, and the early evening football game — a few blocks away from the Freakfest location — was part of a huge social occasion yesterday. (Meade and I holed up inside, watched the game on TV, and went to bed early as the sound of screaming revelers moved farther away from the stadium area to State Street.) So there were some costumes at the game, and as you can see from the statement, the rules were that you could wear a mask once you got inside the stadium.

I don't like depictions of lynching political figures. Here's an old post of mine expressing dismay over a sign picturing the lynching of Scott Walker. And later, I linked back to that post, saying "I said imagine how Democrats would react if Tea Partiers had... depict[ed] a Democratic Party politician as Hitler or with his head in a noose."

And I agree that there is a special problem with showing a black person with his head in a noose, given the history of lynching in America.

But take a closer look at that tweeted picture. See the hand with the peace sign? The person is facing away from the camera. The Obama mask is on the back of the head. We see the shape of a larger mask in front. And if you look closely at the pink sign, the words are Hillary Clinton's: "What difference at this point does it make?" I assume the mask on the front-side of the head depicts Hillary Clinton. And yes, poking around, I see this view of the front of the person. It is a big Hillary Clinton face, and there's another person with a big Trump mask and he's holding the other end of the rope. The rope-holding Trump is walking the noosed Hillary in the manner of Pozzo leading Lucky in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot":



I have no idea if the costumed football fans intended to allude to the Nobelist's great play in which no one gets lynched: 2 characters — Lucky and Pozzo — are connected by a noose that works as a leash, and the other 2 characters — Vladimir and Estragon — consider hanging themselves:

ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
ESTRAGON: (highly excited). An erection!
VLADIMIR: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
ESTRAGON: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

But I think the political theater in the football stadium was intended to express Hillary's criminality and/or Trump's use of the idea that Hillary is a criminal. It could simply be that Hillary and Trump are bound together in a horrible drama that's scaring us, Halloween style.

What, then, of the Obama mask on the back of the head? What a distraction! What does a mask on the back of the head mean? I see that a mask worn on the back of the head may be a device to ward off predators while your back is turned:

Arguing that [the Bengal tiger] only attacks people from behind, workers in the mangrove forests started wearing face masks on the backs of their heads. Thus far the trick appears to have worked.

Mandrakes, mangroves... don't think too hard. It's only Halloween. What is the meaning of the costumes? If you have a nonracist message, take the trouble to edit out the part that will allow viewers to say "That's racist" or they'll never hear whatever it is you are trying to say.

Or do you want to talk about freedom of speech law? I'll take the position that UW handled it pretty well. They conveyed the importance of free-speech values and stressed that they merely asked the person to remove the mask. They reasoned with him and he accepted their point of view — don't make other people feel afraid or disrespected — and he removed "the offensive parts of the costume." That is, he accepted the argument that parts of the costume were offensive and that it would be better not to offend. He bought what the university was selling in the marketplace of ideas. Or that's my working theory until somebody gives me reason to think he was coerced.

IN THE COMMENTS: 2 excellent corrections:

Gahrie said:

Not all lynching was racial. While the Democrats in the South did concentrate on lynching Black people during the Jim Crow era, in the Old West and historically, it was mainly White people who were lynched. 

Grimson said:

AA: 2 characters — Lucky and Pozzo — are connected by a noose that works as a leash

The text mentions only a rope, not a noose, so clearly these are not a couple of Beckett devotees.

Beckett: Enter Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed round his neck. . .

Thanks for both of those. Just to rebalance a little, I'll say: 1. In the mind of present-day Americans, lynching is most likely to be associated with the history of racial injustices, and 2. In the photograph of the "Godot" production I've used and in other productions I've seen pictures of, the rope was tied in the classic "hangman's noose" knot. But I can see, with further research, that the rope isn't always tied that way in productions of "Godot" and also see that in real life, nooses don't always have the "hangman's noose" knot and that a rope with a knot put around a man's neck is perhaps fairly called a noose even when the text omits that explicit characterization of the rope.

As expected, I got some pushback for saying "I hope the Supreme Court blesses us with" a right to same-sex marriage.

That was a provocative way to say that it will be a blessing if the upcoming Supreme Court cases resolve this issue that is dogging and distorting the political discourse in our country.

Even to say "it will be a blessing" would have been provocative, since it seems to give God credit for whatever good happens. But that usage of "blessing" has constitutional text to support it:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. 

Liberty is a set of blessings, our Founders told us. The human task is to secure the blessings. If the Supreme Court says it has found a liberty — let's say a right to same-sex marriage — we may say that it is securing a liberty that is already there. When someone says "bless you," that doesn't mean that the blessing emanates from the speaker. It's short for "God bless you." It's asking God to deliver a blessing. In the Constitution, what we see is that the Framers believed that God had blessed us with liberty.

So to say "I hope the Supreme Court blesses us" is to identify the Court as the source of the blessing, to put the Court in the place of God, and to prompt and tease those who think the Court improperly makes up rights. That was deliberate and devilish temptation. Thanks for succumbing!

Below the fold are the comments that inspired this post:

Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman faked it.

Oh, they say they had to because it was so cold.

The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation....

Well, hell, they knew it was going to be January. If these candyass classicists can't play in the cold, they should have hired some musicians who can.

***

So we were listening to recorded music when the clock hit noon, the constitutional moment for the President to be sworn in! Then, he was sworn in and that might have been fake and there was a second of that too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Gahrie said:

It was real before it was fake, and after all isn't that all that really matters?

... [A]fter the campaign the president ran, can we really be surprised?

Jason said:

This is amazing. Just yesterday I heard the music show on NPR praising the musicians for their amazing skill "people are still talking about it." God I hate them. You think they're giving you useful information and it turns out to be junk

hdhouse said:

between Ma and Perlman they are using about 5million in instruments that do not like cold. unlike Mr. Bush, they "fake it" for a reason.

I'm fine with them keeping their precious objects out of the cold, but let them keep their precious bodies off the stage. And, yeah, they are different from Bush. Bush was President, and as such, he had to perform, whether the circumstances challenged the limits of his capacity or not. They did not have an obligation. They received an invitation do something they knew they couldn't do, and they accepted it knowing it exceeded their capacity and they would fake it.

Paul Zrimsek said:

Folks, give it up for Milli Violinni!

Simon said:

Still, look on the bright side: Obama hadn't been inaugurated yet, so they sneaked it in under the wire before the trickery was over.

LOL. Very funny! I knew those words would come back to bite me. Let it be known that I am on trickery alert.

Leland said:

Fake but accurate.

Bearing said:

It's not that they didn't play in the cold. It's that they faked playing in the cold. That's just cheesy.

We can give the new president his own super-secure Blackberry, but we can't put four musicians in a heated tent with cameras?

And — considering that $170 million was being spent on the big show — project holograms of them outdoors.

Palladian said:

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.