"Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously/This is not a straightforward battle between a pro-human and a pro-economy camp" — by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Now, there's the kind of title that calls out to me. Moderate, promising to look at both sides. It's the second-most "popular" article right now at The Atlantic. The first is: "The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying/The pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others" by Adam Serwer, which is the sort of evil pot-stirring I loathe. I won't do a link for that one. You can find it yourself if you want. I don't want to reward that sort of thing.

Let me give you an excerpt from the article I can bear to look at, "Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously":

Are ongoing, onerous shutdowns warranted beyond what is necessary to avoid overwhelming ambulances, hospitals, and morgues?.... If we knew that a broadly effective COVID-19 treatment was imminent, or that a working vaccine was months away, minimizing infections through social distancing until that moment would be the right course. At the other extreme, if we will never have an effective treatment or vaccine and most everyone will get infected eventually, then the costs of social distancing are untenable.... [W]e cannot know what the best way forward is even if we place the highest possible value on preserving life and protecting the vulnerable....

"In accordance with reopening guidelines, [the Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour] asked all customers to place their orders at least one hour in advance."

"However, many customers ignored the request and showed up without doing so. When the shop got busy, customers took their anger out on the staff, he said. 'Now I open the doors to a whole new world, with gloves and masks and we're running around like chickens, and people are like where's my ice cream? I'm not a trauma center, it's ice cream!...People have forgotten how to treat other human beings in the six or seven weeks that they've been confined to their homes. They have no clue how to respect other human beings.'"

From "Ice cream shop closes one day after reopening because customers didn't follow social distancing rules" (CNN).

I got there via my son John's Facebook post. I wrote a comment over there:

The people most likely to rush out to the places that open are probably the least scrupulous about taking precautions. Realizing that, those who are careful should be even more reluctant to go to these places. That's really unfortunate!

ADDED: If an ice cream shop is open, people will go up to it and order ice cream. It's a bit unfair to say they "ignored the request and showed up without" ordering an hour in advance. It seems more likely that they didn't know about the request and were simply disappointed to have shown up and found out about it. It's not surprising that they'd express a hope to order the ice cream anyway. But they could have been polite and properly distanced about it.

"We now think putting someone on a ventilator is almost a death sentence."

Said Paul Casey, medical director of Bellin Health Emergency Services in Green Bay, quoted in "‘Almost a death sentence’: How Wisconsin doctors, peers are rethinking ventilators for coronavirus" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Luciano Gattinoni, a leading authority on ARDS [Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome] treatments at the Medical University of Göttingen in Germany, examined the records of 150 COVID-19 patients in northern Italy and found two distinct groups of COVID-19 patients. Gattinoni wrote that about 20% to 30% of the patients examined had severe symptoms, with stiff and heavy lungs that should be treated with ventilators under ARDS protocols to alleviate dangerous fluid buildup. But more than half of the patients whose records Gattinoni examined showed less severe symptoms, with thin, elastic lungs that did not fit the ARDS profile. Treating those symptoms with a ventilator could prove deadly, Gattinoni said in an interview.

"In Rodham, Bill Clinton marries another, more conventionally feminine woman and becomes governor of Arkansas."

"When a cabaret singer... exposes the longtime affair she’s had with him, Clinton and his wife agree to an interview on 60 Minutes. In our world, Hillary’s forceful participation in that interview saved Bill’s career; in Sittenfeld’s novel, his girlier wife crumbles on the air, and so do his political prospects. Sittenfeld’s Bill Clinton decamps to Silicon Valley, where he becomes a tech mogul, the glad-handing face of a web services company, and very, very rich. Then he gets interested in politics again.... Hillary Rodham never marries, becomes a law professor, then a senator, then the first female candidate to run for president on a major party ticket in 2016. In the absence of a Clinton candidacy, George H.W. Bush is elected to a second term in 1992, followed by a one-term Jerry Brown presidency and two terms of John McCain. Several major historical events, most notably 9/11 and the Iraq war, never occur, leaving Sittenfeld’s Hillary untainted by a Senate vote supporting the latter. She dirties her hands a bit—running against Carol Moseley Braun in a Senate primary and accepting the endorsement of Donald Trump—but the character Sittenfeld makes of this alternate Hillary remains essentially static: cautious, mildly humorous, committed to public service, but no firebrand. Above all, she is diligent, a grind. The weakness of Rodham is this lack of any significant transformation. Unlike Alice Blackwell, [the Laura Bush character in Sittenfeld's American Wife], Hillary Rodham doesn’t come to the gradual realization that she has thrown away her life on a man she can no longer respect and whose values she doesn’t share. Sittenfeld’s Hillary eventually grasps how perilous her passion for Bill Clinton was, but that’s a revelation without much of a price... Alice Blackwell has humbler dreams than Hillary Rodham....  Sittenfeld’s Hillary... is an admirable woman, but a bit boring, her interior life free of the kind of conflicts that make for a fascinating heroine... [The real-life Hillary is] a survivor of conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine.... How could we hope to truly know such a person, or more to the point, how can we go on kidding ourselves that this is her fault?"

From "Curtis Sittenfeld’s New Book Imagines if Hillary Never Married Bill/Rodham isn’t as satisfying as her novel about Laura Bush, but together, they’re both richer" (Slate).

The answer to that question — "How could we hope to truly know such a person?" — should be: by reading a 400-page novel published by Random House that purports to explore precisely this topic. Characters in novels tend to go through "conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine," and it's up to the novelist to make the character comprehensible and excitingly interesting. The question isn't whether it's Hillary Clinton's fault that we don't know what she's really like inside, but whether it's the author's fault that there isn't a compelling imagined inner life.

Here's the book, in case you want to read it. I was interested in it because someone I respect recommended it. The publication date is May 19th, so I assume this person had an advance copy. I hope. It's awful when authors promote each other's book based on their friendship or their interest in mutual promotion. The author's allegiance should be to the reader.

AND: Does this book rely on the premise that Hillary Clinton married Bill Clinton simply out of "passion"? I've always thought she figured that the partnership was a good bet in the achievement of her worldly ambitions. It's so soppy not to give her that.

ALSO: I'm reading "Hillary Never Married Bill/A new novel hypothesizes a different history — and future — for a trailblazing woman" by Frank Bruni (NYT), who interviews the author:

I mentioned her fixation on first ladies and asked whether there might be Michelle Obama and Melania Trump novels to come. No, she said, suggesting that Michelle’s 2018 memoir, “Becoming,” was so openhearted and definitive that it didn’t leave much room for a novelist.

And Melania? Sittenfeld declined to say much about the current first lady to me, but she previously told The Guardian that she didn’t “see her as someone whose consciousness I yearn to explore.”...

So what does Sittenfeld "yearn to explore"? The next thing in this piece is:

There are whole facets of public figures’ humanity — of the Clintons’ humanity — that we don’t have access to and can’t explore... Indulging in guesswork, [Sittenfeld] visited interiors and rummaged around in intimacies that are otherwise off limits.

“Falling in love and kissing another person — that’s what you read novels for, and that’s what you write novels for,” she said. “I certainly read a lot of nonfiction and respect it, but even the most personal profile of a public figure is not going to have almost anything about them kissing or feeling attracted to someone or maybe having sex and feeling awkward.”

And the piece began with the line "Curtis Sittenfeld likes to imagine the sex lives of presidents." I'm going to say Sittenfeld doesn't want to live vicariously within the persona of Michelle Obama or Melania Trump because she's not turned on by imagining having sex with either Barack Obama or (especially) Donald Trump.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

And please consider using the Althouse Portal to Amazon if you've got any shopping you need to accomplish.

"France, the originator of the burqa ban, has done more than any other Western nation over the past decade to resist face coverings in public."

"But as the country begins to emerge from its coronavirus lockdown Monday, masks are mandatory.... 'If you are Muslim and you hide your face for religious reasons, you are liable to a fine and a citizenship course where you will be taught what it is to be "a good citizen,"' said Fatima Khemilat, a fellow at the Political Science Institute of Aix-en-Provence. 'But if you are a non-Muslim citizen in the pandemic, you are encouraged and forced as a "good citizen" to adopt "barrier gestures" to protect the national community. We see this asymmetrical reading of the same behavior — covering the face, depending on the context and the person who performs it — as arbitrary at best, discriminatory at worst.'... 'In free and democratic societies . . . no exchange between people, no social life is possible, in public space, without reciprocity of look and visibility: people meet and establish relationships with their faces uncovered,' declared a parliamentary study prepared during debate of the 2010 law, which took effect the following year. 'The concealment of the face in public space has the effect of breaking social ties,' the report continues. 'It manifests the refusal of "living together."'... 'It’s not a hypocrisy, it’s a schizophrenia at the end,' said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of secularism and Islam. 'Which is to say that it’s about the problem of Islam. If you cover your face for Islam, it’s not the republic. If you cover your face for a reason not to do with Islam, it’s acceptable.'"

From "France mandates masks to control the coronavirus. Burqas remain banned" (WaPo).

"Can I get a few words?"

Important!! pic.twitter.com/kwlmCXd0vO

— rebug (@rebugmp4) April 29, 2020

"That lady... that new press secretary... she's a gangsta..."

And as for Trump: "A lion should not be so concerned about the opinions of sheep."

Bob Dylan talks — and sings a song — about Little Richard.

"The completely dishonest editing by Chuck Todd..."

The completely dishonest editing by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press is exposed below.

Attorney General Bill Barr DID “make the case” that he was upholding the rule of law, but Todd uses deceptive editing to leave that part out.

WATCH ⬇️ https://t.co/ssOfKI4lNy

— Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) May 10, 2020

Yard sign: "Any Functioning Adult/2020."

"Oh, but they're weird and they're wonderful."

Sang Elton John in "Bennie and the Jets"...



... and I'm just seeing and being surprised that "weird and wonderful" is, officially (according to the OED) a colloquial phrase. A couple posts down, I got embroiled in the subject of what "weird" means and what's up with the people who overuse the word "weird," and I ran into this other subject that needed its own post.

The colloquial phrase "weird and wonderful"  means  — according to the unlinkable OED  — "marvellous in a strange or eccentric way; both remarkable and peculiar or unfathomable; exotic, outlandish. Frequently ironical or derogatory."

1886 O. Wilde in Pall Mall Gaz. 1 Feb. 5/1 There is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind.
1908 T. E. Lawrence Let. 9 Aug. in Home Lett. (1954) 70 Their food is weird and wonderful....
1978 S. Naipaul North of South ii. vi. 227 A weird and wonderful place is Jo'burg.

This is news to me. I don't think it's a colloquial phrase in America. Or maybe it is, and I just hadn't noticed.

From the NYT in just this past year: "a weird and wonderful coincidence," "her weird and wonderful new play," "Weird and wonderful plants are tumbling into gardens," "weird and wonderful obsession with her kids’ effluvia," "weird and wonderful supporting characters, including a sex-crazed elderly woman next-door neighbor,"  "an ordinary childhood that... could only come across as weird and wonderful," "a skin-contact, amphora-aged zibibbo from South Australia that’s as weird and wonderful as wine gets," etc.

That's how I tested colloquialness, and I guess the answer is... well, what makes a colloquial phrase? You can't have separate dictionary entries for every set of words that get put together with some frequency. Is "wild and wonderful" a colloquial phrase? Is "wonder of wonders"? Is "colloquial phrase" a colloquial phrase?

Listen to Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) sing a lot of Beatles songs.

It's one of these coronavirus at-home, live-stream things. It's quite nice:

"Weird Christianity is equal parts traditionalism and, well, punk: Christianity as transgressive alternative to contemporary secular capitalist culture."

"Like punk, Weird Christianity has its own, clearly defined aesthetic. Many Weird Christians across the denominational and political spectrum express fondness for older, more liturgically elaborate practices — like the Episcopal Rite I, a form of worship that draws on Elizabethan-era language, say, or the Latin Mass, or the wearing of veils to church.... One Weird Christian is Ben Crosby... a student at Yale Divinity School.... Raised Lutheran, he was unprepared for what he found as a first-year undergraduate at Yale in 2009 when he attended an Anglo-Catholic parish. 'I walked into a service and it’s a big, beautiful, 19th-century neo-Gothic nave, clouds of incense wafting up toward the ceiling, candles everywhere,' Mr. Crosby told me. 'It was like nothing I’d experienced before.' Likewise for Rod Dreher, a senior editor and blogger for The American Conservative magazine.... [W]hen he was 17, he told me, he visited Chartres Cathedral while on a group tour of France and he found himself moved by the majesty of the Gothic architecture. 'I think this is why a certain kind of person really is drawn to the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship,' he said. 'It speaks to something deep inside us, and, I think, it is a kind of rebellion against the ugliness and barrenness of modernity.'... This sense of rebellion — of consciously being at variance with modernity — permeates Weird Christian politics no less than its aesthetics.... [F]or plenty of Weird Christians, their faith is a call to a far more progressive politics. Like their reactionary counterparts, they see Christianity as a bulwark against the worst of modernity, but they are more likely to associate modernity’s ills with the excesses of capitalism or with a transactional culture that reduces human beings to budget line items, or anonymous figures on a dating app.... Weird Christianity represents an alternative to 'both more liberal and conservative forms of American Christianity,' said Mr. Crosby.... In the age of lockdown, when so much of life exists in a nebulous digital space, a return to the Christianity of the Middle Ages — albeit one mediated through our screens — feels welcome.... Like the hipster obsession with 'authenticity' that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real...."

From "Christianity Gets Weird/Modern life is ugly, brutal and barren. Maybe you should try a Latin Mass" by Tara Isabella Burton (NYT).

I'm not getting the use of the word "weird" here. Burton makes it sound like she's involved in coining (and promoting) the term: "Many of us call ourselves 'Weird Christians,' albeit partly in jest." But she seems to be calling Episcopalians weird. Maybe I'm a little too close to the experience, but to me, Episcopalian is the least weird religion. Yes, the aesthetics are good, and high-quality aesthetics are appealing. But what's weird? You could find all religion weird, but I don't think "the older, ritualistic, aesthetic forms of Christian worship" are particularly weird. In fact, the purported "weirdness" of the aesthetically appealing form of worship is a shield from the real weirdness in religion: true belief.

It's funny. I'm reading (rereading) a novel that has a character whose problems are initially revealed in terms of an inability to say that anything is "bad." She "would only say that this was very 'weird.'"

... Patty was incapable of going past “weird”... the worst she would say aloud... was that [something] was very weird....

The reliance on "weird" is a tell.

Here's the place in the post where I look up the key word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's the older, ritualistic, aesthetic side of me. "Weird" originally meant:

Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.

Later, in the 1800s, there was:

Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny.

It seems that religion is inherently weird. It's weird to think you're saying something special by calling your little corner of religiosity weird. What is the motivation to call your religion "weird"... and then back off and say that's "partly in jest"? People who call themselves weird... what's up with them? Especially, when all they're doing is Episcopal Rite I. Are they doing it partly in jest? Is it "weird" because they fear it's only cushioning from "the ugliness and barrenness of modernity"? Or is it weird because they find they truly believe?

"Did he have a sense of humor about himself? Kind of. But you couldn’t quite tell..."

"... because he would start saying things like, 'I am the most beautiful. I am the king,' all that kind of stuff. It’s like [Flamboyant 1940s and Fifties wrestler] Gorgeous George. A lot of boxers and wrestlers do that. Trump does that [laughs]. But that was like stuff he said on stage. Maybe he got confused, as many of us do, about whether you’re on the stage or in real life.... When he was the biggest singer in the country and his songs were huge hits, people didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.... [H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people. I would always say in my [spoken word] show that we should kidnap him and deprogram him, like what that guy Ted Patrick used to do with Moonies. Remember when parents would hire him to get their kids, and he would take you to a hotel room for a week and get you unprogrammed?...  I guess he flipped over to radical Christianity. He could have been a Christian and not a hate-Christian. He could have just quietly gone to church. A lot of people do, but they don’t say terrible things about gay people. Especially when you look like that [laughs]. Especially when you were Princess Lavonne in the carnival; he was a drag queen in the carnival and wrote about it in his book."

From an interview in Rolling Stone with the film director John Waters. Waters interviewed Little Richard for Playboy in 1987, and Little Richard tried to take the interview back after he'd given it.

Waters has long worn a mustache that he says was modeled on Little Richard:



And Waters used Little Richard's song "The Girl Can't Help It" in his movie "Pink Flamingos":



That's a parody of this sequence in the 1956 movie "The Girl Can't Help It":

"Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger ('I am the King!')."

"Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, 'I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!'... Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. 'They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine... The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.'... Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club.... Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show."

From "Little Richard, the Great Innovator of Rock and Roll" by David Remnick (The New Yorker).

I wanted to find a photograph of Little Richard in the Princess Lavonne persona. I did find this description at Talkhouse, "Pour on the Steam: Little Richard at Age 19/Adam Weiner (Low Cut Connie) tells a tale of magical personhood in a Macon, Georgia bus station":

It was a medicine show spiritualist pseudo-psychic passing through town named Doctor Nobilio who was the first to tell Richard he would be massively famous—he just needed to get the hell out of Macon. He quit high school and joined up with a series of amazingly-titled rinky-dink traveling shows, initially billed as Little Richard, and then as the great Princess Lavonne. He performed with Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show, Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam, the Tidy Jolly Steppers, and the Broadway Follies. Princess Lavonne was an intense, hilarious Queen in Pancake 31 makeup. He worked on his schtick, but ultimately was an awkward drag performer. He had a natural gift to electrify and seduce, but with his mismatched legs, he couldn’t figure out how to walk or dance in heels so he would just stand still and wait for someone to open and close the curtain...

I'd also love to hear the story from the perspective of Ann and Johnny Johnson. Who were these white people who took in Little Richard when his father was so cruel to him? Or was his father cruel to him?

Bud Penniman. What voice did that man have?