SPECIES AND TOWN: Were the killings caused by racial hatred?

TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 2021

The way our species reacts: Last Tuesday, Robert Long—age 21—shot and killed eight people in Atlanta and its environs.

Reportedly, Long has admitted to these crimes. We use the word "crimes" because, again reportedly, there is no sign that Long has offered a defensible justification for these deadly attacks.

Quite to the contrary! Reportedly, Long has explained his actions in a way which takes us the border surrounding the use of the colloquial term "crazy." Somewhat surprisingly, Peggy Noonan offered a sensible observation on Sunday's Meet the Press:

NOONAN (3/21/21): Asian-Americans have been under stress in this country and under various laws and strictures many times over this century. One of the things I think, bottom line, is that when a people tell you that they are feeling more threatened and that their position has become less secure in America, just stop and believe them. People don't report that for no reason. 

There were rallies around the country this week. That sounds sort of pro forma. I don't think so. I think it was a very good thing. 

What is needed very much now as we go through this huge cultural reckoning is a sense, I think, not only of affection and respect, but a sense of, "We've got your back." You can't say it enough. We've got your back, we're all in this together. That's one thing. Another thing, very quickly, is that every time we deal with one of these violent episodes, it reminds me that we are in a mental health crisis in America. Gun control won't, won’t solve everything. We're in that crisis. And at the center of it is our young men.

We don't necessarily agree with several parts of what Noonan said. That said, we were struck by the highlighted statement, in which she suggested that the Atlanta killings involve issues of "mental health."

Are we really "in a mental health crisis in America?" That is to say, are we suffering, to some unusual degree, from breakdowns in mental health?

We don't know how to answer that question. But we'd be inclined to regard the following as obvious:

When someone engages in the kind of lunatic behavior Long exhibited, we take it as obvious that the behavior raises questions of "mental health."

That said, very few pundits have been inclined to raise the question of this young man's mental health. When Kevin Drum touched on this issue in the puzzling post we quoted yesterday, he did so in this manner: 

[T]he bare facts nonetheless suggest that anti-Asian racism really wasn't a major factor in the shootings. I accept this, more or less, and yet I've come to realize that I don't care. Since I'm normally committed to facts above all else, what explains this?

I've been pondering this, and the best I can come up with is a twofold explanation. First, we really don't know anything for sure. And since it was Asian women who Long used to satisfy his reviled sex obsession, it hardly seems plausible that anti-Asian sentiment wasn't swirling around somewhere in his diseased mind.

In that passage, Drum—remember, he's our favorite blogger—starts by saying that he doesn't care what's actually true in this matter. Then, he refers to Long's "diseased mind." 

That's a demonized reference to mental illness. A person could say that the locution comes to us straight out of some "Christianist" playbook.

Here in Our Town, we've largely reacted in such ways to the Atlanta killings:

We walk away from elementary facts, to the extent that the elementary facts are even known at this time.

We refuse to wait for such facts to emerge. Also, we rarely mention the obvious factor of (apparent) mental illness.

The reason why we do this is obvious. There's an alternate Storyline out there, one we love to recite.

What is that alternate Storyline—the Storyline to which we refer? You can read about it in today's New York Times, in this surprisingly accurate column by Bret Stephens.

(Headline: The Atlanta Massacre and the Media’s Morality Plays.)

Why do we say that Stephens' column is "surprisingly accurate?" We do so for  a basic reason. 

In our view, Stephens often presents a sensible premise at the start of his columns. But he has often wondered a bit far afield by the time his column is done.

We don't think he wanders today. He describes the story Our Town likes to tell, and we think he does so quite sensibly. He notes the way we abandon normal journalistic procedures as we pursue this tribal pleasure all through the streets of Our Town.

Why did Robert Long commit those lunatic killings? At this point, we can't answer your question, but we can draw an obvious contrast. Indeed, Kevin Drum noted the same fairly obvious contrast at the start of his puzzling post:

Was Robert Aaron Long motivated by anti-Asian racism when he went on his killing rampage in Atlanta last week? Six of his eight victims were Asian massage parlor workers, so at first the answer seemed pretty obvious: Of course he was.

But then things got more complicated. Racist mass shooters are usually proud to acknowledge their racism, but Long said he didn't care about race. Others who knew him confirmed this. And unlike most racist attackers, he didn't have a Facebook page full of racial fulminations or a Twitter feed that retweeted anti-Asian hate speech. At a conscious level, at least, Long really did seem to be motivated mostly by misogyny and sex obsessions.

Indeed! Unlike some other mass killers, Long doesn't seem to have a history of overt racial hatred. Some such history may yet surface, but there's no such obvious history now, except that we can create. 

(Example: In 2015, Dylann Roof, then 21, shot and killed nine good, decent people at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Roof had an overt history of tragically crackpot "racial" hatred. It's obvious that those killings were driven by racial hatred in a way which doesn't exist in this latest instance.)

Were the Atlanta killings driven by some racial animus? Sadly, it's not at all clear that they were.

That said, thought leaders in Our Town have a story they love to recite. They're willing to disappear logic and facts in pursuit of its recitation—and it's long been clear that recitation and repetition lie at the heart of modern-day, upper-end journalism. 

A vast array of credentialed experts have spoken to us in the past week. "This is our species' brain on tribal conflict," these despondent world experts have said.

Tomorrow: Few facts not left behind

The latest peculiar passage from Blow!

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2021

The fruit of the slumbering Times: Roughly two months ago—it may have been on Saturday, January 30—we spent an hour watching Charles Blow on C-Span's After Words program.

Blow was discussing his new book, The Fire This Time: A Black Power Manifesto. His interlocutor was Robert Woodson, the conservative-leaning founder and president of The Woodson Center.

We were surprised by how nuanced and intelligent Blow was during that hour-long discussion. Why were we surprised by that?

We were surprised by what we saw because we constantly read Blow's columns! As a case in point, consider a puzzling passage in his new column today.

As he starts his column, Blow describes the support Andrew Cuomo has received, in the past week, from "some of his last and fiercest defenders: Black people."  Blow specifically mentions Charles Rangel, "the former member of Congress who was himself found guilty of 11 ethics charges in 2010 by the House ethics committee,"

So far, so perfectly accurate. But then, Blow offers this peculiar passage:

BLOW (3/22/21): This scene was in no way surprising. Liberal politicians, specifically Democratic men, will often lean on the Black community’s reticence to hastily judge and condemn. This is a reticence born out of a history of being falsely accused and persecuted and of needing a second chance to bounce back from the injustice.

This point of view is informed by the whole of American history: enslavement, Jim Crow and mass incarceration. It is informed by the execution by electrocution of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr., the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, the railroading of the Central Park Five and the attempt to use the police to harass a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. Each of these events was inspired by the perceived victimizing of—or false allegations by—a white woman or girl.

Black people have been victimized, frequently in brutal ways, all through American history. For a reason he made no attempt to explain, Blow decided to list four specific incidents, each of which was "inspired by the perceived victimizing of—or false allegations by—a white woman or girl."

What was the point of exercising that peculiar bit of selectivity? We have no idea. Blow made no attempt to say, and it didn't occur to his slumbering editors that one particular demographic group was being singled out in a rather peculiar way.

Blow has walked this path before as his editors slumbered. These headlines sit atop one of his columns 

How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror
There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.

Do all "white women" use themselves as instruments of terror? Do all such people engage in such behaviors, then "deny knowing precisely what they are doing?"

Do "they" all do that? Do "they" all know that that's precisely what "they" are doing? 

Those are the headlines which appear online. It's often said that Times columnists compose their own headlines, but we don't know if Blow wrote those headlines.

That said, those headlines perfectly capture the careless way Blow's column slimed "white women" in general. The text of the column is no more careful to avoid sweeping generalizations about this large demographic group than those unfortunate headlines are.

We liberals! As part of our current culture, we may tend to be careless in our group denigrations. Consider this recent column by the Washington Post's Monica Hesse.

In her column, Hesse decided it wasn't enough that white women are now denigrated, in sweeping ways, by the insulting terms "Karens" and "Beckys." 

She says that we should also start referring to some white women as "Marjories!" In this way, we'll be expanding "our taxonomy of noxious white women," we're unwisely told.

(Would Hesse think it was a good idea to start making derogatory comments about undifferentiated groups of black men by using stereotypical "black" names?  We will guess that even Hesse, and her slumbering editors at the Post, would see what a bad idea that would be. Not so much with the Beckys and the Karens!)

When we were mere freshmen in high school, we took our school's one journalism class. In the textbook for the class, we were taught to avoid certain types of logical errors. One such error was the so-called "glittering generality."

At that time, it was obvious what that warning meant. Quite correctly, it meant that people shouldn't make sweeping derogatory claims about so-called black people. 

That was extremely good advice. It remains good advice today.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are amazingly limited. That's even true here in Our Town, despite the way we liberals insist (and even seem to believe!) that we are the super-smart ones.

At any rate, there was Rand Paul last Friday night, guesting for Tucker Carlson. Senator Paul is in love with freedom, but his wisdom seems to end there:

PAUL (3/19/21): One thing about freedom is, freedom doesn't have to be practical or have a study to say why you should have to have freedom. They need to have a study and a scientific proof to show us why we shouldn't have freedom. I shouldn't have to prove that I want to be free, and I want to be left alone, and I want to breathe the air.

I was on the treadmill the other day, and some Karen goes and tells the people, "He's on a treadmill! He's running without a mask!"

I mean, for goodness sake, is this the world we're going to live in? Where everybody's reporting everyone and a Gestapo's going to come and arrest you because—like this poor woman? I mean, my goodness!

Poor Rand Paul! He'd been huffing and puffing on the treadmill without wearing a mask. Some white woman—one of these obnoxious "Karens"—turned the poor guy in! 

It was like the Gestapo, this giant of articulation said. 

Such is the fruit of the sweeping denigrations which have, in fact, originated in the streets of Our Town. This is where this stupid sh*t goes, once we give it its start.

We were surprised by how nuanced and intelligent Blow was on C-Span. Why were we surprised by that? Because we constantly read his columns, the fruit of the slumbering Times!

How we're seen by Others: How are we seen by Others when we make our sweeping claims? 

Others see us as bad people! One commenter, Lisa from Tacoma, reacts to one part of Blow's new column with this:

COMMENTER FROM TACOMA: "America has taught Black people in this country to avoid snap judgments and rushed condemnation. "

Tell that to Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the men Tawana Brawley accused, the Duke lacrosse team, the Covington Catholic School teens, the Starbucks barista in Philadelphia who told a black man he had to order something in order to use the restroom, and every single white person accused of violence or racism towards a black person. When has any incident or accusation of white-on-black violence not led to immediate uproar and proclamations of guilt by black leaders? And don't forget these incidences are quickly labeled racial hate crimes even if they're no different than black on non-black violence that happens every day that doesn't get labeled racial in nature.

Lisa may be overstating a bit, or being selective, but she's making some valid points. Almost surely, Lisa is also a type of Karen, or she's something which comes very close!

Starting tomorrow: SPECIES AND TOWN!

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2021

Prehistory, brain wiring win: According to anthropologists, we humans are inclined to behave in remarkable ways at times of tribal conflict. 

This morning, the Washington Post's editorial board describes one current example of this hard-wired inclination.

The board describes an ongoing bit of conduct by certain elected officials in Arizona. These humans refuse to accept a basic fact:

Donald J. Trump lost the state in last November's election. 

As the editorial explains, the validity of the Arizona vote count has already been validated by the appropriate officials, who happen to be Republicans. 

That hasn't been good enough for major Republican officials. Hard-copy headline included, the editorial starts like this:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (3/22/21): For some, the 2020 race isn't over

You might have thought that the 2020 elections were over. Not in the minds of Arizona Republicans, who are still upset about President Biden’s narrow win in their state last November. Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) said Thursday that the [state] Senate will conduct its own hand recount of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction. Republicans claim they want to restore confidence in the voting process. In fact, they are only encouraging people to believe the lie that the election was stolen.

The sheer stupidity of Fann's action will become clear if you read the whole editorial. But this is the way we humans are inclined to behave at times like these, an array of top experts have told us.

As we first noted several years back, "it's all anthropology now." There is no longer any reason to think that our nation's warring tribes will be able to resolve current disputes in ways which are even vaguely "rational."

It's the oldest false story in the book, these despondent experts have  said. In our essence, we humans aren't "the rational animal," and we never have been!

We humans are really a tribal animal, these despairing scholars claim. At times of polarization, we're strongly inclined to abandon rational conduct. 

Instead, we find ways to align ourselves with the claims, and with the preferred Storylines, of our own sacred tribes.

For people like Fann, one such sacred Storyline says that Trump couldn't have lost. For an example from here in Our Town, we cite a new post by our own favorite blogger:

As the blogger begins, he asks the question on everyone's mind here in the streets of Our Town. Was Robert Long motivated by racism when he killed eight people last week?

Here in Our Town, we desperately want the answer to be yes. Agreement on such high-minded claims has become the one key way we form our tribal alliance.

Was Long motivated by racism? As he starts, the blogger suggests that the answer is no—but he seems to suggest that, in a pinch, misogyny will do. Headline included:

DRUM (3/21/21): Were the Atlanta Killings Motivated By Racism?

Was Robert Aaron Long motivated by anti-Asian racism when he went on his killing rampage in Atlanta last week? Six of his eight victims were Asian massage parlor workers, so at first the answer seemed pretty obvious: Of course he was.

But then things got more complicated. Racist mass shooters are usually proud to acknowledge their racism, but Long said he didn't care about race. Others who knew him confirmed this. And unlike most racist attackers, he didn't have a Facebook page full of racial fulminations or a Twitter feed that retweeted anti-Asian hate speech. At a conscious level, at least, Long really did seem to be motivated mostly by misogyny and sex obsessions.

Long has no apparent history of racial hatred. This means that, "at a conscious level," he was motivated primarily by misogyny, we're provisionally told.

But was Long motivated by misogyny at all, consciously or otherwise? No effort is made to argue for this second preferred claim. It's taken as a given—and  as the blogger proceeds, his comments become even stranger. 

Believe it or not, here's what he said next. Anthropologists shouted "Eureka:"

DRUM (continuing directly): And yet, there's still the blunt fact that six of his eight victims were Asian, and Long carried out his rampage at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes had been all over the news. Is it really plausible that this was just a coincidence?

That's debatable, but the bare facts nonetheless suggest that anti-Asian racism really wasn't a major factor in the shootings. I accept this, more or less, and yet I've come to realize that I don't care. Since I'm normally committed to facts above all else, what explains this?

According to our favorite blogger, "the bare facts suggest that anti-Asian racism really wasn't a major factor in the shootings." (Truthfully, he hasn't argued that racism was a factor at all.) 

"The bare facts suggest that anti-Asian racism really wasn't a major factor." The blogger says he accepts this (more or less), and yet he doesn't care!

Last week, Our Town spilled with praise for one of the dumbest journalistic performances of the modern era—for Oprah Winfrey's fawning, boot-licking behavior around a pair of multimillionaire royals.

Children were drowning in the sea, but Oprah cared about this. We loved it because it let the clowns in the clown car perform our current favorite story:

Some unnamed person, on some one occasion, had (allegedly) made some unrecorded racist remark! Also, it was sheer luck that the royals could afford to buy their $15 million house. Let's not forget about that!

This week, Our Town is obsessed with the question the blogger is exploring. We very strongly want to say that the killer is a racist. The blogger says the facts don't hugely support this claim, and yet he doesn't care.

The blogger goes on to offer two reasons why he doesn't care. You can peruse his reasons if you wish. Also, you can peruse the comments to his post, in which commenters struggle for ways to keep telling the story Our Town prefers

Remember, this is an anthropological story as it's being told here. We're discussing the way our species is wired to function at tribalized times such as these. 

This wiring dates to prehistory, back to the time when we first crawled up on the land. Or so major scholars have said, even as Vladimir Putin gets tired of all the winning.

In our efforts to tell this anthropological story, we're suggesting that the time has come for you to abandon a false picture of our species. "A picture held us captive," Wittgenstein once wrote, speaking about something else.

Over the weekend, we read (journalistic) garbage by the boatload about the Atlanta killings. This is the best we humans can do, an array of top experts have said.

Starting tomorrow: Examples of the very best which can be expected

Tracking that quote:  "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."

Click here, search on "captive." You'll be taken to paragraph 115.

"Investigators need to stop waiting for evidence," continued!

SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2021

Hesse don't need no facts: We start today with an observation about Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Our observation is connected to something we (liberal) denizens of Our Town may not know about ourselves.

Our observation would be this:

Carlson often starts his Fox News program with some perfectly reasonable point. 

He'll frequently blow his point wildly out of proportion. He will frequently overstate or disappear basic facts.

But in its essence, his point will be perfectly  valid. He doesn't need to toy with his facts.

Our observation gets worse. Quite often, Carlson starts with a perfectly valid point about The Crazy which exists right here in the streets of Our Town. 

We liberals! It's hard for us to spot The Crazy which exists right here in Our Town. Our Town's dogmas have always held that we the liberals are the very smart people—that The Dummies are all Over There.

Here in Our Town, we've heard that twaddle since the day we were born, and  we're strongly inclined to believe it. It's hard for us to see how absurd our conduct frequently seems to be. Also, our self-impressed proclamations.

Much as it is in other towns, it's frequently hard for us to see who we actually are. For better or worse, it isn't always especially hard for Others to see who we are. 

Our ridiculous conduct often gives Carlson an easy place to start. Quite frequently, he'll overstate his case or tilt his facts, but there's no reason why he has to.

Here in Our Town, we've increasingly fallen under the thrall of the assistant, associate and adjunct professors. They've come to us with various elements of their "critical theory." 

We're too dumb to see how amazingly dumb quite a few of their precepts are.

We're too dumb, but also too self-impressed. We've told ourselves that we're super-smart. We're so dumb that we've come to believe it.

The signature dumbness of Our Town has been on display this week. As we noted yesterday, a letter to the New York Times captured one part of this tribal dumbness. Here's what we read in the Times:

The media and crime investigators need to stop waiting for evidence of a racially motivated attack and address it as it is. What happened on Tuesday was a mass murder, a crime against the Asian-American community, toxic gender violence and violence stemming from white supremacy.

"The media need to stop waiting for evidence!" Investigators need to stop too!

Granted, that statement came from a letter to the Times, not from the Times itself. A person could even claim that we've made an insensitive edit.

But the New York Times chose to publish the letter, and that prescription summarized an attitude which was being widely displayed on cable news and elsewhere within Our Town: 

We don't need to no stinking evidence! We already know what we saw!

This morning's Washington Post adds a second, related nostrum. This nostrum is found in Monica Hesse's second column about the Atlanta killings.

Her column today is full of sarcasm. The headlines above it say this:

In print editions: The shooter cliches I never want to see again

Online: Things I do not ever need to hear or read about a shooter again

The things she doesn't ever need to hear or read again! Borrowing from the popular culture, Hesse is telling us this today, and yes it's related to yesterday's letter:

Monica Hesse don't need no stinking facts!

In fairness, let's be fair. If you're willing to bend way over backwards, you can defend most or all of the various things Hesse says today.

You can create a technical defense of Hesse's various demands and requests. Of course, if you're willing to squint hard enough when you look at an artist's rendering of Sasquatch, you can think you're looking at a photograph of Marilyn Monroe or Denzel—or maybe even George Clooney!

Hesse goes on and on in her column, listing the various kinds of facts she's doesn't want to hear. As with yesterday's tetter, so too here:

We're being told that we want one thing. We went to hear the preapproved stories we very much prefer. 

We want to hear our preferred Storylines. We want to hear nothing else.

Let's say it again! If you try extremely hard, you can imaginably defend most of what Hesse says. But you'd better be prepared to work extremely hard.

Hesse's column captures a certain drift which has come to prevail in Our Town. We want to hear our preapproved stories. And we want to hear them in perfect form, in precisely the form that we like.

It's easy for Tucker to mock such work. It takes no effort at all.

But this is who we've increasingly become in Our Town. In our tribal frustration, we're inclined to be very, very dumb. Also, we're completely unable to see this about ourselves.

Also, consider this: 

Ann Hornaday, the Post's film critic, writes today about issues of diversity and inclusion.  We share that point of concern.

We recently watched Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella for the first time. We loved its beautiful visuals, its brisk storytelling, its humorous take on the two stepsisters, its extremely positive values.

We liked all that, but good grief! Especially for a film which appeared in 2015, we were amazed by the (near-total) lack diversity in the kingdom Branagh imagined and created.

Hornaday's column concerns such issues. At one point, she quotes a certain type of thinking which is quite common here in Our Town:

HORNADAY (3/20/21): For those who have been advocating for inclusion on screen and behind the scenes, how will success be recognized and measured? And will hitting any numerical goal be enough?

Madeline Di Nonno, president and CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, believes that numbers have their place. When the institute—which focuses on on-screen representation of women and underrepresented groups—does its research, she says, “we measure against the population as a baseline,” using demographic statistics regarding the LGBTQ population and people with disabilities, for example. But “fiction should at least meet the baseline,” she notes, “and then go way beyond. People of color in the United States are 38 percent of the population. [But] we’re looking at talent. We’re looking at opportunities. And opportunities should be given to talented people and not, ‘Well, we now have 38 percent directors who are people of color, we can stop.’ Absolutely not.”

You can perhaps defend what Di Nonno says there—but it's much easier to mock it. 

According to Di Nonno, Hollywood films shouldn't include a proportional number of directors (and actors) who are people of color. For some reason, Hollywood films should go "way beyond" that!

That statement is extremely easy to mock. At the end of the day, the statement is basically dumb, but it's very much the way we tend to think and talk in Our Town..

That statement begs for satirization. Over on the Fox News Channel, Tucker's prepared to serve.

Anyone can understand the way that statement looks to Others. Correction: Everyone can understand that basic point except us!

This is the way we've come to be here in the self-impressed streets of Our Town. We're very dumb and remarkably clueless, and this basic cultural problem seems to be getting worse.

Please don't believe the accusers: How dumb can we be in our self-impressed town? Consider this news report in today's New York Times.

In Houston, seven women (so far) have brought civil lawsuits against DeShaun Watson, alleging that he engaged in sexual misconduct while receiving massages.

Watson is the star quarterback of the Houston Texans. Today's report about these lawsuits appears in the Times' sports section.

This news report might have seemed a bit over the top during the Mad Men era. The report goes on and on, then on and on, about how "audacious" the lawyer representing these women is.

(Paragraph 2: "The accusations have been broadcast by an audacious personal injury attorney who has little or no history with such cases and who has used Instagram and Facebook to solicit potential clients.")

On and on the reporters go, discussing the "outsize life" led by the accusers' "showy" lawyer: 

We learn about his "reputation for bluster and, depending on one’s view, grandstanding." With respect to the "outsize life" this lawyer leads, we learn that his office is on the 73rd floor of Houston's tallest building. 

We learn about the way he behaved thirty years ago when he was a law student. Also, he drive a Ferrari!  His "very public approach to soliciting clients" is rather casually frisked. 

We have no way of evaluating the claims made by these seven women. We can evaluate the Times' news report—we'll guess it would have seemed to be a bit much during a  Mad Men episode.

Here in Our Town, we tend to assume that we get the straight dope from the Times. "Who's being naive now, Kay?"

The news report's byline names two reporters. We'll even guess that an editor may have glanced at it too!

"Investigators need to stop waiting for evidence!"

FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021

The New York Times saw it was good: This past Tuesday, Robert Long, age 21, shot nine people, eight of whom died. 

We can't tell you why he did that. At the very least, it would seem that Long was badly disturbed.

(Reportedly, he had been a customer at the massage parlors where he committed these killings. Reportedly, he had been tormented by something he regarded as a sex addiction. Reportedly, he had sought treatment at two different residential addiction treatment centers. Reportedly, his parents had kicked him out of their house the night before.)

We can't tell you why this person did what he did. Luckily, others can. For starters, we were stunned by Erin Burnett's behavior last night on CNN:

BURNETT (3/18/21): And I want to go straight now to Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan when he was three years old. He was also inside that hearing today where Congressman Chip Roy made those comments that I played earlier.

Congressman Lieu, I appreciate your time. So let's just start with this. No matter what this wasn't, we know what it was. It was a hate crime. It was done out of incredible hate. Do you think it should be handled and charged as such? 

LIEU: Thank you, Erin, for your question. 

The investigation had barely started. Erin Burnett already seemed to know what its legal assessment should be.

We didn't watch Anderson Cooper. Later, the nose-diving Cuomo was worse:

CUOMO (3/18/21): Georgia has become a crucible, from the election, now with these animus-driven murders. I don't care what the suspect says. I don't know how you divorce them from the choice of victims that he made, especially with the newest details about how personal the murders were.

Cuomo doesn't care what the suspect says. Apparently, he also doesn't care what the FBI director has said, or what the suspect's roommate at one treatment center has said.

Cuomo didn't mention those statements. He didn't mention the fact that Long has apparently been a customer at the spas where he conducted the killings. 

He didn't care about such information. On CNN, people like Cuomo have begun to cast themselves in the role of all-around seers. 

Later last night, we were stunned by what we saw the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig say on Brian Williams' show. She ended up saying that the incident "doesn't appear to be racially motivated at this moment." 

We're not sure why Leonnig would say that. Before that, though, she had seemed to wander the globe, conveying the opposite impression.

(For reasons which may be perfectly obvious, MSNBC no longer creates transcripts of the things which get said on its shows.)

Then came this morning's papers. Atop its front page, the Washington Post's news report started like this:

WITTE ET AL (3/19/21): The shooting deaths of eight people at Asian-run spas in Georgia this week triggered a vigorous national debate Thursday over whether the mass killing amounted to a hate crime, a fraught conversation that echoed from the halls of Congress to the streets of Atlanta, with potentially significant implications for the prosecution of the 21-year-old suspect.

The reckoning came a day after authorities in Cherokee County—the first of two locations where people were shot dead Tuesday—appeared to play down the racial dimensions of a rampage that claimed the lives of six women of Asian descent. A sheriff’s office spokesman had said that the suspect was having “a bad day” and indicated that “sex addiction,” not race, was probably the driving factor.

Those remarks were sharply challenged on Thursday by Asian American community leaders, who denounced them as “an attempt to protect the shooter,” as well as by Democratic politicians and law enforcement experts.

The spokesman, Capt. Jay Baker, was removed from the case Thursday as the sheriff’s office expressed “regret” over his choice of words. Meanwhile, police officials in Atlanta—the second scene of the mass shooting—appeared to distance themselves from the comments, noting that a racial motive was being considered, among others.

In paragraph 2, readers were told that a sheriff's office had played down the likelihood that these killings were fueled by racial hatred. If the reader made it all the way to paragraph 45, he or she was finally told that the head of the FBI, rightly or wrongly, has said much the same thing.

Our Town is in love with claims about racial hatred. At present, it's the only toy in our toy chest. We refuse to wait for evidence to be developed in a matter like this. We want to give voice to our favorite Storyline, and we want to do it right now.

As the perfect example of what we mean, here's the first letter the New York Times published today on this topic. Why in the world would a serious newspaper publish a letter like this?

To the Editor:

The killing of eight mostly Asian women has shocked people across the country, including me, a Chinese-American woman who grew up in Georgia. While I deeply sympathize with the loss for the family members of those affected, I am not surprised that such an incident occurred.

What I saw was the same anger, the same white male rage, that I’ve seen again and again while growing up in the South. This kind of perverse Asian fetishism and white privilege are not well addressed in discussions of race and gender.

The media and crime investigators need to stop waiting for evidence of a racially motivated attack and address it as it is. What happened on Tuesday was a mass murder, a crime against the Asian-American community, toxic gender violence and violence stemming from white supremacy.

L— W—, Atlanta

The killing of "eight mostly Asian women?" Does anyone read this stuff?

At any rate, this writer said the quiet part out loud. "Investigators need to stop waiting for evidence!" They should just go ahead and base their judgments on what random citizens believe they "saw."

At the New York Times, some editor saw that letter and knew it was good. Just like that, the letter was waved into print, trailing its message behind it:

"The media need to stop waiting for evidence!" What could make better sense? 

Why did Long do what he did? We can't tell you that, but we can tell you this:

We were amazed when we saw so many Others start a descent into madness during the Obama years. We're newly amazed to see the same types of impulses and behaviors sweeping through the streets of Our Town.

"All of the animus is related," Cuomo said a few moments later. "And you are either for it or you are against it."

It's hard to be much more simple-minded than that. It's a mentality which is apparently being cultivated at a certain unnamed "news channel" here in Our flailing Town.

Final point: The Washington Post was a genuine gong-show on this topic today. Our Town's ongoing Fail is increasingly strong.

OPRAH AND TOWN: They treated Diana the very same way!

FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021

But that couldn't unseat Storyline: A nuanced thing happened last week to Our Town's favorite story. 

Here's the way it went down:

As hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans increased, Oprah Winfrey was mainly concerned with the feelings and the experiences of a pair of multimillionaire royals. 

At Slate, the children gathered around the campfire, eager to advance Our Town's one current preferred Storyline.

According to leading experts, this behavior is extremely human—is actually bred in the bone. Some scholars have even suggested that last week's  stampede to Storyline was "human, all too human."

The Washington Post's media reporter announced herself to be "entertained" by what had occurred. As that reporter noted, hard-nosed professors praised Oprah for her singular focus on the feelings and experiences of a couple of mulitimillionaire royals.

And then, a nuanced thing happened! On the front page of the New York Times, a report appeared beneath this headline:

A Royal Interview With Echoes of Princess Diana

The report was written by Sarah Lyall. In the report's identity line, she was described as "a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International." 

Let's start with high praise for Lyall! In an act of steely determination, she managed to write a full report without announcing that Oprah—the one who's focused on the interests of multimillionaire royals—is the world's greatest known interviewer/ journalist / humanitarian / down the street multimillionaire neighbor / former guest at the royal wedding / person and personal friend.

Lyall said goodbye to all that! Instead, she adumbrated a nuancing theme. Her nuanced report said this:

Way back when, the royal family had treated Princess Diana in much the same way they had now allegedly treated the Duchess of Sussex! According to Lyall, Diana and Meghan had been treated the same darn way:

LYALL (3/9/21): Meghan’s discussion in the interview of her mental health struggles as a royal wife, of loneliness and desolation and thoughts of suicide, was reminiscent of Diana’s account of the bulimia and depression that consumed her during her own marriage. Both women said they had desperately sought help from the family, only to be ignored and rebuffed.

“When I’m talking about history repeating itself, I’m talking about my mother,” Harry said. “When you can see something happening in the same kind of way, anybody would ask for help.”

But just as with his mother, when Meghan pleaded for help, he said, none was forthcoming. Instead, the family dismissed her concerns and told her, essentially, to keep her head down.

The couple was repeatedly told: “This is how it is. This is just how it is,” Harry said.

Say what? The royal family had treated the Duchess of Sussex in much the same way they had once treated the Princess of Wales? Is Lyall allowed to say that? 

Apparently, the answer is yes! The nuancing comments continued:

LYALL (continuing directly): Like Diana, Meghan married into a family that did not understand her and believed she would conform, without complaint, to royal customs and protocol. As with Diana, when Meghan proved unable or unwilling to toe the family line, she said, the palace did nothing to dispel the emerging public narrative that she was demanding, petulant, entitled. And like Diana, Meghan found herself hounded by the tabloids, which accused her of constantly seeking attention while happily filling their pages with stories about her.

But there are differences, too, beyond the fact that Diana was white and Meghan is biracial, and the fact that Diana’s marriage fell apart, while Meghan has a strong marriage and a fierce champion in Harry.

In an additional act of rebellion, Lyall's account seemed to respect the fact that the Duchess of Sussex identifies as biracial, not as black. 

(That same day, in a possibly somewhat comical act of Storyline maintenance, Salamishah Tillet described the Duchess as Prince Harry's "biracial Black wife." Tillet's CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK essay appeared on the front page of the Times' Arts section. Along the way, Professor Tillet admitted that she herself has "obsessively overachieve[d] in almost every aspect of my professional life." Major journalists are increasingly willing to open up in such ways.)

Let's return to Lyall's report, the one which appeared on page A1. After noting the fact that Diana had been treated in much the same way Meghan later allegedly was, Lyall said "there are differences, too"—as indeed there are.

That said, the differences Lyall went on to list—example: Meghan was substantially older than Diana—did nothing to affect the basic premise of her front-page report. That basic premise was this:

Whatever one may think of the (alleged) ways the royal family treated Meghan, they had treated Princess Diana pretty much the very same way!

To what extent is that statement accurate? Like you, we have no idea. We aren't experts on the way either of these women was treated. 

Also, and also like you, we don't begin to understand the workings of the British royal family. We can't say that we understand the various ways this vestigial gang of millionaire royals interacts with the rest of British society, not excluding the tabloid press.

That said, Lyall's front-page report added an unpleasant strain of undesirable nuance to Our Town's long week's journey into Storyline. This is why we say that:

Professor Tillet's CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK essay appeared beneath a headline which advanced preferred Storyline. In print editions, that headline went like this:

Taking On Royal Life’s Racism

That headline is drawn directly from The One Story We Currently Love in Our Town. Having said that, hold on there! 

According to Lyall, the multimillionaire British royals once treated Diana—Diana was "white"—the same way they've allegedly treated Meghan! 

But if the treatment was the same, then in what way was the current treatment generated by the royal family's racism? Could the treatment simply reflect the way these multimillionaire royals behave as a general matter? Had nuance possibly entered the picture, undermining preferred Storyline?

A long list of credentialed experts have said the same thing about the role of Storyline in human life. It's a basic part of human wiring, these despondent scholars all insist:

Given the way our highly fallible brains are wired, nuance will never be allowed to disrupt Storyline.

We can't say that these scholars are right in this assessment. We can only say that they have routinely offered that judgment—and that, in this matter, Storyline did prevail.

Quickly, a small confession. Some of the "bombshells" elicited by Oprah's brilliance may well have seemed a bit light. Even for people as silly as we are, it may have seemed strange to spend all that time inquiring about which royal had made which royal cry about the bridesmaids' dresses back in 2018.

Even within Our Town, that explosive bombshell revelation may have seemed a bit light! In the end, though, preferred Storyline prevailed on the basis of the most explosive revelation of all:

We refer to the "revelation," such as it was, that someone in the royal family had (allegedly) said something, at some time, about the possible "skin tone" of future royal babies.

Plainly, this was the "revelation" which set Storyline afloat. Pundits rose in indignation to perform the sense of horror they felt about the way some unnamed person had made this unrecorded remark.

Here in Our Town, we started the week with fawning, ridiculous pundit claims about Oprah's journalistic brilliance. Concerning this number one bombshell, might we offer this?

The discussion of this revelation started with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. That said, it's true that the Duchess hadn't heard the remark (or remarks) in question. She had been told about the remark (or remarks) by her husband, Prince Harry—the man who never briefed her about what life inside the Palace was possibly going to be like.

By the way, was it one remark, in one conversation, uttered by one person? Or had there been several remarks in several conversations, perhaps by several persons?

Meghan seemed to start her account in the plural, then seemed to switch to the singular. In fairness to Meghan, it seems fairly clear tat this was all secondhand content to her.

Harry, the one who didn't tell her that life in the Palace might be constrained, is the one who heard the alleged remark or remarks. When Oprah later questioned him, he plainly spoke in the singular, referring to one conversation with one person who went unnamed..

It was when we heard the audiotape of that one remark that we ourselves became upset. Oh wait! There is no tape or transcript of what was said, and Oprah didn't push real hard on that particular point. 

Instead, the person who mainly cares about royals performed in the manner described below. This description appeared in the New York Times, but also everywhere else:

WEAVER (3/8/21): Oprah seemed genuinely shocked by the revelation: Meghan offering a secondhand account of conversations Harry had had with his family on the subject of their then-unborn first child’s skin tone.

As Meghan delivered a secondhand account of the conversations (plural), Oprah "seemed genuinely shocked" by the "revelation." Or so it said in the Times.

Oprah seemed genuinely shocked, Caitie Weaver wrote. This was a highly subjective assessment, one we don't necessarily share. 

Watching the tape, we've found ourselves wondering if Oprah was simply performing. But deep inside the childish realm of the modern press corps, seeming has long been believing. Without any question, Oprah seemed to display a state of shock, and shock it would become.

At any rate, was there only one conversation, as Harry seemed to suggest? In the greatest interview of the past forty years, the planet's most brilliant interviewer didn't try to nail that point down!

Who exactly was this one person, and what exactly had he or she said? Little effort was expended on either of those fronts. Here within our failing culture, interactions like these now exist for one reason—as routes to preferred Storyline.

We the people were left to be horrified by the revelation in question—by the revelation that someone had, on one occasion, said something which fell in this general area. For ourselves, we're forced to make a confession:

If true, this doesn't seem massively surprising to us. That's especially so since we have no real idea about what was actually said.

Is it possible that Harry took offense at something which may not have been super-offensive?

Yes, that's actually possible. It's also possible that the one remark, if there was a remark, was gruesome right to the bone.

Was it Prince Charles who made this alleged remark? Was it perhaps Prince William?

At Slate, Hampton and Craven swapped guesses as they churned their various dogmas and let us enjoy their gossip. But, as experts routinely tell us, this is pretty much the world of our rapidly failing culture.

Children were drowning in the sea. Attacks against Asians were rising. 

Low-income children can't go to school. But Oprah only cares about this. 

Luckily, Harry had been given sufficient spare change that he could afford to buy that $15 million home. Do twenty percent of American households currently lack sufficient food?

We don't know if that claim is accurate. But Oprah was focused on only one thing—on a fuzzy story from inside a multimillionaire royal culture few of us understand..

Diana was treated in much the same way!  But just as it ever will be, it all added up to racism. 

It's the story we currently love to tell, here in the streets of Our failing Town. It's the only toy in our toy box. It's the one thing we know how to say.

It's our current preferred Storyline. As they've done in so many other areas, with so many deadly results,  pundits eagerly jumped in line, awaiting their chance to perform it.

This is the way our brains are wired, top major experts have said. We will especially behave this way at times of tribal conflict.

What did Johnson actually say?

THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021

Has anyone tried to find out?: We've taken down this original post because much of it was wrong.

As it turns out, it seems that the weekend Joe Pags Show replayed the original interview with Ron Johnson. We haven't listened to it yet, but apparently it's replayed there.

What did Ron Johnson say in the full interview? We'll revisit this topic at some point.

Update concerning the interview: If you want to hear the full talk radio interview in which Ron Johnson made his recent widely-discussed comments, the rebroadcast of the interview starts at 19:15 of this audio tape of The Joe Pags Show.

The 43-second audio clip which has been widely played occurs shortly after the 25-minute mark. Several minutes earlier, Johnson has said that he condemns, and has always condemned, the people who engaged in the riot / insurrection at the Capitol building.

He makes other remarks which you will likely regard as dumb and/or embellished. But he says at several points that he condemns the people who rioted. Pags is more articulate than Johnson in making this same basic point.

Our assessments? On the one hand, Johnson often makes dumb remarks. He does so during this interview. 

(Other reasonably valid points get made, possibly in embellished form. These are the kinds of points you aren't likely to hear discussed at "corporate liberal" news orgs.)

On the other hand, that 43-second audio clip strikes us as the product of a rather selective edit.  This is the way our modern discourse quite routinely works. 

(You can hear Pags making the claim that Johnson has been selectively paraphrased at the start of the program. We can't really say that his several claims are wrong.)

We may try to offer an overview of this matter in the next few days. On the other hand, we've wasted a lot of time in the past week trying to find the audiotape of that fuller interview. We had clicked through that two-hour audiotape on several occasions, trying without success to find Johnson's voice.

Is Johnson dumb, or is he a propagandist? We can only tell you this:

Johnson has seemed to be dumb for years; during this interview, Pags is far more coherent. This dumbness predated the point at which the recent perceived propaganda may have seemed to start.

The nation's discourse is falling apart. This partisan process is taking place here in Our Town too.

OPRAH AND TOWN: It was quickly a case of Slate Gone Wild...

THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021

...with the Times not far behind: Children were drowning in the Mediterranean, sometimes alongside their parents. 

In Nigeria, children were being kidnapped en masse. Here in the United States, low-income kids were completing a full year out of school.

According to several major cynics, stars like Oprah simply don't care about such tedious matters. They care about the ruined lives of extremely wealthy celebrity royals—the ruined lives of wealthy people from top families across the pond.

One thinks of the arguably peculiar way the New York Times reacted to the recent two-hour royal audience. The session was broadcast by CBS on the evening of Sunday, March 7. 

In print editions, the Times responded with front-page reports on each of the next three mornings. "We always thought General Washington won win that war," one anguished analyst cried.

By Thursday morning, the "bombshell interview" (sub-headline, March 8) had finally left the New York Times' page A1. Other reports appeared inside the newspaper's print editions or had appeared online. 

The bombshell interview had been thoroughly frisked. On Monday, March 8, one of those online reports, headline included, had started off like this:

LYALL AND MZEZEWA (3/8/21): What We Learned From Meghan and Harry’s Interview

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had been teased for days. So it was a shock to find when it aired Sunday night that it included a number of explosive revelations about the couple and their fraught relationship with the British royal family.

Right there in paragraph 1, we were told that the interview had produced "explosive revelations." And yes, the royals' statements had been "revelations." They weren't simply statements or claims.

The bombshell interview had produced explosive revelations. Perhaps a bit revealingly, the Times' account of one revelation went like this, section heading included:

‘My family literally cut me off financially.’

Most members of the royal family receive money each year from the family coffers in exchange for carrying out official engagements. But when he introduced Meghan to the family, Harry said, that arrangement already seemed to be in jeopardy.

Members of his family suggested that she continue acting, “because there wasn’t enough money to pay for her,” Harry said. “There was some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard.”

He and Meghan said they pleaded with the royal family to pay for security for them and their son, only to be refused each time.

Then, when he and Meghan moved to the United States, Harry said, the royal family stopped giving them money.

“My family literally cut me off financially,” Harry said. When Oprah pressed him on the point, he amended it to “the first half, the first quarter of 2020,” leaving open the question of whether any money had arrived after that.

In any case, he said, speaking of his life in the United States, “I’ve got what my mum left me, and without that, we would not have been able to do this.”

Just how accurate is that account? Like you, we have no idea. Without attempting to establish villains, let's translate what's said there:

Without the money the prince's mother had left him, the pair of grumpy celebrity royals wouldn't have been able to buy the $15 million house—it's near the beach in Santa Barbara—where they currently live.

According to Harry, the royal family stopped giving them money after they moved to the States. If not for the millions his mother had left him, the royals might have had to get jobs!

As children drowned in the Mediterranean—as girls were kidnapped in Nigeria—this is what Oprah explored. Also, which royal had made which royal cry about the bridesmaids' dresses?

These are the topics Oprah explored. Upper-end journalists rushed into line to gush about her greatness.

At such times, we get a look at the dying culture explored in Promising Young Woman--a culture in which, when we get to brass tacks, nobody actually cares. No one cares about anything at all, except about their careers.

As for the New York Times' journalists, they kept themselves nicely on message. The claims advanced in the bombshell interview were quickly called revelations—and the revelations had been explosive. 

Children were drowning and being kidnapped, but Oprah cared about this. Within the self-impressed culture observed in Our Town, this seemed to make perfect sense. 

Some of the royal couple's claims were perhaps more significant. We're going to look at them tomorrow. For today, let's offer this:

In the aftermath of the bombshell session, it wasn't just the New York Times which had gone somewhat wild. Elsewhere, we the people were treated to the latest installment of Slate Gone Wild. Slate came at us early and often.

Needless to say, readers of Slate were instantly Schwedeled. Before 2 A.M. on Monday, March 8, this initial report had appeared:

Monday, March 8:
The Most Damning Moments of Meghan and Harry’s Sensational Oprah Interview
BY HEATHER SCHWEDEL

At least it wasn't a "bombshell" interview. After a few hours of fitful sleep, Schwedel returned with this:

Monday, March 8:
Who Fared the Absolute Worst in Oprah’s Harry and Meghan Interview?
Kate? William? The queen? A complete ranking.
BY HEATHER SCHWEDEL

Who had fared most poorly the previous night? Slate now offered a complete ranking. Schwedel discussed a list of twenty, building up to "the absolute worst."

By Tuesday, editors may have realized that something was missing or wrong. So far, no one had pandered to Oprah's greatness. Up jumped the TV reporter:

Tuesday, March 9:
Oprah’s Uncanny, Singular Skill Is More Than Being Good at Interviewing

You don’t talk to Oprah because it’s easy. You talk to Oprah because it’s good for you.

BY WILLA PASKIN

Before too long, Paskin was nicely on message, offering this:

"Over her two hours with Meghan and Harry, Oprah asked and circled back and clarified and emphasized so that we could see the story that really matters: not a heightened squabble between rich family members, but the ancient racism of a cruel institution."

We'll discuss the "ancient racism" tomorrow. As we do, we'll note the way Oprah actually failed to clarify the most widely discussed allegation advanced in the whole interview.

By Wednesday, March 10, it was time to shoehorn the royal worship into pre-approved narrative frameworks. Hampton and Craven accomplished this task. 

They discussed "the racism, colorism, classism, imperialism, and colonialism" which lay behind this latest royal behavior. They also swapped guesses about who had spoken to Harry about "skin tones," giving their dialogue the requisite Tiger Beat gossipy feel.

On Thursday, March 11, along came Elena DeBré, the Slate intern (and Yale undergraduate) with "The Weird History Behind Piers Morgan’s Meltdown Over Meghan Markle." This was DeBré's background look at the "globe-rocking interview."

For the record, Schwedel had also published two (2) full-length previews of the interview, including this one from February 27:

Saturday, February 27:
Everything You Need to Know About the Meghan and Harry Interview That Is Terrifying the Royals
Now updated with new, exhausting details.
BY HEATHER SCHWEDEL

So much enjoyable snark! This may differ from the preview piece Schwedel published on March 6. Or then again, it may not. We're going to make you check.

Harry and Meghan wanted to leave the Palace. Almost surely, this desire—this decision—made absolute perfect sense.  Why we were supposed to care about this is the part which went unexplained. 

Some aspects of this "globe-rocking" matter may not have made perfect sense. We'd be inclined to include that takeaway in the Times:

Luckily, they had the money his mother had left him. Otherwise, they couldn't have purchased that $15 million house! The mansion near the beach!

Question:

Why are we the people Over Here supposed to care about this? Could it be because of the failing culture within Our Town, within which we may not seem to care very much about things which are really important?

Our modern culture is highly performative. As we gossip about the royals, is it anything more than that?

Tomorrow: The more important claims

Misadventures in Sunday's Times!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2021

No, we're not making this up: We received an email today from a major journalist. The email ended with this:

"It's getting progressively dumber out there, ain't it?"

It seems that way to us. As an example, consider three angry letters which appeared in this morning's New York Times.

The angry letters concern a column in last weekend's Sunday Review. In print editions, the column appeared beneath this headline: 

We Stuck It Out in the City

The column was written by Luke Winkie, a youngster whose work has appeared in the Times on a few other occasions. In Sunday's column, he suggested fining people who left New York City during the pandemic and are returning to Gotham now.

All three letters flatly reject Winkie's proposal. The first letter is most measured. Here's its total text:

To the Editor:

Luke Winkie’s splendidly provocative essay reflects the anger that many New Yorkers feel toward those who chose to leave the city during the pandemic. However, the severe consequences he imagines for the returning transgressors ultimately left me thinking, “The man doth protest too much.”

Some of us who escaped during the pandemic were able to do so because of the generosity of people who provided temporary homes outside the city at affordable rates or for free to family and friends. Would Mr. Winkie have turned down such an opportunity? To walk outside without constantly wearing a mask, enjoying nature and the fresh air? And to live in a safer, less densely populated place?

His powerful essay boils down to sophisticated envy.

P— S—, New York (presumably, New York City)

It seems that this writer is one of those who escaped the city. He admires Winkie's skill, but feels that he's overreacting. 

He thinks Winkie is protesting too much—is trafficking in envy.

The second letter also comes from a Gotham resident. He is unabashedly angry with Winkie. 

"Stop the name-calling, finger-pointing and unfair categorization of citizens obeying public health guidance to avoid 'hot zones," this second writer says. "Everyone who left did the right thing: They escaped danger."

"We need less bickering and more teamwork," he says as he concludes.

The third letter comes from a subscriber in Washington, D.C. She joins the others in chastising Winkie. (According to her Twitter account, she's "passionate about justice, fairness and equality.")

After praising the service of health care workers, she  closes her missive with this:

I am a Washingtonian, and I do not own any alternate luxury place. I do not envy the rich for moving away to safer places of their own, earned, inherited or otherwise. If you have no appropriate skills to offer the community, there is no obligation to stay put at the time of a health crisis (unless you are Senator Ted Cruz).

As long as the rich pay their taxes, why penalize them for wherever they chose to live during the pandemic?

Completing the rule of three, this third writer doesn't envy the rich who chose to move away. 

All three writers rejected Winkie's recommendations. There was only one problem with this morning's presentation:

Winkie's column was clearly written tongue in cheek. It offered a type of "modest proposal." Please don't ask us to offer textual evidence in support of this obvious statement. 

At least three readers of the Times misunderstood Winkie's column. That doesn't mean that things are getting progressively dumber—anyone can make a mistake—but here's something else which does:

Apparently, the New York Times didn't realize that Winkie's column was tongue in cheek! At the very least, the editor who waved those letters into print didn't seem to know that.

In many ways, the New York Times is a very dumb paper. We've noted this fact again and again, but for most people, and thanks to Times branding, this rather obvious critical assessment is just too hard to believe.

For those more daring than we: Winkie's column attracted more than 1300 comments. We haven't dared to look.

This is all anthropology now. According to major credentialed experts, there's no way out of this mess!

OPRAH AND TOWN: A claim is not a "revelation"...

 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2021

...even when made by a royal: Frankly, we were shocked by something we saw in this morning's Washington Post.

What we saw involved an accurate journalistic assessment. Here's the first part of what we saw:

Michelle Obama addresses Meghan’s accusations

That link was proffered on the Post's web site, on the page called "Today's Print Stories." 

Already, we were surprised. When we clicked that link and went to to the "story" in question, we were shocked—and pleased—all over again. 

Why were we surprised and pleased? The headline stop the "story"—actually, it was a news report—actually said this:

What Michelle Obama had to say about Meghan’s claims of racism within the British royal family

Goodness gracious and holy smokes! There the Post went again! 

Basically, it's unheard of! The editor or editors who composed that link and that headline actually understood an amazingly elementary fact. That amazingly elementary fact would be this:

Even if a person being interviewed is a celebrity or a royal, the fact that she has made some claim doesn't mean that her statement is accurate.

We're sorry, but no. A statement doesn't become a "revelation" just because a celebrity makes it, on TV no less! It remains a claim, or an accusation, until it's furthered explored. Amazingly, the journalists who compiled that link and that headline in today's Post understood this amazingly basic fact.

In the matter under review, the claims in question are those which were made by the former Meghan Markle, who is now a semi-royal. The claims were made during Markle's recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, who's a bit of a royal herself within the childish understanding which widely prevails in Our Town. 

During the two-hour interview, Meghan made various statements and claims, all of which may be perfectly accurate. But you can't be sure that a statement is true just because a celebrity made it, on TV, as she spoke to an even larger celeb.

You can't assume that a statement is true just because a celebrity made it! In the wake of this "globe-rocking interview," very few of our major journalists seemed to be familiar with this astoundingly basic point.

Meghan made an array of claims during the two-hour session. To the extent that her claims were precise enough to be assessed, all of her claims may be true. 

That said, at least one of her claim has already been contradicted, or so The Daily Beast has said. It's possible that this claim was based on a misunderstanding of some kind. As with every other claim, it's possible that this claim wasn't wholly accurate.

We don't know if that statement was inaccurate; we just know that it could have been. It's possible that the challenge to the claim is bogus. How's a rube to know?

You'd think that every journalist would understand this basic fact—a statement, claim or accusation doesn't automatically count as a "revelation." But in the wake of this globe-rocking session, very few major journalists seemed to.

Here, for example, is the way Emily Yahr described the interview in a lugubrious profile in praise of Oprah in the Washington Post. She did so with the permission of her editors, or perhaps at their active direction:

YAHR (3/12/21): The special also cemented Winfrey’s reputation as one of the best interviewers in the business—a fact that garnered renewed attention this week after Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, dropped bombshell after bombshell in an explosive interview with Winfrey on Sunday night on CBS. The next day, the Internet was abuzz with the horrifying revelations, including the royals declining to offer help to Meghan when she suffered from suicidal thoughts and Harry’s conversation with a family member who expressed concern about the darkness of his son’s skin color.

The next most-discussed topic, however, was Winfrey herself. In news articles and on social media, viewers dissected her “master class” in interviewing. They focused on her shrewd ability to zero in on the most important details, as well as ask follow-up questions that elicited shocking responses, while expressing empathy and appearing so personable that viewers felt invested.

Oprah knew how to elicit shocking responses. It was a master class!

Within the framework offered by Yahr (and her editors), the Duke and the Duchess dropped bombshell after bombshell during the lengthy session. It had been an explosive interview.

Thanks to Yahr's editors, these bombshells were instantly granted the status of "revelations." Somehow, we were supposed to assume that the bombshell statements of the celebrity royals were all true. 

The statements weren't just revelations, they were also horrifying. Yahr cited two examples, omitting the bombshell in which the Duchess lodged her claim about which royal made which royal cry about the bridesmaids' dresses.

As we noted yesterday, that had bene Bombshell #2 in a listing at New York magazine. Even the rollicking gods on Olympus chose to avert their eyes.

We'll assume this framework came from Yahr's editors, not from Yahr herself. That said, it was a very common journalistic framework across the sweep of the upper-end press corps.

Journalists rushed to assume the accuracy of every word the Duke and the Duchess had said, while falling on the ground in supplication to Oprah's manifest greatness. Our upper-end press corps has functioned in such ways for decades at this point.

As Yahr continued, her editors forced her to spill with praise for Our Own Royal's manifest greatness. Such disinterested figures as Gayle King and Al Roker were quoted as they gushed on the subject, though we'll admit that we were drawn up short when we encountered this passage:

YAHR: “There’s nothing like the reach of a broadcast TV network,” said [Ted] Harbert, who stepped down as NBC Broadcasting chairman in 2016 after 40 years in the TV industry, including serving as ABC’s president of entertainment. And Winfrey is well aware of the power of the platform: Nearly 18 million people in the United States tuned in to see Meghan and Harry, making it the most-watched entertainment special since last year’s Academy Awards.

Say what? The CBS show which rocked the globe was an entertainment special? The performance which won Oprah all that praise hadn't been an attempt at journalism at all?

Citizens, can we talk? Across the spectrum, journalists reacted to this two-hour entertainment special in a way which ought to be shocking, but certainly wasn't surprising. They seemed to think that a statement achieves the status of obvious truth just because a Duke or a Duchess has made the statement to Oprah.

It really can't get dumber than that. But as our nation has slid toward the sea,  our journalism has labored under such childish frameworks  for a very long time now. 

For those with two brain cells in their heads, the lengthy discussion of the bridesmaids' dresses should have registered as an abomination. Just for a moment, consider:

Children are drowning in the Mediterranean, with their parents, as they try to reach Europe. Low-income kids have gone without school or a year in this, our very own nation.

According to the New York Times, "The frequency of mass kidnappings of girls and boys at boarding schools in northwestern Nigeria is rising in part because abduction has become a growth industry amid the country’s economic crisis." And  there sat Oprah, worrying hard, and at great length, about the crying over the bridesmaids' dresses, a royal / celebrity crisis which dates to 2018.

In a world which cared about anything at all, behavior like that would consign the entertainer in question to the lowest rungs of society. In our society, this disgraceful misplacement of royal concern was instantly scored at the latest proof of Our Own Queen's manifest greatness.

(For a film which comments on the inability of many people to care about anything at all, we'll direct you to Promising Young Woman, a film which has seemed to make some high-end journalists nervous.)

Around the dial, the children went wild, nowhere more so than at Slate. The children have little on their tiny minds except the frameworks they find in their scripts, and the children were eager to prove it.

Once again, we're going to postpone the roll call from Slate. Tomorrow, we'll plan to start right there, then move on to the claim by the Duchess, and then by the Duke, which drew the most attention.

We refer to the allegations of racism, or of something very much like it, which emerged from Oprah's master class in entertainment journalism.  These are the accusations and claims to which Michelle Obama has responded in the "story" in this morning's Post.

The scribes all claimed to be upset by these horrifying revelations. As our nation continues to slide toward the sea, how much of that was mandated, scripted—performative? 

To what extent were our upper-end journalist simply performing their latest scripts? And while we're at it, let's try to parse this:

What did the Duke and the Duchess actually say about this important topic? What was their actual statement? What was their actual claim?

Tomorrow: The Queen's rather obvious fail

Oscar "snubs" are being announced!

TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2021

Portrait of an age: We're still happy for Pretty Young Woman, Emerald Fennell's first film. 

Yesterday morning, it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Fennell herself was nominated for Best Director and for Best Original Screenplay.

Seven other films were nominated for Best Picture. According to the New York Times, here's the complete total list:

Best Picture nominees:
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7

Those are the eight nominees for Best Picture. It's a widely varied list. We'll offer two statistical tales:

First, as soon as Oscars nominations are announced, the pundit corps starts telling us which actors, director and films have been "snubbed." They do it every year!

Our pundit corps seems unable to grasp an elementary point—everyone can't get nominated! Did Person A or Film X fail to get a nomination? That doesn't automatically mean that the person or film got "snubbed."

That said, victimization is everything now, and so is the concept of snubs. The mathematical problematics are especially pronounced in the Best Director category, a category in which only five nominations are allowed.

Mathematically, if eight films get nominated for Best Picture, and there are only five Best Director noms, at least three directors of nominated films will have to be left out. 

That is simple arithmetic! It will be years before our overwrought pundits are able to figure this out.

Our second tale goes like this:

Of the eight Best Picture nominees, only two failed to be listed as a "Critic's Pick" when reviewed by the New York Times. 

One was The Trial of the Chicago 7. In a long, even-handed review, A. O. Scott said, perhaps correctly, that the film "is a mixed bag...I don’t think, on balance, that this is a very good movie."

The other NYT snub went to Promising Young Woman. It wasn't reviewed by either of the Times' two front-line critics. In a relatively short review, Jeannette Catsoulis trashed it harshly from her first sentence on.

("A hard candy with a sour center, 'Promising Young Woman' turns sociopathy into a style and trauma into a joke." Later: "Buried beneath blonde curls and sheepdog bangs, Mulligan lends depth and sensitivity to a character that’s little more than a vengeful doll.")

There's no "correct" review of this movie, or of any other film. That said, Promising Young Woman has met with a great deal of resistance from major critics. Hopefully for the last time, we're going to tell you why:

The film's protagonist is reacting with horror to a terrible moral outrage. Perhaps more importantly, she's also able to see a key point:

Nobody else even cares.

Reviewers have often failed to see, or to sympathize with, the second part of that equation. They're uncomfortable with the protagonist's moral outrage. They seem to be much more comfortable with the characters who don't care, with the fact that nobody does.

Our suggestion:

This can be seen as a portrait of the values of our modern, upper-end career journalism. It might be seen as a brilliant capture of a largely uncaring, highly performative age.

Have you ever noticed that nobody cares? We'll guess that Fennell has.

The film's protagonist is doubly outraged. Some film critics are not.

OPRAH AND TOWN: Explosive bombshells widely observed!

TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2021

Which royal made which royal cry?: To our surprise, we're going to start with this morning's Washington Post.

More precisely, we're going to start with the current "most read" news report or opinion column in the entire newspaper. As we type, it's been listed as the paper's "most read" item for at least the past several hours.

According to the Post's web site, which report, column or profile is currently "most read?" It's the hard-hitting, two-reporter news report which appears beneath this headline:

In an emotional finale, Bachelor Matt James breaks up with the winner over racially insensitive social media posts

That's the "most read" news report! The news report starts like this:

BONOS AND YAHR (3/16/21): Nearly every season of “The Bachelor,” there’s a stark disconnect between what was filmed and where the final couple is now, months after the cameras stopped rolling. That’s especially true this season featuring Matt James—a 29-year-old real estate broker from New York who’s the first Black man to star on the show.

As Monday night’s finale opens on a snowy Nemacolin Resort in Farmington, Pa., viewers are reminded that before we can get answers to what happened with Rachael Kirkconnell, the 24-year-old graphic designer from Georgia who’s sparked controversy over her racially insensitive social media posts, we will need to sit through two hours of James deciding who to pick and whether to propose.

The wait is a little excruciating.

We'll admit it! We've missed the current season of The Bachelor, and every season before it. Based on what we read today, the current season has been roiled by the  racially insensitive social media posts of the 24-year-old graphic designer who stood a chance of getting picked and proposed to.

We read perhaps two paragraphs more before giving up in despair. It seems to us there are two different was a person could parse the Post community's interest in this drama:

Possible interpretations:
1) We the people are deeply invested in our new antiracism.
2) We the people are deeply silly. We love our silly celebrity soap opera/gossip and our currently mandated frameworks.

Which analysis would be correct? Borrowing from a former president, it seems to us that a critic could teach it flat or round.

Once again, we'll admit it! We'll admit that we've been struck by the silliness which has occasionally seemed to surround Oprah Winfrey's recent interview with the pair of royals.  

We're referring here to the reporting and punditry, not to the interview itself. For ourselves, we flung our keyboard down in despair when we encountered this (reasonably accurate) overview by Elena DeBré at Slate:

DEBRÉ (3/11/21): In a globe-rocking interview Sunday evening, the Duchess of Sussex and her husband, Prince Harry, revealed to Oprah—and 17 million viewers—how ceaseless cruel press, oppressive palace life, and royal racism drove Meghan to contemplate suicide. Buckingham Palace responded with a statement expressing familial sadness. 

Several questions popped into our heads. Was that really a "globe-rocking interview"—and if so, should it have rocked the globe? 

Judging from the wall-to-wall coverage at Slate (more tomorrow), it certainly seemed that that interview may have been globe-rocking. But based upon the reporting and punditry we had encountered, it didn't seem entirely clear that it should have been.

In fairness, pundit assessment had been fairly standard. Given the brilliance of Oprah's performance, the two-hour session had produced one "bombshell" after another—"explosive" bombshells at that.

As we noted yesterday, the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan said that Oprah's unparalleled brilliance had yielded "bombshell after bombshell." At Variety, Kate Aurthur and her editor went double-dutch on the two key words:

AURTHUR  (3/8/21): Why Isn’t Oprah’s Bombshell Interview With Meghan and Harry on Paramount Plus?

Oprah Winfrey’s explosive two-hour interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, drew massive ratings for CBS Sunday night, with an audience of more than 17 million viewers tuning in live.

In Variety's headline, it had been a bombshell interview. Then, in Aurthur's opening paragraph, the interview had been explosive.

Pundits widely agreed—the explosive interview had littered the landscape with bombshell after bombshell. At New York magazine, Devon Ivie listed "all of the interview’s biggest bombshells about how terrible the monarchy can be."

The headline on Ivie's piece said this: "7 Meghan Markle Interview Bombshells That’ll Make You Anti-Royalist." Finally, we the people would be getting a chance to become anti-royalist! 

Hungrily, we scanned Ivie's list. But when she listed the seven bombshells, the second bombshell was this:

2. Middleton made Markle cry before her wedding.

As a direct contradiction to a flurry of tabloid reports that emerged months after her royal wedding, Markle said that she didn’t make Middleton cry over a tiff about bridesmaid dresses. In fact, she said the “reverse” happened. “It made me cry. It really hurt my feelings. I don’t say that to be disparaging to anyone, because it was a really hard week of the wedding. She was upset about something, but she owned it, and she apologized,” Markle explained. “And she brought me flowers and a note, apologizing. And she did what I would do if I knew that I hurt someone, right, to just take accountability for it.” Markle, who called Middleton a “good person,” added that the media “really seemed to want a narrative of a hero and a villain” between them.

It's true. During the session, Oprah went on and on, then on and on, with Meghan on this topic. They discussed which royal had made which royal cry about the bridesmaids' dresses—back in 2018.

At New York magazine, this was one of the seven bombshells. All in all, the TV show which produced that bombshell had been an explosive "globe-rocking" event.

In our view, it's an embarrassment to the human race that a major celebrity would waste the globe's time in this way—speaking to a royal at length about so pointless a topic. But according to the partial "full transcript" produced by The Sun, Oprah went on and on—then on and on—about this explosive topic.

Major journalists seemed to think that such discussions actually matter. But then, as we told you several years back, "it's all anthropology now."

Let's be fair! DeBré, who said the session was "globe-rocking," is identified this way by Slate:

"Elena DeBré is a Slate intern."

In February of 2020, she was identified, correctly or otherwise, as a sophomore at Yale. In July 2018, she was identified as "a recent graduate of" a Los Angeles prep school.

Stating the obvious, there's nothing "wrong" with any of that. It does point to the way our mainstream "news orgs" keep skewing younger and younger, with all the sins—and all the insights—to which youth may be heir.

Elena DeBré is very young, even by evolving press standards. But what she said is little different from What Almost Everyone Said. 

Oprah's brilliant interview session had produced a series of bombshells—explosive bombshells at that. In one of the seven top bombshells, we finally got a chance to hear Meghan's account of which royal had made which royal cry concerning the bridesmaids' dresses.

Other revelations may have been more significant, except for one small problem. The revelations in this TV show weren't actually revelations. The revelations were actually claims—and sometimes, the claims were rather unclear, the better to embellish them by.

The revelations were actually claims? At this point, very few of our upper-end journalists seem to know the difference. We'll proceed to that point tomorrow—but only after reviewing the clownish coverage granted this session by Slate, a form of comic relief.

Was this two-hour interview an important news event? Or was it just the latest example of silly celebrity gossip? 

Also, has our press corps moved past the point where that distinction is known to exist? There's little sign that inquiring minds have any desire to ask.

Tomorrow: The royals' claims weren't "revelations"—but what did they even claim?

Promising Woman scores five Oscar noms!

MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2021

Dreamscape evokes a royal: We read several fascinating pieces of journalism over the weekend.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf offered this rumination on the Black Lives Matter curriculum now being taught in the Evanston, Illinois public schools.

This morning, at New York magazine, David Wallace-Wells ponders the question we raised once again raised in our Saturday post, producing this follow-up by Kevin Drum. 

Why have a vast range of Pacific nations had stunningly low Covid death rates? Wallace-Wells didn't exactly answer the question, but he did his usual searching work as he spelled it out:

WALLACE-WELLS (3/15/21): Take Germany. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Angela Merkel has been celebrated as a beacon of rational leadership—a technocrat with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, presiding calmly over an unprecedented crisis, with a citizenry often stereotyped as compliant, orderly, respectful of science. To judge by death, Germany has indeed outperformed the U.S., with fewer than 900 per million citizens, compared to our more than 1,600. But New Zealand, to pick one counterexample, has registered just over five per million. That is, for every Kiwi per million who died, so did 162 Germans. And 298 Americans.

New Zealand has natural advantages—it’s small, it’s an island, it’s got national health care; when the disease arrived and containment mattered most, it happened to be summer; there’s an inspiring prime minister, and social trust is high...Nearby Australia is a much larger nation, with a divisive media powered by Rupert Murdoch, and a Trump- or at least Boris-like leader. It has bigger airports and plenty of A/C. You might expect Australia to look a lot more like the U.S. or U.K. But its death rate is under 36 per million—less than one-50th the American rate...

...In Taiwan, the death rate is a minuscule 0.42 per million. The European Union performed, on average, 3,000 times worse...[W]hat is most startling across East and Southeast Asia—an incredibly heterogeneous region, with wealthy nations and poor ones, democracies and authoritarian regimes, national health-care systems and patchwork networks—is just how consistent the story is.

What explains this astounding  regional mortality gap? If we've read him correctly on first glance, Wallace-Wells seems to say that nobody knows. 

We've been struck by the near-total lack of interest in this question at the major news organs of Our Town. Also, needless to say, on Our Town's entertainment- and profit-based corporate "cable news" channels, where we the viewers are rarely taxed with matters like this at all.

We read other fascinating material this weekend. The New York Times Book Review featured one of the most scathing reviews we've ever read. Its account of the relentlessly doctored facts in the book being reviewed made us think of—what else?—the Rachel Maddow Show

We chuckled when we read this piece in yesterday's Times. We'll probably discuss it later.

There was a lot to read this weekend. We were very happy this morning when we got the Oscar news at Slate:

Promising Young Woman has been nominated for five major Oscars—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing. As we read about the film's success, we found ourselves thinking about Prince Harry.

Citizens, here's why:

Slate's Dan Kois delivered an instant warning about Promising Young Woman. "Emerald Fennell’s revenge drama has its detractors, including Dana Stevens here in Slate," the gentleman quickly wrote. Here's the fuller passage:

KOIS (3/15/21):  Oh this is an interesting one. Emerald Fennell’s revenge drama has its detractors, including Dana Stevens here in Slate, who writes that the film’s message is so muddied as to be made imperceptible by Fennell’s attempts to portray its heroine as both an avenging angel and a dangerously driven revenge junkie. They might argue it’s Actually Bad. I’d suggest that, despite its flaws, it offers many viewers the kind of grim catharsis they want out of such a story. Like [several] previous nominees..., it’s not Actually Bad but Worth Arguing About. Every collection of Best Picture nominees should have one of these!

We don't think we've ever seen a major critic misunderstand a major film to the extent that Stevens misunderstands Promising Young Woman. Deferring to the dignity of his colleague, Kois throws Emerald Fennell a bit of a left-handed bone:

Promising Young Woman isn't "actually bad," he generously tells us.

In our view, Promising Young Woman isn't a "revenge drama" in the way Stevens and Kois imagine. It's a dreamscape about a person who's fully aware of a great moral outrage—a person who's also able to see that no one else gives a flying fark about the outrage in question.

Fennell's protagonist is able to see that no one else actually cares. In our view, the film is a bit of an inner dreamscape building upon that key point. 

You'll note that Promising Young Woman wasn't nominated for Best Documentary. Nor is it a "how to do it" "rape revenge" film. In our view, it's a jangled portrait of our own highly performative, wildly uncaring age. 

(People who don't actually care—except perhaps about their careers—may have trouble seeing the film this way.)

In a way, Promising Young Woman could be distantly compared to Chinatown, in which the Nicholson character becomes the only person in Los Angeles who knows about the outrageous misuse of the region's water supply. Also, the Dunaway character.

Today, though, we thought of Prince Harry as we celebrated the film's nominations. Here's why:

In the dramascapes of the past several decades, Harry has been presented as the royal who most deeply cared about the vast mistreatment directed at his late mother. If that's actually true of Harry, we'll say this:

Extremely good for him!

Like Fennell's character, he's been portrayed as caring about an injustice in a way others just don't. That makes some of the conduct described in the Oprah interview especially hard to fathom.

More on that as the week proceeds, but we loved Promising Young Woman. It strikes us as a painfully accurate dreamscape portrait of our false, faux, performative age.

Still coming this week: Rachel Maddow on General Flynn. Rachel on Manchin's racism...