CSotD: The Way We Live Now
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I’m tempted to invite you to read Joel Pett’s cartoon, thank you for coming and remind you to tip your waitress, because he manages to pack an awful lot of current events into his piece, with greedy billionaires and without a lot of exaggeration or irony to puzzle the reader.
Obviously, they’re not this direct, but if you boil out the phognus bolognus and get down to the essentials, that’s what they’re saying and that’s where we’re at.
Or, as Anthony Trollope put it, it’s The Way We Live Now, a scathing, hilarious novel about an ambitious millionaire, or at least someone who proclaims himself a millionaire, who comes to London promising great profits for all who invest in the railroad he is planning to build. That link is to the Project Gutenberg e-book, but you can also get it inexpensively from various e-book vendors.
The benefit of Trollope having written in English being that you won’t need to struggle through a cheap but lousy translation.
It’s guaranteed fun if you find something funny about self-proclaimed millionaires with grand dreams they’d like you to help pay for and foolish, greedy people who let themselves be hornswoggled.
It’s not all that funny in real life, and even Trollope has a character or two whom you care about, just as perhaps you have a relative you wish hadn’t been so gullible.
Bagley is right that there were any number of warnings out there that people chose to ignore.
When people get scammed, there’s a temptation to laugh in their faces, but there’s also a moral imperative to attempt to help them out. You can’t always recover money lost in a pigeon drop or to a Nigerian prince, but we do have a mechanism for recovering money taken by shady investment firms and dishonest banks.
Well, for the moment.
The Doge Boys are planning to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which clawed back millions of dollars for people victimized by unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices, which seems a logical reason for the muskrats to shut the thing down.
While if you were hoping to get a little mileage out of your tax refund, you’re going to have to be patient, since Luckovich’s vision of an empty office is no joke. Catherine Rampell, who as far as I know is still writing for the Washington Post, offered this on BlueSky last evening:
110 of 363 Taxpayer Assistance Centers and 5 of 10 call centers are going to be shut down, per a meeting that just happened at the IRS. During tax season.
Again, it shouldn’t be a surprise. When Biden beefed up the IRS, he explained that it was to provide additional people for assistance and additional auditors to make sure taxes were properly paid, but the Republicans insisted it was for armed, jack-booted thugs to clatter up your stairs and drag your sorry ass away to the salt mines.
Nobody voted directly to screw up the IRS so that people couldn’t get help with their taxes and so their refunds would be delayed, but enough people voted for the people who are slashing IRS staff that they deserve a little blame for letting themselves be suckered.
But, again, our response should be to make them whole rather than to shower them with blame. German suggests that Uncle Sam could use a transfusion of empathy, and it’s true that the folks in power seem utterly unable to put themselves in the place of the average person. I’m not sure you can climb into the top one-percent if you possess empathy for others.
On the other hand, they’re not the only ones who should be kind to others, and the urge to laugh, or scream, in the faces of the people who voted to put us where we are should be tempered with the realization that we’re all going to have to pull together to get out of this mess.
Which means, as measles sweep through Texas and New Mexico and has popped up elsewhere as well, that, despite the satisfaction of seeing Gary Clement’s character say what we’re thinking, it may not be the best way to get anyone to change their position on vaccination.
By contrast, Clay Bennett lays out the facts and lets the blame fall where it naturally will, while perhaps chipping away at the prideful ignorance of parents who let their children (and their children’s classmates) be vulnerable to an easily preventable disease.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Telnaes depicts her former employer as having completed the process of caving in to Dear Leader, offering him evidence of a slaughtered Free Press, while Anderson makes much the same point with what he notes in the corner is a tribute to Telnaes’ principled resignation.
There are all sorts of thoughtful, principled responses to Bezos’s declaration that only (rightwing) politically correct material will henceforth appear on the opinion pages of the Washington Post.
It’s not surprising that Margaret Sullivan, who once worked at the Post, had a strong response in the Guardian to Bezos’s declaration of fealty to Dear Leader, or that she came back later on her own Substack to quote former Washington Post editor Marty Baron on the development.
Nor was it all that much of a shock when Charlie Sykes interviewed journalist Kara Swisher on what he called “our toddler oligarchs.”
However, there is a serious issue of “to see ourselves as others see us” when the overall crisis in press freedom in the United States is addressed by Reporters Sans Frontiers, an international group dedicated to the protection of journalists and the preservation of the free flow of information.
If you think what is happening here is normal, well, it is, but not for the United States. Pedro X. Molina, who had to flee Nicaragua under threats of arrest and death, offers a global perspective born of experience:
Which brings us back to that thing that’s been on social media for several years now:
If you’ve ever wondered what you’d have done in Germany in the 1930s, you’re doing it now.
The Way We Live Now is funny.
The way we live now is not.
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