Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

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At Large Opinion

Voucher Bill

Photo: CDC | Unsplash

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who never lets a chance to try to steer public funding to private schools pass him by, is having a good week. State Senate and House majority leaders filed identical bills to create “Education Freedom Scholarships” that would give $7,075 in public funding for a private education to 20,000 Tennessee students, beginning in the fall of 2025. The plan would grow in scope in subsequent years.

The bill has been opposed by the state’s large city school systems and by legislators in many rural districts, where there are often no private school options, and where getting adequate funding for public schools is often difficult. The voucher bill is also opposed by the vast majority of the state’s public school teachers. 

That’s bad enough, but later in the week, Voucher Bill (see what I did there?) got more good news. In case you haven’t been paying attention, GOP luminaries of all stripes are now urging the abolishment of the federal Department of Education. See, that way, supporters say, the money from the feds would come directly into the state’s coffers, to be dispensed under the supervision of, well, Bill Lee. Shocker, right? It should come as no surprise that Lee is all for killing the education department.

“We know Tennessee. We know our children,” Lee said. “We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., does.”

No you don’t, Bill. What you know how to do — and what you have tried to do for years — is slide public tax dollars into the coffers of private education firms that will then grease the palms of pols such as yourself. If you cared about Tennessee’s children, you wouldn’t want to funnel our tax dollars to well-off Tennesseans who will use it for tuition fees for little Bradley’s third-grade year at Hillbilly Bible Kollege. 

Lee and the GOP have been fighting for vouchers to become law for years, and this time around, given the upcoming change in the White House, they might have the juice to pull it off. If the last election proved anything, it is that the average American is anything but well-informed and well-educated. One of the most googled questions on Election Day was, “Did Joe Biden drop out?” Lawd, help us. 

Here are a few numbers to ponder (and weep over): 21 percent of adults in the U.S. are illiterate; 54 percent of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level; 45 million read below a 5th grade level; 44 percent of American adults do not read a book in a year. So yeah, let’s fix that by cutting public school funding and giving people money to send their kids to private schools. 

My parents weren’t rich, but I grew up privileged. Only we didn’t call it privilege back then because it was so ordinary. In the small Midwestern town where we lived, everybody I knew — Black, white, brown, poor, middle-class, or wealthy — went to the same public schools and attended the town’s single public high school. 

It was a great equalizer, and kids learned — sometimes the hard way — not to get too snooty. I’m not so naive as to think that my Black classmates didn’t suffer negative experiences that were beyond the experiences I had, but we did all manage to get along. And we all had the same opportunity to learn with the same teachers, using the same facilities in the same classrooms, no matter a family’s income level. That is a great and powerful thing about public education — it’s an equalizer. But it needs to be funded and nourished. An investment in educating our youth is one of the best possible uses of our tax dollars. Instead of destroying the Department of Education, we should be funding it better and putting it in the hands of someone with creative ideas to support teachers and inspire students.

I’m not holding my breath, though. I’d put the odds at 50-50 that the Education Department survives the coming administration. And if it does, given the clown-car level of cabinet appointments thus far, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Trump appointed the My Pillow guy to the job. 

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At Large Opinion

The Boy in the Bubble

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry.
— “The Boy in the Bubble,” Paul Simon

I heard that Paul Simon song on Sirius radio last Thursday. I think it was on the Classic Vinyl station. I turned it up loud and thoughts arose, mostly about the time I first heard the Graceland album on which the tune made its debut. 

It was the 1980s and we were living in Pittsburgh. My family and I were at a state park in Ohio, where we’d met up with three other families — friends with similarly aged young children. We’d rented cabins for the weekend and planned to fish and hike and cook out and probably have a little too much wine after the kids went to bed. 

I’d just bought the Graceland cassette and we adults wore it out on a big jam box over the weekend. It took a minute for us to get used to the album’s quirky African rhythms and instrumentation — it was the big-hair Eighties, after all — but when it sunk in, it stuck, hard. It’s funny how music attaches itself like a sticky note to moments in your life.

Last Thursday, I happened to be listening to music because the thought of turning the Sirius dial to CNN or MSNBC or NPR or, heaven forbid, “Progressive Talk” radio was just unthinkable. 

I used to listen to music all the time in the car, but as “The Boy in the Bubble” reached its familiar refrain in the Fresh Market parking lot, I realized I hadn’t really done so in months. I’d become obsessed with politics and the presidential race and I’d been spending all my time while in the car listening to news and political analysis. Horse race radio, basically. 

A month ago, for example, I drove to upstate New York — 17 hours over two days — and listened to nothing but news and commentary, mostly about the presidential race. Even the podcasts I listened to were about politics. I was hooked by my confirmation biases and, if I’m honest, by the progressive outrage I was stewing in for hours at a time. 

I was a boy in a bubble, and I wasn’t alone. There were millions of us, most of whom had convinced themselves that the Democrats would win, buoyed by outraged, pro-choice women, a fresh wave of committed young people, and a massive get-out-the-vote ground game. Oops.

There was another bubble, of course, one that pushed storylines supporting the GOP candidates and stirred up several ignorant and hateful narratives. There were millions of people in that bubble. I knew it existed, but I never dipped my toe into it for very long. Honestly, what kind of idiots would believe people were eating cats and dogs? Millions of them, apparently.

Some votes are still being counted as I write this, but it appears the Republican candidate won the presidency with around 25 percent of the nation’s eligible voters, about the same number he had in 2020, when he lost. The Democratic candidate garnered around 24 percent this time around. 

But here’s the sad truth: The largest party in the country isn’t the Democrats or the Republicans. It’s the Apathy Party, which makes up around 47 percent of America’s eligible voters — those who couldn’t work up the time or energy to cast a ballot. They hold the power, but apparently have no interest in using it. 

Around 8,000,000 fewer Americans voted in 2024 than in 2020. That’s a dangerous trend for a democracy, and something we need to figure out how to fix. In the end, it certainly wasn’t a landslide, as some have claimed. It was more like a slow mudslide. We need to dig out of the mud and leave our bubbles, but keep the faith. Speak the truth. These are the days of miracle and wonder. Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry. 

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At Large Opinion

The Eleventh Month

Photo: Jan Martin Will | Dreamstime.com

November is the Rodney Dangerfield of months. It gets no respect, no love, except maybe a few laughs. There are no great songs about November, and poems about the 11th month always seem to be dreary things — odes to cold wind, fallen leaves, gray skies, death, etc. Sure, there’s a big holiday near the end of the month, but no one would really care if it got moved to September. 

November is a transitional month, a boring layover in our annual trip around the sun, coming as it does just after October’s crisp blue skies and glorious autumnal foliage, and just before the crushing avalanche of December’s major holidays. November is meh. Six hours at the Omaha airport.

I decided to see if I could find anything good written about November because I’m a nerd at heart and that’s the way I roll. I went to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and found November getting kicked around like a rented mule by various literary lights through the centuries, from D.H. Lawrence to Thomas Hood to Sir Walter Scott, who wrote:

November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear …

See what I mean? And in 1562, Richard Grafton (you remember ol’ Richard, don’t you?) penned these immortal words:

Thirty days hath November …

Now there’s a man who went out on a limb, poetically speaking. The best thing he could find to write about November was that it had 30 days! Sadly, a few years after his death, the poem was amended to the more familiar “Thirty days hath September …” And now they’ve got all those sexy months — September, April, May — up there at the top of that piece of doggerel. Like I said, November gets no respect.

Except for in presidential election years, when the word “November” is bandied about for months, as both a beacon of hope and a harbinger of doom, depending on what poll you last saw or which pundit you most recently read. The column you are reading right now went to press on Tuesday — Election Day — so I have no idea what kind of mood you will be in when you read this. You could be filled with joy and hope for our country or you could be pondering a move to the sunny coast of Portugal.

All of which makes me want to offer you a bit of beauty to use as solace or in celebration. It’s a poem by Molly Peacock called, well, “November.”

Novembers were the months that began with No.
“Oh no.” They died in embers. Above were
V’s of geese in skies lit from these low
Even fires. The fires of fall were
Mirrors for the feelings I felt before
Being. I’m telling you now I feel I
Exist for the first time! Neither the bareness nor
Roughness demoralize — I realize I
See much clearer what leafless branches show.

It’s a zen-like puzzle-box of a poem. You can read it over and let the words slide around and small tricks and secrets reveal themselves. I found it comforting and calming. And I’m wishing as I write this that Molly’s poem — and the events of this long-awaited November Tuesday — bring us all some kind of joy, some sense of peace. 

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At Large Opinion

Poll Dancing

Photo: Vitalii Liesik | Dreamstime.com

If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time recently reading about — and listening to people talk about — presidential polls. I keep reading and hearing that the race is a toss-up, or worse, that Donald Trump is leading. I don’t buy it. These are the same pollsters who told us Hillary Clinton was a lock in 2016, that Joe Biden would win easily in 2020, and to prepare for a “red wave” in 2022. The polling for those three elections was all over the place and mostly wrong. Polling itself appeared to be broken. What has changed in 2024?

According to a Pew Research analysis, in the 2020 election there were 29 pollsters of record, and nearly all of them used the live-phone-call method. Now that it’s known that hardly anyone, particularly young voters, ever answers an unknown phone call, that methodology is considered unreliable — hopelessly skewed toward lonely geezers desperate to talk to anyone. 

In the wake of the 2022 election’s miscalculations, Pew says most pollsters now use combinations of live calling, emailed opt-in surveys, online opt-in surveys, and “probability based panels,” whatever that may be.

Pollsters then take the results of their surveys of, say, 1,237 people, and “weight” them, using various percentage models, trying to suss out how many young voters will turn out, how many Republicans who pull an early ballot will vote for a Democrat, how many women of both parties will vote for abortion rights, how the large contingent of independent voters will swing, how likely a “likely voter” is to vote. Bear in mind, they don’t know any of this information. They’re estimating these weighted numbers and hoping to get an accurate prediction of election results for 150 million voters by extrapolating, typically, from fewer than 3,000 voters. 

In a New York Times analysis of the 2020 election, Larry J. Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia discussed how the electorate had changed from 2016: “Trump’s appeal to college-educated whites, especially women, was never very strong. Trump’s character and antics in office sent his backing among this large group plummeting. Blue-collar and rural whites loved it, but their numbers could not substitute for losses elsewhere.” 

Does anyone really think Trump has strengthened his appeal to women and college-educated whites in the past four years? I don’t. And polls, for what they’re worth, show just the opposite has happened.

And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, population density was arguably the single most-dominant element. Biden won the presidency while carrying only 16 percent of America’s counties. In fact, the most reliable predictor of voting patterns in the United States in recent years is rural versus urban/suburban. And guess which of these is declining in population. Hint: It’s not cities and suburbs. Rural and small-town America are shrinking under the crushing double whammy of corporate farming and the Walmart-ization of local town-square businesses. Trump won 84 percent of America’s counties, but his human voter base is shriveling. Acreage doesn’t vote. I find that encouraging when considering how 2024 might turn out.

Here’s another way to look at the race: Use your own eyes and ears. Look at the large, noisy, rabid turnout for Kamala Harris’ events and contrast that with the half-empty, sad-trombone “rallies” of Donald Trump rambling on for two hours, doing his “Scary Home Companion” riffs as his cult-fans trek to the exits. His campaign reminds me of the Seinfeld “Festivus” episode, with its “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength” rituals. 

Does any of this say “momentum” to you? It doesn’t to me.

Trump has never gotten more than 47 percent of the electorate to vote for him. His “platform” consists of trying to scare his (mostly) white supporters with horror stories about Black and brown people stealing their jobs, eating their pets, taking over cities, and committing horrific crimes. Oh, and LGBTQ people are coming to change your gender and make you marry them. So be very afraid and vote GOP, because we’re like you: Real Americans! 

What percentage of Americans will fall for this pseudo-fascist act in 2024 is still unknown, but it’s never been a majority of us, which is a comfort of sorts. The scariest part, as always, is the waiting. Well, that and the Electoral College. And now I’m worried again. Dang it. 

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At Large Opinion

Weekend at Donnie’s

You probably saw that weird Trump rally last week. I mean, they’re all weird, but I’m talking about the one where a couple of people in the crowd fainted and the candidate decided that rather than answering any more questions, he would spin some sweet tunes from his personally curated rally playlist. 

For the next 39 minutes, Trump stood and swayed on stage, occasionally waving or pointing, but mostly just swaying, apparently blissed out by hearing Elvis’ “An American Trilogy” and other tunes from his playlist for the 10,000th time. It was bizarre.

As I watched clips of the rally, I was struck by the dilemma of those stuck onstage with the former president. They couldn’t leave, so they had to pretend like what was happening was not weird. They shuffled awkwardly, whispered to each other, waved desultorily, shuffled some more. Event MC Kristi Noem bounced around in cheerleader mode for a while, pointing, clapping, making the “YMCA” song gestures, trying to pretend it was normal. It must have been exhausting for all of them. 

I read an opinion piece that compared the scene to Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which no one in the emperor’s entourage has the courage to tell their boss that he’s walking around naked in public. That certainly works as an analogy, but for me the rally evoked Weekend at Bernie’s vibes. 

If you have somehow managed to avoid encountering that movie classic from 1989, let me summarize: Two young insurance company executives discover their mob-connected boss Bernie is dead after arriving early at his house in the Hamptons for a big weekend party. Convinced that the police would think they murdered him, the employees spend the weekend trying to sustain the illusion for party-goers that Bernie isn’t dead, just really drunk and stoned. And yeah, it’s as stupid as it sounds. But I think that’s what Trump’s campaign handlers are trying to do during the campaign’s final weeks: sustain the illusion that their man is okay by keeping him upright and limiting his appearances to pep rallies and friendly media. They know Trump is losing sentience with each passing day, but they’ll worry about that after he wins. And that’s a terrifying thought. 

The one helpful thing that Trump accomplished during his first term was to demonstrate the flaws in our system, the first of which is that a president can just ignore the law, especially if he or she is enabled by a compliant majority in either house of Congress or a politicized Department of Justice. So, we owe him thanks for that, I guess.

And because of Trump, we learned the hard way that our democracy is only as good and decent as the president we elect to run it. A president who decides to disregard the established traditions, and even the law (Emoluments Clause, anyone?), can get away with it. The U.S. attorney general, for example, was intended by the Constitution to be the peoples’ steward of justice, a person who would tell the president the truth and stand up for the rule of law. After a couple of false starts, Trump found Bill Barr, an AG who would do his bidding like a Mafia capo. “You want an investigation quashed? No problem, Boss. This guy Epstein bothering you?”

And it didn’t stop with the Justice Department. The Education Department was run by a woman who made millions in privatized education. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was turned into a propaganda agency, forced to bury or alter scientific data to suit the president’s Covid-19 agenda. The Treasury, Energy, and Interior departments were run by lobbyists in the pocket of those they were supposed to be regulating. Even the military was politicized, with top generals replaced if they questioned or refused to bend to Trump’s unconstitutional whims: “We can’t bomb Mexico, sir. And no, we’re not going to ‘nuke a hurricane.’”

I could go on. Looking back at Trump’s first term is real nightmare fuel, but imagining the decisions this barely cognizant man could make in a second term with handlers such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and the Trump children calling the shots? That would not be a playlist any decent American would want to listen to. 

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At Large Opinion

A New Forecast

Another day begins. I make a lovingly handcrafted cortado on my $450 espresso machine and pull up a chair in my all-electric kitchen with its artisanal subway tile and granite countertops. I take a sip. Mmm, frothy and smooth. Life is lovely. I open the New York Times app on my new iPhone 16 Pro, and like all good liberal elites, I play Wordle (got it in three, natch), the Mini Crossword, and Connections. 

Morning brain exercises done, I scan the weekly forecast on my weather app before checking in with headquarters. Things look great for Memphis and most of the South for the next few days — sunny and mild — and I’m guessing our leaders in the Democrat Weather Manipulation System (DWMS) will let it stay that way, at least, for now. We don’t want to raise any more suspicions, especially since so many MAGAs appear to be catching on to us. 

Fortunately for us, it’s too late for them to do much about it. We kicked their clueless butts big-time a couple weeks ago with hurricanes Helene and Milton, and they never saw it coming, except for that cursed Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s been on the case ever since we used our space lasers to ignite the California wildfires a few years back. Thankfully, we’ve managed to marginalize her enough — using our allies in the liberal media — that most Americans still think she’s a moron. Mission accomplished! So far. 

We can’t afford to get complacent, though. Taking control of the weather was a tremendous feat, but there’s only so much bad weather you can inflict on red states before everyone figures it out. It all comes down to getting Comrade Kamala into office. Once that’s done, then we’ll be free to establish the rest of our agenda. Mwah-ha-ha! 

First, we’ll invite brown- and black-skinned countries to send us all the inmates in their prisons. Then we’ll give them weapons and all the pets they can eat as soon as they cross the open border. Have fun, MAGA-troids.

Once that’s done, we’ll mandate that all cars and trucks be electric-powered and limit them to a 50-mile limit. Boats will have to use electric batteries that will be so large they won’t be able to float, thereby exposing passengers to sharks. Let’s see you try that MAGA boat parade now, you nimrods.  

Then, of course, federal agents of the Deep State will begin confiscating all gas stoves and requiring that kitchen appliances be run on solar power. If it’s a cloudy day, no cooking for you, Bubba! Have a salad. It’s better for you anyway. Airplanes will also be required to use solar power. Better stay above the clouds if weather moves in. Just sayin’. 

And we progressives will begin quickly implementing our Big Wind initiative by requiring utilities use only windmills to power our homes. Sure, when the wind’s not blowing, you won’t be able to watch TV, but so what? Read a book, preferably one by Ellen DeGeneres or Oprah Winfrey. Or, if you’re really bored, go out to the nearest windmill and pick up some dead eagles. They taste like chicken. 

Okay, you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m being sarcastic, riffing on the absurd fears being pushed by Republican candidates — from the top of the ticket to the bottom — during the current campaign. Enough humor. Here’s what they’re really afraid of:

That Democrats will pass a law outlawing gerrymandering, so that politicians can’t geographically design their districts and stay in office indefinitely. That Democrats will ban assault weapons and begin enacting real gun reform. That Democrats will expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices, establish an enforceable code of judicial ethics, and install 15-year term limits. That Democrats will overturn Citizens United, the decision that allowed big money into our politics. That Democrats will recognize that climate change is real and institute substantive environmental protections. That a Democratic president will appoint an attorney general that actually goes after the former president for his crimes. And finally, that Democrats will guarantee a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body.

That’s it. That’s what they fear. Well, that, and the fact that we now control the weather. Mwah-ha-ha! Have a nice day. For now. Heh. 

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At Large Opinion

Dog Days

Olive and Doxa (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I’m walking my dogs on a morning that’s fresh from October’s PR department: bright and clear, cool and crisp. The green lawns are spangled with dew, the trees beginning to drop hints of autumn: fleshy ginkgo fruits, walnuts, hickory nuts, and ruby red hackberries scattered on the sidewalks and quiet side streets of Midtown. Watch your step. The leaves won’t be far behind.

Early celebrants have already set out their Halloween displays: Styrofoam headstones, plastic skeletons, pumpkins and gourds on the steps, cornstalks on the door, ghostly cobwebs on the shrubs. The annual happy dance of harvest and death, which has always seemed weird to me. But hey, I like the candy. In the spirit of the season, I bought a big bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at Walgreens a couple days ago, none of which will ever see the bottom of a trick-or-treat sack. Suck it, kids. 

My dogs don’t care much about pumpkins and faux skeletal remains, but they are on the lookout for the occasional gray squirrel that dares skirt our passage. They like to act fierce, like the tipsy bar fighter saying, “Let me at ’em!” as his friends hold him back. I will never let my dogs at ’em and they know it. And they don’t even drink. Idiots.

A car pulls to a halt next to us on Linden and the driver lowers her window. “I really like your columns!” she says. 

“Well, hey, thanks!” I say, feeling mildly celebrity-ish and wishing I’d brushed my hair.

As she pulls away, I regret that I’d not asked her name. It’s a small town, I think. I probably know her. Oh, well. The encounter reminds me that I haven’t come up with a column idea for the next issue of the Flyer. 

We are less than 30 days away from a presidential election that seems weighted with more importance than any in my lifetime, but the thought of writing another column with the lying orange narcissist’s name in it repels me like picking up dog poop. It’s got to be done, I know, but I don’t have to like it. And there’s nothing worse than when one of my girls drops one at the beginning of our walk, so I have to carry a bag of warm doggy doo for 30 minutes. (Unless I go down that one alley behind the big houses, where all those trash bins are. Shhh.) 

Come to think of it, carrying a bag of warm poop around is a pretty decent metaphor for what the former president has done to our heads. He’s gross and there’s no handy trash bin where we can put him. He’s everywhere, lying about hurricane rescue efforts and putting lives in danger, slandering immigrants and putting lives in danger, inflating the crime rate, trashing a healthy economy, disparaging the intelligence of his opponents, pimping for war, doubling down on his lies about the 2020 election. Argh.

And he’s been treated so unfairly, like no president in history, that he can tell you. Everything is rigged against him. Please. He is the most whiny-ass grown man I’ve ever had the misfortune to be exposed to. He has no conscience, no shame, no remorse. His lies are the most easily disprovable fabrications ever uttered by an American politician, but it doesn’t matter and he knows it. And that’s what I can’t get my head around.

If I work at it, I can understand the former guy as the latest in the historical parade of megalomaniacs and fanatics who finagled their way into power in one country or another. Now it’s the United States’ turn. It’s terrible and terrifying but here we are. What I cannot understand is how there are so many Americans who can listen to his never-ending torrent of hate-filled batshit, and say, “Yep, I’m down with that guy. He speaks for me.” It’s depressing.

After seeing clips of the fervid GOP rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend, I’m beginning to think we’re looking at a possible nightmare scenario either way this election goes. Obviously, I prefer one of those scenarios over the other, but there are literally millions of angry and easily manipulated people out there, people who can be convinced that Democrats control the weather, people who aren’t going away. Where’s that alley when you need it? 

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At Large Opinion

Hurricane Blues

Henderson County, North Carolina on September 27 (Photo: NCDOTcommunications | creative commons | via Wikimedia Commons)

Someone created a meme that went viral last Friday, as Hurricane Helene was proceeding to devastate portions of six states. It was a photo of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on a cell phone standing near some trailers and overturned chairs. The caption read: “Hello, President Biden, it’s Ron! May I please have some socialism?”

The meme was being enacted in real life as Helene churned relentlessly across the Gulf of Mexico toward the southeastern U.S. The governors of five of the soon-to-be affected states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) had declared a state of emergency two or three days in advance of the storm, asked for federal help, and quickly got it approved by President Biden.

The sixth state? That would be Tennessee, where our cosplaying Christian governor, Bill Lee, decided to take a bold alternative course of action. None of that damn socialism for Bill, nosiree. Last Friday morning — the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall — Lee asked Tennesseans to participate in a “day of prayer and fasting.” Give me a G—damn break. What criminal incompetence!

Friday afternoon, after flood waters in eastern Tennessee had destroyed several towns, threatened dams, and put tens of thousands of people out of their homes, 54 patients and staff huddled atop a hospital in rural Unicoi County, Tennessee, awaiting help. Fortunately for them, Virginia and North Carolina rescue workers were able to provide lifeboats and helicopters and get them to safety. Good ol’ Rocky Top? Not so much. Governor Lee finally got around to declaring a state of emergency Friday night. Guess he was hungry from fasting all day?

On Saturday, Lee and GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn surveyed the damage and destruction from an airplane. (Blackburn had spent the day of the hurricane in Michigan, “interviewing” Donald Trump at a rally.) We can only presume she was also fasting and praying after voting to shut down the government earlier in the week.

As the remnants of Helene began to dissipate, millions of Americans were left without power, water, and phone service across the Southeast. Roads, homes, businesses, bridges, and other pieces of the infrastructure were flushed downstream. As I write this, the storm has been blamed for at least 120 deaths across five states, with that total expected to rise as waters recede.

Asheville, North Carolina, which was absolutely destroyed, is 500 miles from the Florida coastline where Helene made landfall and sits at an elevation of 2,134 feet. For reference, Memphis is 325 miles from the gulf and sits at an elevation of 338 feet.

Climate change is here, and all the fasting and prayers in the world aren’t going to fix it. We need credible research and forecasting, and science-based information about what we’re dealing with.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees the National Weather Service, FEMA, Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research (OAR), and other climatological agencies, is responsible for keeping state and local officials and the public aware of severe weather and other climate-based threats. Without the updates and forecasts from NOAA, Americans would be, well, up a creek.

That much would seem obvious … unless you’re a devotee of Project 2025, the GOP’s 920-page policy blueprint for the next administration. Candidate Trump has disavowed it, but it was written by several former Trump administration officials. Project 2025 devotes a whole four pages to NOAA and the National Weather Service. The section was written by Thomas F. Gilman, an official in Trump’s Commerce Department. The document calls the NOAA a “primary component of the climate-change alarm industry” and says it “should be broken up and downsized.” Project 2025 also says the National Weather Service “should focus on its data-gathering services” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

Yeah, that damn climate-change alarm industry is just more socialism! Wake up and smell the ozone, sheeple! There’s money to be made on the weather! Fox News or X or Newsmax will take over hurricane forecasts and monetize ’em. It will be like fasting and praying about weather emergencies, only with opinions and ads. What could go wrong? 

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At Large Opinion

The Big Bamboozle

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge that we’ve been taken.”

That’s a quote from Carl Sagan in his invaluable book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Written in 1995, on the cusp of our digital age, Sagan’s insights have proven astonishingly accurate. More than 25 years ago, he warned against the dumbing down of humans that would arise as we began consuming knowledge in pieces, in bits and sound bites. Sagan warned that we would soon be consuming “lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, and especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

Sound familiar? Think of the wave of “experts” that has arisen among us lately, folks who have “done their own research” on politics, science, climate change, vaccines, you name it. It reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon, wherein a man turns from his computer screen to his wife and says, “Honey, come look! I’ve found some information that all the world’s top scientists and doctors missed.”

What Sagan didn’t predict, at least not to my knowledge, was the onset of artificial intelligence, those voracious search engines run by giant tech companies that feed on every morsel of online information and regurgitate it to be used in art, literature, and research. 

It’s garbage that creates garbage. If there’s a mistake in a piece of content, it gets indiscriminately picked up and amplified as a fact, and re-amplified with each ensuing search. It’s called AI “slop,” which is a perfect term for it. 

I’ve written about this before, but when you search my name on Meta AI, it says I was the lead singer of a band called Gun Club. That is only “true” in the sense it is now reported as a fact about my life in some online searches. I’m stuck with it.

This sort of mistake happens millions of times a day, as AI scours and plagiarizes the web, doing non-coherent “research,” creating content that ends up in term papers, on social media, and in the news. These false results can eventually skew and dilute even formerly reliable sources, such as Google. 

The problem worsens when it comes to imagery. AI can produce a “photograph” of anyone doing anything — a picture of Bruce Springsteen jumping the Grand Canyon in an Evel Knievel suit? No problem. A picture of Kamala Harris in a Chinese Army uniform? Piece of cake. Elon Musk even posted one of those to his millions of X followers. It’s not art. It’s a screensaver, an avatar, propaganda. It’s disposable visual slop.We’re being dumbed down whether we like it (or know it) or not. 

To make things worse, AI uses massive amounts of electricity, as does crypto-currency “mining.” (I’m still waiting for someone to explain how bitcoin works as anything other than an unregulated Ponzi scheme along the lines of Beanie Babies or baseball cards.) Here’s a clue: If Trump is selling it (and he is), it’s a scam, designed to remove your actual money from your actual bank account. 

Memphis is now the home to “Colossus,” the largest supercomputer on Earth. It’s Musk’s xAI operation, which is bringing tens of jobs to our community while taxing the power grid and running unregulated, polluting gas turbines 24 hours a day. You want more details about the deal? Good luck. 

Memphis is also getting a new crypto-mining facility that will bring a couple of night watchman jobs to a big field in Hickory Hill filled with rows of “container buildings” surrounded by an 8-foot-high chain-link fence. It will eat up power at a prodigious rate, but MLGW officials are mum about it. Maybe if we put AI on the case, we’ll get some answers.

I know I’m nearing “old man yells at cloud” territory, but since I have to remind myself to do the following, I’ll remind you as well: Take time each day to remove yourself from artificial life. Read a book. Take a walk. Listen to music. Move! Life is short and love is more than a heart emoji on somebody’s vacation photo. Don’t let yourself be bamboozled. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

Silver Alert

Mom is 100 and fabulous. (Photo: Alan VanWyngarden)

I awoke to a loud “Silver Alert” on my phone the other day. I’m not sure why it made a sound, unless I accidentally set up an audible alarm for such things, which is entirely possible. My iPhone is full of tricks and surprises. For example, I haven’t been able to type the letter “p” in texts for six months, which is a -ain in the butt. 

At any rate, I reached groggily for the phone and read that “a Silver Alert has been issued on behalf of the Cowan, Tennessee, Police Department for missing 79-year-old Oscar Howard.* He was last seen in the area of Chestnut Street in Cowan wearing a green T-shirt and blue jeans. Howard has a medical condition that may impair his ability to return safely without assistance.”

I thought about Oscar as I wandered into the kitchen, safely and without assistance, wearing a black T-shirt and pajama pants. I hoped he would be found quickly and vowed to keep an eye out for him. 

I’d just gotten back the day before from a trip to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where 16 members of my family gathered to celebrate my mother’s 100th birthday, and her remarkable life. Let me tell you, the woman is still sharp, funny, and capable of surprises. She zips around the grounds of her assisted-living complex with a walker, but without further assistance, making sure to log at least a half-hour of fast-striding exercise a day. She still has a great sense of humor and seems to know everyone in the place. 

We celebrated my mother’s big day in a private room at an excellent restaurant in Old Mesilla. After dinner, a cake with three large candles was set in front of her (because nobody wants to mess with 100 candles). As we finished singing “Happy Birthday,” there was the usual chorus of “… and many more,” to which she said with a big smile, “Well, one more … or maybe two.” She blew out the candles and said her wish was that we all lived a long and happy life. Then she got up and circled the table with her walker, speaking to everyone in turn, telling me I was “her favorite son,” then, with a grin, telling my brother seated next to me the same thing.

She was on form all evening long and it was a delight to see because like many elderly folks, her mind can sometimes misfire when she gets tired. She can “spiral,” as they say, and repeat herself in the course of a conversation. She does so cheerfully, and is clueless that she’s doing it, but she’s 100 years old, after all, and some age-related mental decline is natural. 

But even so, it was surprising when she suddenly stood up and announced loudly to the room that, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! The people that came in. They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what’s happening in our country!” We gasped and turned to each other, unsure of what to make of such a statement. Then she shouted, “They want to have transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison!” Then she snarled, “In six states, they’re executing babies after they’re born!” 

At that point, we realized Mom needed to be taken back to her apartment. It was past 9 p.m. and she was obviously spiraling, spouting nonsense. She needed rest. Everyone understood, so we bid our good nights and gently escorted her to our car. It was still a wonderful evening and a memory I’ll always treasure … 

Oh, wait. Oh, jeez. No, no, no. I’m so sorry. I guess I was having a bit of a senior moment myself there. My mother didn’t actually say any of that stuff. I was somehow confusing her birthday party with the presidential debate I’d watched the night before. An easy enough mistake to make, I think you’d agree. Both involved an elderly person up past their bedtime. (And not just me.) And, frankly, I suspect it may be time for a Silver Alert for one of them. Like Oscar, he may not have the ability to return home safely without assistance. 

*not his real name