Category: life

Categories
life

Paranoia

Yesterday, I went to the chiropractor—my first time ever. Despite having decades of back issues, I’ve been skeptical of the whole “science” of chiropractic, but I know enough people who swear by it that I figured it was time to give it a shot.

(Quick context: I throw out my back about two or three times a year, usually from something as mundane as sneezing)

A friend recommended a certain place, and I researched them. The two people who run it are licensed chiropractic doctors, married to each other, and part of the statewide and national chiropractic associations. They’ve been in business for years. I researched their doctorate. They both went to (and met at) Life University.

Life University? Really? First red flag.

So I researched the university. It’s struggled for years with its accreditation, but it currently has it.

Okay, it’s accredited, which reduces the red flag to a yellow flag. Plus, I have two (relatively) closed-down colleges on my resume, so who am I to judge? Besides, my friend swore by the place.

I made the appointment, and yesterday, I headed down.

I checked in and was sitting in the waiting room. Everything seemed good. There were good vibes in the place, and it looked professional.

About three minutes after I walked in, some dude in gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie came in. He went to the front desk and said, “Kyle Callahan.”

(If you don’t know, that’s my name).

The receptionist greeted him like she knew him and told him that one of the doctors would be with him in a minute.

So he sat a couple of seats down from me. I didn’t say anything, but my mind was like, “Who the hell is this dude, and why does he know my name?” My first thought was that maybe they had part-time contracted chiropractors who came in and did the preliminary work, kind of like dental hygienists. Maybe?

The doctor came out of his office and invited the dude in. They shut the door. Three or four minutes passed, and the dude came out and sat down again. I thought, “Okay, that was kind of the consult so the doctor could tell this dude what to do with me.”

Then the other doctor came out and called for me to come back. She led me into an exam room where I watched a five-minute video about spines, nerves, and chiropractic medicine. Then she returned, and we reviewed a history of my back problems. She then used a wand to measure my vertebrae in a few different ways, told me she’d get the data back at the end of the day, and that I needed to come back later in the week for a diagnosis and possible treatment plan.

She led me back to the receptionist so I could pay the bill and schedule my next appointment. During the walk to the front, I thought, “Okay, but who the hell is that dude?? Why does he know my name?!” My next thought was that this was all a scam, and the doctors had hired this dude to dig into my finances and insurance and find the best way to get all of my money out of me.

With my mind kind of freaking out, I made the appointment and stood at the desk, typing the information into the calendar on my phone. The doctor came back into the front, leaned out to the dude in the waiting room, and said, “Kyle, we’re ready now.”

At that point, I kind of exploded. I was like, “Hold up! Dude, what’s your name?” The doctor started laughing and said, “I know, right!” The dude was confused and said, “Kyle?”

“Kyle what?” I asked.

“Kyle Calanan.”

Categories
life

Sending The Old Man Home

Spider John is my name, friend,
I’m in between freights, and I sure would be obliged
If you’d share your company.”

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Ballad of Spider John”

I’m thirteen years old. My oldest brother has just come home from college for a break, bringing with him a lot of new music that he’d picked up from his new group of friends. I’m stepping out of the bathroom, and he calls out to me, “Kyle, come listen to this song.”

I enter his room. The curtains are drawn, and the ceiling light casts everything in an orange-ish glow. He hits play on the compact disc player, and the uptempo song starts with an explosive drum and keyboard combo that lasts for a measure and sets up the song’s melodic theme before quickly calming down and settling into the first verse. A man’s nasally half-twang begins to sing, using a playful-in-the-mouth phrase as an opening line, a sentence that bounces delightfully from consonant to consonant: “I tried to amend my carnivorous habits,”

My first thought is, “Well, that’s interesting.”

The song continues, each line a little masterpiece of ridiculousness, lines that don’t belong in a song unless you’re going for straight comedy in the vein of Weird Al Yankovic, and containing internal rhymes that add tempo and surprise to the lyrics: “Losing weight without speed, eating sunflower seeds” and “Not zucchini, fettuccini, or bulgur wheat,” until finally, the chorus, which reveals the subject of the singer’s longing: the American cheeseburger.

“I like mine with lettuce and tomato,” he explains, “Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, a big kosher pickle, and a cold draft beer,” before exclaiming to the divine, “Good God Almighty, which way do I steer for my cheeseburger in paradise?”

I couldn’t believe it. At thirteen years old, I was in the throes of discovering my love for writing by doing as many do at thirteen years old, wiling away my evening hours composing terrible poems. I’d become fascinated with experimenting with rhyme schemes and searching for subjects outside of the norm (one of my favorites from those years: “An Ode to My Commode”).

And here was a professional singer/songwriter making a country-tinged pop hit with a song about his love for cheeseburgers.

My brother left the room to do who knows what, but I stayed behind and listened to the rest of the album, its title an admonition, warning me that I was already way behind where I was supposed to be in my knowledge of this artist: Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett’s Greatest Hits.

I once knew a poet
who lived before his time.
He and his dog Spooner
would listen while he’d rhyme.
Words to make ya happy,
words to make you cry,
then one day the poet suddenly did die

– Jimmy Bufett, “The Death of an Unpopular Poet”

He wasn’t a great songwriter. Even as a dedicated thirteen-year-old poet, I already recognized his use of “did [present tense verb]” as a lazy rhymer’s cop-out, a grammatical construction that signaled the writer’s reluctance to work the lines until he put “the right word at the right time.”

I didn’t hold it against him, however. The lack of attempted perfection spoke to me, and it boosted the mythical character that his songs implied: a well-intentioned, romantic pirate/smuggler who laughed in the face of the squares’ demand for discipline.

The other tunes on Songs You Know By Heart revealed that Jimmy Buffett was not a wanna-be Weird Al. While his songs weren’t afraid to be funny or to relish in puns, they also explored more emotional themes.

  • “He Went to Paris” narrates the life story of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War whose biography involves the death of a wife and child and the loss of an eye
  • “Son of a Son of a Sailor” connects the singer’s lifestyle to his grandfather’s, an honorific of multigenerational inspiration
  • “A Pirate Looks At Forty” reflects on the loves and losses of an aging sailor, “an over-forty victim of fate, arriving too late” in world history for the life he desires to lead
  • “Come Monday” shares the singer’s pre-Labor Day pining for his darling as he nears the end of a long summer tour
  • “Pencil Thin Mustache” reminisces about the singer’s 1950s childhood, when he was “buck-toothed and skinny” and looking up to the star and starlets of the big screen

These empathetic songs were buttressed by humorous tunes, such as his beer-sodden proposal to a possible prostitute in the bar, “Why don’t we get drunk (and screw)?” or his 1979 calypso homage, “Volcano,” where the narrator wonders where he’ll go when the volcano blows, pleading to the gods not to end up on Three-Mile Island or anywhere near Iran’s newly empowered Ayatollah.

The album concluded, and I knew I needed more I dove into his oeuvre, scouring my local branch of Coconuts for tapes and CDs of his back catalog. I wanted to hear more stories of misfits living in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean islands, and the eastern shores of Central and South America.

His songs brought my imagination to a foreign land, and his values — fun, love, and lust, reflected on with sensitivity and humor — connected with my teenage brain in ways that other songwriters did not, and it was “the difference between lightning and a harmless lightning bug.“

We are the people they couldn’t figure out.
We are the people our parents warned us about.

– Jimmy Buffett, “We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us About”

I spent the end of every summer in the second half of the 1990s celebrating the music of Jimmy Buffett with my fellow New-England-based Parrot Heads at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts, singing the songs that, by then, I truly knew by heart.

In those years, Jimmy and his Coral Reefer Band ended their summer tour at Great Woods, after which Jimmy would head down to Martha’s Vineyard for a few days before jumping in his plane and flying back south for the winter. We benefitted from the band’s celebration of the end of the tour. The band was always on fire — Fingers Taylor belting out on his harmonica, Mr. Utley pounding on the ivories, Robert showing us white folks what a pan drum sounds like in the hands of a bonafide master, and (over Jimmy’s career) nearly 70 other musicians, each of whom knew how to bring it.

My brother invited me and two of my friends to our first Buffett concert, where he met up with his college roommate and brought together friends from his high school. Several years younger than the rest of the crew, my friends and I wandered the parking lot, where we discovered a community of over ten thousand fun-loving, mostly middle-aged folks, each as welcoming as could be.

By the time I stopped going to Buffett shows in the early 2000s, they had become a massive affair. I’d have anywhere between three and ten friends with me, my oldest brother would have another dozen, and our middle brother would bring four or five. Our parents were there, as were our aunt and uncle and their three boys and their friends. Neighbors we’d known forever came with us as well. By the time all was said and done, we were throwing one of the largest parties in the parking lot, and just as I’d learned, we were as welcoming to strangers as could be.

Truly, some of my best family memories are set outside of a Jimmy Buffett concert.

All of the faces and all of the places
Wonderin’ where they all disappeared

– Jimmy Buffett, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”

Jimmy’s songs are pickled with nostalgia, so it makes sense for me to think back on those concerts with a mixture of fondness and sadness.

I can see the smiling faces of people I haven’t spoken to or laughed with for decades: Carolyn, Britte, Shea, Justin, Josh, Bill, Chris, Allen, Marty, and so many others. I follow some of their lives on Facebook, liking their posts and feeling proud of their children’s accomplishments, but some aren’t on social media, and so I’ve lost touch with them completely — people who were, in every sense of the phrase, my best friends.

I can also see my mother before Parkinson’s destroyed her ability to walk and talk and laugh with her whole body. I can see her singing along to the lyrics as she shimmies her butt, holding a mixed drink in a red cup, mixed for her by the Vin Man, one of her adopted children from the neighborhood and a trained mixologist. I can see my dad holding her hand as they dance, surrounded by their three boys and all of their friends, flirting with each other and as happy as can be.

I stopped attending Buffett shows when I moved to Vermont. Jimmy didn’t make it up to the mountains and Great Woods was too far away to drive. Plus, my college friends (all of whom were five to seven years younger than me) did not enjoy the “Gulf & Western” stylings of a baby boomer. As millennials to my Gen X, they found his lyrics and his music too corny for their Radiohead-tuned ears.

I didn’t let that stop me though. I played his songs at high volume in my dorm. I wore Hawaiian shirts when the mood struck me. And I proudly declared myself a Parrot Head (as well as a Dead Head and Phish Head — of course, the latter two fit more comfortably into the lifestyle of my new, marijuana-hazed college dorms).

The young ‘uns could chuckle all they wanted. I knew where I came from. Jimmy had given me memories of “good times that brought so much pleasure” and the cynicism of the millennials wouldn’t take them from me.

He died about a month ago,
while winter filled the air.
And though I cried, I was so proud
to love a man so rare.
He’s somewhere on the ocean now,
a place he ought to be.
With one hand on the starboard rail,
he’s waving back at me.

– Jimmy Buffett, “The Captain and the Kid”

Jimmy’s family announced his death this morning. They said he died surrounded by his family, friends, music, and dogs.

So thank you, Jimmy. You helped shape me into who I am. You gave me, my friends, and my family some of the best memories of our lives together. My heart is full, my eyes are crying, and I am so happy to have known you as the poet and artist you were.

Thank you, sir.

Categories
life reviews

Three Books That Changed My Life

In 2007, I began tracking my reading habits on Goodreads. Over the past sixteen years, I read or listened to 581 books containing 210,880 pages. Suppose we use my averages over the past sixteen years to estimate my reading habits for the twenty-five years of my reading history before Goodreads existed. In that case, I’ve read 1,500 books containing nearly 524,000 pages.

I’d like to tell you about the three that most changed my life.

Skinny Legs & All

By Tom Robbins

My friend, Jess Tanen, found me in the hallway of our high school. The year was 1992, and we were in ninth grade. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to her locker. She took a book from her backpack and handed it to me, saying, “Here. This is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. I didn’t like it, but I think you’ll love it.”

I opened it up and read the first sentence:

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.

I don’t think I’ve come across a better combination of words in the English language than “wolfmother wallpaper.” Like a heroin addict, I’ve been chasing the high ever since.

Tom Robbins quickly became my role model as a writer, thinker, and philosopher. He luxuriated in extended metaphors, dazzled with whimsical, mind-expanding analogies, and wrote about the history of religion, politics, governments, and culture without forgetting the role of vaginal juices in the lives of his sexually progressive heroines.

I was already a wannabe writer by ninth grade. I didn’t have the size or talent to be a jock, the work ethic to be an honors student, the discipline to be a musician, or the skills to become a theater geek. But I did love books, and I could sit for hours in a room with a keyboard and a blank screen without getting lonely or bored.

Most importantly, pretty girls gave me positive feedback on my writing. If sports, good grades, guitars, or theatrical monologues weren’t going to do it, writing would have to be my thing.

Every high-school writer goes through an emo phase. They believe in big, heavy literature that plumbs the depth of the human soul. They imagine heroes who look out windows into the pouring rain, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the existential French woman who left them for a one-legged veteran of the Great War who struggles with nightmares and smells like boiled cabbage. Suicide figures prominently in the writing of high schoolers.

Tom Robbins saved me from that. He wrote outlandish books full of big ideas without forgetting to make his readers laugh with delight or get turned on by raw descriptions of human sexuality. He embraced the principles of the Enlightenment at the same time as he reveled in the darkness of our romantic, pagan inclinations. He wove together evolution and spirituality, commercialism and divinity, astronomy and astrology, utopia and reality.

He gave me a way to see the world, care for the world, and love the world without taking it too seriously to remember how ridiculous we all are.

Louis C.K. tells the story of his first memory. He is four years old, standing in front of his parent’s house, shitting in his pants — “a massive, terribly painful shit.” He doesn’t remember the first half of the shit — his memory begins halfway through shitting. “I came online as a result of the anal pain that I was experiencing. It actually awakened me — yeeeeeoooooow! — into the stream of consciousness I’m now living. That’s how my life started. That’s who I am.”

I have the same feelings about Skinny Legs & All and Tom Robbins. Reading that book awakened me into the stream of consciousness I’m now living in.

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

My wife had a boyfriend when we first met. She doesn’t remember this and denies it being accurate, but she told me that she and her boyfriend were engaged. I was attracted to her, sure, and over the next seven or eight months, that attraction would become the love and devotion it continues to be (no feelings were made known until long after she’d broken up with her boyfriend), but in our first months in each other’s lives, we were, more than anything else, great friends.

We were both freshmen in college. We met under a tree. I sat beneath it reading a book, and she had the nerve to approach me (a stranger) and initiate a conversation. One of her first questions was, “What are you reading?” It wasn’t long before it became clear how much we loved books.

We spent virtually all our time together over the next three months. Neither of us enjoyed our roommates, so we exiled ourselves from our dorm rooms and lived in the college library, “surrounded by stories surreal and sublime.”

We wrote papers sitting next to each other in the computer labs, suggested which books the other should read, and printed out short stories the other needed to experience. We ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners together, made late-night runs to Denny’s, and grabbed ice coffees at Dunks.

At the end of the first semester, she was flying home to Chicago to spend the holidays with her family, and I was driving to Boston to spend the month with mine. I dropped her off at the airport, but before we left campus, she gave me a book to read.

I looked at the cover: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

“Look inside,” she said.

I began to flip through it, and the typography and layout were as much a work of art as the story itself.

The story has several layers to it. The main text is a book-length, critical review of a non-existent documentary. The documentary is made Real World style, with mostly fixed cameras placed throughout a home. It follows a famous filmmaker (the director of the documentary) and his model wife as they buy, move into, and settle down in their new home. They quickly discover an impossible hallway on the house’s outer wall. After further investigation, the married couple uncovers an impossible maze built beneath their home, which they soon delve into.

Hundreds of footnotes comment on the critical study. The footnotes were written by an L.A. drifter named Johnny. Johnny discovered the study in the burned-out apartment of an old blind recluse who died violently under mysterious circumstances. His footnotes often run for pages and contain a novel’s worth of plot within them.

The layout and typography of House of Leaves mirror the maze in the story, requiring the reader to, for example, twist and turn the physical book as the characters climb a spiral staircase or skip dozens of pages when the characters go through a secret door. The spillover of the footnotes also causes the reader to flip through six or seven pages to follow Johnny’s story before flipping back to where the footnote started to return to the main thread.

The effect is that the reader gets as lost in the story as the characters. As Johnny begins to question reality and sense an ever-increasing dread at the unknown monster(s) that stalk the characters through the maze, the reader takes on the same emotions, making the book one of the most engaging I’ve ever read and one of the scariest.

I found it so scary that I couldn’t put it down. I read the book in one marathon sitting because the moment I turned out the light, I could hear Johnny’s monster breathing at my bedside, threatening my sleep.

The next day, I called my friend and told her how incredible it was. That’s when she admitted that she hadn’t finished it.

“It was too weird for me,” she said, “But I knew you’d love it.”

We’d read many of the same books that semester. Some were assigned by our shared professors. Others were the result of recommendations from friends.

But when I finished House of Leaves and discovered that she gave it to me because it was too weird and she knew I would love it, I felt more seen than I ever had before.

We wouldn’t confess our love for each other for another four months, but after reading House of Leaves on her recommendation, I knew I was hooked.

James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and The Dead Sea Scrolls

By Robert Eisenman

Jesus was not an only child. He had at least two brothers and probably multiple sisters. After Jesus’ crucifixion, his brother, James, became the arch-leader of the movement. James, the Brother of Jesus, attempts to uncover who James was and how understanding him will bring us closer to the historical Jesus.

In my own life, it served as the final break between me and the faith in which I was raised.

James, the Brother of Jesus, is not a great book. At 1,156 pages, it is 700-800 pages too long and incredibly repetitive. It strays for scores of pages at a time, making it difficult to follow the author’s thread.

It also contains (though not by the author’s fault) a cast of historical personages with similar or identical names, requiring the reader to do too much detective work to determine which person the author is referring to at any given moment. True, this confusion of names lies at the heart of the author’s scholarly investigation (he maintains that the chaos of names was intended to obscure the reality of the Church’s history). Still, he could have made it easier for the reader to untangle the relationships and identities of the individuals involved.

Despite its flaws, James, the Brother of Jesus serves as the foundation of everything I understand about Christianity — namely, that it has very little to do with the historical personage of Jesus and everything to do with the words and acts of a man who never met Jesus, a man we now call St. Paul.

This is not a new understanding of Christianity. Scholars have long understood, and the New Testament makes it clear (Acts 15:2), that the Jerusalem community of Christians that arose after Jesus’ crucifixion had issues with Paul’s work among the Gentiles.

But by focusing on “James the Lord’s Brother” (Gal. 1:19), whom Eisenman shows was the “actual, physical successor” to Jesus, the book provides “a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like.”

I first read the book when it made its debut in 1998. I was twenty-one years old at the time. Despite having served as an altar boy for three years, despite working as a receptionist for the priests in the rectory, and despite the nuns who led my Catholic education in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) telling me since the first grade that I would become “the first American Pope,” I had already ventured beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church thanks, primarily, to the journey Tom Robbins had sent me on (see above).

I retained a deep connection to the Church, however. I may no longer have been a Catholic, but I was still, in many ways, a Christian. James, the Brother of Jesus, shattered my perception of Christianity.

The book highlights the biases of “historians” such as Eusebius, as well as the authors of the New Testament and its Apocrypha, in the creation of Christianity, demanding that believers reckon with the political realities of the early Christian writers and the way Roman and Jewish power structures required so much to be hidden away from plain-reading eyes.

While the orthodox-upending nature of the book is not revolutionary, its subject most definitely was. If we accept Eisenman’s conclusion that “who or whatever James was, so was Jesus,” then we have to admit that the all-loving Christ presented by modern Christianity is fake. Jesus was actually a militant Jewish zealot, a member of an oppositional alliance against the establishment of Rome and the Herodian-controlled Second Temple, whose followers went about armed for battle (Matt. 26:51).

Jesus came not to save the souls of the world but to free Jerusalem from foreign invaders, a political messiah more than a spiritual one. The historical Jesus has more in common with today’s militant Muslims who seek to drive the forces of the infidel American Empire out of Saudia Arabia than with the all-loving Christ preached about in our churches. To get closer to Jesus, one must look to the lost traditions that were driven out of the Roman Church in the fourth century.

With that as the basis for my understanding of the reality of Jesus, my approach to received histories was changed forever.

This perception-shattering work has been followed by dozens of others, all of which could be categorized under the grand title of another essential book, Lies My Teachers Told Me.

As a result, James, the Brother of Jesus, caused me to not only break with my faith; it formed my philosophy as an educator. My goal as a teacher has been, first and foremost, to destroy whatever misunderstandings have been delivered to my students by the myths of our time. For twenty-one years, I was beholden to the myth of Christianity, the complex reality of world history hidden from me and (I imagine) from my teachers. I refuse to let my students suffer the same fate.

Skinny Legs & All opened me up to a universe where humor, sexuality, and profound philosophical inquiry harmoniously coexist. Tom Robbins disarmed me from the stereotypical broody, angst-ridden teenage writer phase and liberated me to become an audacious explorer of thought.

House of Leaves, with its labyrinthine narrative structure, not only tested the limits of my reading comfort but also marked the inception of a deep and understanding relationship with the woman who would become my wife.

Lastly, James, the Brother of Jesus, shook the foundations of my religious faith, transforming my worldview and shaping my pedagogical philosophy. This book, despite its flaws, helped me confront the discrepancies between received histories and the more intricate, often concealed narratives of reality.

These three books have undoubtedly catalyzed significant shifts in my life, and their effect on my personal evolution stands as a testimony to the transformative power of books.

Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Categories
life politics

Standing Up for LGBTQIA+ Rights: A Personal & National History

In September 2021, my child’s third-grade teacher dismissed his class for recess by using some fun way to divide them, with one group going first and the other going second. He did this often, with the identity of the two groups changing based on his mood. He might divide them based on their birthdays or their cookie preferences, or maybe about their opinions of Harry Potter.

On this particular day, he took what he thought was the easy route and divided them by sex: girls would go to recess first, and boys would go second.

He did not realize his prompt created a true crisis of conscience for my child.

A day later, my eight-year-old child came out to their mother and me.

They did it in their typical fashion. We had sent them to bed and were now relaxing on the couch, watching television. My child should have been asleep for at least half an hour, but they came stepping down the stairs in a Hogwarts robe (in Gryffindor colors) with their footie pajamas beneath it. They asked to speak privately with my wife upstairs, and after hemming and hawing, my wife acquiesced and followed them back upstairs.

About fifteen minutes later, my wife came down and told me it was my turn. I sighed, put down my phone, and walked upstairs, where I found my child smiling and kneeling on my bed. As I reached the top step, they slammed their face into the mattress, giddy with excitement. I sat beside them and asked, “What’s up?”

Without taking their face out of the mattress, they said, “I think I’m nonbinary.”

I don’t remember my exact words, but I made it clear I supported any label they claimed for themselves.

I also urged them to be wary of caging themselves behind a label. If, later in life, they started to experience themselves as a boy or girl, I didn’t want them to feel like it was wrong to feel that way, just like it wasn’t wrong to feel nonbinary.

Finally, I acknowledged the power that comes from matching the right word to the right sense, and I told them I hoped they now felt that sense of power.

My eight-year-old looked up at me and said they understood. They hugged and thanked me for being their dad.

During our conversation, they said they wanted to come out because when their teacher had divided the class into boys and girls, they felt distressed by the question and didn’t know which group they belonged to. But here’s the thing: they didn’t want to come out just so their teacher would know they were nonbinary; they wanted to come out so that any other nonbinary students in the class wouldn’t suffer the same stress and anxiety my child had felt.

They came out so they could protect others.

Yesterday, Texas became the most populous state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for minors. They are the eighteenth state to target children whose gender, like my child’s, does not align with the one assigned to them at birth.

Using data suggested by a 2017 study from the Williams Institute on the age of individuals who identify as transgender in the United States, roughly 48,000 children between the ages of 13 and 17 are affected by these laws.

To put that in perspective, Manhattan has a population density of 66,000 people per square mile. If you were to round up ALL of the gender-non-conforming youth in those eighteen states and box them into one square mile of Manhattan (as I’m sure the politicians in those states would like to do), you would still need to add the entire population of a town the size of Concord, MA, to that one square mile if you wanted it to equal the borough’s current population density.

Still, with the volume of outrage coming from those who seek to limit the gender expression of these kids, you’d think our country was being taken over by a horde of woke parents with rusty knives who are driven to slice off the still-budding breasts and undropped testicles of all the nation’s children.

But the children affected by the laws in these eighteen states comprise less than 0.015% of the country. According to the same study, the entire population of gender-non-coming youth is probably no greater than 0.73% of the country.

The political party behind these laws — the Republican Party — depends on social issues to stir up the energy of its base. Having lost the original battle over segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, they spent the next fifty years continuing to lose on every other major social issue.

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court found in Reed v. Reed that the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from being discriminated against based on sex. This was extended in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prevented sex discrimination throughout the education sphere, including school sports, sexual harassment policies, academic opportunities in engineering and the sciences, and discrimination based on pregnancy. It also (and most famously) recognized a federal right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.

With the “Reagan Revolution,” the 1980s offered the conservative counterpunch to the liberal victories of the previous decades. The attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment finally failed in the states after having been passed by Congress a decade earlier. Beyond the Reagan administration’s refusal to fight the AIDS epidemic, which was decimating the country’s (and the world’s) gay population, homosexuals suffered another major setback when the Supreme Court upheld a Georgian law criminalizing sodomy in private between consenting adults.

But there were some progressive victories. The power of Congress to extend the Federal minimum wage and overtime pay to state employees through the Fair Labor Standards Act was upheld, as was the right to parody public officials in the media, the right to stage a boycott to enact social changes, the right to burn the American flag in protest, and the right of students to be free from the religious doctrine of creationism in public schools.

The 1990s saw the Supreme Court uphold the fundamental principles of Roe v. Wade, affirming an individual’s right to abortion before fetal viability. The ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey extended the right further by acknowledging that an individual’s decision to undergo an abortion takes place in “a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.” The verdict invalidated Republican attempts to involve the state in discussions between pregnant individuals and their healthcare providers.

The Court also prevented the state of Colorado from enshrining discrimination against homosexuals in its state constitution, struck down the conservative moralizing of the Internet inherent in the Communications Decency Act and Child Online Protection Act, and prevented public schools from forcing attendees at graduations to listen to religious prayers.

In the 2000s, the Court reaffirmed its finding that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits school-sponsored prayer. Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe extended its interpretation of the clause to prohibit student-led and student-initiated prayer that utilizes school-supplied materials (in this case, a loudspeaker at a football game).

It also overruled its earlier decision in the 1980s and determined that all laws that criminalize consensual, same-sex sexual conduct violate an individual’s right to privacy under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Court affirmed the right of homosexuals to receive a marriage license (allowing for civil unions).

In the 2010s, the Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the right to marry violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, allowing homosexuals to gain all the benefits of marriage.

Despite capturing the legislative agenda of the Republican party, right-wing conservative Christians (a.k.a. “evangelicals”) had been losing in Federal courts for nearly fifty years. Progressives such as myself might be forgiven for claiming that the late 20th-century rise of the religious right was merely the death rattle of conservative America.

After all, demography equals destiny, and more and more children seem to be coming of age in a secular America with a fundamental belief and constitutionally defended notion of equal rights for all.

Unfortunately, as Monty Python tried to teach us, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

The makeup of the Supreme Court changed drastically during the Trump administration. During his four years in office, President Trump named as many justices to the court as President Obama did during his eight years. Two of those justices (Justice Gorsuch and Justice Coney-Barrett) resulted from anti-democratic maneuverings by the Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell.

In 2016, Sen. McConnell refused to allow a vote on President Obama’s final nominee because, as he said at the time, he didn’t think it was fair to vote on a Supreme Court nominee during a presidential election year. However, when Justice Ginsburg died two months prior to the presidential contest in 2020, Sen. McConnell rushed through the approval process of Justice Coney-Barrett to ensure Justice Ginsburg’s seat was filled by a Republican nominee.

Thanks to Senator McConnell, today’s Supreme Court has a comfortable, conservative majority, even if you discount the predominantly conservative voting record of Chief Justice Roberts, whom arch-conservative critics call a “Republican In Name Only.”

The conservative majority on the Roberts Court has, most famously, struck down its holdings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that there is no Federal right to an abortion. The decision empowered state legislatures to determine whether a pregnant individual has the right to an abortion and what limits can be placed on that right.

The Roberts Court also dismantled the enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, erasing nearly 60 years of civil rights protections for Black Americans in the hopes of enshrining the power of White politicians for generations to come.

In October, the Court heard the oral arguments in two cases related to affirmative action. The arguments did not differ from those made in earlier cases when the Court upheld the use of race in college admission decisions, but with the new makeup of the court, conservatives have their best chance yet of erasing the policy of affirmative action, not only from education but from housing, government contracting, and employment.

The Roberts Court has also begun to chip away at the wall separating church from state. The football coach at a public high school regularly conducted demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the school’s football field. When the school decided not to renew his contract based on his behavior, he sued them for violating the Free Expression clause under the First Amendment. Even with lower courts supporting the school board’s decision based on the Court’s precedents around the Establishment Clause, the Roberts Court mischaracterized the facts to overturn the lower courts’ rulings. While the majority’s opinion suggests a narrow interpretation of the case, religious supporters see it as a sign of the Court’s willingness to revisit all its decisions on school prayer.

Is it any wonder that Republican politicians are going after transgender rights? Without abortion, racism, or school prayer to stoke the moral outrage of the rubes in the cheap seats, what other moral scapegoat could they use to drive Republican voters out of their pews and into the voting booths?

It doesn’t help that in 2020, 49.5% of white evangelicals believed that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Add to that the fact that President Trump banned transgender individuals from serving in the military, erased gender identity as a basis for sex discrimination in healthcare, and allowed sex-based homeless shelters to deny access to transgender people (and not just those who self-identified as trans, but anyone who the shelter believed may be transgender based on such fool-proof signs as height, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other gender stereotypes).

Suppose God’s anointed messenger says being transgender is a sin, and the Supreme Court has taken away all the other wedge issues. In that case, it only makes sense to concentrate your political party’s incessant propaganda on saving the children.

My ten-year-old child came out as nonbinary because they wanted to protect those who could not speak for themselves. After telling their mother and me about their gender non-conformity, they asked us to speak with their teacher so he would understand the stress he had inadvertently caused to his students.

Since my child came out, over a dozen children in their school have confided to them that they are some flavor of LGBTQIA+. I’m talking about nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old kids here. They come to my child because my wife and I have taught them to be proud of who they are, to stand up for their rights, and to defend themselves against anyone who tries to rob them of their power.

The other students come out to my child because, as my kiddo told me when I questioned the number, “they know I’m safe, Dad.”

Earlier this year, the state of Vermont passed the first law in the nation that explicitly protects healthcare providers from being sued or prosecuted for providing gender-affirming care. This was how my home state told its LGBTQIA+ youth what my child’s behavior told their friends: You’re safe.

My ten-year-old tells their mother and me that they want to be a lawyer when they get older.

I can only dream that they sue these hateful legislatures for violating their children’s right to be and express themselves in every color of the rainbow.

My child’s experiences are nested within a broader socio-political landscape that is downright frightening. The rhetoric and the rulemaking of the Republican party are resistant to change, and our nation is scarred by battles fought in courtrooms and legislative chambers.

While the laws and attitudes we’re currently facing are disheartening, I do not despair. I find immense hope in my child’s resilience and courage. I see it in the way the kids in their school grasp the complexities of sexuality and gender, viewing themselves honestly. Their bravery in accepting and declaring their identities should inspire all of us.

They fuel my motivation to build a society where truth is respected, not rejected. A society where each individual is allowed to explore, understand, and declare their identity without fear of repercussions.

We may not know the next chapter in our nation’s history. But together, we, as parents, teachers, neighbors, and allies, can write it. We must forge ahead with compassion for those different from us and a steadfast commitment to safeguarding each individual’s right to be who they are.

Categories
life

Lessons From John Perry Barlow, The Real Most Interesting Man in the World

John Perry Barlow died five years ago this week. He was the lesser known of the Grateful Dead’s lyricists, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Wyoming cowboy Republican politician who once worked for Dick Cheney, a mentor to John F. Kennedy Jr., and a defender and promoter of the early Internet’s libertarian ethics.

He also wrote these twenty-five principles of adult behavior. We should all know them, memorize them, and live them.

  1. Be patient. No matter what.
  2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
  3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
  4. Expand your sense of the possible.
  5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
  6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
  7. Tolerate ambiguity.
  8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
  9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
  10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
  11. Give up blood sports.
  12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
  13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
  14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
  15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
  16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
  17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
  18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
  19. Become less suspicious of joy.
  20. Understand humility.
  21. Remember that love forgives everything.
  22. Foster dignity.
  23. Live memorably.
  24. Love yourself.
  25. Endure.

Categories
life politics

The Nation Needs A Salary Cap

The majority of American sports leagues limit what they pay their players. The NFL, NHL, and MLS have “hard caps” that teams cannot go over, while the NBA’s “soft cap” penalizes teams that exceed it.

Major League Baseball doesn’t have a salary cap, which is why we see such obscene payrolls in baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, had a total payroll of $260 million in 2022, which means they spent more money on their 40-player roster this year than the entire state of Vermont did on special-education ($213 million).

Freddie Freeman received a team-high $27 million from the Dogers in 2022.

Even with its hard cap, the NFL had a total payroll of about $6 billion. To put that in relative terms, the NFL’s payroll was higher than or comparable to the 2021 annual spending of four states: Delaware; South Dakota; Vermont; and New Hampshire. There are 1,696 players in the NFL; 1.3 million people live in New Hampshire.

Of course, if NFL owners are spending that much money on players, how much more must they be making on the backs of those players?

The most profitable team in the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys, have an operating income of over $280 million. They’re also the most valuable team at $8 billion. If Jerry Jones, the Cowboys owner, sold today, he would be able support the entire state of Delaware and still have about $4 billion left over to open the “Whites Only” high-school of his youthful dreams.

Jerry Jones in 1957 participating in a violent protest against black students attending a public school in Little Rock
Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, at Arkansas’ North Little Rock High in 1957, where he was one of several White students denying access to six Black students. In related news, over his 30 years as owner of the Cowboys, Mr. Jones has yet to hire a black coach.

Salary caps in sports are intended to ensure parity across the league. No offense against Green Bay, Wisconsin, but without a salary cap, there’s no way a city of just over 100,000 people could generate enough revenue to compete for players against bigger markets such as Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, or Chicago. Thankfully, as a result of the salary cap, no one can predict what will happen on any given Sunday and a small city like Green Bay can afford the highest paid player in the NFL.

There’s Rich. Then There’s Unfathomably Rich.

But let’s go back to Jerry Jones. According to Bloomberg, the Cowboy’s owner was worth roughly $11.5 billion in Dec. 2022. That’s a $2.5 billion dollar increase from a year earlier. Mr. Jones’ income in 2022 was more than 165,271 times the median U.S. household income.

According to Forbes, Mr. Jones isn’t even in the top 40 richest people in America.

Elon Musk lost more money per minute in 2022 than nearly three median American households earn in a year.

Elon Musk, the richest person in the United States according to Bloomberg, lost $107 billion in 2022 (he actually lost $4 billion just in the hours it took me to write this article!).

Don’t feel too bad for him though; Mr. Musk is still doing fine with a valuation of $164 billion (as of this moment, anyway).

If we try to put Mr. Musk’s loss in more relatively down-to-earth terms, his wealth decreased $203,442 per minute, every minute, this year. His minute-by-minute loss was almost 300% of the median U.S. household income — in other words, Mr. Musk lost more money every minute than the combined yearly income of nearly three median American households.

Guatam Adani, the third-richest person on Earth, had the highest year-to-date change in 2022 when he increased his fortunes by $48.7 billion. Mr. Adani owns the largest port operator in India, as well as the largest closely-held thermal coal producer and largest coal trader. His yearly increase was over a million times greater than the median U.S. household income.

Mr. Adani is an Indian industrialist, however, so we should compare his income to his fellow citizens, the median of whom makes less than US $3,400 a year.

Compared to his countrymen, Guatam Adani made 14 million times what the median Indian household made in 2022.

“Every Billionaire Is a Policy Failure.”

These numbers make no sense. I don’t care what Mr. Adani or Mr. Musk bring to the table, they are not (as individuals) worthy of their wealth. As Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has argued, every billionaire is a policy failure.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tried to address that failure by proposing (in the press, not in the Congress) a 70% marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million. Millionaires would send the feds ¢70 of every dollar they earn above $10 million (while still paying 10% on their first $19,400; 12% between $19,401 and $78,950, etc., all the way up through the various tax brackets).

No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, 2020

If Mr. Adani paid taxes in the United States under Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan, he would still have taken home roughly $14 billion of the $48 billion he made this year. That’s more than the state budgets of Vermont, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined.

The $34 billion the government received from this one individual could cover the expenditures of 20 different states.

Mr. Musk complained of having to pay the world’s largest tax bill in 2021 when he (reportedly) sent the federal government $11 billion.

I’m all for the richest man in America paying the highest tax bill ever, but like those sports-team owners carrying those obscene payrolls — if that’s what he paid taxes, how much richer must he actually be?

A 70% Tax Rate Isn’t Enough

I’m a fan of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but I don’t agree with a 70% marginal tax rate. It institutes a soft cap. The nation needs a hard cap.

Between the day the U.S. formally entered a lockdown (March 18, 2020) and the day the U.S. passed one million deaths due to COVID-19 (May 4, 2022), U.S. billionaires increased their worth (as a group) by $1.71 trillion.

Seriously: you can’t even imagine a trillion.

In June 2022, the left-leaning (but factual) Institute for Policy Studies reported that the wage gap between CEOs and median US workers jumped to 670-to-1 (49 of the 300 firms they studied had ratios of over 1,000-to-1). For every $1 a median worker made, a CEO brought home upwards of $670. Only six of the firms studied had pay gaps of less than 100-to-1.

In another report, the Institute demonstrated how several states (and countries) actually have laws on the books to help these billionaires “avoid federal taxation, cheating the U.S. out of revenue with which it could combat poverty or invest in infrastructure.”

More than half of the states mentioned in the report have regressive tax policies, cutting taxes on the wealthy and forcing the poor to pay taxes on a disproportionate share of their income. The poorest 20% of households in South Dakota, for example, pay about 11.2% of their income in taxes, while the top 1% of South Dakotans paid about 2.5%.

The richest of the rich not only have more money than they need but actively conspire to keep what they have despite what our democratic republic requires of them.

These selfish assholes don’t deserve to keep the 30% that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez allows them.

Tax Incomes Over $1 million by 70% & Over $10 million by 100%

There’s no reason to allow billionaires to exist. Hell, there’s barely a reason to allow millionaires to exist. If an individual can’t satisfy their needs and wants on $1 million a year, then those needs and wants are probably immoral.

I’m willing to grant that a million dollar limit is a radical suggestion in capitalist America, so I’ll judiciously allow our top earners a maximum income of $10 million a year. They’ll just have to send ¢70 of every dollar over $1 million to the feds, and once they hit $10 million, every extra $1 is now ours.

If the US implemented such a drastic (but reasonable) policy, it would be normal to wonder what would happen to the country’s revenues. They wouldn’t include, for example, an $11 billion check from Mr. Musk.

But you also have to wonder how it would affect the country’s outlays. 40% of the 300 firms studied by the Institute for Policy Studies received federal contracts in 2021 totalling over $30 billion. Some of that $30 billion went to the outlandish salaries and bonuses of those firms executives.

A National Salary Cap Spreads the Wealth

Just like in the professional sports leagues, the intent of a national salary cap is to spread the wealth.

According to Salary.com, Walmart Inc.’s CEO made over $21 million in 2021, its CEO of Sam’s Club made over $12 million, and both its CEO of Walmart US and its Global CTO made over $11 million each. Its median (median!) employee pay, however, was only $20,942; half of all of its workers made less than that. Walmart’s CEO made $1,078 for every $1 its median (median!) worker made.

Walmart paid its CEO $1,150 for every $1 it paid to the bottom 10% of its associates.

If $11 million of the $21 million Walmart paid to its CEO would be sent directly to the feds, plus $6.3 million of the $9 million between $1 million and $10 million, it wouldn’t make sense for Walmart or its CEO to agree to his contract. Instead, the company would (hopefully) divert those millions back to the lower half of its other 2.3 million employees (more than half of whom, remember, make less than $20,000 a year).

You can think of this as a new form of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics (a.k.a., supply-side economics) posits that allowing the rich to keep their money will lead them to invest in their workers and research and development, creating new jobs — in other words, the wealth of the rich should trickle down to the average American.

Unfortunately, trickle down economics underestimated the power of greed. It also forgot that things only trickle down after they fill up a limited container; otherwise, they just keep growing.

In my version of trickle down economics, the maximum limit is $10 million, with money pouring out faster and faster as soon as it breaks $1 million. Extend this idea to corporate profits in general, and all of sudden, the nation itself, and all of its workers, will become as successful as the NFL.

Categories
asides life

A Tweet Before Dying

From A Tweet Before Dying:

The whole tech industry—by which I mean the cluster of companies that sell code-empowered products to billions of humans—is in extraordinary decline… I’m grieving a little over here. But life must go on, despite who…owns Twitter, and how ridiculous the metaverse might be. That’s why every morning, sometimes before breakfast, when I am in despair, I remember the three letters that always bring me comfort: PDF… This was the original function of the web—to transmit learned texts to those seeking them. Humans have been transmitting for millennia, of course, which is how historians are able to quote Pliny’s last tweet (“Something up w/ Vesuvius, brb”). But the seeking is important, too; people should explore, not simply feed. Whatever will move society forward is not hidden inside the deflating giants. It’s out there in some pitiful PDF, with a title like “A New Platform for Communication” or “Machine Learning Applications for Community Organization.”