Overload

First order of business:
Everyone complaining that Representatives counted on their staffs to read and report on the American Health Care Act, rather than reading it for themselves, should read the entire text of the bill before writing, drawing or saying anything about it ever again. 

Fair is fair and we all hate hypocrites, right?

 

Arctic Circle makes a lucky landing on the moment with this commentary on how quickly exposure to the Internet will destroy good vibes and optimism.

Given that Alex Hallatt isn't even American and is at the moment in Spain and presumably has relatively normal deadlines for Sunday comics, her synchronicity is awe-inspiring.

I have not seen so much mean-spirited, ill-informed hostility in social media since before the election, which was bad enough that I stopped reading Facebook before blogging each morning because it so curdled my mood.

Having unfollowed or defriended rabid Trumpophiles then, I'm now starting in on people who spread unfounded, paranoid misinformation about the health care legislation and those who voted for it.

It makes me think of the old story of the man with two wives: 

One wife was young, and, to prevent her husband from seeming too old for her, she would pluck out his gray hairs.

His other wife was old, and, to prevent her husband from seeming younger than she was, she would pluck out his black hairs.

The outcome in this case would be nothing but dog videos and photos of food and that might not be such a bad thing.

It also makes me sympathetic to John Adams who said, in defending the soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre: 

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Although that was before we had the Internet.

 

The difference between me and Stephan Pastis being that he can make a tidy living from pointing out the dismal nature of our current reality while I can only do so as a hobby.

 

Which segues, in rather bumpy fashion, to Strange Brew and my actual job, because, in addition to editing the work of my young writers each week, I write brief health and science pieces, and, in our next edition, I cover space debris, as illustrated here by NASA and as discussed here and here.

The debris itself is bad enough, but now there are tiny satellites being launched in clouds, with Elon Musk currently planning to give everyone broadband access (Yay!) by placing 4,425 tiny satellites in orbit (Yikes!)

Basically, our low-orbit layer is currently like driving on the Autoroute Décarie in Montreal, where everyone goes 70 miles an hour six feet from each others' bumpers and it works perfectly well just so long as nobody touches their brakes or changes lanes.

If one of Elon's 4,425 little flashlight-sized satellites, or one of India's recent flock of a mere 104 minisputniks, should go cattywumpus and run into an astronaut's glove, the chain reaction could spawn cosmic chaos.

(Confession: Though I use it as an apocalyptic metaphor, I used to love driving on the Décarie, especially the portion that dips under the city for a couple of miles and is like playing Pole Position. Well, except that you don't get any extra lives. But Elon says we're all just characters in someone's videogame anyway.)

 

My hero has always been Davy 

At the other end of technology, Edison Lee revisits the American cowboy, an icon of long-forgotten childhoods in a fading memory.

Growing up in the 1950s, I idolized Wild Bill Hickok, though my older brother was more of a Hopalong Cassidy type, and there's probably a dozen or more doctoral dissertations in why the icon faded.

The cowboy emerged from Ned Buntline's romantic accounts, with Owen Wister's "The Virginian" as the first western novel (and still a pretty good read, BTW), and got its biggest boost from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Shows that toured the country with for-real people like Sitting Bull and stunt performers like Annie Oakley and legions of riders in various fantasy attire.

Maybe the combination of Tonto, and Cochise from Broken Arrow, and The Saga of Andy Burnett added a lot of humanity to the traditional "cowboys and injuns" trope, but we were more apt to fight "bad guys" than Indians.

Which didn't make us little white angels, mind you: We happily waged backyard wars against "the Japs."

Still, we'd grown up with Davy Crockett, who wrote of a future president's favorite president:

It was expected of me that I was to bow to the name of Andrew Jackson, and follow him in all his motions, and windings, and turnings, even at the expense of my consciences and judgment. Such a thing was new to me, and a total stranger to my principles. … His famous, or rather I should say infamous Indian bill was brought forward and, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said it was a favorite measure of the President, and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in everything that I believed was honest and right; but further than this, I wouldn't go for him, or any other man in the whole creation.

We never read that in school, but we saw this on TV:

The time will and must come, when honesty will receive its reward, and
when the people of this nation will be brought to a sense of their duty,
and will pause and reflect how much it cost us to redeem ourselves
from the government of one man. -- Davy Crockett

 

Comments

[Dave from Philadelphia]

Boy ... did this blog bring back childhood memories ...

[Bookworm]

Stephen Colbert's monologue one night this week said TrumpCare would cause insurance premiums for the elderly to go up to 5 times as much as the young. I wondered if that was right, so, thanks to your link, I looked for it. It's there alright. (The current limit is 3 to 1.) It's Title I Subtitle D Sec 135.

[Alex Hallatt]

Unfortunately, it wasn't just luck, but witnessing the internet becoming more and more vitriolic.

But thank you for the shout out.

[Robert H Cunningham]

Five o'clock Saturday afternoon," Wait for me, Wild Bill."

[Mike Peterson]

Somehow, it never bothered me at 5 years old that Jingles P. Jones and Andy from "Andy's Gang" were clearly the same person.

Not as much as it bothers me today that the "Swamp Fox" was Leslie Neilsen.

[Mike Peterson]

(And, yeah, Alex, I'm betting that, if Arctic Circle were running in France, people today would be saying, 'Wow, she sure nailed that!')

[Mary in Ohio]

Stewart Edward White's Andy Burnett books were a pretty good read, too ! Thanks for the memories - and the links !

[Boise Ed]

Instead of linking to the Wikipedia article, perhaps you should have linked to the TV show you referred to, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2rOs4u3aU8 . That was a childhood favorite of mine. I even had a faux coonskin cap.

But wow, I had no idea that the "Swamp Fox" was Leslie Neilsen of Airport fame.

[Hank G.]

I don’t expect Representatives to read the full text of all legislation, but shouldn’t their staffs brief them so that they know what the bill contains?

[Mike Peterson]

The impression I got from interviews was that the Reps had been briefed. That is, "I didn't read it but my staff did" suggests same.

As for the link, I thought Crockett's disagreement with Jackson on the treatment of Indians was relevant in terms of gutless Congresscritters who won't stand up to Jackson's groupie. (Who hasn't read a biography of the late general, but I'm sure has been briefed.)

[parnellnelson]

It's not like reading the bill was going to change anything anyway. Rep. Collins and everybody else knew how they were going to vote even before the bill was printed, me thinks.

[Mike Peterson]

She's a senator, and nobody has ever known how Susan Collins was going to vote on anything. That's what I like most about her.