Hold The Underwear!

My first instinct is to go "see, I told you last week shit was going to get in-a-bad-way weird," but that's hard to take any credit for. It doesn't even qualify as prognostication when there are really only less than four likely outcomes and all of them are directly related to the same people and the same impulses. My bold prediction was that "something will happen!" and I guess we can be relieved it was only yet another late night talk show host getting summarily fired and not, like, an act of violent retribution. Yes, we're down one Jimmy, but the basic rule of late-night TV for the last couple of decades is we stock Jimmys so deep, you never really run out. Things are a little more dire now as we've only got the one Jimmy left, but he's taken steps to anchor and aluminum-clad himself against the battering of the growing storm, for the low-low cost of his basic human dignity.

Kimmel was ostensibly fired for saying insensitive and outrageous things about the Charlie Kirk killing, but it's not even below the surface where we see the issue isn't so much murder as it is merger. Murder is an A-1 problem that warrants no defense. But side by side with the Stephen Colbert thing, the suggestion emerges that the exact same people--the Trumpified FCC--finds points of leverage to lean on corporate interests caught in delicate negotiations for which they need federal approval, then attaches the string tied to the back of the suit-jacket of the very public comedian they don't like, resulting in a yoink off the stage. This is a very cynical analysis, I know, but it starts to look a little bit like the murder of Charlie Kirk is being deployed as a cover in the Kimmel "suspension" to avoid the awkward, muffled indefensibility of the Colbert cancellation. Congratulations I suppose to the Nexstar people, whoever they are, and to the Walt Disney Corporation for their act of radical compliance. Everyone denies this and all is couched in the right number of broadcast-safe allegedly-s. It's also a shallow analysis, but that's what makes it seem somewhat compelling: I'm not actually capable of a deep analysis as the business of corporate law isn't really one of the topics I know anything meaningful about. If it were a category on Jeopardy, I'd still well clear of it. I'd go for "Potent Potables" first and I don't even drink. One of the answers is reliably to do with sherry, whoever she is. But if I can cobble this chain of events together, we can't even deign to call it "underhanded." It's pretty openly handed.

It's also not novel or interesting (and yet here I go!) to notice that the loudness and brazen-ness of the perpetrated act ends up kind of being the point. The first Trump administration was hampered by professionals who knew what they were doing monkeying up the works by insisting on actually doing the jobs for which they were ostensibly hired. Inevitably, they would be fired for competence, or to put it another way, for not offering the most full-throated defense for an insane and reckless idea by the idiot Boy President when asked about it within a half mile of a microphone. On the way out, the president would make sure we all knew they were useless, backstabbing weasels who didn't deserve any level of employment and the fact that he failed to notice that before literally all of them were hired in the first place, well, that just proves how sneaky and sinister they were.

Now the most raging, virulent, audacious incompetence is not only excused but praised as long as the person doing it remembers to extol--as loudly as possible!--the courage and virtue of their boss. The fireable offense they could commit would be to stammer in public when questioned about the work they do. That's the old model, where when pointedly questioned by a lawmaker or a journalist, a functionary caught in a lie or not able to explain away a deficiency or a public fuck up mews and burbles and eventually crumbles, and that's the scandal. Recent testimony in Congress by FBI Director Kash "Krash Out" Patel and RFK "I'll Kill As Many As Your Children As It Takes To Keep Them Safe" Jr. shows that the new model is not only to defend the indefensibility of their records, but it's to SHOUT DOWN ANGRILY those who dare question. If you're wondering how committed they are to this course of action, think of what it takes for someone with RFK Jr.'s voice to actually shout.

That's the line now: we must be outraged, and the source of the outrage itself is irrelevant, so long as it is correctly performed in public. In the short term, it makes everything feel empty and hopeless, as if everything is an edifice and no building, like the rebuilt decoy version of Rock Ridge from the climax of the 1974 historical documentary Blazing Saddles. In the end there, the forces of cynicism and evil and Harvey Korman were defeated; the main difference now is there's no obvious Cleavon Little figure to save us, even though we don't deserve it.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

OK, I don't even want to write today, not because I can't think of anything, which is my normal point of departure as far as procrastination goes. In the guise of "looking for inspiration" I'll be eight tabs deep into an internet rabbit hole about the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world or the post-Laverne & Shirley career of the guy who played The Big Ragoo. Turns out that guy died just a few years ago and he wasn't even 70! Well, at least we know Lenny is still kicking around.

No, the problem is that there's too much inspiration. We've entered into one of those deranged periods where the content and the hot takes are so thick in the air it's impossible to tell which way to move, ever since right-wing political somebody Charlie Kirk was shot and killed yesterday.

As a person who writes a thing that is public, when the atmosphere becomes this saturated with a single subject, you become obligated, to a degree. This even counts when your "public" is a modest, retiring number of low-volume but of high-discernment and class (and well dressed and handsome, don't think I can't tell). That's enough to constitute and audience though, if we're quoting Jesus. To paraphrase Matthew 18:20, if two people show up, you gotta get the puppets out and do the whole show. But Jesus had it easy, he was a prop guy. Loaves, fishes, a whole-ass human-size cross and his big closer, the cave escape. It's a little hack in retrospect, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it still really plays in Branson, Missouri.

Me, in these heady days before I give up and start feeding prompts to an AI version of writer's autotune, I can't whip out a walk-on-water trick, I have to grind words. It feels too weird to ignore it, even though I couldn't really tell you who Charlie Kirk was beyond "right wing" and "not an elected politician" as recently as Wednesday morning. I couldn't tell you where he lived or what his voice sounded like or what platform he was on... I could probably draw him if you asked me to, but that's kind of cheating as they all have that same JD Vance-Ben Shapiro aesthetic of pasty brunette white dudes in poorly fitting clothes.

So do I have a take? I'm on paragraph five to tell you: not really. It was just a week ago I reiterated to you guys I didn't wish physical harm on anyone. That's a long-standing personal conviction I take pretty seriously, but ever since I heard about this yesterday while I was at work, since I'm not entirely off social media, I had to hear about how I, a Dirty Leftist, revel in this stuff and DEFINITELY a) knew who Charlie Kirk was, b) really super hated him! because of all the truths he did!; and c) celebrated his violent death in front of hundreds of unsuspecting people.

Since then I've done really the minimal amount of research, admittedly from probably the least sympathetic sources like The Guardian to orient myself, but it immediately became too depressing to continue. I haven't developed anything. It's a liberating thing when you realize you're definitively the wrong guy to ask about a thing.

Really, what it came down to was this: as soon as I heard about it, I freaked out a little. He didn't seem like a pleasant or admirable person, but I wish he hadn't been shot, for his sake, for the sake of the witnesses, for the sake of his family and for my own. I had to reawaken the group chat with my three GenZ adult sons as the anxiety compulsion ordered me to tell them to keep their heads on a swivel, partially because this is a reminder that no open space is ultimately safe in this country from random gun violence, and because the charged atmosphere felt like a green light to people who have been waiting, engines revving to red-lining, for the word GO to get out and do some really heinous shit to "evil leftists" who will finally--finally! we're certain it was them!--did the thing they've been fantasizing about for ages.

This is even though we currently don't know the shooter. And we don't know the motivation. This would not be clear if you were watching Fox News. They killed him because they couldn't shut him up. None of them will say who they is, but I'm less worried that it's specifically me and my tragic, stubborn leftism and more that one of us will be at whatever public event at which they choose to exact their ritual of blood-extraction payback. Just because they won't be shooting at me or my kids doesn't mean was can't be shot.

A faceless they is effectively all faces. The only reprieve any of us got from this incidence of murder is that the assailant only fired once and no one else was maimed or killed. I have no confidence that will be the case next time.

Jesus. See, I told you I didn't want to write about this. Nothing good can come out of peer-pressuring yourself.

I Don't Want To Go On The Cart

I want to say up front: I feel fine.

I also want to acknowledge that, as a non-public figure with about the same socio-cultural profile as Jeff Dobsky (you don't know him) and Sandra Gilmartin (you saw her once coming out of a dry cleaner in a strip mall by your parents' old house in like 2004-2005, something like that), or many other people whose names I could also make up, but would have the exact same relevance to the general public that I do. The fact that they're invented and published here, ironically, makes them immediately actually more interesting than me and more internet-searchable, so there, I've just created two of my betters out of thin electronic air.

I was about to make a joke like "there are debilitating diseases that are more well known than I am," but then I realized that's probably a good, solid pillar of a functioning public health system and less of a commentary on my notoriety. If I were better known than, say, herpes, we'd all be in a huge amount of trouble. And probably a lot itchier.

Besides, it's not a great time to take shots at public health as an idea. The ground there is a bit shaky at the moment.

But it's not just because I'm a completely anonymous, faceless* public non-entity that you have no cause to be alarmed about my health, but more specifically, I'm not a) the president nor am I b) 286 years old, nor also c) completely devoid of any habits normally consistent with prolonging or preserving life.

None of these, of course, are true of Donald Trump, a near-enough-as-makes-no-difference octogenarian living on a diet of saturated fat deep fried in other saturated fats, aspartame and human grievance and whose idea of exercise is whatever unmeasurable amount of effort it takes to push the golf cart pedal enough to make it go. Admittedly, he does that a lot, but I feel confident expressing my doubts that he does it at a rate that would result in any kind of cardiovascular benefit.

Of course if I were a principled and ethical journalist on the level of a Jake Tapper, unhindered by secondary or conflicting interests, I would have definitely been locked in over the developing story this past weekend of Donald Trump's mysterious lack of public activity and all the gathering signs of physical/medical degeneration or distress. Apparently (and I missed this because I was outside, as the kids say, touching grass over the holiday long weekend) this developed into a whole buzz online and in the media around Trump's health including speculation that he had actually died, to the point where the president, apparently exactly as aware of this as I was, was pushed to speak about it from his position as a non-dead person this week.

Not only was I busy, I think I just missed it because "old person is old and has old-person stuff going on" is not much of a story, so it all just flew under my radar. Also the internet is the internet, so depending on the media I'm seeing it in, "the president might be dead" as a phrase wouldn't even necessarily register for me on, like, twitter or bluesky or whatever. That's old-school interrupt the Sunday morning infomercial broadcast kind of news if it were actually happening. Even while indirectly trying to (as I was), I wouldn't have been able to escape it.

Trump has issues. This is not new. This is also the place where, if I were a total hack, I'd be making "if he went into decline how could we even tell?" or "he can't die, the evil ones last forever" kind of half-joke remarks. But I'm not that lazy, or rather I am cursed with enough self-awareness to be embarrassed by those particular laziness tracks. All I'll say is I've never really wished harm on anyone, include Donald Trump, and not just because I already know explicitly how much JD Vance sucks. I wish the same thing I wish for Joe Biden and his health journey: independent of my judgement or opinion, an outcome commensurate to what he deserves. Read that how you want.

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*not literally, I do have a face. If I were literally a faceless guy, you probably would have heard of me.

Charging...

Theres's an adjustment period to all change, for all humans everywhere. It's true of course that there are loads and loads of people (measuring perhaps even in the low dozens) for whom a change of life circumstances--family, employment, finances, romantic, religious, health, celebrity, level of metallic sheen in your skin tone, all the normal major ones--is just another thing to be noted, piled on top of the stack labeled EXPERIENCES, integrated and moved on from. They can just keep swimming forward, eating as they need, like sharks, but with dead-er eyes. 

Unfortunately, I'm in other category where the slightest disruption of routine or what I know to be predictable is grounds for a late-night impromptu phone session with my therapist at the emergency off-hours rate not covered by insurance. It's possible in this way I'm something of an overachiever in the the-known-is-inherently-better-than-all-other-options scope of human behavior. A decade-plus ago I was the guy trying to salvage a marriage that had already clearly failed, and living miserably because of it. It's embarrassing in retrospect, but faced with the prospect of, say, opening a new bank account and re-establishing your entire online bill paying routine, boy, you'll tolerate a lot. Everything worked out great in retrospect. I mean, I'm with a credit union now, so, that's two toxic relationships I launched myself out of, my marriage AND multinational corporate banking. It's been a real hot streak.

My credit union has an online banking app, which my old bank had too but I was always too wary of losing it because, you know, multinational corporate, etc. You can google "bank of america data breach" if you want, but you're really going to have to specify a year if you want to find just one. The good news is with the app I can access and monitor my bills whenever I want, wherever I happen to be. The downside, as you can imagine, is that now I can access and monitor my bills whenever I want, wherever I happen to be.

So here I am trying to adjust already to the luxurious new emotional obstacle of bonding myself to a new car. Already something of a struggle, if a happy one, just because I'm a native-born Anxiety American trying to metabolize something that wasn't part of my normal six-ish weeks ago. If that wasn't weird enough, it doesn't run on gasoline of any kind, which is admittedly way easier to get used to on a practical level when you don't have to find time to stop and idly read the Prop 65 warnings posted on all the gas pumps as you wait for your car to fill up. You can just plug it in at home! Overnight! As needed!

Convenient, yes. But not the same as it was before, which I immediately noticed, of course, but is really starting to sink in as I check my online banking app and see my first full month's electric bill with the new electro-car and... OK, what's the breathing exercise to calm down? My body is saying "shallow, rapid breaths so harsh you can hear your larynx rasp," yeah, that feels right...

Nope, got dizzy. OK. Southern California Edison is in for an absolute bonanza, congratulations to them, a semi-private public utility that at least has a slightly less murderous PR burden than the state's other major provider.

It's by far the most I've ever paid for electricity. By far. By far. By far. But! I have years of directed training in emotional coping, I can just remember to ground myself, look for perspective, like 1) I've never had an electric vehicle before, of course it was always going to be higher than normal, 2) it's August, traditionally the hottest month of the year, which this has been so far after an unusually mild July, so it was also always going to be the most expensive electric bill of the year, and 3) hoo boy, right down the list of bills from my SCE one is my credit card that I used to use to at the gas station and dang, that's a pretty, pretty low number.

OK, I think I'm there. It'll take a few more months to make this new normal the normal-normal, but I can see a path. And if there are setbacks, I have my therapist's direct line and a paper bag I can breathe into and an almost endless variety of mood-altering drugs on the market if it comes to that. Everyone knows the best way out of a financial panic is to buy your way out of it. Luckily I know lunch-sized paper bags are pretty reasonably priced.

We Will Not Be Mentioning Dean Cain

 

Superman

starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Nicholas Hoult

directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy [all volumes], Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad)

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THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILER WARNING WOULD NORMALLY GO. But this is a 100 year old story, what am I going to spoil for you at this point? OH MY GOD, HE CAN FLY?! Get over yourselves

---

There was a time when I used to collect comic books. Luckily for me, that was back when your hobbies defined not only your entire personality but also carried with them a certain amount of social determinism. What you consumed and how you consumed it still had weight, it was related still to your choices, your discernment, where the things you curated by exclusion (comics? yes. organized sports? yuck, no) ended up sorting and excluding you from certain life paths at the exact same time. That's right, I collected comics back when meant something, primarily that you were several years away from the possibility of getting laid.

Speaking of that, let's just get this out of the way, so you know: this Superman fucks. They don't show it or anything (though we're all still curious about the logistics, or at least we have been for at least 56 years), and they even show it less than did back in Superman II with that weird silver beanbag thing, but as movies have become more and more sexless in the 21st century, explicitly (no pun intended) pushed aside by more action and quippy dialogue in the now-ubiquitous Comic Book IP Cinematic Universii peopled entirely by de-genital-ed men and women who spend a lot of time really violently working through a lot of pent-up pent-up-ed-ness by punching through whole buildings and shit, it's established very clearly that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are definitely smashing. On the scale of things about the re-emergence of this beloved cultural icon to concern ourselves with, should this be the first thing, straight out of the gate? Well, name a more important one, I'll wait.

That's what I thought.

Here's the point I'm making:* the hardest thing to do with Superman is to make him a person in a world and not a weird, stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. The challenge of Superman is a problem of scale. How do you bring a demigod down onto the plane of squishy, puny mortals? Of course there's a way to make a good and decent Superman movie that explores his otherness, but that's only really been tried in earnest once, by Bryan Singer, and what you got is a final shot of Superman creeping on his ex and her happy family from afar, like a lion pondering a frolicking clutch of baby gazelles. Yes, they took pains to establish that that Superman fucked as well, even producing a child, but it was way before the story started and in the end you couldn't help but feel like it had been an experiment or maybe an accident. Also that had Kevin Spacey in it, so the whole thing had the ick on it in retrospect.

And I did like Henry Cavill in the role. He was purpose-built from scratch to wear the suit, but Zack Snyder's default mode is stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. I have inexplicably seen almost every piece he's created, none of which are ultimately necessary but even the really unnecessary ones I've seen, and he has yet to actually produce a piece with a single recognizable human character.

Shout out to local Inland Empire homie Tyler Hoechlin doing his dang best on TV, but cinematically, it's been a lot of misses. The closer we've tried to get to movie Superman, the farther and farther he's drifted away from us, arguably since Richard Donner got replaced most of the way through directing Superman II. It's like we are the comic book collectors and the character is all the girls I knew in high school: aloof, inaccessible, inscrutable, and SUPER busy on--sorry, what night did you say again?--yes, that night.

I never collected any of the Superman titles directly, but for some reason or another, this character in film has always been important to me. Probably because early-days HBO showed Superman II on a goddamned loop with, like, Beastmaster and 9 to 5 and a few others. I can't tell you why I'm less emotionally invested in subsequent expansions of the Beastmaster cinematic representations, but the first Superman I knew was Movie Superman. That's where he fits. That's what I want.

If you've read any other reviews, it won't surprise you to know this is... really good. I'm relieved as much as I am happy about it. I'll say if I have to critique anything, it's that James Gunn understands the Superman Problem exactly the same way I do and makes that the center of the entire film, scene after scene, in every interaction with every character. The grand denouement follows a thunking, heavy re-set of Superman Is An Earth Person Too involving his excellent human adoptive parents, crescendo-ing into him literally screaming this at the antagonist.

All of this comes out in a very human performance by David Corenswet, more grounded by his use of the word "dude" in a few select scenes than by any philosophical soliloquy. The line between Superman and Clark Kent is kept deliberately wobbly to the point of almost not existing (Clark playing Clark where not everyone knows he's Superman exists for exactly one scene). He doesn't change who he is, he just has magic glasses (seriously) so people can't tell. Superman is a great big goob, un-self-consciously uncool in a way that makes him cool again. He definitely could have gotten away with collecting comic books in the 1990s.

Hoult's Lex Luthor is... trickier. I'll be honest, I don't know what I want from my Lex Luthor anymore. We've had goofy schemer (Gene Hackman), boring bumbling dumb creep (Kevin Spacey) and guy-in-manic-episode (Jesse Eisenberg). This is a better, larger, scarier version. He's obviously and overwhelmingly a mad scientist, he has the quiet bitterness and rage you want, the Javert-ian obsessiveness, acts of wanton and outright, unmistakeable malice. He's cool without trying, even though he's trying so hard, which is a weird space to be in. At the end, I think he gets a bit too much of a comeuppance as I think I like my Lex a little oilier, a little better at hiding the raging monster from the public, but for what they were going for here (Superman is more humane and thus more human than the Earthborn Lex), it worked. And I don't think the performance of Nicholas Hoult can be faulted in any respect.

As for who carries this thing, it's Hoult or Edi Gathegi. Corenswet is up there the most (literally! Two separate roles!) and he holds both the screen and the emotional center of the story, but he does get upstaged a tiny bit by The Theme (the stuff I said before about Superman being "human"). Gathegi just sneaks out from behind a flashy and funny part by Nathan Fillion (Isabela Merced is grossly under-used) and makes a supporting role a co-starring one every time he's on screen.

Also the CG dog is good.

If you saw any Guardians of the Galaxy, you know James Gunn does fun and funny and joy and sentiment, visually and story-wise, and that happens here in a long overdue counterweight to the infestation of grimdark that has lingered on DC properties since 1989 Batman gloomed it up to fight the lingering image of 1966 TV goofin' that was the Adam West Batman. Comic books are basically science fiction. The stories only need to be "grounded" if you lack the confidence to try. This is bright. It does its share of goofin'. And all to entertaining effect. If I would have ever read any Superman comics when I was a kid, I would have been just as satisfied.

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*100% meant to make it and am definitely not now improvising to cover. This is in print, so there's no way for you to prove any lack of pre-meditation, sorry. Except maybe my entire previous body of work, yes, that may give something away... 

And The Nominee Is...

It's difficult to find the right words to say when we find ourselves living in a country where a certain percentage of its voting populace are not only indifferent but actually enthusiastic about the idea of military forces deployed on the streets of an American city during peacetime. I'm not even talking about the "logic" of it since the Department of Justice itself just this last January told us that violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, that's a point beyond which rational discussion is even merited, it's all so transparently obvious. Sometimes when you have all the power, you do things just to do them, or, in this case, because people are asking too many questions about your time in the company of a noted and notorious sex offender and his sex offender lady companion. Logic is for chumps.

Look, I'm not suggesting a cover-up or a conspiracy, to be clear. A cover-up would require an attempt to do something out of the public view and, as far as I can tell, the animating philosophy of a Trump Administration is that there is no such thing as "out of the public view." That's soft-boy Democrat shit. Policy discussions and plan formations and negotiation with foreign governments and whole governmental initiatives happen in real time, off the cuff, in rolling insane rambles, in front of cameras and with live microphones, or really, otherwise, what would be the point of doing them at all? The reaction is the juice. The only thing I can think Donald Trump has ever wanted to do out of the public eye is engage in sexual trysts of varying levels of legality and absolutely no levels of morality at the organization or even in the presence of his best friend Jeffrey Epstein, but there are so many pictures and videos of them hanging out and being chummy, I can't even say that with confidence. Honestly, he's so locked in to the idea of immediate feedback, all of this could have been avoided if his parents were broke. Then, instead of going into real estate like his dad, he would have taken some college improv classes and gotten it out of his system. Well, for a while. He still would have been him, which means there's no way those theater kids would have accepted him and all that direct rejection would have probably led us right back to where we are now, except I guess he'd know what a Harold is.

And where we are now is that even the massaging (sorry) of the Epstein story is happening in obvious ways right out in the public view. This should be good news for the Nixon apologists, but no. It's not that his crimes will be re-contextualized as "I guess not that bad really" on this new sliding scale that apparently has no bottom, it's more that he'll be seen as less of a crook and more of a snivelly little bitch who didn't have the balls to really go for it all the way. Really, you tried to cover it up? And you got taken down by journalists?! How fucking quaint. Somebody's out there trying to do crime according to the rules. That's what happens when your racketeer president is a Quaker. I hear he even loved his wife. What a fucking normie.

Things are weird and they're just going to get weirder. The number of citizens who are going to be directly frightened by people whose salaries their taxes pay is just going to go up, which is (just to understate it by ten thousand percent) horrifying. And he'll brag about it when he runs the TV show at the Kennedy Center honors after naming himself the host. The whole thing will be gold-plated and tacky and the jokes will make you want to die (because the only people writing for him will be straight white Republican men, who are all JD Vance-levels of funny at best), but honestly, fuck him, let him have it. I know it's some kind of institution, but if you let him be that theater kid he never had the confidence or talent or empathy or insight or creativity or presence or wit or courage to be, maybe it'll keep him busy. At this point, what we're trying to do is run out the clock at least until November 2026 midterms, but (because I have no confidence in Democrats running a competent national campaign) more likely January 2029. Keep him busy. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize so embarrassingly bad, you guys. Let him have it. Hell, give him one every year. Just bury him in awards. Put him in every sports hall of fame. Make him an EGOT. You know he'll run to each and every ceremony. If it's that or, like, sending the 101st Airborne into Philadelphia, it does seem like the more palatable option.

She's Alive!

First, let's resolve the cliffhanger from last week: I did not, in fact, die as a result of my shingles vaccination shot. It probably wasn't a strictly necessary update since, from public health and demographic standpoints, people dying from vaccines isn't actually a thing, but I didn't want to be all like the first season of Severance and leave you all hanging just in case something unforeseen like a crippling but necessary labor insurrection took us down.

Also the fact that I typed out this whole thing and then eventually hit PUBLISH, those would have probably been enough proof of life to satisfy a hostage's family, let alone a high-single-digit (but dedicated!) readership.

To be clear, though I was in no danger, that second shingles shot really did have me feeling like bona fide goat ass. But it was all in the name of my future wellbeing and a thumb in the eye of all the late millennial/early GenZ parents out there who are trying to undermine the bedrock of our society one wanton public sneeze at a time.

I am starting to wonder what it will take for the societal fever to break. I'm talking less about the viral kind and more like the viral kind, the one where exasperatingly unqualified dinguses all het up on a (uninjected) cocktail of unearned certainty and a righteousness that can only be achieved by the defiantly uninformed reach spectacularly incorrect conclusions about microbiology and public health in easily digestible TikTok clips of under 90 seconds.

I know there are some out there doing the Lord's work of trying to put out counter-information, to correct the record as it were, but we all know there's no way actual true things are going to gain the kind of traction that the the government doesn't want you to know this currently does. The root of the message and the success of the message of correct information is... nothing. Literally nothing. If everyone got their vaccines, nobody (statistically) gets sick from these diseases burdened with the apparently vexing (to some) but quite on-the-nose adjective of preventable. A bunch of people on your favorite social media just sitting around, not having rubella? It's good policy and even better neighbor behavior, but it's absolutely awful content.

At some level, my instinct is "well, if they want to die or be disfigured by something no president has had to manage since John Quincy Adams, or at least Calvin Coolidge, well, I guess win-win," but the problem is we do live next door to these people. Not only does that mean the next house over is potentially a pest house, but more perniciously, the distaste and distrust of institutions and their associated messaging seeps into the information groundwater and next thing you know, Ananada Lewis is dead. We all lose (and have lost) in that scenario.

There's no reason to trust an insurance company on any level, really, and in this country insurance and medicine are the same thing. We're living in an Age of Actuarial Rule, which means everything related to your health is filtered through a lens of risk management for your insurance carrier. Unfortunately for those of us insurance holders, every case of medical need is an anecdotal case, where the outsize effects on family and people mean everything to those enduring it. Sure, it doesn't make financial sense to approve an MRI for everyone with a tummy ache, but if it helped one person catch pancreatic cancer before it was too late, well, fuck your tables, right? But the mega-global corporation can't afford (literally) to think that way, so it's always deny, play the obfuscating and litigious adversary to your own client base and cement in them a paranoia about all aspects of medicine and how it works until they are actively sabotaging their own health and the health of their children just for a quick inhalant hit of control.

Fevers break when they break, with the duration time affected plus or minus by patient self-care, rest and some genetic good luck. It's tough to count on all that when you're talking about a whole country as the patient in this metaphor. Hopefully in the meantime we don't have to get to the point where we're drafting hospital ships to supplement the normal healthcare infrastructure or using refrigerator trucks as morgues. Again. But then I'd have to trust that we're more focused on surviving than willing something interesting to happen, which, yeah, ask me again after the 2026 midterms.