“Red flags for scholars of fascism”

Heather Cox Richardson usually takes a break from writing Letters from an American and posts a photograph as the week ends. But this weekend she was writing, about an increasingly aberrant presidential candidate. From the September 7 installment of Letters from an American :

Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

This installment of Letters from an American, like every other installment of Letters from an American, deserves a wide audience.

Neon in semi-daylight

[4920 New Utrecht Avenue, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure”: Frank O’Hara, in “A Step Away from Them,” imagining what his friend and fellow poet Edwin Denby would write.

I chose this photograph for its neon in semi-daylight, vivid in the shadow of the El. The band of light between the El and the buildings looks itself a bit like neon, or at least like fluorescence.

A quick check of online sources shows that in 1909 the 4920 address housed a saloon. A neighborhood miscreant passed a bad check there. The construction of the El in 1914 led to lawsuits from the owner of 4920 and other property owners on the block over noise, darkness, and decreased rental value, with damages paid out in 1922. In 1933 4920 may have housed a delicatessen.

The property may have been undergoing an identity crisis when its tax photograph was taken. Was it a bar & grill? (Look closely.) A delicatessen? (Look closely.) A liquor store? (Look closely.) The 1940 telephone directory has it as a restaurant:

[Click for a larger view.]

Two brands of beer are advertised in the window, Breldt’s and Ox Head. The Peter Breldt Brewing Company was based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. During Prohibition, the Peter Breldt Company, minus the Brewing, brewed near beer that was too near. Ox Head was a product of the Wehle Brewing Company, West Haven, Connecticut.

In 1949, just days after a liquor license was issued to the Utrecht Restaurant (to a new owner?), this advertisement appeared in The Brooklyn Eagle:

[The Brooklyn Eagle, March 20, 1949.]

Someone was cleaning house.

The Utrecht Restaurant, still operating under that name, received another liquor license (for yet another owner?) in 1963. In 1964 the liquor license for this address went to the Boro Lounge. Today the first floor of 1420 is split between Emil’s Shoes and Zion Car Service.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) : C. O. Bigelow : Minetta Tavern : Saratoga Bar and Cafe

Sanewashing

Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times writes about “the power of a single word about media malfeasance.” The word is sanewashing. The immediate context: reporting about Trump’s bizarre non-answer to a question about the cost of childcare:

Why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

[From the Times: “The crisis for middle-class families struggling with child care? The economic growth he said would be spurred by things like tariffs.”]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

1-A, four letters, “Field of operations”: AREA? ZONE? It doesn’t take long to figure out that today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, will be something of a doozy.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

2-D, six letters, “Puzzled over.” Misdirection.

4-D, ten letters, “Produces with silk, perhaps.” I thought it must have to do with worms.

11-D, eight letters, “Nintendo persona battling Baron Brrr.” I guessed, correctly.

16-A, ten letters, “Genre for Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson.” I thought it was usually called something else.

18-A, four letters, “Not deep or high.” A book that we were just talking about made the answer pop into my head.

29-D, ten letters, “LED-covered dancer with wedding guests.” I must lead a sheltered life.

34-A, fifteen letters, “Subtly shady compliment.” So much novelty in this puzzle.

53-D, three letters, “Q & A in DC.” I always like seeing such effort put into making a Stumper-y clue for a mere three-letter answer. Value added!

My favorite in this puzzle: 12-D, eight letters, “It could have wings.” I thought my answer must have been wrong, and then I saw a way in which it could make sense, and then I didn’t, and then I did. An insanely great clue-and-answer pairing.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Trump splatter, transcribed

Yesterday at the Economic Club on New York, Donald Trump gave a lengthy non-response to a question about the cost of childcare. The non-response is incoherent enough when you watch and listen. But I wanted to see it, and I think the incoherence deepens with print, or with pixels. The questioner was Reshma Saujani, the CEO of Girls Who Code. My transcription, and I’m even giving Trump the benefit of paragraphs:

“If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make childcare affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, childcare is childcare, it couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it, in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

“We're gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about make America great again. We have to do it. Because right now we are a failing nation. [Applause.] So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

By the way, in case you missed it, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of Head Start (page 482) and for an emphasis on funding home-based childcare, not daycare (page 486).

Fading technology

Scene: a restaurant, last night. A daughter of the family — maybe ten? — was helping out at the counter.

“Are you old enough to run the cash register?”

“What’s a cash register?”

The register was, of course, a tablet.

A related post
“What’s a BVD?”

ChatGPT and a forklift

From Ted Chiang’s essay “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” (The New Yorker ). If I were teaching, I’d share this passage with my students:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Related posts
“Human interaction might be preferred” : “Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators” : ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Word of the day: frisket

[“Dots All, Folks!” Zippy, September 5, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In the third panel of today’s strip, Zippy explains: “Th’ space outside th’ panels is un-specked because a frisket is being used to confine th’ spattered areas!”

Frisket comes from the French frisquette, origin unknown. The OED has one definition: “a thin iron frame hinged to the tympan, having tapes or paper strips stretched across it, for keeping the sheet in position while printing.” First citation: 1683.

Merriam-Webster has a definition that fits today’s strip: “a masking device or material used especially in printing or graphic arts.” First use: c. 1898.

Wikipedia offers further explanation.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Georgia, 46th of 50

From The Washington Post:

Gun-control advocates consistently report that Georgia’s gun laws are among the nation’s weakest. The nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety ranks Georgia 46th in the country for gun law strength, in a tier of states referred to as “national failures.” The Giffords Law Center, another organization that advocates for stricter gun measures, gives Georgia an F rating on its annual scorecard, faulting the state for lacking rules such as universal background checks and red-flag laws.

During his term as governor, Kemp has expanded gun rights, including signing a 2022 bill that allows residents to carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit.

When Giffords delivered Georgia its failing grade, Kemp replied: “I’ll wear this ‘F’ as a badge of honor.”

A related post
“We have created this hellscape for our children”

“We have created this hellscape for our children”

Dr. Annie Andrews, pediatrician and senior advisor to Everytown for Gun Safety, on MSNBC a few minutes ago:

“My heart is broken for this community, for every child that was in that building today, for the children whose lives were stolen by this public health crisis of gun violence. And I have a pit in my stomach, as I do every time I see these headlines.

“This is a public health crisis, and what is so infuriating about it is we have created this hellscape for our children. Every child in this country goes to school and sits in a classroom where they should be learning how to read and write, and they're also learning how to hide from a bad man with the gun. And for far too many children in this country, that reality grows even darker when an active shooter incident happens.

“This is a public health crisis, and we know the solutions. The solutions include commonsense gun laws, like expanded background checks, secure-storage laws so that adult gun owners cannot allow access to children to their firearms, and red-flag laws. What we lack in this country is elected leaders with the moral courage to pass the laws that the majority of Americans know that we need and that the children in this country so desperately need and deserve.

“We have robbed every child in this country of a sense of physical and psychological safety in their classrooms, and as a mother, it breaks my heart.”

Related reading
Everytown for Gun Safety

[Context: yet another school shooting, this one at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. My transcription and paragraphing.]