I used to write daily, if not on the Blog, in my Journal, composing numerous drafts, outlines or ideas that I would hope to string together to create a book. At first I was a determined Nonfiction Writer and then I took classes, largely from quasi failed writers who could not Teach which means they either were a great Writer or just lucky. But as a former Teacher of English it included teaching writing and reading. I do not draft and edit nor revise any of the Blog posts, I may update some of them and on occasion edit but largely these are stream of consciousness posts, driven by an Article or Essay that I either reprint or link in which to address an issue I found as a matter of import. And with that I am still a voracious reader of news, four Newspapers I peruse daily, one I read thoroughly and several magazines that I do as well, mostly on the treadmill in which to get those needed 60 minutes of daily Cardio. But I have not felt compelled to write of late. I think it is because I know it means nothing and has no matter of import to me or in fact to anyone. That is not a subtle request for feedback or a compliment is a simple statement of fact. And as I watch the Writers Strike and now the Actors Strike move along into what is the dog days of Summer I suspect many of them feel the same, that the work they have done, the work they do is not regarded as a matter of import. They do not have the all CAPS above the Title name that generates book sales, six figure salaries and the talk show circuit. And that goes for both Writers and Actors. I recall growing up the self important Writer crowd that will align the sofas of the varying Talk Show hosts, be they witty, mercurial or simply witty. I am trying to figure out if we have any Mailers, Vidal’s, Capote’s, Parker or Didion that we will quote and dedicate re-reading their books or perusing their collections of letters and stuff collected at Libraries and Universities as a type of mausoleum to past greatness. And frankly I don’t think there is any Author that fits that bill. I do find it interesting to read the look backs and re-examination of many writers to find out or to at least acknowledge that many of them were screaming Misogynists, Anti Semite’s or Republicans (talking to you Joan Didion) that have lead to some feeling compelled to edit or revise their texts or simple remove from shelves or reading lists. How absurd and utterly beyond the point. I think reading the book with that information and seeing that text with new eyes allows for a new critique and analysis to the creation and intent behind the words. But that is hard and stuff so we don’t do that, we just point and then let the games begin. What a waste of precious time.
I read a recent an article about the late writer Cormac McCarthy in the New York Times. The title I felt was appropriate but not as unique as many would believe as several living ones have expressed similar views regarding their work and others: Cormac McCarthy Had a Remarkable Career. It Couldn’t Happen Now.
I have reprinted this essay with the idea that many many others will never see the light of day with regards to publishing, let alone if they are published see book sales and additions to Top Ten lists be it of sales or reviews. The industry seems to be relegated to Tik Tok and Instagram “Influencers” of what defines contemporary culture and with the endless screeds of subject matter and topical issues defining what a Library or Book Store can recommend or sell to you, these are dark times for those looking for a career in writing. Ask the Screen Writers on what it means to hit a picket line or a “D” List Actor who has had a working career just not one of a BIG TYPE name suddenly find themselves out of work. The LA Times has done numerous stories of how this has been a storm that waves have only begun to move inland as this strike has affected many in the industry that are not a part of those Labor Unions and whose small print names are often listed in the credits of productions. But without Writers there is no production, no creation, no imagination. Well unless we move to AI. And that is the next wave coming.
So with that I have not written anything and the belief is that Podcasting will resume with many of those out of work finding that platform a way to express oneself, which means that option is also off the table for me as of now. We know that Substack and varying other online mediums are struggling and how many newsletters can one read or subscribe to? We cannot have mainstream media function as a profitable industry even when rich deep pockets take on the heavy lifting. Ask those in Santa Barbara about how their local presser, the oldest in California, shut down in Bankruptcy after becoming the wealthy owners personal newsletter of her politics. I see that happening across the country when a local Journalist takes on a bigger figure as they did in a county in Oklahoma over a Sheriff and his illegal doings. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I would say ask the reporter in Vegas about his covering a story but you cannot, he was murdered by the subject. So many voices and so little time to hear them all. And we are all at loss.
Wander a book store, wander the local library and just look at all the books. So many of them and no time to read them all. How about just one?
Cormac McCarthy Had a Remarkable Literary Career. It Could Never Happen Now.
June 19, 2023 The New York Times Opinion
By Dan Sinykin
Dr. Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University and the author of the forthcoming “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”
Cormac McCarthy, who died last week at 89, had a famously unusual career. His first five novels, published over two decades, earned him considerable critical respect but were commercial failures. At one time, all of his books, including his 1985 masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” fell out of print.
Then something remarkable happened. In 1992, after a career spent eking out a living, Mr. McCarthy had a hit. “All the Pretty Horses,” which won the National Book Award and was adapted by Hollywood, set him squarely on a path to literary stardom and an outsize reputation as one of the greatest novelists of his time.
This improbable trajectory — writer toils for decades in obscurity before finding international renown — is the stuff of legend. But it did not occur by accident or happenstance. Mr. McCarthy’s career was made possible by a tectonic shift that was happening in the publishing industry as it moved from the boutique model of the early 20th century to an era of conglomeration. If the first part of his career was illustrative of publishing’s old model, the second half was made possible by a new approach. With his famed reclusiveness and idiosyncratic prose style, Mr. McCarthy might seem like an obdurate anachronism. But his career arc reveals that he was serendipitously of his time.
Mr. McCarthy began his career in 1965 in unpromising circumstances. He was a 32-year-old University of Tennessee dropout with no literary agent who’d submitted a poorly typed manuscript of his first novel by mail to Random House. From the slush pile, it found its way to Albert Erskine’s desk. Mr. Erskine had edited Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren and, most pertinently, the writer Mr. McCarthy had most closely styled his work on: William Faulkner. Mr. Erskine liked the manuscript, and Random House published the novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” a gnarled, strange and decidedly uncommercial debut.
Mr. Erskine doggedly championed the book, sending advance copies to the Random House writers Truman Capote and James Michener. According to the literary researcher Daniel Robert King, Mr. Erskine penned a letter to Saul Bellow, stating that he’d never “solicited you like this before” but that he felt that the book deserved “all the support it could get.” Nevertheless, it sold poorly. Mr. McCarthy’s next novel, “Outer Dark,” was published in 1968 and did no better.
When Random House asked Mr. McCarthy whether he had any connections who could help sell his third novel, “Child of God,” about a necrophiliac serial killer, he replied in a letter, “Ed McMahon (of ‘The Tonight Show’) is an acquaintance. We went fishing off Bimini together back in the spring and went partying together at Cat Cay (until he fell off the dock and had to be flown to Lauderdale to the hospital). You might try to place a copy in his hands. He does read. (Not like he drinks, of course, but some.)”
If Random House contacted Mr. McMahon, it didn’t help. “Child of God” did not sell, either. Neither did Mr. McCarthy’s fourth novel, “Suttree,” published in 1979.
Mr. McCarthy had, however, earned the support of prestigious literary awards and fellowships: the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1981 he won an inaugural MacArthur fellowship, which in a letter to a friend he called “a little windfall from a foundation” that would allow him to “stay in the business awhile longer.” It supported the writing of “Blood Meridian,” an extraordinarily violent book about American mercenaries exterminating Indigenous populations in northern Mexico. That book fared poorly, too.
By the late ’80s, his prospects remained bleak. In 1987, Mr. Erskine retired. In 1989, Mr. McCarthy wrote to a friend, “I’ve been a full-time professional writer for 28 years, and I’ve never received a royalty check. That, I’ll betcha, is a record.”
The fact that the world is now celebrating the arc of Mr. McCarthy’s monumental career is a testament to the novelist’s undeniable talent. But it’s also due to his timely recognition that, without his protector, Mr. Erskine, and the vanished world of publishing that Mr. Erskine represented, he would need to change the way his books were published.
In the 1960s, large corporations began acquiring publishing houses, consolidating the industry into fewer and fewer conglomerates. In the 1970s, inflation increased the price of books even as wages stagnated and consumers had less to spend. Shareholder value became corporate scripture, inducing managerial demands for quarterly growth. For publishing, this meant marketing, publicity and sales departments grew and gained influence. Editors spent more time in meetings and filling out profit-and-loss forms. Literary agents became essential intermediaries, as publishing houses no longer riffled through submissions to find emerging talents. A poorly typed manuscript like Mr. McCarthy’s debut would struggle to make it into, let alone be rescued from, a slush pile.
Random House had a guardian against these forces of change in its chief executive Robert Bernstein, who in the 1970s buffered the publisher from the interference of its corporate parent, RCA. In the 1980s, he did the same when ownership shifted to S.I. Newhouse. But in 1989, Mr. Newhouse replaced him with Alberto Vitale, a businessman who’d spent most of his career at the typewriter company Olivetti and the carmaker Fiat. As recounted in an interview Mr. Vitale gave to Publishing Perspectives, he told the staff members that they “needed to make money.” His new policy, according to the author André Schiffrin, “was that each book should make money on its own and that one title should no longer be allowed to subsidize another.” It was a credo that would have made the long gestation of Mr. McCarthy’s early career impossible.
It did, however, make the next phase of his career possible.
After Mr. Erskine retired, Mr. McCarthy wrote to the agent Lynn Nesbit (who represented Robert Caro, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, among many others) to seek representation. “I’ve never had an agent before,” Mr. McCarthy wrote, as recounted in The Cut, “but I’m thinking now of getting one, and if you’re interested in talking to me, please call me before noon Rocky Mountain time.” She passed his letter along to an ambitious protégée, Amanda “Binky” Urban — who, as it happened, had read “Suttree” and considered it “an amazing book.”
Ms. Urban took Mr. McCarthy on and engineered a move from Random House to Knopf, where a new editor in chief, Sonny Mehta, had recently replaced the legendary Robert Gottlieb (who also died last week). TheNew York Timescalled Mr. Mehta’s arrival at Knopf “tortuous” as he struggled to learn the house’s “mysterious traditions.” He needed a big win, and when Ms. Urban pitched him on publishing Mr. McCarthy, an esteemed MacArthur recipient who had not yet had a commercial hit, he replied, “I’d love that.” She called the head of Random House to approve the move and, as she told The Cut, he replied, “I can’t believe I’m picking up the phone to talk about an author who’s never sold more than 2,500 copies.”
At Knopf, Mr. Mehta and Ms. Urban tasked a hotshot team (including the editor Gary Fisketjon, the publicist Jane Friedman, the designer Chip Kidd and the portrait photographer Marion Ettlinger) with the challenge of releasing Mr. McCarthy’s new book. They recognized that “All the Pretty Horses” — which tells the story of a teenage cowboy who travels to Mexico, falls in love, kills a man and mourns the loss of the West — had decidedly more commercial potential than Mr. McCarthy’s previous work. It was, among other things, the first novel of his career with a hero readers could root for.
Published in 1992, “Horses” was the kind of hit that had long evaded Mr. McCarthy. It initially sold 100,000 copies and was adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon. Mr. McCarthy’s commercial success continued, and soon he became a monumental figure in the wider culture. A later novel, “No Country for Old Men,” was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, and his novel “The Road” became a best seller after receiving the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey.
Mr. McCarthy was twice the beneficiary of the then-dominant industry ethos. His early career was sustained by an editor who stuck with him despite commercial struggles. His latter career was buoyed by the surge in marketing power ushered in by the conglomerate era.
The industry’s trend toward conglomeration has only intensified: Bertelsmann, a German media conglomerate, acquired Random House in 1998. In 2013, Random House merged with Penguin, forming the world’s largest publisher. In 2020, Penguin Random House won a bid to acquire Simon & Schuster, the third-largest publisher in the United States, but the deal was blocked by the Department of Justice on antitrust grounds. When Mr. McCarthy mailed his first manuscript to Random House, the company’s entire staff could be listed on a postcard. Now it employs more than 10,000 people.
A career like Mr. McCarthy’s, with its long gestation before a blockbuster second act, would be nearly impossible to repeat now. An author without an agent or a track record of book sales would never gain a hearing at a major publishing house. And a state-school dropout in his early 30s would face slim odds of becoming a prizewinning author, as an M.F.A. from a prestigious writing program has often become the price of entry for splashy literary fiction debuts.
It’s impossible to know what kind of writer Mr. McCarthy would have developed into without decades in which to hone his singular voice. But contemporary success stories about novelists tend to have a very different aspect: They’re stories like that of Colson Whitehead, who followed up his well-received 1999 debut, “The Intuitionist,” with novels that deftly navigated genres before reaching a new plateau by winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for “The Underground Railroad.” Or Bonnie Garmus, the author of “Lessons in Chemistry,” whose very first book became a runaway hit in 2022.
The job of nurturing voices like Mr. McCarthy’s has largely shifted to the parallel world of independent and nonprofit publishing, where many writers — like Percival Everett, who wrote more than 20 novels for small presses before his 2021 novel, “The Trees,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and who recently jumped to the publisher Doubleday for a six-figure deal — have found their home.
As for Mr. McCarthy, he’ll be remembered as a writer whose career we can admire. But he’s not a writer whose path to success anyone writing today should hope to replicate.
We have been lamenting here in the Tri State area over the election of George Santos who takes the expression “I cannot tell a lie” to “I cannot tell a lie, I have hundreds” in which to defend his new career in politics. Neither the first nor the last frankly as that is a particular field of bullshit. But of late we have hear numerous tales of exaggerations, fabrications and plagiarism to fill our coffers with regards to the business of words and ideas. Journalists have had serious accusations with regards to this issue, see Dominion Voting Lawsuit against Fox to support that. But there was the march to war with Iraq supported by the New York Times Judith Miller who seemed to think any truth half or otherwise was fine to print. There was Stephen Glass at the New Republic (or the George Santos of Journalists), Jonah Lehrer of the Times or the more well known Jayson Blair; Jack Kelley of USA Today and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post, Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe and that is just to name a few. And this is not confined to American writers as Der Spiegel the German Magazine also had a problem with a writer and his version of events in an essay.
Publishing has had many fabulists who not only made up their biographies or their stories of woe, their identities have faced questionable history and with that exposure and ostracized as a result. And of course the issues of plagiarism that is a consistent issue in many works, be they fiction or non. That is a balancing act that is why the concept of Creative Nonfiction was developed; it allowed for the mark of creativity without the need for fact checking and release forms but was under the guise of truth. – the Author’s own.
And with that I have written about the issues surrounding the book that was Authored by a Dr and his collaborator has now admitted she copied most of it. Again the Gatekeepers on this must be accountable as it falls and fails them when it comes to due diligence and following protocols that they demand of their Authors. The Emperor was definitely missing his pants on that one.
Then there are the Authors who have been canceled for their works authenticity, be that of their own personhood or via behaviors or actions. I have written about that with regards to the book, American Dirt. Much of that came from the publishing PR that claimed the writer had Hispanic roots and that later was revealed to be untrue. Again, and again and again, I have issue that there was a need to make that an issue unless that is all you have. When the tropes of color, gender and sexuality are hauled out to show how you are doing more for underrepresented groups, I wonder if it is about that or simply a smokescreen and the work is well okay but hey look we woke! Folks that is what the whole issue is, not that we are actually doing more to get more faces at the table but we are doing so without regards to merit of work and effort. You ain’t helping anyone when they will fail and then further push back progress as it becomes “I told you so.” No bad is bad and there are examples of bad work from all kinds of people but with that we have a barrier or lack of tolerance for those who are not the standard as in white, male and straight. Be a womanizer, a boozer back in the day that was fine, today not so much. But again sometimes pain, anger, rage lends to creativity and is a great outlet. No one is perfect and mistakes are made. Again many of the Journalists I listed were People of Color or Women and when it is a standard bearer the old boy network kicks in to protect its own which does no favors to anyone and says no one can forgive and no one can learn from an error and in turn change.
I read this article today in the New Yorker about a Writer who was a one hit wonder. Well hardly a hit, the book sold less than 6,000 copies so he was a Writer like all others who got published and then would have perished had it not opened a door to academia and he ended up Teaching, but alas one that was not publishing so he was let go. It appears he was a challenging Teacher and apparently well liked by Students, so I this is shows with regards to the profession of Teaching is a skill set of its own, requires its own commitment to the craft but writing is apparently something you can do on the side with no equal demands. Really? Again (my catch phrase) WRONG and it is why perhaps some of the issues regarding plagiarism and ghost writing exists.
The notations in this story are heart breaking as this was a Man who had some talents, and a very creative imagination but no support system in which to find a way to channel his most destructive tendencies and that is not just a problem regarding Writing but everywhere.
The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far
After the Afro-Cuban writer H. G. Carrillo died, his husband learned that almost everything the writer had shared about his life was made up—including his Cuban identity.
By D.T. Max The New Yorker March 13, 2023
he novelist Hache Carrillo was admitted to a hospital in Washington, D.C., in April, 2020. He was fifty-nine years old, and had spent the previous several months receiving radiation treatment for prostate cancer. The first wave of the pandemic was cresting and a hospital was not a place anyone wanted to be. For two weeks, he and his husband, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, held out at their home, in Berwyn Heights, a Maryland suburb. VanEngelsdorp recalls this as “a sacred time” of chatting intimately and holding hands. They suspected that Carrillo’s medication was causing him to suffer seizures and dehydration, and after he collapsed in the shower the couple headed for the E.R.
Carrillo was an admired figure in the literary world. His reputation rested on his one novel, “Loosing My Espanish,” about a Cuban-born high-school history teacher in Chicago. Published in 2004, the book had impressed critics with its bravura use of wobbly Spanish to evoke the experience of an exile whose native language has been supplanted by a new one, and with its complex interweaving of colonial history and cherished memories. The prose was lush, the tales improbable: the narrator’s grandfather emerges from the sea, impregnates his grandmother, then returns underwater. The Miami Herald declared that the novel was “of interest to everyone who has inherited a history and a language they could not fully connect with but still tried to preserve.” Latino writers were especially enthusiastic: the Dominican-born Junot Díaz praised Carrillo’s “formidable” talent, calling his “lyricism pitch-perfect and his compassion limitless.” Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, said of Carrillo’s sensual prose, “Did you know that language can be read and heard and seen and touched? That you can smell it, taste it?”
Since 2007, Carrillo had been an assistant professor in the English department at George Washington University, where he taught Latin American literature and creative writing. Students found him demanding and engaging. On a Web site that posts ratings of professors, one undergraduate called Carrillo “scary smart,” adding, “It won’t be an easy semester but you won’t regret it.” In class, Carrillo, an elegant dresser with gapped front teeth, punctuated his English with Spanish slang—’mano (“bro”), vato (“dude”). Many Latino students were drawn to him and to his commitment to the importance of throwing off the weight of an imposed American identity and reconnecting with one’s roots. At the end of some classes, he received a standing ovation.
After “Loosing My Espanish” came out, Carrillo had begun a second novel, tentatively called “Twilight of the Small Havanas,” set in Miami’s Little Havana on an imagined day when Fidel Castro is rumored to have been assassinated. His work had coalesced around tricky questions of history and identity: To be “Cuban,” did you have to be born there? Or could you just have relatives who were? Did you need to speak Spanish, or could your affiliation be more intangible? He occasionally read sections of “Twilight” at literary conferences, but he told friends that his progress had been slowed by the amount of research required.
Despite Carrillo’s slim output, his literary status and his popularity on campus made him feel that he might get tenure. In a 2010 review of his achievements at the school, he noted that in the previous three years he’d written a hundred and eleven recommendations for students. Around this time, when G.W.U. administrators asked him to list “major media coverage and media appearances,” he noted airily, “My students watch my career more closely than I. They remind me of my upcoming readings when I have forgotten about them, as well as quote things that I have said in the media.” Nevertheless, in 2013, G.W.U. did not renew Carrillo’s contract, citing his lack of publications.
Carrillo transitioned out of academia with surprising ease, securing a post at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, where he organized the judging process for an annual fifteen-thousand-dollar prize given to an American work of fiction. Soon he was tapped to be the chair of the foundation—a volunteer position but a demanding one. Outside PEN/Faulkner, though, things ran less smoothly. His supposed focus was finally finishing his second novel and selling it, but after publishing the first chapter of “Twilight,” in the journal Conjunctions, he lost momentum again, and considered switching to a different project—a novel, called “República,” about a Cuban American war hero who becomes a terrorist. He chain-smoked and procrastinated by playing the piano as much as eight hours a day.
Carrillo surrounded himself with beautiful things. He lived in a salmon-colored clapboard house with vanEngelsdorp, a Dutch-born bee entomologist ten years his junior. Carrillo had filled their place with sculptures and paintings. Bookcases were piled with hardcovers written by friends, and sheet music covered the piano. Carrillo took special pride in a brooding portrait of a heavy-browed dark-skinned young man in a T-shirt. He told visitors that the painting, which exuded a sense of distance and loss, depicted his older half brother, who had died of suicide.
In the couple’s garden, vanEngelsdorp, who taught entomology at the University of Maryland, had wanted to create an ideal space for pollinators. Carrillo cared more about aesthetics. He planted so there were blooms year-round—camellia and witch hazel in January, edgeworthia and daffodils in March. Like Cuba’s landscape, the garden was in perpetual flower.
Carrillo and vanEngelsdorp both wore masks when they went to the hospital, but Carrillo soon tested positive for covid. Cancer had weakened his body, and it quickly became clear that he would not survive. After a week, he was transferred to hospice care. When vanEngelsdorp visited him, he wore a mask and ski goggles. Although the doctors told vanEngelsdorp that his husband could no longer hear anything, he played Carrillo one of his favorite albums, by the Cuban bolero singer La Lupe, and Carrillo seemed to react with a faint gesture of recognition. He died a week before his sixtieth birthday. VanEngelsdorp said of the final hour, “We sat together. It was beautiful to hear his last breath.”
During their ten years as a couple, vanEngelsdorp had never spoken to Carrillo’s three siblings. But, during the hospital stay, he got their numbers from his husband’s phone and texted news of his illness. Soon after Carrillo’s death, vanEngelsdorp arranged a family Zoom call. He knew the siblings by their names from the agradecimientos, or acknowledgments, of “Loosing My Espanish”: María, Susana, and Cristóbal. María was indeed Maria, but on the Zoom call Susana called herself Susan and Cristóbal seemed to prefer Christopher. The conversation was charged with sadness and regret, and vanEngelsdorp was in a fog of exhaustion, but he sensed that something was amiss. He recalls thinking that there must be “something unspoken—maybe a family story that I would one day learn.”
Herman Glenn Carroll was born on April 26, 1960, in Detroit. His parents were public-school teachers who were both promoted to administrative roles. When Glenn—as Herman was known at home, because his father shared his first name—was young, the family lived in Bagley, a modest neighborhood of Detroit. But after the riots of 1967 his parents bought a two-story home in the more comfortable Sherwood Forest area. “White families fled,” Carroll’s sister Susan told me. “Opportunity arose.” The house was white brick with gray shutters and incongruous New Orleans-style balconies.
The Carroll parents, longtime Michiganders, were proud of the history of African Americans in Detroit, and they worked to pass that pride on to their children. When shopping, they gave preference to Black businesses. On evenings and weekends, Glenn’s father worked at a center for at-risk Black youth. In Bagley, the family had hung a Black Liberation flag outside the house.
Glenn approached life with a spirit of play. He took on different identities easily and convincingly. He and Susan, who was two years younger, were best friends. Their mother spurred their imaginations by filling a bin in their basement with costumes. “We would go all day long talking gibberish to one another, and pretending we were from a different country or a different place,” Susan told me, adding, “He was interested in East Indian culture, because he liked the dots they put on their heads.”
Glenn was talented and competitive. His parents started him on piano lessons, but when he saw Susan playing a flute he borrowed the instrument and within a day was outplaying her. She never touched the flute again. Glenn was also labile, and when he got mad he made sure that others knew it. When he was around twelve, he got into a squabble with Susan and Maria and cut off their dolls’ hair. “Look, they’re dykes now,” he teased.
Carroll went to a Catholic grade school and then to a Jesuit high school, where he was unhappy. “He just hated the priests,” Susan remembers. In 1976, he tested into Cass Technical High School, a magnet school in downtown Detroit, and made a fresh start. His fashion choices became more daring; one student, Phillip Repasky, remembers his wearing “gabardine slacks and a silk shirt with a wild, beautiful print.” He was already confident in his sexuality, and led a group that went to Menjo’s, a gay club downtown. Susan told me that her brother had established at an early age his right to be who he wanted to be. When he was eight or so, he was harassed for taking ballet and tap classes, and so “he beat someone up—and that was it.”
Glenn’s father, the first Black quarterback to play at Eastern Michigan University, held conventional notions of masculinity, and refused to accept his son’s sexuality. Glenn’s mother, a practicing Catholic, was more open-minded. (An acquaintance of Glenn’s remembers her as gentle and friendly—“the Black Doris Day.”) When Glenn was seventeen, his parents separated.
Glenn’s sexual identity seemed to interest him more than his racial one. Most students at Cass were Black, although many of Carroll’s friends were white. He himself had dark skin. Phillip Brian Harper, a friend of Carroll’s at the time, remembers, “We were Black kids in a majority-Black city. We didn’t have to talk about it.” Carroll read widely and without a focus on identity. He loved novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Hermann Hesse. He wrote a story titled “Mazurka on the Beach.”
Part of Carroll’s popularity stemmed from the colorful stories he told, but those who knew him best grew to distrust them. In his junior year, he told Harper that one of his sisters had been adopted from Asia. Harper told me, “I was very taken aback, because this was a sister he had talked about many times before.” He told Repasky that his father was “someone famous.” Friends rarely challenged Carroll about his tales; when crossed, he could be vindictive. If he was caught in a lie, he sometimes cried. Even his family shied away from confronting him. When he was in eleventh grade, his mother went to a parent-teacher conference and found out that her son was now calling himself Marx. He had even begun signing art works with the name. He wouldn’t explain why, and wouldn’t back down. “There was no rhyme or reason,” his sister Susan remembers. “He was just being a character.”
Carroll excelled at literature and music but was uninterested in math. In his senior year, a female friend bumped into him as he came out of an algebra class. He claimed that he was helping to teach it, but when she mentioned this to the instructor she was told that Carroll was there for remedial work.
It is not clear if Carroll graduated with his class, but he did get a diploma at some point. He definitely skipped the graduation ceremony—he’d already advanced to a new chapter in his life. During his senior year, while at Menjo’s, he’d met Ken McRuer, a twenty-seven-year-old who worked as a guidance counsellor at a public school in Troy; the day Carroll turned eighteen, he moved into McRuer’s apartment, in the suburb of Ferndale. They lived together for about a year.
Carroll worked as a waiter at the Midtown Café, in the suburb of Birmingham, and as a bartender at the Money Tree, a restaurant downtown. During this period, Carroll told friends that he was attending the University of Detroit Mercy part time, but McRuer never saw any textbooks. When McRuer came home at night, they watched films: Woody Allen, “La Cage aux Folles.” Carroll drove an orange Beetle and read a lot of French literature. He was trying on roles, graduating from smart-aleck to aesthete. McRuer asked me, with bemusement, “Who calls their cat Maupassant?”
Toward the end of their relationship, Carroll and McRuer travelled to New York. After a quarrel, Carroll returned to their hotel claiming that he’d just been mugged at knifepoint—even though it was obvious that nothing of the sort had occurred. McRuer told me, “My impression now is his trajectory along deceit and lies and whatnot was just getting started.” Carroll moved in with the female friend to whom he’d lied about teaching math at Cass. She remembers him making things up even when he wasn’t under pressure: “He’d say, ‘You know, I had cornflakes for breakfast and we’re out of milk,’ and I would be, like, ‘What are you talking about? We never have cornflakes!’ ”
In 1995, Carroll enrolled at DePaul University, in Chicago. He was thirty-five and had knocked around for the previous decade and a half; he was ready for a change. His original reason for moving to Chicago, where he’d lived for eleven years, had been to become a writer, but he had not really known what he wanted to say. “I was only responding to a life-long fascination of the ‘thingness’ and performance of books,” he later explained in a publicity questionnaire that he filled out for Pantheon Books, the publisher of “Loosing My Espanish.” In the years after high school, he had worked on occasional stories and had read voraciously—the novels of John Updike, Henry James, and Toni Morrison were among his favorites. But mostly he had held a string of bartending jobs and other brief gigs; according to McRuer, he worked for Amway for a while. In the Pantheon questionnaire, he claimed a more fanciful list of past employment—“custom matchbook proofreader, a shoe salesman, a canner,” as well as “rehearsal pianist for ballet classes” and “gofer to the art critic for Chicago Magazine.” He had spent much of his time, he claimed, in Puerto Rico.
Carroll was well known in North Side gay circles, and he dated a lot. His friends and family had long noted a strong preference for white men. When his mother challenged him about this, he responded that there weren’t many Black men who shared his interests. His romantic life aside, he was vocal and active in support of Black rights and against racism. (He always emphasized that he was of Afro-Cuban descent. When his publisher proposed using a self-portrait of the artist Antonio Gattorno on the cover of the paperback of “Loosing My Espanish”—a novel widely presumed to be autobiographical—Carroll responded with irritation, writing that he couldn’t see how an image of a “white Cuban of Italian descent relates to my narrator who is afro-cubano.”)
Carroll was drawn to men who deepened his knowledge about culture, beauty, and art. He learned about antiques from a boyfriend who owned a shop. In 1986, Carroll fell in love with David Herzfeldt, an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who also designed furniture. Carroll wasn’t always truthful with Herzfeldt—he claimed that he had covered the Tigers baseball team for a Detroit newspaper—but he was loyal to him. Herzfeldt, who kept a diary, thought that Carroll was emotionally wounded, and he wondered if he could win “the honor of” his trust. One entry suggests that Carroll still preferred mystery to candor. “Yesterday he undressed me, even as he put one layer of clothing on for each I lost,” Herzfeldt wrote. “Eventually he had on raincoat and hat and I was naked.” Herzfeldt was sick with AIDS, and Carroll stuck with him through fevers and pneumonia, until Herzfeldt’s death, in 1988. Herzfeldt’s sister, Donna Herzfeldt-Kamprath, told me, “Herman meant the world to my brother. I really believe it was a true-love relationship.”
In Carroll’s later relationships, he continued his habit of spinning elaborate stories. He told one boyfriend, David Munar—who was twenty-three when they met, in 1993—that he was under contract with The New Yorker and that he had had a child with a Frenchwoman. Munar recalls seeing photographs of the supposed child, along with greeting cards that the child had purportedly signed. (Neither child nor mother has ever come forward.) Carroll stayed at Munar’s apartment whenever they spent the night together. One time, Carroll had a party at his place. It was furnished with valuable antiques. Munar now thinks that it was the antique-store owner’s apartment, and that he was being two-timed.
Even Carroll’s family had trouble sorting fact from fiction. At one point, he declared that he was in the process of adopting a seven-year-old violin prodigy named Guillermo. Carroll’s mother was so convinced that Guillermo was real that she sent him Christmas presents from Detroit, but the family never met the boy and Carroll eventually said that the adoption had fallen through. (Later, in a flourish worthy of Representative George Santos, Carroll told his sister Maria that the child had gone on to Juilliard.) Shane Conner, a lawyer who dated Carroll in the mid-nineties, after Munar, told me, “Most people might tell a little lie, but, generally speaking, you walk the planet telling people the truth. Herman walked the planet lying, and he might occasionally tell the truth. It wasn’t malicious—it was a compulsion.” Carroll told Conner, falsely, that he had degrees from Dartmouth and the University of Chicago. Dating Carroll made you doubt even things that were true, Conner told me: when Carroll took him to see the grave of Herzfeldt, the man he had nursed through AIDS, they couldn’t find it, and Conner concluded that he had made up the story.
Carroll’s final job before enrolling at DePaul was a six-year stint at the Chicago office of HBO. Although in later interviews Carroll would refer to glamorous Manhattan visits for his job in “television,” he was in fact the director of staff development at a call center whose employees hawked the channel to satellite-TV customers. According to Liz Pentin, a colleague and friend of Carroll’s, he oversaw fewer than a hundred people, though his 2005 résumé claims two thousand.
At HBO, Carroll threw himself into the administrative tasks of training and managing employees. “His bosses respected his work,” Pentin told me. But he hadn’t given up on invention. She recalls him speaking in a pointedly refined manner—“not quite Jane Austen, but cultivated.” He informed Pentin that his father was a Persian-rug dealer and that he had once “caught the baby” being delivered by a woman whose partner had abandoned her after she became pregnant. Later, he recommended to Pentin a favorite novel: Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.”
Carroll left HBO under unclear circumstances. On his Pantheon publicity form, he wrote that his position had been eliminated and that he’d been offered a transfer to an office in Albuquerque. But his boss at the time remembers no such office, and Carroll’s sister Susan thinks he was fired after the company learned that he didn’t have a college degree, as he had claimed on his résumé. After HBO and Carroll parted ways, his then boyfriend Conner suggested that he stop faking having a B.A. and get a real degree. “Do you think I could?” Carroll said. “I know you could,” Conner replied.
At DePaul, Carroll felt that he had come out of the wilderness; as he later told an interviewer, “I was odd and strange and a whole bunch of other things, and I read books nobody else had read and I wanted to talk about things nobody was interested in.” Now he read Langston Hughes and European literature. He took courses in literary theory and devoured Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas about “homosocial” narratives, though he was resistant to Louis Althusser’s stance that an individual’s identity was determined by the state. Todd Parker, the professor who taught him Althusser, remembers Carroll wondering aloud “if there was room for individual agency in the construction of identity.”
Carroll became friends with Parker and several other professors—they were nearer to his age than most of the students were. They were dazzled by his commitment and acuity. He was showing signs of becoming a writer, too. Anne Calcagno, who led a creative-writing workshop, remembers him as among the most talented students she ever encountered. Once, she was talking about the importance of vivid description, and Carroll offered an example: “stigmata nail polish.” She recalls telling herself, “O.K., that guy gets an A.” (Carroll told her that his father was a surgeon and that his mother was the dean of students at the University of Michigan.)
Carroll had a breakthrough as a writer in a class called World Civilization. For one assignment, students were allowed to write historical fiction, and he submitted a work titled “Snow/Yellow Food/Brown People, Miami y Los Santos in an Absence of History.” It opens with overtones of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which famously begins with a Colombian colonel recalling his astonishment the first time he saw ice. In Carroll’s story, which is set in Michigan, a young Cuban American from Miami is stunned by the sight of snow. But the story shifts its focus to the young man’s sister, Yesinia, who “decided one day that she was just black,” denying her Cubanness. She is delighted when Black girls at her school assume that her long, silky hair is the result of relaxer—“concoctions of mayonnaise and beer.” She defends her invented identity to such an extent that, the narrator notes, “if one of us forgot and asked her a question in Spanish in front of her friends, she would shoot a look that indicated that she could potentially cut anyone’s . . . tongue out.” Yesinia’s self-hatred begins to infect her brother, and he lashes out at anyone who makes him feel bad about his heritage. Eventually, a priest at the boy’s school guides him to a thick volume of Cuban history, and he learns that things he thought were just family myths possessed “a reality that I had never experienced before”: “Names of places that we had heard all of our lives like Havana from where our mother and Tío Nestor and his wife had immigrated, and Guantanamo Bay where our aubelo [sic] had died could actually be pointed to as places that existed in the world.” Carroll’s professor, Regina Wellner, loved the story. She gave Carroll an A and commented, “Great!,” adding that the succulent descriptions of Cuban food had made her hungry.
As a writer, Carroll had found his way to a question that would prove fertile to him: How much does race or ethnicity determine who you have to be? He had completed stories before, but they’d lacked urgency. In 1990, he had published a four-page piece, “The Train,” in the small Chicago magazine Other Voices. It appears to be the only time that his published work featured protagonists that were not overtly Latino. The story is told from the point of view of a middle-class father whose wife has recently left him. His teen-age son comes home traumatized from an El ride during which a man fell out of an open door. They watch television that evening, and, as the train incident is recounted on the news, the father comforts his child and grieves the departure of his wife. The father says of his son, “I think that we both think that he’ll be O.K.” The story is skillfully written, but there’s an artificiality to the parallel traumas.
For Carroll, writing fiction made the boundary between reality and invention even more porous. In 1998, he joined a DePaul student named Tiffany Villa-Ignacio in editing the school’s literary magazine. Carroll told her that he’d become interested in digging into his Latino origins. The pair—Carroll nearly forty, Villa-Ignacio twenty-three—took tango lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. One day, Villa-Ignacio, who is of Philippine ancestry, announced that she wanted to change her name to Teresa—to remove, she explained, the burden of “too many imperial legacies in my name.” Carroll said that his own real name had been blotted out by history, and asked her to call him Hermán, which he later shortened to Hache—the letter “H” in Spanish.
The desire, verging on belief, that he was Latino had been gestating in Carroll for a long time. As a teen-ager, he had hung out with a trans person, named Miss Q’uba, who styled herself as a drag queen. (A Cass classmate of Carroll’s remembers Carroll taking him to meet Miss Q’uba at a house in Detroit’s Palmer Park neighborhood.) His boyfriend David Munar, who was of Colombian origin, introduced him to other aspects of Latino culture, including how to prepare arroz con pollo. In 1997, the Buena Vista Social Club ensemble released its blockbuster album of Afro-Cuban classics—if you went dancing in Chicago, bolero and danzón music were omnipresent. Wim Wenders soon made a popular documentary about the group. In the summer of 1998, Carroll took an introductory Spanish course.
For someone who kept straining to leave behind his old identity, what better subject was there than Cuba—a country whose population had been divided by a mass exodus? On the Pantheon questionnaire, Carroll gave a slippery account of how he’d rediscovered his Cuban roots: “Óscar’s voice, the voice of Loosing My Espanish, began to appear late every Friday night into Saturday morning for four years as I tried to shake off too much rum, cigar smoke, cafecitos had at a weekly domino game at Chicago’s Café Bolero.”
In 2000, Carrillo, after graduating from DePaul, was admitted to a joint M.F.A./Ph.D. program at Cornell. By this point, everything about him spoke of his Cubanness: his language, his cultural references, his guayabera shirts. Helena María Viramontes, who was the chair of his M.F.A. committee, told me, “I never tested him. But there was no doubt in my mind that he was what he said he was.” Carrillo’s application included the opening of what would become “Loosing My Espanish.” The excerpt describes an immigrant boy in Chicago disappearing through a treacherous hole in an ice sheet covering the Illinois River. Viramontes found it extraordinary, and was even more impressed by the novel that followed four years later (and that was eventually submitted to his advisers at Cornell). She admired the “beauty of language as well as the code-switching” in “Loosing My Espanish,” and recalls the Ecuadorian-Puerto Rican writer Ernesto Quiñonez telling her, “Hache is our Proust.” (In an e-mail, Quiñonez said that Carrillo “wrote like no other Latinx,” adding, “Like Proust he could stop time and write 50 pages about having a cup of tea.”)
Toward the beginning of “Loosing My Espanish,” Carrillo writes, “Ay pobrecito, hombres history is only the memory of others in which you insinuate yourself.” Being remembered and remembering are the twin tasks that Óscar Delossantos, the high-school teacher who is the novel’s protagonist, sets for himself. His two kinds of remembering face off against two kinds of forgetting: that of his mother, who has dementia, and that of his students, mainly American-born Latinos who are ignorant of their heritage. Delossantos begins his tale by mixing the personal and the historical with zestful bombast:
Miren my hands. This color on the map, this bit of orange here. Illinois. Chicago stares me in the face every morning when I shave, señores. My face, this color, a subtle legacy of the British Royal African Company, is, as they say in the vernacular, el color of my Espanish.
Delossantos launches into a headlong, Spanglish-studded lecture on Cuba: its rain-drenched forests, its achingly beautiful waters, its Santería and brujería. A woman wades, fully dressed, into a hurricane-wracked sea; a capitalistic dog devours the cats of the posh El Vedado neighborhood.
These memories are juxtaposed with the drearier life that Delossantos’s family now lives. The clan has arrived in Chicago by a familiar route: fleeing from Castro’s Cuba via Miami, where some family members were met with “yards of concertina wire, dogs with vicious teeth and feet and yards and cubic miles of forms with thousands and thousands of blank spaces to be completed.” Delossantos attends the same school in Chicago where he will one day teach; his mother goes to work in a beauty salon. Magic realism meets dirty realism: a character is haunted by a bird spirit called La Pirata; a mysterious benefactor pays his mother’s overdue electric bill. Beneath it all lies the distinction that, whereas being Cuban in Cuba is a nationality, here it is an identity. By the novel’s end, Delossantos is exhausted by his own lecture—and uncertain if he has changed anyone’s opinion about the importance of remembering. He concludes, “Pero that’s the funny thing about time and saying something, señores, because the exact moment I said it was the same moment that it began to be untrue.”
In October, 2020, I sat with Dennis vanEngelsdorp on the porch of the house he had once shared with his husband. Goldenrod and moon lilies were blooming in the garden. VanEngelsdorp’s blind dog, Huddy, waited patiently by the screen door.
A few months earlier, Carrillo’s twenty-year-long fabrication of his life as a Latino man had come undone. On May 22nd of that year, the Washington Post had published an obituary. It gave Carrillo’s background as vanEngelsdorp had understood it. It reported that Carrillo “was 7 when his father, a physician; his mother, an educator; and their four children fled Fidel Castro’s island in 1967, arriving in Michigan by way of Spain and Florida. Growing up, he was something of a prodigy as a classical pianist, and, by his late teens, was performing widely in the United States and abroad.” Of those fifty-six words, only a handful were accurate: Carrillo’s mother had indeed been a teacher; there were four children.
It had taken a month of jockeying by Carrillo’s friend and longtime agent, Stuart Bernstein, to get the obit to appear at all. Carrillo, at his death, was only modestly well known: his output was too limited, his fiction too complex. (“Loosing My Espanish” had sold only fifty-six hundred copies.) He may have known intuitively that too much attention would create problems for him. There were plenty of people who knew of his deceit and might have exposed it. His former boyfriend Shane Conner had kept up with Carrillo since Chicago. But Conner had never forgotten the time that Carrillo and vanEngelsdorp had joined him for dinner while they were visiting Chicago, a decade ago. There was some confusion with the bill, and it prompted Conner to recall a similar mixup that he and Carrillo had experienced when eating out with Carrillo’s family in Detroit, in the nineties. The memory, however, violated Carrillo’s new narrative, in which his childhood in Detroit never existed. As Conner recalls it, Carrillo looked him “dead in the eye—and I knew he was not messing around—and said, ‘If you do this, I will never speak to you again.’ ”
The G.W.U. faculty ought to have had an inkling of Carrillo’s trickery. Ten or so years ago, David Munar sent a letter to administrators there saying that Carrillo was a fraud, but he received no answer. A native Cuban visiting professor listening to Carrillo’s Spanish concluded that something was off about who he claimed to be—but the doubt was never pursued. For some, the damning evidence was to be found in “Loosing My Espanish,” with its inconsistent, often awkward Spanish. Words are misspelled, accents misplaced. The word vato, which he uses often in the book, is Mexican slang, not Cuban. Soon after Carrillo joined the faculty, Javier Aguayo, a Peruvian-born political scientist there, began dating him, and tried to read “Loosing My Espanish.” He recalls, “I couldn’t go beyond the first three pages. The grammar was wrong. He referred to a woman with ‘castellano hair.’ Nobody says those kinds of things!” In his view, these weren’t the type of lapses that a Spanish speaker forgetting the language would make; they were mistakes that someone learning the language—or relying on a dictionary—would make. Aguayo wondered why no one else had noticed this ersatz quality.
Other Latino writers thought that the question of linguistic fidelity was murkier. The variety of Spanish dialects made it difficult to come to a firm conclusion. Manuel Muñoz, an American-born novelist of Mexican ancestry and an early supporter of the novel, who had been up for the same job as Carrillo at G.W.U., noted to me, “An ex of mine was Cuban and we completely confused each other with the word for ‘snake’: he used majá and I used víbora, and neither of us had ever heard the other word.” Carrillo didn’t speak Spanish fluently—and would sometimes duck occasions when he was expected to do so by claiming to have a migraine—but Viramontes, his mentor, pointed out that it wasn’t unusual for Latin-born academics who had come to America as children to speak little or no Spanish.
Even if Carrillo’s colleagues sensed that the way he spoke about his life was mythic––he told one G.W.U. professor that his ancestors had been enslaved workers on a plantation owned by forebears of Desi Arnaz––they embraced his aura of mystery. In 2010, Faye Moskowitz, a professor in the creative-writing program, was quoted in an article in the G.W.U. newspaper celebrating Carrillo. “Is there a mystique about people who are known by a single name?” she said. “Elvis? Beyoncé? Madonna? We in the Creative Writing Program have our own single-name star. Hache is what we call him.”
After Carrillo’s death, his siblings also had no desire to expose his lies. They were grieving, and had long been inured to their brother’s lack of restraint—sometimes they were even amused by it. He had become the crazy uncle in the family, the one who entertained their kids. Maria recalls her children making French toast with her brother and crying out, in astonishment, “Your nipples are pierced!,” after he insisted on changing into a chef’s uniform. They even came to call him Tío—Uncle—at his request.
Although Carrillo’s family didn’t take his fabulations seriously, they told me, they also didn’t realize how far the stories had gone. When they saw their names Hispanicized in the agradecimientos of “Loosing My Espanish,” they thought it was just their brother using a literary persona. When they stumbled upon Carrillo’s Wikipedia page, not long after the novel’s release, they presumed that, like so many other entries, it had been written by someone who didn’t know all the facts. They also assumed that if he pushed his games of make-believe too far someone would call a halt to them. In fact, they were surprised that no one had done so already. “How come there were no background checks?” Susan Carroll asked me. “We didn’t understand how he got employed.” She added, “If someone would have asked me, I would have told them. But nobody asked.”
By the time Carrillo published “Loosing My Espanish,” he was officially who he claimed to be: in June, 2003, shortly before the book came out, he legally changed his surname to Carrillo.
He had to work hard to keep his two lives separate: family who visited D.C. found him unreachable or available to meet only at restaurants. Friends from his HBO days made plans to see him, only to have him stand them up. There were close calls. In 2007, when Carrillo joined G.W.U.’s faculty, he was likely shocked to find that another member of the department was Robert McRuer, a nephew of Ken McRuer, Carrillo’s old lover from Detroit. The younger McRuer didn’t get why Carrillo kept his distance. When Carrillo’s mother died, in 2015, and vanEngelsdorp asked to attend the funeral, in Detroit, his husband lied and said it was a small commemoration. “He made me feel I would have just added stress to the situation,” vanEngelsdorp said.
Carrillo never cut himself off entirely from his family. He often called his sisters and chatted for hours. Sometimes he entertained them with stories of the insects that his entomologist husband kept in the freezer—he even sent photographs—but until vanEngelsdorp texted them about their brother’s struggles in the hospital they wondered whether vanEngelsdorp was just another Carrillo invention. “We were amazed Dennis was real,” Susan said.
Only one family member—Susan’s daughter, Jessica Webley—was moved to correct Carrillo’s deceitful narrative. When her uncle died, she was living in the Sherwood Forest house that Carrillo had grown up in. She had moved in to look after her sick grandmother, who, she says, had been hurt by her son’s denial of his heritage. The Post obituary, which Webley saw online, outraged her. “Once it was on record that this is who my uncle was, I had to step in and say no,” Webley told me last summer, when we met outside Detroit. Webley, who works for an at-home medical-care company, teared up as she recalled her decision to expose her beloved uncle. (He called her minouche—French for “kitty.”)
To correct the record, she had added a comment to the Post’s Web site, saying that she was Hache Carrillo’s niece, and explaining, “He was born Herman Glenn Carroll. To his family we call him Glenn.” She continued, “I cannot correct all the lies in this article,” appending the hashtag #FakeNews. A commenter calling herself Lady MacBeth shot back, calling her “some anonymous troll’y ‘niece,’ ” and adding, “People are grieving here. Go pollute some other thread.” Webley responded, “I am grieving as well.” She then sent an e-mail to the obituary’s author, Paul Duggan. By the next day, the newspaper had emended the article to explain Carrillo’s double life; when it appeared in the print edition, the day after that, it was correct.
On the porch, vanEngelsdorp was genial and thoughtful; he seemed like a man it would be cruel to trick. He’d taken comfort in the fact that his European friends and family weren’t much bothered by Carrillo’s duplicity. “My best friend, who lives in Sweden, literally said, ‘Dennis, I don’t understand what the big deal is,’ ” vanEngelsdorp told me. He acknowledged being bewildered and hurt by his husband’s lies, yet he wasn’t sure that Carrillo owed him an apology. “I’m a little bit proud of him,” he admitted. “I feel conflicted.” His science background also helped him absorb what Carrillo had done. VanEngelsdorp explained, “Since there’s no such thing biologically as race, it has to be a cultural construct, and if it’s cultural then it’s performance.” His husband had taken this logic to its inevitable conclusion. In vanEngelsdorp’s more forgiving moments, he was at peace knowing that “the only true things he ever told me about his life was his birthday and the fact that he was Catholic.”
VanEngelsdorp had several explanations for failing to see through the charade. Especially when they first were together, he was often off doing field work. He added that he had a bad memory and was prone to abstraction; he had also been abused as a child, and was thus inclined to allow others the privacy of their pasts, and reluctant to probe beneath the surface of things. He gave an example. In 2013, Maryland legalized same-sex marriage, which, paradoxically, threatened the protections of civil partnership which Carrillo and vanEngelsdorp had previously enjoyed. They had to get married quickly, and to complete the paperwork vanEngelsdorp needed Carrillo’s passport. Carrillo resisted but, just before the deadline, gave it to his partner. Opening the document, vanEngelsdorp was surprised to see Carrillo’s place of birth listed as “Detroit.” Carrillo smoothly explained that, under a congressional bill known as the Wet Feet/Dry Feet Act, wherever a Cuban exile first settled was listed as his place of birth. VanEngelsdorp had accepted the story, he told me, without entirely believing it. “I saw what I needed to see,” he said.
We went inside. Carrillo’s ashes were in a container on the piano. We had pea soup that vanEngelsdorp had made, and he continued to ponder why he hadn’t worked harder to find out the truth. He recalled that Carrillo had once told him he’d sold a vase they’d bought together for a big profit, but never produced the money. Shortly afterward, vanEngelsdorp found the vase in a dresser drawer. He described the terror on his husband’s face when he saw him making this discovery: “It was just so clear. There was panic in his eyes.” He decided then that he could tolerate some myths. “If you need me to believe that you sold that vase—I mean, why wouldn’t I give that to you?”
He acknowledged that the deceit had left “holes” in their relationship. He even wondered if the stress of living a double life could kill a person. As he had reckoned with Carrillo’s duplicities, he looked for signs of kindness. He told me that his husband had shredded a lot of papers while they lived together but had saved one old box of financial records. After so much gaslighting, vanEngelsdorp found it consoling to think that Carrillo had left behind these documents so that he could know at least some things had been true.
VanEngelsdorp had already learned that a house he thought he was going to inherit in Puerto Rico had never been Carrillo’s. He was girding himself for more unsettling discoveries. When Carrillo died, he’d left behind a locked laptop. VanEngelsdorp planned to send it to a colleague at the University of Maryland who might be able to hack its password, though it seemed to me that he was less curious about what else might be hidden than about what it had cost his husband to hide it.
I visited vanEngelsdorp again this past January. The witch hazel was in bloom. Huddy had died. In the previous sixteen months, he had scattered his husband’s ashes and given away the piano, moved upstairs some of Carrillo’s “darker” pictures (though not the one with the fake half brother), and filled the house with tall flowering plants that Carrillo would have hated. He had a new partner, a man whose name was Juan but who did not pretend to be Latino. Juan joined us for a chicken pot pie that vanEngelsdorp had prepared.
VanEngelsdorp said that he’d grown more certain in the past year that he had been lucky to be married to Carrillo. His husband, he assured me, had not wronged him: “He knew that if I found out I’d be O.K. I think he knew that the way I thought would eventually come to the place I’m in now.” He and the Carroll family had grown friendly, and he was looking forward to enjoying more of their company.
The cultural discussion around Carrillo, meanwhile, had shifted from how he had perpetrated his fraud to what the response to his cultural vulturism should be. Not all of Carroll’s friends were as forgiving as vanEngelsdorp. Gina Franco, a poet who was exploring her Mexican roots when she became friends with Carrillo at Cornell, said, “He played with my very vulnerable feelings about my own identity. He manipulated me into a friendship and he lied to me. He knew I was scared of being seduced by narratives and he still did it.” Everyone agreed that Carrillo’s students, especially those of Latin ancestry, had been victimized. Jeffrey Cohen, who was the department head at G.W.U. when Carrillo was hired, told me, “There doesn’t seem to me anything great or admirable about deceiving people, especially young people, even if the fiction was spun charismatically.”
Public comment split along predictable lines. Conservatives asked if a white professor would be so easily forgiven. Some critics on the left saw Carrillo as a victim of internalized self-hatred in a racist society—an exemplum of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” Carroll’s family wasn’t persuaded by this interpretation. “I really don’t think he was hiding from his Blackness,” his sister Maria told me. “I just think he wanted a more interesting narrative to his story, and who better to write it than himself?” Susan Carroll had taken a DNA test to make sure that her brother hadn’t actually been telling the truth about his background, and had confirmed that she had no Latin heritage: the family’s ancestry was mostly Nigerian.
Around the time of Carrillo’s death, the writer Jeanine Cummins published “American Dirt,” an awkward thriller about Mexican migrants. The publicity campaign emphasized that she identified as Latina, but when it was revealed that she had no Mexican heritage, and was only one-quarter Puerto Rican, the backlash was fierce; Cummins was accused of engaging in an unseemly masquerade. The Chicana writer Myriam Gurba denounced the work, writing, “ ‘American Dirt’ fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween.” At G.W.U., discussions of Carrillo’s deceptions led to the unmasking of another professor: Jessica Krug, an expert on African American history, who had falsely claimed to be partially Black. In an online confession, she wrote, “For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.” She resigned shortly afterward.
In recent decades, various writers have published work under fake ethnic identities—but often the deceptions have involved white writers engaged in perverse acts of grievance about identity politics. In 2015, an obscure white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson posed as a woman named Yi-Fen Chou, then revealed his identity after a poem was selected for the “Best American Poetry” anthology. But publishing under a name borrowed from another ethnicity is easier than actually assuming the ethnicity associated with that name. In 1984, Daniel James, who had published “Famous All Over Town,” a novel about Mexican Americans, under the pseudonym Danny Santiago, won a five-thousand-dollar award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but, seeing no way to show up and claim it, he skipped the ceremony. In the late nineties, Laura Albert began posing as the queer male novelist J. T. LeRoy; her public face was her androgynous relative Savannah Knoop, whose clumsy impersonation ultimately caused the scheme to unravel. The singular aspect of Carroll’s ruse is that he didn’t just write as Carrillo; he became Carrillo. Perhaps he thought that, if he didn’t assume the personality that the name suggested, no one would find his portrait of Cuban American culture convincing. Or maybe the skeptic he was trying hardest to persuade was himself.
“Loosing My Espanish,” it seems clear to me, is not the straightforward act of narration it was first generally understood to be. Carrillo amplifies qualities that Latin American fiction was then known for—exuberance, sensuality, creamy flan, waving palm trees—to the point of parody. The word guayaba, Spanish for “guava,” appears twenty-three times. In an essay that he never published, Carrillo described the novel as “an exploration of the ways in which cubanidad in the United States had been commodified and orientalized within the US American imaginary since Wim Wenders’s ‘Buena Vista Social Club.’ ” Seen in this light, there’s a mischievous subtext to “Loosing My Espanish”; critics who took it at face value became part of the joke. (The novelist Alexis Romay, who was born in Cuba, described the novel to me as “shtick,” and the writer Achy Obejas, a Havana native who briefly taught Carrillo in a Cuban American literature class at DePaul—he dropped it after two days—believes that the novel’s “performance of Cubanness was mostly directed at non-Cubans.”)
Todd Parker, Carrillo’s theory teacher at DePaul, told me that Carrillo “may have decided that since you can’t beat them, co-opt them.” Carrillo had even engaged in a similar burlesque with his life. Many of the people he duped recall him preparing them comically lavish Cuban meals: piles of arroz con pollo topped off with flan de guayaba supposedly based on his grandmother’s special recipe. Inevitably, a Celia Cruz record was spinning on the stereo.
Carrillo seems to have been unable to keep up this complex cultural dance. VanEngelsdorp informed me that, in the interval between my visits, a tech expert had broken into Carrillo’s laptop. Its contents had been disappointing. There were class syllabi, piano scores, and old drafts of published work. There were no anguished journal entries in which Carrillo wrote about his secrets. And although there was a bit of new fiction, he had evidently hit a wall. The final piece of fiction that Carrillo wrote, dating from around 2017, was a chapter of what would have been the middle of “Twilight of the Small Havanas”—the novel set on the day of Fidel Castro’s rumored assassination. The novel’s ambition is hinted at in its epigraph, a line from the poet Anne Carson: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” The line clearly refers to Castro, but it also seems to apply to one of the book’s protagonists: an elegant and fastidious young émigré who has a gift for reading other people and getting what he wants from them. He travels around America telling fake stories about how his family has suffered: he is the indigent son of a disgraced Argentinean businessman; his mother was raped by Shining Path rebels; his parents were among the disappeared in El Salvador. Moved by these stories, people give him money, jewelry, keys to cars, heroin. The young man’s actual origins remain obscure. (In a précis of the novel, Carrillo writes of the character’s agility at being a “professional Latino.”)
A former graduate student in ornithology named Xiomara joins the young man on his travels, and he tutors her in the art of self-invention. She can be “anything or anyone,” he tells her. “You can be the queen of Romania, a nine-year-old Hindu boy, a clutch of Peruvian artibeus—but never, ever, yourself.” When, under his guidance, she tells her first lies, she feels that “she had suddenly felt a part of herself come into a more real existence than it ever had been before.” But she is not a natural deceiver, and as they continue their journey she ponders her enigmatic companion: who is this man who can manipulate everyone, including her? The text file on the computer breaks off in midsentence, with Xiomara imagining herself a bird: “turning and turning, she had beaten up clouds of dust around the boy that copied themselves and copied themselves un”—
Until what? It’s hard to know where Carrillo meant to take his story. “Twilight of the Small Havanas” is, like “Loosing My Espanish,” an attempt to present Latin identity as a baroque performance. But the plot seems to be heading toward a crisis point. This confidence man will reveal who he is and why he is this way. Such understandings, Xiomara senses, are the true goal of life and literature, and she is ready to hear the truth. “His heart, his heart, his heart,” Carrillo writes. “All she knows is how badly she had wanted to open him up—split him down the breast plate—dissect and examine this thing he kept calling his heart.” ♦
With it being Fat Tuesday and the beginning of Mardi Gras in New Orleans I decided to honor it with the slang term often heard during the Saints football games. More than a phrase it is a mantra that many have used as a call out, but the origin and history behind the expression is an interesting one which NPR explains in this piece. And with that I am culturally appropriating it today to discuss again the never ending tide of untruths, misinformation and falsehoods that align the only media that apparently matters anymore – Social.
I had never heard of Andrew Tate until I read a Guardian article about his arrest in Romania and largely due to the climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who simply pointed out that he should have tossed his pizza box away first. It was from that box they found him there with his Brother and several women whom he has allegedly trafficked and sexually assaulted. It was a “Who Dat” moment, as I was unaware of his life, his thought or anything about him as all, as I don’t follow Social Media. And certainly not the ramblings of a moron former reality star and his thoughts on Women. Well that is unless he becomes President of the United States then I am all ears! The persona that this individual created is one of the king of “Toxic Masculinity” who is a Misogynist, advocated for Rape and abuse of Women and has made several Racist and other hateful messages throughout his “career” as a social media moron. America has Joe Rogan as the close equivalent and Alex Jones the equally histrionic moron who finally was literally taken to court and taken to the bank to withdraw his supposed millions that he covered by filing Bankruptcy, well that is one way to make your financial records public. There is nothing that says, “I am an angry white man” more than one with bucks and the security of the First Amendment. Britain is so in arms about this Tate bullshit and his fake “university” (hmm who else had one of those?) that they are establishing courses to combat this including hosting assembly’s to combat his hateful messaging, with what appears little success, as the audience of Teen boys are enamored by his supposed wealth and of course his ability to get fucked/laid or find pussy. Well when you traffic in it yes it is easy to get.
And this is where we are in 2023, the “new normal” as a result of the pandemic, the switch to online learning, the long hours in quarantine and the like, the lack of socialization, the rise of social media and living a life online have led to this bullshit as fact. I am not sure why some are more predisposed that others but I have long suspected it is a lack of reading comprehension. I do believe many, and particularly People of Color and those working poor are truly functionally illiterate. I remember when I was called that during University only to pass classes when T.A.’s and Professors had dismissed me. I recall having to sit with a Professor’s wife to learn to write. Did I actually learn to write from her? No, I learned to write what they wanted to read. I learned to direct quote and cite and offer little of my personal opinion. It took me a lot longer to learn that it meant in all aspects of life that keeping my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself were critical for me to work and to be a part of larger society. In other words I am very honest, critically honest, emotional and direct. I have heard more euphemisms for this character quality including “unfiltered” “funny” “sarcastic” and all of them negative. Almost all from Women. Men have never had a problem with it as they assumed a Cock in my mouth would shut me up. Well how long does it take? Three minutes, shove a finger up their ass it’s over fast. See what I mean. It is why I live alone and keep to myself it is pointless to have conversations with people who do not read, do not watch TV, Movies, have hobbies or interests. I spoke with a Woman from the Upper West Side, the same place I had encountered the man who informed me I was WRONG about my opinion and went on and on about his working and living in Pennsylvania. She read no newspapers, no TV news or radio and only read the Upper West Side “newsletter” about how bad it all was. Who the fuck writes it? What is their source and is it fact checked? I am guessing like all Social Media it is extrapolated and taken out of context from real sources. I heard a lunatic on a podcast (Juicy Scoop a comedy podcast that veers into nutty conspiracy shit from time to time) say that the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands (who has since been fired from her job due to the Epstein Investigation) was not speaking to the public and instead gave an interview to the New York Times. This incensed her as she said it is a closed access media as it is behind a paywall. Yes you dumb bitch it is a newspaper and if you want to read it you have to BUY IT. Or go to a Library which usually keeps copies of newspapers. This is what we have for fact checking, and a source supposedly reporting news. Someone who doesn’t read or listen to it.
And this morning I ran down to get packages from our front desk, it was around 5:30 in the morning. There was the Nanny who lives in the building and cares for two Autistic boys and she was down there talking to one of the Desk Attendants. I just wanted to get my packages, have some breakfast and finish reading my newspaper from yesterday. That was not going to happen. She asked me about this Rapper friend of hers and played me his track. I am the LAST person you would ask about that genre of music and when I have those situations I usually answer in a question, such as: “Is that person a working musician or working towards a career in music?” My last foray into Hip Hop was DeLaSoul and with that I did tell her that and that Trugoy had just died last week and I had been listening to their work quite a bit on the radio of late. She did not know he had died and then launched into her work as a consultant for creators and that he had not hired her and was demanding she promote him. For someone supposedly engaged in music, how would you not know that a legend in Rap was dead! Honestly, I am again the last person who gives a flying fuck about this and I just nodded and said, “Not a person engaged in Social Media at all, also Hip Hop, so wrong person here about this subject.” And that is when I said I am so oblivious I had just read about this Andrew Tate person, for the first time in the New York Times and had read that in England they are having classes to counter the crazy shit he says online. He is a Joe Rogan meets Alex Jones type, only if possible, more hateful and misogynist. And she in fact, natch had heard of him. Then she launched into how he speaks truth and that his arrest was planned by the Matrix. The what? The who? Is that Keanu Reeves? I finally stopped her and told her that the only news I have read is from The New York Times, The Post and the UK Guardian, all of which have portrayed him as a Human Trafficker and a horrific human being that may be exaggerating his wealth, getting kids to pay all kinds of money for “classes” that espouse hate. She again goes on and on about how people are after him for being a truth teller. Okay, sure.what.ever. With that I asked her if she had seen or heard or read anything about him, his arrest and his toxic masculinity? She again pulls up You Tube and has him on it saying it is all lies. Okay so you sourcing info about him FROM HIM. What? I believe I have a video of OJ denying his innocence too. I told her that citing him as a source about him is missing something such as an objective opinion by a well known and respected source. And with that I am going to stick with mine and a clock is right at least twice a day and I am sure he has said something anyone could agree with as a result. But his hate speech is that and with that let’s change that to Race or Religion, the messenger is the same but now a new message would then you begin to seek out some alternatives? And all of this, the justification, excuse making, all of this is from a Black Woman. My head is imploding at this point and I feel for her. She is a good person but clearly has no ability to read, to seek out sources of genuine information and truth and I believe it is the failure of public education.
In the course of this never ending pre-dawn discussion we passed over the issue of Trans and what that means to be a Woman. And naturally she was unfamiliar with the JK Rowling/Germaine Greer issues agree with much of what is a similar view. But the issues seem to center that if you think that you are against the Trans community. And again this is a falsehood as we may not fully agree on the issues but we agree that the community is one that needs support. So she railed on and then in turn informed me, the Teacher, of how schools are indoctrinating Gender issues in Kindergarten. I have never personally witnessed it, never seen or heard any source that is legit with examples and the curriculum itself. The only one I could find was a California “suggestion” of the Sex Education curriculum done in 2019. And with that I have not actually heard any Teachers doing so. And only of it again through very suspect sources (note no Principal, nor the Teacher or any other Student interviewed) and with that any Teacher doing so is not doing this with 5 year olds who have them for a half a day and impossible to do so with not a Parent involved. As for older kids in High School if there are Teachers who allow Students to self identify and change pronouns without consent of Parents that is there problem and has nothing to do with me. I don’t Teach with them, don’t have Children under their care and with that if a Child is that afraid to talk to their Parents that may be an entire issue that would require CPS and Intervention and that should be a last resort. Any time I have had a Student inform me of their Gender/Identity change I have said, “Until a roster comes from the office with your new name I cannot legally call you by anything else.” Believe me they come up with all kinds of nicknames and bullshit and this was years ago, so I just address them by a surname. And if a kid is that confused I suggest that they see a Family Physician and their convo is HIPPA protected and they can get the advice, assistance and referrals they need. She informed me that a child cannot speak to a Doctor without parental consent. Uh no that the Parent knows (you know Insurance etc) but they can speak privately. It is not illegal and the Doctor only has to report that if the Patient plans to do harm or commit self harm. Again there are many organizations and entites that help kids and they can go there. Those are the appropriate channels and my job is to teach History and English. Folks I don’t want to be involved. What happened to minding my own business and staying in my lane? I understand that a Parent wants to be able to communicate to their own children but if a Child is afraid then maybe you have failed; however, I and many Teachers I feel do feel the same that we are not appropriate intermediaries. And guess what you don’t have to agree you just have to accept it and move on.
And in reality Trans Teachers are barely surviving as Teachers so why the hell would they take on any additional controversy and conflict? They wouldn’t. I knew one in Tennessee and he left the State as they are busy hating on his people so you do what you do. All his colleagues knew but the Kids did not. So where is this agenda again?
I went back up to my apartment with mixed feelings. This young woman is a fucking hot mess. It doesn’t make her a bad person but a misinformed one. I cannot nor do I want to get into these repeated exchanges they serve no one. She will go back to Tik Tok and YouTube and fuel her head to fuel and secure her beliefs. I tried to explain that we have become so tribal and so narcissistic since the pandemic we have problems just accepting even moderate differences of opinion. And I used Dave Chappelle as an example. He jokes about Trans people, okay we get it and you are “distressed” “disturbed” “confused” or whatever emotion he feels justifies his need to joke about it. One point he has made is that since you are new to the marginalized people group you cannot cut in line. And he and I disagree. There should be no line of import with regards to those whom society has exploited, done harm and in turn ignored. We should be a collective and front together to bring attention and hopefully change. But never once I have I heard Dave Chappelle advocate for harm to those in the Trans community. I have read and heard Andrew Sullivan on the Dishcast, a man who is a Gay Catholic and Conservative mock his own people calling them “Alphabet people”with the Lesbian and Liberal writer, Katie Herzog. They discuss the failure to actually discuss the danger and harm we have in pushing the agenda that maybe drugging and participating in altering gender at an early age is not a good thing, and that many stop or go back. So this tribe is a rather diverse one and with that we have the right to express our thoughts, just not ones that encourage harm. Well Andrew Tate whom this Woman likes has and yet she refuses to believe it. Why?
Again we can be affiliated with a tribe and not agree to be just like the other. In fact why is a tribe a singular nature? With all the talk about diversity we should tolerate, accept and understand diversity of thought, of being and belief. Well guess what? We don’t. We are so wrapped up in our identity, be that of Race, Gender, Sexuality, Politics, Culture, Religion or even Regional (think Sports teams) that we simply cannot understand why someone does not follow the script that has never been written by anyone, never read by anyone and in turn followed by anyone who is an invisible being on the interwebs. I can read a book, listen to a podcast, read an article and not agree with all of it, like any of it or even care about it and I can in turn recommend it or write a review that expresses my opinion. It is not your opinion and it does not mean that I personally will have any affect on you personally. So what you do or don’t is not my problem or concern. It only is if we live and/or work together and then we have to find a middle ground in which to work it out. Wow that compromise thing is so retro. Fuck it I would rather spend my time permanently being affronted for it all.
In an effort to cancel culture as in Literature, History, Art, Music and any expression of diverse thought or ideas comes the concept of AI and ChatGPT, where you can create a world of your own making or that of the Computer. Kevin Roose in the New York Times tried Microsoft’s Open AI and to say the exchange is creepy is insufficient. But for likely man men she is a dream come true. And the Washington Post also tried the service and they felt it was much like many of those who post on the comment page – angry. I can see this working out well.
The issues about where I see writing going with the advances of this ChatGPT concerns me. It is still highly structured and with that a quality Reader/Editor/Publisher can see the technical aspects of it easily but with that most people are not that skilled and it will become the new method in which to construct newsletters and faux blogs that will be perceived as legitimate in both fact and source. Again we have a massive problem distinguishing fact from opinion and with that I have complained that most of the Washington Post is now in fact much like Fox, Opinion based new disguised as fact. The argument over the concept of journalism as objective has been raised of late and the idea of it being actually debated as something worth relinquishing concerns me as more and more Billionaires like Bezos who owns the Post turning it into his personal form of propaganda. The LA Times has had a struggle to survive with their changes but I am reading it without a past history so I find the paper very readable. Does it cover local news as well as it once did? Likely no as the Post has cut much of that staff as well. Eliminating the weekly magazine that included local art reviews and other more social news. We have of course Tik Tok, hot mess. Facebook equally so and Twitter certainly will or has due to Musk.
This week as the Tech layoffs continue what has been largely the Fact Checking sides of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have been decimated and with a skeleton crew of one to two left, what was largely already a mess of confusion is now largely non-existent. As we move into election season, the war in the Ukraine and of course more disasters such as Turkey and Syria, Afghanistan and the rest of the world and political upheavals this will not be handled well at all by those who rely on these sites as sources of both communication and information. And it is expected to get worse.
But what about actual books, magazines, online journals and those that still remain in print? Will they soon fall the way of the dust bin? I have no clue as more close and or are consolidated there is another one coming round the pike. Gawker’s reinvention found it closing down again by choice as it simply failed to have the heat as it once did. We are seeing changes in Vice and others as they move forward into a new landscape that seems to rely less on actual boots on the ground. So writing as a profession is deeply in trouble. And on that note let’s talk about dead Authors. Already living ones are finding books being removed off of reading lists and out of Libraries. And there are those of the past being pushed aside for the language and tone of the books by those who feel that the use of language and issues of Race are no longer relevant. And here comes Roald Dahl facing a new editor, social mores.
I wrote about Dahl and his relationship with his wife with regards to a book that is coming out, so I was not surprised that someone decided to re-examine his work on the revelation about his own Misogyny, etc. He is not the first nor the last. The concept of books being used as a political football is not new and the McCarthy Hearings targeted much of the same, ask Dalton Trumbo about that.
I cannot wait to read ChatAI’s biography!
Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive
Augustus Gloop now ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’, Mrs Twit no longer ‘ugly’ and Oompa Loompas are gender neutral
Hayden Vernon Sat 18 Feb 2023 The Guardian
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.
Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, said they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”.
A notice from the publisher sits at the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Dahl’s books: “The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters. This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”
A spokesperson for the Roald Dahl Story Company said: “When publishing new print runs of books written years ago, it’s not unusual to review the language used alongside updating other details including a book’s cover and page layout. Our guiding principle throughout has been to maintain the storylines, characters, and the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text. Any changes made have been small and carefully considered.”
One of the things I began to do in the early days of the pandemic was read the paper the following day, literally making it old news. The next was not watching the nightly news or only listening to BBC or PBS as they covered larger scale stories that were global in focus and the other was to laugh at Cuomo/Murphy/DiBlasio’s Three Stooges Act that finally the rest of the world realizes was just a Daddy scolding people with no real plan, no actual strategy to resolve the issues of Covid from the need to accelerate testing, contract tracing and of course hospital funding to alleviate inequalities among the States medical system. NONE of that happened. And to this day Governor Murphy refuses numerous AP requests on Covid strategy’s and funding from FOIA requests, so that seems to say there is much to hide. We will never know the actual numbers of deaths and of course the realities of who tested positive and the breakdowns of those numbers with actual demographic issues, because of HIPPA and the failure to actually keep consistent ones. Just for the record we can say that only about 1% of all Covid positive cases made it to hospitals and again out of that we need to further break that down of what kind of care they received and the actual data on treatment plans that worked and more importantly those that failed. Hospitals are supposed to have a Good luck with that. That has been a long standing issue in hospital care, their overall negligence. This is from 2013, imagine today.
This is the one site that has a fairly good comparative of the world’s data when it comes to Covid and you can see that while the media did a daily update of constant hysteria it appears that the numbers are not always consistently bad. There like any major issues you see an uptick and decline with some staying relatively small in comparison. I will never forget the daily Cuomo mantra of “flattening the curve.” The most histrionic and absurd use of a phrase that did not mean anything except with regards to hospital admissions. Again which hospitals and where they were mattered as there were many that had vacant beds and some rural hospitals closed in the middle of this nightmare as they did not have the funding. So it was flattening budgets really is what they meant. It was whack-a-mole and the hammer was the Government.
When I wrote early on about the crisis I felt it was being very poorly communicated and in turn managed and my feeling about that has not changed as I lied to get my vaccine and am now awaiting number two, which had I not, I doubt I would be anywhere near getting even one. And I said that in the beginning about testing – lie. The Covid denier I know whose wife seems to be an Instagram whore (Influencer I doubt as there are not enough followers to lend to that) has been traveling, was the one put me and others at risk, exposing us while getting take out on his way to get a Coivd test. WHAT THE FUCK? And in that, including members of his own family, when he realized he had Covid after the test came back POS. Why he did not tell me or anyone he did expose that he had Covid until a year later and still seems to be infuriating if not bizarre. But he is not an outlier in that one.
So this is where we are. He like many others are sure that this is not a pandemic Just the throngs of students on spring break in Miami tell you enough. Now Michigan that let up on restrictions is finding another surge, and in New Jersey our numbers have always been high as we had gyms and restaurants open with capacity limits for quite some time while NYC did not. Now that too is changing and more disruption will follow but the ability to get tested and treated without hospitalization has changed. Mircrosoft and other businesses are opening their doors to workers in the months ahead and I suspect that travel will as well become a big business with airlines and the hospitality industry biting at the bit to get money back into the coffers. So Covid deniers and young people have at it. I have said that all the young should be receiving the J&J shots as they have better immune systems and the oldsters the double down but like testing this is another crapshoot of luck of the draw. Imagine had they done testing by massively requiring all those at risk (the same to get the first shots) to lock down, tested all the young first, had widespread contact tracing, and then allowed them to gradually re-enter the marketplace, that the lockdown would have been months versus a year. And here we are.
There was an article in the New York Times that stated most of the press coverage over Covid was negative. That I knew as well and knew that it contributed to much of the kickback by the deniers as there is only so much one can take before you shut it down/out. It was why I went to Scientific journals early on and realized exactly what Covid was, a virus, meaning airborne and that there are ways to circumvent the spread with masks, limited contact and high ventilation. And I have not been wrong yet. I never fucking washed an Amazon package and I do wear gloves as a courtesy when shopping as that anti bacterial shit was causing my hands to get incredibly bad rashes, so thrown on the gloves, shop, toss them and wash my hands when I get home. I also wear them in the gym to open windows, clean equipment as I have seen what my neighbors do and frankly they are disgusting and filthy so I will continue that protocol for my lifetime when I enter a gym. But I do think we like the media to be the negative Nancy regardless of our Politics as it confirms our ignorance, our unwillingness to read and our need to be tribal.
A podcast I listen to, the Kicker, by Columbia School of Journalism, covers much of these issues and how the media casts a narrative, be it liberal or conservative, and the reality is that this is also why I believe the new media, the online journalism largely failed, as they made no efforts to hide their bias and in turn were actually just opinion pieces disguised as journalism. And while that works on blogs it is not a magazine or journal one pays for, to in fact research and fact check their stories; And yes they too fail at those but they also normally retract and make note of their mistakes. I recall the hysteria over the supposed pee tape and that was to my knowledge never acknowledged as poor journalism. And I subscribe to the Washington Post and The New Yorker, I quit watching Maddow years ago, she bores me silly. She is now the Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. But I read the articles and laughed at it but when it began to not literally hold water I expected retractions or corrections and that has never happened. When the Atlantic published an absurd piece recently about Connecticut sports Mothers I received an email apologizing and their magazine pulled the article online with a noted apology in their print edition. That works and is good policy. But we love our Negative Nancy, I call her the Indignant Army on Twitter with each day’s trending a sort of dance off between the Jets and Sharks to show who can do a high kick better. My God if you spent that much time actually reading and paying for real journalism we may get better journalism.
The U.S. media is offering a different picture of Covid-19 from science journals or the international media, a study finds.
By David Leonhardt The New York Times March 24, 2021,
Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew.
When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it, as far as Sacerdote could tell.
But he was not sure whether his perception was correct. To check, he began working with two other researchers, building a database of Covid coverage from every major network, CNN, Fox News, Politico, The New York Times and hundreds of other sources, in the U.S. and overseas. The researchers then analyzed it with a social-science technique that classifies language as positive, neutral or negative.
The results showed that Sacerdote’s instinct had been right — and not just because the pandemic has been mostly a grim story.
The U.S. media is an outlier
The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me.
About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.
Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).
Sacerdote is careful to emphasize that he does not think journalists usually report falsehoods. The issue is which facts they emphasize. Still, the new study — which the National Bureau of Economic Research has published as a working paper, titled, “Why is all Covid-19 news bad news?” — calls for some self-reflection from those of us in the media.
If we’re constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. We are shading it. We are doing a good job telling you why Covid cases are rising in some places and how the vaccines are imperfect — but not such a good job explaining why cases are falling elsewhere or how the vaccines save lives. Perhaps most important, we are not being clear about which Covid developments are truly alarming.
As Ranjan Sehgal, another co-author, told me, “The media is painting a picture that is a little bit different from what the scientists are saying.”
Why the bad-news bias?
The researchers say they are not sure what explains their findings, but they do have a leading contender: The U.S. media is giving the audience what it wants.
When the researchers examined which stories were the most read or the most shared on Facebook, they tended to be the most negative stories. To put it another way, the stories that people choose to read skew even more negative than the stories that media organizations choose to publish. “Human beings, particularly consumers of major media, like negativity in their stories,” Sacerdote said. “We think the major media are responding to consumer demand.”
That idea is consistent with the patterns in the data, Sacerdote added: It makes sense that national publications have better instincts about reaching a large audience than, say, science journals. And overseas, some of the most influential English-language media organizations — like the BBC — have long received government funding, potentially making them less focused on consumer demand.
All of that sounds plausible to me, but I don’t think it is the full explanation. I have worked in media for nearly three decades, and I think you might be surprised by how little time journalists spend talking about audience size. We care about it, obviously, but most journalists I know care much more about other factors, like doing work that has an impact.
In the modern era of journalism — dating roughly to the Vietnam War and Watergate — we tend to equate impact with asking tough questions and exposing problems. There are some good reasons for that. We are inundated by politicians, business executives, movie stars and others trying to portray themselves in the best light. Our job is to cut through the self-promotion and find the truth. If we don’t tell you the bad news, you may never hear it.
Sometimes, though, our healthy skepticism can turn into reflexive cynicism, and we end up telling something less than the complete story. I am grateful to Sacerdote, Cook and Sehgal for doing to us journalists what we normally do to others — holding up a mirror to our work and giving us a chance to do better.
This is sort of a potpourri catchall post about the goings on in America and the Globe the last few days.
Let’s start across the pond. After the week prior demonstration/protest about safety for women in London where the Cops went all American and tried to corral them into further subjugation and oppression, keep on keeping on as we say here, that only proved that in fact while a Police Officer may have killed Sarah Everard, they are also shitty at handling protests in the same way they do here. But what was even more interesting is that within a few days the Covid deiners in London decided to do their best to stage an even larger protests and once again the Police determined to keep up with their American counterpart, went all Capitol Police and just stood by as the maskless morons marched with determination to prove that even foreigners are equally idiotic there as well anywhere. But at least to prove they weren’t totally useless some of the protestors were arrested. Good on ya Mate! See ya at the pub for a round.
Then we have Americans once again jealous that anyone gets the Darwin Award for being the stupidest on the planet stepped it up to go nuts in Miami Beach. If killing Versace was not enough the spring breakers drugged and murdered another tourist and went on spending spree with her money after repeatedly raping her and leaving her to die. Well I mean is she going to be needing it? This after curfew and other crazed up anti protestor techniques were used to dispel crowds from the Ocean Drive scene, leading some to call the acts racist, that is the new code word for anyone doing anything to anyone that may have to do with law and order, or directing some type of side eye to another who might actually be doing something that is not good, such as rioting, not wearing a mask or playing music too loud.
For the record Ibram X. Kendi has determined that the word racist is not one applied to individuals and that they (well like sexuality I guess) can be fluid in their thought process:
“People should be held accountable when they’re being racist, but I think people should be able to repair the damage,” he said. “I don’t view ‘racist’ as a fixed category.” He added that he did not believe that “if someone said something racist 20 years ago or even two days ago that right now, in this moment, they’re also racist.”
As he now embarks on a new project redefining journalism this is the concept regarding his stance on what it means to be anti-racist. And perhaps that begins with building bridges as his exchanges with the Professor John McWhorter are ones worth noting that the two men of color don’t see eye to eye on the subject. But this new venture sounds interesting.
“If there was ever a body of people who should be arguing out the definition of a term, particularly a seemingly politically charged term like ‘racism,’ why would it not be journalists?” Dr. Kendi said in an interview on Thursday. “They should define the term based on evidence.”
Again that changes much of what was the premise of his book, that all whites are inherently racist as it is embedded within us, in our DNA and our evolution. I am glad to see some ability to compromise, a skill set we struggle with clearly.
Then we have now returned to pre-covid days with another mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado. Well this time the Sheriff’s Office has elected to keep stum rather than open their mouth and speculate on whether the shooter was having a bad day, was a racist, hated organic food, white liberals (I’ve been to Boulder its a bubble town in Colorado) or took issue with wearing clothes. And of course the age of said fuckwit, 21. Gosh like last week’s madman fitting that profile of under 30. And he purchased the assault weapon just six days before the shooting, on March 16, Next up Domestic Violence and Misogynistic issues. They all do. And despite killing a cop ends up unscathed. Wow had he been drinking, carrying a knife, cell phone or was just standing while black that might have been different. Reminded me of the Waffle House shooter in Nashville a few years ago, he too was wearing few garments before taking out the patrons in a largely Black area where the patrons and workers were all minorities. No mention of hate crime in that one. Why? Oh yeah, the South.
As for Covid, yeah it’s still a thing. While Texas and Florida are going all in for stupid, Europe is under another lockdown as the variants spread their terror like a white dude with an AK-47. We got bullets, they get a virus. Boulder had attempted in 2018 to pass a law banning Assault Weapons like the one used there, but 10 days prior had been blocked in Court. Apparently Columbine or Aurora was but a distant memory. But irony on top of irony in Congress the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on reducing gun violence in the wake of the latest mass shooting in the United States.
“While the COVID-19 pandemic raged across the nation in 2020, gun violence did too,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said last week in a statement announcing the hearing. “Americans from across the ideological spectrum can agree that the number of gun deaths in America is too high and that we should take steps to reduce it.”
I see that going a whole lot of nowhere along with self control, delayed gratification and patience required to see us through the end of this pandemic. I got my first shot today and the second next month is scheduled. Living like Job (I love a good Biblical reference) is my plan but not to the young man who asked me out and invited himself to my house to hang out in which to get to “know” each other. Wow I should be flattered but I am more appalled as it is at least another 45 days before I reach a point where I can safely join humanity. And just as I have embraced the post-AIDS world, I will mask up when in public. There is nothing wrong with covering a body part that will save lives, your own the most essential.
And that is the daily roundup. Save lives, start with your own.
There is a musical called Newsies about how young men delivered newspapers to homes all across the country. Back in the day it was often the first job young men (maybe young girls but nope) delivered papers to homes in communities. Subscriptions were reasonable and the cost of production was offset by ads. So it was also a way to find out what was on sale, what the local merchants had on offer or even learn about what was for sale nearby, for rent and of course all the movie schedules at the nearby theater. Today we simply glance at our magical 3×5 card or pull up the info on a laptop. Our news comes from others, largely aggregated and dissementated and we don’t pay for it. We listen but we don’t hear, we don’t vest and more importantly we don’t know.
Newspapers were the lifeblood, the were the Facebook or the Huffingon Post or the Yahoo News that came to your door, came into your home and went out into your community to actually police, to do the work so you did not have to. They went to the School Board meetings, to the Community Council ones, they asked questions, they found sources and sought information and exposed truths and more importantly lies. They wrote of life, death and everything in between. There is nothing that a newspaper does not report as all the news fit to print and all. I never heard of news not fit and in today’s climate, hookers, blow and sex are well news, it is just how it is written about that distinguishes the difference of fitness.
There are many online sources of news and information, some very valid and some less so. Some is opinion which is not news it is opinion and some news as Emily Dickinson said:
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind–”
The slant is the way the story is told, hard or with a bend that enables one’s own political or personal belief to establish tone and meaning. It is not a tool to be used in conventional journalism but alas it is now; however, it always had as the work is often the reflection of the publisher and in turn often the owner of the paper. Hearst newspapers of days gone by to the Murdoch ones of the present, one only has to see that name on the masthead to know what inside will have a tone, a voice that is more salacious and rapacious when it comes to certain subject. And that also can be changed as even the Wall Street Journal wants to matter to black lives and to those who are not just denizens of Wall Street.
With this or despite of it, the press has been called The Fourth Estate for a reason, and without it we would have no idea what the flying fuck is going on in this land from sea to shining sea. And there is a big land here and within it small towns, small cities and in them people who matter “irregardless” of their politics or beliefs. For facts should matter. And magazines and journals matter, and yes they too often reflect the owner and the publisher in tone and content, there has been a few these past few years the tech set has attempted to put its footprint on well established one. And yet the failed to ask those who matter, those who write, edit and do the heavy lifting on how to make this viable and no it will never be profitable but like education it is for the masses.
I look at many of the failed attempts by some of the rich and misguided to well do whatever they thought they were going to do, such as Jared Kushner and the New York Observer, when he for a hot minute was a publisher. Clearly as successful at that as he is Covid Ambassador, Middle East Peacenik, White House emissary in charge. He has more jobs than a Jamaican Family. They at least did theirs better.
But there are others who feel money makes up for stupid and some bilionaires are better at it than others but they love buying media.
But ultimately when you rely on the social of media and the endless sites dedicated to whatever subject they deem important, I question the source, the legitimacy of the sourcing, if at all sourced and of course vetting and fact checking. This from the Seattle Times discusses the end of Money magazine and yes even simple single subject magazines about tech, fashion and money matter. And while all of them are undergoing a massive sea change with regards to diversity all of that should have come from consumers long before but there were few who actually purchased let alone cared. Again with all this revolution happening I find it ironic that no one had ever “heard” of this racism, the Policing and and violence it brought into homes and communities. It took a pandemic where people were forced to stay home and watch a snuff film endlessly replayed for them to get woke. Fuck that shit. Fuck you for mocking me, for ignoring others, for not giving a shit and then sitting in your living room watching a murder on a continuous loop to actually know what is happening down the street, in the city nearby, in a town, on a road, in a jail or in the country where you live. Wow just wow, the stupid lives.
I knew Seattle was a hot mess of white liberalness and having moved back there from San Francisco it was a simple transition and I just went back to not giving a flying fuck in anything but my living room. But it was not until I moved to Nashville to see the parallels about how systemic and institutional racism, oppression, and more importantly MONEY falls into forcing compliance by building ignorance. Seattle has as many educated but utterly ignorant people living there. They have done the right thing, got a degree and a job and of course build the bubble in which they live. They eschew church and instead embrace a liberal leaning sense of politics but little changes. The election of the Socialist to the City Council is a disruption and she has a voice but is anyone really listening. The endless parades of Mayors of color, of sexual identity have been singular. The one black Mayor, the one Gay Male Mayor whose term ended on scandal replaced by a female version makes Seattle the checklist city in which to prove how forward, good and progressive they are. I even remember the debate over liberal versus progressive. Good times!
And for the record the current murder of a protestor has been largely buried in the press as the assailant was black and now it has become a blame the victim for being on a major road, at night, no discussion that the entrance to the road was blocked, Police were present enabling the protest to continue and that a man in a white jaguar came up the wrong entrance, likely on purpose, and it appears to drive deliberately into the two people, drove away and was stopped by one of the protestors who had a car parked as a type of shield to prevent such incidents, jumped into, chased the car, blocked it for Police to catch up. Upon arrest the driver said, “Are they alright?” Really is that what you do when you drive up in the dark, on a road blocked the wrong way, drive into people as they have no business being on the road and then drive off? Really? When I read the once hard core liberal leaning The Stranger cover the incident and the comments I knew I was right to leave there. (Seriously a fight between two drag queens right there is “very Seattle”) This was not the case in Charlottesville and that was a white male in the daylight who drove in reverse at high speed and killed a white woman, so on that note what was the Strangers’ slant then?
We can read one press to confirm our biases or read many to get a full picture. Artists and writers work from a perspective, they show it from full frontal to below like a child looking up, or from above in a God like watchful eye. And it is why we have press so we can hear/see all of them. I read the NY Post and Daily News every day as in between the hilarious titles and rants is actually local news and information. It is written with a certain tone and in a specific voice but it is well written and in fact filled with facts buried in the opinion. I don’t think today many of us know the difference.
I have linked an article, called The Last Reporter in Town Had One Big Question for His Rich Boss, about a newsman in a small town whose paper has closed its doors, it still exists as a ghost and its death was at the hands of a venture capitalist who has no interest in anything but money. They are vultures in every sense of the word as they pick away at the bones of corpses and return to their manses and penthouses without concern. They are waited on and upon and they don’t give one flying fuck about any life other than their own. If there is one thing I learned in Nashville was that the rich like it that way as who else would do the dirty work, the heavy lifting and in turn maintaining the status and the quo. And when they cannot they rely upon the autocrats, the dictators and the President to do it for them. If you were reading newspapers, magazines, knowing the news and information about where you live, shit you might go protest or something and that would be disturbing the way of life for those whose life you never know. When the Big White Daddies let everyone back in the gates and toss silver coins at you, you will forget George Floyd’s name and his black life along with all the others who have died at the hands of Police. News should be free and it is on television on public radio and they do ask for donations or at least some type of cable hook up to get that much yet those who reject that pay for endless streaming services. Ah, Hulu has a local news link to some of the networks and the nightly news. Oh fuck that shit bitch I got to post shit on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to show I am realz and the shizznit. Ah yes being ignorant is what they want and it is why they give you those tools for free but they mine you for something far more valuable and its cost to you is endless you fucking dipshit. A paper costs 2 bucks but then again when you are not paid a living wage, your housing costs absorb most of your income that whatever you have left you need to buy expensive purses, shoes and shit that people see. As what you look like matters more than what you know. Being stupid is cheap and if you don’t think that look to who controls you and the purse strings, they may be stupid but you let them do it.
The Fourth of July is normally the mid point of summer, with families scheduling vacations around this date and the hot days of this month are marked by summer camps and other extracurriculars that have kids still socializing and experiencing some type of emotional and intellectual stimulation if not growth. Right, that is if you have money and access. Few if any programs exist other than local community centers that like the rest of the services for the great unwashed are quite limited. Needless to say the antiquated notion of school running for nine months a year with the summer off might have to go the way with the rest of our former ideas on how to manage and operate the United States. Let’s face it folks, when Grocery Store workers, delivery drivers, public transportation operators and those others without degrees or established professional identities (think cooks, cleaners and other lower elements to the totem pole) are considered “essential” then we have a lot to rethink. They were lumped in with Doctors and other medical professionals or “front line workers” who were there to basically do their job in surreal circumstances, and again those circumstances are the same with the kids going to camp, academy’s and the like during summer break, the staff that work at wealthy hospitals that serve wealthy families. I have already put up the story about New York’s crisis with regards to how patients were treated, no, handled in public hospitals when they landed there for treatment. If they were lucky they were shoved to the naval ship or the Javitz Center or the religious tent in Central Park but those numbers were few and far between and many never made it out of the hospital in anything but a body bag.
Yes American medical care is exceptional in that it has two classes of patients – the have and the have nots. I am 99.9% sure that is why Harborview Hospital mistreated me in 2012 as they did not verify my insurance until after I was dismissed and in turn the damage was already done. Anyone setting foot in that shithole well good luck to you, its only a miracle I did not die from their mistreatment and I suspect many have been now and no one will ever know as they don’t have a massive newspaper with resources to cover this story as most other cities do either so those stories will go untold and the bodies dumped in the potter’s field or thrown into storage trucks parked on roadsides as they are here.
**and for the record the local presses have been very active in uncovering major scandals.. It was the Keating 5 that came out of local press and the story about Boeing from The Seattle Times and there are many many more, The Boston Herald as the Priest scandal that without their local investigative journalism many stories like these would go unknown and the culprits on with their lives, like now but without a good movie. ****
In fact many of the unclaimed belongings are lost in the halls, closets or trash bins never to find a home or place to rest as well. Again if you think that staff aren’t stealing some of these things, think again. Drug theft is the most common (and that includes Doctors as well) but they take whatever is not locked down if you don’t believe me, ask this Nurse. I find it a miracle that I walked out with any jewelry or belongings from my incident. Nurses are two bit cunts, and many others who work inside are lowly paid persons who frankly are largely ignored exploited workers, so they likely steal to use it to pawn. I suspect why they have not raided that cookie jar is largely due to the fact that everyone is so bloody scared of Covid they aren’t touching that shit but what they can take, they will. Again its hard to think of these “heroes” doing such a thing, yeah remember when you felt that way about Cops?
Here is the next casualty on the horizon, public schools and universities. The reality is that States are driven by the budget crisis to cut everything from everything. So if you think public health and education are already cut to the bone, think again. This is an irony on top of a crisis as now more than ever how schools and hospitals go forward will be a demanding if not expensive operation for decades to come. And in fact should be the norm as to ensure that parity and equity are finally achieved for all those who don’t have the privileges afforded them for being just essential workers. I do find that hilarious that the dude who poured my coffee everyday and the other who brought my food had bigger role than my Accountant and Attorney whom I have not spoken to since this began is something that doesn’t surprise me, as I rarely did and they are both new having fired the last Accountant and had just contacted the Attorney to set up some business trust and get my estate in order. Again more irony. I have no idea if we ever will meet or I will find someone else as I never wrote a check or followed up after the quarantine went down. So much for essential.
I don’t think any public teacher wants to set foot in any classroom without heavy duty protections in place, the same go with College Professors. The reality is that the two cohorts who have the most problem following instructions and complying with order are kids, regardless of age. I actually think of all kids, High Schoolers, would be the most easiest to work with as they are just of an age to rationalize what this means, the worst middle schoolers. Then of course those in the first year or two of College are equally disrespectful as they have entitlement tattooed on their forehead as they are convinced their entrance means they are special, like everyone else. What.ever. So after binge drinking, pledging a Fraternity and then drugging some girl up to rape behind a dumpster I am sure they have no problem monitoring their health, wearing a mask and following social distance protocols.
This is what current Academics are saying with regards to returning to campus. And this will also be the guidelines for those in K-12 as who do you think are telling the White Daddies what to do. This is the “brain trust” who come up with these ideas, then go “Fuck this is not working out.” Because trying to tell people how to behave and guide human behavior when they won’t listen, don’t care, assume its a game, political, fraud, made up, will go away, the fault of some Chinese person or whatever other bullshit falls out of the mouth of Trump, tells you everything you need to know in why this shit is hitting the fan. Then you have a media whose sole job is to not actually ask questions, seek varying opinions and follow stories that have the ability to fact check and substantiate, you got more problems. As I have read repeatedly stories that contradict, stories that have odd blank or missing facts without any critical analysis offered. We have seen opinion pieces and ads published without editorial oversight and more importantly, actual scientific reports printed only to be retracted days and weeks later without any real warning noted at print time advising that this may not be all that and a bag of chips has instead become the daily Covid Caller. And these are from the papers that have serious reputations that over the years despite their own roles in major fuckups, (Iran, that one was bad there NYT) (oh and the Post you ain’t innocent either) they are still considered the bellwether; so, when they screw it up we are screwed. Folks, most people are idiots, just ask the bleach drinkers.
And these same bleach drinkers breed, right there a problem, but do you honestly expect their children to be these compliant, well behaved individuals intent on following instructions and monitoring their behavior? Have you ever been to a public school? They barely managed online learning, disrupting those classes when and if they ever showed. So again, what about school?
Just ask these Teachers in Texas, hot bed for Covid 20 which seems worse than Covid 19. And of course the fish stinks from the head and so the White Daddies are putting this all on local districts without any guidance, let alone actual facts on how to do this, so I think this is like hospitals. The rich get all the goodies and the poor, well they can do what they always do, sink or swim. Oh don’t know how to swim? Well yeah that costs extra and we don’t have any extra sauce for you kid. Oh shit, (pun intended) it is like Chipolte. From parking lot fights to gun toting crazies if there is not another reason to set foot in that fast food dump there it is. That place was a hot bed of norovirus numerous times, you know like Covid, but less deadly. So again if you think all these fights and furies are bad now, just wait.
Texas Teachers Consider Leaving The Classroom Over COVID-19 Fears The Association of Texas Professional Educators recently surveyed some 4,200 educators. About 60% said they were concerned about their health and safety heading into the 2020-21 school year.
Laura Isensee | Posted on June 30, 2020,
For 40 years, Robin Stauffer has taught high school English in seven different school districts in three different states. Most recently, Advanced Placement English in Katy, where she says working with kids has kept her young and lighthearted.
But since the pandemic hit, a question has nagged at her: Is it time to retire?
“I was very upset and sad. I was torn. I went back and forth,” Stauffer said.
On the one hand, she isn’t ready to leave the classroom. She’s still passionate about why she joined the profession in the first place: “To be the type of teacher that I wish I would have had when I was in public school, to kind of right the wrongs that I experienced.”
On the other hand, she knows how hard it is to maintain a campus with thousands of students. Before COVID-19, district administrators in Katy reduced their custodial staff, and it was often up to teachers to clean their own rooms.
“They don’t supply hand sanitizer. They don’t supply wipes. None of these supplies were ever given to us. You just used what you had or what teachers themselves purchased,” she said.
Stauffer waited for the Katy Independent School District to release safety plans for back-to-school. Instead, she’s seen what she called a “back-to-normal” attitude.
And then she had to consider her health: She’s 66 years old, has diabetes and a family history of heart disease, all making her more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
“I just don’t trust the school district to safeguard my health during this pandemic,” she said.
Like Stauffer, many Texas teachers are on edge and considering leaving the profession even as the state’s education commissioner has declared it “safe for Texas public school students, teachers, and staff to return to school campuses for in-person instruction this fall.”
As many as one in five U.S. educators say they’re unlikely to return to the classroom because of the coronavirus, according to a national survey conducted before Texas indicated its light-handed approach to reopening schools.
“There are people that have already made the decision to quit,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers. “There’s certainly a lot of people that are considering it. I’ve heard from others as well, too. They’re single parents and they don’t have a lot of choice.”
“So they’re depending on us,” Capo said, “to help make sure that they are afforded as much safety as possible in doing that. So that’s what keeps me moving.”
Higher risk
Nearly one-third of U.S. teachers are 50 years or older, according to federal data. That puts them at higher risk of becoming seriously ill from the virus. And the publication Education Week has identified more than 300 school staff and former educators who’ve died from COVID-19.
“There’s obviously a lot of fear because there are so many unanswered questions,” said Noel Candelaria, president of the Texas State Teachers Association.
He says school staff with underlying health conditions are also concerned. Consider his own family: Candelaria is married to Patty, who is a dyslexia therapist and has had three surgeries to fix a congenital heart defect.
“There are educators, like my wife, who if the districts do not provide an alternative method for them to do their job from home without exposing themselves, (they) are seriously considering a medical leave,” Candelaria said.
Texas public school districts are still waiting for safety and health guidelines from the Texas Education Agency. They were scheduled to be released last week, but were delayed after the Texas Tribune published draft rules indicating few mandatory safety measures.
That has weighed on many teachers.
“We can’t just talk about student health and safety without talking about educator health and safety, because they’re sharing the same space,” Candelaria said.
The Association of Texas Professional Educators recently surveyed some 4,200 educators. About 60% said they were concerned about their health and safety heading into the 2020-21 school year.
Sso far, however, that concern hasn’t translated into an increase in retirements. Nearly 22,000 teachers and state employees have retired this fiscal year, compared to about 25,000 last year, according to the Teacher Retirement System.
Few mandates
Gov. Greg Abbott has said districts will have some flexiblity in implementing safety protocols, and allowing families to continue remote learning.
“The state has already made allocations and is prepared to continue allocations of masks for schools, allowing, I think, for a level of flexibility at the local school district level to make the best determinations for the schools in that district about what the mask requirement should be,” Abbott told KBTX-TV in a recent interview.
But, the Republican governor has told state lawmakers Texas won’t mandate schools to require face coverings or test for COVID-19 symptoms.
“It was really shocking because it seems like nobody cares what’s going to happen in the schools,” said Kristen McClintock, who’s taught special education for six years at a large Houston high school.
She has a newborn and a toddler at home and doesn’t want to expose them to the virus. Nor does she want to expose her students with disabilities, whom she says she misses a lot.
“We’re almost like a family,” McClintock said. “So it’s been really hard to not be able to see them for months. I want to see some of them graduate next year”
But every night she and her husband discuss if they can afford for her to quit and rely on his income as an online tutor.
“It would cut our finances in half,” she said. “We would have to lean on support probably from family to try and get by.”
No choice
McClintock is still deciding. First, she wants to see more health data and detailed plans from the Houston Independent School District.
But veteran educator Stauffer has made up her mind. She turned in her resignation in May.
“All my life, I’ve been a teacher,” Stauffer said. “That is who I am. And to give up my identity, it will be challenging, but I don’t feel like I had another choice.”
She cleaned out her classroom, said goodbye to students over Zoom and didn’t have any real celebration.
That is, until some of her colleagues surprised her with a car parade, waving signs and balloons as they drove by — a fitting end to a 40-year career, in the age of COVID-19.
As the Crazy Grandfather in Chief rails against what he calls “fake news” the real news is out there in the streets reporting and covering the pandemic and now the protests over the murder of George Floyd. But they always have been and many have died covering events across the globe, have been jailed, seriously injured and assaulted both sexually and physically just for doing their job.
I was watching Seth Myers and he had on Michael Che the co-head writer for SNL as a guest. Michael has been personally affected by Covid with his Grandmother dying as a result of the disease and has two brothers, one retired and one currently a member of the NYPD. He generously donated to pay a months rent for all the tenants in his Grandmother’s building when Covid struck and led to the lockdown and in turn for many put their tenancy at risk. What surprised me was during the course of the conversation he discussed his first trip ever out of the country to Egypt in 2011, the year that marks the middle of The Arab Spring, which was in regards to oppressive regimes; A parallel he now realizes is not lost. What, however, was shocking is that he had no knowledge of it at the time. He went as invited and they expressed great pleasure as he was the only one who accepted the invite. What is even more distressing is that while it enabled him an opportunity to learn first hand from those on the ground about this event it also demonstrated to me how ignorant and uniformed Americans are. Here is a member of a infamous show that skewers the news and the world and yet he was oblivious to it. Wow just wow. Again even fame and money show that when you are ignorant you are in bliss, what a fucking cocoon that must be.
Speaking of cocoons, what is Oprah saying about this? Samuel L. Jackson? Denzel Washington? I am not hearing their voices while Corporate America has not ended its never ending PSA style supportive captions to show that Black Lives Matter, in the same way they were here for us during the pandemic. Good to know and once I get a job with a check I will be right there to buy whatever is left after the looting.
But as Journalists from near and far are covering the protests they seem to not be exempt from arrest, tear gassing, rubber bullets and other means of crowd control the Police are using to dispel them. These are not all bloggers and vloggers with supposed credentials they are real card carrying members of the Press be they freelance or otherwise, photo journalists to press from news and television are finding themselves targets. Gosh that the President’s daily mantra that they are “fake” would not have anything to do with that right?
I thrive on news to the best and worst of it and frankly we are seeing it again at its worst. They endlessly prattled on with often unfounded studies about Covid and fueled that hysteria and in turn have played tag with Trump and his ilk to our detriment with the absurd propaganda nightly press conferences and simply neglected other events non-covid related. Then we have the Cuomo Brothers playing who Mom likes best on national cable news frequently further blurring the lines. And lastly we have Fox doing its best to become the state news by parroting the President if not actually suggesting ideas and plans for him to enact. Again the lines are blurred and at this point I do understand why many simply tune out. However, I can read, I have critical thinking skills and there is news that is local, essential, and plays a role in building knowledge about one’s own community and their leaders. From an informed populace it forces transparency in Government and enables us as their constituents to make decisions regarding upcoming elections and voting on ordinances etc. But hey that would require well reading, knowledge and information that at times contradicts, elevates and yes even confirms our views. Is that on a 3×5 card or can I check Facebook? We already know that Facebook is a perpetuator in the fake news department and their own CEO monetizes that for his own benefit to the point that even that well paid elite staged a virtual strike. Nothing will come of that but again little does when dealing with a stubborn white man child.
And again the same thing with regards to Mr. Floyd what happened was horrific but it does not change the fact that last year in 2019, 1004 individuals died at the hands of law enforcement. What is even more distressing in the last five years since Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri it has averaged to three a day.
Just let that sit on you for a moment. How do I know this? I read. I read three newspapers, flip through two more and listen to NPR and BBC radio. I subscribe to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and often buy other magazines. Wow do I have a life? Well sort of but this pandemic and house arrest gives me the time to do so. I pay for all of them either through subscriptions or donations. What do you read?
And there are endless stories about Journalists who have died, been imprisoned, raped and beaten down their jobs. More than 1,000 journalists have been killed worldwide since 1992 — and thousands more have been attacked, kidnapped or imprisoned. It’s not just war correspondents at risk. Recent attack victims include journalists covering the Ebola epidemic in Africa and cartoonists at a French newspaper that pokes fun at political subjects. Even Wikipedia has a list of Journalists killed in the line of duty. Wow where do we use that phrase? Oh right Police and Military.
How many of you even experienced risk be it actual as in beaten by anyone? Arrested? Tried in Court? Had Police stop you? Have Police called on you? Been raped, assaulted and abused by anyone in the system from medical care, to the justice system to the educational one? Been afraid walking into a workplace? Been shelter in place for a assumed shooter?
I have.
I am white, educated, have means thankfully from part luck and opportunity, and am a boring hetero but very unmarried woman. Tell me how I am privileged?
We know no ones narrative until we know them. We make sweeping projections, inferences and assumptions based on the extrinsic factors that we observe, from gender, to color to, demeanor, to their politics, to where they are from. It is the power of Journalists who tell those stories to wake us up out of bubble of ignorance so what happened to me doesn’t mean it has to happen to you in order for you to feel, to know, to demand change and more importantly follow through on that. Grassroots is just that crawling up from the grass on up to demand change and have a way of ensuring that it remains in place for those who follow after don’t have to do what we did in order for it to be so. I am out of this game as not one person ever helped me when I needed it. I know first hand what it is to be afraid, to be alone and to be a victim of others and in turn turn to those I would have believed would be there to help me. Guess what they don’t regardless of who you are. They care about their own and when you are not of the tribe you are open game. Get over being a victim and be the victorious. I wish you all well on this effort but I am Switzerland and I am out of this game. But the game is still on. Good luck and the best way to win is to read the news that is fit to print it is not fake and it may be hard but nothing ever good came easy.
For a man in the news business he is one ignorant twat. His exchange with Dr. Sanjay Gupta regarding people walking, running and how dare they, holding hands on the Embarcadero in San Francisco mid lockdown was histrionics at best, paranoia at worst.
Let’s examine some of the bullshit being spouted by old Jakey boy:
Tapper was the first to react to the images from San Francisco, visibly unsettled by the waterfront’s level of activity. Meanwhile, Gupta chuckled wryly and shook his head in apparent disbelief. “First of all, we see a whole bunch of people here who are not distancing,” Tapper said. “They’re holding hands and walking down the street. Normally I’d say bravo, but this is actually kind of enraging. “My dad is turning 80 this month, you know?” Tapper said. “People out there who are millennials or younger and thinking, ‘Well, if you’re 80 years old, it only affects people who are in their 70s and 80s,’ which isn’t true, although obviously the people in their 60s, 70s and 80s are most vulnerable to it. What are you saying? That my 80-year-old dad, therefore, is fair game? “Who the hell are you to be walking around just giving this to old people and you just flippantly dismiss it?” the anchor later asked.
Now for the record Jake does not know these people or their relationships or health status nor does he or to my knowledge his father live in San Francisco. And again while this draconian measure may be overkill there was no lockdown of the city with regards to the shelter in place and if you are healthy should you not exercise in which to maintain said health and holding hands with one’s partner, with consent of course, is exactly your business how? No one should be having sex right now too right Jake? Of course in lockdown what else is there to do. The porn industry is going to clean house, metaphorically, in this situation. And what old people are these people giving their non diagnosed case of Corvid too. If they are sick why are they out at all?
And exactly how does this affect Jake’s father? Are any of these people living with him, catering him and why isn’t Jake doing it? Jake lives in NYC and well then step it up and practice what you preach and never leave your house either, we will be better for it.
And given that Jake is a “journalist” and Dr. Gupta is a Doctor then how come this story from Al Jazeera is not making the rounds. Oh that is right we can’t panic the population if we do.
In China, life returning to normal as coronavirus outbreak slows
Draconian measures, which appear to have quelled the outbreak in China, are gradually being relaxed. by Shawn Yuan Al Jazerra March 17 2020
Chongqing, China – “Look! What a big fish!” Ding Shijiu exclaimed in joy after catching a carp from the lake where he normally goes fishing.
Sitting under a tree full of spring blossoms on a warm day, Ding is finally able to catch up with old friends over a few fishing sessions – something he has been unable to do since the coronavirus pandemic started to sweep across China in January, prompting a major lockdown of cities and provinces across the country.
“The last two months felt surreal and, trust me, I’m almost 70 years old, and I’ve seen a lot of things,” Yang said while pointing at his friends, unable to contain his excitement of seeing them again.
“But we’re all still alive, and I’m just so happy that the worst has passed.
“This is the first time I came back fishing at this lake since Lunar New Year – I’m very happy,” Yang said with a smile, before trying to reel in another fish.
Like many people in China, Yang has spent nearly all of the last two months at home as the central government imposed unprecedented quarantine measures across the country in a drastic bid to contain COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. The central province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan, where the virus was thought to have originated, were completely sealed off.
As the number of COVID-19 cases confirmed overseas daily have surpassed those within China, the draconian measures that appear to have quelled the outbreak domestically – particularly outside Hubei – are gradually being relaxed.
Chongqing, Yang’s hometown bordering Hubei, has had more than 500 confirmed cases since the disease started to spill into the municipality. But now, there have been no cases in the city for several days.
The slowdown is not only in Chongqing. Across the country, 13 out of 34 provinces in China have cleared their remaining cases, and approximately 69,000 of 81,000 confirmed cases have been discharged.
Pressure easing
Even in Hubei, where some 10,000 cases remain, the pressure on front-line medical workers has eased. On March 17, the first batch of nearly 4,000 medical workers who were parachuted into Wuhan to help control the outbreak were able to leave.
With so many provinces having downgraded their emergency response levels, China is slowly – and cautiously – returning to normal life.
Classes are gradually resuming after most students spent the last month or so at home and studying online. In provinces classified as “low risk of infection,” including Guizhou, Qinghai, Tibet and Xinjiang, local governments have allowed educational institutions to resume classes this month.
“I couldn’t really focus while taking courses online, and I can’t afford to waste any more time because the college entrance examination is in a few months,” said Ouyang Yanjiang, a student in Guiyang, referring to the highly competitive national exam that determines which college students can attend. “I’m glad that we are going back to school.”
Meanwhile, factories that were ordered to suspend operations are also starting to pick up their assembly lines after what many small business owners who spoke to Al Jazeera described as something akin to a “near-death experience” for their companies.
According to the latest report released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, in January and February, the peak of the outbreak in the country, the industrial output of the world’s second-largest economy plummeted to the lowest point since 1998, and the unemployment rate soared to more than 6 percent, the highest on record.
The suspension has pushed many businesses to near-bankruptcy, but as the quarantine measures have been loosened, many are preparing for a rebound in production.
Cities that have a high density of manufacturing industry, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south, are organising their employees’ return to work and pushing for the resumption of long-suspended business.
For example, the production line of Woniu, a Guangzhou-based kitchenware factory, came to a halt on January 20 – the day the government confirmed human transmission of the virus.
The head of the factory told Al Jazeera that, with their income near zero for the last two months, they had been on the brink of closing down the facility for good. But on March 9, their proposal to reopen was accepted by the government, and they are now back in business.
“It’s still high pressure to just break even, but at least we are now back to work,” Liu Lufei told Al Jazeera over a chat session on Taobao, the online shopping site under Alibaba. “Dear God, that was a difficult time.”
The harsh toll the outbreak took on people’s lives also appears to be easing.
Chengdu, famous for its hotpots and foodie culture, now has only a dozen cases remaining and the provincial government has said no new ones have been detected over the past three weeks.
That has allowed a gradual reopening of restaurants, although people remain cautious.
In videos shared online, restaurant patrons line up in front of the city’s many hotpot restaurants – wearing masks and keeping a safe distance from each other.
During the peak of the coronavirus outbreak, residents of Chengdu told Al Jazeera that the first thing they planned to do when the emergency ended was to go to a restaurant, “eating hotpots with friends and family”.
For a city whose soul is “hotpot flavoured”, as some playfully describe it, the reopening of Chengdu’s hotpot restaurants gives residents an almost unparalleled reassurance that the worst of the outbreak has indeed passed.
“We are only allowed to accept 50 percent of our restaurant’s maximum capacity for dine-in guests, and that’s the rule for all restaurants in Sichuan (the surrounding province),” Xiao Ma, a waiter at Shudaxia, a famous hotpot restaurant in Chengdu, said. “But in the last few days, we have been hitting that line almost non-stop.”
“People’s taste buds have been pent up for too long,” Ma jokingly said. Travel gradually being allowed
Apart from dining out, people are also gradually regaining their ability to travel. Many provinces and cities have steadily resumed their public transportation, including inter-provincial long-distance buses that were suspended across the country days after Wuhan was sealed off on January 23.
Even in Hubei, the provincial epidemic prevention and control command has allowed “low and middle risk” areas, such as Xianning and Yichang, to begin operating public transport again
News coverage of the outbreak has also eased. In late January and February, it was difficult to turn on a television or use a mobile phone without constantly being exposed to news about the coronavirus – but with the epicentre shifting to Europe, many entertainment shows are reappearing on Chinese TV.
“Now I’m able to watch something on TV that is not about coronavirus, and that was unimaginable last month,” Zeng Yunru, a Wuhan resident, said. “It’s funny that all of us seemed to have forgotten what our life was like before the virus.”
Barbershops reopening, parks welcoming tourists again, migrant workers making their way back to their jobs – the calamity that disrupted China’s society so completely seems to be receding steadily.
As life begins to return to normalcy, however, experts worry that there is still an underlying risk. There are worries that as soon as the expansive quarantine measures are lifted, China will be a hit by a second wave of infection, especially as the coronavirus is now a global pandemic and imported cases outnumber local ones.
China reported only one new domestic coronavirus case on Monday, in Hubei. Twenty other cases were of travellers arriving from overseas. “I don’t think anyone is saying the outbreak is over – only the worst seems to be over,” Zeng said when asked about her concerns. “What we can do is still exercising social distancing and slowly driving our lives back to normal.”
There is the reality, curtailing travel, following a protocol and yes that means getting tested, early and getting isolated from others, and still following said protocol for the next few months as we ease back into a level of “control.”
Today I went to Home Depot where they were only allowing 50 customers at a time, the same for BJ’s Wholesale and the panic buying there demonstrated a great deal of largely poor and faces of color stocking up on water, toilet paper and cleaning items. There is no logic or sense in all of this. I bought my foaming bleach bath cleaner and some other minor hardware and went to Bed Bath and Beyond to get bags for my Miele and in turn saw shelves in utter disarray and more evidence of panic shopping. Really this is not helping anyone and what is the point? Are we shutting down the pipeline of transportation?
And here is where a rational head and strong leader would emerge but again watch CNN and the Cuomo brothers debate who Mother loved best, Jake Tapper become histrionic and hysterical scolds and listen to fear mongers as they do little to actually establish calm and reassurance that this is all going to be controlled as long as we have some cooperation and compliance with restrictions that include unnecessary travel, large gatherings, staying home if sick and getting medical care asap and that testing will soon be available on a large scale. But nope. Crickets or as I call that Ethan. (I name idiotic behaviors after people I know as a private joke)
We again have a disparate cohort of Governors and Mayors jockeying for the biggest dick and in turn coming up with one shitty idea after another that ensures more panic, builds fear and creates the hoarding mentality including buying guns. Again I have said that this will not end well.
Off the Rack Publishing 