That CDC Orwellian News

Daniel Engber wrote a clarifying response to the panicmongering about the Center for Disease Control (CDC) self-censoring certain flashpoint words like “evidence-based” and “vulnerable” from their internal documentation. Engber suggests (based on National Review reporting) that CDC employees are circulating rhetorical tips on bolstering the chances that their program funding will survive. Paranoid public health officials are telling each other to replace certain snowflake boogeywords with GOP-friendlier jargon.

A government Pee-Yew-rocrat myself, I buy this argument. We have to sell our programs to hostile electeds, so we’ll use whatever tricks we can. “These are not the general fund line items you are looking for.”  

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Facticity Plasticity

The New York Times has apparently told its reporters they can’t tweet anything partisan.

If only the Times had called me (hey Baquet! call me!). I’d have reminded them that, as they surely know, facts themselves are now partisan. The fact of transgender/genderqueer/nonbinary children and adults. The fact of climate change. The fact of resurgent neo-Nazi rhetoric. The fact of white privilege. The fact of the legacy of slavery persistently restricting opportunity for black people.

Lefties tend to refer to these phenomena as factual because they are. And righties tend to dispute the nature of such facts. Because anything from a liberal is biased and therefore untrue.

Apocalinks + Sangria!

Climate change may be turning plants into “junk food”–more sugars, fewer proteins and micronutrients, wheat and rice bulked up like Hans and Franz.

Over the weekend at a party that was genuinely lovely despite impending Trumpocalypse, I tangled myself in a drunken assertion that Stockhom Syndrome doesn’t exist. In the context of terrifying, lying political leaders who govern regular schmoes trying to get by. I was flailing at this argument with two people who had more expertise than I on the topic, including a dear friend with a doctorate in clinical psychology. Sangria for the win.

Updates on the End

While I was on vacation, my Mazel Together post on wedding registries (!?!?! I know!!!) went live. Then, lest I feel too cozy in such lighthearted reflections on bourgious comforts, I read a terrifying and plausible reported tweet chain about how literal my “Trumpocalypse” language is w.r.t climate change and the high likelihood that my grandchildren will live on a planet that is too hot for organized human society. So I’m postponing reading this on same and instead reading this on post-apocalyptic religious terror. And dwelling on the possibility that my grandchildren will be living in isolated, iron-age multifamily settlements far, far north. Or underground. Cuz, realistically, Earth hollows are more likely than Mars.

So, you know, happy summer.

Book Reviewlets: How the Dead Dream

When I was in college, a young punk complained, about One Hundred Years of Solitude, “Why do we have to talk about politics? It’s ruining the aesthetics of the novel!”

And my professor–still perhaps my favorite professor of all–responded, “How come no one ever complains that the aesthetics are ruining a good political novel?”

You put your politics in my novel, Lydia Millet.

I know that the apocalypse is happening at every minute all the time. But is that any reason to ruin a perfectly lovely reverse roman-a-clef?