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Our self-induced anni horribiles, starting with '25

I've been cranky since 9:01 a.m., the time at which I realized I had missed "Bugs Bunny & Friends," aired each Saturday at 8 a.m. on MeTV. The old Warner Bros. tunes are a kind of visual heroin for me, one desperate fix every seven days. I really do need it — especially this year for one very obvious reason — for it soothes the brain, relaxes tension, and once a week I laugh, something much too subdued since listening to some aged, self-centered gibberish from my still-extant ex-wife.


Forsooth, without my fix I fulminate for a couple hours, then turn sullen, morose and altogether gloom-drenched. Thus it is in this mood that I pass along but a few likeminded news items I ran across this morning which relate to America's one annus horribilis, courtesy mostly of the aforementioned obvious reason.  


One somewhat dated story, recommended by today's NY Times' DealBook, centered on trembling corporations trying to appease Cro-Magnon Donald Trump, his quarter-witted congressional allies, Elon Musk and their millions of entirely witless admirers who are as racist as they are fascistic. Yes, corporate trembling is all about their D.E.I. programs. Some have ingeniously changed the title of such to "I.E.D." That should throw off the racist pricks.


After reading about invertebrate corporations I moved along to another dated DealBook link (NYT), a story that briefly touched on the English tongue's contamination. The piece dealt with the corporate giants of Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs' post-pandemic requirement that all employees return to the soul-killing office five days a week.


That itself has nothing to do with language contamination, but this does. The story cited a "former senior vice president for people operations at Google." Senior veep for what? What in hell kind of dystopian sci-fi post-apocalyptic ... silliness? ... is "people operations"?


This linguistic inanity, now virulent and, for people, utterly inhuman, began with the plain simple words of "Personnel Office" being molested and mauled into "Human Resources," which makes me think of Soylent Green. Now Google's innovative toxicity, which is bound to make other senior vice presidents of "people" wet themselves with envy, then acute monkey-do.


In the story's theme — "RTO," return-to-office policies replacing remote work — we again encounter the twisting minds of corporate big shots. Google's just-cited former senior vp argued that "the academic studies that have been done [on RTO], and there are not that many, show a range of outcomes — and they generally show a kind of neutral to slightly positive."


Having risen to the upper echelons of Big Tech, this chap believed, or so I must gather, that merely asserting his assessment would put an end to the RTO debate. Like, you know, the Times reporter wouldn't check around a bit more? Well she did. She interviewed a Wharton School organizational psychologist, who essentially said the vp was an idiot, noting the opposite conclusion from "a meta-analysis of 108 studies." (Requote, senior veep: "there are not that many.")  


The corporate exec's blanket refutation of remote work "flew in the face of researchers [who] have found hybrid work benefits companies." A Stanford economics professor said "that employees who work two days a week at home are just as productive and less likely to quit." The prof was also a man of the world, telling the Times that, for instance, Amazon's RTO policy "was really an attempt to reduce the work force without official layoffs." 


But, to those who enrich themselves by impoverishing others through budget slashings and mass firings had another card up their $300 sleeves. They argued that "return-to-office mandates are driven by the belief that face-to-face interaction fosters" the wonders of "stronger teamwork, innovation and productivity," while "also reinforcing company culture."


(The passage triggered a memory and a chuckle. While in grad school studies I asked my professors for independent reading courses rather than sitting in a seminar circle which might have promoted innovation while reinforcing university "culture." To me it seemed intuitive and indisputable that I could learn a helluva lot more reading for 90 minutes instead of sitting.


After several of my reading-alone credit hours landed on the grad studies director's desk, the shit thereupon hit the department's circulating air. What in hell do you think you're doing? came the gentle inquisition. Too many independent readings attenuate the university's "culture," I was informed, among other knuckle raps. Yet I was pretty sure that one "difficult" grad student among the massive herd would not, yea, verily, could not upend one university's historic culture. Even my ego wasn't that inflated.)     


There were other news stories I read this morning that anticipated 2025's gloom, reflecting my Bugs-less own. There was the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's report on "dark money think tanks" — big trouble looms there — and a Political Magazine piece sort-of predicting "the largest cyberattack in history"; A.I. "bad actors" igniting an "artificial market panic"; and "an infectious disease outbreak" unlike known others. I quote: "The disease is found to be one for which there is an experimental vaccine, but using it would require an emergency use authorization. The Health and Human Services leadership is now full of vaccine skeptics."    

 

Then a Bulwark story on Trofim Lysenko, a Stalin-era Russian biologist whose pseudointellectual theories on crop agriculture — plant biology based on Marxist ideology — sparked only crop failures, then famine and millions dead. The point? Assuming Senate confirmation, Mr. Lysenko will soon be in charge of HHS. See above.


One other item dropped in my inbox, this one from Andy Borowitz remarking on Ann Telnaes, the "Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post." Rather, the Post's former cartoonist. She quit this week. The instigation came from an editor who killed her correctly illustrated concept of the paper's owner and other multibillionaires "debasing themselves before Donald J. Trump," wrote Andy. He encouraged the cartoon's widest possible circulation elsewhere, likely bringing far more attention to it than the Post would have. I shall do my littlest part. 



Oh, also concerning WaPo, I've been meaning to enter the booth and make a confession, but it never fit one of my posts. Ann Telnaes's walk does. Weeks ago I canceled my Post subscription, though it nagged at me. I read a few pleas from the paper's journalists who properly pointed out that Jeff Bezos couldn't care less about — to him — the nickel-and-dime enterprise. Folks, pleaded reporters and opinionists, rampant cancelations hurt only us. Confession: I broke, I resubscribed. And I still can't say which act was the responsible one.


A final item (and yes I hear your thanks). Somewhere this morning I read that President Carter served in the submarine service during WW II. That struck me as ahistorical, yet realizing I had no Jimmy bio in my disheveled library, I sought Wikipedia's infinite knowledge of everything. There, no wartime submarine service, his sub years came later. He attended local colleges and then on to the Naval Academy, 1943-1946.  


I mention this relative insignificance because my eyes had wandered elsewhere on Wiki's page, observing that Plains, Georgia, "had been impoverished by the Great Depression, but the [Carter] family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies." The line struck me like a thunderbolt, excuse the cliché.


Christ Almighty and hellfire damnation why is it that American voters so routinely pass on even the potential of visionary and deeply humanistic politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose singular genius fucking saved this country from imminent implosion with, as he acknowledged, creative yet "experimental" programs. Can't know until we try 'em, he said. Some flopped, some were banned by a 19th-century-minded Supreme Court, many others succeeded.


Next, and hitting me even harder, was the vastly repellent thought of a U.S. presidents poster featuring portraits of the unexcelled Roosevelt and the lowest-life sociopathic scumbag Trump.    


Perhaps it was that occasion that compelled me to the enlarged gloom of this post, a mood detonated by the personal tragedy of having missed my one-hour fix of "Bugs Bunny & Friends," with Wile E., Sylvester & Co. Lord do I need it.


Still, something tells me I'll recover. Otherwise, I do hope your Saturday is a pleasant one. 


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