“I’ve been [working in Myrtle Beach] since 1988,” curfew supporter and business owner Chris Walker said Tuesday. “A lot of things have changed, but just having brazen shootouts on our street, that’s not what I signed up for.”

… Walker owns an ice cream store, two coffee shops, a haunted house and some parking lots in downtown Myrtle Beach. On weekends, he has four security guards at $27 an hour on patrol. He also has 80 cameras and said they have recorded “things that you see on video games” by people who “have no respect for human life, and that’s the sad state of where we are right now.”

The famous final line of The Sun Also Rises will do for our response to the International Criminal Court having “issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of crimes against humanity over the persecution of women and girls.”

The sadistic treatment of that country’s female population is the stuff of nightmares, and I guess it does the heart good, or (if they’re allowed to know about it) does the women/girls of Afghanistan good… But the ICC has no real power to do anything in this case, so we’ll have to be content with whatever symbolic value the gesture represents.

… Czech.

… Jersey-style.

I cover a lot of these, and a lot of them happened most recently on and around July 4, but the basic point is that mass shooters keep shooting up our crowd events: parades, fireworks displays, rallies, high school graduations, sports events etc., etc. I think the great symbol of this social movement will be the 2017 Las Vegas Harvest Music Festival massacre (‘1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and wounding at least 413 others. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to approximately 867.’), but that mad motiveless killer’s death toll will inevitably be surpassed by another person who for no reason at all wants to kill everybody.

But it’s the smaller stories, the daily stories, you’re missing, and that’s too bad because the death of American public events is happening all around us, small story by small story. You can find gobs of them on this blog, like the decision yesterday by the town of Pahrump (not far from Las Vegas) to suspend “Movies in the Park … until further notice,” because a crowd can’t gather in Pahrump without people shooting at everyone. Movies in the Park becomes Mossbergs in the Park and that’s the end of the matter.

Winn [allegedly] took tens of thousands from a former employer, and … lied about being made homeless and about the circumstances under which the couple’s house was repossessed in the memoir [The Salt Path]. [An investigation] also cast doubt over the legitimacy of [Winn’s husband’s terminal] diagnosis.

Und so weiter. How eager we are, again and again and again, to buy what a moment’s serious thought would reveal as almost certainly incredible hard luck stories. The more extreme, the more incredible, the more gullible we. Homeless! Half dead! Treated like shit by strangers! Bring it on!

We never learn. The imposters are exposed, and we move on to the next patently impossible memoir.

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In this, as in so many things, our model is Lady Bracknell:

Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable.

… let me live it as a Putin flunky…

An insider at NPR describes the woke-shrinkage effect that has left even daily listeners like Les UDs wondering why so much of the language coming from the station smacks of a re-education camp.

 In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

UD still gives NPR money. But she can’t stand the ideology-lecture feel of the place (not all the time; some of the time); she hates it that more and more of its stories/points of view make it sound like Chesa Boudin.

She gets that NPR has always leaned left. Les UDs do too. But Uri Berliner is right that lately it has tilted way the hell over.

Owls were about last night.

The original from which the owl drew inspiration.

… for actually answering the stupid how do you feel question.

The flat monotone, one hand protectively held against his face.

The sheer oddness of seriously depressive content coming from a tall handsome champion athlete… The oddness of soulfulness offered to a highly lit studio of jock-journalists…

In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of superficiality we are in depth.

One source has him also saying that he wants “to solve myself,” which made UD think of her guru, Adam Phillips, who warns it ain’t gonna happen. Also Philip Larkin:

‘And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.’

But other good things can happen – settling into who you unchangeably are, and the suffering that life inescapably generates, in a such a way that your “appetitive” energy remains reasonably high (in this case, that a win on the court actually makes you happy and motivates you to win future matches). Since you’re never going to solve yourself, the better path is away from Who Am I and toward simply the daily appetitive enjoyment of your existence — an enjoyment that should indeed involve the enjoyment (or at least you find it interesting; or at least you find it tolerable!) of incessant conflict and uncertainty.

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And as happens so often in life, the Zverev scene was taken directly from Waiting for Godot:

the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones

A house burnt to a crisp by a flare gun! Hundreds of bullets in all directions shatter the night! Happy Fourth!

Doesn’t it have people who monitor online crowd event activity?

Is the place asleep?

Does it have a death wish?

Its poor police chief still thinks this is about babysitting. He needs to be fired and replaced by someone who understands the gravity of the situation.

Yeah, well. Everyone’s kind of expecting gunplay, so when you announce an active shooter from the stage — even if turns out to be only a fight (unpleasant enough , but unlikely to rip out your family’s internal organs) — the whole place stampedes away.

And how many people are then going to turn to their terrified kids and say Okay coast is clear let’s go have some fun!!!! ?

London’s mayor put out some rainbow flags and BOY IS HE IN TROUBLE.

“The [flags] will be ‘rolled back’ whether you like it or not, Mr. [Khan],” [wrote Joshua Charles]. “The options are: 1. Repentance now; or 2. Eternal punishment later.”

… DARES you to deny that Ulysses is the greatest twentieth century novel.

Garrett Park Fourth of July parade, whose theme this year is The Novel.

Photo: Frances Eby