… COLLIDE.

The bad news is that his voice – which always brightened UD‘s day – has now been stilled.

Who else in our political culture will justify no abortion even in cases of rape or incest because there wouldn’t be “any population of the world left” if it weren’t for rape and incest?

*************

But when God closes a door, he opens a window: Adrian Vermeule is just getting started.

Suddenly a jet engine thundered; and I looked up in a starry sky to see low overhead the bright-lit intricate underbelly of a massive military aircraft. It passed at an enormous rate of speed.

************************

Things gather themselves into something more than unsettling. Cities are aflame – corridors of my city, Washington, are aflame, and a protest is scheduled tomorrow in Bethesda. Layers of surreality: the pandemic; the riots; the storming president.

************************

When I, the other day, heard for the first time the phrase immunity passport, I thought, That’s what I’ve always had, and I still hold one now. The world does its chaotique, effrayant, thing, and UD sits way back here, amid the shady woods, fragrant flow’rs and crystal floods, taste, my soul, this charming seat, love and glory’s calm retreat, and now there’s a helicopter out there — I just stepped outside to watch it from the other deck — and it’s circling.

***************

In front of me, as I stood on the decks, gleamed what I’ve come to call The Overdetermined Garden. Our new garden. We ordered up a bee, bird, and butterfly attractor, and boy has it been at it, all abuzz the live-long day… But it means too much to me; my work in it (and beyond it, in our established garden and woods and woody paths) has become too big a part of my buddha-noons, too much an act of belligerence against what is happening to the Isle of the Immune.

Of course no one who lives eight miles from Washington DC really thinks she’s immune. But there’s knowing and there’s realizing.

“Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart while staying at the Inn at Little Washington,” UD told Mr UD as they talked about him after his death.

“What? Hundreds and hundreds of dollars a night, and then meals for hundreds and hundreds of dollars? I doubt it.”

“I read it in Reports From the Holocaust. He was looking for someplace quiet. He said he loved their little courtyard garden.”

“How did he afford it?”

“Well I guess he made a lot of money on Women in Love.“

Thinking about it, though, Mr UD maybe had a point. Eating all your meals at the Inn at Little Washington?

So UD went paging through Kramer’s book, and here is what she found:

I had returned not only from Europe, but from Cape Cod, where I had written the first draft of The Normal Heart, and I was on my way south, to an isolated log cabin in Little Washington, Virginia, loaned me by old friends, to write the second draft.

Whoopsies.

That’s what it looks like Amy Cooper harbors, now that a second instance of her calling the powers of the law down on a man who has angered her has surfaced.

[Martin] Priest said Amy developed a “fascination” with him when they worked together at Lehman Brothers and filed [an expensive] lawsuit against him in 2015 with “fabricated” claims. “I never had a romantic relationship with her, period. She purposely engineered false allegations against me. And she made up allegations targeting my family’s physical safety,” Priest told The [Daily] News. … The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2018 after all parties failed to appear at back-to-back hearings, online court records show.

Right, so she’d done her thing, made her point, scared the shit out of the guy, and now her work was done. No need to expose her lies to scrutiny in court.

Precedents? I’ll give you one real, and one fictional. Whenever another Amy — Amy Bishop — got mad, she went hard against the person who made her mad and then boohooed to the cops that a frail innocent well-bred person like her could never do anything violent. Even more crazily, there’s Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest — another highly educated, impressively employed urbanite who didn’t take it well when a man angered her.

More violent than Cooper? Sure. But who knows what a cop might have done if Cooper had stayed at the scene and continued to make her hysterical claims against Christian Cooper?

I mean, he won it. He fought hard for it and won it for himself: a full life. And he fought to win it for everyone else too.

Opening my copy of Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, I go right to his 1987 speech to the Boston Lesbian and Gay Town Meeting – the beginning of Gay Pride Weekend. You want Larry, that’s where you get Larry.

… I believe this gay community of ours has a death wish and that we are going to die, because we refuse to take responsibility for our own lives… What’s the number of dead friends at which you can decide to stop just sitting quietly like the good little boys and girls we were all brought up to be – and start taking rude, noisy, offensive, political action? One? Ten? One hundred? … If I use gross language – go ahead, be offended – I don’t know how else to reach you, how to reach everybody. I tried starting an organization: I cofounded GMHC, which becomes more timid as it becomes richer day by day. I tried writing a play. I tried writing endless articles in the Native and the New York Times and Newsday and screaming on “Donahue” and at every TV camera put in front of me. I helped start ACT UP, a small bunch of too few very courageous people willing to make rude noises. I don’t know what else to do to wake you up! … “You want to die, Felix? Die!” That’s a line from The Normal Heart. In his immense frustration, Ned Weeks yells it at his dying lover. That’s how I feel about all of you… I am telling you they are killing us and we are letting them! Yes, I am screaming like an hysteric. I know that. I look and sound like an asshole. I told you this was going to be my last tirade and I am going to go out screaming so fucking rudely that you will hear this coarse, crude voice of mine in your nightmares. You are going to die and you are going to die very soon unless you get up off your fucking tushies and fight back! Unless you do – you will forgive me – you deserve to die… [Y]ou are saying that your lives are worth shit, and that we deserve to die, and that the deaths of all of our friends and lovers have amounted to nothing.

As in I did an amycooper/I amycoopered, when we perform such extensive wrongness in the course of one brief continuous action that we actually manage to ruin our lives. This New York City business executive decided she was entitled to be (in the precisely correct word of her victim) an obnoxious “scofflaw.” Why should she leash her dog in a part of Central Park where leashing is the law? Let lesser people obey rules. And here comes this nobody to ask her to leash her dog. Begone, nowhere man!

This man, in fact a rather famous birder, wanted to bird-watch unimpeded by a loose animal, and he did not back down.

Mr. Cooper, 57, [no relation to Amy Cooper,] a Harvard graduate who works in communications, has long been a prominent birder in the city, and is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society.

Words were exchanged, and rather than demonstrating the simple civic understanding that would entail her apologizing and leashing her dog, Cooper became hysterical, called the police, and said a black man was threatening her. Although she is intelligent enough to have graduated from the University of Chicago, she behaved in this way knowing full well that her adversary was filming her.

“I am pretty adamant about not being a participant in my own dehumanization,” [he later explained in an interview].

His film attracted more than 40 million views in fewer than 48 hours.

*************

There’s an interesting footnote. Christian Cooper, clearly a deeply decent person, is unhappy that the woman’s life has been destroyed.

“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” he said. “If our goal is to change the underlying factors, I am not sure that this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.”

He is absolutely right; and though it’s hokey as hell, one way out of her total destruction would be for the two of them to meet again and shake hands. For him to accept her personal apology.

Cause hundreds of Israelis to die by telling them to ignore the coronavirus.

Pressure psychiatrists to lie about the mental health of a fellow ultraorthodox sect member in order to keep her from being extradited to Australia on 74 counts of sexual assault against children. Protect bunches of other sect members also accused of sexual abuse:

[Yaakov] Litzman allegedly intervened improperly to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.

Pass out bribes.

******************

Litzman has now resigned. Who will take his place?

I’m putting my money on Moshe Katsav.

Well, he wouldn’t, would he. His total mismanagement (we’re being kind: it’s just as likely it was total deliberate rule-breaking) of his school’s sports programs has fucked Stephen F Austin University over but good. The school has rewarded him by putting him back in the classroom, where he can share with generations of students his … innovative sports management techniques.

Stephen F. Austin faces a series of penalties, including the vacating of games, for a lack of institutional control violation (Level I) involving the “erroneous certification” of 82 student-athletes in nine sports over the past decade, the NCAA announced Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the NCAA announced an eventual postseason ban for the school’s baseball, men’s basketball and football programs, all of which were included in Wednesday’s release, due to an insufficient Academic Progress Rate.

With the latest reprimand, the school must return 50% of revenue (more than $60,000) from the 2016 NCAA tournament, when the basketball program was led by current Illinois coach Brad Underwood, and vacate any games that included ineligible athletes. Other penalties include a 2.5% reduction in football scholarships and a 5% reduction in baseball scholarships — which can be assessed this season or next season — plus three years’ probation.

Such trivial stuff: You wouldn’t want any heads to fall because of it… No one’s fault, really, and McDermand doesn’t want to talk, so let it go…

… (to paraphrase Yeats), as I looked around for language about tea in order to honor the first International Tea Day,

I finally remembered “Lament” by Thom Gunn. One of the most beautiful AIDS-era poems, it recalls the long sad death of a friend, and among its lines are these:

… Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased.   
Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down   
To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown:   
I’d never seen such rage in you before
As when they wheeled you through the swinging door.   
For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from   
Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom   
The hedonistic body basks within
And takes for granted—summer on the skin,   
Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea   
In a dry mouth.

The poorest town in America, where living conditions are so crowded and squalid that in 1992 seventy percent of their children got hepatitis A, thanks this country for its willingness to let it live a welfare-dependent, scofflaw existence by breaking virus-containment laws and endangering hundreds of children, as well as the people of neighboring communities.

I wonder. If local and state authorities had ever, over the course of the last fifty years, taken the endemic law-breaking of this locality with real seriousness, I wonder if it might have stopped spreading epidemic illnesses among its children. (Don’t even talk to me about measles! Or vaccinations!)

… classrooms, Texas motivational speaker Eric Hogue steps up to ban not books but women. In his capacity as mayor of a small city, Hogue has decreed that women may not lead prayers at city council meetings onaccounta the Bible done said they caint.

Now ah don’t know much bout Christian invocations afore civic meetings, ahm a big ol’ blue stater, and round these parts the idea of praying together afore a town council meeting is pretty fucking weird, and, you know, making sure the prayer always happens to be Christian is even fucking weirder. But you caint quarrel with Mayor Hogue’s Bibleology – the Good Book do indeed go on bout how stupid and pointless women are, and how they better shut up ifn they know what’s good for them.

And I for one am ready to bow down to the superiority of men like Mr. Hogue to the female race. Just look at the guy and ask yourself if you could ever (I mean, ifn you’re a woman ask yourself) hope to accomplish all that he has accomplished. Start with his picture. (Scroll down.) The man is a Clown for Christ, bringing the Good News About Women, in a chock-full of chuckles format, to young people all over America. He has even self-published a clown book – Clinky The Clown (not to be confused with the very similar-sounding, very famous, Blinky The Clown) – which you can purchase. And he’s a magician!

What woman could hope to compete, invocation-wise, with a clown-magician who takes every single word in the Bible literally? Mayor Hogue, the stage is yours.

… to God’s ears.

… these two just got creamed.

From the outset, these two Varsity Blues parents passing their daughters off as rowers not only denied they did anything wrong; they truly believed… they knew… they did nothing wrong. That’s why they felt confident demanding that a judge throw out all the charges against them: How could anyone sustain charges when they did. nothing. wrong?

******************

UD likes to point out instances of true moral degeneracy when they occur. For these two people, being rich means you use your money to hurt less wealthy people, corrupt systems, and gain advantages. Everyone knows that, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s reality. While serving their jail terms, and then throughout their subsequent lives, these two will continue to believe this, though they are now willing to acknowledge that stinking legal systems exist under which this activity may actually be prosecuted.

“It just seemed like they were trying to see what they could get away with.”

Why not? When you don’t know what science is, quarantines seem silly.

*********

A growing number of schools and synagogues have reopened in recent days, defying city and state restrictions.

Are parents on board? Who cares?

According to a recent report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, some Borough Park schools have ended phone instruction, forcing parents to choose between sending their children to illegal in-person classes or risk falling behind.