Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

The fact that SCOTUS was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade was not a secret, even before the draft opinion was leaked. The supporters of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, and Barrett were quite open about wanting them to overturn Roe v. Wade even if the judges claimed during their confirmation hearings that they had open minds. I am against abortion, so let's get that out of the way quickly. But as with most things that I am against, there is nuance. I do believe that health considerations for the mother are relevant. I do believe that rape-induced pregnancies require a good deal of thought.  I believe that if we want a child not to be aborted we need to provide health-care, day-care, all of the support services that the affluent take for granted and the rest lack. There is nuance. Most importantly in this discussion, I do not believe that making abortion illegal stops abortion. The history of illegal abortions in this country prior to Roe v. Wade does not go away; if anything, med...

I find myself doing what I saw older folk do when I was younger, longing for a (mythical) time when ... Different people fill in the ellipsis differently; some folk hearken back to a time when white males were treated as more fully human and of higher citizenship than everyone else. The MAGA folk are pretty explicit about it. Some folk long for a simpler time, when more people died from poorer medical treatment. They don't phrase it that way, but yeah, my kids were both premature and I most emphatically do not long for a time when their early births would have led to their deaths. Me, I long for a (mythical) time when folk cared more about the truth than they do now with our great rushing flood of disinformation at our fingertips. As bad as things are now, I don't think there was ever a time where reason and reasoning ruled. Since I've spent my life in academia that's the mythical golden age I long for. What will my children long for?

The hearings of the January 6 Committee so far have exceeded my expectations, which were of a repeat of the second impeachment hearings. I think we have Kevin McCarthy to thank for this. Given an opportunity to have a bipartisan committee investigate the mob that attacked the Capitol building and killed five police officers that day (more died later) while bragging that they would kill elected officials that had displeased Trump (such as Pence and Pelosi), McCarthy submitted names such as Jim Jordan who had disrupted the impeachment hearings. To her credit, Pelosi said no to Jordan and Jim Banks because of their disruptive behavior, while accepting the rest of the names that McCarthy suggested. Again:  Jordan and Banks had publicly and on video interrupted witnesses and other representatives.  Rather than suggest alternatives McCarthy refused to allow Republican representatives to participate in a bipartisan committee.  Cheney and Kinziger have joined the resulting Select...

Recently I saw an excerpt from Sarah Polley's forthcoming memoir.  I know that she has had a good acting and directing career but I'm afraid my awareness of her work has been limited to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  It is a film that I have enjoyed on many levels, watching it many times, and so it was disconcerting to read that she felt that the director, Terry Gilliam, had put her and the other actors at risk of physical harm during the filming. She states specifics and given these specifics I am inclined to believe her. I have loved The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and one of Gilliam's other works, Brazil (a wonderful updating of 1984 through a kaleidoscope). For a while that love extended to Gilliam, but, and it is an immovable but, Gilliam derogated the #MeToo movement consistently from its beginning. I have had to try to separate my love for the art from the artist. This is not the first time. I am a huge fan of Kevin Spacey's work but it is clear that he ...

Link to powerful Dowd piece:  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/opinion/trump-january-6.html

A number of years ago I was at a low point. I was searching how to work through some issues at work. My two children were not sleeping through the night and I was struggling to be fully awake. My diabetes had just been diagnosed and between my work, my hour commute, my commitment to be a good parent and co-parent, I found myself before dawn each day at the local YMCA trying to lower my blood sugar. I was very clear about one thing that day. The day before I had been tired and in pain; that morning I was tired and in pain; the rest of that day I would be tired and in pain; the next day I would be tired and in pain. That component of my life was ascendant. As with many folk at the gym I brought tunes with me to keep me moving. I had just bought Steely Dan's live album Alive in America (which was released in 1995 but I might not have gotten it right away) and was still learning how the live renditions went.  Reelin' In The Years came on, a tune I had learned by heart as a college ...

My fortieth college reunion is this coming weekend; I am not attending. I've struggled with mixed feelings about that huge part of my formative years spent at Yale. I went there as an undergraduate and stayed to get my doctorate in mathematics. The graduate schooling was more monomaniacal and easier for me to assimilate, but I turned 17 my first month as an undergraduate and the experiences were much harder to process. I grew up middle-class; my time at Yale was the first time that I felt poor. I knew that I wasn't, intellectually, that I never went hungry involuntarily. Still, I was surrounded by a student culture that treated the large disposable income that I lacked as the norm.  After my first year I found a circle of friends who were like me, and from there I felt the presence of a support net socially. This was the first time where I was challenged intellectually as the rule and not the exception. I had taken math classes at a local college while finishing high school, an...

Our Lieutenant Governor has spoken: women are not to lead.   https://www.wral.com/nc-s-lieutenant-governor-we-are-called-to-be-led-by-men-not-women/20318578/ Very sad and sadly not that unusual. Despite all of the biblical examples of women who have led (despite cultures that viewed them as property) a lot of weak men cite Christianity as a justification for their version of Affirmative Action:  all citizens are equal but men are more equal. Despite my (many) flaws I have been mentored by a large number of women in my career and this is one of those things that I feel pretty strong about:  women are blessed with leadership skills in commensurate proportion as men. So what can I do as a person of faith, as a citizen in a democracy (not a theocracy), as a father/husband/son/brother/uncle? 1) This shit needs to be laughed at more and ridiculed. Men who need affirmative action in a culture as misogynistic as ours are pathetic. 2) Folk that cherry-pick proof-texts from th...