No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.

The post I watched the movie “Society of the Snow,” about the 1972 Andes plane crash and survival appeared first on The New Neo.

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that – human nature being what it is – no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion – of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country – its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

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Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is one of the very first pictures you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

The post Happy Mother’s Day! appeared first on The New Neo.

One of the tasks that fell to me since my mother’s death years ago was to go through her papers and photos.

Some “getting rid of” candidates were obvious. Medical records, of which my mother kept very many. Not needed any more, now that she was gone. Ditto her lists of things to do, address and appointment books, and random jottings.

But the rest! A few letters from me in high school and college. Greeting cards. At least a hundred letters from my father when they were dating in the late 30s when he was traveling constantly while working for the government as a lawyer. Those tend to take the form of descriptions of cities and small towns visited, but here and there are some more personal nuggets. A scrapbook of clippings about her activities in the community. A similar one made by her mother my grandmother, and one compiled by her grandfather my great-grandfather. That last one contains his wedding invitation, circa 1883.

Yearbooks. As an only child of an only child, my mother also inherited all the family photos going back to Civil War times and earlier. Some are of people I knew but many lovely ones are of the total strangers who must be my ancestors, and whose identities are lost.

Sorting them out has been time-consuming, and the task is still incomplete many years later. But I try, especially with those things that seem of special interest.

For me that includes my mother’s writing – because she was a writer too, an essayist whose work was often published in local newspapers and who’d written poetry as a precocious child and young woman. I had seen many of her poems and essays before, but some were new to me.

Here’s an essay of my mother’s that I found and read for the first time about a year after her death. I thought it might be fun to publish it on the blog; I don’t think that would have bothered her in the least. It appears to be something she wrote at the age of 80 (during the 1990s) for a writing workshop in response to an exercise staged by the teacher. It’s written in longhand, with various cross-outs, but I’m impressed with how few corrections she had to make in the flow of her thoughts, and how graceful her expression was under the circumstances.

And she seemed to like the dash, too—just like me.

It appears that the teacher had played music for the class, lit some candles, and given the students a sheet of guidelines (these were not saved; I have a hunch my mother didn’t think too much of them), telling the students to write for a few minutes. Here’s what my mother produced:

80 years of living has immunized me somewhat to candles, music, and yes, even meditation—so I looked with a somewhat jaundiced eye at first on Guidelines—and what strikes me at once is the word “Proprioceptive”—what does it mean and where does it come from?

Isn’t that awful—but I do like words and I keep wondering about that one—

The music is delightful and I wonder what is making me put words on a yellow legal pad anyway—and why am I resistant—

Probably because I tend to have used humor as a shield all my life—it helped me overlook hurts, and raise children without going crazy, and a laugh has been like medicine—the best for me.

As an only child I looked for friends—-and it helped me acquire them and saw us through good days and bad.

My husband liked a “light view”—but now it is more difficult because people are different—more violent, angry, and sad. I cling to humor—if and when possible—and its not always possible anymore to find it.

Why am I writing about fun and laughter when I could pick anything? Perhaps it keeps me sane when the alleged golden years have crept up and facing the inevitable is too much. Like Scarlett O’Hara—if it’s unpleasant “I’ll think about that tomorrow”—

Writing fiction is almost impossible for me because “truth is stranger than.” Coincidence, friendships, travels, the endless variety in people who cross your life are enough—there is little laughter these days and I plan to hold onto just as much as possible.

Now I have made a neat ending but the time is not up and the music and candles are still with me—and with them go gratitude for good luck and good health and the ability to cope with what comes—so far so good.

My mother and I were temperamentally very different, although we both liked humor. One of the things we shared was writing, and perhaps that’s why her essays mean a lot to me. I was especially struck in this one by her saying she couldn’t write fiction. I’ve written quite a few short stories, but they’re not my natural genre and I gave up writing fiction about fifteen years ago and it’s been essays ever since.

Some of my earliest writing memories involve my mother helping me write. She was a fabulous typist (she could even use carbons, and boy was she fast on a manual!) and a good editor. When we were young, my brother and I would leave our essays for her to read and correct for grammar errors, and she knew what she was doing.

My mother was also an excellent natural untrained dancer. But even though my mother couldn’t really sing, when I saw Bebe Daniels in the movie “42nd Street” on TV as a child, I was transfixed because the actress reminded me so very much of my mother. Here’s Bebe:

And here’s my mother, at the time of her graduation from college:

I thought everyone had an editor for a mother. I thought everyone had a mother who could write. Turns out they don’t.

The post Mother’s Day is tomorrow appeared first on The New Neo.

There were even places to park, not too far from the main streets, where there were no meters, although the parking was timed. You could park for two hours there for free, if I remember correctly.

Yes, you needed to keep coins on hand. But that wasn’t too difficult because as I said, parking wasn’t mega-expensive.

Then they removed the meters and put in parking stations – is that what they’re called? or kiosks? – where you bought a ticket that you then put in the windshield. At first it wasn’t too bad, although in the snow and sleet and rain it meant a rather nasty trip to the station and sometimes standing in line while the person in front of you paid. The stations took coins or credit cards, and with the coins you could get just a few minutes if that was all you needed.

It occurred to me early on that this had the advantage to the city of parking being non-transferable. No longer could you get the benefit of a person who’d overpaid in your spot. The fee for each person was tied to that person, and so the city got the money even if the time was unused.

Then at some point the parker had to plug into the machine the numbers of a license plate, just to make the fee extra-nontransferable.

And today, when I ran an errand in town and parked, the coin slot at the station was inoperable although it was still there. I think it’s now all credit cards, all the time. This means the shortest segment of parking you can buy has become an hour, which I rarely need and which costs a fair amount.

And then there’s the reading of the messages in the machine. If light is bright and there’s a lot of reflection, faggetaboutity you’ll have to create artificial shade to read it. And please, be quick about typing stuff in, because the machine is impatient and quite quick to say you’ve run out of time and need to start again. Today, for example, there was no diagram to tell me which way to insert my credit card. I tried every way I could think of and it rejected the card and timed out. Today I think I went through the entire protocol about four times before the machine finally had mercy on me and spit the parking permit out – and there, in the slot, I also found the permits of two previous people who’d left them there. They had their license plates on them, so I couldn’t have used them even if I’d known they were there.

Or, I suppose I could get the app. But I park in town so seldom – usually just when on official business – that I tend to forget about dong that until next time. And what guarantee would there be that the app would be any easier to use? None.

Okay, I feel better now.

The post The parking permit blues appeared first on The New Neo.

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun – weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times – a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor – that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center – the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

The post Mayday! appeared first on The New Neo.

,,, [I]n every other aspect of [the lives of the Democrats I know who want Trump dead], they act within the general morality of our culture. They don’t beat puppies and babies, they don’t steal, they’ll lend a helping hand to their neighbors, etc. My BiL is extremely active in the Catholic Church. Yet…..when it comes to Trump, and now through the relentless propaganda, conservatives and republicans in general, the “violent minds” turn on. I keep wishing that someone well-versed in psychology could explain this phenomenon to me, and also provide a solution. I haven’t seen such. If it exists it might even save the country from some terrible consequences.

It does certainly seem like a contagion, but there seems to be no antibiotic to employ.

I have no solution. But I’ll have a go at an explanation. The analogy to contagion is a good one, although obviously there are no microbes involved. People come to believe Trump is a Hitler equivalent, tremendously evil and otherwise unstoppable politically, so it follows that he must be killed. The analogy to Hitler is not an idle one because there were indeed many failed attempts on Hitler’s life and most people consider those who tried to do so to be heroes. The fact that Trump bears no resemblance to Hitler is irrelevant, because most people don’t evaluate things for themselves and their sources – their trusted sources – say Trump is tremendously evil, Hitlerian, and out to destroy our country and must be stopped.

Why those sources are trusted is another story. It’s different for different populations. For older people, it’s the news media amplified by social media. For younger people, the source is other online platforms such as TikTok and Twitch (Hasam Piker is a huge Twitch personality, for example). For many of all ages, they live in communities where pretty much everyone thinks this way, whether it be a blue city or just their own family or their own ethnic group. Often a clergyman or church or synagogue group is part of the echo chamber (in which case Trump-hate is not a religious substitute but is considered consistent with their religion as a sort of “just war”), and of course many Democrat politicians and spokespeople, as well as celebrities, artists, authors, and public intellectuals.

In my case I am often the only Trump supporter friends and family members know. Some have cooled, but some have “grandfathered” me in, as it were, because they’ve known me so long and know I’m not evil.

In addition, some of my Democrat friends simply don’t care. It’s not that they don’t care about politics, but they don’t care in the same very personal way. They never talk politics to me and never mention my curious support of Trump; it simply is not an issue they take into the personal realm. They are my friends (at least so far), they’ve been my friends for years, and that’s that. Nor do they ever mention wanting to kill Trump or wanting him dead, although they’ve made a few remarks indicating they detest him.

What distinguishes these two groups from each other? I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute, plus the intensity with which they view it. But why do people belong to one group rather than another? I don’t know. I have found no specific characteristics that I can see that differentiate between the two groups: neither is predominantly male or female, neither is religious, nor do they differ in education or the way they habitually vote. They also do not differ in the intensity of their personalities in other areas of their lives.

The post How political hatred works appeared first on The New Neo.

It was the casual manner that got me. Neither knew my political leanings, but it was assumed that I agreed with them – didn’t everyone who didn’t sport a tail, horns, and a swastika tattoo? With the first person I was so stunned I said nothing. But later, with the second person, I challenged him – to no avail.

You’ve probably seen similar public statements from Trump-haters over the years – on TV and on social media, for example. It’s become standard. In the last year I’ve heard it again from two different friends, each of them people I’ve known for many years and who’ve never spoken this way before. Neither have any history of being leftist firebrands and in fact each have long been political moderates.

But not on the topic of Trump, apparently. The first was over the phone, and my long-time friend said that if she ever was given a terminal diagnosis she would try to kill Trump. This seemed only slightly tongue-in-cheek and deeply unfunny. She went on to vent quite a bit on how much she hated him. My response was that I hope she never receives a terminal diagnosis.

The most recent person to express this was even more disturbing. This was from an old friend who’s one of the most mild-mannered people I know – ordinarily. We were having lunch and catching up, since I hadn’t seen him in a long while, and towards the end of the meal he said that if he had a rifle (which he doesn’t) and if Trump came anywhere on his property (which Trump won’t) he would kill him. With the previous people saying this, they’d only given very general reasons why; I guess they thought his evil was so very obvious it needed no explanation. But this time I asked him why, and his answer stunned me: it was that Trump wasn’t even human. This was said with vehemence and a kind of fervor and certainty that indicated a very deeply held belief.

Again, I asked why he said that. I wish I could remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that it was obvious just by looking at him – that he cared about no one and nothing but himself, and that he didn’t love America but hated it. He offered no particular evidence and I didn’t press it; to pursue the conversation was going to be counterproductive. This was a person who already knew my general politics, but I think he assumed that despite being on the right that I, as a moral and upright person, would be a Trump-hater too.

There are a great many people like this, and their sentiments are considered perfectly okay and even moral by other people just like them, people I would never have described as political activists or leftists, but who want Trump dead and probably are surrounded by others who want him dead too. The sentiment has been mainstreamed, and it happened quite early in Trump’s first term although it’s only gotten worse..

A couple of days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Jimmy Kimmel did a sketch about the coming festivities. It was supposedly funny, and there certainly were plenty of people or bots in the comments to this video who seem to think it was indeed funny. Here are a few seconds that got a lot of attention in retrospect, for obvious reasons:

Today Melania Trump issued a reaction:

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” …

“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him,” she said. “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

Good luck with that; I don’t think it’s going to happen. There’s an audience for it and an appetite for it, and although Kimmel doesn’t have high ratings I don’t see them pulling him.

Last night I came across the following video and clicked on it because of the title. I kept watching it because it periodically featured people – I believe mostly from TikTok? – expressing the most outrageous death wishes on Trump, with a venom that is extraordinary and no sense of needing to hide their sentiments. For example, two very short segments:

Those aren’t even the worst ones. Here’s the whole thing, in case you’re interested:

There’s plenty more where that came from. What’s happened is not just a norming of such behavior – although there’s that – but a message that it’s not only okay but that’s it’s cool and virtuous, something of which to be proud.

It spreads like a contagion. Some people are more vulnerable to it than others, but I couldn’t have predicted in advance who among my friends would be most vulnerable to it. I also have plenty of friends and relatives who are Democrats and who detest Trump, but at least I’ve never heard them wish him dead.

The post It’s become the norm to talk about wanting to kill Trump or at the very least wanting him to die – and to be proud of it appeared first on The New Neo.

I was not fond of law school. Every now and then an issue would grab my interest, but a great deal of it was boring and nitpicky and so there’s a reason I never went into the law business afterward. If you had told me that lo these many years later I’d be writing about law on a near-daily basis, voluntarily, I would have laughed in your face.

And yet here we are.

The post Law, law, and more law appeared first on The New Neo.

13-inch MacBook Neo Apple A18 Pro chip with 6 core CPU and 5 core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Indigo

Customers commend the 13-inch MacBook Neo for its portability and overall performance, noting its seamless integration with iPhones. The impressive battery life is also a highlight for users. Additionally, customers appreciate the available color options, allowing them to coordinate with other devices.

The post Let me just say that … appeared first on The New Neo.