The Maui fire disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

I have no idea how the people of Maui will react, but Biden will finally be visiting.

There are still between 850 and 1,000 missing people from the area. It is tragically ominous:

“For the schools that started today, I can’t imagine what roll call looks like … when one in every four is likely not going to be there in those classes, in those neighborhoods,” Fielding said. “I don’t know how you have enough teachers or counselors or therapists, or how you… there’s no way to do justice to the real tragedy on the ground.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told reporters over the weekend it’s “possible that there will be many children” among the unaccounted for.

The exact number of missing people is still changing.

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said in a video that 850 names are on a list of missing persons. Bissen said the number of missing people dropped from 1,000 people after lists from the FBI, Red Cross and Maui police were combined.

When there is a large disaster of that sort, many people flee and stay in shelters or with friends. So my guess – and hope – is that a great great many of the missing will be found alive. But the fear is that most of them are actually dead. I assume we’ll be finding out in the next few weeks as it all sorts out.

No matter what, the Maui response appears to have been very poor:

The fire itself was started by poorly maintained power lines, which for years had been identified as a wildfire risk due to their poor condition and proximity to invasive grasses that act as tinder in late summer. The power company was well aware of the issue and had been slow-walking remediation.

Battling wildfires in Maui is a politically contentious issue–so much so that water is not routinely released to battle wildfires and in this case, it took hours to get the water turned on to battle the fire once it got out of control. In fact, early in the day, the fire had been classified as “contained” when it obviously wasn’t. …

The official in charge of emergency response in Maui was a politician with no experience in emergency management, who has since resigned. He made the fateful decision not to warn residents of the raging wildfire. No sirens were sounded, and by the time the text-based warning system was activated cellular service was already out for most people. Residents literally had no warning until they saw the flames speeding toward them. …

When residents finally began to flee the fire all the exits from town were blocked by police cars, who had been ordered to push residents to Front Street at the water’s edge, and a police car blocked the exit out of the town on Front Street as well. That is why you see photos of cars packed together on the main street of town–they were prevented from leaving by the authorities.

Much more at the link.

I don’t know whether some of this is rumor or whether all of it is true. But it makes for ghastly and infuriating reading. There seems to have been a tremendous lack of preparedness and a tremendous amount of confusion. Again, let’s hope we find out more over time.

Weiss: the whistleblowers made him do it

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s even worse than previously thought:

David Weiss, the US Attorney who has led the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly did not plan to charge the president’s son until IRS whistleblowers came forward about his alleged tax fraud, according to a report.

Weiss was willing to conclude the investigation without even as much as a plea deal before the agents accused the Justice Department of interfering, according to private correspondence between Weiss and Biden’s legal team obtained by the New York Times.

After the whistleblowers spoke out, Weiss suddenly demanded Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses

“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents told the newspaper in a statement.

Sadly enough, this is unsurprising.

And recently the intrepid crime-fighter Weiss was appointed special counsel in the Hunter Biden case.

Another story about Weiss that broke recently:

U.S. attorney David Weiss, who offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea deal and is now serving as a special counsel in the Biden investigation, worked for years with Biden’s late brother Beau, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. That’s just another of several connections between Weiss and the Biden family, which led a spokesman for House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) to say that Weiss “can’t be trusted.”

Perhaps the strangest thing about these two stories is that they were reported by the NY Times and the WaPo, respectively. What gives? Is this part of the preparation to dump Joe Biden in 2024? Or do they believe Weiss is now too motivated to go after Hunter to prove he’s on the up and up, and they want him dumped and replaced by someone new who will also give Hunter a sweet deal or even drop the charges? I doubt very much that the two newspapers are now committed to following truth wherever it may lead, so there must be another agenda here.

The pro-Trump forces are at it again with a truncated and misleading DeSantis quote

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve dealt with the phenomenon in this previous post:

But what I detest – no matter what side does it – is the use of propagandist truncated quotes. I’m quite aware that waging war against that practice is a losing game. The propagandist truncated quote is a very clever tool, used constantly by each side. It’s a way of telling the truth – “So and so said this awful thing!” – while taking the quote out of context in order to lead to a misperception (or at the very least an incomplete, misleading perception) on the part of the listener or reader. I hate it when it’s used against anyone. That very much includes when it’s used against Trump – which happens constantly and to great effect, both from the left and from NeverTrumpers who used to be on the right.

How boring and time-consuming to look up the longer and more complicated story. The press knows this; politicians’ enemies and/or opponents know it, too. Nice guys finish last and all that. Much better to go with the attention-getting, incendiary quote, the one the leads people to the conclusion you want. It works for both Trump’s enemies and for DeSantis’ enemies, on both left and right, and both sides are adept at spinning someone’s words. For Trump-boosters on the right, the theme is DeSantis as betrayer stabbing Trump in the back, as well as DeSantis the wimp, DeSantis the GOPe candidate – despite DeSantis’ record in Florida and in Congress as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, the most conservative group in the House.

And so we have another case of the use of the technique against DeSantis by pro-Trump forces. You may have encountered it – the “listless vessels” statement. The assertion by the pro-Trump forces is that RINO DeSantis attacked Trump voters by calling them “listless vessels,” sort of a Hillaryesque “deplorables”-lite. Here’s an example. The headline is, “DeSantis Draws Outrage From Trump Campaign Over ‘Listless Vessels’ Comment.” My my, the Trump campaign has gotten awfully sensitive all of a sudden. Here’s a quote from the article:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis drew broad outrage over the weekend following his comments suggesting some Trump supporters are “listless vessels” in an Aug. 19 interview with a conservative Florida publication.

While the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential candidate has since claimed the comment referred to “some congressional endorsers,” the comment has been widely interpreted by the Trump campaign and supporters as referring to all his supporters, drawing comparisons to former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.

“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary and [calls] MAGA supporters ‘Listless Vessels,’” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, referring to Mr. DeSantis’s remarks made in an interview with The Florida Standard.

“Widely interpreted” – in other words, twisted and used and lied about. The Trump forces have done it, and of course the left is also doing it. The two groups are in lockstep with each other in their approach to DeSantis, because both of them would like Trump to be nominated – for different reasons, of course.

If you’re interested in what DeSantis actually said, here it is:

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called out CNN host Kasie Hunt on Sunday for airing a deceptively edited video clip of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

On “State of the Union,” Hunt claimed that DeSantis described Trump supporters as “listless vessels” in a recent interview, suggesting that DeSantis had disparaged them by implying they do not think for themselves. Hunt then played a clip of those remarks.

In response, Cuccinelli called out CNN for having spliced together two parts of the interview to make DeSantis sound like he was attacking Trump supporters.

“Everybody just saw there that there was a cut. You cut from the beginning of that quote to the ‘listless vessels,'” Cuccinelli protested. “You just did what the problem is. So, everybody who just watched that, understand, go read the transcript, and it is not correct.” …

DeSantis, however, was clearly saying that the Republican Party should be united behind principles — not a single leader.

Here is what DeSantis said in full:

“So there will be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have incredibly liberal left-wing records that is really just atrocious, and yet they’re viewed by some of these folks as, like, really, really good. Then you have other people, you know, like a Congressman Chip Roy, who has endorsed me, Congressman Thomas Massie. These guys have records of principle fighting the swamp that are second to none. And yet they will be attacked by some of these people and called RINOs. So it’s just been totally detached from any type of substance. And ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people. And that’s got to be based in principle. Because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

I think it’s very interesting that what DeSantis was addressing there was the very type of thing that then occurred: the left and the Trump campaign uniting to attack DeSantis or his supporters in a deceptive manner.

Such approaches often work, though, as I wrote earlier. And I believe they are a form of suicide for the right, because I believe that at this point Trump will be the nominee and cannot win the general. I also have come to think that Trump and his most fervent supporters – not all of his supporters by any means, but a significant number – feel that if Trump isn’t the nominee they don’t want the Republican nominee to win. It’s Trump’s way or the highway. And I wonder what sort of principle that represents.

A protest song for our times: “Rich Men North of Richmond”

The New Neo Posted on by

I put Oliver Anthony’s song “Rich Men North of Richmond” in Thursday’s “Roundup” post, but I have a lot more to say about it. First, in case you missed it, here’s the song:

I also noticed that commenter “huxley” wrote about the many reaction videos to the song. So I decided to watch a few and they were fascinating. So many people seem extremely moved by the song – almost stunned at first – and often say the same things about it with similar expressions on their faces. Just a few lines into it, their eyes widen with surprise. Then they get very solemn and start nodding. Sometimes they cry. Often they say that the singer is telling the truth and that you know from his voice and his face that he really means it.

Oliver Anthony’s sincerity come across almost the moment he opens his mouth. He’s got that authentic country twang and his voice has a sob in it – not a weak sob, but a powerful one that speaks of years of anguish combined with strength. People get it – people of all kinds. And not just in this country, either; the reactors are international.

The tune is pretty good and his voice is even better, but best of all are the lyrics. He starts the song at full throttle and jumps right in and hits hard. The words have a relentless, driving quality that just keeps on coming and coming. The listener no sooner hears one heartfelt and well-expressed thought when it’s followed by another, and then another. There are no wasted lyrics at all – no throwaway filler rhymes.

Anthony starts with four lines of complaint about hard work for little money, and then segues into an observation on “what the world’s come to / for people like me / and people like you,” drawing the listener in. The message is we’re in this thing together, and that message is immediately received by all the reactors I watched. There’s little doubt that this sense of shared emotions accounts for some of the viral spread of the song, as do the lines “Livin’ in the new world / With an old soul.” I’m not sure whether the reference was intentional, but to me that part conjures up Brave New World, where the inhabitants are subject to nearly complete social control by manipulative elites – and sure enough, Anthony follows it up by a reference to our own rich elites (north of Richmond) who want “total control.” That’s another line that usually gets a knowing nod from all the reactors.

Most of the listeners seem to understand what Anthony means by “Rich Men North of Richmond,” too. It’s even easier to see what he means when you look at a map: Washington DC is located right smack north of Richmond, Virginia.

Then there are lines about fat people eating sweets purchased with welfare checks supported by other people’s taxes – sure to rile a lot of people on the left, but all the reactors didn’t seem the least bit upset by it. There are references to Epstein’s island, without naming his name, and couched in a pun about “miners” and “minors.” Anthony doesn’t leave out the fact that young men are dying prematurely – or, as he puts it, “puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground.” Is that from suicide, drugs, drinking, accidents, or homicide? It’s a brilliant way to refer to self-destructive behavior, and he links it to despair “Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”

I’ve often thought that, as rhymed poetry has faded and is so rarely written anymore, song lyrics – and in particular the lyrics of country music – have taken over. There’s tremendous power in a music lyric because the words-and-music combination can touch the heart and the brain in a different way than prose or even spoken poetry. Songs cut through right to the core.

When I was a teenager, protest songs were all the rage. But they were almost uniformly from the left. Oliver Anthony’s song is a type of protest song, too, but it transcends politics and is almost purely populist. These days, populism is more on the right (and embodied by candidate Trump), but it is hardly limited to the right. “Power to the people!” was one of the cries of the leftist radicals of my youth, and leftists were once the champions of the working class. No more.

Anthony’s song has gone viral very quickly, and I don’t doubt it repels most of those “rich men north of Richmond” and everyone who thinks they should have “total control” of the rest. But for the most part, people don’t want to be controlled. And they see that today’s elites don’t seem to care about them and aren’t even very good at pretending anymore.

Here’s just a moment at the start of one of these reaction videos:

And here are just three out of so many comments I’ve seen at YouTube:

It’s profoundly moving to observe the moment of realization on people’s faces, when what they’ve always known deep within them rises to the surface. The voice of the silent majority, echoing from the heart of the Appalachian mountains, has a resonance that’s incredibly touching people all over the world.

Whatever the lyrics, whatever side you lean, when a song speaks to EVERY single one of us, it’s powerful & beautiful. We need more artists that make music that brings us all together as we should be. Loved that you were real & honest with your emotions. We ALL have to stick together.

His voice emits the anguish we are all feeling.

Maybe we really are “all” feeling it.

NOTE: The song also made me think of this scene from Network, which came out in November of 1976, shortly after the election of Jimmy Carter:

The beginning of Anthony’s song – “I’ve been selling my soul” – also conjured up the lyrics of another working man’s complaint song, “Sixteen Tons.” I know a lot of different versions, but this happens to be my favorite:

Here’s another reaction video; there are so many more:

It’s a shame that shame has gotten such a bad name

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was thinking about shame.

When I was growing up, shame was a much-used parental and pedagogic device. Parents commonly called their children “bad,” for example. Teachers purposely made us feel ashamed – not necessarily with the old-fashioned dunce cap, but with ploys such as the favorite ones of a particularly nasty teacher of mine who thought nothing of cruel name-calling, and who would hand out our tests after she’d marked them and then call our names from the roll book as we were told to shout out what marks we had gotten and she would write them down. This public self-disclosure punished both those who had done well and those who had done poorly. The latter felt shame for their poor performance, and the former were then subject to the wrath of the latter and felt ostracized for their good performance.

No, it wasn’t a very good system. It had its pluses, but it also caused a lot of people to feel that their every move was wrong and that there was no redemption possible for them. A few years later, the idea emerged that it was better for parents and teachers to tell a misbehaving child that the child had done something bad, and could and should do better, rather than that there was something intrinsically bad about the child’s essence. That still seems to me to be the best middle ground of child-rearing.

Unfortunately, the pendulum then swung too far, into the self-esteem movement. Children were told they were great no matter what, and various excuses were made for bad behavior. Was that behavior even called “bad” anymore? I suppose it depended on what identity group a child belonged to, or whether the school was in a red or blue area. And now, children are even made to feel bad for their race once again, only now the races are reversed and it’s the white kids who are supposed to think they bear some sort of mark of Cain.

At any rate, the context in which the word “shame” occurred to me last night was somewhat akin to Robert Welch’s question during the McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency?” This time, I was thinking about people such as Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith and Fani Willis, who are perfectly fine with stretching the law till it’s unrecognizable in order to charge a political enemy in a transparently partisan move. They don’t care. They probably feel pride. I don’t know much about their backgrounds, but I do know that they are all about the same age: Bragg is 49, Smith is 52, and Willis is 54.

That’s not so very young, but it’s certainly a different generation than mine. My parents were born in the early years of the 20th century, and many of my grade school teachers were born in the late 1800s. Just writing that makes me feel like some sort of dinosaur. It wasn’t the Jurassic, but it was indeed a different world than the one we now inhabit.

Time to revisit this post about the effects of WWI

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed in some recent comments that a lot of people believe that World War I was a turning point in the changes we’ve seen in attitudes towards the foundations of Western Civilization. That reminded me of the following post of mine, which first appeared here in December of 2012. The title was “We have never recovered from World War I,” and the first sentence was, “And I fear we never shall.”

What follows here is the rest of the post.

When I was in school, World War I was hardly touched on in my history classes, so eager were the teachers to get to World War II before the year was over. It was only though reading a review of the Paul Fussell book The Great War and Modern Memory when it first came out in 1975, and then being intrigued enough to read the book itself, that I first learned what a cataclysmic event the First World War was, both in terms of death rates and in its psychological and even spiritual, as well as cultural, effects.

The first hint was this quote by Henry James, from a letter he wrote to a friend the day after Britain entered the war:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

If you hack through James’ typically complex syntax, you’ll see a perfect encapsulation of the effect of the war: blood and darkness, giving the lie to what people of that age thought “civilization” had meant. The war caused people to look back at all the years of seeming progress and regard them as a cruel, tantalizing, misleading illusion, a sort of trick played on naive people who now looked back at the history they themselves had lived through, tearing off their previous rose-colored glasses and now seeing a stark and terrible vision.

We have been stuck with that vision ever since. Whether people are aware of the details of the events of WWI or not, they are part of a culture of profound cynicism that took hold of the Western world afterward and has been part of the reason for its decline. Simply put, the West lost a great deal of its boundless confidence in itself.

This article that appeared in American Heritage goes over much the same territory:

This almost unimaginable destruction of human life, to no purpose whatsoever, struck at the very vitals of Western society. For this reason alone, among the casualties of the First World War were not only the millions of soldiers who had died for nothing, most of the royalty of Europe, and treasure beyond reckoning but nearly all the fundamental philosophical and cultural assumptions of the civilization that had suffered this self-induced catastrophe.

For there was one thing that was immediately clear to all about the Great War – as the generation who fought it called it – and that was that this awful tragedy was a human and wholly local phenomenon. There was no volcano, no wrathful God, no horde of barbarians out of the East. Western culture had done this to itself. Because of the war, it seemed to many a matter of inescapable logic that Western culture must be deeply, inherently flawed.

The pre-WWI ethos was quite different. The American Heritage article uses author Edith Wharton’s world as an example, but Henry James would have done just as nicely:

Because of this fantastic record of progress, the people of Edith Wharton’s world believed in the inevitability of further progress and the certainty that science would triumph. They believed in the ever-widening spread of democracy and the rule of law. They believed in the adequacy of the present and the bright promise of the future. To be sure, they fought ferociously over the details of how to proceed, but they had no doubt whatever that the basic principles that guided their society were correct.

Then, all at once, the shots rang out in Sarajevo, the politicians bungled, the armies marched, the poppies began to blow between the crosses row on row. The faith of the Western world in the soundness of its civilization died in the trenches of the western front.

Seventy-five years later, richer, more powerful, more learned than ever, the West still struggles to pick up the psychological pieces, to regain its poise, to find again the self-confidence that in the nineteenth century it took entirely for granted.

Subsequent events played a part, as well. World War II was a very different war fought for very different reasons; unlike its predecessor, the lines of good vs. evil were crystal clear. But that didn’t make the carnage and the profoundly wearying nature of the war any less disillusioning, it’s just that it was disillusioning in a different way, this time about the human race’s propensity for cruelty and hatred and violence. And of course there’s been the long Gramscian march of the left through the West’s basic institutions such as the church, education, and the media, working constantly to undermine the West from the inside. What we see now are the results of all of this. It’s a miracle there’s any vigor left at all.

A book on the six-decades long Gramscian march

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Rufo’s new book sounds interesting, and even important. It’s called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Here’s a review:

The most extreme anti-American rhetoric from the 1960s is now the norm among progressives and the institutions they control, from schools and colleges to prominent newspapers and television networks. The terrorists of the 1960s, decades in hibernation, have awakened to take control of America. …

Several writers, including Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, and (currently) Christopher Rufo, have tried to explain how this happened. Rufo’s excellent new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, gives an account of the New Left’s “long march through the institutions” over the decades and shows how the radicals adopted that strategy in the 1970s when their efforts to bring off a violent revolution collapsed around them.

I haven’t read Rufo’s book, but I think it’s obviously the case that the 60s radicals began by getting their noses into the tent of education at the end of that era (I’m talking about you, Bill Ayers) and they never looked back. They are patient people, as are their successors. In the 1990s the group began to reach critical mass in education – and the rest, as they say, is history. I see education as the key to the entire process, because it influences each young generation which then fans out into the world, ultimately taking its place at the helm of various institutions in many fields.

Watergate also spawned a movement of journalists – not “reporters” – who considered leftist activism their mission. They have amply fulfilled it.

NOTE: You might want to take a look at this older post of mine about the end of the Constitution and the patience of the left, and how long they’ve been planning and coordinating a takedown of that document.

Vivek and Tucker

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t written much about Vivek Ramaswamy yet, but I’ve paid some attention to him and watched short clips of things he’s said. For the most part, I’ve thought he seems pretty smart and – as a political outsider – somewhat different than the rest.

Last night I decided to watch a long video interview of him with Tucker Carlson. Here it is:

I find myself lukewarm about him. I wasn’t as impressed by him as I expected to be. It may have been partly because Tucker Carlson was interviewing him. I have mixed feelings about Carlson, too (I’ve written about that before, for example in this post), mostly disagreeing with him on foreign policy and agreeing with him on many other issues of the domestic variety.

But this post isn’t about Carlson; it’s about Ramaswamy. What was my problem with him? He seemed to – as Carlson often does – oversimplify the problems, especially on foreign policy. My impression is that he sees no reason whatsoever to intervene in a place such a Ukraine, even by arming them, and is perfectly fine with abandoning them to Russia’s tender mercies. Same for Taiwan, once we manage to get our dependence on Taiwan for semiconducters remedied – then it’s bye-bye Taiwan. At least, that’s my impression of his position.

It’s not that those positions are crazy. It’s that they are clean and simple, and don’t take into consideration the possible effects of what would be perceived as weakness and American withdrawal from the international field. Ramaswamy is all for strengthening our nuclear defenses, and I’m in agreement with that.

Tucker and Vivek (especially Carlson) spend some time from minutes 32:47 to 33:30 in snarky laughter at neocons, of whom they use Bill Kristol as an example. Kristol was never a neocon in the classic sense of changing from left to right, although he certainly did (and still does) support armed intervention in various foreign conflicts. But since 2016, Kristol has been no sort of “con” – no sort of conservative, that is – at all. If anything, he’s been a neo-leftist for the past seven years, a changer from right to left. I don’t think he’s an example of much of anything except the mind of Bill Kristol.

The video reminded me that Vivek Ramaswamy is only 38 years old. He’s a man of very high achievement, but that can give a person the idea that he can fix anything and that the solutions are rather simple. That’s the impression I got, anyway – of a certain low-key arrogance. None of this means I wouldn’t vote for Ramaswamy if he was the Republican nominee. I definitely would. But it means I was somewhat disappointed when I got a large dose of him. Your mileage may differ.

On laughter

The New Neo Posted on by

Ammo Grrrll is sensitive to noise, and she tells you all about it in a very funny piece at Powerline. If you need some laughter as relief from all the angst, I suggest taking a look.

It got me thinking, too. Ammo Grrrll writes:

I have no idea why – perhaps because I was evicted untimely from the womb after barely six months to relax — but I was born with a low tolerance for noise and an inordinate capacity for hysterics. Luckily, the hysterics include both the laughing kind and also the less popular shrieking kind.

Lord knows, I have tried to work on it over the years and sometimes it almost seems to have succeeded. And then, like many addicts, criminals, and other unfortunates in the grip of something beyond their control, I will relapse. No One Year Lunacy Sobriety Pin for me!

I don’t have a low tolerance for noise, except at highly-amplified concerts. But hysterics? Yes, especially the laughing kind; the shrieking kind only when sorely pressed and extremely necessary.

I’ve been in churches and synagogues and theaters of all kinds when something has pressed my laughter-hysterics button, and I’ve had excruciating difficulty trying to stop. But stop I must, or leave the venue – which can be very challenging in theater or pew when there are people in the way. Of course, by that time they’re probably happy to see me go.

What’s so funny, you might ask? It can be something quite minor, especially when I was pregnant. When pregnant, I even had trouble going to the movies because I would end up making so much noise laughing that I’d end up having a fake coughing fit to try to cover it up.

Sometimes my laughter would set off my husband’s laughter, which made it even worse because we’d lob it back and forth as in a tennis match. Whenever I thought I was getting my hysteria under control, if he started laughing again it would set me off once more. It was especially bad in pews, which – you may not realize this if you haven’t laughed in a house of worship – shake when someone laughs, and that can of course spark even more laughter.

Long long ago in Boston, my husband (then my boyfriend) and I were at the Boston Ballet. One of the pieces on the program was Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony, which isn’t one of my favorites. Here’s a very short clip of the San Francisco Ballet performing it:

In that long-ago Boston Ballet version I saw, the male lead had on a hat like the one in the video, only with a single longish feather as decoration. He was a tall man; and something about his hat, the way he held his head, and his profile caused my husband to lean over and whisper in my ear: “Danny Kaye.”

It was one of those phenomena that once seen cannot be unseen. The man – I’m purposely not naming him, but I remember his name very well – was instantaneously transmogrified into Danny Kaye, and his every move thereafter became screamingly funny. Which meant that I laughed so hard I cried with the effort of trying to stop, choking and sputtering and making a such a tremendous racket that I had to leave the theater and wait in the lobby for the duration of the ballet.

Not only that, but for many years thereafter, until that particular dancer retired, I had to check the casting of the company’s ballets before I bought tickets, because I found that the problem had generalized so much that any time I saw him step on a stage it would start my near-hysterics.

And I wasn’t even pregnant at the time.

What’s more, at least five or six times in my life I have experienced the phenomenon of laughing so hard in my sleep that it wakes me up. It hasn’t happened in a while, but it certainly has happened. The sad thing is that, when I would wake up, if I could remember the thing that was so hysterically funny in my dream it really wasn’t so very funny at all when I was in my conscious state.

As for the men in my life, they have mostly delighted in making me laugh, and those I’ve loved the most have been very very funny. This was very much true of my ex, and it was certainly true of Gerard, who sometimes would take little videos of me doubled over with laughter at something he’d said. And seeing him whip out his video camera or phone to record the scene made me laugh even more.