Say goodbye to the old street

Say goodbye to the old street November 23, 2015

• It’s November 23, so let me revisit a strange little piece from a few years ago titled “November 23, 1963.” It’s an attempt to deal with the Problem of Susan, imagining Susan Pevensie — cruelly, magically deprived of remembering who she is and who she has been — reading the newspaper the day it reported the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the news of the death of C.S. Lewis.

Wherever she is today, Susan is well past the 90th year of her second lifetime. But I imagine that other lifetime breathing that magical air has kept her preternaturally young. And I like to imagine she’s happy.

• The title of the post at Joe.My.God is “Donald Trump Tweets Racist Lying Graphic.” The title of the post at Talking Points Memo is “Trump Retweets Inaccurate Statistics About Black Murder Rate.” Joe gets that right. Josh gets it wrong. The former headline is more true and more precise than the latter. It is inaccurate to describe Trump’s tweet as merely “inaccurate.” That’s better than the flaccid, passive, sub-contracted irresponsibility of newspapers describing it as “disputed” or “controversial” or “criticized,” but its still monumentally inadequate.

Trump is spreading deliberate lies deliberately. He’s quoting made-up statistics attributed to a nonexistent “bureau” — statistics that were originally fabricated and promoted by a swastika-waving self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi. Those statistics are not simply inaccurate — they’re wholly untrue. They are a racist lie. Calling them anything less than that isn’t journalistic objectivity or propriety, it’s just irresponsible.

• Both of these tweets have me looking forward to spring.

LGM

• “Example: ‘X was born in Wiltshire in 1943, the son of an RAF pilot.’ ‘Y was born in Reading in 1917, son of an engineer.’ Really? Only one parent??

• It’s been a bad month for sleazy debt collectors and for snake-oil peddling “supplement” companies.

No matter how loudly or how often this sort of good governance is denounced as “big government” or “intrusive regulation,” the bottom line is that most Americans want and expect this from their government. They may have a stingy, resentful, crabs-in-a-bucket attitude toward other people with debt, but they assume that it isn’t — or shouldn’t be — allowed for dubious debt-collectors to lie and extort, or to collect debts that were already paid or never incurred. And they expect and assume that selling chemical stimulants under the guise of all-natural herbal supplements is and should be illegal.

For all that people say they want smaller government kept off their backs, they also want big, huge government under their feet, solidly supporting their weight with every step. And with every step they assume it will be there.


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