(Links to stuff mentioned in this post are collected at the end of it.)
The plot by the governors of Texas and Florida to scatter undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers across the country to Democratic strongholds unannounced is awful, and clever, and perhaps illegal.
The cruelty of it delights their followers, even as they deny that it’s cruel — how could sending “illegals,” as they’re called, to sanctuary cities be cruel, they ask — and linking “illegals” to Democrats advances the creeping dehumanization of the former toward the latter.1
We propose a simple way to stop and remediate the trafficking of people for political gain: gather up everybody exploited in this scheme, bring them to a stadium or arena filled with public and private social welfare providers, and grant them U.S. citizenship en masse. Affirm their humanity in the strongest possible terms; protect them from future exploitation, to the extent citizenship can do that.
Of course that won’t happen. Just grant them all green cards instead.
Of course that won’t happen. We need a law granting immediate citizenship or permanent residency to anybody dislocated from their country by economic or physical violence perpetrated by the U.S.
Of course that won’t happen either, but the energetic responses, rhetorical and practical, to this latest abomination are encouraging. The sort of person who rejoices at the meanness of it is unlikely to recognize that anyone genuinely cares about powerless people flung across the country for sport. That’s a weakness one hopes can be exploited.
We hate fact-checkers, except the ones out on our fringe.2 The mainstream ones sport unsightly infections and biases. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post, e.g., is as frankly bitter and withered and checkered a checker as you’ll find,3 but at least he’s not responsible for deciding that a rumor having Queen Elizabeth mowed down in Motown needed debunked. That honor goes to The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, who are emphatic about it.4
Our ruling
An image shared on Instagram claimed that Queen Elizabeth II was "shot dead in Detroit."
She died peacefully in Scotland on Sept. 8, according to officials from the royal family. There’s no evidence that the queen has been anywhere near Detroit in years.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
400 words, they used. We’re barely past that many here, even adding other people’s words to ours.
Imagine if she had met a violent end in the Motor City, though. Would that not have been glorious? My goodness. Who would have done it? Who would have abased themselves most deeply apologizing for it, and most dramatically declared an end to the U.S. as a great nation? And who would have been the first to publicly point the finger at the Duchess of Sussex?
Our ruling? Dibs on the story. We call dibs.
Hans Christian Andersen drove Charles Dickens nuts during the course of an extended house visit, we learned today, speaking of stories.
Now, this was a particularly bad time for Dickens to have any (let alone such an oblivious) houseguest—Little Dorritt was not doing so well critically, and he was attempting to leave his wife for a woman half his age. Plus, he was acting in a play—his friend Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep. So, he was clearly a busy man, doing many important things.
Then again, Andersen was difficult to be around. At the premiere of The Frozen Deep (with Dickens in the leading role and Queen Victoria in the audience), he loudly burst into tears. Afterwards, he apparently sulked because his presence at the event was not noted more highly. And when he learned that one of his pieces received a negative review, he hurled himself down on the Dickens family lawn and passionately wept.5
We wish sometimes we had the same lack of filters as Andersen, but put to better use. Better public use, anyway; it seems his frailties stood him well on the literary front.
We were watching a Scottish television show earlier and now find ourselves thinking with a wee bit of a Scott-ish accent. It’s quite good; it’s called Guilt,6 and everybody in it has some, mostly earned, and the acting is aces bottom to top.
(Do you like music? We like music. Tell us about the music you like. Musical contributors to this post include Porridge Radio, “Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky;” The Lounge Society, “Tired of Liberty;” Big Joanie, “Sistahs;” Roy Rogers & Norton Buffalo, “Travellin’ Tracks;” Watermelon Slim and The Workers, “No Paid Holidays;” Snail Mail, “Habit;” Young Fathers, “Cocoa Sugar;” The Vaccines, “The Vaccines;” and The Marías, “Cinema.”)
FAIR fact checks the fact-checkers.
PolitiFact’s 400-word takedown of a post alleging that QEII was murdered in Detroit.
The Literary Hub account of the end to Andersen’s friendship with Dickens.
I'd throw myself in tears onto the lawn every time I suffer a setback except 1) at my age, I'm afraid I'd break something or be unable to get back up, and 2) I don't have a lawn.
Thanks for updating my clearly sanitized knowledge of Andersen.