GIN AND TACOS

In my 36 years I have seen some ridiculous things. I've seen Battlefield:Earth. I've seen adult human beings dump ice on their heads in honor of a motor-neuron disorder. I've seen Carrot Top live (I was 16, come on). I've seen three black lesbians karaoke "Dam That River" by Alice in Chains. I've seen a Chicago Transit Authority bus driver freestyle-A cappella a song about a woman who broke his heart in a bar. I've seen people wait in a three hour queue to eat at Olive Garden.
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And I deal regularly with 19 year old American college students.
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So I've seen some shit that left me scratching my head.

This Kim Davis / Hitlerjugend rally, though, might take the cake.

If this wasn't intended to be self-parody, they've accidentally discovered the art form and perfected it the way Henning Brand discovered phosphorus in 1669 while trying to distill gold from his urine by boiling it. They played "Eye of the Tiger." They really did. At least Survivor gets a royalty check out of this. Did I mention I saw Survivor play "Taste of Oak Lawn" in 1995, presumably for beer instead of money? It was dignified compared to this.

The thing that bothers me is that it's so painfully obvious what she's doing here. It's a pattern and she's merely the latest one. Take some kind of nonsensical stand against The Homos. Wave the Bible around a lot. Say incoherent things about the First Amendment. Become a national pariah to most but a martyr-hero to a select group off of whom you will live like a well-hidden parasite for the rest of your days. Book deals. The right wing lecture circuit.

Paid appearances at every Christian Right event from here until the end of time. And of course, the inevitable GoFundMe. That worked out pretty well for the no-gays pizza parlor in Indiana. How long do you think it would have taken them to make $844,000 selling shitty pizza in the middle of a cornfield? Took about three days to raise that amount on social media.

This is the new white trash, pearl clutching version of winning the lottery.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just announce some day that I refuse to teach gay students, wait about a week for the publicity to build, throw up a GoFundMe, and then tell everyone I was trolling all along after I get the first quarter-million bucks. Why not? This is a cynical, crass game. There is nothing principled about this, no more so than faking a slip-and-fall injury in a Walmart and trying to cash in on the lawsuit. Rather than being disgusted or, god help you, impressed by this spectacle I wish everyone could see it for exactly what it is: an audition.

Veteran readers will find this first part familiar, but it is not without a certain irony that Americans bear the insults of our cousins in Europe. God knows there is plenty to insult and plenty of valid reasons to look at the United States with a mixture of disgust and condescension. Our society is violent beyond what Europeans can imagine outside of a civil war, and we have ridiculous levels of poverty despite our extensive wealth.

Our social problems regarding race are embarrassing and heartbreaking. It's remarkably easy for a European to look at us and say, "There go the ignorant Americans again, shooting each other because they're afraid of anyone who's different." It's a fair point.

The irony, as I see it, comes from Europeans' overestimation of how well they deal with these same issues.
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Sure, income inequality is less severe and gun violence is only a fraction of what Americans live with. But when it comes to looking down their noses at us because of the way we fumble issues like race and immigration…maybe look in the mirror, friends. When the chips are down, there is a lot of evidence that Europeans really, really don't like immigrants. Especially immigrants who may be different than white Christian Europe's modal citizen. Especially if they're dark skinned and look as though they might worship a different god.

In reality the nations of the EU have handled the Syrian refugee flows pretty well, certainly compared to the pitiful response of the wealthier nations of the Middle East who have done nearly nothing.
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At the same time we see plenty of evidence that the old nationalist / xenophobic fears are not far beneath the surface. A shocking new poll shows that more than half of UK voters now favor leaving the EU solely over fears of immigration – and we're not talking about Polish Plumbers here. Further, while every EU nation has extended a welcome helping hand to the migrants initially, after only a trickle (and a few days) have been admitted there are already familiar hints that humanitarianism goes only so far. Well-placed leaks suggest that, "Austria and Germany warned they can't keep up with the influx of refugees and said (border agencies) must begin to slow the pace." That translates to, "When the media attention fades, close the gate."

America deals with a porous border that is crossed by hundreds of thousands of migrants each year. In most cases the migration is economic in nature: Mexicans and Central Americans want to come here to earn more in exchange for working like horses.

Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis are fleeing for their actual lives (although in the areas of Mexico most badly affected by the drug war, the same could likely be said). Contrary to what Republicans claim, our society chugs along just fine with our large amount of immigration; I would argue it actually makes us stronger. Would 200,000 immigrants, mostly families with children, really bring continental Europe to a grinding halt? I'm no expert but that seems highly unlikely. What seems far more likely is that they would melt into the 10-15 countries into which they could be admitted, joining the same underclass that people like them occupy throughout the western world.

This weekend I did something I rarely do – something most Americans rarely do. I interacted with human beings above my social status. I am bad at it. Look surprised.

Every so often I end up in such situations and although you could accuse me with justification of being hyper-sensitive to it, I am always struck by the differences in the narratives people of different backgrounds unfold in conversation. It's a useful reminder, on the off chance that you need one, about how class and privilege still dominate every aspect of our society.
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Maybe it's just me – I'm a storyteller in social situations, and maybe that encourages others to respond in kind. But they're hardly the same stories.

When you hang around Ivy League people, it is immediately apparent that they interact almost exclusively with other Ivy League people (and why wouldn't they?) in their professional, if not personal, lives. You can listen to a Harvard person talk about their entire family and every person they've ever considered a friend without hearing about 1) anyone who isn't almost cartoonishly well off financially, although since it is normal to Them they would not consider it as such, or 2) anyone in a profession that isn't some variation of the all-encompassing Business. Nobody is a middle school teacher. Nobody is a dentist. Nobody is in Human Resources. It may be called a variety of nebulous things – Consulting, Marketing, Business, Development, etc. – but inevitably it entails making vast amounts of money to jet around the world doing nothing anyone can identify as work based on qualifications divorced from any skill set.
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Everybody lives in New York or San Francisco or LA or, if they're really slumming it, maybe Boston before they move to France or London or Hong Kong because Business and do any other parts of the world even exist?
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If so, why?

You know what we could really use?
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More think pieces about how wealthy elites inside the exclusionary circle of expensive prep schools, Ivy League universities, and Mystery Business are so f'n bored with being rich and successful.

After you listen to them talk about their lives and their friends for a while you won't be able to stop thinking about how they clearly don't know anyone like you and you clearly don't know anyone like them. My friends went to cheap public universities and do the kind of things that rich people deem useful enough to keep around – mainly babysitting their children for 18 years, providing them with healthcare, and incarcerating one another until they feel safe. Their friends do Business and apparently hopscotch from expensive city to expensive city around the globe, which doesn't count as vacation but don't worry they take plenty of those too and apparently vacations last several months? Who can say, really. It's all a mystery.

There are exceptions. Magazine pieces can always tout a handful of college dropouts who became Big Successes. Every hayseed university has its list of Famous Alumni who got rich in some appropriately salt of the earth manner. But that merely encourages the delusion of class mobility that Americans cling to like a life raft. For 99% of us, what we think of as "success" would probably make actually successful people double over in laughter. It sucks, but you might as well try to stop the tides. All you need to know is that yes, there is a club. And you're not in it. You just happen to meet a few of its members here and there. If sociologically analyzing their conversation doesn't interest you, just make a game out of counting how many boats are referenced per anecdote.

Longtime readers know how much I love me some hockey and the Blackhawks in particular.

So earlier in August you can imagine how disappointed and grossed out I was to hear that mega-star Patrick Kane was accused of sexual assault in his Buffalo home. It is, sadly, the latest in a long line of incidents involving Kane, although the previous problems fell under categories like "immaturity" or "poor judgment." Apparently he has graduated from being a jackass to being a criminal.

Not that I expect the legal system to reach that conclusion.

One of my family members was a public prosecutor for about 30 years and he has noted on several occasions that sexual assault cases are among the hardest to prosecute successfully. Of course most instances of rape never result in so much as a police report let alone prosecution, but among those that do the nature of our justice system (and culture) favors defendants more than usual. It's one of a few instances in which judges and juries must not only consider whether the defendant is guilty of a crime but whether a crime was committed at all. If both parties agree that sex took place but disagree about whether it was consensual, it's not exactly like dealing with a burglary case.

In the Kane case the accuser did every one of the "Well if she was really raped, why didn't she ____?" things that the Men's Rights crowd inevitably brings up. She called the police and reported it. She went directly to the hospital.

The "story" is uncomplicated and consistent. Unfortunately the police are spending a great deal of time investigating things that ultimately are irrelevant. How drunk was Kane at the club? Did the woman flirt with him there? Nothing anybody saw in public at a bar matters. If the woman was climbing all over him and said "LET'S GO HOME AND HAVE SEX" in the presence of a dozen witnesses, it doesn't matter. If she got to his house and decided "Nah, I changed my mind" then that's that. People have a right to do that. Women (or men) aren't contractually bound to deliver sex at Point B because they had agreed to it at Point A. This isn't selling a car.

The much-publicized fact that Kane left a bite mark on the woman is also going to be of limited value to the prosecutor. I mean. Let's be real for a minute here.
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Raise your hand if you've never given, nor received, a bite mark from another human being during an intimate encounter. So it wouldn't be terribly difficult for Kane's (no doubt extremely expensive) attorneys to argue that such evidence was merely part of a sexual encounter that both parties participated in willingly.

Do I believe that? No. Does it look like he did commit rape? Seems more likely than not to me. But "Seems more likely than not" is not a useful concept in a criminal case (civil trials are another matter). There were no witnesses to the actual sex/assault.
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No videos and pictures, at least not that the public has been told about. She will tell a jury what happened and his lawyers will say "It happened but she agreed to all of it." And the odds that the jury will overlook that alternative explanation to drop the hammer on the rich NHL superstar and local hero are vanishingly small.

The justice system gets a lot of things wrong. Sometimes that's because it isn't working. In other cases it's because it works exactly as intended. With some crimes, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is an impossibly high bar.

It can't be easy for anyone to hear a cancer diagnosis. It must be especially difficult to hear when you are 90 years old. Being 90 is a pretty lethal condition on its own; pairing it with one of the leading causes of death in the industrialized world must make the end feel very, very near. It's not an irrational feeling either. The end is getting near.

When I heard that 90 year old ex-president Jimmy Carter had signs that his cancer had spread to both his liver and his brain I was saddened. I like Jimmy Carter, and the news was as close to a straight death sentence that I could imagine for a man of his age. Which is why I was somewhat surprised to hear that he is choosing to undergo radiation treatments. Obviously he is the patient and it's his choice entirely; if he wants to pursue that course, he should. I'm curious, though, to know what endgame he foresees. Does he expect to "beat" cancer in his brain and liver? I've heard that radiation therapy doesn't make one feel terribly well, if I may engage in wild understatements. Does he hope that this will extend his life briefly, trading quality for quantity? Frankly he doesn't seem like the type of person so fearful of death that he would pursue that. Again, it's none of our business what he wants to do, but it's a good example of one of the hundreds of flaws with the system of healthcare in this country.

I am privileged to call some medical professionals friends, and they anecdotally confirm what repeated studies of American hospitals show: a great deal of the money and resources expended by our healthcare system are expended futilely. In some cases doctors and nurses know that it is futile; in others they are responding to patients' desire to exhaust treatment options when the potential benefits are minuscule and highly unlikely. Has any end-stage terminal cancer or cardiovascular patient ever benefited for more than a fleeting moment from being put on a mechanical ventilator? I suppose the medical literature could be scoured to find one.

As people so often do, I remember clearly being in the hospital when the only one of my grandparents I had any sort of relationship with died. According to what must have been hospital protocol, they prepared to use an injection of (adrenaline? something that re-starts hearts?) and a defibrillator on her. She was a massively overweight woman who had been confined to a hospital bed for months, slowly dying of congestive heart failure while hooked to various machines. The idea of trying to resuscitate her struck me, even at 15, as a ludicrous farce. My father asked, "Doctor, is my mother dead?" Yes. "Then what the fuck are you doing? She's dead." I mean, what was the best case scenario there? She lives another eight hours and then they do it again?

That is a question that seems to be asked infrequently in our medical culture. By all means, patients should have access to whatever treatment they and their doctors decide to pursue. And I know doctors are deeply frustrated by the insistence of patients (or families) to do things that are obviously futile. I envision every conversation with or about a terminal patient like Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber; the doctor says "The odds of recovery are one in a million," followed by, "So you're saying there's a chance!"

Nobody knows how they will react to being in such a jarring dilemma until it happens. It's easy to say "No way, I'd just pull the plug!" when you've never had to make that choice outside of hypotheticals. I also recognize that I'm not the best person to opine on this matter, given that I'm ready to call Dignitas during the average chest cold. And who knows, perhaps Jimmy Carter will experience a remarkable remission and go on to live many more years. I don't have a practical solution; I wish we could create some kind of system that would allow medical professionals to be as honest as possible (rather than erring on the side of avoiding a lawsuit) to patients who were capable of understanding the futility of spending gobs of money on the lightning strike odds that some treatment will buy them a few more days alive in the ICU.