Dreamed a kid I used to teach made watermelon jerky. It looked disgusting, and I told him so. He had also made all kinds of other jerky that was good, so he was okay with it. He had gone into business for himself during the lockdown, and had a food truck he ran with his dad. He worked in Conifer, a mountain town near here where I direct and teach high school theatre for StageDoor. I was up there to get a check, talk with the board, and see how everyone was doing. The kid, a boy named Elijah who in real life I used to teach in Superior, a different town about an hour from Conifer, was driving around like the pandemic version of the ice cream man, with a truck full of french fries and candy and various comfort/junk foods. All the teens up there were out following his truck around like little kids. When I told him I thought the jerky was gross, he sent me over a huge slice of delicious pizza. Honesty really is the best policy, I suppose.And that was only part of an epic, complex dream that got shook up like a snow globe the moment I woke up. Sometimes, my dreams don't want to be examined.
Last night, I was watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. I like her a lot. Smart, funny, objective, and from the Bay Area, like me. So of course she's good. She was doing a segment on how social distancing had been working, and no doubt saved lives. This seems like a no brainer, but also seems to be something a lot of people have chosen to ignore when demanding we open up the economy. As I watched it, I began to wonder what people were thinking, what the "other side" was saying, so I switched over to Fox, where Tucker Carlson was on. I could tell he was angry right away, just from his facial expression, but it was the weird anger people sometimes get when they are trying to make an argument and don't want to lose it. He was going on about how in most of the country things aren't so bad. That only NYC and New Jersey have really bad death rates, and Florida has had less death from the virus than deaths from people choking to death on their food each year. Which seemed weird, both the choice of comparison, and the fact that he used two different groups for his comparison. He should have used the number of people who choke to death in Florida each year, not in the nation. So right away, I'm inclined to think he is not making a good argument. I think he was leading to something like "let's open up places that haven't had a lot of deaths yet, so that we can have equality in our misery. Why should New York and Jersey get all the attention and pity? Let's get those mass graves out to the Heartland. I turned it off after a bit, as the overall tone and lack of proper comparison models was too annoying to me.If you wanted to lose some weight, and went of a strict diet, and it started to work, I would think the last thing you would want to do is go back to your old habits. Especially before you even hit your goal.
Picture this. Let's say you weigh 230 pounds, and are told by the doctor you need to lose some weight. You go on the Whole30. At first it's tough. You long for a pizza, some ice cream, and bread. Sweet, delicious bread. But you stick with it. And after 15 days, you've lost 13 pounds. And feel great. Clothes are getting a little baggy, and there's an extra spring in your step. Suddenly, you feel like Whole30 is oppressing you. Taking away your right to a double chin and your American way of life. You stage a few protests in the kitchen, maybe bringing with you a Confederate Flag and a semi-automatic rifle. You make bizarre rants about how stupid your doctor is. How it's your body and you can do whatever you like. And then you eat for like three days straight, chugging sodas, eating whole sticks of butter, and even things you didn't ever eat before but feel like you should because it's your right. And, to keep this analogous and avoid being like Tucker Carlson, you don't stop there. You go around and shoot hot dogs into other peoples throats. Like, everyone you know. Everyone you don't know too. Pretty much every person you come into contact with. You somehow get them to all eat five pizzas a meal. And then you drop dead of a heart attack, and are buried in a mass grave.
That would be foolish.
Let's not do that.
Here's a song. The Doors live at the Isle of Wight Fest 1970 doing When the Music's Over.
1 comment:
The problem with dieting may be a case of rebelling against one's one authority. If a dieter were to abandon logic and attack others in order to extend a kind of rebellion against his own diet, then it could look like a crazy person shooting hot dogs down other people's throats, as you say, with a Confederate flag and and AR-15 even. Someone like Tucker Carlson might say that you are using a fallacy of false equivalence, since legal limits such mandated self-quarantining and maintaining social distance are not the same as a self-imposed limit like a diet.
Carlson, however, does not argue from logic in this way. He uses his own false equivalences, such as the number of people who choke to death in Florida compared to the number of coronavirus fatalities, and builds on such comparisons to inspire anger against straw man authorities like the government. In the political philosophies of people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we are not the victims of government. We are the government. We, the people, have been enacting good government by voluntarily staying home and staying safe, by a large majority, and in a democracy, majority rules. We seem to have made such recent democratic decisions without even voting. We just did it. We are being like the doctors and nurses who keep showing up to save the sick and the dying, even when some of them end of up sick and dying. We are all just doing what we need to do to survive this. These false revolts against our better judgement, these protestors gathering in front of hospitals and yelling at medical professionals, represent a rejection of reason in favor of a capitulation to an appetite for a feast on trumped-up victimhood. It is indeed a feast of fools.
Post a Comment