Pun Salad

I suggest the streaming miniseries based on this book adapt a verse from Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft":

They say this cat Lazarus Long is a bad mother—
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' 'bout Lazarus Long!
(Then we can dig it)

Yes, I'm going to do a major spoiler: about three-quarters of the way through the book, our protagonist, the apparently immortal Lazarus, goes back in time a couple millennia, to 1916 Kansas City, the city of his youth. And meets his family of that time. Including his mother, Maureen. And… like Futurama's Philip J. Fry, he winds up doing the nasty in the past-y. (Unlike Fry, though, it doesn't appear that Lazarus is his own offspring. Apparently too fraught for even Mr. Heinlein.)

Anyway: this 1973 book marked the return of Lazarus Long, last seen in his 1958 novel, Methuselah's Children (which itself was based on 1941 stories in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine). Lazarus is an early success of the genealogical longevity project carried out by the "Howard Foundation".

As this book opens, Lazarus, an actual two thousand year old man, wants to die. He's seen it all, done it all, lost too many friends and lovers along the way. But through a mixture of persuasion and deception, he's brought out of his funk, and rejuvenated. For (approximately) the first three-quarters of the book, he acts as raconteur, telling tall tales about his past, dropping aphorisms and advice. And then finishes up with a (literal) bang, finding himself, against his better judgment, in the World War I European trenches.

Caveat lector: I read this book back in the mid-1970s, but since then my taste for Heinleinian dialog has faded. And this book has a lot of it, page after page of characters yakking. Or doing an inner monologue. Discourses on genetics. Cybernetic personalities transferred into clones. But not a lot actually happening, until that last 25% of the book, which is pretty good, but too late.

When I see the argument that people are too susceptible to misinformation to be trusted with freedom of speech pic.twitter.com/oP8Dd5mnvS

— Chris Freiman (@cafreiman) October 11, 2024

I, for one, refuse to believe that Nina Jankowicz or Tim Walz are made of finer clay.

Also of note:

• I'm still going with "nitwit". But Charles C.W. Cooke goes with the I-word instead: Kamala Harris Is an Idiot.

  Over the last couple of years, as familiarity has bred contempt, and contempt has bred exasperation, I have got into the habit of distilling into uncustomarily blunt terms what I think of our most prominent political aspirants. My modest verdict on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, was that he was “an asshole.” My considered take on his predecessor, Donald Trump, was that he is “a lunatic.” Herewith, to complete the trilogy, I will offer another candid take: Kamala Harris is an idiot.

  Like the little boy staring at the naked emperor in the famous fairy tale of yore, I can scarcely believe what I am seeing before my eyes. Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete. Harris, the New York Times has variously proposed, has been “strategically vague,” “light on detail,” and “careful.” Alternatively, she has “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge”; learned to respond “to unpleasant questions without answering them”; and shown an ability to “avoid delineating her stance on some issues.” And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”

  I disagree. I think that word would be “idiot.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea. What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial. Asked by Stephanie Ruhle what would happen to her plan to “raise corporate taxes” and make “billionaires and the top corporations” pay “their fair share” if the “GOP takes control of the Senate,” Harris seemed unable to process the concept. “But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she replied. “And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it.”

  That's probably NR-paywalled, sorry.

• Not letting Bone Spurs off the hook, though. Kevin D. Williamson is The One Who Will Not Give His Consent.

  I have been pretty unsparing, I think, in my criticism of Donald Trump, his enablers, and his partisans since the beginning of this ugly, stupid, embarrassing mess. It’s cost me a fair bit of money, I suppose, and there are a few old friends I don’t hear from anymore. So be it. But I will admit to being a little bit disappointed by the low quality of the criticism I get. One of the dumbest complaints I hear 1,838 times a day goes roughly like this: “You say Trump is a would-be tyrant, a moron, a monster of moral depravity—which means that you’re saying that the people who support him, half the country, are idiots and moral miscreants and fools.”

  Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I am saying.

  It doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m saying that, of course—you could make a pretty good case that Trump supporters are just stuck in a corner and that they aren’t all morally culpable and entirely willing participants in a pageant of stupidity and cruelty. But that’s not my case. My case is that these people should be ashamed of themselves, that a self-respecting society wouldn’t allow such a specimen as Lindsey Graham to vote, much less to serve in the Senate. I understand that hurts some feelings out there in the dank, wooly wilds of the “real America.”

  So what?

  Hey, if you're a Trump supporter, that probably stings a bit.

  But, yeah: like KDW, sometimes you gotta say: So what?

• You don't have to be an Einstein to recognize poor thinking. As expressed in Jeff Maurer's article: Trump Didn't Destroy America the First Time, So Logically We Should Let Him Try Again.

  Concern about what Trump might do in a second term is usually met with the same rejoinder: “He was already president, and the worst didn’t happen.” Like all devilish arguments, this one contains an atom of truth — the worst things that people feared might happen didn’t happen. Of course, that’s partly because resistance liberals set the bar for “the worst things people feared” impossibly high; we basically ran a Manhattan Project in which our brightest minds developed exciting new theories about why we should spend morning, noon, and night pissing our pants.

  The “it wasn’t a disaster last time” logic drives me insane. If you dodge a bullet, it doesn’t follow that bullets are therefore not dangerous. Here are some syllogisms that I consider analogous to the logic that Trump supporters deploy to wave away concerns about a second term:

  • Not every kid who ate paint chips died, therefore you should feed your child a steady diet of paint chips.

  • A plane once hit the Empire State Building, but the building didn’t fall, so it is good to fly airplanes into buildings in New York.

  • Germany tried to conquer Europe twice but failed both times, so we should let those loveable goofballs keep trying — it’ll be like Elmer Fudd trying to catch Bugs Bunny!

  Just a note: Maurer claims: "40 of Trump’s 44 cabinet officials don’t support him."

  The problem I noticed was that link goes to a July 2023 NBC News story, so Maurer's use of present tense is problematic.

  A more up to date count was done in August of this year by the WaPo, and they found: Only half of Trump’s former Cabinet want him to win a second term.

  So: still not great, but significantly greater support than Maurer claims.

  [UPDATE: Jeff Maurer, being a classy and decent person, has edited his post to reflect the WaPo's article. Ahem: based on a comment I left there.]

• 

  Where I'll be tomorrow night. Since I am a Bryan Caplan fanboy, I'll be driving up to the University of New England's Biddeford (Maine) campus for their President’s Forum. If you attend, and you notice a bald geezer trying to get Professor Caplan to sign a copy of Build, Baby, Build (Amazon link at your right), say hello.