Month: January 2018

Phone Call

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Something unusual happened to me today. My phone rang.

Now, I spend a lot of time with my phone in my hand. A lot. Facebook, news sites, texts, the occasional game, Twitter, the occasional game, but I virtually never talk on it.

I’m not entirely sure why it’s called a phone.

A name came up on the screen when it made that odd ringing sound that I rarely hear, and it was someone I haven’t talked to in several years. I mean, several years. Like, forever. This was one of those many people we all know who we pretend to connect with through Christmas letter.  Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how she knew my number.

My first thought, of course, was “oh my god…what’s happened?” It isn’t my birthday, it isn’t her birthday (I don’t think so anyway), so something awful must have happened.

But, no. Not really. I mean, some people we know in common have died, and I’m not saying that’s not awful, because, it is, but it didn’t happen today and we both knew of it. So, my point is, there wasn’t a real motivation to call. She just wanted to ask me how I was and what was going on with me.

We talked about each other’s families and reminisced about when we used to work together and people we both knew and what we knew of them now–living and dead.

And then, in fairly short order, ten or fifteen minutes, we said goodbye.

But it was the best part of my day.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to communicate with a friend, you either wrote a letter or called. Now, we email, text, or post on Facebook or Twitter or something equally stupid. True enough, you can’t send pictures during a phone call (at least I can’t). But you also can’t hear someone’s voice on Facebook and you can’t react to the emotion in what they say.

Social media might have a lot of values, but nothing beats talking to a friend. An actual living human being, without a keyboard between you.

We’re separated by miles, and years, and yet when we were talking to each other, we were right there, in the moment. As though I never left. Social media, as “social” as it may be, doesn’t do that. Too many Facebook posts start with the second paragraph, assuming we’re on the same wavelength, watching the same TV program, the same game, experiencing the same whatever; and the truth is, I’ve no damned idea what you’re talking about.

I’m sure there is a lot of research and more than a few doctoral theses on the value of social media or, conversely, the breakdown in communication and human interaction because of social media. But I haven’t read any of that. I’m just a guy whose phone rang today. Out of the blue. And I’m sitting here thinking, why don’t I use that phone as a phone.

I’ll still text and post on Facebook, but, if you know me, or we knew each other once upon a time, don’t be too terribly surprised if your phone rings one day. And it will be some odd number you don’t recognize and you’ll let it go to voicemail. Then you’ll discover it was me. And I hope you’ll call back.

And whoever you are, reading this, if there’s someone you haven’t talked to in a long time, maybe you should pick up your phone and push that phone button.  That’s what it’s there for. (It’s the one with the icon that looks like what a phone used to look like.) You might be surprised at what happens.

Interpreting Bannon

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

Steve Bannon has confused me.

Again.

In an interview with Michael Wolff quoted in Wolfe’s book “Fire and Fury” Bannon talks about the meeting with Russians in July of 2016 at Trump Tower allegedly to get dirt on Hillary Clinton and says:

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon doesn’t deny the quote. He just denies that he was talking about Donald Trump Jr. when he said it.

Let’s review. “The three senior guys” in the meeting were Junior, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. He now says he was talking about Manafort, the campaign manager, when he said that treason stuff. Apparently in triplicate.

Don Junior, he says now, is a “patriot and a good man.” A patriot and a good man who just so happened to have arranged the meeting with agents of a foreign government to gather campaign dirt on his father’s political opponent in the midst of a presidential campaign and invited the other senior guys to sit in on the meeting, without attorneys present and without calling the FBI.

Bannon went on to say, about the same meeting, that “the chance that Don Junior did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”

Any minute now, Bannon will be telling us that he meant Manafort when he said that.

And, no doubt we will soon learn he meant Manafort when he said “they’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

So here’s the deal. “Don Junior” is Bannon’s pet name for Manafort.

That’s the only plausible explanation. Unless you think he would be influenced at all by the fact that his criticism of Junior and Senior is the reason the Mercers pulled their financial support from Bannon’s insurrectionist cause. But that can’t possibly have anything to do with it. Bannon’s unethical unscrupulousness is too high to be swayed by gazillions of dollars from a hedge fund manager.

Isn’t it?

Over/Under

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s something curious.

On Tuesday, the President of the United States took credit for there not having been any commercial aircraft deaths in his first year in office, give or take 18 days. Specifically he said – well, no he didn’t say, he tweeted, so let me back up – Specifically he thumbed “Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!”

That’s interesting on several fronts. One is that “commercial aviation” is not a proper noun. Nor is “zero,” except in the case of Mostel.

Another way this is interesting is that the President of the United States, no president, has anything to do with airline safety. No pilots check in with him to get their flight plans. No airline gets its schedules from the president. Although apparently most people in the administration have to pledge their loyalty and fealty to the president, airline pilots do not, and therefore they and their auto-pilots are not beholden to his demands that they exercise caution while flying.

A third way that the president-who-shall-remain-nameless taking credit for airline safety is interesting, is that there has not been an accidental death on a domestic commercial airline in the United States since February 2009. That means that, with the exception of the first 22 days of the Obama administration, there has not been an accidental death on a U.S. airline on his watch. Not that it’s relevant to the actions of either one of them.

Give him his due. The airlines operating during the first eleven months and sixteen days during the administration of the president-who-shall-remain-nameless have a better airline safety record than the administration of the foreign-born, non-Christian president who preceded him and who he detests and with whom he is, apparently, locked in fierce competition.

But wait.

There’s another, even more interesting way that this claim by the president-who-shall-remain-nameless is worth noting.

That is that 2017 set another record. It not only had the same number of commercial airline accidental deaths of every year since 2009, but it also had the most coal mining deaths. There were a record low of eight coal mining deaths in 2016 when the foreign-born, non-Christian president was in office. But, 15 coal miners died in the first year of the administration of the president-who-shall-remain-nameless.

As with airline safety, this is not to the credit or blame of any president, except that the president-who-shall-remain-nameless has championed the coal industry and promised to put coal miners back to work.

In March this year, for instance, surrounded by unemployed, but alive, coal miners at the Environmental Protection Agency, the president-who-shall-remain-nameless signed an executive order vowing to roll back climate change policies of the foreign-born, non-Christian president, including the Clean Power Plan limiting carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. “C’mon fellas, you know what this says?” the president-who-shall-remain-nameless asked. “You’re going back to work!”

He did not mention that, although they haven’t yet gone back to work, those who are working in coal mines have died at a rate 15 times higher than people on commercial airlines.

The conclusion seems obvious. It is safer to be in an airplane with which the president-who-shall-remain-nameless has no control than in a coal mine that he has promised to save.