Postponing election

He rocks in the White House all day long 

Hoppin' and a-boppin' and singing his song 

All the little birdies on Jailbird Street 

Love to hear the Donald go tweet tweet tweet

Well, well! (the Orange Man in the White House again pontificates, sitting at his Twitter console).  The Post Office, whose funding I have threatened to veto, should it be attached to any bill coming to me from Congress, no longer has enough money to handle the mail properly.

It seems that they can't deliver the mail on time, now that one of my Big Contributors and Friendly Cronies, who I recently appointed as head of the Post Office, has ordered his workers to let the mail sit around and gather dust for a few days, rather than make any special effort to deliver it on time.  Tsk, tsk!

And the Democrats -- and disloyal Republicans -- want to allow just anyone to vote in November by mail?  Their ballots to be delivered by the Failing Post Office?  That's clearly impossible.  We don't talk about "snow, sleet, or gloom of night" under my Administration.  

And people seem to have trouble voting in person, especially in big cities, because there has suddenly developed a shortage of polling locations.  Big lines.  People packed together.  With the pandemic?  Ohhhh, you might catch the Liberal Flu, and die.

Maybe it would be best if we just put the silly old election off until a more convenient time.  Like after everyone's forgotten my peformance over the past year, and people are feeling richer and less angry.  Yes, I may exercise my Royal [strike that] my Executive Prerogative to postpone the election until a better time.

The above in part is only my dark imagination of what went through Mr. Trump's mind, and in part a paraphrase of bits and pieces of tweets and offhand comments he may have made.  You know it's not verbatim from the President's mouth because of all those entire sentences and the relatively adequate grammar in which I expressed it.  And no CAPITAL LETTERS or !!!!!!!!! exclamation points.

Mr. Trump was, as so often he does, merely thinking out loud.  To the nation and to the world.  On Twitter.  And as he once more claimed, he was "just kidding," but only after not only only Democrats but several influential Republicans expressed shock at his suggestion, and reminded him that Congress sets election dates, not the President.  It's there in the Constitution, Mr. President.  The one you vowed to uphold?  Yes, we appreciate that you're not a lawyer, but that's why you have the Department of Justice -- to consult before you say things you wish you hadn't.

I don't know what to believe.  Are his tweets a reflection of the idle stream of consciousness that passes through his rarefied "very very big brain"?  Or does Mr. Trump, in coordination with his campaign staff, actually have some carefully planned strategy in mind?  Perhaps a plan to so poison the voters' minds about the validity of the balloting that they won't even bother to vote, leaving only his devoted Base to decide the election?

I suspect everyone by now has made up his or her mind about this president, and has decided how he will vote.  Although the polling margins are so slight in several possibly decisive "battleground" states that neither side can afford to be either complacent or defeatist.

Like most of us, I just want the election to be over.  And, if necessary, to watch U. S. Marshals escort the reluctant "President Who Would Be King" from the White House.  Kicking and screaming at how "unfair" life has been to poor him. 

Martian dreams

Artist's conception of manned base on Mars.
Clarke, The Exploration of Space

The year 2020 will be known as the Year of the Pandemic, of course, but it may also be known as the year of renewed Martian exploration.  NASA will launch its Mars lander "Perseverance" on Thursday.  The payload rover -- packed with scientific instruments, including 23 cameras and a helicopter, and weighing about 2,300 pounds --will make a controlled, soft landing in Jezero crater, with an ETA of February 2021.

"Perseverance" won't be alone.  The United Arab Emirates sent a Martian orbiter, "Hope," into space on July 20, and China sent a lander with a rover of its own, "Tianwen-1," into space on July 23, with an ETA the same month as "Perseverance.".  All of a sudden, after years of inertia and lack of funding, the world's interest has once more turned to the "conquest" of Mars.  China also has made it clear that it has another form of "victory" in mind -- catching up with the USA in the exploration of space.

It can't come too soon for me.  As I've lamented in past essays, I was a space nut as a kid, and I was fully convinced that we would have a manned base on Mars by now.  When I was in second and third grades, I had read all the kids' books on the stars and planets in the public library -- although I was too young to really get into similar books in the adult section.  As I recounted a year ago, at the age of 12, I read with enthusiasm Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 book, The Exploration of Space, which not only  suggested that mankind would have bases on Mars by now, but included his artist's conception (inset above).

The Apollo program put us on the Moon in 1969.  Could Mars be far behind?

Along with my childhood astronomy readings, I was also a budding fan of science fiction.  Some sci-fi was pretty realistic in its science and in its predictions.  Some was laughable, even to a child, like the 1950 movie Rocketship X-M, where a first visit to the moon goes off-course and lands on a barbarian-inhabited Mars by mistake.  Others, such as the collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, were obviously -- even to my immature mind -- intended as fantasy.  Fantasy that presented Bradbury's philosophical and ethical concerns in the context of space travel.  Still, who knew what we would find on Mars?  Maybe not the telepathic shapeshifters invented by Bradbury in one of his scarier stories.  But beyond that, the possibilities seemed endless.

Well, we've been dinking around on Mars with unmanned robots for quite a while now.  We've discovered a lot of interesting and unexpected facts.  But we can pretty well rule out any intelligent life, or any present day life at all.  But NATO scientists hope to determine whether life in some form may have existed in the past, when the Martian surface was apparently rich in water.  With an atmosphere and water and nutrients in the soil, is it possible that no life at all would have evolved, even at the microbial level?  Will we remain doomed, at least until we can leave the Solar System, to the loneliness of being the only known intelligent life in the Universe?

However successful any or all of this year's Martian probes prove to be, my childhood dream of seeing mankind on Mars will not be accomplished.  Not this year, and almost certainly not in my lifetime.  "Perseverance" will take soil samples and insert them in small metal tubes for transport back to Earth.  But "Perseverance" itself will have no means of returning.  The soil samples will be stacked up nearby, awaiting a later, more sophisticated flight -- still an unmanned robot -- that will pick up the samples and put them into Martian orbit, where eventually another flight will grab them out of orbit and return them to Earth.

Optimistically, NASA hopes to get those soil samples -- gathered in 2021 -- back on Earth for intensive analysis in 2031.  I may still be around, and still interested in space travel.  But I will have long since given up ever seeing a manned landing on Mars -- let alone a manned colony on the planet.

You were a smart guy, Mr. Clarke.  But you missed the call on this one. 

Unless, of course, the fear of China's establishing a manned Martian station of its own before we do drives us into a Sputnik-like fever of competition. 

Never underestimate the power of selfish motives!

Seattle madeleine

Self-isolation during our Great Pandemic affects the way we think.  For some people, perhaps, it turns their minds to the Great Questions of human existence, to meditation, to speculative theology -- or speculative science fiction.  Those are the admirable folks, the thinkers we envy, with either pleasure or bitterness.

For me however, as for many others, it turns our minds to reminiscence.  To memories of happier and freer times.  To great vacations we once enjoyed.  To the happiness of families when our now-adult offspring were still children.  To memories  of our own childhoods.

We -- those of us who still subscribe to newspapers -- still find echoes of our collective concerns in the daily comic strips.  I'm thinking, for example, of "Sally Forth" -- a strip featuring a married couple, Ted and Sally Forth, and their middle school daughter Hilary.  All three are somewhat loopy, but the daughter often seems the most mature of the three.  Since, like all of us, the Forths were unable to leave home for vacation travel this year, Ted has suggested that they dwell together in their joint memories of past vacations.

Which they have been doing recently, with strip after strip showing a younger couple and a much younger Hil.  (The strip has become a bit darker in recent days as Sally has been talking to her moderately young but terminally ill father.  How can you hold yourself together, she asks, knowing that you're about to die?  He reminds her patiently that he died thirty years ago, and that she is talking to her memory of him.)  But in general, the family has been happily reliving events like their first visit to Disney World, with Hil initially rolling her middle school eyes, before giving in and also immersing herself in their collective memories.

Maybe this strip seems weirder to many readers than it does to me.  While my family never actually immerses itself in joint hallucinations of Olden Times, we certainly relive those experiences verbally in painstaking detail.   Part of what makes my own self-isolation in Seattle painful is my inability to spend an hour or so daily talking over happy past times with others.  "So there we were in Yellowstone -- I was just ten years old!"  "No, you were nine."  "No way!  That would have made you only one year old, but you were walking and talking -- and you claim to remember parts of it."  "Oh, maybe you're right!"

It can go on for hours.

I'm sure it's some form of mental illness, but trivial events of my childhood often seem more vivid than even the high points of my adult life.  If it's a form of derangement, I suspect most of my family shares it -- although perhaps to a lesser degree.

Walking through my neighborhood a couple of evenings ago, about four blocks from my house, I passed a front yard with a couple of young teenage boys lying on the lawn talking.  Like Proust's taste of a madeleine cookie, the sight instantly flashed me back to my old neighborhood as a 14-year-old boy.  I felt my lost youth almost as vividly as Ted, Sally, and Hil found themselves reliving their glorious past visits to Disney World.  I saw myself and neighborhood friends lying on a lawn in the Northwest summer twilight, maybe swilling cokes while talking, or maybe tracing slow circles in the street on our bikes like cowboys mounted on horses.  Conversations that went on forever, about anything and everything and nothing.

Often I think of the beautiful town

That is seated by the sea;

Often in thought go up and down

The pleasant streets of that dear old town,

And my youth comes back to me.

And a verse of a Lapland song

Is haunting my memory still:

"A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Every age has its pleasures, and every age has its terrors.  In our nostalgia, we forget the neighborhood bully, the procrastinated but now due English paper, the tedium of long summer days, the embarrassment of saying the wrong thing to to a group of friends and the resulting ridicule, the dull but growing worries (even at 14) of what the future might have in store, of whether we'll ever decide how to earn a living.

But the joys were also real, as were the frequent moments of relaxed contentment.  In my moderately small Northwest logging town, I may not have recognized the Italian words dolce far niente, but I knew well the sensation of idle bliss they represented.  They summed up the summers of my youth.

But my brisk walk this week left behind the kids talking together earnestly on the lawn, oblivious to my passing -- and to the instant flashback they inspired in me as I walked by.  The flashback to my childhood probably persisted for less time than it's taken me to write this  blog entry.  My view of the talking boys, unlike Proust's madeleine, has sadly failed to result in six world-famous volumes of memories.  Nor has it resulted even in the Forth family's day or so of collective hallucinations.

But it's a flashback that is often triggered, and one that will return again and again.

Physicals in a time of plague

When I was a boy (and a young man), my annual physical exam was a a detailed "examination."  Every square inch of my body was studied.  Ears were looked into with lighted instruments.  My tongue was depressed with a "popsicle" stick.  Hernias were embarrassingly sought for.  Rear end was examined.  Knees were struck with a small rubber hammer. 

Not to mention the routine use of a stethoscope to check heart and lungs.

Over the years, the exam became shorter and shorter.  The doctor spent more time chatting with me than actually doing a hands-on examination.  More and more, any concerns my hypochondriac mind could dream up were dismissed with the unsettling comment that by the time that became a problem, I'd be dead from old age.  I still saw death as being a theoretical event in the far distant future; the doctor was looking at actuarial tables.

Then, during the last year or so, Medicare has replaced the old-fashioned exam with a "wellness" visit.  The doctor still checks blood pressure and listens to your heart.  He sends you to the lab for blood draws.  He (unnervingly) subjects you to a simple (sorry, Mr. Trump) cognitive test to check for incipient dementia.  But mainly, he just chats, asks how you're doing and whether your stairways have banisters and how often per day you fall.  This wellness visit is supposed to allow him to decide if further testing is required. 

Rather than stripping to your underwear (or less), you stay fully clothed.  The doctor even listens to your heart through your shirt.  Apparently, by the time you reach Medicare age, the medical professional prefers not to be subjected to  the appearance (let alone touch) of your actual, in-the-flesh body

The wellness visit may be useful to the doctor.  I expect it is useful financially, both to Medicare and to the clinic.  To me, as patient, it feels like a waste of time and leaves me with no assurance that my body is still clicking on all cylinders.  I subject myself to it only because the doctor won't otherwise renew prescriptions for another year.

Then came the pandemic.  Yesterday, I had my first wellness visit since last summer. The clinic encouraged me to do my visit on-line, rather than make a personal visit to the clinic  So much for checking my heart  and blood pressure.  All we could do was talk.  I communicate using an i-Phone.  I see only the doctor's face, and he sees nothing more of me.

He asked how I was.  "Fine."  How's the muscle ache in your back.  "???" I didn't even recall that from last year.  I asked if I should have a PSA blood test for prostate cancer.  I told him that a good friend had prostate surgery last summer, and was told he had been lucky to have caught it before it spread.  He assured me that prostate cancer was slow developing, and that with my life expectancy being what it was ... "Right, I get it, doctor."  He renewed my prescription and authorized various routine blood tests.

At least I didn't have to go down an elevator, packed in with various diseased patients and their visitors.  I didn't have to get my car out of the parking garage and pay the attendant.  I didn't have to drive home through city traffic.  I just pressed the "LEAVE" button on my i-Phone.

But somehow, as a kid leaving a traditional physical exam, I felt more confident that I was good to go for another year.

Many are called, but few are chosen

Washington's primary election is scheduled for August 4.  I mailed in my ballot two days ago -- the day I received it, July 16. 

Yes, Washington is one of five "mandatory mail-in ballot" states.  We have no polls.  A ballot is sent to everyone who is registered.  It can be returned by mail, postmarked no later than August 4.  Or it can be dropped off in person at one of a number of collection points, again, no later than August 4.

This year's voting was rather boring.  I have a strong tendency to vote for incumbents in my own party (Democratic), and most incumbents are running for re-election..  My pro-incumbent bias is so strong that I even voted for the Republican incumbent for Secretary of State.  I did so because that position isn't really a political position, and because the Republican incumbent has strongly advocated for our mail-in voting system -- in spite of her president's fulminations against mail-in voting as a hotbed of fraud and error and -- especially -- a device that makes it too easy for the poor and the minorities to vote against him.

Oh, that's our other peculiarity.  Like California, our primary is not a device for helping parties select their candidates.  Each candidate is allowed to indicate on the ballot which party he "prefers," but the two candidates receiving the highest number of votes face off in the general election, irrespective of party choice.  So it's possible, for example, to have two Democrats running in the general election against each other, with no Republican on the ballot. 

For governor, I voted for our Democratic incumbent, Jay Inslee, who most people agree has done a fine job in general, and an excellent job specifically with handling the pandemic in a rational and scientifically supported manner. 

We do get a voters' pamphlet, shortly before we receive our ballots, with statements by each candidate.  To my amazement, this year we have 36 candidates for governor.  Under the old party system, only Democrats and Republicans appeared on the primary ballot; other parties were allowed to choose candidates for the general election by nominating convention.  Now, the only way third party candidates get on the general election ballot is by becoming one of the top two voter choices in the primary.  For most, their chances of being on the general election ballot are thus nearly zero.  To publicize their views, therefore, the primary election voters' pamphlet is their final opportunity.

Now that third party candidates don't have to be selected by a convention -- merely declare the name of the party preference -- the floodgates are apparently open.  For my readers' education and possible amusement, I'm listing the parties "preferred" by candidates, followed by the number so classifying themselves.

Republican Party                                11
Trump Republican Party                      3
Pre2016 Republican Party                   1
Democratic Party                                 4
"Democrat" Party                                 1
Stand Up America Party                      1
Unaffiliated Party                                 1
Socialist Workers Party                        1
Green Party                                          1
Propertarianist Party                             1
Independent Party                                3
American Patriot Party                         1
Fifth Republic Party                             1
Cascadia Labour Party                         1
New-Liberty Party                               1
No Party                                               4

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is democracy in action.  Ain't it grand?

Social distancing -- part 2

Ok, let's be candid.  My most frequent social activity in recent months has been clicking "like" on Facebook posts by Facebook "friends."

What I'm trying to say is that I'm not, under the best of conditions, a social butterfly.  I walk, I say "hi" to neighbors, I smile at strangers, their kids, and their dogs.  I'm not an anti-social grouch.  But I tend to live inside books, as well as inside my own head.

So -- having heard this confession -- you won't be surprised when I tell you that I hadn't engaged with anyone in person, face-to-face -- family, friend, or casual acquaintance -- with anything beyond a few sentences in passing since the arrival of the pandemic here in March. 

Until today.  Today I bit the bullet.  Pat M., a friend dating back to law school (and frequent hiking companion in healthier times) and I have been trying to arrange a city walk for several weeks (see June 26 post), and today we finally got together.  We'd been trying to avoid any activity within the prior two weeks that might infect the other; these efforts had led to a couple of delays.  Even now, Pat had been playing tennis with a friend within the past few days, but carefully.  No handshakes, no high fives, no post-match beers at the nearest tavern. 

I did a quick cost/benefit analysis, and agreed.  "Let's do it."

We wore masks.  We agreed we'd stay six feet apart as we talked.  Have you ever tried to walk five miles, talking to someone, while maintaining six-foot distances?  The masks stayed in place; the distancing was ignored.  But we were walking briskly, and there was a breeze.  We never stopped walking and chatted face to face.

If my time has come, my time has come.  But I think we were reasonably prudent.  And Pat is at least as obsessive/compulsive as I am about health guidelines.

It was fun.  Chats on Zoom are fun, too, but this was "funner."  It was great to catch up with each other's activities (a topic requiring only a brief chat), the lack thereof, and hopes for the future.  We both read a lot, so there was that, too. 

We walked from my house through the Arboretum, through the Madrona neighborhood, over the impressive Pine Street footbridge, and back through Madison Park (for any of you who live in these parts and are keeping score).  I showed him favorite parts of town that I've discovered during my own, solitary walks.  The day was warm and beautiful, Lake Washington was sparkling, and Mt. Rainier loomed dead ahead as we strolled down Madrona Drive.

It was a pleasure to remove my sweaty mask at the end, but it was an enjoyable two-hour social event (or what passes for a "social event" in my life).  We'll try to do something similar in another few weeks.

Voting rights in America -- Part 3

David Domke, professor of communications at the University of Washington, streamed his third and final lecture in this series Wednesday night.  Besides his university position, Domke is also a founder of Common Power, an organization working to expand voting rights across the country.

Much of this third lecture was devoted to discussing his organization's on--the-ground efforts to bring about changes from state to state -- and to encourage his viewers to take part by writing letters and emails and making telephone calls -- even while trapped in at home during the pandemic.  I will just touch on those aspects of his talk of more general interest.

Common Power began as a non-partisan effort to increase voting opportunities.  However, it has become increasingly clear that -- with polls showing that a majority of voters are opposed to much of the Republican agenda in general, and to the Trump presidency in particular -- a major strategy of the Republican party has become an attempt to discourage widespread voting.   Trump himself has openly stated that if people are allowed to vote by mail, he'll lose the election.

Efforts to expand voting include three primary objectives:

1.  Eliminate or reduce the inability of convicted felons to vote.  Domke described successful or partially successful expansions in three states -- Virginia, Florida, and Kentucky -- and efforts being made in a more difficult state, Iowa.  In Virginia and Kentucky, the franchise has been expanded by a Democratic governor's signing of thousands of executive pardons or commutations of sentence for felons who have completed their sentence and post-sentence paroles.

2.  Automatic Voter Registration.  Automatic registration has become a strong trend, but primarily in blue states.  When a person interacts with a state agency -- most commonly, when obtaining or renewing a driver's license -- he or she is automatically registered to vote.

3.  One-time easing of voting requirements in response to Covid-19.  Traditional voting in person poses obvious health risks to voters, to poll workers, to other users of polling sites, and to persons exposed secondarily by contact with the above.  Efforts are being made to decrease dangers -- even if only for this year -- from in-person voting. 

One prong of attack is to avoid congestion at the polls by increasing the number of polling places, and to expand the period of voting over many days or even weeks before the formal election date.

The other prong, which received the most attention during the lecture, was to make it easier to vote remotely.  Five states -- including Washington -- mandate universal mail voting.  It works, it is at least as fraud-free as any other form of voting, and voters like it.  But the political opposition is too strong in the other 45 states to expect any other state to adopt it this year.

Instead, states are being asked to make absentee voting easier this year.  Unlike universal mail voting, an application has to be made for an absentee ballot.  A request may also have to be made for an application.  And in some states, the application must be based on a limited number of statutory justifications for absentee voting.  Domke's organization is pushing 27 states to liberalize, in one way or another, access to absentee voting.  They have been successful so far in eleven of those states.

The struggle continues, as we're within four months of the election.  Voters generally want liberalization, and they want it permanently, not just in this election.  Republican governors in some states sympathize with easing absentee voting requirements, this year at least, in response to Covid-19.  In general, however, Republican party leaders are desperately opposed.

Feline adoption

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

--Sigmund Freud

You may recall my grief.  

On April 7, 2018, my cat Loki died.  On March 22, 2019, my cat Muldoon died.

For nearly 16 months, I have lived in this house without a cat.  Before that, in the forty years from 1978 to 2018, there had been only a year and a half during which I had been catless.

My period of mourning has ended.  No more dark suits.  

Why now?  Because a friend, living in Winthrop up in the Cascade mountains, knows a woman who provides foster care for cats, caring for them until they can be adopted.  At present, she is caring for a mother cat with three new-born kittens.  Last Friday, my friend sent me a photo of the mother and kittens, and a video of one of the kittens soon after its birth.

I acted hesitant.  I hemmed and hawed.  I said, "Maybe."  But it was already too late.  My heart was pounding.  I knew I had to have them. Two of them.

The kittens will stay with their mom until they are weaned and have had appropriate shots and, I understand, until after they've been neutered.  Until the beginning of September.  We will then meet somewhere half way between our cities  -- masked and maintaining six-foot distancing so far as possible -- where the change of custody will occur.

I'll have to once more drape my furniture with dingy covers, impervious to cat's claws.  I'll have to stock up with kitty litter and food.  I'll have to make sure the litter trays are still in good shape.  But I'd be fooling no one if I said I dread all that work.  A house without cats may be a house; it is not a home.

I've found that the way a person feels about cats -- and the way they feel about him or her in return -- is usually an excellent gauge by which to measure a person's character.

--P.C. Cast

Intellectual Memoirs

I guess my first literary disappointment -- aside from wondering whether We Come and Go offered the same rich character development as did the original, We Look and See -- was with the Oz books.

Like most kids, at least in my generation, I loved The Wizard of Oz.  I soon learned that the author had written a whole list of Oz sequels.  In response to my pleading and demands, my folks over the birthdays and Christmases of the next year or so, gave me The Scarecrow of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Tik-Tok of Oz.  What a let-down.  It wasn't just that they weren't as good as the original.  They were essentially boring.

The latest -- of my many similar disillusionments with sequels -- has been Mary McCarthy's memoir, Intellectual Memoirs, New York, 1936-1938 (published posthumously, 1992). 

Why did I read it?  In 2015, I wrote some comments on this blog about McCarthy's earlier memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1972), describing her life from earliest memories up until her graduation from a girl's prep school in Tacoma.  It was a favorable review.  I read the book again last month, and liked it even more.  I asked myself the dread question that I never ask after reading a work of fiction -- "but what happened next?" 

Mary McCarthy actually wrote, at age 75, the first volume of her autobiography, How I Grew (1987), covering her life between the ages 13 to 21. Maybe I should have read this book first, but I didn't.  She had already described her life through age 17 in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.  I wanted to leap ahead.  Intellectual Memoirs, the second volume, begins in 1936, three years after McCarthy had graduated from Vassar.

Long before I first read Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I had read two wonderful works of hers --The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed -- each of which combined a history of an Italian city with a description and analysis of the art that city had given to the world.  They are jewels of that particular form of writing.  I had also read Birds of America, a whimsical novel about a teenage boy and his mother, a mother who -- it appears -- had certain traits in common with Mary McCarthy herself.  I thought -- and think -- that it was a well written and very enjoyable piece of fiction.  Based on these prior readings, I was anticipating something exciting in Intellectual Memoirs.

And the book isn't terrible.  It's just not what I anticipated. 

Intellectual Memoirs is full of interesting and not so interesting facts.  I was reading the musings of a 77-year-old woman, a woman who had led an eventful life and who now felt that every detail of that life was fascinating and worth preserving for posterity.  Thus on one page we read of her conversations with famous people whose names still resonate today; on the next, we read all the details of the construction and decoration of the small apartment in which she was living in 1936.

And the book rambles. It needed editing; maybe McCarthy died before she had revised it. It reads as though she had mused over her memories into a dictation machine, and allowed someone else to type her musings up, unedited.  She will describe an event, and then a few sentences later recall another fact that changes her just-stated interpretation of the event.  Instead of going back and correcting the error, she admits that she was probably mistaken, or isn't sure which memory is correct, and continues charging forward.  This brilliant woman sounds like your elderly relative reminiscing about experiences good and bad out of her past, trying to make sense out of it all, and getting a bit befuddled as she does so.

That said, the book has its interesting aspects, especially, I imagine, for historians and for English thesis writers who seek to find the source of her novels in the events of her life.  In the period 1936 to 1938, she was living in New York, immersed -- so far as possible for a girl just out of college -- in the intellectual life of that time.  She viewed everyone she knew as belonging to one of two classes -- either Stalinists or Trotskyists.  The USSR still was a bright beacon of modernity and hope for persons of her class, although the Moscow show trials were already causing doubts and defections, and were increasing hostility between the supporters of Stalin and those of Trotsky.

By age 24, the refined and somewhat ethereal girl of the girlhood Memories had become considerably more casual in her relationships with men.  She, of course, married four times during her life, but as with an Ottoman sultan, those four marriages were only the tip of the iceberg.  She admits that she found it almost impossible to live without being in a current relationship.  She goes through a period of several months without a "date" early in the book, and finds eating in an inexpensive restaurant alone with a book to be the ultimate in humiliation.  As she became more immersed in New York intellectual society, she happily met plenty of men.  She admits that she rarely met a man without going to bed with him at least once.

It was getting rather alarming.  I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men.

If I had read McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group -- considered scandalous when published in 1963 -- rather than limiting myself to her more rarified and tasteful works, I might have found her life as described in Intellectual Memoirs to be less startling.

I guess I'd call the book "good of kind."  If you really want to dig in to Mary McCarthy's life -- to learn how her one bedroom apartment in the West Village had "eleven sides," and had a bathroom with a window through which you could peer out at the sky while bathing -- then this work is a must.  Otherwise -- well, it's not long and it's a fast read.

Fourth went forth, virus or not

Another July 4 has come and gone.  This one was a bit different, as the virus swirls about us and most business and public pleasure has been locked down.  But not completely different.

No public fireworks display over Lake Union this year, which I usually attend -- by walking to it from my house, the traffic and lack of parking being prohibitively terrible.  But as I walked about my part of town in the early evening, I heard firecrackers and other noisy explosions going on all about me.  And -- a nice sight -- families gathered on their front yards having family picnics.  Or family noises and laughter coming from back yards. 

In fact, in some ways, Seattle's Fourth was like Fourths you see in old movies, like Fourths of July as they were celebrated before I was born, before everyone had an automobile in which to high-tail it out of town.  When families did everything together, and neighbors were neighborly.

When I was a kid, the picnics, although fun -- and tasty -- were important mainly for the adults.  For us younger people, it was all about fireworks.  The public display at the lake in the center of town was great and a lot of fun, of course.  We always attended it as a family, lying on our blankets. 

But much more important, and long awaited, were the personal fireworks that we set off ourselves. 

There were the "pretty" fireworks, the ones most approved of by the adults -- rockets, Roman candles, miniature volcanoes (fountains).  And for the youngest, the somewhat contemptible (but always secretly enjoyed) sparklers, and those little things you lit on fire and watched as they evolved long ashen "snakes."

But the real fun were the firecrackers (not the child-friendly lady fingers, puh-leeze!), the buzz-bombs, the scary Red Devils that skittered around below everyone's feet before exploding, and -- for the truly brave and semi-criminal -- the powerful M-80s.  Fireworks stands went up, wherever legal, at least a week before the Fourth, and we spent whatever cash we had, or could beg from our parents, on massive arsenals of explosives.

The fly in the ointment, of course, as in so many fun activities, was the government.  Government entities hated fireworks -- I'm sure now they had their reasons -- and were constantly getting in the way of our fondest dreams.  I don't think there was ever a uniform state law, although I may be wrong.  During my earlier childhood, no one seemed concerned about fireworks -- they were openly sold at stands inside the city limits.   But by the time I was 12 or so, cities certainly prohibited either all fireworks except, maybe sparklers, or all the fun ones.  Many counties did the same.

I kept a mini-diary for about three years as a teenager, an original source on which I can now rely to reinforce my memories.  Fireworks were prohibited in both my city and my county by the time of my first July 4 entry, when I was 15 years old.  All I could document for the day was winning a couple of ribbons for races at the park -- and the fact that we had no fireworks other than sparklers and "caps" (those red ribbons with tiny explosives that you threaded through your cap guns).  We discovered how to make a Big Bang by hitting an entire roll of caps with the end of a baseball bat.  Necessity was the mother of invention.  All I can say is that it was better than nothing.

My diary entry when I was 16 mentioned disdainfully a band concert and a parade.  But fireworks appear to have been effectively suppressed.  I described that year's Fourth as "rather glum."

When I was 17, folks apparently had suffered enough under the nanny state.  Sale, possession, and use of all fireworks were still prohibited throughout the county.  But a neighborimg county was more obliging, and a virtual city of fireworks stands was thrown up on their side of the county line. On July 2, my brother and I and a friend bicycled some twenty miles to the county line, loading our carriers up with contraband that we gleefully hauled home.  My diary exulted: "There may be a law against fireworks, but everyone ignores it.  Banging constantly, all day and night."

That was my last diaried Fourth, and probably the last Fourth I enjoyed unselfconsciously as a kid.  Yesterday, during my walk, I watched some youngsters set off a whole string of firecrackers.  It recalled the debates we used to have -- should you explode one cracker after another, individually, making them last?  Or squander an entire package in one glorious series of explosions? 

I envied those kids yesterday.  I would have been doing the same thing, even now, if I'd had the explosives.

Voting Rights in America -- Part 2

Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, first Southerners -- and then Republicans in general -- have engaged in a persistent effort to evade the requirements of the statute and to limit the voting rights of those the Act sought to protect.  This was David Domke's thesis last night, in his second of three lectures dealing with voting rights and the 2020 election.

Professor Domke played a clip of President Lyndon Johnson's address to Congress, eight days after the suppression of a peaceful Black march and demonstration in Selma, Alabama.  The speech was sober, heart-felt, and insistent -- it was the duty of Congress to pass a voting rights act, and to do so quickly.

There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.
...
And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem. And so at the request of your beloved Speaker and the Senator from Montana; the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois; the minority leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here tonight—not as President Roosevelt came down one time in person to veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to urge the passage of a railroad bill—but I came down here to ask you to share this task with me and to share it with the people that we both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.

Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in 50 States, are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look to each of us.

He electrified listeners by quoting the title of the song adopted by the Black rights movement -- "We Shall Overcome."  Martin Luthur King, watching the speech on television, reportedly wiped away tears from his eyes.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was drafted and passed overwhelmingly by Congress just five months later, with only some Southerners in opposition, and signed by the President.

Domke remarked on the similarity of issues facing the country in 1965 to those in 2020.  He didn't need to point out in detail the differences in presidential responses.

Those seeking to limit voting by Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and lower income Americans have adopted three basic approaches since 1965.  Unlike the post-Civil War Reconstruction laws, these approaches have not been specifically racial, and they don't make voting impossible.    Just much more difficult -- or even a bit more difficult, which has been enough to change election results.

1.  Voter ID laws.  Blacks and others affected are much less likely to have government issued identification than are more affluent whites.  It requires additional time, money and effort to obtain that ID.

2.  Elimination of the Department of Justice preclearance, which had been required by the Act of 1965 before states with discriminatory histories could change their voting laws.  They succeeded in 2013 in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision along liberal-conservative lines.

3.  Expunging voter rolls of the names of persons who haven't voted in recent elections.  Infrequent voters, less likely to be affluent whites, arrive at the polls and learn that they are no longer registered to vote.

In conclusion, Domke noted that John Roberts, since he was a legal adviser to President Reagan, has worked tirelessly to undermine key provisions of the 1965 act.  His final success came in 2013, when, as Chief Justice, he cast the deciding vote invalidating the preclearance requirement.

Next week, Professor Domke will discuss voter suppression -- specifically as a factor in this year's presidential election.