The Shutdown

Trump's most often repeated campaign promise was that he would build a 2,000 wall between the US and Mexico and make Mexico pay for it. When Mexico refused to pay for such a wall, it was expected that Trump would get the money from Congress because, after all, his party controlled both the House and the Senate. Yet, he failed there too because, as a group, Republicans regard negotiation and compromise as indicative of moral failure (as Kentucky senator Rand Paul put it, it's wrong for those who occupy the moral high ground to those who occupy the low ground). 

When you have a petulant president who is used to getting things his way, and he suddenly can't do it, bad things are sure to follow, the bad thing in this case being that Trump has refused to allow 800,000 government employees to draw their paychecks until such time as Congress allocates money for his wall, something that Congress was unwilling to do even before January 2, when the Democratic Party took control of the House of Representatives. Today marks day 31 days since one-quarter of federal employees drew their last paycheck. 

Trump opened the shutdown with the following words:

"I will shut down the government, and I am proud [that] I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it... I’m going to shut it down.”

A few days later, he blamed the Democrats for making him do it (I don't know if Republicans are too oblivious to notice or too immoral to care that Trump rarely opens his mouth without lying). Since the shutdown, the people who protect our borders are going unpaid, although Trump claims that the shutdown is aimed at strong borders; federal courts are not hearing cases; loans are not being approved; national parks are being robbed and vandalized; travel by plane is grinding to a halt; criminal investigations are ending prematurely; and so on ad finitum. All of these countless millions of people are suffering, not because of anything they did but because their president is in a snit. Such recalcitrance is what passes for strength among Republican voters.

On the bright side, Trump and Congress are still being paid, although the Secret Service agents who protect them are not. When the leader of the Congress advised Trump that, because of security concerns during the shutdown, he should postpone a speech he wanted to make to Congress; he denied her access to a government plane for a secret trip, although he allowed his wife to take a vacation in Air Force One. So what does Trump have to say to (and about) these people who are going unpaid and who, in many cases, are being forced to work because their jobs are deemed "essential"? 

1) He says that most of them voted Democratic, which, I suppose, means that it doesn't matter if they're paid. 

2) Despite having never lived a moment of his life during which he didn't have more money than the life savings of hundreds of thousands of us added together, he says that he can relate to not getting a paycheck. 

3) He says that those who are being unpaid will "get by like they always do" (he is apparently is referring to the fact that the Republican Party has often shut down the government when it didn't get its way, although it has never shut it down for this long). 

4) He says that those who aren't being paid are happy to make the sacrifice. 

5) He assures the country that he's eager to negotiate with the Democrats, but that they're unwilling to negotiate with him, and while it is true that he invited the two most powerful Democrats to the White House, it's also true that they went, and that Trump Tweeted the event as follows: "Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy [he calls others by their first names but demands that he be called "Mr. President"], a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, 'NO." I said 'bye-bye.'"

Trump is the standard of truth to millions of Republicans who praise him to their children as an example of how a good man should live. To millions of Democrats, Trump is proof that the Republican Party represents the nadir of dishonesty and immorality. It is to millions an organization for people who take the position that, "As long as I get mine, then screw you," "America First" being code for "Me First, and You Not at All." I keep thinking that the day will come when these people are finally fed up with supporting a man whose behavior flies in the face of the very Christian values that they claim to hold dear, but since it hasn't happened yet, I find it hard to envision what it would take to make it happen.

Reflections Following Two years of Genealogical Research

According to an ancient myth, the world rests upon the back of an elephant and that elephant rests upon another elephant, it being elephants all the way down. I had similarly thought that the foundation of my identity was my surname, but by the further back in time I went, the less my surname seemed like a solid foundation and the more it seemed like a pinpoint in space. 

Because I exclude cousins, my tree contains a mere 512 names, but even that is too many to keep straight. For example, when I’m telling Peggy about some new discovery, she’ll ask, “Is that on your mother’s side or your father’s?” or, “How many “greats” ago was that?” and I will realize that I had lost sight of the forest while studying the trees.

For some researchers, the point of genealogy is to accumulate as many names as possible and to go as far back in time as possible, and to do these things as fast as possible. The point of genealogy for me is to avoid mistakes, and this means accumulating as much information as possible about one person before I move on to the next.

I’m haunted by the thought that, if I make a single mistake in naming someone as my ancestor, then every prior name in that line will also be in error. To find such mistakes, I sometimes start my research all over again. Well, sort of. The problem with really starting over again is that going over the same ground repeatedly would become so tedious that I would probably give up my research. For instance, having explored the matter thoroughly, I’m convinced that the Ellis branch of my family came ashore in Virginia rather than Massachusetts, so I’m not inclined to research the Massachusetts’ Ellises all over again. Another reason for my reluctance is that not only did generation after generation name their children with the same few names, eg. John, Caroline, Richard, Sarah, Charles, Nancy, William, Mary, Henry, and Elizabeth; they mixed and matched, often making it impossible for even the most diligent researcher to know which person an old document refers to. The further back in time one goes, the more genealogy becomes a process of educated guesswork, and the thought is ever with me that, no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to do more than to dip my toe in the waters of time.

Another challenge is that it can be very hard to find researchers whose work is helpful because few researchers are even remotely conscientious, most of them using appallingly few sources, and many building their entire trees by copying information from other people’s trees. This leads to mistakes being the norm. For example, nearly every tree that includes my father has his first name misspelled; or it gets his name completely wrong (Thomas instead of Tommy); or it mistakenly applies the suffix “Jr.” I frequently find trees in which people are listed as giving birth when they were six; being born before their parents; fighting in wars that didn't start until a hundred years after their deaths; or living their entire lives in Jasper County, Alabama, but registering their wills in Poughkeepsie, New York, etc. I’ve gone from being impressed by people who claim to have traced their families back to the 16th century to thinking to myself, “Fat chance!” For one thing, 1500 is the outer edge of meaningful research for even the most diligent and experienced researcher. For another, 500 years would equal ±1,048,576 ancestors.
 
Upon reading 200 year old wills, I’m ever surprised by how little people owned, most of it being things that no one would bother to itemize in our age of automation. For example, in a will from 1767, my ancestor wrote: “I do likewise give unto my godson Andreas…four of my best shirts.” The testators’ slaves (I’ve found scores of those) were usually listed alongside the livestock and sometimes shared the family’s surname. As for the first names of slaves, I’ve found Richards and Elizabeths but also Caesars and Napoleons. I’ve also found slaves who remained with their former masters long after the government freed them.

Most of my genealogical research boils down to the tedious job of data entry, but when I find something like the 1862 letter that one of my Confederate great great great uncles wrote to his wife a month before he died behind enemy lines following the Civil War Battle of Murfreesboro (Tennessee), the tedium becomes worth it.

This isn’t to say that data entry can’t be poignant. For example, it has enabled me to feel affection for a great great maiden aunt (Mary) who was born in Alabama in 1843. By the time of the 1880 census, her father had died, and, except for a maiden sister (Sarah Jane), her six siblings had died or moved. In that 1880 census, Mary, Sarah Jane, and their mother, Sallie, owned a 400 acre farm. They hired eight laborers (four white and four black) to work four weeks that year at a cost of $20, and they reported a gross income of $592. Their largest expense was fertilizer. Two years later, Sarah Jane and Sallie were dead (Sarah Jane at 52 and Sallie at 78), and Mary had fallen off the map as far as surviving records go, only to reappear for a final time thirty years later when she was 67 years old and living alone in a house that she owned free and clear. I’ve been unable to find her grave.

Alongside Mary in my affection comes her maiden sister, Sarah Jane, who had the courage to remain loyal to the Union during the Civil War, this despite having three brothers who fought for the Confederacy and despite being surrounded by families whose sons and brothers were falling before Yankee bullets. In 1863, she was visiting some inlaws when the Union Calvary came along and took her horse, which she later described as “a fine valuable sorrel mare sixteen hands high.” After the war, she demanded that the federal government reimburse her the value of her horse, which she set at $160, and they responded with a list of eighty questions and required that she produce three witnesses to attest to her loyalty. In response to those questions, she swore that she had shed tears of disapproval when the South seceded; had done her best to keep her brothers from joining the rebel army; had given the Union army all the help she could; and had denied assistance to the Confederacy except when compelled to do so (she was forced to cook for the troops). One of her witnesses said that she was a quiet woman who neither hid nor advertised her loyalty to the Union, and that only her gender saved her from being physically harmed. Thanks to the fairness of the Union, my aunt got her money.

New! Sundry! Hardly Edited! Utterly Uncensored!

I went to the pharmacy yesterday for a flu shot. The clerk had me fill out a form, and said that I should come back in twenty minutes for the shot. I had no watch, so I asked her for the time. She looked at her computer and said it was 11:55. I proceeded to kill time by walking around the store. I looked at the walls for a clock, but there wasn’t one. There never is anymore. If I had cared enough to ask someone for the time, he or she would have pulled out a cellphone. I have no cellphone, and I only wear a watch when I anticipate needing it. Since it is easier to look at one’s wrist than to take out a phone, I don’t know why so few people wear watches, this being but one of the many things that I don't understand about modern life. Another is the abundant misuse of the word like and, to a lesser extent, the word perfect. “For example, a clerk might ask, “Like, what is your phone number?” and when I tell her (it’s usually a her), she will say, “Perfect!” Sometimes, I will respond with, “I’m so glad!” or, “At least there’s that.”

Every year, Peggy and I buy Christmas presents for the kids next door. This year, Peggy called their mother on Xmas day and left a message to call her back to arrange a time. She then left the same message on their father’s phone. Neither called back, so when I saw the woman two days later, I asked her if they had gotten Peggy’s messages, and she said that, no, they never check their voicemail because they prefer texting. Based upon my knowledge of her, I had no reason to think she was lying, yet I couldn't quite believe that she was being truthful either. A few days earlier, I was with someone who pulled out his cellphone to look something up, and he said, “Hey, I see that I got an email from you. What did you want?” I had to think for a moment because I had sent the email two weeks earlier. When I asked him why he hadn’t seen it, he said, “I don’t do email.”
 
My first watches were wind-ups, which were all that existed in the 1950s and ‘60s (come to think of it, my first radio had vacuum tubes, but that’s another story). I don’t remember when battery watches came out, but since they were cheaper and kept better time, I never bought another wind-up. Even so, I regard battery watches as aesthetically lacking. A wind-up watch was something to cherish, partly because it really did require daily care, whereas a battery watch is simply a way to tell time.

Another thing that puzzles me about people who are a lot younger than I is that they will sometimes watch movies or TV shows on their cellphones. My family’s first TV had about a twelve inch screen, so for the next several decades, manufacturers did their best to develop larger screens with clearer pictures, which makes the current desire to watch TV on a cellphone baffling. I don’t even recognize the names of the famous people that they watch or listen to on their cellphones, that is unless those people became famous more than twenty years ago.

When I was a child (I was born in 1949), my family’s phone number was 65M2, and since, in rural Mississippi anyway, dial phones didn’t exist, a person who wanted to place a call would pick up the receiver, and an operator would say, “Number please.” My birth family’s last phone number was 833-5184. I’ve gone through several phone numbers since then, but I only remember those two, my current one, and my last one.

Every year, fewer and fewer people will know—or care—about the technology that dominated my first several decades. They also won’t know that, instead of the word “like,” there was a time when people who lacked self-confidence would simply say, “uh…,” and that the word perfect meant superlative. I’ve always heard that many old people reach a point of feeling “ready to die.” They probably get to that point primarily due to poor health and the loss of loved ones, but I suspect it might also be tied to the fact that the world that they once knew, and still care about, is a thing of the past, and they devalue what has replaced it. The fact is that young people have a tendency to regard the old with condescension, and that the old regard them similarly.


Not that modernity is all bad. For example, I love i-Macs, safer cars, ready access to old movies and TV shows, and even cat litter (prior to the 1940s, people used sand, dirt, wood shavings, or shredded newspaper—ha, my spell check doesn’t recognize the word newspaper). It’s also true that Peggy and I would be dead by now had we been born even a few years sooner. I say this because I suffer from severe sleep apnea, and not only did CPAPS not exist prior to 1983, arrogant doctors would have thought I was lazy or that my sleepiness was all in my head. Peggy would be dead because, starting several years ago, every time she gets a cold, she ends up with bronchitis and has to go on nebulizers, inhalers, and steroids. I’m certain of it—we would be dead. On the downside, increased suffering usually walks hand-in-hand with increased longevity. While doctors can ward off many fatal ailments, they have less to offer when it comes to problems that simply make a person miserable.

I would guess that a great many changes are a mixed bag. Slavery and Jim Crow are gone, but bigotry and discrimination remain. Women have more rights, but they’re still objectified, and many of them seem hell bent on presenting themselves first and foremost as something to fuck. The cold war is over, but horrific violence and the threat of another cold war remain. A heightened concern for the environment exists, yet few people are willing to change their behavior one iota in order to avoid catastrophe. A greater concern for endangered species exists, yet we are in the midst of the second worse mass extinction the world has ever known, and it’s all our fault.

Peggy and I sometimes congratulate ourselves on not having children. We do this partly because most of her sisters’ children and grandchildren turned out to be parasites who, quite literally, never left home. More importantly, neither of us is optimistic about the future, which means that much of the worrying we do is for ourselves, for some vague entity called the planet, and for the millions of other species that we so-called homosapiens are dragging down to hell with us.