The Dish

In an essay sharing how the death of her cat was easier – and better handled by caregivers – than the death of her parents, Margo Rabb recalls the end of that final trip to the vet’s office:

In Juliet’s office [at the clinic], they let me stay on their couch with Sophie’s body for as long as I wanted. My husband left work and met me there. “How long do you want to stay?” he asked me, staring at her body on my lap. “Forever,” I said. I pictured myself wandering around the city, still holding my dead cat. Maybe my friends wouldn’t notice. Maybe they’d mistake her for a fur stole. When I’d told them about Sophie’s diagnosis, weeping, sometimes I felt ashamed to admit that I felt such deep grief over a cat. I wrote in my diary: “The strange thing is it’s not dissimilar from the grief I felt for Mommy and Daddy — how the grief displaces everything, and nothing feels the same anymore.”

The experience left her looking for answers:

Was it because Sophie was an animal that her loss was easier to bear, and easier for [my veterinarians] to give comfort? Or was it luck and the lack of it, to have encountered gentle care for my cat and harsh care for my parents?

In “A Natural History of Love,” Diane Ackerman writes that pets “help bridge that no-man’s-land between us and Nature.” When I think now of Sophie’s last days, I think that, because she was an animal, her loss felt more a part of the natural order, with its inevitable seasons and cycles of life and death. Humans spend so much of our lives railing against the idea of dying, or pretending that it doesn’t exist, or dreaming of eternal youth, or wishing to prolong our lives — and maybe it’s that fighting that made the experience of my parents’ deaths feel unbearable and inhumane, and made the death of my cat seem exceptionally human.

Meanwhile, a Dish reader wrote recently:

We just had to say goodbye to our 14-year-old golden lab, Honza. The experience reminded me of the wonderful thread you started in the summer of 2013 when you had to say farewell to Dusty. My wife dug out the thread and sent it to me this morning. Having read it again, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I was amazed at how similar the situation we encountered was to those of your readers and I hope by writing this it helps to dispel the grief, because it is intense. I cannot believe how hard this has hit me. I’m a northerner, for goodness sake, and am not supposed to react like this.

Maybe it’s because even her name had deep meaning for us. Honza is a Czech nickname given, seemingly automatically, to anyone named Jan. In 1999 we invited into our home as an au pair a delightful young man called Jan who always introduced himself as “Honza”. He came to befriend our Asperger’s suffering oldest son and provide the companionship he was failing to find among his peers. It worked beyond our wildest expectations, and after 18 months with us he was woven into the fabric of family life. Concurrent with his departure, in September 2000, we had to let go of our first dog, Guido, whom Honza (the man) had helped nurse in his final months. My wife immediately went on the hunt for a replacement and found a golden lab puppy, funnily enough, in my home town in Lancashire. My mum brought her down south in a shoe box on her lap, and because the house seemed lacking somehow without someone calling, “Honza”, every few minutes her name was quickly established – (when Honza, the man, heard we had called a female, Honza, he christened his female cat “Andy”, but that’s another story).

Suffice it to say, Honza (the dog) was a great hit. Our middle son, Alex, rapidly formed a rapport with her that lasted until the end. She was, in his mind anyway, “his dog”, and she always treated him more as a fellow puppy than a human. Once she went wandering and a kindly neighbour took her in but without her collar on (for some reason), she had no idea who Honza belonged to. I’ve never seen my wife so frantic as we all headed into the night to find her. It was Alex’s shouting that she eventually responded to. Her barking led us to the right house and all ended well.

Honza also gave my wife great comfort during my all-too-frequent business trips away. In an all-male household, she felt she could watch “girlie TV” with Honza at her feet, and it was my wife who walked her the most, going for miles along trails and country paths together.

Starting last year, she had increasing trouble walking and her appetite varied. And then a tumour appeared on her left hind leg. In recent weeks, as the tumour grew and the stiffness increased, her spirit stayed buoyant and even, maybe, increased. While I was busy counselling preparedness for the end to everyone, she seemed to contradict me at every turn. We got through Christmas with our usual house full, but by New Year’s I noticed a deterioration. The accidents increased as she found it too difficult to get up. On Friday, Jan 2nd, we went out with friends. On the way back we agreed it was now only a matter of “weeks”. The tumour had grown again and was now weeping.

The boys took their last photos with her and she was fed her favourite snacks. Then Alex carried her to the car. At the vet’s she was remarkably calm. In fact, once inside the reception area, she looked great and I commented that the vet would probably recommend we keep persevering with her treatments. However, once inside the little surgery, she could barely stand. And after the tube was placed in her veins, she just flopped down. We sat down with her as the vet administered the dose. As Honza was looking up at me and then, finally, Alex, there was a last wag of the tail. Everyone drew comfort from this last act as though she was telling us that “it’s ok”.

Several things struck me about the experience and those posted by your readers. As a bloke, I really didn’t want to be there. I’m glad I was, but my first instinct was to avoid it. One of your readers said that most women stay but only 50% of men. Maybe it’s the fear of breaking down in front of strangers, but I understand why men want to avoid it. Also, the calmness of the whole thing. To me – and I’m no David Attenborough – it was that she was with her pack. In the wild, I guess, when you can’t keep up the pack, it just leaves you behind. But Honza’s pack stayed with her. That’s why she battled on through pain and discomfort, and I’m sure she was comforted by the fact that she wasn’t abandoned at the end.

So farewell then, Honza. Your passing has saddened us all, but you will always be with us.

To say I stood up and cheered as I finished reading Jon Chait’s new essay on the resurgence of a toxic political correctness on the left would be an understatement. There’s some great reporting in it that really helps put into context what the new guardians of the identity politics left are up to. Here’s one nugget:

Last March at University of ­California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.

Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.” By the prevailing standards of the American criminal-justice system, Miller-Young had engaged in vandalism, battery, and robbery. By the logic of the p.c. movement, she was the victim of a trigger and had acted in the righteous cause of social justice.

Chait has lots more where that came from. But the essay really deepens in the comparison between the early 1990s – when political correctness made its first appearance – and now. The difference is that the illiberal policing of speech, the demonizing of dissent, and extreme identity politics have now transcended the academy and arrived in social media with a vengeance. Twitter and Facebook encourage mutually reassuring groupthink, in which individuals are required to “like” anything that isn’t white, male, cisgendered etc.,  in which an ideology is enforced by un-friending those with other views instead of engaging them, and in which large numbers of Twitter-users can descend on a racist/sexist/homophobic etc miscreant and destroy his or her career and social life in pursuit of racial/gender/orientation “social justice”.

I’m an established blogger with an independent site and have witnessed several such campaigns now – and they cannot but exact a toll. I’m fine with being called a self-hating gay or homophobe or misogynist or racist or anti-Semite, but what of those with much less independence? People with media jobs in which any deviation from the p.c. norm renders them anathema to their peers, those in the academy who are terrified of committing a “micro-aggression”, those in minorities who may actually have a different non-leftist view of reality: what pressure are they being put under right now?

It seems to me they are being intimidated by an ideology that utterly rejects the notion that free speech – including views with which one strongly disagrees – can actually advance social justice, and by a view of the world that sees liberal society entirely in terms of “power” rather than freedom. And if you look across the non-conservative online media, this orthodoxy is now close to absolute. The few brave enough to take on these language and culture police – I think of Emily Yoffe’s superb piece on campus rape in Slate – will get slimed and ostracized or ignored. Once you commit a heresy, you cannot recover. You must, in fact, be air-brushed out of the debate entirely.

The right has its own version of this, of course. Many of us dissenters were purged and rendered anathema years ago. But look where that has actually left today’s GOP. It’s turned into this. And the left’s new absolutism on identity politics – now taken to an absurd degree – should, in my view, worry liberals more. Because it is a direct attack on basic liberal principles. Chait:

Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

And reason is not constrained by gender or race or orientation or anything else.

One tip of this spear is related to sexual orientation, of course, in which some parts of the gay left are back to what they love most of all: “eliminating freedom for their enemies”. And you can see why.

If reason has no chance against the homophobic patriarchy, and one side is always going to be far more powerful in numbers than the other, almost anything short of violence is justified in order to correct the imbalance. The “victim”, after all, is always right. Gay beats straight; but queer beats gay; and trans beats queer. No stone must be unturned in this constant struggle against unrelenting aggression and oppression. In the end, they may even run out of letters to add to LGBTQIA. And all of the “hate”, we are told, is just as brutal as it ever was. And so the struggle must not ease up with success after success, but must instead be ever-more vigiliant against hetero-hegemony. So small businesses who aren’t down with gay marriages have to be sued, rather than let be; religious liberty must be scoffed at or constrained, rather than embraced; individual homophobic sinners must be forced to resign or repent or both, and there is no mercy for those who once might have opposed, say, marriage equality but now don’t. The only “dialogue” much of the p.c. gay left wants with its sinners is a groveling apology for having a different point of view. There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that.

And the paradox of this within the gay rights movement is an astounding one. For the past twenty years, the open, free-wheeling arguments for marriage equality and military service have persuaded, yes, persuaded, Americans with remarkable speed that reform was right and necessary. Yes: the arguments. If you want to argue that no social progress can come without coercion or suppression of free speech, you have to deal with the empirical fact that old-fashioned liberalism brought gay equality to America far, far faster than identity politics leftism. It was liberalism – not leftism – that gave us this breakthrough. And when Alabama is on the verge of issuing marriage licenses to its citizens, it is the kind of breakthrough that is rightly deemed historic. But instead of absorbing that fact and being proud of it and seeking magnanimity and wondering if other social justice movements might learn from this astonishing success for liberalism and social progress, some on the gay left see only further struggle against an eternally repressive heterosexist regime, demanding more and more sensitivity for slighter and slighter transgressions and actually getting more radicalized – and feeling more victimized and aggrieved – in the process.

Which reveals how dismal this kind of politics is, how bitter and rancid it so quickly becomes, how infantilizing it is. Any “success ” for one minority means merely that the oppression has been shifted temporarily elsewhere. Or it means that we dissenters in a minority have internalized our own oppression (by embracing the patriarchy of civil marriage, or structural hegemonic violence in the military) and are blind to even greater oppression beyond the next curtain of social justice consciousness. Or we find out in bitter debates about who is the biggest sinner, that in some cases, are actually more white than we are female; or more black than we are trans; and on and on. This process has no end. And almost as soon as it begins, many people in the gay rights movement or in feminist movement will soon find themselves under attack for not being sufficiently enlightened, and, in fact, for being complicit and even active in others’ oppression. Chait has a great dissection of what Michelle Goldberg has also observed among some contemporary feminists – an acrid, self-defeating, demoralizing and emotionally crippling form of internecine warfare that persuades no one outside the ever tightening circle of true believers.

Someone has to stand up to this, with more credibility with liberals than I will ever have. Freddie has; Yoffe did; Goldberg went there; and now Chait has written the liberal manifesto to fight back. Read it.

(Sidebar thumbnail by Cezary Borysiuk)

A reader notes that “the movie Donnie Darko included an exchange on this very question“:

Another reader raises his hand: “Uh, what about language?” Another picks “writing, of course”:

Speech is encoded in our DNA as the way we transmit information from one person to another.  Writing is not.  Yet writing functions as a kind of disembodied DNA.  We can transmit any kind of information, from personal to cultural to technological through writing.  Writing is what makes it possible for us to know how much is owed or due to thousands of other people, at a glance. It is how we transmit religious traditions, with great fidelity, over generations, and it is how we speak to others long after we are dead.   A single person, knowing how to read and armed with just a few basic ideas, could rebuild civilization in a week if he had access to a decent small-town library.  Nothing else even comes close.

Another goes with:

Cheese.

Man, I love cheese.

Another recommends a recent book on the subject, How We Got to Here, by Steven Johnson:

It’s an excellent and engaging description of how the “invention” of glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light, and the inventions that flowed from those six items, did more to shape who we are today than other inventions. People can disagree with his list, thinking something more critical was left out, or something less critical was overblown by his descriptions in the book, but I can’t think of a more thoughtful, non-philosophical list of inventions that truly made a difference.

Another reader doesn’t buy the invention put forth by a previous one:

“Double-blind experiment”? Oh, please. It is as rife with problems as religion.  Our assumptions that it is better is, in fact, part of the problem.  Just think about Lipitor/statins or HRT, to name two high-profile drugs that were run through all the double-blind studies you could think of that both turned out to have issues.  And while not exactly double-blind, the Tuskegee experiments show that science is just as fallible as humans generally.

Another reader responds to the one who summarized Yuval Noah Harari’s view that “a company exists because everyone agrees that it does”:

This is a gross over-simplification of an issue involving the difference between abstractions and concretions in reality.  To use a different analogy, I can speak of the jar of coins I keep at home.  It’s something I’ve had for a while, so everyone agrees about the “imagined reality” of the jar.  It’s not necessarily a jar of coins, is it?  However, were I to take the jar to the bank, leaving only an empty container, and ask someone how much money I have in my jar of coins, they would quickly reply with “None!”

However, if I had not yet stored any coins in this jar, it being a new construct, something I just decided I would use to store my loose change, and I were to ask the same question, I would be met with quizzical looks.  This is because the concretion of the jar was not elevated to my abstraction of it; its reality did not live up to my imagination.

Going back to the given analogy of a company – a company only exists in “imagined reality” because there is a definite concrete reality to back it up.  The State of Delaware allows an organization right to a title in so far as there are actual physical, monetary and personnel assets to back up that claim.  So we aren’t as much allowing arbitrary definitions to permeate society as much as we are allowing rhetoric to help define that which already exists.

The company already exists; we’ve just applied a definition to it.  Not the other way around.

Another gets silly:

As much as I enjoy considering a chemical company as an imaginary structure, as a science nerd I should point out that there are limitations to this view of human activity.  Perhaps the best demonstration of the limits of human belief would be a 1970s sketch from Monty Python, regarding an architect who erects tower block apartments by hypnosis. The apartments remain perfectly serviceable as long as the residents continue to believe in them, but when a BBC reporter begins a sustained line of probing questions, all hell breaks loose:

Deficits are predicted to rise somewhat in the near future:

The U.S. deficit will fall to its lowest level since 2007, but it is expected to begin rising quickly after 2018, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office. The difference between federal spending and revenue will fall to $468 billion or 2.6% of GDP this fiscal year, which is the lowest level since 2007, the CBO says. The deficit will continue to fall slightly in 2016 and hold steady in 2017. But then it will begin rising once more, reaching 3.0% of GDP in 2019 and 4.0% in 2025.

Matt Klein looks at the causes of those larger deficits:

More than all of the projected increase in the US federal budget deficit between now and 2025 is expected to come from higher interest payments on the existing debt.

He goes on to wonder whether those larger deficits will materialize. Krugman seconds Klein:

CBO shows the ratio of debt to GDP barely rising; just about all the rise in payments comes from an assumption that interest rates will rise. And as both Klein and I have tried to explain, we don’t really know that; there’s a plausible case that it’s wrong.

 I’m not attacking CBO, which needs to make some kind of rate assumption. But if you read someone trying to resurrect deficit panic, bear in mind that even the modest rise in the new projections is just an assumption, with nothing solid behind it.

Louise Sheiner instead focuses on the uncertainty of Medicare spending. She questions the continuation of the “phenomenally slow growth in Medicare spending in recent years”:

Though some of this slowdown is well understood—reflecting payment cuts under the Affordable Care Act and the expiration of patents of a number of blockbuster drugs—much of the slowdown in Medicare spending is not understood by analysts.  CBO’s research suggests that the Medicare slowdown does not appear to be attributable to the recession, and my work, using a variety of data sources, concurs.

CBO has made the not-unreasonable assumption that this slowdown will persist for some time.  But, because we don’t understand why Medicare spending has slowed, this assumption must be viewed as highly uncertain.  It is possible that, rather than persisting, the slowdown could reverse itself, and spending growth could surprise us on the upside in coming years.

Josh Zumbrun pays attention to the growth estimates:

These small deficits may seem surprising given the ferocity of Congress’s recent budget battles. But perhaps even more noteworthy is the economic forecast underlying it. The CBO currently estimates the recovery will continue through at least the end of 2017. If correct, that will be a 102-month economic recovery: the third-longest in U.S. history. The CBO’s forecasts for growth are not that different from the Federal Reserve’s, where policy makers also forecast at least three more years of economic expansion.

Finally, William Gale keeps in mind that the Great Recession pushed “public debt to all-time peace-time highs relative to the size of the economy”:

The debt-GDP ratio stands at 74 percent currently, up from an average of 37 percent in 1957-2007, the 50 years before the Great Recession, and a value of 35 percent as of 2007. The only time in U.S. history that the debt-GDP ratio has been higher is during and just after World War II, when the massive mobilization effort raised debt to more than 100 percent of GDP. …

The current high level of debt is not a crisis by any means. We are not Greece or even close. We do not need immediate cuts in spending or tax increases; indeed, they would probably be harmful to overall growth, as the economy is still in recovery mode. But the high debt level is not good news, and it is a problem to keep an eye on.