First bluebonnets for 2023

 

On February 26th the bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) along Mopac had been coming up for a few days already. At least this time none of the passing drivers called Emergency Medical Services about some guy lying by the side of the road. One did honk, though I don’t know why.

 

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Also on February 26th the New York Post ran a piece by Jonathan Turley headlined “COVID lab leak is a scandal of media and government censorship.” Here’s the beginning:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak.

The conclusion is reportedly based on a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. Many will be exploring why the scientific evidence of a lab leak was so slow to emerge from intelligence agencies.

However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science.

There will continue to be a debate over the origins of COVID-19, but now there will be an actual debate.

For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racist or racist conspiracy theorist.

Academics joined this chorus in marginalizing anyone raising the theory. One study cited the theory as an example of “anti-Chinese racism” and “toxic white masculinity.”

As late as May 2021, the New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.” 

 

Along those lines, thirteen months ago I wrote a commentary about the origin of the Covid-19 virus in which I pointed out how

the origin of Covid-19 quickly became politicized. In mid-2020, as if a switch had been thrown, virtually all establishment sources suddenly began calling the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and asserting—with no supporting evidence whatsoever—that the lab-leak theory had been debunked.

On February 2nd [2022] I read a substack post by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea entitled “TK Mashup: The Lab Leak “Conspiracy Theory,” with subtitle “‘NOT MAN MADE OR GENETICALLY MODIFIED,’ they cried in unison, until they didn’t, as Matt Orfalea’s latest trip back in time shows.” Embedded in the post is that 9.5-minute “mash-up,” which is to say a collection of many brief video clips documenting the groupthink that took place. The video would be funny if it weren’t such an indictment of herd mentality.

 

In light of the latest news, it’s worth reading Jonathan Turley’s full article and also going back to watch the 9.5-minute “mash-up” packed non-stop from beginning to end with well over a hundred clips showing the plague of disinformation that had infected so many in the media.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

A Texas spiny lizard

 

At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12) I slowly approached what seems to have been a Texas spiny lizard, Sceloporus olivaceus, sunning itself on a rocky ledge that coincidentally provided pretty good camouflage, especially at a distance. I got off four pictures in about one minute until my increasing closeness finally sent the lizard scurrying into the shadowed crevice.

 

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Did you hear about how a letter mailed in 1916 eventually got delivered in 2021?

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Texas groundsel and phlox

 

On February 17th we drove 80 minutes south to Gonzales. Several miles north of the town, on the east side of US 183, we encountered a good colony of phlox, as depicted last week. Rising above the supersaturated red and hot pink flowers of what was presumably Phlox drummondii stood scattered Texas groundsel plants, Senecio ampullaceus, that had already budded and in some cases flowered.

 

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That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.

 

To find out what “that moment” was, and to learn more about “The Approaching Disintegration of Academia,” you can read Mark Goldblatt’s full February 7th Quillette article, whose subtitle is “Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.”

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

Nature mixes it up

 

At Schroeter Neighborhood Park on February 15th I came upon this rotund white snail shell that had somehow gotten bits of brown leaf debris in it. If you’re wondering about size, a ruler said the shell is about 32mm long and 25mm across at its widest.

 

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Mathematicians will tell you that if you look at a sufficiently large set of events you’re likely to find one or more striking coincidences. In fact, mathematicians would add, the strange thing would be to look at a large number of events and not find one or more striking coincidences. Nevertheless, we humans seem to be wired to attribute meaning to them when they do happen.

The other day my photographer friend Bob Hirsch in Buffalo released the seventh installment in his series “Photography and the Holocaust: Then & Now.” I read through it, and at the end I followed one of the notes to another article, “The True Story of The Holocaust Train Rescued From The Heart of Darkness – Friday, April 13th, 1945.” It tells how, “Near the end of the war in 1945, Jewish prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen death camp were being transported by rail to another camp when their German guards abandoned the train. The US Army happened upon the survivors. Two soldiers took photographs. And from those pictures, decades later something wonderful happened.”

The wonderful thing decades later was the reunion of some of the people who had survived. Here’s the testimony of one of them, Lisette Lamon:

It was a beautiful, balmy morning in April 1945, when I entered Major Adams’ makeshift office in Farsleben, a small town in Germany, to offer my services as an interpreter. It made me feel good that I could show, in a small way, the gratitude I felt for the 9th American Army, which had liberated us as we were being transported from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Orders found by the Americans in the German officer’s car directed that the train was to be stopped on the bridge crossing the Elbe River at Magdeburg, then the bridge was to be blown up, also destroying the train and its cargo all at once. The deadline was noon, Friday the 13th, and at 11 A.M. we were liberated!

With the liberation had come the disquieting news that President Roosevelt had died, and while I was airing concern that the new President, Harry Truman, (a man unknown to us) could continue the war, a sergeant suddenly said, “Hey, you speak pretty good English. I am sure the major would like to have you serve as his interpreter.”

Major Adams had not been told of my coming, so he was startled when he saw me. No wonder! There stood a young woman as thin as a skeleton, dressed in a two-piece suit full of holes. The suit had been in the bottom of my rucksack for 20 months, saved for the day we might be liberated, but the rats in Bergen-Belsen must have been as hungry as we were and had found an earlier use for my suit. For nine days we had been on the train, and this was the only clean clothing I owned.

Major Adams quickly recovered from his initial shock and seemed delighted after I explained why I had come. He asked how his men had treated us, and I heaped glowing praise on the American soldiers who had shared their food so generously with the starving prisoners. Then he took me outside to meet the “notables” of the German population, and with glee I translated orders given to them by the American commander. The irony of the reversal of roles was not lost on me nor the recipients; I was now delivering orders to those who had been ordering me around for so long! The Germans were obsequious, profusely claiming they never wanted Hitler or agreed with his policies and hoped the war would soon be over.

When asked to come back the next day, I was delighted but hesitated, wondering if it would be appropriate to ask a favor. Major Adams picked up on my hesitation, so I asked him to help me contact my family in America. We had emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, but after six months I returned to Holland to join my fiancé who was in the Dutch army. My parents knew that eight months after we were married my husband was taken as a hostage and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp where he was killed in 1941, but they did not know if I was alive, not having heard from me in more than two years.

Major Adams gave me a kind glance, saying, “Give me a few handwritten lines, in English, and I will ask my parents to forward the letter to them.”

When he saw the address on the note he looked at me, his mouth open in total amazement, and then he started to laugh – his parents and my parents lived in the same apartment building in New York City!

And so it was on Mother’s Day that his mother brought to my mother my message:

“I am alive!”

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Color variations in the ten-petal anemone

 

From February 15th in Schroeter Neighborhood Park, look at these color variations in the flowers of the ten-petal anemone, Anemone berlandieri, one of the earliest native wildflowers to bloom here each year. In fact you’ve already seen two other color variants from January 29th.

 

 

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Here’s a passage about standardized language from Andrew Doyle‘s 2022 book The New Puritans. (I’ve retained his British spelling and punctuation.)

If you thought that by the time young people made it to university they would be less coddled, you would be wrong. Some institutions are now beginning to adopt what is known as ‘inclusive assessment’, a policy originally intended to support students with learning difficulties. According to guidelines from Hull University, the expectation that students ought to be able to write fluently is ‘homogenous, North European, white, male, and elite’. Academic staff at the University of the Arts London have been instructed to ‘actively accept spelling, grammar or other language mistakes that do not significantly impede communication—unless the brief states that formally accurate language is a requirement’.

However well-intentioned, the suggestion that rigorous standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar are inherently ‘elitist’ overlooks one of the chief benefits of standardised English: that it guards against the development of a multi-tiered system of communication which bars certain individuals from the top echelons of society. Throughout history and across cultures, low levels of literacy have been the key factor in sustaining class divisions. It is in the interests of the powerful to keep the lower orders in a state of ignorance. Education brings with it equality of opportunity and the possibility of social mobility. Standards in written English do not perpetuate elitism, they act as a guarantee against it.

If it is true that pupils from particular demographics are failing to achieve their goals, the solution is not to dispense with standards altogether but to improve the education system itself. There is a perverse determinism, not to mention a mild form of racism, in the suggestion that certain ethnic groups are destined for academic failure. As headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh has argued, the proposition that accurate written English is ‘white, male and elite’ does nothing to close the attainment gap, but rather ‘masks the fact that our schools are not delivering and ensures only rich white guys will ever succeed’.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Lichen details

 

In Schroeter Neighborhood Park on February 15th I got close to lichens on decaying branches. Might the first lichen be the one people call pretty ruffle, Parmotrema austrosinense? And might the one below be the eastern speckled shield, Punctelia bolliana? In any case, don’t all those contorted surfaces ensorcel you?

 

 

 

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Bowdlerization

 

Wiktionary defines bowdlerize as ‘to remove or alter those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly.’ The verb comes from the last name Bowdler, borne by English physician Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) and his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler (1750–1830), who together published The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.

In the 20th century, bowdlerization came to be looked on as prudish. The 21st century has seen the practice come roaring back, even as the ideological prudes bringing it back have nixed any reference to the Bowdlers, who as straight white Anglo-Saxon Christians are considered to occupy a position at or very near the top of the oppression pyramid and therefore not to be given credit for anything, even establishing the precedent for the current bowdlerization.

Last week news broke about bowdlerization on a scale so vast as to rival The Family Shakespeare two centuries earlier. This time the multi-offending author is another Briton, Roald Dahl, who can’t speak for himself because he had the bad taste to die in 1990 and thus escape living vilification by today’s inquisitors. Wikipedia states that Dahl’s “books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide” and that he “has been called ‘one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century'”. As the article notes:

Dahl’s short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children’s books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters. His children’s books champion the kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment. His works for children include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, George’s Marvellous Medicine and Danny, the Champion of the World. His works for older audiences include the short story collections Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.

Enter today’s woke bowdlerizers. Holly Thomas puts it this way in an opinion piece for CNN:

Roald Dahl’s books for children, some of the most beloved works of fiction ever written, have had a makeover. According to a notice from their publisher, Puffin, sensitivity readers have “reviewed” the stories’ language, and in some instances, altered it to “ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.”

All, of course, except the millions of people who’ve read Roald Dahl’s books in their original wording and prefer them that way. To give you a sense of what this latest mass bowdlerization is like, here are a few of the great many changes.

Although, the last I looked, black is a real color (or physicists would say the absence of all color), the bowdlerizers no longer allow physical objects to be described that way. Regarding tractors, the sentence saying “the machines were both black” has been cut. Similarly for white: a character no longer “turns white” but instead “turns quite pale.”

No one in Dahl’s books is now allowed to be described as fat (even though elsewhere the same woke censors use the term “fat shaming” to criticize anyone who says it’s not healthy to be fat). “Fat little brown mouse” has become “little brown mouse.” “Here’s your little boy,’ she said. ‘He needs to go on a diet’” has gotten slimmed down to “Here’s your little boy.”

“Fearful ugliness” is now just “ugliness.” “Ladies and gentlemen” is now “folks” because we can’t have any reference to the biological reality that two—and only two—sexes exist, and that they’re different from each other. Similarly, “English father” has become “English parent.”

“Frumptious freaks” has become “beastly Twits.” Won’t animals now find that first word offensive?

“Mad” is another systematic target. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind,” even though “mad” and “out of your mind” mean the same thing (and notice how “woman” vanished). “Laughing like mad” is now “laughing wildly.” “Mrs Jenkins will go crazy” turns into “Mrs Jenkins will be furious.”

Like “disappeared” people who got airbrushed out of photographs under Stalin’s dictatorship, the new censors replace disfavored authors. Take this passage: “She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.” Now it’s “She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck.”

I could go on and on but you get the point. If you do want to see more depredations, you can follow up any of the many hits from this Internet search.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Tansy mustard in a phlox colony

 

On February 17th we drove 80 minutes south to Gonzales. Several miles north of the town, on the east side of US 183, we encountered a good colony of phlox, as depicted two posts back. Erect among the supersaturated red and hot pink phlox phlowers stood scattered tansy mustard plants, Descurainia pinnata, like the one you see here. Its cluster of yellow flowers measured only about an inch across.

 

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Yesterday I became aware of an important February 18th opinion piece by Jonathan Turley in The Hill.
Here’s how it begins:

Last year, the Biden administration caved to public outcry and disbanded its infamous Disinformation Governance Board under its “Disinformation Nanny,” Nina Jankowicz. Yet, as explored in a recent hearing (in which I testified), the Biden administration never told the public about a far larger censorship effort involving an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly targeting citizens and groups for disinformation.

Now it appears that the administration also was partially funding an “index” to warn advertisers to avoid what the index deemed to be dangerous disinformation sites. It turns out that all ten of the “riskiest” sites identified by the Global Disinformation Index are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents.

That sounds like a knockoff of China’s “social credit” system which scores its citizens, based in part on social media monitoring.

 

Our government acts unethically when it contributes public money to an organization that blatantly favors the political viewpoint of the administration in power and stigmatizes opposing political viewpoints. If you lean politically left, just imagine how you’d react if you found out that your government was using your tax dollars to extol right-leaning organizations and discredit your left-leaning views. Our government should not be funding any partisan organizations, period.

I invite you to read Jonathan Turley’s full piece. On the good side, just as I became aware of his article, I also found out that in response to it “The National Endowment for Democracy [Is] To Cut Off Further Support for the Global Disinformation Index.” You can read that follow-up article on Jonathan Turley’s own website.

  

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Devil’s Waterhole

 

On January 26th we spent some time at Inks Lake State Park, located about an hour west of Austin. The damming of the Colorado River has deepened and widened a portion of Valley Spring Creek to create what people call the Devil’s Waterhole, as you’re seeing above. Further upstream is the small waterfall shown below. Both views reveal how attractive the bedrock and boulders are in that part of central Texas.

 

  

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The University of Central Florida has adopted radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming that segregates students by race, condemns the United States as “white-supremacist culture,” and encourages active discrimination against the “oppressor” class, characterized as “male, White, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Christian.”

Officially, UCF reports that it has 14 separate DEI programs, costing in the aggregate more than $4 million per year. But this dramatically understates the reality, which is that the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has been entrenched everywhere. The university’s administration and academic departments have created a blizzard of programs, classes, trainings, reports, committees, certifications, events, documents, policies, clubs, groups, conferences, and statements pledging UCF to left-wing racialism.

So begins Christopher Rufo’s February 15th City Journal article “Racism in the Name of “Anti-Racism.” Of course segregating people and programs by race is blatantly illegal, but the attitude of “anti-racist” racists could be summed up as: the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and human decency be damned.

As the article explains, Rufo and some of his colleagues have proposed doing away with racialized bureaucracies and programs in Florida’s universities. You can read about that in the document titled “Abolish DEI Bureaucracies and Restore Colorblind Equality in Public Universities.”

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Phlox is already phloxing

 

Yes, phlox is phloxing now a little south of Austin, as we confirmed with an 80-minute drive down to Gonzales on February 17th—probably the earliest I’ve ever seen these flowers. Fortunately the ice storm almost three weeks earlier seemed not to have had a negative effect there; who knows, maybe the precipitation even helped. Phlox flowers come in various colors; the combination of saturated red and hot pink on a single flower that you see above may be unique (if you’re aware of it in another kind of flower, please let us know).

Below is the densest section of the colony. Of the two yellow flower heads, the one on the left is a Texas dandelion, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus, and the one on the right is Texas groundsel, Senecio ampullaceus.
(Click to enlarge the panorama.)

 

  

 

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A year and a half ago I linked to an article about Yeonmi Park. Here’s how the Independent Institute describes her:

Born in Hyesan, North Korea, to educated parents, Ms. Park grew up in a society devoted to the worship of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il and uncompromising hatred for any and all critics of his regime. However, after watching a pirated copy of the 1997 film, Titanic, the veil of tyranny began to fall, as she had caught a glimpse of a free world that one day she would yearn to join. In 2003 when she was ten, Ms. Park’s family suffered a crucial blow. After her father, who had been a critic of the regime despite his privileged position as a member of [the] Workers’ Party, was sentenced to hard labor for smuggling, her family faced starvation. After his release on medical leave, the family decided they had to flee from North Korea, but became separated before they could escape together. On March 31, 2007, and at the age of thirteen, Ms. Park and her mother crossed the frozen Yalu River into China, hiding from Chinese government officials who would return them to North Korea. However, they fell into the hands of human traffickers, and when one of the traffickers threatened to report them to the authorities if she didn’t have sex with him, her mother intervened for her safety by offering herself to be raped by the trafficker. Nevertheless, both were sold into sex slavery and Ms. Park was subsequently repeatedly raped. In October 2007, Ms. Park sent word to her father and arranged to smuggle him into China. There, he was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer, and in January 2008, while the family was living in secret, Park’s father died aged 45. The family was unable to formally mourn him, fearing that they would be discovered by Chinese authorities, and they secretly buried his remains in the ground of a nearby mountain. In February 2009 at the age of fifteen, with the help of Chinese and Korean Christian missionaries in the port city of Qingdao they were able to evade the attention of authorities and fled through the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and then by plane to South Korea.

From there Yeonmi Park eventually made it to the United States, where she became and continues to be a great advocate for freedom.

The other night we watched a riveting two-hour interview with her. If you have the time, it’s well worth watching, even if parts of it are unsettling. Turning on the closed captioning (CC) may make it easier to understand certain words and phrases, given Yeonmi Park’s Korean accent.

If you don’t have two hours, you can still watch much shorter clips from the full interview:

Growing Up in Harrowing Conditions in the Oppressive Regime of North Korea (10 minutes)

Escaping North Korea as a Teenager, and Encountering More Horrific Incidents (9 minutes)

Adjusting to America and Enjoying Its Freedom and Opportunity (7 minutes)

Yeonmi Park attended my alma mater, Columbia University, which was once a great institution but has devolved into a hotbed of ideological indoctrination and the suppression of dissident opinions. Yeonmi Park was incredulous, in light of her horrible life in North Korea, when she encountered Woke College Students and Professors Who Claim Victimhood (8 minutes). She contrasts that to her own view that “America is a miracle. It is literally the best country in human history.” She reminds me of my grandmother, who escaped the tyranny of the Soviet dictatorship in the 1920s. When she was in her 80s she once said to me, in her heavy Russian accent, “America is still the best country.”

Hypocritical Elites Who Talk Human Rights But Don’t Practice What They Preach (8 minutes)

  

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Lichens on boulders at Inks Lake State Park

 

On January 26th we spent several hours at Inks Lake State Park.

  

  

Boulder-hugging lichens are a prominent feature there.
Naturally I couldn’t resist doing some abstract takes on them.

 

 

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 A Multiplicity of National Anthems

 

Since the moral panic of 2020 it’s become ever more common at sporting events in this country to hear not only the traditional national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but also what some are calling the black national anthem. So much for the “United” States.

Now, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander—and also for all the gander’s neighbors. Where the black share of the U.S. population is 13.8%, the Hispanic share is 19%, so surely a Hispanic national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem at sporting events. In the spirit of inclusion, shouldn’t we also recognize the 6.2% of the U.S. population that’s Asian? Surely an Asian national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem at sporting events. And we can’t forget the 2.6% of the American population descended from aboriginal peoples, so an aboriginal national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem and the Asian national anthem at sporting events. And what about the 3.2% of the population that identifies as mixed-race? Surely a mixed-race national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem and the Asian national anthem and the aboriginal national anthem at sporting events. Oh, and we’ve got to include the largest racial group of all, the 75.8% of the population that is white. Therefore a white national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem and the Asian national anthem and the aboriginal national anthem and the mixed-race national anthem at sporting events.

But why stop with racial groups? Women make up 50.5% of the population, so a women’s national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem and the Asian national anthem and the aboriginal national anthem and the mixed-race national anthem and the white national anthem at sporting events. The same goes for the 49.5% of the population comprising men, therefore a men’s national anthem should join the regular national anthem and the black national anthem and the Hispanic national anthem and the Asian national anthem and the aboriginal national anthem and the mixed-race national anthem and the white national anthem and the women’s national anthem at sporting events.

Moving away from biological sex, we find that genderologists have identified dozens and dozens of genders and are hard at work discovering many more. As a result of that groundbreaking research, we’ll need a cisgender national anthem, a transgender national anthem, a cishet national anthem, a non-binary national anthem (or perhaps several), an intersex national anthem, a cloudgender national anthem, a genderqueer national anthem, a gender-fluid national anthem, an agender national anthem, a gender-void national anthem, an omnigender national anthem, a pangender national anthem, an androgyne national anthem, an aporagender national anthem, a demi-boy national anthem, a demi-girl national anthem, a neutrois national anthem, a mekangender national anthem, a maverique national anthem, a lunagender national anthem, a xenogender national anthem, and on and on and on.

To be fair to people with disabilities, we’ll also need an arthritis national anthem, a paraplegia national anthem, a quadriplegia national anthem, a wheelchair national anthem, a hypertension national anthem, an overweight national anthem, an obese national anthem, a pacemaker national anthem, an Alzheimer’s national anthem, a cancer national anthem, a stroke national anthem, an asthma national anthem, a blind national anthem (written down in Braille, of course), a short-sighted national anthem, a far-sighted national anthem, a deaf national anthem, an anemia national anthem, a gastritis national anthem, a cleft-palate national anthem, an emphysema national anthem, a stutterer’s national anthem, a bald national anthem, a schizophrenia national anthem, a bipolar national anthem, an autism national anthem, a dandruff national anthem, a halitosis national anthem, a little people’s national anthem, an anorexia national anthem, an eczema national anthem, and so forth. We also mustn’t forget a national anthem for dead people, as it’s not unusual for at least one person to die at a large sporting event, especially when fans riot.

I see no choice but for our government to create a new cabinet position, the Secretary of National Anthems, whose first job will be to commission the composing of an anthem for each of the thousands of groups into which the country’s population can be subdivided. To avoid categorical appropriation, naturally only a composer who is a member of a given group will be allowed to create the anthem for that group.

I see two ways of dealing with the fact that playing through all the national anthems at a sporting event will take days. One possibility is to cancel the sporting events themselves and turn the playing of all the anthems into very long concerts. If sports fans object to that minor inconvenience, another possibility is to play a modest selection of national anthems—say 20 to 30—at each sporting event. The Secretary of National Anthems would be charged with setting up an elaborately rotating schedule of selections which would ensure each national anthem gets played as many times a year as each other national anthem. The Secretary would also have to commission additional anthems and modify schedules as new categories of identity are discovered, which recent history guarantees they will be.

Why no one else has written about this before me, I have no idea (though it reminds me that we also need an intelligence national anthem). Once a country goes from one national anthem to two, it’s only logical to keep on going down that long and winding road to infinity.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman