No, really, it’s good that the young and idealistic get to shame everyone on Twitter for clinging to their old pathetic ideas of freedom. A lot of your day is spent gesturing and laughing - you know, the broad sweep to indicate the follies of the day. But it’s good for everyone when we can point and laugh. Sharpens the mind!
Why. Are. There. So. Many. THINGS.
The advantages of having many kinds of peanut butter are numerous. Price point, nut-fragment studded or not, honey flavored, or the natural stuff you have to stir to disperse the oils. It takes a person who does not care for peanut butter to put on his best John Lennon dreamy squint and imagine a world in which there is but one.
Pasta sauce is different. Again, one can infer the author is not a fan of pasta sauce, or perhaps has a palate with the sophistication of a leather stop. There are many types of pasta sauce, each appealing to difference preferences, and each within a range of prices. Which one would we end up with? Marinara? Peppers and Onions with chunky tomatoes? Arrabiatta?
Who gets to choose?
Why the people, I suppose. Not based on sales - those are the results of mind-control commercial algorithms - but probably based on a decree from the People’s State Sauce Selection Committee, or PSSSC, which, since it embodies the will of the people by virtue of being a manifestation of a collectivist state, cannot make incorrect decisions.
Some of the people on the Committee will be earnest and true, and seek the best Sole Sauce for the masses, but will be stymied by a splitter, some wrecker who deserves to end up in Cuba with an ice axe in his stupid brain. This one insists there should be two sauces, a red, and a white. This does not imply the potential for an anti-social brain-taxing Choice Struggle, but recognizes the reality of two coexisting sauce paradigms.
Thus the Alfredo Question arises, and splits the committee until it is agreed that Alfredo will be allowed to be made, but it will not be called Pasta Sauce, but Pasta Thick Liquid. (By this time the matter is irrelevant, since the Alfredo division of all factories had been shut down in anticipation of making the one permitted red variety.)
As soon as this matter has been settled and the appropriate laws and regulations formulated for approval by the central committee, a member of the PSSSC calls an emergency meeting. His face is drawn and gray.
“Comradx,” xhe says, “in our haste to serve the people, we have forgotten one thing.” Xhe pauses. “Pesto.”
Chaos erupts. When the room calms down the matter is discussed, and it is agreed that they will not make another category, but simply ignore the existence of Pesto in all official minutes and pronouncements. They will add “pesto” to the list of proscribed ideas, however, so if anyone is caught with pesto, or making pesto, or extolling the virtues of pesto, they will be charged with anti-state activities, and since pesto does not technically exist in the PSSSC statutes, the insistence that pesto is an actual substance will be seen as a symptom of mental illness, and the accused shall be sent to a hospital for an indefinite period.
Yes, we might give up Honey Nut Peanut Butter. Yes, we might give up Vodka Sauce. But look what we gain!
The mindspace to wonder "what person shall I become?"
Right now it works like this: I go to the store. I have in my head the quantity and variety of pasta sauces I already have. HOARDER! YOU GATHER UNTO YOUR SELFISH BREAST THE SAUCE, WHILE OTHERS HAVE NONE! I don’t know how to tell you this, but just because I have one red, one white, one pesto, and maaaaybe one red pesto I forgot about - well, this doesn’t mean that someone else has been deprived of sauce. That is why we contribute to food bank charities. May I continue?
I scan what’s on sale, but that’s not the only qualification. Some brands are off the table because they have too much sugar. Some lack good robust flavor. The house brands can be quite good, and inexpensive. I might pick up a white if I’m on the fence about whether we have any, and whether I’m thinking chicken this week instead of sausage.
It all takes about 30 seconds.
But I could be spending those 30 seconds thinking about who I might be.
I have bad news for people who need more time to think about who they might be: they’re already that person. They need some time to think about how they might be someone less insufferable.
Who I might be. Presumably, the tweeter means someone better. Someone more elevated. Someone attuned to the world and its needs, or someone whose consciousness is more developed, and can fight off mind-controlling commercial algorithms that pass as the illusion of choice.
Posts like these get lots of “engagement,” as we used to call throwing rotten vegetables at people in the stocks, but if the ratio tips the wrong way, the poster retreats to his garret and contemplates the fate of all truth tellers.
This is a bit broad, I think. If you say “what if we could all defecate on the bus instead of holding it until we got home,” you would not be punished because you’d questioned the status quo. You’d be ridiculed for making everything demonstrably worse. If you said “what if we dismantled the entire public school system in favor of a voucher program that let students attend accredited learning institutes of their choice?” you’d be cheered by the people who think things could be different, and criticized by people who do not want a paradigm shift.
But it’s more fun to draw yourself up into your cloak and turn off the lights and stare out the windows at the rooftops, and wonder if the knaves will run the show forever.
The most telling thing about truth-tellers like our rat limiter: they assume we don’t think about the person we might become, because we are frozen in the peanut butter aisle like golems, waiting for the acolytes of degrowth to animate us with the heady revelations of what we might be, given the space to contemplate.
It also never occurs to them that what we might want to be is an independent artisanal pasta-sauce vendor.
It’s 1955.
RED CHINESE.
The story doesn’t say why they were held, which seems to be important, no? Missionaries? Secret agents? Lost tourists? What?
As opposed to Jackie, I guess.
James Austin Gleason (May 23, 1882 – April 12, 1959) was an American actor, playwright and screenwriter born in New York City. Gleason often portrayed "tough-talking, world-weary guys with a secret heart-of-gold.”
Long-time Bleatniks know him: “He starred in two movie series, playing police inspector Oscar Piper in six Hildegarde Withers mystery films during the 1930s, starting with The Penguin Pool Murder."
Well whoopty-whoopty fargin’ doo:
I do appreciate the way they assured us that the # of people who boarded and deplaned balanced out.
Patriotic news for young Americans:
Okay, can we find him? The name pops up in this “Korean War remembrance project.” Obviously he was too young to be in the war, but he remembers a soldier who “would jokingly 'threaten' to cut our ears off when we came into the little store run by your parents. I'm devoting a chapter in my book to you. (Signed,) Rusty Fine”
The soldier was buried in Centerville, so that checks out.
We have a letter written by his brother, a CNN cameraman, to Congressman Henry Hyde, asking if Hyde could persuade Ronald Reagan to give his father - a Carterville doctor - a plaque or award.
It contains a bio of the father.
Rusty appears in google searches as a kind commenter on obit pages, and one of them lists him as “Dr. Fine.” It also says he goes by Russ Fine, no Philip in the entry. Well, that should help.
Area natives Russ and Dee Fine have made every effort to pack three or more lifetimes into one grand, on-going adventure. Since eloping more than fifty years ago, after a half-dozen dates spread out over as many months, they’ve lived in Columbia, Missouri, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Chicago and Springfield. IL and Birmingham, Alabama where they’ve made their home for the past forty-one years, raised two sons, have two grandsons and most recently their first great grandchild.
Good for them! Anything else? Dee Fine did some public service, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
For her public and government service which spanned the 70’s and 80’s, in 1984 she was named the first ever female recipient of a prestigious Alabama organization’s Man of The Year Award. Subsequently, Paul Finebaum, a nationally syndicated sports radio and television personality recommended Dee and a “somewhat reluctant” Russ to a heritage Birmingham radio station as talk show hosts,
What?
where they began a successful twenty-year run on Birmingham-based radio which included a five-year long morning drive time radio-TV simulcast on Alabama’s largest CBS-TV affiliate.
Well.
Throughout their entire broadcast career, Russ continued to lead a “double-life,” pursuing the profession for which he was originally trained and recruited in 1974, serving on the University of Alabama School of Medicine faculty, where he remains today, forty-one years later, as Professor Emeritus of Medicine, in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology. His spinal cord, head injury and injury biomechanics research has resulted in over 100 published scientific articles and book chapters in addition to bringing nearly $50 million to UAB.
Holy jeezum crow.
In 1992, Russ and Dee were the subjects of the highly acclaimed, Emmy- nominated CBS Sunday Night television movie, “The Switch” starring Craig T. Nelson as Russ, Beverly D’Angelo as Dee; and, Gary Cole as a catastrophically injured quadriplegic who sought Russ’ help to end his life.
Okay, this can’t be the same guy.
Russ is the son of longtime area physician the late Dr. Herbert and Esther Fine of Carterville, IL.
Ayup. One more thing:
A reminder - subscribing to the Substack is an easy way to support the site and your host, and get EVEN MORE STUFF. Wednesday is mostly for subscribers. And I repeat my solemn promise to you: The Bleat will never suffer because I'm shoveling stuff to the Substack.
This one was an unexpected ride, and I was delighted where it went.
That'll do. Next for you: a reminder that nothing ever really ends here at lileks.com. There's always an update to everything. Here we stretch back many years to complete the in-house industry mag highlights of Chain Store Age.
