"Frank Zappa once said 'the world is rudderless.' I like yours SO MUCH better."

Said RideSpaceMountain, about my phrase "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots," in the comments to this post about the outsider artist Lee Godie. 

I'd wanted to embed a trailer for a documentary about the artist, and the Vimeo page gave me the HTML code, but then, on publication, it wouldn't display, and there was a reference to some privacy policy. I said: "That seems so out of keeping with the spirit of the artist, so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots." 

I was just putting up this new post — because I want to encourage the world to adopt the line, "there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — when RideSpaceMountain re-commented: "Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no[t] Zappa." 

I was torn! I do want to popularize the expression there's "a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots" — and not just because I want to be famous but because I think it might be helpful to think in those terms. It's not that everything everywhere is screwed up and everyone is stupid, a very pessimistic view, but that maybe there's a specific problem somewhere, and maybe just one or 2 idiots. That's actually optimistic!

But maybe this isn't bloggable without the folk hero Zappa. Better than Zappa! What an accolade! And who's Alan Moore? That's quite a plunge, from the Maunaloaesque height of Zappa to whoever this Alan Moore character is. Okay, I looked it up. Maybe he means a lot to you. Maybe better than Alan Moore is bloggable. Sorry, I don't read that sort of comic book (though I am a big fan of a certain sort of comic book).

I'm glad Frank Zappa isn't the source of the quote "the world is rudderless." I just don't imagine Zappa going in for the metaphor the world is a boat. And, Frankly, if the world were a boat, I'd want it to be rudderless — like Noah's ark — because who wants the whole world with a destination and all of us stuck going there?

ADDED: I looked to see whether Frank Zappa had ever used a ship or boat in his lyrics. The answer — if I can trust Genius.com with the lyrics of the lyricist often called a Genius — no. 

On my search for "boat," Genius, apparently grasping at straws, served up things with "beat" (or, desperately, "botulism"):

I clicked through to "Beatles Medley" and read the lyrics while listening on Spotify:

Jim... once had a girl, or should we say, she once had he 

She... showed him her room, isn't it swell, Texas Motel...

Ha ha. Very funny. Speaking of The Beatles, Meade said, "We all live in a rudderless submarine."

Yes, The Beatles had the idea of the world as a sea-going vessel, and they liked it.Isn't it wonderful?

 

I'm seeing a rudder though... and I know that thing had a destination, Pepperland... if you can ever get past the Foothills of the Headlands and the Sea of Holes.

"I don't want to touch an object," I found myself saying, socially distancingly.

The sun was rising, and 3 young women...



... had asked me if I'd take a picture of them — the kind of request I've always happily agreed to. And here I was being stand-offish, in the manner of a person with OCD because they wanted to hand me their phone. It's covid19world, and we're all OCD now, so I couldn't go along with that, and I knew they'd understand. Actually, they'd probably have understood in pre-covid19world and simply regarded me as a person with a disability to be treated with empathy.

But in  pre-covid19world,  covid19world, and  post-covid19world, there is a solution to the problem of not wanting to touch the other person's phone. You don't need to refuse the lovely social opportunity to take someone's picture for them. It's AirDrop. Take a photograph on your own iPhone and AirDrop it to their phone. You just have to remember, and fortunately I did.

It was nice to encounter some young people, up for a 5:40 sunrise, experiencing our strange time with optimism. Nothing more optimistic than a sunrise.

The walk back from the vantage point had the sun at our back and the fading Flower Moon up ahead. I always love when Meade sings. He began "When the moon...." but it wasn't the "When the moon" song that I thought it was. There are at least 3 well-known songs that begin "When the moon...." Which is the first one that you think of? Two are optimistic but they take entirely different paths of optimism. The other one is sad. I don't know why the sad one is the one I thought of, such a sad old Depression-Era song...

"President Trump has taken historic, aggressive measures to protect the health, wealth and safety of the American people — and did so, while the media and Democrats chose to only focus on the stupid politics of a sham illegitimate impeachment."

"It’s more than disgusting, despicable and disgraceful for cowardly unnamed sources to attempt to rewrite history — it’s a clear threat to this great country."

Said a White House spokesman statement, quoted in The Washington Post, which sought a response for its article, "U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic." From the article, published last night:

The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take.... But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak....

But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month....

To be fair, "lawmakers" were very preoccupied with the impeachment of the President.

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president. [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials....

On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus, according to people briefed on the meeting Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings....

Just so you know the timeline: Trump was caught up in an impeachment trial and was not acquitted until February 5th. He had the obligation to perform all his duties as President while dealing with the impeachment, but it sounds as though the White House was working on the virus throughout January, whether Trump did personal meetings with Azar or not.

WaPo quotes some of Trump's early public statements about the virus, and, indeed, he did express optimism. He's still doing optimism. How that correlates to serious protective action for us is another matter.

And here's a WaPo article from January 21st, 11 days before the aquittal: "Trump administration announces mandatory quarantines in response to coronavirus."

The White House declared a “public health emergency” and — beginning on Sunday at 5 p.m. — will bar non-U.S. citizens who recently visited China from entering the United States, subject to a few exemptions.... Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar also said the Trump administration would quarantine any Americans who had visited China’s Hubei province, where the disease originated, within the past 14 days....

President Trump so far has remained uncharacteristically muted on the coronavirus and praised China’s extraordinary response to the growing outbreak. On Wednesday, he tweeted photos of his Situation Room briefing and said his administration was working closely with China to contain the outbreak....

That happened at a time when the World Health Organization was recommending that there be no travel restrictions.