Brown and Out…

Although it has been some six months since we left the USA, I did promise a final post before shutting this blog down. Given what has happened in the last six months – in the USA and the UK among others – it would be difficult to part without any comment.

In a brief visit to the USA a couple of weeks ago, to Anaheim for the NAMM Show and to the City of Angels, the mood was sombre: watching the Trump inauguration live on US soil was vomit-provoking enough (and it was interesting how many people I talked to shared a secret wish that the CIA would take him and Pence out during the ceremony but before the swearing in) and staying with the live TV feeds showing the visibly deserted streets around the parade route to the White House has helped me maintain my sanity despite everything the White House machine has attempted to throw at me and the world since that I can’t trust my own eyes.

It is an old adage about hypnotism that a subject can never be hypnotized into doing something they really don’t want to do. They can however be persuaded to do things that their conscious selves would rarely consider or be ashamed to admit to. There has been something hypnotic about the way that Nigel Farage (rhymes with “cabbage” if his pure Englishness claims are to be taken seriously; none of that fancy “Farage, as in barrage” foreign nonsense, if you please) in the UK and Donald Drumpf in the USA managed to tap into people’s worst insecurities and convince them to align with their vile and hateful rhetoric.

It became clear to me early in 2016 that Trump was no outside field no-hoper: a clown, a demagogue, an idiot (in the original sense of the term) certainly but one who – uncomfortably for many – articulated a betrayal of the white working class by “leftie Hollywood liberals”. Trump doesn’t know “shit from Shinola” (thanks to my Carolinian friends for that one) when it comes to the real plight and suffering of the working class but that didn’t stop him exploiting their fears mercilessly and successfully. And the Democrats let him get away with it. Helped him get away with it even.

About a year ago, I had a couple of lunch meetings with some very prominent and brilliant Democrat pollsters and analysts who had “run the numbers” and concluded that there was no way that Trump could win: to paraphrase: “when you look beyond the safe Democrat states, it would be impossible for him to swing so many voters – not enough people are going to vote for him in the swing states. He just can’t do it”. I countered “the safe Democrat states? why wouldn’t they vote for him?” “He’s a nut job, working people aren’t going to vote for a billionaire reality TV star!”. The Democrats strategy was flawed from the get go. It was exacerbated by the decision in October to drop all electoral activity in the supposedly safe states and concentrate on the swing states. Democrat campaigners closed up offices and moved out of their heartland states assuming they were safe.

My growing sense of discomfort strengthened during Spring 2016 with the increasingly nasty EU referendum campaign in the UK, culminating with the horrific murder of Labour MP, Jo Cox, in her own constituency by someone yelling “Britain First” and clearly taking Farage’s hatred as a personal call to action. Many assumed that the outrage would shock the public to its senses rather than seeing it as an isolated individual who could be hypnotized to murder while millions of others were ‘merely’ hypnotized to hate.

Back in the USA, we ended our nearly seven year stint in Los Angeles with a month long trip across the USA by train, taking in 19 states over the course of July and spending plenty of time on those trains talking with fellow passengers. Time after time I heard laments from working people about the state of the nation, the cost of healthcare, how the corporations were buying politicians, how Washington didn’t care – and how Trump would be their guy. No amount of reasoned discussion, presentation of facts, or dialogue would change their convictions, cultivated and strengthened over months if not years by hypnotic rants and fake news. Trump – like Farage – had framed the debate and so everything in the debate was about them. They had already won.

Back to today: will people – in Britain, where Parliament is currently debating whether to pull the trigger on launching the most disastrous and consequential process of disengagement ever; or in the USA, where the first week scorched Earth approach of Bannon is beyond his wildest wet dreams – start to see that they have been hoodwinked?

No. And there are four important reasons why.

“Alternative Facts” aka Lies

It is not that people have honest disagreements about what is and what isn’t true. We are way past such a polite and decorous political landscape. We see now an entire machine dedicated to propagating lies and making them stick. Not only is the sheer volume of made-up nonsense worrying in itself. It is also the methods deployed to make these lies over time become believable and believed. Orwell’s 1984 articulates the process very clearly with “Newspeak” but there is a twist with social media.

If you are unfortunate enough – as I was recently – to challenge one of these propagators of lies online, be ready to be subjected to a barrage of hateful comments as well as private messages either threatening you or appealing to your good moral values. “That’s my Facebook wall post” you are commenting on (it actually wasn’t). Have some respect (I did). Who do think you are muscling in like that? (I commented. If you don’t want people to comment, disable the feature). I’m just a young female student feeling intimidated by your angry comments (“She” isn’t any of those things).

Net result: if you try to address a lie, you will be vilified and in the end you give up. I revisited such a dialogue a few weeks after it had happened (and where, indeed, I had given up after several fairly nasty attacks, public and private) to see the offending poster triumphantly announce to the discussion “You see? He doesn’t have the courage of his convictions. I told you he was a liar”. And so it goes. For evil to triumph it is sufficient that good people do nothing.

Silos

Writing recently in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, columnist Simon Jenkins argues that “post truth politics will be debunked by online facts” and to an extent he is right – although the sheer volume of misinformation and disinformation makes it difficult to always be able to find the accurate and truthful refutation of the nonsense out there. But his analysis fails to take account of one further factor in the age of online news and information distribution.

People are subjected to an ever increasing range and quality of information sources and what they are exposed to is nearly always intermediated by social media services that run algorithms that in turn select content that accords or at least is similar to their views and those of their friends. We prefer to consort and exchange comments online with people with whom we already have an affinity rather than engage in the real world with a person next to us on a bus, tram or train.

The bigger danger is thus a silo mentality in which there is no longer any meaningful, constructive or open discourse in the public domain. Instead we see the “echo chamber” of peer reinforcement and when – and if – we venture beyond our comfort zones, it is to trade increasingly virulent volleys of statements between our silos across a deserted wasteland that used to be the place of informed debate.

“Gaslighting”

More than just a tissue of well-laid lies, gaslighting (from the eponymous play and subsequent films) is a deliberate process of undermining people’s belief in what they know to be facts and true. By continually presenting them with “alternative facts” and backing those lies up with ever more “evidence” to contradict their world view, people over time start to doubt themselves and admit that the other party might “have a point”.

I witnessed this in our summer train trip last year on several occasions in the form “well you say that and it’s what I thought too but I’ve heard so much recently that contradicts it, that today I’m not so sure”.

You may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but it seems you can fool enough that they begin to doubt the truth when presented with it – and that is enough for dangerous political manipulators to take advantage.

“Headfakes”

OK, this term is a new one on me but not the concept: deliberately staking out a position so outrageous that when you concede a little to the rage that follows, you leave the other party with a sense of marginal victory and yet still end up with a position consolidated way more extreme than the initial state. Some have argued (for example here, from whence I also learnt the term) that President Trump’s controversial immigration ban is one such example. “Even green card holders originally from those Muslim countries are banned!”. Massive protest ensues. The White House clarifies that green card holders are exempt. Some people go away thinking that the protesters and civil liberties lobby have won something. They have not. The policy is real. It is an international disgrace. It is probably illegal. It defies UN conventions. It is certainly immoral and definitely unjust.

Taken together we have a potent and toxic cocktail of despotism in the hands of some very unscrupulous characters at the rotten heart of the new administration.

From the comfort of my new home in Belgium it is easy to philosophize about what we should do next, whether in the USA or in Britain and blithely arguing that “there should be a law against this sort of thing” isn’t going to help. What is needed is a much deeper soul searching – particularly on the left where such marketing and propaganda techniques are treated with distaste – and insights into how to respond politically and socially.

Trump: What role did technology play?

This post is not about Twitter, the role of social media, mass media, in the election of Donald Trump.

It is rather – hopefully – a deeper comment about the role that technology plays in our society. Simply put: I believe that our obsession with certain technologies has irretrievably harmed our societies’ ability to act in a civilized manner.

Many of us have our “go to” book or text as a source of comfort in times like this and I am no exception. During the summer and our three-week long train and boat trip – our own “adieu” to the USA after seven years – I re-read what I still consider a masterpiece of social commentary, Neil Postman’s “Technopoly”. Although written in pre-Internet times it is a powerful, readable and often amusing critique of the dangers of – to put no finer point on it – technology worship.

A central thesis – if I have to give a potted summary (please go read the damned book – he is far more eloquent than me) – is that human civilization depends on conversation and that the nature of the conversation is shared by the technologies we use.

In ancient, oral cultures wisdom, morals, ethics, and justice were passed down by elders through storytelling and ritual: if all you have is the spoken word, then that technology shapes what is transmitted. Later – from the Old Testament forward – the core tenets of society are captured on tablets of stone: if that is the technology available to you, it will shape how you transmit those conversations (I’m guessing that stone tablets were expensive but oral conversation was still cheap given the vast interpretations over the centuries of a small set of ground rules. I digress…)

The Enlightenment was driven by the spread of the written word: the technology of the printing press made Holy scripts easily available alongside the vernacular and critical texts.

Fast forward to today, a future that even someone as visionary as Postman might have found difficult to fathom, and we can see that today’s conversations – about politics, law, ethics, culture, Brexit or Trump – are in turn shaped by the technologies that convey them: in this case, the 160 character limit of the Tweet.

This may seem pretty obvious when laid out like this but let’s spell it out: if the entirely of your political dialogue is conducted over the limiting media of Twitter and Facebook, then you are not going to say anything very substantial, you need to be curt and attention-grabbing; preferably, spicy or controversial; and build up a mass following of shallow commitment.

The technologies of the Internet have spawned this generation of demagogues – or at least given them the valuable oxygen that would have been denied them in other eras. Just as television changed the nature of what constitutes a “political debate” – reducing lucid and penetrating exchanges to the hard-hitting soundbite.

While not condoning the obscurantism and fetishism of religion, churches and church leaders over the millennia provided a structure and method for capturing, conveying and perpetuating the morals and ethics of a society. That role of religion has not been replaced by anything as strong – instead we idolize the superficial and easy to digest; we enable those who insist “don’t tell me how to behave”; we pretend that anyone can be anything – including US President – and then don’t provide any soft-landings for the disillusioned.

In such circumstances it is no surprise that the 2016 monsters of Brexit and Trump have been born.

It is only a surprise that it has taken so long and that we have so complacently allowed technology – in its widest sense – to dictate so much about how our societies should function.

I will be exploring these themes – around how we govern (or rather fail to govern) the technologies we use and, most importantly, the steps we can take to regain control of human conversation and our most precious values – in a new blog to be launched in the coming weeks.

Why I will be supporting Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s new leader

I was asked by a friend this morning whether I would be willing to serve under a Corbyn administration. I immediately responded, “Yes”. Then came the pregnant pause.

I was taken aback: why was I even asked this question? At least that bit was quickly cleared up, divided as the Americans and Brits are by a common language: Although on long-term leave from my main career post, I am still an “official of the European Parliament”. “Official” here in the US means “senior member of the administration”. You know, like Kerry, Biden, etc. So, no, I am not a senior minister in the European government – and this explains my friend’s idea that I might go back and continue to serve in another capacity – so thank you for thinking of me that way.

My (US) friend was visibly taken aback: for her, any sort of socialist was akin to the devil incarnate…but a “left wing” one just doesn’t compute. Major cognitive dissonance looking at this friendly middle-aged guy she’s known for some time.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour Party (Photo: Garry Knight, Flickr)

So, back to Corbyn – and let’s get the melodrama out of the way: he won by a landslide; there are many egos in tatters with tantrums under way or to follow; many – including myself – feel that we belong once again to the party we love; others that we’ve turned the clock back… I’m not going to rehash the arguments.

Yesterday, I was on a call with fellow alumni of the Aspen Institute and we talked a little about a post that was shared with the group and which, for me, sums up a core conundrum for the ‘soft left’ and the whole ‘New Labour’ project in particular: is it OK to uphold (or at best, pretend and ignore) the current very unequal societies in which we live, just as long as our hearts are pure and that we “give back” to the community and the people or – as Anand Giridharadas argued – should we push for a society where we take less away in the first place?

I have felt uncomfortable – ever since the first Blair schmoozes with Rupert Murdoch – that the Labour Party has been far too accommodating to the super-rich. To shift the debate, as Corbyn has done successfully, and argue that this very privileged minority really has to learn to stop taking so much out of society (tax avoidance and evasion, shell and offshore companies – you know the score) and not continually bleat about how much they really, really give back (often in tax-deductible charitable contributions. Pause here: when it’s ‘tax-deductible, it means you are giving to your favourite pet project and taking it out of the public purse. Remember that). I earn well, and would consider myself comfortably off; I pay all the taxes I should and only make tax-deductible contributions to public education institutions. And yet I could come up with a dozen wheezes to cheat the public purse and pocket more. So why don’t I? In a word: Values.

Amidst all the turmoil in the Labour leadership election, I noticed how attuned I have been to the role of “core values”. I was a Labour Party member since 1976 but grew more disenchanted and distant in the last decade during the years of Tony Blair’s leadership and what followed. The party has seemed to be in crisis – not least following the electoral drubbing they faced last May and which seemed to have caught them unawares. In the leadership election (itself precipitated by the resignation of Ed Miliband as Labour leader in the first salvo of shots fired after the general election. Pause again: what does this say about leadership when you throw in the towel at the first major setback?).

An “old guard left-winger” outsider Jeremy Corbyn, stood in stark contrast to the other three leadership contenders, all very solidly “New Labour” mould figures. Back in the early 80s when I worked closely with and for the party, I had – and still have – fundamental differences with Jeremy on major issues of policy (mainly in international affairs) and considered him untrustworthy and unpredictable. During the last months however, I noticed how much one single question kept coming to mind in evaluating the four candidates: “What are their core values?”. Which begs other questions: “what do they actually believe in?”; “what makes them tick?”; “how will they respond to an unknown situation?”; “what will they throw out under pressure or when forced to compromise?”.

I was surprised, despite my initial hostility to him, to realise that he appeared to me as the only candidate who seemed to have a coherent set of values – even if I didn’t share some of them – and whose every pronouncement on issues of policy, who to work with, etc. seem firmly grounded in those values. I am left with no such impression of the other three: I really don’t know what any of them believe in. To hear their reactions today, I still don’t (except a regret to be beyond the grasp of the reign of power). To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they “know the price of everything but the value of nothing”. In the end I am left feeling more comfortable with a candidate whose values I do not necessarily share but who seems more firmly grounded in them than any of the others. And that is why I was involved in politics: values not policies.

The challenge that Corbyn now faces is, having in some ways won a “war of position”, capturing the hearts and minds of many, can he now win the necessary “war of manoeuvre” (come on, you know your political theory, right? No? Here’s a primer) Will he command the authority to win over the apparatus of the party and, if elected to office, be able to take firm control of the levers of political power?

That last point is still problematic, particularly in the mindset of an “old-leftie” like Jeremy: and that is to recognize that the “levers of power” sometimes aren’t connected to anything anymore. The nation state, as a construct of the early 19th century, remains a popular instrument for the 19th and 20th century left. But the Left has often been blind-sided by the fact that the power of the European nation state has been steadily bleeding away: not just to international finance capital (and on which, I have no disagreement with Jeremy); sideways to civil society; downwards to local and regional government; but also upwards to international and, increasingly, European institutions (and generally a force for good). On this last point, Jeremy has been less convincing and he has been part of a leftwing tradition in British politics that has been, to put it bluntly, “little Englander” in its outlook and hostility particularly towards the EU.

If these issues are addressed honestly and Jeremy steps away from the shouty oppositionalists (and he has certainly carried himself with great dignity in the last months) and instead embraces the style of politics he has been espousing – with an open, collective leadership – while displaying a firm commitment to his core values then, yes, I would happily serve.

The politics of hypocrisy

To abuse the famous quotation of astronomer Arthur Eddington, Not only is party political funding in the US stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine…

Take the case of South Carolina, where a long time friend and colleague, Phil Noble, is standing for the position of Chair of the South Carolina Democrats, a party in desperate need of hope, vision and a new way forward.

The current front-runner for the post, to be decided at the State party’s convention at the end of the month, is a former chair and party machine insider, Dick Harpootlian. Phil, on the other hand, represents and reflects the grass-roots disaffection of a state party that seems to have lost touch with its base, lost touch with reality and lost any sense of purpose of hope for Democrats in South Carolina, as I witnessed first hand a few weeks back when touring the state myself.

It comes therefore as something of a shock (that’s my English “art of understatement” at work, by the way) to learn that this front-runner for the position to lead the Democratic Party is actually a serial contributor to…the Republicans!

Yes, a senior Democrat finds it normal to fund the campaigns and work of his opponents, including those on the obnoxious right-wing of the GOP.

As I have shared with Phil, anywhere in Europe, you can expect to be expelled from your party for this sort of behaviour.

How can a man who does this have any credibility or personal honour? If he does this before standing for election to the Party Chair, what would he do once elected? Perish the thought. How can anyone be expected to trust the Democrats if their elected leader is filling the GOP coffers? The man has to go, surely…

Obama’s courageous move on taxes

Interesting to see the speed with which the Wall Street establishment is already fighting back against Obama’s proposed tax reforms – WSJ claptrap about “Soak the Rich Taxes won’t work” only masks the reality that the rich don’t pay taxes in the USA – it’s always some other poor bugger picking up the tab. And never any mention of the indirect tax cuts that come of depriving the public purse from tax revenues that are lost through writeoffs and exemptions, that wealthy people and corporations have always used in order to fund private education, religion, corporate sponsorship and donations to political parties…

We’re all Yankees now

Typical plantation house in South Carolina

Just back from a short trip out to The Carolinas and particularly a wonderful weekend in the company of ‘New Democrat’ Phil Noble in his home base in Charleston, South Carolina.

On this 150th Anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War – with the opening shots on Fort Sumter only a mile away from where we were standing a few days ago – it is interesting to see how some of the secessionist ambitions of the South live on still today, if heavily distorted by some self-righteous tub-thimping from the extreme right.

It’s not so much the likes of the Daughters of the Confederacy or the Sons of Confederate Veterans that bother me – a revisionist lot with some ugly successes to their names but more recently reduced to the sidelines of quaint peculiarity – but the fact that the noisy and media-attention seeking Tea Party of today and many of its supporters still look for inspiration to the Civil War as a lodestone for their odious policies.

As the Washington Post reported recently and others have commented upon, some see the current battles between the ‘evil’ federal government and the rights of ciziens as a re-enactment of the battle lines of 150 years ago. Conservative revisionists continue to claim that the civil war was just a struggle against big government. The Tea Party is playing on the nostalgia of the Civil War to promote the idea that they are simply maintaining a tradition of opposition to big government.

Presumably that would be the big government, who after the Yankee north defeated the southern secessionists, still had to impose martial law to ensure that the southern states implement and comply with those ‘terrible impositions’ such as the abolition of slavery and freedom and equality of all before the law?

Yes, sometimes federal governments have to reign in the excesses of some; act as a stabilizer against excessive inequality and greed; promote policies and actions that can’t possibly be handled at a state or local level; and promote and maintain the coherence of the Union as a whole. For the Tea Party to hark back to the Civil War and denounce everything that the federal government does puts them clearly on the side of the losing Confederates and in the same camp as those who would, still today, probably uphold slavery as a virtue and inequality as an objective in public policy.

It’s always easier to hark back to an older age and, aided with rose-tinted spectacles, believe that it was all better then – easier than having to grow up and face the realities of the decade and tackle them with honesty and imagination, whether dealing with mass unemployment alongside obscene pay and bonuses for an unelected few pirates of industry; health care denied or restricted to many despite often paying more, proportionately, to the public purse than others with clever accountants and tax deductions.

The Civil War was about slavery and injustice, not a popular battle against big government. If the Tea Party wants to draw the battle lines so – then we should be prepared to declare that we’re all Yankees now…

Where to start? Driving

Finding a simple theme with which to start our comparisons, between Europe and the USA on this blog, has not been as easy as I initially thought: “Even the longest march starts with a single step…” – yes, I know, I know… but it is another analogy that comes to mind: once, when lost in the south of Dublin, I asked an old local man for directions. After a pause, he replied cautiously, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here”.

That’s how I feel about this blog, I’m still looking for a “proper” starting point – but it ain’t gonna happen, so let’s just go…

Driving – you can easily spot a European driver on the back roads of Los Angeles. They make clean, crisp manouevres, accelerate and decelerate rapidly, keep to the inside lanes and overtake on the outside. I’m not claiming they are better or safer drivers but there is major culture clash when you compare with driving styles of the locals: slow to move off from a stop, weaving between lanes without indicating, very difficult to ‘read’, to understand and anticipate their next moves.

Driving in Los Angeles is not (just) about getting from A to B. Whether it is the hellish commute to and from downtown if that’s where you work; a trip down to the ‘local’ shopping mall (more about different ideas of ‘local’ in another post); or a 10-hour drive to friends or family elsewhere in the state or beyond, driving is a leisure pursuit. It’s about enjoying the trip, driving in comfort and feeling at home, almost literally.

It still shocks me, whilst evincing nothing more than a raised eyebrow to a local, to look over in traffic and see drivers (and I mean drivers in moving traffic, not ‘passengers’ – themselves a rarity – more on that too…): on the phone (common), drinking coffee (common), texting, reading a newspaper, even watching videos on their cherished iPads (all scarily above statistically insignificant).

In Europe any of these would be deadly and here the authorities are certainly stern with anyone caught transgressing but it seems to matter less because everyone drives so slowly, badly and cautiously, that the chances of disaster are much reduced. A young woman busy texting misses a junction, crosses four lanes of cross traffic on a red light and narrowly misses a crash barrier? Sure, it happens, get over it – everyone sees it coming and gives way. The alternative is to ‘get involved’, a crime in itself.

In Europe, I’d probably be minded to teach the idiot a lesson and let her crash into me and have fun seeing her lose her license and pay through the nose for insurance costs and future premiums. It just doesn’t happen like that here. Not only is it generally a risk-averse culture but you just don’t know what or who you are up against: money (and there is a lot of it in L.A.) buys good lawyers; and good lawyers get things moving in your favour. You never know if it’s a poor airhead or Paris Hilton (OK, or both, there’s probably a fair Venn overlap there) behind the wheel in front so better to avoid confrontation at all costs.Never mind that they might be ‘packing’ and in a mean, ugly, mood and looking for a smarmy bloody Englishman upon whom to vent their spleen….

In Europe, driving is just something you put up with, in order to get from A to B. Here, from coffee cup holders, decent in-car entertainment, good sound insulation from the outside world, soft suspension to handle the dreadful state of the roads (yes, I’ll have to write about infrastructure shocks too..), the ubiquitous automatic transmission (one foot driving, lazy start and stop adding to the languid approach), cruise control (no feet and half a hand driving), to the latest technology – automatic lane keeping assist “for those moments when you nod off or lose concentration”, I kid not – everything is designed for you to think of your car as your home from home. It’s meant to be fun, it is about the journey. People move seamlessly from home to car to office to car to lunch to car to office to car to market to car to home. It is possible to pass days, weeks, of your life without being touched by the real world. The last thing you want is for the real world to impinge on your journey, because ever-so-slightly worse than having to deal with the LAPD (who have probably heard and seen it all, so their famous cynicism and short temper are certainly understandable if not also justified) would be to have the hassle of dealing with insurance brokers, lawyers and court hearings following a prang. So avoid at all costs.

And….well, confession time. Like the new AA member, I have to confess “My name’s Peter and I don’t drive a car”. Admitting that you have a problem is said to be the first step to recovery but I’ve been very lucky in not having had to face my “problem”, living in a sweet spot between good residential area, lots of shops and biking distance from the beach, has meant that I’ve been able to survive, even enjoy for goodness sakes, living here without a car. In a city where there are more cars than people, it puts me somewhere in amongst very marginal minority groups of the desperately poor, slightly batty, idiosyncratic or English ex-patriots (Choose one). The geo-social reality is that without a car in LA, you are very limited in mobility. The low-rise urban sprawl here has no parallel in Europe and, together with a below-par public transport infrastructure, means that getting around outside your ‘local’ neighbourhood is a big deal without wheels…

Upcoming themes on ‘Brown In The USA’

Tonia and I are going through a whole series of themes that we want to cover in the coming weeks, including: “City of Light”, different points of view about the Weather, Advertising, Cars, Sports fanatics, Walking vs ‘Hiking’, Driving, Shopping, Service, Nature, Entertainment, the ‘Industry’, Stardom and Anonymity, and the tough decisions such as ‘Paper or Plastic?’

Tune in again soon…

Brown in the USA, the site is up

After exactly a year in the USA, I finally got around to setting up a family blog – our idea is to comment on anything and everything that contrasts between life in the U.S.A. and life in Europe – from politics, work, culture, habits, quirks, fashion, food, weather.

We also want friends and family to ask questions and comment on our notes.

In the meantime, back to Bruce…