Short and To The Point Ran Out Of Time
Why ask for an extension when you can just do a bad job in a timely manner?
So, I’ll admit that I had a long thing half written about bad art friend and then life and parenting happened, so instead of a long rambling bit of nonsense, you get a slightly more fun newsletter instead. Also, you probably get typos. It’s late and I’m not checking.
This Week in Our Dumb World
Deportation For Crimes of Moral Turpitude
One of the quotes that I find myself returning to most often is “The past is never dead. It's not even past”. I find it comes up a lot in ways personal, cultural, and political and so it becomes something that I tend to sit with often.
One of the reasons that I find it so important to remember is because it’s very easy to examine the ways that our society has progressed and forget just how close we sit to the worst and most insidious kind of bigotry. Reading this story of how the government spent years trying to deport Pat Patterson because he was gay is shocking when you think of the world as it is. It feels utterly divorced from Modern America.
It’s not even one generation into the past. It’s remarkable how we have come. It’s important to remember that every inch of progress is still being contested because the people who did this are hardly gone from our midst.
The documents in Patterson’s INS file aren’t 100 percent clear on the impetus for the investigation into his personal life. But an April 14, 1965 summary of witness interviews points to what appear to be the likely flash points — one of which was an investigation of the local gay community by the Portland Police Department’s morals squad. “The reports relate to an investigation conducted by Portland Police Department morals officers at homosexual parties in Portland,” the document reads. “These reports mention a wrestler named ‘PRETTY BOY JACKSON.’ Also included in the reports were the names of persons who were considered victims, witnesses or defendants. Two of the defendants named in the reports: [redacted] and [redacted] are presently serving sentences at Oregon State Penitentiary for conviction on charges of sodomy. Several other persons, known homosexuals, were also mentioned in the police reports.”
The same document also alludes to the fact that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation was looking into a different wrestler — an Air Force veteran whose name was redacted — “to determine whether he is actually a homosexual and therefore subject to discharge from the air force.” This Air Force investigation is the most likely direct catalyst for the investigation into Patterson, as his name first came up in it just five days before the Portland INS Office requested his file from the central office in Washington, D.C.
After dispensing with the PPD and Air Force information, the aforementioned document delves into the interviews with various “Portland area homosexuals” about Patterson. Many of the details are mundane: One witness, who had “held ‘gay’ parties at his home” that Patterson and Dondero attended, “said he had never actually seen the SUBJECT engaging in homosexual activities with other persons at the parties” and that “the SUBJECT’S actions’ at the parties were the same as any other gay person.” The same witness also alleged that Patterson regularly picked up street hustlers, with the report repeatedly referring to them as “young boys.” (Given the time, context and different uses of the term “boy” in the gay community, as well as a lack of any kind of age range being given, it’s best not to take that phrasing too literally.)
As Significant As The Personal Computer
I remember the first time that I ever saw someone riding a Segway. It was in Washington, DC about 2002. I can’t imagine how confusing it was to see the first bicycle. To see someone riding one of those ludicrous contraptions with the giant front wheel.
I refuse to believe that they were significantly more confused than I was watching that person zip along.
It remains very silly (and now out of production) and it was doubly silly when people pumped it up by talking about how it would replace walking. But, on balance, it’s amazing how common place it became while looking absolutely ridiculous.
The story of the product launch remains absolutely fascinating.
He had another great story, one no one could scoop him on. It was about an inventor named Dean Kamen, who had made his name by inventing the drug infusion pump and the first portable dialysis machine. He was a millionaire many times over, lived in a mansion in New Hampshire, and had his own private island. Now he had come up with his greatest invention yet.
Steve had once written a profile of Kamen, and recently Kamen had invited Steve up to the Manchester headquarters of his R&D company, DEKA—for DEan KAmen—telling him, “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on.”
Now, as Rafe and I listened, Steve told us that the new technology was absolutely revolutionary. “This invention is going to change the world,” he said, his voice crackling over the speaker from his house in Connecticut. He was a mild-mannered guy, generally, but he was fervent about this. “I have complete access to the whole thing. The engineers, the designers, Dean.”
“OK, well, what is the invention?” Rafe asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Steve said.
Rafe looked up at me, eyebrows raised. “Well, how do you expect us to get you a book deal?” he said.
The Story of Civilization (VI)
There is a feature on modern video game platforms that will casually inform you of how many hours you have spent playing a particular game.
I absolutely despise this feature because it consistently makes me feel bad about myself.
I am grateful that it does not exist on any system where I have played the various Civilization video games because it would move from “bummer” to “life horror” if I saw my cumulative hours on these games over the years.
They are always fun and always evolving in ways that make them challenging and interesting. I will admit that the latest update isn’t my favorite because it makes it much harder to win the planet via military conquest, but that probably says more bad things about me.
It’s fascinating to read about how the ongoing development of the game is a constant battle between lofty goals and the reasonable limits of being a video game.
The game unfolds in a manner that echoes the Enlightenment-era belief in progress as a universal rule, as well as the Darwinian notion that societies, like species, evolved from states of simplicity to greater levels of complexity and sophistication. But the idea that history is the story of progress is not the only or even the most natural way of conceiving time. That optimistic view is on the wane now, with climate change increasingly changing the way we think about our present and future. Elsewhere and in other periods, people have understood time as a descent (a decline from a prior period of grandeur), a wave (the rise and fall of dynasties), as cyclical (a sequence of ages), and as a spiral (Hegelian dialectics). Civilization assumes that time is simply an arrow, pushing ever onwards.
Academic critics (the game has quite a few) have pounced on Civilization’s adherence to Darwinian understandings of history. According to the Polish anthropologist Kacper Poblocki, grounding the mechanics of the game in “nineteenth-century models of natural history is not adequate to explore contingencies of human history.” In other words, how can the game truly allow us to “rewrite history” if it so firmly reproduces a particular vision of the past?
In fairness to Meier, this principle may be less ideological than practical. “We toyed with a ‘rise and fall’ model in which players deal with a calamity that sets their civilization back,” he said. “But we found that players often just reloaded the saved game, and so the option was scrapped. Being able to observe and enjoy your progress is fundamental to gameplay.”
A Typical Friday In Oregon
This says it’s satire, but I don’t see what it’s satirizing as this is a fully accurate description of living in the Pacific Northwest.
I live and work in Portland, the only habitable city in the entire state. Portland is located somewhere in the middle of Oregon. It’s also our state capital, houses the University of Oregon’s nationally recognized football program, and has a population of anywhere from thirty thousand to two million people. From my office, I can see Canada and California at the same time.
I work for a company that makes beer taste like pine needles that have been soaking in a vat of apple cider vinegar for thirty years. Our logo is a Sasquatch wearing a trucker hat. I make $40,000 per year, but fortunately, Portland is super affordable probably.
On my lunch break, my coworkers and I swap stories about the biggest blisters we ever got while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. My coworker Sunshine is kind enough to share her bag of organic bark mulch with me, as I accidentally left my alfalfa sprout and tempeh wrap at home. I feed my pocket granola to some feral beavers in the parking lot.
List of National Mottos
This is a good reminder that all nations are fundamentally silly and ridiculous. They also can’t do better than your average instagram meme.
Also, Andorra and Angola have the same motto and I want to know who cheated off of who.