Sunday Sundries, 278

1. HBsOTW: The Human Beings of the Week--not too hard to select in these COVID days: all those delivery people I see on the streets and sidewalks of our neighborhood--bringing mail, packages, hope. The infection risk is very real for them, but there they are--doing what needs to be done in critical times.

2. I finished one book this week ...

     - I charged through the new collection of short stories (though a couple are not short!) by Richard Ford, Sorry for Your Trouble (2020).

Two were so long, in fact, that they nudged up against Novella and begged for admission, but Novella curtly dismissed them, calling them "Shorty."

A few years ago I went on a Ford Freakout and read all of his books (in the order he wrote them) and was, well, dazzled. So now I must wait around until he comes out with new ones. This one was worth the wait.

They deal with love--developing, broken, remembered--and with relationships in general between men and women. He uses flashbacks continually: older men (mostly men) think about their earlier lives, their relationships, some crushing moments (one guy remembers a boy hit and killed by a bus).

Literary allusions are here and there, A. Trollope and V. Woolf among them.

These stories--unlike many of his earlier ones--deal with people who apparently have no financial concerns. (Not the only way he resembles Henry James!)

And, of course, those sentences that make you sit upright:

     - from "The Run of Yourself": "Out of sight of water, Maine was Michigan with no sense of humor" (122).

     - from "A Free Day": "There was so much time to be alive; then you weren't anymore" (201).

3. Via YouTube we have been streaming a production of Shakespeare's The Winter' Tale (at Shakespeare's Globe in London, from 2018 ). It was one of the last plays in our let's-see-them-all journey years ago--no one was mounting it. Then, suddenly, lots of companies were--and we ended up seeing it several times. (It's available on YouTube only till through this coming Saturday--but free!)

In many ways, it's another dark tale of jealousy--a king begins to believe his wife has been having an affair with a boyhood friend of his (now the King of Bohemia), and no one can dissuade him. He even thinks his young son--and his wife's not-yet-delivered child—are not his own. Soon, he is fully mad and does some things that wreak havoc in his kingdom, in his life, in the lives of others.

He sends his newborn daughter off with some aides and commands them to abandon her in the wilderness. They do. But then ...

And, oh, the ending of this one has dissolved me every time I've seen it.

Link to some video.

On a personal note: When I was in London in the mid-90s, I toured the facility (which they were still preparing)--saw them painting the columns, etc. Then, last summer, our son and his family were there for a production (was it The Comedy of Errors?), but the rain sent them scurrying for safety.

4. Last week we watched the first episode of the new season of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix series, Patriot Act, and it was a disturbing one about evictions. I learned a lot--raged a lot.

Link to some YouTube video.

5. Freedom is not doing exactly what you want whenever you want; it's not license. Freedom is a shared set of agreements among us to live by the Constitution and the law. You are not free to endanger me--nor I you. (That's why we have, among other things, traffic laws and many others whose intent is to keep us all safe.) In moments of crisis, our government will restrict and restrain us--not to become authoritarian--but to keep us all safe. (Think of the airline restrictions post-9/11.)

Meanwhile, about 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.

Think of this: If you lined 100,000 people up on a highway, single file, socially distanced, the line would extend for about 113 miles--the approximate distance from Cleveland to Toledo. You would have to drive nearly two solid hours at 60 mph, nonstop, to reach the end of the line.

6. Final Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary

plutodemocracy, n.

Origin: Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: pluto- comb. form, democracy n.

Etymology: < pluto- comb. form + democracy n.

 1. Rule or government by formal democratic processes but with only the wealthy having any real power.

1895   I. K. Funk et al. Standard Dict. Eng. Lang.   Pluto-democracy, government through the influence of money under the forms of a democracy.

1941   D. Wilson Germany's ‘New Order’ 24   German gibes at pluto-democracy.

1970   H. Arendt On Violence 72   A new system, which he [sc. Pareto] called ‘Pluto-democracy’—a mixed form of government, plutocracy being the bourgeois regime and democracy the regime of the workers.

1979   Afr. Stud. Rev. 22 100   Party politics leads not to popular democracy but to ‘plutodemocracy’.

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 2. A democratic state in which power lies in fact only with the wealthy.

1902   19th Cent. & After July 119   If England be allowed to become a Plutodemocracy, then she has the tragic example of Venice to chasten and admonish her.

1948   W. S. Churchill Second World War I. xx. 287   The German Government ceased to define its foreign policy as anti-Bolshevism, and turned its abuse upon the ‘pluto-Democracies’.

1988   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 94 663   The classical elite theorists thought that egalitarianism..is one of the principal myths on which elites rely in mobilizing and controlling the mass publics of modern ‘plutodemocracies’.