Give out the password to thoughts between my eyes

[sovay]

Good news: I slept five or six hours last night. It was sticky, tangled sleep, but it was sleep and at this point I'll take it.

Weird news: I dreamed about secrets of elemental magic contained in children's books, crumbling first editions of a British series that came out in the '50's or '60's and I was looking for them in a library or one of those mostly vanished used book stores like warehouses full of out-of-print treasures and astonishing trash, but the whole milieu felt much more M. John Harrison than J.K. Rowling, right down to the fringe of people who already knew the magic and the character who cried in my arms because he was running from something out of one of the books, not that he could describe it or even tell me which book it came from for fear of attracting its attention. The plot of the dream went to fragments as soon as I woke up, but I think I managed to keep him from dying. I can't say the same about everyone else in that chase.

Bad news: RCN has temporarily broken my e-mail.

Please enjoy this collection of links while I leave the house.

1. The Atlantic profiles Mel Brooks at 92. I like how David Denby writes about Brooks' comedy, which the man himself once famously described as rising "below vulgarity": "The larking sadism still makes one wince—the joke hasn't lost its sting—but in the end the effect is liberating: Brooks pushed the gloom of Jewish history over the brink into black comedy. The Jews had survived; the Nazis and the inquisitors were sufficiently dead to laugh at."

2. The New York Times profiles the policing of mothers. Looking at the list of normal parenting decisions that self-righteous strangers are apparently willing to call the cops on women for, I began to wonder how much of so-called helicopter parenting is really a matter of anxious apron strings and how much is just a reaction to society-wide, racially-stacked, gender-stacked concern-trolling. It would fit nicely alongside all the other damned-if-you-dos-and-don'ts: either you can be the bad mother who neglects her children or the bad mother who smothers them and either way, however they turn out, you did it wrong. Not to mention that once again we see the police functioning as a personal one-stop-shop paramilitary for the reactionary on the street. Whatever this form of micro-swatting is called, there must be a way to legislate against it. At least on the state level I have a chance of the government agreeing with me about who to punish and who to protect.

3. Courtesy of brigdh: jade-green icebergs.

4. Elizabeth Alexander writes about marrying into a family of refugees: "'I don't want the children to be refugees,' my husband would say, and we'd share a dark, knowing laugh. 'But I do want them to know what we refugees know: that you can make your life from scratch. I want the children to have the strength and wile of survivors.'"

5. I just like these paintings of Greek goddesses and nymphs. I wish I could buy a print of Amphitrite.

6. David Schraub re-reads Albert Memmi, still bitingly relevant to the interaction of Jews and left-wing politics today.

7. Courtesy of eshusplayground: the many different things it can mean when a Jewish person says they are a Zionist/not a Zionist/an anti-Zionist.

8. I cannot see either financially or logistically how I am to get to both of these shows this summer, but there appear to be stellar revivals of Carmen Jones (reconceived by John Doyle, starring Anika Noni Rose) and Fiddler on the Roof (directed by Joel Grey, in Yiddish!) going on off-Broadway and while I am slightly biased toward the Folksbiene, I could just use a teleporter.

9. The title overstates like most clickbait, but the article has a point about meta-messages: "With James Gunn's Firing, Disney Destroyed the Message of 'Guardians of the Galaxy'."

Comments

[lilysea]

On the one hand, I think children who are of an appropriate age to do so should be able to play in the park / walk to school / walk to the local library / catch the train without the police being called.

I also think the police should not be called on children of colour and/or low-socio economic children any more than they are called on white children and/or middle class children.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want adults to adopt a totally mind-your-own-business mindset - I was severely physically/emotionally/verbally abused as a child, and severely practically/medically/emotionally neglected, and I wish an adult had intervened.

(I do wonder why my parents friends/the adults at my parents church didn't intervene. Did they genuinely not notice, or did they think it was none of their business?)

One time I had to walk home from the city at a far-too-young-age - 11.3km / 7 miles - because I lost my trainfare (I lost my coinpurse) and my mother refused to come get me and told me to walk home. I decided to walk along the train tracks so I didn't get lost - I didn't know the way home *at all*. The police picked me up and dropped me home with a lecture about how walking on the train tracks was very dangerous and also illegal - but they didn't bother asking me or my parents *why* I was walking along the train tracks at all.

There was also the time my parents made me get out of the car and walk home as a too-young child, and I grabbed onto the car door handle so they couldn't drive away and leave me behind, but they started the car even though I was hanging onto the door handle for dear life, and I got dragged by the car bodily along the bitumen for several metres - and had to walk home grazed and bruised and in tears and I didn't know the way, and no adults stopped or called anyone.

So: I think nowadays in the US the threshold for "call the police on unaccompanied children" is far too low,

but in 70s/80s/90s Australia the threshold for "call the police on unaccompanied children" was far too HIGH.

I would like to see a middle ground, not a return to the standards of the 70s/80s/90s/.

[sovay]

I would like to see a middle ground, not a return to the standards of the 70s/80s/90s/.

I don't think anyone in this thread is advocating a total mind-your-own-business mindset—especially if you look at selkie, moon_custafer, and rosefox's comments, you'll see the assumption that adults must be willing to be responsible for children not strictly their own in order for this system to work, just also the assumption that it's worth it. I am sorry neither the adults in your life nor the adults outside of it were responsible about you. I don't consider making a very young child get out of the car and walk home a reasonable parenting decision. I do think it should not be cause for alarm if a child is comfortable in a car for five or even twenty-five minutes with a tablet or a book.

[lilysea]

I do think it should not be cause for alarm if a child is comfortable in a car for five or even twenty-five minutes with a tablet or a book.

I agree, subject to safe weather conditions - in an Australian summer, a parked car can get hot enough to kill a child in only a few minutes.

"On a typical Australian summer day, the temperature inside a parked car can be more than 30°C hotter than outside the car. That means that on a 30°C day, the temperature inside the car can reach over 60°C (140F)!

A child left in a parked car under those conditions for even a few minutes can very quickly become distressed, dehydrated and can die from organ failure."

[sovay]

I agree, subject to safe weather conditions - in an Australian summer, a parked car can get hot enough to kill a child in only a few minutes.

I think I include "not going to die" under "comfortable."