The Passenger We Call Humanity: How Homo Sapiens Lost Their Nerve

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  (Genesis 1:27-28)

If there were an equivalent to Paul Revere is today's creative arts, they might go charging through the darkened highways and byways of this land frantically shouting "The robots are coming!  The robots are coming!"  Robots and computers and algorithms that are capable of producing human-like writing, visual art, and even music and video.  But alas, our friend is too late.  The call is coming from inside the house.  They're here.

The question, and promise, of automation is nothing new.  Aristotle wrote in his Politics, "If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... if, for example, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, then chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. (Book I, Chapter 3).  Machines, particularly those that could order themselves and require little supervision, could reduce human drudgery and relieve the need for bondage.

However, speaking from the middle of the 4th century BCE, it appears that The Philosopher has missed a great deal and thus his paean to the possibilities of automation comes off as overly rosy.  For example, without the Reformation and the looming spectre of John Calvin, Aristotle misses out on the Protestant Work Ethic, which tied working up in virtue as a way of attaining dignity and serving god.  Further, the ethic of accumulation that underpins the Capitalist order (and echoes the Calvin's assessment that material success is a sign of divine favour) funnels all considerations into the rubrics of efficiency and monetization, eventually coming to market optimization.

Instead of setting humanity free from drudgery in order to pursue their self-actualization, the deep learning models of contemporary artificial intelligence point to something far more alarming and insidious.  Humanity, in outsourcing its art and expression to the algorithm, has lost confidence in itself as a species.

We have a long history of doubt and ambivalence when it comes to the improvement of machines and the possibility of them supplanting us as the dominant force on this planet.  In James Cameron's Terminator franchise, the artificial intelligence Skynet becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity, cranking out loads of identical killer robots bereft of individuality or personality and hell-bent on wiping us off the face of the Earth.  This is played in another direction in the Wachowski's Matrix property, where human beings are kept in a suspended animation and used as an ersatz power source.  The grand commandment of Genesis, to replenish and subdue the Earth and have mastery over it is turned on its head and we wind up as so much bioelectric livestock powering the goals of our artificial successors.

It's been this way since Frankenstein, and probably before.  We attribute our will to power to machines and assume they will forcefully wrest the planet from us.  That is, after all, what we have done to every species and ecosystem we have encountered.  Vulnerable beings are exploited, enslaved, and marginalized.  At first we did this openly, but eventual modesty necessitated the need for fig leaves like the carceral state, austerity, and supply-side economics.

But while we were distracted standing watch for gun-toting cyborgs, we missed the part where they absconded with our humanity in a far more fundamental way.  And we missed it because we were amusing ourselves almost to death.

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man)

Schiller, in his consideration of what really makes us human and thus separates us from both lobsters and toasters, puts forward the idea that we find our strongest self-actualization when we are at play.  We come to the fullest fruition of our humanity through being relieved of the forces of need and duty and thus able to enjoy liberation from necessity.  When we play, we exert energy for no other purpose than to do so pleases us.  This experience of freedom links play to aesthetic activities and the pursuit of beauty and truth.  It is something we pursue as an inherent good, for its own sake.

So it is with art.  We make art (whether painting, sculpture, films, plays, or music) as a way of expressing this phenomena that is "me."  It is among some of the most demanding activities we can engage in, and this exercise of our capacities to their fullest extent is at least one way to take pleasure in one's own existence, a pleasure that may be magnified in the company of others because we are social creatures after all.  If play is understood this way, then it is an activity that needs relatively little explanation.  Life is an end in itself, and a desire to exercise the powers of life follows naturally.  This desire to express connects us strongly to the natural world and to one another.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 52)             

 

Hawks can screech their defiance to the air. A human being can yawp over the roofs of the world. These are fundamental cries of "I am here. I have force." It is difficult to imagine a robot yawping, and impossible to conceive of a toaster doing so. Could an algorithm yawp?

 

I am inclined to say that robots, algorithms, and toasters (no matter how brave) cannot properly yawp. There is, in this case, no actual "I" to do the yawping. The code that may animate the toaster, or the algorithm that filters your media, has no sense of experience. You can't really ask yourself, "What is it like to be an algorithm?" It's not like anything. It has no sense of what it is to be here and now. And yet it is precisely these packets of code, and the infrastructure surrounding them, that we are excitedly testing the expressive capabilities of with ChatGPT, DALLE, and a whole rogues gallery of other programs. 

 

 

As a teacher, I cannot say that I find it particularly surprising that students are turning to artificial intelligence for help (and more) with their homework. This is what they have been incentivized to do. They need the degree to get the better job. They want the better job to make more money. The term paper is something they must do along the way, and the intelligent student will work smart, not hard. The big bad wolf has a passion for pork, not for breath exercises.

 

That the students are ultimately cheating themselves is something, I fear, many are too shortsighted to see. In outsourcing their thinking to machines, they abdicate one of their responsibilities as an adult in society. Tom Rachman, writing in The Globe and Mail, notes that this does not bode well for Democracy, the form of government that (despite its problems) is most rooted in a faith in human judgement. Or, as Frank Herbert put it:

 

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”  (Frank Herbert, Dune)

 

How far are we falling? Is our faith in ourselves so delicate that we will gladly abdicate in favor of our own creations? A recent study reported in Futurist indicates that over half of all textual content on the internet has been either generated or translated by low-quality AI.  As the technology has become more effective and ubiquitous, the web has been flooded with AI generated material that has picked up the not-so affection nickname of "AI Slime." This "Slime" has been crowding into the algorithmic feeds, inundating users. Further, given that most of these AI are trained on the text of the internet, it's also infecting their own training data (especially in under-resourced minority languages).

 

Such terrible food. And such small portions! No wonder the Dead Internet Theory is gaining credence. It essentially kicks enshittification into overdrive. When a platform launches, it treats its users well to deliver value. Once they are locked in, the platform turns to advertisers. Then, once both buyer and seller are trapped, their data is mined further and the platform humps that corpse for payouts to shareholders. It feels almost poetic that this low-effort slime is also being largely engage with by AI-driven bots, as opposed to humans with money to spend.

 

The promise of the release from drudgery was meant to increase humanity's access to self-actualization. In study after study, people indicate that if they did not have to worry about money, they would turn to the creative arts. They would paint, or draw, or write. Our primitive ancestors began painting their caves as soon as we were good enough at hunting to ensure a surplus of food. Even the famous quote beginning "I must study politics and war.." from John Adams points to an idea of freeing humanity generation by generation to pursue what we find best in life.

 

Yet, the clarion call of late-stage Capitalism seeks to have computers write loads of books that nobody particularly wants to read. To crank out quickly loads of subpar images and videos to keep the mill full of grist. After all, if we aren't aspiring to write our novel, then we can focus a bit better at getting those TPS Reports (with coversheets, natch) to the boss by Friday.

 

It is ridiculous. But we've done it to ourselves because, and this is important, that is what has been incentivized.  The species that once went to the moon, created both War and Peace and Flappy Bird, moved mountains, and (at least temporarily) stopped fascism in its tracks no longer has the stomach to write or paint. Computers can do it faster (if not better) and will improve as computing power increases. It's a brave new world of slime.

 

How ridiculous are we talking here? Let us consider outsourcing another element of our basic humanity, the drive toward sex and intimacy. If we want to do this efficiently, we can simply stuff a vibrating dildo inside a masturbation sleeve. Make sure the batteries are fresh, press the buttons, and voila! Instant, unlimited, and efficient sex. The dream of capital come true.

 

Aren't we having fun? 

Feeding the Rush: Or Why I Hate Giving Tuesday

 

The 1990's was a strange decade to have come of age in.  By about 1991, Communism and the USSR were largely a thing of the past.  One of the poles that propped up the world order had fallen, and barely 2 years into it, noted Historian Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to declare that history had indeed ended in the triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism.  It was a strange and foul decade presided over a by a Rhodes Scholar Bubba from Little Rock who put his indelible Teflon stamp on the time.  If Richard Nixon "broke the heart of the American Dream," Bill Clinton pinched its ass and gave it a leer on the way out the door.  We didn't mind, our thoughts were elsewhere, for in the closing of the American Century, we wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer, and we did it at the mall.

Like many American men who spent their adolescence wafting past the strains of NAFTA (that great sucking sound is a problem for another day) and worrying about the twin spectres of the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain, I enjoyed the carbonated, caffeinated nectar known as Surge.  A citrus soda designed to compete with the venerable Mountain Dew, Surge was a "hardcore" experience that was evidently worth a hockey scrum to achieve.  It's caffeine content was such that a 12 oz bottle was sufficient to give you heart palpitations and allow you to hear colours.  Its flavour wasn't so much "good" as it was a "a lemon and a lime screwed in the underarm of a radioactive clown."  It was the pick-me-up accompaniment to pizza rolls for the more discerning Dungeons and Dragons nerds. 

The thrust of the ad campaign for Surge was the lengths one would go in order to get your hands on a bottle.  There is a veritable fight in the above video, which is a fair example of the genre.  Just a bloke and his five closest mates scrambling over a half-dozen hastily assembled filthy hobo couches in a back alley of some major Western metropolis.  No, no, nothing to see here officer.  No need to stop and frisk.  Just me and my friends here enjoying a soda.

All those fine upstanding young men being reduced to an atavistic frenzy at the merest chance at the bottle floated into my mind recently as we, once again, came around to that center of the charitable year: Giving Tuesday.  For those of you playing at home, Giving Tuesday is the youngest of a trio of psuedo-holidays that have sprung up in recent years between Thanksgiving Day and the beginning of December.  Those are, in order:

• Black Friday- The Friday following Thanksgiving, emerged as a distinct concept in the 1950's and is one of the largest shopping days of the year.  Named because this date often marked the breakeven point of the year for a retailer (moving from being "in the red" to "in the black").
• Cyber Monday- The Monday following Thanksgiving, the emergence of E-commerce in the 2000's marked this term being coined in 2005. This is where people do their online shopping for the holiday season, usually on their computers at work.
  
• Giving Tuesday- The Tuesday following Thanksgiving, has become a focal point in the nonprofit world, with numerous giving challenges, matching funds, and other gamified incentives to spur philanthropy.  The perfect opportunity to balm your conscience for dropping cash on Amazon or at the mall.  You might've spent enough money to install running water in a small village in the Sahel, but at least you've still got a bit left over for the "widows and orphans."

This unholy trinity in some ways form a henge of idolatry to the gods of late-stage capitalism.  Grouped with Thanksgiving in the United States it is a triptych of indulgence that would make Hieronymous Bosch slightly ill, followed by the figleaf of charity to set the consumer's mind at ease.  He can rest easy as night for he is no wallower in the city of swine, content upon his relishes.  He has also given to the Kiwanis, and thus can continue to dream his gravy dreams, content in the knowledge that he "helped make a difference."

Charity degrades and demoralises.... Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

 --Oscar Wilde

Giving Tuesday is the foul idol to the neoliberal dogma that offloads the public good into private hands, trusting to the wisdom of the marketplace to decide what is worth keeping.  It is the logical outgrowth of an American cultural policy that created the 501(c)3 nonprofit system, which assumes it is sufficient public support to exempt from certain taxes organizations established for public benefit.  Celebrate them and encourage the individual to give.  The steel strings of gratitude that were played upon the previous Thursday and turned to garrote the individual.  "It's Giving Tuesday, after all.  Why aren't you giving?"  It becomes the individual, driven by guilt, who is called upon to contribute additionally and prop up the public good.

"Consider the pursuit of support and raising money as part of your artistic process. It is not a burden. It is a way of meeting people, building community and articulating ideas, concepts, and intentions… If you have an idea for a project by the time you’ve described it to forty people it will be a better idea." 

--Anne Bogart        

Giving Tuesday is prominent on my calendar because I work in education.  Not only do I work in education, I teach the theatre arts at a chronically under-resourced branch campus of a larger institution.  Each year, I go about my social media, hat in hand, and I ask support.  My workplace has incentivized this by offering $100k in matching funds, until it runs out.  But! If you get X number of individual donors, your fund gets a $500 boost!  So every fund and unit in the school dog-piles, throwing elbows, biting and gnashing, the fashion school is particularly adept with their scissors, and the athletes get in ahead of us all and drain the pot like a refreshing bottle of citrus soda loaded with carbos.

The Fear Factor: One of Commodification's Side Effects

Yes I'm unprepared
And in the face of it all I guess I get just the littlest bit scared
Yeah me
I feel around the darkness of an empty house and there's nothing there
Just a terrified chameleon hiding out in the thinnest of air

- From "Thinnest of Air" by Blues Traveler

In my last post, I explored a little bit of contemporary actor training, particularly the process of commodification that the student undergoes in order to be prepared "for the market."  Today, I want to start unpacking the overall effects of some of this, particularly what I call "the fear factor."

I have been teaching theatre in one shape or another for 15 years now, and one of the majors things I have been struck by recently is the level of fear in my students, particularly fear around making and committing to a decision.  In my experience, one of the primary responsibilities of the actor is to "make interesting choices."  Since they are the one playing the character, they need to decide on things such as actions and the given circumstances.  However, when I begin asking questions about things like objectives and tactics, I notice that, a majority of the time, the student freezes.

The effects of this freeze are noticeable on a physical level.  What is particularly noticeable is that their shoulders begin to creep up toward their ears and they begin pulling their necks in.  This is, essentially, the textbook startle reflex, where the body begins trying to protect its soft bits from attack.  Often, the scale of this response can be quite substantial, and recent studies have found that the more extreme startle reflex shown by the individual, the higher their generalized anxiety overall.  

And anxiety does run rampant in our acting programs.  Recently I had the opportunity to teach lessons on The Alexander Technique on another campus of the school where I teach.  From this perspective as something of an outsider, I was particularly struck by the amount of fear students expressed of the instructors on their home campus.  Whereas I was an "outsider" and thus "safe," students were keenly conscious of the fact that the faculty of their home campus had the power to cast them (or not), and thus horded a great deal of social and professional capital.  Margrit Schildrick acknowledges this element of training in a field like the theatre, writing "in the specular economy, such intertwined relations cannot be acknowledged, and the ethics of modernity are predicated on the separation and independence of subjects."  In essence, such power dynamics cannot be acknowledged least the system fall apart.   Schildrick goes on to point out that boundary crossing by instructors, as opposed to being a form of shared vulnerability, can amount to a bodily colonization.

 

Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that our students feel as if they were living in a veritable panopticon.  They're afraid of slipping up, of making a mistake, lest that mistake disqualify them from the continuing gamble that is a life and career in the arts.  Yet this fear can also be a major inhibitor of their pursuit.  Teva Bjerken and Belinda Mello write, "Fear of making a mistake is an obstacle to the free flow of imagination and expression in the actors' process."  The student essentially faces a potential "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation where they cannot afford to make a mistake and they cannot afford to freeze.  They think that there is a "right answer" and that they "have to get it in one."  Much of the workforce-centered education in the United States contributes to this as well.

 

Much like the "terrified chameleon" from the Blues Traveler song, our commodified students are trying to be completely fungible, and that is a daunting task for anybody.

 

What is to be done in the face of this fear?  I plan to continue this exploration and examine how we as educators can address this lack of comfort and bravery in upcoming posts.

Commodification and Capitalism in Actor Training

 

Who am I anyway?
Am I my resume?
That is a picture of a person I don't know
What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
--From "I Hope I Get It," The opening number of A Chorus Line.

 Perhaps it is simply a streak of curmudgeonly contrariness, but I really don't much like A Chorus Line.  Beginning as it does with a desperate cry for work, proceeding through an exploitative "baring of the soul" and finishing with each of the formerly individual dancers tricked out in identical costuming as part of a never-ending ensemble, it is a piece that points up a great deal of what I find wrong with American performer training today.

When a system has you asking questions along the lines of "What should I try to be?" it should be abundantly clear that this system is broken.  Or at the very least not fit for human occupation, as broken indicates that the system is not working as intended.  In this case, it very much is, the reduction of vibrant individuals into interchangeable cogs.  Nor is this a merely a problem in the United States, Dr. Mark Seton of the University of Sydney also noted in his observation of actor training "Above all, we were to be taught what works and how we could commodify ourselves for the marketplace."

This bears out a great deal in my own training as an actor in college and graduate school.  We were taught to neutralize regional accents, work toward fitting an ideal (or set of ideal) body types, and embrace certain techniques of self-erasure, all in the name of becoming castable.  This is the process of "commodification."

In economic terms, a commodity is something which is a raw material considered primarily for its exchange value, and is fully or highly fungible.  Of particular importance is the fact that this substance can be bought and sold in the market, exchanged easily for other things of similar value.  In a capitalistic, market-oriented system, this is done regularly in order to facilitate the world of work as well as the procurement of goods and services.  

Take, for example, the emphasis on relaxation that often accompanies beginning actor training.  Many of the exercises I have encountered in the warmup of the beginning actor is rooted in trying to find relaxation.  Teva Bjerken and Belinda Mello note this in their own studies, finding "They overemphasize relaxation, especially at the beginning of their studies, when they attempt to embody neutral readiness."  The fully relaxed individual, if there ever could be such a thing, is essentially a palimpsest for inscribing, a blank slate that almost anything can be written upon.

That this is done in the name of joining the creative and expressive arts may seem contradictory on an intuitive level.  Actors are ostensibly chosen for the power, clarity, and effectiveness of their expression.  The very best, or at least most prominent, are rewarded handsomely for their abilities.  Could one imagine a De Niro or Dench commodified?

But those examples lie at the other end of a spectrum of wealth, fame, and power that is light years different than what the characters in A Chorus Line, or even my own students in the acting studio face.  They face a system that looks to commodify them and reduce their expression to liquidity in order to exchange it for value and profit.

This lies at the very heart of what I find wrong with much of American actor training, wrapping tendrils around the hearts, minds, and bodies of aspiring performers.  The question is, and what I propose to continue exploring, is what is to be done about this?

This is the Story of a Girl...

 When I was in elementary school, I remember reading a story in reading class about a young American girl who was living in Britain for reasons that I do not recall.  The hinge of this story was that before classes each day at the school she attended they would stand, face the flag, and sing "God Save The Queen."  In itself, this is nothing particularly remarkable, as I recall that I was in a grade where the pledge of allegiance was required before each day in my own grade.

However, the conflict of the story is that this young lady is an American.  She doesn't want to sing "God Save the Queen," because, as an American, she doesn't believe in the legitimacy of Queens and such.  Given that this was a story in a 3rd or 4th grade reader, there was not a great deal of abstract political theorizing, or moralizing.  The thrust of the story was that, as an American, she should not have to sing a song about a queen despite the fact that she is living in a country ostensibly "ruled" by a queen.

The story resolves itself when a clever uncle reminds her that the song "America" (aka. "My Country, Tis of Thee") shares an identical tune with "God Save the Queen."  So she resolves to sing the American lyrics softly.  The end.

I have been thinking about this particular story a great deal as our nation withdrew from Afghanistan, and the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001 approached.  I thought about it as I sat in an Indian restaurant and listened to the father at the next table explain to his high school daughters the Imperialist justification for the invasion, while they took the abandonment of Afghan women and girls to the tender mercies of the Taliban as a major offense against decency and humanity.  I thought about it during a particularly shouty faculty meeting where issues of diversity and equity had been raised.  I thought about it as I scanned the news scrolls on Fox and CNN.

What was the point of the story of the girl?  A story which has stuck with me even if I cannot recall its title.  Was I to admire her bravery in her refusal to sing the lyrics to a song with which she did not fundamentally agree?  Or perhaps a refusal to embrace "when in Rome," on the grounds of national exceptionalism was to irk me.  Or perhaps I was to admire the skills of compromise that can be found in civilized society.  Some days I think one way, some days I think the other.

This is a nation where a pledge to the flag is nearly ubiquitous in schools despite the fact that is cannot be legally enforced (West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette).  Politifact found that though not universal, recitation of the pledge is plenty common throughout US schools.  Even as recently as 2019, a black student was charged with a misdemeanor surrounding his refusal to recite the pledge.  I can only imagine what the "love it or leave it" crowd would do to a child refusing to say the pledge.  Yet with the same breath we are to admire a fictional girl who won't do similar in her host country.

And perhaps, even as we applaud her compromise, are we heading down a terrible path?  Here she just does her thing quietly so that way everybody can get on with the business of the day.  No muss, no fuss.  But in doing so, is she not like The Magistrate in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians?  Is she simply offering herself a personal salve to soothe the feeling of not standing up against something she feels is systemically wrong?  She is able to have her special "American-ness" but not address the root of the issue, kicking the can down the road for another to deal with.

This story comes back to me again and again in the same way a cut on the inside of your mouth moves in and out of consciousness.  And I feel it illustrates something deeply troubling about this country.  It illustrates the quiet civility of the do-nothing liberal, who has all the right thoughts but does not act on them.  It illustrates the "America first, love-it-or-leave-it" conception of exceptionalism whereby special privilege is given for being "part of the club."

Perhaps I am making a simple grade-school reading activity carry too much.  It's just a story to teach kids how to read, after all.  However, we should keep in mind that it is precisely our "non-challenging" media that we need to be most acutely aware of, as that is where we will find our values painted in the broadest strokes.

How Long Can You Take It, Bruh?

Bad vibes and worse weather swept the Midwest this week.  One of those weeks that leave you staring out the window and wondering just what the hell happened.  Armed protestors on the steps of statehouses around the country, being egged on by the venal, half-bright gink who currently occupies the White House.

This is a man who has all the intestinal fortitude of a half-inflated leather sack with a couple of googly-eyes glued on.  Unable to indulge his penchant for chanting and adoring crowds, all he can do is star as the antagonist of the world-worst whack-a-mole game.  A degenerate carnival where the rich make the poor dance on hot iron plates.  Essential workers to the front.  Defund the WHO.  Normalcy be damned!

Ahh, but those protesters.  The Isolation finally got to you, eh Cletus?  Bunker life got you down?  You go four(ish) weeks without a haircut or the ability to go out and socialize, and you're grabbing your rifle and taking to the streets screaming about your rights? 

Your rights don't end where my fear begins?  Ho-ho.  You poor, spoiled manbaby.  Calling upon recourse to your rights is a weak reed.  It means, simply, that we cannot stop you from doing a thing.  It is a defense of the indefensible.  A ceding of the moral high ground and an embrace of the indulgent, atavistic freakout that you so deeply desire.  You have the right to speech and assembly, and you're a dangerous asshole for exercising it.

But, really, wasn't this what your gun-toting prepper-types have been waiting for?  A societal shutdown that allows you to demonstrate your rugged individualism is just what you wanted, right Luther?  You've been hoarding food and ammo for just this opportunity, but can't even make it a month before demanding your social safety net be restored.  A thirteen-year-old girl hid from the Nazis for two years.  Albert Woodfox did 43 years in solitary.  You can't even make it a month.

I guess nobody told you that the Apocalypse was boring as hell, eh?  There aren't hordes of brown people zombies to casually pick off while quoting "They Live."  You poor, poor deluded saps cast yourself in a video game and it just hasn't lived up to the hype.  So now what are you going to do?

Boredom is a hell of a drug, friends.

King Cucumber: The Bad Theatre of the Daily Briefing

Have you ever encountered a Sea Cucumber, friends?  They are largely crawling bottom feeders on the floor of the oceans, breaking down scraps and detritus.  To fit into small spaces, it can functionally liquefy its body, and then firm it back up. They have no brain, just a rudimentary nervous system attached to a mouth, and when they are threatened, they will literally eject their guts through their anus to defend themselves.  All very fascinating, for the Wonders of Nature know no bounds, and very useful to the marine ecosystem, but not the qualities one needs when it comes to the leader of the free world.

In the depths of the Great Depression and the Second World War, President Roosevelt took to the airwaves to discuss policy and procedure, helping to calm the worries of an anxious nation.  He calmed fears and dispelled rumours, and went down in history as one of the most effective communicators to ever occupy the White House.

But that isn't what we got, ladies and gentlemen.  Today, in the throes of pandemic, the venal gink occupying the White House gets up every day for the COVID-19 briefing.  And all I can think is, "ye gods... we have elected a sea cucumber." Listening to the chunks of phrases that come splattering from his puckered lips, even the least discerning listener cannot think that this mouth is hooked to a functioning brain.  Lies and misinformation, from the President in time of crisis.  No, no, the perception that he has a spine is just that.  He can't be from the same phylum.

And just press him on an issue, watch the tantrum as he ejects his gut to be devoured.  His own dysfunction provides plenty of food for the media, so there's no need to keep an eye on things.  But ho-ho, King Cucumber, we are watching.  Some of us are watching carefully.

It can be interesting to see such rare animals up close on occasion, but in terms of pathos and narrative, there's very little on offer. But King Cucumber is hungry for adulation.  Rallies used to scratch that itch, but that's now out of the question.  So he daily mounts the podium, spews without thinking, and effectively shits his guts out when pressed on something.  Ho-ho, it would be funny if there wasn't so much at stake.

But we're starting to catch on.  There are far more interesting animals to observe.  Is it any wonder that a number of NPR stations are now no longer airing his briefings in whole?