Fritinancy

New writing on Medium: "Restore Sanity"

My latest story for Medium looks at “Restore Sanity,” a slogan being used this year by GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis—and thirteen years ago, facetiously, by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I also look into Republicans’ penchant for re- words in slogans: rebuilding, reannexing, rejuvenating. They really like the past, don’t they?

Read “Restore Sanity” Then and Now. That’s a gift link; if you’re ready to make a commitment, you can join Medium with my referral link, which will earn me a small but much-appreciated commission.

June linkfest

A quick audiobook recommendation: I thoroughly enjoyed So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, a series of conversations between Martin and his longtime friend the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik is everywhere, isn’t he? He was also “in conversation with” the fictional Lydia Tár in last year’s Tár.) Martin, who will turn 78 in August, has spent more than 60 years plying his various trades: magician, musician, comedian, actor, novelist, librettist. Gopnik elicits charming stories and surprising revelations, and gently nudges Martin toward a discussion of craft and motivation. The book—audio only, with some delightful banjo music—is available from Pushkin Industries and the usual online merchants. Or, if your public library supports the Libby app, you can borrow it free for three weeks. (By the way, the title is a twist on the E.E. Cummings poem “So Many Selves.” Martin is a big fan of Cummings, it turns out.)

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Word of the week: Thrutopia

“We need a literature of winning,” author and creative-writing professor Aya de León tells California, the alumni magazine of the University of California at Berkeley (my alma mater). The theme of the spring/summer issue is “optimism,” and de León is talking about her new venture, Fighting Chance Books, which will publish books that “inspire you that hope and optimism are not only possible, but critical to changing the ending of our story as human beings.”

There’s a name for this optimistic future, says De León: 

There’s a movement out of the U.K. called “thrutopia.” It’s not dystopian. It’s not utopian. It’s a thrutopia where people fight through the obstacles to get to the future that we want. That’s the idea behind Fighting Chance Books.

I had never heard of thrutopia, so I did some research. A portmanteau of through and utopia the word was coined by the British ecological philosopher and Green Party activist Rupert Read (b. 1966), who wrote about it for Huffpost UK in 2017:

What are desperately needed, but as yet barely exist, are what I term thrutopias. Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.

New writing on Medium: How Johnnie Walker kept walking

An obituary for Ivan Menezes, CEO of global spirits corporation Diageo, jogged my memory about something I’d written many years ago about Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky brand that Menezes helped revive with the enduring effective “Keep Walking” campaign.

I revisited that campaign—still going strong 24 years after its launch—in my latest story for Medium, “The Man Who Kept Johnnie Walker Walking.” That’s a friend link, so you’ll bypass the paywall; if you’d like to read everything I’ve published on Medium—70 stories so far—as well as all the other Medium stories, here’s a referral link. (I’ll get a percentage of your membership fee—thanks!)

Blog bonus: Here’s a bit of Johnnie Walker history that didn’t make it into my story.

Word of the week: Reverse boycott

On the evening of Monday, June 12, 2023, a mere 4,848 baseball fans showed up at the Oakland Coliseum—a stadium that seats 63,000—to watch the Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Rays. The following night, with the same match-up, attendance more than quintupled, to 27,759. In an essay published in The Oaklandside on June 14, Cameron Kelly wrote:

[Tuesday’s] game itself had little to do with the size of the crowd. Nor was it the A’s six-game winning streak, which has dragged them up from the dregs of “one of the worst teams of all time” to a regular level of awful, as most of the tickets for this game were sold weeks ago. It wasn’t any particular player, nor any special giveaway (at least, not one put on by the A’s), nor was it even the expectation of seeing a good baseball game. 

What brought all those ticket-buyers to the Coliseum on Tuesday was an impassioned protest against the impending move of the hometown team to Las Vegas. Fans, and the media, dubbed the protest a “reverse boycott.”

Screenshot of SFGate headline and photo, June 14, 2014: “ ‘An Oakland tragedy’: A’s fans’ raucous ‘reverse boycott’ started with a single tweet”

Grimace

I have a confession: I have never eaten at a McDonald’s. Once, many years ago, I ducked into a Mickey D’s in Berkeley to use the restroom, and then ducked right out again. And once when I was babysitting a cranky child I briefly pacified him with a Happy Meal. But I myself have never eaten a Big Mac or a McRib or an Egg McMuffin or even the McDonald’s “salad.” I am, obviously, a Bad American.

I’m not totally ignorant. I’ve watched The Founder, the demi-factual 2016 film about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers, so I’m familiar with the origin story. And I’ve written about “You Deserve a Break Today,” the hugely influential McDonald’s ad campaign that ran from 1971 to 1990.

Like just about everyone, I knew about Ronald McDonald, the clown mascot who first appeared in Washington, DC, in 1963. (He was originally portrayed by Willard Scott, former Bozo the Clown, future Today Show weatherman.) But somehow I’d never, even once, heard of the big purple blob called Grimace, a denizen of McDonaldland who’s celebrating his 52nd birthday this month.

Grimace evolution via McDonald’s Wiki

 

And I might have remained blissfully unaware of Grimace were it not for a June 12 post about Grimace’s birthday on The Impulsive Buy, a blog about fast food and supermarket snacks. To celebrate the occasion, McDonald’s is offering a combo meal consisting of a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a Grimace’s Birthday Shake. The shake, writes TIB correspondent Marvo, “has a delightful blueberry flavor that reminds me of the fruit at the bottom of a blueberry yogurt but a little more intense.”

But enough about food. What’s the Grimace story, and why the name?

"Even the names of guns could be important"

From Corey G. Johnson’s ProPublica interview with Ryan Busse, a former gun-industry executive who left his job in 2020 to become a gun-safety advocate:

You know, I tell the story that 15, 20 years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you’d never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don’t get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.

Highland Park: On July 4, 2022, a gunman fired 83 shots into the crowd at a Highland Park, Illinois, Independence Day parade. Seven people were killed.

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Related:

Gun idioms

Ghost gun

Ammosexual

Gundamentalist

Word of the week: Internym

I figured I was pretty well acquainted with the -nym family, from acronym and backronym to mononym and toponym. (If you need a refresher, see Mike Pope’s 2013 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “What’s in a -Nym?”) But last Friday I stumbled upon a new (well, new-to-me) -nym that fills a gap I hadn’t known existed.

New writing on Medium: In 1953, you didn't need AI to listen to Socrates

An AI-generated “conversation” between Bill Gates and Socrates jogged my memory. Hadn’t the ancient philosopher been revived decades ago for a different mini-drama? He had. The drama was part of the “You Are There” series, broadcast in 1953 by CBS. I wrote about it—and about why a 70-year-old reenactment remains more effective than cutting-edge AI—in my latest story for Medium.

Read In 1953, You Didn’t Need AI to Listen to Socrates. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times!), and check out my referral link to join Medium.