Hey, Mr. Postman

...and the cat lady wars

Aug 04, 2024

NOTE: I’ll see you next on August 18.

LOOKING AHEAD: August 6 is Root Beer Float Day. August 8 is National Cat Day. (In honor of J.D. Vance, all you single ladies get out there with your cats!) August 9 is Book Lovers Day. August 14 is National Wiffle Ball Day. August 17 is National #2 Pencil Day. (Right/Write On!) PLAN ACCORDINGLY!

Some potentially good news….

On July 25, President Biden nominated two people to be a Governor of the United States Postal Service Board of Governors. One was a Republican, but the other was Val Demings who was elected as a Democrat from Florida to the House of Representatives in 2016. She left that seat to launch an unsuccessful bid for Senate this past election cycle, although she would have made a great senator. Previously, in March, President Biden also nominated Marty Walsh, former Labor Secretary and Democratic mayor of Boston. Confirmation is pending for all three of the President’s nominees.

As you know, the USPS Board of Governors consists of eleven members, nine appointed by the President. While the President nominates them, they then must be confirmed by the Senate before assuming their positions. The remaining two slots are filled by the Postmaster General and the Deputy Postmaster General. The Governors each serve a 7-year term. Only up to five of the Governors can be from the same political party and they can only be removed for “cause,” defined as a severe dereliction of responsibility. While the system was designed to take politics out of the equation, the framework in this instance backfired.

I’m already three paragraphs into this, but you see where it’s going. It’s all about Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, effectively a Trump appointee (by dint of the Republican/Trump support on the Board during the Trump administration). DeJoy was completely unqualified for the job. It has taken this long to get to a point where DeJoy could be replaced, but only once the three nominees are confirmed by the Senate. Almost there, but not quite yet.

Dejoy has seriously impaired mail delivery. At one point he ordered the dismantling of sorting machines that led to massive delays in deliveries. This just “happened to” occur prior to the 2020 election,

“that led to major slowdowns in swing states just ahead of the 2020 election that resulted in tens of thousands of ballots arriving too late to be counted.”

DeJoy has embarked on a $40 billion, 10-year overhaul to create a consolidated network of 60 regional distribution centers ostensibly, according to Dejoy, “to reduce costs, improve reliability, and make the Postal Service more competitive.” Instead, it has led to multiple disruptions and degrading of service all across the country. Atlanta is just one example:

“In Atlanta, residents have experienced similar delays since a new regional distribution center opened there in late February. After the facility opened, on-time delivery service in the region went from 60%-70%, which was already below average, to as low as 20%, according to [Leo] Raymond [managing director of Mailers Hub, an industry group for direct mail companies]. Local news organizations reported on hundreds of complaints from residents and long lines of trucks backed up at the facility waiting to drop off and pick up mail.
‘Atlanta has been a complete house on fire,’ said Raymond.”

The possibility for “mischief” also remains for the upcoming 2024 election unless these nominees can be confirmed and in place to remove DeJoy as quickly as possible. The confirmation process can begin as early as this week with Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger, who in a previous life worked as a federal agent for the USPS, paying close attention to the situation.

Keep your fingers crossed.

USPS Board of Governors | Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance (Substack) | July 28, 2024

Major mail delivery delays raise concerns about voting in the 2024 elections | NBC News | April 6, 2024

Weird. A five letter word that not only may have thrust Governor Tim Walz (who first uttered it) to the top of the vice-presidential pick list, but seems to be sticking in its application to all things Republican. So what’s behind this? It’s about framing, creating a picture in someone’s mind. It’s a concept that George Lakoff (cognitive linguist, philosopher, author, and now retired professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley) brought to the mainstream of a number of academic disciplines. In the Substack I reference here, Brian Klass elaborates on schemas, a key concept within psychology, neuroscience, and cognition. The concept plays a crucial role in modern politics. It’s about how our minds work. So, what is a schema?

“The word schema comes from the Greek schēmat or schēma, which means “form.” But the concept in its modern usage refers to patterns of thought that provide intellectual shortcuts for processing the information we encounter in our lives. Think of it a bit like your brain’s organizational system, which structures our knowledge, old and new. To organize vast quantities of data, we need to sort everything into categories and patterns, with simplified assumptions.”

Klass contends that “schemas in our heads actually alter how we perceive the world.” We pay more attention to that which matches our schemas and sometimes reshape reality to make things match up to our perceptions. It serves as a cognitive shorthand.

“It doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters what mental framework voters use to assess political options before them. And on that front, Republicans are often significantly better at ignoring the policy details and focusing instead on shaping schemas within which voters perceive the world. Too many people in politics think you’ll win the argument if you have better facts. But winning the argument in politics isn’t often about finding more or better facts. It’s about perception and the cognitive shortcuts we use to process information as we sort our world into neat categories that make sense.”

Forget that President Biden has brought to the presidency unparalleled experience and expertise both domestically and in foreign affairs. Republicans relentlessly denigrated him for his age until it obliterated everything else. Every gaffe reinforced their messaging. The schema set out by Republicans came to matter more than anything else.

“Effective political movements…understand that schemas are what matter most. It’s a depressing truth, but getting the right taglines, slogans, and vivid ways of presenting political opponents is often far more important than being right.”

Klass argues that most people don’t pay attention to politics except on limited occasions. Hence, they process political information using a lot more cognitive shorthand. And, that information often is found in schemas.

So, for once, the Democrats may have turned the tables and may have some success with dubbing their opponents as “weird.” It remains to be seen if it will work, but as Klass concludes:

“If you really want to destroy someone in politics, don’t attack them with a barrage of facts and decimal points, change the fundamental way that their own supporters perceive them. The path to political victory runs, to an astonishing degree, through psychology and neuroscience. That way true power lies.”

Schemas and the Political Brain | The Garden of Forking Paths (Brian Klass’s Substack) | January 16, 2023 (No paywall)

THE UNDER TOAD

The title character in “The World According to Garp,” whose son mistakenly hears someone referring to an undertow at the beach, “subsequently use[s] the phrase ‘under toad’ to refer to the omnipresent threat of disaster that lies beneath the surface of everyday life.” (as described in Wordsense)

Of course! The topic of gender is now getting warmed up as we have Kamala Harris facing Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that “political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself.” Thompson contends that men and women are drifting apart even more so than in the past. Polling and surveys suggest that women are now more pro-choice than they were in 1995. The polling and surveys also suggest that women are moving to the left, while men are moving to the right. He quotes a Vanderbilt professor who contends that “the parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself. People are more divided by cultural attitudes about roles – how men and women are treated – than by gender itself. For example:

“In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.”

In summary, Thompson argues that the gender war of American politics in 2024 is not a conflict between genders, but a conflict over the role of gender, the meaning of gender, and the definition of gender.”

Then, along comes Jessica Grose, a columnist for The New York Times, drawing from the same pollster’s conclusions (Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute), telling us that the largest gap is between divorced men and women – 54% of divorced men identifying as Republicans vs. 41% of divorced women. A somewhat similar gap exists between younger men and women. Cox was then asked if he thought that gap would grow now that Harris is the Democratic standard bearer. I was somewhat shocked by his answer, and have to wonder if he was polling mostly younger Republican men. He said,

“‘A lot will depend on the issues that Harris champions. If it’s reproductive health and abortion all the time, if it’s L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Those are not issues that animate young men. We’ve talked to any number of them, and a lot of them will say that abortion has nothing to do with me. I may be largely supportive of some amount of legal access to abortion, but don’t much care about it.’”

Finally, an article in The Guardian by Carole Cadwalladr caught my eye. The author’s name rang a bell. I remembered all that she had gone through a few years ago. Cadwalladr is the British journalist whose investigative work during the 2016 election exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal which led to major fines for Facebook and the demise of Cambridge Analytica. The scandal also was linked to Brexit, the referendum that led to Britain withdrawing from the EU. Cadwalladr became a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist for this work, alongside The New York Times. It also unleashed against her “a malign, misogynistic, disinformation-laced campaign of online violence which grew increasingly threatening over time.” It also embroiled her in a legal campaign by one of the leading voices in Brexit who sued her for defamation and dragged her through the courts for years. She was silenced by gag orders in the court case and was unable to fight back much of that time.

All that is background to the warning she has just published in The Guardian this past week about the firehouse of misogyny that is about to be directed at Kamala Harris. She references the “childless cat lady” term with which J.D. Vance has tagged Harris. Those were the exact words the Brexiteers directed at Cadwalladr after her reporting broke. This is what she has to say to that kind of accusation:

“But there are things that only veterans of the childless cat lady wars can know. They used to call us witches because we knew shit. We still do. That’s what makes us so powerful. And dangerous. That’s what JD Vance understands: our cat lady energy. We’ve lived through culture wars before they even had that name, before they invented memes and when they just burned us at the stake.
So, here’s what I need you to do now: to shut up and sit down and listen. You are at risk. We are all at risk. Because this is what I know: bad things are coming. We are in a code red emergency.
Because misogyny isn’t bad people saying bad things that may hurt your feelings. (Though it might.) And misogyny isn’t about silencing women. (Though it does.)
Misogyny is now one of the deadliest weapons on Earth. Misogyny is a dirty bomb in the heart of our information system. Misogyny is electoral interference. Misogyny is a national security threat so lethal we can’t even see it.”

Having been through this in the 2016 election, people are much more aware and, hopefully, somewhat prepared for this. But, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous. And know that the billionaire techbros — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, et.al. — are all in with this.

This is a misogyny emergency. A huge outpouring is coming in the runup to the US election | The Guardian | July 27, 2024 (no paywall)

The Election of Divorced Men vs. All the Single Ladies | The New York Times | July 31, 2024

What is America’s Gender War Actually About? | The Atlantic | July 28, 2024

IN DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACY

As a 2024 public service and for us to ponder, I am continuing to highlight one lesson each newsletter from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, in each subsequent installment of this newsletter — with no additional editorial comment. This is the fifteenth lesson.

15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.

ON THE MUSICAL SIDE

Laura Benanti began as a musical theater actress and singer at age 18 on Broadway in The Sound of Music. She now appears on stage, screen, and TV, as well as touring the world with a cabaret show. She sings Children Will Listen (below) in a duet with her mother. The last clip is for those who have not had the chance to see her making an appearance as Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (one of her many Melania appearances).

What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? | Laura Benanti | Album: Laura Benanti (2020)