Personal essays
Reinterpreting reality with a big old Sharpie
Storms rising
Sometimes I look at something my daughter does and think back to when she was a baby.
“Yep,” I think, “you could see it back then. She was exactly like that as a child.”
You can’t reason the other way.
You can’t look at a toddler and extrapolate to what they will become. But somehow, looking back, you can often see the seeds of what they will grow up to be.
I was thinking of that because there are many moments in Trump’s past that foreshadow what we’re seeing now. Not back to when he was a toddler. In many ways, he still is a toddler. But he’s shown us who he is and will become for years.
One example is Hurricane Dorian from 2019 during his first administration. Trump was talking about which states would be hit by the hurricane and he incorrectly included Alabama.
The easiest thing to do would have been to say the president misspoke or made a mistake. In the heat of the moment these things happen to all of us.
But the president doesn’t misspeak or make mistakes. As a result, many people in Alabama were naturally concerned. So the weather bureau issued a statement that no, Alabama was not in the path of the hurricane and would not be impacted.
In doing their job and looking out for public safety, the weather bureau could be seen to be saying the president misspoke or made a mistake. The meteorologists were more concerned about the public than the president.
They won’t make that mistake again. Well, here in the second term many of them aren’t around to make that mistake any more. NOAA staffing has been reduced to levels that people can’t be warned about storms that are coming their way.
Problem solved.
You’re Fired
When our kids were younger we had an annual tradition of watching The Rugrats Passover Special. It’s a retelling of the story of Exodus complete with Pharaoh and plagues.
If you know the Rugrats, Angelica plays the role of the Pharaoh and Tommy plays the role of Moses. The enslaved Jews are played by the babies.
After some of the plagues, Angelica throws the babies out of Egypt. She then realizes there’s no one there to do her work.
My favorite line of the show is when she realizes there’s no baby there to fetch her bath water. Incredulously she asks, “You threw out the baby with the bath water?”
Out of the mouths of these cartoon kids we see a pretty good picture of what’s going on today.
Sort term decisions for look-tough-on-tv moments lead to announcing tariffs, ending health and environmental and economic policies that keep us safe, firing statisticians whose economic reports you don’t like, and sending armed troops into another US city.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s beef up ICE. We have to protect ourselves from <waves vaguely around at imagined dangers that don’t exist>…
Oh look. We threw out the baby with the bath water.
Numbers
The Twain quote that is originally the Disraeli quote is that “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”
It is true that statistics can be gathered and manipulated in ways that can tell a story the way you want. But there are limits.
And so, when Dorian was not on its way to Alabama, all of a sudden we saw a map of the impacted region that now had an extra loop drawn with a sharpie that included part of Alabama.
See. The president was right.
And when the Bureau of Labor Statistics updated the jobs report for May and June to reflect the reality now that we have new data (something that is very common), we need to get out another sharpie. First, fire the commissioner, then hire someone with better numbers.
We have only the best numbers coming soon. Just you wait.
And the new person in charge will take a sharpie and draw loops around numbers until the president’s lies about how good the economy is doing and will do are all of a sudden correct.
Tariffs, employment, the economy - who are you going to believe, your grocery bill or these new beautiful numbers?
Sometimes, it turns out, they just skip the step where they make the numbers say what they want them to say to justify their actions.
Crime numbers in Washington, DC are down in almost every category that matters. The improvement has outpaced the nation.
There was just a car-jacking that involved one of the members of Musk’s DOGE team - the dude known as Big Balls. The DC police responded and caught the people responsible. It was a policing success.
But now we’re told - forget about the numbers, forget about the reality - DC is a hellhole that can’t police itself so we need to send in federal troops.
You’re going to see images online and on tv that make it look as if this presence is justified. Remember the pictures that made it look as if LA was out of control? Ask anyone from LA and they hardly knew anything was happening at all.
The coming coverage is just a high tech sharpie. Don’t fall for the damn lies.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 281. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe