Month: September 2018

What’s wrong with the “women should be afraid that their sons will be accused of rape” meme

[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]

The meme circulating is almost everything wrong with current GOP rhetoric (GOP rhetoric wasn’t always this bad, and being conservative does not mean you have to be stupid). It’s engaging in a false binary, shifting the stasis, asserting empirically indefensible claims, reducing  women to mothers (and, in some versions, wives), and fear-mongering. It’s also weirdly entangled in racist experiences of the justice system. And there is the really bizarre argument that Ford’s accusations can be dismissed because they’re politically motivated, which is a subset of the rape culture topos that rape accusers have bad motives.

Sometimes this meme is explicitly connected to Kavanaugh, and the accusation against him. And it’s sometimes asserted that a male can be convicted on the basis of a single woman’s word. While there are people arguing that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because of this accusation, far more are arguing that his confirmation shouldn’t be, as the GOP is doing, rushed. They are calling for an investigation, perhaps by the FBI. Some are simply asking that Kavanaugh testify under oath about this incident. Some are saying that, in addition to his stance on Roe v Wade, he shouldn’t be confirmed. The reactions to the accusations about Kavanaugh don’t neatly split into two.

The dominant argument is that the charges should be investigated, exactly the opposite claim of the meme. So, this meme shifts the stasis from “we should slow down in this confirmation process” to “women are slutty mcslutfaces who love accusing men of rape because men go to jail over one slutty mcslutface’s word.”

[Edited to add: just to be clear, the argument that most critics of the process are making is that we should slow down this process, and investigate the claims. So, it isn’t critics of Kavanaugh who are cutting short an investigation–it’s his defenders.]

Obviously, women who make accusations of rape are more likely to have their lives destroyed than the men, but there are cases of men being charged who have been falsely accused of rape. And it’s true that major figures will weigh in and insist on punishment even before the trial, such as Trump’s false accusation against the Central Park rapists (which he’s never retracted). So, if you want to worry about someone in power who will make and refuse to retract irresponsible accusations of rape, you might look at Trump. It’s interesting that the cases that get so much media attention tend to be white men (Rolling Stone grovelled, but Trump never has, for instance). The media is very worried about the lives of white males whose lives might be ruined by rape accusations, less worried about how the lives of accusers are always in ruins, and meanwhile almost entirely ignoring that the real crime is convictions on the basis of false accusations. And, to be blunt, suburban GOP white women don’t need to worry that their sons will be convicted of rape on the grounds of the word of a single woman who has no supporting evidence.

There are mothers who need to worry about that, though–the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys, of course, the Central Park Five (whom Trump wanted executed). There are false accusations of rape, and, yes, men have spent a lot of time in prison over those false accusations. Men have been indisputably exonerated.

But the Kavanaugh confirmation has nothing to do with whether white men are falsely accused of rape. That’s the most cunning and wicked stasis-shift of all. Hearings are supposed to be about getting to the truth. As I crawl around the internet, I’m finding that one of the most common defenses of Kavanaugh is that Ford and her supporters have bad motives for their claims. For instance, they claim it’s suspicious that Feinstein delayed releasing the letter, although that’s clearly explained in the initial letter–she requested confidentiality until they could speak. (They don’t know that–they’re drinking the flavor-aid, and dutifully repeating the talking points they’ve been given, not realizing they’re uncritically repeating stupid arguments.)

But, here’s what matters: people who care about the truth don’t care about the motives of people. It doesn’t matter whether Ford has good or bad motives; what matters is whether what she says is true. (Or not, what matters is that the GOP and Kavanaugh’s response is they’re deep in rape culture.) When someone argues that Ford doesn’t get her claims to be investigated, they are openly saying that they favor rabid political factionalism over the truth.

And that’s where the GOP is these days. And it’s tragic. A healthy democracy has people of good will and intelligence reasonably arguing for various policies from various perspectives. The GOP is openly opposed to democratic deliberation.

Apologia as incompetent as Kavanaugh’s

I was trying to think of an apologia as bad as the case being presented for Kavanaugh, and this one came to mind. It’s kind of an unfair comparison, though, since they’re amateurs. It also ends up being hilarious, which is kind of redeeming.

Rod Blagojevich‘s is up there as far as completely incompetent–instead of one apologia, he went to a whole bunch of outlets, played the victim, kept promising he would answer the charges, but didn’t do it in any of the interviews during which he insisted on his innocence. It isn’t clear that there was a good strategy for him, though, as the damning tape was easily available, his argument that what he did wasn’t so bad would seem like splitting hairs to most people, and, most important, even before that tape was released and he was accused he had an unbelievably low approval rating.

A lot of people make fun of Jimmy Swaggart’s weepy apologia for having been caught with a prostitute after having driven a stake through Jim Bakker, but it was actually quite effective. At that point, he was trying to persuade a pentecostal audience for whom weeping is a sign of sincerity, and he cited David (a really problematic citation), and many people were willing to accept his repentance. The larger organization was willing to accept his repentance, and, in fact, the resolution faltered over issues of money and authority. He was able to hang on to much of his sources of wealth and power, however, because his apologia made all the right moves, especially the comparison to David (at least until the second incident with a prostitute.)

Richard Nixon, Dan Harmon, Tiger Woods, and Mark Sanford all managed effective apologia, through a one-time deflection, an authentic act of restoration, a persuasive claim of rebirth and redemption, or an insistence on repentance and refusal to talk about it more.

Of course, for me the most obvious would be the defense of slavery, which was surprisingly lame, but those rhetors didn’t have the expert advice available to Kavanaugh et al.

But, really, the obvious comparison is every apologia Trump has made. Kavanaugh’s defense is incompetent in exactly the way that the GOP apologia have been since 2016. It’s a doubling down.

Trump’s response (and the GOP response since they decided to submit to Trump) has been pretty straightforward demagoguery: we don’t need to argue about whether what [anyone who criticizes us–Dem, GOP, Martian] says is true because we can show [anyone who criticizes us–Dem, GOP, wimmins, actual Vietnam Vets] have bad motives for making that argument. And their argument can be dismissed because they can be identified as out-group. And they’re out-group because they aren’t rabidly and irrationally loyal to the in-group. Duh.

What we’re saying is that they’re bad for being loyal to their group, but we’re good for doing that. So, for these people, political action isn’t about policy argumentation; it’s about performing loyalty to the in-group.

Let’s be clear: for many defenders of Kavanaigh, this argument isn’t about what is “true” in the sense of a reality that exists outside of group factionalism. And that’s crucial.

Imagine that someone makes a claim: A is/leads to B.

Kavanaugh is a person with poor judgment.

How do you determine if that claim is true?

One way, the demagogic way, is to ask whether he and/or his defenders are in-group or out-group. If you identify Kavanaugh as in-group, then his critics are out-group, and you condemn them by saying they have bad motives. That’s actually kind of weird: you’re saying that what they’re saying is false because they’re out-group. But that has a wobbly major premise: people with bad motives might still be truthful.

For people who find this way of arguing (you are wrong, because you have bad motives, and I know that because you are out-group) they think they can reason from group identity because, for them in-group/out-group is all that matters. In-group members tell the truth, and out-group membrers don’t. People who reason that way are stupid.

When you’re more concerned about the truth, and you think truth and in-group beliefs aren’t necessarily the same thing, then the important question is whether a way of arguing is a way you would think good if you made it. If you’re willing to be a reasonable person, then the important question is whether you are holding the in-group to the same standards as you hold the out-group. Or, in other words, whether you are following Christ.

And, in my experience, no argument for Kavanaugh can meet that standard.

So, let’s just say, none of these people get to claim they’re following Christ unless they want cats to laugh.

Let’s set aside their rejection of what Christ said (while many of them claim to be Christian [not that I’m angry about that, not at all]), and, they never identify Trump as Christian on the basis of his doing unto others as they would want done unto them. They claim he’s Christian because he’s getting them the political agenda that conservative Christians believe to be Christian.

To be blunt, conservative Christians have never been able to make that argument, since American conservative (especially Baptist) Christianity has, thus far, supported slavery, lynching, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting gays from teaching or adopting, dumb claims about race and evolution, “gay” marriage, and, if my math is right, marital rape. [If people want, I can provide the links, but this isn’t really news to any reasonably informed person.]

But, here’s the important point: Kavanaugh’s defenders  can make all sorts of arguments. None of them are very good. But the one argument they cannot make is that they are doing unto others as they would have done unto them.

So, let’s just stop pretending that supporting Kavanaugh has anything to do with supporting Christ.

 

Kavanaugh and the GOP and bungling apologia

Rhetoric is an old art, with what amount to textbooks going back, just in the western tradition, to the 4th century BCE. And, one of the very old concepts in rhetoric is the apologia, or defense speech: the genre of speech in which someone is responding to an accusation. It’s an old concept, and there’s a lot of advice out there as to good and bad practices in apologia. More recently, businesses got interested in the topic, and the field of “crisis communication” was born (with the sub-field of reputation repair). And there are people who work with public figures who can advise people facing accusations as to the best ways to respond.

And they all say the same thing: be clear, take responsibility, be honest.

Kavanaugh, the GOP, and the pundits trying to support him have blown this about as badly as it’s possible. They are clearly not talking to anyone who knows anything about how to handle this kind of situation, and that’s concerning.

There are complicated situations in which no apologia is going to work, or in which it might take months or years. And apologia is a rhetorical strategy–in public rhetoric, it might be purely Machiavellian (the person might not really be very sorry at all). But, there are some principles that are so straightforward they can be taught in a first-year college course in rhetoric. (In fact, they were laid out in a 1973 article.)

So, setting aside the question of ethics or sincerity, the savvy move for Kavanaugh and his handlers to have made was to get advice from at least a first-year rhetoric student, if not an actual expert. Kavanaugh had, from the Machiavellian perspective, an easy case.

The accusation, to be clear, is that, as a drunk teen he tried to rape another teen. No one is claiming that he could not have done it–there is plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh and friends were living a kind of life in which it could have happened. They’re claiming it hasn’t been proven to have happened, and they’re pulling out all the standard misogynist rape culture strategies.

And someone who knew apologia 101 would have told them DO NOT DO THAT. The right response would have been an apologia that  engaged in  denial of intent, bolstering, and differentiation. That would have been something like, “I am tremendously sorry for anything I did in those days–I never had any intent to rape anyone, but I was young, stupid, irresponsible, and drinking too much. I don’t know what I did, but I’m sure I hurt people, and I have put those days behind me” [and then a move to bolstering].

Regardless of whether it was sincere or not, it would have been rhetorically savvy–it would have put opponents of Kavanaugh in the position of trying to attack him for something he might have done a long time ago, for which he has apologized, and which he can plausibly say is not a reflection of who he is now. Opponents would have been trying to deny someone a SCOTUS seat on the basis of the character he had at 17.

But, because they went both barrels of rape culture defenses, Kavanaugh and his supporters have made it clear that he probably still is that entitled and irresponsible person, he doesn’t take responsibility, and they still basically endorse the premises of rape culture. They have made it a question of his character now.

And it’s also now a question of his judgment. And theirs. What is striking to me about the current GOP leadership–and this is a new phenomenon–is the extent to which they reject expertise. There are experts out there who could have helped them with this problem, experts whom they either didn’t consult or whose advice they ignored. And that’s the new GOP in a nutshell. It’s all about each of these guys being all the expert he needs.

Sensible crisis communication is a basic concept in business, and it’s one that’s news to the GOP leadership.

They do it too!

It’s really common in a comment thread for someone to respond to a criticism of one group with a comment along the lines of, “The other group does it too.” So, for instance, if someone says, “Trump supporters are motivated by tribalism,” I’ll count comments till I get to the, “Liberals are tribalists too” or “Both sides engage in tribalism.” The unintentional irony of that response brings me a wicked pleasure.

It’s entertaining because it’s a response that only makes sense if you think of all political discourse as being about which of the two possible groups is better. In other words, it’s a response that assumes rabid factionalism.

Here’s what I mean: why is the person making that comment?

Imagine this exchange:

C: I’m going to vote for Clinton because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

That’s a discussion in which the “just as bad” response is relevant, because it’s showing that the major premise of C’s argument is inconsistent with his own actions—he’s claiming that his vote is motivated by a rejection of factionalism, so that he’s thinking of voting for someone who promotes factionalism is relevant. (I’m not saying the response is true, but it’s relevant to argue about whether they are just as bad.)

Imagine this one:

C: To win over Trump supporters, we need to show them how harmful his policies are to them.

E: That won’t work because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

H’s comment is completely irrelevant to the question of how to persuade Trump supporters. And it’s irrelevant twice over: 1) Clinton supporters could be carry pitchforks and torches and the most rabid factional supporters the world has ever known and it has no relevance for whether Trump supporters are too factional to be persuaded by argument, and 2) the world isn’t divided into Clinton supporters and Trump supporters.

For that comment to make sense, every single issue would be reducible to the relative goodness of the only two groups that constitute the American political realm. That’s how H sees it. H thinks he’s being “fair” and “objective” because he thinks he’s condemning both groups equally. He isn’t. He’s stuck within a limited and politically damaging ideology about purity and motives.

That is the attitude about politics–that all political disagreements can and should be about which of the two possible groups is better (and it’s a zero-sum relationship)—that fuels rabid factionalism.

Political discourse should be policy discourse. Displacing policy discourse with arguments about relative goodness doesn’t help.

 

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

[1] There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg Interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump

A recent anonymous editorial says, “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

This author, call them Franz, wants the Trump administration to succeed, and believes the administration is significantly damaging to the US. So, Franz wants an administration to succeed that he believes is damaging to the US. Wait, wait, that isn’t what Franz meant at all.

The problem with Trump is that he is basically a fascist. He doesn’t want a government accountable to the people through a critical press; he wants (and, to a large degree, has) a media that will repeat in a fawning way anything he wants said, that will defend him through any sophistries and casuistries and outright falsehoods necessary (how tall is he? how much does he weigh?).  Trump wants to be a one-person government, he wants to be head of a one-party state, in which there is nothing but fawning adoration of him, and a government of charismatic leadership. Franz thinks all of that is bad, and yet Franz does everything he can to keep Trump from being held accountable for how bad Franz thinks Trump is.

The sensible (and honorable) thing  for Franz to do would be to step outside the administration and call for impeachment. But Franz isn’t willing to do that honorable thing. Why not? Notice that Franz never explains that point. Franz wants to be seen as a hero without actually explaining why he hasn’t engaged in the genuinely brave action his beliefs would imply–openly condemning an administration he thinks is (sort of–he likes the political agenda, sometimes) bad, but not really, because not bad enough for him to take a hit to his political career.

Basically, this coward has done an anonymous negative Yelp review on Trump.

He says he likes the Republican, not Trump’s, policy agenda. Even without Trump, the GOP has Congress, a reliable propaganda machine, and an increasingly and openly Republican judiciary, and impeaching Trump would put Pence in power. So, why not do it?

Because, and this is what Franz doesn’t want to say, without rabid Trump supporters, the GOP wouldn’t have Congress. Franz wants the political energy and power gained by fomenting Trump’s fascism, but Franz thinks he doesn’t actually want fascism.

Oh, yes, he does. Franz doesn’t want the end product of fascism, but he wants the support of fascists. Franz supports fascism. Franz needs fascists. Maybe Franz should rethink his political agenda since 1) it depends on fascists, and 2) it depends on his hiding his ethical agenda from the public.

The German generals disliked Hitler from the beginning, recognizing him as pretty much a shallow thinker and an idiot about military affairs, and many of them were not Nazis, but they were reactionaries, and they loathed what they thought of as Bolshevism (which included liberalism and democratic socialism). They stuck with Hitler because they believed that “many of [his] policies have already made [Germany] safer and more prosperous.” They would have said that they supported his “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Because he did all that. Seriously, Hitler did that. Franz would have liked Hitler. Hitler undid the socialist agenda of the Weimar democracy in regard to regulations about labor, he promised industrialists all sorts of things, and he promised the military what it wanted.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No, because I really don’t think he is, but I do think he’s a fascist (not in the loose way it’s thrown around in the media, but in the way scholars like Paxton describe it). I’m making a more complicated point: Franz is presenting himself as a hero and savior. Is he? And the way to answer that question is to ask whether we would praise the same behavior on the part of other people who made the same arguments Franz is. Franz’s way of defending Trump is how supporters of Hitler defended him. It’s a bad way of defending someone.

That was complicated, so I’ll try to be more clear. Franz says that he has to try to mitigate Trump’s awful behavior because he likes Trump’s policy agenda (and he thinks the two are separate). He can’t leave Trump because then he might not get that agenda. And that is exactly the way that various people justified working with Hitler.

Is Franz’s defense a good defense? No. Not because Trump is like Hitler, but because Franz is like the people who supported Hitler. Had Hitler had to rely only on true believers like Himmler and Goebbels, he would have tanked. He succeeded because of people like Franz.

It isn’t about the policy agenda. It’s about the world you create in the course of getting that agenda. That’s what supporters of Hitler didn’t understand, and it’s what Franz doesn’t understand. You’re supporting a toxic process because it will get you the momentary political gains. The momentary political gains don’t matter. The process does.

So, Franz, your desire to hold on to a GOP majority—that is, your tribalism—means you’re throwing the US under the bus. You’re trying to present yourself as a hero, but you’re an enabler. The kindest thing I could say about you is that you’re Franz. Were I less charitable, I’d point out that you’re Wilhelm.

The image is from here: http://ww2today.com/24th-september-1942-hitler-sacks-his-chief-of-staff-franz-halder

When Chester brought me a little dog

At one point in my life I was living in a wonderful house on an acre of land, and the front windows looked out to the mailbox. Chester Burnette (a Great Dane mix) was there, and so was Hoover (a Malamute). They had strong feelings about looking out that front window. We had put a couch against the front window, a big couch, but they moved it out of the way so many times we gave up and moved it against the other wall.

There was a woman in the neighborhood who had two tiny dogs, and she walked them with her sweatband and sock tassels matching. Every day, she walked them up to our mailbox, which our dogs could see, and let them shit there. And then she walked away. On weekends, Chester alerted me to this, and I knew he wanted me to do something about it, but, like unstable people who study psychology, I’m a scholar of rhetoric because I’m terrible at it. How do you say to someone, “Um, your dogs’ shitting here everyday is not chance. Dogs shit to send a message. You shouldn’t let them do that. And, by the way, pick that shit up.”? Well, you say it by saying it. But I was raised in a barn by wolves, and I’ll admit I was so gerfuddled by her matching tassel and headband and appalling bad manners that I just wasn’t dealing.

So, one day, when she brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, Chester jumped a six-foot fence, and brought me one of her dogs.

He was saying, very clearly, deal with this.

At that point, things were complicated. She was freaking out, and I loaded her and her dogs into my car, and took them to the vet. And on the way she told me about how her marriage was disintegrating. It is a condition of my family that total strangers unload on us about their lives, and I’m usually okay with that. I like hearing about the lives of checkers, people on the bus, salespeople, but I was not prepared for this. Her husband, a dentist, was leaving her for one of his assistants, and I heard way more about their marriage and him than I ever want to know about anyone. Way, way more.

When we got to the vet, the vet pointed out that Chester hadn’t actually broken the skin of her dog, and I paid the bill, and I took her home, and heard a lot more about her very vexed relationship with an apparently awful person. As far as I could tell, though, she was fine with his being awful till he wanted to bang an assistant openly. Once his awfulness was open, she was claiming victimhood and shock and all sorts of things. But the story she had told me on the way to and from the vet was that he was an awful person she was enabling. She only cared now because his behavior might hurt her.

And I could only intermittently care about the fact that she was willing to enable awful behavior until it hurt her. I just cared that I had fucked up by not earlier objecting to her dogs shitting at my mailbox. And I’m convinced she learned nothing from that whole episode. She thought the problem was Chester fetching her dog, but it really wasn’t. Chester, and my mailbox, and even her dogs had nothing to do with her being in a really toxic relationship with her husband.

I sometimes wonder whether I should have tried to talk to her about her own enabling and toxic relationship with the awful dentist? I didn’t. I just paid the vet bill and drove her home.

She no longer brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, so I guess there’s that. I guess Chester did the right thing. I’d like to think that she stopped wearing sweat bands and matching tassels to walk her dogs, but that’s probably hoping for too much.