What Can You Say About an Old Lady Who Died?

Dolly Parton died today at the age of eighty. Her nephew and security chief Bryan Seaver announced it in a moving video on behalf of her family.  He says Parton asked her to do it several years ago. That impressed me, because it suggests that Parton planned ahead, aware of her mortality before it really caught up with her.  Maybe she'd had some health scares even then? There were bursts of publicity in the past year when she had to cancel appearances, but she always minimized them in her public statements. Probably that was a good idea; she was always a canny manipulator of her image.

Many people, predictably, are going nuts. One old friend of mine, a highly educated and intelligent person in her sixties, wailed on Facebook that she'd believed Dolly would live forever, and said Willie Nelson should be wrapped in cellophane to protect him.  To be fair, she's dealing better with her own mother's failing health, having just moved her to a closer care facility as her memory gets worse.  I suspect that people are more realistic about the people they are close and must care for, while celebrities just aren't real to them and they can fantasize that they're immortal. I shudder to think what will happen to her when her idol Bruce Springsteen (age 76) buys the farm.

I've written before about this, how people refuse to let their heroes go, when I saw the mass tantrums over Nelson Mandela's long decline. 

For years before [his death], he had "retired from retirement" because of his failing health.  2013 was a morbid death watch, the way millions of people panicked every time Mandela went into the hospital.  At 95, after a very long life of public service, I'd have thought he had earned the right to rest.  But people still wanted a piece of him, and wanted him to go on living no matter what.  They saw this craving as love, but I think it was something else.  Selfishness is when you let your wishes override the wishes of another person, and I think that selfishness was the dominant emotion in those who wanted Mandela, or anyone else, to be kept alive forever, no matter what.

Robin Williams was another morbid case.  I know people who are still obsessed with him. 

My friend is a Parton fan, and I'm not.  I like some of her music, but country has never done much for me.  What mattered to me was that Parton transcended her background, wandering beyond country as she pleased, while insisting that she was just a simple country girl all along. I will always wonder how much of that was a conscious act, though it doesn't really matter.  Her philanthropy is also important - as a reader I naturally admired her books for kids initiative, and will forever hate my state's governor, for cutting off funding to it. (I know, others did too.)  It didn't really affect the program, it was more a show of allegiance to Trump and his own MAGA base.  Parton's openness and humanity is her legacy.  I expect we'll see more of her planning in the days and years to come; she didn't let death take her by surprise. But like all of us, she was never going to live forever.  I'm seventy-five myself, my health is tolerably good, but I know my days are numbered.  I need to do some more planning myself.

In one of those meaningless coincidences that make life interesting, Parton's death was announced just as I was coming to end of David Lodge's 2008 novel Deaf Sentence.  Lodge died last year at the age of 90, which I didn't know until I looked him up just now.  The protagonist of Deaf Sentence is a retired professor of linguistics in his 60s. He's progressively losing his hearing and the novel is largely about his struggle to adjust.  But it's also about mortality and the meaning of life.  The protagonist encounters a young American graduate student who's studying the rhetoric of suicide notes.  His first marriage ended in his wife's death of cancer, and he's caring for his elderly father; he makes a lot of dad jokes about deafness, playing on the word's closeness to death, such as I had not known deaf had undone so many, and of course the novel's title. In many ways it's a dark, disturbing book, but it has Lodge's typical humanity and humor.  I was annoyed when I read a recent review of another novelist's survey of The Novel, who singled Lodge out as an especially bad novelist.  I disagree vehemently, but then I don't much care, and Deaf Sentence is a reason why, apart from the fact that I happened to read it at an appropriate time.

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Vote DSA All the Way

This week's batch of primary elections had some promising outcomes.  I'll start with Missouri, a red state. Cori Bush was decisively defeated for the Democratic congressional nomination from St. Louis by Wesley Bell. It wasn't a rejection of a progressive, because Bell is also apparently progressive, but he had AIPAC support, so Bush's Israel-critical stance took a hit. 

More important, though, two proposed amendments to the state constitution were rejected by Missouri voters.  Amendment 4 would have made it much harder for citizen-based ballot initiatives to amend the state constitution; this was an effort by Republican elites to block initiatives they find distasteful - for example, to expand Medicaid or protect abortion rights in the state. Voters defeated it, roughly 82-17%. Amendment 5 would have abolished the state income tax; it too went down in flames, 83-16%.

MSNBC commentators, including the obnoxious Rachel Maddow, exulted over this result.  They were delighted that Missouri voters had slapped back at the Republican leadership and insisted on People Power.  Fair enough; I agree.  This was, however, on Tuesday night, when the results of another closely-watched primary were still uncertain, in Michigan.  Here too, party elites and special-interest money had played a major role with the aim of defeating Abdul El-Sayed, who was running against Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination.  El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but he ran on a strongly progressive platform and is vehemently critical of Israel's war crimes and US support for them.  Stevens notoriously said "Israel comes to me in my dreams", is strongly supportive of Israel, and received massive campaign donations from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. She outspent Sayed by a factor of 9 to 1. Liberal Democrats supported her and attacked El-Sayed harshly as a communist, an anti-Semite and an Islamist. But he defeated Stevens anyway, though very narrowly, by one percentage point.  I don't know whether Rachel Maddow is as happy about this outcome as she was of the one in Missouri, but as a matter of principle she ought to be.

Progressives did well elsewhere in Michigan; there's a good discussion here.  The funniest upset involved a Trump-approved Republican who lost by double digits to a competitor who had stopped campaigning weeks ago.  The winner said he'll accept the nomination and run in the general election this November.

Mainstream Democratic celebrities have moved to pledge support to El-Sayed's campaign. Haley Stevens herself has taken the high road; good for her.  Kamala Harris even sent out a fund-raising letter to her list to try to piggy-back on his success.  "It is so important that Abdul enters the general election with a strong start," the letter says.  This is perhaps unfortunate rhetoric, given that Harris's 2024 campaign also had a strong start, with a huge war chest; I hope that El-Sayed will have learned from Harris's mistakes.

Harris's letter also mentions that Republican attacks on El-Sayed have "already begun."  True, but so have right-wing Democratic attacks from the usual scum.  CNN aired an attack interview with him. He calmly batted aside the purity-test questions. Comments under that post, ostensibly from Democrats, are the kind of bigoted froth that was aimed at Zohran Mamdani, and at El-Sayed himself during the campaign; "communist", "mandatory Quran classes in elementary school," "Russian agents but little investigation into it due to fear." Some are probably from MAGA and some are bots, but some are clearly from Democrats.

Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman of New York complained: "All three of us who lost in NYC had very progressive records (including supporting Medicare for All) and we all had the overwhelming support of actual working families — labor unions, public housing residents and immigrant communities."  That's interesting, because I can remember when supporting Medicare for All marked you out as a radical Marxist, and reasonable Democrats pledged to block it.

It's true, supporting Israel is no longer a safe position for Democrats, and even Republicans are less enthusiastic than they used to be. Now we're going to see how firmly Democrats will hew to "Vote Blue No Matter Who."  Some of the terminally online are ready to jettison it and have been since Mamdani won his primary, though I don't know how representative they are.  But I've seen enough frenzied accusations that El-Sayed and Mamdani are communists from Democrats I know personally to feel sure that a significant number of them yearn to make common cause with MAGA. MAGA-adjacent? MAGA-lite?  MAGA-curious?  Whatever you call them, they're a blight in the party, and in the country.  Meanwhile, though I'm gratified by leftish victories, most of them are just primaries. The generals are yet to come.