We Suck Again

If your 6-year-old child, who was born with a congenital heart defect and had Type 1 diabetes, got salmonella at Applebee's and died, and some jerk implied that we don't actually need to reexamine food safety rules and health codes in restaurants because a healthy adult wouldn't have died of that salmonella infection, you'd probably want to do more than punch that person.

That's what all this talk about comorbidities and COVID sounds like to me. It sounds like a lot of people saying that the lives of all people who are not "healthy" (whatever that means) and who have preexisting conditions, autoimmune diseases, chronic illnesses, disabilities, or just plain advanced age just aren't worth caring about all that much. Sure, it's kind of sad when old people in a nursing home die en masse like they're in Flanders field, but it's not a big enough deal for me to accept even a minor inconvenience to my life, right?

I saw that. Did you see his response? I was 🤣🤣🤣 also sidenote, my vote would be Stanley Tucci. Love that man!

1. Fuck it, it’s fiction

2. Let me look up real estate listings, so I can plot out subway routes and schedules and see if this walk really is long enough for them to have this conversation.

Me, a European 2021, after four years of constant headlines, checking up on the Geroge Senate runoff county per county, reading three political websites and following several analysts on Twitter at once simply so I can watch Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s ® political power slowly crumble to dust in his twilight years:

So I looked up how these rules got started

-Don’t wear a hat inside: Medieval knights were more vulnerable if they removed their helmets. Because of this, removing it in a church or in the presence of royalty felt like a respectful act of humility. It’s rude to wear a hat indoors because 1500 years ago some soldiers wanted to show God and King that they trusted them not to stab them in the head

-Don’t put your elbows on the table: In the middle ages European royalty didn’t have dining tables in their banquet halls, they used a long board balanced on trestles and covered it with a table cloth. If you leaned on the table it would unbalance and topple. People are still telling kids not to put their elbows on the table because 1500 years ago some nobles didn’t want to be embarrassed by knocking over a make-shift table and ruining a feast

Like, on AskHistorians we get the question about why men stopped wearing hats in the 1960s all the time. I answer, every time, with “casualness was becoming more and more valued through the 20th century,” and there are always people who want to hear that e.g. it’s really because men were driving cars that were too low for them to wear hats inside, or because the primary purpose of hats is to protect you from weather and with more personal vehicles you didn’t need that protection.

There are no periods of fashion history when women’s clothing was so restrictive that they couldn’t pull chairs out from a table, sit in them, and/or scootch in. (If they “literally couldn’t bend over” then they wouldn’t be able to sit down at all!) Showing deference and giving personal assistance to women, particularly those considered “ladies”, was historically a marker of gentility in men; pulling out a woman’s chair was simply one way of doing this. The same thing applies to holding doors open. We can trace it back to ideals of chivalry in the Middle Ages, but really the modern version is in large part due to social changes in the eighteenth century, I think, when the idea of showing your virtue by being kind and affectionate to women became more in vogue than displaying patriarchal authority.

Taking off a hat inside likewise is a show of respect because … people decided it was a show of respect. You wear a hat outside, in the public world; you take it off in private. Crossing the boundary to take off a hat in a public space of some kind therefore signals something - it’s lowering, not quite demeaning, but it makes you vulnerable in a way that is similar to but not the same as taking off a helmet in a dangerous situation. It shows humility, whether to religion or to officials or to people you’re asking for help from. (Gender also plays into this too, since women have not historically been required to take off their headgear inside, and in some periods have been expected to keep their hair at least nominally covered at all times.)

Keeping your elbows off the table likely also goes back to eighteenth-century shifts in what was considered appropriate. Physical self-control was a huge part of what was considered good manners - sit still, stand straight, arrange your arms and legs gracefully, don’t yawn at people, don’t scratch yourself. By only placing your wrists on the table, you would be showing a decorous restraint and control of your own body, placing you above working-class people with “cruder” habits.

THE FEDS RETREAT.