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The newly anointed and annoying awakened ones are about as welcome a sign of progress and the future as the “church lady” we once held in mocking derision.

Followers of revealed truths have a form of holy passion that’s simply absent in reasoning using an accumulation of fact and experience. And isn’t it perfectly natural the more recent inspired, prophetic visionary would be of greatest interest by having the latest revelation?

Recent prophetic revelation has the caveat of timeliness, the prophet’s boon.

How many, I wonder, readers remember the world’s first nude woman cello player? Around 1970, I recollect, she boldly innovated where not even Mozart (thank goodness) ever went. That long ago, half a century, the world was poised for a new era of all naked string quartets, topless timpanists and bottomless trombonists. Sadly nothing. No Back Bay Naughty Nude Oral Choral Philharmonic.

There’s a chance, though, that with dozens of newly recognized genders omitted or overlooked by ages of evolution there can yet arise a non-binary fusion of the glass organ (the armonica, as Franklin called it) and human organs, skin as the largest being most likely.

Before I depart the mortal coil would that a Sullivan-like Show of Shows would feature hours of cis toes milking silicone mammaries. I should apologize for all that, but age has left me neither wiser nor funnier, so what else am I to do?

It’s disappointing the pioneering nude cellist led to so little. Why’s that? Was the world not ready? Were we lacking in a sufficient community of musical nudists?

Perhaps so as I judge naked cymbal playing as potentially injurious for either specie of biological front-end stuff. But now that clothes wringers are a thing of the past maybe a little risk and excitement is worth inviting back.

What would you risk or hazard? Inventive contemporary minds might while an empty hour into coming up with ways to harvest human methane to make easily portable potato cannons needing only a spark to ignite the gaseous accumulation. Time to stop this before there is more needless humiliation.
But, can you blame a pit side ponderer from weaving his way forward (or back)? We all weaved together, did we not, when pandemic forecasts of millions dead and hospital halls as morgues? Who in right mind didn’t jink to avoid that by staying home, quarantining groceries, and saying prayers for all the convenience store workers soon to die?

Didn’t most embrace fascism (union of business and government) to get a vaccine? Well didn’t we, two administrations in a row act as fascists? Think a mo. What business wouldn’t sign beneficially knowing their government was mandating use of their product? Millions on millions on stab-stab-boost-boost is billions of bucks isn’t it? Let the pharmaceuticals rejoice!

Now, you may rightly ask, is this lunatic going to go off on that chase of wild geese? Well no, crazy Harry is not.

Making volume doses of anything is beyond production of (as was on the common side a century ago) of the local chemist, today’s pharmacist. Big Pharma is what you need to make the big volume of vaccines.

But, go you a better one if you think I’ll be against “gain of function” research. I grasp why, in studying viruses, we’d do that. I get it. There is a considerable risk (as Wuhan seems to show), but if tightly controlled I’d say do it, cautiously, but go forward. I who am not authoritarian or fascist by nature or inclination think it hardly possible to have “advanced” medicines without some fascist melding of government (big) with the pharma (bad) resulting in Big-Bad.

My quibble isn’t with going fascist with research and pharmaceuticals. I wonder why in hell we’d do it with possibly the most fascist government on the planet. We dither in fascism. In China it’s the main dogma. Why help encourage and fund that? Want to know why? Simple as, ask me, Big and Bad understanding of one another and not for many seconds ever doubting their sovereignty over the ignorant masses that be us and US.

Have you noticed some people think talking at is same as talking with? Challenging they are.
A recent exposure to one of these social historians brought to mind my mother’s personal history.

Think, a mere four generations past shoes were special. To save them from wear, mother carried hers to put on before reaching school in Chicago. Later, she got engaged when her fiancé won a nickel raise and did late night piece-work at a book bindery to build a marriage nest egg. One night being robbed she gave up her purse, but refused to lose her ring. The robber stabbed her and took it. In those days there was no community for Polack girls assaulted at night, not much chance of finding the robber, a black man as ordinary in his way as she was in hers. Her widowed mother, older brothers and fiancé pitched in with care and to pay for treatment that prevented a chest wound turning fatal. Fear kept her from returning to night work, but did not stop her from insisting her son have (still has) books from the bindery that near ended her life.

Is the above too specific? Is that why it lacks the narrative power of a social history grander in scope by homogenizing (an opposite of diversifying) for a mass effect of community stature? Social history cooks the past to make a specific type of broth, soup or stew. The history cook decides whether there will be potatoes and whether they’ll be chunked large or fine to bob or to thicken. Homogenized history is a product. Calling it history can be misleading as thinking we understand dairy farming because we drank a glass of skim. The product is skim, and even if “whole” will not be an entire cow nor the other factors essential to the farm. Real history needs be individual and specific.

The other kind is narrative. That means a percentage of fictional make believe not always identified on the label.