Greetings, yinzlings! (I’ve been reading lots of space science-fiction lately, so I’ve got aliens on the brain.)
Listen, after you get past the first point — hell, even the first point is a strong opinion so I don’t even know what I’m saying. I have a lot of opinions about controversial local matters in this edition, including the insanity that has become Sewickley Academy, so please prepare yourselves. Let’s get to it!
1. TL;DR — Shame, not guilt.
As promised last week, at the end of this section is a link to download my work on Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic motivations (college kiddies, this was submitted to Turnitin. If you copy it, you will fail.) Before I began my research, I did an informal survey on Twitter, asking what my followers believed to be the reason Carnegie gave all his money away. I heard words like Homestead, flood, and guilt. I asked my father, who spent more than 45 years working for U.S. Steel and his response was along the lines of “Carnegie decided to give his money away in old age because he felt guilty.” All of that is wrong.
Carnegie, in fact, decided at age 33 that he would quit business by age 35 and give his time, money and talents to the betterment of society. Obviously that didn’t happen in two, ten, or even twenty years. Best of intentions, etc., etc.
In a widely read essay a full four years before the 1892 Homestead Strike deaths, he laid down his belief that the wealthy should donate nearly ALL of their wealth during their lifetimes. So if he decided to be such a radical philanthropist long before the tide of public opinion turned against him, why did he do that? What motivates a person to give away that amount of money and to publicly declare their intentions to do so? Was he that godly? That generous? That morally magnificent?
Allow me to answer that in scholarly fashion … hell to the actual heckin’ no.
It was about his childhood. His pro-labor progressive upbringing. His want of a noble title. His want of status. His hatred of poverty despite his claims to cherish it. His absolute love of money and the extravagant luxuries of wealth. My argument is that there was no guilt for his actions; there was only shame at who he truly knew himself to be (a ruthless money-loving capitalist determined to make a fortune regardless of who he squashed along the way) and how it conflicted with who he thought he ought to have become (a pro-labor progressive living up to his family’s motto of “death to privilege”).
I end with a brief look at where he gave his money and where his legacy lives between Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott. Have a read when you have time. I think you’ll learn something. Crunched for time, you can skip over the “Historiography” section. That’s merely where I outline what other historians have concluded about Carnegie’s philanthropy over the years.
2. About as mysterious as a booger
I have to tell you this: the whole time I read about this topic — this … this … insanity. This asininity. There was this feeling in my throat. I was sitting there, reading the words and saying to myself, “Am I about to cry? Or burst into laughter? What is this feeling in my throat that feels both open and tight at the same time? Why is my head rumbling? Why do I want to crawl into a sewer and live with the sewer people from now on? Is this hysteria? Hysterics? Have I got the vapors? Do I have a fainting couch?”
THAT IS HOW INSANE THIS BATSHIT BATSHITTERY IS.
That is to say, we’ve got another Republican Senate candidate, Pennsylvania.
Step aside, Dr. Oz: A different kind of national celebrity — albeit one best known inside a national movement on the fringe of politics — is running for Senate in Pennsylvania.
Republican Vince Fusca, who has attracted speculation within the so-called QAnon movement that he may actually be the late John F. Kennedy Jr., began gathering petitions for his Senate bid in Monroeville Saturday.
Oh my God. I’m feeling it again. Do you feel it? That weird open tightness rising up in your chest? That wonky push against your heart? Do you want to burst into tears/giggles/laughter/guttural screams/pleadings for a direct hit by an asteroid?
So to recap, joining New Jersey’s Dr. Oz, we now have to deal with this dude WHO IS FROM PITTSBURGH:
Yet who some ding-dongs believe is this dude WHO IS DEAD:
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t. It’s too much. I want off this carousel of opportunistic sideshow freaks and I want to live with the sewer people forever. This is like a naked mole rat trying to convince people it’s really a panda bear that died twenty years earlier … AND SUCCEEDING.
"I threw my hat in the ring because there's too much happening in our nation right now that isn't right: our border, our crime going up, our educational system falling apart,” the fedora-wearing Fusca told WESA at the event.
Fusca said he wants to bring the country “into the future. I want to bring my nation where it should be.” Asked to describe what that future would look like, he joked, “The Jetsons. No potholes — flying cars, boom!”
Omg. He sounds like my parody of Dr. Oz doesn’t he? Just instead of “America. Freedom. Bacon. Guns. Jesus. Eagle flag we the people across the fruited plain,” Fusca is all, “Person, woman, man, camera, TV, MAGA crime border boom!”
Have I said “I can’t” yet? Because I all the way cannot. I am broken. This is politics now. It’s not a vaunted institution aspired to by the best of the best; it is a three-ring circus into which a bunch of clowns are tossing their polka-dotted twirly hats because they’ve begun to believe their own mythologies.
But he did not directly address the question a WESA reporter was obliged to ask: whether he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the 35th U.S. president.
“We're going to leave that for another time, because right now it's about getting the signatures for us to get there,” he said. “We can go in so many different directions with JFK Jr. and other movements. But let's stick to the matter at hand right now.”
Here’s the matter at hand right now, you lard-brained buffoon — You aren’t JFK, Jr. and you know you aren’t JFK, Jr., but admitting it when flat-out asked fully erases every shred of relevance you have and so you’ll continue to string along the fools who could somehow look at you, hear you, smell you and for one moment think you’re the dead son of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. You aren’t being mysterious; you’re being a selfish grifting jackwagon.
Oh, reader, you think he’s harmless? Here’s a public comment on his campaign facebook page:
These are the people being strung along, ruining their lives because this giant loser will not simply admit the truth. The grift is the only thing that matters.
Lord almighty, all you Senate-hopeful clowns, please exit the main ring, pile into your dumb little toot-toot car and drive it into the forking ocean. I have had it.
WHERE THE HELL IS MY LAUDANUM, JEEVES?
I hope the sewer people accept me as their queen.
3. Can’t make this shit up
Here’s a fun one!
What in the hell is going on in this city? I am actually starting to be scared that all our pets’ heads are going to fall off.
A proposal introduced to Pittsburgh City Council on Tuesday would impose a 1% tax on people seeking higher education and receiving medical care in the city, with the proceeds going toward a new fund for repairing the city’s aging infrastructure.
The legislation would apply to students attending colleges, universities and advanced technical schools in the city. It also would apply to those receiving services at medical facilities, including “hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation facilities and any other facility furnishing medical, therapeutic, psychological or vocational care.”
The tax would be applied to the full tuition amount at colleges — not taking into account financial aid, grants or scholarships. It also would be applied to the full amount of medical bills, including the portion paid by insurance.
There would be no exemption or limitation for low-income individuals, Burgess said.
When asked if he was concerned that the tax would make it difficult or impossible for some people to pay for higher education or medical care, Burgess replied: “Bridges are falling down.”
What do you even say to this? WHAT DO YOU SAY? What is this absolute trash, Reverend Burgess? Taxing people trying to get an education or TRYING TO HEAL THEIR BODIES? It literally sounds like a scheme an actual devil or supervillain would cook up. Oh, you’re having a heart attack? Your bill is $500,000? That will be $5,000 please. Glad you didn’t die. Oh, you died? Too bad. Tell your next of kin they owe us $5,000.
Oh, you went to the ER with an asthma attack because we have the worst air in the nation? Pay up or we can’t guarantee the next bridge you cross won’t disintegrate under you.
Oh, you are a Black woman who lives in Pittsburgh, THE WORST CITY IN AMERICA FOR BLACK WOMEN, and you want to give birth to your baby here? Here’s the bill we use to punish you even more for our own failures! Mwah-hahaha!
You want to go after someone for infrastructure money, Reverend Burgess? Go after the nonprofits making billions in profits. Go after the local millionaires and the billionaires who managed to increase their wealth during the pandemic. Look at the fat in your own budget (I KNOW IT IS THERE).
Leave the students and the ill alone; I THINK that’s what Jesus would want, Reverend.
Pittsburgh cannot be the supervillain. This bill needs to die immediately and Reverend Burgess should no longer be re-elected to City Council for even suggesting it. Vote. Him. All. The. Way. Out.
4. We’re getting what we knew we’d get got
Speaking of bridges falling down, last week we discussed some fun possible bridge design options to replace the ill-fated Fern Hollow Bridge. PennDOT recently unveiled the new bridge design and it’s everything we knew it would be.
Well, that bridge is certainly … bridge-y. Very cement-y. Nice and … traversable.
Look, I’m trying to get this post moving in a more positive, less [SCREAMS} direction. I’m doing the best I can. It’s a bridge. It might not fall down anytime soon. It’ll do, pig.
Ah, screw it. It’s about to get heavy in here.
5. To the members of “Sewickley Parents” nonprofit group:
A: If you were proud of your anonymously published opinions that have resulted in the firing of the progressive staff members with diversity connections, your faces and names would be attached to those opinions and I say that as a person who was formerly anonymous but who continues to put her face and name to every strong, divisive opinion she has, including the one that John Fetterman shouldn’t be elected to the U.S. Senate because he disqualified himself when he chased an unarmed black jogger down with a truck and a shotgun and then refused to offer a real apology. In a city where he has cult status, me saying that is real bravery and it will lose me some readers and followers and will cause people to get mad at me and write me mean emails and unsubscribe from my newsletter and possibly trash my whole entire yard. I will let you know exactly how many subscribers I lose for writing that opinion.
B. Claiming that a plan to increase social justice knowledge in Sewickley students’ education is actually sneaky CRT and then fearmongering the other parents into believing such action would radically change the ENTIRE CURRICULUM at the school is truly in bad faith and you should be ashamed for intimating such. And believe me, I deduced from the language used in writing the initial letter that you all have some educated scholars on your side, but as I’ve shown time and again, big words don’t mean you’re smart or correct. I don’t use big words and I’m a freaking genius who is never wrong.
I am kidding. Relax.
Your child is not going to learn algebra by doing word problems about race protests or how the colonists BURNED NATIVES, INCLUDING WOMEN AND CHILDREN ALIVE AND THEN GAVE THE GLORY TO GOD (that really happened, ya history-denying jags). It just means the school was trying to dedicate themselves to turning out students who UNDERSTAND America’s present in context of America’s past and who become more open to inclusion as they graduate. Pittsburgh is segregated. Look at the staff listings of pretty much any organization or company in the city and look at the lack of diversity represented therein. I’ve seen legal firms with 50 lawyers and only one of them is a person of color. Making children more aware of how America’s past created lasting inequality and fostered implicit bias that continues to impact America’s present merely makes your children into BETTER HUMAN BEINGS who not only notice a lack of inclusion, but work to address it. Pittsburgh needs that. There are entire empirical studies that prove the systemic bias exists. This isn’t opinion. There is data backing all this shiz up. Nothing is going to change if we don’t change something. That might not matter to you, but it matters to the marginalized people who will only further needlessly suffer because you’ve created this big bad monster out of CRT — WHICH ISN’T EVEN TAUGHT IN HIGH SCHOOLS.
C. A nitpick: stop using “diversity” when you mean “inclusion.” Diversity is a natural state of existence. Everything is diverse. It’s how the world is. It’s the inclusion that’s a choice. Educate yourselves. I did. I’m a better person for it. But for all my political shifts, from right to left of center, for all the ways I’ve changed my thinking as it relates to progressive societal measures meant to even the playing field and extend EMPATHY to those who don’t have the privilege I do, it doesn’t feel like politics — it just feels like love.
Try it. Let your kids learn real history, not whitewashed history meant to make them stand up and blindly salute a flag. Let them understand their place in the world and how their privilege, if any, grants them status and ease of being. Let them learn facts that foster empathy for their classmates with diversity aspects so that they’ll go into the world, where they will always encounter diversity, and become the kind of people that care about improving the communities in which they live and work … for ALL.
There’s value in learning about the societal value of inclusion.
D. Stop fighting the fight you started that is ruining your school. You royally forked it all up and none of your anonymity or your big words or your convoluted written gymnastics will fix it. You got this one wrong.
6. I’m sorry.
I know you come here for lightheartedness, but I must again ask, WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS CITY?! Did we all die in 2012 and this is some weird gradually deteriorating purgatory?
I’ll try for more carefree stuff next week. But who knows. By then City Council might be taxing the nuns in order to fix the potholes — or even making the nuns fill the potholes.
Have a good week. Deep breaths. Use your voice to push for societal change that addresses the real systemic issues.
Most importantly, Carousel of Opportunistic Sideshow Freaks is my new band name.
As always, if you’re upset I’m not supporting Fetterman’s senate run or for what I said about inclusion, you can direct your anger to …
Press 3 for “insufficient facts always invite danger.”