Fight fiercely Harvard

      The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.
     His vendetta against Harvard University, our nation's preeminent institution of higher learning, has raged for weeks: barring it from accepting foreign students, yanking back its tax exempt status, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. I'm expecting the Army Corps of Engineers to fill Harvard Yard with coils of concertina wire next.

John Harvard

     My first thought was sympathy for Harvard's international students. Thousands of young people, a full quarter of the student body. Sure, many are no doubt scions of wealth, pampered and privileged and shipped off to lay the foundations for a life of same. Somebody has to pay full tuition.
     But some must have scrabbled their way there. Imagine studying in a wretched Third World slum. Hard work and smiling fate contrive to get you into Harvard, and then, while you're proudly wearing your new maroon sweatshirt around your shantytown, the president this buffoon blocks your way because ... because ... remind me, what does Trump have against Harvard?
     Oh right, they didn't bend their knee fast enough, didn't provide enough dirt on foreign-born students so he could choreograph their removal to Salvadoran El Salvadorian prisons.
     Not that I have a particular fondness for Harvard — though the boys at the Lampoon were indulgent to me when I was writing my college pranks book, allowing me the run of their library and archives. We shouldn't focus too long on one harm, because there are so many.
     The president is a whirling dervish of destruction, undermining our National Park Service here, our public health system there. It's hard to keep up.
     On Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for the crime of hanging pictures of Black folk. That hurt, because under her tenure, the gallery became perhaps the most vibrant wing of the Smithsonian. I love visiting it.
     This is a war on history — a literal white-washing — and all of us have a part to play, by being diligent stewards of the past.
     For instance, discussing the current assault, I told my wife: "Harvard was occupied by the British."
     What I meant was the place is very old, has been through a lot and will get through this, too.
     The very old part is true — founded in 1636, our nation's first university.
     But as often happens when you fire history from the hip, I missed. Plug "Did the British occupy Harvard?" into Google, and its AI chatbot pipes up with, "Yes, Harvard buildings were occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War. In 1775, the Provincial Congress commandeered Harvard's buildings, and they were used to house 1,600 British soldiers, according to the Harvard Gazette."
     Being a trained professional, I then read the Harvard Gazette article Google AI linked to. Which did not say that. Sixteen hundred British troops weren't housed at Harvard; it was 1,600 American troops. An important distinction.
     How can everyone keep going on about how AI will eat our lunch, take our jobs and become our overlords? It can't even read a lucid article and differentiate between the British, who occupied nearby Boston, and the colonials, who settled in Cambridge, waiting for George Washington to assemble his Continental Army.

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The nation won't go to hell any faster if you pause to admire butterflies

 

     Let's see. On Saturday we looked at a certain president who's name long ago began to taste like vomit in our mouths, and his vigorous efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history because ... well, I really have no idea why, exactly. Perhaps a legal way to kick people he hates without committing actual atrocities. Or maybe he feels it'll make haters like himself look better, generally, and perhaps instill a habit of casting a soft glow of nostalgic faux patriotism over the harshness of reality, an obscuring pink fog that might linger to when history finally, please God, has a chance to finally look back on our current epoch of national shame.

     So that means today we can shift to some beautiful butterflies I saw Saturday at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Because I think it's smart to alternate. Because we've got ... 44 months left in his second term, assuming the Constitution isn't entirely scrapped by then.

    Butterflies. How could I spot so many? Easy, a highly trained naturalist such as myself can induce a kind of spiritual self-hypnosis where I can look out over an expense of field and flower and just see a single butterfly, resting on a leaf 50 yards away, and sense its presence through deep spiritual bond with the natural universe ...  
     Kidding. Though I see the value of these lies — they're easy and fun too!. No, we went to "Butterflies & Blooms," the enclosed butterfly space at the Garden (writing the self-aggrandizing fabrication above, my first thought was, "Geez, how come libs don't get to just make shit up." My second was, "If the self-inflating brag you're tossing out isn't true, how stupid do you have to be to feel enhanced by saying it?")
     Sorry, butterflies. My wife's idea to go. Can't very well object to that. "No way, dear, I'm not wasting my time ... well, fuck butterflies!" 

     Not my brand. To enter the Butterflies & Blooms pavilion, you go through what is in essence an airlock, a set of double doors, with the interior door having an extra barrier of plastic strips, like in a warehouse freezer, to thwart a butterfly jailbreak. On the way out, you're checked twice, once by a staffer, then by looking in a mirror yourself, to make sure no butterflies are piggybacking on you, escaping into the greater world. It's like visiting Stateville.

Common morpho

     Having a sympathetic heart, my wife noticed a number of butterflies clinging to the mesh, as if gazing wistfully at the unfettered blue, yearning to breath free, and expressed words to that effect. I pointed out that there are plenty of hungry birds out there and, for all we know, we were projecting our love of freedom onto the butterflies. Perhaps they're thinking, "Thank God I'm safe in here!" 

    Our "love of freedom." Ah, hahahahaha. I crack myself up sometime. For a supposedly freedom loving people, we sure grabbed the boot of totalitarianism and pulled it down firmly upon our own necks. The hideous thing is ...

    Butterflies! See how hard this can be? Have we done the etymological (as opposed to the entymological) dissection of "butterfly" yet? Whence the "butter"? That's a stumper. I'm going to guess the color — those little pale yellow butterflies you see, when not in exhibits like "Butterflies & Blooms," but flitting about fields in the greater world.

     Pretty to think so. Especially compared to the theory floated by the Oxford English Dictionary, which tosses up its hands: "The reason of the name is unknown; Wedgwood points out a Du. synonym botershchijte..., which suggests that the inset was so called from the appearance of its excrement."

    Of course it does. Botershchijte. My Dutch isn't so hot, but that word looks like "butter shit" and ... indeed it is. That's perfect. Hopeful me, thinking the insect is named for its modest butter yellow denizens, when in reality the insect was named after its own shit. How au courant. Can you think of another animal named after its excrement?

     Actually, circling back to politics, which return tomorrow: "Trump's America." It does fit, and if that logic works for butterflies, then, well, why not?

White peacock