Hands off our Wordle! -- Column of Feb. 17, 2022

By MARSHA MERCER

“Well, I thought I might be above fads but I was wrong,” my friend Larry, a physician, wrote on Facebook. “I’m addicted to Wordle.”

Who isn’t? The wildly popular word game has many of us hooked.

Wordle is fun, and it’s a friendly challenge. It transports you from everyday cares.

Worried about the high cost of, well, everything? Wordle is free, at least for now. Worried about the state of American politics and culture? Wordle is a politics-free zone.

Solving Wordle brings people together in a shared activity that makes each of us think for ourselves.

I bet if Putin played Wordle, he wouldn’t need to amass Russian troops on the border with Ukraine to feel like Somebody. He’d get a sense of personal accomplishment -- without starting a war. And, yes, there is a version in Russian.

Wordle, in case you’ve not played yet, is simple. You get six tries to guess a five-letter word. With each try, if the correct letter is in the right place, the letter turns green. If it’s the correct letter in the wrong place, it turns yellow. Letters that are not in the word are gray.

The game has a charming back story. Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, created it as a gift for his partner, who loves word games. Wardle named the game Wordle as a play on his last name.

He released the game free to the public in October. It caught on as players shared their winning Wordle diagrams on social media.

The New York Times, which offers games in print and by subscription, bought the rights for Wordle for a price in “in the low seven figures” Jan. 31 and says it is keeping it free for new and existing users “initially.”

It didn’t take long for players to begin griping. Some complain the game is more difficult now with words like cynic and caulk.

Originally, there was one word of the day for everyone worldwide, which meant everyone could compare scores and strategy. On Feb. 15, though, two words were winners. Depending on the platform, the winning word was either agora or aroma.

On the original U.K. site, the winning word was agora, while on the Times site aroma won. This reportedly was a temporary glitch caused by moving to the Times platform. The Times is also removing offensive and obscure words from the game’s dictionary.

Part of the genius of Wordle is its limits. You can play only once a day, with a new word coming at midnight.

For the truly addicted, however, there are many knockoffs. Some free versions allow you to adjust the number of letters and to play endless rounds. It’s very possible to waste a lot of time on Hello Wordl (no e), said the voice of experience.

Another version is Absurdle -- fiendishly difficult because you’re playing against artificial intelligence that changes the five-letter target word as you play. It gave me a headache.

For the high brow, the Folger Shakespeare Library unveiled Prattle. Players can choose to guess words ranging from four to 11 letters, each from one of the library’s Shakespeare texts.

A joy of Wordle is touching base – commiserating or celebrating – with friends and family via Wordle scores. For Denyse Holt, 80, of Lincolnwood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, Wordle became more than a diversion.

Holt awoke in the middle of the night on Feb. 6 to find a bleeding, naked man holding scissors standing over her. The man would hold her hostage in her home for more than 20 hours.

When Holt didn’t text her older daughter her daily Wordle score, and when she didn’t respond to texts or calls, her daughters, who live in California and Oregon, got worried.

The family contacted police for a wellness check. Police found Holt locked in a basement bathroom. The intruder, who had broken in through a window, was still in the house. He was subdued, arrested and taken to jail on several charges.

So, the Times may think it bought a fad that it can monetize, but it also bought a way millions of people connect with each other in a crazy, fractured time.

Don’t mess with our Wordle!

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confused about masks? Join the club -- Feb. 10, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

We went to dinner indoors at a restaurant last week.  

It was a milestone -- the first time in ages we hadn’t gotten carryout or sat outside, and we met friends we hadn’t seen in months. We were all vaccinated and boosted.

Life seemed almost normal. Except that the reservation was for an early 6 p.m. on a Friday, I asked for a table away from other diners and the restaurant was nearly empty when we arrived wearing masks.

We were told we could take off our masks while seated, but the menu requested we wear them when talking with the wait staff, all of whom wore masks.

We enjoyed a leisurely meal and put on our masks to leave, this time passing a boisterous crowd of customers packed in booths. All the customers were maskless, even around wait staff.

This new normal was mildly confusing. We were glad to see the locally owned business with a good crowd, but . . . While we were happy to comply with the restaurant’s rules, others evidently were not. And why wear masks standing up but not sitting down?

It’s not as though the pandemic is history. While numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations nationwide have fallen, an average of more than 225,000 new virus infections are reported daily and an average of 100,000 people are hospitalized daily with COVID-19. On average, about 2,600 people die of COVID every day in the United States.

We all yearn to get on with life, and politicians are responding. California, Illinois, New York and other states with Democratic governors who once were wary about lifting restrictions now race to drop various iterations of statewide mask mandates.

But more people are rightly confused and frustrated. Those who have followed public health guidance to get vaccinated and boosted wonder what we should do now to keep safe ourselves, friends, family members and those whose jobs require them to meet the public. Mask or no mask?

It should be easy to find out, but when I searched the Virginia Department of Health site for guidance, I found the experience frustrating. Clicking on tabs often brought me right back to the same page. A friend had the same experience.

I had better luck with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site, which is sticking for now with familiar guidance. Those up-to-date on COVID vaccinations should wear a mask indoors in public “if you are in an area of substantial or high transmission.” That includes all of Virginia. 

And almost everywhere else: 95% of U.S. counties have high or substantial virus transmission, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, told reporters Wednesday. High transmission is when there are 100 positive cases per 100,000 people per day, and substantial is 50 cases per 100,000.

“Our hospitalizations are still high; our death rates are still high,” she said. “We are not there yet.”

Oft-changing messages have led many people to tune out public health guidance, leading to more confusion.

“Confusion is now the most common reaction to shifts in public health guidance: 60% of U.S. adults say they’ve felt confused as a result of changes to public health officials’ recommendations on how to slow the spread of the coronavirus, up 7 percentage points since last summer,” the Pew Research Center reported Wednesday in its latest survey.

About half those surveyed said the CDC and other agencies are doing a good or excellent job responding to the pandemic, but half said they are doing a fair or poor job.

It shouldn’t be this way. The CDC has changed its recommendations as the pandemic has changed, but its messaging hasn’t been clear.

For people to make wise decisions, the CDC, state and local health agencies need to ensure their guidance is easily available, science-based, understandable and up to date.

As politicians sprint toward normalcy and a mask-free society, no matter the science, we can still choose to wear masks indoors to protect those who are immunocompromised or have other health conditions that preclude vaccination.

Don’t toss your masks just yet.

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Whoopi's bad history a teachable moment -- Feb. 3, 2022 column

 By MARSHA MERCER

Loose talk often rules the day, but what we say and how we say it still matter.

Just ask Whoopi Goldberg, who, while talking about a graphic novel about the Holocaust that was banned by a Tennessee school board, asserted a stunningly wrong view of history.

The Holocaust was “not about race” but about “man’s inhumanity to man,” she said Monday on ABC’s “The View.”

When her co-hosts pushed back, she insisted: “But these are two white groups of people,” she said. “This is white people doing it to white people, so ya’ll going to fight amongst yourselves.”

Her comments were ignorant or misinformed and led to immediate and widespread condemnation.

“Racism was central to Nazi ideology. Jews were not defined by religion, but by race. Nazi racist beliefs fueled genocide and mass murder,” the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington responded to Goldberg in a tweet.

 

Goldberg quickly apologized. “My words upset so many people, which was not my intention,” she said. “I misspoke.”

But Kim Godwin, ABC News president, while acknowledging Goldberg’s apologies, suspended her from “The View” for two weeks, saying Goldberg needed to think about the impact of her “wrong and hurtful comments.”

Goldberg, a longtime ally of the Jewish community, was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in 1955. The origin of her stage name is hazy.

“The true story is that my family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic – none of which I subscribe to, by the way, as I don’t believe in man-made religions. . . So I took the last name from a Jewish ancestor. And I happen to be gaseous, which explains the first name, short for whoopee cushion,” she told Reuters in the 1990s.

But subsequent research by Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed Goldberg’s roots traced to West Africa, and she had no Jewish forebears, Gates wrote in his 2009 book “In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past.”

Goldberg’s recent comments seem to reflect an evolving definition of race and racism as relating only to people of color, some Jewish scholars said.

“What she said was really horrendous, but it’s not her original idea,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said in an interview on Talkline with Zev Brenner, a radio program and podcast. “I don’t think she has a bad bone in her body, but she’s parroting now a new definition that’s wrong.”

This “woke definition” of race as exclusively pertaining to Blacks and other people of color, Cooper said, is repeated over and over, taught in schools and has been adopted by some in the Jewish community.

But “Adolph Hitler and the Nazis were all about race,” he said. “We were the ultimate inferior” race.

Polls show Americans in the 21^st century may be losing the shared memory of the horrors of the Holocaust, when about one third of the world’s Jews were murdered.

Only 45% of American adults know 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, a Pew Research Center survey reported in 2020. In a separate survey at the same time, only 38% of teens know 6 million Jews were killed.  

The banned book that sparked Goldberg’s comments, “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, tells the story of his parents in Nazi death camps. The book depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. “Maus” won a Pulitzer Special Award in Letters in 1992.

The McMinn County School Board in southeast Tennessee voted last month to ban the book from the 8^th grade language arts curriculum because of “inappropriate language” – eight curse words -- and a drawing of a naked female mouse, thus missing the point of the work altogether.

“This is not about left versus right,” Spiegelman told The Tennessean newspaper. “This is about a culture war that’s gotten totally out of control.”

Nothing spurs readership like censorship. The “Maus” books have sold out on Amazon and won’t be available for weeks.  

For her part, Goldberg got a history lesson from which others may learn.  

“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said Tuesday. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected.”

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

 

It's time for a Black woman Supreme Court justice -- Jan. 27, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When I wrote last October about liberal activists’ campaign urging Justice Stephen Breyer to retire, I mentioned President Joe Biden likely would nominate the nation’s first Black woman justice.

Some readers criticized the idea of making race and gender a factor.

A reader in Henrico, Va., wrote me: “Will people ever truly understand that it is better and more important to appoint the best possible justice, irrespective of race and sex?”

His question is a familiar one, but it implies “the best possible justice” can’t possibly be both Black and a woman. Even if unintentional, the implication is wrong.

Judges and justices who bring diverse experiences of more parts of society have a wider perspective that can enhance their fair and independent decisions. Their presence on the bench also helps inspire public confidence in the judiciary.

Ronald Reagan proved the wisdom of judicial diversity when he made a presidential campaign promise in 1980 to name the first woman justice to the Supreme Court. He nominated Sandra Day O’Connor the following year and she served for a quarter century before retiring.

Biden has made a concerted effort to name more women and people of color to the federal bench, and the Senate has confirmed 40 of his district and circuit court picks. That’s more than have been confirmed in a president’s first year since Reagan, the White House says. Among those confirmed last year, 80% are women and 53% are people of color.

In contrast, 85% of former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees were white and 76% were men, according to the Alliance for Justice, a progressive advocacy association.  

With Breyer’s retirement, Biden is poised to make history while, like Reagan, delivering on a campaign pledge.

“I’m looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court to make sure we in fact get everyone represented,” candidate Biden said at a debate days before the South Carolina Democratic primary in February 2020.

Breyer’s retirement comes as Democrats need to revive their base of support before the midterm elections.  Even if Biden hadn’t promised to nominate a Black woman justice, he probably would. It’s not only popular politically but the right thing to do.

It’s time a Black woman joined the nation’s highest court.

She will be only the third Black justice in history and the second, with Clarence Thomas, on the current court, and the fourth sitting woman justice, with Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett. 

Critics say Breyer, a pragmatic liberal, likely will be replaced by a liberal activist. Even if that is so, the liberal wing of the court will remain a three-justice minority. The six-justice conservative majority, including the three justices Trump nominated, will stand.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promises a speedy confirmation process, and the Senate can move fast. Then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed Trump-nominated Barrett through last fall in one month.

The 50-50 Senate can confirm Biden’s nominee if all 50 Democratic senators stick together and are present that day, and Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote.

It’s a stretch to think any Republicans will vote for Biden’s nominee – though three Republicans did vote last year to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. They were Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Jackson is on the likely shortlist of candidates for the high court. She also had bipartisan support when she was nominated for the federal district court in 2012. None other than Rep. Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, introduced her, saying:

“Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity is unequivocal. She’s an amazing person, and I favorably recommend her consideration.”

Ryan, who later became House speaker before retiring in 2018, is related by marriage to the judge.

Also on the shortlist: California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and federal District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina.

Any of them would make an honorable and qualified addition to the Supreme Court.

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Biden needs a reboot for second year -- Jan. 20, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Joe Biden won more than 81 million popular votes, the most of any presidential candidate in American history. He won 306 electoral votes, well more than the 270 needed for presidential victory.

And yet, one year into his presidency, only 43% of Americans approve of the way he’s handling his job and 56% disapprove, the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll reported Thursday.

It was one of many recent polls that show Biden underwater. There are many reasons for his fall from grace: the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, inflation and lasting COVID-19 misery, to name three.

But no other president has had to deal with the headwinds of a predecessor who refuses to accept defeat, goaded his followers to storm the Capitol in hopes of overturning the will of the people, and continues to cling to his delusions that he won.

This should scare everybody who cares about democracy. To this day, many Republicans stubbornly believe the Big Lie, although the former president and his supporters have failed to prove any of their allegations.

Candidate Biden promised to restore integrity, dignity and competence to the White House. People were grateful for his steadiness and calm after four years of unrelenting craziness.

In his inaugural address last year, Biden cautioned that overcoming the many challenges facing the country would require “that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. Unity.” And he asked every American to join him in the cause.

Sadly, they didn’t. Biden has had to fight to keep progressive Democrats on his side. Meanwhile, Republicans solidly united against him.

“I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done,” Biden said in his news conference Wednesday.

Only 28% of people think the country is on the right track, according to the most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls.

Biden says he doesn’t believe polls, but they show a disturbing trend in an election year. Both political independents and Democrats have turned away from him.

Gallup reports that Biden’s job approval rating -- 50% among independents during his first six months – has plunged to 33%. Early on, 90% of Democrats said Biden was doing a good job; that support has dropped to 80%.

Biden’s numbers are almost as bad as his predecessor’s after a year. Only 38.4% of Americans approved of President Donald Trump’s job performance then, Gallup reported.

Biden’s news conference lasted nearly two hours. Although nearly everyone agrees it went on too long, Biden showed a command of many topics, which should dispel criticism he’s not mentally up to the job. But he left unclear how the United States and NATO may respond to a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Biden defended his record, citing 6 million new jobs created in the last year and a drop in the nation’s unemployment rate to 3.9% from 6.2%.

He also suggested he plans a reboot. Let’s hope so. A shift in approach and tone will be necessary to mend relations with voters and save his party from ignominy in November.

He will spend more time traveling, campaigning with congressional candidates, and raising campaign money, he said. He hopes looking voters in the eye and telling them where he stands will remind them why they voted for him and persuade them to back Democratic candidates.

He also will consult experts from academia, editorial writers and think tanks for “constructive criticism about what I should and shouldn’t be doing.”

That Biden is open to advice is an encouraging sign.

Hours after the news conference, the Senate jettisoned a massive voting rights bill, dealing the president another blow.

Biden vows not to give up on his stalled legislative agenda, though it will not be as grand as he hoped. He likely will break up the Build Back Better bill into digestible parts and press for passage of popular items, such as the climate section.

By focusing on the most important issues, he can challenge Republicans to put up or shut up.

Previewing a theme we’re likely to hear often, he said:

“Think about this: What are Republicans for? What are they for?”

© 2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

`A day on, not a day off’ for MLK -- column of Jan. 13, 2022

 By MARSHA MERCER

The federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. blends celebration, reflection and action.

On the third Monday in January, typically there are parades, prayer breakfasts, church services, concerts, readings from the writings of the slain civil rights leader and, yes, sales. Shopping, though, is far less a focus than on other federal holidays.

The King holiday is our national day of service, when Americans are encouraged to volunteer to make their communities better.

King would have turned 93 on Jan. 15. He received the Nobel Peace Prize at 35 and was only 39 when he was tragically killed by a sniper in 1968.

Time dims memories, so it’s worth remembering the holiday honoring him was hard won. Black members of Congress had to fight for 15 years to get the holiday through Congress.

Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, once filibustered the bill with 300 pages of documents accusing King of being a Marxist with communist leanings. Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy or Massachusetts and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York declared the papers “filth.”

Congress finally passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the law creating the King holiday in 1983, with the first observance in 1986. But some states resisted. Arizona did not recognize the holiday until 1992 and New Hampshire in 1999.

Until last year, Virginia still honored Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with a state holiday on the Friday before the King holiday.

Shortly after the first MLK federal holiday, The New York Times published a letter from a Princeton University sociology professor.

“I propose we declare the holiday a `day on,’ rather than a `day off,’” Marion J. Levy Jr. wrote. His idea was that everyone would work on the holiday and those above the poverty line would send their wages to a special MLK fund benefiting education, housing and other projects.

Persuading millions of Americans to work on a holiday and donate their pay was a bridge too far, but the idea of service caught on.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act, officially designating the holiday as a day of national service.

Overshadowing the commemorations this year is the political battle over voting rights legislation.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris paid tribute to King and met with his family Tuesday in Atlanta before the president delivered a fiery speech evoking King’s memory to press for passage of voting rights legislation.   

Voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue but, like most things, it has become fiercely politicized. Partisans can’t even agree on facts.

Biden and many Democrats contend passing the two voting rights bills before Congress is so crucial to restoring equity in the election system that the Senate should set aside the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes, if necessary.

But Republicans vociferously claim the voting rights bills are a massive power grab by Democrats, an attempt to rewrite the nation’s election laws to benefit Democratic candidates.

Biden hopes to make where legislators stand a key marker in this year’s midterm elections.

As senators wrestle with their role in history, the rest of us can find meaningful ways to observe the holiday.

You can Google local MLK service events. If wintry weather or the pandemic makes in-person volunteering problematic, the federal government has two service opportunities people can do at home.

Both the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution are seeking volunteers to transcribe historical documents virtually. Digital volunteers are helping to make letters, field notes, diaries, manuscripts and other handwritten documents more widely available.

For example, the Smithsonian needs help transcribingrecords from the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was formed to improve the lives of formerly enslaved men and women during Reconstruction.

The Library of Congress needs help transcribing pages from George Washington’s farm reports that chronicle the lives and labor of enslaved people at Mount Vernon as well as other aspects of 18^th century farm life.

The library also has projects transcribing Walt Whitman’s letters and Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture files. 

This MLK holiday is a chance to learn while we serve.

“Everybody can be great,” King said, “because anybody can serve.”

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

New Year -- 2022 off to a rocky start -- Jan. 6, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

 Hey, 2022, could we have a do-over?

 You may be hardly a week old, but this in-with-the-new thing isn’t working out. A new year promises a fresh start and a clean slate, but, honestly, you haven’t delivered.

 It’s bad enough that we’re entering our third year of coping with an invisible enemy, the coronavirus. The first case of COVID-19 in the United States was identified on Jan. 20, 2020. We didn’t know then it was called alpha to distinguish from later variants.  

 Vaccinations and boosters were supposed to set us free, but no. Even those who did the right thing, got their shots, wore masks and washed their hands got caught by the latest and most transmissible variant, omicron.

 People who want to be tested must stand in long lines, if they can find tests at all. The good news is the people who followed health guidelines are less likely to be hospitalized and to die than those who shun vaccinations and boosters.

 Still, omicron is disrupting society as it rampages the country and the world.

 Hospitals and the saints who take care of patients are slammed, mainly by those who haven’t gotten their jabs. Airlines canceled thousands of flights around Jan. 1 due to staff shortages caused by sick and quarantining employees. Then a snowstorm hit the East Coast.

 Those who abandoned air travel for cars and trains this week were also headed not for their destinations but for misery. We simply couldn’t get there – or anywhere – from here.

 The debacle on nearly 50 miles of I-95 in Virginia, coupled with gridlock on surrounding roads, created a logjam that affected hundreds of motorists trying to head north and south. Amtrak trains were also stuck under the weather, unable to handle even the most basic of passenger needs – food and toilets.

 Schools in Chicago and other places shut down or returned to remote learning as the pandemic again made in-person classes risky to teachers, staff and students. Businesses pulled back on bringing staff to their offices. Reports of the death of the Zoom culture were premature.

 It’s easy to make New Year’s resolutions for other people – and much more satisfying than making them for oneself – so here’s one for Virginia and federal transportation officials: Work together to focus on essential services.

 We need a country where the systems work. Competence may not be sexy, but it is necessary for peace and prosperity.

 We know Northern Virginia hadn’t had a good snow in a couple of years, and the bizarre change from balmy temperatures in the 60s over the weekend to rain and then heavy snowfall – up to 2 inches an hour – on Monday was discombobulating.

 Transportation officials said they couldn’t pretreat highways because the chemicals would have washed away in the rain. But other states routinely deal with heavy snowfalls without such disastrous consequences.

 And once nearly a foot of snow stopped traffic, surely authorities could have done something to help people stranded in their cars in the cold and dark for more than 24 hours.

 Gov. Ralph Northam wasn’t helpful when he stated the obvious, that people should have stayed off I-95. I’m sure they wish they had.

 But truckers, who are trying to alleviate supply chain shortages and have schedules to keep, as well as other seasoned motorists, know interstates are usually cleared of snow first and are safer than secondary roads in inclement weather.

 When people were finally able to get off I-95 near Fredericksburg, they faced more gridlock on secondary roads. Many travelers reported an absence of authorities to direct traffic or help in any way.

 As officials probe what went wrong, they need to avoid finger pointing, make solid recommendations and implement them.

Americans don’t want more politicking. We want to know we can go where we need to go, safely, and at reasonable speeds. We want our highways and trains to operate efficiently.

 So, while we might like a do-over for the first disastrous week of the new year, there are still 51 weeks left to inspire confidence in America’s ability to function – even if more snow falls. We’re counting on you to do better, 2022.

 ©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30