A week of questions, a week of wonder
The jig is up. I don’t know everything. To prove it, three stories from last week left me scratching my head. (At least three. There may have been more. In the age of social media and everyone’s-a-reporter, it’s impossible to read everything.)
The first involved of all people Josh Hawley, the Yalie senator who gave an infamous fist pump to the barely-tethered-to-reality crowd gathering at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020.
May his gesture of support for those who later stormed the citadel of American democracy forever bar his way to higher office.
However deliberately, repulsively provocative he is, Hawley may have had the better of the public relations argument in an exchange with a witness testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
The witness, Berkley law professor Khiara M. Bridges, was contending for the availability of abortions for all “people with the capacity for pregnancy.”
“Would that be women?” Hawley not so innocently asked.
“Many cis women have the capacity for pregnancy,” Bridges replied. “… There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
In an even tone of voice, Bridges then took Hawley to task for raising the issue. “It opens trans people to violence by not recognizing them,” she said.
First of all, I’m in sympathy with the goal but perplexed as to why Bridges, in response to Hawley’s “that would be women” question, just didn’t simply say, as an opening gambit, “Biological women.”
Second, why did Bridges feel compelled to accuse Hawley of promoting acts of violence, especially at what would otherwise have been a relatively obscure legislative hearing?
The fact is, the nomenclature of gender identity — like gender identity itself – is so new that it’s off-putting to a whole array of people, making it ripe fodder for a crafty U.S. senator pushing a political agenda. (So what else do crafty senators do?)
The second story of the week that left me in as state of bewilderment dealt with a much more mundane topic – money, specifically, the American dollar and the European Union’s euro.
An article in the Washington Post explained the dollar and the euro are now being exchanged at “a nearly one-to-one rate for the first time in nearly a decade.”
Okay, I get that.
The story reported: “The euro had been losing ground against the dollar since the start of the year, when it hovered near $1.13, amid an aggressive inflation-fighting campaign by the U.S. Federal Reserve, along with disruptions set off by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The two currencies “reached parity on Wednesday morning” after the dollar stood the day before at $1.0040.
Well, all right.
Here are the things in the dollar-euro saga which throw me. It seems the euro “peaked” in 2008 “near $1.60.” What the heck!
Also, “the stronger dollar is good news for Americans considering a European vacation” (cue the Griswolds), but it’s bad news for American exporters “because foreign buyers’ purchasing power is weakened.”
There you have: I’ve been hearing about “strong dollar-weak dollar” for a long time now, and I’ve never figured out which is better. I guess – and it’s just a guess – it depends.
Finally, we come to the saga of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which this past week sent back its first images of the universe as it appeared as much as 13 billion years ago, which, I now understand, is a mere 800 million years shy of when “the Big Bang” took place.
Wow!
The Webb telescope is a wonder in several respects. Did you know it’s the size of a tennis court? That because of its size, it had to be “unfurled” in space? That, for cooling purposes, it’s “parked” in a “sunshaded” portion of space about a million miles from earth? That it orbits the sun “with us?”
“Unfurled,” “sunshaded,” “parked,” and orbiting. I’m trying to get my head around those, for sure.
Webb will allow astronomers – all of us really – to observe how stars are born, how they gather strength, and finally how they lose strength and die, all the while looking for distant, possibly habitable worlds.
As Sergio Pecanha of the Washington Post put it: “Bonkers, right?”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.