We Had a Dream

If you go with Darwin--reality and justice--you can't pick and choose. The other side, our opponents, make stuff up. That's not our standard, but the truth is this: the people who had a dream have lost. No one openly defends injustice. They reconstrue reality and market injustice as something else.

Often, necessity. We have a dream but they have a story. It is vain and self-serving and untethered to reality: the wonderful white man, the face of a thousand heroes, tamer of beasts, clearer of forests and subduer of enemies. He who keeps order. White men must rule or it all falls into disorder.

Chaos, that is. It's white men or chaos, but if there's been a "pax of the white man" where is it? I'll order me up some, a full portion. The record looks bad, noting the holocaust, a blip on any screen. Way to go, white men! But they still assure us, many wars later, that they are the leaders we need.

Alrighty! In order for the dreamers to recover, though, we have to look fairly at the current outcome, which is that the white-man coalition has wiped a lot of floors with us. From there we go forward. We can't go much further back, I keep thinking, but those white guys are redefining it all the time.

Ugh

I was telling a black guy I know about an experience I increasingly have when I catch someone, in an instance of momentary eye contact, cringing a little and writing me off as--ugh--an oldie. Yes, Jim, my friend said, that's what if feels like to be black, all the time.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Conservatives hate life. It's an interruption, a trial imposed by God, in the true state of perfection and bliss for which we are intended. This is the source of the cynicism. Life is for losers.

They want to escape but have to see it through. They think it's wrong for our earthly existence to be anything other than punitive and difficult. Having conservatives run things only means misery.

Logistics

My father worked in logistics for the Air Force. He was once on a committee of representatives from the various services and headed-up by a guy from the Department of Defense. The idea was to inspect supply depots around the country to determine if it made sense to consolidate the supply of certain things in the hands of the DOD. 

According to my father there was a consensus in the group that it didn't make sense to consolidate any of it. The branches were already into diseconomies of scale independently of one another. But, lo, the report appears, written by the DOD dude, recommending consolidation. My father thinks it was a setup--that the DOD wanted it done.

This reminds me of Ken Starr, for some reason. Anyway, dad refused to sign the report and subsequently got his ass kicked, by so doing. Now, when you look at American businesses and industries and all the consolidation that has occurred, it happened in the same way, not by fair play and the promoting of efficiency, but by influence.

Think of all the formerly locally-owned stores and such which are now nonexistent or part of huge, effectively unregulated and anonymous monster-corps which got that way as part of a gamed and prejudiced system. Yet again, thank you, Republicans, for ruining our country. I remember the locally-owned stores and businesses where I grew up.

They are gone, gone, gone with some kind of ill, right-wing wind--burned, sacked and obliterated, for all intents. It seems inevitable now but it wasn't. It's a choice we made by electing the wrong people, which we did because we, too, were influenced, in subtle and contrived ways. We've been had, but so easily we can't blame anyone but ourselves.

Necessarily Insufficient

Everything is under-determined over time, but entirely determined over more time.

Trump v. Tomatoes

I'm occupied these days with astonishment at the rise of Donald Trump to the ascendency of something, whatever indescribable malfunction and breakdown this represents, and eating tomatoes, my garden producing an explosion of these wonderful things, from bite-size miniatures to terrifying cannonballs capable of causing real harm if carelessly deployed. 

Always I soothe my soul with rock 'n' roll but, generally, it's Trump versus the tomatoes at my house lately, with the Trump thing blowing every meter and measure I have available. Truly Trump is a fifteen on a ten-scale so higher math is required, and I think we've got to go beyond normal methods to get the guy on the page in graphing whatever it is he represents. 

What he represents, I don't know, apart from a huge "screw you" arising from the souls of puritanical Republicans craving utopia and coming unglued over the horrible imperfection of everything. I celebrate and embrace imperfection. It enables me to do as well as I can with my own inadequacy and failings. Perfectionism is horrible and a curse.

In my experience of certain clinical cases, meaning diagnosed OCD, there is usually a dump or landfill around. In every instance I've seen the person has a closet or part of the yard which is a dump, so I think Trump is a dump, a repository of repressed, right-wing psychological garbage and the refuse of denial, probably composting, at his age.

He's the closeted reality of Republicanism, slowly emerging. Meanwhile I'm eating myself into oblivion with tomatoes, all that digestive energy diverting from the Trump conundrum. I've never seen a technically perfect tomato, the embodiment of the form, but I love them and I'm ready to share. You may contact me about this, as long as the harvest lasts. 

Hell Comes to Whoville

Who is Whoville? It must be us. By that I mean some clan of believers, people with certain values, of generosity and caring and fair play and humor, in an undefended and borderless burg visitors to which are won over by the wise ways of the open-hearted Whos.

But Hell has come to Whoville. It was the values that made them special and the values are lost. There wasn't a formal assault--recognizable evil. It came from within and in the form of confusion. Also it occurred over time, rather slowly. They forgot who they were.

Let us mourn the Whos. Let us mourn ourselves.

Talk About Baggage

Even runaway trains have engineers and conductors and administrators and all. This is the script Republicans have chosen for us, a disaster movie, where we are hurtling toward destruction and so reckless indulgence, sanctimony and despair jostle for position in an environment of fear, awaiting the end. So where are we? 

Watching helplessly from the baggage cars, I suppose, not even villains, as their delusion nears its climax in a crash of unknown severity depending on where, exactly, we come off the rails. They will elect a leader, it seems, an engineer, based on the aerodynamics of his hair so he'll look good out front and not impede anything.

 After all, it's only a role.

Blithe Spirits

The scene in Shakespeare in Love keeps popping into my head in which Judi Dench, playing the disguised Queen, stands up abruptly in the theatre and makes a crack about wearing her name out, she deserving more respect. Judi as well, I think, and then there's God. With an election forthcoming--ugh--many names are coming up, including various Founding Fathers. 

Much of it works at the level of assumption and presumption, though sometimes the names are explicitly dropped, and I picture them standing up, Thomas Jefferson or God, let's say, and asserting their right not to be cited in defense of some policy or scheme. Let's keep this in mind as the carnival continues and the debates begin. Maybe I will don a guise. 

Picture me, one in an anonymous crowd of debate watchers, rising suddenly in a tricorn hat or numinously and asserting my right not to be assumed to be backing some Huckabee sponsored hucksterism or Bush boosterism or other nonsense. I won't have it, I will say, as I'm escorted to a special seat or just ascend my ass out of there.

LOL

Donald Trump for President. LOL, LOL, LOL,...

Wankers or Toadies?

I can't decide which word best describes right-wing suck-puppets, so I put it up for a vote: is it wankers or toadies?