A legion of inexperienced juvenile toadies now locked in place at the head of your Defense, Homeland Security, Education, Trade, Office of Management and Budget, Energy, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, FBI, Health and Human Services, Secretary of State, CIA, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Environmental Protection Agency.
All parasites suckling on the poisonous tit of a megalomaniac.
All happening, while your protection from Inspector Generals, whistle-blowers and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are deceased.
You are on your own. Caveat Emptor, in all things – good luck!
On this day in 1939 twenty thousand American Nazis gathered at Madison Square Garden in front of a giant image of George Washington and their slogan Free America.
Wake me up in 20 years when it is all over, the wicked are dead and I can know that somehow democracy pulled through.
List all the human advances you can, for all human time up to 1776.
It was 229 years ago that Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal…” and enterprise by the free was unleashed on a global scale. With little thought, there is not a one of us that would not marvel at what came of it.
Compare your list of what came under every imaginable despot those first 250,000 years of human existence, with what you can list the last 000.01% of it. Any comparative list would make those first 250,000 years seem devoid of advance in either human comfort, health, convenience, or nourishment. Almost regardless of your circumstance, your life today is with benefits and comforts beyond the imaginations of any ruler in history claiming to be above the law. This relationship between freedom and despotism is no coincidence.
Pride in our forebearers should ooze from every American pore while the return of a despotism boil everyone’s blood.
I’m going to doze off now, but with a hacksaw, on the chance I wake up in a prison.
An alien, never having experienced earth as you know it, walked into our world out of a Brazilian jungle wearing only a loin cloth and carrying some wood.
He took a look at some of our magic – lighters, cell phones and such, turned around and walked right back into the jungle to be seen no more.
America represented stability in the world, because our institutions were stable, our rule of law was stable, and our separation of powers was able to mute extremists. I believe that is how America provided the safest haven for secure investment and fertile ground for prosperity.
Now with our institutions, the rule of law, the separation of powers being dismantled and a tariff wars kicker, I wonder if the coming pain will root in time for a sleepy self-governing people, charged with running this show, to wake up and save their primacy?
Butchy saw it first, tucked neatly behind the bar’s sink, a $10 bill. It was early December, and I knew the tradition. Each Christmas my grandfather, who couldn’t travel and join us for Christmas sent $10 to buy our Christmas tree. Mom tucked it behind the bar until it was time to make the big buy. My best friends, Butchy and Stevie got so excited with the treasure, I got excited too. Treated as treasure found, it was instantly seen as free money.
YEAH! That’s right Butchy, you found BIG MONEY!” Ten dollars in the 50s, is about as rich as three kids can get.
Negotiations started immediately:
Me — “You found it Butchy, but it is my house, my sink, so it is my $10.”
Butchy — “OK! Split it”.
Stevie- “That’s not fair, what about me, I was here too.”
Me — “What are you talking about, you didn’t find it, it isn’t your house. You don’t get anything”
Stevie — “That’s not right, let’s ask your mother.”
Stevie, who would become a good lawyer, always had a knack for ending an argument with just the right words.
On the way to the Five & Dime the discussion was about toys, a new football, a bunch of trading cards with gum, or . . . “I got it,” I said, “the toy to beat all toys. We have enough money here to buy a Zippo cigarette lighter.” The idea was an immediate hit, not because we smoked, at least not yet, but because we were fascinated with that parental no-no – FIRE.
Just smart enough to know that a store might balk at selling three kids lighters, we devised a brilliant and as it turns out successful plan.
Since Stevie’s handwriting was clearly at a crude stage and I could barely read, let alone write, Butchy got the honors. As neatly as he could, which was pretty darn good as I recall, he wrote out: “I hav givn Kimmy $10 to by three liters — (signed) Mrs. Kimball.”
The clerk took a second look but didn’t seem to mind selling us the lighters or that my mom was illiterate. So, with lighters in hand, off we ran toward the arroyo and into neighborhood history.
The arroyo, a dry four-foot-rut in the neighborhood landscape that had water in it maybe six days a year. It ran right by our house, sheathed in a thick forest of thirsty mesquite trees and tall baked brown grasses.
With all the life-molding first time experiences that would come that day, it wasn’t Mr. Franklin, looking out his window, who first saw the smoke billowing over the neighborhood, not the distant approaching sirens that converged on the scene, nor even the odd smacking sound my mother’s lips made when she heard it was me, that sticks in my mind. It was the speed at which a Zippo could turn solitude into Armageddon when it touches blades of dried grass in a breeze under a forest of parched trees.
I can’t remember what happened to Stevie or Butchy that day, but I would be put to death immediately. My mother, having struggled with this odd, and now clearly dangerous child for some years, cracked.
The fire was not what upset her, it was the “Thou shall not steal” stuff I would get it for. I got one good whack with my belt for every dollar we took.
But I got the best of it. Kids, once adults, are forever blaming their moms for imagined errors in their upbringing. The “welts” from the fire of ’56 would become my most effective weapon as I needled the screeching denials of a mother for the next half-century.
I thought I got the best of it. I got the $10, the lighters (she assumed the Fire Department had confiscated them — they had not), and my exaggerated stories about “bloody welts” from my (well-deserved) whipping, up until she wore with pride the “IT’S ALL MY FAULT” tee shirt I got her on her 70th birthday.
The Founders, feared authoritarian government above all else, thus constructed a firewall against any possibility of an authoritarian government. Amongst those few who still know, it was the separation of powers splitting power between the three legs of a stool, that gave government balance and prohibited anyone leg from attaining absolute power over the people.
“If you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will fallow,” a forecast that hung in the Nixon White House now cemented in a Congress where their leg of the stool has mortified into water fetching lackies.
Trump now goes for the second leg that bars absolute control.
Today, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance condemned the judiciary, attacking their legitimacy, the final pillar of the separation of power’s protection against an authoritarian.
As the Vice-President said, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” While Musk added, judges who oppose him should be impeached.
When the people finally get it, don’t expect Democrats to defend you. As Hakeem Jefferies, the House Minority Leader suggests, we need to wait for the pitches we can hit or Martin, the Democratic Parties new leader, who says we need to find more billionaires to keep up with the Republicans.
This is WAR, and opposition has yet to find a leader to enter the field of battle believing that The People can govern for themselves.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the same school Trump attended and constantly trumpets as proof of his intellect, joined US News and World Report officially proclaiming studies that show the United States has surpassed both Germany and the United Kingdom (amongst all others) as the acknowledge greatest education system in the World.
With Trump’s praise Musk now ends, the most glorious effort, copied the world over. It was the 1830’s when Horace Mann hit full stride, forever earning him the title, The Father of American Education on these principles:
The public should no longer remain ignorant.
Education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public.
Education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds.
Education must be taught using the tenets of a free society.
Education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.
Why are we unable to understand that education, our ability to know, is the only thing that separates us from the lowliest of other species on the planet?
We never talk about our poo, do we? It is the goofiest of all human taboos. No other species on earth finds pooing the slightest concern or give it any afterthought. So absurd is the taboo that it is the first bit of humor every child picks up on. Who doesn’t remember the childhood line “Who smelt it delt it?”
Nothing like poo announces our animal nature. Yes, we poo too, but behind closed doors, stalls or bushes, as if we didn’t really do it.
The first time I had to raise my hand in third grade had nothing to do with a teacher’s question. I actually had to raise it 30 minutes earlier than I did, but didn’t, and I regret the memory to this day some 68 years later. In fact, if childhood relevance carried any weight in adulthood, I would say that I regret it more than any other single self-inflicted event in my life.
The quiet rumbles in my lower stomach started while we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance but being agonizingly shy and fearful of any attention decided the discomfort was minor, gave it little thought. Ten minutes later my view had changed somewhat, the early rumbles had become a bit gassy, but if I softly eased it out and looked busy and innocent, I could escape detection. Another ten minutes, I was out of gas, one leg here, move another there, put my weight on the right butt, then on the left, gave only seconds worth of relief. Another 15 minutes and I was in serious trouble. That is when my butt said, “Raise your hand or poop right here.”
I did not raise my hand, I launched it as high as I could stretch. The teacher looked at my sudden appearance like one would a stranger, not at all sure that she recognized me, confused and busy with more important matters she said, “not now.” Like stretching rubber, my arm went to unnatural heights. She took a second look, whatever sub-human quality she saw in my eyes gave me a reprieve. I told her, and announced to all that I, me, the invisible one, needed to go to the bathroom. She said, “Can’t you wait,” and then thought better of it, “OK go.”
I had so wanted to make it. With my first step into the hall, I knew it was now a race, but if I moved too quickly, I would not hold. Only thirty feet left, now twenty, at the ten mark it was over, out it came. Like a green horn just off the saddle, I waddled the last few feet to the boy’s room. It still would have been OK, no one was in the halls, but as I threw open the restroom door there stood Jerry Egerton, the toughest, nastiest kid on the planet.
I did not hear his hackling end even after the bathroom door closed behind him. I cleaned up pretty well and I covered up my underwear with a mountain of paper towels at the very bottom of the trash can, but the damage was done.
The humiliation should have been crushing, but as it turned out, only Jerry Egerton had been humored because everyone hated the bully as much as I did. If truth be told no one was that far removed from a poo in the pants at some point, and others simply thought, “Thank God that wasn’t me.” Within a couple of days, Jerry’s finger-pointing shoutouts of “poo boy” got old and ended. By week’s end no one remembered, no one but me, who still winces at the ancient memory of my final delicate waddling steps.
She broiled children’s brains over the fiery pits of Hell. It was the mid-1950s when Holy Sister Mary Margaret got her chance to imprint on the supple believing minds of six- and seven-year-olds.
She would be dead now, and the children of the world are better off for it. Should I think her still alive, I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her lips closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child, not yet aware that some grownups grew down instead.
Back then and sometimes even now, religious instruction was not so much faith as it was fact. It was a fact that the “everlasting fires of Hell,” as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “was where your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet be continually reborn so that you would be in agony for all eternity.” God’s desire as she saw it, was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.
According to the good sister talking to children, the great joy of Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.” To a six-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly be so pretty, as to beat out a Root Beer Float.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of a sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging, my being guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.
It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At six, I had not yet come to realize that such nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, thinking she would tempt a correct answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the enormous joy of looking upon the face of God.” Again, images of Root Beer Floats danced in my mind.
Years later I would recall it all, thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.
However, at six years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.
The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.
All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.
The following, minus imperfections in my memory, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill.
“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. People thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.
Sometime later the poor sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground, he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”
That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”
You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only, the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “You Poo Poo Head!”
Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.
My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant as to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.
If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to, and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.
Don’t others think of the unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No all-powerful God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of an agonizing death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.
The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.
The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.
