Small Consolation

Despite intense and constant search, so far in this painful new era of the Triumph of the Nasties, I have been able to dredge up only one area of small consolation.  It involves the image I have always seen My-Country-Tis-of-Thee as having, namely that of a huge sea-going vessel, like one of those oil tankers, or container ships, or aircraft carriers, or cruise ships for which no adjective denoting enormous size and unwieldiness really does the job.

I have never had the unpleasant experience of being asked to pilot one, but I can easily imagine that it is one hellish job to turn one of those monsters around so as to make it turn a full 180 degrees.   At least not without having miles of open space to do so, and not without taking all year, and also not without meanwhile colliding with everything in sight.   And I would also think that this would be especially true if the pilot was so unqualified for the job that he wouldn’t even know when to do the fun stuff, like sounding the foghorns, along with knowing what numbers of blasts to make for what messages.

               The Tipped-Over States of America in a Time of T. Rump

In a word, the U.S.  is a country that doesn’t easily change direction, which means that it might take a while before the toxic fall-out from the recent election starts reaching the places where I stand now. 

So does this mean it will be some time yet before 23 of those guys in the black vans and with their shoulders and their heads bent sideways at an angle of 45 degrees come for me?   The Mossad might, soon enough.  I know that by this time Yahuboy is quite fed up with my on-the-nose observations about his actions.  But as for the T. Rump brownshirts, that could be another question.   It’s hard to find one’s way here from there.

Absurd as this sounds, I can’t help forgetting that, years ago, the proprietor of another weblog where I would frequently post my unacceptable opinions, mentioned to his readers that I had just started this weblog here (this was in 2004 or thereabouts), and by way of apparent recommendation, he said that I was on his list of surefire candidates to be carted off soon to Gitmo.

But just as Tennessee Williams had one of his female characters say  that she had always depended on the kindness of strangers, I have always depended on my ringing insignificance as a person.   And if that kind of thing worked for Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” then total obscurity should keep on working for me as well.

As is my practice in these kinds of things, I will just have to go on poking in the darkness, depending on the knowledge that, often as not, darknesses turn out to be entirely empty, even when those 23 squatheads are actually there.

There is one other thing.

It may take time, but sooner or later, if it hasn’t sunk in the meantime, that ocean-going monster can be set lumbering off in an opposite and undesirable direction after all, before at length, because of the bad charts its captain of the moment insists on using, it inevitably starts scraping bottom, runs aground, and keels over, heaving its cargo sharply to one side and eventually overboard.

This could be the case today, if the ship – that is, the U.S. Government --  has been hijacked, and  by the usual, starboard-leaning barfbags.