Nuclear Nutcase and Suitcase

Having had quite a long time to cogitate on these things (3 days ago I hit 86), I have seen nuclear weapons as being little more than a means by which small nations as well as big ones could beat themselves on the chest gorilla-style while yowling at each other without risk of having their bluffs called.   But now that too large a proportion of the U.S. "white" population has let sheer racial hatred get the better of them and they have put into the Oval Office a creature much more terrifying than any gorilla, i.e. a human gone berserk with power, all bets are off – except one.   That one bet, that one hope is that the U.S. military has long since seen the need to quietly but thoroughly disable the button in the legendary nuclear suitcase that U.S. Presidents are thought to have available at all times.    If the military hasn't done that by now, then they are all traitors of the worst kind, to the U.S., and, even more, to the entire planet, since the planet counts for much, much more than do the political considerations of any number of self-absorbed nation-states.

On the other hand, however, what makes me think that the military would act any more responsibly in this matter than would the Executive or any other branch of the Government?   Am I hoping for a coup, or something of that nature?   --Not really, though that would be interesting.  Everything that is bad news for T. Rump is good news for this country.

A Fine Kettle of Fish

Six months after a sizable portion of the so-called "white" population took advantage of a grievous and badly overlooked loophole in the American electoral system enough to enable a  life-long ignoramus named T. (for "Tweetybird") Rump to assume the formerly dignified and even revered office of President of the United States, it's hard to believe that Rump's admirers can be happy with the fine kettle of fish in which their boy finds himself  boiling every hour of the day and the night.  To all intents and purposes he is functionally illiterate, and so is able to communicate with that semi-conscious  entity, the "American People," only by means of that literacy-killer, twitter feeds.   Equally unable to call upon the little that remains of common decency in the Republican Party, he is forced to fill the White House rooms and halls only with low-lifers who resemble nothing so much as they do pockets of maddened piranhas in always bloodied Brazilian rivers.  Otherwise he spends his time riding from place to place and inhabiting fields where the thing is to hit little white balls into little black holes.   And the only policy that he can be said to be pursuing is to reverse everything that his much worthier predecessor in that office, B. Obama, pursued.   Rump figures that that is the easiest thing to do to keep up his impersonation of chief executive.   But finding the flaws that everything that Rump, his grown children, and his companions in crime do are really what is like shooting fish in a barrel, and there's never a shortage of  those misdeeds, from one day to the next.   The MSM is happier than they want to let on.

Medieval Man

Today we have a situation in which a large segment of the white population has foisted upon the rest of the United States, black, brown, red, and white alike, a 71-year-old self-admitted grabber of women’s genitals.   That segment accomplished that heinous act by strong-arming this man into the supposedly high office of the President of those United States.

I have given this man a name.   His first name is “Tweetybird.”  That applies because he is a total ignoramus who has admitted that he has not read a  book since he was in high school, and that has left him able to communicate  only through the use of a dubious service called “Twitter,” in which messages are limited to a maximum of no more than 140 letters.   And his last name, his surname, his family name is “Rump,” which applies because of the bodily feature that he is most fond of presenting to the world.   Thus his full name is “Tweetybird Rump.”

Another name would be just as fitting.   It is “Tyrannosaurus Rump.”   And in fact that name could be even more apt, because it refers to the thing that his  supporters like most about him: his constant readiness to chew on and to chew out other living beings and to fight.   They will never defend him on the basis of whether or not something is right or wrong.   That means nothing to them.  Instead they sing his praises because so far he has spent the bulk of his time in the Oval Office in fighting – fighting back against his numerous, justified critics, since everyone, even his supporters, know that he has absolutely no business being there. 

  Meanwhile the “Tyrannosaurus” also fits because the policies that he espouses and that he flings wildly about like mud against a water tower reveal a hunger to see the rest of the world dragged back into the period in which he would feel the most comfortable, assuming that his caretakers have told him about it, during their bed time stories – the medieval Dark Ages.

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.

Season of Marching Orders

Whenever the U.S. Presidency changes hands, it’s always necessary and interesting to note who is getting their marching orders and in which directions, as well as also seeing who is giving them.

Till now, when it comes to instructing new Presidents, Israeli premiers have had a monopoly.   But so far it seems to me that not as much as usual has been heard from the Yahu guy, and instead it’s been the Trump Humper who has been busy issuing the orders, warnings, and threats left and right, by his words and by his choices of accomplices to accomplish the dirty work.

Or have either I or the deliberately negligent news media failed to notice?

Perhaps B. Netanyahu has been too busy trying to figure out how his efforts in Israel and Palestine might fit in with the new situation in America, since Israel serves as a model for the state in which the current President-elect would like to leave the U.S., now that suddenly and unaccountably he is slated soon to hold the levers of power in his hot, grubby little hands.

However, we should never forget that this business actually goes much farther back in time though not in place, for it involves the aspirations of the slave-holding states of America during that country’s Civil War in the 1860’s.

The state of Israel, often called “America’s 51st state,” has obviously used as its models the twin entities, first, of the now vanished “Nationalist Socialist” state that characterized Germany in the mid-20th century and second,  the form that the losers of the American Civil War would have assumed in the mid-19th century if they hadn’t been chased out of Richmond, Virginia before they could establish the entity that they would have called “the Confederate states of America” and which would have been located in the bottom parts of what is now again uneasily called “the United States of America.”     

It is strange how in such ways Israel has become a paradox like no other.   Yet people treat it much as they do the Sun, as if to look directly at it would burn out their rods and cones forever, without realizing that they are already blind.  There is no other way to explain the general failure to recognize that Israel is today the world’s leading example of a fascist state, albeit a half-assed one and even though its citizens claim to be the direct descendants of a large and much more distinguished group that was almost wiped out through the use of mass shootings and gas chambers by one of several countries that indulged in fascism all at much the same time, in the mid-20th century.   Of those,  only the Germans are much remembered and reviled for having done so, because, being by nature more thorough-going about everything they undertake than are Italians, the Spanish, and now, we dare to hope, the Israelis, the Germans carried the whole through to its ultimate end – including promptly receiving their just desserts of reaping the whirlwinds.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the lot of the Palestinians, who are suffering in the role that was once tragically borne by Jewish people in preceding days, and by American slaves imported from Africa and by numerous tribesmen that were already in the New World, all that is generally available to us is hope, since in his drive to ethnically clear the West Bank of its rightful proprietors, Netanyahu has a gigantic patron that he and his cohorts can always implicitly depend on.  This is especially true since he has set into stone so deeply and permanently his practice of journeying to see every newly elected U.S. President without fail, and there to issue to that individual his marching orders, usually in the forms of backing up all of Israel’s threats to its neighbors, militarily as well as by voting the right way against U.N. resolutions, and, by the way, also by keeping those big checks flowing to all those offices in what can now only be sadly called “the Unholy Land.”

Prezelec T. Rump, the Ultimate Outlaw

How fitting it is that one of the most unqualified and repulsive Americans now alive should nevertheless be in the position of merely needing to draw breath for another six or seven weeks before, amid much mouth-breathing fanfare, he is to be shown the way to the outside steps of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and there sworn in as the next President of the United States.   It will be fitting because of how that dreadful aberration came to be.

We are talking here about a man who has shown that he has no more class than, as might be said in Texas, a bi-donged dog.   One has only to recall how Rump spoke over the radio of how much he has in the past enjoyed grabbing the genitals of women that he seemed not to have known, while just a day or two ago, he went on a “victory” tour in which he boasted to his supporters what they already knew and had been constantly salivating over, namely that they, and he, had won it all – the White House, the Supreme Court, and both chambers of the Congress, while making no mention of how that left absolutely nothing in the way of fairness and justice for the rest of Americans, which is also the majority of them.

This gargantuan and completely twisted tragedy of happenstance was only made possible by the use, even up to this supposedly far advanced day, of a method of choosing Presidents that was imposed on this country out of a need to assuage the states that practiced slavery by allowing them to count each male slave – who of course was never allowed to vote, because he was not considered to be a real human but instead was always to be seen as just a mere beast of burden – as three-fifths of a person nevertheless among the inhabitants of his “owner’s” plantation, household, or whatever.

Of course one would rarely if ever hear this process spoken of this way in most explanations of the Electoral College.   Instead the College is euphemistically presented as a fair-minded way to keep the states with less population from being consistently overwhelmed in the count by the larger states.   Instead now we have the situation where six or seven citizens in one of today’s larger states, especially California, consistently find that their votes taken together equal little more than one vote of a citizen in one of the smaller states, like Wyoming, and that leads to elections as perverse as the one we have just now suffered, in which a person can get two million more votes than anyone else and still see the second-place finisher declared the winner instead.

As if that enormous distortion of the political process (which has not been adopted by any other country on the planet) was not bad enough, I keep wondering why so many people thought that this one particular person rated getting their votes, period, because during the campaign, T. Rump was clearly revealed as a man who has always operated on the sleazy side of the street, and so will beyond all doubt continue to deport himself in exactly the same way in this highest office that, by a thousand orders of unaccountability, he is to be allowed to occupy.  If one thinks that for some weird reasons he has been allowed to get away with more than enough bad behavior already, the words “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” take on new meaning.

He is involved in not just a few but many hundreds of lawsuits, since his favorite sport is suing people, and it looks as if more than a few brave souls have  sued him in turn.

Though thought of by the unthinking as being a good businessman, this man lost 816 billion dollars in one year.   Yet he is thought to have arranged to take advantage of that and robbed the Government by taking advantage of a loophole to avoid paying income taxes anymore for as many as 18 years.   Along the way he also incurred six bankruptcies.

He impressed the highly impressionable by calling himself a billionaire.  Yet, unlike all other Presidential candidates for the last 40 (forty!) years, he never allowed today’s American public to see his tax records and so determine if he was really that successful, or whether in reality his business record is just a long collection of various scams, along the lines of the Trump University dodge that he settled just days ago by shelling out $25,000 .   And he is still being allowed to get away with that withholding of vital tax information.   Why?

And now, even before he assumes office, he is setting up three of his children and a son-in-law to take part in what promises to be a nepotism ring operating from the White House, and it is easy to expect that through these covetous kids, this man will pay much more attention to his bottom lines than he will to the national budget or to the many national and international issues, of which he will have little to no understanding anyway (a good thing, too, in light of all those bankruptcies) and instead will leave those “extraneous” matters to the many other equally unscrupulous members of his mob that he is sloppily staffing, and these henchfolk will likewise be scrambling to benefit themselves and their kind instead of responding fairly and justly to the many pressing needs that others will try to bring to their warped attentions, in vain.

What, then, about the stuff that I already mentioned briefly but that should’ve sunk this guy’s candidacy without a bubble?  It involved his repeated sexual misdeeds of several kinds that were brought to light during the campaign.  Yet, in spite of all that, this man was chosen.

He has been married three times and always to women much younger than he and who all looked like former contestants in one of those beauty pageants that he liked to sponsor because of the opportunities they offered for some serious backstage leering?  Why isn’t his fidelity marked by his possession of a wife who is close to his own age and that he has been married to for a long time?  Why does his latest wife, an immigrant, usually just stand there tethered to his haunch while wearing a stony expression that clearly asks, “What is this?  Elephant plops?”

What happened to “family values,” that purple drum that Republiklans usually beat so furiously?   Why did so many people instead condemn his longtime married (and then only once) lady opponent because she stood by her man when he was copiously accused of yielding to temptations logically brought on and, even more bitterly also because of her choice of email server?   Her email server, for God’s sake!!   How did a person’s email server come to be ranked so highly among the Seven Deadly Sins?

These questions, rarely asked during the campaign, were and still are are never given any answers that make the slightest bit of sense.  Why?

An old-timer, who helped us greatly when we city-slickers moved down here into the Virginia sticks and who through that period was younger than I am now, was fond of putting the clincher on his contentions by saying, “I’m not telling you what I believe.  I’m telling you what I know.”   And here I will follow suit.

There is only one explanation.

“Tonsils” Rump has been welcomed and boosted into power because those who all their lives have yearned to get away with the same kinds of crimes and garbage and more – up to and including mass ethnic cleansing, a la the current Israeli treatment of the Palestinians – see in him the perfect vehicle in which they can happily ride to the fulfillment of all their own highly immoral and base desires.

That includes the Devout – you know, the souls who will ride to Rump’s inauguration on that awful, upcoming January 20th, with, to update Mark Twain’s words of a century or two ago, “the calm, clear self-satisfaction of a Christian holding four aces.”

 

The Golden Door No More

Smack (or, I suppose, almost so) in the middle of New York Harbor is a tiny island that contains not much more than a fort of the 1800’s built in the form of an 11-pointed star and serving purely as an elevated platform on which stands a truly enormous, light green statue that can be seen for miles, geographically speaking, and in fact all over the world, spiritually speaking.  The name given to this statue by its makers is “Liberty Enlightens the World,” though in the U.S. it is somewhat less elegantly known as “The Statue of Liberty.”

This statue was not “made in America.”  Instead it was the result of three Frenchmen putting together their heads and their talents and quickly, efficiently, and successfully carrying through an idea from its inception to its very tangible and meritorious end -- though they would have good reason to be appalled at the physical and moral surroundings in which their conception in its concrete (though I should say “metallic”) form now languishes, 150 years later.

A historian named Eduoard de Laboulaye got the notion that what the world needed was a monument to liberty.  He passed his idea on to his friend, an artist named Frederic A. Bartholdi, who then came up with the design and also put his shoulder to the wheel in finding funds for the project.   Meanwhile one of their illustrious contemporaries in Paris, the builder of the Eiffel Tower, Alexandre G. Eiffel, put together the inner iron framework that supports, among other things, the 331 sheets of copper that, patinaed by the elements, comprise the outside parts of the statue and give it that interesting color of an apple not yet beginning to turn red.

As an aside -- funny thing about the Eiffel Tower.

It would be mainly art students who would know that though the Eiffel Tower has meant Paris through and through for quite a long time, the Impressionists and the other now world-famous painters of the 1880’s and thereabouts were not exactly thrilled when that incredibly tall, ugly, inhuman, iron thing rose up smack in the middle of beautiful, thoroughly human Paris and overshadowed everything else around, and they generally avoided giving that unwelcome intruder any place in their paintings, even though they were as busy as could be recording the slightest glints on oranges, apples, and every other visual subtlety that offered itself.

But when it came to Bartholdi’s statue of that woman holding high her torch, things were different, mainly because as soon as all the parts were fabricated, those were packed into 341 boxes and shipped off in a boat to the U.S. as a gift, at a cost of $250,000 to the French people for the statue itself, and another $280,000 paid by Americans for the Fort Wood pedestal in the harbor.

The French, however, did keep a model of the statue that sits on a bridge over the Seine River in Paris – provided that it is still there at all, and also if the French, a sensitive bunch, have by now let slide the numerous, stupid insults that they had to endure from some Americans for not taking part in the 2003 travesty of invading Iraq, which was a blunder of gigantic proportions that, with the just concluded election, now has every chance to be repeated, in various forms, since the new U.S. President-to-be was voted in by the same numbskulls who so roundly condemned France for acting so intelligently 13 years ago.

Let’s face it.   The French are more evolved than not only Americans, but also the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Spanish, or at least the French are somewhat so, and it’s possible that in 2003 they showed that, unlike their friends and neighbors, they had learned from the many mistakes they had made in Vietnam not that long before – blunders that a long string of American presidents repeated in the same damn place, and that GW Bush was blithely about to repeat in Iraq, with the same inevitable results.   Meanwhile let’s not do more than merely mention the especially dense British, who over the course of 200 years have had their behinds unmercifully beaten and kicked out of Afghanistan by the locals a number of times, yet every time the Americans say, “Let’s have another go at those Pashtun ragamuffins, the British are always right there, saying, “Righto!”  And again, always ending up with nothing but blood and misery to show for it.

That remarkable feat of engineering, the wonderful French gift, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” was unveiled in America in 1886 when Grover Cleveland was President, and 16 years later, in 1903, the statue was graced with the words that come to mind with any mention of it and give the statue its meaning, in the form of a poem written by a lady named Emma Lazarus and titled “The New Colossus.” 

The best known lines of this poem occur toward its end, and they go as follows:

     “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

     With silent lips.  “Give me your tired, your poor,

     Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

     The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

     Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me.

     I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Sheer distaste has kept me from looking to see how tall that multi-storied rats nest, the T. Rump Tower, is, and so I just assume that the statue in the harbor cannot be seen from there.

In any case that big green statue in New York Harbor must be an intense embarrassment for the incoming T.Rump administration, so foreign is that concept of three Frenchmen as to what “liberty” means to the intentions of those who are about to take power in the U.S. these days.   After all the Rumpisants campaigned on principles that are exactly opposite to those espoused by men who remembered how their country had gotten rid of absolute monarchs a century earlier, and at about the same time that the U.S. was founded, supposedly on much the same principles, though not actually, since the so-called “Founding Fathers” did not really believe that “all men are created equal,’’ and especially that their slaves were real people, and so they were quite satisfied to let human slavery remain a law of the land for the next 80-some years.

What, then, will the Rumpisants want to do with a statue that is there in New York Harbor for only one purpose and that is to praise immigration, when the statue is on a concrete island that is now named Immigrant Island, and when their man in the Oval Office has proposed making registries of immigrants who are already here and building walls a la the Warsaw ghettoes to prevent other possible immigrants from coming here, both of these being measures used by the German Nazis against Jewish people?

Will they behave as if ‘”Liberty Enlightens the World” no longer exists?   Will they cover that statue over with a blood red tarp, for the duration?  Will they yearn to disassemble it and ship it back to the French, along with a bill for the cost of that operation, while planning to replace that statue with one of Pitchfork Ben Tillman or Theodore Bilbo?   Will they look around for a buyer, perhaps V. Putin, or, more likely, that model premier who now presides over another country that is now, bizarrely and inexplicably, well on its way to becoming a full-fledged fascist nation, B.Netanyahu?

My guess is that the “Statue of Liberty” is fated to become an example of the far right philosophy that up is down and down is up and north is south and east is west and west is east that has so far served so well for Rumpisants in perverting all notions and realities of long-standing truths, and that  in their eyes the word “liberty” will only mean the liberty to prevent men and women who are not “white” from even thinking about what Ms Lazarus had in mind when she wrote those immortal lines.

Whoever thought of putting “Liberty Enlightening the World” on such a small island really knew what they were doing.   At least, barring the use of a thousand barges, that location prevents T.Rump supporters from staging massive 1934 Nuremberg-type rallies there, a la Leni Riefenstahl’s  well-made though still tedious film, “Triumph of the Will,”  when that criminal section of the “white” population gets to the point of seriously exploring the possibilities of giving themselves the liberty to bring back slavery and so make “their” country great again.

T. Rump's Dilemmas

With no teenage beauty pageants in progress right now, or allowed anywhere near him, I wonder what  T. Rump is doing to keep his life juices flowing right now. given the trouble they’ve always had in reaching his head? (The “T” is short for “Tweetybird” or perhaps “Tonsils,” going by the extremely pronounced ski slope for the bugs that extends from his chin down to the top of his chest and thereby completely hides the color of his neck, at least from the front, though that is easy enough to guess.)

“A man is only as good as his team.”   How many billions of times has that been said?  But if that is so, then Rump is in deep doodoo, as any man, or woman would be, if they had only a bottomless pool of nasties to choose from.  So far, of the 15 cabinet posts, he has settled on the holders of only three, none of whom figures to be remembered kindly in history books written by anyone other than the endlessly hateful David Horowitz.  

It’s interesting to note who, so far, has NOT been chosen.   Not one of his 15 or so adversaries during the primaries has been picked or even mentioned as being in the running. 

I guess that is because they had the temerity to go up against him.  But aren’t they a big part of the Republican Establishment?  And didn’t he run under the Republican banner and at times used their resources?

This means that, just as in the final stages of the campaign when he, a congenital cheapskate, withheld funds from them, so far he has kept the Republicans from sharing the power as well, very likely out of his certainty that he won all by himself.

But then what about the Republican Senate and House and the solidly Republican Supreme Court that he now intends to hang around the country’s neck before squeezing slowly, garrote style?

If then T. Rump has in mind dumping the Republicans, too, then does he belong to any party at all, or does he intend to put into place an all-powerful new one, called The National Socialist American Workers' Party or some variation thereof, beginning with dropping the “Socialist” bit?  Actually, however, if he wants to stay close to his inspiration, he could keep that word in, too, without the Rumpisants being any the wiser, so deeply have they drunk of his Kickapoo Joy Juice – until they start noticing his friends, the Billionaire Buzzards, constantly circling overhead, though by then it will be too late, just as it was for the Germans, the Russians, the Poles, the Jews, and many others, during my lifetime.

Along those lines, however, it is important to note that, in spite of all my warnings, Rudolph Guiliani, the Rednecked Paindear, is still in the running for the post that H. Clinton once held, Secretary of State, and if anything his hopes have been boosted by people like Rump’s campaign chief and now a senior adviser of his transition team, K. Conway, on the basis of his loyalty, and I have to believe that that is not to Rump’s pleasure.  I suspect that to him Giuliani has too much of the odor of the Mob, and T.R. probably has had too many dealings with them, by having been in the casino racket.  Rump could be also recalling what a former president with the initials “LBJ” said, something about urinating in tents.

Another gal should be chosen.  Even S. Palin would be better, though she is being ignored, in favor of a former general who was discredited after he let his main squeeze see classified material.  Palin is always good for laughs, and that ever-present smile can be disarming, which is what the State Department is supposed to be all about.  The State Department is the Peace Department, and the general would fit better in the Defense Department, which in my day was called the “War Department,” and that is still the much more apt name for that outfit.

Snapshots in the Darkness

The Usual Sanctimonious among us, who pride themselves on being so broad-minded and reasonable and fair, are busily braying, “Give the President-Elect a chance for God’s sake, why don’tcha?”

My answer to that is, “A chance for what?  To screw everybody in the country that is not white?”

He was given well over a year to show that he has good intentions.   That period was called the “Electoral Campaign.”

During that time he never revealed that he had even one decent bone in his body.   And he still hasn’t, weeks now after the voting.   For example, look at the thugs that he has gathered around him.  Uniform disasters!   Yet fools persist in denying that 1934’s Germany is already upon us.

. . . . .

During the recently concluded election campaign, when it seemed that H. Clinton, the Lady, had the biggest chance of winning, while he, the Lout, would lose, D. J. Trump repeatedly condemned the upcoming vote by saying that the outcome would be rigged.

D.J.T. did in fact lose.   Ms Clinton received 2,000,000 (two million) more votes than did D.J.  Yet, due to the use of an extremely rigged system called the Electoral College, which has its roots in slavery, and wherein the votes of some states are considered to have more value than those of other states, the U.S.A. has now been placed under the incredible indignity of being presided over by a confirmed bigot and lecher, among many other shortcomings.

Isn’t it interesting, though not in the least unexpected, that having him unjustly decreed to be the Prez has suddenly cut off all statements by this guy and his supporters that the election was rigged, as it so clearly was, especially when one recalls that the U.S. is the only country in the world in which the person who gets the most votes can be declared the loser, as has happened this year, and not for the first time, in a contemporary teenager’s lifetime no less! 

………..

As soon as Der Fuhrer DJT was elected, I started waiting to see what sort of a plum he would drop into the eager mouth of R. Guiliani, perhaps the most venomous of all DJT’s numerous flacks during the campaign.   Now it’s been several weeks, and still nothing has been announced.

Instead we’ve been treated to the very unbecoming spectacle of Guiliani trying to sell himself, first as being a very good prospect for Attorney-General, and now, since that post was filled with a throwback to the arch-segregationists of the 1950's, he has switched to advertising himself as being the best material of all the likelies for Secretary of State, mainly by speaking of how often he has been overseas, serving as a consultant to a decidedly motley crew who wanted to be elected to various posts in their countries.

But somehow that quality called “diplomacy” hasn’t shown itself yet, in Giuliani’s self-boosting or in his lifetime behavior.  Instead, from everything I’ve seen of him over the years, I would call him “topline abrasive,” to the point that he even physically resembles a slightly used sheet of sandpaper, coarse grade, and I believe that the pre-Trump Republican Party also saw him that way, the reason that they didn’t support him for any top national posts, despite his exclusive ownership of 9/11.

So what will they do with him, and with Sarah Palin, and for that matter, even with Michelle Bachman?   Because Guiliani will surely stay loud enough that he won’t be forgotten.

Trump’s Big Tent is going to be a gathering of Infernals if there ever was one.  For the protection of the rest of D.C., the Oval Office is going to have to requisition bars for its windows, Supermax grade.

Another Unsent Comment

(This time meant for a recent diary in Daily Kos, but not sent because of how diaries there tend, after just a few hours in sight, to be dropped into sinkholes in which they appear to be lost forever.   Better to leave it for an archive here, whether or not it is ever again read by anyone but me.  Allow me to keep thinking that one day posterity might glance my way, if only for an instant.  Smile!)

Whenever I read the comments that follow a diary like this, I become troubled, because those comments show that a lot of supposed progressives are no friends of the Democrats and that in fact they may be even worst enemies of Democrats than are the Republicans (unless, of course, those seeming Progressives are really trolls sent here by the dozens by the Republicans to infest this site.

I first noticed this pattern taking shape as far back as the first days following Obama’s win in 2008, not so much in Daily Kos as it was in Common Dreams -- provided that Daily Kos existed then.   I don’t know whether it did or not, but the pattern is certainly there now, and it has gotten so bad that I am sure that even if Hillary Clinton had won the College as well, she would still be under heavy progressive fire that would almost match that of the Fascists, simply because she may not have stressed an issue or two that was most vital to them.

I go back a long way, to the time when Democrats were Democrats (when they were not Dixiecrats) and so were Progressives, instead of being the closet Republicans that too many Progressives appear to be today.

As far as I can see there isn’t enough time to build up a Progressive voice strong enough to replace the Democratic Voice, and in fact very likely there aren’t enough real Progressives in existence, period.   That is shown by a lot of the comments here and in many other places as well, and it doesn’t help anything to constantly pillory the Democrats just to show how clever and even-handed and sophisticated one is, when all they are doing is serving the purposes of the Republifacists.

It’s simple.  Republicans, not Democrats, and certainly not the Clintons, are the enemies, and the burning magnifying glass should be focused on them.  No matter what one might fashionably find to taser them, it is the Democrats, not Ralph Nader or Jill Stein, that are still the last best hope before creeping Fascism finally takes hold.    

Taking This Country Back

Long before the current President-Elect came on the scene, Republicans habitually rallied to the dog whistle cry that, on its surface, expresses desire to “take their country back.”  And after that King of Bankruptcies did arrive and stated his intentions to run, bothersome as that slight inconvenience promised to be to him, I would have thought that by then that slogan would have gotten so stale that he would not have thought of resorting to it.

But those who flocked to his rallies as if bullpoop had never been identified and classified must never have heard that enjoinder, or, if they had, had not heard it repeated over and over again, ad infinitum and also ad nauseum.   Consequently those words became the leading slogan of his campaign and were emblazoned on red baseball caps and other screaming mimies galore.

“Let’s take our country back.”

To me the operative word there is “back,” though most others would choose the word “our” and its reference to the U.S. as being theirs and theirs alone, when in fact, while it may have been their place of residence,  it was and still is far from being theirs alone.   

The word “back,” as used in that slogan, could suggest two things.  One is that they are saying that the U.S. was once theirs but now it no longer is their country, which naturally means that they should leave.  Or the thinking, if any, is that they want to guide the country back to some former state of being or to some condition that is not at all to be desired, that is, to a state of backwardness.

That first usage immediately causes one to ask, “Take the country back from whom?  Who now has the U.S. in their possession?”

Obviously the reference must have been to undesirables who, for starters, didn’t look like these ball fans or go to the right churches on Sunday.

That intimation that the country had somehow slipped into the hands of  “tawny” and “black” others made no sense, because it was easily and totally refuted by a single, very short admonition.   “Look around.”    

By that I meant that merely glancing at photos of gatherings of those who occupied the halls of power in the U.S. prior to the recent elections would have revealed which group had the most hands on the levers and had never been pushed elsewhere.  The nation had not been taken at all, simply because it could not have been taken under the circumstances that prevailed in that period.

But now, after that election, things are very different, and, going by how some highly repellent forces are busy slithering into near total control of the U.S. government, it is quite true to say that the nation is in the process of being taken over, though not by Muslims, Mexicans, and others, but by the nitwits and the bigots in the baseball caps and their apologists.

As to where these people want to return this country and trump-dump it there, it’s hard to guess what’s going to happen, because those locations are too well-known, and mass human deportations and/or extinctions are too messy and also don’t figure to smell good.  In addition, hardly anyone wants to go back to any periods when I-phones did not exist.  No one.  That is because, ironically, instant evolution is already at work, and the drive toward simplifying us into one race and one only of crook-necked and eternally downward-staring catatonics is much too strong.

How Close to Death Are We?

The next time it is close to the end of the month of July, and if I am still around, I will be 86, and so I suppose I am expected to think that, in my own case, that is an interesting question.   And I am interested.   Maybe even very interested.   Not, however, interested enough to want to know the answer.   I don’t know why anyone would ever want to know ahead of time the exact date of their departures.

I started thinking about this not so much in connection with what will happen with me as it was in reaction to the latest comments I’ve been reading on progressive sites in the Internet about the ages of the Supreme Court Justices.  It seems that of the four oldest, two, Ginsburg and Breyer, are liberals, and both are younger than me, though not by much.

These commenters like to ask uneasy questions and to make uncomfortable speculations, such as that in four years, when the next Presidential elections roll around, the chances are good that by that time at least two of those four oldest justices will be gone and, in addition to having successfully evaded honoring Obama's choice for Scalia's replacement, the current president-elect will have also replaced those latter two retired or deceased justices with hard-ass conservative types, and thus will have already made life difficult for a huge number of American citizens who deserved much better, for a long while to come.

    

Besides the political implications there, the way that that prognostication reflects on my own personal situation throws an extra chill into me, though not for long, because I don’t feel particularly close to death, and therefore I don’t think the chances for those two or even just one of the older liberal justices to skate out of here in four years are that good either, if what my person tells me is any indication, and unless these justices already have threatening health conditions that I don’t know about.

I think I have very good prospects for putting in another five years at least, or until age 90.  This is because generally I feel all right, and I’m not aware of having any conditions that ordinarily take out senior citizens, even those much younger than me, though I know perfectly well that something final could hit me at any moment and I would never know that it had happened.   I have long since been told that I have heart murmurs, but the doctor didn’t consider those serious enough to do anything about it right then.   Also occasionally -- though I haven’t told anyone about it till now, dear reader, because I believe it’s been going on all my life -- every once in a while I experience a sudden jolt to my nervous system, as if I’ve been hit with 200 volts briefly.  But like the murmurs, that has been happening for far too long to me to see it as an indicator of more serious matters.

Meanwhile every once in a while a friend will say that, because I do so little harmful stuff and therefore generally still look okay, they see no reason why I shouldn’t, in fact, hit age 100.  But I am not comfortable with that idea, because I don’t want to need any assistance when it comes to walking around.  I don’t want to need any assistance, period.

Yet, at the very same time I would very much like not only to hit 100, but also to go much farther and reach age 115, which seems to be as long as anyone lives these days, so that, should you get to be that age and are declared to be the world’s oldest living human, that news would be enough to bump off a person right there, because it would mean that he or she only has at best a few more weeks before he or she is no more and is quickly replaced in being so distinguished by the next oldest.

--No, I would like to live that long only because I have always been fascinated by the answers that the extremely aged give to eager young reporters who like to ask them what enabled them to grow that old, because I suspect that few if any of those respondents really know.   The factors are too numerous.

Therefore, as an intellectual exercise seasoned with a touch of mischief, I have spent more time than I should, thinking up the answer that I would give, should I be in a position to be so asked, though my reply, too, wouldn’t be actually an answer, because as to why I was still hanging in there, I wouldn’t be any better informed than anyone else.

In light of what I’ve just mentioned about life expectancy after being designated the “world’s oldest living person,” the most appropriate response upon hearing about that development would be to recoil in feigned horror and to strike one’s self in the head while exclaiming, “I am?  Really?   The Oldest Living?” OHHHH shit!”  And saying that not with pride but instead with alarm in my tone.  I have even practiced using that tone.

I have not made a career out of using bad words, but I would get a big kick out of saying just that, to some fresh-faced female 20-year old with a pen in her hand.  It would be almost worth living that long in a world that otherwise has had far too many truly appalling moments, even though the luck of timing and of geography may have allowed me to avoid a large number of the very worst.

First Head-to-Head, or Full and Frank Discussions

There are many reasons why during the campaign I thought, and still think, that there is no way the man who is, incredibly, now the U.S. President-elect nevertheless, could ever do any sort of a good job as the head of the nation.  One of the chief of those reasons is the certainty that he can’t possibly cut a good figure in representing this country when it comes to foreign relations.  This is in spite of the fact that the world stage is far from filled with impressive figures.  Even in that light he would be like a very large  and restless pit bull, on which all the others would keep casting a wary eye, for obvious reasons.

For one thing, this Beloved of the Angries is not fluent even in his own language, and that reflects badly on a person’s thought processes.  For another, if he ever got a good education, that has, to my notice, never been mentioned even by his most rabid boosters.  Or if he did have one, he long ago left it lying limpid by the wayside, like a used condom, so that everything he says gives the strong impression that he is merely winging it – his ideas, his values, his opinions, his policies, his convictions, everything – and that he has never given deep thought to anything in his life, save for doing whatever would allow him to give close-up inspections to beauty pageant contestants, who would otherwise favor him with hardly a glance, especially now that he is an old and badly decayed rascal, with his most notable physical features being weak-looking eyes and all the space between his chin and the top of his chest having a curiously webbed appearance.

I expect, therefore, that when he meets other so-called “world leaders,” especially when there are a bunch of them together, they will see him as being the embodiment of the famous “Ugly American” – huge, gross, indulgent, self-absorbed, and unthinking -- and they will smile, with all kinds of condescension in their faces and in their manners.

--Except for one guy.

There is one other figure who is his soul-mate among national leaders, and like him, has only recently wriggled into view, and I am waiting with interest to see if my prophesy will come true, which is that this person will be the first “world leader” who will have a private tete-a-tete with the current U.S. Prez-elect.  And surprise!  He will not be the widely expected Putin guy in Russia.   It will instead be the recently elected President of the Philippines, who goes by the name of Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte and who has already established himself as being an individual with homicidal leanings and an enormous potty-mouth.  One report has it that he shot a fellow student while in law school, without, however, actually killing him, while others have him being strongly supportive of the murders of as many as 1,400 criminals and drug dealers without the due process of law.   In addition, while campaigning for President, he is supposed to have vowed to see to the killing of tens of thousands more of such people, after which he would officially pardon himself when his term is over.

Our President-elect will not have to worry about being subjected to the verbal abuse that Obama tolerated from this man, for various nebulous causes.  Duterte claims to have undergone a religious conversion that has inspired him to clean up his verbal act.  That cannot be believed.  Habitual cursing is a true addiction not easily dumped, because it is so easily practiced

In any case on the heels of calling Obama obscene names for whatever the U.S. president said or did, which couldn’t have been much, Duterte then went on to show his true colors again, by allowing a hero’s re-burial of what remains of Ferdinand Marcos, the notorious Dictator of the Philippines 30 years ago.  I wouldn’t be surprised if today, outside those islands, Marcos is remembered for only one thing, and it does not even involve him and instead concerns his wife, Ymelda, a shameless but interesting woman, who used the spousal loot mainly to accumulate an incredibly large collection of shoes.   I always wondered what was going on there, as it struck me as being a supreme example of enormous waste enabled by monies obtained by questionable means.  What was she trying to say there?

It will be interesting to see what tune these two men will sing together, during their first meeting in wherever and whenever, with the likeliest spot being hopefully a leaking raft on the South China Sea.   I think they will make a striking pair.  Having just entered their ‘70’s, they were born at nearly the same time, and they have nearly identical and impeccable credentials for being classic “dirty old men.”

I can hear Duterte going right down the American President’s alley, by telling him about one of his exploits when he was the mayor of the city of Davao, and he had had occasion to view the remains of a woman who had been gang-raped and then murdered.  He was struck by how beautiful the woman had been, and Duterte said she looked so much like an American film star that he had asked why he couldn’t have been the first in line to rape her, since he was the mayor.  When an outcry arose he defended himself by saying he had only meant that as a joke -- that old excuse for bad behavior that is apparently as dismally weak in the Philippines as it is in the U.S.

I couldn’t see that that excursion into outright necrophilia was much different from speaking of fondness for grabbing women by that all-important and sensitive part of their physical equipment, their genitals, as that U.S. President had testified to having, in his confabs over the radio with his buddy, Howard Stern, and there was a tape tape to prove it.   So he and Duterte are sure to get along famously, especially in view of Republican support for rape, as shown by statements by one or the other of their candidates every once in a while and their arguments against abortion.

President Dump and President Dirt.  That’s a picture.  The Bad and the Ugly, with nothing Good anywhere to be seen.

Gardner's 2nd Law

(Below is a statement that I submitted yesterday, to Professor Juan Cole’s site, Informed Comment, and it was accepted and published.  It is a comment to an article he wrote, titled Neofascist Trump Appointee Bannon: “Anger is a Good thing” “if you’re Fighting to Take this Country Back”)  I regret my failure to add that I also had in mind the anger that was a major part of how the President-elect’s biggest fans were always designated.)

In reference to the title of this informative article, I long ago decided that Gardner’s 2nd Law is the truth of the matter and that anger is in fact as bad as evil gets.   That Law states that “Anger is one of the very worst traits of Homo Sapiens.  One should never do or say anything while he or she is angry, because otherwise they will find themselves indulging in acts so stupid and uncalled-for that, if the perpetrators have even just a glimmer of conscience, later they will deeply regret what they’ve done.  That will happen every time.”

I have had a lot of time to see how often that holds true, in myself and in others, and I haven’t seen much of anything that would refute that Law.   Deny it, yes, and that’s only to be expected.   But never to refute it.

And so, what sort of a future can this country have, since we are faced with an administration riding in roughshod over all common decency, especially as that relates to women and minorities,  and bearing at the sharpest point of its hell-bent prow a “strategist” who just loves rage and anger and has absolutely nothing else to offer but the destruction of all worthwhile things, such as the freedom to vote without fear of being harassed, or giving everyone equal opportunity regardless of their melanin count?

High Places in America

Beginning with coming into my parents’ lives, in my first years I was woefully late for everything important.   Now, in my concluding years, I am hoping that the same fortunate tardiness will continue, and without too much pain and suffering.  So far it has, save for events that take place far away, geographically speaking, such as the recent elections.

Consequently, it wasn’t till I got into my 30’s – which almost exactly coincided with the 1960’s, the most important and far-reaching decade in recent American history so far, though young conservatives will bitterly and stupidly reject that opinion -- that I stopped being so much of a retard in all matters, especially socially.  Lagging behind my contemporaries by 10 years, I finally did such things as easing into some sort of a sex life, learning to drive a car, getting married, buying a house of my own, getting real jobs, publishing two books (plus also writing a number of others that I think are much better yet are still unpublished), fathering a son, and in general settling down with a fair idea of what I wanted to do through the rest of my life.

That included going to Japan in 1966 with my new wife on a sort of extended honeymoon while we spent the summer leisurely traveling through that country, which I already knew quite a lot about, as I had been there twice before, first at the behest of Uncle Sam, and later because of getting a college fellowship.

During that ’66 swing, one afternoon we were looking at the walls of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto when a young Japanese guy, eager to take another shot at improving his English, engaged us in earnest conversation – an event that was frequently a part of traveling through Japan.  Everything was proceeding on the normal course of topics of no particular importance, when he suddenly hit us with an unexpected question that hit me in my mind like a ton of bricks.  He asked what we thought of the American involvement in Vietnam.

      I was intensely embarrassed, because I didn’t want to admit that, though I prided myself on being a good and even reasonably informed American,  I thought exactly nothing about the American involvement in Vietnam, and the truth was, in startling contrast to the way that I am today, I had paid almost zero attention to things in Vietnam, though by 1966 that situation had already been going on for the better part of two decades.

I had heard mentions of Vietnam now and then, and I vaguely knew that some sort of a contest was going on there, but to me it was little more than a sporting event that we Americans could expect to win at some time in the future, and that was all.   And unfortunately by that time I had long since lost the interest that I had had in my more juvenile days in all such things as basketball, baseball, and football games.   I had decided, and rightfully so, that, especially because I had never participated and would never do so in those kinds of events, they were of no consequence whatsoever and therefore not worth following, and it was in that discarded bracket that Vietnam had always  existed, slumped, in my mind.

If I had known, I might have been made more comfortable by the fact that very few other Americans would have been able to give any kind of a sensible answer to that question either, because, as Barbara W. Tuchman tells us in her great book, “The March of Folly,” the details of that American involvement in Southeast Asia had been kept largely a secret from the American public.  Yet, here was a young guy who was neither American nor Vietnamese, yet was interested enough in that issue to ask what we thought of the things our leaders were doing – or not doing – in Vietnam.

Now, 50 years farther on, all of a sudden, though I had preferred reading about how the British lost America, I am reading Tuchman’s chapters on Vietnam with great interest and excitement, just as if it is a thriller and even because I know exactly how that story is going to turn out.  That is because I still remember precisely what I was doing in that same period, down to the exact year, and year by year.  And that, in turn, is because, by chance, at that very same time I was heavily involved in very different and of course far, far less sweeping (though in the end much more successful) events that took place just a few city blocks in D.C. from the marble edifices in which the likes of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, plus all their world-famous generals and experts, were busy ignoring dozens of “fact-finding missions” that ended up advising the power structure to get the hell out of Vietnam while they could and without losing too much face.  Yet they in all their keen perceptions and wisdom (and fears of the American public) kept making decisions as if World War 2 was still going on and Vietnam was merely the last island that had to be landed upon with the Marines, a la Saipan and Okinawa, and delivered into freedom, only from Communism and not the Japanese.

Today I have more reason than ever to keep paying close attention to what people are doing in their marble palaces and offices here and overseas, because the latest occupants in those high places in America are a bunch of ignorant dummies with bad intentions who in the next few years figure to be especially disposed to indulge in all sorts of follies that Ms Tuchman would never have wanted to explore.  I think that it definitely comes through that she always would have wished for for better on the parts of the citizens of Troy, the popes of the Renaissance, the leaders of 18th century Britain, and those American Presidents of the 1950’s and ‘60’s, and she only recounted those stories in a sort of elevated despair peculiar to hindsight but today – I believe -- is susceptible to accuracy in foresight as well.