Wednesday, November 29, 2017

We're On Our Way

It's been over a year since the election. As I type this I am listening to Trump deliver a speech in Missouri. He's promoting his tax cut legislation. The bill has made it out of committee and is moving closer to a vote in the Senate.
I listen to Trump and I wonder how many people are buying it. If they are, and if it passes, this may be one of the last things they'll be able to buy for quite some time.

There is nothing compelling about what Trump is saying. He is so obviously lying. He is a terrible liar. He is so bad you have to wonder how anybody falls for it.

I have a visceral reaction to Trump. I get nauseous. My head aches. I get angry. 
If this legislation passes, it will hurt lots of people. It will also create a backdoor to cutting people's healthcare benefits in the future. It will also add over 1.5 trillion dollars to our deficit.
It makes you wonder. Who exactly stands to gain from this legislation?
As for the rest of us, well, Donald is taking us on a trip. He's packing us into a tidy little basket and taking us straight to Hell.
Holy Moly!

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Shane The Remake Meets Godless

I grew up watching Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid on TV. These cowboys all had sidekicks. They all stood up to outlaws. They were all fearless. They all rode horses and had six guns strapped to their hips. Hey, I got a Hopalong Cassidy outfit for Christmas when I was 4 years old.
There was nothing new about a hero on a horse traveling with a sidekick and confronting evil. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra gave us "Don Quixote" in 1605. Quixote was obsessed with knights. Wace introduced us to King Arthur and the Round Table knights in 1155.
The American Western movie was our unique spin on knights. Westerns were morality plays in which good confronted evil. The good "guys" persevered by strength of character, intelligence and skill. Westerns helped us reaffirm our faith in goodness and the rule of law.
American cowboys were our knights setting out to correct wrongs and using might for right. American cowboys were our role models.
I was 7 years old when "Shane" came out. It was a different kind of Western. The knight was weary. His guns were packed away. He went to work as a farm hand for a family struggling to survive.
The family was the source of strength and goodness. Identity was derived from family membership. The strength of the community was based upon families supporting each other. If the family failed, we all failed.
Evil brothers want to get rid of the "dirt farmers" and take their land. They hire a professional gunman. The gunman has no moral code. He kills for money. He baits a hard working, but not too bright, farmer into a gunfight. The farmer is killed and the rest of the farmers panic.
As farm families prepare to leave the community and disperse for fear of suffering a similar fate, Shane straps on his gun and rides to town and confronts the evil brothers and their hired gun.
Shane rides in alone. The farmers are no match for wanton criminals. They are growers, not destroyers. They are simple people.
Shane does what needs to be done. He does what he has trained to do. He has been revitalized by his stay with the Starretts. He doesn't want to see them and the other families either driven out or killed.
The movie ends with Shane riding off into oblivion. Unbeknownst to Joey Starrett, Shane has been mortally wounded. Joey calls after him to no avail. Shane has become an anachronism. Joey and his family are the future.
We still had Westerns after "Shane". "Gunsmoke" was on TV for 20 years, but the Western was in decline. There were attempts to revive the Western in the movies. "Silverado" tried to woo us with a loose confederation of independent characters, but it wasn't well received. 
The American public was not having any of it. The American family has been blown apart. Westerns were replaced by robotic macho men slaughtering their opponents without showing any hesitation or the slightest trace of an emotion.
It's no accident that the "anti-hero" has become dominant in a material world of high technology and personal acquisition. Opportunism is the new morality. It's every man for himself and women are commodities to be bought and traded. We are in a "what's good for me is good for the world" mode and there are terrible consequences for us because of that.
Yep, evil has come to town and we are personally ill-equipped to deal with it. Pursuing popularity and following fads has produced an electorate of vapid, amoral people. Conformity is the preferred mode of interaction - don't make waves.
Obesity, depravity and substance abuse are the villains we have to contend with now. We don't confront them at "High Noon", we pay them off daily. Happy hour is not a time of reckoning and rebirth. Doing a line has replaced public service.
The Trump outlaw is part of an international gang. He is a member of a highly organized crime syndicate. He has sold out our country and aligned with a criminal state run by a modern day fascist who kills his critics.
So here we are, a broken family, struggling in the wilderness trying to survive. Outlaws are lurking in the shadows waiting for us to come along so they can pounce on us. They plan on taking everything we have of any "worth". They want our self respect, our dignity and our souls.
The outlaws are holed up in Washington and we are disorganized, disenfranchised, and divided. Will we luck out? Will we hire on a ranch hand who comes to our aid - a ranch hand with a lifetime of experience facing off with thugs - someone to level the playing field?
Robert Mueller has been cast in that role and tasked with that chore. He is leading a posse and moving in on the traitor who has taken over DC. He is armed with the law. That's right, this battle will not be won with a shootout. This will only be won in courtrooms with a series of guilty verdicts.
Our Congress has abandoned us to the lawlessness of Donald Trump. It's up to us to protect Mueller and shore him up while he bears down on Trump. We can only do that with our votes and it's looking more and more like those votes are going to be dependent upon how the women respond - the same women we have relegated to commodity status.
If you haven't seen "Godless" on Netflix, you should. It's a Western series about a town full of women whose husbands have died in a mining accident. Thanks to unchecked criminality in their territory and a ruthless newspaper publisher, the only thing standing between them and total annihilation at the hands of a ruthless gang is their courage and resolve. They do not disappoint.
The fate of our Republic is in the hands of voting women. Our men might as well have been lost in a mining accident. Our lawmen in DC are either on the take or trying to find a safe place to hide. If this guy and other's like him are elected it's all over. We won't have another season.
Holy Moly!

Friday, November 24, 2017

Blaggard Day

Donald Trump deserves to be acknowledged for his unique contribution to the United States of America. He needs his own special day.
I'm not suggesting a national holiday. I'm suggesting a day of remembrance - a day of penance and fasting - a day on which we rend our garments and don sackcloth and cover our heads with ashes and weep and gnash our teeth.
On November 8, 2016, Election Day, Trump was elected president. I suggest renaming Election Day "Blaggard Day". "Blaggard Day" should serve as a reminder to all of us of just how easy it is for us to destroy our system of government - a reminder of what happens when we scorn morality and intelligence and love.
This is an optimistic approach to all future elections. First, it assumes we will continue to have elections. Considering what has happened, this is no longer a given.
Second, implicit in the renaming is the hope that by reminding ourselves of suicidal balloting, we will avoid casting suicidal ballots in all future elections.
Come next Blaggard Day, vote like your life is on the line.
Holy Moly!

Saturday, November 11, 2017

The Thing Is - It's Veteran's Day

I was born into an Italian Catholic family in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1946. I went to Catholic elementary schools. These facts shaped who I am. I no longer consider myself a Catholic, but I would be dishonest if I denied the degree to which my religious teachings have influenced who I am.
When I was 5 years old, my sister took me to see "The Thing". You never really got a clear picture of "The Thing", but you knew it was a deadly enemy that was killing humans and using their blood to grow more things. I was terrified in that theater. That too influenced who I am.
 
Catholic morality was a matter of black and white. There were no grey areas. Something was either wrong, a sin, or right. If you died in sin, you could go to Hell for all eternity. If you ate meat on a Friday you could end up in Hell. What was right or wrong was proscribed in Catholic dogma. The Pope was the ultimate authority.
When I was a kid, movies were filmed in black and white. Black and white was particularly appropriate for horror movies. "The Thing" and "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" were science fiction horror movies. The monsters came from outer space.
The monster in "Frankenstein" was man made. The monsters in "Dracula" and "The Wolfman" became monsters after being bit by either a vampire or a werewolf.
In the Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman movies, science could be either beneficial or harmful. Dr. Frankenstein's ambition created the monster. Doctors in Dracula and the Wolfman movies were often looking for a cure.
I no longer believe in the God I was raised with. I believe in life and that's enough of a mystery to me. I believe that I have responsibility for everything I choose to do. I don't believe I have a right to harm any living creature or any of the various biosystems that support life.
War is the antithesis to just about everything I believe in. Thankfully, I have no first hand experience of battle. I worked for decades with people who suffered from emotional trauma. A large number of them were veterans.
Wars are only possible when people let other people tell them what is right and wrong. Wars are only possible when we choose to blindly follow a leader.
There are many kinds of leaders and there are many kinds of wars. Unfortunately, we are all veterans in one form of "ideological war" or another. Civil rights are not universally respected. Economic freedom is not guaranteed. Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are not always accepted.
There are secular prophets among us. They continue to lead us into conflicts among ourselves. They would supplant traditional religious dogmas with their own personal dogmas that they insist are based upon religious or economic teachings.
Communism has been the enemy of Capitalism for over a century. Russia leaders have been the traditional face of Communism in our world. Russia has been our enemy ever since 1917. Russia was even our enemy when it was our ally during World War II.
There is much happening today that would be inconceivable when I was a child. Russia has interfered with our 2016 elections. We have an Administrative Branch of our government that has colluded with Russia and there are individuals associated with that branch that appear to have committed treason.
Russia has poured millions, if not billions, of dollars illegally into our economy. By investing in crime and propaganda, Russia has contaminated our society and capitalized on our own political, economic, religious and social divisions.
An investigation has been underway for months into all this. Robert Muller is leading that investigation. So far 3 individuals have been indicted and one has plead guilty. Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, was one of the 3 indicted and one of the dozen felony charges against him include conspiracy against the United States.
The GOP has rallied behind Trump. In recent years, the GOP has allowed itself to be taken over by extremists of all persuasions. White supremacy is tolerated within today's GOP.
Roy Moore is currently running as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. He is the president of the Foundation for Moral Law. The other day, several women came forward saying that he sexually abused them when they were teenagers and he was a grown man in his 30s. The youngest of them was 14 at the time.
So here we are on Veteran's Day 2017 and our headlines include: "Trump says he believes Putin's election meddling denials" (CNN). Yes, the United States President is at a world conference in Asia saying that he believes Vladimir Putin over our entire intelligence and justice community. Yep, Putin trumps a total of 17 of our agencies including the FBI, the CIA, the NSA.
Another story quotes Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler. “Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist,” and “Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” Yep, someone is actually using the births of John the Baptist and Jesus as a defense against child molestation.
Bibb County Republican Chairman Jerry Pow said he
he would vote for Moore regardless of the allegations rather than vote for Democratic candidate Doug Jones.
Yep, Doug Jones, the man who successfully prosecuted two KKK members for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, a bombing in which 4 African American girls were killed, is less acceptable a candidate for the U.S. Senate than a man who was both twice removed from his position on Alabama's Supreme Court and who is accused of sexually molesting teenage girls.
The thing is it's Veteran's Day and we seem to have reached a point in our history when the very things our veterans have fought and died for have been discarded and replaced by the corruption of our country on every level.

The man I have evolved into over 71 years has gone through a lot of changes. I'm more sophisticated than I was at 5. I don't believe in Hell. I don't belong to any organized religion. Things are much more nuanced, but I believe it is wrong to lie and steal and cheat and hurt others. I believe treason is wrong.
Problems abound. Solutions are much more complicated, but "The Thing" is still right there in glorious black and white just staring us in the face and draining us of everything worthwhile in pursuit of its own corrupt agenda.

Holy Moly!