Le Tricoteur

It was these fucking things that got me thinking about what eventually became this post. The "Arts of Peace/Arts of War" statues located near the Lincoln Memorial and the bridge across the Potomac between Washington D.C. and Arlington, VA.

The idea for these things dates from the late 1920s. The committee tasked with decorating the D.C. side of the new bridge - apparently the old span was beat-up and undersized, but didn't get up on the target list for replacement until the party to cut the ribbon on the post-World-War-denkmal (the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", in case you couldn't guess it...) was crashed by some traffic jams and general clusterfuckery so noticeable that even the Former Boss of 20th Century Political Corruption, Warren Harding, couldn't look past it - came up with "equestrian statues" since that's what every fucking republic needs is more "statues of men on horseback", right?

Well, the design and construction of these lawn ornaments sounds like a perfect parable for a city run by Congressional committee. The request for proposal went out in 1928 (the actual bridge RFP was issued in 1925) but there was a whole bunch of dicking around with the designs. I especially love this description from the Wikipedia article on how the sculptors were selected:

"James Earle Fraser and Leo Friedlander were both commissioned to craft sculptures for the eastern terminus. Just how Fraser and Friedlander were chosen is unclear. Fraser's biographer, August Freundlich, and the National Park Service both say there was a competition. Freundlich puts the date of this competition as 1931, and gives no further details. This contradicts reports from the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks and Washington Post, which point to a selection process (not necessarily a competition) in 1929. Friedlander's biographers, however, state the artist was directly chosen in 1929. Museum curator Joel Rosenkranz says Friedlander's commission came directly from the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and mentions no competition."

"The more things change...", right? These jamokes would have been right at home slipping Felony Fats' Reflecting Pool Boy a bagful o' cash under the table to fuck up the pond liner.

The tale of the journey between design and construction is a similar sort of "designed-by-a-committee" epic. Design submittals, reviews, redesigns, resubmittals, re-reviews, re-re-designs, and then along came the Great Depression and the whole fucking thing got shut down for lack of funds.

The project diddled along in the Thirties - one big change was in materials for the statues, from granite to bronze - and then along came another World War and bronze was needed for making mess kits or something, so the statue plans went back into storage until VJ Day.

Okay! Now they were cookin'; the post-war boom was ready to go boom, and...wait...now you're telling me that the cost of casting these ginormous traffic islands was twice what you told me in 1939? The fuck..?

Being good American entrepreneurs the sculptors and their Congressional committee patrons shipped the manufacture overseas. To Italy, to be precise, where these paperweights were cast at several foundries between late 1950 and April, 1951.

The Wiki article says that the idea was to "...use fire-gilding to finish the statues. Fire-gilding is a process in which gold leaf and mercury are applied to the bronze. Fire is applied to the area, which causes the gold to adhere to the bronze and the mercury to evaporate."

This apparently was a problem. The quality of the various foundries varied significantly; some were good at the bronze but poor at gilding, others better with the gilt but sketchy with the bronze itself. All the initial gilding was judged too glitzy - the Wiki says that original casting samples were "...shipped to the United States, where it was discovered that the color was too bright." The sculptors' on-site rep had to finesse the Italians to get the metal finish to look like the design plans called for, but eventually did, and the big metal slugs were finally set up and officially dedicated in September, 1951.

And there they sat, for the succeeding 75 years.

Now bronze is a very common sort of "outdoors-metal-sculpture" material. It's fairly durable, and it's also fairly ductile - that is, "not brittle" - so it deals with heat and cold changes, rain, snow, sunlight, all the stuff you can lump together as "elements", pretty well.

It also develops a "patina", a natural (or artificial - different patinas may be applied to bronzes to get certain effects) oxidation product. The link describes perhaps the most familiar patina you know:

"Oxygen and water molecules react with the metal and form a layer of corrosion that discolors the metal. Think of the Statue of Liberty. This statue is clad in copper sheets, but its long exposure to the air and water has corroded the copper, giving it the statue’s iconic green color. That green color is patina, therefore the Statue of Liberty is the perfect example of a beautiful patina statue." 

Yep. The big green Frenchwoman in New York Harbor wasn't originally green but shiny copper.

These bronze ponies developed this patina over the course of 75 seasons, like this:

Now I've seen various bronzes, and the natural patina can add some depth and character to what is otherwise just a shiny hunk of metal. The photos of these statues don't look particularly interesting to me, but some of that may be that big Art Deco stuff kind of leaves me cold. It's the Thirties "burly peasant and heroic soldier" kind of monument sensibility that makes me think of Moscow subways and Mussolini's Marble Arch looming over the Libyan desert.

Anyway, peacefully oxidizing along the Potomac is where they were until Trump lumbered into view.

Okay.

Now, if there's one thing that Fats luuurves more than money (for him), and pussy (for him), and punishment (for his enemies) it's gold. I mean, if you know any one thing about the porcine rascal, it's that "gold" is his thing. 

His reign is the "Golden Age". The money he throws at the U.S. Navy is to build a "Golden Fleet". His special pay-me-for-a-green-card for rich white foreigners is the "Trump Gold Card". He's nailed up so many gilded knick-knacks in the Oval Office that the sonofabitch looks like the party room in a sleazy Vegas cathouse only with Gilbert Stuart's George Washington glowering down from over the bathroom door.

So it's hardly surprising that when Orange Foolius turned his artistic vision to these statues the result was to go from this...

...to this.

 

And that's what got me going. 

I'm not sure exactly what part of this latest damn gold Trump thing that got me so hot.

Was it the gaudy waste? Sure! Here's the guy with whose encouragement his buddy Elon took a chainsaw to government pennies that went to help people, like USAID, but who's been hoovering up graft and hucking tax dollars to J6 traitors, rich pals, and other scummy wingnut fool farms like beads off a MArdi Gras float. 

That this cretinous toad thought nothing of chucking a million or five at slathering gold on fucking statues while telling people who he was kicking off food stamps and utility-bill-assistance to suck it? Sure!

Was it the whole Welthauptstadt Germania neo-Nazi/grotesque Soviet statuary gilded vibe of these things? Sure, that too! The Atlantic magazine piece about them starts like this:

"The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s."

I'd say that equating them with a Chang's was a bit too high-tone a metaphor for this paint job; they look more like the sort of cheapo gilded plaster knockoff "Venus de Milo" yard ornament you'd expect to see outside the "Dolphin II Gentlemens' Club" on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway right off Highway 217.

But after I sat down and thought about it I realized what really pissed me off about this. For itself, an as an emblem of my country circa 2026.

I hate all of this.

I hate the "fuck you, I got mine" arrogance of it. 

I hate what that says about the person who did it. About the people who applauded it. Or ignored it. Or hand-waved it. Or voted for it.

I hate that while something like half to two-thirds of the people in the nation he rules despise this motherfucker, loathe what he's doing, utterly reject what passes for policy coming out of his gilded palace and the fuck-you to all of us who despise him that these golden idols symbolize...

And that there's not a goddamn fucking thing we can do about it.

Our system makes it possible for him, for them, to rule like kings. With 50.1% of the Congress, 6 of 9 of the Supreme Court, that Felony Fats can rule like goddamn Caesar.

And that's what this shit looks like.

It's Louis XVI with his table full of ormolu clocks while starving kids begged in the street and died.

It's Nicholas II playing warlord while his soldiers were butchered by his incompetent "leadership".

It's George III, it's Charles I, it's Nero and Tiberius and Caligula. It's every other goddamn plutocratic royal moron, lolling about in golden ignorance and carelessness (or petty anger or madness...) while the nation burns and the people rage in powerless fury.

The original tricotreuses were poor women of Paris.

In October 1789 their fury - at their own poverty and starvation and at their royal masters' wealth and indifference - erupted in something called the "Black March":

"Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory for weapons and marched on the Palace of Versailles. The crowd besieged the palace and, in a dramatic and violent confrontation, they successfully pressed their demands upon King Louis XVI. The very next day, the crowd forced the king and his family to return with them to Paris."

As is so often the case, however, these people were offered public praise and made much of...until they tried to get hold of real power to punish those aristocratic scum and to change their lives for the better:

 "On 21 May 1793 they were excluded by a decree from the galleries of the Convention; on 26 May they were forbidden to form part of any political assembly. The veterans of the march and their numerous successors and hangers-on gathered thereafter at the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution...as sullen onlookers...the tricoteuses...watched the guillotine as they knitted."

And that, my friends, is right where I am. Exactly how I feel.

Does that mean I'm not going to do whatever I can do within the current political climate to defenstrate the gilded sonsofbitches? Ohhellno. 

But in a political system increasingly tilted against me, with "allies" on my side of the political divide who seem to think that empowering words and optimistic protest songs will defeat fascist goon squads, I'm left with nothing more than a hot coal of rage burning my chest.

I long for nothing so much as a day when I can sit and rock and knit and smile as one after another the bloody heads tumble down off the block.

Trump, Miller, Hegseth, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Markymarkwayne...fuck it, let's toss Alex Jones' and Newt and Callista Gingrich's and Steve Bannon's empty noggins in the basket, too. 

It took millions of soldiers and sailors and aviators, tens of thousands of bombers and aircraft carriers, tens of millions of tons of bombs and shells and bullets to defeat the last great outbreak of fascist scum.

Before that it took years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths and miles and acres of destruction to defeat the first great outbreak of racist traitors here in this nation.

Now that task is before us.

 
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

Catching up 2: White House White Trash

I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.

 
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.

It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.

Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:

"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."

Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:

 

I...I...fuck. Words fail me.

All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.

Why is this a problem?

Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.

I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.

Yet here we are.

And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:

"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.

There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.

I have no idea what comes After Trump.

But I don't think it's going to be good.

 
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.

Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share. 

The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates. 

That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” 

Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents. 

The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.

 
One was a civil war.

In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.

The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).

 
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.

The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them. 

Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.

Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.

And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)

Catching Up 1: I, me, mine

It's been so long since I've really posted anything here that I thought I'd begin with a quick "okay, since this is a personal blog I should probably add some personal information." 

Okay, no. I'm just a fucking egotist, so it's all about meeeeee!!!.

Kidding aside, well. Here's the basics.

I'm just a couple or three months away from my 69th birthday so, yeah, fuck, I'm old.

Throw in the whole "multiple joint replacements and Parkinson's" things and I'm not exactly heading into old age physically robust. That kinda sucks, given that I've tried to do all the "right things"; exercised, watched my diet, kept active and intellectually curious and engaged.

It seems pretty ungrateful for me to have taken at-least-decent care of my mind and body for them to decide now that I'm old to turn on me. C'mon, guys! All this time and finally you just give me the I'm-gonna-stop-making-dopamine finger?

Ingrates.

The other ugly reality is that I'm about two years into the post-second-marriage phase of my life, and that sucks on multiple levels.

On the obvious, social one, it's lonely. I've gone from being part of a family; wife, kids, a cat, loving and living together in a cute little house I had spent twenty years loving and working to make cuter and better.

So that whole two decades now feels like a lost sunk cost. All those years and work and love and caring...vanished as though they had never been.

 
On the physical level, well, I'm alone in a small apartment.

That turns back to the social-suck, because for twenty years my best friend, my companion at home and abroad, the person I liked and cared for the most, who shared our adventures together and apart was Mojo. She was my "working week and my Sunday rest".

And now she's gone. Not just physically, but emotionally; she's made it clear that she doesn't want anything to do with me. Not even the slightest, most casual contact. That hurts, a lot. I'd hoped we could at least remain friends, but Mojo has made it clear that she will not tolerate that.

Ouch. 

And the hard truth is that no other friends, as dear as they may be, can replace a best-friend spouse. For one thing, they have their own lives to live. I'm a third wheel, at best, emotionally, and distant physically; it's not like I or they can just stroll around corner or up the road to say hello and pass the time.

I do try; try and get out, try and go to places to meet with friends, or people I share something with.

I've even tried one of those on-line matching things, and met some good people there.

But, still, the bottom line is, well, what I've just detailed. 

 
What remains?

Well, the essence of my heart and mind. Me, who I am, for better or worse.

Retired now for almost four years I'm finding a lot of pleasure in having the time to myself, to exercise, or travel (locally, for the most part - I have time but not money), or just read or screen (and thank you, the shade of Ted Turner, for the TCM old-movie channel!).

I've been keeping my hand in the soils game until this last year. It's been good to use the skills I spent much of my life honing, and the income didn't hurt, either.

The last engineer I know who still called me in for that contract work is sliding into a different track in the geotechnical business and one that doesn't really require a field guy, though, so it looks increasingly likely that this will be the first real year of "retirement", the last soils work I will ever put my name to.

That's fine. I had a good run, did some good work, and I'm ready to hang 'em up. 

My children are almost man-and-woman-grown, and are a lot of fun for it. The big dude who is the Former Peep is in his third year at university here in Portland, studying geology, of all things. Missy is downstate, planning to be some form of botanist or agronomist. I try and see them as often as their time permits...which isn't the same as living with them.

That's probably the hardest part of post-divorce parenting, not being physically close, missing those little daily collisions, the small change of domestic life. Instead I've become the cliche' "divorced dad", seeing his kids every so often, unaware of and uninformed by the day-to-day happenings that make up their lives.

Still, they're good people and I love them to pieces. 

I still enjoy a lot of the activities I did in the Before Times.

Writing? Sure; not here much, though I'm thinking I want to change that, but quite a bit over at my soccer site. 

Soccer; indeed, it's been an intriguing year for pro footy here in Portland. The Timbers, having struggled through several difficult seasons, finally canned the manager that proved incapable of solving the troubles therein and are using the current World Cup hiatus to hire a replacement. The Thorns are playing surprisingly well, having also shed their gaffer at the end of the previous season.

Reading and thinking about the world around us has become a huge time- and energy-suck, given how appallingly ridiculous and idiotic (and dangerous) the current MAGA Regime has become. I agree with those whose loathing of Trump comes as much for the degree to which his freakishly bloated public presence doesn't permit me and anyone else who bothers to pay attention to public life to ignore his ignorance, stupidity, venality, and cupidity.

One reason I've blogged so little here is that grotesque presence, looming over us all like the giant stone head in the movie Zardoz, makes it damn near impossible to write about anything without having the orange (well, sort of; his face makeup seems to be more like that brownish shoe polish color "cordovan" recently) sonofabitch constantly poking his fucking nose into the story. Corpse at every funeral, by God...

I'm still hanging in at kendo, despite getting older and slower every week. I still enjoy it, and hope to postpone the day that I become too old and slow to represent my dojo honorably. I've picked up a related "sword" art, iaido, which is pure fun; a sort of "internal chanbara movie" thing, cosplaying samurai. Plus it's a way of trying to master myself; it's all about perfecting a series of forms. You're not fighting an opponent outside yourself but, rather, mastering your mind and body, a kind of meditation in motion. 

One thing retirement has gifted me is time to resume an old pastime, birdwatching, and I've been getting out as much as possible to scope the local patches. I'm not yet thinking of doing the sort of "big trip" sorts of adventures I did after my first divorce., but perhaps in a bit...

 
So I guess the final sum is that, while there's a lot about the last couple of years on me that I'd undo if I could, I'm still here. Still trying to live as full a life as I can. Still hoping that I can make of that something worth others remembering me fondly when I'm gone.

While all around me...

...well, that's for the next part of this.

 
(Next: Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?) 

Decoration Day 2026

 

As is my wont this day, I left North Portland early to visit Willamette National Cemetery and spend some time with my Army brothers.

It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.

The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.

Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.

So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007. 

I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.

As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway. 

And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished. 

I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.

 
And then I left. 

Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.

To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.

And then I went home.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.

But I'm still here. 

Not dead yet.

And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?

I will.

Until then?

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few,
And they're all dead.

------- 

As always on this day; this.

"Siri, what killed the most U.S. soldiers in the final year of World War 1?"

 

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning. 

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit. 

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

 

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats. 

Whooo?

It's suddenly early summer here in North Portland, so I drove up to the north end of North to see if there were any fun new birds showing up to enjoy the weather.

New? No, but I did find these two, a couple of new local residents, along the path to Smith and Bybee Lakes;

Great Horned Owl(lets). This one was a better photo op - the other owlet was tucked in tight next to a nearby tree trunk and screened by branches. So here's the other brother (or sister).

Both were still fairly downy, suggesting that they were no more than a day or two out of the nest. The parents were, or a parent was, probably nearby but were more experienced at hiding. Didn't see 'em.

I'm kind of foolishly pleased with this picture, because I don't have a good "birding camera", i.e. one with a telephoto lens to get up close to birds that, like the owlets, are uninterested in providing good snapshot poses. I have a cheap little phone camera, which when tried captured only a dark blob on a dark tree limb.

So I took my binoculars - and I do have good binos, Swarovski 8x42s, since while I'm not a bird photographer I am a birder and good optics are kind of a basic must-have for that - and held the phone camera up to one of the eyepieces.

It took a good bit of fiddling to get the camera and eyepiece lined up, and that doesn't even count the finger-stretch needed to push the "shutter" button, but the result is...pretty damn good. Particularly given what I had to work with.

 Other than that just the usual suspects. Looks like migration hasn't really reached us yet.