The time that is given 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.”

The graph above shows the average ocean temperature from roughly the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (about 66 million years before present) through the middle Eocene, roughly 45 mybp. 

 This geologic period is a contradictory and, to some degree, still confusing one. Global climate at the end of the preceding Mesozoic had been relatively warm and moist; think "dinosaur jungle", you get the idea. 

Then came Death From Above...

...and the world changed.

Among the changes (and, probably, a huge reason for them) were the second most recent of the immense "mass extinction" events that have swept the planet's biota clean, and a long-term change in the climate that made the planet drier and cooler. 

But before it started cooling the planet got considerably warmer. In general - notice the "hill" that starts around 57-59 mybp - this meant a fairly gradual increase in global average temperature that peaked some time near about 52-50 mybp, then from there the climate average began to decline to where we start to see the ginormous "continental glacier" formation around the end of the Pliocene/beginning of the Pleistocene about 1.8mybp. Hello, ice age!

But this climate trendline wasn't entirely gradual. 

The spikes on the ridgeback of the trendline that show up around 55.8mybp? There are known as "hyperthermals" and are described in the Wiki entry as:

"...geologically brief (<200,000 year) events characterized by rapid global warming, major changes in the environment, and massive carbon addition...and stand(s) out as a major change in the lithologic, biotic and geochemical composition of sediment in hundreds of records across Earth."

This, the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum", or PETM, is important to understand today because, as its Wiki entry says;  

"The PETM arguably represents our best past analogue by which to understand how global warming and the carbon cycle operate in a greenhouse world."

Which brings us to what I want to talk about.

 

I've railed in this blog about human foolishness, and, often, the foolishness of the particular humans who have been placed in charge here in the United States. A lot. If you're still here surely you know that.

War. Economics. Non-alcoholic beer. Sex, including procedures, physical form, and body hair.

If a person, or people, can fuck any or all of that of in ways that make life more fucked up for other people (who didn't do anything to help out, or even fought against the fucker-uppers) I've often had some pretty scathing comments about them, and the fucking-up they did.

This, though?  

This is, in my opinion, the single biggest, most grave, most dangerous, and most imperative test presented us humans during the Anthropocene; "anthropogenic climate change".

The fundamentals are simple and obvious.

Since the origins of human civilization; first agriculture, and then, increasingly, industrialization, We the People of Sumer, Rome, the US, &c, have been adding much the same chemicals to the global environment as nature did in the early-to-mid Eocene. Mostly carbon dioxide - the CO2 level shown graphically above - but with a side order of everything from methane, freon, nitrogen...you name it, we've made it. And let it go, into the ground, the water, the air.

It doesn't take a goddamn genius to figure out that if spontaneously-occurring high level releases of natural carbon dioxide could help produce the PETM spike in global temperature, then human-caused released of the same gas could, and most likely would, have the same effect.

The huge, horrific difference?

We - humanity in general - have absolutely no fucking idea what effect a similar rapid spike in average global temperature could, or will, do.

And yet...

The climatology isn't questionable. There's more CO2 in our atmosphere now that there has been in the Pleistocene. Ever. Because, well, duh; we're burning more of everything, starting with wood, then coal, the petroleum. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were televised in the form of the grossly changing picture of atmospheric carbon dioxide shown above. 

Okay, so. First, yes, there has been that much CO2 in the atmosphere in the geologic past. And. The effect of that CO2 has always been the same; a rise in average global temperature. The effects of those temperature spikes have been all over the place; some seems to have come and gone with little or no permanent impacts.

Others? Mass extinction. Biological diversity (both reduction and/or punctuated evolution). Oceanic current changes. 

What will the Anthropocene Thermal Maximum do? I haven't the slightest fucking idea.

Will it do...something? Lots of somethings, probably? Changes in local climate, changes in global stasis like sea levels? Changes in habitability (you think summers in Phoenix suck now..?) or agricultural production or disease or...keep going, I'm sure we can think of more.

 But, unless you're a complete moron or a Republican (but I repeat myself...) there's no way to deny or refute that:

1) Human civilization is producing and releasing CO2 at levels not seen before during the existence of homo sapiens, and

2) That's going to change our world. A lot. And,

3) We (that is, humanity in toto) have known #1 and #2 for at least the past forty to seventy years.

Meaning that we've had our opportunity to "do something" about that. Either...

Alter #1. 

Or prepare for #2.

Or some combination of both. 

And have "we"? Fuck all no, we haven't. 

Largely because, frankly, we as individuals and in a group as societies don't have any real sense of urgency about it. Because "altering #1" would mean substantial - and, largely, unpleasant - changes to our industrial societies, and "preparing for #2" would mean somewhat similar changes that those societies don't really understand, or have any deep concern about, as well as requiring a metric assload of money that we'd rather spend on fifth-generation fighter aircraft and outdoor grills or what have you.

Throw in the fundamental problem that, in most non-dictatorial political systems, voluntarily choosing those sorts of drastic present actions (and costs) to (possibly) avert or (probably at least) mitigate the worst of future problems is damn near impossible.

You're asking me to stop eating salmon and running the airconditioning and dump my Chevy Nova and start walking or cycling or riding a train or bus everywhere? Because it's possible - or even probable - that fifty years from now (after I'm long dead) that the Portland area will be a toxic malarial fever swamp uninhabitable in August?

How the hell do you convince me to vote for that?

(Dictatorial systems, on the other hand, just flat out won't do those things, simply because the dictator(s) have, by the very nature of the system, to plan for the short term. The premier or president-for-life or mullah or Donald Trump can't be sure that the regime will survive him (or is very sure it won't, or, because they're a vicious, ruthless, dictatorial bastard, doesn't care...) so why waste the opportunity to steal everything now to prepare for, or avert, some future disaster.

Christ, fucking Trump & Co. couldn't even foresee the predictable result of starting another goddamn war in Southwest Asia! Climate change? Even if they were canny enough to believe it they'd fuck up the response to it...)

Anyway, as we've shown, we human can't do anything that is going to change our power-drive towards PETM 2; Global Boogaloo.

 Or won't. Or have tried and failed. But, honestly?

We haven't tried very hard.

So, instead, we've failed the great test that was set before us. 

"It" - the most important deliberate choices we as a species were presented with in human memory - is, indeed happening in our time. And as a species, we have "decided to do"...

Effectively, nothing.

And, well...

 

Yep. Pretty much. 

What a fucking fuckstory. But that's how people are, innt? 

In some ways we haven't really evolved all that much, now, have we? 

The first of the last of the Sixties

Yesterday was the first day of my 69th trip around the sun.

 
At almost threescore years and ten birthdays are, well, kind of a mixed blessing - at best.

Making it to another year is fine. It beats the living Hell out of the alternative. But it's a reminder that my remaining time on Earth is fleeting, and that I now have some kind of serious malfunction inside my head that is killing me, and will, eventually, dispose of me in a really fucking nasty way; Parkinsonsism (or whatever you want to call it) is a damn hard way to go.

And yesterday was, even as sexagenarian birthdays go, just pretty sad.

Woke up late - one irritating Parkinson's effect is messing with sleep, and I had a bad night - so slept through my usual Sunday kendo. I didn't have any particular other thing I could think of that I wanted to do, so, despite it being a sunny day, I didn't do much of anything. I'm plowing through a good book ("Cold Iron", by Miles Cameron; fun swashbuckling swords-and-sorcery novel), so I spent a fair amount of that time reading, which was fine but, y'know, lonely.

I splurged on a damn fine dinner - grass-fed rib-eye and new asparagus in garlic butter, with a malty Oktoberfest - but ate it alone. I thought about going out for a high-end restaurant meal but that seemed even sadder than cooking and eating a meal by myself.

 
In the dark of late evening I couldn't help but look at where I stand.

In my life to date I've tried to be a good citizen, a good soldier, a good scientist, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend.

To my credit I think I was, indeed, a very good soldier and a damn fine professional geologist. I was as good a citizen as I could be, though I now regret not being more trouble for the Republican sonsofbitches that led my nation, and especially my Army brothers, into wars we couldn't, and didn't win (while in the process wrecking a damn sight of Southwest Asia as well as our own supposedly-sacred national honor).

I've tried to be a good friend. And I've tried, and am trying, to be a good father.

Sadly, to my shame, in one of the great trials of adult life I have failed. 

Failed to be, in the end, a good husband. A caring partner, a gentle and caressing lover, a fierce advocate, and loving friend. Twice now a good woman has looked hard at me and found me utterly wanting.

That's...indescribably painful.

My marriage of more than twenty years is over. Done, dust and ashes, and I can't help but feel like what was and should have been one of the great works of my life was a failure of crushing weight. That the grief of, and the grieving for, that loss will be with me, mark me, until the Parkinson's finally does it's work and relieves me of the remorse.

The thing is that tomorrow is...a day. Ending in "y". So I've got work to do, words to write, children to worry about and encourage, hobbies to putter with, Republicans to kill (okay, well, no...but that should be on the menu; these fucksticks are more worthless than plague rats and twice as big a nuisance), every little thing that makes daily living so busy.  

 I'm old. And alone. That's not a complaint; that's just the reality.

 
But I'm not dead. Not yet.

And while I'm not, well, tomorrow I'll do what I've tried to do for the past sixty-nine years and a day; shrug my ruck on, settle the weight across my shoulders, look up from under my helmet brim, and move out towards whatever the objective of that day might be. Embrace the suck. Deal with it.

That doesn't sound like a cheerful sort of way to greet each day, does it?

Fuck, no. I'm a sergeant; expecting the shit rain to fall is what we do, because we're the ones who have to figure out a way to work those troubles out. Cheerful ain't what I do.

But, goddamn it, I've tried to do the best I could.

And for now?

 
That'll have to do. 

Fragment from "The Lament of the Staff Geologist", circa 2026

At 4am the clicks and buzzes of the front door lock sound like digital complaints about an analog world.

Street black ice under the sleepless lamps while in the near distance something is humming like a half-forgotten memory.

 
Wakefulness in cardboard, dark as the pre-dawn highway. 

Beyond, the mountains rise with the sun into the mist over the Santiam. Over the Luckiamute, over the Umpqua, over the clearcut-quilted hillsides rising above all the vanquished names. 

 

Something is burning in the valley beyond. White smoke rises like regret only to disappear into the morning haze.

 

There's a high school football game  in Myrtle Creek this coming Friday.

 

As the uncaring traffic rushes past. 

 

--------------- 

(I've been picking up some contract work down in Douglas County. For some reason this stuck in my head, so now it's here. I've got a bit more thought to set down, so back in a bit.) 

Today in "No, duh..!"

The Center for American Progress takes a deep dive into the crime rate stats and finds that sending a bunch of part-time GIs to amble around several urban areas in CONUS has - wait for it - no effect on civil crime.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I hear that there also might just possibly be gambling going on at Rick's Cafe' American.

Shocked, I tell you. 

Here's the two most fucked up things about this.

1) It's about as surprising as discovering that the dog licks its balls.

As I keep hammering away in this place; fucking cops, actual civilian cops that get paid to supposedly crush crime, don't really do jack shit about crime other than nibble around the edges of it. They don't generally stop crime. They don't really solve crimes, either. Not very much, not for the most part, not in any sense that justifies the amount of money and attention we give them.

They're not entirely worthless. But there's simply not enough of them, they're not good enough at what they do, to keep "crime" within below-civilization-ending levels were most regular people not fairly decent, law-abiding citizens.

Crime is not "exploding" not because of cops, but despite them. 

So how in the hell are a bunch of part-time PAC clerks, diesel mechanics, mortar maggots, and five-ton drivers in tree suits gonna change that?

When this nonsense started a year ago I wrote;

“What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do? These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms. So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom." 

Turns out the answers are "not a fucking thing" and "a lot of money". Surprise! 

2) That the nitwit Trumpkins are whining and flailing and screeching about this.

If you want you can chase the first link and read the CAP report. I don't advise it. 

As a piece of public policy it's rubbish. Difficult to read and larded with the sorts of "facts and data" that the sorts of people who enjoy this sort of thing enjoy writing. The prose itself is nearly unreadable. Here's a random example:

"Importantly, the researchers employed the LOESS method to analyze seasonally adjusted rates rather than rolling monthly sums to increase the model’s sensitivity in detecting trend changes immediately after the intervention began. In contrast, using 12-month rolling averages would have meant that the months following the initial intervention would have been calculated using pre-intervention data, reducing the potential for an observable effect."

Seriously? This isn't a term assignment for your fucking stats class, bro! You're trying to convince the Boneheads Sitting In Darkness that Felony Fats is doing bullshit posse comitatus crimes! Make it clear! Make it simple! Use plots and graphs and pictures! Make the conclusions bullet-point direct and simple!

Had Tubby & Co said and done absolutely nothing about this it would have bobbed along in the leftier portions of the internet before sinking without so much as a bubble or two. It's too complex to turn into a slam on the fascist bastards, and since the journos won't read it or understand it either, even if they had the sack to keep bugging Spray-tan Hitler about it they'd get bored and drop it or wander away before it got anywhere close to dinging the porcine bastard and all his little taint-lickers.

They can't ignore this, because they're vicious little mean, petty shitbirds that can't resist screeching and flailing at their "enemies" even if it makes more sense to STFU. 

Now? It might even make it to a CNN late-night opinion show. Wouldn't bet money on it. But maybe, on the "hit dogs holler" sort of grounds. 

Instead the simple sonsofbitches are faffing around talking about suing CAP and getting all fierce and testosterone-y about going after them for daring to tell people that water is wet and rando GIs from Cracklick, WV, don't stop urban hoboes from stealing stuff out of your car at night.

Well, whoodathunkit?!

These fucking people. They're enough to make a cat laugh. 

"What did you do in the Iran War, Daddy?"

 

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. 

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

 "I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk.  Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.

Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like.  In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM.  As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.

Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW?  Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk.  We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.

Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness.  By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)?  Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle.  Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness.  At some point you have to buy that readiness back.

And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul.  Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings.  Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment.  That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable.  You can break a unit, and you can break a force.

 Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)?  Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring.  Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of DefenseWar is not that leader. 

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains. 

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky). 

 

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought. 

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well. 

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence. 

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy. 

Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.   

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right? 

(cross-poseted to MilPub) 

Back in the saddle again

The "Bridge Pedal" is an August thing here in Portland.

It's...very Portland.

The idea is that for most of a summer Sunday a whole bunch of the downtown streets are closed to vehicular traffic - including most of Portland's Willamette River bridges - and are turned over to non-motorized (okay, well, non-large-motorized, since there are always some e-bikes and scooters in the peleton...) travelers to explore.

It's a real fucking nuisance if you're trying to drive around it, and I recall that when it began back in the 1990s the usual suspects pissed and moaned loudly about it. But since an overwhelming number of non-assholes enjoyed and still enjoy it, the whiners have learned to deal with it, so the first Sunday in August the bicycle (and scooter and unicycle and whatever...) wheels roll over the bridges.

Oh, and you can walk part of the route, too.

When we first met this was something that my ex and I did together and enjoyed. We were both just recreational cyclists - although Mojo did dream of a bit more glory and actually rode a century, a two-day endurance ride of one hundred miles, although finding the reality less rewarding than the dream - but for this? That was just fine. 

After my hips and knees started to fail, though, I got off the bicycle some time in the late-Oughts and even sold my old Kona "Lava Dome" by the time I started getting parts replaced in the Teens.

So I thought I was long past my bridge-riding days when my domestic world fell apart.

Since then, though...

First, I felt the urge to ride again. Remembered the joy I felt getting in the wind, pushing myself to speeds my legs no longer carry me with my feet on the ground. I missed my ex-riding-buddy, but I realized that I missed the riding itself. A lot.

And while I couldn't do anything about the one, I could the other. So... 

I picked up a second-hand bike at our local repair-and-refurbish collective.

I started riding again, beginning with our North Portland "Sunday Parkways" a week or so ago. 

And enjoyed that so much I decided to sign up to ride this year's bridges.

Top deck of the Marquam Bridge. Always a traffic jam...even with bike traffic.

The day cooperated; sunny but cool and breezy. I chose to put the bike on my car-rack and unload just above the descent from North Portland into Albina and from there downtown...

(which was a very good decision - I would have regretted adding in the extra two-dozen miles or so from there home to St. Johns after the full bridge ride.)

...and by the time I came off the Broadway Bridge I could take off my windbreaker, so the weather was perfect for riding. The startline on Naito Parkway was full, and my experience was that if you faffed around you'd get stuck in traffic, so I sidled as close to the start and...off we went, up the west ramp of the Morrison Bridge. 

This year's route was curious.

In the Olden Times the way this thing worked was that you could just ride a "downtown" loop that took in the central Portland bridges, or, if you were ambitious, a longer course that included the two "outlying" bridges, the Sellwood to the south and my St. Johns Bridge to the north.

The Sellwood is just a mile or so from downtown, but the St. Johns is a slog; probably eight or nine miles along the St. Helens Road - dead flat and through the grimmest parts of Northwest Portland's industrial wastelands, then back through my neighborhood and down through Overlook and Albina.

That seems to have been a deal-killer, so this year we rode this:

Across the Morrison and then down the pretty bike-path "Springwater Corridor" (an old interurban rail line) to the Sellwood. Back up through John's Landing to the Hawthorne Bridge, back across to the east bank to loop back across the Ross Island to the Hawthorne again!

From there over the first of the two "big bridges"; I-5 northbound's Marquam, which looped around the I-405 freeway - going north on the usually-southbound lanes - to the last crossing to the eastside, the Fremont Bridge.

Once back into Northeast Portland the route swung down along the Interstate Avenue right-of-way I'd ridden that morning to get to the start line...only instead of the Broadway it crossed back into downtown on the Steel Bridge and we were done. 

Fremont Bridge (looking west)

The taiko drum corps had their own iaidoka. Who knew?

Mind you, some things had changed since my cycling prime.

 

Back in the day I was a climbing beast. I was always a poor descender; frightened of crashing at speed, riding the brakes in a nervous sweat all the way down anything more than the gentlest of hills.

 

But going up? I was a fucking monster, "dancing on the pedals" and powering up the most awful grades. I vividly recall an afternoon in the Eola Hills with Mojo and two friends. It had been a nice easy ride until we started up the western side of the hills themselves. 

 

The slope got steeper, and steeper, and the others got slower and slower...until I told them I'd meet them at the top. And just rode away from them like they were sitting still.

 

They caught up with me at a little winery near the western crest where I'd been waiting nearly half an hour; watered, rested, and - as soon as the three staggered to a halt - ready to go on again.

 

I was lucky to escape with my life...but, anyway. I was a hell of a hill climber once.

 

This year? 

 

Not even close. The slightest incline had me spinning away in granny gear, passed by ancient gaffers and erratic small children. My days as the Marco Pantani of North Portland are clearly long gone.

 

Oh, well. 

 

I rode slowly back to Overlook Park where I'd left the car. Put the bike back on the backrack and then treated myself to coffee and a pastry. 

 

Fuck, I'd earned it.

 

Did the ride, and my enjoyment of it, make the world a better place?

 

Ohhellno. Don't even get me started on Fatso's idiotic vaccine order from today. We're still in the New Gilded Age with all that implies.

 

But it helped me feel a bit lighter. Like I'd accomplished some small something happy and good and just for my own.

 

And that was enough. 

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.”