Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Instead of grim politics, how about yardwork and some cats?

I had a post all set with dark ruminations about the State of our Nation on it's 244th birthday.

But, y'know what? You've heard it all before. We're fucked, the Plague is running wild, 40% of the American public is fucking batshit crazy. Welcome to 2020, yeah, well, shit.

Instead, I went out front to work on a project we've been thinking about for years.

Our little house was built on spec in 1922. It was built cheap, and it shows; as my Bride says, "Our house has ugly bones." Everything in and around it was built to turn a quick buck, which means spending as little a possible on any- and everything.

That includes the concrete pavement.

The original plan included a walkway from the curb to the front steps, from there around the east side of the house and out into the back yard to where the original garage stood.

Well, the garage has long-since burned, the only remnants fragments of glass and charcoal we turn up in the back garden from time to time. A tiny portion of the path around the side of the house remains, out by the back door, but the bulk is gone, demolished when we had the east side deck built.

The front walk, though?

Still there.

Broken, overgrown, ugly, crude...like I said - this was cheap, gimcrack Twenties concrete flatwork.

Well, we're cowering under the barrage of COVID-19, and what better time for some home improvement projects?

So we went out front, cleared the grass turf that had overgrown the concrete fragments and pried them up...

..and stacked them in a pile with the object of breaking them into smaller fragments to make a 4- to 6-inch recycled rock, what in the soils biz we call "stabilization rock", the bulk material you through over soft soil to make a dense base on which to build.

And that's when the Little Cat showed up.

This critter's name is "Nine", because she lived in the #9 storage unit in some trailer park or something where she got sick and was generally neglected until the nice people at a Cat Rescue organization took her in. She's desperately shaky on her feet, is a fragile little thing, and is very sweet and affectionate. She also looooves to be outside, and we don't let her roam nearly enough for her liking, so when she can get out she frolics around like a nut.

And this was pure joy for the little nut; outdoors, with these awesome piles of soft dirt to roll and dig in. And so she did...

...until even more fun ambled along, in the form of the Big Cat, Drachma, the senior housecat; black, comfortable, lazy, and plump. He's a solidly outdoors-cat, possessing enough physical eptitude that the Small One lacks that makes us confident he can take care of himself outside.

Full of the wildness she draws from her outdoor adventures, the Small One hunkered down in defilade of the dirt mount and waited for her victim to wander into the kill zone.

He did...and she went Over the Top:

Baruk Catzâd! Catzâd ai-mênu! The startled Drachma responded with a satisfying tail-bottle and crouch, and Little One was a Force of Nature...

...until he realized that it was just the annoying little spaz he shared his house with. Upon which he studiously ignored her, and she found something else intensely interesting in the manner of embarrassed cats since Ancient Egypt.

With the cat skirmish concluded, we could go back to work.

Okay, well, after that we got back to work.

Got the first lift of stab rock in place and the alignment cleared in order to begin digging out towards the street.

So, as you can tell, even yardwork is More Fun With Cats.

These truths

I'll have a longer rumination on Happy Treason Day, but although I didn't really pay much attention to Benito's oration at Mt. Rushmore the other day, it sounds like it was a really juicy serving of red meat to the Base. "BLM is a commie conspiracy against Good White People (probably masterminded by antifa) and we're NEVER going to surrender on our love for Treason in Defense of Slavery!"

Kreegah, Tarzan. Fucking bundolo. It's a wonder that apes aren't the only ones who understand that shit. Yeah, well, racist goobers, so not a dime's worth of difference, but, still...

What makes this intriguing is that at my stage-struck daughter's request we streamed Hamilton last night (wonderfully luminous art, sketchy history...) and the contrast couldn't be sharper between the two visions of America.

Both include a huge helping of myth and fantasy.

But the one myth is hopeful, broad, innovative, expansive, inclusive...

and the other is narrow, angry, resentful, purblind, intolerant, and vicious.

We the People have a seismic-level event this November that will determine which of those myths we embrace.

I have NO confidence that We will chose the hopeful one.

And yet...the promise of this nation, the standard We set for ourselves, regardless of how often we failed to live up to it, is a truly aspirational one. If we were the nation we say we want to be, we would, indeed, be a shining city on a hill.

But more on this subject tomorrow. Until then, enjoy my favorite Hamilton guy, George the Third, tell us about his love and longing...