The Queen of the Little Sea...

 ...is another year older.

How she manages to be so terrific while juggling me and two teenage kids and being Miss Debbie the School Secretary I have no idea. But she does, and does it well.

I loved you then and I love you still.

navigare necesse est; amare est necesse, etiam

A guy's got to have some line he just won't cross.

So I keep hearing from Republicans that the problem is that Joe Biden is a socialist and will completely destroy the wholesomely juicy capitalist goodness of the United States if elected.

Y'know what?

If Joe Biden WAS a socialist and ran on a platform to the left of Leon Trotsky I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump. 

 If the Democratic nominee was the ghost of Leon Trotsky who promised to massacre all the wealthy I'd vote for him before I'd vote for Donald Trump.

If the Democratic nominee was a drag queen named Twinkles LaBarr who promised that if elected she would outlaw God, make every American share a single bathroom, and crown herself Dragon Queen I'd vote for her in a heartbeat before I'd fucking vote for Donald Fucking Trump.

Because I believe that a man just has to have some moral standards below which he will not sink.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

 Until now Ael and I have been largely disagreeing in the comments. But our disagreement is so fundamental to the issues we're looking at now - and, particularly, looking at in the light of the coming U.S. election - that I think it's worth taking a post to discuss them.

Portrait of the Artist Losing His Dainty Freshness, John Day, Oregon, 8/18/20

 

Ael summed up his salient point well in this comment on the "Election Eve" thread:

"...a return to Obama style "Hope and Change rhetoric and fuck all else" won't cut it.
There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land.
If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party, I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP."

 So, first; let me say that I couldn't agree more with his fundamental premise; that the social, economic, and political "playing field" in the current United States is viciously, irremediably skewed against anyone not in a two-yacht family.

The brutal fact is that we are effectively an oligarchy, or a plutocracy, if you will. The "people" - the mass of the citizens - do not, in fact, rule either in and by themselves, or through their elected representatives.

Things that the vast majority of the citizens of this nation like and want to be the things that shape their lives; equal opportunity, freedom from the terror of sudden illness or unemployment rendering them helpless, homeless, and hopeless...a more equitable society, in short...are always put aside in favor of the things that the wealthy citizens of the nation want and like.

The problem is that, right now, there's no way past or through or around that.

First, because the first-past-the-post electoral system always produces two large parties. Unless one of them is dying, as the Whigs did before the Civil War, a third (or more) parties simply splits the vote of that side of the political spectrum and allows the "other side" to win.

Second. because our electoral system is drowned, drenched, soaked in money. You cannot get elected in the U.S. without insanely huge amounts of money.

Which means that either you have to be insanely rich, or you have to court the insanely rich...or you have to mobilize literally millions of un-rich people to pay you and keep paying you.

The result?

The rich have access to political power in a way that everyone else does not.

That's why American politics never bothers to debate the value of tax cuts but has a conniption at the thought of using taxes to reduce inequity.

And that's baked in to the American political system.

Remember these guys?

None of them were poor. None of them were landless. None of them were Black or Asian or Latino or born to the tribes that had lived here before the Vikings (and, obviously, none were women).

They set the system up to over-represent rich white guys. And it's worked well that way ever since.

The story of this nation, the promise of the nation, was that although when they wrote that "all men are created equal" they didn't expect those other men - and women - to take them at their words. And that American history has been a long, hard, fight to make those lofty words reality for those "others".

For much of it's history, though, the United States has been what it is now; an open oligarchy.

Three periods were largely responsible to making some changes in that - the "Progressive" era, from roughly the turn of the 20th Century until the First World War, the New Deal era, from 1932 until the Second World War, and the Civil Rights era, from the 1950s to about 1980.

Right now we're embedded in a Second Gilded Age. The first one was disrupted - not ended, exactly, but broken up and forced to admit some of those "other" people - by the Progressives and the New Dealers. Those left outside by those movements - that is, non-white Americans - had to fight again in the second half of the Twentieth Century to try and gain some of that admission.

But the Empire struck back with the election of Reagan, and the country has been sliding back into economic and political feudalism ever since.

The coalition that frustrated the plutocrats in the first two eras - muckraking journalists, true Leftists - socialists and communists - and labor unions, and noblesse oblige aristos like the Roosevelts - is as gone as the Gibson Girl and the I.W.W.

Instead we're left with a dire dichotomy

The result of the hard graft of the wealthy to own one of the two parties has resulted in a GOP that is, frankly, irredeemable. Just lost. Gone. Entirely given over to everything from embryonic fascism to crony capitalism to really lunatic gabba-gooberosity, stuff like QAnon.

But the other big party is still largely in thrall to it's wealthy donors, and to the fear that if they move to hard to the left they will face the wrath of the now-massively-overpowered financial businesses, big banks, and corporate power.

And, frankly, the problem is that to dismantle the resurrected Gilded Age would, indeed, require what amounts to a revolution.

And that's not a metaphor. It would be, in fact, an economic and social (and political) overturn of the status quo.

Wealth would have to be massively taxed. Capital flight - the ability of large corporate organizations to move their wealth out of the U.S. - would have to first be viciously crushed and then policed with a savage intensity. Financial crimes would have to be investigated and punished with the dispatch and ruthlessness we now use on selling weed or sticking up gas stations. Prisons would have to bulge with banksters and grifters and other financial fraudsters.

In other words, the American public would have to start seeing the wealthy and "business" the way they now see government; as a large, unaccountable, dangerous threat.

And this would have to be done by a million tiny uprisings, tens of thousands of pamphlates, YouTube video after YouTube video, in classrooms and townhalls and community groups. The danger, frankly, is that a "populist" uprising is a fantastic risk of becoming either a dictatorship of the proletariat or a Man on Horseback. There's a reason that the French Revolution produced Napoleon and the Russian, Lenin.

The optimist in me wants to believe that there's a way this can be done. That there's a genuine way for the American people to reclaim those high-flown words written back at the close of the 18th Century.

The realist in me looks around and sees nothing but ignorant armies clashing by night. I don't see the American public as capable of that sort of patient, remorseless, brutally focused action, or as willing to make the sort of sacrifices that action would demand.

And, thus, I'm reminded again why I don't want to write about American politics. The way to political hell is already before us, broad and smooth; a descent into madness on the Right, a timidity and fear of violent revolt on the Left.

The way up is hard and narrow, and requires not simply one person but millions to be willing to walk it, to be willing to work and fight and suffer and, yes, perhaps, die, in that journey.

That's an immense ask.

And I'm not sure - not just if the American people are willing to answer, but - whether I even want to ask if of them for my dread that my worst fears will be horribly confirmed.

For me?

I'll fight.

That's what as a citizen I have to do.

But I fight without much hope.

And speaking of election eve...

 ...here's the latest lunatic GOP goober who will soon be in position to inflict her looney gooberosity on the rest of us to the extent she can.

This isn't an accident or coincidence or happenstance. This IS the Republican Party. This is where these lunatics have been going since Reagan - as Charlie Pierce likes to say - fed them the monkey brains full of trickle-down and welfare queens and government is the problem prion disease. Trump is not the disease. He's the symptom.

And the nation is FULL of these goobers. And they vote. And they are convinced that tomorrow belongs to them and are perfectly happy to dynamite the entire foundations of liberal democracy to get it.

I do not know how you run a popular republic with this much crazy in it. But I think we're finding out during this Plague Year, and the answer is not a happy one.

Election Eve, 2020

Hmm. 

K. 

So...one side of the ticket for the top federal spots this fall will be a bland corporaDem and a former prosecutor with some problematic issues in her past...while the other is...mmm...(checks notes)...a bloated heap of stupidity and lies whose utter incompetence has killed over 100,000 of the people he was supposed to be helping to care for and...hmm...that’s odd...it says here; “...a jar of heated mayonnaise in human form.”

Decisions, decisions...

Well...okay then, gee, that was easy!

From the edge of the blast zone...

 The past several weeks have put me in strong mind of the images recently coming out of the coast of the Levant.

Because here I sit, quiet in the gray light of earliest morning, with my coffee and my hands lit by the phosphor-brightness before me untroubled by more than the usual reminders that my body has been here for sixty-two years and I have not treated it kindly.

My family are all still asleep...no, wait; I do have another early waker, the Big Cat, Drachma. He's our sniper-scout, authorized to roam the AO without specific direction, and he takes advantage of that with characteristic feline ruthlessness. His junior partner, little Nine, has too many physical issues for me to feel comfortable with that; she has to be "walked" during her much-demanded expeditions outdoors. 

Here they are together on the east deck:

You'll notice the craftily-synchronized tail-wagging. I'm informed that is likely to be proposed as a demonstration sport for the 2021 Olympics, assuming that my country is even capable by next summer of sending representatives.

Sorry. Got sidetracked by cats again. Damn critters, they're like that.

Anyway...my point is that the Fire Direction Center is a quiet place. 

My kids are poised to return to Virtual School in less than a month - Portland Public has decreed online-only until the new year - which as a former teacher and parent I find appalling but as a sixty-two-year-old highly unexcited about the possibility of one of my progeny returning from school with a massive viral load of the novel coronavirus am kinda fine with.

My Bride, likewise, is preparing to return to her job as Miss Debra, School Secretary (which, by the way, isn't nearly as fun as it might have been fifteen years ago. I'm not saying we've reached the post-roleplay stage of our sexual lives, but we have gotten to the point where "too much like work" is a genuine factor. Sorry if that's TMI, but, there you have it...) and seems to be willing to be cautious about it.

My job, while incorporating entirely too much boring grunt-level dirt-nanny bullshit work, is still here. My outfit seems to be managing to hang on to clients, and we haven't been seeing - at least, not yet - the shutdown or suspension of backlog work.

And I'm...okay. Getting out to do some of the things I enjoy, diverted by the return of Portland soccer, reading a crap-ton, exercising, trying to stay as healthy and mentally and emotionally sound as I can; this is from a recent nautical adventure on Columbia Slough, with the Bride as Pirate Queen.

The only personal drawback is my physician has ordered me to cut back to less than a single beer or dram a day and no more than four or five a week! - and that's cruel hard for someone who likes the drink taken as much as I do. 

I find I've resorted to finding bizarre beverages to sample in hopes that a single draft will be enough.

And, yeah, this one surely was. Ugh.

So from the promontory where I stand? Yeah, things are well enough.

And, yet, when I look beyond that, it's more like this:

The Senate Republicans and the White House - that is, the "governing" pieces of the GOP, if you can call governing what they do - have given up trying to keep to the inside of the fog lines and simply let the nation, the public, and the economy drive off a goddamn cliff.

There's no urgency. There's no plan. Except "it is what it is". At least the House Democratic caucus proposed something, a legitimately-WW2-level response to what is an extinction-level epidemiological event. The fucking GOP?

Nothing. Let them die, God will recognize his own. Apparently that's all we're gonna get from the Pary of Personal Responsibility.

The states and cities budgets are going to crater. The death toll is going to keep rocketing up. People - most people, I can't speak for MAGAts - aren't stupid enough to dice with Death if they don't have to; they're not going to flock into IKEA and Cracker Barrel and Spencer Gifts (are there any "Spencer Gifts" left anymore, outside zombie enclosed shopping malls..?) so restaurants and bars and little shops and businesses are going to collapse.

One of my favorite little soccer bars, the Toffee Club down on Hawthorne, tried to reopen under the "Phase 1" rules back in late June. Much as I enjoy sharing a pint and a match I had no interest in going maskless to share recycled air with random strangers in the Plague Year. I didn't go, lots of people didn't go...and so now they're closing again.

That's...very saddening.

And pointless. Utterly uneeded. For a tiny fraction of the money that went to Amazon and Yeezy and Untuckit this little bar could have kept playing until we have a vaccine or effective treatments, another year or two.

But, no.

And I won't even bother to discuss the baboon-assed jackanapes in the Oval Office. We all know that he's useless in this pandemic as a tampon in a typhoon, except to spread lies and bullshit and disinformation and propaganda for his BFF Vladimir. Oh, and golf. That may be his most egregious personal wrong; he's taken a game my father the Master Chief loved and was damn good at, a game I sort-of appreciated, and made me utterly loathe because of his ties to it.

So here I sit, watching, appalled, as roughly four of ten of my supposed-countrymen roar and bay and lust for this bloated fool, for this ridiculous abdication of responsibility and sanity, and while they do the supposed free press refuse to put their thumbs on these people - both the MAGAts and their tin gods, the Cottons and Mnuchins and McConnells and, of course, Il Douche - for that insanity and irresponsibility and stupidity.

And...so than, what? 

Vote? 

Sure as hell, yes I'm going to campaign and vote against every one of these sonsofbitches. Starting right here in Portland, where the combination of a worthless Police Bureau and the worthless Mayor who's humping them, need to go

But I live in safely Blue Portland. There's nothing I can to to stop the chucklefucks in Cornhole, Texas and SisterWife, Tennessee (with the help of Trump's people and the GRU...) from inflicting this lunatic graft and corruption and plutocracy and stupidity on me and my family and my Blue Portland for another interminable four years.

It's maddening. It helps me understand rebellions and the construction of guillotines; when the rulers and their partisans show they don't care if you live or die, well...then it becomes you or me, jack, and I'm gonna make sure it's you if I can.

But...all I have is a vote, and a voice, and a keyboard. 

(And, if it comes to that, an old bolt-action rifle, one magazine, and 120 rounds of ammunition, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.)

And that's arrayed against millions of moronic MAGAts. Fox "News". Page after page of bothsider Quisling press. The fucking GRU! The weight of the Executive Branch, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

Even if Trump loses in November - and even if he concedes without him and his MAGAts picking an actual physical fight, which I am thoroughly unsure they won't - all those other noxious weeds will remain, determined to choke with religion and racism and oligarchy what I had thought were the growing trunks of the Trees of Liberty; secular science, equity, comity, equal justice under law.

Much of the time I feel like Smokey the Bear, clinging to my smouldering and shuddering Cascadia douglas-fir, alone at the top of the ridge, whilst all around me all the forests in the nation are burning to the ground.