Freshly fresh and newly new

 

I've seen sixty-three of the sonsofbitches, but the Year 2020 was, hands-down, the fucking worst of them all.

Mind you, 1968 and 1969 were pretty bad, but then I was 11 and 12 then and too small to really understand how bad things got. 

In the early Seventies we had another dangerously worthless Republican shitbird in the Oval Office, but the wingnut horde was smaller and less nutty and the news outfits less stenographic of Republican lies, so I could remain confident that said dirtbag would be defenestrated, and so he was.

But this one? Yeesh. Good riddance.

One thing that hasn't changed from yesterday to today is my broad outlook as a sort of "optipess".

On the personal and professional side I and mine are doing fine. A little ragged around the edges from hunkering down under the Plague, but otherwise unharmed, and looking hopefully to the deployment of vaccines and some sort of renewal of something approaching a normal life.

On the larger and general side...well, we're soooooo fucked. 

We - as in "the global industrial North" we - are doing...well, not "nothing" but more-or-less "effectively nothing" to prevent the recurrence of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and while I'd like to thank the fucking wingnuts for that (and they ARE a huge part of the problem) we the human race in general is turning out to be really, really bad at dealing with massively complex global problems. It's almost like we're a pack of over-armed, over-powered apes that have not truly evolved beyond out proto-hominid beginnings. 

Hmmm. 

And on the next level down we - the "We, the People" United States we - have turned out to be a sort of monkeyhouse divided into roughly three tribes of monkeys.

One-third more-or-less sane dwellers of the 21st Century;

One-third a useless lump of fucking ambulatory protoplasm wasting precious oxygen, and;

One-third utterly whack, bellicose, credulous, gormless, meeching, nitwitted feral apes.

That's not really a good thing.

And I have no idea what I can do as an individual to change either of the above. 

Well, I do - I can't. Not as an individual.

I have literally no "influence" even on the tiniest of local scales. Perhaps I can get more involved in local politics, for what that might accomplish. But I'm disheartened by my fellow Portlanders choices this past November. Given a simple, clear-cut choice between a piss-poor past and a chance at future change, a strong plurality of us said "Yes, more piss-poor, please!"

That's...not good. That's...I'm not sure how you move forward from there. We had good people pushing for good things, intelligent, progressive, hopeful ideas. And the People of Portland shot them down. How do I change that?

Well. Damn.

But - and this is the "opti-" part - there's always bad things. The very first thing I saw this new year, other than the dark house and the hopeful coffee, was turning on the television and finding the 1992 flick Body of Evidence on the cable, as if to prove that bad things have happened in Portland all the time.

 (That's Willem Dafoe walking through Lone Fir Cemetery, by the way. It was the most Portlandy image from this dog I could find on the Internet, most of which was Madonna, perhaps the least Portlandy thing about this dog...)

We got through Body of Evidence. 

Perhaps we'll get through this.

Right now, though, what's sort of emblematic is that it doesn't really feel like a "new" year because, like a a bloated orange colossus, Trump still bestrides the narrow world, Twitter whining and bragging, being an asshole, and golfing. We still have three weeks of the fucking idiot and his braindead minions.

It's just a question of survival until then. 

God, I hope so.

Then, perhaps, it'll really feel like a New Year.

Addendum - "But for Wales?"

I won't make a secret out of the fact that I think the idea of taking random eighteen-year-olds and running them through a second-rate engineering school where everybody wears the same clothes in order to produce Army officers is not a particularly good idea.

Far too many kaydets come out imbued with Duty-Honor-Country and very little else of military value. Which is not to say that good soldiers can't come out of West Point. They do, and have. 

But of the officers I served under the very best did not come out of WooPoo, and the very worst did, so that is a small unflattering sample of the place.

But.

If you're going to have an Army officer college, and you're going to make a big fat hairy deal about it as some sort of knightly training school where a brutal and bloody profession is somehow idealized into a noble calling that requires constant harping on some sort of "Code of Honor" as part of that training.

If you're then going to break that honor code for a very prosaic, very grubby outbreak of academic cheating?

You'd impress me a hell of a lot more if all that grubby cheating was for a higher purpose than playing and losing in the...(checks notes)...fucking "Liberty Bowl".

As my old drill sergeant told me once; if you're not cheating you're not trying, but if you cheat and fail?

That's sadder than both the failure AND the cheating themselves.

Welcome to 2021.