Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

For Labrys

 She doesn't post to the 'net anymore but since she's still in this space I thought I'd us it to write her back.

Get it?

 

I do enjoy your old-school handwritten correspondence; I promise - really, no shit, promise - to actually write, pen-and-paper, back to you. 

 

But for now, this will have to make do.

Bottom line? I'm...good-ish. The thing I wrote away back still holds; here, now, I'm fine. Oh, sure, I have the usual pissing and moaning any GI has a right to, but it's mostly First World Problems. But I'm still the "optipess" I was then; happy locally, dismal globally.

At home? My Bride is lovely, and The Girl is a lot of salty teenage fun.

The Boy? Is being pretty useless at the moment. 

He's given up pretending to be striking for a PGE lineman job. His latest scheme is supposedly looking for something as a cop...but his "effort" in that direction is lacking, well, pretty much everything. He's talked about applying for the Portland Bureau's "cadet" thing this winter, but the Bureau began taking applications back in September and his is still unfinished. I've pointed him towards the Criminal Justince programs at both our local colleges and he's done nothing there.

He is still doing what he did in high school; hanging around playing videogames all day and into the night. 

If he was actually any good I'd recommend he fly to Seoul and try to get on a professional team, but I'm skeptical he'd have the remorseless drive to do that; as far as I can see he games for the giggles.

Now. Me?

My only real bitch is that my new knees have refused to shake off the weird post-op thing that they developed nearly immediately; my shins and insteps are partially numb.

 

Not completely; I have feeling in them. But they have that sort of tingling you get when you sit or lie on an arm or leg wrong and cut off the nerve impulses? Y'know what I'm talking about? "Asleep" as in "Oh, my foot's asleep" when you've sat with your leg tucked under you too long.

 

The fronts of my knees are like that, too, which isn't really a shock given the massive insult involved in tearing onto them, hacking out the bones, and then shoving in metal bits and sewing them back together.

 

But the instep thing?

 

That's weird, and I figured it'd wear off after a while. Nope. I'm to the point of calling the cutter and asking WTF. Not a life-changing problem, but...weird.

 

Other than that, I'm well and healthy. I'm enjoying the first couple of weeks of my retirement. I'm looking at ideas for more writing, including possibly flogging my "battles" pieces to a publisher or magazines. We'll see how that goes.

 

It's on the larger scale that I despair.

Beginning here in Portland, where the local government has decided to go with the Stupid Option for dealing with the homeless situation. I've been over and over this and it's not really worth rehashing other than to note that with a whole range of options to pick from the City commissioners went for the most crude and dismal - herding the scruffy poor into camps. Yeah, because that's worked so well before.

That and the local version of the "crime" panic has let the worthless fucking Police Bureau off the hook again, another subject we've beat to death here and not worth recounting, but my kid might be involved some day (are you reading this, kid? If you want that you gotta get your shit together!) so I keep hoping that someone or ones will force the worthless bastards to be better.

Then move up to the state, where the even-more-worthless GOP managed slight gains in the lege despite being no less worthless than ever (and even moreso in the case if the idiotic Greater Idaho nonsense) as a testimony to the poor taste of the average Oregon voter.

And from there to the nation, where, likewise, the GQP now will flood the federal House with shit in the words of the immortal Steve "I Fell Asleep Drunk With My Head In The Stewpot" Bannon. We're guaranteed two years of unmitigated monkey-shit-flinging about Hunter Biden, Tony Fauci, China Virus, J6 Conspiracies, and every other looney QANut bullshit thing ever thought of.

And meanwhile the climate continues to slowly boil.

I don't want to be dead any more than any other person who ever existed. But there are times I'm glad I'm old. I don't want to be here when the bills come due, the bills for our fucking stupidity about the industrial age, for our fucking unwillingness to call weird and creepy fascists weird and creepy fascists, for our very-human-but-utterly-dysfunctional happiness to whistle past all the difficult and dangerous issues that we should be willing and able to address.

Fucking people, as SSG Layne would have said, they could fuck up a wet dream.

But.

I'm still here. I'm still trying to do what I can. I'm still enjoying what life and living bring me.

And that's pretty much all anyone can do.

So. I hope this finds you and yours safe and well. May the aches of our age lie lightly upon you. May you find some moments of clarity and peace. May you be well and do well, for yourself and for those you love.

I remain,

your friend.

J

Shizukesa ya

 

"Oh, tranquility"...

...is the first line of one of Bassho's best known poems:

閑けさや　岩にしみいる　蝉の声 (Shizukesa ya/ Iwa ni shimiiru/ Semi no koe)

Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock.
A cicada's voice.

 

The voice that penetrated the very rocks along the path up to the Japanese Garden last Thursday wasn't the cicada's, but the modern avatar, the gas-powered leaf blower. Why the groundskeeping staff couldn't have done that work on Monday when the garden is closed, I don't know.

The cold sunshine illuminated the maple golds and reds, though, as bright and bitter as the east wind that carried from the polar high that loured over the continent straight down the gorge and up against the West Hills.

物いへば　唇寒し　秋の風 (Mono ie ba/ Kuchibiru samushi/ Aki no kaze)

When you say something
The lips feel cold.
The autumn wind.

The value of membership is in being able to enjoy the quiet - well, the normal quiet - of this place before the crowds arrive. I've been coming here for ten years or more, and the carefully curated wilderness never fails to find a peaceful place within me.

Less leaf blowers help with that, mind.

The fall color is perhaps the most popular time for the garden, when photographers descend in troops to make art from the maples. Apparently the single most popular spot is "The Tree", the big red maple alongside the upper pond. So much so that the staff has barred off the Tree and posted a set of rules to keep the fighting down to a manageable level.

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡 (Natsu kusa ya/ Tsuwamono domo ga/ Yume no ato)

The summer grass
All that remains
Of the dreams of the warriors.

Or photographers, for that matter.

I with my little phone was no threat to their massive lenses. 

I took my snapshots, paused, and passed on.

As did she.

粽結ふ　片手にはさむ　額髪 (Chimaki yu/ Katate ni hasamu/ Hitai gami)

While holding the Chimaki dumpling
Her other hand held
Her bangs.

Nice try, slick...

 

One of the people I worked with at my last job ("last" as in a week or so ago, mind...) apparently just went to the HR department and - according to my ex-chief-engineer - "threatened" to quit.

Now. This person may well be the single most appalling individual I've ever had the misfortune to work with. He's surely the worst I've ever had work for me.

He's a toxic combination of 1) illiteracy (his daily reports are unreadable, and the thing with these is they're nearly 95% pure boilerplate - you just copy what the go-by says and change the location and date - and he'd been given the go-bys within a week of his hire and shown how to use them. Didn't help; his stuff read like it was written by someone whose English was their third language), 2) obliviousness (which is deadly in his job, which is to be the engineers' eyes and ears on the jobsite, so he is supposed to see, hear, and record everything that happens...), and 3) a bizarre creepy/nasty personality (one of his other coworkers used to refer to him as "school shooter" and remark that if anyone shot up a Safeway or elementary school in his home town we'd know exactly who was responsible...)

He had the annoying habit of disappearing; he lives more than an hour from the central Willamette Valley where his job takes place so it's not like you could drive around and knock on his door. When he'd ghost on e-mails and phone calls and texts? He was unreachable.

You can imagine how well that worked with scheduling.

When the chief engineer told me about this "threat", I replied:

"How could (name of dirtbag) "threaten" to quit? You can "threaten" to quit if you're a critical employee who has skills your employer will find difficult or impossible to replace. If you're a tech and in grossly incompetent one, at that? The only reasonable response to your "threatening" to quit would be a sincere goodbye and wish for success at your next career at Jiffy Lube."

Apparently HR responded just so, and the gomer handed in his two weeks' notice. Good riddance.

I tend to be unsympathetic to the chorus of job-creators whining about how nobody wants to work anymore. No, they want to work just fine. Just not at your shitty job for shitty pay under shitty conditions.

But.

I gotta admit, I've been seeing some pretty goofy hires lately.

Maybe it's my old outfit; I'm not sure their hiring-fu is strong. But I wonder...this guy. The dude who quit before him who wasn't creepy and incompetent but just dumber than a bag of hammers. The other dude whose literacy was even more precarious than this goofball and who quit just ahead of getting canned...

Meanwhile the great people this outfit brings in leave, largely because the work is grim; endless brain-destroyingly dull development construction work, spending hours a day watching dirt move and arguing with people who tell you to believe them and not your lying eyes.

But this guy...wow. That's really special.

I think I'll make sure I go to Oil Can Henry's next time instead.

Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Today, for the first time in twenty-one years, my country isn't making veterans, at least not in any "official" foreign wars.

Oh, sure. Hundreds of GIs of one stripe or another are doing the nation's dirty business - some of it dangerous, as well - in various unpaved parts of the world for some nebulous "national interests" that your average Joe and Molly Lunchpail couldn't identify if they sat on their hands and thought about it for a fortnight.

But the "big wars" of the post-9/11, Post-Gulf-War 1 era?

Done.

And, look! 

Suddenly all that "support the troops" guff? 

It's disappeared like magic, melted like a fallen ice cream cone on a hot summer sidewalk. I didn't see a single Veterans Day ad, didn't hear so much as a whispered "thank you for your service" today. 

Those who gave their youth and strength in the wars their fellow citizens either helped gin up or were at least indifferent to those who ginned them up? 

As invisible as Marley's Ghost was to the suffering poor.

It is as it has always been; "Danger past and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted".

But that's fine. 

That's what happens after wars, if there is an "after" to the wars. The worst part about the "War on Terror" was there never was an "after". 

For years and years I wrote on this day of the seemingly endless trickle of maimed and dead that we brought home, unresolved, and the fields of maimed and dead (and widowed and orphaned and sown with ruin and merciless hatred) we left behind us abroad.

That was the most awful thing; that for years my nation learned nothing and yet forgot nothing, carelessly devouring its' own and others' children like the Titan Kronos.

Well. that's done. 

For now, anyway.

Mind you, I don't expect that my fellow citizens have learned anything from the dark and bloody tale of our Adventures in Politics By Other Means. The next time some irksome foreigner pokes us in the giggy I'm sure the Great American Public can be counted on to rise in righteous wrath, wrapped in the flag and roaring that gawdawful "God Bless The USA" song, demanding that someone - someone else, mind you - go smite the dusky foe.

But at least, for now, we're nominally at peace.

And I'll take that.

Because, as Herodotus wrote: "No man is so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."

I wish you and all of yours a peaceful day full of small joys.

And to those of my brothers and sisters who also once wore the particolored clothes; 

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

If you can keep it

 

Well.

Turns out the "red wave' was more like a pale pink splash, kind of "...like when you wash your Klan robe with your MAGA hat", I think Steve Colbert described it.

My personal fave? 

The Oregonian ("Still longing for the firm hand of a Republican Daddy") headlined the Oregon Republicans gaining one - one - seat in the Oregon Senate as...

Republicans yank Oregon Democrats’ Senate supermajority

 

One. Seat.

 

Fuck me. C'mon.

Keeping the number of rabid monkeys in the monkeyhouse down is good but, mind you, ANY gains by Republicans simply mean that too many Americans are 1) too stupid to be allowed out in public unsupervised, or 2) shitty white people. We just don't get it. These people are catching your attention with drag queens and refugee caravans while they break your leg and pick your pocket. A vote for any Republican - now - is a vote for not just dictatorship of the lumpenproletariat but dictatorship of the bone-stupid lumpenproletariat. 

 

Of brain-dead grievance engines like Gym Jordan and Margie Taylor Greene.

 

The GQP potentially regaining the U.S. House is going to be fucking im-fucking-possible. 

 

Despite getting a razor-thin electoral margin largely through grotesquely-warped electoral maps the fucking GQP Nitwit (sorry) "Freedom" Caucus is gonna act like it got the fucking Mandate of Heaven and will immediately begin to  lard the public press (and the public purse) with idiotic bullshit like investigating Hunter Biden! and forming Select Committees to pursue rumors of voter fraud and trans kids using litterboxes in classrooms.

 

And don't even get me started about the "debt ceiling".

Jesus wept.

 

Here in the Beaver State the usual idiots got up to their usual idiocy - the "Greater Idaho" fucktardry gained another couple of unpaved counties - and the QANut GQP candidate for governor got damn near 44% of the ballots cast.

 

Four out of ten Oregonians.

At least Phil Knight's sockpuppet Betsy Johnson couldn't crack double figures.

 

But that in itself should make you think.

This year Oregon's cranky old people, rednecks, and wannabe finance grifters had not just one but two choices:

An old-school pro-business, plutocrat-fluffing, anti-tax, anti-public-service, stodgy, mainstream Republican.

 

 

 And a fucking lunatic, treasonous, Trump-fellating wingnut.

And they preferred the traitor four-to-one.

 

Of course Drazen hasn't conceded. She's a J6 traitor, a Big Lie, 2020-election-denier. She's a worthless lump of human-like skin, so of course she won't concede and more than 40% of the voters luuuuurve her for it.

 

How the hell do we govern a republic with those C.H.U.D.s running loose?

We. Are. So. Fucked.

 

Anyway. 

 

That's it for politics for a while. I'm gonna take advantage of my retirement for a bit and do some random blogging after this.

See you then.

The Freedom to Starve

Over at Yastreblyansky's joint he's initiated a discussion of the sort of "freedom" the Trumpenscum and assorted tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel are pimping:

"...pursuing happiness has to be something we do collectively, as social beings. That makes it not only a different list, but also a different concept of what liberty is--I mean, making it into a slogan, the conservative idea is liberty from other people and the liberal idea is freedom with other people."

That's fine, as far as it goes. But I think the whole business is a lot simpler and more primal.

This is simply about a certain sort of person, the sort of person who gravitates towards something like the 2022 GOP and someone like Donald Trump, who wants to do whatever the fuck they want to do without a moment's thought for the consequences.

They don't want consequences, period. They want to be immune from ALL the shit their nonsense stirs up; gunfire, lawsuits, mean tweets, censorious looks...it's all about being able to be what they want without so much as a single hard look in return.

Now.

That's a kind of "freedom".

Tom Hobbes described it as "the war of all against all". It basically comes down to that if you can do what you want to without consequence, I can do what I want to, and if I'm bigger - stronger, smarter, richer, a bigger fucking sociopath - that you are, I can do it to you and you just have to suck it up.

It's the 21st Century Melian Dialogue; the rich do what they can, and everyone else - the poor, the dark, the non-cis-het, the planetary climate, everyone - suffers what they must.

It's not a very new concept, or a very original one.

And it only appeals to the sort of nitwit who thinks there can't be anyone bigger, stronger, smarter, more sociopathic, that they are.

In other words, the stupid, the greedy, and the egotistical fathead.

Which means it appeals to a Donald Trump. And all the little mini-Trumps out there (around here we just call them "assholes") who make up about maybe 60% of the GOP.

(...the other 40% or so are just fucking morons, QANuts and people like Margie Green who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They're the "lean Objectivist jerky" that Scalzi talked about; the real monsters will, if they're lucky, keep them as pets (Greene will be some plutocrat's muppet as long as she keeps her looks) but in a pinch will make do with them as soylent green)

The problem is that a whole bunch of the inhabitants of the US circa 2022 - not just Republicans, unfortunately - have been so addled by the firehose of chatter they encounter every day that they have become largely unable to think their way through this. 

I mean...it's hard for ME to keep up with the constant stream of lies, damned lies, and commercials - Steve "I Fell Asleep With My Head In The Toilet" Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" - and I'm a lifelong cynic, skeptic, and political junkie who is utterly immune to GQP nonsense.

So we have people who depend utterly on an impartial government to protect and defend them from rapacious fucksticks like Thiel and Musk and Exxon and Amazon and every other plutocrat who would be their kings...voting for people like DeSantis and Trump who think that they ARE kings and who will let these plutocratic scum BE kings.

(And the problem with Trump himself, of course, is that so long as someone like Thiel sucks his ass and lards him with flattery and bling Trump doesn't care enough about the actual kinging to get in the plutocrats' way. It's kind of ironic that Tubby loves him some Putin, because Vlad the Impaler made damn sure that he put the boot hard on the neck of his plutocrats. For a while after the crash in 1991 it looked like Russia would become just another kleptocracy, with the mob bosses, the New Rich, looting the joint while their pliant figurehead opened the shopping malls and chaired the committee meetings.)

I'm not sure what the hell the rest of us can do about this.

IMO the real issue is that in a massive industrial democracy the only way that the citizens can be involved and informed is through things like newspapers (increasingly irrelevant) and the various electronic media like television (cable and otherwise) and the various internet sites.

The outfits that inhabit these places, the ones that "inform" Americans, seem utterly unable to be clear about the simple reality I've laid out.

I'm not saying they have to be "against" the notion that the strong/rich do what they can...etcetera.

But that they make it clear that is what will happen without some sort of collective protection - whether in the form of a union, or a government (which is needed to back the union against the sort of money power the union's employer will use against it).

Without that?

You as an individual are prey.

Instead, as Jordan Orlando over at Rectification of Names points out (citing John Ganz here):

"An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. 

In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation."

Yep. That's it. That's the plan.

Or, as Driftglass used to sum it up:

There's a club.

And you're not in it.

And people like Trump - and Musk, and Exxon, and Kroger - like it that way.

3 am

Awake, empty-handed, in the darkness with the sound of rain
rattling inside the cheap metal gutters like muffled drum-fire.

The warm, soft smell of your hair pressed close still rich

in the sharp empty chill of the rented room.

 

The sough of the distant highway your night-breathing

rising and falling as though you're traveling faraway.

 

(Years ago I was working on the road, doing the most grinding dirt-nanny work and staying in a cheap motel in Medford, which is kind of the lower GI-tract of Oregon. I awoke in deep night from a dream of home and wife and, just for a moment, thought she was there with me.

She was not.

That was a very long night.)