Ukraine, one year on

I'll admit freely that I was one of those who assumed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be, if not a walkover, over quickly and in Russia's favor.

"The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...)."

Well.

I'm a well-known Eeyore in Portland soccer circles and that carries over into geopolitics, as well. I still don't see how this ends well for Ukraine. Largely, though, not so much because of Russian battlefield performance but because of Western and especially United States political attention span.

It's difficult for the Western democracies, driven by the short electoral cycle, to keep eyes on the prize - in this case, ensuring that a rapacious kleptocracy isn't rewarded for its neighborhood aggressions - and this problem is made even more difficult because the EU/US Right is openly Russiaphilic. 

This isn't just Trump, either. He's obviously either 1) just a stooge, 2) deeply in hock to the Russian oligarchs/Deutschbank execs who are propping up his "wealth", or 3) compromised in some truly vile way (old saying: "dead girl or live boy" because nothing short would genuinely shame Trump...) by Russian intelligence. Throw in his visible man-crush on Shirtless Vlad, and his stanning the Russians is utterly unsurprising.

But the remainder of the Western Right is all-in on Putinism because it clearly fits into the jigsaw puzzle weirdness of their worldview, where transgender teens and moms-against-assault-rifles are existential threats while rapacious plutocrats and anthropogenic global warming aren't.

Unfortunately for Ukraine these people are either close to or holding the levers of power. Watch this U.S. Congress - the nutbars in the House WILL strip out support for Ukraine. Empty G and her fellow Nazis have a Molitov-Ribbentrop Pact that ensures their constant attacks on Ukrainian aid in hopes of ensuring a Russian victory.

And without Western help the Russians will win; if not the complete subjugation of Ukraine - occupying the Ruthenian heartland will be no easier in 2025 - worse, if anything - than it was in 1946 - then the effective "Finlandization" of Ukraine or worse.

Even with that help, it's going to be damn near impossible for a true Ukrainian "victory". Russia is still immensely larger and can keep hammering at the Ukraine so long as the Ukrainians can't effectively hammer back. They can't; Russia has the geographic strategic depth that no Ukrainian weapons can threaten short of risking Putin throwing a nuke.

And if he does...

So I think we're still stuck with the "lessons learned" we learned a year ago:

1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

No real explication needed; we're still here.

I still agree with Point #4. But that doesn't mean that everyone else does, so being capable of giving a bloody response to those who, like Putin, believe that they can just take what they want by force is still, sadly, a necessity.

But.

Anyone who's familiar with the U.S. procurement and doctrine processes knows that neither one is particularly well suited for ensuring that We the People get a most our of our tax dollars. The "conservatives" love to blabber on about how there's SO much "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the federal government, yet are unwilling to look for it where it lives; in the "defense" budget.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

This applies both to Putin - who told us he was going to put the USSR back together repeatedly - and to the Western Right, which has told us over and over that they want what Putin has; the ability to harm, jail, and kill those he/they hate and the power to bind and loose regardless of the democratic norms and opinions of others who disagree. And are fine with him doing what he wants if he helps them with what they want.

3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

As if we hadn't seen enough of that from the reign of Dick Cheney, who intended to reverse the Decline of the Imperial Presidency, and Donald Trump. There's a reason that old imperialist Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government...except all the others. And the worst form - both for those who live within it and for those who outside who are the targets of it - is autocracy, whether in the sort of kleptocracy currently in Russia or the theocracy dreamed of by Western Christopaths or the Dictatorship of the GOProletariat that lives inside Lauren Bobert's head.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

The "leaders" - in Russia and here in the US - will never pay and never have paid the price for their war crimes. Dubya isn't in jail in the Hague, Cheney is still a bloated remainder of the stupidity of the Iraq Misadventure, and Putin won't be the one who falls out of the window.

So here we are; a year on, with more dying and more killing to come, and with no real hope for a "good" outcome, merely bad and worse.

And if there's a more powerful statement about how war is all hell, I can't think of one.

Sunday check-back and...and answer?

 So, about my post below.

I occurs to me that what might explain - while we seem to be bombarded with this theme in what seems like every form of "news" and information - that there really isn't some sort of novel 21st Century human malfunction driven by social media, over exposure to disinformation, FOX "News" (but I repeat myself), radicalization, conspiracy theories, and political polarization, etcetera.

Maybe it's just that we're always been this fucking gullible and stupid.

It's just that without the digital connections we didn't have to see it.

I'm willing to go with Door Number 2, frankly.

(Oh, and aren't these little "bad princess" cartoons wonderful? They're by a graphic artist named Yingzong Xin, and you can see the others here. Joe Bob says; check 'em out.

Sunday check-in and a question

 Got a busy week, but wanted to stop by here and download a couple of thoughts. It's been that kind of day.

The good news is that the Bride's job is reduced only 0.1FTE. We can live with that. I'll have to pick up some more contract work here and there, but we keep ALL the medical coverage, and that's what would hurt the most.

The bad news is that the goddamn IRS refuses to believe that I don't have a quarter million stashed in the Maldives.

Long story, but the bottom line is that my mother's IRA didn't get correctly divided into two inherited IRAs - one each for my sister and me - and instead went 1) into her's and then 2) into mine. There it is; it didn;t get turned into hookers and blow, or whatever the fucking IRA thinks it did. 

But the paper trail is complicated, and I'm not sure how to get the sonsofbitches to see how it worked and that I'm not hiding the money. I've got a FTF appointment this coming Friday and I hope to try and lay out what I have and see if I can convince the guy to see reason.

And fucking Trump has never been dinged so much as a nickel for all his tax chiseling? What a fucking fuckstory.

One thing I've been following with increasing incredulity has been the whole "transpanic" thing.

Fortunately Oregon is fairly insulated from this sort of wingnut freakout. It's not that our wingnuts are less freaky - they are, believe me; nobody who's stupid and twitchy enough to think that it's a great notion to move the less-paved parts of the state into Idaho is anything less than a gibbering loon - but that they're much fewer and much less in-our-faces, living as they do out in the hinterlands far from the decadence of civilization.

But as I understand it the whole idea is that these nuts are utterly unhinged on the subject of transgender people who, as I understand it, are people who are born with one set of genital plumbing but don't think and feel in harmony with that.

I joke about "Sharing the bathroom with a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock" but apparently this is a thing and a thing that utterly drives some people out of their tree; someone who goes to the ladies room and pisses standing up in the stall.

Now WHY this freaks these folks out I have no idea.

I dunno know about them, but I go to the can to do my business and I could care less about what the other people there are doing or how they do it. More than that - I don't want to know. Those excretory and urinary functions?

NOT my kink.

But apparently the whole thing - and I can't believe that it's all purely electoral cynicism; some people HAVE to be genuinely freaky about this for it to gain traction - really DOES freak people out, to which my response is complete and utter bafflement.

Seriously?

WTF, folks?

Why?

Why do you give a shit?

If someone with a cock wants to be called Shirley? If someone with a uterus wants to grow a beard and hang out at the bar with the bros? If they want to be called "them" or whatever?

Why on Earth is it your business to even care, much less "do something"?

No, really.

I totally don't get it.

There's so many things to worry about. So many fucked up problems; global warming, MILF Manor, nonalcoholic beer, exploding freight trains, Dick Cheney, the collected works of Sonny Bono. It's almost impossible to list them all, much less worry and "do something" about.

And you want to fuck around with this?

Like I said; I don't get it.

Anyone help a brother out? No kidding; what's the deal? Not with the cynical GQP scum using it for "culture war" ammo, but the CHUDs out there they're driving with it. What's THEIR problem? Why are these gomers so arsed about this?

Just following orders

 The end of the previous post reminded me of something recently that bugged me when I ran across it.

If you've read this blog for a while you've probably run into some maunderings about Star Wars in general (from my kid's former addiction) and the "clone trooper" characters in particular (because, well, soldiers and soldiering. And my affection for the Karen Traviss Republic Commando series).

Way back in 2011 I wrote about one of the "Clone War" arcs that I watched with the Kiddo. I was actually impressed with the potential for depth of the story...

"You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.

And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives."

...while being frustrated and disappointed by the resolution: 

"...basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master

- the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.

The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him."

Well, not too long ago I found out that Lucas had retconned his prequels yet again.

This time it was to insert - literally - an Elmo-style brain implant into his clone soldiers. This gimmick is supposed to have taken control of them when "Order 66" is issued and turns all the guys into ruthless killers. 

In one of the story arcs at one point some of our heros manage to yank this thing (whut? how? without killing the guy, I mean...) which makes the troopers Good Guys again.

That...bugs the living shit out of me, and I finally figured out why.

Because it steals the soldiers' humanity.

Way too many people as it is already think of soldiers as robots, trained like seals, meat puppets, unable to think or choose rationally, slaves to the rules and their orders.

Now, here, it's even more explicit; these men aren't "men". They're just like robots, with an electronic device that enslaves them, that forces them to act on another's will.

One of the most troubling, and troubled, questions a soldier - a person - will ever face is whether to do something that is morally fraught. Whether it's on their own or at the insistence of another, to do something that's perilously close to - or even over the line into - outright wrong.

This was one of those and while the television episode 12 years ago missed a great opportunity to tell a real story about that crisis this is, if anything, worse.

Think of the fictional setting.

Here are soldiers and their officers who have, many of them, gone through years and long, hard miles together, fought alongside each other, suffered together, grieved their dead and maimed friends together.

Suddenly events take place that suggest that those officers may be part of a deadly conspiracy.

And those officers are, most of them, powerful magic users while the soldiers are just men, muggles in the Potteresque sense, as helpless before their officers' magic as a child before an adult.

They can "arrest" their officers only if the officers let them. And the whole point is that the officers are supposed to have already begun to act in what has been a secret takeover using that magic. So the government, the legal authority, can't take chances - it orders the soldiers to execute their own officers.

That's a horrific situation, and it should have been. It should have forced the soldiers - and their officers - to confront the ties that bound them and the difference in the balance of power that separated them.

It should have given us some drama with a crushing moral weight, including agony and conflict between those soldiers who followed what they believed to be lawful orders with those who refused, believing that no such order could be lawful. And the aftermath; those men who killed other men who might have been leader they loved like brothers.

Instead it had all been retconned into not a moral dilemma...just a technical problem, a hardware glitch, that can be solved with a hammer and chisel and some pliers.

Yeah, yeah...it's schlock, just junk fiction. But who says that junk fiction has to be schlock? Some writers have done damn good work in this fictional world, and if ever there was an opportunity, this was one.

 Buy'ce olar, kar'ta ogir.

What a waste.

Twit

or, "What Did you Do In The Twitter War, Daddy?"

So.

On Twitter I've got a page. 

Somewhere (I don't really know where it is or what's on it...). 

Through it I follow an odd assortment of people and places, funny oddities like The Scamperbeasts (John Scalzi's pets blog), soccer journalists like Chris Henderson and Meg Linehan, several graphic artists (including some very smutty ones, since I respect all Internet traditions and as we know The Internet Is FOR Porn), a couple of political writers like Roy Edroso and Jamelle Bouie, and the Portland soccer teams.

I certainly don't use "my" Twitter homepage to say anything - that's here - and I certainly don't read the news or get general information from it; that's for places like the Beeb or my news and political blogs. So this post over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money says (and better than I could) pretty much how the Blue Bird is working for me:

"In any case, my experience on Twitter is about the same as it’s ever been, minus some of the people I’ve followed who’ve given it up, plus far too much about Musk. My “For You” feed shows only people I follow anyway, with their tweets mixed up in time, not the string of Musk tweets others are reporting."

And I note that, again, since I don't ever look at my Twitter homepage I don't see the "For You" nonsense so I don't get all musky, regardless of how it's set. In fact, I haven't seen anything from the Afrikaner scamp at all, the more luck to me.

So.

While I get that lots of people are angry that Elmo is stanning Nazis and @catturd2 and Trump, I don't see it and that, in turn, kind of drives home the point that unless you're a target for these idiots - and I'm sorry if you are, that syucks - you don't have to see or hear them if you don't look for them.

Which kind of makes the point; this hasnt made Twitter into some sort of Svengaliesque mass hypnosis that's turning decent, kind, intelligent people into raging MAGA nitwits.

The people who are diving into this shit are people who WANT to dive into it.

I don't, so I can go peek in and don't run into MAGAts or Nazis. You gotta want to look for and find MAGAts and NAzis.

Which kind of brings us back around to the whole idea of getting "radicalized".

Supposedly listening to Rushbo and reading QAnon and watching FOX is what turned the supposedly douce suburban Republicans into raving race-hating antivaxx fascist nutballs.

But I listened to Rush back in the day.

I've watched FOX. Yeah, mostly to scoff, but I've watched it.

I have a pretty deep trough of historical knowledge about this country, so it's kinda hard to bullshit me about Critical Race Theory.

And I'm pretty easygoing about "morality", sex, and gender, so it's kinda hard to get me spun up about a ladyboy in a cocktail frock reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to porch monkeys.

But I'm not some sort of geopolitical genius or social media savant.

If I can see through this bullshit, if I can look at cats on Twitter without freaking out about balloons or soy milk, so can you and so can all these other douchenozzles.

As Jim Wright says; if you want a better nation, you gotta be better citizens.

Oh, and speaking of balloons, this wins the Internet for today for the Star Wars riff:

Yes. It is.

(And, speaking as a parent of a former Star Wars kiddo, it never made sense to me that the Separatist Rebellion in SW was called "The Clone Wars". I mean, yes, the fictional Republic used cloned soldiers. But the Seps used robots - "droids" - so why not "The Droid Wars"? Or "The Clone-Droid Wars"? Or, shit, "The Separatist Rebellion"? My guess is that George Lucas hadn't actually thought out his prequels during the Seventies and just thought "The Clone Wars" sounded cool. That's lame, but that's as Lucas-y a thing as I can think of. You gotta be you, George...)

Eveything Old is New Ag...wait, what?

I didn't watch the last State of the Union speech.

Nothing personal. These things are effectively worthless as actual politics, being more or less a sort of brag-session for the current Chief Executive. 

(Given his psychotic level of internal delusion Trump's were, unsurprisingly, appalling, but I had little or no interest in hearing his predecessors chest-thumping, either.)

So I missed, unfortunately, the nightclub-comic slapdown of Empty G and her public lies that her party hasn't had a hard-on for impoverishing old people since FDR got Social Security through Congress.

I mean...c'mon!

I get that the federal government is "an insurance company with an army". I get that a crap-ton of federal money goes to paying old people not to eat cat food and die in a ditch, and that irks the shit out of Republicans because if old people weren't meant not to eat cat food or die in ditches they'd have been born rich like God intended.

But you'd have to be pretty goddamn stupid not to know by now that if the GQP can, it will roll back U.S. society to 1929 or, better, 1899. The GQP has been the party of the Gilded Age as long as I've been alive. Their robber baron donors would stand for nothing less.

Which brings me to my friend Labrys, who writes "What the hell do these people want?"

And, yes, it seems genuinely weird and inexplicable that a fairly large chunk of the American public seems to be pining for...well, a bizarre congeries of generally unpleasant (for most sentient Americans) things that we've spent most of the 20th Century getting shut of because, frankly, they sucked for most people. 

Poverty in old age. Filthy air and water. Dangerous workplaces. Assholes with assault rifles.

I think one of the problems is that the answer is difficult. The answer is "Well...it depends..." because the divisions in these people are legion and they don't all want the same things. 

They're just willing to put up with the others' nonsense to get what they want.

But here's the general outline:

The Plutocrats: The beating (black and shriveled) heart of the GOP has always been the rich.

The fatcats were the rulers of both parties from the emergence of parties until the Nineteen Thirties, when FDR's actions to prevent a red or brown revolution meant nicking a tiny slice of their lucre and they more-or-less permanently moved to the Right. 

And from there to the GOP when the Democrats lost a real "right" in the form of the Dixiecrats.

Oh, sure; if they have no choice they'll buy what Democrats they can - and given the insanely expensive cost of our "republic" it's not all THAT hard to find someone notionally blue who's desperate for cash - but their natural instincts and fundamental worldview sits better with the red side of the aisle.

These malefactors of great wealth want what they've always wanted, wanted ever since they were armed predators lurking in fortifications across Europe and Asia; more money, more power, more fear (or respect, but they'll take fear), and the political influence to gain and maintain them.

Their primary concern in the United States is federal taxation and regulations.

They want the proles' grubby hands off their wallets - i.e. "low taxes", and

They want to freedom to do whatever the fuck they want to get and stay rich - i.e. no "burdensome regulations". 

Work you to death. Dump their shit in your air and water. Cheat you.

They want all that, and because of it any self-respecting 15th Century Raubritter would recognize the DeVoses and the Kochs and their ilk.

They don't give two shits about what the scum do to themselves or each other, so they could care less whether Cletus uses his AR-15 to shoot up his ex-wife and the daycare where she works, and they could care less whether some transgender gal gets murdered, and they could care less who has to hide their pregnancy to prevent the Baptist Taliban from turning them in for aborting the sprog.

Money. Power. That's it.

But...since we're still nominally a republic, their problem is that there's not enough of these bloated hyenas to win elections. 

That's why they need the others. Who are...

The Religious Nuts: of which there's 31 flavors but all of them are what my mother used to call "good haters". Right-wing God-pesterers come in Christian (both the ultramontaine Catholic and fundie Prot variety), Ultraorthodox Jewish, and possibly even some weirdo Muslim, Jain, Sikh...who the fuck can tell with these people.

Their basic problem is with the post-Griswold U.S. there are all these...other people...out there doing...other stuff...that these people don't like and they haaaaate that and those other people.

It's often sex - since there's all sorts of people with peculiar hangups about sex - or just ways of thinking that run counter to the ways these people want other people to think. 

So if you're squicky about men kissing men or girls getting naked with girls or people with genitals who don't think of themselves as that kind of person or - and since religions are strict hierarchies with God on top and everything descending from that - not acting like the God-pesterers think God (or, more specifically, THEY think God) wants those people to act then you want the power to make those fuckers behave.

So these people want the power of law to bind the people they hate - the homosexuals, the gender-fluid, the atheists - and they'll side with anyone who will give them that.

What helps is that very many of these sorts of religious nuts ignore or elide the parts of their religions that insist on squishy stuff like loving neighbors and giving away all your wealth to serve the poor and sick. So they're fine with the robber barons hoarding loot provided the robbers let the God-pesterers hate and kill some homos and women who like to fuck.

So you got fatcats + bible-bangers. Who else?

The Fascists: and by this I mean "people who want "law and order" meaning they want jackboots on the necks of "those people" and they'll vote for thems what'll give that".

This takes in a whole bunch of people.  

Ammosexuals want all the guns, and want the jackboots on the necks of the softies who are sick of mass murder. 

There's also the racists who want the jackboots on the necks of those dusky upstarts who think they should get a piece of the American pie. 

And what I still think of as the hardhats; the mostly-white guys who just reflexively hate the smelly hippies and their "peace and love" and weird clothes and sex and want the jackboots on those hippie necks.

Lots of cops fall in here, too. Plus all the standard freikorps; Threepers, Proud Boys, groypers...all the usual shitbirds.

These people, too, don't care whether the plutocrats are looting the public purse. They just want the liberty to fear-up those people they hate and strut around saying racial and sexual slurs without getting the hairy eyeball.

Notice something?

Yep. Everyone but the country club set is largely driven by stuff they hate.

That's why the richie-riches are using all this "culture war" shit to herd the others. Only the oligarchs have an actual positive goal in wanting money and power to ensure their comfort and influence (sure, it's disgusting, but at least it's moving towards something...).

These others?

They just want to be the boss of the people and things they hate. They all just want to be king shits of their own little Turd Hills.

That they're just soylent green for the oligarchs?

They don't care. 

Provided they don't have to see pictures of men kissing or know that some woman is out there having sex without remorse or that some black kid is getting food without having to beg for it, they will happily be the kapos of the American camps.

Their "freedom" is the freedom to dictate the lives of those they despise.

Like I said; any mook with a sword and a taste for mayhem could tell you about that.

So "what do they want", Labrys? 

They want to be the boss of you. 

They want you to sit down and shut up and (since you're a woman) be whatever some man wants you to be.

And if you won't?

They want you silent. 

Or dead.

These people are damn near 40% of the American public.

And I haven't the slightest fucking idea how you change that.

Success and Failure

The Girl was a star at the soundboard of last night's production of Failure: A Love Story, running something like 30 wireless mikes and a complex recorded musical score like a pro.

So...the show for which she so flawlessly put the sound together?

 

First, it's a very odd little bit of work. Here's what the playwright says about it:

"A magical, musical fable where, in the end, the power of love is far greater than any individual's successes or failures."

That's a pretty roundabout way of describing the plot. Bottom line: it's a Twenties period piece (and there's a LOT of "Twenties" music and other stage business to remind you) in which the main actor shows up after about a quarter hour of exposition and proceeds to meet and fall in love with three sisters, all of whom die in some sort of bizarre way before the lovers do more than steal a kiss or three.

There's a lot more. Music. Dancing. Talking clocks and animals (and the actress who played the snake kicked ass, I have to say). The Chicago River. Johnny Weismuller.

It's one of those sort of "magical realism" things, and there was a lot of fun dialog and clever bits of stagecraft and let's say that it tried hard. 

 

But the construction of the play was fundamentally flawed. 

 

Unless the lead actor is utterly brilliant, the requirement for the character to meet, love, and lose to a series of bizarre deaths three sisters in 145 minutes is just too impossible to make work as genuine drama.

 

If you were playing it for complete farce? 

 

Fine. 

 

But the playwright wanted to make it a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death and a high school cast just couldn't make that work. 

 

Shit, John Malkovich in his prime probably couldn't have. Maybe. But it'd be a hell of a hard pull. The playwright made it damn deadly difficult.

 

The real problem wasn't that the author made a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death. The real problem was that the author wanted to be both glib and clever and deep. The progression of meet-love-die was just too scrambled, too hasty, and too inhuman. People don't love, or lose, the way the stage people were written.

 

In particular the sisters' deaths were 1) too repetitious and 2) too quickly succeeded by the next dead sister. Sure, there was some facile discussion about how knowing our death was inevitable didn't make the life that preceded it a failure, about loving while knowing the looming Hand of Fate.

 

But the need to move the plot along to the next bit of clever stage business meant that there was no real reflection, no real thinking or pondering about death and it's inevitable end of love and life, of loss, of grief and grieving.

The lead actor had no time to do any of that, even if he'd been a Broadway-grade star instead of a nice kid in high school; he had to move right along to falling in love with the next doomed sister.

Again...an actor with tremendous skills and a genuinely manic edge might have made that work as a sort of deeply cynical and fatalistic comment on the folly of our pretensions to eternal love and the Meaning of Life. A sort of "live for today" kind of spurning of The Vale of Shadow.

 

Or someone with the gift to portray a deep, unlighted sorrow might have shed some sort of dark light on how we're born owing God a death, and have no hope to defend ourselves when He comes calling to collect, and how that makes our lives a lingering grief, a deferred appointment with sorrow.

I've been in love with live theater for forty years. When it's good - and I've seen some stunningly good theater - it has an immediacy and an impact no film or book or music has.

But when it's not - and for all that this show tried honorably and hard, and the young cast did as well as they could (and my kiddo was a soundboard star!) - it's no more than facile and easily forgotten words on an empty stage.

Kind of too bad, because the cast and crew worked hard and well.

 

Sometimes, though, all of our best efforts and intentions wither in the bud, never to flower.

And that might be a better summary of the play that anything the playwright intended.

Friday Jukebox: Take it to the GW Bridge and stop

So I just found out that:

1) New Jersey is the only U.S. state without an official song.

2) Unlike our fine Oregon, my Oregon.

"Land of the Empire Builders, Land of the Golden West;
Conquered and held by free men, Fairest and the best.
Onward and upward ever, Forward and on, and on;
Hail to thee Land of Heroes, My Oregon.

Land of the rose and sunshine, Land of the summer’s breeze;
Laden with health and vigor, Fresh from the western seas.
Blest by the blood of martyrs, Land of the setting sun;
Hail to thee, Land of Promise, My Oregon"

Oregon, fuck yeah!

Sorry. Okay, back to Jersey.  

3) Apparently the last candidate was something called I'm From New Jersey by John Gorka, which is this thing:

I love this so hard. For one thing, how can you NOT love a "state song" that tells you about the actual, no-bullshit, way things are in the state it's about:

I'm from New Jersey
I don't expect too much
If the world ended today
I would adjust

 

I'm from New Jersey
No, I don't talk that way
I watched too much TV
When I was young

 

I'm from New Jersey
My mom's Italian
I've read those mafia books
We don't belong

 

There are girls from New Jersey
Who have that great big hair
They're found in shopping malls
I will take you there

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's not like Texas
There is no mystery
I can't pretend

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's like Ohio
But even more so
Imagine that

4) But. I see another contender for the Jersey crown; John Pizzarelli's I Like Jersey Best:

Which also goes hard in on the awesome lyrics:

"Lots of dineries, oil refineries,
Our highways make you cough,
But Spring Lake Heights and Belmar
Are places to get off.
Drinking spots and used car lots
Make the place just grand,
If you want to pay a visit,
Newark Airport's where you land."

So...such a choice!

Whaddya think? Deeply ironic and cynical, or just out-and-out funny? I mean...if you're gonna sing a song about your state, which way to go?

Gasbags

This is the Republican senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance:

Apparently this fucking cluck is out guarding his woodpile from the eeeevil Chinese spy balloon.

Also apparently either this nimrod doesn't - or he assumes his other wingnut constituents don't - know or care that the maximum effective range of his billybadass AR-15 knockoff is not 40,000+ feet but about, umm...1,500 yards. 

I don't really care so much that this nitwit is cosplaying some sort of Air Raid Warden. You be you, peckerhead.

What's irking is that there are a whole basketful of deplorables out there who eat this nonsense up.

It's the exact sort of thing that we had last week in the U.S. House where We the People got our tax dollars used to condemn "socialism".

Y'know what people like this chucklefuck also called "socialism"?

The 40-hour week.

Workplace safety regulations.

Pollution controls.

Old age pensions.

The G.I. Bill.

The New Deal.

Yeah. It's just that stupid.

As stupid as a faux hillbilly out guarding his woodpile from a balloon he couldn't do a goddamn thing to if he fired every round of 5.56 in Ohio.

RTFM

Speaking of the Army I Knew...

So I retired from the rascal about twenty years ago - back in '05, IIRC.

By that time I had twenty years in - twenty-three, to be exact. I wanted to make 1SG - I cared less about the top spot (I had no interest in nagging troops about their haircuts or boots and area beautification...) but I'd always wanted to be a First Shirt.

But.

I also had a new wife and a one-year-old and there were guerrilla wars going on in Southwest Asia and the wife - who is a treasure and a darling and has always been there for me in all other paths of life - had just suffered through the death of our firstborn.

She told me that she couldn't live through a year-and-a-half deployment.

So I pulled the pin.

Anyway, point is that at the time, and all through the time since then, I was fully employed, well-paid, and, frankly, over time lost track of the whole "retirement pay" thing.

Until I retired from my day job.

Then I got to thinking, y'know, it'd be a nice little tickler to have a couple of hundred bucks a month or so to buy a beer now and then or to pay the gas bill. So I yarded out my old Army orders file and looked for my "20-year-letter" etc. to see about asking Sammy for some jack.

And right there on the first page of the retirement packet it read in black-and-white;

"Current policy requires the retiree submits retirement application about 9 months but not less than 90 days prior to 60th date of birth..."

Which was...ummm...five years ago.

Duh!

So, important safety tip:

Read The. Fucking. Manual. 

I called the nice people at Ft. Knox, who said that, yes, I was a fucking idiot and that, yes, I could still apply.

That is all. Platoon sergeants, take charge.

It's all about meeeeeee!!! (considering "The Army I Knew")

So just curious.

For a long time I ran a series of posts I called "The Army I Knew". It was a frankly personal recollection of my Army days, from the Regulars of the Eighties, to - I think - the Army Reserve of the late Eighties/early Nineties. IIRC I stopped when I'd gotten off active duty and had been assigned to a USAR hospital unit.

(Just looked it up - yep, the final post in the series is this one, about the technical side of that particular hospital, a "MUST" gimmick that was very Sixties but still around in the USAR like a lot of other antiquated hardware...)

Anyway.

Is there any interest in following this path? Specifically, I would have posts about:

1. A USAR heavy engineer unit outside North Philadelphia. I wrote about one of the adventures of the GIs-vs-turkey-hunters here back in 2015.
2. From there to the old 104th Division (Training) here in the Pacific Northwest, and spending a couple of years under the hat. It was an interesting look at the whole idea of "Reserve drill sergeants".
3. From THERE to the Oregon Army Guard - as a hat I was involuntarily reclassified as an 11C - mortarman - and would have been expected to go to war as a mortar section sergeant of FDC, and at that time I knew about mortar operations what a cow knows about church, so a lateral transfer to a Guard infantry unit. From there to...
4. A Guard artillery unit. For the simple reason that I was too old and to cunning to walk around with a goddamn mortar on my back, and when the ORARNG went fully to the light MTO&E I wanted to ride to battle. and then my final duty station,
5. The Oregon Guard west-side training post, Camp Rilea, where I retired.

I have no idea if there is any sort of readership for this stuff. I don't really have stories about me as much as about the time and places I lived through. 

That Army - the Reserve and Guard of the Nineties and early Oughts - is as vanished as Ninevah and Tyre. The War on Terror destroyed them as throughly as it did Fallujah and Ramadi. 

The reality of deploying very eighteen months to three years meant that the old-school-post-Vietnam guardsmen, the "two-days-a-month/two-weeks-a-year" guys like me, couldn't hang on to both a real civilian job and a USAR/ARNG slot. Despite the law, your civilian employer couldn't keep you if you were constantly vanishing to go play whack-a-muj every year and a half...so the reserve component units (so far as I can tell) largely became a mix of students and young guys without a career and more-or-less-professional-soldiers who picked up odd jobs between deployments.

But...it IS also truly ancient and minor history. There's nothing important or of social value there. It's just a reminiscence of a time that now seems long ago and far away. I time that, all in all, I enjoyed living through. But not one that I'm sure has any entertainment value to anyone who hadn't.

So.

Thoughts?

The Rich People's Game

 

If you've been a follower of this joint for a while you've probably noticed that I'm a bit of a soccer fan.

And you'd be right; I've supported the local soccer clubs, the men's Timbers and the women's Thorns, since before the men were up in the Show and from the day the women started playing over ten years ago.

Plus I've been a Newcastle supporter for even longer - the Toon caught me back in the Shearer years of the 90's (I've never forgiven Ferguson and the ManU mob for stealing the crown in the 1995-96 season. Bastards.) - and so for the past thirty-odd years my life has been steeped in the Beautiful Game.

I'm a founding member of the "Axe Society", the season ticket holders from the Timbers' first big-league season in 2011.

I've stood and sung in the cold rain of October and the burning sun of August. I damn near tore out the walls of the cheap hotel in Medford, locked out of the playoff run of 2015 by a work assignment, during the insane 22-round-of-penalties "Double Post" game. 

 

I've been, as the tifo says, a Rain or Shine Supporter since the beginning of the modern Timbers era in 2001.

But no more.

Last year, with retirement looming and the cost of my season pass reaching almost $1,000 I gave up the place I've had in the Shed End for over twenty years.

And this season the club has moved its televised matches to the Apple+ streaming service...meaning that even to watch the Boys I'd need eighty bucks for the service AND another eighty for the MLS "Season Pass".

And that's without the cost of any single game tickets I might hope to nick off the spendy SeatGeek app. 

Look.

I get it. This is what I and you and all of us should expect from Late Stage Capitalism. Soccer is Big Money. Everyone in the game - players, owners, broadcasters, sponsors - wants a piece of the action. Nobody wants to leave a penny on the ground if there's cash to be made.

Here's the thing, though.

We. We, the fans, are the cow that's being milked. It's our wallets that all these people are hoovering, our support that's being mulcted to make the providers of the game a fucking buck.

And that's just getting real tiring.

I love this game. I love my town. I love our teams and I want to support them.

But it's getting real fucking old that every time I put my scarf on I turn around and there's another sonofabitch expecting to be hit in the palm.

I don't expect the Boys to play for free. I get it; it costs money to run a big-league team.

But.

It seems self-defeating to monetize every fucking aspect of the sport. It seems stupid to price everyone but the wealthy out of the "people's game".

Footy rose on the shoulders of the working men and women of England, Scotland, France, Argentina and Brazil and even here in the Americas.

But now?

When my beloved Toon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Saudi oil sheiks?

When I can no longer sit down and enjoy seeing my Timbers struggle to a dreary midweek draw with the Houston Dynamo without paying Steve Jobs' heirs?

When it seems like the entire sport is sloshing with money yanked out of the people's pockets?

I just feel like Smokey the Bear standing silent as all the forest around me burns.

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

Some things never change

I woke up this morning worried.

Mostly because my Bride's employer is talking about layoffs. Again. And since she's not just the only regular income at this point but - even more critically - our medical benefit provider that's a little scary.

So, like hanging, the possibility of sudden poverty concentrates my mind wonderfully.

That said, I can't help shaking my head at two fucking haven't-we-done-this-before irritating national news items.

The "big" news item is the now-traditional GQP woody over using the ridiculous "debt ceiling" gimmick to screw the rest of the country out of the New Deal.

I'll spare you my usual "now pay attention" lecture on the why of the New Deal. Suffice to say that the U.S. public, monstrous fool that it is, has no idea what the gutting of Medicare and Social Security would look like because it's been almost a century, but, hint...it looked like this:

You think we have a "homeless problem" now? Yeah...just wait for the New Hoovervilles. Maybe we can call them "McCarthy Manors" to bring the conversation up to date.

The fact that anyone not some sort of lunatic Republican (but I repeat myself) has to argue against the idea that the federal budget needs to be reduced by impoverishing and sickening regular people and not by raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Eisenhower Administration and mothballing a couple of carrier air groups just goes to show how utterly fucked our supposed national conversation about this whole business is.

No Republican should be able to even begin to make that nitwit argument without getting pied in the face. That they don't - that the "argument" is actually listened to for more than a nanosecond - tells me that we're pretty fucked already.

So there's that.

The other, national-but-sort-of-local thing is the ridiculous posturing over the murder-by-cop of the latest poor bastard to have been found guilty and executed for the crime of Driving While Black.

Specifically...that somehow what completely exonerates the entire history and existing society of the United States is that the murder cops were all Black themselves.

Okay, now I get that about 99.8% of the American public knows about history what a goat knows about calculus, but the entire notion of one group working for another group (and killing others in theor own group) is as old as...well, Rome, for one. 

Those Black coppers are no different from some Gallic foederatus carrying a sword for the legions against his Belgae or Suebi neighbor. In return for their own protection the foreign mercenaries can and will happily ruin and kill their own; it's one of those deeply human fucked-up things that people do.

This kind of ties in to the nonsense about "critical race theory" being some sort of commie propaganda instead of explaining exactly how - in a nation where a group of people were once defined as 3/5ths of a human because of their skin color - you can end up with that group of people as a largely dispossessed and disenfranchised target of the weight of social, economic, and political punishment but still used as foederati by their masters?

I'd like to think that the people pushing that bullshit know better and are just blowing smoke.

With these knuckleheads it's hard to tell.

And - since we're on this subject - can we just stop with the whole "let's take cops who already think like an occupying army and make them into some sort of Rambo-fantasy outfit designed to occupy fucking Fallujah" thing?

Beyond the stupid idea of WANTING soldier-cops the entire notion that somehow making more and more dangerously-soldierly cops is somehow "keeping us safe"...who fucking thinks that?

The copaganda We the People suck up every day makes it difficult to recognize that, as I said three years ago, these cops AREN'T some sort of "thin blue line" between us and anarchy.

WE are the line. We're, by and large, good citizens and good people. If we weren't no number of soldier-cops could hold us back short of nuking the place from space. 

The cops?

No.

Cops by and large don't "solve" crimes - clearance rates for most city police departments, in every crime category, are embarrassingly low - and they, in the current drive-by-policing-mode of most big departments, don't "prevent" crimes, either.

They largely do what they're designed to do; keep the smelly poor away from the nice white people who pay their salaries, and defend property.

And that's fine, if that's what you want, and many, possibly most Americans either do want that or don't care enough to make a fuss about it.

But that's how our country is, by and large. 

If we don't like it, we need to do the hard work to change it. If we don't want to do that, we should at least have the honesty to tell the poor and dark people who are going to take the pounding that it sucks to be them and then let them decide whether it's worth dying on their feet rather than living on their knees.

I know.

That's pretty bleak.

But I'm feeling pretty bleak this morning, so there it is.