Le Tricoteur

It was these fucking things that got me thinking about what eventually became this post. The "Arts of Peace/Arts of War" statues located near the Lincoln Memorial and the bridge across the Potomac between Washington D.C. and Arlington, VA.

The idea for these things dates from the late 1920s. The committee tasked with decorating the D.C. side of the new bridge - apparently the old span was beat-up and undersized, but didn't get up on the target list for replacement until the party to cut the ribbon on the post-World-War-denkmal (the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", in case you couldn't guess it...) was crashed by some traffic jams and general clusterfuckery so noticeable that even the Former Boss of 20th Century Political Corruption, Warren Harding, couldn't look past it - came up with "equestrian statues" since that's what every fucking republic needs is more "statues of men on horseback", right?

Well, the design and construction of these lawn ornaments sounds like a perfect parable for a city run by Congressional committee. The request for proposal went out in 1928 (the actual bridge RFP was issued in 1925) but there was a whole bunch of dicking around with the designs. I especially love this description from the Wikipedia article on how the sculptors were selected:

"James Earle Fraser and Leo Friedlander were both commissioned to craft sculptures for the eastern terminus. Just how Fraser and Friedlander were chosen is unclear. Fraser's biographer, August Freundlich, and the National Park Service both say there was a competition. Freundlich puts the date of this competition as 1931, and gives no further details. This contradicts reports from the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks and Washington Post, which point to a selection process (not necessarily a competition) in 1929. Friedlander's biographers, however, state the artist was directly chosen in 1929. Museum curator Joel Rosenkranz says Friedlander's commission came directly from the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and mentions no competition."

"The more things change...", right? These jamokes would have been right at home slipping Felony Fats' Reflecting Pool Boy a bagful o' cash under the table to fuck up the pond liner.

The tale of the journey between design and construction is a similar sort of "designed-by-a-committee" epic. Design submittals, reviews, redesigns, resubmittals, re-reviews, re-re-designs, and then along came the Great Depression and the whole fucking thing got shut down for lack of funds.

The project diddled along in the Thirties - one big change was in materials for the statues, from granite to bronze - and then along came another World War and bronze was needed for making mess kits or something, so the statue plans went back into storage until VJ Day.

Okay! Now they were cookin'; the post-war boom was ready to go boom, and...wait...now you're telling me that the cost of casting these ginormous traffic islands was twice what you told me in 1939? The fuck..?

Being good American entrepreneurs the sculptors and their Congressional committee patrons shipped the manufacture overseas. To Italy, to be precise, where these paperweights were cast at several foundries between late 1950 and April, 1951.

The Wiki article says that the idea was to "...use fire-gilding to finish the statues. Fire-gilding is a process in which gold leaf and mercury are applied to the bronze. Fire is applied to the area, which causes the gold to adhere to the bronze and the mercury to evaporate."

This apparently was a problem. The quality of the various foundries varied significantly; some were good at the bronze but poor at gilding, others better with the gilt but sketchy with the bronze itself. All the initial gilding was judged too glitzy - the Wiki says that original casting samples were "...shipped to the United States, where it was discovered that the color was too bright." The sculptors' on-site rep had to finesse the Italians to get the metal finish to look like the design plans called for, but eventually did, and the big metal slugs were finally set up and officially dedicated in September, 1951.

And there they sat, for the succeeding 75 years.

Now bronze is a very common sort of "outdoors-metal-sculpture" material. It's fairly durable, and it's also fairly ductile - that is, "not brittle" - so it deals with heat and cold changes, rain, snow, sunlight, all the stuff you can lump together as "elements", pretty well.

It also develops a "patina", a natural (or artificial - different patinas may be applied to bronzes to get certain effects) oxidation product. The link describes perhaps the most familiar patina you know:

"Oxygen and water molecules react with the metal and form a layer of corrosion that discolors the metal. Think of the Statue of Liberty. This statue is clad in copper sheets, but its long exposure to the air and water has corroded the copper, giving it the statue’s iconic green color. That green color is patina, therefore the Statue of Liberty is the perfect example of a beautiful patina statue." 

Yep. The big green Frenchwoman in New York Harbor wasn't originally green but shiny copper.

These bronze ponies developed this patina over the course of 75 seasons, like this:

Now I've seen various bronzes, and the natural patina can add some depth and character to what is otherwise just a shiny hunk of metal. The photos of these statues don't look particularly interesting to me, but some of that may be that big Art Deco stuff kind of leaves me cold. It's the Thirties "burly peasant and heroic soldier" kind of monument sensibility that makes me think of Moscow subways and Mussolini's Marble Arch looming over the Libyan desert.

Anyway, peacefully oxidizing along the Potomac is where they were until Trump lumbered into view.

Okay.

Now, if there's one thing that Fats luuurves more than money (for him), and pussy (for him), and punishment (for his enemies) it's gold. I mean, if you know any one thing about the porcine rascal, it's that "gold" is his thing. 

His reign is the "Golden Age". The money he throws at the U.S. Navy is to build a "Golden Fleet". His special pay-me-for-a-green-card for rich white foreigners is the "Trump Gold Card". He's nailed up so many gilded knick-knacks in the Oval Office that the sonofabitch looks like the party room in a sleazy Vegas cathouse only with Gilbert Stuart's George Washington glowering down from over the bathroom door.

So it's hardly surprising that when Orange Foolius turned his artistic vision to these statues the result was to go from this...

...to this.

 

And that's what got me going. 

I'm not sure exactly what part of this latest damn gold Trump thing that got me so hot.

Was it the gaudy waste? Sure! Here's the guy with whose encouragement his buddy Elon took a chainsaw to government pennies that went to help people, like USAID, but who's been hoovering up graft and hucking tax dollars to J6 traitors, rich pals, and other scummy wingnut fool farms like beads off a MArdi Gras float. 

That this cretinous toad thought nothing of chucking a million or five at slathering gold on fucking statues while telling people who he was kicking off food stamps and utility-bill-assistance to suck it? Sure!

Was it the whole Welthauptstadt Germania neo-Nazi/grotesque Soviet statuary gilded vibe of these things? Sure, that too! The Atlantic magazine piece about them starts like this:

"The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s."

I'd say that equating them with a Chang's was a bit too high-tone a metaphor for this paint job; they look more like the sort of cheapo gilded plaster knockoff "Venus de Milo" yard ornament you'd expect to see outside the "Dolphin II Gentlemens' Club" on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway right off Highway 217.

But after I sat down and thought about it I realized what really pissed me off about this. For itself, an as an emblem of my country circa 2026.

I hate all of this.

I hate the "fuck you, I got mine" arrogance of it. 

I hate what that says about the person who did it. About the people who applauded it. Or ignored it. Or hand-waved it. Or voted for it.

I hate that while something like half to two-thirds of the people in the nation he rules despise this motherfucker, loathe what he's doing, utterly reject what passes for policy coming out of his gilded palace and the fuck-you to all of us who despise him that these golden idols symbolize...

And that there's not a goddamn fucking thing we can do about it.

Our system makes it possible for him, for them, to rule like kings. With 50.1% of the Congress, 6 of 9 of the Supreme Court, that Felony Fats can rule like goddamn Caesar.

And that's what this shit looks like.

It's Louis XVI with his table full of ormolu clocks while starving kids begged in the street and died.

It's Nicholas II playing warlord while his soldiers were butchered by his incompetent "leadership".

It's George III, it's Charles I, it's Nero and Tiberius and Caligula. It's every other goddamn plutocratic royal moron, lolling about in golden ignorance and carelessness (or petty anger or madness...) while the nation burns and the people rage in powerless fury.

The original tricotreuses were poor women of Paris.

In October 1789 their fury - at their own poverty and starvation and at their royal masters' wealth and indifference - erupted in something called the "Black March":

"Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory for weapons and marched on the Palace of Versailles. The crowd besieged the palace and, in a dramatic and violent confrontation, they successfully pressed their demands upon King Louis XVI. The very next day, the crowd forced the king and his family to return with them to Paris."

As is so often the case, however, these people were offered public praise and made much of...until they tried to get hold of real power to punish those aristocratic scum and to change their lives for the better:

 "On 21 May 1793 they were excluded by a decree from the galleries of the Convention; on 26 May they were forbidden to form part of any political assembly. The veterans of the march and their numerous successors and hangers-on gathered thereafter at the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution...as sullen onlookers...the tricoteuses...watched the guillotine as they knitted."

And that, my friends, is right where I am. Exactly how I feel.

Does that mean I'm not going to do whatever I can do within the current political climate to defenstrate the gilded sonsofbitches? Ohhellno. 

But in a political system increasingly tilted against me, with "allies" on my side of the political divide who seem to think that empowering words and optimistic protest songs will defeat fascist goon squads, I'm left with nothing more than a hot coal of rage burning my chest.

I long for nothing so much as a day when I can sit and rock and knit and smile as one after another the bloody heads tumble down off the block.

Trump, Miller, Hegseth, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Markymarkwayne...fuck it, let's toss Alex Jones' and Newt and Callista Gingrich's and Steve Bannon's empty noggins in the basket, too. 

It took millions of soldiers and sailors and aviators, tens of thousands of bombers and aircraft carriers, tens of millions of tons of bombs and shells and bullets to defeat the last great outbreak of fascist scum.

Before that it took years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths and miles and acres of destruction to defeat the first great outbreak of racist traitors here in this nation.

Now that task is before us.

 
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Catching up 2: White House White Trash

I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.

 
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.

It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.

Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:

"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."

Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:

 

I...I...fuck. Words fail me.

All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.

Why is this a problem?

Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.

I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.

Yet here we are.

And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:

"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.

There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.

I have no idea what comes After Trump.

But I don't think it's going to be good.

 
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.

Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share. 

The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates. 

That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” 

Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents. 

The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.

 
One was a civil war.

In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.

The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).

 
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.

The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them. 

Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.

Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.

And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)

Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

Game recognize game

Now.

Then.

These numbnuts are deeply ignorant, profoundly stupid, and utterly incompetent. It's their good luck, and the rest of our misfortunes, that their MAGAt party is even more ignorant and stupid and cares nothing for competence so long as they get the performative spite and malice they crave.

And there is no remedy for them in the Constitutional system. No checks. No balances. Nothing.

The United States is now a Stupid Fascist state in fact, if not in name, and if We the People don't want that, well...history shows the path from autocracy to republicanism is ugly, brutal, and very often futile at least in the short and even medium term. 

The Revolution of 1789 led to military dictatorship by 1800 and decades of ruinous war. The Revolution of 1917 led to partisan dictatorship by 1921 and decades of brutal immiseration. Our own revolution was only prevented from a similar fate by a unique combination of individual probity and isolation from neighboring Great Powers.

So, no. There is no Good Way past this disaster.

The trope of 1776 is that roughly a third of the then-American colonies was Loyalist, a third were rebels, and the remaining third just wanted to keep their heads down. Logistical difficulties, strategic incoherence, and Great Power rivalry with France ensured the rebellion became revolution and overthrow of the ruling order.

We certainly have ruling incoherence and economic difficulty from the fascists.

But we have no Power to come to our aid, and the internal division is even less favorable; the fascists run from about 30% - the true hardcore MAGAts - to 40% and the "heads-down" lumpen herdbeasts are another 30-40%. The police and military will obey The Chief Executive; there is no competing "Garde National" or rebellious militias to opposed regime gunfire with rebel gunfire.

We are, in fact...

 

I honestly have no words of hope or encouragement. I can't figure out a way to overthrow these sonsofbitches short of actual violent rebellion, and history also shows how often that goes badly for the rebels.

The time for phone banking and postcard writing is past.

But I can't stand the idea of simply bending the knee to these people. Is it time for building IEDs? How can that ever work? 

I can only stand, shaking with rage, as my country devolves before my burning eyes.

A letter to my sister

My little sis called me today. Left a voicemail about TrumpFuckery, and in particular mentioned Ukraine.

I just didn't feel like spending half an hour moaning and pissing about all that, so I wrote her this email:

 "The reality is that we’re screwed for at LEAST the next two years, and that assumes that these fucksticks’ idiot rampage fucks things up bad enough that even the idiot public gets pissed enough to vote Democratic. Which is far from a given; it’s just as likely that there’s a third party nonsense (which means the GOP wins) or they just don’t vote at all (…so GOP wins…).

 

The Trumpenscum has it all; all three branches, the press licking their taint…all we can do is try and delay and go to court - and that’s a weak reed given the SCOTUS Furious Five - or the streets, and that’s both risky and dangerous, because Fatso WILL invoke the Insurrection Act and become a Fuhrer in fact as opposed to in practice.

 

So everything and everyone we non-scum humans care about - parks, public spaces in general, social safety nets, modern medicine..? All we will have is what they don’t want or just don't want to trash because they’re fucking trash people who are stealing perfectly good oxygen and that's what fucking oxygen-thieves do.

 

Ukraine? Fuck. If the EU doesn’t step up they’re doomed. Palestine? Doomed. Taiwan? If Xi is willing to pay off Fatso? Doomed.

 

I’ll see if I can find the link, but Amanda Marcotte has a piece interviewing someone who’s deep-dived into the wingnut bible-bangers. (It's here).

 

The bottom line? It’s a cult, they’re fanatics, and there’s no reaching them; it’s culture war as ACTUAL war. There’s no going back any more than there was for the Hitler Youth dying in the streets of Berlin or the kamikaze taking off from Kyushu in August 1945. 

 

I’m not exaggerating; we cannot “beat” these people using democracy. They see that as race and religious suicide. They must be destroyed…and that means real, actual, no-shit Civil War. And I don’t see “our side” as ready and willing to do that. I don’t blame them! That’s horrendous!

 

But that’s where we are.

 

I'm reminded of the passage in Tolkien where Frodo is pissing and moaning about how fucked it is that this whole “ring” shit has to happen on HIS watch.

 

Gandalf replies, no shit, Sherlock, really? Word up Frodo, he says; that’s what EVERYONE in this situation thinks. It sucks. It just sucks. 

 

But it is what it is and all you and I and everyone else can do is suck it up. 

 

And so we do. 

 

I'm not saying "Stop fighting". Even if you're doomed to lose, you have to fight. Even if it means you die, if what you're fighting for is worth it, you fight - and die - as hard as you can. Every Nazi you kill in Poland before you die is one Nazi that can't invade France, can't invade Russia, can't defend Normandy or Italy or Berlin.

 

But that doesn't make the dying any easier. 

As we used to say over at Intel Dump:

 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF!

A bas Citoyen Trump

 

Well, at least we know who "We the People" are...

In a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity the American public has chosen to elect a gibbering idiot who pines for the Gilded Age and dreams of Hitlerian policies towards everyone he hates - and he's a good hater - and his clutch of little Nazis who will take an axe to the 20th Century to ensure that no drag queen ever reads "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to second graders again.

To the extent they can, the GOP will root out workplace and environmental regulations and undo the already too-threadbare social "safety net". They will increase the already too-high economic inequality to ensure we become ever more an oligarchy.

Their open lunatic anti-vaxxer, anti-"Obamacare" crowd will undo public health and make us sicker and weaker.

In 1933 the German public had endured war and starvation, hyperinflation, militias fighting in the street, the punitive effects of Versailles...and STILL did not vote in the Nazis.

What's our excuse? That the cutie in the corner booth might be a transwoman in a cocktail frock?

That the roofers next door might be here illegally?

At this point all I can do is echo this comment from the election thread over at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

"The bottom line is that there are more fucking assholes in America than anyone wants to acknowledge.

More immature, misogynist, racist, greedy, myopic fucking assholes than anyone is comfortable admitting to; more really rotten, selfish human beings who choose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion and "fuck you, I got mine" over any sense of humanity.

It's time to face the facts. The fucking rot is wider and deeper than any of us want to admit, and it's growing.

It all makes me want to puke, and the worst of it is that I honestly don't know how to combat it all. All I DO know is that we must all keep fighting, because to capitulate is to descend into madness."

The madness is upon us.

We're in a Project 2025 World now.

Updated 11/6 p.m.: I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...
81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020. 
Only 67 million bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.
Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden turned out yesterday...

Well..?

Intermission II: Weird Ass Boogaloo

 To follow up on the political part of my last post...

The Lawyers, Guns, & Money gang are having a good laugh over the latest Trump weirdness story:

"My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much."

In the post they dredge up an old something I remembered about Tubby because it ran head-on into my military history fetish. 

This:

This weird fake "monument" supposedly dates back to the Oughts when Tubby bought the Northern Virginia golf club within which he set up this goofball thing.

IIRC when the story broke during his 2016 campaign Tubby's apologists tried to spin this as commemorating the 1861 "Battle of Ball's Bluff", one of the many early-war Union debacles. See, the narrative ran, that's what he means! Take him seriously but not literally!

One teensy little problem with that.

The two places - the battle site and the golf course - are nowhere even close. The red rectangle in the upper left is Ball's Bluff, the smaller square in the right center is this goofy plaque:

Ball's Bluff is over ten miles upriver from the golf course.

The essence of a good lie is that it has just enough proximity to some hard truth(s) as to be at least remotely plausible. You have to squint hard to see the lie.

The essence of good bullshit is similar; it can't be completely ridiculous. It has to have at least some elements of what sound like possibilities. If it's just flying donkeys? No, that's not effective bullshitting.

That's what I don't get about the MAGAt cult.

I have a certain wry appreciation for a clever liar, or an accomplished bullshitter, or a cunning grifter.

It takes a certain amount of wit, inventiveness, and brass to be one or all of them.

This stuff? The lies and bullshit that Tubby spews?

It's not even trying.

It's lazy. It's idiotic. It's childish.

History (and literature) is full of people who led others through a mixture of wit, nerve, inspiration, and brass...mixed in with genuine ideals and goals as well as some inspirational bullshit and even some outright lies. 

It's the old "Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" thing - you start with a lie and then make it true.

History is also full of ignorant liars and bad bullshitters.

The outcomes of following the leads of people like that are usually...very, very bad. Children's Crusade bad.

I get that there's a bunch of angry people who want an angry person to lead them against the people they're angry at.

But this joker?

Seriously?

THIS guy?

He can't even fucking lie right.

 

And if they give him to us again in November, we're gonna find out just precisely how wrong that will be.

Thoughts (and prayers)

Two opposing (or at least offsetting) things can both be true:

Political violence is lethal to democratic republics. Regardless of the target or the cause. Assassinating or assaulting the worst idiotic would-be tinpot dictator (coughTrumpcough) is no better than murdering Abe Lincoln. 

The bottom line is that if the cost of political disagreement is lethal, the wages of disagreement will perforce become violent. No sensible person will continue to oppose lethal force with reasoned argument. Bullets will drive out ballots and campaigns will become "campaigns" in the military meaning of the word.

But.

There's a bright line of fault to this sordid little drama, and it runs direct as a bullet towards the faction so now loudly aggrieved and self-righteous about it.

For generations that "conservative" faction has done everything it can to bring its candidate to this place.

It has single-mindedly fought every sensible effort to prevent people like this shooter from getting to that rooftop (synagogue, grocery store, concert venue, nightclub...) with the tool (military-grade firearms) he needed. 

It pranced around the halls of  legislation sporting adorable little auto-rifle pins on its lapels. Which "well regulated militia" did our boy belong to? Remind me..?

It has doggedly fought to turn our politics into a zero-sum battleground by turning its political opponents into mortal enemies. It has fled from "my distinguished opponent" to "scum", "animals", "traitors", "un-American". It has embraced its country's enemies, foreign and domestic, to win allies against its domestic rivals.

It has made violence the language of its "debate".

Once you've done that, once you've created the climate of anger and hate, once you've mobilized the freikorps of Threepers and Proud Boys, once you've declared open season on your political foes, you've effectively removed the firewall between political speech and political violence.

You've lost your right to be pissy when that violence comes for your guy.

The GOP got us here.

If we allow it, they will take us even further. Look up "Project 2025" if you want to be horrified for the head-on collision of venality, autocracy, and theocracy that the "conservative" faction is jonesing for in this country, and the actual violence it will do to millions of people here.

So this ridiculous drama changes nothing.

Tubby, stitches in his ear or no, is still our Sulla and his faction is our enemy.

And if We the People don't want to be ruled by that faction our path is clear, and it leads to the polling place in November.

It's up to us. As Jim Wright likes to say; if we want a better nation, we need to be better citizens.

Today's Wordle: Who Said It?

 “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections...They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy (the nation and it's promise)...the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within." 

Trump? Or Adolf?

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of...youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?"

Trump? Or Adolf?

We Report. 

You Decide...whether you want the promise of this nation...

...or this madman.

Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.

Why we can't have nice things.

So my "news" is alive with "revelations" that the tax outfit that worked for the Trump Organization for a decade or more has bailed.

Yawn.

Here's the thing; all this sketchy Trump shit has been right out there for decades. 

He was a joke in the Eighties when he was bankrupting casinos and running as Veep for looney third party candidates. 

That, and he was an obvious ginormous asshole personally. 

He was a nitwit then. Spy magazine was the one that christened him the "short-fingered vulgarian" and everyone who didn't have to depend on him for income laughed. He was a punchline. 

He was also mobbed-up - mind you, it's hard to work in Manhattan real estate without being mobbed-up, but Trump was a freak even then by being out and proud about it. He was too much of an asshole to even hide it or have the social grace to pretend to be ashamed about it.

But that was Trump; lots of people knew him, lots of people despised him as a worthless, idiotic, asshole-ish if supposedly-"rich" dirtbag.

But now he’s got a third of the country willing to commit treason for him.

 

How fucked up is that? 

 

In a weird way I can get being in thrall to a hero conqueror like Julius Caesar or a charismatic maniac like Adolf Hitler, or a grim tyrant like Josef Stalin. 

 

But to be barking mad enough to go to war, to kill yourself with COVID, to try and overthrow your republic for Donald Fucking Trump? 

 

That’s like being willing to die for the Trix rabbit. Or a box of granola. 

 

That’s just so far beyond “stupid” as to change the meaning of the word “stupid”. 

 

I just don’t get it.

 

I mean...I get that the average GOP voter is all about "owning the libs". 

 

(That's kinda all they have at this point. Who's gonna vote for more COVID, or another tax cut for plutocrats?)

 

Problem is that if the result is that Trump is out there “leading” you in "owning the libs" a person with anything more than a room temperature IQ should have their bullshit alarms shrieking like a horn concerto. 

 

Buying ANYthing Trump markets is the political equivalent of dining at The E.coli Buffet.

 

Of course, these nitwits have been letting Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls for the past thirty years, so there's that.

 

But that's kinda the problem. We're infested with these bucketheads; damn near a third of the public. That's enough to be a problem in and of itself, but in an open society like ours, where it takes a small handful of assholes to utterly fuck up the public space for everyone else?

That's lethal. There's no way a civilized society can work with that level of dysfunction.

 

Movement conservatism is a repulsive shitpile of Gilded Age plutocracy, Jesus humping, racist bull crap and magical thinking. But when somebody like Barry Goldwater was the figurehead you could, looking at it, at least pretend that an otherwise normal human could buy into it.

 

But when your god is fucking Trump?

 

You’re a turnip-grade moron who shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.

And yet...there they all are. All the Second Amendment Solutions in the world won't solve them, and short of an extinction-level genocide event, what else you gonna do..?

Nope.

WAJSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

So since I respect all Internet traditions here's a picture of a cat.

King of Spades and King of Fools

I'm sure I don't need to go into depth about my opinion of the idiot who claims credit for this.

Even so, this nitwit screed is a morass of ignorance and ignorant foolishness profound even for Tubby.

But it points up something that I'd like to briefly revisit that we discussed here way back in 2008, the myth of "Good Ol' Marse Robert".

The second link above points out the many examples of Lee as no better than his treasonous peers as a citizen, as well as no better as a man than many other Americans of his time about race.

But it's the myth of Lee the Military Genius that obsesses Tubby here, and just reminds us that the Artist of the Deal was always a conman and a grifter that knew and knows nothing about anything.

Lee was an excellent tactical commander, and generally decent up to the operational level (although his bizarre obsession with dividing his forces bit him in the ass both in 1862 and 1863 and led to his defeats in Maryland and Pennsylvania).

But above that?

His strategic assessment of the Southern means and ends helped doom the Confederacy. Yeah, he was that bad.

Granted, he had a lot of help from that military nimrod Jeff Davis, but as the rebel equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was his job to advise his political masters of the best way to win independence. 

His advice helped Davis & Co. choose battlefield victory as the means even though those means were always doomed - due to the Union economic and demographic strength, due to the naval mismatch, and due to the political freight of chattel slavery - and had Lee been the strategic genius of Tubby's worm-eaten brain he'd have recognized that.

Fortunately for this nation, he didn't.

Again, I expect little more from Trump. He's simply a bullying fool, a racist, a conman, and an ignoramus.

But this little screed, as misinformed, incoherent, and bizarre as it is, reminds us that Tubby's only real political genius, his dark magisterium, such as it is, is to find the bully, the fool, the racist, the conman, and the ignoramus lurking in us and usher them, blinking and stretching out into the light.

Still here

“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

That quote - often attributed to Mark Twain, by the way, instead of Clarence Darrow who was the actual speaker - is a pretty tidy summation of my reaction to the sad news that the official Donald J. Trump blog is deader'n Ashli Babbitt.

Word, Tubby; as the George Washington character says in Hamilton: Governing is easy. Blogging is harder.

I get it. The long-form blog is dead (he says, as he gazes out over the vast herds of Substack grazing on the lush green lucre of "voluntary contributor"). Nobody wants to read your stupid thoughts, random person.

Nobody wants to read MY thoughts, that's for sure; the traffic on this site has dropped to nothing even from the halcyon days of 2018, when a post would routinely get triple figures in views. Now I'm lucky if I can break 100 pageviews, and even that hasn't happened since the Bay of Pigs post back in April (all the "battles" posts garner looks more than anything else)...

...except for this one:

This is an obscure thing I tossed off in 2011 that included recounting this weird dream I had where my in-laws were Korean; the title is Internet-Hangul for "What dreams may come". 

The only thing I can figure for that bizarre spike in January 2020 - it got over 2,000 looks between the end of 2019 and 1/31/20 - is that someone or someones in Korea Googled the phrase and came across that post instead. It looks like someone found it in October-November 2018, where the pageviews jump from a handful to several hundred and then rise steadily until November 2019. Suddenly they spike from there until the end of January 2020, and then drop back off.

So my guess is that for about a couple of months I was a meme in South Korea.

Who knew?

Whatever. The point is, that it's been almost 15 years, and over 2,000 posts, and I'm still here, still doing the old-school (seriously? Who would ever have thought in the Oughts that here in the Twenties we'd be calling blogs and blogging "old-school"? Jesus wept!) blogging thing, unlike Orange Foolius who couldn't hack it for a month.

Just to celebrate? Since I revere all Internet Traditions?

Here's some cat pictures.

That's the Small Cat, desperately hoping that a squirrel or bird will break the window and hurl itself into her mouth.

Dueling kitties, trying to figure out how to duck the early-summer heat (it was well up into the nineties in mid-week) whist wearing a fur coat you cannot remove.

Sometimes you just can't escape the heat, so you just conk out and accept that your furry ass is whipped.

Drachma in cooler times, loafing on the deck railing.

They're good cats, or, rather, they're good at being cats. And I supposed that's enough, when you're a cat.

I have more to say, but I've got to run and will be back later today to say it.

Point is...I'm still here. And there's something to be said for that.

The clouds return

 

 Today the United States Senate voted that Donald Trump did not do what he very visibly and obviously did between late October 2020 and early January 2021; betray his oath of office as President to faithfully execute the law and support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To me this has the feel of the point in watching one of those historical dramatizations where the characters have come to a decision you know is going to end badly. The conspirators have chosen to go ahead with the plot that you know will end in betrayals, prosecutions, hangings, and beheadings. The commander has made a decision you know is based on bad intelligence, or is because of his hubris or pure stubbornness, that will result in the deaths of thousands of his own troops.

It was years ago that I wrote a whole series of posts comparing my nation today with the Rome of classical times, noting that we seem insistent on repeating many of the same foolish mistakes the Romans of that period did, and with much the same likely result - the end of functional democracy and the establishment of permanent minority rule.

I've been pretty merciless in castigating American "conservatives" (who are, by the way, in no sense "conservative" but are radical reactionaries) for being the driving force behind this and, as this vote shows, they still are.

(What this also proves, in a way I didn't begin to anticipate before the past year, is the extent to which the GOP has become the American Party of KimIlSungism-KimJongIlism. Turns out that we aren't even dignified with the bad examples of Rome. We're fucking North Korea with Pizza Huts and Chevy dealerships.)

So.

Now what?

When I talked about how impossible it is to "talk" to Republicans now it turns out that it's not because they're some sort of rigid ideologues. As far as I can tell the current Republican orthodoxy consists of a bizarre farrago of culture-war nonsense ("cancel culture", "wokeism", anti-"nanny state"-ism, and "personal freedom" that seems to largely consist of violent rejection of common sense like reducing stupid firearm-related behavior and public health precautions during a pandemic) with pure delusion about finance (stuff like "trickle-down economics", the Laffer Curve, taxation-as-theft...that sort of thing).

But the real break-point appears to be that the GOP is now the Party of Kim Trump Q, a personality cult, overrun with bizarre conspiracies and paranoia, devoted to owning the libs even if the cost is its own misery and impoverishment.

There's no hope there.

But what about the rest of the US political world?

The Democratic Party - the only remaining party that the US has allowed itself - has been a willing accomplice in our neo-Roman imperial foolishness. It has either acquiesced, or encouraged, the increasing inequity of wealth in our return to the Gilded Age.

It has been willing to go along with the hollowing out of the American economy, shoving millions of people into precarious "gig" jobs and helped "business" to close out by downsizing, automating, and offshoring the sort of living-wage/good-benefit/stable-pension jobs that helped create the white middle class after WW2. 

It has blinked at, or encouraged, foolish imperial wars.

It has been unwilling or unable to challenge our headlong plunge towards the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum.

But - given today's proof that the entire GOP has gone full juche and the utter desolation of actual sane political ideas in the American Right - if there IS to be a hope of avoiding a collapse-of-the-Republic-fate it will have to come from what passes for the "Left" in US politics.

Can it? And, if so, how?

So that's what we're going to talk about after this.

But you'll have to give me a moment or two. Right now I'm too depressed at what today says about the State of our Union.