Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Decoration Day 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

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

As always today: this.

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.

A Year in Solitary

I noted in the update that Mango Mussolini had suddenly been converted from a COVID Truther to a babbling imitation of a "war president" and I wondered what the hell? This joker notoriously never changes the brain cell he calls his mind; he's stuck where he was in the Eighties.

Well, apparently, here's what happened; he read (or, let's not kid ourselves, was probably read-to and given a colorful comic-strip summary of) a study done in London modeling epidemiological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the likely outcomes. The "no-action" response - i.e. treat this as a seasonal flu and let it run it's course, essentially the Trumpkins' "plan"?

2.2 million dead just from the disease. And that's without the deaths that will happen because the ICUs are jammed with people in respiratory failure from the disease.

But.

"Suppression" - completely banning all public gatherings, closing shops, workplaces, restaurants, basically making people inmates in their homes...apparently works.

Here's the nut grafs if you don't want to read the whole thing:

"Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don't exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear. But here's the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. After the 1st suppression period ends in July, we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by 2 more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. Staggering breaks by city could do a bit better. But we simply cannot EVER allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen."

When do the authors believe a vaccine is likely?

Eighteen months.

So for the next year and a half we will be unable to work, many of us. Theaters, restaurants, bookstores...won't be able to open. How will we live? We will still have landlords demanding rent and banks demanding mortgage payments. We will still have to buy food, pay bills.

As I was saying earlier; the ONLY way I see we will get through this without breaking our society in too many ways to anticipate is for government to, in effect, pay for society to go on for a year and a half while we're all in solitary. Pay wages, pay rent and mortgages, pay shop owners and businesses that can't open.

The alternative?

We emerge from this with a huge mass of impoverished "citizens" ruled by a tiny minority of the obscenely rich who were able to ride this out in luxury.

The problem?

For the GOP that's a feature, not a bug.

Well...shit.

WASF.

Choking on silver

In case you wanted more doom and gloom (and talk about the weather, Ael...) here's two related news items laying out in excruciating detail the killing blow awaiting us at the top of the dark ramp ahead.

First, the near-certainty that we are in the process of baking our world to a delicate crunch.

And, second, that we are ensuring that our New Oligarchic Masters will not give a flying fuck about that.

And despite the furious verbal and written smokescreen that the meeching coterie of remoras for the wealthy and powerful will emit, these are related, and unless We the People act decisively and swiftly mean that those of us not insulated by wealth and power are headed for an ugly future.

Simply put, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution we've been transforming our planet not so much to an unprecedented degree but at a hyperkinetic rate. Our average global temperature has both risen and fallen significantly before this, but these were part of the larger global/solar system heat cycles.

What we've done has been, in effect, to add a heat wave to the vast swells of insolation, ocean circulation, carbon sequestration and release that affect the Earth and have pretty much since the damn thing cooled enough to accumulate an atmosphere.

We con't be sure how big this wave is relative to the swells. But we can tell that it's there, and that it has the potential - assuming that the overall global climate isn't dropping back into a glacial period - to drive our planet towards the kind of climate that makes grasslands of forests and deserts of grasslands, raises oceans and otherwise creates some pretty impressive changes in our local flora and fauna.

And the critical factor is that this is happening fast; a couple of hundred years, a flick of geologic time.

Things like our food crops are the products of generations of selective breeding, and our food-producing regions developed of millenia of human history. And the same history shows that when those crops and regional conditions change, as they did for the Sumerians, as they did for the Anasazi, that can get very difficult and deadly for the humans involved.

Unless...you have the wealth and power to insulate you from that change.

If you can move freely about the globe, if you can pay for your own sources of food, of heating and cooling, if you can pay for your own armies to secure those things and to defend you from those who don't have the wealth and power to secure them for themselves, well, then...why should you care?

Why shouldn't you be more interested in your short-term wealth and power? Why should you give a flying fuck what happens, then?

That's one of the huge reasons that oligarchy and plutocracy are bad for everyone outside the oligarchs, plutocrats and their entourage and, eventually, for them, too.

When you put that much wealth and power into the small group that also controls the polity you produce a perfect storm of ignorance and indifference. The aristos don't know how bad it is for the proles and don't care.

We know what the inevitable result is. The ugly mess shambles along until finally some sort of unholy disaster unhinges everything. The society disintgrates into a war of all against all. The usual conclusion is either the ascent of a strongman, a Lenin or a Napoleon, or a descent into anarchy and barbarism as after the fall of Rome.

And for some reason we've managed to construct this meatgrinder and are ramming our collective dicks into it while we worry more about missing airliners and white girls and who's got the inside lane on this season's reality show.

I have absolutely no idea what the fuck to say about this except the dinosaurs had the excuse that their brains were the size of a fucking walnut.

Sherman's March

I watched the Seattle-San Francisco football game this past Sunday. I watched the whole thing through the final whistle so I got to see Sherman, the Seattle right corner, make a hell of a play to send his team to the championship game, and also enjoy his hyperkinetic rant after time ran out and some sideline reporter was stupid enough to jam a microphone in his face.

I didn't have the same reaction my friend Labrys had or, frankly, that Charles-whose-wordprocessor-I-am-not-worthy-to-reboot-Pierce had.

Because I used to play soccer goalkeeper.

Because of that I completely understand exactly where Rich Sherman was that night, and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with brutality (and, yes, it is a pretty goddamn brutal sport) and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with racism or being an uppity Negro (and, yes, he was rude and loud and obnoxious, and in this country if you're black that will earn you a pantsload of ignorant racist bullshit).

It had to do with playing on the side that doesn't have the ball.

Attackers, whether they're soccer strikers or football receivers, get to do one particular thing that we football cornerbacks and soccer goalies don't and usually can't do; they get to score points.

In most sports let's face it; that's the fun shit.

That's the glory noise, the big news that makes the headlines and gets you on cereal boxes and into lucious television contracts. How many cornerbacks can you think of sitting in the ESPN booth right now? Kasey Kellar is the only keeper I know of that works the booth and that's largely because soccer in the U.S. is frankly weird and keepers are often the only player most Americans outside soccer fanatics actually know.

But playing offense is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Any sports nut can tell you how many points so-and-so scored, how many assists, how many yards he ran for or threw for, how many goals he scored. Any casual fan remembers the quarterbacks and the receivers, the strikers and the wingers, the goal-scoring centers and the point guards.

Who the hell remembers whose tackle saved a sure goal? The stick save, the deflected pass, the steal? Who recalls who batted the possible winning touchdown pass away for the interception that saved the game and the conference championship?

I'll tell you this; they'll damn well remember who did that for Seattle in 2014.

But it's more than that.

Defending is about plain and simple defiance.

It's about raging and hating to lose. It's about pure anger.

It's personal. It's about wanting to ruin the other person's day.

Stopping his best shot. Tackling him when he's got a clear run at goal and stripping the ball off his feet. It's about getting out to full stretch and palming his sure game-winner around the outside of the post. Pushing his slam-dunk back in his face. Sending him to the ice with the puck skipping away.

Sure, you saved your team the points, or the game. But other than that what's the reward for this hard work?

I'll tell you.

It's looking at the striker's face, seeing in that quarterback's eyes, the knowledge that you bested him. That he gave you his best shot and you were better. That he came straight at you with all his skill and strength and you slapped it down like it was a little baby's patty-cake pat. It's watching his sad little face get all puffy and red, watching him watch you with cautious hatred, and loving the feeling that you crushed his hopes and blighted his dream.



We all feel that way.

Sherman just said it.

I know, because of the night the striker on the team sandbagging down to our sad, low co-ed Division 4 level ran in on me as I collected the ball on the ground and kicked it straight back into my face and broke my nose.

(Then had the gall to complain to the referee that I was bleeding on the field.)

So after I stonewalled the sonofabitch the rest of the match - making save after save to deny him the win he so badly wanted - I walked up to him with the bloody twists of paper sticking out of both nostrils and got right in his face and smiled.

He shoved me and I cocked a fist and both teams jumped on us and hauled us away.

And, broken nose and all, I was a happy man.

Because I owned his sorry ass, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and that knowledge filled me with joy.

That's a very low human emotion, I'll admit, but that's the sort of thing that builds good defenses.

And empires.

And to make this about race or civility or something like that is just silly. If you did, or do, you really need to borrow my gloves and go get between the posts and I'll hammer some shots at you and dare you to stop me and we'll see how you feel about that.

Nurture

Yesterday I put up a post about the Whacking of The Nancy that included this comment about the woman who was (depending on who you believe) either the éminence blonde behind the entire plot or an innocent wee slip of a girl betrayed by bad company:

"These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable. In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives. Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people..."

This is and was a sad fact rather than an opinion; the world is full of such people, and the wreckage that their shit-magnetry leaves behind.

But I should add this:

It's important to distinguish between the effects of behavior and environment, between the hard work of fucking your life up and the good luck of having a life that's fundamentally hard to fuck up.

Unbolt the tits off Tonya and put the resulting body in an Andover and Yale sweatshirt and you pretty much get George W. Bush; an intellectually stunted, emotionally impaired, ethically flat-lined, greedy, egotistical peckerhead.

Tonya is a convicted petty crook. A substantive case can be made, based on the grounds upon which an international tribunal indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged Hideki Tōjō, that Dubya should be a convicted Class A war criminal.

Not just that little pecadillo binds the two together. Look at the pattern of their lives. One fuckup after another, one stupid decision followed by a period of complete nonreflection followed by another stupid decision. These two people made careers out of putting themselves in positions of public confidence only to do something incredibly boneheaded that made it clear that said confidence was utterly and disastrously misplaced.

So why is it that Tonya is living in an anonymous trailer somewhere east of Terrebone while Dubya is still booking speaking tours and lounging about the in-ground pool at one of the family mansions?

You know why as damn well as I do.

So, while it's popular and entertaining to sneer at the Tonyas of the world - hell, there's a whole business of trumping up television and movies and books - and even a gawdawful checkstand magazine sneering and leering at these poor mooks - the only real difference I see between them and the Dubyas and the William Kennedy Smiths and the Alice Waltons and the Kenny-Boy Lays of the world is what Ernest Hemingway supposedly said when Scott Fitzgerald told him that the Rich are Different:

They just have more fucking money.

So I don't want you think that I'm slagging off on Tonya. Yes, she fucked up.

But when she did she had nothing there to protect her from the consequences of her fuckedupitude. She got one shot and when she screwed it up she fell, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

Whilst here in the Land of the Free one of the great privileges of great personal or family wealth is the "right" to fuck up - over and over again - and never pay so much as a moment's regret or a day's liberty for it.