Jakin' it.

Well, shit.

I promised content, didn't I. And here it is nearly the end of February and nothing since the beginning of the second week.

Sorry.

I have been thinking...ummm...thoughts. About the coronavirus and the beyond-typically-idiotic Fraudulency Administration "response" (yeah, let's put the guy who doesn't believe in actual 21st Century science and was widely loathed as the governor of his state for his incompetence, and let's do exactly what the government of the PRC did - that is, ensure that ignorant, ass-covering officials are in charge of suppressing or lying about the diesease - that enabled the Covid-19 to escape the infectious disease reporting-and-response protocols enacted after the SARS outbreak of 2003...).

And about the latest Oregon Yik-a-hoo Adventure; the ridiculous "Greater Idaho" redneck rebellion.

And about cops. Portland cops in particular, but cops in general.

And, for the first time since December, 2018, I have a "battle long ago" for March - the Battle of Crossbarry, 1921, part of the chaotic war for independence that turned into a civil war that still has portents for the Ireland and Great Britain of today.

So...more soon, promise!

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a cat:

(This is called "cat therapy", by the way; Mojo or Missy picks up Drachma the Merkitty and cradles him. A sane cat would go utterly insane to be held this way, but the goof just lies there, and the girls cuddle him, for long moments until he finally gets bored and wriggles his way out. You're weird, cat...)

World War Z

As we pause to contemplate the wreckage the GOP has created of the Constitutional framework set in place a couple of centuries ago, it's also worth noting that among other things the Fraudulency Adminstration has gifted We the People is a severely compromised ability to respond to epidemic disease.

"Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

One of the most appalling parts of the GOP cult is it's insistence that, as Saint Ronald of Fantasyland said, "government is the problem".

But for a global pandemic there is no "market solution". Government IS the solution, to the extent that there can be a solution.

The current incipient panic and scaremongering - and, yes, I'm looking at you, Wilbur Ross and Mike Pompeo, you fucking idiots - about the Wuhan coronavirus is not warranted. So far the infection has proved relatively highly morbid (compared to, say, SARS) but with a mortality lower than even a typical influenza. There is really no need for any sort of massive mobilization in the United States.

Which is good, since the Trumpkins have been deconstructing the ability to massively mobilize to deal with a pandemic.

But.

Let's recall that the last pandemic started as a fairly minor flu season.

The initial wave of the 1918 "Spanish" flu passed through the United States in the spring of 1918. It was as bad as influenza got in those early-modern-medical days, but no worse.

Then in the autumn it returned to the U.S., and something in the virus had changed.

Flu typically kills the "vulnerable"; old people, very young people, people with compromised health or immune systems. The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

I know it's easy to be fixated on the viciousness and racism and general Know-Nothingism of these idiots.

But it's important to recall that they ARE idiots, and as any good soldier knows, nothing can get you killed quicker than being stupid.

Can you see..?

The morning of the 242nd Independence Day is cool and cloudy in Portland. The little house is quiet; everyone, including Nitty Kitty curled on the hard planks of the deck outside, is still asleep. I'm at the table in the front room with my coffee and my work laptop, listening to the muted sounds of the summer morning and wondering about my country.

Or, to a great extent, how much there is of "my country" that remains this day in the New Gilded Age.

Almost two years ago now I wrote about my anger and fear of the terrible course my country had embarked us all on.

"I am now too old to really hope or fear for my country. But I have hope, and fear, for my children's country. And if, having listened to the foolish ranting of this president-elect, having seen the parade of grifters, unhinged racist loons, incompetents, and Bush-era retreads he has threatened to employ, you are "happy" about that, Jim, then I'm afraid I will have to sadly lower my opinion of the pre-VOLAR SF officer selection process.

Had I lived in 1896 or 1916 I would hope that I would have been attacking the Pinkertons or the troops suppressing the striking workers. I hope I would have been writing flaming rants in the pages of the Socialist press, and excoriating the bosses and the corrupt politicians like Trump who suckle off them. I hope I would have been unhappy - hell, I hope I would have been furious! - that millions lived and died in poverty and misery so that a handful enjoyed luxury in the "land of the free".

And in 2016 I see that we have been handed over to those who would love to return to those Gilded Age days. I am unhappy and furious about that, and if it shows through the screen from this place, well...then I have done good work here."

Since that time I have seen everything I hated and feared about the unmitigated rule of the GOP come to pass. Just this past Saturday Nazis - actual Nazis! - fought street battles in my home city, not much different than the brawls the Spartakists and the Freikorps fought in the Weimar cities.

The fuck..? I have fucking freikorps in my home?

All of this leads back to the other evening when I went to a Portland Thorns match against the NWSL team from New Jersey. I got there a little late because I had work that ran long, and I was in the line for a beer when I heard the tannoy announce the entrance of the teams and the preparation for the Patriotic Ritual that We the People have - to my mind freakishly - decided with which to begin every meaningless sporting event.

And my weary thought was, well, fuck. I'm glad I don't have to stand for that and pretend to be a Hearty Patriot.

Because my nation sure doesn't feel much like the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to me right now.

And, worse, because there seems to me to be nothing but disastrous choices open to fight the "conservative" scum whose ideal is a return to the ways and times of 1929, or 1899. I am too old and fragile - and too central to my family's security - to fight, actually fight, the Nazis in the street. My vote, coming as it does from distant blue Oregon, seems a frail reed, flattened in the storm of plutocratic, racist nativism my enemies are bringing to the battle. All I have is my words on this page, and those seem now like shouting into the empty air, unheeded and useless.

All this past month I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, her popular history of the pre-WW1 Western world. In it I'm reminded of why the New Dealers did the New Deal. The original Gilded Age and it's comet-tail that lasted until 1932 was an unspeakable horror for people like me, people without money and power, people who would have been forced to beg and scrape for a living knowing that once we were too old, or too damaged, or simply unlucky we were ensured a slow death from poverty and immiseration.

That's why the first Gilded Age was full of violent rage. Presidents, kings, ministers of state were murdered by "anarchists" who were, largely, simply men who were furious at the knowledge of that coming slow death and chose, instead, to visit quick and violent death on others they felt were responsible.

The lives and homes of most people like me were in the ever-present shadow of sickness from foul air and filthy water, from disease and injury for which they could not afford treatment. The great and the good would glide past them in effortless majesty, sleek, replete, shining and happy - at least, from afar - and healthy while all the then-me could have done was shake with impotent fury that they should be born to unearned happiness and I to relentless toil.

A friend of a Facebook friend had a snarky comment the other day about how people like me weren't "willing to give President Trump's policies time to work..." and my immediate response was "Because we don't have to give them time because we've already seen how they work, you fucking stupid Trump-humper!"

"Unlike you goddamn FOX-addicted morons we've read the histories of where the Trumpkins of the GOP want to take us. We already know what's gonna happen, how this shit ends, because We the People have done it before. Trade wars, nativism, racist immigrant-bashing, plutocracy, authoritarianism? Fucking "duh", you nitwit, where the hell else are we going when Orange Foolius and his GOP's "policies...work"?"

I feel this day much as many another generation of Americans must have felt in the 1850s, watching as a cabal of greedy, foolish, venal, ignorant, and, yes, evil neighbors drove their nation into bloody war.

And I wonder. Can this nation endure, half-FOX and half free? Or are we, this day headed where they were, where, in the words of the man who was perhaps most strongly charged with steering the nation through the ruinous result:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."

All I can say is; I do not know.

But the prospect makes me sick at heart, and leaves me with nothing by a mournful longing for the past, and the foolish innocence of my younger days, on this Independence Day.

Friday Jukebox: Tangerine Toddler Jive Turkey Edition

What a fucking week this has been, eh?

So in honor of His Fraudulency's first week full of hysterical meltdowns and brutal, Obama-like executive-order tyranny, and general I'm-a-bigly-huge-assholishness, here's the Ohio Players with his new theme song.