All Things Go

My father smoked Camel cigarettes.  I was the oldest of three sons, and one of my Christmas joys was that, after I was admitted to the mysteries of Santa Claus, Daddy would let me stay up with him until the younger brothers were asleep and it would be safe carefully to arrange the presents under the tree.  We would drink black coffee and smoke Camels together.  These days the Department of Human Services would probably come and take me away, but those were wilder times.

For many years after I left home I continued to smoke Camels.  Other cigarettes just don' taste nearly so good, and besides, the others didn't have the same provenance.  After a long while, I have more or less quit smoking  but I have for many years continued to buy Camels for the big eight festivals of the Christian Year.  Camels have had a role in my celebration as the incense  of Psalm 141.   I have occasionally not had  Camels for some of the feasts, but I have not skipped a Christmas in a very long time, because of the tradition of smoking with my long dead father.

This year, however, I am skipping the Camels.  I have not heeded the warnings of the State of California nor have the memories of those few Christmases when I was no longer a child but not yet an adult faded.  It's just that I no longer feel the need for prompt for those memories.  Perhaps I will buy frankincense for the Nativity Feast this year.

Wondering about my Christmas Camels as I wandered  out under the sky today, I was both overwhelmed by the richness of the memories and surprised by how many of them were from times in winter and linked to sharing cigarettes.   And always they featured people who were immensely important in my life.  It seems that what is said about the sense of smell's provoking memories is true.  There have been other smells in my past, but smoking with someone makes a literal conspiracy, often a quite intimate conspiracy..  And  today's  smoking memories all involve lovers,  men with whom I had become, either briefly for extended periods, one body.  I mean, Jesus did rather suggest that that was the purpose of leaving one's father and mother, right?

The first big memory chronologically is of a deeply cold and clear night in Memphis after the first Christ Mass shared with a wonderful man who was my lover for several years.  We had gone to St. James Episcopal Church on Central Avenue and were walking home to a little apartment we were 'gentrifying' in the Cooper-Young neighborhood.  It had not felt like gentrification to remodel the crumbling structure in which we occupied the top floor.  It had felt like the dust of old plaster and of things one would rather not name.  But now we had everything more or less in place for our second Christmas together and our first Christmas in our new home.  We stopped somewhere along the way and looked at the stars and smoked Camels, which made a particularly wonderful incense in the crisp winter air.

The next July we moved to Santa Fe.  It was a sort of liberation for both of us. He stopped smoking. I tried to be supportive but I cheated sometimes by smoking with other people.  One January night , I came back from dancing at a lesbian night at a club where I was friends with the owner/dj .  She let me be an honorary lesbian so I could enjoy the beats, and I  bummed a Camel from one of the women there.  People could still smoke in public then.  He was offended and that became the ultimate reason for us to pursue different paths. We still see each other from time to time, but there are no more intimate cigarettes.

Santa Fe was, well, a self-proclaimed center of 'spirituality' whatever that is, and therefore the cigarettes made there were called American Spirits.  I was blessed to have series of lovers with whom I smoked American Spirits.  Most of them were rather wonderful artists of some sort or another.  (Santa Fe was like that.)  One was a quite talented painter who had intrigued me for some time.  He and I were at the same club where I had smoked the lesbian's Camel.  It was a cold night, again, and I offered him a ride home.  He invited me in and offered me an American Spirit.  We were not together long, but I still remember the smell of his house, a mixture of American Spirits and nag champa.

With the exception of one very dear friend with whom I lived several times over the years, whom I believe may still smoke Camels in Berlin, the co-conspirators of the years to follow all seemed to have smoked American Spirits.  One of my briefest conspiracies was with a Mohawk--a steelworker Mohawk-- who was visiting Santa Fe for Christmas from New York.  We had flirted at a club, and I had invited him to an after party at my house, which was often rather crowded in those days.  We left the main party so I could show him my room, and afterwards we went out under the winter stars and shared an American Spirit.

Thinking about those days keeps bring back more memories of manylovers, many conspiracies, but I don't want this essay to be so much about the objects of memory as abut the triggers of memory, so I will pass over an architect and a monk and a deacon and such to share one particular memory of another painter, because that memory involves both winter and American Spirits and also music.  

I first saw Stephan at a Japanese bath house.  He was a magical sprite.  We met again at a Halloween party, and danced together.  We did not share cigarettes then. He left the party early because he had glued horns to his head with super glue, and one had come loose and was hurting his eyes.  I went by his apartment a few days later to check on him, and he invited me to spend the night. It was a very cold November.   He cooked, and we had coffee and cigarettes afterwards--American Spirits--and the next morning I lay in bed watching him cook breakfast. He put on a tape or disc or whatever we used in those days, of the Indigo Girls singing Secure Yourself--'Fasten off your earthly burdens; you have just begun.

Music remains the other big door of memories for me, and that song remains very meaningful even if I seldom listen to it these days. So, when winter's cold and the memory of conspiratory smoking is linked with music, I am carried away.  One of my dearest past lovers was Tom, who wanderer only briefly through this world.  He came over a hill one Holy Innocents' evening as I was preparing for a service at Saint Bede's Episcopal Church, and  he was living with me in a few weeks.  We would lie in bed on cold winter nights and listen to Therese Schroeder Sheker singing as the wind made counter-melodies around the corners of the old adobe.  

Time like an ever-moving stream has born all these people from my lives . whether by age or aids or aireplanes.  The only one I even occasionally see now is the first Camel smoker.  I am friends on Facebook with one of the American Spiriters.  

A much younger friend with whom I  have an occasional cigarette asked me not long ago how I get over the separations in life.  I said that I don't.  Although the separations are painful, I try to rejoice in the conjunctions.   I am a rather promiscuous lover.  I never stop loving someone, even when I also love others.  The truth is that if I had stayed 'faithful' to only one person my whole life, if I had stayed at the home of my parents or at the home of my first lover, my life might have been less painful,, but it would have been less rich. For a while I would keep mementos of past lovers, even if the memento were as vaporous as the smoke of a cigarette. But now I find that I am rather like the old woman, Rose, from The Titanic.

I am myself becoming more and more vaporous, perhaps, but I no longer need to hang on to the necklace.  I am beginning to understand my mother's fullness in her old age.  I would invite her to some adventure or another, and she would say that she had had adventures enough.  I am not so adverse to a new adventure as she was, but I also feel quite full.My big holiday memory with her is of drinking eggnog.  I don't really like it very much because it makes my teeth feel furry, but it's a memento of our holidays together.  This year, I will just ponder those holidays and the wonderful cold winter nights with so many wonderfully, lovely people, in my heart.  I hope those same people who are still alive get some pleasure from remembering me as well.

No Country for Old Men

 Whenever I am in the mood for regrets, which is seldom, because I recognize it is for the most part of fruitless mood, I regret that in 1966 I moved to Chicago rather than to New York.  I had been accepted by the New School, but somehow I decided against it.  (I sometimes wonder if that decision extended my life, because had I moved to the Village in 1966, I might have been caught up in the AIDS crisis.)  I went instead to Roosevelt University in Chicago, where I had some very good teachers, met some wonderful people, and fed myself as often as not with the little sandwiches at the Members' Tea each afternoon at the Art Institute.  

What I most regret about that decision, however, is that I missed an opportunity to have known, perhaps, Nam June Paik,  Ironically, I dabbled around the edges of some of the things he was doing in New York while I was at Roosevelt, but I never met anyone else who was at all interested in such dabblings.  What also happened while I was in Chicago was the beginning of what Zorba the Greek called 'the full catastrophe'.  Marriage, family, golden retrievers, mini vans.  It would take me more than twenty years to escape  Then no longer a young man, I nevertheless went West, to Santa Fe.  I took Super Highway 40 to Clines Corner where there is a cut-off to Santa Fe, to a world unimaginably different from Memphis or Chicago or New York.

Santa Fe and the surrounding hills and gullies are about as artsy-fartsy as one could hope for, and again I met some wonderful people. I fed myself with the mountain air and hosted my own teas ,on Sunday afternoons, or  brunches on Sunday mornings.  I even indulged in a bit of artsy-fartsyness myself,and was able to make enough money to wander around a bit.  If I had good sense, I might be writing this in a cafe in Santa Fe--if there is a cafe open in Santa Fe during the Great Fear--instead of in a tin can on the edge of nowhere.  But I have never had good sense, so I wandered back to Arkansas, to Fayettevile and the University of Arkansas.  It was an odd move.  When I lived in Memphis and told people I wanted to move to Santa Fe, their response was almost always 'Oh.  I want to move to Santa Fe.  How can you move to Santa Fe?'  I would answer, 'Go west on Interstate 40 and turn right at Clines Corner'.  When I told people in Santa Fe that i wanted to move to Fayetteville, they would almost always respond, 'Oh.  I want to move to Fayetteville.  How can you move to Fayettevillle?' I would answer, 'Go east on Insterstate 40 and turn north at Fort Smith.'  My move to Fayetteville had a few more detours than that, but I got there eventually, and I found the Purple Chair.

The Chair is Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair.  Yes, that Eero Saarinen, who also designed the TWA Terminal at what was once Idlewild, now JFK, airport in New York.  It sits in the northeast corner of the Fine Arts Library in the Ed Stone's famous Fine Arts Building at the University of Arkansas.  Yes, that Ed Stone, of the MOMA in New York.  In fact the Fine Arts Building has a courtyard that rather replicates the Paley Garden at MOMA.

So, as a no longer even middle-aged man, I could sit in that chair and feel connected to the lost opportunities of my wasted youth.  That chair is right by the stacks holding the books about Korean art, and in my old age I became at least a bit acquainted with the missing piece of the artsy-fartsy understanding of the world I had been seeking a bit in Chicago and Santa Fe.  If I had good sense, I would might be writing this essay in a coffee shop in Fayetteville--if there are any coffee shops open in Fayetteville during the Great Fear. (The coffee shops in Fayetteville are so good that when I got back here to the edge of nowhere, where coffee is a major god, there being no other gods left, people asked if I had gone to Onyx.  When I said I often had breakfast there, they wanted to touch the hem of my garment.)

But I don't have good sense, and besides, the summers in Fayetteville are hot enough to make one want to move to hell for relief, so I came back to the edge of nowhere.  Here I make do with a chair that's an Eames  kock-off. (It's actually more comfortable for long periods than the Womb, which like all wombs, is a little cramped for old men.)

And I just have a little pile of Nam June Paik books. (Although some of them are not in the UofA Fine Arts Library.)

I'm hoping to add to the pile in the future (if I live so long):

Why, you might be wondering, am I sharing too much information with the world.  I am sharing it because a friend back in Arkansas posted today on Facebook about 'having a hard time understanding how our currently frustrating and unhealthy political and cultural state has come about'.  I thought, as I always do, because we have become, as McLuhan predicted, retribalized, and it is, as Toffler described, shocking beyond our ability to adjust.  (Is it any wonder that Zombies walk among us, at least in our popular art?  And didn't McLuhan tell us that if we wanted to understand the future, we should look at art?) But there is another reason I have been revisiting my past about which regrets are fruitless.  It is because I enjoy revisiting hope. (You know, that thing that springs eternal in the human breast, because the human breast is a slow learner.  Or maybe it just has Patience and Fortitude, to borrow an image from another library of my past.)

In 1966, I was a young man full of  hope.  Hope that I could understand the world.  Hope that my generation would get it right.  (Generational hubris is a thing.)  The International Style in architecture still held out an idea that we could build in ways that transcended our tribal differences.  (Even though the nations among which that style was inter- were mostly found in northern Europe.)

And in my past, or present, no one has held up hope more clearly than Nam June Paik, whose life occupied all the great warring powers of the modern world.  His Korean  family took refuge in Japan to escape the Chinese.  He then made his way to Germany. and then to the United States.  He hoped that the tools of the modern world would allow all of us to enjoy personal sovereignty but with cooperation. Nowhere perhaps is this better shown than in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.

That is a hope which I am not yet willing to abandon.  The human breast may be a slow learner, but it is a learner.  Although the scale of modern warfare seems horrible to us, and it is, a smaller percentage of young warriors die in combat,  even in the 'world wars' of industrialized nations, than died in the combat of  the idealized tribes of the our past

As an old man I recognize, admittedly with some regret, that 'An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick'.   And yet I hope.  I take a sort of wry solace in the reaction to Nam June Paik's first major exhibit, one which he enjoyed remembering in his old age. It was at a small private gallery in Wuppertal, much less glamorous than, say, his installation at the Guggenheim.  He exhibited works that would predict most of what he would do later, works that were quite revolutionary in 1963, but which were almost entirely unmentioned in the mainstream media.  What caught the attention of the media was that Joseph Beuys took an axe to a piano in the entrance to the exhibit, and that Paik hung an ox head over the door of the gallery.

Hanging an ox head over the door was a tradition, it seems, in feasts in Paik's homeland.  It was all many contemporary visitors to the show saw.  Now a Google search of Nam June Paik Wuppertall Oxhead brings up no photo of it at all.  

As McLuhan reminded us, we travel into the future looking into the rear view mirror.  Even Nam June Paik couldn't resist hanging an ox head over the door of what would be a very futuristic exhibit.  I hope I live long enough to see what comes when we emerge from the Great Fear.  I am certain it will be much more interesting, much more hopeful, than what is in the rear view mirror.

Political Science? I Don't Think So.

 Lately I have heard a lot of people supporting, often demanding, political actions based on 'the science'.  Ah, if there only were such a thing as 'the science'.  Consider, if you will, the men in these two photos:

Which of them was a scientist?  Well, actually they both were.  (In addition, they both were pipe smokers, a habit I adopted for a while during my college years, thinking it would make me look wiser. )  I'm guessing many more of you dear readers will recognize Albert Einstein than Niels Bohr, but both men's work is critical to our understanding of the universe and how it works.  Both developed theories that could be rigorously tested by predictive experiments and also by something vital to the scientific method, experiments that would disprove them. The outcome is that both men's theories have been proven correct.  The problem is that so far their theories haven't learned to play well together.  More scientists will have to do more work before we begin to understand the stickier bits, and even then it would be premature to say that there is 'the science'.  Rather, there are folks using the scientific method to try to understand the world.

Physics has pretty well established itself as a useful scientific discipline, with demonstrable advantages in our everyday lives.  Such achievements made some other academicians jealous.  How could they receive the recognition and respect given to the sciences?  Well, they would start being sciences, too.  The social studies became Social Sciences.  The venerable philosophical tradition of Politics was in many schools replaced with Political Science.

I had the privilege of taking two courses in political science.  The first was as I guess a sophomore at Memphis State University.  The woman teaching it gave the most boring lectures I think I ever heard, but when the first test arrived, I quickly learned that her multiple choice questions telegraphed the answers, so I started only going to class when there was an exam.  I got an A in the course.  I learned a lot from that experience, but none of it had anything to do with politics.  The second was as a junior at Roosevelt University.  Ah, the exciting sixties.  My professor was Stokley's personal attorney.  (No one would have  been so gauche as to say Stokeley Carmichael, although I had never met the man.)  My professor had I think a law degree, not one in politics, but were radical unpackers, not scholars.  I got a C in the course, not because of  to my work, but because I was white.  All the white kids got C's.  All the black kids got A's.  It was to teach us about white privilege.  None of us unpacked the oddity that most of my black friends got A's in their classes with white teachers. (I had mostly smart friends.)  I learned a lot from that experience, but none of it had anything to do with politics.

All the above is a long-winded introduction to why I am hoping to be less dogmatic in voicing my expectations for the next four years of what will pass for politics in the United States.  When I finally got around to taking a physics class in college, we did little experiments with measurable data, calculated what we expected would happen, and compared the results to test our hypotheses.  A small but real use of the scientific method.

In 2016 I was a sophomore all over again.  I accepted as data about the incoming regime the statements of my friends who watch CNN and get the paper edition of the New York Times.  They were nice people.  Why would they mislead me?  And they 'liked' it if I made some remark about Trump that reinforced our  fore-gone conclusions about him.

Certainly that post from my 1 February 2017 Facebook page is an example.  And, it was pretty correct from my viewpoint.  Besides being rude and non-presidential, he had torn down Bonwit's Art Deco Facade, put a really ugly building right where Michigan Boulevard crosses the Chicago River, and had terrible taste in drapers.  But,  hey man, here's the thing:  when I, to continue my sophomore metaphor, when I listened to the lectures, so to speak, he hadn't done so bad.  If politics were a science, the data would have proved that the theories about Trump were wrong. I was wrong.

Now, in 2020, I would suggest that Joe Biden and perhaps even more so, Kamala Harris, have done everything they could to prove they are unfit to be president.  I certainly understand why people might not think Trump has been ‘presidential’, but the democrats have failed t, in my opinion, to provide desirable alternatives either.

I am going to try to hold judgment based on the ‘data’ available now.  (although  there is a lot more record of Biden the politician than there was of Trump.)  I am expecting nothing good from the new regime, but I am going to wait for results before I conclude that my theory is correct.  

However, that will not keep me from having a bit of fun with the Harris-Biden circus.  It seems that the party , whoever they really are, have chosen Mr. Potatohead as Big Brother.  I expect that Jack Dorsey will continue to exercise his role as Minister of Truth.  Perhaps Kamala Harris will be Minister of Plenty,  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  the Minister of Love, and Andre Maginot Minister of Peace. (If dead men can vote, they can certainly serve as Minister Heads.)

Fear not. (It may take a while.)

I have never actually counted the instances myself, but it is said that there are 366 occurrences of the admonition to 'fear not' or its equivalence in the Christian Bible.  I have often shared that bit of legendary biblical scholarship, and from time to time in my life I have actually followed that advice.  Whenever I have, my life has improved and I have felt good about myself. But, far too often, I have cowered hidden in the crowd. There's not need to be brave or honest if one is not seen.

Sometimes I suspect that there are worthwhile reasons to be unseen.  One of the saddest memories I have of being a father was when I overheard my son telling my daughter. 'never let them know you're smart'. School is pretty much a gauntlet at best, and that happened when they were going to Memphis public schools.  What was I thinking?  

Having feared being known as a homosexual, I had married, and then divorced, something which is I suspect is always hard on children.  It was certainly hard on my children. Giving into fear has collateral damage.  But then I 'came out', and I felt good about being honest.   I did not want to have extra-marital affairs.  I didn't even want a divorce. I just wanted to be honest. But there is often a bias against honesty if it keeps up appearances. My wife did not want to allow that honest, so, we divorced.

However, as important as sexuality is, as essential as trying to understand one's own sexuality is, sexuality is not something uniquely or even particularly human.  What does differentiate humans from goldfish, among other things and perhaps most importantly, is our intellectuality. (Is a word?  I think its meaning is at least clear.)  And coming out intellectually can often be much more difficult than coming out sexually.

Like most folks, I kinda like to have friends, and as I have wandered through life, I have drifted into lots of different groups of people.  It's easy either to agree or at least not disagree with them.  Folks have a lot of crazy ideas, and to call those ideas crazy makes friendship difficult.  A lot of crazy ideas aren't worth the effort to even question.  

And yet.  A lot of not just crazy but harmful ideas become so widespread as to be hardly noticeable unless one disagrees with them.  I have two degrees in history, one from a private university and one from a state university, and (surprise!) both schools were almost entirely Marxist.  Most of my professors could have transferred to the University of Moscow with no changes in their lecture notes. I can remember four exceptions. One was a philosophy professor at Memphis State. One was my advisor at Roosevelt University, who was data-driven in a time when data was much harder to find than it is now. The other two were in my graduate studies at Arkansas State. One was just an all-around skeptic from the University of Colorado, and one was perhaps the most helpful teacher I ever had after high school, with a degree from Claremont, who taught politics.  I flunked one of my graduate essays.  Why?  I wrote my answer from a classical, Aristotelian viewpoint, thinking it would be read by the guy from Colorado.  It was read by a Marxist, and I had posited the outrageous idea that some men (and women, although the actors in the question were men) could act from their concepts of virtue rather than from economic determinism.  What did I do?  Well, I took that question over, writing it in the politically correct vein.  It was a sort of 1984 moment, when I said something I knew was not true, but I did it and didn't even notice.  Thus one looses one's integrity.

Lately, most of my friends are very left-leaning democrats, who seem most often to think that the highest human value is 'free' health care.  They read the New York Times and find Donald Trump disgraceful. Now, full disclosure, I find Donald Trump outrageous.  I also find Bernie Sanders outrageous, and Hilary Clinton demeaning of her 'followers' for whom she wants to be a 'champion'.  What feminist allows for champions these days?  So, in the 2016 election, I voted for Gary Johnson, but I also swallowed the blue pill.  

I remained in the matrix of fear that the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and my democrat friends concocted about the dangers of Donald Trump.  He was going to put kids in cages. (Never mind that Saint Obomber's administration had built the cages.) He was going to destroy gay rights. (Never mind that  one of his Supreme Court nominees supported the decision to extend the Civil Rights Bill's protection to gay people.)  I looked at the news each morning to see where there was a new war.  (Never mind that President Trump has consistently been the least war-making president in recent history.) In other words, I let the little fears spread by the sort of intellectually mushy folks who had been my teachers continue to influence my thinking, because it was easy.  I could post something on Facebook critical of 'the fucking moron' and it would get lots of likes. I was on the side of the angels.  I was on the side of the smart people.  What was it that Hilary Clinton had called Trump supporters?  A basket of deplorables?

For three and a half years those angelic folks the non-deplorables,  milked a false narrative that somehow Trump was a Russian agent, that he was a racist.  Meanwhile, Russia hasn't moved back into Poland,the economy has boomed, and unemployment rates for non-white folks fell to the lowest levels in decades.  I kept waking up to find that the things the democrats would tell me would be the end of the world as we know it if Trump were elected, hadn't happened.  

Now the fear machine is being cranked up again, and I am told that I must be mentally ill because I didn't vote for a demented old man who will almost certainly be manipulated if not replaced by one of the meanest women ever to  enter US politics.  I was told just days ago by one of my 'liberal' friends that I had gone around the bend because I that police should protect private property rights.  I put 'liberal' in quotes because property rights  have long since been abandoned by many main stream leftists.

And now that the folks who spent the past four years calling half the country every sort of nasty name Twitter would allow, and that was just about anything so long as the person being attacked seemed conservative, those folks are calling for unity.  One of my 'friends' posted this on Facebook a few days ago:

Except that the population of Poland was down to about 24 million after World War Two, it could have been one of the propaganda posters used by the Soviets as they improved Eastern Europe after their victory.

Now,, I must confess to being a slow learner.  Or perhaps, more importantly, I should confess to being someone who allows himself to ignore empirical facts when doing so makes life more pleasant on a daily basis with others who are ignoring empirical facts.  It's easy to yield to the fear that one's friends will think one queer if one disagrees with the beauty of the emperor's new clothes. Besides, there is the wonderfully convenient crisis of the corona virus, a virus so deadly one may never know one is infected unless one is tested.  Imagine, all those cases walking around thinking they are healthy when they could be a statistic to frighten us all on the nightly news.  Obviously the only thing to do is to close down the economy and rebuild it better.

In my last blog post, I explained how as someone who leans towards being a libertarian, even an anarchist, I found Trump a much less dire choice for president than Harris/Biden.  Now as someone who has long advocated a post-national view of the world, I want to explain why I don't think Klaus Schwab's view of that world is one I want to support.  The post-national world is possible because , with the emergence of what Marshall McLuhan called the Electric Age and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, communication between people unmediated by states is possible on a scale unimaginable before.  But despite the vision of one my favourite artists, Nam June Paik, that that world might be different from what Orwell had envisioned, there are certainly many folks who have grasped the Orwellian possibilities of being mediators. 

If personal freedom is to survive in Airstrip One, and there is no guarantee that it will, we must first conquer our own fear of being taken to Room 101, because if one deviates at all from the Truth as the Ministry describes it this afternoon, someone will take you to Room 101.  (I wonder if Orwell chose that number because it so often designates the first course in the official story as it is taught in colleges?)  I have long found it ironic that in many ways the world of Twitter was foretold by Jesus:  'whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.'  And as Nietzsche foretold, we have found ourselves stuck in the cycles of Christian theology with no way out.  We have inherited the concepts of guilt, sin and shame,but without the means of redemption (thanks to Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p. 211).  Once one makes one step away from RightThink, one is doomed to the outer darkness.

I have found it particularly interesting that one of my friends who has cast me into the outer darkness is someone with whom I became friends on Facebook and later in meatlife because he thought I was 'authentic'.  I think he means that I have not tried to present someone whom I am not.  (Indeed, one of the things that made Facebook attractive for me before absolutely power had corrupted absolutely, or nearly so, was Zuckerberg's ideal of 'one identity'.)  As always, Shakespeare had it right in Polonius' advice to his doomed son.  I want to be true to my own self, but it can seem dangerous.  But as Winston would learn in Room 101, to do otherwise is to lose oneself.

Or, again, as Jesus said: 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'  

Hey man, here’s the thing.

 

A friend whom I quite respect, and who still speaks to me even though I have come out as someone who is voting for Orange Man Bad, is surprised that I seem to  have abandoned my tendency towards being an anarchist to risk being drenched in the stench of the republicans.  Although I wrote a blog post about ‘Why I’m Voting for the Fucking Moron’, and the reasons I included there still apply, more has happened since then.  Biden has ‘chosen’ Kamala Harris as his running mate and Bernie Sanders has exulted in the compromise to make Biden the most progressive president ever., and the democrats have made it quite clear that they want to ‘extend’ the Supreme Court and make the District of Columbia a state.

I think I made it very clear in  2016 that I was not supporting Donald Trump.  I was horrified by the idea that Sanders might be the democratic nominee, and I said to several friends that between the two, I found Trump the lesser of the two evils.  But, the democrats nominated Clinton, and I had the luxury of living in a state where my vote counts very little, Washington, so I could vote for Gary Johnson.  It was only after the election that I read Clinton's It Takes a Village and I realized how glad I was that she hadn't been elected, but still, I was not expecting a Trump administration to be a good thing.  I still listened to the sky-is-falling forecasts of the major news sources, who were pumping out fear of the Orange Man as fast as they could.  I have friends with gay and trans kids who were worried about sending them to school after the Trump election.  But, guess what?  Trump didn't send anyone around to round them up or try to add some sort of ideological curricula to the schools.  Instead, Betsy de Voss, whom my progressive friends most often call a witch or worse--even those who proudly call themselves witches--go figure--has actually worked to give parents more choice in the education of their children.

As the Trump years wore one, even though I had expected the worst--I mean, shucks ad golly, I'm a gay man who is appalled enough by his choice of draperies--I began to notice that the sky was not falling, that I approved of a lot f his policies, and that often he was being condemned most harshly for policies that had just continued from the Obama administration,  I found it rather unlikely that Trump was actually anti-semitic when he had so many Jewish grandchildren.  I found it hard to believe that he was racist when he was trying to get so many black prisoners released and so many black folks employed.  But then neither Obama nor Trump were judged by the quality of their character, but by the color of their skin:  Brown Man Good; Orange Man Bad.

Now, it's 2020.  I'm not at all unhappy about reduced regulations--remember I am perceived as an anarchist by many who know me--nor by possibilities for peace in the Middle East, nor by a booming economy, nor by the US' having with drawn from the Paris Climate Feel-Good, because I actually do try to follow the science.  I am not unhappy that the United States hasn't gotten into any more wars and has actually begun withdrawing from some.  Still, there are certainly many things Orange Man Bad has done that I don't approve.  In fact, he hardly ever even asks me for my approval.  And still, I would rather there were a candidate for president in 2020 who were less divisive, who didn't call so many people names in 3:00 am tweets.

But hey man, here's the thing.  Trump has said nasty things about the New York Times, but he hasn't censored it.  It's the democrats who seem to censor free speech.  Coming to power at a time when the presidency has been given and taken more power than ever before, he has been quite reticent to abuse his power.  Not innocent, but compared to previous presidents, reticent.  He has actually respected the rights of states, even when they have taken positions he vehemently and clearly finds repulsive.

Now, it's 2020, and although I might wish the democrats had nominated some reasonable alternative to Trump, I don't find that to be the case.  Because hey man, here's the thing.  I didn't vote for Trump because I 'support' Trump.  I voted for Trump because I want to continue to enjoy 'the Blessings of Liberty', which, along with 'Justice, domestic Tranquility,  . . . the common defense, [and] . . . the general Welfare' for which the Constitution was ordained and established.  It is, I think, of great importance that the Oath of Office for not just the presidency but all national offices, is 'to support and defend the Constitution'.  It interestingly enough is not to the people who ordained and established it.  Should the people wish to change it, there are methods within the Constitution to do that.  Now, I am I confess mostly disgusted when any politician, Orange Man Bad, or Clinton the would-be Champion or Sanders the Socialists, tells us that he is 'fighting for the people'.  That is not the job of the president.  The job of the president is to support and defend the Constitution.  And, I suspect often in spite of himself, Orange Man Bad has done that better IMHO than a lot of presidents.

But, hey man, here's the thing:  the democrats are pretty much running against the Constitution. The unfortunate thing about the Constitution, the feature that would-be-tyrants find a glitch again and again, is that it slows down change.  It set up a Republic, which as Ben Franklin more or less forecast, we would often choose not to be wise enough to keep.  It guards against the tyranny of the majority.  It makes the president rather like a tennis judge, who no matter how much he may like one player, is expected to enforce the rules of the game.  Were I a tennis judge, I would be tempted to judge for Rafa every time, not that he needs it.  But then a different judge, who didn't like Rafa, could judge against him every time. And there would no more be anything to call tennis.

I am not, you see, a perfect anarchist.  Then there would be no rules.  I enjoy tennis, and I enjoy rules that respect the dignity of all the players of the game.  One of the things that really convinced me to vote for Orange Man Bad this time, rather than for Jo Jorgensen, besides the fact that I though Gary Johnson would have been a better president thatn Jorgensen, is that watching the Democratic National Convention I saw speaker after speaker act as if the only way anyone could accomplish anything was at the pleasure and with the approval of Big Brother. Then I watched the Republican National Convention, with speaker after speaker expressing their belief in the dignity of persons as individuals, not just as citizens of Oceana.  

So, hey man, here's the thing.  I'm gonna do something I don't usually do, and invoke the flag.  Oddly enough, we now live in a time when if one flies the flag--and I still fly the Jolly Roger--if one flies the American flat, it is assumed that one is a Trump supporter.  After almost four years of the Orange Man Bad, the star-spangled banner still waves o'er a land , compared to any other land, free, and the home of at least some folks who are still brave.  I don't trust that would be true under a Harris-Biden four years.

Evidence? What evidence? We don't need no stinking evidence.

 Many years ago, when I was still living in Mid-Nowhere, I was a crony capitalist.  I did not think of myself as such, but it's what I was.  I bought a failing bookstore because I liked books, and I thought that if I tweaked the business model, it could make money.  I didn't even know the term 'business model', but in retrospect, that's what I thought.  Enter the cronyism.  A reasonable bank would not have lent me the money I needed to make my foolish purchase, but I had family connections at the bank.  For a while all went well.  I was the sole proprietor and sole employee, and I worked hard.  Early in the morning, I was cleaning my windows and rearranging the displays.  Late at night I was doing the books and taking out the trash.  Enter more cronyism.  There's a college even in Mid-Nowhere and most of my customers were from that august institution.  One day the head of the History Department asked me if I would like an MA in history.  He had an assistantship open but didn't like any of the applicants.  Would I like to apply?  I said that I had to work.  He said he had a solution.  I could hire his wife.  Her salary would be just a bit less than the assistantship and I would get an MA in the deal.  So, I became an employer.

Having even one employee is a lot more work than doing all the work oneself.  To make matters worse, the professor in charge of my thesis said that she could only find time to work with me if I hired her son.  The wife of the department head was a great employee.  The son of my supervising professor couldn't even take out the garbage.  But for a while the business was growing and I had a few other employees from time to time. Also from time to time a little man named Mr. Green, who reminded me of no one so much as a shorter Sam Lowry from Brazil, would come by with form 27b-6, and I would give him a cup of coffee while we computed the payroll tax I owed the Great State, and I would write him a check until the next time he arrived.

Alas, the Bible page-thin margin dwindled to nothing during the recession that came with the Carter administration.  I ended up selling the bookstore to a wealthy woman who could use the debt as a tax offset, giving the books to libraries, and moved to the Big City to try to find work to support my growing family and pay my bills. The economy seemed to improve dramatically when Mr. Carter retired from the presidency and went into volunteer carpentry.. It was a bit of a rocky transition, from entrepreneur to employee, and I worked two jobs for a while, sending my then-wife to law school and eventually even getting--did I mention that I am a slow learner?--another Masters and most of a Doctorate, myself.

But there was one particularly rocky moment, one Sunday morning at about 2:00 am, when there was a very loud knock on the door accompanied by two policemen yelling POLICE! Silly me.  I never thought about shooting at them.  In fact, I didn't even have a gun.  They handcuffed me and put me in the back of a Chevrolet with a grill dividing the passenger seat from the command station, and with no door handles in the back seat.  I was finger-printed and mug-shotted  for the offense of fleeing across state lines to avoid taxes.   Without Mr. Green, I had forgotten form 27b-6.  I think I was the only sober person in the cell, which was made entirely of stainless steel, but not in a Mies van der Rohe kinda way.  One baloney sandwich later, I was out on bond.  The affair was actually quite easy to settle, especially because it seemed that the reason I had been arrested in the middle of the night instead of having been sent a bill was that someone in the County Clerk's office had a grudge left from high school. 

Fast forward a few years and a few lifetimes, and I found myself at the edge of the country where all my friends drink chai lattes made with almond milk. We were told that science was going to end after the 2016 election, that Richard Feyman would no longer have money for chalk, and that we should take to the street carrying signs saying 'hooray for our side'.  Now, I had taken to the streets with signs when I was even younger and more delusional than when I had thought I  could. afford both to own a bookstore and buy books.  But I 'liked' the Facebook Page from The March for Science.  Shucks.  Those were the days when I still thought that 'most trusted news source' might imply 'a reliable news source'.

The March for Science came and went.  Science did not die nor get defunded, as I just ascertained by a bit of diligent Googling.  That is, I thought The March for Science had come and gone, until last night.   All of a sudden it was back with a call to march in protest of the Kentucky Grand Jury's presentation of the evidence in  Breonna Taylor's death.  I made the error of suggesting that sleeping with a drug dealer might not be the best way to assure a long and happy life.  One would have thought I had killed Santa Claus.

 One of the things I found most amusing about this excerpt of the things I was called for suggesting that the Kentucky Attorney General might be more reliable than the propaganda of BLM is that I have often been critical of Trunp's foreign policy because I think it strengthens Russia.  (Not that he listens to me any more than Mr. Obama listened to me when I suggested that bombing weddings and funerals is not a good way to win the hearts and minds of the people.)  But, the outflow of vitriol made me a bit more curious about 'March for Science', so I looked at their website.  

Surprise surprise surprise.  Lots of feel-good buzz words.  Lots of claims that opposition to what they are advocating is a conspiracy.  But despite their nod to 'evidence based' public policies, they are calling for protests--mostly peaceful, I'm sure, because that's the only kind newspeak allows--against a public policy based on evidence.  Odd, perhaps, that there is no explanation of how they conclude what 'The Science' is, or about the scientific method.  Just a wonderful neo-puritanism of the sort so popular amongst folks in what I only semi-humorously call The Third Great Awakening.  I was, I confess, a bit amused when many of my friends who marched 'for science' in 2017 had no real regard for science in their daily lives unless they thought it agreed with their prejudices and fears.  One of them sleeps with crystals to channel more chi.  But I had thought that they were probably had good intentions.  One must always remember where good intentions most often lead.  

I should have just shot the two policemen who came to arrest me.  I could have been a folk hero by now.

Welcome to Brazil.  Please keep your form 27b-6 with you at all times.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

 

I suppose it's useful if one can learn from one's sins, so although I'm repentant, I'm not remorseful.  I committed one of the most common sins of the internet and social media, but I hope not to do it again, and by not doing it again, I hope my posts might be more effective.  But probably not, because of another thing I learned from having sinned:  there is a very selective sort of neo-talmudism that occurs on the internet.

For a long time I have been distressed that many Americans, including many of my friends, have chosen ignorance of history and ignorance of  context, and have claimed the contemporary moral high ground of victimhood  rather than responsibility.  Let Lenin convince me that I'm the victim of the Czar and I will likely soon become the victim of Lenin.  Lenin's propoganda didn't mention collecting my land and sendig me to the gulag.  Propoganda's kinda like that somtimes.

So, when a friend whom I generally consider a very good person posted one lament that capitalism is not supporting families well enough and that the government should step into the gap, and followed it with a nice virtue-signal of himself in a BLM parade, ironically while living in a town where the university was shut down for a bit of re-education when it was alleged that someone on one of the Vikings sports teams had made something someone considered a racial slur on an actually rather obscure site, resulting in demands, thankfully not met, that the name of the sports teams be changed from Vikings, I sinned.  I Googled BLM and families and saw an essay from an organization called The Federalist.com which outlined why the author, Auguste Mayrat, thinks the Black Lives Matters movement is opposed to families. I posted a link to the essay on my Facebook page. It seemed to me an unfortunate irony that someone who thinks families need help would expect to find it in an organization that is dedicated to disrupting families.   Common to both of my friend's posts, I suppose, was a not-unusual disapproval of capitalism.  

(Sorry.  I can't help myself)

Mr. Mayrat's essay wasn't perfect.  A friend said that it was unlike me to have shared it if I had read it.  (Indeed, I had read it.  I miss the pithiness of someone like Bill Buckley, perhaps, but sometimes I take what I find.) Disappointed friend said 'It's flawed in so very many ways and written with a obviously biased agenda. I'm kinda shocked.' Well duh.  Of course it's written with a biased agenda, but unlike many publications (I'm looking at you, Good Gray Lady), it doesn't pretend to be unbiased.  The Federalist is a conservative publication, and doesn't pretend to be otherwise. In a long telephone conversation that followed, my shocked friend went on to decry the nuclear family as a myth, to argue that one does need a village to raise a child, and to pounce on Mr. Mayrat's claim that BLM hates families, based on the actual text of the BLM website. The discussion reminded me of nothing so much as Talmudic arguments, which in this case centered around Mr. Mayrat's use of the word 'logic'.  He said that the logic of the BLM website's statement suggested (I must confess that at the time of the discussion, I was sitting on a park bench and didn't have my Mishna with me, or I would have pounced on the word 'suggests'.) 'that children do better without parents and outside the home.'

Now, I realize that by openly admitting to having any conservative notions at all, and even to commit what is probably larger than a micro-agression by quoting a conservative source is enough to disallow most arguments, so I was actually honoured if a bit amused by my shocked friend's extensive discourse.  I also think that his use of BLM's conception of a village to raise children (and of Mrs. Clinton's use in her book advocating passing our children over the fire of Moloch, which I did not read until after she lost the election, but which made me less unhappy that she had lost) is double speak.  If the Black Lives Matter movement were concerned about families and children, we might find folks with BLM signs patrolling the neighborhoods of Chicago to provide a safe environment for children rather than burning the businesses of black women in Brooklyn or torching mattress factories in Kenosha.  (I found that one hard to understand for a while.  I realize that it might be argued that the sister in Brooklyn had sold out to capitalism, but mattresses?  And then I realized that they're just a symbol of bourgeois luxury.  Real workers, I guess, sleep on a thin mat on the floor.  As I do.)

So, in the future I will be much more careful about posting anything in which I haven't counted every jot and tittle.  But I would also encourage my friends who find the BLM website enticing consider that it is written by folks who claim to be Marxists, and then to consider the role Marxists give to propaganda. 

And, finding myself as a sheep in the midst of wolves, I shall strive to be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

And, in this age of miracles and wonders, the Talmud is available online.  But I'll let you Google it for yourself.

Going beyond the Self-Evident

The screen shot above is part of one of billions of interactions that occurred today on the internet.  It's not a bit deal, but it has given me food for reflection all day, and I want to share some of those reflections.  

There are three clauses in that interaction, and I want to discuss each of them, but I will save the first one, about the democrats, for last.

I have known Dan Krotz for about twenty years, since he owned a bookstore from which I bought and then sold and then often re-bought many years.  He's a minor but rather brilliant author, and someone for whom I have much respect.  Indeed, the cover photo on his Facebook  page is one I took of a book he wrote  that I bought and have recommended to many. And Dan said that Trump is simply and openly a pig.  That doesn't seem too remarkable, does it?  And yet, in the history of the world, it's been a rare thing that someone can call the leader of one of the world's most powerful nation a pig with no fear of retribution.  When Trump was elected, I remember being told by many friends that all our rights would be taken away, even that I perhaps should get a burner phone.  But in fact the times I have personally been under scrutiny and censorship by the government was under democratic regimes.  Dan said that without even getting any dislikes on Facebook.  (It's a good thing he didn't call a fat black female actress a pig, because then he would have been put in social media jail or banned for life. (At least he would were he a conservative comedian.) 

Thinking about that remark, I am struck by how much Dan's remark about Trump resembles some of the things Trump says on Twitter about people he dislikes.  Yet, somehow, I still respect Dan.

Now, of course, there are things about Dan's statement that are self-evident.  I mean, I have yet to forgive Trump for destroying the facade of Bonwit-Teller.  He's often crass, calling people things like 'pig'. And yes, there is, I'm aware, corruption in the Trump administration.  But, alas, I'm afraid that is not unusual.  Mr. Obama is somehow now a poster child for good presidenst, but I rented an apartment from the Chicago Democratic Party back in the 1960's when the Johnson administration was tapping my phone , and when somehow my building escaped enforcement of the Chicago building code.  I doubt things have changed much since. (And, if I may borrow a phrase from the democrats' nominee for likely the true leader of the nation, 'are you aware that there's a perception' that people around some politicians are likely to commit suicide?)

So, yes. Trump is a pig. His faults are pretty self-evident.  But, the alternative, about which Dan sadly agrees, the democrats and their program to dismantle western civilization, is carefully covered in banal feel-good phrases like hope and light and love.  If putting up with Trump's self-evident piggishness for another four years will delay the arrival of the full-on Animal Farm, I'm willing to risk it.

Yup.  Trump's a self-evident pig, and he hasn't been given an Nobel Peace Prize.  But I would suggest that it is not enough to just rely on the self-evident appearances of any situation, it is not enough to be seduced by slick intentions, but look for results.  I'm fond of fewer wars.

 

Why I Have Decided to Vote for the Fucking Moron

 

Like  many others,  I was shocked on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  I would not have been pleased had Hilary Clinton won the election.  I thought her a dangerous hawk whose primary qualification was overweening ambition.  But the polls . . .  I had voted for neither of them.  It had seemed that Gary Johnson was the only adult in the room.  He may not have known where Aleppo was, but he didn't need to know because he wasn't going to bomb it.  He may have forgotten the name of Mexican President Vicente Fox, but then so had I and I had worked in Mexico when Fox was first elected, and it seemed very unlikely that Johnson would waste millions of dollars building a wall along the Mexican border. I had no illusions that Johnson would win the election, but it seemed a good thing to at least mark my position, kinda like pissing on a fire hydrant. I live in western Washington, and I'm surrounded by Pavlovian progressives who haven't thought critically since they had to write a compare-and-contrast essay in eighth grade English class.

Like many others, I was horrified on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  He shared Clinton's ambition, but seemed even less likely to choose good advisors.  He seem to obey neither the laws of grammar, nor of the United States.  I confess I have broke both from time to time, but truthfully I more often consider grammar.  Of course what should have been obvious to anyone who has listened to people talk for more than five minutes or has read any novel written since 1900, communication does not obey the laws of grammar, either.  And when I had talked to supporters of the most enthusiastically supported democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, it quickly became apparent that law, especially constitutional law, has very little respect from anyone in the current political climate change.  Nevertheless, I posted a long string of memes describing the president a a fucking moron, posts which garnered likes on Facebook.

Like many others, I expected some great catastrophe to follow after 8 November 2016 when  Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  My progressive friends told me so.  CNN told me so.  And they both told me that Fox News was in cahoots with the devil.  I had been rather appalled by what a pansy Anderson Cooper had been in his reactions to the Trump during the debate he failed to moderate.  (Yes, I know one isn't supposed to use terms denigrating someone's sexuality, but I'm a pansy, too, so I get a pass, like a rap singer using the Nword.)  I had been impressed by how the only moderator during the debates who did reel in Trump was Chris Wallace, whom I had been told worked for the devil himself.  So when the Fucking Moron attacked false news, I thought of that in terms of an attack on freedom of the press, despite that never has the press reported anything about me accurately, and despite that I in general recognize that the true centers of power are now more the big media/tech companies and not Washington.

Like many others, I found that following 8 November 2016 Donald Trump did one outrageous thing after another, and not only did he fail to appoint particularly brightest and best staffers, he fired them as quickly as  he had done on the Apprentice.   It seemed like the presidency as a reality TV show. It was interesting to me that the things my liberal/progressive friends condemned mostly loudly about his policies were things that Mr. Obomber had been doing all along. It seemed to me that the best way to keep from even considering putting kids in cages would be to keep the out to begin with.  But they had hope with Mr. Obomber, and they had horror with Mr. Trump.  Mr. Obomber had been Nice looking, while the fucking moron didn't need to be caricatured. He always looked like a cartoon.

And, can you imagine what Jackie K-O would think about the way he redecorated the White House?  At least he had the honesty to brag about having sex with that woman, so long as she was nice looking.  

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, I like many other people was reminded that we in live a post-moder of alternative facts.  I learned that some massacre somewhere in Kentucky  had occurred in an alternative universe and  that covefe is a thing. I was introduced to government by Tweet, which if one considers it, is really much more appropriate for the contemporary political climate change than fire side chats.  Unlike my progressive friends, I was pretty much pleased by a lot of the early actions of the administration, although they seemed to have been the program of Paul Ryan, who I noticed abandoned the swamp after two years, putting a bit of distance between himself and the new American Greatness.

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, the world didn't end.  No new nations were bombed.   Bombing and targeted attacks were not ended, but hay, America is great right.  I mean, one of Clinton's claims to glory as the assassination of Mumammar Khaddafi, an act which has made life miserable for an awful lot of Libyans.

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017 the wold didn't end.  Things pretty much chugged along as they would have anyway.  People continued to invent things.  Wages went up.  Prices went up, but mostly slower than wages.  Because I am what a friend of mine calls a 'god-damned one worlder', I have been very saddened that the United States has disengaged from China, and indeed from much of the world.  It never seemed to me, for instance, that the Fucking Moron understood that NATO was established for the benefit of the United States.  On the other hand, I must realize that the world in which NATO now exists is quite different from  what existed in 1949.  I don't think that the presidency has much power for good, and a lot of power for bad,  but still I was disappointed that the Fucking Moron's pastiche of tweeted ideas that might better have been saved to examine in the cold light of dawn, often  been to strengthen Russia and China.  I don't think he has been alone in working up the electorate by triggering their-our--fears,  The Democratic National Convention has been a Fear Week.  And no one seems more anxious to race bait sooner than Nancy Pelosi, a woman whom I confess I find a bit difficult to take seriously because she reminds me so much of an aunt who lived much of her life in California and who tended to spike heels and pant suits and a shrill voice.  The only thing Pelosi lacks is my aunt's Chiwawa named Oogie.

But, four years is a long time, and following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, I have been collecting a bit of random data.  The loyal opposition--is irony still allowed in 2020?--has carefully cultivated the Trump derangement syndrome.   Time and again when I have asked my progressive friends, who are about the only sort there are here in western Washington, so I may have a skewed viewpoint, why they support some activity, from such things as the Green New Deal to the looting being perpetrated in honor of George Floyd, their answers have nothing to do with my question but quickly become 'I don't like Donald Trump'.  As he said himself, maybe it's his personality. I, however, find most of the ideas of the loyal opposition arebboatahto6bopposed to the ideas that have made America great in the first place:  classic  English liberalism, free trade, and capitalism.   I doubt the fucking moron understands classic English liberalism, but he hasn't overtly attacked  it.   He has done nothing much to help free trade, alas.  But he doesn't attack--always; I mean, his tweets do seem to be random--the capitalists like Tim Cook who stand up to him on free trade.

But, of course, the Virus.

The Big Black Swan.

It is far too early to pretend to know all the results of the covid pandemic, but I will say that it's foolish to blame it on China, as the Fucking Moron does, or to blame it one the Fucking Moron, as the democrats do.  One needs to avoid derangement syndromes of every sort, I suspect.

So, here's the deal:  Much to my surprise, and largely because of his incompetence and tendency to chase every squirrel, the United States hasn't been doing badly for the past four years if one looks at reality rather than the news.  The United States has not been the worst nation in its response to the virus, as we were repeatedly told by the DNC. nor has it been the best nation, as the Fucking Moron claims.  What makes the United States' situation difficult is of course that it is a union of states, something which Trump has mostly noticed and honored during the pandemic, despite the many calls for one-size-fits-all measures from Pelosi & Company.  As Rahm Emanuel, home boy of Mr. Obomber said, no good crisis should be wasted.

Unfortunately, although the democrats seem firmly in the depths of Trump derangement syndrome, powdered Biden mixed in with one's organic vegan smoothie is not a cure for the virus.  I have seen nothing from the loyal opposition to suggest that their 'belief' in science will actually change the facts for the many scientists all around the world who are working for a cure and/or preventative already.

Unfortunately, I have seen no signs that the democrats would recognize the achievements of Regan and Nixon in bringing Russia and China into the sphere of American influence and build on it.  Rather it seems that the democrats would embrace the notion that Trump and Sanders have in common, the notion that 1953 or thereabouts was some sort of golden age that can be brought back by presidential fiat.  Meanwhile, the policies that the democrats do seem to embrace would be catastrophic to the classic liberal freedom of the individual, of free trade, and of capitalism.  

Like many others, I was shocked on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president.  But I was wrong to think that the United States was so fragile that it could not survive the presidency of a guy who is only slightly, if much more bigly loudly, incompetent than the norm.  The New York Times still prints all the news it pretends is fit to print, even when it's often fake.  Rachel Maddow still says things about the head of state that would lose her her head in many Muslim countries. The people who are being censored are those more conservative than the leaders of Twitter or Google or Facebook.  

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election.  He remains a sort of Cardi B personality, loud and outrageous.  And his opponent, Joe Biden, is--what?-- a sort of retired crooner performing in a casino. Mr. Biden, whom I can't help but think of as a return of Mr. Potatohead, a person with no real personality or ideas of his own, on whom a sardonic smile can be hung by the instructions on the teleprompter, might seem to be a return to a calmer presidency.  But he comes with a lot of baggage.  Many people do not expect him to survive one term, making Kamala Harris very likely the real president. And the others who would almost certainly be members of a Biden presidency are not people I trust to protect my freedoms or the United States Constitution.

Now, four years later Donald Trump is up for re-election, and it has been four years of continuous attack on him by the democratic congress, nearly all of which has been proven baseless.  Again and again the willingness to accept the truthiness of the 'evidence' of the Mueller investigation and the dossier of allegations has proven to be wishful thinking of a bunch of folks who are sure they know better than the electorate. I find myself as surprised by how Trump has really governed as has John Yoo, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, who wrote a fascinating book entitled Defender in Chief:  Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.  In it he writes, 'If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.  I had not voted for him in the 2016 primary or general elections.  His many personal and professional flaws repelled me.' But Yoo brilliantly explains the struggles between Trump and the democrats in terms of the checks and balances and expectations of the federal constitution, not claiming that Trump even realized what he was doing, but that the founders of the constitution created a system in which the struggles of individual persons for their own power would be channeled for the common good.

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election, and I find myself in position I could not have imagined four years ago.  I would have been unhappy with a Clinton but I expected her administration would have been pretty much a return of the normal blundering incompetency we have come to expect from the presidency.  I hope, in case Biden is elected, that I am wrong, but I expect a Biden administration would to be a targeted attack on the principles of western civilization that underlie the founding of the United States and that  have made it a destination for thousands, whether they were 'huddled masses' or others who 'were yearning to breathe free.'  

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election.  I would certainly prefer a calmer candidate, some less ego-centric, someone whose voice I enjoyed hearing, someone who is handsome and doesn't have an absurd hair-cut--the list could go on.  But the United States has survived four years of Trump, and I expect that it will survive another four years, that we will recover from the blows of the virus,  and that we will flourish.  There has been nothing in the actions of the loyal opposition to make me think they would encourage recovery or flourishing.  

Because I live in Western Washington, my vote mostly doesn't matter.  One of my friends will likely call my opposition to Biden/Harris/Pelosi/the Squad/Sanders & Co. mental masturbation.  But I consider it marking my position.  I have  enjoyed the privilege of living in a society that is heir of English Liberalism. I will do what little I can do to share that privilege. To do otherwise I would consider cowardice.  A small cowardice, of course, but at my age, one does what one can, even if those acts are small. 

Perhaps pointless pondering on a summer''s day.

I certainly don''t expect to come up with anything so swell as a theory of gravity.  Besides, I'm sitting under a fir tree, not an apple tree.  Still, pondering during a time of plague remains popular, and it's pretty near free.

Many science fiction writers and entrepreneurs  and I expect the world to be organized rather differently in the future from what we know now.  Some, like William Gibson expect a dystopia.  Some, Mark Zuckerberg among them, expect the connected world to be better for everyone.  I, who look at the world as evolving from smaller to ever-more-inclusive units of identity, expect that there is no pre-determined outcome.  Barringthe complete collapse of human societies, which seems more likely during the Covid pandemic than it has for a while, the trend will almost certainly be towards larger units that we rely on for our identities and to provide us services.  In the struggles between Google and the European Union, I expect Google to prevail over the long run.

But in the longer run, I must admit that we are only seeing the beginning of really large  pan-national organizations.  Trying to think of antecedents, the British East India Company comes to mind. If I weren't so lazy I would study it more closely.  It's popular these days to denounce imperialism and look at the East India Company as some sort of evil empire at its worse.  But, empires are old news.  I think that the East India Company's role in exposing the British to the thought of the world beyond Europe.  Think, for instance, of Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East project, which introduced me to ideas beyond those of the narrow protestant town in which I was raised. The experience of the empire set the stage for the development of classical liberalism, which was concerned with the rights of all mankind, not the just rights of Englishmen. Those ideas with the more material goods then spread to a world in which they were revolutionary.  I suspect that the trade of the East India Company was necessary for the sort of world view that lay behind Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and it would be such ideas on which reformers from Gandhi to King relied.  

Today's multi-nationals, however, dwarf the East India Company in scope and influence.  Perhaps none of them are overtly imperialistic as Facebook, but they all are focused on growing both in size and function.  Apple long ago quit being Apple Computers and became just Apple, moving into more and more areas of service, most recently health and banking  Samsung don't seem to be in the same league as the giants, but it has its own military division.  Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) are both led by men who can only be seen as heirs of the British Empire.  We might  think of Amazon as a store--I can if I want with my voice tell the cute little red cube sitting on the corner of my desk to send me anything the card tied to my Amazon account will allow, but Amazon make most of their money storing data.  Indeed, I am typing this

ponder on a computer that I bought from BestBuy through Google Shopping.  Despite all of these competitors for  influence of my life, I can usually ignore two of the biggest players, Alibaba and Ten Cent, while Walmart, which remains the company with the largest gross revenues, to which I contributed only yesterday, is quickly escaping its brick and mortar fortresses to become a big player in William Gibson's cyberspace.

So, you may wonder, if you have stuck with my meandering this far, what am I pondering, exactly.  Well, I am wondering how these empires will survive the death of their founders, and I think I have found some clues/answers already.  The most valuable company in the world currently, Saudi Aramco, has the most complicated history of all, having been multi-national and complicated from the beginning.  Walmart has not only survived the death of Sam Walton, but has gotten over the 'what would Sam have done?' problem, akin to the 'what would Steve think of this?' question that still hovers over Tim Cook.  Apple seems to have had its War of Spanish Succession while Jobs was exiled on Corsica, if I may mix a metaphor.  The next similar battle seems always to hover around Zuckerberg  at Facebook.  Google has had both a Regency and an abdication, and seems to plow on smoothly, making an ever-wider world for right-think.

But I also suspect that these companies, which seem huge, are more like what we nowadays call the 'petty German Principalities' that began to gather power when the printing press and the Reformation rocked--disrupted--Europe and overthrew the hegemony of the Papacy.  

Damn, it's a fascinating time to be alive.  I suspect that now we see through a glass darkly.  I only know in part.  Then will I know as I am known to Facebook?