Grateful

Daily I have to fight off a sense of complete depression. It was not enough to have to face daily the barrage of lies and other crap flowing out of the Oval Office daily.  Our pseudo-president is a one-man depression machine. And then we have this pandemic thingie. I’m old enough to remember World War II, but nothing, including that awful war, created this sense of foreboding of the pandemic plus Trump. Oh and then there’s that 85 thing.   Maybe were I 39 really, instead of in my 46^th 39^th year, I would be able to say, “oh, screw it, this too will soon go away”. But when old Father Time keeps creeping up to my front door and reminding me that the end is near, it is much more difficult to say, “to hell with this thing”.

But then I realize that our grandson and his lady love will soon be gracing our door, just to chat for a bit, since we no longer get to spend Sunday evenings at a nice family dinner with him.  It’s nice that our grandkids try to do just that with enough frequency that we are able to smile at the thought.  Or they call us from afar, again just to chat, to see how we are. 

And it is difficult to imagine how life would be were my wife (of 65 years) and I not here supporting and loving one another daily.  Many folks are not so blessed. After 65 years and counting, my wife and I are not merely lovers, but best friends.  And not in the Facebook sense of that term.  Best friends means that we finish each other’s sentences. That when one of us begins to want something, but the right word refuses to come out, we toss out the word and then we laugh.  Best friends means that in the morning, every morning, I make a nice cup of Cappuccino for each of us. Then we hold the cups up, click them, look into our eyes, and say, “To Us”.  And in the evening, we do the same ritual with a nice glass of wine.

We snuggle while watching TV together—Late night comedies and British TV mysteries, or comedies. Turns out snuggling is good for friends. Maintains that BFF character the way it was intended.

And then we have the anticipation. What anticipation you ask? Well, we have another Great Grandchild arriving soon. Yes, we have some Great Grandchildren, at least one of whom is now moving out of the “children” stage and into the adult stage. But a new Great Grand remains very special.  And so we look forward to late December or maybe early January to greet our new arrival into our extended family.  And that is very exciting.  Grandkids and now great grands are very special to us oldsters. They provide a source of love without really demanding anything, except some love in return.  Quite wonderful.

And so we continue to understand that love really does make the world this special place. Yes, we all need money and security, but mostly we need love.  Had Donald Trump been loved, ever, in his poor benighted life, he would not be this monster he became.  Because love provides security, a sense that you have worth, and that you have a special place in this world. Lacking love, many people opt for false power over others, and creates a need to demonstrate superiority over other people. With Love,  you know you are special and don’t need to devalue others.

And so, we are grateful. This awful period will actually end someday, even if not soon enough. Hopefully, our grandkids will be able to look back and understand that the world came close to devouring itself, but then we all stepped back from that precipice.  Hopefully, they will be able to open their eyes in the morning and say to a loved one, “Good morning. I love you and thanks for being here”. Or gaze at a glorious sunset and say, “thank you world for being so wonderful.”

Hopefully, Gratitude and kindness will then follow. So thanks world.

Conspiracy Theories

We are getting chocker-block full of conspiracy theories. Remember when Hillary warned us about a vast right wing conspiracy? Well, it turns out she was right after all. We all laughed about it at the time.  But then guess who claimed the presidency after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton? You got it, Donald Trump.  So he claimed the presidency in a sort of republican coup d’état. Yeah, not clear who bribed those electors to cast their vital votes for Donald Trump, but bribed they were.  And now, Steve Bannon has taken on the job as chair of the Republican Conspiracy Machine, and he is hard at work trying to con the American people into another four years of Donald Trump, even if, this time, they have to use machine guns to achieve their ends.  Yeah, good old, Stevie. He knows no bounds.  It’s Donald or Armageddon. 

Now, it should be clear that, mainly, Stevie runs professional grifts. Take your pick. Yeah, he had stuff like Breitbart, but he was into the money mainly.  And apparently the right wing knows no bounds when it comes to grifting. Not long ago, he was charged with a species of penny-ante grift. Yeah, it’s the sort of grift the American right has been running on its own voters for decades, which makes this absolutely fitting. Federal prosecutors in New York a while ago now unsealed criminal charges against Stephen K. Bannon, and three other men they alleged defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors using an online crowdfunding campaign that was advertised as raising money to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Apparently, Bannon and another organizer of the campaign, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, claimed they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called “We Build The Wall,” but that was a lie. Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a nonprofit he controlled, sending hundreds of thousands out to Kolfage while keeping a “substantial portion” for himself. Yeah, they really love America, just as long as it continues to  finance their illegal ways. 

So, the right wing conspiracy machines are now hard at work trying to maintain The Donald in his appointed job as head of the Republican Coup d’état government we used to call America. Whether they succeed remains an open question, since The Donald still refuses to concede that he lost yet again this time to Joe Biden. 

Maybe The Donald should try to run against Donald Duck next time.  Oooh, I know, The Donald should have MaraLago recede from America, and he could appoint himself as Czar of TrumpaLago. I know, I know, MaraLago is part of Florida, but they won’t mind right??   And then the vast right wing conspiracists could all move into TrumpaLago and hold SuperSpreader events as demonstrations that this COVID left wing conspiracy is just junk.

 And on that COVIDIOCY theory about how there is no COVID virus, I had another idea. Why don’t we assume that all those folks who deny COVID—you know, the ones yelling it’s all a fraud, and all the millions more who won’t wear masks because COVID doesn’t exist—would never want to get the COVID vaccine? Of course not. Why would they get vaccinated against a fake disease, right? 

So, then we have a much simpler vaccine distribution problem. We only have to vaccinate the folks who understand that COVID is a real disease, currently killing real people. You know, the folks who actually think.  How’s that for simplifying a complex problem? Now we will likely have to invent a new disease state for the COVIDIOTs who die off or get very sick. Maybe, we can say that they contracted the GOPIFY disease. Very contagious disease that originated in a lab somewhere in Florida, you know, near MaraLago. Apparently some lab rats generated it and it just broke loose at a rally of guntoters.  Can’t be helped. These things just happen.

And meanwhile, back in the Land of Sanity, folks will be able to resume their normal lives, working, hugging their loved ones, eating and drinking at pubs and restaurants. Won’t that be nice?? Coming soon to a Land near you, sometime in 2021 . . . unless Bannon et al succeed in reseating Donald Trump in DC. 

Ta ta for now.

The End of Our Nightmare

 So, the National nightmare may finally be coming to an end.  I do not expect anything gracious from the orange baboon. He is incapable of grace.  Instead, we should expect some temper tantrum, a final outbreak of Trumpspeak. Maybe even a TrumpTwitterati explosion at 3 AM.  It might be interesting to see what Pence finally utters. To see whether he continues to be driven to heights of absurdity.  It will be fun watching someone so religious deal with what God Hath Wrought.

I have been paying attention to presidents since FDR . . . remember him? And yes, I was conscious during WW II, and fully aware when he was taken from us in 1945.  Unfortunately he never got to see the final defeat of Hitler, something he had considerable responsibility for orchestrating. Yes, our military did the deed.  They were magnificent. But FDR was at the helm throughout that valiant fight, working daily with Eisenhower to bring it about.  Somehow, I cannot imagine Trump helping to achieve such a glorious conclusion to that awful conflict.  I cannot really even imagine whose side he would have been on.

And then Harry S. Truman came onto the scene. And Harry picked up where FDR had left off. America has been fortunate overall, even if we managed to elect a few duds along the way.  My first election where I was able to vote was the 1956 Ike-Stevenson race—I just missed voting in the 1952 event. But I really did pay attention early. Mostly, I think the American people exercised their conscience and received in exchange an OK result. Well, we did have that aberration in 2000, when Tony Scalia decided that SCOTUS should appoint the president, giving us Shrub instead of Al Gore.  Yeah, life might have been different, and probably better had Al Gore captured the White House in 2000. But Scalia decided that SCOTUS needed to intervene to give us a man of little substance.  Whatever we might think about Daddy Bush, he seemed a decent man, unlike junior.  We certainly would have avoided that Fake War in Iraq. Remember those fake WMDs?? Weren’t they fun? And the Middle East has been a true mess ever since.  So, yeah, Shrub was kind of an idiot who did more harm than good, sort of like St. Ronald of Reagan.

But none of these dudes even came close to Orangeman. Trump has really all the class of an actual baboon, with even less intellect.  Now to be fair, he is likely the product of his Nazi father.  Daddy, in dealing with his compleat narcissist son Donald, decided that giving Donald everything was the right course. He seems to have ignored that fact that Junior had no intellect, could barely compete in grade school and thus arrangements had to be made to get him through school at all. So, instead of  providing close supervision of him and perhaps placing him in some fully orchestrated position where he couldn’t do much damage, Daddykins seemed to have given him free rein, leading to the monster adult we all know today.  I guess Daddy would have been pleased that Junior made it all the way to the presidency. I mean, who would have guessed?  To be fair, I assume that junior making it all the way to The Apprentice would have stunned dear old dad.

I have always wondered, though, whether daddy would have been shocked to watch his son ascend into the heavens of politics. Surely, he would have known the potential for damage from such an event.  But, Daddy was a Nazi, and I guess Nazi’s don’t shrink from power.

And so, we have all been witness to the damage wrought by Junior.

And I think the damage caused by Trump is not limited to the actual direct damages, e.g., the excess deaths, perhaps in the range of 100,000 or more deaths caused by his entirely casual approach to his awful pandemic. He played it down, even making fun of it, and now we have 100,000 people per day coming down with this illness.  Had he been a real leader, we might have resembled other more effective nations. But no, it is always completely about him.  Even when he contracted the illness through his cavalier behavior, he did not stop and take heed. No, not him. He continued making fun of it, causing how many more thousands to become infected. But he also created damages in terms of the changes he created in the American people. Those people may never be the same.  And America is the worst for it.

And his America Alone policies causing America to withdraw from the world on climate, on Arms control, on simply getting along, have now left America as some leper colony. We are a pathetic nation, instead of a world leader.

So, we are not sad to see this cretin leave the stage. We still do not know how much more damage he will cause or attempt. Clearly, he is not finished with his game of life and death in America. He will try to attempt some last stage death dance, I would predict. We cannot let him succeed. We need our military, our government, and our people to hold fast and to move towards becoming a normal, decent nation again.  We must become sane again.

I expect that President Joe, and VEEP Kamala will begin to take the reins so as to reel him in.  Let us hope so.

And Joe and Kamala, thank you for being here just when we needed you so much. We, at least some of us, well most of us, are thrilled to have you as our next head of government. You bring joy beyond any known boundaries. America needs sanity and that is what you deliver. Send the cretin back to his wormhole, where he may lounge in the arms of his favorite mobsters.

Welcome President Biden and Vice President Harris. We wish you success.  We need your success. Welcome good people. Welcome to our world.