June 14, 2020, Late spring of the plague year
I write this on Flag Day, 2020, in the middle of month 5 or 6 of the plague year caused by Covid-19 and year 4 of the Donald Trump plague (btw, it's Trump's 74th birthday, a living testament to how much money can overcome all forms of natural selection in terms of survivability). Thanks to Mr. Trump (and his like-minded oligarchs or supporters of oligarchs in Congress, mostly but not entirely in the Republican Party), we are now simultaneously "enjoying" the Covid-19 plague in which we lead the world in both cases of infected persons and deaths (now over 117,000; although Brazil, with a comparable "right-wing populist leader" committed to valuing his own macho image over the lives of his citizens, is moving up the tables very fast), economic depression (something like 40 million people have filed for unemployment benefits out of a work force of around 160 or 170 million, a staggering real unemployment rate of at least 25% not seen since the depths of the 1930's Great Depression), and now, good old civil unrest (mass protests have broken out in all 50 states and all over the world to specifically protest police violence directed against black people after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in broad daylight and recorded on camera, with the apparent assistance of three other police officers.)
The aftermaths of a series of protests of this nature, which are still going on just about every day in many places, has led to a number of unilateral reforms of policing in many jurisdictions, removal of offensive symbolism (such as toppled statues, removal of Confederate flags by NASCAR, and a sort of non-apology apology from the National Football League to Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement), and discussions of "defunding the police" or even slavery reparations, seen as unthinkable just a few weeks ago.
In my view, we have arrived at a moment of reckoning and inflection we have not encountered probably in living memory of anyone who did not come of age in the 1920s and 1930s, the last time capitalism was having an existential crisis of this magnitude. Then of course, waiting in the wings to launch an audacious program of socialistic measures (that he learned at the feet of the great Al Smith of New York) would be the greatest President of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the American capitalist system from itself during the 1930's Depression and, by cleverly getting the Soviet Union and Great Britain to do much of the bleeding, saved the world from fascism in World War II.
Waiting in the wings now is Joe Biden, who at least served as Vice President to the greatest President of the still young 21st century, the competent technocrat Barack Obama, whose "no drama Obama" personality didn't really permit the sort of bold moves that we got from FDR, even though the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 really did warrant them (complete with prosecutions, of the rapacious financial sector figures responsible for that crisis). But, competent technocrat that he was, the measures that Obama took did manage to stave off a major depression. Until now, of course. By way of example, the running of the Boston Marathon was canceled this year for the first time in 124 years. Many august commercial institutions like J. Crew, Neiman Marcus, J.C. Penney and Sears have filed for bankruptcy amidst the covid/Trump depression, and possibly approaching an amazing 25% unemployment rate in two months speaks for itself. Simply put, so many institutions that could survive so much, but not four years of Donald Trump.
And we're just getting the party started. Some commentators have rightly worried that come August, when, simultaneously, moratoria on evictions and extended unemployment benefits expire, economic conditions, as horrible as they are, will only spiral further downward (all while the pandemic still rages).
Only in a shithole and armed madhouse full of racists like the United States would the incumbent President "presiding" over conditions this insanely bad even still be in office, let alone running for reelection as his party's standard-bearer, let alone with a chance (albeit an ever smaller one) of actually being reelected. But the racism here is so ingrained, and even the survival instinct has been overcome by the insane refusal of people to wear face-masks because Der Führer himself refuses to have his macho (I know, I know) image challenged by wearing a face-mask. And thus, the most effective means of cutting down transmission of coronavirus is not being used by vast numbers of people, even as his "government" does other "helpful things" like hijacking medical supplies and personal protective equipment.
I could go on, but there is so much I'd prefer not to think about. This has been, Late spring of the plague year.
May 9, 2020, E-Journal of the Plague Year
As I write this on TD Dad's (of blessed memory) 83rd birthday, I note that exactly two months ago, Mrs. TD and I landed in Madrid for what we hoped would be a week's visit with the Loquacious Pup, then studying abroad there. She had also planned study in Paris later in the spring (would be close to being done with it and then visiting Italy right about now, actually). What a difference a plague year makes! Instead of a week's visit, we were frantically woken up (as if we could sleep!) by several friends in the middle of the night on our fourth day noting that the Orange Monster who infests our nation's highest office had, evidently, misread his own message, and seemingly told U.S. citizens that they would be locked out of their own country for thirty days if they did not get back by midnight, 13 March.
Our return ticket would have gotten us back by midnight 14 March, and so we panic-bought spot tickets home, and called the Loquacious Pup circa two or three in the morning at her dorm with a one word instruction: PACK. (She later noted a possible "racial memory" about being expelled from Spain in the middle of the night.) We spent a long, long morning on line at the airport, with quite a few other students returning home much earlier than hoped.
The irony is that as Spain was rapidly moving up the coronavirus table to challenge Italy for unfortunate supremacy, the United States, and the New York City area especially, was moving even faster, and a month later, would be the world's epicenter. As of now, (9 May 2020, the ever moving tables provided by John Hopkins University show New York State alone at over 26,000 deaths, and over 1,300 per million deaths, the latter a "world high," more than any other country, even really small countries).
And so, now approaching two months of a local "half-assed lockdown" (the powers that be only recently mandated facial masks in all closed spaces like grocery stores and pharmacies, and near as I can tell, public parks, and of course, the NYC subways, remain open; and it seems our very own Secretary of Education is paying people to protest public health measures as a matter of a psychotic "personal freedom" that involves the peasantry conducting armed revolt to ensure more privileges for the aristocracy), most of the United States finds itself in a strange form of house arrest (as does a huge swath of the world's population). As we approach two months of this, we note a sudden resurgence in media interest in one of our themes of permanent house arrest inside a shipping container (that would be Guantanamo Bay), we have a Pulitzer Prize winning story of one of the released men, Mohamedou Salahi (I interviewed one of his attorneys Nancy Hollander), and a new podcast out detailing Abdul Latif, one of the poor bastards still held there. Perhaps a country that has unjustly held so many men without charge or trial based on its own irrational (and carefully media driven) fears of dark-skinned people now gets a perverse form of karmic payback. Indeed, while nearly 3,000 Americans died on 9-11, the coronavirus sometimes kills that number daily, and of course, most Americans are more or less pinned down in their homes. But I digress. We typical Americans (except for the over 2 million incarcerated persons!) aren't exactly living in GTMO.
Here in Brooklyn, of course, there aren't any gendarmes who will stop one from leaving their house and walking around, although a mask and social distancing will be required (especially for people of color). Even getting in a car or the subway and "going somewhere" aren't expressly prohibited, although most public gathering spaces such as bars and restaurants are shuttered (except for take out and delivery).
And so most of us have little choice but to "stay home," the prevailing public health advice that rational public officials would dispense, except of course, for that orange monster, who keeps saying "we have to open up America," even though it was never effectively shut down in the first place. Needless to say, state and local officials who are his political allies (and hence, more likely to value money over human life, especially the lives of the non-white and non-rich) are more likely to embrace this scientifically and economically insane "strategy" which is pretty much guaranteed to destroy both countless more lives and what remains of "the economy," but our "leader" operates on a twelve-hour time scale and lives in his own peculiar media bubble where the only thing that matters are some self-selected (and always favorable) polling data and of course that day's Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Which is to say that I continue to marvel at a media environment where the prevailing story of the day IS NOT a demented President babbling about drinking bleach and injecting disinfectants as a cure for the coronavirus, in the middle of a pandemic that has already infected over a million Americans and killed tens of thousands, but, in a strange fit of either political karma (Kavanaugh?) or political deja vu (Clinton? John Edwards? Trump himself?), a quarter century old sex abuse charge against Joe Biden, which, of course, forces so-called liberals and progressives (i.e. Democrats) to deal with their own bullshit on the "guilt upon accusation" "Me Too Movement." In other words, the public has long made up its mind that this monster must go, the media will prop up anything and everything to "make this a horse race," because that apparently is "good for ratings."
As to the Biden thing, the beauty of this own-goal is that we get a nice diversion from the orange monster's actual performance which includes the aforementioned nearly 80,000 dead Americans (just as of today), over a million infected, and of course, a Depression-era unemployment situation. This on top of 3 1/2 years of racial monstrosities such as children in cages, synagogue/church/mosque shootings encouraged by him, a first-week-in-office Muslim travel ban (later expanded for real), plus numerous gutted health, safety and environmental regulations, record tax cuts for billionaires and tax increases for blue state homeowners, kowtowing to dictators and shunning allies, and just this year, a quid pro quo to Ukraine for dirt on the aforementioned Joe Biden that led to an impeachment (Mitt Romney's speech should still inspire you), a near world war started with Iran over assassinating a key general, weeks of Oval Office denial and mockery of the coronavirus pandemic, and now of course, the main event, national house arrest, more American deaths than in the Vietnam war (and on some days, more than on 9-11), coupled with massive unemployment and the economic depression.
Alrighty then. It is most fortunate that one of the "essential" services here in NYC is liquor stores, because one avenue of introspection is whether drinking is an appropriate response to this pandemic (provisional answer, YES). This is a moment for self-introspection. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have jobs that still pay us to "work from home," an opportunity to 're-set our work-life balance' in favor of always working if we can, or at least, perhaps, an opportunity to figure out some useful projects (binge-watching shows?) or "social media" (I favor twitter) or reading or studying (the Ivy League offers stuff online), or, what sensible people are actually doing, drinking. Especially some excellent new tequila products put out by Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, finally available here in Brooklyn.
I know at some point even we here in Brooklyn will be forced to go back to that island with lots of tall buildings on it, though I suppose I will have to allow an extra hour each way for an on-foot commute, because I don't think I will be using the NYC subways... ever again, or at least until the coronavirus thing is over (2021? 2022?). And so, even as the White House itself seems to be the new hot spot, we can expect the learning disabled orange monster there to learn NOTHING, except what he perceives as necessary for his political survival (and of course, to steal what isn't nailed down). While we mere peasants keep getting sick, and dying, and losing our jobs.
This has been... E-Journal of the Plague Year.
April 14, 2020, LiveJournal of the Plague Year
And so we come to more or less the middle of April, 2020, year 4 of the Donald Trump Plague and year 1 of the Covid-19 plague, both plagues much more lethal when occurring together. Just today, my own city of between 8 and 9 million people revised its accounting to over 10,000 coronavirus deaths here. That is more than one per thousand people now dead from a single condition, in barely a single month. Over three times the September 11th death toll. Thousands more than all American dead in September 11th, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the entire war on terror combined. One city, one condition, one month.
The tracking web site set up by Johns Hopkins University, as I write this, right around 5:00 pm EDT on 14 April 2020, puts the world's coronavirus cases at 1.99 million and over 125,000 deaths world wide (over 600,000 cases and 25,000 deaths in the United States alone). Yes, that means nearly 8% of coronavirus deaths in the world (and nearly 40% in the USA) have been in New York City.
Various public messages like #StayHome are everywhere: the people who can do so are urged to, and should (either because their employer has sacked them-- and over 16 million American workers have filed for unemployment in just the last three weeks, because their employer has made some kind of telecommuting option available, or because they didn't have a job in the first place) stay home. But in New York City, health care workers, transit workers, police, fire and corrections workers have to go to work. As do food service workers even as bars and restaurants are shut down, relegated to take out and delivery only, but grocery stores and pharmacies remain open.
Amidst what is, at least for a century, an unprecedented public health calamity, the alleged national leader of the alleged United States has declared himself supreme ruler.
For good measure, he played a bat-shit self-aggrandizing campaign ad attacking the press when doing so. Which is both odd and not odd. Because Herr Trump has a wink wink love-hate relationship with the media. Mostly, the media created this monster by, as our friend Professor Lemieux says, covering an election for the chief executive of the United States as if it were for fourth grade president.
But I can tell you that in my over 18 years of blogging, this is exactly my observation of how it is: the media doesn't play fair. EVER. They create narratives, and then they pick winners. And the public crosses the media on this less often than we would hope. Needless to say, a simple media narrative could finish Trump off TODAY, if the media were serious about being done with him and not serious about enabling and protecting him. It's a simple narrative, really. "OMG, Donald Trump is clearly working too hard to have come up with such an unhinged statement; is he getting proper medical care? Where is his dear wife Melanoma Melania to take care of him? Is Vice President Pence up to the job of being acting president as the President appears ill." You see where I'm going? Instead, we simply have another perfectly ordinary policy dispute between a perfectly ordinary president acting in perfectly ordinary good faith (ignore the 25,000 and counting dead Americans) while he still can't figure out how to personally profit from Covid-19 testing and hence tests remain largely unavailable, and even a pandemic that has literally shut down the American economy is no reason at all to let up on whatever administrative or logistical bullshit is keeping these tests unavailable.
And so, his desired Easter "reopening" of the American economy foiled by those awful scientists, Herr Trump has nominated an entirely not nepotism driven panel that includes his daughter and son-in-law to "reopen the economy" (that he destroyed in the first place), although now that enough comedians have torn this nonsense to shreds, apparently, they won't be.
Meanwhile, in what might be the opening shots of another American revolution or civil war (as if!), two sets of governors (NY, NJ, PA, DE, CT, RI and MA in the East and CA, OR and WA in the West) have announced that they will be seceding from a country stupid and batshit enough to have a system where Donald Trump could even become its leader and joining Canada coordinating their efforts as to when to relax mandatory social distancing measures on a regional basis, rather than as ordered by Der Führer.
For my part, as a 57 year old male in the sweet spot of coronavirus lethality, I have not strayed from more than 100 feet from my own house for several weeks now (that, to retrieve trash cans after they are collected and migrate up or down the block, or to retrieve mail or packages).
If we're lucky, very lucky actually, a vaccine for this might be available by sometime next year. Meanwhile, it is suggested by Harvard researchers that (at least some) social distancing measures might be necessary until 2022.
Meanwhile, because of a "slow" national response and "supply chain issues," personal protective equipment is still in critical short supply here (our country really can't do much of anything anymore except successfully bullshit itself.)
And so, here we are. You'll find me here in Stately Dog Manor, along with Mrs. TD and the Pup. We'll be here all week, folks. And possibly held over for a while.
March 15, 2020, A Journal of the Plague Year
I could also call this "Beware the Ides of March." As I sit here in New York at the moment, the third Covid-19 related death among over 700 cases in the state. Barely 72 hours ago, Familia Talking Dog returned from Spain, where coronavirus cases shot up in the four day period we visited, and now include 288 deaths and over 7,000 confirmed positive cases now. The Loquacious Pup was doing a semester abroad there (and in Paris-- that ain't happening), and so, instead...
To be honest, we were scheduled to return today, and then we changed it to yesterday, but only the President's insane incompetence in announcing a blanket travel ban that included American citizens spurred us into leaving immediately (at some expense). And we took the Pup with us. And so we're home.
We were waved through customs with only a cursory inquiry about visiting Italy (which we didn't, of course). And so, we weren't told to, but we will "self-isolate" to the extent possible for 14 days-- at least keeping our "social distance" (and working from home).
The Clown Prince in the White House continues to pretend everything is normal, including never-ending psychotic press conferences intended to drive up the stock market.
We have come to the nightmare that our entire press corps (and of course the GOP Establishment) just found hilarious: a genuine crisis and an inept, self-serving clown at the helm-- and the fuckers are going to do it to us AGAIN. But it's FUNNY, right? The, ahem, President, IS ENTERTAINING, right? And Hillary was so... cackly... and so... BORING.
Sitting in my self-imposed make-shift quarantine WITHOUT SPORTS TO WATCH, I just shake my head. It will take a miracle for this not to end in an unbelievable number of casualties.
February 29, 2020, Happy Leap Day
February 29th only comes once every four years, so I thought I would take this opportunity to sneak a post in on this "extra" day.
Right now, the world is convulsing through a COVID-19 viral outbreak that has not yet been termed a "pandemic," but today, marked the first death within the borders of the U.S. Naturally, the President did what he always does and lied, first suggesting to one of his Nuremberg rallies that the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by Democrats to discredit him (which he walked back... eventually), and then misidentifying the victim as a woman.
And so, as the shit-show goes on and decisions must be made (Mrs. TD and I have travel plans coming soon... or do we?), and the worst stock market drop since the financial crisis last week fueled by the President's endless bullshitting at a moment of extreme crisis from the pandemic may continue to play out, as a global pandemic (centered in China no less) would, of course, do wonders for the global economy.
Meanwhile, what if they ran a primary in the middle of this, in say, South Carolina, and Joe Biden were to win big? It might make the Democratic primary battle really interesting all of a sudden! Anyway, while I am ideologically liking Sanders and Warren, I am much more concerned with defeating Mr. Trump, and the headwinds Sanders (or Warren) would face from a Democratic Establishment more concerned with keeping their big campaign donors happy than with keeping their voters happy concern me to the point where I am favoring Mike Bloomberg, who could, hopefully just buy the Presidency, or Mr. Biden should Bloomberg not catch fire on Super Tuesday and beyond.
Finally, I briefly watched coverage of the conclusion of the Tokyo Marathon, which was actually cancelled for non-elite runners.
Seems wise not to bring in 38,000 people from all over the world to a potentially infectious area; I observed most of the race officials in surgical masks. Unless the COVID-19 virus calms down by May, I don't see how they are going to pull off the Olympics there. Just saying.
While it's nice to have one extra day, the exception would be one more day when Donald Trump is President. But this one was baked into the cake. Alrightie then. Happy Leap Day.
February 16, 2020, Apocalpyse pandemic now?
The novel corona virus originally centered in Wuhan, China now exceeds 71,000 cases world wide and over 1,700 deaths. Supposedly there are about 15 cases in the USA.
The ordinary seasonal flu has infected over 250,000 people, with an estimated 14,000 deaths for the 2019 to 2020 flu season.
I was wondering about some other things going on. In the most recent full year for which data is available (2018), world AIDS deaths were around 770,000.
Meanwhile, in the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, since the outbreak began in August 2018, there have been 3432 total cases resulting in 2249 deaths.
Just for the hell of it, the most recent year for which complete data is available, for 2017, the USA recorded 39,773 total gun deaths.
While I do lay out a number of unusually American statistics in my chapter "Death And/Or Taxes" in Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism, among the top ten things Americans die of are fascinating, including medical errors, suicides and accidents, for example.
I don't mean to discount the seriousness of the "COVID19" virus or downplay the suffering it is causing. I merely mean to point out that it is operating in an environment where other things are, at least for the moment, more lethal both worldwide and even within the United States (which, after all, is the only thing Americans care about). My broader point is that there is an agenda out there in telling us what we are supposed to be concerned about; and maybe it makes sense, and maybe it doesn't make sense. I don't quite know about this one.
I just note that any country that goes ahead and elects Donald Trump as its president is a country that has already been fucked with in terms of the things it is told. And what we are told about diseases and threats and death tolls is no exception.
January 29, 2020, Reality bites - Jan. 2020
And so we come to a day or two of "Question Time" or something during the third ever "impeachment trial," in this case of "President" Donald John Trump, when the issue of "calling witnesses" may have spun beyond Senate Majority Leader Mitch "Dick Turtle" McConnell's control, at least for the moment. Although, I tend to believe (1) there won't be any witnesses called and (2) the impeachment "trial" will be promptly terminated by a majority vote entirely along party lines, because (3) we aren't remotely a "democratic" country (if we ever were).
So I thought this would be a pretty good moment to step back a bit, and look at WTF is going on here. The impeachment as it is now configured is about Trump's call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky which has now spun into a scandal leading to impeachment. Hilariously, both Trump and Zelensky played t.v. characters prior to their current role, failed conman and huckster Trump pretending to be a successful businessman and Zelensky pretending to be [wait for it] the President of Ukraine. So far so good, except that Ukraine is engaged in a bloody fight with Russian-backed insurgents in the Eastern part of its country (you will recall that Russia already annexed Crimea, previously part of Ukraine), and Ukraine receives significant American military aid to assist in that fight. It is really not disputed that Trump was all ready to "impound" or block that aid, at the time he spoke to Zelensky last August. And so, Trump had his call, asking for "a favor" from the Ukrainian president, that favor being an investigation that would implicate former USA Vice President and Democratic front-runner Joe Biden and his son Hunter (who at one time worked for a Ukrainian oil company called Borisma). This favor implicitly involved a hostage situation with the military aid, the ransom being announcement of an investigation involving the Bidens. This seems pretty clear, whether or not the words "quid pro quo" (with a silent "Clarice") were actually uttered.
So far so good. Despite Trump's own not-at-all-credible protestations, these facts really aren't in dispute. The "witnesses" that seem to be the basis of the (unfortunately) process based Democratic prosecution of Mr. Trump would more or less further corroborate what I just said, but again, I will go out on a limb and say "so what?"
For his part, Trump is hoping that polls that show as many as 55% of the public favoring his removal from office won't really matter because those aren't the numbers in a few critical swing states (PA, MI, WI, OH, FL, NC and IA, for example), and he may even be right about that.
The fundamental problem would seem to be how American voters make their decision as to which candidates to vote for (to the extent their votes even matter given the absurdity of an "Electoral College" that turns one person one vote on its head), and far more disturbingly and importantly, whether to vote at all. It is hard to argue with the voters when the harsh reality is that they are mostly an irrelevance to actual policy (i.e., the USA is more of an oligarchy than a democracy.) Or to the point, the rich will never permit their money to be taxed away for social programs in "our democracy", unless they also perceive a benefit to themselves. Nonetheless, in terms of basic economic and social safety net programs (including protections for workers, the environment, children, racial minorities, etc.), as imperfect as they are, the Democratic party tends to favor a broader spectrum of society, and the Republican party tends to favor the narrower interests of business, particularly big business.
And so we come back to why people vote the way they do. It is a truism that "culture wars" issues (gun control, abortion and gay marriage being among the more frequently discussed) cause the regional divides between "coastal elite" states (generally the East Coast north of Virginia and the entire West Coast except for Alaska) favoring Democrats, and the South and large parts of the Midwest and Mountain West favoring the Republicans. Donald Trump's election also causes one to wonder how much pure racism is a decisive factor in this as well. But I still think something more fundamental is going on, at a molecular level.
And then an image popped into my head. A double image, actually, a front and back. As a marathoner runner, I get to run in places that few others are permitted to be, at least as pedestrians. One race that permitted such an unusual view is the Disney World Marathon, run each January. I happened to run it about eight years ago. A number of things come to mind (besides running it in Mickey Mouse ears instead of my usual Brooklyn Dodgers cap); many runners were in some kind of Disney branded attire. The course winds through each of the four theme parks that together constitute "Disney World," being in no particular order, "the Magic Kingdom," "Epcot," "Disney's Hollywood Studios," and "Disney's Animal Kingdom Park." But as a preliminary matter, the course starts on a service road which is a good walk from the Epcot parking lot where runners are asked to park, and in the middle of the night which, even in Florida, can be cold in January. And it seems to be in some kind of forest (I would say "mangrove forest," but I really have no idea). Anyway, it's got over 26 miles to cover, and you can only wind around the theme parks so many times, so needless to say, most of the course is on these service roads, and so you get to see things like maintenance areas and waste treatment (including water and sewage treatment) facilities applicable to the theme parks, and in short, the "infrastructure" that few if any regular park goers will encounter.
The more "memorable" part of the course (aside from opportunities to stop and take selfies with Disney characters, who are all over the course) is the portion of the course that takes you into the famous theme parks themselves. And obviously, running through Cinderella's castle (in the Magic Kingdom) is cool, as is running through the main parks at a time when most of them aren't even open to the public yet. But what I remember of particular relevance to this discussion took place, appropriately, in Disney's Hollywood Studios park. And specifically, it was because the course went behind a street scene and, unsurprisingly, what appeared to be complete buildings on the "street" side of the scene were revealed in actuality to be nothing more than supported facades when viewed from behind. Similarly, the second story on "Main Street USA" (in "Disneyland," at least, though I think it applies to the one in the Magic Kingdom") is only about 5/8 or so of a full story high, because the eye adjusts to forced perspective.
And so here we get to the ultimate irony of American life, and yes, it is of critical important to the engineering (and yes, that's what it is) of our "democracy" (which, as you know, is a "sort of" democracy). Disney World, were it a country, would be the most visited country in the world, at least by Americans; in any event, it is, by far, the most visited vacation spot on Earth. Obviously, it is "easier" to take a domestic flight of a few hours to Florida to see cleverly constructed imitations of the world's treasures (as in "Epcot center," which is literally that) than to take longer and more expensive trips to see "the real thing" (which include other inconveniences, such as the United States being the only industrial country without mandatory paid vacations). But Americans are trained not to even want the real thing: the fake is so much more "authentic" to Americans (seeing as it is designed with American stereotypes in mind).
Flash forward to our current circumstance. An actual "reality television star"- Donald J. Trump, a man playing a businessman on a t.v. show (because his actual record as a businessman ranged between "bad" and "disastrous") and the only man ever elected President without either holding government office or at least possessing significant military experience- has assumed the Presidency, largely on the strength of the American media having selected him because it and it alone decided that the "reality star" was "entertaining" and would be good for "ratings" (if, ironically, very bad for the actual bottom lines of television networks and entities dependent on paid advertising.) And, given that American presidential elections have been reduced to bad theater (think visits to diners in Iowa and New Hampshire and "man in the street" interviews with folksy sounding people holding guns and wearing cowboy hats) as played out in a small handful of "swing" states, there is a strong possibility that these swing state voters will still back him, despite the distaste of an absolute majority of most people in the USA. Amazingly, the bad theater of Donald J. Trump addressing rallies of paid supporters wearing "MAGA" hats (with his unique off the cuff "two minutes hate" stretched out to a couple of hours of emotional crescendo in the best Joseph Goebbels style presentation he can muster) continues to appeal to a still large, albeit aging (and mostly white) portion of the American demographic.
Did I have a point? I never know anymore; I have suggested in my own recently published book, "Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism," that one of the great "advancements" was "engineered consent" as conjured up by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays ("father of public relations") who pioneered much of what we now understand advertising to be. For full context, one can also understand "political framing" as discussed in my own interview with linguist and expert on the subject George Lakoff.
Simply put, we are being primed for suicide, and our instinctual responses, based on being hominids out on the African savannah or the MesoAmerican jungle or some other survival situation much closer to reality than the modern electronically mediated "life style," are being played back against us for the purpose of enslaving, and as necessary, destroying us. And not for some sinister "Illuminati" like cabal, but simply for profit (and power). The beneficiaries of this arrangement are even people we are well aware of, to whom we willingly hand our most intimate personal details. The rich and powerful seized on the government-created Wild West platform created by the internet and world wide web (yours truly began this here blogging adventure in September 2001, after the "internet bubble," but before FaceBook and Twitter, and in the early days of Google, Apple and Amazon). And, with "smart phones" perfected, most First World-ers now walk around spending most of their lives staring at bouncing electrons on tiny screens. I am guilty of this too, so I won't get all holier than thou about it.
In short, our instincts are played against us by a technology believed by many to be as addictive as cocaine. We get our dopamine rewards (or whatever the mechanism is) from our little screens, which in turn, we use in lieu of reality, even as reality often ends up hitting us at about 45 miles per hour.
So, back to Disney. The Disney "imagineers," given how much money they make from the whole damned thing, could, quite easily have built their city-scape (or "Main Street USA") to a perfect one to one scale, probably using vintage materials and vintage artisans to do it! But they have determined two things: (1) they do work for a profit-making company, and it is much cheaper both to build and to maintain simulacra of buildings than it is actual buildings (and besides, the real "views" of it will all be from outside anyway), and (2) the modern human mind has been primed to appreciate the fake more than the real, especially when we get into the realm of "experiential." It shouldn't come as a surprise that virtual reality technology companies are already in the tens of billions in terms of market capitalization. As they get their game on, people will prefer their products to actual reality too (if they don't already).
And so here we are. I mean to neither underplay nor overplay the importance of the national election in just over 10 months time: quadrennial American elections are always important. But Donald J. Trump does seem a special case: as I predicted he would, Trump not only won but engaged in the unchecked right-wing feeding frenzy I knew he would. If he wins a second time, he will be entirely unchecked by the prospect of another election. I'll stay away from implications of whether or not he is an actual Russian asset or merely a fan-boy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but he is an unabashed right-winger, and has introduced racism, bigotry, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and xenophobia (particularly directed at people of color) in a way we haven't seen here at the national level in perhaps a century or more.
So... it seems important. And so, the fact that much of the public's understanding of all reality, as well as political reality in particular, is mediated through the "experiences" they have while staring at the bouncing electrons on their electronic devices, images that can literally alter the depiction of reality at the speed of light, and present platforms that have a staggeringly bad record of presenting false information, seems even more troubling. While my own "Libtard" credentials are, I hope, pretty solid, I am not making a partisan point here; I am suggesting only that opinions should have some bearing in reality, whether or not I agree with those opinions. And in 2020, it seems, many if not most opinions... aren't grounded in reality.
And it seems that a moment when the USA's White House has an unprecedented "disruptor" like Mr. Trump, whose response to well-established norms is to ignore and/or smash them, the national decision (even via the highly flawed and disjointed one via the obsolete and affirmatively anti-democratic and as of 2020, at least IMHO, extremely dangerous electoral college) should at least be based on actual reality, and not on what bouncing electrons tell us reality is.
Sermon over. Go back to your regularly scheduled electronic devices.
January 11, 2020, Age of Majority
It seems fitting that my first post of the new decade will be GTMO related. For those who still care (which I hope is you), today marks 18 years since the opening of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, still home to forty men (some of whom were captured as boys). All Muslim. All foreign nationals. As usual, there will be a protest across the street from the White House. God willing, I will be there, as I have for the past several years. Andy will be there; hopefully, the Stately DogMobile will do the job along the various turnpikes, parkways, etc.
In an age of Donald Trump, where thousands of children are being ripped away from their parents often after being thrown in cages for months or years, with immigrant bashing, and assorted hate crimes up off the chart (especially anti-Semitism), with income/wealth inequality soaring, with environmental, health and safety regulations trashed, etc., etc., why is Guantanamo still important? Because it remains "the grand daddy of them all": the symbol of detached power. If we can do it to these men, we can do it to you, or to me, or to anyone.
Again, God willing ("Inshallah"), by this time next year, I will have published something like "Guantanamo at 18," giving it my particular treatment (akin to "Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism"). And maybe we will all understand just how important this is.
For those able to join us, see you at the White House! For everyone else, happy January 11th.
December 31, 2019, Party like it's 1979
As I am writing this, late afternoon New Year's Eve, I understand that various Iraqi militias allegedly linked to Iran have stormed the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, a $750 million behemoth. I understand that embassy personnel are trapped in a so called safe room there, and 100 US Marines are on their way.
The President used the occasion of this crisis (which he caused through ill advised bombings of these militias in the first place and his withdrawal from Obama's nuclear deal with Iran for no reason other than Obama is Black) to send hateful tweets about Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and liberals in general, and to play golf in Florida.
Is the President wagging the dog? He might want to distract from his slow motion impeachment, which hasn't formally been referred to the Senate because Majority Leader McConnell gave away his plans to rig the 'trial' to be devoid of witnesses or written evidence, presumably as demanded by the President, but opposed by over 70% of the American public. Or are we just flailing: the worst fear of the inexperienced TV businessman coming to a frightening realization, with only his unnatural relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin keeping the world from blowing apart, although the US standing in the world will be dramatically reduced.
I will just say this looks awful. The polarized America will not let the corrupt and incompetent President be removed one minute before 20 January 2021. So we have to survive another year, and a real crisis is here.
I look back and wish I had worked harder to get Hillary elected. Just to avoid what we are now staring at. Next time, we don't have the luxury of distaste for the Dem candidate.
I said at the beginning of the year I had a number of projects planned, and I managed to publish Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism on the Amazon platform. You can even get it there. I will try the same for GTMO at 18... as insane as that thought is. Maybe my 59th marathon will finally be a Boston qualifier. Or an urban gardening book. Or not.
Idle thoughts for suddenly serious times. Best wishes for the coming year and the coming decade.
December 23, 2019, Could it be Festivus again?
Yes, yes, 23 December only comes once a year, friends. Don't know what to say. In what I will just call incredibly irony, the President lashes out at the evils of... windmills. Apparently, you would go to jail for killing a bald eagle, whereas windmills kill billions of them.
There is definitely the possibility of a Captain Queeg thing going on with the President, as impeachment takes its toll on him as his own supporters' insistence on a sham trial designed to acquit him as opposed to an actual trial designed to acquit him seems to be taking him to... well... crazy town. Even if I think it's all a Vinnie the Chin Act.
Don't know. Don't care. That a man this awful in every single way, despite being impeached, might be reelected President because he is a big enough racist and has stoked up white supremacist demonstrations as well as violent attacks on synagogues, schools, shopping centers... tells me more about how awful the USA is than even I care to admit (and I wrote a whole book about how awful it is).
2019 is coming to an end soon; in 8 days time, we will be out of "the teens" and into "the twenties" of this 21st century. While I expect to go another full year with this President, if we have to go four after that, we are done as a country, and quite likely, as a species. Something called the United States will doubtless persist for a while, but it will be a miserable totalitarian racist entity, full of hundreds of millions of poor people and tens of thousands of rich people who own everything. With bad taste as its national image.
So... happy Festivus. Hope the remainder of your holiday season is as joyous as circumstances permit. And we can talk about next year. When Guantanamo turns 18.
December 13, 2019, History?
The House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against Chancellor Drumpf. Reichsfuhrer McConnell has vowed to rig the proceedings to ensure.an acquittal. This will permit Democrats to resume bashing Senator Warren for suggesting that Medicare for all is possible without a massive tax increase.
In other words, happy Friday the 13th.
November 16, 2019, Happy birthday
To Mrs. TD!
October 22, 2019, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM- it's ON!
I am pleased to announce that Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism: It's Not You, It's Just America Being America is now available for pre-order on Amazon, per that link. Release date for the kindle version is Hillary's birthday (and mine)-- Saturday, 26 October. I hope to have the paperback ready to go by next week-- but just a different set of logistics. I promised you all a literary project- or even more than one- at the beginning of the year, and by God, here it is.
(Yes, that means that I am ghost-writing for my friend, Donald J. Putin. LOL.)
Maybe there will be another literary project before the year is out. Or maybe there won't be. Don't know.
Also, finished marathon #57 in flat sea-level Atlantic City on Sunday-- almost the same time as the mountainous Adirondack Marathon a few weeks ago.
Well, the Drumpf shit-show rolls on. Some extremely damaging testimony against Drumpf by diplomat William Taylor-- but somehow, Drumpf can't seem to be accountable.
Well... shit's bigger than him. As I tell you... in the book!
September 23, 2019, Better late than never
I am five days late in noting what is now the 18th anniversary of this blog. At this point, it is safe to say I am keeping it up as much out of habit as anything else, what with the more or less once a month posting pattern ever since my "friend" Donald J. Putin began kicking ass and taking names on Twitter.
One feature of this blog has been my occasional reporting on my efforts at distance running. At 56 years old, it is likely that my fastest days (which were never fast) are well behind me. As such, I look for other things, like quirky goals of various kinds-- 50 states, 7 continents, 100 marathons, whatever. Hence, yesterday I completed my 56th marathon in this, the year I am still 56 years old, at the Adirondack Marathon in Schroon Lake in upstate New York. Regular readers are vaguely familiar with "my usual range" and this was on the slow side, but "in the range." I realize significant time improvements will require significant weight loss, which I find difficult to do with a full-time job. But hope springs eternal. I will just say that this race took particular focus, as the first 10 or 11 miles were virtually all uphill, and at times, extremely steep at that. So after the legs and lungs were destroyed, I also had to contend with "the sweep bus"-- a vehicle customarily behind the last runner-- following most of the way as runner after runner behind dropped out, leaving me to be the last runner (presumably not time-wise in the ultimate standings as quite a few started early).
That said, while my first and still fastest was done at age 19 in North Carolina, in 2001 at the age of 38 I began running marathons as an adult. Later that year, I began this blog, a week after 9-11 as it turned out. Over the years, I have kept up both activities, with whatever sense of accomplishment comes with each. The marathons alone total in excess of 1,400 miles (I have run many other races, both shorter and longer, but never stopped to add them up), and I am sure I am well over 1400 posts to this blog in its current Movable Type form.
Guantanamo Bay has been open since the beginning of 2002. My college classmate Barack Obama became a two-term President of the United States, only to be replaced by a media-created circus clown. The USA has been "at war" since all but about a month of the existence of this blog (and that first month was the immediate aftermath of September 11th). Lots of personal stuff; TD Dad passed away around four years ago; the rest of TD Familia is carrying on, albeit 18 years later (including the Loquacious Pup who, adding 18 to her age at the time we started this... is now 19).
Mostly, I saw a world in crisis at the start of this project in the aftermath of 9-11 fail to extricate it from that crisis. We can add climate change to all the other problems of the world; I see no cause for optimism, as there seems to be a catastrophic failure of imagination, that the overall system that isn't making anyone happier (let alone happy) is going to end up killing all of us so that a few rich people can hold on to extraordinary privilege does seem... catastrophic.
OTOH, in Jewish lore, the number 18 Is an alpha-numeric Hebrew code spelling "Chai" (the Jewish or Scots "Ch" rather than the English as in chimney); Chai of course means life-- a lucky number often used as a multiple for cash gift giving. Because of a 2012 cancellation (climate change again) in a few weeks I will run my 18th NYC Marathon, an active streak that puts me in the top 200 in that category for that event. So... there is always a basis for hope. Somehow. Young people are generally not assholes, unlike many old (especially white) people.
So, at the end of the day, we'll just keep on keeping on. "Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism" should be coming out in October-- perhaps not as early as I would have hoped, but I expect it too to come to fruition while I am still 56.
September 11, 2019, Happy 9-11
Ordinarily I love to rant on this date, and would have done so earlier in the day. My earlier technical problems (a firewall at my IP address) have been helpfully resolved by my hosting company, and so we are back! Boo ya!
I have My friend Donald J. Putin has a lengthy diatribe over on twitter, which is lengthy by twitter standards but not by those of this blog.
Bottom line, it has been 18 years since 9-11. The damned World Trade Center twin towers were only open for 28 years. And yet, once the next ten years come and go, I predict that we will still go through the motions of a public ceremony devoted to private mourning as a national tragedy that led to insanely expensive (and end-of-American-empire inducing) wars that, in the end, have only made us less safe in every way. 18 years since the morning I got to watch the events from a ringside seat a block north, and then walked home through the surreal lower Manhattan environment and over the Manhattan bridge. Loquacious Pup wasn't even two. BTW, the most obvious manifestation of those events, a forever prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is still up and running despite holding only 40 prisoners, and get this, the trial of the alleged 9-11 perps is scheduled for January of 2021. Of course it will proceed as scheduled. HA!
I don't know what else to say, so let me make it easy: the terrorists won. We deliberately killed ourselves. Any dispute as to that was eliminated with the election of Malicious Circus Clown and presumptive Russian intel asset Donald J. Trump as President of the United States simply out of massive personal pique and media malpractice in deliberately relying on stolen Russian information (stolen from DNC email servers) but not attributing them to stolen email servers, while giving said presumptive Russian asset a complete and total pass for his lifetime of personal corruption and incompetence. Bi-partisan advancement of neo-liberalism so that elite financial professionals profited at the expense of the lifeblood of everyone else on Earth has finally caught up to everyone (at least 4 out of 5 Americans living paycheck to paycheck), and enough Americans said "fuck it," even if that meant a known clown and probable traitor.
Well then.
Much of the current terminal state of the American Empire is the subject of Donald J,. Putin on American Exceptionalism: It's not you, It's just America being America, which should be available early next month (I hope). (Wait, WUT? Did you just use the sanctity of 9-11 to advertise yourself?)
Alrighty then. As we often do, we turn it over to the Cheneys.
