Doing It All Over Again

Listening to a debate in the British Parliament today, and apparently the Kool-Aid is flowing across the Pond. The Conservatives are all for sucking up to Trump to get a trade deal. Even willing to, as one lovely Scotsman put it, "Pimp out the Queen." The Liberals objecting to Trumps racism, misogyny, cruelty, ignorance and general distastefulness also mention that he has refused to meet with Prince Charles. Charles is England's Al Gore on the issue of climate change.

As in this country the Conservatives spit out the word Liberal with the usual venom of a Party that defends self interest over the common good. Self righteous and self serving as they are, someone should remind them that Chamberlain was a Conservative. For as much as the stink of humanity learns from the past, one could say of history, as the Bard said of life, "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned

Today in the news:  Trump tells Netanyahu that a one state or two state solution is okay with him; he tells our NATO allies that they will have to put more money toward their national defense or he is going to rethink our commitment; he prepares to put a billionaire crony in charge of “reviewing” our intelligence community – guy’s background is in business.  Through it all he changes his story about Flynn, again.  It seems that the man who lost his trust is now a wonderful man who has been badly abused by the media.  Who hasn’t in Trump’s world? 

Clearly, he is a coward and a fool; an extortionist; a liar and a bully too stupid to know that our intelligence community covert and dangerous as they are will eat his lunch. Mostly he is an embarrassment. 

Finally, you can’t make this shit up.  Neither Poe nor Coleridge every smoked enough opium; neither Asimov nor Carter ever stepped far enough out of the known world to imagine this monster on any level. We are fucked.

In Solidarity

This is why so many men and women continue to support Bernie. By contrast Pelosi proudly displays her hubris, bragging about being "a capitalist" which from out here in the real world, where people actually work for a living, often looks like legalized corruption. The Bible thumpers suck up to a man who worships himself and his wealth only, scream about the immorality of abortion for the sake of LIFE, support war and capitol punishment and deny help to children at risk - ours and everybody else's. Both are repulsive beside Sanders whose faith is in a world of hope born of charity. His vision is based upon the sense that we can't escape our common needs and dependence upon one another. His liturgy is solidarity.

Whether you like Bernie or not, and be clear I don't much give a damn, a reckoning with his decency, his honor and his integrity is unavoidable. Bernie Sanders has been the same guy, standing for the same values since he first appeared on camera being drug off a campus in cuffs.

While the proud, the haughty, the ignorant and the self destructive gaze at themselves in a cracked mirror, both political parties seem to be set on going the way of the Wigs. The Democrats betrayed their base long ago, and continue in denial of that fact. The Republicans have crawled in bed with, to borrow a phrase from another religion's book, the Anti-Christ whom they insisted is their rightly ordained savior and prophet.

It is time for a new paradigm, time to put people over profit. It is time for a leap in consciousness. It is time to stop blaming one another and time to start teaching and learning together for the resistance and in solidarity.

Bernie Sanders

Chaos

Rick Wilson is a very smart man. He is a Conservative. I don't dislike smart, sane Conservatives. I dislike Conservatism. To me it is another way of saying, "I am the center of the living universe." As a life long Socialist, committed to Social, Economic and Environmental Justice I reject the stagnation and selfishness of Conservatism.

Having said this and understanding that there are one or two things in this article with which I take strong issue, it is a must read. I don't say that often, but Wilson has expressed exactly the meaning and the potential of Trump's administration. The end won't be easy or pretty, but this egotistical hump's agenda is not sustainable. It WILL all come crashing down - I suspect sooner, rather than later. The people who voted for him will deny it; the people who didn't vote at all will swear they did; those who promoted and/or supported him will hide their heads in shame and run for cover.

Henceforth, I shall only refer to him as Chaos. I can't and won't bring myself to call him president. That office was vacated on January 20th.

President Chaos Collides With Reality

A Little Lady

Let us speak of a sweet spring evening over 4 decades ago, in a large hospital in a major U.S. city, say Denver, where the staff of the ER takes a  call from the EMS crew in the field that they are bringing in a female adolescent who is hemorrhaging – we will call her Little Lady.  Upon being received in the Emergency Bay it is immediately determined that she is unresponsive due to blood loss and cannot be stabilized nor her hemorrhaging stopped outside of the OR.  Accordingly, Little Lady is taken to surgery where she is found to have sustained a hole in the wall of her uterus and uterine artery.  An emergency, partial abdominal hysterectomy is performed – leaving her Fallopian tubes and ovaries intact – to save her life.  She is taken to the ICU post op where she remains unresponsive. Some days later it is determined that she is in, what we would call today, a persistent vegetative state.  Little Lady is transferred to a nursing home to live out her “life.”  Within the year she dies, covered with bed sores and still unable to respond to her grieving parents.

Little Lady’s back-story isn’t unusual for that time. It is simply this, she “falls” pregnant – pay attention to the language, it matters.  The sperm donor, for he can be called nothing else, refuses to take any responsibility. Why should he, no one can prove “it is his.”  So, our Little Lady goes with two friends, savings from her part-time job in hand, to a butcher working out of a garage in Downtown Denver who will help her “out of trouble.” The “doctor” must have known what he did when he punctured the uterine wall and artery.  He must have, because he took the time to pack her uterus and vagina with dirty oil rags before sending her home to bleed out.  He knew also that he would be gone before the door closed behind her; she wouldn’t fare well without medical attention; no one would look very hard for him and no one “could prove he killed her.”

When Little Lady arrives home, she goes to bed pleading a headache. Mom with the instincts of an excellent parent checks on her once or twice. The last time she finds her lying in a pool of blood that is soaking through the rags and onto her sheet.  You know the rest.

The understanding that Little Lady would have survived today because her abortion would have been safe and clean, doesn’t seem to resonate with the Ryans, McConnells, their idiot president or the arrogant bastard he drug out of Colorado Conservatism to nominate for the Supreme Court.   They would never have the guts to admit what really lies behind their phony Christianity and lame moral superiority, although Trump came close.  They would never say, what I surmise they believe that Little Lady deserved what she got.  She had sex without permission of their miserable moral order.  She got “knocked up” all on her own.  The boy isn’t culpably; boys will be boys.  Remember that all boys want to marry a virgin, even if they don’t mind screwing the asses off of 266 before they find one.  The 266 deserve what they get – butchers, dirty hands, piss filled alleys, oil rags, coat hangers and knitting needles. 

Are we going to stand for this shit again? Can any of us look at a girl or woman in our lives and not say, HELL NO? We must rally around a woman’s right to exercise her health care options in a safe and clean environment.  This filthy, stinking patriarchy, its perverted misogynistic God and hatred of women must not condemn another Little Lady to death.  We must rally around our sisters’ rights as we have rallied around our LGBTQ brothers and sister and our Muslim brothers and sisters.  We must fight.  It is a matter of life and death.  Abortion isn’t going away. Safe abortion is at risk of being taken away.

Resist!