I guess it was the trombone.

I was a band nerd when I was growing up in the ’70s.  I wasn’t just a garden variety, run of the mill band nerd though; I was the special kind of band uber-nerd who plays the trombone.  I wasn’t the kind of trombone player who can pull it off and make it seem like a cool or at least marginally socially acceptable thing to do, either.  There was a kid in my 9th grade class named Theo who could absolutely pull that off.  I was definitely the other kind…picture a tall, exceedingly thin and gangly dork with big bushy hair and a seemingly guileless demeanor, who skulks around his high school in that kind of self-conscious manner that suggests perpetual embarrassment about everything, but especially about that odd-shaped trombone case with the long round end and the flanged other end.  That was my 9th grade year.  I was new to the school, and freshly transplanted from Cincinnati to New Jersey.  So add a touch of culture shock to the mix, too.

I did find a niche eventually, and some very good friends along the way; and we did some very cool things as a result of being in the band.  We marched in the Cherry Blossom parade in Washington, D.C. and in a marching band competition at the U of Penn. football stadium; and the jazz band played in a competition at the Berkeley School of Music in Boston, and played a midday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Center in NYC.  We also met Maynard Ferguson and Doc Severinson at jazz clinics, which was very cool.

What does that have to do with today? This: I have been in kind of a blue funk over various issues for the last couple of weeks.  I don’t know if it is midlife crisis material (I had that at age 25, in a series of episodes involving illicit substances, undercover FBI employees, a felony conviction and being a guest of the state; all of which I will write about in due time).  There has just been an element of uncertainty about many aspects of my life, and I have been really struggling for traction.

On my drive home today after work, I felt one of those undefinable angsty bubbles welling up deep inside my chest.  Popular children’s author J. K. Rowling describes characters called “Dementors”, which by their simple presence suck the very life force out of their victims, leaving them drained and bereft of spirit and hope.  Dementor was my copilot on the drive home tonight.  Winston Churchill called it “the Black Dog”…a wave of depression that is not necessarily “about” anything, but just lurks and looms and colors your thinking dark.  The one tonight was sudden onset and very intense, and was accompanied by a physical weariness in the limbs and chest.  I was thinking about heading straight to bed to sleep it off, when my cell phone rang…

It was my stepdaughter, and without preamble she asked, “Do you have a trombone?”  As a matter of fact, as a former trombonist I do have one, and said as much.  When I asked why, she said it was a long story.  I got home, and found out that it is surprisingly easy to misplace a trombone case in our house.  I also found my mood strangely buoyed by the addition of a goal, however oddball and out of the blue it was.  We looked in the basement, the garage, and several other places, and finally found it upstairs in one of the bedrooms.  I assembled the ol’ slushpump for the first time in several years, and played a Bb scale.  Little rusty there.  Tone sounded, in Leo Kottke’s words, like a goose fart on a muggy day.

The story was, my stepdaughter, who by the way is an extremely gifted pianist, had tried out for the high school jazz band.  Her background is not in jazz, and she did not make the cut.  The band director then mentioned that all his trombone players were graduating and asked if any of the incoming students wanted to try out for their spots.  She raised her hand instantly, figuring (I suppose) that the rest of the minor details such as getting a trombone and learning how to play it and whatnot, would all take care of themselves at some future point.

That future point being the phone call to me, which led to a feverish search for the long-dormant instrument.  All of which subsequently led to me offering some rudimentary instruction on trombone assembly and slide positions and embrochure and the Bb scale and finally, the proper use of a spitvalve.  That activity seemed to forestall the personal emotional slump I had been in just minutes before, which was an unexpected bonus.  And it felt kind of cool that the same trombone that led to so many interesting and fun experiences in my life, may yet play a similar role in the formative experiences of a lovely and talented young lady.  I hope she enjoys it.

Peanut Noir

Today at work I attended a webex (shared screen) and teleconference meeting with about 90 other people.  The meeting was almost aggressively content-free, and irrelevant to my job or the tools I need to do it.  But it counts toward my development plan, so I was all like whatever and clickety click there I was.  To pass the time, I browsed metafilter.com and from there found a link to a very dark and funny mashup between Frank Miller and Charles Schulz.  Well, here:  http://www.cinematical.com/photos/frank-millers-charlie-brown/1419750/

That loosely inspired the following, but I took it in a little bit different direction (I love productive meetings):

Peanut noir

The silhouette of the small kid with the big round head trudges with resigned determination up the mudslide to the pitchers mound. The rain, the endless rain, pelts the players, but no one has called the game, and no one ever will.  The kid wears a yellow shirt with a black jagged slash like lightning across his scrawny chest.  He eyes the thumbsucking blanket-hugger in the on-deck circle, and thinks about how that kid is sweet on his sister, and he grinds his teeth and thinks melancholy thoughts.  He thinks about the years of therapy, the endless pile of nickels spent on psychiatric bills with the shrieking harridan of a shrink.  He thinks about the years of having his foot get just…that…close… to the sweet spot on the oblate spheroid, only to have that god damn football get yanked away at the last minute.  Every single time, it gets yanked away at the last minute, and he ends up on his ass, feeling like a total chump.  He thinks about the dozens and hundreds of kites tangled up on power lines and trees, with the kite strings macrame’d into an asphyxiating stranglehold around his skinny neck.  He thinks about the years of being a patsy, a dupe, a schlemiel, a scapegoat.  His eyes are narrow slits as he prepares for his wind up.  Maybe this time, things will be different, he thinks.

Overhead, the players hear the drone and sputter and cough of a single faltering plane engine. It is losing fuel and altitude as the pilot returns from another of his endless missions.  That beagle again, with his tattered red scarf and leather brainbucket and shot-up flying doghouse and a hornet’s nest in his cranium, is flying another sortie over the ball field.  He is the lone remaining conscript from some deranged militia, fighting a battle in a war that has been over for almost a century, chasing a phantom enemy through the hollow skies.  No one else can see his arch-nemesis, but no one disputes that the bullet holes in his doghouse are real.  The little bird he meets on furlough is the only thing standing between him and a section eight discharge.

The round-headed kid winds up for his delivery.  He eyeballs the runner on first, a filthy dirt-covered messy little slob, who tags up.  The tinny plinking notes of a broken down piano play a forlorn passage from a long-dead composer, the sound wafting out over the infield.  No Hammond B-3 or mighty Wurlitzer blasting out the strains of “Charge” or “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” for this motley dead-end group of washed-up has-beens and never-weres.  Just the sad-sack strains of yet another Harry Connick wanna-be, sitting crosslegged at his little garage-sale piano, trying to stifle the sting out of his broken dreams of being signed by a big record label, passing the days picking up a little chump change out at the ballpark. “Buck a shot for pop tunes, and a fin for guided tours…”

The pitch floats in a lazy parabolic arc toward home plate, a little high and inside.  Just where the little thumbsucking blanket hugger likes it.  How far has he gotten with my sister, wonders the round-headed kid.   The bat connects and the ball takes off…

…His teammates are long gone, returned to their dreary dismal lives, working on homework for that crazy teacher whose voice sounds like a muted flugelhorn.   The round-headed kid stands there yet, in the rain.  He stands on the mud-slicked pitcher’s mound, his back to home plate, facing the spot at the edge of the field where the ball bounced and then rolled into the woods. He chokes back a tear and sighs, and thinks to himself “there is always football season…maybe this time, things will be different”.

Chili Cookoff at work

For operation feed. I’m going to enter this one. It is a sophisticated blend of flavors and textures that can be easily transformed via the judicious addition of hot stuff, high octane jet fuel, and cleaning products commonly found under your kitchen sink, into an oozing LaBrea tar pit that requires an insurance waiver and a titanium spoon. I’m not going to take it there, this time:
1 lb lean ground beef
1 package spicy Bob Evans sausage
2 medium or 1 large onion, finely diced
1 large green pepper, finely diced
1 jalapeno pepper, finely diced
3 sticks celery, finely diced
1 large can diced tomatos
1 medium can tomato sauce
1 15 oz can light kidney beans, drained
3 T vegetabe oil
2 t cumin seed
2 t salt
1 t black pepper
2 t sugar
2 t Worcestershire sauce
2 t chili powder
1 c water and 1 beef boullion cube (optional)

Heat vegetable oil in large skill on medium-high heat.
Sautee cumin seed for about 1 min.
Place beef, sausage, onion and celery in skillet; brown and drain.
Stir in green pepper and jalapeno.
Add salt, pepper, chili powder, sugar and worcestershire sauce, stir well.
Add tomatoes and tomato sauce, bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer 1 hour.
Add kidney beans.
If liquid has reduced too much, add boullion cube and water and simmer until mixed well.

But I live there…

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  Having the axis of the earth tilted at the exact same angle relative to the sun as it was 365 days (and one second!) ago, is a poor reason for me to get off my figurative ass and change something about myself.  But even if it was sufficient reason, why not just pick the anniversary of some other angle?  Any one is as good as the next.  Or better yet, drop the correlation of self-improvement with our home planet’s location in space.  But anyway, there is one thing I want to try to change.  I want to migrate from here….  (I am pointing at my head) to … here.  (now I am sort of patting my belly).

Here is why:  I always have thought that to understand something, I have to be able to describe it.  Such as with words.  Lots and lots of words, if needed, or at least with obsessively thorough and detailed mental pictures, each of which is apparently worth a thousand of those sons of bitches, ceteris paribus.  What this leads to, if you’re me, is a tendency to not just be able to grok some shit on the quantum, accept it and then move on with mental grace and emotional serenity; but instead to succomb to the paralysis of analysis.  This can lead to getting so bogged down in thinking about something or someone or some event or some memory, that the object of such thought can move on and do whatever the fuck it wants while I am still mentally chewing over some fossilized remembered remnant of the thing or person or event.

I have a feeling that this doesn’t make sense yet, so now I am going to describe it some more.  (Haha, that is called irony).  One way to do that is to remember how one of my religion professors in college described religion as an act of metaphor.  There are two parts to a metaphor, the vehicle and the tenor.  The vehicle is the mechanism by which meaning is expressed, and the tenor is the meaning itself, or I guess you could say the thing that is being meant.  Most religions are rooted in references to things or beings well beyond the grasp of human comprehension, making their God by definition something that cannot be defined, but only believed in.  That leaves religion, when considered by me anyway, bogged down in symbolism, chock full of stuff that stands for what is holy, but is not holy in itself.  I am not really educated in this kind of thing, but I do see people regard objects–man-made ones, at that! And food and drink, in some cases–and hold them in reverence and awe, as if “stuff” in a room, right in front of you, were actually something divine.  Let me veer off the rails here to say that this is a very simplistic recap of a series of conversations I had with a deacon (and a couple of shorter conversations with a priest, who by the way is as deeply spiritual and honest a person as I have ever had the privilege of talking to) during the course of RCIA instruction a few years ago.  Yes, I joined the Catholic church, right before I got remarried, and also a little bit before I learned about that church’s arcane thoughts on annulments and whatnot (”Wait…on your say-so, 10 years of my life and 16 years of someone else’s, along with our respective former spouses’ lives, did not actually happen??  Except mine is different because I came to this party really late, but those years just kind of got squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed or some shit?  OK, so then what the fuck are all these kids doing here, and where did I get that scar??”)  I actually did give it an honest try, and have many times since then, but I can’t fully grok the notion that a wafer and a cup of wine are anything more than symbolic representations.  Once my literal mind gets beyond the shuddering thoughts of cannibalism (and the inner smart-aleck stops thinking shit like “Yum! Krist Krispies, again!”) I still can’t help thinking (see?) that actual human flesh should be chewy and that real blood would not taste so…grapy.

I didn’t mean for this to be about religion.  As you can see I am quite retarded on the subject.  Agnostic in the precise sense as defined by Thomas Huxley, but once or twice in my life an actual believer (not at this moment), would about sum it up.

Try again: many of my life experiences turn into what I would call chewing gum for the mind.  No nutritional value whatsoever, but man does that fucker ever keep busy with memories and conjecture and attempts to define and understand what I have experienced:  replaying, speculating, scripting possible do-overs and alternative responses or behaviors or actions for events that took place way off in the distant past; analyzing the shit out of what I should or shouldn’t have said or did, agonizing over what-ifs and how it could/should have gone differently or better.  Unchecked, this kind of shit could lead to a life that is a tooth-grinding, paralytic waking nightmare.  Good thing for me that this is only a tendency, and not a full time hobby.  Although sometimes at night I wake up with my jaws clenched.

One good thing that has come out of this sort of obsessive tendency is a lifelong love and respect for language; English in particular but also for all the cool shit English has inherited and mostly stolen from other languages.  My prevailing need is to describe shit in order to understand it, to make some order out of it, and what better means to describe shit than via language, hmm?.  I know, there are other ways.  Anyone who is an artist or musician or writer or dancer or athlete, or for that matter anyone who has ever found themselves deeply moved by what artists and musicians and writers and dancers and athletes have produced; knows this on some level.

Anyway, the thing I want to do is not have that analytic tendency so much, the one that gets my mind so bogged down in the artifice of life that it overlooks the beauty in just experiencing it. Analysis paralysis…it interferes with the present, and that is really all we have. It is like this:  if you have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow, you are in a perfect position to take a giant dump on today.

If I were not such a retard I could have just summed this all up with some pithy little ditty, like the bumper sticker that says “Be here now”.  I usually fail at that simple instruction, instead concocting some thousand word mental essay going deep in to what that could really possibly mean.  In fairness to me, most of the time that bumper sticker is surrounded by several dozen other ones of equal or greater (by which I mean lesser) pith and depth.  And bumper sticker-plastered cars like that usually just end up pissing me off.  Pithing me off, too.  Take your god damn ontological salience and get the fuck out of my way, I think at them, really loud, in my head.

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions, but this time I am going to think about it.

Rent-a-git

Sometimes I see things wrong on first glance, and the original misinterpretation is what sticks in my mind, forever.  And sometimes I prefer my first impression of an event or person, regardless of subsequent evidence that the original thought is just stupid or crazy.

First example: On the way to work I pass this place that sells things on eBay for you.  Its name suggests that it should be pronounced “Re-Tag it”, but its logo looks like: reTAGit, with a very stylized font for the TAG part of the name.  For the life of me, I can’t look at that sign without seeing what I saw the first time I read the sign: “rent-a-git”.  I think “Git” is a British synonym for what we over here in the colonies might call a “dumbass” or a “fucktard”, so this makes me laugh inside my head a little each time, and try to imagine scenarios in which I might want to rent one.  Maybe to fill in for me at meetings at work, or to do stuff around the house:  “Oy, come ter order, then…this ‘ere is when we ‘ave a meetin’ ter discuss ther bleedin’ archivin’ rules fer the ‘lectronic communications then, innit?” or “Watcher ffink ’bout some bloomin’ Navajo wite fer the bleedin’ wainscotin’ an’ crown moldin’, then?”  I like the idea of a bunch of obnoxious cockney dumbfucks milling around a holding pen, waiting for the dispatcher to call them up, day-laborer style, for their daily git gig. Giggety git.

Another example is from a misreading of the sign outside the Gordon Food Service outlet store.  The sort-of bolded comic-sans font of their logo makes the sign look like it says “Goddamn Food Service”.  At least it does if you first see it through misty car windows on an overcast day in heavy traffic so you only get a cursory glance at the sign, and you’re retarded like me.  So ever since then, that is what I see every time I pass their store or one of their trucks on the highway.  There goes the goddamn food service truck again.

“Where is that Goddamn Food Service delivery order?”
“I don’t know; maybe we should rent a git to track it down.”

A third, and really stupid example, is from one of the shampoo bottles in the shower at home.  Without my reading glasses, I swear the name of the product on the container looks like “damn clean”.  Closer inspection shows that it is really called “drama clean”, all in lower case like that.  That is stupid enough on its face; in this case I think my version, while stupid in an entirely different way, is actually preferable to reality.

Sign me up!

Bush apologist and cranio-rectal-syndrome poster child Karl “Turdblossom” Rove is writing a book about the Bush presidency, in which Rove ”threatens” to name people who…
“never accepted him as a legitimate president…I’m going to name names and show examples.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/07/rove-to-name-names-and-sh_n_149092.html?page=26&show_comment_id=18600267#comment_18600267

Hmmm…dude might have a shorter list if he includes only people who DON’T think that way.

Haiku

This is my favorite one.  I heard it a few years ago:

I don’t like haiku

Because you can only use

Seventeen syllab

Back in the saddle

I have been away from this for over a month.  Just got a new laptop, another one.  So here goes.

One big thing that happened was that a very good friend and coworker collapsed at his desk one morning, a few weeks ago.  I have known him and worked with him for 16 years.  At abou 9:30 in the morning I heard this unearthly noise which it turns out was him gasping for air and experiencing the incredible pain of an aneurism.  He blew out an artery to the lower part of his brain.  Just  before that, he had looked unwell, and complained of dizziness.  He turned to the guy who sits right across from him and said “I need help”, and then everyone around heard this high-pitched keening as he was trying to breathe, and he collapsed to the floor.  The squad came, and took him to the hospital.  He is still in a coma, and they don’t know yet the extent of the brain damage or whether he will regain consciousness or functionality.   He is about my age.  Scary.

Some other shit has happened, too.  More later.

Train

I seen somethin’ strange once.  It was out west, and it was a little differnt than anything you ever heard of.  I was a little bit kinda down on my luck a few years back and was ridin the rails, thought maybe I could get me some timber work out by Vancouver, or maybe the salmon fleets were hirin’ out of La Push.  One drizzly night me an some other tramps was floppin’ under a cliff next to a rail bridge on the St. Joe river up near the Kootenai valley, waitin for the 3:05 Union Pacific out a’ Coeur d’Alene.  We useta set up a little jungle by the trestle, where the 3:05 had to slow way down on the straightaway just before the bridge took a hard curve across the river gorge.  The engineer was a friendly, an didn’ much care what kinda boardin’ passes we had, or didn’t.

This particlar night, this little eye-talian feller name of Goosheppy had clumb all the way down the gorge and speared hisself a chinook salmon and diced it into a big pot of mulligan over a fire he made by the slagheap from the old tapped out copper mine.  He passed around a mason jar a’ shine and we was all hunkered down under a big lean-to a’ tin siding, outta the rain.  The rain thrummed on the corrugated tin, soundin’ like a endless round a’ polite applause, as we squatted there talkin, lyin’ about the places we’d been, spittin Mail Pouch into the mud, and usin’ fishribs as toothpicks.  Scared Eddie was regalin’ us with stories about his days on a bomber crew in the Eighth Air Force.  Me, I mainly left things out a my stories, but told some, too.

The engineer on the 3:05 usually seen us an’ just waved, ’cause he knew we knew the bulls only patrolled the city yards, an’ never made it out here to the mountains.  Sometimes though he’d  wave us off if he weren’t pullin no deadhead boxcars, or if the switchyard bulls was out to meet a quota by roustin’ some bums off their turf.  His shift ended up at Bonner’s Ferry so this was his milk run.  Sometimes the milk runs sour though for some fellers, I’ll get to that.

Gotta tell you now ’bout Towser, a old three-legged one-eyed stray mutt that kinda adopted me a couple years before, back in East St. Louis.  Ol’ Towser had this uncanny knack for knowin about stuff that’s gonna happen, kinda like the gift a’ seein’ that them brujos has, down in New Mexico.  One time back in West Virginia, I had just helped some ol’ boys clear out a seam of anthracite from a family mine back in some unnamed holler, an’ was camped out by a little crick, when Towser just up an’ lit out, flyin’ up to the top of the ridge, then runnin’ back to yip at me an’ drag my pants cuff to move me along.  He done that back an’ forth a few times, gettin’ more ‘n more wound up each time.  Well not fifteen minutes later, just as I crested the ridge and was wonderin’ what all his commotion was about, a flash flood filled that holler and warshed that campsight right down the gulley, leavin’ nothing but mud an’ trees, all broke up like kindlin’.  That was the first time I seen Towser act up like that before somethin’ big broke loose, but it weren’t the last, I’ll tell you what.

Anyhow, ol’ Towser was our freight train alarm clock, an would usually start yappin’ and run over to the track an get in a kinda half crouch, half point, and then–you could measure it on a clock–we would hear the train comin 5 minutes later.  We’d douse the fire, take down the jungle and wrap up our swag just in time for the trainwhistle to get into earshot.  Towser would clamber right on up onto a flatbed or a box car only after he was sure I was aboard.

Well, I remember this partic’lar night clear as a bell.  After the rain let up the hunters moon showed through in places.  But the sky was still holdin’ water, kinda misty low and cloudy high, with clear spots driftin’ through.  Around 5 til 3, Towser started actin a little peculiar.  He simpered and whimpered and slunk off all bellycrawlin’, ’til he was fast up against the rock cliff on the far side of camp.  He parked his hind end an’ sat there quiet, with his good eye starin up the tracks all furtive an shifty an worried like.   We all heard the whistle about the same time, only this time, instead of a low occasional moan, it was steady an’ shrill, an’ getting too loud too fast.   Just about the time the clouds broke an the moonlight put everything around in a sort of ghostly pale glow, we all seen the train’s headlight crestin’ the cutout that’d been blasted through the last mountain pass before the river.  Towser looked scared, like if he’d been wearin’ pants he’d a wet ‘em, like he wanted to crawl right inside the escarpment.  The train came down the last straightaway, only instead a’ slowin’ like it always did, this time it was pickin’ up speed.  And this time, instead a’ the engineer wavin’ and noddin’ like he usually did, he was starin’ straight ahead with his face pulled back into the grimace of a dead man who found out just at the last minute what was coming.  Well the dead man’s pedal hadn’t got the message yet, ’cause that diesel was ballin’ the jack, just like to flyin’ down that last straight section a’ track.  Last time I seen a face like that feller’s was when I was a young’un, the day a air bubble got in my uncle Willis’ heart an’ it blew up. Well the doc said he was deader’n James Dean before he ever got dragged under the combine.  That combine made a perfect circle in the winter wheat that day, till it run outta gas.  I know Uncle Willis ain’t never been to England, an’ didn’t make them crop circles over there nohow, but that never stopped his inlaws from castin’ aspersions about him ever’ chance they got, god rest his soul an’ ta hell with theirs.

Anyways, back to this one night.  Where the track turns sharp and goes over the river, the train kept goin’ straight that night.  The bridge timbers groaned and creaked and finally snapped, and the train arc’ed out over the river and fell straight down, lookin just like a giant slow-motion rolly-coaster.  Just about the time we seen the red light of the last car blinkin’ kind of calm and lazy into the mist, we all noticed the same thing, the strangest thing of all, that night.  Kind of a eerie hush fell over the river gorge, all’s we could hear was the river an’ the wind, an’ a loon, real far off.  No explosion, no sound of metal crashing into rock, no sparks, no nothin’.  Goosheppy climbed down the gorge an’ came back an’ said there was no train, no wreck, no dead engineer, just the river an’ the rocks ‘an the pale white glow of the moon and the sound of the wind whistlin’ down the gorge through the broken trestle.  He stood there shiverin’ like he was colder’n a well-digger’s ass, an struck dumb to boot.  Me an’ Towser lit out down the tracks in the direction a’ Coeur d’Alene an’ turned south on the first road we got to, where I stuck out my thumb.  Just about the time the sky turned the color of Velveeta, we was gettin’ settled in the back of a Roadmaster wagon driven by a feller who was headin’ toward Amarillo to do some roughneckin’.  Me an’ Towser got work as rodeo clowns the next spring outside a’ Las Cruces.  Me an’ Towser hasn’t been on a freight train ever since…

Thirsty

Black Power vs. White Trash

After watching the Democratic National Convention last week, and from what I have seen of the Republican National Convention so far, I have, for the first time in a long time, a vague and unfamiliar feeling of–what is this?  Is it optimism? Is it hope?–of guardedly positive anticipation, maybe, that this country will soon be on a new and improved trajectory.  No, scratch that.  I am still too cynical for that.  Maybe what I feel is relief, that the socio-politico-economic mudslide we have been riding will soon come grinding to a halt.  Yeah, that’s it:  Not that things are automatically going to get better once the current presidential outfit is out of office, but that the injury they have done and continue to do to the country will stop being exacerbated.  Like the farmer who comes up out of his storm cellar after an F5 tornado, surveys the flattened wreckage of what used to be his farm and his crops, and says “Look, Ma, ain’t it grand the wind stopped blowin’?”  (To paraphrase Bill W., may mad props always be with his legacy).

Amiable Dunce

My personal political cynicism began in 1980, with the Reagan presidency.  I have tried for years to understand the nearly idolatrous cult of hero-worship that surrounds the Reagan legacy, and I just can’t fathom it.  When it was first announced that he had dementia, part of me felt a little bit sorry for him, but part of me was at the same time screaming in my head “No shit Sherlock!  How did that escape everyone’s notice from 1980 on?? His own biographer had to make his story less vapid by inventing characters and other shit about his life!  Seasoned and intelligent foreign policy insiders called him things like ‘amiable dunce’ and wrote books about him called ‘Sleepwalking Through History’, for god’s sake!”  And his defenders assert that he surrounded himself with good people.  And I wonder to them “Who, exactly?”  James Watt was a lawyer for strip miners, who was put in charge of Interior, which put him in charge of our natural resources.  When questioned about global warming, his response was “wear more sunscreen”  Ray Donovan, who dodged questions about legal ties to mob figures, was in charge of Labor.  Nice fit.  And after the inquiry, he asked “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”, to which the logical response should have been “Dude, you work for Reagan! What fucking reputation are you referring to?!?”  And Alexander ‘I am in charge! My finger is on the button, and to hell with rules of succession!’ Haig, whose closet ambitions were laid bare during the drama after the assassination attempt.  And various gunsels, thugs, miscreants and ne’er-do-wells like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and William Casey and Ollie North and Robert McFarlane and John Negroponte and Caspar Weinberger and multiple felons Ollie North and John Poindexter, all of whom basically said fuck the constitution, we’ll do what we want.  Which they did, in the Iran-Contra affair (Hey! Let’s illegally sell these weapons to Iran through Isreal, and then secretly use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, in DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!  C’mon, it’ll be fun!!), the illegal war in Grenada, the illegal war on working people (firing the air traffic controllers), the fuck-the-poor trickle-down Reaganomic policy (which by the way was ultimately discredited by its own architect), the October Surprise (which almost fucked Jimmy Carter out of a legacy altogether, had he not been born with more character and integrity and intelligence in his little pinkie  (and unfortunately far less cutthroat political savvy) than everyone in every Reagan and Bush administration put together had, ever).

He was a god damn puppet!

This is the crowd that surrounded Reagan, cynically taking advantage of his advancing feeblemindedness and decrepitude to advance their megalomaniacal agendas.  And his defenders assert that he was the right man for the times, and I wonder to them “What part, exactly?  The tripling of the national debt? The quadrupling of the national deficit? The subverting of the Constitution, which that smug bastard North had the unmitigated gall to brag about, in front of Congress?  The fact that the U.S. went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation by the time he was done? No, really, which thing do you like about his legacy?”   And they mutter something about the fall of communism.  Which only proves that Mikhail Gorbachev was as much of a sucker for the Reagan charisma as his other worshipers are.  Even so, the Soviet Union’s collapse had as much to do with the expense of (and the resulting social disillusionment of the population, due to) the Soviets’ prolonged military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southeast Asia (holy shit! sound familiar, anyone?) as with some bellicose orangutan from the West showing its red ass about communism.

Like a cross between Mr. Rogers, Don Knotts, and some Macchiavellian nightmare…

My cynicism continued through the G.H.W. Bush years, which were thankfully cut short when he threw ‘92 to the Dems because he had to issue first term pardons to the Iran Contra crowd, which would have basically been political suicide had he continued to be president after that.  No, really.  He would never have been able to survive the scrutiny and investigations of that little saga of corruption and subversion, along with the probing of his role (and likely exploitation of CIA connections) in the October Surprise, that helped get him and Reagan into office to begin with.

Clinton

We did have what the Onion called “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity…characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas” during which Republicans demonstrated a) a willingness to spend $40 million investigating secret blowjobs, and b) that there were really no depths to their venality, and their desire to undermine any foreign or domestic policy achievement he ever tried to make.  They just couldn’t fucking stand that his shit worked, and theirs didn’t.  It drove them fucking nuts, which was fun and a little bit sickening to watch  as it played out on the national stage.

What the hell were we thinking?

Along came W., which got my cynicism kicked into full gear.  In 2000, I thought that the best case was, we had an affable goofball, a slaphappy windbag, a country-club chucklehead, who if not for an accident of birth and the backing of a family who would stop at NOTHING to grab and maintain political power, would have aspired to maybe, at the most, be qualified to be regional manager of some “84 Lumber” stores, with the politial skills to lead local chapter of the Kiwanis or Rotary International.  He brought all this heavy-handed religiosity to the table, along with a great whopping shitload of absolute ignorance.  I used to get involved in these epic on-line debates and discussions about the role of religion in government, with a group of political and religious conservatives.  Both sides and many nuances in between would chime in, but sometimes after carefully debunking “Christian Nation” myth by documenting the Deism of the founding fathers, and their specific intent NOT to make this a Christian Nation;  I would invariably end up trotting out ridiculously inarticulate shit like “No fucking way our country was founded on those principles!  Our country was founded by people getting on little wooden boats and sailing the fuck AWAY from those principles!”  And then I would sputter on my keyboard and wait for my neck veins to subside.

I got what what-do-you-call-it, “outrage fatigue”, along about year 5 1/2 of the current Bush regime.  I mean, was that really the best we could do?  And was that the best the Dems could do, to counter it?  Really?  Al Gore is honorable and well-intentioned, but he allowed the media to steamroll him with the Love Canal and Love Story and inventing the internet stories.  They were–and are–all easily debunkable lies, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK! (fwiw:  Tim Berners-Lee, who actually sort of did invent the world wide web, gave Al Gore all due props for the legislative initiatives that provided for its funding and creation.  If anyone would actually bother to go back and read Gore’s remarks IN THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THEY WERE MADE, they would realize that the whole claim to inventing the internet story is a hoax, originated and perpetrated by the likes of Limbaugh and other screaming douche bags).   And in 2004, the swift boaters succesfully painted John Kerry, more of a war hero than, let’s see, ANYONE in W.’s draft-dodging, military-obligation-shirking, hypocritically-bombastic-jingoism-spewing circle of acquaintances and advisors, as some kind of lying glory-hog.  Again, easily debunkable by the public record, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK!.  Kerry, brave in combat, showed his fucking belly to a bunch of lying assholes.  That illustrates exactly how Clinton, with all his moral failings, survived (and even thrived) politically, in the toxic political climate that marred his years.  He pushed back, every single time.  Even when he was a) lying, and b) wrong. At least he made the other side fight for their victories.

After we got W. the second time, I sort of had to give up being overtly pissed off about it.  I had to give up the epic lunch-table verbal sparring (I work with a bunch of absolute frothing, Reagan nutsack-licking, W-behavior-justifying-no-matter-how-egregious-and-incompetent-the-freshly-perpetrated-outrage-against-common-sense-and-common-decency, Kool-Aid drinking wing-nuts), and watching shit like Crossfire and the Sunday morning bobble-head shows, and reading shit that would make my blood boil.  Every once in a while I will stump them though, by asking what exactly they are proud of or satisfied with, in regard to W’s legacy.  Hahaha.  But all the same, I came to a kind of resigned acceptance that as a country we get exactly the kind of government we deserve, and if the majority of people vote for it (I KNOW!  THEY DIDN’T! AMONG OTHER IRREGULARITIES AND OUTRAGES AND VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND OUTRIGHT FRAUD, THE OWNER OF THE COMPANY THAT MAKES THE GOD DAMN VOTING MACHINES PLEDGED OUT LOUD AND IN PUBLIC THAT HE WOULD DO EVERYTHING IN HIS POWER TO ENSURE THE ELECTION AND RE-ELECTION OF BUSH!  WTF? I MEAN SERIOUSLY!  WHAT.THE.FUCK.QUESTION MARK.EXCLAMATION POINT.  (sigh. deep breath. fuck it. caps lock off.)), then that is what we will be saddled with.   The one remarkable achievement of W’s presidential career is that he successfully pulled off the impossible task of making his father, incompetent boob and bastion of mediocrity that he was, seem like a fucking statesman of genius.  At least, if you grade on the curve.   Note:  I have been a huge fan of the Bush family ever since I found out that their fortune was made by Prescott Bush, who had major holdings and investments in Thyssen Steel and other German industrial concerns that financed and fueled the Nazi rise to power, and that Bush only pulled out when the U.S. froze his assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act in 1942 (THREE YEARS AFTER HITLER BEGAN FUCKING EUROPE, BY THE WAY), and that 60 years later, a civil action for damages was brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz. Nice fucking family, just the kind of people you want in charge of your country.  Fuckers.

Yeah, yeah.  Whatever.

But this Obama guy, he seems like someone I can get enthusiastic about. Based on nothing more than he seems to be level headed, seems to want the job more than Gore or Kerry ever did, and that he already has more respect and credibility in the rest of the world than W. ever had.  And maybe, just maybe, people are finally realizing that the religio-political conservatism that has influenced and dominated public discourse for a generation, represents a consistently wrong, discredited and dying ideology.   I know, maybe I am just drinking some different flavor of Kool-Aid here.  But I am really fucking thirsty, and have been for too long.