All Lives Mattering Not Much

 IT HAS BEEN EXPLAINED how hollow, purely rhetorical, and meaningless by being obvious is the insipid phrase :all lives matter". The blue sky is blue. The right wing is rife with insipid nonsense, employed to disguise their fundamental cruelty with hollow platitudes and non sequitur nonsense. Their cruelty consists in their, racist refusal to even acknowledge, much less support "Black Lives Matter'. To simply, jingoistically assert that "all lives matter", or that the sky is blue, are both pointlessly true.The dirty little secret is that, in the real world, all lives do not matter much, not much at all. Consider history. consider today's world. All lives matter? Tell that to the eighteen year old doughboy in the stenching, shit filled trenches of World War One, or to the millions of poor dead men who served as cannon fodder for the glory of people like Caesar, Napoleon, MacArthur, and Lee . There were more than one hundred million military dead during the twentieth century. All lives matter, but not much. And consider the fact that the twentieth century, bloody as it was, was per capita less deadly, less violent, than any other. Over the centuries, humankind is becoming less violent, statistically, so maybe there is some hope, some hope that eventually all lives truly will matter. All lives matter, but not much, not nearly as much as the parcels of blood soaked land over which they were fighting. Consider Donald Trump, his benighted, deluded supporters, the ones who sanctimoniously mouth "all lives matter", all the while dismissing and downplaying a deadly epidemic of disease and death, in preference for their vanity, convenience, and personal pride.The word "evil" is inadequate to describe any American president who would lie about and downplay a national disastrous emergency costing hundreds of thousands of lives, merely to preserve hos own popularity among his supporters and to preserve his personal political power. And there is no word sufficiently evil to describe people who would follow such an evil leader with unquestioning, unexamined loyalty, refusing to acknowledge his sheer personal greed, ambition, dishonesty, and evil, and, by virtue of their sustained acquiescence and support, their own.

Why Are We Still "Downplaying"

 MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of the recently revealed interviews with Bob Woodward and the president, in which Trump is exposed as having lied to the people about the severity of the virus, having known of its severity in February, and pretended otherwise, what he lamely calls" downplaying to avoid panic". In fact, Trump has been "downplaying "lying) about Covid 19 all along, all through the spring, summer, and right up to today. Just yesterday, he once again lied, telling the nation that "we have turned the corner" when in fact we have done nothing of the kind, the virus is worse thane ever, still out of control , and now two hundred Americans are dead from, with another one hundred thousand predicted to die by the end of the year. The president continues to lie about Covid 19, as he always has, even though its nightmarish reality is and has been well known to everyone for six months. Why? Obviously to avoid personal blame and to gain reelection, hoping that the voters will not associate the epidemic with him, that's why. Whatever panic the American people experienced has long been manifested in a flurry of mask wearing, home staying, and job losing. The panic cat is out of the bag, so to speak. For months we have been dealing with the virus in a calm, bored, dark, dreadful, sometimes humorous way, what else can we do? So how can Trump possibly claim that he is downplaying the epidemic to avoid panic? In every lie, there is a loophole. As lies are multiplied to avoid discovery of the first lie, inconsistencies emerge, and the entire network comes crashing down as one lie fall son top of the others. We've all been involved in this, we've all seen it happen, usually, embarrassingly, to ourselves. Now, as usual, its Trump's turn. Joe Biden, and the rest of America, ought to be, and probably soon will be asking this president exactly why on Earth he is still downplaying the virus, when, after all the months, there is no panic, never has been any, and never will be. Think about it. This point cannot be made too often or too strongly. Even after six months of Covid 19 hell, long after the word "panic" has lost all relevance in the midst of post panic misery, our president persists in downplaying the disaster, and has initiated or led no effort to combat it. he dismisses it smugly, while holding MAGA rallies with unmasked people packed together like sardines. The only possible reason is that the president, in his world of delusion, wants to deceive us all. Panic is no longer even remotely possible as an explanation for downplaying the virus. We have all long been award of the pandemic disaster, have already panicked, long ago.It is too late for panic, too late for lies, and too late for Trump to escape blame for his sick, twisted thinking and his failure to provide any semblance of leadership. And it is too late, far too late, for the people who still support this criminal president to reclaim any claim to morality, basic human decency, or responsible citizenship.

Hiding Behind Barr

 FOUR SHORT YEARS  and a seeming eternity ago, Bill Clinton bumped into Obama's attorney general, country star Loretta Lynn, on a big town tarmac. Perhaps you remember. They conversed, the former president having walked from his plane to hers. They kept it light and coo, so they said, though she admitted to being a bit nervous. After all, the vast right wing conspiracy was at the time digging deep into  imaginary dirt on wife Hillary, and Obama's A.G. was expected to be neutral, if not actively involved and cooperative. All hell broke loose throughout right wing Clinton hating America. One of my best friends cried foul, I suggested that he might be a bit angry,and he called me a maniac. We haven't been close since. Compare that instance of potential but unverified attorney general corruption to Bill Barr, his relationship to President Trump. The purpose of the attorney general of the United States is to represent the legal interests of the American people, not the president. Supposedly, the A.G. is an independent office, although appointed by the president and approved by Congress. When the Obama attorney general met with Bill Clinton and chatted, America's right wingers assumed, incorrectly, without any evidence, that they were conspiring to derail existing investigations into Hillary Clinton, investigations which eventually yielded nothing anyway. That was the whole extent of corruption within the Obama administration's attorney general's office. that's it. It was truly much ado about nothing. Flash forward. Bill Barr withheld the Mueller report form the people, then issued a four page summary, completely mis- characterizing the report, making it sound as if it exonerated Trump,w hen in fact it did just the opposite. bill Barr has repeatedly looked the other way from Trump's, and assisted the president in obstructing justice by refusing to compel his to release financial documents, and by refusing to investigate Trump's many violations of the constitutional emoluments clause. and just recently, and most shocking of all, the attorney general has assumed the role of Trump's direct attorney, representing him in one of the any sexual molestation lawsuits against him, this one involving Trump's defamation of one of his many accusers. Trump fired his previous attorney general, and appointed Barr knowing full well that Barr would effectively act as Trump's personal legal body guard, representative, and defender, against all constitutional and legal tradition. it is truly appalling. And yet, you hear not a whimper of complaint from the same sanctimonious people who protested so vehemently about a conversation between Bill Clinton and Obama's attorney general. Once again, as always, America's right wing Trump supporters have proven themselves shamefully hypocritical and corrupt. They  should, as usual, be ashamed of themselves, but, as usual, are not, nor will they ever be.

Ending Normal Days

 TWO TOO EXTREME weather events occurred side by side in the great American west just recently which defy logic and meteorological tradition, and make one's hair rise in dread and horror. On the west coast, an extreme heat wave, more intense than any before seen, sent temperatures soaring in big cities into the one hundred and twenties, for days at a time, helping to touch off the apocalyptic wild fires so much in the news of late. Simultaneously, a huge super frigid cold and wet front came plummeting down from the Arctic, and into the Colorado Rocky Mountain zone, which resulted in Denver's temperature plunging from a hot dry one hundred degrees to a snow filled twenty degrees in less than twenty four hours. Talk about a sudden change in wardrobe. The clashing weather systems made for meteorological mayhem out west.The extremity of all this is, as always, exactly in keeping with predictions scientists having been making, and we have been ignoring, for decades. For our conservative friends, there is one silver lining: the air quality in Portland, Oregon, along with the rest of the Northwest, became so choked with soot that it became the worst air on Earth, worse than even huge coal burning cities in India and China. This meant that the Black Lives Matter protests on Portland, which had gone on uninterrupted for four months, were severely hampered, as the participants, covered in soot and choking, were scarcely able to see each other or read their protest signs, let along make an y impression on the rest of the world. This has not been reported in the media, there's too much else to talk about, but the streets of Portland are now wide open, available for conquest by Trump's storm troopers and all many of right wing militia groups and their confederate flags, swastikas,  bibles, and assault rifles. Climate change is here, and here to stay, as are massive wild fires, which are already spreading all over the world, including soon into the Eastern United States. Laughably, tragically, much of the conservative evangelical community will and already has begun to proclaim that all this devastation, all this human misery, is God's wrath and judgment for something utterly unrelated, like, say, the existence of gay people. That, of course, is sheer deranged lunacy, of the usual sort. Meanwhile, a majority of the Republican party still clings to its deranged belief that climate change is either a liberal or Chinese hoax, they are't' sure which, and president Trump goes toddling right along, appointed people who see no problem with the environment to environmental jobs . Many of Trump's evangelical followers still insist that climate change is a moot issue, because, whether or not the climate is actually changing will never matter, because the lord, with fiery chariot and terrible swift sword, is soon to return, and rapture all the believers into heaven, leaving behind the poor misguided liberals and climate scientists who should have kept their mouths and computers shut in the first place, voted for Trump the savior, and waited, along with the elect, for the smell of a fiery chariot lighting up the sky as it plunged towards Earth, and the end of normal days.

Changing the Subject From Trump

 THE OTHER GUY couldn't get his credit card to work at the gas pump either, so we both masked up and went inside. the problem turned out to be the internet, or lack thereof. I had never known, but now do, that pumping gas relied on the internet. I joked about my mask motif with the other guy, with my favorite college team on it. The other guy remarked that he wish he had a Trump mask to go with his Trump hat. I realized with horror that the gentleman, about my age, presumed that I was a trump supporter -isn't everyone? I muttered something about seeing him at the ballot box, and I think he understand, at last.  My next encounter was with a young Hispanic man, my neighbor's employee, with no accent. He had never heard of Watergate or Bob Woodward, the Bob Woodward of now, not then. His truck's trump bumper sticker made his loyalty quite clear, his accent was all American, and he not an inkling that anyone named Bob Woodward had interviewed anyone named Donald Trump, nor of teh uproar precipitated by the recent revelations of said interviews.My initial horror at his ignorance and Trump support subsided into resignation. Why should I expect anyone who supports Donald Trump to have heard of Bob Woodward or of his interviews with Trump? And even so, by now those who are aware of it have decided that its all fake news, a liberal or Chines conspiracy, correct? Intrepidly, i explained to the young man the interview's contents, Trump's dueling versions of the virus, the whole story. You might imagine what happened next. The young conservative gentleman with Hispanic ancestry and blue collar social status mumbled something incoherent about history, maybe something to the effect that Trump's burden consists is undoing all the havoc wreaked by Obama and Black Lives Matter, and immediately changed the subject to Nancy Pelosi. Warning; Trump people, when confronted with facts, will invariably try to change the subject to Nancy Pelosi, as if there is relevance in so doing. something about her having been seen without a mask in Chinatown. Pure fiction, of course. It was at this point that nightmarish reality fully hit me. Trump will be reelected, that is how stupid forty nine percent of the American people are. He will spend the rest of his life in office, and I will spend the rest of my life in some twisted, grotesque Q-ANON version of hell.

Wishing It All Away

 MUCH TO THE PROBABLY CHAGRIN of much of America's white Christian conservative white supremacist community, the Black Lives Matter movement (which in my humble opinion should be renamed "Black Lives Matter Too") has trickled down into and permeated small town America, even in the deep south, in a small town in which I attended several BLM protests. One of them consisted of about fifty high school girls, whit,e Christian, and yours truly. I loved it, they loved it> I was their token "little old man". In a similar small town nearby, the mayor ran out of patience. To paraphrase "I wish all them folks comin' down here a politickin' would just pack up and go on back home, and leave us alone." I'm just guessing he was referring not some traveling troupe of twenty twenty Trumpers, but rather, to BLM people, perhaps even African-American ones. What were his plans for the local BLM people, black and white? After all, they are already home, unless the mayor wanted them in quarantine. Should all MAGA people self isolate also? When an elected official doesn't specify, questions arise. The mayor might have served his self expression better by simply clearly stating that he wanted everyone associated with Black Lives Matter to leave town, without letting the door touch tush.What his honor wanted, it seems, was to live in a Black Lives Matter free bubble, and he wanted it to be his own town, for his convenience. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were all mayor, free to pick and choose what we wanted to wish away, and free to wish it all away? In my bubble town of the mind, I would immediately wish away Trump and all his supporters, whom I, frankly, detest. Next, I'd get rid of the white right wing evangelical Christians, because after several decades of listening to them tell me that I'm going to Hades in a hand basket if I do not embrace their religious views, I'm wishing for different treatment. My dearly departed mother had a trick which makes me laugh to this day. Whenever religious propagandists, Jehovah's Witnesses or whomever, would knock on her door, she'd answer, and, after they introduced themselves, tell them that "I'm Catholic, and I'll pray for you at mass". She wasn't, of course, so she didn't, but they didn't know that. I never had the heart to remind her that it would have been easier for her to simply not answer the door, but, where's the fun in that? Nor do I have the heart to suggest to the mayor that while the Black Lives Mater people are out in the streets, they won't be there long, and all he has to do is ignore them, and they will, at length, go away.

Shark Baiting

 THE VIDEOS are always impressive, darkly, ominously lurking fear, just what the networks, their corporate masters, and their viewers want.We are transfixed, intrigued. the dorsel fin of a fifteen foot great white must protrude out of the water for effect. At least one clueless dude sun bathingly languishes in a kayak. The variety of nearby recreational boats with pretty people aboard is pure multi culturalism. In the real world, whatever that is, shark attacks happen rarely per capita, but when they happen they happen at least in part because invincible human beings ignore warnings given by people whose job it is to pay attention, issue warnings, and to protect people from sharks, and from a much deadlier danger, themselves. Ever see a rock climber defy death and ask "why"?  Ever been cruisin' along the interstate ad a steady seventy, looked in your rear view mirror at the millennial hottie applying lipstick and texting two feet behind your rear bumper? don't say no. If not, you haven't lived, and in fact you've almost died, probably quite often, without thinking about it. I confess to having eaten at least one cheeseburger and one cheese and bean burrito while allegedly driving. Is it just me, America, or homo sapien sapiens? Are we crazy, or what? Are we torn between two lovers, acting like a fool, trying to decide whether we really are invincible or trying to fulfill a death wish, since we will all die soon anyway? Do we challenge and defy death by swimming with the sharks because we think we will never die, even though we see people all around us dying every day, or because we know we will, and are resigned to it?  The dorsal fin never sinks beneath the water, the terrible triangle circling the oblivious sun bather drowsing in his kayak. Its almost as if the fangy gape mouthed monster understands that she is being watched intently in fearful admiration, and wants to appropriately impress her admirers. She's hungry, and a kill would be nice, urgently expedient. If only one of these long limbed primates would carelessly dangle an arm or a leg in the water. They always do, eventually, stupid things. Its happened before, it will happen again, with enough patience, enough waiting, it happens every time. the perfect moment, the sudden lunge, the desperate helpless thrashing, thick red blood in the water. Patiently, circling...circling...

Downplaying, Avoiding Blame

 DONALD TRUMP, attempting to present himself as a sort of savior for America, is now claiming, incredibly, that he deliberately downplayed the severity of the virus in order to ensure that we the American people did not break down into a national panic. He must think that we the American people are cowards and idiots, three hundred million of us, who simply cannot handle the truth, when the truth is unpleasant and requires strong action. The truth, of course, is that when it became obvious that Covid 19 was going to spread out of China and unto all the world, Trump himself panicked, and saw his reelection chances being damaged by having an epidemic sweeping the nation as the election approached. He downplayed it, hoping that the rest of us would do likewise, and told us that it would go away with the coming of spring and warm weather, because he wanted us to believe that it would and no matter how bad the epidemic became, he wanted us to believe that it was not a serious matter, that it had nothing to do with him or his leadership, and that he was saving us from it, not exposing us to it by lying about it and by doing nothing to stop. it. Had he taken strong action at the national level, the virus would have been stopped, but he was uncertain of that, and certain only that by taking such action, he would draw attention to it, instead of distracting us from it, and thus we would associate the virus with him. As Bob Woodward himself has pointed out, Trump chose to go down the road of deceit, instead of leveling with the American people, and trusting us to do the right thing, to make the necessary adjustments to our lives to thwart the epidemic.Trump's behavior not only has totally destroyed any faith we might have retained in his ability to provide strong effective leadership, he has cost the United States tens of thousands of lives, directly, through his lack of appropriated and proper action, thereby  turning himself into a cold blooded killer. I can no longer count the times I have thought or remarked that just when you think Donald Trump has reached bottom, he sinks lower. Its true every time. This is no hoax, this is not fake news, and nobody can claim that it is, neither Trump nor his equally immoral followers. By mercifully sparing his poor weak children, the American people fear and panic by sparing them the truth, Donald Trump, by also failing to lead a strong, organized national response to the epidemic, has killed nearly two hundred thousand people, and counting. there will be  many more. For this, he should be impeached, triad, convicted, removed from office, and incarcerated as a murderer, the murderer that he is. To paraphrase Jefferson: I tremble for Trump and his supporters when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Backing Black Lives

THE NBA )basketball) and the NFL (football) are, athletically speaking, overwhelmingly majoritarian African-American, much to the probable displeasure of America's conservative Christian white supremacist community. Ensconced within their anti Covid safety bubble, the NBA players are adorning themselves with not only teh usual team names and player uniform numbers,but also message like "Black Lives Matter" prominently displayed on their jerseys. The franchises, an all white billionaires club, mostly conservative, are possibly not happy with this arrangement, perhaps snarling beneath their billionaire breath, knowing it will alienate some viewers, but are strangely powerless to prevent this player's public plea for progress.The owners have money for a reason; they're smart, and they understand; if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, or at least let 'em self express. The NFL players are doing the same thing, as their tenuous under attended by design season of Covid contact football commences.Black Lives Matter, printed in bold letters in the end zones, all over the player's Jerseys, and so forth. Before the games, the players, seventy percent black, are gathering together for a bit of kneeling and are interlocking, while the fans, a large percentage of whom are right wing white men, boo mercilessly, thinking social commentary ought not be part of the pre game festivities. Millions of right wing American men, forced to choose between an ongoing never ending pay per view insulting affront to their latent racist right wing, or to turn off their cherished favorite team, just as the ball is kicked off. Donald Trump must be turning over in his grave, which is to say, the intellectual graveyard of his mind. As we sometimes say; too damned funny. Since the seventy percent of NBA and NFL stars are black, what can they do? all that blackness means nothing to the Trump loving self proclaimed not racist at all white right wing community, so long as the boys play good ball, win, and stay in their appreciative place, loyal to their systemically racist country, uncomplaining. It just too damned bad that the players don't exactly share the white right wing male version of thiri place in society, and that, after all, they are all too human, with feelings to boot.

Hanging With the Cool Folks

 DURING THE SIX MONTHS that our tiny town senior center has been closed, and daily lunches have been handed through car windows slowly moving through the parking lots, all masked up, I have missed my progressive Democratic friends ( we used to call ourselves "liberals", but the right wind demonized the word) and have enjoyed the merciful respite from the far right devil worshiping MAGA Trumper evangelical gangsters. Thomas Paine, who invented the American revolution and wrote "The Age of Reason", excoriating the cruelty of the biblical god, and Bertrand Russell, whose essay "Why I Am Not a Christian" says it best, agreed that, as Russell said: "Cruel men invent and worship a cruel god whose cruelty they use to excuse their own cruelty." The people I don't like at the senior center are the people who worship the cruel biblical god, and almost invariably support Trump, as if one requires the other.My friends are the ones who do neither. Invariably the progressives, with their liberal politics and beautiful, benevolent deity, are the far more pleasant people, with pleasant, cheerful personalities. the adherents to the scriptural deity and Trump, the right wing fundamentalists, are generally stern, gruff, judgmental, unfriendly, snooty. And why not? Deep down, they know that they are doomed to decompose into dirt, and that their wait for the return of their lord in his fiery chariot wielding not an olive branch but a terrible swift sword is laughable, ludicrous, and futile.They must know this, unless they have brainwashed themselves beyond any semblance of sanity, which, as evidenced by their unshakable devotion to the criminal, traitorous, pathologically dishonest present president of the United States, they may well have.

Trump, Mercifully Sparing Us

WE FINALLY KNOW WHY President Trump ignored the pandemic from the beginning, dismissed it, prescribed ridiculous cures such as bleach, claimed it would be gone by Easter, and told us that it was a hoax, only a little flu.  Not because he is a callous, clues idiot, as we might have suspected, but because his cup runneth over with mercy and magnanimity. In his kind benevolence he feared we all might panic, might run crazily down the streets of America arms flailing, a fate from which he generously spared us. That he ignored the virus because he wanted the voters to ignore it and not blame him for it, for doing nothing to stop it, perish the thought. Trump downplayed Covid 10 out of concern and mercy, my butt. Better to stick to the incompetence, clueless theory of Trump. did he really think that if he talked honestly and prepared national plans to fight the virus that millions of Americans would lose control of their senses, and ransack cities in sheer terror and madness? Or did he think that in our panic, we all might go out and buy masks and personal protection equipment, self quarantine, and social distance? that is of course precisely what more of us should have done earlier and more often, but many didn't, thanks to Trumps's merciful prevaricating. Trump's mercy has so far cost anywhere from fifty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand American lives, and counting. The number will only increase. Neither his immoral clueless followers nor the politically inert have ever taken this disastrous epidemic seriously. Just today Trump held one of his gangster MAGA campaign rallies in Michigan, thousands of people, packed together like sardines, no masks, spreading disease and death. All across the fruited plain they party on, oblivious.Only the left wing radicals have worn masks and had the sense and decency to stay home and stay safe, out of concern for public safety. Thank you very much, Sturgis bikers. Trump wanted Covid to quietly go away and the public to either blame the Chinese or nobody, so he pushed a false narrative, an insane line of drivel, all lies, week after week, month after month, as revealed by his tape recorded interview with famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward. Lest we forget, we were to inject bleach and Lysol to cure the virus, America would reopen by Easter, and the epidemic would end with the advent of warm weather, in the lunatic universe of President Donald Trump.

Paris, Parading

 HOW OLD is Paris Hilton now? Like, maybe thirty five? Or is she, like Annette Funicello,  your prototypical eternal teenager? Well, like, whatever. No matter how hard she tries, Paris simply cannot seem to elude the harsh glare of the celebrity spotlight. Especially when she's running towards rather than away from it. Now, she's complaining, again, and law suiting, again, about her upbringing, about her time spent in a tough love boarding-reform school in Utah, to which she was kidnapped and summarily sent by Nick and Cathy Hilton as a last resort, in her chaotic teen years, in a desperate to save her life and straighten her out a bit. The allegation is that the young recalcitrant lady was disciplined a bit too hare, licked in bare rooms naked, that sort of thing, and it may well be true. Stay tuned. This reality drama, you can sense, has but barely begun. Paris, much like her immaculately groomed and mad up parents, seems to have wanted somewhat more than her allotted fifteen minutes of fame, and, like Nick and Cathy Hilton, she, like got it. Teen sex videos, her the star, the high profile glam parties, the clothing, or lack of it, the whole gamut, she ran it. The great Hilton celebrity parade stopped. She was raised that way. Raised to have no idea how clothing thrown on the floor got clean. Raised never to have heard, until early adulthood, if you can call it that, of Wal Mart. Wealth, privilege, and the never ending noble cause of getting as many people as possible to pay attention to it, were her and her parent's cause celeb. to this I can relate, because Kathy and Nick are my age, and I have often wondered how on Earth I would have raised a daughter like Paris without losing my sanity and blood pressure monitor. i wouldn't have. Praise be to Nick and Kathy. We insecure baby boomers were raised religiously with the gospel of wealth and upward mobility, and, for icing on the cake, power and prestige. We were taught, aglow on victorious post war euphoric fantasy, to take these values to heart, to worship them, and to either achieve them or applaud those who did. Hence the Hiltons, hence Paris. Since we don't change much after childhood, Paris will likely always be either running away or towards the bright lights and cameras, her parents will remain impeccably groomed and class conscious, and most of the rest of us will forever remain firmly ensconced on the sidelines, applauding it all.

Here's Johnny, Going Rogue

THE NINETEEN SIXTIES was a golden age for late night TV, if only because Johnny Carson was in his prime on NBC. I wasn't much interested, being a bit young, but my sister, in  high school, was. Often she would wheel, deal, and  cajole our strict mother into letting her stay up late on a school night just late enough to catch Johnny's always masterfully funny monologue. My sister recently confided than on many nights, after she had gotten mother's permission to stay up late, mom would pop pop corn, and watch the monologue with my sister. I never knew it. i was thirteen years old, asleep in bed. In February, 1968, the show went rogue. Harry Belafonte, at the height of his celebrity and radicalism, guest hosted the Tonight Show for a week. It would never be the same. Of the twenty five guests Belafonte selected to have on in the five nights, fifteen were black,and all were controversial. all, including the white ones, were politically charged, and radical.  they included Robert F. Kennedy and martin Luther King, both within weeks of being murdered. The normally somber King was urged by Belafonte to be funny, and he was. Kennedy spoke of social, racial, and economic equality. The smothers brothers, recently barred form CBS for turning Viet Nam into a farce, which it was, didn't disappoint. Right on they all radicalized. Never before in television history, and never since, except for the advent of the black channel decades later, had African-Americans dominated mainstream American television in such numbers or with such a radical agenda, talk wise. Although the whole affair caused quite a momentary uproar, it came and went so quickly, and the left wing agenda was covered in so much humor and comedy, that it passed muster,and eluded outright censorship and immortality. Johnny Carson returned the next week, and simply acted as if nothing ha d happened. The greatness of Johnny Carson is that he could get away with almost anything.

Fantasizing, With Fervor

AMERICAN CULTURE'S steep descent into fantasy, is predilection for the avoidance of reality, the encroaching proclivity of its member's to construct and dwell within individual paradigmatic bubbles of self contentment, a centuries old cultural characteristic, has been well documented and discussed. Less discussed is the alarming level of fervent devotion with which our many fugitives from reality freely flee, and, with complete self assured certainty, construct, inhabit, and dwell within their alternative cosmic paradigms, and then, not content to merely remain aloof, urgently beckon others, like some pied piper, to enter and join them, as if to relieve their crushing loneliness. I have former friends, dearly departed from the realm of empirical, observable reality, whose only intent for me seems to be that I abandon my loyalty to mainstream science, history, and sociology, and declare my allegiance to their newly constructed fantasy worlds.Sometimes I pity then, their isolation. These people never show the slightest interest in my actual life. For all they know I could be raising dozens of children with multiple wives and pursuing careers on Broadway or in Congress, and they would either not know it,or if they did, not care. Their only care is whether I, are anybody else, will join them in a universe of alien interventions, hidden conspiracies of the paranormal kind, and alternative dimensions, intermingling with, of course, themselves. The truth must come from them. they hand down down the truth from on high, and I receive it, either passivelly, or approvingly, they are conetne with either response. Any hint of disagreement from me is met with stern rebuke, or sulky silence, and dismissal.Any information or thought from me which does not conform to their doctrine is ignored, or summarily dismissed. Hence, I am always the first to go. I do not expect anyone to share my personal philosophical, religious, political beliefs. But I expect, indeed I insist that everyone agree on a certain fundamental set of empirically provable, scientific verified, tangible facts, observable by all. Failure to accept this fundamental reality disqualifies anyone from participation in respectable, responsible intellectual circles, by virtue of preferring personal fantasy to manifest reality. Inquiring minds must gather together in a place of sanity, not contrived fabrication. The aimless fantasizers often complain that we sticklers for scientific fact are "narrow minded". Anyone who demands proof of what they say is so labeled. proof is their undoing, and is what they despise. they always claim to have it, but they never do. They are in fact the narrow minded ones, for they reject open inquiry and the scientific method of obtaining truth in favor of a sort of dogmatic religion, in which theirs is the doctrine, and their doctrine must be embraced by all, at great peril.

Running On Dirty Money

EVEN THE LOWEST among us, the mere cogs in the great social hierarchy machine, if they pay even the slightest attention to the world and current events, begin to glean a glimmer of suspicion about how the world really works. About how the world's wealth is heavily concentrated in a few powerful hands, how the moneyed class becomes and remains the economically and politically powerful elite, and how, in all the corners of the Earth, in every nation, the ruling tyrants, the ultra powerful use wealth, often dirty, ill gotten wealth, to move mountains, shape events, manipulate the masses, and mold the world to their designs. A new book by investigative journalist Tom Burgess, "Kleptopia: How dirty Money is Conquering the World", seeks to expose and explain this ongoing process, his hope being that by so doing we the people might muster the political will to resist, oppose, and thwart it, with information, education, and public resolve. By exposing teh schemes and machinations of the powerful elite, and possibly arousing antipathy against them, Burgess understands that he risks arousing their ire, and that as a result, his personal safety may be in jeopardy. He point out that his sources if inside information are risking much more than he. Everyone knows that people like trump and Putin, all powerful and all wealthy, are corrupt as hell, criminals. Everyone knows that the ruling political and corporate class in the United States, and just about every other country, constitutes a corrupt criminal class, their knees firmly on our necks. What we mostly do not know, and haven't given much thought to, is how st stop groveling as the feet of our oppressors, how to organize, rise up, and overthrow them, and to replace them with governance of the people, by the people, for the people. As always, we the oppressed greatly outnumber our oppressors. Most of us, however, either were our oppressors, wittingly or otherwise, or, by our inaction, passively acquiesce in our own voluntary oppression.  if and when we finally all unite and organize against the forces of tyranny, over seven billion strong, then we will take our strength into the streets of every town and city in the world, and, at long last, secure our freedom, and see if we can keep it.