No Way

 The fifteen year old shooter...

The second teacher who made the 911 call...

The school full of stories...

The ones who won't be returning...

The ones left in mourning...

The community in shock...

It's a tired old story. We don't even bother any longer to make bold postures like "this will be the last." As a country we have come to expect school shootings as a fact of life. A fact of the end of life for those who did not survive the other three hundred twenty-two times it happened in the United States this year. 2024 ranks as the second highest for the total number of school shootings in a year. That is since 1966, when records on this manner of execution started being kept. As a matter of scale, in that year there were nine school shootings. In 2023 there were three hundred forty-nine. 

Contributing factors such as increased population and demographic changes figure in, but even though crime rates continue to decrease, gun ownership continues to rise. That would be a comforting thought if all those guns were actually protecting people, but it seems that some of them are still being used to kill people. 

In schools. This past Monday a fifteen year old shooter killed a teacher and another student before turning the gun on herself at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. A second teacher made the 911 call that summoned police. "This has obviously rocked our school community," said Barbara Wiers, the director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life Christian School. "But we know it affects not just our school community, but Madison and the greater area and all schools."

And so on. 

The satirical news outlet The Onion regularly posts the same story each time there is a school shooting. It starts with the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. 

No way. 

Newsletter

 Dear Friends and Family,

2024 has been a heck of a year. I don't know if you heard, but dad got his old job back! This is great news because it means he won't be hanging around the club, bragging about that nine foot putt he almost made. Oh, and also he won't be going to jail!

Sorry, buried the lede there. 

I've been staying busy with my podcast and attending all those amazing events my dad puts on. I've met all kinds of celebrities and junk like Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. I know what you're thinking, but the Hulkster is really a complex guy. Did you know he pre-shreds all his own shirts? Also, as it turns out the campaign trail just may be the trail to true love for this guy. I met Bettina in Palm Beach, just a chip shot from Mar A Lago, and I can't tell you how relieved dad was to hear that even though Kim and I will always have a special bond, getting her a job in Greece will make this transition so much easier!

With my former fiancée off to Greece and the need to dispute vote tallies from this past election, I suppose you're wondering what yours truly will be up to over the coming year. Well, first of all there's a whole lot of endangered species that still need to be stuffed and mounted for display on the walls of the club, and while I'm happy to have some "bro time" with my "bro," it gives me a chance to take out my petty frustrations on innocent animals. Until we have to turn back the latest immigrant caravan, I'll just have to settle for the occasional white leopard or Mongolian sheep. 

And I know you're all waiting to hear about my ever-changing responsibilities in the family business, and I wish I could tell you more right now, but dad says that keeping an eye on his personal line of fragrances will be pretty much a full-time job. I suppose it will be a step up from bankrupting casinos and maintaining that perfect three-day's growth of facial hair that makes me look so darn cool and not at all like a vagrant. 

Vagrants are poor. 

I'm not. 

So that's about it from the top of the Tower. I hope you and your loved ones enjoy the Christmas season, unless you don't celebrate as God intended. In which case I hope you rot in hell. 

- Don Jr. 

Strained Verbosity

 Some of you may soon be receiving holiday cards. Some of them may be Christmas cards. Others could be less pointed, gesturing in the direction of the whole back end of the calendar year. If you are reading this, there is a distinct possibility that one of those pieces of mail in your box at the end of December will be from me. And my wife. 

You may notice a distinct lack of specific sentiment written by yours truly at or near the lower right hand on the inside as you open our card. Just my name or a few words then my name but nothing in the realm of specific greetings for a holly jolly Christmas or Happy Holidays or a Cavalcade of a Kwanza. To that end, I am specifically apologetic, but here's something you may not have considered: 

It's December. I'm nearly out of words. The ones you are currently reading have actually been set aside months in advance in hopes of being able to make it all the way to the thirty-first. Happily, of course, there is a certain amount of recycling that goes on in my head as the nights get longer and the days get shorter. See there? I just cobbled together a sentiment about the winter solstice that echoes many of those that have come from years past. Plus, many of the diatribes I may spout about the incoming Trumpreich carry with them the stink of those left over from 2016. Only now they're four years older and perhaps none the wiser. 

Just stinky. 

Plus there's that element of drawing the actual card. Starting back in the days before Thanksgiving, I was busy scrawling on my sketchpad, trying to come up with something pithy to share for the nearly fifty years of coming up with something pithy to share. You know that whole bit about a picture being a thousand words, so let's just say I'm already several thousand words into the holiday season and having thought about it that much has made my brain hurt. 

Not a lot, thank you for your concern, but enough that staring at a pile of envelopes with the thought of having to be clever one more time makes me so very tired. Trying to find a way to sugarcoat 2024 is next to impossible anyway, so you'll have to take my collective words here for it.

I hope you're merry. I hope there's some jolly in it for you too. I suppose that I hope that the joy that can be found during this time isn't wasted by wiseapples like me. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out how to rhyme something with "convicted felon."

Rotten melon? 

Bigger Than The Game

 You may not have heard about De'Vondre Campbell. He's a professional football player, but not in that upper echelon of professional football players that you see on television selling insurance or underwear. De'Vondre is a linebacker who played for the San Francisco Forty-Niners. "Played" because he will no longer be playing for that franchise. It is not clear if he will be playing for any professional football team in the near future. This kind of thing happens around this time of year, when injuries take their toll and careers begin to fizzle out. 

That's not why Mister Campbell's football future is in doubt. In the midst of a somewhat forgettable battle of field goals against the Los Angeles Rams this past Thursday, the linebacker who had started the game in front of De'Vondre injured his knee. When the coaches tapped Campbell to go in as a substitute, he declined. He chose not to play. 

The reason for this choice was initially a little confounding. Why suit up and head out in the wind and rain of December in the Bay Area just to turn down your chance to get a little playing time? As more of the story became clear, it seems that De'Vondre was unhappy with the way he was being treated by the organization, coaches and ownership. This was his moment to stick it to the man. Which got me thinking about another San Francisco Forty-Niner, a quarterback who led his team to the Super Bowl a few years back. 

You probably remember Colin Kaepernick. He was a star in the manner of Mahomes and Manning. Until he decided he wanted to take a knee during the National Anthem. Not during the game, mind you, just during the pre-game "festivities." This was in 2016. Kaepernick was using his non-presence as a statement against a country that he felt "oppresses Black people and people of color." Even worse, other NFL players began to follow suit, and eventually there were dozens of others joined in the protest. 

Cutting to the chase, Colin Kaepernick's career with the San Francisco Forty-Niners was over soon after that. Donald Trump was elected "president," and in spite of being in his prime a Super Bowl quarterback Kaepernick was not picked up by any other team. 

This memory sent me way back in the data files to a movie from 1987 called Amazing Grace And Chuck. It tells the story of a Little League pitcher who decides that he won't play baseball until there are no more nuclear weapons. A professional basketball player hears about this and follows suit. Eventually there is a house full of pro athletes taking this pledge, causing a national crisis. The president is played by Gregory Peck in this film, so there's a little more liberal tinge to the goings-on, and I won't tell you how it ends. But I can say that it makes for a good parable. 

I hope that De'Vondre Campbell gets to play football again. 

Supervision

 My mother used to talk wistfully about how if Child Protective Services were alerted now to the things that she had allowed her three sons to do once upon a time, they would have swooped in and taken us all away never to return. Especially in the helicopter parent reality of today. The tired bit I do about how disappointed she was when all three of us would return from an afternoon of playing with foot-long steel-tipped lawn darts. All three of us were allowed, encouraged, to zip up and down the dirt road in front of our mountain cabin for hours on end with only the promise to wear a helmet as our safety guidelines. These were the things that regularly occurred with complete knowledge of the parental units. 

Were there other things that we dared to do for which my parents were never fully apprised? 

Yes. There were. 

Plenty of them. 

Like the multiple occasions a bunch of us neighborhood kids trekked up the hill to another street with a looping slope to their street and experimented with various ways of riding our skateboards in tandem. The one that was the most exhilarating involved sitting on our boards facing one another, legs and arms intertwined. Steering was accomplished by leaning back and forth as we gathered speed on our descent. Usually, there were no cars on that suburban stretch of street to dodge. 

Usually. 

Close calls were badges of honor. Scrapes and bruises were walked off because anyone returning home early would potentially send up an alarm. Like the epic dirt-clod fights held at the construction sites within a bike ride's distance of our home. Every so often, one of those clods contained a little higher rock content and created an owie that might have shut down the battle. "Suck it up," we encouraged one another, since the alternative was going home.

I was showing off the scar on my left forearm to my wife the other night, explaining how I got it from a spiral staircase in the University of Colorado Fieldhouse. Not in any place where we should or been allowed to be, but rather creeping about in the abandoned corners of a facility that we accessed by crawling through an open window. Telling mom about the cut on my forearm might necessitate telling the rest of the story, and then the jig would be, fundamentally, up. 

And yet, here I am. Sixty-two years old. More or less in one piece. With a whole bunch of stories about how things used to be. Mom, if you're reading this somewhere, I'm pretty sure you had an idea all along. 

What Is That Whining Sound?

 What's that sound I hear? 

It's not bells on bobtails. It's not the crunch of footsteps in new fallen snow. It's not the vibration of the filament in Rudolph's nose. 

It's the Voice of America. Voice of America, or VoA. is an international broadcasting state media network funded by the federal government of the United States of America. Not to be confused with National Public Radio, or NPR, which is a bunch of radical leftists discussing the next Delicious Dish. Which all right thinking Americans know is just radical leftist propaganda to ween us off McDonald's. 

Think of VoA as "state radio." The "state" in question here is the United States, and for more than eighty years it has been the Voice that folks in other countries have heard when they needed to hear some good ol' American common sense. There are those who insist that the Voice of America was part of the erosion and eventual fall of the Soviet Union. 

That, and blue jeans. 

With the installation of the second Trumpreich, it is certainly important for us to maintain our foothold in the ears of the rest of the world, so picking the right person to head up this endeavor is a big ask. Which is why the former game show host picked the only person who has contested more elections than he has: former TV host Kari Lake, fresh off her "triumph" in the senatorial race in Arizona. 

If you're not familiar with Ms. Lake's resume, she was the lead anchor for KSAZ-TV for more than twenty years. She bailed on that job in 2022 to run for governor of the Grand Canyon State. She lost. Not that she would admit it. She followed the convicted felon's denial playbook and argued that verdict right up until she made another run, this time for Senate. She lost that one too. 

But because she's such a good little MAGAt, the man who kept endorsing her to no particular avail picked her off the heap to lead The Voice of America. The fear from inside VoA is that the voice of freedom might sound a little different when strained through the limited vision of one of the "president" elect's most ardent followers. It could, dare I say, start to sound a lot like the propaganda that the Voice of America was created to counteract. You might be wondering how the rest of the world's opinion of us could sink any lower. 

Me too. 

Carry On, Carry On...

 "...as if nothing really mattered."

Those of you who know the score understand the beginning of this song. "Mama, just killed a man..."

New York City sees plenty of this. King Crimson, not Queen, would remind you that it's "a dangerous place." People die there. A lot. Of course there are plenty of cities across this great land of ours in which people die a lot. But recent events have caused me to wonder if there isn't something even more dangerous about New York City for which any musical group could prepare us. 

Just a few days ago, Daniel Penny was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was "acting erratically." Apparently acting erratically enough that Mister Penny saw fit to put Mister Neely in a choke hold. For six minutes. Jordan Neely did not make it to the next subway stop. He was dead. A jury found Daniel Penny not guilty and dismissed a more serious charge of manslaughter. 

Daniel Perry killed a man. But it would seem that the death of a homeless street performer suffering from schizophrenia did not seem to tip the scales of justice in any particular fashion. 

How about the other end of the spectrum? Let's say the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan. That would surely get some folks up in arms, wouldn't you think? Yes, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Even as the manhunt for the killer of Brian Thompson, public sentiment skewed in a rather unsettling manner. Like to the tune of "that guy deserved it." The life of a millionaire executive working for a healthcare firm was deemed an acceptable loss. "Send a message," was the suggestion that many people made. 

Mister Thompson's killer, sorry, alleged killer was apprehended at an Altoona McDonald's. Luigi Mangione has become something of a folk hero here in the land of the brave and the home of the free. The same country that loves its Ten Commandments also loves its "sic semper tyrannis." For my own part, I do recall recently suggesting that no one "deserves" to be killed. That, as I understand it, is not under our purvey. 

That is for the Lord to decide. 

Or a bunch of podcasters and keyboard trolls.