Gravitas

 "dignity, seriousness, or solemnity of manner."

I believe that the Cable News Network might now be out of business if it weren't for the sonorous tones of James Earl Jones: "This is CNN." Not leaning in for what this station has to say would be a bad choice. There is an implied imperative in those three words. Thanks to the voice of James Earl Jones. 

Much in the way that we all learned about the Circle of Life. "Look Simba. Everything the light touches is our kingdom. A king's time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One day Simba, the sun will set on my time here- and will rise with you as the new king. Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures-- from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope. When we die, our bodies become the grass. And the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life."

For many of us, the story of Muphasa and his son was our introduction to Hamlet. James Earl Jones made the classics relatable. Like the story of Conan the Barbarian. Or that guy with a baseball diamond in his cornfield. Frightening or uplifting, if Mister Jones was saying it, it was important. Which is why George Lucas should probably have stopped making Star Wars movies once Darth Vader stopped being voiced by James Earl Jones. Hayden Christiansen take note: In space, no one can hear you whine. 

It was always a treat to discover that voice hidden in the mix of The Simpsons. Or anywhere else. He was bombardier Lieutenant Lothar Zogg in Doctor Strangelove. 

I discovered James Earl Jones not watching cartoons or some sci-fi epic, but viewing The Great White Hope. What was an eight year old doing watching the story of Jack Johnson and his ill-fated marriage to Etta Terry Duryea. Race relations in sports and relationships was a pretty heady mix for me, but I have my mother to thank for steering me through the experience. Things were not always black and white when it came to black and white. James Earl Jones showed me that struggle. 

Over the decades, his voice led me to places and ideas that I might have missed. And most importantly to me, he was not above making light of his own basso profondo. Which is why James Earl Jones will be missed. There is no doubt that he stomped profoundly on the Terra, and he made our lives a lot more interesting for it. He will be missed in the Circle of Life. 

Tales From The Crypt

 I get to work by seven each morning, and I start to work preparing for a new day. The bathrooms need to be unlocked. The cart with the PE equipment gets rolled out onto the playground. If it has been warm the day before, I prop open doors and windows to encourage air circulation. Before I go to my classroom to make things ready for the education adventure, I stop by the office to make sure that there are no large parcels in need of dissemination before the day begins. My principal and I confer about the challenges ahead: which staff members are out, who had a substitute, who does not, will there be a fire drill?

This is a quick peed behind the scenes of the hour before kids arrive at the gate, ready and for the most part raring to go for another day of school. 

That's when the busy-ness of my job really begins. Lessons in how to share the ball, using respectful words, and listening for the bell that means it is time to move on to the next part of the day. 

At no point during all this rushing about do I or anyone else on our staff have time to perform gender affirming surgery. I am not sure what dark recess of the brain of the convicted felon who is running for president came up with the scenario in which children who attend public schools. He asked a crowd in Wisconsin, “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation?” 

No. I cannot imagine this. As a matter of fact, I am very uncomfortable with the type of mind that could come up with such a scenario. 

This is, of course, the same mind that conjured up "post-birth abortions." 

Not in the world in which I live and work. As a matter of fact, funding for health care in our schools is such that we only have a nurse on our site once a week. She is not performing any sort of operation or treatment. She is filling out the paperwork that allows us to keep her for the very limited time that we do have her on site. 

The lies have become more surreal and desperate. We have a little over a month and a half before we have to choose which version of reality we want to live in. The challenging future that is full of things we have to fix, or the terror-filled version from the lunatic mind of an adjudicated homophobe, racist, rapist and con man. 

I'll take the challenging future, thank you. 

Enough

 What was the AR-15 designed to do?

Some refer to these as "assault rifles." Others suggest "America's Rifle." Originally the AR was emblematic of the original manufacturer, Armalite. Back in 1959, the Armalite folks built a gun for military use that became known as the M-16. It was the automatic version, or machine gun, used by American soldiers in Vietnam. After the war, Colt took over production of a semi-automatic version of the gun for law enforcement and civilian use. For the rather transparent purpose of killing human beings. 

Authorities in Kentucky found an AR-15 in the woods near I-75. This was near the area where several motorists were reported to have been injured by gunfire. Law enforcement officals were searching for a suspect who may have taken his semi-automatic rifle out to the forest to take some potshots at passing cars. Which, in its own ludicrous way may have been a choice made because school is not in session on a Saturday. It was only a few days after somebody decided to take his AR-15, a gift from his father, to his high school to kill two fellow students and two teachers. 

If you're going to try and kill your fellow human beings, there is not a lot of questions about what your weapon of choice might be. There have been numerous studies that show just how destructive shots fired from this "sports rifle" can be. If you're not up to looking at the graphic details, I can just let you know that the results are horrifying. 

Of course, humans aren't designed to take a lot of punishment when it comes to bullets. Especially when they are fired at close range from high-powered weapons. Like the AR-15. What would banning these "assault weapons" do? Would the events of the past week play out any differently? What sort of carnage has to occur before it makes sense to human beings who seem to be the most likely targets for shots fired, quickly, in anger? 

Haven't we seen enough? 

No Accounting For Taste

 It is a failing, I suppose. 

I like what I like. My tastes run to the very pedestrian, suburban American fare upon which I supped as a child. It confounds my wife to a certain degree that when she is going out for an evening I ask for a TV dinner. 

But she buys me a Swanson's Salisbury Steak because it's what gets me through. 

There was a time, when I was very young, that I would only eat McDonald's when the family was getting fast food. This incensed my older brother whose tastes ran to the marginally obscure Arby's and Taco Bell. I was called "The Burger King," but not in a particularly affectionate way. There was a lot of eye-rolling on my family's part as we had to make a separate stop for "The Burger King." 

This narrow range of food intake lasted for many years, but somewhere around the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I decided to add lobster to my acquired tastes. My father looked on this development with some chagrin, wishing that I might have found something just a little easier to pick up in landlocked Colorado. 

Along the way, I have been offered a great many tastes and treats, specifically when someone hears that I have a deep and abiding affection for chocolate. They want to share with me the finest confections that they have sampled. Truffles and hazelnut chews. Gourmet infused bites of ninety percent cacao. And I take a bite. And I smile. And I wish I could have a Hershey bar. 

It makes me feel just a bit embarrassed because I'm a grownup now, and I really should appreciate the finer things. Like when they put arugula on my chicken sandwich. Or when they offer me pepper jack instead of cheddar. There I am, somebody's parent, looking at the kids' menu for inspiration before I order something with a garlic demi gloss. But I want to do it in such a way that I don't draw attention to my somewhat obvious infantile palate. 

It's called "comfort food" for a reason. I am not much of an adventurer. My parents raised me right. I know not to turn up my nose at whatever my hosts put on the table. I know how to present as an adult. It's just that when I'm at home alone, I regress. Macaroni and cheese. Chips Ahoy. 

And yes, the occasional Hershey bar. 

Facts Of Life - And Death

 Hot take: This is not a policy. “I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”

This was the response from the Republican candidate for Vice President, Jerry Donovan Vance, speaking the day after two kids and two teachers were killed at their high school in Georgia. The answer, for Jerry Donovan Vance, is to kill them before they kill us. Which sounds not just a little weird. 

It sounds psycho. 

But keeping in mind that his boss routinely mentions fictional mass murderer Hannibal Lecter in the ramblings he makes in front of rabid crowds, why not go ahead and swing for the fences? 

Or, you could propose has both stronger gun controls, such as banning sales of AR-15 and similar rifles, in addition to making sure classroom doors don’t lock from the outside. That is what our current Vice President has suggested. 

The line of Monday morning quarterbacks forming to find blame starts with those pointing at violent video games. Then the music that kids listen to. That awful rock and roll rubbish. If Frederic Wertham was alive today I am sure he would be pointing a finger at comic books. And ultimately the answer to guns is more guns. 

Which is horrifying, since the father of the shooter in Georgia insisted that the threats against the school could not have been made by his son, since at the time he was initially being investigated more than a year ago. It was shortly after that investigation ended that dad bought his boy the AR-15 that killed four people. At the high school he never would have imagined that he would do any harm. 

Keeping in mind that these kind of shootings are not "facts of life." They are facts of death. They do not happen only in schools. Parking lots. Churches. Theaters. City streets. That same guy who babbles on about the villain in Silence of the Lambs was recently the target of a kid with a gun. An AR-15. One might expect this would alter his views on assault weapons. 

Isn't that just a little bit weird? 

Back To School

Back to school.

Time to start shooting. 

A fourteen year old was taken into custody for the murder of two teachers and two fellow students. This time it was in Winder, Georgia.  Apalachee High School joins a long and seemingly endless list of places where "we never thought something like this could happen."

Time to change our thinking. Not as long as the weapon of choice continues to be so readily available. The shooter's father insisted that there was no way that his son would use any of the guns in his house "unsupervised." He was not allowed. The shooter, whose name is sadly ironic, Colt, apparently did not take dad's admonitions to heart. So much so that he was a known potential threat to the FBI a year ago after making online threats. Colt was not arrested at that time because there was no probably cause. 

Well, on Wednesday, they got it. Four dead. Nine more wounded. 

Hundreds more traumatized. Who wants to go back to school when every time you pass that room you see the blood and bullet holes? We prepare our students to duck and cover. How to barricade a door. We expect to be able to keep the children safe, with the exception of a band-aid here or there when they fall and scrape their knees. 

We are only moments away from the refrain from the nutjobs who insist that shooting back is the answer. 

We already know the sadly inevitable punchline: The shooter used an "AR platform rifle" to kill and maim the people at his school. 

Thoughts and prayers were tossed out as well, our best known defense against such things. Authorities said they would "bolster patrols" in the area, which should have the effect of making everyone who survived feel more secure. 

Safe? That's another matter entirely. As long as we continue to bury our heads in the collective sand pit of the "spirit" of the Second Amendment, completely unnecessary tragedies like the one in Georgia and all of those that preceded it will make it hard to sleep at night. For those with a conscience. For those with a soul. 

Now back to school.  

Still

 So, the convicted felon insists that he has "every right" to interfere with the 2020 election. 

It is September, 2024. 

Four years have passed since the twice-impeached ex-"president" and adjudicated rapist decided that he wanted to take on our nation's democratic process. He continues to try and stir up fuss about an election he lost by seven million votes. The Nile is not just a river and it runs through Mar-A-Lago. 

In addition to this continuing screed, the former game show host marvels that each indictment and conviction boosts his poll numbers. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up? When people get indicted, your poll numbers go down. But it was such, such nonsense.”

Nonsense indeed. Much in the same way that most everything that drips from the slit below his nose exacerbates the unprecedented amount of fabrication done by a single candidate. Brazenly suggesting that he would be "a dictator on day one," and that he would jail his political opponents, the very special world between his ears continues to be a dark and scary place. 

With millions of devoted followers. 

That, dear reader, continues to be the most frightening part. Even as the seventy-eight year old MAGAt in chief's slide into delirium, his red-capped legion continue to line up for his dissertations on bacon and wind power. Which wouldn't be as big a deal if the Supreme Court of the United States hadn't issued an opinion saying that the Orange Obelisk is immune from "official acts" as "president." 

I might suggest that in order to fall under the auspices of this decision, the guy who will be sentenced in New York soon for fraud would have to act in some way "presidential." 

And no, sneaking onto Arlington National Cemetery to make Tik-Tok video does not count.