Lessons Learned

 Where did we go wrong? Did we, as a nation, take the metaphorical "left toin at Albequokie" that Bugs Bunny warned us about? Certainly my fellow travellers would agree with Bugs that this ain't Pismo Beach. No, I think we left the track toward the American Dream some time ago. 

Obviously any country that would elect a slumlord to the highest office in the land, we may have needed course correction, and certainly repeating that mistake eight years later suggests that we haven't learned our lesson. 

But I do not believe that the United States was completely well long before the election of 2016. Some might argue that somewhere around the time we began to embrace the currency issued by our Treasury more than the values printed on it. "Out of Many, One." "In God We Trust." Back in 1987, Oliver Stone directed a movie that offhandedly reminded us that "greed is good." I don't believe that Oliver was making an overt statement in Wall Street, but rather reminding us of the perils that awaited us all if we forgot the working class and embraced corporations as our gods. He certainly wouldn't be the first artist who unwittingly created a snuff film for those who viewed it more as an instructional video rather than the fable for which it was intended. 

Of course if we had already been lost in the woods, this story never would have been necessary. I can just skip past Watergate, since Richard Nixon assured us so very many times that he was not a crook. Instead, I will place the blame squarely at the feet of Lizzie Maggie. If that name doesn't ring a bell, you may have played her game: Monopoly. You know, where you buy up real estate and try to run all your friends and family out of business as you attempt to own everything. It even includes what was the precursor to the pardon, the Get Out Of Jail Free card. Not unlike Oliver Stone, Ms. Maggie was attempting, as she developed her game, to create something that would give us all a lesson in greed. 

All these years later, it would seem that the lesson she intended is not the one we learned. I don't know about you, but I can remember plenty of times when the kid down the street was caught cheating while we were playing Monopoly. 

I'm just a little surprised that he didn't go into politics. 

Mad Dogs And Englishmen

 If you're anything like me, and if you're not why the heck aren't you, then you probably spent a chunk of the past weekend trying to determine how you were going to spend your hard-earned fun coupons celebrating our nation's birthday. I was intrigued as ever by the nightly flurries of aerial shells with showers of sparks and loud reports in our neighborhood. The ones that began in mid-June and will continue to disrupt our quiet nights for the next couple of weeks are a mystery to me. 

It was a few years back when my wife and I traveled north to Oregon to celebrate the anticipation of our anniversary right around the Fourth of July. Crossing the border into a state where fireworks of all sorts were legal and available for sale, we pulled over to one of the many tents pitched by the side of the road and began inspecting all the possible ways that gunpowder and sulfur could be ignited and dispersed into the sky. Eventually we settled on one particular product with the intriguing sobriquet, Mad Dog. We also purchased a few odds and ends like sparklers and smoke bombs and glow worms with the notion that we might find someplace safe and sane that we could share those less than explosive ordnance. When our friendly fireworks salesperson tallied up our purchases, they came to just under fifty dollars, with the Mad Dog being by far the big ticket item. 

We tucked these items in with our luggage and continued on up to Portland. 

We never did find a time or place to make a lot of noise and smoke on our visit north. We retuned to Oakland with our contraband without having fired a single shot in anger or fun. It simply never seemed like the right time or place. 

New Years Eve came and went, and though we were sorely tempted to carry out our barrage, neither my wife nor I could get up the gumption to set fire to the sky. Not when we had so much help from all those houses up and down the streets surrounding us. 

Somewhere in there we decided to give up our Mad Dog. We handed it over to our son, who we figured would find a clever or subversive use for pyrotechnics. 

I remembered all those trips I used to make with my brother when we were young, across the border to Wyoming where they sold beer on Sundays and fireworks were the best reason to make that drive. On one of those excursions, I purchased enough pop bottle rockets that I was able to parse them out over the next several years, bringing some of them along with me when I moved to California. 

They're gone now, much to the chagrin of my son to whom I taught the simple rule: Light and run away. These days there isn't much good running will do. We are surrounded each summer for three to four weeks by things that go boom in the night. 

How can they afford it? 

Born At Or Near The USA

 The convicted felon and adjudicated rapist masquerading as a leader of the Free World is considering a ban on visitors to our country who happen to be pregnant. This was the somewhat ridiculous and draconian response he arrived at after the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was, in fact, already settled business. Section 1 reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Looking for the gray area? This is "birthright citizenship," and this is the reason for the Second Trumpreich to keep pregnant tourists from visiting the land of the free and home of the brave. Apparently we are currently experiencing a freedom and bravery deficit and we just don't want to run out. "Birth tourism" is a rare enough occurrence, but since we are having a particular challenge staying free and brave here in the moderately United States, 

A couple years ago, the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist wanted us all to be afraid of the murderers and rapists being unleashed on our shores by other countries. 

Very afraid. 

Now we are being asked to be afraid of pregnant women who happen to find themselves within our borders, especially when they're obviously here simply to land a sponge here that will soak up all those glorious resources we offer all our rightly born American babies. Stephen "Nosferatu" Miller made his terror be known to Jesse "Holdyer" Watters on Faux News: "So, you have mothers that come in fully pregnant, have a baby, go home, and that baby gets Medicaid and that baby gets welfare and that baby gets cash assistance. They'll leave the baby with a cousin, a relative, whatever, then send welfare checks back home. You can support a whole family in the third world."

Since "birth tourism" is already illegal, the fright described by the undead minion of the convicted felon is already covered. And since it has been the policy of the Second Trumpreich to kick children and families off any and all kinds of assistance programs anyway, this just serves as one more egregious effort to make us all believe that the United States doesn't have enough money to take care of its children. 

Which may go a long way toward explaining how we ended up bombing that girls school in Iran. 

Happy News

 In the midst of all the ugly news that gets run past us on a daily basis, I figured that I should shine a light on the Supreme Court decision to uphold birthright citizenship. If you were born here, you're an American. 

And that's that. 

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

Who would have thought that the same court that outlawed transgender athletes in school sports would act so compassionately? Could it be that there was no big push for transgender rights during the framing of our Constitution? Are civil rights limited to those who conform to the very limited spectrum of pronouns that existed back in the eighteenth century? 

Whoops. Sorry. I was highlighting happy news: Birthright citizenship. Now the ICE goons can get busy setting free all those folks in detention camps that were born here. Presuming they can find them.

And that they're still alive. 

Oops. Did it again, didn't I? 

It's a little like the Supreme Court made it clear that the convicted felon is an adjudicated rapist, but that doesn't mean that he has to leave office. Or the country. Or stop defacing our nation's capital by hosting poorly attended spectacles at all of our expense. If the thought occurred to me to go to the big America 250 sale-a-bration in Washington, I would have to figure out how to finance the fuel it would take to get me there. 

Sorry: Birthright citizenship. It's a good thing. If you're born here, you get to stay here. Which currently doesn't seem quite like the cool deal it probably should. 

Yay

 Just a reminder as you're taping those red, white and blue streamers to your front porch and preparing to feast on the grilled hot dogs you could afford to buy instead of the steak that you wanted for the bit Fourth of July barbecue: The forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United State is an adjudicated rapist. 

Yay. 

This ruling was essentially upheld this past week when the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the convicted felon's appeal to overturn the decision that said that he had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll. Oh, and the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States is a convicted felon, which I believe we covered just a moment ago. 

Perhaps I should also clarify that the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States is the same "person." The same convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who says that he does not think about your financial situation. And he loves inflation. 

Same guy who threw a party for himself on the front lawn of the ruins of the White House. Same guy whose name appears more than thirty-eight thousand times in the Epstein Files. To give you just a little flavor for that last number, Jesus's name appears approximately one thousand two hundred times in the bible. 

Yay. 

This convicted felon and adjudicated rapist whose name appears more than thirty-eight thousand times in the Epstein Files started a war with Iran, he says, because his son-in-law who is a real estate agent told him it would be a good idea. You know: location, location, location. 

Or distraction, distraction, distraction. 

In an effort to celebrate himself rather than the country for which he was nominally elected to lead he has painted things gold and blue and attempted to get anyone but himself to pay for it. Like the people who he was nominally elected to lead. He's going to have McDonald's for lunch on the Fourth of July because he doesn't have to pay for it. You're going to have to pay for it. Yours and his. 

Meanwhile the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist is committing war crimes and getting rich on insider trades while the rest of us are just trying to live out a sliver of the American Dream left to us: The part where we no longer have to worry about an adjudicated rapist in the White House. 

Yay. 

A Good Start

 Artificial Intelligence isn't something brand new. 

It used to be called "homage." Or in some corners, "plagiarism." 

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was under a deadline and grinding hard to get something that his wealthy Christian landowner cronies would sign. To do this, he "borrowed" from a number of texts that seemed to more or less coalesce his thoughts about freedom. 

There was some Aristotle tossed in there. Like the notion that government should provide a place for humans to flourish rather than dominate. It has a fancy name: eudaimonia, but maybe that was just a little too Greek for the colonists so he roughed it into more of an inalienable rights angle. 

John Locke might have been flattered to see his theory about "life, liberty and property" laid out for King George as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Except that he had been dead for seventy-two years by the time Tom got around to footnoting him. 

Except he didn't. 

Thomas Jefferson just scribbled all these great ideas into one document without annotating his sources. He didn't bother to mention George Mason, a fellow Virginian who was very much alive and whose Declaration of Rights offered up a very clear template for Tom to follow. Even though George's work hit the stands almost a whole month before Tom's did. George didn't even get to sign the July 4 version, as his health didn't allow him to make the trip all the way up to Philadelphia. 

He also failed to shout out his Scottish Enlightenment and its supporters, one of whom was sitting in that sweltering room in Philadelphia with Mister Jefferson: a Reverend John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey soon to be renamed Princeton. 

And maybe it should be pointed out that all that wild talk about all men being created equally, the document also stokes the fear of "merciless Indian Savages" as it seeks to rile up settlers against the indigenous people who were having their lands appropriated by this new nation. Probably just an oversigh on Tom's part. Kind of like the slaves he kept on his plantation. No Declaration of Independence for them. 

Still, two hundred fifty years later, this flawed bit of writing stands as a meaningful starting point for us all. We might all take a moment today to appreciate the cleverness of Thomas Jefferson for finding all these ideals and writing them down for us to consider as a beginning. 

Two and a half centuries later, we still have a long way to go. 

Centennial

 As you read this, Mel Brooks will be more than one hundred years old. Apparently Al Gore's Internet met with some confusion as to the actual date of Mel's birth, which as it turns out was this past Sunday, June 28. It speaks directly to the power of comedy that Clint Eastwood, four years Mel's junior, chose to retire from directing and acting this past year while Mel Brooks is overseeing the production of the sequel to his film Spaceballs, set to appear in theaters on April 23, 2027. 

It pleases me no end to be able to celebrate Mel Brooks while he is still a-live. There is no question as to whether or not he stomped on the Terra. On New Years Eve this past year, a group of us gathered together in our living room, and began searching various platforms for something to watch until midnight. Having worked in a video store in another incarnation, I understood that trying to find an entertainment for any group larger than one was made exponentially more difficult with each added human's taste and predilections. Our festive mood was darkening just as we ran across the DVD of Mel Brooks' The Producers. Murmurs of ascent, perhaps brought on by the thought of spending any more time trying to select something for which we were all in agreement. We put in the disc and hoped for the best. 

For the next eighty-six minutes, we laughed. Hard for most of it, and though we were all aware that we were yukking it up about a group of morally reprehensible people during a time when things were not "woke" by any means, we savored every frame and when all was said and done, most of us were humming Springtime For Hitler. We did this with full awareness of how important being able to laugh at fascists was a gift given to us by none other than Mister Mel Brooks. 

I could go on about the importance of my memoires of being taken to see Blazing Saddles while still a kid by my father, or how I selected the soundtrack of Young Frankenstein as my one souvenir of my family's trip to New York City. Or my wife's enduring affection for Madeline Khan's turn as Lili Von Shtupp singing "I'm Tired." 

I might even wax rhapsodic about listening to Mel and his great friend Carl Reiner's recording of the Two Thousand Year Old Man. 

But for now I will simply bow down and say, happy birthday, Mel Brooks. Who reminds us, “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” And hoo boy can we use that right now.