Fifty-One

 Anybody else out there wondering how Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia are doing?

It seems like a war ago that the U.S. Armed Forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. Compared to the quagmire that has become the "Expedition to Iran," the military operation in Venezuela seems positively quaint by comparison. Sure, shots were fired in anger, but no girls schools were harmed during that incursion. 

Now the convicted felon is musing once again aloud about how he believes that Venezuela would make a nice fifty-first state. Assistant press secretary Olivia Whales announced on behalf of her boss, "As the President has said, relations between Venezuela and the United States have been extraordinary. Oil is starting to flow and large amounts of money, unseen for many years, will soon be helping the great people of Venezuela."

Oil and money are flowing. Don't you worry your pretty little heads about economic and political stability. 

Which raises certain questions for me: Does a military invasion count as a path to statehood? If this is the case, how worried should the citizens of California and New York be about Federales rolling into their historically blue settlements? Or if the adjudicated rapist follows through with his plan for Venezuela will he just be guaranteeing yet another blue headache? 

Of course, all of this requires some mild forward thinking and planning. The quagmire in Iran suggests that this is not the strong suit of the current administration. Running out of missiles and time, the oil and money in that corner of the globe doesn't seem to be flowing in the direction the twice-impeached Orange Worst had in mind. And all of that Venezuelan money and oil doesn't seem to have found its way to the American consumer, who are experiencing the worst inflation in three years. 

Meanwhile, former president Maduro and his wife are living a life of relative calm and safety in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until their case can be tried. As for that whole fifty-first state fuss, the rules concerning that sort of thing are laid out in the U.S. Constitution. Which, for this group of idiots, means that they don't have to worry about the details. Not right now. 

We've got a ballroom to build!

On The Timeline

 In this spot twenty-one years ago, I wrote about The Worst Sunburn I Ever Had. If you have a penchant for remembering such tales, then you probably recall how I went out to a baseball game while my wife waded through those last hours of labor. The sunburn of song and story came as a result to sitting my lily-white thighs out in the California sun as I spent the last few hours of being a child before having one. 

Now that baby is all grown up and facing his own transition to adulthood. This has included becoming ever more responsible and buying himself a second motorcycle. When I turned twenty-nine I had begun to believe that relationships were things other people had, and I was going to spend my golden years visiting friends who had gotten married and had their own kids. I would be Uncle Dave to the world, and I was on my way to unconditional surrender to this idea. 

Then I fell in love. And got married. And my dad died. And there was a parking spot in the world's lot available. My wife and I decided we could test our own freshly minted adult skills by growing an incipient grown up all on our own. 

We needn't have worried. The support we received from those around us was instantaneous and amazing. When I say "we" I mean my wife who is primarily the one that seeks out and creates community. Left to my own devices, I might have stopped instructing our little boy after I instilled in him an appreciation for Bachman Turner Overdrive. When he was less than a year old. 

These days, I am happy that I didn't stop trying to give him life lessons. That mild commitment has had the slingshot effect of having him return the favor. I know what a hemi powered drone is. And the secrets of mustard-fried burgers at In 'n' Out. 

Every so often, my son broaches the subject of becoming a father himself. This fills me with pride and sends me into flights of speculation, imagining what adventures await him and his progeny. I look forward to hearing the story of the worst sunburn he ever had. 

Happy Birthday, son. 

A Colorful Individual

 “The last time I checked, I owned the films that we're in the process of colorizing. I can do whatever I want with them, and if they're going to be shown on television, they're going to be in color.” 

This is the quote from a bygone era, one in which Ted Turner and his single-minded vision for "preserving art" brought us to the crossroads where MGM and Warner Brothers movie catalogs were bought up by this four-time Yachtsman of the Year. Casablanca. Adam's Rib. Father of the Bride. Arsenic and Old Lace. And the list goes on. And on.

In 1986, I took this as a personal affront. As someone who had grown up watching these and hundreds of other black and white films with my mother, I found Ted's cavalier attitude toward the treasures he felt compelled to release onto an unsuspecting world in a washed-out blast of sepia and pastel in order to "improve them." Many of these films, such as The Bad And The Beautiful, were made long after color became readily available and making them in black and white was a conscious choice by the artists creating their vision. 

"Last time I checked, I owned 'em," is the reason why all these years later I found it hard to work up a tear for Ted Turner's passing. He gave us Cable News Network and World Championship Wrestling. His was the first "superstation," paving the way for the explosion of cable TV in the 1980's. Twenty-four hour news meant that suddenly we were forced to pay attention to events that had never needed the attention they were getting. As for WCW, Ted's brash take on "professional wrestling" allowed fading stars like Randy "Macho Man" Savage and Hulk Hogan a new lease of life. 

Thanks a lot, Ted. 

Of course, he was also the guy who gave a billion dollars to start the United Nations Foundation, and his purchase of all those black and white films led to the creation of Turner Classic Movies, where those movies are shown uncut and commercial free, in their correct aspect ratio and, if I might add, in the colors in which their directors envisioned them. Then there's the decade long marriage to Jane Fonda, and the subsequent friendship between the two that lasted for decades after that. 

Did I miss something? 

Maybe we could make this right by taking all the video of Ted's Terra-stomping and drain them of all color, just for safe-keeping. 

Aloha, Ted. 

Wheels

 I am glad my son got to ride a Big Wheel at his preschool. As a matter of fact, Big Wheels were such a big deal at my son's preschool that eventually the T-shirts they sold for fundraising came with a picture of one emblazoned on the back. Anyone who spent any amount of time there knew the routine: all the various cycles and scooters would be rolled out to the top of the hill behind the school, where kids would take turns rolling at what seemed like incredible speeds for the toddlers and the parents charged with watching them via the co-op management program. But the bottom line, literally, was that if you rode a Big Wheel all the way down the hill, you would of course roll it back up to the top. 

This was the world into which my son grew. A co-op preschool that honored both speed and personal responsibility. It is where I first gathered in the expression, "Use your words." This admonition has served me well in my elementary education career, as well as a great many of my adult relationships. It was okay to be mad. It was okay to be sad. It was okay to share those feelings. It was not okay to take those feelings out on others. 

Our son, an only child, was gifted with an immediate sea of friends, some of whom remain close to him even as they approach middle age. 

Imagining a world where the philosophy of those formative years could be shared with every child in the city of Oakland, the state of California, the United States. A world full of humans who learned to share, to cope with disappointment, to belong to a community. It gives me pause and it makes me happy to remember that we gave this to our son all those years ago. 

Life got so much more complicated once he landed in kindergarten. He missed those rides down the hill on a Big Wheel. It's probably what brought him eventually to the purchase of a motorcycle of his own. He knows that if he gets all the way to the bottom of the hill it's his job to get it back to the top again. 

And to be properly insured. 

Pay Me

 My older brother will be acknowledging the fiftieth year of his graduation from the public school system of Boulder, Colorado. He was part of the one hundredth senior class of Boulder High School. By the time I came traipsing along four years later, the hoopla had died down considerably. Numbers with zeroes in them tend to get folks worked up. 

I say this as preface to the article he shared with me as the auspicious anniversary approaches. According to the Boulder Daily Camera, the school district in my hometown has begun handing out fifteen thousand dollars to veteran teachers to entice them into retirement. It seems that those educators at or near the top of the pay scale are causing things at the Boulder Valley School District to get a little tight financially. More than half of the district's teachers are in the top two tiers of compensation, while those at the entry-level make up only five percent. "We have a skewed distribution," says Superintendent Rob Anderson.

Two things stick out for me here: First of all, this news comes to me during the glorious fete that is Teacher Appreciation Week. Secondly, I have a very clear and distinct memory of school districts around the country working feverishly to get a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. This was part of a little program called "No Child Left Behind." That edict is now some twenty years in the past, and we currently find ourselves shutting down the department of education in order to buy more bombs to blow up girl's schools in Iran. 

I was offered a "deal" earlier this year to show myself to the door in order to help close a gap in the eternally messed up finances of the Oakland Unified School District. My circumstances were not exactly ripe for the picking of this particular "windfall," but I couldn't quite shake the feeling of an invisible hand in the middle of my back "encouraging" me to wrap up my vaguely illustrious career as a teacher here in California. California, the state whose governor held on to nearly two billion dollars in money earmarked for education, and has proposed to keep another five billion in this coming year. 

It would seem that budgetary woes are being felt throughout this great land of ours, as the Department of Education experiences the same respect as the East Wing of the White House. Things have become so odd and desperate that the powers that be are willing to pay teachers not to teach in order to save money. 

For a ballroom. 

Lift Us Up

Mothers are the ones

who care for us

they bend and stretch 

make room for us

They bring us into the world

and turn out the light

when it's time for bed

time for sleep 

Those nine long months 

end in labor

but it's only

just beginning. 

 I'm pretty sure

if they put mothers in charge

there would be no wars

and a whole lot of people 

would be sent to their rooms

to think about it

Endangered

 Wind back the clock.

That's the program. The convicted felon has never felt fully comfortable in this age of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Women should be kept in their place. Busy decorating the ruins of the White House in shades of red or buried somewhere on a golf course in New Jersey. He routinely refers to African Americans as "thugs" and "low IQ." His obsession with tariffs remind us of a bygone era when William McKinley was President, and so many things were gilded. Like his toilet. 

Tangentially, I wonder if there is someone out there who would be able to name a major accomplishment of the McKinley administration. Outside of the fact that he was assassinated near the beginning of his second term in office. And he led the American half or the Spanish-American War. And he annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. He never invaded Canada. That may have been his plan had he not been shot.

Okay, that's probably enough creepy comparisons for now.

Except this new one strikes me more of Andrew Jackson, another fave of the Orange Worst. For those of you presidential scholars out there, you might remember Andrew as the "first America First." And you might also remember he's the guy who oversaw the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of Native Americans beginning in 1830. Without any significant Native American presence left to herd, the Second Trumpreich is looking for force hundreds of bison off public lands in Montana. This overturns forty years of peaceful grazing under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management, also known creepily enough as BLM. This move has led to a protest by the Coalition of Large Tribes, Over the course of white folks pushing west from 1800 to 1890, the bison population of North America diminished from a high of one hundred million animals to just a thousand. Now there's a discouraging word. 

In 2026, it is estimated that there are half a million bison on this continent, brought back from the brink of extinction through protection and conservation. They are not currently considered an endangered species, just "Near Threatened."

But then again, aren't we all?