Bumpy Ride

 Fourteen years ago, on the Fourth of July, my family and I were visiting Washington D.C. In a rare outburst of Clark Griswold type energy, I gathered my wife and son and pushed them out into the heat and humidity of an east coast summer where we went on a forced march to the National Archives, where it was my hope that we would all have a chance to stand in front of The Declaration of Independence. On the Fourth of July. I confess that at certain moments throughout this journey I doubted my own commitment to our quest. Public transportation and our human frailties took their toll, but eventually after finding the end of the line and living through the time it took to finally take our place in full view of the one and only. For just a minute or two, I felt humbled. That piece of paper, encased in glass, was what started all this fuss in the first place. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And that was without the aid of Chatgpt. 

This past Fourth of July I found myself wondering how those ideals had become so diffused. All men are created equal? Unalienable rights? The pursuit of Happiness? I have spent great chunks of each day over the past month taking in video accounts of masked agents who refuse to identify themselves shoving men, women and children into unmarked vehicles without any warrants or due process. Just relentless brutality against anyone and everyone who gets in their way. Meanwhile, in some of those same halls that my family and I toured fourteen years ago, the rich were given still more riches while those in need of food and health care were cut off from that promise of life and liberty. 

You can forget about the Happiness. 

I recalled a summer some forty years ago when the words of Bruce Springsteen pushed me into some of my first adult commitment to world politics. I joined Amnesty International in the hopes that I would be able to help those "prisoners of conscience" being held in gulags and work camps around the globe. I wanted to be a part of the evolution of our world. I put my faith an trust in people I believed who would elevate our worldview. We should all have those unalienable rights. Not just an ideal. A reality. 

 I could not have imagined that four decades later I would be watching the wholesale dismantling of all those hopes and dreams. Here in America. I listened again to The Land of Hope And Dreams, and was reminded that we are still on a journey together. Because that is what America really is, and we can't let go of that dream. 

This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'

Hold on tight, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

Up Yonder

 Upon reflectin, it seems as though the life and career of Jimmy Swaggart should have given us some inkling as to the depths of depravity Americans were capable. Not Jimmy himself, mind you. He was the same husckster he was straight along, but each time he was caught with his pants down, quite literally, he was able to wriggle free and find his way back to the pulpit. That million dollar pulpit. 

Televangelism is kind of a dying art, but in its heyday, Jimmy was top of the heap. His media empire kept expanding in the 1980s to include his own broadcasting network and a Bible college that bears his name. From his humble beginnings as a gospel singer and pianist on Colonel Sam Phillips' Sun Records (yes, that Sam Phillips), Jerry found his way to the airwaves on the radio and eventually television. By 1983, two hundred fifty television stations were carrying his weekly program. 

It was somewhere around this time that he told his followers, "The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that." That was kind of the setup for the moment that he was caught with a prostiute and summarily defrocked by the Assemblies of God. This led to his impassioned sermon where he wept and begged for forgiveness from his Father who art in Heaven and everybody felt like that would be a wrap for Jimmy. 

It wasn't. He took his show on the road to another network and got back to preaching. For about another three years when he got pulled over by police in Indio, California for driving on the wrong side of the road. With the reverend this time was Rosemary Garcia, who had this to say: "He asked me for sex. I mean, that's why he stopped me. That's what I do. I'm a prostitute." This time, Jimmy's response was less tortured and filled with grief: "The Lord told me it's flat none of your business."

Speaking of business, Jimmy's son and later his grandson picked up the family trade, but neither one of them won a Grammy like daddy did. Of course, neither one of them managed to have the Bible college they startedd change its name to deflect unwanted publicity. 

Jimmy passed on to that next phase of his evangelical path at the age of ninety, having spent most of the past thirty years off of the public radar, no longer able to reach out and beg for money from his followers. When he went to that big revival tent in the sky, he was still worth five million dollars. 

Rosemary Garcia was not available for comment. 

Aloha, Jimmy Swaggart, cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis. 

What Stinks

 Okay. That lasted a little less than a week. I have come to realize that I am simply not strong enough to ignore the chaos that swirls around me every single day. It is one thing to avoid low-hanging fruit, but another when that fruit continues to drop into your lap and onto your head with a frequency comparable to your respiration rate. 

The former game show host is currently selling cologne. The adjudicated rapist is no stranger to the fragrance market, having Unleashed his Fight Fight Fight scent back in December, and before that in 2004 he had a bottle of stink called Donald Trump The Fragrence on the market. The most recent addition to this line is called Victory 45-47, and it comes in a gold bottle that shaped like an action figure of the twice-impeached convicted felon. Since his daily activity is best described as stomping about and yelling at people, you're not getting a lot of "action" here. 

Which brings me to the point I feel I need to make. The "president" has made a point of how he is willing to forego his salary for ignoring the rule of law and thumbing his nose at the Constitution. That gig is just the front for his continued stream of side-hustles that circle around his stock in a company cleverly named Trump Media. All those forays into selling sneakers and phones, always with his predilection toward gold-plating things, are what he does to keep his other empire alive while he does his best to pad his nest in the Oval Office. If you believe that a sitting American President needs to take time out of his busy day to sell perfume, then maybe you haven't been keeping track of current events. 

And, if you are so inclined, you can feel free to take this opportunity to imagine what this eau de toilette smells like. I would imagine something along the lines of the cushion of the seat on his golf cart after nine holes. Or maybe the faint whiff of bathroom trouble. Perhaps it''s reminiscent of the smell of lubricant that should have been used to grease the treads of the tanks in his birthday parade. Some might suggest that they smell like napalm in the morning, which given the Dear Leader's fascination with bombs might make sense. 

Now I would like to insert my own feelings about cologne in general. I am not a fan. This additional aroma layered on top of our human stink is there to distract and confuse us. Some people are good at wearing just a hint of something to catch our olfactory senses off guard. I am not guessing that is what your average MAGAt will be doing with this junk, slathering it on in hopes of smelling like their cult leader. 

You can't cover up stupid. 

This Land

 This land is your land. 

This land is my land. 

From California to the New York Island. 

Thanks to Amerigo Vespucci, that is. If you don't have an encyclopedic memory for such things, Mister Vespucci was the guy who correctly pointed out that Christopher Columbus had not managed to sail around the world to Asia, but had run into a completely different continent. For his navigational cleverness, folks back then started calling this new place Vespucciland. Finding that is didn't have quite the ring they were hoping for, they went with his first name, anglicized to "America." He got two continents. His buddy Chris eventually got a city in Ohio named for him.

Then, for a couple hundred years things stayed pretty quiet. Back then it was a whole lot easier to "discover" places than to commit to actually living there. Probably the one star ratings from the folks in Roanoke just before they all disappeared had something to do with that. As it turns out, the best way to get folks to move to a new country is to chase them out of the places where they had overstayed their welcome. I'm looking at you, William Bradford. 

Suddenly, Amerigoville was open for business. Which came as a bit of a shock to the people who had been inhabiting hills and valleys for centuries prior, but heck, why not help the new kids out? Have a big dinner and invite everyone? A couple years later, another big party was held, but there were mostly white faces sitting around that table. 

And so it went for the next hundred years or so until the east coast of this "America" place was full up. So full in fact that rather than sending boats back with troublemakers to England and so forth, it was decided that we would start pushing west instead, "discovering" all kinds of strange new worlds and new civilizations to disrupt and overwhelm. We said goodbye to the King and set about making ourselves a brand new country. 

From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters. 

And it's about there that most renditions of Woody Guthrie's song stop. They don't go on to that next verse: 

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said, "Private Property"
But on the back side, it didn't say nothing
This land was made for you and me

So here we are, nearly two hundred fifty years after Cornwallis handed his sword to George Washington and said, "You're a nation." and we're trying so very hard to make ourselves out to be "great." Again. And just how do we go about doing this? By rounding up immigrants who helped make this land and sending them somewhere else. This land was made for them every bit as much as it was made for you and me. That's what the voice was "a-sounding." You and me. 

Us. 

Get it? 

Strategy

 Seventy percent of the world's electric vehicles are made in one country. These cars "have far superior in-vehicle technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are in every car," Ford's CEO Jim Farley said. "You get in, you don't have to pair your phone. Automatically, your whole digital life is mirrored in the car."

"Beyond that, their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West," added Farley. 

Wait a second. "In the West." This country that he's talking about, could it be the United States?

In a word, "no." In some more words, I have to admit that this post is not precisely the happy news promised earlier this week, but rather a side trip down "Warning Street." Ford's CEO has made several visits to China over the past several months and has returned "humbled," to use his word

"I don't like talking about the competition so much, but I drive the Xiaomi," Farley said of the Xiaomi Speed Ultra 7. The SU7 is Xiaomi's maiden electric vehicle. "We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I've been driving it for six months now, and I don't want to give it up." For those of you unfamiliar, Xiaomi is the world's second largest producer of cellular telephones and a consumer electronics company based in Beijing. 

And they make cars. Electric cars. The retail price for the newest version of their "luxury high-performance SUV" is less than the Tesla Model Y. 

This is good news for a planet that needs more electric cars. It does seem a little confounding since Ford recently announced that they were shifting their focus away from all-electric vehicles and back to hybrid versions of those same cars, primarily SUVs. This announcement came from the Ford's CFO, John Lawler. Which made me wonder if John and Jim ever sit down and discuss business. 

The car business. The future is out there. It just may not be found in America. 

Stirrings

 It has not been a good summer for sleep. As I have mentioned here recently, I have had a head full of trouble and I suppose I only have myself to blame for the poor sleep hygiene. 

Unless I want to blame the cat. 

The feline with whom I live has a rather demanding schedule that includes a great many naps throughout the day. I tend not to notice these when I am working because I am working. Not checking in on his lengthy lolls about on the couch. Our bed. In the spot of sun in the back room. Back to the couch again. Onto the table that looks out on the front yard. He's getting plenty of rest. I know this because I am witness to it while I make my way through this "vacation." 

When he's awake and moderately alert, he will mince about the house, vocalizing his moderate displeasure with the lack of attention he is receiving. My wife and I alternate replies to his plaintive cries. She prefers to speak to him in her native tongue. I choose to greet him in his own vernacular. This does not have the effect of confusing or calming him. He seems to believe that we are carrying on a conversation. 

Which brings us to those late nights and early mornings, when he feels completely comfortable entering our room and shouting at the top of his lungs. It would seem that he is expressing his deep and abiding concern that we have forgotten about him. Not that we should be attending to his needs and feed at four in the morning. During the school year I can shut out his lamentations until six, when my day begins and there is some inkling that we are sharing breakfast. Have a good day at work, he murmurs before loping off to the bedroom to curl up on  my side of the bed. The space I have left empty for him to begin a had day's nap. 

But now it's summer, and I have this absurd notion that I should be able to catch up on the rest that I have missed. Couple this nocturnal predilection with my own inability to nap myself and we end up with loose ends of a sleep cycle. My recent bouts with insomnia have not helped me manage any better, and the cat seems pleasantly amused by my late-night ramblings. Whatcha doin'? Are we going to eat now? Sounds great! He has a running commentary for a time that I wish was only a dream. 

This too, we are told, shall pass. Soon enough the daily rituals will return to normal. Whatever that is. I suppose it has something to do with a cat sitting on my chest and staring at me, waiting none too patiently for me to use my opposable thumbs to open that new can of cat food. 

Sunshine!

 In keeping with my vision of a less-snarky Entropical Paadise, I would like to put forth the news of this bit of legislation coming from our friends in the Sunshine State.

Yes, I know this puts me at odds with so much of what goes on down in that pendulous appendage to the lower forty-eight, but when something good happens, I feel it bears mentioning. 

At least that's what I am trying to do. 

In a flurry of new Florida State laws set to go into effect over the coming year the lawmakers and governor have made many choices. I will steer away from some of those with which I wholeheartedly disagree, I will focus on the happy news: An education package that includes a ban on cellphone use by students during school hours. Once upon a time I am sure that visionaries imagined that encouraged a trend toward school kids having their own personal research devices were thrilled at the prospect of having a room full of Internet access. The immediate response of children with access to Al Gore's Internet was not to collect bookmarks to educational websites and content. They were in it for the YouTube. And the TikTok. And the games. Not unlike their adult counterparts. Most of all, they wanted to text each other. Not with the answers to this week's Algebra homework, but with the latest update on the happenings in the bathroom. 

So, I'm okay with that portion of the legislative agenda in Florida. The other educational themed codicil that allows those students who participate in marching band to receive physical education or performing arts credit. As a recovering member of the Boulder High School Marching Panthers, class of 1980, I might have graduated a semester early for all the time I spent hanging around in the band room. 

Okay. Then there was a whole lot of other mess much more in line with what we expect to come from Ron DeSantis and his lawmaking pals. But I'm not going into it now because I'm honorbound to try and shine a light on the good things. Even if they are very hard to find among the DeSantis Detritus.