With Friends Like These

Over the weekend, some things began to change. “I was one of the people that was saying that Nancy Pelosi was not the right speaker going forward, that they needed leadership change. I’m here saying I was wrong, I completely underestimated how powerful and how strong she is.” These were the words of Meghan McCain, ABC News contributor and daughter of Republican stalwart Senator John McCain. 
Ann Coulter, of Fox News and author of a book entitled In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, went on HBO Friday evening to tell the world, "You want to get Trump? I'm telling you how to get Trump," she said told her frenemy Bill Maher. "He promised something for eighteen months and he lied. It's not this Russia nonsense. You are so wasting time!"
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. Or the foxes of media, anyway. 
This crack in allegiance did not go unnoticed by our "President." Before he went to bed on Sunday night, he tweeted this: “Never thought I’d say this but I think @johnrobertsFox and @GillianHTurner @FoxNews have even less understanding of the Wall negotiations than the folks at FAKE NEWS CNN & NBC!”  Loading up another one hundred forty characters, he returned with, “After all that I have done for the Military, our great Veterans, Judges (99), Justices (2), Tax & Regulation Cuts, the Economy, Energy, Trade & MUCH MORE, does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL? Done more in first two years than any President! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Apologies for the abundance of capital letters. I just wanted you to get the full flavor. A more lower case version of his sentiments appeared in a Wall Street Journal interview: “I hear she’s become very hostile,” Trump said. “Maybe I didn’t return her phone call or something.” 
My guess is that a lot of phone calls will go unanswered and it may become necessary to change the name of Fox & Friends. Or maybe just a set of quotation marks: Fox & "Friends." 

Countdown

Our "President" has given us just three weeks to pony up the money he needs to make a see-through wall on our southern border or else he's going to shut the government down. The last time he did this, he blamed Democrats and it cost the country approximately six billion dollars. Terrible irony since that is just a little more than the price tag he has put upon his StopsAll Wall. Meanwhile, government workers stood in line for food and picked up extra hours at other jobs that paid while they waited for the standoff that just happened to be about our border with Mexico.
Meanwhile, none of those other problems have gone away. While responsibility is tossed around like a hot potato, a great hue and cry has been raised about all the people dying here in America because of the evil that is crashing through the ersatz barrier currently separating us from that evil. All that heroin that comes, apparently strapped to the backs of gun-toting MS-13 gang members who are only here to rape and pillage, is killing hundreds of Americans every week. The overwhelming abundance of these drugs are being smuggled through legal ports of entry, not tossed over barbed wire fences. And what if some of that six billion dollars had been spent on the demand end: addicts themselves?
If you were hoping that the government shutdown might somehow stop the rest of the country from committing crimes because we were on a time-out, I am sorry to say this is not the case. A young man in Louisiana went on a shooting rampage that left his mother, father as well as his girlfriend and her brother and father dead. With a light shining brightly on the StopsAll Wall, this crime went on without a link to the Humanitarian Crisis on our southern border.
We know that the "President" watches a lot of TV. He may be under the impression that there is a version of Flex-Seal, about five billion dollars worth, that could keep all that concentrated evil out. Meanwhile, he seems to be oblivious to the evil bouncing around inside our own borders.
Well, we've got three weeks. Maybe we can convince him. Or stock up on Flex-Seal. 

Release

A few nights ago, I was regaling my wife and her mother with tales of my Tuesday night visits to the record store. I was traveling a thread that started about attention spans and habits. I am that person who, once he has decided to do something will keep doing it until he is asked not to. This has caused a few embarrassments in my personal relationships. I had not been clued into the notion that dating was a mutual activity and simple persistence was not enough to maintain a connection. Not that I was a stalker, exactly, but anyone who witnessed me showing up at that same record store in the mall every Tuesday just after six might have imagined that I was in love with the record store girl.
I wasn't. I was in love with the idea that I might happen upon that one gem or missing link in my collection. I was determined not to let something get past my ever watching eye, and knowing that Tuesdays were new release day was going to keep me from going more than a few hours between when that LP showed up in the bins and the moment it sat on my turntable. This allowed me the Wednesday conversational gambit, "Hey, did you hear the new Van Halen album?" Because I had. Not that this was a weekly occurrence, mind you. There were plenty of Tuesday nights that I meandered out of the record store with nothing my hands but the certainty that I would be back next week. And the week after. Until I found treasure.
When the record industry made its big turn into compact discs, I kept going. Now I had the double-edged challenge of finding new releases on CD that would replace my now aging and outmoded collection of vinyl.
Many was the time that I tried, in vain, to gather interest in these pilgrimages. But this was a more solitary time in my life, when Tuesday nights were all about the record store and getting a slice of pepperoni downstairs at the mall. Many years later, I used to drag my wife and infant son along to Tower Records while I attempted to scratch this same itch. Happily, there were magazines there to keep mom busy and comic books for the boy. There was no pepperoni slice at the end, however. Only Burger King.
And now, new release day has shifted to the digital friendly Friday. I only need to boot up my computer to take a peek at what I have been missing. Or what I need to pull out of some cloud to hear for the first time. Or the last.
In this case, I didn't break the habit. The habit broke me. 

Follow The Stink

Once upon a time, a film was made about the disintegration of the Nixon White House. All The President's Men was written by the exemplar of screenwriters, William Goldman. One of the shadowy figures featured in this whodunit is the informer referred to as Deep Throat. In 2005, the true identity of the man played by Hal Holbrook in the film was revealed: Mark Felt, the associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. From the darkened corners of a Washington D.C. parking garage, he told reporter Bob Woodward to "follow the money." Hard to say through the haze of history if these were the actual words spoken by Mark Felt, who was given the nickname of a porn film from the seventies, or if those were the words created for the screenplay by Mister Goldman, but it turns out they were good advice.
By connecting payments made from the Committee to Re-Elect the President, CREEP to its friends, Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein were able to connect burglars caught at the Watergate Hotel to the front steps of the White House. Toss into that investigation a heaping help of Washington-type scurrilous activity among those with spots closest to the President and you've got the one and only case of a President of the United States resigning from office.
So what have we learned?
Follow the money.
There is an awful lot of that (money) in Washington these days. Sadly, not as much of it is being paid out to the government employees who were furloughed or asked to work for free since things were shut down for more than a month. But there is a lot of it around. Some of it could be found in the metaphorical pockets of one Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to our current "President." Mister Stone was arrested Friday morning on seven counts including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering. This is a guy who has a long list of campaign "advising" that includes the current resident of the White House and (wait for it) Richard Nixon. This brings the total number of current administration officials and hangers-on indicted to thirty-seven. When the smoke cleared and Nixon's helicopter took off from the South Lawn, there were forty from the Nixon administration. 
Follow the history. 

Until

A gunman killed five people at a bank in Florida this week. I hesitate to add the "lone" to that description since it seems to convey something more sinister. Acting alone in these situations is pretty much the way they work, even though investigators will spend at least a few moments looking for additional suspects. Because the kind of evil that is involved in taking a life must surely be generated in the minds of a gang or an army or a nation. Or just one guy, acting alone.
After killing five people, the gunman barricaded himself inside the bank, attempting to hold off the assembled SWAT team. He eventually surrendered to authorities. These same authorities were not quick to assign a motive to the crime (murder), since robbing the bank did not seem to be the motive. They referred to the event as "senseless."
And so Sebring, Florida takes its place on the ever-expanding list of cities and towns in America that can claim a mass shooting as part of their infamy. In response, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said this of the suspect, "Obviously, this is an individual who needs to face very swift and exacting justice." 
Obviously. One might wonder if the subtext there is that the suspect should be dragged through the streets, or simply shot on sight. Which makes sense to him because now that we know someone is a killer, killing is not senseless. We have laws that say we can take someone's life. We are a government by the people and for the people and the people must be protected from senseless crime committed by senseless people. 
Which makes me wonder what sort of sense existed inside this gunman's mind at the time of the shooting. My guess is that he had made peace with the idea that he might be killed himself, or that he was somehow invulnerable to the bullets and lethal injections of the world that had generated the senselessness. 
So now we are left to make sense out of it. Until the next one. 

From The Mind Of...

What to do. What to do.
There are so many problems and so many possible solutions. Finding the correct turn on this particular version of your navigation app becomes more confusing by the minute. The "President" poses an interesting question: "Why is it that when I decide to bring our troops back from overseas it's a bad idea?" Furthermore, "Why is it when I say build a wall on the southern border, it's a bad idea?"
Perhaps this is because this is the brain-trust that brought us Space Force. It is the same mind from which the notion of serving up fast food to a group of highly conditioned athletes sprang. It is the same mouth from which dripped the assertion that there were "some very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville when white nationalists marched, eventually resulting in the death of one of the counter-protesters.
I am pretty sure that if the "President" announced that he had discovered the cure for cancer, there are folks who would flock to McDonald's for whatever it was that he had to sell. And people like me would swear off Big Macs forever.
Back in the days before Christmas and the government shutdown, I had in my mind a Dickensian moment of clarity that would come to the White House some early morning. Clanking chains and moaning spirits. Maybe a trip to a graveyard. Maybe the "President" would wake up from that dream, or was it? and take to the airwaves announcing that his small heart had grown two sizes that day. Just enough to be normal.
That didn't happen. Instead, the second month of government workers going without pay has begun, and the wall continues to be the insistence in spite of a number of ongoing investigations that seem to be gathering momentum not just from their weight but by the bumbling efforts to make them go away.
How would we know a good idea if it actually swam to the surface of this toxic morass?

Pretend Genius

I was recently bemoaning my lack of science and math prowess, and it occurred to me that maybe I have been looking at it all wrong. For all the appreciation and interest I have in explanations for How Things Work, I should be focusing more on the theoretical. Once I learn that gravity and coincidence has somehow delivered us a moon that appears the same size in the sky as our sun, then a whole lot of mysteries about lunar eclipses are neatly wrapped up. I won't get too wrapped up in explaining how this came to pass, since that might require math with parentheses. Instead, I will marvel at the way the play of light and shadows can make amateur astronomers swoon, as was the case with last week's Super Blood Wolf Moon.
Not just your standard Blood Moon. The Super Blood Wolf Moon. Two more adjectives. Made possible by the same science that allows kindergartners to make butterfly hand puppets on a screen in front of a projector.
Theoretically.
Then it occurs to me that I live in this world much in the same way that I live in the world of rock and roll. I have endless appreciation for all manner of bands and musicians, and it is my years of study of piano, trombone and tuba that allow me to understand the rudiments of what they are doing. What this allows me to do is to pantomime wildly as if I were playing those guitars and drums. And, given a large and loud enough crowd, sing along. This mild devotion to air guitar was finally rewarded by the invention of the video game Guitar Hero, which became an obsession in my life for a number of years until I realized that I was actually coming no closer to my dreams of rock and roll stardom, stuck as I was on Medium.
Which isn't to say that I don't get what Eric Clapton is doing. Or Neil Peart. Or any one of a thousand different players whose notes I have imagined recreating in that overbite-eyes-closed state that somehow makes my flailings more sincere. Not an accurate recreation, but a generic simulation of gestures that could be confused with playing music.
And something about stars.