Unbirthday Play on Words

Excuse me for not blogging for so long. It's not that I've been out jogging or busy cataloguing all the things I haven't written and haven't done. I'm just right here sitting more or less adrift like a shipwrecked sailor on the wine dark sea waiting for a shark to make a meal of me while I tread water for all eternity. My keyboard clacks with noiseless sounds where all my empty thoughts abound after everything is gone that I have tracked and kept in storage in a treasure chest buried on an island under a thousand feet of shifting sand far from the madness of the world at large; my own personal madness will do quite nicely. Today is my half-birthday. I'm sixty-seven and a half today. Who cares? Well, at 67 ½, every day you wake up breathing is a cause for celebrating. Whatever the weather, wherever you are, whoever is in power at the moment near or far, life is good, life is fair.. At least for me; in that sense I've been pretty lucky. I have hair. Lots of it. My brain is still reasonably functional. I still remember all sorts of s—tuff. My train of thought blithely sits on the track waiting to move. My bags are packed and whatever I lack for the trek I will figure out at the other end and, what the heck, I celebrate by sharing the following paragraph with all my friends, and rest assured I'll never quit. I've been on a poetry kick of late, rhyming lines on love and fate. The Trump Show makes me hesitate, but sometimes you just have to leave politics aside and go on a more joyous ride, and sometimes you feel a lion's pride in the few things you can control and the many things that feed your soul. So rhymes have become my oars on a lifeboat that suddenly appeared, easing all my deepest fears for now as I put in for a distant rocky shore, and I can see you standing there waiting with a warm blanket6 and a steaming cup of tea.

Cassandra Writes Her Blog

I've been away for a while, by choice. I pulled back from my blogs because the political scene just keeps getting more Reality TV absurd. I began to feel like Cassandra warning the Trojans not to open the gates and let that giant horse inside, only for me it was a giant horse's ass to worry about. I kept track even though the news has been depressing, frightening, at times ridiculous and at times sublimely absurd. I would laugh except it is all so real—an egomaniac with no moral compass who believes his own lies is running our country by alienating our allies and antagonizing more and more of his own people. I keep seeing smug Benito Mussolini addressing the Italian people on how great things are going to be at a rally before the start of World War Two—he didn''t know someone else was the puppet master and his people had no idea what they had purchased. So I backed off. Let things play out. Worked on my own stuff. Figured no one would be listening, anyway. Then Charlottesville happened, and guess what? The majority of the American people began to speak, by a 2 to 1 ratio, not just against the purveyors of hate who tried to incite the nation into violence, but against a President who cannot say the right thing whenever he is left to his own devices, and wouldn't know the truth if it hit him in the head, which it does, continually. Looks like I'm the one listening now. He won't. He's too busy building a horse. I bet those who didn't come out to vote in 2016 are sorry now. They elected this man.

Fire the President!

The honeymoon appears to be over. Republican members of Congress and other staunch members of that party are being confronted by the stark reality of Donald Trump's belief system. I remember when he first began his campaign, just seconds after he walked down that staircase and announced he was running for the office, and then went on a tirade against illegal immigrants that went far over the top, and I thought, this man's a joke. He will get nowhere. But so many people told me, “He doesn't really mean it.” I thought, are you lkistening? “It's just what candidates say.” But all we have to judge by are the words a person gives us, especially when we have no idea of that person's track record in actions. Trump did mean what he said. He keeps saying it. Now, finally, it seems that most of the country and even some of the Republicans among us are getting it. Trump's base support keeps shrinking, down to 34% this week. 40% of Americans want to see him impeached. 6% more want him tried by Congress and thereby removed from office than support his agenda, whatever that is, and his rhetoric, which is remarkably clear. Even die-hard supporters are eroding away, and rightly so—who wants to remain associated with the closet bigotry that helped elect him and that he has so blatantly taken out of the closet? Which begs the question: can't we just look at Donald collectively and say, “You're fired!”? The answer, sadly, is no. the Constitution has never made a provision for lack of confidence. Other democracies have a vote of no confidence clause, and use it, but not the United States. We have to wait. We have to wait for the general election of 2020. We have to hope that the other party presents us with a worthy opponent whom we can trust and in whom we can believe. To act sooner, we have to wait for the 2018 mid-term elections and if, IF, the House flips to a majorty for the Democrats, then impeachment proceedings might be voted upon to begin. Otherwise, we have to hope that a Republican majority Congress votes for it now, or that they, in conjunction with the President's own cabinet, decide that he is unfit and invoke the 25th Amendment, placing Mike Pence in the top spot, which is equally frightening. Or Trump might resign. I think he'd rather drop nukes on North Korea.

A Note on Free Speech in lieu of Charlottesville

In a discussion on free speech, my brother expressed to me a certain ambivalence about whether of not Confederate Robert E, Lee's statue should be removed. I asked him, what if you were in Berlin or Amsterdam and someone wanted to remove a statue of Adolph Hitler, assuming one was there? After all, Hitler is a vital part of human history. I am not equating Hitler with Robert E. Lee, but I am equating slavery with Nazism. Both were and are heinous institutions that derive(d) their power from the misery and enslavement of others. Neither is on the scrapheap of history—obviously, neo-Nazism and White Supremacy and the bigotry and hatred they engender are still loud and vulgar in America and elsewhere; and the fact is that over 26 million human beings are enslaved around the world today. So why is the removal of one statue so important: because any symbol of either Nazism or slavery is an affront and an insult to Liberty. Ironically, Lady Liberty allows someone so inclined to display suich images. But when the land is 'public,' when it belongs to and is freely open to all who wish to go there, those symbols do not belong. Those who display them privately or as an expression of free speech should be mindful of what those symbols really represent--hatred--and how displaying them makes that person appear to the rest of us. One has to think that such public displays are meant to incite violence and hatred, given what they represent. It was not a statue that was the issue in Charlottesville; the statue was an excuse to cause a riot. The First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceful assembly; I saw no intent to promote peace or understanding among the neo-surpemacists in Charlottesville. Those who exercise free speech are not required to have respect for the institutions that guarantee and protect that speech, or for the majority of citizens the speaker presumably wants to sway to their point of view. You do not have to respect us, but do not expect our respect in return.