Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

I wrote this song 42 years ago, Dec. 8th, 1980, in a cabin up Nine Mile back when Nine Mile was still out there, a good hour away from Missoula when the weather was good, another continent when it was bad. 

I never sang or recorded it. I figured it was such a bummer song that no one at my relatively un-serious gigs (gig-lets, gig-gles) would want to hear it, but I've always liked it. 

A friend of mine, Addison Double, wrote one at the same time, too, in Missoula, and I remember coming into town soon after the tragedy and sharing our musical heartaches in that old house on Stoddard Street just below what's now the Toole Street bridge spanning the railroad tracks. Stoddard was a dead-end then, only the White Pine and Sash mill yard across what passed for a street and no Toole St. bridge to hop you across the tracks to the happening part of town.

I remember Burlington Northern making trains in the hump yard just south of the house. There'd be a tremendous chugging of the diesel engine as it pushed the linked mix-matched cars heading to different parts of the country backwards and up the "hump" where, once every car was ready to roll down the the other side of the hump it would be uncoupled (maybe they already were) and you'd hear big steel wheels rolling on big steel rails for a few seconds as the loose car picked up speed and was channeled by the yard crew at the fork in the tracks that sent it to its proper train and then "BOOM!!" when the car hit the train on the make. Like a cannon. You'd sit straight up in bed out of a dead sleep. That was the old North Side. I loved it.

I imagine Addison and I swapping our Lennon tunes on a dark winter night (no streetlights then) to the sound of booming trains, or cannons, whichever your imagination preferred.

After so many years I don't remember all the words to Addison's songs, only the chorus:

"You can kill the singer

But you cannot kill the song

Unless you can kill everyone

Who wants to sing along."

I'll record my song soon and post it here, but in the meantime, here's to peace.

Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

by Bill LaCroix

The news is out, it’s in all the papers

The killer stalks, and he’ll never get caught.

If you ever turned your back on a shadow

You might get shot, you just might get shot.

I used to listen to his songs when I was a kid

And I never got caught, and I liked them a lot.

I’d sit in my room and play them for hours

He helped shape my thought, yeah he helped shape my thought.

Chorus 1:

Then Mark David Chapman, he bought him a handgun

For two hundred bucks, for two hundred bucks.

He hid in the shadows and on Lennon’s back

He tried his luck, he tried his luck.

Guitar break

Chorus 2:

He was famous as Christ, sometimes he was careless

But you know that he tried, yeah you know that he tried.

He wrote some good songs about this world’s unfairness

And that’s how he died, y’know that’s how he died.

As the news of his death was splashed in the papers

I read the same message I heard in his songs.

It said look at this thing that’s happenin’ to people

Something’s wrong, yeah something’s wrong.

All those lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Thought for the Day After Election Day, 2022

OK guys, here's the deal...

 

We had an election where the Talking Heads and the brains behind them (Ew...ww..!?) tried to convince us that forcing women to be incubators for unwanted pregnancies was not as big a deal as inflation. Turned out they were wrong but still, we should give those (not) poor pundits credit where it's due. They were unspecific about what kind of inflation women should be more worried about than full-metal, fascist speculums with body cams (??!!??). 

 

In other words, there was no "red wave", because people--predominantly women and predominantly young ones--who felt they should have more say about their bodily functions than, say, a state legislature full of local wing nuts in the pockets of billionaire oil sheiks (Hello, Montana!) showed up and spoke American. "Go to hell," they said to the bastards, and here's what I say--in American--to all the guys (and pundits) who put Choice on the back burner this election cycle cuz (just cuz....) Shame on ya. If you couldn't see how your rights are just as tanked as the rights of women over such a basic, biological, moral issue, then you deserve the neutered, technicolor Disney-fantasy-land where you never get laid that you apparently live in (Jeez, did I just write that?)

 

But it wasn't just the punditocracy and some other guys who were wrong about the apparently-mysterious ways of democracy. The Democratic Party was wrong on both their messaging and their strategy. There was an energized base after the Alito leak that I don't think will ever be matched in my lifetime. We all knew the axe was gonna fall as soon as Barrett was shoehorned into the supremes, and we all knew it was coming years before that. Why didn't 50 states have an abortion rights proposal--sponsored and promoted AND FUNDED by Democrats--on all the ballots this fall? This is Politics 101 in a functioning democracy: motivate your base with actual actions that will improve their lives and then turn them out at election time. It would have been a "two-fer", getting people to the polls who knew what fascism looks like even if they couldn't articulate it (Hello, Kansas!) and getting us as a society a long ways towards taking the microphone away from psychopaths. 

I happened to be in DC when the Alito leak hit the headlines and spent several days in front of the Supreme Court protesting. There was one, spontaneous big protest right after the leak but then I was shocked when that tapered down to anywhere from 5-50, ebbing and flowing with no apparent program, just pissed off people like myself. We should have been jamming First Street NE in front of the Supreme Court every single day but we weren't. Why? I asked around to those who were showing up regularly and seemed to be in the know for some clues, and they said the national groups were telling people NOT to show up at the Supreme Porch because they didn't want the "optics" of pros and antis shouting at each other on the news. The national pro-choice groups did organize one huge rally and 10s of thousands, possibly 100,000, showed up. Of course corporate media low-balled it and made sure they sought out the .0001 of the crowd who were wingnuts to give them "equal time". For math geeks, .0001 is 1 in 10,000 which means if 100,000 people showed up to support choice, 10 showed up to support religio-fascism, which was about right. But does the media's baked-in bias mean you don't organize in-the-streets dissent of religio-fascism until nobody can think of anything else? Of course not, and I think this is a big failure of electoral strategy for the Dems, as well as the Pro-Choice movement. The only reason I can think of that keeps them dropping our ball is cuz they're competing for the same billionaire dollars as the Repugs. They made a conscious decision to take "the quiet route" cuz of their relationship with corporate America and more to the point, corporate media. This kind of attitude is almost as infuriating to me as the trumpsters'. We needed real leadership when our actual bodies are on the line and they were AWOL. Just like the Clinton campaign in 2016, they were listening to the same bad birds who whispered in their ear "Just squeak through without rocking the donor boat." (Hello Rahm Emmanuel!!) and--need I say?--she lost to the most horrible head of state in modern times. Nice job, racehorse whisperers. I'm furious. Aren't you?

 

So yes, we missed the bullet the other day, thanks to everyone who turned out to vote but don't forget that dodging bullets isn't our only option. IMHO, it would have been a "blue wave" if the Dems hadn't fumbled the ball with Hobbs. Again, there should have been boilerplate pro-choice initiatives, not just candidates, ready to hit the streets in all 50 states the day after the Alito leak and on the ballot Nov. 8, and there were not. As much as many of us hate to admit it, the Dem are beholden to the same billionaire bucks as the Repugs and we should be just as mad at one as the other. Time and time (and time and time) again since Reagan the Dems have chosen to ride on the backs of everyone who shows up and does the legwork for them--voters especially included--despite the obstacles placed in their way by the corporatists, both Republicans and Democrats. At the very least, Dems should acknowledge the not-rich people who are coming out to vote for them--in spite of what they're not doing for them--with action: Climate Sanity, Universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, expanding the Supremes, getting rid of the Electoral College and filibuster, tanking "Citizens United", but so far they have not. The Dems, thanks to all of us who pay attention and care, are still playing the electoral game that should have more consequences than they think it does when they flub it. There has to be pro-choice ballot initiatives (or the equivalent) starting up in every possible state for 2024 and there has to be the hot oil of public opinion being poured down the neck of every Democratic candidate every time they show up to a meeting or rally for the next two years to not only support these efforts but to shake their money bushes to fund them. They have not felt our non-violent/ electoral/ moral wrath at letting us down so often for so long yet. They need to or there will be no electoral game for them--or anyone--to play in the very near future. 

"If you cut off my reproductive choices, can I cut off yours?"

 

Politically-Correct Forestry

Mill Creek Canyon 18 years after the so-called "stand-replacement" fires of 2000

 

Note: I submitted the below Letter-to-the-Editor to the Bitterroot Star a couple weeks ago in response to an article they ran about a forest fire deep in the Selway-Bittterroot Wilderness that the Forest Service over-reacted to. This kind of forest mismanagement is of local significance but also of national interest. The current Bitterroot National Forest (FS) supervisor, Matt Anderson, is trying to implement a run around the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which was passed in the '70s to require federal land agencies to have meaningful public involvement in their projects. The FS has long complained about having to do Environmental Impact Statements (EIS's) on every logging project so Anderson wants to include the WHOLE Bitterroot Front, 150,000 acres, into a catch-all fuzzy-edged Environmental Assessment (EA), so the Forest can literally just cut-and-paste any massive, industry-friendly disturbance they choose within those boundaries under the rubric: "Trust us but if you don't too bad cuz we have the legal t's crossed and i's dotted so see ya later suckers....hahahaha......!) He attempted this at his old post on the Tongas in Alaska, got his (read: our) agency's ass sued over it, but it looks like it might go through this time cuz of false fire fears and wing nut local officials. I'm putting it here more so I can find it in the future than anything else.

Your Oct. 18^th article quoted Stevensville District Ranger, Steve Brown, at length about his reasoning for carrying out a logging operation at the mouth of Mill Cr. Canyon under the guise of “fuels reduction” and “forest health” and was amazed at how effortlessly he seemed to present himself as a forester just doing his job mitigating fire danger instead of an ideologue violating core wilderness principles in favor of “getting the cut out”.  

I have a long list of disappointments concerning Brown’s statements on what he thinks his job is supposed to be, which I think Mill Cr. landowners, Jim Miller and Dr. Eric Keeling, who were also quoted in the article, covered pretty well, with the proper mixture of intelligence and cynicism appropriate for such bureaucratic shenanigans. Brown’s statements and actions were full of inconsistencies and paradoxes, maybe the biggest one being the fact that the father of one of the landowners he blew off was Dr. Charles Keeling, the internationally-renowned climate scientist who was among the first to notice Climate Change and to develop the first accurate system for measuring carbon in the atmosphere still used today: the Keeling Curve. I have to admit I smiled when I read that and realized that, notwithstanding recent and vigorous efforts to kill it, irony’s not quite dead yet.

More to point: Brown used a wildfire deep in the wilderness that posed no danger to people’s ill-placed houses in the woods to invoke the worn-out, anti-wilderness boogie-man of “fires roaring out of the canyon” to carry out a logging operation using firefighting funds. I have lived through many intense fire seasons here, I’ve been evacuated, helped with evacuations and actually have firefighting experience. I watched both the Mill and Kootenai Canyon fires from our home on the west side, read the Inciweb reports and the weather reports accessible to anyone with a laptop(!) and I was not only not worried about it “roaring out of the canyon” but was wondering what the h… the Forest Service was doing running helicopters up there in the wilderness at thousands of dollars a trip! Wilderness fires are far cheaper and more beneficial to the environment than non-wilderness fires precisely because they aren’t supposed to be “fought”. Everyone who knows anything about wildland fire knows (whether they publicly admit it or not) that $10,000 bucket drops in steep mountain canyons far from any structures is not only not a serious firefighting effort, it’s a political air show. “A big bank in the sky that opens up and showers money.” To put a finer point on it, wasteful air shows in wilderness areas is the “politically-correct” thing to do in our current, facts-optional times, but are not based on any provable forest management techniques. To sharpen that point to where it actually might sting: a district ranger who authorizes them in a designated wilderness area is demonstrating either his profound ignorance of wilderness laws and ethics or his inexplicable disregard for them. When one considers that tens of thousands of acres within Brown’s district are within designated wilderness that includes much of the most pristine headwaters of our Bitterroot River and is also some of the most prized wildlands in the country for its own sake and that his job is actually to promote wilderness values rather than degrade and ignore them, his statements and behavior are jarring. 

Even on Brown’s own terms, an actual “shaded fuel break” as a firefighting technique is supposed to be a couple hundred feet in width, not the size and shape of the logging project shelved by his district in 2014. His assertion that his only choices were to log the mouth of the canyon to protect the public from a fire not threatening them or to wait for the evil fire to advance multiple miles in wet weather and then punch an ugly dozer line in and  “kill all the trees” in a backfire is just plain fearmongering, and clumsy fearmongering at that. His absolute silence about Climate Change being the real driver in today’s fire behavior speaks volumes about his perspective. Logging mature trees to “save the forest” while ignoring the fact that those are the trees that actually have the best chance of survival after a fire (and did survive above Bass Creek campground notwithstanding his inexplicable statement to the contrary!) and that logging them for the sole and obvious purpose of feeding short-term profits to mills while eliminating what’s left of those real heroes of carbon-storage has been standard fare for foresters since the ‘90s. But to wink and nod at wilderness detractors and “golden-days” logging proponents by claiming he’s merely trying to take the forests back to the way native people used to manage it is just plain insulting to those of us who’ve felt the brunt of such winks and nods. 

In the past I have often told folks who complain about the Forest Service “letting fires roar out of the canyon” that they have nothing to complain about. Given the complexities these bigger and bigger conflagrations present to firefighters due to defending homes in the foothills built on the assumption that tax-funded fire suppression will be provided when politicians panic, along the Forest Service’s own reputation for muddle-headed bureaucracy, on-the-ground firefighters do an amazing job at protecting the public’s life and property year to year. If district rangers like Brown would pay more attention to science than politics and leave the fire-resistant, carbon-sequestering mature trees alone (the very ones the mills want) rather than create next decade’s weed patches and scraggle-forests by using fire as an excuse to “get the cut out”, they could extend their amazing job by decades. It’s too bad that “politically-correct forestry” like Brown’s undermines public confidence, and adds to their confusion.

Finally,  I understand that some of my language in this LTE is charged, but I have a long, informed connection with these mountains and canyons and this latest violation of trust comes on the heels of BNF’s proposed Bitterroot Front Project which could give the BNF the green light to turn our Bitterroot faces right up to their peaks into a hundred thousand acre “shaded fuel break”. Again, by his own terms, a “shaded fuels break” by definition has to be “retreated” every 10 years in order to be “effective”. Will Brown promise us any such multi-decades treatment even on this relatively-tiny logging project of his? Of course not, and so I can’t help but look at this Mill Cr. chop-job as a sort of pilot program for the whole forest and feel well within bounds to opine: Really, who does he think he’s kidding?

Thought for the Day

Ok readers...

...C'mon. Quit the BS. You know who you are. ...

Here's our thought for the day before the election where fascism is on the ballot and all the Talking Heads, who are getting paid more money per minute than you ever dreamed of getting for your house or first-born son, are predicting a win for fascism: 

If you can't laugh at your predicament, your predicament is too predictable.

Your welcome.

Home Sweet Home

I've been walking around these days looking for birds. Where I live is up against the Bitterroot Mountains, surrounded by old cow pastures with rotting tree stumps shot through them, testimony to a time, not long ago, when this spot where our home now sits was forest. Still, it's a relatively-intact ecosystem compared to many places in the country, and there used to be--and should still be--a lot of birds. But for the last few years I've been seeing less and less of the normal residents: chickadees, warblers, bluebirds, Western Meadowlarks. Especially the Meadowlarks. 

The lack of our common bug-eaters is scary enough if you're cursed with paying attention. Take a long-haul car trip in late-spring or early summer, for instance, and be amazed at how your windshield doesn't fill up with goobered insects between each fill-up anymore. This phenomenon is as recent as it is in-your-face. It's therefore no stretch to merely observe that there's something seriously wrong with the insect population you've just driven through, which is the definition of scary-enough. But the lack of ground-feeding birds like the Western Meadowlarks in areas where they used to be common but that are now infested with non-native California Quail should add the spice of anger to your fear. 

These quail are the result of sportsmen and women buying chicks and eggs from suppliers all over the country (Iowa, for example) for release into ecosystems that didn't previously have them for the sole purpose of shooting them, for pleasure. Each pair has two, sometimes three huge broods a year which, being birds, grow into adults very fast and become a moving carpet of eco-pox on the land, devouring whatever ground food remains in our compromised landscape that would normally help keep the native bird populations stable. Quail and Meadowlark habitat overlap. Is paying attention the specialized domain of "experts" then? I'm certainly no expert, so you tell me. I'm just sayin' what I see. 

I'm sure there are studies by now, although I won't look for or site them here. This paucity of (mostly) winged creatures is a personal observation on top of decades of personal observations in my Northern Rockies home, and is, more to the point, a deep and personal pain. How can I rejoice in the paradise within which I live when I know how very sick She is, possibly dying, because of our collective selfishness, neglect and, maybe most deadly of all, our inattention.

Let those who either know better or are addicted to putting a positive spin on catastrophes prove me wrong. I'd be glad if they would, because I dearly don't want to be right any more than I want to put in the work of being an "expert". I only want to write these lines and share what I think, which is this: too many of us who have been paying attention long enough to feel uncomforted by platitudes-with-no-visible-means-of-support are not angry enough about what we see unfolding in our beloved Land. I further think that too many of us are over-worrying the factoids and truisms which seem to be pedaled so cheaply, bought so blithely and bind our minds so thoroughly that no solution except more of the same seems possible. 

Remember bugs on your windshield? Meadowlarks singing from every other fencepost?

Here's an expert question then. What have we done to our beloved home? 

When "Thousands" are Millions

Two Pro-Choice extremists violating 18 US Code. 1507 in front of the Supreme Court “exhibiting unadulterated rage while no longer recognizing any limits of decency or civility in our political discourse.” (according to The Hill)

It should be recognized as common scheme by now that:

A.   The cops never shoot mass murderers if they’re white.  

B.   The media always undercounts demonstrations held by anyone left of Atilla the trump.

This has always been hard for me to understand. After all, they never seem satisfied to leave it to your imagination and report on the mere “thousands” attending a Super Bowl or a Rolling Stones concert in New York City. We know why, but it’s frustrating all the same. So this morning, after I and my daughter attended the HUGE pro-choice rally in D.C. yesterday, I did my due diligence and perused the “news”, looking for hard numbers, or at least fair estimates for how many people gave up their Sundays to break the law (according to The Hill) to express their outrage at five Supremes trying to take us back to the 17^thCentury. No such luck.

 

Fortunately for my readers (you know who you are), I developed the habit of estimating crowds when I was perpetrating them for the Montana Human Rights Alliance back in the days before my wandering the Earth seeking adequate education services for my deaf daughter whom our inestimable Montana School Superintendent, Elzie Arntzen, may or may not describe as a “vegetable” not deserving of such services, as some of her honorable Republican colleagues have done in the past. 

 

It’s pretty easy and here’s how I figured it this time. First, here’s a pic of the march from Washington Monument, where the rally was held, and the Supreme Porch, where the march was aimed at, and concluded:

The cops had us channeled down Constitution Ave, so I had a finite area from which to make a micro-estimate of (thank you, cops). Constitution Ave is 8 lanes huge, and it was packed all the way across for the mile (plus or minus) between the presidential phallus and Porch (we were somewhere in the middle here). 8 lanes times 8 ft is 64 feet and cars are 2 passengers-width apiece (plus the extra space for the rest of the car). Suffice to say that a very fair low-ball figure for a Constitution Ave packed like it was yesterday would easily hold 100 “pro-choice extremists expressing unadulterated rage” (The Hill) per every 10 feet. Now, simply multiply that by 500 (5000 ft divided by 10 ft) and there you have it. 50,000, The magic number you’ll never see on the nightly news. 

Okay, okay. I feel your pain. "I get it", as the more fashionable marketing houses are fond of putting in "cool peoples" mouths these days. Let's do give The Hill even more than its due and admit that we “pro-choice extremists expressing unadulterated rage” are so immature as to be prone to exaggerate. So let's do cut that already-conservative figure in half...and there we have it again. 25,000 this time. A number no reasonable human being sitting on that fictitious-but-certainly-uncomfortable-ass-poking fence can argue with. That’s still (conservatively) 10 times more than the “thousands” that most people would assume attended these rallies if they merely perused Corporate Media and then believed them. 

Now let's multiply by 10 any lowball estimate you may or may not have seen about how many citizens of this country are truly outraged and ready to show it that Alito (or let’s be honest, Barrett, cuz, you know, govt. funded, top-tier healthcare) can’t have the pleasure of experiencing a terminal ectopic pregnancy.

And furthermore, as much as I generally assign The Hill to the toilet bowl of corporate propaganda, they do have journalists working for them, who occasionally let slip something useful like the following:

"Demands that Garland arrest all of the protesters (at justices' homes) is a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. Such prosecutions could create a massive chilling effect on free speech, even if any convictions are unlikely to be upheld. After all, protests are common at the court itself, which is covered under the same federal provision; if it is unlawful to seek to influence a pending decision through picketing “near a U.S. court,” such protests could be viewed as crimes under this interpretation."

Are we there yet? Can we move on from having any respect for these pearl-clutching A..holes and focus on saving our democracy"?

Here's my story and I'm sticking to it. We are the vast, undercounted, over-pissed-off majority. Don't forget it. Don't back down.

 

The Winner!

Here is the winner for Best Sign at today’s (May 4^th) Pro-Choice demonstration in front of the “majestic” Supreme Court steps and pillars. Behind the sign is a self-assured young woman enjoying her right to A: demonstrate her knowledge of human anatomy and B: have an opinion about it. Beside her is a Wise Man (Wise Guy in the vernacular) who may or may not understand the connection between anatomy and opinion and may or may not have a problem with the way our democracy is getting flushed down the toilet bowl draining into the upside-down swamp called ‘Susan Collins In Wonderland’ (where Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb go to Congress and float across the mythical aisle in a pea-green boat with Tweedle-Dumber) but knows enough to bite his tongue when his opinion doesn’t match his anatomy, which is what he’s pictured doing here.

 

When Wise Guy showed up on the steps of the Supremes this morning, there were about half a dozen women and a couple guys holding signs. An hour or so later there was a couple dozen and shortly after that there was four, five, six dozen chanting Pro-Choicers and lots of support from the onlookers. This compared to about three flat-earthers who—wait for it—were dutifully interviewed for “balance” by the media grips and gabbers who showed up. 

 

Never mind them. Know this, that you are in the supermajority of Americans who not only do not want the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade but want Tweedle-Congress (and Joe Biden) to get off their asses and codify reproductive rights into law. Also know that this is the way you do it. Show up and build your voice, over and over, and over and over until the bastards can't ignore you (us) anymore.

 

Finally, for all you guys out there who aren’t sure about how this affects you, consider biting your tongue before you say anything really, really stupid to these totally-pissed off women.

 

In other words, if you can’t figure out how this pending decision is going to flush us all down the toilet bowl of wing nut libertarianism where your freedom isn't loved by those educationally-challenged bigots who love their own but want to legislate yours out of existence (google: 'fascists'), just stick to the fallback position of any sensible Wise Guy on this one:

No Uterus-No Opinion

7 P.M. update:  When I went back down to the Supreme Porch around 4:30 there were a solid 40-50 Pro-Choicers AND NO FLAT-EARTHERS IN SIGHT. When I left about 15 minutes ago (becuz I had to pee) there was a joyful, young, loud 300+ AND ONLY ONE ANTI-CHOICER WHO HURRIED THRU WITH AN INSCRUTABLE SIGN which was the only way to tell whether or not she had a date with the edge of the world which I could have told her was just south of Conner, Montana if she’d just stuck around. 

 

Tomorrow promises more. I’m planning to be there.

 

On Boomers, Founding Fathers and Cultural Relativism

The Slippery Slope

Okay…remember money? If you’re a ‘boomer’ you do. If you’re not, you still suffer from embarrassing cultural delusions whether you want to admit it or not—which is what we 'boomers' did and is where you came from, so get over it!

Either way, grab your wallet and pull out a dollar bill. Lay it on the counter and take a good look at that sly guy glancing back at you. Is that not the condescending smirk of America's mythical version of Zeus? The all-knowing, paternal metaphor for financial security? The chiseled face of money, the only path forward for what has been considered possible on this continent since that "filthy little atheist", Thomas Paine (whose face isn't on anybody's money), outlined the democratic underpinnings of the American Revolution?

We live in an age when high-quality pictures and videos are readily available at the snap of an iPhone, and, as is typical with our species, we haven't been very thoughtful about it. In fact I think this ever-devolving fascination of ours with the visual image has all but killed off whatever remnants of organic perspective on the natural world we managed to drag into the 21st Century after 50 years of the mass-hypnosis experiment conducted by television producers whose credentials on mental health or ethical-hypnosis techniques were always known to be sketchy at best.

There comes a time, though, in most cultures at least, when its hubris outweighs its paradigms, and it needs to examine and re-arrange itself in order to survive. In the old days, before climate chaos, it was fine if this didn't happen. The composting culture just went extinct and a new one took its place. But this time the slow-motion arc of human evolution isn't an option anymore because...well...it's slow, and we've finally proved ourselves too stupid to manage our own destruction with enough aplomb to allow another culture to rise from our ashes. These are the times of not only climate chaos (which IMO includes the Covid debacle) but of nuclear-tipped oligarchs either warring with each other or propping each other up over resources, which is just another way of saying "money", and I think we've finally arrived. This is the point in our evolution as a species when no cultural icon is too trivial to snark at. Fair warning, but it beats feeling stupid. 

So, keeping these admittedly-arbitrary guardrails in mind, check this out:

This was the stoic fountain from which all those billions (and billions) of dollar bills sprang. It's Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait that Martha, who liked a previous portrait Stuart did of George, commissioned him to do for her so she could have one of her own. Stuart, however, didn't want to give up what became his best prototype (and moneymaker) to the First Lady so he never finished it, and kept it around to crank out future founding images with. Follow this story to its logical end and it's hard not to conclude that Stuart took Martha's money (which didn't include faces of George yet but whose Custis "dowry" included over 100 slaves who, along with their descendants, were never freed until the Emancipation Proclamation) but failed to deliver, placing him at a watershed moment in our country's history of canonizing cheats who can afford to get away with cheating, but never mind. No matter his intentions, his mythic image endures. Three years previous, though, in 1793, portrait artist Edward Savage had George looking like this:

Two years goes by, and in 1795 another American portraitist, Rembrandt Peale, gives us this one:

And then, later that same year, Rembrandt's father, Charles Watson Peale, did this one:

Seeing a pattern yet? If you're noticing that George's image was undergoing the same transformation our movie stars' images do today, of getting younger as they became more iconic, then you're seeing what I did when I accidentally stumbled on these portraits while walking through the American Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. 

I've been in D.C. since the beginning of the 2021-22 school year (more or less) accompanying my daughter who is going to high school on the campus of the first--and still foremost--deaf university in the world. Ironically, Gallaudet University was chartered by another American icon, Abraham Lincoln, who, coincidentally, did not get younger as his star rose. Maybe that's because Lincoln, like Tom Paine who also didn't get any iconic makeovers, actually believed in democracy, or at least his era's version of it, and acted accordingly, unlike a lot of old-time slaveholders and modern (mostly Republican) Montana politicians. In other words, I've been in D.C. most of the year instead of my beloved Montana because our once-healthy politics has been captured, hogtied and tortured by our inimical social warriors, like Montana's current Superintendent of Public Schools, Elsie Arntzen, who can't possibly give special needs kids what they need to have a decent adolescent experience because they believe Jesus was white. Really. No kiddin'.

So again, full disclosure. I'm a "boomer", as is Elzie Arntzen which, if that ridiculous insult to the future of Social Security means anything at all, means that I was:

A. Sitting at the Round Table in the school library when my 5th Grade teacher came into the room crying, informing us that President Kennedy had been shot and that school was out for the rest of the day and:

B. I was raised to believe that George Washington had false teeth made of wood and that his stern tight lips were necessary to keep them from falling out, which all of these portraits, I believe, faithfully represent. He could not tell a lie because he had to hold his teeth in. Ask any 5th grade teacher (which Elzie was in her previous life), or 18th Century portrait artist.

None of this is not to disparage false teeth, wood or 5^th Grade school teachers, God forbid. All have their issues and uses. But there comes a time, maybe in these times of oligarchs and their Final Wars of Choice over money, to point out this tiny yet obvious flaw in our linear thinking that forever leads us into such debacles. Ready?

The face of money is as absolute at myths, oligarchs and 5th Grade school teachers.

You’re welcome, and remember, you heard it here first.

             

 

Democracy (Socialism) vs Capitalism (Fascism): Our Choice

Today's news, once again, is all about war and nothing about climate chaos and, while climate change is yet to reach "visceral" status with our species, the atrocities of war have been consistent attention-getters ever since we started using our "smarts" to organize around it as a solution to problems. War, the vast majority of our species agree, is gruesome and no one in their right mind would want to be on the same continent as one. It's curious, then, when that supermajority of war haters dwindles to a mere plurality (or less) when a war is happening on a different continent. From a distance, that wonderful, atavistic revulsion of ours to murder, rape and torture somehow morphs into a good vs evil fantasy tale. How easy it's been for the warmongers (read: oligarchs) du jour  to sucker punch us over the ages, but we're story-based critters, after all. We love our epics, which usually include a war or two to get the juices going, which is to say that the thought of war is entertaining. In fact, as anyone who's subjected themselves to a writing workshop knows, good narratives are based around conflicts and, at times, their resolution. War is conflict writ-large and ready-made. No resolutions need apply, just winners and losers. Literally speaking, though, war as a narrative devise is shallow water by definition and should long ago have become a toxic cliche but, sadly, hasn't. 

Which brings me to the Azov Battalion that has been "heroically" defending Mariupol for the last six weeks. Members of this unit, which has been fighting Russia in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, are now trapped in the city's last holdout, the Azovstal Iron and Steelworks and threatened with annihilation--in real time on Twitter and YouTube--if they don't surrender. Their plight, along with the plight of the 200,000 civilians still trapped in the city, is the current cause celebre for shaming nuclear-tipped western democracies like ours into formally entering a regional conflict against another, equally-nuclear-tipped one. So first of all, let's recap: War is gruesome and anybody in their right mind, which probably includes the vast majority of people stuck in the hellhole that is now Mariupol, wouldn't want to be anywhere near one. What's being perpetrated there by Russian forces is surely evil if there's still a meaning to that overused word and no excuses need apply. But wouldn't a meaningful definition of "evil" also include those who choose war as their natural habitat and then force others to endure it as a consequence of their bad boy choices? That definition would include the Azov Battalion which, despite protestations from jingoists to the contrary, was formed and is no doubt still buckshot through with nazis. It would also include the Neo-Cold-Warriors of the west (NATO comes to mind) who chose years ago to fight Russia "to the last Ukrainian" with the help of the Azov Battalion.

I have zero doubt that there are dozens of Netflix screenwriters drooling over plot scenarios involving impossibly-muscled Ukrainian soldiers fighting the Russian invaders to the last "patriot", with the Azovstal Iron and Steelworks, which was already a dystopian, industrial deadzone before the war, as a backdrop. I'll just say "Rambo" and leave it for you to google up. Meanwhile, climate action, the narratives of which don't generally include musclebound "patriots" with bloody assault weapons and dysfunctional wartime love affairs, is dead in the water. Our story-based minds have, once again, led us to the edge of the existential cliff in the name of War and, just like so many times these last few millennia, we're f....d. What to do?

Well, I'll admit that maybe this time it's too late for hope. But how about we give at least a thought to where we'd be as a species if we were as capable of being viscerally-fascinated by, say, epic tales of saving our planet from Climate Chaos as we are by war. I'd call such a narrative paradigm shift akin to evolution, similar to approaching the consciousness of trees, who have learned to thrive over the eons with their network of root hairs and micorrhyza that communicate and help their fellow rooted beings for the good of the Whole. They've been here longer than we have, you know, and it's the height of hubris to ignore their example. Yes of course there's competition. Over water, sunlight and other existential necessities and "duh" to that. But please consider how much more cooperation there is than competition in their--and by definition, our--natural world. They don't "compete" with each other to the point where whole forests are destroyed for the sake of feeding their oligarchys' egos. There'd be no such thing as forests and the climate we all live within, would there be? They, and every other creature on this planet including ourselves if we gave ourselves half a chance, are hardwired to cooperate as a Whole and that is why there is life--and democracy--on this Earth. Fascism (Brazil in its current iteration) is the antithesis of healthy forests and Capitalism (the U.S. in our current iteration) is the antithesis of healthy democracies. Yin and yang so to speak.

What's happening now in Ukraine--which nobody in this country ever distinguished from Russia until a few short years ago--is despicable, just as what has happened to Iraq and Afghanistan has been. A better case could be made than not that these wars could have been avoided if we weren't inflicted with such creatures as arms dealers, mercenaries and craven politicians who've taken one too many Rambo movie to heart, but the dog's out now, and he's a runner who doesn't come to call. Good luck shouting our lungs out for the next, what? hundred years or so until the hatred and trauma being perpetrated before our e-eyes cools enough to at least be stored underground into perpetuity. In the meantime, I won't be presumptuous enough to offer any suggestions out of this mess except to pray for a miracle.

Or hug a tree. To me that's one and the same.  

On Ether

Think of Facebook like Mark Zuckerberg does, as a “rarefied, elastic substance that permeates all space including the interstices between the particles of matter, the medium whose vibrations constitute light and other electromagnetic radiation.” 

 

Actually, that’s the old-fashioned definition of ether before atoms, electricity and the armless abelisaur were discovered, but never mind. It’s a good description for what kind of toy these billionaires think our Known Universe is to them. 

 

A counter-point to the world view of bastards is the way I think of Facebook: it sucks, but people live and read in that airy reality Zuckerface and his ilk presumes to dominate, which is the very reality writers presume to occupy, too. So writers gotta go with the flow, move with the rest of the circus, be one with the elephants. Fine.

 

Of course, neither definition is correct, but the fact that we even have to ponder such mushy mush means I am free to bend and manipulate whatever archaic universal laws exist or don’t to my own, personal will. I’m doing this not because I’ve sussed out the secret to the distance between atoms or whether Greek gods really wear loincloths, but rather because my blog, after a solid $@%##! year of refusing to function despite my hours (nay, days!) wasted clicking this and that floating button of frustration into the Elon-Musk-polluted Universe, has healed itself, or at least its attitude, and I can post on it again. Why my blog decided to work again is the stuff of conspiracy theories (if you are a 21st century Trumpian) or crystal energy (if you're a 20th century hippy). Either way, the upshot is that, instead of firing off half-baked missives about a world gone wrong to friends and other innocent bystanders as “replies”, I’m going to condense, curate and, yes, edit them into blogposts, and use those posts as my Facebook presence. Zuckerface can still make money on my “content”, and I can still post my (hopefully more-fully-baked) rants on the great bulletin board of post-pandemic human interaction. It’s liberating to finally enter the 21^st Century, albeit kicking and screaming. Win, win, win, whether ether exists or not.

 

You’re welcome.