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. 

 

The Long Covid

 Note: This piece was first posted exactly a year ago, and after stumbling over it while looking for something else on this blog, I thought, hell. If history is repeating itself, this piece bears repeating, too. The original title was "On False Patriotism" and I thought it was pretty clear at the time that, in the face of a bona fide global disaster, a large swath of our fellow travelers were ardently choosing to make things worse, not better and, in this country, doing so under the banner of a piece of cloth fluttering from the back of a few testosterone-propelled pickup trucks. A year later and we're still wearing masks largely because of their childish refusal to acknowledge such a simple survival concept as "the common good" and they're still the ones whining about how much they love their freedom, and how little they love yours. A lot of toxic water's been dumped under the bridge by the carriers of such insanity since April, 2020, and I suppose I should feel sorry for them by now. After all, they're obviously short a few bricks and it may not be their fault. But I don't. In fact, I think it's fair to say that, after a whole year of sustaining such unfathomable idiocy, I propose that anyone who's been doing their best to do their part all this time, worn their masks and got their shots so we can all emerge out of this Covid hell as soon as humanly possible and are still wearing their masks because of the utter ignorance and selfishness of those wrapping their bad behavior in a flag should be mightily-pissed-off by now. It's obvious, to me anyway, that that would be a very American response.

My ancestors have only been on this continent for a short time, since the 1600s. The same blood flowing in my veins has been in every major conflict that the colonists (later the Americans) have fought in since that time. I had ancestors who participated in the Revolutionary War battle where the American flag was invented, and if any hairsplitters out there want to argue the point with me then they can kiss my ass. I actually signed up for a war myself, and ended up serving four years in the Navy, but didn't go to Nam, not because I was some kind of smart, but because of the simple luck of the the other side of my family, the Irish. 

In other words, I feel I can say something about this flag thing, and here it is: I don't hate the American flag. In fact, I have every reason to love what it stands for in my own mind. But this child of pilgrims and pioneers hates what it has become in the hands of our seemingly-bottomless pit of psychopathic "leaders", and I offer up a new, colorful equation, a flaggy one (!) which is really an ancient formula reworked for us unfortunates who inhabit a more and more two-dimensional age, where colorful pictures apparently have more impact than actual thinking.

 ÷

+

=

Yes, Hitler certainly was an evil man, wasn't he? But he had lots of help. In high and low places. The equally-evil men in the high places had agendas, wanted power and knew the formula for getting what they wanted.

 

But the low ones, the enablers? They have no excuses anymore for falling for this bullshit, do they? And they will have much to answer for in the very near future. Won't they? 

How dare they wave American flags at us? How dare they?

News Flash: Machine Guns are Pro-Life

 

Sen. Jason Ellsworth (R-Ravalli County) has a machine gun pointed out his business window (above).

 

There is no better picture to show how 'pro-life' and 'pro-freedom' Sen. Ellsworth is, so I’m sharing it with you. Like all Republicans in Helena this session (and the last and the last and the last....) he is adamantly in favor of telling young women what to do with their bodies and threatening fellow citizens with machine guns. Add to these stellar qualities a can-do willingness to expose vulnerable neighbors to a deadly virus and you have a profile of a certified, freedom-loving patriot who is so ‘pro-life’ he's willing to point a machine gun out the window of his business to prove it. This, by the way, makes Sen. Ellsworth’s machine gun ‘pro-life’ by definition. Isn't tortured English wonderful?

 

There’s one other thing about Sen. Jason Ellsworth you may not know about that puts him in even higher esteem with the life-loving, freedom-shooting gang he hangs out with. He was caught bilking unsuspecting people his telemarketing company called (unsolicited) by selling them magazine subscriptions for $3.83/month for four years and then billing them almost $50/month for almost a year and a half and then (presumably) siccing a collection company on them when they didn’t pay up (Ellsworth bilks unwary costumers). If Sen. Ellsworth hadn’t made $600,000 bilking unsolicited owners of telephones he wouldn’t have been able to buy an out-of-court settlement and he would have gone to prison with a felony conviction. But that’s the kind of guy Sen. Jason Ellsworth is, and why he is held in such high esteem with all the ‘freedom-loving’, ‘pro-life’ patriots currently legislating us back to the days of the Montana Copper Kings. He’s all about ‘personal responsibility’, and maybe that explains the machine gun pointed out the window of his business. Out of 35,000 magazine subscriptions ‘sold’ to unsolicited owners of telephones, over a thousand of them complained about his company’s fraudulent practices to the Federal Trade Commission. To anyone who's had to endure unregulated telemarketing calls that promise you the moon and then sell you a hat for the price of a car, that means that a lot more than 1000 were ripped off and knew it but didn’t complain because they figured if they did he’d probably rise to the level of a state senator or something. So maybe Sen. Ellsworth is justifiably worried that one of his bilked customers might take the ‘personal responsibility’ to come visit him to discuss their ‘buyer’s remorse’, which is Sen. Jason Ellsworth’s euphemism for explaining away the not-so-perfectly legal con of bilking unsuspecting owners of phones in the name of 'freedom' and 'life'.

 

While I’m on the subject of ‘pro-life assault weapons’, here’s a little déjà vu. a pop-up quiz. Can you name the machine gun pictured below?

Yep. that's right. It's a Bushmaster .223, the main weapon Adam Lanza pointed at little children--and fired into the faces of. The Ravalli County Republican Central Committee, the club to which Sen. Ellsworth belongs, has been auctioning off a machine gun looking very much like this one at the Ravalli County Fair ever since, where countless local children walk by it and are impressed by how much the Ravalli County Republicans, including Sen. Ellsworth, love 'freedom' and 'life'. 

Finally, here’s Bushmaster clinical description of such a ‘life-giving’ weapon, designed soley for combat, capable of firing up to six rounds a second into a crowded classroom of little children by literally anyone who can afford to buy one online:

“With a Bushmaster for security and home defense, you can sleep tight knowing that your loved ones are protected. Bushmaster offers everything you need to ensure the safety of you and your family. Our high-quality pistols, carbines, and rifles are extremely reliable, easy to shoot, and include lightweight carbon models that are perfect for women. And with their intimidating looks, all Bushmasters make a serious impression.

Are we there yet? Can we start evolving now, or at least start talking like grown-ups?

Bitterroot Gun Garage and Telemarketing Complex

Pilgrim's Progress Redux

 

Freezeout Lake, Teton County, Montana

The Dagwood Sandwich

Note: A little bird told me that if I want people to follow my blog I have to post more than one piece every few weeks. "Duh," I told this little bird, poor and blameless little thing that it is.The problem is that most writers would have to stretch the patience of their readers to act like they have anything useful to say more often than that which, of course, most writers do these days, and I'm competing with them for your justifiably-limited bandwidth! Grrr...I snarl in the general direction of these modern times, but that's all the disclaimer I have to show for reposting this piece originally posted August of last year while we were in the throes of so many converging disasters while being swallowed whole-hog by Covid Times (emphasis mine). I re-read it while thinking about how the Democrats, who were gifted control of the presidency and both houses of Congress by a desperate people (us), are blowing it again with the Covid Relief bill they're about to pass with no Death-Cult (oops...I meant "Republican") support and no $15/ hour minimum raise hike and, sadly, not even a blip of discussion about Single Payer/ Medicare for All. Bernie and progressive House Democrats bravely fight on for us, and it's my enduring hope, which may be labelled an Act of Faith at this point, that they become the new center of the party in the near future, but in the meantime, I think the words of a centrist-Democratic governor of Minnesota who misperceived the size of the sandwich he and his party are still trying to get their lips around are appropriate to repeat and examine. I don't have any other useful words to describe a Democratic political system whose elites respond to a pandemic that has ravaged a people and their economy and can only be addressed by providing immediate not-for-profit medical care to the least among us by tacking right and never mentioning Medicare for All as a serious possibility than to repeat the below. My apologies to the easily-bored.

When I was a kid I used to read “Blondie” in the rolled-up paper that'd get tossed on our porch every morning. Those were the days before virtual gizmos, when the comics were the only 'memes' we kids had other than the sports page which, like the comics, was meant to entertain. And we were.

 

In those good old comics, Blondie’s husband, Dagwood, would rise from his napping couch about once a week, sleepwalk to the refrigerator and pull out a dozen rich ingredients that every good old suburbanite was supposed to have in their refrigerator, too. He'd slather two slices of white bread with mustard and mayonnaise, layer cold-cuts, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes and olives until the sandwich was a foot-thick and absolutely inedible. Then he'd crack a joke. 

Dagwood was a nice, white guy. He wore a tie to work, and he wanted us kids to know that this was what America looked like. Everyone should have a foot-thick Dagwood Sandwich that you couldn't possibly eat but that you should have nonetheless. Everything was as it should be, this cartoon-husband wanted us to know, and we believed him.

That Dagwood Sandwich should have hit us white folks like a ton of bricks when the Black Lives Matter protests took off a few month ago. It did me when the Mayor of Minnesota was quoted saying that his city was between "two crises that are sandwiched on top of one other.” The George Floyd uprisings occurring within the COVID pandemic. An edible sandwich with only two different coldcuts, in other words, squished in with lettuce, sliced tomatoes and tasty pickles. Something you can wrap your mouth around enough to take a bite out of, have an effect on.

Well, I've had some time to think about it, and I think Mayor Frey's two-ingredient metaphor is the classic kind of understatement that comes from politicians who don't take cartoons seriously enough. I understand the rock and the hard place he's in between. George Floyd was lynched in Minneapolis, and Mayor Frey is a Democrat. Being a Democrat in Minnesota means he is actually a member of the Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor Party, which means he is the beneficiary of a legacy bequeathed him by 150 years of socialist uprising and organizing from the co-op infested plains of the 19th Century Dakota lands that, thanks to Hubert Humphrey in the 1940s, morphed into the Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor Party. It follows, then, that if you belong to a formally-socialist party that allowed a guy like Hubert Humphrey to crash it, then you have a serious case of political cognitive dissonance. In other words, Mayor Frey was wrong about the size of this sandwich he's trying to eat.

There are multiple crises “sandwiched” together into a epic, impossible sandwich. There's institutionalized bigotry and the COVID crises, of course. But the rise of fascism also comes to my mind, coupled by murderous COVID outcomes in countries run by them (Brazil, the U.S., Russia, Britain). Economic depression caused by the same scoundrels for the same reasons also shows up, worldwide environmental collapse and, (spoiler alert for us American humans) a D.O.A. healthcare system. That’s not just two ingredients in a crisis sandwich that can be dealt with by taking it one bite at a time. That’s a Dagwood Sandwich, multi-layered, all the ingredients part of the whole while being nothing without all the ingredients, and completely inedible unless you're a white cartoon husband about to crack a joke. 

 

The problem with us white people is that we think we’re white, which isn't the case. The COVID bombshell should have taught us that, but I guess learning comes hard which, by definition, means slow. COVID should have been an existential lesson in equality for all of us. Yes, we honkies opine from our comfortable Northern Rockies’ zones, it is hitting poor communities worse than ours, but it’s hitting ours, too. And, given how much time and energy we’ve put into isolating ourselves from the outside-world uglies, it’s hitting us very hard indeed. Furthermore, we honkies in the Northern Rockies may feel smug about getting “far from the madding crowd” and there’s a certain amount of self-satisfaction in accomplishing that. But then we insist on thinking there’s nothing we can really do, and that blows our cover.   

 

I recall a conversation I had with a “fun-hog” friend of mine at a brewery after returning from Standing Rock in early-2017 (full disclosure: I'm a part-time fun-hog myself). He had been out skiing while I had chosen to face off against a militarized police force in a blizzard. During the debacle that took place on those same co-op infested plains from which the Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor Party sprang I thought about all my hedonistic Montana friends playing expensive, consumptive outdoor games in the face of an environmental/social collapse that would take down those very ecosystems we claim to cherish so. I think it was in the middle of helping to butcher a cow in sub-freezing weather at the Veteran's Camp that I worked up something in my head to say to them when I got home, which, unfortunately for this truly-good-hearted friend of mine who was the first one to ask, I did. 

I told him, listen, man. This kind of activism is right down your alley. You’re going down these wild rivers and skiing these insanely chilly mountaintops for the sake of excitement and the love of the outdoors when you could be having the exact same kind of excitement and outdoor experience in a North Dakota blizzard with armed soldiers to bump up your adrenaline rush even more. You want brave? Do it with a purpose. You got the chops, and you don’t have to sacrifice your outdoor time. Not anymore. Maybe not ever again. 

Those of us in the Northern Rockies who care talk about "minority" communities and how “they” need more justice so the sandwich shrinks and becomes edible for us. Those of us who don’t care just talk about “those people”. But the end result is the same. We don’t acknowledge the giant-ness of the Big Problem, nor how much we, no matter how good our intentions, are part of it. This goes for people of all shades, by the way, because the sandwich is epic. But us pilgrims have had such a long run these last three or four hundred years, I think it's only fair to say, "listen, man." 

So, for what it's worth, here's the punchline to the joke I'm trying to tell you while staring at this cartoon sandwich. The damning finger of "white privilege" is now pointing straight at a fixable target, the predatory for-profit healthcare systems currently crumbling against the rocks of the Pandemic Age. How can anyone deny the urgency or the opportunity. You can bet this won't be the last bug to come after us, and after the next couple-three hits, a 'white', privileged class will not exist as a functional fantasy, false identity or false flag for less-thoughtful folks to rally around when times get tough. There's only one race of humans, multi-shaded (duh), and to deny some of those shades adequate access to medical attention as a basic human right, everyone runs the risk of dying horrible deaths while the rich, who do so love to keep us divided, will just get richer. 

Tax the bastards and tax 'em hard, in favor of Medicare For All and a $15/hour minimum-wage or it's bye-bye to our cherished Democracy. 

Simple. Why's it taken so long?

            

Is That The Smell of Freedom On Your Breath?

Wreck on the Highway

A Musing

At a recent Ravalli Co. Commissioners’ meeting to ‘develop a message about COVID-19’, one man stood up to proclaim that he was an ‘Americanist’, which meant (to him) that he wasn’t responsible for his neighbors’ wellbeing. The commissioners, who apparently are also ‘Americanists’ , agreed, declaring quite adamantly to the mostly-unmasked people in attendance that they weren’t interested in infringing on peoples’ ‘liberty’ by being the ‘mask police’, that they would settle for ‘encouraging’ people to act responsibly while letting their fellow ‘Americanists’ decide how much harm or benevolence they choose to visit on their neighbors. 

Well, I’m only someone who’s lived in Montana for the last 4 decades and whose ancestors have only been on this continent for the last four centuries. I do have a keen interest in U.S. history and have never come across this new breed of impervious citizen before, but I’ll admit that more than a few bold movements have been woefully unreported on these last few hundred years, including this ‘Americanist’ thing. Maybe I just read too much and am therefore ignorant, but this child of pilgrims still feels entitled to share a few facts and ask a couple questions of our commissioners who are getting a good salary on my dime in order to speak for me.

It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to observe that both traffic laws and Covid 19 mandates are enforced on behalf of public safety and welfare. This is easily demonstrated by simple math. Since January there have been 167 traffic fatalities in Montana. In that same timeframe Montana has seen 365 Covid 19 deaths. Four of those Covid deaths and two traffic deaths (that I’m aware of) have been in Ravalli Co. In other words, there are at least twice as many Covid deaths in our state and county than fiery scenes on the highway, yet traffic laws clearly meant to oppress citizens’ freedom to drive recklessly are still enforced while mask ordinances that would muzzle an ‘Americanist’s right to whine but would potentially save twice as many lives are not? I’d agree with any freedom-loving ‘patriot’ that not all traffic deaths would be avoided if everybody drove as if somebody else’s life depended on it, but some would be. So why does a mask ordinance that would save twice as many of those random lives get a pass while the city of Hamilton is still writing $100 tickets for going 29 MPH in a 25 MPH speed zone? If the commmissioners’ logic of not being the ‘mask police’ is followed to its natural angle of repose, should we expect the police to ‘encourage’ citizens not to drive drunk while acknowledging that it’s every citizen’s constitutional right to drive drunk if she wants to? 

 

I don’t know if any of my ancestors were actively-involved in the Salem Witch Trials, if they were passive bystanders or if they actively spoke out in resistance against tyranny. I do know some of them were involved in some pretty sad wars against the indigenous people they sought to displace and that history is a lesson we either learn or don’t. I also know that everyone barring one individual who attended that commissioners’ meeting failed to wear a mask. That meant that folks like myself who take personal responsibility in respect to my neighbors seriously as well as my own health can’t attend public meetings convened to discuss the public’s business in a public building because the commissioners have decided to opt-out of enforcing ordinances that reflect nothing but basic human decency. This is undemocratic by definition, which begs the real question here. With such doings afoot right under our (masked or unmasked) noses, I think We the Taxpayers who foot the bill for these public officials’ gold star health plans but who don’t share their peculiar political ideology should hear from them on where they stand on this thorny issue of Democracy? It’s a pretty simple question. Do they believe in it or not? Can we participate in our democracy while protecting our loved ones and ourselves or do the commissioners really believe some of us deserve less freedom than others? 

 

Democracy, then, commissioners. It’s such an old fashioned word, but a simple yes or no will tell us all we need to know.

 

Bitterroot Redux

 

Historical Monument along Highway 93 just south of Hamilton, Montana

No explanation necessary, really. Just a question. Are we there yet?

The Great Divide