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  • A fascinating time to be alive

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Holimonth Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Dinner with Tom at the Willows last night. Long time friends. Diane. A Mountain Wind. Snow knocked off the Lodgepoles. Snow and Ice on Black Mountain Drive. Advent. Sussex. The Jacquie Lawson advent calendar. Going to bed. Waking up. The Chrysalis Effect by Phillip Slater. CJ Box. Kep, the old dog. US vs. Netherlands. How to become a pagan. Acting class. Nitya. Teaching the Ancient Brothers.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Holimonth

     

    Acting class has been hit by illness. Tal, the teacher, has the flu or something like it. Nitya, a class member, spent several days in the ICU and is still recovering in the hospital. Not sure what will happen. Tal wants to hold a class on Friday, but I’m reluctant to go given the recency of his bout with the flu. A tough wind down for what has been an interesting and challenging experience.

    I was ready. I’d gotten both monologues memorized and somewhat polished. I knew all the lines in my two scenes. Not wasted work. Good work. Helps the brain. Adds some literature to the bank.

    Tomorrow morning I present in the Creativity class. Think I’m going to do my How to become a pagan piece. Wrote it yesterday. Gotta see how long it is when spoken. Going to lean into writing and art over the winter as I said yesterday. This was a start.

     

    High Wind warning today. The Lodgepoles have begun to sway. Dancing with each other as Sunlight makes their tops glow. I haven’t written about it but the Mountains and their Trees and Wild Neighbors? I would have missed them. A lot. Couldn’t imagine being in a city environment where no Pine Trees framed the Nighttime Stars. Will not trade this beauty for a place with less. Hawai’i matches the Mountains with its Oceans and old Volcanic Mountains, its rich fauna. Someday. But right now. This wonderful place is home.

     

    The world. Russia looking like a blind Bear in the Ukraine. Wrecking the place, striking out wildly. China finding that suppression and repression have their limits. Even with a newly anointed dear leader. The US struggling with divisions at home and new fractures among European allies. Not a great time to be a world power.

     

    It is however a fascinating time to be alive. Talks of a moon base. Be still my John Carter, Flash Gordon little boy heart. The James Webb showing us more and more of the universe in which we live and move and have our becoming. A world shifting its long term basic rules. Climate change accelerating. Women growing in power. China and Russia and the upstart USA. All in flux.

    Glad to have these years as my last ones.


    Acting Great Wheel Hawai'i Hermitage Politics Shadow Mountain The Move US History Weather +Climate World History Writing

  • RazzPutin

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Beltane Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Blue Sky over Black Mountain. A fading contrail. Sun hitting the solar panels. Wind. Muscles still healing. Luke. A sweet guy. So talented. Rabbi Jamie smiling, easy. Mussar. Kate’s yahrzeit tonight at CBE. Her plaque on the yahrzeit wall lit up. Kya. The road trip to meet her tomorrow. Ode on the Road.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: A possible buddy for Kep

    Tarot: Six of Vessels, reunion

     

    At first I thought. My class reunion in September. Read a note about it before I shuffled the cards. That’s pretty on the nose. But something deeper. The mound, a dolmen? Pouring out of it. Water. Into a pond on which six small vessels float, a light in each one. Ferns and arrow root frame the vessels. Two otters look intrigued. They might slide into the water and play. The sun is behind the trees, faint as if it were dawn or dusk. Long shadows jut out from the leafless, gnarled trees.

    The deep and holy well of memory gushes into the pond of our everday, our present. Perhaps unexpected. Yet with strong emotion. Emotion that can illumine our life. If we let it. Maybe I’m the Otter, the one with his head up, looking at the Waterfall. Maybe I’m the Arrowroot, ready to offer stored up energy for the table of this life.

    This continues the story from yesterday, of old bonds broken, other old bonds recalled and renewed. Gushing out of the dolmen, informing me. Philosophy. Acting. Writing about travel, politics. Writing itself. Friendships nurtured. Maybe movies. Art.

    This is the Watercourse way. Following the River of self where it flows, not forcing it. Embracing the eddies and pools, the rapids, the sudden falls. Ah.

     

    The war in Ukraine. America loves an underdog. The plucky Ukrainians against the old Russian empire led by Czar RazzPutin. The bare-chested bear baiter ruler against the comedian. Seems like an obvious win for the Empire, neh?

    Funny how things are working out. As the military loves to say, the Ukrainians have taken the fight to the Russians. The supposed easy victims now become the aggressor. Must be confusing for the folks back at Russia military HQ. Heads will roll.

    While I sit atop Shadow Mountain, fingers crossed that some event or another doesn’t pull us all in. Biden’s got this one right. Unite the allies. Send weapons. Money. Intelligence. Stay out of it otherwise. A larger war would serve no ones interest. A Ukrainian victory just might make the world safe for democracy. For awhile. As we’ve often claimed as our motive.

     

    Of course. That assumes the electorate in the U.S. still wants a democracy. I’m pretty sure the majority do, but there’s that troublesome fringe  of fascists, organized and strong. Trumpites. Trumpettes. Trumpists. Fascistii with too long red ties, those red hats, and hearts filled with sadness over the loss of white privilege.

    Live free or die. Don’t tread on me. Those confederate battle flags. Flown in defense of a form of government that will, by definition, restrict freedom. Oh, well. May you live in weird times. We are.

     

     


    Dogs Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Memories Politics Shadow Mountain Tarot US History World History

  • Erev Beltane

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Beltane Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Kate, always Kate. Pete and the chandelier. Better than I thought. More exercise. Call from Ode. Breakfast with Alan on Monday. No Mouse in the kitchen Rat zapper! Cool night. Wild dream. New Acorns. Still reading Amanda Palmer. Qin Empire: Alliance. TV. Outer Range. TV. High Country News. P-22, the Mountain Lion of Griffith Park in LA.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The predator eating the Mice

     

    I throw the dead Mice over the fence. In a very short time they’re gone. Gonna watch this AM. See who this critter is. Glad to feed somebody. Makes this less onerous. A circle of life thing.

     

    Presentation tomorrow for Groveland. Zoom. Quite the thing. Something I couldn’t have done otherwise. Devolution. Trying to follow David Sanders advice. Write as I talk. Still working on reimagining faith after all these years. Getting very close to what I saw originally. The key move may be asking why privilege faith in the unseen when the seen has as much power in our daily lives? Our whole lives. I will post Devolution after I’ve presented it. Happy for critiques, thoughts.

     

    Ode called from the road yesterday. On his way to Taos. Blown away by the West. His sketchbooks, my blog. A daily discipline. Influenced by life in the moment. A confidant. To whom we tell our story. While other people listen in. Or see. Native to each of us. Over many years. A friend. He saw this similarity.

    A legacy of a sort. Maybe a legacy in reality. I’ve ensured Ancientrails’ longevity past my death in my trust. Not really a bid for immortality or legacy, but a way for grandkids and kids to remember Dad or grandpop. What was he like? Oh, yeah. Kate’s quilts, mug rugs, shirts, dresses, wall hangings. A bit of us hanging over in the visible world: stitches, color and ink, words.

     

    Healthspan. Asked Kristie about it. She said I could live 10 plus years with the treatments available for prostate cancer. Kristen, my PCP, said 90 was reachable with my current health conditions. Both positive and sobering. I mean, geez, even fifteen years. That would get me back to only 60. Not that long ago.

    Still. Able to live, love, write, travel. Tomorrow is not promised. Only this moment is sure. Gonna keep at it until I can’t. Unafraid. Except about getting Covid. Damn that disease got under my skin. Stephanie, the PA I see at Conifer Medical said, “Covid’s weird.” She had a tone of respect in her voice. Wu wei.

     

    The world. Odd things. Why my gratefuls include items like prostate cancer, death, grieving, illness, war, climate change. We see only dimly, though that darkly glass. Putin invades Ukraine. Awful. Ukraine stands up to Putin. Amazing. The fractured EU and Nato begins to heal, the West remembers itself. Wonderful. Ukraine pushes Russia out of Kyiv and begins to carry the fight to them. Wow. Biden’s handling of our response elevates him in world leadership.

    As does his handling of Covid. Which we may now find ourselves sort of out of. As a pandemic anyhow. Not gone. Probably never gone. Like the flu. Will we need Covid shots, boosters now? Like flu shots. Annually? Maybe. Fine.

    Covid has changed the nature of work. Created an economic recovery which has raised wages for the working class. Has cost us so many lives. So much time together. Made us realize how precious community is, even for solitaries like me.

    We often see well only in what Kate used to call the retrospectoscope. Why we need history. So much. I love history. And art. And religion. And writing. And people. And Shadow Mountain. And Arapaho National Forest. And Maxwell Creek. And whatever eats my dead Mice. Even the Mice. And life itself. Death, too.

     

     

     

     

     

     


    Colorado Coronavirus Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Great Wheel Health Our Land and Home Plants Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Shadow Mountain Tarot The West US History Weather +Climate World History Writing

  • No Wonder

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and Seoah’s Citizenship Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Alan. Boredom. Sadness. Missing Kate. Clean Kep, so playful in the morning. The up and the down of grief. Warm weather. More Snow coming. Ruby. Her need for the bad fuel. Habituation, the helpful and the unhelpful. Getting to the inflection point. The delicacy of an early Morning blue Sky over Black Mountain.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Boredom

     

    Feeling my way into boredom, sadness, and grief. Sounds like a devil’s potion moving toward despair, but I don’t think so. Instead it feels like my psyche trying to break free.

    Yes, I sat and cried yesterday afternoon. In that time after my nap and before evening when I feel. Pointless. Bored. Don’t want to read. Don’t want to watch TV. (a good feeling at that hour.) Don’t want to study. Don’t want to write.

    Pointless. I have no purpose, no way forward. Just traveling. Walking. Slow. Along the ancientrail of longing for. Something. I know not what.

    That delicate blue Sky has a few puffs of Cumulus now, lit up by a turning Earth revealing the Sun’s presence to start a new day. Whirling through the vacuum of space around and around and around. Following the Light Giver like a trapped Angel. As all the Angels and their Light Giver twirl outward from their home. A journey of ancient celestial mechanics. Glory. Glory. Glory. Hallelujah.

    This journey older by far than the Laramide Orogeny, one that places the whole of Earthly Creation in its proper perspective. Deer Creek Canyon and its consolation nods to its Progenitor.

    Purpose and purposelessness burn away. Sadness and grief burn away. Life itself burns away. We travel because we are in the journey and of its Way. The path is our meaning and our destruction. Like sadness and grief.

    See the Self here. On a high velocity spaceship created not by rocket science. No. But by the forces that made possible the rocket scientist herself. Made possible that Fish clambering across the liminal zone between Water and Land. Made possible that one-celled Creature. Swimming. And even then the journey had long been underway.

    Ah. No wonder the Taoist says follow the Water.

     


    Feelings Fourth Phase Great Wheel Great Work Mountains Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Science World History

  • The Mandate of Money or The Mandate of Heaven?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Waxing Gibbous New Year Moon

    Webb being lifted by crane. creative commons, nasa

    Where’s the Webb? 80% of the way to L2. 723000 miles from home, 176000 miles to L2 insertion. Down to .2132 mps. Mission day 17.

    Tuesday gratefuls: The cleaners. A sparkly, yet still disorganized upstairs. Bowe coming tomorrow for backsplash work. The setting sun. Gabe and his presents for his Dad: Crappy Taxidermy, a book, and Things That Can Kill You, a 2022 calendar.Working my new schedule. Worked on my pagan book, a forever task related to reimagining faith. Who knows, maybe I’ll finish it. Waiting on delivery of the Werewolf book by Marina Warner. Gonna do more research and pick up Lycaon for another novel. Also, planning to re-read Jennie’s Dead, get back into it. Writing Ancientrails as Kep and Rigel run the fenceline, loudly, with Zeus, Boo, and Thor. When Jude comes home.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Change and its beauty

    Tarot: Ten of Vessels, Happiness (same as yesterday!)

     

    Fan Kuan

    Want to come at the whole democracy debate from a different angle. A Chinese perspective, tianming. The Mandate of Heaven. In the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 B.C.E.) the Emperor and his government (always him in those days) had the Mandate of Heaven if the people did well. “The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ established the idea that a ruler must be just to keep the approval of the gods. It was believed that natural disasters, famines, and astrological signs were signals that the emperor and the dynasty were losing the Mandate of Heaven.” PBS learning media

    Good crops, freedom from plague, no warring factions, healthy villages. But. As with Celtic Kings, if the crops went bad, or plagues killed many people, or warlords disturbed the peace, then the ruler could be called to account. The Emperor, the Chinese would say, had lost the mandate of heaven. In that case others could vie for the throne. As long as the Emperor had the mandate of heaven, anyone rebelling against him would not gain traction in early imperial China.

    It’s not a bad way to judge a government. If the citizens do well, then the government is just. If not, then it’s unjust and needs to fall. It’s an unspoken assumption among us democrats (small d) that a government by the people and for the people will serve the people’s interests. Yet we’re gaining striking experience in a “democratic” government which makes the opposite assumption. If the government serves the needs of its wealthiest and most influential, its corporate class, then it has met the mandate of money. If we’re makin’ money, things are ok. If not, change the government or at least its policies.

    Our form of government, far from the only one, is in danger right now of losing the mandate of heaven by basing its survival on the mandate of money. The weird part is that many folks most damaged by the mandate of money are the ones rebelling against the old democratic regime. Yes, it was a center right thing all along, but at least some progress got made and people weren’t dying by the thousands. So here we have the strange circumstance of rebels insisting on more corporate influence, more oligarchic rule, yet rebels whose own jobs are often in jeopardy.

    The Chinese imperial government had one thing that we don’t have. Homogeneity. The Han majority are almost 94 percent of the large Chinese population. Yes, there is a lot of diversity in China, but the numbers of the non-Han population are miniscule compared to say the Latino or African-American percentages of the U.S. population.

    This helps explain the strange politics of our moment. There is no need for Han supremacy politics since it’s already baked in to the perception of Chinese citizens. Minorities might wish things were different, the Uighurs for sure do, but their chance of making waves based on ethnic politics is zero or at least vanishingly small.

    In the U.S. however the oligarchs have a situation where the white population sees its share of the population shrinking, the sort of jobs its middle and working class depended on disappearing, while increasingly restive ethnic politics like Black Lives Matter strengthen the influence of the non-white population. The road to power still runs through the valley of white privilege though for how long is anybody’s guess. Uncertainty feeds the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon…” Oxford online dictionary.

    Thus a certain percentage of the white population in the U.S. feels that its Mandate of Heaven has been violated. Loss of manufacturing jobs, automated work places, a further elevation of education as a job requirement. They feel justified in their rebellion, their January 6th moments, because the old, comfortable world in which white was right has begun to come undone.

    African-Americans and perhaps to a lesser extent Latinos look to different Mandates. African-Americans had the mandibles of slavery instead of a Mandate of Heaven. Latinos had sufferance for agricultural work, but met resistance to permanent immigration. Both hope for a new Mandate of Heaven whose arc of acceptance would include them. In the eyes of these communities the American Mandate of Heaven, its Manifest Destiny, has brought them suffering and oppression, not good crops and disease free villages.

    I think its fair to say that our government, its Mandate of Heaven, tenuous though it was even for working class white folks, has not served the needs of our minority populations and the poorer segments of the white population. This is a pragmatic way of judging the viability of government. Throw out the pursuit of liberty and equality before the law, throw out independence and freedom, the Bill of Rights and instead ask if this government has delivered for its citizens. The answer any honest auditor would give is no.

    It may be time to give up the shibboleth of democracy and ask the hard question: Is this an effective form of government for our time, for all of our people? If the answer is no, as I think it must be, then what form of government will serve all of us? This might be the real question rather than trying to prop up a republic with arcane rules that serve the rich and not the poor.


    Asia Commentary on the news Politics Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. US History World History

  • Half the Sky

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the waning Megillah Moon

    Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Friends: Paul, Tom, Mark, Bill. Women. Diane, Mary, Kate. Marilyn. Tara. Eve. Sarah. Anne. BJ. Women’s History Month. Chili. The writers for Billions. And, Vincenzo Cassano, Sisyphus. The golden age of television. Covid. Covid relief bill.

    Sparks of Joy: Dr. Thompson. Rigel snuggling. Vaccines.

    Women’s History Month. Starts today. Women hold up half the sky. Mao. Without women there would be no humans to hold up any portion of the heavens. At all. Glad to know this month exists. A lot we don’t know. Read The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner. 1986, but still explosive.

    Hard to imagine today, but a central issue of the student revolution of the early 1960’s involved the doctrine of in loco parentis. A college or university would act in the place of parents. But, only for women students. Sexually segregated dorms, curfews, clothing restrictions. Got rid of that one at Ball State.

    So much. Women expected to take all the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity. Whether it was a reasonable decision or not, I took this seriously at the age of 26 and had a vasectomy. It did not seem then, nor does it now, that only one partner bore responsibility for reproduction.

    As a direct result of that decision, Joseph entered my life, so for me it was a resounding success. I did try to have the vasectomy reversed, my first time ever in the hospital after polio. And, it worked. Sort of. My little guys were not very energetic. It had been 7 years of r&r and I guess they didn’t see any point in going back to the hard work of swimming all the way to the goal.

    So many fronts. Child rearing. Domestic chores. Glass ceilings. Internalization of the oppressor. Domestic violence. STD’s. Unwanted pregnancy. Ratio of men to women in so many professions, workplaces. Or, in lower paid jobs, women to men.

    The work far from done. The U.S. still has not had a female President. The Denver Post reported yesterday that the number of women on corporate boards in Colorado has moved toward the national average. Not far enough.

    I see hope in our granddaughter, Ruth. Smart, politically aware, no bullshit. Yet, knows how to sew, cook. Women have come much further than men in this ongoing revolution. We males have so much work to do.

    Generation Z, Ruth’s generation, has come of age in 45’s despicable term in office. They’ve seen the patriarchy in its unapologetic form. At its ugliest. Will they remember? I believe so. The country almost took a turn, may still, toward a crude reversion to male dominance. Reactionary politics, MAGA, always include returning to an era of privilege. For men. For white men in the U.S. For those who believe only a special minority can rule, should rule.

    Every male heart needs close examination, by men. Especially those of us lucky enough to be born white. We need to peer into the dark recesses of our assumptions about women, about people of color, and put them aside, forcefully. I do not believe we can purge them, that is become pure feminists or anti-racists, but we can know them and choose not to act on them. We can do that.


    Family Myth and Story Original Relation Politics US History World History

  • Go, young one, Go

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Simple roast chicken. So good. Red Lobster dinner rolls. Likewise. Shadow Mountain Israeli Salad. Cooking. Kate’s feeling better this morning. Rigel prancing in the snow. At 12+. Kep and his serious life. Perseverance. For all those at JPL. Yeah! For all those from Colorado who participated (a lot). Yeah! For the part of our soul that is curious, that wants to see, that wants to know.

    Sparks of Joy: That roasted chicken when it came out of the oven. Vaccines. The love of and by dogs.

    We live in an age of exploration. I know it got started even earlier, but we have good evidence of humanity leaving Africa and spreading out over the Earth. A long period of exploration that once begun, we have not been able to stop.

    Yes, it’s had its bad moments. Many of them. Colonialism its worst, I think. But a lot of glorious ones, too. Rounding Cape Horn. Summiting Everest. Walking the land bridge from Asia to North America. LANDING ON THE MOON. Voyager. Curiosity. Perseverance. Down to the Mariana’s Trench. Into the microscopic, the sub-microscopic.

    And there are the psychonauts who explore the mind on hallucinogens. The mystics, who do their exploration without technology. Scholars who roam libraries, tells, caves for evidence of our long pilgrimage, how we have handled it. Children who go down the block, turn right into the field, and leave this planet by means of their imagination.

    We are explorers. Pilgrims. Wanderers. Always hunting for some new place to live our lives, or to visit to expand our life at home.

    I celebrate each explorer. Each pilgrim. Each wanderer. In you, in us, we grow beyond this species and into the future. May it always be so.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    Asia Beyond the Boundaries Commentary on the news Dreams GeekWorld Letters Memories Mountains Myth and Story The Move Third Phase Travel US History World History

  • And they went and died about it

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter (last day) and the Imbolc (Wolf) Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Kate’s better couple of days. Rigel, who gets up between 6:30 and 7:00. I get up at 5:30 now, better rested. Resurfacing after 3 plus weeks of difficult days and nights. The Lupercalia. Lycaon. Arcadia. Pan.

    How many people have ever lived? Somewhere between 100 and 113 billion. See this wikipedia page for data. Got to thinking about this a few nights ago.

    How many people do you know? Probably higher than Dunbar’s number of the 150 with whom we can maintain stable relationships. This article posits a number between 290 and 600. The same article ends by saying most people know only between 10 and 25 people they can trust.

    Let’s imagine the number you trust is 25. The high end. Out of all the people that have ever lived you trust only .000000000025 of them and you know fewer than .0000000006 of them.

    Why am I belaboring this idea? Good question. What got me going was the idea of how few people, in relation to the historical population of the earth, I know. This thin, wafer thin, slice is the group upon which I base my understanding of our species. Sure, I’ve studied anthropology and psychology, both ways to understand our species considered in aggregations like cultures or personality types, but these are at best reductionist views of exceedingly complex phenomena.

    Reading helps. Novels in particular. Even there though we’re viewing characters through the understanding of a novelist whose known slice of humanity is as wafer thin as our own.

    In any case we compare our learnings from those methods against the people we know. Who aren’t that many, really. Especially historically. Here’s another issue. We don’t know 600 diverse people probably. Some may. But most of us know people whom we’ve met at school, in our hometowns, in our neighborhoods. Largely people like us.

    My point, you might reasonably ask? How little we know about our own species. How little we can know, even if we study the humanities, anthropology, psychology. How small our cohort of known persons is, how really small our cohort of trusted persons is. Given this reality is it any wonder that the 331,000,000 US citizens break into so many small and self-interested groups?

    And yet. We have this from Our Town.* Notions, ideas, beliefs. These are the trail markers on the ancientrail of human life. We use them to guide our actions because we can’t use our exhaustive knowledge of life as a human. We don’t have it. Can’t have it.

    And we go and die about those notions, ideas, beliefs, or, as General Patton memorably said, “We make some other poor sonofabitch die for his country.”

    Humility. That’s what all this means. Provisional, what we believe. What we know. What guides us. Based on so small a sample of other’s lives that it might as well be considered nothing. But of course it’s not. It’s our life, our way of being as part of this hundred billion mass of humanity that has lived and died upon this spaceship Earth.

    The things a guy thinks about. Geez.

     

    *Our Town, Act 3, spoken by the play’s narrator, the Stage Manager, as he gives the audience a tour of the town cemetery, pointing out meaningful landmarks:

    “Over there are some Civil War veterans,” the Stage Manager says. “Iron flags on their graves . . . New Hampshire boys . . . had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”


    Aging Cinema and Television Commentary on Religion Commentary on the news Family Friends Humanities Literature Politics US History World History

  • Wool and Dross

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter and the Imbolc (wolf) Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Rigel. Prancing in from a time outside. Kep, jumping up, making his wooo-hoo sounds. Kate and her love. Restorative sleep. Have I mentioned here that Trump is gone? 5+ inches of fluffy snow. Ted, plowing us. Life. Covid.

     

     

    Gathering some wool, some dross, and a few grains of wisdom about our near term future. It’s not the most important stuff; but, it could be if it weakens or distracts from work on climate change, racial and economic justice, health care reform. Not there yet. So much to consider.

    Here are some of the questions that occur to me:

    Who are the Trump cultists? How many of them are there? Where do they live?

    Who are the Bernie supporters? How many of them are there? Where do they live?

    What do independents think? How many of them are there? Where do they live?

    How will the factions within the Democratic congressional delegations be managed? Are there any Republicans who can be shaved off? Who? For what issues?

    Will Trump’s trial convince business Republicans that he’s toxic? Will it create a fissure in the GOP? Will it strengthen and harden Democrats? Or will it create some unanticipated trouble?

    What is the strategy for neutralizing the libertarian right wing? The pickup truck, flag carrying right? The militia and white supremacist right?

    Can the economy stay so hot? Will it boil over, go into a big correction? Will Congress and the Fed guide us to a smooth landing? How?

    How do we support small business owners and the huge number of unemployed persons who used to work for them? Can we do both while strengthening unions?

    What might challenge movement on climate change, racial justice, economic justice, health care reform? These domestic issues as well as foreign affairs. We need to move forward on all these fronts at once, divide up the tasks, co-ordinate.

     


    Politics US History World History

  • Folks Who’ve Tasted Blood

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter and the Imbolc Moon

    Monday gratefuls: 46 in, 45 out. A wabi-sabi world. There’s a crack in the world and that’s where the light gets in. My ancient friends. Sleep. Better rested. Kate’s shower. The stoma site improving. Cold. A bit of snow. Reasonable health. (mine) That Kep. And his girlfriend, Rigel. Murdoch.

     

     

    Three articles I’ve read:

    How experts define the deadly mob attack at the U.S. Capitol.

    Coup attempts usually usher in long stretches of democratic decline, data shows

    Put these together with the post I made about solipsism. Not a pretty picture. We have sealed off cohorts of angry white people who get their news from agit-prop sources ranging, get this, from Fox News on the left to Parler, Stormfront, Gab on the right. When that’s your continuum, there’s gonna be trouble.

    Somehow we have to push forward with vaccines and ppa’s, personal protective actions like masks, social distancing, and remaining at home. We also must push forward on stopping climate change, the true long range threat to people of all colors, everywhere.  No waiting, either, on racial and economic justice.

    Yet. We have to do these necessaries while contending with folks who’ve tasted blood. Who have a fat, golf-cart riding pseudo-billionaire willing to chum their waters. Whose economic reality is dire. Whose violent tendencies the NRA reinforced and armed for years. This is a big, big problem.

    There is no unifying with folks who believe your values are products of the devil’s wiles. That’s the dangerous conflation of far right rage with evangelical Christian certainty.

    I’m not sure what the right strategy is for contending with this toxin festering in our body politic. This is not a small, fringe pool of our fellow citizens. How many folks is it? Again, not sure. Not all the 74 million who voted for Trump, but a large number of those.

    Trump’s notion of a Patriot Party might be one solution. Sequester them in an impotent third party so they have a chance to foam and rant, but not accomplish anything. Might backfire. They could be the National Socialists of our moment.

    And, what sinister figure slouches among them, waiting to be borne upon the tide of their anger? Is there one who will think like Trump but act like McConnell? Is there one who’s not a fries, milkshakes, and burgers guy, but a sly and competent leader? A Josh Hawley type? A Joseph McCarthy?

    How we deal with this clear and present danger to our nation will, no doubt, determine how far we can get on the other pressing issues. A messy and fraught time ahead.


    Politics US History World History