The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind

 Lucius Cary, the second (or third, I'm not sure which) Viscount Falkland, has always been one of my favorite philosophers.  I doubt he would have thought of himself as a philosopher; he was a soldier and a man of action, a loyal servant of His Majesty King Charles II during the English Civil War (His Lordship’s side lost, in case you were wondering), and I believe that he would have thought prolonged philosophical thinking a bit of a bore when compared to the less intellectual delights of hacking and slashing His Majesty's enemies into a thousand tiny bloody pieces.  Lord Falkland never wrote a philosophical treatise of interminable length, unlike so many other philosophers then and now, who insist that entire forests come crashing down and get pulped into paper so that they can inflict their deep ideas about the meaning of it all upon a long-suffering and not terribly interested humanity.  No, indeed, Lord Falkland was an Englishman of the empirical school, whose entire philosophical output comes down to us in a single sentence, an observation that he made in passing to a friend. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said, “it is necessary not to change.”  That’s it, that’s the whole of it, and his lordship packed more philosophical depth into that one sentence than many philosophers can pack into tomes so physically and philosophically dense that I could drop said tome on a mouse in the absolute certainty that the annoying little rodent would not survive the encounter.  

Labels: baked goods, Democrats, Donald Trump, geography, gulf of america, gulf of mexico, Mexico, Politics, Robert Benchley, Roberta Vasquez, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

 You know, I remember back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost moved the city of New Orleans into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, a reporter asked General Honore, the head of the Federal task force coordinating the response  to the catastrophe, a question about the shortcomings of the earlier state and local responses the general had been brought in to correct. General  Honore cut the reporter off, telling him to not get stuck on stupid.  There would be a time for such questions once the disaster was over, but the current moment was neither the time or the place; people needed rescuing, the levees had to be shored up, the city had to be saved.  First things first.

Twenty years later, the city of Los Angeles, California (is the state even necessary in this sentence? There is only one LA, and everyone knows where it is located) is not only stuck on stupid, the city and the state's leadership class is firmly and proudly stuck on stupid, stranded in the muck of its own progressive delusions and doing its best to remain stuck there while simultaneously getting the rest of the country to pay for the cleanup (unlikely) and avoiding responsibility for the fires in the first place (even more unlikely). But hope springs eternal, so there will be no change in the city's forest management program and the reservoirs will remain unfilled and the snail darter will remain protected.  Los Angeles firefighters will have to check the right demographic boxes in order to get a job in the first place and will have to spout the progressive movement's DEI bromides with tremendous enthusiasm in order to keep the job they have.  Insurance companies will not be allowed to make money for their own good and poorly insulated electric wires will remain above ground for reasons that surpasseth understanding. So the more the fires destroy, the more things will stay the same. And Los Angeles, the city and the county, and state of California will not lower taxes on the population in their time of affliction, which makes the city and county of Los Angeles and the state of California look a lot less like modern governments and more like a poorly run protection racket operated by the Mafia's not so best and brightest.  All of them will probably be re-elected. 

Labels: California, Democrats, fire departments, fires, Politics, Roberta Vasquez, stupidity, taxes, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

 I have not written much about the current election season, which is to say that I have written nothing about the election at all, for which I do apologize. The comic possibilities raised by the lives and thoughts of the two main candidates are endless and I have chosen not to use them because I am very lazy. Therefore, I am resurrecting a post from 2004. No one liked it then; frankly, I am not sure if I like it now; but it is what it is and I am going to resurrect it from the Blogger boneyard.  Enjoy!!!

Well, the silly portion of the political season has finally arrived and not a moment too soon, I think; the voters can always use some diversion. This year we are all a-buzz about election signs and posters vanishing from roadsides the length and breadth of our happy little burg, vanishing with the rapidity of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies off the top of your grandmother’s oven. There’s no apparent pattern to the thefts; signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alike are disappearing during the dark of night with equal speed, with each side declaring that they are the injured party and blaming the other for the political pilferage. The local constabulary is now hot on the case, the gendarmes declaring that they will get to the bottom of the mystery posthaste and once again make our streets safe for politicians to annoy honest citizens.

Frankly, I don’t care if the signs ever reappear; the streets look just fine without them. I can remember the day when one such sign was put up on a telephone pole near a busy intersection on South Cedar Street, announcing that the gentleman running for office was an outsider, new to politics and, unlike his predecessor, who'd been in office for the better part of thirty years, not at all susceptible to the blandishments and corruption that come with political power; the poster finally weathered away halfway through the man’s third term in the state legislature.

And if the posted signs were in any way protected from the elements then they would never go away, remaining year after year until they became an embarrassment. One famously bald local politico had to paper over a poster like this at a bridge underpass; it had been there for years, reminding the voters that when they first voted the man into office he’d had a full head of hair and only one chin. Some politicians, on the other hand, do that sort of thing on purpose. You can save a lot of money on signs recycling last election’s signs for this campaign. It’s good for the environment as well.

I can see the point of stealing some signs. I’ve read somewhere that there are approximately 86,000 governmental bodies in the United States, the vast majority of which hold elections to determine who gets to run things. There’s so many state senators, assemblymen, aldermen, mayors, school board members, town supervisors, and library board trustees running at any given time that no voter can keep track off them all, and before long they all start to blur together in one's mind. The first time you really know who the candidates for some of these offices are comes when you see their names on the ballot. You have no clue who some of these people are, what with their signs disappearing left, right, and center, and in that case why not just vote for the incumbent, since you really don't want to waste your vote on someone you've never heard of and who was obviously not clever enough to steal his opponent's signs. Letting someone too dumb to steal his opponent's signs anywhere near the public coffers is not a good idea, I think; if he doesn't notice his signs are missing what else won't he notice when he actually has the job?

You don’t always need signs or posters to run for office. A few years ago my brother became the president of our local volunteer fire company, elected for reasons that surpasseth understanding, as the Good Book often says of the Lord when He goeth about smiting the hips and thews of passersby for no immediately discernible reason. My brother was a write-in candidate; he agreed to run because a firehouse faction, and yes, we have those here, needed a warm body in the race. My brother won, which everyone in the family found very odd, and makes one question the wisdom of the whole concept of universal suffrage. In the United States, candidates for public office run for that office; in the United Kingdom, a more politically sedate country, candidates stand for office. My brother is one of the few political candidates anywhere who sat on his ass on a barstool for office. He has since retired from the presidency, laying down the onerous burdens of civic responsibility and returning to a richly deserved private life, ending all too early a none too promising political career. He remains firmly ensconced on his barstool, however, offering sage political advice to all and sundry, which is what got him into trouble in the first place.

So for some, but not all, political races, stealing signs is not at all a bad idea. This, however, brings up the question of why anyone would steal the signs of the presidential candidates? Signs or not, it’s not like the populace doesn’t know who’s running, what with those two guys all over the evening news every night of the week and twice on Sunday. Still, you can never be too careful. I bring my Keep Cool With Coolidge sign into the house with me every night. You never know when you’ll run into a John Davis Democrat; better to be safe than sorry. People were awfully bitter about Davis' losing back in 1924.

Labels: baked goods, beer, Donald Trump, elections, political campaigns, Politics, Presidential race, Robert Benchley, Roberta Vasquez, signs, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

So, here’s the thing: I spent the last month or so dealing with the pestilence of our time, the Wuhan wet-market wonder virus, and so I have little or no time to write anything, even though the faux election of this nation’s first walking dead president provides, and will provide, I think, a never-ending supply of anecdotes to comment on over the next four years.  As to the virus, I am well now, or so the local board of health says so, but my doctor is not sure he agrees with them. Therefore, in an effort to ease his distrust of the board of health, I went to another doctor's office and have a nice Jamaican lady shove a cotton swab up both my nostrils.  I trust that the results will be negative, if for no other reason that I intensely dislike the sensation of having things shoved up my nostrils.  It is most disagreeable, as I am sure you will agree when this happens to you.  And it will.

As to the disease itself, for me it was little worse than a not too bad head cold or maybe a very weak flu.  Temperatures went from normal to weak fever to normal again within the span of a few hours, as did my desire to do hurtful things to Chinese people for unleashing this plague upon us, although calling it a plague do little else except give the virus a swelled head and make it feel much more important than it really is, in much the same way as a D-list television actor might feel if he / she / it /they / xhe / whatever landed a big role in a major feature film. Whatever the Wuhan flu is, it is not septicemic plague or the Ebola virus.  Here in this our Great Republic, we have shut down the most powerful economic engine in the world over a disease with a 99.98% survival rate.  I know that different people react to the disease in diverse ways, but I would think that protecting the most vulnerable populations, i.e., the ill and the elderly, first would be a promising idea, and then just let everyone else get on with their lives.  This makes sense to me, but I live in the Vampire State, where the reigning blue monarch will brook no dissent from his decrees about what it is good for the peasantry and will not tolerate sense if said sense does not conform with his whims. So, such is life.

I should also point out that my 91-year-old mother has the virus, and yes, she blames me for her having it, thank you very much for asking, as does my brother, whom she infected when he brought her into the doctor’s office for the test, and I must say that the decibel level denouncing the former is much higher than the decibel level denouncing the latter, mostly because that is apparently my fault as well.  My mother is doing quite well; she is not happy with not being able to do yard work, but we must all make sacrifices at this unhappy time in our country’s history; and I expect that her next test will be negative, given that her oxygen levels are in the high nineties and her appetite is slowly returning.  My brother is also doing well.  He hunkered down in his house with a year’s supply of Doritos and enough Bud Lite to float a team of Clydesdales on and watched football for the whole of his quarantine.  I suspect that his viruses were probably the happiest viruses in the state, and that his bloodstream these past few weeks was a veritable Mardi Gras of drunken viruses traveling from one of his ends to the other while wearing Saints gear and screaming hoo dat at the passersby .  After shocking the locals with their behavior—I am not sure how that is possible either in my brother's bloodstream or in New Orleans, but I suppose that there is a first time for everything—our celebrants then started puking in the street and on themselves, before sidling up to a cute T-cell in a black leather bikini and pumps on my brother's equivalent of Bourbon Street and saying, hey baby, wanna replicate?  In any case, my brother tested negative a few days ago and is already back to work.  I’m not sure how things worked out with the T-cell.

Labels: Covid, Democrats, disease, Politics, Roberta Vasquez, toiletries for sale, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

Blarney, the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, is flattery laid on so thin that you couldn’t help but love it, whereas baloney was flattery laid on so thick that you hated it.  And so it is with elections.  A little Chicago-style chicanery here and there livens up the dinner conversation and makes the teller seem dashing and worldly, especially if you don’t live in Chicago and have to live with the consequences of electing and re-electing hordes of grifting and grafting politicians, and causes the Europeans at the dinner table wonder how such an advanced society could tolerate such shenanigans. For example, one can hardly imagine Maximilian Robespierre casting his ballot for Monsieur Macron, Louis XIV seriously contemplating the political ramifications of voting for Marine LePen, or Joan of Arc publicly supporting France staying in the European Union.  And yet here in this our Great Republic, veterans of the Civil War voted for the Democratic Party’s nominee less than two short weeks ago.  I found this bit of news a bit perplexing, given that the last undisputed Civil War veteran, Albert Henry Woolson of the 1^st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment, died in Duluth, Minnesota on August 2^nd, 1956 at the age of 106.  While I think that we must all honor the sacrifices made by the men of the Civil War generation, I do not believe that this homage extends to permitting those same veterans to vote in the 2020 presidential election or even the 1956 presidential election. The question arises, however, if any Confederate veterans voted for the Democratic nominee in Georgia, and if they did, does this make that nominee a racist, an important question in our iconoclastic age.

Here in our happy little burg nothing like this would ever happen.  We live in a safely Democratic state in which nothing untoward ever happens to the Democratic nominee for almost any office you choose to name and therefore no feels the need to stuff the ballot box, except, of course, in municipal elections.  In municipal elections the population of our town awaits with bated breath to find out who Mr. Martin Meehan voted for in this election cycle.  Mr. Meehan was the scion of a lace curtain Irish family—his father was a respectable publican and one of his brothers was a priest and his youngest sister became a nun—but young Martin himself fell in with evil company and became a wastrel, a lout, and an altogether unpleasant young fellow. After his father cut off his allowance, Martin decided to make some money of his own so he could continue his debauched habits.  Not being the sort of person who would ever stoop to or even contemplate actually working for a living, and not being especially bright to begin with, Martin decided to rob a grocery store in the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from our happy little burg.

To that end, Martin procured a pistol and a box of bullets.  He fired two bullets for practice and did not hit the empty beer bottle he was aiming at.  Later that day, he crossed the river on the ferry and proceeded to the grocery store, which he then robbed of $12.83.  The owner of the grocery store objected vigorously to Martin robbing him, a trait common to many small tradesmen, whereupon Martin fired two shots at him.  The shots struck the owner of the grocery store in the chest, the man being somewhat larger than an empty beer bottle, and he fell dead to the floor.  Martin, according to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, seemed more than a little nonplussed by this turn of events; apparently he had not given any thought to the possibility of being a murderer as well as a thief; and so dashed out of the grocery store and into the arms of a local constable, who had heard the gunshots and came running. After a brief scuffle, in which the constable broke Martin’s nose and blackened his eye, our heroic flatfoot dragged Martin the two blocks down Broadway to the police station.

Events moved swiftly after that, the judicial system of the time being less constrained than it is nowadays.  Young Martin was found guilty of murder by a jury of his peers and sent up the river, or in Martin’s case, down the river, to a cell in the state’s death house, where he waited a month for the courts and the governor to reject his appeal. Two days after the warden got the bad news from the governor’s office, Martin received the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church from his brother the priest.  The brand-new state electrician and his equally brand-new electric chair then swiftly dispatched Martin onwards into that country from whose bourn no traveler returns, except, it seems, in election years.  Martin was only the third person the state electrician had executed with the device and he was the first person the state electrician had gotten the voltages right with, the two previous occupants of the chair having been more roasted than electrocuted. 

Afterwards, Martin’s parents buried him in St. Thomas’ Cemetery, in the family plot near his great-grandfather, where Martin has remained active in local politics ever since.  To my certain knowledge, Martin Meehan is the most loyal Democrat in the county, having voted in every local, state, and national election since the state shuffled him off this mortal coil in 1912.  I think that it is a good thing for Martin to be so involved in politics, a much more remunerative and altogether safer form of crime for everyone involved than robbing grocery stores.  After all, the present Democratic nominee for president has spent most of his life drawing a government salary and is worth $9 million that we know of.  Martin, I think we can all agree, missed his calling in life.  He would have made a fortune if only he had run for the state assembly, a fortune, I’m telling you!

Labels: Democrats, Donald Trump, International Communist Conspiracy, Joe Biden, political campaigns, Politics, Presidential race, Roberta Vasquez, the dead, voters, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

 What the title says, not now, not ever. Resist.

Labels: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Politics, Presidential race, Roberta Vasquez, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

Hello there. I am still alive, despite the best efforts of the superbug and the political leadership of the Vampire State, although calling what we are enduring political leadership stretches the plain meaning of words to the breaking point and beyond. All is vaguely well here: nothing is happening, and I suppose that we should all be grateful that this is the case. Large numbers of people are moving into our happy little burg from the great metropolis to the south and they bear with them the same stupid habits that caused the great metropolis to the south to go south in the first place. The day of the locust has come upon us here in our little town and its ugly name is gentrification. New buildings are going up left and right hereabouts, sometimes literally left and right, as in directly across the street from one another, and the twin edifices, which are bigger than the rest of the buildings on Main Street, of which more later, block the sun, leaving that part of the street in a more or less perpetual shade. What I find interesting here is the rents charged for these apartments.[1] The landlords are charging city rents for an apartment here. I suppose that the landlords think that the city people are used to spending two thousand dollars a month and so won’t complain about the rent—rent  here was eight hundred dollars a month not too long ago—and what the city people don’t know won’t hurt them. Also, the landlords are making the prospective buyer a sweet deal here: two thousand dollars a month in the city buys the interested would be tenant an apartment so small that it would be illegal to house prisoners, pigs, and most forms of bacteria in, whereas two thousand dollars a month here buys you two or three bedrooms, a full kitchen and living room, and maybe a couple of bathrooms as well. Yes, the price is the same as the city, but here, Mr. I need to get out of the city quick, you will have space. Real space. So much space that you can keep chickens here if you want. Fresh eggs, people tell me, are a powerful inducement to move.

But enough bitterness from me. I am alive in a plague year and so I must be happy. Therefore, let me count my blessings. The country is tearing itself apart with mostly peaceful protests, but the country facing this unfortunate circumstance is that portion of the country the Donkeys hold hostage and therefore the destruction is of little consequence. An electorate gets the politicians it deserves and if the people elect doofuses, well then, that is their right, isn’t it? Elections have consequences, a bit of wisdom the former junior senator from Illinois enjoyed annoying the passersby with whenever he had the chance, and if the people asked for doofuses then they deserve the doofuses. One must, in times like these, remember the wise words of the late George Ade, who said at the turn of the 20^th century that the people are worth dying for until you put them all in one place and give them the cold once-over, and then they strike the disinterested observer as largely bovine, with a high percentage of vegetable matter.

In any case, I have been doing well, or at least as well as anyone can expect in this time of pestilence. I lost twenty-five pounds and then promptly regained five of those lost pounds, which leads me to suspect that the weight didn’t really leave so much as it took a two-week vacation and is now back to work, happy and refreshed and looking forward to expanding my belt even more. I bought a new computer for my home; Windows 95 is apparently one with Nineveh and Tyre, so it seemed time to ditch the old beige box and buy something new. The new computer is nice, and I am enjoying my big new monitor. There is something to be said for working on a computer that does not cause eyestrain and a headache after fifteen minutes of use. I would like to apologize for the jumpiness of this piece. I have not actually written anything except checks for the past several months and I am now out of practice. Well, that is it for me right now. I will be back, and I hope that all is going well with you and yours.

Labels: baked goods, Democrats, gentrification, our happy little burg, pearl of great price, Politics, Roberta Vasquez, whining, writer's block, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

Labels: abortion, annoyances, cereal killers, Chuck Schumer, hail the size of canned hams, John Roberts, justices, Politics, Roberta Vasquez, speeches, Supreme Court, US Senate, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup

Labels: agony aunts, collusion, Congress, Donald Trump, investigations, Politics, Presidential race, presidents, Robert Mueller, Roberta Vasquez, stalkers

Labels: America, borders, Democrats, Donald Trump, Mexico, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, Republicans, Roberta Vasquez, theology, walls, yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup