Mind skittering, crablike, over the littered ocean floor

Learned a neat Django lick from Robin Nolan on youtube, a riff that uses several of the classic chord embellishments Django probably invented.  After re-reading a few pages of one of Charles Johnson’s books, and being struck by the line in his paragraph bio that he was, among other things, a cartoonist, I looked him up online. Johnson is a brilliant writer I’ve long admired, he’s admired by everyone else too, it emerges. Read The Middle Passage or Dreamer and you’ll see what I mean.   Read his biography on Wikipedia and you’ll say “no wonder the man writes like a genius.”   Who knew he started as a prolific young cartoonist who has been practicing martial arts and studying Eastern religions for the last fifty years, taking a few years to get a PhD in philosophy?

Earlier today I’d heard about the overturning, on Tenth Amendment grounds (states retain all rights not enumerated for the federal government), of the 1916 Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, the federal government’s first attempt to regulate child labor by invoking its powers under the Commerce Clause.   Since the product of child labor goes into the stream of interstate commerce, the law signed by Woodrow Wilson stated, federal law overrules any state state law that allows employment of any child younger than fourteen, or working someone between fourteen and sixteen for more than eight hours a day, nor can employers start the child’s working day before six a.m. or end it after seven p.m. [1]  The law went into effect September 1, 1917 and was in effect for nine months (nice irony there in the law lasting the gestation period for producing a new child laborer) before the Supreme Court struck it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart.  

That case was brought by the Roland Dagenhart, father of two Dagenhart kids who worked with him in a North Carolina cotton mill, six days a week from sunrise til ten p.m.    Roland stood to lose a lot of income if his young children were not allowed to work with him.    The Supreme Court, in 1918, agreed, on multiple grounds, that the Child Labor Act was repugnant to the Constitution.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, and his view would carry the day more than twenty years later when Hammer v. Dagenhart was overruled (paving the way for federal intervention in civil rights cases using the Commerce Clause).    After all his legal arguments, Holmes added (according the Wikipedia):

“But if there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed – it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.”

Civilized countries, oh boy, there we go again!   We can’t torture, we can’t make six year-olds work all day, and into the night, to help support their families, we can’t use poison gas in warfare any more, we can’t decide who will, and who won’t use our public bathrooms, can’t lynch uppity, guilty troublemakers who threaten the peace by offending our morals, we can’t even use the damned n-word anymore!   Hand me my MAGA hat, boy, there’s work to be done!

My mind skitters and I see the worried faces of several people, over dinner last night, furrowing their brows over what they see as the certainty of another four years of Trumpocracy after the 2020 election.   They saw their fear clearly as inevitable, Americans are credulous idiots, we elected him, nobody can beat him.  Look what he did to the rest of that busload of Republican nominees before the bully juggernaut steamrolled his way to the candidacy, then the presidency!   

Look at history, also.   We may learn little from it, but we sometimes take a good lesson here and there.   In 1918 the Supreme Court decided child labor was a matter for each state to rule on.   By 1941 there was a widely supported federal statute regulating child (and all) labor on the books for several years (my father, born in 1924, was 14 when the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect) and a Supreme Court decision specifically overruling the 1918 ruling that employing seven year-olds for 16 hours a day was perfectly fine if an individual state said it was perfectly fine.  The new principle was that the federal government could intervene in state practices whenever interstate commerce was affected.  This nation still, every so often, uses law to fix a longstanding injustice or take down a major league asshole or a president who is a crook.

Things change, although the pendulum of history, which is supposed to swing regularly from reform to reaction and back, has been as stubborn as a French Bulldog straining toward reaction during most of my lifetime, but– looky here.   Slavery is today unthinkable in the USA (though it’s still practiced worldwide, apparently, and convict slave labor is a problem here too, for convicts), so is putting seven year olds to work sixty hours a week in factories (though it’s done in places seeking competitive advantage with the global psychopaths who pursue a morals-free bottom line).   Common things, things we take as given, change in the minds of people and nations.     The difficult part is persuading people of the right way, the civilized way, the enlightened way.   We have twelve years to figure it out, climate scientists tell us.  Hard work ahead.

I sit here every day, trying to talk sense to myself as I tap these keys.  It is sadder than a lot of things, I suppose, this writing out my thoughts for my own use, but also less sad than many things.   I don’t ponder how sad or happy it is, I think only of its value to me, its possible use to others.   The mind skitters, I pick up a calligraphy pen and write a few words, which delights my senses in another way.  I pick up the guitar, at the ready in a stand right by where I write.   Let me practice that Django riff again, get it under my hands, up to speed.  Play it in another position, another key, there you go.

How my life looks to others, I have little sense of that.   A mystery, no doubt.  Is a life really less mysterious if you go to work everyday, do a job, get money, buy things, spend $200 a seat to see a living miracle on Broadway, put another $100 on the card to have a nice dinner after that?  That too is a mystery, like much of this arrangement here.  

Is it any wonder, not doing those seemingly reasonable things, that I sit here today, mind skittering like a hopped up crab on the littered sea bed, vying with a million other hopped up crabs?

 

[1] The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate commerce of any merchandise that had been made by children under the age of fourteen, or merchandise that had been made in factories where children between the ages of 14 and 16 worked for more than eight hours a day, worked overnight, or worked more than sixty hours a week

Limiting the scope of an investigation

Because people feel so harried all the time these days, pressures mounting, attention spans shrinking, the 24/7 news bombardment as constant as the ever more personalized commercial come-ons, because the demands on our time are so relentless, few inquiries are ever carried out as thoroughly as they need to be, for best results.   We deal with vexations by triage, finding ways to relieve the most immediate and pressing tensions and moving on to other things.   It works to keep things going as they are, though it seldom leads to anything better than that.

During an interview with the New York Times reporters who researched and wrote the massive story of the Trump family’s long history of tax avoidance schemes, including outright fraud, the reporters were asked what the single most important aspect of their investigation was.   “Time,” they both said at once.  

Time is needed to complete any thoughtful research project, to follow where the new information points, to verify, to do more research, find corroboration, interview new witnesses, review new evidence, follow the leads from the new evidence.  Time is needed to refine the final product, eliminate avoidable errors and slapdash conclusions.  In the case of a newspaper, it takes time to run everything you plan to report past the lawyers who then have to review everything prior to publication.

The time and care the Times took in researching and writing that massive article on Trump’s family fortune is what enabled them to print and cheerily brush right past Trump’s lawyer’s empty threat:

20181029_184055 (1).jpg

We learned the other day that the FBI seized a tremendous cache of hard drives, computers, phones, reams of digitally stored information in the raid on Trump political adviser Roger Stone’s home last week.  They also seized bank records.   The raid came shortly after interim Attorney General Matthew Whitaker addressed the nation and sweatily announced that the Mueller probe was reaching its conclusion and would be wrapped up soon.

Clearly, the timeline has now changed for any final report from Mueller, as this trove of potential evidence in the Roger Stone criminal case is reviewed.  I heard a knowledgable talking head say yesterday that while the Roger Stone chapter, which ties many themes together, is likely the last one in the Mueller report, the final chapter could be a long one, comprising maybe a third of the final book.

Once again my mind flashed on the farcical five day limited FBI investigation into credible and specific allegations against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.   The FBI, we were told, had already investigated Mr. Kavanaugh numerous times and found nothing, no hint of impropriety of any kind.  That these allegations by Christine Blasey-Ford were being made for the first time in the fall of 2018 did nothing to quiet the indignant Republican chorus about how many times this good family man, this fine Christian jurist, had already been investigated by the FBI and found spotless.   The 51-49 majority finally struck a deal, bravely negotiated by the supremely spineless Jeff Flake, where they allowed a limited week long FBI investigation, for the sake of fairness.  

While the limited investigation was going on, the president entertained supporters at his campaign rallies by mocking Kavanaugh’s accuser about not being able to remember anything about the incident.  Never mind the many specific details she did testify to — according to the Mocker-in-Chief she didn’t know where, when, what, how, who, ha ha!  

Nobody who volunteered to speak to the FBI about the college incident where a drunken Kavanaugh allegedly exposed himself to a fellow student at a party at Yale was interviewed.  Almost nobody was interviewed in connection with the incident Blasey-Ford testified about during that less than week long investigation, no leads were followed, the FBI’s report on its extremely limited inquiry was kept from the public, though it concluded that the few people they spoke to had not corroborated anything, THE END.  Fair is fair, now we vote!

I was thinking at the time how helpful it would have been to the investigation if the floor plan of the house where the alleged attack took place had been verified, the home located.  Skeech, or Stinky, or one of Brett’s other little hard drinking prep-school buddies, may have had a home with the floor plan Blasey-Ford described in some detail in her testimony.   The stairs leading up, the bedroom door right there, on the right, directly across from the bathroom on the left.   Once the house was located, all kinds of other inquiries could have been followed.   Blasey-Ford remembered her attacker because he was not a stranger at the time of the attack she described.  She had met him before, knew his name, his face.  But she was also not interviewed by the FBI.  Shit, they only had a few days and she’d already done enough damage to a great American in her public testimony.  

Not to mention that Kavanaugh’s full defense of himself after Blasey-Ford testified was that he was the victim of a calculated and well-financed left wing smear job,  He even cried a few times to show how unfair this orchestrated partisan attack had been to him, his good name, his fine family, his lifelong dream of a seat on the Supreme Court, his Lord and savior.

I don’t expect Republicans to suddenly develop spines, or Democrats either, for that matter.   The FBI has a checkered past, a lot of it shameful, so I don’t look for high moral standards there either.  It’s up to we the public to make enough noise, to demonstrate the determined public opinion that democracy, no matter what it may have been in the past, is not a few rich twats deciding how much freedom, information and liberty the rest of us get.   Organizing this will take tremendous concerted effort, strategic brilliance, grit and time.  Time, of course, is running out as the clock itself is constantly being run out on so many things in a stressed-out nation with no memory of things that happened two weeks ago, let alone a decade or more in the past.

 

A Nice Case for Impeaching the Motherfucker

The author of this recent piece in The Atlantic makes an excellent case for beginning the impeachment process against Donald J. Trump.   The article by Yoni Appelbaum is here.  Appelbaum points out that the impeachment mechanism was put in place by the founders to provide a constitutional way to rein in an obnoxious president, and, when 2/3 of the Senate agrees with the case made by the House, after proof of the facts alleged, in a public trial where sworn testimony is heard and documents are put into evidence, remove that unfit president from office.  

This is precisely what needs to be done now, particularly after this obnoxious, unfit president rashly shut down the government and unthinkingly burned $11,000,000,000 for working Americans, causing massive suffering to stage a 35 day public temper tantrum, before he agreed to a three week reprieve, threatening to do the same thing again if he does not get what he is demanding.   It is time to put his unrestrained presidency on the defensive and lay out, officially and publicly, the many reasons he’s unfit for office.  

Remove him from office [1] or not, the impeachment process is an important part of our troubled checks and balances system.   It is the constitutional tool intended for the purpose of, at  minimum, restraining an unrestrained president. Impeachment should begin now, my fellow Americans.

I always enjoy a bit of historical perspective, and learning something new that adds to that perspective.  Here, from Appelbaum, is a contemporary of Andrew Johnson’s, writing about that historically crude, vulgar, egotistical president, the first in history to have presidential vetoes overridden by Congress [2], the first of only three to face impeachment:

The case before the United States in 1868 bears striking similarities to the case before the country now—and no president in history more resembles the 45th than the 17th. “The president of the United States,” E. P. Whipple wrote in this magazine in 1866, “has so singular a combination of defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat.” Johnson, he continued, was “egotistic to the point of mental disease” and had become “the prey of intriguers and sycophants.”

Those eerie echoes of history.   Time to impeach this motherfucker, for real.  Read the case Appelbaum makes.   It is hard to refute.

 

[1] As for those worried in the event Trump is impeached, convicted by the Senate and removed from office, about interim president Mike Pence, put that worry aside. Pence is a pale nonentity, placed in office by the Koch brothers who orchestrated the few political successes the unappealing Christian zealot has achieved.  Pence is an unpopular, squirm-inducing politician without charisma or charm, beyond the narrow Koch donor base.   He is unlikely, as lame duck president, to be able to do even a small fraction of the damage POTUS is currently doing.

[2]   As Congress should have done when Trump refused to sign the unanimous bill for keeping the government open that he’d previously signaled to vicious partisan enabler Mitch McConnell he would sign.   When Trump vetoed (by refusing to sign, the ‘pocket veto’ I suppose)  that unanimous bipartisan bill funding the government on an interim basis, Congress had a duty to act against a rash, vain, arbitrary president and prevent a senseless government shut down.   Congress did not act.  So much for checks and balances, Mitch, you rabid zealot.

Troika of Tyranny and other thoughts

Somebody, you can be assured, was paid a pantload of money to come up with that snappy John Bolton catchphrase “troika of tyranny”.   Venezuela, we are now being told, is part of a modern-day Axis of Evil.   Axis of Evil was great, because Hitler’s government was the dominant Axis partner back in the day, so the Hitler piece was baked right into the phrase that paved the way for the Iraq war, one of our most glorious and victorious triumphs as a nation.    

Troika of Tyranny is perfect for today, fresh, with a touch of wicked irony, because of that Russian-sounding “troika”.   Plus, we learn that Venezuela has the world’s largest supply of fossil fuel (who knew?).   An American invasion would pay for itself, we’d just seize and privatize the petrol, according to John Bolton’s unimpeachable mustache.    

Anyway.

I was wondering how many billionaires we have in the USA today.  One second later google gave me this answer from Forbes, albeit a two year-old number (like POTUS himself):

There are 540 billionaires in the United States, with a combined net worth of $2.399 trillion, according to our 2016 list of the world’s richest people.    source

Reaching for my calculator, I tapped in $23,900,000,000,000 (it’s more now, two years at even 5% interest — hoo boy) and multiplied it by 1 %, just for giggles.   You wealthiest of Americans, kick in a one time donation of 1% of your fantastic wealth and let’s see what we could buy the American republic and our beleaguered environment.   The total from our 540 billionaires each kicking in 1% of their wealth would be $239,000,000,000.  

Even just the interest on that amount, that 1% of the wealthiest 0.01%’s wealth, would be a significant number.   At a modest 5% interest rate the interest on that sum, at the end of one year, $11,950,000,000 would be added to the public purse. A tidy little sum, boys and girls.  What would happen if we actually ate into the principal $239B to solve our most pressing social problems? [1]

Of course, that would be some kind of fucking commie Troika of Tyranny shit right there, even asking, let alone expecting, the richest among us to voluntarily not also be the greediest and most heedless among us.  It’s not like they have any obligation whatsoever to fucking parasites like us, or even to the earth we all live on.  

These are clearly the kind of thoughts that come of having too much time on one’s hands…

 

[1]  For a future post, break down some of what that $239 B could buy, socially: ensure free, public education and health care for all children, homes for the homeless, medical care without financial anxieties, funding programs for job training, meaningful hopelessness prevention therapy, protecting the environment, creating joyful community events.  

related thought:

Enacting laws to protect the environment, it turns out, is only the first step, funds must also be allocated.  Even then, without enforcement no law is of any consequence.   What do you call a law on the books that the authorities don’t enforce?   I don’t know either.

 

Interesting idea for a 20 trillion dollar economy

I just heard the president’s current chief of staff refer to the US economy as a twenty trillion dollar economy.   That would be $20,000,000,000,000.   I have no reason to doubt that almost unimaginably gigantic number.   Let’s take it as fact.  Divide that number by ten thousand.   You get two billion dollars.   

When you have very large sums of money, a tiny fraction invested at even a moderate interest rate for a ten year term can yield a mountain of money.   Here is a little math to illustrate this:

The stock market, over the years, pays about 10% a year.   When I was a kid savings banks used to pay 4% for what they called passbook savings accounts.  Let us take 1/20,000th of the value of the US economy or $1,000,000,000.   The average billionaire has at least one of these.   What happens if you just leave a billion dollars in a bank account for a year at 4%?

$1,000,000,000 would yield $40,000,000 in interest the first year if in a 4% passbook account at an old fashioned savings and loan bank.   If you let the money ride, that $40,000,000 gets added to the principle, which becomes $1,040,000,000 which the following year is $1,081,000,000.   After three years that number becomes $1,124,264,000.  At five years that account has $1,214,229,120.   The interest in the seventh year would be $52,532,408.   After ten years the account would have $1,477,295,382, some time in the eleventh year you’d have 50% more than you started with.

I read about a fascinating idea for funding solutions to longstanding social problems. It is called a Social Welfare Fund.  If the will is there to solve social problems, this idea would provide the funds.  The model has apparently already been used successfully in several places around the globe.  The article at the link above is very readable and makes a clear and convincing argument for Social Welfare Funds.

A Social Welfare Fund invests a large sum of money and the money it generates can be spent to ensure housing for all, a living wage, environmental protections, health care, job training, elimination of deadly diseases of despair, the elimination of poverty, providing dignity for elderly citizens, etc.  

If you took the first trillion dollars spent overthrowing Saddam Hussein in the lead up to perpetual war and put it into a social welfare fund, managed by a conservative who keeps the money in a 1960s savings bank at 4%, you would generate $40,000,000,000 the first year.   The fund would generate that annually, at the modest return of 4%.

Of course, few investors would be content with a 4% return.  If the trillion dollar Social Welfare Fund, more shrewdly invested, made 10% that’s $100,000,000,000 a year.   You could do a lot with that kind of money.

The president’s $11,000,000,000 temper tantrum

Look, full disclosure, I never liked any bully I’ve ever seen anywhere.  I don’t like braggarts.  I have a reflexive dislike of the extremely privileged, they like things just the way they are and would be fools not to, I suppose, but fuck ’em.   So I never liked our fake president, even when he was just a rich, racist, blustering publicity hog who put exaggerated accounts of his amazing sex life on the pages of the tabloids of NYC for years, questioned the legitimacy of our first mulatto president and called for the death penalty for wrongfully imprisoned black youth (Central Park Boys) even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence, waging a long public relations war to make and market his exclusive brand: winning.

I have nothing good to say about Trump.   That said, the cost of his senseless, history making 35 day government shut down (previously only done by rabid partisans in Congress) is now calculated at $11,000,000,000.   He was holding his breath until Democrats agreed to release $5,700,000,000 to build a border wall only his chanting crowds think is a good idea.    Not for nothing, the total cost of the wall is estimated at several times $5.7B.

The president has no notion of real world consequences, never having lived in the real world.   Being a millionaire by age eight will do that to a twisted little fucker. He doesn’t know how government works, or economics, or compromise or anything else that most people come to grasp at some point.   After the Trump heir apparent, Donald’s charismatic older brother Fred Junior, revealed himself as too decent to be a real estate titan, prior to drinking himself to death, Donald was the only viable heir to the  vast real estate empire of ruthless, grasping, imperious, law-flouting, fraud-hatching Fred Christ Trump.  Fred Christ Trump was the heir of his ruthless, grasping father who had been deported from his native Germany for evading military service and cheating on his taxes.   It’s in the blood.   These motherfuckers are just no good.   You could look it up.

So this president who never had to know the price of anything, because he never paid his own money for anything, finds out he cost the nation $11,000,000,000 by folding his arms and pretending to be a resolute leader.  What does he care?  Not a dime is coming out of his pocket.   Which is the way it usually goes when the super-entitled, hereditary super-wealthy fuck their social inferiors.

Fair is fair, yo.

“Let’s just say (pause, one beat) he remains unchanged”

At this point I don’t remember what I have written about my father, now a skeleton up in northern Westchester County, and it is likely I’ve mentioned his great bon mot about his brother, my uncle, but here is a new take on it.

In the years before cellphones, (these days I often walk while talking on the phone) I almost always drew during phone calls.   My father had stayed overnight with his brother and my aunt, who lived in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC, where my uncle worked for the government.  I don’t remember why my father was there, or why my mother wasn’t with him.   I spoke to him shortly after the visit and asked him how my uncle was doing.  He paused to reflect for a second.

“Let’s just say … he remains unchanged,” he said diplomatically as I transcribed the wonderful bit of understatement on my drawing for posterity.   He told me we could talk more about the visit when I was in Florida in a couple of weeks.   We never did, but the point was made.

My uncle was a slightly built, seemingly jovial man with a corny sense of humor and a distinctive scraping laugh he let loose regularly.   My mother was always unaccountably cool toward him, seemed to regard him as an annoying bantam rooster.   It turns out she’d seen flashes of his violent temper early on and was disgusted by the overbearing little tyrant.  

I’d had nothing but warm interactions with my uncle, until I was about 40, when I was suddenly confronted with his implacable temper and rigid, irrational demands.   I can see now that he was fucking nuts, but for much of my life I always felt he was much more approachable and understanding than my father.

“Ask his son which one of us was more approachable and understanding,” said the skeleton of my father.  

You’ll get no debate from me.  I have to give it to you on this one, though of course, it’s not a very high bar.  It’s certainly undeniable that the last night of your life you were very open to conversation, at least as far as setting forth your regrets, apologies and concerns.  

“Well, I didn’t want to leave without setting all that out as clearly as I could,” he said.

That you did.  One of your regrets was that you’d always seen the world in black and white, you sighed as you imagined how much richer your life, all of our lives, would have been had you been able to appreciate that beautiful array of gradations, all the colors and flavors of life.

“Well, you gild the lily there a bit, I wasn’t so florid in my description, but yeah, that’s essentially what I said.”

It hit me the other day when I thought of your great line about Uncle Paul, “let’s just say he remains unchanged”, that it was, at the same time, not only a characteristically personalized judgment on your brother but also an expression of your overall view of anyone’s ability to change.  You always held that people cannot change in any fundamental way.

 “I still hold that belief, pretty much,” said the skeleton.

Although you yourself have changed.

“Well, yeah, I’m a lot thinner than I used to be, if that’s what you mean,” said the skeleton, “and I’m not very active, though none of that was my doing.”

Come on.   You were changed when you were full of regrets and apologizing that last night of your life.  

“No, that’s not really a change of any kind.  It’s a common occurrence when a man contemplates his life helplessly from his deathbed, Death hovering nearby, looming over him, those kind of thoughts, you know, it happens a lot,” said the skeleton.

My mother denied she was dying of the cancer that devoured her until she went into a coma.

“Well, there you go, different strokes for different folks.   She had less to regret and apologize for than I did,” said the skeleton glibly.

Glibness is its own reward, pops.  

“Well, look, in our case, you and I had a lifelong battle and I couldn’t yield any points to you, ever. It’s just the way it was.  You may have changed, I suppose you did when you stood by my bed at the end of my life.  I would have expected at least a little anger from you, was relieved to feel none,” the skeleton turned his head, surveying the small cemetery with sightless eyes.  

Anger was pointless at that point, dad.  You know, to another way of  thinking, the anger between us is what your insane mother always referred to as Seenas Cheenam, senseless enmity.  

“Well, a case could be made that it was that,” he said.   Thoughts of my father’s long, terrible childhood ordeal flashed before both of us, under the turns of two turkey vultures, wings outstretched, lazily riding the thermals.

“Look, Elie, you recall that your mother told us both that she saw the change in you, how much better you became at reining in your anger.  I refused to see it.  You remember when you told me….”

That you yourself were living proof of our ability to change ourselves.  Yeah, and you certainly won that point, though it cost you pretty dearly.

“I’m not proud of that moment,” said the skeleton.  “But, again, I saw the war between us as a zero sum, black and white game, one of us had to win unconditionally and the other had to lose.   It was an asshole’s view of things, granted, but it was as far as I’d been able to come in 78 years.”

You remember that Yom Kippur about ten years earlier, when I’d told you I’d no longer tolerate hostility thinly disguised as paternal advice?

“Yeah, link to the fucking piece you wrote about it, spare us all here and now,” said the skeleton.

 Done.  So, during our last major argument over whether angry people can learn to be less angry, learn to breathe, to honestly discuss things instead of debating from obdurate positions, I pointed out that you had kept your word not to discharge hostility in the guise of fatherly advice.   Tell everybody what you said, dad, during that last real conversation between then and two or three years later, on your deathbed, when I pointed out how well you’d refrained from that behavior for the decade since.

“You’re still fighting me, Elie,” said the skeleton.

I am fighting the bullying impulse, wherever I encounter it, the insistence on forcing people to swallow their legitimate feelings, to submit to intolerable conditions, to stuff whatever reasonable grievances they might have.  

“Fair enough, when you put it like that, ” said the skeleton.

“I never really thought there was any possibility that I could change anything about my life and I extrapolated from that on to everyone else.   I was desperate when  I dismissed my own change in my superficial actions toward you.” 

My point at that moment was that changing the superficial actions had been a step toward improving our relationship, even if only a small first step.

“Had it really been a step toward improving our relationship, Elie?   Seriously?  In light of everything else?”  

No, not at all, not in light of what you said next, go ahead, say it.  

“I told you it was merely an act, hiding the hostility, like the insincere, transactional act I did with Roy, who I fucking despised, and that ‘if I ever told you how I really feel about you it would do such irreparable harm that we could never have any kind of relationship.'”

The People rest.

“Like I said, I’m not proud of it.  I was about to lose, Elie, that’s how I saw it, my back was to the wall, I had nothing but the nuclear option at that moment.   The only way not to lose was to blow the whole fucking thing up.  You want to say love wins, you merciless fuck, how about I tell you that I treat your love exactly the same way I treat the love of another bastard who I openly despise?”  

Nice.  

“Nice work, if you can get it,” said the skeleton dispassionately.

Eerie Historical Echo

In 1981 Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who had been on strike, illegally, for two days, decertified their labor union and banned them from federal employment for life.  In 2019, Donald Trump is forcing 10,000 air traffic controllers to work for free, now for over a month, as he continues to hold the nation hostage over his irrational promise to his angry base, the finest people.

PATCO, Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization, was one of the few unions (possibly the only) that backed the anti-union, free marketeer Ronald Reagan’s presidential bid in 1980.   Reagan supported PATCO’s calls for better working conditions, said he recognized how vital their services were.   Soon after his election as president, Reagan crushed PATCO when the air controllers went on strike in protest of bad working conditions, too many hours, too much stress.  A “sickout” (federal workers are forbidden by law to strike) a decade earlier by PATCO had resulted in some improvements to Air Traffic Control and the lives of the controllers.   Take it, Wikipedia:

The sickout led officials to recognize that the ATC system was operating nearly at capacity. To alleviate some of this, Congress accelerated the installation of automated systems, reopened the air traffic controller training academy in Oklahoma City, began hiring air traffic controllers at an increasing rate, and raised salaries to help attract and retain controllers.[2]   

Reagan, who had supported PATCO while campaigning in 1980, gave a big “fuck you” to the air traffic controllers when PATCO went on strike in 1981.  When striking PATCO members refused to immediately return to work he fired 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life.  He also fined PATCO into bankruptcy and made sure to decertify their union.   That should teach you not to ignore your oath not to violate 5 U.S.C. (Supp. III 1956) 118p (now 5 U.S.C. § 7311), which prohibits strikes by federal government employees, no matter how unreasonable or dangerous your conditions of employment.  Private employers were very impressed by Reagan’s swift action against unruly workers, as were Republican front men, who got busy curtailing the power of unionized labor.

The crushing of PATCO was the turning point for Republican anti-unionism (organized labor traditionally votes Democratic), which spread over the next few decades until unions today, whose membership has shrunk from about 25% of the American workforce to about 10%, have a shred of their former influence on working conditions, safety, wages, health benefits, retirement packages etc.

Today, almost forty years later, another conservative president is forcing 10,000 air traffic controllers to work for free while he tries to twist the nation’s arm to build a symbol of his ability to keep even the most irrational of his campaign promises.   He can lie about everything else, and nonchalantly does, but he is not going to lie to adoring crowds of his supporters who chanted “Build That Wall!” and “Lock Her Up!”  

Mitch McConnell, intractable turtle faced motherfucker, sent a unanimous bill to the president keeping the government open, right before the deadline for funding all operations of government.   The president was poised to sign it, but Prime Minister Anne Coulter and Minister of OxyContin Rush Limbaugh vetoed that and the president unilaterally shut down the government, folded his arms, and now blames the Democrats for not budging off their stubborn refusal to give the giant irrational baby his $5,700,000,000 bottle.  

Fucking Mitch McConnell, proud and unrepentant hyper-partisan who wields unethical power for the same reason a dog licks his balls (because he can), is keeping his head in his shell, waiting this one out.   He won’t send any bill to the president, he says, that the president won’t like.  Build that wall, Mitch, Lock HER UP!

What is it with right wing presidents and royally fucking the people who are tasked with making sure planes full of Americans don’t crash?