Respect and the Trump Tattoo

Imagine your best friend: a regular guy with a wife, a few kids, and a steady job.  You've known him for years; you love him as a brother; you thank God everyday that he's in your life.  

But let's say he comes to you one day and says he's going to get a tattoo.  Not just any tattoo, but a large one on his face cheeks.  Yogi Bear dunking a basketball over Shaquille O'Neal.  He's wanted to do this for a long time, and he thinks it's a great idea.  

Of course, as a friend you try and talk him out of this crazy idea.  How can this look good?  Is this really how you want to present yourself?  Are you mentally ill?  But your friend is adamant.  He's gonna get this tattoo, and if it costs him your friendship, that's your problem.  He knows who he is, a Yogi-Bear-lovin' hoops fan.  Nobody can stop him.  

He gets the tattoo...and for awhile you still love your friend.  You have gone though enough stuff together that you won't give him up that easily.  But everytime you look at him you see this tattoo...and it really is the very worst thing you've seen, something you can't unsee.  It's not just the idea of a tattoo, but that he chose the worst tattoo artist in the county to get it.  The characters are all wrong, the placement is off-center, and there's not a soul out there who would think that this was done while somebody was sober.  He continually defends the tattoo, of course...if people don't like it, well they are just stupid.  They have been brainwashed by the anti-tattoo lobby.  Only he knows the real value of this art.  

Slowly but surely, over time, you stop hanging out with your friend.  You will always love him, but your respect for him has suffered immensely.  You longingly wait for the day where he comes to you and recognizes that the tattoo was a stupid idea, can you help him find a plastic surgeon to remove it?  But that day never comes.  And you continue to drift apart.  It's hard to respect somebody that delusional.  

----------------

Over the past decade I have had a lot of people in my life who have their own tattoo: the imprinting of Donald Trump on their hearts.  No matter how terrible an idea it is, no matter how badly executed it has been done, they defend their devotion to him with their very being.  Even as you bring up his incompetence, his venality, his corruption, and even his immoral depravity, all things that are so obvious that anybody should be able to see them, it's never Trump's fault.  It's Obama's fault.  It's Democrats.  It's the mainstream media.  It's Hunter Biden's laptop.  It's Hilary's emails.  

Rather than admit the ridiculous nature of the Trump tattoo, they flaunt it and celebrate himwith their red hats, theirs cheap (and quickly dissolved) flags, their Facebook memes, their devotion to a MAGA echo chamber that always points fingers in another direction.  And so they learn to hate windmills, hard-working immigrants, random members of Congress that their lord and savior has decided are the enemy.  There's nothing real about most (if not all) of his grudges, but this doesn't matter...the Trump Tattoo tells them what to think.  

I will continue to love these people as I slowly and depressingly wait for them to wake up from whatever zombie virus they are under.  But I can't really keep respecting them.  When they speak, even as it's not about Trump, I look at them and all I can see is that terrible tattoo on their face.  

A hundred years of New England freedom

This past week our family took a vacation through the New England states; I especially enjoyed the forests and tranquility of Vermont as well as a boat trip on Portland's harbor.  With vacations it's always nice to get away and see things you don't get to see everyday, but after a week it was also nice to get home and sleep in my own bed last night and poop in my own toilet.  

When we approached Boston, consciously or not a lot of our trip involved looking at stuff related to the Revolutionary War.  We stopped first in Concord and Lexington, just west of Boston, where it could be said that the civil war started in April 1775.  There we saw the places where 'the shot heard round the world' kicked off a series of events by which a bunch of diverse colonies united to claim independence and ultimately win it as well.  We also saw some of the historic sights in Boston, as well as a few touristy ones like the Tea Party museum.  It's a reminder that people suffered and sacrificed for the idea of a new nation, for liberty, for the ability to begin something very new.  No matter how imperfect it was (I was expecting monitors from the Trump administration to be sniffing around to see how America-glorifying it was, which it wasn't always), these are things that should give Americans of all stripes a sense of pride.  

A few days later we left Boston and drove to Newport, Rhode Island.  Rhode Island is where Roger Williams fled in the 1630s when the freedom-seeking pilgrims of Massachusetts denied that freedom to others  Rhode Island was found as a colony seeking a greater sense of religious liberty.  Two and a half centuries later, however, Newport became known as the place where religiosity was easily swept aside in the name of rich people wanting a summer showplace built a series of mansions overlooking the ocean.  It was the time of the 'gilded age' of the 1880s, a time where people (many of whom genuinely had worked hard; some had inherited wealth going back generations) had the wealth to lavishly show off their position in society.  Many of the old mansions still today, though a lot of them are museums; a few now belong to a college I had never heard of before, Salve Regina University.

It struck me as we strolled along the cliff walk that bordered these homes and the ocean how this week had explained a lot of America.  Our country was founded on a sense of freedom, however imperfect (ask the slaves, women, and indentured whites), but a century later was more about wealth and status in a way that might have embarrassed our English forbearers.  It may well be that this is the eternal struggle of the United States, that the energy and passion that inspires true greatness inevitably leads to a form of greatness that is gilded and self-absorbed.  Could it be that our human nature and our tendency to desire a legacy in the form of monuments leads us into a place where importance is only something that is bought?   

Worry and the Almost EV

Today, the 4th of July, we have begun our vacation.  I sit in a hotel on a Friday night in a town I know almost nothing about, thankful that today's airline flights went as scheduled and that we can look forward to a good time.  

Several months ago I made plans on Expedia, and when it came time to pick the rental car I chose the cheapest option, the Manager's Special.  We don't really need anything too big for the three of us, I thought, so I figured this would be a good place to save a few bucks in the time of inflation.  

I didn't think much about it until about 10 days ago, when I started getting emails from Hertz thanking for my rental, and oh by the way here's a bunch of reading you need to do about renting an EV from us.  Zoinks?!!  I went back and looked at my rental email and sure enough I had chosen not simply the Manager's Special but Manager's Special EV or similar.  Over the next few days I started spending my free time reading up on EVs, having never driven one before, and really having no idea how the entire system worked.  At first I was convinced that I was likely to get a Tesla; one reviewer online of the Hertz at the airport from which we would be renting complained about how he showed up to get his car and all they had left were a dozen Teslas.  

My thinking soon turned to wondering how long it would be until somebody keyed my rental, or maybe set in on fire, as the liberals for whom they were designed soon began to resist the car given to them by a modern day Nazi.  Maybe, I thought, I could put a sign in the window, PLEASE DON"T DESTROY IT'S A RENTAL I CAN'T AFFORD THE DEDUCTABLE.  But surely the rage at the South African First Buddy was starting to fade.

Soon, though, as I began to read about the Tesla I started to realize that the bigger problem might be that moment like in a dystopian movie where I have to abandon it on the side of the road because of a lack of power charging.  At the hotels we had rented I can't slow charge them overnight in a garage, and even as some of the areas we were going had Fast Chargers online reviews were saying that they didn't always work.  Was my vacation going to center on sitting at slow charging stations for six hours so I would be able to be able to drive another 80 miles?   

Then about three days ago I got another email from Hertz.  Plan your route by expecting your Polestar 2 to go about 200 miles.  A Polestar 2?  What was that?  A little research led me to realize it was simply a Volvo EV, with worse range.  But also I quickly discovered that there were other EVs as well Hertz rented, a Chevy Bolt, a few Kias, who knows what else.  How on earth was I going to digest all this information on EV charging and what different adapters one might need for each vehicle in certain situations?  

I literally spent a dozen hours online researching all the permutations of this over the past week. But what's worse, even as I tried convincing myself (and others) that I was making peace with these things, my old worrying habit came back with a terrible kick to the nuts.  Ever since this stuff all started, my pooping routine has been, shall we say, scattered.  Where once I gave a few solid poops a day, I was going 6, even 8 times a day, and often with a consistency that looked more like chocolate syrup instead of a Baby Ruth.  I wondered, maybe I'm suddenly lactose intolerant?  Maybe I have stomach cancer?  At least I wasn't getting the sores in my mouth that I used to get in times of stress; instead, the sores went into the lining of my stomach and intestines.  

Worry does some bad stuff.  And this doessn't even include this Guy thing I have in which I have to take charge, to help the wife and son have a good time, to make so many plans on my own.  What really were we going to do on this trip?  Maybe, just maybe, this is the last vacation, that I will be content to be like everyone else and just go to the lake all the time and sit around the same campfire and try to enjoy fishing.  Bleh.  And since Donnie Dimwit may well have declared himself emperor for his 38% of fawning supporters by this time next year even as the economy starts to look like my poop from this past week, we may well be more likely to be in hiding from feral ICE patrols than sitting on a beach or wandering along mountain streams in the near future. 

So.  Today our two flights go well, and we arrive at the Hertz rental counter with also doubles as the Thrifty and the Dollar rental counter.  A large woman is running around trying to do several jobs at once, as she bore the brunt of corporate understaffing.  Finally I get to talk to her...she gets my name and ID and I say as pathetically as possible, I made a mistake.  I didn't mean to get an EV rental, is there anything else possible that I can drive.  She says, honey, we don't even have any EVs for rent right now.  Let me get you and your family into something.  

In that moment everything changed.  The worry and terror I had lived in for the past week and a half suddenly lifted.  I'd use the regular analogy of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, but it's better to say that I could feel my bowels suddenly heal.  We talked a bit, I said I hoped she had a good 4th, she said she was happy to work, it got her away from her kids for awhile.  All was well.  

We walked out into the parking garage and I went to my car, a Chevy Trailblazer with less than 2000 miles on it.  The fanciest thing in the world?  No.  But as my first car was a Chevy, I know how to drive these things, and don't plan to spend my evening meticulously planning a trip around where charging stations might need to be on my map.  

The world can be a nerve-wracking thing.  America may not make it to its 250th year, but why worry?  After resting up tonight, our adventures start tomorrow.  All is good.  

Foolish v Evil

I actually agree that no longer making new pennies is a good idea.  Surely we can afford to round to the nearest five cents if we are still pay cash, right?  

But almost five months in, and that's just about where my agreement with the President ends.  Dimwit Donnie 2.0 has been a greater disaster than we could ever have imagined...if the first one was bad but we could recover from him, this one means the end of our country unless he is vanquished soon.  

I find it of interest the manner by which we are to think of his reign.  Is he evil, or merely foolish?  So many things I've seen so far are just plain dumb.  Hey, let's call it the Gulf of America!  I'm the new chief of the Kennedy Center!  And hey, let's bulldoze the rose garden so I can have a series of statues of people I really don't know anything about beyond hearing their names back in 8th grade but it seems kinda sorta patriotic so why not?  

Foolish behavior was the mark of Trump 1.0.  But having gotten away from being held accountable for his past crimes and felonies has emboldened him, and a lot of the things that he is doing are just plain evil.  Even something like the tariffs, which I though at first were just a sign of his stupidity as he raised and lowered them on a whim, are likely acts of evil.  Knowing enough about how the stock and bond markets work, it's pretty clear that even little acts like placing a tariff can drastically altar a stock.  Jerking them around, and giving your friends (though he likely has no friends, only supporters) a heads up that such things are happening, means that they get to profit off what he is doing.  Some of the direct conflicts of interest, such as hiking up tariffs from Vietnam while his family forces a new resort into the country, are just criminal.  

But one doesn't even have to look too closely before you see open corruption and wickedness.  The billions he has made off of $Trumpcoin.  The $40 million he gets for selling a documentary about his (estranged) wife to Amazon that nobody but their worshippers will watch.  The way he has shipped off certain 'undesirables' without any due process to foreign prisons, even as the courts are demanding that they be returned.  His gutting of federal aid programs as he seeks in his big and beautiful way to get massive tax cuts for billionaires.  How he has sold pardons to his supporters and given over 1600 other criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card for their actions on January 6.  

I could go on, but it gets depressing to keep recounting all the things this man has done.  He's a fool, but he's an evil fool.  Lord, forgive us.  We have had enough of retribution.  Deliver us from evil.

Three Dark Ones

I'm in my quiet season of being down to one job, so I've been catching up on some shows and movies that have been building up in my queue.  While I'm more of a series guy at this point, I decided to knock out the three Max movies I'd been wanting to watch.  

Last night I watched Mickey 17.  It's about a worker in space named Mickey, an expendable type who can continually die and then be 're-printed' as many times as needed.  Mickey 17 nearly dies after a terrible fall, and since it's assumed that he died, on his way back to the ship Mickey 18 takes his place.  All along the way a egomaniacal ex-congressman who is leading the space expedition/religious cult wants to destroy the mostly friendly inhabitants of the planet at which they have arrived.  In the end Mickey 18 blows him and the blowhard up and everyone lives happily ever after.

Today I endured the Brutalist, a brutal 3+ hour movie about a Hungarian architect trying to rebuild his life in the United States.  Actually I only made it through the first two hours before I started skipping ahead, but I got the gist, that our hero gets raped by his boss, becomes a heroin addict, and watches his wife suffer before he finds international success and is celebrated in old age by a Holocaust-surviving niece who was once mute but then kinda regains her voice.  

The final movie this evening was a brand-new release, Mountainhead.  Four tech bros, with real-life counterparts like Elon Musk and Jeff Zuckerburg the most obvious, go for a boys' weekend at the poorest one's new Utah ski mansion.  Along the way the world is melting down because of the deepfakes made possible one of them, they have lots of bad quasi-philosophical discussions about how to creats coups to overthrow the government and push us towards a post-human life before deciding that such things are too much trouble, and the one with the slightest bit of a conscience about what they are doing is almost murdered by the other three.  The four survive the weekend, the world seems to regain a sense of balance, and they go back to their crappy and self-important lives.  

Whatever the quality of movies these were, I'm always a bit of a believer that movies reflect a lot about the world in which we live.  Maybe it's just me and what I watch (very possible), but it seems quite possible that these movies are so dark because we live in a dark time.  I'm starting to think that we have never really recovered from COVID, that maybe the final symptom of that disease was not something physical but something very social.  We are paranoid, angry, and for all the talk from the pseudo-religious right, we really don't like people much at all.  Maybe going into quarantine zapped out of us the social skills we'd taken generations to build.  Maybe coming out of quarantine was never a great idea, that perhaps we should have simply loaded our souls into the matrix and found a way to stay there.  

I think I do better with shorter shows.  Maybe the White Lotus or Veep or Stranger Things has its own form of darkness, but at least 45 minutes doesn't affect me nearly as long as 2+ hours of troublesome thoughts.