reaper

Thanks, America – hey world, I’m gonna make you “great again….”

 

*   *   *

Dateline: Last Sunday, early afternoon. MH and I stopped at the local Baja Fresh for lunch. It had been at least three months since I’d eaten there, and I was surprised by the remodel, which included a partition separating the ordering and eating areas.

“Look,” I said to MH, “they built a wall! Do you think they got Mexico to pay for it?”

 

 

*   *   *

A Little Story About The Election Results

The reality of what might be began to haunt me late last week, when my lowest common denominator assurance – i.e., people aren’t that dumb, are they? – commenced a-crumbling in the face of reality. Specifically, the existence and continued popularity of that boil upon the ass of humanity, Reality TV.

I started thinking about a show that was popular just three years ago – FFF  [1], it’s painful to even type the title – Here Comes Honey BooBoo. The idea that such a show could even exist – never mind attract and hold the attention of over two million viewers; the fact that for two years a substantial amount of allegedly sapient bipeds found entertainment from watching white trash in action – specifically the emotional, intellectual and nutritional abuse of a six year old girl by her serial-convicted-child-molester-dating mother…

I knew no one who watched (or would admit to watching) the show, but it existed. And knowing that fact…tanks my heart.

Bear with me with this segue. An American pro basketball player, when informed that the average height of males in the USA is 5’9 ½ “, sneers in disgust and disbelief.  “That can’t be true,” he protests. “No dudes I know are that short. I’m surrounded by dozens of guys all the time, all over the country, and they are all way taller than that.”

We limit the world by our own experience (read: ignorance), forgetting – sometimes not even understanding in the first place – that nature don’t play that game.

 

 

What “global warming” – it’s nice and cool down here.

 

 

Gravity “works” whether or not we comprehend its definition,  [2]  or have even heard of the term, and both the most brilliant Nobel-prize-winning physicist and the illiterate Lapp reindeer herder will be subject to its force  if they slip over the edge of a cliff while trying to get a better view of the fjord below them.

Even that which most (educated) persons know to be true is easy for many of us to discount when it is out of the realm of personal experience. The geologic time scale is imaginary to us four-score-and-change-if-we’re-lucky living humans; thus, it is easy for reality-denying, evidence-ignoring, supernatural-peddling shamans and charlatans to make us doubt the facts and evidence of evolution. Yet we “employ” the reality of scientific discoveries and explanations every day, without being aware we are doing so. There are scientists and engineers who study and apply the esoteric physic frameworks which are behind microprocessor design; there are laypersons such as moiself, whose knowledge of the subject is sketchy at best; there are also science-o-phobes, who deny that the “bizarre phenomena” of quantum mechanics even exists…yet computers function for the lot of us.

So? So…. In all my speculation during the past couple of years about where the country is heading, I’ve now had to admit to myself that this nation of so many goodhearted and clear-thinking people is also a nation filled with millions of people who continue to give shows like Housewives of Dumpfuckistan their 15 minutes of fame.

MH, feeling as gloomy as moiself, reminded me Wednesday morning that we don’t know the real reasons why someone would vote for the candidate endorsed by the KKK. And then, there are those who essentially flush their ballot choose a third/minor party candidate, even with the knowledge that by doing so it may help to elect someone they do not support, as a “protest vote” against the status quo.

The fact that I don’t personally know, rarely encounter, or choose not to associate with people who cheer demagoguery and champion anti-science and ignorance and xenophobia and racism and misogyny [3] does not mean that those people don’t exist. The evidence shows they are here, in far greater numbers than I’d have imagined in my sickest nightmares, and have been waiting, so it seems, for someone to champion their hate and paranoia, thus enabling them to crawl out from under their delusions-of-persecution rocks and slither toward the polling places.

And those poster boys for deplorables, those Trump supporters such as Tony Pettway, charged with assault after sucker-punching and stomping on a peaceful protester at a Trump rally –  guess what? His vote counts, the same as mine.

Is this a great country, or what…or WTF?

 

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of I Know This Third Party Candidate Has No Chance Of Winning
But I Want To Protest The System By Doing The Intellectual Equivalent
Of Slamming My Genitals In A Car Door

As for the previously mentioned “protest vote” constituents, the war-mongering debacle that was the Bush/Cheney era would have never been – the Supreme Court would have never had the opportunity to subvert the will of the people and there would have been no need for a recount – had those who voted for third party spoiler Nader “in protest” cast their votes (as the polls and interviews indicated they would have) for Gore.  

Here we are, once again, haunted by the ghost of Florida. In that closely contested state, with key – 29 – electoral [4] votes, the margin separating Clinton and Trump [5] was a mere 128,863 votes. The votes received by the “protest” party candidates (Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and two others) totaled 293,770.

Go fuck yourself, Susan Sarandon, [6] et al.

 

 

*   *   *

Department Of Speaking Ruptures In The Very Fabric Of Space And Time

Isn’t there some way we can blame this on The Chicago Cubs?

 

 

*   *   *

May you be careful what and how you protest;
May you realize that we all, eventually, pay for the walls you build;
May you try not to blame The Cubs;
…and may the hijinks…one day…ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

 

 

[1] Festering ferret farts.

[2]  the force of attraction by which terrestrial bodies tend to fall toward the center of the earth.

[3] Or are willing to overlook or explain away those characteristics for what they think is some “greater” cause…I don’t know which is worse

[4] When the *&!$? are we going to free ourselves from that antiquated fucktard shackle that is the electoral college?

[5] Updated Nov 9, 2016 6:58 AM PST

[6] An actor and activist whom I once admired…a long time ago in a galaxy far far away….