What Kind of Mother#)A$(*#?#?!!ckery is This?

To borrow from the inimitable Amy Winehouse.

It's 60 days and counting and I am still in a state of simmering apoplexy.  What kind of nation have we become that this ignorant, lying philistine with his concubine faux-wife represents our collective American selves?  What does that make us?

What kind of Democrats have we become that white liberals believe reading J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is revelatory?  (Or for that matter that the existence of a Barack Obama was chimerical.)  I and the rest of my siblings grew up among these north-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line crackers and have listened aplenty to them, and as far as I'm concerned they are my fellow Americans worthy of civility and entitled to their dignity, but I sure don't owe them any apologies.  Now solid research shows that working class white folks are dying of despair and I'm supposed to have enough magnimony left in me to care?

It's always been abundantly clear to me that the USA cuts way too much slack (an informal way of saying "privilege," which has now become too weaponized a word) to white people.  Period.  That only when a phenomena significantly harms white people is it recognized as mass suffering as opposed to moral defect or criminality. (1980's crack epidemic vs. 2010's opioid epidemic, anyone?)  But frankly, judging from some of Congress' rationale for gutting the ACA I'm not sure the "significant harm to white people" bar is holding either.

And yes, when I'm not as inflamed as I am in the Age of Trump, I am well aware that class and other variables determine collective and individual fates.  But, I am tired and the harm in communities of color (and yes, it's another fashionably weaponized word, but sometimes you need shorthand) continues as a crisis and I am nowhere near the mediation stage.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

Lately I've been getting e-mails from Michelle Obama asking me, beseeching me, really, to sign Barack's birthday card.  I've been thinking about it.  Ordinarily, if this was an office situation and I'd been asked to sign a card for an executive who was way way above my paygrade, I'd decline.  Chances are I wouldn't know him or her, and to sign the card would be to insinuate myself into their personal life for no other reason than I wanted to score points or just get-along-to-go-along.  But I admire the man, and might make an exception to my own rule.  Perhaps more than any president in my lifetime I wish Barack Obama as many birthdays (happy or otherwise) as he can have. There is such derangement in this country that every day seems to offer up a fresh opportunity for some aggrieved and put upon fin de siecle white guy to imagine himself the hero assassin of the President.  Can't cut more food stamps for the poor?  Shoot him.  Can't win the war in Iraq?  Shoot him.  Can't stop the tide of brown children from Central America who are coming here to take our jobs, and, as soon as they grow up, rape our women?  Shoot.  Him.  All of that to say that birthdays are not preordained for that man; so I hope he'll have his next one.

But Michelle's request notwithstanding, coming as it does in the midst of a slaughter in Gaza, I can't sign the card.  Because really, I've been so over Israel for decades.  Back in the 1980's, June Jordan and other leftist academics (who are so fashionably lampooned by smug libertarians and the unctuous assholes who love them) were publishing works about Israel as an apartheid state.  And Israel's support of its sister regime in South Africa.  This is Israel:  they spy on us, they have such power in the halls of Congress that both the Senate and House passed unanimous resolutions in support of this phase of the war.  (Now, I ask you, where else in the history of the Obama's presidency have House and Senate Republicans unanimously agreed with him on Anything?  Makes you wonder how that's even possible.)  They are the recipient of billions of US tax dollars that purchases weaponry (and no doubt intelligence) that advantages them to wage asymmetrical, brutalizing war based on any rationale that suits Israel at the time.  (See Gulf of Tonkin attack, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers.)

And now -- what? almost 30 years later -- we have to listen to the likes of Barack Obama, a man who certainly knows better, trot out all that hum-de-hum-hum about Israel's right to defend itself.  Our stalwart friend in the Middle East, yada yada yada.  (If I paid a man to have sex with me on a regular basis and laugh at my jokes do I also have to stand in front of mikes and call him my friend?)  It would be insincere of me, Mr. President, to sign your card.  I wish I could say the same for your support of Israel's actions; but I can't.

Bumper Sticker I'd Like to See

Paul Ryan .... the Lance Amstrong of VP candidates