It's Tuesday, Monday Remembered and Chapter 55

 I wrote this post last night on Word and forgot that I didn’t post it until this morning. —See how out of it I am?

So, back to Monday: By the time I posted twice on Substack today, SubstackJoyceDavis, it was 4 o’clock. I was starving, as I had only coffee, toast with peanut butter and apricot jam for breakfast.

I planned to go to Fred Meyer grocery, a distance from our house, however it is close by Mami’s Burrito who sells super burritos. A match made in heaven. I had a burrito the size of my lower arm--pork meat, rice, beans, veggies plus guacamole and chips, and their super-duper green salsa to spice it up. The open-faced, friendly young Mexican fellow who served me and I joked a bit about the pouring rain. I had an affinity with him, of course not knowing if he was legal, not legal, had a green card or was born here. I didn’t care. He seemed sweet. I thanked him, and as I was leaving, he said I had “good energy” which surprised me considering before that encounter I felt lower than a snake’s belly.

With Sweetpea sleeping beside me and the heater jacked up to womb temperature, I ate my burritos with a fork, huge as they are, left the holder tortilla, was stuffed, warm and sat dumb for the next hour about what I had read today. 

Trump confirms plan to declare national emergency, use military for mass deportations.

Deport “millions,” he said.

“In the early hours of Monday morning “reports” on Truth Social suggested Trump’s administration was “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion.”

“TRUE!!!” Trump wrote in response.

Doesn’t that scare you?

I didn’t know we had a “National Emergency” with Immigrants.

I thought about the kid who just served me. Was he at risk?

I thought of all the Immigrant workers who tend our farms, pick our fruit, tend our lawns, start business and restaurants, raise their families, get jobs. We had a young man in San Diego who mowed our lawn every Tuesday. He would be sent back to Mexico on occasion, but every week someone of his family showed up and mowed the lawn. Then he would be back mowing again. I could depend on him.

That was 40 years ago. I fear what would happen to him now.

What is it with the deportation of Immigrants? Am I focusing on the innocents, and there are rapists and insane people Immigrants out there as T says?

Is this ethnic cleansing? No wonder the Statue of Liberty is hanging her head. Did you know there are broken shackles as part of the statue carved at her feet?

Are we a nation of bigoted prejudiced people?  I thought we were over that.

Dumb me.

And RFK Jr. wants to defund infectious disease control and research.

No wonder I couldn’t remember what I wanted to write today.

It appears that people are running on emotions and dropped their brains on the sidewalk. They want T to fix everything. They want a Messiah.

Be careful as you walk down the sidewalk, folks, or you’ll slip on a brain.

Before this present time, I was never very political. Elections were like an athletic event. You won or lost. You felt bad if you lost, but it wasn’t so serious. Now I feel that we ought to speak up. Like leave Transgender people alone. They are 1% of the population. Focus on Global Warming—that affects all of us.

(Oh, I forgot, Global Warming doesn’t have the emotional impact that transgender does. Sure, “Send your boy to school in the morning and he comes home a girl,” To quote someone when he was running for office.)

Many don’t believe in Global Warming anyway. Boy howdy, we had severe winters when I was a kid. Now they are like spring. Species are dying because the ocean is warming.

I don’t know if Global Warming is a naturally occurring event or how much we are contributing to it, but I know we are affecting the environment and we ought to give it huge attention.

The epic poem Gilgamesh is the oldest poem known to man. It is the story of a selfish king trying to achieve immortality, and his “Noble savage,” Enkidu. Gilgamesh angers the gods because he cuts down the ceder trees. Enkidu shows more respect for the gods for he knows that The Land of Cedars is not only a place representing nature and the wild, but also a place holy to a god. (Small g’s on purpose.)

T. claims to be a Christian—I wonder if he has ever read the verse in the Christian Bible that says: “And the King shall answer and say unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’” (“The King,” so say Christian scholars, is Jesus.)

Tonight, an acquaintance told me not to worry. It wasn’t worth getting upset about.

Really?!!

End of rant.

Thanks for sticking with me.

 

 

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Motive and Opportunity

I’m sitting in the car waiting for my grandson.  Moments ago, I read a post by Grant Faulkner, who in 2016 was the Executive Director at National Novel Writing Month.

“I’ve been remembering the 2016 election this week,” he wrote.

Normally, he said, November draws thousands of writers; however, after Trump’s election in 2016, writers’ stories literally collapsed.

It wasn’t just the NaNoWriMo writers. (Writers who commit to write 50,000 words for a novel in 30 days.) Many of his friends and professional writers stopped writing.

They were traumatized.

Faulkner said before that November, he didn’t believe in writer’s block, but then he saw that writing is difficult and sometimes impossible for a battered brain.

Trauma and depression can turn off the spigot of creativity.

 

“It’s easy to think that our art is trivial when it’s up against such a menacing and malevolent block of history as we’re living through, but the opposite is actually true: our art isn’t trivial; it’s what can deliver us.”

 

Faulkner said that James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953, Notes of a Native Son, 1955) expressed the importance of the role of the artist better than he could:

 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

 

Howard Zinn’s quote, “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” provided Faulkner with hope because we need to see that “compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness” are a part of every era.

 

Don’t let them destroy your connection to life and the joy of living. Appreciate the world we live in and the fantastic beauty surrounding us.

I look up from behind the steering wheel and notice that the great flock of Canadian Geese I admired before settling into this page have dwindled to about 25.

The 25 are scattered about the grass, their white breasts glowing like snow patches left after the bulk of snow has been absorbed into the ground. Some are preening, and occasionally, one—male or female, I can’t tell the difference –will spread their wings in a morning wake-up stretch, revealing dark feathers beneath.

(Like some of us, some geese are slower to wake up or are simply basking in the glory of the day before getting to work.)

The day is overcast. As am I.

As I reflect, I wonder how many of us who lived through the Second World War are alive today. Do they despair that the U.S., the land of the free, the home of the brave, has opened its doors to Tyranny?

 I don’t know.

 

Monty Python:

“Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how’d you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.”

--Dennis (Michael Palin)

 

I went to sleep last night more hopeful than days earlier. I wondered if somebody had thrown a monkey wrench in our electoral process.

Could it be that the numbers are off? Could more than 50% of the voting population see the danger of what just happened with the Presidential election?

Motive and Opportunity?

Do you have questions regarding the outcome of the election??

Oh, I know, Trump got the 270 electoral votes that declared him a winner. Harris conceded. It was over just like that.

The losers were standing around, going, “Huh?”

No one stormed the Capital. No hangman nooses hung from platforms. No one was clubbed to death. Harris promised a peaceful transfer of power. No one was yelling that the election had been stolen from them. No person clutched the white house carpet like a feral cat we were trying to extract from its cage.

That was quick and easy.  Sap, it was over.

But wait!  Were we really that wrong? Did we so believe in the goodness of humanity that we ignored the fact that a man running for the Presidency once kept speeches of Hitler on his bedside table? Did we forget that the President-elect once said he wanted his General to be like Hitler’s Generals?

 

See, people don’t remember WWII.

You might say I’m stupid or ignorant but look at it.

Number one: Trump faces criminal charges which, if elected, he can pardon.

Number Two: One of the wealthiest men in the world, who gave one person per week a million dollars to persuade them to register—no tampering with the election- he didn’t tell them how to vote. This person fired his workers because they went on strike. This person said the “Alpha Males” should run the country.

 “Musk, who has a history of sparring with regulators, also faces government investigations into his companies that could result in more lawsuits or even criminal prosecutions.”—Bloomberg News

“Bloomberg has identified more than half a dozen ongoing legal fights in which Musk is a defendant or a plaintiff, as well as about a dozen others involving his companies.”

Before the election, Elon Musk said, “If Trump doesn’t win, I’m F*****.”

After the election, he made 60 million dollars.

(“Tesla headed for a $2 trillion valuation after Musk’s ‘big bet’ on a Trump win.” Analysts say.") –story by Breck Dumas.

 

Follow the money, say the lawyers.

Motive and Opportunity? ask the courts.

Indeed, we have motive. Do we have opportunity?

I don’t know.

“Elon Musk said his satellite internet venture Starlink now has more than 1,500 active satellites in orbit above Earth.” –story by Kellen Beck

Could any of those satellites interfere with the ballots and their outcome?

Does anyone know?

Does anyone else smell what I smell?

Hey, there are good rats too, my kids had one.

In Times of Trouble the Crème Rises to the Top

 

In times of trouble the crème rises to the top…such as the insights and creativity, from such people as Lucian K. Truscott.

I just read his Substack post:

“This is Our Rosa Parks Moment.” 

Truscott writes:

“Politics is not the only mechanism by which democracy works.”

“Democrats tried and failed to end the Vietnam war in 1972 with their votes for George McGovern and lost. Richard Nixon carried 49 of 50 states and won the popular vote by 18 million votes.

“The protesters at Fort Benning wanted the war to end, but it didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen.

In 1973, the soldiers were brought home, and two years after that, the war ended because we lost it and pulled out of Vietnam militarily for good. It was unrestrained power and idiocy that started the war in Vietnam. It wasn’t the power of the vote in our democracy that ended that war.

It was the hundreds of thousands of protesters just like those at Fort Benning who did it.”

Peter Greaves commented on Truscott’s post. The president-elect was only elected by 32% of those eligible to vote. He was allowed to be elected by 38% of eligible voters who chose not to cast a ballot.

He does not have a mandate.

Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump delivered his closing argument at a Madison Square Garden rally that drew comparisons to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in the same arena and characterized by similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press.  

Enough Americans bought it to elect him.

We must conclude that most voters want what Trump is offering.

Or it could be that they have been gaslighted into believing his lies.

I know people are angry and want to strike out—we’ve been stirred up for the last nine years—people are on tenterhooks. Don’t you know, folks, it was planned that way?

From Paul Rosenberg:

“Like the conman in the original film “Gaslight,” Trump spun elaborate fictions, claiming that Obama had come out of nowhere, demanding to see his college transcripts and inventing a team of investigators sent to Hawaii (who did not exist). That got the anti-Obama base fired up, while presenting a pseudo-serious facade to the broader public. This is how he gaslights routinely in politics, rarely engaging directly with the right-wing mythologies he taps into, but freely improvising his own fantasy extensions.  

In this election, Trump relied on five key themes of gaslighting in various different ways, all of them adding up to an overarching sixth theme: Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and Donald Trump is its savior. 

“It is the upside-down logic used in abusive relationships.

“Gaslighters may lie all the time, but when the chips are down, they gaslight.”

For example, “The hate you saw was really love, and if you can’t see that, you’re the hateful one.”

(Google— “How Donald Trump Gaslit America,” by Paul Rosenberg.)

 

Wow, that President elect isn’t stupid, he is devious.

Or, could it be that the idea that a woman of color could possibly become President is so repugnant to many that they would elect a rapist, misogynist, amoral man who cannot even take pleasure in winning but must still rail at the Democrats?

Doesn’t he know that an athletic event (since he likes fighting so much—as displayed on the Joe Rogan show) has two sides?

(The fighting they were so enamored with is extreme fighting where they kick to break their opponent’s legs, and sometimes the fighters carry a razor blade to cut themselves to make their injuries seem worse.)

If you win, you celebrate, but you do not want to annihilate your opponent, they were there so you could win.

Didn’t your coach teach you anything about sportsmanship?

The country elected a man by a democratic voting system—even Latino men whom he has threatened to deport voted for him. I’m boggled.  

I’m ashamed. When hate opens the door it gives other haters permission to be their worst. Some far-right men have taunted social media women, “Your body, my choice.”

That tells me the abortion ban is not about saving babies. (Nobody wants to kill a baby.) It’s about sticking it to women. It’s about control.

I always wondered when I saw how maligned an unwed mother was, how she was hidden, set off, made ashamed, and ridiculed. Sometimes, the man just ran off. Then, after the baby was born, “Oh, how cute it is.” Now, it is a person. While it was in the woman, it was a shameful sexual act, a biological blight that made the woman swell up and commit to the act of pushing what feels like a watermelon out of her body. And let’s make sure she did it, and hopefully in pain. (Evidenced by some nuns who facilitated childbirth.) The Bible said a woman was unclean after giving birth and had to spend a certain number of days to cleanse.

Back to the question I posed in an earlier blog—and it is not why Harris lost. Why did Trump win?

“Trump’s voters turned out because they believed him when he stood up there at his rallies and claimed that he would fix all their problems, whatever they were.  For them, it was what passed for leadership, so they followed him.  He won’t fix things, he doesn’t even know what their problems are, and he doesn’t care.  But that doesn’t matter right now.

“What matters for us is that the time for complaining is over.  Here is how my father told me to get over myself: 

“Buck up.  There are things to figure out and work to do.  We have the tools; we’re smart; we can do it.”

—Lucian K Truscott

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
 
“Before he (the President elect) enters on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:– I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
Fourteenth amendment: Section 3 

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Why haven’t we acted on this?