So, This Happened Yesterday

 

Trump who gets invited to the BEST FUNERALS, showed kids at the White House Easter Egg Hunt his post-assassination attempt collector's card while the stock market was tanking.

That's it. That's the picture. That sentence is the whole blog post. I've been doing this a minute and how do you even add to that? 

"Hey kids, do you know who ELSE was almost killed and rose again? Your favorite president, who got so many eggs you can't even find them all." 

Rest in Power, Sheila Jackson Lee

 

The time is now to unite behind the President and get to work beating Donald Trump — one last time. https://t.co/d84qoX5n5h

— Sheila Jackson Lee (@SJacksonLee) July 19, 2024

What an admirable career of fighting for others! In that spirit, let's get right, unite, and fight.

On the Passing of the Queen

 

One isn't obligated to comment on the passing of every single meaningful personage, but in this case, I feel it should not go unremarked that while I didn't know her, I appreciate that her astonishing 70 year reign will feel like the passing of an era to so many among the 2 billion souls of the Commonwealth and elsewhere. 

Even hearing "God Save the King" seems jarring--and it seems like the royal formerly known as Prince Charles has accepted King Charles III because if he's gone by "Charles" for this long, how can you throw "George" or whatever on with one's coronation? It would be absurd.

I think the word that has echoed in remembrances that strikes me as awkward is "stability", If anything, Queen Elizabeth II represented a Great Generation face of the post-WW2 era of trying to move on. She wasn't responsible for colonialism, but represented the family that wrought the scars of empire on whole nations and was not, herself, the person who would ameliorate them. She maintained the face of the royal family and the duty to service of the state but did not essay to remake it.

Stability is a word that often means keeping up appearances. Maintaining a status quo.  Monarchs are not apt to be revolutionaries, and for my part, while I don't despise her for the sins of her ancestors, it only goes to show I am very white and my Irish ancestors left for the US a long while ago. I'm sure my distant cousins living through the Troubles would have felt differently and more personally about it. History has a bad habit of not judging people for what they failed to do when they weren't particularly expected to do it. 

As an American, I was able to view the Queen more as a character in a royal soap opera played out over the front pages of tabloids. I suppose that sounds seamy and I am not sure that isn't what the royals had coming. Randy Andy (who his mum covered for, and while love and duty are meaningful, so was his culpability), Charlie the Tampon, the dirty way they did Diana, Camilla the Homewrecking Vampire, Prince Phillip as a creature not unlike Fawlty Towers' "Major".  And Elizabeth, the resilient monarch, just keeping the whole rotting thing together. 

I toast, not the new King or the memory we have of his mother, but Archie and Lilibet, her great-grands via Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  We in the US are supposedly shed of kings and queens (despite the coronation some want to push on a decrepit real estate magnate/game show host) and the idea of using human beings as a symbol just feels off to me. Maybe there needs to be a post-royal future--that what the family represents or is supposed to is just too batshit and stressful and they should just be healthy and work on themselves.  And the UK, etc. also moves on. Beyond an age of the romanticizing of personages based on their birthright, and on to something more meritocratic.  

These babies just got titles, but don't need them. I would like to believe we can move past such titles, as well. 

Per Aspera Ad Astra

 

A life well lived is one that will be long-remembered, and Nichelle Nichols truly lived that meaningful life, where the example of talent and heart, interest and intellect, will long outlast the mortal journey. Her portrayal of Starfleet officer Lt. Nyota Uhura, an African woman who was a key crew member of the Enterprise 's bridge on the influential original Star Trek series, did not only entertain but inspired by representing to young people what could and should be. 

That her work on that sf tv program, so influential some of us want to see it as our aspirational future world, was seen as vital by Dr. Martin Luther King, and lead to her own considerable influence in the careers of actors and NASA figures--scientists and astronauts alike, is a story about her commitment to the idea of the future and human advancement. 

We humans are a messy folk, but there are people among us who remind us to look to the stars. Nichelle Nichols did that so uniquely. Set course for home--among the stars. 

Ivana Trump ( 1949-2022)

 

I used to wonder where Don Jr. got his dark hair from until I saw this picture of his young, athletic built mother. She wasn't always blonde, but she was always striking. She passed at a strange time in the story of the Trump family--the post-White House period, a time of subpoenas and depositions (delayed) and occasional strife. 

I will admit--when I look back on when I got my first extremely negative impression of Donald Trump, it was because of the Big Divorce Story and Ivana's bid to get a little more than the prenup would allow after all she had been through. I took her side. I don't know what it was, but something about the whole deal told me that being married to Trump was absolutely a kind of work. And I didn't even know about the alleged abuse and rape, then, but felt like she had a story to tell that maybe we wouldn't ever know, fully, because she wasn't the type to tell, fully.  She struck me as a survivor. Not a person who tells tales. A person who lives through them.

I was a little proud of her "Living well is the best revenge" phase. She prepared for her landing.  She did not use her time after the dissolution of the marriage to disparage her ex, but to do her own thing. She raised the Trump kids until the age when they could choose to go follow in their father's path. 

Some people say she was Trump's twin, in that she also had an indefatigable will. Maybe.  I don't know what to make of the story that she fell down the stairs and received blunt force trauma to the chest a day before her ex and children were supposed to have a deposition in NY regarding their business dealings, but sometimes coincidences do happen.  It's only because of who Trump is and how naturally the question rises up in the mind that people are even thinking the thing that seems too shocking to say. 

But surely, that's only a delay and wouldn't be worth any person's actual life. Not anyone so near and dear to all concerned. Of course. We aren't so deranged by Trump's infamy to think the unthinkable. 

I do wonder what her residential security camera situation was, though. And whether she had any visitors that day. No reason at all. Just curious as any person might be. 

December is a Dark Month

 

 I haven't posted about the suckularity lately because to me, living in "pandemic time" only meant becoming wrapped up in the passing of so many lives and I never wanted to turn the blog over to obituaries and eulogies, but December hits hard, sometimes. Harry Reid, George Madden, April Ashley, bell hooks, Joan Didion, Mike Nesmith, even Bob Dole. Anne Rice, E.O. Wilson, Sarah Weddington. I note their passing, but just can't bring myself to write the damn things about them. 

Their time and mine intersected, and for their merits and their flaws, you can look anywhere, but as for me, it's memento mori as much as anything else. We carry the good in our memories and follow their positive example. 

That's all I've got.

Our Better Angels and Our Greater Devils

 Colin Powell knew that the UN speech he gave to lay out the case for war against Iraq on the sketchy basis of their weapons program would haunt him to the end. He was an intelligent man capable of great insight and scrupulous honesty. That's what makes his fault a bit worse: how does an adult, experienced leader go and peddle half truths (and unsubstantiated nonsense) to set the stage for a ground war that he knew would be brutal, that he warned the Bush Administration about (albeit in terms like "the Pottery Barn" rule, which seems awfully flip in the aftermath, doesn't it?) , as if guilelessly led by "a bad crowd"? 

It's impossible. And yet, he was not the worst of the Bush Administration lot, at all; just at the time, so exceptionally disappointing. And also, I believe in his own way he understood the extent to which his reputation was used to promote a war of choice that was not legitimately reasoned, and I note his later support of Obama and his rejection of Trump--but they were low key. 

Could he have served his country better were he more vocal? See, I don't have responsibility to not be vocal, so I say what I want. His position was as a soldier with a respect for civilian leadership who ceded his reputation to the service of his CINC. Maybe he felt that he served best by offering his opinion, but leaving it to the person selected by 5 members of the Supreme Court elected by the people. Maybe he understood, at least since the time he whitewashed the My Lai massacre, He had a vantage to to a political window of how war history got made. 

I don't believe in hero worship. We're all fragile skin sacks barely containing the drama caused by mutant brains that perceive and personify and signify a lot--a blessing and a curse. Colin Powell was better than a lot of our kind are, and not better than he could have been. He was a trailblazer and the people who know him well liked him a lot, but I have noted how one can smile and be a villain, I've noted how intelligent people can be persuaded to get it all wrong and defend getting it wrong long past when it made sense. 

Our better angels sounded in him, and our greater devils also had their way. This man died at the age of 84, with Parkinson's and multiple myeloma, a cancer that sadly, specifically has implications for the immune system, and he died of "Covid-19 complications", which is more like, "COVID-19 was fatal to Powell because of his immunocompromised state". Which, because he was also fully vaccinated, means anti-vaxxers are using his example to wage their war on science. 

This is sadly typical, and not what he or we deserve, It is only too sadly what our greater devils do with themselves, finding a figure to make their mischief with. Once again, his profile is lent to a bullshit right-wing narrative.

But my sympathies and condolences to those who loved him. One could not regret his fault so much, were there not also so much to redeem. And for those whose care for him predated his Iraq/Bush era error, perhaps redemption was never even in question. But I could not post an elegy without a reckoning--this is just my way. 

(Adding: Notwithstanding, read about something like birth defects in Iraq, and see how you feel about anything at all about the US as a country.)

That Authentic Grief Dollar

 

Wow, what a-holes.

The original: @nytimes: "Biden, Still Grieving His Son Beau, Finds That Not Everyone Wants to Hear About It"

Now: "In Invoking Beau, Biden Broaches a Loss That’s Guided His Presidency" pic.twitter.com/6IHuzr52q6

— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) September 4, 2021

I didn't want to broach this part of The Discourse and all, but when supposedly serious journalists started in on whether President Biden's references to his son were appropriate because they might rub some people the wrong way, I heard Bill Hicks in my head. Something along the lines of: 

The Authentic Grief dollar. That's a good dollar. Lot of authentic grief to go around. Covid-19, endless wars, the opioid epidemic (we really helped that last one along, sir, let me tell you...). But we're not getting positive reactions across the market, so we think you're gonna have to workshop your grief a bit, Mr. President. Just to give it a more broad, universal, generic appeal. You with us? 

And my gut-level response to what that makes me feel about it is very like that of the late Mr. Hicks. Just kill yourselves you fucking fucks. 

The media hovered like vultures over Al Gore's honesty, Hillary Clinton's laugh, Barack Obama's tears and said "Look, they're human. That means they die and we eat." And then both-sidesed people who promoted unregulated fossil fuels in the face of climate change, policies of torture and endless war, and featured columns from people who, with a straight face, suggested little kids could fling their bodies at a mass shooter to stop him. Eventually. 

If it bleeds it leads. The bloodthirsty dollar. Always a great promotion. You know how it goes.

That's right. We have little kids going to school with bulletproof backpacks or with active shooter drills where they pile into a coatroom, but thanks to scum-life mouthpieces, we are supposed to be respectful when ever-growing numbers of kids are getting COVID because god forbid someone's little precious had their freedoms impaired by covering their wee Hummel figurine features with a mask. Because empathy and common sense have been beaten to death in a parking lot for not having the right Q rating.

Leave people's bloody personalities alone (unless they are unrepentant racist rapist narcissistic sociopaths, in which case, report that shit early and often). Report facts. We're fucking dying over here!

Ah the Fear of Death dollar. A very reliable mover. Pretty much our oldest trope....say, can we interest you in a flight to Mars in like, 2037 to escape all this? Some vitamins? A weapon to protect yourself in our future Mad Max Hellscape? 

Fuck. This. For. All. Time. 

Things Related and Not

 

It happens that a man can live a long time and do any number of appalling stupid things, like help facilitate a long, brutal, murderous war of choice and authorizing torture, and if he is capable of mustering a grin and fashioning statements that in hindsight seem ghoulish or hysterical depending on how you look at things (among the greatest hits, "I don't do quagmires", "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have", "Freedom is messy" and the convoluted mush that is the full "unknown unknowns" quote) and he will somehow receive surprising praise even in death,

He's still dead though, and the history he leaves behind him is still brutal. Some people will say that the Iraq invasion, and the way the justification was tied to 9/11, and the excuse made for appalling judgements of error and misrepresentations of fact were judgment calls by people who felt, after the enormity of 9/11, that they were doing the right thing. Others will say those choices were deliberate and, had there been no 9/11 to tie them to, would have still been made, if more slowly.

Unknown unknowns, right? 

Even after investigations and time, accountability is hard to come by. 

That's the frustrating thing, after the lives lost and damage done and still ongoing. And there was a lot of blame to go around. 

Later, Hater

Let's take a moment to consider the man that he was:

Rush Limbaugh was given the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union last night. Here's a bit on who he is.

Viewer discretion is advised. pic.twitter.com/rWYbfnDThl

— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 5, 2020

Before anyone chides me for celebrating the man's death, let's get this stright, I'm deploring the work that he did. The man that his mourners are calling a pioneer of conservative talk radio was a divisive bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe, an man who literally screamed that a fellow human being was a slut for hours because she believed that birth control should be treated as any other necessary health care.

It may be true that he blazed a path for others, as Father Coughlin or Joe Pyne could have been said to have blazed one for himself--but I would argue that was never a good thing. He lowered the discourse and called it entertainment in the way an abuser knocks someone around and then says they were kidding. He fought against "political correctness"--a made-up term that means when people try to apply some standards of decency to people who have stepped out of bounds, by being hyper-political and seldom correct. 

Anyway, he normalized the kind of rhetoric that made Trump sound so reasonable--it could be said that generations of conservatives had received a Limbaughtomy and their frontal cortexes never worked quite right again. 

I'm not grave-dancing--he hasn't been buried yet. But in a small and nasty way, the tone of my blog probably honors him better than the megadittoes of people who should be asked which inflammatory statements they think furthered conservative thought and ideals, and that's more than he deserves.

TWGB: Legacy, 400,000

 

-84 days after the 1st recorded passing due to COVID-19, the US surpassed 100k deaths.
-121 days later, the US surpassed 200k deaths.
-84 days later, the US surpassed 300,000 deaths
-36 days later, the US topped 400k deaths.https://t.co/AqwjyKWQz3

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 19, 2021

In this tweet, Congresswoman Tlaib notes the rapid advance of the COVID-19 death toll, because the number is staggering, because these were our fellow Americans, because the damage done cannot go unnoted. Given the advantages the United States had, or should have had, so very little was made of our resources, because the people at the top (Trump above all) did not know how or couldn't be bothered or both.

If you need to know, my heart was in a place "more of sorrow than of anger" when Trump was elected, even understanding all I ever thought I wanted to know of this man's character. I was concerned about his racism and incomplete understanding of the American project in terms of our democratic values as a creedal nation, but I was stricken that so many others believed, or wanted to believe, in his version of greatness. 

His version of greatness lost the House and the Senate for his party, the trust of our allies, our esteem around the world, millions of jobs, he has widened inequality, he lost us the unique privilege of being a nation that enjoyed a peaceful transition of power according to our democratic elections. He added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. He never really built his stupid wall, even if he shut down the government a couple times.  He didn't end wars so much as shuffle around military personnel. He made the cultural domestic cold war at the minimum room temp. At worst, we will see more terror.

But he lost 400,000 human beings, in part because he thought the ones being lost were the right ones--blue state minorities. He knew the disease was bad and lied to us. I could go through the lot of the TWGB stacked case against Trump's presidency: his useful idiocy for Russia; his shameful act at Helsinki; his miserable cabinet choices; his lackluster policy; the way his snotty rich kid thin-skinned inability to fake competency for the media dug a deeper hole for himself that he subsequently blamed the media, not himself, for; the way he furthered distrust amongst his supporters for government over all, and so on, but still and all, the least little thing he could have done correctly, when faced with a challenge that harmed American lives, was show the least bit of a damn. 

Trump's supporters, some of whom seriously believe the vote was fiddled and Trump somehow won in a landslide that was snowed-in by fraudulent ballots, don't seem to know that 400,000 Americans dying because Trump was incompetent is bad, I guess. Some of them prefer his lies to the truth, and don't believe the death toll is real, either. It was the high testing, you know. The numbers looked bad because Trump was, I dunno. Willing to let them look bad. (As if!) And masks are bad, and state economies should be wide open--because liberty! And wolverines! And I guess, 1776. 

I've never been here to praise Trump, and I am not here to bury him either, because I do not believe this is even the last of the TWGB series, because the damage that men do lives long after they leave office, and he hasn't even left yet, and there is a lot of room for fuckery in the hours to come. But the worst he did was let 400,000 plus people die and didn't try to stop it. He tried to take credit for Operation Warp Speeding a vaccine into existence, but the distribution--the part that is the government's job--is fucked. 

At one term, two elections, no popular vote, the lowest polling of any modern president, and two impeachments, Trump is clearly a disaster.  Reputational salvage experts can swarm over this shipwreck forever looking for accomplishments to demonstrate that this was a hard-working and very masculine SOB, but what Trump mostly accomplished was watching his shows, golfing, and Tweeting. 

Anyway, Trump's golf game has probably never improved, he's been kicked, quite justifiably, off Twitter, and I for one, think it most apt if he just watched his dumb news shows, and was never a part of the news cycle again.

Especially after letting 400,000 plus of us die. I welcome a president who will mourn with us as he tries to correct this terrible tragedy.

"We Want Them Infected"

 

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD," then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials. 

"Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…" Alexander added. 

"[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected" in order to get "natural immunity…natural exposure," Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee's select subcommittee on coronavirus.

This doesn't really even come as a surprise at this point: the spread of COVID-19 in the US was driven by a nonsense idea of acquiring herd immunity by assuming that young people weren't harmed by the virus and failing to understand that they can spread the virus to others. The notion ("PERIOD"!) that low-risk groups, because they might not experience dramatic physical health deficits from the virus, should be exposed without understanding that everyone lives in a society seems like peak imbecile conservatism--assuming some "sacrifices" keep others safe instead of understanding how we are interconnected. 

Young people and "middle aged with no conditions", it turned out, didn't actually have zero to little risk. To go further, the idea contains within it a failure of the imagination--that only two conditions exist: fine and dead--without understanding that people could experience health complications that might not kill them within weeks or months, but would nonetheless possibly shave years off of their lives, or significantly impact functionality. Or it was a blatant dismissal of the meaning and consequence of those affected for the Administration--the disposability of some people. ("Blue state" people. Minorities.)The lit fuse on a bomb that would only go off some time later when it could be plausibly denied.

It was a thoughtless experiment with human lives. It's shitty science proceeding from shitty politics--and let's note that it definitely was about politics. The Trump Administration inserted itself into CDC decision-making and messaging in a way that made everything worse than it needed to be. They thought they could message facts away. 

Over 300, 000 people have now died in the US. It could be numbing. The callous and ignorant disregard for life and health distributed from the top--the message that we could all just go on as usual is infuriating though. I contemplate that people may have died needlessly for messaging. Because it was an election year. 

I don't know how to be numb about that. 

All Their Lies

“It is being contained.” One month ago today Kellyanne Conway chastised me for suggesting #COVID19 was spreading across US. @CBSNews #Quarantine #CornavirusOutbreak #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/L4ApHezmJs

— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) April 6, 2020

You know that thing where Trump claims he shut down travel between China and the US? He didn't. And where the administration claims they didn't know the potential scale of the spread of the disease? They were warned. And when Trump wants to congratulate himself (or solicit congratulations from anyone else) about the job he's doing right now? He should have his nose rubbed in the 70 days he did literally less than nothing, because he actively made things worse. And when he wants to put Barack Obama's name in his lying mouth about whether the national stockpiles were depleted and what ever was a poor spoiled manchild to do after three years in office, maybe someone can tell him to take responsibility for his shitty choices for once. And everyone who has publicly agreed with these palpable untruths needs to never be heard from, again. There shouldn't be any character rehab for this.

Because they lied. The administration lied. They had the information, and they lied. And Trump's lickspittle right-wing press furthered his lies. (No wonder he thinks the mainstream press is awful--they sometimes call him on it.) Trump can't do his rallies, so he has his press briefings where he lies a lot, and then maybe Pence lies a little, and he encourages others to go on ahead--lie for him. But over time, the things he says don't hold up. We can factcheck what was said.

Trump especially lies, and still does, every day. It's the only thing he knows how to do. But he couldn't lie like this by himself.

The virus wasn't contained. It wasn't going from 15 cases to zero. We crossed 10k fatalities today and may very well cross 12k fatalities tomorrow. And all Trump wants to do is lie.

Lie and get re-elected. Lie about something that is killing Americans right now, pat himself on the back, and expect to be rewarded for it.

I work with math every damn day, but that does not compute.

Ain't No Sunshine

The man could repeat "I know" over and over in way that seemed to convey paragraphs. The lyricist of some of my favorites. "Just the Two of Us" popped on the radio in the limo when I got married and became "our song" almost 18 years ago. I know I just wrote about not being an obits blog, but Bill Withers is an exception.

COVID-19 and the Suckularity

I have discussed the "Suckularity" on the blog before,  and have tried to avoid commenting on the passing of people of note of late for fear of turning the blog into an obituary page. 2016 was brutal. 2017 continued the trend. And so on. Some passings have been mentioned, but it's an idiosyncratic thing, isn't it? 

2020 will doubtless be even more brutal. Social media makes neighbors of us all. In a way, every passing is that of someone "of note". Everyone will be personally, meaningfully affected by loss this year. 

But I don't yet know how I want to deal with that fact here. I only know that I'll have to.

John Dingell: An Historic Life

Because John Dingell's life was so extraordinary as a witness to and participant in history and American politics, it feels weird to acknowledge him as a kind of great and feisty Twitter grandpappy--which is the way I will actually miss him. You follow some people on Twitter knowing of their contributions to politics or entertainment but come to admire them as people. I felt that way about the late Harry Leslie Smith, about Rose Marie, about Leonard Nimoy. I felt that way about John Dingell, who is his retirement took to social media and was a witty and incisive critic. It didn't obscure his congressional legend, it just reminded us he was still out there, sharp to the last. And still on the right side.

Recounting the life of John Dingell from his service record to his swearing in to finish his father's term in Congress, to his championing of universal health care, his participation in the passage of key environmental legislation, and his support for civil rights-- he tried to be on the right side. In his time, he evolved on LGBT rights.   He was outspoken about the collapse of our institutions and the lack of education about civics and history, and the fault that lay in the failure of government to always be truly representative. 

He was one of the good ones, and it is harder to know if we are sadder for his passing, than glad that we had him to begin with. 

 

Barbara Bush Was Unique, Wasn't She?

I guess the thing that sticks in the memory for me regarding Barbara Bush was how she had spoken about the Hurricane Katrina survivors who had been displaced by circumstance; they were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."  It was, if not racist (who knows to what extent she was looking at this through the lens of race?) at least deeply classist. She was privileged, and she could only see silver linings because she did not understand how desperate it was for people to lose literally everything they had. One thing you could say about the former First Lady--she was blunt, and she did not go out of her way to camoflage her meanings. If anything, she was highly articulate and sharp-tongued. It was hard to say she "mispoke" when she held forth.

This isn't the sort of thing one normally thinks about when considering a political wife--the spouse of a president and mother of another. The stereotype of the political "helpmeet" is inoffensiveness, but that was not really Mrs. Bush's style. But, she made her sarcasm and directness work for her, even if she could not always help the fortunes of her spouse or her first-born son with them. 

Without gilding over her flaws, Barbara Bush was a serious and intellegent person. She was not an orthodox conservative, and one of the things she did best was simply be, quite publically, an imperfect figure. She stood in her prematurely white hair and solid frame, and just was herself. 

She isn't alone by a long shot at being a first lady who I liked better than I liked her spouse, or, for that matter, her son. And while I do wonder how GWB's values reflect how he was raised, I can't help but wonder about her speech to Wellsley in 1990:

For over 50 years, it was said that the winner of Wellesley's annual hoop race would be the first to get married. Now they say the winner will be the first to become a C.E.O. Both of those stereotypes show too little tolerance for those who want to know where the mermaids stand. So I want to offer you today a new legend: The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream ... not society's dreams ... her own personal dream. And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse.

I wish him well!

Her understanding of what it meant to be a mermaid--to do one's own thing and do it with one's heart, to be connected and live so as to have no regrets, resonates with me. Her thing was marriage and children, but she wasn't judging anyone else's thing. That was saying a lot.

And as for her son, who I like far more as a late-blooming painter than I ever did as a president, he summed something up about her so aptly:

Laura, Barbara, Jenna, and I are are sad, but our souls are settled because we know hers was,” George W. Bush said. “Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us she was so much more.”

"Our souls are settled because we know hers was."  It was her time, and she went with no regrets and laid her down with a will.

We could anyone of us do worse, couldn't we?

I could wish some of her family anything at all as a political happenstance, but about seeing her life through and the business of burial, I wish them well. She had a great if awkward spirit. She knew educational inequality and illiteracy were such great barriers to success that she strove to see people acheive parity. She was kind of like America's occasionally not enlightened Mee-Maw, whose pronouncements were not right, but she thought you should hear them anyway.

She was unique.

My Condolences to the Families of the Niger Four

There is an incredible back-and-forth regarding the four deceased service members who were on a mission in Niger and were killed by an ambush attack from as many as 50 ISIS-linked combatants. Somehow, the story has been diverted from the nature of their mission and the purpose and reasons for their sacrifice, and has become a strange debate on the nature of how we recognize the ultimate sacrifice of our military personnel and the appropriate observances that should be made.

These were, by all accounts, excellent people from differing backgrounds, but united in a desire to exercise their skills with a sense of purpose.  What we know of the expected White House response to their unfortunate end was that a good statement was made regarding their service and the importance of their mission (in Niger, both ISIS and Boko Haram have been known to operate, and Niger is also well-known for uranium). This well-crafted statement was never delivered. 

“Melania and I are heartbroken at the news that three U.S. service members were killed in Niger on October 4 while providing guidance and assistance to Nigerien security force counter-terror operations. We offer our deepest condolences to the families and friends of these brave American soldiers and patriots. They will remain in our thoughts and prayers.

"We are also praying for the two U.S. service members who were injured in the incident. We wish them a complete and swift recovery.

"The heroic Americans who lost their lives yesterday did so defending our freedom and fighting violent extremism in Niger. Our administration and our entire nation are deeply grateful for their sacrifice, for their service, and for their patriotism.”

What we had instead was a nearly two-week period of silence from the White House regarding the deaths of these service members, despite news reports, until a reporter questioned President Trump about these men in a Rose Garden press conference on Monday.  That was when Trump, apparently unguardedly, spoke offhand about the event.

QUESTION: Why haven't we heard anything from you so far about the soldiers that were killed in Niger? What do you have to say about (OFF-MIKE)? TRUMP: I've written them personal letters. They've been sent, or they're going out tonight, but they were written during the weekend. I will, at some point during the period of time, call the parents and the families, because I have done that traditionally.

I felt very, very badly about that. I always feel badly. It's the toughest -- the toughest calls I have to make are the calls where this happens. Soldiers are killed. It's a very difficult thing. Now, it gets to a point where, you know, you make four or five of them in one day -- it's a very, very tough day. For me, that's by far the toughest.

So the traditional way -- if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls. A lot of them didn't make calls. I like to call when it's appropriate, when I think I am able to do it.

The problem with this statement is that as far as we know, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama did call, or send letters. Often. But it's complicated. Sometimes people could not always be reached, or someone was reached and someone was not, and they felt some way, or whatever other purely human distraction caused a disruption between the intent of the occupant of the White House and the bereaved. Human interactions are often fraught, and those who have suffered losses often do experience a need to understand blame or fault or the reason for the catastrophe that had come into their lives. It isn't always even rational, however necessary that process might be to finding an end to the grieving.

The People You'll See After the Massacre

It feels like we do this too often, as in, we do this at all, right? Stay in some mode of attention after a horrific mass killing event looking for anything, anything at all, that helps us make sense of the senseless, that helps us frame this brutal chaos into an orderly worldview.

Of course, it doesn't help that some of the first people you see after the massacre are the hoaxers and conspiracy theorists. They bubble up from 4chan and fake news sites and get forwarded on by your halfwit news uncles like Gateway Pundit and Alex Jones. They aren't really interested in getting the story right--they basically are interested in clicks, chaos and creating zombie lies that never entirely die, even after being proven to be total bullshit. What they lack in character they make up for in industriousness. They spread lies before Truth even begins to pull her socks up.

Then there's the "Hopers". They hope you aren't going to politicize this thing (to the extent of this thing not being politicized counter to their own pet theory--you better not make this about guns when they want to make this about terrorism, or you better not make this about X privilege when they want to make it about Y social factors, like mental illness or economic anxiety). They usually prefer you wait until all the facts are in before counting the politicization they are already doing out. 

There's the people who greatly prefer you not blame the accessibility of guns for all this, because pea shooters and knives have also been used to kill people. To some extent. Or could. And it's too soon, anyway, to get into that subject. (Even if it isn't soon enough for the next shooting, which is almost certainly going to happen before we've the least opportunity to get any kind of effective gun regs ready for a vote.) 

We get to see the "thoughts and prayers" people--mostly harmless. Some of them legitimately just have thoughts and prayers at the ready and feel wrecked that an event like this happens and don't know anything else to do at this very second, and mean to give blood at the soonest opportunity, and will by all means contribute something to the Go Fund Me for the victims' medical bills and funerals. And some actually could be doing other stuff, but offer "thoughts and prayers" because if they did shit all about gun access, their campaign donations would get bricked. There's various layers of thoughts and varying qualities of prayers, and vice versa. 

There's the "call it terrorism" people and the "don't call it terrorism" people.  We hear from terrorists who want to claim the tragedy as their own, if it seems bloody enough, whether they even had anything to do with it.There's the "Thank fate this wasn't my political identity" people and the "Not all my political identity" people. There's "this random snippet about the shooter is conclusive" talk and "this random snippet about the shooter means nothing" discussions. There is even discussion about why the people getting shot were the people getting shot. Even though, in the days to come, we'll eventually hear about them, and from those that are living, and the family and friends of the deceased. And those people definitely matter, and it is great they get heard--

And then another of these things happen, and we hear from the hoaxers and the conspiracy theorists...

The Suckularity Continues in 2017--Landau and Romero

Of the iconic series of Television Past, one of the greats is Mission: Impossible, and my favorite character was Rollin Hand, played by Martin Landau. He was cool, handsome, and a master of disguise. Martin Landau, the actor, was a Rollin Hand as an actor--cool, handsome, and as a character actor, a guy who folded into his roles beautifully. His career was exceptional and I'm sad that he has been lost to the suckularity. 

George Romero also--there was a period in my teens were I was a Tromaville afficcionada, but that sort of dirty, graphic, socially-aware kind of cinema milieu probably wouldn't have even existed if not for the example of Romero, who basically invented the zombie genre.  But his amazing work on movies like Creepshow and Monkeyshines show his depth in understanding human horrors. He visited dark places and brought humor and reality to the otherwise senseless dreamworlds. 

They both shaped my world a lot. Safe travels in the beyond, if there is one, to them both.