Wednesday June 17, 2010
137 Days until the election on November 3rd
217 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
I feel like I am writing a nineteenth century chapter of a novel where you go to the Table of Contents and there laid out over several lines is a brief summary of the whole chapter. I have wondered if the authors did that to keep track of what they were doing or did the editors do it for that purpose.
Let’s get to it. I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday to pick up the book I mentioned yesterday entitled Impostors, which talks about how the Republican Party no longer cares to govern but rather put out press releases and call it a day. They no longer have policies only BS. You can go to their website to verify what I’m saying, as the author did. Compare that to Joe Biden’s campaign website where he has over seventy action items. Go to Donald Trump’s website, there is nothing. No policies, no prescriptions, no action items – just bull.
When I walked around Barnes and Noble I saw several books that made me spin around and say to myself, “What the ???” One was a book that reported to have discovered the crimes that Devin Nunes uncovered. Either that book or another one was written by the guy who wrote “Clinton Cash.” Another book featured an ominous looking photo of Chelsea Clinton revealing, supposedly, her cozy criminal fiddling up to power. You have to really go aways to make Chelsea look sinister but a green filter with a blue one and a dash of purple kind of did the job. It was so dark however that I wasn’t sure who it was at first.
But here’s the thing – all those books are crap. Lies. Now, we could argue that there might be some shreds of truth in them; much like one can argue that most of what Hitler said was sort of true, but that misses the point. The purpose of these books is to foster a false narrative, an overall lie. It is an attempt to gas light, to try and convince you and me that something happened that really didn’t. We’ve come to accept this in political campaigns, but in governing? That’s a different story.
If when you govern you try to do it by lying you will find yourself in a world of trouble, as Donald Trump has. Not that he’s discovered that fact. But this is the way the Republican Party has acted for decades. They don’t have ideas or principles by which to govern. They have animosities and scores to settle and lies to foster. There are no solutions, just press releases.
On leaving the book store I got a call from Shelby, “Where’s the sausage? Did you do something with it? I can’t find it.” I reassured her I didn’t do anything with the sausage and that the last time I saw it, it was on the middle shelf in the frig, in the front, right in the middle.
“It’s not there. I’ve looked everywhere. I’m afraid I might have taken it out, put it somewhere and we’ll discover it smelling weeks from now.”
The hunt was on. I came home. Confirmed it wasn’t on the middle shelf. Not in the freezer, or any other shelf in the refrigerator, not in the trash or the other refrigerator, or the pantry, or the front hall table, or the bathroom, or next to the magazine stack by her chair, or in the car. It had disappeared. No, it wasn’t in the other bathroom. It was gone. Disappeared.
Robert Gates has written a book I’ve gotten tired by former government officials who have written books. Many of them are the same format. The first 7/8 is the history of their rise within the ranks and the last part mentions the stuff you really want to know.
Gates has served in government for forty or fifty years. He’s been Secretary of Defense under Obama and W. He’s run the CIA, been on the National Security whatever. He’s seen threats and dealt with them. He knows his way around Washington and Presidents. He has respect for the President and the office of the President.
Gates said several things in an interview last night that I think are worth repeating:
The army is trained to kill our enemies. The National Guard is trained to protect our communities and to assist when disaster strikes them. (This puts it in pretty stark terms. This all made me think about the policing problem we have. We’ve put all sorts of problems on the police’s shoulders that aren’t what they are trained to do. Then we started giving them military weapons and military (kill ‘em!) training. Now, some are surprised by the outcome?)
The other really big point Gates made was that we have hollowed out and defunded many of the tools that we have had for spreading our influence around the world that are of a non-military nature. He pointed to Voice of America and other radio type operations. He said most presidents didn’t always like what VOA was saying about them. But the programs were trusted around the world not only for telling people what was going on in America but what was going on in their own countries. “Why aren’t we telling the Iranians how their leaders are stealing from them? Or the Russians what Putin and his thugs are doing?” he asked. Why indeed.
Gates went on to say that China has been buying up media and communication outlets around the world so they can tell their story and we have nothing to counter that. I can’t remember why we stopped such programs but I’m willing to bet it was due to administrations and Senators who didn’t like what was being said about them and their party.
Another point Gates made was that it appears that we can no longer solve our own problems and this makes people around the world wonder if our system of government is right for them.
How though, I ask myself, can we solve any problem when we aren’t willing to face the truth? We need to go no further than the current pandemic and the administrations actions around this crisis. Mike Pence has just praised Tulsa for their outstanding work in fighting the pandemic. What is he drinking? Oklahoma has just had their biggest rise in cases this week and Tulsa leads the way.
One person on the front lines in Alabama was asked about a second wave of the pandemic. She scoffed and said we never got over the first wave. The results in other countries versus our own is startling. Italy, Spain, and other countries have graphs with a huge rise at the beginning that has been brought down to low levels. Us? We have a huge rise and it’s leveled off at a high plateau. Remember that football coach who ESPN keeps replaying saying, “Playoffs? Don’t talk to me about playoffs.”
Like “Are you crazy? We’d like to win a game.”
Yeah, well. “Second Wave? Ha. We haven’t dealt with the first wave.”
I have really enjoyed Vivian Howard’s new show “Somewhere South.” It’s on PBS, like her other show, “A Chef’s Life.” In her original show she told the story of going back home to eastern North Carolina to open a restaurant in the town she grew up in. There’s not much in Kingston except for her restaurant and a replica of a Confederate ironclad ship, which sits on pilings on the side street opposite her restaurant.
In this new show she’s traveling around the south to see how various people in their corners of the south do southern cooking. One show was about greens and another about barbecue. She talked, cooked, prepped, and ate with black people, rednecks, Asian Americans, American Indians and Indian Indians. One thing they had in common – they were from the south. They lived worked cooked and ate in the south. It became clear to me that this was not a show about cooking but about people and their food. (Well, duh. She said that at the beginning. I know, but it takes awhile for me to catch on.) She has a big beautiful book out. Many would call it a cookbook. It’s that, but it’s more than that. It’s the story of food. Her food.
Shelby took one of Howard’s recipes for cooking greens. One of the things Vivian Howard spoke about in her show about greens was “Pot Liquor,” The juice made from the greens cooking. I wanted to know what that was like. I guess Shelby wanted to let me experience it too. This brings me back to the missing sausage package. It was for that recipe.
She found and defrosted some other sausage and let me tell you – the greens, the sausage, and the pot liquor were tasty. That should be a capital “T”.
I had not experienced greens like that before. Now I understand.
Later that evening I went to have some yogurt and blueberries. There were two large flat square packs of blueberries. I picked up the first pack. Nearly empty, but enough for my yogurt. And will you lookey-here. Both blueberry packs had lips on them and just enough to hide the sausage package from view that was sandwiched in-between. Even when you got down and peered straight on. Where were those pesky sausages hiding? Second shelf right in the middle of the shelf, where I had first descried them to be located.
Moral of the story – Sometimes things are as they seem.
137 Days until the election on November 3rd
217 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
PS Go back and look at the second to last photo. See the white edge of the sausage package? It’s between the two blueberry containers.
PPS I’m glad I didn’t find it right away. ( Then I would have done a superiorty dance. Pissed her off. And I’d be sleeping on the couch – so to speak. )
Also, Black Lives Matter.
You mean I have to buy the book to learn how to make some pot juice?
And how about all those Statues being torn down?
BLM!