Day 813 – What a Week it Was

Monday, April 10, 2023

Last Friday a commentator was reviewing the week:

Monday – something awful, I forget,

Tuesday – an iindictment

Wednesday – Was that the day the Tennessee legislature threw out the two black legislators and kept the white woman?

Thursday – Was that the day the right wing judge in Texas declared a drug couldn’t be used anymore?

Then this weekend I was listening to Jann Wenner’s book. He co-founded Rolling Stone, but he’s its heart and soul.

Some have criticized the book as being nothing more than name dropping and the like. Yeah? What did you expect? It’s kind of like the person I heard on the radio years ago comparing Terminator to Terminator III and saying that the plot … He was stopped right there by the DJ. Plot? If you are going to see Terminator for the plot you missed the point. Arnold shoots: Arnold kills – end of plot.

Wenner’s asides are – well – leaving you wanting more. Explain! What? Who? Please.

His description of Reagan being elected president “the first movie TV ..” was spot on.

And Trump? “We awoke to learn we had elected a moron.”

He also pointed out that W won Ohio and it was odd in that the head of his campaign there was also the head of the election and certain sites in particular counties had numbers that Wenner described as “surgical precision.” 

He described how David Stockman, Reagan’s whizkid economist had admitted the supply side economics was merely a ruse to cut taxes on the rich.

If you think about the time from Reagan to Trump you can see how the middle class was screwed: first under Ronnie and killed off under Donnie. From Ronnie to Donnie. In between we had the lost in woods Papa Bush and the empty headed W. Hey, W only started two wars neither of which we needed to be in, but so what? They all ran up the debt. But so did the Dems you say? Right. But the Dems are pikers compared to what the Republicans do.(Well, wait you say look at the first year or two of a Democrat after a Republican has been in office. Those Dems spend a lot. Yeah, they have to in order to pull the economy out of the hole left by the previous administration.)

Trump asked, “what have you got to lose?” We are now seeing the answer to that question.

The question for most of us, “Is it too late?”, “Can we reclaim our democracy?” or to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson “will the swine …?”

Right now. The swine are winning.

I’ve thought a lot about how things have changed. Folks on the right like to say, “People don’t want to work anymore.” I point out that it used to be you could get a minimum wage job, work your ass off, go to college and come out debt free or be able to pay off your loans within a few years. Now? Kids are talking about their loans being forgiven after twenty years, if they are lucky. What? 

After WWII a man could work a forty hour a week job, have a house, the wife stayed home and raised the kids. They could take a trip to Europe. Now? Both have to work and they barely can keep a roof over their heads.

What happened?

The GI Bill got replaced with student loans. Loans that if the government wasn’t behind them they’d be brought up on usury charges. Minimum wage is what? In Virginia as of the start of this year it’s $12.00. A so-so college can cost $32K a year. It doesn’t matter if it’s a for-profit college or a high felutin private or state institution of learning. It’s damn expensive and kids have also learned it’s not preparing them to get a job that pays much. So why go? Why pay all that money to end up in debt? Might as well stay home and play video games and watch tik-tok.

Become a social influencer and take pictures of yourself in your bathroom. 

What’s wrong with kids today?

Nothing.

What’s wrong with the adults in the room?

Let’s see. We allow any idiot to have a gun that can so destroy a person to the point that their body can’t be recognized. We rig voting so that people either can’t vote or their vote is inconsequential. We deny people health care and basic rights. We tell women what they can and can not do with their bodies. We keep voting to enrich the rich and deny the poor and the middle class (what’s left of it). We allow hate filled speech and lies to be the norm. We allow other countries and the very rich to disseminate lies that influence people’s decisions about their lives, their health, and their economic well being.

We’ve allowed our courts and many of our state governments to be taken over by minority opinionated people with radical views out of step with common sense and the common good. The town square has been made a place for sly individuals and organizations to carve donuts with fast spinning jive while pointing to somewhere else and exclaiming “not our fault. It’s all legal!” No moral compass. No sense of the common good.

When Mr. Smith went to Washington he started a movement that the people, the regular people, the common people, the vast silent majority came to his aid in droves. Will that happen now? Or will it come down to a French Revolution? Something that country is still dealing with. Or Iran? Or Mexico? All had revolutions. Did it help its people or did they trade in one form of oppression for another and call it progress?

Revolutions like that often bring worse conditions. Our country has had a unique run, but most democracies are seen as times of transition and last about two hundred years. Has our time run out?

The fundamental conditions that our country depends on to function are in serious jeopardy. When eight or ten states that collectively have less population than one county in California, that’s a problem. What’s the likelihood that will change? The only way I see that changing is a Kansas style population move to those states.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas )

Will that happen? I dunno. Maybe, we can move all those kids sitting on their parents’ couches to those states. Let them watch tik-tok there and go vote. Yikes. Hallelujah, I have a solution.

Wyoming was won by Trump by 120,000 votes. Move that many tik-tokers to there? Sure. You could move that many out of LA County alone and that county would never know they were gone. (LA County is 9.83 million. The state of Wyoming is 578,000.) Okay, so here’s what we do. Fill up the Rose Bowl with applicants and bus them to Wyoming where they will get free housing and pizza delivered to their couch. All they have to do is vote for a sane candidate to keep their couch. College loans will be forgiven and they will get a job. 

The job will be delivering pizzas, or making them, or creating content for the apps that everyone is watching while sitting on their couches.

Where will we get the money to pay for all this? From Mexico. Mexico will pay for it. Trust me.

Or .. I’m guessing that the good citizens of Wyoming won’t like this and will figure out a way to screw the newbies out of a vote. No problem. The newbies will go to the local gun shops and …

Maybe, I need to rethink some of this.