SPECIAL
I am trying to think of which was the most unusual Thanksgiving I ever had. I am reasonably certain that I had four of them at sea, the first underway across the Pacific Ocean enroute to Wellington, New Zealand, to deliver a spare propellor to the USS Glacier, which was there under repair.
We had steamed down the Atlantic coast and through the Cuban Missile Crisis, taking the windward passage around Cuba and had already concluded the Crossing-The-Line ceremonies, so we were all shellbacks by then and steeped the in mysteries and traditions of King Neptune's Court regarding that thin line—the Equator. A month later, on Christmas Day we were locked in Antarctic pressure ice 8 feet thick and rivet heads inside the holds of the ship were popping off, while the Captain was making preliminary plans for abandoning ship.
Just sort of guessing where I was the next year. My ship had been in Guantanamo Bay the day President Kennedy was assassinated, so Thanksgiving that year was at sea enroute to Kingston, Jamaica. It was a somber day as I recall, and the rumor mill and scuttlebutt were humming. Very nervous.
The next year, different ship, homeported in Naples. I was the ship's Navigator, we were probably in the central Mediteranean Sea due east of Valetta, Malta, then experiencing its first full year of independence. We would have been in the company of many ships, probably two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, lots of cans, probably an attack sub. Maybe that was the time the Soviet cruiser Sverdlov and its accompanying frigate decided to harass our mass of ships and got a stern lesson from the air wing flying off the Independence or was it the Saratoga.
The next year we were stateside, but getting short trips to various places. We were in Brooklyn, Miami, and in Bar Harbor that Fall, so likely enroute to one or the other or going back to Norfolk.
I drove up to Boston in a snow storm to be Operations Officer on my third ship just after Christmas at home with my mom and sister. We took that ship through the Canal to Long Beach and then Manila, Subic Bay, Tonkin Gulf, the Sea of Siam, a typhoon off the coast of Borneo, Singapore, so we were off Danang as I recall, the second time, or on station at Point Yankee for turkey day. It was February before we arrived at Yokosuka, from where I flew to Travis AFB in California to re-enter civilian life.
I have cooked the entire Thanksgiving Dinner many times. It is more work than I care to do these days. So, with my daughter today I am just doing the scalloped potatoes in a crockpot.
There are United States service men and women out there today, and for some of them it is their first Thanksgiving out in the world way far away from home. As you enjoy your day with the crazy uncle and his great kids, the wives and husbands who have cooked the meal, think of the sailors, soldiers, and air force personnel out there becoming seasoned and wondering how they are going to remember Thanksgiving 2025, and wondering what those people back home who love them are feeling ... during these moments.
Special
The Daily Beast podcast has 404,000 subscribers we are told. I happened upon this YouTube of their discussion with Dr. John Gartner, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, with whose diagnosis and the concurrence of hundreds of licensed psychologists and psychiatrists millions of us agree.
The odd thing about this question is that we all know the answer, and yet we want to have it told to us officially. Has Donald lost too many of his marbles? Can he to be trusted with the nuclear attack codes? Is he—all things taken into consideration—clinically insane? He cannot be trusted with the authority to use nuclear weapons. He is way past maladjusted or neurotic. He is psychotic and dangerous, and his dementia is getting worse. His VP and aides are not to be trusted as Donald's condition slides further and faster into dark madness. He is already clinically, legally, insane.
Of course he is! He is now 79 years along the well-known path to this outcome. The horrible truth is that he has been verging on insanity for at least 70 of those years. As a young child of eight or so he threw rocks at babies in the neighborhood. He knew right from wrong at that age, but had a stronger need to strike out at symbolic targets to prove his ability and willingness to do so. Perhaps it was meant to erect a toxic palisade around himself against those who hoped to guide him, all of whom he saw as threats to his autonomy. When you add it all up he is genuine sociopath sitting in the White House with equally disturbed people around him getting him to do their mad work.
A solipsist believes himself to be the only real person, and all the rest something less, not experiencing life as he does.
A malignant narcissist does not care whether people are real or not. He has no empathy. It is a love/hate relationship with himself. He is never sure. His inadequacies torture him quietly in the background and force him into fantasies they are of no concern or somehow strengths ... like lying.
Donald's brain cannot repair itself. It is dying of atherosclerosis, the stress of chronic overweight, genetic errors, and epigenetic mutations, and of the toxic mess he and his parents made it to be ... all manifesting in aphasia, dementia, and sociopathy.
Special
The failure of imagination within the leadership of the Democratic Party and the failure of integrity within the Republican membership of the entire Congress will have played almost perfectly into the hands of Donald J. Trump. Given the "deer in the headlights" posture of most of those men and women in positions of authority and considering probable preplanned thuggery at peacable assemblies, he, President Trump, will easily find a reason to declare Martial Law. Here is the situation, the pretext, so far by the Executive Order of April 28, 2025.
Saturday's plans for country-wide peaceful assemblies for "No Kings Day" and his parade plans for his birthday, at this age and unhealthy situation potentially his last, provide the nearly perfect opportunity to stake his claim finally for ultimate power. Peaceful assemblies will be assaulted by the thugs, The Proud Boys, the Three-Percenters, KKK, Stormfront, The Base, White Lives Matter, and hundreds more. There will be blood in the streets and the Republic will cease to be! I hope I am wrong!
In any case, Democratic leaders and Democrats from previous administrations need to have already contacted other like-minded people in and out of government to establish lines of communication, to consider the application of force where needed, to agree on what constitutes a Rubicon, a bridge-too-far, a truly unacceptable event. They know they must always prefer peaceful means, but equally must always have had the choice of other methods.
Today Senator Padilla was assaulted here in Los Angeles and pushed to the ground and handcuffed for entering a Kristi Noam, Secretary of Homeland Security, news conference and for asserting his Constitutional authority as a US Senator to be in any federal building and to ask the Secretary some questions. He is a big guy, and maybe for that reason Noam's security personnel over-reacted, but Noam did not dissuade them, even when the situation quickly was clarified and the Senator identified himself.
We will be confronted by personnel just exactly like those you saw on television news today.
They are remorseless and single-minded enforcers, who see themselves as righteous patriots, and when given instructions to protect their leader, the boss, they carried them out like bulldogs, not exactly like rational human beings.
Donald Trump is counting on hundreds of thousands of legitimate federal personnel and for millions of radical MAGA thugs to act exactly like that on Saturday. He wants to be dictator of this country. As things stand now, he will be, but the question is how long: one day, a week, a month, or years?
Remember, Presidential candidate Trump narrowly escaped assassination on July 13th last year! He is still pretty annoyed about all of that! Moreover, the fact that he survived when just a moment before he would not have, Trump may feel it is his destiny to carry out this coup d'etat.
You and your loved ones, should agree on protocols for keeping your selves together and how to avoid extended necessary separations and to be safe. Do not bear arms without having gone over the situation very, very thoughfully and carefully. Public utilities are levers the Trumpfascists will use. The internet will probably be lost. When all if this happens things will never be quite the same again!
I believe that the national situation has not quite reached the ideal time and conditions to carry out the coup d'etat. We are very close, however. Trump is sketchy and aging rapidly, though, and if he has the courage, he will do it, and it will ultimately fail. But, please notice that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Secretary Noam, and Fox News, for the most prominent today, are acting as if this situation is "normal and expected" in terms of their overall plan to make America into a different kind of nation, one with a dictatorial President and where things are more like they were in 1960, but where dissent is illegal and punishable by deportation, incarceration, or death, if they so wish!
Special
We are aboard the whaling ship Pequod with every bit of the original crew and our own versions of Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Pip, the others, but —like the current Broadway rock opera—missing the parson, Father Mapple, and his sermon, clearly rudderless in that one way. And, there is that whale, Moby Dick, about which or whom we on the ship have divergent views. A white whale is special and rare. This one seems especially large, perhaps, beyond the height of its maturity.
Ahab is consumed by the need to best, to conquer, to finally annihilate the beast who cost him his leg, his promise, his due. One might wonder what other blessings were omitted by his mother and father. His will is revenge, retribution. His life's purpose —his destiny— has condensed from becoming a ship's master to mono-maniacal obsession under the pressure of his grievance and the perfect authority and freedom he has at sea, ruling over lesser men than he.
First Mate Starbuck is the voice of conventional reason, who sees this small ship's purpose as commerce and his first duty to be loyal to the office of captain, but pragmatic when opportunities arise. He may not sympathize with his captain's course, his plan, but also seems not to understand the pulse of his ambition, and at the last he does not manage to avoid the catastrophe, despite the murmurs and terrors of the crew. He does not see the knot which binds him could be untied.
With no one in his way and ignoring obvious omens, Ahab takes Pequod into a battle that quickly turns to disaster. The ship and all but one are lost, but Moby Dick lives on, representing the realities that all life is contested and that the agnostic mighty, devoid of empathy, do win.
Allegory is full of surprises and unsuspected turns, with out-of-place and illogical pieces and characters, but the novel Moby Dick has legs that the whales gave up to better survive at sea. We have plummed its depths for meanings perhaps not there; it lingers in the imagination as a preface to our madness and probable comeuppance. And it changes the scale of things!
In 1864 my great-grandfather sailed on the SS Oneida out of New Bedford in search of whales at the end of an epoch before petroleum or electricity. On the way back from Shanghai, China, fully laden, the ship was captured by the CSS Florida, the crew removed, the vessel burned to the waterline and that way sunk. But, returning to the east from his homestead, years later, James sued in the Alabama Claims Court and won.
In our disorientation we wonder about these
epic tales and their authors, as if some, maybe all such, get a glimmer of history to come. It is our own brain searching for the logic of things that confront us, we wondering why some stories seem to be metaphors, coded messages, symbols taken from the present to prefigure a vista of almost unimaginable strangeness, often horror.
Why does Salvador Dali's 'Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening'- 1944 have two threatening tigers, but one being consumed by a large fish? And need we be naked, barely rousing, impossibly over-matched? And, what's with the GOP elephant raised off the surface impossibly high on fragile legs, yet walking on water, clearly enjoying a "high horse" moment while bearing away a vaguely familiar obelisk?
It is the moment just before the catastrophe, lucky that the Christian fish is solving our problem, but only half. Maybe the bayoneted long gun tells us the tigers are just symbols of our violence, but that this prosaic violence is very real?
The coincidence of Dali's objects may be a story. Certainly, it is a warning, we say among ourselves, as we wonder of whom this art might be subversive.
Special
We each have a voice in what happens here in America. Not just Americans, but steady voices almost everywhere are important. Steady voices are those that do not shriek in panic and do not lie. Each voice represents a point of view and a level of understanding so that a voice and a sign repeating "Hands off Social Security" down on Main Street zeros in on an issue seriously affecting millions and millions of Americans, zeroing being the good sense to keep it simple, easy to read in a flash.
These essays, though, are often composed of long compound sentences that combine multiple ideas, all in the belief that reality itself should be described as complex, multifarious, and having its own logic. So, some parts of these essays are too "academic." And, these essays are peppered with typos because the author is a terrible editor. He fixes most of them after publication, hoping that the readers will tolerate his aging. In fact, though, he has nevvver been a good editor.
His voice is self-acknowledged to be emanating from the left of American politics. AOC and Bernie are his heros. He is an historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Accordingly, he taught young men and women at a medium large state university that they should wonder why so many people got sucked into Lenin's version of Marxism. To do that he needed to really understand the full range of political thinking from monarchy and absolutist and dictatorial regimes to modern democracy and to anarchist ideas each involving an economic system.
So he also re-read both of Adam Smith's books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The first of which hardly anyone in commerce has ever read and the short title of which should be On Hope. The second has been read by all MBA's (or half of them) and its short title should be On Politics and Greed. A lot has happened since 1759 and 1776. We now understand electricity, for instance, and have thermonuclear weapons of mass-destruction.
He politely refers his readers to evidence, which slows down the read, but takes advantage of his readers' critical thinking skills.
He understands that telling a well-reasoned point of view in a sea of others telling their less well-reasoned points of view is a strangely and counter-intuitively sisyphean task, since reason is so very poorly understood world-wide. All of which brings us to his point.
The format of Iron Mountain was and The View From Now is based on the idea of a website that is always there, so not emphemeral and very easy to tell others about. The polls should assure you that we are the majority, we are not alone, but life is hectic, so word-of-mouth (and e-forwarded) referrals are very much appreciated and essential. Thanks!!
Special
The Emergency Room is by the standards of American folklore and conscience a very special place. It is noisy, but not like some restaurants. It is a busy and multitasking place centered on helping hurt and sick people get stabilized and then better while not exhausting, but rather replenishing, the ER's budget and business plan. Young people predominate, including the occasional MD or DO and the Techs. I know; I was there yesterday!
Yesterday President Trump issued another Executive Order; this one is about elections, which I have explained to you is how the average citizen becomes actively OF, BY, FOR the constitutional government we cherish ... not fetishize, but cherish. Here is the Executive Order. You should read it and understand that it elbows its way into matters where the President does not have authority to act in any way.
Sam Stein on Deadline White House today remarked that Article I, Section Four of the Constitution does not give President authority over elections of Reps and Senators. But Congress has passed laws about the conduct of elections for which the President does have the responsibility to see to it that laws are faithfully executed. And, more importantly, the President and VP are still elected by Electors in the Electoral College. Scan it, especially where it says it takes a Constitutional Amendment to change the process.
This is the beginning of Trump's formal attack on the democracy at its pivot point—elections!
The incident in the news program mentioned above that elicited the ER metaphor is Social Security. Congress, the Republicans in it, have let Elon destroy its viability. The former Governor of Maryland and former Biden era Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Martin O'Malley, said today that 90% of the things necessary to be done to the SSA to wreck it completely have already be accomplished. To me, the moment that Social Security fails is exactly the moment the Republicans must stand against Trump and Musk ... or, failing that, We the People must rise up and remove them ... Trump, Vance, Johnson, and all those appointed by them to governmental offices.
Special
My news/analysis/evidence programs/shows have adopted what I think is a perverse stance regarding the destruction of the federal government by Trump. It is not only about the federal government, but even more importantly the stance of my country regarding the world's problems: disease, ignorance, national sovereignty, race hatred, genocide, and self-determination ... all of those in Africa, Gaza, New Syria, and importantly to Europe, Ukraine, and places like Iran, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hungary, Greenland (just kidding), and Brazil. More about this perversity shortly.
Last night a well-known and well-respected historian from Yale said Ukraine is, de facto now, Europe's to manage and save with strength. Trump believes he has or will soon have made a deal with Putin about Ukraine. The deal leaves out of the equation the all-important point that Ukraine opinion is not recognized as important to the formulation of the deal. What is unspoken on my television is what the deal might be. I think the answer hangs on whether or not Putin nukes Kyiv and lets the country rot in the fallout, or the deal is that the US will put its name to the dissolution of Ukraine and its incorporation into Russia, but not as a member of the Russian Federation—complete annihilation! There are doubtless many other parts to the deal, including the Baltics, Moldova, Georgia (Gruzia), Afghanistan, the fourth (or fifth) Partition of Poland, and so forth. Needless to say, perhaps, this "deal" will be the origin of WWIII.
Last night I learned of the decimation of the National Science Foundation, one of the signs that the USA was once a maturing nation worth of leadership on this planet. I learned that reliance on the Judiciary is the only trick the Resistance (such as it is) has, except for people massing in the streets with cardboard signs decrying Trump and wishing they had voted for Kamala. I am impressed with (depressed by) the fact that Democrats do not have a beyond-the-Constitution plan for retaking the government and reasserting the Constitution. If they do, it is unspoken ... for obvious reasons ... which seem to converge on their own survivals.
Last night I learned that Trump has vowed not to meddle with Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Does that mean that I cannot file my federal income taxes to an escrow account, rather than to the IRS which has been penetrated, sullied, infringed, and made completely untrustworthy? Does this mean my governor and the state administered pension I worked thirty years for will be sending withheld taxes money to that IRS? To whom do I complain if my usual tax refund gets lost in the shuffle? No one knows and that's why it is unspoken, not to mention that no one wants to be accused of starting a tax rebellion.
Now, about that perversity at my news shows: last night as one news/analysis show glided into the next, I noticed that after a few minutes the next news/analysis host seemed quite a bit less worked-up and the hair was not even smoldering, whereas the previous host's was vividly on fire, except for moments of sarcastic triple entendre. My thought of spending this time writing to my Governor about secession slowly evaporated in the deceptively firm confidence expressed by my new host/analyst. So here I am, writing to you, instead, about the end of the world without saying so (except for that little slip).
"Institutions will hold" is the mantra of the Resistance, but institutions are people, not buildings made of steel and granite and glass and marble. People are being fired in great numbers, their lives taken so lightly and ruthlessly that one wonders, if there were sudden medical emergencies in the White House and Congress, perhaps ending in a reshuffling of hands on the levers of power, whether any would return to their positions, if the coast were clear? No one knows. One hestitates to speculate. It is one of those things left unspoken.
I woke this morning with the savory (umami) taste of rebellion on my lips and lingering in my mind. It was, in truth, the result of biting my tongue for three and a half straight months. My state together with the two farther north and the one further west would form the fifth most important national economy on this planet.
It would have the top per capita GDP, higher than the country from which it withdrew. Our GDP (2023) is $41,775,000,000,000 ... between Japan $4.2t and India $3.5t). It would have the odd-numbered Navy fleets, Pendleton, Travis, Vandenberg, Pearl, Hickam, and scores you have never heard of, and hopefully soon Area 51. For a few news cycles, at least, the new nation would rock the world.
Other people not as propinquitous or adjacent would join. The tax question I have would be resolved. The medical emergency question might well evolve. Billions of people across the oceans and an overwhelming majority here would rejoice!
Special
20 December 2024
I have been doing some research into earlier essays about what is happening to us now. Instead of just quoting from them I am presenting two from the end of 2021 for your inspection. I think they were good essays and have stood the test of time. I hope you think so. Happy Holidays!!
12/1/21
Nostalgia
~1220 words
Nostalgia is the pain or ache or longing for something "ours," principally something including home. The word is related to "nostrum," meaning "our-making" or "home-made." It is also related to the expression "cosa nostra," which means "our thing." Several of my readers are "nostalgic." They yearn for the stability of the solid past they knew very well, the arrangement of things and people, the tricks and methods they learned: how to tie one's shoes, how to open a can of soup, how to frug, how to do the twist, Chevy Bel Air, Olds 442, Eisenhower, Elvis, snowy Christmas scenes, sandy beaches, the security of neighborhood, the reverence for church and the nation's war casualties, a huge enemy far away, commies to hate, high school football, apple pies and fritters, less crime, fewer foreign people or of different, darker races, school principals and teachers, literally thousands, maybe millions of things and people who seemed to fit into a stable picture of the way things were and ... which changed, but only slowly.
These words: secure, solid, strong, steady, firm, sure, steadfast, level, unwavering, unvarying, unfaltering, unfluctuating, unswerving. established, long-lasting, long-lived, deep-rooted, well founded, well grounded, abiding, durable, enduring, lasting, constant, permanent, reliable, dependable, true. That list is copied from a Google search of the word "stable," which I misspell too often. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people hope for stability in their lives in order to be able to plan for education, career, retirement, but the news gives us jolts of instability on a daily basis. We learn that people in other countries do not play our football, eat apple pie, worship our god, drive big colorful automobiles, play red rover, marry the person they met in high school or college, know what kind of man Eisenhower was, or even depend on the kind of stability we believe to be essential. The last word in Googles list was "true." In effect all those things constituted reality and many things and events since are aberations, seemingly, sometimes, not "true."
Yesterday I encountered one of those lists of bad cities in America. Here is one such list, not the one I saw yesterday, but very similar. Yesterday's list had a lot of New Jersey cities and California cities (principally in Los Angeles County), but Michigan had a few and Louisiana and Missouri. That list mentioned that General Motors had closed cities' factories, so unemployment was high and devastating. Crime prospered in these places. New Jersey is the most densely populated state, while California has the largest population. The problem is not the masses of people, but the way we all construct the present, or allow it to be constructed, whenever it is.
A lot of the bad parts of old cities is the result of human behavior. My cousin Nick was told by his company that he would be moving his lightbulb factory to Puerto Rico. Instead, he quit. The company saw labor as a variable in the cost equation, not really as people willing to work—needing to work to live—and regarded everything around their factory and warehouses as "legal externalities," and had done so for many years—decades! Accordingly, they took no interest in the human beings, only the product and service. You have to wonder how accountants and senior managers get so detached from reality!
But, change happens! Changes sometimes pile up on one another, especially during and after wars. The US spent most of the 20th century at war. And, one of the things that wars produce are inventions useful in war, some of which are useful—repurposed—in civilian life: communications, cybernetics; transportation, etc. Each new thing brings in change. The globalization of commerce begun with Marco Polo (we suppose) took off after 1492 and then with gusto after WWII and the Vietnam War and was accelerated by advanced computing, AI, and ubiquitous communications—cell phones. The changes were such that instructions for using new devices in America were written by people who barely understood English, but worse yet, the devices were conceived and manufactured with ideas different from what we were used to. A button used to be a binary switch, now a button is "virtual" and it has one binary function and perhaps several multiple functions if you continue to press on it. I know a button that has at least two levels of continued pushing: 3 seconds and then 10 seconds. Drives me crazy.
But, I must contend with it. My "watch" tells time, day, date, steps, pulse, sleep, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and shows messages. It cost $30.00, was delivered to my door, less than 24 hours after I ordered it. I am good with this change. I now have a drawer of old watches. I watch movies and series on Netflix, but after probably two hours of fiddling two of us could not register on Apple TV, which is the great grandchild of iTunes, which was amazing not too long ago. My CRV tells me when I am diverging from my lane, when I am too close to another vehicle for my speed, my MPG, range, and stuff I have not discovered in the four years I have owned it. It drives me crazy.
Yet, I feel almost no nostalgia. I read lists of minute things from the past and think that it is good they are part of the past, but not part of tomorrow or the real future. I can hardly wait for human beings to land on Mars. I was told by a high-school counselor that being an astronaut interested in "space-medicine" was not going to happen. I am proud that my daughter can be an attorney at law or that her sisters can be astronauts or CEOs or astronomers or physicians or vice president! I did not know any colored people in my youth—only the janitor of our part of the apartment project. Since then I have dated a Black woman, a Chinese woman, a Russian Woman. My country is strong, leading the world financially—ours is the reserve currency for the entire planet—militarily our fleets and armies in being protecting at least a billion people who cannot reasonably protect themselves. I am a guy in the present, slightly confused by some new things, but seeing improvements all over the world and promise of much more to come ... and ... with lots of change.
There are millions who have not adjusted to things like I have. It has a lot to do with family, but also mobility and education and small-scale courage, all of which are available.
All of this affects my politics, too, of course. I will strongly resist the politics of nostalgia. We cannot restore the past we remember fondly or not. I think we should not want to restore it, even if it were possible. Believe me, it is not. The past was full of moral and legal errors. The present is now real and "out of the tube," and it is impossible to get it back in or erase it. There is one political party in American that dangles this prospect in front of those whose need for stability is greater than mine, but that is not what they are really selling. They are selling political exclusion, White supremacy, misogyny, paternalism, and simplistic authoritarian nostrums wrapped in nostalgia! Fuhgeddaboudit!
JB
(Society)
11/19/21
Reconstruction and Charlottesville
I have been working (as an historian) on the problem of "forgiving and forgetting" for a very long time. I have inserted and sometimes substituted the terms "learning" and "unlearning" into the equation with some success. Let me say, right now, that forgiving is not to be confused with forgetting, even with so-called deliberate forgetting.
All learning involves physical changes within the brain, the kindling of new pathways and, therefore, new "arrangements" among the new and the old matrices of neurons. I must leave aside for this essay that learning and memory does not take place in just one neuron or even one part of the brain, but instead involves old and new parts of the brain, lateralized parts, and process-specific parts like the amygdala, hippocampus, and those associated with motor and sensory function. So, in a word or two, learning is very complex and so is forgiving and forgetting and especially "unlearning."
"Unlearning" is in quotation marks to indicate, somewhat surprisingly, that the imagined symmetry (put in, take out) between unlearning and learning is probably meaningless. Given that learning is based in physical reality of the brain, unlearning would then also have to be a physical process, maybe something short of extirpation or destruction, but something sufficiently emphatic to "seal off or shunt past" the learned matrix as seamlessly as possible. In other words not a reversal of the learning process, but a repair, or detour, or cover-up.
To forgive is to rationalize an affront or injury toward insignificance to you as a person. It is a high order decision to stop thinking about and doing things that rekindle and, therefore, strengthen the matrix of physical neurons associated with the affront or injury. We say, "let it go, Jimmy, it is not worth your time and energy." Bullies depend on you not being able to "let it go."
Deliberate forgetting it is also a rational process which requires you to kindle detours, new neural pathways around the matrices of the affront or injury, a process that can—but does not require—that you involve a higher order "forgiveness" routine.
Non-deliberate forgetting is another story. I was very impressed by the two movies I saw ("Away From Her" and "The Notebook") each featured a marital partner regressing into Alzheimers. The stories included an emotional hurdle the unfortunate characters were unable to surmount. In sum, though, I would be willing to bet that most non-deliberate forgetting is either caused by a) physical deterioration of the brain tissue, or b) a completely sub-conscious but nevertheless "deliberate" forgetting process, or c) probably both. The sub-conscious (aka pre-conscious) is very smart and runs a lot of your daily events.
The other day I found on the web a quotable thought from Oprah Winfrey:— "Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be [have been] any different." It is an important idea that pivots on the word "hope." Hope is the desire for something to happen, so it is person-positive, but not necessarily socially-positive. I think Oprah's using "be" instead of "have been" is an important error, and also probably the most common way of holding this idea, since it allows history to be read to suit the needs of the reader.
So, thank you for holding on to the title I have given this essay. I lived in Charlottesville eight months in each of four years while at the University. I know nothing much about the city, which has doubtlessly grown and improved over the intervening sixty some years. But, we all know that there is a civil trial taking place in Charlottesville right now, and it is nearing its conclusion. The defendants are White Nationalists, Fascists, Hitlerites, racists, ruffians, proto-KKK members, and the like. They are all destitute at the moment so the awards for damages they caused, if found guilty, will not act as balm for the aggrieved persons' injuries and harm. In fact, I believe the Kabuki of this trial will not assist anyone's brain to forgive the miscreants, found guilty or not, nor will they forget the rampage these people perpetratated on the city and my alma mater.
And, certainly the trial will not extirpate the grievances that motivate the perps and to which they cling like grim death, that is, the feckless, inconsistent, and often vindictive Reconstruction of the American South after the Civil War, as well as the responses to which resulted in the kindling of hatred, fear, and victimhood, learned from family, friends, neighbors, officials, schools, and dog-whistles galore statued all over the South. The war we are now IN was caused just like the aftermath of WWI caused WWII.
So what is the point? Is it Kabuki or judicial formality or what? I think that solace from a guilty verdict will be thin gruel, indeed. But, it will be fact, and maybe the fact that it is a public fact will give some heart to all of us. Heart may not be enough to avert what is coming next! But we do need courage!
The real problem is throbbing right next to each of us. I think we may have to inspect other cultures for what seems like their success in forgetting, if not entirely forgiving the past. Perhaps we must look in the other direction, too, perhaps to Russia, a country that was subjugated by the Mongols for nearly two hundred and fifty years—and most importantly with some of their own number complicit in that horror—then continuing when the Tatar Yoke was caste off. The horror is literally unforgettable and renewed by endless subjugation under authoritarian leaders.
The approach to a solution for Rusians and for us will be tortuous and what emerges at the most favorable outcome may not be anything we will would recognize today. Truthfully, I think that is the most likely thing. It's is just a matter of how badly we beat each other up along the way.
This general line of thought will continue in near-future postings. Stay tuned. Watch this space.
JB
(Society)
12 December 2024
I cannot bring myself to think of this period as business-as-usual. We have limited time to bring the nation to the understanding that nothing we expect to function to save our country will function. We have been assured and reassured that there will be no need for mid-term elections in 2026 or a presidential election in 2028. That means everyone's hopes to throw the bastards out at those times is utter fucking foolishness.
If the President can act with IMPUNITY and break the law day after day there is no rule of law. Period. Please let that sink in. If upstarts charge his minions with breaking the law, he will simply pardon them. Literally, all the mechanisms and traditions and processes for achieving free and fair governance will become a colossal joke. The joke is not funny. It is deadly serious. Those who conspire to destroy our federal government have no respect whatsoever for the nation that exists now and until January 20th.
The Constitution under which we expect to live until January 20, 2025, provides for an orderly process for amending, for evolving itself. It is the amendment process which has several modalities.
Article V
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
Under any "Rule of Law" worth discussing any attempt to change the form of government by other means is unlawful, and when mounted by a conspiracy of those intending to carry out changes by other than Constitutional means, is treason and punishable (often by death). If we let go of the current government and the rule of law, there is no way of recovering short of civil war. Passive disbelief is no excuse. It is aid and comfort to a lethal enemy.
Time is on the side of the conspiracy. The normal pace of government and civic activity must be paused to allow for sufficient time to be clear in our minds that the intention of the conspiracy was justified and ratified by the Presidential Election of 2024. Clearly it was not! WE have not given permission to Donald J. Trump to trample our freedoms and destroy our hard won national institutions, property, and associations.
19 November 2024
You should listen to MSNBC "laying out the case" against the pre-inauguration "decisions" being made by President-Elect Donald Trump. It is a decision they have made that the Constitution, fragile as they have been saying for the past eight or more years, must be protected in normal ways, and perhaps silently saying it cannot survive. They are indicating that they are unwilling to recognize the actual enormity of the situation. "Preserve and Protect" are words in their vocabulary, but they think those actions must be prescribed, only useful if already written into the Law.
The MAGA Republicans and those other Republicans afraid of and bending to the will of them are planning out loud to literally destroy the federal government and replace it with a dictatorship, so as to be able to compete with other dictatorial regimes like China and Russia. Is there any reason to believe they are kidding? Who is going to stop them?
Do people kid about destroying a government, especially "fragile" governments? Well, the Constitutional Republic they want to destroy has the built-in right and duty to resist destruction, and it can. Every person who has taken the oath of office is required to protect and defend our Constitution and the government formed under its authority, which is the authority of We the People.
I recommend everyone read the Wikipedia entry online for Martial Law. It turns out that martial law and suspension of habeas corpus have been done 68 times for situations quite a bit much less existential than avowed destruction of the federal government. Given that the Attorney General Merrick Garland is a eunuch and incapable of finding law to support Protect and Defend, DoJ must be reserved for the aftermath. Martial law may be the only thing the Executive Branch has left.
President Biden can, but probably will not, order martial law. He is weak, tired, increasingly prone to rigid sets of his conservative jaw. He is out of touch with the essence of the threat against the government. He is an "institutionalist" in a unique situation ... LOST. Nothing could be worse. He could, should, and must resign. NOW! That would give Kamala Harris two spare months in which to right the ship of state.
Vice President Harris can order martial law. She has more at stake, of course, including getting to the bottom of the Elon Musk funding of the Trump campaign. It is likely that Musk literally bought many more than the margin of voters for Trump. The NYTimes is reported on MSNBC on November 18th to have reported a day earlier that the election results are razor thin, 250k votes over three states. As it stands at this moment six Electoral votes are in the wrong column. It is a moral duty to investigate that. In any case, she already has the solemn responsibility to the Constitution to preserve and protect it and the government it creates. She must act now!
Would the imposition of martial law cause a civil war? No one knows, but if Trump carries out the planned destruction —"burning to the ground"— of the federal government, there is no way to stop it once he has again taken the oath of office.1 In any case, civil war is possible, will be frightening, and will probably be very short. The number of armed MAGA troops is considerably fewer than those defending the nation.
"Preserve and Protect," as MSNBC mentions from time to time, and "fragile" as they mention often are the two concepts that tell us NOT to hand over the powers of the Presidency to a person publicly dedicated to the destruction of the government. But, there are many other reasons domestically, including the derangement of the economy and, thus, the probable collapse of the world financial system. But, in Ukraine, millions of lives depend on the US continuing unabated its policy that Ukraine is of a right a free and independent nation, sovereign, and fighting for its life and for democracy throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
This sounds strident, I know. But, this situation has never, ever occurred before. No one and yet everyone knows how easily Trump can destroy a century of American leadership and democratic ideals. Who among the ignorant are willing to take the chance they will figure it out in time to stop it? Martial law is the two-minute time-out ... a pause just to gather our resources and to act to save the country before it is too late. It will be too late if Trump is inaugurated.
1 One might wonder if the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will actually believe Trump's or Vance's oaths, given the out-loud declaration of destruction also coming from both mouths.
SPECIAL
15 November 2024
The Presidential Election of 2024 was corrupted by the richest man in the world who was —right before our bleary, hopeful eyes— asked by his candidate to take over the funding of his on-the-ground campaign during its last weeks. As you read this, the richest man in the world now has well over one-third of a trillion dollars, from his various enterprises in automobiles, space rockets, satellites, and many others. The richest man in the world paid voters not only to vote, but HOW to vote.
The election was fraudulent. Donald Trump is not the President-Elect.
People do not understand really big numbers and so they have assumed it would be impossible to coax so many people into voting for a candidate on a scale that would register as a sweep across the nation. But it is very much possible.
One percent of the richest man's pre-election-day money ($309 billion) is $30.9 billion. FYI, it increased by $20 billion on November 7th. By the time you get around to asking Google, his wealth will be over $350 billion.
How many times would $2000 of vote-producing, pocket change go into that 1% number? It goes 15.45 million times: that many votes. Big numbers!
So, it is unlikely that he had time or wherewithal to purchase the votes of 15.45 million voters directly. But he could easily get party bosses to pay party loyalists to distribute $2000 each to 15,450 million voters, or some combination of that, which does not exceed $30 billion by much! Cash is good for sticky fingers all along the way. Big numbers are weird; they are hard to imagine when you are not familiar with them. Remember, he recouped most of the money two days after the election, and his money machine keeps on going! He pulled it off against "the odds," against the "common sense" of millions of politically astute, but big-number innocent observers. He (they) bribed 15 million people in less than a month. That's the big secret!
And now the nation and her Fourth Estate passively squirm in the agony of seeing a mentally ill, socially malignant, pathological liar about to burn a 240 year old, very slowly evolving democracy to the ground ... just because he needs to assuage his self-loathed being and its twisted ego.
None whatsoever!
Moreover, this is not about Racine, Wisconsin, or Savannah, Georgia, or Flagstaff, Arizona! The entire world, has grown to depend for physical safety, freedom of conscience, and surety of finances on the USA. The world financial order is the paramount concern of us now. We could plunge into a world depression lasting centuries! The Roman Empire's expiry left Europe bereft for half a millennium. Is there anyone in Washington who wants that on their resume? Joe? Kamala? Blinken? Austin? Yellen? Jeffreys? Schumer? Off your butts! All your temporizing and your simplicity have finally come home to roost!
It is manifestly obvious and beyond a shadow of doubt that Donald J. Trump is literally not capable of being President of the United States under the Constitution. Neither is J.D.Vance. They must not be permitted to assume the offices to which a corrupted election seems to have elected them! The damage to the nation, but more importantly, THE WORLD ORDER, is too great to give them a chance to undertake the dismantling of our democratic republic and the lives of human beings across the world!
Those who voted for him were deluded into thinking they would get even with the system that failed them and allowed them to fail themselves. The insults to the intelligence of the vast majority of the country already in plain view are a sufficient and urgent casus belli against them.
The sitting President must declare martial law and completely remove from society the perpetrators of this assault on civilization!
SPECIAL