A Typhoon in the Bathtub Only Threatens the Rubber Ducky

Tags

America, Health care, Humor, immigration, life in the foothills, Politics, satire, state of the freakin' world, teabaggers, the GOP

Excuse me if I’m a bit confused here.

The GOP has agreed on one thing–to a man and woman they HATE Obamacare. I mean they don’t just think it’s not a good program, they see it, also to a man and woman as the singularly one piece of legislation that will be known historically as the only and complete cause of the demise of the Republic and like a domino, will precipitate the collapse of Western civilization (which is the only one worth discussing of course) as we know it.

They have worked tirelessly since its passage to repeal it, defund it, and/or otherwise make it ineffective. They have sued it, screwed it, and otherwise squeezed it until every bit of blood was drained from its carcass. This they have tried.

They have warned the public that the plug would be pulled on grandma, that death panels would deny their precious precocious preteen the very treatment needed for life, all in the name of communistic commune-style equality. They have said that the doctor you love so much that you never forget her birthday, will be ripped from your arms to be replaced by automatons spitting forth paper check-off symptomatic lists and nurses that cackle in the hallway as you sit drenched in sweat and shivering dressed in your paper suit awaiting the verdict from a committee of cost-cutting psychopaths.

They have, in the guise of their governorships and GOP-controlled state houses, refused to participate in enlarging their own Medicaid rolls, even when guaranteed that for the first three years the Federal government would pick up the entire tab and 90% of the tab thereafter. They have sat with arms crossed and refused to set up exchanges to allow their citizens easier sign-up.

They have threatened the very economy of the entire country rather than give up on their pipe dream of ending this law–all in the name of stopping the vicious damage they have predicted would ensue to Ma and Pa Kettle and all their lil’ childrens across the great American landscape.

Sooooooo.

It strikes me as odd, that when your constant refrain to folks is, by golly gee wiz, doncha dare sign up for that devil-inspired, dripping with communistic red health care plan, that when there are problems, as there always are, with the website and sign-up procedures, you are not jumping for joy at how many people are being saved from the evil law, but rather you are complaining about how difficult it is for people to sign up as if that is evidence that the law is all kinds of bad.

I mean my head is turning around faster than Regan in the Exorcist. Aren’t they glad the sign-up is not working? Instead all I see are properly “horrified” members of Republican rectitude moaning about how this “has got to be fixed” or defunded, or repealed, whichever.

Has there been ONE SINGLE offer of a solution?

Has there been ONE SINGLE offer of an alternative to insure those presently uninsured?

Oh, yeah, I forgot, this is the party of NO. This is the party of destruction. This is the party of no government is good government.

Except where you and my uteruses are concerned. Except where who I sleep with is concerned. Except where who I pray to is concerned. Except to what I learn as science is concerned. Except there. Oh yeah and except where there are enough cheap junk F-18+ how ever many more there are today that still don’t work worth a damn but until there are enough of them to have one in every damn driveway of America–Strength Through Massive Military Might–. Except where it concerns black and brown people and their pesky determination to continue having children and making me sooo uncomfortable that they might not want to the same things I do, so I need to keep them marginalized with voter suppression laws. Have I left anything out?

Now, the President has called once again for the House of Representatives of Big Business to get off their yawning asses and get on with some immigration reform. And the response of  Speaker out of both sides of his mouth, Boehner and his wanna be speaker next, Eric Cantor, has been, why sure we need some of that, cuz as rational? Republicans we know that we gotta placate those brown faces EVENTUALLY or we will never win a damn election again. But the rank and file? Oh my heavens no.

The same crazy that brought you 16+ days of glorious “screw America” can’t wait to bring you more of that sort of crap, because “I can’t stand to even look at your face” and you know that means that we can’t do a thing that would make this BLACK Demon look good. We enjoy cutting off our noses to spite our ugly faces doncha know? Course it ain’t got a thing to do with our fear that we as pasty white dudes are losing control of the reins of power. We are wearing Depends all the time now, cuz we are so scared you will do unto us as we have traditionally done unto you. But you’re being Black? Why that’s irrelevant to our cause, and besides you are only half-black which means something even worse to hear it from the TeaLegions of Crazy.

Which all goes to say, that I am expecting nothing to change.

Did you know these lazy asses have only 19 more days to work for the whole rest of the year?

And I am so very sick and tired of talking points.

And I’m in favor of taking a lottery system and putting everybody’s name in the drum, and drawing out the requisite number of sending them forth to Washington. It could not seriously be worse. I mean can you imagine worse at this point? Don’t you feel rather Italian? Or Greek? Hurrah, we now have governments just as chaotic and worthless as much of Europe. Or truthfully, are we more like China, with only the illusion of government meant to mimic real ones?

I’m going back to bed. At least my dreams involved palm trees, and warm sands and softly brushing waves upon the shore of my sanity.

I’m On Planet Quaintly Backward, Yes?

Tags

America, Good Samaritan laws, GOP, immigration, Jeb Bush, Latinos, medical care

I would sure like to know who drugs me and transports me without my agreement to these other planets in the galaxy. I mean, I go to sleep one place, and get up and everything seems normal.

Until of course something so outrageously insane happens, and I look skyward, knowing of course that that sun up there is not my sun, but rays down upon this alien landscape that just looks like my earth.

How do I tell?

Oh. It’s the outrageously insane thing that happens. I mean it ain’t human the thing that happens. It belongs to a foreign and utterly insane race of people who do the opposite of anything any NORMAL human would do. I pity that poor planet. It’s not like mine.

On this planet, a “nurse” who works at a senior assisted living facility, calls emergency services (oddly also called 911 here) to announce that an 80-something lady has collapsed in the dining area and is “barely” breathing. The operator, sends off help and then instructs the nurse to go over and begin doing CPR (apparently they have a similar heart-lung circulatory system as we do). The nurse refuses telling the operator that the company she works for doesn’t allow her to do that.

We are told that the facility doesn’t “do” medical care as part of its services, and prohibits the nurse (whose purpose there is never explained) from rendering assistance to a resident in distress. The operator becomes more and more excited, begging the nurse to find “somebody” who can. The nurse says nobody (except presumably her) knows how to do it. The operator says that’s fine, she can teach them over the phone. The nurse says the company doesn’t allow that either.

The woman of course dies.

The state (also oddly enough called California) has a law that says one is not required to come to the assistance of another. There are plenty of states with such a rule. There are also states that have rules that are called “good Samaritan” laws that protect well-meaning people who help from being sued for causing harm during the helping.

It begs the question I guess to wonder if a nurse has a duty beyond “obeying orders” that might be above the inhuman (obviously because this planet’s inhabitants must not be human like us), order of a company who cares nothing more than for the bottom line–profits shall not be diluted by lawsuits.  It begs the question too why there is a “nurse” employed in the first place if not to at least imply to residents and their families that medical care is only a “step away.”

I sure was glad to learn that I had been secretly kidnapped to this draconian planet. Nothing like this could happen on my earth, and certainly not in my country. Nobody would be that cold and, well, inhuman. No, never in my America.

If that wasn’t enough to assure me that I was no longer in Kansas or anywhere nearby, I saw another thing on this nutsy planet that make it clear it was not mine.

I heard a guy (I swear this is true) who called himself Jeb Bush, just like our Jeb Bush  in America. Only this one, he didn’t have any love for the Latinos like our Jeb. No this one, (not sure he is married to a Latino woman likes ours) he is against allowing undocumented workers a path to citizenship. He is, (believe it or not) in favor of creating them as a permanent underclass in this country they call America, although I think the correct spelling is AmerIKA. No citizenship for them, for as he put it, the last time they did amnesty, why a whole bunch of them didn’t take advantage of it anyway, so they must not really want to be citizens, doncha know.

Yeah, he didn’t mention that maybe some of them were still afraid, and many even more couldn’t afford to pay those fines that you had to pay first to apply.

Our Jeb would never think of such a thing. He’s the smarter of the Bushes (yes they have a passel of  Bushes here too) and that is such an ugly idea that nobody who cares about immigrants would ever suggest that we start defining a whole class as some slave labor reservoir.

They say that this Jeb here, why he is thinking about running for president in 2016. And they tell me that a tiny minority of really nasty mean people hate Latinos for all kinds of imagined things, and this Jeb is courting them for votes.

Our Jeb ain’t like that. He has principles. That Jeb could learn a thing or two from our Jeb.

So, anyway, I gotta run. I’m heading down to the airport and find the next transport back to the third rock from the sun. I sure hope to be back by tomorrow. The food here sucks.

**I learned after the posting of this that the woman in the first instance may have signed a DNR order and may well have been informed that staff were prohibited from offering any medical assistance. I am wrong to castigate the nurse in question if that is so, although I find it odd that she made no mention of this fact when talking to the 911 operator. I apologize to anyone I offended by my attempt at humor. I will not withdraw the post since it’s important to publicly admit one’s errors and not try to erase them in my opinion. I stand by my opinion that the company should have no such “rule” in place.

Related articles

• Jeb Bush: Legal Residency, Not Citizenship, For Illegal Immigrants (mexicoinstitute.wordpress.com)
• Jeb Bush backs pathway to failure (maddowblog.msnbc.com)
• Care home death: Nurse refuses to do CPR on 87-year-old who died at California home (standard.co.uk)
• Jeb Bush rejects path to citizenship, says immigrants don’t want it (voxxi.com)
• California CPR case shines light on what retirement facilities offer (kansascity.com)
• A retirement home is defending one of its nurses who refused to perform CPR … – Detroit Free Press (freep.com)
• ‘We always start CPR,’ local medical official says in response to Calif. case (seattletimes.com)

I Really Hadn’t Thought About It

Tags

America, Juan Cole, terrorism, white terrorism

To say that America is a violent country is to say nothing new. To say that the a large number of fringe groups dedicated to hate of one kind or another inhabit our country is also to say nothing very new.

We continue to be subjected to white supremacist groups and nothing has changed much except that perhaps we don’t pay much attention to them, although their numbers have, I believe, been on the increase.

I’m not one to reprint other people’s work and dust off my hands, thinking, “well, there’s another post completed,” but Juan Cole is someone you should pay attention to regularly, both because of his superb reporting, but also for his superb analysis.

Usually I would point you to his post, but I think that it is better to reprint it here. Have you thought about how the press reports on incidents of internal terrorism? Juan has. And you should listen:

Top Ten Differences between White Terrorists and Others:

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”

2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.

3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.

4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.

5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.

6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.

7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.

8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.

9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.

10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.

Kind of brings you up short doesn’t it?

And it would be well worth your time to read about the culture of hate that is being cultivated in this country by the rich, whose interests are not at all patriotic but who use pursue Muslim hate as a means to frighten unsuspecting Americans into supporting them, and thus giving them the power base they need for their real agenda.

Believe it or not, there are wealthy interests in this country who have much to gain from continued and increased violence in the Middle East and elsewhere.

It’s disheartening yet predictable that sadly uneducated and malleable individuals can become enamored of hate-centered groups. It is more than likely that the latest example, Mr. Page, thought he was striking out at Muslims, utterly and stupidly unaware that Sikhs are not Muslims at all.

It is worse than disheartening when we hear various elected officials appear to fuel the fire by finding a Islamic jihadist under nearly every bed. The fact that most of these hate-spewers are Republican is probably predictable given their ties to the interests who would promote surreptitiously an agenda of war.

We cannot keep ignoring these people as irritating nuisances. They are dangerous and must be stood up against everywhere.

On a lighter note, Juan Cole has a lighter side: I thought this was cute.

Photograph on road from Tripoli to Misrata, Libya, May, 2012, by Juan Cole

 

Related articles

• FBI: Right-wing terror is real (salon.com)
• Why the Reaction Is Different When the Terrorist Is White (theatlantic.com)
• A Double Standard of Terrorism (jodylancastle.wordpress.com)
• The Sikh Temple Tragedy and White Supremacist Terrorism (rootedinbeing.wordpress.com)
• Republicans Blasted Obama Administration For Warning About Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (thinkprogress.org)
• Experts: White supremacist groups experiencing resurgence (wtvr.com)
• A Weak White Supremacist Movement Is Even More Threatening Than a Strong One! Donate Now! (reason.com)

Honoring All Who Serve

Tags

America, the human condition, Veterans Day, War

It is not who we are but what we have become.

I shall remain firmly convinced of that, for to conclude that we are violent by nature, by DNA, by proclivity, is to have no hope. We are doomed.

Looking upon the picture featured today, gives us a historical perspective of war in this country. But truly, we can, without any trouble at all, look deep into the past, and see a pattern of war that has existed nearly as far back as we have recorded our collective lives.

Thucydides wrote of the Peloponnesian Wars, and Caesar wrote of the Wars with Gaul. Numberous others have written of our World Wars, our Wars of Roses, and our Revolutions. We have our “remember the Maine” and “remember the Alamo”. We have iconic photos of raising flags over distant lands, and of naked children running down roads burned by napalm.

We have seen the crematoria and the mounds of human bones. We have seen people hacked and beaten, and fired up. We have seen the horrors on our television screens, and we have thought that we “knew” war.

We have not of course. We have not breathed it in, have not suffered the stench of rot, have not see the maggots and last vestiges of  life turned ghost. We have not had to pick up and bury. We have not felt the raw sharp pain of utter terror. We have no gathered our friend, no longer recognizable, to our breast and cried in some surreal moment when our minds disconnect and we cannot make our brains function.

But they have. Those that serve us by keeping all this horror at bay for us. They allow us to worry about what to fix for dinner, and whether these pair of shoes is a good match for the new skirt, or whether we should invest in a new coffeepot. They dig in the dirt, and erase the signs of death and inhumanity while we flip through channels and choose the movie fare for the evening.

They are in uniform sometimes, and sometimes not. They act out of patriotism, or out of raw need to help create a better life for themselves or their families. They suspend their lives, offering up months and years to be used as fodder in the great war machines, declared or otherwise. They point weapons at other humans and  in their minds create the scenario that makes it correct for them, at that moment to pull a trigger, ending the life of another human.

We see some of this carnage as honorable, and some as not. It depends in large part on which side of the street you are standing. For each side, in our side-less slaughter sees itself as some moral keeper of the right. Whether led by ideology or theology, we all, warrior and spectator, develop explanations for why this must be.

And of course, there is no explanation worthy of human beings. We are taking the easy way out, which makes it all the more a crime that we continue. We kill out of fear, naked and ugly. We accuse others of greed, whether it be monetary or simple power. But in the end, it comes down to fear, as most of our negative anxieties do. We kill because it is simply the fastest way to end the fear that plagues us. It is a temporary solution, but at least it is one. And by the time that all of it has fallen apart again, it will be the next generation who will bear the new burden.

It has gone on so long, so very long that we know no other way. Would that some alien race would step in and take away our weapons of war and force us to face the truth. We will perish together or survive together. Together is the operative word here.

 We are a species that is communal in nature. That is our nature. We are not lone carnivores, coming together only for quick and frantic mating rituals to perpetuate our race. We cannot survive alone, physically or emotionally. We are in this together.

We have a planet, that does not have arbitrary lines of demarcation. There are no borders other than the human constructs we create to separate ourselves from ourselves. Resources are strewn across the landscape of the planet in an arbitrary yet functional basis dependent upon climate and pure luck. Nobody “owns” it simply by standing upon it. Attempts to do so, lead to fear on someone else’s part, and then to violence to protect or secure one’s well-being.

This has all been said before.

I do honor those who have given “the last full measure” yet, I cannot help but cry out in dismay that we never seem to get on with it. We are like a needle caught in a scratch on an old vinyl record–unable to free ourselves from ourselves as the needle cannot jump forward and continue the melody.

Remember all who suffer from violence this day, but especially those who offer themselves to protect you, to give you a better life. The mechanism is shit, but the motive is pure. Honor the motive.

**Please remember that our veterans have higher unemployment, are a larger percentage of our homeless, suffer more from alcoholism and drug abuse, and have more psychiatric problems that are warranted by their actual numbers. We need to help our men and women who have been damaged by war–that is all of them.

Amen.

Related articles

• The Art of War: Honoring the Fallen for a Lifetime (lightbox.time.com)
• Dorian de Wind: A Veteran’s Ring of Honor (huffingtonpost.com)

I Know People in High Places

Tags

America, Bacon's Degrees of separation, genetics, Humor, psychology, regional language, the Lone Ranger, violence

Well kiddos, another score for me! Sorry Contrarian, but I am soooo far ahead of you. Eat my dust baby.

You undoubtedly play this game with your spouse, significant other, friend, pet, or stranger. Yeah I know you do. Just what famous celebrity could you reach out and touch? Kevin Baconish strands of connection?

First let’s set the record before I tell you of my latest coup.

The Contrarian lists the following:

• His mother met the man whose father was the Marlboro Man on the TV commercials.
• The Contrarian once sat in the chair that Fess Parker had sat in when he played Davy Crockett on TV.
• Once, when a child, the Contrarian’s mother urged his brother Gary to go and get the autograph of the nice man making the rounds at the farming exposition. She was sure he was a politician and would run for President. He did get John F. Kennedy’s autograph, but lost it before the 1960 election.

That’s it. That’s his paltry collection of “I know people in high places.”

Me on the other hand:

• I attended a summer theatre production of Arsenic and Old Lace in Flint, Michigan and saw William Shatner after the show signing autographs. I was within 8 feet of him (20 foot rule applies). I did not seek an autograph. I am so above that sort of thing.
• Jane Fonda gave an anti-war speech at MSU and stayed at our dorm that night. I stood within touching distance of her. (She is one tiny person!)
• I knew the cop who was a bodyguard for then Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and he had been to Camp David and met President Carter. (A true Bacon event)
• I shook hands with George McGovern when he was running for president.

And now I have another, and this is just an amazing one.

My high school biology teach, Mr. Everette Humphrey, owned the only known saddle of the Lone Ranger! Yes indeed. Aren’t you utterly totally and forever amazed? Now this was not the TV Lone Ranger, not Clayton Moore, but the original radio Lone Ranger.

Mr. Brace Breemer, (for that was his name) traveled widely dressed in his Lone Ranger gear. He also, at his home in Oxford Michigan, kept his horse Silver. When Mr. Breemer died, Mr. Humphrey, an avid memorabilia collector, bought the saddle.

Pretty heady stuff huh? So there you have it. I’m so far ahead, that well, I’m thinking of offering myself onto the speech-givin’ circuit to wow Americans across the land with my “I know people in high places” talk. I’m sure I can command a healthy fee. Move over Sarah, I’m taking over!

♦

What is a Maybell? Depends on where you live. Yes, language is regional. If you are the type who loves words and how they change and are changed by location, location, location, then buzz over the the Humanities Magazine and read their fun article.

And there is a book, The Dictionary of American Regional Language. This is a must for the Contrarian. Unfortunately, it’s multi-volume and probably costs a fortune.

By the way, in Wisconsin a Maybell is a lily of the valley. In Michigan it refers to a marsh marigold.

♦

We’ve had a few fairly interesting discussions about the issue of violence and how we have come to it. Is it part of us? Learned? Inevitable? Subject to evolutionary death?

Steven Pinker writes a wonderful essay on the subject and argues that we are in the most peaceful time of human history. It seems to me I posted something very recently on Pinker’s thinking, but in any case, this seems new and more importantly check out this site. It is called the Edge, and it’s mission statement is:

To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

 Looks like a site worth keeping a close eye on. Note: there are other essays there worth taking a look at.

♦

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the Documentary Channel and some of the interesting stuff we had got a chance to watch. I mentioned that some of them seemed rather odd, like the one about the “man with paraplegic wife who wants to open a brothel.” 

Now I assumed this was some dirty old man living up in the hills who wanted to run some girls out of his spare bedroom. Not quite the story. It related to a man and woman who lived in Australia. She was pregnant and have a massive stroke.  They were just kids and yet unmarried. She was left completely unable to move, unable to speak, but with feeling everywhere.

Well, her boyfriend married her. They have been married for like 14 years. They have two children (she is able to carry to term.  They run a sheep ranch. Prostitution is legal in Australia and he and some friends invested money and built a lovely brothel and started it up. They never got the clientele they were hoping for and have since closed.

But the amazing tale of how this man loves and cares for this woman is simply a blessing to watch.

So anyway, today the Contrarian went to the lumber yard to get a few things he needed. He stopped at the local market to get me some cream and carrots. He also got some donuts.

“Babe, I got you some donuts at Sherbon’s.”

“Yes, thanks hon. I appreciate that.”

“Always lookin’ out for my sweetie. Can I open a brothel?”

You see what I must contend with?

Teachable Tidbits

Tags

America, bookstores, Internet, Sarah Palin

No doubt you heard that a few weeks ago, Border’s Bookstore went into bankruptcy. I hadn’t had the delight of being in a Border’s for some years. I never found one in Connecticut nor have I found one in Iowa. No matter, they are gone now.

I, as I’ve spoken of before, have a love affair with books. I like to touch them, hold them, move their pages. I find joy in their makeup, their choice of papers and decoration. Most of all, of course, I love the wisdom I hope to find within them.

I don’t think any day was as grand to me when I was a college student than the day I went to the campus book store to buy text books for the upcoming quarter. I carried this pile home, and one by one examined them in detail, growing in excitement at the contents.

I have, amassed books wherever I lived in America. A goodly number of boxes will be accompanying us on our move to New Mexico in a year or so. I lend books rarely, since for some reason, people tend to “forget” to return them, and I, not wanting to be petty, mention the subject a couple of times, sigh, and realize that I have lost one of my children. Sometimes I replace them.

But bookstores, my favorite haunt, are going the way of the dinosaurs. It seems inevitable with iPads and Kindles and other sorts of electronic reading apparatus. And something good and wonderful will end. I recognize my own participation in this slaughter of the book seller. I confess that most of my books are bought from Amazon. This is simple finances. They are just cheaper since they added the “used” books sellers to their repertoire.

And I confess that I tended to haunt the environs of the bigger national bookstores rather than the local seller. These poor but wonderful folks have been virtually wiped out. They can’t carry the breadth and depth of choice that the major chains can or could. But even the big chains are dying.

I don’t like the idea of not having my book with me, there to touch, perhaps reread, but gaze upon with fondness. I like the idea of convenience in the e-reader, but I will lament the loss of my friends in my bookcases. No virtual bookcase can suffice.

For an article about this inevitable changing of the guard, read the TNR article here.

♦

Goodness knows it’s easy to look upon the American landscape and find little that gives us hope for the future. We seem mired in a class war, largely pushed by the extreme right. Our state legislatures are busy with all manner of utterly silly and dangerous bills, having little if anything to do with the real issues that confront us. Our national politicians are comprised of mostly people unfit to collect our garbage.

It is easy to be pessimistic. Fareed Zakaria is one savvy political journalist. There is a link to his Time‘s essay, Are America’s Best Days Behind Us? in this Foreign Policy review of his essay. It’s well worth your time to read both.

♦

Okay, just to return to some sense of reality. This just in: Sarah’s panting lap dogs (read fans) are planning a show of “how I hate, hate, hate, Obama”. How you say? Well, supposedly on Sunday and 4pm, if you hate Obama, you are to pull off to the side of the road, and honk your horn for a solid hour. Yep, this is the brainchild of some group called Stand Up for America. Yeah, I’d say America’s best days are far far behind it.

♦

We hold the people of Japan and Libya in our prayers today, as well as the people of Wisconsin now facing life at the hands of a demagogue.

 

Related Articles

• Support local bookstores (goodenuf2publish.wordpress.com)

Once Upon a Time

Tags

America, editorial, GOP, Politics, right wing religious

Once upon a time there was a bunch of strange aliens who lived on Earth, specifically in a land called America. They kept to themselves because of the way they interpreted a very old collection of writings.

One day, one of their leaders got to talking with a group of men from another group, called Reduplicans, and decided to hitch his group’s wagon to them.

The aliens had very strict ideas of what was moral. They wanted to be elected to make everyone conform to their ideas, but the people of this place called America, didn’t think that a very good idea.

They liked the idea that people should make up their own minds about personal things like what to do with their bodies, and other similar things. So they wouldn’t elect these  moralies aliens.

Then the moralies aliens got an idea. What if they stopped talking about how they were going to force everyone to live as they believed, and instead ran for local offices like the school boards and city councils? They wouldn’t tell any of the voters what their real agenda was, and once elected, they would, as majorities, change the local schools and governments to suit their personal believes.

And lo and behold, they started to have success!

The Reduplican group still tried to curry the favor of these moralies by making lots of promises to promote their beliefs, but mostly all it was was lip service. They had their own not so hidden agenda, and that was to support the richest and prettiest people in the land of America because those aliens (and they were just as much aliens as the moralistic ones) promised to throw crumbs to the Reduplican group, such as trips and fat jobs when they retired from this Washington place.

Well, when in control of things, the Reduplicans did bad things. They sent a lot of people off with guns to kill other people, but a lot of them got killed. The people who did the sending didn’t send their children to these places of course, and the voters got mad. There seemed no reason for this.

While interfering with other places on the blue planet (for that is what it was), they kept giving away all the money to the rich aliens. So much so in fact, that the regular people started to be terribly poor. And they got mad and voted out the Reduplicans.

The Reduplicans were very sad. The richie rich aliens were very mad at this turn of events. They engaged in a long campaign to convince a lot of the working people (some of whom were the moralies aliens, and some who were working class) that the real trouble was with bunches of other people who didn’t look like them. They had skins of “color” being brown, and yellow and black. And some had different ideas they got from different old books.

Anyway, these new cuppers aliens started raising a stink, because they were afraid now. They blamed everything on something called conspiracies, and all manner of people were involved, trying to destroy the land of America.

But these cuppers, some of whom were as I said, the original moralies, were scary themselves, and for the most part, except in small areas of the land of America, they were rejected. And the Reduplicans worried that they would never get their power back.

Then they remembered the trick the original moralies had played. They concentrated on getting elected to local state governments. And once they had secured majorities in the land of America, they started their devious ways.

Although they had campaigned to the people on creating jobs and fixing what ailed the land of America, they turned instead to wasting all the monies of the voters on things like destroying unions, enacting state gun laws that let more of their moralies and working poor carry weapons, making women look at pictures of the fetuses they felt they could not raise, outlawing laws of other places that had never been used in the land of America. Everywhere, their secret membership was busy introducing laws to make it harder for other people who didn’t like them to even vote.

They discovered that if their message wasn’t pleasing to the people of the land, then they would just reduce, by union busting and voter law restrictions measures, the ability of those opposed to them to have a voice. That is what they called “democracy.” For they were strict constructionists of a thing called a Constitution.

Unfortunately, most of the people of the land were busy just keeping their heads above water by this point, and they didn’t have much time to devote to keeping up on things in the land. And they are in very serious trouble, though they don’t know it.

If the good people of the land of America don’t wake up soon, and stand up against these aliens, all of them, then the wonder of the land of America will be lost, and the people will end up being ruled by the richie rich, while their daily lives will be regulated by the moralies. And the great experiment will be over.

THE END