Screwed In The End Times

An Early Fall

Yes indeedy, those of you who subscribe to Murrmurrs have probably noticed I've signed on with a new subscription service called follow.it. I had no idea it would send out such an alarming spammy-looking initial email, and if it made you suspicious and you unfollowed me, well, you can always sign back up again at that <<--new box in the left margin under Pootie's handsome mug. It's actually a pretty spiffy outfit and gives you options of how you want your Murrmurrs dose, such as to your phone, to your email, to your mama, up your butt, or dropped by drone on your front porch. It also makes it super easy to unfollow. Horrors! And now, to really test your-all's loyalty, I give you a new, super-bleak post with no humor in it whatsoever. I don't want this to be a trend either, but I had to get it out of my system. Thank you all for coming. And caring.

 

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Let me set the whole sorry scene. We're in a major drought. It's worse every year. Large trees were already visibly suffering. We just had our three hottest days ever recorded, and by a long shot. Four trees on my alley turned brown literally overnight. They clatter in the breeze.

This year there seemed to be a consensus that fireworks would be a very bad idea. They've been banned in the whole state. Some teenager burned down most of the scenic Columbia River Gorge with a firecracker a few years back. Last year the parts of the state that weren't on fire were smothered in acrid smoke for weeks. This shit is real.

I say there seemed to be a consensus because for the days leading up to July 4th we heard maybe one or two bombs bursting in air, which is way under our traditional mayhem. People would talk about it on the street. Hope no one sets off fireworks. How stupid would they have to be?

 

And so we got all the way to about 8pm on Independence Day before the first one went off, and it was a doozy. Sparks flew a hundred feet high. Two more followed. You could feel the outrage igniting from inside every shaken household. And then one of our neighbors went screaming down the street like an avenging angel in the direction of the noise. That's illegal! What the hell do you think you're doing? Hey! And so on.

 

Only takes one such soldier and suddenly I, nobody's vigilante, had jumped out of my chair and bolted off to offer support. Of course, I had no idea who was setting off the fireworks, but I figured a posse would be helpful. On the way I passed another neighbor, an 80-year-old gray-haired woman in a bathrobe and scuff slippers, shuffling the same direction, loaded for bear. By the time I got to the blast zone, there were about fifteen of us arriving from all directions. All of us women. All of us old.

 

There was my dauntless neighbor, loudly explaining about drought and fire danger and the fact that a nearby apartment building had burned to the ground from fireworks the previous night, killing two. And that the governor had banned them. She was nose to nose with another woman yelling even louder.

 

And that's when things got ugly. Rather than the twenty-year-old drunken yahoos I was expecting, our miscreants were a Black family, one of very few in the vicinity. There was a lot of hollering. Mainly it was the two women nose-to-nose, but people had their backs up. The fireworks lady said they'd been shooting off fireworks for fifteen years and they weren't about to stop now. Everyone yelled back that this is not a normal year. Someone said they'd had a death in the family and they just wanted to cheer themselves up. Someone else said maybe they could do that without burning the place down. Everyone was yelling at once. Within minutes our old-lady posse had been pegged as racist. There were ugly accusations. The avenging angel continued to insist this was not about race but about fire. Her adversary laughed in her face and said "Just look around you. Look at the demographics here."

 

I walked away. What was clear was that nothing good was ever going to come from this confrontation. I knew a lot of facts about the situation, but they wouldn't be heard here. One: yes, all the complainers were white, because that's pretty much who lives here. That is a problem, but it's a different problem. Two: we had converged on this family because they were the ones setting off fireworks. Three: as far as I could tell, most of us had come from two or three blocks away, and had no idea who was responsible. Four: I know the avenging angel well. She is the original Anti-Karen. She wouldn't call the police on a Black man if he was threatening her life; she doesn't trust the police to behave. By confronting the other woman, she was treating her exactly as she would have treated anyone else doing the same thing. Five: she shouldn't have come at her so hard. Nobody likes to be charged and yelled at. It didn't help. It made things worse. Six: she did it because she had just plain lost her shit. We were all crazy with worry over this. That. And all the other Things.

 

All the other things.

 

And that is why, as I lay in bed later listening to the bombs going off, from that unrepentant corner and from one street over in the other direction, for hours, with my window open in case I smelled smoke, I finally burst out sobbing. I've done well holding it together, but suddenly it all was so hopeless. My own personal troubles, which are not trivial. The impossibility of communication when we're all stoking our own private fires. The drought. The three days of insane heat that, frankly, shook me up more than I could have imagined. The quickening tumble toward climate catastrophe. Extinction. The coming water wars. A world in migration. The sheer stupidity, at every level, of our kind. We're face to face with it, now. Nose to nose.

 

I'm as well-rooted as anybody but sometimes I feel myself clattering in the breeze. 

 

 

Another Place The Shoe Fits

The country is being ripped apart by hatred, so Republican strategists have rolled out a new initiative: I Know You Are, But What Am I? And that is why we Democrats and liberals are now being called racists. Because we persist in calling everybody racist.

Except, Sugar? It's not true. We only call racists racists. It just seems like everybody, these days. Believe me, we're not happy about that. Nobody's "playing the race card." Even though it's, ah, a trump card. Our problem is that our whole deck is full of those shitty cards. We would be so happy if the pit boss would come along and swap out that deck, but we can only play with what we got. And what we got here living among us is a shit-ton of racists.

And a lot of them are accusing us liberals of trying to sow division and hatred by calling our President and his supporters hateful names. Why, they even say we want a civil war!

Yeah, no. No we the hell don't. We aren't even armed. What are we going to do, whack you with our Talking Stick? (Because that is an improper use of a Talking Stick.)

Yes. We're scared of you. Because you're scared of everyone else. Y'all are frankly terrifying in all your fear. We're not inclined to violence and we got nothing in our tool bucket to make you go away, but if something were to happen and you were gone, we'd be relieved. Some quick, tidy, painless thing. Maybe the Rapture. Oh praise the Lord, let it come, so the rest of us Americans, in all our splendid variety, can continue on in peace without you.

The only bright spot in all of this is that apparently, at this writing, people still consider it a bad thing to be called a racist. Ain't that quaint? They have no problem being racist but they don't want to wear the T-shirt. Despite a nearly complete inability among many white people to imagine a person of color, other than Morgan Freeman, as entirely human, they do not want to be called racists. They're fine with people of color existing as long as they do it quietly and far away.

We're not racists, they say. It's not racist to call out people who knock over liquor stores and break into houses and sit around all day drinking Colt 45 and collect welfare checks and food stamps, and it's not our fault if all of those people happen to be black. They're either guilty or they look just like someone who is, so it's no wonder the police give 'em an extra thump just to make sure. You can't blame the police for that. And it's not our fault so many of those people are in prison, because they wouldn't be there if they didn't deserve to be.

And Muslims. There is no reason to wear the hijab if you're not trying to hide a bomb. Those people are dedicated to enshrining Sharia law in America and outlawing Christianity, and our own God and Constitution are not strong enough to withstand a threat like that. It's not racist to sound the alarm about those people if it's true. It's just standing up for what we believe in. You know. Freedom.

And don't tell us those "refugees" at the border aren't a threat. A good parent feeds and clothes her child and makes sure she goes to school. You sure as hell don't march your little kid across a thousand miles of desert to sneak into a better country and steal someone else's job. What kind of monster would be that cruel? Fix your own damn country, that's what a good parent would do. My God. So obvious. These are not good people. It's not racist to say so, if it's a fact.

Thieves and terrorists and drug dealers don't belong here. It's not our fault that we can tell who they are just by looking.

Well bless my buttons. What happened to the Home of the Brave? I don't understand much of this. I don't know why folks who are proud to sling rifles over their fat butts in the town square are so damned afraid of so many powerless people.

But I did just think of a good place to store my Talking Stick.

As this post rolls out at 3am PST, Portland is, reluctantly, about to host a swarm of right-wing provocateurs from across the nation. Many of them haven't been laid in a long time and they're very interested in exercising themselves violently. They are likely to find willing foils on the left here, and they know it. Ordinarily, I like to attend these events to witness and to point and laugh (as appropriate). I'm skipping this one. I don't actually want to die yet. Wish us luck.

Bedfellows

I don't know, guys, I don't know.

The good and beautiful people of my good and beautiful city are walking around like survivors in a blast zone. Strangers embrace. The detonation has happened and now the concussion and devastation will ripple on for a long time. I find I'm not interested in food. That's never good.

We can all see each other now. The really, really bad people are lit up like flares. They're celebrating in their white robes and waving their Confederate flags and terrorizing their fellow citizens in the street. Their unwitting partners--almost half the country--are not really bad people, probably. They're just full of shit.

I don't mean that in the normal disparaging way. I mean that a systematic propaganda apparatus has been cranking away for decades now, and its architects have concocted a poisonous stew of lies and distractions, and seasoned it with honey, and people have tipped their heads back and allowed the funnel to be placed in their mouths, and all that shit got pumped in. A party devoted only to increasing the wealth of the wealthy was rebranded as the champion of the middle class. A good, smart, hard-working woman was recast as a devil. Sound science became fantasy. Demonstrable falsehoods were propagated with glee. But folks on the left as well as the right sucked on that funnel and accepted the particular load of shit that was curated just for them. Truth is the first victim, but there are so many more. When you've been pumped full of shit, you actually begin to believe certain of your compatriots threaten you, when clearly those people have much more to fear from you.

Muslim citizens do not like to be mischaracterized as terrorists, nor Hispanics as criminals, and so too, Trump voters are outraged to be called racists and xenophobes. That's not who they are! That stuff is peripheral. They had other concerns. And you know what? They're probably telling the truth.

But the ability to filter out and discard as irrelevant the flagrant racism metastasizing all around them, and the demagogue at its epicenter, the Igniter-In-Chief, does not speak well of their capacity for empathy. To them I say: these are the people you have cast your lot with. To discount them is to reveal yourselves to be comfortably cocooned and unwilling to take a step outside your own experience and imagine someone else's: your neighbor now afraid to wear her head-scarf to the grocery store. The gay man now second-guessing his usual route home in the dark. The Latina betrayed by her own facial features and subject to derision and terror. The black man assumed to be a gangster, and subject to execution. This is what's happening in America today. We marginalize and dehumanize people who frighten us. Every single time we generalize about people, we're wrong. We're wrong, and we're lazy, and we're also less safe, if that is the point of the exercise. We are all far, far less safe now.



So what do we do? Deliberately, we do not have all the options embraced by some of our political foes: most of us are not armed. That's not the way we roll. One thing we do is band together for peace. We keep our eyes and ears open, and when any of us is under attack, we stand with that person. Literally. Physically. We stand together and we give each other strength. And we reject violence.

And we mobilize. There is so much to defend: our civil rights, our health care, our environment, our standing in the world. Everything we've ever cared about is under attack. Everything that actually does make America great is to be dismantled. It has not escaped us that international terrorists will take this opportunity to goad our new president, an insecure, easily-bruised, childish bully, into the all-out holy war they have yearned for. They've got their man, now. As bad as that is, we don't need an external enemy if we're rotting from within.

And with all that, there are even worse things.  We are many years too late to undo the damage we've already done to our planet. But we must keep things from getting worse. We have to at least try. We are out of time to waste. And we can't do it by pulling out the rest of the fossil fuel and burning it up. We have an international climate change agreement signed now--baby steps, far from adequate--but even at that, our new president wants to rip it up and drill, baby, drill. He wants to shovel ever more coal into the boiler of a runaway train. He is a simple, uninformed man: he thinks he's creating jobs. He wants to give us full employment--as grave diggers. When we're done we can all jump in.

We can't let him. We need to stand, march, and holler. We need to fill the streets with our good and beautiful selves and hold each other up. Someone talked about building a wall. We need to be that wall.

Sweet Alfred E. Neuman On A Hat!

You've got to hand it to the Cleveland Indians. They've done real well. They were so good they might even have done as well if they'd been called the Cleveland Bowling Pins. It's hard to say, because they're still the Indians. They've still got the dopey Little Injun Boy on their hats and everything. He looks like Little Chief Pee-Pee Pants. He's adorable.

There's talk of replacing the name and mascot, but it's meeting the usual resistance. I saw a thread about it on Facebook and, predictably, someone was cheesed off. "Are you saying calling my team the Indians makes me a racist?" Well, no, not that per se. Other stuff maybe. Maybe you just can't fathom that such a mascot might be seen as insulting, since you don't mean anything by it. Maybe you lack imagination. Someone's messing with your tradition? Okay. Hang onto that aggrieved feeling, because we'll get back to that in a minute.

Let's try a little experiment. Supposed the contending team in this year's World Series is the Mighty Whities. There's a fellow flexing on the cap; he looks like Mr. Clean. How does that make you feel? I see. Yeah, bad example. Mighty Whities is kind of redundant. You're not offended. Dude looks strong. Mighty Whities rule.

Which is kind of why they're hard to mock effectively.

Let's try again. Y'all lost the war. New Mexico is the most powerful nation in the world, and most of you English-speaking white people are clustered in little shabby settlements. Strip malls. Trailer parks. You're doing okay outside of tornado season, and as long as the Waffle House stays open, nobody much complains. Then the World Series rolls around and there they are again: the Pasty-Faces won the pennant. It rankles, because you know you've gotten the short end of the stick in general, and the New Mexicans think you're kind of dirty and you kind of are, what with the meth problem and the fracking spoiling your water, but you still  have a proud European heritage and a right to dignity. Remember that bristly aggrieved feeling when you thought someone was calling you a racist, thinking you're something you're not? It feels like that. You and your people have been a national joke for 160 years. It's like a splinter in your heart every time the Pasty-Faces come up to bat wearing those stupid caps with Alfred E. Neuman on the front. You're being made fun of. You're inconsequential.

So is this another one of those cases of political correctness? We all know that person who is offended by everything. You learn to tread lightly around her, even though you think she's too sensitive and she really needs to get over a lot of that shit--and you're probably right. It's when a whole lot of people have the same complaint that it might be worth considering they have a different but valid perspective. And that their grievance might have more weight than your tradition.

Sure it's a tradition--it's a relic from the days when white men never had call to doubt their dominance over everyone else, including women. The name and mascot are fossil ridicule, embedded in a now-crumbling substrate. But you know? It's not that big a deal, a tradition that's lasted only your whole life, and part of your father's life. That's not that long. You can do better. You'll get over it.

Go Bowling Pins!