If there was ever a time to hope that we Americans will collectively keep our heads, it will be the next twelve months. And I’m talking to both sides of the so-called culture wars, to lefties and righties and even those political agnostics, the independents. It’s likely that there will be a fire or two set during this time, with some well-known blowhards puffing on the flames like strutting blacksmith’s bellows.
I am also talking to the “media,” who have been known to fan a flame or two themselves whenever it helped their circulation. No one should feel that they need to give up any firmly held political principle, but we need a safe space where such things can be debated, and some of the actors in our national drama would take this space away from us and use it only for themselves.
There are moments when I get all tensed up as il fascisti strike their poses and do their acting out in the public square, and I see those puffed-up warriors wearing their camo outfits and brandishing their AR 15s. Do we need a clearer picture as to their intent? They are made of the same clay as the blackshirts and the storm troopers from another time.
As boring and tedious and mind-numbing as our political debates can be, they are essential to keeping the best of what we have and offering a better future for us all. When the scales finally fell from Italian eyes back in 1945 and they threw off fascist rule, they did it with some grisly fluorishes, including hanging a bunch of them from a girder, Mussolini included.
But it had taken nearly thirty years for enough of them to come to their senses. We need to do that before November 2024, and reject authoritarianism and its ugly buddies – power cults, looking for the strongman, threats of violence, rejection of the very ideas that have made the ideals of America worth supporting. Authoritarianism tends to carry the seeds of its own destruction along with it, but there can be so much harm done along the way.
In our past, a respect for fair-mindedness and decency have kept us strong and united even in our fractiousness. Taken together they are a heady blend, something to get quietly high on.
In the beginning I thought Donald Cluck was a joke, but I stopped laughing quite a while ago. He is our American creation, our very own Frankenstein monster, and a personification of the worst aspects of our natures. We need to be done with him.
The ballot box is the place to do it.
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We’ve had the pleasure of having Cynthia, a good friend of Robin’s from South Dakota, stay with us for several days. She is a delightful person, and from my standpoint it was great fun to watch these old buddies get a chance to chat and laugh and flat out enjoy one another’s company.
On the other hand, being caught in a small house with two intelligent and fast-talking women at the same time is a harrowing experience for me. I simply could not keep up, and had to keep inventing excuses to go off to my room to catch a breath.
(I am much more at my ease in the company of a bunch of typical male louts, scratching and farting together and dealing with the deeper questions of life like “How ‘bout dem Broncos, eh?”)
Of course, having a guest means we got a chance to show off this part of Colorado, which offers much to show off. The weather wasn’t perfectly cooperative, with some rains here and there, but there was just enough sunshine to keep our plans on track and our mood light.
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In our conversations I was reminded of the first time I took Robin canoeing in the Boundary Waters. We put in at an entry point that I had used several times before and headed for a portage a few miles ahead. An hour or so later I realized that I was seeing a shoreline I had never seen before, which meant that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere and we were now in unfamiliar territory.
As I was fuming at myself for my chuckleheadedness, Robin spoke up and suggested that we return to where we had started out and begin the journey anew. I stared at her for the longest time before I came up with this response:
Robin, dear, if I knew how to get to where we started out, we wouldn’t be lost.
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I am a sucker for signs that bring a laugh or even a grimace if they are bad enough. Collected these this week. I especially appreciate the desperation of the one covering the urinal in the men’s room in a restaurant in Silverton CO.
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The number of people who follow this blog puts me somewhat short of enough to qualify as a macro-influencer. I am definitely in the “nano” category.
People with followers in the range between 500,000 and 1 million followers on a social network are macro-influencers. Most influencers are micro-influencers with between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. In really specialist niches, you have nano-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers.
Influence Marketing Hub.com
Which brings me to acknowledging the latest follower to sign on to the blog, who is from Nigeria. I am delighted to welcome them as my first followers from Africa.
Amazing, isn’t it? The ease of communicating with people thousands of miles away, separated from us by vast oceans. There is certainly a darker side to what the internet can be used for, but I believe it is far outweighed by the positives. So I will return the favor and follow this new blog from the folks in Nigeria with hope that I will learn something about a country other than my own, from the people who live there.
It serves as a reminder that what we now refer to as the internet was once commonly called the world-wide web. We no longer need to type in the “www” on a web address, our computers make that assumption for us, but it’s still true.
[Now would be the time, I think to admit that I am not any sort of influencer at all. Just a rambling sort of writer. I just wanted to talk about it as if I were, for a moment. If you need corroboration of this, you need only contact my children, who will tell you straight up that I have never influenced them in the slightest.]
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One of the table conversations with Robin and Cynthia was about early rock and rollers, including Elvis Presley. I consider myself a fan of his, but only of the too-short period before he was drafted. After that he was mistakenly guided toward turning out some sort of canned pop-rock that had obvious appeal because he sold a gazillion records. But I didn’t buy any of them.
Following up on our discussion I have included three tunes today from that golden time when he was young and fresh and thought to present a clear and present danger to public morals.
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Little Home In The Valley 