Tag: revolution

Who You Calling Evil?

jono55

When I was a lad, a few dinosaurs still roamed the earth and most people lived in caves or slept out in the open. Television, computers, artificial intelligence, and air hadn’t been invented yet. It was that long ago.

We were ignorant but happy, living out our average lifespans of twenty years and then being gobbled by some scaly predator when our running speed had begun to slow.

So the difficulties of old age … almost nobody had ’em. Certainly not in enough numbers to care about. Actually, getting past a ripe old age at twenty drew suspicion that one might be possessed of some evil spirit, so my family of origin was forced to move frequently to avoid unpleasantness at the hands of our neighbors.

But, hey, who doesn’t have problems? Right? At some point we scuttled across the Bering Strait and invented real estate, whereupon we immediately began cutting up the new land into parcels to sell to the next new arrivals.

Today I look back on those growing-up years fondly, and yesterday when members of our present government were voicing the view that all progressives were possessed of evil spirits, I felt right at home. It was like old times.

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Mr. Tambourine Man, by Odetta

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Tale #1: One day when I was working at doctoring in South Dakota, my nurse handed me the charts of the next two patients who had come in for well-child examinations. They were from somewhere in the part of Nebraska that still hadn’t been named. Interesting was the fact that they had received no immunizations.

When I learned that the names of the two little girls were Quasar and Zanzibar, I paused with my hand on the doorknob of the room. At that point I knew that the chance I would change anyone’s mind and the vaccinations would begin that day was small … minuscule … and that proved to be the case. The kids were delightful, their mother polite and pleasant but adamant in not wanting to discuss issues of preventive medicine. I never saw them again.

Tale #2: There was a chiropractor who was fairly well-to-do, a complete charlatan, and rarely kept a wife for more than three or four years. When wife number four came along, it took almost no time at all for there to be two infants coming to our clinic. I was chosen as the family pediatrician and thus ran into the husband’s policy of NO IMMUNIZATIONS.

The children’s mother was from a New England state, and always had a sort of sorely stressed air about her. For she’d realized that her spouse was a fool who tired of his wives rather quickly, and that her old friends and family were thousands of miles away. After several years of marriage she made up her mind to take leave of the old prat, and this time it was she that filed for divorce.

During the drawn-out legal proceedings, she did something interesting. Bringing the kids in for routine exams, she had both of them immunized and brought right up-to-date, without telling their father. It was not quite the right motive and more than a little spiteful, but I obliged her in her important work of disobedience.

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This Is Definitely A Rogue’s Gallery

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Before daylight this morning as I was composing more of the trash that I affectionately call my writing, I noticed the motion-sensitive spotlights in front of my neighbor’s house light up. An instant later a vulpine silhouette crossed the beam running from stage right to stage left. The fox was out, on a chilly night.

The Fox, by Bill Staines

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Here’s part of a longer piece and all I can say is that I am glad she isn’t angry with me. At least I hope she’s not.

Of course, this isn’t really about what we need to do — we’re already doing it. It’s about what the mainstream media, and anyone still cowering in silence, needs to do. Because silence isn’t neutral — it’s surrender. It hands the microphone to a bully and pretends that’s balance. And I need to be clear — this isn’t just about him. It’s about the crowd that roars for him too. The ones who leap to their feet when he says he hates half the country. The ones who fist-pump when he spits bile and take it as permission to be their worst selves. They need to know we see them too. They need to know this isn’t patriotism — it’s corrosion. It isn’t strength — it’s rot. Every cheer is a confession of their own emptiness. Every laugh is proof of how small they’ve let themselves become. And we aren’t pretending it’s normal. We’re calling it what it is: indecency on parade, depravity dressed up as politics. And the minute we stop saying that out loud, the minute we start shrugging and moving on, is the minute they win.

JOJOfROMJERZ AND THE SIREN

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Our chapter of Indivisible got together Monday evening for a potluck supper. What savage revolutionaries we are! It was a small group, but we only see one another at events that are scheduled, and rarely get to talk about anything but the serious business of showing how democracy works to an unpleasant group of people who aren’t one bit interested – our national government..

All in all it was an enjoyable time. We even got to play a new card game whose name I have already forgotten and that’s okay because I sucked at it. The next meetings will all be in preparation for the second No Kings nationwide protest. It will happen on October 18. The last one back in June set records and showed how deep the distrust of the Cluck regime went. Since then they have done so many more bad things we anticipate a larger turnout.

A couple of days ago I was talking with one of my children on the phone, answering the perennial question: How are you doing? In answering I was to realize how much of my time is spent working on things political. I found myself wondering: Hey, you’re an impossibly old dude, what would you be doing now if you didn’t have a large bunch of fascists to deal with? And the answer is … probably nothing as interesting or compelling. So I guess I have Cluck and the gang to thank for providing a seemingly endless source of provocations to think about. Otherwise I might be just noodling in my rocking chair and wondering if it’s time for afternoon tea yet.

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I will close this post with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. I almost hesitate to put it here, because if I really think deeply about it, perhaps there would be nothing in this space to read.

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.

Gandhi

Namaste, brothers and sisters.

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Pastures of Plenty, by Odetta

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It was the best of times …

jono55

Andy Borowitz is still out there seeing and telling it like it is (or at least as he sees it) Here is his latest.

Complicating Donald J. Trump’s plan to send troops to Chicago, on Tuesday thousands of National Guard members called in sick with bone spurs.
The White House was plunged into chaos after receiving over seven thousand notes from guardsmen’s podiatrists, sources said.
At the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed that he would get to the bottom of the bone spurs epidemic by enlisting the nation’s finest medical minds, including Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
“A sudden outbreak of this size is very suspicious,” Kennedy told reporters. “The most likely culprits are COVID-19 vaccinations.”

That is beautiful. Just beautiful. If he were here in Paradise I would hug him, even though I generally avoid those things like the plague. To me hugs are a socially acceptable form of assault.

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Finally – a break from the 90 degree-plus heat! I don’t know how to behave. Here it is mid-day and I am outdoors without a medical attendant and I am not pulling a wagonload of water bottles behind me.

Today I am reminded how summer once was, a season to be joyful and dancing and singing’s praises rather than cringing from it in fear and a double-slather of sunscreen.

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Sugar Magnolia, by the Grateful Dead, live at Fillmore East

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From The New Yorker

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Not one of you has asked me: “Hey, Jon, how is the psychedelic mushroom farm coming along?” So I will tell you, even though you obviously have no interest. First of all, I am growing small quantities of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, or shrooms. It’s not quite a farm, more like the smallest container garden you can imagine. Secondly, we have no plans to ingest these things in the amounts necessary to produce a psychedelic effect, but are microdosing to try something new in our approach to chronic pain struggles where standard methods have failed.

There is a lot of evidence, although it is largely anecdotal and sorely needs to be studied systematically, that many people are helped through this microdosing. Along the way if we inadvertently find ourselves in some celestial glade dealing with blue animals that eat from our hands and sing to us in Spanish, we will know that we are not in the land of microdosing any more and must retreat and reduce the amount we are taking.

That’s how it works, when it works. Anyone can buy the materials needed for mushroom culture online, but in only two states (Oregon and Colorado) can you legally grow shrooms for your personal use. But even here, try to sell the mushrooms to anyone else and you can be in trouble written large. Here’s a decent summary of the situation in our state.

So the basic rules here in Paradise are:

  • personal use has been decriminalized
  • selling them violates state law and fines or imprisonment could occur
  • you can share them with friends and family members
  • the physical space allotted to growing shrooms can be no bigger than 12×12 feet

My first crop was on the dismal side as far as quantity is concerned, but hey, so were my last couple of years with tomatoes in the back yard. If I were to describe my gardening skills I am not quite a black thumb, but I am more properly located in the “numb thumb” area.

Black thumb: This term implies a natural or notable inability to make plants grow successfully. 

Brown thumb: Similar to black thumb, “brown thumb” also signifies a lack of gardening skill and a tendency for plants to fail in one’s care.

Numb thumb: This is a more informal and sometimes preferred term for someone whose lack of success is due to a lack of effort or understanding, rather than a complete lack of skill. 

This is a photo taken from the web of a lovely crop of Golden Teacher shrooms, the species that I am presently fiddling with. At no time thus far has my production looked anything like this.

I am not too tempted to chomp down on a large mushroom to experience new worlds since I barely fit into this one. Remember, I was a practicing physician in the sixties, and was involved in the care of many who were having what was euphemistically called a “bad trip.” Three vignettes may reveal why I am reluctant to try them myself.

A young man is in the emergency room having been vomiting for hours and is moderately dehydrated. The nurse tells me that he has ingested some sort of mushroom. I ask if she has any idea what kind when a groaning voice from the man on the ER bed calls out “Amanita muscaria.” It’s not the only time a patient diagnosed their disease for me, but it was the only time that one did it in Latin.

In the middle of a deep winter night in the Upper Peninsula local police find a young man standing naked in a snow-filled churchyard and singing anti-war songs loudly enough to bother the neighbors.

He was admitted to hospital for hypothermia and being seriously out of tune. We never determined the exact species he’d eaten because not even he knew what he had been messing with.

One more young man who had sampled some shrooms was brought in in restraints by the Minneapolis police. His offense was to shout obscenities loudly and repeatedly on a downtown street and when the gendarmes tried to reason with him he became enraged and attacked them. They were having none of that, and thus the restraints. I was working a shift as an ER doctor and called the man’s physician of record. I reported that the patient was tied to a bed, incoherent, unable to have a conversation worth anything and asked the worthy doctor what we should do with him, expecting an order for a temporary protective psychiatric admission. I was surprised when his MD advised me to send him home and direct the patient to call the office in the morning and get an appointment to be seen. I sputtered in disbelief for a moment and said: “But doctor, the man is not in his right mind and will likely not remember anything we tell him.” The answer received was: “Put a note in his pocket.”

I hung up the telephone and called another attending physician who promptly admitted the unfortunate gentleman to psychiatry for a short stay.

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From The New Yorker

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The Wheel, by the Grateful Dead (Live at the Fox Theater)

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If we were only to read the papers to form our view of present-day American life, there would be an epidemic of razor blades and warm baths, I’m afraid. Because all of the news is dominated by one very poor excuse for a man. We are living inside of that perfect storm where all of the elements came together that were necessary to bring our democratic experiment to a halt. A pause, not an ending.

One of those elements is the media who have revealed their own weaknesses by utterly failing to give “equal time”to the stories of resistance, and to the excitement building in that largely uncovered sphere.

There are millions upon millions of brave hearts out there, and some of them write so very well. If you need something to brace a tired spirit there is no shortage of people to provide just that. One of them is a guy named Jack Hopkins, who put this piece together, and who frames the story in a way that fits better with what I encounter on the ground here in Paradise. I offer you a repost of his substack entry: Outlasting the MAGA Darkness. Right On, Brother Jack, right on. (I am sooo fixated in the Sixties … you’d think i’d be embarrassed).

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair“

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities

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Cry Havoc!

jono55

Let’s face it, folks. Elon and his junior partner Donald are no friends of America. What they are doing is what an invading army does when it takes over a country. Dismantling the government, then installing their toadies and sycophants into the spaces left behind after firing the people who knew what they were doing.

It’s hard to tell which one of these evil twins is the poorest example of a leader. They treat a great nation as a corporate raider would treat a chain of hardware stores they were taking over, blowing it up and then pretending they know how to put it back together.

Hubris describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning “to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people”. To arrogate means “to claim or seize without justification… To make undue claims to having”, or “to claim or seize without right… to ascribe or attribute without reason”.

Wikipedia

They couldn’t pull this off without the help of the Republicans in Congress. That batch of quislings must share the blame for every part of the ugly mess being created daily.

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Robin and I have slipped into a new pattern, at least for us. When we got together 33 years ago, both of us were coming off of unpleasant divorces (are there pleasant ones?).

One of the great attractions of a new relationship is that you have no mutual baggage. Every conversation is brand new, a fresh and exciting exploration of the other person. Our recent pasts were still so heavily filled with events involving our former marriages that neither one of us wanted to spend much time in those neighborhoods. So we didn’t.

Time flew and there were new memories being created almost faster than we could catalog them. But time eventually slows down, and now we are exploring parts of our histories before we met, one tidbit at a time. This son or daughter did this, when I was ten I did that … some of you may know how that drill goes.

But it has been really interesting to learn so many new/old things about someone I’ve been living with for quite a while now. Today we talked about lean times in our families of origin when bread and butter with sugar on it was supper.

A small thing. Not remembered as a hardship. Just two a decade and hundreds of miles apart who eventually would have a conversation at a supper table and realize yet one more thing they had in common.

Perhaps a photo of these nutritional victims would be in order here.

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In a recent post I spoke lightly about mounting the barricades if the need for revolution ever came. I may have been boasting. It’s a common practice of mine, as you may have noticed if you’ve been regular readers. Perhaps better to think of it as a metaphor.

These days if one puts up a barricade they will soon have a bulldozer in front of them and a drone behind, neither machine caring much about a man’s cause or well-being.

But there was a time when pure valor went a long way … this song from Les Miserables is of that time and is my favorite from the film.

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Today’s header photograph is labeled simply “Boundary Waters.” It’s been a while since I explained what that meant, so indulge me for a moment.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BW) is in northern Minnesota, and for many decades has for me been a place of beauty, mystery, and almost mythological significance. It is a million acres of forest, water, and rock. The only watercraft allowed within its boundaries are those that one paddles, primarily canoes with a few kayaks thrown in.

The BWCAW extends nearly 150 miles along the International Boundary, adjacent to Canada’s Quetico and La Verendrye Provincial Parks, is bordered on the west by Voyageurs National Park, and by Grand Portage National Monument to the east. The BWCAW contains over 1,200 miles of canoe routes, 12 hiking trails and 2,000 designated campsites. 

U.S. Forest Service

I have visited the “BW” more than fifty times. Some of those trips only involved driving to the town of Ely MN for a touristy visit, some to rent a lake cabin on its periphery for a few days, but most of them were to take a canoe along with a bit of camping gear and push off from an entry point to enter one of the few places left in the US where industrial life is shut out.

What to find there? Well, solitude, natural beauty, aching muscles, loons and their library of calls, occasional bears and wolves, rocks under your camping pad, blisters, and spiritual renewal. That’s just to start with. I used to go twice a year, but the Rockies are a long way from the BW, and the last time now was six years ago, when Robin and I took grandson Aiden for his first trip in. The header photo was taken when Robin and I visited in 2011, and was marked by very warm days, grand scenery, and occasional attacks by hordes of particularly bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

It’s a piece of America that requires something of the visitor, but is worth the effort ten times over.

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Genghis Noem

jono55

Things to feel positive about when each day seems chockablock with disheartening news.

  1. We are learning so much about our own country’s constitution through the efforts of those who are attempting to subvert it. Knowledge is power so that’s a good thing, right?
  2. While eggs at City Market now average above a daunting $9.00 a dozen, it means that chickens all over the country are now earning enough that they no longer need to work two jobs and can spend more time with their families.
  3. February is hump month vis-a-vis the weather. Get past it and we are coasting downhill into Spring, which is a swell time. Very swell.
  4. If you are reading this you probably don’t have the bird flu.

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Kristi Noem has been confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. While that is not great news for the U.S. as a whole (she has an unfortunate tendency to shoot creatures who displease her), within seconds of that confirmation we received a phone call from a lifelong South Dakotan who was so ecstatic to be rid of her as governor that her joy could not be contained.

Before she gained renown for blasting away at her pets and livestock she was already famous for mostly ignoring COVID in South Dakota and for getting herself barred from all Native American reservations in her own state.

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[Some people have an antipathy toward poetry. Perhaps it might help to think of a poem as sometimes serving as a hone, sharpening their senses and appreciation for what was already there in front of them. Here is one by a pediatrician/poet, written in 1921. ]

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Winter Trees

by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details 
of the attiring and 
the disattiring are completed! 
A liquid moon 
moves gently among 
the long branches. 
Thus having prepared their buds 
against a sure winter 
the wise trees 
stand sleeping in the cold.

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From The New Yorker

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On the subject of pediatricians (you didn’t know we were discussing them?), long ago I had a mentor named Henry Staub M.D. who I met only after my formal pediatric training was completed. Henry was a children’s physician, an ardent community activist, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. As a young man with Jewish parentage he, he had left Nazi Germany just in time to avoid being drafted into the army and thus discovered.

There is much of what I became in my own professional life that I took on from Henry by osmosis, but there were two sayings of his that I still think of frequently.

“The best doctor is the one that hurts the most.” On the surface this might seem paradoxical, but what he had observed was that there was a strong tendency to be “kind” to sick children, and for that “kindness” to delay discovery of sometimes serious illness.

For example, suppose that a child presented with symptoms that might be early signs of something really damaging. If the patient had been an adult, there would have been no question about doing the required but often uncomfortable testing, but in this case the physician decides to wait and watch for a while, to be certain that investigation is required since the patient is so young. However, in not wanting to cause pain to the small one the doctor instead sometimes hurts it far more by delaying diagnosis and proper treatment.

The second was a brief description of his own hypothetical professional journey, and was always told with a smile at the end. “I went into pediatrics because I didn’t like adults. After a few years, I didn’t like children, either.”

But Henry did love children, and was their constant advocate. Not for just those in his practice, but the larger community as well. A wise guy.

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“I heard a very good joke yesterday, someone said: ‘Musk is not a Nazi, Nazis made really good cars.’”

Stephen Fry

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Hypnotic. Beautiful. Don’t worry that you can’t understand the lyrics. No one can.

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I believe myself to be living in a revolutionary time, where many of my long-held standards and beliefs about my country are being dissected and discarded, their fragility revealed, the spider’s web of a platform on which they rested found to be riddled with gaps … easy pickings for the unscrupulous.

One one hand there is the thuggery and brutishness of MAGA, a collection of the benighted if there ever was one. On another hand there is the aging creakiness of the Democratic Party leadership, which seems unable find the laces on its Louboutins in order to tie them properly and so to get on with the people’s business. Yet another hand says a pox on both those houses. There are other “hands” as well. We may only have two official political parties but there exist oh so many constituencies.

One of those constituencies is the most influential of all, and that is that of the extremely wealthy. This one is actually more powerful than any of the parties.

In the old days (anything more than one election cycle ago) those people ran the country and the world but much preferred being invisible. These days the one percenters have not been not just taking blatantly more than their fair share of everything, they have used their fortunes to stack every deck they can get their hands on to perpetuate and increase their privilege.

Our history shows how easy it has been to pit us one against the other so that we would ignore their machinations. For instance, in our Civil War there were 620,000 deaths. While slavery may have been the spark that started the whole bloody mess, only a very tiny fraction of the men who died in either army had ever owned a slave. So why would a threadbare farmer from Minnesota travel a thousand miles to shoot at threadbare farmers in Virginia? What was their quarrel?

Who told them that taking up arms was the proper thing to do?

Guess.

So if there is a revolution coming, count me in. I may not mount the barricades as nimbly as a couple of days ago, but if nothing else I am more dangerous because I have good eyesight and less to lose.

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No Banker Left Behind, by Ry Cooder

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