As birds of the wild find our niches to nest in,
So do we of this world build our homes for to rest in.
As instinct drives our bird-friends to nesting,
So does our faith release us to Christmas in resting.
As our birds weave their nest and then fly into the sky
So shall we, as the angels, ascend by ‘n by.
“T’was the One in the manger who will one day receive
our lives in ascending . . . you just gotta believe.
Selah.
’T’was just a simple twist of irony
in this, our passing Presidents’ authority:
Our Veep who last election wielded gavel in the Senate
has now the Oval prize, as he did win it.
So now Ole Joe accepts the Vote of victory
as our 2020 he has won for all to see.
Yes, he who last time swung that Veepy gavel
will now to Oval Office travel
But now VP Mike wields that Veepy gavel,
as our nation strives ‘tween Presidents to unravel.
When in the Senate, Electoral votes are counted,
Will Mike’s gavel seal decision honestly accounted?
Will Mike wield our gavel to do the right thing?
Or will he abet a Trumpist uprising?
’Tis just a simple twist of fate we see
As Mike replays Ole Joe’s last Vice Presidency.
Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what the Lord had said to her.
Mary said: “My soul exalts the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior, because has regard for my humble state . . .
and I can feel it now. From now on all generations will call me blessed.
The mighty One has done great things for me! Holy is his name.
Hey! His mercy is upon generation after generation, toward those who fear Him.
He’s done great things!
He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones.
He has even exalted those who were humble, and He has filled the hungry with good things.
I was grieving our present situation. It’s gotten very messy.
Scrolling around landed me on a a blogpost from 2700 years ago.
The message looked something this:
Scrolling a little further through our human predicament brought me to a musical rendering of the scroll, which helped me to understand what is happening now and has been going on for a long time.
While I felt that we could not handel this present showdown, after hearing what these singers had to say about it, I felt like I could handel the mess a little better.
At one hour, and a half-minute, into this oratorio event, I discovered the musical rendition that helped me reconcile our sad situation.
Surely, surely . . .
he has borne our griefs, and our sorrows He carried.
Yet we him esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was pierced through for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities.
The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed.
All of us, like sheep have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way.
But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.
It all fell on Him, the one in the manger.
Politics is too much with us, late and soon;
We gave our governance to a buffoon.
This nation that sent our pilots to the moon!
But no stability in this circus do we see.
We fret and argue, and lay waste our liberty.
Yet tweets still boil up at all hours;
civility collapses like twin towers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
they think he hung the moon!
These delusions sho’nuff shred our hope.
We jez gotta find some way to cope.
Maybe cruise on down some river . . .
to set our torn-up hearts a-quiver–
and help get us back to our deep roots.
No drain no swamp, but hear some toots:
Yeah down that river where jazz was born,
We’ll hear ole Louie blow his horn!
In hard times such as we have now, we find a widening gulf between the Have-a-lots and the have-barely-enufs.
In our already Great American experiment, we have two political parties that represent the interests of their respective halves of this econo-politico pie.
Bleeding hearts who want to construct an egalitarian society advocate taxing the rich so the poor can have more to live on.
Capitalizing hearts want to construct a society that maximizes the capacity of each person/family to make their own way in the world without .gov interference.
Through the history of our already Great American nation, this dualistic system has taken various forms. The most obvious one is the political divide: Democrats v. Republicans.
During the hard times such as we have now, our public discussions extend multiple branches with multiple iterations of the haves v. have-nots scenario:
rich or poor, slave or free, capital or labor, white collar or blue collar, red state or blue, republican or democrat, elite or working, coastal or heartland, rural or urban, snooty or downhome, college or high school, privileged or taken-advantage-of, welfared or well-heeled, cool or square, labor or management, snarky or goodoleboy, stockholder or stakeholder, believer or atheist, episcopalian or evangelical, high or low, to or fro, shutup or don’tchaknow, come or go, ho chi minh or hohoho .
But in these hard times, as pandemic and economic conditions divide us, further separating our Left from our Right, the terminology becomes more intense, and potentially more vitriolic, as players in the public games fling forth a term such as:
Communist v. Capitalist,
which pertains to an economic system in which any particular citizen’s stake lies in their access and profiteering from the “means of production.” Which was, almost two centuries ago, the term by which Karl Marx referred to what we would call today our business-industrial infrastructure.
Over these last two centuries, that Communist v. Capitalist dichotomy has played out in many iterations, the most notable one being: United States v. Soviet Union, which later morphed to Cold War or Glasnost, East v. West.
In my lifetime, which began in 1951, I have observed with dread and curiosity as our World War alliance with the Soviet Union degenerated, incrementally into a worldwide Us v Them contest that initially pitted Capitalism v. Communism.
But by 1989, the big question got settled when the Soviet Union fell apart, yielding Russia and all those previously-satellite Socialist Republics, which were now sovereign countries.
In my humble opinion, that was progress. I think most of the world would agree with me.
Since that time, rhetoric surrounding these ideological issues and political divisions has been applied to our domestic politics at home.
When I was a kid growing up in the Deep South, calling someone a Communist was, without a doubt, an insult.
As the years rolled by, we generally fat ’n happy Americans divided ourselves quite peaceably into Democratic and Republican identities.
As we had so much prosperity during this lifetime, and most folks were pretty well taken-care of by the system, our terms for political insult went through some changes. In recent years, the term “Socialist” has replaced “Communist” because everybody knows that the Stalinist Communists screwed up terribly when they whipped up an oppressive gulag system, every bit as as destructive as the Nazi one with which Hitler and his crew of third reich thugs attempted to enslave the Europeans.
So now, in 2020 approaching 2021, amidst the debilitating covid pandemic and its consequent economic hard times, we find that the “socialist” insult is copiously applied by sore-loser Republicans who have been striving all year to slap what they consider to be a severely negative label on the Bidenesque Democrats.
Which is ridiculous because Joe Biden rescued the Democratic party from the “Socialist” path that Bernie and Lizzy might have taken. Haha! Just kidding, all ye progressives out there.
Furthermore, “Social” is not such a bad idea anyway. We’ve had enough of Republicans throwing tax-cut money at privileged folks in the upper half.
Let the Democrats see if they can even up the antes a little bit in this great grand experiment we call Free Market Capitalist Democracy.
Let ‘em throw money at poor people for awhile, like the New Deal did 90 years ago, at least so everybody can have a vaccination, a meal ticket, maybe even a place to lay their head on a cold winter’s night that is so deep, and maybe even have a job in our great 21st-century Re-tooling.
That’s better than giving the booty to the non-productive flash-cash AI-driven day-traders. We need to twist the arms of those day-traders . . . redirect the Treas-Fed-Market infrastructure so that Corporate coffers can get back to where we once belonged, capitalizing and enabling a new 21-st century industrial infrastructure of appropriate technology, sustainability and Earth-friendly Enterprise, enabling appropriate profits along the way.
A lot of this future distribution—be it capitalist or socialist—depends on what the big corporations do: whether they just direct their big profits into their shareholders, or can they find it in their hearts to cut a generous share of those profits into their other stakeholders. . . the workers.
So that .gov doesn’t have to do all the doling.
I was a kid growing up in the Deep South when we had three main TV networks. It was a different world then, and a different USA.
In retrospect, we baby boomers can look back on those hazy days and be astounded at the difference between our media environment then and the total-immersion we have now.
Back in those sepia-tinged days of 1950’s-’60’s, we had a funky little electric TV box in the living room. In the evenings we’d watch as Huntley/Brinkley, John Daly or Walter Cronkite deliver the news of the day to America.
It was a very fortunate arrangement for a bunch of kids growing up as the first generation in the history of the world to be raised with a boobtube in the living room.
Now we know that the world we grew up in has been changing at warp speed ever since, so that now we have . . .
. . . well, you know.
Somewhere between Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh there’s a widening e-space that carries those two and their loyal followers to two different worlds where never the twain shall meet.
This morning, Erick Erickson was lamenting the negative consequences of our diverging media; he was observing the habits of some friends:
“When all you consume is the media that tells you what you want to hear and all your friends believe the same thing you believe. . .”
Another outcry that I encountered this morning came from Joe Scarborough. In his Washington Post column, Joe lamented:
“ a conservative movement that would . . . identify itself by what it was not, define itself by the enemies it kept and occupy itself with an endless search for a lost America . . .”
Now we wake up to fractious times in our America. Some Texans are muttering about secession in the wake of Mr. Paxton’s pseudo-legal heist not working out in our Supreme Court.
And so now it has come to this: talk of secession.
It reminds me of when I was a kid in Mississippi. The governor, Ross Barnett used to mumble about secession when they were desperately trying to keep James Meredith out of Ole Miss.
And next door in Alabama there was George Wallace with his perpetual racist rant, threatening secession . . . while the good ole boys from Savannah to Susquehanna to Texarkana and on every backroad and MainStreet in between, sported “The South Shall Rise Again” plates on their bumpers.
But why in the hell is all this muck and mire oozing back in the wake of a measley failed presidential heist?
Our media done split all to hell. Everybody’s got their own little nook of opinionating drivel.
I really miss Huntley/Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, Erik Sevareid.
And I miss that howdy-doody world that used to be, and . . .
Walter Cronkite is dead, y’all.
Read ‘em and weep.
Where we go from here is anybody’s guess.
But my prayer is congruent with Abe’s at Gettysburg, that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
A lot of men and women bled and died for this country and we don’t want to screw it up now, at this late hour.
The world may still be depending on us to help keep this planet from being blown apart apart.
Serious stuff, y’all.
Whose election this is I think I know,
The Demmie Party’s on the Go.
Yet no one sees me grieving here
As GOP puts on the bully show.
My data AI must find it queer
that I blather neither there nor here
Between the donkey and the bull
In this deepstate dark election year.
They give their politics bells a shake
Each summons up their our-side snake
But I hear noise inside my brain,
so I’ll just lay me down low and fake
This year is swamped in politics so Deep
Yet we still have our dreams to reap
This trumped-up creep hath made me weep
But we have duties yet to keep.
with apologies to Robert Frost for what we have done to his quiet path of so long ago . . .
When in the course of American events, a Pennsylvania Lawyer petitions our Supreme Court to deny millions of Citizens their right to vote, simply because they voted by US Mail . . . and
When in the course of Electoral events, that Lawyer petitions our Supreme Court to prevent the tabulation, computation, canvassing and certification and finalization of Pennsylvania votes . . . and
When in the course of Political events, Representative Kelly accuses the State Legislature of violating the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania when they Legislated an Act to permit Mail-in Voting . . . and
When in the course of Judicial events, —— Kelly and his band of tRumpian lawyers accuse the Governor and the Secretary of the Commonwealth of conducting an illegal election because they enabled Mail-in Voting . . .
A decent respect to the Health of our Citizens requires that we should defend the Rights of all Pennsylvanians and correspondingly the Rights of all Americans to vote safely while social distancing through Mail-in Voting during a time of Voter suppression and deadly pandemic.
And when in the course of Petitions to our Supreme Court, one Justice Alito and his peer Justices of the Highest Court do consider the question of whether Mail-in Voting in Pennsylvania is Constitutional, or Not . . .
Then We the People do insist that, in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the Mail-in votes of millions of Pennsylvanians, then We solemnly petition the court to . . .
Require the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Summon all those Mail-in Voters and solicit their individual votes in a manner that satisfies their supreme Judicial requirements, to be conducted in a timely manner so as to permit their votes to be tabulated, computated, canvassed, certified and finalized by December 14, 2020, before our Electoral College meets on December 16.
And furthermore, if the Supreme Court finds such revised process to be for any purpose impractical or unworkable, that the Justices should allow the already tabulated, computated, canvassed votes to be submitted as Certified votes, to their Electors, so that We the People will not be denied our right to choose our President, Vice President et al and etc, instead of the Lawyers rejecting the decision of We the People on the basis of a strict-constructionist technicality prompted by the manipulations and smoke and mirrors etc etc etc of a self-obsessed president and an Electoral College institution born in the nascent 18th-century Age of our dawning Democracy by Founders who could not find it within themselves to go the extra mile and actually institute an Election of the the people, by the people and for the people. So don’t forget, Samuel, that God, in Whom We Trust, is still watching, even after all this time and 21st-century legal obfuscation.
This transition scenario working out between trump and Biden is hauntingly parallel to the transition between Hoover and Roosevelt, 90 years ago.
I hate to break it to ya; it will take a long time to get this national dysfunction worked out.
What we are headed for is a Depression.
There will be no quick fixes. Joe, Kamala and the Democrats are starting out hamstrung because of trump’s wrecking the .gov on his way out the door, which could make it worse this time than it was in the 1930’s.
Yeah, he’s draining the swamp allright, and the liquidity and the ripped-up safety net and everything but the kitchen sink.
I mean, back in the day, 90 years ago, Hoover was a pretty nice guy; his problem was just that he was clueless about the depth of the Crash problem and its utterly debilitating consequences. But this time, the incumbent is no nice guy. He’s a sore loser, a spoiled sport and he’s gonna take his big balls and go home because he didn’t get his way.
Meanwhile, America goes to hell in a handbasket. But he doesn’t care; he’s got nice digs to crash in. Man of the people? Who you kidd’n, mister?
As some ole guy sang somewhere back on the the tube. . . Mister, we could use a man like Joseph Biden today, hey! . . . or something like that.
But here’s the deal, or . . . the new deal . . . whatevah.
Americans will have to turn to each other for help, because .gov is broke, busted and your uncle Mitch and your aunt Nancy can’t be trusted.
We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert.
And yes, Virginia, there will be churches to turn to for help, because this is America and we got freedom of religion, which the Supreme Court has just reaffirmed, and we still got people of faith and they will rise to the challenge.
And yes we do, Roscoe, have socialists in our midst. Let ’em do their thing. Maybe they don’t wanna go to church. Maybe they wanna do an Occupy. Let ’em do itl Let ’em do it in the road, as Lennon said.
Just let us religious types do our thing. Maybe we can get back a little bit to that “they had all things in common” as in Acts.
But here’s the silver lining, Boobie, behind the cloud: We need to rebuild this American infrastructure and update it as we go.
You heard of the New Deal?
You heard of the Green New Deal?
We need to reconstruct American business, industry, and finance according to 21-century necessity for sustainability and appropriate technology. Maybe we oughta recruit Elon Musk. I don’t know. Where’s Nick Tesla when you need him?
Or Edison? Where’s Edison when you need him? Or Betsy Ross? Where’s Norma Rae when you need her? Maybe we need a Harriet Tubman. We may need a Kamala Tubman.
Underground Railroad Rides Again
Now is the time for all men and women of goodwill to come to the aid of our country.
Don’t be lookin for no handout; it may never come.
Be lookin for something that needs to be done, and do it. If you’re expeditious, or maybe just lucky, you can finagle a way to get paid for it.
And that’t the way it is . . . 2021.
Sorry, America, Read ’em and weep. Or look around and reap.
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