The Word Hoarder
My 99-year-old mother lived through the Depression and World War 2 and possibly the War of 1812 (hard to say, she has a fantastic memory for things that never actually happened) and as a result learned to “make do” so she can’t ever throw anything away and when I pulled one of her many many cardboard boxes filled with papers and documents off a shelf and said, “Let’s go through this” in an attempt to cut down on the clutter, the first item I picked up was a pink slip for a 1925 Ford.
Not having seen any 1925 Fords on her property in the last 60 years, I felt confident that we could at least throw that one piece of paper away, but she said no, she’d have to look at it first and didn’t feel like looking at it right now this minute possibly because she can’t see for shit and it would be like Stevie Wonder taking a gander at your Form 1040 right before you send it to the IRS.
OK, so big laughs at my mother’s expense (no worries, if you recall that last paragraph, she can’t see for shit so she won’t be reading this) and if you’re in need of a broken rubber band or three inches of dirty string or two swallows of sour milk – she doesn’t believe in sell-by dates either, possibly because she can’t see them – she’s got you covered.
But recently I started going through my saved Word documents to see what was on them and realized I had developed at least one of my mother’s traits:
I’m a word hoarder.
Lots of ideas start out strong, but then dry up or I get interested in something else so I save the partially-completed essay because you never know when you’ll need a partially-completed essay along with two swallows of sour milk and some dirty string and then forget I ever started it and today is yet another of my many attempts clear some of this crap off my laptop and we’re going to start with…
Things You Shouldn’t Say On Social Media
“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”—Donald Trump post on social media.
This quote is often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (another megalomaniac with delusions of adequacy) and it’s a really dumb thing for anybody to say, much less somebody who got shot in the ear by a disgruntled American. If Trump’s would-be assassin thought he was saving his country from a dangerous demagogue, would Trump be OK with it?
John Wilkes Booth thought he was saving his country.
The January 6th rioters though they were saving their country.
The 9/11 hijackers thought they were saving their country.
Currently, lots of people think the USA is going to Heck in a Handbasket and as much as some of us don’t like Donald Trump, it doesn’t give us the right to do anything we feel like doing and you’d think a guy who missed being assassinated by about three inches would agree.
News Alert: Two Wrongs Do Make A Right
After I wrote about affirmative action a reader sent me an email that said two wrongs don’t make a right which is a highly convenient belief if you’re a White male and you’re the one who wronged somebody. “Hey, my bad on those 246 years of slavery, but giving a minority that night manager job I had my eye on is totally unfair.”
Also…
That’s a bullshit saying because we live in a society where we firmly believe two wrongs do make a right: commit a crime and we send you to jail, cheat somebody and a jury might make you pay damages and invade Poland and don’t be surprised if the 101st Airborne comes calling.
As anybody who has raised kids can tell you: actions need to have consequences and if he never suffers for his bad choices, your bratty kid might grow up to be the 45th and 47th president of the United States.
My Conspiracy Theory Theory
Semi-recently I wrote about conspiracy theories and the people who believe them and the New York Times had a list of wild theories that had believers and one of them was the theory that more than one person was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
One of the reasons conspiracy theories gain traction is because some of them are real.
And when the New York Times says believing that there was more than one shooter involved in the JFK assassination is just another looney conspiracy theory, I think they hurt their case more than they help it.
If you watch the Zapruder film, you can see JFK get hit from the front and to his right (the grassy knoll’s location) and if you try to tell me I didn’t actually see what I just saw (and there are people willing to give that a shot) then I’m going to think you’re lying and if you’ll lie about that, why wouldn’t you lie about Jeffrey Epstein’s incredibly convenient “suicide”?
If you tell me COVID-19 started in a wet market and I believe you (and I did) and then later everyone pretty much admits it actually started in a lab and the less said about that the better, why would I believe you next time you try to explain something?
Some conspiracy theories are real:
Operation Paperclip did falsify records so Nazi scientists could come to America and work for our space program.
The Tuskegee Experiment did pretend to treat syphilis in Black men so they could see what would happen if their syphilis went untreated.
The CIA’s MKUltra program did secretly dose Americans and Canadians with LSD and then interrogated and occasionally torture them.
The CIA did assassinate people.
The CIA did secretly control members of the media (man, I’m sure writing C-I-A a lot) and by the 1950s had 3,000 media members churning out CIA propaganda.
The FBI’s COINTEL program did infiltrate political organizations and do everything it could to discredit them.
Operation Northwoods was a CIA plan to attack and kill innocent citizens and soldiers and blow up ships and hijack airplanes and blame it on Cuba so we’d have an excuse to invade and when JFK heard about it, he rejected the plan, which is one of the reasons some people think the CIA was behind killing Kennedy; he wouldn’t let them do all the batshit crazy things they had in mind.
When the government does sketchy shit and lies about it (and our government has done a lot of sketchy shit and lied about it) and then the truth eventually comes out, it makes people think they can’t trust the government so maybe Area 51 is hiding the Starship Enterprise and they were injecting us with tracking devices when they asked us to get immunized (although I know that one’s crazy because we’re already carrying tracking devices—our cell phones—and we’re the ones paying for them) but that Starship Enterprise thing starts to seem entirely possible.
Project 2025
That was the name of the Batshit-Crazy-Nazi-Wanna-Be Term Paper put together by a bunch of right-wingers imagining what America would look like if they ever got put in charge which scared the crap out of people who don’t have mental issues and a Nazi memorabilia collection, but when then-candidate Donald Trump was asked about it, Trump said he hadn’t read it.
Which coming from Donald Trump is actually kind of believable; Trump clearly hasn’t read the US Constitution either.
Whenever Trump gets in trouble for being in bed with the Proud Boys or the Project 2025 authors or the Corleone Family, Trump claims ignorance which in his case is easy to believe.
At the point Trump was asked about Project 2025 he was trying to distance himself from a manifesto that sounded like a dictator’s blueprint, but Google “is Trump following Project 2025 so far?” and you get led to an article by Forbes which quotes the leader of the group who wrote Project 2025—Oberfuhrer Paul Dans—who describes Trump’s agenda as being:
“Beyond my wildest dreams.”
If you want to read the details and where Trump has followed the Project 2025 agenda and where he hasn’t, here’s that link:
Seven Hours of Oliver Stone
Two of my three sons have podcasts and apparently I might as well be engraving these essays on stone tablets because I don’t have one—yet—and one of those podcasts is about movies and a while back the movie-podcasting son watched the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s NIXON (213 minutes) and suggested watching the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s JFK (205 minutes) first, a clear indication that my son enjoys serious movies and has way too much time on his hands.
Do the math (215 plus 205, add an hour for Daylight Saving’s Time and adjust for inflation) and that’s 420 minutes of movies which is seven hours of movies or—as I like to think of it—4.67 action movies starring The Rock or Jason Statham or, if at all possible, The Rock and Jason Statham.
And the only thing you’re going to learn from those Rock/Tham movies is it is theoretically possible to jump a sports car between two skyscrapers and punch people in the head repeatedly without causing them brain damage or breaking a bone in your hand.
BTW: If you’ve never been in a serious fight and want to know what punching someone in the head actually feels like, find a bowling ball, wrap it in a bath towel, wind up and punch the shit out of it.
And after the emergency room doctor sets the fifth metacarpal—the bone between your wrist and pinkie finger and breaking it is called a “punch break” because that’s the bone most likely to snap when you punch someone in the head and, yes, I’m speaking from experience—and they put a cast on your hand, you won’t be able to do much but watch movies because like a dummy you probably used your dominant hand to throw that ill-advised punch.
So the lesson here is; don’t hit people in the head, it’s barbaric and causes damage to everyone involved so wise up and if at all possible, kick them in the nuts.
I also wouldn’t advise trying to jump a hi-powered sports car between two skyscrapers, but if you’re going to ignore me and do it anyway, leave a comment and tell me when and where you plan on making your attempt because I wouldn’t mind watching that.
OK, so now that we’re done with things you shouldn’t attempt, here’s what I got from watching seven straight hours of Oliver Stone movies.
1. Kevin Costner should never take any role that requires him to attempt an accent.
2. People who think things have never been worse than they are right now need to think about that.
Not that things aren’t extremely bad…they are…but whenever someone says things have never been worse, I like to remind them we had a Civil War which killed around 698,000 people and the Oliver Stone movies (despite their flaws) reminded me that things have been extremely tense between Americans a lot more recently than that.
Student protesters were getting shot, Civil Rights marchers were being sprayed with fire hoses and having dogs set on them, politicians were planning burglaries and assassinations and those are just the things we know about.
None of which excuses what’s happening now, but it’s good to remember we’ve been through extremely tough times before and still made it to the other side.
Time-out For An Update
Everything you just read about how bad things were in the 1860s and the 1960s was written months ago and now things are going batshit in LA and Trump is making them worse and escalating the conflict and let’s not forget when people rioted on January 6th and fought the cops, Trump called them “patriots” and said January 6th was a “day of love” and pardoned them, so we’ll have to see how bad this gets, but I’d still like to think we’ll get through this bullshit too and if I’m wrong please bake a cake with a file inside and mail it to whatever reeducation camp I’ve been sent to.
But first I’ll try to make the case that I thought I was saving my country so I didn’t break any laws and if that doesn’t work, I’ll make a run for it in my mom’s 1925 Ford.
Hang in there, everybody.
Thanks, Lee! You juggled reality, fantasy, humorous snark, and kindness all in one piece! I’m sharing with everyone I can. And yes you should have or be part of a podcast.
The book “Sapiens” reinforces the point about people who claim that things have never been worse. In a nutshell, “they’re wrong.”
Warning: “Sapiens” could take 7 hours to read.