Living Behind A Mask

I was going to title this “What’s it like being an atheist in the hyper-superstitious US Midwest?” but that was too long and the title I chose answers that question in a nutshell. For the majority of my 76 years, I’ve had to waste far too much time idling away the minutes after some arrogant nutjob mutters “Let’s pray.” One of my fondest memories of living in southern California for almost 10 years was that never happened one single time. Midwestern faux-Christians might squall about the “godless heathens on the left coast,” but I’d just call that good manners. I found no shortage of religious people in southern California, but for the most part they were not particularly fragile types who required me to pretend along with them to maintain their faith.

If you are a superstitious Christian tribalist/primate-trooper, you might imagine that Californians are harboring “deep feelings of fear and guilt from a sinful life and turning [their] back on God,” but you’d be as nutty as usual. It’s impossible to “turn your back” on an omniscient imaginary friend, for one thing; if he’s everywhere that would be physically impossible. But, mostly, the Californians I knew were incredibly hard-working, talented, and driven people who were trying to live their lives as best they could.

Before the Reagan Revolution did its permanent damage to the California education system, the highest percentage of adults I’ve ever known were taking night classes at the community colleges and the many University of California facilities, working one or many side hustles, trying to improve their neighborhoods and communities, and enjoying the best weather and recreational opportunities in the country. The mega-churches were still stuffed with Midwestern robo-people, but it wasn’t hard to find people who had useful things to do. Outside of a few marginally civilized cities, the Midwest is nothing like that. And I lived in Orange County, the L.A. area’s most conservative nuthouse! The more rational parts of the state are even less infected with delusional Christian cults.

What it’s mostly like living in the Midwest, especially in the burbs or rural areas is lonely. It’s also scary because the one thing the followers of “the prince of peace” are best known for is intolerance and violence. Humans, like most other primates, are a herd animal. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and monkeys live in “troops.” Although orangutans are mostly solitary animals, just watching freeway traffic will make it pretty obvious that humans are inclined to pile up in tightly packed herds, even when we are going nowhere. Put generously, we’re a “social animal,” more honestly we’re a herd animal easily spooked into following the lead steer over a cliff.

All religion is about producing conformity, but Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions and cults are about forcible conformity. So it is entertaining, at best, and incredibly disappointing, more accurately, to hear someone whining about atheists asking some sect of the Christian cult to behave at least marginally-legally and morally. The US version of Christianity has been as ruthless, ethnocentric, racist, and self-centered as any cult in the history of humanity. That is not to imply that Christians have behaved particularly well since the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned the first edition of the Christian Bible and invented Christianity in 330 CE.

The fact that the majority purporting to be Christian (representing 68% of the US population) could be terrorized by the miniscule 4% of the population representing atheists should be hilarious, but it is mostly disturbing. Christianity is a religion based on conformity of thought and speech, not necessarily actions. From simple observation, it is clear that those Christians are so shaky in their faith that they require universal conformity to cling to their fragile beliefs. As one academic author explained, “The Church so fiercely opposed heretics, i.e. those who did not conform to the articles of faith that they espoused, because they believed that their existence threatened society and would undermine the Church.”

So, those of us who aren’t terrified by our mortality and gave up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairies and angels, demons and fire-breathing dragons, and other imaginary terrors are forced to try to be invisible in this fading empire of superstition, kleptocracy and capitalist feudalism. I have lived in western Kansas, north Texas, rural and urban Nebraska, urban California, suburban Colorado, urban and rural Minnesota and the only place I felt I was safe without my constant mask of anonymity was California. If I could have afforded to stay there, I would still be there. Nobody moves to places like everywhere-else-I-have-lived because they want to be there. If we all had the necessary skills, motivation, and drive to be in California, we’d be there. We pick lessor places because they are easier, the competition is less fierce, the standards of performance are practically non-existent in rural areas. That makes the place where I currently live less demanding, but far more lonely.

Hitting Critical Mass

When I was young (from about 12 to 30), most of my reading was science fiction for two reasons: 1) SF was heavily frowned on by 1950s and 60s western Kansas local book censors, parents, and other guardians of intelligence and too-much-knowledge and 2) the best of SF made more sense than the conservative version of magical Christianity surrounding me. One story, above all of the others, that has stuck with me for more than 60 years is The Marching Morons, by CM Kornbluth, published in the 1951 April edition of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine which you can read for free as a reasonably well reprinted eBook here. By today’s standards, it is a fairly politically incorrect story, but the basic concept is still accurate, as explained by one of the few intelligent people left in this dysfunctional future to a recently-cryonics-revived, childless, 20th Century real estate agent/con man:

"Very well. Mr. Barlow, I understand you and your lamented had no children.

"What of it?

This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized child-bearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damn-fool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!"

"As far as I can see," said Barlow, "you're running down the best features of time. Are you crazy?"

"The rockets aren't rockets. They're turbo-jets—good turbo-jets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilometer is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they're going two hundred and fifty. The cities are ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who'd be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside.

"We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

Today’s post-2024-election political and social climate seems to be making Kornbluth seem like a farsighted genius. Other than the obvious 1950’s racial nonsense (“the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers” who he probably intends to mean non-white people), for the most part Kornbluth is talking about rural goobers. Rural parents tend to have more children, although some “analysists” like to call this a liberal vs conservative tendency. That, of course, avoids the blatant worldwide education level variances between urban and rural citizens where, for example, “15-year-olds studying in urban schools in 37 countries outperformed rural students by roughly the equivalent of one full year of schooling.” In the US Midwest, what passes for K-12 “education” is filtered through the racial and superstitious biases of parents and other uneducated small town power brokers. In the US Southeast, if something has to be explained with words that contain more than two syllables it’s considered to be too dangerous for young children to learn.

The fact that a low-brow,convicted felon/rapist, fraudster character like Donald Trump is a viable candidate for anything other than an asylum or prison is right out of The Marching Morons. In the 2024 US Presidential election, 76,917,041 marching moronic cult members (50% of the votes cast) voted for a convicted felon (34 felony convictions), who had been successfully sued for rape, who not only illegally retained top secret documents after he lost the 2020 election but carelessly passed many of those documents to the nation’s enemies, and has a lifelong history of criminal business practices and business incompetence. That should be impossible to believe, but in 2024 it is the state of the nation’s intellectual decay. In 2024, half of the nation’s voters are ethically, morally, intellectually, and politically corrupt and incompetent. Thanks to consistently stupid rural voters and the usual assortment of mentally lazy and racist urban voters, Trump and his merry band of fascists are in control of the United States of America. I think we’ve hit critical mass of stupid. It’s all downhill from here.

Across the nation, stupid people are taking control of local education systems, taking control of local education systems, dumbing-down everything from science, civics, history, and even language programs. Stupid people are getting themselves elected to local and state government offices, partly because stupid voters are making public service a miserable experience, not worth the sacrifice for anyone who is qualified to do those jobs or motivated to do those jobs well. The whole nation is sliding into becoming a shithole state like Florida.

The fact that rural military veterans have gone for the Russian-owned Trump disaster that shouldn’t be a surprise either. Only about 3% of enlisted military personnel become college graduates and officers. Almost none of the officer candidates from the past 50 years have come from rural areas. Even with all of the education and advancement opportunities, the overwhelming majority of enlisted military members only “reach the rank of E-4 (Specialist or Corporal depending on the branch) before leaving the military.” That is in spite of the fact that “almost all officers (99%) have at least a bachelor's degree, and 42% have advanced degrees” while “only about 17.2% of enlisted military personnel have an associate's degree or higher.”

It’s safe to say that after rural kids have managed to crawl out of the stagnant life they left, get a college degree, become an officer and experience that life, damn few of them are going back to the farm or small town America. After leaving any branch of the military, officers tend to live in or near urban areas where they can take advantage of their experience and education economically and socially. Which leaves most of the grunts to resentfully crawl back to rural America and the menial labor life they left; bringing their PTSD, entitled and uneducated dissatisfaction, their tendency toward violence, their meth, alcohol, and synthetic heroin addictions, and their racial prejudices with them.

The Marching Morons was about the outcome of hundreds of years of down-breeding and the resulting collapse of society as more and more people are unable to comprehend how anything in the culture works and fewer and fewer people are stuck with those critical tasks. Sooner or later, there will be a backlash from the people who can “pull the pin” most effectively.

In 2020, when I was surrounded by dumbasses who believed both that Covid 19 didn’t exist and that it was engineered by China, I often asked, “You don’t know any engineers, do you?”

After listening to the moronic drool that passed for their answer, I elaborated, “When engineers design a pandemic it won’t kill a pitiful 3%. Nature does that kind of sloppy work. Engineered diseases will not only kill 97% they will target their victims to specific genetic characteristics.” For example, there are several known genetic markers for a variety of undesirable human characteristics. A well-designed pandemic virus would aim right at that group, which would solve 99% of the world’s current problems (which are all human creations).

Jokers on the Left, Clowns on the Right

For a short time in the late 60s I was heading toward being politically radically left. I’d participated in several anti-Vietnam War rallies and marches and was a member of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization (although I was not an SMU student). I’m not ashamed of any of that and, as far as it went, I was on the right side of history and morality. The downtown marches were usually ended by the marchers being beaten by cops and rednecks. After one of those episodes, I was sitting in the downtown El Centro College student cafeteria, watching the detritus and fallout from the chaos outside. I’d been hit a few times, mostly by thrown beer bottles and cans, and glancing blows from enraged and terrified cops’ nightsticks, but I was young and indestructible and, mostly, unharmed if disappointed. Up to late-1968, I’d been under the delusion that my fellow US citizens were decent people who were just misled by bad information. The violent and irrational opposition to Vietnam War protests were eye-opening and I would never be that optimistic again.

As I was watching the chaos, another young man I knew from the SDS meetings sat down beside me and pointed to an armed and armored cop on the sidewalk a few feet from our vantage point and said, “I can’t wait till we’re in charge and they have to be afraid of us.” In that moment, I realized that the difference between the far left and the far right was insignificant. 50 years late, when I expressed that view to a good friend, his response was, “The left isn’t usually as violent or destructive, don’t you think?” We ended our discussion there, but I think it’s just a matter of degree rather than a real difference. Right or left, if you go far enough in either direction you end up circling back to the same practical point: jokers on the left and clowns on the right, both meeting at the same point of stupidity.

In the last 40 years, I’ve been disappointed by folks I once thought were on the side of the Martin Luther King’s hope, quoted often by President Barak Obama, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." After 2016, I have given up entirely on what I would define as the “far left,” which is not at all the people Trump and the fascist far-right would label “far left.” They do not, in any way, understand the concept of baby steps, which is how all change happens. They want it now and on their terms, just like their fellow-nutjobs on the far right.

Irrationality and magical thinking comes at us from the far, nutty ends of both sides. Damage-wise, I don’t see enough difference between the two to make it worth my time to parse out the left-right advantages. They both work hard to sow discord, disbelief, and distrust in our democratic institutions (media, education, government, and community) and neither offer anything constructive to take their places. Thanks to both, we are now at a point in the decay of the American Empire where we are on the cusp of destabilizing the entire human world for the interest of argument. I don’t see an easy way out of this mess. In fact, the more I learn about the plans of the 2025 Trump Administration, the more I expect the future to be bleak.

You Are Right, I Hate Trump Voters and Everything They (and He) Stand For

I bet you don’t hear this a lot outside of your rural or suburban Fox/NewsMax echo chamber, but you are right. I absolutely despise people like you. My father, an east Kansas farm boy with an accounting degree from a small east Kansas teacher’s college, was commissioned as a Navy lieutenant in 1943. He and five other young men sailed an LST from Virginia Beach to North Africa, then to Italy, and, finally to Normandy, France. He was about as poorly-suited to command a ship as any person alive in 1943. He’d never been in a canoe or more than knee-deep water before stepping foot on to his first LST. I don’t believe he could swim.

He was a shy, introverted, pacifist, Christian man who spent the last 60 years of his life coming to some kind of grips with the horrors he saw fighting people just like you: incompetent, under-achieving, racist, angry, entitled, hateful, small men with poor self-esteem and a love of power and violence. When the US military was mopping up the remains of the German army in North Africa, he and other Americans discovered US-made Bendix (an Indiana company partially owned by General Motors) electrical controls in German vehicles. In Italy, he participated in a landing where he witnessed the results of a fascist controlled country. At Normandy, he watched most of the 200 Marines ,who had crossed the Atlantic with him in that small ship, cut down by German machine gun fire when the bow ramp dropped. He developed a life-long dislike for his own country-of-origin, England, when British LST captains dropped their bow ramps, stopping several hundred yards short of the landing target and forcing US soldiers out and into deep water to drown or be helplessly shot down. So, he and other US LST pilots and sailors humped the que and his crew made two more trips back to the Normandy beaches, to prevent British officers from uselessly and cowardly sacrificing American soldiers. (I’m sure you empathize with the British officers, can’t you? Why should they risk their lives for Jews, liberals, gays, people of color, and other “weak” people who aren’t like you? Hitler and his fellow fascists hated exactly the same people as you.)

After those experiences, his tour of duty was over and he was supposed to ship back home, but every ship he was assigned to was redirected to the Pacific war front. There is a famous picture of the U.S. Petrof Bay narrowly missed by a Japanese Kamikaze pilot. In the background, there are a half-dozen members of an aircraft gun crew looking on helplessly as a Mitsubishi light bomber splashed into the ocean a few yards from their guns. My father is somewhere in that picture. Dad used to, humorously, point out his spot in that crew and point out where he was hiding when the plane missed his ship in a Navy coffee table book that ended up on a bookshelf in my bedroom when I was an adolescent.

He was messed up for the rest of his life from that experience. Always a shy and introverted man, he struggled against his inclination to crawl out of sight and became a high school math teacher and coach. My mother was responsible for a good bit of his drive and success, but she died when she was 34 from cancer and he barely managed not running away and starting over after remarrying and overwhelming himself with three more children and a hysterical, prescription drug addicted second wife.

When he was in his 70s, I’d drive from Denver and, later, Minnesota to west Kansas and chauffeur him to the NCAA Junior College basketball championship tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas every March. His eyesight had failed and he lost his driver’s license due to multiple accidents. We made that trip for about a dozen years before other infirmities made travel impossible for him. Those trips where when he opened up to me about his WWII experiences and the damage those experiences had done. PTSD wasn’t a thing in 1945, when he came back to Kansas to finish his education, start a family, and find his first teaching job.

Mostly, he was an absent father spending the hours from his last class until the rest of us were in bed sleeping “grading papers” by himself. At 9-years-old, I learned how to heat cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli or spaghetti and meatballs, clean the kitchen and dishes after my younger brother and I ate, run the clothes washer and dryer or hang them out to dry in the warm months and fold clothes (badly), vacuum and pick up after the two of us, and be a latch-key kid until he remarried and our lives really went to shit with two, then three, more kids in the house and an angry, hysterical step-mother to try and avoid as much as possible. On one of those basketball trips, Dad told me that he’d often sit in his car in the garage, listening to the screaming and turmoil in the house and imagine what it would be like to “just drive away.” But he didn’t and, instead, I left home between my junior and senior year of high school and lived in a 1-bedroom trailer with a friend and paid my bills with income from our band, odd jobs, and getting by on eggs and chicken our landlord sold wholesale.

There are only two moments that I can remember where Dad actually demonstrated some of what must have kept him going on that LST. Once he stood up to a trio of high school bullies (loosely defined as “high school” because at least two of them have failed so often they were nearly 20) and once when he opposed the teacher’s union. Otherwise that large, fairly fit but overweight, athletic man was as timid and reclusive as anyone I have ever known, if I can claim to have known him at all. From those conversations we had while traveling, I learned how broken WWII had made him. From reading authors like Studs Terkel, William Shirer, William Manchester, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Drury, Tom Clavin, and several others, I know a little more about those experiences and the men who fought to prevent fascism from sprouting its evil wings in the world and, especially, in the United States where people like you desperately wanted to imitate their hero, Adolph Hitler.

And, now, we stand exactly where my father and unwilling soldiers just like him stood in 1941, but we’re on the losing side. Post-WW2 right wing bureaucrat, George Kennan, wrote in 1948, "We have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Since Truman, the Republican Party has been devolving into a group of rich men (laughably self-defined as “businessmen”) who have worked to further the goal of preventing “the raising of living standards and democratisation.” Trump voters have finally given them everything they want and, like Hitler’s sponsors, those rich and powerful (mostly) men are now going to do everything they can to destroy the faint echoes of American democracy and put the 99% into servitude and poverty. They have been working toward that goal since long before the Civil War and, in fact, that goal is exactly what the Civil War was fought over.

I don’t use the word “hate” often or casually. I dislike all sorts of people and things, but I reserve “hate” for those that I truly despise. The weak Americans who are terrified of “wokeness,” whose own sexuality is seriously challenged by gays, lesbians, and, especially, transgender citizens, who pretend to be Christians or Muslims while behaving like amoral predators, and the lazy, entitled white men and women who want a “strongman leader” to justify their own failures are despicable and deplorable and, yes, I hate them. It takes that kind of motivation for most of us to get out of our comfortable lives and make the sacrifices necessary to go to battle with evil. Evil is already filled with hate and ready to make victims of everyone outside of the cult. I am not willing to be a victim without a fight.

When You Can Fool Enough of the People All of the Time

Wednesday, a writer I usually enjoy, Jeff Tiedrich spontaneously labeled what remains of the United States as"Dumbfuckistan" and provided a new continental map; much to the outrage of many of his readers who could claim their state barely voted for Kamala Harris although many-or-most-most of the congressional elections went for the stupid candidates. Tiedrich’s new national identify label came from a 2016 book titled, Welcome to Dumbfuckistan: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America. And that is definitely who we are today and, most likely who we will be for decades to come.

Sadly, Jeff’s map is more accurate than the AP’s presidential results indicate because in the other state results from California to Colorado and New Mexico to Minnesota the congressional results masked the inner stupidity of the rural and suburban areas (i.e., Minnesota’s Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fishbach, and Pete Stauber, Colorado’s Jeff Hurd, Lauren Bobert, and Jeff Crank, and Virginia’s Rob Wittman, Jen Kiggan, John McGuire, Ben Cline, and Morgan Griffith, all 2016 election deniers and MAGA Republicans). The re-elected incumbents were some of the most incompetent and laziest of the most incompetent and lazy congress in our pitiful national history. (If you do a search on “laziest congress in history” you’ll get a collection of MAGA editorials titled “Is this the least productive congress ever? Yes, but it’s not just because they’re lazy” you’ll get three Google pages of articles listing several lame excuses that would get any normal person fired for incompetence.)

I've seen this coming since the 1960s. A country stupid enough to elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, G. W. Bush, and Trump, twice each, it's pretty damn dumb. But Trump is somewhat worse than all of them and he doesn't make any pretense at being decent, competent, or in any way interested in preserving that infamous "American way of life." And more than half of the voters loved all of that and fell for it like starved fish in a stock tank. And this is after the few reputable people from the first Trump administration had the courage to warn their own voters that Trump is a fascist, is incompetent, and a generally vile human being, Trump’s 34 felony convictions, and the fact that when presented with Trump and Harris’ polices, the before the election, “voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.”  “Stupid is as stupid does.” As Heather Cox-Richardson pointed out, “An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: ‘We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.’” In other words, a buttload of stupid, lazy people.

Abraham Lincoln may or may not have said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." What he left out is that you only have to fool enough of the people all of the time to do whatever damage you have in mind. The necessary ingredient for that magic formula to be true is stupidity. I am not using the word “stupid” carelessly. For a lot of years, my definition of that word has been the one detailed by Professor Carlo Cipolla in an essay titled “The Basic Laws of Stupidity”: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” That definition perfectly describes the tribe of culters known as “MAGA Republicans.”

And the 2024 national election was a point where stupid people in the former United States of America hit critical mass of stupid people. If that XY graph is too complicated for you, here is a simplified, cartoon explanation that might meet your intellectual requirements. The stupid category is on the lower left quadrant where an angry nitwit intentionally crashes into a ladder where a worker is laying bricks, causing a brick to fall on the stupid fucker’s rage-fueled, but otherwise non-functional head. If that is too complicated for you, you are beyond help. And if you voted for Trump and the MAGA crowd, you are definitely stupid. Most of the actual MAGA politicians, with a few exceptions, are in the lower right quadrant: pirates: where they are somewhat-to-very-intelligent, but intend to do harm to the rest of us. That group rarely does much damage to the “harmless” crowd because they are not infected with entitlement and greed and are always opposed by the “intelligent” minority. But in fascist environment, the intelligent opposition is the first to go against the wall and that has been true since the first largely-stupid  tribe selected a pirate leader throughout history.

And, now, here we are, Dumbfuckistan led by a pack of MAGA pirates diving stupidly into fascism with empty heads held high and happily dismantling 250 years of bursts of random steps forward and lots of stupid steps backward. We have reached the critical mass of more than enough people who can be fooled all of the time, a corporate controlled national media more effective at delivering misinformation and propaganda than anything Moscow or Beijing ever dreamed of producing (because the citizens of Dumbfuckistan willingly pay for their misinformation), and all the elected branches of the federal government controlled by the tools (and fools) of fascism. I don’t see any way out of this mess without violence, luck, and outside assistance and none of that is visible anywhere on the horizon. So, as Jeff so accurately wrote, “Welcome to the United States of Dumbfuckistan.”

Known by the Company You Keep

You voted for a known con man awaiting sentencing for 34 felonies. You knowingly ignored the fact that those convictions were decided by 12 citizens who risked their lives to ensure that no American is above the rule of law. You have no integrity, no decency, and no values that can make up for your flaws. You voted for a man who was convicted for raping a woman, again ignoring the courage of a jury of whom half were selected by Trump’s lawyers. That is a clear statement of who you are, man or woman, and how little you care for a woman’s safety and her right to exist as an equal. Russia, especially Vladimir Putin, obviously exerts significant influence with Trump and every investigation by both the House, Senate, FBI, and CIA confirmed that. But you have no interest in US national security, do you? That certainly defines who you are in many ways. Trump is a known conman and incompetent “business man,” but his flaws and failures are just yours inflated to an international level, aren’t they? Robert Reich has cataloged “The 101 worst things about Trump’s shambolic presidency,” saving me the trouble of making a similar list. None of that is hard to find or verify, but you don’t care do you?

When I was a kid, when the sun was tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet, a common parental warning was “You are known by your friends” or ““You are known by the company you keep.” Supposedly the origin of that saying came from Don Quixote, “Here, quoth Sancho, the proverb hits right, Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are. If your worship keeps company with those who fast and watch, what wonder is it that you neither eat nor sleep while you are with them?” You are known by the politics you follow, too. For the last dozen years Trumpers have been given slack with a collection of lazy, unobservant excuses: they don’t know better, “they are hurting,” the education system failed them, liberal elites don’t pay attention to their problems, and the list is inexhaustible. And it’s bullshit. I’ve lived among the people who voted for Trump for all of my 76 years and they are, as Hillary said, deplorable. They are lazy, uneducated by choice, emotional and anti-intellectual, timid and terrified, selfish, greedy, violent, and will be just as happy marching in uniforms toward any target they are aimed at as they are sitting in their living rooms cowering from the blue glow of their televisions. You can always identify them by their deep-set scowls and angry fear.

Another author did a fine job of pointing out the error in imagining there is some kind of thin shell of evil over mostly-decent Trump voters, “If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.”

Back in 2012, another Republican Trump-enabler, Rick Santorum, admitted, “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Santorum was talking about intelligent, decent people in the media, but he was also right in the broader category of who fascists will never have on their side. Smart people rarely tend to also be treasonous, self-serving, uneducated, and gullible. Don’t get distracted by professions or degrees, as the 2nd of the Five Basic Laws of Human Stupidity clearly warns us, “The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.” For example, 2022 Minnesota Republican Governor Candidate Scott M. Jensen is a Chaska, MN family physician. A “doctor,” right? But a really bad doctor whose own patients and other Minnesota physicians warned Minnesota voters that Jensen was a nutjob. Not only was Jensen an anti-vax nutjob, but he also over-prescribed opioids to his patients while pretending to be outraged at other physicians’ use of their “prescription pads.” Doctor, yes, “smart person,” not so much.

In my Rat’s Eye View blog, I have pointed out the many flaws in considering a collection of so-called professionals “smart” since 2007 and much of that early material came from my initial attempt to create a business management consulting website in 1999. From engineers in every profession to medical doctors to every sort of executive (government or business) to scientists and the arts, stupid people abound.

But even if they are a small minority of humans, there are 8 billion of us littering the planet and some of those humans are very smart. So smart, in fact, that I have often suspected our species is about to snap off another evolutionary branch. Those people have now witnessed inconvertible evidence that Trump voters are deplorable, unredeemable, dangerous fascists. Those very smart, very talented people are out there running every complicated aspect of modern life. They are the physicians, scientists, engineers, and public servants who once thought they were working for some “greater good” who now know the greater good would be to let nature take its course more often than not.

The deplorables will be unable to contain their glee at this most recent victory. They will self-identify without fear, loudly and proudly. When they need the services of the intelligent minority, I hope they see increasingly overwhelming obstacles. One million medical professionals left the field during the Trump covid massacre, either through death, retirement, or career change. There are few replacements in the supply chain and, regardless of Trumps delusions, far fewer foreign physicians from his designated “nice countries” will be interested in immigrating to fascist America. “Smart” doctors will gravitate to decent communities and rural America will continue to be abandoned. Trump will accelerate that by demeaning the sacrifice necessary to become a medical professional and directing even more resources to “unearned income” such as his tax breaks for the rich and vulture capitalism. More and more clinics are facing doctors nearing retirement and insisting on “no new patients” while new doctors quickly reaching patient capacity and being unwilling to accept a work load that demeans their profession and endangers the patients they have. It turns out that no matter how much you pay an equity capital anointed hospital executive, nitwits who majored in “business management” don’t know anything about healthcare and are nothing more than a grossly overweight albatross dangling from the neck of doctors and nurses. Medical professionals have less trouble immigrating to “nice countries” than any other group.

When Trump and his nepo-imbeciles are done privatizing NOAA, US climate scientists will largely be out of the business of formulating climate models so that a few of Trump’s corporate buddies can use the fragile remains of that agency to sell weather predictions to other corporate interests. You can safely assume that climate-impacted areas will continue to see insurance companies divest from home owner insurance and other government-regulated obligations, while Wall Street gamblers use that same data to short those same areas based on insider weather information. We saw a surprising number of US “smart people” move across the border to Canada in the first Trump regime. Vancouver is a hotbed or US techie immigrants and Toronto is the “New New York” for tech immigrants from all over the world.

So, revel in the fact that you “broke the system” for as long as that euphoria lasts. The problem with breaking something as complicated and intertwined as the very fragile United States of America is that you will never see anything like the country you broke again. A surprising portion of every state in the nation wants their state to leave the union. Trump’s election may mollify the non-productive, dependent red states, but if they leave the country won’t be nearly as effected as if the blue states jumped ship. Most of us wouldn’t miss Alabama-Mississippi-Arkansas-Louisiana-etc if those sad pieces of real estate disappeared into the earth’s core. Economically, they are all nothing more than a burden. Be careful what you wish for. There is no coming back from this sad victory. You have made it clear who you are, both by your actions and the company you keep. You will never again have the “fellow Americans” trust of the people you desperately depend upon. Once that bond is broken, it can’t be repaired and you are totally unprepared for the consequences. And there will be consequences.

They Aren’t New

In 1967, I’d about played out my rock & roll pipedreams and my father and step-mother had confiscated my coerced “college savings” (US Savings Bonds compulsorily taken from my paper route earnings as an 11-through-13-year-old plus a couple years of summer farmhand work) and written a $5,000 check (about $47,000 in 2024 money) to a fly-by-night for-profit (is there any other kind?) Texas “computer school.” I was deposited, with $100 cash to tide me over until my first after-school job’s paycheck, in a Dallas flophouse that the school pretended was a “dorm.” I was barely 19 years old. Lucky for me, there were several other Kansas students/victims in the “dorm.” After a few nights of cowering inside our rooms with furniture stacked against the doors to keep the roving drunks out, we found a house to rent together.

That turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement because the oldest-and-wisest of us (a very low bar to exceed) decided to to back home to Lawrence, Kansas and finish his accounting degree at the University of Kansas. Soon afterwards, the next-sophisticated of our remaining quartet of Kansas bachelors decided to move to rented room in a house across town. Not wanting to be stuck paying rent for the guy who had broke up the study-band, I followed the twins and rented a single-car garage apartment behind the house they were renting. Calling that room “an apartment” is a huge compliment. It was nothing more than a tiny room with a camper-style “bathroom” and a single-burner stovetop, sink, and micro-refrigerator kitchen. It cost $10/week, which was all I could afford with $10 going to rent, $10 going to school tuition, $10 for food and transportation, and the rest to taxes and other uncontrollable expenses on a $50/week income. So, when I got the occasional invitation to a free meal, I always took it.

My new across-the-driveway neighbors were the first people I had ever met from Alabama. They rented the entire downstairs apartment, with a quartet of kids, and were the “apartment managers.” They were also the worst people I had ever met at that point in my life: with Confederate flags, racist posters and KKK memorabilia, and swastikas on their walls. They had invited me to dinner one evening and, when I entered their apartment, I was immediately struck with so much radical-right artwork that I thought it was some kind of sick joke. I must have stood in the backdoor way for several minutes, staring at the horrific, nightmare  interior of that living room.

I was mostly stunned throughout the evening. I am often stunned into incomprehension by the vile behavior I have witnessed from my “fellow” human beings. But that hadn’t happened so blatantly in my previous 19 years. For the next three years, my bar-of-expectation became lower by the experience on a constant and relentlessly disappointing interval. I was exposed to poverty at third world country levels. I was exposed to racism, brutality, corruption, and unexpectedly selfish and vile behavior. Dallas was a real college-of-the-streets experience for me. I thought I had seen some bad shit, worse than most people ever experience, before Dallas, Texas, but life was just getting started with me.

Meeting the two twenty-something people from Alabama was the beginning of what formed my increasingly low opinion of human beings. Up to then, I had never experience overt, hateful, racist people. Probably lots of discrete variations of that theme, but these folks were not even a little bit shy about flauting their hate. Today, November 5, 2025, many Americans (the good ones) are stunned to learn how awful their neighbors and countryfolk (sadly, and certainly not “fellow” countryfolk) really are. This election is a repudiation of every professed “Christian value” I ever heard on my way to atheism. This election voids 248 years of spoken, if not acted upon, traditional liberal values of equality, equal opportunity, decency, fairness, civil responsibility, patriotism, obligation, and gratitude.

As a friend wrote this morning, “Welcome to Ameristan. Manipulated by affirmation---and that’s a wrap on the US as we’ve known it.” We can never go back to anything resembling the country most of us thought we were building. From here out, everything will be different.

Fooled Again?

Today’s big left issue is Biden’s “collaboration” with Israel and Netanyahu’s Gaza-and-beyond expansionist war. Lots of voters, who might be Democratic voters, are abstaining or tossing their votes into the sewer for alternative “candidates” in protest. It struck me that they are likely falling for one of the oldest Republican tricks in the Treason Book.

Republican far-right politicians have been pulling off red-herring voter scams using treason as a tactic since before our involvement in WWII. The Foreign Agents Registration Act that ensnared Paul Manafort was a byproduct of that period. Disinformation was a pretty common weapon in their toolbox, too. The 1940’s America First Committee propaganda organization included several congresscritters, including Representative Hamilton Fish III (R-NY), who used congressional franking privileges to publish and mail disinformation to their constituents. Lucky for the world, they were unsuccessful; back when the US empire was likely at its intellectual peak.

Skip forward to 1968 and Republican candidate Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger and Anna Chennault to Paris to sabotage President Johnson’s desperate attempt to end the Vietnam War. Liberals and middle-of-the-road voters were conned into imagining that Nixon’s “Secret Peace Plan” actually existed. Back then the Soviet Union was afraid of Republicans and they were pressing North Vietnam to participate in the peace talks. Nixon’s tactic worked and he buried the nation in war debt, that is still unpaid, and corrupted the federal government. American democracy took a series of hits from Nixon’s Republican gangsters that set us up for the next treasonous Republican regime; Ronald Reagan.

Now it’s 1980, and President Carter is entangled in the Iranian Hostage Crisis; another marginally significant event that captured more attention than it was worth. There is substantial evidence that William Casey, who would become Reagan’s CIA head, and Joseph Verner Reed, who was Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco, negotiated with the Iranians to hang on to the hostages, 52 US diplomats, until after the election. Later, that turned into the Arms-for-Hostages payoff that established Reagan’s “Teflon President” credentials.

Now, it’s 2024 and President Biden, and Vice-President Harris, are tangled up in Netanyahu’s war on Gaza’s civilians and Netanyahu’s desperate attempt to stay out of jail (like his parallel in the US, Donny Trump). As Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in 2019, “There’s not much daylight between Netanyahu and Republicans, at least Republican elected leaders.” When President Obama was attempting to apply some leverage on Israel in 2015, Netanyahu’s speech to the Republican congress was both an insult to Obama but to the intelligence of the United States citizens. By 2015, US “intelligence” was in such decline that at least half of the country received the insult as a compliment.

There is absolutely nothing about the herd of Republicans, in either the House or the Senate, that should inspire confidence in their honesty, decency, or patriotism. If you don’t think that Netanyahu is talking, regularly, to Mike Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and everyone who will listen in the Trump campaign, you are a gullible fool. These clowns would sell out their own mothers for a reasonable bid. Sadly, what remains of the US investigative “press” has been co-opted by Republican billionaires and it could be a lot longer than it took to uncover the details of Reagan’s treason before we learn about today’s misdirection.

Most Americans, including the so-called “educated” left, don’t know how our government works. They imagine that the President has ultimate power to direct aid, the military, and civil service. Even Donny whined (surprise!) about how little power the President has to wreak things and get his way. If Republicans want to sabotage Biden’s attempts to end the Gaza invasion, they have a more than willing accomplice in Netanyahu. Netanyahu has zero interest in stopping his war because, if he does, he’s in the same kind of corruption legal mess as Trump. It’s a long term bet, like 10 years, but I’d bet $100 that, eventually, we’ll learn Republicans are encouraging Netanyahu to keep up his invasion and illegal war until, at least, after this election.

Fixing the Left Coast’s Taxation Inequality

The Left Coast—California, Oregon, and Washington—are grossly under-represented in the US federal government.  “The coastal counties in the United States are home to almost 40% of the country's population (50M people), even though they make up less than 10% of the land mass.”  Those three states make up a huge portion of the US economy: In 2024, "California is once again the sixth-largest economy in the world.  If you add the GDP’s of Washington and Oregon, California would surpass the United Kingdom to become the fifth-largest economy in the world."  In 2023, California's GDP was nearly $3.9 trillion, making it the fifth largest economy in the world for the seventh year in a row. California's GDP growth rate was 6.1% from the previous year.  Oregon's GDP was $318,884B a slight increase from the previous year, when the state's GDP was $254.71B.  Washington's GDP was $807,864B.

In 2023, the federal government collected $4.44 trillion in total income taxes. The residents of California paid over $234 billion in federal personal income taxes in 2023. That's about 15% of the national total, and nearly 95 times as much as paid by residents of Vermont, for example. Washington paid $44.2B in personal income taxes and Oregon paid

This is just a partial list of the dependent states (only the top 10), but it’s pretty obvious that the majority of freeloaders are Republican states. Even some of the so-called “Blue States,” like New Mexico, are geographically red states, they are mostly rural and the rural, uneducated, and gullible areas are solidly Fox/NewsMax territory. Sadly, that is also true for the Left Coasts’ rural areas in the eastern portions of the states.

But, imagine if those Left Coast states quit paying those billions of federal taxes and invested that money in their own defense systems, infrastructure, economic development, education systems, and world trade. The rest of the US would suddenly be buried in its national debt (currently at more than $34T) with no functional economy with which to repay any part of that mountain of paper. Skilled immigration to California, especially from Red States, would likely blossom into a massive brain-drain from the remainder of the US.

The rising price of real estate would purge even more of the economic losers from the states to the massively dependent and unproductive Mountain West. About 40% of California’s homeless were born in other states (or countries) and the new Left Coast nation would be under no reasonable obligation to support them. As of February of this year, “of Californians feel they'd be happier if their state was no longer part of the United States.” The threat of suffering another episode of Trump is a driver, too: “"If Donald Trump is elected, the number of people who think California should become its own country will undoubtedly go up in California," Michal Strahilevitz, a California business professor, explained. "If Joe Biden is reelected, or really anyone other than Donald Trump, the number is unlikely to go up and may even go down. As in many blue states, most residents of California are terrified of another four years under Donald Trump." Another overthrow of the popular vote by the Electoral College could be the event that really trips this trigger.

It is not inconceivable or impractical. The flame-throwing MAGAots like to imagine they are brave patriots, but when they are asked to support themselves and be responsible for their actions they will be like their “fearless leader” Donny and bankrupt themselves and their futures. We could be in for an ugly, exciting future.

Public Education’s Purpose

Most of goober/rural and suburban America is in a brainless anti-education trance in 2024. Like my current hometown, this movement is disguised by code names like “Moms for Liberty,” the “1776 Project,” and other quasi-patriotic sounding names echoing similar Brownshirt movements from 1936 Nazi Germany. These Soviet-patriots are even using the same fascist tactics to harass and threaten board members. I’ve been here before and it wasn’t pretty. In the 1950s, in many school districts, the Christian-right and other generally uneducated and superstitious deplorables were so terrified of evolution and science education and what it might mean for their easy money that they dumbed-down public education to “readin’, ritin’, and ‘ritmatic.”

Then came Russia’s Sputnik and the whole half-witted portion of the country freaked out and started buying bomb shelters. The US military discovered that what passed for “scientists” and “engineers” from the majority of public schools were barely able to mechanically manipulate a slide rule, let alone do complex calculations with that device. So, the federal government and states tried a variety of mostly-unsuccessful tactics to crank up US education standards. And religion, as usual, freaked out and fought back. Mostly, what that accomplished was creating education ghettos across the country. In California and the Left Coast, where higher education was publicly-supported so strongly that anyone who could support themself and could afford college, produced high-tech idea generators like . Places where religion was dominant, like the Midwest and Southeast . . . not so much. The end result has been economic deserts where poverty, ignorance, and social and economic inequality are accepted norms.

Public education is not and should not be intended to support and promote parental “beliefs.” Good parents, probably about 1-10% of the breeding herd, hope their children will be smarter, happier, better educated, and more competent than their parents. Awful parents are jealous of their kids’ successes and terrified that their children will grow up to realize their parents are clueless, arrogant, entitled morons. As a friend recently reminded me, the purpose of public education, though, is to provide society with citizens capable of making intelligent decisions, supporting themselves and their families, adapting to changing technology and new information, and promoting the improvement of the culture. That is the ONLY reason that “childless cat ladies,” other taxpaying childless adults, wealthy people who can afford to sent their children to private schools, and seniors can be rationally required to pay for public education.

The only way a culture can provide that kind of public education is by supporting schools that protect teachers from idiot parents, regressive school boards, incompetent city management or school administrators, and that pay teachers enough for them to make the sacrifices necessary to be good teachers. In most US public schools, the starting salary for teachers is almost half of that for police and fire employees. If a country wanted to make a strong statement of values and priorities, that is about as blatant as it gets.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing about “public education’s failures.” What needs to be said loudly and often is that parents are failing their children and the conservative cowards are failing the country. (Remember, the word “conservative” means “averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.” There is nothing courageous about resisting change since change is an inevitable variable of life.) George Washington wrote, ““The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.” That was not a statement from a conservative, but someone who understood that change is a constant and a scientific “experiment,” such as democracy, has to be adaptable and constantly evaluating the outcomes of that experiment. Without a high quality public education, independent of politics and corruption, a society will quickly evolve into the kind of tyranny that the United States was designed to resist.

Pet Calculus

NOTE: I wrote this rant the day Luci was dying, at the end of August. Then, it sat in my computer waiting for either exposure or deletion. Since I still miss my big guy and his death still stings, I went for exposure. So, I swapped the current verbs for past tense and shipped it.

In late August. I watched another of the many pets we have survived suffer the end of his life. Like our last cat, we had Luci (short for “Lucifer,” a character in one of Ms. Day’s favorite cartoon series) for about a year. He was a shelter cat who suffered a lot of unintentional abuse and misery in his life before us. We don’t know much of this story, but his previous owner, an older woman, died in her house/apartment and her body wasn’t discovered for several days. Luci wasn’t discovered in the house/apartment for an unknown but extended time after she had been removed. When a company was hired to empty the property, those folks found him grossly overweight (he’d opened a large bag of Purina Cat Chow and helped himself) and his long black fur was matted into dense dreads. A police officer delivered him to the shelter and while he struggled, he did not bite or scratch her. Our best guess was that he was a Norwegian Forest Cat or very close to that. Depending on the season, he weighed between 16 and 18 pounds and it was all muscle. He weighed closer to 30 pounds when he was brought to the shelter. His fur was so messed up that he had to be sedated and shaved. After all that, he was in a tiny cage in the shelter for more than 6 months before Ms. Day decided to adopt him.

When we brought him home, he was a mess. He was terrified, disoriented, and still never made the slightest attempt at lashing out from fear or anger. He would struggle to get away from us, but never using any of his formidable weapons: 1” fangs and claws nearly that long. For a big cat, he could hide incredibly well. It was several months before he would willingly be touched, but slowly he began to sit beside me while I wrote in my corner of our dining area. Ms. Day says we bonded because we both come from train wreck histories. All my life, I was the black sheep of my family and Luci was, literally, a black cat. We are both introverts, easily overwhelmed by people and situations. He always fled whenever I would grab a guitar, so he had far better musical taste than me. He was a shop cat, there was nothing he liked more than to relax in our work areas while we work.

But he was on his 3rd urinary tract infection in less than 3 months. He battled through the first two, but the last one was his last. There is math involved in living with a pet, especially one you unwillingly become attached to. The area-under-this-curve is the pleasure you derive from their lives vs the pain you will suffer when that ends. Ms. Day says she looks at their short lives as “brief, beautiful flowers.”

I have outlived so many people and animals in my 76 years that I do not have the emotional resources to do that again. When their lives end, I am stuck with wishing it was me and not them and feeling like my heart has been ripped out. Nothing about the brief time I had with them compensates for their loss. Fuck “better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.” I can see how that philosophy could work with “beautiful flowers,” but not with a living, thinking, responsive being that had become my friend and, even, family. As you can see from the chart above, the area under the “misery” curve is substantially greater (longer and deeper) than the brief pleasure of that life, if the life is a short one. And the fact is clearly that we suck at keeping cats alive and healthy.

These are awful times in history and, particularly in this country. Half of the country is unable to tell fact from fantasy; and they are proud of that fact. I am incredibly tired of being disappointed when I discover someone I once thought might be a decent human being is a Trumper. I try to keep a sense of humor about the decline and fall of the United States, but it is hard for me not to look at the sky and hope for a planet-killing asteroid. The way we have chosen to kill ourselves is going to be slowly, painfully, stupidly and sadly and I’m not up for that.

It is embarrassing and unrelentingly painful how much I miss my big, beautiful, black cat. It has been more than a month since he died and I still catch myself hoping to see him bounding around the kitchen when I wake up, trying to get me to let him outside on his leash to watch the sunrise and the life in our backyard. I miss how he would hug me, with no claws involved, when I’d pick him up to carry him outside or bring him back in at night. I miss his silent presence. I miss him sleeping, purring loudly beside me in my office while I write. I miss his undeniable sense of humor and intelligence.

The pets we’ve lost in the past 3 years have given me an appreciation for the wild hope that there is an afterlife. I, honestly, have fewer than a handful of humans who I’d like to see after death, but at least a dozen beautiful, soulful animals have passed through my life and I can almost imagine an eternity with them that would be pretty fantastic. 

When people ask “If you miss him so much, why don’t you get another cat?” my answer is “I don’t want another cat, I want Luci.” Irrational, I know. Even delusional, I suspect.

None of This Should Have Happened

   Luci (short for Lucifer)

Last year about this time, we had yet another pet die. (We are. apparently, the place to send animals you want to see dead and buried.). It was heartbreaking because that cat, Diva, was a one-in-a-million animal who actually reconvinced me that I liked cats. One of the many disadvantages of living in a rural area is that, usually, all forms of healthcare (for humans and animals) is pretty dismal. We’ve been lucky because, so far, the Mayo Clinic has a facility in our town, but our luck with veterinarians has been more typical: as in dismal. We lost one cat, two years ago, due to repeated episodes of urinary tract blockages and insanely expensive and ineffective treatment. That cat, who was a pretty poor representative of the feline species as a pet in every way, Ms. Day had named “Doctor Zogar.” And I called him “Stinker” (to give you a hint about his personality and our relationship). After his demise, Ms Day didn’t give up and adopted another shelter cat almost immediately. A year later that cat, Diva, died after even more money spent and even worse diagnosis and totally, grossly, embarrassingly ineffective “treatment.” Being charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for ineffective pet medical care is the epitome of “adding insult to injury.” Ms. Day is a dedicated cat-lover and after a few months of going cat-less, she decided she needed another cat. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with either the decision or another pet. I’m still not clear on how Ms. Day convinced me to go along to the local shelter to look at cats, but I may forever regret that lapse in judgement.

She’d done some due-diligence, came up with some selection criteria and, after one really poorly-chosen attempt, had it down to three possibilities. Her main criteria, after Diva who was small and fragile from the start, was that our next cat needed to be strong and tough enough to survive. A large, long-haired cat the shelter had named “BB King” was the obvious answer. We felt the name was inappropriate and Ms. Day renamed him “Luci” (short for Lucifer) after a favorite character in a Netflix cartoon series.

Luci had been a middle-aged woman’s pet until she died in her home and went undiscovered for several days. After her body was removed, it was some time later before the house cleanout service came to remove her belongings from the home and discovered she had a cat. Luci had, in the meantime, clawed his way into a large bag of cat food and had eaten his way up to nearly 25 pounds of fat, upset, matted and dreadlocked cat. A cop delivered him to the shelter where he had to be drugged and shaved to untangle his matted fur. Then, because of his size and appearance, he was stuck in a small cage at the shelter for more than 6 months before he attracted Ms. Day’s attention.

I think, because of his sad and traumatic past, he was cautious, fearful, unsure of how to live in a house with people, and yet he was “a presence.” We are not sophisticated cat people. Ms Day loves cats and, mostly, I tolerate them, but neither of us are particularly alert to what's going on in a cat's head; me least of all. I guess it should be some sort of consolation that our local shelter doesn't know much about cats either, because we didn't get squat for guidance from them. We brought him home from the shelter, let him loose in the house, and he promptly disappeared.

For a large cat, he could find an incredible number of hiding places in an 1100 sq ft house. His first disappearing act was behind my office computer. This is not a neat area, with lots of cables, usually a stack of bills, and many other things that could be easily knocked over or disrupted to expose his hiding spot. Never happened. Because he was so careful and sure-footed, he went for days only coming out to eat hiding behind that computer.

 That was clearly not Ms Day's intention for having a cat. She wanted someone to cuddle up with on the couch, a companion. I can't, of course, speak for Luci, but I think he just didn't want any more awful stuff to happen and he was keeping his distance until further notice.    

Having spent 6 months in a shelter, the only food he was familiar with was the cheapest Purina Cat Chow. And, maybe, that was the only food he had eaten with his previous owner because that was the only thing he would eat. So, using food to entice him into expanding his behaviors wasn't a useful tactic. The only tool we had was to wait and see what kind of animal he would turn out to be.

After doing a little reading and some internet searches, I learned that the right move would have been to put Luci in a small room and let him become comfortable with that space. We have a small bedroom, that Ms. Day uses as a dressing room, and we set that up for a cat. He quickly settled in and spent most of his days on a couch looking out the window into our backyard. It didn't take long until he appeared to be looking forward to us visiting him in that room. After a while, we left the door open and he started exploring the house and us.

Ms. Day is not particularly patient. So, she started bringing other cats in from the shelter to see if they would meet her needs. The first one was a noisy, super irritating male cat that made me start to look for a camper and another place to live. Turned out he was sick and he went back to the shelter. Ms. Day is nothing if not relentless and she brought another cat home. This one was a small, noisy, but very friendly female cat. That cat moved into the room where we had tried to acclimate Luci. Which, of course, meant he could no longer go there. And things went downhill pretty quickly from there.

I will never be able to explain how this happened, but, somewhere in that period, Luci and I made a connection. Especially in the winter, I like to get up before the sun, make a bowl of cereal and fruit and coffee, and head to my computer and write. Lucy started sitting on the couch near where I would work and overtime he moved closer and closer to me. Eventually, he was sitting close enough that I could easily reach over to pet him and hear his gigantic purr. When her territorial acquisition tendencies forced me to give up my spot in the corner of our sunroom and move upstairs to ride, Luci moved with me.

When spring arrived, I started to spend those mornings on our back porch and trained Lucy to come out with me on a leash tethered to our clothesline. It took him almost no time to learn to put up with the tether for the opportunity to be outdoors. He and I spent hundreds of hours quietly enjoying each other and that space. Ms Day developed something between tolerance and love for Luci because of his and my connection. He was never "her cat," but he certainly was our cat. But, in many ways, he was my first pet. Every other animal that has come into my life, was brought and kept there by someone else, usually Ms. Day. As for cats, way over 3/4 them would have been out in the cold in minutes if it weren't for Ms. Day or our daughters or grandkids.

Ms. Day deserves a lot of credit for putting up with Luci. We had serious behavioral problems with him, particularly in his territorial marking of the spaces the second cat had taken up. And, in retrospect, he probably had urinary tract problems right from the beginning. Most of the time, he was absolutely house trained, but there were instances where he tried to “reclaim” (as in piss and crap all over) that small bedroom and even our bed. The first time he marked our bed he almost ruined it. But Ms. Day helped clean up the mess and tolerated him for me. We did not, by the way, work out what was going on until after Luci died and in our grief looked back to evaluate those moments.

We had experienced another cat, only a few years ago, going through the rapid decline of a urinary tract blockage and having been raped-and-pillaged by the local vet for well over $1,000 in failed "treatment." When Luci clearly started showing those symptoms, we tried to treat him ourselves (as the local shelter often did for similar reasons). His first bout was serious and with warm baths, for which he had to be sedated, massage, and diet he came out of that one as strong as ever. But, a little more than a month later, those symptoms returned and we tried the same tactics. It seemed to have worked but, after we had been gone for a day visiting friends, when we returned he was well past the point of no return.

We spent almost all of his last day together. The weather was kind to us, slightly cloudy, mild temperatures, with enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes off. Luci loved the yard and our house and as the day went I moved him back and forth from his favorite places to another. There is a spot in one our gardens, under a clawfoot bathtub on a bed of Moss where Luci liked to watch birds. He spent most of the day there and I sat on my swing chair a few feet from him making sure he had water and something to eat. He didn't eat but he did drink. Late afternoon he started to crawl from that spot towards me on the swing chair. I picked him up and he wants to be held. So, for the first time, I brought him back to my swing chair and we sat together on the phone for almost an hour. He tired of that and struggled to get up, so I brought him inside and laid him on a towel below the couch where he spent so many hours watching birds in a feeder I had made for him. And that's where he died.

Luci, the strongest, quietest, least demanding, most gentle friend an introvert ever had was dead. I buried him in a spot behind our backyard, next to Gypsy and Diva. I have put so many hours of love and enjoyment into holes in that spot that I can barely walk by it without breaking down. When Gypsy died, I planted four small Cedars in that area as a memorial. I maintain it like a more intelligent person might maintain a cemetery.

Cleo, the replacement cat Ms. Day found to satisfy her cat needs, was a total territorial bitch to Luci most of the time. Anytime he made an attempt to approach her, she would hiss and swat at him, but now she wanders the house looking for him. She used to sleep on the corner of our bed, guarding the bed as if it were her private territory and making sure he knew he was no longer allowed there. Now, I find her sleeping in his old spots at night: the "cat shelf" or on the pad I laid out for him on my electronics parts bin in the basement, my upstairs office chair, the wicker chair he used to like the claw on the back porch in the morning, or the couch with a bird feeder view. All of Luci’s old hiding spots.

I am not going through this again. I loved the animals in my pet cemetery, but there is something wrong with me that obliterates the memory of all those good times with the pain of losing them. Our house and yard was haunted for months by my memories of Gypsy, when she died, then Diva, and now Luci.

Someday I will stop looking for Luci whenever I see a dark shadow in the corner of the house or the yard. Someday, when I get stuck in a spot in my writing, I will stop automatically reaching out with my left hand to pet him for comfort and inspiration. Someday, I won't wake up at 5:00 in the morning, looking forward sitting on the back porch watching the sunrise while my giant cat pounces bugs in the yard and terrorizes squirrels. Someday, when I see some walking their little dog, I won't think, "My cat could beat up your dog." But I will never want to go through this pain again. I am 76 years old and Luci was barely five. I expected him to outlive me by several years. If I had the option, I would have split my remaining years with Luci in a heartbeat. We have friends who have nearly 20-year-old cats, but cats rarely live beyond five or six years with us. We are clearly not a good home for cats and I don't have the temperament to grow attached to them and watch them die.

 

Another Valuable (expensive) Lesson

In late 60s, Ms Day and I lived in Dallas, Texas. We were poor, but didn’t know it and we mostly got by surprisingly well considering that we were totally on our own as kids (me, 19 & she, 17) in a big city. We’d financially “graduated” into being car owners in 1968—a nondescript German import brand that no longer exists—that looked a lot like a tiny hearse. .As usual, Ms Day decorated it to look like a vehicle the Munsters or Adams family might own. While I was driving to a meter reading route (I worked for the Dallas Water Department) I was t-boned at an intersection by a lady driving a new model Cadillac. Our car and a lot of my savings were totaled as a result. The German hearse was unrepairable and our friend/mechanic had a great deal for me; a barely used 1959 MGA that an Air Farce guy had been keeping in storage for several years and was looking to unload for $500. What I knew about cars, auto mechanics, and car maintenance could have been extensively documented on a single side of a page with double-spaced, large type print.

The MGA was a very attractive sports car with some of the most ludicrous attempts at engineering in human history. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been saddled with a worse car for that time and place. The picture, at left, is pretty much exactly the POS British crap that I owned, color and all: 4 cylinder, 1489 cc, 108 BHP (79.488 KW) @ 6700 RPM, cast iron block with an aluminum head, dual SU carb, twin Lucas distributor, 4-on-the-floor manual transmission, rear wheel drive, two-seater convertible, wire wheels and all. That summer, Dallas was hitting some record high temperatures and the postage stamp MG radiator wasn’t even close to up to the job; resulting in multiple blown head gaskets. (A good reason why that generic MGA picture is next to a pond.) Couple that with the twin carbs and distributors that needed moment-by-moment adjustment or they’d slip out of tune and set the freakin’ wooden floorboards and air filters on fire, and you have a formula for sudden bankruptcy and lots of stranded moments in weird Dallas neighborhoods (the only kind of Dallas neighborhood).

By the time I gave up on the MGA, my hard-won savings went from more than $3,000 (Almost $28,000 in today’s money.) to the $500 I received from the sucker who bought the car from me. When he drove the MGA off, it was bellowing smoke from yet another blown head gasket and back-firing because it was, again, out of time. I was happy to see the damn thing disappear from my life and amazed that someone who owned a beautiful white 1960’s Ford Falcon convertible would want a British anything.

The inspiration for this essay was an accidental run-in with a 1960 MGA and its owner at the Red Wing River City Days this past weekend. The bleached white beauty at right is the exact car. I was bicycling past the car show when I saw it and I had to take a look for old times’ sake. The owner was nearby, providing some comic relief. I had all sorts of flashbacks looking at that money-sink of a wannabe-vehicle.

Ms. Day’s “favorite” memory was when I foolishly signed us up for a rally that ran some distance in the north Texas countryside past Plano, west to Grapevine, and into Ft. Worth before sending us back to Dallas for the finish line; not that we got anywhere near finishing. Somewhere near Lewisville Lake our MGA started backfiring, setting the floorboards on fire and sending flames into the passenger compartment. We spent the rest of the rally driving slowly towards home, watching the ditches and fields on the way for any sign of water and the typical Texas litter that would include bottles and cans to hold water to use in putting out our flaming vehicle. One of my “favorite” MGA memories was as we were returning home from our wedding ceremony in the MGA, some damn thing happened in the transmission causing enough pressure to pop the rubber transmission fill stopper and shoot hot transmission lube into the vicinity of the glovebox where it dribbled down on Ms. Day’s bare legs and her wedding dress.The only good part of that memory is knowing that she was still this happy to be married to me after all of that.

So, while I looked at the MGA in the car show, I listened to the owner talk about the “joys” of owning this kind of vintage POS. He described the fixes he’d made to the car’s many engineering faults, the money and time invested, and the joys of driving the damn thing. I looked at the odometer and he’d managed to rack up a grand total of 5,200 miles in 64 years (he was the original owner, too), or about 80 miles per year. That isn’t even a decent stat for a pair of boots.

The MGA was a life lesson for me, though. Since that car, I have never once felt a moment of envy toward any sports car owner. If they don’t look like total assholes, sympathy at best, but envy never. Sports cars are uncomfortable, unreliable, impractical, and irrationally expensive. As David McRaney said in the “Spotlight Effect” chapter of You Are Not So Smart, “The spotlight effect leads you to believe everyone notices when you drive around town in a new, expensive car. They don’t. After all, the last time you saw an awesome car, do you remember who was driving it? Do you even remember the last time you saw an awesome car?”