Couldn’t Find a Heart with an Axe

The current exodus of good, smart, talented people from the American medical system reminds me of my first experience as a “field clinical engineer” in medical devices in Colorado. Starting in early 1002, through an odd series of career plans gone bad, I ended up taking an offer from a Denver pacemaker company, Teletronics, in their Technical Services Department. I was offered the job because the department was overstaffed with nurses and understaffed with people who understood how the technology worked; engineers. The department manager was a nurse, by training, and every employee in the department was trained as a nurse, except for an old friend who had recommended hiring me, and was the group’s supervisor, and me. When I started, Technical Services was part of Training, Field Clinical Engineering, and a few other counter-intuitive operational groups with a manager who didn’t know much about any of the people or technology or customers. He did, however, know how to spend money like a Republican President and he introduced me to extravagance that made the 1992 “me” understand the true meaning of “decadence.”

I don’t remember how this happened, but early on I made a friendship with one of the Denver area sales reps and he decided to help me move from Tech Services to Field Clinical Engineering. Telectronics didn’t have much of a training system, considering the size of the company, the complexity and newness of the products, and the criticality of the products and applications. In fact, the “process” was pretty much toss the victim into the fire and see if they burn or escape with a few injuries. I was actually one of the instructors in my own training class. A few months after I’d started my new job and career, The sales rep asked me to cover for him at a hospital in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. To help me get ready for the implant, he let me follow him for a couple of days and about a half-dozen pacemaker implants, a few days before I was due in Glenwood Springs.

Glenwood Springs was, and is, a rich person’s town. It’s a 10,000 person city with average household incomes above $120,000 and lots of homes owned and unoccupied by millionaires and billionaires (probably none of them in 1992). There are five expensive private golf clubs in Glenwood. The overwhelming majority of houses in Glenwood Springs are over $350,000 with no shortage of $500,000 to $1,000,000+ homes in the city. If there was ever a city that epitomized the lifestyles of the rich and infamous, it would be Glenwood Springs. It’s where Doc Holiday withered away his TB-infested lungs and is buried.

As a western Kansas small town kid with a lot of rural relatives, I’d shot and butchered a fair number of small animals. I have never been much of an entrails or organs gourmet and I never bothered learning to identify organs because I was just going to toss them. Starting out in my new career, I often joked (sort of) that “I couldn’t find a heart with an axe.” I had, however, studied hard, learned to answer telephone questions about devices and implant procedures, and knew as much about the technical side of Teletronics’ products as anyone in the department. The sales rep and my boss thought I was ready to field test.

When I arrived for surgery, I discovered that the cardiologist had blown off the implant procedure because he’d scheduled a golf game some time earlier. The surgeon was not a cardiology specialist, but about as general a surgeon as a doctor can be. He managed to place the first lead, of two, fairly efficiently if not ideally. Positioning the second lead, the atrial lead, was far above his pay grade and he’d never done a dual chamber pacemaker before. After several attempts, it was obvious that he’d managed to incorrectly entangle the atrial lead in the coronary sinus, which did not properly synchronize the atrium and ventricle. The surgeon had an argument with the anesthesiologist about the structure of the heart: the surgeon was wrong, the anesthesiologist was right, and I stayed out of the argument. After failing multiple times to get good numbers from the atrial lead, the surgeon threw a pout and left the surgical suite and a nurse sewed up the patient.

Before I left the hospital, I left a message for the sales rep that the implant had gone poorly and that I suspected a follow-up surgery would be necessary. Two days later, I was invited to a Denver hospital to watch an actual cardio-vascular surgeon remove the atrial lead and implant a new lead in a functional position. There were a lot of jokes in the OR about the Glenwood Springs surgical staff (I stood up for the anesthesiologist) and rural hospitals in general.

Glenwood Springs is a hyper-rich community with as many idle rich “residents” as humans. Still, all that being true, two of the three doctors involved that procedure were among the worst I experienced in ten years of attending implants, “battery” replacements, lead extractions, follow-ups, and pacemaker/ICD troubleshooting sessions. The surgeon was absolutely clueless about cardiac structure and had no more business trying to implant a dual-lead pacemaker than does a veterinarian who specialized in horses and cattle.

All that was in 1992, post-Reagan but before the US tax system’s mangling from that period started spitting out more money-fondlers than doctors, engineers, scientists, and other useful professionals. Since then, almost anyone with less-than-perfect idealism has been drawn into the equity capital/money manager/hedge fund gold mines, leaving the country with a giant hole where national expertise used to be.

While it’s true that rural hospitals are dying off because they’ve been absorbed in the vulture capital nightmare, they are also unable to attract talented doctors and physicians’ assistants. Once you get any distance from a major city, hospitals are typically “sharing” physicians and specialists across long distances. Odds are that in any sort of emergency, those hospitals are not much more than helicopter pads with semi-skilled EMTs providing first aid, until the patients can be evacuated to a city. Even major cities are having problems staffing their hospitals with doctors and specialists and some specialties (family medicine, internal medicine, dermatology, cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, gastroenterology, endocrinology, oncology, infectious disease, orthopedic surgery, plastic surgery, urology, and pediatrics, for example) are in desperate shortage. There are no solutions in the foreseeable future to a drastic shortage of new doctors in the medical school pipelines.

The Republican’s Big Godawful Bill is about to make all of that move from desperate to disastrous. Cutting the heart out of federal support for the ACA and Medicate and, soon, Medicare will accelerate rural hospital closings in the short term and eliminate any sort of future revival in the much longer term. For a lot of rural communities, this is very likely an “extinction event.” As Republicans have proven, repeatedly since Nixon, breaking things is easy and “fun,” but building and repairing things takes time and skill. Republicans and Republican voters are notoriously short on either patience and talent.

Fools or Bastards?

 A while ago, I wrote in this space, “Trump’s beloved rural “uneducated” are overwhelming the base for the dumbing-down of the Republican Party and they are undeniably the people Trump can ‘fool all of the time’ in any subject. Based on their current ownership of the Republican Party we should all be calling them “the Know Nothing Party” because they proudly know nothing of use about any subject and their wishes and dreams exactly mirror the ‘policies’ of that mid-1800s political movement: religious nonsense (you might notice a conflict between #1 and #10 in their platform), ‘Americans must rule America’ (and they don’t mean native Americans), states’ rights (except when the states disagree with the Know Nothings), increased naturalization obstacles, and the usual goofy white male ‘supremacy’ crap.” Living in rural America has biased me toward believing that the majority of the Trump and Republican voters are inbred morons. 

Closer to the Edge, a Substack page that I follow regularly, had a different take in an essay titled “The Idol of Rot”: Trump “does not lead his followers; he reflects them. Every jeer, every chant, every violent outburst is the sound of America talking to itself through a mouthful of glass. They don’t worship him—they worship the permission he grants to stop pretending they care. He offers absolution for hatred, indulgence for cruelty, and calls it patriotism. He is the unholy child of greed and grievance, the mascot of a generation allergic to shame, the influencer of an empire addicted to attention. He takes their hate, repackages it with a logo, and sells it back to them at a profit. And while the cameras roll, democracy gasps for air, dying not with a bang but with a brand deal.” I recommend that you read the whole essay and if you have a different opinion I would welcome hearing it. 

I’m not sure which perspective is more harsh: Americans have downbred into a nation of gullible fools or we’ve finally shown ourselves to be the vicious, heartless, greedy sons-of-bitches the rest of the world has always known us to be?  And if you don’t believe the rest of the world has long despised, feared, distrusted, and even hated what the United States of America has come to stand for, you don’t get out much. 

Trump’s 2024 election cemented those feelings from one end of the globe to the other.  Countries that might have once imagined the United States had a chance of being something at least a little bit of what we’ve claimed, now think we’ve lost the formula.  As Rufus Wainwright sang, “You took advantage of a world that loved you well. I’m so tired of America.”  After World War II, it seemed from the inside and the outside of this country that we might become a role model for the parts of the world that still needed role models.  From the inside, our fascist countrymen started working immediately to dampen those hopes.  Joe McCarthy was the poster child for driving that disappointment, but Donald Trump’s vicious mentor, Roy Cohen, kept at it his whole life and he had plenty of help.  Nixon and that branch of the Republican Party made treason into a political tool and those same awful people populated Ronald Reagan’s pack of incompetent criminals and started the disassembly of anything resembling democracy and progress on all of those “American Way” ideals.  G.W. Bush set new records in political corruption but he was a piker compared to Trump I and, now, Trump II.  Today, corruption is the primary function of all three branches of the federal government and they have plans to expand those activities into every aspect of life in this country.  If The Mob had taken over Washington, D.C. the effect would be no different than what Republicans have done. 

As a friend of mine observed on November 5, 2024, “The country will never recover from this and be the same place, at least in our lifetimes.”  Someone at NASA said the mass, uninformed firings at that institution were “an extinction event” for American space science and much of Musk’s damage to the FDA, CDC, and the rest of the federal government’s scientific and healthcare agencies would take several generations to repair, if we were inclined to be a serious nation again.  The damage to our national security and national law enforcement agencies has to make the country’s enemies practically delirious with the possibilities for terrorism, cyber-crime, and China is moving quickly to replace the US as the dominant world power.  Catching up would take a concentrated national effort and I don’t think we have that in us today. 

The question I wanted to ask with this essay was “Are we a nation of fools or evil bastards?”  Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that is a false choice.  We could be both. 

Killing Them Loudly with Pleasure (and approval)

 How do you move from one of the world’s most hated, or disregarded, nations to one of the most popular? 

Turns out, the answer to that question is simple.  You just indiscriminately blow up as many billionaires’ luxury yachts: ideally, including the billionaires, their friends and family, and business associates as possible.  Religion, economics, political identities, race, nationality, and the rest of the usual culprits of polarization all vanish into mutual agreement when it comes to offing billionaires and blowing up their stuff.  Everyone, but the billionaires, hates billionaires and loves to see them destroyed.  Just ask movie producers since . . . forever about the popularity of snuffing rich people.  If you started listing the movies and books that were popular because their basic storyline was about killing rich people you’d have a book, even without describing the stories or the people.

The world’s clueless billionaires have gone overboard in squandering hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars on extravagant luxury ships of all sorts.  The only thing these boats have in common is their arrogant overindulgence.  Malaysian “businessman” (aka “mobster”)  Robert Kuok’s “History Supreme” is unrivaled with a $4.8 billion price tag and the ship is more insane extravagance than any palace in human history.  Russian oligarchs, like Roman Abramovich, and his $1.5 billion “Eclipse” set the standard for over-priced privacy and tasteless opulence.  Any list should include Nepo-baby and Amazon’s lucky founder Jeff Bezos’ half-billion-dollar, 127 meter-long, luxury yacht, “Koru” might be the most blatantly arrogant American demonstration of excess wealth and social irresponsibility.  But in 2026, there were hundreds of similar examples of the filthy rich wallowing in floating excess and greed while more than a billion people on the planet lived in extreme poverty, many living on less than a dollar-a-day.  To a certain group of the unwashed masses, these billionaires were idolized, but to the majority of the world’s population they were the most hated people on the planet.

The fall of the American Empire, was headed by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the worst-of-the-worst of so-called “conservatives” from the politically far right, who had been supported by America’s enemies since Ronald Reagan’s mindless regime created a power vacuum in the world.  After Trump fired every national security and national criminal justice expert from the CIA, FBI, and the NSA, he trashed the upper ranks of the US military.  In the end, the world’s most powerful military was brought down to its lowest common denominator, while club-footed fools and wannabe-tough-boy amateurs like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe caused an exodus of talent and experience from every area of American law enforcement, national defense, and national security.  A two trillion dollar US military budget was wasted on the remaining men and women who were led by fools and Russian useful-idiot assets.

The moment was ripe for a new world disorder and as Greek physicist-philosopher Parmenides argued 2,500 years ago, nature acts quickly to fill a vacuum.  In this case, a huge power vacuum existed as Russia squandered its attention and economy on Ukraine and the border states that Putin believed were the property of the Soviet Union he desperately wanted to reconstruct.  The United States struggled with delusional “enemies within" and had torn the “United” part into the historic collection of nation-states that the country had often threatened to become.  Russia has never been useful as an international law-and-order enforcer, but the United States struggled with determining which nation-states would “own and control” the military apparatus stationed inside their borders and docked in their harbors.  That left the open seas to become the Wild West (and East) when it came to piracy and simple sabotage and revenge killing. 

First, the surface pirates in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans really upped their game, targeting oil tankers by blowing them up and forcing the shipping companies to pay protection money to dozens of off-shore accounts.  The Singapore and Malacca Straits became so overrun with a variety of well-financed and armed pirates that even China considered putting its own navy into the battle for the open seas.  However, China’s precarious economic situation, hampered by national and internal debt, and Xi Jinping’s problems with his trade partners, who often sided with the pirates, limited China’s response. 

However, the opening shots of the international class war were fired in late May, when more than 300 super yachts were found on full display for the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix.  The two events were physically located barely 30 miles apart, with the film festival ending as the Grand Prix began and some parts of the race visible from where the ships had been anchored for the film festival. 

Well-coordinated renegade submarines crews from Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, Türkiye, Greece, Egypt, and Algeria teamed up to field more than 60 submarines armed with 2,000 torpedoes and several hundred tactical missiles. The French and Monaco Navies usually provided security for these events, along with support from other EU nations, but right-wing challenges to the French, German, Spanish, and British democratic governments provided a substantial multinational distraction for everyone involved.  Tourism revenues were drastically down everywhere in the world as was taxpayer support for the entertainments of the ostentatiously rich.  So, while there was lip service paid to the security of these two high profile events, the actual investment was cursory and no attention was paid to action below the surface of the ocean of the Mediterranean coastline. 

On Friday, when Cannes was wrapping up and the Grand Prix main event was staging, the submarine coalition opened fire on the mega yachts, sinking more than 200 of them in the first few minutes of the attack, including all of the largest ships.  Because Abramovich’s “Eclipse” was equipped with a missile defense system and other military-grade paraphernalia, his ship was targeted by both air and underwater weapons from three different subs, including two Russian subs that launched their missiles from the Bay of Biscay, a few hundred miles west of Bordeaux.  The collateral damage from that one objective practically emptied the area around Golfe Juan of any floating vessels: commercial, recreational, or military.  Port Hercule was another prime target and since Friday was when the rich and powerful were the overwhelming majority of the race’s audience, the race itself received a substantial number of tactical missiles and the body count was almost 20,000 high-rollers and their hangers-on.  The attack was an overwhelming success with every single mega-yacht sunk, hundreds of billionaires and thousands of their families and “friends” wiped from the face of the earth.  Faster than any possible military response during the best of times, the attackers scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, through Gibraltar, or back to their home areas in the Mediterranean Sea near Türkiye, Greece, and the Black Sea. 

These were not the best of times.  Pete Hegseth was in his usual rage-filled hysteria and issued dozens of conflicting orders to the Navy and the NSA.  The US Navy, having been removed from the Atlantic and NATO support earlier that year, had no ships capable of a response within days.  The NSA, usually able to employ spy satellites on a moment’s notice had been crippled by Hegseth’s brain-draining purges and political in-fighting among the Trump sycophants left in charge of national security.  In the best of times, the NSA and CIA could have, at least, tracked some of the subs when they surfaced, but that would have required the kind of department discipline that had been removed during Musk’s DOGE mass firings, Trump’s loyalty purges, and Hegseth’s “reorganization” of national defense “leadership.”  Russia, of course, was totally focused on national survival because Ukraine had received a substantial weapons upgrade from the sans-USA NATO and had launched ground and air attacks on Moscow and the Russian military infrastructure. 

The coalition of anti-oligarchy submarine commanders were, for the most part, not even missed from their official duties.  The Russian commanders, for example, had been stationed between Ireland and Portugal and they were able to return to their assigned territory unnoticed.  They would, later, use up some of their remaining ammunition on unimportant Ukraine targets to reconcile their inventory when they returned to Russia.  The unrest in the Russian military was so universal and overt that all real controls had been abandoned almost a decade earlier.  Russian officers had been handing over their equipment in exchange for a ticket out of Ukraine and the war for years.  A returning ship would be treated like national heroes without examination.  One of the many hallmarks of a kleptocracy is poor, or non-existent, inventory management. 

The outcome of the Attack on the Oligarchy was a celebration almost everywhere but in the bunkers of the once rich-and-powerful.  A virtual armada of mega-yachts had been destroyed.  The founders and their families of hundreds of predatory trusts and vulture capitalist funds were dead and/or missing.  The world financial system took a huge hit for several days, then bounced back as if nothing significant had happened. 

While none of the submarine commanders had been outed for their participation, becoming a member of a submarine crew, officer or enlisted personnel, became the goal of millions of young people around the world.  Speculation about where the attack submarines originated morphed into rebellion myths that turned into actual rebellions in several of the countries where the submarine fleet originated and the prevailing regime was most objectionable and vulnerable. India and Pakistan found common ground in their hatred of their respective oligarchs and they both blew up their hierarchical cultural and economic structure and experienced a blossoming of an educated middle class that transformed their countries into the world’s leading manufacturing economies.

The remaining billionaires learned, some the hard way, that “with great wealth comes great responsibility."  The concept of noblesse oblige had vanished from the minds of the tech bros, vulture capitalists, and the nepo-babies who had inherited the world’s wealth.  Suddenly, there were vacancies in the mansions of the filthy rich, all over the world.  The richest of the rich were all dead and their fortunes were being picked apart by heirs, governments, and anyone who could make a claim on the remains.  Many of the wealthy class had abdicated their assets and power and had fled to “Doomsday bunkers,” where they not only feared being discovered and outed by neighbors and the press, but their own security people who had no reason to service loyalty.  The only way to survive and come out of hiding was by being useful to society.  Of course, most had no idea how to be useful or even decent.  The few who did, found that, by disposing and donating the bulk of their wealth and making life more equitable, they could still live exceptionally well without worrying about being hated, hunted, and in constant mortal danger.

In the oceans, the remaining mega-yachts were being hunted into extinction.  Turning the US military over the worst and dullest decentralized and democratized military control.  Not wanting to miss out on the fun, the scattered remains of the US Navy became an actual branch of national defense, usually to local nation-state interests.  In the Southeast, the military forces remained in service to their traditional ruling elite.  However, the available technology was limited to mostly post-Korean War era.  In the Northeast and Pacific West, state-of-the-art military equipment and industrial capacity flourished.  The Midwest and Far West states coalesced into semi-organized agrarian areas dependent on the coast nation-states for access to technology and export markets.  The old Century of the United States of America was history, but the new North American structure made more sense, economically and culturally. 

So, in his usual way, Trump did “Make America Great Again.”  “America” now included Central and South America and Canada, while the bulk of Trump’s supporters were forever mired in dependence and mediocrity, America flourished.  However, they still had their bitterness to wallow in and “their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  Now, that frustration was bound by nation-state borders and they didn’t have to worry about immigrants wanting to cross into their territory.  Nobody, including MAGA wanted to live in the MAGA-controlled nation-states.  The walls they had built to keep immigrants out became barriers to contain the people stuck inside those boundaries of mediocrity. 

 

Creating A Representative Democracy

 In the unlikely event that the USA survives Trump and Republican fascism, this is an important step in creating an actual representative democracy.

In 1929, the Republican House of Representatives (the same people who kickstarted the Great Depression and WWII) passed the “Reapportionment Act of 1929,” which limited the size of the U.S. House of Representatives to 435 members.  Originally, the House was intended to be the only nod to actual democracy, with the Senate and Presidency acting as a buffer between the ruling elite and the unruly “mob” of Americans.  Like all of the well-intentioned concepts in the American Experiment, it didn’t take long for that idea to be perverted into a faux-democracy and a non-representational republic. 

Today, just the name, “House of Representatives,” is a slap in the face of every person in a blue or large state.  Wyoming, with 590,169 residents (at the most recent 2025 estimate) has one Representative and two Senators, or one Representative for every 590,169 residents and one Senator for every 295,085 residents.  California has an estimated 39.4 million residents and 52 Representatives and two Senators, or one Representative for every 757,692 residents and one Senator for every 19,700,000 residents.  The House is almost infinitely more democratic and representational than the Senate, but that 1929 act robbed California of 14 Representatives (relative to Wyoming), if the House were actually “representational.”  By the same standard, New York was robbed of 7 Representatives, Texas was shorted by 15 Representatives, Florida 11, Washington 3, and so on.  One slightly more rational method of determining the number of House members would be to divide the current population of the US (342 million) by the population of the smallest state (Wyoming, currently) which would mean the House would have about 580 members. 

Of course, overall population is a mediocre measure for representation. Eligible voters, about 174 million in 2025, is a better baseline.  Again, barely-a-decent-sized-county Wyoming could set that standard with 274,759 voters which would give us a 633 member House of Representatives.  Even better would be eligible voters who actually voted, again 219,305 in Wyoming and 154 million total; resulting in a 702 member House of Representatives.  Screw the total population or census count.  The only people who should be counted are the ones who bothered (or were allowed) to participate, to vote.  That would buy us several very democratic things, including incentive for states to encourage voting instead of finding disgusting ways to discourage and prevent voting.  Texas, for example, has 18.6 million registered voters, but only 61% of those registered actually voted in 2024: 11.3 million Texas voters found their way to the polls for a variety of reasons, including racist and anti-democratic Texas policies.  By the metrics I’m describing in this paragraph, Texas would be encouraged to have their large, under-represented Hispanic and Black populations to vote instead of doing everything possible to keep them from the polls.  Same for Wisconsin, Florida, and all of the southeastern states. 

That would be a good start if we wanted to put some reality behind the constant babble about “our democracy.”  The Senate is a holdover from the long history of senates in the world, none of which are in any way democratic.  Putting representation in the drivers’ seat of at least one branch of the federal government would be a good, and achievable, start.

Trump Will Die and He Will Be Forgotten, Sadly

 I was in Washington, D.C. once in the late 90s, for a medical presentation on a topic that I’ve long forgotten, but I haven’t forgotten visiting several of the Smithsonian Museums, the Washington and Lincoln monuments, and several other incredible memorials to the good and bad moments of this country’s short history.  I have also been to Marble, Colorado several times before and after my Washington visit and I saw where the stone used for many of those sculptures was quarried.  In this depressing and embarrassing moment in the decline of the American empire, I can’t help but believe that, while “this too will pass,” the damage done will last for generations.  In fact, I doubt that the United States will ever again be “great,” united, or even a major world power when Trump has done his damage.  The “sad” part about Trump’s eventual death and the American fascist period’s disappearance from our memories is that forgetting it means it will happen again.  And, probably, it will happen here again.

Just like when Stalin’s statues were torn down in Russia during that pitiful country’s brief moment of marginal sanity, Russians forgot those lessons in less than a generation and are, now, repeating every Stalinist mistake made in Putin’s regime (and creating some really impressively stupid new ones).  Just like that, in a short time the “loved” gullible, uneducated Republican voters will forget how their foolish infatuation with a fake billionaire and a Russian tool caused the end of the American democratic experiment and folded up the nation’s “empire” like a piece of single-ply toilet paper.  That is the only sad part of forgetting about Trump and the Republican/Russian fascist political zeitgeist. 

Other than Chairman Mao Zedong there are no statues proclaiming the brilliance of any of the world’s past fascist, terrorist “leaders” in the world.  The vote is still out on Chairman Mao, since China has staggered into the 21^st Century more capitalist than socialist while remaining centralist and largely a dictatorship.  The rest of the world’s Trump role-models—Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Tiso, Antonescu, Salazar, Stalin and Lenin, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Amin, Hussein, and their historic predecessors Napoleon and that ilk—have all found their rightful disreputable place in history and their statues and portraits and other likenesses have been trashed and hidden from view.  But the followers of tyrants are not good at history and are even worse at observing reality.  It’s hard to imagine what is going on in their tiny minds, but it isn’t hard to see what kind of world they’d like to construct.  Full of fear, hate, ignorance, prejudice, and foolishness, the minions of dictators just keep getting it wrong and learning nothing from the experience. 

At this point, with the Senate and House of Representatives abandoning their Constitutional responsibilities and stuffing their noses as far up Trump’s ass as possible, it isn’t hard to imagine a nightmare abomination like this picture being funded and, even, begun.  Most likely, it would end in the destruction of the entire monument, since no one with talent, taste, or intelligence would be willing to be involved.  Since Native Americans have long disliked the original sculpture, calling it “a giant middle finger to Native Americans,” they wouldn’t object to having the faces “gently” removed from their mountain.  With Trump’s ugly mug plastered up there, too, more than half of the country would be right there with them.  By the time Trump and his Russian handlers have pumped-and-dumped the US stock market until there is nothing left to hype, it’s possible that even Trump’s minions might join them from the unemployment line and homelessness. 

With nothing but a pack of losers, fake news talking heads, mediocre hedge fund mismanagers, and simpering military second-stringers who forgot their oath to the US Constitution so quickly that you’d suspect they weren’t listening when they were sworn in, this latest pack of fascists are unlikely to last long.  They might outlast me, but I’m fortunately-for-me old.  Putting the US back on the pile-on-the-carbon path to accelerating climate change, it’s possible I might last as long as any of you, though. 

 

Red Voters Create Economic Dead Zones

 Several years ago, I read about a collection of mid-sized towns along the Pacific Coast, between Northern California and the Canadian border, that were affordable (under $300k for a decent sized home and lot).  Because I'm always looking for any excuse to move, no matter where I live, I immediately checked them all out.  When we made our last move, I had created a spreadsheet of things that I needed to investigate along with a scorecard for those things. I've added a few things since then, because rural southeastern Minnesota (where we moved) turned out to be quite a bit more redneck than I had anticipated.  In fact, all of rural Minnesota is more backwards and uneducated, right wing, racist, and downright regressive then you might think from an outsider’s perspective of Minnesota; or from just living in the Twin Cities and only visiting the outback areas. 

 From that lesson I added two high-pointer qualities to my next prospective new location: #1, there needs to be a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship somewhere very nearby (within 10 miles) and #2, I don't ever want to move to a place where the majority of voters voted for Donald Trump.  I don’t even want to live somewhere where nearly 50% voted for a rapist/felon/Russian asset.  You probably wouldn't be surprised to know that all of those affordable places in California, Oregon and Washington were heavily slanted towards Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  Likewise, you might not be surprised to know that all of those small towns are economic dead zones, with high crime rates, lots of meth and Fentanyl arrests and overdose deaths, and most of those affordable houses, and neighborhoods, look like they were lived in by someone who died from a meth or fentanyl overdose.

 After reading a recent article that described the possibility that the Vermont legislature might actually start outlawing loud exhausts and applying appropriate fines for violators[1], I started looking at Vermont real estate.  In particular, I was interested in real estate along the Canadian border.  My first surprise was that area is incredibly affordable and most of the urban parts (A misnomer in a state where a 45,000 population “city” is the largest in the state.) of Vermont are way out of my price range. (For example, 900 square feet and 2 bedrooms in Burlington is nearly $400k.)  That made me suspicious. So, I did my presidential election results search and discovered (you guessed it) most of the northern border of Vermont is filled with unemployed, drug addicted, illiterate, racist Trump voters. 

 The question is, are all of the negatives in the area what created the Trump voters or are the kinds of people who are inclined to be Trump voters also inclined to trash an area? Personally, I'm inclined towards the second.  Either, or both, could be true, though.

 Another example, Crescent City, CA, is a town almost right on the California-Oregon border and only 80 miles north of an absolutely spectacular small, very liberal, and totally unaffordable city (Arcata, CA).  Crescent City is an example of one of those affordable garbage dumps. Crescent City currently has a selection of houses available for sale between $90,000 and $260,000. None of them are particularly amazing, but several are definitely livable. Arcata, on the other hand, will cost you anything from $180,000, for a lot to build on, to a bit short of a million dollars for a very similar collection of well-maintained, very livable houses.  The difference is one city is filled with loser Trump voters and the other is largely intelligent human beings. 

 As anyone who has paid the slightest attention to US states’ economic situations knows, red states don’t foot their own bills.  Blue state taxpayers not only pay their own way but they also carry the deadbeat red states.  The same is true for rural areas . . . everywhere.  All of that would be dramatically less irritating if there were some level of gratitude from red and rural dependents, but, like typical teenagers, rural Americans imagine they have done something to deserve their “allowance.”  It’s certainly not based on the “food” they grow, since corn and soybeans accounted for 87% of total U.S. grain and oilseed production and most of that is either converted to energy-inefficient ethanol, health-destroying corn syrup, or exported, with heavy state and federal subsidies, to other countries.  Even substantial percentages of the meat products American farmers grow is exported, again with federal supports, because farmers produce too much of what Americans don’t want to eat and the various chemical contaminants make those products undesirable to non-US consumers. 

 All that means that regressive Republican towns and cities are filled with a majority of non-productive, mostly-white, uneducated, entitled residents who don’t take good care of their property or communities.  It’s hard to spot those things from outside, especially from hundreds or thousands of miles away, so the best tool I’ve found for making those kinds of judgements is stereotyping; as politically-incorrect as that may be.  There might be some responsible, decent, intelligent, creative, democratic-minded (small “d”) communities, somewhere in this country, but the odds are staggeringly against that and, if they exist, they are the “exception that proves the rule.” 

---

[1] As far as I’m concerned, shooting the drivers of illegal vehicles is “appropriate.” 

They Aren’t Terrible People

 “I’ve met them, talked to them.  They aren’t terrible people.”

A good friend, who is a far more tolerant person than I ever want to be, if I could be, keeps trying to convince me that Trump’s voters have some value, deep down inside, far below the surface, that makes them redeemable. Apparently, it’s hidden underneath their lizard skin “disguises.”  “I’ve met them, talked to them.  They aren’t terrible people,”  he says.  When he lived in an industrial farming area, his neighbors were all red neck, uneducated, agricultural-welfare dependent, Trumpers.  They imagined themselves to be “conservative” and, even, capitalist, while desperately depending on “the big city” to pay their bills, build their roads, install and maintain their communications systems, provide their power, and create fake markets for their toxic commodity “crops.”

He is, mostly, a city kid who grew up with the Mayberry image of rural people being kinda stupid, but good-hearted and trustworthy.  He is incredibly well-travelled, nationally and internationally, I’m none of those.  I’ve been in Mexico and Canada, both by motorcycle and plane, and I tend to keep to myself and rarely put much effort into getting to know people while I travel.  I suspect my friend and his wife are downright gregarious, when they travel. 

First, if they are “not terrible people,” you’re going to have to explain to me what morality and ethical code they use to re-elect a convicted felon with multiple outstanding charges pending, a rapist who has been successfully sued for committing rape and accused of rape dozens of times, and who tried to overthrow an election.  Really?  That’s something “good people” would do? 

I grew up in small town, western Kansas and spent a good bit of my early career years working in agriculture: first, as an electronic scales (weights and measures) technician and, second, as an electrical engineer for an irrigation manufacturer.  In both jobs, I was always surrounded by, what Gene Wilder, in Blazing Saddles, described as, “people of the land, the common clay of the new west.  You know, morons.”  For the ultimate city guy, Mel Brooks read the rural Midwest like it was a child’s first book.  When I hear politicians babble about “hardworking farmers,” I always have to laugh.  As a field service technician working for those characters, when I had to get the equipment owner to make a financial decision, I always had to hunt them down in the local bar, regardless of the time of day.  And they would always be in the company of a half-dozen or more other rich, idle farmers complaining about the size of their welfare checks or pretending to know something about the scary “Big City” based on the stupid stuff they’d seen on television.

I grew up around those people and the one thing I learned, above all others, is that they only tolerate people who look, believe, act, and talk like themselves.  For the first half of my life, I’d learned to become a cultural chameleon: imitating the accent, mannerisms, and appearance of the people I worked with and for, from living in Kansas to Texas to Nebraska and all of the surrounding states and customers.  A rare example of my forgetting to stay “in character and costume” is the story, “The Last Wagon Wheel Gig,” and that experience stuck with me for the rest of my life (which could have been cut very short that night).

It would be a mistake to assume that everyone in the rural areas is an asshole, but starting with that assumption is always a good idea.  Even total asshole states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, the Dakotas, and the deep south, still have 25%-to-almost-50% of their population leaning somewhat progressive.  As James Dickey tried to depict in his book, Deliverance, in those places, the nicest people are among the finest, kindest, most generous examples of humans on the planet, while the rest are solidly the absolute worst.  It’s always a good plan to stay incognito until you know who you’re dealing with. 

At the other end of that scale, when I was barely 19, I moved to Dallas, Texas for a fly-by-night computer programming school (that folded less than a year after they’d taken all of my college savings and were sued by students and parents).  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the worst people in “the big city” were rural immigrants and, consistently, the only people who were trustworthy and decent were people who had lived their whole lives in the city.  Of course, most of the people I met were in my economic class (poor), but not all of them. 

For me, moving to California (the L.A. area, in fact), in 1983, was a brief moment in my life of simply being who I am without any sort of costume.  I was there for almost a decade it and, for a closet liberal/hippy/semi-creative, that was my “coming out party.”  When I left California, I (lucky for me) tried Indiana first, which quickly helped me rebuild my damn closet and outfit it with all of my old disguises.  Indiana is a disgustingly red state, filled with beat-down, uneducated, lazy, mostly-white, poor people and a tiny minority of filthy rich, idle and useless, nepo-baby, ruling elites.  That pack of ruling elites are proudly anti-union, anti-education, anti-immigrant, and fascist Republicans.  I was there in a half-hearted (by the company owners) attempt to bring product design and manufacturing to a small audio electronics division of a company that had long-since abandoned everything but marketing and sales and was sinking into corporate oblivion (which would happen two years later). 

From there, I moved to Denver, Colorado and, like Dallas and California, the most vile urban Coloradans are consistently rural immigrants to “the big city.”  They bring their prejudice, ignorance, and gullibility with them and drag the city down with them.  Like most of the nation’s urban areas, Denver is a liberal, “Blue” city surrounded by imbecilic red-staters (Representative Bobert is a prime example of rural Colorado).  From Denver to Minneapolis in 1996 to today, the rule remains true: rural implants to the city are more often than not idiots dragging everyone else down with them.  And it is a huge mistake to assume that they are benign idiots, since they are overwhelmingly the characters who decide gunning down a building full of little kids or assassinating a popular, productive politician is an act of rebellion. 

So, my friend, I disagree with you.  They are “terrible people” and, typically, so are their offspring: untrustworthy, racist, violent, gullible, selfish, and greedy.  Stupid people tend to produce more stupid people and that is exactly why this country is where it is today. 

A Hopeful Unintended Consequence

 At my age and during the current de-evolving condition of this country, I’m not much for hope.  Because a growing majority of the human population is stupid, lazy, vile, and corrupt, it’s hard to see much good happening in the future until we make it all the way to The Marching Morons stage where the functional minority decides to ship the dead weight off to Mars or actually designs a killer virus that attacks the “conservative chromosomes” and purges the planet of the sluggard mass of humanity.  But even with the current race to the bottom coming at us from every direction, I have one slight hope for Republican’s historic tendency for unintended consequences having a positive outcome.  It’s a slight hope, but that’s still infinitely more than no hope.

As was intended by our slave-holding founders, the US federal government is grossly over-represented by low population, dependent, rural red states and red areas in the few populated blue states.  These are not bright folks and, while they are totally dependent on tax-paying blue states and urban areas for every aspect of what passes for “modern life” in backwards rural areas, they imagine themselves as being critical, self-sufficient, and necessary.  If they aren’t from California (almost 50%), Washington, Oregon, the rapidly diminishing unflooded bits of Florida, small portions of Texas, Colorado, and small rural and urban truck farms across the country, rural politicians bragging about their constituents “putting food on the table” for the rest of the country are talking about US agriculture production of inedible commodities like corn intended for energy production, animal feed, and the kind of “processed food” (i.e. “pre-digested food”) that even Worm Boy thinks is harmful. The rest of that “food production” is the world’s carbon production champ: cattle, pigs, and other meat animals. 

The US government pays out somewhere around $38B/year just to subsidize beef and milk production.  Call it what it is, corporate welfare.  Without that money being handed out to deadbeat farmers/feedlots/ag-factories producing products no one but suckers in the US are willing to eat, a Big Mac would cost somewhere more than $13 instead of $5.  As University of Oxford study of British diets pointed out, “meat-rich diets (more than 100g of meat per day) resulted in 7.2kg of CO₂ emissions, vegetarian and pescatarian diets about 3.8kg of CO₂ per day, and vegan diets only 2.9kg per day. Much of this difference comes from heavy reliance on cattle production.” 

In the US, unless we’re giving it away, there are few customers for our antibiotic-saturated, pesticide and herbicide-resistant poisoned GMO-fed meat products.  So, with more assistance from federal subsidies, that is exactly how the slim remainder of our world agricultural “markets” are propped up.  In the meantime, almost 20% of the food Americans eat, including meat products (especially lamb) are imported, as are considerably more of our fruits and non-corn vegetables.  If the reason rural America is propped up by urban consumers is “food production,” urban consumers are getting screwed.  And they are.

And here comes the “hopeful” bit.

The current “administration” (to abuse that word viciously) is bent on eliminating practically every form of federal assistance to anyone who isn’t a billionaire.  Killing off Medicaid, alone, is going to decimate healthcare in rural areas, which are already in dire straits due to a lack of doctors, nurses, and up-to-date facilities.  In most rural areas, up to 50% of the patients depend on Medicaid assistance to have any sort of healthcare coverage.  Almost all “industry” in rural areas is dependent on federal supports and assistance and urban support for infrastructure.  Between the threats to rural infrastructure, education, medical care, and commerce and Trump’s war on cities, we could see a Detroit-style urban food independence movement, nationally.  In 2017, during a visit to Detroit for a technical course, I took a tour of the city that was mostly designed to illustrate the damage white flight, the damage the DeVos mob did to Detroit’s public education system, and the abandoned industrial and residential areas.  The tour ended up highlighting many of the brand new urban truck, hydrophonic, and greenhouse farms and the businesses that sprouted up to make use of the food now being produced in the city. 

If cities take the rural-vs-urban economic and cultural war as seriously as the rural rubes have in their whole-hearted endorsement of Trump’s fascism, cities could decide to keep their wealth, talent, and resources to themselves.  One offshoot of that could be moving protein production (meat) from rural handouts to investing that money into urban “cultivated” or lab-grown meat production.  That could be a game-changer in more ways than any Republican ever imagined.  States can more easily shut off the financial support of their own rural areas easier than blue states can cut off red states.  Once that kind of movement is happening in places like California, Washington state, New York, and even Minnesota, where all of the financial support for red states originates, the country could see an economic battle waged between urban and rural area that would transform local and national economics, food production, and politics.  Without the bogus “food producers” argument, rural areas will be forced to confront their own lack of contribution and value and that could be the end of the kind of communities that the Department of Agriculture has been defending and supporting since 1862, when the department was created by President Lincoln for exactly that purpose: “to provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, and rural development, and to promote economic opportunity, foster sustainable agriculture, and ensure a safe, nutritious, and affordable food supply for all Americans and for the world.”

I’m not just hoping that plant-based, cultivated, or lab-grown “meat” replaces feedlot “farmed” meat because I want to see rural America and industrial agriculture get what’s coming to it (that is an attraction, though).  I actually like many of those products, especially sausages from Field and Roast and cheese substitutes from Miyoko’s way better than the animal products.  Vegan replacements for “meat,” like Beyond Beef and several other hard-to-find meat substitutes are not just better for the planet and my own health, they taste as good or better than the “real thing.”  We are long past the point where sustaining rural “lifestyles” is worth the sacrifice the rest of the country is forced to make so that the dumbest kid in the family can afford to inherit the farm/ranch.  Personally, I think that would be a good beginning to updating and redesigning the government of the United States of America. 

One Foot in Front of the Other

 “Every child had a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their old man got, but something happened on the way to that place, they threw an American flag in our face.”

 

The late civil rights icon and Democratic Congressman John Lewis, died on this date (July 17) five years ago.  In 1965, Mr. Lewis was beaten to the ground and arrested in Selma, Alabama by lawless cops and a mob of white men, who assumed they would be unidentified and even praised for defending segregation and white power by violently breaking up a peaceful, non-violent march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge petitioning for voting rights.  Mr. Lewis was 25 that year and I was 17.  This year, today, I officially turned 77 on the “anniversary” of John Lewis’ death.  Although I’ve rounded my age off to 77 since sometime in mid-January.  Congressman John Lewis was fighting for justice, decency, equality, and the tattered remains of American democracy into his last week of dying of pancreatic cancer at 80-years-old. 

 

I, on the other hand, woke up this morning without any hope for this country; and I have been on the white privileged end of the stick for all of my 77 years.  The closest thing to knowing what it’s like to be non-white, that I have experienced, has been a result of my life-long atheism.  And that is, more or less, a choice I made at age 9 after watching my mother die of cancer at 34 and hearing the cynical “God works in mysterious ways” bullshit from the so-called adults in my life.  All I had to do was pretend to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the god-of-the-moment, like every other faux-believer overcrowding and polluting this world, and I could have avoided any of the discrimination I’ve experienced as “a godless heathen.”  [Yes, I absolutely believe that 99.999…% of the people pretending to be Christian, Muslim, religious Jews, and the rest of LaLa Land worshipers only “believe” in the bits that benefit themselves and pretend the inconvenient “love thy neighbor” bits are inconsequential and inconvenient.] 

My pitiful contribution to humanity and my country, today, is supposed to involve changing from my usual “whatever was at the top of my dresser drawer outfit” to my “Sunday best,” a 40-mile drive to Northfield, and a short walk across a park and a block-long bridge on a mild summer day to participate in the Northfield Good Trouble Lives On March. 

The Red Wing Friday protest has been diminishing steadily for the past month or so, after peaking at about 300 people (far short of 3.5%) in June.  Most Americans appear to be unsupportive of the Republican platform, but most are clearly baffled by Russia’s non-stop disinformation and the weak knees of the pitiful remains of the US billionaire-owned MSM.  We are clearly at one of our 80-year-reinvention moments [If you aren’t familiar with this historic cycle, I really recommend that you read that last link.] and, this time it seems that it could be the last one.  It isn’t because of Russian interference, billionaire contamination, or even the fact that the Republican Party is totally fixated on destroying the United States of America.  I think the country has been breeding for stupid for so long that we’re at a turning point that will require more than a moderate level of ruthlessness from the people who actually make things work.  So far, I’m not seeing any signs that is likely to happen. 

A friend, whose opinion matters to me, argued that it’s worth putting in an appearance, especially in a venue as benign as Northfield, Minnesota where the odds are good that Republican violence is unlikely.  I’m torn.  I’m not worried about my safety, other than the drive which is no more dangerous on Thursday afternoon than Sunday morning, from the usual Trump-deranged nutjob with a car full of weapons.  We have lots of them in Minnesota, like every other part of the country that has an inventory of uneducated, uninformed, racist idiots.  In other words, rural people everywhere.  At 77, I’m more worried about living too long than dying too soon.  My father lived to 91, but his last two decades were almost totally without anything resembling a quality of life.  My younger brother and I are the oldest males from my mother’s side of our family.  And I’m definitely at the stage of life where I am giving up favorite activities at an uncomfortable rate. 

So, my only real resistance to “one more protest” action is that it feels pointless.  The wild hope is that the Trump resistance will meet or exceed the magic 3 ½% mark.  Maybe it’s because I live in a cowardly, conservative rural area, but I know a LOT of people who express disappointment and, even, outrage at the Republican assault on American democracy.  But they aren’t bothered enough to even join a safe local protest that lasts for 1 hour on Fridays.  If that level of “participation” is too big a step to make, rebelling against a national fascist takeover is not a possibility.  And that is where I am, today.  Do I keep trying to make some kind of contribution in a country that is doomed to fall into fascism and decline or do I begin to marshal my resources and plot an escape?  I have no interest in being “the last Jew to leave Germany.” 

“I’m Not Russian”

In 2015, when Trump first started to make idiot noises about running for President, local goobers would ask me “How do you feel about Donald Trump?” 

My answer was always “He’s got nothing for me.  I’m not Russian and I don’t care about billionaires” and that would almost always end the conversation.  Usually, the questioner would walk away in a huff and, at best, I’d never have to speak to that moron again.  A big part of retiring, for me, was downsizing.  And A big part of downsizing was getting rid of paper books: a lifetime collection of paper books that once filled five 7-foot-tall bookshelves and an entire wall of our living room.  If we had kept that collection, it would fill an entire bedroom of our current home, including closing off access to a close or filling the closet.  Today, I still read A lot but I use my local library as my storage facility and most of what I read is on ebooks. That sometimes means I wait A long time to work my date way down the patron list before I get to check out and read A book I’m interested in.  an example of that would be Craig Unger’s House of Trump House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.  This is A 2018 book that I put on reserve, a year or two later, and justice now got. That isn’t A particularly onerous Handicap, because I usually have a dozen-to-fifty books on reserve and always have something on my E-readers waiting for me to finish whatever it is I’m currently reading.

However, House of Trump House of Putin was a surprise, even given my long-held opinion of Donald Trump.  My assumption of Trump’s Russian connections was not only confirmed in Unger’s book, but those connections were multiplied; exponentially.  The fact that Donald Trump is president and not in prison is evidence of, at least, 40 years of law enforcement failure.  From Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama, Trump’s business and personal connections to organized crime has been tested and proven in and out of court.  And while that has often cost him money in civil court, Trump’s ability to stay out of jail, even when convicted of felonies, is glaring evidence that our legal system needs an overhaul.  Obviously, “justice” for a rich white man has A completely different definition than it would for the rest of us.  And if that is “too woke” for you, I suggest you go fuck yourself.

At least for me, one of the bigger surprises in House of Trump House of Putin was the tight connection between the Russian mob and the Israeli mob and Mossad.  If the United States ever does A 1930’s-style political house cleaning, we will break all connections to Israel.  It is not possible to morally justify Being attached to a country that is, literally, organized crime throughout its political and economic system. 

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us.  They’re bringing drugs.  They’re bringing crime.  They’re rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people.” (Time Magazine 2015)  You can multiply statement that by whatever exponent you feel comfortable tacking on, When it comes to Russia, their former Eastern bloc compatriots, and Israel.  Except, for the most part I think it’s unreasonable to assume many of these immigrants are “good people”.  Like Ivanka and Melania Trump, a whole lot of them were not legal immigrants, either.

Every move Trump has made, especially since January 2025, has been to degrade US national security and our national criminal justice system.  Obviously, all of those moves are to Russia’s and, particularly, Putin’s advantage.  Firing experienced FBI, CIA, and State Department experts (especially Russian experts) couldn’t be a more obvious present to Putin and our enemies in general.  There has never been a moment in Donald Trump’s life where he expressed or demonstrated a micron of patriotism or loyalty to any aspect of the US Constitution and, yet, his cult remains convinced he will “Make America Great Again.”  I might be inclined to ask what their definition of “great” is, but I have lived among these deadbeats, vipers, gangbangers, and fools my whole Midwestern life and I already know the answer.  The closest thing to an answer to that question was illustrated in “Idiocracy.”