Rising and Falling, All Over Again

 US history is a 250-year graph of long and slow degradation, followed by a crisis, followed by some kind of “resolution.”  It is nicely described in the Strauss–Howe generational theory.  I think this is best explained in a chart and this one is pretty complete, if not all that easily interpreted.  The first Anglo-American cycle began in 1493, with the Renaissance reformation and the current cycle began with the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  The anticipated outcome, in the chart below, from “WWIII?” is a list of consequences that Americans will not like but will, likely, be powerless to effect.  The high cost of allowing the “Alt-Right” to take the wheel is very likely going to be the end of the United States Empire, at best, and a large collection of irreversible calamities, at worst. 

So far, the “Spring: High” outcomes have been largely positive for Anglo-Americans.  As they say in investment warnings, “Past performance is no indication of future performance.”  We’ve been lucky to this point, but nothing about our system of half-hearted-democracy and a non-representational republic combination of oligarchy and kleptocracy has given the country any sort of moral or ethical advantage.  Our long history of superstition/religion, racism and inequality have done exactly the opposite and it is likely and justified that Anglo-Americans might very well end up at the bottom of the economic and political heap as a result.

So many things about this past dozen years have been labeled “extinction events”: of course climate change is at the top of the list, but the last year’s losses have more specifically been the nation’s ability to contribute to weather prediction, NASA’s capabilities and contributions, medical research, industrial and technological research and development, and national security.  One of the many things that the thick-headed crowd don’t understand is how complicated the world has become.  With human knowledge doubling every year and the volume of doubling every day or less, falling behind today has huge consequences.  The vast difference between the education and capabilities of the average citizen in blue states vs red is stunning.  There are claims that some red states are actually driving education reform. But the data is shaky.   In fact, having lived in several red states, and currently living in a red part of a blue state, I doubt the validity of their education claims.  One of the lessons learned in researching teams is that, in clinical hospital settings (for example), the teams that reported the highest number of “errors” also had the best surgical outcomes.  As you might expect if you’ve ever worked in a team, teams mismanaged by the worst leaders were afraid to report errors and, in those hospital situations, that produced higher patient injury and mortality events.  But they looked good, on paper, until you examined the paper.  Likewise, knowing the political climate of red states, I doubt that anyone down the chain (teachers, for example) are feeling free to be truthful about educational outcomes. 

I’m currently reading Andrew Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation  and the similarities to this moment are startling.  From corporate monopolies to direct financial ties between the 1% hyper-rich elites and government officials (elected and not) to a general atmosphere of moral and ethical corruption, top-to-bottom, to the morally ambiguous public tolerating and participating in the corruption, history is repeating itself.  Another way to look at the cyclic curve is the chart below.  It shouldn’t make you feel better or worse, it’s just the same data displayed another way. 

This is all just a numerical way to remind us that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and the rest of us are condemned to watch the same stupid shit happen again.  I suspect that, when Americans were in those three earlier periods of “unraveling” and “crisis,” it was hard to cling to hope for a positive future.  It certainly is today.  From every direction, the news and the dependability of the news sources is degrading.  Not only are the stories awful, but the reporters are even worse. 

Mixed Memorial Day Messages

 Today, I learned that the original Memorial Day (then called “"Decoration Day”) was created in Charleston, South Carolina, by recently freed slaves who, in 1865, converted a South Carolina racetrack, that had been used as a ruthless Confederate military prison, into memorial grounds. The founders of this holiday exhumed 250 black and white Union soldiers who had died at the site and reburied them with markers and flowers.  Not in any way surprisingly, white Confederate sympathizers created a parallel holiday that they called “Memorial Day,” celebrating the Confederate dead.   In 1968, the Johnson Administration declared Decoration Day to be a national holiday and changed the name to “Memorial Day.” Interpret that turn of events as you will.

As a member of the Vietnam War generation, the holiday has always had a mixed message.  As a dumb, frustrated, rural western Kansas kid who thought his options were played out after a couple of miserable community college semesters, I tried to join the Navy when I was 18, in late 1966.  As I’ll describe later, my father was a WWII Navy officer and, sans-the-officer credential, I was sort of following in his footsteps.  I didn’t know I had asthma, but the Navy decided I was physically unfit for service and reclassified me to 1Y.  Between the spring, when I signed up, and fall, when I was supposed to be inducted, I’d been reading David Halberstam’s New York Times Vietnam reports and he’d convinced me that I didn’t want anything to do with that war.  I spent the next 6 years doing what I could to end that fiasco.

Several of my friends didn’t have my luck.  Louis Dorsey was the first of several friends who didn’t return from Vietnam.  Some that did come back weren’t much better off than those who did.  One of the most talented, physically gifted friends I’ve ever had, Don Vest, died at 73 in 2021, but he spent too much of his life trying to find his way back from the horrors of Vietnam.  The last time I saw him, probably sometime around 1982, he was not the same guy I’d known in more ways than I can describe. 

My father finished his Business BA before he was inducted into the US Navy.  As his obituary explained, “Fred entered the U.S. Navy in 1942. He was in Midshipmen's school at Columbia University in New York and received his commission as Ensign in February of 1943. He was sent to North Africa as a small boat officer. Fred was involved in landings at Licata, Sicily; Salerno, Italy; Anzio, Italy; and Southern France. He served as a Gunnery Officer aboard the carrier CVE 80 Petrof Bay.”  All of those landings were perilous, but “Southern France” was Normandy, D-Day and the “small boat” was an LST (Landing Ship, Tank).  I had no idea how awful his Navy time was, until he suddenly told me the story of his LST war career sometime around 2005 when he was 86-years-old and I was 57, and we were on our way to a college basketball tournament.. 

Normandy Invasion, June 1944

Before that day, I didn’t know Americans actually crossed the ocean in those glorified flatboats.  I always figured they loaded them on to battleships or something and dropped them into the ocean a mile or two from shore.  The invasion ships travelled in a great convoy, under the assumption that there is some sort of “safety in numbers” or the “strategy” was something as simple as “if we send off thousands of those silly ships, at least a few of them will get through.”  He and four other sailors and about 50 Marines crossed the Atlantic to North Africa, then to Italy, and finally to Normandy.  Dad, being a farmboy from eastern Kansas, didn’t know anything about boats and was never gifted with any mechanical skills, a sense of direction or celestial navigation skills, and he had no idea how to captain a ship. In his telling of the story, the other four sailors carried his mostly-useless ass across the ocean and through the first three landings.  It really sounded like they put a seat in the front of the boat and told him to “sit there and stay out of the way.”

None the less, it was a complicated story with a high-seas, mid-crossing engine overhaul and, after the relatively easy crossing to North Africa and that invasion, another LST pilot, of higher rank, “claimed” Dad’s boat and dumped Dad’s crew with a near-wreak of a ship and not enough time to do the work.  Dad’s crew apparently knew what they were doing and they managed to hang on to that boat until Normandy.  Same boat, same 4-man crew, same 50 Marines.  On the first pass into Normandy Beach, when the gate dropped for the Marines to run out into the fight, at least half of the group were killed before they made it off of the gate and the rest didn’t even make it to the beach before they were machine-gunned down. 

Dad’s LST escaped the beach and returned to the armada, where they were supposed to get in the back of  the queue of LSTs waiting to get more soldiers and equipment into the war.  And this is where a lifelong prejudice of my father grew wings and claws.  The 2^nd wave of LSTs were piloted by British officers and crews.  According to my father, for many of the politically-connected British officers, that was an unearned “reward” for having been in the fight before the USA joined the Allies.  Dad told me that the US Navy watched the British-crewed LSTs dump US Marines hundreds of yards from the Normandy beach, at gunpoint, sending them to their deaths by drowning, heavily laden with a combat load of equipment and ammunition.  From then on, US-crewed LSTs started jumping the queue, in front of the British crews, risking their lives and trying to save US Marines from drowning pointlessly. 

The story got vague at this point.  Years ago, I looked up Dad’s LST and Navy career on the Navy’s website, but all of the links I’d attached to the article I wrote back then are dead now.  Dad never, once, pretended that he was the “officer in charge” of his boat.  He always made it clear that he was little more than a special passenger.  His boat, however, made three trips to the Normandy beach.  Watch the first few minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” to get a feel for what that was like.  It is especially compelling/terrifying in surround sound.  As far as I know, Dad hated everything about the United Kingdom for the rest of his life: and BOTH of his parents were British immigrants. 

I have always been a bit baffled by his lack of relationships with the four men he served with on that LST.  He never did any of the usual veterans’ stuff, other than maintaining a membership at the local American Legion Club, because that is where he played golf.  For many summers, he was an accountant for a local manufacturer: Mayrath Manufacturing.  For several of those summers, one of the guys who’d been in his LST crew was a Mayrath’s assembly-line welder, but Dad said they never spoke to each other, ever.  When we were kids, Dad let my brother and I play with all of his Navy paraphernalia: clothing, medals, and anything else that caught our eye.  When I was in my early-twenties, I converted his khaki officer’s jacket to a full-on hippy suit coat, with peace signs and British motorcycle patches and my wife’s artwork.  My grandson has that coat now.  Dad made a “respect” joke when he saw it “finished,” but he didn’t seem to care. 

Far too late in both of our lives, I realized that he had suffered incredible damage in his WWII experiences.  Then, a dozen years after he came back to his “real life,” the love of his life, the reason he did everything that he did to stay alive, my mother, died of cancer in 1957 at 36-years-old.  I was almost 9-years-old and my brother was 6.  Dad came unglued and I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that awful blow.  Maybe, none of us did. 

Disrespecting Voters

 Recent Republican gerrymandering tactics are about as blatant in their disrespect and anti-American behaviors as Americans have ever experienced.  And that’s saying something from a country that often blathers about “our democracy” while never having had anything that even approaches a representative democracy.  American history is a 250-year story of the rich and powerful beating back democracy at every attempt from the 1700’s Shay’s Rebellion to the billionaire-contaminated 2024 national elections.  Apparently, the only way citizens of the current United States of America will ever experience democracy is to either move to Canada or to break up the current 50 states into several smaller, less powerful, and likely less stable nations with part of those new countries being democratic and the south/southeast and Midwest definitely being fascist oligarchies or kleptocracies or both. 

The fact is, it would be difficult for any rational society to create a more fucked-up mess of a government than did our “founding fathers.”  Those self-infatuated, 3^rd tier, elite boys were more concerned with protecting the institution of slavery, which was rapidly falling out of favor in the rest of the world, and the idle-rich lifestyle of slaveowners than creating a democratic government that would flourish and last.  As a result, the US has been plagued with corrupt corporations and vile, spoiled nepo-baby “businessmen” for the country’s entire lifetime.  Trump and the refuse who populate his mis-named “administration” are just the latest in a long line of ruling class idiots.  

   

The obvious thing about these two Texas maps is that Republicans are convinced that their voters are so stupid and cultish that their votes can be taken for granted, no matter how badly Republican foolishness and corruption treats them.  Inflation, national bankruptcy, wall-to-wall corruption, desecration of national monuments, war, even world war with a universal draft and without a single rational, competent, responsible ally from our nation’s 250-year history haven’t made a dent in their loyal infatuation. 

The Republican Motto is clearly H.L. Menken’s “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people,” commonly shortened to “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter."  The other obvious thing about these maps is that the state’s stupid, self-destructive people are concentrated (to abuse that word) in the vast, unpopulated, uneducated, unemployed and poor rural hinterlands of Texas. 

That same analysis holds true for Florida.  Florida Republicans had already isolated the few educated, intelligent, and decent voters from the bulk of the awful people who call themselves Republicans.  But their latest gerrymandering is blatantly assuming everyone who ever voted Republican is a total fucking moron and, again, couldn’t be knocked out of the cult with a sledgehammer. 

The old political saying is “liberals fall in love and conservatives fall in line.”  Today, with what passes for “conservatives” totally infatuated with the MAGA cult and Donald Trump’s mobster administration, “love” and “falling in line” have merged into the dumbest political movement in American history; and we’ve had some really dumb moments in our awful 250-year history.  If there is any hope, any comeback from this pitiful moment in time, it is likely going to be from another plague.  This time there won’t be any medical backup from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, which was instrumental in developing vaccines and getting the country ready to distribute that technology when Trump’s Ship of Fools left the government in 2021.  This time, Democrats won’t be back in power in time to stop the plague from running its course.  Trump has practically dismantled the NIH and anything resembling the federal government’s ability to respond to any national health crisis.  Hegseth has dumbed-down the military to Fox News “standards” and the country is ripe for another pandemic; natural or man-made.  In fact, our nation is less secure in every way than any time in modern history.  And that may be the nation’s only hope for restoration, after a hundred million or more die on the pedestal of stupidity. 

So, for what they’re worth, keep your vaccination record up-to-date, stock up on N95 masks and hand sanitizer, and keep your cupboard stocked with at least a few weeks’ worth of up-to-date canned and dry goods staples.  One way or another, we’re going to be in for a lot of wild times and they aren’t likely to be much fun. 

The Dumbest Americans Since the Confederacy

 For most of my life I have been confused by how easily the South’s ruling elite managed to get the white underclasses to fight and die for the 1%’s “right” to own black people (and white people if they had their way).  The past 10 years has cleared that up for me, with painful clarity.  There is no bottom to stupidity and “you can’t fix stupid.” 

The United States has been breeding for stupid from the start, beginning with the failed English Jamestown “settlement,” which was mostly stocked with the 2^nd and 3^rd sons of British aristocracy who weren’t going to inherit much from their parents and were obviously useless, spoiled excess males.  As should have been expected, once the working-class sailors and soldiers who delivered the deadbeats to Jamestown left, the 3^rd tier British elites starved to death waiting for someone to feed and house them.  England followed that debacle by exporting the unruly mobs from Scotland, Ireland, and the unemployable chumps from England’s urban underclasses.

As Bill Murry proudly(?) said in “Stripes,” “We’re not Watusi.  We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh?  You know what that means? Do ya?  That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.  We are the wretched refuse.  We’re the underdog.  We’re mutts! . . . But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.”  Yep, you can kick ‘em, beat ‘em with a stick, starve ‘em half-to-death, but a mutt will just keep coming back for more because they aren’t smart enough to know that they have the option to run away, or stay and fight, for a better situation. 

Outside of the US, lots of people are wondering how Americans could have elected someone as stupid, petty, and destructive as Trump and his cronies to the Presidency.  Inside the US, it’s pretty obvious: the country is full of idiots, gullible cultish fools, and illiterate know-nothings who make proving the Dunning-Kruger Effect their life’s “work.”  It’s not, as many desperately want to believe, that our “education system has failed.”  The problem is that a significant percentage of the gene pool in the US has been pissed in by goobers who shouldn’t have made it past the embryo stage, let alone “grown up” to be mental dead weights dragging the world into the Sixth Extinction and reproducing like Viagra-stoned rats. 

Every time you hear a vehicle with an illegally loud exhaust, you’re listening to the sound of a moron passing, spewing unspent fuel and burned oil from poor maintenance and shade-tree “engineering.”  Every tattered and faded “Trump/Vance” sign you see on a run-down, unkempt yard marks the home of an idiot.  Every “Remember Charlie Kirk” flag marks the home of failing K-12 grades and chronic economic dependence. 

A lot of the country (and world) has been deluded into thinking that Minnesotans are all like the Twin Cities “bleeding heart liberals” who put their lives and freedom on the line to protect their neighbors. A quick glance at the responses to Amy Klobuchar’s Facebook page would destroy that hope.  Just look at the stupid nonsense, mostly coming from rural Minnesota’s dumbest voters and you’d be hard-pressed to imagine this state is any smarter than Alabama’s inbred, low-brow honkies. 

I lived in a St. Paul suburb for 19 years before retiring and moving to a southeastern Minnesota small town (foolishly for the “quiet” and “slower pace”).  Outside of Harley Davidson “season” (6-9 months out of the year), we mostly got the quiet.  “Slower pace” mostly means way too many morons per square mile: “slow” as in mentally slow.  In 2016, 85% of Ramsey County (our old Cities’ district) voted for Clinton while 57% of Goodhue County (where we are now) voted for Trump.  We had only been here for two years at that point and Ms. Day was ready to pack up and run back to the Cities immediately.  We probably should have done that while we could afford the move.  Not surprisingly, house values in Goodhue County have been stagnate since about 2016, but Twin Cities housing prices have increased 168% since 2016, pretty much pricing us out of the market.  (We sold our Cities home, in 2015, for $254,000 and it’s currently valued at $450,000!)  In 2016, many of Goodhue’s available housing inventory were foreclosures and we’re beginning to see that trend again in 2026.  So, getting out of here is going to cost us some retirement security. 

Early in our experience in rural Minnesota, I took a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN.  Same school system as the course I wanted to take, about 70 miles south on Highway 61, but easier to enroll for a class that year.  The end result was massive cultural shock.  I have lived in some pretty regressive places, but I haven’t lived anywhere worse than the people I met in that class.  Primitive, racist, unintelligent, uneducated, superstitious, entitled, dependent, and unpredictably violent are just a few of the words that come to mind in describing the mostly-old-white-men in that evening class. 

The word that always comes to mind when I realize how outnumbered we are in so many areas of this country is “disappointing.”  63 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, this is not where I’d hoped we’d be in these rarely-United States.  It is probably hard to remember, but a lot of that “Sixties’ hippy nonsense” was about hope and optimism. Yes, we were protesting a genocidal war and a blatantly and violently racist “Establishment,” but we somehow imagined building a better world for the future.  While that was going on, “the worst of the worst” (The Heritage Foundation, for example) were working toward a very different world.  And we are living in it now: a superstition-filled, racist, martial, patriarchal, oligarchical, “Christian Nation” that denies reality, science, justice, and democracy at every opportunity.  And all that has been possible thanks to the dumbest Americans since those fools who fought and died for the Confederacy. 

Morning/Mourning Styles

 

Ms. Day and I have been together for almost 59 years.  You’d think some of our personal “styles” would have merged or, at least, compensated, after a lifetime together, but you’d be largely wrong.  I don’t buy much art, since my house has been “decorated” by a compulsive and impulsive artist so that nearly every open spot on the floor or walls displays something.  When I saw this ceramic tile at one of our favorite Wisconsin galleries, I had high (and foolish) hopes that it might be more than a hint, “a fun thing to do in the morning before I have my coffee is not talk to me.”  Syntax aside, that seems like a simple request.   

I wake up fully introverted.  In a perfect world, I’d wake up in an unheated, un-electrified cabin at least 100’ from the main house.  On cold mornings, I’d get out of bed about 9AM, toss some kindling and a couple of logs into a woodstove, put a coffee pot on the stove, and go back to bed until the room warms up to about 60^oF.  Once the coffee is percolating, I’d get dressed, make the bed, choke down my pile of pills with a cold glass of water, assemble a bowl of cereal with fruit, pour a cup of coffee, and sit near a window to write and eat breakfast.  Sometime around 11AM, I’d leave the cabin and wander down to the house to start the rest of the day.  Until I walked into the house, I wouldn’t have had a word of conversation with anyone. 

In the morning, Ms. Day practically hits the floor talking.  She wants to talk about her dreams, the last half-dozen things she watched on YouTube before going to bed the previous evening, and the living room television set starts blasting streamed cartoons, nonsense “documentaries” (usually about aliens or bullshit archeology), or last night’s talk show monologues.  “Cacophony” best describes my usual morning soundtrack.  I have a decent set of over-the-ear, noise-cancelling headphones that I’m usually wearing by 8:30AM.  The phones take the television noise down about 30dB and, if I add some light ambient noise or music, it’s almost like I’m not living in a trashcan manufacturing factory.  Even those large, black headphones are insufficient clues to Ms. Day that I’m trying to ease into the day. 

Likewise, when it comes to emotional loss we have very different styles.  Both of our mothers died, when we were young, in slow misery due to cancer.  Ms. Day was 15 and I was 9.  Without the strong guidance of her mother, Ms. Day was a lost child and her father was less-than-useless as the “adult in the room.”  She was sent to live with hostile, rich relatives in New York while her father tried to drink his way to the next phase of his life.  When my mother died, I was an angry boy who was forced to pretend to be grown up enough to manage myself and my little brother, while our father hid in his high school classroom “grading papers” until long after we’d fed ourselves, cleaned up, and put ourselves to bed.  He tried shuffling us off to church and religion, which only confirmed (to me) that gods don’t exist and any belief in magic is a despicable and cowardly dependence.  If you want to quickly terminate a conversation with me, all you have to do is toss in a couple of references to gods and magic and I’m “outta there.” 

The past half-dozen years have been too often punctuated with loss.  Too early in our first post-retirement trip, our eight-year-old cat, Spike, ran off from our Lake Texoma campground in late 2013.  He was as close a friend as I’ve ever had in the animal world. Ms. Day immediately began to refill our home with animal life and her first adoption experiment was a freakin’ disaster.  But she stuck with an unpredictable, sometimes-violent, always destructive black male cat until his 2^nd hyper-expensive urinary tract infection when she finally “surrendered” him for adoption to a local vet (for a $120 fee).  He’d tortured our dog, Gypsy, almost as much as Ms. Day.  Gypsy was glad to see him disappear from the household.  In the spring of 2022, our 15-year-old canine partner, Gypsy, died of old-age complications. 

Soon afterwards, Ms. Day adopted a beautiful little shelter cat she named “Diva.”  Diva quickly got close to both of us.  I can’t lie that Diva took some of the sting out of losing Gypsy, but Diva was a fragile little girl and she barely lived with us for a year before some awful, slow disease killed her in the fall of 2023.  Her death broke our hearts, again.  Ms. Day has a, probably healthy and realistic, philosophy that these beautiful animals who live with us are like “flowers” with short, precious lives.  She can move on, fairly quickly from that kind of loss with that viewpoint philosophy.  I can’t. 

Within a few months, Ms. Day adopted a huge black cat we called “Luci” (short for Lucifer, named after a cartoon character not the demon, although the cartoon character is a cat-like demon) .  Luci was insufficiently “friendly” for Ms. Day and, after too short a time for that poor guy to acclimate himself, she adopted a 2^nd cat (I, by the way, had no input in any of those decisions.) who promptly made Luci feel even more out-of-place.  Luci, like me, was an introvert who couldn’t have been quieter or less demanding.  He and I bonded, eventually, and then he died (after a series of urinary tract infections and blockages).  Ms. Day had her cat and I was left to deal with Luci’s last days and, as always, burying him.  A year later, I was still missing Luci and hurting from his loss. 

I’m almost 80 and, having seen how long, and unhappily, some older pets languish in the local shelter, I’m not convinced we’re doing them a favor, bringing an animal into a home that is not likely to survive their “short, precious lives.”  Regardless of all that, Ms. Day insisted on adopting a 2^nd cat who she named “Felix.”  Felix and I did not start off well at all, mostly because I was unwilling to let go of Luci’s memory, even after a year.  I found things wrong with him that were all me.  He was, and is, fine. 

Ms. Day is also right in her “moving on” attitude.  Dwelling in the past, in “what ifs,” in sadness and bereavement just results in prolonging the pain.  The healthy way to get through pain and loss is to move on as quickly as possible.  That doesn’t mean forgetting, it just means finding something or someone to fill the vacuum left by loss.  Easy to say, but harder to do for some of us.