If We Eat the Rich, Who Will That Inconvenience?

Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

 

 

Elmo Musk is back out there challenging the average numbskull to imagine what the world would be like without billionaires.  This is the funniest part of the whole AI panic: the idea that when AI becomes prevalent, the average worker, skilled-laborer, healthcare workers, and everyone who keeps the wheels turning will be out of work and the hedgefund goobers will be at the top of the stack. 

Elmo hasn’t made a useful decision in his whole pedophile, nepobaby life and he’s the poster boy for the useless rich kid.  He thinks his money and intellectual “contributions” are what make his “businesses” work, but the actual business relies on the people who know how to code, design and build cars and rockets, can do the accounting and pay the bills, and sell the crap his companies build.  Every AI program in existence today would do Elmo’s “job” better than him in a heartbeat.  AI could easily be programmed to behave like an entitled, racist, selfish asshole, so it could replace Elmo in every aspect of what passes for his “life.”  Likewise, the hedgefund banksters don’t “contribute” anything useful to the businesses they gobble-up, sell off the functioning divisions and assets, and overpay themselves (as “consultants”) and the deadbeat mismanagement they bribe into allowing the barbarians into the corporate castle.  Like Musk and the rest of the billionaires, they are leaches draining the life from the businesses they contaminate and the nation they are destroying. 

Americans heard this “you can’t survive without us” nonsense from “businessmen” who created government-funded monopolies back in the 1890s.  Luckily, after repeated economic crashes, depredations from the overbearing overlords of wealth that caused entire states’ economies and populations to collapse, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. became the 26th president of the United States and put a temporary end to the American Oligarchy.  It wasn’t the intention of either the always-flawed Republican Party or the Marching Moron American public to either elect Roosevelt or to stand on their rarely-used hind feet, it was pure and simple luck.  It was a well-placed bullet that took out the Republican establishment’s President, William McKinley, and dropped the right man into the right job at the right time for one of the few, brief, good moments in American history.  The inflation-adjusted “billionaires” of the day (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Hetty Green, Jay Cooke, James Hill, and a few lesser-known figures of American “royalty”) were just as convinced as Musk that the country couldn’t survive without them.  And they were also wrong.  

Labor, invention, science, and the necessities of life, culture, economies, and progress do not need the “influence” of gross wealth, they struggle to survive in the presence of them.  In spite of the “conservative” interference from stagnate, paralyzed capital held closely and selfishly by the entitled rich, actual progress can barely keep its head above the sewage.  Whether that wealth was inherited (Musk, Gates, Theil, Bezos, etc) and, occasionally, expanded on through luck and/or skill or initiated through hard work, luck, and innovation, once it is captured and hoarded by the rich and powerful it becomes a roadblock for everyone else. 

The uneducated MAGA crowd, who keep babbling about a time when “America was great,” are likely talking about the post-WWII era when the top income tax bracket was more than 90%.  That was when the United States, representing a few ideals that the rest of the world wanted to emulate, was at its most productive, creative, and optimistic.  Of course, the part of the 1950s that MAGA wants to return to is the Jim Crow racist bullshit because, even 1950s technology and education levels is beyond the capacity of Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” 

Obviously (I hope), the best way to “eat the rich” is to tax those useless deadbeat hoarders into insignificance and put all of that idle capital back to work rebuilding the country they tried to destroy.  When America was great, in 1950, the top federal estate tax rate was 77%, applied to net estate values that exceeded $10 million, working down to as little as 3% for smaller estates with a $60,000 estate tax threshold.  The purpose of inheritance taxes was to prevent an idle aristocracy from becoming powerful. Reagan convinced the Marching Morons that estate taxes were “death taxes” with a math-free argument that only made sense if you were either on the receiving end of the estate or too stupid to know how taxation worked (every MAGAot who ever lived).  It’s hard to imagine today, but those taxes were intended to pay off the World War II national debt (to itself and US citizens, not foreign investors) and to rebuild and catch-up on the time, prosperity, and progress lost during that war.  Since Nixon, US voters have been convinced that passing responsibility on to future generations is not only a right and privilege, but some kind of magical get-out-of-responsibility-free card in perpetuity. Without exaggeration, that is how fuckin’ stupid American voters are today.  

 Because we are living in a country that has ALWAYS despised education and knowledge and held a special reverence for violence, we’re unlikely to use the “best way” to resolve vast, irrational, self-destructive economic inequality.  Americans resort to violence, first, and, occasionally and briefly, think later.  That is largely true for humans everywhere, with a few impressive, notable exceptions.  The French Revolution is mostly remembered for out-of-control excess and injustice.  There was plenty of that in the American Revolution, too, on both sides.  Today, the filthy rich have their own private armies. With massive taxpayer assistance, they have built private military organizations that are likely near-equal to democratic governments’ national defense forces.  If the rebelling public imagines that “storming the castle” will be a practical way to “eat the rich,” we’re going to see an all-out battle for . . . everything.  It won’t be pretty and that war is entirely capable of swamping the world in violence, destruction, irrecoverable and disastrous environmental damage, and the odds of success aren’t worth betting on. 

Wrong, Again

  

About 20 years ago, a good friend speculated that “We’ll be the last generation to enjoy global warming.”  As I’m sure you’d assume, we’re both Boomers and were expecting a sooner-than-later use-by-date, too.  The fact is that, regardless of Republican and Religious Right denials, the climate is changing at a record only beaten by giant asteroid planet-killing extinction event.  Of course, with Trump and Musk’s decimation of NASA and their Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the SpaceX and Starlink clutter, we could be in for a planet killer strike, too, and won’t know it until we see the billionaires heading for their rabbit holes.  This summer, if it is an example of what we’re heading into, has not been enjoyable.  It has been hot, dry, and even our semi-rural Minnesota city’s air has been as polluted by smoke and factory emissions as the worst I ever experienced in L.A. in Reagan’s environment-denying-and-defiling 80s. 

Seeing these kinds of environmental changes in my own lifetime is (and should be) startling.  For example, in the late-1970, I was working for an agricultural equipment company that maintained test plots in northern-central Florida.  Having grown up and suffered the “real Midwest” for all of my life, at that point, the only running water I’d ever seen that had any visibility at all came out of a tap and, even that, was cloudy.  One weekend off, one of the welders I worked with and I decided to canoe the Ichetucknee River, which was at that time the source of the most pure water in the country.  It was, in fact, like canoeing in a really large bathtub or aquarium.  We were surrounded by tropical plants and animals (especially the occasional alligator and snapping turtle and, often, several water moccasins) and, when our boat drifted over a spring outlet we could see scuba divers 30-40 feet down as clear as you can imagine.  That was my first experience with a canoe and it became one of my favorite, regular activities for the next 50 years.  However, in those same 50 years, Florida’s clear water springs and creeks have been decimated by agricultural pollution and over-development.  Florida is not and has never been a place anyone sensible would call “environmentally responsible,” but with 1,000 new residents every day the place is in need of a new, much larger handbasket in which to travel to hell.  You have to wonder if the dinosaurs were this irresponsible and that is what attracted the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Gulf of Epstein 66 million years ago and put an end to their overpopulation? 

One of the less-often-discussed reasons for climate change denial, not just in the uneducated, dumbed-down United States but in other declining and fool-filled civilizations, is that nationalism eliminates any possibility of international action to preserve a climate that humans can live in.  In fact, nationalism has zero answers for all complicated world-wide problems, so the only “logical” approach is to call those problems “a hoax” and ignore them until they are impossible to ignore and way beyond the point of no return.  That kind of “solution” works for bills that we can’t afford to pay, like the national debt or balloon payment home loans, why not for world-wide catastrophes?  Since the Nixon Regime, Americans have grown so used to putting off responsibility to the next generation that it’s just a reflex now.  We haven’t even begun to pay off the Vietnam War debt and Reagan treated the national debt like it was a pile of chips someone had given him to play with at a casino.  Carter, Clinton and, to a lessor extent, Obama made an attempt to convince Americans that either taxes had to increase or spending had to decrease before the debt became unsustainable (which it is far past today), but Reagan’s gift to the 1% of control of the national media kills that discussion before it gets real.  And, like global warming, we’re just going to let that problem creep up on us until someone with a bigger stick calls the debt due.

If we’re lucky, we might be the last generation to enjoy spending the American dollar, too. 

Happy 4th?

 I recently saw that half of Americans don't have any idea what they are celebrating on the 4th of July, “including 61 percent of Gen Z respondents.”  That is certainly consistent with my experience, with rural Americans and, especially, rural young people. On average, the "Proud to be an American" crowd doesn't have even the slightest idea what parts of American History they should be proud of and what parts should be causing deep shame and embarrassment. Worse, at least half of them don't have the capability of feeling shame or an obligation to make things better for anyone but themselves. 

 This is the crowd that, exemplified by Elon Musk, think that philanthropy, empathy, and community are obsolete concepts. If you want to put a circle around the people who have caused the United States to become a lawless trash can of fools and degenerates, this is the group you put your focus on.

 A few days ago, I was talking with a friend and we were trying to determine when our police departments quit cracking down on illegal exhaust systems. Where he and I live, the noise level is often bad enough to make us decide to pack up and move to someplace quieter.  When I was a kid, 60 years ago, every young man who owned a motorized vehicle, from scooters to cars, worried about the smallest pin-holes in their exhaust systems.  Any sort of unmuffled sound would get them stopped, ticketed, and it might even result in the vehicle being confiscated; if it was the second or third time they've been stopped for that offense. From the early 1970s until the late 1990s and early 2000s, most states performed emissions testing, which included visual inspection of vehicles’ intake and exhaust systems for illegal modifications.  When that ended, so did anything resembling law enforcement of vehicle noise laws. Today, it's impossible to tell the difference between a modified, aftermarket exhaust system and a straight pipe on a huge number of vehicles of all sorts, including vehicles that are absolutely illegal on public streets, regardless of exhaust system condition. Since I still read about cops making house calls when neighbors make a disturbing the peace complaint, I know the country hasn't gone stone deaf. We have just gone stone lawless. When, and why, did that happen?

 The answer to almost every question in these United States can be found by following the money. And there is certainly lots of money to be found in the illegal exhaust business. But that doesn't explain why people want that kind of lawlessness, and they seem to want it in large quantities.  First the Nixon Administration (with a major impeachment threat setback) and, then, the Reagan Administration demonstrated that the nation’s laws do not apply to the rich and powerful.  I will always believe that everything in human culture is driven top-down and that doubly applies for criminal behavior.  When the average Joe Douchebag saw that the people who run the federal government were unimpeded by any sort of ethics limitations and were filling their pockets with anything they could steal, he decided those same rules applied to him. 

 For more than 60 years, I thought the American Constitution was the closest thing to a sacred document, at least related to governments, that humans had ever created.  Then, I read it cover-to-cover several times in 2013 and 14, when I was trapped in a New Mexico Campground with a broken Volkswagen camper. Even not considering all the lines drawn through slavery protections, it's not a very organized or impressive document. The Declaration of Independence, the thing we are supposedly celebrating today, is even more flawed. Ignoring the fact that the document only acknowledges that "all (white) men" are "endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," a good bit of this celebrated document embedded vicious racism in the origins of the country.  The declaration’s final complaint being that the king refused to protect the European invaders from ". . . the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." The North American European invasion history that followed that document is best described as the largest, most ruthless, and blatantly racist genocidal campaign in human history. Add that to the lined-out provisions in the Constitution protecting and furthering slavery and we should probably be having a moment of silence rather than a raucous, drunken, fireworks-detonating celebration of 250 years of mortification and greed.

 That isn’t, of course, who we are today.  Instead, we are a nation divided and on the edge of another civil war.  Our federal government has been dumbed-down to accurately reflect the lowest-common-denominator in our culture.  After 250 years of trying to find the least-fit person to hold the office of Presidency, it’s hard to imagine moving that bar any lower.  Donny Trump’s rampant corruption, narcissism, mental deficiencies, and vile amoral behavior is a sad and scary reflection on who so many of our countrymen and women are today.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not celebrating this moment today.  I’m going to spend this day and evening at home with Ms. Day and my thoughts and hope that next year is better.  Or, at least, not worse. 

There Is No “Coming Back” from This

 With the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the country demonstrated how gullible, violent and vicious, unpredictable, and dangerously stupid the country is at its core.  After Trump and his minions attempted to violently overthrow the 2020 election results and the repercussions for Trump and what passes for Republican leadership proved to be non-existent, national credibility and trust took another huge hit.  The 2022 midterm elections were another demonstration of how awful a near-majority of the country are.  Regardless of the legitimacy of the 2024 national elections, and the outcomes were very likely fraudulent, the fact that 78 million Americans voted for a convicted felon with close ties to Russia and organized crime and put the American Fascist Party in charge of both houses of Congress and the Extreme Court has marked the country as “unstable” to the world.  Those were the latest nails in the national coffin. 

Nixon and Reagan started fastening the coffin shut 40-50 years ago.  By expanding the Vietnam War without Congressional approval and weaponizing the dumbest half of the population against the institutions, standards, ethics, and laws of the nation, Nixon began the countdown to empire collapse.  Even though Nixon paid a small price for his corruption and fascist moves, his minions (the entire Reagan Administration) exacted a price that really started the nation’s decline.  In eight chaotic, noisy, distracted years, Reagan trashed the integrity of the nation’s media, flipped the tax system to penalize talent, work, and usefulness as opposed to inheritance and financial gambling, formalized treason as a political tool, created an unsustainable national debt, and convinced the nation’s Marching Morons to repeatedly vote against their own interests.  Trump is the logical end result of the kind of self-serving, short-sighted, downright evil “businessman” politics that fascists have promoted since the Roman Empire. History repeatedly demonstrates that always results in the same conclusion. 

As Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, described earlier this year at Davos, the world is "in the midst of a rupture, not a transition . . . [and that the] middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.”  That our once-closest friend and neighbor is now warning the world that the United States is as unpredictable, unstable, and dangerous as the other major world powers (Russia and China) is as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described "uncharacteristically candid both for Davos and a Canadian." The Carnegie Endowment document said that Carney had "laid out, for all to hear, the catastrophic implications of Washington's current policies for global order and signaled that at least one erstwhile ally is prepared not only to hedge against an unpredictable and predatory United States, but, if need be, to balance against it.”  For the world, this is not a bad thing.  The United States has been an irrational force in the world since the turn of the last century when our government became little more than a military tool of corporations.  How our country has been perverted into a front for uniformed armed mobsters was eloquently described in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, “It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And in the next 93 years, nothing has changed except for the worse.  The best estimates are that the United States has successfully overthrown somewhere between 14 to 26 foreign governments (estimates, because our government’s actions are far from transparent).  Despicably, 6 to 10 of those covert, military international interventions were against a democratically elected government. And not a one of those intrusions was, as General Butler said, for the “two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.”  It’s time that the rest of the civilized world (the one we’ve abandoned) treats the United States as a threat, not a dependable ally. 

As Trump, Musk, and Theil’s minions wandered through the ranks of the federal government, purging “disloyal” (i.e. “competent”) federal employees from every institution from the Department of Education to the CDC to the military, the country has been dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator in one painful, ignorance-filled, destructive year.  I doubt that anyone thought the country’s intellectual capacity was that fragile, but here we are.  In February of 2025, when Musk’s DOGE idiots were plowing through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, one of the recently purged scientists described the damage done as a national intellectual “extinction event.”  That kind of destruction has been perpetrated across the federal government and the only thing Musk and Trump proved is that even total fools can break practically everything.  At the other end of that demonstration, they proved that total fools aren’t even capable of painting a shallow concrete pool. 

 Sadly, I’ve had plenty of experience with this kind of foolishness at a much lower level.  Unskilled, lucky fools who stumble their way to the top of the corporate ladder rarely know how little they contribute to the organizations they mismanage.  In their ignorance and arrogance, they plod through functioning organizations like hippos in a china shop, breaking stuff and spreading shit everywhere in the process.  Today, we’re experiencing that phenomena on a national level and the right reaction from the world is to gain as much distance—socially, economically, politically, and militarily—as possible from this train wreck of a nation.  The long term goal of the world should be to do whatever is necessary to disarm the United States before Trump or some other idiot starts pressing red buttons. 

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.