They Only Wish They Were Pretti Good

 

A Substack page I read regularly, The Contrarian, wrote “Sadly, a larger swath of Americans — white men and gun-owners, for example — might only have been stirred when the victim turned out to be someone who closely resembled themselves and people they know.”  Sadly, I object to this analysis because I live in rural Minnesota and, other than gun ownership, there is nothing about Alex Pretti that resembles many of the white people here in the outback.  Mr. Pretti was educated, adventurous, liberal, generous, and courageous.  I know a few people here who fit that description, but I was surprised and disappointed, when I moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, to discover that “Minnesota Nice” mostly applies to the urban areas. 

I have lived in many of Trump’s favorite “shithole” states and counties from Kansas to Texas to Nebraska to southern California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota and worked with and around racist, ignorant assholes from Florida to Alaska.  Up to taking a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN in 2015, I thought the rural southern goobers I knew in Dallas, Texas in the late 60s were the worst people—the most racist, ignorant, most violent and dangerous, and flat-out-evil—I’d ever imagined meeting.  Think the murderous Deliverance butt-fuckers for reference and you’ll almost have a feel for how vicious and awful our first Dallas neighbors were.  The ignorant, intolerant, fascist rural boomers filling the Winona State Cabinetry Lab night class were so benignly awful that I felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a KKK country club.  As wonderful as the huge Minneapolis anti-ICE crowds have been, it’s important, even critical, to remember that just a few miles outside of that fantastic city the countryside is sparsely filled with goobers who are just as awful as any ICE goon, Alabama Klan member, Michigan Proud Boy, or January 6^th seditionists. 

I don’t believe, for a second, that the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti are waking these awful people up with some deeply buried and suppressed sense of compassion, community, decency, or empathy.  I imagine that the majority of rural fascists are church-going and that the churches they attend are led by pastors and priests who are just as awful as the people they “minister” to: selling hate, prejudice, and racism like it’s some kind of “get out of hell free” pass for fun and profit.  Minnesota’s claim to decency comes almost exclusively from the progressives in the major cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Rochester, Duluth, and the state’s college towns) and that is about two and one-half million of the state’s four-million, eight-hundred-thousand people.  A not-insubstantial percentage of the Cities’ suburbs are uncomfortably transplanted rural goobers who are exactly the same miserable souls as their rural misfit and unfit relatives. 

I would love to believe that the majority of rural Minnesotans were stirred to action or even empathy because the two murdered Minnesotans “closely resembled themselves and people they know,” but I’m not that gullible. 

Things We Do and Say At the End

In 2009, a long-time friend who had always made herself valuable, by being totally no-bullshit, received what, three years later, would be a terminal cancer diagnosis.  We had been having a long email dialog about a variety of personal subjects and, out of nowhere, she sent me a blistering, hyper-critical “never write or speak to me again” email.  I don’t have a lot of friends and I, usually, go to foolish extremes to hang on to the ones I have and, after a few days of letting that percolate, I wrote back to her.  I apologized for whatever it was that had set her off and asked for some clarification about the awful thing I had done to deserve it. 

After a bit, she wrote back and told me about the cancer diagnosis and made it clear that she did not, ever, want sympathy for her situation.  She had decided that she’d rather be friendless than to have to listen to sympathetic and sorrowful outpourings from her friends.  Like me, she didn’t have a lot of friends and even fewer family members who she was close to.   This was a tough, tough lady who had been independent since she was 16.  When she was married, she was her family’s sole income source until her husband found a younger substitute, when their son was about 5-years-old.  So, from then on I started every email with a joke about death.  As a life-long atheist, I tend to think concerns about death are funny-to-hilarious, so the jokes I picked were pretty ruthless. And we continued to communicate until her death three years later.

Our friendship began, slowly and weirdly, when I hired her to be a manufacturing engineer for a small audio company where I was the manufacturing engineering manager.  She not only hadn’t done a lot of electronics manufacturing, but she didn’t have any sort of engineering degree or even a high school diploma.  She did have a terrific track record with past employers and interviewed brilliantly and, critical to my situation at the time, she was cheap.  Early on, I discovered that she was hyper-conservative and very, very Christian; all negative flags for me, personally.  So, we began to argue about that stuff, off work and for the fun of it.  She was my first experience with a Christian conservative who never, ever, resorted to logical fallacies: Ad hominem, Ad populum, and an appeal to authority are the ones I most often experienced with conservative or religious people,  Philosophically, I often felt like I was falling on my face when I had prepared myself for the kind of irrational response I’d consistently experienced for my first 40 years of life and, instead, got a rational, fair-and-open-minded, well-considered rejoinder. I am a bit autistic (or a lot, depending on your opinion) and a stutterer, so I have always had to mentally prepare my replies in advance to keep from sounding totally mentally deficient.  When a response is completely unexpected, I have to reformulate my thoughts, rewrite my response, mentally practice forming the words, and, eventually, say something.  Arguing with her was a LOT more work than practically anyone I had ever met.  More rewarding, too.

A year or so before I left California, she had become a lead manufacturing engineer for a large medical devices company and she had arranged interviews and a pretty good offer for me with her company.  I was grateful, but had no interest in living in the southern California desert (where her employer was located), even for a six-figure salary.  After I left California, had lived in Colorado for five years working for a medical device company, and ended up in Minnesota working for another medical device company, we discovered that we were employees of the same conglomerate.  We restarted our email correspondence and I was surprised to discover that she had become a far more radical, much more angry, atheist lefty than me.  She and several other manufacturing engineers started a consulting company.  Her income bumped up against seven-figures, her lifestyle was international, and she was regularly published in the Journal of Manufacturing Engineering as an international quality expert.   

In 2007, a medical condition wrecked all of that.  Her ability to hyper-focus and work insanely long hours uninterrupted by sleep, meals, or rest turned out to be due to a Graves Disease variation that began to unravel her life.  Pre-ACA, she was dropped by her health insurance company and could only find coverage for $10,000/year with a $50,000 deductible.  Her medications cost nearly $500,000/year and she was unable to work.  The Great Recession and her medical situation cost her nearly everything, but she was able to manipulate the total disorder of the last year of the Bush II administration into freeing herself, with bankruptcy, from her expensive Riverside County, California property, her medical debt, and she ended up owning, outright, a small acreage in the desert hills of San Jacinto, California.  She turned that into a successful organic farm, where she grew heritage tomatoes, in buckets, that approached trees in size and a variety of herbal remedies that she sold at farmers’ markets and through her website.  And that lasted until her cancer took away the physical ability to maintain her farm and business. 

One of the last emails I received from her, a few weeks before she died, contained her list of “Things I have learned and learned to accept in this life”: 

•       Bad things happen to good people
•  Good things happen to just horrible, even evil people
•  No good deed goes unpunished
•  Mercy is preferable to justice
•  Keeping up with the Jones’s is a symptom of insanity
•  Degrees & diplomas are not worth the paper they are printed on, but are handy to light a fire.
•  If you are angry or bitter, you forget how to be happy
•  It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty - who the fuck cares? The point is to DRINK.
•  Humility gives clarity to a natural state of gratitude that generates real happiness.
•  Fanatics, on all extremes, are not worth listening to - they are confused and in pain.

She was about a decade younger than me and died at 51 years-old.  Now at nearly 78, after the past six years of one fucked up medical issue and lost capability after another and feeling my mortality pretty strongly, I can relate, strongly, to her urge to avoid sympathy at all costs.  Sympathy and pity are not helpful and the words are, usually, more depressing than encouraging or comforting.  Those of us who are introverted and a bit (or more) antisocial are more likely to want to die like an old cat, with “a quiet, unaccompanied acceptance of mortality amidst the recurring, cyclical, and violent destruction of human civilization” (from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.).  At its best, this life is hilarious and violently nonsensical, punctuated with brief moments of compassion, love, and loss (lots of loss, seemingly mathematically impossible with what feels like more loss than initial gains).  Someday, I hope to have a friend who sends me occasional jokes about dying when I am in that state. 

Here Is Where We Are in History

 And who we are imitating.

 

As proud of this comparison as the MAGA fascists are, the most embarrassing part is that the Nazi executioners had the “courage” to do their murders in plain sight, mask-less.  Trump’s “Gazpacho” is so certain that they are criminals, likely before imitating “law enforcement,” that they go nowhere without their disguises in position.  Even as degraded and corrupt as the ICE goons are, they are not proud of this moment in history and their part in it.  That may be the only normal thing about the moment in history that we are witnessing.  Otherwise, this is the US equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989.  Two years later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke into 15 independent countries. 

Today, it’s certainly not hard to imagine the United States’ lower 48 dissolving into Colin Woodard’s “11 Nations” plus Hawaii returning to independence and Alaska being battled over by Russia, China, and Canada.  Republicans have long been “the party of unintended consequences” and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is very likely to have a totally different outcome than their “plan.” 

Outside of The Far West, the Deep South, and Tidewater, most US citizens would have a hard time surviving under a king or a dictatorship and a “racially pure” society.  And those places, without the moderating influence of the democratic state would quickly devolve into 3^rd world status and feudalism.  The only argument I have with Woodard/s map is that, if The Far West did split off from their more progressive and productive Left Coast benefactors, I suspect the Left Coast would claim, by force, a lot more of the California, Oregon, and Washington territory. 

While Cheeto Benito would likely be the dictator the South and Tidewater worship, I doubt that climate-exposed area will be much more prominent in world politics and power than Italy or Greece is today.  Scraping away diversity and returning to a primitive patriarchy is a formula for cultural decay and economic stagnation. 

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Fools or Bastards?

A while ago, I wrote in this space, “Trump’s beloved rural “uneducated” are overwhelmingly 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 which also includes  ‘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’ (aka “white mediocrity”)  crap.  Living in rural America has biased me toward believing that the majority of the Trump and Republican voters are inbred morons and unknowing Know Nothings.

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: 1) Americans have downbred into a nation of gullible fools or 2) 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 in “Going to A Town,” “You took advantage of a world that loved you well. I’m so tired of America.”  After World War II, it seemed, from outside of the United States (and less so from the inside), 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 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 or 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 and 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. 

We had it so good?

 A recent article about generational wealth stated that “reasons listed in the report for higher boomer net worth include how this generation was in the ‘right place at the right time.’ By definition, boomers were born after World War II, allowing them to enjoy the economic boom post-war: falling tax rates during their lifetimes, generally healthy stock market with rising values, relatively affordable housing prices, and since the 1980s, falling loan interest rates. In contrast to pre-boomer generations, boomers have benefited from 401(k) retirement plans and associated tax breaks.”  When I read crap like this, I wonder what world the author is living in.  Boomers lived through at least 5 recessions, including a “Great” one that bankrupted somewhere between 6 million to 10 million households who lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more who emptied their savings and sold their possessions to avoid bankruptcy. 

That so called “World War II boom” lasted until most of my generation were about to enter the job market in the 1960s.  First, the Vietnam War draft removed 2.2 Americans from beginning of their work lives to pump up the wealth of that group of Robber Barons who would go on to rape and pillage our economy for the next 80 years.  There is are several reasons that the often quoted “average (mean) net worth” of Boomers is over $1.5 million while the real average (median) is somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000.  Not enough for a secure retirement, by a long shot.  There are 11 million 65+ Americans working past their retirement age, 20% of that age group, and many are living paycheck to paycheck. 

Nixon started the shift, especially by encouraging health insurance companies to become for-profit institutions with the s Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973.  That set the stage for an annual half-million Americans going bankrupt due to medical bills.  41% of working-age Americans—72 million people—are paying off medical debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.  7 million 65+ adults are also in the same sinking boat.

Most of that huge income inequality gap is due to tax policies enacted during the Reagan years that transferred nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% by 2025 and has all but eliminated the US middle class in the process.  Reagan and his goons launched a propaganda parade against the “unearned income tax” rates and that set us up for the hedge funds, vulture capitalists, and the billionaire class that the USA is probably permanently cursed with today.  Every tax cut since has widened the gap, increased economic inequality, decreased working class security, and lowered the quality of life in this country. 

 

In 2011, my grandson and I took a motorcycle tour of the Black Hills, the Utah and Colorado Rocky Mountain range, and the spaces between Minnesota and those destinations.  We camped almost every night in state and federal campgrounds.  Every single campground was hosted by people from my generation and all of them had lost everything except the trailer they were living in and the vehicle that pulled it from campground to campground.  Several of them admitted that they didn’t really own the camper or the vehicle, either.  They were on the move to avoid the repo man, since they couldn’t afford the payments on the remains of their life before the Crash. 

There is no generation alive today who had it easy.  But there are generations of the inherited rich who have passed on entitlement, wealth, power, education, and opportunity to their offspring.  Thomas Jefferson wrote, ““… there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.”  While Jefferson didn’t live up to many of his own ideals, he proposed a “law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature,”  Reagan’s goons convinced voters that an inheritance tax was a “death tax,” which is ridiculous but was effective.  Trump’s goons are trying to eliminate public education and to dumb-down the nation to prevent an outbreak of democracy, justice for everyone, and the kind of giant leap in technology, culture, cooperation, world peace, and stability that might allow humanity to solve the real problems, like global warming, that will end our species if allowed to go unchallenged.  Pitting generations against each other is key to preventing anything good from rising from the ashes of our current decline.

Bad Apples and Spoiled Barrels

One of the many weird things about living in a country where almost everyone gets their food from sealed packages and in Happy Meal bags is that a lot of the phrases we use every day lose their meaning.  For example, “one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel.”  When was the last time you saw a barrel of apples, if ever?  I know people who have never picked an apple from a tree and a few who think apples magically appear in their parents’ refrigerator’s crisper drawer.  That “bad apple” phrase has been distorted and manipulated by politicians and media until it has become meaningless, but not to those of us who have apple trees and harvest them every fall and count on storing them well into the winter.  

 In 2020, Trump’s 6^th National Security Adviser from his 1^st term, Robert O’Brien, speaking about George Floyd’s murder, said, “There are some bad apples in there. And there -- there are some bad cops that are racist. And there are cops that are -- maybe don't have the right training. And there are some that are just bad cops. And they need to be rooted out, because there's a few bad apples that are giving law enforcement a terrible name.”  Like many of the people who misuse this warning,

O’Brien clearly had no idea what the word “spoiled” means.  We’ve had bad apples in our police departments for as long as we’ve had police departments in this country.  We’re to the point, now, where the problem isn’t that other good apples are being contaminated by a few bad apples, but that there are so many rotten apples in the barrels that the barrels themselves are contaminated and decaying. 

One easy way to determine if a department is full of corrupt cops is counting the number of cops in a department who support a felon for President. There is no law-abiding way to take that position and in both the 2016 and 2024 elections it appeared that most US cops are Trumpers. 

 

One of the worst police departments I’ve ever experienced is in St. Paul, Minnesota and, this week, the St. Paul cops took a stand to make us all knowwho and what they represent: corruption and violence.  And you know they are not proud of what they are doing because, like Trump’s January 6^th ICE gang, they are wearing bandit masks even in their own communities.  

Masked and armored with their badge numbers hidden, like their ICE partners, the St. Paul “rapid response teams” stormed a neighborhood, using violence and intimidation to try and subdue the people who they are supposed to “protect and serve” in an entirely predictable manner.  If any police department in the country deserves to be defunded, it’s this one.   

 

And there are far more barrels full of rotten cops than anyone wants to admit.  The reason is that we keep imagining that a couple hundred years of rotten apples has just contaminated a few of the apples in the barrels.  Correcting that mistake was what the “defund the police” movement was all about.  Police and the ruling class fought back with propaganda, myths, and foolishness, but the only way to make our police departments “protect and serve” the communities who fund those departments is to create effective incentives and punishments that make the few decent cops root out the majority bad cops. 

 Minnesota has an unearned reputation as a “liberal state,” but since the state is 30% rural and a lot of the urban areas are contaminated by rural immigrants and rural goobers are 90% “conservative” (a synonym for “timid”), the state is often as backwards as the rest of the South and Midwest.  And that is not a compliment.  The St. Paul cops proved themselves to be defund-worthy during the 2008 Republican Convention and they are repeating that performance today.  The city’s police department has had a long and infamous friendly relationship with the Mob and gangsters in general.  Today, with a President who is closely connected to the Mob and a federal Department of Random Deportations operating with literally no legal justification or restrictions, the St. Paul police are in comfortable and familiar territory.  St. Paul police Chief Axel Henry excused his department’s joyful participation in “crowd control” with the claim that “the street was compromised with foot and vehicle traffic, and a dangerous situation was unfolding.”  As in the 2008 Republican convention, the danger all came from overzealous, violent cops who were getting to play with the lethal and non-lethal toys in a safe (for them) environment. 

One of the reasons Dallas, Texas was where a Presidential assassin was successful in 1963 was the city’s police department’s comfortable relationship with the city’s mobsters.  From years of nancyboy, cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover’s Mob connections and corruption and reckless incompetence, the FBI did as bad a job of protecting the President as they did the country throughout the Cold War years.  Eventually, the once-competent and functional US Justice Department launched an investigation into the Dallas police department and, as a result, in the mid-60s hundreds of cops were fired and the Dallas police department became smaller, more competent, and (for a while) actually attempted to “protect and serve” the citizens of the city.  To this day, the Dallas police department is an outlier in the corrupt, decadent state of Texas, although it is by no means exempt from the rotting barrel syndrome. 

I moved to Dallas in 1967 and, after some job shuffling, I ended up (believe it or not) being the department manager for a big box store’s downtown drug department.  Our employee break room served as a de facto coffee shop for a lot of downtown cops.  I got to know a few of them and heard lots of stories about the cops who’d been fired by the Justice Department’s investigations.  It was a non-stop horror story told by the not-rotten apples who’d been exposed to the contamination in the barrel. 

The problem with bad apples is that their contamination spreads quickly through the whole barrel.  If they aren’t removed quickly, you have to toss the entire lot, minus a few outliers.  The “few bad apples” argument is irrational nonsense.  A “few salvageable apples” is more realistic, at best.  St Paul’s police department is a well-known case of a barrel full of rotten apples. 

Who Are They and Where Are They Taking Us?

 Trump has taken the sad remains of the United States of America so far down the rabbit hole of corruption, domestic violence, treason, and incompetence that it should be amazing that he has any supporters left in this country. But he does. And that remaining 26-38% who still approve of Donny and his sad sack band of third tier elites are, and should be, amazing. “Loyal” doesn’t begin to describe their addiction and attraction to Little Benito. “Perverse” is the first description that comes to my mind.

Trump’s falling approval numbers are based on Trump’s incompetent “handling” of the economy, mostly the rising cost of consumables, and the suspicions (if you are totally gullible) that Donny is a pedophile and is hiding his relationship to his pedo-bestie Epstein. Weirdly, corruption, grotesque levels of abuse of Executive power, threatening violence against his opposition, his disdain for the US Constitution, and generally childish, petulant behavior isn’t even a thing for the shambles of the Republican Party and its minions. So, while I’m disgusted and discouraged by the goobers who voted for Trump and have, recently, soured on him, the ones who are left are something even more despicable. They are, in fact, economically and ethically, poor examples of exactly who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, amoral, greedy, childish, and stupid.

Ms Day and I often participate in a local protest event. We stand along Highway 61, downtown at rush hour on Friday with 100-200 other locals waving signs and talking to people about the decline of the American Empire. [I know. It’s probably a pointless exercise, like piling sandbags against a beach house when a tsunami is on the way. I’m almost 80-years-old. Thanks to worn out hinges and struts and biomechanical supports, I can barely lift my arms over my head some mornings. There isn’t much that I can do to change the direction of our destruction, but I’m going to do what I can, while I still can.] At that protest, we get a close look at who the Trump culters are and we hear a lot from them, too. This is rural Minnesota, which is no smarter than rural anywhere else on the planet. At least half of the citizens in our county are on some kind of government assistance for food, shelter, healthcare, and employment. The region’s education level is below the state’s average, the average age in our county is 42.3 years and a substantial portion of the population is over 65. Of the remaining population, maybe a quarter are actually fairly self-supporting and the rest are living on socialism and/or Mommy and Daddy’s money (most “farmers” inherited their occupation, real estate, and a lot more). As a group, we’re nothing to brag about, but that doesn’t stop the strutting, preening, and chanting. Rural Americans are nothing if not full of false pride.

Last week we had the usual bunch of loud pipes bozos, spewing noise and wasted fuel as they left the stoplight where we congregate. It’s hard to beat that for an expression of disrespect for law and order and the public peace and it’s a pretty clear statement from local “law enforcement’ that the only laws enforced are the convenient ones. We’re drawing near the end of the 3-month biker season (it’s much longer for motorcyclists) in Minnesota, but that crowd is consistently pro-Trump and anti-civility. Since early March of this year, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Hardly riders who expressed anything but disdain for our protest. A safe rule is “the louder the exhaust system, the more pro-fascist the rider/driver.” This, by the way, appears to be true across the globe. Dictators from Putin to Venezuela’s Maduro to Israel’s branch of the Infidels Motorcycle Gang are used as enforcers without any sort of interference from police and government restrictions. You have to be a special kind of stupid to imagine that the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws, or even the many biker gangs comprised of felon-loving US cops care about the US Constitution.

One of the weirdest protest-protestors was a young person of unidentifiable gender, in the front passenger seat of a car, somewhere between 18 and 30, who screamed “I hate you, I hate you . . .” as he/she/it slowly passed our group in the moderately heavy afternoon traffic. I’m not exaggerating the description. If you asked me to identify this person, I could describe a lot about clothing, hair color and length, but I couldn’t even make a guess about the gender. The voice was high and shrill, but not necessarily feminine. The person’s face was as gender-neutral as a baby. The person’s light brown hair was cut at about 2-4” and scraggly. Even the voice, screaming at the top of his/her lungs, was gender-neutral. None of us knew what to make of that display of weirdness.

We get a surprising number of weird looking old men who stop in the intersection to shriek indecipherable pro-Trump polemics at us. It’s hard to rank them for weirdness, because they are all peculiar, lonely, old Minnesota bachelors with varying levels of either credit or resources. That last assumption is based on the vehicle they are driving and the amount and content of the crap piled in the seats around them. I have never understood a whole sentence from any of them because they are incoherent and rabid in their love for Donny the Pedo. Hands-down, the weirdest of this old white men bunch is a ZZ Top looking gnome, about 5’5’ and with a white beard and long hair, who spoke with such a strong eastern European accent that I could only understand a few words out of the hundreds he shrieked at us. One of the people I was standing near decided to engage this doofus and was drenched in spittle as a result. I was impressed at that person’s ability to translate enough of the “conversation” to try and interact. Between the volume, the flying saliva, and the cartoonish Russian accent, all I could do was look away and try not to laugh.

At least once every Friday, there are the scraggly barfly groupies who scream “I love Trump” as they wobble through our intersection. Like women who vote Republican, these characters are seriously deluded. There is, literally, nothing the Mango Mussolini or the Republican Party could or would ever do for these people. Even if they weren’t poor, uneducated, and beaten half-to-death by a gnarly ugly stick, our Founding Farter is clearly fond of per-pubescent little girls who can be threatened by a micro-penis. Of course, Cheeto Benito has nothing but disgust for anyone who isn’t a billionaire or a Fox News supplicant, but he is particularly put off by “those dirty people” who were foolish enough to vote for him. Of all the filthy hands he doesn’t want to be touched by or seen near, “ugly women” are at the top of the list. But they still “love” him and that is, at the least, confusing.

This week, one of the most baffling counter-protestors I’ve encountered rolled down her window and very pleasantly said, “I Love Trump.” There was nothing classically Trump-cult about her: she wasn’t scared with the usual permanent anger lines, she made her announcement with a shy smile on her face, the driver of her vehicle remained as uninvolved as possible while waiting for the light to change as if he were somewhat embarrassed, and they both looked reasonably middle-class. The best response I could manage was, “That is sad to hear.” Of course, I thought of a dozen better comebacks after she was gone, but my first response was as honest as anything I thought of later. It is overwhelmingly sad to realize that some of the people ensnared in the Trump cult are not obviously awful people.

There have been a few political figures in my life who I have admired, but none that I would say I “love.” I don’t know any of them well enough to make that kind of emotional commitment. There is nothing about Trump to love, so what is going on there is beyond my comprehension. It is clearly and obviously a cult. In a Guardian article. titled “Watch Out for the Tell-Tale Signs,” a cult is defined as “‘formal religious veneration,’ ‘a system of religious beliefs and its body of adherents,’ ‘a religion regarded as ‘unorthodox or spurious,’ ‘great devotion to a person or idea’ as well as ‘persons united by devotion or allegiance to an artistic or intellectual movement or figure.’” That appears to be the mental state of at least 79 million American voters and, to me, it is incomprehensible.

When 79M citizens are this easily conned and take their selfish, racist, uneducated, paranoid conspiracy-insanity this far down the rabbit hole, the rest of us are condemned to suffer some of the consequences. On average, Trumpers are less educated, older, more rural, more superstitious, and, obviously, more gullible than the average casino sucker. Know-Nothing Donald ought to, at least, give them all Trump University diplomas, then they’d have something to show for all that they have lost. As for the rest of us, the United States of America will never be the place it was before the Trump fascist movement changed everything. The rest of the world has moved on without us and it’s hard to imagine that our former allies will ever consider us to be sane, intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, or even useful. There will be repercussions for all of that and none of it will make any part of America great and we will, likely, never be anything near great again.

The New FBI, Same As It Ever Was

When I was a kid, back in the 50s and 60s, television depicted the FBI in a relentlessly positive light: the J. Edgar Hoover-approved The Untouchables from the late-50s.  Television carried on the joke with The F.B.I, in the 60s, the 80s and 90s collection of The F.B.I. Files, FBI: Most Wanted, FBI: International, FBI: The Untold Stories, Criminal Minds, Numb3rs, and the farce is still playing with the current CBS FBI show,  In those fictional fairy tales, we’re led to believe that FBI agents are relentlessly protecting the public from serial killers, terrorists, bank robbers, and general purpose bad guys.  The delusion got played to its ultimate farcical denouement when the nation sat on the edges of 320 million chairs waiting for ex-FBI Robert Mueller to uncover and prosecute Trump for being a Russian asset and FBI Director James Comey to bring the Republican band of traitors to trial.  Of course, none of that ever happened, even though the evidence was overwhelming. 

In sad retrospect, it was pretty funny watching (and being one) liberals and even 60s anti-establishment types wildly hoping that the FBI would overcome it’s long history of corruption, right wing politics, being the federal strongarm for big business and bad government, and relentless incompetence and, finally,  put Trump in jail where he has belonged for at least 50 years.  A lot of that pipedream had to have been based on generations of television and movie propaganda misleading the public into believing the FBI was a protector of “law and order.”  The opposite is, generally, the truth. 

The origin story of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover’s scheme to create an internal federal police force to keep politicians in line and to protect the interests of big business and idle wealth.  Hoover turned the FBI into a collection of mobsters who hunted down, sometimes murdered, threatened, and prosecuted anyone who smelled even a little bit like a small-“D” democrat.  There have been few moments since 1924 when the FBI could make any kind of claim to being on the side or working people, democracy, or even the United States of America. 

Competence-wise, the FBI has been made fools by WWII Germany, Cuba, Russia, Iran, and practically every other enemy of the United States over the past 100 years.  While there have been a few notable FBI agents who managed to do their jobs, in spite of a lack of leadership, most are perfectly suited to the job Trump has them doing now: intimidating US citizens and assisting ICE in terrorizing the country.  The agency’s vaunted “high standards” for applicants has long been little more than window-dressing, but today is is less than that.  As agents who actually investigated Trump and his minions for treason, corruption, and other crimes are being purged from the FBI, those positions are being filled by people who should be behind bars, not pretending to be law enforcement.  Along with the dilution of the military leadership, the NSA and CIA, the U.S. Marshalls, and even the Secret Service, the nation has never been this unprotected and exposed.  It’s hard to see a way back from this and I don’t expect it to improve in my lifetime. 

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.