The mission continues
I’ve spoken with a couple of readers recently, both of whom lamented half-joshingly, “Hey, you used to write fun stuff about travel and hot springs and sunsets and hummingbirds and stuff, and now you’re this blazing lib crank, and well, you know …”
Hey, guilty as charged. In fact, it’s now been about a year since I turned “Notes from the Neon Babylon” into “Trump?!? Are You Shitting Me? Donald Trump?!?” and there’s no gettin’ around it. I’ll confess there’s a cathartic effect in howling at The Heinous Anus and his minions/enablers on a weekly basis that I find not just therapeutic but downright dreamy. I’m strung out on it. I’ve written a couple of travel-oriented columns in recent months, just for old time’s sake. And sunuvagun, I just couldn’t turn ’em in. Couldn’t get serious about ’em. They just seemed trite in the context of The Dum Dum in Chief.
So I was mulling all this while sitting out in my front yard, a large thunderstorm darkly and dramatically framing Spanish Springs peak, air temperature a perfect 88, a warm, mild breeze blowing in from the west, drinking some acceptable sauvignon blanc, listening to this terrific old Pat Metheny album, and vaping up my own happy haze with this totally satisfying new doodad from one of our gleaming new pot shops, and I had to admit, at that moment—things could be a lot worse. A whole lot. Summer is so unfailingly gorgeous here.
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OK, back to The Never-ending Bitchfest. One of the hallmarks of right wing junk thinking is the common refrain of “where will it all end?” So when us semi-sane types dare propose that folks shouldn’t be able to buy bazookas and anti-tank weapons, that inevitably morphs into “The Liberals want all our pistols! They’re coming for our shotguns! Watch for black choppers!”
This lameass and frustrating thought process is now surfacing with the issue of Confederate Statues. “Today, it’s Bob Lee and Stoney Jackson! Tomorrow, they’ll want Washington and Jefferson! Where will it stop? Where?!?”
As usual, the proper response is—fuck off, take an Advil, change your Depends. We don’t want to remove statues of hallowed Founding Fathers. OK? We do, however, want statues of racist losers from yesteryear moved from public squares and parks into museums, drive-ins, redneck cemeteries. We aren’t changing history, screeching Hannitarians! Nobody is erasing Robert E. Lee’s Wikipedia page. But it is time to get statues of seditious slaver secessionists out of our parks. Get over it.
