Category Archives: angry rant

January 16, 2017 · 4:59 pm

When You Can’t Laugh at the Clowns

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It is sad that Ringling Brothers, Barnum, & Bailey will be closing for good this coming May.  I have personally gone to the circus and enjoyed the spectacle under the big top (though actually in arenas) about fifteen times, first with my parents and then with my own kids.  I loved the elephants, the wire-walkers, the lion tamers, and I laughed at the clowns.  And now that will no longer be possible.  I have gradually lost more and more of the most important things in my life as I have gotten older.  I lost mobility with arthritis.  I have lost financial security through health problems.  I have lost the ability to do the job I devoted my life to and so deeply loved.  And now I can no longer laugh at the clowns.

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The problem is not that there are no clowns left, even though most of the greatest ones, Emmett Kelly, Bob Keeshan, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and the man who played Bozo, have all passed on.  The problem is not that my kids are afraid of clowns, scared to death of people who aggressively get right up in your face while theirs is covered with grease paint (especially since my kids are now grown and can sock the clown in his painted mush if he gets too close).  The problem isn’t even that the clowns are not funny any more.

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The problem is that the Clown in Chief has killed the laughter.  He has become an agent of instability and chaos.  When he is mocked brilliantly by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, he has to mount a tweet storm on Twitter and uses his limited twit-wit to angrily denounce and threaten and belittle instead of laughing at the jokes as other politicians like the current President and Vice President have graciously done, even sometimes using self-deprecating humor to get in on the jokes themselves.  Even notoriously humorless political clowns like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have more grace in ignoring mockery and smiling at insults than this Great Orange Face that we put in charge of the country’s most serious business.

The ability to laugh at oneself is a very serious thing.  When the whole “golden showers” business made it into the national debate, this manic moron did not make it seem mere political hum-buggery by laughing it off.  No, he got deeply offended and defensive, the same way a person who is actually guilty of the accusation would react.  So, if it is not true, the Crybaby in Chief has only bolstered our belief that it is most probably true.  As ridiculous as the accusation sounds, you have to admit that Trump’s behavior in the past makes you at least entertain the possibility that it is a true thing that he has done.

And now, he has over-reacted again, this time to the very real concerns raised by Congressman John Lewis, an honest-to-God civil rights hero, with cruel and crusty criticism that lowers my respect for Trump as well as lowering all future expectations.  The man isn’t even sworn in yet, and he has already shown such bilious badness in his character that I truly dread living in this country under his rule.

I am a man who lives to laugh, and laughs to live.  That is how I overcome the things that bother me as well as the things that hurt me.  I use laughter as medicine, not as a weapon.  And I hate to see the viruses in our society that I have always been able to inoculate myself against with humor become totally drug-resistant in that way.

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January 12, 2017 · 12:21 pm

Sour Grapes and Old Foxes

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There are things still to come even though the world ended already.  I am not giving up while I still have life and breath.  I just finished an edit-review of my novel Magical Miss Morgan which I am publishing with Page Publishing, a cheaper vanity press than I-Universe with much lower publishing standards to explain the cheaper price.  I believe they are only providing a mess-up-your-spelling-and-punctuation service in lieu of editing my manuscript.  So I just now finished fixing all the corrections they made that have to be changed back.  Seriously, they wanted to change “Miss” to “Ms.” in the gol danged TITLE!  And they don’t let you write anything in all caps or use the danged … that I so often employ for pregnant pauses.  So, once this book is in print, I spend no more of my own money on publishing.  I will take the rest of my books to Amazon and self-publish.

But the book is gonna be great.  It will be worth the effort because it is among the best things I have ever written.

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This is a picture I intend to use on the cover of Magical Miss Morgan.

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I continue to put down Trump in this blog, on Twitter and on Facebook.  And I continue to get backlash.  My Trump-supporter friends make excuses and accept whatever kind of an incompetent horror he is without blinking.  Every clever put down I come up with for the Scary Orange Face yields nothing but, “You lost, get over it, libtard!” comments and further insults about Hillary and Obama that they are offended if I don’t laugh at.  But I have not un-followed or un-friended anyone.  They expect me to be civil and accepting in spite of the fact that they were never that for my candidates, even when Obama beat them twice.  But to some degree that is exactly what I have to do for their candidate.  I know them and care about them as people.  The more he betrays them and hurts them, assuming they ever realize that that’s what he’s done, the more they are going to need a friend like me who is capable of tolerating and understanding far more diverse and difficult people than they have ever been able to.  As a former school teacher, I have experiential advantages.  I know how to “love ugly”.

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So I will continue to make jokes and entertain, and try to slip a few good lessons into the mix in a way that they will actually take the medicine.  You know how Mary Poppins always recommended “a spoon full of sugar.”  As foxes go, I am definitely the old one in the title.  I am not really a red fox.  I am more of a gray fox now.  And I am not so much crafty and sly.  Just experienced enough that bears and wolves have not eaten me yet.

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I will continue to do my thinking in metaphors on this blog, a thing that protects me from a lot of my less reader-ly friends.  Metaphors just make most of them go, “Huh?”  And I will get away with saying things about them and their candidate that might make them want to exercise their “2nd Amendment rights” otherwise.  Who knows?  Maybe I can make life a little better for all of us before the orangutan we elected to the White House gets us all cooked, smothered, poisoned, and killed.

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January 11, 2017 · 3:56 pm

Bittersweet Irony

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“Mickey, you nerd!  Your jokes are not funny!

You’re not clever, you’re stupid, and not even punny!”

 

 

–wisdom from a Twitter troll who admires Dr. Seuss

I will admit, I was not joking when I said the world ended when Trump won the election.  I believe climate change is beyond our control when stupid, vicious, greedy people control 100% of our government.  They are busy already, before Obama even left office, with sealing our doom.  They recently passed the REINS Act, which is intended to not only curb but roll back government regulations.  The Republicans will no longer simply allow regulatory agencies like the EPA to control which toxic chemicals go into our food and drinking water when it might cost the taxpayers (especially RICH taxpayers) money.  They passed a rule that if corporations want to inject batrachotoxin into hamburger meat to increase profits short term, the FDA can’t regulate and prevent that without first having a congressional committee in each of the houses of congress voting their approval of the ban.  This with the aid of Tea Party sandbagging and temper tantrums to grease the gears toward refusal to turn.  Batrachotoxin as every congressman surely understands is the chemical in poison dart frogs that will will kill you if you kiss them.  We certainly need more of that in hamburgers to make the meat look tastier.  So, they will quickly and efficiently ignore the issue and fail to allow the regulation.  We are doomed, dear ones.

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Turtle-boy, pictured here, shows off his favorite flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony which he uses to throw at the heads of dumbnutz who don’t get what irony is.

Irony is when everything you held in your heart as an expectation and looked forward to as something you could depend on for the rest of your life comes abruptly to an end and the opposite is what actually occurs.

Republicans now hold all power in the US government.  Again!  Eight years of Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown, a Wall-Street meltdown and resulting Great Recession, two nearly-endless wars fought over false intelligence about WMDs, and eight years of obstructing everything the other side tried to do to fix their mess was not enough to satisfy Lucretia Borgia’s party of poison and greed.

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Senator Turtle-man McConnell doesn’t get irony.  He doesn’t understand now why Democrats don’t get on board with all the legislation and confirmation hearings that the GOP wants to push through right away.  Why would they want to obstruct legislation that helps people by reducing their social security benefits and ending not only the Affordable Care Act, but doing away with medicare as well?  It’s what the people voted for, isn’t it?

I have instructed Turtle-boy to throw the flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony at Turtle-man’s head.  But he must do it quickly and accurately, or the slow-talking Kentucky Senator will pull that big turtle head back inside his shell, as he has done so many times before.  And even if the flat iron hits squarely, it will not change anything.  We have lost and the future is lost to us and all our offspring.

I do still have some hope of survival of the human race and life on Earth.  Ironically that is because I am just as soft-brained and hopelessly stupid as the rest of my kind.  And I believe in savoring the time we have left.  I intend to cast off political worries into a sea of forgetfulness.  We shall have to see what sharks that attracts.  But hopefully, the sharks that actually eat us will die of food poisoning.

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January 9, 2017 · 4:04 pm

Explaining the Words… Part Three

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This is the last part of this monstrous political potpourri, I promise.  Because even a nattering nabob of liberal claptrap like me has to reach a conclusion sooner or later.  If I don’t, then sooner or later Donald Trump is going to hear that I may have called him a Fascist, soon to be followed by a Twitter Tweet Storm from Hell.

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But the only part of the continuum of political terminology I haven’t explained is the center of the horseshoe.  Yes, I said “horseshoe” because it is not a straight line continuum.  The two extreme ends, the crackpot communist end and the freaky fascist end both bend towards chaos and destruction.  The safe part is in the middle.  When you mount a horseshoe over the kitchen door for luck, the middle part goes at the bottom.  This way the horseshoe holds the good luck in.  If you tip it upside down, the good luck all drains out.  And for my extremely conservative friends in both Iowa and Texas, that is a metaphor, when you use one thing to mean something else completely, or compare two unlike things to get at a deeper meaning.  So please don’t break your brains trying to figure that one out.  It is just more of what you call, “loony liberal stupidity”.

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I have always thought of myself as a moderate, at least until recently.  The right side of the equation has skewed the numbers so badly that moderates are now liberals by comparison.  Republicans since Reagan have really turned Eisenhower into a liberal.  What once was a moderate conservative Republican in the 1950’s would have to be considered a liberal Democrat today if he or she maintained their core values.  I have the Bushies who are really proto-fascists peeking in at the right side of the moderate cartoon because they both started as moderates, and are really pretty much to blame for pushing moderates to the narrowing left as they ballooned the more evil aspects of the right.

In truth, the old Greek idea of “Moderation in all things”. also provably a Biblical idea, is really the best approach to politics.  Liberals aim to change things for the better (which we desperately need them to do in the next four years) and conservatives aim to preserve everything that already exists that is good.  We need both of those sides in a political debate.  But good governing happens always in the middle.  Remember, chaos happens at both the extreme ends.

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Eisenhower is a good example of the kind of moderate I am exalting as the best political sort of thing.  He was a moderate conservative Republican.  But if you substituted Barack Obama’s picture and name on this quote, my conservative friends would start hooting and hollering about the communist Muslim president from Kenya.  The idea itself is what they have been taught is communist liberal claptrap.  I may have mentioned before that I see Eisenhower policies and politics as virtually a synonym for the policies and politics of Barack Obama.  Obama is a moderate.  As is Mitt Romney whose Republican healthcare plan as governor of Massachusetts Obama stole to turn into Obamacare.  Jimmy Carter was a gentle Christian gentleman who was not only a moderate, but the first presidential candidate I was ever eligible to vote for.  I could easily have lived with Bob Dole, the moderate Republican senator from Kansas as president.  Moderates, in my estimation, are a very good thing for our country.

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Harry Truman was also a moderate, though he was very much on the conservative end of the moderate bench.  Still, what he said in this quote is really more true now than it was in his own time.  I would rate Truman as more conservative than Eisenhower.

So there is my essay on politics in three complete parts.  I have said my piece, and am now ready to be called a “stupid fear-mongering liberal”.  Let the throwing of overripe tomatoes begin.

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January 8, 2017 · 5:21 pm

Explaining the Words… Part Two

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Yesterday I tried in my very best loopy-liberal reasonable voice to explain what liberals are, their inherent characteristics and flaws, and the reasons we should not simply shoot them on sight.  So today I will try to make the case for what I believe conservatives are really all about and why we should not automatically shoot them either (or shoot them with automatic weapons so that Ted Cruz can cook more machine-gun bacon.)

Remember, I explained liberals and liberal philosophy as being an instrument of change.  And I identify myself as a liberal in these times of the Trumpster, Chaos Clown of Making America Sweat Again.  I think change is needed.  I had hoped for that with Obama, but the conservatives were victorious in their primary function of preserving the status quo.  Now, I do think there are times in history when conservatives were absolutely essential to our government.  The 1950’s is a good example of that under the Eisenhower Administration.  (But not for social reasons like the struggle for equal rights, rather the economic situation of growth and innovation and positive spirit… along with the invention of Rock and Roll.)

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Conservatives are meant to preserve what is workable and good, beneficial to all.  Unfortunately, some conservatives fall into the trap of wanting to preserve their own power.  That leads down dark paths to Fascism.  In my cartoon of conservatives immediately above, I should point out that I have included only the cartoon characters that have fallen at least partially into the Fascist tiger trap.

George Herbert Walker Bush is the son of Prescott Bush, a politician and banker whose New York UBC bank (he was president of the bank at the time) in 1942 had funds confiscated from it on the grounds that it was Nazi money funding the Nazi party in Germany and allowing the funny-looking failed painter from Austria with the toothbrush mustache to become the ultimate Fascist leader.

George W. Bush, his son, also known as Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown (mainly by me), continued the Nazi tradition by introducing the Patriot Act, reducing American civil liberties and establishing the surveillance state that we now enjoy.

Definition of Fascism from Webster’s; 

  1. often capitalized :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

  2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>

Richard Nixon had a direct link to the good conservativism of President Eisenhower, having been Ike’s Vice President and even being related by marriage as Nixon’s daughter married David Eisenhower.  But he also had a streak of paranoia and panic that caused the entire Watergate kerfluffle and his eventual flight from power into ignominy.

Donald J. Trump is, to be fair, still pretty much an unknown quantity.  But everything he has demonstrated in his business history and presidential campaign suggests he will be an even stronger Fascist than anyone I have named so far.  He puts on a show like P.T. Barnum, and horrifies and fascinates his audience.  But we never made the mistake of electing a liar and a con man like P.T. Barnum to the highest office in the land before.  And the paranoia and excuse-making through denial of reality we have seen so far in the Russian hacking scandal, makes me fear the worst.  Trump is more paranoid than Nixon.  He will probably do much worse things than Nixon did as a result.

The KKK has a place in my cartoon because their history is one of trying to preserve the status quo through violent repression and terror campaigns.  Their suppression tactics are the same as the Nazi brown-shirts on Krystallnacht and the Gestapo throughout WWII.  And through the Steve Bannon connection, the KKK has a firm grip on the underlying philosophies of the Trump Administration.

So the possible end point of the conservative push toward Fascism is the same sort of chaos you get on the far left end.  The leftist idea of constant revolution ends in violence or Fascist dictatorship.  Fascist dictatorship squeezes everything it tries to control so hard that it breaks, and Fascists try to control everything.

So, I fear both ends of the political spectrum.

Though I apologize to Bernie.  I would’ve voted for Bernie.  He was just the farthest left Joker meme I had to choose from for this metaphor.

As you have probably guessed by now, I intend to write one more post about this whole mess of political nonsense.  I have talked so far about the doom on both ends of the horseshoe, and so far ignored the middle, the part that holds the good fortune.   So, being well over 500 words once again, I will leave you until my next horrible political post about the world just prior to the Apocalypse.

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January 7, 2017 · 7:27 pm

Explaining the Words

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I used to have political arguments all the time with my father that would end only in frustration… for me.  He was happy to see his offspring boiling over ideas with smoke coming out of both ears.  Because no matter what I said, he would always take the opposite position just to oppose me.  I know this because I tested it.  I would counter an argument he had just made by rephrasing it so that it was in different words, but meant exactly the same thing he had just said to me.  Naturally he came up with opposing views immediately.  One time I even flat out stated, “I agree with you!”  Which naturally led to an immediate and complete reversal of the position on his part.  I think now that he was training me to think more deeply about things than just parroting talking points heard on television.  Either that, or he really really loved to argue.

The most important thing I learned in the endless arguments about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Two Bushes, and Bill Clinton was that you have to establish the meanings of the terms you are using.  Hence the reason for this post.

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The words that made the most difference in my discussions with my father were “liberal”, “fascist”, “conservative”, and “communist”.  When my dad used those terms, “conservative” always meant “good guys” and the other three words meant “bad guys”.  But when I listened to the policies and concerns he wanted to talk about, whenever he said the word “conservative” he was really saying “moderate”.    And because he was pretty much in the center of the political spectrum, he thought of fascists and communists as being the same thing.  If my father ever was truly wrong about anything political, it was when he followed Ronald Reagan’s affable, smiling “Morning in America” politics towards the far right and abandoned the moderate principles he held dear.  He had been deceived by Nixon, and regretted it… in fact, we all were deceived and we all regretted it.  But that did not prevent him from being deceived by later Republicans.  We both have had a long-standing admiration for President Eisenhower, Senator Bob Dole, Senator Chuck Grassley, and Senator John McCain.  They represent the moderate wing of the Republican Party.  But the GOP has marched relentlessly towards fascism and oligarchy of the rich, and we both feel that has tainted both Grassley and McCain.  My dad ended up voting for Barack Obama twice.  Obama, to him, is Eisenhower reincarnated.  The problem, we both agree, has come anytime American politics have moved away from the center.

So let me begin defining terms by ridiculing the Loony Left.c360_2016-12-26-23-19-35-929aa

Being liberal means promoting change.  Hence, the Marxist devotion to revolution and the desire to have an on-going revolution of constant change.  Unfortunately constant change is another way to define chaos.  That is the main reason that communist-socialist experiments have generally ended in violence, economic collapse, and fascist-type strong-man oppression.  The poor raggedy communist in my cartoon, standing on the left end of the spectrum is always doomed to poverty and violent death.  If you don’t believe that, just ask Leon Trotsky if it isn’t so.  Oh, wait, you can’t.  Stalin had him murdered.  Stalin ended the Russian experiment by cracking down on everything, making himself the antithesis of actual socialist ideas.  I included the ultra-liberal philosopher and hedonist Alistair Crowley on this end of the spectrum because he fought against all social norms and rules.  That sort of religion leads to sexual depravity, vice, and corruption to a degree that got Crowley labeled “the Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived” in a BBC documentary.

Sometimes being liberal is needed desperately.  Then you get the kind of liberal change agents that JFK was (and thankfully, LBJ carried out his liberal changes to an American society crippled by racism and xenophobia).  Martin Luther King Jr. was also that kind of agent of change.  Bernie Sanders is a parallel agent of change to JFK in that Barack Obama’s policies are almost a mirror image of Eisenhower’s in the 1950’s.  What the media today labels as a liberal is equivalent to moderate Republicans before Nixon.  Very similar changes are needed in social and economic areas today.  We have yet to see if Sanders can get elected in 2020 and then assassinated shortly thereafter.

You can probably tell that this article is not yet complete.  I have a lot more loony liberal pontificating to do (and please note, I said “pontificating” not “defecating”.  I am not a Trump voter.)    But I am well past the 500 word goal for today, and so, I must leave the rest of the crap to be said in a part two article.  Maybe also a part three.  Please stop me before I reach part twenty-six.

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I do so enjoy making fun of Trump and his tiny, tiny hands.  So here I am sharing another lampoon at the expense of the Great Orange Face of America.

 

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January 6, 2017 · 12:10 pm

Betsy De Vos and the Golliwogs of Education

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I have often said that I don’t really approve of insult humor.  I don’t think calling someone names really adds to the discussion in any useful way, and the real point of humor is to reveal the truth in a way that is palatable because it is surprising enough to make you laugh.  Revealed truth is much funnier than calling someone names.  So when I call Donald Trump the king of rotten cantaloupe rinds, I am really being no more clever than he is talking about Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary.

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Three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, (from left to right) Famine, Cinnamon Hitler, and the Pale Rider, Death.

So, what in the heck am I doing talking about Golliwogs in this post?

A Golliwog is a Raggedy Ann-type rag doll from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were a common doll type for typical little white girls in typical little middle class families.  My Aunt Jean, my father’s sister, had one as a child.  A female one with a red dress with black spots.  You could flip that doll over and underneath her skirt was a different doll, a yellow-haired white girl in a blue and black dress.  The image has become poison in modern culture because the blackface-minstrel roots of the character is now deemed racist and offensive. The Golliwogs in the children’s books of Florence Upton and Grid Blyton, though, were actually quite heroic, good-hearted and kind.

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As much as we vilify people for having them nowadays, there are many people who secretly adore them and wish to collect and preserve them.  I have long been enthralled by the brilliant 1920’s newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay.  But there are many who would lecture me sternly about that because there is at least one Golliwog character in the cartoon strip, and it is even debatable that the main character of Flip, the “bad kid”, is just another kind of Golliwog.

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Now, the point of this article is to make relentless fun of Betsy De Vos, the harpy that Donald Trump has put in charge of the implosion of the Department of Education.  There are a number of very bad things about this wicked witch and her policies.  Diane Ravitch does an excellent job of explaining what’s wrong with De Vos and her wicked witch plans in Ravitch’s education blog, linked here.  You should read all about it so you know why I am regressing into vacant-headed teacher burblings about her, and resorting to the kind of insult humor you find me committing in this blog post.

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Betsy De Vos looks at public school children and sees Golliwogs.  She is suspicious of their pedigree and basically doesn’t like them.  Remember, we are talking about public school children, not the children in upper class, rich private schools, the only kind De Vos actually touts.  She wants to give Golliwogs only the minimums absolutely necessary, the spoiled and the spilled milk.  The cream belongs to rich kids.  And she’s not prejudiced or racist, oh, no.  She sees poor white kids as just as golliwoggie as poor black kids, and she would have no problem pandering to Ben Carson’s kids.  Ben has lots of money.  He can be Sleepy McBoing-boing as much as he wants, and take off after phantom luggage whenever he wants, because money keeps you from being the detestable Golliwog.

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But the secret… the revealed truth is… Golliwogs are worth loving and educating.  Diversity and the resilience learned from hardship and poverty are priceless things, resources too rarely put to good use.  Most of the kids I truly loved as a teacher were Golliwogs.  Not just the chocolate-flavored ones, though those were very precious and precocious children, but also the vanilla-flavored ones, the caramel-flavored ones, the blueberry-flavored ones and the grape-flavored ones. (Okay, maybe they were only blue and purple in my crazy old head. And maybe I shouldn’t be making metaphors that suggest I am promoting eating school children.  That was Jonathan Swift’s thing.)  But Betsy De Vos and her boss, Donald Trump, will never understand that, and never see the true value in them.  If we are ever again going to have a fair and just system of education, we have to give value to the Golliwogs.

 

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December 28, 2016 · 2:23 pm

No Safe Space

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He’s watching.  There is no safe place to hide.  Well, that’s not true.  He doesn’t actually read.  He only uses a sifting program to latch onto everything in media that uses his name, and then he pounces with a twit-storm on Twitter, tweeting like an angry bird, launching his face and explosive personality at people he perceives as pigs. But the true danger, the reason there is no safe place is his army of Trumpkin Trolls who pounce and threaten and bully and attack with the ninja-assassin skill of middle-finger fu.

A fellow teacher, a college teacher of a popular human sexuality course named Olga Cox is under attack for saying Trump’s election was an “act of terrorism”.  Here is the video of her supposed sin caught on the cellphone camera of a conservative non-pig student who was apparently being assaulted by her comments.

I have to admit I searched out and watched this video because I got wind of the Bill O’Reilly tirade on Fox News railing against it.  (And what a foul stench wafted on that wind!)  Republicans in the surrounding community are outraged by the “angry rant” this liberal educator used in the classroom.  They are calling for her to be fired.  Death threats have come through Twitter and email, especially since the O’Reilly “Fair and balanced” angry rant.  One lovely Trumpkin sent her a picture of her own house complete with address and the email called Cox a “libtard, Marxist, hatemonger, nutcase” and said “her home address is now going to be sent everywhere.”

Far be it for me to defend a hatemonger, but as I listened to the rant, I was struck by the soft, supportive tone of voice the teacher was using.  This was a human sexuality class, and obviously some students take it because of their own sometimes hidden homosexuality.  She has had many students find the courage to come out of the closet because of that tone of voice and the supportive caring environment she tries to create.  Not only that, some of her students are part of a minority or religious group that have good reason to be nervous about Trump and Mike Pence taking over the reigns of the government sleigh and slapping the reindeer that pull it with considerable force to get them on the way with deporting illegals, reversing LGBT rights, and other loving conservative threats made because… well, we just don’t seem to know how to live our lives, and government should deregulate everything except our personal lives.

Here is another video to clue you in on the Marxist, nutcase dialogue that goes on in this teacher’s class;

I mean, it sounds to me like she is promising to keep students safe from hate-filled bullying, and offers phone numbers and links that students can use to find refuge.  How exactly is that being a hypocrite?  I really believe we need more teachers like this one, not less.  Her right to say these things should be protected.

After all, this last Presidential campaign was filled with instances of unacceptable hateful speech that was lauded as “not politically correct” because being politically correct does not mean “not trying to offend anyone”, but is somehow a horrible weapon that gores the side of conservatives like a bull in a China shop and must be rooted out of our society with bulldozers of invective.

I am sorry that the poor conservative child who videoed this was so injured by it that it had to be posted on the internet to go viral and force this teacher to leave her job for the rest of the semester and contemplate leaving permanently.  But the conservatives tell me that college kids are too obsessed with “safe spaces” where they can go when their “soft little liberal feelings are hurt”.  Obviously conservatives feel that these safe spaces have to go.  This story in the Orange County Register obviously shows how they are tracking down and attempting to remove them.

But if that is really the case, then who is really the hypocrite here?

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December 26, 2016 · 3:41 pm

A Plethora of Bad Days

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I’m sure you probably are saying to yourself something like, “What the heck is Mickey saying?” or “Why is this gesticulating goombah complaining again?” or definitely, “What the heck does plethora mean?”

Well, the results of 2016 I truly did not love.

Saturday my football Cardinals got a measure of revenge.  They were leading the hated Seahawks by a score of 31 to 18 in the second half.  Then, like God was cheating in their favor or something, the doofy Seahawks made a couple of long scoring plays and should have been able to kick the winning point after touchdown with less than two minutes left in the game.  Miraculously, the kicker shanked it wide left.  Tie score, 31 to 31.  So then, karma finally kicked in and the Cardinals got down into fieldgoal range on a pass to David Johnson, the miracle running back who ran for over 100 yards in his 15th consecutive game.  The game ended with a successful Cardinals’ field goal that gave them the unlikely win.

So, why am I not happy with a win like that?  Because it was practically the only one.  The Cardinals had a talented team this year that was predicted to win the Superbowl at the beginning of the year.  But they kept losing games.  Eight of them, as a matter of fact.  They were out of the playoff picture before Saturday’s game.  And the last time they played these skanky wanky Seahawks, they scored first in overtime, but still only got a tie out of the game.  And these same Seahawks made it into the playoffs as the winner of the Cardinals’ division.  Football life is really unfair sometimes.

And besides that, the Cubs won the World Series.  Donald Trump is going to be President in 2017.  The world is ending (at least within 100 years).  I am dying (at least within ten years).  And I am no closer now to being a successful novelist than I was on the day I was born.  Oh, and I have a viral infection that makes me cough and may kill me.  Life is all dark brown and dumbly glum right now.

So “plethora” means a whole gol dang lot of something.  And somewhere, somehow, someone owes me a good day or two.

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December 23, 2016 · 4:53 pm

Who Do You Listen To?

There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news.  Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.”  He never seemed to put a spin on anything.  No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK.  You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?”   His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.

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The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?”  Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.

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William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me.  I loved to listen to them argue.  They were equally matched.  They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion.  Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego.  Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos  with  an equally giant ego.  I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them.  They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth.  And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.

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When I was young I identified as a Republican like my father, and thought George Will was a reasonable opinion-leader.  After all, a man who loves baseball can’t be a bad guy.

Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate.  The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre.  The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA.  I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)

And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part.  And with him came Fox News.

Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious.  I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something.  So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News.  They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy.  And I suspect they do the same for everyone.  They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.

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News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions.  And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news.  So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real.  I found it in the most surprising of places.

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I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment.  It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?”  Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations  hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing.  And these are very smart men.  As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is.  I know because I have tried to do the same myself.  And is it really “fake news”?  It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.

So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news.  Is that where you expected this article to end up?  If not, where do you get your news?

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