I am not superstitious. At least, not as long as I don’t discover I was a Knight Templar long ago in a past life. Especially not a Templar in France on Friday 13th of October, 1307. It is not a good idea to poke old demons and wake them up when they have been sleeping for centuries. But I don’t believe in demons either.
The St. Louis Blues hockey team won their playoff series this week, ending the series with three straight wins in a best-of-seven series against the Minnesota Wild. So, bad luck didn’t affect my favorite NHL team in their quest for a second Stanley Cup. Of course, they didn’t play on Friday the 13th.
The future still looks bleak. Those of you who were depending on Elon Musk to solve the climate crisis by moving us all to Mars or something need to be aware that he is buying controlling interest in Twitter. And he is truly terrible at Twitter. He’s not thinking about saving the world on Friday the 13th, rather, he’s planning to put Trump back on Twitter We are probably doomed. Jeff Bezos probably can’t save us either. He is evil enough to have a self-publishing program on his Amazon world-wide mercantile monopoly that allows Mickey to publish his own books. And then Bezos does nothing else to help sell the product and keeps a majority of the money from all sales. This Friday brings to mind the fact that I have not sold a single book all month. Take that, Jeff Bezos! You can’t get any money from me this month. Of course, I can’t either. And the world is doomed on this Friday the 13th because Bezos can’t get money from Mickey this month, and so, refuses to save the world.
And so, there is a theory of bad luck on Friday the 13th that says once you make it through a Friday the 13th with no bad luck, then Friday the 13th will always be lucky for you ever-after. Of course, the omens are not favorable. And the Reaper has a chicken for some reason. So, things could go very, very bad later today. But I am not superstitious. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about 1307 and burning at the stake for some reason.
On my daily walk in the greenbelt park there are bridges to get back and forth across the creek. The park is both a place of recreation and a flood-control device that helps keep the city above water. I crossed bridges six times in my walk today (one small bridge twice, the Josey Lane street bridge, the Frankford Road bridge, and the two wooden-plank bridges that help you walk a loop through the park.) With my near-crippling arthritis, I could not navigate the park without those bridges.
And life is getting harder as I get older. My eyesight is becoming cloudy and blurred. My joints all ache. I have problems with bodily functions. I constantly talk about things like that last one in this blog that you really don’t want to know.
Yesterday this blog got fewer views than any single day since 2013. And that includes days when I didn’t publish even one post. Yesterday I published two, one I wrote about God believing science fiction is true, and the other about crying at movies that is a popular old post re-posted.
I do this blog because I am nominally supposed to be promoting my published books. I was set on this path by the marketing advisor for I-Universe Publishing. It was not intended as a way to have fun writing and using it as a way to prove to myself that I am somehow a successful writer.
The bridge I have to cross is believing in myself. I need to stop having doubts. Good days and bad days happen to all writers. Stephen King , getting run over by a passing car, had a worse bad day than I have ever experienced. And because I continue to struggle and write, getting words down on paper, and putting together publishable paragraphs, I am proving that I am a writer every day. No one can take that away from me. And I truly believe I am a good writer. I know a lot about how to write that even successful writers don’t really know. And even though some who read my books have hated them, and a majority of those who have read them don’t leave a review, I have good reasons to cross the bridge into the bright green park of believing in my own writing..
Writing every day is the exercise that keeps my mind alive just as walking in the park every day keeps my body and especially my heart alive.
God finally finished the last episode of the radio comedy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on an old cassette recording from the BBC brought to him especially from Heaven’s out[-of-date AV department at his command. He hadn’t listened to it when it was new even though Saint Peter kept telling him how funny it was and he really ought to make himself aware of the works of Douglas Adams. And he needed a new comedy writer for the Sacred Stand-up Comedy Review next Saturday.
“Make it so, Peter,” God decreed.
“Um, Lord, I fear our lend-lease agreement with the Bad Place has expired.”
“You mean, the writer of that radio play is not in Heaven…?”
And then God, being all-knowing, remembered that humorists, comedy writers, and satirists had lost favor since the Middle Ages. If only Dante hadn’t made that snippy comment about Deus ex Machina moments in real life. Writers should not assume God has a sense of humor.
“Well, if I cannot get the comedy writer I need to write my monologue, I will use some cosmic humor of my own and just change all of reality to satirize how things work in science fiction.”
“Oh, my!” said Saint Peter. “What are the rules going to be?”
“First of all, if you ignore small scientific rules for too long, they build up problems and cosmic tensions to a point where they create world-ending catastrophes. Like having too many cows farting on farms leading to global warming and the atmosphere eventually catching fire. Methane burns, after all.”
“Well, that could never happen. People on Earth would never value hamburgers over being able to breathe without inhaling fire.” Saint Peter had a smug smile of satisfaction on his face for that faulty realization.
“Don’t bet your afterlife on it, Peter.”
“What’s rule two?”
“Anything mysterious or inexplicable found by archaeologists was done by alien beings in flying saucers.”
“But that could be true, couldn’t it? There are planets capable of life and civilization that are millennia older than Earth, possibly even millions of years older. If interstellar travel is possible, then some explorer-type civilizations have probably already visited Earth. Maybe even announcing themselves as gods. After all, we haven’t really figured out how the pyramids were built.”
“Peter, be careful how you blaspheme! And don’t let Zeus hear that I have created this second rule.”
“Sorry, Lord. Forgive my misspoken ignorance, and tell me the third rule.
“Well, time travel is possible. And because it is, it has already been invented somewhere in the universe, and therefore it exists in all times and all planets. There are nearly infinite time travelers watching everything happen.”
“Won’t they mess up the time lines of events that happen in their past?”
“They cannot. A time traveler is part of the history they visit. Therefore they might cause the event to happen. But they can never change it. Anything they do is part of the history that already exists.”
“So, is David Tennant from that show a real time traveler?”
“That is for me to know and not for you to question… Though I can reveal that David Tennant is not the real-life Scrooge McDuck, only his cartoon voice.”
“That is good to know.”
“And the final new rule I will create for my humorous monologue is that all alien civilizations will speak and understand English, but we will all know they are alien because of strange little alterations to their neck, nose, or forehead.”
“Will you nickname that one the Star Trek rule?”
“Is Gene Roddenberry in Heaven or Hell?”
“Good point, Lord. At least he won’t be embarrassed when you spring this new reality on the angels at the Comedy Review on Saturday.”
The rooster riding was easier than Poppy had anticipated. These chickens were not quite the same as the ones she had known back in the Necromancer’s city of Mortimer’s Mudwallow. And Seltzerwater and Tannehauser were both apparently smarter than any chicken she had known in the Necromancer’s little river town.
Still, the first day’s progress was slow. The cornfields that they navigated were often obstructed by foxes, pheasants, and an occasional farmer on a tractor.
They would end up making camp along the southern bank of the creek the Fairies called Pallas’s Slow Water. They were somewhere to the West of Mortimer’s Mudwallow. Poppy’s sister, Derfentwinkle, was now the ruler of the Mudwallow after helping the good Fairies to capture it and destroy the evil Necromancer. It made her wonder why Flute hadn’t led them there for the first night’s rest. They would surely be welcome. But maybe he had some reason for not wanting her sister to know she was traveling with her new masters.
As camp was set up by Flute and Tod, Glittershine and Poppy settled the roosters. Their reins were tied to long ropes of at least three English-measure feet so the roosters could scratch for weevils, aphids, ants, and worms. Glitter was talking softly to Tannehauser, so Poppy tried talking to Seltzerwater.
“You were a very good boy, Seltzer. Tod let me guide you with the reins and I had no problems controlling you. You are very unlike the chickens we had in Mortimer’s Mudwallow.”
“I understand you had a very hard life in your previous home,” Glitter broke into her conversation with Seltzer. “Can you tell me a little about it?”
“Very little. When Derfie, my sister, rescued me from there, the White Stag entered my mind and removed most of the memories of the times when the Necromancer abused me. And since that was almost all of the times I was ever with the Necromancer, I can’t even remember his name.”
“That must have been terrible.”
“Yes. Even with the memories removed, I still have nightmares.”
“You know that you and I are supposed to work on your spellbook this evening. To do that, we must remove the garments that shield our minds and bodies…”
“Oh, good! I will get to be naked once more.”
“I was afraid that your trauma might prevent you from doing that. I understand that the Necromancer controlled your mind and body…”
“Yeah. But I was always freeist whenever I could take wing with nothing on my body but sunlight. These clothes are the things that make me panicky and uncomfortable. I don’t remember it, but the Necromancer had strange fetishes that involved putting things on me.”
“Well, I am glad it won’t be a problem then. There’s a space under those purple thistles that will work fine for our session of magical translations.”
Poppy was delighted to bounce over to the indicated thistle patch and shed what little clothing she wore. Glittershine had a double-layer riding dress on, and that took her longer. She was, however, quite graceful and beautiful once she was nude. And she took care of laying out the spellbook and writing quills.
“Poppy, you must say or sing the spells in your magical imagination. The spells will come to me by magic, and I will let them flow through me, so that I might write them down on the paper. That is how we translate the magic within you into words in your spellbook.”
“What is magic… exactly? What is it made of?”
“That’s a very good question. In fact, that is part of Prinz Flute’s magical quest. We have talked endlessly with the White Stag about codifying magic in a way that makes it like the Slow Ones and how they developed the thing called Science. It allows them to have their talking wires and tellybizhions and caddylacks and things.”
“So, Science is Slow One Magic?”
“Or Fairy Magic is Fairy Science.”
As they got into it, Poppy sang out the beautiful magics she held inside, the ones the Necromancer never found out about. And none of the magic the Necromancer taught her was still there in her head, messing up her mind with muddy magic.
Page after page after page filled with Poppy’s own signature magic. By the time she could remember nothing more, half the spellbook was already full.
“You have an amazing amount of spells here for an apprentice, Poppy. But your strongest spells seem to all be about polymorphing.”
“Polymorphing?”
“Yes, changing the shape of other Fairies, animals, other Fairy creatures, and even probably yourself. You can actually change Butterfly Children into birds and back again if you need to. You can give wings to frogs and spider-legs to rabbits. Though, I doubt we will ever have a need for that.”
“I suppose I can use my imagination. But, my imagination might turn a little dark at times… thanks to my past.”
Glitter smiled at Poppy as Glitter slipped her clothing back on.
“We have set up separate lean-tos for each of us. We need to get in them and sleep. Flute and I will share the watch during the night. You two have to recover from the magic generation,” said Tod with obvious concern for how tired they both looked.
“In the morning, then,” said Glitter.
And the temporary camp settled down for the night.
Twitter is a place where trolls live. It is a bull-puckie paradise where trolls can poop on things to their hearts’ content. It is toxic. Not a safe place to go naked. But many trolls do. They tell you exactly how ugly they are, not just in their skin, but all the way down to their bones.
I am not a troll myself. I am a nudist at heart, like the girl in the picture. I think it would be nice to walk in nature nude. But like the girl whose parents are hippies, but law-abiding hippies who would never send their daughter to school without clothing as long as that is an illegal act, I myself don’t put naked pictures of myself on Twitter. Some nudists do that. But trolls throw poo and links to porn if you do that. And being publicly naked physically is not my goal. Only naked ideas publicly.
But I put a lot of opinions on Twitter that are totally naked. They have no clothes on to cover up how I really feel underneath, the way a lot of so-called conservatives do to get their racist points across without being accused of having racist opinions. They dress them up nice.
I have a naked opinion about the impending repeal of Roe Vs Wade beginning the roll-back of safe abortion-services and the right for women to control what happens to their own bodies. I am not pro-abortion. I am pro-choice. And that is how I will vote. But I also believe it is the wrong approach to have this issue before considering some other very important things.
You need to be providing a better life for the majority of children brought into this world than you do now. Not just the Republican answer to abortion being adoption. You need to do something about all the unloved and disadvantaged children that already exist. Too many die of starvation. Too many die of abuse. And far too many are abused by the adults in their lives to the point that they grow up into monsters, abusing their own children, the children of others, and sometimes becoming sexual predators.
Why don’t we make a law where all parents must undergo intensive training and get a license to be a parent? You need to earn a license to drive a car. Why don’t we pass a law that corporations have to make certain that all children in their assigned districts are well-fed before they can do stock buy-backs to increase their value? If they want a healthier, more-capable work-force, they should invest in one. Why are we not passing laws to ensure that the planet’s environment is protected and children’s future is guaranteed? And all of these things should come before we worry about all people who are conceived actually getting born.
And why are we putting up with places like Florida punishing teachers for teaching tolerance to people who are different, not only by color of skin and culture, but by the sexual preferences and gender identity God made them with? If you truly want to do away with the need for abortion services, then you need more and better sex education rather than gag-orders against teachers to be punished by parents suing to get them fired and pilloried.
There will be less abortions needed if you teach kids what they need to know about how babies are made, how to use contraceptives safely, and how to talk to others about the facts of life so that everyone can know more about it and proceed with procreation properly, according to whatever version of God’s plan (including science-based secular beliefs) that you choose to believe in.
These are naked opinions. Saying flat out what I believe. Open to the poo-flinging of trolls and those conservatives who are easily offended if an opinion contradicts their self-proclaimed truths wearing the clothing of rather twisted and misrepresented Christian beliefs.
Let me be clear. I am not afraid to die. I am not afraid of the end of life on Earth. Even though I am just atheist enough that I don’t believe in an afterlife or rewards for being good after I am dead. I am also not afraid of turning evil in old age. My life is centered, peaceful, and grounded in a positive, life-affirming moral philosophy. So, why would I choose to write about fear if I am not afraid of anything?
But, that’s just it. I am not immune to fear.
I am sometimes afraid to watch Cardinals’ baseball games. It seems like, during playoffs and playoff runs, if I watch the ballgame, the Cardinals lose. I am afraid of being the cause of them losing important games, as if they would’ve won if I was not watching.
Of course, I listened on the radio the night Bob Gibson pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 70’s . I watched the day Mark McGuire broke Roger Maris’s single-season home-run record. I watched the Cardinals win the World Series in 1982, 2006, and 2011. I followed the series in the newspaper in 1967. So, my fear is really a matter of being determined to overcome superstition. 1985, 2004, and all the other lost playoff series were really not my fault.
But a more real fear is my fear of stupid people winning the War on Ignorance that I have been fighting all my life, especially from 1981 to 2014, my teaching career. I am concerned that our education system is intentionally being driven into a dogma of only producing docile, controllable adults that will work hard and not demand a living wage, fair treatment, and equal rights with the privileged and wealthy minority. I labored for years to promote creativity, critical thinking, research skills, and reading-and-writing skills in students who come from poverty, Spanish-speaking homes, and who sometimes misbehave because they are not treated as well as their white, wealthy peers. Those are the hardest things that a teacher needs to teach. But the stupid people are demanding that we ban books and eliminate any idea or literature that might make privileged white kids feel the least bit guilty about racial attitudes, historical treatment of Native Americans, Slaves, and their descendants that their own ancestors might have had something to do with. And the feelings of those kids descended from those same oppressed peoples are disregarded. Stupid people would prefer that events like lynchings. the actions of the KKK, and other outrages committed in the name of racial hatred just be completely ignored and forgotten about. That is not how culture flows in a positive direction in a free democratic society.
As a retired teacher, I wish this meme had better spelling and was less true.
Stupid people are not only enacting racist book-banning crusades against straw men like CRT, Pro-Gay and Antifa terrorists, and liberal pedophiles, thus succeeding in firing black educators. banning the books of Alice Walker, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, and preventing teachers from answering questions about sex. But also in getting stupid and violent radicals elected to offices they have no ability to handle only so they can do hateful things to the people their voters hate… mostly the poor minorities and marginalized immigrants, LGBTQ people, and even liberal educators like me that FOX News and Mark Levin tell them to hate.
I definitely fear having to live the final years of my long life under the rule of Trumpists, racists, narrow-minded stupid people, and Ted Cruz.
Oh, and I am afraid of being watched by ducks. Beady-eyed, soulless mallards, pintails, mergansers, Muscovies, and other kinds of ducks. Even though it was actually a goose that caused my preschool trauma and current phobia, it is a mallard with teeth that haunts my nightmares.
Troubled hearts can be soothed with words. In 1Samuel 16:23 David plays the harp and his singing was a relief for Saul and the bad spirit departed from upon him. In the same way, the written word can touch the soul of the reader and, like Saul, free the reader from the demons besetting him. That is power. That is responsibility.
Of course, I am the last person to claim that I can teach you to write with power… I can’t even claim that I can write with power myself. But I know how to write well enough to make myself laugh, cry, and feel through my writing. And occasionally someone else reads my writing and agrees. Through years worth of being a writing teacher, I do have some thoughts about how it may be done.
First of all, I am not wrong to choose David’s harp playing, inspired by Jehovah as it was, as a metaphor for writing power. It is in the very sounds of the words that a great deal of emotion and meaning is embedded. One can evoke a very bitter and angry feeling by describing a cruel woman not as a “mean girl” but as one whose laughter is “like the crass cackling of devious old witch”. Mean girl has too soft a labial sound, even with the hard g, to be as ugly and staccato as the repeated k sounds added to the tch and the fact that “devious” comes so close to “devil”… a related word. A happy feeling can be created by describing a smile as “a sudden sunburst of white teeth and happiness”. That almost makes me laugh…unless you add “shark’s” between “white” and “teeth”… and then I am convinced I am about to be eaten. The s sounds in the description are like a sizzling burn that leads into the firework display at the end of the word “sunburst”. To write with the music inherent in words, at some point you have to hear it out loud. I always hear the words in my head when I write, spoken in a wide variety of voices. But to truly get it right, I have to read aloud to hear with my ears… which I have already done three times to this paragraph alone.
In order to have power, writing must manipulate feelings. I don’t mean by using the word “manipulate” that it is some sort of Machiavellian bad thing. Simply put, a writer must control the feelings of the reader, not by sound alone, but by the depth of meaning of the words. You must be able to weave a paragraph together not only with the simple meanings of the words themselves, but all the connotations and denotations in those words. You must use metaphor and simile, comparison, allusion, and sensory details. Ernest Hemingway had a working style almost completely devoid of metaphor and the writer’s own personal commentary… but that only worked because all his themes were about dispirited people suffering tragedy and loss and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness. Hemingway is a powerful writer… but his books never make me laugh. Purple prosey over-describers like Charles Dickens can make me laugh with a simple list of things. “The boy’s desk had a nearly dry ink bottle, several pens that needed new nibs and were chewed about the grip, and a small stack of papers crammed full of ink drawings of skulls and skeletons.” It is that last startling detail in the list that makes the mundane suddenly funny.
I suppose to do today’s topic true justice, I should write about it in book length. There is so much more to say. But I have bored you long enough for one post with writing nuts and bolts. It is enough to say that I believe in the magic of words, and I think that if, like any good Dungeons and Dragons wizard, you study your books of magic long enough, you can soon be casting fireballs around the room made up of nothing but words.
When it was decided that there would be three teachers rather than one for the start of Poppy’s magical training, the debate between them was about what to do next.
“I will explain as we head to the stables,” said Flute rather imperiously. Poppy supposed his status as Prince, Prinz in the Zauberin language, gave him that authority to decide things without asking for anyone else’s opinion.
“Not Roosters again?” asked Tod with a pained expression.
“Poppy and I can fly,” added Glittershine.
“Rooster riding is an important skill for life in Tellosian Court. And besides, we need to ride out to Castle Cornucopia to fulfill my duties to the White Stag’s needed magical research. We need riding beasts that can fight back if we are attacked by Cyclopes and Wartoles between here and there. We will be crossing lands contested by the Stoor.”
This was distressing news to Poppy. She hated chickens. They had bird capabilities, but dinosaur temperments. And she remembered from her time enthralled by the Necromancer that the Stoor’s people were always ugly, cruel, and mean. Worse even than chickens.
Of course, the walk down to the stables would take them all the way to the root of the willow tree that had been shaped into Cair Tellos. There they would find two large Rhode Island Red Roosters, their wings strapped down with Fairy saddles to keep them on the ground and ready to ride.
“The biggun is Tannehauser en the little-un is Seltzerwater,” said the naked little stable boy.
“Those are their names?” asked Poppy.
“Yessum,” said the Sylph boy with a proud salute.
Steps made from Slow Ones’ cracker boxes and matchsticks were pulled up to each rooster.
Prinz Flute mounted Tannehauser with Glittershine behind him. Poppy mounted Seltzerwater with Tod climbing up behind her and taking the reins by reaching around her with both arms. To be comfortable in that position, she had to put away butterfly wings with a Wingaway spell. Most Butterfly Children didn’t have the option to put their wings magically away in such situations, but she had never noticed how much of an advantage the spell really was.
“So, we’re going to Cornucopia?” Poppy asked Tod.
“Apparently. King Mouse needs assistance with something that requires some of Prinz Flute’s Invention Magic.”
“Oh.” Of course, Poppy had no Fairy-worldly idea what the heck “Invention Magic” even meant.
Seltzerwater eyed Poppy with one creepy yellow eye before Tod turned its chicken head with the reins and spurred it to make it go.
Poppy wished she were riding naked, the way the Elder Gods made Fairies to be, but even with these clothes on, it felt good to lean back against Tod’s strong chest and feel his quickening heartbeat, knowing he was forbidden to assault her in any way. For the first time in her young life, she was feeling safe and unafraid. And she really was no longer thinking about hitting Tod anymore.
The roosters ran out of the castle gate at a very fast pace.
No Slow Ones were watching, although the massive homes of the gigantic human ones surrounded Cair Tellos. The Slow Ones’ town of Norwall had been built all around the willow tree quite by accident. And the fairies refused to move as their kingdom had been there first. But it mattered little. There were many glammers, disguising magics, that kept Slow Ones from seeing fairies as they really were. The roosters were even hidden from their big Slow-One eyes.
In minutes the roosters were through the wire field-fences and running through the farmers’ fields that made up the bulk of Tellosia’s above-ground territories.
“Did you give Poppy her new spellbook?” Flute shouted at Tod.
“Not yet, but I will do it now.”
Tod reached into his bag of holding and brought out a vellum-covered book made of highly magical pages. Normally it would be a carefully crafted thing made by the hand of the apprentice’s new master. This, however, was an ordinary and rather plain one bought at Oddbod’s Magic Emporium.
“Thank you!” Poppy hugged it to her chest as a treasure she would never part with.
“I’m sorry the Master didn’t make you one with his own hands. Master Pippen is too often thinking only of himself.”
Tod’s face was red at the embarrassing confession.
“Oh, no, Tod. I love it. I have never owned any such thing before. This is something I would never have imagined I could ever own only a year ago.”
“Well, the White Stag says you have many worthy spells to be written in it. Glittershine will help translate them by magic into the spellbook this very evening when we make camp. You really deserve something better.”
“How could one such as I, lucky to even be alive at this point, expect anything finer? I will thank Master Pippen over and over again for giving me a treasure such as this.”
In debate and discourse the “Straw Man” is the character the debater draws up in his narrative that he will use to represent his opponent which he will then be able to knock down as easily as if he were a scarecrow made of straw.
So, Mickey will make a straw man to represent Republicans. He is looking forward to knocking that straw man down to the ground or below.
And Mickey will make the scarecrow out of Iowa Senator Charles Grassley. Made out of corn husks is almost the same as made out of straw, right? And Grassley is around nine hundred years old, so if there is any of the old iron left in his soul, it has long since dissolved into rust. Mickey’s verbal fists will not get broken bones in them.
I once shook Charles Grassley’s hand back in the 1970’s at the Wright County Fair in Eagle Grove, Iowa. He asked me to vote for him because I lived in his district, and he meant to do the right thing in Washington for the average hard-working farm family. So, I voted for him in 1976. And I did not regret that vote. Of course, that was the real Grassley. Not the corn-husk man Mickey is making for this essay.
I used to respect Republicans. Certain Republicans, anyway. The ones that still stood for something good. The ones who supported the Eisenhower Administration’s platform.
This was the Republican Party in the year that I was born. These were some of the principles that Mickey’s corn-husk man promised to uphold.
But then came Ronny Ray-Gun.
And the Republican Party got remade. They became the party of rich people. Ronny Ray-Gun introduced Voodoo Economics (a theory given its name by George HW Bush.)
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” said Ronny.
Of course, he meant, “If you’re not rich enough to own a boat, you can drown and we won’t care.”
And the corn-husk man, Mickey’s Straw Man in this argument, could’ve objected, and insisted Congress did not go down the yellow-brick road that Ronny laid out for the GOP. Instead, he said Ray-Gun was a truly great President, and he proceeded to make himself rich enough to buy a boat, something his average farmer-constituents did not have.
And when the conservatives on the Supreme Court handed an election victory to Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown that he probably didn’t actually win, Mickey’s corn-husk-filled Straw Man thought, “Isn’t it wonderful that we get to be in power without winning an election first!”
And the Straw Man went on to help the GOP faithful (now less the Grand Old Party, and more the Greedy Old Poopheads) put a justice on the Supreme Court who sexually harassed a black woman and never apologized for it, and a justice who likes beer enough to not remember trying to rape a teenage girl at a party when he was also a teen and caused Mickey’s Straw Man to be outraged… not at the Justice’s attempted crime, but at the fact that Democrats wanted to investigate the crime he committed.
And then came the years of The Donald, allegedly born of an orangutan and allegedly the winner of the 2016 election, and all the monkey poo that the king of all monkeys could fling. And Mickey’s Straw Man failed to remove him after he was impeached…. twice in fact.
Such is the nature of Straw Men. All of the Republican Straw Men are pretty much the same. I have a grudging respect for Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowsky, Jeff Flake, and Liz Cheney. And I haven’t made up my mind about Susan Collins… because she, like any Straw Man, can’t make up her own mind. But even those few believe in Ronny Ray-Gun’s boat theory.
So, now Mickey should deliver a haymaker or two on the corn-husk-filled Straw Man. He should be easy to knock down. But all the Iowa voters… and Texas voters too… have straw where their brains ought to be. This is why the party of the farmers was once-upon-a-time known as the Know-Nothing Party. So, knocking down the Straw Man has no visible effect on the votes of any of them. Oh, well… Mickey tried.
Catch a Falling Star 