American Vacation: A Break From The Un-Sanity

Even out here in the world, I can see how weary Americans are…

Tired of the constant weight of well… everything.

Collusion, graft, dishonesty, racism, lies and all the rest is making Americans at home and abroad very sensitive to the effects of political stress
(* I know… politics are a man-made construct that could be transitioned into something useful if we wanted but we’d have to be committed to acting in the interests of the common good and who has time for that!)

It’s all becoming too much.

In fact, we expat Americans have developed a new salute to let each other know when we’ve reached the edge of reason …

Back hunched, head lowered, right-hand palm against forehead & left hand and index finger waving wildly from left to right, it is a new signal that is used when the onslaught of controversy from the homeland becomes too much!

But more than that, it is an indicator, a sign that illustrates how badly even we, who are by definition, away from it all need to get away from it all.

As any Expat can tell you the flight from your homeland comes with a certain sense of impotence, a disconnect that never truly leaves you until you return home, or so I’m told.

Expat or not Americans are already worn paper thin by the Trump Error and though it is thought that Americans don’t travel well, in the aid of mental preservation I do suggest that you consider it, after all this may continue for some time, as much as 4 years!

We gotta pace ourselves, we’ll never make it if we go on as we have this last year, we gotta go easy.
I know what you say…
“ You wanna get even”… Well, Get Cool

“You wanna BUST!”…  I say bust Cool

You wanna GO!”… Go cool

So, if we’re gonna stay cool, it’s important that we somehow cut ourselves loose for a while.
You need time to remember that without us there is no America.
You need time to reacquaint yourselves with the REAL enemy of the people.
You need to start to think again… not react.

But where?

Where can a weary American go these days to decompress… reassess?

Mexico used to be a good place but not so much anymore.

North to see our good friends?

They’ve always shown a bit of tolerance and an ear for a good explanation

Of course, we’d have to have an explanation to offer and although it’s the simplest thing in the world, somehow we have not quite wrapped our collective heads around how to voice that explanation.

Or maybe one of the many nice Caribbean islands?
Oh right…
that whole business with Puerto Rico…
Cuba & Jamaica…
maybe not the Caribbean

Maybe Sweden!
Hmmm… Maybe too many questions there… and as a modern American probably best to stay away from stressful situations like a social structure known to be inquiring or the effects of “the midnight sun”…
In fact…anything that leads the mind to wander is probably not advised.
I mean we can't have Americans out in the world ... Thinking... no, that wouldn't do!

What you need is a place where being American still has its potency…
still has some cache,
a place where Bullshit is still spoken!
Maybe Moscow?

Faux America... Let’s return to that place that never existed!

MAGA!
Was there a time when America was greater than it is now?

Really?
I think there are huge numbers of Americans that would take exception with that idea.

Hasn’t America just been getting progressively greater from its founding and won't it just continue to get greater until the end of time?
Isn’t that the plan?
Or…
Is there a faux America?
or more precisely, many faux Americas
France’s America
England’s America
Australia’s America
and so on… and so on…

Because America does not exist in a vacuum how it is perceived should be of some concern.
You see, how great America is, depends a lot on from what perspective you view it.
The Trump Error is making America take a good long look at itself but we should also consider carefully how we have changed in the eyes of the rest of the world.
When I first started to travel outside the states I was struck by the level of esteem we had attained, sometimes it was almost embarrassing, other times it left me scratching my head and wondering if they were, in fact, thinking of us…

Were they thinking of the same America I know and love?

I have always been puzzled by the fact that so many countries have chosen to follow the US down this centuries darkest, questionable and most forbidding rabbit holes… It may seem unbelievable now but our “rep” was once so good that it inspired whole countries to act in ways that were clearly not in their best interest.
The things I have heard about what they think we are has been absolutely dumbfounding!
I am not trying to pigeonhole America as all good or all bad part of the beauty of America is its many facets and it’s grey areas but accepting that you’d still have to reference our history when considering following the US into a fight.

When I first landed in Australia I was met with an odd combination of awe, admiration & an almost unrecognizable vision of the American mythology.
We as Americans have seen so long being unconcerned with what the world thinks of us that we are now quite surprised when the tide turns and we are no longer in favor, no longer the goto guys for peace and democracy to some this is quite a shock not to everyone but to some.
It doesn’t matter much though because President 45 has forever changed how America & Americans are seen by the rest of the world.

He has made the world an unsafe place and America is no longer a beacon for the tired, poor, huddled masses but before we pack up the statue of lady liberty and actually become the evil empire some thought we always were, let us consider what our image has done to the world and to ourselves.
One of the founding ideas behind America is that in the interests of the common good we will at times as is necessary, make adjustments to the way the system works amendments to the constitution that reflect the changing societal norms and attitudes of the American people …Now, who wouldn’t be all for that?
As we are finding out, not everyone thinks it a great idea. no matter if you like it or not it is the path that this nation has set out on.

So… the “great” America has never actually existed, will never exist but if we're lucky we may grow up and be a “good” America! 

Trump’s Genius: Unfocus is the new focus!

It came to me in a dream…
Now it’s clear to me that we’ve been looking at Trump the wrong way
He’s not only a narcissistic, racist asshole he is pure genius!
Remember those Magic Eye pictures?
Understanding Trump is a bit like that … You gotta unfocus your mind to see the real truth!
Let me lay it out for you.
Let us start with the southern border wall…
He’s so right, we won't have to pay for it …
When you think about it, it’s so simple!
Here’s the magic of the long political con.

1. Trump behaves so incredibly batshit crazy that the world becomes stunned and confused.

2. Canada gets justifiably frightened and builds a northern border wall to keep US out.

3. After that is done our newly expanded military sneaks up north under the cover of darkness and steals the wall bought and paid for by our Canadian neighbors and moves the whole damn thing down to the southern border.

4. Problem solved!

5. What problem?

6. Does that really matter?

You see how it works now?

You can apply that same unfocused mind effect to all the issues of the Trump Error…
Mass shootings in schools, sure…
Arm & train the teachers and then because they can’t be trusted arm the students and because they can’t be trusted put fences around the schools and hire independent military contractors to keep the lid on.
You may think a building filled with testosterone/ estrogen addled teens and adults suffering group mentality disorder might not be the best environment to insert weaponry.
but your unfocused mind can see no problems with this!
Pure genius!

And now for all those pesky cabinet openings!
Still got your mind unfocused?
Good!
The important thing to remember about filling cabinet positions is to choose people that have spent a considerable amount of time trying to destroy the part of government they will now be in charge of… who could know it better?
So… following that logic … Trump logic here are some of the new nominees for pivotal cabinet vacancies ( or spaces soon to be vacated ) and remember using Trump logic the nominees need not be qualified, sane, alive or even real!

Attorney General… That great American Al Capone
Secretary of Health & Human Services… Dr. Josef Mengele
Secretary of Commerce… C. Montgomery Burns
Secretary of Labor… General Stonewall Jackson
Administrator of the small business administration… Cosmo Spacely

So... see the answer is simple to understand a Trump you gotta think like a Trump so, unfocus your mind and relax!
We have nothing to fear but the coming apocalypse!

Group Think: I won’t be part of a group that would have me as a member!

I have never been a joiner
I simply don’t feel the need to belong to a group outside of that group called humans to which we all hold membership.
The idea of groupthink has always rubbed me the wrong way it has always seemed a lazy, dangerous way to go about your life and I have watched as groupthink has more and more become an American way.
I, however, have always kept my own council and done my own research, the reasons for this is part of my path through life and is owed to a number of incidents and experiences.
Not that I am needlessly contrary but if the group is walking one way it is almost always my impulse to go another way, even though we may all be trying to reach the same place.
I’ve reconciled myself to the truth of this long ago and once I realized that I never needed anyone’s ok to do a thing or be a thing I have been much better off.
Keep the above in mind as I lay out the following ideas …
It is because of this personal stance that I have never, for even a moment believed that I am excluded from anything, while I understand that some would have me excluded for some reason or another, I have always known that is a fault in them and not one in myself.
Rodin, Shakespeare, Baldwin, Hughes, DaVinci and countless artists & creators who’s names I will never know ALL created for me, ALL their works benefit me… inform me!
We all create for the human race and I am that.
I am, we are, the greatest and most horrible thing this planet has produced to date… human…
Not a God…
Not a King…
Those things are falsehoods that flow from our flaws, they are things to which only a fool would aspire, in my opinion, further, desire for them points to a very large character flaw.
The groupthink tells us something much different, doesn’t it?
It cautions us not to ignore the thoughts and the flow of the group, it tells us that to live outside the borders of the group will surely bring us low, it tells us the flow of humanity is what it never has been, a consistent, knowable, hard line that must be followed.

Let me cite a few examples what this all means to me…
As a lover of comics, I have long had the ability to put myself in the story, I’m sure most readers do this, it adds to the enjoyment of the form to immerse one’s self in the stories personally I cannot see how it could be any different.
While I am reading Green Lantern…
I AM Green Lantern when I read Star Wars…
I AM Luke when I read Batman…
I AM BATMAN!
From time to time I have had conversations that have been confronting to my truth that says that there is nothing on this earth that my coloring will exclude me from if I have the will and desire I will make any thing, MY thing because it is and always will be my thing!
Sadly there are always a few people hanging round that do not see the world and it’s people as it/they are and stubbornly refuse to accept them as they are.
Let me say that I believe that you have to be an incredibly recalcitrant bigot to cling to the idea that some people are less human than some others or are that they are born somehow different but it seems ignorance is eternal.
Come along with me, back to a conversation I had in 1983 after seeing “Return of the Jedi”, it was one of the handful of times that I viewed a film in the company of a group, this was not so much my group, I was then and still am mostly an adjunct to any existing group.
I do love my little groupings but if I’m being honest… in a very short time I find them entirely tedious.
I can remember being just a little uneasy at the prospect of having to submit to the rules of the social group think even then, my experience has taught me that these situations were to be avoided at all costs!
I am quite sure one of the major reasons I hold on to my resistance to groupings can be traced back to that one time after an evening recreation session at my elementary school when innocent stargazing somehow morphed into a crazy star-lit circle jerk!
After my swift retreat from that scene, I resolved to limit my associations with groups of men.
Back to the film.
As I remember, I could not think of a legit way to bow out of this particular film session without relating the “Circle Jerk” story and the many other reasons I kept my fraternal associations minimal, so… I went along, making the small talk you must but I have always despised before the film and worse during the film but it was the cinema post-mortem that held the kernel of wrongness …
While, as I have said, I was not a formal member of this group, if asked I would have told you these men were friends and if trouble came our way I would surely stand with them and stand toe to toe with any adversary!
I know now though that friendship can take on so many forms.
It was during that filmic Post Mortem that I learned a thing or two about groups & groupthink…
While we went through the film and characters I suppose it was only natural that we began to place ourselves in the story.
This one thought he was much like Boba Fet, that one felt like Chewbacca and another Han Solo… I felt an affinity with the story’s hero Luke…
Quixotic, a bit clueless, not always aware of the gravity of the events until safety is secured … yeah… that’s me!
However, I was astounded …
Appalled?
To find that the group was secure in the belief that I would, of course, be cast as … Lando Calrissian!?!
WTF!
So, now I have an idea of the group's relationship with its privilege ( remember… this is 1983 a time when only POC knew what white privilege was ) and how it was going to affect me, of course, I had no choice but to tilt my lance at the evident injustice of the situation.
I found the more I pushed the more heated the group got and the more it dug its feet in and when I queried just what “race” they thought Chewbacca was … and why it mattered well… let’s just say a ridiculous conversation got even more so.
 At no point did I ever find my coloring a blockage to connecting with the characters I love because the characters and stories are human stories and being human I find them familiar as any human would.
However, I have very often found that so many never get past what they think my coloring means.
Now anyone that does not realize that that Group called Americans will most often see POC in a particular light and that that light is about as unflattering as light gets.
I know, as you do, that there are some that would have you and I exist in a place outside humanity …
Below humanity,
But that is more a fault in their humanity and not mine and so it is not my humanity but theirs that needs correcting.
Accepting all of this I have had a few issues with the shape of the time we are currently living in.
I have always heard ideas that run contrary to my beliefs ( even more so here in The Trump Error ) but luckily I have been able to, as my uncle Bill was fond of saying       “ know shit from shinola” unfortunately Bill was not everyone's uncle and so they have not had the benefit of his wisdom.
Group Think has truth on the ropes these days and it is increasingly hard to be sure where all the lies are trying to lead us but only the truly foolish doubt that we are being lied to and for some purpose.
For the most part we are lucky that the lies are so bad that we can see them coming a long way off but even those lies tell us something about how broken the system is, for so long people of colour and ALL disenfranchised people knew that the system does not serve them well, if at all but now it is becoming clearer that it means to do them harm, not neglectful harm but real “we’re going to keep you in your place” harm.
It seems the only way to combat the evils that our systems, political & social would oppose upon us is to get together in a real effort to live the phrase E Pluribus Unum

A thought about truth & the information stream

So, today I ran across a few posts that repeated falsehoods that have wide followings, from that totally false pic of Mike Pence's "Gay Days" to the recounting of the billion-dollar lawsuit involving the Matrix & Terminator films these things help to further taint the information stream.

While I certainly understand the desire to raise my lance to any & all offending windmills and follow the truth down into even the most foreboding rabbit holes before I go chasing rabbits I have to at least separate the 'shit from shinola" as my uncle used to say.

We need to keep a deep focus on truth and what serves the common good as we walk through this age of deplorables, liars, traitors and political opportunists so that when we come out the other side ( and we will come out the other side ) we come out clean and with the knowledge gained from our horrible common experience!

Only Humans... Why would you believe anything else?

I’ve been on this planet for a while now and it didn’t take long for me to notice that all humans are very similar. Male, female, black, white all cultures and all the little segments we’ve made up want pretty much the same stuff.

Now, inside all the little compartments we created there are aberrations, some feel small some feel big, some feel different, for the most part, these things are affects of our minds things we made up due mostly to the negative way we have built our little societies.

If you find it hard to believe that we are all basically the same I direct you to all of human history. 

All cultures and societies have suffered through the same issues… lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy & pride. 

Yes, that old biscuit! 

Any combination of these seven,  (let us not call them sins, in this present age they are more like states of being ) can lead a person to believe that they are more than common and feeling more than common it’s a short walk from there to believing that the right to dictate is yours! 

Maybe you start to think the right is God-given or some perceived genetic superiority, in either case, you’d be wrong but you would still be part of a very large group of deluded sock puppets. 

I may add some of whom came very close to killing us all.

Now anyone that knows me knows that I have a long-held personal theory that one of the major problems with Earth’s human population is bad definitions we constantly conflate success with money, love with passion, truth with justice and so on and so on.

I think that America’s set of bad definitions comes from the ever-growing level of ignorance in the society, ignorance and a double helping of both hubris and malice mix that up in a big bowl with the American superpower of rationalization and you get halfway to the dystopian nightmare we are currently building.

The simple fact is that as much as we say we love freedom and often chuckle at the hijinks of the countries that have somehow held on to their royals we still have the desire to raise some to a level from which they can easily look down on us, rule us. 

How does that help us?

Why would we do something that is so counter to our stated goals?

A country not held together by our similarities but by our differences is what we are supposed to be building, not concerned that we are not there and may never be but even with that knowledge, we keep working on it anyway.

This is a period of time where America & the world is going to be forced to face and reconcile our long-held set of bad definitions the truth is we have been living a lie for so long that it was inevitable that we’d come to the place where we could no longer see the truth, and that has made easy victims to tribalism & conmen.

We do say we want freedom, truth, justice but the simple things we must do as a people to achieve these things are apparently too hard an ask. Even at the risk of the loss of freedom we refuse to come together to defeat what we all know is evil, instead we revert to our tribes in the hopes that somehow we will be somehow spared the results of our ignorance by clinging to our religion, righteousness, intelligence or the foolish idea that “someone else” will come along and fix it all.

Is freedom just too hard for modern humans?

Are we better off being dictated to and made to stand in line until our time comes to leap into the gaping maw of the salivating machine we have built and now must be fed?

Of course not but the path we are on leads only to 90% of us living on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence.

Trump the great emancipator!?!

How Trump may free us!

I feel the need to repeat a phrase that is all the rage in the Trump Error … “These are strange and unprecedented times!” but it’s not ALL bad…
Actually, it is pretty bad but likely not fatal It seems with each rising sun we do discover something new about who and what we are and that's some kind of growth and growth is good … right?
Now we can spend days sorting through who insulted who or which President is not suited to the office and such but instead, I’d like to spend some time on some of the positive things he’s done for us … this may be a very short piece.
While some Presidents bring new words, phrases, and ideas into the American consciousness, “The buck stops here!”, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself!” and our Trump’s “you can grab em’ by the pussy!”

Yes, we have Trump to thank for opening the door and admitting “Pussy” into the popular lexicon as well as “Bigly” and many other newly created words.
With new boundaries being destroyed on a daily basis we are all being freed, freed from the restrictions of polite societal conventions & mores & critical thought… hell, at this point we can pretty much consider ourselves freed from all types of thought.

What a gift!

Let’s examine just what gifts such as these might do for us all, besides the obvious effect of giving some the freehand they have long awaited, freedom to offend and make America great again.
Freedom to put liberals, people of color & women right back at the bottom of the heap the way they probably think God intended.

The long-maligned white men of this world can once again grab the wheel and continue running the world into the ditch but not ALL white men, even the Trumpians can see that it is the select few that will hold the power and as for the rest?

Well… They’ll make great pets?

The Trump plan, as it always is with despotic rulers only acknowledges money & power but also as it always is, this plan will never take into consideration the considerable power of the resistance, the power of history the power of the people.

Society is moving beyond the system that kept the balance by issuing small crumbs of power and regional influence to the surf class and as we move beyond that system we will have to build a new one hopefully one that better serves us.
I know we have dared to dream of a better more equitable future many times but it does fit well into the ironic nature of existence that our darkest President may usher in a new age of light & enlightenment.

How can I say this?

I guess I can because I still remain hopeful because I want to believe that by staring into the dark of the abyss we may be able to fully appreciate the light and that appreciation may steel us to the task of bringing more light to our lives.