TO ALL MY FELLOW TENNESSEEANS

To all my fellow Tennesseeans:
Two Democratic state legislators have been unjustly ejected from our State House because they were fed up with being deliberately passed over, ignored and effectually forbidden to speak. And only now are too many of us learning how the lopsidedly gerrymandered 'Republican' legislature has shut off effective debate on many a measure for which our troubled state has a screaming need.
I guess this attempt to discuss common-sense firearms safety laws in the wake of still another school shooting may be the final straw. I know it is for me; I hope it is for you.
And instead of attending to the state's actual legislative needs, these fascists have been trying to divert us with drag queens and other such irrelevancies, building up the spectre of drag queens 'grooming' little kids at story times and with everything they say about drag queens being a foul slander!
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather trust a drag queen reading a story with any child I might have rather than with a Smackwater Jack or Jill with a Bushmaster and a hundred-cartridge magazine!
Be warned, fellow citizens: when fascists don't need your vote anymore, they stop thinking about you except as a thing, a marionette who either does what they're told or, if they don't, as an inconvenient object that needs to be broken, one way or another, or exiled. That day, when state elections are either no more or may as well be nonexistent, is dangerously close to us here in Tennessee!
By expelling two young Democratic state legislators on transparently phony pretenses, our fascists have shown their hand! It is past time for all of us to wake the blank up and organize to turn both houses of our legislature a heavenly azure! That's a chivalric word for 'blue', btw!
I'm not sure how much of the state Senate is up for re-election next year, but, as in all the other states, members of the House are chosen every two years. Which means, next year, they are all up for re-election.
We need to take our chance and excise from our political body the cancer still calling itself the 'Republican' party, but would be more accurately known as the Trumpery/QAnon cult!
Next year, we need to vote out every single elective officeholder with (R) after their names! They are all too weak to listen to criticism when they need to (and we all need to listen to criticism of ourselves at least now and then, right?).
I hope our Democratic party has enough ready candidates so that no 'Republican' runs unopposed next year. We need to oppose them in every legislative and senatorial district. We need to both explain to the people what's going on and we need to connect our program to images and hopes we all cherish for both our state and our country!
If we don't thus prepare for next year's elections, will we have another chance to do so? Don't count on it; we are closer to being a one-party banana state than I dared to believe was possible!
Next year will be make or break for democracy in this state and very likely around the country as well!
Let's get ready for the fight!

POSSIBLE DISLOCATIONS

 Now that even Orange Julius Caesar himself has said that, 'no Republican should vote to cut so much as one penny from either Social Security or Medicare' (although God alone knows how sincere this is) we need to take a good, l-o-n-g look at everything that would be lost by the deep cuts over which the MAGA fascist Randians are salivating,
"Get a job," the Randians snarl. 'Join the makers'. That is, those who will make already obscenely rich white males (whether they're really men or not is very questionable indeed) still richer. Nothing else but that.
In point of fact, a great many, if not most, able-bodied recipients of government money (and many that aren't) actually do have jobs. Those jobs might not pay any, or little, money, although, so long as those who do them have their moderately comfortable incomes, more than make up for that in job satisfaction. That is, a great many of the people who do very necessary, albeit unpaid, jobs--that is, volunteers--are retirees or only partially disabled. That's a whole segment of very necessary work but work for which people are unable or unwilling to pay. What happens when those who do them need to be better paid?
And think of the grandparents, both grandmas and grandpas, who provide either primary or backup childcare for their grandkids and other children. What happens if and when they can't afford to do that anymore? There'll be a lot of people who won't be able to afford child care. If you run a business, you know what a headache that can be, am I not right?
Now let's go to the sections of the economy that depend to a large extent on money spent by retirees or the disabled, medically and otherwise. How many sectors of the economy collapse if these people don't have money to spend on what are necessities to them? Still with me? Want to contemplate that? Does it or doesn't it amount to a wholesale cave-in of some pretty necessary parts of our economy?
These biped monsters basically seem to think that, if some white males somewhere are not made rich by some endeavor or other, those endeavors are, ipso facto, worthless and don't deserve any consideration! At least that's what it looks like to this aging palefaced Anglo-Scot!
And I feel that outlook reeks, to put it quite mildly! It reeks of undeserved self-importance and, above all, of unslakable, downright satanic, GREED! And that greed is NOT GOOD AT ALL!!
Unfortunately, I don't have the facilities to do this, but I think someone (or groups of people) ought to take a comprehensive look of everything and everyone in our country who would be adversely affected by deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--primarily but not exclusively--and publish it and share it virally! If you can think of anything and anyone, feel free to share with, where necessary, explanations of how these people and their endeavors would be so affected!
Come one come all: let's make a long, long list, bring it to Congress and shove it into the ugly face of the House's current majority! Who's with me in this? Let's get rolling NOW!

CONSCIENCE, EMPIRE & DEMOCRACY

"As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you." Edmund Burke 

Yes, now I'm beginning a third post with that quotation. And why?
The reasons for that will likely prove to be long and involved. Beginning with how fashionable it now is to excoriate not only the European 'white' empires but also the whole notion of empire.
As to the second excoriation, I'll say, well and good, accompanied with questions about what may take the place of current unitary or corporate empires. You can, and I would, bet my bottom dollar that they're not about to be replaced by peaceable confederations and still less by pristine forests with innocent human creatures prancing like fauns in Arcady. As to the first, I'll observe how much of the excoriations come from other current or former Great Powers (China, Arabia and Turkey, I'm looking at you) and throw some words which basically amount to, 'Can it, sore loser!'
I hope none of my readers need reminders that the sequence of formation, zenith, decline and fall of empires is as old, almost, as civilization itself. It has been nearly unheard-of for any empire to have internal critics who will tell the rulers of said empire that they are behaving in a way which will prove the undoing of that empire in time because said empire is betraying the best in itself.
Virgil may have come close to such a thing, but in a more upbeat way when, after admitting all the talents of the recently-conquered-by-Rome Greeks, he wrote these lines:

But you, Romans, remember your great arts;
To bring [civilization] to remote places,
To establish peace under the rule of law,
To subdue the mighty, and show them mercy
Once they are conquered.

Apart from that, there is only one nation with such an internal conscience, and it never was and probably will never be, an empire. Indeed, it is a tiny nation which punches far above its weight, thanks to the God Who made them a nation: Am Yisrael.
And there may have been only one empire which at least tried to have such a conscience. Yes, many of its agents only pretended to have such a conscience while they were only in it for the money, but there were also many who actually did. Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden, is today roundly condemned for its 'racism'. But some say Kipling wasn't referring to lack of melanin in the skin but to the light in the hearts of such 'uplifters'. At least, he sounds genuine in his belief in such lights to me. Ponder this couplet of lines from that poem:

Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease.

These are two things Kipling thought of as vital to the success of the imperial mission. Yes, I know of the imperial role in making the Bengal Famine of 1943, not to mention the Great Hunger of 1845-49. And however much some may regard this poem as a screed, I'll also bet my bottom dollar that Kipling himself never meant it to be so used. But tell me: in all of human history, had any empire even thought of doing such things? Had any empire had any thoughts at all aside from subjugating as many others as possible and taking as much as possible from its subject peoples?
The British Empire had an appreciable number who believed in its mission, and who were also willing to call out authority in the City and/or Westminster and/or in the field for behaving in ways they considered antithetical to that mission, indeed for downright un-British behavior. I suggest that, a primary reason for this, is how deep many Britons were into the Scriptures. A secondary reason would be their knowledge of their own history and their long struggle to bring even the Crown under the law.
Democracy is a progression and we need it to be progressing again. No nation should measure greatness in how many billionaires it has; they are likelier to be onerous parasites on those nations than anything else! No, any nation's greatness is measured in the absence of abject poverty and ignorance among its citizens, in the equal fairness of the law and its enforcers to all its citizens and enabling all of them to be heard somehow and in civil discussion that can and must be passionate and yet measured and civil towards those on the other sides--and the resources left for succeeding generations!
On my dad's side, my ancestors were colonists here: Scots, English and Welsh. And here, and in what were once called the Dominions, many have come from other nations to adopt our language and our civics while retaining their own customs at home and enriching our societies.
My dad's people were also independent, slave-less farmers in the antebellum South. They had an idea where 'liberty' stopped for them and others. It is time for democracy to move forward again, and not only in America but all over the English-speaking world and to resume its offensive worldwide as well. On the Continent (of Europe), in Latin America and Africa.
Conscience above the power of one's tribe is a gift of God to this planet, transmitted first through the Jews (which is why all those who would make the tribe and/or nation absolute hate the Jews with such intensity) and then through a growing number of peoples.
I think I will leave you with this question: has any other empire even tried to rule with such a conscience as have the empires made by those of us whose mother tongue is English? Seriously, as the young people say nowadays.
I also hope the source of such conscience doesn't dry up in the face of what might well be serious Jewish fascism. At any rate, the new Israeli government scares me in that.

 

BURKE CONNECTED WITH QUIRKS

"As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you." Edmund Burke
 

Yes, I know. I started my last post with these lines and now I start this post with the same quote.
And this is why. We all have our own 'quirks', right? Well, one of my quirks are the images which certain songs produce in my mind.
Some of you may remember a Canadian rock group of the late eighties up to about 1990 called The Pursuit of Happiness. Maybe you also remember an album they made titled Love Junk. It has quite a few songs which get me to think of London as it once was and might still be again, although probably not within my lifetime given how horrifically insane a majority of our cousins seem to have gone.
That is, London as the hearthstone of such liberty which, back around 1990, seemed like it was on top of the globe. I remember how happy I felt that English is not only my native language but my ancestral language on my dad's side. When I imagine these songs as musical backdrops to the above quotation, I actually choke up. No, really.
And I choke up all the tighter when I'm back in 2022 and I remember that England (not Scotland, at least not as much) has gone insane with xenophobia and that we here in the States still have a long, hard fight ahead of us to get democracy out of the woods and onto the sunlit uplands where, for the first time in recorded human history, democracy will be multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith and, I guess, multi-gender (although that last is something I barely understand at all!)
Then will we see that freedom is not zero-sum but something which acts in such a way that, the more rights and freedoms (and yes, corresponding responsibilities to maintain and strengthen these things) we all have, the better off we all are! With the possible exception of those who need someone to bully to feel they're alive.
Our way of life is not and should not be defined by letting just anyone get rich and overly powerful but by the ancient Biblical promise that 'every [person] shall be under [their] own fig tree and none shall make them afraid'. And let's remember that every person means just that. Everyone of every color, ethnicity, faith or sexual orientation. And faith in every person having a voice and in the rule of law to ensure that no one is stifled who does not seek to promote division based on one of the factors I have cited. And that when power changes hands, it does so without bloodshed.
We now know we fight against fascism; what I outline here is what we need to recall as what we fight for! A truly level playing field, no one compelled by dire hardship to what is essentially slave labor,  freedom of faith for all under the law and no retribution from speaking uncomfortable truth to too-complacent power! This doesn't mean power shouldn't argue with you; we need to expect that. But also remember that argument means just that. Ad hominem/mulieram attacks should not be part of that, nor should ethnically or sexually based epithets be considered argument!
'Fellow' pale males who think you entirely earned your positions, tell the rest of us why and how you did so, but be prepared to be reminded of helps you may have had absent to others not male and not as pale.
On the other hand, let me remind those on my political side, calling out lies and liars for what they are is not gutter politics. Right now we need to fight bare-knuckle, but we don't need brass ones. We need to shout out truths from the housetops and thereby drown the lies.
Remember what is best in what we who speak English have given the rest of the world. For those things, let us fight unremittingly until democracy's new day fully dawns!

A FATEFUL HINGE INDEED!

"As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you." Edmund Burke

It is, and should be, debated how true that is or how true it's ever been. Not only for the USA, but for the English-speaking world as a whole. We should be able to debate that, and other political questions, with both passion and civility, always with the awareness that our opponents may well have something worthwhile to say. How difficult that's been for at least since the Clinton administration speaks unhappy volumes about the crumbling of our freedoms--and who's doing nearly all of the crumbling!
But let's set that aside for the moment as, in two days' time, we come to a seriously fateful hinge.
I see the great 'gifts' that the English-speaking peoples have given to the greater world as these: first, the equality of all before the law and no one, not even the Crown, (let alone any president!) being above it.
Second, representative democracy and the idea that, given enough truthful information and time to digest it, we are all capable of participating in it. Third, that democracy is also a process, one which might never be completed but is all the more worth pursuing. Fourth, that certain freedoms (I think FDR's Four Freedoms is an excellent summing up of them) are the God-given rights of every human being on the planet!
To all of you who have yet to vote in this election: whether we in the English-speaking world will have a rebirth and expansion of those freedoms or whether we, having turned our backs on what we gave the world and, indeed, the truest sources of our own greatness, will decline into richly deserved obscurity and contempt, is now on all of you. Yes, you.
You cannot not decide this time. Indeed, 'not deciding' is a way of doing just that--opting for the way towards obscurity and contempt. Whether you like it or not (and I'm pretty sure most of you don't) this question hinges on your choices on Tuesday.
If you do your duty to your country, your civilization, your language and our common faith and vote straight Democratic, then you will point the way towards a rebirth of the spirit of freedom and equality for all of us. You will be a sign to our cousins across the Pond (in England, not Scotland as they've stayed canny and sane) to continue to recover their senses. You will be a wonderful source of frustration to foreign autocrats who still dream of making themselves emperors and a beacon of hope to those who know how much further democracy has yet to travel.
But if you are feckless and either vote for so-called 'Republicans' or try to dodge the question by not voting, you will open further the path which leads to the varieties of English becoming actual separate languages and thus to the end of anything called 'the English-speaking peoples'. The autocrats around the globe will be cheered as they point to us and say, "See? Didn't we tell you so? They were always in it only for the money and the excuse for exploiting poor folks like you." They will say this in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and, yes, Riyadh as well. Not only that, but it will shake democracy elsewhere.
Shills for autocrats and slave-masters will say all the louder, "See? Freedom is zero-sum. More freedom for them (fill in the blank) means less freedom for you."
'France' originally meant, 'land of the free people'. How does it feel to think that French might then be freedom's primary language? Or, maybe, Spanish? Those two languages, especially French, love logic, so maybe they can save freedom if we turn our back on the gifts we've given the rest of the world.
Maybe with the help of the still-sane Scots--renewing an old medieval alliance.
Some will remind us, we've been here before, and they'd be right. But there are two signal differences between now and when one-party Jim Crow rule was reinstated across the South: first, back then, most of the world didn't have its eyes on us. Second, the parts of the world that did, most of them actually thought the peckerwoodies were doing the right thing! Neither applies now.
In any case, the choice is on you. Either towards a future which can still be bright for more of us if we do our part, or back towards an already-failed past. And let me remind y'all in passing that the 'Republicans' have no solution for inflation either. All they want to do is further enrich the already obscenely rich and satanically greedy as they try to take your benefits from you!
Choose wisely on Tuesday. Vote straight Democratic. At all governmental levels from local to federal.

WHO, REALLY, IS MORE 'GOVERNMENT DEPENDENT'?

 As I ate my breakfast this morning, I meditated on how our fascisti and their supporters voted as compared to us libs and progs and so forth. They all goose-step together to the polls whereas getting enough of the American majority that we really are seems to make herding cats look relatively easy.
So I started to wonder, why is that? Why does politics not swallow more of us up like it does our 'fellow' palefaces and their shills of color (I'm looking right at you, Distort D'Newza) on the right, just past John Fogerty's bathroom?
And then I thought a little more. What is a YUGE part of the takings of most of those obscenely rich and satanically greedy billionaires who buy political slaves, fund propaganda outlets like the Cato and Claremont Insititutes, endless lobbyists (including the gnomes at ALEC) and are largely responsible for democracy's decaying this far?
I'll tell you: government contracts, many of which are no-bid. That means, our tax dollars are supporting billionaires who live in such a way as to make Nero and Louis XIV, to name two despots, look like peasants in their own eyes!
Yes, liberal and, most of all, non-partisan organizations, get government bucks too. But the difference between liberal and non-partisan organizations on the one hand and right-wing corporations on the other is, the first two seek to benefit every one of us with their endeavors. The last, or at least the pale males that run them, are primarily, when not exclusively, interested only in fattening their pockets and, maybe, their wives' purses.
And another thing: none of us beg the government to buttress any beliefs we have without external empirical proof. We rightly understand that to be our own business, and only that. And our neighbor's beliefs are only her business as well. Etc. A large part of what our fascisti do is either beg or threaten government (be it  local, state or federal) to defend their worn-out unspoken points of 'faith', such as racism.
With these things in mind, it makes all too much sense that they believe that they, and only they, should rule. They're not interested in sharing anything. Now, I know that most of us are, on the contrary, geared to share with others. But this is where we need to steel ourselves and , first, vote as many of them out as we possibly can and, second, when they bring out their AR-15s and hundred-round clips of ammo, be ready to fire hot lead back at them!
Let them have what they need to pursue their non-government-connected endeavors (to whatever extent they have them) but get them OUT of government at any and all levels!!! Don't let them anywhere near anything to do with public education, for one thing! If they don't like what's taught there, let them go organize a Private Academy, often a guise for continuing Jim Crow anyway!
As I have stated before, I'd even be willing to kick in so they can have some decent bars with decent booze and even pianos on which they can mangle sad songs as they drink and weep for the only ones for whom they ever shed tears: themselves. That's another difference between us and them: when we weep, it's for things larger than ourselves--our planet, our country, our civilization, etc.--or for others who are afflicted. Very rarely do libs, progs, etc., weep for themselves. Many would  think scorn to do so.
On the other hand, the enemies of democracy weep for themselves alone and cannot comprehend anyone weeping for anything else. They are truly children of darkness as described in John 1:5. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." Isn't that our right wing, fascist and fellow-travellers, or what?
Ten days now till Election Day. If you can, vote early, but vote--and, if you believe in democracy, vote Democratic on all levels. Let there be no officeholder with (R) after their names still in office on Wednesday!

SAVE DEMOCRACY THIS NOVEMBER!

 Elections have consequences, as we all say these days.
And if Democrats don't hold both houses of Congress and win some state legislatures, expect the results to be disastrous.
I was appalled to see that more voters actually believe 'Republicans' are better for the economy than Democrats. I want to ask these voters: Why do you think this? How could you think this? Especially when each incoming Democratic administration has had to clean up the mess left by the Greedy Oligarchs' Party? Or is that why you think the way you do?
Do you really believe the GOP makes it easier for people like you to make more money and be able to put a bit by, as our cousins would say? Which reminds me: take a l-o-n-g look across the Pond, see what Truss's Tories tried to do. It was so bad for the economy that even the City gnomes nixed it--and it's almost exactly what Kevin McCarthy the jellyfish promises to enact!
God, please let our cousins be coming back to their senses!
In any case, if you do think that, that means the GOP has gaslighted you to a degree nothing short of astounding. Of course, they were helped by your readiness to believe that the 'n***ers' and 's**cs' were just itching to take your plasma screens and other status symbols from you when it's they who want to take much more important things from you--yes, from y'all as well as from the you-know-whos! They mean to take the following from you, me and all of us just holding on:
Our Social Security. Our Medicare. Our Medicaid. Our Veterans' Benefits. Veterans' Benefits, for God's sake!! They must share Trumpelthinskin's opinion of our honored dead: "Such suckers!" Remember hearing Orange Julius Sawdust Caesar say that?
And as they prepare to steal from us, they distract you with LIES about how kindergarteners learn to read with Show Me! and how CRT is going to make you and your kids feel personally responsible for slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and all the rest of our history's dark side! Or whatever related lies they use, ad nauseam!
Do any of you know, CRT is only in graduate schools? As an elective?!
They want their political masters to own everything--including, eventually, all of us. Not just the ones with darker skins but all of us. Never mind streets safe from 'n***ers', etc., but rather think about having safer streets, classrooms, supermarkets and so forth from unhinged white male incels who find it easier to get an AR-15 then to get a date! Think about having the law really treat everyone equally so that Trumpelthinskin and cohorts might now wear the orange jumpsuits we know they deserve!
If the GOP is hinting that you, too, can aspire to be above the law if you go stomp on 'n***ers', 's**cs' and maybe 'k**es' as well, be warned: that will last only as long as it suits the new class of feudal barons for whom they really work! And how long that might be, to quote the Bard, who knows save Heaven?
If the GOP wins anything next month, it will probably be the end of our democracy. In time, you, or your sons and grandsons, will see yourselves reduced to serfdom--including seeing the young and arrogant lordlings rape your wives and daughters before your faces! Imagine watching that while all you can do is cringe like a poor beaten dog!! But, then, remember: we can still give them the drubbing they grievously need. It's still up to us; use this chance well for your own sake and that of your granddaughters!!
Harry Truman once said, and I think he was so right, "If you want to live like a Republican, vote for Democrats." True when he said it, and even more so now.
See, when Democrats 'make it', they reach a hand back to help others. When 'Republicans' make it, they either pull up the ladders as they go or otherwise render them inaccessible and/or needing repair. Inwardly digest and remember what I write here as you vote. Vote Democratic; let not a single candidate with (R) after their names be either elected or re-elected. That's what's necessary for keeping our democracy alive and well this November!