Hekate
Hekate's JournalFrom the very beginning I called him the Mad King, long before several cartoonists...
...started portraying him as the nekkid emperor with an ermine-trimmed robe and sometimes King Louis XIV high heels.
It was just so clear — and I knew just who was the heir apparent, too: Crown Princess Ivanka, not her two brothers by Ivana. Princes all, but obviously nowhere near as important, and kept far away from the court on other business. Melania’s obviously the queen consort, and powerful in her own way — she has to be in order to protect her own young son from this nest of vipers. Melania comes by way of a secret treaty with a foreign emperor, as in days of old. Crown Princess Ivanka and her Prince Consort Jared are another marriage of the interests of two powerful houses of crime.
Tiffany — it was so clear from the body language of her half-siblings when she showed up in 2016: she’s just Daddy’s little bastard, and somewhere deep in what they imagine are their hearts they probably blame her birth for their parents’ split-up. I see she has now, by giving the required speech at this year’s RNC doings, managed to insinuate herself into the workings of the Mad King’s court and probably the family business as well — but Tiff, dear, deep in your own heart you’ll always know what they think of you, and that your own mother wasn’t as powerful or as clever as either Ivana or Melania, and is just a cast-off concubine.
I developed this psychological mythology out of a fascinated horror with what I could see of their family, and as a way of coping with it. They are warped, cruel, sick, and entitled, and visibly care for nothing but their own interests. I think they are everything our own Founding Fathers detested about Europe's centuries of monarchies, and feared for the new country they were forming.
They ran for president as Democrats. They lost. They did what was right & supported the winner....
....in order to defeat Trump, who is a very dangerous man indeed. Joe Biden not only won the nomination, he won the presidency by historic margins.
Joe Biden has already put John Kerry in his cabinet as Climate Czar. Biden is elevating the position not only to Cabinet level, but to sit at the National Security level. Kerry has a very long record in this regard. He was endorsed by no less than Al Gore.
Does this make you happy? It makes me happy. Or is it just “throwing the Bernie/AOC supporters a bone” and will they proceed to depart the Party in high dudgeon and, I don’t know, start a 3rd party?
Or is it not even a bone?
Uh-huh. I notice the usual tropes are on display in this thread: quotas, identity politics, ...
...and should only choose a woman if she happens to be the most qualified person in the known universe. It was exactly the same when Obama announced he was going to select a woman for the SCOTUS vacancy.
It’s instructive that when a couple of dozen candidates are presented who are all white men, nobody brings up identity politics, or quotas, or needing to be the most qualified candidate in the known universe.
Why is that, I wonder?
I remember it vividly. LIFE magazine was full of photos of kids in iron lungs...
...during the last great epidemic. Every single school had its quota of kids in heavy metal and leather braces — forever. No ramps, no elevators.
So when the injections became available, every parent in town, with few exceptions, lined their kids up for this new lifesaver. The Anti-Vaxxer Shit was confined to a few fringe religious sects.
It never occurred to me to wonder what my parents paid or if they paid until I was well into my adulthood. We had no money. I realized the vaccination program had been free.
In my town, Kailua, Oahu, the site for the clinic was Kainalu Elementary, where my brother and I went. It was after dark, and the line of parents and children went from the classroom, out to the playground, all across that, to the gates, and on down the sidewalk a long way.
There were 4 of us kids, and my little sister was needle-phobic and threw a tantrum of epic proportions when she saw what was coming. And you know what, Anti-Vaxxers? My mom held her tight until she got her shot.
How did ANYBODY vote for Trump? Read today's Letters page in the LA Times...
The Letters editor decided to devote the entire page today to their plaintive wails that they are not racists. That they are simply voting their wallets, and that (their) religious freedom means everything to them, and that he is protecting the unborn, and other countries need to pay their fair share, and he’s good for the country...
They self-identify as male, female, white, black — well, you get the picture. Something from every demographic in America. 70,000,000+ voters.
So deal with it. As a white woman and lifelong Democrat, I’m sincerely sick of reading that “white women” are at fault for having brought us Trump in 2016.
Just deal with it. Every single city, town, village, rural grange, university, community college, church, synagogue, neighborhood, and family has Trump voters within it.
This is a nationwide malady.
Thanks, George. I like that folk story & song in all iterations. I was powerfully reminded ...
...of the story (but did not dare tell it) while on a musical tour of Ireland some years ago. That is, we were tourists, and musicians traveling with us on the bus were giving us a tour of Ireland.
One was a fiddler name Sean, older, with white hair and skin to match. He was the whitest man I ever met who wasn’t an albino, but his chief feature was his skill with a fiddle. One night after dinner our party had a room to ourselves, and as he began to play, a woman walking by the door was drawn in as though by a thread, and she began to dance. Her feet flew, and as if he had been dared, his fingers and bow flew faster yet. She kept up, the bow transcended. She almost but not quite faltered, and kept dancing as fast as he played until he put his bow down.
In awe, all I could think was: “He played the Devil down.”
The story of this musician or that who meets the Devil at a crossroads at night to make a bargain that he (it’s always a he) will be the best of the best is (or was at one time) widely told in America. I knew that Sean had worked at his fiddle night and day in his youth to be the best of the best — but dared not mention the American folktale to this deeply Catholic Irishman.
But the awe never left me.
No, "we" did not. Every step of the way there were US citizens objecting like hell...
...We were donating to groups on behalf of cages children and abused immigrants, showing up at airports to offer aid to Muslims, marching, voting, screaming. Joining with Black Lives Matter despite being white. This entire Spring and Summer Washington DC, Portland, and other cities were flooded with people of all colors protesting for BLM, enduring gas, beatings, and rubber bullets.
So no, “we” did not “let” them do any of the shit they did. Stop repeating that nonsense.
They had the Senate, the White House, and a malice like none we have ever seen before. They moved so fast it took my breath away.
Almost half this country seems to be really okay with authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and school shootings. Fascism. That is really horrifying.
But more than half the country keeps voting Democratic. We have a severe problem getting our people into office — but we are the majority, and never forget that.
I keep trying to tell you guys, California is not the solid liberal paradise you think it is...
While I’m at it, may I point out that taking so much out of the Legislature and putting it up for direct popular vote (the “Propositions”) is a fricking stupid idea. We elect legislators to get into the details and legislate. Oh wait, we voted for term limits so just when an elected official is getting a good grasp on things, they get turfed out of office and like as not go find a job as a lobbyist.
My husband and I did what we always do: took all the recommendations from the Los Angeles Times (gravitas), the Santa Barbara Independent (liberal), and the League of Women Voters (impartial) and compared them. We looked at who is endorsing each Proposition: cui bono? We discuss it with each other.
The dialysis centers are a case in point. Prop 23 is something the Legislature should have hammered out, but it came up “from the people,” i.e. those who could raise enough money to get enough signatures on petitions. As near as we can tell, the bottom line is that trained sub-professionals are fully capable of running a modern dialysis center, and Prop 23 would have mandated that each one have an MD, NP, or PA on site. We are short of doctors, NPs, and PAs, and that would actually cause closures. You would not believe how many people are on dialysis to stay alive after their kidneys fail (often from the diabetes that is running rampant in the US).
But wait, there’s more. The Indy said vote Yes. The League of Women Voters was Neutral. The LA Times said they would not endorse because there was no evidence it would help patients, but was in fact being used improperly as a labor organizing tool. Say what? We ended up leaving the damn thing blank. We are pro-union as all get-out, but this is not the way to get there.
I’m not as grumpy as I sound just now & I didn’t mean to jump on you. This day when Joe Biden finally became the President-Elect has been emotionally exhausting, starting with tears and hyper-ventilation when I turned on the news early in the a.m., and ending with more tears watching Kamala and Joe speak in Delaware, and I have not slept well for 4 years anyway. Immediately after dinner I crashed on the couch and slept for 6 solid hours. My husband finally woke me up after 1 a.m. and suggested I go to actual bed. Now that I’ve done a few things, I will do that. It’s 3 a.m.
Sitting here with yesterday's LA Times, have 2 articles to recommend to all DUers...
But first you, since you wrote this post. This should lead to the first page of the California section, 11-5-2020.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e&edid=30a5cd13-c5d1-42b1-9709-87a1488dbc9f&pnum=18
The first one is by Erika Smith, one of their Black columnists, and just kind of breaks my heart, as I suspect broke hers: “Facing who many of us are in Calif.”
The opening: in 2016, there were 4 million Californians who voted for Tump. In 2020, there were 4 million Californians who still voted for Trump, and they are a lot more diverse than you think. The closing: Biden keeps saying “This isn’t who we are.” But maybe, Erika Smith says: it is who we are.
Man, that just made me tear up to write. Tears running down my face. Like you, I am exhausted.
On the same page, by Gustavo Arellano, who as his name suggests is one of their Latino columnists: “Latino Trumpers? No surprise there.” I haven’t finished it yet, but it also looks like something we need to read.
That’s all I’ve got today. Thanks for your thoughtful post, as always.
At this point we are two countries, intertwined. Look at the history of Pakistan/India partition...
...to see how badly wrong separation can go.
There are other countries where the “enemy” is your neighbor. Try Israel and Palestine. Have a look at Ireland during The Troubles. Everywhere there are examples of bloody conflict over land that can occur when people decide they can’t live together.
Seldom do we humans get a chance to just move on and start over in an empty land. It means leaving everything you know behind (house, property, farm, relatives) for one thing. But more importantly, no land is empty of other humans.
One of our foundational myths as Americans is that is how America was founded. The Pilgrims thought they could build a “New Jerusalem” — a perfect society. The pioneers thought the vast continent was empty and theirs for the taking. Too bad about those pesky Indians, though: they were here first.
My heart breaks at what we might become. But one thing is sure: we can’t partition our way out of it.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
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Member since: 2002
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