History in the Making!

 Who you gonna call?

Treason Busters! United States House of Representatives special committee to uncover the truth about  what happened in our Capitol during the Jan6 insurrection! 

They discovered:

Bannon boy spurted the game plan, before the main event. Before the election, he let the batshit crazy cat burglar out of the bag:

“If Biden is winning, there’s gonna be some crazy sh*t.”

'T'was Pre-planned treason against the American people and against our duly-elected Congress. . . is what it was, truth be told.

And Bannon’s pre-planned sh*t did indeed hit the fan! serious bullcrap, even a dead American Capitol-defender or two, as a consequence of trump's treasonous fun and games . . . and boldly deposited defecation on the floors of the US House and US Senate!. . .

just as bannon boy had said: there’s gonna be some crazy sh*t!

Stop the Steal!: Famous Lost Words shouted by world-class losers.

The Winners? The American people, thanks to our Congress,  . . . who withstood the attack, and then appointed House members to get to the bottom of what happened. . .

Raskin, Schiff, Thompson, Cheney, Kinzinger, Luria, Lofgren, Aguilar, Murphy. God bless America! and a few brave legislators.

Raskin and Schiff, God bless ‘em . . . smelled the rat long before it crawled into the Rotunda on Jan6 ’21. Your persistence has borne fruit. Never give up, advocating for truth and accountability.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. . .

Liz took the ballot-box beating in Wyoming so that she could do the right thing to deliver our Republic safely, back into the Rule of Law . . .

battling in our House to prevent  our Executive branch falling under a renewed occupancy  by Rebumlican gangleader trump, whose harpy minions, called now to accountability. . . quickly proclaim: Fifth!

“Fifth.” Roger Stone, John Eastman and a throng of lawless shroud boys and oath-leapers, leaping over the Rule of Law to defecate in the legislative chambers, fulfilling bannon boy’s prophetic gutterance: . . . “some crazy shit!”

This just in: US Supreme Court declines to rule on trump’s Special Master bellyaching.

Meanwhile the urgent call goes out: Is there a Statesman in the house? Not for long . . .

Adam Kinzinger will be bowing out of Congress after a stellar job of defending the Government of the People of the United States of America.. Maybe he's fed up with politics. Job well done, Adam. Your mission is accomplished in Congress. But hey!

Who’s gonna clean up the Rebumlican party after this mess?

Who we gonna call?!

Treason busters! Cheney, Kinzinger . . . Collins?  any volunteers?

Glass half-Full

Magnolia Dignity (Replay)

 Here's a re-run of the ode-to-Georgia poem I wrote and published in 2021:

Hark!  

I think I saw a flash in the pan!

I think I can; I think I can

Yes, I can see a flash in Atlan-

-ta!

Georgia!

Yep! Georgia’s on my mind

Cuz now in Georgia we do find

A glint of hope!

Maybe now our USA can cope.

Cuz trump’s senator Perdue got thrashed

By Governor Kemp in a Republican flash

And yeah, I say unto thee

There’s triumph in honesty.

Cuz Raffenberger’s quest for truth

has borne some precious Georgian fruit.

Yay! I say unto thee

There’s honor in integrity!

Cuz Brad, on trump’s sneaky phone call declined

When donald begged him for some votes to “find”!

I think I see a flash in the pan!

I think I can; I think I can

Yes, I can see a flash in Atlan-

-ta!

Georgia!

Yeah!Georgia’s on my mind

Yeah! now in Georgia we do find

A glint of hope!

There’s hope again for America

shining up from Atlanta.

Selah.

Yee-ha!

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

o’er our land of honesty, the home of the brave!

Cuz the devil went down to Georgia

lookin’ for some votes to steal.

But he got way-laid by an honest politician,

a Republican with a truthful rendition.

The South shall not lie again.

Yep, I have seen a flash in the pan

It’s shining up from At-lan

ta!

Georgia.

This bodes well for magnolia dignity

not maga-iniquity.

Glass half-Full

Indigenous Peoples in America

 Recalling the long, historical struggle of native Americans to find their place in American life, I commemorate their struggle in a song I composed and sang, many years ago, about the battle at Little Big Horn, Montana : 

As the stars began to fall,  the sun began to rise, bringing light to a newer day, and bringing light to their eyes. Hovering like a spectre, the Little Big Horn sat, and little did Custer know . . .

      Sitting Bull's Eyes

 

Glass half-Full 

Tree Agreement

Did you ever see a tree

with which you agree?

Today I did see a tree

with which I agree.

You may think me to be

a little daffy

because I did see this tree

and to think I could agree

with a tree is a little wacky

But I’m not the only one.

You may say that I’m a dreamer

but I’m not only one.

Leo Tolstoy once saw a tree

with which he did agree.

Actually it wasn’t Leo who did see

the agreeable tree.

It was Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

And yes, with Prince Andrei I do agree

that a tree can agree with me. 

He saw a tree that was old and gnarly

and with it he did agree

But the next day it was green and bloomy.

So he convinced himself to agree

that an old tree,  that was, like life itself, gnarly

could indeed be bloomy, not just all the time gloomy.

Prince Bolkonsky and the tree and me do agree!

Do you see now how I could agree 

with a speechless tree?

After all, poems were made by fools like me

but only God can make a tree

and who wants to disagree

with the Deity?

Not me.

The tree with which I agree

is growing on a rock!

Imagine that!

Although you don’t have to imagine it.

Here is another tree for you to see:

I didn’t make it up. 

So maybe you can agree with me and Prince Bolkonsky,

and of course, Emily. . .

Poems were made by fools like me, but only God can make

a tree grow on a rock!

Selah.

(Glass half-Full) 

A Day in the Strife

Listen to the song: A Day in the Strife

     Read the message here:

I heard the news about Old Glory

Fifty stars dragged down into the mire

A crowd of rebels in our Capitol

They cast our Congress to oblivion

They blew their mind out in a riot

They wouldn’t notice that the nation changed.

A crowd of people watched online.

They’d seen that dread spirit long before, in 1864.

Our nation’s splitting soul was up for grabs,

The joker brandishing his tyranny

Casting spells of spoken alchemy

Tossing tales of woken enmity.

He’d spouted words stand back stand by

They stormed the Dome with rebel cry.

They trashed and gashed the hallowed hall

They wouldn’t read the writing on the wall 

He blew their minds out with a lie

They raised the zombie rebel cry

A freaked-out nation sat and stared

They’d seen that face before, back in 1864.

The’d heard that rant before.

Nobody was really sure what the hell was happening.

His spell was marching on.

Glass Chimera 

Deja Vu, Literary Version

 Just as history does not repeat itself, but does “rhyme,” so are a few other elements of life in this world; for instance, literature.

This morning I had the strange experience of historical deja vu, the literary version.

I write novels; I have published four of them since 2009.

How I got into this activity can be simply stated: it was something meaningful to do in response to my own, personal mid-life crisis. 

I was reflecting on these events after encountering a book review in the New York Times this morning. 

     https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/lion-feuchtwanger-oppermanns.html?

As I was reading there about a 1930’s German author, Lion Feuchtwanger, I had a feeling of deja vu.

If you don’t know what deja vu is, you can get a notion of it by viewing the cover of the vinyl LP record album, Deja Vu, recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, in 1972. That album jacket features a photo of the quartet as they had re-imagined their group would have existed in the American West, a century earlier. 

    https://vinyl-records.nl/folk-rock/crosby-stills-nash-and-young-deja-vu-germany-release-vinyl-lp-album.html

But I digress. I was about to tell you about the German writer, Lion Feuchtwanger, whose historical fiction work preceded, by 73 years, my own novel, Smoke. Both books tell a story  about events  in Nazi Germany, 1930’s.

Lion wrote his novel, in “real time”, which is to say, his story was built arounds events that were actually happening in real time, while he was living, where he was living, in Germany, in the early 1930’s. 

In contrast, I wrote my novel, Smoke, as part of a wider European odyssey set in 1937, based on historical research.

Admittedly, Lion was far more qualified to write about Nazi Germany than I am. He was living there, and saw first-hand, the terrible events that were being inflicted on Germans—especially Jews—at that time.

In my case, however, because I had discovered some terrible truth about Europe, specifically Germany, by research, I decided that there was an historical fiction tale that needed to be told. . . hence, Smoke, which I published in 2011.

In Joshua Cohen’s NYTimes review yesterday, Oct 3, he writes this basic description of Lion’s novel about a persecuted family in 1933: 

“The Oppermanns” is a novel about the decline and fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture dynasty whose members are unable to countenance the rising threat of National Socialism.”

This brief description got my attention, because the historical fiction story that I composed in Smoke includes events in which a Jewish family, the Eschens (altough they are not the main characters) make the very difficult, but necessary, decision to leave their native Munich home. The Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1934 were making life so difficult and dangerous for them. These people had a thriving cattle/meat/deli business that the third reich basically stole from them. This persecution was happening all over Germany during the third reich, 1930's.

 That theft also included the Nazis' imprisonment of the Eschens' son, Heinrich, in a prison called Dachau in 1937. I chose their fictional family name to be “Eschen” because my research revealed that the first prisoner who was killed at Dachau had that name. In my story, however, Heinrich manages to get out of that first concentration camp.  

So this morning while reading Joshua Cohen’s review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns” I had the deja vumoment. 

These two fictionalized families had similar backgrounds. One had a furniture dynasty; the a other a prosperous deli. But both families suffered the oppression of anti-semitic Third Reich Nazi persecution, and ultimately. . . Holocaust.

All that to say: May it never happen again! Let history be a lesson, a warning, for us here and now.

 I was not able to comment in the NYT on Joshua Cohen’s review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.” So I wrote this blog instead. I had to do something to get the deja vu out of my system!

Smoke

Why Being a Centrist is So Hard

If you’ve spent a significant part of your life trying to be a moderately conservative republican, then you are probably in the same leaky boat that I am in.

In 2016, when trump was kidnapping the Republican party, any faith that I had in the GOP started to evaporate. I remember vividly, the night we were visiting relatives in Raleigh, my wife went to a family gathering—a mourning event—and I chose to stay in a motel and watch the prospective GOP nominees debate.

It was a terrible night. Not only was their death in the atmosphere, but that was the night that trump bullied his way into the party nomination by so rudely and crudely ignoring all the rules of standard debate. Then later, as it all unfolded in 2020, he crudely broke all the long-standing principles of good governance and statesmanship, even instigating treasonous insurrection. 

For this centrist republican, these last four and a half years have been all downhill, with the very bottom of Republican integrity being dragged into the mud to be slung upon our Republic (if we can keep it, as Ole Ben had said.) 

Now, a few brave Republicans, most notably Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, with help from the bench regularly provided by Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and (what-the-heck-happened to Paul Ryan?) a few other brave souls. . . remind me that there may be some salvation yet to be found for the party of Abe Lincoln. 

Anyway, now here it is . . . autumn of midterm election year, and the bully trump crowd may be being slowly driven back into their holes.

But hey, life if funny, y’know? 

Suddenly, up pops the anomaly (to use one of JordanP’s favorite words) and I am reminded why I forsook the democrat party back in the early days of my maturing phase.

The unexpected development was a proposed bill in Congress that I discovered while reading email, on this gloomy post-storm Saturday morning. This proposed legislation is House bill 1209.

Here is the paragraph that I found in the inbox, which—upon reading it— renewed my political identity crisis:

H.Res. 1209 is designed to elevate the LGBTQ agenda above freedom of religion and will make abortion a federal right. In addition, it will use our federal government to punish anyone who will not promote the LGBTQ agenda or abortion. I’ll explain more below and share how this resolution is intended to harm both parents and children. —Mat

This is a perfect example of why being a centrist nowadays is such a conundrum. 

I am okay with assuring Constitutional provisions that allow other citizens to define their own identities, sexuality and personal lifestyle, even their friggin’ marriage. I get it.

But when these disruptive doctrines about sexuality are dragged into our public schools to be used as propaganda fodder, lesson plans, for grade-schoolers . . . I just don’t get it. 

And so once again I find myself agonizing over my trump-instigated exit from the Republican party. 

Because sometimes Republicans do make better sense.

But other times, Democrats are much better attuned to protect the rights of minorities.

But sometimes their zeal for defending alternative lifestyles crosses a boundary called religion, which is a Right that is protected by our First Amendment.

So I am not suggesting that everybody needs to be religious. I am only saying that parents are allowed to teach their children religion-based morality, if they so choose.

And they should not be required by politically-obsessed schoolmasters to have their children’s faith undermined by progressive doctrines of sexual identity.

Sorry Dems; read ‘em and weep. This House Resolution 1209 is not a good idea.

And maybe you can discern, through this complaint, the conundrum I have—along with many other centrists—who find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. 

My only hope for returning to the GOP would be found in their nomination of a true statesman to be our next President. Apart from that development, Joe is okay with me. I voted for him last time. We’ll see what the elephants in the gloom come up with in ’24.

God forbid a replay of the trumpian disaster.

Glass half-Full