Not quite three weeks ago Ben Carson was being question by Katie Porter, a member of the House Financial Services Committee. For those who haven’t heard about it, or (assuming you’re reading this long after it happened) hadn’t heard about it, she asked him if he knew what REO stood for. It is a technical term that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development should have known.
Instead, Secretary (or is it Buffoon?) Carson thought she was asking him about Oreo cookies. Hilarity ensued, especially on Twitter. My response was to take to Photoshop for a moment and whip together what went through my mind when I heard of this.
The original anti-fascist movement prepares to disrupt a large Nazi gathering.
In an interview with Piers Morgan that aired on June 4, two days before the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in France, Donald Trump was asked if he wished he had served in Vietnam. His response: “Well, I was never a fan of that war, I’ll be honest with you. I thought it was a terrible war. I thought it was very far away. At that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.”
I wasn’t a big fan of the war in Vietnam either, but I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the Spring of ’66, just as things were beginning to heat up again. I failed my physical, as I was born with club feet, which required surgery to correct my left foot when I was five years old. The doctors saw the four large incision scars on my foot, ankle and shin, and nixed my service.
I argued that sailors don’t do a lot of marching and I should be able to make it. They let me in. When I arrived at the United States Naval Training Center in San Diego, I immediately suspected I had made a mistake. As the bus I was on drove into the camp, I could see numerous company’s of men marching on the largest blacktop (we called it a grinder) I’d ever seen. As it turned out, marching was one of the things we did a lot of . . . and it was hell on my arthritic ankle and my shortened Achilles tendon.
There was on thing, one punishment that was meted out to us that sealed my participation and my eventual discharge. During graduation ceremonies, we would be required to bend our left leg at the knee so we could rest our rifles against the inside of our thighs (so the rifles wouldn’t clatter to the ground) while we screwed our white hats onto our heads in preparation for demonstrating some physical exercises with those rifles.
When our Company Commander thought we needed some admonishment or straightening out, he would make us stand in that position for up to a half hour. It required me to bend my left ankle in a way it just wasn’t capable of doing, as I have a shortened Achilles tendon. Needless to say, it was becoming quite painful after a while. All the marching wasn’t exactly helping either.
I decided to go to sick bay, where they x-rayed my left ankle and, after reading the film and seeing I had arthritis in my ankle, I was offered an honorable discharge. I declined. When I went back to my company, to a man they all told me I was an idiot and that I should take the discharge. Two days later, I decided they were correct and by early July I was a civilian, with a DD214 that said I served 1 month and 23 days. It also said I had been awarded the National Defense Service Medal.
I don’t think of myself as a veteran. I have never attempted to get veteran’s benefits, making a conscious choice after my discharge to not use benefits that others needed far more than I did. I know I wasn’t officially in long enough to quality, but I believe I could have made the case they should never have let me in and the hours and hours of marching and painful standing at “five-and-dive” exacerbated my medical issues . . . but I chose not to try.
After I was discharged, I became more and more opposed to the war and, by 1968 I was involved in the anti-war movement. I also joined a group of leftists, including a bunch of lawyers from an organization called Bar Sinister, in a Hapkido class. I could do most everything, but kicks that involved using the heel of my left foot were problematic and I almost broke it sparring one time.
We eventually morphed into a security team, doing everything from protecting demonstrators to armed security work for people like Jane Fonda, Roger McAfee, Hortensi Bussi Allende, and Vietnamese students in the U.S., among many others. I believed then, and I believe now, I was serving my country by opposing a cruel, illegal, and unjust war; a war that was killing my friends, one of whom it was my solemn duty to serve as a pall bearer for not too long after graduating High School.
I’m proud of what I did, though I frequently have wished I had tried a little harder to stay in the Navy. I do believe my work in the anti-war movement was important and valuable. Nobody paid us, and hardly anybody ever thanked us, but we prevented a lot of bad shit from happening . . . and helped, in many small ways, to end the war in Vietnam.
I just came across this tweet from Teh Donald™, which I’m quite sure is part of the collection of tweets where he has previously said something about someone else (usually Obama) that is actually applicable to his presidency. Donald John Trump has severely wounded irony and satire. It remains to be seen if we’ll ever recover a normal, decent sense of humor.
I’m also (not sure this is the right word) “pleased” to see this very special one was originally born on my 67th birthday and will now follow me all the days of my life . . . which are far fewer than they were even then.
A friend of mine on Facebook shared the following quote by Bertrand Russell, which was sent to Sir Oswald Mosely in response to a request by Mosely to debate the merits of fascism.
There is no doubt in my mind the Trump administration, and the bulk of the Republican Party that’s currently enabling him, are fascists. They have every intent of restricting our freedoms and keeping us in relative poverty and misery, all so a few may get wealthy at our expense. We must not allow this to happen. We must not give away those precious rights and freedoms we’ve won, and that so many have suffered to gain.
The original anti-fascist movement prepares to disrupt a large Nazi gathering
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
I’ve been getting more and more comfortable with Photoshop’s many editing tools, chief among them layers, cloning, blending, and various level adjustments.
I find politics, especially the clowns in the Trump administration, wonderful subjects for my efforts. For instance, recently the Attorney General, William Barr, responded to a question about whether or not he was worried about his legacy with the following:
“I am at the end of my career. Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
Aside from his use of the filler “you know” four times in one sentence, I was stuck with the thought, “is he being stoic or nihilistic?” I’m still not sure, but the statement reminded me of a song by George Harrison. I found a pic of the album cover, researched then downloaded the proper font, and tweaked the cover like so:
I think he looks appropriately unconcerned, don’t you?
I’ve started blogging again here at Systems Savvy and needed to do some research on my history doing so. I came across the following blog post on another, now defunct blog site, The Cranky Curmudgeon, which I wrote on October 29, 2008. I entitled it “Talk About Your Angst!” I forgot I wrote it and I’m somewhat amazed that my characterization of the Bush admin sounds quite similar to my characterization of the Trump admin. We’re doing something wrong . . . bigly!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Barack Obama Makes a point during debate with John McCain
Well, here we are . . .
what is it? . . about six days out from what I’m thinking is the most
important election of my lifetime. Any election involving Nixon, Reagan,
or either of the Bush gangster family was, of course, important, but
this one – whew! After eight years of so thoroughly screwing up
everything they touched, I am on pins and needles waiting to see if we
get a brand new start at fixing things, or if we get something possibly
worse than George Bush.
I think I need to explain something too.
Although I take the position George Bush and his administration screwed
up everything they touched, I think it’s important to note they did
exactly what they had planned to do all along. The failures were not
truly failures, as they fit into the general plan. Don’t think for one
moment these criminals weren’t working toward the dream so famously
articulated by Grover Norquist when he said his goal was to shrink
government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
I have no doubt that is exactly what has been going on, especially when
government means services for the people, as opposed to handouts for
the well-connected. We have witnessed the most massive re-distribution
of national wealth, certainly in my lifetime. Now, perhaps, we can see
some of that bleeding stanched.
Six more days! I am on pins and
needles. We so desperately need to take this nation in another
direction; to back away from the arrogant unilateralism and the move
toward the so-called “unitary executive”; the use of torture and the
spying on our own citizens; and the outright flaunting of the
Constitution when it serves the narrow interests of the administration.
Obama has created one of the flattest campaign organizations ever,
thanks in large part to his team’s understanding and use of information
technology. Let’s see if they can translate this knowledge into a new
politics of engagement and involvement . . . and – dare I say –
democracy.
When I returned from a two-month working journey to Cuba in 1973, the FBI showed up at my door with questions about my trip. I had been a member of the sixth contingent of the Venceremos Brigade, and a small part of my education for the trip was the admonition to politely refuse to speak with them, which is what I did.
It was a short, pleasant conversation. I told them I wasn’t going to answer any questions and they asked me if I was sure. I said “yes” and they said “have a nice day” and left. That was it.
My years of activism had brought me to the attention of many law enforcement agencies, chief among them the LAPD and the FBI.
All to say, there’s been little love lost between me and these organizations . . .
Yet I’m really looking forward to what James Comey has to say.
After a couple weeks of breathless anticipation, endlessly hyped by Trump TV . . . er . . . Fox News, the ballyhooed Nunes memo was finally released, creating a giant thud as it fell flat on its face. After all the buildup and breathless hyperbolating over it being set to expose the worst scandal in United States history, it was a real let down, though you wouldn’t know that by the response of the Knucklehead-in-Chief or his band of merry sycophants.
As I have mentioned before, I’ve been spending time learning how to use Photoshop to create my own renditions of the news or other things that catch my fancy. I’ve got two of them related to this debacle. One I created is based on an earlier “confrontation” where something Mueller had done was written off by the right as a “nothingburger”. I’m afraid I can’t quite remember what that something was, but I obviously reacted to it. I didn’t do much; merely found a great shot of a hamburguesa tremenda, then added some words.
The second one took a bit more work as I had to create a series of layer masks to represent what I envisioned. Generally, I put these together, then post them to Facebook and, at times, to Twitter as well. I’m working on remembering to post them here too.
Here they are, with added captions.
Wrap Your Mouth Around This Puppy
Jerky is Such a Disappointment When You’re Expecting a Thick, Juicy Steak
I believe I wrote this (see below) during the administration of George W. Bush who, at the time, I thought was the worst President I had lived through. Harry S. Truman was POTUS when I was born (1947) but the first I remember is Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower). With the election of Donald J. Trump, I have lived through 13 presidencies, most of them two-termers.
Now that I’ve figured that out, and despite not being superstitious, I can’t help but note that Trump is number 13 and, were I triskaidekaphobic, that reality (a difficult word to use in the Drumpf era, no?) would be significant. In this case, I consider it amusing, but entirely random.
At any rate, inasmuch as I’ve begun using this space to share some of my other work from different venues and applications, I have some old poetry and the like I will no doubt put up on occasion. Some of what I’ve written (and bothered to keep over the years) is not what I would consider complete, as I sometimes just jot stuff down as it occurs to me and often don’t actually spend the time completely fleshing it out.
One day I guess I was thinking of the song “America The Beautiful”, as I’m wont to do at times, since I love to sing and patriotic songs — as well as religious ones — are often particularly beautiful. It doesn’t mean I believe in them, at least not any longer . . . and not for a long time, but they’re pleasing to the ear musically, if not lyrically. So here’s a verse of that song, as rewritten by me at least 10, more likely 15, years ago.
Oh beautiful for specious lies That shelter capital gains For the poor and elderly Who endure financial strains
America, America Your God damned lies I see Have replaced thy good with two-bit hoods And political chicanery
I’ve known for a long time the reality of what this country stands for is far from what most of us were led to believe (read “brainwashed”), but I still feel it’s important to think of those things as aspirational. As Robert F. Kennedy said “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
I wish this truly were the greatest nation on the planet, but it’s not. If you think about it, I don’t believe there is such a thing. Different nations lead in different areas of government, economy, and society. There isn’t one that truly stands out as “the greatest”. We can leave that to Muhammed Ali, who really was just that. 😉
When I returned from a two-month working journey to Cuba in 1973, the FBI showed up at my door with questions about my trip. I had been a member of the sixth contingent of the 
Systems Savvy 