A Glass Half-Full To Last A Long Weekend

I worry about stuff.  I worry about details.  I stress about problems, and when there are no problems, I worry that I’m overdue.  I worry that I’m writing crap and I worry that not enough people are reading the crap I write.  I worry about the things I’ve done, the things I haven’t done, and the things I don’t know that I’ve done or not done.  Take yesterday, for example.  I worried that my site statistics were on the decline and I stressed over having nothing particularly cogent or pertinent to share.  I did my usual article by article search of Huffington Post and CNN.com, and even noted the headline about the Supreme Court overturning another state’s ban on same-sex marriage, thinking to myself, “Great!  One more state down, thirty or forty to go,” and completely missed the story of the day by failing to click and find out that the state in question was my very own bright RED uber-conservative god-fearing Mike Pence-led Indiana.  My bad.  But here’s where the glass starts being half-full.  In the midst of my whining and failure to report a local scoop, I had more site hits yesterday than in the past two weeks.  Begging apparently has an effect.

Let me be the first (or more like the ten thousand and first) to congratulate Federal Judge Richard Young for ruling that Indiana’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.  It was the right thing to do and it was about time.  It came right on the heels of a similar ruling by the federal courts in Utah on Wednesday.  Clearly the tide of progress, tolerance, and human dignity is building momentum, and that’s where that glass remains optimistically filling.  But there’s always someone eager to rain on even the happiest parade, and they are not far behind.  My gay friends in the Hoosier state would be smart to get to the altar sooner rather than later, because suits will be filed, stays will be contemplated and almost certainly issued, constitutional amendments will be pushed, and even marriages signed sealed and consummated today may be reversed and denied tomorrow.  But for today love and sanity are triumphing over hate and fear.  Glass half-full.

The federal courts were full of surprises yesterday.  The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the police need a warrant to search the contents of your cell phone, which is about the biggest concession SCOTUS has made to civil liberties since the Miranda decision.  So that’s good news.  The glass is half-full.  Still, it makes you wonder how the court can rule the contents of your iPhone to be sacrosanct, but the contents of your bladder to be in the public domain.  It’s the sort of dichotomy I’ll never understand.  At the same time, while it’s very nice that State Trooper Jackboot can’t see who you’ve been sending pictures of your tattooed and pierced junk to, the NSA not only has their names and numbers, but they know about that little rash you’ve been concerned over…it’s probably just from the heat.  Nothing to worry about.  The glass is half-full.

Which brings me back to me (it’s Kibbitz Corner, where it’s all about me all the time).  I may worry that I don’t have as many readers as George Will, but no one is accusing me of being a paternalistic insensitive mysogynist either.  In fact, I figure I have about two dozen people whose days aren’t complete without a dose of Wendellisms, and another two dozen who check in when the moon is in the correct phase.  I appreciate all of you.  When I finally write the book, I promise to autograph your copies.  The other sixty or so will be in my attic, just in case my fame multiplies posthumously.  In the meantime, I’ll be off the grid until next Tuesday, visiting my son in the Mile High City (make of that what you will).  But I should have some great stories and stunning pics when I return, so all in all, the glass is half-full.

BW

I Promise To Stop And Smell The Roses…Tomorrow.

First off, thanks to the two dozen or so of you who stop by every day to review my scatterbrained musings.  I’ve been desperately trying to figure out how to increase your numbers, and I’ve come to the conclusion that one way would be to write lighter, fluffier, more humorous pieces.  Kittens are always huge sellers, and failing that, self-deprecating jibes seem to generally work.  You can’t go wrong with a couple of dick jokes, and that ought to be easy for me, given that I spent part of my morning watching my own blood pressure rise to alarming levels while waiting in the exam room at my friendly neighborhood urologist.  Checking my site statistics, I note a slight rise when I play to the comedic segment, and a more precipitous drop-off when I concentrate on politics and current events…as I’ve been doing for the last week or so.  The readership has dropped to a level where I’m afraid that my hours at this keyboard constitute little more than mental masturbation…not that that’s a bad thing, but hell, at age 61, even mental masturbation is time and repetition and quality limited.  Anyway, now that I’ve done the requisite whining and perhaps given you a chuckle, guffaw, or minor giggle, I’m going back to some current events, with the above promise that in future columns, I promise to stop and smell the roses, or at least not bitch incessantly about stepping in any nearby dog shit.

Reason #7,342 to do something about guns in this country: In the year after the New Town massacre, 100 children have died in accidental/unintentional shootings in the US.  So in answer #9,876 to the NRA acolytes, no, guns don’t kill people, children with guns kill people…quite often themselves or other children.  Unsurprisingly, these childhood mishaps were more frequent in rural areas…you know, the places where folks think it’s cool to give little Johnny his first .22 varmint gun as a third grade graduation present.  In Japan, where gun ownership is strictly forbidden, as best as I can tell from a few minutes of Google research, there were ZERO children killed in accidental shootings (at least for 2008, the last year for which statistics seem to be available.)   So for us to keep parroting the nonsense about there being nothing we can do about the horrific blight of our national gun addiction is just utter bullshit.  It’s not there’s nothing we can do, it’s that there’s nothing we will do.

Election news and views: Chris McDaniel, the Tea Bagger’s choice in Mississippi, is refusing to concede defeat to his Republican primary rival, incumbent Thad Cochran, who achieved a victory by a narrow margin in yesterday’s election.  McDaniel claims that his loss was due to liberal Democrats crossing over to assure Cochran’s victory, which might, in fact, be true.  But this is what it’s come to here in the land where the inmates have assumed control of the asylum:  Democrats are voting for a guy like Thad Cochran, who by any standard is just slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, because, after all, he wouldn’t be as heinous as Chris McDaniel, and no matter what happens, an actual Democrat would have the same chance of winning Mississippi’s senate seat as I would have of securing Miss Congeniality at the Miss America Pageant.

The situation in Mississippi precisely parallels what transpired here in Indiana in 2012.  Republican Senator Richard Lugar, one of the last living “moderates” in the GOP and one of the longest-serving and most respected members of the US Senate, was ousted in the primary by Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock, who went on to infamy with his comment that pregnancy resulting  from rape is “something God intended.”  That unfortunate declaration allowed Joe Donnelly, who is as close to being a Republican as a Democrat can be without actually worshipping at the Church of the Holy Reagan, to win in the general election.

Ties get wider, hems go lower, pink is in for the summer, but anti-Semitism never goes out of style:  Gary Oldman, who ironically stars in the latest addition to the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, said in a Playboy interview:  “Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him, and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough.”  When Oldman sobered up, because we can only assume he was chemically altered in some adverse way when he gave the interview, he offered the usual “if what I said offended anyone” apology:  “Upon reading my comments in print — I see how insensitive they may be, and how they may indeed contribute to the furtherance of a false stereotype.”  Oh, I get it.  When he spoke those words aloud, it didn’t occur to him that he was being a racist bigoted douchebag asshole…it was only when he saw them in glossy print that he had the epiphany.  And by the way, if Jews run Hollywood, and the world financial markets, the Illuminati, and maybe the NFL…well, I still haven’t gotten the memo, the invitation, or the royalty checks.  So I’m saying it here and now: Hey, Moshe, give a brother a hand!  I don’t ask for much.  Just a couple thousand more blog hits every day.  Oy!

BW

 

 

 

 

Wrongs Continue To Be Wrong

You have to wonder how much some things have to be thrown in people’s faces before they begin to register as real.  I know I’m beating the proverbial deceased equine, but we’ve got too many guns in the US, and contrary to what the NRA tells you, guns really do kill people…in fact, people with guns tend to kill other people with guns, which is just a routine day in any big city in America.  On somewhat more notable days, it’s a person with a gun killing a whole bunch of people without guns.  Yesterday it was Miami, which has become the Dodge City of the modern age in this half century long drug war (cue “Miami Vice” theme music).  Two dead and seven wounded, with dozens of shell casings left behind.  Just another day on the mean streets.

Those streets might get a lot meaner, especially in Florida.  They’ve already got the “Stand your ground” law on the books.  I’m not sure why that hasn’t been dubbed “Zimmerman’s law”, yet, but Trayvon Martin could tell you all about it…if he wasn’t dead.  Now Florida Governor Rick Scott has signed into law a “warning shot” extension of Zimmerman’s Law.  It seems that under a loophole in the previous version, you could still be prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon…if you missed.  Now it’s ok to shoot into the air, the ground, or a nearby trash can, and you’re still held harmless.  I feel safer already.

Look, these nutjobs are insisting that it’s their right, in fact their patriotic duty, to push their cart at Kroger and sip lattes at Starbucks and do laps on the track at the Y with a Glock strapped to their hip.  At the same time, in Florida and a number of other states, it’s perfectly ok to pull your weapon and start banging away merely if you feel sufficiently threatened.  I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty threatened any time I’m confronted by anyone carrying a gun.  “Open carry” and “stand your ground” are ultimately going to cross paths and result in more deaths, including of innocent bystanders, because it’s now acceptable to miss whoever you’re shooting at.  Two wrongs are just twice as wrong.

In other news of the painfully obvious, this May was the hottest since records have been kept.  In fact four of the hottest months of May in history have occurred in the last five years.  I realize that these anecdotal reports can be attributed to transient weather changes and statistical variation and reporting bias and yada yada yada, but just how many dead whales, starving polar bears, and vanishing glaciers does it take before the deniers stop denying the reality slapping us in the face, that the planet is warming at an alarming rate?

In a final bit of embarrassing wrongness, comes this glaring error from my alma mater, Northwestern University:  At this year’s graduation from the school of journalism, the diplomas read:

Medill School of Journalism, Media, Itegrated Marketing Communications

1 – How in the world can a school of journalism fail to PROOFREAD??

2 – What was wrong with “Medill School of Journalism”?  This is almost as bad as when they changed the name from Northwestern University Medical School to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.  Money talks and good taste walks.

3 – At least no one was shot.

BW

 

 

WWJD?: 40 Rounds In Five Seconds, Then Reload

Ok, so it’s another Monday, and I’m basically bereft of ideas for a column.  I hate to keep returning to the well, but as I’m fond of saying, “As long as they keep committing outrages, I’ll always have something to talk about.”   I keep thinking that the various lunatics on the Right have finally bottomed out and there can’t be much more they can do that would shock, nauseate, surprise, or offend my sensibilities in general.  Then I wake up, read the morning news, and I’m right back to feeling like I’ve yet again stepped through the looking-glass, waiting to be served tea with the Mad Hatter.

At the Ignite Church (Ignite? Really?  Has this guy not heard about all the church arson cases?) in Joplin, Missouri, they’ve come up with a whole new answer to the ongoing question of “What Would Jesus Do?”  Judging by the campaign being waged by Pastor Heath Mooneyham (No, I did not make up that name), what Jesus would do is grab an assault weapon, pull the charging lever, level the sites, and start shooting some shit.  I’m pretty sure that’s documented somewhere in the gospels of St. Lapierre.  Pastor Mooneyham is attracting new faithful to his flock by raffling off two AR-15 assault rifles to any new attendees at his place of worship.  And it’s not just any AR-15.  No, my children.  It’s a Black Rain AR-15, “the Lamborghini of AR-15’s”.  Praise Jesus and amen!

You might ask why the devout, the saved, and the forgiven would need to be armed with the same weapons favored by SWAT teams and special forces.  Well, the answer to that question was delivered by Louisiana governor and GOP presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, speaking Saturday (unsurprisingly) at the annual conference of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition.  Jindal declared,  “I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States  where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.”  Huh?  Rebellion?  Hostile takeover?  He’s not suggesting that people take up arms against their own government, is he?  Nah, that couldn’t possibly be it.  Jindal’s reasoning for this insurrection, by the way, is to stop the government’s covert “war on religious freedom”…you know, the one that doesn’t drag shitweasles like Heath Mooneyham away in shackles when he gives free murder weapons away as an inducement to find Jesus.

Thankfully, the entire Republican Party isn’t comprised entirely of blood-lusting gun-nuts.  Some of them are still committed to the single defining concept that has been the shining beacon of GOP principle since before Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address…delegitimizing the presidency of Barack Obama (aka “that uppity negro”) in any way possible.  On Saturday, at about the same time that Bobby Jindal was speaking for hostile takeovers in DC, the South Dakota Republican Party was holding it’s annual convention, where, after days of discussion, debate, and discourse, they decided that the single most important measure they could pass was a resolution to impeach Barack Obama.  They had a whole list of high crimes and misdemeanors, but prime among them was the president’s unforgivable felony of engineering the release of an American POW.  That, and BBWP (being black while president).

BW

Celebrities Behaving Badly: The Popester Is No Dopester

Listen, as Popes go, I like this one more than most.  He doesn’t take himself too seriously, even refused to wear the hideous red shoes.  And miracle of miracles, he actually spoke out in favor of rich people doing their part to help poor people, a position which would instantly disqualify him for consideration as a Republican nominee for just about any office in the USA, right down to animal control officer in Asswipe County, Missouri.  And he seems to have indicated in some fashion that if the use of condoms might save a few million lives in places like Africa, God might not smite down the earth with a plague of locusts or frogs or Miley Cyrus clones or whatever.  So kudos for that.  But now he’s come out foursquare against the legalization of marijuana, presumably to reassure the faithful that he’s not fallen entirely into Satan’s warm embrace.  I’m hardly a biblical scholar (even though I play one on this blog), but I’m pretty sure Jesus had nothing to say on the topic of smoking dope.  He did, however, purportedly convert water into wine, so I’m thinking he was not entirely opposed to the occasional chemically induced state of relaxation.  Anyway, I’m here and now inviting Pope Francis to join me next weekend in Denver, where we can discuss philosophy, religion, politics, and theology…and you know, just sort of kick back.  He might go back to Rome with a whole new outlook.  And I might come home with an autographed Pope baseball cap or t-shirt, which would be very cool.

Porn star news: First off, adult actress Casey Calvert has her own blog on Huffington Post…and I don’t.  How is this possible?  (Note to Arianna Huffington: If getting naked is what it takes, fine, just give me your cell number and prepare to laugh until you pee your pants.)  Speaking of getting naked, Olivia Wilde had some charmingly sweet thoughts on her nude scenes in upcoming film “Third Person”:  “Not only did I have to do it again and again and again, but this was a scene in which I was running down stairs naked, which no one should ever do on camera”.  Yep, that definitely constitutes “bad naked”.  Anyway, the other porn star in the news is Dave “Pounder” Mech, age 38, who is running for the school board in Palm Beach, Florida.  It’s worth noting that Mech holds two doctorate degrees, but has virtually no chance of winning the seat…not only because of his previous employment, but because he makes way too much sense.  He’s in favor of (GASP!) sex education and condom availability for high school students.  What’s next, you commie perv?  Free school lunches for poor kids?  Oh, the humanity…

Celebrity Short Takes:

Chelsea Handler is moving her talk show from the E! Network to Netflix.  I’m not a big Handler fan.  She’s typically so full of herself that she can barely move, and she stated in one of her books that she only sleeps with guys who have umm….well…ah…big dicks, which for some reason I find offensive (my standards were always somewhat more liberal…I would only sleep with women who would generously agree to sleep with me).  But she did mention that one of her primary reasons for switching affiliations is so that she never has to interview Justin Bieber again, so there’s that.

Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony are officially divorced.  Marc who?

Michael Douglas and Katherine Zeta Jones may be getting back together.  I actually like this story.  For a confirmed cynic, I love happy endings.

Maksim Chmerkovskiy may be leaving “Dancing With The Stars” as a dance pro.  He says he wants Meryl Davis to be remembered as his last partner…although both of them continue to deny any romantic relationship (much to the disappointment of me and my fertile imagination…talk about a “spinner”…)

Wishing you all a hot and happy weekend.  If you end up in a tabloid, may it be for having an affair with someone way out of your league.

BW

 

 

 

Better Late Than Never

Anyone who’s been eagerly awaiting their daily dose of wit and wisdom from Kibbitz Corner has been sorely disappointed. As morning dragged on into afternoon and then evening approached, and still all was silent, the hungering masses waited.  Don’t despair.  The font of wisdom, such as it is, has not completely dried up, but sometimes real life interferes with internet life…at least for those of us who still have lives outside the confines of the worldwide web.  Judging from some of my recent surfs through the waves and tides of Facebook, I’m one of the last hold-outs in actual three-dimensional reality.  But I digress…and have managed to use over a hundred words just in explaining why I don’t have a hell of a lot to say today.  I’ve been busy with real estate in the real world.  Trust me…I’d rather be blogging.

Here’s a shocker: President Obama doesn’t seem to be heeding my advice.  Two days ago he announced that 275 Marines would be headed to Baghdad, ostensibly to protect the US Embassy.  He was careful to point out that they were not combat troops.  Today we’re told that an additional 300 GI’s will be returning to Iraq as “advisors”.  Hell, nothing can possibly go wrong with that.  Remember when JFK sent the first 1000 “advisors” to Vietnam in 1961?  Nothing much came of that, except for those 55,000 flag-draped coffins that came back by 1973.  Well, at least these aren’t “combat troops”.  Sure they’ll be armed with Special Forces Combat Assault Rifles (SCARs) and ride in helicopters sporting Hellfire air-to-ground missiles with laser targeting, and the whole thing will be under the watchful eye of several dozen Predator drones…but I’m sure no one will actually shoot anyone…unless it’s a really hot day or there’s some sand or wind or scary loud noises.  So fine, we’re minding our own business.

Remember my smug self-assuredness when “I told you so” about the nonsense of toilet seat covers?  I’ve got an even smugger and more self-assured gotcha for all my technophobic and hippy back-to-nature friends.  Wanna know which people have twice as much sex as other people?  Huh?  I’ll tell you: It’s people who have TV’s in their bedrooms.  I have a 55″ Samsung HD flat screen in mine…and I’m still waiting.  I may not get laid more, but I have a place to watch the weather when there are two things recording simultaneously on the DVR in the family room.

One last thing.  Remember the whole New Jersey bridge scandal (the one Rachel Maddow covered just slightly less thoroughly than CNN did the Malaysian Air 370 disappearance)?  Remember wondering how something of that magnitude could possibly have happened without Governor Chris Christie knowing that it was even occurring, let alone not having ordered it personally?  Well, it may be that your incredulity is about to be rewarded.  Word on the street is that Paul Fishman, US Attorney for the state of New Jersey, is just one soon-to-be flipped witness away from making Christie Rod Blagojovich’s roomie at the federal pen.  It could be a decent radical diet plan for the gov.  Somewhere Bobbie Jindal and Jeb Bush are smiling.

So that’s my mea culpa for being tardy today.  Tomorrow it’ll be celebrities behaving in their predictably atrocious manner, all documented here (without accompanying images, more’s the pity).

BW

Random Musings: Blind Squirrels Finding Acorns, Japanese Kink, And The Genius Of Adele Dazeem

This is one of those mornings when I’ve been staring at my screen, sifting through news stories, and patiently awaiting inspiration.  I wonder if Stephen King does this just before he sits down at his word processor and churns out another spellbinding 800 pages every six months or so.  (Mr. Mercedes is book six in my Nook queue, right after a John Sandford and a David Baldacci…I enjoy franchise authors just as much as I like franchise restaurants.  Don’t judge me.)

In the department of “even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn”, we have two startling examples: None other than Sarah Palin threatened to renounce her Republican ties if the party doesn’t get behind doing something about the tragedy of illegal alien children being held in abominable conditions in a warehouse in Nogales, Arizona.  I suspect that Palin’s declaration is roughly equivalent to me threatening to give up snack foods if Lays doesn’t bring back Wow Chips, but still, it’s not every day you see this quote from the queen of helicopter moose hunting:  “Finally, they have won me over. I actually agree with the liberals’ war whoop.” Still rubbing your eyes and feeling mildly faint?  Check out this one from Glen Beck:  “From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn’t…. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have.”  Ok, so in a single day we have two of the furthest fringe batshit crazy right-wingers simultaneously affirming that “the liberals were right”.  Three words…”I’m coming, Elizabeth!”

Since my eldest son is a apprentice Buddhist Monk/English teacher/expatriate living in Kummamoto, Japan, I keep my eye on the wacky goings-on over in the Land of the Rising Sun, and they rarely fail to amuse and amaze.  Look, if you’re living here in the Hoosier Heartland, you get u.sed to things like covered bridge festivals, apple festivals, and the ever popular annual Pork-fest, but if you’re in Japan, things are a little different.  You may recall my previous post heralding Japan’s annual “Festival of the Steel Phallus”.  It turns out that they have a sister event every June…“The Sex Lube Olympics”…which isn’t exactly what you might expect it to be (you filthy-minded pervs).  Instead, it’s a series of athletic competitions like tug-of-war, relay races, and wrestling…with the competitors slathered in K-Y and Astroglide.  I think the same thing might be a success in Brownsville or Jasonville, but instead of sex lube, they’d use bacon grease.  A sure winner.

In the area of “I told you so”, we have a little scientific study showing that using those toilet seat liners available in every airport bathroom is an exercise in futility.  Repeat after me: You can’t catch a disease from sitting on a toilet seat.  You can, however, get sick if you don’t wash your hands after using the restroom, and aside from that, it’s just rude and disgusting.

In real estate news, there are two stories of places with what you might call unusual condominium conditions.  First we have Hacienda Villa, an apartment complex in Brooklyn, whose residents are all polyamorous…so essentially everyone is fucking everyone…which is a lot like sharing the pool, but just different fluids.  I suspect that most of the Hacienda residents are young and fit, but that’s not a requirement for hanky panky.  Take “The Villages”, a retirement community in Florida, which is a place a couple friends of Mrs. Left and I are determined to retire to in the near future.  I’m beginning to understand the attraction.  Recently a 68 year-old woman and a 49 year-old man (see under: GILF/cougar and boy-toy) were charged with indecent exposure after being caught doing the horizontal mambo in the middle of the town square.  And apparently the incidence of various STD’s at the The Villages’ health clinic exceeds that of most college infirmaries.  So at least it looks like I’ve got something to look forward to in retirement.

Finally, why I love Broadway performers.  Anything performed live is better than anything on tape or lip-synched, and these talented folks do it every night, eight times a week.  So when something goes wrong, they don’t panic, and they don’t miss a beat.  They just keep performing…the show must go on. When Idina Menzel’s boob almost popped out of her dress during her one-woman show at Radio City Music Hall, she smoothly turned around, smiled as a wardrobe assistant manhandled her lady-bags into submission, then turned and told the crowd, “Well fuck it!  They’re real.”  Real is always better.

BW

 

Don’t. Just Don’t.

For those of you who were around when I was jousting back and forth with my conservative blogmate on  “Left, Right, and Centered”, you’ll know I’m not lying or exaggerating when I say that I wrote repeatedly in the midst of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that once we finally left, both of those places would return to exactly what they had been for a millenium before we ever showed up.  War and murder and terror and mindless feuding have been a way of life in those places since before anyone now alive can remember.  I know virtually nothing about Islam and less about Shiite and Sunni, but the very little I know is that these people have always been willing to kill each other, commit atrocities, decimate whole families and villages and cities, all over some arcane concept about which cousin was granted which authority from some religious tract written by goat herders a thousand years ago.  It’s not even “My god is better than your god”.  It’s the same fucking god.  It’s a thousand year’s war over what that god supposedly said to who when.  You can’t reason with people like that.  They’re going to keep on killing each other and when they’re all gone, their children will kill the children of the other side and so on and so on and so on.

Which is exactly what is going on in Iraq at this moment.  It’s nothing new.  When we invaded back in 2003, it was relatively tranquil in Iraq.  That’s because Saddam Hussein, who was a predatory sadistic son of a bitch, had all the guns and all the tanks and didn’t hesitate to have anyone who fucked with him drawn and quartered on the polo grounds of one of his many palaces on national TV.  Once we deposed Saddam, all the other lunatics who’d been stewing in their own religious hatred in various caves and mud huts, with their precious AK-47’s hidden in hidey-holes were free to return to the serious business of shooting one another, because that’s what their holy books and god of choice told them to do.  Even while we had  a hundred thousand troops on the ground and a hornet’s nest of fighters and bombers in the sky, these maniacs were regularly loading  pick-up trucks with tons of TNT and Semtex and detonating themselves in town squares and in shopping bazaars.  So it’s not exactly a shock when they’ve managed to organize themselves into armies of madmen to continue the slaughter in a more efficient manner.

Let them.  Let them fight their religious war.  Let them fight their civil war.  We had no business there in the first place.  There were no WMD’s and there was no connection to 9/11, and we sure as hell weren’t really trying to install democracy.  That would be like trying to give a cell phone to a donkey.  All of the Bush apologists were lying to us in 2003, and now the same warhawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Paul Wolfowitz are spewing the same nonsense that cost us three trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives a decade ago.

Don’t listen to them and don’t restart a war that never should have been started.  Don’t.  Just don’t.

BW

Belated Father’s Day Musings

I spent the weekend with my son and his three sons, so Father’s Day was all about fathers and sons, even if it kept me away from my keyboard until now.  I don’t begin to pretend that I can top all the tributes to all the fathers I’ve seen in the last couple of hours.  Facebook is literally a solid wallpaper of paternal praise.

I’m not sure how good a father I’ve been.  As they say, we’ll live that judgment to the historians.  But if I’m to judge my own fatherly abilities by the father my son has become, I guess I did alright.  He spends most of every 24 hour period with a child in each hand, another one calling for his attention, and a stack of chores he seems to accomplish with his feet (the prehensile toes were not an inheritance from me).  My grandsons are precious, precocious, and pretty awesome.  They walk, they talk, they laugh, they climb, and they radiate love like three little lighthouses.  How my son and his wife manage to keep twin two-year olds and a nearly four year-old happy, healthy, well-behaved, and even for the most part clean, is an accomplishment that continues to boggle me.  How they manage to prevent three overcharged monkeys from creating some kind of calamity on a daily basis is all the more amazing.  So my best Father’s Day gift was seeing what a fabulous father my own son is every single day…and hearing those three little voices calling for “Grampy” wasn’t exactly chopped liver either.

But like every son on Father’s Day, my thoughts turned again and again to my own father.  Dad been’s gone since 2003 and there’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t miss him terribly, and hardly a time when I can tell certain stories without choking up and tearing up and sputtering like an old Model T, which I’m pretty sure my father drove at one time or another.  Just like all those other adoring sons I saw in social media yesterday, I’m convinced that my father was the best father anyone ever had.  Which got me to thinking: Why do I believe that?

Dad wasn’t a war hero.  He got classified 4-F in the wartime draft…for a ruptured eardrum of all things.  (I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: You’ve got to worry about a government that won’t send an otherwise healthy young man to a place where he’ll be next to all kinds of things that go “boom!” because he’s deaf in one ear.)  So Dad ended up pressing pants for the US Army and others in California during WWII.  Dad wasn’t exactly a moral role model either.  He went through five marriages, which doesn’t rank him with Mickey Rooney or Elizabeth Taylor, but you wouldn’t think it would produce a son who’s been with the love of his life for nearly four decades either.  I keep trying to remember what pearls of wisdom my father shared with me over the years, but the closest I can come to a Ben Franklin-esque aphorism is, “Son, when you’re in bed with three women, you’ve got trouble.”

So why can’t I think of my Dad without getting soppy emotional and starting to cry?  I think it’s because he was always there for me, especially when hardly anyone else was.  When virtually everyone in both families did everything in their power to break up Mrs. Left and me in our early years, he never wavered a millimeter in his love and support and confidence in our bond.  He didn’t go nuts with praise when I succeeded, but he was visibly proud.  And he didn’t berate or belittle when I failed.  He just noted that tomorrow was another day.  But most of all, I think he didn’t try too hard at the job of being a father.  He just let it happen.  In medicine, the opening line of the Hippocratic Oath is “First, do no harm”, and I think that’s what my Dad did.  He didn’t read a lot of books on effective parenting, and he didn’t try to make me into a baseball player or a scholar or even a doctor.  He just supported me and trusted me and watched proudly as I found my own way.

The last time I saw Dad was just a few days before he transitioned.  His lucidity came and went at that point, but he had moments when there was no doubt he was completely with the program.  The last thing I said to him was, “Dad, I’m going to miss you,” and he replied “Son, I’m going to miss you too.”  I was right.  I do miss him.  And I hope that wherever his spirit dwells, he felt a little of that energy as I held and hugged and loved the next generations of fathers and sons.

And that was Father’s Day.

BW

P.S. As you get older, and as you have grandchildren, you take fewer and fewer pictures of your own kids, but I thought I’d share this one of my middle son, the father of those grandchildren, and a great father in his own right.  (Also, I just didn’t get any good shots of him with his sons…the little buggers just move too fast.)

Friday The 13th, Full Moon…And Solar Flares

Perfect day to travel.  No worries.  More news and views and nonsense of all kinds on Monday.

BW