If I Should Die Before I Wake

    I was taught my Even Prayers by my beloved grandmother.  Now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…. Wait! What?  What was that middle thing again?

    It was right then I started looking for a way out.

    A way out. I’m going to draw a distinction between thought and belief. What we know intellectually is different from what comes to us as belief.  Intellectually, it becomes obvious that every system of belief that posits some continuation of an individual identity or soul is really just an effort at denial. Denial of the finite nature of our existence. No hell below us, above us only sky. 

    Well, that got outta hand pretty quick.  Did you follow that?  There may be a quiz later.

    All I’m trying to say is, I think when I die, I’ll be dead.  It’ll be just like before I was born but when I think of others,  I irresistibly imagine them in Heaven.  Not just any Heaven but Thorton Wilder’s Heaven from “Our Town”.  Having just rewatched “Our Town”,  I’m tempted to open another can of worms by saying, "White People’s Heaven"  but I won’t. 

    I think that the idea of coincidence plays a bigger role in life than we think.  I also think that the idea of synchronicity explains an awful lot but then the idea of ‘mystic cords’ begins to build a bridge from intellect to belief. Beyond even synchronicity, at times there seems to be an almost mystic connection between us one to the other.

    How do you explain this?  Out of the blue, I emailed my eldest daughter with an innocent question:  Were her grandmother, and two aunts sisters?  They were. It was an idle question on something I never really had clear. I was surprised to have an immediate, terse answer. “Yes”.  I was working on something and never expected my middle-of-the-night email to be answered until the next day. That caused me to respond with a recounting of these feminine familial connections even to my daughter’s great-grandmother.  I was just thinking out loud, kinda half connected to the thought I was working on about the one extraordinary aunt. 

    My daughter responded that the reason she was up in the middle of the night was her daughter, my granddaughter had just had a daughter of her own.  I was a great grandfather.  That’s way cool.  It’s something I would have discovered the following day in the normal course of things.  What was it that told me to insert myself in that moment? It was a feeling of presque vu.

    That whole thing is a bit much to be explained by coincidence or synchronicity, especially the recounting of the female lines in the family before knowing the lines had been extended.  Then, to top the whole thing off, I said, to a friend of mine, the first friend I told about the new arrival, that Penny and I were great-grandparents.  Penny and I certainly are my daughter’s parents but we haven’t been together in over 40 years.  Hell, the woman has been dead for 15 years,  apparently occupying a ladder-back chair in Thorton Wilder’s Heaven. Did she rise from that chair, break the quiet contemplation of eternity to whisper in my ear that something important was afoot?

    I don’t know what I think of that idea and I don’t know what I believe about that idea.

    That’s a selfish thought.  Is there something beyond my sphere that’s important about the arrival of that beautiful child? Something that warranted a general announcement thru the ether or is it just the way things work, if we can listen?

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How Stupid Do You Want Me To Think You Think I am?

     Oh for God's sake!  Trump started the litany of "voter fraud" in the spring of 2020 because even the dumbest member of the republican elite had realized by then there was no chance he would ever be elected. What no one mentions is, it wasn't the Russians in 2016.  It was the voting machines that had been abused since 2004. The ones that hadn't been replaced in a nationwide initiative, had been repaired. That's what the Stein Audits were about, to force repair of the highly suspect machines.  Until those machines were replaced and repaired rural republican candidates had been spotted a 7 to 10 percentage point lead in any election, nationwide.  That included all statewide candidates. The idea of the perennial attempts at "Russian interference"  was tossed out as a fig leaf to help preserve faith in our elections.  Even I was surprised when the Russian "fig leaf" actually showed Trump really had committed treason. The Russians and others have always been knocking at the door.  Until Trump, no one had treasonously answered the knock. The FBI wasn't spying on Trump.  They were spying on the Russians like they always do.  They just caught Trump. Now, the machine advantage was gone and with it the swing states. Working with that advantage, if you count 3rd party votes, Trump failed at majority election, in '16, by 12 million votes. Even with Russian connivance there was never reason to believe he would fare any better in '20.

    The decision was taken that a coup would have to be staged to keep their collective snouts in the public trough and planning began in earnest. They doubled down on vote suppression tactics that had produced guys like Johnson, Cruz, DeSantis, Kemp. They cemented further, the Feral American/Duck Dynasty Base with the usual, baseless smear campaigns. They hoped that the Duck Dynasty boys would be adequate shock troops. Can you imagine what these jokers must have thought when the guy in the headdress showed up leading the Gravy Seals? The plan was to take several members of Congress hostage and the ensuing situation would give justification for declaring martial law. Then the confusion would allow a rejection of the election results. These guys actually thought the murder of Mike Pence (whom they all considered hapless) would really give punch to the impetus for overwhelming authority. One of the funniest things is Pence acting like he doesn't understand this.  Maybe he doesn't.  Either way, it's hilarious.

    Part of this "plan" that the Duck Dynasty troops kept referring to on January 6th, was the reconnoiter tours sedition friendly members of Congress had staged in the days leading up to the attack, to familiarize useful idiots with the layout of the Capitol. I don't think they realized how resilient building security really is.  No one was put in zip-ties, no one was assassinated. No "high value" target was even allowed to be approached. They were outmaneuvered at every turn because they just weren't very bright.

    Another part of the plan was to have local, useful idiots, abuse their campaign funds to charter buses to bring potential rioters to the Capitol. These boys bear watching. They're the same ones encouraging turning school board meetings into rathole radio zombie rallies.

    Oh dear!  This is a conspiracy!  No, no, it's not.  It's the usual confederacy of dunces. The way you can tell it was Trump's idea is: It didn't fuckin' work!  The guy's a train wreck.  I can't wait for him to screw up a one-car funeral.

    Seriously, try to keep your eye on the ball.  These people literally tried to steal our government and think they should be given a walk for no other reason than they failed.  

    I don't think I'm in the minority when I say, "I don't like having my intelligence insulted." That has been a major component of republican tactics since Reagan. As the passage of time has conclusively shown, Reagan didn't belong in the same room with Jimmy Carter.  Particularly thru rathole radio and then Fox News, there has been a concerted effort to make stupidity fashionable.  That's not new. It's always been a component of the various Nativist and Know Nothing movements. They always try to galvanize the feral elements of the population.  It's just never been this prolonged or sophisticated before.

    Here's something no one has commented on.  As a racist, "law and order" trope, republicans love citing the nationwide demonstrations for social justice triggered by the death of George Floyd. Republicans never mention the spontaneous, nationwide celebrations when it was confirmed Trump had lost. People realized they could unite and insist on common decency.  With a minimum of organization, we could easily meet in the streets and demonstrate who we really are as a people. Who we emphatically insist on being as a people.  Can you imagine what would have happened had Trump tried to remain in the White House for so much as a day longer than he had to be allowed to remain?  The obvious truth is, had they attempted to push it, there wouldn't be many voices left to come from the right.

    In other countries, the world over, supporters of failed coups are summarily executed, quietly murdered or simply disappear.  You can hear the panic in the voices and statements of the coup supporters who get that factoid. That's certainly what would have happened to these people in the country they would create. It just reinforces the fact, so-called "conservatives" would create a country,  not worth defending, where they couldn't survive. They would freeze in the winter, swelter in the summer and eventually would drown in puddles of their own shit.

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