News from the front

Even though there was remarkably little reporting of the #SecondCivilWar (evidently the revolution will indeed not be televised), I came across something on my walk yesterday that might relate to it.

I mean—does it not seem extremely likely that a bright yellow muscle car advertising hunkiness was used by Colonel Shout My Manliness of the Red Hat Compensation Issues Battalion?

More 'splaining

As you may recall, a while ago I got stuck on an hour-long Metro ride with a contender for Mansplainer of the Year. It’s not enough that this guy is invested in pontificating on various subjects of which he possesses minimal knowledge; he pontificates on subjects he knows little about to people who possess considerable expertise in them.

A key element in this is that he’s so busy enjoying the sound of his own voice that he can’t be arsed to determine whether or not his target set of ears might know something about the subject. Or, indeed, if the listener has any interest in it.

I was reminded of this on Monday when the colleague suddenly appeared at my office door as I was wrestling with a spreadsheet. He plopped himself down and proceeded to regale me with 40 minutes of details about his move from one house to another in our community. As in: having to downsize from 5300sf to 1800sf; dealing with whackjob house buyers; consequently having to pay two mortgages; needing to get rid of a large dining room table (“that I paid $2800 for”) and a lot of other furniture that won’t fit; how great the new place is; all the plans for using his son’s bedroom while the kid is away at college; needing to buy an outdoor grill because the kitchen doesn’t have all the luxe features that his $1M house did; bus schedules to the Metro station; details of bus routes to the Metro station; having the option to get picked up at the station because they have three cars; etc., etc., etc.

I gotta tell you—it takes a powerful lot of pishing to make me wish I could get back to a spreadsheet. I hope to avoid any future encounters at Metro, because my life is flashing before my eyes just at the thought.

Battle cry of freedom

As you know, it’s Independence Day, and there’s a lot less comity than normal around what should be a national celebration. I mean, usually the most discord is about who was supposed to bring the potato salad to the picnic and why the hell are we swimming in blinkin’ cole slaw.

This year, it’s different. For example, on Monday certifiable RWNJ and tinfoil-hat supremo Alex Jones brayed a call to arms among his flabby-in-mind-and-body followers by announcing without a shred of either truth or shame that the dreaded Snowflakes of the Left are about to rise in insurrection.

Or, since “insurrection” has about two too many syllables for his adherents, here’s what he said:

Well, my fellow snowflakes—who previously devoted all their energy to squabbling about the virtues of Himalayan pink versus Fleur de Sel versus Black Hawaiian salt—have responded like the troupers they are, under those ethically-sourced, naturally-dyed hemp-based clothes.

On social media, of course.

Now, there are two general trends that have been crisscrossing Twitter ever since Jones opened his halitotic yap, #secondcivilwarletters and #civilwarpotluck. With a few outliers. So I’m just going to let We the People tweet for themselves.

The #civilwarpotluck was the first one I saw, started possibly by Aunt Crabby:

Tbh, I’m a little leery of tuna casserole in the summer months, but if we’re going civilwarring, we have to be willing to make sacrifices. But fortunately, hundreds more stepped up to the plate. (Some even volunteering to bring the plates!)

In case you're wondering, I was going to bring brownies, but the Colorado contingent got in ahead of me, so I just said I'd bring a few units of Chateau le Cardboard wine. I mean, everyone means well, but things could get rowdy and better to cut back on breakables, no?

But then there were the #secondcivilwarletters, styled after the ones made so famous in Ken Burns’ masterwork from (wow!) more than 20 years ago. Ah, the poignancy of those arrayed before Bowling Green, Hobby Lobby and places that will be enshrined in history books of the future—their thoughts, their fears, their hopes:

Lest you think all the letters are from only the left, here are a couple from the Redhats:

#Sad!

And here’s one special one:

Ah—#campfollowers.

Well, one can only read so many of these heart-wrenching missives before one must refill one’s glass of organic, fair trade chardonnay.

Just a couple of the flotsam and jetsam of war:

And one final, wistful thread:

Courage, comrades. We shall prevail as we did 153 years ago.

And 100 years ago.

And 73 years ago.

And 10 years ago.

Develop this

Last Thursday evening I emailed two files to colleagues who were to meet yesterday to discuss them. One was a document, the other a spreadsheet. I sent them that early because I wanted to give them time to read through everything before the meeting, without making them do so at the weekend.

In my email I asked the recipients not to return edits or comments to the document until after the discussion, so that we’d all be talking from a single source of truth. After the meeting, I said, I would welcome any inputs.

So what did one of the recipients do? Yes, indeed. Friday afternoon he hit Reply-All and attached the document, with his edits and comments. In his email, he included a smiley-face.

(This is someone who has called me—in person and in email—by a name that is not mine, multiple times. I finally had to point out his error.)

Apparently the requirements for a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at George Mason University do not include reading emails or following instructions.

Gratitude Monday: local beauties

After a bizarrely coolish Spring and early Summer, we’ve finally been experiencing seasonal temperatures for the past few days in the District They Call Columbia. I’m not heralding this with joy, because “seasonal” weather for June, July, August and early September is blazingly hot, unspeakably humid and mosquito-infested. This is the price we pay for gorgeous Autumns and frequently breathtakingly beautiful Springs.

However, the heat and humidity does kind of bugger your plans for outdoor exercise, unless you get up at oh-dark-thirty and just suck it up.

I did not go so far as to get up at the crack of 0500 yesterday, but I did finally haul my sorry butt out around 0800 with the intention of walking over to the new gourmet grocery store in the FauxTownCenter nearby.

I typically start the walks that take me along the W&OD Trail by passing through the beautifully landscaped grounds of a neighboring corporate center. A big feature of their campus is three man-made mini-lakes, one of which has water lilies. They must die back in the winter, because over the past couple of months I’ve noticed that the pads have gradually taken over more and more of the water surface. And only in the past two weeks or so have they started to bloom.

Well, yesterday morning they were just going cray-cray in the flower business. And as I rounded the curve to the lake, I came across a phalanx of photographers with multiple cameras armed with zillion-mm lenses on tripods, just snapping away.

I pulled out my trusty little pocket camera and did my best, as well. Because these things just make you smile with joy to see.

  

(Water lilies always make me think of the Waterlily House in Kew Gardens. Kew was one of my weekend pleasures when I lived in London.)

It was too early in the day for the turtles in the second lake to be out basking in the sun. But here's one from another day’s walk (turtles are surprisingly quick when they're escaping possible danger):

In the end, I bagged the gourmet store and walked up to Target to buy some cleaning stuff. On the way I met a fellow out walking what at first appeared to be a pony, but turned out to be a mastiff of some sort, who’d just celebrated his eighth birthday the day before (with a cheeseburger).

By the time I got home, I had 8K steps on my pedometer, only one new bug bite and I was shvitzing pretty thoroughly. But it was a lovely way to start out the month of July, and I’m grateful for having such beauty around me.

Merci and thanks

It’s Canada Day—the Canadian national holiday, equivalent to our Independence Day—and it seems only right and proper to consider what good neighbors Canadians are—to us and the entire world. Especially in light of the Kleptocrat’s recent completely delusional ranting about how mean Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was to him at the G-7 meeting (which he didn’t want to go to anyway, because he knew it wasn’t going to be as much fun as haring off for his Nobel-worthy-in-his-own-mind photo-op with Kim Jong-Un), and his slapping ludicrous tariffs on Canadian products under the completely ludicrous pretense of “national security”.

I could get silly and talk about Leslie Nielsen or one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Due South. But I’ve already done that.

And Canadians are way more than wacky comedians and upright Mounties in a cynical American city. They’re even more than mail-order pharmacies and refuges for cabernet-toting discontents fleeing whichever administration gets into office down here.

They are pretty much in every way the kind of neighbor you’d like to have on your street. They don’t throw loud parties, or park huge SUVs in their driveway, or toss their clapped-out washing machines in their weed-infested front yard.

They quietly go about their lives as conscientious citizens of the world, picking up the trash they find (and disposing of it responsibly) and pitching in whenever asked to help set the worst things to rights. They define the term “stand-up guys”.

Three things in particular I’m thinking about:

Teheran, 1979. In the midst of the chaos of the overthrow of the Shah, six American diplomats were given shelter in the Canadian embassy for 79 days, until they could be extracted by a joint Canadian-CIA mission. It was an act of both neighborly kindness and extreme courage for the Canadians to hide the Americans, especially at a time when it was clear that “diplomatic courtesies” didn’t rate high on the Iranian revolutionary priority list.

The Canadians risked personal safety and national policy to help out six Americans, who’d probably been trash-talking hockey teams right up until the embassy takeover. They didn’t hesitate and they didn’t flinch.

My second example of Canadian rectitude is Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire. Dallaire had just about the worst job of the 1990s: Force Commander of United Nations Assistance Mission Rwanda (UNAMIR), from 1993 to 1996. During the worst genocide of the second half of the 20^th Century, Dallaire commanded forces without resources, with limited remit and  no backing from his political masters. I cannot believe the fortitude of a man who still managed to save thousands of the people under his care.

Although at a terrible, terrible cost. Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle told the story much better than I could, so I’ll let him do it. It was an impossible command, an impossible remit and an impossible expectation. But Dallaire took it on.

I can just picture most American generals after that posting—speaking engagements, management consulting, appearances on talk shows, joining a racist régime and presiding over the destruction of American values. Dallaire went back to Canada, where PTSD led him to a suicide attempt. His big public outing has been to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who was subsequently convicted of war crimes. He also advocated for children affected by war—something he’s an expert in.

Canadians at every level have consistently shown their decency and humanity and neighborliness. On September 11^th 2001, ordinary citizens of the small Newfoundland town of Gander opened their homes and their hearts to more than 7000 air passengers and crew whose planes had been diverted to their airport following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. They fed, housed and cared for the sojourners—as, frankly, they’ve done for more than 150 years.

Canada, after all, was the last stop on the Underground Railroad, where escaping slaves could find the guarantee of freedom and safety that wasn’t available to them in the United States.

In the musical world, Canada has given us Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Sarah McLachlan. Imma let Justin Bieber, Celine Dion and Nickelback slide. Their writers include Margaret Atwood (whose The Handmaid’s Tale has taken on new elements of horror as it turned out to be more prescient than we though when she first published it), Michael Ondaatje, Louise Penny, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro.

The entertainment industry has been enriched by (for instance) directors Arthur Hiller, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Paul Haggis, Ivan Reitman; and actors Nathan Fillion, Nick Mancuso, Genviève Bujold, Dan Ackroyd, Anna Paquin, John Candy, Sandra Oh, Rick Moranis, Raymond Burr, Donald Sutherland, Jim Carrey, Graham Greene, Paul Gross… Canada is where American production companies go to film movies and TV shows that look like the States, but don’t cost like the States. Where would Star Trek: TOS be without William Shatner and James Doohan?

Also, I got two words for you: Tommy Chong.

I cannot express my admiration for the country that produced people like this. You don’t think of them a lot, because good neighbors don’t get in your face. But you’re always really, really glad they’re there.