Mobile truth

Another vehicular special edition today—not vanity plates, but the bumper stickers.

All I’ve got to say is: they are correct.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Executive privilege

Special edition of vanity plates today.

Saw this one Saturday, on my way to pick up my CSA in the K-Mart shopping center. (Yes, the K-mart closed decades ago, but that’s what everyone calls it. I don’t even know what its official name is.)

The driver used both a right-turn-only and a left turn only lane to traffic hop on Baron Cameron/Elden Street. I lost sight of the car (naïvely thought that he’d actually turned left when he pulled into the left-turn-only lane), so I was surprised to see the thing parked in the fire lane near the ABC store in the shopping center.

Stayed parked there for at least eight minutes, with flashers on to I suppose indicate he wasn’t going to sit down to a meal somewhere, then hauled out ahead of me.

Didn’t seem to be in such a hurry on his return journey—there was no lane-weaving.

But what a maroon. An executive-level maroon.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Workers

Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services; and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t at times been part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Thirty-six years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno (because NO BREAKS!). Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions.

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by  the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name. (It would help if there were some sort of—oh, I dunno—independent inspection of food products to detect and cull out things like salmonella, e. coli, cyclospora and screwworm so that we don’t sicken and die from them, but I may just be indulging in a pipe dream.)

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

(Someone may tell the Kleptocrat about Cleveland and we’ll see SECDEF assigning the military not only to firing on strikers, but also to taking up jobs in factories and the farms after all the deportations. As it is, he's nixed labor unions for several federal agencies and would happily ensure that working stiffs be reduced to indentured servitude. Or—what’s wrong with slavery?)

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.

It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Caught up in circles

 The music world lost another great this year. Jazz singer-songwriter Cassandra Wilson died at age 70.

I’m not big on jazz—unless you’re talking Miles Davis or John Coltrane. But I am big on amazing female voices, and Wilson certainly had that. She commanded whatever she sang. Actually, she reminds me a bit of Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone and Norah Jones.

Hear for yourself. Here she is covering Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time”.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Bee-ing wonderful

Do you need some clips of bees in late-August action?

Well, I do, so here we go.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Circle of life

We had kind of a wet beginning to August. So there were crops of mushrooms around the ‘hood.

I followed the lifecycle of one of them.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

A tale of two hillbillies

It’s occurred to me that Dolly Parton and JD Vance represent the spectrum of what comes from Appalachia. So—a couple of thoughts.

I mean—it’s interesting that they both came from families in grinding poverty; Dolly in Tennessee and Shady in Ohio and maybe Kentucky. (I frankly can’t be arsed to research. His parents were in Ohio, but he spent time with his grandparents in Kentucky, I think.) Hers was a loving, happy family, while his appears to have been dysfunctional. Something about drugs, I dunno. Maybe that accounts for the contrast in strength of character?

Because Dolly’s life of grace, generosity, acceptance and joy was built on a core of integrity, honesty and an abiding sense of fairness, while Vance is a grifting, lying, shapeshifting opportunist, eager to latch on to anyone and any ideology that he thinks will advance his personal goals. (Which I think revolve around acquiring wealth and power.)

They both made their Appalachian heritage focal points of their careers. Dolly captured universal truths couched in images of the mountains in the more than 3000 songs she wrote in her lifetime. She never exploited her subjects in the process, though. Couch Boy shat on the people he grew up with in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, to both make a buck and declare his superiority.

Shall we speak of charity? Compare the millions that Dolly’s contributed to her community and the world—seeing a need and stepping up to meet it, from early childhood literacy to medical research—with…uh…yeah, I got nothin’. His charity is mostly self-directed, which is truly on brand.

As for faith, Dolly lived hers in her actions with consistency and humility. JD journeyed from evangelicalism to atheism to a form of Catholicism that somehow gives him the unmitigated gall to instruct the Pope on theology. His new opus, delving into his spiritual path is more of the same Elegy performative exceptionalism, for which he has used his office as the vice president to promote sales. The cover of the book features a very picturesque country church; a Methodist church, into which he has never set foot. Also, I believe, like the grandees of the 17^th Century, Mr. Late-life Convert prefers to have Mass said in a private setting in his official quarters, rather than mix with the plebs in the local parish. (Okay—TBF, the folks at Saint Thomas the Apostle lucked out in this regard.)

Someone whose blog I support last week said he was going to church to pray for the repose of Dolly’s soul. I thought, well, okaybut—I cannot imagine anyone leaving this life with any more certainty of the welcome she’ll receive in the next than Dolly Parton. By any measure, her soul is guaranteed to rest easy.

JD? Yeah, not so much.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Cup of ambition

Yes, of course—my gratitude for today (and the year) is for the life of Dolly Parton. The singer-songwriter-actress-philanthropist-entrepreneur-humanitarian died last week at age 80, but her legacy—no, legacies—of love, generosity, acceptance, joy, fairness and (of course) music are going to live for the ages.

I titled this post “Cup of ambition” (from her hit “9 to 5”) because Dolly was supremely ambitious. She left her home and family the day after she graduated from high school, taking the bus to Nashville because she was determined to turn her musical talent into a successful career. IMO she was definitely not running away—hers was a loving and happy family, albeit abjectly poor—but running to something: stardom. She knew she had it in her at age 17.

Four years later, she joined country star Porter Wagoner’s television show, where that quality became evident to everyone who saw her, even the people who resented her replacing a beloved fixture of the show. She stayed through her five year contract with Wagoner, and two years beyond; then left to go out on her own.

Wagoner, who’d come to resent the attention Dolly was getting nonetheless sued her (in 1979) for breach of contract, demanding $3M and 15% of royalties from the songs she wrote and performed. Eventually Dolly settled for $1M, which took her years to pay off. But she never said anything negative about Wagoner.

And no one ever got a percentage of her royalties. When Elvis Presley inquired about recording “I Will Always Love You” he demanded 50% of the publishing rights (as was his custom). Dolly said no—in the nicest possible way. It was a difficult decision, because: Elvis. But that cup of ambition came with very clear ideas about boundaries, acknowledgement and fiscal canniness.

It also came with a firm sense of self. Early on, she developed the persona of the big-haired blonde who put her makeup on with a trowel, could make music with her acrylic nails and let her chest precede her into any room. She liked that image, so she kept it her entire life. Anyone who tried to take her down discovered that she was way ahead of them with the jokes. One of my favorite lines was “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

She may have looked cheap, but she was all class.

Along with accepting herself, she took others as they came. Race, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, level of education—we’re all God’s children, she said. If God was happy with his creation, she wasn’t the person to quibble. She particularly enjoyed drag queens, many of whom model themselves after her; she sent gifts of support to at least one of them who ran afoul of Texas law.

Speaking of which—it was kind of divinely ironic that on the day of Dolly’s death, 25 August, a federal judge in Texas struck down a 2023 law banning “sexually oriented performances”. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge David Hittner cited Dolly’s exuberant persona and told the pearl clutchers that if they were offended by this kind of thing, “just don’t go.”

Dolly’s career was enormously successful. Her financial assets were estimated in the hundreds of millions. And she used that money to do so much good. She built Dollywood, a theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., the largest employer in that county. All employees—full-time and part—are eligible for full tuition at Tennessee universities and receive health insurance, paid time off and child care.

When Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” rebooted millions in royalties, Dolly invested that money in a Black neighborhood in Nashville, turning a down-at-the-heels area into her recording studio and kick-starting further investment.

Her friendship with a medical researcher at Vanderbilt University led to her contributing $1M for research into the mRNA vaccine that was developed by Moderna into the Covid vaccine received by tens of millions of people around the world during the pandemic. She also had a video made of her receiving the vaccine early on, encouraging people to do the same by repurposing her early hit “Jolene”.

More than 30 years ago, she started Imagination Library, a program that sent a book a month, from birth to entry into kindergarten, to children in Sevier County, Tenn. Eventually, she expanded the program to all of Tennessee, then the US, and now Canada, Britain and Australia. For blind children, the books are in Braille.

Imagination Library does rely on partnerships with government, and Republicans in Indiana and Missouri recently cut a combined $10 in funds to the program, even as they all tweeted their condolences at her death. That is, after all, how they roll.

Which reminds me: I was expecting something typically crass and self-aggrandizing from the Kleptocrat. (Remember how he responded to Aretha Franklin’s death? “She used to work for me.”) I was surprised at the measured reaction, although I didn’t rule out the probability that someone whomped him with a stun gun and prized the phone from La Harp’s claws to send that tweet. And, of course, a couple of days later he tweeted out an AI slop image of Dolly and him at the White House. I’m not linking to it, but it shows him with his tiny hands in his coat pockets and Dolly reaching through to hold his arm, as though 1)she’d ever be seen in his company; or 2)she’d be the supplicant. Asshole.

(Not that Dolly would ever call him that. She was pretty scrupulous in her non-partisanship. She just did what was right and kept moving.)

Dolly showed us that a fundamentalist can live the spirit of Christ, and that you can be highly ambitious without also being a prick. 

As you can tell—I’ve been letting the spirit of Dolly Parton infuse my thoughts this past week. She set such an example of strength, focus, happiness and welcoming; it makes me smile even as I type these words. That woman was born with a joyful heart and she was a goddamn national treasure.

I’ll leave you with a clip from Designing Women, the late-20^th Century sitcom set in an interior design company in Atlanta. Charlene, about to give birth to her first child, is overjoyed to find that Dolly Parton has entered her dream. Dolly insists that she's not an angel, but spoiler alert: later in the episode, she returns as an angel to escort an elderly Black woman, played by Bea Richards, to heaven.

Well, we knew she was an angel all along, didn’t we?

  

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Hitch a ride with the wind

Back in the late 80s, my life pretty much imploded. No need to go into details, but at the time a friend gave me some advice. “[Bas Bleu], you don’t have a job, you don’t have a place to live, but you do have a nice car. Why don’t you go somewhere?”

So I packed up my gold Celica and hit the road—I-40 and then I-10, to be precise. I had 10 cassette tapes, and one of them was Trio, the collaboration between Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. I have no recollection of the other nine, but I about played (and sang) Trio to death on that trip (which eventually brought me back to California, but only for another year before I moved East).

I’ve got plenty to say about Dolly Parton, who died this week at age 80, but while I’m still collecting my thoughts, here’s “Wildflowers”, from the album, which Parton wrote and which she said is about her own journey as she left Sevier County, Tenn., and went out into the world.

Which she undeniably conquered with love, generosity and joy.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Invoking the universe

This guy seems to have chosen a patch along the W&OD Trail for his morning meditation. He’s not there every day, but does appear with some frequency.

The thing is—August in the People’s Republic is ghastly: hot and humid, even in the mornings. Also, this year the gnats have absolutely taken over this part of the W&OD. I often see him using his towel to swat them away, which must interfere with the meditative experience.

However—full props for the practice.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu