We've been traveling far

I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I just don’t know what to tell you on this, the 250^th anniversary of our national birthday.

Pretty sure the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence would side-eye each other and go down the tavern for a gill of brandy if they caught wind of how their bold gamble was turning out. They were ready to risk everything—“our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—to break away from Mother England; they were overwhelmingly men of property, so they had a lot to lose.

And the men who carefully put together the Constitution, with its first ten amendments, would be equally gobsmacked. Like the Declaration, the Constitution was a response to a failed government (in this case, the confederation) and it was constructed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. (Liberty figured in both documents, but the concern was lawfulness as a basis for all government actions.) They crafted a form of government that they intended to live and grow; one that would be immune to feckless rulers, corrupt judges or petty legislators because of the built-in checks and balances.

They just didn’t anticipate a circumstance when we would have all three at the same time.

This administration has committed many of the crimes in the Declaration’s indictment of George III, in addition to many others no English king could have imagined. The Kleptocrat is manipulating global stock markets with his tariff declarations; building an armed secret police that can be turned against anyone in the country, citizen or not; declaring war on states, governors, mayors and anyone who doesn’t sufficiently bend the knee to him; breaking international treaties; desecrating national monuments; committing war crimes; violating constitutional provisions; ignoring actual laws; selling off national lands; enriching his family and friends; alienating our allies and squandering our soft power; and generally behaving more despotically than anyone since Ivan the Terrible.

Beyond that, he is visibly rotting both physically and mentally. We’ve all seen him falling asleep at official functions any time he’s not actually speaking. We’ve clocked him staggering and stumbling (on stairs and ramps particularly). We’ve noted his bruised and spackled hands, bloated face, swollen ankles. We’ve listened to him brag about taking repeated cognitive tests as though that’s an achievement, not a warning sign. And—more than anything else—we’ve watched as his speech increasingly slurs, animated only when he gets to grievances (of which he has legion), punctuated by the mangling of multisyllabic words. The guy is the picture of Dorian Gray.

Congress—more specifically, Republicans in Congress—have utterly abrogated their constitutional power because they’re terrified that TACOman will sic his followers on them either politically or physically. They’re willing to kiss the ring just to hold the title (and those sweet, sweet lobbying contributions and insider trading opportunities), as they tug their forelocks and murmur, “Yas, boss” whenever he makes another demand on them. They’ve taken away healthcare from millions of Americans, thrown billions of dollars at ICE, gutted environmental protections and given billionaires and corporations more billions, hustling to get the job done in time to get home for July 4^th fireworks and barbecues with the constituents they’re fucking over.

And the courts—God bless them, the frontline judges and even most of the Circuit judges are doing their damned jobs like Trojans, but the most corrupt SCOTUS in history is in hog heaven, using their court-of-last-appeal power to cut out the constitutional support for decades of progress on civil rights. They’re barely cloaking their intent (or their glee) in their rulings. I’m pretty sure they write “because we can” in all of them and some clerk removes it before they’re released.

So—that’s where we are.

But let me say a few words about what we could be—still.

Tomorrow is the 250^th anniversary of our founding. Which is to say—we’re celebrating the birth of our nation, dating from the day we drove a stake in the ground and said, “We declare ourselves independent,” and setting out the legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from Mother England. I’ve written about this before, and it never grows stale.

The Founding Fathers weighed all their options and agreed that—much as they were sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

And when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political documents (which you’d naturally think is an oxymoron of the first order, but it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States. Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.

And beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though they understood they had no idea what form it might take.

(Yes, we are once again in what Abraham Lincoln referred to as a great test of “whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” See the opening paragraphs of this post.)

But here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day of the final surrender.

It’s the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals) resolved that these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.

Yeah—guff me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the ground and work with it. July 4^th was, as they say, close enough for government work.

And what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns, marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory in battle, but the victory of an ideal.

The thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence, defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to keep doing ours, as best we can. And we can start by celebrating this anniversary like we always do—with barbecues with our neighbors, town parades and local fireworks; not the money-laundering self-referential, tacky displays emanating like a miasma from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

With all that said, what should be our earworm for today? I’m thinking something about how immigration not only enriches the American spirit, but makes it. So Neil Diamond it is.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Cool it

The extended environs of the District They Call Columbia are under a heat dome, which is expect to last at least through Friday. That means that our normal stinkin’ hot and disgustingly humid days and nights are about to go on steroids. (It was 85°F at 2130 last night; we never get any respite from Summer here.)

God bless the marvel that is air conditioning in buildings and cars; ditto, ceiling fans. For those who have neither, seek out public cooling places.

(Ignore the date; some time ago all the electrics were disconnected during some service and I've not bothered to hunt out the owner's manual to reset. Shot yesterday at 1514.)

Like my local library:

And hydrate.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Happy birthday, eh

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. 

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.

Third, 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.

Also—Canada will never, ever be the 51^st state of the US.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Death from above

I’ve discovered a new torment of summer. Recently (meaning, in the last few months), when a mosquito bites me, it doesn’t produce just a small red spot of itching. This has happened twice in the last month alone.

No, it welts up and then spreads to a 2” x 4” patch of inflammation. When you touch the red area, it’s noticeably hotter than the surrounding skin.

Since my back yard is an epicenter of Aedes activity during the season, I’m just not looking forward to the next three months.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: a welcome return

With all the crappiness surrounding us these days—mostly man-made—I was filled with joy and gratitude to peek through the trees around the (man-made) ponds on the former corporate HQ campus and current construction site of absolutely hideous townhouses selling for $1.2M and discover my old friends the sacred lotus blooming.

Those ponds were completely drained a couple of years ago, and I was so worried about the flora and fauna that were part of their ecosystem. The snapping turtles were rescued and relocated somewhere; I haven’t seen the blue herons. But the lotus gives me hope.

A definite reason for gratitude.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Like flashy sparkles in the water

Given the whole saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—the graft that keeps on grifting; the $15M "improvement" job that lasted less than a tenth of a Scaramucci before it began to sprout algae bloom—I think the only possible earworm for today has to be “Bein’ Green”. And who else to sing it but the OG, Kermit the Frog.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Lilies of the field

Do you need some Asiatic lilies? I expect you do.

You’re welcome.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Homeward bound

I’m guessing that one of the members of a neighboring household was away for a while. Really sweet to see this walkway o’ welcome for their return:

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

It's the berries, mate

For years I’ve found the fruit you get in the local supermarkets tasteless. With the exception of apples, oranges, grapes and sometimes cherries, everything (especially stone fruit) has the consistency of concrete chunks, the juice of a tax form and the taste of cardboard.

This usually includes berries. Occasionally you can find blueberries that don’t feel and taste like little balls of paste. And since all strawberries now seem to come from Driscoll, they’re gigantic, hard replicas of berries with no fragrance or taste.

So this summer I signed up for a CSA from a farm in Pennsylvania. So far, I’ve had two deliveries, both of which included strawberries. (The first one also had peaches, which frankly were indistinguishable from what I could find at Wegman’s—if they don’t smell like peaches, they won’t taste like peaches. The second had a clamshell of cherry plums, which were mildly flavorful, but of course they journeyed from South Carolina to Pennsylvania and then to the People’s Republic. The CSA farm did notify customers that it’s been a rocky year for fruit and they’d be supplementing their supplies with items from elsewhere.)

Those strawberries, though—they were the absolute berries (if I may be so bold.) Small, intensely flavored, richly crimson. They absolutely exploded with flavor. The first time in years I haven’t had to sprinkle sugar on a bowl to entice any taste out of them.

See what I mean?

Just a tiny slurp of Cointreau to macerate these babies:

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: the scent of summer

We had three gardenia bushes in the house where I grew up in Southern California. We also had no air conditioning, so on summer nights my bedroom windows were open. Even though I was at the front of the house, I could still catch the scent of the gardenias. It was heavenly.

About seven or eight years ago, I bought a little gardenia shrub and planted it in a pot in my back yard. It’s not an ideal situation for it—that area gets only scattered bouts of direct sun seven months out of the year, due to all the trees around me. But that little trouper has hung on, even though it took a bit of a hit during the snowcrete days we had earlier this year.

Although it doesn’t give me weeks of scented evenings, I’m still grateful for the flowers it produces for me. Gardenias mean summer to me.

©2026 Bas Bleu