We had a little storm front
come through Sunday evening:
Very grateful that the only
damage to my back yard was a whole lotta leaves on the ground yesterday
morning.
Others in the cluster,
however, were not so lucky:
(This is what's on the other side of the video just above.)
And this guy—who’s been here
since before these townhouses were built around him in 1970, and who’s kind of
a stickler for slapping PRIVATE PROPERTY signs all around the perimeter—took a
couple of direct hits.
(Fire department came out; no
one injured, fortunately.)
Folks: ya doesn’t want to mess
with Mother Nature. Her bitch slap is a corker.
My gratitude for two days
after our nation’s 250th anniversary is meteorological: the stinkin’
hot weather has finally broken, and it’s only seasonally ghastly. Thursday,
Friday and Saturday brought triple-digit highs, along with humidity levels
kicking the heat index up to the teens.
Then a storm system came
through Saturday evening. Messed up the cult activities on the National Mall,
but it also knocked the corners off the heat, so ill wind and all that.
Moreover—grateful for air
conditioning in home and car, and for ceiling fans. I had to drive out at
midday on both Friday and Saturday for appointments. Even with my 25-year-old
Saab’s AC working at max all the way, it didn’t do more than take a bite out of
the heat. Still—I cannot imagine the experience without it.
I’ve
been thinking about it all week, and I just don’t know what to tell you on
this, the 250th 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 4th
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 250th 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 4th 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.
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.)
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.
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.
Third, Canadians at every level have
consistently shown their decency and humanity and neighborliness. On September
11th 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 51st state of the US.
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.
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.
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.
