A Weed-Eater loose

I have a regular topic of conversation with a colleague who lives in Georgia; it’s basically Death To All Squirrels. He insists that they’re not bad with gravy and biscuits, but that’s not really much of a recommendation.

I bring this up because one of those convos brought me to today’s earworm; frankly, my colleague had me at the words, “There’s a Ray Stevens song…”

“The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” seems particularly appropriate for the week in which WaPo has published two stories about White evangelical goobers who would definitely worship at the First Self-Righteous Church. The first one reports on klansters in Appalachian Ohio who cashed their 2021 Stimulus checks but then whine endlessly about how the government support going to other people is screwing with the economy, driving prices up and is Communistic. Several of them are otherwise living on Social Security payments.

The second story is from Appalachian Virginia and reports on critical care nurses who’ve had to endure more than a year of Covid-denying klansters refusing to wear masks, opposing vaccines and deriding everyone in the medical profession as simultaneously lying, greedy and incompetent.

The kill shot for me was Jessica Goff, who said that the virus was a hoax and would go away after the 2020 election. When her own mother came down with it, was hospitalized and intubated, Goff became furious with the doctors for not bringing out sock puppets to convince her of the severity of the case; she told her mother to refuse remdesivir. When—despite her best efforts to the contrary—her mother recovered, Goff declared, “It was definitely a miracle,” but not a medical one. “I had rallied the prayer warriors.”

She still thinks the virus that has killed more than four million people worldwide is exaggerated and that the medical profession is falsifying cases to make money.

So, here’s my wish: may a plague of flea-infested squirrels descend upon every branch of the First Self-Righteous Church and run up the skirts and trousers of every single person there.

That would be a better recommendation than serving with biscuits and gravy.

Oh, here’s the song. 

 

Cycles of life

Here’s a story waiting to be told. A couple of weeks ago, I came across this dead motor scooter on the sidewalk.

How it got there, I have no clue, but it obviously was not going to go anywhere with some of its innards removed.

Then, it got knocked down by person or persons unknown.

And then someone moved it to the street—no telling why.

It’s been there ever since. Clearly Fairfax County PD do not bother with abandoned vehicles, as witnessed by this one, about a quarter-mile up the street. This one's been there for more than a year, with expired tags for ditto.

 

Lake views

Here’s a recent sunrise over one of the People’s Republic’s manmade lakes:

Here are some tourists:

And here are some kayaks and paddleboats ready for the non-webbed set:

Neighborhood buzz

Saturday morning I took a different route on my morning walk and discovered something I must have been passing daily for weeks:

“Those look like beehives,” I thought. So I investigated. And so they were:

America—gonif!

There didn't seem to be any activity, but it was pretty early in the day and I've noticed that I mostly see bees at work later on. I do wonder about how these were set up, and by whom.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Year 245

Yesterday marked the 245^th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. In the past I’ve written about the beauty of that document, which I’ve tried to hold on to during the past five years. I knew it was under assault beginning with the 2016 election, and in the first year of Cadet Bonespurs’ reign, the structure of the world he and his ilk wanted to build became clear when his end of the Twitterverse responded with ridiculous outrage to NPR tweeting the Declaration (as it does every year).

It turns out to be not at all surprising that pig-ignorant goobers who’ll have no truck with the notion that all men are created equal would storm the Capitol to overturn an election less than four years later.

The Founding Fathers have taken some hits in recent times—and not just from the would-be dictator and his white supremacist cult. The fact that race-based slavery was embedded in the Constitution because a goodly number of the Founders couldn’t imagine an economy not based on human chattel slavery has made it out of the academic halls and into the mainstream press. That’s proving to be as enraging to both ends of the political spectrum—those who mourn its loss while simultaneously denying it, and those who want white folks to acknowledge that the foundation of this country rests on the blood of their ancestors.

We have still so far to go to achieve the promise of the Declaration.

But on this Gratitude Monday, I’m thankful that we survived the past five years, even as we are still under the assault of both home-grown and foreign anti-democracy elements. After generations of small town parades and community barbecues with fireworks, we've been treated to militaristic willie waving and bloviating at Mount Rushmore. That was hard to take. But there are still more than 81 million of us who want to see this bold experiment succeed. That’s worth a day of gratitude.