Today’s earworm is some advice from Nina Simone for the Democratic party. The Dems weren’t her specific target when she wrote it in 1964—in an hour of concentrated fury. It was her response to the murders in Mississippi of Emmett Till (lynching), Medgar Evers (shot in the back), and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four Black girls.
I’m just going to let Nina Tell her own story.
©2025 Bas Bleu
There were three or four of these crates left out for trash pickup on Monday. I thought the slogan was…interesting.
So I found their website. Um.
This is their holiday offering.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Some people were having a bad morning last Friday.
At first I thought it was just the SUV
that had rammed the curb. Then I realized the Mini was involved.
And then I saw the two cars that were
being towed already.
This morning I saw the SUV. Didn't look too bad, but probably thousands in repairs.
©2025 Bas Bleu
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.
From August 1914 until November 1918
around 8.5
million soldiers of the
various armies and navies were killed, and another 21 million wounded. Maybe
six million civilians were
killed and I don’t have figures for further collateral damage.
I’m also not counting the death toll from
the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, or the Russian Civil War, both of which are
related to the conflagration.
World War I was one of those appalling
confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in
positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they
expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military
commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners and the strategists.
What they essentially ignored was the fact
that the invention and implementation of the machine gun gave the tactical
advantage to the defensive, and that the frontal charge, even by mobile troops
like cavalry, simply couldn’t work against entrenched forces with this new
technology.
Every time I revisit this war, in books,
in film or TV or on the battlefields, I’m poleaxed all over again at the utter
blindness and criminal stubbornness of the professionals whose business it was
to send men into battle for a purpose (to win battles, gain territory, destroy
enemy armies, ,bring about some change). Because again and again they proved
Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again,
expecting different results.
And, frankly, it’s not like they didn’t
see it coming. There were European military observers at many of the battles of
the US War Between the States, when the prototypical use of entrenchments and
rapid fire indicated things to come. And at the battle of Port Arthur in
the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, western military observers practically
outnumbered the combatants and saw first-hand what happens when infantry
charges machine gun emplacements. (Among the observers were Ian Hamilton, later
to command the British debacle at Gallipoli; John J. Pershing, commander of the
American Expeditionary Force; and Douglas MacArthur. Don’t get me started on
MacArthur.)
The First World War is a nightmare of
pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a
four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and
national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of open wounds,
disillusion, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve
fully recovered from it 92 years on.
The problem is, in my view, that we
haven’t really learned from it, although we’ve been paying for it all along.
Old men were too traumatized by 1914-18 to step up to the plate in 1933 in
Manchuria or 1938 in Munich to scotch the snake (which by then was armed with
20 years of improved weaponry, like tanks and tactical fighter-bombers; as well
as ideologies that would have wilted the moustaches of Wilhelm II or Franz
Josef I). Willfully blind to the realities of Stalin’s rule, western leaders
gave away the farm in Eastern Europe, and then gathered to their bosom
surviving Nazis to help fight the Cold War. (And, 80 years beyond that, now we
have technologies including satellite navigation, drones, handheld missile
launchers, dirty bombs, assault rifles and mass communications undreamt of 100
years ago. And nuclear devices.)
We've even got bona fide Nazis guiding policies in our own government.
And then there’s the situation in the Middle
East. All the result of or exacerbated by that Great War, and all living on
beyond the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
You notice I’m short on any answers to
these situations. Me—I start by remembering.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Here in the Old Dominion, Democrats took
the three statewide offices (governor, lieutenant governor & attorney
general), as well as a large gain in the legislature. I’m really hoping they
can undo a lot of the damage the current (Republican) regime caused in the past
four years. County elections, too, saw Republicans unseated, even in places
where the incumbent thought his ass was thoroughly planted in office.
You will know about the New York City
mayoral race. Despite billionaires contributing $40M to PACs supporting Andrew
Cuomo, NY Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani absolutely danced to victory, with more
than a million votes. Cuomo and a flock of other wealthy soreheads have sworn
they’re going to leave the city (and the state, apparently) because “communism”
and “taxes”.
They really know how to threaten people
with a good time.
In addition to whatever benefits electing
people to office high and low who aren’t ravening ideologues may have, Tuesday
pissed off the Kleptocrat royally. The old guy spent so much energy spluttering
at the results that he plumb wore himself out and slept through most of his
public meetings on Thursday and Friday. I imagine there was a severe ketchup
shortage in the White House dining room.
We are not out of the woods. The
administration still had time to fight multiple court orders to release SNAP
funds that more than 40 million Americans need to provide food for themselves
and their families. ICE, Border Patrol and local LEOs are keeping up their Stasi
raids on American neighborhoods, violently ripping individuals from their
homes, workplaces and autos and stashing them in secret confinement. SECDEF
Kegsbreath announced that we’re “facing a 1939 moment” and therefore we are no
longer in peace, but on a war footing. (Not clear to me whether they’re going
to run a false-flag Gleiwitz incident, maybe in Venezuela; or Greenland; or
Canada.) And the Speaker of the House is still keeping members from the Capitol
to avoid swearing in the duly elected Adelita Grijalva, who will cast the
deciding vote to release the Epstein files. Li’l Moses still knows and sees
nothing and the House has been in recess since the end of September. Oh—and the
government is shut down because the Republicans crammed provisions to cut
Medicaid and ACA subsidies from their “clean” budget bill, and Democrats are
not of a mind to make Americans choose between food and healthcare.
So—yeah, we have miles to go before we
sleep. But the gigantic, neon two fingers up to everything these bastards stand
for gives me hope. And it makes me grateful.
©2025 Bas Bleu
