Revolting

I really don't enjoy this.

What I want to do is publish the post I already had scheduled for today. Old fart meets credit-card reader, and hilarity ensues. I want to explain why spider bites are usually on your fanny because spiders object to being sat on. I'd like to tell you that my new shampoo smells like Pine-Sol and now I get out of the shower wondering if I've been scrubbing the toilet bowl with my head.

But I can't, because we can't go three days in this country without a lunacy grenade going off. We're all collateral damage, and the shrapnel is by now lodged in all of our hearts, and half of us are trying to pluck it out and half are happy to let it fester.

 

Nearly half cannot comprehend losing an election, because everyone they knew voted the same way they did. They cannot visualize their opposition, even though they've been mocking us for four years. Did they, too, believe we were fictional bots?

 

And some of them answered the call, when the call came. They were standing by, an army ready for their leader to deploy. Still, it was shocking. At first it almost looked like men were gaining the Capitol by scaling its walls, but surely that can't be--walls keep people out. Don't they?

 

But no, there they were, a faction of fat fascist fucks playing dress-up, and no, I'm not fat-shaming; I'm merely describing; they are shaming themselves. Just look at those fat white fucks. Where is Lorena Bobbitt? Get her on the phone.

These are described as "mostly white males," although that is a nod to their tattoos: this group is all about white power, and meanwhile, while we fantasize about where they can jam their rebel flags, Black power is alive and well a few states to the south, extracting the monkey wrench from the gears of the Senate with grace and peace. This is a day for the books.

But no sooner do we all bear witness than the Mostly-White-Males' operating system begins planting new seeds of deceit and broadcasting them into the soft spongy soil of the brainwashed: Antifa did this awful thing. That we totally approve of.

 

Sure. Those are definitely anti-fascists dolled up in raccoon underpants and traitor's flags. But it has come to this, that if I read a headline about vandals leaving a severed pig's head at Nancy Pelosi's house, I do not immediately know what group is responsible. Because the radicalized left and right occupy much of the same territory, where the politics of confrontation erases civility, and defense of freedom erodes freedom, and war is proclaimed the path to peace.

 

I do not equate the two. Neither by extent, or intent. I understand that the left musters in the cause of justice, and the right in the cause of a toddler's notion of liberty. But I have seen both sides attack an assault-weapon ban for the same reason: the need to fight our own government. I'm horrified to hear it from the right. It breaks my heart to hear it from the left.

 

After a while, the soldiers at the fringes start to look the same. Rage is its own fuel. Fury is all-consuming, and obliterates reason and dissent. Can it be quarantined? Set up a tournament, a jousting match. Duels: penises at ten paces. Make it ten inches, they still won't touch each other. Make it pay-per-view, and we can buy ourselves some nice health care, reparations, solar panels for all.

As for the shameless architect of our ruin, I do not want to see him harmed. I do not want to see him hanging upside-down in the town square. I wish to see him escorted into a court of law and delivered without ceremony to a secure location, wearing horizontal stripes and as long a necktie as he wants.

 

Strike A Pose, There's Nothing To It

Well he showed us! No sooner did hashtag BunkerBitch get smeared all over the internet than President Trump himself stood erect brandishing a Holy Bible in front of an authentic place of worship, proving that he is in fact fearless--fearless!--in the face of immolation by thunderbolt.

The scene was widely regarded as either a stunt or God's Word made flesh in the form of Donald Trump, depending on your news source. A large number of people were, however, offended, and even more were taken aback by the use of tear gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protestors from the president's path, or to make straight in the desert a highway for our God, depending on...well. Same thing.

A reporter asked the president if the bible he was holding was his own. Oh c'mon. Of course it isn't his bible! Even I, as a miniature Lutheran, had my own bible stamped with my name in gold letters. You know the president couldn't have passed that up. He'd have a bible with TRUMP all over the front with the living hell gilt out of it. And if you opened it up, you'd find all the pages of Song of Solomon stuck together.

What really disturbs me is the number of folks, including Joe Biden, who suggested the president open the book once in a while "because he might learn something." Holy shit, people. What are you thinking?

What the heck do we think he'd learn? You think peace and love are going to waft out of it? There's war. There's rape. Execution. Incest. Child murder.

You think he's just going to somehow trip over the verse in Numbers where the Lord instructs us to give six sanctuary cities to the refugees? Highly unlikely. Even if he starts at the beginning and tries to work his way through he's not going to be able to get past the chapter where Lot's two daughters bed him, one right after the other.

The trouble with earnest liberals everywhere is they assume the bible is basically Jesus' Sermon On The Mount with a lot of filler on both sides. It's not. And there's no assurance he'd learn from it anyway. Donald Trump's random bible could easily pop open to Matthew: "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Sword! Heh heh. You should see my sword. I guarantee you, there's no problem.

Or Acts: "And suddenly there came a sound like a mighty rushing wind...and divided tongues as of fire...rested on each one of them. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit." Sounds like God's Tear Gas to me.

Or Galatians: "Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." Hey. In the clear. I don't drink. Besides I already inherited a nice chunk from my father who art in real estate.

Or John: "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies." Like I always said. I'm a product of superior genes.

Keep the dang book closed. It's just like the internet: you can "learn" whatever you want to from it. God should sue us for slander for suggesting the thing is His Word.

The Color Of Money

Andrew Jackson is said to be one of Trump's favorite presidents. Dollars to donuts he can't name more than about ten of them altogether, and only boned up on Jackson when he learned that Obama wanted to have him replaced by Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill. Clearly this could not stand. Because Obama, number one. And number two, as Trump said upon seeing the proposed design, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posed ta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"

So Trump got someone to read him the Cliff's Notes on our seventh president, and he liked what he heard, and ordered his portrait hung in the Oval Office.

Even when he was running for president he weighed in on the issue, and while declaring Harriet Tubman a very fine woman, he thought she could just as easily dress up one of your lesser currencies, such as the Malawian kwacha. He said the whole idea of evicting Jackson from the twenty was a matter of pure political correctness, which is what people like him call correctness.

It is, however, a fine idea, and inspiring to many. Harriet Tubman was an exceptionally brave woman who was instrumental in establishing the Underground Railroad after she herself fled slavery. Jackson's reputation, on the other hand, has suffered a bit because he offends the delicate sensibilities of moderns who have been engaged in "rewriting" history, or stripping the propaganda out of it. And many of these people look askance at his enthusiastic embrace of slavery and his role in driving Native Americans out of their homeland on the so-called Trail of Tears so white people could take it. Slavery, extermination. Stuff like that.

Freakin' snowflakes ruin everything.

Trump, on the other hand, relates to Andrew Jackson, whom he regards, now that someone has whittled his Wikipedia entry down to 140 characters, as a populist tilting against the elites. There are resemblances. Jackson was said to be easily offended and something of a bully. He dabbled in real estate, dealing in particular with claims that had been set aside for the Cherokee and Chickasaw. He may have owned more than 300 slaves in his life and was not known for treating them well, advertising at one point that should any of them escape and be caught, he would offer "ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred." Clarifying later whilst on the stump, which was probably an actual stump, he said "Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay. Just knock the hell--I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise."

There are differences. Jackson was the only president who ever retired the national debt.

At any rate, we'll have to wait to see Harriet on our money. As Secretary of the Treasury and head pirate Steve Mnuchin put it, there's no way they can redesign the twenty before about 2028. It's just too complicated to do that and also work on other Treasury priorities, such as stripping consumer protections and rolling back financial market regulations, at the same time. Simply impossible. Makes Kennedy's moon shot gambit look like a stroll in the Rose Garden. "It is my responsibility now to focus on what is the issue of counterfeiting and the security features," Mnuchin said, by which he means "Trump said there ain't gonna be a nigger on the twenty while he's still President."

Where'd all those dogs come from?

The State Of Our Union Is Wrong

Like everybody else, except Native Americans who might otherwise like to vote, the State of the Union has an address. Which means you can get a pretty good fix on it. With a good enough address, you can find out if the fellow in charge is able to correctly identify actual problems and then not really do anything about them; or, conversely, he has no idea what's at stake, attacks fictitious problems, and doesn't really do anything about those either. The first gives you that tiny pop in your sails for a few minutes, and the second makes you want to go straight to bed with Cheez-its, a bottle of hooch, and a catheter.

This one was a doozy. Both teams were in uniform: white on the side of Faint Hope, blue suits and red ties on the side of the Co-Conspirators. The co-conspirators got the most exercise. If you were able to thread them properly and hook them up to a machine, you could have stitched a nice long seam. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. With the white team, you'd end up with the same basket of unfinished mending you started with. That's what makes them relatable.

All those ovations took a toll on the co-conspirators, though. Next year they're hoping to power their pants with coal, if they can't farm out the standing applause to ragged children in Bangladesh for a nickel.

Ovations there must be, however, in order to keep the Dear Leader from sagging like an inflatable tube-man at a used car lot. He was thus encouraged to tout all his accomplishments, most of them, amazingly enough, having been achieved like never before. This is the kind of thing you say if your history book starts the moment you get your breakfast cheeseburger and concludes with The Sean Hannity Show. Highlights included the smooth segue from defending sacred fetal life to having the biggest, baddest-ass military ever, like the world has never, ever seen.

It was a little disappointing, though, from a reality standpoint. Our commander-in-chief, as well as the rest of us, is standing under a monster Death Star and his plan is to shade his eyes, send the Death Star supplementary fuel and supplies, and send in the Marines to deal with a little hatch of imaginary terrorist mice on the southern border. It does make one wonder if he and the co-conspirator team even know where the true threat lies, but not to worry--it turns out they do.

It's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ordinarily someone this fresh to Congress would not be the subject of so many mocking memes and hysterical right-wing attacks, so you have to give the suckers credit for knowing who's about to eat their lunch. Even just since the State of the Union address, where she sat resplendent in white with all her congress-sisters, she has been attacked for being too wide-eyed and wild AND being too sullen. She needs to find that middle ground.

Specifically, the middle ground wherein she pushes inconsequential legislation, protects the interests of billionaires, comes out strong against childhood diseases and the plague, and paves in a few wetlands on weekends.

While being blonde.

The Liberals Are Coming! The Liberals Are Coming!

In a meeting with evangelical leaders, Mr. Trump said that if the GOP loses, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence." He liberally means us liberals. And that scares me a lot. I don't even like to skoosh a bug. But I guess I'm going to have to get up to speed in a hurry.

It's weird, because it's exactly what we thought would happen if Trump didn't win his election: his followers would shoot us all in our beds, and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it except come up with universal health care.

We do have a few antifa folks with rocks in their pockets but they scare us too, because every time they show up, there's a bunch of Nazis around. Sending them up against the pistol-packin' patriot boys with their flag suits and Kevlar is like making a little barefoot Palestinian kid square off against the Israeli Army.

We got nothing. We could throw tomatoes and eggplants, but that would be wasteful. And we're not going to scare anybody with a well-arugulated militia.

Besides, if we have to get violent to run these assholes out of town, then we're going to have to get organized, and that's not our best thing. First we're going to have to find our old plowshares and beat them into swords. And that's not easy. Maybe it would have been at one time, but we aren't plowing anymore, because what with the destruction of the soil structure and the scarcity of water it's more sustainable to plant cover crops and layer compost. Almost all the remaining plowshares have been welded into garden art.

And then if we did round up those plowshares, we'd have to find someone to beat them into swords, and other than a few random hippie blacksmiths in period costume and a drum circle, we're short on talent.

We can't even manage a fertilizer bomb. Not with the run-off and the toxic algae blooms.

Sure, we get upset, but the basic problem is we're peacemakers at heart, and it's an uphill battle. I mean, we're dealing with the kind of people who did all they could to keep the black man from rising, but then when he takes a knee, that wasn't right either, so it's not like we're going to make them happy. They'll get pissed off over anything. The prospect of having to share a country with colored people gets them going in a way that the mere destruction of the planet or billionaires stealing them blind simply doesn't. Massive flooding, hurricanes, drought, extinction? Kid stuff compared with being forced to bake a cake for queers.

There we'll be, chanting at the standoff, facing assault rifles, and until they start making bullet-proof poster board we won't even be able to protect ourselves.

Liberals violent? We can get snarky, but now that there's a marijuana glut you can get three-dollar bud at the dispensary. Our biggest gripe is finding snack food that isn't made by Nestle.

But don't be fooled. You don't want to get us really angry. We won't hold back. We'll go after your grammar and spelling every time. We've been stockpiling your extraneous apostrophes and we're going to pack them all into one giant nail-bomb of a polemic and it's going to sting, babies, it's going to sting. You might have to look up some stuff, but it's going to sting.

It's Time To Light A Fire

We just smashed the record for days above ninety in Portland, and we're not even through August. The historical average is eleven 90+ days each year, unless you're counting just since 2000, which would make it an average of 15,  or since 2014, which pops it up to 22 days, including the previous 2015 record of 29. Can you plot that trajectory, boys and girls? We are not happy. But there's good news. It might not get quite as hot as predicted today because the wildfire smoke is blocking some of the sunlight. Awesome!

Today the sky looks like sun-bleached construction paper, the shade no kid wants to use. Our smoke is mostly coming from Canada and Washington at the moment but it could turn and drift up from southern Oregon and California, where we're keeping our spare fires. California is basically cooked. But there's good news. A lot of the fuel that had built up over the years has been torched so the odds are good that a massive fire won't hit those particular spots again for a while. Awesome!

Wildfires, of course, are another anticipated result of the global warming that has been going on for, primarily, the last fifty years, caused by all the carbon we've porked into the atmosphere, and fire itself puts even more carbon in the air, as does the decaying vegetation left in fire's aftermath; not to mention that the loss of the forests themselves takes away a perfectly good carbon sink that might have helped mitigate the whole clustercaca, so that's a nasty greenhouse feedback loop for us right there. But there's good news. Fire isn't nearly as much of a carbon emissions source as our fossil fuel use. Awesome!

Yes, it's mostly our fossil fuel dependence that has transferred enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to slick the rails to apocalypse. Methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but good news! We can totally blame that on termites. Termites and landfills and intensive livestock farming (like when you pack hamburger-on-the-hoof so tight as to rub it bald), and the production and transportation of other fossil fuels, but don't forget the termites, which are not only gassy but 100% natural. Also, a planetary bolus of methane is predicted to belch out of the Arctic any year now, because it's in the permafrost and the permafrost is getting less perma all the time, because of the global warming we created, but good news! We won't have personally put that methane in the air, or gotten any personal use out of it. That's just a collateral-damage kind of thing, like dead civilians in an otherwise profitable war.

Awesome.

Yes, it's true, people have kind of messed everything up, and even though many smart people have been aware of it for a long time and even know what to do about it, we haven't done a single thing, because that would threaten perfectly good money, but good news! The human population is due for a nice culling any time now, what with all the buried legacy viruses that are expected to resurface because of global warming, not to mention the widespread droughts and famine, and loss of water, and war over dwindling resources.

In the face of the clear imperative to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible, the acting president proposed the exact opposite policy, in statements spiked with random gratuitous insults and racist dog-whistling, delivered in the style of the stupidest kid in second grade--all in all, the most impacted shitwad of sheer brainlessness the world has ever seen, but good news! This probably isn't the apex of imbecility after all!

Because there's always tomorrow.

When You're A Con, You're A Con All The Way

I don't know how many Trump supporters read this blog. If they do, after everything I've said, they're probably really nice people. And I know there are really nice people who support Trump. Those are the people I'd like a word with. I won't yell, I promise.

I know you're out there. You voted for him, but if we ask you what you think of his behavior or demeanor, you cringe. You wish he weren't quite so crude; you wish a lot of things were different about him, but you believe with all your heart that he is on your side, and if everyone just gave him a chance, he'd make a big difference in your lives. He's a tough-talker, he's rich, he must know what he's doing. So if some of us worry about his careless and bellicose approach to the world, well? Maybe he'll shake things up by forgoing diplomacy. Maybe diplomacy is for losers. Maybe the guy with the tough talk will win it all for us. And if nation after nation loses respect for us, well, maybe they're the ones that are wrong, and we're better off on our own, and it just goes to show how special we are. And maybe all politicians are alike. They all make mistakes and say stupid things, so we should give this one a pass.

But he's shown us who he is all along. The man who mocked the disabled reporter, the man who put a photo of his wife next to Ted Cruz's plainer wife and considered it a campaign poster, the man who boasted about his dick during a televised debate, the man who demeaned his opponent Carly Fiorina by saying "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?"--the man who, for God's sake, took the basest, most overtly racist lies about Obama and threw fuel on them, for years, for years, knowing they're not true, the man who uses coy innuendo to plant lies, smear opponents, and inflame mobs, that is who he is. And yet so many of you hope he will somehow come through for you that you keep quiet, and wince a little, and even pretend that you don't hear Nazis and white supremacists chanting his name--because that doesn't have anything to do with you, does it? They've got the right. It's a free country.

I don't know. Maybe your only news source is the one manufacturing "news" straight out of a think tank funded by billionaires for their own purposes. Maybe you buy into the bullshit memes the Macedonians and Russians have been putting out. Maybe you help them go viral because they confirm what you already believe. Maybe you believe everything you hear.

Maybe you believe Trump was the only one who cared about you. Maybe you think that other party, the one that tried to get you affordable health care and equal pay and protect your water and air, was filled with snobs who thought they were better than you. Maybe you think this guy'll bring your job back, or bring your medical premiums down, or stop all the brown people he's instructed you to hate from coming into the country. But he won't.  

He has no idea what to do about health care other than tear down the previous compromise with nothing to replace it. When it doesn't work, he'll blame the Democrats for obstructing him, because that always worked before. You bought it before.

Here's what he has done. He's given you a tiny temporary tax cut and cut billions of tax dollars on corporations and the rich permanently. In a country with the most powerful military in the world that can't even provide clean water for its citizens and insists on a $7.25 minimum wage, he's put 700 billion dollars into the military. He's ripped up environmental safeguards that were already inadequate so that fossil fuel corporations and their shareholders can keep racking up profits, while hoping you all are still watching the actors on the "news" channel who are being paid to tell you climate change science is controversial. When we must be going all in on innovation in new energy and a sustainable future--one might say any future at all--he's barreling straight into the past on the fastest coal train he can find.

You're being played. He doesn't care about you. He just wants your vote. He'll tell you migrant workers and asylum seekers and Muslims and black men kneeling are your enemies, because he knows people with enemies can be talked into anything, and then he'll promise to protect you, to get your vote. He'll pretend he gives a damn about abortion to get your vote. He'll tell you four conflicting things about gun control so that you can pick the one you like and choose to believe that's the one he believes, too. And get your vote.

He'll make sure the violent MS-13 gang, which has operated on both sides of the border and internationally since the 1980s, remains on the front page, because he wants you to associate the gang with brown people, so he can sell you a big, beautiful, useless, 18-billion-dollar wall, while our own infrastructure is crumbling. And he wants you to worry about that gang every day, so you won't notice his own gang is dismantling the middle class and throwing the poor into the river to enrich the super-wealthy. His gang. The one that's rushing to tear down the protections put in place for you after the financial meltdown of 2008. Because the financial sector--a.k.a. "the swamp"--has long since made off with your pension and benefits and transferred your wealth to the wealthier, and they're eager to do it again as soon as Trump and his gang of Republicans gut the restraints. He is ballooning the deficit and debt. He's proposing billions of dollars of cuts to your Social Security and Medicare. He told you he had a 1.5-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan for you but asked for only 200 billion in his budget--after cutting existing infrastructure programs by the very same amount. Did you notice?

It's a con. He doesn't care about you at all. He cares about himself, he cares about money, and maybe he cares about his daughter, the sexier one. He doesn't give a damn about you. He wants your vote so he can continue to rake it in. To privatize public assets for profit. To deregulate for profit. To destroy unions for profit. That profit is not for you. It's for the super-wealthy. Look at that bad, brown gang over there, this man says; don't look at mine.

Does he believe what his Nazi admirers believe? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe he's not that guy. Maybe he doesn't care about Nazis any more than he cares about anybody else. He damn sure doesn't care about you.

The Enemy Of The People

Someone just told me that America's in trouble because too many of us are blinded by our mindless hatred of the president. One would assume he was referring to the fist-bumping, angry, terrorist-loving, fraudulent Muslim president who was born in Africa, but no. Whole different president. Seems like someone has set people like me up as a straw man. After all, there's no need to listen to a mindless hater.

Except that doesn't describe me or my friends. America's in big trouble, but not because of us.

This president? I don't hate him. I do think he's a loathsome, contemptible, ignorant, ill-bred, dangerous, pathetically insecure con man, circus barker, and bullshit artist, but I am a forgiving sort, and do not demand purity from my politicians, and if he did anything laudatory I would acknowledge it. But he hasn't. Across the board, in every sphere, at every level, he is making everything worse. Catastrophically worse. That, I hate.

He's the sort who might be expected to dismiss the Black Lives Matter movement by piously claiming that all lives matter--except for all the people whose lives don't matter to him at all, including our fellow citizens, other nations, tribes, faiths, and his own political opponents. We are being deliberately sliced into factions, for no purpose but to divide us and politically conquer us, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

We might wish that every Republican who rails against abortion would light up like a bulb if he has personally paid for an abortion. But let us just stipulate that for every one of them who honestly believes in the rights of embryos, there are dozens more who don't care at all, but are willing to use that lever to pry a reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And somewhere there might be a Republican who suspects that gun rights have gone too far, but he is willing to let that go in order to pry off another reliable chunk of the electorate into the Republican column, to one end. The enrichment of the rich.

And you know what? I care about reproductive rights, and I worry about gun violence. But I would cede it all, and send women back to the coat hanger, and give every man, woman, and fetus a gun, if it meant the modern Republican party would wither and die. Because we're in a heap of trouble, and we're out of time.

It was forty years ago I was first startled to read that carbon might be our most dangerous pollutant. And now we are looking at the extinction of half the world's species in the next eighty years; we're on track to a collapse of all the world's fisheries in thirty; half our coral is dead now; we're running out of fresh water;  our ecosystems are collapsing; and those sounding the alarm are being dismissed as fearmongers and frauds. And a population easily gulled and lulled believes it. We grew up in the oil age with no sense of how special it is, how extraordinary our energy-enhanced abilities are, how unsustainable this existence is. We're a species that has muddled along for a million years and then, pretty much in my own puny lifetime, shot about sixty million years'-worth of buried carbon into the air, and that means that yes, unfortunately, as incredible as it seems, we really are living in the end times. We made them ourselves.

And the time to do something about it was at least thirty years ago, and plenty of people knew it. But the past is not retrievable, and the best we can do is start now. Instead, thanks to the feckless and ignorant occupant of the presidency, and his cynical enablers in the Republican Party, we're all in Thelma and Louise's car with the pedal to the metal. We know what must be done. We have no time left for ignorance. Or dupes. Or mercenaries. Or greed. Or any member of the one party whose only core belief is that--for them and their friends--there is no such thing as too much money.

The Empty Hutch

It's quiet at first. Tater the cat has been swatted off the keyboard or plucked off the newspaper or punted from the quilt-in-progress or otherwise discouraged from expressing herself inconveniently. Minutes slide by.

Then comes the first "plink" from the dining room. Her favorite lightweight battable item, a small wooden chicken on the first shelf of the hutch, has hit the floor. It will be fine. There are three more wooden chickens on the hutch and in due time they too hit the floor. Plink. Plink. Plink.

It is important to not reward this activity by running into the dining room waving your arms and yelling "Potato Brewster, get down from there." There's nothing Tater would love more than to see you do that. That would be the highlight of her day.

There is a pause and then a new sound. The soft thub thub thub of a felted sculpture plummeting from the second shelf. Another pause. Then the scraping of a heavier item being relocated toward the front of the shelf. An ominous thunk and clatter.

At this point the human is no longer working. The human is mentally reviewing the contents of the hutch, and plotting the trajectory of the cat. Then a disturbing rattle is emitted from the dining room, its provenance sussed out, and the next target in line identified as a Steuben glass bud vase. No! The human vaults into the dining room waving her arms and screaming.

Cat, rewarded.

This is how I thought the Trump regime would be. In wave after heartsick wave of insomnia, I visualized the losses, totting up the horrors that would soon enough be coming our way: the demonization of entire segments of our society, the sharpening of the divisions among our tribes and creeds, the erosion of women's rights, the denial of science, the stripping of regulations from the financial sector, the accelerated transfer of wealth to the wealthy, the privatization of schools and public lands, the despoilment, the isolationism, and--the sharpest arrow to my aching heart--the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and the resumption of headlong investment into a fossil-fuel economy that will undo us all. I imagined each horror as another wooden chicken falling to the floor while the evil agenda churned inevitably through a Congress with an inadequate opposition, and periodically we the faithful would turn out to holler as the next beloved item hit the floor.

I did not think the soulless son of a bitch would clear the whole hutch in ten days.

But in ten days all of that was set in motion. A woman who made her millions undercutting public education is proposed to oversee education. Sheer fiction is employed to encourage Americans to fear each other: Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, protestors, and--oh, let's call them "inner-city types" and wink at Ben Carson. Innocents are scapegoated, assuring future carnage that will then be used to justify war or a police state. A former CEO of Exxon is installed as Secretary of State and already working on easing sanctions on Russia, allowing Exxon to drill the last oil in Siberia. The infamous abortion gag bill is reinstated with repercussions for the health of women worldwide including, not coincidentally, a spike in abortions. Diplomacy is abandoned for belligerence. Oil pipelines are approved and the military marshaled to quash dissent. Any constraint against Wall Street rapaciousness is to be repealed. The Stream Protection Rule is tossed out. Oh, let's slow down and have a look at that last one, shall we?

Coal mining is dying a natural economic death fast, due to better alternatives. The Stream Protection Rule, which prohibits the dumping of coal mining debris in waterways, is the only tool in the bucket for preventing companies from blasting entire mountains into oblivion, burying natural streams, and ruining watersheds for all time. The precious coal itself is all burned up by the time the coal companies haul up stakes and move on, stranding their workers and leaving residents to contend with poisoned water and a lifeless moonscape. Putting the Stream Protection Rule on the chopping block in the first two weeks is not about jobs: it takes far fewer men to dismantle a mountain than to mine it conventionally. It's not about energy, which is cheaper and cleaner any other way. It's certainly not for the health and safety of populations either local or worldwide. It is for the enrichment of a select few who can scrape out that last smudge of filthy energy and turn it into private fortune, and the hell with absolutely everybody else. And it's to give Mitch McConnell the woody of his dreams. That's all.

But none of that was enough. There was also the gratuitous assault on the separation of church and state. There was the transparently specious vilification of refugees for no reason other than to invent a class of enemies and grease the rails for the war machine. There was--could we possibly have made this up?--the elevation of an actual authentic fucking Nazi to the National Security Council--a man who is on record as being devoted to tearing down government and advancing the cause of white supremacy.

The hutch is empty. I don't know where Tater is, but I smell gasoline.