Hope, Gravity, And Beans

I planted beans. They're already beans when you plant them and I think you could just cook them up, but instead we bury them and have them go through this whole thing so we have beans. They were bashful about germinating. Finally one brave scout poinked its little nose in the air and stood like a protestor defying a tank. Well, that kind of courage comes naturally to plants. They're rooted. Anyway it must've called the all-clear because the rest of the row showed up later.

You can tell they're beans because they're all lined up where I planted them. Otherwise it can be hard to identify a plant at the poink stage. They come out with little blobby leaves that don't look like the finished product. It's a starter set, the cotyledons, and across the seed-plant kingdom they look kind of similar. You have to wait for the prima donna leaves to unfurl like ballerinas to tell the rest of the story.

The leaves in the starter set don't count as real leaves though. Cotyledons are actually part of the embryo. (Yes, plants have embryos, a little something you should think about if you like to eat seeds, which you should totally leave alone until the plant bursts into the air, at which point they're fair game and the Supreme Court doesn't care what you do with them.) The purpose of these cotyledons is to raise a flag of hope to the anxious gardener, a little arrival announcement to the world--and prior to that their job was to glom onto the nutrients stored in the original seed. Once they've gotten the show on the road, as it were, they are sort of done. They figure if the "real" leaves want to spend the rest of their lives sucking up sun and working for the whole enterprise, they're welcome to it. The cotyledons have done a heck of a job, getting the plant to kick its way out of that tough seed coat and head off in the right direction, and now they're retired.

That "right direction" part is cool. Every kid learns that you can get a working plant out of a seed even if you plant it upside down, no matter how dark it is down there. They don't just send out shoots willy-nilly and hope some of them hit the air. Plants react to gravity. They detect it because they have little starchy packages floating around the gooey bits of their embryos, and those sink to the bottom like a load in a diaper. "Ah, that way is down," the plant intuits, and the part of the plant that aspires to being a root gets the drift and goes that way. And the other part, the shoot, goes the hell in the opposite direction out of sheer tribal hostility to the root, a little botanical friction that has worked out well, evolutionarily.

If anything more massive than the earth were nearby, the root would go that direction, but we'd have problems of our own and probably wouldn't notice. That's all gravity is, a mutual attraction between things with mass or energy, and the only reason the earth's gravity is so much more impressive than ours is it's bigger and more opinionated. But our planet is attracted to us, too, and don't let anyone tell you different. Everything is attracted to everything else, even Republicans, and yet we still can't get a decent bill past the Senate.

I'm certainly attracted to this bean plant. I check on it daily, and hope someday it will be full of beans, just like Mitch McConnell.

Independence Day Special

As I understand it, Mitch McConnell and his wrecking crew not only held up Obama's choice for Supreme Court, but did the same for hundreds of other vacancies in the judiciary, so that by the time their biddable bag of meat acquired the Presidency, he could pack the courts with young conservatives who might be expected to steer the country hard to the right for many decades.

Which is awesome if you happen to believe that abortion is the most important moral question we face. It's an answer to prayer. To the Republican majority and the billionaires who underwrite them it is less a matter of God's will than the culmination of a long-term strategy designed to gain and maintain power. It's one element in a campaign that also includes gerrymandering, voter suppression, union-busting, propaganda, and flat-out cheating.

There are a number of reasons I believe abortion should be legal, reasons having to do with coercion and control, and the mysteries of the soul, and the pragmatic consideration that more abortions can be prevented by access to free birth control than by criminalization, and a bias in favor of women's health and autonomy over fetal rights, but it's not something I intend to argue about with people who describe themselves as pro-life.

Suffice it to say fetal success is not at the top of my list of concerns. Not above civil rights for the born; not above the destruction of the particular climate that has sustained us and other life forms; not above the demonization and marginalization of entire groups of people, by race or faith or country of origin, which precedes and condones their elimination; not above the lust for war, which precisely tracks the lust for money. So much. So much I care about.

So many of us do. Enough to march. Lawsy, wasn't that a march! That sea of pink hats! There are more of us than there are of them. How did it all go so wrong?

Let's go back to the anti-abortion folks. Sure, they're just one element of a constituency that includes nervous gun owners and xenophobes and outright racists--there's some intersectionality involved here--but let's look just at them.

These people care. They really care. They care enough to vote, and they vote every chance they get. They put their people on the school board. They elect judges. They elect their city council. They scrutinize every ballot to reward the stance they favor. They're in a minority, but they win. Because they vote.

Is there anything we care enough about to do that? To vote?

Peace? Justice? Sustainable energy and economy? Shared prosperity? Do we care about extinction? The collapse of the oceans? Refugees? Poverty? Do black lives matter to us, at all? Do we assume our own version of righteousness should prevail on its merits, without us having to bother to vote for it?

How would this world be different if Al Gore had had enough extra votes that the Supreme Court would have been ashamed to hand the election to Dick Cheney? Would climate deniers have dominated the Cabinet? Would we still be mired in a fossil-fuel economy? Would we be at war in the Middle East? Did we really think Hillary and Donald were equally bad choices? Really? I guess so. Enough of us stayed home pouting. Waiting for that gorgeous candidate, so we could rest easy, put a LOVE sign on our lawn, and go back to our oblivious daily lives. We didn't care enough.

We care enough to march. We care enough to write checks and make calls. We can start caring enough to vote, every election, every chance we get. Or we can start knitting pink handbaskets.

Pudding, Steak, and Cake

I've decided to devote mornings to priming the rental house. It's been close to a hundred degrees for forty-five days this month alone, and it may not pay to put off painting until it cools down, because it's possible it will remain this temperature until approximately 100,000 years after the death of Sen. Mitch McConnell (Rep--Kingdom of Coal). But it's been horribly warm in the mornings too, and that is how I discovered the precise temperature at which primer turns into pudding and slides off the house.

It's always something, with pudding. You put in all the ingredients and then you stir and stir and stir over low heat and nothing ever seems to be happening and you re-check the recipe and sure enough it does say "over low heat" but you start to lose confidence and you crank up the burner a little and start casting a longing eye toward the drawer with the cornstarch in it, and then all of a sudden, BAM, pudding. In fact, pudding that can stand up and march out of the pan. So it's all very temperature-dependent. And the primer on the rental house turned into pudding at precisely 10:38am, and when I checked the temperature graph for the day I found out that it was, at that moment, a bazillion degrees. So mark that down.

If I'd waited until afternoon, I could have stuck my paintbrush in the can and pulled out a can-shaped block of primer on a stick. It's fucking hot, is what I'm saying. Dave, as usual, went for a long walk and when he came back he was brown all the way through and his juices ran clear. I spent some time outside also, and by mid-afternoon I'd started to pull away from the sides of the pan and spring back lightly when pressed in the middle. I was a little flat, but that's because I don't have any eggs anymore. I should be presentable with a nice topping of the little crisp, crumbly bits that used to be my garden. So we're totally ready for company, if they should happen to be cannibals.

I've had some experience with this nonsense. I grew up in what would have been the shadow of Washington, D.C., if it had any shadows in the summertime. We coped. We opened up the house at night and exhausted the air out with a fan and then sealed it up tight in the morning and drew the shades, and usually we could get all the way to early afternoon before having to lie down on the linoleum in front of the little round black oscillating fan, breathing shallowly, waiting to die, and dreaming that some day someone would invent air conditioning.

And someone did, and we all love it. Even though it is helping make everything hotter, we all love it.

Majority Rules

It's the start of a new year, and Republicans are patting their fingertips together and making nummy noises, eager as maggots on roadkill. Dozens of congressional committees await their new chairs. Gavels quiver, lobbyists prowl the hallways in a state of arousal, and resigned liberals reach for the lube. Things are going to be different now.

The new majority, sensitive to the charge that their positions are rigid--and some of them are very rigid indeed--have already softened their stance on promoting more women and minorities in their ranks, and are poised to install a cohort of mostly white men. Except for Rep. Devin Nunes (CA), who is also a mostly white man.

Jason Chaffetz, the incoming chair of House Oversight, the committee in charge of ignoring things, is expected to hold the line. The Appropriations committee hopes to continue the good work begun in the 1980s, when rule changes enabled a robust new financial sector that appropriated America's pension plans. The stubborn persistence of pockets of overtime pay and the threat of an uptick in the minimum wage signal the need for more appropriations.

Rob Bishop, the new chair of the Natural Resources committee, has warned that there are still some natural resources left and he will see to their extraction. Citizens living above shale fields can look forward to taking it right up the ass in exchange for a brief boom-town bump followed by years of desolation that can be blamed on future liberals.

Helming the Agriculture committee, Rep. Mike Conaway has promised to maintain Cheez Doodle price supports and has announced the implementation of a new program to increase yields through the application of a mulch of dead honeybees.

The new majority is in agreement on the need to end Obamacare, replacing it with the previous system, to which they intend to introduce economies via a nationwide network of trapdoors, roulette wheels, and tiger cages.

The new chair of the Science, Space, and Technology committee is particularly excited about his plans to remove Science altogether and replace it with Volleyball and Driver's Ed.

This suits incoming majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has vowed to reduce the scourge of science in favor of good old-fashioned alchemy, which he credits with turning coal into gold and his own state of Kentucky into a flayed wasteland. His colleague James Inhofe is eager to begin the dismantling of the environment in his new post as head of the Environment committee as soon as he gets done stroking himself.

Chuck Grassley, the new chair of the Judiciary committee, will be in charge of blocking more court nominees. Long renowned for his ability to dig up dirt in candidates' private lives, he vows ever more stringent fabrication.

And finally, John McCain, 112, prepares to take over the Armed Services committee. Famous for his departure from the party line on the subject of torture, he promises to eliminate the need for torture altogether by identifying large geographical areas that might contain terrorists and bombing the living fuck out of them, which is totally fair.

Meet The Priss

The atmosphere in the ExxonMobil Room was electric. The new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pranced in on his coal-black unicorn Republican Wave, slid off with the agility of a much younger man, and bounced up to the microphone, his cheeks pink with arousal.

"Well met, well met, well met!" he boomed archaically. "I'd like to welcome you all on this suspicious Caucasian. The American people have handed us a mandate for change. The American..."

"Sir, before you claim a mandate, would you care to comment on charges of voter suppression?"

"Please. Have you seen the turnout? Those people voted longer than anybody. Leave it to the coloreds to have nothing better to do than stand in line all day to vote! Am I right? Now. The American people have spoken, and they said it's time to get things done. The American people said they're not interested in climate change, so: Job One. We're getting rid of it. Poof!"

Cheers erupted as Mr. McConnell waved his tiny wand and a swirl of black dust settled over the room. James Inhofe, presumed new chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, patted his fingers together in ecstasy and had to be excused when he sprained his face giggling. Republican Wave whinnied and hawked up a loogie while Lamar Smith, chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee strolled in to enthusiastic applause, flanked by Adam and Eve and a triceratops.

"That's right, sir," he said.  "The American people sent us here today to solve problems, and the biggest problem we face is science. That's Job One, right, guys? Let's all give a hand to our friends here, Adam, the little woman, and this big fellow."

Adam nodded shyly and patted the triceratops on the thigh, his fig leaf beginning to flutter. "Found him in the Garden of Eden," he said, as Eve cast him a demure smile. The triceratops rumpled up his face plates in confusion and motioned for an interpreter.

"But you can't--" the reporter winced as if in pain--"you can't just wave a tiny wand and make science or global warming go away. You--"

"Just did, son," McConnell said, his hand in a complimentary bowl of Cheetos. "It's the responsible thing to do. Look. You can have all the airy-fairy theories you want, but at some point you need to grow up. We can't fix climate change and burn fossil fuels both. And the American people know what they want. We're not going to stop giving it to them until all the money is drilled out. We're the greatest nation on Earth! We'll be fine."

"But--but that's like saying Hiroshima was no big deal, because the Enola Gay had comfy seat cushions."

"Exactly." Member of the assembled new Republican majority shrugged in unison, pleased at the consensus.

"Job One number three," House Speaker John Boehner put in, dabbing away a tear, "Repealing Obamacare." He held his hand up, acknowledging the ovation. "We're going to rip Obamacare out by the curly hairs, and replace it with a good Republican plan that guarantees a marketplace of affordable insurance options, prohibits the cancellation of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and allows children to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26."

The reporter appeared to be working out a kink in his neck. "But that sounds exactly like O--"

"FreedomCare," Mr. McConnell inserted. "It's completely different, son. And we're adding a phrenology benefit and a free annual balancing of the humours."

"But--"

"And no website. Am I right? We'll have Marge and Phyllis back on the switchboard, doing what they do best for America. Make no mistake: we are here on America's business, but we are extending the crabbed hand of cooperation and hoping the President will agree to meet us halfway. Say, the sixteenth century," he concluded.

"I would like to point out at this time," whined Harry Reid from a low stool in the corner, "that the room is fast filling up with unicorn and triceratops shit. And your friend Adam over there is looking a little gassy. Can we adjourn until such time as we get this all cleaned up?"

"Cleaned up!" McConnell was tinkly with laughter. "Let me show you how it's done, my friend. We don't clean up. We'll just adjourn to the GlaxoSmithKline Room for now, head over to the Monsanto Cafeteria for lunch, pee-pee in the BP teepee, and reconvene tomorrow in the Johnson and Johnson Senate Chambers. Clean up!" The room had collapsed into hilarity, with several members off-balance from attempts to connect with a high-five.

Boehner honked merrily into a hankie. "It's not like we're going to run out of rooms," he wheezed.