Battle Lines

I'm a 2016 American just like all the rest. I have my opinions, you have yours, and unless yours and mine are the same, you have your head up your ass.

I'm sorry it has to be this way, but about twenty years ago someone set up a propaganda machine and funneled oodles of money into it, and it really took off. Things had started to go south for a lot of us during the Reagan years, what with the changes in laws and relaxing of regulations which allowed a new financial sector to blossom and dominate the economy. And corporations dismantled the unions, and jettisoned pension plans, and encouraged employees to gamble with their money in the guise of freedom; and people were just plain not doing as well as they had been, and they were feeling everything slip away.

All they knew was something had been taken away from them, and they were right. The money didn't disappear, but it did get siphoned uphill, and the folks uphill preferred that nobody notice. So they funded the propaganda machine and trotted out a new News Station and stocked it with interchangeable gals with stiff yellow hair, and they began churning out News about all the people the middle class really should be upset at. Your gays, your Muslims, your Mexicans, both of your anti-Christmas people, your union members for sure--all of them were taking stuff away from good Americans. It was all pretty clearly bullshit, a sophisticated shell game, but there's nothing anxious people like better than someone to blame stuff on.

So what happened is we ended up with two sides of the country operating on entirely different information and inclined to point fingers and double down, and now we're not talking to each other anymore. Why bother? A person is free to dislike the president's policies, but when he's on the social media all day talking about the Kenyan Muslim president and his bitch Killary, what have we got to work with? You're kind of left with "Let's agree to disagree," or "Die soon."

Which means we have a problem, and it isn't going to go away if we dodge the fat orange bullet. Because there is a faction in this country that isn't going to consider that result legitimate. Even if a comfortable majority of American citizens cast ballots for Clinton, a large number of people are going to see her election as proof that the system is rigged and democracy is dead, because their votes didn't count hard enough. And this is not a universal reaction across the political spectrum: this is special.

See here: sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court tipped the election to George W. Bush over Al Gore in what a whole lot of us thought was an egregious miscarriage of justice. And we were outraged, and we complained bitterly, and we wrote heated and well-constructed letters to the editor, and maybe we drank a little, and then we moved on, because we have a grounding in civics and a certain amount of faith in the system.

But others don't. Lincoln may have thought he freed the slaves, but the side that lost the war never accepted that, and they steadily resisted, and wrote their own laws, and terrorized a whole population, until the former slaves were once again no longer free. They re-fought the Civil War until they'd won it. They ignored the law of the land and substituted their own, and they used their guns to do it.

And there are still citizens of this country who will not accept a democratic result they don't agree with, and their numbers are growing, and they're still armed, and they're still dangerous, and they've been told exactly who the enemies are, and they're ready to take their country back, from...well. From the rest of us.

Yee-haw, darlings. Buckle up and hang on tight. Remember we're supposed to be the home of the brave.

Parasites In The House

Birds work their fannies off. That's why you hardly ever see a proper fanny on a bird. Especially during nesting season, they're up at the crack of dawn and spend the whole day going about the business of raising a family. There's nest construction, and defense, and music performance anxiety, and feeding their young. It's not easy.

Unless you're a cowbird.

Cowbirds are among the animals collectively referred to as "brood parasites," and they've figured out how to rig the system. Cowbirds roll out of bed when they feel like it and have sex with, you know, anyone, as long as it's probably another cowbird, and then the females go lay an egg in someone else's nest--someone who may have been working on that particular nest for a long time and had it just so. The cowbird egg may be bigger or more speckled or otherwise different from the eggs of the nest proprietor, and yet that proprietor will often incubate all the eggs, and then feed the cowbird when it hatches. Furthermore, the cowbird generally hatches first and starts kicking out the other eggs. The cowbird nestling is a giant mouth on bird legs. Any surviving original hatchlings wither in eclipse under its gaping maw, and the parent birds run themselves ragged trying to fill it up. The cowbirds prosper at the expense of the hard-working host birds, and their success depends on the host birds not noticing.

It's hard to imagine how a little mama warbler would mistake this pituitary case for one of its own, but sometimes things sneak up on you in life, especially if you're busy, and you can find yourself in a situation without knowing how you got there. Especially if it's all you can do to fend for yourself and your family. Even among humans, it's not uncommon to trudge through your work-a-day world and suddenly wake up in mid-life and discover you have a gigantic, speckled ass. And divorce is too expensive.

Or, it could be that the host bird is just programmed to be nice. I haven't forgotten the time Dave came home from the tavern towing a pert young blonde and said, just before falling into a fast, flatulent sleep, "this is Denise. Talk to her. She's been hitchhiking up I-5 from California and she thinks she'll be safe because she has an angel on her shoulder."

So I talked to little Denise and informed her she wasn't going anywhere, she was staying right here with us until she found a safe place to live and renounced her invisible angel, and that was that. And that was that. She stayed for a few days, then a few more days, and on into months, eating my food, wearing my clothes, wrecking my bike, periodically offering to whip up some "peanut butter and spices on crackers," all the while keeping up a bright soprano patter of thought-free conversation until we had to kill her, with no angelic intervention, and it was a tremendous waste of effort and resources, although the new concrete patio was nice.

At any rate, this situation obviously benefits the cowbirds, who are free to go about hoovering bugs to their big fat hearts' content, since they don't have to do any of the work of maintaining a domicile and child-rearing. It is of no benefit at all to the host birds. Why do they let such a thing happen? Well, cowbirds are stealthy.

They scout out host nests while they're being constructed, and squat in them when they know the nest builders are hard at work collecting materials. The day before they plan to drop an egg, they'll come by and kick out one of the host eggs. They plant one of their own in among the others. Then they quit making payments into the host birds' pension funds and tell them they're better off investing their own money, even though they aren't. Meanwhile they raid the pension funds for executive bonuses, and finally they explain the whole defined-benefit pension fund thing is not sustainable, what with their raiding and all, and go after the union birds' pensions too, because their success is ruining their narrative.

They lay a lot of eggs and deposit one each in nests all over the territory, taking advantage of the new lenient bankruptcy laws to restructure corporations, and use the Net Operating Loss Deduction to avoid any taxes at all, while allowing them to borrow money to raid other nests and close some down and sell off the assets, thus transferring all the risk from stockholders to individual taxpayers. Then tax reform encourages them to move factories abroad and escape federal income tax. By the time they pressure Congress to repeal the Glass Seagull Act, there is nothing to stop the cowbird from getting fatter and fatter at the expense of the host birds' own nestlings. The cowbird profits handsomely no matter what befalls the birds that work so hard on their behalf.

You have to wonder if such a scheme is sustainable, of course.  If the host birds cannot learn to recognize a fat cowbird squatting in their own nests, they may not survive, and the cowbirds will no longer be able to profit from all of their work. And some species have indeed learned to defend themselves against the cowbirds. What the cowbird does, however, is plant eggs widely and indiscriminately. The American brown-headed cowbird has been observed to parasitize the nests of 220 species. Even if the whole operation falls apart some day, they'll have had a mighty nice run.