A Grand Slam Single and Other Freaks of Nature

Independence Day has me thinking about the state of the country.

On January 13, 2021 the Defense Department released a letter signed by the head of every branch of the military including General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirming that that the 2020 election was indeed legitimate, as if there was any real question. That is perhaps the single most powerful argument against Trump's claims of fraud. Trump knows this and is intent to undermine it next round.

It's no secret what Trump wants to do the first day he's president. He'll fire the heads of each military branch and install people who are loyal to him versus the Constitution. You know, dictator-on-day-1 things. I've thought this for years, but it seems like it's now become his official policy, according to Project 2025. He even suggested weaponizing the justice department to investigate Milley. Of course he did.

Get rid of the responsible people at the top, and the rest of the military could follow. Everybody in the military swears an oath to the Constitution. Trump's aim is to equate the country to him over the Constitution. It's not a secret that he demands loyalty before everything else.

When the military swears and oath to Trump, either outright or implied, it's his military, not our military. That's something that we've never had to think about, the politicalization of the military.

Use your imagination to see where this goes. The Supreme Court just granted Trump unchecked power. I'm sure they wouldn't put it exactly that way, but do you get the idea their legal nuance will be lost on him? No question it is.  

Trump clearly lost the last election, by any measure other than his own mouth, but he tried to use his power to remain in office. Do you think that's now more or less likely to happen again? With unchecked power, authoritarians delay elections indefinitely.

There's one, and only one, thing that makes me feel better about this, and that's the fact that we have such a strong candidate opposing him. Right? We have someone who can coherently and persuasively articulate the dangers of Trumpism in complete sentences. Yeah right, I wish. 

No, the only thing that makes me feel better about our situation is that Trump has no defining ideology outside of himself. One day he'll be gone, and his followers will have no possible way to replace him. His imitators will lack the same luster. What damage will he do in the meantime though? Who knows.

Perhaps his defining ideology is power for its own sake. Reminds me of the Charlie Chaplin quote- "You need power, only when you want to do something harmful otherwise love is enough to get everything done." Draw your own conclusions on how that's applicable.

The head of the Heritage Foundation just referred to a coming second American Revolution, that will be "bloodless if the left allows it to be." That's a not-so-veiled threat. They are the ones who groom potential Republican Supreme Court nominees. See how some of these dots are connected?

Think about this. What would we need a second revolution for, if not to subvert the constitution?

Take this seriously, a small group of revolutionaries can take over a country once they have support of the military (look at Cuba in 1959), and if the military it's designed to be loyal to a man over the Constitution, there's real trouble ahead.

Yes, Biden is an extraordinarily weak candidate, and I hope he is soon replaced, but I'd vote for a cuckoo clock over Trump's authoritarian insanity.

Today is Independence Day, and I'm no jingoist, but it is starting to really mean something to me that so many of our ancestors died so we could be independent of a king, and we are, at least for now.

July 4, 2024

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The 4th of July, a day to celebrate rebellion.

David Foster Wallace- "Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval." 

What I see these days is a lot of wannabe rebels, captured by groupthink, terrified of displeasing somebody.

Reminds me of what George Carlin said about tattoos:

"It used to be you got a tattoo because nobody had one. Now people get them because everyone's got one."

What we have these days is a lot of tattooed people, trying desperately to fit in.

July 4, 2022

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The first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is truly marvelous.

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

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George Carlin:

It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do something different. And, of course, this country is founded on the double standard, that's our history! We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free...

So, they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their Black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, and move West and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people.

You know what the motto of this country oughta be? 'You give us a color, and we'll wipe it out.'

It's a good thing George Carlin was cremated or he'd be spinning in his grave. I found the link above on Ranker, but it replaced "killed a lot of White English people" with "took out a lot of English people." KILLED has turned into a bad word???

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Eva Marie Saint was born on this day in 1924. What a knockout.

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Bertrand Russell- “America’s immense heritage of idealistic ability is squandered by a system which divides all power between the prejudices of the ignorant many and the ruthlessness of the plutocratic few.”

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I was driving through downtown Lancaster yesterday in some terrible rain and my windshield wipers broke. Brought back a crazy memory of perhaps the greatest coincidence of my life.

In the mid-90's I was in a torrential downpour at night. I had tried driving with my head hanging out the window, nearly ran someone down, couldn't see a thing, and barely made it into the nearest driveway. It turned out to be a mechanic's garage and he was still there at 8pm. On top of that he actually had a windshield motor for a '71 AMC Hornet. He fixed it for like $20 and I was on my way in like 15 minutes. Seems like a dream.

July 4, 2021

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I'm watching a documentary on the Zodiac Killer and found out that one of the most well known murders happened 50 years ago tonight, the 4th of July, 1969. I also watched Star Wars tonight and remembered from earlier in this documentary that when Luke says he has to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters, George Lucas picked the name Tosche because he was the lead investigator on the Zodiac murders. He lived near where the Zodiac murders took place and followed the story. Currently in the documentary they're following some Zodiac codes to try to find where somebody was buried, which took them to a hiking trail named after the Donner Party. The trail was named Donner Pass, and the woman they're looking for is Donna Lass. George Lucas's mentor Stanley Kubrick mentions the Donner Party in The Shining, the last shot of which ends on a Fourth of July ball, 1921. 

This is really just a bunch of random nonsense, but if Stanley Kubrick would have picked the ball to have been on July 4th, 1919 instead of 1921, and tonight was the 100th anniversary of it, and the 50th anniversary of the Zodiac killing... I'd be kind of freaked for some reason.

July 4, 2019

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Lou Gehrig said goodbye to baseball before a sold-out crowd at Yankee Stadium on this day in 1939, baseball's Gettysburg Address. He left us two years later.

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Rallying cry of the American Revolution- "Taxation without representation is tyranny!" 

So...

Statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico!

July 4, 2018

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My list for what movie epitomizes America. What did I miss?

It's a Wonderful Life, My Darling Clementine, Grapes of Wrath, Blue Velvet, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hoop Dreams, Ken Burns' Baseball and Civil War, High Noon, Hearts and Minds (Vietnam doc), The Last Picture Show, Salesman, The Godfather, Citizen Kane. Did you know it's original title was The American?

July 4, 2017

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Clarke Kant- "I can't trust my gut. It's full of shit."

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This Millennium Falcon shirt is an icebreaker for nerds, they approach me wherever I go.

July 4, 2015

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MAMIHLAPINATAPEI- (Tierra del Fuego) [mam-i-lah-pi-na-ta-pay-ee] "the look across a table or room when two people are sharing a private and unspoken moment."

July 4, 2014

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The Great Coincidence:

1n 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, respectively the second and third presidents of the United States, died on the same day. A regular daym? Nope! It was the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives," not knowing that Jefferson had died hours earlier. And that's not quite the end of it- five years later to the day, 5th president James Monroe also died.

This is such a big coincidence that I believe it goes a long way toward proving that our brains can keep our bodies from dying.

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Quite a day for the transcendentalists. In 1845 Henry David Thoreau moved in to a cabin on Walden Pond, and exactly ten years later, the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published.

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Henry David Thoreau- "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on this day too, in 1804. Not a transcendentalist. 

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

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The Wanderers was released on this day in 1979. As far as my tastes go, a perfect film.

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Rube Goldberg was born on this day in 1883, thus completing the very first Rube Goldberg experiment that started with a twinkle in his mother's eye.

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Philosopher Thomas Nagel joined us on this day in 1937. His essay, What Is It Like To Be a Bat?," is a must-read.

"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?"

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Samuel Richardson left us on this day in 1761.

"Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal."

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Marie Curie left us on this day in 1934.

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."

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Koko the Gorilla was born on this day in 1971.

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Adrian Adonis was killed in a car accident on this day in 1988. What an 80's heel, adopting an effeminate persona, "Adorable" Adrian Adonis.

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A massive heat wave struck the northeastern United States on this day in 1911, killing 380 people in eleven days and breaking temperature records in several cities.

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Nazi crimes against the Polish nation: Nazi troops massacred Polish scientists and writers in the captured Ukrainian city of Lviv on this day in 1941.

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On this day in 1994, in the Rwandan genocide- the Rwandan capital of Kigali was captured by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, ending the genocide in the city.

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Other notable birthdays- Gloria Stuart (1910), Neil Simon (1927), Richard Rhodes (1937), Geraldo Rivera (1943), Michael Milken (1946)

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Other notable deathdays- Eva Gabor (1995), Bob Ross (1995), Charles Kuralt (1996), Jesse Helms (2008)

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Ivan Seroi

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From Frederick Douglass's speech, What to the slave is the 4th of July?:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

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On this day in 1976, Phillies catcher Tim McCarver hit what became referred to as a "grand slam single."

McCarver hit a grand slam but is called out when he passed Garry Maddox on the base paths. He was credited with a 3 run single.

https://youtu.be/PBgJkQWv7xU

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Bukowski- Independence Day 

https://bukowskiquotes.com/2012/07/independence-day-by-charles-bukowski

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Nagle again, "Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself." 

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The Onion headline, February 19, 2013- Seagull With Diarrhea Barely Makes It To Crowded Beach In Time

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What a loss, cinematographer Robby Muller died.

https://youtu.be/54YhQZN5Uq8

July 4, 2018

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Normal day yesterday in Trumpworld. The president held a rally with no social distancing and no masks, meanwhile Ivanka tweeted for everyone to have a safe holiday while social distancing and wearing masks, meanwhile Don Jr's girlfriend and campaign worker just contracted coronavirus from the Tulsa rally, and Eric Trump tweeted a pic of that Epstein woman at Chelsea Clinton's wedding as proof of something or other, apparently unaware of the 80 pics of her, Epstein, and his dear old dad. What is it with these bizarro people? They are just total fuck-ups! Shit rolls downhill as they say in the funny pages.

https://youtu.be/FX9CAf2hyrU

July 4, 2020

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McSweeney's, June 22, 2020- I’M THE GUY SETTING OFF FIREWORKS EVERY NIGHT IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD AND I HAVE YOU RIGHT WHERE I WANT YOU by Ilana Gordon

Nice to finally have a little insight:

"There are, of course, those who seek to destroy me, and to them I say: take heed. Like the heads of Cerberus, I am only one of many. You can move away or even flee the state, but you’ll find it makes no difference. Wherever you go: BOOM. Baby, it’s a firework."

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-the-guy-setting-off-fireworks-every-night-in-your-neighborhood-and-i-have-you-right-where-i-want-you

July 4, 2021

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Nagle, yet once again- "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Agreed, it's seems like there's no God, which is great because I don't want her to be one. If there was evidence though, I would be handcuffed.

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Arthur Schopenhauer- "The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."

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Herman Hesse- "Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

Ummm, well put?

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Vladimir Nabokov:

Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

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Ernest Hemingway- "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."

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Bertolt Brecht- "Who does Not Know the Truth, is simply a Fool... Yet who Knows the Truth and Calls it a Lie, is a Criminal."

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Lai Tzu- “The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.”

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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest- "Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

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Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet- "Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."

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Jung- "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

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Marcus Aurelius- "If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance."

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Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary- "Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."

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Elie Wiesel- "When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude."

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau- "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they."

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Addendum

Independence Day Indeed!

Running on fumes, I pulled into the Sunoco station at Pine Grove. A guy was smiling and pacing around outside and as I walked up he said, "Hey man, you ever see Cannonball Run?"

"No." Hmmm, where's this going?

"There are cars in it sponsored by corporations, all covered with stickers. Look at that car."

The car to which he was referring was covered in Sunoco stickers, proclaiming Sunoco fuel to be the "official fuel of NASCAR." We had a nice laugh at the car's expense. As I walked into the station I noticed a plastic pocket on the door holding more Sunoco stickers than most people would ever need. What marketing genius came up with that? A raise is in order.

As I handed the clerk my credit card I noticed her sweater- a red, white and blue number proclaiming "Liberty, Justice, Freedom, Peace, AMERICA." Oh yeah, it's the 4th of July. I left to fuel up, thinking about Scooter Libby and those bums that call themselves Democratic members of Congress. Nancy Pelosi said that in commuting Libby's sentence Bush "abandoned all sense of fairness when it comes to justice." Reaaaalllly???

So I fueled up, paid my $250 dollars to Sunoco (and by proxy, Osama bin Laden), and as I was leaving the lady said "You can help yourself to a coffee or fountain drink if you want."

Wow, a perfect day for a Lipton iced tea. And free too. Liberty, Justice, Freedom, Peace. Somehow I see it in an all new light- it's not what we represent, but what we should strive for.

Then back on the road, alone, to celebrate Independence Day, wondering how Lipton helps the war effort.

Who said freedom isn't free? I get paid for it. And today I'm getting paid to listen to Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Here's an excerpt:

Every day we're told we live in the greatest country on earth and it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure 60 x 80 inches, and America is the greatest country on earth.

Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans too, none of which are

"We're number two!"

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The freedom of road.