01/30/2026
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Operation Varsity Blues

716 Words: Your Grade or Your Life

In a simpler day, say, a few decades ago, the typical person who might threaten your life was a mug with a gun emerging from a dark alley. “Your money or your life,” he might snarl.

How quaint.

He might be wearing a mask and have suddenly popped out from around a corner and shoved his snub-nosed Saturday night special into your ribs. He’d unburden you of all your valuables — your watch, your wedding ring, and necklace, too — if he was a conscientious crook.

Of course, I’m describing a comic strip characterization. Back in those “simpler” days there were many ways people made you fear for your life. Hell, in October 1962, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy scared the excrement out of the whole world for about 13 days. And, of course, there was the usual array of psychotics and hooligans for hire who might put your continued existence in peril.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, though, and say it’d have been highly unlikely the person threatening your life would be the parent of a student you were teaching because your grading criteria were more stringent than he’d want.

But that’s life in this godforsaken year of 2026.

A friend of mine who teaches at Indiana University confided to me that he’d received an email from a student’s parent last night that, yep, threatened his life for the grade he’d given the sender’s kid. I won’t reveal any details about this instructor for obvious reasons. I wish to hell I could give you all the possible details about the email sender so that the whole goddamned world could pillory him.

This is where we are today.

I’ve long been baffled by the outsized importance people place upon the prestige of the college or university they’re sending their kid to and the perceived vital nature of each GPA decimal point said kid earned there. Scads of people would sell their souls to the devil to get their kid into, say, Harvard or Smith or Brown. Hell, a passel of parents — the actor Lori Loughlin famously among them — went to jail a few years ago for bribing and cheating their kids’ way into this or that jewel of learning. Some institutions of higher education — Indiana University is one — rake in tuition dough from folks whose kids couldn’t make the cut into Yale or Penn. They send their kids to these second-, third, and fourth-choice colleges and stew because their darlings have failed them.

Why?

Do they teach better or different facts at the Ivy League schools or the Seven Sisters? If you want to be a doctor, will you be allowed to learn a secret way of treating a broken leg at Northwestern? Is the math taught at Stanford more accurate than that offered by the University of New Mexico?

Of course the real reason parents risk incarceration to get their kid into Dartmouth or Duke is their desire to ensure their 17-year-old will belong to the best, the right, club. Harvard alums help out their confreres. So do Elis and Blue Devils and Smithies. Your college’s alums will be more likely to hire you and put you up for membership at their country club and contribute to your campaign should you ever decide to run for office. Or even abet you in the skirting of the law.

In this sense, a lot of colleges and universities have morphed from schools into something like cartels. Or worse, crime syndicates.

And, their trophy children having failed to gain entrance to an Ivy League school, these pathologically competitive parents can’t shake the urge that drove them to crave their kids’ entrance to Columbia in the first place. So, when the kids study at IU or the University of South Carolina, the parents remain as cut-throat as they were when their kids were high school juniors. The result? Their kid gets a B in Math 101 and they feel compelled to issue a fatwa against the teacher. Have they so little faith in their kids? Do they think, because the little darling got that totally unjustified, unfair, devastating B, that the kid’ll never be able to get a job after graduation? What world do these people live in?

This world. I don’t have to like it.

01/28/2026
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Ilhan Omar

824 Words: I’m With Omar!

At long last, there’s a Democratic politician I can enthusiastically get behind.

Well, I exaggerate, of course. I’m four-square behind the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, JB Pritzker, Pete Buttigieg, and about a half dozen others. But loyal Pencillistas know I’ve been ragging on the party for years for its turn-tail-and-run ways.

Some three decades ago, Newt Gingrich distributed his GOPAC Memo, the meat of which was to turn the term liberal into a libel. And in making certain the Democrats would always be associated with that “slur,” Gingrich and company succeeded in turning the very name of the party itself into a smear. The Dems ran like rabbits from the word liberal, rather than standing up straight and proclaiming loudly, You’re goddamned right I’m a liberal!

How about John  Kerry being accused of falsifying his Vietnam War injuries during the 2004 election? This was back in the days when the Dems thought it best to “go high when they go low,” as Michele Obama would dub the philosophy a few years later. Kerry ignored the charges. He and his party didn’t realize at the time how powerful the then-nascent social media could be. The charges stuck among tens of millions of people who, by the way, were never going to vote for him in the first place. No matter. The impression grew and solidified that when pushed into a corner, the Dems wouldn’t fight. Kerry didn’t fight. Oh, how I wished he would have dramatically and effectively raised his trouser leg during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, shown his scars, and said, How dare you chicken-hawk bastards accuse me of lying?

Then another Dem pol I really liked, Sen. Al Franken, turned tail and ran when a member of his own party, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, pilloried him for sexual harassment, a charge wholly imagined by the Right Wing propaganda machine. Rather than say, Hell no, I didn’t do it!, he instead resigned. Again, it wouldn’t have swung any votes but it would have shown he was ready to rumble.\

Even Barack Obama played it oh-so-cool when haters charged he was born in Kenya, schooled in a terrorist madrassa, and therefore ineligible to be president. He never told his accusers to got to hell. He never equated their phony theories with flat-out racism. He went high when they went low.

America’s been watching this for decades now. Tens of millions of people see the party as a collection of eggheaded, kumbaya singers who wouldn’t fight for them because, well, fighting is bad.

Even pacifists recognize the need to fight on occasion and that occasion has been developing for a long time now. Li’l Duce is a plain speaker who isn’t afraid to throw verbal hands and those characteristics appeal to a huge swath of the electorate. The result is the teardown of the social, educational, environmental, scientific, cultural, artistic, and human service infrastructure of the federal government.

Just the other day, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota declared he wouldn’t run for reelection because his family’s been harassed by Right Wing lunkheads. For pity’s sake, what did he expect when he first ran for governor? The Fox News/4chan/Wonderland delusionalists had already long held sway. Of course they were going to doxx him and his family, threaten them, molest them, harass the kids at school, make up crazy accusations against him, and all the rest of the thing incels, the obsessively aggrieved, the theocratic supremacists, and the fascism advocates do. Minnesota became the new locus for America’s Polarization Wars and immediately the online hoodlums attacked. Just as immediately, Walz turned tail and ran.

Funny thing is, lots of Republicans and MAGA-ites are being doxxed and harassed, too. I assume they love their families as much as Walz loves his. But they’re not quitting. They’re staying in the fight and doing what they need to do to protect their families.

I wish there were more of that kind of feistiness in the Democratic Party.

Lo and behold, one Dem pol has indeed shown some spunk. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was attacked by a man who sprayed her with some kind of noxious substance yesterday at a town hall she was holding in her district. Rather than cower or run, Omar went after the wretch and raised her fist as if itching to loosen a few of his teeth. Here, watch it:

Omar’s not quitting, nor is she fleeing. In fact, she said, “I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win.” She added, “I’ve survived war, and I’m definitely going to survive intimidation or whatever these people think they can throw at me, because I’m built that way.”

I’m swooning.

I hate fights. I hate war. I hate strife. But they’re here, like ’em or not.

I ‘ll tell you who I do like, though. I like Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

01/27/2026
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Apollo 1, Artemis II

727 Words: Risks, Here & Above

Gamblers

As a kid, I never realized how fraught with peril space travel was until this date in 1967 when three NASA astronauts were killed in a capsule fire.

The irony was, their Apollo 1 spaceship was on the ground and they were merely rehearsing for their scheduled flight the next month.

“Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were the first American astronauts to die in service. I was 11 when the tragedy occurred. I’d been fascinated by NASA and America’s goal of landing on the Moon before the end of that decade. I remain a space geek to this day.

(L-R) Grissom, White, Chaffee.

BTW, if you’re space geeky in any way, here’s a very cool site. Hosted by Amy Shira Teitel, The Vintage Space is a lively, informative, and entertaining bunch of videos in which the Canadian historian and science writer riffs on Moon missions, orbital sojourns, interplanetary explorations, and scads of other science-y things. She presents her takes in way that reminds me of myself the first time I ever saw a Saturn V rocket at the Kennedy Space Center’s big hall. My jaw dropped and I wanted to babble on and on about it like…, well, like an 11-year-old kid. I was 56 at the time.

Anyway, NASA’s sending another crew toward the Moon in a few days. The Artemis II mission is due to launch on or some time after February 6th from Cape Canaveral. The trip’ll last 10 days and the route will take it around the Moon and back. The first Black man, the first woman, and the first non-American to travel to the Moon will be among the crew of four. They’re going to travel farther away from the Earth than any humans ever have.

The Artemis II Crew: (L-R) Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, Jeremy Hansen.

Space travel remains a risky business. In fact, some observers are worried about this mission because a previous Artemis test flight revealed some problems with the capsule’s re-entry heat shield. NASA says the issue has been addressed but, honestly, we won’t know until we know.

That’s the thing about crewed spaceflights. There have been 411 of them since Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth a single time aboard the Soviet Union’s Vostok 1 capsule in April, 1961. That may sound like a good number of tries, enough to work out any conceivable kinks in technology and planning, but it’s the equivalent of the number of times airplanes were flown before the year 1910. And you know how perilous air travel was for the first half century (at least) of its existence. In fact, poor old Yuri Gagarin died, not in space, but in a routine training flight aboard a MiG-15 fighter jet that crashed in 1968. At the time, the MiG-15 was one of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the world.

As for lunar missions, there have been a scant total of eight of them with humans aboard since Apollo 8 first circled the Moon in December 1968. One Apollo mission, 13 for you triskaidekaphobics, had to swing around the Moon and limp back home because an oxygen tank exploded. The crew made it back to Earth by the skin of their teeth. Traveling to the Moon is still a crapshoot.

Then again, to put things in perspective, 40,000-plus Americans die every year in car crashes even though everybody owns a car, hundreds of millions of them have been manufactured, and we drive (literally) trillions of miles a year.

Nevertheless, I still think my daily drive to Hopscotch Coffee is safer than the trip the Artemis II crew will take.

A Lucky Pup

Let’s get back down to Earth for a minute. As you know, temps in Indiana dropped well below zero last night. Hell, I was shivering even in my comfy home with the heat turned up to 72º and with two blankets covering me in bed.

I noticed a heartwarming post on social media this AM. It seems a lost pooch made scratching noises at the back door of some guy who lives in Indianapolis. The guy let the mutt in and posted his picture. Here he is:

How lucky is this doggo? I mean, he was probably hours — or even minutes — away from dying of hypothermia. Now he’s in a warm home for the nonce. The Indy guy is now sifting through pleas from people hoping to adopt the dog.

01/26/2026
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Alex Pretti, Gun Crazy

1071 Words: Gun Crazy

Several things, today.

Armed Guards at Kroger

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece about a woman who was uncomfortable with the presence of armed guards at the Seminary Square Kroger. She told me she was going to make her feelings known at the next meeting of the McDoel Gardens neighborhood association.

That meeting did indeed take place and the poor woman found, to her surprise, she was in a tiny minority. The preponderance of opinion, she tells me, was four-square in favor of the armed guards. In fact, she says, she almost felt “attacked,” so boisterous and intense was the reaction to her objections.

Seminary Square is not my Kroger but I stop in there on occasion on my way to the WFHB studios or the Book Corner after I’m finished writing at Hopscotch. The guards I see there, employees of a private security contractor, don’t often appear to be agile enough to chase or wrestle with any kind of troublemaker. That alone makes me wonder, if push comes to shove, if any of them might be more prone to haul out the artillery in response to a heated situation.

I generally catch the guard’s eye each time I leave the store (they stand, usually, near the windows in the front end). I nod and sometimes offer a salutation; they are, after all, human beings. And, I might add, they’re working women and men and my loyalty always rests with that class.

Speaking of class, it’s the homeless who camp in the little strip of parkland between Walnut and College avenues, adjacent to the grocery store, who comprise the class that many McDoel Gardens Neighbors want to be protected from. By artillery, if necessary.

Again, I understand a certain wariness — some of the habitués of the parkland appear hard and menacing. There are drugs and mental illness enough to make the strongest among us cautious when we encounter these folks. But I also feel a lot of people may be more afraid of becoming part of that class than they are of any individuals within it. That’s especially true these days with wealth inequality growing by the day and affordability more an aspiration than a reality. Hell, it’s becoming harder and harder to afford Bloomington’s rents. And if you want to buy a home, well, good luck; you’d better hope to win Powerball.

Perhaps the armed guards are a sort of symbolic bulwark against any possible slide into homelessness.

The woman couldn’t stop shaking her head as she told me about the meeting. She never thought she’d be so alone in her take on the situation. Then again, considering all that’s gone on around this holy land the last year or so, it shouldn’t have been all that shocking.

Fascist Fanboys

You think the ICE-stapo is scary? Try scrolling through the comments section under any Right Wing internet/social media post re: the killing of that Alex Pretti fellow in Minneapolis last week. Oh sure, they’re all twisting themselves into pretzels trying to vilify a person for carrying a gun after years — decades, for chrissakes — of advocating for everybody up to and including toddlers and convicted wife-beaters to carry guns at all times. And you’d have thought Pretti was rolling down the street in a tank, made in Venezuela, the way they describe the “threat” the man posed to Li’l Duce‘s semi-private police force.

I mean, all that is pretty much the same old boilerplate nonsense that the Right has peddled since…, oh, it seems since the beginning of time. But what’s especially alarming right now is the glee these commenters take in the mayhem, the violence, the death. These damaged males appear to be — dare I say it? — aroused by the killing. Sexually aroused. These guys get off on the videos of the Pretti killing as well as that of Renée Good.

Erik Larson, in his book In the Garden of Beasts, describes the everyday fascism people on the street exhibited in mid- and late-1930s Berlin. Pedestrians waiting at stoplights, Larson wrote, would spontaneously break into Hitler salutes and if someone didn’t raise his hand, he’d be set upon and beaten. Berliners could be walking down the street and the person coming the opposite way might Heil and salute. You’d have to respond in kind or suffer the consequences. Brownshirts and other lunkheaded sorts would be on patrol to make sure everybody saluted.

Fascism isn’t wholly a top-down phenomenon. It can only thrive if just plain folks help make it happen. Hell, at certain points, the last American ambassador to Germany learned, Hitler himself was a bit afraid of the rage, the seemingly uncontrollable viciousness of the people on the streets.

These American guys who salivate and even grow tumescent at the audio of a gunshot and the video of a resultant pool of blood are as terrifying as the Mad King himself. Maybe even more so because he’s old and unhealthy and likely not long for this world. They, though, seem to be evergreen.

The Headline

A bit of trivia. Gun Crazy was a 1950 film noir about a hapless kid, Bart, from some unnamed small town who’s been gaga over guns since he was a little boy. Despite this, he’s gentle and loath to harm any creature, even a rogue mountain lion that threatens the town. Nevertheless, he meets a circus sharpshooter, Annie, and falls madly in love with her. They marry and soon run out of money. So the two decide to rob gas stations and stores. The criminal life becomes addictive. Now they aim for bigger scores like banks and factory payrolls. It turns out Annie has no problem offing whoever gets in their way and, eventually, Bart…, well, I don’t want to ruin it for you.

Scene from Gun Crazy.

The movie is rightly considered one of the classics of the film noir era. One extended bank robbery scene is shot in a single take from a POV inside the getaway car. The scene ranks with the opening shot of Touch of Evil for masterful timing, direction and acting.

Anyway, the script for Gun Crazy was written by Millard Kaufman. If you’ve never heard of him it’s because there was no such person as Millard Kaufman, the pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, who at the time was blacklisted.

The Hollywood Blacklist. The last time (and not the first) this holy land nearly slipped into fascism.

01/16/2026
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Brain Crumbs

920 Words: Brain Crumbs

Just a few thoughts that’ve been rolling around on the cutting board of my mind.

THE PERIOD.

A whole bunch of young folks are up in arms over people’s usage of the heretofore innocuous period — yes, the period — in texts and emails and other communiques in use in what is turning out to be this godawful 21st century. There. I used a period to end that sentence. As I should. As I’ve been taught since kindergarten. As people have done in most written languages for thousands of years. Yet an entire generation not only doesn’t like it, they don’t want me to like it either.

I’ve been reading about this phenomenon for a while now. This sniffy snit expressed by the planet’s newbies, whose cerebra, to be sure, are not even fully developed yet but they feel they must ban that simple, straightforward, elegant graphic signal that an entire thought has been expressed. Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period?” The author tells us that once the smartphone arrived creatures under a certain age decided the period is a trigger, a micro-aggression, an act of non-physical violence. Then they discovered that those older than they hadn’t yet recognized the period as a blunt instrument.

Those benighted older folks, the author continues, actually began to knuckle under to a burgeoning embargo against the poor period. Such bans, he says, have “aged their way up into typical workplace communication….” Conceivably, the next email you send in a workplace context can earn you a good dressing down from the deans of discipline in the HR department. All because device-addicted Gen Z/Alphas have misinterpreted the smallest piece of punctuation extant.

I SMELL.

The Loved One and I not long ago started subscribing to streaming services after years of not having Netflix or Prime Video or even broadcast TV.

Now, I’ve known since childhood advertising’s whole purpose is to tell me how fucked up my home, car, clothing, food and drink choices, skin condition, hair…, hell, my entire existence is, but it all can be remedied, simply and magically, by buying whatever crap they’re peddling. You know, it’s hard to wake up in the morning so use Dial soap and it’ll feel as though you’ve gulped a methamphetamine and ecstasy combo with your coffee. Or only “concentrated” All can get ground-in dirt and grease out of your kid’s jeans.

Those simple problem/solution ads seem so quaint now. These days, even after you wash your clothes and take a shower, both your wardrobe and your body still reek. Commercials implying both interrupt every movie or documentary I flip to. A Tide ad shows a couple cooing over their fresh laundry and telling me how their clothes used to still stink after washing with that other brand. Same with a bath soap brand whose name I forget. The guy steps out of the shower, sniffs his pits, and grimaces. All I can think is what in the hell are these people doing in their lives? For pity’s sake, I’ve rolled in dog shit and gotten the odor out of my pants with a good washing. And I’ve bike messengered throughout Chicago’s downtown streets for ten hours straight on a 95-degree humid August day and emerged from my after-work shower smelling like a newborn baby. The people in these commercials? I can’t imagine what kind fo sewage-laden, toxic chemical morass they subject themselves and their wardrobe to.

HAIR-SPLITTING LIBERALS.

Even though I’m reasonably confident the whole Trump house of cards is teetering and likely will collapse in November, I have next to no confidence my side will fill in the gap.

Trump’s simple message from the get-go (besides his insistence that Brown and Black people are scary and poised to take over everything) was, The system’s broken and you’re getting screwed. That’s plain talk. And who can argue the truth of it? My side, sadly, has been incapable of plain talk for nearly a half century now. Simplicity works. Period. (There I go again, assaulting you with my punctuation — even typing it out loud!)

Not only do Democrats, progressives, liberals and such stripes lack the ability to speak plainly, they refuse to embrace any and all whose orthodoxy differs from theirs by the width of an atom. Comedian Neal Brennan has a good take on it. He says when someone comes up to a group of Republicans and says “I’m a Republican,” the group welcomes him. When a person approaches a group of liberals and says, “I’m a liberal,” the group eyes her suspiciously and says, “We’ll see.”

Take, for example, this: Lots of people, including me, have been equating ICE with the Gestapo. It works. It’s accurate. And it’s a gut-punch. Perfect, right? Wrong. A social media meme is going around featuring a woman — angry, finger-pointing, condemning — saying, essentially, how dare you equate ICE with the Gestapo. You should be equating it with the pre-Civil War slave patrols, dammit. Unspoken but implied is the condemnation of anything having to do with Jews (read, Netanyahu’s genocidal Israel) and forgetting that America always has been, still is, and forever will be a racist slave state. And every one of us who fails to remember that is as bad as Bull Connor. Reinhard Heydrich? Who’s he?

Yeah, Trump’s gonna fall but my side’ll be too busy picking nits with each other to put the pieces of America back together.

We are screwed.

01/14/2026
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MAGA

722 Words: Hate

I don’t usually traffic in memes and GIFs and all the other unimaginative, crowd-based horseshittery that the internet has drowned us in for the last couple of decades. If I’ve got something to say, I’ll say it. I don’t need some faceless ghostwriter making my argument for me.

So, while today’s post isn’t exactly one of those hit-and-run things everybody on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, X, and yes, even that virtual rest home, Facebook, posts, it is somebody else’s work. I’m not going to quote an expert or a serious researcher here. And that’s fine in this case because the author expresses a deep understanding that I’ve come to and have touched upon at various times since the Tea Party started making waves in 2009 and ’10.

It all was crystallized for me a few years ago when I read about some anonymous, extremely low-income, elderly White man being asked why he opposed the Affordable Care Act, even though he was sickly and in need of expensive medical treatments and was unable to get it without ACA. He said, I don’t care if I have to die, I’ll be damned if my tax dollars are gonna go to help somebody else out.

I couldn’t believe it at first when I read his response. Then again, of course I believe it. That’s why I’m calling back this excerpt/post that made the rounds a few years ago. It remains spot-on to this day. Think of it as me, pretending to be a lawyer, calling in a pinch hitter as it were, ala Johnny Cochrane tag-teaming with F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, and other celebrity shingles during the OJ Simpson murder trial. This time, though, the murder victims are many: truth, reason, democracy, equity, diversity, compassion, and so on. The accused perpetrators are all those people who love the hell out of Li’l Duce, even depite all the Mad King’s missteps, crimes, sins, insults, and programs that hurt them. Read on:

The question was posed, Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does? A lady named Bev answered it this way:

You all don’t get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.

They don’t give a shit what he does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals. That’s it. Period.

He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.

The fact that people act like it’s anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.

If you keep getting caught up in Why do they not realize this problem? and How can they still back Trump after this scandal? then you do not understanbd what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It’s Fuck liberals. That’s pretty much it.

Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable and they’ll explain some way that rationalizes it, that makes zero logical sense?

Because they’re not even keeping track of any coherent narrative. It’s irrelevant. Fuck liberals is the only relevant thing.

That’s why they just laugh at it all because you all don’t even realize they truly don’t give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.

It’s just a side mission story that doesn’t matter anyway.

It’s all just trivial details –the economy, health care, whatever.

Fuck liberals.

…

You’ve got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness. They believe strength is hatred of weakness.

And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred…. That’s what proves they’re strong, their passionate hatred for weakness.

Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness.

They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they’re in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance. To them, that an obvious sign of weakness.

Kindness equals weakness. Honesty equals weakness. Compromise equals weakness.

They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anytone who doesn’t hate weakness as much as they do.

They consider liberals to be weak people who are inferior, almost a different species….

That’s as good an explanation as I can find for a for a phenomenon that has baffled the bejesus out of me since June 16, 2015.

01/12/2026
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Breonna Taylor, Renee Good

687 Words: Not Now, Not Here

I had an urge to try something new on this global communications colossus. It’d be an irregular, repeating feature herein that I was thinking of calling somethings like “Good America.”

I wanted it to be a series of posts on triumphs, decencies, compassionate acts, inventions, societal advancements, cultural and artistic landmarks, and all other sorts of positive things happening in this holy land. We need, I reasoned, an alternative to the corporate and social media fixation on terrifying, enraging clickbaits. Go to CNN, for instance, and every single day, seemingly, there’s another virus or foodborne illness that’s spreading like wildfire. Or some heretofore ignored poisonous creature is now creeping toward our suburbs. Or our homes are toxic, our kids are suicidal, and our spouses are cheating on us.

All this on top of real looming perils like the thousands of nuclear weapons that still exist around the world, the runaway wealth disparity, the threat of AI, the simmering, nearly boiling atmosphere and ocean, and, of course, the transformation of the United States into Li’l Duce‘s personal fiefdom. (BTW: a George Will opinion piece in the Washington Post today is headlined A President Who Treats Washington Like His Chew Toy. Perfect.)

It all makes you want to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills.

I wanted, in other words, balance.

We — individuals and the collective gang of us — cannot survive, or at least thrive, living on a constant diet of panic and fury. We’re not all bad. This life isn’t hell. And, for all its rotten sins throughout history, not everything about the United States is evil.

I was going to start this feel-good thing this week.

Now it ain’t gonna happen.

Nope. No way. Not yet at least. Not after that heavily-armed, camouflaged, masked bunch of thugs gunned down Renee Good. Her murder is as abominable as that of Breonna Taylor and others, but since she was a pleasant-looking white woman, it’ll resonate within the hearts of many more “middle” Americans. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the tipping point for the Caligu-lite phenomenon.

Taylor (L) & Good

It was, after all, that 15 percent slice of “middle” Americans who put the Mad King over the top in the goddamnedest presidential election of your or my lifetime. Those non-MAGA-ists who were turned off by the whole Joe Biden is too old so let’s just crown Kamala Harris our  candidate and be damned with primaries and the will of the people. Well, they and the Dems who found repugnant Biden’s defense of Netanyahu’s scorched earth policy in Gaza and reacted by not voting at all. Li’l Duce‘s election was a perfect storm — okay, imperfect storm, but you know what I mean — that led to the dismantling of a federal government that operated since FDR’s New Deal for (sorta) the people. Now, there’s no more sorta. There’s no more pretense. America’s government is no longer in any way for you or me.

That 15 percent is now surprised and disappointed and they’re not only going to turn on Li’l Duce but also the entire Republican Party. (Of course, if you hadn’t foreseen what was going to happen in Trump Redux, you were, in James Carville’s words, “a goddamned idiot.”)

Yeah, I’m vibing that the Trump Magic Show is on the way to being cancelled. Nevertheless, the present moment remains ugly with his private ICE-stapo flooding Dem-controlled cities and all the cultural, scientific, artistic and flat out compassionate programs and departments of the federal government being annihilated. Citizens are being killed in the streets. The corporate media have been leashed. The internet has been flooded with goons and loons. And the truth has been paltered with so much it almost doesn’t exist anymore.

No, this is no time to play the positive card. That’d be a lie, and I leave lying to the likes of Noem, Hegseth, Miller, and all the rest of the lickspittlers who work for the Ugliest American President Ever.

Maybe I’ll revive the idea some time down the road. But I can’t find it in my heart to crow about a Good America right now.

01/05/2026
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Homeless, Kroger, Security Guards

884 Words: Armed and Irksome

I dunno about you but I’m one of those guys who detest the sight of armed guards everywhere I go.

I know, I know, we humans can be a bunch of rowdy jerks on too many occasions and somebody has to flash the artillery at us to keep us from tearing the building apart. Still, I don’t like being under the watchful eye of pistol- and taser-packing lugs.

Here in Bloomington, we don’t experience too much of the random violence and threats thereof that people in, say, New York or Chicago have to endure every day. Back when I was living in Chicago, I used to frequent a 24-hour taco joint on Blue Island Avenue, deep in the heart of disputed gang turfs. Around that neighborhood, the La Raza (Folks), Latin Counts (People), and Party People (Folks) gangs wrestled for supremacy, all too often firing automatic pistols at each other in hopes of convincing the other guys of the error of their ways. Notice the Folks-People descriptors? Pretty much all American street gangs identify with one or another uber-organization. In Los Angeles, gangs are either Bloods or Crips. In Chicago, they’re either Folks or People.

Anyway, I’d often go into that Pilsen-neighborhood taco joint at, say, two in the morning for an after-carousing, late-night snack. At the door, I’d have to stand with my arms and legs spread and get patted down by a couple of heavily-armed, uniformed guards to make sure I wasn’t packing. I understood why it had to be done but I didn’t have to like it.

Similarly, when I’d go to Roosevelt High School basketball games up in the Albany Park neighborhood, I’d have to remove my vintage 1908-style Cubs baseball cap because caps weren’t allowed in the gym. Again, armed guards enforced the rule because the gangs in that neck of the woods wore caps of different colors and at different angles on their heads to demonstrate where their loyalties lay. Should, for instance, a blue-capped punk run into a red-capped punk in the gym, fists might fly.

Again, I hated being told what to do by armed guards even though it had to be.

The Kroger at Seminary Square here in Bloomington is being patrolled by armed guards. Now I know every big supermarket has one or two undercover shoppers lurking around, keeping an eye on likely shoplifters. I get it. Some people filch steaks because they’re hungry. Others, because they’re hooked on the thrill of it. Either way, the store doesn’t want to lose too much to shrinkage (and not the “Seinfeld” definition of the term, either).

The Seminary Square store is commonly referred to as the Kro-ghetto, a pejorative I hate. Especially as it contrasts with the moniker for the Kroger on the east side of town, known as the Kro-gucci. Ick. Ick to the point of retching.

What’s the need for armed guards at a grocery store that’s not stuck dab in the middle of a gangbanger shooting war? Is shrinkage there so pervasive that shoplifters must be subdued with lethal force? Have there been mass rumbles in the potato chip aisle? Have innocent bystander grocery cart-pushers been mugged and molested repeatedly?

I don’t know.

A woman I know who lives in McDoel Gardens around that Kroger in question tells me the neighborhood association is planning to meet sometime next week to discuss the matter. She asked me what I think they should do. She fears the n-hood assoc. will drag its feet and not do anything of consequence about the situation. I told her she, as a private citizen, should write letters to both the store manager and to Kroger’s corporate offices in Cincinnati asking why the troops have to be deployed. She seemed to like that idea.

The Kroger at Seminary Square sits right next to a small strip of parkland between Walnut and College avenues that’s been a locus for homeless encampments for years. Every once in a while, the Bloomington police sweep through the little park and roust the squatters, sometimes even confiscating what few possessions they own. I went through the park a few years ago, looking to interview people for a radio story I was doing about homelessness. I came to understand that the folks who squat there are a hard bunch. There’s enough drugs and menace and, frankly, mental illness to go around. Every once in a while, one or another denizen will take umbrage at something and start swinging a knife or an old hammer at somebody else. Blood is drawn, the story makes the Herald-Times, and everybody tsk-tsks about the homeless problem. Two days later, the incident is forgotten.

Perhaps the Kroger store manager wants to make sure the Seminary Square park milieu doesn’t migrate into the frozen food section.

This being a college town, there’s no shortage of earnest young critics who demand something be done about and for the homeless. As if there’s some acknowledged solution to a problem that has bedeviled every society since, I assume, the first cities sprang up in Egypt or the Fertile Crescent or what is now China.

Maybe the armed guards at Kroger are necessary. I’d be interested to learn how the store and its corporate parent justify it all.

Even if they do, I won’t like it.

12/29/2025
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2026

Curiouser and Curiouser

2026. I dunno. It just doesn’t sound right. Not like 1968, 1979, 1984, 1991, or 2020. You know, years that sounded like…, well, years. This coming annum, 2026, would more appropriately be the identification number of a safe deposit box in a big bank.

But, that’s me. Being a writer who, for the last 43 years has striven to craft articles, stories, and posts that flow, that sound musical — dare I say poetic? — I’ve always felt writing should be as close to a song as possible, w/o getting all sappy and melodramatic about things.

2026 sounds like something went down the wrong pipe. It wouldn’t fit well in a poem. Sure, you could rhyme it, but there’s a hell of a lot more to poetry than that.

My writing has rhythm and meter, tone and mood, alliteration and repetition, rhyme and figurative language. At least I hope so. I mean, I try. Whether I succeed or not is up to you.

Me? I like my stuff. But the trick in being a writer, a poet, a painter, a songwriter, or a sculptor is finding that Goldilocks spot wherein my work that I like, you’ll like too, without me losing my idiosyncrasy

Anyway, we’re going to be stuck with 2026 beginning Thursday at midnight.

What to expect?

I know for the next ten months, several tens of millions of people and I will be crossing our fingers that American voters come to their senses and start throwing Li’l Duce‘s bootlickers in Congress and the various statehouses out on their pasty posteriors. Now, the expectation that any grouping of Americans, from voters to TV show watchers to subscribers to Kim Kardashian‘s or Andrew Tate‘s verbal emesis platforms, coming to its senses ranks vanishingly low on the probability scale. Still, I can hope, can’t I?

Expect? Nah. I learned some ten years ago not to expect anything. The election in 2016 of Caligu-lite proved that the most ridiculous, unforeseen, whacked-out thing could become a reality. Expectation? Hell, not in this internet age. Russian bots, conspiracy theorists, drunken uncles, the proudly unread and uninformed, and wannabe fascist strategists all will make sure a hefty mass of insomniac clickers and YouTube communicants will think, and believe, the wrong thing.

And that would lead me to my main prediction for the year 2026. There will be at least one — and probably several — unforeseen new beliefs that would sound so demented now but, in twelve months’ time, will have become as normal as considering the January 6th Insurrection “a day of love.”

Honestly, who, 20 years ago, would have predicted a significant swath of the 21st century American populace would subscribe to the flat-earth theory? Or the moon-landing hoax theory (oh yeah, Kim Kardashian’s big on this one)? Or that Joe Rogan would be seen as anything other than a clown?

By the way, Rogan, who endorsed the Mad King in the 2024 election, suddenly is shifting gears, slamming the current president for his post-Rob Reiner murder comments, for his Epstein Files stance, for his ICE-army invasions of American cities, and for the C-in-C’s overall mental health. Rogan, not alone among America’s top media influencers, cares more about clicks than anything else. His switcheroo on Li’l Duce clearly demonstrates the popular mood is swinging away from our holy land’s Cult leader-in-Chief.

So, what will this coming year’s new deranged beliefs be? Some possibilities:

  • Bill Gates’s microchips, embedded in vaccines, are designed to block human fertility, thereby drastically reducing the world’s population.
  • The Illuminati makes a comeback.
  • Extraterrestrial aliens warned NASA to keep its hands off the moon, effectively ending the Apollo program.
  • The Loch Ness Monster makes a comeback.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has not been in the news of late, has been kidnapped by MAGA extremists.
  • Phrenology makes a comeback.
  • Warren Buffett falsely claims to be a junk food junkie because he owns stakes in numerous candy, fast food, and processed food companies and wants you to get addicted.
  • The John Birch Society makes a comeback.
  • An extinct race of giants built the Pyramids and Stonehenge, among other structures.
  • The Yeti makes a comeback.
  • The Deep State secretly pushes performers to write and sing love songs so that there will be more people born to pay taxes.
  • Eugenics makes a comeback.

You think I’m being funny? Every single one of the lunatic ideas mentioned above already is embraced by a lot of people. One of them, maybe even two or more, may well become viral in the coming year.

Happy 2026!

12/27/2025
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The 21st Century

Our Dumb 21st Century

(With apologies to the people at The Onion.)

Well, whaddya know? We’re now a full one-quarter of the way through the 21st century. Hah! I remember thinking about the coming century when I was a little kid. I even worked out how old I’d be when we’d hit the year 2000. At the time, I thought 44 years old was ancient.

Now, of course, I see 44-year-olds as punk kids.

Just like pretty much every other imaginative, The Day the Earth Stood Still-loving borderline juvenile delinquent, I was expecting moon colonies, personal jet-packs, mass transit helicopters zipping through the skies, and really cool silver clothing.

The 21st Century.

Back in my own callow youth-ness, I figured 2000’d be the first year of the new century/millennium. Now, natch, I’m more persnickety (more anal?) and will argue that it was actually 2001 that kicked off this epoch. Ergo, we’ve been 21st century-ites for 25 years now.

Think back to the first quarter of the 20th century. For pity’s sake, those alive then had witnessed a world war (the first of two — sheesh!) that killed about 20 million people, the invention of the airplane, the crazy-wild spread of cars, and the very advent of radio and telephones. They saw the development of tanks (for warfare) and the aerial bombing of civilians. Their world turned modern, seemingly in the snap of a finger, with the invention of the escalator, the safety razor, the vacuum cleaner, the air conditioner, the neon light, Corn Flakes™, Bakelite™, Cellophane™, the assembly line, the crossword puzzle, the bra, stainless steel, the toaster, the Band-Aid™, the robot, frozen food, and television. Einstein even modernized our view of the universe.

What have we seen during this past quartile?

I got to thinking about all this when, yesterday, I received the latest edition of Nate Silver’s “Silver Bulletin” newsletter. Silver’s the stats and probabilities geek who made a huge name for himself predicting (and every once in a while mis-predicting) elections. His latest missive is titled “The 51 Biggest American Political Moments of the 21st Century.” Without looking, I immediately thought the three tops would be the election of Barack Obama, the rise of Donald Trump, and the 9/11 attacks with their resultant wars and oppressive, paranoiac legislation.

Honestly, don’t these three phenomena rank among the very biggest political moments in our entire history? Surely they’re as weighty as Marbury v. Madison, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the decision by Roosevelt to supply Great Britain and the USSR with war materials long before the rest of the country came to the realization we’d be fighting for our lives against the Axis?

I’d love to say the Li’l Duce presidencies will be fleeting footnotes in our history, but they won’t. His dismantling of the New Deal/Great Society state is as earth-shaking as the institution of either of those human-centric efforts. Future historians will say FDR was the great visionary, he and LBJ the great implementors, and Caligu-lite the snotty brat who tore the whole thing down.

So, let’s see what Silver thinks are the top political moments of our no-longer new century. Here’s his Top 10:

  • 10: November 3, 2020 — Joe Biden elected president.
  • 9: November 5, 2024: Donald Trump wins election for a non-consecutive term.
  • 8: September 15, 2008 —Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
  • 7: March 13, 2020 — Biden declares COVID a national emergency.
  • 6: March 20, 2003 — US invades Iraq.
  • 5: November 4, 2008 — Barack Obama elected president.
  • 4: November 7, 2000 — Florida recount after no winner declared between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
  • 3: December 12, 2000 — Bush v. Gore.
  • 2: September 11, 2001: 9/11 attacks.
  • 1: November 8, 2016: Trump wins presidency.

By the way, I wouldn’t figure a numbers monkey like Silver not recognizing that decades, centuries, and millennia begin on the ’01 year, not the ’00 one. Whatever.

Anyway, a number of Silver’s items are so related they should be consolidated. And, yeah, the Florida election fiasco and Bush v. Gore indeed were monumental. Especially since the Democrats chickened out of pressing the issue to the max. It was at that moment the party set its course in the coming century/millennium as a weak, ineffective, sobbing, whining, finger-wagging bunch of sophomore dorm pretend radicals. Maybe one day the party of my youth and tradition will rise again. It may even be this coming fall. But I ain’t holdin’ my breath.

So much for politics.

How about inventions and techonology, you know, the kind of things our great-great grandparents stood slack-jawed in wonder at a hundred years ago?

Okay, here goes, in no particular order:

  • The Smartphone.
  • Social Media.
  • Artificial Intelligence.
  • Renewable energy.
  • The death of broadcast and print media.
  • The completion of the Human Genome Project.
  • Wikipedia.
  • Skype, Zoom, etc.
  • Streaming Media.
  • Multimodal Biometrics.

All remarkable, sure. But none really is as dramatic as great-gramps staring in stunned silence at a biplane passing overhead, then asking, “How do they keep that thing up there?” And, to this day, none of us layfolk can adequately explain why E equals mc squared. Hell, I can’t even figure out how to superscript the 2!

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