Indiana Oh Indiana

I wonder often how and why our nation divides itself into its ideologies of Democrat versus Republican. That division is, to a great extent, symbolic in its views and energized by mountains of presumption along with an almost war-like determination to separate rather than unite us. There seems to be no fine line between our stereotypes of the Red and the Blue. As a rule, most of us seem programmed to resent or even dislike the “other” color. We seem less and less willing or capable of focusing upon what we share or have in common. The adrenalin rush of self-righteous indignation seems just too enjoyable as a national boxing match so that we wear our prejudices like shining armor instead of the puerile, playground nonsense it really is.

This divide is becoming more and more pronounced and much edgier to a point at which the extreme and purely emotional, swaggering nonsense of people like Marjorie Taylor Green blindside us with a level of stupidity that stuns many and provides sick humor with racial slurs that take us back a hundred and fifty years.

The egomania of some in Congress has become more newsworthy in the media than our shared needs as a country. I cannot understand why there seems to be so little modesty and common sense left that the American political arena begins to resemble a playground devoted to childish insults and theatrical rubbish, instead of actual grown-up behavior and sacrifice that get something done for the good of the nation. Washington D.C. has become a childish playground for too many in Congress who haven’t yet seemed to grow up enough to realize that a show of ego as a contest needs to mature enough to make our nation a better place on the world stage.  JB

Though Donald Trump is no longer president of our nation, his face and voice linger menacingly on almost every TV channel and in other media. He seems to have consumed way too much of America’s political oxygen through his outrageously exaggerated and unending tabloid messages of political nonsense and through an ego more ridiculous than those of Emperor Nero, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler, combined.

There are too many in our nation who are drawn into what are Trump’s phony display of “strength” that is really nothing more than a terrifyingly inflated disregard for everyone but himself. Waiting for this man (who depends upon inflating doom and gloom for his gullible base) to show even the tiniest bit of compassion is like leaving the porch light on for Jimmy Hoffa. He confronts the tiniest bit of advice or criticism with a rage that renders his complexion even more orange than it was.

It will be interesting to see how history books portray this megalomaniac, who has managed to sit for way too long atop a mountain of lies that have made him richer only in terms of money. The man hasn’t a shred of integrity, which makes his embracing a Bible or American flag more insincere and disgusting. There is room in his life for nothing more than his monstrous, decaying ego and terrifying disregard for the law and other human beings.  JB

We all age and mature at different speeds. My having turned seventy-seven this week has been one in a long series of experiences involving both mind and body. Aging happens so gradually that we don’t usually notice the increased effort required to blow out the candles as the years pass, and, after age fifty, our lungs get a bit crankier and whisper, “Hey, what was THAT all about?” in that progressive climb toward our golden years. I do remember that thirty was a milestone, and after blowing out the candles on that birthday, hearing one of my older friends saying, “It’s all uphill from here on, pal.”

America is a country where the terrors, large and small, of aging seem to be in at least a third of television commercials and magazine ads, so that life can become a competition to delay decrepitude for as along as we can, while we view ourselves in mirrors, sometimes dimming the lights a bit to hide any signs of infirmity in those extra wrinkles and sagging cheeks (the ones on our faces and the other ones farther down).

I do resent the widespread presumption that, because we have silver or white hair, we are automatically compromised mentally and physically in the eyes of too many around us. As someone who taught high school classes for thirty-five years, I can say with some confidence that if you want to work with or criticize someone who is physically and intellectually compromised, then help teenagers everywhere. They need all the aid we can provide in eschewing, among other things, those sharp steel facial inserts that can be quite dangerous  during electrical storms.

“Middle age is when you’re faced with two temptations, and you choose the one that will get you home at 9 o’clock.” Ronald Reagan

In any case, aging is relative and can affect people in many different ways. The one advantage I already relish about aging is that, as a rule, “younger” people (those forty to sixty) will generally open doors for me to go in or out, based, I believe, upon my having silver hair. If I have my cane with me, I own any space that doesn’t already have someone in a wheelchair.  JB

“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.” Marjorie Barstow

Florida’s Governor Desantis is a self-righteous bully. A graduate (with honors) of both Harvard and Yale, he is certainly not a stupid man, though wisdom and intellect don’t always come in the same package. He knows his aged and conservative voters, while playing cunningly to the gallery concerning issues of race and sexual identity with unilateral precision, as though his personal time machine can take all of us back to the year 1950. The difference, however, concerns not The Red Scare of that era, but a terror that too many have, regarding race relations that, for the Desantis’s flock, signals what too many fear is the possible ebbing of white power, which our governor seems to see as the end of civilization as HE wants it to remain.

His interference in public education (including college) smacks of Russian oligarchy and unilateral control of what is taught and learned. The imagined threat of any remaining balance of power among Floridians seems to terrify him as though his royal crown of authority might somehow be compromised.

The issue, for me, is that there is little, if any, balance of power between the public and our government officials, namely Ron Desantis, instead of discussion (with others besides the governor’s pre-programmed toy soldiers). That authoritarianism is becoming more terrifyingly popular, not just in Florida, but throughout the nation.  JB

OK, I need to vent (whine) today about the weather down here in South Florida. My friends and family up north already think (know) that, having lived here now for almost ten years, I’ve become something of an adult version of a spoiled brat when it comes to climate. January here in Fort Lauderdale is generally in the 70’s during the day, dropping at night into the sixties or upper fifties. There is never any sleet or snow here, but after folks become accustomed to this pattern, low to mid-forties can create a panic when our furnaces groan back into use, and fireplaces with their usual fake logs suddenly require real ones with actual flames, and I don’t mean for roasting marshmallows.

I’m looking now out windows to see palm trees with their branches wafting in the wind like enormous plumes. Even they seem shocked by the drop in temperature, as though waving for help.

At this moment, I’m sitting in my favorite wingchair with a wool blanket over my legs (perfect picture for a Christmas card). Situations are always relative to experience or to what we’ve become accustomed, so I suspect that someone from up north reading my little diatribe might compare it to that of a billionaire losing twenty dollars in the stock market. Mea culpa… and BRRRR are my responses.  JB

Political rivalry can create a polarization so extreme, that one’s head can swim in the vitriol created by both sides. I’d like to step back for a moment from my personal political inclinations to look at the panorama of slings and arrows being used by both Republicans and Democrats.

Fox News and MSNBC are two examples of the extremes people support in trying to put over their candidates for president. There is good and bad in both. It’s easy to become almost hypnotized by one side or the other if you don’t try to get on some kind of middle ground, but it seems that both parties are blaming each other for every hangnail in the nation. It’s a time of scapegoats. I do believe in fact-checking, as long as that research is done in a non-partisan way (if there is such a thing). I hate political equivocation, which in both parties manages to carve away just enough truth to create views so prejudiced that the truth could win a prize for the best costume at any masquerade party, fooling anyone who isn’t extra cautious about where the facts lie. Stretching the truth seems to be very popular this season, complementing outright lies so outrageous that many voters, their brains having become anvils accustomed to being pounded by partisan ads, seem too stunned to know the difference anymore.

I am most suspicious of those whose acidic comments are more personal than political, comments cloaked in silly rhetoric sloping toward utter absurdity. These are the people who come off as being just more of the same self-righteous, pompous windbags we have all heard for way too long on the extreme right and the extreme left. Finding that sane balance somewhere between is harder than it has ever been before. That doesn’t stop my longing to find a middle ground, where reason prevails in terms of cooperation aimed at getting things done for the country itself instead of for a particular party with its power plays, vain images of personal glory, and the same old intellectual and partisan constipation in congress from which the country has been suffering for much too long. JB

The past five years in American politics have been different from most others of the 20^th Century in their absence of courteous formality and restraint, creating a seemingly one-way street with all names displaying the same individual…Donald J. Trump, whose image in the media has shown an egomania that seems to suck in all the oxygen that would normally be shared in rational discussion and debate. The results are tantrums generally reserved for and sometimes expected from infants with diapers that need changing. The constant pontificating and bullying by this crude fraudster have convinced too many weak-minded and unquestioning worshipers that slander and ugly lies can win the day if they are non-stop enough that no one can keep up with them. Civility, grace, truth and mutual respect are reserved for the “suckers” in Trump’s mode of thought.

The result of this man’s lies (latest count: over 35,000 documented untruths over the past five years) is a state of confusion or self-righteous comfort for the many who never question his motives or even his sanity. He’s like a playground bully who believes that rules and laws are only for suckers. Now that he’s being more systematically cornered by truths that appear daily in the media, he has become an even uglier caricature of himself, lashing out with responses from his fountain of lies in order to addle the more naïve and desperate, who still believe he gives a damn about them. They continue to admire the rawness of his rhetoric, which they mistake for truth instead of the sham that covers his fear and revulsion of his ever having to face any unifying message of honesty or sense of community that isn’t under his thumb.

History will have an interesting retrospective about this man and his monumental evasions of truth, compassion, reason, and hope for such a long time that it has brought about an ugly and unnecessary national division, the intensity of which we, as a nation, have not seen since the 1860’s.  JB

I’ve never liked stereotyping groups or individuals, despite the wonderland of opportunities nowadays, especially in politics, but the time comes when, if I don’t let go of some of this angst, my brain will undergo a serious hemorrhage  The past few years of our political civil war between Democrats and Republicans have released verbal harpoons from both sides on a daily basis, as though we were kids in a cutthroat playground competition to prove who doesn’t have cooties.

Most of our rancor has come from opposite views of the same man, Donald Trump. I know people whose faces either light up with that “Welcome to Fantasy Island” look or deflate like a tire losing air when Trump’s name is mentioned. It’s truly extraordinary. The Trumpsters believe everything he says, despite his history in piles of broken lie detectors that simply exploded when he even went near them. Others, who are sceptics like me, whose eyes wince when even his name is uttered, have only tiny expectations based upon past behavior of this walking symbol of untruth. Trump seems to believe he is exempt from obeying any laws, which he believes are meant only for peons like the rest of us. His egomania takes all the oxygen from any room he occupies, but his loyal, clueless flocks of followers seem to accept or even enjoy groveling before someone for whom law, manners, compassion, empathy and basic respect are simply unnecessary, except for other megalomaniacs like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jon Un, since Trump sees other people in general as mere servants to do his bidding without question. His lecherous moral bankruptcy seems only to elevate him in a world he believes is actually his alone and where humility and compassion are weaknesses not to be practiced by those who are worshiped. The wonder of it is that his followers see him as a tower of strength instead of the sniveling crybaby he really is. Liz Cheney is a much stronger and more rational person than he. So is his niece, Mary. Trump sees everyone around him as his personal servant, expected to mind him each time he barks.

The comedy, however, of this egomaniac is unintentional on his part. The most terrifying thing is that his worshipers believe everything he says, despite his actual history as a compulsive liar. Those same people can become another mob like the one he inspired on that fateful day January 6, 2021. All his gullible worshipers need is for him to embrace an American flag or hold up a Bible (even if it’s upside down) to intoxicate them with his holy presence. He is, in their eyes, higher even than their Jehovah instead of the huckster the rest of us know he is. My great fear now is that those same people, bewitched by Trump, will become that mob they were before if law and order attempt to make him pay for his crimes against the nation of which the mobs evidently no longer feel a part. The January 6^th Committee has yet to reveal the information it has collected, so the facts will show themselves soon, though those truths may not be what his starry-eyed mobs of unquestioning zombies wish to hear. God help us all.  JB

The sharp political division in our country has been growing over the past five years until it has reached the definition of a vast chasm between both sides in which vitriol of the vilest kind has been hurled back and forth to a point of no return. We seem, as a nation, to be on the verge of returning socially and politically to the early 1860’s.

Self-righteous ardor is exchanged daily and puffed up even further by news media that see it as their true bread and butter. The orange man still has a huge audience in his star-struck worshipers in whose eyes he can apparently do no wrong, which takes me back to a comment he made before he was even elected, in which he claimed that if he shot and killed any passerby on 5^th Avenue, he would get away with it, because no one would arrest or even question him. At the time, I thought it a characteristic example of his poor taste in attempted humor, not the reality that ensued.

The rage in many voters was already seething below the surface even before the orange guy appeared on television, but he knew well the buttons he needed to press in order to hoodwink half our nation into its current bowing and scraping posture, one in which he has adoring fans questioning nothing he says or does, his monstrous ego consuming everything and everyone in the fantasy land of Maga World.

January 6 was only a sample of his insatiable and blind lust for power and absolute control, despite the necessary ocean of lies upon which it had to sail. The result is that reason, logic, and unbiased analysis have become mere incumbrances to his determination to be crowned and enthroned again.

We are now in a world where an increasing number of passive worshipers exist and thrive upon bowing to tyranny. We are not the only nation to be experiencing this scary phenomenon of lazy passivity, which I think of as social and intellectual sloth, where bowing to megalomania  of one despot is indolent but easy in terms of no longer having to do any thinking for oneself..

Again, history shows us the inevitable result of bending to the strong will of dictators like Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia, where too many were fooled but who realized and acted upon the truth much too late. Being gullible is not an option. Another round with the orange man in the White House could bring about another blur of mass confusion in deciding which god is to be worshiped…the one in heaven or the one in The White House.  JB

I generally watch and listen, with some degree of interest, to the decisions, actions, and shenanigans from our nation’s capital, and how those edicts are intended to affect the lives of all of us in every town, city and state of the union.

Many or most of those decisions and laws rarely funnel their way down to my neighborhood, my street, or my house. I vote in all local and national elections with the hope that our voices will be heard as majorities and minorities that show that all our hopes and voices matter, despite the extraordinary national division between our political parties over the past five years, as though China and Russia had created that separation in the most potent and stultifying ways.

I still believe in democracy over any other form of government, but I often feel now that I’m residing on a planet in some other solar system, where my interplanetary telephone is out of order. The result sometimes is that the years seem to be rolling by with greater speed so that, as Jeanne Robertson says, “When I lay my head on the pillow at night, I can hear myself wrinkling.”

The consequence is that though I will always vote in every election until my “upper floor” is no longer furnished, I won’t have such emotional reactions to things that won’t be changing life in my own town or in my own house. Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, where you stop your story.”   JB