About an hour ago, I was walking out of my office for the day.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 10, 2019
There was a man what I believe was his teenage son hanging a small sign they made outside my office (we let people leave well wishes on our wall).
Astonishingly, his sign read: “Trump supporters for Ocasio-Cortez.” pic.twitter.com/IjVKbvetEI
I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
Assholery, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Somebody, sometime.
Pretty much from the start, I’ve felt that the Democratic obsession with the Trump Russian Collusion was a mistake, the Democrat’s great white whale. It seemed to me to be just like the Republican’s obsession over Clinton’s blowjob. I just don’t see where the crime is. By crime, I mean a real, provable crime, like a tape saying “I’ll give you the nuclear codes if you help me win the election”, not some phony charge of Collusion to commit a crime that didn’t end up happening. My thinking was that anything less would seem like the Democrats were just hounding the President and would leave the country in disarray and might even help Trump.
My first reaction to the Mueller Report is that I was right (isn’t that always our first reaction). There was no smoking gun and it would be politically detrimental to the Democrats to Impeach Trump not just because it would go nowhere in the Senate but, also, because it will be hard to prove any real crime to a Trump backer and it would only result in more public discord. Then Elizabeth Warren said she read the report and he should be impeached and I am questioning my assumptions.
Listening to Warren, I realize I have been thinking politically which, ironically, is exactly what I have been so critical of Democrats for. My criticism is that they are using Focus Groups to make policy, rather than voting in alignment with what they say are their beliefs and ideals. At best, they are voting for what the Focus Group told them somebody else would like. However, in reality, they don’t know what that mythical other would like because the problem with Focus Groups is that they tend to validify the focus group organizer’s thesis and that results in a distorted, second-hand opinion in a time when people are hungry for authenticity. If Trump is really breaking a law or a bunch of laws, the authentic position, the honest position, the moral position, the good American position, is to try to impeachment him even if the Senate doesn’t convict. The argument I keep hearing against impeachment is that the Republican Senate will not convict anyway so why try, but the Senate is not who needs to be convinced, the American People are who need to be convinced and, if there is real evidence of criminal behavior, Impeachment will do the convincing.
What I like about Warren is that she has read the report and thinks it shows criminal behavior so, go for impeachment. What worries me is that the position that Speaker Pelosi is taking is the worst thing to do. She seems to be saying that the President has committed real crimes but he shouldn’t be impeached because “He’s Just Not Worth It”. But, Impeachment shouldn’t be about Trump, it should be about the Country and, if he has committed real crimes, isn’t the Country worth it? On the other hand, if the President of the United States is just a nasty, mean, vindictive, asshole that we are embarrassed about but is not doing anything illegal as President, the Democrats should drop it and move on.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. Now the Lorraine Motel is the National Civil Rights Museum and Martin Luther King Jr. has a holiday named after him, but then, in 1968, King was not a popular figure with white people. He was a trouble maker, as Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country.
Sunday afternoon, it feels like a month ago, Michele and I drove from Mountain View Arkansas to Memphis Tennessee. We both were feeling punk, Michele with a head cold and me with a chest cold so we ended up doing not much. This was our third time in Memphis, the first time I didn’t even know about the National Civil Rights Museum, the second time, we didn’t have time, so it was on top of our list this time and we spent most of Monday there. It is not a happy place, partially because it is the site of a murder but more so because it tells the African-American story from the African-American side and that side of the story paints a picture that is not as benign as our whitewashed version.
I’ve written and rewritten these couple of paragraphs several times, mostly talking about the African-American journey and this museum. The journey has been almost impossibly hard and the museum doesn’t try to gloss over that; we are only about a third of the way through the museum when slavery ends and Jim Crow starts. This museum is terrific at reminding us of the astounding journey that African-Americans have taken in a world that has done its damndest to hold them back. I suggest the National Civil Rights Museum to anybody traveling through Memphis.
We went in to see my Cardiologist today and I am in much better shape than I was heretofore told. I am not in Afib!
When I went to my cardiologist, the first thing she did was have me take an EKG. The EKG showed that my heartbeat is normal – and strong – although with a slight additional blip. It is an APC of some sort; APC stands for a group of Atrial Premature Complexes, which doesn’t sound very good to me but, according to Healthline; Premature beats are common and usually harmless. What I think happened is that, after I was shocked, my heart returned to normal, the cardiologist watched my heart on the display for a couple of minutes, she saw that it was normal – with the APC – and went out to the waiting room to tell Michele. She then went back to her office. Back in my room, the computer told the nurse that I was in Afib and, knowing that the trace on the screen wasn’t entirely normal, passed it on to me and my cardiologist. It may not be optimal normal, but my heart is no longer in Afib, apparently, no matter what the computer says.
I’m not going to elaborate because it is dinner time and I want to get this out ASAP. To be continued….
Meanwhile, back in Eureka Springs Arkansas, we have decided to drive about an hour to Branson Missouri. Originally we were going to spend a couple of nights in Eureka Springs and then move on to Branson in Missouri but we liked Eureka Springs and didn’t think we would like Branson so we changed our plans to make Branson a day trip. Driving to Branson, the Ozarks seem subtly different than they had a couple of days earlier, they were are starting to come alive. The trees were starting to bud and, here and there, were blooming white-flowered trees. We were told were wild flowering pears and it seemed almost impossible to capture their vibrant burst of life in a photograph. Going roughly northeast, we dropped out of the mountains, drove across a valley rich with farms and large industrial chicken facilities, then back into the mountains just after we entered Missouri. Usually, on a driving trip, I drive and Michele takes all the photo while we are on the road, on this trip I’m doing all the photography,
Before we got to Branson, Michele, who had been doing her homework the night before, said that our best bet for lunch in Branson wasn’t actually in Branson, she suggested lunch at the College of the Ozarks just outside of town. The College of the Ozarks bills itself as a Christian College and it does not charge tuition, requiring that its students pay for their education through working on campus. One of the things they do is work in, raise and grow the organic food for, and run the restaurant where we had lunch. It was good, not great – they didn’t have tacos but, otherwise, it was pretty standard forward-thinking fare, including roasted Brussel sprouts with crispy kale chips, shredded parmesan, fresh lemon and sweet garlic aioli – but good and the college kids who were doing everything from cooking to waiting were charming. BTW, while this is a Christian School, its courses include BIO 323 – Evolution and Population Biology As an aside, I used to think that, as I have gotten older, all young adults sort of look the same age. I don’t think that anymore, these kids were not the same as a waiter in her/his late 20s. The way they carried themselves, even the way they stood, was different. End aside.
I probably should start by saying that we really didn’t give Branson a fair chance. We drove in past the new Convention Center, parked the car, walked along the river – or lake as they kept calling it, looking it up, I found that it is an abandoned meander, so I guess it is technically an oxbow lake – walked back through a shopping area between the old downtown and the lake, and drove home. We didn’t go to the strip along 76 Country Boulevard or the Titanic Museum or much of anything, really. I looked at one local marquee and didn’t know anybody except The Oak Ridge Boys and we weren’t particularly interested in the Branson Murder Mystery Dinner Show or the Absolutely Country, Definitely Gospel Dinner.
After our stroll around the shopping arcade, we drove back to Eureka Springs for the night. The next day, we spent a bright, sunny, and warm morning at the Diversity Celebration in ES and a dark, rainy, and cold afternoon driving through the Buffalo River Watershed – BTW, the Buffalo River is the first river to be designated a National Wild River and is managed by the National Park Service – to get to Mountain View Arkansas for the night.
Mountain View looked like a nice town but it was Sunday and everything was closed which we sort of expected when we made plans to layover there on our way to Memphis. Mountain View is also the home of The Ozark Folk Center State Park which has daily Ozark Folk Music shows and, while we knew we would be there a week before it officially opened, we hoped we might find some music in a local tavern. It turns out that Mountain View is in a dry county so there are no local taverns where local musicians play, which was fine as neither one of us was feeling great. As an aside, one of my favorite groups during the mid-70s was The Ozark Mountain Daredevils who I discovered through Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman and is a welcome addition to anybody’s road music collection. End aside.
One thing we did miss, however, was The Urban Forge which, looking through the windows of the closed store, looked like the most sophisticated store we had seen on our entire trip and would have been a great place to see local folk art. We were still five hours from Memphis and our trip was winding down so maybe we were better off not having a place to spend an extra hour. So we moved on to Memphis…to be continued.