With the Retardican Party

The Dissociated Press sent me to test the waters at the rally last night for President Koom-Posh, former child-star of the popular Mr. Brain TV show. Allow me to share a few impressions from the event, held at a local airfield.

Hovercraft were circling, dropping confetti and Anti-Responsibility, or Antiree, propaganda thickly everywhere. The concerns of the Antiree movement are so small that they fit on tiny, nearly dust-sized pieces of paper. Numerous older folk who had been brought to the rally by Retardican organizers were choking and reeling over, hacking and feebly begging for handkerchiefs. One sufferer told me that the shuttlebus driver had taken away his mask, because of the cameras. Coverage needed to show Retardican unity, the driver said.

I was wearing my mask, of course. It was my own news coverage, I suppose. I feared it would do me little good, though, given the shouting and screaming around me from those who seemed able to breathe and exhale clouds of Antiree propaganda without distress. When President Koom-Posh appeared, he arrived surrounded by the device Retardican leaders have been using lately. It seems perfectly transparent and efficacious, at least when used among fellow Retardicans. These "Bubbles of Delusion," produced by Devotion Under Infidelity, or DUI, an agency run by the President's uncle's wealthiest nephew, have become synonymous with the President's claim to have won the last election, and to have already won the next one.

A great hoorah following Koom-Posh's revelation that an adulatory mirror had told him he looked extremely handsome that morning. Then he excoriated his opponents for their socialism. "They say I have no plan for my second term but I have one," he said, inserting his trademark screech of understatement. "I will end socialism. I have already knocked over environmental barriers to business and industry because the national parks and wilderness areas, even our very land and water and air, are infected with public ownership! Now I will lay low not only Social Security — you see how cleverly they slipped 'Social' into its name? — but also the U.S. military, which is socialistically owned by the state; the VA hospitals, which are socialized medicine; the police, a socialized security force that must become even more anti-social; and the highways, those socialized routes for travel that insidiously have spread everywhere! Who needs them when I can fly here to see you in Air Force One, which is socialized air transport for my use only and which I personally will privatize!"

During the roar of approval I turned to a nearby woman with a small hat-size and enormous chest who was breathing rapidly.

"I thought last time," I said, "that he accused the opposition of wanting to eliminate the police."

"This isn't eliminating! He will make them all private Homely Securitoids!"

"Make them — what?"

"You aren't a believer, are you?"

"Oh, I suspect Koom-Posh has dug himself a deep enough hole."

"Just you wait! He'll dig himself deeper!"

On stage, Koom-Posh accused the Media of counting how many people were being hospitalized with breathing problems, not to mention Covid, after his rallies. "The Media are creating the situation and need to stop the counting!"

I turned to my companion again.

"He may get his wish. The Media will stop counting votes for him."

"That won't matter!"

"It won't?"

"No! He is above that!"

"He is?"

"Yes! Counting applies to everyone else! But he doesn't count!"

"President Koom-Posh — "

"President Koom-Posh doesn't have to count! So he doesn't count! He doesn't count!"

So loudly vociferous was she that others around her took it up. Soon the area was roaring, as well as wheezing, the chant of President Koom-Posh's not counting.

"Am I not counting on you?" came the responding roar from the stage.

"We don't count! We don't count!" roared back the crowd.

The time had come to leave, I thought. My ears were ringing with emanations from Koom-over's Bubble of Delusion and the none-too-tuneful ululations and chantings thickly swirling about me. The police at the edge, however, were letting no one leave early, unless on a gurney. Someone bumped me from behind. Turning to find a policeman there, I felt my mask being ripped away. A baton propelled me headfirst back into the crowd. I gasped, took in a dusty lungful, and passed out.

The next morning — apparently, since the sky was bright with sunshine — I woke groggily to a piercing headache. I held my hands before my eyes, and saw they were chalk-white.

I had frozen to death!

My hands shook so violently with fear at this insane thought that the thick Antiree dusting fell away. The stuff had nearly persuaded me. I stood up, coughing, and looked around at the field covered with corpses — or whatever they were, abandoned on the runway tarmac and surrounding grass. They looked like those ash-covered bodies at Pompeii.

I went to the cordon at the field's edge, still manned by police.

"Why is this fence here?" I said.

"To keep the Media from counting you all in there," said a policewoman.

"But I'm not one of them. I'm not dead."

She squinted at me. I half expected her to ask about my being a believer or not. Then she opened the gate.

"I guess you don't count," she said.

I believe she meant it as a compliment.

An Open Letter to Senator Ron Johnson

To Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin:

Only four years ago, you thought it fitting for a Supreme Court nomination to be postponed or negated, because it fell "only eight months before an election where the American people are going to decide the direction of the country."

You were lying — perhaps to yourself, but more certainly to the public. You were lying, that is, unless you are a weasel now. Conceivably you are liar and weasel both, since you have accommodated yourself so well to the needs of Forty-Five, the devil whose name had best go unmentioned, who has proven himself so adept at being, at one and the same time, a liar and a weasel.

If you are either or both of these things, you do not represent me, a Wisconsinite and a supposed "constituent" of yours. Wisconsin has its share of liars and two-legged weasels, admittedly; and perhaps you have an obligation to do your honorable best by them.

Many voters here seem unperturbed at your having been put into office by offensively wealthy men; at your being a toady to a bigot who boasts of offensive wealth but who opens a wallet thick only with bluster and bilgewater; or at your helping oversee the violent violation of the rights of innocents through "Homeland" heavy-handedness. You shame Wisconsin, which suggests that your supporters, too, feel no shame.

Yet now in October — only weeks before the Russian government will attempt again to decide the direction of this country — you reveal yourself as a weasel, to all. I hope that your supporters see this through your Badger disguise, and feel pride enough in the fact that they are Badgers themselves to speak out and make you realize that your blush of success in a realm awash in bluster and bilgewater is, instead, the fever-bloom of falsehood — and, I do believe, of your poverty of integrity, and of your deep-seated guilt for doing wrong against your own state and nation.

Most sincerely not yours, Mark Rich, Cashton, Wisconsin

Exit Bloom, Enter Bloom

[Written March third, this year.]

For days, in the mornings when studying Emerson, I looked at the last blooms on the Christmas cactus, and yearned to have pencil and paper at hand to draw what I saw — the fragile, warm-toned, and drooping bloom seen only partially, through the fern that sits nearer at hand — through its dark stems, its leaves capturing in green the northern window's morning light.

And now I see only the spent blossom — still, it is true, fragile, warm-toned, and drooping — there, barely, through rising stems and spreading leaves.

And now, too, with the cactus done, the begonia on the same table blooms.

Thoughts for Youth in a Troubling Time

A few days back, on the 23rd, I was remembering an incident recounted by a friend. She was replying to someone else's comments on Facebook. Misha, a friend in mundane life as well as in this electronic realm, related the behavior of a teenaged group she meets on a street. The youths disregard prevailing thoughts about the necessity for social distancing, and show in their actions a disrespect for their elders.

This occurs in a political environment in which some people, even some who call themselves "lawmakers," express a willingness to threaten and dispense with the older members of society, in order to let the economy function. An economy that functions on the death of the knowledgeable and experienced is an economy to let founder and die, to my mind. But I suppose that those who profess this willingness are Morlocks, who have no taste for the old, and would rather have the young at hand.

Misha perceived in these youths' actions and attitudes their resentment toward her being older, which makes her symbolically the source of all that is troubling their young minds.

On the 23rd, sitting in a rocking chair even older than I am, I found myself penciling thoughts that I might say to these youth. So I place them here. For who knows? One or two, out of any group of twenty or so resentful youths, might listen. So:

Thoughts for Youth in a Troubling Time

If you listen to your peers, weigh carefully what they say.

Sometimes if you follow the group lead, and then go into error or worse, it feels less bad a thing than when you make a mistake through your own thought, trusting to your own instincts as to what is right to do, or good to do. Yet however soothed you may feel in being able to say that it was someone else's fault that you acted the fool, you feel this way because you have a callous over a callous. For you have wounded yourself doubly.

If you act against what is right and good, that is one self-inflicted wound. If you do so to follow someone's exhortation, or due to group pressure, then you are listening to them, and not to your own inner voice. And that wound — of ignoring yourself — is the most grievous of wounds. People go scarred and lamed through all their lives because of it, and never know. They think that the smile they see in the mirror is a true one. Since no one has hurt them but themselves, they think themselves unhurt.

If you say to us who are older that you deserve your folly, because you are only young once and must have your day, then give an ear to what those who are older can tell you. Youth is the making of mistakes. We find our way through life by wrong turns. If we recognize them as such, we go on to be older in years, and perhaps wiser. Otherwise we go on to be older in years, but with our committed foolishness compounded with illusion.

Most of us mix the two approaches.

Besides this, I say that you need not fret yourself over being young only once. If you heed your inner voice, and view life as a process of continually making yourself anew, you will find yourself able to make mistake after mistake after mistake, no matter your years, few or many. For you never cease finding your way. And if you live in this manner to your dying day then your "being young only once" has lasted all your life.

We are young forever, so long as we make only our own mistakes, and steer clear of the mistakes that others would have us make. Though not easy — nothing about youth is easy — this is what life offers to you. It offers it to you, as an individual, alone.

Cheers . . .

Masks for All in General

Science-fiction readers among you may have had a scene from a novel coming to your mind, lately. It has been to mine.

It must have been more than two decades ago that I read the Lisa Goldstein novel having this closing scene:

The tyrant who has persecuted mask-wearers finds one of their masks in his hands.

He tries it on.

Whether he then sees the world clearly, at last, or sees himself clearly — or whether Goldstein makes either aspect plain — memory fails to tell me.

The memory, though, does help bring to the fore this thought: that in fomenting rebellion against those state governments which have adopted lock-down methods to mitigate contagion's impact, our unmasked president is, indeed, persecuting mask-wearers.

Cheers . . .

Major Tom To Face Trump

Dissociated Press, U.K. — Major Tom, famous for his courtyard perambulations in support of the British NHS, has accepted the nomination for the BOAST (British Organization Against Stupid Trumpists) party, which has gained admittance to the U.S. presidential race thanks to an epidemic-caused rules relaxation.

Observers have noted that Major Tom would run circles around the U.S. incumbent — being only physically impaired, not mentally. While his candidacy would shame the Grammatically Offensive Party, or GOP, his clarity and eloquence would set a bar for American candidates that most could best only by going under, not above, in a sort of political "Limbo."

His example of placing human compassion and personal effort above self-inflation and personal gain, however, would so dwarf the GOP that the American public would need to take care — to avoid stepping by accident on its members.

When asked for his opinion as to his chances, Major Tom quipped, "Not only do I know how to finish a race, I know how to finish a sentence. Correctly, in both cases."

Notes on the Travesty

I voted yesterday in the Wisconsin primary and wanted not to. The event was a sham forced on the state by sham politicians disguised as justices. I wanted to stay away from the polls, though, for the sake of the volunteers there. This travesty of an event imposed unduly on their elderly constitutions.

Yet I went to vote in hopes that some youths might have stepped in, to help. Youths might catch something but presumably survive.

The case proved otherwise. One regular volunteer was present, pursuing her duty. Her two usual companions were absent, I was happy to see. The village trio have been dedicated workers, election after election, without, as it happens, growing any younger.

The voting process seemed slightly streamlined in response to the conditions. Unfortunately, the one person who replaced the two missing ones was another woman whom I might have guessed — well, not younger.

Statistically it would seem highly unlikely that yesterday's primary should not result in more illness. Though adequate measures were taken, the fact that health-care workers are falling ill during this epidemic makes a strong case for adequacy being inadequate.

And who holds the blame, if anyone falls ill in Wisconsin as a result of the primary? Or if anyone dies?

The party in Wisconsin that holds the state Senate, House, and Supreme Court, and that pushed through this primary, wields the power that it does thanks to outside forces. A pair of brothers with money-bag eyes were two of the highest angels, so to speak.

Which I mention in the context of guilt. It sits not entirely within this state's borders, even if all of guilt's puppets do.

If the state's Republican party members do not vote their politicians out of office, as soon as possible, then they, too, will be accepting whatever guilt there is to be passed around. Or at least accepting their responsibility for heartless stupidity.

For heartless stupidity might explain yesterday's travesty.

Heartless stupidity, naturally, stands not even a safe six feet away from cruelty.

And if anyone falls ill, or just falls over, due to this travesty, how can we not call the travesty's imposition cruel?

We know that it was unnecessary.