Tag: Pogo

‘We have met the enemy,’ etc.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” revisited for the modern era.

“We have faults which we have hardly used yet.” — cartoonist Walt Kelly, from “The Right Freedom, for the Right People, in the Right Place, at the Right Time,” published in the fall 1955 edition of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Review

Choices.

At times when we cast our ballots it seems we’re doomed to choose between getting stomped by the Hell’s Angels or chain-whipped by the Gypsy Jokers when all we wanted to do was ride our motorcycles. Or decide whether we should buy our bacon and beans from Safeway or Albertsons when we feel peckish. Just another shift in the barrel, and the view through the bunghole rarely changes for the better.

There simply is no “good choice.”

“Boy, you sure get offered some shitty choices,” a Marine once said to me, and I couldn’t help but feel that what he really meant was that you didn’t get offered any at all. Specifically, he was just talking about a couple of C-ration cans, “dinner,” but considering his young life you couldn’t blame him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was that there was no one anywhere who cared less about what he wanted. — Michael Herr, “Breathing In,” from his Vietnam book “Dispatches”

Six decades later every can we open is full of worms. We couldn’t care less about what they want, and they feel likewise about what we want. Nobody loves us, everybody hates us, we’re gonna eat some worms. Thus we shit the bed that our forefathers built for us.

Oh, but we’ve done our research. A podcaster on YouTube, this gal on TikTok, a Facebook group. Even worse, some dipshit blogger.

Nope. Democracy is not a spectator sport. Sure, you can pick a side, be a fan, follow “your” team online, on TV, or even in the newspaper … if your town still has one, and informing the readership still outweighs entertaining an audience. But you didn’t pick a single person in the lineup, from the head coach right on down to the waterboys. “Your” team was presented to you by its owners, who won’t even give you a ball cap. Not for free, anyway.

Citizens of a republic have to come off the bench and find the time, somehow, to engage with The System: study its mechanisms, learn how (and whether) they work, decide who might be best qualified to pull its levers and punch its buttons, and dismiss the time-servers and shovel-leaners who always seem to be on a coffee break or beavering away at some more lucrative side hustle.

Many if not most of us gave that up long ago, just like that Marine gave up looking for Mom’s apple pie in those C-rat tins. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Examining voter turnout in 2020 and 2024 the Pew Research Center observed:

Most Americans are not regular voters. Even across the three most recent national elections, which featured higher-than-normal turnout, just 41% of adult citizens who were old enough to vote cast a ballot in all three. About one-in-four (26%) did not vote in any of them.

Nonvoters tend to be younger, with no college and lower family incomes, the Pew research indicates. So, the future’s not so bright that we need to wear shades at the old ballgame. Or so it seems to this geezer on the dole with his cowtown B.A. in journalism.

I could rave on, but it all seems kind of obvious, yeah? Back in the Day® there was a bumper sticker — a hippie riposte to the rednecks’ “America: Love It or Leave It” challenge — that read “America: Fix It or Fuck It.”

Hm. Which one do you think we picked? Pass the C-rats, bruh, maybe there’s some chicken salad in one of ’em instead of the usual.

Autumnal equi-knocks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Time and clouds, on perpetual fly-by.

Summer’s end’s around the bend, just flyin’? Nope. It flew right past us at 12:50 a.m. Mountain time and here we sit, sipping coffee as we slip-slide straight into fall.

Speaking of falls, we have a Noo Joisey senator being indicted (again) on federal corruption charges; MAGA cultists in the House of Reprehensibles making a meal (more of an amuse-bouche, really) of Squeaker Charlie McCarthy’s withered testicles; and at least one Supreme Court justice with all the ethical bona fides of a hyena on a gutpile.

I’d like to assign blame for all these shenanigans, but it’s a beautiful day and there are bicycles around here that need riding. So I’ll just observe that if we keep locking our mutts in the national pantry, we are liable to keep finding ourselves light on pork come suppertime.

Pogo was right.

Cybrrrrrrrrrr Monday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Baby, it's cold outside.
Baby, it’s cold outside.

Still no snow here in the Duke City as the Thanksgiving weekend lurches to an overstuffed close. But it’s cold out there — 29 degrees as of java time — and there’s white stuff in the forecast, if not yet on the ground.

Elsewhere, things are heating up a tad. Having sold the rubes a bill of goods, the national media are now gleefully pointing out the dings, dents, leaks and creaks in the gold-plated machinery that is the Pestilence-Elect.

Seems he’s a liar, and a walking, tweeting conflict of interest with his short-fingered paws in some very questionable pockets. His chief adviser is a white-nationalist propagandist and political opportunist. And he’s larding up his administration with the sort of rich, connected honkies you’d expect from pretty much any ol’ rich, connected honky the GOP managed to shoehorn into the White House.

Huh. Who knew? Only anyone who’d been paying attention, is all.

Turns out that if you want to drain a swamp, it’s probably a bad idea to hire the guy who likes the swamp, knows everyone who lives there, and owns a fair chunk of it.

As another famous swamp-dweller once noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”