My Cow Cat

Addendum: 

My beloved cow cat Readmore lost his battle with cancer and walked down the cat lane of the Bridge across the Rainbow on Novemer 28, 2017. He was welcomed by the loving siblings he had never met but who went before. He will be loved by Rabbit, Wheel, twins Razzy and Rachel, Cecil, Bobbi, Steve, Fang, Gray Cat (who dismembered his stuffed Newt Gingrich doll) and Hei Mao, and my Shadow. When the time comes, Readmore will joined the welcoming party for newbie Colleen and others who may join the family before my turn to be reunited with all my fur children comes. Catministrators should note that he loves the internet and that he may sneak over to the Dog Park to snuggle with his Pyr Kia. 

💗💔

Violence

Little Miss Huckabee Sanders almost made me throw up today. The epidemic of kids murdering kids in Chicago is a "MORAL PROBLEM," opined the predictably permanent tabula rasa, spawn of the man who once said there is more freedom in North Korea than in Obama's America. 

In Dostoyevsky's great work, Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has a dream, an ugly, grotesque nightmare, that is so effectively narrated that its horror made me almost unable to get through it, and still does. I ask of you the patience to read the excerpt below:

"… He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more. 
“I’ll teach you to kick,” Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long, thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. 
“He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him. “He’ll kill her!” 
“It’s my property,” shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud. 
“Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?” shouted voices in the crowd. 
And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and fell upon her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow. 
“She’s a tough one,” was shouted in the crowd. 
“She’ll fall in a minute, mates, there will soon be an end of her,” said an admiring spectator in the crowd. 
“Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off,” shouted a third. 
“I’ll show you! Stand off,” Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down the shaft, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. “Look out,” he shouted, and with all his might he dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on the ground like a log. 
“Finish her off,” shouted Mikolka and he leapt, beside himself, out of the car. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything they could come across—whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died. 
“You butchered her,” some one shouted in the crowd.
“Why wouldn’t she gallop then?” 
“My property!” shouted Mikolka, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the bar in his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to beat."

And now please think how many human African slaves were starved, worked to near death, brutally beaten on beautiful ante-bellum manicured estates. Each of their murders was an Active sin, an Active crime, committed by White America. 

What we are now standing back and allowing to happen in Chicago and other places to young people, especially African-American teenagers and young adults is also a crime, but a crime we PASSIVELY commit by things like standing back and doing nothing except feeling morally superior. Just hearing of each murder should make us all as sick to the point of vomiting as the Dostoyevsky horse dream does to me. AND THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, NOT HORSES. THEY ARE OUR CHILDREN.

Note: In 1979, the great actor John Hurt portrayed Raskolnikov in a superb three-episode TV mini-seriers. If the horse scene is in it, I've blocked it out of my mind! I think I'll see where it's streaming. 

EVERYTHING'S CONNECTED.

Worse than Watergate

Nixon never, never, and never would have, let an unfriendly foreign power, let alone one run by a KGB agent, hack into or meddle in or influence any United States election. Yet he was guilty of impeachable offenses and resigned 2 years and 2 months AFTER the Watergate break-in took place and was reported all over the world.

Trump WILL BE taken down, hopefully to a traitor's noose, but St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, DC. It may take years. Sun Tzu said it around 500 BC. It's been said more than one way since Plutarch lamented the slowness of juststice. Today's expression adds hope: "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine."

We will be shouting truth after truth for years. MLK's "fierce urgency of now" makes it difficult to be patient. Every day is full of danger. But we all know people who will laugh at our outrage, looking straight at evil but neither thinking or caring what it is they see. It could take several years, but we will be vindicated, the insane criminal will be found guilty of soooo many crimes, and the wheels of justice will succeed.

I can hardly wait.

Violence is okay now, like hate and greed. Oh Boy!

The late Bill Buckley wanted something else just as much as he wanted his conservative movement to flourish. He wanted to keep the kooks, misanthropes, the Birchers, white nationalists, the neo-Nazis OUT. Most commentators consider him to have been successful, especially considering there are 4,500 species of actual cockroaches and possibly an infinity of human RWNJ ones. And one of those was really deadly.

In 1960, conservative Protestants and Catholics were in strong opposition to each other. No more. Today evangelicals form a social and political monolith. But I could find you in one hour over a hundred protestants on the right who will secretly admit that they think their Catholic friends are going stright to Hell. My childhood among right wing fundamentalists taught me that, unlike Catholics, nothing about social responsibility. We rushed over Matthew 25 or ignored it. Every sermon was about how to save your ass from Hell. Sometimes preachers were grateful and moved that God provided Christ's crucifixion and resurrection as a way to be "saved." But mostly it was shouting, banging on the pulpit, telling you how you were BORN on your way to Hell, and the only thing to do was to be BORN AGAIN. The rhyme that still echoes in my brain was "Repent, Believe, and Christ Recieve." Repent from your drinking, smoking, dancing, card playing, movie going, adultery and fornication, or just your lust. And what would show the world that you were born anew? Well, when you still did that stuff, say you're sorry. 

At age 5, as my dad backed out of our parking space after church one Sunday, my little voice came from the back seat, asking a question that had been bothering me from parts of that morning's sermon. "Daddy, if Jesus loves the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white they are precious in his sight, WHY DON'T WE?"

Do you know what I was taught about social justice? That my works, deeds, and actions do not matter to God, "lest any man should boast." Only the grace of God could save me, and once saved it seemed that everyone acted as though they had been give a Get Out of Hell free card and so could do anything except work for Social Justice, pinko commie BS. If you are unfamiliar, read about the Christian Right's interpretation of Christianity. Why do they say Jesus would "pack heat" for just one thing?

Do we all learn in history class that the Southern Baptist Convention broke away from American Baptists and established itself because American Baptists were Abolutionists. The whole Convention was born to support SLAVERY. I don't have enough friends to covene enough fingers and toes to count the people I have heard say they HATE Lincoln, that he was our worst persident, and that they are GLAD HE WAS ASSASSINATED. 

Okay, back to Buckley. When he began in the Seventies to make nice with the Falwells, Bob Jones University, he defeated or abandoned his goal to keep out the kooks and haters. He opened the door wide. They came in droves and they hijacked the Movement, making any legitimate conservative movement impossible. In the early days, I even wrote Buckley a letter, begging him not to fool around with those fundamentalists. I was nobody. I'm sure nobody read it.

Don't be nostalgic for Buckley. If he were here, he would not be able to keep the kooks out anymore.

What we have is a Republican Party controlled and dominated by HATE, GREED, and the quest for POWER, power to control everyone else, to get everyone else's money, to disregard even everyone's very life. We have thugs and goons and pieces of merde who are hostile to education, to knowledge, to books, to science. They are even hostile toward scientific work that might save their own lives by curing cancer and Alzheimer's.

We've got Trump, refusing to shake hands with Merkel, shoving the leader of Montenegro, a Balkan state of about 600,000 people, not knowing Israel is in the Middle East, ad infinitum.

And we've a brand new jewel in our crown today, Greg Gianforte, Montana's newest Representative, who truly attacked, assaulted a reporter the night before the election. And the voters who used to be law and order types cheered him and elected him.

It all comes back to the voters. Something is wrong with our voters. Even Appalachian Trail fan Mark Sanford said that SOMETHING WEIRD IS GOING ON OUT THERE.

Greg Gianforte