Forward!

In keeping with our family’s Movable Feast Tradition, we wrapped up most of Father’s Day last night in the bleachers of a small stadium in Madison.

Lauren said she would take me to see Forward Madison, the local US League 1 soccer team, which was a lovely thing to do. Kim paid for her own ticket to join us, and we were happy to have her along. Oliver wished us well, as he had just returned from several weeks of wrangling middle schoolers and high schoolers at various Mother Ship Campus events and was mostly interested in sitting very still in a quiet space for a while, which was understandable.

Forward Madison is an interesting club. Their colors are blue and pink, their mascot is a flamingo (a call-back to one of the great student pranks in UW Madison history), and in true Madison style they go out of their way to annoy the American right wing whenever possible, which only makes me want to support them even more.

It’s a very small stadium, located on a busy street just north of the Capitol. There’s exactly enough room for a soccer pitch, seating along three sides, concessions at both ends, and a cow. Because it is Wisconsin, and there is always a cow.

We got there early so we could have a leisurely dinner, there being many options to choose from and an assortment of tables where you could eat without having to balance your food on your lap. And then we made our way over to our seats, which were not far from the midfield line.

There was a pretty good crowd for a USL1 game. It’s nice to see the team supported like that. They were playing something called a Jaegermeister Cup game, which – in the grand soccer tradition of putting multiple schedules on top of one another – is a separate series of games from the regular season ones. The opposing side, Lexington, was above Forward Madison in the Jaegermeister Cup standings but below them in the regular season standings, so it was a fairly evenly matched game if rather chippy at times.

The lower tier leagues are always a lot of fun. We have a minor league baseball team in the next town over from us and I enjoy their games more than the major league ones I’ve been to, for example. In the lower tiers you can get right up to the action – only one ball ended up being kicked over the wall and into the street last night, but it was returned fairly quickly once someone caught up to it – and there’s a fairly informal atmosphere where the fans are allowed to enjoy themselves in a way that seems frowned upon in the big leagues.

For example, every time the opposing side got a free kick from any range where it would have been reasonable to try for goal the fans all started making this little WHOOOP WHOOP noise, which I suppose could be the Call Of The Flamingo except that I don’t really know what flamingoes sound like. Nor, I suspect, do they. It did seem to throw the opponents off a bit, so there’s that. Also, the stadium folks quarantine the fanatic home fans – “The Flock,” as they seem to be called – off into the bleachers at one end of the pitch and let them bang on their drums and blow their trumpets and chant all game long the way you find in most soccer stadiums around the world. It’s festive.

At halftime Lauren and I wandered around the stadium a bit, checking out the cow (and the two pigs in the neighboring stall) and the souvenir stands. We wandered over to visit The Flock and view some of the signage. There was a tracker for the last time Forward Madison was awarded a penalty kick (31 days and counting), but my favorite was the Pink Panther sign.

Madison sits in the 608 area code, if you’re wondering about the Roman numerals at the bottom.

In the end the home team won 1-0 on a booming second half goal that crossed from the top right corner of the penalty box to hit the netting on the inside left of the goal, and really what more can you ask than a mild summer evening with your family and a home win.

Forward!

This Guy? For Real?

And so, for the first time in American history, a major political party has nominated a convicted felon for the highest office in the land.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been tried and found guilty by a jury of American citizens of 34 counts relating to election interference and financial crimes and is still awaiting sentencing. These are crimes that have resulted in jail sentences for past offenders.

He remains indicted on 57 other felony charges in three different jurisdictions on charges ranging from stealing top-secret documents to insurrection, crimes that have resulted in executions for past offenders. “The classified documents described in the indictment are some of the most sensitive information we possess,” said Mick Mulroy, a senior Pentagon official during Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration. “This type of information should never be removed from a secured facility.” His pet judge has dismissed the documents case in violation of both law and precedent, a rogue decision that will be appealed and probably result in disciplinary action against her but will achieve Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s larger goal of delaying the trial past the election. You will note that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s main legal strategy is not to proclaim his innocence but simply to declare that he can’t be prosecuted for any of these crimes.

He slithered into office in January 2017 after losing the popular election by over two million votes because we don’t elect presidents democratically. We elect them using Electoral College, which gives depopulated rural areas (overwhelmingly white and disproportionately evangelical) far more influence in the presidential election than their actual numbers would warrant. He lost the popular vote in a landslide in 2020 by over seven million votes, and he lost the Electoral College by roughly the same margin as he won it by in 2016. His response has been to deny reality, undermine the fabric of the American republic, and encourage his minions to threaten anyone who opposes him, which they have done in numbers.

He achieved this victory through Russian interference, something that the Mueller Report conclusively demonstrated even if the Justice Department declined to indict a sitting president for it. Even if you limit yourself to the publicly available sections (and if this is what they were willing to release, imagine what is in the parts they censored) the report noted “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference with the 2016 election and roughly 150 contacts between Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign and Russian agents during that time. Six of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s advisors were charged with crimes based on the Mueller Report, and five pleaded guilty. Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson testified under oath before Congress that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump “is effectively compromised and being blackmailed” by Russian agents.

He was impeached twice during his disastrous term in office, something no American president had ever done before. On both occasions a bipartisan vote nearly convicted him, but Republican party discipline defeated patriotic loyalty to the nation and he remained in power.

The first impeachment was for trying to blackmail the sovereign nation of Ukraine into manufacturing false allegations against the son of his main political rival by threatening to withhold military assistance approved by Congress until they did so. It is worth noting that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has steadfastly supported Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has promised not only to cut Ukraine loose to be devoured by his patron but also to sabotage NATO so that Putin can take the rest of Europe should he choose to do so.

The second impeachment was for inciting insurrection and attempting to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States. It is further worth noting that during the January 6 Insurrection Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump saw no need to move to safety as he knew very well that this was his movement, nor did he have any particular moral qualms about threatening the sitting Vice President of the United States with death should that Vice President not overturn the 2020 election.

He is an adjudicated rapist and a proudly self-confessed sexual predator who has openly lusted after his daughter. He’s a serial adulterer who cheated on at least one wife while she was giving birth to his child.

He is a racist who ripped families apart at the border and tried to set up detention camps for asylum seekers there, in violation of both American and international law. He has openly campaigned on using the US military to carry out mass deportations without due process should he seize power again. His cult waved signs demanding this at this week’s GOP nominating convention, in fact. He has a track record of lawsuits filed against him for his racist activities that goes back to the 1970s or earlier.

He so willfully and grievously mismanaged the US response to COVID19 that peer-reviewed scientific studies estimate that he is solely responsible for over a quarter of a million extra American deaths. He used pandemic aid as a political weapon, denying it to his political opponents. He went on national television to endorse injecting bleach up your ass as a preventative and horse dewormer as a cure.

He has gone bankrupt multiple times trying to sell alcohol, red meat, and gambling to the American public, something that by rights should be physically impossible but that’s what happens when your business skills are just that bad.

He is an open authoritarian who has declared that he will be a “dictator on day one” and his thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court has now granted him that authority. He does not appear to have ever read the Constitution and he certainly has demonstrated no interest or ability in complying with it.

He spent four years actively courting the world’s dictators and alienating America’s staunchest allies. US intelligence agencies regarded him as such a security threat that they refused to share information with him and advised allies not to do so either. In this they were fully justified because on several occasions Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump divulged secret and sensitive information to our enemies and weakened US national security. His abject groveling before Vladimir Putin in Finland during his term was so morally repellant that even Republican officials sharply criticized him. The American Conservative magazine flat out called him “Putin’s prison bride.”

He declared that Nazis were “fine people” after one of them killed a woman protesting his policies. I am sure that the Americans who gave their lives fighting against Nazis in WWII would have a different perspective on that, but then what does Corporal Bone Spurs know about fighting, after all. You can’t be a good Nazi and a good American at the same time. We had a war about that. The whole world was there. This did not stop him from hiring actual out-and-proud Nazis for his administration in his first administration, and it won’t in the next.

The fact that some idiot took a potshot at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently doesn’t change the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is manifestly unfit for any office, let alone the presidency, and should not be allowed near the White House even as a tourist.

This is the guy the Republican Party wants to install into power in January 2025.

And I say to hell with him.

One Fucking Idiot and Things Get Ugly

So apparently some fucking idiot took a potshot at Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump today.

I suppose it says something that my first thought was to question whether it was a false flag operation designed to make a twice-impeached self-admitted sexual predator and serial deadbeat campaigning on a platform that openly calls for the destruction of the American republic somehow more sympathetic.

But there is no shortages of fucking idiots with guns in this country, and the GOP has gone to great lengths to make sure that nothing whatsoever can be done about this fact. There is no need for a false flag operation for this to happen. We slaughter our own children with a demented glee that you simply don’t find in civilized portions of the world, so the idea that someone with inappropriate but unfettered access to firearms decided to impose himself (I’ll put money on the fact that the shooter was a man) on the election should come as no surprise.

My second thought was that the last thing this country needs is for that two-bit neo-Fascist grifter to become a martyr.

I bow to nobody in my contempt for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and those who seek to use him to impose dictatorship on the United States (hello, there, Heritage Foundation!). He’s 77 years old, morbidly obese, and held together mostly by rage and high blood pressure so if demographics were to take its natural course I wouldn’t mourn.

But I do not condone political violence.

Not even for candidates who call for violence against others.

To go down that path is madness. Once people start down that path nobody has any idea where it will end except that it will be worse than anyone imagines.

That’s the nature of political violence. It just makes everything worse.

All that will happen now is that the vast neo-Nazi support mechanism that props up Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s candidacy will feel unleashed to begin their reign of terror on the American people earlier than they had planned.

The Republican Party in its modern Trumpian mode have brought this on themselves with their open solicitation of “Second Amendment Solutions,” their continued support for violent insurrection, and their absolute refusal to do anything about the rising tide of gun violence in this country in general, and the only surprise to me today is that it backfired on them instead of the people they usually direct those threats toward.

The coming fallout will damage everyone, even the vast majority of us who understand why that sort of violence can never be allowed or defended.

I grieve for my country.

Hang onto your hats, folks. We could end up miles from here.

Wrapping up the Holiday Weekend

1. So Independence Day has technically come and gone but the War for Darwin’s Basement continues in full swing as guys named Lefty, Claw, and Stump spend their next few mortgage payments on fireworks to try to outdo the official city display. Tonight, for example, someone to the southeast of us put on a show that lasted at least fifteen minutes and probably cost them over five thousand dollars. It was, admittedly, quite a show.

2. Our Little Town, like most towns around here, held their official fireworks on the last Saturday in June for some reason, and since Grandma and Grandpa’s town also held their fireworks that day we ended up driving up there for our cookout and show. We had the full ‘MURCA experience – burgers, dogs, hanging out, a few fireworks of our own, and then the official ones which their town set off over the lake to the north but which were clearly visible from their house so we piled into the boat parked on the side of the house and watched from there. A good time was had by all!

3. For the actual Independence Day we were planning to have a small grill out, just me, Kim, and Oliver, as Lauren had plans with friends, but our friends Heidi and Travis joined us as well and … wait for it … ANOTHER good time was had by all. I KNOW! I didn't take pictures, so you will just have to trust me on this one. Hey – just because the world is on fire doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice evening now and then.

4. I’m actually surprised Lefty, Claw, and Stump had anything left for tonight, as Thursday night the entire city reverted to its usual post-fireworks condition – the air was grey and smelled of cordite and the whole town sounded like the inside of a popcorn machine. Things have been slowly calming down over the last few days, with only the occasional barrage until the show really started an hour ago.

5. Why people insist on shooting off fireworks in broad daylight I do not know. Wait until it gets dark, people!

6. Our holiday weekend has been pretty quiet, all told, although we did prevail upon Oliver to use his Tech-Fu to pirate some of the Euros. We got to watch Spain beat Germany in a match that got better as it went along, and England somehow beat Switzerland in a match that nobody really seemed interested in playing as far as I could tell. But it was enjoyable to watch, for those of us who enjoy watching that sort of thing. The Olympics start soon, and my won’t that be an adventure for all sorts of reasons.

7. I also mowed the lawn today, which normally isn’t anything I care to mark here except that it is the first time I’ve been able to do that since early May. My wrist felt fine, and the usual dismay I have about undertaking that particular task was at least softened by the fact that I could in fact undertake that task.

8. Technically we still have another 26 hours of the holiday weekend, so who knows what else will happen. Even as I type, there are still fireworks going off, if not at the frenetic pace they were an hour ago. Usually the War for Darwin’s Basement doesn’t really peter out until Bastille Day or so.

9. No word on whether we hit the over/under on garage fires this year. This is the down side to not subscribing to the local newspaper anymore.

10. Watching the UK throw off the shackles of abusive right-wing misrule this week does give me some small hope that perhaps we here in the former colonies can learn from that for November and prevent our own abusive right-wing former rulers from coming back like the plague they are. You never know. Could happen.

A Revolution Betrayed

George Washington didn’t want to be king.

He was the hero of the American Revolution, the rock-steady leader who kept the Continental Army together and in the field long enough to exhaust the world’s strongest military power into surrendering, despite intense political pressures to replace him and often dire material conditions. He understood, as most people on either side didn’t, that he didn’t have to win the war – all he had to do was not lose it, and eventually the British would tire of it. He was the man who turned back the Newburgh Conspiracy, which would have seen the unpaid men of the Continental Army march on Congress and overthrow it, simply by taking out his reading glasses to read a letter to those men. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown grey but almost blind in the service of my country.”

They wanted him to be king. They didn’t know any better. The idea of a republic – a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln later said, though who counted as one of “the people” was and remains a matter of fierce debate – was largely untested, and few at the time thought a country could survive without a king. Most such experiments had ended quickly and badly.

But the American Revolution had been fought to restore the balanced republican government that King George III had thrown out of order with his – to the colonial mind, at least – arbitrary and lawless conduct.

The Declaration of Independence is mostly remembered for that one jewel of a sentence near the beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the bulk of that document is an indictment of George III for his crimes against the colonies. The most common first word of every paragraph is “he” and that “he” is the king who had refused his assent to necessary laws, dissolved legislatures, made judges dependent on his will alone, kept standing armies in times of peace, cut off trade between the colonies and the wider world, and so on.

Also, George III had restricted immigration into the colonies – a serious crime according to the Founding Fathers.

The entire point of the American Revolution was to rid what would become the United States of a ruler who was above the law and replace him with a ruler who was not.

When the Revolution was over, Washington steadfastly rejected calls to replace George III with a new George I. He supported the Articles of Confederation until it became clear that states’ rights was a foolhardy way to try to run a country, and then he supported the Constitution when it was written to replace the Articles with a more centralized government.

Washington served two terms as president. He could easily have served more, but he walked away from power to demonstrate that this was how proper American leaders acted. They were not all powerful. They existed within the framework of the Federal Constitution of 1787 and of the laws, subject to all of them.

This bedrock foundation of the American republic lasted for 237 years, which, admittedly, is longer than the Founding Fathers thought it would. They understood that republics were fragile things, that such governments depended on the virtue of the citizenry – “virtue” being defined in the 18th century fashion as the willingness to sacrifice your petty, private interests for the sake of the public good. They knew that the greatest threat to the survival of the American republic would be an unvirtuous citizenry led by a tyrant – a demagogue who would stir up the vulgar passions of the mob and declare himself above the law and beyond restraints.

For more than two centuries we survived as a republic.

And last week the Supreme Court betrayed all of that in order to shield a twice-impeached convicted felon who is on public record calling for the weaponization of the federal government to persecute his personal enemies, an unrepentant insurrectionist, an admitted sexual predator and adjudicated rapist, a man facing 57 further criminal indictments in three separate jurisdictions, indictments which include crimes the United States has in the past executed people for, from the consequences of his crimes.

The decision in Trump v US, handed down by the Roberts Court, ranks among the most catastrophic ever handed down – right up there with the Dred Scott v Sandford decision of the Taney Court in 1858. It renders the president a figure entirely above the law and beyond restraints, and it returns the United States to the rule of kings.

It is a betrayal of the American Revolution and the ideals of the American republic, and if allowed to stand it will destroy this country in ways we haven’t even begun to contemplate.

This, apparently, is the plan. The president of the Heritage Foundation – one of the most radical right-wing organizations in America – celebrated this betrayal by declaring “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Leaving aside the explicit threat here that only if Americans stand by and allow the extremists on the right to destroy the American republic will we be allowed to live, and also the issue of what they think the “left” is in this country, there is the simple fact that the only reason to have a second American Revolution is to get rid of the first one.

My fellow Americans, on this Independence Day we face a crisis. The far right has mobilized to claim this country as their own private inheritance, in defiance of the will of the majority and the intent of the Founding Fathers. They are not even bothering to hide it anymore. They intend to rule, absolutely and as arbitrarily and lawlessly as the colonists accused George III of ruling.

But we do not suffer kings or their minions in America.

And to those who say otherwise, remember that we outnumber you.

You are on the wrong side of history, morality, and American patriotism.

We will see you fail.

We will see you forgotten to the seventh generation, your works erased, and the follies of your pride held up to ridicule and shame.

George Washington understood what American monarchists wanted and he rejected them. We as Americans can do no less.

A Pen for Your Thoughts

Someone on my dad’s side of the family had money way back when. Probably around 1900. None of this money found its way to us and I suspect it evaporated in the Great Depression, though that’s pure conjecture on my part. Maybe they lost it all buying war bonds in 1917. Or maybe they just lost it the usual way, slowly, almost unnoticeably, with bad business decisions and poor financial planning, at a wholly unremarkable point in history. Who knows.

But every once in a while I run across something that reminds me these people were fairly well off for the time.

When my dad passed away in 2016 we did a sort through the house in preparation for my mom’s move to the senior apartment where she spent the rest of her life. A lot of things in the basement went out the door, but we saved a bunch of stuff too.

One thing that sticks in my memory was an entire box of piano rolls – paper scrolls about a foot wide with holes punched in them. You put them inside your player piano and started it up and it would play the song for you. Each of these rolls cost between $2 and $4 in the early 1920s, which was a good chunk of a day’s wages – or more – for a lot of people.

These days they’re worth nothing. I couldn’t even give them away. I tried. Nobody wanted them – not university music programs, not museums, not antique stores. I saved one and tossed the rest. I’m still sad about that, but so it goes. But back then you had to have some coin to afford that many of these rolls, not to mention the player piano to slot them into.

Every now and then I go into the basement and bring up another box that I took out of my mother’s apartment after she died. My brother didn’t want most of it – he lives in a small apartment and is working on downsizing from that – and we have a big basement, so much of it ended up here. Last week, while trying not to pay attention to what I suspect will be an oncoming train wreck (no, not the political one – that one I’m kind of resigned to), I pulled out a box and went through it.

There were some photos I hadn’t seen before and some interesting papers, all of which I need to scan and add to the genealogical folders I have online. Honestly, I could spend the next year just organizing the genealogical information I already have without searching for any new stuff, and that’s kind of a nice project to have out there. Maybe when I retire.

I also found this:

It’s a dipping pen, the kind you’d use with an inkwell. It’s about seven inches long, from tip to nib. Most of it is solid mother of pearl and it still has the original velvet case. It probably dates to about 1890, plus or minus a decade or so.

It’s not worth a whole lot now. I looked online for auctions of similar (and occasionally identical) items and most of them were in the $20-70 range depending on condition though there were a couple of wildly optimistic sellers who clearly had not done a comparable search before listing their asking price. Most things aren’t worth what people want them to be.

But once upon a time this would have been an expensive item for a middle-to-upper-middle class household, the sort of aspirational purchase someone like that would make as a statement of moving up in society.

If I had to guess, I’d say the purchaser was my great-great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran who, toward the end of his life, would occasionally turn up in the Philadelphia papers in the social notes section. He wasn’t the subject of a whole lot of column inches – mostly the odd one-or-two sentence announcement – but that’s more than most people got for their activities. That sort of social prominence began and ended with him, as far as I can tell.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this pen. It’s lovely and I’m not going to sell it because it has that family connection, but I don’t know what I would use a dipping pen for. My handwriting isn’t that great to begin with. Oliver says there are special tools you need to clear out the nib – a razor blade would be too thick – so I can look into that as well. Perhaps I will learn copperplate style.

I keep acquiring small projects.

Happy Father's Day!

We celebrated Father’s Day on Friday because that’s when we could all get together for it.

The joy of having a Movable Feast Tradition for all holidays is that it takes a lot of the stress out of planning. Can’t make the officially designated day? Well, when can you make it? Because the whole point of a holiday is to celebrate it with the people you love, and what is a calendar compared to that?

So Friday it was.

Oliver was back from his visit with Dustin, Lauren came down from Main Campus University, and we had a lovely time together. I ended up making General Tso Chicken, which is a newfound family favorite we stumbled into recently. It takes 90 minutes, isn’t remotely healthy, and uses every dish in the kitchen but it is really, really good and there are never any leftovers.

We watched some of the Stanley Cup Final game afterward while Digestion happened, and we were all glad that Edmonton forced a Game 7.

And then it was time for cards, both of the greeting and playing varieties. There was a rather spirited game of Phase 10, which we decided to play Yahtzee-style as Kim has been lobbying us to do forever, and it was a good time hanging out together. Phase 10 is a wonderful game because it hits that absolute sweet spot for any game – interesting enough to hold your attention but not so much that you can’t talk and eat and drink while you’re doing it. There were chips and dip. For some reason Supertramp’s Breakfast in America has become our go-to card-playing music and we had that in the background. We decided that a) they should go on a reunion tour and call themselves Seniortramp, b) they really should be from Australia instead of England, and c) they should sell stamps because the marketing for them is right there. Band members, take note.

I got some lovely gifts and I am grateful for all of them, but the best part of the whole thing was simply having all four of us together, hanging out and enjoying our time with each other. Those times get more spread out as people get older, as lives and responsibilities change and take us in different directions, and that is just how the world works these days.

But for an evening we were sitting at a table, sharing a meal and a game and the time we have together, and you can’t ask for more than that.