Europe 24 - Getting There

There is always a lot to do before traveling.

You have to make the plans, for one thing. Where will you go? How will you get there? What will you do once you’ve arrived? All those details that make or break a trip.

I’m not good at those details, to be blunt. I tend to get overwhelmed by it all fairly quickly and then throw up my hands and decide that my nice comfortable home is perfectly acceptable and I can continue to live in it just fine. I’m not really much for FOMO and I have never understood the whole idea that you’re obligated to get out of your comfort zone – comfort is a rare and precious thing in this world, and it should be savored – but I also know that I will have a lovely time once I get wherever we’re going and I will not regret being uncomfortable for a while if it means traveling to new and interesting places.

You should travel, in this world. It is a big, fascinating place full of interesting and lovely people, many of whom are happy to sit down with you and share a conversation or a meal. There is no better way to understand how constructed your own worldview and experiences are than to go to a place where people construct those things differently.

Travel takes money, of course, and in an age where people are often struggling it can be out of reach. But it doesn’t take as much money as most people think, and you’d be surprised at what you can do for the money you have. I always am, anyway.

Fortunately Kim is good at the planning side of things. She enjoys it, in fact – “the thrill of the hunt” for airline tickets, things to do in new places, and so on – so as someone who is not stupid I simply leave most of that to her and am glad for it.

We had a few guideposts for this trip. First, we wanted to go to Ruoti for the Émigré Festival that Felice was organizing. Second, since we were going to be in the country, we wanted to see if we could stay at the apartment in Testaccio in Rome that we’ve stayed at before – it’s a lovely apartment, and Stefano is a gracious host – to see new things in Rome and visit some previous favorites. I also wanted to see if it would be possible to catch up with my friend Anita, which worked out in a brief but lovely way in the end, and Kim (and Lauren, when it still looked like she would be able to come with us) wanted to go to some new places as they are the adventurous ones in the family.

And in the end, we were able to do it all!  And then some!

We try not to check bags when we travel because that way madness lies. If you can do everything with carryon luggage you can skip the wait, avoid having your bags lost, and have a convenient excuse not to buy any big things to lug back home. I have reached the point in my life where I am mostly deaccessioning stuff so I am less tempted to bring big things home than I was in my wayward youth anyway, though I did end up bringing a few such things back because they were gifts given to me with affection and for such things the rules don’t apply.

But the airlines have caught on to this carryon trick, and now they’re cracking down on what you can bring inside the plane too. Aer Lingus, the carrier for three of our four flights on this trip, has a 10kg (22lb) limit on both personal items and carryon bags, and their personal item dimensions are tiny. We hit the weight limits, but not quite the dimensions. They never checked, though. As long as we could stuff them under the seat in front of us they were happy.

We were supposed to check our carryon bags for the flights that weren’t transatlantic, but both times we ended up taking our bags onboard with us which made things so much easier. For the first one, the gate attendant simply noted that since we hadn’t left the secure area we could just slide right on and nobody would care. For the second one, the baggage system died and eventually they just told us that if our bags fit the carryon dimensions they’d be happy not to deal with us at the check-in counter so off we went.

Packing is a bit of an art, really. You have to take clothing, and the first rule of packing for trips is that you don’t need half the clothes you think you need. You may have to do laundry, but that’s relatively simple. And as for having room in the bags, I bought some inexpensive plain t-shirts for this trip and if necessary I could have just left them there without any real loss. You have to bring toiletries, but there are places to buy those where we were going so that wasn’t a huge issue. You have to bring adapters and chargers because in this connected, digital world you simply have to do that. Most things can handle multiple voltages now, though, so you don’t need the old transformers to step down from 220 to 110 anymore. And three cheers for that. Those things were heavy.

For us, we also need to bring food allergy cards, and in our late capitalist era people will sell these to you. And here let me offer an unsolicited and unpaid endorsement for the Equal Eats company who – for the princely sum of $9 – will sell you digital cards explaining your food allergy in a wide variety of languages. You can get similar cards from FARE for free, but the Equal Eats cards are more specific and list examples – “tree nuts” is not really a mental category in Europe, so having the examples helps a lot. You can download them and (if you’re like us and happen to have the laminating machine that Home Campus got rid of twenty years ago) laminate them for your wallet in whatever quantities you want, and when you are in a place where you don’t speak the language you can just hand one to the cashier or waitstaff. In my experience they tend to prefer to have something in their own language rather than you imperiously expecting them to speak English. They also take this very seriously and were uniformly happy to work with us – often more so than here in the US. We didn’t always get the answer we hoped for, but that’s okay – we got the right answer, and then we could either stay or move on.

For this trip we decided not to get the international data plan from our normal cell carrier (a prohibitively expensive option and very limited in capacity) so Kim found eSim apps online that allowed each of us to purchase whole number multiples of GB of data compared to what we had collectively last year, and for a combined fraction of the cost. It was a bit of a struggle getting set up and eventually I had to give in and set up Apple Pay, which I had avoided until this summer, but I have to say the eSims worked pretty well. Oliver had a different carrier than Kim and I did, and that was a good thing – that way one of us always had service even in the mountains of southern Italy.

I also downloaded a pile of books onto my phone, which you can do for free with your local library card and either Libby or Hoopla. I tend to read travel memoirs on these trips, which is a fun genre anyway. Last year I blew through five books so this year I borrowed seven and only managed to get through two of them. But they were fun books, and that has to count for something. I generally prefer paper books, but when you are limited to 10kg and you are schlepping things on your own across the ocean on your own back, saving the weight is worth putting up with electronic books.

We left on Wednesday, July 24. Grandma came down that morning to housesit while we were away, which both we and the cat and the rabbits greatly appreciated. We no longer have chickens, which is one less thing to figure out on these trips. Lauren arrived a bit later and drove us down to O’Hare for our flight. We got through security pretty easily, all things considered – not something we can say about other flights on this trip – and found some lunch before heading off to our gate.

I bought some snacks just to get the nice heavy-duty bag they come in, which I used as my personal item bag until it died in Naples and Kim replaced it with a much better bag while I was in line to not check bags. The snacks were also much appreciated.

The flight was delayed a bit because they had to check everyone’s passports and for some reason this European airline running a transatlantic flight from the US hadn’t factored that into their plans, but eventually we got on.

Airline seats keep getting narrower, even as I get wider.

I have always been wide from side to side – I inherited my dad’s shoulders, which make great shelves for carrying things like backpacks and roof ladders but which become troublesome in seats designed for the modern preschooler. And as I have gotten older I have started to get wider front to back, which I really should do something about but nearly everything I enjoy doing involves sitting still in a room so it has been a bit of a struggle that way. I squeezed myself into my assigned microspace and resigned myself to the unhappy toddler behind me, and in a shockingly brief time by historical standards we were in Dublin.

It was Thursday morning there.

This was not the end of our traveling. This was simply a layover, and we’d come back to Dublin on the way home for a more extended layover but this time we simply found our way down to the bus which took us to the subterminal where we waited for our next flight along with several vast and happy groups of students on school outings of some kind. There was also a vending machine for drinks, and thus was our first purchase in euros made for this trip.

Also, the reflections in the windows made the airport look like an alien invasion site, which we appreciated.

For our next flight we boarded from the tarmac, which seems to be a much more common thing in Europe than in the US. We also got to board from the back as well as the front, a much more effective and efficient process. And the plane was much nicer – it’s astounding how much two extra inches for seating can improve your day.

We landed in Budapest, a place we had never been before and where none of us even remotely spoke the language. By the end of our stay there I’d figured out precisely one word – “kijárat,” which means “exit,” a handy word to know in museums and subway stations even if I never did learn how to pronounce it – but since English is still, at least for the moment, the international language of travel, most of the airport signs were also helpfully in English for us.

We decided to take a taxi to our apartment, a nice little luxury after a long day or so of traveling and not all that much more expensive than three airport bus tickets when you do the math. You don’t just go out and hail a cab at the Budapest airport, though. You go to where the taxis congregate and there you will find a little kiosk building with a couple of people working inside. You get in line and when you get to the window you tell them you want to go to Budapest center and they enter it into their system and hand you a receipt with a big number on it, and in a couple of minutes a taxi shows up with that number and you climb in.

It was an interesting ride, seeing a whole new place for the first time.

The driver let us out about a half block away because our apartment was on a pedestrianized street and that was as close as he could get.

Welcome to Budapest!

Europe 24 - People Who Travel

I have apparently become one of those People Who Travel.

I’m not entirely sure how this happened.

It really wasn’t part of my upbringing. I grew up in and around Philadelphia and like all good Philadelphians we had our summer trip down the Jersey shore, which happened in the first week of August and was timed to the shut-down week at my dad’s company when the factory would retool. The company had one other location – in Wisconsin, ironically enough – and their shut-down week was timed to the start of deer hunting season. I understand this much better now. But for us shut-down was August and that was beach time.

By the time I graduated college – in a ceremony which took place about half a block from where I was born – I had expanded my geographic range south to Williamsburg VA and north to Hartford CT. A year or so later I moved to Pittsburgh, which felt like the far west to me at the time.

Sometimes you look back on yourself and just shake your head.

The first time I got on an airplane I was 24. It was a tiny little commuter plane that took me from Philadelphia to NYC, where I had six hours at the airport to consider how that went before I got on a different (much larger) plane to visit my friend Julia in the UK. It would be fourteen years before I left the US again after that.

Now, traveling is one of the Things We Do.

It’s basically our one extravagance. We’ve lived in the same house for nearly thirty years now and we paid it off right before the pandemic. We have no car payments anymore – haven’t for years. None of us has expensive taste in clothing, food, or gadgetry. We like stuff as much as the next person – ascetics we are not – but it’s not a prime motivator in our lives. But we like to go places and visit people and see things, and that we’re willing to devote resources to doing.

We’ve been to much of the US, a big and fascinating country and one that requires very little advance planning to see if you’re already here. Oliver and Lauren have had passports since before they were in kindergarten, and we’ve been abroad more times than I ever thought I would when I was younger (admittedly a low bar). When we travel we try to do some of the tourist things (being tourists, after all) and some of the more prosaic things as well – daily life is fascinating when you can step back and see it anew. I love going to grocery stores and riding the bus or tram in new places, for example, because you get a better sense of how people live that way.

Familiar and normal are different things. Until you go somewhere new you’ll never really understand that.

Last year we went on our BFT23, all four of us. I wasn’t sure if that would be the last of the family trips before Oliver and Lauren hived off into their own lives, but we treated it as if it might be and just had a lovely time of it.

And then we were invited back.

Last year when we were in Ruoti, the hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, we met Felice, who it turned out was working on a project about the emigres from Ruoti and their descendants. In fact, there would be an entire festival devoted to the emigres in early August 2024 and would we like to come back and take part?

And we thought about that. Perhaps too long, because by the time we decided that yes, in fact, we would like to come back and take part the rooms at the town’s B&B were full. We ended up in the next town over, which is a long story for a future post. But we were going, and from there it spiraled out into a full-fledged Trip, one that would see us not only return to Italy but also visit two new countries as well.

Lauren couldn’t come this time – she had commitments here in Wisconsin this summer – so it was just me, Kim, and Oliver. To make up for this Lauren and her friend Arden planned a trip of their own, which will be starting in just a few days. One of the things I love about our family is that we are all People Who Travel now. It’s what we do. I will look forward to hearing her stories when she comes back, and perhaps next time we can all travel together again.

We had a wonderful time on our trip and much of the posting here for a while will likely be about that, if only so I can preserve my own memories. If you’re someone who doesn’t like reading about other people’s travels you may want to skip out for a while. I’ll talk about other things again soon enough.

I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures anyway, mostly because I am surrounded by adventurous people and I am willing to be uncomfortable and I say yes even when I’m not sure about it at all. It’s worth it in the end. It’s always worth it in the end.

It’s good to go. It’s good to come home. It’s good venture out to the places and meet the people and do the things and come back with the stories to tell even if you only tell them to each other.

So we travel.

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.