What’s up, Doge? A terribly Parochial View.

No really. I have no idea what this is. I have only a passing familiarity with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. But like any doubter, I fear that which I do not understand. But a couple observations.

1. I am naturally skeptical of anything for which people evangelize, whether it’s a religion, movie. Band, or TV show. This minute you advocate for something that I just HAVE TO TRY/DO/LISTEN TO/WATCH, I am already shifting into self-defense mode. I like my things. I like what I like. I know who I am and what I like to do with my time. Why are you trying to change me????

2. In general, I find talking about money to be staggeringly dull. But even further than that, I also find that I can’t read about it or watch movies about it. My eyes glaze over trying to understand the many terms used for the stock market, derivatives and such. I just can’t.

3. Um…why are you still here? If you’re making so much money, why aren’t you on a yacht somewhere?

4. Why would I ever take advice from you? Have you looked at yourself lately???

5. Color me…whatever…but I’ve lived a long time and I’ve never come across anything to replace the “go to work/earn a check paradigm. (Is it a paradigm? It feels like a paradigm.) All the ways to make easy money always wind up biting in the ass: look at the saps who owned all those Air B&Bs. Or people that thought they would make it on Amway? I just don’t have a very strong faith in the easy way. And that’s coming from a person who isn’t crazy about going to work and would love to know that there is an easy way.

Anyway, that’s my time. I am the Parochialist and I have a parochial view of everything.

American Kompromat: A Parochial Review.

American Kompromat

By Craig Unger

(How the KGB cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery.)

It’s right there in the subtitle. This is the first thing I thought about when considering how to review this. Because it does stray from the initial topic quite a bit and may cause the casual reader to wonder “what does this have to do with THAT?” But the scope of the book is broad and paints a picture that we all recognize at this point. But the wrinkle of Trump being recruited as an asset back in the 80’s (one of many) by the KGB and then unwittingly parroting back the whole Soviet/Russian worldview as a platform for a major political party is the kind of thing that was supposed to be exposed by the Mueller Report. As explained in the text, it was all skillfully buried by AG William Barr. Barr gets a lot of time and airplay in this. It does offer a relatively damning summary of Trump’s time in public life, how one can trace back 40 years to see how the former Soviet Union saw promise in this brash young real estate tycoon on the rise, and how his ascent to the top office in the United States would have gone beyond any KGB recruiters’ wildest dreams.

But like a lot of books from the era of Trump, it will convince the initiated and be dismissed by his supporters who may or may not bother to read books. By the very nature of the subject, it can only be hearsay. And the book makes a point about how all the best intelligence operations are done with very few laws broken.

The last chapter sums up the last year of the Trump administration and the attempt to overturn the election. Somewhere Vladimir Putin is smiling.

Random thoughts…

Random thoughts…Re: The Mess We Inherited, No one is Getting Canceled, Teachers, Dr. Seuss.

I write these things down and sometimes they sit and I’m just going to bullet point put them in a blog in no particular order...

· How do you feel when you come to work and the night crew hasn’t done their job? It’s like that but on a much larger scale. Getting mad at Joe Biden because the coronavirus has not been contained and the country is still on partial shutdown and he has asked us to wear masks is like getting mad at the guy who showed up late because he is replacing the guy who didn’t show up at all.

· People act like when a person gets “canceled” it is because of a misunderstanding…one tweet, one misstatement, one stray hand in the wrong place, when it’s usually part of a pattern. (Garrison Keillor actually is creepy. Gina Carano had a sustained hate march against marginalized figures. JK Rowling doubled down on hate. And on and on… and yes. Andrew Cuomo is a scumbag. He should resign, as should any man who abuses or rapes or harasses women, especially in a power dynamic.)

· Online politics is full of people disingenuous enough to wonder why a single person can’t “fix” systemic racism, especially when the entire force of white supremacy always comes out to defend itself. Re: “I’m not racist but…” and butt hurt over voting rights and “Ma freedom” to say “Ma little (racist/misogynistic/picks on retards) joke… We are some terrible people. And we fight to stay that way.

Because it’s much easier than trying to learn someone else’s point of view and why your joke or statement is hurtful or offensive.

• People: “Yay, teachers are heroes and we love you.”
  

Teachers: “We need vaccinations and face shields and basic precautions before we can come back.”

Also People: “Teachers are lazy! They should just do their job!”

(BTW…take the words “lazy teacher” out of your stupid fucking mouth.)

· Dr. Seuss is not beyond reproach…to be treated like a saint instead of a man with human foibles… He was a man of his time and reflected the racist attitudes of the time. (You probably don’t use the same words you used when you were a kid, either. When was the last time you called someone a “Poopy-head?”)

HIS PUBLISHING HOUSE is doing this PROACTIVELY to protect his legacy. No one is “canceling” him. I would hope that if I became rich and successful off of a fifty-year career in writing that when I’m gone someone might look out for me in a similar way, eliminating some of the less-evolved pieces I may have written earlier in my life.

Hey…you’re an adult: did you even know about the existence of these books before this news came out?

And for the “Butt-hurt” people: without Googling, do you even know which books are being discontinued? Do you have them on your shelf? We’re not talking about the Cat in the Hat here.

· Finally…If you’re using social media to show the world what a mean and awful person you are, we don’t have to be friends.

Anyway…I am the Parochialist, and I’m glad to get that off my chest.

Finally Coming Clean...

(*This is Satire* No one should be this stupid.) Wow. The right-wing crazy people really got us all figured out. How we wanted to be forced to stay inside and miss our friends and live entertainment and movies and sports and performances…and how we engineered a hoax to exaggerate an illness and latch it on to other illnesses. Because 500 thousand people dying from a bunch of different things wouldn’t have attracted as much attention as just calling it Covid-19. I gotta hand it to you: you really figured it out. It was hard keeping it to myself for so long.

We did it all because we just didn’t want to go to work, and we wanted to crash the economy. But it worked too well…many of us just had to work from home. And we really crashed the economy (luckily, our stocks soared, so we still win!) We didn’t account for how many of you wouldn’t fall for it. Well done, America.

Unfortunately, the technology to work at home was better than we’d anticipated. But we loved seeing our friends and former co-workers suffer and go broke while waiting for unemployment checks to kick in. They should have just gone to one of those low-paying front-line jobs where they could have gotten sick more easily.

You sure saw through our scheme to lose people we cared about while we secretly smiled beneath our masks (Which we wore so that we could disguise our secret pleasure with how well the plan was working!)

Sadly, all good things have to come to an end. But at least the trackers that we installed in the vaccine will help us to keep tabs on you. We were getting tired of doing it through your phones and social media.

Oh well. We are smart, but you guys were smarter. Sorry about your friends who didn’t make it through this thing. They didn’t realize it was a hoax and a power grab.

Can’t win them all.

I Got a Monster: A Book Review.

I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg

I take this one somewhat personally because it is the city in which I live; the city that I consider my adopted hometown where I have spent 27 years working and writing and performing and making a life. I am biased for it and enraged at so much of what happens in this truly excellent book.

In 2017, Officer Wayne Jenkins and 6 others members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) were arrested by the FBI on multiple charges relating to their work on this special unit of the Baltimore City Police. For years, Jenkins and his men were at the heart of a criminal conspiracy to steal money from citizens, plant evidence on people they wanted to nail, and engage in reckless behavior behind the shield of the law.

This unit operated in response to the violence and gun deaths that have plagued Baltimore for years. The murder rate in this city has topped 300 a year for the past 6 years. In a post-Freddie Gray Baltimore, the Gun Trace Task Force flourished, taking guns off the street, making busts and pocketing cash along the way. And the scatter-shot approach to policing, which often swept up the innocent with the guilty was ripe with corruption and bad arrests.

In this mix is a cast of dirty cops, drug dealers, collaborators, victims and lawyers. One such lawyer, Ivan Bates had tangled with Jenkins on many occasions and in time became determined to do something about the corruption. This whole thing is like real life Bad Lieutenant. Cops ripping off drug dealers, planting evidence, roughing people up. The argument could be made that “oh, who cares? They were just drug dealers?” But the job is not to throw shit against the wall to see what sticks. The job is not to rob “bad” people. The job is to enforce the law and protect the public.

I Got a Monster is an absorbing read. I take note of the fact that the States Attorney comes off terribly. Marilyn Mosby is a peripheral figure in all this. The corrupt Gun Trace Task Force flourished under her. And they were subsequently brought down without her help. She does what is politically expedient: Dropping charges in case brought by dirty officers before investigating; she’s not thoughtful or methodical. All these arguments were initially used by Ivan Bates in his campaign to replace her as State’s Attorney, which is reported in the book. Ultimately, he had to drop that line of attack since he was a defense attorney and going against the GTTF would impact his clients. (the race was spilt three ways and Mosby won).

I Got a Monster is likely to be just one of many books about the GTTF. I know people outside the city love to dump on it (they can kiss my ass). But this book exposes a small sliver of one of the many ways in which local leadership fails the citizens of this city every day.

Re: Marilyn Mosby

This one’s for the Baltimore Readers.

Recently the city Solicitor determined that Marilyn Mosby, our States Attorney, did not violate any rules with her official travel. The reasoning appears to be because there aren’t any rules, there is no way to break them and therefore she has done nothing wrong. And furthermore, this was not tax money and we were not on the hook for any of it.

“[Inspector General Isabel Mercedes] Cumming found Mosby reported taking 24 trips in 2018 and 2019, traveling as a conference guest and speaker to Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere.” From Tim Prudente, Baltimore Sun, Febrauary 18^th, 2021

She has reportedly spent a total of 144 days out of town on these trips spanning 2018 and 2019.

Now…I’m not here to pile on or condemn about her traveling. I do not take particular exception to her spending about 19 percent of the year away from her duties in the city. For the purposes of this post, I will take on faith that these are legitimate business-related ventures…

No, my issue is with her job performance.

Mosby succeeded Gregg Bernstein, who presided over a comparatively calmer period in Baltimore when the murder rate was down and we had a decent Police Commissioner (Bealefeld). She took issue with the murder rate and his approach at reducing it. She also took issue with his conviction rate (95 percent).

Now…I know it might be apples and oranges, but after Freddie Gray, the murder rate has been way up in this city. From a low point of 196 in 2011…under Bernstein…we hit our high in 2019 with 348…under Mosby.

I know, I know…It’s astounding and terrible, and none of these are good numbers. Murder and drugs and crime and poverty and racism and corruption and redlining and neglect on a shocking level are all baked into the Baltimore experience, and I don’t presume to have the answers.

But come on.

That conviction rate “plunged” a whole 3 points to 92 percent…under Mosby. Which in and of itself probably isn’t bad, but what do I know? I’m not a lawyer, I’m not in law enforcement. I am just some beautiful stranger on the internet.

Also…

Her attempt to prosecute the Freddie Gray cops was admirable. But I said from the beginning, it was overreach. It had no shot in hell of working. And it didn’t. They all walked.

The corrupt Gun Trace Task Force flourished under her. And they were subsequently brought down without her help.

I know I’m only scratching the surface. But that’s what I got.

No. I don’t care about her travels. But I live in Baltimore, I read the news, and this is what I see. I want us to do better.

I don’t know much.

But…I am the Parochialist.

Rush, My Dad, and Me.

Jesus. Do we always have to talk about politics?

It began one day when I was in high school. I heard a voice coming through my dad’s radio that was saying things I wasn’t used to it saying. It wasn’t quite news, it wasn’t quite comedy, but it seemed like it was tailored to my dad’s conservative politics.

It was Rush Limbaugh, radio host out of Kansas City, now syndicated nationally through his Excellence in Broadcasting (EIB) Network. He was saying things that I knew weren’t being said by others. I learned about the Dittoheads (people who just agreed with everything he ever said) and “feminazis” and the Harmless Little Fuzzball (his fuzzy description of himself which belied the fact that one day, he would be the most dangerous man in media).

My dad lapped it up. He was a public-school teacher, a mild-mannered fellow, lots of good qualities (that I’ll get into soon enough). And while I can’t say Rush made him a conservative, it emboldened him in a way that must have given him comfort. Listening to the three hours a day of Rush, must have been enormously comforting for someone living among the liberal establishment of the deep blue state of Massachusetts.

(Though it’s not as deep blue as you might think: after all, they/we elected 2 Republican governors and the state went red three times in the last 40 years. Don’t fact check me. I’ll look it up.) For mild mannered people like my dad, there was an apparent rage not far below the surface. And while I can’t say he was ever as unhinged as the people we see on Twitter and in the news now, he certainly didn’t mind following a man who regularly disparaged The Liberals for…well, existing.

But for me, I think back to some of the things that my father might have supported in the days before Rush entered our lives. He had a minor crusade involving the treatment of prisoners in jails which I now find incongruous with the rest of the package of Republican Values. He had a strange fascination with the Anti-Abortion movement, especially with wacko right wing Operation Rescue, and it is to my ever-dying relief that he never followed through with joining those whack jobs in protesting abortion clinics. He was a deeply religious person who along with many like-minded friends, formed a sort of quasi extracurricular Church amongst themselves. Every Friday or Saturday Night in the early to mid-80’s, there was the Prayer Meeting.

Sidebar: it was during these prayer meetings when I snuck off and knocked on the door of my friend, the dear sweet old lady who lived with the leader of the meetings. Aunt Peg. I was about 7 years old and too young to stay home by myself. But when I knocked on that door, she always let me in. We watched TV away from the group. My favorite show was the Dukes of Hazzard. I don’t know how long we did that. All I remember was that I was always welcome and it was safe and I looked forward to seeing her every week and I really feel like shit for never coming back to see her after I grew old enough to stay home by myself.

Point being, a lot of these things were already there, already in place. At the same time, my dad loved animals and old comedy and Green Acres and laughed at fart jokes and who once took solace in the Urkel character on Family Matters. This same man who had all these harmless characteristics also devoted hours a day listening to a man that spewed ill-informed but confidently delivered crap that supported the superiority of the white middle class male, taped on his little timing device on the stereo and played on long car rides on trips in my childhood. Rush was so confident, so authoritative, so...convincing…the way a lot of Narcissists are. I didn’t realize how awful this man was until much later, when I had time away from home to finally learn how to think for myself.

And my father picked that up…constant barrage of “liberal this” and “liberal that.” “Clinton is a crook” and…it really didn’t matter if it related to the situation or not. I might have learned at some point to deflect these conversations, but that probably was a skill that didn’t get honed until I was much older.

I’d love to say I would have had a better relationship with my dad without all the Rush…but somehow, I don’t think that would have ever been the case.

It all rubbed off on me for a while, much like his love for classical music and appreciation for the Marx Brothers…I absorbed the contrarian appeal of the Limbaugh effect, even as I began a lifelong foray into punk rock…I have to admit, growing up in Western Mass, in the depressed shell of the once-great General Electric’s factory, it always felt a long way from the liberal enclaves of Boston or even Northampton. In my first presidential election, my father’s hatred of Bill Clinton rubbed off on me as I cast my very first ballot for his opponent, Bob Dole. Then a few years later, sometime after the excesses of the Clinton Impeachment trial, I began to slide back in the other direction. I believe seeing how far one party was willing to go to bring down a member of the other party was a huge factor in why I turned away from the GOP. I went third party in 2000 (never again) and then by 2004 I was voting Democrat and have done so ever since.

Meanwhile…

My dad went on doing what he did in elections. I can only assume he was still listening to Limbaugh and voting for the GOP.

Then…sometime during the Obama years, something happened….my mother got sick. He spent more of his time taking care of her as she suffered a series of mini strokes that ultimately took her down in November of 2012. But during that time, my love and respect for my father grew. He was setting an example for what it means to take those marriage vows seriously. After 46 years of marriage, this was the “sickness” part of “in sickness and health.”

And coincidentally, he stopped talking politics, and stopped listening to Limbaugh. Because even while he still revered this man who spoke to him daily for so many years, it just wasn’t doing anything for him at the time. “No one else is listening so why should I bother?” It would seem that the relative calm and competence of Barack Obama’s two terms coupled with the stark reality that he would lose the woman he loved and be alone for the first time in almost half a century would trump any desire to hear the words of an angry man over the radio.

I have to admit, this was my favorite era of my adult relationship with my father. Even as he took a world of shit from other relatives, he stood firm and took care of my mother until the very end….

I don’t know who my dad voted for in 2016 or 2020. I mean, I do know. But as long as I don’t know for absolute certainty he didn’t vote for That Awful Man, I can fool myself into thinking that his decency wasn’t compromised. But the reality is I know he would never vote for Biden and I’m even more sure that he would never have voted for Hillary, who was one of Limbaugh’s most frequent targets from the early days of the Clinton administration. Honestly, her biggest liabilities were her length of public visibility (apparently not a problem with Biden) and the continued dominance of the patriarchy.

Part of me just wishes that there had been a line that he refused to cross. That Trump would be the bridge too far; that this awful man who got where he got by putting people down, trashing women and the disabled and immigrants and anyone not maintaining the white supremacy narrative in the US would not get my father’s vote. That my God fearing but harmless little man that everyone seems to love would finally and at long last turn his back on the party of Rush and Trump. Honestly, all my high school friends, everyone around town, they all love Mr. C and for that matter, they all loved my mother as well. They were an odd little couple who were embraced for their oddness.

But alas…that was not to be…

For my mother’s part, she went a long time just being as “live and let live” sort of person, with a big, misdirected heart. And over time, with my father’s Limbaugh listening and Ditto head turn to the hard right, she went along with him. Because my father would preach. I mean, preach at her, us, anyone. Not talking with, but talking at. I hated that. How can you be polite and civil to someone you love who thinks that “anyone who votes for a Democrat is an idiot?” And she went along for the ride, becoming a card-carrying Republican, replete with bad words about Hillary, harsh words about Feminists and abortion and the most memorable moment coming during the Anita Hill testimony and subsequent Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Confirmation: “The Bitches didn’t get him!”

I know where that came from. It wasn’t her. It was my father, who channeled it from Rush.

Rush Limbaugh was dying, but that didn’t stop him from spouting off misinformation or being an evil prick. (no, it’s not called Covid-19 because there were 18 Covids before this; no, advocating a secession or even feeding that beast at all is not a good idea—you have listeners! You have a responsibility!)

Now Rush Limbaugh has finally died. On the one hand, I am glad, because he was such a prick. But then again, I know it must make my father sad, which oddly is still bothersome to me.

*

We talk a few times a year. It’s not a close family, but that is more of a product of our personalities than anything political. We’re not a “Trump divided us” kind of family. It’s just how it is, how it’s always been. Father’s Day, his birthday, my birthday, Christmas…we talk on the phone. Pre-Covid, I saw him once or twice a year. But my stoicism, my introversion, my love of the library and reading, my love of old comedy and the Marx Brothers: that’s all from him.

Please…turn off the TV sometimes. Turn off the news: no one needs to watch it 24-7. Find things that unite rather than divide. Sports are good. Movies are good. Trump is gone. Rush Limbaugh is dead. Maybe now I can talk to my dad again.