In the Country of the Young

 

February 8, 2025

Sweet summery days, that the TV news says are numbered. Blades of daffodils emerging in their multitudes. The heat is almost unbearable in my study, but I won’t turn the heater off just yet. What if it doesn’t come back on?

In the bracket with things I never expected to see are bears in my yard, a hurricane in my mountains, an American government become a toxic, fascist clown show, the clowns somehow not dragged offstage with a hook and thrown into the hoosegow. The news allows us to imagine Musk as a three year old with a crayon in his hand, whirling from room to room trying to deface as much as he can before an adult steps in. It’s more systematic than that. He chooses and his senile boss agrees to the choice of halting everything that has to do with control, safety, oversight, regulation, equality, anything that protects and strengthens, anything that tries to level the playing field, anything that might curb hate or ignorance (so useful to Trump at all times), anything that defends the weak against the predation of the strong. If it protects workers in the workplace, animals in their wilderness, children in their schools, patients in hospitals and pharmacies, innocent men and women trying to live their lives, it makes Musk itch with impatience, because nothing can be allowed to stand between the super-rich and the easy acquisition of an ever greater portion of the common bounty. If it interferes with profit or slows the 1% ever so slightly in their gobbling up of resources, it must go. Safety oversight, food and drug quality, health care, day care, workplace safety, retirement, civil rights, culture and civility are irrelevant to those who can buy them for themselves. Billionaires are the only constituency considered by this unfolding administration, the only constituency which can possibly profit from actions taken in the last week by that moon-faced fraud. The Supreme Court is bought lock stock and gavel, but where is Congress? Where is the NRA, who justified their bloody existence in the past by promising to be ready when tyrants arose. I vowed for my own health not to look at the news, but sometimes the hubbub becomes briefly audible between cat videos. 

Tried to go on my sister’s Rhine cruise, but it was sold out.

PBS documentary on Jefferson. Informative. Inspiring.  I was never sure just what a Federalist was, and why Jefferson didn’t like it. 

Believe I have finished In the Country of the Young.