Out running and a guy running the other direction put his hand out and we high-5-ed as we passed and that part was awesome, but his palm was soaked in sweat and that part was not awesome.

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Necessitous Men.

Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) made white people’s brains liquefy into steaming pools of shrieking acid a few weeks ago by suggesting that America return to a pre-Reagan-presidency tax structure, I have been thinking about my man Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).

Since this is the internet, I feel compelled to mention that I think racism is bad and that Japanese internment was unacceptable. As time goes on, I think this will be up there with slavery and the genocide of Native Americans as one of the worst things the United States has ever done on its own soil.

However, that is not why I have been thinking about FDR. I have been thinking about him because of something he didn’t do, or rather, failed to do.

On Tuesday January 11th, 1944, FDR gave his State of the Union Address (but it wasn’t called that then) and he proposed an American Second Bill of Rights. He believed that the original Bill of Rights had in many ways, “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Sometimes this Second Bill of Rights is referred to as an ‘economic bill of rights’.

FDR said, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

BTW, “necessitous” is an adjective meaning “(of a person) lacking the necessities of life; needy.” Even I had to look that one up and I’ve often been accused of possessing a sesquipedalian loquaciousness.

Basically he was saying that you won’t have a free country very long if people can’t afford to live. Here, and in a great deal of his policies, you see notion that politics and economics are inextricably linked in an input/output fashion. If you input massive wealth inequality, you output dictatorship. If you input economic egalitarianism, you output democracy.

I don’t believe this thinking of this sort is common anymore and I think that it would be generous to even refer to it as “rare”. Thinking of this sort is essentially nonexistent.

Now it is lucky for me that no one reads this blog, otherwise a wandering BernieBro would pop up in the comments and wail, “THAT IS WHAT BERNIE HAS BEEN SAYING FOR ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS EVEN THOUGH I JUST LEARNED WHO BERNIE WAS THREE YEARS AGO!”

I like Bernie, I have always liked Bernie, I’ve liked Bernie since I learned who he was in the 1990s when he was working on health insurance reform with … (wait for it!) … Hillary Clinton. However, what I’m saying here is that neither Bernie nor anyone else is making the argument that anti-democratic political movements are a direct result of economic inequality. To make this theory even simpler, we’ll just call it: Garbage-In/Garbage-Out. If our thinking can dispense with notions of dignity and equality (though I value those things and believe they are important) and narrow down to the simple notion that the battle against wealth inequality is a battle that is objectively in everyone’s self interest, I think we would get a whole lot further.

I recently did a Quija Board call with FDR and he said that I am presenting this information correctly.

Here are some of the things FDR proposed for the Second Bill of Rights:

The RIGHT to a job.

The RIGHT to earn enough money to afford decent food, clothing, shelter, and recreation.

The RIGHT of every farmers to a fair income.

The RIGHT of businesses “large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad”

The RIGHT of every family to a decent home.

The RIGHT to “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”

The RIGHT to “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”

The RIGHT to a good education.

For context, this was the American President who was arguably the most popular during his lifetime, in the midst of the largest and most expensive war that had ever taken place in the history of the world, suggesting not only that we should do these things, but that they are so arguably necessary that they rise above the realm of simple policy and should instead be enshrined as inalienable rights. I can count on one hand the politicos I think even have the moxie to say something like that out loud. And FDR said it a State of the Union address.

The past is a wild place that is almost always unlike how we think of it, because we often only think of it the way we have been taught to by people who were not there.

FDR went on to say, “America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.”

Sadly, FDR - who was not a well man - died about 15 months after this speech. The spirit of many of these rights were rolled into various government programs and legislation (like the Employment Act of 1946 or LBJ’s Great Society project), but no one after Roosevelt had the verve and, frankly, the batshit-crazy determination to make the American Second Bill of Rights happen.

It is my personal opinion that the last 40 years of American political thought has been a disastrous failure of imagination. I personally lay blame for this at the feet of Ronald Reagan and his facile and puerile sense of what patriotism means, but other people might have other culprits to blame.

I’ll say this though, I think we need a second American Bill of Rights and I think there is great value and utility in framing that discussion as one that was started 70 years ago by the only President we’ve ever elected four times.

*** Tune in next week when we ask the eternal question: are we absolutely certain that birds don’t have arms? ***

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Stop, Drop, and Cover.

You know how everyone makes fun of Mitch McConnell because he looks like a turtle? Well I am not in favor of that. I think it is not right to make fun of him. He is not funny. He is however, a treacherous and treasonous cancer on this country and author Christopher R. Browning recently referred to him as “the gravedigger or American democracy”. McConnell has probably done more damage to America than the actual fucking KGB did during its 37 years of existence.

But that's not what I want to talk to you about. Sorry. I somehow managed to start on a tangent. What I want to talk to you about is actually Bert the Turtle. OH! That’s what happened: Bert the Turtle is a turtle, Mitch McConnell is a turtle and so my brain just went from there. Now it makes sense. Anyway, fuck Mitch McConnell and now let’s proceed to Bert the Turtle.

In 1951 the US Federal Civil Defense Administration released a nine minute black and white film to American schools that focused on how to survive an atomic blast. If you know about this at all, you know about it because it’s where the phrase “duck and cover” came from. There was even a little song.

Well Bert the Turtle is a turtle and he’s just turtle-ing along (on his hind legs like a human, as turtles all tend to do when no one is looking) and suddenly a fucking terrorist monkey lowers a fucking stick of dynamite down next to Bert’s head. Well I guess that despite the well-known centuries-long blood feud between monkeys and turtles, this particular dipshit monkey didn’t know that turtles can RETRACT THEIR APPENDAGES inside their famously dynamite-proof shells, which is exactly what Bert does just before the fuckwad monkey detonates himself exactly like Mitch McConnell did to his sense of patriotism in order to make room in his heart for one of Donald Trump’s fucking horcruxes.

Anyway, when the smoke clears Bert is fine and the monkey is as dead as good faith parliamentary procedure is in the United States Senate.

As the film goes on it features actual humans and even school children demonstrating how to duck and cover. In each sequence there is a FLASH OF LIGHT as an atomic bomb goes off and then whomever is in the frame drops to the ground and curls up into a ball of hides under a desk or a picnic blanket.

By the time I became aware the Cold War was going on, we’d already entered the glasnost & perestroika era. I lived a childhood free of the fear that had my parents had been indoctrinated with. They lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis after all. On the other hand, I always kind of liked Mikhail Gorbachev, he seemed like a cartoon beaver. I certainly wasn’t afraid he was going to bomb the living shit out of everyone I’d ever met.

That, however, is the interesting part. See, even though I was not afraid of Gorbachev (even remotely as much as I am afraid of Mitch McConnell), in the 1980s he controlled somewhere north of 55,000 nuclear weapons including the largest yield ever developed, the 50+ megaton “Tsar Bomba” weapon. During the period of time when I was not afraid of thermonuclear annihilation, it was very much within the realm of possibility that I would die as a result of thermonuclear annihilation. At the very least it was technically POSSIBLE, which is to say that it was within our ability as humans.

And so we laughed at old Bert the Turtle. “Oh Bert,” we would say mockingly, “you dumb dumb stupid idiot turtle dummy. Just accept the sweet inevitability of death why don’t you?”

That’s how we all talked on my elementary school playground.

But Bert knew something we didn’t. Bert was a creature of his time and his time was 1951. When America dropped the first atomic bomb on the unsuspecting population of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the resulting yield was clocked at about 15 kilotons.

Now 15 kilotons is nothing to sneeze at. That’s 15,000 TONS of dynamite. It killed an estimated 200,000 people. It was no laughing matter. Before and after pictures make it look like the city was scraped from the face of the Earth with the edge of a blade.

Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. A big round implosion-type bomb named “Fat Man” free fell through the air for 43 seconds before detonating almost two miles off target. The blast radius was so wide however, that it didn’t matter that they missed. It killed about 80,000 people.

At that moment, as Fat Man dropped free of the B-29 bomber floating above Nagasaki, it was the only functional atomic bomb left in the world. The United States initially built three bombs. One was detonated as a test in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico. One was dropped on Hiroshima. After the third bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, there were literally no more. In what was possibly the boldest bluff in the history of the world, the United States acted like it TOTALLY had a bunch more of these things.

And in fairness, pretty soon after that they did have a whole bunch more. Turns out it is not that hard to build an atomic bomb once you already have the material and the manpower and the knowhow and the money and the desire to do so. And the US had all of those things.

The Soviets had a lot of those things too, but they didn’t detonate a bomb of their own until August of 1949.

That bomb was called “First Lightning” and it had a 22 megaton yield, so it was bigger and more destructive than the bombs that America had dropped, but it was not bigger by orders of magnitude. It was not unthinkably bigger. It was big and terrible and the most destructive thing in the history of human existence on the planet Earth, but what it wasn’t, was the end of the world. In fact, when the US dispatched researchers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, they discovered that the bombs had not even been as destructive as they’d initially believed.

Yes, that means that there was a moment when a team of Americans with clipboards were standing on the surface-of-the-moon blast zone that had once downtown Hiroshima and writing in their notes, “Need to make the bombs bigger.” They researchers discovered that in the midst of all of destruction and carnage and unspeakable horror, a surprising amount of life had survived. People in basements, people under water, even people who were simply lying down on the ground had survived.

So this gets back to the difference between Bert the Turtle in 1951 and me in the 1980s. The bombs of the 1940s and 1950s were of a type and size that - while powerful and god-awful-terrible - were strictly speaking, survivable in a lot of scenarios. That is to say, a child inside a single story brick or cinder block school building a few miles from the hypocenter of the blast could, if immediately upon seeing the flash, drop to the ground below a heavy wood and metal desk and maybe maybe maybe survive. “Duck and cover” was not actually nihilistically laughable advice in 1951.

But 30 years later in Reagan's America, we had every right to laugh. By then America had developed the B83 hydrogen bomb which offered 1.2 megatons of destruction at the push of a button. Whereas the Hiroshima bomb was equivalent to 15,000 tons of dynamite, the B83 clocked in at 1,200,000 tons of dynamite. Just to be clear: that is 15 thousand vs. 1 million 200 thousand.

By the time my friends and I were laughing at dumb old Bert the Turtle, mankind had very easily transitioned from having three bombs that destroyed cities to tens of thousands of bombs that destroyed species.

That is the important part. The real history is not - as we are so often taught it, when we are taught it at all - that humanity went from being simply really good at killing, to suddenly jumping the shark in the sky above Hiroshima in 1945 by suddenly becoming capable of utterly extinguishing itself entirely.

It didn’t happen that way.

We built three bombs. We dropped two of them on other humans. Then we carefully surveyed the destroyed landscapes, the sagging melted flesh of the survivors, the skin of the women whose kimono patterns were burned onto their bodies, the children whose eyelids had been seared from their faces, the blackened remains of bodies incinerated by light, and then we said, “We’re gonna need some bigger bombs.”

The decision to build the fourth bomb was even more important than the decision to build the first.

In 1951, when Bert the Turtle was turtle-ing along, minding his own business and trying to avoid monkey assassins, the Soviet Union had 5 atomic bombs. Five. A decade later they had more than 1,500. And America always had more than the Soviets did. By the time I was a kid, there were more than 70,000 bombs in the world. No amount of duck and cover can save you from that.

So the lesson - and now I remember why I was thinking about Mitch McConnell! - is that sometimes we don’t notice the BIG CHANGE. The point of no return isn’t always where we think it is. We did not develop the actual ability to destroy the world and the entire human race in 1945 or even 1951. It was on some random day sometime in the mid-1950s as the US and the Soviet Union raced to crank out bomb after bomb after bomb. One bomb, one city. One bomb, two cities, and on and on and on and suddenly we have one bomb for every city and two bombs for every city and on and on and somewhere in there we reached critical madness.

The day we developed the ability to actually annihilate ourselves went completely unnoticed.

*** Please tune in next week when we try to determine if a snail is a mammal, a bird, a fish, a reptile, or an amphibian. ***

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Ag-Gag Body Camera.

So called “Ag-Gag” laws have been passed in 8 states and a full HALF of the states in the United States have at some point attempted to pass Ag-Gag laws.

So what are Ag-Gag laws? Well I am glad you asked (because I actually know the answer to this one)!

The US 9th Circuit Court has described Ag-Gag laws as those laws which seek to criminalize the recording of the “conduct of an agricultural production facility’s operations.”

So what the hell is that about? Well I am glad you asked!

Basically these are laws designed to keep activists (henceforth referred to as DIRTY HIPPIES) from sneaking into agricultural production facilities and recording the goings on and then disseminating those recordings.

“But,” you ask, “what are the DIRTY HIPPIES doing breaking into dairies? Are they high or something? Is this a PSA about not smoking THE POT, because if it is then I have bad news for you because I am stoned like right now.”

Well no, that is not it at all.

“So what is it about then, man?” You ask this while gazing transfixed down at your hands.

Basically Ag-Gag laws exist …

“Hey,” you say, interrupting me quite rudely, “have you ever really looked at your own hands? Like really LOOKED at them?”

So Ag-Gag laws exist because …

“Really looked at them, I’m saying???”

This BTW is what you’re actually like when you’re high. Anyway, Ag-Gag laws exist so that the general public does not ever SEE the conditions in which livestock animals are bred, raised, and slaughtered.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually saw what a chicken farm looked like? The answer of course is that you haven’t seen one, because there are laws against anyone showing you one.

My family’s background is in agriculture and I grew up in a predominately agriculture focused region, so I know all of this. I’ve always known all of this. I’ve seen downer cows (these are cows that either due to damage, disease, or defect lose the ability to stand up) and I know what happens to them (they are slaughtered, but that was usually going to happen anyway) and so I am familiar with some of the cruelty that is built into our food systems. I think about it just about any time I eat meat. And I am no vegan.

It only recently occured to me that not everyone is me (though some of you could be trying a little harder) and so you might at this very moment be sitting down to a nice big steak with a side of scrambled eggs and a nice tall glass of milk and you MIGHT NOT EVEN KNOW that that food is made of ANIMALS!

“Animals???” You ask, still looking at your hands.

Yes, animals.

Realistically, I think that people low-key know that the large scale factory farming of meat has cruelty built into it, but I also think that people choose not to care because they do not know the scope of the cruelty, which means that people are not actually making informed decisions. And of course the reason they’re not making informed decisions is because there have been laws passed that make it illegal to inform them.

I don’t think that is great and I can’t think of another area in our civic life where such a thing would be true (except maybe Vietnam in the mid to late 1960s). Now I’m not a DIRTY HIPPIE and I’m not saying that factory farming is EVIL or anything (the cruelty has been ratcheted up because it creates efficiency in order to meet the demands of the marketplace), but I do think that the general population is being prevented from understanding this issue because of Ag-Gag laws. Don’t you want to know the real costs of things?

“No,” you say, suddenly looking up from your hands, “because you’re a DIRTY HIPPIE!” And then you pull out your badge because you’re A COP! “You’re under arrest!” You shout at me.

But you can’t arrest me because I am writing this in Arizona, which does not have any Ag-Gag laws.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” You ask while pulling off your stoner disguise and revealing your uniform underneath, “Well you didn’t take into account that I’m no by-the-book cop, I’m the prototypical rules-are-made-to-be-broken kind of Hollywood movie cop that has totally fucked up the modern police officer’s conception of what it means to be police officer!”

Then you push me to the ground and start kicking me and you’re shouting, “Dirty Harry movies completely brain fucked my entire profession!”

Just before I pass out from your kicks to my face, I notice that you’re wearing a body camera and so maybe maybe maybe, some good will one day come of all this mess.

*** Please tune in next when we discuss whether it’s better to burn alive with your loved ones in a thermonuclear first strike, or to survive the blast and starve to death in the irradiated post-apocalyptic hellscape. ***

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Today the pool at the gym looked like one of those abandoned Soviet amusement parks.

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Pinkos.

Did you know that in the early 20th Century three states passed laws that margarine had to be pink?

Margarine is an artificial butter substitute and it is white when extruded from the factory. It is dyed yellow to more closely resemble butter (which itself is often dyed yellow to more closely resemble what you think butter looks like).

The milk and butter lobby (“BIG BUTTER”, as I and I alone refer to them) got laws passed in 32 states that regulated and restricted the dying of margarine (read: not yellow). Only South Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire required that it be pink because obviously their state legislatures were filled with old timey Tammany Hall types who were as hilarious as they were sadistic.

Eventually the Supreme Court got involved and in their famous case, “I Can’t Believe It’s a Supreme Court Caliber Case v. Can You Even Fucking Believe This Is a Supreme Court Case” ruled that BIG BUTTER needed to stop wasting the Supreme Court’s MFing time.

Despite the SCOTUS ruling, the state of Wisconsin kept its anti-margarine dying laws on the books until 1967 because … let me check my notes. Oh yes .... because no one actually gives a shit what color the margarine is in Wisconsin. Like literally, I bet that after the Supreme Court ruling there was a meeting at the FBI that went something like this:

INT. J EDGAR HOOVER’S OFFICE. DAY.

FBI AGENT

So we have been hearing rumors that Wisconsin still doesn’t have yellow margarine, despite the Supreme Court ruling. Should we send some people up there to …

J. EDGAR HOOVER

Get the fuck out of my office.

FBI AGENT

But I just …

J. EDGAR HOOVER

No, seriously. Fuck you.

FBI AGENT

But the Supreme Court …

J. EDGAR HOOVER

My next meeting after this is about actual fucking Soviet spies. KGB assassins and shit. And you’re bringing me this broke ass, weak tea non-yellow margarine bullshit? And anyway, isn’t Wisconsin in Canada? How gives a seagull’s fuck in winter about Canadian butter. Are you embarrassed right now you asshole? Because you should be.

FBI AGENT

I’m … going to go now.

J. EDGAR HOOVER

Goddam right you are! Jerk.

END SCENE

I don’t have transcripts for any of that, but I have put in a FOIA request, just in case.

*** Please tune in next week when we examine legislation regulating what percentage of your toothpaste can be accidental insect parts. ***

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Iceberg, Ahoy!

Today I have been thinking a lot about Sarah Ruhl’s book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater.

As the title indicates, the book is a series of micro-essays. It is a charming and interesting book. Some of the essays are almost poetry in and of themselves. This is one of my favorites:

11. An essay in praise of smallness

I admire minimalism.

It reminds me of a pretty little iceberg.

I have been thinking about that book because I am in a creative rut right now. In many ways this is less about my creative life than it is about my actual life. For better or worse, I have never been one of those writers who thrives in adversity. Sadly, I am one of those writers who thrives when I’m busy. Some of my most productive writing periods have been when I had non-writing and/or non-academic jobs, working 60+ hours a week and dealing with all kinds of other junk. I’m good at writing when it is a haven. I am bad at writing when my day is wide open. And oh man let me tell you, my life is waaaaay too wide open right now.

I’ve been trying to find a writing project just to get my fingers typing. I wonder if there might be something interested in playing around with what is called “flash nonfiction” because I know nothing about flash nonfiction. I guess I know that it is short and true. Maybe that would be a good name for a project.

This is likely not going to be good writing, but it isn’t supposed to be. If I have learned anything about writing in the nearly four decades I have been alive, it is that most writing isn’t good and a great deal of it shouldn’t even be done with goodness in mind.

And then I remembered that I have this whole website where I can post writing no matter how bad it is! WHAT A WONDERFUL COINCIDENCE!

If you’ll excuse me, now I need to go Google “flash nonfiction” to see what it is. Ig nothing else, I have been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, so at the very least I can start cataloguing interesting information. I don’t know. I know that I just need to be writing more because I am getting a little stir crazy out here in the desert with nothing to do.

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