It’s hard to believe it’s already the end of September 2022. This summer didn’t go as planned for me for a number of reasons. Hot weather, rain, and current events that seemed to come out of order and just seemed to keep breaking my stride. Now as we head for the midterm elections, it’s not so unusual to see so much going on with almost nowhere to hang your storybook hat. The politicians are good at that. At what? You know, that what I said.
The non-existent capital insurrection is still in the news. How do you talk about an event that didn’t even happen? Maybe I’ve got too much in common with Alex Jones. Ok, I get it, there was a riot and some of the riot was organized by conspirators. The notion that anyone in that riot actually thought they could overthrow government is ludicrous. They managed to disrupt a proceeding but that isn’t what I think of as an insurrection. As far as I’m concerned the hearings are nothing but beating a dead horse.
Then, Donald Trump took some homework to Mar-a-Lago. Get real, no way is Donald Trump gonna really screw up with anything all that important. He’s smarter than that. Another dead horse.
Trump is good at grabbing the spotlight. In the news business they say all news even the bad news is good news. Trump seems to follow that protocol and most of the time it does seem to work for him. He’s staying in the 2024 campaign even before the campaigning begins. But it can backfire. In Alabama where there’s not much taste for nonsensical political shenanigans the Capital riot cost congressman Mo Brooks his run for the US Senate (good riddance). This is where Trump may have miscalculated. Even though Joe Biden is really trying to loose the next election I don’t think Trump will win.
What about Roe V. Wade for a topic? No, that’s just beating a dead whore. Look, I know the abortion mongers are all tore up, but RvW was a bad law and did not have a constitutional basis to begin with. Get over it. The congress, or the states, or not, will make future decisions about abortion, after which they may still end up before the Supreme Court.
The biggest and most understated story, aside from the Sandy Hook good cop bad cop case undermining the 1st amendment, is really the Supreme Courts contempt for Church and State separation. The stage is set for a fundamentalist takeover that could end up making Iran look like a liberal state. I was in agreement with a conservative shift but had misgivings about Trumps SCOTUS appointments for just this reason. No, it’s not going to happen overnight, and that’s why its tough to hang your hat on that storybook hook. But most likely it is going to happen and it will be much worse than younger liberals, or even conservatives, can imagine.
And, as it sinks in that Trump has handed the SCOTUS over to the same faction that actually stole the election in the first place, his ardent alt-right supporters might not be so happy to see where the results are actually headed, and so also my incantation that Trump might not be headed back to the White House after all.
I remember when they passed RvW in the first place. But the contempt hasn’t got anything to do with RvW since it was bad law to begin with and has no religious basis either way. The underbelly is the encroachment of fundamentalist zealots into the schools. I say, it won’t happen overnight because it will take 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years to brainwash and condition innocent young minds to accept fascism. Maybe other cases will come up and reasonable boundaries will be set but that isn’t the horse they’re riding on at this time. And I do mean “contempt.”
Of course, the Queen of England died. Some folks seem to wonder why I hand’t much to say about that. Well, I’m amused with the English monarchy but when it comes to policy and politics I live in the United States. Elton John is giving his farewells and about to leave the Southeastern United States for the West Coast – maybe for the last time. No doubt about it, the demarcations are happening worldwide and with far-flung implications that indicate tectonic shifts in time and culture. Damn. War and Peace is one helluva book but it’s already been written and really I’m just into writing these short stories. That hat is just too big to tackle in one column. And frankly, you had to be there.
But, it’s not quite over anyway. There’s still three months in 2022, the honor guards have been dropping like flies, and there’s no telling what all might happen to punctuate the book finale. “Book” seems trivial in scope. I remember once a long long time ago when someone was describing the future Internet and they said something like the entire Encyclopedia Britannica would be able to be transmitted coast to coast in a matter of seconds. Inconceivable back then but doesn’t even seem too impressive now. Nowadays, google knows everything, and that’s way bigger than any encyclopedia ever was. I guess it’s like that, google I mean. If all of history and all of intelligence and learning and art and culture and science were ending in a book called google – well, that’s the scope of the demarcation were passing through right now.
You might want to google demarcation, and encyclopedia.
©2022 – Jim Casey
