Birthday Luncheon

Last month, I submitted a flash fiction entry to a contest by Writers' Advice.  I didn't win, but I did get honorable mention.  I was very happy with that and will continue to participate in the contests.  For a small fee, they'll give you feedback about your submission.  It's worth it to me to have that advice.

I'd posted this before under a different title.  I like this title better.

Birthday Luncheon

 

It really pisses me off when I have to waste my free time feeling bored.    Why do I have to go to family lunches and stuff like that?  No one talks to me, well, hardly ever.  Today we had to go because it’s Nana’s birthday.  I don’t even know how old Nana is!  My father got out of it because he works.  I told my mom I needed to do homework and she said she didn’t want to hear it because it’s Saturday and I can do it tomorrow.  It’s not fair.

At least the restaurant we went to is kind of fun.  It has all kinds of cool things up on the walls.  There’s a really old bicycle.  It has to be ancient because it doesn’t even have any brakes on the handles.  There’s a lot of pictures of people from olden times.  Some of them look like movie pictures.  There’s a really rough looking guy in a big cowboy hat.  He’s laughing about something.  Maybe someone called him beautiful – not!  There’s also a guy wearing a raincoat and a brown slouch hat almost down over his eyes.  He’s really ugly – and old.  There are sports things up there, too – a hockey stick and a baseball mitt.  The weirdest thing up there is someone’s arm sticking out of the wall.  I guess it’s from a dummy model but I wonder why they just stuck an arm up there?  Where did the rest of it go?

My mother and Nana yakked across the table while I looked around the room at all the cool stuff.  Brian kicked me under the table.  I stuck my tongue out at him but he was pointing to something over our heads.  It was just an old airplane.  So, what.  He was trying to tell me something but I wouldn’t look at him.  Brothers are so stupid, especially the older ones.  They think they know everything.

I was bored so I grabbed a dessert menu off the table and opened it up.    At first, I didn’t understand why all the desserts were in tall float glasses and then I realized that this was a drink menu.  I didn’t want Brian to know that I made a mistake so I kept looking at it just long enough to be able to put it back down without getting all embarrassed.

When I looked up, I saw the waiter standing by Brian’s shoulder.  He was writing and Brian’s mouth was moving, telling the waiter what he wanted.   I tapped my mother on the shoulder but she was still talking to Nana.  Why didn’t she tell me the waiter was there?  I tapped her again but she held her hand up. I hate it when they do that.  They don’t ever bother to talk to us and they expect us to just sit there and be polite.  I tapped her again, harder.

“WHAT?” my mother signed to me, looking exasperated.  “What do you want?”

I fingerspelled: “S-p-r-i-t-e.”

 

Democratic Leaders: Are You Sleeping?

I don’t feel so good about my country.  I watched a YouTube video. It showed the first portion of Senator Whitehouse (of RI)’s presentation to the Senate about a fifty-odd year old plot layout to have corporations take control of government by subverting the Supreme Court.  It was written by William Powell before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.  His memo is also here:but I have to admit it was easier for me to understand by watching Senator Whitehouse explain it.

Backstep: I’ve always been an avid reader.  When I was a senior and about to graduate from high school, my favorite author was Taylor Caldwell.  She’s written many excellent books and now that I’m thinking about her, I want to go back and re-read her stuff.  I started to read her first novel, Dynasty of Death,  because the description sounded intriguing: two brothers in conflict.  I got more from the story than that! 

Caldwell wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of the CEOs of businesses and corporations to take control of their governments.  The conspirators had a long range plan for accomplishing this.  In addition, they planned wars in different locations at different times.  Wars are very profitable for business and that was the bottom line: wealth and power.  I remember how it opened my eyes.  Fiction?  Yes, but what if this was really happening?

Another book by the same author, Captains and the Kings, was similar in many ways.  To be honest, it felt like a fictional Kennedy story.  The patriarch, Joseph, immigrated to the United States from Ireland.  He worked his way up to the head of his own company, through determination and a definite lack of empathy.  There was a similar conspiracy of businesses with the same purpose: a quiet takeover of the company.  Similarities to the Kennedy family: a “curse” follows the family.  Joseph grooms oldest son Rory to become the first Catholic President of the United States.  However, Rory is too liberal for the conspirators and someone among them has Rory assassinated.

Ok, back to present time:  as I watched the videos, I immediately thought of those two books.  Justice Powell had written the blueprint for GQP behavior today.  The plan had to be implemented very slowly, insidiously, over five decades.  Slowly, slowly the GOP moved to obstruct and block legislation that would “harm” big business or that would help middle class citizens.  Fifty years ago, I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention to politics.  Except for Watergate, I can’t remember the squabbling between the parties that we’re seeing today.  Soon after Powell sent his memo out, Republicans got hold of it.  I remember that President Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court.

I imagine that’s when the poisoning of the court began.

Then Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McDonnell sealed the evil deal of packing SCOTUS with conservatives by refusing to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee to the court after Antonin Scalia died.  Obama chose Merrick Garland, and McConnell declared he wouldn’t hold any hearings until after the 2020 election.  As a result of this illegal maneuver (that apparently no one tried to stop), tRump was able to pack the court with ultra right wing screwballs.

In the next session, SCOTUS agreed to hear a case that could totally change the way we have elections.  The case is called Moore vs. Harper.  The Rethugs in NC came up with a redistricting plan that only served to profit them and the state court threw out their maps.  The Rethugs sued, claiming that throwing the maps out was a violation of the Constitution’s election clause.

“In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.”

Really?  That means anything goes in an election.  If we don’t like who got the popular vote, we just throw them out so “our guy” wins.  This has the potential of completely overturning democracy.  Voting is our only power.  It’s take away if authorities decide they don’t want a particular set of votes counted.

It would be a total disaster.

But no one is talking about it.  The Democratic leaders are dismayingly quiet or blowing useless raspberries.  Nothing is being done.  It’s going to happen because everyone at the top is sleeping at the wheel.  I’ll have to write to my reps, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader about this.  They can’t sit on the hands anymore, wishing it would all just go away.

It’ll go away, all right, but if no action is taken, no one will be free.

They're Not Here To Hurt Me

 

Over a day later and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yesterday’s testimony.  It’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of it.  The up-close-and-personal-details were shocking, those little things that have been hidden away until 25-year-old Cassady Hutchinson stood up and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I’d never heard of her, but apparently, she was well known on Capitol Hill and was around for a lot of the pre-insurrection talk at the White House.  She was right there as the coup attempt took place, right there with Mark Meadows (tRump’s chief of staff), Pat Cipollone (tRump’s attorney) and others.  She was a top aide to Meadows.

TB and I were already very much aware of tRump’s involvement from the get go.  You had to be a real fool not to realize what he was doing at his speech to his hordes the morning of January 6^th.  He exhorted them that they might “fight and fight hard” to preserve The Big Lie (OK, he didn’t call it that).  We knew he was involved when he did absolutely NOTHING to call off his violent mob for hours and hours.  We heard reports that people at the White House were begging him to call the insurrectionists off and he refused.  One thing he did do was tweet a message that set his followers raging after Mike Pence.  We knew all that.  Reinforcements didn’t arrive until AFTER the President sent his go-home-I-love-you video to the traitors. 

What we didn’t know:  he didn’t even want to do that.  He thought Pence deserved to be hanged.  He believed the mob wasn’t doing anything wrong.  Well, all that seemed pretty obvious.

Hutchinson was stoic but looked frightened all the same.  She’d heard all kinds of stories floating around about January 6^th but she didn’t feel really scared until a conversation she had with Rudy Giuliani on January 2^nd.  Giuliani was all bubbling over with glee about “going to the Capitol” on January 6^th, and she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good.  She consulted with Mark Meadows, who seems to have been a very detached and cold-hearted character.  He was sitting on the sofa scrolling through his phone and that seemed to be something he did frequently.

She tried to discourage him from getting in the middle of all of that potentially violent shit.  He did anyway.  There was a “war room” at a hotel in DC where tRump’s loyal inside group of screwballs were plotting and planning.  She did manage to convince Meadows not to go in person; he participated by phone.

She was at the Ellipse when tRump was going to give his incendiary speech.  He was majorly pissed because there wasn’t enough of a crowd in camera view.  That’s because most of his traitorous army were armed to the teeth and didn’t want to pass through the secret services’ magnometer machines.  They didn’t want their deadly weapons detected and confiscated.  She heard tRump become irate and profane.  I’m the fucking president, he said.  They’re not here to hurt me.  Get the fucking mags out of here.  Let my people in.

So, he wanted the secret service to allow all those followers waiting outside the Ellipse to come into the circle.  It didn’t matter they were carrying knives, guns, spears and what have you because “they’re not here to harm me.”  The hell with everyone else, right?  Those are the rioters who attacked and injured so many of the Capitol police defending the building.

I wondered about the one statement he made on January 6^th that they were all going to March on the Capitol now.  I’m going with you, he said.  He never showed up, and I remember thinking what a coward he was.  Well, it turns out he wanted to go and had a major tantrum when he found out the secret service wouldn’t take him there.  According to Hutchinson, Tony Orvaldo, a secret service agent serving as the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that tRump became so enraged he tried to grab the steering wheel and also lunged at lead agent Bobby Engel’s throat in an attempt to force them to take him to the Capitol.

Although shaken then, today both men are denying anything like that happened.

Unhinged and shocking.  More along those lines, apparently tRump was wont to throw plates of food and overturn tables when he was irate.  And this was the man with the codes.  We certainly were protected by all the guardian angels in heaven during that awful man’s administration.

After tRump was returned to the White House, he went to the Oval dining room and watched TV.  TB and I were watching coverage of a court case which was suddenly interrupted by live coverage of the incensed mob descending on the Capitol.  They quickly broke through the barriers and steamrollered over the Capitol police.  We couldn’t believe our eyes.

There was equal horror in the West Wing.  Hutchinson tried to alert Meadows but he was scrolling once again, virtually ignoring her.  She said Pat Cipollone barreled in, telling Meadows they had to go talk to tRump.  And Meadows said, “He doesn’t want to do anything.”  tRump had no interest in stopping the violence, in other words.  When they finally did go to confront tRump, they had no luck.  Cipollone was very upset because tRump had said Pence deserved to be hanged.

For 187 minutes, tRump did nothing but watch the coverage.  Finally, he was persuaded to reluctantly release the video telling his supporters to “go home, we love you. You’re special people.”

On January 6, 2021—which was also TB’s birthday by the way, some present! —we realized how close we’d come to a coup of our government.  This was the United States?  That kind of thing didn’t happen in the greatest democracy in the world, but it did.

Even worse, all of those people in the White House that day knew tRump had lost the election and told him repeatedly he’d lost.  There was no steal.  They could have said something but none of them did before or after January 6^th.  The witnesses who testified didn’t speak up when tRump and his cronies carried on (and still carry on) about the Big Lie.  They all knew it wasn’t true.

The witnesses are hailed and praised for speaking up now before the committee.  I am very glad that they’re being honest about what really happened but I still wonder why they didn’t speak up sooner.  Were they afraid of retaliation?

tRump makes me think of Mafia dons.  They led their “families” and often would have other soldiers doing all the dirty work.  And the soldiers and other family members protected the dons.  They had this code of silence called omerta and so it was that no one could figure out just how these organizations worked.  Federal agents were frequently frustrated trying to prosecute illegal activities.  If it wasn’t for people like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Henry Hill, Joseph Valachi and others, that whole criminal syndicate of families wouldn’t have been cracked open.

Liz Cheney closed with some chilling information.  Apparently, people in tRump’s world are attempting to interfere with witnesses’ testimony.  She shared two of those messages, filled with fake promises and subtle threats.  It’s illegal to do that, of course, but that was a major tactic organized crime used to silence witnesses.

What is happening and continuing to happen in this country?  Between these hearings and the take-over of the Supreme Court by radical right wingers, I am feeling scared for our future.

Anthem

 It’s hard for me to think of what to say about Anthem by Noah Hawley.  I saw it offered on one of my eBook mailing lists.  Two things attracted me: I knew Noah Hawley created the way-out and successful Fargo movie and series.  I so enjoyed his way of telling a story: lots of darkness with a nice sprinkling of comedy.  The eBook list said this: “An epic literary thriller set where America is right now, in which a band of unlikely heroes sets out on a quest to save one innocent life—and might end up saving us all.”  Oooh, sounds like a fantasy-type!  I wanted to read it and so I requested it from the library.

The back of the cover warned: This isn’t a fairy tale

I disagree.  Fairy tales have violence, monsters, and many times unhappy endings.  I would say this is a dystopian fairy tale, set in our very near future.

I was hooked right away, even though many things upset and disturbed me.  I seem to be reading a lot of that lately, believing one thing about a book and discovering something very upsetting and learning something true and awful.

The very basics are this:  there is a movement among teenagers that starts small and starts spreading from our country to around the world.  Teenagers often learn that their parents and their times aren’t perfect and so they rebel.  This particular rebellion has very tragic consequences.  The other basic information is that a group of teens, kids that don’t fit in for one reason or another, band together to rescue a girl being held hostage by an evil character nicknamed The Wizard.  There are other horror/fantasy characters as well: a witch, a troll, orcs, and other Lord of the Ring races.

The book brought to mind others I’ve read and I don’t mean to say Hawley’s style is better or worse than any others.  The development of characters and use of horror reminded me of The Stand by Stephen King.  A lot of recent social issues came up and, now and then, Hawley wrote about them with no other characters interacting.  That reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath, in which John Steinbeck would insert chapters about the Dust Bowl, the cruelty of people toward the displaced farm families that lost everything, and the struggles one particular family had trying to survive.  Reading this book also reminded me of 1984, Animal Farm, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

So, be warned.  I thought it was an awesome book.  But then, I have an active interest in my future and that of my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  What will it be like?