The smoke from those Canadian wildfires is reaching down here to Greensburg, and so I’m told, back home in Baltimore. If anything it’s worse today than yesterday. Oh and I’m going home now to temperatures in a high 90s. It was like this a few years ago, during first retirement, when I bopped out to California and the heat past the Rockies was brutal. I don’t remember it being like this when I was a kid. Hot during the summer, yes, and disgustingly humid. But not like this.

I’m in Greensburg Pennsylvania presently, the ancestral home of my mom’s side of my gene threads. I used to post these travelogs often here on my blog in real time, but I don’t anymore because thieves and burglars might be listening in and see an opportunity to break into my house and steal things; and never mind I always have neighbors and security cameras watching and my alarms set. It’s the world we live in now. But I’m getting tired of that, and I think I’m going to post about my travels here more often.

I’m here in Greensburg to drop some family history I inherited after mom passed away. Family bibles with birthdates, death dates, and marriages recorded in them, and lots and Lots of old family photos and random artifacts. I’ve given it all to the Greensburg Historical Society. I still have family living in the area I suppose, but I’m completely estranged from them because of how mean they were to my mom. The only person I’m still close to on that side is mom’s cousin, who stood by her all throughout her life and whatever the family drama was. But like mom, she doesn’t live here anymore, and hasn’t for decades.

As I type these words I suddenly realize that, like mom, and her mom, mom’s cousin never had any interest in returning to Greensburg after they left, long, long ago. Mom took me here often when I was a kid for visits, but in retrospect that was mostly for her mom’s benefit, to visit old friends and the one son she still had living nearby. We would stay with a distant relative, whose relationship to mom’s family I’m still uncertain of. I still have fond memories of those visits, but that was before the family drama really started touching me.

When I came to the Greensburg Historical Society the other day to drop things off, they gave me the tour of their collection so far. The people working here are very nice folks, history nerds, and so friendly it did my heart good because my feelings toward this place are mixed now at best. I’m writing this to my blog just to put this one more little message in a bottle out here for you because the collection of German artifacts they have surprised me, and then made my heart ache in a different way from the ache I expected to have being here. I always knew in the back of my mind the German influence here in central Pennsylvania, but seeing it all collected together and representing a significant part of the history of this place startled me.

There was a magnificent old bible, one of those big heavy embossed leather bibles with heavy metal clasps to close it, well preserved in a glass display case, and it was in German. There were school books in German, travel books, written histories of Pennsylvania and Westmoreland County. Stories of the people who came here, made a life here, in the language of their homeland. The folks who work here said they’d brought a translator in to help with cataloging all that. And I immediately  thought of you, and wished you were there with me just then, because you could have looked all that over and told them things about it that maybe they didn’t know. And I began aching for a life I never had a chance to have, and which probably one you wouldn’t have wanted with me anyway.  The old dream that will never completely die, but that becomes something to just acknowledge, like getting old.

I’m letting go of all that family history now because the Parkinson’s diagnosis leaves me with a new perspective. You always kept telling me toward the end of it, that I needed to let go of the past. Live in the present you said, using the word as a double entendre.  I wouldn’t exactly call Parkinson’s a present, but it works well enough as a mile marker. I can let go of a lot of stuff I’ve carried with me since mom died, because I was never much a part of it anyway, and I am going to need to carefully manage the energy I have left to me. I’m sure at some point the people in my family here became aware that mom’s son by the father they all despised is gay, but they’d have kept me at arms length anyway because I was his son and the sins of the father will always convey to the son if he’s the only convenient target.

Mom loved me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s gone now and my connection to the others was tenuous at best because that was how they wanted it ultimately, and I came to accept it. The life of the only child teaches him how to rely on himself. The only one who took an interest in me was the one who left Greensburg for California and he never went back either. How I’ve wished I could have grown up closer to him. But then I would never have met you.

The trick in letting go of things is knowing what parts of that life you lived made you the person you are, what you need to honor and respect, for better or worse, and what was just the back story, not your story.

This came across my Facebook news stream yesterday, from user Alex Bernard in the “Dune” group…

J.R.R. Tolkien famously disliked Frank Herbert’s Dune “with some intensity”. He never wrote a detailed critique, but literary historians and scholars attribute his feelings to fundamental clashes in their worldviews, moral frameworks, and storytelling philosophies.

I’ll just leave this with two of his bullet points, because they’re really all that needs to be said:

• Moral Ambiguity vs. Objective Good: Tolkien championed stories where characters fought for objective, uncompromised good—even when faced with impossible odds, like Frodo’s quest. In contrast, Dune operates in gray areas. Its protagonist, Paul Atreides, embraces a consequentialist mindset, choosing “lesser evils” to secure power, which Tolkien would have found deeply troubling.

• Pessimism and Power: Tolkien’s concept of “consolation” involved a eucatastrophe (a miraculous, happy ending) and hope. Dune is a bleak, tragic universe where absolute power corrupts, and the ultimate outcome is inherently dystopian and complex.

That last is basically Herbert the man right there. Let me add Herbert was also a homophobe. But of course these things tend to be bundled together, springing from the core of a rotten soul. And where you really see it isn’t in the Dune novels, but in Soul Catcher; a book I have hated passionately ever since I finished it, threw it across the room and tore it to bits. When I learned later that Herbert had a gay son it occurred to me that the book was an exercise in vicariously tormenting and murdering Bruce. (Herbert detested his gay activist son Bruce, who struggled with drugs his adult life…which wouldn’t have had anything to do with how Herbert would, among other things, hook his sons up to a lie detector when they misbehaved) But it can also be seen as a purer horror story than the Dune novels. Herbert is on record as saying the character of Paul Atreides was meant to be a warning, not a hero, and you can suppose the character of Charles Hobuhet is also in that vein; a warning about men who assume they are favored by the gods. But Herbert is too cute by half here. See how many people miss what Herbert claims is is point about Paul. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t calling out his god’s right hands; he’s admiring them from afar. And like your usual moral runt, he dresses it up in various disguises and self serving excuses, so he doesn’t have to see the creep in the bathroom mirror.

I’ve read there is some sort of effort towards turning the book into a movie, but the people working on it, with the support of Herbert’s family it seems, were trying to rewrite the end to be more “politically correct” (their own words). I can appreciate why, since the book is so thoroughly disgusting in its total indifference to child murder. But the essential problem with the book isn’t that the thirteen year old boy is murdered at the very end, only moments from when he might have been rescued. The core problem is it is yet another crazy murdering Injun Joe figure created by a white man with zero understanding and sympathy for native Americans, a moral indifference for cultural appropriation, and bitter resentment over having a gay son. Native Americans just don’t need more of that sort of thing dumped on them, and I’ll bet Bruce didn’t much like seeing himself vicariously tormented and killed by his own father. I don’t see how you make that “politically correct”. So I hear, Herbert lost his only native American friend when he showed him a draft of the story. Of course it didn’t discourage him from getting it published.

Decency versus vulgarity.

Tolkien almost certainly disliked Dune “with some intensity” because he had Herbert’s number. They could not have been more different men.

I really needed to get some more cat food, in case Walter comes for a visit (he didn’t last night). And cookies. But talking even a short walk is risky in this heat, and especially for someone my age. I decided to wait until after sundown and the temperature dropped to at least 95. One of the perks of living where I do is there is a really good Giant Food store that’s not more than a 10-15 minute walk from my front door.

Out on the front porch it was still like an oven but not so intense that I didn’t think I could manage it. So I grabbed a small canvas shopping bag and headed out. All I needed was a few cans of cat food to tide me over until I could drive out to Cockeysville and the Pet Smart there. So I wouldn’t be carrying a lot back home.

What I hadn’t figured into this was that the intense heat of the last couple days had really baked the pavements and everything else in my environment, such that even if the sun wasn’t bearing down on me and the sky was getting dark, the heat was rising up at me from the ground all around me.

But I made it. I have food (and cookies). Probably not venturing out again until Monday when this heat wave is supposedly scheduled to end.

When the temperature gets into the triple digits the Mercedes gets its cover on until the temperature gets a little more reasonable. This is how it looked the first day of the heat wave yesterday. Oh…and the wildflowers I planted last spring. More about those later.

I bought the fitted cover, among other accessories, from the dealer when I bought the car. So this is the real fit for this specific model not a generic one, down to the little pocket for the hood ornament, and also for the satellite/GPS antenna on the roof. It’s actually pretty easy to just unroll and slide on and off. But even early this morning the heat was oppressive and I was exhausted just putting this on. I was going to take an extra early morning walk but it was already too hot. I tried again this morning but it was already 92 at 7:30.

I’m maintaining the bird bath and trying to keep drinking water out there for them. and I need to clean and put fresh humming bird juice in the feeder every night this heat wave goes on because at these temperatures that sugar water will start to ferment.

Walter came for a visit…

You caught the shoelace. Or did it catch you?

…and I gave him food and fresh water, and I was hoping he’d stay indoors at least until the evening, but after about a couple hours he poked his nose in the door which is the signal I’ve always accepted from visiting street cats they want back out, so I let him out. Walter is not a feral cat. Sadly we (the neighborhood) thinks he was just abandoned when his owners moved from the apartments a couple blocks over. So he’s friendly, if a bit playful and bitey. Probably just a couple years old. He won’t stay inside which is fine with me because I don’t want anymore pets after what happened to Claudia and the calico. Still, in this heat I would have let him stay inside my air conditioned house all day. But no, he wanted back out eventually. I have to trust he has places under some of the homes here where he can nap and escape the heat. None of those single family homes across the street have basements, just crawl spaces. I know one neighbor has put a little place for him under his porch.

The heat outside yesterday and now is…just amazing. Just topping off the bird bath in my front yard is as much outside as I want to be today. Any grocery shopping I might want to do (I’m going to at least need more cat food) will have to wait until after sundown.

I have two weather stations outside on my backyard deck, plus the temperature sensor inside the AC compressor unit in the backyard. Yesterday they were all reading 103 around 2 o:clock. It’s 101 now as I write this and it’s not even noon yet.

Every now and then when it breaks 100 I step outside onto my front porch just to see how it feels. The front porch is covered and mostly but not all in the shade all day long. It feels like looking into my oven to check on something I’m baking.

Yes I’ve set the central AC to 75. Additionally I’ve installed a small window unit in my upstairs bedroom, because it is difficult to keep the second floor in this little 1950s Baltimore rowhouses cool. At night I turn the central AC up and the window unit down. This is going to be an expensive month electricity wise. But I’ve always been on board with Heinlein’s saying that you should budget for the luxuries first. I budget for the utilities first. I’ll eat cold cut sandwiches and energy bars all month if I have to.

Someone in the comments remarked that the New York Times seems to be only letting Log Cabin Republicans editorialize about Pride during Pride month. You have to remember it was decades, long after ‘gay’ became a commonly used term for ‘homosexual’ before the Times would allow it to be used that way on its pages.

I was guessing as I read that guest editorial title that its author, Matthew Vines, is a post Stonewall baby. In fact according to Google he was born in 1990. So he wouldn’t know that, as a matter of fact, yes, yes he is a queer.

That is what we were back when I was coming of age in the late 60s/early 70s, and well before then too. We used ‘gay’ to self identify, first as a bit of deep insider slang late in the 19th century, then more frequently and openly in the years after Stonewall. But to a certain subset of our neighbors, ‘queer’ is what we were and would always be. When it wasn’t one of the other dozens or so slurs for ‘homosexual’.

A Coming Out Story, What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

I came of age when ‘queer’ was one of those slurs, and I will go to my grave flinching a little every time I hear it. But I appreciate the reclaiming of the word by the younger set; that defiance, that Yes We Are So What attitude. It makes things happen. Frank Kameny, bless his soul and may he rest in peace, approached gay activism by way of showing the world we were little different from anyone else. He insisted his White House marchers dressed, suits and ties for the men, dresses for the women. He said if you’re going to protest for the right to hold a job, you need to dress like you’re going to a job interview. It took a lot of guts back then. And it motivated a lot of us. But it was the drag queens, transsexuals and scruffy street kids who rioted for nearly a week in front of the Stonewall Inn set the movement on fire. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.

Or as Harold might say: “You’re a queer and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your God, not all the analysis you can buy, in all the years you’ve got left to live. You may one day be able to know a gay life if you want it desperately enough. But you’ll always be queer as well. Always Matthew. Always. Until the day you die.”

Get used to it.

Oh yes…I went on a crash diet. After I reconnected with my high school crush after 30-something years. The pain of holding those Oh So Nice bluejeans in my hands just now was almost as bad as the memories they drew out of me.

So…recently my storage room raised its rent on me, which still isn’t much but I’d like to get it off me before I second-retire this coming September. It shouldn’t be too difficult with all the stuff I’ve decided I don’t need to keep anymore going to recycling. But I have seasonal stuff I still need a place for. Garden stuff for spring and summer, Halloween stuff for fall. My Christmas stuff has a place in the basement, but I might get off a bunch of that too since I don’t see myself putting up a tree here at Casa del Garrett (East) anymore. I’d rather spend the holidays in California with that side of my family now.

I have two cedar chests, one that’s been mine since I was a kid, that allegedly my maternal grandfather built himself. The other a very nice old Lane I inherited from mom. What’s in both of those I think I can let go of, and repurpose them for the seasonal stuff. I also have two old steamer chests I inherited that are allegedly from the trip from England to America mom’s side of the family took when they came here to live. One of those is in use for storing bedding. The other I have completely forgotten what’s inside of it, which is a good indicator that whatever it is I don’t need to keep it.

The fact is I don’t recall much of what’s in the two cedar chests and so just now I opened the one I used to have in my teenage bedroom, only to discover it packed full of shirts and bluejeans I cannot get into anymore, that I could as recently as 2008 – 2016. Those, uncoincidentally, were the years I’d reconnected with my high school crush and I went on a crash diet after he asked for a photo and I was too embarrassed to show him all of me. For about eight years after that I felt that I looked pretty cute. We had our nuclear war in 2016 and for some reason I gained all that weight back.

So I suppose I was saving those shirts and bluejeans on the off chance my waistline would drop back down to 30-31 inches. But that’s unlikely now. A shame because I thought I looked pretty nice in them once upon a time. You get that slight male hourglass (which I define as having a waistline that’s visibly narrower than your hips and chest) and a lot of things look good on you that Really Don’t if you don’t got it. All the low rise hip hugging bluejeans I just discovered in that cedar chest for example.

It all goes to one of those clothing bin drop-offs I see around here.

Sigh.

Been a while since I updated my blog but don’t think that means I’m bored with it. Far from it given how unpleasant commercial social media has become. But the Parkinson’s diagnosis has thrown me for more of a loop than I’d originally thought (that happens) and I’ve been engaged in a process of downsizing and letting go. I’ve taken several large storage containers full of stuff I’ve saved for nostalgia value to recycling because I’m feeling now like that past I had, while valuable and important, is not something I need to keep as close anymore, if I’m to spend a few final years of my life in peace and serenity. And adventure.

It seems to me now that there is a lot I should just let go of, so I can be me, and not as much a replay of the me I was once. Some of it I will never let go of, because it made me the person I am today. But I don’t need the details of my past as much as I’d thought I would. Those 16 and Tiger Beat magazines I saved to remind me of the closeted gay teenybopper I once was, I can send to recycling and let the paper they were made of become something new, just as I can finally become something more than everything I used to be. There is a saying that’s particularly relevant to gay guys my age and my generation, to the effect that the task before us is to remove everything about us we had to become in order to survive, so we can finally be our authentic selves; the persons we were always meant to be, and would have been if not for all the hate we had to endure. And I have always said there is no such thing as growing up, but only growing. I think that diagnosis of Parkinson’s has given me some perspective. I am letting go of a lot of stuff, so I can grow, while I still have time to grow. Before I become a prisoner inside my own body.

More later…

“We are aware that these pictures do not so much fix the face as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens the picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist.” -Jacob Bronowski, “The Ascent of Man, Chapter 11, Knowledge or Certainty.

This Glen Campbell song is a deep favorite of mine ever since I first heard it on the radio back in 1968. I immediately got a 45rpm copy of the song (LPs were too expensive for a kid on an allowance). I still have it in my collection, its groves almost worn smooth with replaying. I was still a kid with zero understanding of how it felt to be in love and I mostly avoided whenever possible any story that had a romance as its main plot point. In retrospect that was because none of them spoke to the gay kid I was growing into. But looking over my tweenage+ collection of 45s I see an abundance of love songs among them. I ignored the lyrics and just grooved to the music, which I better understand now spoke to me in a way the boy-loves-girl lyrics could not.

Wichita Lineman with its evocative melody and background string accompaniment hooked me right away. Campbell’s vocals, and those Jimmy Webb lyrics, spoke to some ache deep inside that probably should not have existed in a 14 year old kid, but which some quiet foreknowledge understood completely. I knew what it was to be solitary. I am an only child, and I liked having my moments of solitude in my own room, or while taking my long walks, often along the railroad tracks near the apartment. When I first heard the song I thought the lineman was working on the railroad tracks looking for trouble spots, and only later understood that he was working on the telephone wires strung across the Oklahoma plains.

He’s a lineman working on the telephone lines strung out in long straight stretches of wire on the empty flat pains. AM Radio stations out there are allowed to use more energy because so much of their listening area is empty and they need more reach. And that AM radio energy can produce the effect of hearing the radio sound coming off the wires. So the song is about a lineman doing his job, and he’s hearing a beautiful woman’s voice on some AM radio program but coming off the wires he’s working on, and he falls in love with that voice.

Many years later I would take road trips across those open plains and see for myself how empty and lonesome the landscape that inspired Jimmy Webb was. It’s one thing to think you know solitude and you’re a teenage boy walking alone along the railroad tracks with suburban sprawl all around you everywhere, and another to have it hit you in the Oklahoma panhandle and you’re standing beside a road that goes straight as an arrow to both horizons and there is nothing else there but you. And then another to realize one day that you’re old and that life partner will never be.

But what I really want to point out here is how the Process of creation worked in the case of this one particular song, and that the song that Webb wrote and Campbell sang was Unfinished. And it is perfect just as it is. I was surprised when I viewed this video about its creation how accidental the process turned out to be. And that is so Right given the nature of the song. It didn’t need the formal structure of pop single tune. It’s as if the song put itself together. There are times I don’t want to know how a favorite work came to be. In this case it makes me appreciate the song even more.

And the Wichita lineman is still on the line…

A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that’s why they work. -Glibert Baker, creator of the rainbow Pride flag

All the hate I was seeing this morning in the news about Pride at the last Giant’s game isn’t helping my mood or my energy levels, which are pathetic as a baseline now anyway.

I’ve been in this struggle since I came out to myself in the early 1970s, and I’m practically a connoisseur of all the shifty, tactically evasive little ways hatemongers spit in our faces and excuse themselves as only having an opinion, or just following the bible, or citing some junk science from the likes of Paul Cameron. This year they, or more likely some well paid right wing propaganda mill, came up with a couple new ones.

Red state governors and local mayors are proclaiming Faith And Family month as a pushback to Pride. But those four Giants pitchers were showcasing another one that’ll probably spread around. On their Pride event caps, which they could have chosen not to wear, they scrawled Genesis 9:12-16. It’s trending on Google search now…for some reason…so you can easily look it up.

It’s a neat trick. Instead of throwing Leviticus or Paul at us, they’re simply quoting the only passage in the bible where the rainbow is mentioned. This allows them to deflect accusations of being motivated by prejudice because the verses say nothing about homosexuality directly. You can’t have your rainbow because it belongs to God.

One of the pitchers, Landon Roupp said of writing the inscription on the Pride event cap that “…the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant to us, and us as believers to stand firm in that. … There’s no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for and what I stand in.”

Swell. But context is everything and when you wave the bible at your LGBT fans during a Pride event you might as well be waving Leviticus at us too because it amounts to the same incitement of religious passions that have justified killing us, throwing us in prison, torturing us with quack cures, wreaking our lives in every way possible so that Jesus will know you love him. You might think you’re not being hateful because you’re not waving Fred Phelps signs at the fans, but all you’re really being is a coward about it. LGBT fans came to the game that day hoping to feel welcomed and appreciated and you just could not stop yourself from spitting in their faces.

Arne Johnson, of the Rainbow Families Action, said afterward, “One night a year, we asked for the players to cheer for our children, and they couldn’t even manage that.”

They say not to read the comments, but I often do just to find users to block. But this time the comments on all three articles I read, including one on a gay sports page, were thick with vitriol against the LGBT fans. It was so intense I was wondering which right wing pages here were linking to the stories for rage bait. But it could just as easily have been Facebook’s own algorithms stirring up trouble because that translates to engagement.

Andy Woodard
The players finally found the balls to stand up for what is right

Roger Alan Cotton
Exactly why are people and the government expected to celebrate and defer to the Alphabet Community?

Ray Hegarty
The demons are twisting in pain at the site of a Bible verse

Anthony C Hargreaves
Fag pride is garbage dog shit trash. They have no protein anything but perversion and destruction of anything they don’t agree with but then accuse others of doing that instead. Mental broken people should be put away or down. Society doesn’t allow rabid animals so why do we allow these ones ?

Tom Marsh
Yea. Wouldn’t want to mar your Satanic celebration!

It’s left me profoundly depressed, which leads to more overall fatigue, and no heart left in me to create anything, and it’s a vicious circle. I just want to lay in bed all day. For every story I read about Pride, I see like a half dozen or more about how much people hate us and want us to be gone. And they’ve done it before.

[Update…] I added a few from the comments to one of those news stories, to give you a flavor of how it is in there. The only thing surprising about it to me is the torrent of it, which leads me to think some Facebook hate page(s) were directing traffic to those posts, or that, as I say above, Facebook’s algorithm was doing it automatically because rage translates to engagement. That said, how many of those are simply right wing bots is hard to know for sure, but a lot of them likely are.

Bill Browning on Facebook posted this image about how republicans will enact a synthetic panic over gender affirming care for trans kids, but are just fine with actual gender reassignment surgery on intersex babies…

Intersex people are born with reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones that don’t fit standard definitions of male or female. It happens in about 1.7 percent of births. That’s more common than being a natural redhead. Beginning in the mid-20th century, doctors started performing surgeries on intersex infants to make their genitals appear more “normal,” driven by the view that without surgery, these children would not be able to have a normal marriage or sex life. Doctors cut first and asked questions never.

The intellectual foundation came from a psychologist named John Money. His theory was simple and wrong: gender identity was malleable, and surgeons could assign intersex newborns to whichever sex the doctors preferred. That theory justified thousands of surgeries on children who never asked for them. His star patient was David Reimer, a boy raised as a girl without his knowledge or consent. Money published the case as a success. He was lying. Reimer struggled his entire childhood, reverted to living as a male when he finally learned the truth, and later died by suicide.

The medical establishment believed Money’s lies for decades.

He raises a good point, but I have another. I watched a documentary about the boy mentioned there, David Reimer, who had this gender reassignment surgery after a botched circumcision, and was raised as a girl. David was not born intersex, he was surgically made female because at that time it was easier to do than reconstruct his damaged penis. His parents then took him to Money because Money believed gender identity was malleable and that David could be successfully raised as a girl. I saw an interview with David’s parents after David was told the truth about what happened to him (read the Wikipedia article…it’s just horrific), and during that interview they made one of those little aside comments where you see a deeper truth.

They said they had a lot of difficulty when David was very young, getting him to stop trying to pee standing up.

And there it is. Money was wrong. Tragically, horribly, categorically, wrong. Gender identity is not malleable. But that is not to say it always agrees with the body.

That casual aside is one of those things I count as a personal proof that transsexualism is a real thing, because that wasn’t the boy’s body telling him to do that, it was his brain. He had gender reassignment surgery, had been told all his life up to that point that he was a girl, but he still had that male brain. And it was telling him something about his body, despite the gender reassignment surgery he’d had, but didn’t know about then.

And if you can admit that the brain has anything at all to do with how gender is perceived, that it’s not simply a matter of the body you were born into, or made into, then I think in all intellectual honesty you have to also admit that there can be times when a child is born with a mostly male body, but a mostly female brain. There’s gender dysphoria.

It’s a real thing. I have a story I should tell on this blog someday about the time I met a trans man at a gay bar and how that opened my eyes.

I’m old enough to remember when Walter Cronkite could tell Americans that the Vietnam war had become a stalemate and president Johnson said If I’ve lost Cronkite I’ve lost middle America. I remember a press that followed Watergate right to Nixon’s doorstep. The commercial news media back then was in no way a liberal bastion. If anything it was moderately conservative, and spoke mostly to the middle class. But it would speak truth to power fearlessly when push came to shove. I wonder now in retrospect if all that courage came from having a supreme court that was always on the side of freedom of the press.

In any case, all you young’uns feeling a constant sense of outrage these days, I can relate…in a way. Except I was there when Johnson lost Cronkite, and The Washington Post and The New York Times ran stories about The Pentagon Papers.

“It’s true. All of it. The Force, the Jedi. All of it. It’s all true.”

It’s true. All of it. Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Dan Rather, Eric Sevareid. All of it. It’s all true.

I was there.

In July 2016 President Obama established America250, as a nonpartisan, non profit 250th anniversary commission. Congress gave it 150 million to organize it in communities in all 50 states. Trump gutted America250 in favor of his newly created and for profit entity, Freedom 250, then diverted $125 million of America250’s funding, probably all that was left by then, into it. This is essentially why the entire thing’s become a shitshow.

Something to pay attention to is this isn’t just about the way he trashed the celebration in Washington DC, but also how he’s trashed all the state and local celebrations because he stole the money to pay for their organizing.

This is what Donald Trump does. This is what he has always done. But he didn’t do it all by himself either.

There’s the American right wing white supremacist evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, who went all in for Donald Trump because he was cut from the same cloth as them.

There’s the ersatz conservatives who went all in for Donald Trump because he was cut from the same cloth as them.

There’s the tech bros who went all in for Donald Trump because he was cut from the same cloth as them.

And of course the American fascists who went all in for Donald Trump because he was cut from the same cloth as them.

And the pure as the driven snow Left that won’t vote strategically to keep the fascists, the white supremacists, and other hate mongers out of government, because that would mean casting a vote for someone who isn’t as pure as they are.

None of these are hard categories. There’s a lot of bleed between them. They amount to maybe a third of the American voting population, total. But there’s another third who have even less excuse morally. Those I have just described are at least honest, somewhat, in their hatreds, their arrogance, and proud of their moral squalor. They may hide behind a religion, they may excuse themselves on the grounds of some half-baked Randian, technocrat, or leftist political morality and/or philosophy. But they stand openly on their ground. They are proudly what they are. The other third I mention are the totally clueless, the Can’t Be Bothered, who routinely walk away from the task of citizen participation in their own democratic government, and allow themselves to be manipulated by anyone and anything that catches their attention before election day. The ones who think politics is boring. The ones who excuse themselves on the grounds that their vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Both these groups brought us to this bleak place. But the clueless are the worse offenders because they never cared one way or the other so long as their own lives remained untouched. They are the ones Dante spoke of as the neutrals Heaven does not want, and Hell will not have. And I would hope if this really is the end of the American Experiment, it is their names on the roll call of the damned, ahead of all the others. The first would have never thought to stop this because they wanted it, while the last could have but couldn’t be bothered. And they’ll be the ones complaining the loudest when it all comes crashing down, and pointing their fingers everywhere but at themselves.

Full story of how the 250th anniversary turned into a shitshow follows, from Facebook user “Top Disney”…

How the current President ruined July 4th and an historic anniversary in just over a year due to narcissism and delusions of grandeur.

Disney’s 2026 Semiquincentennial celebrations of the United States aren’t going to have the same pop as they did for the Bicentennial in 1976, and here’s one of the main reasons why.

On July 4, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a joint bipartisan resolution from Congress establishing the non profit American Revolution Bicentennial Commission to organize national events for 1976, a full decade away.

His successors in office, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, left the commission alone to do their work, and the result was a year long 200th birthday celebration that people still talk about.

President Barack Obama, following the example of LBJ, signed a resolution establishing America250, in July, 2016.

America 250 was also a nonpartisan, non profit commission, and they got right to work.

Their initial project was reaching out to Americans in all 50 states to record or write their own American life stories, which would be collected, preserved and shared during the Semiquincentennial celebrations in 2026.

Many of these family and individual stories would be from those whose ethnicities, faiths, cultures and groups were traditionally marginalized throughout American history.

The plans also called for kicking things into high gear in 2025, with party planners across the country coordinating with America250 on the best way to have celebrations large and small that included everyone.

That’s the way it was done in 1975, getting communities and their local representatives and media excited a year before, creating a groundswell of red, white and blue leading up to July 4, 1976 with little to no cost to organizers.

Congress allocated $150 million to America250 for that purpose.

And then….

In January, 2025, America250 was essentially gutted, in favor of a newly created for profit entity called Freedom 250.

$125 million of America250’s funding was immediately diverted into Freedom 250, which was also known as “The White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday.”

Also added in to the new for profit commission were the instructions that the name of the President of the United States and his picture be added to all public materials connected with Freedom 250’s celebrations.

No other President requested that before for any public July 4th celebrations, as the aim was to keep them nonpartisan and more about the nation as a whole rather than one person or party.

Freedom 250 also did something else that America250 did not.

They set up licensing and branding deals and merchandise for profit with groups like the UFC, where the funds would go to undisclosed accounts and not the U.S. treasury.

Some of the President’s family and cabinet members were also given sweetheart deals for their companies, like crypto currency brokerages, that will bring them enormous profits.

The America250 idea of collecting and sharing individual stories and connecting with local communities to generate interest and excitement was scrapped in favor of Freedom 250’s events like a UFC match, a Grand Prix, a military parade and a “National State Fair” all to be held in Washington D.C.

While some events are still happening in cities big and small around the country, they are muted, as is enthusiasm for our 250th.

It’s hard to recreate such a massive success as the 1976 Bicentennial, but when you tinker with funding and programming at the last minute, it makes it even more of an uphill climb.

 

…Grindr And The Pit.

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