“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.