To paraphrase Alfred Pennyworth…some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just don’t care whether or not the world burns.
They don’t necessarily want the world to burn, but they have their eyes on a prize and they will walk over everyone and everything to get their hands on it.
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer
They will walk over the ashes of the dead world to get what they want, maybe only later realizing what they have done.
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” -J. Robert Oppenheimer
These are the worst. If it were money they were after they could be bought, reasoned or negotiated with. But they have their eyes on a prize and won’t be deterred. And for some of them, even after seeing the damage done, they’ll just get busy making excuses, forgiving themselves for the role they played in setting yet another fire to an already burning world. The physicist and the technically sweet problem. The techbro working on AI. The billionaire owner of a deep sea tourism company objecting to needlessly prioritizing passenger safety over commercial innovation.
The actor and the role of a lifetime.
It isn’t fame. It isn’t the money. It’s the role, the character, the part. If Leni Riefenstahl came back to life and announced work on a new movie about world war II, there are actors who would walk over everyone and everything for the once in a lifetime chance to work with the legendary director, and play the part of one of the famous generals of that war. Because that role is the one they were born to play. And Riefenstahl is a brilliant director. And just never you mind her regrettable political ideas, just never you mind Triumph Of The Will.
The actual fascists among actors wouldn’t even rate during the auditions. It would be the A list actors who get the roles. The ones with real talent and star power. As historian Henry Adams said about Robert E. Lee, It’s always the good men who do the most harm.
They would say to their critics that Riefenstahl’s movie is simply a story about the war, not promoting fascism. They would say Riefenstahl is tragically misunderstood.
And maybe later, when the money she makes from this new movie goes toward promoting fascism around the world, and synagogues start burning, and democracies began falling to the extreme right, when the hated others start dying, they might see what part they played in promoting Riefenstahl’s fascism by excusing it, by looking the other way, by complaining about “woke”.
Maybe some would express regret after it was too late for regret to matter. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But most of them will just start excusing themselves.
I’m looking at you, all of you, in the cast and crew of the new Harry Potter HBO series.
When more laws against transgendered people are passed thanks to Rowling’s billions, and even more of your transgender neighbors in this life are thrown out of their families, their homes, their jobs, isolated from their communities, afraid to be out in public, dying at the hands of thugs, or by their own hand, what will you tell their families and friends? What excuses will you make the rest of us listen to?
The only thing tying me to Disney parks now is the 100 DVC points I got regrettably talked into buying again after I’d sold all my other points because I was so disenchanted with what Bob Chapek had done to Walt Disney World. Part of the reason I bought back in was Chapek was shown the door and Bob Iger came back and I thought Chapek’s greedy disrespect for the parks and guests was over and that most of it would be undone. But the nit picky greed has only got worse. Of course Disney was all about the money…as a certain someone once riddled me when I was considering going with a friend to a DVC presentation…
He: What does Mickey Mouse eat?
Me: Cheese I guess…?
He: What’s in your wallet.
The advice I got then was to break both my arms so I couldn’t be talked into signing anything. But eventually I did because I just loved Boardwalk and wanted to stay there every year. I got enough points in Boardwalk to do just that and the signing gifts I got were lovely.
When I signed back on some years later for the same number of points what I got as a signing gift looked like cheapshit WalMart stuff.
I think I knew then I’d made a mistake.
For a while I had annual passes at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. But the very act of buying them by then resembled the insane Christmas mobs trying to buy Cabbage Patch Dolls or Tickle Me Elmo. I remember vividly buying back my WDW annual pass during the brief window of opportunity that opened, and hundreds of us logged in only to be placed into a queue where there was no guarantee that any of the Limited Available Passes would be left when we got to the front of the line…and a bunch of us were texting each other in some social media channel waiting with baited breath to see who got theirs, and encouraging the others to stay in line because who knows, you might get yours too… Well I got mine but I had to wonder…where’s the Disney magic in all this..?
I noticed to my alarm that Disney wasn’t warning you your pass was about to expire, like they used to, like sending you big postcards and emails and texts reminding you weeks beforehand to renew. I missed renewing my Disneyland pass and was distraught for a year before circumstances seemed to open up a chance at getting another one. ABC/Disney had cancelled Jimmy Kimmel and everyone was in a rush to cancel their Disney+ subscriptions and the little devil on my left shoulder started whispering in my ear I bet they’re selling annual passes now…
The last straw was when it came time to renew that annual pass and I was told those passes where no longer being sold, but that I Might be able to get one of the other new ones that one was being replaced with. At full price of course since it was a new pass not a renewal. And only if there were any available.
And I had enough of it. Time was you wanted an annual pass, you just bought an annual pass. And then every year you got a notice to renew. Some years that notice came with a promise of extra months on the pass.
But then time was you didn’t need a reservation to enter the parks, just your pass or your ticket.
It just kept getting more and more astronomically costly to go, at the same time it kept getting more and more difficult to go. Everything that used to be part of the package you got simply by going was being nickeled and dimed to death. It seems now that “plus it” thing Walt Disney often spoke of isn’t about making the guest experience better, it’s about plussing the bill.
The other day I chanced across this blog post from Magical Dad Blog on Facebook, that really speaks to me too, even though I don’t have kids of my own like he does…
Disney’s former CEO proudly called things like the Magical Express, free FastPass, and complimentary MagicBands “revenue opportunities left on the table.”
Chapek’s memoir excerpts came out this week, and he defended, even bragged, about every price hike and perk cut, pointing to 18% profit growth as the proof. I’ve been thinking about his phrasing a lot the past few days.
I know what that “revenue” left on the table looked like from our side.
It looked like my kids watching Mickey cartoons on the Magical Express while my wife and I sat there realizing we hadn’t thought about logistics since we landed in Orlando.
It looked like MagicBands arriving in the mail three weeks before the trip and my boys carrying them around the house because they couldn’t wait to leave.
It looked like touching your wrist to a reader and hearing that unique Disney chime instead of the cash coming out of your wallet.
Sure, those things never showed up on a quarterly earnings call, but they’re the reason families chose Disney over every other vacation on earth.
To me, that’s not revenue left on the table, that’s the magic that Chapek so happily torched in the name of a bottom line.
Disney’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, started at Disneyland 28 years ago and worked his way up through the parks, including a stretch running resorts and transportation at Walt Disney World. He knows what that table used to look like because he helped set it.
Here’s hoping the table eventually gets set again, and a few more kids get to fall asleep on the bus back to the airport with a MagicBand still on their wrist.
…What I have is the Disney kid inside of me, who a certain someone awakened after a long sleep, and I walked into Walt Disney World and Epcot for the first time…and it all came back to me.
I am skeptical any of it changes due to new management. They’re all about the money now, not the magic. Which is not to say they weren’t about the money before, but at least they were also about the magic. The trick they pulled to make renewing your annual pass impossible so you had to buy a new one every time was the last straw for me. The annual passes saved the regular visitors money. They’re not interested in those visitors anymore…the people who came just to spend some time in Walt Disney’s World and believe in that great big beautiful tomorrow for a while. If you’re not there to spend lots and Lots of money they don’t want you.
It’s a small world after all…There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day…
I want that magic back. But I don’t think it’s ever coming back.
This poor guy that I used to be. I feel so afraid for him. He is so happy now, but does not know what’s coming…
September 22nd, 2007
Message In A Bottle
It’s been almost a year now since we talked. It was amazing that last time, to hear your voice after so long: you sounded just like you did way back when. It took me back…almost like that first time I called, and heard your telephone voice. Well…actually it was better, because that first time, I think I might have gotten you into some kind of trouble. You remember. You gave me your phone number that Friday before school was over, and we agreed that I’d call you Saturday and maybe we could both take our cameras for a hike somewhere…like maybe Great Falls. By the way…I still have that roll of film of yours you had me develop. I think I gave you the contacts I made, and some prints, but somehow I ended up with the negatives. I can mail them to you if you like. Anyway…I called and asked whoever it was who answered if you were home, and then you got on the line and you were all like…uh…sorry…I didn’t think you’d call…why did you call…I can’t go anywhere…I didn’t think you’d call…like I wasn’t supposed to call, which really confused me because we’d agreed I would call and you gave me your phone number which isn’t the sort of thing you do when you Don’t want someone to call you. Next Monday morning I met you at school it was like nothing had happened. There were times while we were seeing each other, when I wasn’t sure when you were teasing and when you were serious. And you always kept me at arms length from your family. For years afterward I wondered if I’d gotten you in some kind of trouble with your parents for giving me your number. Maybe we should have agreed you would call me.
Say…maybe you should call me now. It’s been almost a year. It would be nice to hear from you again. We’re too far away from each other to go for that camera hike like we were going to back then. But we can chat now, can’t we…without it getting you in trouble…right?
Wave back sometime. Please. It would be the best birthday gift ever.
I still vividly remember how I knew it was him even before my brain was parsing the words on that answering machine recording, just by the sound of his voice. After all those years. It was 1972 all over again…and I was that kid all over again…and that should have been the warning sign, because it didn’t end well back then either.
I’ve had the last two movements of Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique on heavy replay these past few days, thinking not of the story Berlioz was telling, but imagining a certain fictional kidnapper and murderer getting his comeuppance for fictionally kidnapping and murdering a fictional 13 year old boy. I really should not have re-read parts of that story I threw across the room and tore to shreds back in the day, but I wanted to get some of the details in my alternative version of it correct. It’s been bothering me ever since.
“In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.” -Mary Renault
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Mahatma Gandhi
Think Of Constant Stress As The Fire Alarm And Your Body As The Fire
This came across my news feeds just now…
NEWS: New reporting from POLITICO reveals Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has been hospitalized multiple times for stress while carrying out Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda.
According to officials, Lyons faced intense pressure from the White House to ramp up deportations, amid reports of heated calls and internal chaos. It is also said that Stephen Miller frequently yells at him on calls. In one incident, he was rushed to the hospital overnight. In another, officials feared he may need emergency intervention on the spot.
I went and looked him up only to find he was born in 1981, almost a decade after I graduated from high school. Is this even the same planet I lived in when I was a young man, let alone a teenage boy. I don’t generally feel old, but for a moment there I really felt the years I’ve lived. I guess sometime soon there won’t be anyone left who remembers the America that was, before Reagan promised us that shining city on the hill.
I know stress. I’ve felt its clutches on me. It’s driven me to tobacco and alcohol and I know it’s shaved years off my life. If what this reporting is saying about you is true Mr. Lyons, Get Out Of There. It isn’t worth it. Whatever it is you think you’re accomplishing in there it’s rotting your soul and killing your body. These aren’t patriotic conservative men, they are the bottom of the human sewer, and if you don’t want to spend your last hour in there with them and be remembered along with them then get out. Go find the better man you can still be, while you still have some hours left.
I am anxiously awaiting the NRAs take on ICE shooting and killing a citizen who had a carry permit after they disarmed him.
[Update…] They did it.
Not actually surprised, but was unsure if they would push back on this, given their part in the culture war. My working hypothesis all this time is they just exist to get right wing republicans elected. But then they really impressed me when they came out against a Trump Justice Department push to ban transgender Americans from owning firearms.
They’re calling for more investigation, which is fine on its face, but stay tuned. I want to see if the other shoe drops. Of course there must be an investigation. But look at who is doing the investigation. The same people who have been throwing out one blatant power lie after another after another about the protests and the people ICE arrests?
We will need better investigators. Also impartial judges and juries.
Greg Sargent on BlueSky has a killer thread about how public reaction to the Trump/Miller campaign of terror is unnerving some of their advisors that is a Must Read…
Trump is privately worried about the “optics” of ICE raids and his advisers are looking for ways to soften them, Axios reports. I’m calling bullshit: The terror and violence cannot be hived off from the broader policy agenda. They are 100% intrinsic to it.
There is no recalibrated or sanitized way to conduct the war that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror.
The policy *is* the terror, and the terror *is* the policy.
The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations rests on the idea that they can be carried out without mass disruptions. But that is not doable. The Trump-Miller agenda by definition requires prioritizing high removals over all else to achieve ethnic cleansing:
Terror is essential to Miller’s project. It’s designed to dissuade us from showing solidarity with the immigrants getting removed. Stand in the way of ethnic cleansing and you risk violence yourself.
Trump Admits He’s Itching To Cancel Midterm Elections
Finally, under a heading Reuters euphemistically called, “MANAGING MIDTERM EXPECTATIONS, there was this explicit confession that Trump thinks there should not be a midterm election: “The president expressed frustration” that Republicans could lose power after the midterms, Reuters wrote. Then this: “’It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,’ Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.'”
That was the end of the article.
None of this is normal…a president of the United States saying openly that he thinks there shouldn’t be another election. This should be a headline everywhere, even in the local shopper saver. But our legacy news media keeps treating it like it’s normal. And so they sell their country, and everyone in it, out.
If stone could shed tears of grief every tombstone in Arlington Cemetery would be crying now.
Reuters did a 30-minute interview with Donald Trump. Here’s the LAST paragraph of their write-up of it:
The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
He’s laying the groundwork for cancelling the 2026 election, or at minimum cancelling it in democrat majority states.
I tested negative for COVID-19 a few days ago and my vitals all look good, so I reckon I’m done with it and my upcoming ablation procedure is going to happen on schedule. It’s just amazing, really. Only a few years ago this thing was killing people by the tens of thousands, and now two vaccines and four booster shots later and what I got was less painful than your usual case of the flu. I had a fever for just one day, and my blood oxygen level never went below 95.
Don’t ever get me started on Mr. Wormbrain Secretary of Health and Human Services and his insane ideas about vaccines. And especially childhood vaccines. In 1961 I and a bunch of my elementary school classmates got the first Sabin polio vaccines delivered via a sugar cube. The Salk vaccine had been approved for use in 1955. Those vaccines were considered miracles. Here’s why…
Look at it. This is where you are going when you throw science out the window. Without science all we have are myths, lies, and superstition. And…Darwin, eventually. That prize DeSantis lunatic Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who got up in front of reporters the other day to announce that making childhood vaccines mandatory for school attendance was like slavery…I got your slavery right there you drooling moron.
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. -H. L. Mencken
Last night’s nightmare was vivid, intense, and very unwelcome. Not that any nightmares are welcome, but this one which clearly sprang from all my stress and fear over the coming election was one I could have done without. I won’t retell it, partly because some of its details are almost comical in their surreality. I’ll write it all down in a private dream diary I keep later today. But the essence of it was I was among 14 others being rounded up to be taken to a place where I was pretty sure we were all going to die. I tried to slip the line but was put back into it by an idiot who was also in the line and thought he was being helpful. I escaped once, was recaptured, escaped again, almost recaptured, then finding my way to a safe hideout, only to realize that one of the others there, by a slight slip of the tongue, was a betrayer.
When I awakened from that last moment, it reminded me of a meme I’ve been seeing lately on commercial social media. The one about being disappointed to realize that you had friends you would not want to know where Anne Frank was hiding…
I considered reposting that except I don’t have any friends or family (on my dad’s side) that I would feel that way about. We would all keep Anne hidden, of that I am certain. But there’s another side to that coin.
Turn it around. Put yourself in Anne and her family’s place. If You had to hide, let’s say because the hate mongers have been painting a target on You for decades, and now suddenly they have free reign to do with you and everyone like you as they please, who out of all the people you know would you worry about turning you in?
Well…again…nobody among my friends or family (paternal side) would do that to me I am certain. And yes, there are a couple on the maternal side who I’m pretty sure would resist…which would make them just as much a target as me. But there are those others who have occasionally walked into and out of my life that I’m pretty sure would.
But even more disturbing than that are the ones I’m not sure about. I can see their faces as I type this and I honestly don’t know what they would do. It’s a very creepy feeling.
I Would Often Wonder About That Kid…And Now I Know, And Sorta Wish I Didn’t
It was the late 60s and I was just barely a teenager. I loved with mom in an apartment along Parklawn Drive in Rockville. Back then, before they built the Metro system all the way out to Twinbrook you could walk across the railroad tracks to get to places along Rockville Pike. I used to visit Congressional Plaza that way often, walking up to Fishers Lane where the big HEW building was built (later to be called Health Resources and Service Administration) and walk across Twinbrook Parkway to where Fishers turned into a narrow road barely a step above gravel. It went almost right up to the railroad tracks and then took a sharp right and connected to Halpine Drive where there used to be a railroad crossing that was since taken up because it was too dangerous.
Not entirely happy with the left hand panel there because it doesn’t quite get it, but I was trying to get it out. I might revisit it later. All of that is mostly gone now since they built the Twinbrook Metro station and a bunch of other commercial buildings in that field to the left. As you can see there used to be some small houses on the right. In one of those houses lived a boy only a few years younger than me, who looked to be severely handicapped.
His legs were visibly withered from unuse. But instead of a wheelchair he moved around laying on his chest on a small board on wheels. I would see him from time to time as I walked down Fishers and wonder why his family didn’t provide him with a wheelchair. Were they too poor or was there some problem with his back also that prevented him from sitting upright. I felt sorry for him, but also confused. Why did it have to be a board? Couldn’t someone do something for him?
Later I noticed that I hadn’t seen him for a while and he never showed up again, at least while I was walking down Fishers. Eventually I concluded that he’d most likely passed away due to whatever medical condition it was that was severe enough it kept him out of a wheelchair and on a board.
But he hadn’t…
I came across this on a Rockville memories Facebook page the other day and I read the Post article and the comments to it hungry to know what had become of that kid I’d seen on the board. There’s more images from that Post article but I won’t put them here. But judging from that Post article, and all the angry comments on that Facebook page, his memory isn’t a very good one.
He seems to have been brutally mean to everyone he crossed paths with, sometimes venting racial insults, sometimes pulling out an “Old Timer” knife and getting into it. If it’s like the one I have carrying that thing on him all the time says quite enough about the person he was. I only used mine for wilderness backpacking because it’s useful as an all around woodsman’s knife. As a personal weapon it’s way overkill. But that was probably the point. He would roll up behind someone and trip their legs then flop on top of them. One of his knife fights earned him 20 stitches. His wheel tracks were often found around the sites of recent burglaries. The police and courts in Rockville knew him so well that they informally named the handicapped access ramp to the courthouse after him.
He earned a living apparently as an automobile mechanic, and he drove and raced cars by way of a device that allowed him to manipulate the pedals with his hands, though sometimes according to the article it was family and friends working the pedals while he worked the steering wheel. This tells me he could have used a wheelchair if he’d wanted to, but I reckon that board had become a part of his outlaw persona. According to the Post article he’d won several racing trophies. But he had no brakes. Not just emotionally but so it seems not literally either on the night he died, killing another man. He’d been was cited at least once according to the article for driving along the centerline. That night he was driving 100 miles an hour in the wrong lane. He just didn’t care.
That Post article provoked a bunch of letters to the editor complaining about fairly canonising this guy (“a man of the fiercist pride…”) and ignoring the good man he killed. It didn’t have to be. But then, maybe it did. I’m 71 now (as of a couple days ago), and I’ve met people like that…mean, racist, quick to start fights, as willing to steal as earn their money…who were whole in body and rotten to the core in mind and spirit. And also people who were severely handicapped and did great things with their lives. It wasn’t his body, it was him.
I kinda wish I didn’t know the rest of the story. I’ve been thinking back to that time in my life since. It was a time before the Metro, when I would walk everywhere and let my eyes behold horizons that were full of promise, and I still believed like Anne Frank that people are basically good at heart.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
