Bernie and Ted's Big Adventure

It was Ted's finest hour. There in Cleveland, among the angry and insane, the roving packs of journalists covering it straight, others, like Stephen Colbert, dressed as the character Stanley Tucci played in The Hunger Games, carrying on at the podium in a manner not immediately distinguishable from the rest (who were apparently still sleeping at that hour, asleep or out supporting the Cleveland economy), until he was hauled off the stage ... there in Cleveland, the Republican who came in second place, the guy who doesn't play well with others, Ted Cruz, in his prime-time convention speech, when he was expected to get in line and support the winner, Donald J. Trump, who, when the game was still on, had suggested that he, Ted Cruz, much like the odious Barack Obama, wasn't in fact a proper citizen of this country (a Canadian to Obama's Kenyan), that his father, the Cuban, had somehow been involved with that bunch that had killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas back in 1963, disaffected Cuban ex-CIA types that had eluded everyone from The Warren Commission to the New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison, the real planners, these fellows, for whom the disaffected former tourist to Soviet Russia, (not Bernie Sanders but) Lee Harvey Oswald, was merely a patsy, the guy, The Donald, who had further laid out pictures on Twitter of his wife and Ted's wife, saying, in effect, Which piece of ass would you rather have? His piece of ass? Or my piece of ass?

But this was politics, a bare-knuckle sport, as we are often reminded in this country by the many journalists/entertainers who cover it, a sport and a pastime that goes on endlessly, much like, increasingly, our wars. A distraction, a pageant, however, with a few key moments of punctuation, one of which is the Republican National Convention, held this year in Cleveland, an event that was to be "contested," we were told for many months by the serious journalists, suggesting that maybe, perhaps, given our country's enthusiasm for guns, that there might be some gunplay among the contesting factions on the convention floor, but, much to the surprise and disappointment of many, rather than a contested, hurly-burly convention, the viewing public was presented with a largely orderly presentation of hate and vitriol—less a showdown at the OK Corral than it was a staging of Meet the Trumps.

For which the second-place finisher was expected to do his part—to be one of the Uniters, to just "Say It!!"

But he didn't say it. Wouldn't say it. Vote for Donald Trump!

No ... Instead of encouraging the seething throngs to vote for a man who had insulted his father and his wife, who, worse than any of that, was a New York Values Democrat, Cruz exhorted the crowd to vote their conscience, for which he was booed, if reluctantly praised by many who had gotten used to hating his guts through the years.

My friend JB, for instance, a man formerly in politics, reeking of booze and cigarettes, tears welling in his eyes, leaned toward me (a bit too close, really, uncomfortably close, in fact) at the bar where we were watching all this on a giant screen, and said, "I never figured a miserable son of a bitch like him could ever do something so moving."

"You don't suppose he's just angling for the gold in 2020?" I said. "Now that Paul Ryan has pimped himself out to a huckster."

"2020?" JB laughed, pixelated eyes gleaming. "You just wait until next week."

After another glass of wine and three or four more cigarettes, JB told me that he had it on good authority—a redhead from Harlem, single, with cats, who had no reason to lie—that Bernie and Ted were preparing a run, this fall—

"Get the fuck outta here," I said, pushing the slouching JB up straight on his barstool. "Bernie's even more New York values than #The Real Donald Trump."

"That may be true," JB slurred, "but at least he isn't a Democrat."

"Well, you got me there," I admitted.

"He's a socialist," said JB. "And you know who else was a socialist? Jesus was a socialist. The meek shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers ... what kind of capitalist talks like that?"

I had to admit I didn't know any.

"Anyway, you don't hear too many folks talking about the Lord Jesus Christ more than Ted Cruz does."

Well, I thought, that was sure fucking true.

"If you cut the right wing and the left wing off the bird in the middle, what do you have?" JB then quizzed me.

I had to think a moment. "A bird falling from the sky in a pantsuit?"

"A Status Quo that can't fly," he said, knowingly.

"But you were Establishment, JB. You were the Status Quo."

"I'm just a man like you," JB insisted.

"But Bernie already said he'd support the ticket."

"He said he'd do everything he could to defeat Donald Trump. Not that a lot will have to be done, but that's not the same thing."

A socialist and a libertarian. I was having a hard time imagining it.

"They're both gold bugs," JB whispered, raising an eyebrow. "Neither can abide the Federal Reserve. They got to be friends on the Deep Web. Do you know what I'm talking about when I talk about the Deep Web?"

I wasn't so sure I did.

"Characters," JB said. "Aliases. Game Theory."

"Sort of like Pokemon Go?"

JB's eyes gleamed and glittered. "Do you play?"

"No," I said. "I'm a writer. I live a deprived adulthood."

"I've got um in my house," he confided.

"Ted and Bernie?"

"Squirtle," he said. "And Pikachu. And Charmander. They like to spin in the dryer. If I open the door real fast I can sometimes spot them in there flopping around with my socks."

I laughed. "This is getting a little silly."

"What's your point?" replied JB, who had watched the entire Republican National Convention and planned to watch the Democratic one, too, who had run for office, American-style, more times than I could count right offhand at the moment.

"So, a disaffected coalition comprised of those who resent Big Government AND Big Business."

"You can't say it isn't brilliant."

He slipped off his barstool now, stood up, nearly fell, then settled into a cheerleader's pose, like George W. Bush back in his days at Yale. "Pure Left! Pure Right! Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!!" he chanted.

As crazy as it sounded, it made more sense, if one hoped to win, than courting exclusively old, pissed off white people, men mostly.

"You just wait," JB assured me. "This week in Philadelphia, there's going to be a big surprise."

"Pokemon at the convention?" I wondered. "Pokemon instead of Colbert?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Pokemon don't care about politics. They like my dryer too much."

I glanced at the bartender, who shrugged and shook her head. I said to JB, "Sanders/Cruz: Both Wings without the Bird."

"Pure flight," he said, adding in the manner of someone who'd been tuned in, exposed, for too long, "You just wait. Bernie's no sellout, no pimp for the Establishment. They won't get Bernie to say it, either. Instead, Bernie will bring out Ted and the two will announce the purest party of disaffected purists ever. Bernie and Ted are going to surprise us, you just watch."

Bye Bye Britain

It was another one of those things that no one saw coming. Pollsters and bookmakers alike all said, Don't worry, this will be yet another one of those things that the media gets you all whipped up for only to give you an ending that makes you wonder why you bothered.

Not this time.

After watching the stock market soar all day Thursday, gold drop, if not precipitously, people out there trading "risk on" as they like to say, comfortable with the pollsters and the bookmakers predictions that, by night's end, sensible people would carry the day, sensible meaning the ones who listened to the urgings of Prime Minister David Cameron, the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the Canadian Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, a "Eurosceptic" going way back, whose leadership as a Remainer was desultory, not exactly passionate, but a Remainer he was said to be, we were told, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that was supposed to do better in the last election and, had they, would have had the power, governing as a coalition with Cameron's Tories, to veto David Cameron's election promise to an increasingly loud and unruly faction of his party to hold a referendum, which would have gotten Mr. Cameron of the hook, except that Mr. Cameron did better than he figured he would and thus had to keep his promise and hold a referendum, on whether or not Great Britain would leave the European Union. Within hours of the tally being finalized, with Brexodus coming out on top, Mr. Cameron was standing in front of 10 Downing Street resigning his office, effective soon. According to the Onion, or perhaps it was the Financial Times, he and his wife are going to open a pie shop somewhere in the hinterland, far from the madding crowd.

The U.S.  President Barack Obama also thought Great Britain should remain in the European Union. As did Hillary Clinton and all the smart people advising her. As did the head of the International Monetary Fund, as well as many big hitting investors like George Soros, who, years ago, made a fortune betting against the pound, which, not surprisingly, dropped like a stone on Friday, along with stock markets around the globe, when all the people at The Club—smart, respectable folk, who know what's best—realized they were wrong.

I was at a bar Thursday night taking part in a quiz show when the tide began to turn. Gold went up $80 USD in the two hours I was there as a member of Team Alone and Drunk at the Bar (4th place; we needed my wife there to answer questions related to anything that happened after 1979; also, someone who can recognize Taylor Swift's voice). Earlier in the day my old friend and former guy at Morgan Stanley texted me and said they, the Brits, were going. So there was one. He was right. My gold guy also had a feeling things were going to go to the Brexodus Bunch. He admitted, being a gold guy, that it might be wishful thinking on his part, but it turned out he was right. Jim Rickards, who was educated at the same school as Tim Geithner and appears frequently on Bloomberg and CNBC, was also right. He has been saying for some time that gold will hit $10,000 USD before our current democratic nations of the world zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) slouching toward negative interest rate policy (NIRP) plays out to that full-stop one finds at the end of the sentence.

I guess we'll see.

Donald Trump, meantime, flew into the Scotland, which voted resoundingly, along with London and Northern Ireland, to remain in the European Union, to check on one of his properties. Perhaps not understanding that Scotland hadn't been in favor of the outcome, perhaps forgetting that Scotland had recently held its own referendum in 2014 to leave not the European Union, but the United Kingdom (it narrowly lost, and might not next time), Mr. Trump praised, in Scotland, Great Britain's brave decision to, as he put it, take back their country. Not surprisingly, not all cheered. An older woman, standing beside a shrugging police officer, held a sign proclaiming: "Trump's a Cunt!"

Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve who was a rock star when stocks were going up and then became a cunt when they suddenly went down, says this, Brexit, is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, who are we to listen to? The kooks, the cranks, the goldbugs and cunts, or the people who tell us to stay the course, to not get sullen and ridiculous, that all will be fine, the cheerleaders who, six months ago, predicted the Fed would raise rates four times in 2016, this despite Europe's malaise, Japan's malaise, the opaque slowdown in China, despite wage-growth being at a 40-year standstill, credit expansion having reached its outer limits, a majority of Americans, marketed to death their entire lives, following the tune, most of them, with no savings at all outside of their still-mortgaged homes and home-related credit lines.

Where is the Back to Normal part of that picture? Being greedy little fucks, most of us, we'd get behind the smart people and imagine that we too might one day be Club Members if more of the spoils were trickling down our way, as it seemed they were for much of the nineties, when Greenspan was God and regular people without a lot of money started to turn into greedy little fucks talking about taking a cash advance on their Visa Card to buy Tyco, or Enron, or WorldCom, or Global Crossing, or any number of soon to be smashed dot.com stocks. Instead of all of us getting laid at the end of Caddyshack, as Rodney Dangerfield had proclaimed, we would all get rich! Instead, it's been more like getting invited to come play poker with the guys who have been playing together for years. Once in a while you get the cards and you win; but for the most part, your money added to the pot just means that the regulars are going to walk with more at the end of the night.

Sooner or later, however painful it is, enough of those who got fleeced wake up to the fact.

And the pitchforks are starting to come out. Not just on the right, but on the left as well. We here in North America are not as imperiled, yet, as our friends in Europe—as we like to say in Colorado: one doesn't have to outrun the bear, just the rest of the people running—and the Brexit vote is not a harbinger of a coming surprise vote for Trump in November. He'll be lucky to get 30%.

But his thirty and Bernie's better than thirty add up to something that isn't likely to bode well for the folks all confident and pleased with themselves at The Club.

And don't count Hillary and the Democrats out when it comes to taking their, The Club's, warm, seemingly sensible advice—the kind that will tell her to pick some middle-of-the-roader like Tim Kaine to be her vice-president, rather than someone like Elizabeth Warren or ... Bernie himself (why not?), the guy out on the left, the Scandinavian-style socialist who no one expected to give her much of a run, who—surprise!—nearly beat her, and has the hearts of more folks than Trump. It's going to be a tough decision for her and her people to decide whether to invite those folks in and risk upsetting Club Members, notably her Goldman peeps, but also, possibly, national security stalwarts, now in, or nearly in, support of her candidacy, guys formerly Republican like Brent Scowcroft—how is Trump going to call her a Loser when she has Brent Scowcroft, one of old man Bush's boys, who flew over to China after the Tiananmen Square slaughter in 1989 to calm things down, assure China, get things back on track for global trade, in her camp?—or go to the comfortable center and assume all those folks who went for Bernie will accept the advice of the smart people and vote Hillary, so they don't get that cunt Donald.

Thursday's Brexit vote might be telling us that what we think, based on what the smart people think, may not be so. And if it is for the moment, it might not be for much longer.

Religious Radicals with Guns

They tell me it's Father's Day, and to drive home the point I've already had a Bloody Caesar and a ... well, coffee, cards, and new cologne from my wife and children. I've walked the dog and watched the sprinklers do their thing at dawn. And now I've got a little time before the Waterloo opens and serves me a second (in this case, the American, Texa-fied version) Bloody Mary and a big, hearty brunch, and so you don't think Daddy and the Rattle & Hum office is slumming entirely just on account of it's Father's Day ...

On these jihadist-like gun slaughters, Bill Maher and the Republicans and a few others say we should call it what it is: Islamic Extremism. I say we take it a step further and roll in the nuts who happen to be Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, what have you, who also kill, light themselves on fire, blow up abortion clinics, federal buildings, believe Noah's Ark is still hidden under the sea somewhere, think Evolution is just God pulling our legs with a fossil record, who think they have it and the rest of us don't, and along the way manage to talk themselves into believing nonsense a reasonably judicious 10-year-old would think is silly based on the evidence, that we bring the whole bunch into the same corral and call them Religious Radicals. Cover all the bases and not be exclusive and mean-spirited by choosing to single out any particular set of nuts.

Also, lest you think I'm one of these gun pussies. I'm not. I've shot about every kind of gun you can imagine: handguns, rifles, high-powered rifles, shotguns, assault rifles. That said, as Kurt Vonnegut once said: "I wouldn't have one of those motherfuckers in my house for anything." THAT said, I have a lot of swords, and a cane I would pick over everything else in the very unlikely event that things got dicey and I needed to kill someone to protect my family. I also think that, in the age of drones and Blackhawk helicoptors and the like, to think you can protect yourself from a government run amok without owning a SAM (surface-to-air-missile) launcher is just really delusional. Anyway, I don't own guns because I think the odds of me blowing my brains out with one of them is much higher than my using it to protect my home and family. I also think I could easily not get to the gun safe in time and forget the combination at my age if things got really stressful with someone attacking our home, which, again, is unlikely, but, on the other hand, I have my down days, and you might say those sharp swords maybe aren't the smartest thing to have around either, and I'd have a hard time arguing with you.

All that said on this, my Father's Day Sunday, when you could hardly blame me for doing fuck all rather than carry on for free ... I support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I don't want the First Amendment to go away and therefore accept that the Second Amendment is the law of the land as well. It reads, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [sic], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Which is to say, the first part contradicts the latter, but—BUT—they didn't have as many MFA programs back then to workshop the sense, the semantics, and so a little latitude needs to be allowed for a judge to interpret, or else what is a Constitutional Judge to do? End up like a novelist? Largely irrelevant to the culture? I wouldn't wish that on them. Anyway, if you read a lot of the other amendments, they, like Revelations, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Salman Rushdie, don't exactly track as clearly as some who think they know and others don't would like us to think.

Also, to be fair to the people who know a thing or two about guns: the assault rifle you can buy at the store is not an automatic weapon. You have to pull the trigger each time you want it to shoot a bullet; they don't just spray out if you hold the trigger down, like in the Rambo movies. Having a magazine that holds lots of ammunition is the bigger issue, and to that more relevant point you might ask, regardless of your politics or fidelity to the Second Amendment: Will that high-capacity magazine help you more than a cane or a shotgun might when some asshole breaks into your home to steal your TV? Perhaps. Or it might kill the family next door. Then again, if the intruder brings his entire extended family or small town with him, that clip might come in handy. But, and perhaps more importantly, will it help destroy that drone sent by the government that is about to blow you to smithereens from way up in the sky, like a top-notch laser-guided SAM launcher might, which, for whatever crazy reason a citizen isn't allowed to purchase legally?

Probably not.

As the Australian comedian Jim Jeffries has said (in a YouTube'd performance you can Google): the best argument beyond a certain debatable reading of the Second Amendment we here in the States have for owning and keeping as many guns as we want is: "Fuck off, we like our guns."

There it is.

In other news: gold is going up, the yield on the 10-Treasury is going down, close to 1.50% in depreciating dollars that you'll get now for lending your government money. I should add, this is much better than the negative rate you would receive for lending the Germans or the Japanese governments money. Expect this counter-intuitive state of affairs to increasingly matter as time goes on. How? Your guess is as good as mine. In fact, explain it as best you can to a ten-year-old, and ask her what she thinks it ought to lead to, and then watch it not lead there right away, but eventually lead there. When? Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh, and before I go, there will be no successful "organic" movement to bounce Trump from the top of the ticket in July. Dream on, Republicans! Join the Berners! They continue to dream as well, though their dream will come closer to passing in time. When? Not this November.

But here it is almost 11:00 AM. Time for Daddy's Bloody Mary and brunch!

Daddy abides.

Orlando Tragic

I woke up today thinking I would go downstairs and make coffee and watch "This Week" and "Meet the Press" and while the kids were still asleep maybe type out a quick blog suggesting that Hillary could do worse than select Elizabeth Warren as her vice-presidential running mate. Quiet the lingering, edging toward pitiful Berners out there, who, like Japanese soldiers holed up in a cave on an isolated island years after the war is over, keep the fight coming.

For the sake of their mental health, I thought, and so I don't have to look at their ongoing delusions on Facebook (I love you, too, Dave!), why not come out with a ringing endorsement of the estimable firebrand that the Berners wanted before they wanted Bernie—Elizabeth Warren—as our country's next vice-president?

After all, it only makes sense for the centrist and politically less talented Hillary to pick the person who would have been the first choice of that faction of the Democratic Party who can't stand her.

I know. Who's delusional now? But seriously, why not throw it out there? She's going to win anyway. Why not try and make everyone happy?

Who's your Mamma? Well, now you got two ...

America's Got Two Mommies!

Why not? It's had two Daddies going back to George Washington. I'm not suggesting the mommies would do any better, just that they likely wouldn't do any worse, and it might in some small way break the tedium of the next four or five months. Anyway, I think it would be a nice touch, a brilliant touch, a cool, if not radical touch, since the country's mostly women anyway, but still—

Clinton/Warren, the Motherload, here to straighten all your man shit out. Oh, what fun!

I also think Donald Trump should pick Megyn Kelly for his Veep, and not necessarily because she knows the issues better than him, which I'm sure she does ... I just think picking Megyn Kelly would, in its own way, be as brilliant and beguiling of a choice as Hillary Clinton picking Elizabeth Warren. Of course, Trump would still lose, and Hillary would still win, but at least we'd have something more than a fait accompli to look forward to over the next four to five months—which is to say, almost a half a year still.

Anyway, that's what was going through my head. And I thought I'd try to whip it all into some kind of coherent shape in a single sitting like I sometimes do on a Sunday, when I turned on the television and saw, instead, another Special Report about another shooting. 20 people killed, at a gay nightclub ... until they discovered the number was more like 50, with 53 more injured. That would be 103 casualties if this were a war.

And maybe it is.

At the very least it's a new record for firearm slaughter in this country. At least since the Civil War.

A guy who was born in New York, who in one older picture is wearing an NYPD T-shirt, who moved to Florida, beat his ex-wife, saw two guys kissing in Miami and apparently that was all it took for him to say Enough! and go to one of any of a number of places where a citizen, a security guard, no less, can get an AR-15-style assault rifle legally in this country, load up on some ammo and magazines and drive two hours to Orlando, to a place where lots of homosexuals were drinking and dancing and otherwise not bothering anyone, and shoot the place up!

Oh, and before he did, he apparently called 911 and declared his allegiance to IS Radicals. Which is just great. "Yes. Hello? 911? I have a prepared statement. Do you have a moment? I know I shouldn't be doing this while I'm driving and trying to load my brand new assault rifle, but ..."

Being the appreciative, one good turn deserves another sorts that they are, ISIS, through their own media outlet, made the former wife-beating security guard with a gun permit and everything an Honorary Jihadist! Of course by then he was shot dead, as often happens, by the police. No big-breasted bombshells waiting to motorboat him in Heaven. A sad end, you might think, and yet, until next time, he'll be the latest martyr in the cause of Bigotry and Intolerance and Other Not Very Nice Things God Tells Me ideology pulled from the Interwebs.

Forgive my sarcasm, but I can already imagine the feckless political debate that will follow and it already tires me.

Two men kissing. Fifty years ago it might have been a white woman holding a black man's hand.

It Takes a Shrink

So I've been missing in action since Mother's Day. Sorry. Feel terrible about it.

So let's get caught up:

Trump is going to get crowned the Republican nominee in Cleveland this summer, and Hillary, after she squeaks out a win in California on Tuesday, will be crowned the Democratic nominee. In November, she will become the first woman president of the United States. Given that the majority of voters in this country are women who have had the vote for nearly a century now, one wonders why such a first has taken so long to happen, given that not all the men of the last century have been stellar.

All to say, nothing has much changed since I last wrote, and that the narrative for this year's presidential election is not going to wrap with a headline such as this one: NATION ELECTS FIRST REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER/REALITY SHOW HOST PRESIDENT OF THE FREE WORLD!!!! [subheading] —A FUCKING FREAK, GRANTED, BUT AT LEAST HE ISN'T A WOMAN WHO SHOUTS AND DOESN'T ENTERTAIN US AS WELL AS SAM KINISON USED TO WHEN HE SHOUTED, BUT OF COURSE SAM KINISON WASN'T A WOMAN—

A pretty long, improbable headline for any number of reasons, but you get the idea.

Also unlikely is the likelihood of news coming out of Philadelphia this summer that the Democratic crown will, after much hand-wringing and deliberation and a final burst of triumphant ecstasy, be handed to the soon-to-be-crowned woman's most excellent sparring partner, the old Jewish Socialist from Brooklyn with the steady left jab, who, unlike the woman, would scold the banks and the military industrial complex into playing ball like it is imagined they do in Denmark, and we'd all get Medicare and free college and everyone who was making shitloads of bank on the old way we did things back before Bernie got tough would just say, Fuck! Why didn't someone ask me sooner? Happy to do my part! Would it help if I sent you some of the money I got stashed in the Caymans??

The future of the Democratic Party will look more like Bernie's world than Hillary's world, just not yet. Hillary is going to get her shot. And she is going to bitch slap Trump in a way no one has in his entire silly fucking life.

After which we can all hope that after a quarter century on the main stage of politics, during which she endured no end of attacks and accusations, some justified, most not, after sticking tough in a marriage to a man more popular and likeable and politically talented than her, who, to complicate matters, had a very public thing for chasing skirt, she isn't going to be overly quick—quicker than her predecessor, who has been criticized for not leading, for not being as quick to lead as, say, his more headlong predecessor—to lead us into another grinding and fruitless shedding of blood in faraway lands for the ostensible sake of those who by and large hate us and who otherwise aren't much interested in sharing the profits that can flow, good and hard in some cases, to the nimble and ambitious and well-capitalized during times of protracted chaos. Folks who, until recently, had generally, though not always, voted Republican, but now, as with the banking class, given the Republicans' hard turn toward nativism and its cowardly if crestfallen embrace by the likes of the Speaker of the House, perhaps we will witness a sea change in voting alliances of the sort that civil rights brought to Democratic fortunes in the South.

Arching over the top of that worrisome storyline is the story of the economy, which continues to be the most hale and robust of all the late-arc shufflers in the nursing home.

And now, to see if you're still with me ...

A big reason that I've been AWOL from my post these last few weeks is that we've listed our house here in Louisville, Colorado, and plan to move back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, by the end of summer.

I hired one of those big Dumpsters and spent the better part of two weeks filling it with all kinds of stuff that, shall we say, accrued over the years. It occurs to me that this is a good metaphor for the state of the western economies. A lot accrues over the years and there comes a point when it has to go. Depending on one's politics, what is seen as needing to go differs, but, in short, it is easier to buy shit than it is to get rid of shit. Occasionally this process gets helped along by a flood or a fire—the equivalent of war or plague in this metaphor—but more likely in these our less dramatic times (despite what the media tells us), it is a more banal occurrence: divorce, job loss, job gain, having more kids (which is how we got in this big house in the first place), or simply deciding that, for a variety of reasons, not least of which my wife misses her home, and we miss the ocean ... it is time perhaps to refresh the system. Get rid of shit. Live smaller. Spend less, drive less, get out more, haul less freight. That sort of thing.

Easier said than done. Especially for a country.

But we're not a country. We're a family. And it's time. Tearfully so, but time.

Happy Mother's Day!

Take the day to be kind to the person who brought you into this world, the person who raised you, who helped raise you, who was there for you when a lot of others had other things going on, who loved you even though you were someone who for a moment, a day, a month, a year, most all of your life, only a mother could love. Be kind to your mother, to her memory, even if she wasn't perfect and johnny-on-the-spot like all the mothers on television in the 60s and 70s that you later read had drug and alcohol problems that may well have been brought on by playing characters that don't exist in real life. Be kind even if you are too young still, or still too stupid, to realize that you are far from perfectly easy on the nerves yourself. Understand that as lame as it may sound, she, Mom, probably did the best she could given who she was, the forces animating her, and what she'd lived through, what she was sorting out at the time, the things going on inside her while you at the same time had things going on inside you that blinded you to the things that were going on inside her, and so you can be certain that for much of that time you were driving her nuts with things that you now understand, or will soon, or may one day, we all hope, were thoughtless and inconsiderate and at the very least no less maddening for being understandable, because you were young, you didn't know any better, you were doing the best you could, which is how you, we, all of us, cut ourselves slack for all the heartbreak and crazy and totally unnecessary we visited on our mothers' nerves and so today and every day forward we do the same for them, as best we can and are able, given everything that is going on, inside and out, given imperfections, character-flaws, a disturbing number of which are probably genetic, but still, be kind, show compassion, show the love.

Happy Mother's Day! 

A Lament for Ted

I'm beginning to feel sorry for Ted Cruz. At least I feel like I should be. After all, I felt sorry for Jeb Bush almost immediately, seconds into the first time I saw him speaking on television, back when a lot of smart people still thought he was going to be the GOP nominee and all I could think was, No he's not! Look at the poor guy—

I feel sorry for Hillary now and then. Being married to Bill and putting up with all his indiscretions and then having him be the one everyone likes and you being the brittle, shouting, disciplined, ambitious bitch who is only going to win because the Republicans are going to nominate a real estate developer most of the party can't stand (though they like him better than Ted), as if this were a city council race. Anyway, everyone loves Bernie, no one loves Hillary, which is sad, except that compared to Ted, she's lovable, which is really sad, for Ted, and you'd think no one could be that unlovable, and that there'd be pathos there, but I'm dead inside for Ted, this while fully aware—and you might find this surprising—that I felt sorry for Richard Nixon after Pat died. Seeing him break down like he did at the funeral, sprawled over her casket crying like a baby. It wasn't the kind of thing you saw too often anymore, a former president, someone other than John Boehner, crying his eyes out. Never mind Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, Watergate, the Checkers Speech, I felt the pathos of that moment.

No pathos, yet, with Ted. And it's weird. Because you hear kind things said about all kinds of people who are generally considered horrible. Hitler, for instance. You hear it said that Hitler was kind to his dog, that his dog in all likelihood would have had a very high opinion of him had he been allowed to express it. Had Hitler and his dog been together a half century later, you can easily imagine some enterprising ghost writer penning a memoir from the dog's point of view, and you can bet the dog would have had more than a few nice things to say about the Fuhrer.

Stalin, for example. Franklin Roosevelt, of all people—not a Russian, granted, a goddamned commie-friendly liberal from New York, but still—purportedly said after Yalta, "I kind of like Old Joe."

There were people who probably thought Pol Pot was great.

On the other hand, you don't hear anyone, not a soul, coming out and saying, Oh now, I've known Ted Cruz for years, and he may get a little carried away from time to time with that Libertarian nonsense of his, all that Lord Jesus Christ stuff coming out his mouth every third sentence, even us Christians get tired of hearing a fellow go on like that, but really, you shouldn't take all that stuff his old college roommate at Princeton says too seriously, or John Boehner, calling him the most miserable son of a bitch he's ever worked with—what the hell does John Boehner, a government insider who smokes and cries over the goddamnest bullshit, know about anything?

Not one kind word, by anyone. Maybe his wife, if she wasn't so busy at Goldman Sachs. Which by itself is suspect. Don't get me started. I wonder if she's so inside she got to hear Hillary's speech? I wonder if she even told Ted about it. If she had, wouldn't he be talking about it? Or did she start to tell him and he just went La la la la la!!

Maybe his kids want to say nice things but aren't allowed. Maybe he's being kind, taking a tip from Obama, the cool guy all the comics like, the Kennedy to his Nixon, he imagines, though he's not even as likable as Nixon. Nixon's daughters liked him, loved their dad. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they did, that I heard or read it somewhere. And there was his buddy Bebe Rebozo. The staffers on that day he resigned, the speech he gave—a pretty decent speech, really, considering the day he was having—the tears welling in many of their eyes before he did that windshield wiper like wave to all of them and got in the helicopter and flew off to San Clemente or wherever it was they took him.

Maybe Ted needs to be president first. Which, someone please tell him, isn't going to happen. Even though he picked a running mate this week. A failed CEO who understands government, he says—rather bizarre for someone who this morning, on "This Week," said that the problem with Trump and Clinton and Obama is that they believe in government. Which is a little like saying the problem with the current Chief of Surgery and the two candidates with the best chance of becoming the next chief is that they believe in surgery. Which would be a ridiculous thing to say even if you weren't hoping to become the next Chief of Surgery yourself. If you didn't believe in surgery, why spend two years of your life campaigning to become lead surgeon? You'd have to be a self-aggrandizing prick who just liked the idea of being in charge no matter what you thought of the enterprise, which, possibly, answers a lot of questions, and wouldn't make him all that unlike a lot of other politicians, and yet it still is unseemly.

What Trump understands and Ted possibly—tragically, if anyone gave a shit or had a kind thought about him—doesn't understand: the base doesn't really much give a shit anymore about conservative government and/or principles.

They're just really upset.

A lot of people are really upset, and don't believe so much anymore, rightly or wrongly, that the answer to all their problems is less government, that government is the problem, that it is bad, that it needs to be done away with, that the beast must be starved, after which a golden age will begin and we'll all be happy again like the kids in Lord of the Flies.

Ted, who wants to be the head of a government he doesn't believe in, says that a majority of Republicans don't want Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee for president. What the brilliant debater from Princeton, the US Senator from Texas, doesn't seem to get, or want to admit, is that even fewer—a lot fewer—want Ted Cruz to be the Republican nominee for president.

The GOP, the ones who courted these angry disenfranchised people but aren't that angry or disenfranchised themselves, can't believe they're caught in such a pickle. It's goddamned unbelievable. Still, given a big boss man who's kind of funny, and a miserable son of a bitch who isn't, they're going with the first guy, count on it. Better that Trump hang out to dry in November as have to kiss that miserable son of a bitch Ted Cruz's ass for one second.