Short Notes on Current Events

Instead of a rant...

Shoot Everything and Get Out of There, 2020; oil on canvas, by the author

1. I’ve read too many arguments denying the existence of Palestine as a real place. These writers claim Palestine never existed as a nation. But here’s the thing; they exist as people. And there are several million of them, currently under attack by their neighbors. Isn’t their humanity enough justification to recognize and to correct the abuse they receive inside a country that was imposed on them by force?

2. Regardless of how they arrived and settled in local communities across America, strangers and their descendants were inevitably isolated and given odd names like wop, mick, yid, bohunk, kike, dago, nigger, spic, beaner, chink, gook, gringo, wetback, cracker, hillbilly, okie, white trash, redskin, slope, etc. The etcetera is especially depressing. Today we now have strangers called illegals. They are illegals because they arrived when we were not as prepared for them as we should have been. They are in fact undocumented, or more accurately, inadequately documented. And now Donald Trump and company arrest them when they show up in court to be properly documented. That’s a betrayal of our reputation as a nation of immigrants.

3. If CNN’s cameras are recording a speech Trump is giving, and in that speech he points them out, calls them “fake news”, and complains to the audience how he “has to put up with them”, why don’t the executives at CNN turn the cameras off? Are they not a free press? Trump is only an effective bullshitter on television. When his actual accomplishments are relayed by cold, factual reports, whether delivered by a network anchor, or printed in a periodical, they shrink to their real size, which are typically much smaller than his boasts.

4. Russian troops ordered by Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. That’s what the war is about.

5. What we call government health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) are not entitlements. Legacy acceptance letters sent by major universities to the offspring of wealthy parents are entitlements. No one on Medicaid gets a check to spend as they wish. Medicare and Medicaid are programs through which doctors, nurses and other health care professionals get paid when they heal people who cannot afford profit driven health insurance. Call me radical, but I believe doctors should get paid.

6. Waste, fraud, and abuse? Look to the salaries of the Congress of the United States of America. They fail consistently to pass any meaningful legislation. They’re good at hearings, though. Hearings in which they confirmed for important positions in government, conspiracy nuts, puppy killers, real estate hustlers, Fox News personalities, drunks, wrestling managers, and a once competent Senator from Florida who looks more each day like a man who bought a boa constrictor for a pet and just lost it in a park.

7. Tanks in the streets of Washington DC will be, to put it mildly, inappropriate. On a more practical note, the reputation of the greatest military on earth will be tested this Saturday against the resiliency of water main pipes under Constitution Avenue.