20 January 2024
From the autumn of 2008 until the autumn of 2012, I was laser-beam focused on plowing ahead with my life, and with the writing and completion of my two-volume novel, THE DAWN. I took notice of “political” events as they happened, but, back then, as now, there wasn’t much to see in the way of real action, those watershed events and sea-changes that I crave.
I most certainly didn’t see any deeds of derring-do to generate the achievement of the top-selling buzzword for political inertia:
CHANGE.
As a matter of fact, true fact, the more talk there is, the less action there’ll be. That truism is the primary reason why Talk Radio was so huge, yuge (no, Ms. Pages, not “luge” or “Yule” but YUGE) during the 1990s America and its Holiday from History.
By the Subprime-Collapse/Do-Nothing 2000s, “hope”, along with “change” got peddled like hotcakes, or waffles, to the U.S. citizen by the professional liars known as politicians. Those creepy corporate shills had no intention of changing anything, for them, or for us. They possess what I consider a death wish, for many things, hope, change, life, decency, perhaps America. And they can’t even do the death-wish with any measure of merciful efficiency, or OSHA-enforced cleanliness.
From 2008 until the year 2018, when I moved out of the Peach House, I was creatively tucked away in my corner of the world, in Newcastle, CA. Spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally, I’d moved to Provence. Mentally, however, I was still very much rooted in that little town that really wasn’t much of a town.
With persistence I tried, but couldn’t ignore these nagging thoughts anent:
when would the Great Recession end; when would the Candidates all stop looking and sounding like robotic dolts, and acting like them; when would the Media become a real source of accurate information; when would the American People wake up and figure out we’ve been voting — those small numbers of us who were still legally voting — for our own rip-off acts for decades . . .
Those questions weren’t about to be answered . . . until 2016.
As part of my catching up with pieces of the past I purposely left behind, I looked online this morning at “The Tea Party” (the movement, not the rock band). I’d known a few small business owners in my bailiwick who’d joined the Tea Party, right off the rebel-bat in 2009. Every week, they attended the counter-revolutionary meetings, engaging in what today would be labeled “insurrection” by the lewd liars of the Non-Ruling Class.
They were good men of good conscience, though not of good cheer.
I admit to being picky about those matters of the heart. Being of good cheer, especially during the dismal doldrums, is of prime importance to surviving those doldrums, to prevailing over any crisis.
In 2009, the crisis upon the Fruited Plain consisted of the two-faced foulness of the elected thieves in Congress, in the White House, in the State Houses, in the City Slum-houses, and in more than a few private houses. Those incredibly lazy abettors of treason were cloddily perpetrating, in the Name of the People, a series of organized, and unorganized, crimes, sewer-level corruption, and cockamamie fibbing through their crooked teeth.
Alright, the teeth are straight, too straight, and too shiny neon white to be real. There’s a clue.
Those conscientious citizens of Tea-Party conscience are no longer with me. I look back upon them fondly, but with some sadness because their private sorrows had become so burdensome that they sought the illusive solace of purpose in the political arena, the quicksand of manipulative fraud from which they would not emerge unscathed, if at all.
My very dear friend and fictional advocate advised me in October 2010 to go down to the coast, to Monterey and Carmel, one last time, before it all falls apart with the return of Moonbeam to the Guvnership.
I went, I saw, I came home. My sensibility was not exactly “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered) by Julius Caesar after he, and his army, defeated Pharnaces [which is not the word, Pharmacies, Mr. Pages] of Pontus.
What I experienced was an unsettling realization of the pit of poverty, degradation and overall despair that the California beyond my Placer County had become. A final jaunt to Asilomar at Pacific Grove during the month of April 2016 was, for me, the coffin nail on my ever going again to this West Coast; and the beginning of my mourning what was once a beautiful, pristine part of the Golden State.
I found myself singularly alone in my melancholy. Dear Husband, A California Native, hailing from Nevada City, never did care much for the touristy hot spots of his home state. Perhaps because I am a refugee from New Jersey, I’d carried with me high hopes, very high hopes, that California wouldn’t become the odious Welfare State that NJ did.
Dear Hubby says that I am most unusual in my assessments of his native state. I don’t consider Los Angeles a real city, or even a part of California. It produces nothing of positive worth, and it must import just about everything to barely function. If one were to cut off the hauled-in water, food, and lights, the pit would collapse upon itself. And that’s without an earthquake, flood, fire, or mudslide.
LA is a manufactured urban sprawl of a venal underworld, carved from a desert, dependent upon imported water, food, energy, and labourers. The blob is perceived as California, en soi, but it’s actually an extension of Arizona. The LA-AZ scofflaw linkage reared its ugly head in 2020, but it’s been festering there for aeons.
It is said that you don’t find fleas on a dead dog. The remaining fleas on California look about to flee this once-prosperous paradise. I’ll brew a pot of Yorkshire tea for that silent revolution.
The other night, I watched an episode of Murder, She Wrote wherein the murder victim was a boxing manager/thug who paid opponents to his Boxer in the ring to take a dive. The plot (which, by the way, takes place in Boston!) involves a past-his-prime pugilist named Blaster who can win the match only when he gets mad. He reminded me of me, once the rage begins. When he admitted to having taken a dive, he reminded me of a certain Republican candidate in 2012, and in 2008 . . . albeit not for the same reasons and motivations.
Blaster also reminded me of the millions upon millions of American citizens who have terrifically and tremendously transformed their apathy toward their Constitutional right to vote into, initially, a Tea Party; and, then, a miraculous movement that is being led by a gutsy guy with whom I enormously identify — and it’s not just because his initials are those of my maiden name.
Those two initials also stand for delirium tremens. This American hero incites that condition wherever he goes amongst the traitorous skunks who have driven this country almost into the ground.
Of the Tea Party Movement, I learned very little this morning from the ether-sphere, in terms of actual facts, factual info, the real truth. I did discern that the Brits still haven’t gotten over that original Tea Party in Boston Harbor on 10 May 1773.
That’s a long time to carry a grudge!
The absolute worst and most despicable deceptions and juvenile lies about The Tea Party can be found on British websites, particularly the ones for Kiddies. The indoctrination has to start early!
The British Propagandists might be copy-and-pasting (or copying-and-pasting) the vile verbiage from the usual digital suspects in the States, but I think not. The A-leets ™in John Bull pompously pitch their environmentally virtuous bull in their roles as poppycock partisans and foreign interventionists in the elections of other nations.
The rise of the individual has never been triumphed in England, nor the rise of capitalism, and, thence, a middle class. We, in the Colonies, find ourselves more and more out of touch with the passive masses in the Mother Country, except whenever it comes to the citizenry being defrauded, deceived, bilked, reviled, ridiculed and roundly despised. The Yankee reaction, however, is decidedly different.
The zeal for a decidedly different response, or reaction, is, most assuredly, American. Therein is where the paid-hacks of politics always go wrong, so very wrong. The True American likes a realistic plan of action, a do-able road map to the future, not a taxpayer-funded shovel to dig your own hole, or grave. (Think shovel-ready.)
Whilst searching online for cross-stitch images of the original Boston Tea Party, I remembered the cross-stitch project of my sixth-grade class. A facsimile in little x’s of the historic Tea Party was to be completed by the end of the school year; but my design, on ivory cotton, with red and blue threads, just kept getting more and more detailed. I had to bring the amateur œuvre home, unfinished.
Mrs. Collins, my teacher, was good-natured about it. She’d undoubtedly concluded, but didn’t tell me, that I’d turned a simple, humble art project into the Sistine Chapel of embroidery!
My simple, humble choices of morning tea are, in the fall and winter, Scottish Breakfast, and, in the spring, English Breakfast. By summer, it’s so blasted hot in the Sierra Nevada foothills that I tend to drink iced tea in the a.m., and in the p.m.
That demon tea is my only true vice, and I consider it a virtue.
Tea, anyone?