6 November 2022
The Death of Stateline
Not a good sign.
This morning, I tried to access the website called Stateline. I was repeatedly re-directed to a Domain-Name-For-Sale hawker.
This past summer, the most ominous indication was there at this online ath-leisure site which sold Clothes Made in the USA from cotton grown in the USA:
merchandise at obscenely reduced prices.
I scooped up a gray t-neck tunic for 1/4 the price I’d paid in early 2021. The thickness of the all-cotton garment was about half of that of the initial one purchased, in black. The size felt, and is, about one size smaller. Sometime in 2019, I’d felt confident enough to start purchasing Size SMALL in American-made clothing. Size Small has since returned to its pre-2017 state of meaning SNUG.
There still exists, however, that Bay-Area manufacturer of ath-leisure, the shrinking American Giant, from which I’ve stopped purchasing. That California gimmick is thick with commie-vibes. “Ships from a Small Business in Southern California” is the info given on other capitalist-tricks at the online shops that peddle wares shipped to L.A. from There — China.
The Production Partner and Component Partner: Guangzhou, China.
The very latest in Foreign Production and Component Partners is Russia.
Since the spring of 2022, the number of capitalist Russian shops set up in Vilnius, Lithuania and in the Ukraine — is huge. It’s an appalling yet remarkable sight to see such innovation and fraud in the digital Retail Realm. Dropshipping for Dummies is making a cash-killing.
Drop-ship is the wave of now.
Drop-kick is the wave of tomorrow, and the future.
I understand that there are far more important, crucial and pressing matters than the financial demise of one wonderful American business. What’s one among millions in this country?
This one, however, represented a major move away from the cheap Chinesium that has plagued this country, and the world, for decades. Methinks that many, many, many Americans, like myself, are not going back to Buying Foreign-Made-Bads (Goods). We’ve got adequate, and ample, threads to cover our behinds, unlike the citadins who believe Unlimited Everything has been secured for Them by the Political Class.
Yesterday, I announced to Dear Husband that “we” are not buying a turkey this year. I refuse to pay $150 for fowl. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration last year, after the previous year of 2020, when we ate canned goods for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. During those fateful fall & winter seasons, we celebrated our holidays austerely in a brand-new house without electricity that, after six months, still hadn’t been installed by PG&E.
I’m thankful for those celebrations of 2021. I can do with less this upcoming Turkey Day.
Not my spouse!
He refused to contemplate such an idea. He asked me if I’d prefer to plunder one of the 50 or so skinny wild turkeys that traipsed over our property that very afternoon.
I gave the idea some thought, but those scrawny critters ought not have to die so that my small temper tantrum can be indulged. I wasn’t being stubborn, however, — but willful.
Being willful has propelled me into some very magnificent scenarios in my life, accompanied by fabulous achievements. It’s also placed me in dreadful situations, from which I escaped danger through desperate avenues. I then reclaimed freedom, the freedom to learn from my mistakes.
I backed down from my petulance, and decided to read the next chapter of Le Comte de Monte Cristo, LXXXIX, La Nuit, The Night. I’m closing in on the last 300 pages!
Chapitre LXXXIX led to the next chapter, XC, La Rencontre, The Meeting, because they work as a duo in terms of dramatic effect and plot-line. Those 2 chapters are the apex toward which the entire book, two volumes worth, has been heading.
I left this hour of reading Alexandre Dumas aloud in the French — with eyes swollen from having wept over the profound beauty of the prose. And I realized what Edmond Dantès finally realizes, and despairingly comprehends to the core of his being.
The power of his love for this woman named Mercédès is stronger than his zest for revenge. He was wrongly acting upon the belief that God had sent him on this mission to avenge this evil enemy who has married Mercédès. Edmond confronts the solemn and saddening truth that even if a person believes that he is on a mission, sent by God, to exact vengeance for a savage wrong done to him, he can be utterly blinded to the fact that using God is no excuse for taking His will into his own hands — and causing tragedy to those untainted by the stain of the sin.
Vengeance truly is the Lord’s. If a man, or woman, uses Yahweh as the pretext to get back at an evildoer, Yahweh will most certainly punish that person who isn’t putting the punishment into the hands of the Almighty. A man is duty-bound and must avenge certain sins and crimes. He must, however, place into the hands of his Creator the act of balancing the scales of justice when harm will come to an innocent because of a blind desire for just recompense.
The love that this man had carried with him for years and years for Mercédès has become a love that he’d been willing to deny, subvert, and sacrifice to the cause of redressing heinous wrongs against him. The fullness of that love is realized, and powerfully felt, only when this man, who had been stripped of this woman from his life, yea, almost stripped of his life — experiences the depth of her love for her son.
In Chapter LXXXIX, La Nuit, Mercédès is willing to sacrifice herself for her son who may die in a duel with the Count. In Chapter XC, she commits a painful act of self-abnegation and confession to spare the life of Edmond Dantès in this duel which he has determined will end his life with honor.
Edmond is shaken to his pitiful, passionate core by the transformation of his love for this woman from a self-absorbed passion to a glorious and transcendent passion. He comes to the soul-searing certainty that justice on earth pales in comparison to the justice delivered by the Creator to the evil among us. The Count of Monte Cristo has, indeed, journeyed countless miles from the Château d’If to attain this height of splendour.
Mercédès, his lost love, becomes sublimely ennobled by her selfless love for her son and for this cruelly wronged man, whose fate she had feared to discover, so long ago. Edmond is, in truth, a man she never stopped loving, even as he was so unjustly torn from her, and from himself.
“It’s all so noble,” I wept in telling my husband of those two chapters.
It is through his awareness of the sacrifice of love by the woman he’d presumably loved beyond measure, beyond time, that the Count of Monte Cristo learns about love in ways that had been subtly woven throughout this long, long novel. Those pathways to that higher love are traveled every day by persons in my nation who bear witness to such exalted levels of virtue, valor, and honor. Most of these heroes and heroines remain unknown and unsung heroes, except to those who love them, and to their Maker.
One man, however, is known to the true Americans as the hero in whom We the Patriots place our trust, with devotion and gratitude. Because of his love for this country, the hand of God has been at work, and remains in force.
Retribution in the name of love — of country, of family, of beloved, even of truth — that deed is most assuredly ordained, even expected, by the Almighty in a land blessed by liberty and strengthened by the sanctity of the blood of our fallen heroes.
The death of Stateline begets the birth of a new creator of fine merchandise, Made in the USA. The deaths of myriad statelines in the USA is what We the People are dedicating our days and nights to defend against.
His truth is marching on.
