The Alphabet of Politics (this week)

Writing the April poem was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Not because it was poetry and poetry is not my strength (I took that difficulty into account before I began and sought assistance from my wife, the Queen of Rhythm (credit where credit is more than due)) but because writing anything about politics right now is... is...
Writing politics right now is like trying to juggle eggs during a major earthquake while more eggs are falling from the sky. You can only deal with the egg in your hand and you can't make any plans about future eggs and you can't figure out why eggs are falling from the sky.

To put it another way: It's chaos.
Needless to say, many things in the poem changed during the month due to changing circumstances.
Like chickenshit Paul Ryan effectively resigning. He wants to run for President, I'm sure, and that will never happen unless he manages to climb out of the shithole he helped create.
Well, I'm not going to go through all the things that manipulated the end result. It is what it is at the moment.

Here's the whole thing all in one place with only a few minor edits here and there; however, there is an alternate version below reflecting things that had been planned then scrapped due to the aforementioned chaos.


Abortion is A, a right fundamental,
the Constitution says it's her choice.

B for the boomers, they've gone fully mental,
only heeding their own selfish voice.

C is for Congress and its very brown thumb
shoved eagerly up its own ass.

D is for data; Facebook plays dumb
while selling you out for hard cash.

E for the Earth, if we don't keep it cool,
we'll sink in a watery grave.

F is for fake news. Your feed is a tool
for Russia to make you its slave.

G are the guns that we buy without limit,
no matter the state of your mind,

and H, the health care and need of a clinic
you'll find you're already denied.

I is for I.C.E. on which they want to put you,
cold storage without any rights

or the J that is justice, which they eschew,
unless, of course, you're skin is all white.

K is for Kushner who doesn't have clearance,
but no one's crying you lost it.

L is the Left and its public adherence.
Be aware, we're not gonna quit.

M is for mass shootings and the Right's lack of care
about our kids dying in their schools,

which is why we have N for #neveragain
and why the Right will all look like fools.

O for Obama whom we'd like to have back.
He was never a laughing stock.

P is for porn star and her breathtaking rack
and Cohen behind a padlock.

Q is for quiet for which I long and pine.
If only they'd learn how to behave.

R is for racists and lyin' Paul Ryan.
Turns out he's like Robin the Brave.

S is for schools where we ought to have guns,
says DeVos, to keep out the bears.

T is for Trump; he believes he's "the one,"
but, really, he's just putting on airs.

U is for under, the water I mean;
Now is your time to go to the coast.

V is for violence which cops seem so keen
to use against black folks the most.

W is for "wag the dog" or maybe for war
all to keep you from looking at

X-rated tapes, but not the ones in your drawer,
the ones with Russian "pussycats."

Y is for you and how you need to go vote;
it's time to get out and fight

for Z, zero tolerance, not just a note
that we're through with this shit from the Right.

copyright Andrew and Sarah Leon 2017

Also this:

Abortion is A, a right fundamental,
the Constitution says it's her choice.

B for the boomers, they've gone fully mental,
only heeding their own selfish voice.

C is for Congress and its very brown thumb
shoved eagerly up its own ass.

D is for Dreamers and how we've left them the crumbs.
It's time to give them a pass.

E for the Earth, if we don't keep it cool,
we'll sink in a watery grave.

F is for fake news. Your feed is a tool
for Russia to make you its slave.

G are the guns that we buy without limit,
no matter the state of your mind,

and H, the health care and need of a clinic
you'll find you're already denied.

I is for I.C.E. on which they want to put you,
cold storage without any rights

or the J that is justice, which they eschew,
unless, of course, you're skin is all white.

K is for Kushner who doesn't have clearance,
but no one's crying you lost it.

L is the Left and its public adherence.
Be aware, we're not gonna quit.

M is for mass shootings and the Right's lack of care
about our kids dying in their schools,

which is why we have N for #neveragain
and why the Right will all look like fools.

Oh Shit! We're all gonna die in nuclear fire!
How are we back in the 80s?!

P is for porn star and her breathtaking rack
and Cohen behind a padlock.

Q is for quiet for which I long and pine.
If only they'd learn how to behave.

R is for racists and lyin' Paul Ryan.
Turns out he's like Robin the Brave.

S is for schools where we ought to have guns,
says DeVos, to keep out the bears.

T is for Trump; he believes he's "the one,"
but, really, he's just putting on airs.

U is for under, the water I mean;
Now is your time to go to the coast.

V is for violence which cops seem so keen
to use against black folks the most.

W is for women and it's certainly time
for #metoo and all their voices heard.

Enough x-rated plant sex from Harvey Weinstein.
C'mon, you know he's a fat turd.

Y is for you and how you need to go vote;
it's time to get out and fight

for Z, zero tolerance, not just a note
that we're through with this shit from the Right.

copyright Andrew and Sarah Leon 2017

Justice

or the J that is justice, which they eschew,
unless, of course, you're one of the whites.

The New Civil War (ongoing): Charlottesville

I know a lot of you out there think I'm going overboard with talking about a civil war, another civil war. Not just talking about it but writing about it as well (that story starts here: "Day One") but, while that story is fiction, the idea that there is a new civil war coming is not.

It's already here.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that in the future, historians are going to look back and say that the Second Civil War began in Charlottesville, VA. In many ways, it's the first confrontation, the first confrontation where the Nazis came in with intent to kill. And I don't just mean the terrorist incident with the car.

If you haven't watched this video, you need to.

Just to be clear, none of what I'm saying is because of that video. The video is just research that backs up what I was already saying.

Look, I am not advocating for a war. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, because there won't be any battle lines this time, not physical ones. There will be no armies that meet and clash in the way it happened in first civil war or in WWI or WWII. This will be a war fought in the streets of our cities all across America, often between regular people. It will be a war of terrorists attacks being performed by Nazis and those on the Alt-right. There will be no safe zones.

Can it be stopped?

I don't know.

The consensus, currently, among historians and military people who study this kind of thing (including civil wars currently being fought in other countries) say we're at about a 35% chance of a full civil war, but one of the leading minds on the subject (I forget his name and am not going to go back and look it up again now) puts us at a 65% chance of a full civil war.

One thing is clear, we can't stop it with Trump #fakepresident in office, and we probably can't stop it with anyone from the GOP in office. In fact, as I'm writing this, Bannon has just  been given the boot by Trump and Breitbart is going to war with the #fakepresident over it. I don't even know if that's figurative or not.

What I know is this:
Right-wing nutjobs have been arming themselves for decades. A huge number of the Nazis at the "rally" in Charlottesville were armed to the teeth. That guy in the Vice video was pulling out weapons as if he were Gimli in Jackson's rendition of LotR. They are prepared for violence and they want violence.

The Nazi faction in America is still growing, still getting stronger, and they want an ethnic cleansing. They want an America for white people. At some point, unless they are put down first, there's going to be a concerted effort on their part to attack minority groups with the goal of killing them.

The Left needs to be prepared and, right now, I don't think that we are. We somehow think this is all going to blow over or that real violence, really real violence, isn't going to happen, not here, not in America. Well, it's already started and it's just going to get worse. I mean, hell, various white supremacist groups are going on and on about how glad they are that they made the first kill and how she deserved it. And she was white! Wait till they start on the people they really want to go after.

If you're going to go to a protest, you need to take precautions. Minimally, I think that involves buying some Kevlar or some kind of body armor and probably wearing a helmet. Yes, I'm being serious. The white supremacists are armed and armored! You need to protect yourselves.

The time for trying to be in the middle is over. This is not going to pass without people taking a stand against it. It's time for those of us who believe in justice and liberty for all people to stand up for it. It's time for those of us who believe in what the nation was founded on to stand up and fight for it.

Most of all, it's time to deliver a message to the GOP that they need to get off of the fence. It's time for them to quit using their mealy mouths to condemn Trump #fakepresident while doing nothing about it and trying to work with him to further their own hate agendas. Either stand with Trump #fakepresident or stand against him. And, if they're going to stand with him, they need the message that they will go down with him.

What I know is this:
If you want to stop this war before it really gets going, it requires strong action now. Strong action NOW. Not more talk. Action. For some of you, that action is talk; it's speaking up. Now. It's time for the first civil war to end, for racial injustice to end, for white supremacy to end.

Truth, Justice, and the "American Way"

No, this is not a post about Superman. Except, maybe it is a little bit. Or a lot.

"Truth, justice, and the American way," as a phrase, has been around for long enough at this point that people don't realize it originated with Superman. They may know it's been associated with Superman but most people think it's its own thing, not what amounts to a marketing phrase for the 50's Adventures of Superman, the Superman show I watched in syndication when I was a kid.

I'm not sure if there was an idea tying truth and justice to America prior to Superman (and I'm not doing the research on that, right now, to try and figure it out),but Superman, since his inception, has been tied to truth and justice. From the early days of the comic book to his days on the radio and, then, in the earlier TV series, Superman always stated that he was here to fight for truth and justice. That's all, just truth and justice. Those, to me, seem like things worth fighting for. I'm not so sure about the "American way."

See, the "American way" was something tossed in during the 50s in the midst of the Red Scare and McCarthy-ism and was less about America than it was about White America: Leave It To Beaver, white picket fences, and Father Knows Best. Probably some Andy Griffith, too. TV in the 50s was all about the "American way," and it's hard for me to dissociate that idea from those TV shows because they epitomize so much of the idea of the "American way."

And I'm not going to try and say that there's nothing attractive about those shows and the, for lack of a better word, ideal they put on display. But it was all a fantasy. Real life America was never like Father Knows Best or Mayberry. Real life America has never been all White all the time in nice little subdivisions with white picket fences. And it's never been about women who wear their heels and pearls in the kitchen while making dinner all day. All of this isn't even a White fantasy; it's a White Male fantasy about how everyone else lives to serve them in their own individual little kingdoms.

It's kind of sick.

It's possible I wouldn't have a problem with the whole "truth, justice, and the American way" thing if truth and justice were a part of it, had ever been a part of it. But the "American way," as it applies here, has always been about white male supremacy. It's why Steve Bannon holds the 50s up as his ideal era of what we need to get back to. The White Male was supreme, and everyone else knew their places.

As for truth and justice? We seem to have culturally abandoned those ideas of late. We've abandoned truth in favor of opinion and, even, outright lies. You can see the evidence of that in the man who was elected president, a man with absolutely no relationship with truth whatsoever. His lackeys display the same break from reality with their "alternative facts" and misrepresentation of historical accuracy. Sorry folks, history is not an opinion. Things happened. Saying they didn't or trying to recast those events in some other light doesn't make them not have happened.

And we've abandoned justice in favor of racial prejudice and allowing the rich more and more power and money. "We" have allowed the Republicans to wave religious dogma at Conservatives to keep them in power so that they can continually enable corporations the ability to take advantage of people, poison their water, and keep them in debt. That Jeff Sessions and Neil Gorsuch are where they are serve as proof that we have shoved justice down the stairs and broken her scales. We have become the money lenders in the Temple, and have elected the worst of them as president.

This seems to be the "American Way": no truth, no justice, just the dream of white picket fences in white neighbors with white schools.

Superman isn't coming. It's time to abandon this "American Way" nonsense as the fable it always was. It's time to stand for truth and justice. Truth and Justice! Which means demanding, all of us, that we have politicians who are knowledgeable, smart, and believe in facts, not money. It means demanding a change to the system so that the system doesn't check our skin color before it decides who gets a fair shake. It's time.

Epitaph (a book review post)

When I was a kid, before I discovered dinosaurs (which I did at the age of four), the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. My grandfather had cows on his farm, so I figured that made him a cowboy, and that's what I wanted to be. Imagine my surprise when I got to my American history class in high school and learned that the term "cowboy" became popularized and associated with the west because of a band of rustlers operating in Arizona in the 1880s know as the Cow Boys. Yeah, you heard me; the Cow Boys were the bad guys.

Interestingly enough, it was these same Cow Boys who would create the enduring legacy of Wyatt Earp and, by extension, Doc Holliday. Wyatt Earp, who was possibly the ultimate frontier lawman... right up until he wasn't.

Of course, there are those who would argue that he was never a lawman, just an outlaw posing as one, but, mostly, those are the outlaws who accused him of that. Or men like Johnny Behan, and we know Behan was crooked, so it makes his accusations a little less believable.

At any rate, Epitaph is not really a book about Wyatt Earp. Which is not to say that it's not a book about Wyatt Earp, because it is. Mostly, though, it's about the conditions that lead up the shootout that was not actually at the O.K. Corral and the fallout after it. The enduring legacy it created.

The temptation, here, is to get into the history of it, but that's in the book. To say that Mary Doria Russell is a meticulous researcher is probably an understatement. We'll say instead that I trust her research. And, sure, I'm biased and, sure, this is historical fiction, but I believe the facts are mostly in place and the suppositions logically follow from the facts.

That said, it's Russell's ability to allow the reader to walk along with her characters that is her greatest asset. And that's where her research really shows, I think. She writes as if she knows these people, as if she spent time with them, as witnessed these things herself. It creates a completely believable world.

Basically, I can't recommend this book or Russell more highly. And, although this is a companion piece to Doc, Doc is not required reading; Epitaph is not a sequel.

Whether you think Wyatt Earp walked with the angels or the demons (and it's not unreasonable to suspect either considering that he was never shot; even when his clothes ended up full of bullet holes, he never received a wound), this book is worth reading for the insight on the situation. The incident "at" the O.K. Corral formed a view of the Old West that has never been shaken, one of showdowns and street fights that never really existed. And maybe that's okay, because it's the legends we look up to and aspire to be. Parts of me still want to be a cowboy.

No Thoughts Interview

Hmm... maybe that title doesn't sound so good? I mean, that sounds like I have no thoughts... wait a minute, that might be right?

Okay, just ignore me and pop over to No Thoughts 2 Small to see me answer a few questions about Shadow Spinner including what the theme song would be. You can tell me what you think of my choice. That is, if you've read it, you can tell me what you think.

Also, don't forget, "Part Thirty-three: Justice," the penultimate chapter of Spinner is FREE! today!

Lego "Justice" (a Fair post)

So, okay, you got me. There's really nothing to do with justice and Lego (by the way, did you know that "Lego" is the plural of "Lego"? (I think I mentioned this before, but I don't feel like checking)) in  this post. At least not together. I suppose if this was a Lego Batman post, we could talk about Lego and justice together, but it's not. No, this is about the Lego exhibit they have every year at the Fair. (We'll get to the justice part in a bit.)

The arts and crafts stuff at the Fair always includes a fairly large Lego exhibit which is something we spend a lot of time at. At least, we spend a lot of time at it in comparison to the other arts and crafts. Mostly, this is the fault of the boys. Actually, my wife and my daughter usually just glance at them and go do something else while I hang out with the boys while they examine every piece. Okay, not every piece, because my younger son has incredible disdain for kids who send in their boxed kits as their entries.

And I get it. It's supposed to be original creations. But, you know, how do you tell that to a six-year-old? Or to his parents that don't really know the difference. Or the judges who are almost certainly old(er) people that barely know what a Lego is. Yeah, I know I'm generalizing and stereotyping, but, since the contest is supposed to be about original creations and (at least) half of the entries (including some that win prizes) are just kits you can buy at the store, I have to assume that these people don't have any working knowledge of Lego.

Anyway... there have been some really incredible builds the last few years. Some guy made a huge model of a scorpion (and, when I say huge, I mean somewhere in the 3-4' long range not counting the tail) from the technic type pieces and, I'm assuming the same guy, some other similar type bug thing another year. I wanted to share pictures of those, because there was nothing quite so impressive this year, but... well, I can't seem to find those pictures. [They got put into storage (off my computer) at some point, and I don't know where they are (probably because we moved since I did that). And I did, actually, spend several hours looking for those discs to no avail.] All of that to say, you'll just have to be satisfied with the pictures of this years' creations (and hope that I find those other pictures at some point in the future).

My son assures me that these are not from kits (and I don't know of any kits of these, but they are so well done, I thought, maybe, there was some older line of military vehicles or something that I didn't know about). As you can see, they won first place in their category.

Yes, someone touched the plane on the left. My son really wanted to fix it, so I had to remind him about his feelings on the subject and whether he'd want someone he didn't know fixing it if it was his creation.

(I wanted to fix it, too.)

And, now, for the most impressive thing this year

(which is nowhere near as impressive as the things from the last couple of years).

That's the Lego show from this year.

My son always wants to enter something, but, when presented with the knowledge that he would have to submit the piece for judging at some point before the Fair starts and that it would be on display for weeks (where other people could touch it and potentially break it), meaning that he could be without his Lego for more than a month, he always decides he'd rather not. Then, he walks around grumbling about how his thing was better than this-or-that thing. Except he never said that about those Lego creatures. That just made him want more Lego so that he could build something that big. I told him when I sell a million books that we'll talk about it.

Speaking of books!

Today is the penultimate release of the Shadow Spinner serialization! Yes, the end is almost here! Want to find out what happens to Tib, Michael, and the Man with No Eyes? Well, this is your chance to do it. Not to mention the Serpent and... the Angel, Uri'el! This is one climax you don't want to miss! Grab "Justice" today!
Here's your list of today's FREE! offerings:
"Part Thirty-three: Justice" (FREE! Monday, September 23 and Tuesday, September 24)
"Part Thirty-two: The Gate"
"Part Thirty-one: The Serpent Strikes"
"Part Thirty: Called in Judgement"
"Part Twenty-four: The Serpent"
"Part Twenty-three: The Harlot"
"Part Twenty-two: The Undying"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
That's only nine parts this week, but, hey, running these things for FREE! every week uses up the free days pretty quickly. Next week: "Part Thirty-four: Uri'el" and, maybe, something else new!