A Diversion on a Friday

(In the light of the mostly depressing news this week and today – I present a short chapter from the next Luna City Chronicle – which we aim to have completed for release in November, 2016)

Dance with the Bunny Boiler in the Pale Moonlight

Some weeks after Romeo Gonzales arrived and set up his own campsite in the near-deserted Age of Aquarius, Richard pedaled up the road deftly avoiding the ruts, bumps and puddles that nature and the passage of the occasional heavy vehicle had scoured into the clay-like soil with the skill of experience. It had rained lightly the night before, so puddles there were in plenty, and the fresh new grass had begun just raising tender new blades coyly between the old dead hay of the previous season.
On the whole, he had found Romeo Gonzales to be a congenial neighbor, given that it was hard to be anything else at half an acre space between their trailers and workplaces some blocks distant from each other. At least, Romeo showed no inclination to conspire together with malignantly-inclined micro-media operatives to ambush him at the door with lights, cameras and harassing commentary, unlike the egregious Penn. Who, in concordance with the injunction delivered through Jess, showed every inclination of making himself scarce whenever Richard was around. Richard was profoundly glad of that, not least because he treasured his afternoons of solitary contemplation of the pleasant but uninspiring landscape and his studies in Larousse.

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My Big Fat Hillary Problem

So, it looks like Her Inevitableness is tottering on the way to her coronation, attended by throne-sniffing, lickspittle courtiers like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who most notably got bent out of shape last night by Patricia Smith (the mother of former SEAL Sean Smith, killed in the 2012 mob attack on the US consular office in Benghazi) calling Her Inevitableness a liar. Such “lese majeste!” harrumphs the egregiously offended Mr. Matthews, whom I assume followed this up with a demand that those kids get off his lawn.

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OPSEC

That is one of those military acronyms which everyone who has ever been in the military for longer than oh, I don’t know a couple of years? A single hitch in one of the armed services? Whatever; what it means in plain English is “operations security” and what that entails in the larger sense drilled in by basic training, refresher training, briefings, a constant dribble of AFRTS spots cautioning the same in 30 second bites, and occasionally by the direct intervention of a supervisor administering a stern reminder is that you keep your mouth shut about stuff and treat classified material with every care. Even stuff that seems minor, inconsequential, trivial, and is not in point of fact, actually classified. Because a whole lot of little pieces put together by an expert analyst could reveal a pretty big picture; a big and possibly life-threatening picture to someone, or hundreds, even thousands of someones.

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The Paving on the Road to Hell

That paving was laid down in California over the last few weeks; first by attendees at a Donald Trump rally in San Jose being harassed and physically attacked after the rally by protestors and this with the apparent acquiescence (or possibly the tacit encouragement) of the San Jose Police Department, and then again in Sacramento a week ago, when a protest organized on the grounds of the California State Capitol in Sacramento by a group calling themselves the  Traditionalist Worker Party  variously described as white supremacists or neo-Nazis was attacked by a group proudly identifying themselves as anti-fascist. As was reported in the Los Angeles Times, when last Sunday’s rally began, “Waiting for them were counter-protesters, including members of the anti-fascist organization Antifa Sacramento, which had promoted a “Shut Down Nazi Rally” event on its website…”

The Traditionalist Worker Party members, whatever their merits or lack thereof, had a permit for a demonstration, and in the larger understanding of things, a perfect right to make fools of themselves in public, just as it was found in 1978 that a neo-Nazi organization had the perfect right to march through Skokie, Illinois. No less a luminary than the ACLU defended that as a matter of free speech and the exercise thereof. Personally, I find it ironic that the so-called anti-fascists are acting more like actual, historic fascists than those they loudly accuse of being fascists.

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A Diversion: From Luna City 3.0

(Yes, the two Chronicles of Luna City are selling very well, and my daughter and I have generated sufficient plot for the next volume – Luna City 3.0. For your delectation and amusement, below the fold is some cheery and diverting humor, set in a little South Texas Town which could, if you bent down and looked at it sideways, bear a slight resemblance to Cecily, Alaska, or Lake Woebegon, Minnesota…)

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