Personal Narrative

A Skin Suit, Demanding Respect

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You know, the most disgusting aspect of the most recent Trump hit is the fact that it appeared to have been engineered by the management and apparently the current ownership of the Atlantic. This whole skeevy story was rather obviously intended to be the October Surprise, something like the 60 Minutes-Rathergate-Bush/ANG story, calculated to catastrophically hit in time for Election Day 2004. Frankly, I never cared much for CBS 60 Minutes, after a certain point in my development as an adult with a passing interest in public matters. It was all a rather contrived and scripted business, all carefully edited in the furtherance of the “gotcha” narrative o’ the moment. After Rathergate and the faked ANG memo, though, one did rather wonder exactly how many other previous 60 Minutes exposés had been based on fraudulent and/or sketchy documents, which no outside CBS ever got a chance to examine with a gimlet eye.

But the degradation of the Atlantic from a once-respected venerable literary and cultural publication with 160+ years of solid worth … into a purveyor of partisan sleaze is something that hits me rather personally. It demonstrates Iowahawk’s oft-quoted tweet about identifying a notable and influential institution, slaughtering it … and then wearing the pelt as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

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When The Bough Breaks

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I have so far in life been sufficiently fortunate never to have been caught in a full-frontal weeks-long, totally-life-destroying national disaster. But I have been on the fringes of several brief national disasters; the earthquake that hit Sylmar in 1971, a massive typhoon that hit Northern Japan in the late 1970s, a horrendous rainfall in late 1998 which put a lot of South Texas floating down various rivers and creeks, another rainstorm a few years ago which flooded out the small Hill Country town of Wimberly, and an early spring snowstorm which dumped almost a foot of snow on South Texas, snow which stubbornly remained for most of a week, featuring freezing temperatures which knocked out both power and water in much of metro and suburban San Antonio. My parents’ retirement home in Northern San Diego County was destroyed in a massive wildfire in 2003. I also was on-line and paying attention to disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, to the fires that destroyed Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii …

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The Most Wrecked House on the Market

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So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is a painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.

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Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat

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Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”

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Visible Signs

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My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.

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