It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

Worse Than Crooks

     Lying and cheating is kind of expected of politicians -- but they're not supposed to embezzle millions; they're supposed to keep their lies small and personal, and stop at merely shading the truth about big things.  They're supposed to have some respect for the government of which they are a part, or at least to fake it in a convincing manner.

     The Trump administration's egregious nonsense about voting, and especially voting by mail, is far outside even these lax norms.  Their proposed "fix" for the non-existent problem appears to be designed to create chaos and disenfranchise the greatest number of legitimate mail-in voters.  It imposes a "zero error" requirement on outgoing ballots, in which a single mistake on one envelope would result in the rejection of an entire batch of thousands of them.  At least 24 states have pushed back, including some controlled by Republicans -- and even though pending court cases only blocked mandatory compliance with the proposed USPS mail voting requirements, not a single state has chosen to voluntarily comply and many report that they simply cannot.  Nevertheless, the administration has gone to the U. S. Supreme Court to ask for a ruling that will allow the scheme to proceed, even as the first states prepare to send out ballots within days.

     It's a huge, dirty Federal thumb on the scales of a balance the individual states are supposed to be looking after -- and they have done so from the first days of our republic.  No entity has ever produced evidence of statistically significant vote-by-mail fraud, despite a great deal of very diligent searching for it.  At this point, even a nursing-home worker helping the frailest of the people in their care fill out ballots must surely be aware that the slightest fudging will come under the microscope.

     Stealing from campaign funds for nice dinners and limo service, sending Federal business to your son-in-law's uncle's firm, ignoring constituent complaints while swapping votes with colleagues -- sure, we voters don't like it, but it's not unexpected.  Election interference largely aimed at the most helpless or isolated voters is far worse than ordinary crookedness.  It's a slow-motion, low-key coup attempt, an autogolpe under the thinnest veneer of pretended concern.

     You can help stop 'em.  No, I doubt the Supremes listen to anything but the ringing in their own ears these days, and the only thing the Trump administration listens to are its own worst members and the whims of the man at the top, but you can get out there and vote in November, in person if possible, and vote hard against the undermining of American democracy.  You might end up with a few farther-out Democrats than you'd prefer, but the Dems have demonstrated a willingness to accept being voted out, and voters can always remove the most egregious in the next cycle.  Mr. Trump's Republicans, especially the man himself, have repeatedly refused to accept defeat in fair and honest elections: vote 'em in one time too many and you may be stuck forever.  Consider the stakes.  It's not a safe gamble.

The B*stard Theory

     Still waiting on more examples, but so far, my theory about what it takes to run a successful human spaceflight program is holding water.

     Of course, it takes talented engineers, and plenty of them; of course it takes access to resources -- money will do, but money and actual materiel is even better.  And it takes a decent manufacturing base.  Countries with those things, and a will to send stuff into space, can and do run space programs: Japan, the European Union, India.

     To successfully send humans into space, and bring most of them back, you need one more thing: an utter bastard at the top.  Three of the four entities that have done so demonstrate this: The Soviet Union, the United States, and SpaceX.  Two of the principals were trained engineers, though the details of their spacecraft were designed by others; the third is a coder (or was; it takes about fifteen minutes away from that work to get out of date, and he's been a business promoter for decades now).  All three were or are relentless promoters.  All three accommodated the political environments in which they operated, without regard to moral hazard.  And all three were or are pretty much bastards.  They're not the precise same kinds of bastards: raw and relentless, charming and driven, or weird and unflagging, but they're all relatively amoral.  They all chugged on through anything that got between them and their goal.  And though they all got people into space, none of them quite got to where they wanted to be.

     I'm waiting on another example.  Obscurity still conceals China's guy(s); India's manned space program is supposedly still on track, but they're quiet about it.  But there's almost certainly some kind of bastard behind the scenes, driving the detail people, navigating bureaucracy, moving with little regard to the feelings and careers of others.

     I'm deeply skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history.  Getting human spaceflight programs up and running may be an exception. 

Star City

     I finished the first season of Apple TV's Star City a few weeks ago.  It's the Russian-side companion to their alternate history series For All Mankind, in which the Soviet Union barely beats the U.S. to the Moon and the Space Race never stops.

     The latter series shows events from the U.S. side, and the hardware is mostly familiar to anyone who grew up with NASA-inspired articles in the Sunday supplement and national magazines.  It provides about as much view into details of the USSR's space program as we ever got in real life: clunky, overbuilt equipment and cosmonauts who got the job done through grit and fatalistic determination -- or died trying.  Where America succeeded or failed in plain sight, the Russians announced results after the fact, or swept them under the rug when things went wrong.

      And that's what Star City is about: exploring space under paranoid totalitarianism and sometimes despite it, using improvised hardware, taking chances the West never would.  The hardware is...well, it's very Russian.

     Watching the series, I thought the clunkiness and improvisation was a little overplayed.  Surely the real-life Russians had better stuff, despite the awful politics?  Tamara's been reading The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, by John Strausbaugh.  He certainly looks to have done his homework, and the real Soviet space program was, if anything, even iffier than the TV series makes it out to be.  Oh, the Russians had (and still have) plenty of fine engineers, and Sergei Korolev was (and needed to be) even more determined an organizer, manager and overall rocket designer than Werner von Braun.  But circumstances far outside his control resulted in an effort that had to brute-force everything and accept huge risks.  One reason the R-7 launch system, direct ancestor to today's Soyuz, has been able to become ever more capable though incremental improvement is that it was a crude (but workable) mechanism to begin with; better alloys, better machining, better construction techniques and better electronics have kept it usable, and increased the payload carried on the large amounts of thrust originally needed just to get the stack of stages off the ground and headed for space.

     The Wrong Stuff makes an excellent companion volume to Star City, for all that it slightly undermines the big "what if..." of the series: what if Russia got there first?  But the real "what if..." is a different question: what if Korolev had not been so terribly abused under Stalin's purges that his time in the gulags left him physically damaged and headed for an early death?  If anyone could have led the way to getting the N-1 launcher working and pulled off a Moon landing with Russia's equipment, he would have been the guy; but as things went, he was gone long before the deadline.

     In For All Mankind's timeline, the USSR is still together by the early 2010s -- but it's not quite the same place it was, having loosened up just a little under the pressure to compete (and sometimes cooperate), largely peacefully, in space and at home.  But after one season of Star City, it's clear that even making that small amount of progress will be a long, hard road.

"Primary Results Muddled"

     That's the occasional headline: "Unclear Primary Results For Dems" is the most common version, but in fact, the Republicans are inconsistent, too -- sometimes Trump-endorsed candidates win, sometimes more old-school GOP politicians who are at some distance from Trumpism.

     And, oh gosh, it's true.  In some counties, cities or districts, DSA-affiliated or adjacent hopefuls are doing well; other places, it's your aunt's Democrat, with pictures of FDR, LBJ and Joe Biden on the mantle.  There are locales where the Christian Nationalist Republicans come out on top in primaries, and others where, well, Mike Lindell is firmly convinced some kind of skullduggerous Deep State made him lose by over 11 percent.*

     If you think of primary voters as some solid block of Party identity across the country, from sea to shining sea, majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain (or is that floodwaters?) included, it does look pretty muddled.

     But it isn't.  Two big-tent parties dominate American politics and, under various names and historical shadings, they always have.  You might not like sharing your particular tent with the more wild-eyed candidates and their voters, yet there they are and there are some places where they do well, especially in primaries.  Rural Americans like hardcore conservatives, and a lot of 'em aren't any too sure about foreign people with foreign accents and foreign religions.  The details have varied over the years, but that stereotype exists for a reason.  Likewise, people crammed into big cities or enmeshed in a daily struggle against harsh climates often value highly organized cooperation, and see government as a natural way to create it.  You're going to get Lefty, socialist-leaning All-Cops-Are-Bastards candidates in giant metroplexes and parts of the Upper Midwest; you're going to get various kinds of Right-wing, xenophobic Christian Nationalist candidates in the vast swath of agricultural and ranch lands where the towns are small and widely spaced.  And you're going to get more "purple," center-leaning candidates in the industrialized places that draw population from these extremes.

     People, even people that look pretty loony to you or me or that dude over there and hold some far-out views, deserve a fair chance to select representatives, mayors, governors and so on that reflect their community.  I don't very much like Indiana's current Lieutenant Governor, a religious nutjob who thinks the Earth (and the Universe) is a little over six thousand years old (and that's one of his less objectionable notions), but his party put him on the Republican ballot for a reason, and I hope the Governor, state legislature and courts can keep a lid on the crazy little guy.

     While the Unitary Executive excesses of the Trump administration are not, in my opinion, at all normal or proper, running and sometimes electing a very mixed bag of elected officials is normal, and if you want to keep them within more reasonable limits, that power is in your hands: go vote in primary elections!  You can count on the extremists showing up; they've got an axe to grind and the ballot box is their whetstone.  You can make it more of a grindstone, and help hold the noses of our politicians to it, simply by showing up and making an informed choice.
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*  It did, in fact, not.  This would not be the first time Mr. Lindell has been plagued by imaginary spiders or the like, and in my opinion, it will not be the last.

What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

Don't Know Much About History?

     Have I got a guy for you!  A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry will take you on deep dives into history with a genuine scholar, footnotes and all, often answering those questions that gnaw at perceptive students getting a view-from-orbit look at history.

     Wear comfy shoes and pack a lunch.  You're going to be awhile.

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
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* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

Flashback To 2017

     Nine years ago, a series of tweets (and they were still tweets then) that did nothing but quote the Declaration of Independence got angry, defensive responses from supporters of the then (and now) President.

     At the time, it seemed like silly overreaction.  Ah, memories!  Good times.

The Orginal Fireworks

     I haven't felt much like celebrating this Independence Day; it seems to me that our Republic is on the ropes, and the next three or four years will restore it or break it.  I'll be on tenterhooks until the trend is clear.

     But I certainly don't begrudge anyone's celebration of this historic day.  John Adams was right: "It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

     Our neighborhood, like many cities and towns in the U.S., sounds like some kind of a battlefield tonight; man-made shooting stars light up the sky, and a series of short, soaking rains in late afternoon should mitigate many of the usual hazards.  I grilled hamburgers for dinner, and cleaning up, I noticed an unusually large number of lightning bugs, fireflies, flashing their own beacons as they hover above the back yard.  It's as if, seeing the lights in the sky, they are determined not to be left out.

     Field Notes, purveyors of fine pocket notebooks and related items, is giving away a pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution all day today, with any purchase; or you can buy one for $4.95.  It's good reading.  It's essential reading, and on this day of all days, they're worth looking over.

Reality

     I found the article, but I didn't bookmark it: it would appear that the state DSA in New York is somewhat at odds with the wider Democratic Socialists of America. (Found it.)

     The reasons why are a microcosm of how political parties work, especially when they are forced to be "big tents," despite the DSA not being a freestanding party.  The tl;dr is that in New York, and NYC especially, the DSA's got a pretty good chance of influencing the Democratic platform and of affiliated politicians winning office, so they're focused on pragmatic goals with some chance of achievement -- it is a city that had a radio station (WEVD) named after Eugene V. Debs for three-quarters of a century, after all.  The dog occasionally catches the car it chases and New York's DSA has learned what to do about it.

     Elsewhere, DSA-linked candidates stand less of a chance; their local Democrat organization is less likely to listen and as a result, True Believers outnumber pragmatists within most of those DSA groups.  Politics is run by Those Who Show Up; ask me, ask Robert Heinlein, ask any of your local Party organizations and you'll get the same answer.  And True Believers are often very good at showing up.

     So outside of NYC, you're much more likely to find the kind of wild-eyed DSA candidates that rate scare headlines and flaming-letter quotes -- in broad outline, the kind of fringe stuff that all fringe parties and movements generate.  Antisemitism's always popular on the horseshoe ends and in various nooks and crannies of U. S. politics, just as it is in Europe, along with broadsides about bosses and cheaters.  But don't read too much into it; in the wider major-party organization, there are a lot more plain old Democrats showing up in the hinterlands.  I stand by my previous post: the function this sort of outside-insider activism serves is to shake up the big parties when they get too comfortable running things, and I'm never especially sorry to see 'em get a good shaking.

     This is very nearly orthogonal to "leader principle" effects, which can take over a party, at least for a time, and sometimes bend it (see Jackson, Andrew).  I don't like it when any individual politician starts being touted as the Great Hope, especially when they buy into it themselves, and it doesn't matter which party.  The U. S. has a pretty good history of reminding such leaders that they are no more than mortal men, but we've often taken our own sweet time at it and the present run is longer and messier than any.  (FDR got longer at it, but he also got a lot more criticism and outright correction.)  If a sprinkling of DSA-connected Dems will help level the scales, I'm all for 'em -- especially in the U. S. House of Representatives, the (supposedly) fastest-moving and (on paper) highest-turnover collection of elected Federal officeholders we've got.  Reflecting the will of the people, shaking things up, trying even crazy stuff is their job; it's how the Federal government was built from the very start.

Father's Day

     If you've got one, I hope you made contact.  Yeah, yeah, someone's going to tell me about an awful, awful father, and I'll ask 'em, "Worse than Saturn?" but most fathers do their best, or however close to it they can manage.  One day a year to recognize it isn't too much to ask, and who knows?  You might even end up as friends.

     In the end, my father was my friend, same as in the beginning and a lot of times in between, and I still miss him.

That Was...

     Monday wasn't fun.  Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back.  I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers.  I did not see this coming.

     I mean, it could be worse.  I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.

     Oh, wait.

     The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me!  I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down.  They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.

     The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not.  I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.

Clever Cicero, Time Traveler?

      The Roman lawyer, writer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is greatly admired for his command of language.  Like Shakespeare centuries later, he introduced new words and conventions of form that persisted ever afterward.

     And like the Bard, he was fond of wordplay -- but how could he possibly have invented a riddle that works the same in English as it does in Latin?  Sheer luck, of course, the same chance that preserved his words and Shakespeare's.

     A greeting:
     "Mitto tibi 'navem' prora puppique carentum."*

     In English:
     "I send you a 'ship' lacking stern and bow."

     Something of an "Aenigma a patre," I suppose.
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* I have here taken the cheapest/easiest transcription of written Latin.  For Romans vowel "u" and the consonant "v" were distinguished only by context, as readily as we skip through the myriad inconsistencies of English orthography.  While contemporary fancy inscriptions and (probably) professional scrolls would have written MITTO TIBI NAVEM PROPRA PVPPIQVE CARENTVM at best and probably abbreviated many of the words in standardized ways, Cicero himself probably jotted it down in a chicken-scratch cursive not too unlike a modern doctor's handwriting, with a character like a cross between a "v" and "u" and what looks to our eyes like a ruthless disregard for getting the letters on the same line; Romans didn't see 'em the same way we are taught. 

Happy Birthday, I'm Old

     Oh, I'm not as old as old, but I'm really quite an age, and I had thought I would be spending more time at my own keyboard and less time punching someone else's clock by now.

     That's not how it has worked out.  Bad knees and bad luck have me hanging on, looking at Wall Street and Washington, wondering when the bubble will pop.  (Probably first in my knees, though it feels more like rust and grit.)

     Having grown up in an unacknowledged but overwhelmingly real tradition in which birthdays were far more for painful reappraisal and remorse than celebration, I have to wonder if I missed my stop.  Most of my friends at work already stepped off, and the four techs who remain, we're all bouncing around like peas in a bucket and are about as effective.  But here I am, no matter where I go.

     I'd like to thank everyone who has shared birthday wishes, especially my friend from the 8th call district who sent a card!  They really are nice to receive.

     Be well, all of you.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

Memorial Day

     It's Memorial Day -- and like pretty much every Memorial Day of my entire life, U. S. troops are in danger.  Soldiers and sailors, Marines, aircrew and Guardians.  Fifteen serving military personnel have been killed in the last few months in our ongoing conflict with Iran: undeclared wars are no less deadly than declared ones, and it doesn't matter to the dead or their survivors if it was a war of choice or an unavoidable clash.

     They served and died.  Remember them, not as faceless statistics but as individuals no different from you, your family and your friends.  It's all you can do.  It's little enough to ask.

Television Of Interest

     Tamara and I recently watched the entire run of the CBS-carried show Person of Interest, finishing last night.  Despite ending nearly a decade ago, the show is surprisingly current, addressing the rise of "machine intelligence," pervasive surveillance, government (and government contractor) corruption and the morality of power.

     Heavy stuff -- but carried along with no small amount of action and adventure, by a group of competent characters who will beat you at chess or in hand-to-hand combat.  The series begins as one more entry in the "mysterious strangers help good people and stymie evil" genre, along the general lines of, say, The Pretender, Mission: Impossible, Quantum Leap, Have Gun Will Travel, Danger Man, The Avengers and so on: drama in the Gothic mode, with a clear conflict between good and evil, in which good triumphs just in time for the credits to roll, usually by the skin of its teeth.

     That would have been more than enough to carry a TV series, but Person of Interest didn't stop there.  A smart underlying concept and strong characters pushed it more and more along science-fictional lines, in a near-future, near-cyperpunk world of corrupt cops, honest cops, warring criminal gangs, computer geniuses, super-spy/assassins -- and a number of surprisingly human touches, throughlines of love and loss.  From season to season, the story deepens, the bad guys get bigger and badder, and our small band of heroes rise to the occasion or die trying.  There are Classical mappings to most good drama, and if you ever wondered what might happen if clever, lame Hephaestus; bold, handsome Apollo; wise, cryptic Pallas Athena; implacable Nemesis; Artemis the huntress; the Delphic Oracle and a gritty NYC police detective* faced off against Hera, Zeus and Hermes (with a small army of giants and Titans on their side, all answering to Colossus the Forbin Project), this is an answer, with enough side characters and conflicts left over to fill out any collection of ancient gods or a modern rogues' gallery. 

     This is a series well worth watching while it is still fiction.  Don't wait too long.
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* Even I can only strain a metaphor so far, though impulsive Ares is a not-unreasonable analog for Detective Lionel Fusco.  But I will still argue that most ensemble-cast dramas (and not a few comedies) can be mapped onto the various pantheons of the past, for a very simple reason: our stories still deal in archetypes and in human emotion writ large.  Good casting helps; the actors in Person of Interest were as varied as their characters, people of divergent inclinations and career paths who all brought something of themselves to their roles.