So this popped up in yesterday’s news.
Sure, shitbirds like this infest every state in the Union. My Show Me homies don’t have a lock on white supremacy and regressive thinking. But there are Red states and Redder states, and I sometimes hesitate before telling new acquaintances I’m from Missouri. Or that my home town, Cape Girardeau, also gave us the late Rush Limbaugh. When I do share that information with others, I often point out I was only there as an infant, that my military family moved every two to three years, and that of the six states (and one European country) we lived in before I was old enough to drive, Sacramento, California felt most like home. It’s where I spent my teens and came of age. It’s where I went to high school, and later, college. It’s where my wife and I spent our twenties. Sacramento’s home.
On Facebook, reference Missouri’s Klan Kandidate for governor, I joked about filing for a change of birth state. Which is a thing you actually cannot do, unfortunately. Then I realized Facebook profiles include our home town and state, and that one can simply overwrite “Cape Girardeau MO” with “Sacramento CA.” So I did. As silly as it seems, I feel as if I’ve done something that needed doing. I feel … better. Missouri, I renounce thee!
On Wonkette this morning, owner and editor Rebecca Schoenkopf writes:
Israeli tanks are shooting at everyone in Gaza now, firing on thousands and killing more than a hundred people in a crowd waiting for food (and possibly stampeding for it! because they are literally starving!). Regular readers know I’m a “blah blah right to self-defense” and “blah blah oh so a cease fire that only applies to Israel HUH?” person. It’s been months now of absolutely insane attacks on civilians — far beyond anything that could be considered a proportionate response — and this is the day Joe Biden needs to … I have no idea what Joe Biden needs to do, send in tanks to arrest Netanyahu? (It does not sound like Joe Biden is going to send in tanks to arrest Netanyahu. But it is time to figure out something, quick.)
Am I anti-Semitic for thinking Rebecca isn’t? As for Netanyahu, Joe Biden isn’t going to do anything to stop him. I think Biden can. I wish Biden would. But it ain’t gonna happen. Israelis can stop Netanyahu, but will they?
This is worth it. E.B. White, writing in the Notes and Comment section of the July 3, 1943, issue of The New Yorker:
We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
I reset the date on a bunch of wristwatches this morning. While I was at it, I took a photo of my chronographs to share with you. Black & white is fun sometimes. Almost as much fun as renouncing your birth state!
