Month: June 2020

Summer Reveries

evenabrokenclock102 Comments

Summer flowers

It is good to know in the midst of all of the concurrent crises we face, that nature  proceeds at its own pace unconcerned with all of the worries humanity has. Thus we return to summer in West Virginia, where the biggest issue is whether the cowbird will be successful in laying an egg in the wren’s nest up in one of our flower baskets.

We are loving it out in our outdoor living room, where we enjoy our coffee and newspaper in the mornings, and use its space for our afternoon cocktail. In between we can read or just watch  nature as it visits our porch. The finch feeder is in use most of the daylight hours, with the purple finches unafraid to visit while we sit there, though the gold finches are shy and only visit when we are not present. We were treated to seeing a hummingbird chase a finch away one day, though what the finch did to draw this attention is unknown. This year we are not seeing any non-conforming finches, where a brood is raised that includes a foreign egg from a cowbird. Last year we saw a young bird that was unable to use the finch feeder, though it tried valiantly. Instead, it chirped and waited for its father to deliver a seed directly to it, since it could not reach into the feeder with its own beak.

A wren built a nest in one of our hanging flower baskets. You can see it dart in and out, and it often scolds us, especially when we are at the table with our coffee. That puts us directly next to the nest, and that is obviously too close for the bird’s comfort. But it is the cowbird couple that is the most interesting. Last week I saw the couple, with the male perched a few feet away while the female scoped out the nest. At that time there were obviously no eggs there, and they flew away. But just yesterday I saw the female eyeing the nest again, and this time the wren flew directly at the cowbird, chasing it away. It remains to be seen if the battle will have future acts.

The fallout from the finch feeder keeps other birds busy who do not have the physique to feed directly from the feeder. Often we can hear the whooshing of the morning dove wings as they fly away after having poked through the rubble looking for intact seeds. And chipmunks cross our porch regularly, stopping sometime to search for seeds, while other times stopping under the hummingbird feeder and lapping up the spilled sugar water. Then they hustle off to whatever their business is.

This year I’ve seen not only the neon blue skinks skitter across the porch, but another color of skink. They are fast and you have to really be watchful in order to see them. So far they are the only reptiles we’ve shared our space with.

The flicker loves the hummingbird feeder. It will hang off of the feeder, and you can see it drinking as it brings the liquid into its beak and works it down its throat. The hummingbirds know that they cannot force the flicker away (too big), so an uneasy detente exists where the hummer will visit the side of the feeder opposite the flicker. It is amazing how much entertainment you can get out of a half-cup of sugar dissolved in water. We have seen at least one hummer battle, but know that more are to come as the alpha male perches on the wires leading to the house, keeping watch and driving away any other hummers who dare to intrude on its designated home turf.

2018 flicker

Several years ago we had to take down the hemlock tree that graced our front lawn due to storm damage. We replaced it with ornamental trees that won’t grow as tall so as to threaten the wires. The ornamental cherry directly in front of our porch is growing daily, as you can see the new leaves stretching higher each time you look at it. It may never give us shade, but that doesn’t matter to the birds who use any location as a handy perch.

We have apple trees which have very seldom given us apples. Not because the apples weren’t produced, but because the squirrels get to them first. But until this year, they’ve always left the crab apples alone. The tartness of them must be a turn off even to voracious squirrels. This year, though, the squirrels are taking the crab apples right off of the trees and eating them.

Squirrel

It is good to take the time to really see the world around us. If nothing else, this time of physical isolation and separation from the rest of humanity, has intensified the desire for watching the world of nature. It is good to realize that the life outside does not care about human pandemics, or divisive politics, or any of the other matters that occupy the airwaves. Just hearing the sounds of birds, and the chirring of the crickets helps to put things into perspective.

Snowflakes Are Dancing (As They Melt)

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snowflake

Pity the poor snowflakes. Those who cannot adjust to the changes in society. They are the ones  who so often decry those on the left who make the argument that a society cannot survive while a substantial portion of the population still suffers from inequality. In many ways, that is what we have seen with the ascendance of the Republicans this past decade. They do not accept that we live in a fundamentally different society than the one they so fondly remember. The one they remember that never really existed at all. Instead, like the view perpetuated by popular cultural phenomena of “Gone With The Wind”, which wistfully viewed plantation culture as the epitome of white culture, they remember only the image they were fed. That is one reason why “To Kill A Mockingbird” was so devilishly subversive. It showed the mirror side to the part of the population that believed in white supremacy, by depicting the reality of life for so many who lived by the rules imposed upon them, but still got caught up in the scapegoating that white privilege allowed.

The poor snowflakes are melting down. Of course, they are unable to understand subtlety. Defunding the police becomes synonymous with anarchy and riots, since clearly it implies a binary choice. You either have order imposed at the end of a gun (or a knee), or you have chaos and anarchy, brought to you by a phantom called Antifa. Nowhere is there room in the discussion to bring up the uncomfortable fact that through the decades since we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, we shifted more and more of the responsibilities for them onto the police force. By allowing the mentally ill more freedom by removing them from institutions, it brought their issues into conflict with the larger population of the nation, and when calls for assistance came, only the police were in a position to respond. Unfortunately, too often they respond with lethal force, since that is the main tool they come equipped with. Since we as a society have not funded alternatives to institutions, street confrontations and growth in homeless populations keep the snowflakes demanding a police solution to these problems.

The Republican snowflakes are melting into a pool of stagnant water. They no longer have the ability to defend their leader when he makes yet another asinine claim (this time it was that the 75-year old Buffalo man was an Antifa plant). Instead, they march right on by the press who tries to get them to respond to this outrageous claim. The press keeps waiting for reasonableness to creep back into the Republican party. They don’t realize that the only reasonable Republicans are the ones who have left the party (because the party left them). Subjugation of the party to the service and worship of one thin-skinned man has caused them to abandon their principles. They don’t want small, fiscally-conservative government. Instead, they want to fund ongoing degradation of civil liberties by unleashing the military directly on those who exercise their first amendment rights. They want tax reduction above all else. They want those who are unqualified and on the extreme fringe of legal thought to be awarded lifetime positions in the court systems, in order to perpetuate their short term hold on this nation.

For this is the thing that causes the full-scale melting of the snowflakes. They can see the sea changes coming to this society. We have indeed moved past the homogenous sea of whiteness that they long to bring back. Unfortunately, those who held power in this nation have never willingly yielded any of the power to those of “lesser” characteristics. No, you had to impose the force of law in order to keep blacks enslaved. You had to push out the native inhabitants into plots of poorer lands in order to facilitate the confiscation of the lands by the favored classes. You had to restrict the immigration of Orientals since their alien culture would never be accepted by the real patriots. Even after multiple generations in this country, you had to exclude Japanese ancestry from the larger culture in WWII since allegiances could be faked, and you couldn’t take the risk from the other.

Now that demographics are changing, and changing fast, the desperate scrabble for power is being exposed daily. The snowflakes tried to redistribute votes in a favorable way through gerrymandering, and that proved very successful in many states. The snowflakes were successful in judicially enfeebling the voting rights act, which led states to reduce polling stations in demographically challenging locations. After all, if you can make it into an all-day ordeal in order to exercise your rights by ballot, you will discourage many from even trying to exercise the franchise. That will allow you to hang on for yet another election cycle, and right now that appears to be the limit of the strategic vision of the snowflakes. They only want to keep the warmth of civic life from melting them completely, causing them to be lost in the entropy of society.

Successfully Jumping Sharks

evenabrokenclock104 Comments

Trump's world

The words of Charles Mckay from 1841 ring as true today as they did then:  “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” Thus it has been with the slow recovery from the election of 2016, where the electorate went just enough insane to select the disruptor in chief, thinking that their choice would at the very most, place a thumb in the eye of the establishment. Little did they know that their choice was in fact an existential one.

Finally, though, the event we were waiting for happened last week. The President jumped the shark! By staging that photo op event of holding a generic Bible in front of an Episcopal Church, then inviting his enablers to stand beside him to join in this glorious display, this reality star performed his sit-com equivalent of Fonzie jumping the shark on water skis. Perhaps this is the only image this ratings-obsessed creation can understand. His act has gone stale, and the blatant hypocrisy involved in using mounted police to purge demonstrators from Lafayette Park while simultaneously declaring himself to be the ally of peaceful protestors everywhere, served as the last straw for many of his former allies. Add to this the story of his call to governors where he called for the domination of the streets and threatening to send the nations active military to any location that failed to maintain “LAW AND ORDER”, the mask came off and his true nature became apparent to all.

Thus it was that during the week we were shown one after another of the military men who had graced both this and former administrations, moved to denounce the anti-constitutional nature of the current occupant of the mansion on Black Lives Matter Plaza. Next will come the tell-all to be released by the owner of the walrus mustache. Expect others who have taken part in this immoral and chaotic administration to slowly dribble their truths out into the media maelstrom over the summer and into the fall, until only those who still believe in the racism and evil that Trump personifies stick with him into the election.

Of course, we will have the benefit of seeing Darwinian evolution in actual practice, as the mass gatherings of Trump supporters will soon be back in vogue. When you are washed in the blood of the Donald, you need fear no virus. None would dare harm any of his followers. Or so he would have you believe. After all, the entire virus was nothing but a nothing burger. Don’t believe what you see on the TV. They only work to deceive you by directing attention away from the glorious economic recovery happening day by day. So when the smattering of contact tracers go back, they will find mass spreading events that coincide with Trump’s rallies. That’s a prediction for the future.

The events of the past few months have defied belief. This is how you know that time travel back to the past does not exist. If it did exist, someone would have come back at the start of the year and warned us of what we were to face. I don’t remember anyone that called for a pandemic plague, an economic catastrophe, and a racial explosion reminiscent of the late ’60’s. Maybe I just wasn’t listening hard enough to hear the rumblings beneath the surface of the serene waters of the DC swamp.