Okay, ya’ll, this morning I was hunting up a new keyboard cover for my laptop because some of you  guys make me spit coffee on my keyboard.  Mine is getting a little crusty so I figured good ole Amazon would probably bring one to my house.

And here’s what I came upon.

Don’t do this.

Just don’t.

A week or so ago, Donald Trump, Jr. a.k.a Sonny, demanded that the Secret Service leave him the hell alone.  He did not want those busy bodies following him around with their guns and secrets and whatnot.  He wanted some damn privacy, and apparently he was willing to die for it.

So two weeks pass by and nobody sees much of Sonny.  But then …

The President’s son had previously requested his protection be scaled back, seeking more privacy.

By law, as an immediate family member of President Donald Trump, his son is authorized, but not required, to have protection.

It is not clear what prompted the move.

Americans are weird. No, really; Americans are weird. We play the national anthem, wave flags, and parade active duty military and veterans around before major sports events. EVERY major sports event. Even some little league parks play the national anthem before the little tykes run out on the field to play for 30 minutes.  And we love HUGE flags.  Not just any HUGE flag, cover the entire football field HUGE.  In fact, if you don’t get all weepy when you see that HUGE flag, you’re a reprobate and un-American.  It’s like, “BE PATRIOTIC!  IF YOU’RE NOT PATRIOTIC TO OUR SATISFACTION, WE’LL SLAP IT INTO YOU PATRIOTIC!!! DAMMIT!”

This is a strange custom that is unique to the US. No other country does this Kabuki play every time we gather to watch huge guys beat each other to a pulp.  When did it become tradition to play the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events?  Well, according to an article in Time, the first time the tune was played before a baseball game was during the Civil War in 1862 (before it was declared the national anthem), was played again before the opening game of the World Series in 1918 at the end of WWI, but didn’t really get ingrained in sports until after WWII when loudspeakers replaced live bands and they could play the tune any and every goddam where.

Up until 9/11, it was a tradition with really no controversy.  We’d get up, discreetly sip our beer and wait for the song to be over so we could drink more beer.  However, in 2003, when we invaded Iraq for no good reason,  the US government started using the national anthem before nationally televised games as a propaganda opportunity using veterans and active military as props to whip up all those patriot emotions and tears.  In 2009, the NFL started requiring players to be lined up on the field for the anthem.  The government even started paying the NFL for these displays.  In fact, between 2011 and 2014, the Department of Defense paid over $5 million dollars to the NFL for all the pregame red, white, and blue hoopla.

So, all this televised nationalism is really very recent and has been normalized by bribing the NFL and other major leagues to promote it every week.  It’s not surprising then, that when Colin Kaepernick starting sitting out the anthem as a protest against systematic racism in America, that all the jingoists would go nuts.  After being thoroughly hated on, he was then blackballed from the league even though has has one of the best records in the NFL; he also became the new punching bag for Fox Noise. The whole controversy just kind of rocked along until last week when Tweeto Jesus wandered into the mess looking for something to distract from the Mueller investigation.

Hilariously, the Orange One got more than he bargained for.  Suddenly, the Great Divider actually became the Great Uniter, at least this week, by galvanizing the protest movement.  The pressure on NFL owners is so great now that even THEY are taking a knee on the field, if only just before the anthem than during.  The whole thing is pretty entertaining.

But let’s look at the real issue here…There is a lot of hand wringing by my conservative friends on social media fretting over young athletes daring to disrespect the (flag, veterans, active duty, our country, our patriotism… Insert your descriptor here) _______.  The problem, though, is that they are not doing that.  Not at all. They are exercising their right of free speech – to protest what they see as injustice.

Let’s take other examples of protests:  When Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, was she protesting public transportation?  Of course not.  She was protesting institutionalized racism.  The young black men who sat at the Whites Only lunch counter.  Were they protesting lunch counters?  No, they too were protesting institutionalized racism.  There are many examples of civil disobedience for the greater good, and that is exactly what these young athletes are now doing.  They play a prominent role in our modern culture.  They can have an influence on our society, and they, led bravely by Colin Kaepernick over a year ago, are doing just that.  Good on them.

So, for all my conservative buds who are fretting over this whole thing or burning their cheap Made in China replica jerseys in their trashcans in the backyard, maybe they should just think a little bit about this protest.  Even today we live with the scar of the cancer that was slavery.  Even today, over 150 years after it was ended, we still live with the symptoms.  Even today, we still face institutionalized racism on a daily basis.

This is still a free country, and people can express themselves how they please.  That is what’s happening here and the movement has grown with the inadvertent assist from Tweeto Jesus.

We can be thankful for that, even if we are just a little weird.

Haven’t been around as much as I’d like lately, and I apologize.  Family health stuff, much more pressing job, yadda yadda – the exigencies of life.  But what with learning that Puerto Rico is in the midst of an ocean that, apparently, our navy can’t navigate past Gitmo, I reflected on what else is true about Puerto Rico, and came to the realization that everything Trump knows about it, he learned on Broadway in the 50s.  So I’ll just leave the stage version of these lyrics, from West Side Story, right here:

Chita Rivera as Anita (Broadway)She’s STILL hot, BTW

 

ANITA
Puerto Rico . . .
You ugly island . . .
Island of tropic diseases.
Always the hurricanes blowing,
Always the population growing . . .
And the money owing,
And the babies crying,
And the bullets flying.
I like the island Manhattan.
Smoke on your pipe and put that in!

Rita Moreno as Anita (Movie) and lately
Also, still caliente!

ROSALIA
I’ll drive a Buick through San Juan.
ANITA
If there’s a road you can drive on.
ROSALIA
I’ll give my cousins a free ride.
ANITA
How you get all of them inside?

According to the Washington Post, North Korea is reaching out to Republicans for help in understanding Trump.

North Korean government officials have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.

…

“The outreach began before the current eruption of threats between the two leaders but will probably become only more urgent as Trump and Kim have descended into name-calling that, many analysts worry, sharply increases the chances of potentially catastrophic misunderstandings.”

Said one Republican: “Their number one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out.”

So, they are sending The Heritage Foundation’s “expert on North Korea” to help.  Wanna talking about the blind leading the blind? You want a man from a butt crazy organization to explain a butt crazy man to somebody who speaks Korean? Okay, I admit maybe that will work because nothing else has.

The last meeting in Geneva, without anyone “official” from the US there, was interesting.

The North Koreans at the meeting displayed an “encyclopedic” knowledge of Trump’s tweets, to the extent that they were able to quote them back to the Americans present.

Oh goodness, that’s not gonna help diddle squat.  He was erasing tweets about Luther Strange this morning, like he can erase the collective memory of a confused people.

Okay, on our bet about the point spread in Alabama.  Here’s my math.

That means a point spread of 9.2 according to my jeweled solar powered pocket calculator.

We have a winner.

Close but no cigar honors: Marc Davis and Rebecca at 9.3, and John Jasynes at 9.1

But Annabell Lee hit it right on the nose at 9.2

Congratulations Annabell.  Your book will be right on the way as soon as I get your address.

Thank you all for playing and we should do this more often.