The Beauty Salon’s foreign correspondent in DeeCee has reported sitings of Stephen Miller in fancy-pants restaurants, clouding the atmosphere with the odor of smoldering morals.

We were wondering why the creep was hanging around DeeCee other than scaring the beejesus out of little girls, reporters, and zombies.

Well, come to find out —

Cue the tiny violins. It appears Stephen Miller, noted white nationalist and architect of Trump’s child-separation policy, hasn’t been able to unload his luxury condo at CityCenterDC.

He’s asking a million two for it. It’s been on the market twice and not even a nibble.

My favorite line from the story is this one. When explaining why it hasn’t sold when the market is hot …

But we’d wager the high-profile seller (who once claimed a DC bartender followed him into the street and flipped him the double birds, prompting Miller to throw away $80 worth of sushi) isn’t exactly reeling in local interest.

He and his bride have moved to Arlington.

 

We here in Fort Bend County elected the sheriff to go to congress, making our newest congressvarmint a dumb guy but this time it’s a dumb guy with a gun.

Troy Nehls, with his mail order degree from the prestigious Liberty University of fallen Jerry Falwell fame, is a Trump Republican. Yes ma’am, he does have some goofy looking hair and he’s so short that you can see his feet on his driver’s license photo.

Well, you send a dumb guy to DeeCee and he generally doesn’t stand out much.  But, this guy has distinguished himself as “not a mathematician” and “poorly defined ethical limits.”

He hasn’t been there long enough to hatch an egg but he’s already in trouble with the FEC.  Among his reporting problems.

Illegal and excessive contributions and failure to report major contributions

Embezzlement of campaign funds

Inability to do arithmetic

Inability to read previous report

Failure to report conduit contributions correctly

Okay, so that’s a pretty long list.

Here’s the person suspected of embezzlement or at best he ‘accidentally’ used campaign funds for personal expenses.

 

There is no Daniel living at that address but seriously, how drunk do you have to be to make illegal charges on the campaign account of a guy who’s sheriff?  I’m saying so drunk that you have to hold onto the grass to keep from falling.

It’s hard to get away from grief. I’ve seen and heard it everywhere. I am involved in a makeshift Zoom support group that covers topics on mental health. Our next assigned topic is grief. Then, I read John Pavlovitz’s last piece on grief and of course you get inundated every day with others’ grief on social media. It’s not a bad thing necessarily. People feel better when they share. It just forces us to deal with our own stuff. I think what hits me more than anything is the grief over what has happened to us as a country. If one were to define grief, they would define it as something we’ve lost. Most of the time that is a person in our life. It is a family member, a friend, or someone we work with. A lot of the time it is death, but it could simply be the end of a relationship.

We grieve other things as well. We grieve the end of a chapter of our lives. That could be childhood in general. It could be the end of a career or a particular job. It could be watching the end of a particular stage in our children’s lives. With loss comes change and change can be a scary thing. Sometimes it is for the better, but it often brings unique challenges we might not be prepared to face.

Today, I find myself grieving the loss of a nation. No, the United States hasn’t gone anywhere technically. Yet, many have called it the greatest country in the world. No, I’m not going to launch into a “we used to be the greatest country in the world” tirade like on HBO. After all, what we rank in math, science, literacy, or anything else has little to do with why we were the greatest country in the world.

We were the greatest country because we had some of the greatest problems in the world. We had the greatest problems and we were always willing to tackle them. Sometimes we won and sometimes we lost, but we never backed down from a fight. Moreover, we usually found the better angels of our nature. Goodness knows it was never easy, but we found it within ourselves to fight.

Whether it was the battle over all types of equality, suffrage, or simply getting a handle on our own limitations and prejudices we managed to overcome for the most part. Unlike most wars, these battles are never over and the job is never complete. Yet, some people want to declare victory and move on.

We used to be the greatest country in the world. We aren’t the greatest country anymore. We aren’t because we are no longer willing to even try to tackle the problems before us. It isn’t even so much whether we solve those problems necessarily. We aren’t even willing to try. We deny they exist. Out of sight and out of mind.

Grief is a deeply personal thing. When one grieves a loss that is not tangible it becomes especially difficult. Do we hang on with quiet desperation? Do we find ourselves living in the past and reminiscing on better times? In the case of grieving the loss of a nation we can choose to bail or we can refuse to admit defeat. We can shout from the rooftops that the job is not yet done. We can vote out those that refuse to even address the real problems we have. That will be my choice. The rest is up to you.

We are still under a warning that if we’re not sweating, they’re gonna come and take our air conditioning.  It was 97 degrees at my house today.

My uncle wanted my help. See, this particular uncle is the only other progressive in our family. Most of my other family are conservatives. Mind you, they aren’t bad people. They work hard and generally don’t wish any ill will on anyone. Yet, they are the type of people that peddle this kind of stuff. I absolutely detest labels, but for our purposes here we will call this woman “School Board Karen“. He wanted me to respond to his friends.

For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, this is one of many men and women that go to school board meetings and rant about critical race theory or some other such nonsense that is supposedly being taught to our kids. See, his friends were cheering this woman on.

He wanted me to respond. I could have picked over a dozen videos, but I think this is the one he sent me. I honestly couldn’t know for sure. I call it nonsense not because critical race theory is nonsense, but because this woman exists in a bizarro world that I don’t know. I’ve only done this for 24 years and the first half in a history classroom. I really don’t know what she’s talking about.

I never taught critical race theory or white supremacist theory or anything that could be labeled Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Aryan brotherhood or any such nonsense. I taught history. In most years I taught World History, but I dabbed my toe in U.S. History once or twice. We did our best to teach the curriculum in front of us and augment it with other authentic history that the textbook skipped over.

I’ve taught in five different school districts and a private school. So, some might be tempted to say that maybe she is describing something that happens in schools you’ve never taught in. Sure. I guess anything is possible. After all, this is happening in another state. Yet, we have to ask ourselves what is more likely. Is it more likely that some rogue teacher or school somewhere is indoctrinating children with crap or is it more likely that Karen needs to take her meds?

I’ll have to admit that my response to the email was short and terse. I honestly don’t have much of a response to what this woman is saying. It’s just so ludicrous that you almost don’t want to interrupt her. You quietly make a distress call to the local mental hospital and wait for her to run out of gas. The problem isn’t this woman. The problem is that many feel the need to respond to it with anything other than laughter or scorn.

Somewhere along the way we have lost sight of something. Just because a number of people believe something, that doesn’t make it true. Not every opinion has value just because a certain number of people have it. Yet, people like our governor respond to it. They respond by creating a patriotic curriculum that does exactly what this woman is suggesting. Except, it does it to reinforce this woman’s point of view.

‘Murica is the greatest country there ever was and the greatest country there ever will be. Racism and bigotry only exist in the mind of the liberal. Events like the civil war weren’t about slavery and events like the Tulsa massacre didn’t happen. Lynching and riots weren’t about racism or even if they were, racism is long gone now.

That’s what they want us to teach. This is all in the guise of teaching students the “real” history about America. So, they want to guard against stuff we don’t teach by teaching stuff that didn’t happen. My wife is fond of saying that science doesn’t care about your feelings. Neither does history. I have no doubt there are rogue history teachers out there that try to indoctrinate their students with a political ideology. I’ve never met one and I’ve worked with a lot of them. I certainly don’t think there are enough to make a huge stink about a non-existent socialist plot to indoctrinate our children. God forbid we take the mic away from Karen, it’s ‘Murica after all.

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”–Yoda

Quoting fiction and popular fiction at that is not necessarily the most high brow way to diagnose a problem, but occasionally it fits. I have been interested in the concept of issue framing ever since I read a book by Thom Hartmann called Cracking the Code. Admittedly, his book didn’t address this absolutely on the nose, but he danced around it plenty.

Parental politics is simply the name I’ve given it, but the concept is clearly not mine and unlike certain ex presidents, I refuse to take credit for things that came decades before me. Parental politics refers to which stereotypical parent dominates our political point of view. Daddies tend to worry about certain issues and mommies tend to worry about certain issues. If you can cause people to worry about the daddy issues you get them to vote conservative. If you can get them to worry more about the mommy issues then they tend to vote more liberal.

Obviously, this assumes certain gender roles and it assumes personality archetypes that are likely outdated. Of course, that by itself is a hot button issue. So, I will simply highlight the subtle difference between the word fear and the word worry. They sound the same, but they are just different enough to make all the difference.

I worry about having a roof over my head. I worry about whether I can feed my family. I worry about what might happen if I lose my job or suddenly get sick again. If I don’t worry about those things then I worry about those around me. What happens to people that don’t have a warm bed at night or a hot meal at the end of the day. Worrying and being afraid can sound similar, but they aren’t the same.

People who fear, fear the other. They fear black people coming into their neighborhood and ruining their way of life. They fear people south of the border from coming up and stealing their job. They fear those same people bringing drugs that will enslave their children. They fear terrorists that don’t look like them bombing their kids schools, a shopping mall, or some other public building.

They fear transgender kids coming into their bathroom or putting on a dress and joining their daughter’s basketball team. They fear teachers indoctrinating their children with silly notions about racism or inclusion. They may even fear that all of this will spread to their children and they may be turned gay. As Yoda said, fear leads to hate. Everyone worries. It’s what makes us human. Some of us hate and that is much worse.

Daddy is the protector. At least that’s the moving stereotype. He protects us from intruders. He protects us from those that would do us harm. He protects us from those we would hate. So, if you can get people to fear and you can get them to hate then you can get them to vote conservative. So, the active game for conservatives is two-fold. First, you convince people that there is something to fear. Then, you convince them that you alone can protect them from it.

That’s why we promise to build walls. That’s why we promise to protect our children from predators in the bathroom. That’s why we blow up the issue of human trafficking. That’s why we demagogue immigrants, people of color, and members of the LGTBQ+ community. If there were nothing to fear then there would be nothing to hate. If there was nothing to fear or hate then we wouldn’t need excessive protection.

Moms care. Obviously not all moms care, but if we are to giving into stereotypes then they do. Moms worry. Moms nurture us. Moms take care of us. So, therefore moms care about the government programs that do those things. They care about how we do in school. They care about our health. They care that we are eating right and taking good care of ourselves. If we give into the stereotypes than they also care more about the people around us. They realize that we are only as good and as safe as the people around us allow us to be.

If the whole idea of the moms and dads doesn’t make sense to you then simply think of the difference between worrying and being fearful. What are we worried about? What are we afraid of? If we focus on our worries we tend to be more progressive. If we focus on what we are afraid of we tend to be more conservative. Remember, fear leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Yoda taught us that one.