“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.” From Ohio, written by Neil Young.
The New York Times, which nearly half the American electorate conflates with Pravda, said yesterday “Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But an 1807 law, the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban for situations in which the president decides that ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States,’ make it ‘impracticable’ to enforce federal law.”
Over the next month or so, it is likely you will be inundated with two words: “Superman,” and “Insurrection.” We all know the former is a big-ass movie about a boy and his dog, but what is an insurrection?
In 2006, George W. Bush considered intervening in the state of Louisiana’s response to Hurricane Katrina back in 2006 — you may remember the photo op of Bush impotently performing a flyover in Air Force One. Louisiana’s governor refused. In 2020, Donald Trump said he would invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the protests following the murder by police of George Floyd. Trump told “every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers to re-establish civil law and order until the violence has been quelled.” Like the governor of Louisiana thirteen years earlier, the sundry state officials in question did not cave in to Trump’s demand. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: You Say You Want An Insurrection”
It’s not Trump. History tells us most dictators and despots are deposed after a while, one way or another. Mental and emotional basket cases in major positions of power such as our president have been a dime a dozen. Unfortunately, they’re like Kleenex. Pull one out, the next one pops up immediately.
I used to think humans were basically good. Sure, we’ve all got our foibles, and there are a small handful of true deviants out there that require observation, but overall I’ve been pro-humanity. I stuck to this for two-thirds of a century. Silly me. I have been the great native naïvitist.
The fact is, Donald J. Trump could be shot dead at high noon on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue (instead of the other way around, which, you will recall, Trump said he could do without suffering any consequence) and we would still be left with those 63,000,000 paranoid goose-stepping hating cowards marching around this nation supporting the murder of Black people by police, the religious totalitarians who believe their so-called values and only their so-called values are kosher, the environment is doing swell, the Covid virus is a Democratic Party hoax, the liberals are going to confiscate your guns, and the people who think everybody on welfare are thieves and people not wealthy enough to afford health care deserve to die.
The America we were taught to love and respect in school and in our houses of worship and on television barely existed on its best day. That’s what an experiment in progress is all about. It’s time to put the lie to that one. We’ve had our moments, but today America exists only as a fool’s paradise.
I am about to propose a hypothetical. If you are the least bit uncertain about the definition of that word, or you are associated with the Department of Homeland Security or any official law enforcement agency, or if you are a knee-jerk right-winger who believes in magical thinking and that “Black Lives Matter” means you are in greater danger now than you were before police were called out for their unchallenged murder of Black people, please use 
Let’s say a lone gunperson assassinates this president. Shoots him dead. I mean, red blood gushing from orange skin with a chunk of dyed-blonde hair flying into Mike Pence’s lap dead. Hypothetical, remember? The gunperson is arrested and stands trial for first-degree murder, as well as whatever other charges that give Attorney General Barr an erection.
Here’s a sequence of letters I never thought would flow from my fingertips: I miss the Republican Party.
Of course, there is something worse than a two-party system. When one of those parties is nothing to write home about and the other one is brain dead (a popular term this week), and the two parties we’re stuck with rigged the system so that there can not be any more parties, what we are left with is America 2019.
Why are we doing this? Well, I believe there is one very good reason.
At first, I thought it was just another sign of senility. You gotta expect that, I guess. Then, I thought I was having one of those LSD flashbacks I was promised a half-century ago. I briefly considered the possibility I slipped through a hole in the time-space continuum, but, damn, no such luck. I had to face the truth.
Donald J. Trump broke time. 
