(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
The contagion is deep in the people now, reaching everywhere, twisting reality into burlesques of itself, betraying the senses and establishing its own natural laws that we follow almost without knowing we’re doing so. And the pandemic is pretty bad, too. From the Peninsula Daily News:
The family — a husband and wife, their 16-year-old daughter and the husband’s mother — were driving a full-size school bus and had prepared to camp off a logging road spur on the A Road about 5 miles east of U.S. Highway 101, Anderson said. The family had shopped for camping supplies at Forks Outfitters and were confronted “by seven or eight carloads of people in the grocery store parking lot,” Anderson said they reported to deputies. “The people in the parking lot repeatedly asked them if they were Antifa protesters. The family told the people they weren’t associated with any such group and were just camping,” the press release said.
“The family had to drive their bus around vehicles in the parking lot in order to get back onto Highway 101.” The family told deputies that at least four vehicles followed them as they drove northbound out of Forks. They said that two of the vehicles had people in them carrying what appeared to be semi-automatic rifles.They drove their bus up the A Road and onto a logging spur road, where they pitched a tent to camp for the night, they told deputies, but then heard gunshots in the distance and power saws down the road from where they were camping. They packed their camp to leave. They found that someone had cut down trees across the spur road. They were trapped.
In a very Pacific Northwest manner, these unfortunate people were saved by four high-school students with power saws, who dismantled the impromptu barricade so that the family could free itself from the Talk Radio Militia. This is the contagion which now has spread to the country’s police forces, and which has its primary vector the Executive Branch of the national government, which is edging toward a substantial body count. Why did these people think the campers were “antifa,” as though there were an actual organization by that name? Because the president* told them so. Because the attorney general told them so. Because various ambitious bobble-throated slapdicks in the Senate told them so. Because their favorite radio and TV savants have told them so.
After all, this was a multi-racial family. Res ipse loquitur.
The contagion is deep in the people now. And it’s spreading. And there is no vaccine, and there is no safe quarantine.
On the electric Twitter machine, T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) has been threading together videos of police officers all over America caught on video beating protestors of all ages, colors, genders, and, as near as anyone can tell, political persuasions. There is now a massive, ongoing public demonstration of the fact that the training of our civilian law enforcement has gone badly wrong, that we have raised up generations of over-armed, over-amped Praetorian goons with no qualms at all about injuring or killing the citizens they are paid to protect. Indeed, they are committing these crimes under color of law, knowing full well that almost everybody in the country can record their crimes on pocket-sized telephones. They know and they simply...don’t...care. This is impunity turned to iron certainty. Layer on top of this the lunatic notion of using the military for civilian law enforcement, and the country becomes utterly unrecognizable.
Journalist Radley Balko has been on this beat for years now. Minority citizens have the right to at least moments of bemusement as they watch the country generally come to realize what they’ve known in their bones at least since the unrest in places like Detroit, Watts, and Newark in the 1960s. The Pentagon runs a program whereby local police departments can obtain surplus weapons of war, further militarizing their function and further militarizing the mentality of their officers. Chicken, meet egg. At this point, what came first hardly matters. There have been fire bells ringing in the night on this issue for decades.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “If The Rabbit Had A Gun” (Memphis Slim): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here’s Children’s Day at Wembley Stadium in London in 1925 because, dammit, we all need some clowns in our lives who actually know they’re clowns and act accordingly. History is so cool.
In my appreciation on Jedi Master trolling, I have to give it up to Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for her work outside the White House on Friday. I mean, the BLACK LIVES MATTER mural on 16th Street was gold, but renaming that stretch of the road "Black Lives Matter Plaza” takes us to a whole ’nother level. She can’t do much about the invasion of her city by anonymous armed stormtroopers, but she’s pretty much doing everything she can to strike at the president*’s tender spots. We can talk about what kind of mayor Bowser is some other time, but she is a first-class prankster, and all the whoopie cushions we can put under the president*’s vast hindquarters, the better.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Daily Express? it’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
The Overoraptor Chimentoi's discovery was first reported by the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in 2013. But researchers led by doctoral student Matias Javier Motta in 2018 have uncovered more parts of the dinosaur's skeleton. The effort has revealed bones from the dinosaur's wings and legs as well as the vertebrae, and parts of the shoulder and pelvic girdles. According to Fernando Novas of the Anatomy Institute of Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Argentine Museum (MACN), the dinosaur is more closely related to birds than any other known species of dino. He said: "When analysing its arms we found avian features related to flight, which was striking since we knew that it was a running species. This leads us to consider that in the phylogenetic tree, the Overoraptor is closer to birds than most of the raptors discovered so far.”
Missing links! They were so big in the sci-fi movies of my youth, and here may be a real one: the link between dinosaurs and the Canada goose you chased off the fairway last year. And then you four-putted, but the goose was a great story in the bar after the round, because even highly evolved modern dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday with more of the view from the blogging aquarium here. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and stay safe from all forms of contagions, mind and body.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
