Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Random Jottings From A Bemused Writer

     Bemused. Yes, that’s it exactly. Puzzled. Mystified. Confounded, even. “Over what?” I hear you cry. Simply this: Given all the arrant nonsense that’s making the news lately, why haven’t we heard about millions of Americans being injured or killed by uncontrollable laughter?

     It’s a cover-up, I tell you. It must be!


     It’s a home truth that “the tail goes with the dog:” i.e., you must expect your actions to have their foreseeable consequences. Moreover, you must be willing to take responsibility for those consequences, at least if you’re a functioning adult allowed to leave the house without a minder.

     Yet it seems that there are categories of persons who were never taught that:

     Poor, poor Kathy Griffin. She’s currently performing in Austria, but complains that she doesn’t have any work when she gets back to the US of A. Not. One. Gig.

     She also takes a page from the Hillary Clinton playbook, which means she blames everyone else but herself. Moreover, she claims that “this wall of crap has never fallen on any woman in the history of America the way it has fallen on me.”

     You’ve got to wonder about Griffin’s sanity. She could have asked Lindsay Lohan what to expect from the course she chose. She set out, deliberately and with malice aforethought, to offend over 60 million people: we who voted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Her own actions made her radioactive. Inasmuch as her career was television-based, and sponsors regard alienating half of their potential audience as poor marketing, what on Earth did she expect? A crown of laurels?

     I never thought much of her act, and as a sports-DVDs-and-video-games type I wouldn’t have been part of her audience anyway. Still, her plaint made me wonder whether there’s a degree of public exposure that rots the brain of the under-prepared.

     It’s good for a laugh, anyway.


     Writer Danielle Bova reminds us of something she wrote a year ago:

     It has been 3 weeks since America elected the next President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and we are still in the throes of the biggest, loudest, hysterical temper tantrum in recent memory.

     Yes, Hillary voters, I’m talking about you.

     There has not been such a show of immaturity in at least 60 years, if not longer. I know this because my mother told me. She’s 81, and said flat out that she remembers nothing that compares to the Left’s rage at the fact that their candidate didn’t win in all the years she’s been voting.

     (Except, perhaps, when Al Gore decided he had won in 2000, and subjected the country to the spectacle of hanging chads, lawsuits, and a Supreme Court decision that ruled that he could not continue trying to find enough Florida votes to declare himself the winner.)

     *Disclaimer* – To those Hillary voters who have done what normal people do when their candidate loses, (having some time of anger, and speaking about your disappointment, and then watching the new PEOTUS and commenting on his performance): This post is not directed at you.

     This is directed at Far Left Democrats, Media, and their sycophants & twitter trolls who have decided to overthrow the fair election of Donald Trump, and/or, those who insist on nasty tactics of passive-aggressive “statements” that are really ploys to humiliate Trump & his VP in public.

     Please read it to the end; it’s a useful memory refresher.

     Yes, it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? But don’t imagine that the Left’s temper tantrum will come to an end at any moment short of Election Day 2020. Americans are enjoying themselves under the Trump Administration...and if there’s anything leftists hate with a red passion, it’s the thought of Americans pleased with life and looking forward to the coming day.

     Grievance is the pulsing heart of Leftist politics. Remember Bill Moyers’s famous statement: “The worst thing you can do to the liberals is take away their grievances.” If there’s no one they can point to while claiming that “This injustice is YOUR FAULT, America,” they can’t make a case for intruding upon our remaining freedom and expanding the State!

     Their tears do taste delicious, though, don't they?


     The tide of sexual harassment and abuse claimants is swelling toward a flood. It’s not limited to plainly assaultive behavior, either. It seems there’s no one in public life, be it politics, journalism, entertainment, or what have you, who hasn’t made an under-considered remark or gesture at some time in the past. Careers are being ended left and right. A lot of money has changed hands over such allegations, too.

     Whereupon it falls to your Curmudgeon to provide a perspective restorative.

     A great many of the claims are situated, temporally, in the Seventies and early Eighties. If there was ever a time or place more sexualized than America in those years, I have yet to learn of it. Those were the bathhouse years, for Pete’s sake! They were the hookup years, when one-night stands were au courant and waking up next to a stranger wasn’t considered all that newsworthy.

     In other words, the norms of that period were far from what they are today, in our era of AIDS, chlamydia, palimony, and lawsuits over hoary old idioms and facial expressions.

     Raising a row over behavior forty years past is a bit like an ex post facto law. Maybe we didn’t have our heads on straight back then. Or maybe we don’t have them on straight today; it doesn’t really matter. The norms were different. Creating a foofaurauw today over behavior and speech that was acceptable back then is inherently illegitimate. But this will probably fall upon deaf ears, given the glee in many partisans’ faces over the opportunity to damage important figures on the other side.

     I fully expect that the above will displease some people. I can’t be bothered to care. They can shove it up their asses with the rest of their shit.


     Yesterday began the big Innocents giveaway. And boy oh boy, have I given away a lot of copies of Innocents! (1790 copies as of this writing.) For those who have partaken of my beneficence, I have a handful of requests:

  1. If you enjoy the story, please review it at Amazon.
  2. If you really enjoy the story, why not purchase one or two of my other books? They’re not that expensive.
  3. If you really, really enjoy the story, consider telling other people you know. Word-of-mouth is the best advertising an indie writer can have.

     Thank you. And now, it’s back to my previously scheduled programming.

1 comment:

Amy Bowersox said...

No, you're quite right, Fran. And consider also that the same people that are insisting people be judged for their actions in the Seventies and Eighties by the standards of 2017 are the people that refuse to judge, say, the atrocious treatment of women under Islam by the standards of the civilized world.

So standards are permitted to differ if it's part of the "diverse" cultures we're supposed to celebrate, but our own standards are fixed and must never be looked at in the light of earlier attitudes. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.