Light at the end of the tunnel?

Sure, everything’s bad. Republicans fractured, caving in as we knew they would, pundits still grousing about the Ted Cruz quasi-filibuster.

But here’s the deal. Ted Cruz stood up against ObamaCare. That’s going to matter next year. Because ObamaCare is an utter, horrific disaster. It’s going to hurt almost everyone, in their pocketbooks and in their access to healthcare.

The failed website is actually a distraction from what will be painfully clear in another six months. The premiums will be higher, somewhere between 50 percent and 90 percent higher, and the deductibles will be approximately 400 percent higher.

This kind of cost increase is going to kill people. It’s not a political advantage for Republicans. It’s a rolling, escalating cataclysm. But it’s also a wake-up call for the American people.

There’s at least a chance they will notice that they can’t feed their families, that mom died because she couldn’t find a doctor, that their lives are worse and more filled with fear. Fear of a government that doesn’t care about anything but controlling them.

Toot toot, the whistle bloweth. The government train is coming down the tracks. At you.

If they notice they’re worse off, that’s a glimmer. But noticing isn’t something our people have been very good at lately.

What could be more important?

Almost all the nations of the world are broke and trading each others’ debt like stock. The Middle East is plunging into a new dark age fueled by religious hatred of everyone who achieved something like civilization. One or two of them are determined to build nuclear weapons to annihilate the infidels while the rest fiddle and turn away.

The United States, whose self imposed responsibility it was, for over a century, to keep this stinky stew of a world from boiling over is now being led (there’s a word) by a cartoon character as pompously boastful and brave as Daffy Duck, who hates absolutely everyone but uniformed dictators and Muslims.

Most recently, this whole nation is subsiding into penury and oppression, as Daffy’s malignant will to power steadily converts government services into tools of intimidation and tyranny.

Simultaneously, this same great nation is saddled with a generation of youth who can’t find their own country on a map and can’t be induced to pay attention to anything but exhortations to promiscuous sex, vampires, and zombies. Not a coincidence.

At the exact present moment, the federal government hasn’t had a budget in five years and is about to have its credit card declined at Sears, while millions of people are being compelled to sign over the responsibility for their healthcare to a government system that doesn’t even exist. This is called a glitch. A glitch.

But we’re asked to believe that a major issue of the day commanding our immediate attention is the 80 year old name of a professional sports team.

Really? Really? Really?

Even Ed Morrissey at the conservative Hotair website seems to think there’s something to think about here.

Thanks to a long and wonderful day with my granddaughters, I didn’t get a chance to watch the RedskinsBarrycaders-Cowboys game until well after halftime, and it turned out to be much as I predicted (which is rare enough this season, I grant you). I didn’t get to see the Steelers win their first game over the Jets, either. All of that was balanced by not having to sit through this rehash of a lecture from Bob Costas, who took two and a half minutes of halftime to tell the NBC audience absolutely nothing it already hadn’t heard repeatedly in the naming controversy in Washington…

Frankly, I don’t have an opinion on this topic, except to say that the opposing arguments have clearly been delineated, and have been for years. I am not a Native American, and don’t particularly feel the need to take offense on their part; I figure that Native Americans can express themselves perfectly well on that issue themselves, if they do take offense. I’m also not a Washington Redskins Barrycaders fan. Not only did Costas not say anything new, he didn’t even have the nerve to actually take a stand. He just meanders around for two and half minutes like a tourist through a debate museum, and then finishes by saying in essence, “Hey, maybe they had a point!”

Ed’s an ass. Of course Costas was taking a stand, and of course Ed’s a Native American. Indians, or Native Americans as Indians insist on hyperbolizing their identities (Canadians are more correct in referring to their ‘aboriginal peoples’), are already lavishly over-admired in our culture, endowed by an incessant PR effort with a wisdom and entitlement they’ve done no more than any illiterate neolithic tribe to earn. Spectacular success for a people whose principal contribution to our shared legacy is the scalping of defeated enemies. But since they mostly died toothless before the age of 30, we should probably make allowances. Would that the savages who inhabit the corridors of power in Washington shared the same fate.

Still. I was amazed to learn that not only the terms Redskins (self-named as I understand), Indians and Chiefs are considered a slur by Bob Costas and company but also ‘warriors.’

Really?

Where I beg to differ. If some damn tribe of redskin injuns had run into my tribal ancestors in the highlands of Scotland, they’d have learned what warriors really are. The Romans built a wall across all of England to keep Scottish warriors out. Injuns. We’d have butchered them. They’d be carrying their sorry asses back to South Dakota with both hands. If you know what I’m saying.

I’m guessing the Zulu, the Mongols, and the Vikings would have similar thoughts.

If you know what I’m saying.

How stupid do we have to be to get lulled into idiot non-controversies like this?

No. Don’t answer. Your explanation would be too depressing to read.

Deerhounds live for maybe eight years. I’ve lived maybe seven times that. Care to tell me what I don’t know?

Yeah. I know. You’re sick of everything. Withdrawing. I feel the same way. The mass media are all liars and shills. The new media are almost as bad, their message being, “The mass media are all liars and shills, which we’ll inform you about with passionate conviction while we continue to build our own careers and incomes.” Which would ring truer if they could write well, or even grammatically. Or with words correctly spelled.

Which leaves you where I am. Talking to myself. What do I talk to myself about? Everything.

I talk to myself about the nation. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it would be proof against a temporary setback like we experienced in 2001. It isn’t. I thought we would always remember who we were, how we were founded, and where we might go. I was wrong.

I talk to myself about people. I had always believed that people were more good than bad. I don’t believe that anymore. Give them an excuse to give up and they will. Give them a title on the door and they will shove others into the dirt. Give them a cause and they will destroy everyone and everything in their path. Including themselves and everything they come from.

I talk to myself about right and wrong. Which can only be discerned by relying on the wisdom of history and the illuminated minds of our past, who have consistently humbled themselves before God. But in an age of no education, there is no history, which makes it possible for there to be no God, just one book or one band or one icon we’re willing to trade our own consciousness for.

I talk to myself about myself. I tell myself I should be nicer, but I can’t be. I tell myself I should be more accommodating, forgiving, tolerant, civil. But I can’t be. When almost everyone you know is steaming full speed ahead over a cliff — with a momentum that will probably take you with them — what are you supposed to do?

I talk to myself. Sometimes out loud. Everything I’ve ever believed in is still true, but it’s being poisoned by morons I actually went to school with. There’s almost no one left who can appreciate the monumental irony of how much good has been recast as evil, how much evil has been recast as progressive correctness.

Am I obsolete? Am I the guy the smart ones are waiting for to die? Yes. I’m obsolete because the terms in which I view things are no longer comprehensible to the illiterate poseurs who now control the public discussion. And, yes, they are waiting for me and my kind to die. Because we are an embarrassment. We know more, have always known more, and aren’t fooled by their platitudes.

But… But… But… I’m not done yet. They’ll have to come and kill me. With what I understand about ObamaCare and the NSA, the IRS, and the DOJ generally, they may. It won’t be because I stop fighting, though. I’m the old thing that doesn’t fade away. Is something that leaps at your throat obsolete? Uh, no. It’s a clear and present danger.

Just talking to myself.

So. However much you withdraw, I’ll still be here, equally withdrawn perhaps but spitting nails. Whether you show up or not. There’s always a new warrior willing to pick up the weapon you dropped in flight.

Fulcrum of life.

Yeah, the pic is a bit blurry at this size, but so is the boy. Let me explain.

I’ve had easily a dozen dogs in my life, many of them brilliant beyond the pronouncements of animal behaviorists. All of the brilliant ones showed a marked capacity for understanding and adapting to the family, with some determined exceptions regarding their own desires. An Irish setter who could ferry a pack of cigarettes to my dad in the bathtub. A fox terrier who — told to exterminate a troublesome mouse in the morning — presented the corpse of said mouse on the threshold of the bedroom doorway when the masters returned from work. A German Shepherd whose devotion first to me and then my dad made me regard her as a Catholic saint. A greyhound who feared men but immediately regarded me as a protector and never changed his mind, even when I participated in his euthanasia. A Scottish Deerhound who was loath to show his emotions but trusted me to the end.

Raebert is unlike any of them. He’s the whole span of dogdom. He’s the smartest and the dumbest, the best and the worst, the most dependent and independent, all at the same time. He’s like a visitation, an occupying force. Almost a lesson.

I’ve written and deleted a bunch of words about how different he is. They all boil down to this. He thinks he can make everything better, no matter what we think. At night he gets itchy. When my wife and I are on the couch, he mills, he roams, he poses, he demands (our) food and attention. What he really wants is to get on the couch with us. He wants to blanket us with his gigantic body, as if he could protect us from the fears and worries he detects in us, and he just knows that he can hold time hostage while he goes massively to sleep with his head on my lap and his invulnerable rear end on my wife’s lap.

That’s the only time I could ever call his sleep blissful. He goes out completely, limp and at peace. But he’s just so so heavy that you have to wake him up and push him off.

He’s not trying to adapt to us. He’s trying to adapt us to his mission, which is… What?

I’m the one prone to flights of fancy. My wife isn’t. She’s flummoxed. Early on, she thought it was a domination game. But now that he buries his head so submissively and constantly in her lap, she knows that’s not it. What she says is unnerving. “They’re the hardest, most demanding dog you can have, and I can’t imagine ever not having one again.”

Me? I keep thinking of my email user name “SigmaZrn.” It’s short for Sigma Zerone. Sigma being the mathematical symbol for summation. Zerone being a mathematical term I invented in my punk writer days, as the universe of possibility and meaning between zero and one, which is infinity, totality. Everything that happens occurs in the space between zero and one. Raebert is the living embodiment of Sigma Zerone.

This is not an abstraction. He needs to be near me. All the time. He is life itself. When I lose heart, I can put my hand on his impossibly huge chest, feel that great heart beating, and forget that there’s any time but time now.

What’s it like? It’s like having a unicorn curled up beside you. Unreal but miraculously hyper-real. He’s there but maybe he really isn’t. Nothing like this could be true, could it?

Why he looks so different in his pictures. Some days he’s this. Other days he’s that. He’s not always the same color. He’s as childish as they come. Then he’s a wise Scottish lord from aeons past. As I said, blurry.

He’s a gift from God. And being the ungrateful jerk I am, I keep thinking the gift can be withdrawn at any time. Maybe he’ll be taken away as abruptly as Psmith was. But to quell that pointless fear, all I have to do is reach over and stroke his shoulder. He’s right beside me, you see. As he will always be, one way or another.

Photography credit: My Wife.

When you forget who you are, go back to the land you come from. Not the nation or its institutions but the land itself.

My wife goes to work from here and up the Turnpike every day at dawn. Most people have their coffee and the radio and cruise control. The tunnel vision of the constant commuter, the road a ribbon to ride to the office. But not her.

Lately, she’s been pulling over en route to take pictures with her cellphone. Because she finds the land at dawn inspiring.

She’s sent me multiple photos, beautiful photos. This is the one I can’t get out of my head. Initially, I thought the telephone pole at left was a fault. It isn’t. Bent and ugly in the foreground, it’s the crap we have to look past in order to see what’s still vital and lovely.

Beyond the horizon, through that pink mist, lies the majestic Delaware River. The eye that took the picture knows that and could see it. This is no wasteland. It’s just part of the wave of life, which isn’t always battering but salving and life giving. Mist is water is life. And light is light.

I find it inspiring. I find my wife inspiring.

However dark it gets, I have this. And you have this. If you want it and can see it.

Darkness in Detroit.

Sometimes a movie doesn’t have to be great. It just has to have a timely context. This one dates to 2010. It’s a modest sci fi movie with a good cast and a better than average script. Not MUCH better than average, but better than Stephen King or Rod Serling could do. Not the TMI dialogue of King or the TMI messaging of Serling. Result? A movie length Twilight Zone episode without the precious sermonizing at the end. Like the Japanese do so much better than we do. (Oh wait. They already made this movie too. And it was haunting.)

Okay. This one isn’t haunting. It’s suddenly “Mystery Science Theater 3000” starring Hayden Christiansen, John Leguizamo, and Thandie Newton.

A palpable predatory darkness suddenly attacks the City of Detroit. People disappear, leaving only their clothes behind. The few survivors are those who were holding or wearing lights at the time. (Smokers who were lighting up got spared; amazing that NPR liked the film.)

You’re thinking, “Is this another episode of the dreary Left Behind franchise?” But NO, it isn’t. Or NPR wouldn’t have liked it, right?

Sunrise gets later, sunset gets earlier. Our focus is reduced to a bar bearing the lights “Sonny’s Happy Hour.” Cool.

When the inner jeering starts. What’s the darkness that’s stalking the survivors? It’s fucking Detroit. Maybe umpty generations of liberal tax and spend liberal politics that sucked the life out of everything. Or maybe it’s the Tea Party attacking the rights of the welfare state. Or is it even worse than that? One after another dies proclaiming the words “I exist,” which suggests that maybe we don’t, that there’s a new statist sense in which we don’t actually exist anymore. Even that our only freedom lies in surrender to the annihilating darkness.

It all works pretty damn good for the Detroit of 2013, don’t it? What I mean by context.

Watch this movie and there will be times you’ll be sure you can see the Obama administration flowing down the street.

Of course, the bottom line is the old reliable leftist truism of unforgivable sin. The only ones permitted to survive are children. The rest of us must die. Even the cars of Detroit have to die. The kids will have to escape on a horse fed by organic apples. How cool is that?

Who knows more about light than children who don’t know anything?

The term ‘Golden Girl’ is overused. This is the usage that’s literally true. Her coat looks like gold.

She’s also the one who can keep Raebert off the couch. When she’s on mommy’s lap he’s jealous but has nothing really to say. He weighs 110 lbs, she weighs 7 lbs.

The Exotic Donut.

They like each other. Funny. The most utter opposites you could possibly imagine. But he knows that her couch time is not his. And he never steps on her.

As I said, funny.

One thing that’s my fault. The pictures above make her look too big. She’s not big.

But big enough.

Another Fox Thing. Have to say, I’m unmoved.

Hot? I’m not buying it. Go-for-the-jugular lawyers are never really hot. Fox has lots of blondes I prefer. Heather Knauert is nicely pneumatic. Ainsley Earhardt is sweet and reliably bakes cookies for everyone. Dana Perino is a relentlessly polite dunce who should learn how to bake cookies. Gretchen Carlson is dumb as a rock but still has great cheekbones on top of her childbearing hips. Elizabeth Hasselbeck is a semi-celebrity with the IQ and pluck of a reality show contestant. Alisyn Camerota is hopeless in every respect but at least she’s honest about what a high maintenance spouse she is. Martha McCallum, on the other hand, is first rate in every respect but, uh, ten years older than Megyn Kelly.

Starting to catch the drift here? Megyn Kelly is… desirous of being a star. She learned tactlessness and nonlistening skills from Bill O’Reilly, filibustering from Sean Hannity, transparent unctuousness from Greta van Susteren, and being full of herself for no particular reason from Shepard Smith. What a doll.

Importantly, she’s up against MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and CNN’s Piers Morgan in the nine o’clock hour. Hard edged as she is, she’s no lesbian but the mother of three children. Touchdown! And she’s also not a halfwit Brit pantywaist. Touchdown! Not a Rhodes scholar either, but who cares? Pretty good chance Bill O’Reilly’s connections can get her into Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government so she can start claiming, as Marist grad O’Reilly always does, that (s)he’s a Harvard man, er, Harvard working mom. See?

I’m sure she’s smart and capable enough to have a run in prime time. What I wonder is whether there’s really anything exceptional about her. She’s sitting in a hammock between O’Reilly and Hannity, who are both exceptional. O’Reilly has charisma, a gravitas that oddly transcends his intellect. Hannity has a sunny, perseverant nature that enables him to work and dig and keep at it like some kind of conservative bulldozer, no matter how grim or tiresome things get, as well as be emcee of every kind of forum; he’s the perfect game show host of political punditry. Greta, who’s now — let’s face it — been bumped to below prime time, is only twice as smart and accomplished as Megyn, but I’ve never seen her legs and don’t want to.

Does this make Megyn Kelly a smart move for Fox News? Maybe. Does it make her a good move? Not necessarily. Being combative is not the same thing as being insightful. Being pretty is not the same thing as being attractive over the long term. If she gains fifty pounds will we still want to watch her interrogating fat congressmen with toupees?

If they wanted a blonde in the nine o’clock hour, it should have been Martha McCallum. Why? Because I’d still watch her clever eyes and careful questions even if she did get fat. Think about it.

In preparation, Martha McCallum posed for this as her ultimate glamor shot.

Oddly, no teddy.

Don’t get me wrong. I wish Megyn Kelly well. I’m just not sure she’s up to it. Part of why I continue to harbor strong doubts about the soundness of the Fox News Channel. The other part being their continuing, baffling, total inability to spell anything more ambitious than “cat” in their onscreen graphics. Maybe Lincon can forgive them, or Coolige, but not me. I’m a hard ass.

Oh. Kimberley Guilfoyle is okay. Her implants aren’t as ridiculous as Andrea Tantaros’s. But they’re brunettes and therefore irrelevant. The Hispanic chick — uh, Julia Banderas — is okay too, smart, aggressive, and sexy, even when she’s pregnant. But irrelevant. Just like Harris Faulkner and Lauren Green — because, you know. Are we clear here?

Actually, why are blondes better than brunettes in any objective sense? I’m thinking I might rather have dinner in the Rainbow Room with Harris, Lauren, and Nicole Petallides than with any of those blondes up top. And Julia Banderas if she’s through being pregnant for the moment. Kimberley Guilfoyle not so much. She can stay home with Andrea, lying to their friends about how much they adore Bob Beckel.

Don’t get excited. I’m not trying to start anything lurid. Blondes yell about what people are wearing. Brunettes yell about what people are doing. More interesting. Redheads watch who people are being. I’d have one of those by my side for protection. She’d make sure I wasn’t being bad, I suppose. More vitally, she’d back up my excuse for leaving when all the yelling gets too loud.

It always does. Are boobs actually advanced bio-tech, treble loudspeakers?

Forget I asked that.

Never mind.

I teased with this post. My better half captured the Raebert en route upstairs tonight. He usually does it faster (i.e., like a total maniac), but this time she was standing in his way with the camera. He’s also gentler with her. As he should be. But maybe you can get a sense of it. Maybe the most film can give you of real life.

(If you go to full screen video, you can repeat at will. I know it’s quick.)

Just keeping my promise. We all have demons. Mine at least loves me. And his mommy. They have a diploma together.

He was the smartest one in the class. But he was just showing off. Teaching us he understood it all.

P.S. A reminder for Ron, in case he thought there was some trickery involved.

I’m thinking all the time…