Flowers Along Jones Street

 Flowers Along Jones Street

David A Fairbanks

Copyright February 2022

1

Coming into the kitchen, full of warm yellow afternoon sun, Deloris DeVille looked about, tasted the scent of yesterday's fried chicken, and imagined Sandy and Tim as small children at the table, fussing and trying to deliver the meanest insult. Their noise makes the window over the sink vibrate. And then at a full-grown college kids’ home for a week, a laptop computer on the table, with wires going to a dot matrix printer on the counter next to a chrome and glass ten speed blender, a gift from Alex's mother on their first wedding anniversary.

Out in the cool dark foyer, Grandmother Ida’s 1940’s Hamilton clock chimed three times, and as usual Yancy meowed and then went back to sleep on her blue pad under the front window. 

A white envelope, with a green logo, from the property management company, lay on the table, where Alex sits. Opened and read several times, each word cutting deep into her heart, mind and soul. Deloris touched the edge of the polished maple table, saw a scratch that she was certain came from a knife decades ago. Was it from an argument, a moment of what? She wasn’t so sure. 

Images came, some of them recognizable, others too fleeting to be certain of. There was Alex, just weeks out of the Marines, drinking beer and chatting with his sister Beverly on the phone in the kitchen the night he and his longtime friend Mark Shelby got on with Brisk Tool and Die, on Dickerson Road, accepting a swing shift for a start. He was certain there’d be a day shift available. Two years later, there was.

How he loved that job, engineering the frame (steel or brass or plastic) for an order, perhaps a revolving lathe cutter or a metal joiner or separator, supervising the warehouse staffers and then having the setters fill the frames, and then the finishers putting the ready product on the cooling racks, and then after a day packing the order and the lifter crew rolling the dollies onto the shipping trucks.

For Alex the satisfaction of a finished product that he could call his own and would be a physical legacy that his children could be proud of.

  She recalled that after four years, Alex was the ‘Running Boss’ earning four hundred and seventy-five dollars a week. The last year before retirement he was earning seven hundred and fifty dollars a week. Her income from Walmart on 7th Street brought home two hundred and eighty dollars a week. They lived a comfortable life, managed to get Sandy through college and helped Tim and his beautiful Jesse get into their house down in Carson City when his Army years ended. 

Deloris recalled grandchildren little Maggie and her brother Steve, making noise not different from the noise of twenty-five years before. She never tired of them, and it was fun to watch them start school just as Tim and Sandy and get through the grades and finally set off for college. Tim and Jesse raised them well. Deloris wanted the grandkids to come for the weekend and bring their sweethearts if possible. She wanted the house to be full of noise and let it rattle the windows, slam the walls and raise the roof.

A text came from Alex, he was at WinCo at Northtown, and had run into Bud Parker, they were going over to Home Depot for a bit, he would be home by five-thirty.

She sent a text reminding him to grab a package of Sharp Cheddar.

2

Outside, on the back walk, Deloris could see the Riverside Towers three blocks away; they were the tallest buildings in the neighborhood. Her mother had joined a dozen others in protesting their height and bulk, to no avail. It was the 1970’s and Reno was growing fast and city fathers wanted to show the world that this was no little mountain town anymore. As it was, they would be the first and last towers, the 1975 recession put a stop to such thinking. 

The grass needed to be cut, she’d get Joe Felton to come over, maybe on Tuesday, that was Alex’s day at the V.A.

By the Japanese hedge, Deloris sat on a steel bench she had bought online five years ago and then spent a full weekend trying to put the thing together. Alex finally stepped up and was done in twenty minutes, being decent and not laughing to her face.

The sky called to her, a blue that went forever, fluffy white clouds floating toward the desert only to fade away before reaching Utah. From early childhood the sky was her secret friend. Here was magic, here was a hiding place for angels, a place where her ancestors watched her. 

In third grade Mrs. Yee, had read a very old story from China about an entire world in the sky. “We live in the visible world, but those who came before us have moved to the invisible world. Children in the sky move the clouds and when family members are fussing the thunder and lightning come.

For Deloris, and after a schoolmate was lost in an auto accident such notions gave her solace and a lifetime chance to simply look up and see the distant past and her eventual future. There were family and friends up there.

Her mother and then her father joined the clouds and then unexpectedly a neighbor who had taught her to knit and to laugh. 

3

A dog barked somewhere, reminding her of Ned, a big black devil that Mrs. Keefer kept in her backyard on a thirty-foot leash. Deloris hated that! A life that was limited to thirty feet. Deloris had confronted Barbara and they went at it a dozen times, and in the end, Ned was liberated, well, in the evenings! She and Alex started taking Ned to Idlewild Park and letting him run along the river, ignoring the leash signs. Ned lasted twelve years, and was never dull, rude or threatening. Barbra Keefer loved him and fed him well, but for her Ned was a toy on her terms. Alex detested such thinking, he’d even offered cash for the dog, no deal. Barbra was alone after Thomas went away; Ned was her burglar alarm.

Jolie Pierce came to mind, the first black to move onto Jones Street. Not yet thirty, a manager at the new Macy’s at Meadowood Mall. Neighbors met, drank coffee and tried to think it through. Thomas Keefer who had not yet left Barbara, that was a decade away, along with Brian O’Malley the Civil Litigations Attorney went and sat with Miss. Pierce at The Gold and Silver Inn and discussed property values and other matters. She was not married but there’d been a man a few years older than her around the property. 

A month later she moved away and tensions at Powning quieted. For a while. Within a few years there were several dozen black, Hispanic and Asian residents. Older folks from the war years or the troubled sixties, finally took leave to posh senior communities up at Spanish Springs or down south at Pleasant Valley. 

Deloris had made a point to keep out of it, her mother dated a black soldier after the Korean War for almost a year, she recalled him as smart, direct and able to get from here to there with little trouble. Reno in the 1950’s was like everywhere else. The blacks did the grunt work and kept to the quarters over by Indian Village.

Deloris remembered a raging debate about a certain private club on 2d Street. There’d been talk about maybe the place would suffer a fire, sending the fairies straight to hell where they belonged. Reno was a family town! Nothing came of it as everyone watched the troubles in New York City and decided that Truckee Meadows did not need that agitation.

What was never talked of but was a concern was known as ‘the California Virus’ A serious and possibly disastrous thing to happen. Real Estate companies from San Francisco or Sacramento buying older houses and demolishing them and building apartment blocks or row houses lined up and full of people from out of state paying top dollar rents. 

Alex’s father had built the house, a midcentury craftsman, for ten thousand dollars. At first to be built on Washington, but that meant traffic at all hours, so he went with a lot on Jones, between a 1920’s guest lodge and a 1950’s apartment building that had six units. The lot was deep but not wide. The house was cut by two feet on all sides, and it fit just fine. The backyard was just right for the kids and the Hicksii hedge was a good break between them and a very big and luxurious Victorian on Riverside.

Paul DeVille had been a soldier in WW2, saw Normandy and later helped put together the Nevada Memorial in Idlewild Park.  Paul led soldiers in a march along 4th Street in 1960, endorsing Jack Kennedy, a risky thing considering area concerns about Massachusetts Liberals and Catholic’s. Alex created a stir when he supported LBJ and not Barry Goldwater, but then he was a kid and what did he know?

Should she call Sandy, maybe Tim? Deloris was not sure. Feeling tired she got up and followed the brick path alongside the house, she recalled Alex and the kids collecting hundreds of bricks from the rubble of a house on Keystone where a shopping center was being built. They loaded the station wagon a dozen times and then what was to be a patio became a back walk and a side wall became a walk to the street.

On the sidewalk she watched as an expensive SUV pulled up at the Mathers house across the street. Russell was gone to glory and Samantha was doing a B&B on the sly. The top front bedrooms were a hundred a night, and never empty. Deloris had considered it; Alex was against strangers in his house. They had rented a room to a U of N Korean biology Student three years ago; he was good and kept the K-Pop to a faint roar with those wireless headphones.  They were going to try another student but had yet to do so.

The purple Astilbes were in bloom and would need a clip, the Big Lilly Tufts were turning blue and they hid the Periwinkles. Deloris leaned over and touched the top of her White Iris; they were holding up in the coming summer heat. Several Hostas were crowding the just bloomed King Edward Yarrows that her sister Clare had planted the first year Clinton was President. 

The flowers were such delights, planted as part of a neighborhood project during the first Gulf War. Dolly Myers had sent letters and many of the ladies gathered for a lunch at the Eldorado Buffet and discussed cost and color. Deloris had considered Mountain Laurel only to be dissuaded by Barbara Keefer that the Nevada sun would cook them, even in the shade.  

Tears came, Deloris closed her eyes, her life was no longer full of energy or adventure. She and Alex had not been to Paris in five years, though they talked of it all the time. The apartment on Rue de Youy was still available for a month in summer, but fourteen hundred Euros was a bit more than their budget, and now, with the letter, she wasn’t so sure what they would do.

On the front porch, Deloris hated herself. They’d sold the house in 2009, after the economy crashed, and Alex was laid off and there was a chance Brisk would move to Mexico. As it was, United Technologies bought the company and kept it right there on Dickerson and Alex returned to work in 2010. But Alex was getting older, and he was going to retire in 2013. Was that a mistake? The house was rented back to them at a very good rate, for a few years. They had considered Paris, a real adventure that would light up their golden years, but what about the kids and their kids? Who did they know in Paris?

4

The kitchen was cool and there was a scent of flowers coming through the open back door. For a moment Deloris watched the floor, remembering that night only a week or so after she and Ales had inherited the house, he had taken her to the floor and made love to her like a teenager, their backs ached for a week. That was forty years ago!

Reno was home, their life, and fulfillment of their dreams. What would Paris give them? Deloris knew the truth, Paris was a promise that gave her and Alex comfort, there’d always be a plan B. 

At the counter she made a whole wheat sandwich, fresh broiled and cut roast beef, along with green pepper, a trace of lettuce and some yellow onion. For a moment she considered mustard and then decided on a touch of mayo.

Sitting at the table, she watched the envelope. They were going to raise the rent by two hundred dollars. A hundred for actual rent, fifty for sewage, twenty for water and thirty for property maintenance which was a joke, having old Eddie come and sweep the sidewalk was a lot of nothing.

Alex could drive to Carson City and meet with an agent; last time wasn’t so good. Two years ago, a big real estate firm out of Walnut Creek, California had bought out the original company 

Friends warned Alex the ‘Virus’ was coming and now it had. 

In 2010 they paid four hundred dollars a month total. By 2015 they were paying seven hundred totals, in 2017 eight hundred and a fee for maintenance was added, and in 2018 a fee for water, and now sewage. Rent would top a thousand dollars this time around and in 2020, they might see twelve hundred a month. When they owned the house, the mortgage was just three-fifty a month. 

The sale had yielded sixty-thousand free and clear. They helped the kids and then a little for the grandkids. Alex had figured that his military pension, their social security and what was left of the 401K and some savings, they’d get by. What they did not expect was Reno becoming California.

5

Alex came from the bathroom, tee shirt and shorts, picked up the letter, Deloris took it away from him, placed it on the counter, “I want you to do something.”

“What is it?”

“Lay down on the floor with me.”

“What? Are you crazy? There’s dirt on that floor!” He noticed her eyes and he felt regret, “Deloris, we’re not kids.

She laid down, adjusting her blouse, watching him, old and gray and when was the last time they did anything.

Fear was in his eyes. He sat, sighed, leaned back, “Jesus, what is this?”  

Deloris touched him, “I remember when this was always ready, and we used it often.”

“Yeah, Reagan was President. Now it’s that idiot from New York.”

“I love you, Alex, we made babies, we lived a life.”

“I love you too, Deloris. My hips are hurting.”

“Would you like to go to bed, I think there’s a couple of those pills left.”

“Are you getting a heat flash, Deloris?”

She laughed, “No, I’m thinking about my husband who bought me a Mustang, who took me to Paris seventeen times, I’m thinking about Sandy and Tim and their noise and how wonderful it was.”

“I agree.” Alex sat up, “Deloris the truth is my desire has retired, with the prostate business and all.”

She sat up, “You’d be surprised what a man can do, even at eighty.”

“Well, I’m not there yet, damn that’s twelve years, I remember when fifty was twenty years away.”

She leaned close, “In 1981 we made love two hundred and forty-three times.”

“Yeah, well, I could run a mile back then, and jump over that table. Now, I shuffle to the porch and watch the crows fly about. Deloris, I want to have you, I want to burn you up, but sweetheart, the flame is gone.”

“Not the one in my heart.” She kissed his ear.

He looked at her, “What is this, what is going on?”

On her feet she went to the counter, held the envelope to her bosom. “This can wait, until tomorrow.

“Are you sure?” He was standing behind her. “You’re holding a letter; I assume it’s about the rent?”

“Not today.” She placed it in the knife’s drawer.

6

The TV was on, and there was talk about a fire up north, an explosion at the university, and a small flood down south. 

Alex accepted the silver tray; they were having beef stroganoff and mixed vegetables. Black coffee with an oatmeal cookie at dessert.

Deloris ignored the TV; it was the same old thing, different names. She imagined walking along a path at Place de Vosges, evening light, coming stars and a comfortable studio apartment waiting for them.

What Deloris knew was that their Reno is done, what they had known all their lives was gone, never to return. With the big tech companies coming the gaming era was over, much of downtown was empty, the new Reno was across the river. Old timers, aging Hippies and various cranks were not welcome anymore. The faces at Whole Foods were not of Nevada but California.

Reno was becoming an extension of the Golden State and with it three thousand dollar a month one-bedroom apartments and four thousand dollars a month for a house.

Alex watched her, “We will get through this.”

“Not this time, we are done with Jones Street.”

“I’m not dead yet, Deloris, relax we have always made our way.

For a moment she believed him, but that went away. From behind her Grandma Ida’s Hamilton Clock chimed eight times. Yancy meowed and then went back to sleep. 

David A Fairbanks 8192019 revived final Reno Nevada

Quiet Plans To Steal The Election

by Mark Harvey 3 Quarks daily

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this–who will count the votes and how.” –Joseph Stalin

In the game of chess, there are dramatic moves such as when a knight puts the king in check while at the same time attacking the queen from the same square. Such a move is called a fork, and it’s always a delicious feeling to watch your opponent purse his lips and shake his head when you manage a good fork. The most dramatic move is obviously checkmate, when you capture the king, hide your delight, and put the pieces back in the box. But getting to either the fork or checkmate involves what’s known in chess as positioning, and for the masters, often involves quiet moves long in advance of the victory.

I wouldn’t compare Republican operators to a Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen, but in several swing states that could determine the 2024 presidential elections, they are playing their own version of a quiet game and positioning to win the election by hook or by rook. As opposed to a Kasparov or a Carlsen, there’s nothing elegant about their strategy, and what they’re attempting to do is really an end-around any form of democracy. It involves the chess equivalent of mid-level pieces—bishops, knights, and even pawns–and in some cases, political positions you’ve probably never heard of.

The Republicans have taken a clinical look at the demographics, the voting trends, and the results of the 2020 election and concluded that a traditional play of just big money and ugly ads won’t do it next time. Yes, there will be a lot of ads with dark music, photoshopped images (using the darkening and contrast feature), and the menacing voice-over saying, “Candidate X wants to free all the criminals, raise your taxes to Venezuelan levels, and concede Texas to Russia.”

But to win in 2024, Republicans are working to change basic electoral rules, install vote counters and election judges, and make it much more difficult for those who would vote against their candidate to vote. You don’t have to be a grandmaster of politics to understand the plan and to see it happening in plain sight. But I fear that the average American voter, due to either the hazards of having a real life or lacking interest, is missing the beat.

Ideally, American politics work like this: Our political parties choose candidates, those candidates get a chance to share their message, an election is held, the votes are counted by scrupulously honest people, the person who gets the most votes wins, everyone shakes hands, and moves on with life. Obviously, our elections have been adulterated with big money and nefarious advertising. Still, Americans have had reasonable confidence in final vote tallies, and the allowance of mail-in voting has helped enfranchise millions of Americans who might not otherwise vote.

The last presidential election shook Americans when the legitimacy of the vote count was challenged right up to the final certification in the Senate on January 6th. Of course January 6th was the most violent and disturbing act by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the electoral count delivered by the several states. But even before January 6th, election judges, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and even volunteers were threatened and defamed as they worked to oversee the ballot boxes.

Having failed at seeing their candidate win the presidential election of 2020, Republicans in many states have taken a page from Joseph Stalin’s book and are working to make sure that in 2024 their hand-selected people supervise the election, count the votes, and do whatever is necessary to deliver a win for their choice of president. Putting it bluntly, Barton Gellman wrote in The Atlantic, “With tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft.”

In a paper titled The Election Sabotage Scheme and how Congress can Stop it, authors at The Brennan Center for Justice outline the mechanics of a quiet coup. The strategy involves four basic components: 1) Suppress the vote and make it harder for your opponent’s constituency to get to the ballot box; 2) In case voter suppression doesn’t work, install your own cadre of vote counters; 3) If voter suppression AND picking vote counters doesn’t work, install officials who can declare the election results you want; 4) create laws that make it a criminal offense for officials not to follow your other rules.

Voter suppression is nothing new in the United States. At its most extreme, southern states made it nearly impossible for blacks to vote, with bizarre literacy tests at the polling places, intimidation and scrubbing voter lists. It’s more difficult these days to do the blatant style of voter suppression, so some states have taken to a more refined form. The favorite method is by limiting mail-in voting. By shortening application periods to apply for a mail-in ballot, reducing the number of mail-in ballot boxes, and shortening the periods in which voters can send in their ballots, states are lopping off hundreds of thousands if not millions of potential voters.

And the strategy to limit mail-in ballots has nothing to do with eliminating voter fraud. It has everything to do with the cross-section of voters who send their votes in using the postal service or dropping them in ballot boxes before election day: they are overwhelmingly Democrats. According to the Pew Research Center, 58% of Biden voters in the 2020 election used mail-in or absentee ballots, while only 32 percent of Trump voters did. It doesn’t take a Karl Rove to figure out that severely constricting the time frame and ease of mail-in voting disproportionately cuts into the Democratic votes.

According to the Brennan Center, in 2021, states introduced more than 400 bills aimed at voter suppression. A Texan law, SB 1, signed by the governor last September, is an example of the brazen legislation aimed at winning elections by restricting voters. SB 1 introduces a slew of rules ranging from the number of voters allowed to carpool to a polling place (no more than four without signing a form unless all are family members), bans drive-through voting, bans 24-hour voting, bans sending out unsolicited vote-by-mail applications, etc. The text of the bill cites “election integrity and security.” The bill will discourage thousands of otherwise perfectly legitimate voters from voting. This brings us to the second strategy, installing hand-selected vote counters.

The second prong of the quiet coup involves state canvassing boards. Their job is to certify election results after thousands of volunteers do the tedious and arduous work of tallying votes, county by county. State canvassing boards are meant to simply certify the results submitted by counties and present those to the secretary of state. They are intended to be like the umpires who write down the number of runs scored per team at the end of a baseball game.

By law, most states have the same board members per party and there is rarely a controversy—the job is clerical or ministerial. But various Republican parties from swing states are appointing board members who vehemently deny that Biden won the last election. So if there is a deadlock vote in 2024 on the election’s legitimacy, the certification will fall to the secretary of state in some states. Obviously, this makes control of that office extremely important.

And in swing states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, the 2022 races for Secretary of State are being filled by candidates who still think the last election was fraudulent. With their supervision of elections, and in some cases, their power to cast the swing votes to certify an election, the position of secretary of state across the nation has become a key piece on the board.

The third prong of the quiet coup is to install and empower officials at the state legislature level who can say yay or nay to election results without any scientific, forensic, or statistical standards for making those judgments. A recently introduced bill in the Arizona legislature illustrates this strategy. House Bill 2596, submitted by Rep. John Fillmore, is so half-baked and poorly constructed that it has little chance of passing (I assume). Still, Fillmore has included a section that allows the state legislature to approve or disapprove election results based on…nothing. Under his bill, once the ballots are tallied, the legislature is required to hold a special session and vote whether the results are legitimate or not. If they decide the election is unfair, any voter can sue the state to hold new elections. Fillmore’s bill is so incredibly vague, problematic, and filled with unanswered questions that, if passed, would create absolute chaos in Arizona.

In the same bill, Fillmore has proposed eliminating mail-in voting entirely (except for absentee voters), eliminating any machine counting, and requiring the hand-counters to have results within 24 hours of polls closing. Given the millions of voters in Arizona, the 24-hour requirement for the hand count alone shows that Fillmore really hasn’t thought this one through.

In an interview with the Arizona Republic, Fillmore said, “We need to get back to 1958-style voting.” Judging by his anti-democratic instincts, I wonder if he meant to say, “We need to get back to 1658-style voting.”

The fourth prong of the quiet coup is to introduce criminal punishment into the election process with the threat of felony prosecutions for violating election laws. There’s certainly nothing wrong with trying to hold fair elections, but the measures to create election police that are being introduced by various states have a Gestapo quality to them (or gazpacho quality if you represent Georgia’s 14th District).

Florida has proposed a bill to create an “Office of Election Crimes and Security” to investigate and curb election fraud. If there were widespread evidence of election fraud in Florida, such an office might be warranted. But even Governor DeSantis tweeted in January of 2021, “Florida’s 2020 election season was a resounding success and model for the nation.” The NAACP considers Florida’s proposal to create an Office of Election Crimes and Security a transparent effort at voter intimidation.

In a February 3rd letter to the Florida House of Representatives, the NAACP’s legal counsel reminds the legislature of past intimidation tactics in Florida elections, such as being questioned about criminal records on their way to polling places and being subjected to checkpoints placed between black neighborhoods and polling places by the highway patrol. The letter states, “…nothing in the bill precludes this new office’s investigators from showing up at voters’ homes to interrogate them about their voting practices or facts underlying their voting eligibility, which could have a threatening, intimidating, or chilling effect on their future participation.”

Gubernatorial candidate David Perdue has proposed a similar office in Georgia to be called The Election Law Enforcement Division. Perdue tweeted, “This is about transparency and accountability. Georgians deserve confidence that only legal votes will be counted, and that anyone who tries to interfere with our elections will be arrested and prosecuted.”

The thing about these various proposals to spend millions of dollars on election police is that despite tens of thousands of hours recently spent by lawyers, election officials, and even partisans looking for widespread voter fraud, very few cases have ever been found. But creating new rules obstructing the basics of democracy—mail-in voting, longer polling hours, more ballot boxes, etc.—would give these election police far more opportunities for investigations and criminal prosecutions. The combination of arcane rules along with a new ballot-box police force would, in essence, make voting daunting, difficult, and intimidating.

It is a transparent strategy that is singularly undemocratic and adverse to everything written in the preamble to the Constitution, especially the first three words.

I used to play a lot of racquet sports and there was this one guy I played with who would cheat without shame. He would call shots that were clearly in, out, and would do it unconscionably and with regularity. For a long time, I assumed he just had poor eyesight or that if he was cheating, his conscience would get to him and he would come around. But the cheating never stopped and I finally realized that I was playing with a loathsome guy who considered our game scores –two amateurs who played a couple of times a week—important enough to lie about. I finally quit playing with him.

We have some cheaters in this country who are as unscrupulous as my former sports partner, but the stakes are much higher, and we can’t just walk off the court and find a different game. The stakes are democracy as we know it. Those of us who still believe in free and fair elections have to raise our game and beat those who would break the rules without compunction.

The chess grandmaster Emanuel Lasker said, “When you see a good move, look for a better one.” This weird unstable moment in the American journey calls for entirely new moves and new coalitions. Last month I cut a hefty check for Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney even though she stands for almost everything I oppose. Given Cheney’s lineage, I suspect she would happily drill for methane gas in the Wyoming State Capitol building if a petroleum geologist gave her the thumbs up.

But there’s little doubting Cheney’s dedication to the spirit of democracy as she risks her entire political career co-chairing the January 6th committee in an effort to see that another defiling attack on the capitol doesn’t happen again. So my check to Cheney is kind of like sacrificing a chess piece—in this case, many of my principles—hoping for an outcome worthy of that sacrifice.

I’ve also sent a check to reelect Colorado’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who is about as far from Cheney’s politics as Boulder is from Cheyenne. But, like Cheney, Griswold is fiercely defending legitimate elections in Colorado—and across the nation—even as she and her staff receive death threats on a weekly basis. And as we’ve seen, secretaries of state across the nation will play a crucial role in seeing that elections are done fairly.

Unless we pay attention to the ugly game already in motion and motivate ourselves in these next two elections with the clear understanding of what’s at stake, we will witness a coup by mediocre men and women with authoritarian instincts. With its dramatic beginnings, American democracy was not meant to be lost to gaslighting operators, to those who made fortunes on manufacturing pillows or insider trading, to those who frequent the gun ranges in toy-soldier fashion while wearing loafers, and to those who are, to borrow from Winston Churchill, sheep in sheep’s clothing.

A nation founded by men and women seeking to escape a tyrannical king was not meant to be returned to the tyranny of a cult.

A few words from David A Fairbanks

 A few words from David A Fairbanks

When I created this blog in 2006, I was a security officer doing a grubby detail in a parking lot of a Walgreen's drug store on Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. My job was to protect the customers cars while they shopped. Over a ten month assignment I never encountered any trouble. Inside the store was a big South Pacific Islands guard who scared everyone; never mind he was harmless. We used to kid around about how local thieves avoided him.

George Bush was president and we were in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither worth the effort. Such waste of life. Russia was beating up Chechnya again and threatening Ukraine and Belarus. 

At the time I was writing a new Pat Trembee story that burned out and that was that.

Here we are in 2022 and there's a hint that World War Three is coming. There will not be a thermonuclear exchange. Russian Generals have children, grand children and they will not incinerate them for Putin or anyone else. American generals feel the same.

What is happening is gross tragedy and like WW1 we don't seem to know how to stop it.

Western propaganda portrays Putin as an aging ex KGB who pines for Russia's east Europe empire and wants to punish the west. Much of this is true but not quite the way it reads. Putin is 68, he knows that Russia made a huge mistake in not developing a home grown consumer state and a technology program. Russia imports everything and especially computers and cell phones. The feeble local product amount to nothing.

He now realizes that technology will rule the 21st century. Warfare will be Bots, Drones, cyberwar, and specialized forexes trained to get into an enemy country and create havoc.

Traditional war with soldiers and tanks is obsolete and too bloody for todays society.

911 proved that a country could be destabilized and greatly damaged by nothing more than teenagers and a few jet planes. 

Putin  knows that ordinary Russians will walk away from him if thousands of young conscript soldiers come home in body bags. Their girlfriends and wives will hold up crying babies for the TV networks.

Putin knows the United States is a fucking mess, not because of him, but feckless politicians in Washington who don't give a damn about anything except their financial sponsors. What Putin rages over is a 'Lost Chance" had he acted aggressively in 2002 while America was reeling from 911, he might have taken all of Ukraine and maybe influence a few other recently liberated states. 

The United States is not failing and Biden is not senile or anything close. Being a bit slow to talk is not a weakness. Behind Biden is the most talented and best educated military on the planet.

Should fighting break out in Ukraine all of Putin's fantasies will evaporate and soldiers of fortune and adventurers from all over will harass his army and proxy forces with advanced weapons will wear down his occupation forces and in a year or so Russia will look stupid and dated. Putin will likely get the boot from an angry military. There we be no final glory in Ukraine.

After WW1 there were a dozen small wars in Europe, Asia, and South America. The same will happen after the war in Ukraine. North Korea might decide to go for broke and attack the south. China goes after Taiwan and India and Pakistan have a go at it. Democrats facing a stolen election in 2024 might decide to bloody the Republicans. Insanity rises up along side war, count on it.

It took thousands of years for humanity to create the fabulous world of comfort we live in. All of it can be reduced to ruin in just a few days of insanity. Not with nuclear bombs but crazed kids torching enough of everything.

I'm amazed at how much of today resembles the past. Marvel comics movies are the mythology and religious heroes of today and we are captive to the CGI fantasy. Where does it take us?

In 2022 The Beatles are the number one entertainment for almost everyone. How strange. It's like a 13 year old in 1964 pining for the pop stars of 1914. 

The virus appears to be fading, let's hope there isn't another coming.

The weather is warm in winter, will we ever get serious about global warming.

Roosevelt Station my magnum opus is about to be published. I might just upset everyone with it.

We will see.

 

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