The Loch Ness Monster and the Deep State

 

As a lifetime member of the Deep State, I find it amusing that right-wing politicos think, but don’t know, that we exist. Some will acknowledge our group by name with conviction, but it is obvious from their demeanor that they have no proof. As the emeritus chief of the Unicorn Division of the Deep State, I have access to their top-secret files. I have full knowledge of the clandestine GPS coordinates of all 46 known Big Foot (or should that be Big Feet) caves. I know the location of the 90’ white ash Keebler Elves Hollow Tree in Sylvan Glenn, near Lake Springfield. I personally know Ernest J. Keebler (Earnie to his friends) and a few of the others, namely Flo, Elmer, Buckets, Roger, Leonardo, Fast Eddie, Sam, Doc, Zack, Casey, Professor, and Zoot. I had a brief affair with Flo, the bakery accountant, back in the 70s. It was a short fling (pun intended) and it was probably all for the best that it ended when it did because Flo was later caught with fudge all over her little elfin Vienna Fingers.  And, yes, Jeff Sessions was a Keebler Elf, but was kicked out of the tree when he got too big for his britches.

 

 

 

When I started, we were just State. Area 51 was only 42 ½ at the time. It soon became clear that espionage, collusion, conspiracy, intrigue, cronyism, and dirty tricks, would require a bit of secrecy. Enter the Deep State. We made rapid advancements in the early days with the help of alien technology. The capture of one spacecraft and four aliens was a boon to our understanding of technology. They gave us Velcro, now how cool is that?

 

Entrance to the Deep State Headquarters near Area 51

 

Fear of the Deep State is its own tool. It’s like a fear of gravity in that you can’t see it, you know it exists, and realize it can hurt you, but only after you achieve some level of altitude. The higher you get in politics the more you fear the Deep State. But for those of you who might say the Deep State is a malevolent organization bent on mischief, I say balderdash. I’ve been writing for years and that is the first time I was able to use “balderdash” in a sentence with some sense of purpose. Who would Steve Bannon, Mick Mulvaney, and Donald Trump have that they could blame for their mistakes if it weren’t for the Deep State? We provide a public service, albeit an unwitting one.

 

Pardon Me but, Hang on to your Trump Card

 

We, in the Deep State, are unique in that we only have two letter initials to our name, DS, not to be confused with BS. We are like the Madonna, Pink, Sting, Cher, Charo, Beck, Enya, and Bono, of the espionage world. All other agencies are required to have the full compliment of three letters like CIA, FBI, NRO, NSA, DOD, DHS, DEA, DOE, and CID. The thought that we are a network of entrenched government officials who function independently from elected politicians and work toward our own ends, is preposterous. When have you ever known government officials to function at all?

 

Membership in the Deep State has provided me with an enhanced outlook of life on our planet. I know that the Tooth Fairy is actually Flo (aka Stephanie Courtney). The Tooth Fairy Flo should not be confused with Keebler Elf Flo. Tooth Fairy Flo is much taller. She sells the baby teeth she collects as the Tooth Fairy, on the black market as ivory. I know she is a Republican because she works for PROGRESSIVE (insurance) Corporation as a double agent. I know the Easter Bunny never existed because rabbits don’t lay colored eggs and most of them can’t paint.  I know the main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.  I know that the Loch Ness Monster summers in Barbados and loves his Piña Coladas.

 

Nessie at the beach in Barbados

 

For fellow Deep Staters, remember to get your bus tickets early for Georgia’s January 5th senate runoff. You must bring different colored pens to fill out all those fake ballots and if you are bringing dead people with you to vote, make sure you have the correct spelling of their names. If we can’t steal this election properly, we might as well stay home.

 

I loved my active-duty time in the Deep State but now I must get back to my day job of Cat Behavior Consultant and part-time exorcist. Now that Trump is on his way out, I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief through my face mask. But, as we enter this Post-Trump phase, remember the wise words of George Carlin, “Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.”

 

The Circus is Still in Town

 

 

 

QAnon, WTF?

I remember when “Q” was an ageless sometimes malevolent supreme being who identified with the Q Continuum. He lived and materialized at will in the future time of 2367. He took delight when he harangued Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek fame. He was a fictional character and perhaps the inspiration for the creation of another mischievous apparition. This new specter would act as an inside secret source of information for those who could interpret his clues, known as “Q drops.” His followers would be called QAnon.

 

Q of Star Trek fame

 

 

 

QAnon seems to be the creation of one bored YouTube video creator and two Dark Web conspiracy posters who decided to monetize the conspiracy industry. They invented “Q” to be a high-ranking military officer with insider information. The identity of Q’s creators would be hidden behind aspects of the Dark Web. There are names associated with their IP addresses, but none have come forward to claim authorship. The original three, with the help of fellow conspiracy theorists from whom they solicited help, have taken to the various fringe message boards and websites to create a fiction that would excite an expanded base of followers. Unlike the satire site, the Onion, which is clearly labeled as satire, the QAnon folks are true believers. I’m guessing this is the digital age’s version of the supermarket tabloid.

 

 

 

They have championed Trump to be the latest comic-book-like hero who is fighting evil. Yes, Donald J. Trump has replaced the two-headed space aliens holding Elvis captive aboard their yellow submarine in the city of Atlantis. This would be funny and something we could easily dismiss if it weren’t for the fact that two Republican QAnon believers won their elections and are headed to Washington in January. Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene won a House seat from Georgia and Lauren Boebert won a House seat from Colorado. Both Greene and Boebert are QAnon believers.

 

 

QAnon followers in Congress

 

Another in the wild QAnon conspiracy theories was their belief that John F. Kennedy Jr. was still alive and that he would be Trump’s announced running mate for Vice President. Try getting your head around that pronouncement and then imagine the types of people who would consider that a possibility.

 

The evil villains in their stories are all members of “the deep state” that includes the Hollywood elite and top Democrats who are baby-eating, Satan worshiping, pedophiles. Some in this growing fringe of society believe that lizard-people, disguised as corporate leaders and celebrities and evil scientists and governments are all conspiring to use Covid-19 for their own dark purposes. Much of their rhetoric follows the racist and antisemitic lines of other Trump followers.

 

While I’m sure many of us have read the crazy headlines at the supermarket checkout counters, I don’t personally know anyone who actually believes those stories to be more than entertainment. But, enter the digital age and its collision with the folks who think the National Enquirer is a real newspaper, and you now have conspiracy theory followers dangerous enough to arm themselves and take action against the evil villains.

 

 

 

That there are people gullible enough to believe these stories is frightening. In 2018 a follower blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam with an armored vehicle. One early QAnon story was labeled Pizza-gate and claimed there was a pedophile ring operating out of a Washington, DC pizza shop. One deranged follower showed up at the business with his assault rifle and fired it during his “rescue” of the non-existent children.

 

Pizza shop falsely targeted as site of child sex ring

 

 

Researchers theorize that conspiracy beliefs may be tied to anxiety and a feeling of being powerless. Such individuals latch on to these wild theories to gain sociopolitical control by a rejection of official narratives that contradict their own interests. These people may feel otherwise isolated but, by sharing conspiracy beliefs with other like-minded individuals, they find solace.

 

One personality profile of conspiracy believers was the injustice collector. That individual finds the world an unjust place and is likely to be impulsive and overconfident. They were excited to expose the naïveté of others not “in the know.” By holding on to such outlandish beliefs, they got the attention that they crave and a sense of camaraderie with other believers. Our current pandemic and the deep political division within our country, have created the perfect storm that feeds the delusions of the QAnon adherents.

 

In the outer fringes of this group one personality disorder is prevalent and that is a pattern of thinking called “psychoticism.” Phychoticism is central to the schizo-typical personality disorder with its magical thinking and paranoid ideation. It is just a few degrees short of full-blown schizophrenia. In this extreme group are those who may act on their delusions and become a threat to others. Conspiracy theorists run the gamut from those who will just forward unvetted questionable stories supporting their belief system to those who actively look for lizard-like behavior in others.

 

The Lizard People are Everywhere

QAnon followers fall into the extreme end of the spectrum. Donald Trump refers to QAnon followers as “people who love our country” but the FBI has labeled them a potential domestic terror threat. It is not just domestic as it has a worldwide audience. The “Q” posts show up on the message board 4chan, the rebranded 8chan now called 8kun, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. There was a July crackdown on Twitter to curb QAnon content that affected 150,000 accounts. Facebook too has announced the removal of sites that “represent” QAnon and all supportive ads.

 

QAnon Supporter at Trump Rally

 

If you think we are now entering the Twilight Zone, just know that the last four years were not a dream. You’ve been living in that parallel universe for some time now. QAnon is with us. Two of its followers will be sworn into the new Congress. In a recent survey of 1,583 registered voters, 37% of Trump’s base believe that he had been elected as a savior to root out a secret Satanic child-sex trafficking ring run by Democrats.

 

 

“It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Trump Zone.”

 

 

Party Evolution, Revolution

When I was born in the 40s, there were still people alive who fought in the Civil War. In fact, the last Union Army Civil War veteran was Albert Henry Woolson, and he died in 1956 at the age of 106. The last Confederate veteran had predeceased him in 1951. His name was Private Pleasant Riggs Crump. It was now official; the Confederate States of America had even lost the war of attrition as the last man standing was a Union soldier.

General Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9, 1865, but it wasn’t until August of 1865, that Lt. Cmdr. James Waddell got word aboard the CSS Shenandoah that the last of the fighting had ended. Waddell stowed his guns and sailed to Liverpool, England where the Confederate flag flew for the last time aboard a Confederate fighting ship.

 

 

The Civil War was over. Its’ end happened over several months. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and then Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee got word of Lee’s surrender. He refused an order from CSA President Jefferson Davis to continue fighting and surrendered to Gen. Sherman. Confederate General Richard Taylor surrendered in May and several days later Nathan Bedford Forrest surrendered at Gainesville, Alabama. He told his men, “That we are beaten is a self-evident fact, and any further resistance on our part would justly be regarded as the very height of folly and rashness.”

If only President Donald J. Trump were a student of history or, at the very least as observant as Nathan Bedford Forrest, he might realize that this current fight for the presidency is “the very height of folly and rashness.” But Donald Trump is a transactional president just as he had been a transactional businessman. He sees every event as a singular transaction to be negotiated for his ultimate benefit. There is no big picture, just the transaction. His focus is often myopic. The expression “can’t see the forest for the trees” comes to mind.

 

Can't see the damn forest with all these big trees in the way.

Much, if not most, of Trump’s support comes from people who are still fighting the Civil War. They sell Confederate flags at his rallies. They won’t admit that the Confederate States of America lost the war 155 years ago. They also sell Nazi flags at his rallies in support of another losing ideology. They won’t admit that Nazi Germany lost their war 75 years ago. The Nazis lost. The Confederacy lost. Trump lost.

 

Flags at Trump Rally

Historically, Democrats were the party of racial inequality who wanted to continue the theory of white supremacy championed by both the Civil War and Hitler’s Nazis. The southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats, were fighting for segregation and Jim Crow laws long after the end of the Civil War. Famous segregationists included Jesse Helms from North Carolina, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, Allan Shivers of Texas, Harry Bird of Virginia, James Eastland of Mississippi, Lester Maddox of Georgia, and George Wallace of Alabama. These were all Democrats.

 

George Wallace defying court ordered integration of school.

 

 

 

Over the course of time, the cause of white supremacy switched parties. The south, unhappy with Public Law 88-352k, aka the Civil Rights Act of 1964, began a migration to the Republican Party where people found sympathy for their perceived white minority persecution. The south and much of middle-America moved to the Republican Party while many of the coastal states and certain large urban centers became more Democratic.

Donald Trump, with the guiding hand of his advisor and confidant Stephen Miller, found the smoldering embers of this white supremacy contingent and emboldened them to action. They provided a national platform for this marginalized group. Using racism, hatred and fear as a strong motivators, the Miller/Trump contingent managed to take over the Republican Party and to use that triple threat to build a support base that would walk through fire for their new Messiah. Whatever was left of “normal Republicans” were struck dumb with the fear of antagonizing the power of Trump’s base. As the song goes, it’s all about the base.

The odd faction within this vocal base were the Nazi supporters. While they readily deal in white supremacy, they include Jews in their targeted groups. Stephen Miller is Jewish, and Donald Trump has a Jewish son-in-law. I can only guess at the consternation caused by this dilemma. Perhaps they figure that they can postpone one goal to achieve another. Stephen Miller has advocated many extreme white supremacist concepts like the “great replacement theory” where whites are being eliminated through immigration. He has also linked immigration with crime. These themes run throughout Trump’s rhetoric.

 

Trump's "nice people on both sides"; Nice Nazis

 

While many Republicans would be loath to consider themselves racist, their support for Donald Trump provides a certain validity to that perception. You can’t champion a race-baiting xenophobe and then distance yourself from the fallout caused by his actions. You can’t support his recent attacks on our democracy and later try to wrap yourself in the flag.

 

 

While both dominant parties have evolved during my lifetime, this latest change was the most jarring. It happened in less than four years. The Trump presidency will be studied not so much for its few achievements, but for the damage to our democracy and for the challenges it presented to political normalcy. Republicans told Nixon his time was at an end and he walked away. It is time for Republicans to admonish Trump in the same way. I won’t hold my breath. One way or another, he will be out of power in just a matter of weeks.

 

 

 

Reflections on 2020

There is supposedly a Chinese curse, that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” By most accounts, not one of the current 1.4 billion Chinese has any recollection of such a statement or curse having been uttered at any point in their 4,000-year history. We can only guess that something was said in Chinese, it was translated into English, and somehow ended up getting repeated enough times that we now attribute the quote to our Asian friends. The origins of the quote seem to go to the British diplomatic corps early in the last century. I can relate to the possibility of a miscommunication between the British and the Chinese. I would easily understand a gaffe in a translation from Mandarin to English. I watch a great deal of British entertainment and I need to turn on the subtitles to get more than half of what they are saying; and we supposedly speak the same language.

Confucius

I had long heard the quote about living in interesting times but was surprised to find out it was a curse. It almost sounded like a good thing, to live in interesting times. Perhaps the Chinese have a strange sense of humor.  Another of their "curses" reads, "may your every wish be granted."  One possible explanation of its origin confuses matters further. It involves the story, “The Oil-Peddler Wins the Queen of Flowers.” Those of you who follow Chinese romance literature probably know it better by its more common title, “Maiyou lang duzhan huakui.” In this story the main characters are driven from their homes by war. A portion of the story reads, “Truly, better to be a dog in days of peace, Than a human in times of war!” Now that’s some creative translation.

Well, to call the year now ending an “interesting time” would be the understatement of the millennium. It seems that the year 2020 really got jump-started in late 2019 when someone in China caught a case of the sniffles, from a bat. We now know that “bat-sniffles” can get serious and it's certainly nothing to sneeze at. It seems that when bat viruses make the jump between species, things can go wrong. How one gets close enough to a bat to catch a cold still escapes me. It’s easier for me to imagine a botched Mandarin translation than to think about how a human gets bat-sniffles.

Kiss Me, I'm Cute

 

 

 We perhaps need to reevaluate “the butterfly effect” where the flap of a butterfly’s wings can supposedly cause a weather event across the globe. As we all know, this idea comes from chaos theory where the butterfly effect is based on the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. But you knew that. Since we are all familiar with the work of meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz, I will thankfully not need to explain this any further. What we now know is that his theory also seems to work at the bat level. But I digress. I do that more often now that I have more grey hair than brains. I’m even beginning to understand a cat’s fascination with chasing the red dot from a laser pointer.

The Butterfly Effect

Yes, 2020 didn’t turn out like anyone imagined. While the term 2020 is commonly associated with having good vision, I doubt anybody saw this one coming. Instead of learning more about the countries scheduled for our planned vacation, I ended up learning how to cut my own hair. What I learned was, don’t do it. No matter how easy it looks on those YouTube videos, don’t do it. Get help. I did manage to take the skills learned maintaining my own mustache for many years and I was able to extend that knowledge to include sideburns and a little light trimming in the front. I then get Sue to cut the back and sides that I can’t easily see or reach. She tells me she did a good job. I’ll take her word for it. I’m sure its fine. If you find out different, don’t tell me.

 

Zoom Meeting

So, what else have we learned this year that we might not have predicted way back in 2019? We all know more about streaming video. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc., have become more important than cable TV. Many of us now know how to have a Zoom meeting from home when twelve months ago most of us thought zoom was what cars do. Many of us have learned new cooking skills and have either rejoiced in that new culinary ability or learned that you can Uber food. How many of you shopped for groceries on your computer before this year? A trip outside your home now requires more planning. Facemask, check. Hand sanitizer, check. Backup facemask, check. Get in car, check. Remember where you were planning to go, whoops. Go back inside house to figure out where you were going, check.

We are also ending 2020 with yet another example of the butterfly effect in the world of politics. It seems that, about the time my mother was giving birth to her cutest son, a couple in New York made love. Nine months after my birth, the result of that heinous act in New York brought us one Donald J. Trump. Who could have predicted that the little tax deduction that arrived on June 14, 1946, would one day take a television reality show where he fired everyone and move it into the Oval Office? Yes, an act committed seventy-four years ago, created a 250 pound man who just happens to wear 25 pound red ties. This same man is now planning his exit from the White House, maybe.

We had an election. Trump lost. This would make him only the third president in the past 80 years to not win a second term. He is not happy with that scenario and has filed and lost over 50 lawsuits in a vain attempt to overturn the election. Georgia just completed the third recount and Joe Biden won each time. The three counts showed that the first machine count was 99.964% accurate. In the final tally, Trump lost Georgia by 11,779 votes. Not a landslide but as they say, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and table-top shuffleboard.

 

Cardboard fans

I wonder about the future. I’m now wondering how sportscasters, reviewing football games played way back in 2020, will explain the 2-D cardboard cutouts of people sitting in the stands. I also wonder if we will still be wearing masks for both Halloween and Christmas next year? Will I ever get to eat in a real restaurant again? Will handshakes be forever verboten? Will I ever take another cruise? Will I wake up and find that it is really January first of 2020 and this was all a nightmare caused by too much New Year's champagne and some bad calamari?

Getting back to our opening gambit of living in interesting times, I found a further reference in Chinese philosophy with one of their common maxims. It says, “that the worst of men are fondest of change and commotion, hoping that they may thereby benefit themselves; but by adherence to a steady, quiet system, affairs proceed without confusion, and bad men have nothing to gain.” What picture reference does that create for you?

While we may blame the Chinese for fostering an environment where humans and bats get close enough to share diseases, had we been following the above quoted maxim, perhaps the years beyond 2016 would have been better. If this virus has a silver lining it might be that it pointed out a serious weakness in our chosen leadership. Enough of us saw that flaw and acted accordingly to make a change. May 2021 bring about a healing and renewed hope for the future.