7/26/2025

 Saturday, July 26, 2025

D+260/188/1273

1948  Truman issued Executive Order No. 9981 to desegregate the US armed forces

2023 Sinead O'Connor 12/8/55 - 7/27/23 

My attempt many, many years ago to paint a portrait of Sinead O'Connor, perhaps after her frontal assault on the Church and the Papacy on Saturday Night Live on October 3, 1992.  I drew the undersketch largely freehand and failed completely in terms of likeness, but I liked the painting nonetheless and have it hanging on my bedroom wall.  Although it doesn't look at all like her, it reminds me of her and of her troubled journey through life.

In bed at 9:30, awake at 1:30 for a pit stop, unable to sleep with some bladder/urethra pain/discomfort and some anxiety over upcoming surgery, or rather, post-surgical pain/burning/stinging.  Been there, done that.  At 2 a.m., I heard a loud clunk from the back of the house, where Geri was sleeping.  I took my flashlight and went back to check, but saw nothing fallen or appearing to be out of place.  From Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, and Things that go Bump in the Night, Good Lord, deliver us!  66°, high of 80°, cloudy, rain this morning.  I was back in bed at 4:30 and slept until almost 9.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 11:30 a.m.  

America's Draculas.  I read Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula many years ago when I went on a monster-story binge: Dracula, Mary Shelly's 1818 Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I enjoyed all of them, Dracula perhaps most of all, although that distinction may belong to Jekyll and Hyde.  In the current POLITICO, there is an essay by Dan Brooks titled "The Epstein Conspiracy Is the Horror Story of Our Age."  Brooks writes 

As a vehicle for our worst fears about the 21st-century United States, Epstein is our Dracula. You are probably familiar with Count Dracula, the blood-drinking aristocrat with a taste for virgins who is vulnerable only to holy water and garlic. . .  It doesn’t take a degree in folklore and mythology to notice that the count, who leaves his castle only to drain the life from peasants and corrupt young women, and who persists unnaturally from generation to generation until he is stopped by the power of the church, says something about how medieval Europeans saw their titled aristocracy. His parasitic relationship with working people, his rivalry with priests, and his infamous horniness all reflect the anxieties of the late 19th century, when hereditary landowners vied with industrial capital and religious authority for control of Europe, and ordinary people exercised little power in proportion to their number.

The conspiracy version of the Epstein story [circle of superrich pedophiles, a client list,  blackmail, murder, immunity] expresses similar anxieties about power and who wields it in the 21st-century United States. . . This narrative, like the Dracula story, says some obvious things about how our culture understands its ruling class. The most powerful figure in it is not an elected politician or celebrity but rather a financial adviser, a guy whose money and connections make him the real force behind the facade of representative government and impartial law.

The Epstein conspiracy theory describes two Americas, with two sets of laws and standards: the one most of us live in, where you have to go to work, abide by public morals and wait on hold when you call your congressional representative, and the one rich people live in, where statutory rape is an open secret and presidential candidates put aside their differences to hang out on tropical sex islands. In this world, the law, public opinion and party politics have power over ordinary people, but money has the power to transcend all of them. Financiers run the whole thing, literally and figuratively seducing political and cultural leaders in order to control them, while the various rules we democratically agreed on don’t apply to anyone involved — as proven by their successful murder of the only guy with the secrets to bring them down.

The Epstein conspiracy theories are unproven, but you don’t have to say the words “hyoid bone” to read the Epstein story as a fable of how power works in the 21st-century United States. The non-conspiracy version of events says just as much.

This story of institutional failure should be familiar to anyone who has been to a VA hospital or worked somewhere that got bought by a private equity fund. It’s the story of a system that prioritizes low taxes and high profits over how well anything actually works, cutting costs and squeezing wages at the expense of long-term success. In other words, it’s the story of a country that runs according to the interests of Epstein’s clients: wealthy people who get their money from rents, investments and inheritances and therefore have a material interest in nothing changing, not this month, unless it’s a lower tax rate. It’s the story of finance taking over the economy and money taking over politics, the story of a system that doesn’t do enough to restrain the power of those few Americans who live well without working, even as the rest of us are supposed to rule by majority. In other words, it is the story of vampires, whose existence is defined by exemption from the rules that determine the shape of ordinary people’s lives.

That is a story of the world we actually live in, and millions of Americans believe it. The conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong — which it almost certainly does — the important parts are still true.

I posted this essay on Facebook with this comment:

This is an essay on America's Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.  It's also a 'red pill/blue pill' tale, addressing "the facade of representative government and impartial law."  If Trump's ascension to the epitome of national and global power has done no other good, at least it has made clear who really runs the country and the world, and it's not us.  Bernie Sanders has tried for years to address this problem.  We see how far it has gotten him - and us. 

Days like this make me question my sanity, or at least my mental health.  When I am not reading something, or writing something, or working on a painting, engaged in a conversation, or doing something else that requires focused attention, thoughts flitter around my brain like my favorite metaphor for them, minnows in a bait bucket.  The thoughts are not invited (or are they?) or welcome.  They are often complaining, unhappy, dissatisfied thoughts about my health, or more specifically, my muscle and joint aches and pains all around my body, my bladder, urethra, perineum, the persistent desire of my body to pitch forward and fall down, my upcoming surgery, cognitive decline, etc.  Or, they are despairing thoughts about my country or about my species, homo hominis lupus, Trumpism, and all that.  My usefulness is not zero, but approaching it: I do the dishes, try to keep the kitchen clean for Geri, take out the garbage, go to the food store, and occasionally provide a ride to Andy or one of the grandchildren.  What does the future hold?  Dementia, a wheelchair, dependency, loss of autonomy - who knows, but it's nothing good.  I'm such a wimp, like the lyrics of the old classic blues tune, Why was I born, why am I living.  SNAP OUT OF IT and all that, but to what end?  I hate writing this and hate even more thinking and feeling this, pissing and moaning, feeling sorry for myself, whining, Micky the Mope, Sad Sack.  Pathetic way to live.