Corruption Pervades Everything (and my knee still hurts)

"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics."

-John Adams

"Mistah Kurtz—he dead"

-T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad

A gloomy one out there, with light rain and temps in the low 70s. The a/c on the family room side of the condo died over the course of the heat wave, so the damp overcast is a blessing.

That'll likely be several thousand dollars to fix. Then the boat should be ready soon after nine months in the shop, and lots of late-discovered issues that had to be addressed. Cha-ching. And the Columbia's in its annual inspection, a $7,000.00 undertaking when things go perfectly.

It's all sort of depressing, but I was there anyway. Last week I finally got in to see the orthopod who repaired the meniscus tear in January. We had a good talk, and he suggested a cortisone shot to tamp down whatever is causing all the pain and stiffness. It took all of about three seconds, and by the next day I experienced no pain at all, for the first time in maybe a year. The doc warned that we'd see how things went---some folks only get a couple weeks of relief, and some get six months to a year.

It's Monday, and the pain is right back where it was. This is, to put it mildly, disappointing. In part the depression over this setback flows from the notion that getting the knee working would be the next step in starting to run again, which in turn would help burn off these twenty extra pounds, reduce or eliminate the snoring, and allow P to move back into the master bedroom on worknights when my sawing Zs drives her to the couch.

Now none of that's going to happen. I'm stuck with this malfunctioning meat bag that is me, and it's not going to get any better.

So it's in this rather dark mindset that's descended over the last few days that I read the paper and see that He Who Ruins Everything has now managed to spoil the World Cup, something I care nothing about but seems to have brought a lot of joy across the globe as countries engage in fair competition on the pitch. Well, at least until DJT got involved, and called the FIFA president to get the U.S. team's star player's red card rescinded so he could play tonight against Belgium. So much for the country coming together to pull for the red, white, and blue. One more reason for the planet to hate us. He's simply the worst human being ever to occupy the White House. Our country won't recover from this in my lifetime, if ever.

I mean the whole mass looting and vandalism that mark his second term, not the soccer imbroglio.

I would count Mitch McConnell as an almost equally wretched human, the guy who stacked the SCOTUS with these vile partisans while preventing a vote on Obama's nominee because it was too close to an election, the guy who allowed Trump II to happen with his impeachment vote. Yeah, pretty bad. But I can't really count him as a bad human because, at this juncture, he's a pile of necrotic tissue in an ICU, heart kept pumping with drips and drugs the same way you'd keep an organ donor going before the big harvest.

McConnell died about three weeks ago--well, he was found unresponsive and with no heartbeat, and they crushed his chest performing CPR. The chances of an octogenerian surviving all that is below 5% if the patient is in good health, which Mitch decidedly was not.

So why not let him go over the rainbow bridge and take his place in hell with Nixon and Scalia and Pol Pot? Well, if he dies before mid-August, the governor of Kentucky gets to appoint an interim successor, and Governor Beshear is--gasp--a Democrat.

Which leads to the absurd spectacle of Senator Thune telling folks he spoke with McConnell a couple days after the corpse arrived in the hospital, and press spokespersons relaying that although Mitch can't make it to the Capitol to vote, he's huddling with staff on important policy issues. The patient is intubated and on a ventilator--he has had his last conversation in this life, and it was quite a while ago. No one is talking policy with him without a Ouija board.

But this is where the Rs are--lying, cheating, and bullshitting the American public in a way that is so blatant it's hard to fathom how a third of my neighbors are still buying this. Then I think that the largest religious denomination in our country is the Southern Baptist Convention--res ipsa loquitur.

And, as Hannah Arendt, Timothy Snyder, and others have pointed out, in a fascist country the lie is sort of the point. The ultimate loyalty test is not only to accept the whopper when it's delivered, but to repeat it as if it's an irrefutable truth.

That's where we are right now, which I guess sort of explains the malaise and depression.