I think it’s reasonable to assume there are sensible people amongst us, and non-sensical people. When I meet people for the first time, it would be a really nice value-added component of the human design if I could determine their sensibility before subjecting them to a field test of the Myers-Briggs or Enneagram on the fly. Those are error-prone, at best, and many non-sensical people are unexpectedly quite clever. It’s in my nature to presume that glib and intelligent people are sensible, but late, that is proving to be a dangerous premise. Every non-sensical insurgent does not wear moose horns and expect penal institutions to serve organic food. My bad.
The latest example of a dangerously non-sensical person is Marjorie Taylor Green, a U.S. Representative from Georgia. She claims to represent GA-District 14, which includes Dalton. I haven’t looked up the demographics for that district, but wonder if any people of color living there believe she truly represents them. She is rabid. Stalked a kid, who survived a mass shooting, on a public street to challenge him about why he was advocating for gun control, telling him he couldn’t defend his “stance”, and that if there had been an armed officer present at the shooting it wouldn’t have happened. She intentionally recalled the shooter’s name in her seemingly endless harangue, which occurred before she was elected to public office. The victim did not respond, and later said that he was utilizing his mindfulness meditation practice to enable him to keep his composure. What a classy woman! Since her installation as a member of Congress, she’s been loudly and snidely displaying her gun, and defiantly iterating her “right” to carry it to her Congressional office. As the owner of one of my favorite bars used to say, “Let’s go to Disney World with THIS m-effer!”.
Once again, I don’t quite understand what any of these people want. If Congress, the Supreme Court, the governors of all 50 states miraculously came to their senses and agreed the Presidential election was indeed stolen, and the recently inaugurated President is illegitimate, then what? OK, so we throw out the new guy, bring back the old guy, and THEN what? Can someone tell me exactly what next steps they want to see taken? Do we pull back COVID-19 testing efforts, and back to letting each state decide what to do and how to do it, with inadequate supplies of the vaccine? Do we pull out of the Paris Climate Accord again – is that the big issue? Do we re-issue permits of oil drilling on federal land and construction of pipelines that disrupt access to water supplies? If we did all of that, would THAT satisfy these “patriots”?
Even if these angry hordes got their way, there is no force in the Universe that can reverse the ever-increasing deterioration of normalcy that COVID-19 has brought. There is nothing that will open schools and businesses and eradicate the risk of infection. There is nothing that will keep people alive once the virus has wreaked full body havoc. So, what is the goal of ongoing episodes of crowd hysteria and sound bites of people behaving badly (incredibly badly)? I contend there is no viable goal. Things will never revert entirely to pre-pandemic circumstances, and thank goodness for that. Let’s say we traveled back in time to January of 2019, before George Floyd, before Jacob Blake, before masking became a bone of contention. We’d still have division, we’d still have food insecurity, we’d still have killing of unarmed Black men at he hands of law enforcement. Quite honestly, we’ve had that for decades. The only difference is the mask. If people really thought it through, the mask could be their salvation – they could get away with all manner of incivility, and be remain incognito. Y’all ain’t even competent thugs.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a really bad example of the best and brightest the GOP has to offer these days. Her mess isn’t even original, just repetition of party talking points. She once owned a CrossFit gym…hooray for her…maybe somebody dropped a kettle bell on her head or something. Despite the lack of substantive content for her outrage, I would still be really interested in why she’s so unwaveringly pissed. From what I can see from her bio, her life is pretty good – married, with three kids, nice house, family-owned business (she sold the gym, apparently). What the eff is she so pissed off about? While I am the first to admit that external trappings do not translate to happiness, I just can’t figure out why a sane person would go so far out of their way to be so intentionally nasty. She’s apparently a QAnon afficionado…so perhaps she has uninvited mental images of Satanic rituals or something making her a bit testy. Whatever it is, there are some fine medications on the market that might help, and I would hope she avails herself of same.
I have been that enraged in my life. I have not, however, vented my proverbial spleen in public and emerged without consequences. There was always pushback, retaliation, loss, damage…and that was only when anyone had bothered to listen. People the world over are not only listening to this horrid shrew, they are debating and discussing every one of her outbursts, word by word. This gives tacit legitimacy to her ill-formed arguments, but also to her right to use them as weaponry in the public square. This is behavior that should not be modeled by public officials, or by rational adults at any level of society, which brings me to another point: how the HELL did this woman get elected? I don’t think she concocted her wobbly platform just last night, after the 11pm news, so it’s nothing new. I’m willing to things like gun control and QAnon are her signature issues. So, repeating – how the HELL did she get elected? The people who voter for her, those are the people I want to know about, because if they weren’t at the Capitol on January 6th in person, they were there in spirit. I don’t want to meet up with them or their spirits any time soon, but … I know they’re out there. And that’s only Georgia. They’re out there in Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Missouri, and North Carolina, and every other state in the Union. To me, they demonstrate that volatile level of mental fragility that could explode at any moment. With my luck, and my propensity to attract charming nut cases, I’d be the one who inadvertently lights their fuse, and they’d blow like a super-nova. Accordingly, I want to know who they are, where they are, and have a working knowledge of the rules of engagement. As an old t-shirt said, I’m here for a good time, not a long time. So, if the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene are gonna pollute the air with stuff that isn’t very much fun, let’s hurry this up a bit before the bell tolls one too many times.
The Sound Hole 