THE CLENCHING OF AMERICA

Reports of chinook winds beginning in East Glacier last night were so welcome that I didn’t plug in the extra electric heater in the bathroom and I set the floor furnace thermostat a little low.  When I woke up, it was nine degrees outside and fifty inside, a little lower than that 65 I usually maintain in the daytime.  The day is bright and clear — no wind, road report says half the highway to Conrad is clear; cats are outside prowling the snow.

I’m a bit giddy from waking up expecting (half-hoping) to turn on the computer and find out Trump has defected, asked for asylum, been mysteriously killed by a handkerchief or umbrella.  In fact, the world has been so preposterous lately, that I’m thinking way outside reality myself.  I have some new rules to offer.

1.  No one can be president without passing a GED (General Equivalence Diploma) test, even if they went to a prestigious college, esp. if a generous donation was made to the college while they were attending.  The test shall emphasize citizenship.

2.  No one can serve in either the house or the senate if they make more than $100,000.  Millionaires and billionaires are automatically disqualified.  (I'm thinking about lawyers.  Lately doctors have been equally peculiar.  Maybe clergy.)

3.  Nepotism laws will be enforced:  no offspring and no spouses may be hired by the politicians and the fiction that family can manage a “blind trust” will not be allowed.

4.  The laws pretending that corporations are people will be struck down.  Shell corporations will no longer exist.  LLC’s are outlawed.

5.  Religious institutions and political institutions will be conflated — both simply institutions that serve and inspire the people.  A code of ethics will be devised for them, based on the US constitution.  Taxes will be based on transparency, not sacrality or prestige.  Holiness is its own reward and cannot be taxed nor confined to an institution.

6.  National service for everyone — doesn’t have to be military combat but can be military support.  Domestic Infrastructure rebuilding counts as combat, particularly elements of transportation like railroads, highways and bridges.  (This is defensible in terms of possible invasion.  Think like Eisenhower.)  We already use military resources for catastrophic natural disasters.

7.  Total rethinking of the Presidential obligations and accesses.  No longer one-person/one-click initiating of nuclear strikes.  ("Nuclear war" is not listed on Amazon no matter the color of your VISA card.  It is not an economic perk.)

8.  The Flathead Valley (Missoula/Kalispell) boasts of being only fifteen minutes from Montana.  We should honor them by moving the western boundary of the state to the Rockies.  This is merely gerrymandering rollback.  (The Flathead was originally supposed to be part of Idaho.  At the moment there is a voting district that is bisected by the Rockies, clearly an effort to confine and divide reservation voting, which is usually Democratic.)

9.  Total rethinking of what legal marriage means, particularly in terms of profits and obligations under the law.  What are all these trophy wives going to do as the cranky old billionaires march off to prison?  What can they keep as “theirs”?  How do they testify about what they knew and when they knew it?  The “sanctity” of marriage and the fantasy of becoming “one person” is pretty well undermined by powerful people who marry multiple times and not for the sake of alliances between families or the protection of children.  More for protection since spouses can't testify against each other.

10.  Why do I have to think up “ten” preposterous reforms?  Because I have ten fingers?  If I were Tester, I could think up fewer.  But if all politicians were like Tester, I wouldn’t have to be preposterous.

I’ll go wash the dishes and then come back with more.

(No more list numbers.) Loathe as I may be to FORCE people to vote, one of the major problems in this small town is avoidance.  No one wants to put the extra effort into monitoring elections, esp since campaigns last so long, are often fake, and mean having to travel after supper.  Around here, around this time of year, that can actually endanger one’s life.  That’s specifically elections.  

Other meetings are also burdensome unless your ox has been gored and you’re angry.  OR if the purpose of gathering is sports.  We willingly send youngsters on long perilous road trips for the purpose of competition.  We urge them to exert themselves extremely enough to endanger their brains and joints.  We remember incredible amounts of data and anecdote and base the reputations of towns on the success of coaches who use dubious psychological means to win.  How do we harness all this for the greater good of the whole community instead of putting it on the backs of schools?  Is there money being made?  (A Heart Butte story was about a new school board who had run off the superintendent and gained access to the safe.  They found a shoe box of cash from game tickets.  Or was that Browning?)

Speaking of schools, we need to re-think the Prussian pseudo-scientific procrustean idea of ranks, grades, social hierarchy, that was devised to serve the industrial revolution by preparing children for cog-wheeling on the assembly line.  The industrial revolution is over and the children themselves left it decades ago, except in third world countries where circumstances are harshly authoritarian.

Even here, many have not understood what it is to be able to think in abstract concepts instead of pre-digested facts and givens.  Many have left the ideas of honesty, hard work, reliability, loyalty, and a lot of other things that seem dorky.  A bank cashier stole my VISA number to order car parts for her boyfriend.  A post office employee was just dismissed for stealing mail.  Various (usually female) clerks and treasurers have been convicted of stealing funds for their families, often shockingly large amounts.  

I call it the “clenching of America,” the idea that one’s loyalties are owed to smaller and smaller groups, down to just a single mom and her kids, and anything outside the handful is less important.  It is the result of never having quite enough, being blamed for that but offered no way out, and a growing sense that the world is collapsing and we may ALL end up walking with only a bedroll and water jug.  That’s not entirely unreal, but seems realer if you watch dystopic movies at bedtime or you live in fire or flood territories.

My next task this morning is to compose an overview of my eye symptoms and treatment so far because the clinic I’ve attended since the Seventies keeps losing its ophthalmologists.  I’m signed up with someone new in an independent practice.  The town of Great Falls — which counts medicine as a major part of the economy — is so rife with politics, competition, misrepresentation, arrogance and resentment that when I joke about it to the clerks and schedulers, they burst out laughing.  Bitterly.  The local newspaper dares not cover all this because so much of their revenue is hospital advertising.

In my back bedroom office the temp has just risen above sixty.  I watch the thermometer in order to be objective about how warm it is.  I'm finding it hard to be objective about anything.