OK, It’s Tuesday in The Big Week. It is pretty cool to be here in the Piedmont. The skies are a pale blue, with strands of pale cirrus clouds way up there, and evidence that humans have done the pre-flight inspection, loaded a cargo of high-value stuff and some assorted people, and are already hurtling at hundreds of mile an hour through the same thin air way up there.
The seasons are changing. We noted the change to the rich green that has surrounded us for months while puffing on tobacco products yesterday. They were labeled as dangerous but still legal, at least at the moment, and despite the apparent normality of skies and thundering jets, there is some very strange stuff going on.
For openers, it is a short week. Thursday is the end of the year, at least according to some other Congressional mischief done long ago. As Boomer Americans, we are accustomed to strange things popping up. In the last few weeks, the wise authorities in California have decided Sirhan Sirhan should be released from prison so as not to infringe on his rights. All he did was murder the front-runner in an old Presidential election. Yesterday, we heard that John Hinkley is going to be released from supervised confinement at his Mom’s house where he placed five years ago. He shot a serving President.
We are somehow expected to believe this is a justice system. It goes with the strange territory in which we live these days. The other stuff is just mind-boggling. The current President told us yesterday that the various bills in the Congress will not cost a penny, which would normally be enough to justify some sort of professional intervention. The Writer’s Section at Socotra House is befuddled. We had a suspicion we would see some strange stuff as we got closer to the end of the fiscal year, and we were right. Tomorrow at midnight we pass into a strange Neverland, one not governed by the same financial structures that have governed our national behavior for the last couple hundred years.
We still have product that needs to get out the door as a publishing concern, but since things are changing very ten or fifteen minutes, only social media accounts like Twitter are agile enough to keep track of the changes. We think that midnight will still happen tomorrow, since Congress has done nothing to alter the course of the sun or moon. We think it was considered, but unlike some of the other stuff, deemed too ambitious even for this Congress.
We went back to notes from the beginning of this turmoil. We thought the $1.2T bill was pretty large, considering it was following a couple Trillion thrown at the pandemic that might have been funded by taxpayer dollars. On top of that is another $3.5 Trillion to overhaul how our government works, and continue the profligate expansion of our national debt from around $28 Trillion at the moment to something like $45 Trillion by the time we see the hands on the clock stand upright tomorrow night.
You would think it might be worth having a chat about that, but instead we are rushing toward some strange amalgamation of crazy ideas that will be declared “law” before midnight on Wednesday. Some of us wanted to run a picture of Dana Perino, one of our favorite flat-screen commentators, and much more articulate than that cat picture above. She was the first media personality who said out loud what Splash, Loma, Rocket and DeMille have been muttering for days. “This is no way to run a government.”
Since we have several hoops to leap through in the next thirty or forty hours, we will not prejudge the wisdom of our rulers. They have told us it is all going to be fine. We will let you know how that goes tomorrow. But in the meantime, everything is fine and the grownups will have it all sorted out before anyone has to pay more for gas, food, or representative democracy. Oh, wait…
We told you it as going to be fun. And now it is.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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