Bourbon Old Fashioned

There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make excellent bourbon Old Fashioneds, and the other is to put together excellent nuclear attack mission folders for Naval aviators. Doing so taught me to never trust Russians and those who do not like Old Fashioneds. Decades of Naval service reading the Early Bird clipping service of news articles on DoD and National Security had taught me to distrust news media. Those were also the days when America’s Task Forces had bombs, missiles and evil intent — not studies, point papers and press conferences with faux masked men and women.

Watching and reading the plague news made me aware once again that the biggest and most impossible conflicts on earth were based on some form of this dialogue: “You are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid.” I wish they’d just drink a pitcher of good bourbon Old Fashioneds and try to look forward.

Life and the news during the plague worked to convince me that right was not necessarily right, but rather what the persons in charge, or those who felt they were in charge, said was right.

So, to my mind all the politicians on earth were idiots or Communists, and all of their decisions were either idiotic or Communistic. And when they were Communistic, they were also idiotic.

Given the undeniable role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) undeniable in spreading the plague worldwide, I remain to this day surprised by the lack of any consistent news media coverage pinning the rap on these Middle Kingdom communists, presumed communists, suspected communists, possible communists, highly unlikely communists, and the odd Chinese commie(s) who might be innocent. It just didn’t seem to be the American Way under which I had grown up during the first Cold War. This worldwide plague wasn’t any act of God. Its spread was an act of pure human fuck-you-ery. They kung-fu’d us in the face. Yeah, yeah, the CCP’d been a barking, snarling dog for a long time to us Western running dogs. But for a long while now, they’d been biting on and hitting us. Why we held on and put up with this biting and hitting remains a mystery to me, since it was common practice during more than half of the last century that when a person, political party or country turned into a dog and began to bite or hit the US, someone rose up to shy it off, if not kick the ever living shit out of it or them.

Somewhere there had to be a journalist or three who would question rather loudly, the fact that the American media, academia and China Hands had predicted the passing of the American century and the rising of the Chinese Commie century on no less than fifteen occasions between 1989 and 2019 — and quite sensationally unnoticed managed to get it wrong all fifteen times.

It seemed that all they wanted to do was end their stories with “And we all lived happily ever after” or “we’re all gonna die.”
—–

Upon reflection, here’re a few postmortem side thoughts
on the Chinese Commie and western media thread above

Maybe, none of us wants to see portents, omens, indicators and warnings of bad CCP intent no matter how concrete they were despite how much we enjoy our ghost stories and spooky films with their premonition moments. Do any of us really wanna see a big star rise in the East or a pillar of fire in the night? Peace, rationality, and routine are what we humans want and seek — not the multiple devils that exist for every god we profess to have.
There were bad omens in the winds, evil portents and legions of indicators and warnings that predicted the Chinese commies would do as they did. “Knowable knowns” is the term of art we used in DoD thirty plus years ago. Maybe they were just too scary to contemplate and thus were ignored like a colony of bats quivering in the dark hay loft of an abandoned barn.

Sure, it was easy to miss their soft fluttering, but how did we not smell, if not outright taste, their foulness in the night air? A sour, pungent, shitty taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cook-out and all mankind was going to be the barbecue.

At rock bottom the CCP are conveyors of filthy habits like spitting & nose picking, profane language, corrupt business practices and mass cruelties upon its peoples and the world that know no bounds of decency.

Maybe we are just too pampered and soft. We have forgotten what it was like to be a leader of the, not a, free world and seemingly had no particular urge to relearn it. FIGMO (fuck it, got my own) seems to be our new slogan.

The real plague here is, of course, the virus of Communism. It’s this that must be henceforth quarantined as we did in the past.

—–

I found myself after about the first two weeks of plague reporting, that broadcast and cable TV news, national magazines and big city newspapers had stopped reporting, according to the old-fashioned and easily defensible standpoint that if you didn’t have anything new to report, you said nothing. They just perseverated on and on and on. It was as if they had suffered traumatic brain injuries.

The local papers and TV station news broadcasts held out longer. If they had nothing new to say, they interviewed somebody who didn’t realize that he or she too had nothing new to say.

Even so, every night during the earlier stages of the plague I closed my eyes and felt perfectly convinced that I could accept passing away forever. My life had been not just satisfying but quite exciting — the entire journey — nothing lasts forever, except possibly general stupidity. And that we saw everyday 24/7 on cable TV news and in big city newspapers. It had become tiresome.

After a few months had passed I recalled one hot spring day during our back road wanderings — we had pulled off at a distant roadside garden shop out along Route 80 when I heard a stout 50-something women let loose a string of profanities as she watered the desiccated plants they had for sale. She was quite unaware that anyone had heard her. I was tempted to give her an admiring look. I had never heard a woman swear so much in such a short time — it was quite delightful to the ears of this foul-mouthed sailor who was on the lam.

I must say that our time in lockdown during the plague was so long that life seemed to have gone into overtime. After several periods with no results, it became much easier to take liberties with the rules that kept us cloistered.

Hanging around at home day after day for an indeterminate sentence quickly evolved into the ennui that would attend awaiting your 100th birthday party in the lounge of an old folks home as the senior resident — something to be avoided at all costs with all the near lifeless corpses awaiting their afternoon sweet treat in wingback chairs, the lame-o group songs, and the ill-tempered facility director with her bad tasting, pink-icing’d, angel food cake from a long out of date mix bought at the Dollar Store. It was mental moments like these that caused W and me to plan our irregular escapes for a high-speed afternoon on the lam.

We would do what we wanted, and considered that in general it was quite necessary to avoid the grumpiness of incarceration since we had the chance to do so,

Sometimes we rode on towards home in the twilight with the sun in the west flushing streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like purple blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise. We’d turn to watch as our colorful earth drained up into the sky at the edge of blackness as the top of the sun sank out of sight. Once it cleared the unseen rim, we sat quiet while speeding home to avoid the squat, pulsing and malevolent virus that closed in, behind and around us.

Our plague road trips were not rash undertakings. We were possessed by the notions of considered chance and risk as well as resolve to not let an indifferent and imposed fate become our preoccupation.

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