So, the Saturday Zoom call got squashed by the ice storm out in Pac NORWEST. We rescheduled for Sunday, eager to talk about what happened on the Hill, but it turned out to be not much.

They tried to impeach the former President again, or they actually did impeach him- again- and he was acquitted. Again. “Two for three,” grumbled one of the call participants. “They only overthrew him once.”

There was more, naturally. One was the matter of the 5,000 troops who are going to stay to protect the men and women we elected in the whole constitutional thing. That is presumably to protect them from their constituents. But that is how the conversation went. Some of us are still mildly bemused by the whole thing- the “insurrection” conducted by alleged domestic terrorists, not like the mostly peaceful demonstrators who burned a dozen cities over the summer.

The whole thing was more than a little surreal, since the big Elephant in the call is something we are not supposed to talk about. The facts are pretty much out there, since doing something as big as what they did is now prohibited speech.

We used to have a fairly limited view of what things like that were. Our pal Arrias talks about First Amendment protections that are bestowed not by a fact-checker at the New York Times but by God, him-or-herself. Or maybe that is just another thing like shouting “Fire!” In a crowded theater. Free speech was a pretty big deal, and everyone supports it except for the speech used by people we disagree with. So, the fix was easy. We didn’t amend the Constitution. We invented a new standard for stuff none of us wants to hear. We call it “hate speech” or “disinformation” and that is a lot easier since we don’t have to prove anything. We just use it against people we hate, so the term is perfect.

No one on the call was quite sure what the point of the impeachment was. One guy growled that the dangerous violent right wing domestic terrorists from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were all FBI informants, and thus run by America’s new Police State. There was some talk about the CIA messing around with domestic matters, since one of the founding precepts of the Agency was that was a no-no for a taxpayer funded organization. But we did agree that it seemed curious that the FBI and the boys and girls from Langley were in the middle of everything that has gone on for the last decade or two. Someone mentioned Jim Comey, who decided he had a personal role in former Secretary Clinton’s election campaign, or his successor Mr. Wray, who has been noticeable by his absence on television since his elevation.

I don’t know if the guy who growled was sober or not. He certainly seemed to be agitated. You know the kind. He refuses to wear a mask in his house when he is on a call with other more responsible citizens. He thinks the Government is hyping up a nasty flu season for some crazy reason, like overthrowing the Government. Why the government would be overthrowing itself left us all a little confused, but we did come to a sense of general agreement. We are comfortable with emergency government, since don’t have to talk about what is going to happen next since we don’t know. We have agreed we will support whatever wild ass stuff they come up with. The drunk claimed that boys were girls, or could be with the right determination. We all agreed that just made sense. There was a casual reference to the new legislation to abridge one or two of the Amendments that did provoke some discussion. The drunk said that there was a perfectly straightforward way to change the Constitution, and the procedure was in the document itself. It is fairly straightforward. Congress does something or other, then all of us out here get to vote for other people who get to vote on it, and bad things can be eliminated.

That was as much as our lawyer could take. His position was that the process of amending things was cumbersome and took too long. It was easier to just go around it, and we all got what we wanted, even if we didn’t want it.

You can tell it wasn’t the best call. People seemed unfocused and unable to concentrate. Finally having enough, I invented an excuse to get off the call- it is Valentine’s Day, after all, and theoretically I should be doing something in keeping with the spirit of the day. It started around A.D. 270— oops, sorry, I forgot we are not supposed to say “Anno Domini” anymore. Some claim the early Christian Church decided to place the St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of what the Romans called The Lupercalia. That was a fun one, from what I hear. It was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture. Unlike Valentine’s Day, though, Lupercalia was a bloody, violent and sexually-charged celebration awash with animal sacrifice, random matchmaking and coupling in the hopes of warding off evil spirits and infertility.

That seems actually to be just what we needed on the Zoom call, but like most good ideas these days, it was too late. I am hoping you did the right thing this year. We are going to be masked up for a while, but we thought maybe we adapt from what is common practice now. Two masked, one for free.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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