(Picture on top is of marchers yesterday in Your Nation’s Capitol. Lower left was last summer. Lower right is one taken of the hoax against a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia last month).

“Activists disrupted rush-hour traffic around the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday to demand congressional action on a host of liberal issues, including climate change, immigration, racial…”
– Washington Post, 07 December 2021

Sorry. Really sorry. The Socotra House Writer’s Section has an imperative that drives the production schedule. Normally, that requires Tuesday to be the production day for the weekly Weather Report, the little screed the Chairman likes to publish each week as a sort of incremental record on the decline and fall of the West. It is not as much of a leap as you might think for a gentle crowd that reflects the diversity of the American experience.

Melissa is unashamed to be smart and female. DeMille could play to the melanin content of his epidermal layer, but prefers to rely on his experience as a nuclear engineer. Splash and Loma were operators, specialists in carrying out sometimes improbable things like jamming other people’s electronic devices or causing large structures to collapse in plumes of concrete dust.

Rocket represents the class of people one turns to when in need of making large and fast machines perform to precision design specifications. That has become a characteristic of an oppressive society, but forgive us if we would prefer to have him driving the jet. My occasional expertise was not piloting things, but rather attempting to connect the story of how and why the machines were directed to perform the missions assigned to them by the people with the power to do so.

We are pretty much “OK” with that, even if the common hand signal that used to mean that now seems to mean something else, depending on which hand is used. Accordingly, the minutiae of Monday and Tuesday involves lining out the events of the week, measuring events against the dominant Narrative playing out all around us.

Wednesdays are the day we assemble the notes and one-liners to see if there is something to interpret, and either explain it or mark it as one of the continuing social mysteries.

We would normally be an unusual source of feminist outrage, although as a matter of courtesy, the unisex latrine prominently posts signs regarding the placement of seating devices in a suitable neutral position, and a prominent note declaring any testosterone-enhanced humans must take at least four decades off competitive athletic activities before they can announce a complete transference of their chromosomal structure. The former guy who took a season off from all-male competition to return to compete against estrogen-enhanced humans in a swimming event this weekend was a minor topic, since “she” beat them in the event by 38 seconds.

Melissa smiled, but refused to even begin to get into it. She characterizes it as a matter of social lunacy, and taking a brief poll, discovered the group agrees.

Which brought us around to the matter of “truth” as a general matter. Loma was late to the circle, since he got hung up on a news report regarding the intentional inflammation of a large Christmas Tree placed at Fox Circle in New York City. It had an alternate headline as well, not mentioning the network.

This would be the second anti-holiday attack of this season, and thankfully one that did not involve the intentional murder of children, dancing grandmothers and an old man. But still, the brief description of the incident included the age and sexual self-identification of a 49-year-old-male, allegedly from Brooklyn though apparently categorized as without a home. After a foot chase, he was apprehended in possession of a “lighter.” No allegations of ethnicity were included in the report.

Naturally, that prompted a brief discussion of the other Christmas attack which we are apparently not supposed to talk about. So we didn’t, even if it was a mass murder.

What did prompt discussion was the story about Tuesday in DC. We had noted that impending event on Monday, when reports circulated about an effort to shut down the Nation’s Capitol on Tuesday by blocking streets and highways for commuting bureaucrats. We were not completely sure who or why the protest was being conducted, only that a glance at the late afternoon reporting indicated nothing earth-shattering occurred. That had to wait to this morning. The Washington Post made the report the way owner Mr. Bezos thought it happened. The emphasis was on some of the important issues buried in the humongous Build Back Something or Other Bill, currently hanging in the United States Senate.

Since it may be the largest single bill to be decided in American history (and possibly the World’s) it has generated some modest discussion. A recurring theme has been that the current budgeting process in the U.S. has divorced itself from the traditional means of legislating. In the old system, large and ungainly bills such as “Defense” or “Agriculture” were discussed in public forums, with most provisions subject to debate and registered votes of the members of those committees, for or against. Thus, the Framers had intended representatives to be responsible for what they vote for. Today’s modern system causes everything in the Federal budget to be rolled up into a single gigantic bill (2,500 pages in the BBB) to be decided by an up-or-down vote. That reduces accountability to being either “in favor of,” or “opposed to” a functioning government with just a few thousand significant issues buried within a single bill. And it is based on five simple words used as justification for a vote of “yea” or “nay.”

It is plainly unconstitutional, but no one seems to give a rat’s buttocks about it. Then we got lost for about twenty minutes about some of the things in the bill. The hiring of 80,00 new Internal Revenue agents is just one of them. The idea that they are going to target the relatively few billionaires with another thousand agents apiece seems a little unlikely. Another provision is whether your car should be monitoring you every second you are in it.

Then, the law would mandate forwarding the details of your activities not only to the ignition system, but the police. That is the only aspect of the current defunding movement we would consider supporting. And the whole issue of what constitutes a Constitutionally acceptable use of the term “mandate” threatened to get out of control. Those are just two or three of the strange elements of the thousands that are in that bill. We note with concern that the words “some of it” or “hell, no” are five words not included in the legislative process. The matter of whether to include or exclude exclamation points occupied a few minutes before we unanimously voted to defer action.

Instead, Splash waved his tablet around with a prominent picture on it of males in identical khaki trousers carrying American flags. They wore tall socks, white masks and ballcaps. We did not dress in such compatible garb even when we wore uniforms. The story went that this group was the one protesting in DC. There were about a hundred of them. No reports of violence, even though they were all carrying the flag we served. Some were upside down, a demonstration which has a traditional meaning signifying “distress,” but which in the accounts was supposed to connote “disapproval.” Words are sort of screwy these days.

It was curious, considering the way the Washington Post claimed the day had gone, which was about some of the other issues in the gigantic piece of legislation. We were still on that matter- someone was yammering about free child-care and community college to help teach things that used to be accomplished in the old K-12 system. It would be worth discussion, but there are not enough minutes in the morning. Then Splash jabbed his finger on the screen of his device and produced another image. This one was from a summer demonstration, and a group of demonstrators who appeared to have been bused in from an institution of some sort. We all knew what sort of organization looks like that since we had been part of one.

There was a pause as the tablet was passed around. We thought the guys looked familiar. In fact, it could have been a picture of all of us in some earlier incarnation. But what was eerie about was the similarity between those two images and the one that popped up at the end of the Virginia electoral cycle last month. That one was a poor hoax, and DeMille passed it around on the screen from his phone. “Check it out. Same khakis and hats. Same tiki-torches as the big demonstration in Charlottesville. Complete fake.”

There was some laughter about the last one, since it was so amateurish. Of the five participants in that image, only three could plausibly be characterized as angry white men. Rocket observed cogently that the torches were not lit, and were possibly returned to the Home Depot store after the photo opportunity.

We laughed at that part, but the deadline for production was still looming. So we decided to go with something short, like “White Supremacy on Parade in Largely Ignored Protest.” We know, it is weak and had not a single reference to The Kids or Better Life for Everything costing absolutely nothing. Or Zero, as Rocket pointed out.

We agreed. How could you oppose a good deal like that? And the corollary, of course. Who the hell is making this stuff up? The ones in khakis or the ones in the black outfits? They seem to keep changing them, you know?

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com