This week has been a freak show.
It began with the latest COVID-19 figures, 180,000 fellow Americans dead and another 5,800,000 infected. If we lived in the 15th century, there would be men pulling carts up and down our streets, ring bells and shouting, “Bring out your dead.” Now we just stack them in refrigerated trailers to wait until they can be respectfully buried or cremated.
Then the Circus of the Dr. Caligari came to town. It was a fascist version of the Ring with all sorts of disgusting monsters crawling out of our screens and shitting in our minds. Kudlow the Klown talked about the pandemic in the past-tense. There may be 250,000 dead by the end of the year. There is past-tense and there is, passed. Choruses of sycophants, wet brown noses held high, told us how they had seen a kindly, fatherly, Trump show interest in their woes. The Great Leader that no one else sees. “Believe us,” they croon with the same mouths that lied to us for years. The economy is great, if you own the right stock, and aren’t one of the millions who have lost their jobs, or businesses, or homes, or health insurance, or lives from despair.
I could only take so much of the Orwellian doublespeak before I decided it was more fun to drive nails into my forehead.
Then there was the riot downtown. A man suspected of killing someone in a parking garage, was cornered by the police on a crowded street. The man pulled his gun, put it up under his chin and pulled the trigger. People nearby thought the police had just shot another black man. The rumor spread like a prairie fire and soon angry young people were raising hell, starting fires and looting. The police in a unique move, released video within 90 minutes that clearly showed that it was suicide. City and Black community leaders quickly began correcting the misinformation, an independent news reporter who had first erroneously reported a police shooting quickly retracted and corrected his story. These actions kept many people from coming downtown and demonstrating. But for the people downtown, it was too late, rage and opportunism were out of control.
The fascists promptly used Minneapolis, the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, and unrest across the US to frighten the white suburbs. Never mind that a 17 year old right-wing terrorist went to Kenosha to join other vigilantes and then shot and killed 2 people and wounded a third. Don’t give a thought to the fact that the Kenosha police welcomed the vigilantes and actually said, “We’re glad you’re here.” I wonder why black Americans are enraged and react quickly
By the end of last night’s Nuremberg Rally I felt unclean. A shower didn’t help. The pollution was in my head. I needed a mind douche.
That’s what the Bumble Bee is all about. It’s image is cleansing. Something beautiful that graced the flower garden behind my garage. My neighbor Glenn is the ultimate gardener. Over the last few years he has been planting flowers in the foot-wide right of way between the garages and the alley. It’s his flowers that attract the bees and butterflies. He is slowly transforming our end of the alley into a strip of paradise.
Photo: Les Phillips, CC BY-SA 4.0