Reflections on the long, very hot summer of 2022

If there’s any justice in the world, Joe Manchin will fry in hell. The problem is, the rest of us will, too. We already are.

It’s so hot in Texas that the word has lost meaning. We need a new word for these temperatures. Hottissimo. Hyperthermic. It’s just hotticulous down here.

It’s so hot in Texas that people are lighting their fireplaces just to cool off a little.

It’s so hot in Texas that the AC compressors have stopped trying. They just smirk and say, “As if…”

Maybe the hotticulous heat this summer will actually change some reactionary minds about climate change.

As if…

Donald Trump has successfully created a cult of personality around himself. What baffles me is how he created a cult, with that personality. It’s like inviting someone to your home who makes insulting remarks about your wife, leaves a big yellow puddle on your bathroom floor, slips a piece of your silverware up his sleeve, and won’t let anyone else get a word in. And as he leaves you give him a big hug and ask him how soon he can come back.

I don’t really understand the resentment that’s piling up against Joe Biden. The last year and a half of sanity have felt pretty soothing to me. I could definitely use another six and a half of that. Compared to another four years of unrelenting dread and disgust…no contest, inflation smation.

Oh, you don’t like high gas prices? Then dump your F-150 and get a Yaris.

Every time there’s a massacre of innocent people here in Texas, our state’s leaders shed crocodile tears and shake their heads over “mental health.” Well, the Uvalde killer was nicknamed “school shooter” by his classmates and that apparently didn’t lead any gun dealer to think he wasn’t mentally stable enough to buy an assault rifle.

And may I say, as an actual Texan, if the plan is to reduce mass shootings in Texas by curing the mental illnesses of Texans…well Sisyphus has a cushy job in comparison…

Idea for a new law: Whenever a violent crime is committed with a gun, then the last person to take money for that gun shares legal responsibility, prison time, and/or a lethal injection with the shooter, no questions asked, legal gun purchase or not. Whether it’s the guy at the register of Don’s Sporting Goods, Gary at the “gun show,” the shooter’s cousin Floyd, or the guy who runs the Guns’N’More website. Maybe that would make Gun Show Gary stop and think about whether or not to sell the pale mumbling  teenager in army boots an AK.

As if.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITORS LEAVE MESSAGES ON THE STREETS OF DENTON, TEXAS

It is an incontrovertible fact that visitors from outer space have left messages for the human race, written in ribbons of tar on the streets of Denton, Texas. They were never meant to be secret and are not encoded. They are simply written in a language we do not comprehend.

Until now. With the help of Bletchley Park, the NSA, and that guy with mental health issues who hangs out on the corner of Fry St. and Oak, we have translated these messages for the benefit of you, humankind. As always, you are welcome!

BETELGEUSE BOYZ RULE!!

Betty Ann Blumenhagen does it with non-carbon-based lifeforms!

300 Million Americans to choose from, and you make Donald Trump your leader? Please explain, really, I want to understand!

We were all set to make an offer on your planet til we saw the inspection report. We’ll talk after you get the A/C fixed

YOUR WORLD WILL END ON MARCH 10, YEAR [undecipherable]

Best Beef Jerky in the Universe! Straight Ahead 50 Million Light Years, Then Left 1/2 Mile

BLEEZUS SAVES

DOES ADVERTISING WORK? JUST DID!

just fix the damn street

HELP WANTED

Leery of a national draft for the Ukraine war, the Kremlin is offering cash bonuses and employing strong arm tactics.—”Desperate for Recruits, Russia Launches a ‘Stealth Mobilization’,” New York Times July 10 2022

ENTRY LEVEL CANNON FODDER—No experience needed, we’ll train you! Positive attitude and willingness to stand in front of professional soldiers a must!

CALLING ALL CRIMINALS—THUGS WANTED for immediate deployment. Do you love to make innocent civilians suffer? Let your inner monster out—and get paid for it! Walk out of prison today…psychotic tendencies welcome!

WARM BODIES NEEDED NOW—report now to Field Hospital 441, Donbas, Ukraine. No experience required! 1000 ruble signing bonus for O-Negatives!

BURIAL TECHNICIAN LEVEL I TO START IMMEDIATELY—If you can dig a hole we need you!

WAR CORRESPONDENT WANTED—Work from the comfort of your home! Get paid to sign your name–we’ll supply the content!

BIG-RIG DRIVERS NEEDED! Top pay to probe for road mines with Soviet-issue supply trucks! Report immediately and don’t tell mom and dad!

Potential Threat to the Tranquility of the State? There’s an App for That!

Across China, the police are buying technology that harnesses vast surveillance data to predict crime and protest before they happen. The systems and software are targeting people whose behavior or characteristics are suspicious in the eyes of an algorithm and the Chinese authorities, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.–“How China is Policing the Future,” The New York Times, June 25, 2022

Here in the Garden, we’re as appalled as anyone about how the Chinese government is leveraging technology such as big data, CCTV cameras, smart phone technology, facial recognition, and GPS tracking to monitor, control, and suppress its own population. But having once been in the computer programming game ourselves, we have to wonder what is going through the minds of the bright young things of China’s technocracy who are bringing this all about. We imagine here how the conversation might have started…

PLACE: THE PEOPLE’S COOPERATIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT CENTER FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF A HAPPY TRANQUIL SOCIETY, SOMEWHERE IN BEIJING

COMRADE DARRYL: Hey Comrade Duane, can I run something by you…

COMRADE DUANE: [furiously thumbing his smartphone]: one sec dude, I’m just about to level up in Smash American Hegemony in the South Pacific…awesome, I just got like a zillion points for nuking Guam! What up, bro?

COMRADE DARRYL: Well you know how half of us here in China are loyal citizens of the People’s Republic, and the other half are like security police to make sure that the first half stays that way…

COMRADE DUANE: Yeah, and it totally sucks!

COMRADE DARRYL: Right?

COMRADE DUANE: It’s like you can’t take a piss behind a bush without a cop popping up and arresting you…not that I would ever, outside of a designated People’s Facility for the Release of Bodily…

COMRADE DARRYL: No, of course not! Me neither! But what I mean is it’s so freaking labor intensive! Hey, remember that app we made a couple years ago to track every citizen’s COVID status?

COMRADE DUANE: You mean that one that made it such a pain in the ass to go anywhere or do anything if you hadn’t been vaccinated?

COMRADE DARRYL: Right!

COMRADE DUANE: Or had tested positive within the last two weeks?

COMRADE DARRYL: That’s the one!

COMRADE DUANE: Or lived in the same building as someone who had tested positive or hadn’t been vaccinated!

COMRADE DARRYL: Exactly!

COMRADE DUANE: Or was tracked on GPS to be within one kilometer of anyone who…

COMRADE DARRYL: Yeah dude, you don’t have to like repeat the whole freaking algorithm. So what if we like adapt that algorithm and marry it to the database of dissidents, criminals, and everyone who’s ever said anything that implies that Premier Hsi is a doo-doo head?

COMRADE DUANE: You mean so we can help criminals who’ve caught COVID?

COMRADE DARRYL: No, dummy, so we can track their movements anywhere in the country in real time!

COMRADE DUANE: Hey, yeah! And we can use it to keep them from getting on the subway or applying for a job or entering a restaurant or…

COMRADE DARRYL: That would be so totally cool! That would be so funny if some dude’s taking his girlfriend to have some crispy Szechuan fish…

COMRADE DUANE: God, I love crispy Szechuan fish!

COMRADE DARRYL: And when they scan his phone it goes, like, “WAAAH! DENIED! CAUSE YOU COMPLAINED TO THE PEOPLE’S GLORIOUS HOUSING AUTHORITY THREE YEARS AGO ABOUT YOUR TOILET BACKING UP INSTEAD OF SLIPPING A FEW YUAN TO THE SUPER LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!”

COMRADE DUANE: Ha ha! Right! And I was thinking, ok, what if…now this might sound crazy oppressive…

COMRADE DARRYL: No, go on, dude! Automated faceless oppression rocks!

COMRADE DUANE: Well what if we stole the points system from a gaming app and applied it…

COMRADE DARRYL: So if you’re caught participating in a demonstration you get dinged!

COMRADE DUANE: Yeah…but if you turn someone in for participating you earn points…

COMRADE DARRYL: Plus maybe free large fries!

COMRADE DUANE: And a large Coke, if they’re like a journalist! And everyone would start out at zero…

COMRADE DARRYL: Except Uighurs who start out at minus 1000…

COMRADE DUANE: Which would be so mean! But yeah! So basically we’re crowd-sourcing the terror state!

COMRADE DARRYL: And then we could tie in the whole thing to all the CCTV cameras in in the country!

COMRADE DUANE: Along with the facial recognition technology!

COMRADE DARRYL: Right! Call it the paperless police state! And then if the authorities need to, they could punch in someone’s ID and follow them online…

COMRADE DUANE: Yeah…like for example that totally hot babe who goes shopping at the fish market every Tuesday…

COMRADE DARRYL: You mean the one who lives on Hero Mao Avenue Section C Block 11 Building 5, 3rd floor north hallway number 12…

COMRADE DUANE: Dude, she is so hot! No, I mean the one who lives on Red Victory Boulevard Southwest Section F…

COMRADE DARRYL: Oh, right right right, the one with the awesome…

COMRADE DUANE: So we could get an alert whenever she’s going somewhere…

COMRADE DARRYL:  And follow her on camera even when she goes into a People’s Designated Facility…

COMRADE DUANE: As a theoretical example of what the technology is capable of only! Because we would never…

COMRADE DARRYL: No, we fully respect the upright loyal sister comrades of the People’s…

COMRADE DUANE: We sure do!

COMRADE DARRYL: Funding won’t be a problem…I bet even those limp old geezers on the Central Committee will get a chubbie when they hear about this…

COMRADE DUANE: Dude, I just have one problem with this…do you think a system like this might ever be misused?

COMRADE DARRYL: You mean like, to harass good loyal citizens who have legitimate concerns about the state?

COMRADE DUANE: Right! Or that it might be abused by those who just want to consolidate their own power and quash their enemies?

COMRADE DARRYL: Or to more efficiently keep minorities out of decent jobs, housing and education?

COMRADE DUANE: Yeah, I guess that would never happen. [phone buzzes]. Wait, I’m getting a message. The police are on the way, dude…someone in our building just called the Central Committee “a bunch of limp old geezers!”

On Taiwan

This is not an objective commentary: I love Taiwan, the place and the people. I am connected to it by family (through marriage), and I’ve visited it many times over the past 35-odd years. I could sing the glories of its natural beauty, its street markets, its food, its jungle-covered mountains and spectacular shorelines, as well as its problems. But I want to deal with one important question here: is Taiwan worth America fighting for?

To answer that question, we have to ask others: Is Taiwan a democracy? If it is, does that justify sacrificing American lives and expending American resources on protecting a small far-away country, at the risk of starting an all-out war with a very big far-away country?

Is Taiwan a democracy? Yes. Regular presidential elections have been held since 1996, and they are authentic elections—power has changed hands more than once between what had been the ruling party since 1949 (KMT) and the main opposition party (DPP). The current president belongs to the DPP.

And free speech is alive and well on the island. People in Taiwan (and Taiwanese abroad) have strong opinions all over the political spectrum, and enjoy espousing them openly, without any fear of reprisals from the state. I know that because I have personally been the object of much espousal.

Bookstores and convenience stores offer a wide variety of Chinese and English-language magazines and newspapers, published locally as well as imported, that are openly supportive or critical of Taiwan’s government (whichever political flavor it may be at the time) as well as of China. (Though no one apart from a Chinese troll or two expresses any desire to hand over Taiwan’s sovereignty to Beijing.)

And no one should doubt what would happen to that democracy and free speech if Taiwan is taken over by mainland China. Hong Kong is the example: sham elections of Beijing-approved candidates, journalists silenced or disappeared, demonstrations brutally repressed, independent media shut down. And that’s not to mention what has happened in Tibet, Xinjiang, and on Tiananmen Square, and to dissenting artists, journalists, and thinkers.

But does all that add up to a reason for putting American necks and resources on the line, if (God forbid) China makes a serious military move across the Straits of Taiwan?

I think it does, and not for any reasons of economic or security-related self-interest. I never believed in going to war for oil, or for that matter, microchips. And I don’t think China poses a serious military threat to the United States.

I take it to be self-evident that when a totalitarian state tries to take over a free one, that is an evil thing, and that if the United States has the ability to prevent evil with reasonable risk to itself, it should do so.

But what is a reasonable risk? That of course is open to interpretation and opinion. We should supply Taiwan with as much weaponry as Taiwan can use to stop or, more optimistically, pre-empt a Chinese invasion.

American forces? That’s a much harder question. I don’t think we should deploy ground forces in Taiwan. In cases like this I mentally apply my “grieving mother” test. I believe in defending Taiwan in the name of freedom. But could I look into a grieving American mother’s face and tell her without blushing why her son or daughter had to die to keep China out of Taiwan? I don’t think so.

But I believe we can and should use American naval and air forces to keep the People’s Liberation Army from crossing the Straits of Taiwan, even though that would put our sailors and pilots at risk.

I don’t serve in the military, and never have. So I am very conscious of how easy it is to send other people to die for a grand cause. But that’s no excuse for avoiding hard questions such as this one.

China claims (and millions of Chinese sincerely believe) that Taiwan “belongs” to China. But no historical argument changes the fact that China is a police state and Taiwan is free. A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would be a latter-day parallel to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, or Japan’s invasion of China. We can make China think twice about destroying Taiwan, and if necessary, we can help Taiwan to stay free. And because we can, we should.

On Abortion

Here goes the post that will lose me half of my followers. Plus the other half.

The issue of abortion rights is not like the other big issues of our day. If you tell me you believe that climate change is a hoax, or that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or that subsidized, single-payer healthcare is tantamount to Bolshevism, or that discrimination against Black people ended sometime in the 1960’s, I can look at you with a straight face and tell you that you must be ill-informed, stupid, or lying. But if you tell me that a microscopic fertilized egg is a human being, deserving of rights equal to those of its mother under the U.S. constitution, all I can tell you is that I disagree.

I don’t know when life begins, or, to put it another way, what exactly constitutes a human life. I don’t think it’s just a complete set of chromosomes. I don’t think a beating heart is enough, any more than a functioning liver would be. A functioning brain, perhaps. But then we have to decide what defines a meaningfully functioning brain.

I don’t know when life begins. No one knows. It’s a matter of opinion. Science can’t tell us. It can only give us partial information about what functions develop at what stage in the womb.

Looking at the issue from another direction, some of the most intelligent and well-intentioned people I know sincerely believe that abortion at any time after conception is murder.

Of course, here in the great and sovereign state of Texas, there is no end of disingenuous, hypocritical “pro-life” advocates who simply use the issue to gain votes, who cynically claim that our ever more restrictive laws are in the interest of the health of the mother(!), who want to abolish abortion yet are dead set against actually teaching our schoolchildren how sex actually works and how to avoid pregnancy (except perhaps through celibacy).

These types make my blood boil, but I cannot get around the fact that there are also smart, compassionate people of both genders who sincerely believe that abortion is immoral.

I don’t know when life begins, so for myself (a male, to be clear), I hold that the decision rightfully belongs to the indisputably human bearer of the fetus, the one who, let’s be honest, will likely bear almost all of the burden of raising a child. For what little it’s worth, I will say it and write it and blog it and vote it. But I won’t demonize people who disagree in good faith. If, on the other hand, you’re one of those [expletive]s who claim that Donald Trump won the election….

On Contessa Lara, Evelina Cattermole

Unkown photographer – from: Maria Borgese, La contessa Lara : una vita di passione e di poesia nell’Ottocento italiano, 1930

I don’t know a lot about Evelina Cattermole, but if I had another lifetime and a generous research grant I might devote it to writing her biography. “Dramatic” doesn’t begin to describe the life of this gifted, beautiful woman. The basic elements are these:*

She was born in Florence in 1849 to a musician mother and Scottish professor of English. Her first collection of poetry was published when she was 18. She was welcomed in the home of the poet Laura Beatrice Olive, wife of Pasquale Mancini, the eighth Marquis of Fusignano, where she fell in love with the marquis’ son Francesco, an army lieutenant. She married him at age 22, and they settled down in Milan. There she frequented the salons of leading writers and thinkers of the day, while her husband demonstrated a taste for gambling and consorting with actresses.

She took a lover, and the affair was eventually betrayed to the husband by a servant. Francesco challenged the young man to a duel and killed him. After being acquitted for murder (on the pretext of defending his honor), he divorced Evelina and evicted her from their home. Her own family would not take her in (her mother had died, and her father, who had remarried, was scandalized by his daughter’s affair). She returned to Milan briefly to attend her lover’s funeral, which she witnessed from a distance, trying to remain unseen.

She moved around Europe and settled in Rome, where she gradually found critical success as a poetess, short story writer, novelist and editor, writing under the pen name “Contessa Lara.” She had affairs of varying duration. One of these, with a young painter with more financial need than talent, turned out to be fatal. When she tried to end their relationship, he turned abusive and violent. A male friend of hers gave her a pistol to defend herself with, and it was with this pistol that her ex-lover shot her. After several agonizing hours (and her lover was apparently in no hurry to get a doctor) she died; the ex, who had shot himself, survived. Before she died, she cried out to witnesses that she had been killed “soltanto per interesse”—only for money. She knew her killer might get off the hook if he could paint his crime purely as one of passion. (He didn’t entirely escape punishment, being eventually sentenced to a jail term of 11 years and 8 months.) As if all that wasn’t enough, funds collected for her burial vanished, and she was buried in a common grave.

As a literary translator, I am interested more in her artistic creations than in her fascinating life. But generally I don’t translate poetry, and I found her semi-autobiographical novel L’innamorata (Woman in Love) interesting but uninspiring.

She wrote short stories that were published in journals and eventually collected into anthologies. They are hard to find today, but one story of hers was included in an anthology of 19th-century Italian short stories, Novelle italiane, L’ottocento, edited by Gilberto Finzi and published by Garzanti Press in 1985. That story—”Il vezzo di corallo” (“The Coral Necklace”) was included in an anthology of stories by 19th century Italian women, translated into English, titled Writing to Delight (University of Toronto Press, 2006).

I haven’t read that, because after reading the marvelous story in Italian, I wanted to write my own translation without being influenced. That has been graciously published by my brother, the novelist Jonathan Eaton, in his online fiction blog Corylus Press. You can read it here, and I hope you enjoy it. And I hope that Evelina, wherever she is, approves.

*Full disclosure: everything I know about Cattermole’s life comes from the Italian Wikipedia article about her, and a brief prefatory biography provided by Gilberto Finzi in Novelle italiane, L’ottocento.

Greenlight This: Five Movie Proposals for a Putin Biopic

Jailing Private Yuri—when the armored vehicle carrying three brothers is blown up on its way to de-Nazify Kyiv, President Putin organizes a special task force to find the surviving brother and make sure he keeps his damn mouth shut

Citizen Putin—pretty much like Citizen Kane, except with poisoned doorknobs and radioactive tea

Gone with the Oblast—when the blissful era of show trials, labor camps and forced collectivization comes to an end, certain people throw a major hissy fit

Richard III on Nevsky Prospekt—Al Pacino plays Vladimir Putin as Shakespeare’s Richard III, complete with happy ending

Psycho—an American women’s basketball star checks into a creepy Moscow motel whose owner has some kind of Mother Russia complex

On “Servant of the People”

By 1+1 – https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/942397/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60575960

I’ve started watching the Ukrainian sitcom Servant of the People, available on Netflix, and it’s a funny, surreal, and horrifying experience.

The premise of the show is this: a high-school student surreptitiously records a video of his history teacher, Vasily Goloborodko, as he rants to a colleague about the corrupt Ukrainian election system, its mediocre candidates, and the subservient populace that lets it continue. The video goes viral. The teacher’s students, without letting him know, start a GoFundMe page to pay for his candidacy. At the same time, the power brokers, who customarily collude behind the scenes to fix the election, decide on a whim to actually let the election play out, rather than wasting money on sham campaigns. As a result, the thirty-something schoolteacher literally wakes up one morning to find out that he’s been elected president of his country.

It’s pretty funny. Much of the humor (of the first two episodes at least) derives from all the privileges the new president and his family are suddenly confronted with—the kind of privileges they claimed to detest before. For example, when Goloborodko is taken (by presidential motorcade) to a branch bank to make the monthly payment on the loan he took out to pay for a microwave oven, the teller cheerfully informs him that his debt has been suddenly wiped clean…he just happened to be the winner of a promotional contest! Goloborodko’s father starts getting phone calls from long-lost friends, and proudly promises cabinet positions for all of them. The rundown public tenement where Goloborodko, his parents and his niece all share a cramped apartment suddenly gets a new paint job and landscaping. Etcetera. It’s evident that the arc of the story will be largely occupied with how Goloborodko comes to grips with all the interests trying to pressure him, and whether he can retain his integrity.

It’s a surreal experience, because the actor who plays the schoolteacher is one Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who is now in fact the president of the Ukraine. Because President Zelensky’s face has become so familiar, it’s a struggle to watch the show—which originally aired from 2015 to 2019—without feeling as if you are actually watching the president of the Ukraine, who for some reason decided to act in a TV show as a schoolteacher who becomes president.

But there is a vaguely sickening aspect to the experience of watching this show. Why?

The show functions partly as a social and political satire, mocking the corrupt, self-serving and hypocritical aspects of Ukrainian society. But it is not a dark comedy. Its tone is fundamentally cheerful and optimistic. In the opening credits, Goloborodko bicycles to work in the presidential palace in the golden morning sunlight of Kyiv, along clean, spacious boulevards and past green, blossoming parks. The future of the country, as represented by the good-natured students in his history class, looks bright. The country’s real power brokers, represented by three meaty, elderly men in suits, who always seem to be sharing cocktails or a lavish meal, their faces obscured, are still in control, but you have the feeling that Goloborodko will eventually be more than a match for them.

The problem is of course that since February of this year, reality has turned out so much worse for the people and country of the Ukraine than anyone could have imagined during the production of this show. You can’t help but wonder who, among the actors of the show, are still in the country. Are they all still alive? Are the gleaming towers and baroque palaces that Goloborodko bicycles past still intact, or are they in flames? The real Ukraine may have gotten its uncorrupted, everyman president, but that did nothing to stop Russian bombs and artillery shells from turning the country into a deadly nightmare. This TV show about corruption and hypocrisy now seems…terribly innocent. It’s like watching an old home video someone made of an impossibly cute kindergarten play, knowing in retrospect that the happy children in it will later be sexually abused. It feels a little wrong to take pleasure in watching Servant of the People, knowing what is happening now to that servant and those people. But I’m going to keep watching it. And rooting for its actors and their countrymen.

We try to find something positive to say, and think, and feel, here in the Garden. In this case, here it is: this show is more evidence that the Ukraine is a country worth saving—a country in which a comedy about its own corrupt government thrived for three seasons and 51 episodes, and ended up by arguably making its own fantasy a reality. It’s hard to imagine such a project lasting beyond the pilot episode in today’s Mother Russia.

Texas’ AG: Follow My Cruel, Stupid Orders, Unless It Makes Me Look Cruel And Stupid

As we have written before, the Great and Sovereign State of Texas, a place we love and call our home, is a scary, stupid state. It is especially so around this time of year, when primary elections take place.

You see, no Democrat has won any statewide office in Texas since 1994. In such a safely Republican state, the general election is irrelevant. What matters is which Republican candidate wins the primary, and our cynical state leaders have decided that the way to win a primary here is to be more reactionary, more macho, and in many ways more cruel towards vulnerable people than their opponent. And my fellow Texans have rewarded this strategy with electoral victories.

What this means in practice is that our unimaginative leaders search for ever more ways to make more guns available to more people to carry in more places with fewer restrictions than ever before; find new ways to make life more difficult for women who want to get an abortion, by twisting and torturing the meaning of the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings to the breaking point; conduct witch-hunts on books held in school libraries; send an otherwise law-abiding ex-convict to a lengthy prison stay for the crime of casting her vote; threaten to revoke tenure for public university professors who want to discuss the possibility that one’s quality of life in these United States is affected by the color of their skin; make the act of voting more difficult and complicated for any demographic perceived to vote Democratic; use my tax dollars to file lawsuit after lawsuit against the federal government…and the list goes on.

Another recent example of cruel political cynicism was foisted upon us by our state’s top cop, Attorney General Dan Patrick, who wants to convict parents who support their child’s sexual identification of child abuse.

Last year, the state legislature tried and failed to pass a law defining medical care such as hormone therapy for minors as child abuse.*

But who needs a law? Patrick simply issued an official opinion that such medical care constitutes child abuse. That was all our governor, Greg Abbott, needed to hear. He directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of children receiving such care for child abuse.

And wouldn’t you know it…there is at least one good public servant who actually works for the department—a child-abuse investigator—who has provided “gender-affirming care” for her daughter. She made the mistake of asking her boss about Abbott’s ruling and how it might affect her and her family.

According the Austin-American Statesman, “Within hours of making the inquiry[…]the employee was placed on leave, and a child-abuse investigator came to her home the next day to determine if her daughter had been abused[…].”

The woman filed suit, and judge issued a temporary restraining order against the state, stopping its child-abuse investigation of her. True to form, Patrick appealed that ruling.

In his appeal, Patrick–the man of a thousand lawsuits against the U.S. government–complained that the woman was “self-reporting” child abuse in order to “gin up” a test case.

In other words (Patrick is saying), the woman was only complying with his legal opinion, potentially losing her job, her daughter, and going to jail as a child-abuser, just in order to expose Patrick’s ruling as stupid and cruel. Some “gin up!”

None of which suggested to Patrick that he actually revise his legal opinion, or drop the investigation against her, but rather that it be allowed to proceed…without her pesky lawsuit.

So to all you lawbreakers in Texas: go and ahead and turn yourselves in…unless it makes our Attorney General look stupid and cruel. We can’t have that!

_______________________________________________________________________

 *For the basic facts behind this case I rely on the article in the March 10 2022 Austin-American Statesman, “Court sides with trans teen’s family”

Texas, You Missed One

I will not stand by and let looney [sic] Marxist UT [University of Texas] professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory.—Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick via Twitter, February 16, 2022

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!—Karl Marx

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.—Matthew 5:5

Dear Mr. Patrick,

Thank you for doing your best to protect our children from those loony Marxist professors who infest our state’s flagship public university. But I have to call your attention to a frightening example of radical religious teaching that has been allowed to spread like a disease all across our state. (Like a phony, made-up disease, I mean.)

It all comes from a horrid little book they call “the Bible.” Especially Part 2, which is all about a radical freedom fighter named “Jesus” who wants to destroy our traditional way of life. For example, it says “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth!!” And later on in the same part it says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God!!” Evidently this “Jesus” is just code for Karl Marx…he hates rich people! And you should see how he feels about the banking industry!

And you won’t believe what this Bible says about gun control. It talks about God bringing peace to the earth by persuading people to turn their swords into plowshares. When obviously the way to preserve peace is to make sure all law-abiding citizens get to keep their swords! And Glocks and AKs! And even if they’re not law-abiding but at least white!

I can’t believe that among all the hundreds of books that our state legislature wants to ban from public schools, they missed this one! It’s tons worse than Catcher in the Rye!

And don’t even get me started on Part 1, which is nothing but sex and nudity!

But don’t take my word on it…try reading it yourself!

Though if it’s all true…we’re in big trouble!

A Shortlist of Shmucks: Suggestions for Donald Trump’s Next Running Mate

Editor’s note: It has recently come to our attention that Donald Trump will need to select a new running mate in his crusade to restore his crown in 2024, since his previous VP turned traitor and refused to overturn Joe Biden’s election. In our never-ending struggle to aid this great nation, we propose vice-presidential candidates for our former and future president who would help his re-election by attracting votes, and who bring proven ability to the table, along with reasons for and against the candidacy of each. As usual, you are welcome!

Vladimir Putin

Pro: Highly skilled in altering constitutions to eliminate term limits and liquidating pesky journalists and protesters

Con: Divorce court will decide who gets to keep nukes in 2028

Lauren Boebert

Pro: Appeals to the gun-carrying idiot demographic

Con: An ever-present danger to herself and anyone within approximately 12 hundred meters

Buffalo Man

Pro: High entertainment value

Con: Currently unavailable

Satan

Pro: Darling of the Christian Evangelical crowd

Con: Might try to hog the spotlight

A Rock

Pro: Won’t ask any questions or raise any objections

Con: Can’t overturn an election

Louie Gohmert

Pro: Like a rock, except would overturn election

Con: If anything happens to the POTUS, would become president

Andrew Cuomo

Pro: Swingin’ wing man on Air Force One!

Con: May possibly still retain a shred of integrity, you never know

Kim Jong-Un

Pro: Will raise level of civility in the administration

Con: Will have to be kept away from grownups’ things, like ICBMs

Me

Pro: Could use the bread

Con: Ok at weddings if there’s booze but hates funerals