The other day I received in the mail an envelope that encouraged me to claim this SPECIAL OFFER WITHIN 10 DAYS. Normally I just toss these sorts of things straight into the trash, since they are never anything I am interested in, but this time I just happened to see through the envelope window the phrase… PRESIDENT TRUMP TRAIN.

Well.

Breathlessly I tore open the envelope and was deluged with multiple forms and pieces of paper.

This opens up.

NOT AVAILABLE IN ANY STORE, KENNETH!

Notice how you don’t get your FREE TRACK SET until Shipment Two.

Of course this is a scam to separate the MAGAts from their money. How can I tell? See how that flyer opened up and there’s a foldover on the right? On the reverse:

That’s right, this crap is from 2016. They haven’t even updated the brochures.

Look, KENNETH, “gleaming gold-tone wheels.” Not gold, not gold-plated, gold-toned. Appropriate for that new President, indeed.

Then we start getting the details: You’ll get another train car every other month — but no clue as to how many this might end up being.

As for Trump’s “stirring messages of patriotism and American greatness,” I invite you to scroll back up and look at the close-up of the first three shipments. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN seems to be about it for stirring messages, but then again, the audience for this scam is easily impressed.

The audience for this scam is also easily stampeded. As amygdala-based lifeforms, they seek fear and anger to feed their brains, and so this whole pitch is designed to make their brains tingle with anxiety that they might miss out on this PART OF HISTORY.

YOU’RE SPECIAL. YOU’RE ENTITLED. DON’T WAIT! ALL THOSE OTHER SPECIAL, ENTITLED PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BEAT YOU TO IT!

And best of all: SEND NO MONEY NOW.

What’s not to like?

If you are of a suspicious mind, you might be wondering how much this costs. Does it say? Not on the big brochure. Not on the little folded note-size piece, that reiterates that YOU NEED TO HURRY IF YOU WANT THIS HISTORICAL THING. Not on the claim notice. Not on the generic Hamilton Collection flyer.

So many pieces of paper! It’s almost like they think the audience for this scam might not have the laser-like focus needed to read it all.

Ah, there it is, in the fine print:

That’s right, the charge for the first shipment is $89.99 plus $14.99, and wouldn’t you know it — you get all [redacted] pieces for the same attractive price, which is… do the math, carry the one… $104.98.

One hundred dollars for each of those HISTORIC train cars. That’s $314.94 just for the first three cars — and there is no indication of when (if ever) the shipments will stop. I’ll let you do the math for a decent-sized train set. (And The Hamilton Collection is a subset of The Bradford Exchange, which charges your credit card before each shipment. You’ll never even notice the money is gone, right?)

And HO scale?

That’s the one in front. Notice the hobbyist’s fingers at the right of frame. The gauge of the tracks, i.e., the distance between the tracks, is .625″, 5/8 of an inch. $104.98. Each.

So the Bradford Exchange has had these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere for eight years and has the chutzpah to pass them off as a fresh idea. And only someone who is too dumb to realize that if the Bradford Exchange still has these to sell after eight years, then maybe DEMAND DIDN’T ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS as might have been expected.

A Trump voter, in other words.

It’s all about choices.

Here’s a piece of music. You probably don’t even need to click on the video to hear it in your head, but give it a listen, at least a little bit.

The glorious Finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in d minor, “Ode to Joy.” There is very little like it in Western music. Leonard Bernstein played it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Berlin Wall after it fell. We know what it stands for.^[1]

Here’s another one. You are more than likely not familiar with it, so click and listen to maybe a minute or so.

This is the second movement to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in e minor, the Allegro.

A little background: In 1936, Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 4 — my favorite of his — and it nearly got him killed. After Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk and hated it, critical and official denunciations of “corrupt” “anti-Soviet” music appeared in the newspapers, and Shostakovich kept a packed bag by the door.

As an extra precaution, he canceled the premiere of No. 4, and we didn’t get to hear it until 1962. He ingratiated himself with his Symphony No. 5 (subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism,” just in case they didn’t get it), and his wartime symphonies (No. 7 and No. 8) were huge hits.

No. 9, right after the war, was dinged for not being “patriotic” enough, but it was still passable.

So he waited to premiere No. 10 until after Stalin died — and then in 1979, Testimony was published in the West, purporting to be a biography written with Shostakovich’s input and approval. (He died in 1975.) We are still arguing over how much of the book is actually true, including this quote about Symphony No. 10:

“I did depict Stalin in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin’s death and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that’s the basis.”

And so I have both of these pieces of music teed up so that I can blast one of them over the quite powerful speakers in my labyrinth, alarming and possibly angering everyone in a three-block radius.

As soon as we know the results of tomorrow’s election. It’s all about choices, innit?

—————

^[1] My other choice would be the Finale to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. This one, if you aren’t familiar with it, you should listen to the end.

Six years ago I made this modest proposal, and with the most important election of our lives here in less than two weeks, I think most of us would appreciate a repost.

Voter turnout in the world’s greatest democracy^[1] is, for some reason, an issue.

I have a solution.

No,  we can’t pass a law making voting mandatory because no one does that.^[2]

Instead, let’s work with what we have: overwhelming campaign ads/begs/emails/commercials. Rather than trying to get money out of our elections,^[3] let’s leverage the disgust and frustration most of us feel every time a new email pings our box.

Here’s how: We establish — by law — a national database. When you vote, you’re given a unique code. Using the code, you log into the database and confirm your info: any and all email accounts,  phone numbers, cable tv service, anything we can think of where we don’t want to hear from politicians. You click the box, and presto! the politicians are instructed to block their campaigns from contacting you or face a substantial penalty for each offense. (I’ll start the bidding at $1 million per offense, and I wouldn’t object if that sum were payable to the voter.)

Think about it. If you vote early, then you get to opt out for the rest of the campaign.

Turn, turn, kick, turn — yes, IT WILL WORK!

edited to add: I’m thinking the politicians will actually be in favor of this; once we’re off the table they can focus their limited resources on the people who haven’t voted yet.  It’s a perfect feedback loop: we get left alone, while the politicians will ratchet up their pressure on the nonvoters to go vote. The more people who vote, the more pressure on the remaining nonvoters. TTKT—YIWW!

edited to add also too: The law should also state that voting begins as soon as the campaign does.

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] The United States, in case you were wondering.

^[2] Lots of people do that.

^[3]  Lots of people do that, too.

The outrage du jour is of course the conservative Xtianists making their brains itch by deciding the Paris Olympics have besmirched their own personal religiousy beliefs by pArOdYiNg ThE lAsT sUpPeR KENNETH, but I’m not going to address that. “BUT THEY APOLOGIZED AND EVERYTHING KENNETH” no they didn’t apologize for parodying The Last Supper, because they didn’t parody The Last Supper, and I’m not going to address that. Their concerns are not legitimate.

Instead, let’s jump back a couple of weeks and consider that Oklahoma’s State School Superintendent, one Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that Oklahoma teachers would all be given a Bible and that every teacher “will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.”

The state’s Attorney General raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips on that one, and more than one school system has politely but firmly told the Superintendent to shove it, but Walters is adamant that Oklahoma’s madrassas will do his bidding.

It is in that spirit that I offer the following lesson plan to Oklahoma’s teachers.

One of the weirdest shibboleths of the Xtianist world is that the Ten Commandments were an integral part of the founding of this nation, and that we are therefore a Xtian nation even though Moses and Mt. Sinai can in no way thought of as “Christian.” To be clear, they push the idea that requiring the Decalogue to be posted in every classroom is not religious in the least because the Commandments are part of the founding documents of the United States of America. They want students to be taught that without the Ten Commandments we wouldn’t have the Constitution.

—————

So, class, today we are going to look at how the Ten Commandments informed our nation’s governing document. Bobby, can you pass out the Commandments, and Alice, give everyone a copy of the Constitution…

Does everyone have their packet of ten different highlighters? You’ll need a different color for each Commandment, of course. And you all have a black marker, right? Good, let’s get started.

Let’s start with your pink highlighter. Highlight the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Okay, good. Now work with your partner to look through the Constitution and find where James Madison and those other guys used the first commandment as a source for their ideas, and highlight that passage with the pink highlighter.  I’ll set a timer for five minutes. Don’t worry, the Constitution is short, not quite four pages, so you’ve got plenty of time.

::five minutes pass — ding!::

Okay, what did you find?

…

Well, okay, maybe that commandment wasn’t a primary source for the founding fathers. Just strike through that one with your black marker and we’ll just keep using the pink highlighter. Go ahead and highlight the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Let’s look for where Madison & co. used that commandment in the Constitution.

Let’s put five minutes back on the timer, and… go!

::five minutes — ding!::

[Since we can all guess how this is going to go, we will now cut to the end of the exercise]

So class, what did you discover?

Sonia, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Commandments played no role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. No, I know that we couldn’t find a trace of any of them anywhere in it — and good catch, Clarence, that the right to a fair trial actually comes from the Magna Carta and English common law and not the Ninth Commandment — but maybe we just missed the references. Here’s what we’ll do: Work with your partner and write a letter to Superintendent Walters asking if him to come to our class and show us how we missed it. I bet he’d be delighted to do that!

And class, my apologies for asking you to buy ten different highlighters when only one would have been enough.

Here endeth the lesson.

I and my Lovely First Wife are at Grand Canyon for the week. This afternoon we will motor into Tusayan, the little village right outside the south gate to the park, for a quintessentially American 4th of July parade, the kind you can only get in a village of a couple hundred people. There will be a about a dozen kids with their decorated bicycles, couple of floats, and an ambulance, and horseback riders, and of course Smoky the Bear, and it will be glorious.

(They also have a kick-ass party afterwards, culminating this year in a drone show!)

As we’ve explored the now-familiar haunts — this is our fifth trip to the Canyon — we have as usual enjoyed all the people watching, and I have some thoughts. We see, in no particular order, …

• young families corralling their rambunctious offspring, coaxing the toddlers back into their strollers
• Harley-Davidson types, bushy white beards + branded t-shirts + big bellies
• tattooed, nose-ringed young persons, smiling as they serve you breakfast
• a not-small Hispanic family, women with children, “illegally” “camping” in a rented RV in the parking lot
• a busload’s worth of teenage girls, all uniformly dressed in their religious sect’s idea of modest clothing, chittering like a flock of magpies like teenage girls do, later praying at the rim, davening over their prayer books
• completely Caucasian families from the Midwest, slowly turning pink in the southwestern sun
• the taut, fit hikers, tall and sleek
• sullen, disaffected teenagers, immune to the awe of their surroundings, glued to their phones
• Native-American silversmiths and artists selling their crafts
• a Pakistani businessman conducting his business, loudly, on his phone
• dyed-in-the-wool southwestern cowboy/farmer types, knives + phones + tools strapped to their belts
• the older gay couple, pushing their elderly chihuahua in its stroller
• the young man, Tongan perhaps, with a glorious crown of thick curls, excited to show his African-American girlfriend her first view of the Canyon
• the middle-European college students, here on J-1 visas, working for the summer at the lodges and restaurants
• the elderly couples able to travel at leisure, even if they won’t be hiking the Bright Angel rim-to-rim trail (which is closed for repairs on the north end in any case and that’s our excuse)
• the aging hippie in his Utilikilt and his tolerant Lovely First Wife
• the developmentally challenged adult who, perhaps astonished at my kilt, impulsively told me “hello” (and whom I greeted in return, but now wish I had stopped in my trek to chat with him)
• mixed-race families, showing in the best possible way that “race” is a spurious concept
• pretty young Asians, doggedly fashionable even as the general American public dresses down
• burly, bald, bearded guys, intently helping their little girls select their Grand Canyon t-shirts in the gift shops
• bus drivers, from crusty retirees with their dad jokes to young Micah giving off  “Chris in the Morning” (from Northern Exposure) vibes (we half expected him to launch into a trademark “As Kierkegaard mused…” meditation as we approached the next stop)
• the constant ear-soup of accents and languages from around the world, people who have traveled to our country to see this unique wonder
• even the middle-aged lady wearing a Trump 2020 t-shirt, to whom I wanted to say, “Isn’t this amazing? I’m so glad we got to see it before the corporations tear it up looking for uranium, aren’t you?” [viz: the recent Supreme Court decision reversing the Chevron ruling]

My point — and I do have one — is that this is what the United States is and should be, and to those who would turn WE THE PEOPLE into a crabbed, restrictive shibboleth embodying violence and exclusion, I’d just like to say: FUPP YOUR FOURTH, you Christofascist, racist, nationalist thugs.