When the Bough Breaks

I’m going to figuratively go out on a limb and say that everyone has heard the lullaby Rockabye Baby. Even Millennials. If you haven’t, you should know the drill by now. That’s right, look it up on the YouTube®.

It’s a cute little song to fall asleep to, except for the whole crashing to the ground from the top of the tree part. That would startle you awake no matter how deeply you were sleeping.

See? I told you.

A lots of bad shit can happen when the bough breaks. It’s like unto the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. You take as much as you can for as long as you can, and then you snap.

Like I did last Sunday.

* * * *

The Minnesota Vikings played their fourth game of the season. In yet another dismal performance against a divisional rival, they looked absolutely pathetic as they were manhandled by the Chicago Bears and lost, 16-6.

Four games. The Vikings are 2-2. Hey, that’s no reason to jump ship, Mark!

I actually had people tell me that. But I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well. Being a Vikings fan is like unto dating a really hot girl that fucks you like a nympho pornstar one weekend, then shits all over the bed the next.

I finally got tired of having to clean up the mess. Halfway through the Chicago game I decided it was time to cut my losses and change allegiances. I became a Detroit Lions fan. I’ve been thinking about doing it for two years, so it shouldn’t be a complete surprise to anyone.

If there’s one team in the NFC North that sucks more than the Vikings, that team is the Lions. They’re so bad they only have one great player, but he is their quarterback. Matthew Stafford is a fourth quarter wizard. He is a master of the fourth quarter comeback, and finds a way to almost win a lots of games.

In the last ten years, the Lions have lost more games by three points or less than any other NFL team. You better check that. I may have made that statistic up.

I decided I’d rather root for a team that no one expects to ever win a game and almost always does, than root for a team almost everyone expects to dominate their opponents and looks like the Keystone Kops more often than not.

I. Am. Done.

There were few notable events in the game that contributed to my meltdown. The first was Chase Daniel. He’s Chicago’s backup quarterback. He came into the after Mitch Trubisky, Chicago’s starting QB, was injured. Backup quarterbacks don’t usually win a lots of games in the NFL. There’s a reason why they’re backups.

Chase Daniel looked like Tom Fucking Brady against the Vikings defense, which is supposed to be one of the better defenses in the NFL, but Mr. Second-string Junior Varsity moved his team up and down the field with relative ease.

The Vikings revamped offense looked terrible against a depleted Bears defense. That’s right. Chicago didn’t play a few of their best players because of injuries, and they still shut down Kirk Cousins and friends.

The Vikings had one of the best rushing games in the league prior to last Sunday. Against the Bears they rushed for forty yards. If you can’t run the ball, you have to pass it. And if you’re going to that, you better protect your quarterback. Kirk Cousins was sacked six times, and spent most of the game running for his life.

Kirk Cousins is the $84 million man. He was supposed to be the missing piece of the puzzle for the Vikings’ Super Bowl aspirations. The Vikings hired at least two coaches to come up with plays just to make Kirk look good. And as long as he’s playing against teams that aren’t very good, he looks awesome.

However, when he plays against good teams with winning records, he looks like the biggest mistake the Vikings have made since the infamous Herschel Walker trade.

The Purple and Gold are the new Browns. You heard it here first.

This is what my social media meltdown mostly amounted to…

* * * *

Last week, the House of Representatives began an impeachment inquiry into some of President Trump’s more questionable actions. The Donald may have abused his presidential powers and sought help from a foreign government to undermine former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democrats trying to become the next President of the United States.

The Donald has said and done a lots of questionable things since he became President. Some of them have been reprehensible, in my humble opinion. But you can’t be impeached simply because someone thinks you’re an idiot. Or an asshole. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have any Presidents that weren’t impeached.

Bill Clinton was impeached because he got a blowjob from one of his female interns in the Oval Office. It’s ironic because I’d be willing to bet every dime I own that every man who voted in favor of impeaching President Clinton was also guilty of getting blowjobs from their interns in their offices.

I know it’s hard to believe that a guy who acts like he’s a Mafia boss would actually do something that you’d expect a mob boss to do, but that’s what appears to have happened. According to several diverse sources, this is just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s illegal activities, and they are seemingly legion. We’ll see how all of this plays out…

The Donald denies any wrongdoing. This weekend he had a Twitter® meltdown that made my meltdown look like the beginning of the last Ice Age. He posted over eighty tweets saying he was the victim of a witch hunt and was being harassed and bullied by the Do Nothing Democrats. Then he demanded to know the identity of the whistleblower who exposed him, and threatened everybody associated with the inquiry with vague retribution and severe punishment. 

That, is witness tampering, and it is most definitely a crime.

He said the country would be torn apart in a civil war if he were to be impeached, which may cause some of his more loosely-hinged supporters to shoot a whole lots of other people. We’ll have to see how that unfolds, too. He added this wasn’t an impeachment, but a COUP intended to take away the God-given rights and freedoms of all Americans. And he said he’d be willing to fight with his supporters, but he has bone spurs and a note from his doctor, so there’s that.

At any rate, there has been a paradigm shift in American politics that will likely only increase the huge divide that already separates the Republicans and the Democrats. Though if you were to ask Republicans how they feel off the record, many of them would probably say they support impeachment and are secretly relieved.

* * * *

My lovely supermodel wife and I had lunch with a friend of ours last week. She was an attorney and a political lobbyist in New York State. During lunch she told me her theory about why the American political system fell apart.

White wine.

Remember when everyone started drinking white wine because they heard about some study that said white wine was good for you?

Before the release of that study, people drank whatever they wanted. Beer. Gin. Whiskey. Vodka. Tequila. Whatever. And that included politicians. That’s how legislative deals were made. After a political session ended, all of the legislators would get together in an office and have a few drinks, and voilà!

Shit got done.

Then everyone started drinking white wine, and going to the gym, and no one could eat gluten anymore…

Now nothing gets done.

I hadn’t heard this theory before, but chronologically, it makes sense. And I never thought I would ever hear myself saying these words to anyone, but you goddamn politicians aren’t drinking enough alcohol. Get your heads out of your asses. Drink a couple of glasses of Scotch, and do your jobs.

Drink, drink, and vote yea.

That, and nothing else, will make America great again.

The Law of the Land

A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, like, a state, or a nation. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. A government can be classified into many types–democracy, republic, monarchy, and dictatorship.

There are a few more, but you get the idea.

The original concept of government, I think, was to improve the lives of the majority of the people it governed. Contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t alive before the existence of any type of government. However, I can surmise that before any government was established, anarchy had to be the law of the land. Because anarchy tended to augment misery for the many, the need for control and order was of great value. 

Any government essentially creates and enforces the laws of whichever land it oversees. And sometimes those laws are humorous.

Did you know that in Scotland it’s illegal to wear underwear under your kilt? The fine is two beers, which is probably worse than the death penalty over there. Also in Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and asks to use the bathroom, you are required by law to let them in. I’m not sure what the penalty for non-compliance is. Possibly having to pick up poop in your front yard…

In Switzerland, it’s illegal to flush the toilet after 10:00 PM.

Did you know that whaling is illegal in Oklahoma? I didn’t, and used to live there. The interesting thing is Oklahoma is landlocked, and there hasn’t been a saltwater sea in Oklahoma for over 500 million years.

In China, it’s illegal for Buddhist monks to reincarnate without the express approval of the government. In Britain, it’s illegal to die in the House of Parliament.

Theoretically, government started out as a good thing. You know, like, the Interweb. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a return to anarchy. I think government is a good thing most of the time, except when it isn’t. And then it’s a huge pain in the ass.

I’ve pondered the vicissitudes of government many times in my life. My latest post made me start pondering them anew. My last blog installment was more or less about monarchies and a few crazy monarchs. And stuff…

No one knows who the first king was, but monarchies have been around for over four thousand years. The biggest flaw in the monarchical system was that monarchies tended to be hereditary.

Rulership was handed down from father to son, or sometimes to a daughter. And there was a simple reason for that. It was good to be the king, and even if it wasn’t, it was still way better than being a peasant.

To make it even more binding, one brilliant monarch came up with this idea: The Divine Right of Kings. It’s a concept asserting that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God. 

Remember the Middle Ages? Fuedalism?

Feudalism was a combination of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. And evidently, blessed by God.

The classic version of feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.

A lord was, in broad terms, a noble who held land. A vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord. The land was known as a fief. In exchange for the use of the fief and protection by the lord, the vassal would provide some sort of service to the lord.

Grow crops. Raise livestock. Suck his cock. Maybe all three. Whatever. There was no such thing as rent control back then. Whatever their lord demanded as payment, the vassals had to pay. If they refused, they’d be fortunate to simply be removed from their land. They’d probably get their heads chopped off.

That was the law of land for centuries. It stayed that way mostly because the peasants were illiterate and uneducated. It wasn’t until the emergence of an educated middle class that things started changing.

Educated people were the death of the monarchies. It wasn’t that uneducated people didn’t ask questions. It was more of a case that educated people asked the right questions. When the profound answers no longer made any sense to the people asking the simple questions, they began to organize their opposition.

Eventually, there were riots and revolutions all across the planet. Thousands of people got dead. In the end, the monarchies were replaced by more democratic forms of government. Leaders were elected by the people, not chosen by God.

Again, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The people overthrew the repressive royal regimes to get more freedom, and eventually their elected officials slowly took away one freedom at a time. Once a freedom has been taken away, it rarely gets reinstated.

The only thing I can think of is the repeal of Prohibition. Most likely because the politicians were tired of not being able to get drunk, too.

Over time, those elected officials have started living like unto kings. The adage really is true. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nowadays, career politicians tend to be so insulated from the people they’re supposed to serve that they don’t have any idea of what real life is like.

The most urgent prayer of every member of Congress is that term limits aren’t forced on them by the American public. Then they’d have to get real jobs and work for a living like the rest of us. And as we all know, that can really suck.

* * * *

There’s one form of government that I haven’t mentioned.

Theocracy.

It’s defined as a form of government in which a religious institution is the source of all authority. Technically, that would be a church on this planet, and I imagine all of the administrators would all be priests. Or, even worse, nuns.

I’m sure this sort of political system has existed on this very planet, and failed. Probably for the same reasons monarchies did. Some priests and ministers and nuns had a tendency to be off of their fucking rockers, too.

Ever heard of Pat Robertson? He’s an American conservative televangelist. He more or less runs the Christian Broadcasting Network. And he’s kind of famous for saying some outrageous things. You could look them up. There’s a lots of them.

I can’t find the exact quote, but he said something like unto this: Atheism is bad because it teaches you to think for yourself, and not trust in the words of God. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most resounding endorsement for atheism, ever.

Again, I’m not advocating a government run by priests. If I wanted that, I could convert to Islam and move to Iran. Those guys seem happy over there…  What I’m trying to talk about is a government directly administered by God.

Yeah, that God.

I’ve written about my belief that the only reason God is interested in this planet is because He intends to establish His government here with us as His people. You could look it up if you’re curious. Why else would He need a king? In this scenario, Jesus would essentially be a supernatural alien version of William the Conqueror, minus the French accent.

I’m still not sure why He wants to do this. There’s that whole perfect world theory, but seeing how none of us have ever lived in a perfect world, it’s not something any of us would reasonably expect as a condition of life. But that’s what God says His purpose is. I think it’s similar to what Donald Trump wanted to do when he decided he needed to make America great again. 

The Donald has presented himself as probably the smartest person, ever. And certainly the most successful President. However, he’s consistently failed to provide any specifics beyond needing a Great Border Wall to accomplish his purpose.

Much like unto The Donald, God doesn’t have much to say about how He’s going to accomplish His purpose either.

I’ve learned to accept that from God. He has always presented Himself as being mystical and magical. Being secretive is part of His nature. However, if He can’t be transparent about His motives, can God be absolutely trustworthy? And He hasn’t had a perfect record in picking Kings, so there’s that.

* * * *

In my previous post about God’s theocracy, I speculated that if God ever acted on His purpose to establish His government, I doubted there’d be anything we could do to stop Him. God isn’t who and what He is because we voted for Him. If He did in fact create the world, He more than likely possesses the power to also destroy it.

I used to believe that I would be alive to see this happen. The longer I live, the less likely it seems.  Given the fact that things are most likely going to have to get a helluva worse before God sees any need to step in and fix stuff, it’s probably not the worst thing.