Welcome to my new Substack letter! If you’re reading this, it’s because your name appears on the pitifully short list of people to whom I might send an email without some lawyer firing off a cease-and-desist in reply. Probably. Substack seems to think my initial subscription list should include at least ten names, so, if you’ve never heard of me, you’re the tenth person on the list. For your benefit alone, allow me to introduce myself.
I am a retired criminal, criminal investigator, developmental psychologist, criminal “justice” professor, and now, mostly retired criminal defense attorney. I have gone from carrying a gun to not carrying a gun to objecting whole-heartedly to most people having guns, much less being allowed to carry one. Nevertheless, I still own a gun. I’ve taken to cleaning it, lately. More on that some other time. Just to circle back for a moment to that first vocation – “criminal” – it was a short-lived but lively couple of weeks. One of you has perhaps read this far, and not-so-fondly recalls being with me up near Chicago when we were desperate to get out of Illinois and back to Colorado. The late 60s, as I recall.
My only other claim to fame is a succession of several wives, two of which produced offspring, which accounts for three of the names on this list (one wife, two daughters). I’ve been married to Schmandie for 32 years. That marriage and my mysterious ability to find good parking places are the sum total of my luck.
I do a lot of cooking, with mixed results, and am OCD about how the dishwasher should be loaded. For recreation I engage in various racquet sports. I am a terrible player and a miserably bad sport. It’s no wonder I have so few friends.
So. What’s this all about really? Pure desperation. Here I am, in the denouement, the last few years that I have left to enjoy, and my fellow citizens have apparently decided to pull the plug on democracy. “Let’s give fascism a whirl!” She’s a wily one, that salty siren of despotism, crooking a come-hither finger and cooing promises: “You won’t have to vote, no need to make decisions, we’ll build a wall, kick out all the foreigners and open up fine jobs for the welfare crowd – wimmen and chillen pickin’ cotton like the good ole days, brand the atheists and queers and libtards with a big woke “W” and conscript them to labor camps and war in far-off places. The skies will darken and the air will become poisonous and the seas will flood and the forests will burn, but, gaddamn, some of us are gonna get PAID!” Happy days.
This is going to be my written record of how we went from electing people like Washington and Lincoln and the Roosevelts (Ted, Frank, and Elenore), Eisenhower, and so many others to where we are now, shortly to be represented by such pinnacles of modern manhood as would-be NC Governor Mark Robinson and, of course, DJT. Robinson, among his several other virtues, used to hate the Jews, or at least the liberal ones on the American Left. Then he saw what a fine job the Israelis were doing mowing down the women and children and hospital patients of Gaza, ostensibly to get at the Hamas cowards who hide behind them, and now he’s a great friend of THOSE Jews.
The one thing I will do, I promise, is avoid any appearance of disinformation. For example, I’ve read several (two) legitimate-sounding news stories recently about Vladimir Putin being dead, and now it turns out that he isn’t dead at all, not even a little bit. That’s the problem with disinformation – just when you get your hopes up, reality rears its ugly head and in this case it’s a half-naked guy on a horse.
Of course, along the way, I’ll do my best to keep you entertained with tidbits of recipes and some notes on other geniuses in government. Comments heartily appreciated, un-subscriptions promptly processed. Cheers, T.
LFG, Tom! About time you gave FB a break and put that brain back to work writing all the words. Here I am: ready to read. (Also, say hi to Schmandie for me.)