Author: Kilgore Forelle

Teletrouble

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Maybe it’s because I got my driver’s license renewed last week, but my phone is ringing off the wall with calls that usually start like this, “hello, this is Bob (or Chuck or Wayne or some other macho moniker) on behalf of the Police Fund for [whatever].”

Firstly, yes, that’s correct, we here in Kentucky must seek the permission of the state to engage in human action, and pay for it, and get placed on all kinds of lists, official, semi-official, quasi-official, and pseudo-official.  I mutter under my breath, Robert A. Heinlein’s admonishment,

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

I do not tolerate police fund drives, much less those that are conducted by mercenaries (paid fundraisers).  In particular, I don’t tolerate fund drives that purport to be for the benefit of some underprivileged set.  I can just see the wretches held incommunicado someplace for a week, listening to and watching 24/7 propaganda.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Not My President

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

I’m sharing with you a link to an article I read Thursday morning.  I can’t believe it has taken this long to simplify, to map the current political landscape.  Maybe it hasn’t, maybe I have been negligent, maybe this is old hat.

Those who really care have left the building, they just haven’t abandoned the panacea — voting — yet.  They haven’t put 2 and 2 together.  The political madhouse has been taken over by the country club set and the crackers and cheese set.  How else could a reality show host and a wild-eyed old man from Vermont have stolen the march?

Read the linked article.  It’s not exactly deathless prose, but it contains a large helping of the truth about how we continue to live in the past.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Keeping Score

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Big Six Henderson was a Revenuer, and remains a folk legend in Kentucky — here is a good article.  In later life, he served also as the timekeeper for the Western Kentucky Teachers College basketball team.  Truth and Big Six’s stories sometimes aligned, but I cannot attest here.  It is related that Big Six once said, after WK won on a last (or perhaps beyond last) second shot, “There’s no reason to lose if you’re the one keeping score.”  Whether he said it, or not, the thing itself seems true.

Remember when POTUS took credit for the commercial airline safety record?  POTUS is an instinctive storyteller.  The process is called controlling the narrative.  It consists of cherry picking the factoids, and to a lesser degree, the facts — or re-arranging the frame.

Here is another article, in which POTUS seeks to abolish poverty by redefining it.  Remember that he also reports frequently on progress of the border wall, turning imagination into infrastructure.

This is nothing new. LBJ, FDR, WW, TR, and Honest Abe (sic) were past masters.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Memento Mori

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Memorial Day has come and gone.  Now we can retreat to normal levels of hypocrisy for most of the rest of the year.  But we will also have to live with the remorse that arises when we miss out on the better mattress sales.

Thank those lucky stars, we still have those NBA Finals to let us down easy in our spiral of hypopatriocrisy.

— Kilgore Forelle

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No Country for Old Men

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

I’m reading The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA’s Heart of Darkness by John Prados.  The narrative references a CIA operative who admired Tommy Lee Jones, particularly his character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, in the movie, No Country for Old Men.  She (the spy) builds her motto on something the Sheriff said, I paraphrase: You can’t stop what’s coming, but you’ve got to try.  I would recast that to say, one has to deal with all of the consequences for all choices one has made.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Sundowner

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

When I was below the age of five, I was not expected to do physically demanding things, such as hod carrying or bicycle riding.  I was not required to do things that required experience or problem solving skills.  I was not held responsible for things that were assigned competence levels.  Some of these institutional hold harmless agreements stayed in place until my voice changed, or I reached 16 years of age, then 18, then 21.  I had to reach 35 to be held out of selective service eligibility, or to serve as POTUS.  Lastly, I ran into a smattering of bedraggled annualizations which marked my being eligible for lifelong learning, senior discounts, early retirement, regular retirement, extended retirement, and various age-related, statist benefit programs.

Maybe when we become superannuated, we should have reversed our trajectory a la Benjamin Button.  Our competencies are not so easily misperceived when we are wet behind the ears.  Although the spirit is still willing, the body becomes weaker everyday … and the spirit begins to follow.  I am getting smaller.  I am getting weaker.  I am more susceptible to adversity.  I am more weary of the constraints that other generations impose — see TSA, the cartelization of education, and air travel in general.

Why is there not a lessening of responsibility as we re-approach infantility?  Why?  The arrow of time has not been reversed.  Consequences at time B must be arising from human action at time A.

— Kilgore Forelle

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