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Tuesday, May 31, 2022

May melee: much too much to muse on

Another month has flown by with your increasingly distracted hostess being absent from her Whirled for almost the entire month. It's not that I don't have enough material on which to muse: to the contrary, the problem is that there's too much, and (though this isn't really a problem) there's also the for-pay writing and editing and so forth that are the first priority. But I'm keeping my dogged and perhaps irrational commitment to post at least one offering each month, even if it's a mere stub of a post.

To tell the truth, Scamworld per se hasn't weighed on my mind over the past few weeks quite as much as matters that are far more serious, though sometimes related to Scamworld and scammers. One obvious weighty topic is the
May 24, 2022 school shooting/mass murder in Uvalde, a small rural town west of San Antonio. That gruesome and almost certainly preventable incident, which left 19 elementary school children and two teachers dead, plus more than a dozen people injured, once again highlighted Texas' status as the proud leader of both gun lunacy and gun-related deaths in the United States. Talk about Texas exceptionalism... or Texceptionalism, as the case may be.

Of course, gun-nuttery isn't the only shining example of Texceptionalism, thanks to regressive republican Texas politicians and
the increasingly crazy and brutal laws they're foisting on the rest of us.

Naturally, right-wingnuts in Texas and all across America are blaming everything but guns for Uvalde and the countless other mass shootings that have dominated the American news cycle in recent years. Included in the blame game are "wokeness" and "critical race theory" -- not to mention the LGBQT community, illegal immigration, "the left," and other rethuglican bugaboos -- but never, never are guns and those who worship them to blame.

Despite the recent carnage in Uvalde,
the annual NRA (Nazi Republican Armies) convention was held elsewhere in the state this past weekend, in my former hometown of Houston. Some of the rethuglican luminaries who'd been scheduled for in-person appearances -- e,g., Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and assorted other scoundrels -- cancelled their attendance, though Guv'ner Assbutt still managed to be a presence at the gun orgy. (In lieu of wheeling his way into the NRA, the guv'ner opted for another trip to Uvalde, where he was... well... not enthusiastically received.)

On the other hand, loathsome weasel
Ted Cruz and #NeverWasMyPresident Donald John Trump appeared at GunCon in the (rotting) flesh -- blaming, of course, everything except guns and the people who cherish them for the horror in Uvalde. Trump's speech was particularly offensive; after feigning compassion by staging a Hunger Games-ish sing-song reading/mispronunciation of the Uvalde victims' names, complete with a gong sound after each name, he did a little dance. As reprehensible as he is, though, he remains a hero among the gun loonies, not to mention the hero and de facto leader of the entire rethuglican party.

To add endless insult to boundless injury -- and here is where my Whirled's original beat and American politix converge in an unholy union -- Trump has expanded his grift by hitting the "motivational" speaker circuit as part of the "American Freedom Tour," as reported by Axios earlier this month. It could be argued that he hasn't been off the speaker circuit since his presidential campaign began in 2015, what with the endless string of fascist pep rallies he has conducted -- but the "motivational" gig goes above and beyond the fascist to-dos.

It can be pretty pricey, for one thing: though tickets for the riff-raff start at a mere nine bucks for the "Satellite tier," which apparently grants the lucky ticket holder the right to watch the program on a TV screen in an overflow room, "Presidential tier" tickets cost nearly $5,000, and the promoters won't even list the price for the top "Patriot tier."

By now I'm far beyond caring about individuals who actually get grifted by Trump. At this point, anyone stupid or willfully blind enough to still admire him deserves to be scammed. I do, however, care about the countless folks who have been, are being, or will be harmed by the ugly stain of Trumpism, which is far more to blame for the mass shootings in America than "wokeism" or "critical race theory." All I can say now, to eligible voters in the United States, is this: Vote blue in November and beyond. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but the other party is batshit crazy.

I'll be back in June, which is just around the corner. I'd like to say that I hope it will be a calmer month, but I wouldn't count on it.