Wonderful Matters

The second half of the month of June we were on a nice vacation back east, seeing sites with very good friends and family who live there. It was wonderful.  One of the places along the touring route was Gettysburg, and we had to stop in. We enjoyed all the museum and visitor center things, but because of time constraints and pretty good rainfall we didn't see much of the battlefield areas. On our drive back out we did, however, stop for a look-see at the Gettysburg cemetery and the exact location where Lincoln gave the famous address. I took a snapshot of a memorial to that event, not exactly where he stood but close to it. Sure enough engraved there is the entire speech, along with a nice bust and... and... Fasces. Huh. Arguably the greatest speech about the merits of the thing DEMOCRACY and how much it must be defended with honor and sacrifice and all the rest of it -- the thing is here memorialized with the most meaningfully profound display of authoritarian hegemonic power ever...

Today is March 13, and two years ago, a Friday no less, they shut down our school campus. They essentially established a formal segregation policy dividing students from their teachers because of a firmly institutionalized and largely fabricated dread of an illness. Public schools are still reeling from this as it has been used to further rationalize the unabashed and pronounced instruction related to socialism (it is fine for the disadvantaged to expropriate wealth from the privileged with all due impunity), sodomism (it is fine for people to express their novel sexual proclivities no matter how immoral many consider them), and racialism (it is fine to furiously censure certain people for being inherently racist). I recently posted a home page piece at my webzine opening with a remark about that date and the present moribund condition of a popular discount movie theater I'd frequented before. I thought I'd share some photo shots of the other movie posters that were still ther...