This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

God Damnit! I told myself this is a holiday. If you can’t write something nice. Don’t go around depressing people on their off time. I just get so angry with Elon Musk running around scaring nice people with his threats of what he’s going to do. He’s not going to do shit, except maybe tire out his tongue beating it against the back of his teeth and flaunting his innate ingrained ignorance.

First of all, Elon’s office is a wholly made-up creation. Like Oz or Never, neverland and not an actual real thing. They have no offices, no stationary or mailboxes. This is an honorary title bestowed by the King. (See: Carrot on the end of stick) Elon is director of the bureau of Bad stuff but has zero actual power to do anything anywhere. Court gum flapper and personal gum flapper to the King. Elon can make recommendations, but to whom? Congress? The President’s proposed budget is already dead-on arrival, even before it’s written.

If you go shooting your mouth off about carving up the Washington bureaucracy. They will close ranks against you.  “You need what? Who? I don’t know. I’ll try and find that for you and get back to you sometime next week maybe.” Big boss man is coming in and threatening everybody. “Don’t answer the phone…it’s him!” (ha, ha, ha, guffaw, giggle)

We had a tie gang foreman on the railroad. He wasn’t a bad sort; he just wasn’t a leader. Instead of just saying, “Come on fellas, let’s go to work.” He had to give a Barney Fife style fifteen minute motivational speech. “Alright men, it’s time for us to start another work day. I know, it’s going to be hard and you’re going to get hot and tired and dirty. But we owe it to the B&N to give them our very best! A good day’s work and make this the best damn stretch of railroad in the whole damn world!”

By the time he finished his little speech, the gang was already plotting against him. They wanted to cut his tires or take him into the woods and do away with him. The one thing they steadfastly refused to do was to make this the best damn stretch of railroad in the world. The gang wasted no opportunities to trip him up. They took the antenna off his walkie talkie while wasn’t looking. Then when he found the antenna, he couldn’t find the walkie talkie.  He put himself above his team and made himself an outsider and enemy to the team.

The King’s men are fashioning an executive order to medically discharge 15,000 honorably serving Transgender members of our armed forces. Out on their ass, just because the King says so. Just by the by, how do you suppose the military will respond to this Stalinist style purge? Not the Generals so much, but the enlisted folk. Remember, they came for the labor unions, but I wasn’t in a union. There will be a spasm and a reaction, there will be class action court cases which will drag on past our perspective lifetimes.

Most of the threatened have near 12 years’ service and two deployments under their belts. How will the rank and file respond to this decimation? Fawning allegiance or subliminal intransigence? All ashore who’s going ashore! “I was going to stay in and retire but, you know.”

A medical discharge requires doctor visits and recommendations for disability, rehabilitation or available duty. Are they going to give everyone disability payments? If Transgenderism is a debilitating condition and the King discharges them all as medically unfit. What level of medical disability is Transgenderism exactly?

It is an immature childish view of the world. Thinking they can just write on a piece of paper, you’re all fired! Signed, The King. And that’s the end of it. Done and done! But I would anticipate somewhere  around 15,000 legal cases fighting their medical discharges based solely on the grounds there is NOTHING medically wrong with them. The King won’t just have to make up the law but make up medicine as well. They have to find a way to convert the King’s personal sordid whims into a legal precedent. And then, probably a class action lawsuit ranging in the billions of dollars. How can you throw someone out of the military on a medical discharge when there is nothing medically wrong with them? Sounds expensive and a Pandora’s box best left untouched.

The King has been running his toilet flapper threatening our allies and trading partners with tariffs. In Canada, already they hold meetings on reciprocal tariffs. In Mexico, the President promises to do more to prevent migrants from reaching the United States. But she asks, when will the United States do something about all the illegal guns flooding her country and fueling violence? When will the United States do something about its huge consumption of illegal drugs?

Tariffs are the King’s answer, but many of those overseas factories are owned by American corporations or multinational conglomerates. Sure, go tell Volkswagen, Porsche and Audi about your tariffs. Tell Mercedes-Benz that too. Tell the Japanese, I’m sure they would like to know all about it. Sit down tubby! You ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t gonna tariff nothing, see?

Here be the problem in a nutshell. Most of the products we sell in this country like timber, coal or petroleum or farm products are available tariff free elsewhere. If we can’t get our cell phones or laptops from China, who would we get them from? Who else sells Hondas?

The King’s new Administration seems to be on a collision course with just about everybody. It means a fightin and a whooping and screaming and hollering and not much getting accomplished over the next four years. Lawyers getting fat like buzzards, feeding on the carrion of the King.

“Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin