The sun has barely risen. (The Sun Also Rises…?) The pup has just eaten and is eager to go on her accustomed early AM walk. Wifie has just received news that her younger brother’s surgery (for CA) was successful, but that he tested positive for COVID-19. Her younger sister, who went back East to be with the brother, also tested positive, a status that delayed her flight back to Californica (sic). On top of all this, wifie’s youngest brother and his wife (from Hong Kong) just spent 24 hours hanging in the air to pay a visit from the former British Crown Colony (after several years of restricted travel, imposed by the CCP). For the record: The (youngest) brother has asthma and allergies and his wife doesn’t like dogs.

My wife, who is the eldest of 6 children, has had the responsibility all her life of shepherding the younger sibs through life’s circumlocuitous and often tortuous twists and turns. Even though all the sibs are now fully grown and (like all Chinese families’ progeny) successful in their various academic and professional careers, wifie still bears the psychological onus of that ‘eldest sister’ burden on her shoulders. It does extract a toll on her, of that I am certain. And sometimes that burden is shared with me…

This morning (for example), while we were walking the pup through the local park (which now has three ‘permanent’ homeless…read: bums, vagrants, psych cases and substance addicted maladjusts…who haunt it), wifie complained that because we have dogs, the younger brother and his wife can’t come to our house to visit. W*H*A*M! The provocateur-grenade exploding in the room! Before I exploded myself, I carefully removed my earplugs (which are necessary, since the park is situated directly adjacent to a major cross-town avenue with heavy daily traffic) and took a deep breath… The pup continued sniffing and squirting, completely unaware of the storm that had just descended on us (me)…

This AM, as is my usual wont, I fired up my rickety WIN-10 OS desktop and checked my email (which typically consists of about 95% advertising messages/spam/junk mail, 0.5% legitimate messages from friends, etc.). Among the 0.5% were updates from THE FEDERALIST, THE SPECTATOR, EPOCH INSIGHT, and a few other news sources. Just before starting out on the walk, I had run across a news item concerning the prospects of Californica approving and passing a legislative bill to grant what are euphemistically called ‘Reparations’ by the progressive liberals to ALL blacks in the State (estimates vary from $5MM each to about $10MM, per person).

All this cost, in a state that never supported slavery, to be borne on the backs of Californica’s already overburdened aggregate of taxpayers…including those who not only didn’t have family that supported slavery but who probably aren’t even aware of what exactly the American Civil War of 1861-65 was all about! And being given out to just about everyone with a black skin, regardless of whether or not their family was even in the USA back then! As might be expected, the People's Republic of San Francisco has taken the lead in this effort, since that city's influence predominates in Sacramento's capitol...

Fast forward to the park, this AM. Despite being careful to avoid stepping in the dog shite that irresponsible dog owners leave scattered all over this lovely park (and despite our own care to pick up our own dog’s effluent), I managed to step in a fresh, steaming pile of fresh dog crap that must have been deposited by an oversized Bernese Mountain Dog with diarrhea!

My by-then already black (sorry...poor choice of words) mood suddenly notched up exponentially and despite my sudden urge to email President Putin that he target Sacramento with an extra powerful MIRV'd ICBM warhead, I managed to contain my growing fury until I got back home, carefully cleaned my shoe’s sole off and sat down to expiate all the above poisonous toxins in digital form.

That said, the Irish Citizens’ Army battle flag is hoisted on the flagpole outside, and for three cents and a freshly sharpened pike, I’d be heading for the barricades right now! Fortunately, I’m quite accomplished at subsuming radically antisocial urges and swallowed all this down (to the detriment of my notoriously irritable stomach!). [I suspect that every time my stomach growls with suppressed irritation, by some quirk of Quantum complications mechanics the cash-register in my gastroenterologist’s office merrily chimes ‘Ka-CHING!$$$’…

However, my frequent and recurring threats to pack everything up and head for the rural serenity of the Southern Idaho hills (where my maternal family hails from) are now perilously close to becoming reality; in fact, about as close as we in America are to midnight on the vaunted ‘nuclear doomsday clock’.

The state I was born in (Californica) has now become such a flagrantly progressive socialist paradise that I may soon have to put my money where my brains are and flee this (as MAD Magazine used to put it) “Ferschlugginer” state before it irreparably erupts and melts down into a spontaneous state of political, fusion-reaction chaos.

If Idaho is by now too full of equally frustrated and outraged conservative ex-Californicans to realistically contemplate a physical relocation, I may have to return to the paternal family homeland of Counties Meath and Dublin, Ireland, my fall-back plan. Sanity still resides on those distant, lovely shores that the Colonial English chased my ancestors from, through consistent persecution and starvation (i.e. the ‘Great Famine’ of 1852). There are still indescribably lovely, serenely remote parts of Ireland to retreat to, so I am told, and culture there hasn’t yet embraced the toxins of the sort of Marcusian/Marxist socialism that today’s younger-than-40 generations so naively and mindlessly enthuse about, that have eaten away at our Constitutional Freedoms like a malignant, metastacised cancer.

Furthermore, in the non-urban Irish countryside there are laws that mean what they say and God help you if you shirk your communal responsibilities and treat your fellows with disrespect and deficit dignity. They also don’t have a society in which the 80% majority aren’t accused by a 12% minority of being inherently ‘evil whites’ who owe the ‘woke’ proponents of CRT, DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) everything their hearts (and wildest fantasies) demand!

America is now, in my considered opinion, that state that George Orwell famously warned us about in his famous novels (1984 and Animal Farm, etc.), as did Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World. A nation in which everything has become so needlessly sensitised and ridiculously politicised, and in which our entire corps of ‘professional’ politicians (both left and right of center) have become so grossly corrupted (both ethically and morally) that one can no longer count on being able to elect public officials who aren’t either multi-billionaires, NBA super sport heroes, Hollywood ‘celebrities’, or slavish sell-outs to leftist radicalism (hello, Bernie!). And a nation of dumbed-down proletarian, mouth-breathing ‘anti-intellectuals’ (a term invented by a former acquaintance of mine, Stephen E. Pickering) who are enslaved to the sort of execrable ‘pop-culture’ effluent that Hollywood spawns and foists upon these mindless (as the Irish term it), ‘Feckin Idjits’.

As the prospect of overt war war with Russia looms larger and closer, with the People’s Republic of China lurking malignantly in the background to supplant America as the world’s leading superpower, it is quite clear to me…and I hope to those few out there among you who still have a few unanaesthetised frontal lobe brain cells with which to ponder rationally and reflectively…that America is now little better than a geopolitical Titanic, doomed and floundering in a frigid sea of cultural vapidity of its own making! Is this what happens to ALL democracies that were once presumptuously poised to rise to cultural brilliance…and failed utterly, joining all the others in the dust-bin of history? It would certainly seem so!

Having gotten all this off my chest, and in a remarkably BRIEF expostulation at that, given my usual, ponderous circumlocutions of 4K words or so, I went out to retrieve my shoes and started to put them on just now…only to notice that, like the socio-political shite that now covers us all in this sadly chaotic, sorely divided and out-of-control nation we are rapidly becoming, some of that dog crap is still clinging to my soles (and quite possibly also to my soul...). A scatologically unhappy omen for America?

So yes, as I said, the Irish Citizen’s Army battle flag (the ‘Starry Plough’)* is on the flagpole today and things damn-well better improve before the sun sets this evening! Have a happy day (note: implicit irony, here).

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* NOTE: This is a reference to a famous quote by Irish National Martyr James Connolly, who was executed by the British for his role in the 1916 Irish Rising. It is also the title of a famous Irish play by Sean O'Casey.