Monthly Archive: August 2021

“You Work For Me” – The Tell and how to respond

graham August 29, 2021 0 Comments

From time to time, anybody who works in government and deals with members of the public will encounter a member of said public, usually a person who is riled up for some reason, who unleashes the imperious statement “You work for me”.

This is a Tell, on several different levels.

Firstly, it is a clear attempt to establish dominance in the encounter. It is a form of bullying. The subtext of “You work for me” is “you will do what I want”. This is a variation of the other classic dominance gambit used by angry customers – “Do You Know Who I am?”

Secondly, it is an attempt to link taxpayer funding of government to the need for government to be responsive and deferential to the taxpayers that fund it.

The problem with the second line of reasoning is that it is defective on two grounds:

The taxpayer yelling “you work for me” is probably, when you do the math, contributing, at most, a few cents of the salary of the person that they are yelling at
The person they are yelling at works for a leader in the organization that controls what they do and how they do it. Not the yelling member of the public.

The big question in all of this is how the government employee should react to the demanding, possibly yelling customer.

Well, leaving aside obvious push-backs such as “shut the f**k up and sit down”, no matter how tempting those might be, here is my suggested answer.

“You help to fund this organization, but I report to a leader who controls what I do and how I do it, so no, I do not work for you.”

Crisp, correct, and hopefully not too inflammatory.

Ultimately, the primary thing to remember is that a person using this line is trying to bully a government employee to get what they want. You cannot negotiate with a bully. They regard attempts to negotiate as a sign of weakness, a signal that they can bully you some more. So meek acceptance or attempts to placate this kind of verbal abuse are not likely to be effective. Firm, authoritative push-back, sending the message “I will not be bullied, so try something else” is required.

Communication and Tells

A blunt and honest letter from a UK politician

graham August 27, 2021 0 Comments

Dear UK voters,

I thought it was time that we, the politicians, (you know, those people that you love to hate), told you the honest, blunt, unvarnished, non-spun truth about a few issues.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. More BS from self-serving corrupt nincompoops.

For sure, a lot of us are exactly like that. But, let’s start with the biggest and, for you, the most embarrassing fact.

You voted for us, consistently and persistently for decades.

So when you sit at home watching the TV on your sofa, or sit on your barstool at the Dog and Duck, whingeing about “shysters”, “arseholes”, and using other choice words, you need to remember; you almost certainly had other choices when you voted at the last few elections.

And you chose us to be your elected representatives.

Now, if you say “but a majority of us didn’t vote for you guys”, well, that is probably true. We are in power, with this very nice majority, because there is an election system in the UK known as “first past the post”, where the person getting the most votes in a constituency gets to be an MP, and every other candidate gets to keep their rosettes, posters and concession speeches and wonder What Might Have Been. We also benefit from the fact that an awful lot of you seem to be incapable of actually, you know, moving your arses from those sofas or barstools to go down the road to a polling station and vote. The fewer of you that vote, the easier it is for us to win those elections.

Now, if you don’t like that system, I have to remind you that you all had a chance to implement a different electoral system in 2011. And you voted to keep this current one. So, this is what YOU voted for. Again.

You’re sensing a pattern here? You should. Because I am about to remind you of some of your other decisions.

At this point, I can sense some of you are mouthing “f**k this” and preparing to leave the room. You can do so, but that is a Tell. It tells me, even if you haven’t realized it yet, that you are in Denial. Denial is not a river in Egypt. It is that comfortable place where we all like to live, where our beliefs and worldviews are correct, everything in the garden is rosy, and there are no Big Problems.

Right now, as I am sure you have noticed, we have at least two Big Problems.

One of those is the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, which continues into the foreseeable future. I will be frank, everybody in the UK has not done a good job of handling Covid-19. We, your elected representatives, talked ourselves out of listening to experts, because, well, they use big words, and sound aloof, so it is easy for us to take cheap shots at them in order to rile up the guys and gals in the cheap seats. Sometimes the experts are wrong, because they are humans, and then we get to act all smug and say “see! Those experts were wrong AGAIN!”, and then we think that gives us credibility (and reduces their credibility) so that after a while we can come on TV and say utter fucking nonsense like “well, I think the British public has had quite enough of experts, don’t you?”

The second problem is Brexit. You, I have to remind you, also voted for this. Those of us who are going to be honest know what made you vote for it. You were pissed off because, in common with most politicians who believe in laissez-faire economic policies, we allowed ourselves to react to a recession starting in 2009 by cutting government spending, when we should have increased it, in order to support the less fortunate and more vulnerable in society. That led to wholesale cuts in public services and economic assistance, which in turn led a lot of you to conclude that we don’t give a damn about you, the majority of the people.

It’s true. We don’t really care enough about you because, well, you don’t fund us. We’re whores, for sale to the highest bidder. At least privately. And the main reason that we are whores is that, well, we’re paid terribly. In return for the important and extraordinary responsibility of representing potentially hundreds of thousands of voters in Parliament, we get a base salary of 82k a year. This is chickenfeed, when compared to jobs of a similar responsibility in private business. What it means, in practical terms, is that unless we are already financially secure (in which case we probably live in a bubble and we will be clueless about your careabouts and challenges), we will be whoring ourselves out from the moment we announce that we intend to run for elective office. And the sort of people that we like when we’re whores are people who hand us large wads of cash at frequent intervals, in return for certain “considerations” when we make decisions and draft government bills. The sort of people who can hand out sufficient cash in one fell swoop are the likes of big business, and oligarchs (like those nice Russians and other mind-bogglingly rich people who live in the UK, some of whom happen to own football teams). Not you, the common people.

This could change, if you are prepared to accept that if you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys. But whenever the idea of a pay rise is floated for politicians, the media comes down on the idea like a ton of bricks, and whips you up into a frenzy from your sofas and bar stools, and the idea often dies on the vine, with people suddenly retreating at high speed, saying “it was just a thought…we didn’t really mean it!”. And so you continue to pay peanuts to your elected representatives, and we will continue to whore ourselves out in private, usually to the highest bidder.Anyway, I slightly digressed.

Brexit. Ah yes.

The other challenge with Brexit is that we have not been telling you for decades about how important the EU has become, and how closely our entire economy had been integrated into a single European market. So we allowed a polite fiction, that of an independent Britain, to become ingrained in the minds of many people. Too many people.

The reason we did this was that our party has been split on the fundamental question of whether the UK being in the EU was a good thing. For decades. Not just us. The Labour Party has had the same problem. They call themselves Eurosceptics. Like most of what they say, that’s total bullshit. They have always been reflexively and dogmatically anti-EU. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Every time somebody in our party said something good about the EU, all of the baying hounds would rise up and say shit like “No! EU stuffed full of unelected bureaucrats imposing United States of Socialist Europe!”.

Like I say, total bullshit. But we were scared of these folks, because they would threaten to rebel and vote against some important bill or piece of legislation, or make our lives miserable in other ways, and they would keep pointing at the UKIP and other racist shit-stirrers and crackpots and say things like “if we don’t fight the EU, those guys will eat our lunch”. So we kept kow-towing to the Eurosceptics by being reluctant to say anything good about the EU in public. This, as you might expect, made the EU wonder about just how committed we were to being good members of the EU.

Starting in 2013, the anti-EU faction began pissing and moaning, and the UKIP began taking support away from us with their nativist anti-European claptrap. So, just like the whoring weathervanes that we are, we tried to out-UKIP the UKIP, by getting all tough with the EU, demanding and negotiating concessions, and agreeing to demands for a referendum. We figured that once enough people realized that being in the EU was a good thing, we would win the referendum.

Well, we got that wrong, didn’t we? We didn’t realize how pissed-off you were with politicians generally, and we also screwed up our entire Remain messaging, to the point where “Remain” sounded like a meek acceptance of a bad deal, where “Leave” sounded brave, action-oriented. We also allowed the Leave supporters to use empty weaponized slogans like “take back control” and “sovereignty” without demanding that they actually define what the hell those words and phrases meant. Oh yes, and writing codswallop on the side of a big red bus.

The fact that many of the Leave supporters were charlatans, all mouth and no trousers, was something that we were too polite to point out. They were impolite enough to complain about “Remainers” and propose a Brave New Global Britain, without actually explaining any of what that meant or how it would work. But we are not in a position to complain that much, because we had spent 20+ years miserably failing to explain how the EU worked and why being a member of it was a Good Thing for the UK.

So Leave won the referendum.

Now, remember what I said about us being whores? The other thing I forgot to mention is that we love power. We do a good job of hiding it in public. After all, nobody is going to be impressed by a candidate that says “actually the reason I want to be an MP is not so that I can serve you, the voters. Did you come down from the hillside with the last rainstorm or something? No, I am in this for money, attention and my own ego. And to shag that nice little number in the office round the corner”.

That is what we call Saying The Quiet Bits Out Loud. It may be truthful, but you should have realized by now that most humans would rather hear simple bullshit than complex truths (especially if it fits on that bus, or if it makes for a snappy tabloid newspaper headline). So we learn to say All The Right Things, like “I exist to serve you, the electorate”. Then, once elected or re-elected, we get down to the serious business of Whoring In Private.

Because we are whores, and we love power, we tend to forget about principles. If we were principled, those of us who thought that Brexit was a batshit crazy idea (which is most of us) would have resigned from office and parliament shortly after the referendum, explaining that we could not, in all good conscience, try to implement a decision that we profoundly disagreed with. Yeah, no. The money and the power took over. So you got to see most of an entire generation of guys and gals in our party swallow hard and say shit like “we will respect the vote, and negotiate to leave the EU”. Then we proceeded to adopt all of those silly weaponized slogans that Leave had used, and started acting all tough in public, because when the people that voted for you have voted for you because they are angry and vengeful, you have to pretend, at least in public, that you agree with them. We not only know how to whore, we also know how to pander.

Unfortunately, because nobody had seriously thought that You, The Voters, would be dumb enough or uninformed enough to vote Leave, we had no strategy or plan to negotiate our way out of the EU. So then we had to try and create one. This, as you will have noticed, proved to be impossible, so that after 3 and a bit years of dicking about, we were still locked in negotiations with the EU, with no end in sight, and no real strategy, other than empty cliches like “sovereignty” and the New Grand Phrase, “Global Britain”.

At that point, late in 2019, there was another General Election. That was great for us, partly because we presented ourselves as bellicose defenders of the Mighty UK, and partly because our political rivals, to use that old phrase, couldn’t have organized a piss-up in a brewery when it came to having a unified position on Brexit. We offered that elusive, totally bullshit-based, but powerful-sounding item to the electorate. Certainty. Backed up with some more tough-talk that we know is bullshit, but which you folks and those tabloid newspapers that you read seem to love. I mean, Boris may be a total bullshitter, but “oven ready deal” certainly went down well with the tabloids.

It worked. We won by a country mile. Having talked tough, we then went back to acting all tough with the EU, but we still didn’t have a strategy, and as you noticed, our leader is a bullshitting arsehole, so everything since then has been a shambles. We now have the worst of all possible outcomes, including a virtual border down the Irish sea, which is causing all sorts of problems in Northern Ireland, a fisheries policy which has reduced many of our fisherman to impotent penury, and all manner of restrictions rules and processes that we now have to obey simply to send a paper clip to the EU. And we have border personnel behaving like arseholes, because we have an arsehole as Home Secretary.

So when you ask “has Brexit been a disaster”, those of us who are honest will say Yes, of course it is a disaster. We have a minimal trade agreement with the EU, and if you think that Liz Truss is out there signing fantastic trade deals with all of those countries that the UK has been unfairly neglecting for decades in favor of the Big Bad EU, and that those trade deals will magically replace our trade deals with the EU, then I have a bridge near New York to sell you. Really cheap of course. Particularly if it has a trade agreement thrown in, haha.

Now, remember what I said earlier about the town named Denial? The one where most of you live? Well, this where it comes into play. If we were to be brutally honest, we would, at this point, be saying to you, the voters, “this is is a disaster, it is going to become a bigger disaster, and you voted for it. “.

We won’t say that. And if you look across the other side of the political spectrum, you will notice that very few folks on that other side are saying that at all. The reason is that you, the voters, don’t really want to hear it. You don’t want to hear it because when you are in Denial, you will ignore any information that conflicts with the voice in your head.

Too many of you, to be blunt, are still living somewhere between Lalaland and Cloudcuckooland. The reality is that if you leave the club, you don’t get to keep the membership benefits. So all of those benefits of being in the EU, the ones that we obtained by virtue of being in the single market, and the customs union? Those benefits have all gone away.

We decided we had to leave the single market because freedom of movement was an integral part of the single market, and we found out a long time ago that many of you think that “freedom of movement” means “totally uncontrolled borders where any darkie can waltz in on a boat across the Channel and collect lots of government handouts and steal Our Jobs”.

I have to tell you, you bought bullshit from the tabloids. The dirty little secret is that you lived in a country where, whether you liked this or not, or even understood it, we did a Faustian bargain decades ago. We allowed immigrants in, and expected them to do all of those shitty dirty low-end jobs that we had decided were Not Good Enough For Us. In return we let them stay around. When we, the macro-economically stupid government, imposed what is now generally known as “austerity” starting in 2010, you all began to resent these folks, and the tabloids invented the mantra “they’re taking our jobs!” The fact that we are now short a few tens of thousands of lorry drivers, and tens of thousands of agricultural labourers, should be a large hint that we broke the Faustian bargain, by leaving the EU and cutting off that supply of willing workers.

At some point, enough of you are going to realize that Brexit, in its current form, is a disaster. Then you will get angry.

Some of you are already angry, but as is normal, you’re getting angry at the wrong people. It’s no use you complaining that Remainers are mean or negative. They owe you nothing. They voted against leaving the EU, so blaming them is like complaining that the guys who wouldn’t jump off the cliff at the same time as you are refusing to fall.

And, although my colleagues like to pretend that the EU is being mean to us, this is all performative bullshit for show and to show you that we are still With You. The EU is simply imposing rules about what it is like to be a third country dealing with them on matters of trade and movement of people. Those are rules that we helped to write over the last 40+ years. I think the old British Navy phrase for this state of affairs is “hoist by your own petard”.

As for the complaint “this isn’t what I voted for”, that is both true and false. You DID vote for Brexit, albeit by a narrow majority. What you didn’t have a clue about (because it wasn’t part of the referendum question) was what form Brexit was going to take. That’s down to us expecting the answer to the referendum to be Remain. Also, we’re stupid, unlike Switzerland where they run referendums frequently, and where they would have actually asked 2 questions (1) do you want to leave (2) if you want to leave, how do you want to leave? With the referendum question as it was, anybody saying “I know what I voted for” is really saying “I had some idea about what Brexit should comprise at the time, I expected that to be the final version of Brexit, and now Brexit has happened, I don’t like it much”.

Of course, there were lots of charlatans and bullshitters (with names like Farage) telling you that you could have your cake and eat it. You believed them? Well, I can be tough and say that’s not my problem, but in reality most of us kept quiet when we should have said “that is not going to work”. Instead we were worried by the constant drumbeat of “will of the people” being promoted by the Brexit charlatans and the tabloids.

By the way, “will of the people” is a phrase historically used, a lot, by fascists and demagogues. But I digress again.

Brexit is a disaster, and will result in an acceleration of the decline of the United Kingdom. If you look at the history of the UK, we passed our peak as a country a long time ago. We should have realized this when the US forced us and France to withdraw from Suez in 1956, and we had a second chance to learn when we had to devalue the Pound and get a standby loan from the IMF in the 1960s. But instead of realistic acceptance, we ended up with the ludicrous “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, which lasted all of…ooh, about 4 months. I could point out the acute similarity between “I’m Backing Britain” and “Global Britain”, but I won’t.

So, many people in the UK continue to live in that pleasant place named Denial, convinced that we are still an empire. I hate to break it to some of you, but a few collections of distant islands are not really an empire, and our Special Relationship with the USA is, ahem, in a spot of bother because Boris supported Donald Trump, who is no longer around, and pissed off Joe Biden, who is still around. So we are short of friends. This is one of the realities that your tabloid newspapers never seem to discuss.

Brexit may also result in a break-up of the UK. A lot of Scottish people are angry, and I don’t blame them. Scotland voted Remain, and we are acting like arseholes. That is because a lot of us are scared. Our leader is a bully, and when bullies cannot get their way, they get all obnoxious and, well, more arseholey.

Not a lot of what I have talked about will change, until You, The Voters, start thinking a lot more about what you want from your politicians and elected representatives. You keep electing the same sorts of people to elective office, and that is not a recipe for change.

As long as you pay us peanuts, for example, you can expect us to be money-grubbing, expense-chasing whores. We have a living to make, and quite a few of us can be fired by you at election time, so we have to safeguard our personal and family futures. Plus, you know, we can get addicted to nice stuff, like expense accounts, chauffeur-driven cars, and that nice little number in the office round the corner.

If you vote against proportional representation, you can expect the scenario where more people vote against the ruling party to continue. That’s how first-past-the-post works.

if you vote for a strategic direction change for the entire country without knowing or understanding what that actually translates to in practice or impact, you get something like Brexit. Put it this way, if somebody says “let’s go on a journey to Nirvana” and you say “great! how do we get there?” and the person responds “no clue, but I’m sure we can find our way there eventually”, you might reasonably ask “is this a person I want to travel with?”. That’s what happened when you voted in 2016. You probably don’t want to do that again.

Oh yes…forget all of that “sunlit uplands” nonsense. It sounds great if you really like that hymn “Jerusalem”, but it’s just another one of those tabloid slogans.

I am prepared to bet money that within 5 years we (those shysters and arseholes) will be telling you that the UK needs to be starting a dialogue with the EU to re-join the Single Market and the Customs Union. Whether the EU will want us back is a whole different matter. We haven’t exactly been covering ourselves in glory when talking with EU representatives in the last few years, and our behavior in public has been even worse. Sitting in the EU parliament chamber, chanting football yahoo slogans and waving Union Jacks may look good to drunkards at the Dog and Duck, but I have to point out that it made the UK look like a country dominated by arseholes who elected a lot of arseholes as MEPs.

Cynically, some of you who voted for Brexit will be dead in a few years’ time, so why should you care anyway? I suspect that your children and grandchildren will be the ones who have to wise up and try to vote for the right people to stop the accelerating decline of the UK. We already slipped from #5 to #6 in GDP over the last several years. Not long before we do not qualify for those nice G7 meetings where our Prime Minister gets to strut around looking all powerful and important.

I have to get back to more governmental bullshit now. Something involving “sovereignty” and lorry drivers.

Current Affairs - UK and Europe

Trump and anti-vax partisans – the deep hole of Denial

graham August 14, 2021 0 Comments

Once in a while in life, one comes across one or more individuals who have backed themselves into a corner or dug themselves into a hole over an issue or an event.

They usually defend their position by repeating the same general rhetoric over and over again, peppered with tough-sounding justification phrases like “it’s the principle!” (that, folks, is a really big Tell that you are dealing with somebody who is dug in and not coming out).

The ultimate fate for these people (which some of them actually come to embrace) is martyrdom. Martyrdom, giving up your entire life for a cause, be it personal or a group cause, removes you from the planet, but probably gets you into the history books. Ashli Babbitt, one of the January 6th insurrectionists, who was shot and fatally wounded while attempting to break into a secure area inside the Capitol building, is being re-born as a martyr as I write this.

Cults and cult followers often end up in a hole, sometimes because they collectively break laws, or because they adopt ideological positions that are incoherent, self-contradictory, or in many cases, totally at variance with reality. When a belief system does not match reality, it becomes a collection of delusions.

Right now, in the USA and the UK, there are millions of people who have adopted beliefs totally at variance with reality. Those people are trapped in a worldview that they adopted. They are also usually surrounded by people who have identical or mostly similar worldviews. Those people are their social circle, comprising friends, family, church and other sources of social and ideological validation. Those sources provide powerful and continual reinforcement.

The insistence by supporters of Donald Trump that he won the November 2020 Presidential election, for example, is being perpetuated today, 9 months after the election concluded with him losing the Electoral College to Joe Biden. The delusion that Trump won extends far beyond the insistence that he was in fact the winner. There are people out there insisting that Trump really is in charge, and that the images of President Biden are digital manipulations, and that Biden is under arrest or has been executed. To an observer who deals in facts, the people making these claims look utterly deluded, and are living somewhere between Lalaland and Cloudcuckooland.

Any attempt to engage with these people on social media is largely futile, except for the grim amusement of seeing how many ways they can contradict themselves in the course of a discussion, and how many more and more bizarre methods of rationalization they can invent. Their fundamental convictions and beliefs remain fixed, immovable, and insistent. When stressed by contrary fact, they act like 8 year olds found stealing from the cookie jar, throwing tantrums, blocking people and ultimately stalking off in a huff.

I have yet to see a single person in this group admit to making a mistake. Nor do I expect to. The reason, as explained in this article, is that people dug into a defective worldview are sustained in that worldview by their social world, which is their primary support system. They are not going to pay attention to any perceived opponents, since those people are outside of their social circle already. Nor are they going to pay much attention to experts, which explains the parallel (and often overlapping) resistance of anti-vaccine individuals to inputs from epidemiologists and medical professionals. An experienced epidemiologist on TV doesn’t stand a chance next to Fred down at church.

A parallel contributory factor to the communication failure is the infantilization of communication and interaction in the modern USA. Covid-19 has magnified this tendency by dramatically limiting social interaction opportunities, where people congregate together for extended periods of time to discuss all manner of subjects. Now, instead of talking over dinner or drinks, exploring issues, people huddle over smartphones and consume limited-bandwidth soundbites that neatly summarize a complex issue down to binary math. This good, that bad. Me good, you bad. This helps to explain why so many partisans, especially Republicans, seem to have adopted the interaction style of emotionally stunted adolescents, complete with all of the signs of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. “You’re not the boss of me!” is merely a different version of the adolescent foot-stamping cries of “Shan’t” and “You can’t make me!” that most parents get to hear at some time in their life as parents. Of course, most adolescents eventually do learn how to Adult, at least most of the time. But right now, when it comes to political issues, an awfully large number of people seem to have regressed to adolescence, or something preceding adolescence.

They are, to some extent, taking their cues from above. Donald Trump’s communication style, right now, is that of a jilted, emotionally injured adolescent. One thing I have had to come to terms with is that people spend far too much time imitating those above them, and too little time asking the question “is this person talking or acting like a dick?”

The evidence is all around us that being pro-Trump and being anti-vaccine are positions which are deluded, and dangerous for the collective welfare of society.

Desperate supporters of Trump believe that insurrection is a valid tool for redressing their electoral grievances, since Trump told them that the election system is corrupt and rigged, which therefore justifies seizing power by other means.

Anti-vaccine activists believe that harassment, intimidation and refusal are valid tactics, despite all of the visible evidence that people that refuse vaccination are harming not only themselves, but also their families and wider society. One would think that the sheer numbers of prominent people who ranted against vaccines, only to contract Covid-19 and die from its effects, would be having some impact on anti-vaccine activists. So far, the impact seems to be limited.

The big question is how long the Trump and anti-vaccine cults (when you examine their collective behavior, the parallels to religious cults are obvious) will keep up their collective and individual positions.

The likely answer is: quite some time. We are dealing with people who are in the first stage of change: Denial. The other stages, classically analyzed by psychologists, are Anger, Bargaining, Acceptance and Commitment.

This, as you will have noticed, is the classic transition that all addicts go through. And, as Nick Carmody has pointed out, the supporters of Trump show all of the signs of addicts, in that they eagerly accept and like any information that reinforces their convictions that they are right. Any and all information of that type gives them self-validation, the dopamine high of “see! I am right!”.

Right now, the rapid transition of Trump partisans to anger when their delusions are challenged tells me that many of them are in the transition from Denial to Anger. This is dangerous, since angry people tend to do stupid things as individuals, and as groups, can do terrible things to others. I would not be surprised if highly hyped individuals try to assassinate or attack politicians and government officials who are seen as supporters of Biden or supporters of authoritarian measures related to Covid-19 mitigation. There is plenty of evidence of this latent anger, in the form of activists harrassing and threatening medical professionals and people wearing masks. (Ironically, in Florida, the state government is adopting the Orwellian position that being required to wear a mask at school can be defined as harassment).

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - UK and Europe, Current Affairs - US

God admits to causing Great Flood – “it was an oops” says God

graham August 3, 2021 0 Comments

Heaven, August 3^rd 2021: In a press release from Heaven, God, nearly 4000 years after the event, issued a belated apology for the Great Flood that required Noah to build a massive container ship to preserve the Earth’s animal species.

“Yeah, well, that was a boo-boo on my part”, he said, after stopping part-way through creating yet another variant of the Covid-19 virus. (“I decided to throw the whitecoats another curveball”, he said by way of explanation). “I left the shower on in the bathroom and went for a long weekend to party with Satan, and when I came back there was water everywhere. You should see the water bill for that month. Horrible. It could be worse though. I did tell that guy to build a boat and capture two of every living thing. Otherwise I would have had to make all of those animals from scratch, and I lost the CAD plans for some of them. Can you imagine how much time it takes to model a rhinoceros or a lobster? And it is just as well I had whistled up that volcano group, Ararat or whatever, when I built Asia Minor, or Noah would have been totally SOL, haha.“

Asked about the Plagues, God sighed. “Yeah, well, one of those was a SNAFU with the local Celestial Depot. Those DIY stores keep running out of pesticides in the Spring, ya know? Otherwise I might have been able to stop that locust thingy.”

God excused himself at that point. “Sorry, gotta go. I have to go sort out the earthquake and hurricane schedule. You guys are pissing all over the environment, so things are going to be a lot more hectic down there in the near future. “

Satire

Bill is…not content

graham August 2, 2021 0 Comments

Bill sits at his old seat in the bar. He got it back tonight by showing up early. Mutt is lying under the chair, snoozing it up.

Officially Mutt is not supposed to be in the bar at all (those damn hygiene regulations or some such) but since Bill is a regular, almost as old as the beams holding up the roof, Lance lets him bring Mutt in in the evenings, although he warned Bill that if he hears that any city guys are coming in, Mutt will need to temporarily make himself scarce.

Bill has his usual tall Miller Light in front of him. He is watching Fox News, as ever. Tucker is on a roll, yelling about those ungrateful sons of bitches in Tokyo, who won’t salute the flag properly. Damn it, why did they select them in the first place? Lance used to call that soccer player woman with the pink hair Megan Rap Music. Bill liked that, he understands the joke, making her out to be black when she is very white. And bent as a three-dollar bill, haha.

He takes another gulp of Miller. Things are different here. Since Randy disappeared, it hasn’t been quite as friendly. They have a new barman, Dave. Randy hasn’t worked out where Dave is coming from, but the signs are not good. Why, the other day Bill walked in (well, it was a bad day, he limped in on his cane) and the damn TV was showing CNN. What is this shit? Where was the American television station? A quick word to Lance, and Fox was back. But Bill suspects that Dave, who is a lot younger than Randy, is not One Of Us. His suspicions were aroused the other day when a video of Biden came up on Fox, and Bill growled “not for long”. Dave asked “what does that mean?”

“Trump will be back there soon, you’ll see” said Bill.

“How is he going to get back there?” asked Dave.

Bill said nothing, but he seethed. Of course Trump will be back. Those Democrat swamp-dwellers couldn’t find their ass in broad daylight with a flashlight and a map. They are already kow-towing to China. Yes Mr Chink, No Mr. Chink, three bags full and you can have Taiwan Mr Chink. Time for paybacks. Impeach the sonofabitch and Kamala the Ho. Everybody knows the election was rigged. Look at the pillow guy’s lawsuits. They’re going to get that shit overturned any day now.

Tucker goes to commercial. Bill takes another gulp and looks around the bar. It’s different these days.

Bill’s buddies are not here very much any more. This damn virus has made many of them shy of going out. What the hell is happening? Two years ago there were no seats along this side of the bar. Now half the seats are never filled except on Friday and Saturday nights.

But the biggest news, which is really sticking in Bill’s craw, is the rumor that Lance is going to request proof of vaccination to allow anybody in the bar starting…Real Soon. Dave said the date is not fixed, but Bill heard it from Old Joe, who said that he is going to stop coming in if it happens. Old Joe seems to only be here about half the time these days.

Old Joe doesn’t care for any of those damn rules, especially if they come from the government. That might have something to do with his run-in with the IRS and the courts over child support a few years ago. Since then, the mention of the word “government” usually has Old Joe growling, and drinking even faster. And that guy can drink.

If the silly vaccination rule is for real, maybe he and Old Joe can find a different bar, where they don’t have to have that damn vaccine and muzzle up just to get in the front door. Besides, is Lance going to make Mutt muzzle up as well? Bill is hoping that the governor will do what the Texas guy did and prohibit cities and businesses from imposing mask mandates and requiring proof of vaccination.

Of course, what Bill won’t admit to is that his real problem is that little needle. Ever since knee high Bill has been terrified of hypodermics. When you are 4 years old, even a small one looks like it is half the size of your forearm, and when it is being waved in the air by a massively tall human authority figure, it is…scary. Bill remembers getting a tetanus shot. It hurt like hell, and his arm was stiff and sore for days. No thank you. No more of that inoculation shit. Plus, he keeps hearing that it gives you flu symptoms for up to 2 days. That’s ridiculous. You should go to the doc to get cured, not catch something.

Bill looks at his glass. Most of the Miller is gone, but he has to be careful. He asked Dave for a sub 2 nights ago, because he was out of cash, but Dave appeared to not understand him initially. When Bill explained the arrangement that he had with Randy, Dave smiled. Then, without saying anything, he went to the middle of the bar, and moved Lance’s sign that says “Even God Pays Ca$h Here” up one shelf to the middle shelf, and angled it towards Bill. Then he went off to serve somebody else. Bill got the message.

Bill wondered about asking Lance. Hell, he is part of the furniture here. And when he tries to move his knee and his back, it sure feels like it. These days both of those parts of his body feel like creaking timber. But Bill knows that the arrangement was strictly between him and Randy. He doesn’t want that conversation.

Mutt stirs, and makes a bored dog sound, and scratches his body with a back leg. Then he puts his head down and goes back to doggy dreaming.

Bill sits alone with his thoughts. His knee is really painful tonight, and the beer isn’t enough to even dull the pain. Bill knows he needs a knee replacement. The doc told him 3 years ago. But he fears even going into the hospital might be the last thing that happens to him. Kevin, the brewery distribution guy, went into hospital in the next city last year after complaining of stomach pains for weeks, and within a month he was dead. He never left the hospital. Cancer. That’s what happens when you go in there. Sometimes you never make it out.

Bill knows his son and daughter-in-law want him to get both his knee and back fixed. His daughter-in-law even offered to come down from New York and help him with his recovery. Bill nixed that idea pretty damn quick. A city woman driving him around? Hell no. The embarrassment. Besides, she couldn’t handle the truck. It does pull to the left a lot under braking these days. You gotta be a man to keep that damn thing straight. Bill’s buddy Aaron says steering arm is bent and the brakes need a rebuild, but that costs money, which Bill doesn’t have.

Bill drains his glass. He looks up. Fox is on weather. Nice girl. Dave is talking to a new couple, who look younger than the normal age range. He hopes Dave is not pulling in Democrats. The horror.

He straightens himself on the chair, his back speaks and not in a good way. These days, getting down is more painful than getting up on this chair.

Everything seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket. The guy who could have sorted everything out is gone, replaced by those damn business-as-usual sharks, the virus won’t go away, and now the bar is changing around him.

Bill fumbles in his pocket for his car keys. Mutt hears, and gets up off the floor.

Bill down at the bar, Stories