Response to Bumper Sticker Foolishness

(See: Just Above Sunset : Bumper Sticker Foolishness)

Uh! Oh! Puppy pooped on carpet! Need to put puppy outside, where he can poop all he wants without annoying everybody!

Okay, later in the day, the puppy took a hike. Trump says he had nothing to do with the guy’s decision, but in fact, everything Modly did and didn’t do, just his being there, acting in a position that he took over from a guy that Trump fired because Trump knows how to do stuff he doesn't understand, insulting the captain of a ship in a way that insulted the whole crew, and his finally jumping or being pushed out of there? Trump may have had nothing to do with it, except that’s not true at all. The whole filthy episode has Trump written all over it, and I’m guessing that Mr. “Look-at-me!-I’m-running-the-world!” had everything to do with all of it.

Although there’s no use yelling out loud about this guy, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, since most Americans are already members of the choir, and the rest probably think he’s perfectly normal.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that the Trump administration should be the perfect study of some enterprising social scientist, along the lines of Laurence J. Peter’s “The Peter Principle”, a managerial theory in which he describes how it is that so many people on their way up the ladder somehow stop rising at exactly the moment they reach their level of incompetence. The point is, nobody ever takes the time to move him back down to where his abilities were.

But back to our study, which would demonstrate the process in which a nasty blockhead at the top of an organization eventually ends up presiding over all these other nasty blockheads — all the nice smart people have been let go over the years, while all the budding nasty stupid-heads have been rewarded for turning themselves into Mini-Me replicas of the head jamoke, by adopting qualities not generally valued much in society at large.

Sort of like some virus that, by invading the cell, is able to replicate itself, lasting until the organism either successfully kicks it out, or dies in the attempt. Seems to be a lot or that going around lately.

And here's just one of the issues that illustrates what’s happening within the Trump administration, the presumption amongst its minions that a free range news media — that is, one with an unhealthy obsession with the very concept of “truth" —  is the natural-born enemy of all real Americans, especially those who might have accidentally volunteered to serve in our Navy, such lucky sea-dogs as happened to have heard, and maybe even recorded, this pep-talk from our late “acting” Navy Secretary:

You can jump the Chain of Command if you want and take the consequences, you can disobey the chain of command and take the consequences, but there is no, no situation where you to go the media. Because the media has an agenda and the agenda that they have depends on which side of the political aisle they sit and I’m sorry that’s the way the country is now but it’s the truth and so they use it to divide us and use it to embarrass the Navy. They use it to embarrass you. 

So think about that when you cheer the man [off] the ship who exposed you to that.

In normal times, anybody in any leadership position of government who believes the news media is the enemy would be, and should be, physically and rudely removed from office, in the same way that any Secretary of the Navy, acting or otherwise, would be immediately shit-canned during the Cold War were he to publicly proclaim his allegiance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Anybody in any position of leadership in the U.S. government who doesn’t understand that countries in which the public gets all their information from the government, instead of from an independent press, are countries not to be emulated. 

None of the politicos overseeing our military lately have seemed to have the brain cells needed for the job. In Modly’s case, if my calculations are correct, he was born about when I was finishing up high school — not old enough to have learned anything from our mistakes in Vietnam, and in the case of President Bonespurs, he suffers from a delusion that he actually WAS in the military, when in fact he was only in a private military academy (now defunct, having followed Trump University into a history best left forgotten) — which would be like me imagining myself a genuine Great White Hunter after having taken the jungle-themed cruise through Adventureland.

I harbor no delusions that this Modly guy’s anti-press prejudices will disappear from the regime after he’s gone. In fact, it seems to follow logically that some let's-pretend Commander-in-Chief would think it's okay to loosen the rules for some despicable war criminal in the ranks, at the same tighten the rules for sailors only trying to escape death from a rampaging pandemic, especially if you know that that commander learned everything he knows about the military by attending a military-themed high school.

So another “acting” whatever falls by the wayside, soon to be replaced by some new acting part-time something-or-other — one moving target replacing another — which seems to be Trump’s newly-discovered defense mechanism that this disease called “The Trump Administration” has adapted in order to survive.

But with any luck, this disease will have run its course by year’s end, at which time maybe we’ll all feel free to once again emerge from our hiding places and go back to putting our collective lives back in our control.

Unless, of course, we fail to stamp out the disease, and it stamps out us instead.