Cancellation nation

 Yesterday was the Jahrzeit of John Lewis.  For those who aren't from New York that's when you light a candle and remember a person on the anniversary of their death.  On the preceding Thursday Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) and several other people made good trouble by getting arrested at the Capitol demonstrating in support of voting rights, the cause for which Congressman Lewis nearly died at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.  Good grief, I was fourteen then.  Now I'm old and grizzled and why is this still a battle to be fought?  But it's good to know the Capitol Police can handle nine peaceful, unarmed protesters, as long as they're not singing.

Mass shootings are so common you have to pick your spot if you want to make the news.  How about Nationals Park during a game with the Padres?  Three people were shot outside the park but only one had a ticket.  Inside the park panic was caused by an announcement advising people to stay where they were.  Little kids do active-shooter drills in their classrooms; time to introduce this practice at sporting events, movie theaters and places of worship, because we're the freedom-lovingest place on earth.

America Third?  Three venues in California refused to rent space to Statutory Gaetz and Margie Greene for their America First event, so they blocked the sidewalk in front of Riverside City Hall and put on a free show for about a hundred passers-by.  Naturally the subject was their cancellation by the "radical left" of Orange County, where people think Mitt Romney is a Marxist.

Australia appears to have learned the hard way not to introduce non-indigenous species which cause havoc, like rabbits and Katie Hopkins.  The Ann Coulter of the UK was dropped from the Seven network's version of Big Brother and there's talk of deportation.  I can't imagine why.  Boycotts work!

The latest Confederate general to get a crane ride is Jean-Jacques-Alfred-Alexandre Mouton, who has graced the city hall in Lafayette, Louisiana, since 1922, a full fifty-seven years after Lee's surrender but right in the middle of the post-war Klan revival.  No doubt the United Daughters have plans to give him a good home.

This is kind of a wheels-within-wheels thing:  ticket sales are sluggish for next December's Trump-O'Reilly Reunion Tour, leading to whispers that America is cancelling the two stars of far-right sexual misconduct.  By way of retaliation Bill O'Reilly is threatening to cancel news media which report on the public's lack of interest by suing them.  Performances are scheduled for Dallas and Orlando but not, apparently, Tulsa. 

The Delta variant has broken loose and is running rampant in all fifty states and many foreign venues, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified the dirty dozen worst disinformation peddlers.  When Joe Biden singled out Facebook by name yesterday he was probably too sad or too embarrassed to mention Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who regularly links vaccines to autism and blames the pandemic itself on 5G broadband.  I understand.  To boomers like Biden and me the Kennedy name still has a distant glamour.  Not all of them have fallen this far.

At least one Republican governor is trying to make amends.  Asa Hutchinson has been touring Arkansas, where only 35 percent of residents are vaccinated, and most don't want to hear him.  One exception was Teresa Cox, who got her shot at a mobile clinic in Texarkana, but it isn't clear that Hutchinson deserves the credit.  "I have been anti-vaccine all along, but I have also been on a ventilator three times and I don't want to be back on a ventilator.  You don't forget it."  Hey, don't bogart that vent, they're getting scarce again.

They counted and counted until their fingers bled, they scanned for bamboo and sniffed for soy sauce, they held ballots up to the light in search of non-existent watermarks and counted some more, and every time Joe Biden won Arizona.  Now the Cyber Ninjas want to knock on doors in Maricopa County and demand to know how people really really voted.  I for one worry about Bible confiscation.

The NFL has announced plans to play "Lift Every Voice and Sing" before every game this season.  White genocide!