Black Monday

 Based on the commercials, Thanksgiving is just a speed bump on the road to Black Friday, the opening of the commodity exchange season that makes our lives just a little bit grimmer.  It's already on! at least one retailer assures us.  Soon it will swallow the whole week, then the rest of November, in a relentless assault on our time, patience and credit cards.  With all the ginned-up panic about inflation, you might think people would stay out of the malls.  No sign of it.

But there's always someone with worse trouble.  Here's a woman on the UK site Mumsnet who just found out she's invited to pay for Christmas dinner.  The money will allegedly go for champagne, which she does not drink.  If that's not bad enough she'll be expected to put on a paper hat and listen to wince-inducing "jokes."  Were I she I'd go back for seconds on the dressing.  I know, it was a matter of time when people -- all right, Americans -- began sending out bills with their wedding invitations, but come on, Christmas?  Even Ebenezer Scrooge wouldn't be that mean.

The German health minister Jens Spahn practices tough love that Anthony Fauci might envy.  As the pandemic enters its second winter he states, "Probably by the end of the winter, more or less everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, cured or dead."  The Delta variant has Europeans using words like "triage" and "lockdown" again, and it's a matter of time before the wave crests over here.  Vaccinated or dead works for me.  Stick to your guns, Republicans!  In every sense.

You may be wondering just how long the arc of the moral universe is and why it takes so long to bend toward justice.   You may even be wondering if King knew what he was talking about.  There have been two reasons to doubt lately, the exoneration of the men convicted of killing Malcolm X and this stunner from 1949.  The Groveland Four were accused of raping a white woman in central Florida.  Two were convicted on fake evidence and later paroled.  One was "shot while trying to escape" and the other was shot by a "posse" (lynch mob) over 400 times.  All are now deceased, of course, but their families welcomed the good news. 

We all need to sit down and decide exactly what constitutes a "terrorist" attack.  Yesterday a man named Darrell Brooks is accused of driving into the Waukesha Christmas parade, killing five people and injuring 48, including many children.  Since Brooks is Black some people immediately saw a connection to the outrage in nearby Kenosha, but it appears he is only a domestic abuser who was having a bad day.  After an earlier incident he had been released on a surprisingly low bail, but the chief of police wants it known that he acted alone and "this was not a terrorist event."  Would that require a political agenda, maybe a manifesto?  Because I don't think Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook was concerned with justice for Palestine, or even trying to impress Jodie Foster.  How about:  You terrorize a lot of people with a gun, a car, a gender-reveal party -- congratulations, you're a terrorist.

On the subject of domestic abuse, it looks like Trump-anointed candidate Sean Parnell will not be the Republican running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.  His estranged wife was granted custody of their three children.  It's the usual litany of choking, screaming and chair-hurling, but what caught Dear Leader's eye was the time he dropped Mrs. Parnell off on I-79 when she was six months pregnant and told her to get an abortion.  Too bad.  He would have been a good playmate for Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, Neely K and the rest.  

Who said, "I'm not a racist person, I support the BLM movement.  I support peacefully demonstrating."  If you said Kyle Rittenhouse you win all the jelly beans.  Of course, he said it on Baby Tuckoo's White Power Hour, where nothing truthful is ever allowed to be said, so feel free to assume crossed fingers and a smirk.  Didn't Trump say he was "the least racist person you will ever see"?

Maybe hope, the thing with feathers, is worse than cynicism.  After Kenosha I'm not optimistic about Brunswick.  But the McMichael/Bryan lawyers are already complaining that Judge Walmsley's instructions to the virtually-white jury will make it clear that there was no probable cause to detain, much less kill, Ahmaud Arbery, knocking their case into a cocked hat.  "This is what a public lynching looks like in the 21st century," Kevin Gough actually whined.  Tell it to Tucker, Kevin.  (You know he will.)  I will wait and see, and follow the Scary Black Pastors Act as it works its way through the Georgia legislature.

She put on blackface for a college skit, she refused to mandate vaccines or masks, she signed a law to protect Alabama's Confederate monuments, she tried to keep same-sex couples from adopting babies, she criminalized abortion -- not good enough!  Trump is gunning for Kay "Poison" Ivey because he blames her for cancelling one of his hate rallies last summer.  What can I say?  She's not his type.