Can you believe it? More than three years have passed since I last posted. In that time, my wife and I moved from California to Texas  and we've been busy resettling. Is that the source of my shame? No. My shame is rooted in an unkind thought and I felt need of purging it. Please bear with me.

​Paramount+ is streaming the cult classic, Jericho, a postapocalyptic story first aired in 2006. It is a moderately watchable series starring has-beens and wannabes. Watchable once. I wouldn’t do it again. However, it took my wife longer to recognize it and I sat through the first two episodes with her. I’m glad I did. The end of the second episode inspired an interesting thought.
     At the end of the second episode, the townspeople of Jericho, a small rural community in Kansas escape to shelters as a storm threatens to immerse them in nuclear fallout from the device that destroyed Denver. The final scenes feature one of the edgier characters who has intercepted a radio broadcast in Morse Code, plotting American cities lost in the attack. The camera zooms in as he places a red pushpin at each location. As the scene fades, the camera focuses on his hand removing pushpins from a drawer where they are stored.

​This series inspires many thoughts. Were we worried about nuclear war in 2006, fully fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? If not, what was going on in the world at that time that might inspire fear?
     The political landscape following the 2004 elections generally favored the Republican Party and the Democrats were casting about feverishly for a new strategy to motivate their Rainbow Coalition. The one they settled upon would emerge over the next twenty years. Fear. It’s not hard to imagine that stories reviving the specter of nuclear holocaust would be helpful launching the campaign. Climate Catastrophe and Pandemic took time to nurse into global panic.
     Beginning at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution began a massive migration from rural America to its cities. In those early days, there was nothing political about it. People were simply following the jobs. However, it became political as city life took its toll on individual self-reliance.
Industrial and commercial employment occupied everyone’s full attention and urban dwellers became dependent on others for everything else, including the most fundamental needs, food, shelter, and clothing. Zoning laws forced city dwellers onto streetcars and subways. More importantly, zoning laws were just the first step in bending individual will to the will of community leaders. Thus, America became politically Balkanized.
     Look at the political map below. That is the color pattern of political Balkanization. Americans have divided themselves between those who are free and those who have freed themselves from the responsibility that attends freedom. 

While all of this is speculation, though interesting it may be, it is not the interesting thought inspired in me by the closing scene of the second episode. No, it is something more perverse.
     As I watched those push pins marking the cities lost to nuclear attack, I thought to myself that if a peer enemy were capable of such a surgical attack, it would instantly and irrevocably alter America, likely not in the manner intended. It brought a smile to my face.
     Instantly, I was ashamed of myself, but only a little.

​Watching Dopesick starring Michael Keaton on Hulu got me to thinking. I’ve felt the pangs of addiction at one time or another during my life. Haven’t you? No, not nearly as compelling as addiction to drugs or alcohol. Honestly, I've avoided those for fear of becoming addicted. Sadly, Dopesick tells the story of addiction promoted by a pharmaceutical manufacturers aided and abetted by doctors and the federal government.

Once upon a time, TV executives lived by the Nielsen TV Ratings. Nothing else mattered. If a show won its time slot, it survived. If it didn't, some hyper-popular show from the past like I Love Lucy or Gilligan's Island, was resurrected from the vault and substituted before viewers were tempted to spin the dial and find something to watch on a competitor's network.

These days it seems that shows will be aired regardless of audience approval until we knuckle-draggers learn to love what the networks are offering. Aren't they aware that We the People now have options?

Have you ever listened to Monday-morning quarterbacks discussing the big game from the day before. Passionate, aren't they? It's almost as though they are team owners lamenting or celebrating the results, speculating on countless whatifs. Politics is a lot like that, isn't it? Well, with one difference. We the People are the owners and everybody is losing.

Seriously folks, if you want to argue in support of President Biden, knock yourself out. I will allow any comment so long as it is an affirmative argument in support. I won't waste my time nor my readers posting complaints about President Trump. That train has left the station and we are living with the consequences of being governed by this man. We need to keep our eye on the ball.

Divine retribution. Karma. Comeuppance. Call it what you will.

If you believe this is a strange question for a storyteller to ask, you may not have been paying attention. All stories, even fiction, deal with questions of morality. Indeed, westerns and science fiction are the paradigm of morality plays. So, let’s dive in and ask, do you believe in ultimate justice?

“...massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.”
This is the core theme of Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, by Paul Johnson.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Shelly, Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman are among the revolutionary thinkers who have shaped the past 250 years of Western Civilization, and they are, if we are to believe the author, they were all deadbeats, philanderers, depraved, cheats, mendicants, and phonies. ​