For the good of the nation

I forget -- oh! -- now I remember. Wilda's lede in her weekly gossip column suggested doing something for The Good Of The Nation, which seemed like common sense to heed. I told her I'd get right on it, patted her affectionately and came home to my writer's lair, if you can call a tin barn a writer's lair. It has a coffee pot, microwave, laptop, and a plywood bunk that needs a pillow. The old one became so filthy with mold that I had to toss it on a flaming brush pile, along with that week's trash bags. I generate a lot of garbage, not exactly good for the nation, but it's life on life's terms in rural living. A year ago when I still had a car, I drove trash bags to town and let the town garbage collectors bury or burn it. If I understand the national situation correctly, nearly every consumer in the United States produces tons of waste.

Nothing I can do about that. Voting won't fix it. Same intractable problem with 9,220 Veterans Administration buildings and 49,000 Dept. of Agriculture offices and inspection stations, plus 373,000 miles of road maintained by the Forest Service, a USDA subsidiary. The military? Hah. Defense occupies 696,470 buildings worldwide, plus 8 million square feet in Virginia. Roughly six million people are directly or indirectly employed by the Pentagon, not including allies. In the Old World, allies were called "auxilliaries," had to be fed and watered, disinclined to do much serious fighting, unless they were British Gherkas. Ancient history. War is a Raytheon inventory to be launched by stealth fighter or drone nowadays. There's not much that you or I or anyone else can do to enhance national security. It's already the third-largest budget item funded by government, after Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure that anything can be done to assist the Corps of Engineers with 650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, and 926 harbors to maintain. I guess we could vote to borrow more money from offshore tax havens.

I'm not big on voting. The last time I voted was in 2008, because Sarah Palin was on the ticket, a reasonably normal person, guileless and honest. Since then I spent quite a lot of time at my laptop, exercising my remaining wit as an author, hoping to contribute inspirational literature for The Good Of The Nation.

I should have stood in bed, as the expression goes. Jews, blacks, gays, and doe-eyed victims of Christianity have a lock on publishing and the 16x9 public square of televised squabbling. Frozen out, I self-published twenty books. Good joke on me. A decade of effort exiled my work to laughable obscurity. My latest and best novel was shunted to Amazon.mx, denied existence in English, deemed unfit for American readers. Mighty hard to leverage The Good Of The Nation when the nation in question forbids admission to the marketplace of ideas.

"Free speech has limits," they scold. "You can't shout fire! in a crowded theater."

Maybe that was my mistake, I should have shouted fire in a gay nightclub, won a customary fifteen minutes of fame as a patriotic pariah, a noodlemeyer paraded in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. If I owned a car, I could have waved a tiki torch in Charlottesville, shaved what little hair I have left on my head. Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Confederate statues or any other legacy writ in concrete. The focus of my work was liberty, an extinct species of civil rights, and embarrassingly frank cis-het adventure novels, an antique artform.

It seems strange that national progress should be left in the care of bartender Sean Hannity and butch Rachel Maddow, but they're certainly less boring than Andy Rooney was, a salutary binaural eclipse of monotone Sunday night CBS schtick. I give Fox and MSNBC a one finger digital salute and note in passing the fan-losing Negro Football League taking a suicidal knee for The Good Of The Autonomous Vehicle Gig Economy Queer Nation. Mom always said that I was an optimist. Liberty is the future for some of us, unwilling to bend over for modernity.

I find myself in agreement with Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, on the occasion of Confederate secession from the Union. "Let the erring sisters go in peace," he pleaded. Why not? Separate yourself for the greater good of all. Boycott Nike.