Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
I was going to talk about magic as if there is an enemy by the name of Dawkins Harris Hitchens whom I must rebut, rebuke, and spank, lest humankind plunge into disaster. I was going to talk about magic as a food, a necessity. Why? Because this week has been so rollercoaster, I can’t get a grip on it. I can barely get a foothold on the slippery sizzling Earth.
Kind of a mixed bag this week or so, is what I’m saying. We’ve got a building collapse with 150-something people missing, but we really won’t know how many till we dig them out. It’s similar to the building disaster in London last year. And there’s a similar sense that Reagan and Thatcher’s plans to starve the public sector is really starting to bear fruit.
Of course, both collapses are reminiscent of 9-11, but we can’t possibly blame that on imperialist overreach and the immanent downfall of the West, can we?
But on the up side we did have some criminal indictments come down against the Trump team, and Rudy Giuliani lost his license to practice law.
But then again the Pennsylvania Supreme Court let convicted rapist of unconscious women he himself drugged unconscious, Bill Cosby, out of jail. And there was a PhD white supremacist shooter who killed two Black people in an incident in Massachusetts no one’s talking about.
And the Pacific Northwest is now the same temperature as the surface of Mercury. Ups and downs, good news/bad news.
But yesterday, the final day of Pride Month – I’d like to tie this in with Pride Month –Donald Rumsfeld, demented fascist war and peace criminal under no less than five administrations, up and died. So, all right! As they say in poker, “call!” He and Dick Cheney were joined at the junk early on under Nixon. Reagan was their third boss. Reagan was to AIDS and HIV what Trump is to Covid 19. Maybe Rumsfeld didn’t have much to do with that part of the Reagan regime, but it’s still good he died.
Hurrah, huzzah! Rumsfeld’s dead, Rumsfeld’s dead, everybody dance and sing!
We can close this all on an up note! Right? Rumsfeld, dead, that is big and beautiful enough to take center stage as the curtain rings down on June 2021. Closing Pride Month with Rumsfeld losing his one precious garbage life is the splash! It’s like there was a new star born in the sky over Stonewall at the best possible moment, when everyone orgasmed! Oh, such joy!
“Oh, Jeff, he wasn’t such a big fish. He was a henchman,” you say. Yes, that’s the best thing you can say about Donald Dagwood Bumstead Rumsfeld, born under a bad sign, a no-vacancy sign that kept flickering on and off, in 1932, in the vermin infested basement of a roach motel. Yes, yes, but he was the henchman of all henchmen. He was the henchman’s henchman.
Rumsfeld could have been a great man, had he lived in an age where the size and weight of one’s skull determined the outcome of one’s career. But he was wooed by the siren song of power. Not just of power, but of being right, being important, making the big calls, the right calls, taking a big obese bite out of the world.
During the course of his life he somehow convinced himself that geo-political stability was the key, the talisman, the golden goblet from which to guzzle the Santorum of Ares. And, of course, the key to that key, the key to stability, was US military dominance. All in the service of US military dominance. All right and wrong, all murder and mayhem, all scheming and spying, for US military supremacy.
Two million Indochinese dead? For stability! Latin America under rampant fascist bloody tyranny? For stability! Panama, Grenada, Libya. For stability! And when he actually had the authority to call the shots: three-quarters of a million Afghanis displaced, and any excuse to invade Iraq. For stability! Torture, torture, and more torture. For stability! Anything and everything, social cohesion, whether foreign or domestic, workers’ rights, human rights, public wellbeing, all were secondary to geo-political stability, which he defined as: no one he had to see on a daily basis getting bombs dropped on them; for that, all must be sacrificed to the Sacred Golden Bull of US military superiority.
And, in the end, he never learned his lesson. He just died. In his final moment, the devil grabbed him by the face holes like a bowling ball and yanked him out of his physical existence. And then he was reincarnated as an ostracized stinkbug, rejected by stinkbug society. And I don’t know what happened to him after that.
And that is joy, my fellow humans, mammals, vertebrates, eucaryotes. That is the reason that, today, we rejoice. That is the reason the mountains skip like rams, and the clouds like lambs. Because death comes to us all, all of us who have tasted life, sometimes tragically, sometimes comically. But sometimes foulness itself dies. Not that foulness has disappeared from the Earth. But a very significant foulness has been snuffed out.
And that, my loves, is magic.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!