Stationary Waves

Stationary waves are a predictable phenomena caused by jumps in the contour of a riverbed.

Small-town America was abruptly abandoned about forty years ago. Angry tribes of white-complected people are prepared for battle with proverbial pitchforks.

Cresting stationary wave in the Otter Tail River
below Fergus Falls Dam

The embittered people who remain in largely insular, hardscrabble towns range from dysfunctionally depressed to putting on a happy face for tourists who visit their town to escape the stress of some modicum of economic viability in pockets of urban America.

Stationary Waves is a poem that includes a cresting stationary wave found in a river that surges through a small town in western Minnesota like a pulsing blood vessel, overlain by my knee-jerk impressions of a town in decline.

Stationary Waves
Fergus Falls, 28 August 2016

Naked bedrock
punctuates history
like a stationary wave
reveals a shameful deceit

Black flies circumnavigate
the Fergus Falls imbecile
like delinquent exoplanets
orbit a fading red dwarf

Colonies of pickup trucks
permanently stuck in reverse
back into empty spaces
in overflow parking

GOP Shutdown Postmortem

Standard & Poor’s estimates the Federal Government Shutdown of 2013 cost the economy $24 billion.

By comparison, NASA’s budget is $16.6 billion. We're no longer a nation reaching for the stars.

Politics in the US is busted. It's a sad state of affairs when a small but well-funded band of delusional opportunists and hate-filled nincompoops can orchestrate a bogus crisis for political theater of the absurd. Worse yet, both political parties use this theater to stuff their war chests.

It was shameful how many emails sullied my in-box from the DNC or PACs attempting to convert the daily fear & loathing fomented by the GOP into donations.

January 2015

The 113th United States Congress will prove to be one of the most ineffectual in history, particularly the ridiculously gerrymandered US House of Representatives. The Republican Party, and its self-serving leadership, are to blame.

Today's GOP is a small tent political party bereft of rational thinking, and burdened by vitriolic hatred and an irrational fear of the common good. The US will be shackled to the 113th Congress until January 3, 2015.

Let us count the days until November 2014.

November 2014

Come November 2014 many of us will have the privilege and responsibility to vote out all of the delusional opportunists and hate-filled nincompoops who held our country hostage during the Shutdown of 2013.

REFERENCES

• Here’s How Much The Government Shutdown Cost The Economy, by Eliana Dockterman, Time, October 17, 2013.

It's the Oven Door, Stupid

Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign strategist James Carville coined the phrase

It's the economy, stupid

during Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush.

Initially the elder Bush was considered unbeatable because of positive foreign policy developments such as the end of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. The phrase refers to the notion that Bush had not adequately addressed the economy, which had recently undergone a recession.

Things have not improved much in the last 18 years. Today's catch-phrase is

It's the oven door, stupid

Figuring out how to reign in the insurance industry to improve health care delivery is important, but

the middle class in the US had gotten hammered for over a quarter of a century.

So as Any Major Dude Will Tell You, It's the oven door, stupid that's foremost in everyone's mind.