A Real Servant of the Public

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Sunday June 17, 2018 · 7:34 AM PDT

2018/06/17 · 07:34

I’d like you to meet my Dad, Bob Hamele. He was, first and foremost, a cop. He ended his career in law enforcement by creating and serving as first Chief of the Wisconsin State Capitol Police.

The op-ed reproduced below will give you an idea what kind of cop he was. [There is no link; the piece was published in 1976. The writer, Frank Ryan, was UPI bureau chief in Madison, WI for many years.]

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Thursday April 06, 2017 · 9:29 PM PDT

2017/04/06 · 21:29

Violence. There’s plenty of it around these days, in the streets, in the prisons, in private homes, in the damn weather. The visible, tangible, bruised and bloody public face of violence is nearly anywhere you care to look. That’s the violence we all read about, watch, follow in the papers, whatever your personal media highball. The right has become adept at portraying that in ways that effectively make people afraid for their lives, and they have used it to slowly chip away at Americans’ personal liberty.
However, when I think about the actual real world effects of Donald Trump’s shredding via executive order of regulatory agencies, the “wall” that keeps predatory corporations partially at bay, I have to ask myself: Is this not also violence? If you take away the Meals on Wheels program, you commit violence against our elderly and infirm. If you take away after school programs for kids, you not only commit violence against them, you increase the violence in their communities. Jeff Sessions wants to possibly nullify policing agreements with a number of cities around the country, agreements which are intended to reduce violent encounters between law enforcement and the public. And then, you know, TrumpDon’tCare’s proposed marooning of 24-26 million Americans without viable access to healthcare over the next decade, Americans who will collectively be sicker and die younger than those of us who have it. That’s violence, if it should come to pass; violence being committed by a government against its own people.
What should we make of that? And I mean ALL of us. Americans, regardless of political party, ethnicity, religion: everybody who’s here. What should we make of a president who promises coal miners their industry back then destroys the government programs that would help sustain or retrain them until the pipe dream came true? Violence.
What it boils down to for me is this: We have somehow been convinced that government occupies some kind of other, upper dimension separate from us, the governed. This works to the advantage of charlatans, particularly in the legislature. Their only job is to represent our interests. That is the one and only thing we elected them to do. By maintaining this kind of royal-corporate-dimensional “we are not thee” they are relieved of doing their only job and are free to experiment with their whims. What they forget, what we forget, is that there is no separation between the people of the United States and the government of the United States. They are one and the same.
In trying to destroy the regulatory structures that protect all Americans, what is this administration attacking, exactly? The government. The people of the United States. The people of the United goddamn States. The Republican party has been waging guerrilla warfare on the government for decades. They have now released the Kraken.

Purple Beads

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Tuesday January 31, 2017 · 3:17 PM PST

2017/01/31 · 15:17

These amethyst beads hang from the rear view mirror in my PT. I bought them in Istanbul six years ago, at a booth a few blocks off Taksim Square. It was my last night in the country; I'd had the good fortune to spend almost two weeks in Turkey, split between Istanbul and Ankara, playing blues gigs with two other Americans and two Turks from Ankara’s music scene.

I am not a follower of Islam. I hung the subha from the mirror in my car simply because the beads are pretty when the sun shines through them, and because they reminded me of my friends in Turkey every day. After Erdoğan quashed the “coup” and started to suppress dissent, it became a kind of daily prayer for me.

The years since I got home from that trip have seen things at both ends of the flight go pretty much to hell, and I have come to appreciate that while the subha represents praise of Allah to Muslims, obviously, in a certain class of ursine Americans, Islam and it’s symbols evoke unreasoning fear. They’re so afraid, they have installed a bastard president who has the ethics of your average Lab, or a 2-year-old child:

If I like it, it's mine.
If it's in my mouth, it's mine.
If I can take it from you, it's mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
If I'm chewing something, all the pieces are mine.
If it looks just like mine, it is mine.
If I saw it first, it's mine.
If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
If its broken, it's yours.
(Source unknown).

It’s broken, so I guess it’s ours. Trump’s ban on Muslims traveling to the U.S. points up just how broken.

Having grown up and lived my entire life in Wisconsin, I know these people. I remember some of the idjits in my high school class looking down on those of us who were going on to college, and I know these are the same people bitching about not being able to compete for jobs in today’s society. They have in fact chosen not to compete. To paraphrase Molly Ivins, you can’t fault somebody for being stupid, but ignorance is a choice.

In order for the cost of an education to be an issue, you have to MAKE it an issue by deciding you need one in the first place.

I’ll say it once more: ignorance is a choice. That it seems a viable choice to so many Americans is the crowning glory of Ronald Reagan's war on public education.

Archaeological Find: Fishing culture unearthed in Wisconsin

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Tuesday January 19, 2016 · 11:54 AM PST

2016/01/19 · 11:54

January 12, 2016. Still air temperature, 2°F. Windchill, who knows? Bad.

MADISON, WI, Tuesday, January 19, 2016 — The artifact pictured above was discovered a week ago just before noon on what was the coldest day of the winter, thus far. Consisting of a long twig that has been wrapped with strapping tape at one end, sticky side out, it was found as pictured, next to a ventilation grate.

It is believed the device was used by homeless sapiens to retrieve loose change and cigarette butts that fell or got tossed into the well beneath the grill by passing pedestrians. Whoever the tool-makers may have been, they are gone.

A spokesperson for the expedition has declined to speculate whether a jumble of boxes, crates, tarps, tote bags and crap piled on the sidewalk in front of a USPS facility across the street might be their winter quarters.

Good News. Well ...

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Friday June 26, 2015 · 1:22 PM PDT

2015/06/26 · 13:22

When I was a kid, 3rd or 4th grade, one of the other kids invited me to his place after school to attend a Good News Club meeting hosted by his mother. I went, not willingly but at the insistence of my own mother. What I encountered there, in essence, was a religious cult.
I was informed that I was evil, that I had been evil from before I even hit the sheets at birth. I was instructed that the only way to redeem myself was to accept Christ as my yadda-yadda. My friend's mom said by not doing that I would condemn myself to hell. In addition to being “saved,” one had to earn favor by telling schoolmates the “good news” and recruiting them to come to meetings. Keep in mind, then and today, Good News Clubs are teaching this to children as young as four.
A child of four can easily be made to accept that they are evil. The malleability of young children is a primary reason Good News Clubs exist. There are about 3,500 active GNCs in the U.S. today. Please step below the fold with me …

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Wednesday June 17, 2015 · 9:27 PM PDT

2015/06/17 · 21:27

He had the name before Grandpa bought him. I don’t know what I’d have called him if he needed one, but Patches suited him so it stuck.
He was a black & white pinto equine, sized halfway between a pony and a horse. His lineage was subject to speculation on the part of my uncles; my guess today is that he was part of the gene pool that eventually grew into the Pony of the Americas (POA). The latest entry on his resume was a position in a carnival pony ride, as the mount they put the overgrown kids on. This would prove to have fallout. Stay tuned.

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Wednesday June 10, 2015 · 11:21 AM PDT

2015/06/10 · 11:21

This story comes from a few different places. I don’t really know where to start, so here’s this:

The boards are stored in the loft of the old stable at my family’s farm. The topmost ones are covered with bat and pigeon shit. When you turn one over, the unweathered side is the tawny gold of old, unfinished oak. They are rough, ready for the planing mill; the tracks of the saw blade are clearly visible on the splintery surface. Dad picked them up at an auction somewhere and nobody remembers now just where they came from.

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A Real Servant of the Public

Donald Trump’s War on Americans

Purple Beads

Archaeological Find: Fishing culture unearthed in Wisconsin

Good News. Well ...

Patches

The Leopold Bench