Frangry.

As I've written before in this space, and I am painting with a football-field-wide broad brush, one of the major differences between amerika today and the amerika I grew up in is that we've become over the last forty years a nation of spiritual bullies.

I remember talking to my deceased friend Fred about this. "We used to root for Jimmy Stewart fighting Potter, or political corruption in old movies," I said one night over a Pike's Ale (the Ale that won for Yale!) "We used to root for Gary Cooper to take down the Frank Miller gang. Or Bogart confounding the Nazis, even if it meant giving up Ingrid Bergman."

Today, our Stockholm-Syndrome Nation roots for the pistols.

"Bomber," (Fred's baseball team nickname for me) "you're right. Now people root for entrenched powers and make excuses for big money. They forget that most entrenched power was born on third and thinks they hit a triple."

In the four years since Fred died, the amerikan infatuation with bullyism has grown more fervid and intense. 

That's the only way I can understand our current mal-administration, our unjust bombings, our militarized police, our lack of social safety net and healthcare, the evisceration of public education and the mandatory-ness of "accepting" at every turn 4,000 words of small-type "terms and conditions," just to download a substack.

Not to mention the yuck-symbolism behind 45-percent of all vehicles on the road being 7,000-pound pick-up trucks that are seldom used to pick-up anything more than processed cheese food from our local infarction factories.

Many people have remarked through the years at my anger. 

Fine. And go fuck yourself.

I am angry. 

(George Shaw once said, "the power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who haven't got it." You can substitute anger for cynicism and it works just as well. George, I'm sure, would agree with George.)

Angry at companies that cut service but never cut prices.
Angry at taxes that hit me more than the mega-rich.

Angry at people who give air to the trumps, the musks, the malefactors. Angry at the semantic bullshit like calling tax-cheat job-creators. Angry at our collective acceptance of lies and the lying liars who, like Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman, "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

Angry at the rigging of the system by people like Mark Read, out-going CEO of WPP. Read literally destroyed half the market-cap of WPP, lost half the clients, can't win new ones, and fired thousands along the way. Read, when he finally leaves, will likely walk away with a life-long stipend along with scores of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of parachute and parting gifts.

This man did to WPP what Atilla the Hun did to Pax Romana. 

What makes me angry though, isn't just what's been done. What's being done every day, and the well-clad marzipan flatulence that shrouds the fat gleam of privilege, it's that 99-percent of my world, seems oblivious to it all.

99 percent of the world knows the latest bit of asininity from the 29/12 news cycle (it's way worse than 24/7) but they don't know shit about the charade of the modern world. Many even defend it. A case of Cosmic Stockholm Syndrome.

The great Robert Riskin wrote in the Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck movie directed by Frank Capra, a line delivered by Walter Brennan.

"I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber."

Step one is knowing that.

Step two is not accepting.

Step three is speaking out.