Worms Turning. The Come-Uppance Edition.

It's hard, such is his evil, to see anything, read anything, eat anything, talk to anyone etc. and not think about the nastiness of trump and the racism, greed and hatred he emerged from.

Hate, if you hate it, can consume you with anti-hate. As it has so many.

Right now I'm nearing the finish of the book pictured above. Its essential gist is that roads, like the thousands of miles of them the Romans built virtually around their world, are a civilizing force. We think of great buildings as evidence of an empire's reach, or statues or stadiums, but often its most basic infrastructure speaks loudest.

Last night, in a bit of emotional arrears due to my nervousness about the next morning's 5AM wake-up and 7:30AM cataract surgery, on arriving at the chapter shown above, I stopped reading for the night. 

But it got me thinking about roads and dictators. And the practice the willing-go-alongers have of naming roads and buildings and stadii after the soup du jour. Most people, in politics, frat-houses or offices will perform any obsequity to curry favor with whomever seems invincibly powerful at the moment.

Right now, a lot of obsequity is swirling around you-know-who. The more of an ass he makes of himself, the more many in power, or many who want to feel more powerful kiss it. It's only, in my humble opinion, a matter of months before many cities in the (re)Confederate States of America rename main streets and highways after our Charlatan-in-Chief.

This sort of thing happens to roads. Especially when a people are too stupid to incorporate distance into their decision-making. 

Baseball has a rule that you can't be elected into their Hall-of-Fame until you've been retired for five years. Such pragmatism has disappeared from most of amerikan life. As Marlene once sang in "Lili Marleen," "men cluster to me, like moths around flame..." That is, I'm surprised we don't have the Laura Loomer Skyway linking the Gowanus Canal to Fresh Kills Landfill.

All that's a prelude to this. A badly copied list of cities around the world that had Adolph Hitler Strasses or Adolph Hitler Platzs. (Including one right here in the New York suburbs.)

It would be beyond, I think, anyone in the orbit of trump to read Shelley's "Ozymandias." But before too much longer, I pray, the concluding lines of Shelley's masterpiece will be more relevant than ever:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Colossal wreck. It has a ring to it.