Tag: Louisa virginia

Birth of A Monarch

A couple years ago, my wife and I created a rain garden.  We selected plants that liked their feet wet, to include a swamp milkweed. To our surprise, last August the milkweed was chock full of monarch caterpillars voraciously consuming it.  They ate, and ate, and ate, until all that was left were the stalks.  Not a leaf in sight.  Then, as fast as they had appeared, they disappeared.  Where did they go?  A week later, we noted several green chrysalises in the garden.  About ten of them.  The caterpillars had alighted from the milkweed and found shelter in nearby ornamental grasses.  

The chrysalises were beautiful, a deep green with a golden beaded band near the top.  The green transformed after a week, it seemed overnight, to black, but in reality, the chrysalises were turning translucent.  The black was the emergent butterfly, patches of fiery orange could also be seen through the translucent chrysalis. Any day or moment they would emerge, I thought. 

By then I felt like an expectant father.  Protective, pacing the gardens edge, counting the chrysalises, trying to divine when they would emerge. You see, there were no contractions to count, no water breaking, no nurses to explain.  

Hourly I checked on them.  I mostly missed the emergence of the monarchs over the next day and a half, stepping out to see new monarchs unfolding their wings, flapping them at times, but mostly, it seemed they rested, gaining strength and taking in the world and preparing for their journey.  This was the generation that would return to Mexico this fall.

The next day, exactly at dawn, I came out of the house to check on the remaining chrysalises.  I spied an emerging monarch.  “No, no,” I thought, as I ran back into the house and got my camera, sporting a macro lens for this moment.  No time for a tripod.  Back out in a flash, I crouched in the garden, focusing the best I could in the low light.  The slight breeze did not help as the monarch swayed.  

The monarch was already outside the chrysalis and beginning to unfold its wings.  Wow, I thought, they pop out damn quick.  Given the low light and hand holding the camera I hoped the images were in focus.  Some were, some weren’t. Over the course of two days, we counted about a dozen monarchs that emerged from known and unknown chrysalises.

This spring we planted two more swamp milkweeds, hoping to entice more monarchs to lay eggs.  This August we counted abut 13 caterpillars, and like last year, after voraciously denuding the milkweeds, they disappeared.  We only found and counted 4 chrysalises, however.  Disappointed, we hoped we missed some, not finding them in the ornamental grasses.

Yesterday, two of the four chrysalises turned translucent.  Learning from last year, I pre-staged my camera and tripod beside the front door.  I was determined not to miss the emergence of this year’s batch of Monarchs. 

This morning, when I checked them early, the Monarchs had not yet emerged.  Them, around late morning, a summer shower ripped through.  Heavy rains, winds and gusts, one of several storms pummeling central Virginia over these past few weeks.  After lunch, I went back out to check and discovered both Monarchs had emerged.  

Damn, missed the emergence again.  

As I photographed and observed the two, to my surprise, four more Monarchs emerged from the grasses.  A total of six, with two known chrysalises remaining.  What a beautiful moment.  

In this dreary time, with an angry Monarch spreading his wings across America, one must take in and relish the beautiful moments in life.  I have written enough about these dark times and wanted to write about hope and the goodness that can still be found. I found it with these Monarchs.

Godspeed to these emerging Monarchs and wish them a safe journey back to Mexico where there they will produce a new generation of Monarchs to spread their wings and migrate north across this great continent.

The Power Grab:  NextEra Energy and Virginia’s Dominion Power.

NextEra Energy wants to buy Dominion Power for $67 billion, or thereabouts.  That’s not good for you, for me, for Louisa, or for Virginia.

This week Virginia’s Lt. Governor Ghazal Hashmi started a listening tour in Loudoun County to hear what voters have to say about the proposed acquisition or merger.  According to reporting from one packed public hearing, the critiques and concerns were many.  Only one person, it was reported, approved of the merger.  NextEra is expanding and buying electric company utilities up the east coast, not just Virginia.  

It is a juggernaut.  While it boasts of being Florida’s largest public electric utility, it has its corporate fingers and tentacles everywhere: Data centers, power grids, transmission lines, battery storage, solar power, gas fired power plants to power data center campuses, nuclear plants.  Last year It partnered with Google Cloud to “scale multiple gigawatts of power” for new data centers across the U.S. 

With the acquisition of Dominion Power, NextEra claims it will be the “largest regulated electric utility business by market capitalization and one of the world’s largest energy infrastructure companies,” adding for emphasis, “with an unmatched operating platform benefiting customers.” Ha! 

I think we know a monopolistic octopus when we see one.

They are, it seems, bad neighbors as well.

NextEra describes itself as “the largest electric power and energy infrastructure company in North America and is a leading provider of electricity to American homes and businesses. Headquartered in Juno Beach, Florida, NextEra Energy is a Fortune 200 company that owns Florida Power & Light Company, America’s largest electric utility, which provides reliable electricity to approximately 12 million people across Florida. NextEra Energy also owns one of the largest energy infrastructure development companies in the U.S., NextEra Energy Resources, LLC. NextEra Energy and its affiliated entities are meeting America’s growing energy needs with a diverse mix of energy sources, including natural gas, nuclear, renewable energy and battery storage.”

NextEra has been in federal court recently.  

In April NextEra agreed to a $150 million settlement with investors who alleged “fraud and deceit.”  I think the settlement is merely window dressing and housekeeping before it becomes an issue with Virginia’s regulatory body.  The settlement, it appears is still under review, by a federal appeals court, before final approval.

Clean Virginia, an advocacy group that has filed motions with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission regarding the proposed merger, stated that the merger “would hand Virginia’s electric grid to a company with a troubling track record of raising bills in Florida, heavily interfering in state politics and prioritizing corporate profit over the public interest” (https://www.cleanvirginia.org/2026/07/15/mergerapplicationfiled/).  This included ‘ghost candidates’ and surveillance of a journalist.

It has its own political arm:  NextEra Political Action Committee.  In fact, there was a Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigation in 2022 which alleged campaign finance law violations.  In 2024 the FEC closed the investigation, citing it did not find illegal activity.   Hmmmmm.

Additionally, according to online reporting, NextEra’s PAC has donated approximately $60 million to various politicians in various states.  Our new governor received some of that largess.  It was reported that Governor Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration committee received two donations from NextEra totaling $15k.  While $15k seems like a small amount, it opens the door for larger donations.  Like a free bag of dope.  Spanberger, now that she is on the bandwagon to challenge the merger and apparently the first governor in Virginia history to “intervene” in the regulator process, should return the donation.

Campaign donations, public utilities, and politicians go together like a peanut butter and banana sandwich on white bread, and, are not a new combination to Virginia.  A recent Virginia Mercury article reporting on the NextEra merger, “Public Utilities Shouldn’t be Funding the Campaigns of the People who Govern them,” journalist Ivy Main highlighted the perils of taking unlimited donations from public utilities.  According to the article, Virginia’s House speaker Don Scott reportedly has received nearly $4million in donations from Dominion Energy over the years.  Wow, $4 million (https://virginiamercury.com/2026/08/31/public-utilities-shouldnt-be-funding-the-campaigns-of-the-people-who-govern-them/#).  

Overall, the merger would be a disaster in my opinion for Virginians already battling high electricity prices and a tsunami of data centers, Louisa County included.  NextEra has a history of price spikes.  In Florida they raised the rates 33 percent from 2021 to 2026 and has a poor history of customer service, unauthorized charges, doubling or tripling rates after the initial, introductory, contract expired.  

Basically, the merger would create a monopoly with NextEra’s tentacles everywhere, from our pocketbooks to politicians’ pockets.  Monopolies mean higher prices, poorer service, and more woe. Let’s not move on to that next era of monopolies.

Time to write your local representatives and Governor Spanberger.  The final decision by regulators is January. Tell them “NO” to the merger.

Les Enfants Terribles

“The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world,” wrote American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History. Stop, pause and think deeply about those words.  That thought is both simple and profound, I think.

Niebuhr was an influential voice of conscience as the shadow of the Cold War darkened the world and McCarthyism was eating at America’s soul. He wrote through the lens of a mid-century white male American gaze, eliding some of America’s worst excesses as a nation, or, at times, obliquely referencing them.   But who doesn’t write though the lens of the present and one’s lived experiences.   

His salient points, nonetheless, were about virtue, and in his book’s case: not rejecting the “Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue” while America pursues it Cold War battles with the Soviet Union through proxy wars.   He wanted America to avoid the trap that our way, the American way, was the one true way. 

You can imagine, were he alive today, Niebuhr would be a tenacious critic of Trump and the Christian right’s cult of virility; embodied by Stephen Miller’s pronouncement that the only virtues in the world are power, strength, and violence. Niebuhr’s and Trump’s concepts of virtue and Christianity are diametrically opposite. 

As for an infant being secure in his world, I think Niebuhr was critiquing the naiveté of the growing popularity of the myth of American exceptionalism and government policies that flowed from that belief.  The hubris that Americans of European heritage were a chosen people, in a land created by God for them, blinded them to history’s lessons.  We see that myth once again resonant in America.  Our government is run by these man-infants, these enfants terribles who naively and mistakenly believe that they are God’s chosen, that they speak for God, that only they have the virtue to lead America.  

Well before Niebuhr, many, many centuries ago, Abu al-Ala al Ma’arri  — a freethinking  poet, philosopher, and writer, some would say heretic — was born in Syria in the late 10th century.  He was skeptical and suspicious of any religion’s claim to absolute truth.  

Blinded by smallpox while young, he was nonetheless a prolific author, dictating his many works.  I came across a quote of his while reading about the crusades.  At the time, I was posted to Beirut and had borrowed a three-volume work on the crusades to help pass the nights away.   While al Ma’arri lived before the first crusaders set foot in Jerusalem in 1099, he did live in an Arab world where Shia and Sunni battled over the soul of Islam, territory, and power.  

Al Ma’arri’s truism stuck with me.  I even printed and framed the quote, hung it in my office for years:  “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:  Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”  It was reminder to me of the sectarianism, fanaticism, and zealotry that drove (and drives) much of our world’s history.  In Beirut, the grim reminders of sectarian civil war were everywhere.  

It’s about extremism.  Whether it be religious bigotry and zealotry predicated on deliberate interpretations, misreadings, or misconceptions of religious texts to murder the other; or scientific Darwinism used to justify the sterilization or murder of the mentally and physically disabled.

We never seem to learn the lessons of sectarian violence.  If anyone is the personification of this ideation of no brains but religious certitude and bigotry it is Secretary of Defense Hegseth.   For Trump in general, and Hegseth in particular, the Iran war wasn’t really a war to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, although it was part of the equation. The war is really about going to war with Islam on a global scale, punishing a transgressive Iran for not becoming supplicants like the Saudis or Emirates.  

Netanyahu, for his part, exploited Trump’s and Hegseth’s biases and infant-like world view for his own purposes.  For all his faults, and there are many, Netanyahu is not naïve like an infant, he sees the world for its complexities.

As for domestic politics, most every single consequential executive order issued by this President revolves around a form of white male Christian sectarianism and zealotry:  American history (who counts and who’s erased), DEI (reinstating white male privilege), Immigration/birthright citizenship (racist replacement theory), access to reproductive rights (male control of the female body), and vaccinations (God decides who lives or dies). 

Our government, it seems every day, is falling deeper into the latter half of al-Ma’rri’s dictum and continues to self-radicalize as Trump’s misjudgments tanks the economy and he is humiliated on the world’s stage by Iran.   It is bad enough that the Executive Branch has been captured by these enfants terribles, but when Congress and the Supreme Court are also controlled by this gang of enfants terribles, things become dangerous.  

Trump’s strongman grip strangling America’s democratic institutions is starting to slip as he becomes weaker politically, but his weakness is also simultaneously a time of greater danger.  All strongmen flail violently when the end nears.  Miller’s virtues — power, strength, violence — are a warning.

Democratic institutions like the courts should be rallying around the Constitution, and they are at the lower levels.  But, given the Superme Court’s recent stay of a lower court’s order blocking implementation of parts of Trump’s executive order regarding mail in ballots, I doubt the Court will block Trump’s meddling and interfering with the mid-term elections. 

America has had periods of rupture before and come back stronger.  Will our country recover from the coming rupture this November?  We have seen what Trump’s acolytes can and will do to overturn an election.  Unlike January 6, 2021, the guard rails are gone.  They are acting for God, they believe.  Will Trump’s paramilitaries (DHS) rain pain on Americans after the mid-terms?  Will the military occupy blue cities and seize ballot boxes?  Will the Justice Department conduct mass arrests and detentions of Trump’s political opponents, blue state governors?  Will Speaker Johnson refuse to seat newly elected democrats in the House?  I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I thought they were far-fetched.  Ten years ago, I would say these are crazy questions.  Now, you feel in your gut that they aren’t far from the mark.

 Our 250-year-old experiment in in serious jeopardy, both at home and abroad.  We are a nation without friends.  A bully pushing agendas driven by sectarian ideologies.  Even our geographic neighbors – Canada and Mexico — hate us, it seems with a passion.  Why? Because we the people choose this nut job now residing in the White House.  We put him there. We choose this path with eyes wide open.   Most Americans who voted choose to reelect a Machiavellian, narcist, psychopath with a god-complex whose first disastrous term ended in an attempted coup.  What could go wrong?

V is for Voting

Famously, presidential candidate Bill Clinton posted a reminder note that said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  A cue that wonky policy sound bites or nuanced discourses on the pro and cons of a particular policy only go so far with the average voter.  For most voters, it comes down to kitchen table issues:  

Can I pay the mortgage or rent? 

Can I feed my kids?

Can I afford a middle-class life?  

They measure these questions against the previous few years:  Am I better off today than I was four or two years ago?

For conservatives and Republicans, continuing failures to successfully manage kitchen table issues – remember 2008 and 2020, the Great Recession and then the COVID pandemic – brought them down a path to embrace the most divisive candidate, and then President, in modern American politics.  Kitchen sink issues were replaced by xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and its corollary misogyny, and racial animus.  

The basic kitchen table question must be revived.  Am I, and the people of Louisa, better off today than they were January 20, 2025?

I say, “No.”  The people of Louisa are worse off by most kitchen table measures.  

Louisa’s farmers are hard hit.  High diesel and gas prices, record fertilizer costs combined with low prices for commodities, and disappearing lucrative foreign markets, like China, are crushing Louisa, and American, family farmers.  This is the result of Trump’s misguided tariff war with China.

While unemployment remains at 3.9 percent, core inflation continues to shrink paychecks.  Wage shrinkage from inflation continues to be a self-inflicted wound.  Trump’s economic nationalism, which includes steep tariffs on most countries, continues to drive inflation up and shrink real wages.  

The disastrous never-ending war on Iran continues to keep gas at over $4.00 a gallon and diesel at over $5.00.  Borrowing money is increasingly costly as investors sour on America’s ten-year bond, raising interest rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and small farm and business loans. 

Food Insecurity: The Louisa Resource Center Council’s Food Bank has seen record numbers of visitors, I learned, over the past year.  Louisa County Public Schools this  summer — starting June 8 — began a summer school age nutrition program serving meals at various locations throughout the county. The meals are free of charge, and available for any child ages 2 to 18. No ID is required. This program speaks to the ongoing food crisis for vulnerable children in our county. How is it we have the first trillionaire, yet our children go hungry?

Housing costs in Louisa soar:  Housing costs have been increasing for well over a decade.  The median sales price for a home in Louisa is $445k, up from $234k a decade ago.  The price per square foot, however, increased close of 6 percent over the past year.  This is a huge rise, directly correlated to Trump’s tariffs.  His recent 50 percent tariff on Canadian wood products, will only make matters worse regarding affordable housing.

Access to health care continues to shrink: Deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare subsidies and the elimination of the Affordable Health Care Act premium subsidies have left many folks in Louisa County with no health care or delayed health care, many of them vulnerable children.

Meanwhile, as the denizens of Louisa pay the price for Trump’s mismanagement of about everything he touches, he and his family have profited to the tune of $2 billion dollars, mostly in the dark world of crypto currency.  The swamp he promised to drain has turned into a deep sea of corruption.

You can also frame the “are you better off today” question in terms of our democracy.  Is America’s democracy better today than it was before January 20, 2025?

I think most Americans would respond with an emphatic “No.”

By most measures, America is backsliding from the hallmarks of liberal democracy:  Pluralism, the rule of law, a healthy civil society, a government with three coequal branches, government transparency, equal access to voting and representation in government at local, state, and federal offices.

Sustained attacks on America’s institutions such as a non-partisan civil service, an apolitical military, Congressional powers, the federal courts, an independent justice Department have severely degraded America’s 250-year experiment.

Our Justice Department has become so rotten that a man was arrested and charged with vandalizing the Lincoln reflecting pool just to support Trump’s claims that his embarrassingly botched reflecting pool make over was sabotaged.  Prosecutors lied to and mislead the grand jury that indicted him.   This is what dictators do.

Despite all these challenges and threats to our democracy, we must still care …. and take the time and effort to vote.  The Democratic primary is this coming Tuesday, August 4.  Get out and vote for one of the three Democratic candidates for our district (Tom Perriello, Rob Tracinski, and Suzanne Krzyaowski).

As for this November, Rep. John McGuire (R) must go.  He has done nothing over the past two years for the folks of Louisa County or the 5th Congressional District.  His main job has been to kiss Trump’s big, beautiful orange ass. His legislative achievements for Louisa: a ‘big fat nothing burger’ as right-wing influencers are fond of saying.  Mostly culture war stuff.  He did vote for the big, beautiful bill, however, which crushes Medicaid and Medicare services to Louisa’s poorly paid working class and her seniors, and refuses to reign in Trump’s never ending illegal war with Iran.  As for Louisas farmers, he has been a big fat zero.  

Seems he is more interested in the stock market as he bought Nvidia stock twice this year and other stocks that his House Committee assignments oversee.  Once a couple of weeks after Trump purchased his own Nvidia shares.  Hmmmm?

Now, as we near the November mid-terms, Trump is increasingly signaling he will not accept the results.  He is positioning the Justice Department, the country’s intelligence services, and the Department of Homeland security to support his claims of fraud.  Will the military stay above the fray or go all in with Trump? What will the Supreme Court do?  

This raises the very serious question that are on many minds.  Will there be a peaceful transfer of power after the mid-terms?  Voter turnout this November must be huge. A democratic win must be overwhelming. Not by one or two points but by tremendous majorities.  Trump won’t dare to challenge a massive electoral loss, especially in deep red counties and states.  At least I hope he doesn’t.  But he is crazy, and not all there, so who knows.  If he does, then we must be prepared take a different tact, massive civil disobedience in coordination with court action. 

So, ask yourself, and ask your family or friends, are we better off today than we were in January 2025?  No. So, let’s get out and make our voices heard next week and in November. 

Screwworm:  Putting the Screws to Texas and John McGuire

Screwworms infestations were detected in Texas recently, according to media and government reports.  The screwworm, known as the New World Screw worm, is a fly that lays eggs on open wounds, for instance on livestock, that then grow into flesh eating maggots.  It can be fatal if not treated.

The screwworm was eradicated from the U.S. in the 1960s.  For decades, the U.S. worked to keep the screwworm at bay, working closely with Mexican and Central American governments.  This included the U.S. government funding facilities to produce and distribute sterile flies, for instance.  In 2023, the screwworm started migrating north again, probably climate change related, no?  As a result of further northward migration, a ban importing cattle from Mexico was recently put in place.  This is a key contributor to the shortage of beef cattle in the U.S., in fact, a 75-year low.  

If the screwworm infestation becomes more widespread in Texas, the state could suffer close to $2 billion dollars in economic losses.  Canada banned livestock imports from Texas temporarily.  A 1976 screwworm outbreak in Texas caused economic losses between $700 million and $1.8 billion in 2024 dollars, according to a Congressional Research Report submitted as part of a bill introduced in 2025: H.R. 3392 (more on that bill a bit later). 

The response to the new infestation has been, to say the least, interesting.  Texas ranchers are blaming the federal government for being too slow to respond.  Yep, the same Texas ranchers I suspect who voted for Trump, once, twice, and most likely thrice.  They, I would imagine, cheered on the DOGE cuts to USAID and USDA, two agencies that are instrumental in programs to contain the screwworm south of the border. Things could have been different, but ….

On May 14, 2025, Texas Republican Tony Gonzalez introduced the “STOP Screwworms Act” in the House of Representatives.  H.R. 3392 required the Secretary of Agriculture to “establish a New World Screwworm fly rearing facility, and for other purposes.”  It never got past being introduced, much less become law.  It was a bipartisan bill, with over 50 cosponsors.  The same CRS report mentioned above outlined the devastating impact an infestation could have on Texas and other border states if no action was taken.  

The failure of this bill to pass and become law illustrates how screwed up and incompetent the House of Representative is under the control of the Republicans and Speaker Johnson. Not to be outdone, the current Trump appointed Secretary of Agriculture blames, wait, wait, wait….. Biden and open borders.  The cattle ranchers aren’t buying it.  

Some ranchers have proposed self-funding screwworm eradication programs given the federal governments slow and incompetent response. You know, you get slow and incompetent when programs are defunded, scientists hounded out of government service, and all sorts of other stupid stuff.  

Meanwhile, as the screwworm infestation gets worse, our President keeps a razor sharp focus on……the reflecting pool, his billion-dollar ballroom, and his birthday bash UFC fight at the White House’s Thunderdome.   Texans.  What the hell did you think was going to happen?  It’s your own damn fault.

Another thing that irritates me is that when there was a 2025 measles outbreak in West Texas that infected close to 800 kids, of whom about 100 were hospitalized, and two died.  All hell should have broken loose, but no.  Texans seemed to shrug.  Fits the anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-government ideology of Texas. Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human services blamed the vaccines and suggested suspect treatments.  Where was the outcry?  I guess you all like your cattle more than your kids.  About 70 percent of kids are vaccinated in Texas, that is below the national average.  

Come on Texas, you can do better.  The federal government’s slow and haphazard response should be a warning to farmers and ranchers that still support Trump, in Texas and my home state of Virginia.  He’s not your friend.  Do you trust a politician whose hands have never touched dirt, or had a callous, or owned a dog, or got up before sunrise?  

But, I imagine you’re busy trying to find buyers for soybeans and corn crops you planted and worrying whether you can afford the diesel fuel or fertilizer as Trump’s incompetent and haphazard war of choice with Iran drags.  You farmers and ranchers all need some “straight” talk and tough love at times:  You screwed yourselves.  

This November, put a stop to the chaos. Make Congress vote for you and not Trump. Vote for Democratic candidates and family farmer friendly policies, not for corporate farm monopolies.  

John McGuire, our representative, has not introduced or sponsored one bill to directly help the farmers of his district. He doesn’t serve on any farm or agricultural subcommittees.  He did vote for two key bipartisan farm bills, however, which included funding for a new fire truck for Louisa County and monies for the Nottoway Sheriff’s office, hardly direct help to our farmers here in Louisa.  He did sponsor a bill to “Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” in 2025.  

The sugar farmers love him it seems, as he gets campaign donations from them and their associations.  For instance, the America Sugar Cane League, the Michigan Sugar Growers PAC, and the Sugar Growers Cooperative Florida.  Do we even grow sugarcane in Virginia?  Did I mention he has been buying Nvidia stock this year?  Twice (January and May).

Philomela: The Nightingale, Epstein, and Trump

Philomel means lover of song. In classic literature and prose, philomel was substituted with the nightingale.  William Shakespeare, for example, employed the nightingale, or even philomel, at least 33 times in his plays and sonnets as symbols of song, grief, and trauma. Its’ origins trace back to Greek and Roman mythology; of how the gods created the nightingale.

It is a tragic story, and like many Greek and Roman mythologies, is racked with violence, sexual violence in particular.  This story contains such tales.  There are several versions of the myth, I learned, and over the ages this story has been reinterpreted in prose and art. 

The story I still thing resonates today, Greek and Roman Gods were powerful beings, they not only abused their powers to indulge their thirst for vengeance and lusts but also silence their victims. They also had soft spots and intervened at the last second in supposed acts of generosity and kindness. Today we have powerful men who use their money and office to silence victims.

The story of Philomela is one such example.  Philomela was the younger sister of Pronce who was married to Tereus, the king of the Thracians.  Philomela’s voice was considered beautiful, like a birds song.  Tereus developed an obsession for Philomela.  He raped her, and to stop her from telling his wife much less anyone else, cut out her tongue.  Philomela, however, used her master weaving skills to make a purple robe or shawl with hidden messages of the rape.  Through the symbols woven into the shawl or robe, Pronce learned of the rape, and in a rage killed her (Pronce’s) and Tereus’ son, cooked him, and served him to Tereus.

When Tereus found out, he raged, grabbed an axe, and chased Philomela and Ponce out of his palace, intending to murder them.  He caught up with them, but, at that point, before he killed them, the Gods turned all three into birds.  Ponce became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Tereus a hoopoe, a very orangey, colorful bird known for its feathered crown.

Over a week ago, news media reported that E. Jean Carroll, was being investigated by the Department of Justice for perjury.  Carroll, famously sued Trump for defamation a few years ago, and won a $83.3 million settlement.  The civil jury found that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in New York City.  The judge called it rape.  Trump has appealed the civil courts verdict, asking that the settlement be set aside.  It sits before the Supreme Court today.  

You can smell the corruption all the way from Illinois and the White House. Trump, as President, presides over the Department of Justice.  The acting Attorney General is a former attorney for Trump.  The Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Bourtos, is overseeing the investigation. As a side note he is an alumnus of UVA law school.

As the fate of the civil case and judgment against Trump rests before the Supreme Court, Trump is using the Department of Justice to ‘cut out the tongue’ of E. Jean Carroll.  She is today’s Philomela.  It is outrageous.  It is also meant, I think, to silence victims of Epstein and his many friends from coming forward.  

Trump is a vile and heinous man and thinks nothing to use the full weight of his immense presidential powers, both legal and illegal, to go after and silence his accusers.  He fancies himself a deity.  Congress and the Supreme Court have allowed him to be a king and deity.

He needs to be turned into a hoopoe, orange feathered crown and all. A massive turn out this November will effectively turn him into a flightless Hoopoe of sorts.  The Greek and Roman gods did have a sense of humor, however.  Perhaps they would turn Trump into the Dodo bird or better yet a fluffy-backed tit-babbler or a blue-footed booby.  

Goethe, a Dead Italian Poet, and an American Presidency

In the late 18th century Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe completed a play loosely based on the late 16th century Italian poet Torquato Tasso.  Part autobiographical, according to one scholar, Goethe explores Tasso’s real-life moments of inspired poems created in the throes of mental illness, perhaps during episodes of manic depression or schizophrenia.  

At one point Tasso was confined to a ‘madhouse’ for pulling a knife on his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfons.  In the play, the protagonist also was placed under house arrest for threats and pulling a knife.  Goethe uses the play to explore the ‘tensions between the rational and the irrational,’ according to one academic article. From this play comes the much-quoted saying, “the coward only threatens when he is safe.”

This is a cogent observation of the human condition, even if the quote has become something of a truism.  It worries me because our President seems to be threatening everyone and everything as he too shuttles between the rational and the irrational.  His knife is our military and domestic paramilitary police.

Things are not going well for Trump – mentally or politically — it seems.  

His war with Iran is a military, strategic, and political disaster.  Iran checkmated him.  Meanwhile, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and America’s main street economy tanks, Trump fiddles with childlike vanity projects.  

Inflation is rising at a quick pace, all because of Trump’s disastrous tariff wars and his catastrophe of a war with Iran, a war of choice.  Last week gas prices were at this country’s highest national average cost per gallon ….ever.  Americans, according to a new report, are falling behind in debt payments “at the fastest pace since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.”  Credit card delinquencies rose to 13 plus percent in the first quarter of 2026.  Additionally, auto loan delinquencies are also at record numbers.  His polls are lower than sleepy Joes ever were.  

Internationally, the world is aghast at Trump’s pretenses of not only being King of America but seeking to rule the world.  At every opportunity he channels the evil emperor Ming the Merciless of Flash Gordon fame.  Trump’s daily mental ruptures are rattling global markets.  The 10-year government bond yield is at record highs, meaning sureness in the U.S. government ability to pay off its debts is declining.  Because mortgage rates are linked to the 10-year bond, not to the Fed’s rate that banks get, it means that mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, making it harder to buy a home. That’s Trump’s doing, not the Chairman of the Fed. In short, international confidence in America is in freefall. 

Yet, Trump seems wholly unconcerned with the mid-terms or 2028.  Just pleasing his MAGA base and ignoring the basic sensibilities of democracy and the democratic process. As if they no longer exist. He even posted an image of himself with a rifle and the carcass of a rhino.  Threatening Republicans who don’t back him 100 percent. 

 Why?  What does he have up his sleeve that makes him think he is safe from political disaster and reversal?

I can only guess he isn’t concerned about the Republicans losing the house and senate this November or the White House with a democratic incumbent in 2028.   That the outcomes of the vote of 2026 and 2028 are irrelevant; that he intends, and believes, he can and will stay in power. 

As Trump vacillates between the rational and irrational, he increasingly lives in the latter camp. I am deeply concerned that a mental health driven constitutional breakdown is becoming increasingly likely should neither his Cabinet or Congress intervene.  Given the cowardice of his cabinet Secretaries, Vice President, Roberts, Johnson, and Thune, Trump has nothing to fear and continues his campaigns of threats.

Corrupt

Corrupt is a word much used nowadays to describe Trump and his administration. I even heard it in Louisa in an establishment that I would say is part of MAGA country. A few weeks ago, when my wife and I were in a store in the Louisa and Mineral area, the owner standing behind the counter, went on a tirade about Trump and his corruption.  Stating that Trump and his family pocketed over $1.4 billion.  

I have been to this store several times and there has been, on occasion, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-democratic party bantering and comments made by folks in the store and behind the counter.  For instance, if something was free, it was a “democratic discount.”  I stopped going to the store, but sometimes they were the only game in town.

That said, when I heard the owner dis Trump recently, I got a grin on my face as wide as the Grand Canyon, said nothing, paid for my stuff, and left.  “Damn,” I said to my wife in the truck, adding, “holy shit that was interesting.”  

Whether that anger translates at the polls to a dem vote, is to be seen.  It may turn into low republican turnout, which will benefit the democrats.  But who knows.  Who knows whether a corrupt White House will try and cancel the November election by declaring a national emergency, or, if there is an election, whether Trump will nullify democratic wins by claiming fraud and seize ballots.  That is the $1.4 billion dollar question.

Corrupt, however, is more expansive than simple bribery, self-dealing, insider trading, and all unethical things Trump is doing to enrich himself, his family, and those loyal to him.  It has a much richer and broader meaning.  Corruption is plush in adjectives and verbs dating back to the 14th century.

Like many words in English, it has a Latin origin.  It’s root meaning corrumpere, simply means to destroy to spoil.  In the English language starting in the 1300s it took on the modern sense of how we understand corruption, both physically and spiritually. Most folks nowadays think just bribery, but it has many meanings.   Sadly, I think you can put a check mark by each of the words below and say, “yep, that’s Trump.”

Debased in character, unhealthy, uncouth, bribe, to break, decrepit, putrid, putrefy, spoiled, depraved morally, pervert, contaminate, impair the purity of, seduce or violate (woman or child), render impure, and finally, influence by bribe or other motive.

Not only is Trump using the office of the Presidency to corruptly enrich himself and his family, but the list of his other corrupt acts is deep, and America decays and putrefies every day he remains in power:

he demolishes the rule of law in America every opportunity he has. 

he routinely perverts the course of justice;

he broke America’s social contract;

he debases America and its allies daily with wildly crazy midnight social media posts;

he orders extrajudicial killings on the high seas and starts unjust wars without cause and without the people’s consent.

he violated a woman in a department store dressing room, a civil jury found;

 he was accused by a woman of raping her when she was 13, per FBI documents;

he was a longtime friend with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein;

he posts images of himself as Jesus.

And finally, he is personally uncouth, not worthy of the highest office in our great land.

So, what to do.  The first order is to vote in November, make pleas to friends and family to get out and vote.  That’s the easy party.  If Trump cancels the election or nullifies the election or tells congress not to seat the new congress, what then?  What’s the response? I think, and I believe this, it will be the beginning of the end of the union.  I don’t think disenfranchised states will wait for the courts.  

Civil War?  I hope not, and most Americans do not want this.  It would be fratricidal. Problem is Trump is an insane, corrupt nihilist who likes to play the madman, when he is in effect really a madman, surrounded by sycophantic child like nihilists like Vance, Miller, and Hegseth.  The question is, what will a depraved Trump do when massive demonstrations erupt across the country and in Washington DC should he cancel or nullify the elections?

A Very, Very Short History of Voting Rights in America: 1776 to 2026

Let’s begin with a very short quiz.  True or false: Up to 1926 non-citizens in many States could vote in local, state, and national elections.  

If you answered True, you are ………correct.

If you carefully read the original ratified constitution, you will note that it did not explicitly define who could vote.  Or, for that matter even define citizen or citizenship.  In fact, and practice, voting rights in the several states at our founding tended to be based on the big three:  acquired wealth, gender, and race.  These three qualifications defined who could and, consequently, who could not vote.  While property qualifications pretty much disappeared in the early 19th century, gender and race defined who could vote, not citizenship, for many, many decades.

Some state constitutions merely asserted “white males” could vote with no mention of citizenship.  As the country expanded westward voting by aliens was encouraged, for instance in the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 “freehold aliens” could vote.  Some states required aliens to take an oath that they were upstanding inhabitants and intended to become citizens.  Becoming a naturalized citizenship was linked to race, however, in our early Republic.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that only “free white person of good character’ could become citizens after two years of residence, however, several following Acts raised the residency requirements first to five years, and then in 1798 the Alien and Sedition Act raised the residency requirement to 14 years.  This last requirement did not last long and was in response to fears of dastardly French influences.

The Constitution of 1789, while never linking voting to citizenship, clearly stated, however, that the President, Representatives, and Senators must be citizens, and added an additional modifier for President, they must be a ‘natural born citizen.’  The absence of any express statement in the constitution linking citizenship to voting suggests that voting by non-citizens was such common practice that it was deemed a common law right, at least in the American colonies which, before the revolution, were generally governed by written charters.  

Americans, it seems, before they were technically American, were better off than their fellow Englishmen in Great Britian in terms of suffrage.  In Great Britian, voting in the 18th century was extremely restricted and it was not until a series of reforms in the 19th century did Great Britian enlarge the voting franchise.  

For about 150 years then, many states permitted aliens, that is non-citizens, to vote.  I think Scalia, were he alive, and other constitutional originalists would vomit at that thought.  

Voting by non-citizens did ebb and flow over time, however. Wars resulted in contractions of voting rights by non-citizens, for instance the War of 1812 and the First World War saw pushback.  The rise of nativist movements as waves of immigrants arrived provoked some pushback as well on non-citizen voting rights in the mid 19th century.  This accelerated when immigrants from eastern or southern Europe — such as Greece or Italy — began arriving in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[i]  

Basically, folks from an earlier list of shithole countries or representing threatening religions, you know, the ever-dangerous Catholic or Jew.   Claims of intellectual, genetic, and moral inferiority abounded.  They couldn’t assimilate many claimed.  Does that not sound familiar?

As we have seen, voting rights in America has a peculiar history and was (and is it seems) very much tied with gender and race, not citizenship. Citizenship was a variable state by state.  Women gained the right to vote 105 years ago.  African American men in 1870.  Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until 1952, and therefore ineligible to vote.  

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to enforce and federalize and nationalize the right to vote.  It did much to ensure all citizens, regardless of race or origin, were given equal opportunity to vote.  That is no longer the case.  While the reversals of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been articulated in terms of impacts on black and brown voters, the demise of the Act will have broader impacts on other communities: Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and other diaspora communities.  

Trump’s new immigration policy is designed to impact the make-up of the next generation of voters.  Afrikaners over Africans, whites over others.  And, with the help of the Robert’s court, making it harder for everyday Americans of color to vote in states with long histories of denying black and brown people the right to vote.  The attack on the Voting Rights Act is just one part of a broader, systemic attack on who is an American, who can become an American, and therefore, who has a voice in America’s present and future.

This November we are voting for more than just neutering Trump politically, we are fighting for whose America this is, and who will inherit America from us once we are gone.  This is a generational vote, a vote for our kids, our grandkids, and our generations of unborn Americans. 

Post Script:  The Supreme Court recently invalidated Louisiana’s congressional district voting map because districts were gerrymandered by race.  A normal grace period of a month was set aside by the Court to allow immediate action by Louisiana.  Voting was already underway.  The Louisiana governor is currently refusing to count over 30k mail-in votes already received.    

[i] Texas permitted non-citizens to vote until 1921.  Indiana as well. Kansas 1918. Oregon 1914.  Virginia 1818.  Pennsylvania 1838.  See Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States, 2006.

Supreme Mistake: Et Tu Roberts?

The Supreme Court last week gave a final, mortal blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Et tu Roberts. The Court’s majority opinion, penned by Justice Alito, argued that America has changed since the 1960s, that the racial animus predicating the denial of black and brown people from voting or having the chance to be represented in Congress, had magically evaporated.  

The Louisiana congressional district map, which was at the heart of this recent case, was therefore unconstitutional, according to six of the justices. Voting districts, per the Court could be gerrymandered to reflect political favoritism toward a political party but not race. To add insult to injury, the Court then granted Louisiana the immediate ability to change the map.  Normally, there is a month’s long grace period giving the losing side an opportunity to prepare arguments in lower courts before the ruling comes into effect. 

The central premise that America has changed is facile and flawed and misguided.  Yes, America has become a more pluralistic society, black and brown representation did increase since the late 1960s.  However, in many deep south states with large black and brown populations, white’s continue to be overrepresented in state houses and the House of Representatives.  It ignores repeated and continual attempts to disenfranchise black and brown voters through ostensibly race neutral laws.

On another level, the racial animus towards black and brown folks is as strong as ever.  Take Trump’s words that immigrants from ‘shit hole’ countries are polluting American blood, or that Haitians eat folks’ pets, or that Somalis are low IQ, or that non-white immigrants are destroying western civilization.  I don’t think these thoughts are outliers in MAGA world, or for that matter in the minds of some of the Supreme Court justices.  

A week before the riots in Charlottesville in August 2017, in which Heather Heyer was murdered and dozens more were injured when a white supremacist drove his car into peaceful protestors, I posted this essay. An essay about my community here in Louisa.  Given the Court’s decision last week, I believe the essay deserves a repost. I repost it in its entirety below followed by a brief postscript: 

Four ladies were sitting in a pie and coffee joint. In walk a priest, a rabbi, and an Imam. Naw, in walk my wife and I. What follows, disappointingly, is a true, but sad story. As we walk in the four women were playing bridge and conversationally engaged. As I ordered coffee and tea, a slice of rhubarb pie, and a muffin, at the counter my wife selected a table cattycorner from this bridge quartet, well within earshot, especially as they spoke in upturned voices.  

Given the closeness of the tables, it was impossible not to be encompassed in the conversation, even as detached, unwilling silent witnesses. Eavesdropping into the conversation mid-way found us somewhere in a conversation about church business followed quickly by a lamentation that a friend, who apparently was pictured in a Ku Klux Klan photograph, was being unfairly associated with the racism. “Guilt by association” chuckled one woman slightly. It was like walking into a Kafka soliloquy.  This tête-à-tête then veered onto the hot local subject of the removal of a confederate statue from a nearby university town. All expressed bitterness, with one speaking out loud for their little group, that it was a disgrace, that you “can’t change history.”   

She’s right, but apparently, she can’t fathom or acknowledge that the South’s history is more than about white heritage. Then, in a deeply submerged psychological association, the statue controversy was instantaneously linked to the public schools — think 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education declaring racial segregation unconstitutional – when one exclaimed in the next breath to mutual concord, that “We provide them with a free education” and if ‘they don’t take advantage of that, it isn’t our problem.’  Oh, that set me off. We and them. WE and THEM! That basically sums it up. At that point my wife shot me that ‘not now’ look with a little Mona Lisa smirk, part threat, part calm down. I mumbled aloud about walking into a ‘daughters of the confederacy’ meeting. 

My back was to this bridge playing klavern and I was facing out the pie shop’s picture window taking in the Mayberry-like main street, named of course Main Street. Across the street was the antebellum circuit courthouse, a little red brick jail stood off to the left of the courthouse. A statue of a confederate soldier stands a silent vigil; his gaze forever fixed towards the northeast watching over the town square and all who approach. Sheriff Andy Taylor or Atticus Finch may walk by if you close your eyes for a second.  This American circuit courthouse was a facilitator of slavery and racial oppression. No doubt, slaves seized from indebted planters were most likely sold just yards away. Wills that directed the selling off or gifting of slaves, breaking up families, were filed in that courthouse. I wondered too about the little jail and imagined whether slave traders, with their coffles of slaves heading down from Alexandria to Richmond, and then on to New Orleans, would bed down their walking inventory in the local jail overnight for a small fee.  

I am not sure the irony of their conversation juxtaposed so close to slavery’s ghosts was apparent to these card players. Nonetheless, the carefree and unguarded manner the conversation played out in a public space underscored, I think, the impulsive racist bigotry that pervades many American towns. It is as natural as breathing it seems. The fact that they spoke in raised voices like it was 1859 or 1955 leads me to believe these women intuitively assumed, that because my wife and I are white, we automatically subscribe to their philosophy. 

Shamefully, I sat mute, halfway between cowardice and rage, sipping tepid tea, but felt my anger and words would not change what has been etched in these women’s minds since before their mothers’ mothers were even born.  Their banter was wide ranging and not all about race. At some point one commented about CNN “yapping on” about the “Russia thing,” “brain washing of liberals,” and what to do about North Korea. On North Korea, at least, there was disagreement. While it isn’t fair to put all the white folks in this corner of the South into a box and label it “toxic bigots, handle with care” racism’s complexities remains deep in this part of the woods and the women playing bridge no doubt have already infested their children and grandchildren with their septic views of race, supremacy, and obligation.  At least the muffin was good, but the conversation left a bitter, sad after taste. 

On reflection, “WE and THEM” is at the heart of America’s political divide. It always has been. At its core is the fundamental question about “whose America is this?” America belongs to the descendants of African captives forced into generational slavery, the new African citizen, the fifth generation Mexican American, the Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt, the Shia Muslim from Syria, the offspring of Puritan New Englanders, the Chinese Americans whose ancestors helped build America’s western railroads, native Americans. And yes, even the fearful daughters of the confederacy who indifferently sip the tepid tears of those lost to slavery while playing bridge, should have equal access to a piece of the American pie.

Post Script:  The Supreme Court made another decision antithetical to American democracy and misjudges the residual racial animus and antipathy still much alive in this country.  This decision highlights the need for every vote this November.  A democratic majority in the House and Senate will put a dead stop to Trump’s rule by decree.  The Senate will ensure no more supreme court justices appointed by Trump are confirmed should any retire or die during the last two years of Trump’s term.