At my doctor’s appointment recently, 0n checking out I was given a rather unimpressive copy of a copy of a copy (etc.) of form that required me to write down my medicare number and sign that I was indeed who I said I was. The young woman then asked if I wanted her to look up my medicare number. I almost burst out laughing.
I asked if this were part of the hoo-ha of our duly-elected government’s shit show. The answer was affirmative.
Then I got mad
😤
I just finished watching Mr. Robot, a fantastic television series from the mid-2010s about hacking a huge corporation that is now controlling the world, led by a secretive cartel of the world’s billionaires. It sounds entirely familiar.
For no apparent reason, it was announced that the once-known Free State of Florida has been renamed MoonPieTown.
People have been encouraged to ‘not think about it too much’, as it makes common sense to a minority of Americans.
Banana
Today, as the Chief Dude of the town formerly known as Cocoa Beach, I signed an Executive Order to rename the city to Banana.
This highlights our fair town’s position as the capital of the Banana River Empire.
The Banana River Empire: Banana is arguably one of the most significant cities globally, as evidenced by the Cape Canaveral Space Force Command on the left and Patrick Space Force Base on the right.
Once known as Ulumay Lagoon by some illegal Spanish alien in 1640, renaming it more accurately reflects the glorious beginnings of our beautiful tourist trap of a city.
Remember our old dream, Manifest Destiny? Well, it’s back! First, we had the Gulf of Waffle House, then MoonPieTown, and now, get this – a Banana MoonPieTown on the menu at the Mars Cafe!
MoonPie’s on Mars – It is MANkind’s Manifest Destiny!
What’s not to love about Peter? He takes his time but nobody can craft songs like this guy…
‘Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky… and the moon has always drawn me to it.’
I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:
The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.
This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.
Occupy Mars
Update January 2025
It’s official! Fearless Leader tRump mentioned Manifest Destiny when making some vague tRump-style commitment during his Inauguration Weave, ringing in America’s new Oligarchy.
It just fucking pains me to no end to have to agree with our Felon-In-Chief being a Liberal Coastal Elitist Sociopath. However, I grew up right smack dab in the middle of another President’s proclamation:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F Kennedy ~ from an address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort, is a September 12, 1962
I am not going to hold my breath, but I have to admit it would be fucking bitchen for humankind to make it to Mars in my lifetime.
American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their ancestral homeland. Updated by yours truly to incorporate our fearless leaders’ inauguration comments. – source Wikipedia
