Welcome to Muleshoe; Now Keep It Moving...

 “Oh crap.” 

I’m not privy to the tone you imparted on those words as you read them just now in your head. And I am not normally one to try to dictate to a reader how to read the words I have written.

But in this particular case, tone matters. A LOT.

Look at the words on the page (or screen) again. They end with a period, not with an exclamation point. So the valence on the words, while still negative, is not anything too highly pitched. 

Imagine you reach into the fridge, say, and take out a quart of milk. You take the lid off, pour a splash into some coffee you have fixed for a friend who has stopped by on a pleasant Saturday morning to say hi and shoot the breeze. As you go to put the lid back onto the milk, you drop it and it rolls a few feet away under a kitchen island. The island is a good six inches off the floor and the lid will be very easy to retrieve.

The tone you should use when reading that first line up above is the same tone you might use when you drop the cap: ever-so-slightly put out, but not really even mad.

Now that you know this, let me start again.

“Oh crap.”

It was February 1990 and I was behind the wheel of my tan 1970 Plymouth Valiant, driving west on state Route 84 just outside of Muleshoe, Texas. There was a hornet in the car and I had a strong preference that the hornet be outside the car. Without thinking, I reached with my left hand for the window crank and gave it a turn. As soon as I did, the window fell into the door with a solid clunk I knew all too well. 

The Valiant, (named Fuad) was a solid old car with a reliable slant-six engine. He was nothing fancy, but he served me well and I loved him. One of his quirks was the driver’s side window would fall off its track and into the door any time you touched the window crank. I had gotten very good about not touching the crank, but every once in a great while I would forget—usually when my brain was focused on something more pressing—like a hornet by my head.

Whenever the window would fall into the door I would have to pull over, get the specially-folded wire coat hanger I kept on the floor in the back for just such an occasion, and fish the window up out of the door and back onto its track. It didn’t take long. That morning outside of Muleshoe was no exception and I was back on the road in no time, heading for Santa Fe, New Mexico and my friend Amy Schwendimann.

Amy was Stop #2 on my first cross-country road trip, which eventually covered more than 7,000 miles over two months and 21 states. Stop #1 had been my college friend Adam Faschan in Baton Rouge, Louisianna, whom I had not seen for more than two years.

I graduated from college in May of 1987 and shortly after that found myself in the United States Peace Corps in Yemen. This was long before cell phones and the internet and during my two years in Yemen the only way to communicate with my friends was by letter. So by the time of my road trip in February 1990 I had not seen any of my college friends for a long time. Adam was in Baton Rouge to get his Ph.D. in civil engineering at LSU and I think he appreciated to opportunity to show me around New Orleans to hear some music and drink some hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s.

When I left Adam’s small Baton Rouge apartment early in the morning and headed west I had a real feeling of excitement. I was 24, alone, in a car with a working AM/FM radio, and $2000 in my bag. I had never taken a real bona fide American road trip and here I was, doing it! I had hitchhiked all around Yemen, and that came with its own feeling of blissful lost-ness. But I had never experienced the vast freedom that comes with an open road, a full tank of gas, and a vague plan.

Fuad had no tape player, so I was at the mercy of whatever stations my radio could pull out of the sky. That particular morning near Muleshoe I had found a Top Forty station and the B-52s’ song “Roam” was playing. It felt like the universe was talking directly to me. And, maybe because of that, my foot got just a tad heavy on the gas pedal and I was doing 37 in a 30 m.p.h. zone.

I saw the Bailey County Sherriff’s car parked sneakily on the side of the road just as his red lights went on and his siren revved up. He pulled onto the road right behind me and I pulled off of the road as soon as I was able. I had Delaware plates and was probably the first car from Delaware that Sherriff had ever pulled over. As he talked on his radio I fished out my registration and insurance card. He came up to my car and told me to roll down the window.

I told him it was broken and that I would have to open the door. This raised his hackles a bit. He stepped back, put a hand on the butt of his gun, and told me to open the door slowly and step out. I did, and after that the interaction was polite and almost pleasant, though I did get a $40 ticket. I got back in Fuad and prepared to drive away. As I turned the radio back on, I heard a tap on the window and unthinkingly went to roll it down.

THUNK!

The sound made me say again “oh crap.” It made the Sherriff jump a little and grab for his gun. 

I stuck my head out the now-empty window and said, “Sorry about that—it’s broken.”

“Startled me,” he said. “I forgot to give you back these.” 

He handed me back my license and registration and wished me a safe trip.

 

I’m not sure if his well-wishes had any impact on my trip, but I did indeed have a safe and amazing trip.

Open Letter to Benjamin Netanyahu

 Dear Benjamin Netanyahu,

What the actual fuck are you doing?

Your policies are leading—directly—to the deaths of tens of thousands of humans. You know it is happening and yet you let it continue. Not only do you let it happen, you ORDER it to continue.

What’s that line the spokespeople always say? “The Israeli Defense Force is the most moral army in the world…”

Putting aside the discussion about whether ANY army is moral, your policies have made this sound like something out of George Orwell. “Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace.”

Tens of thousands of non-combatants are stuck in a patch of land measuring 141 square miles. This is the size of Denver, Colorado. Your policies have led to the deaths of 65,000 citizens of the Gaza Strip. That is the equivalent of 90,000 peaceful Coloradan men, women, and children being brutally killed by a foreign government.

Before the savage and inexcusable Hamas attacks of October 8, 2023 Gaza, had a population of 2,200,000 people. A few thousand of the people killed have been members of Hamas. For argument’s sake, let’s say 5,000 of the Palestinian dead were members of Hamas. That leaves 60,000 non-combatant Palestinians dead because of your policies, Benjamin. That does not sound very moral. Certainly not “the most moral.”

Yes—I know that Hamas hides like cowards under hospitals and in schools. This is not about Hamas, really. It’s not about Israel, either. Or Israelis. Or Jews. Or Judaism.

This is about YOU. And your policies. You are pursuing policies that are crimes against humanity. YOU—Banjamin Netanyahu—are a war criminal.

You have killed roughly 3% of the civilian population of Gaza so that you do not have to face corruption charges or take responsibility for the intelligence failures that led to Oct. 8. You, Benjamin Netanyahu, are a weak and cowardly man willing to kill thousands to avoid accountability.

Sometimes I wish I believed in the Christian afterlife, Benjamin Netanyahu. That way I could trust you would experience the consequences of your abhorrently evil policies. But I don’t. And you probably won’t.

I mean this sincerely when I say “Fuck You Benjamin Netanyahu,”

 Chris

Justified?

On October 23, 1998 a man named James Kopp lurked in the dark outside the Amherst, NY home of Dr. Barnett Slepian. Kopp had a rifle, and when he saw Slepian through the doctor’s kitchen window, he took aim and fired. 

Dr. Slepian was hit in the chest and died two hours later.

Kopp was motivated by his belief that Dr. Slepian, who performed abortions, was himself a murderer and needed to die.

I have two important questions for you:

1) Do you have any sympathy for James Kopp and what he did? 

2) Do you think of him as a murderer?

Okay, now how do you feel about Luigi Mangione? Do you have any sympathy for him? Do you think of him as a murderer?

If your answers about Kopp differ from your answers about Mangione, then you should think a bit more. If one is a hero to you and the other a murderer then you are playing some serious cognitive games with yourself.

We will get what we deserve

I find it both laughable and unsettling when I scroll through Twitter and see the AI-generated images (popular on the Right) of Donald Trump with huge muscles and movie star good looks, wielding a machine gun, riding a lion, or decked out in a Superman cape. 

Donald Trump is no Superman. It is pretty obvious by now that he is a petty little man who has never been loved by anyone. I do not say this mockingly but instead with much pity. Donald Trump has never known one second of what it feels like to be loved simply for being himself. When I let myself imagine what that absence might do to a person, it gives me real pain.

In Donald Trump’s case, this lack of love was combined with an abusive and impossible-to-please father, a self-involved mother, and an enormous fortune. His bluster and fake tough guy persona are efforts to impress and hide the needy child at his core. If you have ever seen the animated movie Spirited Away, then you know that Donald Trump is much more like the oversized destructive baby named Boh than like Superman. He demands attention and revels in chaos.

The past nine years, ever since that ridiculous ride down that ridiculous golden escalator, have left me increasingly saddened by my fellow Americans. So many good people seem to have adopted a petulant huckster as their hero. And no matter what he says or does, his idolators lap it up. I have never seen a more obvious example of the old adage about it being easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled.

Donald Trump has never cared about anyone other than Donald Trump. He does not care about the people who work for him. He does not care about the people who voted for him. And he certainly doesn’t care about doing what is right for the American people. He uses people until they are squeezed dry and then he throws them away. There is nothing heroic about his narcissistic behavior. Nothing.

Compare Donald Trump to Jimmy Carter. Carter attended the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis during World War II, ready to serve the country wherever he was needed. He graduated in 1946 and was stationed on submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He then did graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the nation’s second nuclear submarine.

Donald Trump avoided serving in the armed forces during Vietnam by getting a doctor to attest to the “fact” that he had bone spurs in his feet. (Funny how those bone spurs never seemed to bother Donny one day of his entire adult life since…).

Jimmy Carter married Roslyn Smith in 1946 and they remained married for more than 70 years, clearly still in love right up until she died in 2023. Donald Trump has had numerous wives and numerous affairs and treats women like he treats everything else in the world—like objects to be used until he is done with them.

President, Jimmy Carter locked himself away at Camp David with Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat and refused to let them leave until they had signed an historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. He used the power of the United States to champion human rights throughout the world. He created the Department of Energy to focus on making America more energy independent. He doubled the size of the national park system and tripled America’s designated wilderness areas.

Donald Trump in his first term gave the top 1% a massive tax cut (increasing the national debt by TRILLIONS of dollars), weakened environmental protections for America’s land, air, and water, weakened relationships with long-time allies around the globe, and praised Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, and Kim Jung Un. He also promised to repeal and replace Obamacare and to create and pass a much-needed infrastructure package to rebuild America’s aging highways, ports, airports, and bridges. Needless to say, he reneged on both of these promises.

(Obamacare is still the law of the land and Joe Biden finally did in fact pass an infrastructure bill.)

After losing the election of 1980 Jimmy Carter went on to live another 44 years. He spent those years working to make the world a better place. His Carter Foundation eradicated a terrible disease called river blindness in many countries. He worked to shine a light on unfree and unfair elections around the world. And he helped build houses with Habitat For Humanity.

When Donald Trump lost the election of 2020 he lied about it. He whined and moaned for four solid  years about the unfairness of it all. In other words, he remained true to the petulant, spoiled, insecure brat at his core. 

And now here it is, almost January 20, 2025 and Donald Trump is about to be sworn in again as President of the United States of America. At this point all I can say is that we get what we deserve. We have voted for a proven failure to lead our country. There is something rotten at the core of America these days. Rather than choosing to be led by people like Jimmy Carter, we are opting for Baby Boh.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

I’ll tell you some of what I predict will go wrong. These are in no particular order:

Most cabinet picks and other high positions will be approved by the Senate. Trump will have the Supreme Court, Senate, and a closely-divided House all in Republican control. And still he will not act on his “concept of a plan” for healthcare. Too many people benefit from the ACA for him to really mess with it.

He will push all of his people to ramp up deportations and the actual results will not come even close to his promise to deport millions of people. It will become clear that behind the scenes Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, and many wealthy GOP donors are lobbying Trump to be very selective in his deportations so that the building trades don’t grind to a halt.

Likewise, wealthy GOP donors and some Senators will push Trump hard to scale his tariff plan waaayyyyyyy back.

If Trump ignores their pleas and institutes widespread tariffs, prices (and inflation) will rise, unemployment will rise, and China and Russia will strengthen their alliance while the US loses even more global influence. The European Union will put some real distance between the US and EU and the US will be bargaining from an increasingly weak position.

The quality of the air and water in America will decrease as Trump loosens environmental regulations.

Trust in vaccines will plummet even further as RFK, Ladapo, Joe Rogan, and other fully unqualified people steer public health policy and discussions. Deaths of children from previously-controlled diseases will spike.

Likewise, maternal mortality rates will rise.

On the world stage, Vladimir Putin will feel emboldened to do whatever he wants to do—this will mean harsher crackdowns on any perceived dissent within Russia and more overt meddling in other countries.

Same is true for Netanyahu in Israel (if he manages to stay out of jail). He may feel empowered to annex parts of the West Bank and starve Gaza.

Christian Nationalists in the US will push as hard as they can to get Christianity into schools and other publicly-funded realms.

The Justice Department will see mass resignations as Trump uses it to punish anyone he sees as an enemy.

Trump will leave office on January 20, 2029 with approval ratings around 23% and will be widely viewed as the worst two-term President in our long history.

Predictions for January 2025 to January 2029

I am posting this here as a place to have these on record. Skip to the bottom for a summary.

In no particular order:

Most cabinet picks and other high positions will be approved by the Senate. Trump will have the Supreme Court, Senate, and a closely-divided House all in Republican control. And still he will not act on his “concept of a plan” for healthcare. Too many people benefit from the ACA for him to really mess with it.

He will push all of his people to ramp up deportations and the actual results will not come even close to his promise to deport millions of people. It will become clear that behind the scenes Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, and many wealthy GOP donors are lobbying Trump to be very selective in his deportations so that the building trades don’t grind to a halt.

Likewise, wealthy GOP donors and some Senators will push Trump hard to scale his tariff plan waaayyyyyyy back.

If Trump ignores their pleas and institutes widespread tariffs, prices (and inflation) will rise, unemployment will rise, and China and Russia will strengthen their alliance while the US loses even more global influence. The European Union will put some real distance between the US and EU and the US will be bargaining from an increasingly weak position.

The quality of the air and water in America will decrease as Trump loosens environmental regulations.

Trust in vaccines will plumet even further as RFK, Ladapo, Joe Rogan, and other fully unqualified people steer public health policy and discussions. Deaths of children from previously-controlled diseases will spike.

Likewise, maternal mortality rates will rise.

Women will be raped and assaulted at higher rates.

On the world stage, Vladimir Putin will feel emboldened to do whatever he wants to do—this will mean harsher crackdowns on any perceived dissent within Russia and more overt meddling in other countries.

Same is true for Netanyahu in Israel (if he manages to stay out of jail). He may feel empowered to annex parts of the West Bank and starve Gaza.

Christian Nationalists in the US will push as hard as they can to get Christianity into schools and other publicly-funded realms.

The Justice Department will see mass resignations as Trump uses it to punish anyone he sees as an enemy.

 

TL;DR. Inflation and unemployment will rise, most measures of public well-being will fall, America will lose much of our standing and power in the world. And though it all Trump will blame everyone but himself.