Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is herself isn’t thinking about LETTING UP. She writes:

Being back in Minnesota in the winter has reminded me of a unique Minnesota expression of resilience and optimism. When you make plans to go out for the evening with a Minnesotan, by God, you’re going! There can be a whiteout blizzard, you cannot see your hand in front of your face, and you call your friend to say “Do you think we should maybe, possibly rethink this outing?,” and a true Minnesotan will say, “I think it’s letting up.”

No. It isn’t. But you are not going to be able to wuss out without severe loss of face. Latin men may have reputations for machismo, but they have nothing on Minnesotans of any ethnicity in the winter, trust me, and that includes their womenfolk.

Now, watch carefully what I do here to segue into an entirely different subject:

I’ll tell you another thing that isn’t “letting up” and that’s the mass hysteria over the election and its alleged dreadful consequences to various and sundry “oppressed” groups.

(See? That was a professional at work. Do Not Try This At Home!)

We’ve had actors hectoring the newly elected Vice President of the United States from the stage in a lapse of theatrical tradition and manners so egregious there’s really no word for it. We’ve had an “important” film actor deliver a broadside against the President when she was accepting yet another self-congratulatory award. That started quite the trend where it seemed that the sole purpose of the awards shows was for one sheep after another to try to out-bleat the last idiot with obscene or threatening criticism of the President.

We’ve had riots. We’ve survived two “general” strikes that claimed to show the horrors of a day without an immigrant and a day without a woman, though they looked to most of us clueless Deplorables like pretty unremarkable, yea, good days. We’ve had thousands of women walking around with strange little pink knit caps representing lady bits, though frankly, the resemblance was lost on me, along with the point.

Though I haven’t watched it in many decades, John has reported that Saturday Night Live is devoting its meager comedic talents to full-time Trump-bashing now. The new wrinkle is that these brain-dead young writers, who couldn’t think up one sketch critical of Obama in eight endless years, find it hilarious to have a woman playing a man from the Trump Administration. Whoa! Talk about side-splitting! Move over, Benny Hill.

It would be merely pathetic had not one charmless left-liberal used SNL as a springboard to become a United States Senator. After his performance in the Gorsuch hearings, if television ever remakes Perry Mason again, Senator Al Franken will be well-positioned to play Hamilton Burger, the lame district attorney who, in nine years, lost all but one case against Mr. Mason. (And somehow kept his job! Ah, government work!)

Sadly, Al’s partner in partisan mediocrity, Senator Amy Klobuchar, who, rumor has it, is an actual attorney, gave too embarrassing a performance even to play a bailiff. It’s always impressive to be reminded by mental midgets that the 18th Century geniuses who wrote the seminal documents of our great Republic, neglected to use politically-correct pronouns, like “xe”. Never mind that there isn’t a language at least of the five besides English that I have studied – Spanish, French, Latin, Hebrew, Russian – that doesn’t use the masculine when referring to groups that include both sexes.

Space considerations compel me to offer but one final example of things not “letting up.” When I was back in Minnesota, “up north” to visit my Papa, I had to stay in a hotel, what with the ol’ family homestead sold and all. In the hotel breakfast room every morning, even though the television was routinely tuned to Fox News, the wretched Star Tribune was on the tables. I picked up the March 11 Variety section, thinking that would be my best bet at not having my head explode all over my Cheerios. Haha. As if. Sports, entertainment, nothing is safe.

Here is the opening paragraph of a fatuous article many column inches long about poems on the theme of “migration,” and no, they aren’t talking about birds going south for the winter: “Desperate times call for desperate measures. And really desperate times call for poetry.” The gist of the article is that since the election, the fear and loathing abroad in the land has stimulated a renewed interest in poetry as a propaganda tool. Mostly because poems are short. Seriously. They prefer stuff that can be Tweeted.

Ah, yes. To return to my Minnesota roots: “You betcha.” We live in “desperate” times: The people who soldiered on at home and abroad in two world wars, the people who survived the concentration camps to go on to establish the State of Israel, the millions who weathered a decade of soul-grinding poverty in the Depression, they had no idea what suffering was. It takes an election that doesn’t go your way to really “get” what “desperation” is.

And having reached that point of existential despair, what could possibly help more than some pedantic free verse? I offer a poem of my own. It is short; rhyming, no extra charge.

Violets are nice, but Roses are best. Could you play with your Play Doh? And give it a rest?
Violets are blue. Roses are red. The Left has gone bonkers. And satire is dead.

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