Observed, Quarropas

Decoration Day

We Americans need to remove Memorial Day from our Monday holiday schedule. Instead, like Independence Day, observe this occasion on the date whence it falls. Unless it occurs on a Saturday or Sunday. Only then we should accede and extend the holiday onto Monday.

We should resume Memorial Day’s normal cycle in order to give more than lip service to patriotism and sacrifice. Americans have been giving both shorter shrift since the Reagan Administration. Currently, President Scalawag has all but erased their meaning.

The America in which we presently reside has become at its now feebly beating heart one the Founders would not recognize. Not from the technological or social advances none of them could’ve conceived. The tricorns, breeches and buckles set would see that little of the premise which created our once great nation still exists.

Rather, Americans have been gradually becoming disinclined in practicing the attributes that incited the Colonials to become Americans. Continue reading Decoration Day →

Baboon America, Pop Culture

Notorious Fame

Received one of the more laughable proposals off the web no filter could’ve deterred. Were I Ace Face, were I younger, image conscious, immodest, okay, vastly superficial, thought myself capable of converting into a “brand,” sure, I’d have succumbed.

Instead I rather muse about our current easy accessibility to undeserved celebrity. Continue reading Notorious Fame →

Tales Out of School

Inside the Assisted Drinking Facility

No Nevada buddies, no Las Vegas place to call a hangout should such even exist. Life’s dispersal has reduced the number of friends and associates remaining in Tucson, a k a the Desert Margaritaville. This same mortality has also shuttered many of the premises where we caroused while attending Arizona and afterwards.

One of those few elbow-benders which matured with us shares a Las Vegas connection.

During the days and nights of Sin City’s glorious mob rule, the proprietor of a vital, well-known Tucson establishment often gambled away fiendishly in Las Vegas. Away from the tables he proved himself a successful businessman. He headed franchises his family owned throughout the Southwest.

Who remembers what game of chance had buried him? The boys would’ve taken his marker. Doubtlessly both parties would’ve worked out a repayment plan to the outfit’s onerous advantage. However, the businessman defied the inexorability of his losing streak. Convinced the next hand, the next roll held the start of regained fortune he finally put up his enterprise as collateral and continued playing … only to lose everything. Continue reading Inside the Assisted Drinking Facility →

Dim Neon, Poky Town, Quarropas

Dislocation or Resettlement?

Five years ago this week, I started the process which sped me to Las Vegas. Mine wasn’t a calculated move but one performed more through necessity. Instinctively I knew it time to leave New York because other than inertia were there any reasons to stay?

In 2013, the Quarropas I’d known, had spent my lifetime, the locale which had created me, had vanished completely. Or as I could glibly tell any Nevadans who asked, “Whatever I miss was already gone before I left.” Continue reading Dislocation or Resettlement? →

Baboon America

Sauce for the Goose

One of the Las Vegas newspapers has an editorial page which lurches right. So far right readers should ask why columns and letters to the editor aren’t printed in Fraktur.

Given the harmful effect of Twitter on political debate, the city’s broadsheet, an at times schizophrenic news source – news remains objectively presented while opinions often harken back to those of Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter – offers American reactionaries a forum through which they can mock tweets veering from their less enlightened view of our society. Thanks to Donald Trump’s current soiling the Oval Office, malcontents once rightly embarrassed to publicly demonstrate their various intellectual deficiencies may now further poison open discourse with them.

Say this about the short-fingered vulgarian he sure has tipped over a lot of rocks. Continue reading Sauce for the Goose →

Agitprop/Propaganda, Baboon America

Skewed Views and News

These days, when I hear some dope (if an American) supporting or a provocateur (if a paid agent of an adversarial country) praising Donald Trump, anyone aware of history can only imagine the level of Joseph Goebbels’ envy.

Were the Nazi Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda among us bodily today, the distinct lack of resolve which now cores out the United States would warm his cold soul. It would do so because the credulous people we’ve become didn’t bother with much suspicion before swallowing whole the most puerile falsehoods ever conceived. Continue reading Skewed Views and News →

Baboon America, Dim Neon, Observed, Poky Town

Little Incivilities

Living in Las Vegas, a k a, “The Big Mayberry,” has disabused me of any nonsense that small burg residents conduct themselves kindlier than big city dwellers. In New York, we weren’t rude but as befitting a hustling cosmopolitan metropolis, just in a hurry.

See, there was always more to do and less time to do it. Continue reading Little Incivilities →

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