-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

November 7, 2016

Today was a work day, but I took a break and stopped by Farmer Orville’s house. The temperature was seventy-five, and mosquitoes were in a feeding frenzy. And miracle of miracles, I picked a ripe tomato and two red and orange peppers. Green tomatoes were still growing, still ripening.

Ruby Puppy and Reba the farm dog were chasing each other and mock fighting in the far meadow. Incredibly, the beehive was active, and sulfur butterflies still floated above the ground like small yellow-green leaves. Gnat clouds roiled at head height.

Orville, his beloved Quilt Queen and I had coffee and talked with dread about election day tomorrow. There was no joy in Mudville, in the warming neo spring.

And then I walked home and sat on the front stoop and watched the birds diving at my feeder. Two pair of cardinals, a blue jay, countless house finches, nuthatches, black-capped chickadees, juncos and some south-migrating, striped thrushes: all these competed for sunflower seeds.

A murder of crows raised an unholy ruckus of squawks, meaning that an owl or a hawk were perched nearby. And sure enough, the Cooper’s hawk which has been stalking the bird feeder, rose up from an oak tree and screeched: busted.

A special guest, a northern flicker sent all the other birds scattering like bowling pins. Its head was brilliant scarlet, its breast mottled. The flicker’s body was three songbirds large, too big for the space; it couldn’t perch on the seed platform. It grasped the rim of the feeder with its claws and seesawed up and down, plucking up seeds on the upswing.

Those birds waiting for a turn scurried along the ground in and out of fallen, bright-colored sassafras and maple leaves. The leaves rippled, a winding stream of compost and splinters.

Birds are calming, songful, comical, scolding. The nuthatches run down the tree bark, and the chickadees perch on the ends of twigs, replacement ornaments for the once dressed-up dogwood tree.

What keeps birds, the evolutionary ancestors of dinosaurs, from attacking us in great swarms, like in a Hitchcock movie? Nothing. What stops dogs from eating their masters? Nothing. We are unique, an unrestrained species, and only we will stop us from extinction.

I’ve been watching Season Four of “House of Cards,” which eerily mirrors our county’s dilemma with its updated Macbeth theme of mad husband and wife who think nothing of a murder or two, for the greater good, themselves. The last line of the season, uttered by Kevin Stacy’s president as he stares at the camera: “We are the terrorists.”

I was so struck by the World Series, of the many ballplayers who mentioned their anxieties regarding historic legacies, as if history were a thing, not a human construct. History is a short list.

Which is why we always forget: to ‘never forget,’ and occasional monsters rise up and bloviate and trample us, and we beat them back, only to forget and grow complacent again.

Cue Nat King Cole, make a g & t with lime, and sit back, and hum along. ‘This too shall pass.’

Yes?

October 31, 2016

The philosopher Aristotle, in “The Poetics,” wrote, “Is it better to be an old man who is embraced, or a younger man whom women avoid?”

Farmer Orville, not to be confused with Aristotle, weighed in on this important question as we sat at the kitchen table with Quilt Queen and drank coffee and ate Pecan Sandies. (Homemade cookies don’t start until after Thanksgiving.)

“Monica dropped by this morning and gave me my hug, and told me to keep an eye out for her place.”

“Monica hugs you?” I exclaimed.

Monica is our new neighbor. She may be fifty. She also visited me this morning, but I didn’t get a hug.

“That’s because you are dangerous,” Quilt Queen told me. “You’re in that fifty-something danger zone men are known for.”

“I am sixty-eight,” I said.

“I always think of you as being younger than me. All the women who pick berries and tomatoes hug Orville, the old horn dog, because he is fangless. Right, old man?”

Orville chuckled so hard he spilled coffee on his fingers. He drinks his coffee from a Hardees paper cup, one of about twenty he keeps stacked by the coffee maker. He does not care for coffee mugs. He does like hugging women and Donald Trump’s politics.

Quilt Queen has proclaimed a Hillary-free zone; we may not talk about that awful dragon lady. Which is fine by me; I voted early in case I might upchuck at last minute revelations.

The couple love tag teaming on me, one of the few liberals in Midwest Babbitland, and it is all in good fun. It is good they have me in their lives, to keep them on the facts. It is good I have them in my life; they are the epitome of good neighbors.

I stood up to go, opened my arms, and said to Orville, “Hugs.”

“Oh no,” Orville said, making a cross with his arms like I was Dracula.

“But you hug Monica. I’m a hugger.”

“If you don’t know the difference between you and her,” my friend said, “you are beyond hope.”

And I am beyond hope, it’s true. I lay awake this morning at four am thinking that very thought. I was born with an artist’s brain, which has produced some weighty words. But this talent doesn’t organically translate to being a good person.

I walked up the hill which separates my house from Monica’s digs. My sassafras tree was all aflame in bursting burnt red – it glowed. And I walked to it and gave it a hug.

Take that, Monica.

October 28, 2016

Farmer Orville and I cut down half of my redbud tree this afternoon. The tree, which had bloomed so lushly last spring, had its trunk split in half in a storm. The south half listed down until it was strangling a flowering bush next to it. We labored for two hours, loading the wood into Orville’s pickup truck and setting it afire on his burn site.

It was seventy degrees, tee shirt weather, and a pair of Cooper’s hawks circled overhead. Ruby Puppy and Reba chased each other around the fields and performed mock battles, locking their jaws on each other’s snouts. All the walnuts were down, and crows and shrieking blue jays retrieved them, tossing the shells to the ground, splitting them open for a nut feast.

We talked baseball – I talked baseball; Orville does not like sports – and I invited him to Genehouse to watch the Cubs in the World Series, but he declined. He watches home decorating shows of an evening, topped off with Fox News. We kept stopping our work and taking in the day, the sky a pale, watercolor blue and a south breeze sharing tropical breath uninfluenced by mouthwash: raw and earthy and fruity.

Dog-eye sulfur butterflies flew low against the brown grass, their spotted wings pale yellow now, and there was the odd monarch, wings torn, which probably wouldn’t make it south. Honeybees flowed in and out of the hive in the north pasture, checking us out for sweet spots, an unlikely find on men such as us, but bees are optimistic. The orange brother and sister barn cats lay near the brush fire, legs splayed, fur soaking up heat, the felines perhaps worshiping a deity.

Living things in autumn linger, like the season is a luscious pie, and the last piece rests on the plate, and we glance at it, smell it, stick out our tongues and imagine it, lust for it. Autumn is one last bite of a fruit pie before we hibernate.

They’re throwing snowballs at Pinkham Notch in New Hampshire, those hardy, crazy souls that wax poetic about cold and ice and how it builds character. They’re throwing sweet gum balls here, and oak leaves, and acorns, and they’re rolling in a fairy dust of goldenrod.

This is the time of year when men think about warm and sturdy mates whose bodies will heat their nether regions come the cold. Mind, Orville has a warm and sturdy mate, Quilt Queen, but he dreams. I mentioned this, and my wise friend opined that Trump has ruined it for men, that all the women we know are now looking at us suspiciously – they know what we are thinking. And they’re right.

But I still have a tree frog humping my front porch light at night. Small moths dust the storm door window with patterned lace. The last of the mosquitoes wait for the opportunity to enter the house and draw blood for last call. At night, the storage shed beside the house creaks and bangs and issues that sickening metallic scrape of claws as critters settle in to their rustic hotel. And Scout the cat settles in at the top of the basement stairs and waits for mice.

But tonight, there is baseball. The streets around Wrigley Field were jammed with people by noontime. Tonight, an old man wearing a Cubs cap – I met him at Joe K’s at lunchtime; he grew up on Pulaski Street in Chicago – will settle in with his family and root, root, root for the home team, which has let him down since 1940.

The World Series, you see, is that last bite of pie. The Chicago Cubs are rhubarb pie, and those pretenders from Cleveland are raisin, that pie that languishes in restaurants because nobody likes raisin pie. And yes, I’ll say it: Hillary is canned peach and Trump is mock apple.

But all of us, even politician apostates from hell, love autumn. It is rare and short, sweeter than any berry, its song is falling leaves and echoes of universe, its cloth is spun from caterpillar and spider silk, and its brand is fire in the brain.

October 20, 2016

The storm hit with fury, mid-evening, and I watched from the open front door, the cat behind me and yowling. Rain slammed down, the fume and fog of it sounding like a waterfall, with rocks hitting the carport roof, the sidewalk, the house. There was a mirage of a lake and small waves running west to east.

A flock of geese flew north – I couldn’t see them, just heard and felt the movement – making such an anxious racket of sound. A huge raccoon made its way across the yard, pawing at the ground.

And then there was an explosion, fifty feet above me, a burst of orange light, like a firework, and a force slammed into my chest. I came to on the floor, the cat nowhere to be seen, the Cubs game on the television, for the power was not knocked out. No broken bones, just a pratfall, prone on my back.

I stood up, checked for broken bones, saw that the ballgame wasn’t close, and tried to focus my mind on what had happened. Then I had no talking point; I didn’t know what had happened or where it happened. I felt my pulse. My heart was racing, and with hindsight, I was afraid.

This morning, I walked outside at six am and saw two-to-three-foot long shards of wood, scores of them, laid out in concentric circles, radiating from one of my Kentucky coffee trees, the explosion having flayed the tree’s trunk, long fleshy strips from the top down.

Lighting had struck the tree at the top. I can’t tell you how electricity behaves, but I can say the force of the strike tickled me mightily.

I expect I’m not the only person who has pondered on the self-image of death. Had I been electrocuted by the lightning, whomever found me would have seen magazines strewn about the floor, two beer cans next to my chair, an empty bag of nuts on a hummus container (all I need to wait out the Apocalypse is hummus and bananas), a study of complete chaos, with a dictionary and history books with mentions of my grea-great grandfather lying opened on the floor, old envelopes filled with my scrawl of notes and plastic newspaper sleeves that the cat likes to bat around the room.

What would people have said? What have I done for anybody? How many ex-girlfriends would say, ‘That son of a bitch is finally, beautifully, poetically and appropriately dead.’ (or, to the point, Good, rot in hell!)

The pragmatic among you will want to know if there’s a will. Yes, there is a will, but you’re not in it. And there is a way. Farmer Orville has kindly opined that my body would fit nicely in his compost heap. I don’t doubt it.

Meantime, I am still here.

For now.

October 11, 2016

A chill is in the air, squirrels are playing with their nuts and Donald Trump is palpitating his right-wingnuts. Autumn lets us cool down, enables us to breathe easier, and wipes away the crazies in our brains.

Right?

Apparently, a few of us didn’t get the chillin’ message. Take, for example, the hungry gentleman in St. Louis, last Saturday afternoon. He pulled into the drive-through of a Steak and Shake, placed his order, and as he reached for said order he shot himself in the head. God intervened and let him live – why, I can’t imagine, but God works in mysterious ways – and the guy’s recovering in hospital.

Police didn’t release details, but that’s never stopped me.

Scenario: I’m in my car, I’ve got my gun . . . in my lap? Am I afraid that the African American cashier might reach through her Steak and Shake window and throttle me, or worse, laugh at my whiteness, my bleached bald head? Meanwhile, I’m feeling randy while waiting for my Under Four Dollar Meal, so I unzip and reach for my boys . . . and grab my gun instead – it’s a huge gun – and I pull my trigger, and I get an owie in my brainpan.

Scenario: I’m a robber, and I need a few bucks to tide me over. Why not roll a Steak and Shake? So I’ve got my gat between my legs, place my order, drive up to the window, raise the gun – only I’m holding it backwards, only it’s too late to stop this premature ejaculation of a bullet from shooting my eye out for a perfect hole in one. Now I’m in a hospital bed on a no-fat diet, with a four-hundred-pound male nurse sitting in the visitor’s chair and hacking my emails.

Then there is Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, who has issued an invitation to Christians to pray for the “blessings created by the oil and natural gas industry.” She even set aside a day: “Oilfield Prayer Day.”

But the good governor – she had issued a similar proclamation every year since 2011 – changed this year’s wording to include only Christians, as only Christians believe that “oil and gas are created by God.” Muslims and Hindis and Buddhists, it seems, embrace science but are shit out of luck and have to ride bikes to work.

Scenario: God meets with Governor Fallin last night. He tells her that oil was created by compacted dead dinosaurs millions of years ago, that evolution is His divine miracle, that Earth is a failed project in a cosmos of infinite projects, and that his son Jesus Christ’s message was all about yoga, spas and strawberry daiquiris.

Scenario: Governor Fallin gets so upset, she reaches into the waist band of her polyester skirt, pulls her gun out, shouts, “Donald Trump, grab my pussy,” and fires at Our Lord, but the bullet deflects to a statue of White Jesus, thus deflecting the projectile back at the good governor, blowing out her left kneecap. At hospital, a four-hundred-pound male nurse notes that Governor Fallin needs some booster immunizations, but Independent presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein steps in and denounces immunizations, and Governor Fallin dies of the measles.

Autumn lets us cool down, enables us to breathe easier, and wipes away the crazies in our brains.

Right?

October 9, 2016

Go ahead, unfriend me. The truth is I grab a pussy three to six times a day. What’s more, the pussy likes it. Is it wrong? Wrong that the palavering, palpitating, polycrotic pussy purrs? Wrong that the pussy gently nibbles my digit?

So what word do we need to substitute now that “pussy” is passé? “Vagina willow?” “Genital Galore?” “Josie and the Vulva Cats?”

And here’s what really galls me: It took a Bush to take down a bat shit cray-cray billionaire.

I love Bush’s Baked Beans. They’re yummy, and post-feast, they’re potent, noisy, nosey. Past tense: I LOVED Bush’s Baked Beans. Now I can’t put a spoonful of Bush in my mouth without thinking about uh, women’s Area 51’s.

My pussy – my gender-bent, gesticulating, jester-centric genitalcat – carries a string around in its mouth. It throws the string into the air and pounces on it. It drops the string into its water bowl after every play date. It screams for its maw to be filled with raw spinach. It climbs into my hiking boots – Genital-in-Boots.

Aughhhhhhhhhhhh!

Ladies, I don’t mean to go down on you in a negative way. It’s just that political correctness long ago destroyed men’s sense of self-worth. We have suffered from bad badinage since the birth of literature. In short: the penis. “Prick,” “schlong,” “thing,” “thumper,” “dick,” “wang,” “bat and balls,” “up and comer,” “erector set,” “mama’s boy,” “juicer,” “flaccid Fred,” “external hard drive,” “dong,” “ram-a-ram-a-my-ding-dong,” “that’s entertainment,” “going my way,” “rod,” “little rascal,” “snake,” “night crawler,” “whirly-gig,” “redhead.”

Pre-debate Hillary on her campaign bus: “I’d like to grab Chuck Todd’s p—k and pound my p—y with it.”

(Pause, as I wipe away my tears.)

(Pause, as you wipe away your tears.)

(Pause, as renegade clowns wipe away their tears of a clown’s.)

This is the start of the long road to Hell. Next comes “tit.” “Fake tits” (D. Trump), “Tufted titmouse,” “titillating,” “titivate,” “titter,” “tittup,” “titubation.” Teehee? I don’t think so.

What up? Is this the death of language?

“Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts’ huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy.” James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake”

Nah.

(I write this, with a striped, breathing, farting, dreaming, snoring pussy on my lap.)

October 5, 2016

Syrian star swimmer Mireille Hindoyan, who swam for the Refugee Team at the Rio Olympics, has been killed in an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria. Her mother survived the bomb blast, finding her daughter next to her, legless and handless.

While Hindoya’s death is no more or less tragic than any other tragedy around the world, it was born of the same mindset which kills young, unarmed black men in America, that sanctions genocide of Jews and American Indians and Tutsis and Cambodians and others, which has slaughtered 200,000 people young and old in religious wars around the world, which made the twentieth century the bloodiest century of all time.

Ms. Hindoyan was courageous beyond explanation, to train and swim for events in which she had no chance of winning, as she was surrounded by well-trained and -fed American and Australian women swimmers. To merely get to Rio was a miracle for her.

Her death puts the Ryan Lochte story firmly in “The Ugly American” franchise of louts, spoiled brats, braggarts, commercial-endorsed and privileged white athletes (and black athletes), in a country in which Sport is the real God.

This senseless death is unnerving. I’d like to posit the hope, that we will learn from this. Ironically the only hope for saving Planet Earth is the complete extinction of humans. We are an utterly failed evolutionary experiment.

Bless you, Mireille Hindoyan, and a plague upon the bombers and upon religion. I hope you meet Kurt Vonnegut and that the two of you can fly hand in hand and comfort one another.

Enter butterflies, stage left.

September 28, 2016

Suddenly everybody is cold. It was 58 degrees this morning, with a hefty breeze blowing from the north. Simile of the day: The cleanness of the air jerked off my polluted lungs, like a deep tissue massage. And let’s get in that metaphor: The leaves on the trees danced the Pax de Deux from “Swan Lake.”

Don’t forget reality: ‘Winter’ is the last word of an autumn sentence.

I walked into the Melville Dairy for my morning Joe (still 8 dimes) and “Mornin’, Gene,” from Debbie who works the counter, and my newspaper.

A fifty-something guy walked in and selected a cinnamon roll as large as a Frisbee and a bottle of vitamin water. His hair was quaffed, his eyeglasses were stylish, his moccasins were Daniel Boone.

Brace yourselves, younger and more sensitive readers: The guy was wearing a puffy vest, which doubled his slender, caramelized-kale eating frame. What the hell, had he had an Ichabod Crane moment, awaking from a long sleep and assuming it was winter? You knew he wasn’t from around here – he lived here, but there’s a difference.

The cornfields are filling with ugly faux mansions with fake “Gone With the Wind” columns in the front, and J. Crew-clad St. Louis folk in Range Rovers taking over the little towns of Southwest Illinois. “Faux-fake-fie-fum,” I smelled the blood of Yuppiedom.

People don’t wear puffy coats around here – ever. They wear Bermuda shorts in deep snow and pull up the collars on their sleeveless denim shirts, only donning an unzipped camouflage coat when the temperature drops below 10 degrees (not counting my pals Farmer Orville and Sheila S. who are always cold; Orville’s idea of air conditioning is 85 degrees).

The yuppie customer was lucky that none of the morning pint-whiskey-river rats were around. A whiskey-fied river rat might have punctured that puffy vest puff by puff. Talk about getting fleeced.

There is good puffy and bad puffy. Scout the Cat, when scared or stalking and de-legging crickets, puffs out like a fiend from hell on steroids, surely a horror movie for the hapless insect caught beneath massive paws and sharp claws and rancid cat breath. Donald Trump is oh-so-puffy: jowly, baggy, belly-bumped, bald with a fur net that may or may not be ass hair. Even his voice is puffy. His nose puffs like a “things go better with coke” inhale. Or maybe it’s snuff.

Good puffy: My friend Quilt Queen’s homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Bad puffy: Michele Bachman’s dead squirrel eyes.

Good puffy (sort of): Meatloaf singing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

Bad Puffy: The “artist” known as P-Diddy, or Puff Daddy, or Diddly or Puffy, or Poofie-D, or however he’s known now.

Really good puffy: Comedian Louie Anderson who plays a mother on “Baskets.”

Really bad puffy: That guy from “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”

So yes, ‘winter’ is the last word of an autumn sentence, puff-puff-puffin’ on Genehouse’s door. But ‘spring’ is the first word of a mattress commercial. Buy a comfy mattress and pull up the covers, friends.

But don’t lose your dignity in a yuppie-puffy winter coat, even as you hike to Canada to escape President Trump.

September 25, 2016

I stopped at my grocery store for a bottle of wine this pm, and after walking up and down the aisle, I made a selection, a jug of cheap red. A clerk approached me. He was holding a portable CD player. He clicked “on,” and the “Star Spangled Banner” started up. Thinking of Brother Colin Kaepernick, I kneeled.

I walked into the specialty foods area and got some potato salad and three bean salad. The nice clerk behind the counter wrapped my selections, and she clicked on a CD player and played the “Star Spangled Banner.” I kneeled. Other customers put hands on hearts and sang along then booed me.

At the dairy case, I got some yogurt, and the dairy gal sang a robust version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” One customer was so moved, she squeezed a plastic gallon jug of milk hard enough that it exploded. Before my shopping adventure was over, Brother Colin Kaepernick, I had knelt eleven times, heard eleven versions of the “Star Spangled Banner,” was booed eleven times, developed low self-esteem, experienced the heartbreak of psoriasis, and the shopping cart guy anointed me with strawberry-flavored seltzer water.

While driving home, I stopped at two sets of stoplights, and in each case the “Star Spangled Banner” played, and drivers got out of their cars and sang with gusto. I remained seated, whereupon honk-ees gave me the finger.

When I opened my front door, Scout the Cat began meowing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and when I kneeled, she swiped my ears bloody with her claws. Then crickets in the basement chirped the “Star Spangled Banner,” and since Cricket Lives Matter, Brother Colin Kaepernick, I stood with my hands folded.

The “Star Spangled Banner,” the tune of which (I’m not kidding) is an old English drinking song and is not singable – unless you’re stoned or a three-hundred-pound soprano from Elephant’s Breath, Iowa – is a jingoistic, masturbatory song with lots of rockets and ejaculation lyrics suitable for a fifth grade boy convocation on the playground.

Contrast that with say, the canon “Finlandia,” which posits that one country is just as good as another, and God bless us everyone, and watch where you point that cannon.

My next door neighbor, Jose, after five tequila shots, has been known to sing “Jose, Can You See,” which is actually quite touching – after five matching tequila shots – even though he can’t sing a lick. After five tequila shots, you can’t see, sing, sigh, Sue, sack race, soul brother, solemnly swear, syncopate or scintillate.

If I were Czar, Brother Colin Kaepernick, it would be down with national anthems, nationalism, nation building, the national bank, and nationality. It would be Up with People, up yours, upstart, up skirt, “up, up, and away.”

Meantime, my television won’t let me watch Masterpiece Theatre unless I stand and sing the “Star Spangled Banner” and the theme from “Rocky IV.”

Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Samuel L. Jackson: “It’s about patriotism while fighting snakes on a plane.” Samuel Beckett: “That’s how it is, on this patriotic bitch of an earth.” Book of Samuel, Chapter 6, Verse 2: “We shall drink patriots’ blood at happy hour.”

Brother Colin Kaepernick: Please pass the patriots.

September 23, 2016

All is well in the natural world, where no black birds have been shot by bird police, where flocks of pelicans swirl on the river and no pelican police stop their fellows’ peaceful assembling, where butterflies flip-wing and no butterfly police arrest them for flying without a license. Where color is flippant, bursting, boastful, brandished, worshipped in the Church of Nature.

The hell, the chaos, the fear, the hate: belongs to us alone, a single species. Please explain.

Please explain our instinct to tame, to bulldoze, to cut down, to possess, to grow out until we run out of land – we, the most invasive of species – and destroy our fellow humans, our literal relatives (ourselves) over mere dye hues of melanin, over culture.

Ultimately, we are killing ourselves. Please explain that.

Research in the great libraries. You will find no evidence of policing of insects, no courts of law for small mammals, no Ten Commandments or Thou shalt nots, for trees.

There is no unfettered Nature left, no wild and unseen secret glade or forest or cave – we have seen to that – and now we “manage” that which is greater than ourselves yet we do not manage or control ourselves. Explain, please.

God “made” Man in His own image. A man wrote that down. A man taught me that. A man immersed me in water, saving me. From what? Trees? Flowers? Clouds? Mountainscapes? Rivers? Rain?

From whom? Men.

Nature is for exploitation, for the sole use of Men, and Men need saving from themselves, so: Buddha, Yaweh, Jesus, Great Spirit, save us from us. We are utterly incapable of stopping our own destruction. We have no idea how to love, how to “consider the lilies of the field.”

On a four-billion-year old planet, two hundred thousand years ago on a plain in Africa, apes stood on two feet and evolved to us. We started raping the planet right then and there. We moved out of Africa and raped every natural place we encountered, and we raped our own people. Please explain this to the Martians.

So here we are.

Still, pelicans endure. Butterflies migrate with no knowledge or fear of extinction. Trees still stand, still shade. All are confined, all managed, all dependent on us. Until humans go extinct and architecture is trumped by trumpet vine and rocks of ages.

We currently are worried about a charlatan Republican and a terribly flawed Democrat. Why? They’re people. They are us. Why are we surprised? The Prophet Pogo predicted this outcome long ago.

If you want change, vote for Wolf. Elect Viper. Choose Stream. Opt for Prairie. Or: Poison Wolf, eradicate Viper, pollute Stream, cut down Prairie.

Oh wait, we’re already doing that.

Please explain.