Trojan Horses

I treated myself to some fluff reading over the weekend. Between last week's funeral and the bitter, bitter cold that's settled over the tundra, I needed  a little bit of decompression time. 

In the land of fluff, I have a guilty pleasure reading romance novels by Aven Ellis, Lucy Score, and Claire Kingsley on my tablet. None of these ladies write particularly deep, steamy Fifty Shades type books; these are quick reads with lots of laughs. All three write really snappy dialogue amidst really sappy stories. It's like eating a profiterole  or an éclair, sweet but you can only eat one or two before your teeth sing. But this weekend, I needed something more  complex to divert my sighing sadness over the passing of Uncle Mike. So off to the library I went, and on You R Lucky shelf (those hot books in high demand) I caught a copy of State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Clinton. 

I'm not reviewing the book here, but suffice it to say, it was a fascinating read. The story, of course, casts the Mrs. Cleaver look-alike Secretary of State as  the flawed  but determined hero. Duh. Still, Clinton walked  that  walk for a few years and she provides some unexpected insight into the job and the personalities that  inhabit the halls of American Power. Some of it was, oddly, thought provoking. Not that this was real life and the  depiction of  the previous president, a Feckless Leader look-alike named Dunn, is particularly terrifying in light of  the recent investigations of January 6th, but still, it got me to thinking about a couple of things.

Mykonos vase, 670 BCE

One of those things was the Trojan Horse. The phrase has been used a lot lately, mostly ascribed to Islamic State attempts to infiltrate any number of locations/schools/corporations or to describe malware that appears to ride in as harmless software. However it's used, a Trojan Horse is a powerful image. It is explicitly about deception, the desire to conquer from within, as well as a certain level of crude trickery. No matter what you wanna call it, it's not nice.

Trying to fall asleep last night, I could not shake the image of a Trojan horse. Its middle is vacant, ready to be filled with something implicitly evil. It's designed to deliver a stealth payload of nothing good. And  in my imagination, it's BIG. Every time you hear about a Trojan horse, your mind immediately goes to a big thing on wheels being rolled into the center of a city, only to have a plague released at  midnight. 

BIG. The thing is always big. Big enough to hold an army, according to the story. I kept thinking about other things in which you could hide an army. And then I thought, maybe not an army army, but a cabal. A cadre. A cell of dedicated somethings. What if you pulled back the dome like  an open beer stein, and instead of men and women dedicating their lives to the preservation of democracy and the ideals delineated in the Constitution, you find a bunch of power-brokering lobbyists who have traded reality for a stack of lies interspersed with personal gain? 

Whatever happened to Truth, Justice, and the American Way?

Oh, wait; there are people out there who will tell you that this is the American Way: deceit, lies, self-interest...maybe it is. We have some pretty terrific role models out there for that kind of  behavior....Carnegie, Rockefeller, Hill, Astor, Madoff, Feckless....the list is very long. We have a history of internal marginalization and discrimination: Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Jews. We are certainly not the worthy inhabitants of that shining city on a hill.

It's  like  the rotunda flips open like a beer stein, and inside you see the New Americans.....the ones who shit in the hallways and trashed the halls where our laws are made. Maybe they were making an editorial comment. Or maybe they didn't fully understand what it means to live someplace other than a democracy, however flawed, where repression was the rule of law. Maybe they need to spend a week or two in Venezuela or Saudi Arabia to experience life without the basic freedoms? 

(And speaking of basic freedoms, why is it a matter of personal freedom whether or not to wear a mask, but the government can tell a woman what to do with her body? Another conundrum.) 

But back to State of Terror. Had I read this book 6 years ago, I would've laughed it off as highly improbable. The idea that secret dirty bombs could be built and hidden would've seen possible, but far fetched. The very idea that we could have a president who was so unprepared to lead, so crude, ill-mannered, and grotesque in speech was unfathomable to me. Even Bush II could put together a cogent sentence. Nowhere in my imagination did the possibility of such a lout being elected even cower in a corner. No; the age of television and public debate prevented such a travesty from happening. Except it didn't. The electorate in this country wanted a guy who grabbed pussy and shoved his tongue into women's throats  because he was a celebrity and that makes it okay. Even if the popular vote favored Hillary Clinton, the reality of the electoral college gave us a guy who liked despots and admires dictators. This scenario sets up Clinton and Penny's book and suddenly, it doesn't seem so far-fetched. That's what make the book so terrifying: it could happen. And it probably already has. We've already had one failed  insurrection and attempted coup.

What will it take for We, the People, to pull our collective heads outta our asses to deal with the BIG LIE and get this show back on the road? We've had so many warning shots across the bow, it's no wonder we're beginning to look like an Iranian ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

Today, President Biden was heard responding to a Fox reporter's question on a still hot mic:

Peter Doocy of Fox News Channel: Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?

President Biden: It’s a great asset. More inflation...(apparently thinking the mic  was dead:) What a stupid son of a bitch.

Y'know, it was a pretty stupid question. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week
Midterm elections are coming.

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campaign for a candidate who supports that which is important to you.