12 days of Christmas, 12 cool songs

Posted on December 24, 2021 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was mad because Alvin and the Chipmunks didn’t make the cut. “You don’t like my Christmas playlist, then put together your own,” I told him.

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The suburban Philly gods bring you — fire!

Posted on December 22, 2021 by oddmanout215

Warming up to winter with so-called creative destruction. (Burn, phoenix, burn.)

We lingered last weekend at the 18th Firebird Festival in Phoenixville, PA, where a giant wooden figure shaped like a phoenix had been set ablaze for hundreds of fire worshippers to behold.

“This is my kind of celebration,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “Perfect for the winter solstice. Burn the mother down and start the new year fresh.”

But my mangy friend was spooked. “Looks like a sneak preview of one of them wildfire seasons out West. Too radical, if you ask me.”

I told him it was a mainstream event. An act of creative destruction. Even Milton Friedman and the vulture capitalists would approve. Elon Musk, too.

Swamp Rabbit remained unmoved by the spectacle. He broke the seal on a pint of Wild Turkey and took a big swig. I told him he should read about the myth of the phoenix instead of boozing and watching football games in his broken down old shack. “Our hopes will rise from the ashes,” I said.

“Ain’t nothin’ gonna rise from them ashes but smoke,” he replied. “I’ll stick with the booze.”

Footnote: The headline paraphrases a line from “Fire,” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown… To really get into the holiday spirit, watch The Wicker Man (the original with Christopher Lee, not the ghastly remake with Nicolas Cage).

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An Xmas stocking stuffer from Manchin to Democrats

Posted on December 20, 2021 by oddmanout215

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A lump of coal is the Democrats’ reward for trusting blatantly corrupt Joe Manchin.

Swamp Rabbit said it best back in April:

Joe Manchin is a DINO — a Democrat in name only. He likes the filibuster rule and thinks raising taxes on the rich is radical.

At the time, Joe Biden seemed confidant that both houses of Congress would pass a future bill — the Build Back Better Act — that would enable expansion of healthcare and education benefits as well as measures to combat climate change. But it already was clear that the Democrats’ slim U.S. Senate majority would be worthless if even one Democratic senator wasn’t on board with BBB.

Democrats tried tying BBB to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF), a bill that Manchin and most other legislators supported. Progressives insisted the two bills be voted on concurrently to keep Manchin from double-crossing them by abandoning BBB after the infrastructure bill was passed. But most Dems eventually caved, allowing a vote on the infrastructure bill and whittling down the BBB budget to $1.5T to appease Maserati Joe and his fellow DINO, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. In the end, Manchin humiliated them by announcing on Fox News (of course!) that he “just can’t” support BBB, falsely claiming it would increase inflation and the national debt.

After the Fox News show, Swamp Rabbit blamed “that old fool Biden and them other Dems” for not realizing Manchin was never going to support a bill that would hurt coal companies and help poor people at the expense of the rich. He reminded me that Manchin became a multimillionaire thanks to investments in the coal industry and has done nothing as an office holder to raise standards of living in West Virginia, one of the country’s poorest states.

“Enough!” I said. “You’re saying the same things I said back in October. You’re preaching to the choir.”

I told him Manchin is what he is — a prehistoric lizard spawned in one of his home state’s waste coal pits. A poster boy for political corruption. The other Democratic senators know this; some of them are only marginally less corrupt than Manchin and all 50 of their Republican colleagues.

“If you want to blame somebody, blame the reporters and talking heads,” I said. “They should have questioned Manchin’s sincerity from Day One instead of devoting countless thousands of words to pretending he might take the people’s side against the polluting, tax-dodging rich. They should have been shining a light on his corruption instead of bolstering the status quo.”

Swamp Rabbit laughed. “Them mainstream reporters got more in common with them corrupt senators than with the people,” he said. “They are the status quo, you dummy.”

I didn’t reply. The argument was over. I hate it when Swamp Rabbit is right.

Footnote: It’s worth noting that Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive legislators weren’t fooled by Manchin’s months-long effort to slow-walk BBB to death.

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Food and gratitude, in that order

Posted on November 25, 2021 by oddmanout215

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I’ll have the turkey, please, but hold the white bread.

I wished Swamp Rabbit a Happy Thanksgiving, knowing this would set him off.

“What’s so happy about it?” he said. “This supply chain problem is making me crazy as a chinch bug.The Dollar Store is charging the same price as the Superfridge for tin foil, on account of the Superfridge ain’t got no overstock to sell cheap to the Dollar Store. Avocados are five dollars each at the Superfridge, and they ain’t stocked Philadelphia Cream Cheese for weeks now, even though we live in Philly. I had to steal the store brand yesterday.”

“How do you justify this theft habit of yours?” I said. “I’d better get you a copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.”

“I ain’t justifyin’ nothin’,” he said. “If I’m hungry and broke, I do what I gotta do.”

Blame most of this mess on Covid-19, I told him. Food delivery all over the country is delayed. There’s a shortage of staples in some places, and of truckers and warehouse workers. Demand is outstripping supply. Go to a food pantry and ask for corn and they might give you string beans instead.

“I would have invited you to my shack but there’s no turkey dinner this year, it’s too expensive,” I said.

“I guess that means the price of hoagies went up,” he replied. “I know for a fact that buying turkey hoagies at Wawa — they’re called Gobblers and have cranberry sauce and gravy on them — was as close as you ever got to cookin’ Thanksgiving dinner.”

I told him the tradition of serving turkey as a holiday meal dates back many centuries in England, and that Charles Dickens‘s A Christmas Carol (1843), along with myths about America’s Pilgrim settlers, helped establish the holiday turkey tradition in the United States.

Swamp Rabbit rolled his eyes and told me to skip the history lesson, what he needed was a good meal.

“Your problem is you lack gratitude,” I said, handing him enough cash for two turkey hoagies. “It’s a well-known fact that people who practice gratitude tend to be healthier than ingrates like you.”

“Maybe so,” he countered. “But if there ain’t no food, there ain’t no gratitude.”

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Save the planet in three easy steps

Posted on November 19, 2021 by oddmanout215

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The residential mix in our cities might change in a big way if climate change is ignored.

We were discussing the recently completed COP26. Too bad we couldn’t afford to be there, I told Swamp Rabbit. In the news reports, the Glasgow natives seemed more serious about fighting climate change than your typical gas-guzzling American, maybe because the climate over there is already terrible.

“We didn’t miss much,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Same old story. Too much talk, not enough action. Blah, blah, blah, as Greta Thunberg would say.”

The climate crisis became real to Swamp Rabbit in September, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the Greater Philadelphia area and flooded our shacks in Tinicum, PA. He read up on the subject and was dismayed to learn that humans must achieve net-zero emission of carbon by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophical levels of global warming.

“Net zero ain’t happening,” he said. “Not with China using more coal than ever last year, and India on its way to new coal-burning records. Not with the U.S. gov’mint leasing the Gulf of Mexico to all them oil drillers.”

I told him to stop being a gloom peddler. The countries at COP26 (what a weird name!) have all pledged to end deforestation. by 2030, and to put more money into fighting climate change in so-called developing countries.

“You’re a saleman,” I said. “You know how to accentuate the positive. Why don’t you come up with a new sales pitch for clean energy, something that will help save the planet?”

He put down his can of beer and turned toward the swamp. “Okay, peeps, let’s save the planet in three easy steps,” he shouted, as if addressing a crowd. “Step one, stop driving. Step two, stop using plastics. Step three, stop worrying, and ignore steps one and two. The planet will still be here long after us humans are gone.”

“This is about saving the the planet for humans, you dope,” I said. “What sort of planet would this be if there were no humans on it?”

“A healthier planet,” he replied, without missing a beat.

Footnote: Environmentalist Bill McKibbon blames Covid-19 for slowing the worldwide movement to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, but he cautions against despair: “… As Covid recedes… rejuvenated activism will combine with the continuing horror of the climate crisis to produce more pressure for change. It had better – Glasgow’s finish makes clear that when activists aren’t able to push as hard as we need, inertia and vested interest remain powerful forces. The idea that the world’s governments will simply do what needs to be done is just a fairytale.”

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QB ‘immunized’ against science and ‘woke culture’

Posted on November 8, 2021 by oddmanout215

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Image from The SATURDAY EVENING POST

Here’s Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in August, responding to the question of whether he’d been vaccinated against Covid-19:

Yeah, I’ve been immunized. There’s guys on the team that haven’t been vaccinated. I think it’s a personal decision, I’m not gonna judge those guys.

I showed the story to Swamp Rabbit, who said, “Rodgers pretended ‘immunized’ meant ‘vaccinated,’ which makes him a freakin’ liar. It’s a good thing he ain’t gonna judge his teammates, ’cause he ain’t got the right to be judgin’ nobody.”

The vehemence of Swamp Rabbit’s reply was surprising until he told me he’d lost money betting on the Packers-Chiefs game when bookies changed the odds after Rodgers tested positive for the virus and was barred from playing.

“That’s what you get for gambling,” I said.

Swamp Rabbit shook his head.”That’s what I get for thinking that sneaky bastard was smart enough to know that throwing a football better than most people don’t make him stronger than the plague.”

It’s the way of the world, I told him. You reach a certain level of fame or wealth and you think you’re above the rest of the tribe, to the point where you even downplay the efficacy of vaccines that have protected millions from a deadly virus. Rodgers said he did his “research” and concluded he was better off taking horse de-wormer and “homeopathic” remedies. He misquoted the CDC guidelines regarding allergies and apparently refused to believe he might pose a danger to others if he remained unvaccinated.

And Rodgers had the balls to say this:

I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your body, not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something.

“I don’t get it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “What the f%&* is woke culture?”

I told him “woke culture” was a big subject. In this case, it’s a term used by right-wing yahoos to describe anybody who doesn’t think we should be able to do whatever we want, even when our behavior might get other people killed.

“You mean them lying politicians and oil company CEOs and coal barons and arms merchants and pharma execs and Wall Street crooks and such?”

“And sports stars,” I said. “Some of them are just as bad.”

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Strange days have found us

Posted on November 3, 2021 by oddmanout215

Living in a black-and-white (and blue) world

It was a spooky weekend here in the Tinicum swamp, but not because of Halloween tricks or seasonal changes.

“So why was it spooky?” Swamp Rabbit said.

I told him I’d watched a movie called Strait-Jacket, with Joan Crawford as an ax murderer who, after 20 years in an asylum, comes home and creates more mayhem. The next morning I got into my car to drive to a job upstate, but my path was blocked by a boxy blue Amazon delivery truck driven by a woman who looked exactly like crazy Joan.

She got out and banged on the doors of three different shacks. No one answered, but she left parcels at each shack. I shouted for her to please park on the side of the road, I was late for work and had to get by. She furrowed her thick Joan Crawford eyebrows and stared daggers (axes?) at me before driving off.

She crossed Passyunk Creek to the tony side of the swamp, where the road is wider and the shacks much bigger. I tried to pass her, but it was tough going. Delivery vehicles were double-parked on both sides of the road — Amazon, FedEx, UPS.

“It’s eerie,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “People don’t go out to shop anymore. They’re home, but they don’t even answer the door when their deliveries arrive.”

Joan put the brakes on near a shack with an American flag hanging out front. Except the flag wasn’t red, white and blue; it was black and white with one blue stripe in the middle symbolizing (from what I’ve read) the flag owner’s support for the police (the “thin blue line”). I steered around Joan’s van as she left a package containing God-knows-what on the steps near the flag.

“Everything seems strange, even the flag,” I complained. “Amazon is everywhere. People are hiding from Covid-19 and climate change.”

And that’s not all that’s strange. A bunch of QAnon followers went to Dealey Plaza in Dallas last week to see the late JFK Jr. appear there and announce his solidarity with Donald Trump. A U.S. Senate Democrat is blocking clean energy. A closet Trumper was just elected governor of Virginia by people who would rather erase history thsn let their kids learn about slavery in school (though Matt Taibbi thinks there’s more to it than that).

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Signs and wonders, but what can we do about all this stuff?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna steer clear of Joan Crawford,” I said. “I think she keeps an ax in that truck.”

Footnote: You can order a black-and-white cop flag from Amazon, of course.

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Manchin again (the video version)

Posted on October 21, 2021 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was hungover and tired of my blogging choices. “How come you gotta do two posts in a row about Manchin? What about all them other creeps in the U.S. Senate?”

So I told him for the tenth time: “Because no other Democrat who will vote on the Build Back Better Act has a more damning and documented record of personal corruption than DINO Joe. He pretends his opposition to the bill has nothing to do with the coal industry being the source of his wealth. He’s not only a liar but also an enabler of the companies that are polluting his constituents.”

“Ain’t no big deal to me,” Swam Rabbit said, wincing at the sound of my voice. “I’m already polluted.”

Footnote: Why did Washington Post recently re-investigate the old story about Garrison Keillor allegedly groping women coworkers but not investigate Manchin’s lucrative relationship with the coal industry? Why is there more comprehensive information about the Manchin family’s corruption in Don Winslow‘s two-minute video (posted above) than in thousands of words from the Post and the New York Times? Just asking.

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Moral midgets like Manchin hold sway

Posted on October 19, 2021 by oddmanout215

“Lighten up, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said as he stepped into my shack with a bottle of Wild Turkey. “You can’t call Joe Manchin a moral midget. What’s moral to him might not be moral to you, and vicey-versey.”

“No relativism, please,” I replied. “That pompous hick opposes sufficient funding to fight climate change because it would hurt the coal industry, where he made his millions. He says his investments are in a blind trust, but that’s a lie. He knows his dividend checks are coming from the coal industry. He’s close to the profiteers who are stalling to prevent the replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy. If he had an ounce of moral sense, he would recuse himself from working on any legislation that concerns the environment.”

“Then the Dems would lose for sure,” Swamp Rabbit said. “They need his vote. They ain’t got no choice but to cut the climate change budget.”

I asked my mangy neighbor if he remembered when he noted in April that Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia, was likely to destroy any hopes Democrats have of passing strong progressive legislation. Sure enough, Manchin hasn’t budged in his resolve to neuter the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, which would “expand the social safety net” and combat the impending climate crisis. The Senate is split 50-50 and all 50 Republicans will vote against the bill, so a “no” vote from Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democrat In Name Only, would send the bill down in flames.

Joe Biden and company have tried to ignore this reality for months but it hasn’t gone away. So here we are, all of us, living in a so-called democracy but with no power to overrule corrupt officeholders who place their own interests above ours.

No one else was around, so I blamed the problem on Swamp Rabbit. “It’s cynics like you who allow the Joe Manchins of the world to seize power and wreck the future,” I said. “You could fight to elect more progressives, but you’d rather remain comfortably numb.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Swamp Rabbit said as he broke the seal on his bottle and poured himself a shot.

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Goodbye, Columbus? Not in South Philly.

Posted on October 12, 2021 by oddmanout215

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This is a follow-up to a column Odd Man Out wrote last summer.

A bizarre psychodrama was unfolding in South Philadelphia while Swamp Rabbit and I worked a dull sales event in the suburbs. Hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate Columbus Day with a parade near the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands on Marconi Plaza. But the Columbus statue was encased in a plywood box and confined behind a metal fence, as it has been since last summer. Someone had hung a “Free Chris” sign on the fence.

Like I said, bizarre.

I showed Swamp Rabbit a newspaper account to bring him up to speed on the years-long fight to remove the statue of Columbus, a hero to many Italian-Americans and a villain to activists who cite evidence that he played a central role in the killing, mutilation or enslavement of large numbers of Indigenous people. Bowing to pressure from the activists, city officials earlier this year canceled Columbus Day. From now on, the holiday on the second Monday of October will be called Indigenous People’s Day. Columbus remains in solitary confinement. His fans are not happy.

“I don’t blame ’em,” I said. “The guy discovered America, and so what if it was by accident? He had a lot of guts, sailing into the unknown and all that. The city should give him his due.”

“He didn’t discover America,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “He confirmed its existence for Europeans. And so what if he had a lot of guts? Stalin had guts, too. Should the world celebrate Joe Stalin Day?”

But we were being too glib. The Columbus Day cancellation is still being disputed in court, and the dispute will never really end because it’s rooted in a moral dilemma. Why should city officials single out Columbus when so many other revered historical figures are guilty of similar crimes?

A Columbus fan at Marconi Plaza told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the famed explorer was “not the monster everyone has made him out of be.” This is exactly wrong; Columbus was the first of many European adventurers who, in their lust for gold and glory, sparked a genocidal effort to replace Native Americans with Europeans.

But the fan made a sensible suggestion: Why not take the lid off the statue, leave it where it’s at, and add a display that lists the explorer’s transgressions but also explains that his voyages set in motion a mass migration to the “New World” of millions of people who would have endured a bleak future in overcrowded Europe?

I agreed. “We wouldn’t be in this here country if it wasn’t for Columbus,” I said. “Besides, he’s no worse than Thomas Jefferson and them other rich white guys who preached equality but kept slaves.”

In other words, history is a form of marketing. It’s almost always written by or for the victors, whose natural instinct is to downplay the great crimes they committed while building their empires. They can’t sell their myths to the masses unless they leave out or distort information that would cast them in a bad light.

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with myths,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Them Italian-Americans need their heroes, just like us. You take away Columbus and who’s left? Next thing you know them activists will be knockin’ down statues of Rocky Balboa.”

Oh no, anything but that! I repeated what I said last year: “Sometimes the revisionists go too far.”

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