Skunked By Grouse: Motorcycle Trip: Part 1

I recently mentioned something about headlamps and then went off line. You’re probably wondering where I was. I went out into the hinterland in search of Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane.

I didn’t find an imaginary comic relief 1970’s Southern sheriff. But then again he never existed. As a rational man I know that. The reason I went was mostly to forget for a while the implausible modern world in which we all live. As a rational man, I needed a break. Rationality happened. I call that a win.

Lest you think I’ve gone down the rabbit hole… I haven’t. I’m standing next to the hole. I marvel at the masses at the bottom frantically digging deeper by the hour.

“You guys want me to throw down a rope or something?”

“Your insistence on standing next to this hole is why we must dig.”

By comparison, my memories of a goofy sheriff with a funny dog are quaint. Oddly, he was more “realistic” than our current reality. He had logical reasons for his choices. He interpreted and enforced laws according to the words in which they were written. He was a crooked cheater but still waited for the Duke boys to screw up before acting. He didn’t simply make up accusations out of whole cloth… the boys really were speeding. Speeding really is illegal.

He didn’t armor up and kick in their door at midnight. He didn’t impound the General Lee for committing a crime and force the Dukes to prove they weren’t running heroin with it. He didn’t shoot the Duke boys, set fire to their barn, or drive local mechanic Cooter out of business for fixing their car. He liked his dog, hired an honest underling, did slapstick hijinks, and generally was closer to Mayberry 1950 than Minneapolis 2021.

The butt of every joke, the antagonist of the plotlines, a crooked cheating liar… he was more moral than almost everyone in politics or media right now. For that matter, Boss Hogg didn’t import 500 refugees from New York City and use them to cement forever control of the little county.

Compare that dumb fictional show to our current world. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad and we’re madder than any LSD trip Timothy Leary conjured on his worst day. There’s no particular realm free of madness. Dinner out at a restaurant hinges on a Governor’s imagined or real emergency powers and the emergency du jour (which may also be imagined or real). Sports went woke. Entertainment quit entertaining. Science fiction books have sucked for decades. Surf social media for a photo of a puppy and you’ll wind up “informed” of the government’s mandatory truth. It will be delivered in a theoretically non-government panopticon that has completely merged with one of two parties. Our shared experiences became battlegrounds because our society was not built for this much enforced conformity. Workplaces face it too. First unreality and then force, either implied or explicit. Parrot groupthink or you will be ostracized, and then punished. Get with the program; irretrievably commit to the unreality or be burned at the stake.

Suppose you’re doing honest labor that’s completely non-political, say mixing cement. Such work should be without political drama. It might even be fulfilling; especially if you like cement. In this era, your job might require you get injected, by force if necessary, lest a vaccine fail to inoculate the initial voluntary patient. None of this has anything to do with the pros and cons of concrete versus cement. Plus you’re worried about the HR people… who wouldn’t know cement if you put it in their herbal tea. Interacting like normal people is dangerous and cement has less and less to do with your job at a cement plant. Things just keep doubling down.

How can any of that be a normal world?

(If my cement plant analogy seems odd to you, pick up and examine some other irrationality from the growing pile. For example, try to explain to yourself why greenbacks backed with a debt of $28,429,870,638,746,795.00 still buy groceries. Give it a shot. I’ll wait. If you can’t do it, you can put down the shovel. I’ll throw you a rope if you want.)

Time, once again, to turn the page in my choose your own adventure book:

• For an action story turn to page 42 where Australian cops mace an old lady to protect her from a virus.
• For a paranoid thriller turn to page 1984 and see if Facebook will let you display it.
• For Aldus Huxley, toke up on legal weed and then turn to page 1984.
• For a horror story, turn to page 666 and read about the history of forced injections.

Or, if the bullshit is too much, go camping; which is what I did. Stay tuned.

For those of you who missed the 1970’s (which generally sucked so don’t feel bad), here’s an introduction to Roscoe. He’s an old timey fictionalized corrupt cop:

Here’s a real picture from 2020. Technically these cops aren’t corrupt. This is supposedly what the good guys look like in 2020:

This is an 1987 fictionalized cyborg law enforcement officer from the future. He patrols the dystopian hellhole of New Detroit. This too is supposedly the good guy.

These are cops in England in 2017 (I chose 2017 because it’s long before Covid-madness). These are supposedly good guys.

Frankly Roscoe, corrupt but human, seems a whole lot safer for all of us than any of the other examples.