Founding Questions is a much appreciated fount of rationality and humor in this, the third year of the Bidenverse (and the seventh or ninth or thirtieth year of the long drawn out swirling of the drain). Among other wise thoughts you’ll find there is the First Rule of Clown World: “No matter how fake and gay you think it’s going to be (for any value of “it”), it will always somehow end up being so much faker and gayer.”
So true!
I spent January riding out a boring old fashioned winter cold, burning my inadequate firewood supply, and stacking canned goods. I was forced by circumstance to sit still. I used the time to idly ponder what stupid thing would roll around after the mid-winter cold snap wrapped up. (I think last mid-winter had Texans freezing their ass when windmills froze up?)
It tried ever so hard to think of the dumbest, most pathetic, lamest, stupid thing that could happen but the First Rule is never wrong. Clown World did it’s thing by diving beneath the lowest bar I could imagine.
A balloon? A fucking balloon!?!
Great raving gibbons of Gloucester*! The stupid thing was a fucking balloon?
I’d pinned my guess on a limp dick AI generated article that proved CPUs are racist. Or maybe a boatload of “non-documented totally anything but illegal migrant blessings of diversity” would have a tragic whale based accident near offshore windmills.
But no… it was a goddamn balloon.
Early last week it “suddenly” appeared; just lot like certain myocardial issues… see what I did there? It appeared in Montana. Virtually nobody in any press mentioned how it crossed from the Pacific to the Great Plains without anyone noticing. Since our press is nothing but propagand-tainment nobody bothered to ask why the entire nation of Canada didn’t pick up the phone and maybe give us a heads up. Nor why NORAD didn’t flag this issue long ago. (Are they literally doing nothing but tracking Santa?) Don’t we have an air force? (Or God forbid couldn’t the space force do something? Bwa ha ha ha the space force! I crack myself up!).
Nobody dropped that fucker because nobody is in charge.
When I see a raccoon heading for the chicken coop I handle it. I see the threat, I assess options, I consider where the creature is headed and evaluate possible outcomes. If the critter is about to take out a chicken I know. I know what to do. Most importantly, I do what I know how to do.
Invariably (if I see it) the raccoon is dispatched within ten minutes or less and not a feather is riled on a single chicken. If a raccoon was made of fabric, three stories tall, radar indicated, and moving at walking speed it would be even easier.
Yet in Clown World the balloon seemed to have the upper hand. The most highly funded military on planet earth couldn’t handle the same decision made by a dipshit blogger with a chicken coop.
The balloon just hung around. Noticed by all and addressed by none.
I’m not particularly worried about spying or even Chinese spying. I’m especially not worried that Chinese Lidar is going to scan a midwestern cornfield (or even the adjacent missile silos) and figure out something they don’t already know.
However, there’s one thing they might have learned. In case there was doubt before, it’s now proven that our chain of command can’t do shit. It literally couldn’t handle the basic and stupid situation of a balloon in our airspace.
“General Sir, there’s a balloon the size of a Winnebago floating near Billings, shall we blast it to smithereens?”
“Stand by soldier, I need to check my nail polish and then make Powerpoint slides for a hundred meetings.”
The dumb, stupid, slow, lazy balloon outwitting a whole nation is what happens when nobody’s in charge. It’s not that we lack the capacity to handle a stupid balloon, we lack the command structure to decide to handle a stupid balloon.
I tried to think of the fakest and gayest possible resolution to this situation. Letting it coast at the speed of USPS all the way to the Atlantic is about what I imagined. Unlike a lot of people, I’m not worried about a fucking balloon. It does what satellites do, just slower and cheaper. Lacking any more information than anyone else, I figured someone in China tossed it into the stratosphere as a sort of test; “lets see how long it takes the morons in American government to detect and shoot this thing down”. I’m sure they got a laugh out of it; “What do you mean it got the way to Montana and now it’s a trending meme on F***book? How is is still floating? Are they all too busy watching the Finnish Figure skater fall over?”
Over a couple of days it became a waiting game and I had a bit of hope. One neat idea would be to let that fucker just plain float clear to France. It would be a pretty chill response. Show the world that the US isn’t easily panicked. Ideally it’d drift from stupid America to stupid Europe and heck… it might make it all the way back to a completely baffled China.
I thought the lowest level of fake and gay would be to let it drift as if undetectable clear to the heartland, then let it lumber across the eastern seaboard, then earn back a little redemption by watching to see what everyone else did. After all, the best way to look like we weren’t so incompetent as to be unable to decide what to do about archaic technology might be to let archaic technology float on by.
Has anyone here ever done any sparring? If your opponent’s punch ain’t gonna’ land, you don’t have to expend energy blocking it. Sometime that’s the boss move. By the time it got to the coast I was expecting that to happen and I was mildly optimistic that we hadn’t behaved like total jackasses.
We could learn something. Since formerly mighty and now completely inept America had let it pass like it had zero fucks to give, what would come next? Would France flatten it eleven nautical miles from Brest like a proper nation? Would Portugal pick it off from the Azores like a proper nation? Would Spain consider it a new from of green energy and have a parade as befits the Clown World. Would it drift over a bickering, irrational, indecisive EU only to wind up vaporized the instant it got within view of the Russian Federation (which for better or worse appears to have adults in charge)?
Ha! This was going to be fun. Canada (as far as I can tell from American propagand-tainment) either didn’t know it was there or was too busy picking out new socks for Trudeau to do anything about it. America hyperventilated while doing nothing. My nation’s government used the excuse of “it could hurt someone if it fell on the densely populated civilians of Eastern Montana”; which convinced absolutely nobody who’s seen the empty spaces of Montana. So now we could enjoy the show. What would France’s reaction/excuse be?
But I forgotten the first rule. There was a faker and gayer resolution. One so incandescently stupid that I hadn’t been able to conceive of such a thing.
“General sir, we’ve had days to ponder the situation. Are we just going to let the balloon float to Europe for the exclusive entertainment of an obscure blogger?”
“No! I’ve consulted with Captain Pike… I mean I’ve spoken with a very popular president who won more votes than any other candidate in history and is clearly in charge of everything. He says we should let it float over every single inch of the continental United States but then, just when the wreckage would fall into salt water where retrieval and reverse engineering would be hardest, blast it.”
“Yes, sir. We will call it operation First Rule!”
So it was done. A nation of 350 million people, once the most technologically advanced society in human history, a people that could put men on the moon 50 years ago, used a 35 million dollar fighter jet to eliminate a fucking balloon that had finished it’s presumably super secret spy mission across an entire continent. We failed to either quickly dispatch OR stoically ignore technology first demonstrated in 1783. We picked the dumbest possible option out of a huge universe of slightly less dumb options.
None of it matters. The balloon will be forgotten by next week. Sooner or later something similar but even dumber will happen again. Why wouldn’t it? If you were the Chinese government and had inexplicably outwitted the Americans with a balloon you’d logically experiment with something even slower and dumber. Maybe they’ll put a chihuahua in a kayak and see if it can take out Tacoma? (Based on the balloon, a chihuahua might work!)
Tomorrow the president who got more votes than any other candidate in history will provide the next example of the First Rule. He’ll give his state of the union speech. I don’t know what he’ll say but his last two memorable speeches have been a doozy. One involved getting me fired while cursing me to a winter of severe illness and death. The next involved blood red lighting while flanked by soldiers in a setting that would make Darth Vader cringe at the negative symbolism.
At this point I can only imagine what he’ll do and I simply can’t imagine the ultimate level of fake and gay that is certain to happen. Kittens being thrown into a wood chipper due to climate change while executing gas kitchen stoves for racism? Interpretive dance while on stilts?
There’s something out there that’s so fake and gay I cannot possibly imagine it. Tomorrow we get to experience it.
Stay tuned. And lets offer a silent nod of appreciation for the Chinese engineers who did pretty well. They flummoxed not just one but two nations, encompassing most of North America… using fabric. I’ll bet they know calculus in a way our military doesn’t.
Good luck y’all.
A.C.
*It doesn’t have to make sense. Nothing has to make sense.