Alan "Sunny" Crow, late of Fort Bragg and more recently cooling his heels down Corcoran way, made his presence known here in the letters column a few issues ago where he said some nice things about me and detailed some aspects of our association.
I'll say first that it's always nice to be praised and good to hear from an old friend, however obliquely. I was a little surprised to find him spelling his sobriquet in the bright and cheerful adjectival form; I naturally assumed, knowing him as I do, that it was the homophone "Sonny" long associated with juvenile delinquents, outlaw bikers, and serial killers, he would have employed. Alan Crow is a lot of things, but one thing he is decidedly not is "sunny." Dangerously unpredictable, yes; batshit crazy, by any accepted standard; demon-possessed, very likely; someone you don't want to turn your back on, definitely. I would recommend keeping him squarely in front and a respectable distance away, ideally several miles, but at the very least opposite ends of the room.
During a group session at Ford Street, Alan once threw a chair across the room because I used the word "crepuscular." Maybe he had a point, but I still think it was a little extreme.
Of all the criminals who've made the questionable choice of pleading their case in the letters column of the AVA, Alan's account was by far the most entertaining and fanciful I've ever read. I don't have the article at hand, but as I recall his claim was that the complainant offered him $100 to perform an obscene act on his (Alan's) person. According to Alan, he responded with a polite but stern refusal along the lines of, "Sir, I find your proposal repugnant and ungentlemanly, and I feel it incumbent upon me to restore the balance of the universe by taking possession of your automobile. This is not a crime, but justice, and if you should be so craven as to report the act you will bring dishonor upon yourself and your ancestors."
The main problem with this story is that someone even casually acquainted with Sunny/Sonny would know that you'd be safer offering a blowjob to a grizzly bear than to Crow. Had this unfortunate victim actually proposed booking Alan's whammer and paying for the privilege besides, he'd have been in the trunk as Alan drove the car away, thence conveyed to Todd's Point to have his carcass flung into the sea.
By way of qualification, I'd also like to mention Alan's intelligence, loyalty, sense of humor, and generosity, and I look forward to hanging out with him in the future, if he gets his medication right.
* * *
In other news, El Niño is sweeping in from the south and inundating the state with rain. Some might call this wet weather welcome, seeing the phenomenon as a moisturizer being rubbed into California's sere, cracked skin and a respite from years of drought. I say El Niño is just another dangerous Mexican immigrant coming in to sell us drugs, take our jobs, and rape our women, and he won't find it so easy to penetrate the border next year with President Trump on watch.
Seriously, though: President Trump? The mind reels, not unpleasantly. Because if the Donald becomes our Commander-in-Chief, then all bets are off and anything is officially possible. I am a skeptic's skeptic and don't truly believe in much of anything, but if this comes to pass I'll be as credulous as a Victorian moppet and eagerly monitoring basic cable channels for the latest news about ancient aliens.
I see two possible solutions to the Trump problem. For the first I will be mining, as I so often do, the annals of The Simpsons. All human knowledge is in there; all the good stuff, anyway. You can use The Simpsons as religions use their sacred texts, as a font of wisdom, solace, and guidance. Properly explored and interpreted, the program can demystify any conundrum, unify any dilemma, concretize the most existential of crises, and set the muliest reprobate to rights. I would not, however, recommend asking oneself the question, "What would Homer do?" in times of doubt.
In the "Stonecutters" episode, Homer is deemed unfit for and denied membership in a Mason-like secret society but later admitted via a legacy loophole. After desecrating a treasured icon and being stripped and shamed in a banishment ceremony, a birthmark reveals Homer J. as the Chosen One, or foreordained leader of the group. Homer's obnoxiousness in the role causes the rest of the Stonecutters to quit and reform in another building under the name "No Homers Club."
So the GOP should just cede the party to Trump and re-form across town as the "No Trumps Party." If he asks why his daughter Ivanka was allowed in, just tell him she was grandfathered in.
My second possible solution is more in the way of the long game and requires some vision. First, the Democrats need to throw the race by putting their support behind Trump. Bill Clinton should publicly disavow his wife's campaign and bring the full weight of his super-charisma to the Trump campaign. This should lock down a victory for the Donald, and six months or so after his inauguration when he's led out of the White House in handcuffs and Dr. Oz or Tony Stark or Mark Cuban or whoever he's chosen as VP is being sworn in, we can be reliably certain that no Republican will ever be elected to anything again.
The first national election in which I was personally invested was the 1968 contest between Tricky Dick and Triple H. I was a third-grader at Quail Hollow Elementary in Ben Lomond and sort of the FDR of that fine institution, having been elected president of my class three years running and thus pretty well conversant with matters presidential. I was a rabid Democrat but ran on a "smartest kid in class" platform, which I definitely wasn't, though possessed of a degree of verbal precocity that made it easy to convince third-graders — a credulous lot — that I was some kind of genius. I believe the colloquial term for the principle I employed is "bullshit," and I continue using it to similar effect today.
My ideas about the two parties were black-and-white: Democrats good, Republicans bad, and naturally stemmed from my parents' quite vocal opinions. But I'm certain I would have arrived at the same conclusion absent any other data than the candidates’ public personae. One look at Nixon's scowly, jowly, shifty-eyed pan was enough to turn me off Republicans for life. And how can you not like a guy with the incredibly genial name of "Hubert"? Put the whole thing together and you have a name at once grandiose and silly, presidential and Seussian. "Hubert H. Humphrey." It cried out to be rhymed with "gallimumphrey, or some such nonsense. Had our nation's schoolchildren been included in the electorate, I believe that election would've had a different outcome and we'd've been saved one serious and indelible blot on the presidency.
I perceived Nixon as evil on the order of a storybook ogre or witch, and of course I was right. Had he not gone into politics, he'd have been arrested on suspicion and jailed on general principles.
I fell asleep on the couch watching the returns, and when I woke up the first words out of my mouth were "Who won?" When I got the news, I was truly crestfallen and experienced for the first time that hopeless sinking feeling I would-grow to know too well over the years as various Republicans cheated their way to victory.
When you're eight, four years is— well, it's half a life.
I anticipated the worst, but after a few days in which no stormtroopers showed up at my door to confiscate my Hot Wheels, I pretty much forgot about politics until the following year when I was defeated in my bid for 4th-grade class president by Chris Wortman, who was running on the "cool kid" ticket. As the kids got older and a little more sophisticated, their susceptibility to my spurious brilliance was strongly mitigated by Chris's dazzling good looks, charm, and athletic ability. That sonofabitch went straight to the top of my enemies list, where he remains to this day.
Richard Milhous Nixon was a cad, a bum, a scheming, sneaking, duplicitous, meretricious, treasonous thug, but if he were alive today and compared to the current crop of Republican hopefuls, he'd stand head, shoulders, knees, AND toes above them all. Compared to Trump et al, he'd be a mixture of Jefferson, Solomon, Churchill, and Jesus. That's how bad these Republicans are.
My advice to Hillary (or preferably and ideally, Bernie) is: if you can't utterly destroy whichever bombastic ass-clown manages to bluster his way into the nomination, you need to give it up because politics just ain't your game.
Be First to Comment