Category Archives: Comment

Trump and the cobra

COMMENT.TRUMP.COBRAby Talmadge Jarratee

The Donald showed his first signs of mealy-mouthed weakness at the second round of GOP debates when instead of sticking to his guns and not denying what everybody with any measure of eyesight knows—that Carly Fiorina is an ugly woman with an even uglier, nastier soul—backed down and actually told this miserable hating beast she was “beautiful, and that she was a beautiful person.”

Good God, the woman drips venom. At any moment as she speaks you expect some kind of exorcism to occur and a blood-dripping, claw-handed, serpent-tongued monster to slither out of her gut and begin screeching a death knell at the lot of us. This bony python with the CEO-slick huckster delivery, who accused Hillary Clinton of being a liar while spewing saccharine balderdash about watching a fetus twitch into death in her tirade to abolish Planned Parenthood, was no more than a vulpine overture to the pitiless money-bags and operatives in the Reagan Library hungry for Trump’s scalp.COMMENT.TRUMP&fiorina

This ghastly apparition of a female had to work overtime not to curl up her lip in a contemptuous sneer ala Dick Cheney as the poison fought to ooze out of her. Can one imagine the ambitious male hides having to work for and answer to this cold-blooded human icepick in a corporate structure, realizing immediately it was all about revenge against a male race owning the signature advantage to get to the top—a penis? Trump should have gone to sleep kicking himself in the ass for backing down like a pansy to this shrew, for breaking down like the gentleman pansy Jeb Bush and having the laugh-out-loud gall to accuse her of being beautiful.

Shame on you Donald, Ivana must be shocked!

Meanwhile, as Fiorina, who IS tough, and scarily so, zinged daggers at the Donald, the male hides on all sides of her tried to act tough, a pathetic charade among 13 guys who’ve probably never been slapped in their faces in a lifetime. Bush, like your most stooped owlish lackluster lecturing professor pedant, forced a little anger at the Donald for insulting Mexicans and therefore insulting his wife, a Mexican, and demanded an apology to his wife, which the Donald, back in attack mode, scoffed at. Cruz, with the face of an implacable jackal, in full alarmist war-mongering paranoia, vowed to tear down every accomplishment by Obama his first day in the White House and go after the terrorists. All these tough guys are fearless of Putin, whom Fiorina said she would not bother to confront and would possibly be the only one of this crew Putin might fear of losing his nuggets.

Rubio, a little boy talking loudly and carrying a twig, was forceful for the pundits, venting the appropriate threats at our enemies while tight-roping the Immigrant Debacle. Pencil-necked Walker’s attempt at making a splash with his finger-pointing toughness so reeked of overheated rehearsal that you wanted to send him to drama school. A Brownie point for Christie for imploring in his mannish way to Fiorina (who feels she can get away with it because she’s a woman) to stop interrupting him like she had everybody else. Huckabee had his moment with Jesus while viewers went to the fridge for beer or the cupboard for a stiff one. Only Paul made any sense in his pacifist neutrality and critique of Bush’s wayward wars, and Kasich, a reasonable hick, who did make sense, was overwhelmed by the Cobra. They were mostly ignored.

Only Carson communicated with the velvet glove in soft-spoken terms, the witch doctor, who does not believe in evolution or climate change, claims homosexuality is a choice, among other idiocies, and, like Clarence Thomas, is that white black man the GOP loves to stuff down the throats of Democrats. He came off as a truly mature, humble human being, if a drastically misguided one guaranteed to please the uninformed.

At the end, instead of trampling all over each other in their reverence of Jesus, they were  trampling all over each other in reverence to Reagan when in truth not one of them even slightly resembles a man with true leadership qualities and are basically a stink in his nostrils. Watching them fawn and gush and beam with pride at their idolatry of and so-called conservative devotion to the great savior, a real Republican of the Nixon-Eisenhower era should have wanted to slap some sense into their mean-spirited faces.

As for Trump? Same old bilge flood of empty platitudes and promises, sheer mindless nonsense aimed at his clamoring morons, his yawning boring insipid performance drawing new endorsements in former tantrum-throwing tyrannical troglodyte NFL player and coach Mike Ditka, who now works for the ESPN hydra, and pretty-boy quarterback with the New England Patriots, Tom Brady, married to a high fashion model and living in a palatial estate and too arrogant to attend Obama’s White House to celebrate his team’s Super bowl victory with his mostly black teammates.

I’m sure, if Trump’s still in the running come February and the football season is over, he’ll have these two boneheads on the stage with him raising their fists in victory.

As for the Cobra? Time will tell. It’s like the monkey going up the flagpole—the higher up she goes, the more you see of her asshole. §

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco and, because of his views, may soon be homeless. For more on Talmadge, visit dellfranklin.com

Trump’s blighted white men

TRUMP.BLIGHTED.JARRATEEby Talmadge Jarratee

Donald Trump’s blighted white men, spawn of the “greatest generation,” who endured our worst economic Depression and World War II, are the prime pawns in his quest for the presidency. Trump’s blighted white men are the most spoiled, petulant and fortunate generation in American history, the inheritors of free education, an awesome safety net, powerful unions, opportunity for employment in both blue- and white-collar industries, and the overall advantage of being white instead of black so that they were guaranteed automatic employment. Trump’s blighted white men are vigorously on board with his insane and cruel attacks on Mexican immigrants. Trump’s blighted white men, who would in most cases deny with vehemence that they are racists, fulminate against a black president named Obama because he wants to allow “a bunch of undocumented Mexicans” in the country and tax the rich “so unemployed lazy niggers can live on welfare,” even if these white men in almost all cases have everything they ever wanted and need nothing more because they lived in an era where everything fell into their hands.

Trump’s blighted white men are the most spoiled, petulant and fortunate generation in American history.

Many of Trump’s blighted white men, and perhaps the most vitriolic, are those fat flabby red-faced golfers in ball caps and white mustaches who congregate at gyms or coffee shops to vent the poison built up in their craws because of Obama and complain that the government is the enemy, as declared by Ronald Reagan, their idol. The government provided this crew with just about everything the New Deal and the Great Society created, only to turn on it after they became flush. The trouble with Trump’s blighted white men is that they have it so good and are so bored in retirement that they need something to bitch about, something to feel persecuted about, something to hate, especially those who grew up in an era where everybody on their side of the tracks was white, and the blacks and browns lived across those tracks in another world they did not know or want to know and feared as they would aliens in the same xenophobic way they now do immigrants.

These days, Trump’s blighted white men claim the country has been taken away from them, which means that from the beginning they felt the country was strictly theirs, belonging only to white people who controlled the government and the money and tossed crumbs to minorities. Suddenly, today, Trump’s blighted white men are surrounded by blacks, Mexicans, Central Americans, Asians of every stripe, Indians, and mixes of all these nationalities, and it is all confusing and depressing to see their once powerful populace shrivel as the dreaded Muslims and immigrant criminals close in on them and scare the shit out of them to the point they might in the future need armed security in their neighborhoods or at their gated communities, not to mention their arsenals of guns.

Truth is, Trump’s blighted white men, who claim THEY are the great American work ethic and symbols of the great American dream and responsible for making this the greatest, godliest country in the world, are recipients of huge pensions and inheritances and a culture that enabled them to reap great rewards while not working half as hard as their parents and ancestors or any of the hated and dreaded immigrants, and especially the Mexicans, who work so hard and are so hungry that the blighted white men, whose children and grandchildren spend most of their time either talking on cell phones or fidgeting with ipads and seem to accept minorities, homosexuals, transsexuals, same sex marriage, abortion and immigrants, have become perplexed and apoplectic.

Truth is, Trump’s blighted white men are either the most uninformed or stupid people in the country, so much so they are prime prey for demagogues who usually prey on the poor and desperate but in this case have the greatest scapegoat in the American history of demagogues—Barack Obama. Trump’s blighted white men are in a frenzy over Obama, even if the country and their finances were in shambles because of the boob they voted for, George Bush, and are now flush again and out of danger and the country is much better off as they express their hatred of government and the man responsible for bailing their asses out.

I am 72 and grew up with this lot. They all seemed so content and happy with their cars and girls and trendy clothing and jobs at the local diner or department store or Disneyland, in my case. Who would have thought such a cheerful, care-free generation of young males would turn into this intolerant, up-tight, stingy, glum, mean-spirited legion of malcontents. One of my best friends, fellow jock who taught high school English and coached baseball in Orange County, has had a falling out with all his fellow coaches and golfing partners and career-long friends, all Republicans. He told me a story of visiting an old football friend in a small town in Wyoming, where he refused to bring up guns and abortion and the government, just so they could get along and talk old times.

“We were driving along, and this guy, he’s the mayor, and he sees a rabbit on the side of the road, he pulls over, jumps out, shoots and kills the rabbit, just leaves it there, jumps back in his truck and says, ‘that’s for fucking Obama, the motherfucker ain’t taking away MY guns.”

Almost all of Trump’s blighted White men, who will end up following him to hell, deserve the hell he just might produce, and are leaving a legacy they ought to be ashamed of. §

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco and, because of his views, may soon be homeless. For more on Talmadge, visit dellfranklin.com

Trump and the Jesus factor

COMMENT.Donald-Trump-Thumbs-Up-665x385-433x256by Talmadge Jarratee

Just as the 14 incredibly shrinking men and the shriveled wicked witch running for the GOP presidential nomination fawn over and pander to and curry favor with the billionaires usurping the power of the people for money, they are now trampling all over each other as they pander to and fawn over and seek favor with Jesus. All the incredibly shrinking men have made it resoundingly clear that Jesus is THEIR friend and inspiration. Huckabee, the Christ-crazed huckster, appears to have stamped his patent on the Jesus factor, therefore herding evangelicals and rhapsodic worshippers. Whiter-than-white, pencil-neck Governor Walker, whose feeble presence seems a minute notch above Jeb Bush, smugly claims his adoration of Jesus because his father was a clergyman who obviously set hisCOMMENT.TRUMP.HAPPY JESUS son on the course of the single-handed ruination of the state of Wisconsin. Others, like Santorum and Cruz, who would love to abolish all manner of abortion, same-sex marriage, as well as voting rights, Obamacare and anything else that might aid the poor, seem almost biblical in their praise of Jesus.

 

As a party, the GOP has gotten down on its hands and knees before the sanctimonious American public and observed Jesus as their savior and the moral compass of the Greatest Nation ever in the world! When questioned a few years back at a debate on whether they believed in Jesus, every hand went up, accompanied by beneficent smiles.

The Donald takes another tack. The Donald momentarily notches down from his stern terse nonstop bombastic dominance and sweetly admits he likes church. The Donald says he liked Sunday school, a place hated by most kids growing up because public school was enough and Sunday school was on a par with church and sermonizing when it came to interminable and insufferable boredom. The Donald likes the bible. The Donald talks of his past and current church with the warmth and appreciation of an astute businessman schmoozing a stern and imperious bishop or pope. How else could the Donald fill a stadium in Mobile, Alabama, with a horde of more than 30,000 fat God-fearing white folks and perhaps a three or four black Baptists?

When asked how often he attended his church by a sharp and leery inquisitor of the media, Trump casually claimed “as much as he could,” which seemed odd from a nonstop busy, mercurial, expedient and impatient person as Trump, a person who seems incapable of enduring the humbling of himself before anybody, much less lose the center of attention to a cloaked and gowned ecclesiastic droning on about such stale subjects as sacrifice, salvations, quotes from the bible, and other assorted lectures aimed at guilt-mongering and money-snatching; the former something the Donald will ignore, the latter he will fulfill as he has the coffers of those he needs for future exploitation.

I was starting to really like the Donald in all his swinishness because I felt deep down inside he thought all this Jesus stuff is bullshit,  just another charade by typical phony politicians trained to pose and lie, and would spank these incredibly shrinking hypocrites for their cheesy hero-worship of The Man, because Jesus would never in His right mind approve of their mean-spirited behavior and dehumanizing comments and treatment of immigrants, something an unshackled nonbeliever like I thought the Donald was could get away with.

I wonder if at some point the Jesus punditry so commonly seen on cable news stations

begin issuing doubts about the Donald’s devotion to Jesus. Will they not be happy until the Donald walks among the nut-house zealots as a skulking born-again like the blundering Bush who corralled the entire evangelical born-again populace to win office in 2000 and go on to wreck the country? Like Bush, will he allude that Jesus talked to him about his major decisions, and especially the one to go to war and bomb the living be-Jesus out of Iraq?

This remains to be seen. Trump continues to climb in the polls. He is becoming a brighter and bigger star every day, delivering riveting speeches without notes and showing his mental agility and feel for the podium each passing day as he lands in his own plane and addresses huge crowds as a savior/potentate. The question is, will the Donald at some point feel he is bigger than Jesus? The 14 incredibly shrinking men and the shriveling wicked witch certainly hope so, because it might be their last gasp to jump on him and accuse the seemingly unstoppable and indomitable Donald as a thrice-married, draft-dodging, money-grubbing, sinning heathen.

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco and, because of his views, may soon be homeless. For more on Talmadge, visit dellfranklin.com

    

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN AND HIS FELLOW DWARFS

COMMENT.INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

 

by Talmadge Jarratee

Poor Rand Paul tried to re-establish himself to the Republican voting public by attempting to take down the mighty Donald with lame imitations of the Donald’s disreputable gibberish and in doing so beame the incredible shrinking man (ISM), the kind whose emaciated skull once hung from mirrors of cherried-out jalopies driven by hooligans back in the 1950s and ‘60s. The Donald regards Senator Paul as if he is an annoying flea to be flicked off his thousand-dollar sleeve. The ISM maintained the Donald  cheapened the campaign among the 16 stooges trampling all over each other like a mad scramble to roll back every single piece of legislature the Democrats have passed since the 1930s, when President Roosevelt placed people like William O. Douglas as head of the SEC and stuck it in their big business craw.

Rand Paul began his childish whining during the first debate, when, like a little boy hiding behind his big brother facing the neighborhood bully, began challenging the Donald on “hedging” his answer on whether he’d run as an Independent. The Donald flicked him aside. Throughout the debate the senator, obviously having rehearsed his assault on the Donald in the mirror for hours in an attempt to look tough and resolute, appeared peaked with his skull recently shorn of familiar curls, possibly to seem more presidential. The ISM bobbed and weaved and slithered behind his big brother all night long like the kid every other kid in the neighborhood hates just by the sneaky look in his ferret face. Now the pathetic senator is caviling every chance he gets on all the cable stations while the ponderous Donald calls his own press conference, which is treated like a monumental happening and plays big and friendly with the press corps he previously excoriated as less than vermin.

Fox News, tortured that Donald might be the nominee, backed down, and are now ON him. The salvation.

Meanwhile, Senator Paul, whom the Donald accused of losing to him in golf, claimed the Big Bad Donald was playing on “his home course,” has seen his poll numbers plummet to near extinction—which the Donald notes—while ex-Governor Jeb Bush, the joyless non-personality lump of a brother of the blundering ex-President, sees his stooped frame wither on the vine as the Donald calls more press conferences and waxes eloquent in a show of bravado, as if he has already been elected President.

The major news cable stations—Fox, MSNBC, CNN—scurry to post …BREAKING NEWS… alerts and go apeshit as the Donald, with no notes or teleprompter, excoriates the remaining shrinking men as losers in life because they don’t know how to make money and build castles and fuck the government and are dependent on swine like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelsen and other bilious billionaires interested only in power and control to bankroll their shriveling campaigns.

The other night, with thousands cheering and the Donald regaling them, he tore into Bush who was down the road lecturing a paltry lot of 200 max in his own lackluster way about policy and trying to ignore the Donald’s barbs about his being “weak.” The exalted, entitled Bush, a hand-picked momma’s boy by the steely Barbara to be our next President, who obviously lived a sheltered childhood as he worked his way through prep schools and the University of Texas at Austin, retorts with the sneery snipes of somebody who’s never been punched in the nose—in certain realms he would be punched in the nose, just for his looks and bearing.

His voice is weak and whiny. Next to the Donald, he looks like a punk. He’s shrinking, shrinking, his numbers plummeting as he claims he’s in for the long haul with his $114 million, more than any of the other contenders, most of whom, beside the Donald, have shrunk into vapors—troll-like Jindal; Huckabee, Christ-crazed, fire-breathing ex-governor from Arkansas is near extinction (thank God); Santorum is a feeble echo in the din; Senator Graham went down in flames with his cell phone; brain-dead Perry is broke and babbling nonsense; the paleface hypocrite Walker from Wisconsin along with the weasel-faced demagogue Cruz have turned to caddying for all of the Donald’s putrid, mean-spirited, outlandish, grandiose so-called policies, sucking up in case he falls.

They’re all trying to arrest the terrible shrinking within and without by holding interviews with cable employees stuck with the rotten job of listening to their lame excuses and empty vows of hope while it’s pointed out their poll-numbers are shrinking.

Kasich looks the rumpled eastern European just got off the boat next to the sartorial Donald, who travels in his own plane with a third wife gorgeous enough to be on the cover of Vogue. Pataki is a sour pill impossible to digest. Only the venomous-tongued scarecrow of a woman Fiorino, the Hewlett-Packard devouring vampire, who looks like she belongs on a broom headed to Oz, and the doctor, who read his debate retorts from a script and likens Obamacare to slavery, are fighting off the shrinkage Donald heaps upon them. He doesn’t mention them. He knows they’re no threat. Right now he’s in the process of extinguishing the third Bush, not exactly a manly man.

But he’s got his millions, and he’s got his brother, whom he defends, and blames Obama for the situation the boob brother started and ignited, and he’s quickly backing away from every humanitarian policy or statement he ever made for the little guy and reiterating that he is “his own man” and not his dad or brother, so as to curry favor and votes from the numbskull slugs lost in the wilderness of ignorance and anger at being passed over by the new technology and the rapidly increasing ruthlessness of their own party.

What Bush is is the same flotsam and jetsam as all the rest—sans Trump—a pawn and puppet of the big money boys turning America, the greatest democracy in history, into a flat-out oligarchy.

We deserve Trump.

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco and, because of his views, may soon be homeless. For more on Talmadge, visit dellfranklin.com

TRUMP TRUMPS THE LILY-LIVERED

COMMENT.TRUMP-GRAHAM

Lindsey Graham once asked Donald Trump for money for his senatorial candidacy and handed him a slip of paper with his phone number on it, a strip of paper Trump showed everybody on national TV.

by Talmadge Jarratee

Is anybody anywhere having more fun than Donald Trump? This is a man who loves to create raw abrasions and rub them with salt and giggle with demonic glee. He’s a big soft white slab of cowardice with a bizarre shock of carefully tended and glistening hay atop his head, a blow-hard bringing his fellow GOP candidates to their knees and savoring every second of it. A certified draft dodger, he had the gall to imply revered war hero John McCain was not a real hero because he was captured after being shot down in Vietnam. McCain’s capture and years as a POW made McCain a loser in Trump’s eyes. When McCain caddie Lindsey Graham delivered a sanctimonious speech supporting his hero and condemning the blasphemous Donald, the Donald had trouble remembering who Graham was, then mentioned that Graham once asked him for money for his senatorial candidacy and handed him a slip of paper with his phone number on it, a strip of paper Trump showed everybody on national TV and read off the number, causing Graham to change numbers after he was besieged by crank callers enthralled with the Donald.

According to Trump, Rick Perry from Texas needs an IQ test if he’s serious about running for president and wears glasses to appear studious and smart when voters question his mental capacity after displaying stunning stupidity in past debates. Jeb Bush is a nice guy, but he’s weak, would make a terrible president. There are 15 of these stooges vying for the big enchilada, and they are all distracted from slamming Obama and Hillary because they have their hands full with the bullet-proof Donald, who, unlike his rivals, feels no compunction to show his softer, compassionate side. When he was asked about his three marriages, always a political bugaboo, he softened just a might by adding that they were all nice ladies and still his friends and he loves women.

The Donald is an unabashed rogue. He is a lacerating bully. His vicious verbiage is gleefully out of bounds.

The Donald is an unabashed rogue. He is a lacerating bully. His vicious verbiage is gleefully out of bounds. As a ruthless businessman used to sycophants kissing HIS ass for money, he scoffs at the beggarly tendencies of his competition and announces he has 10 billion and doesn’t have to go skulking hat in hand to billionaires interested in holding the puppet strings. He doesn’t have to read from a teleprompter. He seems so imperious as to be immune from careful speechwriters terrified of insulting one group or another. The Donald doesn’t give a hoot and hell who he insults or humiliates or treats with snarling disdain when they muster up enough nerve to retaliate.

And oh how Trump thrives on retaliation. What he seems to enjoy even more is to watch the carefully calibrated and advisor-plagued candidates cringe and squirm after each one of his rancid salvos so filled with contempt for the common man, and especially Latinos, or, primarily, Mexican immigrants. Next to Trump, Rubio seems a slithering weasel, a little boy, while Mr. Walker from Wisconsin appears to be the whitest white man in captivity, so white he blinds you when you’re forced to look at him, so white in every way that those Obama-hating whites in their 60s and 70s are in love with him, even if he smacks of one of those white kids we all remember hating when they ran for school president.

The 15 stooges have tried ignoring Trump. This does no good, because Mr. Trump has so captured the stage as to reduce them to pygmies if they remain silent. If they maintain their dignity in measured tones, answering the Donald’s insults with judicious dignity, like Jeb, they seem even weaker and more spineless than suspected. If they lash out in outrage, the Donald quickly seizes on the fact that they are politicians with years of hypocrisy behind them while trying to be all things to all people, or at least all things to the tight-asses in their party whose votes they need for the presidential nomination. Does the empire-owning Donald with his OWN jet plane and entourage really care about religion? Abortion? Same-sex marriage? He quickly skims these issues and talks about belting around the Chinese, bombing the hell out of Iran, running the Mexican criminals and immigrants out of the country and building a 2,000-mile wall to keep their greasy asses out, and creating jobs while the stooges slither and stew and plague us with their stiff joyless cheesy smiles of losers maintaining a brave face after suffering a personal thrashing.

As a ruthless businessman used to sycophants kissing HIS ass for money, he scoffs at the beggarly tendencies of his competition.

The 15 stooges and their loyal pundits claim the Donald will eventually fizzle out, because there’s no way this verbal brute could possibly run a country, and people will come to realize this. The pundits analyze the Donald and carefully admit his strength, his popularity, admitting he has touched a sore spot among discontented Americans igniting them, uniting them into one frothing dogpack clamoring for change. Unlike the stuffed shirt 15, who expound on their wholesomeness while sporting their perfect little families, the grinning sexless maiden-like wives, the Donald admitted long ago he likes young women half his age and prefers sex with them over alcohol. What more could one appreciate than a guy who relishes young pussy? Unlike the straight and narrow dullards—Jeb leads this pack—who have craved office all their lives and limited any roguish tendencies in fear they might be discovered, the Donald has always swung wild with no concern for his image of a man who steps on little people and negotiates with those supposedly on his own exalted level, never backing down or back-tracking from his image as the ultimate winner and billionaire American business tycoon.

If the Donald is having more fun than anybody in America—hands down—the Democrats are right behind him, rejoicing as the 15 stooges quail and quiver and look to advisers in a desperate quest for answers as to how to deal with the meteoric and overwhelming and overbearing Donald. Chris Mathews, on MSNBC, grins and glows every evening while the gloom settles in among the Fox News crew of scowling tough-guy gasbags and snide blondes who try to deny the Donald is dragging down the Republican party and exposing the 15 stooges to America and the rest of the world as a disgrace, an absurd rendition of democracy so putrid and unlikable that its citizens wonder how the hell it ended up that we are forced to vote for these assholes. As we repeatedly claim we are the greatest country in the world, what must highly progressive and well-run countries like Sweden and Germany and Denmark and Holland think of the sniveling Republican reaction to the bombastic bilge tossed at them by the Donald? Has the greatest country in the world, as we claim, become a laughingstock to the rest of the world?

Perhaps so. Meanwhile, just keep following the Donald, as he licks his lips and snorts and stomps around like a middle linebacker in the National Football League anticipating another lily-livered Lilliputian taking the ball across the line of scrimmage—his territory. §

Talmadge Jarratee writes about politics and occasional sketches of San Francisco.

 

Hilarious drunks?

COMMENT.alcohol-001Forgive me for not laughing

by Dr. Steven Sainsbury

Ask those people who are close to me, and they will tell you that I have a great sense of humor. I love jokes, remember them easily and tell them well. I love to laugh and smile. Having worked more than 20 years as full-time emergency physician, I have learned to use humor to cope with the stress and tragedies that surround me on a regular basis. But with all due respect to my friend Dell Franklin (founding publisher of the Rogue Voice), there is one subject that I cannot joke about, cannot take lightly, and find clearly and distinctly unfunny: That subject is drunks.

San Luis Obispo County is awash in drunkenness. And I don’t mean the homeless alcoholic, living beneath the freeway overpass, scrounging every day for a daily fifth of hard liquor. Even though we have plenty of those. And I don’t mean the sad, “functional” drunks whose lives revolve around their daily descent into an alcoholic oblivion as their pitiful lives slowly but inexorably evaporate into a hepatotoxic hell.

Instead, I think of the Cal Poly coed who binge drinks after midterms. This is the same person who hours earlier meticulously calculated her engineering problems to the tenth decimal point, but fails to consider, for even a moment, the huge cost that her drunkenness will impose on her future.

***

Jane is a straight-A engineering student who went out bar-hopping and binge-drinking with her girlfriends on Saturday night after a grueling week of midterms. By 11 p.m. she was grossly intoxicated, and could barely walk without falling. Nonetheless, she managed to hook up with a new acquaintance at one of the downtown bars, and left with him. Her so-called friends were so drunk themselves that they allowed her to leave with a total stranger. I met Jane later the next night in the ER. She had awakened earlier that Sunday afternoon, hung over, achy, and miserable. But even worse, she woke up naked, her tampon pushed up against her cervix, and knew immediately that she had obviously had sexual intercourse with the stranger she had met the night before. Yet Jane had no idea who he was, where he lived, or how he could be found. Tearful and fearful, she came into the ER to be tested for STDs, pregnancy and AIDS.

***

I also think of the SLO professional, who attended four years of college and another four years of postgraduate training. A smart, well-educated fellow, he must have slept through that day in biology class when they discussed the effect of alcohol on judgment and hand-to-eye coordination.

***

John, a middle-aged, married father of two, attended a barbeque one evening, along with several of his friends. Carelessly, he drank too much and decided to drive home. Soon thereafter, he lost control of his vehicle, injuring himself and killing his front-seat passenger. His blood alcohol of 0.18, coupled with his subsequent felony manslaughter conviction, landed him in prison. In addition to losing his freedom, he lost his business and professional license. He killed his friend, destroyed his family, and tossed aside his happiness as quickly as he had guzzled down the original 12-pack of Budweiser.

***

I think of the young father who started drinking with friends while in college, then continued the same pattern as he developed his business in San Luis Obispo. Always limiting his drinking to social occasions, he scoffed at the notion that he had a problem with alcohol. After all, he was successful at work, had a wonderful wife and family, and was in superb physical shape. Even his golf game was steadily improving.

Nonetheless, Ted’s golf game began to suffer as the daily toll of social drinking escalated in his life. Ten years after moving to San Luis Obispo, Ted was fired from the national company that had employed him since college for his unreliability and lack of productivity. His long-suffering wife, weary of his increasingly frequent drunken binges, filed for divorce. His children soon began to dread the court-ordered visitations, which became less and less frequent. Within just a few years, Ted had several outstanding alcohol-related warrants, a series of failed jobs, no money, no home, no driver’s license, no wife or family, and his health was failing. His life and golf game were in shambles with no hope on the horizon.

***

Most readers see a drunk staggering out of the bar and laugh at his silly attempts to walk without falling. I see a drunk who will come to see me in the ER in an hour or two, because he actually will fall, whereupon I will spend an hour sewing up his face, trying to ignore his vomit-laced beer breath that permeates my clothing and breathing space. Or worse, I will see his wife for a broken jaw and blackened eye because she dared to complain about his drunkenness: Loads of laughs, those staggering drunks.

Many of you, as you hear your friends lament about getting arrested with a DUI, console them as if they were some type of victim. Your friend’s huge fines, loss of license, and mandatory probation time invoke feelings of sympathy and compassion. Not for me. Those who drink and drive, every single one, instill in me only feelings of anger and disgust. You see, I look at your same drunk-driver friend and see a potential (or actual) murderer—someone who willingly takes a multi-ton weapon and propels it at 60 or 70 miles per hour at anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in their path. Small child, pregnant mother, and frail grandparent—it makes no difference. The drunk driver will plow them all down equally, without so much as a blink of their eye. Twenty years of washing the congealed blood of maimed and dying bodies off my scrubs has removed all trace of sympathy for anyone who so recklessly endangers the lives of total strangers: Yep, real knee-slappers, those drunk drivers.

Consider the following statistics—just try to control your laughter.

Alcohol is a significant factor in 40 percent of all automobile accidents, and responsible for about half of all drowning, fatal falls, and house fires.

More facts to chuckle over: Alcohol is involved in 2/3 of homicides, half of all rapes and domestic violence cases, and more than 80 percent of campus crimes. Additionally, the use of alcohol is implicated in a large percentage of divorces, suicides, and regretted sexual activity leading to sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS and unwanted pregnancies.

So you see, our alcohol-drenched society, and our acceptance of its lethal and painful consequences, fractured my funny bone a long time ago. Work with me for just one shift on a typical night in the ER and you’ll probably quit laughing also. §

Dr. Steven Sainsbury is an emergency physician who works in San Luis Obispo County. He can be reached at Stesai@aol.com.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER

Oscar Higueros Jr., volunteer Cayucos fireman arrested on charges of rape.

Oscar Higueros Jr., volunteer Cayucos fireman arrested on charges of rape.

by Stacey Warde

Yes, let’s talk about Somebody’s Daughter.

Larry Narron’s fictional account of a woman, abused as a child by her father, confronting the ailing, aged man in his later years, could have come right out of a bedroom scene here in Cayucos, as we learned last week when Oscar Higueros, Jr., a volunteer fireman, was arrested for the rape of a 17-year-old girl, and charged with 33 felonies, including forced sodomy and oral copulation, threatening a witness, and possession of cocaine.

A lot has been said about the merits of the case and about Higueros’ character but little about the alleged victim. What people seem to have forgotten is that the victim is somebody’s daughter, not unlike the one in Larry’s story. Little has been said about this child and how we might in the future protect her and other youth in our community from child sexual abuse.

These alleged crimes took place in a home not far from any of us. Why not give some due consideration to the real victim in this case, and to other potential victims who live in our community? Why do we so quickly dismiss the victims in our midst and go to the defense of an accused rapist just because he’s a fireman?

And, why in the digitally social world of data inundation do we resort to flaming, illogic and basic  stupidity when commenting on these events? You would think from many responses defending Higueros in the week since his arrest that he’s the victim. “He’s a fireman. No fireman would put someone at risk like that,” I’ve heard. “We don’t need to know what he did,” I’ve also heard.

“I hate the fact that such personal information can be public knowledge,” wrote one commenter after I’d posted a news item about the case on my Facebook wall.

A lesson in Civics 101 ensued, in which we discussed the importance in a free society of knowing when someone is arrested and what for. Eventually, the commenter removed her comments, but the protest against media hype continues, even as details of the case come mostly from press releases distributed by the district attorney’s office.

I’ve also heard others warn: Don’t point your fingers until you know all the facts. I don’t know all the facts but I do know when to be cautious, when to pay attention, and when to withhold judgment. Also, there’s the implied “don’t judge unless you want the skeletons in your own closet to be exposed.” Well, now, there’s an idea.

Comments on news sites covering the case show even more ignorance, not only of what goes on under our noses, but of the process of jurisprudence and of how we stay informed and safe in a democratic society. Flamers attacked news site KSBY, for example, for “sensationalizing,” when the facts of the case itself, coming to us directly from the district attorney’s office, are sensational enough. It won’t matter what KSBY or any news outlet reports, flamers will still accuse them of doing it only “because they want publicity.”

Some news agencies do that but most reporters I’ve known over the years do it because they want the community to know the truth, even when it’s an unpleasant truth. Is Higueros guilty? Not until a jury decides.

Regarding the alleged victim, I’ve heard: “Well, she’s probably some tart from the Bay Area, who was looking for some thrills and asking for it.”

No, she’s somebody’s daughter. We’re not talking schoolboy prank here. A child was manipulated and violated, according to the DA. Regardless of whether she was an angel, it doesn’t matter. She’s still a child. Yet, there’s more wringing of hands for an alleged rapist, because he’s a “good guy,” or a hard worker, or a volunteer fireman.

So-called “nice” people do bad things, even firemen. And young girls do get into trouble and it’s our job to make sure they don’t; it’s our job to protect them from predators who want to use them for their own profit and pleasure.

The judge set bail at $1 million, then raised it to $1.2 million during Higueros’ arraignment after charges of human trafficking were made against a second perp in the case. That suggests more than a slight moral lapse or minor indiscretion from someone with high marks for serving the community as a paid volunteer fireman.

It’s quite possible, as often happens in these cases, that law enforcement has overzealously trumped up the charges, but I doubt it. It’s the judge’s job to determine the strength and validity of a case, and this judge concurs, at this point, that the accused, Higueros, is a threat to the community. He will likely stay in jail for a very long time, at least until the court sorts out the facts and details of the case to determine his guilt or innocence. Meanwhile, expect to learn more disturbing details about this case in the weeks and months ahead.

This teenage girl, somebody’s daughter, remember, is not unlike the one in Larry’s story, who will similarly grow up one day and be forced to confront the demons of her past. We would do better to imagine how we might help her and prevent another young girl or boy in our community from falling into the clutches of predators than to fret over whether the accused was a good guy or not. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.