Don's Tuesday Column

      THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   7/11/2023

Campground vignettes, thoughts

The first things that grab your attention upon arriving at a mountain lakeside campground—especially after leaving the sweltering, brown valley—is the greenery, the still-springlike foliage of ferns, grasses and a multitude of plants unseen since the last trip. The sky of rich bluish hue comes from having 5,000 to 6,000 feet less of the smoke and smoggy haze above us; and highs in the 70s all day.

It restores our optimism for humanity and America seeing children being, well, children with their spindly arms and legs powering their 2-wheel scooters and bikes with abandon round and round the campground circle. Think of where, in this cynical world with threats seemingly at every turn, parents can let pre-teen kids out of their sight to play with cousins, brothers, sisters and new and old friends till mealtime. It prompts a silent prayer for angels to keep them company and deliver them safely into adulthood.

Occasional foreign languages suggest that nature and camping have universal appeal; the basics remain the same—food, shelter, water-based recreation, campfires. 

We’ve encountered a variety (I abhor the word “diverse”) of American lifestyles: The motorcycle-riding women of a religious persuasion with the men in their lives, who started when one of their group donned a helmet and wrapped her ankle-length denim skirt over the Harley’s seat to find what the road has to offer. Years and a dozen of her sisters, friends and their men later, it takes a couple of campsites and a trailer (the tool-filled “sag wagon”) to keep them rolling along.

Over the weeks we spend at our “touchstone” campsite in Oregon’s Cascades by a lake looking at Diamond Peak, numerous neighbors come and go. One unique (in all our years) couple came from Milwaukee, Wisconsin via Portland and Eugene. Their vocation: Ballet dancers in their off-season, a married man and woman duo that I’d hoped would perhaps show a move or two; however, camping and sightseeing took all their time.

Upon reflection, their “artistic performances” are intensely athletic, probably requiring a strict regimen of workouts and diet, not unlike any other athlete needing to stay at their peak. The only other athlete we recall meeting while camping was a huge lineman for the Oregon State Beavers, of Samoan descent. However, to say ballet dancers and a lineman are both athletes is like saying an osprey and ostrich are both birds.

Barbara’s phone “hotspot” provided a nearly seamless internet “window” to goings-on back in the “real world” of cultural and political controversy. It seems the Bidens and scandal are like the fabled “Brer Rabbit” and the tar baby; the more innocence is protested, the more the narrative of rule-breaking sticks.

Cynically “low hanging fruit” jokes, over the baggie of cocaine discovered in the West Wing residence of the Bidens, practically write themselves: It couldn’t be Hunter’s cocaine because he’s never left a house until the cocaine was gone (rimshot);

Yes, it’s the “highest office” as the guessing game commences like a twisted version of the board game “Clue”—Who’s cocaine is it? The crime is solved to reveal “It was Hunter in the West Wing with a straw.” Satire site BabylonBee.com: “DC police say they may never discover who left a bag of cocaine labeled ‘Property of H. Biden’ at the White House” (more rimshot).

Pundit Charles Lipson changed James Clapper’s “Russian disinfo” line (re: Hunter’s laptop) to “The cocaine in the White House has all the earmarks of a classic Columbian cartel disinformation campaign.” As usual, the shifting narrative suggests duplicitous “CYA” all around.

Judicial decisions have wreaked havoc with “progressive” shibboleths: Affirmative action (aka racial preferences); and the “one degree removed” censorship by government agencies leaning on social media to do the dirty deeds. This column long ago cited a Supreme Court ruling that the government cannot escape culpability, for violating the First Amendment’s Free Speech guarantees, by shifting the violations to a private party, or social media in this case.

Left wing icons hypocritically fell over themselves deriding the long-overdue banning of race as a criterion for college admission. The brilliant Thomas Sowell has spent decades inveighing against such race-based policies, citing the failure rate for Black or Brown “affirmative action” students that are in over their heads at the elite level; whereas they would do very well and succeed in many of the other 3,000 colleges or universities.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson obliviously chided the six conservative justices as “unelected” deciders of policy, as if she or either of the other Supreme Court liberals were voted into their positions.

Our “wannabe” POTUS Gov. Newsom condemned the decision as a “whitewashing” of our nation’s history, tweeting “They want to bring America back to…segregated campuses.” As if widespread segregation—Blacks separating from Whites in housing, graduations, etc.—isn’t already occurring. Hey, “Guv’ner,” California voters opposed race-based policies by 53 percent for Prop 209; voters reaffirmed said opposition in 2020 by defeating Prop 16 by 57 percent.

House Oversight Chairman (Republican) James Comer: The Bidens may have raked in $40 million from foreign sources; six policy decisions were affected—“This was organized crime.” More to come.