I did however find time to go out to the garage and tinker with the Ninja. She's purring like a kitten and waiting for her spring ride, just as soon as the weather clears up a little.
The big news this Easter weekend was the Tax March. That's the latest spasm of the anti-Trump movement, die-hard Hillary fans who have yet to concede last November's election.
Come on folks - even Fareed Zakaria acknowledges that those 59 Tomahawks have rendered Donny J Presidential!
Yup, he's got blood on his hands. That's what America looks for in a leader.
What caught my eye in the news coverage of the Tax March was the logos of Dem Party astro-turf outfits all over the place.
If you think that tax march was some kind of grass roots thing that just happened, think again. Go to taxmarch.org and check out their partners page. Holy cow, that page could keep a Soros-is-the-antiChrist conspiracy theorist busy for months!
What baffles me is that all these groups are invariably described as "leftist," yet they've all been co-opted by the Democratic Party. I'm a long-term observer of US politics, and I'd have to say I didn't notice much of a leftward tilt under eight years of Obama... nor under eight years of Clinton, for that matter.
Mind you, I'm a long-time small "c" commie and what I understand by the word "leftist" may mean something else. I suppose you could be relatively leftist as long as you only compare yourself to those to the right of you on the political spectrum, but has there been anything to the right of the Democratic Party in the last twenty years? At a minimum the label should imply the prioritisation of the interests of working people over the interests of capital.
Maybe this watering down of labels and their meanings is all part of the long term bamboozlement of the working class in America. Kind of like how "red states" means Republican states. In the rest of the world the colour red is unambiguously associated with the political left. Only in America has that been successfully turned upside down.
With the Ninja shaking off the winter hibernation the only vehicle in the fleet still giving trouble is the little Ford 4x4. A friend was telling me the other day that could be stale gasoline. After all, it's been parked in a snow-drift all winter.
Possibly, but the Mustang 50 was parked one snow-drift over and took only a half hour on the battery charger to come alive. The Ninja wasn't fired up once all last year, so the gas in the tank is two years old and I've got it running.
Can't be stale gas.
I think that almost universal ignorance of what is "left" is what allowed Donny J to waltz away with Hillary's election. That MAGA schtick worked wonders for a class of marginalized Americans who wanted so desperately to believe that the ersatz billionaire was going to set things right for them. Little did they realize...
But here's the good news. Trump tapped into massive voter disaffection with the political establishment. So did Bernie. Both men eventually sold their supporters down the river. Those people are still there, and there's no reason to think most of them, both the Sander's supporters and people who voted for Trump, are going to be anything other than pissed off when the 2020 White House contest gets serious.
With the right candidate, maybe then Americans will get the change they can believe in.
I picked up that Ninja for cheap just a few weeks before my 60th birthday. I was in denial. That old chestnut about how inside every sixty year old there's a sixteen year old wondering what the fuck happened is truer than true.
So I bought a motorcycle. Next sunny day I'll take her for a blast around the block, which happens to be a ten mile loop with a lot of long straightaways. Spring ain't truly sprung till you get that first rush of 90mph wind through what's left of your hair...
Happy Easter!
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