Old Fox Guy, The Singer & Aleister Crowley

Govt. Shutdown Day 13 - Fake President at Thursday's
fake press briefing with his posse of bald xenophobes 

It was my intention to begin 2019 not so much with the daunting pressure and outsized expectations of a bold "New Year's Resolution".

But rather with the simple, honest pursuit of good intent.

So after work on Wednesday I closed my office door, changed into my workout clothes and drove over to the Retrofitness gym just around the corner from my apartment.

I needed to escape the incessant media coverage of Trump's delusional whining about building a pointless wall.

After spending much of my New Year's Day nursing a hangover, eating and watching Penn State come up short against a resurgent University of Kentucky football team in the Citrus Bowl on Tuesday, it felt good to work up a good sweat and burn some calories.

Now for some folks, the gym is a social experience, some people spend as much time talking and shooting the breeze with others as they do working out - which is cool.

But I'm more the cerebral type, and after a day of ringing phones, nonstop emails and constant interruptions at work, just meditating and thinking quietly while working out is much more relaxing and rejuvenating to me than talking.

Excessively chatty people at the gym, especially the types who thrive on a captive audience in a confined space where others are forced to hear them talk, can really annoy me by intruding on the peaceful, quiet place I try to create inside my head when I'm working out.

An asylum seeker pulls her children away from tear
gas fired by U.S. Border Patrol agents

My first workout of 2019 went pretty well, I did 30 minutes of lifting and ab work, then 30 minutes of cardio.

While on the treadmill I flipped back and forth between local weather and a CNN panel discussion of Trump's delusional demands for Congress to authorize $5 billion in taxpayer funds to begin construction on a useless monument to his xenophobia, bigotry and infantile ego along the southern border with Mexico.


Afterwards I walked into the locker room to change and grab a hot shower, and these two regulars are in there - one of whom is an older conservative guy I know to be a Fox News watcher.

He's not a bad guy, but he tends to roam the expanse of the gym looking for people willing to listen to him spend 15 to 20 minutes talking in excruciating detail about the woes of the Philadelphia Eagles or his right-wingy political views - which come straight from the aforementioned Fox News.

Allow me to share an example.

Back in the summer of 2017 I heard him angrily denounce Arizona Republican Senator John McCain as a traitor after the feisty, decorated Vietnam vet and former POW famously gave his thumbs-down on a Senate floor vote to pass that sketchy, cobbled-together Republican bill to repeal Obamacare - torpedoing Trump's disturbing obsession with rolling back the Affordable Care Act.

That's just one sample of the kinds of things I've heard him say in the gym at high-volume.

So as I enter the locker room on Wednesday, there's Old Fox Guy talking to this other gym regular who defies the Retrofitness dress code by insisting on working out in jeans, black leather boots, a black t-shirt, and a black baseball hat - he also wears headphones and spends much of his workouts singing loud, off-key snippets of classic rock like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.

(I enjoy classic rock, but if I'm going to listen to 'Breathe' from Dark Side of the Moon I want to hear Roger Waters sing it - not some sweaty dude in a gym with no musical tone staring at himself in a mirror pretending he knows the lyrics.)

Trash normally collected by Park Service employees
piles up across from the White House

Anyway, I see these two characters talking so I scurry over to my locker to change as fast as I can to try and get in the shower as quickly as possible where it was my hope that:

A) neither of them will try to engage me in conversation.

And B) the force of the water will hopefully drown out the sound of whatever conversation I know they're about to have.

I was making good time peeling off my sweaty clothes when The Singer brings up the government shutdown.

Old Fox Guy quickly agrees that something must be done, but before he can launch into some kind of tirade about Nancy Pelosi being responsible for it, The Singer stops in the middle of the locker room and his face gets red.

He raises his voice and announces that he's "sick of the whole thing", and with Ayn Rand-ian flourish says he could care less what happens to the 800,000 federal workers who are still going without a paycheck.

Many of whom have no means to pay their monthly mortgage, car loan or rent for January.

Now even Old Fox Guy was taken aback by such a statement, and despite his decidedly right-leaning political views starts to make a point about federal workers deserving to get paid.

But The Singer cuts him off, and shoots back that federal workers all get better benefits and pensions than he does and that they don't care about him.

Right-wing Net rumor: English occultist Aleister Crowley
was the father of First Lady Barbara Bush

He suggested they're all in cahoots with "the politicians" and out of the blue ( I shit you not) he says:

"Dude, you know Barbra Bush's father was Aleister Crowley, right?" 

Old Fox Guy is suddenly and uncharacteristically silent, as he ponders this question.

There are others besides myself in the locker room, and he has to realize how totally bat-shit crazy that sounds.

To me, suggesting that the wife of former President George HW Bush is actually the biological daughter of Aleister Crowley, the notorious British occult leader and prolific womanizer, ranks up there with the Pizzagate conspiracy that revolved around allegations that Hillary Clinton was a member of a pedophile ring that was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant - which doesn't actually have a basement.

Curious about where The Singer could have dredged up this Bush-Crowley nonsense, I looked it up online and read an article on Gizmodo.com by Charlie Jane Anders which pointed out that the source of the rumor was an article published on the Cannonfire Website - on April Fools Day 2006.

Anders reported that he contacted author Tobias Churton, who wrote a biography about Crowley, to ask him about the rumor - Churton claims that Crowley, who like many cult leaders incorporated sex into the "rituals" associated with the occult practice he founded, kept meticulous notes of the various women he had sex with in his diary - there's no mention of him ever having had sex with Barbara Bush's mother Pauline Pierce.

So back to the gym, at this point I'm all but running past these two guys to get to the shower.

As I pass him, The Singer is red faced and pacing the small locker room area complaining that the Bush family are part of a cult that worships Satan.

By the time The Singer asks Old Fox Guy, "Do you believe in Lucifer?" I've got the shower going full blast and am rinsing my head to try and drown out the rest of his muttering about Trump foes being Satanists - this kind of irrational vilification of moderate Republicans by MAGA-hat wearing Trump loyalists is truly frightening.

8-YO Guatemalan immigrant Felipe Gomez Alonzo who
died in US Border Patrol custody on Christmas Eve

What's sad about that odd verbal exchange in my gym is how it reflects the kind of de-evolution of intelligent discourse and substantive political debate in this nation.

It's a direct byproduct of our deeply polarized political climate, and Trump's toxic presence in a White House where lies and deceit have become a daily part of the narrative.

His efforts to normalize racism, his paranoid attacks on institutions like the free press, the judiciary and free and fair elections go hand in hand with the denial of facts that Trump peddles like his xenophobia and bigotry.

The remarkable thing is that this Con Man-in-Chief doesn't actually care about any of these reprehensible views any more than he gives a shit about migrant children languishing (or dying) in detention facilities around the U.S. because of a policy he implemented.

Like 8-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Felipe Gomez Alonzo who died while in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol on Christmas Eve as a direct result of the intentionally inhumane immigration policy that's been the centerpiece of this nightmare presidency.

Trump's absurd policy positions and clownish statements are little more than crude tools used to prod and stoke the anger of the approximately 34% of American people who fawn over him like a cult leader, or quietly tolerate his intolerance.

Simply because it serves as a psychological outlet for the pent up fear and anger over their growing economic marginalization in a nation that's growing more racially and ethnically diverse every day.

A nation where the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to widen thanks in part to the Republican Party's zombie-like devotion to their corporate oligarch donor base.

All The President's Men

The quasi-delusional chaos Trump sews also serves as a way for him to try and deflect attention away from the shocking revelations of the Mueller investigation.

Like the fact that his former fixer-slash-personal lawyer (Michael Cohen), ex-campaign chief (Paul Manafort) and ex-national security adviser (Michael Flynn) have all been found guilty of varying degrees legal and ethical violations that point to a clear and sustained effort by the Trump campaign to actively conspire with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections.

So it's troubling that I went to my gym to try and escape the ceaseless barrage of media coverage centering on Trump's rampant idiocy, and ended up being forced to listen to a "Freedom Caucus" Trump supporter whose contempt for mainstream Republicans is so extreme, that he's literally standing in a crowded public locker room repeating a baseless internet rumor about former First Lady Barbara Bush being the biological daughter of Aleister Crowley.

But that's okay, I get in, do my workout, shower and get out - calmed and reassured by the knowledge that a solid Democratic majority has just been sworn into the House of Representatives.

Politicians motivated by a desire to legislate on behalf of the majority of the American people, and energized by a sense of responsibility to reign in the chaos of a man who has turned the White House into a cesspool.

Besides, if the quasi-delusional rantings of The Singer are any indication of what's motivating Trump's base and the divisions within a Republican Party that's shown itself unable to govern, then the 2020 elections are shaping up to bode well for Democrats at the local, state and national level.

Happy New Year indeed.