DC

This Land: Maryland

We have the “West”.
We have the “Midwest”.
We have the “Southwest”.
We have the “Post-Jim-Crow South”.
We have the “New England” colonies.


All of these regions have their unique character. However, there is a place where this variety gets brewed into a delicious stew. That place is called Maryland. Sorta like “spiral motion physics,” where the motion around a source of attraction forms spiraling patterns toward the source like a whirlpool. That point is DC, and the American stew is at its diversity-best in the surrounding area, Maryland. And it’s not just the people as the geography is also representative of this diversity. Maryland may not be one of the largest states in the US, but with its variety of culture, climate, topographical features, and temperament, some would say…

Maryland is America in Miniature

Now… it’s impossible to speak of Maryland in the year of our lord 2025 without mentioning the apparent shifting in nature of that cultural/political source of gravity in DC. It is a brazen spectacle to behold, our present-day republic teetering on the precipice of a descent into a veritable kakistocracy. A governance of the witless and the fearful as outlined in the so-called “Project 2025.” This ponderous tome, a testament to the enduring American appetite for sanctimonious nonsense, imagines a future so bleakly uniform, so relentlessly scrubbed of the invigorating cacophony of realpolitik, that one is almost moved to pity the authors for their impoverished imaginations. They pine for a nation remade in the image of a white-washed sepulcher, a monotonous ethno-state lorded over by a monarch of their own anointing.

In moments of such profound national heartburn, it is instructive, and indeed, affirming, to cast a backward glance at the decision to remove the federal government’s seat from the feverish grasp of Philadelphia to the relatively blank slate of Maryland and what is now known as the District of Columbia. This was not merely a geographical relocation, but a providential compromise of competing interests escaping the miasma of a political homogeneity that then, as now, threatened to asphyxiate the nascent republic in its sleep.

One need only consider the character of Maryland, that delightful America in Miniature, to appreciate the wisdom of our founders. Here is a state forged in the crucible of religious tolerance, a haven for England’s persecuted Catholics, who, though a minority, were granted the revolutionary courtesy of coexisting with their Puritan tormentors. This early experiment in pluralism, though not without its lamentable “plundering times” at the hands of Cromwellian zealots, set a precedent for the rich and varied tapestry that is modern Maryland. It is a state where, to this day, the descendants of indentured servants and the progeny of freed slaves live and work alongside a vibrant influx of souls from every corner of the globe – Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. Indeed, it stands as one of a handful of states where the so-called “minorities” now constitute the majority, a demographic destiny that sends shivers down the spines of the Project 2025 Christian Nationalist hierarchs.

The very soil of Maryland seems to reject the notion of a monolithic culture. From the salt-laced air of the Chesapeake to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, the state’s varied topography mirrors the diversity of its people. It is a place where the first American-born saint rests, a testament to its Catholic roots, yet where Protestants and the happily godless now outnumber the papists. It is a “Free State” not merely in its defiance of Prohibition’s follies, but in its very essence – a haven for the unconventional, boasting one of the highest concentrations of those who defy the rigid taxonomies of gender and sexuality. Let us not forget that the first American to proudly proclaim himself a “drag queen,” the courageous William Dorsey Swann, hailed from these parts, a pioneer in the eternal struggle for the right to be oneself, however flamboyant.

National Archives
Pride Day on the Mall
Capital Hill
Summer Cool-Down Shelter
America!
Navy Memorial
Hoover FBI Building
The Center of Gravity
Transparency Please
China Town
Congressional Reading Room
Archives Metro Station
War Cabinet
Washington Monument
WTH is this?

Contrast this vibrant, chaotic, and ultimately more interesting reality with the sterile vision of the Project 2025 evangelists. They yearn for a nation of one political philosophy, one creed, one stultifying set of beliefs, a landscape as flat and featureless as their own intellectual horizons. Theirs is a philosophy born of fear – fear of the other, fear of the new, fear of the messy and unpredictable nature of a truly free society. They would dismantle the very administrative state that, for all its bureaucratic bungling, provides a framework for our collective endeavor, and replace it with a system of pay-to-play patronage and ideological loyalty tests. They would, in essence, turn the clock back to an imagined golden age that never was.

The historical record of Maryland stands as a powerful rebuke to this retrograde fantasy. It was in Maryland that the ideals of the Revolution led to the liberation of thousands of slaves, a moral awakening that, while imperfect and tragically delayed, pointed toward a more just future. It was on Maryland’s soil, at Antietam, that the tide of a bloody Civil War, fought over the very soul of the nation, began to turn. And it was Maryland that, in the ashes of that conflict, abolished slavery and extended the franchise to its non-white citizens. This is not the history of a people wedded to a single, exclusionary identity, but of a people grappling, often violently, with the complexities of building a society out of disparate and often conflicting parts.

The proponents of this newfangled ethno-nationalist monarchy would do well to study this history. They would do well to observe the thriving economy of Maryland, buoyed by its proximity to the very federal government they seek to corrupt. They would do well to visit its public libraries, those bastions of self-directed education that offer knowledge to all, regardless of station or background.

In the final analysis, the decision to plant the nation’s capital in the embrace of Maryland was a stroke of genius. It was an implicit recognition that the strength of this republic lies not in its ability to enforce a bland uniformity, but in its capacity to absorb and celebrate its manifold diversities. The future of this nation, if it is to have a future worth mentioning, will not be found in the sterile pages of Project 2025, but in the noisy, vibrant, and gloriously untidy reality of places like Maryland. Let the hollow sycophants preach their gospel of homogeneity; the rest of us, the free human beings in this republic, will continue to draw our strength from the rich and fertile soil of our diversity.

And that’s all we have to say about that.

Onward through the fog… RH

You can’t just waltz by…
The state of Maryland…
Too much to see…
Too much to do…
Get on the Metro…
To the Fed. Triangle…
And don’t forget…
To hydrate properly.

This Land: Delaware

Ok… Ronnie wants to share another vivid dream. This time accompanied by a lone, mournful saxophone moaning a melody from some vaguely familiar smoky jazz club. The scene is a dusty phantom TV studio at night with the sound of a flickering fluorescent light, buzzing like a trapped fly. The dream conjured forth a vision so preposterous, yet so uniquely American in its blend of earnest naivety and jaded cynicism, that it deserves attention.

To the mournful strains, a debate between two ladies, from drastically different eras, denizens of that diminutive state of Delaware. A place known for its accommodating incorporation laws and its haste in jumping on the Federal bandwagon.

The first, a clever gal called “Lizzie” Magie, the originator of the popular board game, Monopoly, was aflame with the righteous indignation of a perennial reformer. Her prescription for the nation’s 21st Century Defcon-II constitutional emergency? To uproot the entire federal governing apparatus from its swampy roost in DC and transplant it for a time to the hallowed, if somewhat cramped, soil of Delaware. Rehab, a shock to the system for a period of time before moving back into the original storied monumental structures. The symbolism, she declared, of returning to the “first state” would, by some occult magic, restore the pristine virtues of the Founding Fathers… those gentlemen who, if they could witness the current state of their handiwork, would likely prescribe a universal draft of Jonestown Cool-Aid.

This Lizzy Magie creature, with the touching faith of a Nebraska retiree buying into a Mazatlán time-share, lamented over the rapid degradation of the “three co-equal branches,” a charming myth that has as much relation to current reality as Schoolhouse Rock has to the operations of Donald Trump’s meme-coin exchange. The branches, she correctly observed, are no longer co-equal; they are, instead, a grotesque mirage… it’s all about the ONE, she would say. One part AI Pope, one part Verruca Salt, and one part Bonaparte wannabe. Her solution to this, beyond the geographical transplant, was a ballot method currently adopted by a few progressive states and municipalities called “ranked-choice voting.” Anathema to the current crop of minority rule denizens, and so not likely to be adopted as long as they hold the reins. Then again, the notion of an innovative method of tabulating ballots can somehow transmute the base metal of homo imbecillis into political gold is rather quaint! The idea, as she expounded it, was to compel the scoundrels who infest the halls of power to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate, to dilute their venom, to approach a reasonable approximation of “the common interest”. Of course, this will only fly over Christian Nationalism‘s dead body.

Against this geyser of well-intentioned wishful thinking stood the second apparition, a younger, livelier, specimen of Delawarean womanhood named Aubrey Plaza. This curious exhibit, draped in the deadpan weeds of fashionable apathy, met the older madame’s reformist zeal with a blast of arctic cynicism that was, we confess, almost refreshing in its bleak honesty. To the proposal of Delaware as the governmental rehab facility, she responded with a chuckle worthy of a seasoned city editor observing a cub reporter’s first fumbling attempts at the Parks & Rec. desk. The problem, she drawled, with a voice like coffin nails scratching ice, was not the capital’s temporary address, but the fundamental, irredeemable character of the political species and the greed that elevates them.

This Aubrey Plaza-like apparition, to her credit, harbored no illusions about “fairness” or the noble aspirations of the founding slave-owners. Politics, in her view, was a naked grab for power, and the current vogue for “minoritarian rule” was not a bug but a feature, a “boutique monopoly of misery” to be savored by its practitioners. She saw in ranked-choice voting not a path to a more reasoned polity, but a machine for manufacturing “beige” politicians, an army of anodyne chameleons stripped of even the base authenticity of their current awfulness. Her ultimate vision, delivered with the deadpan ennui of a bored Delphic oracle, was of an algorithm anointing rulers, a prospect that, in its sheer mechanistic horror, almost eclipses the current system of selection by dark money, performative martyrdom, and juvenile bullying.

What, then, to make of this nightmare debate between the earnest, if deluded, progressive and the languid, clear-eyed absurdist? Lizzy, with her touching faith in procedural tinkering and the essential goodness of humankind, represents the eternal optimist, the kind who believes a new coat of paint can mitigate dry rot. Her desire for a return to foundational principles is understandable, if naive; her championing of ranked-choice voting, merely the latest iteration of the age-old quest to make silk satchels out of swine ears. It presupposes a citizenry capable of, and interested in, nuanced decision-making, a presupposition so wildly at odds with observed reality as to be laughable. The average voter, faced with ranking their preferences among a slate of multi-creed options, would likely succumb to vertigo or simply vote for the candidate with the most reassuringly vacuous slogan.

As for dear Ms. Plaza, her pronouncements, while reeking of the intellectual sewer, at least possess the virtue of an unvarnished realism of sorts. Her embrace of minoritarian rule as an “elegant slide” is, of course, monstrous, yet it is an accurate enough description of the trajectory of more than one so-called democracy. Her dismissal of compromise as “what people who are losing agree to” is the distilled wisdom of every ward heeler and backroom boss since Odysseus launched his armada. She sees the game for what it is: a contest of audacity, not a symposium of philosophers. Her suggestion that some tribes are simply “better” and that the point might be for the “correct minority to achieve a beautifully efficient, aesthetically perverse monopoly” is the quiet part said loud, the unspoken ambition of every tinpot Messiah and aspiring oligarch.

As rare as it is to glean coherence from these prematurely interrupted sleep cycles, Ronnie was able to dredge some meaning, if fleeting. Namely, the dream offered a grim choice between two equally unappetizing just-desserts. On the one hand, the saccharine, pie in the sky nostrums of the bleeding heart progressive librul, forever convinced that one more committee meeting, one more ballot reform, will usher in a new Shining City on the Hill. On the other, the cold, reptilian embrace of power politics, a frank acknowledgment that the entire enterprise is a swindle, best enjoyed by those with a taste for the perverse.

The notion that advanced information technology, as Lizzy hopefully termed it, could facilitate a more pluralistic utopia via ranked-choice voting is perhaps the most vulnerable element of the entire phantasmagoria. Technology, in the hands of civic charlatans, may end up being a more efficient tool for bamboozling the citizenry, for refining the techniques of mass manipulation, less for elevating civil discourse. To imagine it serving the “interests of all” is probably a hopeless pipe dream.

So, the capital can remain in Washington, or it may, for all we care, be relocated to Mars, with Congress critters required to broadcast their imbecilities in matching blue space suits… it’ll make no damn bit of difference. Ms. Plaza’s final, chilling observation about Delaware’s “low incorporation fees” as a boon for some minoritarian corporate monarchy is perhaps the most salient takeaway. For in this emerging grand, cacophonous, and increasingly deranged Republican Autocracy, the only true constants are the pursuit of plunder and the eternal, unyielding willful compliance of at least a bloated third of the electorate. And it will take more than bizzarro dreams to push back against this unfortunate state of affairs. Now, if you’ll excuse us, it’s time to head out to the van and throw a burrito down a clearly hangry dreamer’s throat.

Onward through the fog… RH

A sure-fire way to…
Spoil Thanksgiving…
Fire up a game of…
Classic Monopoly…
It works the same way…
For national unity…
Go ahead and blame Delaware.

Audiovision: Fly My Pretties!

The rain… a perpetual shroud over the fetid swamp of DC, mirrored clammy despair in the heart of someone whisperingly referred to as the Befuddled Witch of the East (BWE). Not a cackling crone of storybook malice, but a figure of unsettling obsequiousness, her very presence a damp chill upon the sunniest glade. Her name, if she ever possessed one beyond the epithet, was lost in the miasma of her singular, consuming obsession: the great and terrible Wizard of Oz.

Like Uriah Heep, that crawling embodiment of false humility, BWE haunted the periphery of the Riviera, her shadow a constant, unwelcome guest. Each pronouncement from the Wizard, each flick of his theatrical wrist, was met with her fervent, unsettling adoration. “Oh, most wondrous Oz,” she would croon, her voice a wheezing whisper, “your brilliance blinds me, a humble speck in the dust of your magnificent eminence.” The Wizard, a man of smoke and mirrors, found himself perpetually slimed by her devotion, recoiling inwardly at her damp palms and the unwavering, unsettling gleam in her wide, unblinking eyes. He’d force a strained smile, a practiced gesture of benevolence that never quite reached his own authentic countenance.

Her dwelling, a dilapidated hovel sinking into the mire, was a testament to her singular focus. Scraps of emerald fabric, pilfered or bartered for with dubious trinkets, adorned the rotting walls like pathetic devotional offerings. She hoarded every discarded pronouncement from the Wizard, every stray spark from his grand pyrotechnic show, as holy relics. Her days were spent in a grotesque pantomime of service, offering bombastic bumper sticker slogans or suspiciously dubious conspiracy theories to any unfortunate soul venturing near the Riviera, all the while proclaiming her utter unworthiness compared to the glorious Oz.

But beneath the veneer of simpering devotion, a darker current stirred. As Uriah Heep’s false humility masked a gnawing ambition, so too did BWE’s obsession curdle into a grandiose delusion. In the long, dreary evenings, amidst the croaking of unseen things in the swamp, a transformation would take hold. The stooped posture would straighten, the wheezing whisper would deepen into a resonant pronouncement. She would gaze into a cracked, tarnished mirror, not seeing the gaunt, damp reflection, but the fiery eyes of Isobel Gowdie, the Scottish witch who confessed to consorting with the Devil himself.

“I am she!” she would declare to the silent, dripping rafters. “The ancient power flows through my veins! I ride the winds, command the shadows, and the very beasts of the air tremble at my decree!”

And here, the parody took its most ludicrous turn. BWE genuinely believed she commanded a legion of flying monkeys. In her mind’s eye, they were a terrifying, disciplined force, executing her malevolent whims with ruthless efficiency. In reality, the flying monkeys, a ragtag bunch of mischievous creatures with a penchant for petty chaos, simply tolerated her pronouncements. They found a certain amusement in her self-importance and the opportunities her “commands” presented for causing minor mayhem. A market crash here, a stolen election there – they were chaos agents, and BWE, in her delusional grandeur, provided the perfect, self-unaware puppet master.

So, the Befuddled Witch of the East lived out her days in a grotesque ballet of misplaced adoration and self-aggrandizing fantasy. She simpered at the feet of a Wizard who wished her gone, and she issued imperious commands to a band of flying monkeys who merely indulged her for their own amusement. The bogs of DC remained damp, the Riviera remained oblivious to the true nature of its most devoted admirer, and the legend of the Befuddled Witch, a gothic absurdity woven from delusion and damp despair, continued to fester in the shadows. Her end, when it comes, will most likely be as anticlimactic as her life – a sudden, ignominious squashing, leaving behind only a pair of striped stockings and the lingering, unsettling echo of her fervent, misguided devotion.

Stay tuned… much more to come.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie.