Days 162 and 163: Bumper Stickers...

I'm in the Napa Valley--earning my keep.

Stepping on the scale Friday morning at the Monastic Dorm, I discovered I'd dropped five pounds in the last two weeks. I don't have a scale at home, so this is the one I dare step on every once and awhile. Hard work on the house has benefits!

Friday I took a walk outside of Calistoga. The Napa Valley is filled with tourists this weekend. Every square inch seems to be occupied by Yuppies in the BMW's, Jaguars and other implements of opulent consumption.

Saturday it was off to watch Springer's son play Legion baseball in Yountville, I drove past the French Laundry (gotta eat there someday) and I took a walk around the Veteran's hospital's sprawling campus. The ball field is located on the campus.

I had fun admiring the bumper stickers on pick ups and SUV's (I'll load photos of them later). Some of these bumper stickers make me pause; makes me wonder if the Oliver North Junta types within our military establishment might just try and pull off a coup if some President got too much out of line. I wonder if Obama retaining Gates as the Defense Secretary wasn't a strategic decision on Obama's part to placate the Keepers of Empire?

The sheer venom against Obama on one Marine's SUV makes me think that a patriotic coup is more than a possibility.

I used to get forwarded e-mails from a relative of Joni's who was a colonel in our military. You know, the mass produced, disinformation kind of e-mail that circulates amongst retired military people. My hunch is that some of these right wing, patriotic missives originate in a disinformation section deep in the Internet bowels of the Pentagon. I'm sure you've come across a few of these in your Inbox. They flutter about the Internet like viruses.

Walking around the lush Veteran's Home grounds, I come across a mule deer. I watch him for the longest time, and he doesn't run off until I'm only twenty feet away from him. Mule deer care nothing about empire. They don't care about some 700 plus foreign bases in 100 plus countries (China has zero foreign bases). They don't care about one trillion dollars having been spent on Afghanistan and Iraq. Deer don't care about the senseless loss of life and the plunder of treasure.

And for the moment, watching the beauty and grace of the deer, neither did I.