This Morning

PART II: Time for the crazy shit.

ClearImage result for crazy pirate

(Have you all told everyone about me? Image taken from here, and it’s for sale.)

(Here’s Part I.)

So all right: we’ve got our floating garbage-land, called Spirit of Trump (Trumpia? Trump-As-Fuck-Land? We’ll discuss. There will be a meeting. One awesome thing about pirates is that they were members of an essentially egalitarian and democratic society.). Now it’s time to talk about our long-term goals. I mean, sure, we can just float around on our trash-berg, but how long will that satisfy us? For my own self, I feel I will need a purpose greater than snickering at Trump while living on a giant mound of waste.

So here’s the plan.

First of all, we’re going to become Lords of Plastic. I’m hopeful that we will have some science-minded people aboard, and they will be willing to experiment with the plastic that makes up our proud island; maybe they can find ways to manipulate it, better than we can now. Specifically I’d like to make plastic that is impervious to bullets and rockets and torpedoes and the like, as I plan to go to war and it would be swell if our plasticontinent didn’t get wiped out by the first salvo. Though really, the main protection from assault would be the sheer size of our rubbishy Nautilus: I want this thing to be so big that the U.S. Navy could blast away at the edges for days and do nothing more than break off a whole lot of plastic confetti. But I figure, once word gets out that we’re creating a free society, with Trump’s blessing and outside of his control, and also helping clean up the oceans? I mean, imagine the brain drain on the United States of Trump: imagine all the brilliant minds who can’t stand to turn on the news every day and see that straw-haired Nazi Cheeto in the White House. Think how many of them would rather live on a giant pile of floating trash rather than a country filled with MAGA hats. I mean, really, which honestly seems more like worthless garbage? So I’m pretty sure we’ll  have all of the greatest minds in America on our team.

Just imagine what they could do, what America’s best minds could do, given free rein and a cause to fight for.

To that end, in addition to plastic shielding, I’m looking for some intriguing plastic-based weapon systems: I want plastic netting that could tangle motors and machines, and maybe trap attacking ships; and I would love some plastic that could adhere to people and sort of cocoon them in a plastic shell. You know what else would be awesome? Sentient plastic. Ooo — and maybe Flubber!

Once we can turn the plastic into our weapons of war, then it’s time to become Lords of Plastic for real. We’re taking all the plastic. All the garbage. All the recycling, too, since 91% of plastic produced ends up in landfills, which means recycling is just another pile of bullshit. Like Trump and his goddamn slogans. I figure we can reach an agreement with the nations of the world — certainly with Trump and his ilk, the megalomaniacal idiots — to take all of their plastic garbage off their hands. They’ll pay us to do it, so long as the plastic doesn’t end up in their landfills, in their rivers and streams, making them look bad for their people; no, indeed, we don’t want that. So we’ll take it all, and we’ll earn some hefty fees, too — garbage is lucrative. Just ask the Sopranos. But what’s even better is that the more plastic we collect, the larger our island will be. Considering the sheer quantity of plastic we produce now, worldwide, I figure we’ll overtake Australia in no time.

But the goal is not to make the largest plastic island in the world. The goal is not even to escape Trump’s America. I want those things, I want fame and fortune, and freedom. But you know what I really want?

I want my fucking country back.

I don’t mind losing a political fight. I don’t mind being wrong; it intrigues me, actually, when I finally shed the blinders and actually understand an argument from the other side; and when I see, just for instance, the economy improving in a lot of ways, even in the last two years under Trump, I have to recognize that there’s something to the idea of lowering taxes and decreasing regulation in order to give businesses a boost. That makes sense, even though my liberal soul says that we need the money from taxes in order to help people who need it. But the truth is somewhere in the middle: taking too much from those who produce wealth really does make it harder to produce wealth, and there are problems with that, including that it makes it harder to collect money that we want to spend on good causes. Things like that make me recognize that Republicans have a point. They’re not inherently wrong. The pull from the right, to draw back the government and keep it small, and to ensure that it is not involved in every aspect of our lives, is a valuable influence on our society. We shouldn’t go all the way to that side, I don’t think, because frequently the government is the best way to ensure a level playing field, and to protect people from injustice. But government unchecked is not any better than capitalism unchecked. I know that. I know that because of conservatives who have won arguments, who have made good points, who have done things when in power that are actually good for all of us. Fiscal conservatives keep us from overspending. Small-government conservatives are a good check on large government, because large government institutions are inefficient and wasteful, and occasionally corrupt; just look at the Senate under Mitch McConnell, the evil fucker with his hand up the dummy-Trump’s backside. I don’t even see that son of a bitch as a Republican, not now after he’s repudiated everything the GOP is supposed to stand for in his naked grab for power. He’s a kleptocrat, just like Trump. Just like 90% of the current Republicans in power, who have given everything up in order to support Trump, just so they can maintain power.

I won’t leave my country in their hands. I won’t.

So once we have our floating continent of filth, we’re going to come back and fight for this giant pile of waste we call home.

What we do is, we go after the oil, first. I’d love to start subtly, by taking all the plastic we can steal: we pirate all the cargo ships carrying plastic goods, and steal them all; shred it and add it to our island, or maybe provide any useful material wealth to the “shithole” countries, and all the ones that Trump cut off aid to because they’re not white. The more plastic we can steal, the more oil they’ll have to produce in order to replace the stolen plastic. Then we go after the offshore oil rigs: it would be great if we could have two garbage islands, one in the Atlantic to go into the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to hit the coast of California, and/or Alaska. I sorta think all we have to do is float into them, and let our island crush the oil rigs underneath our neverending plasticine bulk; but if not, we’ll use the plastic weapons, nets to foul the drills and to capture the tankers, plastic cocoons to freeze the workers and float them back to shore. Once we stop the oil production, and/or push up the price of crude so high that America’s overheated economy can’t afford to import it, then the economy will crash. (Obviously renewable energy would be the other option, but all of the best minds, and the most liberal ones, will be dancing on a giant ice-shelf of shredded water bottles and Chinese-made toys, flipping off everyone in a MAGA hat.) Once the economy crashes, Trump will not only lose his support, but his only reason for being President, which is his own enrichment and aggrandization; he’s not going to want to be the leader of a poor nation that got beaten by a floating pile of garbage.

A floating pile of garbage with an Ultimate Weapon.

My idea for the ultimate weapon is this: the island has a volcano cone, but obviously no volcano under it. I figure it would just be a hole down into the ocean below. So we make huge balls of plastic, big enough to fill the volcano completely, like ping-pong balls in a giant Nerf gun: then we push down on the whole island with enough force to make the water shoot up through the volcano and launch that plastic boulder for miles. I don’t know how we aim it; that’s why we have all the brilliant scientists. But I know this part: know how we push the island down? That’s easy: when we clear all the plastic out of the oceans, we’ll win the undying friendship of all the whales. So we get them to leap out of the water, and land on the island, all at once. It’ll shove the whole island down, fast and hard, and BOOM! Plastic volcano launches plastic boulder. The whales will be fine; the island’s just plastic, so it won’t hurt them, and we will quickly help them back into the water, so they can swim around and do it again, as soon as we can reload the volcano with another giant plastic pellet. It’s foolproof! And maybe we can make the plastic pellets hollow, and fill them with — I dunno, something good, something that will dissuade anyone from fighting us. Eight tons of butterscotch pudding or something. Radioactive waste (I bet we could get a good deal on that if we agreed to take it off America’s hands when we get all the plastic.). Maybe sewage? That’s be poetic, wouldn’t it? If we dropped a giant plastic ball filled with slimy, festering shit  right on top of Mar-a-Lago?

Anyway, between all of our piratey scalawags, our continent of plastic, the geniuses who were pushed out of Trump’s America, and the allegiance of all the whales, and probably all the dolphins and porpoises, and definitely the sea turtles once we clear out all those straws, I’m pretty sure we can win this fight. Really, I bet all we’d have to do is threaten to destroy every building and golf course named after Trump, and he’d resign in no time.

Really, I think this is the best plan. It certainly seems more realistic than trusting our democratic institutions and trying to heal all the damage that partisan fighting has done to this country.

So who’s with me?

This Morning

This morning I am formulating a plan.

I know it’s early to be thinking of contingencies, and I don’t mean to be negative or imply that I won’t do my damnedest to see that this doesn’t happen, but: in case everything does go wrong, and Trump wins a second term in 2020, I know what I’m going to do.

I’m going full pirate.

Image result for skull and crossbones

I like this one because the skull has an eyepatch. Perfect. Though I wish the skull and crossbones on his hat was also wearing a hat with a skull and crossbones, which was also wearing a hat, so we could have an infinite regression. But this will do. Image taken from here.

 

I’m going to take my family and head to the high seas. I have several friends who are both enamored of the pirate life and also as disgusted as I am by Donald Trump’s presidency; I hope they will be willing to join my crew. Some of them are boat lovers, sailors, mechanically inclined, which is good as I am none of those things — I love tall ships and like boats of all kinds, but I know nothing about them, nor about sailing. I’m also uncomfortable with the ocean, as I have a morbid fear of drowning. But that’s okay! Because I know a lot about pirates: such as the fact that most pirates were terrible seamen, as they were often drunk and sailed the ships they could steal, which were never the fastest nor the most seaworthy; also, the pirates of the Caribbean, particularly, couldn’t keep a ship in the water more than about two years before it was eaten by teredo worms (Actually, they weren’t worms, they were long clams: their shells were tiny, attached only at one end, and were what the clam-worms — clorms? — used to burrow into the wood of the ship. And if that doesn’t fucking terrify you, you’re not allowed in my crew.). The pirates didn’t win their prizes with fast or clever sailing; they used knowledge of the local waters to set traps, floating like giant inebriated jellyfish in the shipping lanes and attacking ships that came too close, or else they would fill a ship with so many men that when they managed to get close to a merchant vessel, the mere sight of so many drunken violent filthy scalawags was enough to make the ship surrender. Point is, you don’t  need to sail well to be a good pirate. So I’m in. Also, there is a long tradition of sailors being unable to swim, since the ocean is a bad place to have to walk home from if your ship sinks; most people would rather just go down quickly. I’m not one of them: but I also don’t plan to run that risk.

Now we  get to the good part. Ready? I’m going to create a pirate nation. Because I can’t swim well and I can’t sail at all — and I have no ability nor instinct nor interest in anything violent — but by gum, I can think up insane ideas as well as anyone else here, and better than most of y’all.

Here’s my plan. We will get some of the large booms that have been proposed to help clean the ocean of floating plastic debris and use them to collect as much plastic as we can. We will then sail to one of the five “garbage islands” — preferably the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — and push all the additional plastic we can into the 100,000 metric tons already there. We’ll surround the GPGP with booms, and shove everything together, until it is dense enough to walk on.

That’s where we’ll live.

We’ll establish ourselves as environmentalists (though we’ll let the actual environmentalists in on our plan, so they’ll help us gather the plastic and won’t oppose us) and we’ll also tell Trump that we’re going to help him. It shouldn’t be hard; the man only understands sycophancy and animosity, so if we suck up to him, that means we aren’t enemies, we’re “very fine people.” And we’ll keep working to bring in all of the plastic we can, to extend the size of our garbage island, piling it higher and higher until we can actually have a stable land base — hopefully with a volcano and a lagoon, like a proper pirate island — and hopefully getting some assistance from Trump. We’ll name the island after him. It’ll be perfect.

Not piratey enough? I see you’ve never heard of the privateers. They were pirates who were granted a letter of marque from the government of a European country, which gave them permission to attack the ships of that country’s enemies. A license to pirate, as it were. Captain Henry Morgan himself was as much a loyal soldier of England as he was a pirate; he was made the Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica after he retired from pillaging the Spanish colonies in the New World.

So once we’re got the sanction to build up our island, and we’ve cleared the oceans of all of the plastic we can find, then the time comes to put Part II of the plan into motion.

But I think Part II will have to wait for tomorrow’s post.