Cruel, cruel April
Hurry up. Hurry up and wait. Is it just me, guys, or has every single day this spring felt like it’s the longest Sunday ever?
Our “Boring Twenties” new decade has been stalled out now, DOA, almost from the day it first started. Was it really just two years ago this very month that, overnight, we’d suddenly self-sequestered ourselves behind bolted doors, attempting vainly to hold back the angst of where, exactly, does a universal lockdown lead to?
The air, I recall, became so suddenly clear — via no cars on the roads — that from my balcony’s corner I could crisply see Fort Worth. No plane trails zigzagged the sky. Mesozoic blue, it shimmered.
At night, I could actually see twinkles up in the sky from more than just the Moon and Venus. During daylight, whenever one of my cats sauntered out on deck for a bit of sunshiny basking, I’d double-check the heavens just to make sure no pterodactyls were in range to make quick tidbits of Roo and Miss Pineapple.
Such was the prism of surrealism through which our new normalcy refracted. And it has lingered ever since.
To this day everyone still, pop-eyed, holds their collective breath — waiting for what unprecedented drama we don’t yet know to befall us next.
The potential for April harboring the seeds of truly being the cruelest month — thank you, Mr. Eliot — is finally at the door, with a battering ram: The two-party political system we’ve been flogging now in America since the days of Lincoln has, inevitably — just like wizened old Abe warned us — gone horror-house divided. In fact, it’s collapsed, both chambers turning equally wasteland upon the other, all partisanship having gone the way of the dodo.
Last week, pilloried by their own craven members, a mere three Senate Republicans displayed the tribal magnanimity to vote for Biden’s exemplary new Supreme Court justice nominee. The 47 others instead sneered steadfast, in defiant unison, humility-free, stroking Ted Cruz’s turd-mongering pedophilia obsession, the flagrancy of their racism denials patriotically waving at full, jizz-junkie hard-on.
And we wonder why Q-Anon just will not die?
April’s firmamental star-alignment definitely feels somehow off this year, although, on the surface, it’s not too particularly unusual. Just a shortlist of April’s history-altering/world-changing events is staggering: ‘Twas April when the American Revolution began (1775), as well as the Civil War (1861) and, equally, America’s entrance into World War I (1917). April played host to the sinking of the Titanic (1912), the meltdown of Chernobyl (1986) and the assassinations of Lincoln (1865) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968), and the martyrdom of Ryan White (1990).
April also witnessed the births of, arguably, the three most influential people to have ever lived: William Shakespeare (1564), Vladimir Lenin (1870) and good old Adolf (1889). Yeah, the paper hanger. April doesn’t do gray.
Nor is there any spring rainbow to Putin’s scorched-earth annihilation of all remaining civilians still trapped in Ukraine, either — a country only slightly smaller than the state of Texas, by the way, whose main export just happens to be wheat, the staff of life, which of course isn’t being planted this year.
Africa will, literally, starve.
In America, just 2 percent of our commodities arrive from Ukraine, and, although we’ll feel no hunger pangs this summer, I sure hope we’re hungrily looking for new ways to mine neon here in Freedom’s Land, a gas indispensable in microchip production.
Ukraine — formerly — supplied 70 percent of the world’s neon. Those factories are now rubble, hitting home only too well how all nations are so completely interconnected now that only a madman would dare attempt blowing an entire country off the map.
Inside Russia — largest country on planet Earth, but with an economy smaller than the state of Texas — it’s no secret that Putin’s personal rationalization for invading Ukraine was to show the west that his country wasn’t, as the running joke went, just a gas station with nukes. How quickly, too, did Mr. Putin — all rockets blazing and his Napoleon Complex in full view — prove what a smoke-and-mirrors act it all was, Mr. Macho Moscow Man!
Such a pity party to be thrown for the armada of goon super-yachts, now nationalized to foreign nations, that your fellow klepto stooges diverted all Russia’s military-upgrades’ spending to. Wholeheartedly, do I agree with President Biden and, for once, with even that pearls-in-the-kitchen flamer, Lady Lindsay Graham: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
(Uh huh. Ad-libbed, my ass!)
But at the risk of getting all too Hillary Clinton with our highbrow hubris here, let’s remember that human morality and children’s lives come cheap on both sides of the ponds: Bois and girlz, in case Grindr/Tinder have been consuming most all your quality time, another bombshell has exploded here on home turf, this one against the LGBTQ community. Again.
Seems Alabama just became the first state to legally ban all medical care to transgender youth — even threatening 10-year prison sentences against any doctors and nurses who attempt helping them. Only God blessed Gov. Kay Ivey her walnut-sized, dinosaur brain. No doubt, too, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” measure is sheer manna from Heaven to the Ivey. Why, oh, why, Alabama, why my home state? What’s with this eternal determination of the damned you have, Alabama, to always claw for rock-bottom? Always!
As Guv’nah Ivey — who, if technically not lesbian, sure missed a good opportunity — rapturously emotes: “I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl.”
Uh oh, Socrates, you’ve got competition!
Ivey clearly has a direct phone line to sweet baby Jesus himself, for upon signing Alabama’s bill guaranteeing all its gender-malfunction bitches will die in agony, pervy Abbess Ivey then actually stated, beatifically, “We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life.”
Oh, Kay, your canonization is imminent!
Nothing’s ever as good as it appears, and anything that appears out of nothing’s never good. In our new world order, of this year 2022 AD — land of TikTok, torture porn and Tesla payments — even the etiquette of debauchery has its mantra. Opening my door Sunday morning to fetch the paper — yes, I’m old-school like that — I heard wafting on the air the faint, distant strains of Blondie: “Hurry up, hurry up and wait/I stay awake all week, and still I wait/Dry your eyes, Sunday girl.”
May, bring us your flowers, gurrrrrl . . . hurry!
— Howard Lewis Russell
Send your questions to AskHoward@dallasvoice.com and Howard may include yours in a future column.
