It’s been quite the week for serendipitous coincidences around here, seems like. First, after having brought up cousin Reggie in the post on legendary Naval aviator Capt Dale Snodgrass, I was poking around the ol’ Wayback Machine just for grins when what to my wondering eyes did appear but this:

Big fun comin’

At last it can be told: I’m posting this from Strike Fighter Central, where I am now comfortably ensconced in my palatial suite at the BOQ, Bldg 460, #B241, NAS Oceana. Tomorrow morning Cousin Reggie will formally assume command of VFA-83 – the Rampagers. Tomorrow night the band will be doing a show to celebrate Reg’s change-of-command ceremony at the O-club across the street, within easy staggering distance of my lovely rooms. Reggie will be cordially invited onstage to play some guitar with us, but only after I’m certain he’s plastered enough to be rendered incapable of showing my ass up. This is going to be soooo much fun, folks. Having a great time so far – wish you were beer.

Tomorrow: photos!

And photos there were, in the two follow-up posts* just above that one. Also happily included in the Internet Archive page are all the comments, including a lengthy riposte from none other than Regbo himself. There are a good few from Reg’s fellow fighter jocks as well, all of which were as enjoyable for me to read as they were unexpected. The photos I was especially happy to see, since somehow or other I had lost most of them during the Great Migration from my long-deceased iMac onto the one I’m using now.

Then came another very pleasant and unlooked-for surprise when, in the comments to the other night’s post on Billy Beck, the dude pops up in the comments section. Flabbergasted doesn’t even begin to cover it, I assure you.

Which brings us right ’round to this.

The Trump years were a thing to behold. I’ve said many times that he’s a damned fool.

The day he came down the escalator, I knew he could win. When the nominations were cinched at him and Field Marshal Rodham, I knew that he would. I saw him as the answer to Rick Santelli’s original “tea party” rant on CNBC in 2009 (which I saw when he did it, live; I was watching CBNC that hour). She was running a strictly Old School Demshevik campaign in the first decade of real American Idiocracy and hadn’t sunk quite far enough below the level of, say, Hubert Humphrey-type hackery to really herd-up the New Lumpen.

Trump is a New York City lout. He’s a gamer, which is naturally because he grew up in that real estate “market” (if we want to call it that), along with everything that goes into it: the mob and the unions and every variety of government from City Hall to Albany to Washington. So; anyone who understands, for instance, coercive market distortions (von Mises & Hayek, ladies & gentlemen) and “the politics of pull” (Ayn Rand) can easily account for certain aspects of his ethics.

The thing is; he still has a gut-level appreciation of and love for America. Even if America isn’t really him, he’s still really American.

He went wading all that energy of his into D.C. with an attitude like he could deal with those people in dollars, as if that sort of power were the coin of that realm. He didn’t understand that it was a very different sort of power: the well-oiled and loaded .45 at the bottom of every stack of government paperwork, and everything that means.

For instance: he didn’t really understand (if he ever really even imagined) intelligence tradecraft; the applied power of the state in defense of itself.

When I first heard the term, “deep state,” I thought, “That’s pretty good. I wish I’d thought that up.” I soon saw it lensed against the left, which is arguably fair enough (e.g.; in the context of the five year-long coup attempt manifest in all the transparent commie horseshit about him and Russia). What I had mind, however, was the whole state, per se. Like; the entire administratum comprised in all the alphabureaus and their career apparat that’s virtually never subject to electoral politics, even if their appointed chiefs come & go.

Trump didn’t have the sense to take a chainsaw to that much of it, and spent a lot of his time in running fights with it. Now, he likes to fight, but that was a vicious waste of the time that America had left.

His spending was profligate (but now paling into shadow under what’s going on today).

One important thing came in his consequence: he scared the living shit out of the commies. They now have to make some really big plays to get their whole wagon back in the lane of trans-nationalist “transforming of America”. This is, for instance, why we’re seeing the whole disaster at the border: they’re importing voters. Stealing the 2020 election was an emergency maneuver. Pretty well-done, but maybe not well-enough to prevent it from going down correctly in honest history. We’ll see.

In any case, the lines that I drew back in the day are far deeper and one can watch America separating like a microscopic cell budding into halves. “The pace of this thing is picking up.”

Communist China is a monster.

I see anti-lockdown riots all over Europe which, dammit, is actually sort of encouraging.

I don’t know, man. I just hate it all.

People in my generation are unique in all of human history. I saw the peak of human culture: born in America in the 1950’s. Although he had the same outlook as me, my father didn’t see the backside — over the hill — of the American ascent. When he died in 2003, it was all still just barely coasting near the peak. The children, conversely, will never know what it was really like: what got lost.

I’ve seen the whole rise and fall; what it really could have been, and what it’s come to.

I saw some wag or other describe it as “like the fall of Rome, but with cell phones.” Nobody else will ever see anything like it.

That, of course, is but another jolt of hi-watt insight and analysis in the inimitable Billy Beck style from the aforementioned comments, to which I can come up with not a single word that would be worth adding.

* All the pics are good, but the one you really don’t want to miss features myself and Reg onstage, each of us sporting a female undergarment atop our respective head for reasons I was far too drunk then to be able to recall now. In fact, I have to wonder where the hell those thongs even came from in the first place; there were in fact a handful of female swabbies in attendance, but why they would have agreed to doff their delicates for use as decorative headgear I couldn’t say.

Man, what a night that was.