The federal government has been partially shut down since midnight last Friday, but around here you would have hardly noticed it over the weekend. Maybe it’s because the federal government is always partially shut down on the weekends, or the almost tolerable winter weather we’ve lately had, or everything else that’s going on around here and the rest of the country, and as bad as partial federal government shutdown inarguably is it didn’t seem a big enough deal that any of the responsible parties have any incentive to resolve it soon.
After watching Friday’s desultory news late into the night We slept through most of Saturday morning, and by the time we arrived at the local “women’s march” in front of the Wichita City Hall the speeches had concluded and the crowd was dwindling. Even before the federal government partially shut down a comely young woman outside the Vagabond bar in Delano had handed us a handbill about the event, which we immediately understood to be the feminist sisterhood’s collective outrage about President Donald Trump, and we had been looking forward to it ever since. As aging white male Republican heterosexual Christian conservative Republicans we have our own reasons for being outraged about Trump’s presidency, and by now we’re quite sympathetic to all the gripes by women of color and women in general and even those darned liberal women, and with all the required apologies and assurances that at least we’re not all creepy about it we’ll confess the girl-watching is always pretty good at these sisterhood gatherings.
A couple of handsome young Wichita police officers told us they estimated the crowd at its peak between 300 and 500 people, although they admitted they weren’t much good at estimating crowd sizes, which is not a bad turnout for a liberal rally in this town even on a tolerably warm winter day, and we saw on an afternoon’s internet surfing that hundreds of thousands had shown up in more populous and it all added up to the millions around the country, which suggests to us that all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons had gripes with Trump even before the federal government partially shut down.
Saturday night was the second night of the “Meat Fest” at Kirby’s Beer Store, and if you ever find yourself in Wichita, Kansas, on a tolerably warm mid-January weekend we highly recommend you attend this annual event. Kirby’s is a subterranean low level dive bar right across the street from the residence of the president of Wichita State University and just adjacent to a ghetto laundromat, its clientele is comprised of counter-cultural types stretching from the beats to the hippies to such to Republican but punk sorts such as ourselves, and as you head to an evening all those bearded and tattooed and tight-pansted sorts of hipsters we don’t what to call. Once a year they offer two nights of free charbroiled meat along with a jam-packed line-up of the local weird talent they offer on a pretty much nightly basis, and on Saturday night that featured an excellent set by our old friend Alberto Alfonso’s one-man-band which included a rousing rendition of Frankie Laine’s theme song to “Blazing Saddles.”
The rest of the acts were too loud and noisome to our ears, but there was free char-broiled meat, and with the requisite apologies and assurances that we weren’t at all creepy about it we’ll say the girl-watching was pretty damned good. All in all, we were pleased that another “Meat Fest” went full-steam ahead even as the federal government partially shut down.
Somehow we still made it to worship services at the West Douglas Church of Christ on Sunday morning, where we were honored to be asked to deliver the opening prayer, which gave thanks for the relatively warm weather and all the preceding cold weather that made it seem almost tolerable, and no mention was made of a partial government shutdown. After that we took a nap, then shook our heads while reading the latest internet accounts of the American president’s alleged but very believable account of of a sexual tryst with a porn star he paid an alleged $130 thousand dollars to hush up about it, even though she’d already given an interviews to a tabloid about how he liked to be spanked with a rolled-up copy of Forbes magazine with his picture on the cover, and the latest admittedly funny story has her capitalizing on her notoriety by appearing at strip clubs with the promise to “Make America Horny Again.”
By early Sunday evening we were back at Kirby’s Beer Store, where they were no long offering free charbroiled met but did have a jam-packed lineup of weird local musical offerings. Three of our fellow old-tmers and good friends were there, one a predictably liberal gay guy and another a conspiracy-theory nut from one of the local aviation plants and the third a pragmatically old fashioned professional Democrat lawyer who’s currently a disability judge, and it in our brief conversation about the partial government shutdown we all agreed it wasn’t that bit a deal and there’s plenty of blame to spread around.
So far as we can tell the sticking points in this partial government shutdown are about funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and those designated “dreamers” who are illegal immigrants because they were brought here as blameless children, and we all agreed that sooner or later the Republicans are bound to cave on all of that. There’s a convincing argument that no Democrat should should even partially shut down the government over something the Republicans will eventually cave to, and a similarly convincing argument convincing argument that the Republicans shouldn’t allow a partial shutdown over something they’re eventually cave to anyway,and no plausible argument that Trump is the great deal maker he always claimed to be. The conspiracy nut noted that we were making the same glum assessment of the situation as that Joe Scarborough guy on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, which is embarrassing enough, but we all pretty much agreed it was true.
Once upon a time the entirely believable accounts of the president and the porn star would have been a bigger topic of conversation, along with all the news about the “Russia thing” that was scrolling on the muted television, but all that chatter was pretty jocular. The relatively young folks on the small stage of Kirby’s Beer Store were mostly acoustic and playing at a volume that allowed for old-timers’ political discussion, and we have to admit it mostly sounded pretty darned good. Although we can assure you we weren’t at all creepy about it, and were careful to also compliment one handsome young man, we also noticed that a couple of the performers were rather comely young women.
Today is Monday and all the responsible parties will probably spend it pointing fingers at one another, and they’ll all have a reasonable enough argument to make for themselves, but here in Wichita we’ll trust that the rest of us will muddle through it somehow.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 