"It's great to be an American"

I began blogging l'astronave (starship in Italian) on October 7, 2007. This blog, noodletoon, rolled on without an interruption from that one. So yesterday was this blog's seventeenth birthday.
Seventeen! I first went to college when I was seventeen... (Didn't stay long that time, but went.)

People have liked my transistor radio print* more than I'd expected---I think it has emotional resonance for those of us who grew up before computers. Also old tech looks cool.
I'm going to do some more prints of communication tech from my childhood. Rotary dial phones. View Masters!

This morning I'm looking at wall-mounted pencil sharpeners.
In the high school last spring, I saw none--only electric pencil sharpeners. Half the time they didn't work so people used those little plastic ones--one inchers.

Kids did use pencils, but every classroom had a 'Promethean board' mounted in front of the old blackboard. These are electronic touch screens that connect to the Internet--you can write on them and show videos.
No more clapping chalk out of erasers...
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"current state of America"

This mini-vid online showing warring yard signs made me laugh, so I took screencaps.
Feels just right, though usually these people aren't right next to each other, at least not in my neighborhood, where I've not seen a single Trump sign.

Funny how we separate ourselves.
Though not always...

I was shocked yesterday when an old friend told me he approves of how El Salvador's president/dictator Nayeb Bukele has suspended legal rights and used police to round-up suspected gang members [84,000+ so far] with no due-process and put them in camps like the new Terrorism Confinement Center (overview on Wikipedia),
and then I was horrified that he thinks we (the US) should do this too.

"Why can't we round up these guys hanging out on the corners, killing downtown businesses?"
(He's older and rather frail. He's afraid to walk downtown. He’s not paranoid: it’s true it's emptied out and become more crimey, as has the whole city, since Covid--and after the murder of George Floyd. But who did that? THE POLICE.)

But they aren't breaking any laws, I said. They're just poor and have nowhere to go--maybe we could change that. And besides, I said, we already have a massive prison system.

He wants more discipline, and harsher. Like extending Guantanamo to every city in the US.

I was truly shocked--perplexed--disturbed. Disbelieving. Surely he didn't understand what he was saying?
I kept bringing up objections and alternatives.
"How bout if we start with changing gun laws?"

"That's too hard," he said. "It's not going to happen."

"But this sort of 'solution' has never turned out well. What's to stop someone who does that from rounding up, say, trans people?" I asked.

He abruptly stood up and said he had to go.

I felt rather sick. But it gave me new insight into why people would vote for Trump, if this educated, well-off man--a "nice" person--wants to put people in camps (he used that word, "camps") because they frighten him.
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Coincidentally, this morning I was listening to Harry Nilsson and heard him sing Randy Newman's "Sail Away" for the first time--about how happy people should be to be brought to America:

"Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay.
In America you'll get food to eat.
You won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet,
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day,
It's great to be an American."

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* P.S. I added an antenna to the radio--(I think I''ll angle it up a bit)--but most importantly, I finally bought some water-washable, oil-based printing ink.
It's (relatively) waterproof, nicer to work with, and it covers smoother and prints glossier: