Mysteries

At the risk of disorienting you dear reader allow me to begin this post with the answer to last week's murder mystery. The culprits, as I have reconstructed the crime scene, were 1) our lawn guy, who in the process of cutting and edging I believe neatly severed the poor mousie's foreparts from his hind. The tip off was that my initial discovery was just the morning after our yard had been mowed. 2) As to how the body got into a garden bed a fair distance away, my current theory is an opportunistic omnivore, a Crow or Blue Jay spotted an easy meal but dropped it before it could finish snacking. I admit I am an amateur at Sherlocking, but I believe the reconstruction fits the crime neatly. Did anyone have a better solution?

My preoccupation with the mouse mystery set me off in the direction of others that are lately in the news. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that we do not lack for crimes--real and imagined and even more conspiracies that seem to occupy the headlines and keep the chats on social media alive with a barrage of commentary, theory and pseudo explanation. Now we certainly have enough real crimes to engage our sensibilities these days and they require little effort to uncover. In fact we are exposed almost daily to the evidence of some new grift or abuse of trust. We have become so inured to the kleptocracy that passes for government at present that it scarcely gains attention in the mainstream press. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen quipped: "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money."

Outrage at the latest scam is muted--lost in the inflamed rhetoric on both sides of the political divide. The only thing of which we can be certain is who is paying for it--we are. Indeed, the perpetrators don't even bother to hide the evidence. In the latest scam billions of dollars flow to wealthy inside manipulators who possess a prescient ability to time trades in the markets to pronouncements from the Commander and Chief regarding a war that itself is a deflection from real crimes committed by a host of celebrity culprits. it's so bad that a recent satirical headline in The Onion regarding the acceptance of pedophiles in high office was duplicated almost word for word by the Reuters News service and it wasn't a joke. We have lost our capacity to be shocked by what we read--either accepting it as so-called fake news or shrugging our collective shoulders at the latest in what is almost a daily occurrence.

At the same time that high crimes and misdemeanors gain scarce notice we are inundated with fresh conspiracies regarding disappearing scientists, reptile overlords living beneath the disappearing polar ice caps, and the ever popular belief that we are living in a simulation constructed by these same aliens while they occupy our minds and bodies for their infernal purposes. Apparently our world is so desirable that these fiends traveled hundreds of light years solely to steal time from us. That's right, they came here according to one 'expert' because they had used up all of their own past, present and future and are now pillaging ours, stealing our hopes and dreams.

Well as I write that sentence I can't help but observe that in fact our hopes and dreams are being stolen; the only question is whether we are willing accomplices or possessed. The culprits are , however, sadly human.

I don't wish to make light of the deaths and disappearance of our scientists or those of any other country--they are real and disturbing to be sure-but I am not a little outraged that reports of same are a footnote amidst the flurry of daily scandals and texts, most composed around 4am when the rest of the country is not so soundly asleep. Perhaps you think this post is a bit tongue in cheek. I assure you it is not--it's just that the thin line dividing reality from the fantastic has blurred to the point of non existence. Given the lifecycle of most headlines perhaps that is the plan. Hit us with an unceasing barrage of scarcely believable crimes until we can no longer summon indignation, much less press for investigation. The black hole of theft and graft has reached such a scale that it is hollowing out our nation and will eventually consume us all save a chosen few.

I cannot speak for you but given the circumstances I might take my chances with the reptiles. At least all they want is our memories, and the way things are going we may not want to remember how we came to this end. In the words of the late Edward R. Murrow I bid us all; "Good night, and good luck."