will they Bomb us
back to Smithereens if
our Bitching's overwrought?

b. who's Idea was it to
keep Inviting them back? or
do they just Invite themselves?

and General
Dynamic$!

how 'bout a
Trident sub
lighting off
a few Fire-
crackers?

'Our Mission
is Peace.' boy
Howdy! don't
Piss US Off!

I feel the same way, strangely, even without having been away.

Thanks for today's Seattle smile.

We should send them to Ukraine, who has a need for F/A-18s.

With all due respect, M. Seling, the Blue Angels are a nothing but celebration of America's willingness to allocate a billion dollars to killing for every one spent on diplomacy. They are a climate damaging, war mongering, criminally wasteful celebration of the worst in human nature: a brutal exercise in toxic masculinity, destruction, and hate, with a contemptible history.

They have also, in the past 48 hours, caused Mr. Dapper to stop eating, hide under the bed, and compulsively groom the fur on his hindquarters down to bleeding skin. He, unlike us clever thumbed apes, is sane, decent, and wishes harm to nothing he can’t eat.

M. Seling, as I sit here with my hands over my ears and a heavily sedated cat on my lap, I cannot help but find you as vile as the display over which you wax sentimental. If if this is what summer means to you, then, like Narnia’s White Witch, I would make it winter forever.

Growing up in the midwest, I first encountered The Blue Angels at the annual Air Show at the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Bellevue Nebraska. Papa Vel-DuRay, a WWII veteran of what was then called the Army Air Corps, always brought me to that show, and I mostly remember it as standing around on a hot tarmac squinting at planes that were high above us.

My next encounter with The Blue Angels was in the 80's when I was working as a sort of houseboy for a lesbian (although we dare not speak that word) couple who had a big beautiful home in the Mount Baker neighborhood of Seattle. My job was to show up, empty the dishwasher, take out the trash and recycling, dust a bit, accept UPS deliveries (they had a business in the basement that seemed to involve accepting UPS packages and resendings UPS packages) and letting them fight through me (which is a whole other story).

Well I remember that first time the Blue Angels flew over the house. My first thought was that I was going to die as a dysfunctional lesbian couple's houseboy. My second thought was to their elderly lab (another of my jobs, from time to time) who was looking at me for a reaction. I gave him my poker face, he gave me his poker face. I sat down on the floor next to him, gave him a milk bone and a petting, and things got cool. Together, we made each other less freaked out about what had just happened. That's a lesson that I have taken down through the years: pets are only as neurotic as their owners.

As I have said in earlier posts today, and have said down through the centuries of slog, Seattle and the Puget Sound region are heavily dependent on both the military and the Aerospace industry for jobs. There's thousands of people here - good, liberal, people who vote Democratic - who love the Blue Angels.

Don't be a moral scold. Leave that to the Green Party.

@7 -- you may be in Luck!

we send our bomber death planes
over to a defanged Zelinsky, Pooty's nuk-
ular Winter may be Just around the corner.

send the Belligerents packing:
we Need more 'shrooms &
ZERO mushroom Clouds.

I finally managed to move back to Seattle earlier this summer after having spent a horrible four years trapped hopelessly in Indiana. I have seldom been happier about anything in my life than I am about getting the fuck out of there and back here. But when the Stupid Fucking Blue Angels screamed overhead the other day, my immediate response was to launch into a brief rant at a bunch of nearby children who freaked the hell out about the terrifying noise about how it's a wasteful, expensive, intensely inconvenient military propaganda tool which I wish would go away forever. I guess I got enough jingoism back in the state I've heard called "the Middle Finger of the South" that even a small supersonic burst was still enough to depress the berserk button.

My unexpected "I'm home! I'm HOME!!!" moment was when I first walked in and smelled the Dearborn Goodwill again. Also weird, but probably spreads less PTSD around the city per capita per summer. I recommend that instead. I got a really cool new backpack, with no I-90 bridge closures necessary at all!

"my immediate response was to launch into a brief rant at a bunch of nearby children who freaked the hell out about the terrifying noise"

That must have been so comforting to them.

Random children are not the appropriate audience for you to act out your need for attention, dear. Maybe you should reconsider Indiana?