The vigilante man

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Kadizzle, Ry Cooder, and the Vigilante Man

Kadizzle has officially become an extreme Ry Cooder fan.

There are musicians you admire. There are musicians you respect. And then there are musicians whose songs crawl inside your head and refuse to leave. Cooder has a way of doing that.

One song in particular has been haunting Kadizzle lately: Jesus and Woody.

It’s not loud. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t scream. It simply observes. And in observing, it cuts.

There’s a line in the song that refers to Trump as a “vigilante man.” That phrase stuck with me. I had to look up the word vigilante to make sure I was using it correctly.

A vigilante is someone who takes the law into his own hands because he believes the law is inadequate. He believes the system is too slow, too weak, too compromised — so he substitutes himself for it.

Sound familiar?

Trump operates from the premise that he is the law. If he doesn’t like a court ruling, it’s corrupt. If he doesn’t like an election result, it’s rigged. If he doesn’t like a prosecutor, it’s political. If he doesn’t like the Constitution, it’s inconvenient.

A vigilante man believes his instincts outrank institutions.

That’s the danger.

In a functioning republic, no one gets to appoint himself judge, jury, and executioner. The rule of law depends on something very unfashionable these days: restraint. It depends on process. It depends on accepting outcomes you don’t personally prefer.

The vigilante mindset rejects all that.

It says:
I know better.
I alone can fix it.
Rules are for other people.

Ry Cooder didn’t have to shout to make his point. He just laid it down in a song. Music has a way of distilling truth into a few simple lines that a thousand political speeches can’t match.

Kadizzle keeps replaying that phrase — “vigilante man.” The more I think about it, the more it fits. Not because it’s dramatic. Not because it’s partisan. But because it describes a worldview.

When a leader starts believing he stands above the law instead of beneath it, the country doesn’t become stronger. It becomes fragile.

That’s why the song lingers.

Sometimes it takes a guitar and a quiet voice to explain what cable news never quite can.

Kadizzle will keep listening.

And thinking.

The rattlesnake bit the dog

Winky warned old Kadizzle about walking in the brush. Apparently a dog was bitten by a rattlesnake yesterday. We are sitting in the Earth Module in an area with plenty of snakes. The snake feared the most is in the White House. Yesterday we rode our bikes to a eating place in the land of the rich. Kadizzle has always been astounded by the real segregation in this country. Enclaves of those reeking with money are hidden all over the country. No, crime, no filth, and none of the worries of the slummers. It works well. Those abused never see where all the spoils of oppression end up. Trump never pushed a lawn mower in his life. In the enclave immangrants are the slaves pruning the shrubbery. Pretend we live in a classless society. The reality is nothing has changed. One group walks off with all the goodies, and everyone left behind doesn't notice or dreams they will hit the jackpot. Welcome to America 2026. May god bless Trump with cancer of the bunghole. 

Bike Wheels will turn

 The bike wheels will turn.  The Kadizzles have made it to McDowel Mountain Park to ride bikes for a couple of days. Trails here are excellent and there are hundreds of miles. The sun is just now coming over the four peaks. You can almost see it move. Our phones are providing internet, and the internet slows down as people awaken. Kadizzle has his new super duper ebike and it will be a pleasure to have more power on the new bike. Have to dream up some topic for the National Association for the Advancement of Humanity blog. 

The people who host us

 Here we sit in a wonder site at our friends home right on the Catalina mountains. Does it get any better? Sometimes. We have some wonderful friends with wonderful homes, but the real treat is the cooking, and good company. 

Vote for The Tea Party and Hitler comes free

 Don't ever forget, Hitler was elected. Payson is gradually being taken over by the local Nazi faction, you know the guys who go to the fantasy land of Tea Party meetings. The three Stooges, Otto, Bell, and Ferris bathe in the glory of stupidity. Attend a town hall meeting and just listen to these guys bloviate. The best one ever was when Ferris tried to withhold funds from the library because it promoted pornography. These scoundrels would wear Trump mask and shoot people in the back just to bag a terrorist. Nothing appeases the Tea Party in Payson more than a good paranoid fantasy. Otto and his gang ran on the theme the last council was crooked and they would root out the deep state. Once elected they turned over every rock and found nothing. Next, they took the 1% tax the last council instituted, and they promised to remove, and used it to their own glory. Do we want a town run for the benifit of the broke guys living on social security in a run down moble home. If the Tea Party gang is the only group that votes, the I guess you get what you vote for. 

When the Nazis get me

Kadizzle lives in a little MAGA town — a place so deep in the conservative echo chamber it makes our old Republican farm town in North Dakota look like a monastery of honesty. And that’s saying something, because the North Dakota crowd could be crafty and crooked when they wanted to be. But they never perfected the industrial-scale lying and reality-twisting that the Payson Tea Party brigade has turned into an art form.

Payson has its own propaganda mill: KMOG radio, a station that would make Hitler nod in admiration. Their morning ringmaster, Kenny Murphy, presides over the daily ritual — open with a pious prayer, then unleash a flood of grievance, fantasy, and political fairy tales so thick you’d need hip waders to get through it.

Every washed-up politician scraped off the bottom of Trump’s shoe seems to find a microphone at KMOG, eager to retell the gospel of The Big Lie. And our mayor, Steve Otto, happily pays the station to help him spin alternate realities over the airwaves.  The new town manager has already caught on: if you want Tea Party approval in this town, you’d better support the local Ministry of Truth and call it “community outreach.” The town manager has dipped into the town budget to help KMOG along.

Kadizzle has seen it all up close. Years ago, the former local GOP chair, Gary Morris, showed how easily truth can be bent, folded, or tossed aside in a courtroom when party loyalty is on the line. And the mini-MAGA faithful here? They aspire to be just like their idol. They imitate Trump’s swagger, his contempt for facts, and his talent for bulldozing the truth as if it were a sport.

Welcome to Payson — where the hats are red, the lies are loud, and reality is whatever the loudest man on the radio says it is.

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Brother Tom went on to the next game

Remembering Tom

Tom was the second oldest in a family of nine. Kadizzle came in at number seven, which put a good stretch of years between us. I used to joke that Tom was the only one out of nine who never finished college—but he was also the one who built a thriving business from nothing. Mountaineer Excavating rose out of Tom’s stubborn determination and long days servicing the coal mines in the Ohio Valley. Today his son Kevin, armed with an engineering degree, runs the company, shifting its focus to the region’s natural-gas boom. The legacy Tom started keeps rolling on.

Tom’s generosity was legendary. He didn’t just help the community—he helped all of us siblings in ways too many to count. When I was a broke college kid, Tom simply handed me a car. That was just Tom.

I remember the early days when he was driving his own rig, hauling steel and frozen goods across steep mountain terrain. I went along on several trips. One run I’ll never forget—though I somehow managed to sleep through the exciting part.

Tom’s truck lost its brakes barreling down a mountain grade. I was in the sleeper, dead to the world. By the time I woke up, we were gliding into a small town at the bottom. Half asleep, I said, “Tom… that’s a red light, and you’re going right through it.”

Tom, calm as a man ordering a cheeseburger, just said, “I know. I don’t have any brakes.”

That was Tom. Unshakeable. Capable. Quietly steering disaster into something manageable.

The stories about him are endless. I could write pages and still barely scratch the surface. Tom was unique—he played the hand he was dealt and played it well. And it worked.