Semper Lie

The Trump Corps motto. 

Real Men Don't Wear Trad

Trad is for losers. Insecure men want submission. Real men don't wear trad. 

Intellectual Ferment

Conservatism rots brains, not that conservatives can't be clever. That's different. Fermentation might enhance that.

Trumpists Are Not Reflective

They're not philosophically inclined. Or they're vampires

I, Bacterium

Americans are about to show that in the most favorable circumstances imaginable, an Eden of natural beauty and fantastic resources, people will exhibit the brains of bacteria, competing for resources to the point of collapse. 

Beyond Blanche DuBois

The truth is trite. Two plus two equals four. Not fun. Two plus two equals sixteen is interesting. Two plus two equals Blanche DuBois is more interesting. It's creative. If there's a wild woods beyond Blanche DuBois Republicans are there. 

Casino Fatale

The casino economy has unusual stakes. You can lose your life. James Bond doesn't win, the good guys die, and you can't choose not to play. They roll the dice for you. Cue the music. 

Everything Goes to Shit

You can too. 

The ICE Chronicles

My father was a chemical engineer and then an industrial engineer. He taught management from the engineering end. He talked about businesses building a capability. What do we call it when the capability is destruction? The Nazis figured it out experimentally. Then they built camps. They built ovens. 

Still a capability. Republicans are building a capability. They've skipped some steps. Consolidated it. Intent is critical. And the willingness to use violence. Those are in place. The rest is evolutionary. Shit happening, like ICE murders and incarcerations, are a prelude to doing whatever the fuck they want.

To anybody. 

Republicans Were the Beneficiaries of Political Correctness

Republicans were the beneficiaries of political correctness. They'd been working for decades to overthrow the government. Democrats were too polite to call them on it.

Meanwhile they accused Democrats of everything, almost none of it true. The stuff was true of them. They defused accountability against them with attacks on Democrats.

Cunning fuckers. Democrats made them look brilliant. Destruction is easy. Preservation is hard. Building is harder. They didn't come to save or build. They came to destroy. 

Conservative War on America

It’s terrifying. More so because it's mostly unconscious, resisting repentance and reform. Racism is so personally toxic it got institutionalized so ‘good’ people could practice it, the Bible and Constitution suffering reinterpretation in parallel. The bigots rejected both but used them for cover. A couple of generations down the road the inheritors of the tradition are so buried in lies they have no clue, like the point Zwick made to you but with the urgency of denial because the racist material they’d embraced is radioactive. 

Mad Men stepped in, the marketing revolution replacing everything productive with, essentially, lies. Republicans rejoiced. They wouldn’t have to live in the leafy shadows of Newport and Greenwich anymore as a political matter and southern voters could be had for the beads and trinkets of racist innuendo. The woke people saw this. The politics were terrible but the perception correct, that the social conservatives were coming after everything, down to the universities, the last real institutional bastion of the left. 

Hollywood was about money, always to a degree, though some fought its influence. It wasn’t their fault where the money took them. There are good lies, called art, that they had sold in the past. Anyway, the Confederacy had been conditioned and primed to succumb to lies, a torrent or trickle, and we got both, frontal assaults and subtle manipulations, the frontal assaults predominating lately. Democrats are still on their heels, or asses, knocked so off balance they can’t see what happened, forget mounting an effective defense.

Even now, when the enemy has won and the country will have to be recaptured, Democrats can’t see clearly what has happened. I feel for them but the stupor of suburbanity mostly has them in its grip. Republicans are street fighters. Democrats studied how to run a country, as Lakoff points out, or watched West Wing longingly as it aged into irrelevance. Republicans studied how to win since they had no intention of running the country anywhere but into the ground. They can’t ‘get out of their story.’ They’re enslaved to it.

War of the Worlds

Trump's regime is in a war of death against life, including the destruction of their own humanity which they hate. We're a part of nature so they want to kill that too. It's a war of the worlds. 

Death envying life, an existential battle, not against individuals but individuation. A drive to absorb or annihilate all they can encompass, since life is meaningless, unintelligible and shit.

Make America Ass Explode

We aren't halfway through Trump's term, it seems like forever. The world feels immensely older. Trump promised a rebirth. It's a slaughter. Now America is shitting its brains out, courtesy of Trump. 

Run, Trump, Run!

I had a thought. Maybe people had been telling Trump for years to run because he was about to get his ass handed to him in another failed venture and Trump, in his obtuseness and unsurpassed vanity, thought they meant he should run for president. It was always a mistake! 

Will Success Spoil the USA?

It already did. We scammed ourselves. 

Love Is All Around

That's why we can't see it, sometimes. We're swimming in it. It glues life together. The glue can be taken for granted, however. Eve's failing, in my opinion, in the archetypal tale. 

Eve lost perspective. Girl, get a grip. You're in the Garden of Eden, and you get obsessed with the one thing you're told you can't have! Maybe most sin is taking things for granted. 

A interesting idea. Anyway, we can focus on the good, cultivate and encourage it. But because of Eve, or whatever, we must guard against the bad. We're living in the ruins of Eden. 

Still a beautiful place. Maybe more beautiful in its imperfection. 

Rugged Institutionalization

Rugged individualism was always a canard, innocent in its place. Vanity is everywhere, in a manner or degree. At the extremes it achieves escape velocity into unreality with the most dependent, subsidized and supported class claiming supreme independence, branding themselves 'makers,' and riding off into a mirage and hallucinated sunset of productivity and personal achievement. 

We Are the Barbarians

We always were. America has some great people. Responsible, intelligent, ethically gifted citizens, the best of us, appeared representative. They never were, but when they led the country it worked. 

The barbarian elements, concentrated in the south, were bonded by a shared bigotry and a revivalist, irrationalist, charismatic religion that legitimized  authoritarianism, apartheid and brutality. 

Fantastically Degraded White Man Lindsey Graham Is Dead

Leaves no children but grotesque legacy. 

Trump the Chicken

Little Donnie Trump is the most protected man on earth and he's scared to death. Call him a chicken. 

Can Trump Win the Nobel Peace Prize by Dying?

Finally, Saddam Trump might deserve his Nobel Peace Prize. By dying. Republicans, the FATH* party, will try to carry on killing. They love killing. But there will be a huge lapse in the power of hate in the world when Trump dies. That deserves to be recognized. Hail Trump! Thank you for dying. The best thing, the only decent thing, you ever did, ridding us of you. The world is finally united, in relief.

* Fuck America To Hell

My Political Awakening

I was about 12. My father worked at Logistics Command at WPAFB. There was a cassette tape circulating there, of all places, he brought home that criticized our involvement in Vietnam, based on cultural knowledge. I don't remember specifics, but it argued we had no idea what the fuck we were doing. Dad had concluded, I believe, that Dayton might be the Siberia of the Air Force. Step on the wrong toes in Washington and there you go. The base, in any case, was impressive. SAC. The whole package. 

He said they got some brilliant people. He wondered what they were doing there. I thought there might be a hierarchy of Siberias. Anyway, I was an instinctively conservative kid but I wasn't stupid. The info in the cassette made me mad. And made me a lifelong liberal though I was a preservationist, interested in the old ways and cultural continuity. So, a weird mix. I would have identified as a Democrat because of Kennedy. I stayed a Latin Mass sort of preservationist but never bought the broad brush. 

Not after the cassette. I always wanted to look deeper. I mistrusted positions backed by enthusiasm and emotional appeal. I was highly sensitive about unloading, putting your baggage on someone else and lighting them on fire. It infuriates me. I don't know where that came from. Again, I was 12. My rust-belt city was beginning to fail. The Catholic Church threw out Gregorian Chant for the most insipid guitar music I'd ever heard. I remember arguing in grade school that the National Guardsmen at Kent State needed to be considered, that they couldn't be that different from the students. They never should have been in the situation. Something went terribly wrong. I never said I was normal. 

Probably a neurotic kid. I felt incredibly alone. Maybe every kid does, I don't know, in their individual way. I disliked Nixon. More confusion. I couldn't understand how he got elected, but when he got caught I said we needed to own our role in it. We elected the fucker. Who did we think it reflected on? He won, a real landslide. A super-humongous, incredible, never-before-seen or to-be-repeated landslide by a certain standard. But, no, we needed to feel better about ourselves by making a bonfire out of Nixon. 

Republicans aren't conservatives. Democrats are coservatives. Republicans are nuts.

So I'm dying these days. Unloading is the new America. Bonfires worldwide. Rampant vanity, and blow-the-curve unloading. We've always done it but more in a childish, innocent, positive, rah-rah, everybody-look-how-great-we-are kind of way. Now it's fucking horrible. Worst unloading I've ever seen. Calvinist, witch-hunt shit. Life-hating shit. Kill the messenger, his entire family, and blow his country to bits shit. And why? Did somebody hurt out feelings? Awwww. We hurt our own feelings. Sensed an end to an imagined kind of America, an idealized kind, and threw a tantrum not wanting to grow up. 

We're stuck in a frat house phase. Another thing, I evolved an attitude about the south. Confusion again, bordering on bigotry. To my Catholic sensibilities something was wrong. I didn't like how southerners, like Johnson, for example, presented. I saw the preachers on TV, whenever that started, and thought, they call this religion? Again, enthusiasm concerned me. Unloading, self-righteousness and a lack of balance concerned me. And, in this puritanical context, their women went to church looking like prostitutes. 

Confusing! I ended up living in the south. My assessment has been solidified. I understand now why the women dress that way and the makeup. I read books on it, by southern women. It's an expression of white male power. Of privilege. They don't work in the fields! You want to be as obviously, pretentiously far from that as possible. I wonder why. Somebody was happily working there on their behalf, we're told, and being treated very well. That's unloading at a structural level. Ask black people. They know.

We're there now. 

The whole country is the Confederacy. So, read about the Confederacy. Notice the obsession with ownership. Pay attention to black people. They're the experts on it. And stand in awe of the injustice. If it's a byproduct of something larger, like authoritarianism, or religious fundamentalism, or a hatred of creation that encompasses everything, the bigotry being a product of that because women and minorities are archetypally perceived as being closer to nature, then fine.  But the interface, for us, is injustice. 

Horrific injustice, and it's the leading edge of the thing. 

Have They Tried Burping Him?

Has anyone tried burping Trump? He's old, he's ornery, he's overweight. We have to try it. I might be mixing his emotional age in with things, since in aspects he's stuck in infancy and babies need burping or they can get cranky. Trump is cranky all the time. The reasoning is solid.  

Who, for Christ's sake, would elect such a person? That was an aside.

It's hard to imagine how this wretch became president. Anyway, he looks gaseous as hell. That's evidence. Somebody try it. Be vigorous. Smack him on the back. Strange to think such a thing might mean life or death for millions. Might already have, Trump's dyspepsia and bloating. 

He hovers and moves like the Hindenburg. Burp the shit out of him. 

Rage Against the Machinators

I don't give a shit about the machines and their capabilities. Well I do, in a positive way when they're used to do good. But fuck the people who use them for ill. And they seem to be everywhere. 

Trump Tells America to Eat Shit

MAGA says thank you, we love it, we deserve it and bless you, Sir.

The Casino Is Bankrupt. Long Live the Casino!

The problem isn't Trump, if it ever was. He's fucked it up royally, again. The American casino is bankrupt. There's no daddy to bail him out. Run, Trump, run. 

He's his own banker, courtesy of crypto. We're at that stage when Trump goes bust and weasels his way out. He grabs the money, as much as he can, and runs. 

Queens Quixote

Donald Trump, Quixote from Queens, is actually attacking windmills. Real ones and imagined. The windmills are fighting back. And they're winning.

Every Day Is Massacre Day in America

Happy Massacre Day.

Only People With Guns Shoot People

Tell gun nuts guns are the problem and they will shoot at you. They say people are the problem. They proved both. Guns are the constraint. 

Gun nuts are also the problem. Only people with guns shoot people. Let them choose. Regulate guns or regulate gun nuts. Either is fine with me. 

Individual Lives Are a Roll of the Dice

You only find meaning in the aggregate. 

America Lost Its Mind So You Don't Have To

The world is learning from us. Electing your Id to run your country is not a good move. You can thank us later if we're still around.

Asshole Course of Action

Anyone else think the predominant and possibly only filter active in Trump selects for maximum asshole effects subject to ego gratification? The boy LOVES to fuck people around. Great man to make president, a professional troll and certified dick. 

State of Abnormality

Democrats have got to go big if they have the chance. Nothing piecemeal. Declare Trump's entire stint as president, both terms, illegitimate. He impeached himself, if with a bunch of abettors. Blow the whole fucking thing up. The Republican Party is the Confederacy. Traitors. The South has risen again. The stench of death is everywhere. 

I've Got to Be Me

No you don't. That can mean a failure of socialization. Maybe better to say you can only discover who you are in context. In community. 

Whoopee We're All Gonna Die!

I'm suggesting this as an alternative to 'In God We Trust' for monuments and coinage. Not as pithy, maybe, but I think it captures something of the evangelical spirit and American ethos. 

Moron Day

Maybe if we celebrated morons, gave them their due, they wouldn't try to rise up, take over, and get us all killed. Just a thought. 

War of the Worlds

Donald Trump is at war with the world, in revenge for being born. He's that damaged. He has allies, firstly an extreme, life-hating bunch of feral Calvinists that hate creation. Pentecostals. Somewhat unbelievably they are joined by a group of tech tycoons who have become catastrophists. 

They think societal collapse will play out well for them, never mind the carnage. They don't care. The tech tycoons are like brains suspended in a medium as was portrayed in a Star Trek episode. Alienation unites these factions in a war of the worlds. Life against Death. Love against Hate. 

Existence against non-existence, when it's modeled out, but not all of them will own it. The Calvinists might. They really hate everything. The corruption and imperfection of creation as they experience it makes them all mad, both pissed and crazy, so in both those senses of the word. 

Not to be discouraging but this is it. We didn't choose it but we are thrust into a battle of good against evil. The world of life against the world of death. Intelligibility against chaos. Cooperation against convulsion. We are called on to resist in an epic and battle that looks like bathos from the inside.

Third-rate characters like Trump. Even our villains suck but they kill you anyway. Satan is driving a clown car, but it's still fatal as hell. They will destroy everything and kill us by the billions and never look back. Big numbers are nothing to them or they like them. Psychopaths think big. 

Waiting for Answer

Evangelicals: we want collapse because Jesus comes.

Billionaires: we want a catastrophe because more for us. 

America: (waiting for answer)

Trump Universe

I can usually understand what Trump is trying to say, it’s just elliptical as shit. Lots of bits left out, but the guy is in his own world and not very smart, only driven to win and self-centered to such an extreme it probably would take a psychic or savant to comprehend it and they might not come back intact.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy there's a thing called the total perspective vortex that destroys you by enabling you to glimpse how REALLY insignificant you are for a split-second. Trump is the opposite, a total lack-of-perspective vortex. Inside there the universe is Trump. And Trump is the universe. 

Donald Trump, Debutante

Trump scammed himself. Unable to maintain his identity, weakly linked to reality on his best days, he has fallen for his own lies and is buying his own bullshit. Believing is madness, buying-in a catastrophe. We know from the study of the southern belle. Bellehood. 

It's a role. You play a role. You play the game. Don't step inside it, for fuck's sake, but no one can accuse Trump of any sense. I defer to authority, Shirley Abbott, in Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South. The point of a belle is to become a lady. God help you if you fail. 

Trump failed. Trump wanted to be prom queen. He got elected. He gloried in it. Things began to go wrong. Wrong by his standard, magical compliance with his every wish, Trump being infantilized beyond recovery. He felt disrespected. Heads must roll. 

The stage of retribution arrives. Vengeance. Think of the movie Carrie. And the correspondents dinner, where Obama made fun of Trump. Everyone gets it at those things, but Donald is different. Très fragile. Trump fumed. He was livid. He brings it on himself. 

Nobody makes fun of Trump! What a fucking idiot. We all must pay. So this is our country now. Watch the revenge scenes from Carrie on your own. Choose your version, it all burns down. This is Trump's story and the story of the south. The south wanted its dream. 

They needed to live the lie. Failure was unthinkable. Failure was growing up, the end of a vile system, voluntarily or otherwise. Otherwise it was. Still, they never gave up. The presentation of purity and innocence masked astonishing debasement and corruption. 

The USA now, with the monster, Trump, our embodiment and bastion of purity.  He carries the torch. The scepter. He wears the sash, Miss USA, Miss World, Miss Galaxy, Miss Cosmos, whatever he claims. The magic wand of lies and corruption makes it real.

But it's not real. It's nothing but lies. 

Leaning Tower of Trump

Trump is falling over. Get out of the way.  

Trump, the Musical

I envision a remake of The Music Man telling the story of Trump, a trickster, fraudster and hustler who concludes he is every outrageous, self-inflating lie he tells about himself. He falls for himself, or the idea and invention of himself because there's nothing there. Language fails us but I think we can portray it, as a matter of art. Love, for example, can't exist within the gravitational pull of Trump's egotism. 

I know, hard to get your head around. Trump is alone in the universe. 

Trump's self-centeredness -- again, language fails but work with me -- creates a draft, vortex or suction of such ridiculous force it swallows people instantly into the black hole of Trump's nothingness. We can't imagine it without reference to something or without meaning attached to it but we have to get past that. Meaning doesn't exist in proximity to Trump. How the fuck do we portray that? 

With negative space. We can infer the shape and substance of Trump from his effects, and the area of devastation around him. 

The things we value, love, family, our health, connection with nature, security, beauty, vanish into the void encountering Trump's influence. Their lack defines Trump. Vampire elements are in play, but vampires are intelligible. Reason, ethics, right and wrong -- vaporize on contact with Trump. Trump is a void. The currency among people is meaning, in my opinion. It's not the currency with Trump. 

Trump is an invitation to abandon your humanity and assimilate with him in the void. As I say, impossible to confront directly. I try to imagine Trump's aloneness. Truly, he is alone in the universe. Nothing means anything. Everything is terrifying and incomprehensible. Or, he doesn't know what intelligibility is. He's never experienced it. The fear is unfathomable, existential and all-consuming. 

He is so incredibly fucking alone. Now, to give you an example of a song, there might be a version of this some maiden sings to Trump before her humanity is destroyed, and then Trump singing a version 'Till There Was Me' after annihilating the maiden, which Trump sings to himself.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=zmt9d6zr0bs&si=I7JlSnhKQPMS65u-

Goldwater Girl Has a Gun

Democrats can't get their heads out of their asses. They humored the crazies too long. No, the Second Amendment isn't about the private ownership of firearms. It just isn't. Unprejudiced sources agree, nine of ten, at least. Hillary, stop saying you have a gun. Or a license, or whatever. You're not pulling it off. And I'm tired as shit of it, Democrats playing to the nutcases. 

That helps them stay nutcases. And that's only one issue. The list is long, maybe most impressively on defense. The military. Guess who Republicans are attacking now? Anybody they want, including American citizens. And we didn't take a stand, so people don't know what the fuck we're for. Maybe Bernie. But the Democrats wouldn't have him, or get clear on anything.

The Devil Wears Nada

The devil operates in stealth mode. We personify Satan but Satan infests his victims and co-opts them. Turns them into agents and drones. The devil wears nada. The devil isn't incarnate. The devil is a force. He'll be in the people around you. Having said that, I think Trump is hiding horns under the hair. 

A Confederate Fourth

They can't hide it. For one thing it's a compulsion. They say it's patriotic, unifying, bipartisan and blah-blah. Is that a joke? It's one cheapshot after another, and an exercise in tyranny. What is it, really? The consummation of the privatization of the government. Of the country. Conquest.

Republicans are the Confederacy. They own the country. Private equity firms buy companies, strip them of assets, saddle them with debt and say go and good luck. Leave your pensions. They skipped the good luck part. They are throwing a gargantuan party with our money, an orgy of corruption. 

And not only for the 4th. It's going on all the time. The country isn't ours. It's theirs. They own it. Bought it. Beat it. They own us. We wonder who 'they' are and analyze it down but screw that. The richest 1%? The richest tenth of that? Koch's cronies and Musk's minions? Name your torturers.

It's them, the NPCs, the mindless agents of doom Musk was after. He didn't find them. We found them. Smashing our doors down, hard to miss. It doesn't matter. What is a cheapshot? Kicking at people who can't fight back.  Sound familiar? We are the brown people. All of us. They are ICE.

No one nation under God. Never was. How will it be characterized, decades away? Think on that. We're inside of an explosion. This is what it looks like, from the inside.

An epic failure and enormous shitshow, but it doesn't matter. The coup, putsch, takeover, conquest, sacking, demolition, usurpation, whatever, but I wonder how it will be remembered anyway, Trump's mind-blowing graft and grift? The ICE surges? Everyone knows more is coming. 

A long summer awaits us. At the same time, it's over. It's done. Our country is gone. Law, values, integrity, traditions, up in flames. We handed inconceivable power to people whose corruption, venality, dishonesty and cruelty defy description. Or they seized power. It doesn't matter. 

Trump staged our funeral. An orgiastic episode, ann end to a looting in barbarian fashion. Rape, pillage, murder, repeat. Plunder on tape loop. Plunder to exhaustion, of resources or plunderers. 

We can't go back. Forward, folks. We are the generation that failed. Say it's the boomers, if it makes you feel better. It doesn't matter. The torch has been dropped. The country is dead. Those that carry what it was in their hearts will have to unseat the false heirs and traitors. 

And start over. It wasn't rational by any standard. They're settling a grudge, punishment for the Civil War and desegregation. So they will leave nothing. Salt the fields of democracy. Make it impossible to build on the ruins, if they can. Where there was integrity, cowardice and dishonor. 

Resurrect something, people. Acknowledge what has been lost, like a generational link that is broken when an abusive, addicted wastrel wrests control of the family estate and trashes it. We are the sons of liberty. They are the destroyers. Witness in Washington our utter disgrace. 

Decency is lost, in the aftermath of conquest. A celebration of a glorious victory. A party for a bunch of pigs, marauders and destroyers. The worst frat party ever. It's not us. It's the Confederacy. They've won, for now. Let's own it, what's happened, for once. And move on. 

The Force Is With Us

Why don't they just call him Lord Vader. Darth would do. Republicans are under a spell. In a cult. Part of a robot army. Call in the exorcist.

Almost Hell

 We're heading for Hell. Not there yet. The suspense is killing me. 

The Bell Tolls for Us

This had to happen. If we didn't know it before we know it now, that America has an undercurrent of evil going back to slavery, racism and a creed of greed, a religion of money and power that grew in parallel with Pentecostal Christianity. We never dealt with it. Those forces have risen up and are running the show. Calling it evil is not exaggerating. It is evil. They are evil. We, the opposition, hesitate to say it but we can because we are not tribalists and an identity cult. Which means we criticize behaviors. 

They can became un-evil. Someone can't became un-black or un-brown. That's the identity cult. We are being forced to own our evil. That's good. Canada is a model. Scandinavia is a model. Hell, the rest of the traditionally western, European countries are models in comparison with us. We made it easy. Trump is evil but he's sick. He's a compulsive. Non-compos by a normal standard. Lord Vader, Darth Donald, still a tool. We need to deal with the Death Star. The fatalities are rolling in. The bell is tolling for us. 

The Umpire Strikes Back

John Roberts has overthrown America's democracy. That battle has been lost. But the dream lives on. The forces of evil will be beaten in the end. 

Conservative Industrial Complex

Conservatism can't be separated from money. It isn't an ideology it's a business. It isn't a political philosophy it's a scam. It doesn't have an economic model it has justifications for exploitation.

Conservatism is the result of aristocratic desire. The desire to be at the top. The desire to stay at the top. The desire to have everything ordered your way to be revered and taken care of. To feel special. 

Conservatism is all lies. Conservatives want generational wealth and arbitrary authority that survives them. Authority that's structural and that they can pass on to their heirs. Hierarchy and inheritance.