Sauna

Man, do I love Finnish sauna. I have a sideline business installing them and I have one myself. Just did one, in fact. Best thing ever. The protocol is this:

Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round one
Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round two
Sweat your balls off, cold dunk (full immersion), round three
Hot, soapy shower, scrub with brush, cold rinse, dry down
Optional, if you have a sweetie: soapy massage

Now get a stiff drink. I mean it. I'm going to hit you with something hard. Here we go. Deactivate whatever you have in the way of visualizing skills. Turn it off. It's for your own protection. The proposal, the prescription, the decree:

Dick Cheney does a sauna, with his sweetie (his wife, one hopes). Repeat as necessary.

Oh, man. You okay? The idea is, if we could get the Republicans to do saunas, it might just sweat the meanness out of them. The resentment. The indifference to human suffering. We may have to have sauna internment camps -- spas, we'll call them --and employ a regimen, but just the thought gives me hope.

We have the opposite problem with the Democrats, how to get them pissed off. How to get them to fight back. I think everyone engages in projection, to a degree, so the Democrats think the Republicans are normal, when they're wackers, and the Republicans think the Democrats are foaming, when they're harmless. The Democrats are mild-mannered, generally. Constitutionally even-tempered. Regular residents of Lake Wobegon. Soft spoken. Respectful. Non-confrontational. Alright, maybe not quite so saintly but, still, it will take a lot to stir them. So, I'm thinking, severed heads. On the lawns of prominent Democrats.

Thing is, there are these severed heads cropping up in Mexico and, I mean, we paid for those. Our money. The provenance is indisputable: our money, drug lords, severed heads. Some of those must surely go unclaimed by the families. I understand there may be some trouble with customs, but we'll deal. I wish we would own our shit and do away with the drug war, but this is America. We don't do that. We unload our problems on innocent people elsewhere. Next best thing is to make good use of what we've bought. Just a thought. A modest proposal.

So somebody go get Dick. He's usually elbow-deep in the red meat at NumNuts, his favorite restaurant, or on the golf course, or blasting his friends with the twelve gauge. Forgot about that, didn't you. While we're waiting here's another idea: waterboard his ass. Not his ass--you know what I mean. If he's guilty of half the stuff it appears, well, he makes the bearded guy look like an amateur. And if that's the way you get good info, good intel, true confessions, we've got to use it.

The problem is the disparity. The Republicans are fighting a war. Against I don't know what. Good question. Certainly truth, justice, the American way. What do they want? I guess it's a vision thing. A feeling. Authoritarian. Arbitrary. Mean. Maybe more than a feeling. A program for a social model. Plantation. Or prison, maybe.

And the Dems. How many times do you have to get cold-cocked before you get it, it's not a game to them. They want to kill you.

Last time you looked in the mirror did you see Yugoslavia? It's hard, human nature, I suppose, to see your own shit. And the US is as divided a place as Yugoslavia ever was. A third of the country under apartheid, ruled by terrorists, with religious underpinnings, for most of our history.

Then what? Desegregation. The hated Yankees telling us how to live. Ain't going to hand our nuts to us again in a dessert cup, like the last time. All of a sudden after desegregation, the country turns inexorably to issues supposed long settled. States Rights. Gun Rights. Religion in the Schools, the Workplace, fucking everywhere. Nullification. I mean, Nullification? What century is this? Secession? How obvious does this have to get? And Property, Property, Property. A biggie south of the line, owner or owned.

And, my god, do they hate the government. And social programs. What's the big deal? Oh, wait, it's not our government, the apartheid government. It's the Yankee government, giving free shit to undeserving black people. And something goes off in their heads. It must be destroyed. It... must... be... destroyed... (picture the zombie walk here). At any and all costs. So the question is not, will we live by 'the constitution,' it's which constitution, and the Confederate one is now in force. So says the ghost of Lee Atwater.

How to destroy. Drown it in deficits. In debt. Very Norquistian. A bathtub of debt. And leverage. Use leverage. Get 'em by the nuts. You don't need a majority, when you got 'em by the nuts. That's a song in one of my plays.

And there we are folks. We've just been through it again, courtesy of the Boehnerites. And now Sarah, god help us, or someone from the tea tribe has the Boehner balls in her teeth. GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, red-state style. Glad we turned that imaging apparatus off.

All the while Rove's Reich, at the real governmental headquarters, attacks everything we thought the country ever stood for. I see it in the mists--was it that long ago?--when the US did not torture people. FUCKING PERIOD. But the gates are open now.

So, Dick. And I mean, "So, Dick," with sinister undertones. Never waterboarded a guy with a pacemaker. Could be interesting. You never had the training, did you? The military training. Interesting. So much for the sauna.

This has been so unfair. The sauna has immunized me against the harshness of what I've written, with the mellowing effects. But not you, gentle reader. James, you still there? It goes to show the power of sauna. I'm feeling strong. That's right, James, you have one as well, don't you. I wasn't thinking. So get your white ass in there.

Mull all this over and report back. The rest of you, well, maybe you can use mine. Or, then, there's ketchup. Natural mellowing agents, I've heard. A home remedy from the Wobegoners, a peaceful tribe. They use it in their casseroles. Wait a minute, maybe we can douse Republicans in that. I'm open to suggestions here.