Frat America

There's another element to the Republican takeover of everything I haven't mentioned. It's OIL. Not OPERATION IRAQI LIBERATION. The black stuff. Here we're talking real addiction. Serious denial. Arrested development. Misappropriation. Misrepresentation. Criminality. Conflicted interest. Bad faith. Bad manners. Squandered resources. Lying, lying, lying. Got to feed the habit. As always, like any addict, they end up stealing from family. From us.

The Dems are well implicated in this too, but they're responsible social drinkers by comparison. The Republicans are screaming petroholics. It's twelve steps or the ditch for them. And so, sadly, for all of us. They're dragging us along with them. And we're enablers as long as we allow it.

Maybe we'll get lucky. Get a DUI. A wake up call. Be forced to deal. Had a couple close calls already. That 70's oil shock. And, notably, 9/11. Real DUI on that one, I'd say, now that I think about it. And did we question ourselves, the way of life? Look in the mirror? No way. We lashed out. Like an ignorant, wasted frat boy at a bar. Went out and blew stuff up.

The degree of the failure after 9/11 shows just how far gone we are, how ripped on the juice. The failure of leadership, to an incomprehensible degree. To think that America ever had the world's sympathy to the extent that we did, and where we went from there, it makes you ill.

And, no less distressing, to think that we ever stood for something besides consuming the world's resources as quickly and desperately as possible. The memory fades. And it's all based on OIL. And some flaw in the national character, I guess. Predisposition and opportunity.

There's been no reckoning, of course, on our catastrophic reaction to 9/11. That's the nature of denial. Of addiction. Same people running shit. All the architects of the disaster carrying on as though they hadn't been proved wrong. On everything. On strategy and tactics. On conception and execution. On planning and implementation. On vision. Total fucking failure.

We're living in the world of ANIMAL HOUSE here. Been to a frat party and gotten smashed on the petro punch. Frat America. We're hungover, and drunk, and still drinking, all at the same time. We're never sober. So you deal with a tragedy like 9/11 like idiots. Never asking why about anything because the guys flying the planes are supplying the booze, the crude. Their peeps anyway. That's the one thing that can't stop, that supply.

And, in 2000, we had elected Bluto president. A pig. A pernicious pig. The guy who will drink until he dies, knocking down the crude. The guy who lives on the assumption no one has to clean up the mess, get up in the morning, go to class, get a job, get out of bed even. Let alone grow up. Living off mommy and daddy. Got fetal alcohol syndrome, petro version. You could see it in the eyes.

And he'll suck the vulnerable down into the pig vortex. The shit vortex. Suck everyone down. So we had exactly the wrong guy in place at the time. To say there was a problem of character doesn't even begin to get it. He wasn't even in the arena, living on an island of addiction to the crude, out of sight of shore. An island called, let's say, Texas. The absence of addiction is inconceivable in that world. It's all they know.

A guy like this can do a lot of harm even kept around as a kind of jester. A human amusement. The guy who defines the lowest possible level of existence, making everyone else look better by comparison. But, my god, you don't want him running things. We've seen the results of that.

Point is, however, he wasn't really running things. Somebody else was. Still is. He was a prop. A stooge. An idiot anti-savant. Ignoramus. Operating well below shill level in the great Republican ponzi scheme based on our tax dollars. The backward child of the upper classes. The type usually institutionalized at an asylum at great expense.

I recently watched the original UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS again after many years. Kept thinking of Junior, our illustrious 43rd, in relation to James, the upstairs crowd's son and heir. James was solid by comparison. He actually went to war. Risked his life. But, overall, James would be characterized by cluelessness, self-centeredness, and incompetence. He's likable though. Disarmingly. Most of the time. When he isn't running into walls.

One telling moment among many: James gets told that Rose, head house-maid, is leaving. Getting married and leaving the country, actually. Has a life of her own, thank you. James wants to know, who's going to bring him his coffee. Like now. Rose has been there, a big part of family life, forever. And it doesn't register what's going on. That he should care or at least feign caring about her. 

Rose's life isn't real to James. It's subsumed into the family's functional existence. This is to say she has no existence of her own to James. Kind of like the young Americans Bluto shipped off to fight in Iraq. This is called racism, I think, or classism, or something. Anyway it's not good. It's Republicanism. 

James eventually blew Rose's money in the markets. She had stuck around, turns out, after all, and inherited her former fiancee's money when he died in the war. James meant well. 

James kills himself which, again, shows his staggering moral superiority in relation to Junior. What, me worry? That's our guy's attitude. No conscience at all. Must have been excised or irradiated. Assuming he had one to start.

Look at all the Americans whose lives have been wrecked under the Republican Reign of Error. Wrecked as in dead or mutilated, in the case of some of those sent off to Iraq. 

Or Afghanistan. Young Americans, many of whom joined the military because they couldn't get jobs. Couldn't get jobs because the Republicans had sent their jobs to China, or obliterated them in other insidious and stupid ways. So they throw up a smokescreen of patriotism, the national interest, security, whatever, to obscure the carnage and their stupidity, those Republicans.

And wrecked, other American lives, as in working harder and harder for less. And wrecked as in not having health care. And wrecked as in not having hope. Not being able to assume anything about the quality of your future existence. Or quantity, given the health care. They want to take it all away, the Republicans. Allocate resources to feed the addiction. Stoke the fires. Have toga parties on their yachts.

Pretty obvious when, of all the imaginable, meaningful issues the country might tackle, the Republicans become obsessed with the DEATH TAX. They care only about themselves. All the while from the wars, from everything, money accumulates in Republican coffers. Enormous silos of cash. Just seems to happen. Poof. They swear it's all fair, legit, above-board. Incidental to the normal operation of free markets. That it's their due. That's their opinion, as disinterested parties.

None of it is real to Junior or to America's new Republican plutocracy. It doesn't register, the suffering, the destruction, the despair. It's almost unfair to say they don't give a shit. They're just not in that world. They're insulated. As insulated as they can make themselves. Impenetrable armor of ignorance. Force field of obliviousness. And they're going to heaven, they believe. The ignorance, the lack of culpability, they get to keep it. For eternity. That's their idea. Cool model. Doesn't ring biblical to me, exactly. But what do I know.

And then there's the damage we've done to the rest of the world, which I don't even mean to get into. The insulation here is easier not so much because of the physical separation but because the people can't vote. They have to spend a fortune peddling lies to us, at least. And the alcoholic stupor of consumption helps on the domestic front. Dulls the awareness. Keep consuming, sucking it all in, and don't stop to think about anything.

We sold our souls cheap, people. For shit we didn't need. Non-essentials. Not food, shelter, clothing. Who's the buyer of our souls, in this sad-ass Faust story? The American version of that English upper class?

Who's running shit, behind the scenes? Paying the shills, suckering the suckers, pulling Junior's strings? It's corporations and the corporatists. This isn't even good drama. This is banal. No Charles Manson. No swastikas. No Darth.

We do the bad stuff the way the English did it, in our new class culture, as you would expect. With decorum. With self-righteousness. With composure. The stiff lip. The immobile, pasty complexion. 

Talk to me about it. I'm Irish, by descent. Ever read about the Irish famine? Genocide by incompetence. Willful neglect. Malignant carelessness. Crass, self-interested, criminal stupidity.

But wait, who empowered the corporations and the corporatists? We did. We voters. We fucking idiot voters.

Hang on.

I'm back. Had to check the mirror, the forehead, for the swastika. Not there. Thank God? We should all get them, like ashes, on Ash Wednesday. Serve us right. Because we enable the enablers, the corporatists. Kind of circular sounding, which is what you expect, I suppose, in a closed system of denial, when you can't acknowledge the addiction, the dependency.

It's a perpetual motion, squirrel cage kind of thing. Our whole, huge, unsustainable economy. And the thinking underlying it. The rationalizations. We're all implicated. Perpetual as long as you ignore the enormous energy subsidy, the addicting agent, the OIL. That'll take the perpetual out of that machine, if you take away the oil. So we're all living on borrowed time. Borrowing from the past and the future. Anything to keep the addiction alive.

That should be our motto. In Latin, on all the national stuff. ON BORROWED TIME. Like "Videri Quam Esse." Yes, Mr Colbert, I saw that. So we've all had to empower the inner idiot in ourselves in an ongoing, seat-of-the-pants sort of way, to keep it all going. It's required, denial, to live in this exploding plastic inevitable (sorry to lose you, Lou) consumption machine of ours. Too painful otherwise, to not quell the awareness.

I've depressed myself. That's the problem, there, in a nut. Who wants to look at this crap straight on. It hurts too much. We had it made. All we had to do was not blow it, and we screwed up so badly. For nothing. No Star Wars. No white hats or black. No winners. Lots of losers. We've seen the enemy and it's ourselves.

But there's hope, I'll tell you. It's OIL. The Republican ponzi scheme is real, as is the inevitable reckoning, but it's different because we're pulling money from outside the system, in the form of OIL. Could save our irresponsible asses.

Which means maybe the inevitable isn't inevitable. 

We may get away with it if we stop. Now. Did we stop yet? Time to grow up. Graduate. Get a job. Get productive. The model ain't the frat, it's the family. We have to get it through our fucking heads, we really are in it together. Got to start behaving like grown-ups.