Characteristically the Republicans are accusing the Democrats of doing what they themselves are doing which, in this case, is taking a wrecking ball to Christmas.
The war on Christmas is a Republican thing. I appeal to Frank Capra, who truly knew what America is about. Sorry, was about. I appeal to the ethos represented in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Who can watch this movie and doubt that the Republicans are all Potterites?
Hell, Mr. Potter wouldn't dare dream of what the Republicans have pulled off. Mr P. hadn't the vision of Phil Gramm, the destructive drive of Tom DeLay, the creative accounting skills of Paul Ryan, the administrative savvy of John Boehner, the frat-boy arrogance and callousness of the College Republican crowd, or the self-righteous certainty of the whole religious right. And he was in a wheelchair.
Our boys think big. They've turned the entire country into a playground for bankers, financiers, and other crooks. Hell, the whole world is funding their fun, now that they've shipped our jobs to any place with cheap labor. Thank you, assholes. Within their gated communities they're insulated from the plight of the commoners, the working--oops, unemployed--masses.
And there's a great getaway, Hedge Fund, NV, where they gamble with our money. If they win they keep the loot but we pay out if they lose. The profits are piling up while there's a corresponding boom in homelessness, hunger and every brand of misery.
But, hark, a blare of trumpets. An angel of the Lord appears, Walter, with a new video for all to see, THE SHIT HOLE. In it the Republican's poster boy president, some moron from Texas who goes by W, short for Wanker, is injured by an errant ball on the golf course. Conked on the noggin. A dream ensues. A fantasy.
We see, Wanker sees, in vivid detail, how much better life would be if he had never existed. Lives saved. Injuries unsustained. Economies flourishing. Food for all. Industries reborn. Infrastructures rebuilt. NPR and PBS funded to the gills. Support for the arts. Education for everyone. Health care for everyone. A paradise, by comparison. A really humane place.
Wanker doesn't like it, the world he sees there. A world of pussies. He's expecting the other boot to fall. Cowboy boot. Attached to a man. Attached to a hat. Ten gallon minimum. Not that he ever fought for anything. Earned anything on his own merits.
There's an assumption of violence in Wanker's world. Meanness. A struggle for power. Winners and losers. And Wanker is a winner. Born that way. Never had to work for shit. Got bailed when he failed. What's not to like. He don't want no competition. Likes the deck stacked the way it is. He's a pure product of privilege, a wizard of the high art of incompetence.
Wanker liked things the way they were. But he doesn't live in the shit hole, the real world he helped create. He is devoid of compassion. Of the capacity even. Of sympathy. Of caring. He is a void. A vacuum. Entropy man. The principle of disintegration embodied. Of destruction. A black hole of a human.
I mean, maybe not. He's a Christian. A follower of Christ. So he knows that any effort to turn back the clock, to Eden or Camelot or whatever, before the Fall from Grace, is blasphemy. The work of the humanists, the blasphemers, those in league with Satan. God wants the shit hole. So, who knows, maybe Wanker is doing God's work. He thinks so. His handlers tell him so.
So then Walter, playing himself in the video, taps Wanker on the knot on his noggin and, shazaam, Wanker is reborn as one of the unwashed. He's in the shit hole. He is amused, then stunned. He feels for the noggin knot. It's gone. This is reality, not a dream. It's all mixed up. He's cleaning toilets for the plutocrats. On a good day. Lots of bathroom time. Walking by a mirror, he sees himself. Shit, man, he's a nigger. This is worse than Kafka. Other days he's unemployed.
He blows a raspberry. No use. Heard somewhere that might work. Credit on his puny soul's all used up. There wasn't much to start. He sees a faint image of a laughing man with little horns disappearing into the distance. Looked like Peter Cook, kind of. The proprietor of the used car lot of souls. Poor Wanker. He was a junker.
Wanker's life sucks. But you know, to his credit, I guess, he accepts his lot and gets on with it. His belief in the Republican view of life, of the inevitability of injustice, of the certainty of suffering and its role in salvation, of the transcendence of the class struggle and the rise of the supermen and sinking of the scum, all this is unshaken.
It's tautological. If his life is shit it deserves to be shit. It was predestined. It's deterministic and fatalistic, this view. Positivistic, not normative. There are no standards. Justice is just what happens, so it's no different from injustice. There's no freedom, so no morality. Whatever.
It's a self-fulfilling world view. Self-justifying. Like the Big Dude himself. We see here with incontrovertible logic, if I can get a handle on it, that Republicanism is nothing more than a form of mass mental illness.
If they would say that they hate children, for example, and want them to starve, well, then there would be some consistency, some cohesion to their thinking. Some honesty. Some integrity. They won't do that.
Then there would be accountability. Last thing they want. You deny what you've done to the point of denying it while you're doing it. Ballsy, if nothing else. And completely insane.
They take food away from children while calling themselves Christians and patriots and moral and ethical people. They are none of the above. It's conceivable to me that their world view is valid. I don't think so but who the fuck knows. What's it's not is American or Christian. It's un-American and un-Christian.
Back to Wanker. So Clarence, I mean Walter, realizes he's dealing with an intellectual non-entity and tells him the way out, back to the land of grilled steaks and the back nine. Blow a raspberry. Wanker blows. Damn if it doesn't work this time. For a frightening instant he appears dressed as a nun. But, then, the bermuda shorts. The knit shirt. The putter. Back where he belongs.
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