I'm no fan of LBJ but after watching the Ken Burns thing on the Roosevelts, well, I don't know anymore. I always thought LBJ was a pig. That sounds harsh, putting it out there. But he was or at least became a real Roosevelt Democrat.
The last viable one. I think he internalized the whole outlook. One thing for sure, presidents know they will be remembered. Evaluated and appraised. Ranked and regarded. The legacy thing.
What most impressed me about Eleanor and Franklin was the extent to which they believed that we were all diminished, as a people, when any of us failed for want of a fair chance. That it represented a systemic failure and reflected on all of us.
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
And now where are we? In a country founded on Enlightenment ideals and as an antidote to privilege we are being driven by anti-rationalists in love with privilege. Driven off a cliff. Probably only a fiscal cliff in the short run but ultimately to annihilation, I suspect.
This just in: Florida Senator Barko Rabio has fired a shot across the bow indicating that we are in for another fiscal cliff-hanger and government shutdown extravaganza. He blew the bow off the boat and it sank but, you know, stuff happens. Stuff like Iraq.
LBJ really tried. This man, the incarnation of ambition, was transformed by the presidency. From power politician to idealist. Which isn't to say he was well-motivated. Who knows. Who cares. As long as he does some good.
There were good wars and bad wars on his watch. Vietnam: bad. War on Poverty: good. Civil Rights Act: good. We should learn from this. Less Vietnam, more War on Poverty. More Civil Rights. More spending on education and infrastructure.
More Johnson. I can hardly believe I want that, but I do. And less Barko.
I just got the OUIJA board out and conjured up Karl Marx, on an impulse. He looks so approachable in all the pics. Engaging. Most likely a fun, lighthearted guy, a regular Oktoberfest type.
Boy, was he ever in a good mood. All those years of waiting and he finally sees the possibility of a true communist revolution, the way he envisioned it, in a place where there's an existing industrial infrastructure. What's left of it.
In America. He said that the Republicans have now proved him right after a demoralizing spell during which it looked as though capitalism could support a healthy middle class.
So much for that. They have now shown, the Republicans, that capitalism inevitably results in unsustainable concentrations of wealth and insane, self-destructive levels of inequality.
That's Karl's view. I'd question him on the inevitability, but he thinks we're nearing a turning point, the point of no return. His excitement was palpable, for a dead guy.
The working people will be so screwed they will have to rise up, Karl says. He doesn't think they'll call themselves commies because it doesn't play well, but they'll have to embrace the principles. Either that or our economy will just collapse.
What do you think, folks? Get your OUIJA boards out. Read the entrails. Talk to your favorite astrologer. Reason and science are on the run these days. Vanquished. Removed from the field of battle, on stretchers or in body bags.
So we've got to argue the thing out on their terms. Republican terms. Ass-loads of money, and attack with whatever you've got. Screw the truth. Karl still had his Romney-Ryan cap on, by the way. I wonder if he knows something we don't.
My new company is called MAL'ZOOKA. It's designed to counter a Republican outfit called KIELBASA. The Republican firm is a reincarnation of a secret group called KILL OBAMA. This name was deemed a little too partisan and outspoken, though nothing else was changed.
But the phonic resonance of the new name with the old warms the hearts of all the original managers, employees and investors. It's deeply associated with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with them since the thing was incorporated right after the '08 election, that fateful November.
When they felt like an embattled minority defending true American values from the infidels. And the American voters from themselves. And the American State from its duly elected president.
The secret origins of the company name also gave insiders a very special feeling. A bond. I guess that's screwed now that I blabbed it all over the place. I didn't think of that.
People assume there's some fun, phallic thing going on with that name, KIELBASA, since it's mostly run by obviously mojo-challenged white men. There is, however, the usual complement of crazy-ass, right-wing babes employed by the firm, out front, interacting with the public, as in the case of FOX NEWS.
This, by the way, the crazy babes, is how right-wing nutballs reassure potential converts: we've got pussy. Everybody already knows they've got money. And tons of guns, but they need to appeal to adolescent boys before they develop a conscience.
And keep that conscience arrested and inoperable. It's only a nuisance. Sex is the last link. Rachel Maddow can talk sense all she wants, those boys are going to react to a more primal appeal, in the end.
Now in any rational world this effort of theirs, in contradiction of the very office and function of the presidency, would be called treason. But thank God they know better, at KIELBASA.
With that in mind, and like good businessmen and negotiators anywhere, they aim for at least half again what they think they can get, at the outset. To their own surprise they're getting it all.
Who would dream that birtherism, for example, or declaring something as benign as the Affordable Care Act to be the Great Satan, would actually get traction. Unbelievable. God must surely have a hand in it.
So what might appear to be subversion and sedition is in fact morally right and patriotic. We're fortunate that the folks at KIELBASA saw that Obama was a problem before he even became president, before he did anything.
Obama turned out in fact to be a conservative, by any sane measure, but sanity is not their strong suit. So KIELBASA redefined conservatism. They moved the goals entirely off the playing field, since you can't have too much of a good thing, or whatever.
Which really threw the Democrats, since the entire world in which they had previously worked was unrecognizable. The disorientation persists, which is why you only see them walking around bumping into things. This is where I get involved, and my company, in an attempt to draw attention to how incredibly extreme the Republicans are.
We have licensed a device which shoots marshmallows some distance with high accuracy. We're going after them with that, the KIELBASA crowd. This is modeled on those protests which most effectively countered the Westboro Baptist Church, using clowns and kazoos.
Which we will use in addition to the marshmallows. We feel that the marshmallows make a much stronger statement and will help people see that the Republicans are as crazy as Fred Phelps, through the use of incongruity and nonsense.
Or, failing that, to have a lot of fun. Our spies tell us the Republicans intend to use the IRON DOME technology to ward off the marshmallows, at an estimated cost of $30,000 per projectile, which should put a dent in their finances.
Actually, no. I just learned they have found a way to use our tax money to destroy the incoming marshmallows, cunning devils, so we will stage only surprise attacks at selected venues, special forces style.
Worst case, if we encounter real interpersonal hostility, we will roast marshmallows and make s'mores and then go home. Live to fight another day, as they say.
KIELBASA kept the same structure, board of directors and so on, after the rebranding, staffed head to toe with right thinking people and patriots. Christians and conservatives. Good family-loving types. But they knew they were going to lose their best element, at the national political level, as soon as they took stock.
The College Republicans, I mean. That initial group of guys who changed everything. Rove, Abramoff, Norquist, Atwater, the scorched-earth crowd. Lee is already gone. The others can only last so long. Which brings us back to the problem of recruiting and indoctrination.
The younger guys just don't have the fire, the extreme drive and animosity of the older guys, who came of age when it was uncool to be conservative. Those pioneers, the College Republicans, embraced the contempt and fed on it.
And gave the country the finger in return. The whole world, in fact. Their approach, now fully embraced by the Republican Party, is simply "FUCK YOU." The newer, younger guys have been well chosen from the available pool, but still seem to be missing something, the core of resentment.
Though most were recruited at gun shows and evangelical Christian events, and at gatherings involving target practice at secret firing ranges where they shoot at effigies of their opponents, so they're not exactly lacking in militancy. But it's entry-level stuff, by the standards at KIELBASA.
And we, at MAL'ZOOKA, don't want to push them into full blown fanaticism by challenging them, so it's a fine line we must walk so as not to instill in them the amazing animus of the Atwaterites. The persecution complex. The propensity to attack. The single mindedness. The destructive drive. The utter lack of conscience.
Hence the marshmallows. And the incongruity. In testing the targets have mostly learned to catch the marshmallows in their mouths. This can only be good for us, since a less healthy food is hard to imagine. Or the marshmallows bounce off harmlessly and are eaten by ants.
Please help us with this effort. You may volunteer, or donations are welcome. Of cash or marshmallows. A good time will be had, we promise. The camaraderie is great. And morale is high. You will want to be a part of this.
In a puritanical culture like ours the seeds of anger and despair are always close to the surface, due to utopianism and perfectionism and the dualism underlying the whole puritanical system of thought, though it's not really thought in this instance. In our American case, that is. It operates at a deeper level.
It's not even a system of belief. It's more like a system of unconscious operating assumptions, which may or may not have coherence, so you get a guy like Paul Ryan. Picture him sitting on a riverbank watching life float by. He can't look out at the world and see what's really there.
He sees what he wants to see. But, then again, "want" is a weird word in this context. It implies agency and he's more acted-upon than actor. Acted upon by his fears or some set of preconceptions about the nature of life.
That it is lived at an animal level, the level of instinctive drives and primal dramas, archetypal stuff. There has to be winners and losers. Someone's got to be on top. We are not all in it together.
So Ryan sees himself in the river, or sees the river through the lens of his own unacknowledged humanity, the darkness and weakness and mortality. And this is because puritans are uncomfortable being human.
The body is a prison. God stuck your pure, immortal soul in this thing for some indeterminate period for some incomprehensible reason. Then you die and get to be pure again and be with God.
Paul's crowd isn't pro-life. They despise life. And all of creation. It's just wrong to try to thwart God's will by messing with it, by altering the terms, by having it be humane or anything other than punitive.
Our boy Paul is Narcissus. He's not in love with himself but trying to find himself, but the tension arising from being stuck in a piece-of-shit body in a piece-of-shit world is insurmountable.
An insurmountable barrier to accepting his own imperfect humanity. That's why we had Jesus, who became human to resolve that tension, for the stupid humans who had created it through a lack of understanding.
Okay, Paul, you dumb-fuck, isn't the message there obvious? If God can become human--corporeal, that is--and suffer and die, the flesh and spirit can't be in separate, irreconcilable places. They are part of the same system. The spirit isn't pure and the body isn't shit.
They just are what they are, but you are shit, Paul. Most bad stuff gets done by proxy, that's what I think. It's a way of off-loading responsibility, and this Ryan character is doing that with both Jesus and Ayn Rand.
At the same time. Saying he represents them both, Jesus for appearances and Ayn for her wonderful callousness and contempt, I suppose. Her amazing heartlessness and arrogance.
I'm sorry, but this is just not possible, so I'm worried for Paul. If Ayn's philosophy isn't antithetical to Christianity then nothing is. Poor Paul's sense of self has got to be in pieces all over the place.
So he's looking for himself in the river of reality. But he can't see reality because he has no sense of self, of who or what he is. He sees reality through his own unfamiliar image and is intrigued by it, arrested by it, but in denial of it because it's human, imperfect, not pure.
All that impurity is assigned to reality. To us, it would seem, especially to those too weak to resist, too screwed to fight back. Or any easily identifiable subgroup. Black people come to mind.
And that ersatz self, as embodied in Paul, is fearful because of its fragility, its instability, its lack of integrity. He sees purity and shit. He's pure and we're shit. But he's only seeing his own darkness, which he can't acknowledge, in us.
He attacks other people because he sees his own faults in them, his own suspected worthlessness. You want to tell him to lighten up. Have a beer. Some pizza. But he must kick ass. Our asses.
This is the connection between narcissism and paranoia, as I understand it. Whether fear eradicates the self or the ersatz, eradicated, inauthentic personality produces fear, I don't know, but they are associated. And the fear results in aggression.
The result, as is well known, is an avalanche of bad shit. You might think from what he says and does that Paul can't go to bed at night with a smile on his face if some kid somewhere hasn't missed his lunch so a pasty-ass white man can have another round of golf.
This is not an unfair assessment but it misses the point that Paul is just a needy guy. What you expect is for such a person to wind up in an identity movement, from which he gets a sense of self. A sense of identity. And superiority.
Holy Fuck, what was that explosion? Here I was, observing Paul there on the banks of the Cape Fear, and all of a sudden it's like I'm in 'Nam. Huge blast. Where's Paul?
His ship has come in. I see it now, smallish but incredibly lethal-looking, probably a sixty footer. "H.M.S. MALFEASANCE," it says in big letters. Her sister ship, the LOLLIPOP, is just over the horizon.
It's PFC Paul Ryan, it turns out, Pirate First Class. It makes no sense. He doesn't know how to sail. He must be like a marine. They send him on shore to knock heads together, as required.
And he sings in the boat's chorus. I hear it, the singing, wafting over the waves. Oh, it's Mitt himself, on the ship's loudspeakers, being piped in from Aspen or somewhere: "I... am... the... very... model... of... a... modern... major... general..." l had no idea.
It's so cool being Republican. You can declare yourself to be anything you want. This must come from Ronnie Reagan, actor president. Reality? The movies? No matter, not when you're making everything up anyway.
Mitt, we're told, is a creator, a maker, to such an extent that his descendants will never have to work again for as many generations as you can imagine. There's competition for you, Republican style.
And he's a major-general, as well, now, and Mitt never contributed anything, not that I can tell. So Ryan declares himself a budget expert, a fiscal something. On the basis of what? Nothing. It's an invention. A marketing ploy.
Here I was--I mean, I'm a Democrat--feeling all sorry for Paul and ready to chip in for some analysis, some therapy, but he's got this great gig on the boat, because he's regarded as a wonk and an economic know-it-all. He doesn't need my sympathy.
He's a fiscal enforcer for Mitt and that crowd. They must have more money, Mitt and his crass, grasping clan. It's an imperative, categorically. More or death. I vote for death, or at least disability, but it's not my call.
Oh, wait, I take that back, about the death and disability. It's our deaths they have in mind. Why should they assume any risk, when they can get a bunch of people killed while raking in the cash, as they do when they invade some country on some pretext.
It's the flagship of Bain Capital's enforcer fleet, the MALFEASANCE. There they go now, steaming out to sea on some mission with an enormous song and dance going on, twenty or thirty Bette Midlers, it looks like, dancing and singing their heads off, all in flamboyant costume.
And a week later the report comes in, Paul is in serious trouble. He got ordered to put the muscle to Deloitte and he thought they said Detroit. He sailed up the St Lawrence and now he's in a world of shit.
In the slums of Detroit. The black guys have got him. And they're not happy, what with the Bain flag flying above that boat. The boat shelled the piss out of the slum for target practice, or to blow off steam.
URBAN RENEWAL, according to the press release, but the slum doesn't look any different. Killed some people, though. Probably the point. They've got Paul in a bunker. The black guys were in despair even before ‘08.
When the Republican deregulatory pigeons came home to roost, but now it's even uglier. Then they had to endure prep-school Mitt insulting them and flippantly saying he'd have wasted the whole automotive industry as though he were closing the local Dairy Queen.
And Mitt's daddy was a fucking auto exec. It was just too much. So they've got Paul in an alley, now that the shelling is over. It's being filmed, a message to the world. Oh, shit, they're going to behead him.
You should see the look on Paul's face. Surely Mitt will save him. But Mitt doesn't care, not about him. He's not even Mormon, doomed to a planet-less afterlife. And Paul had the insolence to have designs on some of those beautiful Mormon babes.
The question is, will Paul get a clue, will he comprehend, before he dies, the incredible suffering he has caused. But the lives of these black guys are nothing to him. They're nonexistent in his world, like the lives of all those young Americans the Republicans sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Republicans really just don't give a shit. It's the audacity and implausibility of this that saves them again and again. People can't see how totally crazy they are.
Paul feels the man standing above and behind him. The sword is raised. Will he get it? Will he understand? It's so simple. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT? To be treated that way, the way the black guys have been treated.
And, increasingly, other Americans, higher up in the food chain, shafted, insulted, reeling from the last blow and, shit, here comes another one. There's no time to even get your balance, between blows, to regain your equilibrium.
Everything is in slow motion now. The sword begins to descend. Paul is aware of the blade slicing through the air. The look in his eyes.... It's done. Ker-plunk. A strange thud and Paul's head comes to rest on the asphalt.
The body falls away to the side. People say there's a few moments of consciousness the other side of the knife. Some say they see the awareness in Paul's eyes, in the video, that he gets it. He is redeemed, or whatever. We'll never know.
What does it feel like to be treated as though your life is nothing? To see your rights go up in smoke in front of your eyes? Insult upon injury, day after day, from the likes of Paul and Mitt, vacuous humans.
Folks, that feeling is coming to your town. To your home, maybe. Be ready for it. It's everywhere now.
