The Island of Lost Souls

Someone who writes, as I do, that everything has gone to shit should say when he thinks that happened as a point of integrity and as a reality check. And how and why it happened, maybe, a more speculative thing, which I will do here even though I try to avoid earnestness, because I don't want to write the sort of thing I don't like to read, but this illustrates a point: I assume my own fallibility. The Republicans do not.

Assume their own fallibility, that is. They think I'm wrong all the time. The pivotal year here is 1994. That's when the Gingrichers, the self-righteous, religious conservatives, came to Washington and ended what collegiality and decency there had been there, and transformed their party and Washington and now the country and the world, to a degree, through their need for certainty and quest for power, because they insist that they are right. They think that rightness is a state of being, not a matter of behavior, so you can be existentially right, which they are in their own estimation.

To the exclusion of everyone else. Southern voters tipped the scales on this but there are two main constituencies in the coalition of crazies, evangelical fundamentalists and Christian fascists. The evangelicals believe that each person is, in effect, their own church. They're the ultimate schismatics. Individualists to the point of self-negation. Religious solipsists, skeptics and pessimists. Atomists of the person. And no one can judge them because their subjective experience of communion with God is transcendently objective to them.

Everyone else's status on that front is unknowable and suspect, however. They are their own authority as channeled from God so they are very much against any other authority like, let's say, the Pope or some imam, and are opposed to the idea of universal human rights since these are wasted on the non-elect. The Christian fascists, including, especially, conservative Catholics, are at the other end of things. An absolute authority exists apart from them in this world in the form of an institution approved by God to which you must submit or you are in league with the devil.

You may not question or challenge this authority. These are anti-individualists, again to the point of self-negation. They are collectivists and corporatists. Unskeptical. Believers and adherents. A direct, personal approach to God and the assumption of such a connection is for them presumptuous and suspect, the distance being too great to bridge. Only within an earthly, institutional context can such a connection be regulated and deemed valid because an unsupervised individual might, simply, screw it up.

Someone like Jimmy Swaggart, maybe. The evangelical way is more left-brain, abstract and analytical. More masculine. They lose their humanity by abstracting themselves from it and associating themselves with God. In effect they think they're God, through close alignment, while living in a world that is material and therefore un-Godlike and crap, and so without legitimacy and unworthy of respect. They are haughty and imperious when it comes to morality.

The fascists are right-brain, empathetic and immersive. They lose their humanity through submission and obedience, the more traditionally feminine way, the dark side of which is that it is parochial and limited in its vision of inclusion. They are servants of God through submission to God's bureaucracies in this world, usually the Church and the Nation. And soldiers for God in the event of an attack, which they are quick to see erroneously because of their tribalism.

There is common ground in the two groups in the need for certainty, which means it is an attempt to escape from the basic conditions of humanity: powerlessness, ignorance and mortality. The fascist approach makes people effectively less than human by abdicating the responsibilities of consciousness and independence to an institution with claims to the certainty of truth, so they really are like sheep and will follow someone off a cliff.

The evangelical approach makes individuals out to be capable of escaping from uncertainty themselves and thereby becoming demigods. By claiming godliness in this world, that is, like Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson. They will lead you off a cliff. And do it again, if they survive. So both approaches get you to the same place, ultimately, dehumanization. You escape from uncertainty at the cost of your humanity. You are de-civilized, dysfunctional and sociopathic. Inhabitants of the ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, also known as the Republican Party, in a marriage made in hell, sociopathic leaders and sheep. What fun.

Evangelical fundamentalists clearly have the tougher time of it in order to make life bearable, since they live with enormous tension in a material world they deem to be inauthentic and shit. They make their existence endurable by establishing an ersatz community through salvation signs and by conferring personhood, the assumption of inalienable human rights and naturally occurring brotherhood being a nonstarter for them. The primary indicators of righteousness are wealth and code language, which they construe as evidence of salvation. But the fundamentalists are unavoidably dehumanized through the doctrines of Perseverance (of the Saints) and Predestination, which mean they are not free and so inhabit a world with no meaningful morality.

Within which their behavior, once they are saved, is irrelevant, thereby removing them from the world of uncertainty, which is to say, humanity. They also confer personhood, meaning salvation status, on non-personal entities such as corporations and countries. Everything becomes an issue of power for them and exclusion since godliness is only possible in this world through rejection of it and power is an attribute of God, the more arbitrary the better. The religious fascists only need to deprive non-adherents of personhood and thereby dehumanize them so that they can be mistreated and killed, in order to maintain normal social relations within their group, but in so doing they also dehumanize themselves, of course.

The fascists are much more likely to come around, though, because they at least have normal relationships within their defined group. Evangelical fundamentalists are profoundly dysfunctional and resistant to reform. They are cultists and may require deprogramming, so they should be written off in the short run. This means that from a practical political perspective the target groups for Democrats are white women and Catholics, assuming the Democrats actually want to win and stem the tide of insanity, but there is diminishing evidence of that.

In the meantime what we are seeing is an institutional example, in the Republican Party, of the efficacy of sociopathy as psychologists normally observe it in individuals. These people get shit done because they are unencumbered by conscience. You have to wonder why they can't accept life on the terms of its offering, but evidently they can't. Probably because of some primal, existential fear, which compels them to come back at it with certainty. Which is sadly unattainable in this life.

On that high note I leave you with warm holiday wishes for a peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

A Faust Story

"Faust and the adjective Faustian imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term."
                          

                

It's hard to reconcile the ethics of John Boehner with anything. Except, perhaps, that winning is everything. This within a context of complete moral certainty and blindness because he thinks he is right and he is driven to win and when he does he is reassured of his rightness, a positive feedback loop.

As it was when he played football in high school at Cincinnati Moeller under Gerry Faust. They did nothing but win, which they had prayed for to God or the Blessed Virgin or the patron saint of ass-kicking. But, for anyone who witnessed the spectacle and debacle of Faust at Notre Dame, well, it was difficult to see the Jesus in that.

Gerry Faust, though, is sure that Jesus and the Blessed Mother had a hand in it all to this day. And John Boehner must have the same certainty, which makes it possible for him to carry on as a political thug with way more composure than Gerry ever had, at Moeller or anywhere. But Boehner is in fact Faust.

He has won just by getting into the position he's in. But from there it's all failure. Failed policies on every front. The record is as clear as Notre Dame's under Gerry-the-misguided, but that's not how they keep track. Partly because Jesus made it happen. Through the intercession of the BVM, surely, to whom Gerry is particularly devoted.

This is so medieval, I think, as I see the carcasses of working people carried away on their shields. And children and the elderly, dying because life's necessary resources are all spent stupidly, and in further consolidating wealth. Tax cuts for the rich! Did these guys think a little man with horns would actually approach them?

And make them an offer on their souls? It doesn't work that way. That's in the movies and plays and books, you idiot Reaganites. In real life it just happens, because you want something so much you don't see the damage you do to get it. Also with John and Gerry I think there's an authority angle.

You don't fuck with authority. Catholic sensibilities applied to our government and society, America ex cathedra. Always right, that is -- infallible. Boehner's evangelical allies come at it from another place. The institution stands in the way of your salvation. You want it stripped down to nothing.

An odd alliance. But back to Boehner. What do we do with the guy? He's just such an asshole. His high school football ethics aren't up to the job, I would say. Lo, Gerry Faust is now a motivational speaker. We'll bring him in. Perhaps, together, they can bend reality to their will. Gerry will recommend war, I bet. 

War is so like football, a game to be won, against Obama or the Democrats or some foreigners, like that foray into Iraq, maybe. Gerry, you ever think you might be wrong on this? That life can't be reduced to football and isn't, in fact, like football? Pray on that, please, but avoid those dastardly, imaginary WMD's.

This is the other aspect of the thing, apart from the religious self-righteousness. They have no idea what to do if they can't run something through the petty combat model. It's the only model they have. And the pettiness is important because in football you live to play again, more or less. But not if you're an Iraqi. 

Or, otherwise dead. Nothing petty in that. Or someone else whose life has been destroyed in another way by the Boehnerites. I guess respect for life has its limits. Meanwhile, all we can do is watch the Republican demolition derby. Someone will win, by their tally, but we'll all be way worse off in the end. 

See if they care.

http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/gerry-faust-on-mother-mary-and-his-days-at-notre-dame

Ersatz Everything

I think I remember from college reading DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA and the author, Alexis de Tocqueville, expressing alarm at discovering that the columns of our stately houses were made of wood. Now, if he were to knock on our democracy itself, he would find that it is fake--faux representative government.

I had such a moment as a kid encountering woodgrain Formica, a dishonest material, or an honest material forced into a dishonest representation of itself, anyway, commercial servitude. Color Formica up nicely and it looked good without the grain. I have it in my kitchen, a warm-green version looking like what it is.

Synthetic as hell. So now we've got this kind of government, imitation democracy. It's ersatz America, woodgrain, veneer. We're Naugahyde. Pleather. Inauthentic to the core. Democratic but not. Christian but not. Industrious but not. Independent and free but not. Everything but not.

Futurism

So I saw a painting yesterday evening which made me think of the precisionist works of Gerald Murphy. I hadn't thought about the Murphys, Gerald and Sara, in years, long enough ago that I was immediately reminded of how it felt not to be ashamed to be an American.

The good old days. There's always been that tradition, the one of the ugly Americans, the boors. I can deal with having a few boors on my side. Rubes. Jethros. Aborigines. People without respect and a sense of tradition and perspective. But we had good qualities as well.

Innocence. Optimism. Open-heartedness. Enthusiasm. Equanimity. Practicality. Inclusiveness. A sense of fair play. The Murphys were pioneers and not boors. Insiders because of their money. Outsiders because they were from immigrant families and Catholic. Not Brahmins.

An early example of what America could give back to Europe, once we had begun to become a power on our own, something good. I read about it in Wikipedia this morning. The Murphys invented sunbathing. Who knew. Or they were proponents of it and popularizers, at least.

I didn't know I was witnessing the end of this, as a kid. Our Golden Age, as much as we had one. And I read Toffler's book, FUTURE SHOCK, when it came out, as did everybody else. Also I'm aware of Neil Postman, who's opinions are still confusing to me.

They both wrote about change. The quality and quantity of change. I'm all for change for reasons of inevitability. It does happen and will happen independently of any desire to stop it. But you can't have it occur in good ways if you're in denial of it.

I think we have to work with it. And, man, are we ever failing at that. Thinking of the Murphys I remembered how I felt when I last read about them, in the 1980's, in connection with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, by which time I had misgivings about America.

And since then we have run entirely off the rails. It's mourning in America now. Sadness and a sense of loss are the only appropriate responses in witnessing the country's failure and degradation. You have to be suspicious when people say the sky is falling.

As did both Toffler and Postman in their ways. But it has fallen. Future Shock? The infantilizing of adulthood? Man, I don't know. Narcissism, maybe, as Christopher Lasch wrote about it. But it's so wearing watching it all happen.

If you care about the country and what it once supposedly stood for, which I do. And I'm uncomfortable saying that because, who am I, to judge. But judge we must. And I mean must, because we do it inevitably, by our acquiescence, if nothing else.

The people doing all the damage have no hesitation to judge. They insist they're right. But they're all lotus-eaters. The ultimate luddites. You actually live in the past, in your heads, forgetful of all else. This takes resources.

Hence their love of continuity and privilege and money. It's a virtual plantation. Supported by the industry of others, as it must be, in order to work. Maybe not, if they chose to live like the Amish. Don't hold your breath. They are oblivious.

And they're running everything.

Just Say These Words

No doubt Democratic congressmen are walking the streets of the capital silent and stupefied at the prospect of the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse of the new Republican majorities. A Zombie Apocalypse typified by the RYAN BUDGET, a thing fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of its creator, whosoever that may be.

You can't kill the budget because it is already dead. Get over that. The same is true of the whole Republican wish list of insanity. So, here it is on a fucking plate, you Democratic congressmen, the thing to do in the face of the zombie onslaught. Say these three things and keep saying them, until I tell you to stop, if ever:

1. THE REPUBLICANS CREATED THE DEFICITS
2. THE REPUBLICANS SENT YOUR JOBS TO CHINA
3. THE REPUBLICANS CAUSED THE RECESSION

If you should be pressed by someone you may add a little background, which I bet you don't understand or you would have been saying these things already, so stick to the script.

The deficits were created by cutting taxes and raising spending on defense and other crazy, wasteful stuff. Your jobs went to China because corporations want cheap labor and Republicans give corporations whatever they want. The economic collapse was caused by Republican-engineered deregulation, a la ENRON.

Again, you don't need to understand any of this. It's too late to do any good, according to my non-creationist, economist sources living in exile. But someday, when they examine the corpse of our country, it may help to determine the cause of death if this stuff is on the record.

How Many Fifths

Let's say that Sheldon Adelson is a man. I know he doesn't look like one but bear with me. Then how many fifths of a man am I, politically? A fifth of a fifth? No way. I'm less than that. Sheldon is a man's man, politically. But I won't stipulate to less than a twenty-fifth. It would mess with my mojo.

Not to complain, but isn't that illegal? And I'm a white guy. Maybe I'm collateral damage here, but the folks who put the money in politics won't say what they want, exactly, so it's hard to figure out. We could just give it to them and then they might leave us alone, and I could get my franchise back.

What if they want the country for themselves? Oh, I bet that's it. Disenfranchisement is the goal. Then they can do what they want, on the fly. If they control the system then the battles are all won before they're fought, and they don't have to worry anymore, and I would have to worry a lot.

Because I'm no Sheldon Adelson, politically. I bet I can take his ass in a fight, though. Where does he live? All over the place, you say? Trying to steer clear of me, no doubt. I'll kick his butt. Then I'll wind up in jail, probably a privatized one, the owners of which will give money to the same causes as Sheldon.

I'm having trouble figuring this one out. Makes you feel kind of impotent. Bad choice of words, there, I say to the women in the audience, but you know what I mean. Maybe Sheldon will give me a job, sweeping floors in the casinos. Sorry, Sheldon, I didn't mean to be so hard on you. 

Have a nice day, dickwad.

Peace in Our Time

The Democratic distaste for conflict has quickened the Republican lust for blood. There is no peace. There will be no peace. Only when the Republicans have bombed the homes of the people that matter will they care. Care enough to run for cover, laptops in tow, so they can amuse themselves and keep up with their investments.

As the bombs rain down. By the time they care it will be too late. It is already too late. To prevent the war. The war is here. But who will win? No one will win. Everyone loses. It's what the Republicans want. They must destroy everything. They are driven to destroy everything. They are compelled to destroy everything.

It doesn't matter why. It doesn't matter how. We are fucked. Woe are we. Welcome to the new Republican millennium. The gods of destruction are among us. They have come. Watch in awe. They will bring the world to its knees so they can feel their power and revel in the wonder of their wanton destruction.

Imaginary Man on First

My brother reminded me today of something I had forgotten. We would play, when we were kids, baseball games in the street with so few people you routinely had to bat again while being on base, in which case there would be an "imaginary man on first" or wherever.

You could drive yourself in. Cool. So civilized, these games were. Never a cheap-shot. We played hard but fair, our neighborhood code, but I assume it was common among kids in the area, kids everywhere, civilization in miniature.

And we enjoyed one another's humiliations so much, in good humor, yet we were barbarians. Little savages, without conscience, in many areas, because we were unsophisticated, not grown up. So what is the excuse of the Republicans?

Are they not grown up, or what. Cheap shot after cheap shot. I'm so tired of it.

Home Alone IV: The White House Years

Mostly I write to please myself. To vent. And as an expression of frustration, I'm sure, but there's always the chance you will stumble onto something, an instance of insight, and I think I have.

The hardest thing to grasp, for me and my like-minded friends, is the lack of a conscience in our antagonists. The apparent indifference to suffering and death and the attendant obliviousness to all the systems that are supposed to make a society work.

Such as enjoying your freedom in ways that don't interfere with the ability of others to do the same. And we see this lack in people with whom we identify, to a degree. And who say, in fact, that they embody the ideal, the model of citizenship. Say it all the time.

While they don't seem to be channeling Charles Manson, exactly, they fall short of the standards we are supposed to share, in the estimation of myself and my friends. In reaching for understanding in such a situation I often look for limiting cases, the purest examples, extremes.

Then I interpolate. Move toward the middle. Use what's obvious in extreme cases to understand those less extreme. I posit George Bush as an extreme case. And Jesus, his avowed master and model, but possibly his antithesis. A foil, for our purposes. What does Bush most uniquely embody? What are his defining traits and characteristics?

In relation to Jesus, especially. And I speculate: boyishness. The worst of adolescent destructiveness and self centeredness. A lack of the understanding of connectedness and consequences. No social conscience. No sense of responsibility. Dependency. Defensiveness. Possibly the enjoyment of cruelty.

Not Jesus. But we elected this guy, twice, to the presidency, the office most likely to have elements of form associated with it in relation to the national ideal, in the second instance after he had proved to be stunningly incompetent and offensively aggressive, on the military front.

So maybe we, the electorate, embody some of the same traits, a generational case of arrested development. I wouldn't wish my fifteen year-old self on anybody, and I would have done a much better job of running things than Bush, as I was at fifteen.

But fifteen year-olds are supposed to be fifteen, fifty-somethings are not. So you are immediately in the arena of a Paul Ryan, an unintegrated self, ripe for supplanting with the ego or ideals of someone else. Borrowed integrity. Borrowed identity. Ayn Rand, in the case of Ryan.

Probably Dick Cheney, in the case of Bush, though, ostensibly, Jesus. And the void offered room for others at the same time. Rove, maybe. Bush's brain, reputedly. And Rumsfeld. A poker party of a personality. "I raise you an invasion." "Deregulate and call." "You can't do that!" "I just did."

A HOME ALONE situation in the White House with a delinquent kid in charge, and his criminal cohorts. A delinquent kid with nukes, operating out of a framework of decision-by-committee in which no one knows the other's intent, because they don't know it themselves. Not really.

A recipe for sociopathy. Their own motivations are a mystery to them, out of arrestedness and a lack of personal development. Something resonates with me here in relation to THE WIZARD OF OZ, a personality in pieces due to a lack of the development of its parts: courage, caring, sense.

A person unrealized in all aspects, in the case of Bush. Maybe that was the attraction to the powerful men behind the scenes. He's a clean slate of a human, someone without a hint of character or self-awareness. Suddenly, writing this, I feel fortunate. It could have been worse. He could have done even more harm.

Mr Jones Goes to Washington

We all know about Mr Smith who went to Washington. Don't worry, I won't tell you otherwise. But there was another guy, Mr Jones, who also went. You've never heard of him. He's almost virtual, keeps his head down.

He's a lobbyist, initially only in defense but he went everywhere from there. And I mean everywhere, even social issues once it was realized that certain people would pay you to put their ideas forward even if it didn't work.

And they would keep paying you once they realized it wasn't working, an income stream independent of results. No one knows why but it is thought it involves the deep human desire to torch something, as in "whole, burnt," some kind of sacrifice.

An offering, like sending money to Jerry Falwell. Ares Jones, the lobbyist, saw the synergies, the link between the social issues and the hard stuff, ideas and ICBM'S. This is in keeping with the shift to intellectual content as a basis for growth.

Ideas are everything, if you don't care about jobs. You can put manufacturing in a box and bid it out, which they did. China won. Now Ares in not partisan, not ideological, in the usual sense. The ideas aren't rooted in anything, just a means to an end.

But he is pretty partisan about money, because it gives you power. So I sent in the forensics guys to try to determine what was going on, accountants to do the early work, and some folks to examine the remains, if casualties were found.

Social scientists, because I don't believe that money goes up in smoke, hardly ever, though it may go towards something intangible, especially in the leisured class, since they have money to burn. So where did it go? Towards dismantling democracy.

The corpse turned out to be our country, which was always virtual anyway. An idea. An old, inefficient idea. You wouldn't think they would trash something so big, but it turns out they're internationalists, and super rich. It didn't seem like a big deal to them.

It did to working people. But money and power know no bounds. The Bain types are indifferent about liquidating a company. They can go either way, it doesn't matter. Only the money does. It's a small step from there to liquidating a country or anything else, if it is in the way.

The "whole, burnt" crowd is helping fund this for reasons as yet undetermined. The poorer folks who vote red, that is, who actually sent money to idiots like Falwell. Mr Smith is long retired. He made great headlines but didn't have much influence in the end.

Ideals don't motivate people the way that money does, I guess. Not normally. Money is much more primal, more addicting. Maybe everything comes down to that, ultimately, I'm not sure. But where is Mr Smith when you need him?

The Sorcerer's Apprentices

What a dream I had. The Republicans had taken over everything and the country was spinning entirely out of control. I have to say, it didn't feel personal at all. This was new to me. It used to always feel personal.

I cut my teeth on Jesse Helms in this regard. He was the first politician for whom I felt visceral loathing, super-personal. Since then there have been so many loathe-worthy Republicans I have lost track, so you learn to take defensive measures. Dissociation, that is, in order to dull the pain and awareness.

The danger of dissociation is that you can't understand what's going on well enough to counteract it, having walled it off. No normal person wants to go there. The interior life of Jesse Helms? Shudder. But someone has to do it, be a Van Helsing to Helms's Dracula, to protect us and ensure our survival.

I volunteered for this duty once in an effort to get close to Winona Ryder, but they wouldn't have me. I think she's really attractive. I see no one currently out there in the role, which isn't to say our Van Helsing isn't among us, looking like Anthony Hopkins or not. Will he please stand up? Maybe he's waiting for his moment. I sure hope so.

Meanwhile the Republican sorcerer's apprentices have let loose a raft of evil. It's impersonal in that they're screwups, weaklings, incompetents, and novices. They've stepped out of their appropriate role so they're kind of not responsible. They shouldn't have been entrusted and left unsupervised. It's a reign of error, not terror, but this could change.

Because there's no sign of a conscience anywhere. It's easy enough to loathe Mitch McConnell and his boys and the Boehnerites, they're so loathable, but why bother. In the dream I saw clearly that all these Republicans are like children, playing with forces they don't understand and can't control, which is scary as hell because there's a suspicion.

That the Master, the Sorcerer, won't come back in time to save us, or that he will but we'll already be screwed because in the bigger picture we didn't really matter. We'll still be functioning but really messed up, because our problems didn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Forced to give an opinion I'd say that this is the case.

So let's just have a party, an Irish wake, which is to say we'll look directly at our worst fears and thumb our noses at them and have some fun, with a lot of alcohol and good fellowship and sentimental singing. Anybody have a better idea? If not, it's on, a wake for America.

See you there.

Heavy Metal

Waking up early this morning due to the time change, I flipped on the radio hoping that the BBC would NOT be reporting on the impending American electoral catastrophe. Someone was talking about lead poisoning.

It was more interesting than you would think. Evidently lead can mess you up in such a way that you become a criminal. Immediately I thought of the Republicans, inhaling all those lead-laden fumes, what with their love of petrochemicals and combustion.

I don't believe much in discontinuities. There is usually some underlying consistency. Look at the sixties, all those folks calling themselves radicals and revolutionaries and it was the same old stuff, to my mind, people declaring themselves to be right and better than everybody else and unloading on the previous generation mercilessly.

And founding Utopian communities in a search for purity and self fulfillment, protesting the hell out of the war, all the while, though those protests pretty much ended with the draft. Suspiciously, I would say, though not to fault anyone. I didn't want to go, not to that war.

But on the war went. What I can't figure out is what has happened to my country since then. We used to be the good guys, or at least think we were the good guys. Okay, at least we aspired to be good. Am I wrong, there?

Now we don't seem to give a shit about anything, except maybe money, and we're correspondingly more self-righteous. Certain elements of it I understand, the Civil War angle, and the resentment revived by civil rights and desegregation.

That Southerners want to get the country back on the right path and have miscegenation punishable by death and so on, old fashioned values. All well and good but how did this outlook ever win the day, in the whole country, all that divisiveness?

And the incredible hatred of government and love of privilege, the violence, the defensiveness, the non-inclusiveness. And the touchiness and aggression, the sense of entitlement, all that stuff. Lead poisoning, that must be it. 

Again, I'm looking for the consistency. How did we go from good guys to jerks, so damn quickly? And this lead expert was convincing, that lead is a problem, and that it's in the systems of the people who grew up when it was around, more so than now, and is affecting their brains.

In a bad way. But she also argued that there is a generation in the pipeline unaffected by the lead, born after, especially, they pulled it out of gasoline. That they are peaceniks, that generation, which the Republicans sure as hell are not. May I live to see the day, when the peaceniks are in control.

I will support them. In the meantime what are we to do? It just so happens that I install Finnish saunas as a sideline. Some people think that you can sweat out the lead, no kidding, by using the sauna. In any case I will argue for the beneficial effects.

I want a government contract to install these and to get mean people to use them, starting of course with all those congressional Republicans, since the beneficial effects will be multiplied by their power.

It's only serendipity for me, that I would make a lot of money, and I want my shot of serendipity, like the Republicans, who propose all these tax breaks and military expenditures and deregulation while, serendipitously, getting rich as shit.

Reassuring us constantly that they only want what's good for the country and that they're very patriotic, not self serving at all. I want some of that, to the tune of the cost of one B-1 bomber, let's say. That's a lot of saunas.

And a lot of profit for me. I swear I only want what's best for the country. Will you support me?

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

Thom Thumb

There's a real possibility that North Carolina will be sending a remarkable, reactionary guy to the Senate in Washington to stem the tide of wasteful spending on nonsense like school lunches. But those outside the state may not know of the great exploits and adventures of Thom Thumb.

Whose determination and persistence have earned him the admiration of all who know him. His tiny stature belies his enormous will and pluck. He is the champion of minority everything. His minority, that is. Smallness, in size or numbers, is compensated for with tactical aggression and massive infusions of cash.

By means of which Tiny Thom has wrested control of North Carolina from an African element determined to loll about waiting for hard working, productive, European types to show up with a truck full of watermelon and fried chicken for them to eat. Naive, native Northerners will be kept from this fate by Thom when he exerts himself at the national political level.

So the whole country may be saved from sloth by Thom, and from the loitering masses hoping for free shit. This is the reality uncovered by Thom and his compatriots, they themselves having witnessed the enormous envy of the darkies sweating their balls off working in the sun while the the white folks knock down the lemonade in the shade.

And they understand all too well how all that ball-sweating has instilled in the laborers an unusual craving for shade and lemonade and the easy life, the realization of which would obviously destroy the country. Now Thom and his allies have managed to forestall all that by shifting the burden of labor to China and elsewhere.

But those people are getting the craving. It's a huge problem, which can only be solved by folks like Tiny Thom, who have themselves seen the envy in the eyes and understand its power. The craving must first be kept in check at home, later in the coolie countries currently under active exploitation.

All the while the search goes on frantically for additional resources, human or otherwise, to keep Thom Thumb in his accustomed and rightful place. The free shit stops with him. It must. No real reason, but Thom and his crowd got used to it. It would be so unfair to take it away.