Life Among the Nihilists

I had trouble understanding the Paris attacks when they happened. Mass shootings are more than anyone can comprehend. I try to get inside of things sympathetically but I can't do it with the crazy-fucks who do this stuff, only with the people they attack.

Now, with some distance, what I remember is about a French philosopher, Andre Glucksmann, who called this kind of terrorism "nihilist." It seems true to me because it is destruction for the sake of destruction, an unintelligible thing, madness.

It made me think of Thomas Frank and his book, "The Wrecking Crew," about our right-wing. Frank, in an introduction, seemed to believe that the election of Barack Obama was a rejection of the wreckers. He was assuming, I think, intelligibility.

He thought that the wrecker coalition was cunning, not crazy. But they look to me now like nihilists. They have abandoned all standards, an expression of contempt for everything. They embrace an ethic of death. There is no goal, end-game or resolution.

It's acting-out. Also I think it is an attempt to flush God out of the shadows. It's an adult version of the testing done by adolescents to try to reassure themselves that their parents are resilient and worth respecting. They are trying to force God's hand.

They want to see God so they assume the role of the anti-Christ. They are people of fear. We are in very, very big trouble. They have chosen a battle that ends with someone in the ditch and we are in the middle of it, more or less like civilians in a war-zone.

Unconsciously they want to be stopped, so they bait God. And we have only to unelect them. Poof! Crazy gone. Poof! Peace and normalcy. It's hard, though, because they are so insane. Look at the harm they cause. Look at how they lie and cheat and steal.

Look at how they have co-opted the entire government and sabotage everything. And they want God, the existential parent, to stop them. It's an affront to God if anyone else tries, so they are mighty reactive. They are our nihilists.

Only the Young Die Good

Do you ever have the feeling we've worn out our planetary welcome? Some people would say we own the place and can trash it at will, the hooligans. Where do we go from there? 

To jail, you hope, for the hooligans. There's a chance, then, of going somewhere good, as guests. Not somewhere else but we could be good guests, instead of a bunch of rock stars.

Don't get me wrong. I loved Keith Moon and I wish he were still alive, but I wouldn't have wanted him as a roomie. I think I just equated evangelical Christians with Keith Moon. 

They're vandals. Evangelical Christians think it's their right to wreck the world. They think God wants it, maybe. I say lock them up. Possibly, too, they are working for the other guy.

The guy with the little horns.

The Inviolable Precepts of Republicanism

Cut taxes, squander money on defense, deregulate everything and install political hacks in important jobs. 

Making America Suck Some More

The Republican rhetoric is heading right back to Reagan-land. "It's Morning in America." Right. The dawning of the age of bullshit. 

"Make America Great Again." Right. Even Republicans long for the days when they weren't running things. So, we trust them now? 

Right. We're supposed to trust the people who made us suck in the first place. Really? But we are dealing with an ignorant electorate. 

Uh-oh. They reelected George W. Bush. Shit, anything could happen.

"No Rain"

We have been having an ass-load of rain lately, courtesy of El Niño. I wonder if the hippie tactic might finally work: standing out in it and chanting "no rain" like they did at Woodstock. Something about that seemed really Irish to me, a stylish exercise in futility. 

There's something about the Irish, a tradition not only of accepting their failure but celebrating it, and laughing about it and having a drink. They do this even with death. It reminds me of the "occupy" movements, which I admired, as long as it was good-natured.

The power disparity, between the protestors and the Wall Street crowd, was insane, downright undemocratic. They may as well have been chanting in the rain. That's where we all are now, helpless passengers along for the ride, up against the politics of big money.

Cool Foundations

I've heard about the philanthropic foundations, most recently the Ford Foundation, and I'm impressed by how intelligent and well-intentioned the people are who run them.

But what sense does any of it make when they are working at cross-purposes with our own government? They are trying to alleviate problems our government is causing. 

It makes me think that they should do art. Not support it but do it. I mean be it. Do something so unexpected and cool as to constitute art. The foundation becomes art.

To start out they could give all their money, in a given year, to black people. Not cool enough but getting there. They could have Jeff Koons do it, with blues music playing.

Hell, I don't know. I'm no good at cool, but those intelligent and well-intentioned people can master it, I'm sure. They can't master our runaway government, though. Forget that.  

Crime and Punishment

In the Scandinavian mysteries I've been watching they give someone a ludicrously short jail sentence for killing somebody. Don't they give a shit? That was my reaction, but then I saw it differently.

It means that they understand that society is implicated. It is more individualistic, I soon understood, than the mythological, American view. It sees people as they are, incomprehensible out of context.

And dependent on the circumstances of their lives. Real individualism is rooted in realism. Real individualism understands that autonomy can only exist with a strong social system for support.

Real individualism is about balance.

Marketing Inhumanity

Markets are inhuman. A reverence for markets is a reverence for inhumanity. Inhumanity is hard to market so the fans of inhumanity market markets.

It's the stuff you hear all the time about efficiency. Efficiency only makes sense within a defined, narrow context. The world is wasteful and the universe profligate.

All that energy squandered, converted into another, less palatable form. But then there's the energy that went into making us. We are organizations of atoms.

On the palatability index I don't know where we come in, but we are only organizations of atoms held together by energy, with limited liability and control. 

Ah, that "control" word. Can we enforce palatability? There's no reason to think the cosmos cares or isn't indifferent, but we care, within the limits of our liability.

How is that defined? Not being a deist, I would say arbitrarily. And I would celebrate exactly that, since the deists are failing so miserably. I choose to value us.

I choose to value human life and the systems that sustain us, not markets. Markets don't value life at all, intrinsically, whatever the market deists may say.

A Powerful Insult

It's hard not to write about seeing your country reduced to rubble. The mechanisms are interesting. There are many facets to the thing, some more representative of the inner workings than others, but at one level the absolute purity of the insult is astonishing.

Why? That's the question asked so often, and there is often an answer, but when there is no answer, no tactical or strategic explanation, you are sometimes faced with the realization that it is only a display. They do it sometimes just because they can and want to. 

And they do something that doesn't make any sense specifically to show their power, something so insulting to smash the morale of their adversaries. If this doesn't sound extreme to you, remember, that we're supposed to be ON THE SAME FUCKING SIDE.

The pivotal year here is 1994, when Newt Gingrich's brownshirts showed up in Washington, religious rebels and crusaders, certain of their superiority and rightness. That was the end of civility and reasonable and reasonably effective government. Credit it to Newt. 

We might as well. He will be proud. He has made his mark. The wrecking crew has done what they came for. Our country is ashes, an unrecognizable hulk and burned-out shell. We have no idea whatsoever what we stand for anymore.

Current Resident, or Current Resident

Man, it is mighty hard not to be affected by the social trend of indifference. The message society sends out is that you have to assert your worth. You have to look out for yourself. 

The baseline is that you are a nonentity. You have to prove otherwise. People have no intrinsic worth and so net worth stands in. I think this is bullshit but, whatever.

It is the new ethos of American society. It is disenfranchising and, as good Calvinists, the ruling elite have asserted this same thing in relation to God, saying it's Biblical.

If your life sucks it is because you are unworthy. I revert to "self-evident" in arguing against this. If you aren't out of your mind it is self-evident that it is wrong, but there's the problem.

They, the ruling elite, are out of their minds.

No Trump

One story about Fred Trump stuck in my head. He would tell people that he was Swedish so not to offend his Jewish tenants. No problem, but he probably underestimated his tenants. And reinvention is an honest part of our American tradition, if that isn't weird.

I mean, there's something unavoidably dishonest about reinventing yourself. Maybe it can go in the direction of greater authenticity, but it can sure go in the other direction. Now Donald, the son, doesn't seem to understand that reinvention isn't an end in itself. 

He's in such a constant state of reinvention it would be fair to say there is no Donald, no Trump. He is a means to an end. The end, I suppose, is his image, a kind of hot-air balloon of immense size that he must work frantically to keep inflated. His visage is on it.

But it's not him. There is no him. He is the fulfillment of a trend starting, at the latest, with Ronald Reagan, the actor president, a trend of presidents as pawns or props, on the Republican side. It's hard to imagine a greater non-entity than George W. Bush, but, voila!

They have found him, the Trumpster. It's also hard to imagine greater wreckage than was left by that Bush guy, but there's the potential there in Trump. Republican grandees are salivating, I'm sure. The end of the American state, as we have known it, is at hand.

A Little Analysis

My gift to Donald Trump and his supporters for Christmas is a little rudimentary analysis. They despise Muslims and Mexicans not because they're un-American but because they are American. They're more American than Trump--not saying much. 

Those immigrants are more willing to work, expect less in return, and appreciate the promise of America and the opportunity it represents way more than Trump, the privileged and favored son of an enormous developer. Eureka! I have found it.

Trump's problem: that "son" thing just kills him. He is a successor. Damn, George W. Bush was as well. And Mitt Romney. And John McCain. All of these guys have powerful families. They must have daddy issues. They must all have complexes.

The Muslims and Mexicans are more like those privileged guys' predecessors than they are, but with darker skins. The complexes have something to do with complexions. I'll leave it at that and support any effort to provide an in-house psychiatrist.

At the White House, should a Republican ever reside there again. My work is done here.

Donald Trump's First Christmas Message to the American People, as President

My Fellow Americans:

At Christmas we celebrate who we are, and who we aren't. We aren't Muslims and we aren't Mexicans. We are Americans. I am therefore announcing the creation of a new national day of observance, DEPORTATION DAY, coincident with Christmas.

Every year now, on Christmas, we will have a mass deportation of Muslims, in celebration and in order to send a message. It should also improve security. We will wait a few days and do the same with the Mexicans, since they are at least Christians.

Sort of. Anyway, God Bless You, God Bless America, and Merry Christmas.

Hillary, I Just Can't

I can't vote for Hillary Clinton. I will only vote for her if, when she wins the nomination, she chooses herself as running mate and puts Bernie in as the nominee for president. This may happen in a fit of conscience. In Hillary I see only ambition. I want a reckoning.

I will only vote for someone who tries, at least, to unimplicate us in the right-wing insanity. Without that we go backwards. We keep going backwards, I should say. I'm tired of going backwards. I'm tired of it all. For my entire adult life America has been run by lunatics.

I want my political voice back. Hillary does not speak for me.

Gold Stars for the Robot Boys

Gold stars all around this year for all the robot reporters at Fox and Breitbart and Rush Radio and the other reliable sources of misinformation. They have been good and true servants of their masters.

Weather Report

Once we had the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, a free spirit. Those were the days. Now we have the Neo-Fascist News Service and the weather is wholly subsumed to it, a pawn in a political game. "It is not raining," says the neo-fascist weather lackey.

As per instruction. "Look out the window, you idiot," says the bewildered bystander. "Well, I'll be darned," says the lackey, but not to the audience. "It is not raining," he says to the audience. The audience believes him because they believe in belief. 

They walk out in the rain and they say it is not raining. It is a powerful poison, the denial of reality. No one dares to disagree, to say otherwise, to admit the truth and risk censure or worse. "It is not raining," they say, now among themselves. It's conformity.

It's compliance. But they actually believe it, eventually, that it's not raining. They believe it's not raining and they're standing out in the rain. Initially they had only believed that you must believe. Now they don't know what they're doing or why they do it.

I don't know how this ends. I think not well. Signing off.

You Can Go Home Again. Ho, Ho, Ho!

What "going home" usually refers to is a return to childhood. Culturally it means a return to the collective childhood of earlier times. You can't recapture the innocence of childhood but you can recapture the absence of responsibility and worry.

At only the cost of your soul. Christ gets us out if this dilemma by extending family feeling, love, to all of humanity and, I would say, to all of creation. It's the best we can hope to do. We accept a new father, God, and get a large, new family in the deal.

We get a diffuse sense of belonging and security. But we also have to accept and own our lives and independence, grow up, and quit trying to withdraw into the aboriginal past, the lure of tribalism, the loss of individual liberty and identity to group affiliation. 

That, tribalism, is the antithesis of Christianity. The challenge for everyone is not to sell your soul for the false security of tribal membership. Faith, Hope and Charity: it isn't all that hard. The greatest of these is the last, the uniting force of God's love.

We celebrate love at Christmas by believing that we are an expression of God's love and more than our matter, more than a meaningless accumulation of atoms, and by hoping to be deserving and to be better. At Christmas we go home.

We go home to our truest selves, our best selves, when we are most aware that we are all in it together, as children of God. May the force of God's love be with you. Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho!

Responsibility of Reason

If reason and moderation aren't woven into the fabric of a society the society is doomed. Don't get me wrong, irrationality has its place and must be honored.

It must be honored as part of acknowledging the animal aspect of human nature. But the higher stuff better run things or you wind up living, in fact, like animals. 

Not a lot of fun. Especially for the prey. 

The Car Wash at the End of the Universe

That last post gave me an idea. Let's give Donald Trump a car wash to run somewhere. He will probably build it into the biggest chain of car washes ever. It should keep him from mischief for a while.

Adversarial Living

Donald Trump has a lot of people wondering where we went wrong, starting with questioning the validity of his party and the faction within it supporting him. I'm sure they don't wonder or worry about anything. That's the point. They're only defensive and unthinking. 

But from there I wonder about everything: the country, Western Civilization and Christianity, humanity, creation, and the universe since its inception or whatever. This is what Trump can do to you, take you from irritation and stupefaction to universal, existential horror.

The trouble must have started with the mistake of going adversarial with nature, I bet, and thinking that our species is different, special and somehow outside of it. But in screwing-up nature we are screwing ourselves. It has been a suicidal romp culminating in Trump. 

Possibly even that will feed his vanity. His self-importance is qualitatively neutral. He doesn't care what it is as long as he can stick his name on it and feel like a big man. The United States of Trump? He would probably be happy to be known as the biggest anything ever. 

Even idiot, loser or nut-case, as long as he gets the attention. It means he could make us all into losers without a thought. His campaign has caught fire--no, it's on fire, and we're about to be engulfed. Are we having fun yet? It appears that he is, as a spectacle, a car crash.

The Prodigal Exemption

I know I'm hard on conservatives. I can't help it if they're out of their minds. But I would welcome them back, anytime, to the land of sanity and the flock and fold of true believers in the authentic values and traditions of America. They must repent, however, and change their ways.

Grinch-Jacking

In another inversion-of-reality special Ted Cruz has hijacked Dr. Seuss. May those little girls he has inappropriately used to further his megalomania and rampaging ambition grow up to know that their father is a hideous hypocrite and a scoundrel.

He's a self-serving schmuck and a loathsome liar and charlatan. Is there no one who can sue him for this? Hello? The heirs of Dr. Seuss should be pissed. The heirs of the true American traditions of reason and fair play and generosity should be up in arms.

Or take up arms. God, give us another John Brown. The right-wingers assault people the way weaklings always do, by remote control and manipulation, and without retribution. They should be compelled to suffer the consequences of their chicanery.

Intestinal Fortitude

Someday there has to be an honest reckoning on the gut of George W. Bush and where it got us. His no-mandate presidency was the model of anti-government ineptitude, with the occasional, accidental or incidental non-failure.

The Bushers were unconscious in their way, animated more by the need for aggression, certainty and self-righteousness than anything. Does anyone ever intentionally embrace evil? I don't think so. Those who seem to do so are sick.

It's hard to credit most evil-doers with real agency, which gets us to the great man's famous gut. The gut guided him, by his own authority and claim, and must have kept him from the awareness of the consequences of his actions.

Bush's reliance on his intestines was the passing along of agency to the realm of instinctual, unconscious forces, an abdication of free will and responsibility. Yes, the dumbass told us what he was doing and we were too stupid to see it.

Let's Play "Pretend"

Pretend Americans don't torture people. Pretend we are independent and free. Pretend we have any intention of leaving the country unimpaired to our kids. Let's just pretend we give a shit about anything, to remember what it feels like.

Marco-Terrorism

Conservatives do not give up. If they hate something it is toast. They hate "Obamacare" so it must go, by fair means or any means, hence the Marco-man's time-bomb.

He stuck it into a bill, so the American government is hanging health insurers out, failing to pay promised funds to protect them in the early years of the ACA. And, my God.

We're talking about the amount of money the top two, or maybe three, hedge fund guys make in a year, or a stealth bomber and a half, wasted on health services for citizens.

Marco, expert in government by hostage-taking and molotov cocktail, will say, yet again: "See, government sucks." Get up off your knees, Marco. No, he's not praying.

At least not to a recognized God. He's bowing down before wealthy donors. What he does, exactly, on his knees I don't know, but Republicans are submissive sorts. 

They believe so strongly in hierarchy that they aspire to be henchmen. It's an affront to the American and Christian traditions of individualism, but dare not to disagree!

To be anti-them is anathema. The real affront, in their minds, is not to challenge principles but to challenge people, their overlords, the wealthy of the earth, God's chosen.

Maybe I've Been Wrong About Everything

I buy a lot of stuff on eBay, mostly for my work. I have to say, eBay is amazing. The sellers on there, in my experience, are mostly really trying. It challenges my assumption that Americans are idiots.

Some of these people must be politically conservative. This means their foreign policy is "fuck off." Their domestic policy, "fuck you." Their economic doctrine, "fuck-it." But these people are nice.

I can't make sense of it. There's a disconnect somewhere and I'm not seeing it, but maybe it's because the eBay transactions are personal. The rest of it is impersonal or so it seems to them.

But it's not impersonal at all. Foreign policy is personal. Domestic policy is personal. The economy is personal. Everything is personal. I don't know how to convey this to conservatives.

Dwarf Army

In the famous "seven dwarves" testimony from 1994 the heads of all the major tobacco companies testified before Congress, under oath, that they did not think that nicotine is addicting.

The dwarf army has invaded Washington. There's no climate change, cutting taxes on the rich is the answer to every economic and social ill and money spent on the military doesn't count.

What kind of short-circuit occurs in their minds? Is it induced by greed? Ambition? Religious fervor? Nervous collapse or mental disintegration? Whatever the case, it's no way to run a country.

The Voices Crying in the Wall Street Wilderness

"Make straight their paths. They are the lords of finance." The Anti-Christs have come, with their soul-sucking greed. Hallelujah, we are un-saved!

U. S. B.

Everything points to me to renaming the country. Maybe it will mean a fresh start. John Brown would be an excellent person to honor since he saw how screwed up we are on race.

The "United States of Brown" is to be the new name. I'm sure we'll have no trouble getting this through Congress. Or, if that doesn't work, how about "Boca Raton"? 

I've always liked the way it sounds and I think it means something like "mouse mouth" so it's pretty non-partisan and shouldn't offend anyone.

Live by the Blowhard, Die by the Blowhard

Well, George Will, see what you get?

We're Bedraggled

We're living the Faust story, the part where it gets interesting. The devil is demanding his due. The pact, the deal with the devil, was called the Southern Strategy. Republicans pandered and played the race card and they won.

But now the forces of chaos are rising up and can't be stopped. The social conservatives, the dupes and fools, are insisting they get the insane stuff they've always wanted. See you on the other side, whatever is left of us.

My Cell Tower Thinks I'm Overseas

I knew it. This is not the United States of America. It can't be. Look at the flaming idiots in charge, in a country founded on enlightened ideals. They have no ideals, no enlightenment. 

They're pigs and squatters. Amnesiacs. But my cell tower tells me I'm in another country, surely some hell-hole, so that explains it. Thank God. I knew this couldn't be us.

A Guy From Chennai

They interviewed a guy, a "citizen of Chennai," on the BBC the other day about the flood there. He was so articulate and sane it made me weep, virtually, for our insanity. I remember him saying "this is not the time to point fingers."

Citizen, will you join us? We no longer know how to live. We are a disgrace, a nut nation smashed on consumption and self-righteousness. I can't remember the last time I heard an American speak so well. "Citizen." It has a strange ring. 

We don't believe in citizenship anymore. It's individualism running amok among us, or demagoguery on the other end, with no middle left. It's every man for himself now. That, or fascism. We have become a nation of crazy people and we can't see it. 

Coffee, Tea, or Thee

Evangelical Christians play it cool. It's never, ever, about them. Always the scrutiny is turned outward.

Let's turn it in, on them.

The Cracked Nut

Word has it that Republicans are doing a remake of THE NUTCRACKER that involves a lot of head-bashing, part of a broader effort to counteract left-wing influence among the young, which is turning us into a nation of pussies.

How in the hell are we to deal with Sharia Law and suicide-bombers and all that shit if we teach our kids to be nice, let alone sentimental, when they may have to blow themselves up someday in order to counteract the Islamic threat?

This would only be as a last resort, of course, but you have to fight fire with fire, or maybe gasoline, as Republicans have done successfully in causing Muslims to show their true colors. They knew that those heathen were after us.

It was apparent in all the oil deals, when they put us through unnecessary trouble and expense in securing what is rightfully ours, since everyone knows that we are God's chosen people and better than everyone else. The nerve!

As for THE CRACKED NUT, the right-wing's answer to the usual flaccid holiday fare, you are encouraged to take your kids to see it more than once, to make sure that they become instinctively suspicious, aggressive and mean.

Keep Your Heads Down

At Fox-Hole, the conservative news network, they cower in safety as others are killed. Anything could happen, though. John Boehner went under the bus in an instant. You see it again and again in gangster movies, when the trusted henchman becomes the object of fear.

It could happen to any of them. They are schismatics and secessionists and won't stop until they are alone, isolated, in a room full of guns or the virtual version, or down to the status of a snake-handler in a church in a holler somewhere with a small band of true believers.

Helmet! Flak-Jacket!

INCOMING! Here we are again, folks. I'm reporting to you from a foxhole at--GET DOWN, DUMBASS! Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. I'm reporting to you from a foxhole at the front lines in the culture war and it is not looking good. The carnage is indescribable. 

Truth blown to bits. Fair Play a distant memory. Justice and the American Way are missing and assumed dead. This war has redefined collateral damage because of the deceit and the treachery. So much for the distinction between combatants and non-combatants!

It doesn't exist, so steel your stomachs for the photos, folks. The inhumanity is unprecedented in our history. Our adversaries are killing machines. They have no conscience and no mercy. It is as though they are possessed. Their certainty is unshakeable. 

Their determination is supreme. Prepare yourselves. Say goodbye to your loved ones. Don't bother with a will. It's too late for that. The enemy is among us so I doubt I will survive. RUN, BOY, RUN! Remember, that once there was a spot--our Camelot!

White-Boy Basketball

What the Koch boys and their allies really want is arrested development. They want everything arrested where they have the advantage. Think white-boy basketball in the 1950's, all insularity and privilege.

And look at pro-ball today, the home of the purest competition anywhere. It's regulated all to hell and the draft is socialism by any standard but not a giveaway. The giveaway goes in the other direction.

In the absence, that is, of extremely strict regulation, which ensures that the system which funds the thing is itself funded. Otherwise the sport implodes. This is the libertarian plan for America--implosion. 

They will all walk away--from the economy, their espoused principles and the country. They'll probably live on an island they bought somewhere with their own militia. They don't care about the country.

Why should we care about them?

Shit-Homers

People like Paul Ryan must shit-home.  At some point in their creepy lives the contempt takes over and they start selectively zeroing in on the bad stuff, the rationalizations and predications and justifications for a long and unproductive life of privilege. 

Contempt is the key to this and isolation the result, a bunker mentality, culminating in a fragmented psyche in a fragmented, polarized, inauthentic society. Theirs is a subculture of like-minded people compelled by contempt to feel superior, that they are somehow better.

They think that they are uncovering this, the weird hierarchy, but they are creating it. The shit-homers will their dystopian society into existence. They home-in on the likes of loathsome Ayn Rand and long to be among her übermensch. Other people are untermensch.

This is the same old issue, the forces of order and civilization against the forces of disorder and disintegration. Disintegration because, why, in the end, should people acquiesce in a system that spurns them? A system that punishes, abuses and exploits them?

They will not. Paul Ryan's primal society can only survive where there is an enormous power disparity, rooted in privilege, the thing explicitly disallowed in "all men are created equal...." Without it we go right back to the murderous sectarianism of tribal societies.

Afghanistan, anyone?

ZuZu's Petals

I asked a friend of mine how in the world Republicans could watch It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas-time and not cackle like crazy and wring their hands with sinister glee over Mr Potter and at the sight of the wonderfulness of the cruel, Calvinist dream-world of Pottersville, thinking they must be in denial about it, and damn if he didn't think they do cackle and wring and maybe chortle.

He said a friend of his does, anyway, an extremely rich guy who inherited it all. The anger surged up in me and I wanted to go and get the rich guy and shove ZuZu's petals where the sun never shines and a lot of old barbed wire too and then disembowel him and force his intestines and the barbed wire and the petals all down his throat and kill him as gruesomely and with as much pain as possible. 

Hmmm.... That's not a very Christmassy attitude on my part, actually, is it? 

Identity Issues

Wow. The United States of America, the most powerful country ever, is now being run by the ethical equivalent of skinheads. Maybe there's something cool about this, in a punk-rock kind of way, but I find it upsetting.

The only rational, and therefore non-racist, way of judging people is by how they behave. Those who don't are usually judging people by affiliation or identification with a tribe or clan, or some other incidental thing.

Our Man Woodrow

What good does it do to rename a building or some institution? And where do you stop? Amerigo Vespucci may have been a lout and who knows what else.

I apply this test: is it about owning or disowning something? And what? In disowning Woodrow Wilson we would be disowning ourselves.

Our heritage of racism. He isn't in any way an outlier, abnormal or unrepresentative. It may make us feel better but he isn't a rallying point for anything.

Not about race or anything unambiguously bad, anyway. Now the Stone Mountain Memorial, on the other hand, I would call in the drones on that.

Anti-Culture

It only takes a couple of minutes of looking at the history of human migrations to realize that nobody is indigenous anywhere. We're all resident aliens, invasive exotics. It's a tale of occupation and ass-kicking. Early on it was possible to move somewhere where there wasn't already human habitation, somewhere without political jurisdiction, however shaky. 

Good luck with that now. The planet is pretty well settled. Beyond this it's all about culture, to my mind, escaping a situation where power is all that matters. After 9/11 the U.S. abandoned its ideals and declared open season, supposedly on "the terrorists," but also on its own people, by accepting the terrorists' terms and creating the apparatus of a police state. 

We basically said "bring it on" to our convenient enemies. In fact I think some idiot did say that. And every citizen is now a suspect. So the country's culture warriors are actually anti-culture warriors. They aren't representing civilized, let's say, Christian, values but throwing those values out the window. This is the problem with immigration, for example. 

Those people have hope in us. So sorry. They are more American than we are but it's too late. We are misrepresenting our values to the world and to everyone. America will inevitably become brown. Let's hope the brown people have the sense and strength to return us to our ideals, though we have represented them so imperfectly.

I hate to think that those values are gone from us forever.

The Wife of the Don

It's interesting that Donald always has a wife where there's a huge power disparity. And they look as though he bought them at a department store. 

You would think that there would be a little authenticity in this one part of his life, but, no. He's a sham and a pharaoh, after several generations of breeding. 

He's an entity without essence, only function. I guess it means he's a machine, someone without a soul. I bet he's out there in search of a soul, a thing you can't buy.

Ah, maybe his wives act as his soul, soul/mates. They say his kids aren't so bad. Or maybe he thinks the presidency will provide him with one, a soul. 

That's not my idea of a dignified end for a country, as the trophy-wife of a mogul, and not the first, but, hey, it's a new and different world out there.

Can We Be Saved?

No, I don't think so.

R. I. P.

Reporting from the front lines in the culture wars, I have some sad news: Uncle Sam is dead. That kind and peace-loving gentleman was strangled by the burly hands of a white Southern oaf who took offense at the idea that we are all one nation, a common people with a shared destiny and values. 

The old fellow, who cut his teeth on those principles in two World Wars, was surprised by the assault and unable to defend himself, thinking his beliefs were held by all Americans, including the moron who strangled him while mumbling something incoherent about "socialism."

Truthiness is Stranger Than Fiction

Truthiness is fiction with a pretense of reality, which means it is more fictive than fiction, which hasn't the pretense. 

Flananomics

My economic theory has elements gleaned from reliable sources, and sometimes made up, and then loosely and incoherently stitched together into something I wouldn't call a system, but it falls broadly under the heading of "baroque" in the history of economic thought.

The incoherence is out of respect for and in deference to the inscrutability of economic matters. The idea is to operate on the basis of what you know and not worry about the rest. I deal only with capitalism and the new world order of incomprehensible wealth.

It really is incomprehensible and, according to one of my core tenets, serious wealth is by its nature predatory and parasitic, not to sound critical, because these are naturally occurring roles and functions. It is normal for predators and parasites to take out weak individuals.

But not entire species, such as the middle class, destabilizing everything and resulting in systemic collapse, in which case everyone is harmed, even the wealthy. This kind of extreme wealth, called "serious" with intentional ambiguity, is impossible without prey.

The wealthy class must be protected from itself by very high marginal tax rates which, it turns out, are objectively "fair" because individuals are incapable of creating this wealth. In the physics of economics it is impossible. Wealth is created by societies, not individuals.

Wealth is a systemic and social function. Natural resources, in particular, are reasonably claimed by everyone, all individuals. Subject to sustainability, that is, in a society that is not suicidal or dominated by religious fanatics and other lunatics with a yen for destruction.

Those people are not irrational, only insane, and should be quarantined. Economies should function as ecosystems. Prejudicially, prey is regarded as a lower element in the system, though all elements have a necessary and natural place. Wealth is the product of socialism.

It is redistributive in the opposite of the way in which the term is usually used, in the moving of rewards upward in the system as a subsidy and the granting of privilege with respect to natural resources, as though everyone does not have an equal claim on these.

 

Depriving someone of a fair share of the productive output of a society is disenfranchisement, reducing citizens to serfs, slaves and the spoils of economic warfare. In American this is a violation of our inalienable rights, granted by God and society.

Brownbacking It

In the interests of ease and efficiency I pose a new question: what isn't the matter with Kansas? It's the new Republican utopian nightmare, our closest approximation to Afghanistan. Let's call it the "Screw Me State." What kind of morons voted for this mess? 

Good, old-fashioned, American, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Picture them sitting on their porches, cradling an M-16. Ewen McGregor's great rant from TRAINSPOTTING comes to mind: Kansans aren't even wankers, they're colonized by wankers, wrecking crew wankers.

In other words, they're such losers they don't even qualify as jerks, just dopes. Many other states, mostly Southern, are poised for this fate. We should put a fence around Kansas before it's too late, with an additional fence around Lawrence, as an asylum for the sane.

Trumpelstiltskin

Promises, promises. I'm through with promises, or promissory notes, or whatever. Donald the imp, the predatory sprite, specializes in the family tradition of finding and taking advantage of weakness. Always there is a price, and the only precondition for the practice is that you have no conscience at all.

It makes life so much easier, not having a conscience. And profitable. There are promises, always, on both ends but the end result of the deals, on average, is that Donald will come out ahead and carry on seeking out vulnerability and helplessness. Down on your luck? Don't turn to pitiless Donald.

And weep for your children. Among his ilk, innocence only inspires contempt and the hunger for more money and power for themselves.

FOP

Donald Trump may be our first-ever, full-fledged FOP, fuck-off president. He's failed, so far, to work his way fully back in the fuck-off hierarchy, having spared his own constituents, the fuck-off base. He will, though, if elected, give the finger to everyone, for sure, even those who elect him.

They're fired! He will be our first FOP, the First FOP, in addition to being a fop. Who will be his FLOTUS, our first FOPess, the First FOPess? All I can see is one hell of a hair-do. Will she upstage the Donald, on the hair front, a ship's figurehead to Trump's hood ornament? He won't have it!

Hardassed

Sometimes I have to go hardass with myself and be insistent and ask: what do I want? Or, what do I really know? What is the best information I have, the thing most likely to be true?

This is an old habit but also a crossword thing, when you get down to answers you don't know and have to collate and integrate likeliest answers across clues. It's good practice for life.

Decision-making is an important skill and you have to play percentages. If I ever stop making mistakes I'll know I have stopped living, by my standards, growing and learning and adapting.

Usually the Problem...

Is that people see things as binary when they're not: good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, us or them. But elections are binary and Democrats don't get it. It doesn't matter if you're right if you continually lose.

Democrats are losing even when they win, since Republicans won't let them govern. The most Democrats can hope for is to undo some of the damage done by Republicans. We can't go on like this. It's too messed up. 

The end is near.

My Side: The Losers

The Left hasn't had a meaningful hand in running our country for decades now. America was always essentially progressive: open-minded, adaptive, practical and not fundamentally ideological. We knew who we were, as defined against monarchists, fascists, royalists, racists, commies and such.

What the hell happened? We are becoming all of these at once. It's unclear which strain of insanity will win, but behold Donald Trump, way too something, a morphing maniac, spouting inconsistent positions which, not to his credit, occasionally include some sense, an intelligible policy or position.

There is no way the Left can not be implicated in this. Remember when we won the Gay thing? We were simply right, that it can't be morally wrong if it isn't a choice. You could condemn someone for having gay sex but not for being gay. The Right cried "uncle." Triumphalism ensued, on our side.

I can picture the victors in D.C., dancing around chanting "LGBT, LGBT." Tell me, how are the "T" and the "B" the equivalent of the "L" and the "G"? The "B" and "T" look a lot more like choices to me, not states of being. I actually don't know, but I do know this: people don't like to eat shit.

Democrats should understand, having had that feed-bag on forever, but we gave in to a lot of unseemly, self-righteous celebrating. It's bad morality and bad politics. We should have immediately talked about everyone having a place, a voice, a fair-shake, and a shot at a decent life.

But, no, we had to put it in their faces and reaffirm their worst fear, that they were cracking the door to a lot of other stuff if they lost anything. We could as easily have welcomed them into a coalition of people who reason and care. Instead we appear to be a party of outsiders and misfits.

I know better, but look at how we present. We make it much too hard, unnecessarily, for people who see things differently to want to join us. Righties should be running from Trump like a disease. We have made it too hard for them to jump that ship, with only our own righteousness to show for it.

Failed Utopias

Is there any other kind?

How Do You Say "Asshole" in Aramaic?

More often than not, when I start to write something, I have no idea where I'm going with it. The other day it occurred to me that Judas is a good example of Puritanism in the Bible. He's the Bible's version of an evangelical Christian or right-wing nut.

Judas is self-righteous, self-serving and, well, a jerk. He's small-minded, judgmental, miserable, petty and mean. He's a hypocrite. Alright, he's an asshole and, in the end, a traitor. How does this not describe our conservative fellow countrymen?

What sticks out to me is the baiting--such an annoying trait, even for a traitor. You would think treason would trump everything, but not for sheer annoyance. It's hard to feel for a principle, the way you would, say, about fingernails on chalkboard.

And the baiting goes on and fucking on, just forever. It's not even satisfying to see George Will get the full-blown asshole treatment from O'Reilly. I want to say "where have you been, George?" Did he think he would be spared? But O'Reilly's our asshole.

You might say. He's on our side. He's a line of defense against the bad shit. A warrior doing the necessary dirty work. No, he is the bad shit. He's a traitor. He's an asshole, and it's interesting to see the type, the rogue insider, well-represented in the Bible.

Beltway Bush People

Washington is full of primates and aborigines, practitioners of the ancient and honored ways of foraging, taking in as much as they can with as little effort as possible, becoming as bloated and carefree as a pasha can be. 

There is so much there, good and plenty, easy pickings with the fruit hanging low in the trees. Witness the crowd of the seekers of the garden of abundance that puts forth without work, where you can truly live for free.

Ruination's Revelers

They're loving this. You ever get that feeling, with creeping discomfort, because, let's say, the event is the deaths of many people? Welcome to the new reality of Republicanism, and their real reaction to the Paris attacks. 

They love it. The reaction is real, but the deaths are not real to them. The dead are Republican funny money: fake, expendable and cheap. What does it take to get through to these people that the deaths are real? 

It's their realm of unreason, a slow-motion apocalypse they are willing into existence. Yes, they are that crazy. On short analysis there are two aspects to it: the denial of what's real and their choice of an alternative, parallel world.

Obliteration. Death. Picture zombies with blood dripping from their mouths and after more gore. Ye Gods, it's Ann Coulter! Laura Ingraham! The Newtster tweets in. Argh! Forgive the panting. I'm running as fast as I can. They're after us!

Dumbasses

I recall reading, in grade school, about the American Revolution and the Americans shooting at the idiot British, marching in formation, from behind trees. I was so proud and pleased, as only a boy-child can be, at the killing and how we were smart and the Redcoats dumbasses.

Who are the dumbasses now? 

To Be Pure

In one if my favorite, ever, short interviews, Carlos Fuentes, when asked by Deborah Solomon about being an atheist in Mexico, said that in Mexico even the atheists are Catholic. Similarly the soul of America is Puritan, the distorted spirit of Salem. 

The Feminists are Puritan. Gays are Puritan. Even a lot of Catholics are Puritan. How can you tell? Puritans are judgmental, idealistic, humorless and self-righteous. Their idealism is utopian. The standard is an impossible ideal of piety and purity.

They aspire to perfection so they take whatever they have for granted, The glass is always half empty. I knew older gay guys who were thrilled not to be beaten up and bothered all the time. The younger guys want everything. Fine, but get a perspective.

Remember how lucky you are. Is there a model Puritan in the Bible? Well, there's Judas. When Mary Magdalen washes the feet of Jesus with perfume at the home of Lazarus, Judas finds fault with the waste. The money could have been given to the poor. 

This is Puritanism: the inhuman standards, the lack of balance, understanding and reasonableness. They are fastidious with everyone else, jealous, and always applying a critical eye. Puritans are inconsistently scrupulous and unfairly exacting.

Life is too damned imperfect for them. Too messy. No wonder we are so screwed. We are witch-hunters, always on the lookout for imperfection, and oblivious to our own. Puritanism is antithetical to life, in always striving to be beyond its limitations.

A View from an Asshole

Increasingly the Republican view of the world is that of tail-gunner Joe McCarthy, from the ass-end of an airplane, struggling to see the enemy through shit-smeared goggles, unaware of the forward momentum of the plane, it's progress, plan or destination. 

All of that is above his pay-grade and abilities. He is there to shoot stuff down as part of a mission of destruction, But, wait, everyone else has parachuted into Shangri-La, or Wichita, and he discovers he is alone in the plane. Still, something must be attacked.

He is an attacker, a mindless missile, no matter the rest of the crew is now drinking daiquiris by a pool, having forgotten Joe, the idiot underling, who doesn't know that the class war is over and won. Even henchmen get their reward, a bone or two from the table.

Wait, again, a target has come into view, an oasis of ease and degradation, a place for retired mercenaries, tax-avoiders, under an unfamiliar, pirate flag. Bombs away! Joe sees the glint of the pool as he peels away from daiquiri-land. They never knew what hit.

Stuck in the Middle with Me

I have had two close friends kill themselves. You hear about the guilt associated with that and, I don't know, but for me a story had ended and I was still stuck in it. It frustrated a sense of appropriateness that has to do with whatever it is in us which wants to make things into stories. 

It was left to me to hold the bag, as they say, to go on living as though it made sense to go on living in the same circumstances, an insult somehow to what had happened. It would have made more sense to me to wake up in a cell with Dustin Hoffman in PAPILLON, eating bugs and shit.

Then I could have felt that one story had ended and that I had been reborn, somewhat, into a new and fresh life and that it wasn't disrespectful to my friends to carry on, but I was stuck in the middle, in a life too changed and not changed enough. The other way to get there is a length of time.

That was the way for me and it took a hell of a while. And I was lucky. Some people are wounded in such a way that they never come out of it. Some don't even know that there is an "out" to come out into. I ache for them. And I ache for anyone beset by a burden of circumstances.

I Have the Answer

(I'm waiting around now for the self-fulfilling thing to kick in)

Enter the Dragon

I live in a college town. There are vestiges of the old ways, when most of the professors went to church but were mainly academics and the church-centered people, the faith crowd, loved the University for what it was, many things at once, a complement to them and a challenge in some areas and respectfully independent in others. And, oh, the sports.

Enter the Dragon. Somewhere in there the faith contingent, acting out of insecurity, declared war on the universities. God must be the center of everything and, well, they'll fire your ass if you don't agree. Surely, no, you might think, they wouldn't be that brazen and crazed. Google "UNC, Tom Ross." They fired his ass and that was only the beginning. 

They will fire your ass and any other asses they want if you disagree with them. It's their way. What the hell was wrong with it before, in the situation I described, when everybody all kind of got along? Nothing, of course. Remember, these are the people who gave you the Civil War and segregation, evangelical Bolsheviks. There's more of that to come.

Do You Believe in Magic?

I want me one, whatever magic wand the Republicans have which, together with the fairy dust, turns deficits into manna from heaven and wrenching economic hardship into the money-making version of a perpetual motion machine. Poof! And I mean poof with a capital "p" and that rhymes with "b" and that stands for something. Not "something." Maybe "bullshit."

Ah, the hidden connections. The mystery. There's a whole universe there and I know it because it is true and revealed to me and besides that Tinder-bell is flitting around, between sexual liaisons, and all the other signs are there as well, as we are in the realm of divine dispensation where the good shit flows up out of the ground like oil from a well you didn't even have to drill. 

The darkies or someone drilled it for you. Drill on, baby, drill on. Praise Jesus for all the goodness that comes from nowhere when you believe, as you must believe, as you must agree, as you must toe the line and unanimously consent and profess it and witness with wonder to the fantasy world of free shit. Or maybe it's just the end-times. Oh, my, wouldn't that be cool! 

This is Your Chance

It is time. Act now before it's too late. 

Let's Spend the Night Together Next Week!

With some things immediacy matters. It brings with it a sense of urgency and emotional investment. You would think that seeing your country wrecked by crazy people would qualify. 

Where is James Bond When You Need Him?

WORLD DOMINATION. What kind of a nut wants world domination? It seems to me you're just a big target with nowhere to go but down. Wait, I think that's us, the world's only remaining superpower. It was such a short time ago when all we wanted was not to be dominated ourselves. So we said.

Now the world is our living room. Our lebensraum. We go where we want and do what we want. We don't even think to ask why we're here, there and everywhere. We need the resources. We need the security. How, exactly, are we endangered? How have we not had our share of the goods?

But we're somehow different from everyone else. So we think. We're special. The standards don't apply to us. The rest of the world is so reassured, I'm sure. Let them ask God, if they have any questions. Just as an idea imagine us without military installations all over the place, and in space.

Man, it would save a lot of money. We could then try to live on our own resources or those fairly bartered for. Then, maybe, we could look to our own, see to our own people and our own problems, which we manifestly have. Imagine it. Would we be less secure? I don't think so, but ask Dr. No.

Near Death

My reaction, when I first encountered someone undeniably under the control of unconscious drives, was not "you monster" but, at first, amazement. Then I thought that I might have similarly repressed stuff, because I must, but to a lesser degree, I hope, because the person was nuts.

This is my way, to look for the underlying core of common humanity, and then the differentiation on top of that, probably more of each than we can see. Extreme cases reveal things to us, and about ourselves, which is why I so often use interpolation, interplay and averaging, a kind of dialectic.

Too much. Not enough. Too much. Not enough. You come out in the middle, which, it is to say, with respect to the drives, that we only make sense as a people, as a species, averaged and aggregated. We are incomprehensible in isolation. You can't understand anybody out of context.

So I judge everything with a low-grade level of wry restraint, respecting those unconscious drives, since you never know how much they're in play. That awareness keeps the drives in check, the experts say, and enables the more integrated elements to run things. Now, consider near-death experiences. 

It's as unconscious as you can get, to be clinically dead. There are lessons there, whether you believe in the afterlife or not, and people come back from those as flaming, foaming liberals. They are nice to everybody and live with compassion and acceptance and happiness in the little things.

Contrast that with certain non-liberals. Oh, let's not. I don't have the heart for it right now. But it does make you want to freeze some folks, induce near-death experiences in them, and try to turn them into caring, civilized beings, capable of living in harmony and peace with everyone else.

All We are Saying... Is U-up Your Ass!

To everything there is a season. Playing nice with the right-wing crazies hasn't worked. It's time for confrontation.

Nerf Sword at a Knife Fight

Certainly since the days of Bob Shrum the Democrats have been bringing a nerf sword to a knife fight, and it goes much further back, though seeing Shrum's candidates skewered by Lee Atwater was such a spectacle, American politics at the low ebb at which it remains.   

Atwater got well nerfed and Shrum was left pricked and stunned, but what do we care. Somewhere in there it became clear that the knife side in the fight didn't still believe that we are all on the same team, all Americans and deserving of a voice and the assumption of good will.

The Atwaterites remain ascendent on the Right and the standing insult to Democrats continues, as they run around brandishing their nerf weapons. America struggles and staggers on, in the care of people who are great at winning elections and terrible at everything else. 

Bad Shit

Occasionally I glimpse the deep, inner workings of the soul of a southern white man and know that we are doomed. They say that emotional injuries suffered early enough in life can play out horribly because they aren't objectified and understood as incidents but construed existentially.

Or, in another parlance, archetypally, as manifestations of a world of primal forces of mythological cast, where everything is fraught with sinister import and significance. So a sickness or injury isn't that but an indication that the world is always offering up annihilation, extinction and oblivion.

Slavery is America's early childhood injury. It's the thing that we process archetypally and can't objectify or see for what it is, a massive moral fuck-up but still an incident, a thing that happened, the consequences of which can be addressed rationally and directly rather than by analogy.

The souls of southern white men, driving their brains from the archetypal regions, take them to libertarianism and other laundered versions of the same old racist crap, white male power and privilege, with property being pivotal, as in the distinction between owner and owned, slave and free.

In this analogical, parallel world of hobgoblins and bogeymen and red herrings everything is processed unconsciously and partially, as a means of evasion and avoidance. So the Confederate flag, for example, isn't racist when it is, voting rights aren't diminished when they are and so on.

This is morally corrosive stuff, since it cracks the door to a world of wishful thinking, defensiveness and unreason, a world which is most likely accepted as real because the true source of the fear, being unaddressed, will always find other homes, like an illness propagating itself among hosts.

Hippies

Something has triggered a couple of intense dreams for me lately. The last one, apart from a lot of unrelateable strangeness, had me somehow winding up in a neighborhood of sorts which turned out to be an informal community of hippies and lefties and somewhat disorganized, impractical people.

Do you notice an air of judgement in that? Well, it was there in the dream as well and I got schooled on it, being confronted with my own sense of superiority. We must all have some of this but I am, in fact, pretty judgmental. I have always identified with authority and loved standards and structure. 

I think I'm comfortable with that generally but that, in times of stress or confusion or vulnerability, those deep attributes which define us to some degree can become our enemies, by being too extreme and becoming a way of protecting ourselves by being less free and open in our daily lives. 

By being more compulsive and determined, that is. I have always been an energetic, creative, improvisational person. Can you see it in my writing? I think the love of structure and standards is connected to that, to keep me from flying off into space, kind of, in some sort of semi-ecstatic state. 

Anyway, I recall feeling superior to the free-spirits in that informal community and I think it's just the fear of my own freedom, that I'm more like them than I think. Late in the dream some beautiful young women started dancing loosely in the street, on their way back from shopping or somewhere.

It looked right out of Isadora Duncan. It was beautiful and such a simple expression of everyday joy. "Joy." These words don't serve us well, sometimes. Whatever it was it was essential, like food, in the dream, or more likely inevitable, if someone lives fully inside of their humanity, without fear. 

I doubt I'll move to that community, in my head--it doesn't live anywhere else--but I'll take my practical self there and befriend them, maybe helping them build something, and they will admire me for my practicality and I them for helping me dance spontaneously a little more, if only in my dreams.

Forbidden Planet

I have returned, after a lengthy lapse, to remake a movie on Republican lines, Forbidden Planet. I can't, however, seem to get past casting, and not for want of good candidates. There are far too many to start. Help me here. I can't picture anyone but Lindsey Graham as Robby the Robot. Would he work?

In the crucial role of Dr Morbius we have to evaluate the insidious ids of some scary characters and I fear I may not come back from that intact. We will cast him on the basis of the id alone, whose is darkest and deepest and most representative of irrational, right-wing fears. There are monsters there.

The monster itself is easy. It's Hispanics, Muslims and other vessels, made-up as carriers of the inner, repressed nastiness of the collective id of conservatives, embodying all the aggression and insecurity, objectified. They are props, vehicles and substitutes, innocent victims of the primal, conservative fear.

The fear of themselves. Who's number one? They are, the punitive masterminds of their own destruction and the destruction of us all. We are all inadvertent casualties, incidental to the id's imperatives. It's why it doesn't register, when people suffer and die all over the place because of them.

The primal drama must play out. Or maybe we should stop it. We're enabling it, after all. For now we are prisoners, which is a fair result and representation of that right-wing drive, with its cynicism and contempt for life, except for that of the "unborn," those innocents. The rest of us are guilty.

Guilty of having been born, it seems, of having begun our sentence in the prison, plantation or work-farm of life, however you choose to see it, and it's wrong to try to escape or make it less than unpleasant, the point of every plank in a unified and comprehensive conservative platform of misery.

I Have Nothing To Hide

At least, not that I can remember.

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?

After they've seen D.C.? The cotton is high and the living is easy:

The corporate money flows and the graft, it grows, as they dole it out droves, the lobbyists, you know, greasing it all for those that have it, so they can have more. They need it, they need it, they need it, they need it: it's all you ever hear. They will never be the same, and you will never be the same, after you've seen D.C.

Down On Me

At the end of every Republican presidential debate I feel that I want to hear a rousing choral rendition of Down On Me a la Janis Joplin. You would think that these unbelievably privileged people had been hounded, all their lives, by horrible, mobile cactuses or something, chasing them around, the way they talk.

The world is down on them, alright, but not in the way that they portray it.

Absolution

Maybe there's an unintended consequence to feminism, that some guys feel absolved from any ethical requirement to treat women well, since women have declared themselves to be equal and not in need of the condescension of having men look after them. 

It didn't depend on a power disparity, though, and mean that it was open-season on women, since this wasn't the norm anyway, that it was already open-season on anybody, not if you weren't a sociopath to begin with. You sometimes hear the bullshit phrase "it's just business."

This, as though there's a realm in which, in the name of profit and money-making, it's fine to be unethical and a crook and a schmuck and an asshole. Back at you, big-boys. What they want, these people drawn to unprincipled power, is for it to only work in one direction.

They're never the ones being messed with. No. Fucking no. The rules have to apply fairly to everyone. I may propose a union, of women, where they keep track of the men who do this stuff and get back at them, depriving them of sex. And money and other things, the jerks.

From Jesus to Dick Cheney

How do you get from Jesus to Dick Cheney? You don't. You can't. 

Live and Let Live

I met an original, live-and-let-live kind of Lab today. Happiness on four legs. Why can't people be more like that?

Ben Carson

Republican cynicism and self-loathing are coming home. They hate government but they are government. The financial guys play the same game, all short-term. They hope they get out before the big one, the next massive crash they cause. It's musical chairs with our money.

So with the American state. There is no long term. Jesus is coming anyway. Ben Carson is a surgical savant and, typically for a savant, an idiot outside of his area of proficiency, but being an outsider is all that counts and he's the latest un-whatever and anti-everything.

The righties have painted themselves into a corner, requiring a candidate who despises what they themselves are, and they won't get out of there with patience and aplomb. No way. They'll go all reactive and crazy, their proclivity anyway. Let Ben Carson play foosball.

It's his other great skill. The little opposing foosball guys can all be done up as Muslims and other heathen. Let him live out his fantasies in foosball, harmlessly kicking ass at that.

We Had a Dream

If you go with Darwin--reality and justice--you can't pick and choose. The other side, our opponents, make stuff up. That's not our standard, but the truth is this: the people who had a dream have lost. No one openly defends injustice. They reconstrue reality and market injustice as something else.

Often, necessity. We have a dream but they have a story. It is vain and self-serving and untethered to reality: the wonderful white man, the face of a thousand heroes, tamer of beasts, clearer of forests and subduer of enemies. He who keeps order. White men must rule or it all falls into disorder.

Chaos, that is. It's white men or chaos, but if there's been a "pax of the white man" where is it? I'll order me up some, a full portion. The record looks bad, noting the holocaust, a blip on any screen. Way to go, white men! But they still assure us, many wars later, that they are the leaders we need.

Alrighty! In order for the dreamers to recover, though, we have to look fairly at the current outcome, which is that the white-man coalition has wiped a lot of floors with us. From there we go forward. We can't go much further back, I keep thinking, but those white guys are redefining it all the time.

Ugh

I was telling a black guy I know about an experience I increasingly have when I catch someone, in an instance of momentary eye contact, cringing a little and writing me off as--ugh--an oldie. Yes, Jim, my friend said, that's what if feels like to be black, all the time.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Conservatives hate life. It's an interruption, a trial imposed by God, in the true state of perfection and bliss for which we are intended. This is the source of the cynicism. Life is for losers.

They want to escape but have to see it through. They think it's wrong for our earthly existence to be anything other than punitive and difficult. Having conservatives run things only means misery.

Logistics

My father worked in logistics for the Air Force. He was once on a committee of representatives from the various services and headed-up by a guy from the Department of Defense. The idea was to inspect supply depots around the country to determine if it made sense to consolidate the supply of certain things in the hands of the DOD. 

According to my father there was a consensus in the group that it didn't make sense to consolidate any of it. The branches were already into diseconomies of scale independently of one another. But, lo, the report appears, written by the DOD dude, recommending consolidation. My father thinks it was a setup--that the DOD wanted it done.

This reminds me of Ken Starr, for some reason. Anyway, dad refused to sign the report and subsequently got his ass kicked, by so doing. Now, when you look at American businesses and industries and all the consolidation that has occurred, it happened in the same way, not by fair play and the promoting of efficiency, but by influence.

Think of all the formerly locally-owned stores and such which are now nonexistent or part of huge, effectively unregulated and anonymous monster-corps which got that way as part of a gamed and prejudiced system. Yet again, thank you, Republicans, for ruining our country. I remember the locally-owned stores and businesses where I grew up.

They are gone, gone, gone with some kind of ill, right-wing wind--burned, sacked and obliterated, for all intents. It seems inevitable now but it wasn't. It's a choice we made by electing the wrong people, which we did because we, too, were influenced, in subtle and contrived ways. We've been had, but so easily we can't blame anyone but ourselves.

Necessarily Insufficient

Everything is under-determined over time, but entirely determined over more time.

Trump v. Tomatoes

I'm occupied these days with astonishment at the rise of Donald Trump to the ascendency of something, whatever indescribable malfunction and breakdown this represents, and eating tomatoes, my garden producing an explosion of these wonderful things, from bite-size miniatures to terrifying cannonballs capable of causing real harm if carelessly deployed. 

Always I soothe my soul with rock 'n' roll but, generally, it's Trump versus the tomatoes at my house lately, with the Trump thing blowing every meter and measure I have available. Truly Trump is a fifteen on a ten-scale so higher math is required, and I think we've got to go beyond normal methods to get the guy on the page in graphing whatever it is he represents. 

What he represents, I don't know, apart from a huge "screw you" arising from the souls of puritanical Republicans craving utopia and coming unglued over the horrible imperfection of everything. I celebrate and embrace imperfection. It enables me to do as well as I can with my own inadequacy and failings. Perfectionism is horrible and a curse.

In my experience of certain clinical cases, meaning diagnosed OCD, there is usually a dump or landfill around. In every instance I've seen the person has a closet or part of the yard which is a dump, so I think Trump is a dump, a repository of repressed, right-wing psychological garbage and the refuse of denial, probably composting, at his age.

He's the closeted reality of Republicanism, slowly emerging. Meanwhile I'm eating myself into oblivion with tomatoes, all that digestive energy diverting from the Trump conundrum. I've never seen a technically perfect tomato, the embodiment of the form, but I love them and I'm ready to share. You may contact me about this, as long as the harvest lasts. 

Hell Comes to Whoville

Who is Whoville? It must be us. By that I mean some clan of believers, people with certain values, of generosity and caring and fair play and humor, in an undefended and borderless burg visitors to which are won over by the wise ways of the open-hearted Whos.

But Hell has come to Whoville. It was the values that made them special and the values are lost. There wasn't a formal assault--recognizable evil. It came from within and in the form of confusion. Also it occurred over time, rather slowly. They forgot who they were.

Let us mourn the Whos. Let us mourn ourselves.

Talk About Baggage

Even runaway trains have engineers and conductors and administrators and all. This is the script Republicans have chosen for us, a disaster movie, where we are hurtling toward destruction and so reckless indulgence, sanctimony and despair jostle for position in an environment of fear, awaiting the end. So where are we? 

Watching helplessly from the baggage cars, I suppose, not even villains, as their delusion nears its climax in a crash of unknown severity depending on where, exactly, we come off the rails. They will elect a leader, it seems, an engineer, based on the aerodynamics of his hair so he'll look good out front and not impede anything.

 After all, it's only a role.

Blithe Spirits

The scene in Shakespeare in Love keeps popping into my head in which Judi Dench, playing the disguised Queen, stands up abruptly in the theatre and makes a crack about wearing her name out, she deserving more respect. Judi as well, I think, and then there's God. With an election forthcoming--ugh--many names are coming up, including various Founding Fathers. 

Much of it works at the level of assumption and presumption, though sometimes the names are explicitly dropped, and I picture them standing up, Thomas Jefferson or God, let's say, and asserting their right not to be cited in defense of some policy or scheme. Let's keep this in mind as the carnival continues and the debates begin. Maybe I will don a guise. 

Picture me, one in an anonymous crowd of debate watchers, rising suddenly in a tricorn hat or numinously and asserting my right not to be assumed to be backing some Huckabee sponsored hucksterism or Bush boosterism or other nonsense. I won't have it, I will say, as I'm escorted to a special seat or just ascend my ass out of there.

LOL

Donald Trump for President. LOL, LOL, LOL,...

Wankers or Toadies?

I can't decide which word best describes right-wing suck-puppets, so I put it up for a vote: is it wankers or toadies?

Creep Thought

Creep Thought is a deranged supercomputer, evidently in the hands of right-wing extremists, capable of a higher degree of twisted calculation than an unhinged Einstein on amphetamines. Additionally it has a "chew on this" function which enables it to use free resources on questions of no immediate practical application, such as the meaning of death, despair and nothingness.

The computer also cheats at chess and counts cards. Republican meta-psychologists had found that it was hard to thwart the normal empathetic functioning of aggregations of human beings over time. Individual sociopaths are all over the place but to get people to practice the inverse of the Golden Rule consistently was not easy and required highly-evolved algorithms of perversion. 

Within Republican ranks there is tension between those who want only to make money and those who want to hasten the end of the world, but there is a common desire for cash because rushing the apocalypse turns out to be expensive. The world doesn't want to end yet and the money crowd doesn't want to die but religious fundamentalists are in control and increasingly insistent about their aims.

The computer, originally code-named "non-sequitur" but now affectionately known as Sarah, for Sarah Palin, has recommended selfishness as the quickest path to world self-annihilation. This primal human trait is the fastest way to destruction. And the answer to the ultimate question, of death, despair and nothingness? Sarah Palin. Self reflection, that is. Look only to yourself and you will find nothing.

The Quest for Cuervo

I need a drink. And, I mean, I need to be permanently, partially drunk to deal with the stuff going on around me. Anyone who thought that humanity is heading, inexorably, for a more-evolved place, I say to you: Donald Trump. Hand me the Jose.

Partial Reality

You know, I think there's reality and then, well, unreality. It's hard to imagine them mixing it up and getting along, like matter and anti-matter, but then there's humanity, stuck in a strange, contradictory existence. People are capable of self-awareness, abstraction and reflection but still mortal and witnesses to their own personal and corporate decay. 

By corporate I mean our inability not to cause the destruction of our own species, but three cheers for us anyway. The planet and universe may do well to see the end of humanity. Let's suppose it's our inevitable end and nothing to be fought against or resisted or derided, but there's an aspect to us I find intriguing, that we appear to live in permanent partial-reality.

We can't exist without some grip on things but can't get the other foot out of the swamp of insanity and compulsion. Then the alligator comes and pulls us entirely under or maybe we just give up and sink-in out of fatigue and despair. Whatever. But what do we find so compelling about the swamp of unreality? Oh, reality is our mortality and we don't like that.

Tough shit, as we used to say when I was a kid. There's a lot to be said for reason and truth and the justice of accepting our fate and living in a truly civilized way, firstly with a sense of responsibility to one another and a willingness to share the resources needed for our individual and corporate survival. Maybe there's a species version of reincarnation and we'll get another shot. 

We seem to have blown it, this time.

Rebels Without a Cause

What an amazing thing it is to consider that the reactionary right might be caught in the flames they have fanned for so long, those of bigotry and resentment and exclusion and aggression, and that the agent for this may be his hairness, Donald Trump.

For decades now reasonable Americans have watched unbelievingly as the crazy bar moves higher and higher. The only filter Republicans seem to reliably apply is "not crazy enough." They'll jettison anything in favor of the bright, shiny new object of insane desire.

Truly, the coefficient of crazy is higher than ever and Republicans must have a secret, probably unconscious, compulsion to destroy the American state, like adolescents challenging authority from a need to be assured of the authority's strength.

I say: grow up. Republicans are difficult children--truants, renegades and delinquents--and must not be indulged or allowed power over anything. They will only wreck it, wanting reassurance of its resiliency. It's not for the rest of us to be responsible for this.

We can't be. It's simply not our place.

Trashed

I was riding in the car once with a friend and the SUV in front of us barfed out some fast-food trash just before turning into a subdivision, a Habitat for Humanity subdivision, an unusual thing. Someone gave them a tract of land. Normally they build individual houses here and there. The two people in the SUV were Hispanic. 

My friend thought that the trash-barfing was cultural, that they didn't see litter as trash or as discordant in the environment, only as "stuff out there," but I will bet you their houses were tidy. No matter, but this is what happens when people are excluded and uninvested in their society and when there is no expectation of justice.

The disunity affects everyone and disunity is what Republicans now promote: average citizens are "stuff out there" to them, trash and road-kill. Average people mean nothing to wealthy Republicans. Maybe it's wrong to say they don't care because it assumes a context where caring makes sense. We are simply nothing to them.

When they talk about freedom they mean their freedom: the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want, to live on inherited money or have it easy and have all the security imaginable, no matter what, at our expense. It was hard to comprehend the trash thing, that someone could not see it as trash.

But average citizens are now nothing, detritus, being outside of the virtual community of wealth, and undeserving of health care or a job or a fair shake, due to the partisanship, selfishness and polarization. "Black Lives Matter" isn't jingoism. Black lives don't matter. America wants black people to go away.

Now that they've had their use of them. Average white people, get a clue. This now applies to you. The Chinese are slaving away so you aren't needed anymore. If the right-wing crazies destroy the economy again--permanently, this time--you will be left holding the bag in a way you never thought possible. Wait and see.

Too Bad

I've really limited my news input and it has helped enormously with my equilibrium. The election coverage, though, is hard to avoid and then I see that George W. Bush has been paid a big chunk of cash to give a talk to a wounded veterans group. 

At some point you have to cry "uncle" and say that it is all over and just give up. Clearly this is it. If that unrepentant piece of shit can do this without being struck down by the gods of justice or, at least, severely smacked by a wounded vet, all is lost.

We are Yugoslavia

I visited Washington years ago and stayed with a friend-of-a-friend who lived in a tiny apartment above Daniel Patrick Moynihan's house, or part of it. Cool, huh? We went to a performance of Yugoslavian dancers at the Kennedy Center -- Matt was Yugoslavian. 

The dancing was amazing and very diverse, which I commented on and Matt said, well, there's a reason for that: that the country was totally fragmented and religiously polarized and that it would fall apart the minute it wasn't held together by force.

Of course it did, brutally and genocidally. This is us, to a much greater extent than we care to think. We have never been one country but two, North and South. We are now becoming one but on what terms? On those of the South, I would say -- property and privilege.

An aside:

There was another very distant brush with Moynihan, in my life. I had neighbors as a kid, the Finns, and in an act of tolerance now beyond imagining to me they let us neighborhood youths use their small, full-court basketball set-up. We abused it, of course. 

We abused both the court and the kindness. I also house-sat for the Finns. Their older son, Chester, had been Moynihan's aide in India and had married an Indian woman. I think I met them all, Chester and family, and there was a picture or two of Moynihan around. 

Mr. Finn, the father, spoke of Moynihan's charm and how likable and engaging he was. Anyway, the Finns and some other Jewish neighbors were my introduction to a world of higher standards and accomplishment. My parents were smart and well-educated and open-minded and kind.

But there was something those Jewish families introduced me to which I appreciated later, a bigger view of everything. It also rained brisket when somebody died. The last time I ran into a reference to him Chester was still around, at a university, and a Republican.

Darn it. I will always think highly of any Finn, though, because of those parents.

Another Narcissistic Enterprise

My internet travels take me to all kinds of places. This morning's examples: Precision Strategies and The Omidyar Network. These are my peeps, in some ways. We're on the same side, I think, but the self-satisfaction is just so intense. Okay, you're the good guys, but how about we get some shit done?

They do get stuff done but there's a societal aspect to this which takes the whole thing to the same place as the war on drugs: we're funding both sides. I don't want to be a trash-man for the American rightists, cleaning up the messes of the Reaganites and Bush supporters. Let's stop the damage first.

Then we can spend our money actually going forwards, not just trying to undo the bad works of crazy Republicans.